Insights from
Events Data Aggregation Report
Research & Learning
A new report from FRY Creative seeking to understand how to best aggregate and understand the quantative data from major events.
This research, conducted by FRY Creative, brings together audience data from three major events from 2022: the Birmingham 2022 Festival which took place over six months as part of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, Coventry 2021 City of Culture (which ran May 2021-April 2022) and Unboxed: Creativity in the UK.
The report focuses on if and how you can bring together data from different festivals, similar in content and objectives, but deploying different data collection methodologies.
In January 2023 Spirit of 2012 published the final report from our inquiry into maximising the impact of events. In it, we called for the establishment of an events data observatory to better capture and track long term impacts from public events, and improve knowledge transfer.
We know there is strong appetite to understand the collective impact of events, and to make comparisons between them. But we are currently not making it easy for policymakers, event organisers or researchers to do this work – and that reduces our ability to apply lessons learned to events in the future.
The report finds that:
- We are asking questions in slightly different ways, meaning we can only bring together a minority of the data between different events;
- Access to data is not easy and is often contingent on pre-existing relationships;
- Where we can bring information together, we can strengthen our understanding of who attends events, and who is left out, and make events more inclusive in the future.
