Arts & Business Council

For the next installment of A&BC’s MARKETING MATTERS SERIES focusing on the audience’s “experience,” Jennifer Novak-Leonard, senior consultant at WolfBrown, presents on how to strengthen bonds with audiences and visitors through various forms of impact assessment and verbal and written feedback.

Jennifer recently spoke with Artsbiz about the topic of her upcoming workshop presentation.

Successful audience engagement strategies necessitate a “customer-centered” approach. But what does that mean?
 
It’s an institutional philosophy. Being “customer-centered” requires a high level, cross-departmental commitment amongst an organization’s staff to provide ongoing mechanisms for audience and visitor feedback, and then actually having conversations about how that feedback factors into day-to-day decisions about marketing, fundraising, education, programming, and even mission.

There are multiple examples of these approaches – formal and informal – ranging from interviewing methodologies to structured audience surveys.  The most important element of any of these approaches is a well-structured audience “listening plan.” Any arts organization, regardless of budget size, can design and implement an audience feedback system.   Explaining the philosophy behind these methods and how to implement some of them will be part of the workshop.

Does that mean customer feedback is driving  the artistic product?

Becoming more customer-centered does not mean swinging the pendulum to that extreme.  I think that the next step in being customer-centric is understanding what experiences your audience wants and benefits most from, while providing the expert knowledge and quality of the art form.  This change in practice reflects a shift towards arts organizations viewing themselves as “enablers” of arts experiences rather than as expert providers or arbiters of artistic taste and quality.  The DEMOS publication out of the UK, Expressive Lives (2009), further discusses the idea of arts providers becoming enablers.

Is it possible to measure “Engagement,” “Satisfaction,” and “Impact”?

A key motivation for Alan Brown (principal of WolfBrown) and myself as we worked on our Intrinsic Impact research  was a comment from Edward Pauly, The Wallace Foundation’s Director of Research and Evaluation, [paraphrased] If you can describe it, you can measure it.

It’s absolutely possible to assess audience engagement, satisfaction and impact through quantitative data collection.  It requires arts organizations to get into a different headspace – to move beyond the box office measures and the number of warm bodies that come through their doors – to think hard about their mission and to truly know if they are making progress toward reaching it.

These are difficult concepts to measure, but that does not mean it’s impossible to measure them.  Alan and I have been working on the development of metrics for these concepts for about five years now, and we will continue to refine and develop those metrics, because engagement and impact are what we believe are at the heart of an arts experience.

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Join us on Tuesday, June 29 at National-Louis University from 9:30-12:30 at A&BC’s next Business Essentials for the Arts “MARKETING MATTERS” workshop.