The following guidance outlines what cinemas and film festivals can do to understand audience travel impacts and how to help them make more sustainable travel choices.
This resource was developed by Julie’s Bicycle for the BFI’s Sustainable Screen ‘Beyond Production’ programme for BFI National Lottery funded organisations and the wider sector.
Introduction
Audience travel can be a big source of impact for cultural venues and events, in particular those not well-served by public transport. It contributes to pollution and affects local communities, nature, and biodiversity.
It can be hard to measure audience travel impacts accurately, and reducing impacts depends to a large extent on audience behaviour change and the wider transport infrastructure. However, the power of cinemas and film festivals lies in their influence – making audiences aware of the impact, and promoting and incentivising lower impact travel options.
According to Indigo’s Act Green 2024 survey (over 17,000 audience responses across 112 cultural organisations including cinemas), 62% said availability of public transport is a key consideration when thinking about how to travel to venues. The survey also showed what audiences expect of cultural venues in relation to sustainable travel.
The most popular responses were:
Provide information on sustainable travel
Install facilities such as bike racks or EV charging points
Offer discounts for sustainable travel
Arrange additional public transport options
Measure audience travel impacts
Audience travel surveys provide valuable information about your audience and how they travel to your venue, event or festival. The data can also be used for carbon footprinting and help to inform and create meaningful change.
If you are a BFI-funded exhibitor, you should be surveying your audiences using the APF survey or the FAN Audience Survey. For the wider sector, we have provided sample questions you can ask here.
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- Can you integrate travel survey questions in your booking or checkout system? You might already be collecting some of the information you need (e.g. postcode data). Or, can you link to your travel survey on your ‘thanks for booking’ page?
- Share the link to your audience travel survey periodically in your newsletter, through social media, or on your website.
- At your venue or festival, create a QR code for your survey to put on signs in areas where people are likely to have their phone out, or be waiting in line (e.g. near toilets or bars).
- Depending on your venue or event, front of house staff might be able to talk directly to visitors and fill out the survey on their behalf.
- Ask about how someone travelled to your event or venue when you collect post-event feedback.
- Consider offering small incentives for survey completion, e.g. 5% off a drink or food item, or a chance to win a monthly prize.
- Can you integrate travel survey questions in your booking or checkout system? You might already be collecting some of the information you need (e.g. postcode data). Or, can you link to your travel survey on your ‘thanks for booking’ page?
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Using a carbon footprint calculator, work out audience travel emissions and include it in your wider carbon footprint. The Julie’s Bicycle Creative Climate Tools have a section for ‘Audience Travel’. Reporting using the Tools is a requirement for some BFI National Lottery awardees.
Set a schedule to monitor how your audience travel survey data is changing over time – at least once a year, but ideally more often if you have a higher volume of visitors – and use this to inform your planning.
Plan and take action
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Audience travel commitments and actions should be included in your wider environmental policy and action plan. See our guide to getting started for more on this.
1. Start with what you want to achieve
You can define a qualitative goal, or, if you are already measuring audience travel impacts, you can set a quantitative target.• Qualitative goal example: Our goal is to reduce the negative impacts of audience travel, and connect with others in our community to work collaboratively.
• Quantitative target example: We’re aiming for 40% of our audience to travel by public or active transport by the end of this year.
2. Then identify key actions to reach what you want to achieve, for example:
- We will measure our audience travel using the BFI Film Audience Network survey (or other audience travel survey) and review the data each year to understand where we can improve.
- We will share audience travel findings with local transport authorities, to better inform their planning.
- We will provide information on public and active transport options on our website, and post about sustainable transport on social media at least twice yearly.
- We will learn more about transport and accessibility, so we can apply an accessibility lens to sustainable audience travel initiatives.
- We will put up posters (see our editable templates) to share sustainable transport options with our audiences.
- We will run at least one creative initiative (e.g. a workshop, focus group, art competition) to understand and/or raise awareness of our local barriers to sustainable transport.
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Start with small actions and work your way up as you gain knowledge and experience. Use the data you’ve gathered to shape your ideas. For example:
- If lots of people cycle – or you want more people to cycle – can you provide more secure or covered bike storage?
- Do you have signage or information on your website to help people navigate nearby local transport?
- For event marketing, would it be better to target local audiences or run geographically-bound ticket presales or discounts, instead of targeting international or visitors coming from further away?
Look at the sustainability plans of other similar organisations for ideas, or attend webinars or focus groups.
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Your cinema or film festival audience might have unique pain points that aren’t immediately visible. Do visitors want later buses? Can you better align start or end times with public transport services? For larger film festivals or a consistent timing or route issue (e.g. a bus stop being quite far away from a cinema), your data might help local transport providers with their planning.
For example, the Royal Shakespeare Company (in Stratford-upon-Avon) used audience travel data and partnered with local bus company Stagecoach to provide late-night bus services post-show.
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This helps keep you accountable, builds trust with your audience, and can also inspire others in the screen and wider arts sector. It can be as simple as a social media post or a more in-depth report, depending on your time and resources.
Communicate effectively and creatively
Change is a process, which can be greatly speeded up with effective and creative communication. There are a number of approaches to consider, depending on your organisation and your audience.
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Nudge communications are a way of subtly encouraging certain behaviour change, based on psychology, including, for example:
- Highlighting social norms – showcasing what others are doing to encourage similar behaviours. This can include messages such as ‘Most people travel here via public transport.’
- Making something the default option – such as writing your communications as if public transport is the obvious option (‘from the train station, you can find us …’ before providing information about parking). Larger events could consider combining tickets with public transport options as part of the checkout process.
Using appealing visuals – images, bright graphics or placing signs at eye level can help attract attention and get your message across.
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Cinema or film festival-goers will consider their travel choices at multiple points: when buying a ticket or making plans, as they prepare to travel to the venue, and before they travel home. Can you suggest sustainable travel options at different times, and in various ways? For example:
- As part of a ticket confirmation (if people buy online ahead of time), include information about public transport options to your venue in the ticket email or on your website. If you use ‘Add to Calendar’ widgets, you will likely be able to customise the event description to include links to public transport.
- At your venue, put up signage to encourage change – you could even consider a targeted, unique campaign to tackle negative perceptions around public transport.
On social media, your website, or as part of your newsletter, share success stories to remind people of everyone’s positive progress, and encourage them to make the sustainable choice each time.
Take a look at how HOME Manchester share and communicate their sustainable travel initiatives, including their partnerships with the Corridor Manchester Sustainable Travel Group and alignment with the TfGM (Transport for Greater Manchester) Travel Choices guidance.
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People respond best to things they relate to. Find and show examples of real people changing their habits, and appeal to the values of your audience members. You could do this in a creative way, through artworks, murals, videos, or other art pieces.
Focus on the collective change and the positive difference ‘we’ can make – it’s a positive choice we’re all making together, not individual sacrifice. Showing the work you’re doing as an organisation, event or venue can encourage other people to make a sustainable choice to support the broader movement.
For example, Transforming Audience Travel Through Art was a collaborative project with Perth Theatre and Concert Hall and embedded artist Helen McCrorie on a year-long project using creative methods to address the environmental impact of audiences travelling to and from their venues. The project created space for conversation and creativity for all ages, resulting in a number of recommendations for the Perth community.
Editable posters for your venue or event
We’ve created a series of editable graphics and posters for you to use as part of your sustainable travel communications.
- PDFs are available for direct printing
- If possible, we encourage you to download and customise the posters for your venue or event – download the SVG files below (they can be edited in Canva or Adobe Illustrator).
Build in accessibility and inclusivity
Public transport can be significantly more difficult (or impossible) given accessibility or other invisible barriers. Public transport might not be close to your event or venue. Neurodivergent people may struggle with busy or unfamiliar transport options, and incentivising public transport can inadvertently penalise disabled people who may be unable to use these options.
Focus on encouraging those who can make lower impact travel choices, and don’t shame others. Your approach will depend on your venue or event.
Consider:
- Making sure any information about your venue or event and public transport includes accessibility information e.g. is your nearest train station step-free, is your venue wheelchair-accessible?
- Working with local transport providers and/or councils to improve the accessibility of the public transport your audience uses.
- If you incentivise active travel or public transport (e.g. 5% off drinks if you cycle), make sure it doesn’t make it more expensive for those who do need to drive for accessibility reasons.
- If you run an event or festival, connect with other events or festivals locally to collectively drive demand for better electrified accessible buggies, shuttles, and coach services in your area.
For more on making live events more accessible, read the No Climate Action Without Us toolkit by Attitude is Everything, A Greener Future and Julie’s Bicycle.
This resource was developed by Julie’s Bicycle under the BFI’s Sustainable Screen ‘beyond production’ programme for BFI National Lottery funded organisations and the wider sector.