Building Arts Brands: First, Know Your Audience

photo credit: Daniel Frese via Pexels

Click here to read my introductory article, Building Arts Brands.

Arts leaders are often given the mandate to increase visitors to their institution. But that’s difficult if you aren’t clear on your core audiences.

Where to start? Your mission tells you who you’re supposed to be serving. Make sure you’re aligned with that. But an important step is figuring out who, exactly, these people are who show up to your institution. An email list of thousands of people is worthless if you don’t have a clear picture of who’s represented on that list.

As well, are your programs relevant and resonant with your audience? A surface response is, “Yes, we know they do because we get decent turnout at our events.” But let’s dig deeper: Which ones are your “regulars”? Which ones are first-time visitors?

When I say core audience, I mean those people who will support you no matter what, because they feel like your institution and its offerings speak to them. They enjoy being in your space, so they are regulars at events. They spread the word for you because they believe in your work and how you do it. They can be counted on for donations.

I’ve noted elsewhere Wired Magazine’s founding executive editor Kevin Kelly and his useful concept of 1,000 true fans, the simple idea that you don’t need the biggest audience in the world, you only need 1,000 dedicated supporters who will contribute to your efforts. While it’s not a hard and fast number, you get the idea: Spend time finding and serving those who are most likely to support and cheerlead for you.

Cultivating core audiences is often overlooked by arts organizations. Everyone thinks, “My institution should appeal to everyone!” On the one hand, it’s lazy. But I also recognize that it’s the result of arts organizations giving marketing and brand building short shrift.

Make no mistake: None of your other efforts matter if you don’t know your audience.

The difference between aspiration and reality

Your mission is who you purport to serve. But data will show you who’s really coming through your doors. Do you know what the degree of difference is? If it’s a significant delta, then some work needs to be done to narrow it.

Here are questions that arts organizations should have the answers to:

• Who comprises our core audience? Are these the people we said we’d serve? (age, HHI, educational attainment, zip code, )
• Which programs attract the largest audiences?
• What do the people who come to our programs think of us?
• What do the people who don’t come — but who we want to attract — think of us?
• To what extent would the people who come to our programs regularly recommend us to their friends, family, and community?
• How long has it been since their last visit?

Four ways to determine who you’re actually reaching

There’s never a good time to stop and do a deep dive into your audience, so pick a time and do it. Think of it as an ongoing effort to add data points to your team’s understanding of who they’re serving. Some approaches that you can implement immediately:

In-Person Visitor Surveys

These ask people to rate their experience on their way out and can be captured on paper or on a digital device such as an iPad. This can be a two (2) question survey: 1) rate your experience on a scale of 1–5; and, 2) share your zip code. This gives you day-of data on how people are feeling about their on-site experience, as well as some idea of where these visitors live. The good thing is that most people don’t mind sharing their zip code, so over time you’ll develop a sense of where your visitors are coming from.

Email Surveys

Email surveys involve sending 10–12 questions max to your email list. This can be used to form a baseline for an annual longitudinal study of visitor perception. Typically, the 10–12 question count includes a few demographic questions added at the end. Try to get as many completed surveys as you can, but researchers typically shoot for at least 300 fully finished surveys. With that number of completes, while the picture you gain of your audience won’t be definitive, it will be directional.

In-Person Interviews

These can be done either 1-on-1 or in a group. Solo interviews tend to be better when you’re digging for the unvarnished truth about your organization, and you want to ensure that the interviewees feel comfortable speaking bluntly. It’s easier to ensure confidentiality in this setting. Group interviews — a la those wonderful charrettes of strategic planning — are great when you want to brainstorm toward specific outcomes. In either case, care must be given to the development of the survey questions well in advance. For group interviews, you’ll need to consider what constitutes a representative sample of your audience.

Your Online Audiences

In addition to in-person audiences, most organizations have online audiences. Figuring out where you’re getting most of your online engagement from is another critical component to having a 360-degree understanding of your patrons and supporters. Making sure your Web site is tracking visitors will help you understand where to prioritize time and financial investments.

For example, at one organization I led, most of our online audience engagement was on Instagram. With this in mind, we focused our outreach there. While we had a presence on Twitter and Facebook, we could tell that neither site drove much traffic or engagement. The question, given who comprises your audiences, is whether it’s worth investing in platforms that aren’t driving traffic, i.e., are these sites not driving engagements because we weren’t doing much to cultivate them, or are our audiences just not on these platforms?

The central pillar of your brand-building efforts

You will never effectively build an arts brand without a clearly defined audience or an understanding of what motivates them. If you continue business as usual, you’re simply shooting communications out into the void, hoping that they reach someone for whom your organization and its programs are relevant. This is a waste of your team’s valuable time, and it undercuts all the great programmatic work you’re doing.

But once you know exactly who you’re talking to and what they think of you, you’re in a stronger position to close the gap between what you say your brand is and what your audiences think it is.

That’s work worth doing.