In 2012 The Big Idea ran an online survey to learn more about our audience and community, by inviting visitors to complete a 15-question survey. A total of 321 survey responses were received (including nine from outside of New Zealand) – thank you!

In 2012 The Big Idea ran an online survey to learn more about our audience and community, by inviting visitors to complete a 15-question survey. A total of 321 survey responses were received (including nine from outside of New Zealand) – thank you!

Just over three quarters (76.95%) of you who responded work in the creative sector, and here is what you told us…

• The top seven creative disciplines you work in are Visual Arts (31.28%), Writing/Publishing (18.94%), Arts Management (17.62%), Theatre (16.30%), Design (14.10%), Moving Image (13.66%) and Community Arts (11.45%) – some of you work across more than one discipline.

• We attract 2.6 times more women than men to our site; with most of you ranging in ages from 26 to 54. Specifically 35-44 (27.01%), age groups 26-34 (22.99%) and 45-54 (21.17%) are fairly evenly split, 15.33% of you are between 16-25, while 13.5% of you are over 55.

• Our creative sector is diverse indeed! In terms of ethnicity, most of you identified yourselves to be of European descent (83.57%; 59.85% of whom are New Zealanders), while among the rest of you, 6.20% are Maori, 5.11% are Pacific peoples and 3.28% are Asian; other ethnicities represented include African, Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Latin American.

• Unsurprisingly most of you are based in our two largest cities, Auckland (48.86%) and Wellington (28.03%), while the rest of you are located across the country, from Northland to Southland and the various regions/cities/towns in between: Otago, Christchurch, Bay of Plenty, Waikato, Taranaki etc.

• Nearly half of you (44.25%) describe yourselves as mid-career creative professionals, with just over a quarter of you (27.43%) describing yourselves as established practitioners, just under a quarter (23.45%) of you are starting out, with the rest of you either studying or retired.

• Almost half of you (47.58%) are self-employed or freelancers, over a third of you are in employment (29.96% in permanent full-time employment plus 7.05% in permanent part-time employment), and some of you are owners of a small business (6.17%).
  Another way to look at this is that nearly 54% of you are, in fact, creative entrepreneurs!

• Income-wise, nearly half of you (49.63%) earn somewhere between $21,000-$60,000 a year and a fair number of you (27.74%) rake in over $60,000 in annual income.

• An indicator of how technology is influencing the creative arts is that the gap between digital content creators and traditional (non-digital) content creators is closing fast – 43.01% digital v 57.35% non-digital; some – probably many – of you crossover between the two, of course!

  Oddly though, for a crowd that is digitally-inclined, around three-fifths of you don’t use a smart phone (43.91%) or a tablet (43.17%)! Among those of you who do, Apple devices seem to be preferred (28.41% iPhone, 14.6% iPad) over Android (19.93%) or other devices (3.69%). Looking at our regular traffic sources we know this is rapidly changing.

• We get more than 100,000 visits to the site each month, and this is thanks to the 25.81% of you who check us out at least once a month, the 45.16% of you who visit us one or more times a week, and the 18.28% of you who log on one or more times a day – nice one!

• Like you, we’re always on the hunt for the next big idea, so we thought we’d ask you what our next big development could be. Your top two choices were for us to develop an international freelance listing board, or to provide a creative sector professional services app – like a “yellow pages” for the sector. We’ve got our work cut out for us then!

So there you have it folks. Our thanks again to those of you who took part in the survey, helping us understand our community better. Armed with your survey responses, we can now plan our next steps to better serve you and the rest of our community. Watch this space!