by Lisa Mackay
Arts attenders have been declining for many years, and as we know too well by now, the pandemic exacerbated that decline. The Rozsa Foundation seeks to support the arts community in Treaty 7 territory by helping address current issues faced by the sector, and right now, that includes audience development. We are working with Stone-Olafson and our funding partners to provide research on Alberta's arts audiences that will hopefully help arts organizations create messaging and programming that will resonate with the public and bring people through the doors. We also have funding programs for audience development experiments and strategies and for new customer relations management and ticketing tools. Since most of my working experience has been in arts marketing, sales, and audience development, we thought it might also be useful if I outlined some of the key areas to consider in building audiences. I will cover one of them here in this article and include a second in a future newsletter. As I know all too well, intense pressure to find new people in large numbers can have organizations throwing spaghetti at the wall, trying to find the right approach. But before diving too deeply into any new audience campaign I feel like it is important to differentiate between ‘finding’ an audience and ‘developing’ one, or put another way, to acknowledge the difference getting people in the door and “make those numbers” and developing an ongoing relationship with your potential and existing audiences. One might help in the short term, while the other is a longer game that hopefully continues to have people coming back again and again. Both can be useful, but for resource-strapped organizations, the second is more efficient.In order to create sustaining relationships with audiences, organizations need to become as knowledgeable about their audiences as they are about the art they present. This topic will be the subject of this first newsletter, with a second important strategy (Part 2) to come in a later newsletter.
Part 1: Becoming Audience-Obsessed
I like to imagine arts organizations as a matchmaker between the art and its audience, working to create the optimal circumstances for connection and mutual benefit. Like in any healthy relationship, we need to set realistic expectations that can be met and create an experience where everyone has a good time! To make sure this works well, we need to know as much about the audience as we do about the art to make sure we are getting the right fit between the two.Most arts organizations already know the art side deeply and passionately. We live and breathe our subject matter and for many of us, we work to bring it to audiences because we love it so much. We are excellent subject experts who push out information to the public about this art we love to get them to attend, using phrases like "World-renowned!", "Canadian premiere!" or "Violin Virtuoso!". Often this information is detailed descriptions of what we offer, full of jargon that requires an existing understanding of the art form to make sense, as if we expect our audiences to share level of our passion and knowledge. For years, our relationship with audiences has been more of a monologue than a conversation, and this is rarely a recipe for a good first date.We need to start learning a lot more about our audience and what they bring to the experience. Becoming “customer-centric” is not a new idea, especially in the for-profit world, but it is more difficult to do it well than it sounds. It won't work to centre the patron and speak their language in one advertising campaign but not on the website where they book tickets or in the program notes they read when they get there. Successful audience development is more of a philosophy that needs to be deeper and wider than marketing and sales and baked into an organization at every level. It sometimes requires organizations to question long-held assumptions about how art is ‘supposed’ to be presented and honestly assess if those assumptions are getting in the way of building a great relationship with the audience. Audiences are more than just your patrons, and these days they have innumerable options for how to spend their time. We need to truly understand their habits and motivations and become obsessed with discovering how we and our art fit into their lives.
Where to Start
Your database holds important insights about your patrons, and tracking things like sales per offering, the timing of ticket purchases, where people choose to sit, when most groups attend, and what postal codes they come from can help with creating marketing and sales strategies can be targeted to reach and retain the people most inclined to attend.Looking at the average 'lifespan' of patrons can also be fruitful – how long do patrons generally attend before they donate? After how many years or experiences do they drop off and how can you address that? Your database can help pinpoint pain points and opportunities for improvement. It also has the potential to provide a much more personalized approach to communicating with your audiences which is so important in this developing relationship.Also, do take a look at the results of the first two rounds of research on our website, with the latest findings coming the week of October 28. Our shared arts audiences are not that different from one another and the research from Stone-Olafson is providing great insights by looking at behaviour patterns, frequency of visits, motivations, and more. They have also done some of the work for us in their presentations by explaining the potential implications of the research results and how they can inform more successful messaging and communications that will speak to audiences where they are and in their language.
Look at them through a framework
There are several existing frameworks in the for-profit world that we can use to help identify and communicate audience expectations. One is the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) theory developed by Clayton Christensen. The essence of the JTBD theory is that no one purchases anything without it serving some purpose for themselves, and we need to figure out and speak to what that purpose is. In other words, we need to identify what ‘job’ they are ‘hiring’ us to do for them. I personally appreciate this approach because it focuses on common motivations and not demographics. Using language and imagery that speaks to the end result of having attended your organization may help them see you as the solution they are looking for. Ruth Hartt has some great advice on how to action this theory.Another approach I appreciate is Seth Godin’s Minimum Viable Audiences theory, which I got to hear him explain in person at a conference. It builds on the idea that instead of aiming to appeal to broad audiences, companies should focus on a small, dedicated group of customers or fans who truly value their offering. The aim is to serve this niche audience deeply, leading to loyal customers or followers who will help drive organic growth through word-of-mouth and advocacy. This doesn't mean we can use all the inside-baseball jargon we want, it just means that once we get it right with a certain group of people, we have to prioritize keeping them happy and satisfied. Again, this is more about patron personas and less about demographics, which I find to be a more effective way to segment audiences. It allows organizations to develop more personalized marketing campaigns instead of casting a wide net, ensuring their resources are used more effectively to engage the audiences that truly care about their mission. It is also easier to build closer, more humanized relationships with smaller audience segments through personal communication and relevant engagement.A great case study of deep audience focus in action can be found in Audrey Bergauer’s Orchestra X series, where she chronicles an experiment she and her team conducted at the California Symphony interviewing new audience members, made up of people who “should” attend the symphony but don’t, about their experience at several concerts. Her experiment is gratifying because it tells us potential audiences love the art once they experience it, they just don't identify with all of the packaging we put around it. She shares their very frank feedback and how the Symphony incorporated it.
It works for them
If spending so much time thinking about your audiences and how to delight them seems like a daunting task, recent data in the corporate world might inspire you to keep going. A recent study from the Institute for Corporate Productivity highlighted the shared traits of companies that consistently outperform others in revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction. It turns out that a deeply embedded customer-centric culture was fundamental to their success. High-performing organizations were three times more likely to collect customer data and use it to create a formal strategy, almost three times more likely to align the organization's structure and process to better serve customers, and four times more likely to set customer satisfaction goals and translate them into actionable, measurable activities. According to a Forbes article, organizations that are customer-focused are up to 60% more profitable than those that aren’t. An Accenture study found that companies that held customer service as a core value saw 3.5 times more revenue growth than others.
Focusing deeply on your audience and beginning with the goal of delighting them consistently should be at the core of all audience development plans, using the approaches outlined above or one of many others. This work is constantly evolving, and there is much to learn from the for-profit world, which was forced to start turning from product-based development and marketing to a customer-based focus much earlier than those of us in the arts. While we don’t want to allow economic pressures to dictate the art we present, borrowing practices from the business community can help us understand audience needs and motivations and how to speak to them. Arts audiences and for-profit customers are, after all, the same people.
With a better understanding of your current audiences and how to delight them, opportunities for building and growing new audiences will become much clearer. I believe it might also fundamentally change the way we produce and present the art we love so deeply, and deepen our relevance to the world around us. If dwindling audiences are a sign that what we present, or more specifically how we present it, is no longer connecting with the community we exist to serve, bringing ourselves back into alignment has to start with the people who support us and making sure that we are bringing value to their lives - using their definition of value.
Once we can use our deep knowledge of art and pair it with our understanding of audiences, we can help build a whole lot more Happily Ever Afters.
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