Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted cultural production and engagement in ways we do not yet fully understand. It manifested as an interlude, an acceleration and an inflection all at the same time. Little remained the same: some things reduced then returned, while others reduced for good; some things kept changing in the direction they were already heading, and some sped up; others changed in new ways that have persisted beyond the immediate crisis. This observation holds as much for audience trends and dynamics as it does for institutions and practitioners. It is difficult to divine whether we will witness a gradual return to old patterns of engagement or a radical switch, pushed to further extremes by the cost-of-living crisis. The prolific shift to digital distribution made a wealth of new arts content available to audiences stuck at home, but did it have the democratising, game-changing effect on audiences that many thought they were witnessing?

This chapter investigates how audiences and the wider UK population engaged with cultural content during the pandemic, in both live and digital spaces, and explores how their behaviours and attitudes are evolving as we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis into the cost-of-living crisis. It presents, contextualises and discusses the findings of the Cultural Participation Monitor, a bespoke longitudinal tracking survey of the UK population that analysed changing digital engagement habits and attitudes towards re-engagement. Led by The Audience Agency, the Cultural Participation Monitor has been asking a representative sample of the UK population across multiple waves about their cultural experiences and expectations before, during and beyond the pandemic. Our exploration of audiences’ digital behaviour change includes a deep-dive analysis of social media by Jenny Kidd and Eva Nieto McAvoy at the moment the UK went into national lockdowns in March 2020. The chapter interrogates how society’s relationship to arts and culture may have shifted over this time of significant change and tells a story about the kinds of cultural content and interactions that people found valuable in a period of unprecedented uncertainty and anxiety.

The chapter concludes by assessing the signs of longer-term trends in audience behaviour and engagement and by exploring the implications of these trends for artists, cultural organisations, funders and policy-makers.

Methodological reflections on our population survey

To understand and analyse any possible relationship between digitisation and democratisation of cultural engagement and to move beyond a perspective mediated entirely by cultural practitioners and commentators, we felt that it was vital to engage directly with the general public. As new rules and regulations for social distancing came into law, there was an outbreak of audience surveying as organisations and umbrella bodies rushed to understand the potential impact of each new wave of restrictions. Many surveys were hastily concocted, posing narrow or parochial questions, one-off and close-up exercises, based on dubious samples, sometimes intent on ‘proving’ what the sector thought it was witnessing. Others were well-crafted and considered but inevitably biased towards committed cultural audiences. In this deluge of more or less reliable intelligence, it seemed important to develop a statistically significant, universal understanding of the impact of the pandemic on people’s cultural engagement across the UK’s four home nations. Our aim was to provide an ongoing, real-time barometer of the public’s response, fleeter of foot and more responsive to change than existing studies such as Taking Part, the national statistical survey on participation (DCMS, n.d.), but more independent and impartial than the sector’s urgent DIY research.

Accordingly, we chose a population-wide survey. The survey was carried out online for practical reasons, despite some risks of sampling bias. We attempted to mitigate these by making it nationally representative by region, age, gender, ethnicity and Audience Spectrum, The Audience Agency’s ten-category segmentation model, often and accurately used to track significant differences across a spectrum of cultural attitudes and behaviours. Audience Spectrum enabled us to differentiate between privileged segments ‘highly engaged’ with culture of the formal, publicly funded variety, less frequent or medium-engaged groups, and those ‘less engaged’ with formal arts and cultural offers. The research design also reflected our interest in the widest range of cultural and creative activity across society rather than a limited range of institutional offerings.

Our primary interest was in the scope and degree of change in cultural habits over both the short and long term. We could not assume that those regularly attending before COVID-19 would do so after it – and understanding potential new audiences would be as important as understanding newly lapsed ones. Similarly, we were looking for shifts in ‘everyday creativity’ (see Wright, 2022), evolving interaction with digital cultural content and evidence of other cultural or creative pursuits not mediated by public institutions. We therefore included questions about how much spare time people had and what they did with it before and during the pandemic, and what they anticipated doing after it. These core questions were repeated across roughly quarterly waves for eighteen months and offered a sense of how public attitudes were changing. To these we added spot-questions to understand sudden changes – in policy, attitude, the news, etc. – as they emerged. Having this fresh information at our fingertips became increasingly valuable as the sector became more adept at adapting; and since the rate of change has scarcely slowed, we continued the Monitor beyond the period of the original research, into 2022–2023. This unforeseen extension to the survey contributes something of a sequel to the original research story and facilitates a longer-term observation of audience trends.

The evolution of cultural engagement through the pandemic

In terms of a direct response to the impact of the pandemic on external activities, a clear picture emerged from the first wave of the Monitor in November 2020. Nine months into the crisis, with one lockdown behind us and another one on the cards, it was clear that just over a third of the population had no intention of going out to do cultural – or indeed any other kind of – activity. Another third were only likely to do so under strictly controlled conditions, while a final group – just under one-third – were keen to go back to doing in-person activities. Perhaps predictably, these divisions of opinion corresponded to age and life-stage, with older audiences significantly more cautious than younger ones, especially those with young families. We mapped a similar divide between rural and urban communities: our survey highlighted how people in large metropolitan centres – especially London – were far more gung-ho. Intriguingly, it seemed that the different COVID-19 policies across the nations may also have driven public confidence and perceptions of risk, with the proportion of people willing to return in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland being far lower than in England throughout the pandemic and despite factoring for age and other demographic influences.

Remarkably, however, the vast majority – over 95 per cent in repeated waves of the Monitor, including those keen to get back to normal attendance – continued to think that social distancing was important and to be respected. Very few people suggested that distancing measures spoiled their experience – at least not enough to put them off returning to cultural venues – and 90+ per cent of respondents repeatedly rated arts and cultural organisations as doing a good job with the measures they put in place. Of all the measures, those allowing flexibility, such as offering ticket refunds and the chance to move time slots, were the most highly rated. This reflected our finding that what people liked best about digital opportunities was their ‘always-on’ quality – the chance to engage as and when people wanted and on their own terms. A side story about the appeal of more flexible, customer-considerate ways of working emerged in our analysis.

Contrary to popular belief, the COVID-19 pandemic was not unremittingly devastating for the arts and cultural sector – at least from an audience and funding perspective. In fact, the population’s interest in and support for arts and culture seemed considerably consolidated by the pandemic, with 57 per cent of people reporting that it was important to their wellbeing, 63 per cent saying they were more willing to support public funding for cultural institutions and 56 per cent confirming that they were more likely to donate personally to organisations to help them operate with COVID-19 restrictions in place. The plight of public organisations through the crisis clearly touched a nerve and we might speculate that the creative, social engagements that some organisations turned to with their communities, as highlighted in various chapters in this book, made a significant public and civic impact.

Meanwhile, as reported widely in the media, people got used to staying in, discovering the joys of hunkering down and getting creative or consuming lots of new cultural content – and sometimes both at once. However, it emerged that very few people actually took up new creative hobbies or developed a new digital cultural habit during the pandemic. Our research demonstrated that people who were already keen everyday creatives and/or digital culture enthusiasts engaged more than ever before. This generally applied to more privileged, more arts-engaged people who fell into the group with more time on their hands. However, these trends started to drop off relatively steeply after lockdown as a significant proportion of the population returned to the office (and the gym, commuting etc.). This suggests that removing physical barriers to engagement such as lack of time, lack of money and the need to travel is not in itself an effective way to open up cultural and creative opportunities to a more diverse audience base. This confirms existing research by Stevenson (2019), which identifies the presence of the ‘disinterested’ cultural participant but challenges the finding by Brook (2016a) that spatial equity can have a significant impact on cultural participation.

The segmentation of audiences by levels of confidence – a third staying in, a third remaining cautious and a third getting out – was remarkably persistent throughout the pandemic and it was only by the very end of 2021 that we observed a small but significant shift. By November 2021, a residual 37 per cent were still staying in and, as of September 2022, 26 per cent of people said they still did not want to return. This highlights a significant lag between the actual level of risk and people’s perception of it, which is continuing to hamper ticket buying and thus to hinder the recovery of the cultural sector itself. The enthusiastic ‘keen to get out’ group, however, did indeed flock back to venues as they reopened, with many of them reporting higher levels of engagement than pre-pandemic.

The cost-of-living shockwave

Despite the lag effect on perceptions of risk, by autumn 2022, the majority of people were willing to go out, although a net 20 per cent of people were still anticipating that they would do less overall in future than before the pandemic. Considerable differences between forms of cultural engagement began to emerge: at one end of the spectrum, 20 per cent of people reported that they were expecting to attend more outdoor experiences than before the pandemic, while at the other end 34 per cent were expecting to go to the cinema less often than they used to. Divining lasting impacts has become complicated by the new shift in behaviour precipitated by the cost-of-living crisis. By the end of 2022 some organisations, particularly metropolitan venues, were reporting attendance back at pre-Covid levels. However, most respondents to the seventh wave of the Monitor in September 2022 indicated that they were worried about the effects of the cost-of-living crisis on them and their household (86 per cent said they ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’, with almost half strongly agreeing). People also told us that this will directly impact their cultural activities, with as many as 92 per cent intending to scale back on entertainment spend outside of the home as a result, especially among mid-engaged, middle-aged and less urban groups. When we asked about the range of areas people were expecting to cut back spending on, entertainment and leisure outside the home was in a small group of areas second only to ‘non-essential retail’ (or what we might call ‘shopping for fun’). Although the picture remains complex, the outlook for healthy audience figures across the cultural sector looks bleak.

Inequality and exclusion

We have long known that cultural engagement is socially stratified: people’s socio-economic class, wealth and education levels are the most significant predictors of their propensity to attend publicly funded arts and cultural events (O’Brien, Brook and Taylor, 2019). The Monitor confirmed this established pattern (by Indices of Multiple Deprivation, by occupation type and by socio-demographic profiles). Notably, when focusing in on precisely those groups who were structurally disadvantaged, the survey highlighted some of the ways in which COVID-19 actually exacerbated this effect. For example, those with professional backgrounds were more likely to be better off as a result of COVID-19, cutting costs, such as holidays and commuting, without losing income. Older groups were also least likely to see a change in income, as those who were already retired could not be furloughed or lose their jobs. But those who were younger, disabled and/or in semi-routine or routine occupations were likely to end up worse off financially and encounter more disruption to their routines. On this latter point: this was because these groups were both more likely to have less time (working longer, reduced public transport, looking after children, etc.) and also more likely to have more of it (due to furlough or unemployment, for example).

We saw these inequalities reflected in cultural engagement, as the divide between cultural haves and have-nots widened considerably. Pressure on the income and time of less-well-off, frontline workers was of course greatly exacerbated by the sudden scarcity of arts and cultural opportunities, and the complicated new ways in which they could be accessed. Other chapters in this book document the inspired acts of many organisations that managed to support and cheer their communities in creative ways but there were not enough of these valuable interventions to show up in a population study like the Monitor.

It looked as though this effect was starting to level off by early 2022. However, as we have noted, as the cost-of-living crisis deepened it impacted less affluent people in a disproportionately negative way, meaning that people in lower socio-economic groups were even less likely to spend money outside the home. One particular concern is that the groups most affected by the cost-of-living crisis (younger, urban, family and lower-income groups) were in many cases those whose levels of cultural activity had bounced back furthest since COVID-19. The new crisis has seemed particularly targeted at those whose attendance has proved most resilient following the previous one, thereby maximising the total impact of the two challenges combined.

The impact of age, life-stage and lifestyle

Across the phases of the research, several key factors recurred as the drivers of different levels of engagement (and also factors we know to be linked to different behaviours, attitudes and motivations). We saw consistently higher engagement – and more elastic ‘snap back’ – from those who were younger, urban, highly engaged and with dependent children. These audiences attended more online, returned soonest when small windows of opportunity emerged mid-pandemic, and returned first and in greater numbers once venues started to open more fully, especially from autumn 2021, for live events. Their willingness to engage persisted throughout 2022, generating implications for what the ‘new normal’ might look like.

In many ways, this echoes previous research by The Audience Agency (2016) which identified notable differences between the ‘Baby Boomer’ age cohort (with a large population ‘bulge’ entering retirement and taking on an increasing proportion of cultural engagement, especially at ticketed events) and those who were younger. Back then, we anticipated increasing reliance on this group, until a point – perhaps fifteen years in the future – when there would need to be a shift towards a younger audience, one which the sector had not, up to that point, been incentivised to prioritise. This, we warned, could result in difficulties adapting and a loss of purpose if organisations did not start to adapt well in advance.

COVID-19 may have sped up this process. The loss of Baby Boomer audiences due to COVID-19 (risk, change of habits, accelerated ‘ageing’ of lifestyle) has brought forward the point when a reduction was expected due to age and ill-health. Since older (core) audiences have different needs, interests and behaviours, this affects both the immediate impact of the pandemic and future developments for the sector. For example, many organisations’ revenue and planning anticipates behaviours that Audience Finder tells us are strongly associated with older audiences such as early booking, donating, subscriptions, in-venue dining and attending matinées. This will disproportionately affect art forms with older audiences, notably classical music, theatre and opera. It also presents a conundrum for many organisations who will need to work harder to retain older core audiences while learning new habits and developing radically different offers for younger audiences with divergent tastes. To some extent, a renewed focus on younger audiences post-pandemic could potentially alienate and therefore exacerbate the demise of core older audiences on whom the cultural sector has relied for decades.

Family audiences

After age, the most striking difference in our survey analyses was between those with or without dependent children in the household (hereafter: ‘families’). The family experience of the pandemic was different in several notable ways, including home schooling, looking after children’s wellbeing and development in difficult and novel circumstances, and greater exposure to infection via children and their social contacts. These factors combined to give a strong incentive to engage with culture outside the home once this became an option. Even before COVID-19, there was latent demand for more family arts content and once again the pandemic turned up the dial on this trend.

There are several benefits to family engagement. Attending with (and for) children gives a motivation (or excuse) for adult audiences to visit unfamiliar venues and spaces. It also makes entering those spaces easier: people know that they can at least play the role of ‘parent’, whatever other unfamiliar roles might be projected onto them in a novel environment. As a result, we see a far more diverse range of audiences (e.g. by social group and ethnicity) for family arts events compared to many other art forms. This is significant in the context of urgent policy drivers to diversify cultural organisations. As attending cultural activities at an early age is also associated with later engagement (even if there might be a period of non-engagement in between), building family audiences also helps to build audiences in the longer term, so emerges as a strategic priority for cultural organisations.

Digital and hybrid future

Small comfort though it was, the cultural sector quickly realised that lockdown presented an extraordinary laboratory situation in which to carry out a giant and arguably long-overdue experiment in designing digital and hybrid experiences. The opportunity to test the potential of digital content and digitally enabled visitor journeys was unprecedented, albeit not entirely planned for nor properly resourced. In effect, COVID-19 created a classic ‘burning platform’, pushing the sector beyond its usual caution and justifiable reservations about digital. With time on our hands and a nation in need, what was to lose? Many organisations also said that they had increased their digital offer during lockdown to help maintain or strengthen their audience relationships and the Monitor suggests this was generally successful, with just over 50 per cent of our sample saying they had used digital content created by an organisation they had visited.

These forays into the unknown were not of course carried out under strict laboratory conditions, especially in terms of gathering good data, and it seems that the sector was also prey to optimism bias. Many organisations who put a lot of time and effort into their new digital offers were convinced that this work was opening up access for new, hitherto excluded audiences. Other stakeholders were also optimistic: the rationale was that when apparent barriers to live engagement such as transport time, high ticket costs and ‘threshold anxiety’ were removed, new audiences would emerge onto new and existing digital platforms to enjoy cultural content from their own homes, with little else to occupy their time. However, the Monitor showed clearly and consistently that this wished-for democratisation failed to materialise at the macro level. In fact, it showed that the net increase in people engaging with cultural content was less than 3 per cent. This became the headline about the pivot to digital content, a story of failure in many eyes and one that is still circulating.

The full story is, however, far more complex. Because consumption of cultural content did inevitably increase massively, some core attenders showed a big appetite, some new audiences were indeed found and, importantly, digital content and platforms did provide much appreciated new access. As illustrated in Figure 3.1, 58 per cent of our sample had engaged with a digital experience created by a cultural organisation. People who already had an interest in digital culture offerings did a lot more during the pandemic and were ready and willing consumers of the online, hybrid and social media content and experiences produced by cultural organisations. 87 per cent rated their digital experiences positively, with 79 per cent reporting that they exceeded their expectations.

Figure 3.1Digital engagement with culture, November 2021

While it should not really come as a surprise that the most likely to engage with digital were urban, super-arts engagers and supporters, and tech-arts early adopters, it is still significant that the profile of these enthusiasts is significantly younger, with much higher representation among people of colour than the audience for in-person arts and museums. As depicted in Figure 3.2, younger people were also far more likely to take part in participatory and immersive kinds of experiences. Although there has been a gradual tail-off in the amount of time younger audiences are now spending online, at the end of the lockdown significant numbers said they thought they would engage more with digital culture in future. By September 2022, a net 12 per cent of the whole sample said they would do more if more online culture were available and the percentage was far higher among under-thirty-fives and people with families – for example, 22 per cent of the younger, educated Gen Y/Z segment ‘Experience Seekers’. 20 per cent of our participants said they would do more if they could find what they were interested in. Again, this figure was much higher for under-thirty-fives and even higher for people with young families.

Figure 3.2Digital cultural activities people engaged with in the last 12 months, by age group, November 2021

One of the most important discoveries was that digital really did open up access for disabled audiences, many of whom had been campaigning for more equitable access to cultural content for some time. A significantly higher proportion of disabled people engaged online than they had in person. They engaged far more online than the non-disabled people: 74 per cent of disabled under-twenty-fives, compared with 48 per cent of non-disabled under-twenty-fives. This unprecedented access has increased their appetite for future activity, with 25 per cent of disabled twenty-fives to sixty-fours versus 9 per cent of non-disabled respondents strongly agreeing that they wanted more digital culture. Indeed 62 per cent of arts-going disabled twenty-fives to sixty-fours thought they were likely to replace most or some of their in-person engagement with digital in future. Combined with our findings about younger audiences, this reinforces the strategic need to develop more online cultural content for younger and disabled people and families to build future audiences.

This enforced innovation in digital practice reached beyond the UK population participating in the Monitor. As showcased in Chapter 5, many organisations were delighted to find new niche audiences in far-flung places across the globe, and they were often surprised to connect with them by increasing their social media and gone-digital events. Meanwhile, at the other end of the global–local scale, there were inspiring stories of community-embedded organisations who chose to focus on the hyperlocal and target those furthest from opportunity. Often out of concern for the vulnerable people they work with, practitioners were prompted to try new digital routes to engage with surprising consequences. These creative forays into online engagement demonstrated how for some it can be less intimidating to meet on Zoom than in a public space, that WhatsApp can be an inclusive conduit for a migrant community’s creativity, that digital archiving is a great way to start and connect a new community, and that museums make far more compelling school resources than most. There were many other stories of unexpected and transformative emergent practice, all of which demand further investigation.

In short, we must conclude that, seen in a more nuanced way, there is a considerable and untapped market for digital content and digitally enabled experiences in a hybrid mix that is set to grow significantly in the future. While the pandemic may not have solved the digital business model conundrum, the sector was at least able to test demand and build a better understanding of what kinds of experiences work for whom. We saw how digital could enable more accessible, flexible visitor journeys, be a channel for dialogue and community building both locally and globally, draw large numbers, and cement and extend relationships. Although it did not diversify audiences on the macro level, it did attract more younger and disabled audiences and deepen engagement and loyalty among existing audiences. This supports existing research highlighting how digital platforms show more potential in enhancing engagement among existing audiences than in attracting new audiences (Walmsley, 2019). However, we should note that digital experimentation is still in its infancy in the arts and cultural sector and therefore warrants much more strategic investment, research and evaluation.

Social media engagement

As part of our audience research we conducted a systematic analysis of a six-week snapshot of Twitter activity from 19 March to 5 May 2020, the early weeks of lockdown in the UK. The findings presented here are grounded in a mixed-methods analysis of 9,000 tweets shared across the hashtags #MuseumAtHome and #CultureInQuarantine.¹ This approach enabled an assessment of social media interactions that extends far beyond the elementary metrics which cultural institutions typically report on, such as likes, comments and shares – the so-called ‘vanity metrics’ that, it is argued, often amount to little more than ‘success theatre and projection’ (Rogers, 2018, p.454). While we used these metrics as a starting point, our aim was to better understand the quality and depth of interactions on Twitter – rather than just their reach – through an analysis of themes, tone and values in the tweets.²

Most tweets were from accounts representing cultural institutions or those working in the creative/cultural sectors. Members of the public accounted for only 7 per cent of the tweets in our sample, and only a minority of these (as far as we could tell) were new audiences. Tweets featuring video were more likely to register as high on traction, that is, in the top ten tweets for numbers of likes, retweets or quote tweets (thus most visible).³ This is perhaps unsurprising given the amount of video content we encounter now in social media environments, but it is really pronounced in our sample, echoing research reporting on cultural institutions’ successes in using video content to spark interaction (Najda-Janoszka and Sawczuk, 2021). The sample was international, but mostly representative of the English Twittersphere, and for tweets located in the UK, London and the Southeast were the most active regions.

Some institutions, notably museums and galleries, proved more agile in pivoting to the social media environment during lockdown, quickly moving to produce new content and activities which privileged empathy and intimacy over traditional production values (see also Kidd, Nieto McAvoy and Ostrowska, 2021). A significant proportion of tweets from institutions tried to spark and celebrate the value of curiosity by asking questions and encouraging people to explore and experiment digitally. Other types of cultural institutions (e.g. theatres, opera houses, etc.) were more likely to be conducting traditional promotional activities around events. Regardless, we found that most members of the public were positive about the offer on social media, mentioning pleasurable and enjoyable interactions with content or events.

We found an overall increase in the number of tweets that tried to inspire interaction as compared to previous research (e.g. Kidd, 2011), either asking for engagement or issuing a call to action for people to respond to (in 26 per cent and 17 per cent of tweets, respectively). Strategies included asking people direct questions or inviting them to take part in quizzes or crowdsourcing projects. We also found examples of calls for users to be creative at home, either by providing links to downloadable activities or asking people to engage with everyday objects and to tweet or post the results back to institutions (for example, the Getty Museum Challenge). These examples point to the importance of ‘hybridity’ – that is, efforts to bridge the traditional physical–digital divide. As institutions closed their doors, we found a heightening of ongoing efforts to connect users with the materiality of cultural institutions in ways that go beyond mere representation (cf. Galani and Kidd 2020; Noehrer et al., 2021; Walmsley et al., 2022). Other examples of hybrid or blended approaches included work with online exhibitions, virtual and 3D guided tours, workshops and lessons for adults and children, and live-streaming of concerts, theatre and other performances. We also found ‘behind-the-scenes’ moments and snapshots of surrounding outdoor venues (like museums’ gardens) that attempted to connect audiences with (closed) cultural spaces as well as nature.

Wellbeing and everyday creativity

Shaped by its real-world contexts during this period, popular content connected powerfully, playfully and/or emotionally with the themes of the pandemic. ‘Arts as a way of coping’ was present in 59 per cent of qualitatively coded tweets.⁴ This included tweets that were Covid inspired or related, as well as tweets which specifically referenced the arts in relation to wellbeing and care. Pre-empting the subsequent findings of the Monitor, many of those tweeting spoke about the potential of culture and the arts to make lockdowns and the related isolation they were experiencing more tolerable. Also of related interest was a grouping of tweets that referenced support, advocacy and funding for the arts in particular. Although not quite so prevalent, references to nature were also present, often cited in relation to art and wellbeing and linked to the value of reflection.

A significant proportion of tweets championed the value of creativity and celebrated practical engagement with the arts. We found plenty of examples of institutions encouraging users to be inspired by objects in their collections to create artistic responses at home to share online. One of these initiatives was National Galleries of Scotland’s call for users to respond to a challenge and create #arttogether on 25 March 2020:

Users responded well (twenty-seven replies, eleven of which were creative contributions, some by children). This tweet offers a perfect example of the hybrid approach mentioned earlier. We also found a number of responses to the responses, demonstrating the value of playful interaction in the social media environment.

Other values that were celebrated in the sample of tweets included social value (discussed below), playfulness (often demonstrated through the use of emoji and GIFs) and considered reflection (including nostalgia, admiration and resilience). We saw only very few tweets which debated or made the case for the arts’ economic value.

Place and community

Arts and culture were connected dynamically with place in our sample (mostly locally or regionally rather than nationally, especially through the use of hashtags). Tweets reaffirmed the heightened importance of community and local green spaces during the early weeks of lockdown.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, museums and galleries were most likely to share information about collections, but they were also the most likely group to be sharing ‘behind-the-scenes’ insights. These attempts to open up institutions via behind-the-scenes snapshots proved popular in our sample, perhaps demonstrating a longing within audiences for the reassurance and familiarity the physical space and place of a museum building seems to suggest, to some people at least, even remotely. This is interesting, as it highlights the importance of place and locality in the sample and underscores active attempts by organisations grounded in communities to be visible, and to engage, collaborate and support. In this respect, we may have seen a more nuanced consideration of what specifically social media ‘community’ means for these organisations, an examination of which, according to Wong (2015), is long overdue.

During this initial period of lockdown many tweets promoted and celebrated social values. Some promoted initiatives for local place-based communities, while others referred to wider civic and societal issues. Many sought to solicit a sense of belonging or togetherness among followers, offering comfort, enrichment and connection digitally while their doors were closed. There was a sense of benevolence from institutions sedimented into our sample, a wish to be public-spirited, helpful and ‘of’ the communities they represent. As such, tweets that might provoke or anger users were avoided. It has been noted elsewhere that the pandemic has seeded or nurtured civic-mindedness within institutions – a ‘pivot to purpose’ (Walmsley et al., 2022) – and our analysis suggests that digital teams have played an important role within that endeavour (see also Kidd, Nieto McAvoy and Ostrowska, 2021).

Changing ideas of the local

Attitudes to local engagement reflect other trends. As well as respondents indicating that they expected to engage more locally after the pandemic than before it, they also indicated that they had become aware of more cultural things to do as well. This effect was most pronounced for younger, highly engaged groups in urban areas, highlighting that there is less likely to be ‘spill over’ from cities to surrounding areas. This trend is likely to intensify the existing geographical inequalities between areas.

Working from home (WFH) is another trend already changing attendance habits and it looks set to have a lasting impact. We know from previous research, including Brook’s (2016b) analysis of Audience Finder data, that working people are most likely to attend either where they live or work. When these become the same place, there is likely to be a greater concentration of local audiences. Moreover, not only do many of those who have been working from home expect to continue to do so, they also prefer it (and hence are incentivised to maintain it where possible). In practice, as debates have continued about the future of home working, changes to office accommodation (with many organisations downsizing), working practices (familiarity with online working) and location (e.g. remote hiring) mean that many changes are already ‘baked in’. The Monitor showed us a strong correlation between those that anticipated WFH most or some of the time and high levels of cultural engagement. We can be sure, then, that this is likely to shift the profile of audiences significantly for some venues and organisations and could well have a positive impact for smaller organisations that are located further away from iconic city-centre buildings and shiny creative districts (Florida, 2002). This shift implies that cultural organisations should maintain a more local presence and reimagine and re-engage their local audiences.

Conclusions and implications

The most significant finding from our investigations into audience behaviour and perceptions over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the removal of what have traditionally been perceived to be spatial and financial barriers to engagement failed to diversify who engages with publicly funded arts and culture in the UK. This confirms existing research into cultural engagement but challenges studies that advocate for more local arts venues as an audience development strategy.

Our analysis of social media tells an important story about the kinds of content and interaction that users found valuable during this time of crisis. It therefore helps us to understand and articulate the value of cultural content on social networks more broadly as we emerge from the pandemic. It presents a rich and nuanced snapshot of social media activity and highlights emergent debates that demand further consideration in those contexts relating to hybridity, the value of user creativity and connection, digital inequalities and the limitations of traditional engagement metrics. Our analysis raises a number of questions as we consider implications for future digital engagement and for research in that field: How has the pandemic impacted institutional assessments of the value and importance of social media activity? How do those assessments inform digital strategy, resourcing and training within institutions, and across the sector? Can cultural institutions continue to centre place-based and community initiatives online, as well as work towards inclusion and social justice, in the midst of a post-pandemic recovery that sees cultural infrastructure being squeezed? As social networks continue to evolve, and as their own priorities shift post-pandemic, how will cultural institutions respond?

Overall, our research demonstrates that the sector’s efforts to stand by their communities paid off. Support for the cultural sector and public understanding of its value have increased significantly since 2019. Perhaps it took the pandemic to show many of us how important culture and creativity really is, especially when enjoyed in the company of others. In many senses, then, the case for culture has never been stronger. This makes the plight of organisations caught between the after-effects of the COVID-19 tsunami and the current storm of the cost-of-living crisis seem particularly unjust. It is probably still too soon to call what the lasting changes on audience and engagement trends are likely to be, especially given the new volatility generated by the cost-of-living crisis. As we conclude our analysis, there are four clear issues emerging from our research that we ignore at our own peril.

The first is that the widening gap between the nation’s haves and have-nots is particularly problematic in the context of cultural engagement: the Monitor shines a spotlight on the structural inequalities that continue to determine who does and who doesn’t engage with publicly funded arts and culture in the UK. Despite the sector’s growing confidence and skills in building meaningful relationships with people traditionally less engaged with formal arts and culture, the setbacks wrought by the pandemic and now the cost-of-living crisis are severe. We know that in times of crises like these, people need both bread and circuses and yet many organisations are ill-equipped to provide accessible and attractive cultural content, creaking as they are under the pressure to maintain their social commitment while increasing revenue.

This reality appears particularly challenging in the face of the second trend: the general changes in habit which are likely to diminish the core audiences the sector has relied on for far too long. We have seen a measurable change among less committed, less confident audiences, which will only be consolidated by the cost-of-living crisis. The Monitor shows us that a significant group – largely older, away from the big cities – were already predicting they would be engaging less in person in future. This trend has been masked in some places by large numbers of younger people doing more in a post-Covid rush, but the cost-of-living crisis is disrupting this shift: the autumn 2022 wave of the Monitor showed that the large majority of the population (particularly younger people and those with young families) think they will be spending less on culture as a result. This is especially worrying given that these groups were emerging from the pandemic as segments with the highest potential to engage with culture, as revealed in our earlier analysis. Ultimately, the pandemic has helped to put a spotlight on the generation gap and the critical importance of not assuming that each generation wants the same thing. Future-thinking organisations will need to pay close attention and apply their ingenuity to address the increasingly divergent habits and preferences of the next generations of audiences.

In this environment, it is also essential that organisations are mindful of the third issue: the changing dynamics in how we relate to the places where we live and work. The Monitor gave us many clues that this change is on the cards, although it may be subtle, long term and hard to perceive. Again, future-proofing will require organisations to become fully enmeshed in the DNA of their place, to be vital partners in cultural co-production and engagement, and places of community, joy, solace and sanctuary.

The fourth major trend – the shift towards public expectations of high-quality digital and hybrid content and experiences – is arguably the most critical. Poised, as many predict we are, on the brink of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the technically enabled ‘imagination age’ (Moin, 2022) seems to be the factor we can least afford to ignore. Frustratingly, then, while many organisations learned from and gained new confidence from their pandemic digital experiments, many have ‘snapped back’ to business as usual: some because they framed their digital offers as a temporary way of getting through the crisis rather than as a way of anticipating seismic change; others because, despite a sense they were on to something good, they lack capacity to keep pushing forward on all fronts.

Our research clearly signals that change, showing us that early adopters at the front of the curve are highly responsive to emerging digital offers; that digital can provide new solutions to old problems; that the next generation want not just digital content but digitally transformed cultural experiences that are immersive and participatory; that we can and must offer the smarter, more flexible, more personalised visitor journeys that automation, AI and immersive and responsive technologies can enable.

It is hard to see how this potential can be properly met by organisations who still struggle for survival and lack the deep pockets required to convert their pandemic learning, let alone accelerate the rate of experimentation or collaborate with others, to seriously scale the sector’s reimagination. There is an obvious role and responsibility for cultural funders and policy-makers here, and elsewhere we have set out our recommendations for these key stakeholders (see Culture Commons and Centre for Cultural Value, 2022). In summary, the cultural sector urgently needs targeted support to capitalise on the digital learning from the pandemic and attract the next generation of cultural audiences. We know that this will be a more hybrid generation and hope that it will be a more diverse and representative one.