Illuminate
Audience Data Platform for arts and cultural organisations. Owned by Arts Council England. Built by PwC.
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About the platform
Illuminate is the Arts Council’s Audience Data platform. It’s a free tool that helps organisations gather and analyse data on their audiences and participants.
For our funded organisations, some audience and activity data previously collected through the Annual Survey is now brought into Illuminate too, to simplify the data you submit to us. You can easily upload this information throughout the year and see all your audience-related data in one place.
Users of Illuminate can gather and submit data through audience surveys and box office/ticketing connections. Once data is input, users can then access meaningful insights, establishing who engages (and who doesn’t engage) with their activities and benchmark against regional and sector data.
Illuminate went live on Thursday 1 June 2023. Over 1,000 organisations are using the platform and we have seen more than 64,000 activities reported and over 220,000 survey responses collected via Illuminate in the first year. This data will help the Arts Council continue to make the case for investment in creativity and culture and deliver our ambitions for our strategy, Lets Create, deepening our understanding of audiences – who they are and what they want.
Read our blog with Sanj Jagait, Chief Data Officer at Arts Council, about why we developed this platform, and how the creative and cultural sector can benefit from it.
Activity / Event reporting
Activity/ Event reporting
All funded organisations must use Illuminate to report to the Arts Council on funded activity and audience or participant numbers.
There are different ways to add your funded activity to the platform, the following guidance documents explain how.
Your audience surveys
Your audience surveys
So that everyone can understand and respond to audience patterns across creativity and culture, there are mandatory questions that organisations will need to include in their audience surveys to ensure the data is consistent.
The mandatory questions will be included as standard if you are creating and sharing your surveys via Illuminate.
You can also choose questions from the Optional Question Bank available in Illuminate, allowing you to collect additional information important to your organisation and/or programme. We welcome suggestions from users, please contact our Customer Service team if you have a question you would like made available in Illuminate.
If you are collecting responses outside the platform to upload later, you should follow the How to Upload Offline Survey Responses guidance.
These documents will be useful for your planning.
Uploading your box office data
Uploading your box office data
Illuminate is designed to enable Box Office/Ticketing providers to send data on your behalf.
To allow things to get started please provide a named contact at your Box Office/Ticketing provider, or advise this person to contact us direct, by emailing the Arts Council Customer Service team.
If your box office/ticketing provider is unable to integrate with Illuminate for any reason, you can also manually upload your data using the template provided.
Survey sampling
Survey sampling
The more data you collect, the more robust your outputs will be. The table below suggests sample sizes you could aim for based on your total audience size. Further information on these can be found in this document.
| Total Audience | # of responses |
| <2k | 40 - 100 |
| 2-4k | 100 – 200 |
| 4-6k | 200 - 400 |
| 6-8k | 300 - 600 |
| 8-10k | 400 - 800 |
| 10-30k | 500 – 1,000 |
| 30k+ | 1000 – 2,500 |
Organisations are currently free to establish what a representative survey sample size is for their activity. To do this you should consider your reporting requirements, guidance and your organisation’s own resource and capacity. This in-depth article from the Digital Culture Network is a great place to learn more about survey sampling, including details on confidence intervals and margin for errors.