To see a world in (five grains) of sand
Many imagine audience research to be complex and expensive. But often a useful answer is just five questions away.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour”
—William Blake, from “Auguries of Innocence”
Audience and community research can seem like an expensive and time-consuming proposition. Many arts professionals think it requires big dollars, many datapoints, heavy analytics, and high-priced consultants to gather anything useful. And yet, in many cases, productive insight is just five datapoints away.
That’s the surprising reality of the “rule of five,” a statistical truth described by Douglas Hubbard in his classic text, How to Measure Anything (2014). According to the rule of five:
There is a 93.75% chance that the median of a population is between the smallest and largest values in any random sample of five from that population (Hubbard 2014).
Say, for example, you wanted to learn how far your audience traveled to get to your evening event. Or, you wondered about the group size among those attending together. Or, your planning team was curious about the age (or height or shoe size) of those participating in a particular program.
You could certainly set up a comprehensive, high-volume survey or deploy large research teams to gather detailed results. Or, you could ask five people at random, take the lowest and the highest answer, and have 93.75% confidence that the median of the entire group is between them (remember that the median is the middle number in a dataset, the point at which half of the population is lower and half is higher).
Granted, that may not provide the detail and reliability you want for a significant, high-risk decision (to consider when to spend more money and time, see this post). But it goes a long way toward reducing your uncertainty for whatever comes next.
p.s. For a great starter guide to audience surveying (including ideas for selecting a random sample), see “Who’s Coming? Respectful Audience Surveying Toolkit” from Slover Linett and OF/BY/FOR All.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Marketing
Marketing involves creating, communicating, and reinforcing expected or experienced value.
Framework of the Week: Calibrating Uncertainty
How can you know when to spend more money and time gathering evidence for a key decision? Just consider the chance of being wrong and the cost of being wrong.
Sources
Photo by Justin Shen on Unsplash
Hubbard, Douglas W. How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business. Third edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2014.
Slover Linett Audience Research. “Who’s Coming? Respectful Audience Surveying Toolkit.” OF/BY/FOR All, 2019.