“Organizations should frankly assess whether they seek to expand audiences or whether they seek to expand audiences strictly for their artistic priorities, because these can be in tension. Organizations can choose to do either or both but should not conflate the two.”
— Francie Ostrower, PhD, In Search of a Magic Bullet: Results from the Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative
Barely a page into Ostrower’s magisterial report for the Wallace Foundation, we learn that the first part of the title is meant ironically. Magic bullets? You’ve come to the wrong place. Ostrower, a professor at both the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, concedes: “As much as we wish it were otherwise, the reader should be forewarned that neither the initiative nor this study yielded easy solutions to the problems” that performing arts organizations face in retaining audiences, engaging new ones, and staying fiscally healthy at the same time.
Ostrower’s report sums up lessons from research and evaluation connected with a five-year investment of $41 million that Wallace made to 25 large nonprofit performing arts organizations in the wake of reports from the National Endowment for the Arts, and elsewhere, that attendance rates were flat or in decline. In Search of a Magic Bullet is the final of a series that Ostrower produced for Wallace as part of her independent study of the organizations’ audience-building efforts.
Those projects were undertaken within a “continuous learning framework,” with the organizations pursuing different strategies and different target audiences. From 2015, the initial year of the program, through 2022, Ostrower tracked them all. She and her team conducted hundreds of surveys with the organizations, in addition to surveys of audiences and analyses of ticket data.
In one survey, 65 percent of the organizations rated the strategy of “encouraging crossover between programs” a major part of their audience-building efforts. As Ostrower explains, crossovers involve “offering special programming to attract the target audience, in the hopes that the target audience would then cross over and attend [the organization’s] main programs.”
Long before the pandemic, nonprofit performing arts organizations sought to reach younger and more diverse audiences, even while attendance levels were shrinking for demographic groups that had been the primary sources of patronage for these institutions. Thus, it became common to consider programming that likely would resonate with a particular audience group—one that might not normally attend the organization’s regular offerings. By hooking the target groups with special programming, some performing arts managers believed they would see them return for more traditional fare.
Ostrower debunks this assumption. In her study, “organizations repeatedly concluded that crossover strategies did not produce the hoped-for crossover outcomes,” she writes. As an example, she recounts how one organization in her sample, a symphony orchestra, had “developed a new genre-crossing series where orchestra musicians played with indie artists, in the hopes that millennials would attend and then go on to attend main season programs.”
“As one interviewee said, ‘We really thought this was going to be a gateway drug for millennials to come to…some more core product…. That really didn’t happen,’” she reports.
In another case, Ostrower instances an opera company that “coupled food with musical performances around its geographical area” in an attempt to reach younger and more diverse audiences. In an interview, one of the opera company staff said: “I think in our naiveté, we thought: well, we’ll convert 70 percent of these new audiences into mainstage ticket buyers…. Like we see them in a restaurant, and then they’ll buy a ticket to a three-hour opera, and come sit in the dark with us.”
“In the dark” is right. As with the symphony, the opera company found that its crossover strategy did not meet expectations. Even so, the strategy was credited with raising public awareness about the company and with engaging audiences outside of its performance season. Similarly, the orchestra that was disappointed at not attracting return audiences was loath to call its crossover strategy a bust. One interviewee maintained that “’having a series, a space where millennials feel comfortable coming to the [hall] is enough,’” while another pointed up the intrinsic value of having a more diversified program.
Beyond changes in repertoire to lure a target audience group, some organizations—like the aforementioned opera company—explored strategies such as performing in unconventional spaces, again in the hopes of achieving crossover. One theater company, which commissions works by multi-ethnic artists, and has seen a growing percentage of people of color among its main season ticket-buyers, also ran a special series that entailed site-specific performances in community settings. “Originally, the organization hoped the series would serve as a pipeline to their main season productions, but that did not occur,” Ostrower notes.
In the words of one interviewee, the company initially thought “if we get people interested and we go into a community, and people come there, downtown or whatever, and they do an interesting sort of site-specific 30-minute thing that they can do with their friends that’s $20 and that involves a glass of wine, that will be their sort of entry drug into coming into the theater…. And it turns out that’s not the case.”
Rather, “there’s a whole bunch of people who are really happy just doing the [special series],” the interviewee continued. Although these enthusiasts have not become subscribers to the theater’s main season, they constitute a different demographic that the theater wants to include in its total audience. At the same time, the interviewee characterized the work as “hugely, hugely mission-specific [and] cultivating a different set of artists.” (The series also relies more heavily on subsidies than do other projects at the theater.)
Despite these alternative wins for performing arts organizations that attempted crossovers, Ostrower warns: “Some organizations concluded the programming was not attracting even the target audience or experienced no real connection between the special programming and the organization’s identity or goals.” Moreover, “even when organizations did embrace the value of new programming, real challenges remain; a significant one being financial sustainability,” she concludes.
In two other cases, organizations tried to convert people who attended a performance once or maybe twice a season (so-called “infrequent” attendees) into more frequent audience members. This type of crossover attempt failed as well, but, in the case of one of the organizations—a theater company—yielded a fresh insight: the possibility of what one interviewee called a “reverse crossover.” In other words, the theater had managed to persuade its season subscribers to book tickets for special event programming.
As a result, “instead of trying to attract people from ‘gateway’ productions to different types of productions, the organization is now exploring ways to help audience members connect to other performances that reflect the audience members’ interests,” the report states.
For performing arts managers, Ostrower’s report is chock-full of insights that range far beyond the audience-building strategy of the crossover. Here’s another example: audience gains over the study period were accompanied by declines in frequent attendance. As she puts it, “more people were actually attending, but they were attending less often.” The report erodes a stereotype among many performing arts managers, what one interviewee calls the “old myth of the long slow escalator.” It was the notion that, “once attracted, new audience members would progress to become more frequent attendees (hopefully subscribers) and then donors,” Ostrower says.
This idea, like so many other pre-pandemic constructs, may have exploded already—but if it hasn’t, then her report will gently put it to rest.
Confirms what I’ve seen over 25+ years as a concert and theatregoer. Many have thought that “If someone likes X then certainly s/he might like to try Y,” tried to build the bridge, and then burned out when it didn’t work as hoped or at all. Even within classical music there are many subcommunities that prefer specific types of events and don’t attend others.
For whatever reason, the belief that “Just do it in a bar or club and it’ll be great” won’t die. Bars and clubs are more exclusionary than any of the supposedly elitist art forms.
Not sure why Wallace needed to spend $41 million. I’m old enough to remember when symphony orchestras played pops concerts because they thought that those audiences would then buy a ticket to hear Beethoven, Brahms, etc. However, it has long been known that this is not true, that there is virtually no “cross over” between pops audiences and “classical” audiences. This is truly old news.
Dr. Ostrower might have spent her time on something more worthwhile.
Sunil, how does what you learned from Ostrower advance or conflict with the NEA’s When the Going Gets Tough study from 2015? I’m especially curious about contextualizing her findings with the reasons people don’t attend; time (47%), costs (38%), difficult to get to (37%), no one to go with (22%), did not want to go to the location (9%), and lack of interest in the programs (7%)
Thanks for the question, Antonio! In my view, those particular data points don’t tell us much about how to interpret the new study findings about how audiences respond to “crossover” event promotion.. What might prove more relevant are other findings within the General Social Survey (arts module), both in 2012 and in 2016 (as reported in “When Going Gets Tough” and its sequel, “Why We Engage”) about the motivations for people going to visual or performing arts events. Those reports considered such drivers as wanting to “learn something new” or to attend at a specific venue/site. I can see how those factors, if strong enough, might nudge someone who attends special programming to “cross over” into more traditional offerings by the same organization. Not that this happened here.
Thank you, Sunil!
The outcome of this enormous Wallace investment was easily predictable, and one must question whether the ROI was worth the cost. As usual, this is a case of arts organizations attempting to do it “their’ way — doing something “they” think, from their insular perspectives, will entice new attendees. Everything attempted was simply an overlay on business-as-usual, not an effort to look systemically at false assumptions and the underlying motivations. The study at least calls attention to the question of WHY arts organizations are trying all of these initiatives — if they were artistically motivated, there might be a chance to tap into the interests of more diverse audiences, but they are not. Wallace and others would do well to invest in understanding current and prospective audiences (building on the NEA’s 2015 barriers report). Perhaps we need fewer gimmicks and more authentic engagement efforts around our core missions — anyone can see through efforts that lack authenticity relative to mission. Do we want, as the report suggests, to build audiences, or is increased attendance potentially the result of meaningful engagement that builds perceptions of value among diverse publics.
Please let me offer a resounding second to David Myers’ observation. This was an arts insiders talking to arts insiders project that sheds no light on the attitudes, expectations or potential behaviors of future audiences.
Most of these crossover initiatives are dreamed up in arts organization conference rooms by insular arts administrators who have no authoritative information about – or direct experience with – the outsiders they mean to influence. Spending millions of dollars to discover that programs built on guesswork don’t work is incredibly wasteful.
If the Wallace Foundation wants to find out if crossover initiatives work, they should speak to the people who are expected to cross over – not the unengaged insiders who launch new audience initiatives without learning who their new audiences are or why they’d want to participate.
As others have mentioned, we’ve known this for generations now, based on the experience of orchestra pops series. It’s a separate audience, which is not intrinsically a bad thing, if your mission encompasses that work. What’s more interesting right now, though, are the institutions for whom “crossover” (a questionable, limiting term in itself) events are changing “core” offerings — as David Myers says, those where the artistic vision is changing, so that what appears as crossover to a researcher, is actually evolution. We’re seeing that among a few smaller US orchestras, and their growing artistic differentiation is fascinating.
I’ve been a professional musician since I was a teenager…all this looking to expand audiences in the name of diversity, etc ( and the horrendous amount of $ this seems to incur in administrative fees) could mostly be avoided IF schools don’t cut out music programs! This is where your audience “engagement” begins!!
Although the report says that it took place from 2015 to 2022, I would be interested to know if this study measured “cross-over initiatives” by an organization over multi-year period as opposed to 1 event in that 7 year period, or even a 12 month series of events. Is it possible that the process might take several years of enticement, and by then a patron’s understanding of themselves has changed e.g. that a “Pops” patron evolved into a “Serious Music” patron as tastes changed with age?