Evaluation

Taking Forward Brighton Open 2011

Who were our Brighton Open Artists?

The success of OpenFridge depends on our growing band of enthusiastic magnetic artists. 241 people took part in the Brighton Open, contributing 539 works in total.

OpenFridge attracted a wide range of people from many different walks of life:

• 39% were male and 61% were female.
• 31% came from the Brighton area and 58% from elsewhere in the UK; 11% came from outside the UK.
• Of our adult artists, a third (33%) were aged 16-35, a half (47%) aged 36-55 and a fifth (19%) aged over 55.
• Most (58%) were new to OpenFridge; 42% had taken part in a magnet show before.
• 77% had submitted work to open exhibitions before, making the Brighton Open the first exhibition for 23% of artists.

(All figures in this section based on information drawn from our list of artists or people filling out our feedback survey)

Information and networking?

How did artists hear about the Brighton Open? Most heard about it directly from Alban (32%) or someone else they knew (24%), via Artists Newsletter (24%) or Isendyouthis.com (8%). 78% had passed on information about the show to others.

Website traffic? Our website (brightonopen.blogspot.com) received 6,314 page views in total between December 2010 and March 2012, highest between February 2011 and May 2011.

Generating interest in the Brighton Open? Most of our artists had visited the Brighton Open website (74%), and 25% had made it to the event itself. 86% had checked out the website of other artists taking part in the show.

Publicity for our sponsor? 83% had read about our sponsor on the Brighton Open website, and 60% had visited the sponsor's website (tooveys.com).

(All figures in this section based on website stats or people filling out our feedback survey)

What did artists think of taking part?

38% of artists said their favourite aspect of the Brighton Open show was it taking part on the streets and away from the galleries. For 19%, their favourite part was people picking up the work for free or seeing their work on the exhibition website.

Nearly all our artists agreed that taking part in the Brighton Open was a good opportunity to show their work (97%) and that it made them feel part of a network of artists (89%). Most also agreed (though less strongly) that it made them more confident about their work (87%). About two thirds agreed it made them want to organise something similar (66%). 29% agreed that having the exhibition in their local area was important.

For the first time, we tried out Collectors Comments – people picking up the magnets could fill out a postcard with a message to the artists, with all the messages put on the website. Although most artists (89%) thought we should keep these in the future, we found that only very few people filled these out – despite all the magnets disappearing!

People filling out our feedback survey also gave us lots of ideas for improving the magnet shows in the future. These included having bigger magnets, more than one copy of magnets available, the ability to text comments instead of completing postcards.

(Information in this section based on people filling out our feedback survey)

Brighton Open vs LightBite Nottingham

Although the profile and experiences of artists were similar, the Brighton Open had a more local flavour, with a high number of local artists (31%) and more use made of local networks. Although the non-gallery setting remained artists' favourite aspect, more Brighton artists valued the opportunity to show their work.

Past Evaluation  - http://lightbite.blogspot.co.uk/p/evaluation_23.html

This information is based on our list of participating artists, website statistics for brightonopen.blogspot.com and a feedback survey that all artists were invited to fill out on http://www.surveymonkey.com/ (37 people filled out all or some of the questions).