Theatres across the UK will shortly receive an invitation to join the Theatre Evidence Centre from SOLT and UK Theatre.
The Theatre Evidence Centre will be a sector-owned source of sales and audience data to help SOLT and UK Theatre achieve visibility of the pace and distribution of sales, how audiences are changing, and a better understanding of patterns of programming across the country.
Nominated legal contacts will receive an agreement to counter-sign.
Frequently Asked Questions
In most cases, searching on Companies House will provide you with the theatre’s legal name and company number, as well as the registered office address. Select Filing History and tick the Incorporation option to see the Memorandum and Articles of Association or the Incorporation statement. This will normally tell you what type of legal entity your theatre is, for example:
– A company limited by shares
– A company limited by guarantee
– A private unlimited company
– A Limited Liability Partnership (LLP)
– A Community Interest Company (CIC)
The Evidence Centre is open to all primary ticket sellers in SOLT and UK Theatre. Please let us know who the best contact is to reach you.
For many UK Theatre and SOLT Members, signing the legal permission to extract and process data will be all that is required at this time. The agreement grants permission for us to collect data on sales and audiences (postcodes and Customer IDs only) from the date the agreement has been signed, and going back up to five years.
In some cases, we may ask you to notify your ticketing vendor that you have given permission to SOLT and UK Theatre to extract data. Spektrix users will be asked to complete a few short steps to grant access to sales data – a guide will be published here soon. If we need to, we’ll get in touch with your technical contact.
We are using the same technology as that currently installed for The Audience Agency’s Audience Finder and/or Baker Richards Segmentation Engine / Advantage Dashboards to securely extract and store data.
We hope you were able to join us for the SOLT and UK Theatre Member Webinar which introduced the Evidence Centre, or you may have seen recent announcements from SOLT and UK Theatre (here and here). This project will for the first time create a detailed granular dataset on sales and audience behaviours in theatre which is truly owned by the theatre industry. SOLT and UK Theatre will use the data as an evidence base to lobby on behalf of the sector, at this crucial time.
The collection system will also ensure that there are fewer requests for you to compile and report data manually. This data collection will inform our regular sales reporting to the sector.
The purposes of processing are described in the agreement. SOLT and UK Theatre will use extracted data to monitor sales and audience patterns at an aggregated level – we will not analyse any single theatre or production in isolation without requesting prior additional consent. This data will inform our lobbying and associated campaigns, as well as being used in reporting to and on behalf of the sector.
The agreement does not permit the commercial exploitation of any data gathered. Data is transported over an encrypted connection and is stored in a secure data warehouse hosted by Amazon in the EU.
The UK Theatre Evidence Centre is not connected to the ACE National Portfolio audience data programme being delivered by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
We are mindful that there are multiple data aggregators operating in the UK, and that performance/production coding is a burden on staff time. Once the initial data collection is underway, our intention is to develop a machine learning model to assist with coding productions (.e.g. by artform/genre), and early pilots of this have been promising. We will ask a small number of people for assistance with training the machine learning model.
No. Membership of the Evidence Centre and access to the resulting reports and insights is a benefit of membership of SOLT or UK Theatre.
For a period of time in 2023, the Evidence Centre will share data extraction technology with The Audience Agency’s Audience Finder. The Data Extraction Client extracts the data from your system once, and transfers it to a staging area – the “Core History Data”. From there, different data is moved to the relevant applications. The Evidence Centre for example receives only the Customer ID and Postcode, where Audience Finder receives more data.
We provide below an example clause for use in your Privacy Policy:
We share information with Society of London Theatre / UK Theatre and Baker Richards Consulting Ltd in order to contribute to theatre sales data aggregation and to benchmark our organisation against others. Data is anonymised and processed for statistical/research purposes.
Please email evidence.centre@baker-richards.com or enquiries@soltukt.co.uk to verify.
Do you have a question that hasn’t been answered?
Please get in touch, and we will be happy to help.