Finding ways to engage new and existing audiences is obviously a huge, long-term priority for arts organizations and for their philanthropic backers. How Americans interact with art is constantly evolving, and so is the profile of the arts donor, who can no longer be thought of solely as the older, white, affluent arts patron of yesteryear. For many years, the Wallace Foundation has taken a keen interest in the issue of engagement with the arts — with all its implications for arts funding — pumping millions into efforts to build audiences, research the field and suss out best practices.
Launched in 2014, the foundation’s Building Audiences for Sustainability (BAS) initiative invested $52 million over five years to support audience-building efforts in 25 performing arts organizations across the U.S. As the initiative unfolded, we’ve kept a close eye on its outputs, which included in-depth reports showing how participants attracted and engaged demographic groups like millennials and new residents.
BAS has officially wound down, but its participating organizations are taking one last curtain call (pun very much intended).
Last month, the New York City-based foundation released “In Search of the Magic Bullet: Results from the Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative.” Penned by Francie Ostrower, professor of public affairs and professor of fine arts at the University of Texas at Austin, the report digs into how BAS attempted to build audiences from 2015 to 2019. Title notwithstanding, the report doesn’t identify a “magic bullet.” However, leaders said that rigorous experimentation, performance measurement and flexibility yielded positive outcomes, even if success looked different than what they anticipated.
“Although there may not be easy answers or one simple solution, the initiative demonstrated emphatically that targeted audience-building is possible, and that there are a few tried-and-true strategies for doing this work effectively,” said Bahia Ramos, Wallace Foundation’s vice president, arts, via email. For example, “nearly all of the 25 organizations who participated in the initiative found that changing their communications and marketing tactics helped them to reach new audiences.”
The report’s most salient takeaway — that the most successful organizations showed a willingness to adapt to audience needs — is also a through line to the foundation’s ongoing $104 million Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative. The program, which Wallace launched in 2021, supports organizations founded by, with and for communities of color, and is the thematic successor to BAS and its focus on building audiences.
“All of Wallace’s initiatives are iterative and cyclical,” Ramos said, “so while BAS itself has concluded, its learnings helped shape the development of Advancing Well-Being in the Arts.”
Challenging “widely held assumptions”
To compile the report, University of Texas at Austin researchers interviewed organizational leaders, analyzed ticketing data and reviewed audience surveys to gauge the effectiveness of BAS participants’ engagement efforts. Ostrower analyzed the material and determined that “unexamined and unfounded assumptions hindered organizations’ ability to connect with new audiences they hoped to reach.”
For example, take the assumption that “audience members progress along a linear pipeline,” as Ramos put it, of ever-increasing engagement. It’s a familiar narrative. An individual attends a performance and returns for future performances. With luck, the individual becomes a consistent donor. While a litany of variables can influence such an audience member’s behavior — age, location, disposable income — the field has historically centered its engagement efforts around this seemingly logical pathway, which one leader called “a long, slow escalator.”
“However,” Ramos said, “neither of the organizations who selected infrequent attendees as their target audience for this initiative were successful in converting them to more frequent attendees. In fact, many of the other organizations reported similar challenges in encouraging repeat attendance from the new audiences they were able to attract.”
The report hits on factors inhibiting organizations’ ability to engage attendees, such as limited success in competing for Gen X’s leisure time or assuming that “work sells itself — that the label of ‘world premiere’ alone is enough to attract audiences,” as Ramos put it.
It’s easy to see why arts organizations might pin their engagement hopes on new work that’ll generate headlines and underscore their support for up-and-coming artists. In reality, however, participants “found that they actually needed to provide more information about what to expect from a production to help audiences commit to paying to see something new or less familiar,” Ramos said. In other words, new work doesn’t necessarily sell itself. A particularly effective way for transmitting information was creating short video trailers about new productions and sharing them across the organizations’ digital and social media platforms.
Reaching “new audiences on their terms”
Some of the report’s findings are bit discouraging — but not all that surprising. For instance, consider the fact that judging from BAS’ effort, no amount of targeted, data-driven engagement can make an infrequent attendee a repeat customer.
Few arts leaders want to cut ties to any of their attendees, but at the same time, they have to be strategic about how they allocate finite resources. The idea that engaging infrequent attendees may be a lost cause “actually may be freeing,” Ramos said, “as it allows organizations to accept infrequent attendees for who they are and instead focus any efforts aimed at deeper engagement on audiences who are already invested in their work.”
In other words, leaders don’t need to feel guilty for abandoning efforts to engage infrequent attendees. That being said, it doesn’t mean their outreach efforts should be set in stone. “What many organizations learned over the course of this initiative is that they couldn’t just expect audiences to change their behaviors or tendencies on the organization’s terms,” Ramos said. “Instead, organizations needed to change their own behaviors in order to reach new audiences on their terms.”
This sounds intuitive — it’s not as if arts leaders believe audiences will blindly jump through behavioral hoops because the organization says so. But it’s worth remembering that leaders often have preconceived ideas of what it takes to get audiences on that “long, slow escalator.” At some point, inertia kicks in and leaders may be unwilling or unable to alter their trajectory. Others lack insight into what specific organizational changes will move the needle.
Fortunately, “In Search of the Magic Bullet” provides some guidance, noting that successful organizations showed a willingness to change their communications and marketing strategies to be more welcoming and informative. “Often, organizations had been using language that was too ‘insider,’” Ramos said. “By shifting toward a more accessible communication style, they were able to resonate more with the audiences they hoped to reach — meeting them where they were.” Conversely, the report lists audience-building efforts that consistently fell short, such as creating “crossover” programming with new genres and staging performances at “off-site” locations like bars.
Readers interested in digging deeper into these issues are in luck. Wallace will be hosting a webinar about “In Search of the Magic Bullet” on Thursday, April 11, during which Ostrower will chat with four participant leaders to learn how they’ve continued the work since the initiative concluded.
Wallace’s current arts initiative is “well underway”
Ramos also provided me with an update on Wallace’s Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative, which, like its predecessor BAS, is funding work around building audiences and sustainability, with a focus on organizations founded by, with and for communities of color.
At the thematic level, Ramos said that the BAS organizations’ “community-centered approach is a contributor to organizational sustainability, and are exploring this relationship further with the grantees in the Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative,” which she described as “well underway.”
Wallace is currently pursuing two threads of work through Advancing Well-Being in the Arts. First, an initial cohort of 18 large arts organizations of color are entering the second year of implementation for projects they’re undertaking “to advance their organizational wellbeing,” Ramos said. Research fellows have been embedded with these organizations, exploring issues like what drives communities of color to create arts organizations, how those organizations define success and how they work toward it. Wallace is also commissioning cross-site research studies to delve into some of the shared ideas that the grantees are exploring through their projects.
As Wallace proceeds with Advancing Well-Being in the Arts, some unanswered questions still remain from the BAS initiative’s audience-building efforts, such as whether the lessons gleaned from 25 large organizations apply to their smaller peers. In addition, Wallace noted in “In Search of the Magic Bullet” that many of the long-term trends cited by the participants preceded and were exacerbated by the pandemic, and “post-pandemic interviews with organizational leaders suggested that the urgency of the pandemic has not yet yielded new solutions to long-term challenges.”
