Arts Predispositions I: Yeses

In nearing the final stages of my “how to” book on community engagement, a project about which I have hinted a couple of times here, I have been playing with a new concept that may be helpful in plans to reach those who are not currently involved with the arts. This post and my next two will lay out the basic ideas.

There is a tendency to look at the universe of non-participants in the arts as an undifferentiated whole except for economic class or racial/ethnic status. Not being aware of subsets of the collection of those we would like to reach gets in the way of basic marketing efforts. It is also a hindrance in planning for community engagement.

In the early 1990’s, Bradley Morrison and Julie Dalgleish wrote an interesting book on arts marketing called Waiting in the Wings. Some considered it to be a worthy successor to Danny Newman’s iconic book on selling season subscriptions Subscribe Now! Morrison and Dalgleish proposed an approach for moving non-participants in the arts to participants and then to core stakeholders. A central feature of the work was an understanding of the population as a whole being divided into Yeses, Maybes, and Noes with respect to arts participation. (The book’s process was designed to convert Maybes to Yeses.) Yeses were those predisposed to be arts patrons. Noes were infants, the infirmed, and the incarcerated. Lumping all others into the Maybe category was highly optimistic. (The Rand Corporation’s New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts uses the categories Disinclined, Inclined, and Current Participants for a similar purpose. The National Endowment for the Arts 2015 publication, A Decade of Arts Engagement–NEA Research Report #58, identified a category–“interested non-attendees”–that is parallel to the Maybes discussed here.)

While Waiting in the Wings‘ promised great migration of people from Maybe to Yes did not pan out, its acknowledgement of predispositions is an important consideration both for traditional marketing and for community engagement. However, a viable future for the arts industry lies in expanding reach into the category of Maybes and, if definitions different from those used by Morrison and Dagleigh are applied, Noes.

Arts Predispositions
Yeses
Maybes

• Backsliders
• Blissfully Unaware
• Apathetes/Agnostics

Noes

• Cultural
• Structural
• Actual

Yeses
Yeses likely had exposure to, education in, and experience with the arts as children. They are of an economic class with access to disposable income, and they likely are from a cultural background (in broad terms) shared with the work presented by the arts organizations in question.

This group is the one (and the only one) for whom “getting the word out” might be an effective approach to marketing. (Though even with them it is seldom sufficient.) They know about the arts and have enough experience with them to respond when they hear “the word.” These people make up the core audience of arts organizations. While they cannot (must not) be taken for granted, they do not make up a large enough cohort to support the nonprofit arts industry as it exists today. Certainly work can be done to increase yield among the Yeses and doing so should be an important part of any marketing strategy. However, since its members do not, by and large, represent a new community for arts organizations, addressing them is usually not a part of a community engagement plan. This is, however, a practical rather than a theoretical consideration. They are a potentially identifiable community. At the same time, more effective communication with them (and with Maybes) is an important element of “getting from here to there,” regardless of where “here” is.

Next time: Maybes
(Exciting, huh?)

Engage!

Doug

Photo: Some rights reserved by Kyle Taylor, Dream It. Do It.