Victorian Dance Demographics
One of the more interesting features of a "Fan Page" on Facebook is the ability to gather demographic information on your fans. The demographics shown below were derived from the Social Daunce Irregulars Victorian Grand Ball Facebook Page, which currently has about 450 fans. These statistics are, of course, not necessarily indicative of all Victorian dance groups, or vintage dance groups everywhere, but they seem to be, from what I have seen, fairly typical.
Note: it doesn't do fractions, and full info isn't available on all users, so it may not add up to 100.
Female: 67%
Male: 31%
Age 13-17: 0%
Age 18-24: 5% (1% M, 4% F)
Age 25-34: 19% (4% M, 15% F)
Age 35-44: 25% (9% M, 16% F)
Age 45-54: 29% (11% M, 18% F)
Age 55+: 20% (7% M, 13% F)
Some thoughts on this.
This is a measure of who is engaged enough to be a "Fan". This skews very strongly female, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the boyfriends and husbands who are getting dragged along, but aren't really fans.
The weakest cohort is the 18-24 year olds. They do OK with the more established, have-a-job crowd. The strongest cohort is, no surprise, the mid 40s to mid 50s crowd, and that also has the hightest proportion of engaged males.
All in all, not too bad. While the fan base is a bit on the older side, I think they have done well enough with the 30 something crowd that they can look forward to a few more decades of wear, provided they can keep their interest.
We all do still need to build a stronger college age cohort though, and consider what factors (expense, need to plan ahead etc.) might discourage them; and what might encourage them -- and can we do this without alienating our established, core support base.
I hope this might be helpful to all of you out there who are trying to make vintage dance happen.
The Social Daunce Irregulars may be found at:
Cheers,
Walter Nelson