I didn’t run the New York City Marathon yesterday, but I felt like I was standing on the sidelines cheering just like thousands of New Yorkers —thanks to a young woman on TikTok who made me care about her race as if it were my own.
Content creator Amanda Luckie set a huge goal for herself: to cut two hours off her marathon time. For months, she shared every long run, injury recovery, and tough speed workout with her followers. On race day, she didn’t hit her goal; she shaved off forty minutes instead. And yet thousands of us were thrilled for her. We’d seen the training miles. We knew what those forty minutes cost, and what they would mean to her.
Amanda didn’t just run a marathon. She built a community around her determination, aspiration, and vulnerability. Her audience felt invested because she invited us into the process. The process itself created value – not just for her because now she’s more fit, more mentally strong – but for all of us who got the pleasure of following her journey and inspiration from all of her efforts.
That’s the lesson the performing arts world needs to learn from the content creator world.
Polish Made Sense—Until It Didn’t
When the nonprofit arts sector professionalized starting in the 1960s, polish was power. Clean brochures, black-tie openings, and impeccable program notes signaled credibility to audiences, funders and civic leaders. The strategy worked; it said, we belong in the grown-up economy.
But sixty years later, perfection reads differently. One reason is that in a media environment saturated with algorithmic and AI-generated content, slickness can now feel suspect. Now with what AI image and video generators can produce, a flawlessly produced post can trigger skepticism, not trust. Another reason is just a shift in what people are watching that I would trace back to the late 1990s with the start of reality television. What audiences now crave is personality and process: evidence that real people are behind the curtain.
The Trust Shift
Today’s audiences don’t separate authenticity from artistry. They trust what feels human, not what looks flawless.
Think about your own social media feed. The videos that stop you aren’t the polished commercials; they’re the rehearsal clips, the tech-week bloopers, the mid-project reflections. We live in a participatory media culture where creators show their work in progress. That transparency doesn’t cheapen the art—it builds anticipation for it.
Arts organizations, however, still tend to appear only at the polished moments: opening night, season announcement, gala photo. That’s the equivalent of Amanda posting only her finish-line photo. You miss the story that gets people to care.
Some organizations are starting to do this well – Minnesota Orchestra is the top for me right now. And others I give credit for trying, but are still figuring out how to let go of their perfectionism. I saw a video of a theater showing how they did a special effect and it was almost there, but the people on camera were still too stiff, the video was too long (if they’d cut it into 3-4 videos, they would have had more to share!), and it just wasn’t FUN.
Evidence from Broadway: Process Pays
The kind of content I’m talking about is the long game: build interest and excitement over time, and when the right event comes along, the customer will be all ready to buy. It’s long term brand building, and it’s an investment that will take some months to pay off as your organization trains the algorithm to reach people who are – or are open to – interested in what you have to offer. But it WILL pay off.
A study published a few months ago from No Guarantees Productions makes the case with numbers. In Unveiling the Value of Broadway (2025), researchers found that when young audiences were shown what it takes to bring a Broadway show to life—rehearsals, design, labor, cost—they were willing to pay 3.5 times more for a ticket.
Their average “willingness to pay” jumped from $141 to $512 when the context of the work was revealed*. Audiences didn’t just want cheaper tickets; they wanted to understand why the experience mattered before they bought. One 21-year-old participant said, “People want to see how things work. I’d like to get a taste of the behind-the-scenes.” That’s because that’s what they’re used to: seeing a lot of explanation and evidence about how everything is made: from things as mundane as oatmeal to things as complex as glazed pottery.
That’s the performing arts’ proof of concept: showing process raises both emotional and financial value. You have to inspire them to care. The good news is that the way to make them care is to share exactly what you appreciate about the arts: the level of skill and talent it takes, the many tries to get it right, the heartbreak and the humor, the comradery that comes from a collaborative effort.
What Audiences Want Now
The report frames this as part of the “artisan economy,” where Gen Z and Millennials favor experiences that feel crafted, local, and human. They aren’t measuring purchases by cost alone but by emotional return on investment—what the No Guarantees report calls calls ERoI.
In that world, showing how a play is built, how a costume is dyed, or how a dancer trains isn’t oversharing, giving away the mystery, or cheapening the skill of the artist —it’s meeting audiences where their sense of value now lives.
To get there, arts organizations need three things:
- Volume. Visibility requires frequency. If every post has to be perfect, you’ll never post enough to stay in the conversation. You stay in the conversation by giving the social media algorithms a chance to learn what content you’re making resonates with which groups of people.
- Personality. Put a face to the feed. Consider having one or two people that appear regularly (most of your videos) that are a “host” for your content who acts as the audience’s guide—someone who sounds like a person, not a press release. This is what content creators do so well. It comes naturally because they are one person, not an organization, but organizations can
- Curated authenticity. I think there’s a fear at arts organizations that matching the style and tone of other content on social media risks sending a message that their artistic work is low quality. But that doesn’t have to be the outcome at all. Show the high quality output – and ALSO show all the work that it takes to get there. It means sharing thoughtfully, showing real people and real effort in service of real art.
The Long Run of Trust
Amanda Luckie’s forty-minute improvement was worth celebrating because we saw the work behind it. The same is true for the arts. When audiences witness the striving—the rehearsals, experiments, and near-misses—they feel part of something bigger than a single night out.
The arts don’t need to drop their standards. They need to show the miles.
In a digital culture drowning in polish, presence is what builds trust. Audiences don’t just want to buy a ticket; they want to believe in the people making the art.
Let them see the process. Let them meet the personalities.
That’s how you turn curiosity into commitment—and keep your audience cheering for the long run.
* While I don’t doubt the survey results, I would like to see a more rigorous research process on this particular question of impact on willingness to pay – especially when talking about specific prices. My advice to you would NOT be to expect your audience’s willingness to pay increasing nearly 200% once you start to post regularly on Instagram. But I do think you can take the broader point about audiences being willing to pay more for what they come to understand is painstakingly human-made art.
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