In my last post I reflected on the potential damage to relationships (or damage to the capacity to form relationships) with those outside the inner world of the arts that the word “outreach” can inflict. (Outreach) I mentioned that there were other such words or concepts that have the effect of creating or supporting distance between our organizations and those with whom we would like to build meaningful relationships.
There are, in our field, long-standing habits of thought that form barriers. Some of them are words that, like outreach, create an arms length (at least) distance. One is in the title of my book, Building Communities, Not Audiences. “Audience” implies a separation and an unequal status between “us” and “them.” Similarly, “target” objectifies those we identify with that term. Frankly, “donor” is also an objectification. What we value is their money, not them. Marketing research, when focused on quantifying behaviors–attendance and purchases–and analyzing the motivation of choices, can do so as well if it is not grounded in a sense of relationship with the “objects” of the research. (As with use of the words outreach, audience, target, and donor, marketing research is valuable. The point here is not to fall down the rabbit hole of objectification. Indeed, I now see yet another blog post on this topic in the immediate future.)
It is not my intent to eradicate these words from our work. They are too ingrained and there are other far more important battles to fight. And, paying too much attention to this issue can be Lilliputian in the extreme–neither meaningful nor worthwhile. The words can serve as extremely handy shorthand, if we understand and fight their implications. For just such reasons of simplicity, I talk about identifying target communities in the process of developing an engagement plan.
The really good news in this is that the potential negative impact of these words and concepts on our work is entirely self-made and self-perpetuated. We can, with a bit of discipline, continue to make good use of them all so long as we understand the pitfalls they present and work to avoid them.
Engage!
Doug
Berlin Wall Photo:
Some rights reserved by Dave Cross