Continuing my summary of our recent alumni conference in Madison on The Rise of the Active Audience, our afternoon keynote meshed fabulously with Lynne Conner’s morning conversation (discussed here and here). Alan Brown is among the leading audience research consultants and consumer behavior specialists in the arts these days. And his library of reports and articles on what he’s learned make for compelling and useful reading (you can find many of them here).
For the past year or so, Alan has been wrestling with the insights of the Wallace Foundation/RAND study, ”Gifts of the Muse”, which mirrored many of his own discoveries in arts participation research, but conveyed that wisdom in a rather dense and impenetrable fashion (my words, not his). At the center of the RAND report was an odd and unintuitive graphic, exploring the intersection of two axes: “instrumental vs. intrinsic” benefits of arts experience, and “public vs. private” benefits. The idea was that there are individual and community benefits to arts experiences — some affecting the participant, others “spilling over” into more public benefits in education, economics, and civic engagement. But the graphic and the narrative left many practitioners scratching their heads about what to do about that.
Alan’s interpretation of the same concept changes the axes entirely. One axis breaks down the proximity in time to an arts experience (“during,” “before/after,” and “cumulative”). The other axis changes the “public/private” axis of the RAND model (which was confusingly political) to an “individual/community” axis…adding an “interpersonal” between the two (click the image for a larger view).
The resulting infographic is a rather compelling metaphor for how and when “value” and “benefits” from arts experiences form and accrue to individuals, to interpersonal relationships, and to the larger community. In the lower left of the graphic is the source of all impact…the arts experience itself. Alan describes this point in the model as a pebble dropping into a lake, causing ripples to move outward…sometimes for a lifetime. And the two axes mapped together lead to five clusters of value and benefit, that I’ll drill into in my next post.
More thoughts to come on Alan’s map and insights. We’ll just let that ripple travel for a moment.
Through my work at Wesleyan I have been fortunate to work with Alan Brown and make use of his Connecticut Values Study. Recently, I began working full-time at the Green Street Arts Center, a unique project founded (in the post-anomalous arts world?) as a partnership between Wesleyan, the City of Middletown, CT, and a local neighborhood activist group. Green Street was conceived and built with the intent of being a community anchor for the economic and social benefits of Middletown’s poorest neighborhood. Our active audience is a small but growing group of people who are extremely diverse in terms of arts interests as well as income, culture, and education.
One thing I have learned is that engaging the active audience requires far more than simply programming and marketing.
Overall I am thrilled by the fact that so many people are invested in what happens at Green Street. But it definitely comes with a new set of challenges–particularly in the realms of providing administrative transparency, information flow, and measurable success to our new community, social service, and economic partners.
I know there are many arts orgs out there who already have an active audience base, and I would love to hear advice/experiences from them about facing the challenges, as well as the benefits, of an active audience.
Wish I could have attended the conference!
Lex Leifheit
You got a lot of mileage out of this alumni conference – now where’s the next part in the series? (Friday)
Hey Kate,
A crazy schedule delayed my final post on the matter until early next week. Hope you can hang on until then!