How it works?

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

GGA has been a cheerleader, shouting on our behalf.

Member - Glasgow Grows Audiences

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

Data capture rate

What does this mean?

A measure of the number of booking transactions made at an arts facility for which details have been recorded. This rate is typically expressed as a percentage, i.e.:

(No. transactions for which details are recorded / Total number of transactions) X 100.

How did we get this definition?

The extent to which arts organisations are managing to trap and record a full set of name, address and other data about a customer is an important indicator of that organisation’s potential to analyse and understand its customers.

One measure of this is the percentage of customers for which name and address details are obtained, as compared with the total number of customers.

But unfortunately this data capture rate tends to vary between organisations (for instance, in a report on dance attenders in Scotland, consultants Heather Maitland and Tim Baker report data capture rates ranging from 14% to 100%.)

This has two implications. First, it is desirable for arts organisations to monitor their achievements in capturing data by constantly assessing their data capture rates, and second, – because of the variety of organisations and settings involved – it is not possible to set an industry standard for a required data capture rate.

Related and similar definitions

The data capture rate is calculated as: (No. of customers for which name and address data is recorded) X 100 / Total number of customer transactions

Possibly the easiest way of finding the ‘number of customers for which name and address data is recorded’ is to find the total number of customers and substract from this the number of customers for whom there is not a full and usable record of name and address.