Understanding how the demographics of your members or audiences compare to the make-up of your geographical community can be helpful when planning your strategy, performances, or community engagement plans.
We have created a census comparison survey to help leisure-time music groups collect data from people who belong to your group, or attend your events, so you can directly compare it to the UK government's Census 2021.
Doing this exercise with your group will help you to understand who you are already engaging well with, and where you might want to focus your recruitment efforts.
Making Music will also use data from this survey to see how our membership compares to the demographic make-up of the UK. This will be anonymised and neither your group nor its members will be identifiable.
How to use the survey
You can access the census comparison survey on our website: https://www.makingmusic.org.uk/census-comparison-survey
- Send the survey link out to everyone that you would like to collect this data from – your group members, or people who bought a ticket for your concert - with an explanation about why you are asking them for this information. None of the questions are compulsory, so remind them that they do not have to answer, or they can click ‘prefer not to say’. You might want to suggest a date to have responses in by.
- It’s important that any responses are linked to your group – please make sure that the people you send this to know which name that Making Music uses for your group. If you’re not sure what this is, you could ask your Making Music Group Rep or use our Find a Group tool to check quickly. This is especially important if you are asking audience members to fill in the form.
- Once members of your groups have filled in the survey, send an email to let us know. We will send you an anonymised spreadsheet of the responses from your group within a week.
- You can then compare this to data from the UK Census – how you find this data will depend on which nation you live in (see the section below).
Remember to comply with GDPR when collecting and storing data. For more information, take a look at our Data Protection resources. All data will be anonymised, so you will not be able to identify who it belongs to.
How to find information from the UK Census
We recommend you compare the results of your survey to data from your local area, not the national statistics. We have developed some guides to help you do this using the UK Census:
- Guide to finding census data (England and Wales)
- Guide to finding Census data (Scotland)
- Guide to finding census data (Northern Ireland)
Using the data we send you
Here’s a guide for using Excel to calculate the percentages of responses in the form. This guide shows you how to create a simple pivot table. If you have a different system for calculating this, that’s fine.
Census comparison survey - Excel guidance
These tools are all brand-new and still being developed as part of our INCLUDE project. If you use them and notice anything that’s not quite right or have any suggestions on how we can improve them we would like to hear from you. You can get in touch with us via email.
Musical background survey
Making Music has developed a survey to find out more about the musical learning of our members before they joined their groups. We think this could be useful to members to help them understand their membership better and to communicate about their group when writing funding applications, building partnerships and collaborations, speaking about the value of music education and more. The questions are:
- How were you first taught to play a musical instrument or sing?
- At what age did you first learn to play a musical instrument or sing?
- Can you read musical notation / sheet music? (Western / staff notation)?
- To join your music group, did you have to be able to read music?
- Have you sat and passed music exams/assessments? (please select all that apply)
- To join your music group, did you have to play/sing to a specific level? (e.g. play to Grade 6 level or equivalent)?
Making Music will also use the data from this survey to find out more about Making Music members. All the information is completely anonymous, and respondents will not be identifiable by Making Music or their own group. Not all the questions will be relevant for your group, but they will be useful for Making Music when we look at the whole set of data.
How to use the survey
This is the link to the musical background survey on our website: https://www.makingmusic.org.uk/musical-background-survey
- Send the survey link out to everyone that you would like to collect this data from with an explanation about why you are asking them for this information. You might want to suggest a deadline to have responses in by.
- It’s important that any responses are linked to your group – please make sure that the people you send this to know which name that Making Music uses for your group. If you’re not sure what this is, you could ask your Making Music Group Rep or use our Find a Group tool to check quickly.
- Once members of your groups have filled in the survey send an email to let us know.
- We will send you an anonymised spreadsheet of the responses from your group within a week. For guidance on using the data, see for how to use Excel to analyse data.
There is no UK set of data for comparison in this survey exercise. If Making Music collects enough data, we will publish a data set you could use for comparison.
We hope you find this Making Music resource useful. If you have any comments or suggestions about the guidance please contact us. Whilst every effort is made to ensure that the content of this guidance is accurate and up to date, Making Music do not warrant, nor accept any liability or responsibility for the completeness or accuracy of the content, or for any loss which may arise from reliance on the information contained in it.
