Measuring BFI Audience Diversity - AWARD

The BFI has made a variety of commitments within its 5 year strategy, BFI 2022, to engage with and diversify the variety of audiences with which it champions the cultural value of film. The strategy is published and may be found here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/2022/

In order to deliver our commitments, the BFI regularly conducts research in order to measure and evaluate reach and diversity of the various audiences that engage with our activities.

We now wish to launch a new programme of audience research that will deliver the most representative picture possible of our current visitors & users whether it be to films screened at events or at our Southbank venue, to our digital properties including visitors to our website and to films screened across the UK that the BFI supports in terms of production and distribution. This research needs to provide us with a set of benchmarks that will enable us to set our KPI's and then to monitor these through time.

Our primary aim of this new programme of research is to create an approach that permits us to deliver a consistent and reliable measure of our audiences. This is relatively simple in concept, but we recognise it is more complicated in execution. We thus welcome agency views as to how we can best meet this requirement, delivering robust data that stands up to scrutiny, but with relatively modest investment. We envisage that this research will be delivered through a mixed mode, modular programme of research, which will include

• A UK nationally representative 'Establishment Survey'
• Surveying groups of BFI audiences using our own database of members & registered users
• Face to face surveying of visitors to our Southbank venue

We want the first wave of this research to take place as soon as possible, though due to the BFI calendar of events, specific audiences for festivals and events may need to happen at certain times of the year. The aim is to create a set of 2018 benchmarks, that can then be monitored in further waves of research in 2020 and finally in 2022.