This is the third in a series of posts dealing with the ways we in the arts unconsciously distance ourselves from the public. This time I want to expand a bit on the potential of market research to separate us from communities as well as its significant potential for supporting engagement. To that end, let me being with a story I’ve used several times in my speaking engagements:
Twenty years ago, my sister-in-law was the harried mother of two exceptionally rambunctious young boys. She was talking with her grandmother (my wife’s grandmother)–Mattie Lou Higgins, Mamalou–about her frustrations and challenges. Mamalou, who was born in 1899 and lived to see the 21st Century, had raised 7 kids with little or no help from her husband, as was typical in that era in the mountains of SW Virginia. My sister-in-law felt she was going under for the third time in the roiling waters of parenthood. She was utterly frazzled, and asked her grandmother, in near despair, how she had coped. Mamalou grinned slightly and told her, “Honey, we didn’t know we had to talk to them.”
Talk to them, indeed. Recently I’ve been seeing many writers highlighting the need to do so. The Wallace Foundation’s report on audience engagement, The Road to Results, has audience research as one of its nine principles. By that the writers meant talking with people about their needs, interests, attitudes, and opinions. The Irvine Foundation/Helicon Collaborative’s report Making Meaningful Connections on arts engagement touts “extensive face-to-face conversations” in describing effective methodology.
I’ve written before about the potential for focus group meetings to be transformed, with a slight shift in emphasis, to story circles accomplishing the same marketing ends and serving to develop relationships between the arts organization and the group members. (Focus Group or Story Circle) When our approach to meeting with groups external to our organizations is all about gaining information to help us, we treat them as guinea pigs. When we see the participants in those activities as individuals (and, yes, representatives of larger communities) with whom we want to develop relationships, we humanize them (de-objectify them to carry further a point from my last post), making connecting far, far easier with greater chances for success.
Engage!
Doug
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It’s astonishing to think we work in an industry where administrators have to be told they have to know their customers. It’s like telling a farmer that he needs to put seeds in the ground if he wants crops to grow.
Maybe this is an indication that out-of-touch arts organizations need to be allowed to collapse under their own weight so smaller, more human-scaled organizations can step in to fill the void.
If you’re too big or too busy or too important to know your customers, you probably don’t deserve to have any.