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LEARNING
ABOUT AUDIENCES By
Alan S. Brown and Laura Sankey
We thought it only
fair to warn you right away: this is going to be an article about research. (You cringe.) It’s not the sexiest of topics, we know. (Your past experiences with research pass through
your mind. You recall audience
surveys administered by your own staff, collected and still sitting
in a pile somewhere in your offices waiting to be tabulated. Or perhaps a pro-bono study conducted by a local research firm.
After the hours spent helping these people understand
the complexities of your product and your market place, you sat through
the presentation and thought to yourself “but I already knew that!”)
You may not realize
it, but you conduct research more frequently than you realize. Most likely, you already depend on research
to help you make decisions on a daily basis.
Do you not attend every performance and eagerly scan the audience
looking for new and different faces, trying to determine subtle changes
in the demographic make-up? At
intermission and after a performance, do you not stand in the lobby
talking to patrons, asking how they like the program (or receiving such
opinions unsolicited)? Whether you realize it or not, all these pieces
of information which you collect become data points which you synthesize,
analyze, and process when you make decisions about programming or marketing
strategies.
This type of “intuitive”
research is routine in the not-for-profit arts industry. In addition to gathering data informally, you
might also attend conferences, listen to your peers, read trade publications,
and – perhaps – consult a magic crystal ball from time to time.
These kinds of research activities are critical to your decision-making
and help you feel connected to your customers and to the field.
However, this type of informal research, while cost effective,
lack the rigor and reliability to allow you to make generalizations
about your customer base with confidence.
Until recently, arts
organizations were able to successfully market and sell programs and
retain customers without needing to conduct formal research. Because markets were growing and entertainment choices were limited,
institutions attracted audiences simply by opening their doors. In this environment, a standard model for marketing
programs was developed several decades ago and replicated in organizations
across the country in all of the performing arts disciplines.
You know this model: using direct marketing, sell subscription
packages for programs months away; allow single ticket sales closer
to event date; convert single ticket buyers into subscribers; repeat.
For many, many years, that model worked extremely well.
In the late 1980’s, however, buying patterns across the country
began to change. With increasing
momentum, subscription bases began to decline, ticket purchases were
made closer and closer to the day of the event, and competition for
entertainment dollars, time, and marketing messages intensified.
All of a sudden, the traditional sales model was no longer relevant
and this sea change took nearly everyone by surprise.
Throughout this article,
we will describe and illustrate different examples and applications
of research on audiences. We
recognize that every organization is different in terms of their information
needs, marketing strategies, and data resources.
It is not our intention to suggest that all research is appropriate
for all types of companies, but rather to recommend ways that research
can help you to remove the guesswork from your decision-making.
Of course, research will never tell you how to choreograph a
ballet, design a set, or supplant the artistic process in any way, however
its ability to identify market trends is invaluable. Why Research?
Research – good research
– can be a remarkable tool for arts organizations. If conceived, designed, implemented, and analyzed in a thoughtful
and rigorous way, research can help to shed light on many of the complexities
involved in presenting performances in today’s complex market place. Just as you value professional development
provides opportunities for you and your staff to learn new techniques,
strategies, and management skills, research is a means to learn about
your audience and your market and to expand your abilities as a manager.
In the cultural world,
the questions we seek to answer are fairly narrow in scope:
There is a range
of options as to how you go about answering these questions, depending
on the complexity of the question.
Simple descriptive characteristics (demographics, geographics,
and basic purchase behavior) are relatively easy to gather.
Often, you can turn to secondary data gathered by a third party
to help you get some of this data.
Questions about attitudes
and values, relationships to institutions and art forms, and motivations
and barriers to attendance, on the other hand, are more complex and
require more complicated research methods.
To answer these questions, research must ask the questions directly
and seek to “get inside” the heads of both attenders and non-attenders,
which can be a formidable challenge in terms of both scope and cost.
There are a variety
of research tools available to managers seeking to learn more about
their audiences and to answer these questions.
The “tool kit” for a cultural organization includes a both secondary
and primary research methodologies.
Secondary
Research
Within your own organization,
you collect a great deal of data in your customer database. Many organizations do not utilize this data
to its full applicability. An
analysis of your database is the first place you can turn to study trends
in the buyer behavior of your customers.
Your database should be able to quickly and easily inform you
about customer buying patterns, giving patterns, and subscriber renewal
patterns.
Additionally, there
is an increasingly-large body of compiled data gathered by independent
companies on the American public. This
data is available for purchase and use.
For arts organizations, the most common application of using
secondary research is to study the characteristics of a market through
mapping and demographic reports. Recently,
a large ballet company in the Midwest went through the process of having
their Nutcracker ticket buyers mapped separately from their regular
ticket buyers. The exercise illustrated the geographical differences
between each group of customers and highlighted ZIP Codes to be targeted
in direct marketing efforts.
Another application
of secondary data is through mailing list enhancement and modeling. Simply put, this procedure matches each record
in your customer database with collected information from any number
of clearinghouses. The results
are returned to you in an aggregated format (in other words, you get
the characteristics of your entire customer file or sub-groups, but
not the characteristics on individual customers).
This data which is appended to your customer data file is collected
from a variety of sources, including, warranty cards, auto registrations,
National Change of Address, and Census data.
Many organizations use data file analysis to refine mailing list
purchases and to identify target ZIP Codes and demographic segments.
The benefit to secondary
research is cost effectiveness – any time you use data gathered by another
party, you save money. The trade
off comes from the fact that you are using data compiled by third parties. As such, it is never as reliable as if you
had gone out and collected the data yourself.
To increase your level of reliability, you need to turn to primary
research methodologies.
Primary
Research
You conduct primary
research any time you gather new data for a specific project, to be
analyzed and used by you (of course, if you were to turn around the
make the data available to other parties, they would be using secondary
data). Many types of common research studies fall
under the category of primary research.
There are, however, some more common applications of primary
research techniques in the cultural sector.
Examples of these include in-audience surveys, mail-back surveys,
telephone surveys, and focus groups.
Arts organizations
typically use primary audience research to paint a picture of their
customer base. Short surveys,
particularly in-audience and telephone surveys, are good tools for gathering
a small amount of information (e.g. demographics, decision-making patterns,
etc.). Mail-back surveys are used to extract a greater
depth of information from your customers (program preferences, cultural
attendance patterns, attitudes) because respondents complete these surveys
in their homes when they have more time.
Focus groups are
the most qualitative of research methodologies, consisting of in-depth,
structured discussions with participants.
Focus groups are excellent ways to test new product ideas and
new marketing materials. Perhaps
most beneficial, they allow you to listen to your constituents discuss
your organization and the art form in their terms.
For example, through focus group research, a ballet company in
the South discovered, much to their chagrin, that the image they were
using in their Nutcracker marketing materials was frightening to small
children.
There is also a body
of primary research that seeks to learn about the characteristics and
leisure patterns of people who do not attend cultural activities. Focus groups with non-attenders of a particular
cultural organization (but attenders of other cultural organizations)
can help identify barriers to attendance.
Finally, it is important
for organizations to conduct public telephone surveys every several
years to ascertain marketing patterns, general market awareness, and
community-wide arts participation.
These types of studies are frequently undertaken in conjunction
with community-wide planning efforts (either for new performing arts
facilities or for cultural plans). Though costly, these types of project lend
themselves to collaboration among many different groups.
No matter what type
of research you conduct, whether it is sitting down with a report from
your database or designing a community-wide arts participation survey,
you need to have clearly-defined research goals.
To get the maximum value from your research effort, it is imperative
that you establish a set of research questions before you begin any
method of data gathering.
Successful
Research Strategies
In our own experience,
we have worked with a number of presenters and producers that have begun
to use research to rethink their approach to their customers.
Within the dance
field, organizations are beginning to explore the unique relationship
between audiences and the art form.
Dance St. Louis, a presenter of a dance series in two venues
in the city, recently conducted four focus groups, an in-audience survey,
and a file analysis. The survey provided the organization with demographic
data on their audience and a profile of relationships with other St.
Louis cultural organizations as well as some additional data on sources
of information and media preferences.
The file analysis was used to highlight differences in the geographic
and demographic characteristics between the Nutcracker ticket buyers,
subscribers, and single ticket buyers.
While, the survey
and the file analysis provided the organization with a wealth of information
about their core audience, the organization wanted to learn more about
the segment of their ticket buyers who had limited interaction with
the organization, having never attended any performances or having only
attended one performance. The organization conducted focus groups with
these groups of non-core attenders to learn about their motivations
for attending dance performances, perceptions of the art form, and awareness
of Dance St. Louis.
In the focus groups,
a number of realizations were made about this elusive group of infrequent-attenders.
This segment of the audience differed from the core Dance St.
Louis audience in terms of their perceptions of dance phraseology, especially
in regard to classification of certain kinds of dance and dance styles.
This finding suggested that for Dance St. Louis to begin to attract
this segment to their programs, marketing materials would have to be
written using relevant terminology to this segment.
Another realization was in this segment’s need to see and hear
upcoming programs in order to evaluate the appeal of a company – many
of these focus group participants had attended a Dance St. Louis event
which had received an unusual amount of television coverage and promotion.
Dance St. Louis continues
to analyze the data gathered through the audience research and contrast
it to the learning accomplished in the focus groups.
The organization is in an ongoing process of implementing and
evaluating new marketing initiatives designed to attract and retain
customers who may fit the profile of dance attenders, but who have no
established relationship with the organization.
As Laura Burkhart, the Director of Marketing and Operations,
stated, “research of this nature yields an immense amount of information.
We continually refer back to the data and are still in the process
of investigating new strategies. There
is a tremendous amount of learning that happens in a project such as
this.”
Although each organization
and its market are unique, there is tremendous benefit to be gained
from sharing the results of research between peer organizations. In many cases, there are parallels in consumer
behavior, similarities in attitudes towards the arts, and shared patterns
in barriers to increased attendance.
These examples notwithstanding,
the not-for-profit arts sector lags far behind other industries in its
research efforts. Neither individual
organizations nor the industry as a whole have integrated research into
their business decisions or policy-making. Often, decisions are made without adequate
data, new marketing strategies are implemented without testing (or not
developed at all), and signs of changes in the market place are gone
unnoticed and take managers by surprise.
What
Research Is Right For You?
In a perfect world,
arts organizations would be integrating ongoing research into their
marketing activities, rotating methodologies from year to year. Although every organization will have different needs and research
requirements, we might recommend the following, multi-year research
plan for a dance company in a major metropolitan area:
The tasks in Year
1 – audience survey and file analysis – are usually the first tasks
recommended to organizations new to research.
Results from these tasks are generally not surprising, but provide
the organizational leadership with a common starting point from which
to discuss larger organizational issues.
By its qualitative nature, focus groups often yield results which
generate much discussion on programs and marketing strategies.
The development and implementation of new strategies can be tested
and refined in further focus groups.
Community-wide surveys should be conducted to measure public
awareness, involvement, and behaviors. Finally, every several years, base-line research
should be replicated to identify trends in your audience and in the
marketplace.
However, conducting
research is not simply a matter of following a formula or a calendar. The research you conduct needs to relate to
your research goals, the questions you’re asking, and the initiatives
you’re evaluating (for example, measuring the impact of a new marketing
campaign). Organizations should seek to develop a tailored
plan for research to address their unique needs.
While we should qualify
that each organization will need to find their own comfort level in
terms of resources, energy, and time devoted to research, the overall
goal is to establish a continuous, proactive learning process.
Industry-Wide Strategies
As important is it
is for individual organizations to begin to integrate research into
their marketing and strategic decision-making, it is equally important
for research to be occurring at a more macro level.
It is imperative that the industry, as a whole, undertake research
initiatives to systematically study arts audiences across America as
well as the organizations which provide live programs for these audiences. This type of “meta research” has long been standard in other types
of industries, especially commercial industries, industries where transactions
are large (i.e. finance and banking), and industries where competition
is high.
We are able to cite
some examples of industry-wide research:
A major national
foundation has, for the past six years, has continued a multi-methodology
research project on theatre audiences in conjunction with the evaluation
process of its theatre granting program.
This project entailed in-audience surveys at 42 theatres across
the country for several years, community-wide telephone surveys in selected
cities, focus groups in targeted communities, and organizational assessments.
A national service
organization, Opera America, spearheaded a project in 1996 to study
opera audiences nationwide. In
many cities across the country, focus group discussions with new opera-goers
were recruited in an effort to identify pre-conceptions of non-aficionados
in attending opera as well as the circumstances surrounding first-time
attendance.
The National Endowment
for the Arts has administered the Survey of Public Participation in
the Arts since 1982. Updated
every five years, this survey strives to monitor arts participation
in a wide variety of disciplines and types of programs and to track
changes in participation over time. While the National Endowment for
the Arts is a logical place for systematic research at the national
level on the entire specter of arts participation in America, service
organizations may be the most logical place for such research to take
place on specific disciplines.
Future Directions for Research
Following the recent
meeting of the National Task Force on Dance Audiences, the dance field,
in particular, is primed to take on the challenge of establishing rigorous
protocols of studying dance audiences.
As the dance world has begun to grapple with the difficult issues
of the future of the art form on an industry-wide level, it is at the
national level where it is appropriate to begin to ask the difficult
questions. There are a number of future research imperatives
which the dance field could choose to adopt. They include the following:
·
Create a leadership structure to guide
the dance field through a long-term learning process. There are a number of decisions to be made
in any research process. A discipline-wide
research effort would best be served by a panel or steering committee
of representatives of the many different types of dance in this country. Academics and professional researchers should
be present to guide the process. Leaders
from all segments of the dance field as well as from other fields should
be drawn upon to set a course of action which could then be used as
a model for other disciplines.
·
Establish better quantitative measures.
The vast majority of arts participation research is based on
recall data, not actual behavior. Currently,
the best method to track attendance data is by asking people to recall
their performance over a specific time period – usually within the past
12 months. The industry should strive to establish a monitoring
system which tracks arts participation on an ongoing basis. On any given day, we should be able to cite
the previous night’s attendance at the theatre last night, the ballet,
the symphony, etc. Until arts
participation is being monitored effectively (and reconciled with ticket
data from venues and facilities), any measure of the total impact of
the arts in America requires a fairly substantial statistical leap of
faith.
·
Establish better qualitative measures.
At the same time, there needs to be a systematic approach to
measure the difficult aspects of arts participation: attitudes, motivations,
values, and self-image.
·
Collaborate on common issues.
Again, we emphasize the need for communication and cooperation
in research. Collaborative research
efforts (between a couple of organizations, throughout an entire community,
or even across the nation) are ways for organizations to develop and
pool resources that would not be available individually.
Much learning has come from these types of efforts.
For the dance field,
in particular, there are some long-term research questions, which include:
·
How do audiences perceive the range
of dance organizations and programs available to them in their market?
·
How does dance education translate
into dance participation as adults?
·
What are the crossover relationships
between dance and other forms of movement and physical activity?
·
What strategic challenges and opportunities
does the dance field have, compared to other disciplines?
·
How is dance a portal into the arts?
The task involved
in answering these questions is formidable.
However, for dance – as for any art form – to remain viable and
relevant in an increasingly complicated and noisy market, the field
must gather in a proactive learning process.
One Final Thought
From time to time,
we encounter organizations seeking to learn more about their customers,
yet wary of using research to make artistic and programming decisions. Research and data will never supplant the artistic
process and the need to provide challenging programming and “stretch”
audiences artistically and intellection.
Our ability to understand our audiences, their buyer behavior,
and the market forces which shape their entertainment needs will only
enhance the vision of artists, of organizations, and the arts in America.
Alan S. Brown is the Director of Audience Insight LLC, the research affiliate of AMS Planning & Research Corp.; Laura Sankey is a Manager with the firm. AMS specializes in strategic planning and facility development for arts and cultural organizations. Audience Insight provides consumer and market research for arts and entertainment providers.
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2008 Audience Insight LLC, P.O. Box 423, Southport, CT 06890 |