Audience Profiles

Crowd of people watching a golfer celebrate on the golf green

Impact assessments benefit not just from knowing how many people attended an event, but also from knowing who those people were.

Building a profile of attendees and being able to segment them by demographics, behaviours and attitudes adds another layer of detail to the evaluation process that enables more insightful analysis of event data.

What to measure

We recommend you attempt to identify as many of the following demographic characteristics as possible among attendees (which will help you to monitor how the event audience aligns with the protected characteristics set out by the UK’s Equality Act 2010, which are explained in detail in the Social section):

  • Place of residence
  • Sex
  • Age
  • Socio-economic group
  • Disability
  • Ethnicity
  • Educational attainment
  • Employment status

Where the scope and budget of your evaluation allow, obtaining additional profile information will support the assessment of broader economic, social and environmental event impacts. These could include:

  • Primary motivation for visit (event attendance or other)
  • For larger events, baseline data that enables measurement of post-event changes in attitudes and/or behaviour

Audience profiles: How to measure them

Surveying attendees at the time of an event is the primary means of capturing the data needed to profile its audience.

It’s important that your survey sample size is large enough to be representative of the whole event population. The size of a representative sample will vary according to the size of that overall population and the level of confidence you want in its results.

Where possible, questions should align with those of national surveys (e.g. Sport England Active Lives Survey or DCMS Participation Survey) to enable comparison between event attendees and wider population groups. Using standardised profile questions also enables comparisons to be made between events.

When including demographic questions covering the characteristics in the section above it is important to ensure you include an answer option of “prefer not to say”.

Other resources that can help determine appropriate survey sample sizes are available at: