For art's sake

The people who run your average arts organization would love to have more information on their audience. They’d love to know why people attend, why they don’t attend, where they come from and what they think of the arts-going experience. That information would be, as the research industry saying goes, "nice to know."
However, finding the time and money to conduct a research project is difficult when most of your day is spent fighting to stay solvent. With their budgets a patchwork of grants, endowments, donations and ticket revenues, most local art galleries, dance troupes or theater companies are more concerned with keeping their doors open.

But as their potential audiences shrink and funding comes under fire, "nice to know" is quickly turning into "need to know." In addition to competing with each other for a slice of our leisure time, arts organizations must battle the likes of the Internet, video stores, household chores and the twin Goliaths of sloth and apathy. Plus, monetary support for the arts from public, private and government sources has come under fire as various factions wage the good art/bad art debate.

What’s a research-minded arts institution to do? One solution is to find strength in numbers. That’s the approach taken by the organizations served by two arts councils in Raleigh, N.C.

Earlier this year, the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County (United Arts) and the Durham Arts Council conducted a joint research project called "Cultural Attendance in the Triangle: A Market Study," on behalf and with the cooperation of 34 arts and cultural organizations in North Carolina’s Durham, Orange and Wake counties.

The Triangle, encompassing everything from farm communities to larger cities like Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, is a rapidly growing, diverse area that’s home to a number of colleges and universities and several high-tech companies.

The need to conduct such a study was identified in 1991, after the merger of two smaller arts organizations that created United Arts, says Robert Bush, executive director of United Arts. "We knew that we needed better market information if we were going to be successful not only in raising more funds for the arts community but also in helping them build their audience. They were too dependent on grant money and they needed to do a better job of earning revenue," he says.

Combined efforts

While the need was there, the resources weren’t. But in 1995, after conversations with the nearby Durham Arts Council, Bush says it was clear that if the two groups combined their efforts, they could undertake a wide-ranging research program.

"In talking with E’Vonne Coleman, director of the Durham Arts Council, we figured out that we had similar information needs and so we tried to come up with a way to work together and make it a broader effort with regional impact. We began exploring funding options and found eager supporters in the foundation community who were not only intrigued by the nature of the project but even more intrigued that the barriers were breaking down between these two very similar agencies."

Conducted with the help of ArtsMarket Consulting, Inc., a Bozeman, Mont., firm specializing in marketing and consulting to arts organizations, the research project had three parts. First was an analysis of audience information from the databases of the various organizations that make up the two councils, followed by a telephone survey and a series of focus groups.

From a gross database of 173,948 North Carolina households, a net of 84,146 households in the Triangle region resulted after elimination of duplicates and other data cleaning.

With such a wide range of arts organizations contributing, the databases, containing information on customers and their ticket purchasing habits, ranged from simple to state-of-the-art. "One of the first things we learned was about the lack of sophistication most of the arts groups had in maintaining databases of donors, subscribers and single ticket purchasers. We had every kind of software imaginable, every kind of format, from an index card system to sophisticated databases. Getting them all in formats that could be used by the researchers to create a massive database of regional arts patrons was quite a task," Bush says.
By appending other information to the database, the organizations could look at their markets by the type of program the household attended, the admission prices paid, the venues, the amount of donations, participation in memberships and other factors. Demographic and lifestyle variables were also added.

The telephone survey was conducted with 900 households in Durham, Orange and Wake counties that occasionally, rarely or never attended arts or cultural activities. "With the telephone survey, we wanted to talk to people who had attended very infrequently or not at all, since the database analysis gave us so much information on people who already attend arts and cultural events," says Louise Stevens, president, ArtsMarket Consulting.

The third part of the research was a series of eight focus groups. Two of the groups focused on talking to African-American participants. Others focused on donors and subscribers, repeat attenders, participants (those who take classes and participate in amateur arts/cultural events) and casual/infrequent attenders.
The telephone survey and the focus groups didn’t center around opinions and perceptions of particular organizations. Rather, the aim was to uncover the factors that motivated and/or prevented attendance and participation and to gauge perceptions of the arts and cultural opportunities within the region. "With so many different organizations participating we were looking for the kind of information that would give them a foundation upon which they could do their own more specific research," Stevens says.

An embarrassment of riches

One of the most interesting findings was a classic good news/bad news scenario. While respondents felt the Triangle area was filled with interesting and worthwhile arts and cultural events, that belief led to a kind of complacency. "Some respondents said that in past years they had a sense of great urgency when a big performer came to town; everyone rushed out to buy tickets. But as one focus group respondent put it, ‘Now there’s so much good stuff happening virtually every week, that if I miss something good this week, something else will come along,’ " Stevens says.

Because of the large number of young families in the area, respondents were very interested in events that would be affordable for an entire family. "They did not ask that the content be changed but that the programs be made more family-friendly from a cost standpoint so that it was possible to bring everyone along and make it a learning experience for the children. That is an incredible area of opportunity to dramatically expand the audience base," Bush says.

The strong interest in family programming has helped secure sponsorships from local businesses, Bush says. "We can say, ‘This audience demographic matches your store’s demographic,’ which makes it easier for those retail establishments or companies to buy in to the sponsorship. We have data to back it up when we say that this is a family oriented program and that this is what the market says it wants."

The telephone surveys netted a surprisingly high level of support for public arts funding. "Coming from a non-attender or a casual attender, that opinion says even more than if we had gotten it from people who are regular patrons and donors. Many people say that funding the arts with government money isn’t something the public wants. Obviously it is something that people are interested in and they want tax dollars to go to," Bush says.

Respondents had low awareness that they could contribute to arts organizations on their own, as they do with charitable organizations. "There was a lot of interest in giving to the arts but people didn’t realize they could give to the arts. So that’s also a real opportunity for us," Bush says.

Perhaps the most troubling finding was the feeling expressed by African-Americans in the focus groups that many regional arts institutions aren’t open to diversity. While they felt that the quality of programming produced in the black community was high, they felt that issues of race and culture needed to be better addressed by the region’s arts organizations. "The research findings brought up some deeply held feelings in the black community that we still are having to fight to overcome. Being a progressive community, that comes hard to hear. We have a hard time accepting that those issues are something that we are still dealing with. We’re going to have some training after the first of the year on how to handle that issue," Bush says.

More active

With the voice of the customer still ringing in their ears, the various Triangle arts organizations have become more active in seeking out potential ticket buyers. The research found that one of the biggest barriers to arts program attendance was the perceived hassle of getting tickets, so the organizations are looking at ideas like region-wide ticket passes and new box office systems.

"The research motivated the organizations to move far more rapidly on a lot of significant organization-wide marketing," Bush says. "Most of our groups across the region tend to spend most of their energy on season subscriptions instead of single ticket purchase advertising and marketing. So that’s requiring a real shift in thinking across the board.

"We really look at the study as a baseline that we need to continue to update. This was not the end of the project but the first step in better addressing the needs of the community," Bush says.

Respondents also said they wanted to have better access to information about the various events and programs. As a result, the organizations are looking at restructuring customer service and communications.
"It’s really motivating all of the organizations to do vastly more prospecting than they’ve ever done before, with a variety of media, not only direct mail. It’s a high-tech area. With Research Triangle Park close by, they have to be providing information via the Internet. They can’t be relying on old fashioned traditional media, like a listing in the calendar section of the newspaper," Stevens says.

Cooperation

A welcome outgrowth of the audience study has been the spirit of cooperation it fostered among the arts organizations that, while not previously hostile to each other, had nevertheless been protective of their individual turfs and their customer information. "The groups are now eager to collaborate, to look at ways to share information, to look at ways that we perhaps together can create a database that is usable by the arts community across the region. We’ve broken down a lot of barriers now," Bush says.

"We’re not doing things the way we’ve done them in the past. We’re really opening up to a new array of methods rather than the traditional ways we’ve always used and I think the research was the cause of that reexamination."

Mix of approaches

Stevens says that this research project was pretty typical of others her company has conducted. "With arts organizations that haven’t done research before, we try to have them use a mix of approaches. We find qualitative to be very valuable because perceptions are critical. The arts have gone through very trying times with a lot of negative national publicity. That seems to be behind us but it has left in its wake some perceptions at every level that need to be dealt with and have real implications for cultural and arts organizations.

"They need to become more savvy at finding their niche. If this kind of research helps them understand their niche and helps them understand more about how they are viewed by people who have not wanted to walk in their door, and start working on ways to get them to show up, then they have a chance," Stevens says.