We asked ninety-two people who run events, venues, festivals and rosters the same four-word question, and wrote the answers down without tidying them. Not one of them named a single place. Every answer was a list, and the length of the list turned out to be the whole finding.
Key takeaways
- The question was "where does your audience live", asked with no follow-up.
- Nobody answered with one place. Every answer was a list of three to seven.
- The discomfort appeared after they finished listing, not while they were doing it.
Why one question and not twenty
Because a long interview produces a long transcript and a short one produces a usable one. The failure mode of product research is asking people to design your product, and they will politely try, and everything they say will be a guess dressed as a requirement.
The alternative is to ask about the world rather than about the software. Good practice in user interviewing says roughly the same thing in more careful language: ask about what happened, not about what would be nice.
So: where does your audience live. Then nothing. The first answer is the tidy one, the one they would give a journalist. The second answer, which arrives after four or five seconds of silence, is the real one.
The shape of the answers
| What they named | How it usually came out |
|---|---|
| The ticketing platform | First, always, and with a caveat attached |
| A spreadsheet | Second, slightly apologetically |
| The email tool | Third, and often with a wrong number attached |
| The Instagram follower count | Named as audience, though nobody could message it |
| A previous team member's laptop | More often than we expected |
| The venue's own system, if they are a promoter | Or the promoter's, if they are a venue |
| A partner or sponsor's list | Last, and usually with no access |
Reading a table like that, the fragmentation looks obvious. Sitting in the conversation, it did not, because each item had arrived for a good reason at a different time and nobody had ever laid them side by side.
The pause
The interesting moment in almost every conversation was the same, and it was not during the list. It was immediately after.
People would finish enumerating, stop, and then say some version of: "which is a bit of a problem, actually." Nobody said that at the start. The fragmentation was invisible while it was being described and obvious the second the description ended.
That is the whole reason to ask the question out loud rather than send a survey. A survey with a text box would have collected the same seven items and produced none of the pauses.
What we did with it
Three things changed as a result, and one of them was in this product.
We stopped asking what to build. The list was not a feature request. It was a description of a world in which no single system had ever been the obvious home for a person, so every system became a partial home.
We took the agency case seriously. A recurring version of the answer, from people managing several artists or venues, was worse than the list: it was the same list, multiplied, with a rule that the audiences must never be mixed. That became the Roster in HIIPE, where several accounts sit behind one login with their fanbases kept separate rather than merged.
We stopped believing the follower count. It was named as audience in a large share of the conversations and it is not one, for the reasons set out in what a link in bio does not do. Correcting that in a sales call is rude. Publishing the argument and letting people arrive at it is better.
What we would do differently
Ask the second question. We deliberately did not, to keep the interviews comparable, and I think that was right for the first ninety-two and wrong for the next round.
The second question should be: which of those places would you lose if the person who set it up left tomorrow. My guess, and it is only a guess until it is asked, is that the answer is at least two of them in most organisations.
The finding, in one line
Ninety-two operators, one question, and not a single answer that named one place. The average was between three and seven, the second half of every list arrived slowly, and the discomfort appeared in the pause afterwards rather than during. If you take one thing from this, it is that the fragmentation is invisible from the inside and obvious the moment it is said out loud, which is why the exercise is worth doing on yourself even when you are certain of the answer.
What it means if you are the one being asked
Do the exercise on yourself. Write the list, and then write one date next to each item: when it was last updated. Anything older than a year is not part of your audience any more, it is an archive that you are still counting.
The argument for what the consolidated version should hold is in what a fan CRM is, and the reason to consolidate before you need it rather than during a launch week is in what an event CRM should do between two events. How the pieces sit together is on the solutions page.
Read next : What a fan CRM is, and what it is not · Venue marketing: the problem is not Saturday, it is Tuesday