Transcripts

National Conference 2006
Friday, June 9
Transcript: Kevin McCarthy
“Understanding Arts Participation as a Behavioral Process”

Shay mentioned that I’ve done a lot of work on demography, and I thought in the interest of truth in advertising I’d tell you what a demographer is. A demographer is someone who works with numbers but doesn’t have the personality to be an accountant. [Laughter.]

Today’s presentation is really based on two specific studies we’ve done at RAND on arts participation. One is a book, Building a New Framework for Participation, and the second is The Gifts of the Muse, which expands the initial model we talked about in the first study. What I’ll do today is start with a brief background on where these studies came from and what they’re designed to do and how they relate to what I view to be a changing arts environment. Then I’ll move rather quickly to one of the key elements of this new approach. I’ll talk in some detail about the initial participation model, which is based on the Framework book. And then I’ll talk about the expanded model, which is in the second book, which makes a distinction between the decision-making process for occasional and infrequent arts participants and those who are habitual participants. And then I’ll talk about how the model can be used and what it’s designed to do.

Let me start by giving you some background in recognition of the work the Wallace Funds have done in sponsoring these two studies—the New Framework book and The Gifts of the Muse. This work, unlike a lot of other academic works, including academic work on audience participation behavior, is really designed not so much for academics. It’s designed to help organizations build participation in their activities. So it has a very distinct practical focus. The model essentially is designed to help explain the decision-making process individuals go through in making initial and then subsequent arts decisions. The key assumption that underlies this whole approach is that to influence behavior you must understand the decision-making process. So what this work has done is try to amplify a window into how that decision-making process works, what factors drive it, and how you influence it.

Underlying this whole approach is a basic premise: that is, that the arts today are really facing a new and much more challenging environment than in the past. This relates not only to funding difficulties but to increasing competition arts organizations face in trying to attract audiences given changing leisure patterns and the increased competition in a growing entertainment industry. But in the face of these challenges, as arts organizations have attempted to increase participation in their activities and awareness of the organizations and the art forms, they face a real challenge. Because building participation, as I hope to convince you today, is a complex task. And arts organizations often lack both the resources and the expertise to accomplish that task as effectively as they might otherwise do. And this is complicated even more because I am not a great believer in the notion of a single best practice. I believe that in fact there is no one single best strategy that can be used to accomplish whatever goal you’re trying to do, but in particular building participation. And the key to solving the challenge is to understand the nature of the decision-making process.

Now the challenge to building participation rises in part from the fact that increasing participation is not a single thing. In fact there are three different ways you can go about building participation in your activities. The first is to broaden the audiences you have. That is, to attract people who are part of existing audiences, perhaps only occasional attendees but to convince them the benefits of participating in your activities. The second and more difficult way is to diversify. That is, to attract people who are not attending not only your organization’s activities but aren’t generally involved or inclined to participation in the arts in general. The third way is to deepen your connection with existing audiences, to get them more involved in your work. Each of these different approaches, I will argue, requires different strategies because each is targeted at different populations who are at different points in the decision-making cycle.

Thus, effective strategies have to be based on the notion of being tailored to the individuals and the groups and where they are in the decision-making process.

I mentioned before the approach we’ve used at RAND is designed to be practical, to help organizations. If you go to what has become a growing academic literature on participation patterns, my belief is that doesn’t provide a lot of practical assistance for a number of reasons. First of all, most of the studies I’ve seen are traditional marketing studies; that is, they focus on the correlates of individual participation behavior. What proportion of different sociodemographic groups attend, at what rate, that kind of thing. This approach implicitly assumes that behavior is determined by individual characteristics—age, education, that kind of thing. The problem here is that there’s a distinction between the correlates of behavior and the causation of behavior. There are clear patterns of correlation between things like education, income, etc. and participation. But those aren’t necessarily causes of participation. In fact, if you look at higher education people, yes they attend at higher frequencies than those who aren’t educated, but not all the highly educated people attend, nor is it true that all people who don’t have that education don’t attend. These are correlates of behavior. They’re not the determinants of behavior. In fact, there’s a more complicated process that links attitudes to intentions, intentions to behavior, behavior to experiences and then experiences to future behavior.

A second major problem with academic studies is they often oversimplify the decision-making process. They typically treat it as an either/or, that is, who attends and who doesn’t attend. I’m going to argue that in fact it’s more complicated than that, that there are more stages in the decision-making process; moreover, that the decision-making process really differs in some major ways between those who are occasional attenders and those who are habitual attenders. Moreover, when the literature does recognize the multiple dimensions, it tends to focus on such things as who attends in person, who’s actually involved in the arts in a hands-on basis, who are your supporters, your donors, your volunteers and that kind of thing. And when they do examine discrete behavior they look at it as individual occurrences, that is, who attending this year, or this kind of thing, rather than look at participation as an ongoing process. And that process follows several general rules. What our work is trying to do is understand, unpack, if you will, get inside that box. Look at that decision-making process and see how it operates over time.

Before I actually begin to describe the process, let me talk about the key assumptions of our approach and how it differs from what’s typically done in the literature. First, a point I’ve mentioned before that I will stress over and over again: to influence behavior you must understand how the decision-making process actually works. It’s not enough to look at correlations. You have to unpack that and think about how people make decisions and where you can intervene to have an influence on the outcomes of that decision-making process. Second, the participation process is not a single “do I participate or not,” it’s a process that involves a complex set of considerations and stages, and these stages are important and help you unpack that process because they distinguish between background factors and how they influence attitudes; attitudes and how they influence intentions; what stands between intentions and actual behavior; and how current behavior affects future behavior. Moreover we maintain that individuals, depending on which group you’re looking at—and I’m talking here not about individuals in terms of their general social demographic or economic characteristics but rather if terms of their decision-making or psychological makeup—are at different stages in this decision-making process, and that different factors will affect the decisions they make in each of those stages. So what we’re trying to do is look at this as a more complicated behavioral process and learn how to intervene.

A key point of this, and something I’m sure you’re all quick enough to have already gotten: There are several key steps in this decision-making process. The first is, how are the attitudes formed in the arts? That is, what are the factors that determine whether people are inclined to participate or not inclined to participate, as well as the strength of that predisposition? Second, those attitudes will influence intentions—people who are more inclined to support the arts, believe the arts have benefits for them are much more likely to have an intention to participate. But there are a series of practical factors which intervene between your intention and whether you actually do participate and how you do. So you have to understand that part of the process. Finally, once you participate, the nature of those experiences, the quality of it, how engaged you are with the arts participation experience you’ve had, will in turn influence future behavior. So you’ve got to look at each of these different steps, figure out where people are and where you can intervene to make a difference.

Now, what may sound like a complicated process is outlined in the next slide. This is the initial framework that was defined and described in this book. What we’re looking at here are essentially four different stages in the process. The two categories, background factors and intervening factors, are the factors that influence the individual’s attitudes toward the arts both as an individual and as a member of a social group, which in turn influence the individual’s attitudes and shape overall their predisposition, are they inclined to participate or not inclined to participate, and how strong is that predisposition. The strength of that predisposition, in turn, will influence whether or not obstacles that stand in the way become major impediments or are simply something they try to work around to get to what they want to do. So you talk about background to attitudes toward intentions, these attitudes influence your decisions—are you inclined or not, and how strongly—and there’s a series of practical factors which intervene between your intention to participate and your actual participation. And once you participate, the arts activity and the reaction to that activity in turn feed back to your individual attitudes toward the arts and your perception of your reference group’s attitudes, and thus influence your decision about participating next time. So it’s a feedback loop built into this multi-stage process.

What I’d like to do now is talk in a little more detail about each of these different stages in the process. We’re looking at the background factors that influence an individual’s attitudes toward the arts. And there’s several different groups of factors here including characteristics of the individual’s family, their own individual characteristics and the community in which they live and form reference groups. And these things determine their interest, their aptitudes. Their opportunities, their attitudes toward the arts in general. Family factors for example, they help shape the taste, they provide opportunities based on the family’s own experience and inclination toward the arts for the individual experience of the arts when they’re young, and they also condition the attitudes, what people think about what are the arts, because there are real differences between the formal or more informal and community-based arts structures. So how they define the arts, how they think about them, as an individual. They have various personality factors which influence what you like to do, whether you prefer to appreciate, the variety of different ways you might approach it, as well as the resources and constraints you bring to bear on your success, in terms of the nature of the experiences you have, as well as the tastes and talents of individuals more generally.

In addition, it’s important to recognize the role the community plays in all this, because the sociocultural influences you bring from your community also influence, again, how you define the arts, what forms of participation are deemed appropriate or whether any forms of participation are deemed appropriate, as well as the opportunities available in that particular community. And those in turn will influence your attitudes about the arts.
In addition to these background factors there are two sets of very important intervening factors which also help shape attitudes. One is exposure to arts education. When you look at the correlates of participation you find that people with high levels of education are much more likely to participate. But among those who have high levels and don’t participate and have lower levels and do, there’s another factor that’s very important—which is whether they had exposure and good experiences with the arts when they were a kid. And those can either occur in a school context, or by a family member or important reference person taking them to the arts. And whether those experiences are positive enough can have a major influence on how they think about the arts—whether the arts is something they’re interested in, whether they get pleasure, etc. from it. And there are variety of different characteristics both of the nature of the education they had and who introduced them and the arts experiences they had if it wasn’t in a school context. In both cases, whether those early experiences were positive or not makes an enormous difference in how they think about the arts and the attitudes they bring when they’re making decisions today.

So if you go back to that earlier slide, we’ve talked about how these background factors influence both the individual attitudes and the community’s attitudes toward the arts. And as I said these attitudes are shaped both by individual and group beliefs and also vary along a continuum between positive, very positive, and negative, very negative. And the key factor in trying to get people to be predisposed to the arts before they have attempt to make a decision about an individual performance they have to be predisposed to the arts in general, and those attitudes of background, individual and community factors will influence whether they’re inclined to participate or not. And the difficulty of changing their initial predisposition will vary on the strength of their predisposition—what they see as the cost and benefits and the influence of their reference groups on their behavior. It’s important to recognize—and when I’ve talked about this to arts organizations they often get a kind of a-ha feeling because many organizations assume that to bring in people who are not predisposed or to broaden participation they should lower prices—that’s the key. Well, if someone’s not predisposed to participate, the prices, the availability, the schedule, the program is not going to make any difference. For people who are not predisposed, or alienated, who believe that the arts aren’t any good—the arts are worthless at any price. It may be hard for you believe but it’s critical to recognize this. So if you’re trying to diversify, to get people not involved or not inclined, it’s not the practical factors, it’s how do you get at their attitudes and how do you change those attitudes toward the arts and what the arts may have to offer them.

The next stage is how you translate from intentions to actual behavior. At this stage, when you’re talking about people whose attitudes are positive, who intend to participate, they have to face the decision of, “Do I choose to take advantage of a particular opportunity?” And it’s at this stage that the practical considerations intervene between intentions and behavior. If you’re thinking about what I mean by practical factors, well, I mean how much information do they have, what are the costs, is it convenient in terms of time and location. Many people, if you look at studies of why people say they don’t participate, they say they didn’t have enough time. That’s true in one sense, but what that really reflects, I believe, is a disinclination to participate, because they’re making the implicit choice that other things are more important for their time.
If you get people who are actually inclined, then things like do they have a babysitter, what does their work schedule look like, and how does it compare.... One of the advantages that art museums have over the performing arts is that art museums are open for longer periods. People can go when they want, decide what it is they want to see, and spend as much time as they want. As opposed to having to go to a theatre for two hours, and they’re at the theatre. That, for people who aren’t strongly predisposed, that can be a real obstacle so you have to think about the practical steps that make it easier for people who are inclined to take advantage of that opportunity.

Finally, once they’ve participated, the nature of that experience can take variety of different forms, forms that will vary with tastes, benefits, knowledge. Which is why you have to think about how you tailor programming to particular interest. But the nature of that experience, the quality of that experience, in turn will affect subsequent behavior in terms of their attitudes and intentions. And at some point—and this is a key thing—the process actually changes from a decision on an individual opportunity basis to an ongoing commitment to attend the arts on an ongoing basis.
As I see it, and as the work we’ve done tends to document, the decision process differs for individuals at different levels of this participation decision-making process. For initial participants, that is the infrequent or disengaged, or disinclined, changing attitudes about arts and arts participation are key. But once they’ve had the experience, the reaction to the experience in turn will affect and may strengthen their predisposition to—or, if it’s a negative experience, against—participation. And that’s why arts organizations have to think carefully about how with the audiences they have, do they engage them in that experience, rather than turn them off?

But for frequent or habitual participants the question isn’t whether they’ll participate again, but it’s when, and under what circumstances. So arts participation in fact becomes a continuing process. They’ve internalized the motivations to participate and this gets them involved in a cycle of participation which builds their skills and knowledge level and often changes their tastes. So the kinds of things you’re programming for an audience which are infrequent or not inclined to participate, and those who are habitual participants, is often very different because their competency levels in the art are very different. And that can lead to one of the real complications when you’re trying both to diversify and deepen at the same time.

These distinctions between the infrequent and the frequent really suggests that the decision-making process is different for the two groups. In The Gift of the Muse, we tried to amplify that by suggesting that once you get to the stage of ongoing participation there really are two very different models that are going on. One for the infrequent, where that experience shapes back on attitudes which then informs future intentions, but for those who are habitual participants there’s a different process going on. I won’t bother to amplify it here but I’ll come back to it in a later slide.

How is it then that frequent participants differ from occasional ones? I think they differ in three important ways. First, they differ in the nature of their motivation. Second, they differ in the level of engagement they have in their arts experience. And third, they differ in the confidence they have. Let me talk about each of those factors in turn.

As I’ve already suggested, a critical different between frequent and habitual arts participants, and those who are occasional participants, or entry level, is the degree which they internalize their motivations. If you think about and talk to people who are occasional or infrequent or not inclined to participate at all, often the reason they’re attending a specific performance relates to external factors—their friends, they had a date, something caused them to do that. That’s external. They’re not doing that so much for the arts, per se. But when you talk to frequent or habituals, they’re committed to the arts. The question for them isn’t whether they’re going to do it again. It’s when, and under which circumstances. So they’ve internalized that motivation. And it’s important to understand that distinction between the two groups, in terms of how they behave.

I’ve also talked about critical step in transforming someone from being an infrequent to an infrequent is the level of engagement they have with the arts, and we talk about two different types of engagement. There’s first kind of an emotional or cognitive engagement with the work of art itself. Talk about people being moved by the arts, or being gripped by them or the experiences they see on the stage for example and that just changes the way they look at the whole experience. They become fully engaged, to some extent. There’s an author named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who’s written some very interesting work on what is it that engages—how do you distinguish between people with different levels of engagement in the activities they’re involved in. He talks about people who are basically just filling seats because someone brought them there, not because they’re engaged. Then there’s the next stage up, because they’re relaxed, they’re enjoying it. Then there are those people who are really involved in it. And then Csikszentmihalyi talks about a flow characteristic, where the challenge meets the ability and people lose a sense of time and a sense of place and that’s what he means when he talks about fully engaged.

In additional to emotional, cognitive engagement, there’s also social engagement in the arts. A lot of the people who are committed and habitual arts participants or supporters are not actually active and engaged in the intellectual or cognitive elements of the arts, per se, they’re involved in it as a social process. You can think then that these things are mostly independent. You think about people doing something by themselves, solitary, you can think about people in the same place doing it in parallel but not together, you can think about joined, and then you can think about a communion where people are feeling engaged with the performers, and sometimes that’s actually true in terms of the process, not just emotional engagement. But people who are frequent or habitual participants are going to be engaged either emotionally, cognitively, or socially in the process. That’s what moves them on in the engagement process. And in this respect they differ dramatically from the occasional or infrequent participant.

The final key distinction between the frequent and infrequent participant is the level of competence they have in the arts. And you can think about competence here as falling along different dimensions. You can think about people who are attendees, or arts appreciators, you can think about those people who are involved in a hands-on way, and you can think about those people who are involved in supporting an arts community. And often if you’re talking about getting people more engaged in your organization’s behavior you’re talking about bringing them more fully into your own specific community. That often involves appreciation but it also involves support: volunteering, donating, that kind of thing. And again what you see is differences in the level of competence in terms of entry level versus habitual in terms of each of these three dimensions. This is one of the reasons that you have differences in taste, depending on what level of engagement and competence you have. Think about increasing knowledge in terms of appreciation, and skills in terms of doing, and increasing community ties in terms of support levels.

As a background we can look at that second part of the earlier slide I talked about and try to distinguish between where we’re talking about the frequent or habitual, the person who’s committed to continuing involvement, and how their decision-making cycle differs somewhat from the infrequent or occasional. The decision to participate is again shaped by practical factors—cost, schedule, location, opportunities—but they’re committed. It’s a question of choosing which among several are most important for them. That, then, leads to the activity. What form that activity takes depends upon a lot of those individual factors I talked about before: talents, knowledge, inclination, etc. You can even talk about differences in appreciation, doing, support. Once they’ve done that their level of engagement—both types—as well as their competence increases, which then influences their future plans. Now, their future plans can differ not just because of individual experiences but as people’s life circumstances change—they have kids, it becomes more difficult to go. When you look at artists’ careers, you see that there’s a stage at which people who are inclined or would like to become professional artists find they can’t make a living at it and they continue their involvement but in different ways. They’re less involved in the doing way, more in the appreciation way. Social networks change, which lead people to change the form and nature of their participation. And then those in turn compound the future decisions. But it’s a different sort of process than it is for those who are occasional and making the decision on a once-in-a-while or on a specific occasion basis.

That’s the basic model framework that we’re using, which I hope you can see differs from a lot of what the traditional literature talks about. How do you use this model? How has it become practical, as I said we’ve designed it to do?
I think it has three practical applications. First, it helps to understand participation as a process rather than as a discrete behavior. Second, I believe it can help organizations develop effective engagement strategies, as well as choosing appropriate tactics to meet those strategies. Let me talk a little more about each of those.

First, in terms of understanding it, the key points to make here, and it’s just a reflection of what I’ve already said—it highlights the complexity of participation as a multi-stage process. It explains how and why different factors come into play. It also talks about how social factors can build into emotional cognitive participation. It recognizes how repeated participation changes the nature of the decision-making process and it suggests the importance of specifying target populations and tailoring strategies to the target populations you’re interested in.

So in terms of developing effective strategies the key consideration here is to align what you’re trying to do, your goals—are you trying to broaden, diversify or deepen participation—which target population are you talking about? If you’re trying to broaden, you’re talking about having better penetration, as it were, among those people who are generally inclined but not currently participating either in your organization or in the arts with any kind of frequency. If you’re talking about diversifying you’ve got a very difficult task because there you’re talking about disinclined and the nature of the problem being essentially perceptual, whereas in the first case with people being inclined but aren’t participating you have to think about the practical factors that can lower the barriers to get them to act on their intentions. Finally when you’re talking about deepening you’re talking about targeting your current participants and how do you make the experience enriching, engaging enough to get them further involved in your arts group as a community.

These general approaches or strategies in turn lead to certain suggestions about the tactics—how you employ these strategies, what specifically do you do. In terms of key tactical considerations, absolutely key is that effective tactics are targeted tactics. The problem with lowering prices when you’re trying to reach people who are disinclined is that’s not an effective tactic targeting to the population you’re aiming at. Figure out what group you’re aiming at and what tactics are going to be successful for that particular group given where they are.

So aligning goals, target populations and approaches is central to this whole building participation process. Now, how do you do that? Well, there are lots of different ways. But information is critical to this process. There are two critical information exchanges which are necessary. One is from individuals to institutions, that is, what does the institution need to know about individuals to develop target tactics to reach them? And at the same time the individuals need to know enough about the institution that they can make informed choices to be able to appeal to those individuals given where they are. So what are some of those information needs? Well, organizations need information about their target populations at several points. First is where are they in their decision-making process? This is different than the traditional, “Okay, what proportion of my population falls into different ages, ethnic, income groups?” It’s not easy to do, necessarily, but through going out, talking, outreach, etc. you can get a sense of the populations you’re interested in. Where are they? How do they think about the arts? Are they inclined or not? What factors are obstacles? How do I find out about where the leverage points are with this population? What are their motivations? What are they looking for in the arts? Are they looking for emotional, intellectual, support...what is it that drives them, to get them involved, to hook them into the process? And then how do the programs fit with their lifestyles, interests, etc. You’re not going to appeal to old folks like me with the same tactics you apply to teens. We’re just different. So you need all of that information to build effective tactics.

Similarly, the individual needs to know enough, a variety of things, about the institutions. They need to know, what is it the institution does that is a benefit for them? They need basic information about programming schedules, what are they performing, what’s it about, that kind of stuff. And then because you’re trying to take people who are disinclined, make them inclined, and from inclined to make them infrequent and then frequent and then habitual attendees—that is, you’re not looking at individual discrete decisions, you’re looking at this as a process—you also need to think about how you build understanding and knowledge among these populations. That’s one of things that pre-theatre or pre-symphony meetings between orchestras and audiences...what kind of programs to get them more generally knowledgeable about the process so they can appreciate it...that’s critical to their thinking about participation as a behavioral process rather than as a series of discrete individual decisions.

And then in general whether you’re talking about information about individuals for organizations or about organizations for individuals, you need generally to think about, what are the most effective information channels? How do you reach them? And that’s changing dramatically. It used to be word of mouth was the most effective and that’s still true for a lot of groups. It’s one of the reasons why newspaper articles about arts things are often more effective than advertisements in the newspapers about things, but the Internet and the information revolution is changing things dramatically. Blogs and ways of getting information and not just clicking but getting profiles and stories. It’s all changing. You have to think about what’s the most effective way. The Internet thing is going to be most effective for some groups but not for other groups. And then you have to think about appropriate messages, that is, how do you package the information in a way that’s attractive to the groups.

In an attempt to summarize what I’ve said, I mentioned earlier that I don’t think there’s any one best practice. I think understanding the nature of the challenge is critical and what I would argue is what organizations need to do is think about an integrative approach to building participation. This actually starts, this integrated approach, by thinking about what your organization is really all about—what you’re trying to do, what are your values. I’m not talking about outputs here—I’m not simply talking about building audience members, I’m talking about outcomes. What are you really trying to change? What’s your real artistic accomplishment? Whether it’s community building or advancing the canon or creativity-focused or a variety of different institutional outcomes or values or goals. Once you’ve done that, you can think more clearly about what target groups you’re interested in. Are you really about broadened or deepening or diversifying? And for what ends? And thus, which tactics do you need to do?

It also helps to think about what are your organizational resources. If you’re trying to diversify that’s because it’s a perceptual problem. It takes much more in the way of resources and expertise than if you’re simply trying to broaden, appeal to a group that’s already out there or if you’re trying to build communities to deepen. Again, a different set of strategies are going to be necessary there and, of course, different resources and different expertise. So you have to think about all of that.
Another key thing is you’re not going to get it right the first time. You can almost guarantee it so you need to establish feedback and evaluation processes to see what succeeded, what didn’t, why you might have to modify it. How do you change based on what’s actually happened? Again, the point that I repeatedly emphasize—you have to remember there’s no single most effective approach. The approach you use will vary with your target population.
Thank you. [Applause.]

Question

Hi, I’m Laurie McCants from the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble in Bloomsburg, Pa. A number of years ago I had an experience that I’m still troubled about. Across the street from my theatre we had a beauty school, which was a place I would escape to when I was having difficulties within the walls of my theatre. I would go over to the beauty school and have my hair done. [Laughter.]

One of those times this young woman was doing my hair and had a novel on her table. I don’t remember what novel it was, but it was a novel of some depth and complexity. And I talked with her about it and it was clear this young woman was a reader and very interested in what she was reading. Then I asked her if she had been to our theatre right across the street, and she said, “Oh, no, I’m not smart enough for that.” I said the only thing I knew to say which was, “Oh yes, you are,” but I guess I want to know, what should I have said? [Laughter.] How can my theatre let people know that yes, they are smart enough?

McCarthy

A critical issue, obviously, when I talk about the quality of the experience, is you’ve got to think about ways to convince them that’s the case. What I would have done is asked her about what she was reading and say how that relates to things you’ve done, to make it more approachable to them. But once people come you need to have ways that—if you look at studies that have been done about why people don’t attend, a lot of it is because, “Well, that’s for the....”

[BREAK IN TAPE]

It’s also trying to think about, how do you connect with them? Sometimes that means going to the library, to people who read but don’t think about going to the theatre, and doing something there which makes it more approachable for them. I can’t say specific things, but engaging the person is the critical step.

Question

My name is Mike Detroit. I’m with Playhouse on the Square in Memphis. You brought up a point about predisposition, and I’m intrigued by that. It’s kind of a two-pronged comment about that; perhaps you can expand on it. First of all, how do we know how somebody is predisposed in terms of whether they’re going to come to the theatre or not? Because we don’t live with them. Should we just assume that everybody is predisposed to come to the theatre, in terms of marketing? Without knowing that answer I would have to assume everybody is so I can do my marketing effectively. And if we don’t know, or I guess I should say if we do know how they’re predisposed, for and against, how can we change their disposition?

McCarthy

As I said, one of the difficulties with this behavioral approach is unlike demographics, which can be garnered reasonably quickly from various outside materials, when you’re trying to get at people’s attitudes, those aren’t transparent.
I wouldn’t assume that everybody is predisposed. I would determine first what of the three different approaches, which one is most important for where my organization is right now—that is, broadening, deepening or diversifying. Then you say, okay, which groups do I think I should be getting—and here I would think in terms a little about demographics—is it youth, is it working people, what is it? And then I would try to do outreach into those communities. I’d go to churches, I’d go to schools. There are a variety of ways to sit down and talk with people and find out where they are in the process and trying to do it analytically in terms of, okay, what does this person represent in terms of a broader spectrum of people, among the groups I’m most interested in targeting? That will give you some sense about where they are in the process and what their psychology is.

I’d also try out ideas—how would they react to that kind of thing? Kind of like a focus group almost.
But you know the part of the dilemma here, when I think about the arts, is too often the arts focus too much in terms of building supply—getting more funding for the arts—and not enough about building demand. In other words, instead of focusing on government funds as the answer to the problem, the real answer is to get more people engaged, more demand, etc. And there’s a short-term and a long-term answer. The long-term answer, I’m convinced, is in arts education, which is getting kids early on so that they’re enthused about the arts, so that in fact you can assume for most people that they are predisposed. Because they will be. They won’t all be very strongly, but they’ll be predisposed to the arts. If they have no experience with the arts, they’re not likely to be in this society. But that’s a long-term solution. What do you do in the short-term? Well, in the short-term you’ve got to think about which groups you’re most interested in, where are they in the decision-making process and how do you target them most effectively. That means outreach and going out into communities and doing things like that. Cornerstone’s a good example.

Question

I’m Raye Varney with Theatre in the Square in Marietta, Ga. I appreciate what you said today. But it’s brought up so many things for me. I’m sort of concerned. I love your frequent and habitual person. [Laughter.] I feel like I know these folks, we’ve developed strategies that help us speak to those folks, you exchange lists with other arts organizations, you can reach people who are already arts patrons. But doesn’t that reinforce the whole issue that she brought up, which is “It’s not for me”? If I’m already talking to the people who are already in the circle, how do I get beyond that? I mean, if we really want to orient our organizations to that outreach model, it’s got to be beyond that marketing perspective of we have to grow demand for our product. I feel like we have to be holistically engaged in reaching people out beyond the group. I don’t know if this encourages us to better market to the people who are already in the group or help us find others.

McCarthy

At least as I hear you there’s an implicit assumption that organizations should do all three—that is, broaden, deepen and diversify. I don’t think you can do all three effectively. I think it requires too much in the way of resources and splits you in too many different ways. That’s part of why I think it’s important to start with what are your critical organizations goals, what are you really trying to accomplish, and what can you do most effectively.

There are organizations that are very good at broadening. There are others that are better at creativity and deepening. There are others, particularly community groups, that are particularly good at diversifying. I think organizations that are trying to do everything risk doing nothing well because they’re splitting their resources in too many different ways. That’s why, I think, it all starts with the strategic thinking about what is your organization really about and what’s your highest priority. I don’t mean to be discouraging but I think there’s a real danger in trying to do too much.

Question

My name is Amy Mueller; I’m from Playwrights Foundation. I’ve been reflecting on the different things we’ve heard today and I think one of the thoughts I’ve had and I’d like to hear your response to it is that Anne Bogart was talking about the relationship of an artist and her audience. And I think that the habitual, the people who enjoy coming and the people who are in your theatre, often people that you get to know, become part of your family and they are your, you have a relationship with them. It seems to me as you begin to want to broaden or.... The idea of outreach in the way you’re speaking about it feels generic and very distant. Like, who are all these people? Who are these people in this church? It seems to me that if we were to think about our community of audience as much as we think about our staffs or our work, as a resource for us and also for them, to help us broaden our audience base, that might be also another kind of strategy that we often don’t employ because our audience becomes monolithic. It’s an “audience” rather than people with whom we have a relationship.

McCarthy

I think you’ve got a good point there. But you talk about the habituals and building this community and having them feel a sense of family. One of the things that drives the people inside is that sense of community and it’s a little bit like religion in the sense of proselytizing. The benefits they get from that, they would like other people to share. Well, those people provide entrees into a variety of other communities because they are, as it were, your committed followers. Their goals should be not just to support the organization financially but to broaden its outreach and to provide you with insights into people who are more like them sociodemographically, while they might be more like you in terms of your psychologically with the arts, if you can understand what I’m saying there. And that’s an avenue to do that.

You’re right that it sounds like I’m putting these people in various categories, but one of the nice things about our society is that people can mix and match in all kinds of different ways. You can be like someone in some dimensions, and very unlike them in others. And so this is a way of crossing over into that, by using your community to help reach out.

Question

[Inaudible]

McCarthy

For those of you who might not have heard it, she’s talking about the possibility of saturated markets, and information overload for people and how do you deal with that? It’s part of the reason why I talk about an integrated approach as starting out with, what’s the strategy. I’m not sure—I mean, if you look at the order of magnitude of growth in the number of arts organizations and I’m not just talking about performing arts organizations—in the last 30 years it’s really been dramatic. And there may in fact be situations where there’s more supply than the demand can bear under current conditions. You mentioned there are cases where the same show is being put on by two different groups at the same time. That’s why I think it’s very important to start out with, okay, if all arts organizations all did the same thing all the time, there would be too many of them. That’s why we need a division of labor in the arts sector. And community-based groups have different goals and different objectives and different target populations than organization which are really about developing new artists and creativity-focused and those that are more involved in being the canon institutions for their particular communities.
There are different organizations with different purposes that will have different target populations, etc. What is critical—the test of how successful in some senses you are—is whether there’s a community of interest and support for your organization. If there isn’t, I mean, it’s not unheard of for organizations to go out of business. It’s a sign they haven’t done an effective job of building a community. It’s harsh but it’s true.

Question

I don’t want to give you my name, because I’m going to disagree with you and I don’t want you to hate me. [Laughter.] First of all, you’re really smart. [Laughter.] But here’s where I disagree with you. I think there is one overall broad solution and not a whole bunch of individual ones. Let us say that we’re not going to compete with other arts organizations but what if we collaborated with all the arts organizations. Now if we did that it would be to me a little like the milk process, they came out with a campaign that said, “Got Milk?” but they did it in a way that was emotional.

I think the solution to our problem very often, we keep walking away from it all the time here, is we don’t remind people of what the arts are, not only how important they are, but we could do it in a way if we collaborated—I mean, just take a look at what “Got Milk” did. You talk about all the things happening with the change in demographics and ethnics,. If we took a spokesperson like Tiger Woods and we ran an ad that said, “Butch Harmon gave me the swing but my dad and the arts gave me my character.” And we said, “Want to play like a Tiger? Go to see something tonight.” The point I’m trying to make is we need to make people aware of, and you do that with advertising and you do it I think collaboratively rather than just as a...I’m sorry to disagree with you.

McCarthy

You’ve got lots of points in there, some of which I actually agree with.

Question

Oh, good. Then my name’s Jack. [Laughter.]

McCarthy

I do think, and in fact in this study that Shay made reference to earlier about local support systems, one of things we’re finding is the communities that are responding more effectively to the challenges they face are communities where the arts organizations are collaborating. One of the difficulties when you get collaborating is often collaboration within the theatre sector but not between the theatre and the visual arts. You really need to get collaboration there. I think in fact, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts when you get collaboration.

Having said that, when you talk about marketing, I’m not telling you not to market, I’m just telling you the nature of the message you try to convey differs with what your target population is. The notion that Tiger Woods saying I learned my creativity and self-discipline and enjoyment from the arts will appeal to one group of people. There’s another group of people it won’t appeal to. What’s important is recognizing the different groups you have out there and trying to figure out how you market to them most effectively.

When I talk about information and effective tactics it’s all about marketing in a broad sense; it’s just not the traditional I’m advertising or having public service announcements and that kind of stuff. I don’t disagree, it’s a question of what does that mean and how do you do it.

Contact conference@tcg.org or Jenni Werner, National Conference Director at 212-609-5900 x233.