Midsumma Festival

Midsumma Festival is Victoria’s premier LGBTQIA+ festival. A cross-generational festival that champions LGBTQIA+ ideas, stories and experiences through conversations and events.

Usually held in the summer months each year, the festival is a three-week program made up of visual arts, theatre, spoken word, cabaret, film, live music, parties, sport, social events and public forums. The organisation also works year-round to provide support and tools to artists, social changers and culture-makers.

Culture Counts has partnered with Midsumma since 2018 to evaluate its annual festival – capturing the social, cultural and economic impact of the event using the feedback provided by audiences, participants, volunteers and the broader community. The final reporting output, our Online Insights Report, highlights:

• The demographic profile of respondents
• The cultural and social impacts of the event
• Marketing channels, sponsorship recall and Net Promoter Score
• Sentiment analysis of comments and feedback
• The economic impact of the event

By evaluating Midsumma activities using a consistent methodology, Midsumma has been able to provide its supporting partners with an overwhelming amount of evidence that captures the size, value, diversity and importance of the Midsumma Festival and its impact on Victoria and Australia.

Requirements

In 2018, Midsumma Festival was exploring ways in which it could report on the various outcomes of their annual festival event – bringing the research interests of their operations team together with the kind of third-party evaluation that stakeholders and supporters were looking for. Midsumma engaged Culture Counts to undertake a full evaluation of the festival and to provide the organisation with a comprehensive report it could use in its own decision-making, reporting and relationship management with stakeholders.

Approach

Culture Counts worked with Midsumma to design a custom-built survey in the Culture Counts Evaluation Platform. The survey needed to cover:

• Demographic questions, including age, identity, access and previous attendance
• Social and cultural impacts of the Festival
• Marketing channels and sponsorship recall
• Qualitative feedback and sentiment analysis of respondents comments
• Economic impact of the festival on the local and state economy

In collaboration with Midsumma, Culture Counts built the survey and provided Midsumma organisers with a link to the online questionnaire. Organisers distributed the survey through direct email to ticket holders, as well as social media. A QR code for the survey was also included in the Festival program. This multi-channel approach was used to source response data from a diverse set of perspectives, in a practical and cost-efficient manner.

After data collection was complete, Culture Counts analysed and summarised the data collected. The reporting format was co-designed with Midsumma and customised by Culture Counts to deliver reporting data in a functional format that could be easily used by the Midsumma team. The report was delivered as an Online Insights Report, which contained charts and accompanying insights from the Culture Counts team.

Outcome

The report effectively illustrated the diversity of impacts the Midsumma Festival delivered. One of the most predominant goals for Midsumma is to engage new audiences whilst maintaining a positive ongoing connection with current audiences. In 2018, 42% of attendees were new to Midsumma – with 33% of attendees being new in 2019 and 2020. On average, audiences attend three shows during each festival, with recent data showing an increase in participants from older audiences and female attendees – a strategic focus of the Festival.

As for its economic impact, Midsumma attracts a significant portion of its attendees from outside of the Melbourne metropolitan area – approximately 15%. In the 2020 Festival, Culture Counts estimated that the direct economic impact of the event was $11.1 million, which created $32 million of multiplied impact for the wider economy. This represents spending that would not have occurred otherwise, if not for Midsumma Festival.

The social and cultural impacts of the festival are particularly poignant, with 95% of survey respondents in 2021 saying they the felt Midsumma Festival is an important event for Melbourne. 94% said that attending the festival helped them feel safe and welcome and 89% said that participation in Midsumma helped them feel more connected to the community. 89% said that attending Midsumma had a positive impact on their personal wellbeing.

By engaging with Culture Counts over successive years, Midsumma has been able to collect consistent outcomes data for analysis and benchmarking. Tracking actual outcomes for identified strategic priority areas is of huge benefit, as is seeing how investment and added resources to these areas achieve measurable results in both audiences and artist engagement. These learnings are further fed year-on-year, into the development of practical programming and positioning strategies, as well to help facilitate deeper ongoing development at the organisational level.

Image Attribution: Ballads and Ballgowns, Midsumma Festival 2021.