The art of insight

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In 2018, the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) will celebrate 250 years since its conception, when a group of artists lobbied King George III to recognise and promote art as a profession.

The academy is probably most famous for its Summer Exhibition – an annual event that showcases what the Royal Academicians (the practising artists elected to steer the academy) consider to be the best art at that time. Any artist can enter work into the Summer Exhibition, and everything is for sale.  

The RA is also well known for its location and elegant buildings – it has been based in Burlington House, in London’s Mayfair district, since 1867 – but many of the staff, including head of insight Claire Clutterbuck, are currently based in Unilever House, overlooking the Thames. This is because the academy is undergoing some expansion, linked to its impending landmark birthday. 

In 2001, it bought Burlington Gardens – a space that has since hosted a number of temporary exhibitions – and work is now under way to link the two buildings. This will not only increase the available exhibition space, but also open up the other aspects of the RA’s work, such as its schools, to become more visible to the public.  

An unexpectedly positive outcome of the disruption, says Clutterbuck, is that the various – previously siloed – RA teams are now more aware of each others’ work, thanks to the open-plan workspace at Unilever House. This is of particular importance to Clutterbuck, who joined the RA three and a half years ago to take on its first exclusively insight-related function. The RA is one of only two UK galleries that has invested in a complete insight resource – the Tate is the other. 

Making it stick

Clutterbuck was taken on as part of a move toward the organisation becoming “audience informed” (she has chosen her words very carefully, for reasons that soon become clear). There was no research work before she arrived, apart from ad hoc exit surveys; she has since demonstrated the usefulness of insight, but the academy is still, in some ways, resistant to audience input.  

“Because we work in an artistic organisation, it’s always about creating the new,” Clutterbuck explains. “It’s the same as the BBC – you don’t want to be led by the audience, you want to be putting the ball in front of the audience and leading them. It’s that idea of ‘if I give them what they want, that’s not what they came for’. You want to be audience-leading. That’s where the resistance comes from. They want to be innovators.” 

Even now, she says, 50% of her role is not doing research, but trying to convince other people that what she knows is useful to them. “Nobody wants to read reports, nobody wants to come to presentations – they don’t have time. They always have 10 million ideas and are always trying to execute five million things. So I have to be thinking about how to make it as sticky as possible.”  

A lack of insight hasn’t dampened the RA’s success; it had four of the 10 most popular exhibitions worldwide between 2009 and 2014. But one issue – its audience demographics – had started to become apparent: 60% of the RA’s Friends are aged over 60, which raised the questions: should it carry on doing what it was doing, bringing in the over-60s, and hope that would be enough? Or should it look to bring in the next generation – and, if so, how?

Segmenting the audience

To understand the issue more deeply, one of the first things Clutterbuck did in her new role was a segmentation. “The key challenge for us is understanding who’s coming, who’s not coming, what they need and what the barriers are for not coming,” she says. 

“It’s not rocket science, but a segmentation gives you the numbers so you can say, ‘OK, there are this number of people, but they represent this volume – so they might be a small segment but, you know what, they’re coming six times a year, so we need them’.” 

On the back of this segmentation, as well as some other visitor data, Clutterbuck produced a pocket guide: a fold-out pamphlet with information on the RA’s audience segments (and potential segments), where it sits in relation to its competitors, and what factors are likely to be important in the future. This, she said, was her attempt at a calling card, to get the organisation interested in the power of audience insight.  

“It tells everyone, in a nutshell, what I know. It shows that we are really big and really successful, but presents the challenge and what it is we want to do – to be younger and more digitally engaged. 

“I’m trying to present them with the audience strategy. This was my recruitment drive in some ways – it was fertile ground.” 

At the most senior level of the organisation, adoption of insight has been high, Clutterbuck says. But one of the challenges has been the speed of turnover of people in their roles – something, she says, that is quite common in the arts. This is in stark contrast to Clutterbuck’s previous place of employment – Procter & Gamble (P&G) – where she was a consumer and market knowledge senior manager, and where change of personnel was very low. Not only that, but the budget for research was higher, and the way in which insight was integrated was very different. 

At P&G, she sat in a multi-functional team where everyone’s expertise fed into a common team goal. Her data was needed to inform investment decisions, and advertising sign-off was dependent on her testing. Everyone was in it together, and the consumer was king, so her information was in demand.  In the arts, Clutterbuck says, people are more proprietorial: “It’s always: ‘YOU did this’ or ‘this is MY exhibition’.” But she sees it moving in the right direction, in terms of working together, and refers again to the importance of the current open-plan working style.  

“It gives a better appreciation of what everyone does – and helps people recognise that you can’t do it by yourself. Everyone has their individual area of expertise. Bringing it together to deliver something that’s even better than anything that anyone could individually have conceived of is a very different thing to that single genius idea.” 

When it comes to the reduction in her budget, Clutterbuck is of the opinion that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The money available for research at P&G came with an expectation that everything could be tracked. “That’s not the same as getting insight, so I’m not sure it’s a great thing to have an unlimited budget.” 

Volume forecasting

Clutterbuck’s second act in her new role was to introduce systematic exit surveying. Most museums and galleries with permanent collections do quarterly surveys, she explains, but the RA puts on an exhibition, then takes it down and puts up something else – changing its face with each one, in a sense. In that way, the rhythm of the organisation is based around exhibitions, and understanding who’s coming to each one is vital.  

This is the only kind of base tracking the organisation does, and it has become embedded in every aspect of what Clutterbuck produces, including volume forecasting. 

To inform this forecasting, she set up a database of the RA’s internal data – including the size of its exhibitions – as well as freely available external data. This allowed for testing of the likely interest of RA Friends, and others, in the concepts of potential future exhibitions.  

While she had to push hard to be given the go-ahead to do this, Clutterbuck has since discovered that more people have started taking notice of what she’s producing.  

“We have got an exhibition coming up and there’s pressure on the financials for it. Tim [Marlow, artistic director at the RA, who Clutterbuck says was previously very resistant to the use of data] said in a meeting: ‘You know what, we should run it through that Clutterbuck system.’ That was perfect. He’s never going to want to be seen to endorse it, yet he finds it valuable.  

“And when an exhibition is a success, nobody is going to say: ‘It’s because of that great audience insight.’ It’s not outright refusal to use it, it’s just that the ideas will never be attributed to the data. But the adoption is getting more, and they’re informing their decisions more and more on these systems that I’m embedding. Almost by stealth, it’s kind of informing what they’re doing.”  

This slowly assembled platform of confidence has meant that Clutterbuck can, more assertively, offer her insight in relation to addressing the issue of the RA’s demographics.  

Shifting demographics

Strategically, the RA knew it needed to get a younger, more digitally engaged audience, and it needed them to become Friends, because one in two visits to the academy is made by a Friend, she explains.  

But when they look at the data they now have, and the notion comes up that the RA needs to attract younger people, a counter argument can be crafted from having access to clear-cut information.  

“When someone says: ‘Oh, we need to get younger people’, you can actually focus the discussion, by saying: ‘50% of the people that came to Ai Wei Wei were under 40, so they are coming. The challenge is that they are not coming back.’ 

“There have also been discussions about young people not being reliably regular visitors. ‘Young people are totally disloyal. They’ll just move on – so if we get them and we’ve effectively told the older generation to go away, they’ll just move on to the next shiny thing.’ Well, no, that’s not right. They’re going to exhibitions. They’re just not coming here.  

“They are a big part of the market, but you also need to keep the people you have got. The art is going to be keeping these guys and putting them and the younger generation together – working out what unites them, and why they can be one community. Which I think we can do.”