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Having the GGA Audience Development Intern with us this year was invaluable. Susie’s focus on family audiences pushed this area of our work up the agenda at the right time when we had new opportunities in our programming to exploit and made it an active part of our strategic and tactical planning for the year. It allowed us to achieve results in an important area of our development as a company and I firmly believe these would not have been achieved otherwise.

Alison Martin, Marketing & Communications Manager, Citizens' Theatre Glasgow

Benchmarking

Step 1

Decide why you want to benchmark?

Before you begin, it’s important to be clear about why you want to benchmark and how it will help you. Here are some examples:

Internal advocacy

You might want to use benchmarking information to prove to your management team or board that your online marketing operation is under-resourced.

External advocacy

You might need facts and figures to prove to your local authority that you represent value for money. Or you might need to demonstrate your value to a potential partner or sponsor.

Informing strategic decisions

You may be making decisions about salaries or planning a capital investment programme and need external data to strengthen your case.

Checking how well you are doing

You could use benchmarking to compare your performance with others; for example, what kind of response you are getting to your direct mail or what proportion of sales are made online.

Identifying areas that may need investigation

You might have a ‘hunch’ that something’s not quite right or that you’re under-performing in a particular area but need more evidence to back this up. Or you might simply want to see if anything emerges from the exercise to help in your future planning. An open mind is fine!