Culture Key: A New Platform Transforming How Bath Understands Its Cultural Impact

Culture Key is the first tool of its kind in Bath & North East Somerset: a secure, anonymised analytics platform that transforms ticketing data into clear, actionable intelligence. By aggregating anonymised ticketing data from organisations across the city, the platform creates a shared cultural dataset - enabling the sector to understand its activity not just organisation by organisation, but at the scale of the entire city.

This platform was co-designed with local cultural practitioners who took part in workshops, feedback sessions, and platform testing. Their needs, priorities, and challenges shaped every aspect of the tool.

Platform Development

When development began in January 2025, our ambition was to explore novel creative technologies, including an interactive 3D map of Bath’s cultural activity, merging digital storytelling with cultural insight. But as we undertook co-design workshops with the BACE network, a different set of priorities emerged. Organisations needed something more immediate: robust, practical analytics that would help them demonstrate their value to funders, policymakers, and partners.

As a result, Culture Key was refocused on delivering the core functionality cultural organisations told us they needed most. The creative 3D map concept remains in our long-term roadmap, but only once this foundational layer is fully established.

Co-Design at Each Stage

Culture Key has been built with and for Bath’s cultural sector. Bath Arts Collective facilitated design workshops through the BACE network, helping us uncover real user needs and test early prototypes. Organisations across the city shaped key elements of the interface, metrics, and workflow.

This co-design approach allowed us to move quickly, iterating in response to direct feedback, a process that strengthened both the platform and the partnership.

What Culture Key Does

Culture Key allows organisations to privately upload ticketing data and instantly receive insight into:

1. The "My Insights" Dashboard

• Ticket revenue
• Audience locations
• Average ticket prices
• Genre performance
• Trends over time
• Booking patterns and lead times

2. City-wide Insights

• A shared view of Bath’s cultural landscape, combining anonymised data from participating organisations to show:
• Total attendance
• Cumulative ticket revenue
• Popular genres
• Geographic distribution of audiences
• Booking trends

3. Automated Reporting

• One-click PDF exports for:
• Funding applications
• Board reporting
• Year-end evaluation
• Monthly summaries

4. Ethical, GDPR-Compliant Data Handling

Privacy was treated as a core feature, not an afterthought. We worked closely with data protection specialist Kate Fitzgerald (CIPP/E) to embed GDPR compliance from day one.

Organisations retain full control of their data at all times and can delete their account instantly.

A New Way to Understand Cultural Life in Bath

• Culture Key enables Bath’s cultural practitioners to:
• Evidence their value using real data rather than anecdote
• Strengthen funding bids with clear, credible insights
• Contribute to a shared cultural dataset that benefits the whole sector
• Understand audience demographics and behaviour

The project also uncovered deeper challenges, including inconsistent approaches to measuring social value and a need for greater data literacy across the sector. Culture Key begins to address these gaps by making data more accessible, meaningful, and actionable.

Get Started

www.culturekey.co.uk

Sign-up requires an invite code provided after an onboarding call. To request access, email jasminebarkerbath@gmail.com.

Acknowledgement

Culture Key was funded by The Studio Innovation Fund at Bath Spa University, supporting projects that strengthen social impact through creative technology. We extend our thanks to all participating organisations across Bath whose collaboration, feedback, and generosity shaped this prototype.