How it works?

You can either click on a letter, scroll through the terms, or search by a word you want.

GFT found working with GGA a very easy and enjoyable experience. We have used the findings of the report to write our own internal report, which helps to support funding applications and influence our marketing strategy for 2010.

Seonaid Frame, Glasgow Film Theatre

Jargon Buster

  1. A
  2. B
  3. C
  4. D
  5. E
  6. F
  7. G
  8. H
  9. I
  10. J
  11. K
  12. L
  13. M
  14. N
  15. O
  16. P
  17. Q
  18. R
  19. S
  20. T
  21. U
  22. V
  23. W
  24. X
  25. Y
  26. Z

Attender

What does this mean?

Someone who actually comes to an event or performance.

An attender could be someone who has made a booking (i.e. a booker) for themselves and then made an actual attendance. It could also be a person who has come to an event or performance, but who had a booking made for them by someone else (i.e. an associate). Equally, being an attender does not imply that a booking has been made, or that money has been paid. What is crucial here is the essential act of actually coming to an event or performance. However someone who books a ticket but then does not use it for their own visit to a facility CANNOT be classified as an ‘attender’.

Attenders can be sub-divided according to their current status in terms of the relative frequency of their relationship with the organisation. The suggested definitions here are shown in the following table.

Term Definition
Current attender Someone who has been to an event at the organisation within the last 12 months.
Regular attender Someone who has been to an event at the organisation a minumum of two times in the last 12 months.
Frequent attender Someone who has been to an event at a recurring rate that an organisation considers to be higher than average.
Lapsed or inactive attender Someone who has a history of attending the organisation, but who either:
  • has asked to be removed from the organisation's records, or
  • has not been to an event at the organisation during a period equal to one year plus the number of years the organisation considers to be the norm for this type of attender.
Revived attender Someone who had stopped using the organisation but has restarted this behaviour.
How did we get this definition?

An ‘attender’ is defined as “someone who actually comes to an event or a performance”. A number of key distinctions need to be noted here.

Firstly the difference between an ‘attender’ and ‘attendances’. ‘Attender’ refers to discrete individuals who attend, and thus ‘totalattenders’ is the count of people who come to a facility. However ‘attendances’ relates to the total number of times that visits to an event have been made. The total for this (‘total attendances’)therefore refers to seats or places occupied and not to the people doing this.

Secondly a distinction needs to be made between ‘attenders’ and ‘bookers’. Attenders are people who actually come to an event,whereas bookers are the people who organise the tickets for an attendance, but who might not actually come themselves (since they could be booking the tickets for someone else, or having booked a ticket might not use it).

Related and similar definitions

Another big issue here relates to how the status of an attender should be defined. This is particularly challenging since research carried out,as part of the study which led to the creation of this document,suggests that different individuals and organisations define the various types of attender in a variety of ways.

Andrew McIntyre suggest that there is evidence that the typicallongevity of an attender (ie the period they remain an active user of an organisation) tends to work according to four year cycles. His company – Morris Hargreaves McIntyre – are also developing an approach to classifying attenders using a process based on ‘half-lifes’ (ie How long does it take before half a group of audience have stopped coming, then how long does it take before half the remaining audience stop coming,and so on).

Yet at the same time, Roger Tomlinson and Tim Baker make a logical case for the time periods that define attender status to be treated dynamically. Hence they argue that, because of the diversity of event types and organisations involved, it would be imprudent and misleading to set an absolute national standard here.Then a number of organisations (including some of those represented at the initial definitions and protocols symposium) do use absolute time periods to define attender status.Consequently to square this particular circle, and in an attempt to resolve this conundrum, the recommended definitions and protocols use a combination of some absolute figures, and some dynamic ones that will need to be decided on an organisation by organisation basis.These are as follows (with the relevant reasoning shown in brackets).

A current attender is someone who has been to an event at an organisation within the last 12 months (12 months is the recommended time frame here since it mirrors one of the conventional timeframes used for business reporting purposes).

A regular attender is someone who has been to an event a minimum of two times in the last 12 months, (since this appears to be the frequency most commonly used by organisations for this type of attender).

A frequent attender is someone who comes to an event, organisation or facility at a recurring rate that is higher than the average for that facility’s audience. (This definition is therefore a dynamic one, and will depend on what the mean rate of attendance is for a typical member of an organisation’s audience).

A lapsed attender is someone who has a history of attending ut who has either asked to be removed from the organisation’s ecords, or who has appeared to have stopped coming after a eriod equivalent to the average (mean) period that a typical ustomer remains active plus one year. (The first of these aspects has been included at the suggestion of Roger Tomlinson, whose research with the Data Commissioner is understood to have identified the Data Protection Act need to respond immediately to a request to be removed from an organisation’s records. The second is a hybrid of the need for a dynamic definition that is set by each organisation combined with the pragmatic addition of an extra year to allow for that fact that lapsed attenders might reactivate their attending behaviour).

Then a revived attender is a lapsed attender who has started attending again. (Another case of a dynamic definition, how long to leave before an attender is judged to be truly and fully inactive and never likely to return, can only be decided by each organisation on the basis of its own patterns of user behaviour).Instance of when to use this: Identifying and counting attenders - especially according to the categories listed above – is of particular use when you either want to evaluate how effective your organisation is being in retaining users (or how bad it is at losing users). It can also be vital intelligence if your organisation is considering running a campaign to try and increase the rate of use of current attenders, or to reenergise lapsed attenders.(Since in all these cases it will be necessary to identify which category a particular user falls into).

When to use

Identifying and counting attenders – especially according to the categories listed above – is of particular use when you either want to evaluate how effective your organisation is being in retaining users (or how bad it is at losing users). It can also be vital intelligence if your organisation is considering running a campaign to try to increase the rate of use of current attenders, or to re-energise lapsed attenders (since in all these cases it will be necessary to identify which category a particular user falls into).