Five key takeaways from the DCMS Participation Survey 2024

5th September 2024 17:24

'Five key takeaways' banner: Museum background

By Rebecca Green, Research Director and Culture Lead.

I’m always excited to get my hands on a new dataset, and the latest installment of the DCMS Participation survey (formerly “Taking Part”) is an excellent excuse to take stock and reflect on what we know about contemporary cultural audiences.

Here are my five key takeaways, and what I think they mean for culture and heritage professionals.

Young people

The headline narrative for museum and gallery visits is good – a 10-percentage point increase in the proportion of adults visiting in a 12-month period. But as we might expect this isn’t uniform growth.

For cohorts between 25 and 79, the proportion who have visited is up by between 10 and 12 percentage points, but for 20 to 24s, this increase is only +6 percentage points, and for 16 to 19s, no statistically significant increase is detected...Click to download the full article for takeaway 1.

This is not “new news” for anyone connected to the cultural sector. However, the most recent release starkly illustrates the differences within as well as between different ethnic groups.

At the level of broad ethnic groups, engagement has increased within four of the five categories, except for Black and Black British Ethnicities. When we drill down, we also see marked variation within different ethnic groups...Click to download the full article for takeaway 2

By "digital" I mean digital engagement with the collections or other related content such as animations, games or podcasts.

Headline data shows that both physical and digital engagement have increased year-on year...Click to download the full article for takeaway 3.

An elderly set of hands

While the role and importance of digital continues to grow, there remain groups of the population who either cannot or do not engage digitally. One of the strongest correlates of this is age.

Below age 65 use of the internet is near-universal (at or above 95%), however for older age cohorts, engagement drops rapidly. Cultural venues must therefore remain fully mindful of potential limitations on digital access whilst they develp their engagement strategies if they are to successfully maximise accessibility and inclusion for the long-term...Click to download the full article for takeaway 4.

This isn’t strictly about cultural audiences, but I wanted to finish on a positive note, and I do think it has relevance. I’m old enough to remember Euro ‘96, and all the coverage of the England Men’s team. At that time most female players were not full-time sports people. In this context, seeeing awareness and engagement statistics for the UEFA Women's 2022 Euros is heartening, perhaps even a little moving. And it should provide culture sector proressionals with hope...Click to download the full article for takeaway 5.

In closing...

Thank you for reading, I hope you found this useful or at least interesting. You can download my full report here, which contains all five takeaway articles and thoughts on what they mean for sector professionals. There’s also plenty more to explore in the Participation Survey itself.

If you’ve got a question or you’d like to talk more about how audience insight can inform your work, you can contact me directly rgreen@djsresearch.com

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