Audience | Don't Ask, Just Come

This section documents my audience research and the subsequent adjustments I made as a result of the findings.

Audience Research Survey

The research was undertaken via a short survey I created using SurveyMonkey. As I was only able to have 10 questions on the free version of the platform, I had to condense some questions together, which meant that the survey was slightly harder to navigate and somewhat clunky. I am aware that this may have affected the responses I was given, and in future I will be sure to undertake more thorough research through the simplification and refinement of questioning.

The survey was distributed to a small pool of people within my personal network. This was in order to gain insight into individuals I had perceived to be the target audience - those being millennials who have an existing interest in the themes of drag, fetish, art and Japanese culture. This distribution pool consisted of UAL students, artists, and Japan Exchange and Teaching programme participants. I received 25 responses. If I were to partake in a audience research survey for this project again in the future, I will be sure to expand my distribution pool outside of my personal network to ensure responses have less of a bias.

Question 1 was the most compacted question. In future I would prefer to have each of age, sexual orientation, employment status, location and political bias as separate questions.

72% of the responses were from 18-24 year olds, who I perceived to be my target audience as they are the prime audience for drag television programmes and performances in the UK. I thought they would be the most likely to want to actively research and learn about drag and fetish. The other 28% were 25-34. So my survey is really an insight into the perceptions given by millennials on the whole.

While there were a range of sexual orientations selected, a majority 40% selected heterosexual/straight and nobody identified as homosexual. I would like to gain a wider insight into the opinions of those outside of heterosexuality in a future survey as drag audiences in the UK tend to include a large percentage of those who identify as gay, according to my research. I would be interested to see if that demographic would be inclined to visit something like Don't Ask, Just Come.

A majority 48% were students and a majority 40% were living in North West England. I would like to target more Londoners in my future survey as the Digital Residency aims to build a London-based community.

A huge majority of 72% identified as left-wing. I would assume that this is in line with the majority student status of those surveyed, and the relationship between LGBTQ+ communities and left-wing politics. This requires further research.

The responses to this question varied. While nobody selected that they regularly attended drag shows, most selected that they sometimes did or that they had at least once or twice. LGBTQ+ events received a similar response. On the other hand, fetish events were not so popular, and 20% of respondents said that they would not want to attend fetish events at all. When I followed up with people informally, they disclosed that fetish events sounded too private/scary/intimate/sexual/hard to find/non-existant. Yet, 20% said that they would like to attend fetish events, and in the informal follow up some of those people cited the similar reasons for having never attended before.

It seems like the reputation of fetish is something uncomfortable and alienated from event spaces. Having thought as much, I followed up with questions regarding how they would feel about being educated on the topics later in this survey. I would like to do more research into whether or not the archive could convince them to start, learn about or join a fetish community.

I used this question to start planning where I would invest in paid post marketing. Instagram, Facebook and YouTube were used by almost every respondent.

I have decided to go with Instagram as my main site of marketing. This is because, of those I informally chatted with after, most agreed that they only used Facebook occasionally to catch up with older family members, thus, making my target demographic on there only sometimes available to see the posts. Department H has an Instagram and Ameblo account, but no Facebook profile. I would like to use Ameblo in the future but my lack of Japanese language skills and minimal knowledge of Ameblo makes this redundant right now.

YouTube is the host for some of the video content we already use, and we do not plan to host any content on that platform ourselves in order to avoid creating a narrative that is not the community's own.

Most respondents already had some vested interest in drag, LGBTQ+ or fetish on social media platforms. They would be the easiest to target with paid marketing as their accounts already have a relationship with the themes presented in Don't Ask, Just Come and Department H.

Here the responses are somewhat hard to follow, again something I would change next time. Despite that, it seems that only 4 respondents identify as being a part of any LGBTQ+, drag or fetish communities whether in real life or online. 8 respondent claimed to want to be a part of one or more of those communities and 5 would not even consider it. With large percentages of respondents selecting that they are an ally or the communities, despite their other selected responses within the same question.

Thus, it seems that most respondents, whether involved, wanting to be involved, or not wanting to be involved do have some relationship with communities, especially LGBTQ+ and drag. Fetish, again, is less represented - perhaps due to the reasons listed earlier. More research can be done on this in the future. Yet, this still provides me with an inferences that this demographic has a personal interest and investment in the communities Don't Ask, Just Come is documenting.

This question received a broad range of answers that are hard to quantify, but give a good qualitative insight into respondents understanding of the communities.

Some responses talked about following drag-related accounts on social media, which is interesting because nobody selected that they were involved in the drag community. It would be interesting to know their understanding of what it means to belong to a community. For some people that could be limited to those who are drag performers, while some may consider themselves a part of the community as an ally/follower. This could definitely use some further investigating.

Some responses alluded to the community as unwelcoming and/or exclusive. It may be the case that this is common to UK culturally-based communities, but that requires further examination. In my research, I read that drag is opening up to an audience that has a large % of straight females. Perhaps this perception is slowly changing? I wanted to make sure that Don't Ask, Just Come felt inclusive and welcoming, and so I ensured it was a publicly accessible platform and made the Digital Residency self-selecting rather than reliant on my autonomy over the site. To add to this point, Department H openly invites those curious to their events, with the tagline "don't ask! just come...". It would be interesting to know the perceptions of Department H in terms of exclusivity.

Just under half of the respondents would visit an archive with themes similar to Don't Ask, Just Come. I can infer from this that at least some of these respondents would be interested in visiting Don't Ask, Just Come.

Most respondents had visited some sort of archive, so its not a stretch that they would visit another.

Despite the relatively low interest in fetish, 40% of respondents said that they would be interested in viewing archive material from fetish communities. 36% said they would be interested in viewing archive material from drag communities. An additional 36% responded with 'Maybe, I would have to experience it to find out'. This shows that there is an existing audience, within the target audience I have predicted, who would be interested in something like Don't Ask, Just Come.

28% responded with 'Yes, to find out more AND get involved with all', while 32% responded 'Yes, to find out more about all'. 24% responded 'Maybe, I would have to experience it to find out'. It can be inferred from the data that most respondents would be willing to look at art based on those themes and their communities. Thus, giving a potential audience to the Digital Residency.

Only 1 person selected 'Yes, to get involved in all' and only 1 person selected 'No, art cannot change my opinion of things.

The responses to the final question were varied. Though very large majorities agreed that all 3 communities 'definitely need more documentation', which serves the archive well as a site of collective memory. Drag was the only community considered well documented by a small selection of respondents. This may be due to the current popularity of drag television programme and their famous performers.

Amongst those who didn't select 'definitely' related answers, there were a small percentage of responses in the 'some ... experiences should be documented' sector. It would be interesting to engage in further conversations about the value of some documentation over others. I will ensure to follow-up on that point in the future.