As a passionate advocate for a data-led approach to audience development and cultural policy, Anne Torreggiani founded The Audience Agency (TAA) in 2012. Its purpose is to enable organisations across the cultural sector to increase their reach, relevance and resilience. In 2023, we’re delighted to be launching TAA Tech Ventures as part of TAA Group.
Our story shows how a team of Tech4Good experts are creating solutions designed to improve the social impact and financial sustainability of cultural enterprises all over the world.
Meet The Tech Ventures Team2014 – 2016
With funding from Arts Council England, Anne’s team built and launched its flagship solution, Audience Finder. A world-first, the solution is a whole-market audience data aggregation and data-analytics-as-a-service platform. TAA Group, headquartered in Manchester and London, is now one of the UK’s largest creative research consultancies.
2016 – 2022
Rolled out across 1800+ cultural organisations and 15,000 users in Britain, Audience Finder holds the biggest cultural engagement dataset in the world, covering £7bn+ of transactions, 20m households, 1.5m survey responses.
2017 (Our Eureka Moment)
TAA’s Commercial Innovation Director, Patrick Towell – now CEO of TAA Tech Ventures – led the largest ever study of audience data use in the cultural sector, funded by Innovate UK. This found that many cultural professionals lacked confidence in using data and didn’t know how to create actionable insights. So, we shifted our vision of Audience Finder from data aggregation and analytics to decision-support and professionalisation of data use.
We began receiving enquiries from leading agencies and funders around the world who were using Audience Finder as a reference for an ideal solution in their territories.
2018
To meet the needs of these cultural sector leaders, TAA Group created its international enterprise arm, TAA Tech Ventures. TAA Group has invested £1.5m into the company and its Audience Finder Global flagship product since then and is now seeking external financing to accelerate its internationalisation.
TAA Tech Ventures’ Audience Finder Global platform and Audience Spectrum population segmentation provide actionable market intelligence and customer insights for cultural and wider experience economy enterprises.
Competitor products focus on revenue optimisation alone. Our data supports evidence-based decision-making to balance financial sustainability and maximise the social and economic benefits culture can deliver to places and communities.
Our analytics and decision-support serve and align interests across the value chain:
- representing the views and needs of audiences, communities and the public
- informing cultural producers’ and venues’ content, marketing and strategy
- providing live intelligence for market, academic and policy research
- driving enhancements in ticketing, CRM and marketing automation technologies
Audience Finder Global is being developed with our partners the Institute for Research on Cultural Participation (IKTf).
Audience Finder Global’s state-of-the-art catalogue of research questions for cultural visitors is the result of two years of R&D with IKTf, combining the knowledge and experience of the two largest visitor research systems in Europe. Already available in English and German, it’s been designed to easily extend to different languages and cultural contexts.
Audience Finder Global is integrated with some of the largest cultural ticketing systems in the world – Tessitura, Spektrix and Ticketsolve – with more on the way. The Audience Spectrum UK segmentation is being licensed into an increasing number of such systems.
We have multiple partners discussing potential licensing deals with us for European territories – and enquiries from public sector, research and tech partners all over the world.