Putting Audience in your Mission

Where is the audience in your mission statement?

It is the question I ask every time I’m engaged to develop a marketing and audience development plan.

If the mission is all about your organization and what it does, you will – guaranteed – have difficulty setting actionable, measurable audience development goals.

If the mission includes your audience – your community – it gives a depth of meaning to everything you do. You will be able to write one dynamite strategic plan, and your marketing plan will be able to directly support your mission and your goals. You will be able to measure your progress and demonstrate clearly to your donors and sponsors exactly how you are making a difference.

Here’s a simple exercise to test your mission statement.

If yours was a company that, say, made women’s fashion, which mission statement would better motivate your staff and give you long term direction as well as opportunity?

“To make beautiful women’s clothing…”
or
“To make women feel beautiful and well dressed…”

Is mission about what your organization does, or is the real essence of mission in the impact of what your organziation does? I opt for impact. See what it does for your mission.

Finding Feasibility: Feasibility Studies, Economic Impact, and the Arts Market

Doing a feasibility study for a new cultural center is one of the most important policy tasks any arts community takes on, and it is especially important when the economy is tight and funders need to stretch their dollars.

My take on it is that the task is not to say if a venture is feasible or not, but to determine what will make a project the most feasible, the most viable, in even the tightest economy. (Anything is feasible if your pockets are deep enough.) I’m interested in finding a model or approach that will be beneficial to all involved. A great home for the arts needs to be both a wonderful arts center and financially beneficial: A) to the community, that wants/needs a facility/icon/cultural anchor; B) to the user groups, that need/want viable facilities that truly work for them: C) to the economic system that supports it, to right size the building so the economic impact is positive over time; D) to building the arts audience, so that the seats are sold out rather than half sold.

One of the very first consulting projects I took on some 26 years ago was a performing arts facility, recently opened. The board chair called saying “we built the thing, and now we are facing having to lock the doors and throw away the key. We had no idea it would cost so much to operate. What can we do?” Figuring out the solution for them and ensuring they kept the doors open was the foundation for a lot of my thinking about arts facilities. It taught me that the real trick is thinking beyond the capital goal. The real job of feasibiltiy testing is planning for long term sustainability. Be careful about what you build: you are creating an economic ecosystem, and all the arts and arts supporters around you will be impacted. Your arts groups will have to pay the rent. Your audiences will pay the operating costs. Your donors will pay the balance, and their other grantees will feel the impact if emergency resources have to go to the facility.

On the plus side, everyone will benefit when the facility draws thousands into town every weekend, parking, eating out, staying over, shopping, spreading new dollars through the economy. Everyone will benefit when property values in the contiguous blocks increase. Everyone will benefit when education quality increases through stronger arts education. Your task in determining the feasible model is to capitalize on those benefits, and ensure the benefits are greater than the costs.

When you take on the task of determining feasibility, there are some key questions you should be pondering.

Who do you want to benefit from the facility, and for what? If your top goal is to have your local resident organizations benefit from a terrific home base, then the facility has to really be about them – affordable, designed primarily to showcase them and to their audiences. If the local symphony averages an audience of 800 a performance, be careful about the impact of a 1700 seat venue! Don’t build a hall they can’t afford and can’t grow into. (Sometimes, smaller is better for everyone.) If the total annual rent now paid by a local group is $2000, a new hall that will cost them $40,000 in rent a year is likely to have a real impact on the local funding community. Make sure the funding community is prepared.

What partnerships or joint ventures could fill the hall, every week, every day? Real economic benefit comes when arts hubs are alive and filled every day. That’s when the surrounding businesses are buzzing, when property values increase. More and more, the way to make this happen is through community partnerships between the nonprofits, area school districts, and higher education. Suburban halls often require the extra guaranteed tenancy of urban groups that will confirm to a second home relationship. The task is to find the right combination that will open the doors every day. We favor adding ample educational “wings” and facilities to ensure that the facilities are educational hubs, and adding various sized black box studio theaters and/or simple recital halls.

What will be the source of the operating subsidy? Going in, know how the budget gap will be met, year in and year out. Create the funding strategy, and include it in your initial public dialogue. If you can model out the increase in property values, you may be able to make the case for related public funding. If the school district is a 50% tenant, you can make a case for school district support. If other municipal offices are a 30% user of all the meeting and educational rooms, you can make a case for their partnership. Bascially, answering this question means going back to that partnership question over and over until you have the user mix that ensures the operating funding mix.

What is the audience of the future, and how can the facility please them/win them as regulars? Imagine your community five to ten years from now. Will it be substantially more diverse? Will it be younger? Will people drive less distance for entertainment? Build for your arts market of the future, not today.

These are just a few of the important questions that deserve real thought, real dialogue. Make sure your project asks them, and involves your entire community in dialogue to find the right answers. If you do, you’ll find the most feasible approach to building for the arts, even in tight economic times.

The Culture in Cultural Development

Culture is everywhere in the news. The culture of Wall Street investment banks. The culture of American political views. The culture of change. The Gen X culture versus the Baby Boom culture. The culture of greed versus the culture of giving. The very polarized high art versus real life culture that author Lee Seigel described in the Wall Street Journal last Saturday (September13) talking about a new round of culture wars in America. (Heaven help us!)

So what kind of culture do I focus on when talking about community cultural development? How do communities actually go about planning for culture? If you are doing cultural planning, how can you steer clear of culture wars and instead focus on doing good civic planning via culture?

There is plenty of “culture” included in cultural development planning. A few of the keys…

- The culture of place
- The culture of community identity(ies) and values
- The culture of the arts and artistic/creative expression
- The culture of heritage, history, and tradition
- The culture of the natural and built environment
- The culture of aesthetics
- The culture of education

Can you plan to facilitate the expansion, strength, and utilization of these cultures as a part of community planning? Yes.
In furthering these, can you develop strategies for the resulting “culture” to play an increased role in economic development? Yes.
Can you develop a democratic community consensus on cultural priorities within these? Yes.
Can you budget for cultural development, and determine a return on investment scenario? Yes.

Coming into a new town, I’ll often te told, “we don’t have much culture here.” Ah, but you do. It is who you are, where you are from, your hometown pride or lack thereof. It is what you value and what you teach. It is how you celebrate your creativity and how you recreate. It is how you keep reinventing your communities to keep pace with tomorrow’s generations – or how your communities stagnate and disappear. It is the choices you make for community investment. It is your world view, the way you view your neighbors, and how you want the world to view you.

This is what makes cultural development planning so challenging to do. It is why cultural development planning requires lots of diaglogue, lots of community input, a many divergent views. And it is why the goals and desired outcomes from cultural planning deserve a place in overall civic master plans. The cultural goals that we as communities can agree upon are too important not to be right up there in master plan documents. Coming to demographic agreement on civic cultural development priorities should be an essential task for every community, everywhere. Healthy culture isn’t someone else’s culture – the Gen X culture or the Western culture or the New York culture, etc. Heatlhy culture is about us, who we are as people and communities. Our own back yard.

The Incredible Shrinking Suburban Audience

Words of Wisdom and Wit

The next time someone asks you about the value of marketing and if your arts organization should cut marketing costs in a tight economy…

From David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather…

“I have come to regard advertising as part of the product, to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard, any more than you would stint in any other essential ingredient in your product.”

And from the lore of the Wrigley Company…

On a train trip to Texas, a friend asked Mr. Wrigley why, with the lion’s share of the market, he continued to advertise his chewing gum. “How fast do you think this train is going?” Wrigley asked. “I would say about 90 miles an hour,” his friend guessed. “Well,” said Wrigley, “do you suggest we unhitch the engine?”

The Web and Shopping for Arts Events

Yesterday’s blog brought so many emails to my inbox that it opened the door for deep conversation about the web’s importance for prospective ticket purchasers. The importance of the web as a part of totally integrated multi-channel marketing is huge! So let’s dig in a little more today by turning to a resource I couldn’t live without, the incredible research reports from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They should be a bookmarked read for every arts marketer. (I’ve included links to a couple of key recent reports in my blogroll.)

I’ve recently been fascinated by the implications of John B. Horrigan’s May 18, 2008 report for Pew on “The Internet and Consumer Choice: Online Americans use Different Purchase Strategies for Different Goods.” Horrigan studied music purchasers to see how they buy music, which has immediate implications for those in our field who are selling tickets to live performing arts – as well as to the packaging of digital music.

Herrigan proves the point of multi-channel marketing, noting that 51% of music buyers report offline sources as “more influential than the internet in shaping their choice of music purchase.” He goes on to say that, “in general, 62% of music buyers who used the internet to learn about music say an offline source mattered most as compared to 32% who said something on the internet made most difference.”

So, okay, the brochure and direct mail targeting still matter. So does the non-web advertising strategy, as Horrigan points out that ads and WOM are still primary influencers for music purchase.

But the web is a huge factor, particularly for web-savvy consumers. Note, the web, not just email. Here’s what Horrigan reports:

56% of music buyers say they watch a music video of the song or artist, some of which may be online videos, before the purchase.

44% have done at least one online activity relating to their music purchase, such as going to an artist’s web site or reading blogs about the artist or band.

The web is particularly important in reinforcing what Horrigan refers to as the “experience good” of music. (Actually, Horrigan rightly quotes Carl Shapiro and Val Varian’s “Information Rules” (Harvard Business School Press) in that term. An experience good such as music – or one might argue, a ticket to a play or a trip to a museum – “has a quality that is difficult to determine before the purchase, which makes sampling very important to the purcahse.”

So Horrigan notes that among music buyers, 39% go to the artist web site to “connect directly with artists.”

28% look online for live performances by the artist.

13% post their own reviews to places like Facebook.

And, 26% say that on-line resources led them to buy more music.

Seems pretty straight forward to us. Good use of the web in marketing arts events and tickets is more than sending email reminders for upcoming concerts. Add links to artist web sites. Add links (not just program notes) to your web site to satisfy web users’ insatiable need for research resources. Add you blog about the upcoming event, and/or your guest artists’ own blogs. Find better and better ways to let that need for “sampling the experience good” be satisfied. Sure, that sound bite of the Symphony or the new production of Lucia is a great start. But more is better. And, make sure to add opportunities for what Horrigan calls “post purchase” interaction. He notes that “Alexander Grahanm Bell was the first to see that communication technology might change the communal nature of listening to music, as he thought the telephone would be used to let people gather to listen to concerts happening on other places. The internet turns Bell’s vision on its head… (in part because) they can virtually gather in cyberspace to talk about it.”

What are you doing to foster that post event chatter?

Cross Channel Arts Marketing

Getting cross channel right is key to selling more tickets. In simple retail terms, cross channel shoppers are those who investigate before buying, relying on the full triangle of information triggers: the store, the web site, and the catalogue. And in the retail business, it has been pretty well proven that cross channel buyers spend more, are vastly more loyal, and make more frequent purchases.

So how do the arts create good cross channel buyers?

1) Think about how the catalogue (brochures) support the web, and how both are supported by the store (destination/box office.) The messages, the look, the call to action, the ability to satisfy the customer should be consistent. That means regular updates to the web, matched by periodic updates/new versions of the catalogue. Yup, new covers and inside front pages of the “catalogue” a couple of times a year, to drive people back to the web site, also with fresh content.
2) Think about prompting purchases at key times during the year. Did you know that good cross channel shoppers are 110% more likely to purchase from catalogues than non-cross channel shoppers? Basically, that catalogue you get from Restoration Hardware is prompting you to get back on line, check things out in depth, and then finally make that purchase you’ve been putting off.
3) Make the web experience terrific, fresh, and deep. There are many tremendous arts web sites with great content. (The Mesa Arts Center’s interactive brochure this year is terrific! Fabulous job, Randy!) Think of the customer who looks things through in the catalogue, goes on line, zeros in on the lamp he wants to buy, zooms in for a closer look, gets to then zoom in for detailed product information, more background and even more background, until he is satisfied that this is indeed the lamp to buy rather than that other lamp over at that other store/catalogue/web site. Don’t imagine for a monent that your customers aren’t doing exactly that kind of comparison shopping! They are, even for a $25 ticket for Saturday night.
4) Knowth thine customer. The more you know about the customer, the more you will be able to segment your customer base into four or five manageable slices and target them with the right catalogues at the right frequency. This isn’t always as easy to do as it might seem. Right now, we’re working at creating a single analysis database out of one major presenting organization’s three years of Ticketmaster box office transactions – none of which are linked together. (More on creating a viable customer database at another time… Sometimes, the back office is the most important office in marketing.)

There are real implications here.

1) Question the viability of a single season mailer. Would you buy as much if you only got one Bloomies catalogue a year? Make them different sizes, different thickness, different content.
2) Change the web to match the changed catalogue. Allow for new zooms in, more depth, special deals, new features. Assume that at this point your buyer is actively doing comparison shopping.
3) Build customer intelligence files.

There’s a great IBM publication on cross channel marketing. Check out the link to the left.

The price of admission…

The recent Wall Street Journal Review and Outlook editorial (Thursday, September 4) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122048621675397153.html has a wonderful graphic showing the 2008 spike in the so-called Misery Index, which is a combination of the unemployment rate + inflation rate. The Misery Index is nigher now than it was in 90 or 92 (Bush I), coming closer to the 82-84 Regan years. (The MI was never higher than during the Carter administration, followed by the Ford era.)

Why does this matter to the arts? As the article goes on to say, recent “opinion pools support what the Misery Index and common sense tell us. According to a Pew Research pool in July, no less than 45% of the public cited rising prices as the top economic problem. That was nearly double the 24% who citied prices in February. Nearly two-thirds (64%) now say their incomes are not keeping up with the rising cost of living.”

So how many 10th row center seat tickets are you buying these days? Yup, price sensitivity is very, very real. But there is plenty you can do about it. Those of you who have followed my ArtsMarket newsletters and white papers know that price elasticity is something I preach, and something I feel strongly has been under utilized in the arts field. Two of the greatest demand builders for consumers are urgency and a good deal. Yet in the arts, we tend to give good deals when there is no urgency (i.e. discounts on season tickets if you buy them six months in advance). Let’s see some courageous flipping of this equation. Let’s see great deals a week or so in advance of opening night at the symphony – and not just for nose bleed seats!

In the proceedings from the recent Wallace Foundation meeting on audience development, Foundation president M. Christine DeVita says in her opening paragraph that “unless we get better at building demand and appreciation for the arts, we will not have the strong, healthy cultural life that our communities deserve and that arts organizations need in order to flourish.” Building demand is the job of great marketing. Price, urgency, flexibility – these are tools of great marketers. Think about that Misery Index, and get to work!

I’ll be writing more about the Wallace Foundation report shortly. (They actually used the word marketing – going finally beyond the safe term audience development!) For the Wallace Foundation report, go to: http://www.wallacefoundation.org/NR/rdonlyres/61989019-61FD-4929-8EDE-974C9AC91B76/0/ArtsforAllConnectingtoNewAudiences.pdf

Cultural Districts: Creating A String of Pearls

I’ve had the pleasure of counseling cities throughout the US and Canada on creating vibrant cultural districts that go on to become exciting and economically successful hubs. Here’s my list of elements of success.

Authentic to Location. Simply put, a cultural district is the antithesis of a “town centre development” that looks like every other urban shopping area in America.
Identity, known for “something unique.”
Cultural Inclusive and culturally diverse. Don’t limit definition of art, entertainment, or culture.
Started Small. Made a density difference, and grew organically as the market demand expanded.
Right-sized. Not too big. 14 blocks.
Critical mass of activity, 24/7.
Diverse offerings.
Connective Tissue: Space-making sculpture, beacon-lights, outdoor vendors,
murals, small touches. Make the grand intimate. Human scale.
Branded and marketed as a cultural destination.
Visible art.
Economic incentives. Loans. Investment strategies.
Strengthened arts organizations to operate
successful venues.
Artists at the center. Work space. Live space.
Vibrant role for arts education within the district. All ages.
Great partnerships. Civic. Cultural. Educational. Philanthropic. Business and entrepreneurial.
Fun.
Programmed.
Mixed Use.
Box Office.
Green Spaces.
Planned.
Managed.
Funded.

Looking for good examples of this approach? I’m proudest of the City of Indianapolis’ strategies and programs for cultural district development. Through a true bottom-up process, six distinctive and unique districts were shaped, supported, and thrive. Go to culturalindy.org
Check them out.

Preparation for Cultural Planning

I’m often asked, “How to we get ready for cultural planning? What questions should we be asking? What homework can we do before we engage a consultant?”

Here are some of the questions I ask communities to explore before I come on site the first time. Try this as a good preparation for any cultural development, cultural district planning, or overall cultural planning.

Exploring Cultural Development
Preparation Questions

1. What are your community’s cultural assets? These may include any/all of the following:
a. Organizations
b. Civic offerings and services
c. Educational, school and youth focused programs, and life-long learning opportunities
d. Individual artists and crafts people
e. Creativity based businesses and enterprises
f. Heritage and historic assets
g. Festivals and celebrations
h. Facilities and sites

2. How do these currently support and further community health and well being?

3. Use a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) to describe the condition of the cultural assets. Include the financial conditions including financial assets, participation counts, geography or communities/neighborhoods served, facilities and other measurables in this.

4. Use a Gap Analysis to consider missing or limited cultural assets; use a GAP analysis to consider unmet community needs or population segments that aren’t reached by the cultural assets.

5. Create a vision statement for culture and the arts in your community. What is the completed or achieved vision like? How do people engage and benefit from arts and culture in the achieved vision? What tangible and intangible differences are there from the present cultural profile?

6. To achieve this vision, it is likely that many players will need to work together in partnership. What are the existing and prospective partnerships and alliances that can be developed working toward further developing your community’s cultural vitality? Who should be at the table?

Now that you have a sense of where you want to head (the vision), and who should be engaged, you can begin to shape the assessment (needs) and planning process. In preparation, think through the following:

1. What documents do you need to use as a foundation?
2. What community input process is necessary and important?
3. What kind of consulting assistance, if any, would benefit the planning process?

With this work completed, you’ll know what to seek in counsel. You’ll be able to engage in a cultural planning process that will win community enthusiasm and investment and gain significant outcomes!