Audience Insight Lead (Maternity Cover)

The team leads audience research across the five branches, including market research, formative and summative evaluations for programming and major projects, ongoing audience insight and tailored audience research projects to support organisational priorities. The team is also leading on the development of new audience segmentation to support both outreach and programme development.

The Audience Insight Lead is responsible for the development and implementation of the Imperial War Museums’ (IWM) audience research and evaluation. The Audience Insight Lead champions audiences and analyses our audience data and research to provide vital insights that informs strategic decision making and the setting of visitor figure forecasts and targets. This role works across the breadth of IWM departments to inform the development and monitoring of all public-facing activity through data and insights. This role presents to key groups, including the Senior Management Team, the Executive Leadership Team, and Board of Trustees. Key collaborators include Exhibitions, Learning & Engagement, Marketing, Digital Transformation, Access & Inclusion and Commercial. This role is vital to ensure we deliver fantastic programming, events, and products which have significant impact on our audiences.



Key responsibilities

The core responsibilities of the role are to lead the audience insight function, including line managing the Audience Insight Manager. This role will be critical to the embedding of new audience segmentation system, which will be developed in Winter 2026 and rolled out to staff in Spring and Summer 2026.

The postholder, supported by the Audience Insight Manager, will develop consistent and timely insights into IWM’s audiences and how they engage with the museum (digitally or in-branch). The postholder will engage and work with stakeholders across IWM to coordinate new and existing research projects that deliver the understanding needed to empower teams to drive up audience numbers and commercial revenues.

The postholder will project manage a range of their own projects and coordinate other IWM research projects, often working alongside key senior managers and leaders.

The postholder will be expected to work independently as well as across different teams contributing to the

delivery of IWM’s strategic objectives and priorities. The postholder will use their knowledge, skills, talent and potential to the best of their ability.

The postholder will always focus on delivering excellent customer service and positive social impact. The role also ensures value for money whilst being professional, courteous and demonstrating the behaviours and attributes expected of all IWM employees. The postholder is required to adhere to all corporate standards and use IWM’s systems as directed to ensure consistency of service, brand and operational delivery.



In addition, your duties will include:


Specific Duties

Lead the audience insight team, highlighting the voices of IWM’s audiences across the organisation.
Provide line management to the Audience Insight Manager, whose focus includes day-to-day management of the continuous research programme and support for internal research projects.
Manage the audience segmentation project, which includes embedding the new segmentation across the organisation throughout Spring and Summer 2026.
Provide expertise in audience data and research to build consistent, effective data collection and analysis across programmes.
Be the expert on IWM’s current and potential audiences based on scrutiny of the evidence and data currently available about who they are and what they do, think and need.
Identify areas where IWM doesn’t know enough and initiate further exploration, non-visitor research or additional data collection as appropriate.
Identify and commission strategic, operational and tactical qualitative and quantitative research as appropriate.
Project manage relevant commissioned research and any other initiatives, alongside management of any corresponding budgets.
Analyse and interpret data from internal and external data sources that highlight the potential strategic and tactical implications of the analyses. Create opportunities for discussion to expand the use of audience insights inform IWM’s strategic direction.
Act as a cross-departmental specialist resource, working with staff at all levels to identify insights that inform action plans for a variety of teams. Draw together experience and insights learned from across IWM and the wider sector to identify high quality research and avoid duplication of effort.
Implement a culture of continuous improvement using evaluation and audience insights to tie past learnings into opportunities for future success.
Oversee work with internal stakeholders to clarify their research needs, support the writing of research briefs and the appointment of research partners, and manage ad hoc research requirements. Ensure that research briefs are clear and contribute to the interpretation and delivery of results to IWM.
Ensure that all programme commissioning and development relies on accurate and relevant audience data and insights to support decision-making linked to strategic aims and ensure that audience understanding and focus is at the heart of all public-facing activity.
Provide critical evaluation of research findings and challenge perceptions and thinking on audience attitudes and behaviour.
Use a range of techniques for disseminating audience data and evaluation findings to ensure that presentations are understandable to non-specialist audiences.
Present relevant data to all management levels, notably several strategic internal leadership groups.

For a full list of duties and the person specification (which your application will be marked against) please view the Job Description.

Museum Website: https://www.iwm.org.uk/jobs