I'm an audience insight consultant, specialising in the museum, heritage and cultural sectors.
I help organisations to better understand their audiences by conducting audience research, evaluation, finding insight in existing data, and running strategy and audience development workshops.
I've worked in audience insight for the last seven years, working for several of the UK's national museums. As well as freelancing as a consultant, I currently work as an Audience Analyst at the V&A museum in London, and ran the audience research and evaluation functions for The National Gallery and Imperial War Museums. I've also been a Committee Member for the Visitor Studies Group and a Steering Group Member for the Culture & Data Research Network since 2018.
I started (and named) Culture Bulb because I enjoyed helping my colleagues to have that "light bulb" moment when they're looking at audience data and something suddenly clicks. It's that moment of real, deep insight that helps people to truly understand their audience's wants, needs and behaviours. And it's an understanding of those needs and behaviour which in turn helps them to design programmes with audiences at their heart.
My approach to audience insight is creative, collaborative and inherently pragmatic. Having commissioned countless research projects working in museums, I know that audience insight needs to be easily actionable, so that research can be used to create change in your organisation. I like to use 'how might we...' questions to challenge organisations to think differently about how they might engage their audiences in new and exciting ways. I am a big visual thinker, and am a huge advocate for presenting data and insight in new, exciting ways that capture your attention and get people excited about audience research.
I've been fortunate to work on projects for a range of different organisations, including:
