The Secret Ingredients for Audience Development: Will Power and Patience

Share your Pas­sion. Develop your Audience.

By: Denis J. Bertrand

Last month, through a face­book post, The Cul­tural Human Resources Coun­cil announced the Con­fer­ence Board of Canada’s 2010 ser­vice data on Envi­ron­men­tal Trends and Issues for the Cul­tural Sec­tor. The Con­fer­ence Board iden­ti­fied 15 trends or issues. You won’t be sur­prised to learn “Changes to gov­ern­ment spend­ing” and “Changes to gov­ern­ment pol­icy” came at the top of the list. In con­trast, at least five issues are related to arts mar­ket­ing and audi­ence devel­op­ment. In order of importance:

• Tech­no­log­i­cal changes
• The need to adapt to new mar­kets or services
• Chang­ing con­sumer tastes or expectations
• The age­ing labour force
• Increas­ing diver­sity of the labour force

Two other fac­tors can be added to this list, ‘the dif­fer­ences between urban and rural pop­u­la­tions’ and ‘regional differences’.

It’s evi­dent that social media altered the way artis­tic orga­ni­za­tions oper­ate. They pre­vi­ously depended on tra­di­tional media out­lets to pro­mote them­selves. The meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion were “sim­pler”; it was suf­fi­cient to give a state­ment, broad­cast a com­mer­cial, print advise­ments and posters and that was that. Social media is a more demand­ing form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It requires fre­quent updates to bring in results. This is why I rec­om­mend, to all my clients, using a short eval­u­a­tion to assess their com­mu­ni­ca­tions; are they work­ing effec­tively? Is the method being used sim­ply out of habit, all the while know­ing there is a bet­ter method?  Why not invest some time into the pro­duc­tion of social media con­tent? This should be self evi­dent in the arts and cul­ture sec­tor because one of the main goals is to tell sto­ries. So, use social media as a tool to announce your next activ­ity and speak more fre­quently to your audi­ence, offer them vir­tual tours of your work, men­tion your suc­cesses, expose them to your work between show­ings, present pro­files of employ­ees, board mem­bers, vol­un­teers and artists, speak to the ways your prod­uct has affected people’s lives and so on. You can even pro­mote com­mu­nity events orga­nized by other groups. Your ‘friends’ and ‘sub­scribers’ will not hes­i­tate to share their pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences and rec­i­p­ro­cate your generosity.

It’s true that:

• Arts and cul­ture con­sumers are age­ing. It’s the case with Cana­dian soci­ety in general.
• Our com­mu­ni­ties wel­come peo­ple from dif­fer­ent back­grounds who have inte­grated into Cana­dian soci­ety. Our cul­tures are dif­fer­ent but often have many similarities.
• Cer­tain seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion con­sume arts and cul­ture in dif­fer­ent man­ners (online or at home with new tech­nolo­gies) oth­ers pre­fer to invent in the cre­ation of cul­ture rather than sim­ply be consumers.

The chal­lenge exists for all sizes of artis­tic orga­ni­za­tions who want to reju­ve­nate, diver­sify and increase their audi­ences. The use or tra­di­tional media, and even social media, is not suf­fi­cient to reach the desired num­ber of audi­ence mem­bers. To do this we need to invest in the devel­op­ment of direct rela­tion­ships with desired clients. Whether, it is ado­les­cents, young adults, mem­bers of the cul­tural com­mu­nity, or peo­ple with dis­pos­able income who can buy your products.

The effort, I am about to describe can­not be achieved by a sin­gle per­son. It needs to be adopted by all mem­bers of your team, the board, your vol­un­teers and your most fiercely loyal clients. In summary:

• Leave the office and meet the peo­ple whom you want to attract. You can con­tact indi­vid­u­als or groups. Speak to them about what you do and how you serve the com­mu­nity. Avoid over the top pro­mo­tional tac­tics and really lis­ten to what the pub­lic has to say.  Share what you dis­cov­ered with your col­leagues and work together to for­mu­late con­clu­sions from the work.
• Call on the mem­bers of your board and your net­work to intro­duce you to peo­ple who will exert influ­ence over your tar­get audience.
• Famil­iar­ize your­self with the cul­ture of your audi­ence. It’s a good prac­tice; after all, you want them to accept your own!
• Fully immerse your­self in this exer­cise. Be pre­pared to revisit your func­tion and your offer. And, above all, have patience. Do not for­get, long term rela­tion­ships do not occur over night.

I already know what your objec­tion to this approach is: We don’t have the time to do all of this! Rather than going after the pub­lic at large, tar­get one group and invest your organization’s time into reach­ing them. Start a pilot project over a year or two. Doc­u­ment your pro­gres­sion using social media. You can enlist allies.

I have often said, it’s not nec­es­sary to spend great amounts of money to under­stand the ways to develop your audi­ence. You only need to invest time and will power.

Don’t hes­i­tate to let us know your solu­tions for reach­ing larger audiences!

Denis J. Bertrand is an expert in devel­op­ing audi­ences for art orga­ni­za­tion and is an asso­ciate with the mar­ket­ing firm 50 Car­leton. He con­ducts audi­ence devel­op­ment strat­egy work­shops, tai­lored for artis­tic orga­ni­za­tion, across the coun­try. He also writes about the topic on his blog www.developpezvotreauditoire.com. Denis is a mem­ber of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Con­sul­tants Cana­dian in the Arts. He lives in Sud­bury, Ontario.