Case Study: Art Institute of Chicago achieves targeted local audience growth with Alteryx

Finding a New Audience for Art Institute Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago, a major art museum committed to collecting, preserving, and interpreting art for public education and inspiration, faced pressure to grow and diversify its local audience while maintaining financial stability. The museum struggled with segmentation approaches that lacked neighborhood-level detail, useful but inconsistent data sources (from handwritten lists to normalized databases), and limited analytics resources and budget.

Using Alteryx, the team built a census block-group database for Chicago, geocoded and blended disparate visitor datasets, and incorporated census and Experian segmentation data; spatial joins and a Decision Tree model then identified high-potential local segments and target block groups. The work enabled more effective, measurable outreach and membership messaging, revealed geographic coverage gaps, unified audience-development methods across departments, and delivered these insights quickly and affordably.

Art Institute Chicago

Andrew Simnick

Vice President, Museum Finance & Strategy