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Why You Should Be Expanding Your Audience, By The Numbers

February 10, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience laid out some interesting data about audience sustainability for different types of cultural organizations. (subscription required) They look at negative substitution trends as well as the engagement cycle for different types of cultural entitites.

If you are asking, “Okay, so what is negative substitution,” IMPACTS explains it like this:

Negative substitution is a phenomenon wherein the number of people who profile as active visitors leaving the market (i.e., by way of death, relocation, or migration) outpaces the number of people who profile as active visitors entering the market (i.e., by way of birth, relocation, or immigration). Essentially, people who fit the profile of a cultural visitor are leaving the market faster than cultural entities have been able to replace them by expanding their audiences. The result is a shrinking visitor base.

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Engagement cycle is how the average time between when a person first visits an organization and when they return. For exhibit based organizations, this is an average of 24.7 months. However broken down by different disciplines it varies. For aquariums it is 23.8 months; art museums it is 24.1; Children’s museums it is 29.7 months.

Similarly, for performing arts organizations the engagement cycle is 28.5 months, but for symphonies it is 28.7 months and for theaters it is 25.8 months.

They break down these rates for 11 different organization types in the article. These examples are just a sample.

Negative substitution rates vary for each of the 11 types as well. For aquariums the substitution rate is .991; art museums is .955, children’s museums is .92; symphonies is .907 and theater is .946.

As an example of how these two numbers come together in a relevant way, here is an example using the general exhibit based substitution rate of .982 and engagement cycle of 24.7 months:

An organization welcoming 1,000,000 visitors per year may be engaging their current audiences effectively (via marketing, exhibits, etc.) and yet they could reasonably expect to engage only 982,000 visitors 24.7 months after that, and 964,300 visitors 24.7 months after that. Every visitation cycle leads to progressively fewer visitors, even though our hypothetical organization is doing everything right by their current audiences!

Because this organization is not actively working to expand its audience profile, it is losing attendance over time simply due to shifts in the population.

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They provide a similar breakdown for each of the 11 organizations if you want to see the trends for your particular corner of the cultural landscape. Some of the numbers become a little sobering. For example, an orchestra serving 1 million people in 2025 might expect to be serving 822,600 people at the end of the second cycle in 66.2 months.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Marketing/PR

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Getting People To Reveal The Boxes They Want Checked

February 4, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin recently made a post that set off all sorts of thoughts in my brain.

I was going to say it checked a lot of boxes for me, but that is the title of his post and it felt a little repetitive.

The simplest way forward is to see which boxes your target market has and then check all of them.

Unfortunately #1: The audience doesn’t publish their actual list of boxes, they conceal many of them.

Unfortunately #2: They don’t all have the same boxes.

Unfortunately #3: If it were that straightforward, your competition would have done it all already.

Great work finds emotions, stories and possibility. Great work invents new boxes.

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His first point about audiences not making it easy to learn what boxes they need checked reminded me of an Arts Hacker post I made which mentioned the “5 Whys” technique often required to drill down to discover root causes and motivations. This is because the first answer you often receive often just reflects a surface understanding.

The first why might elicit a response that someone values the symphony for live performance. Asking why live performance is important might get an answer of extraordinary experience. Why does that matter? Makes me a better person. Why is it important to be a better person? Creates a sense of inner harmony.

Freeman says if you only asked Why once or twice, you will end up focused on product features and benefits and not really learn about what people see is a value of the experience to them as a person.

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Godin’s point about everyone not having the same boxes and that great work finds emotions, stories and possibilities dovetails with a lot of what Ruth Hartt espouses for marketing the arts in a way that responds to audience needs. Many of the marketing message examples she uses resonate with a desire to de-stress, have a sense of harmony, spend time with family and friends, and other things people may want out of an experience.

Among the most effective ways to communicate that you offer those sort of benefits is through messaging and images that tell stories and evoke emotions. To some extent using this type of messaging may help audiences create new boxes to check–or rather validate that their root needs from an experience are worth verbalizing more frequently rather than concealing.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Marketing/PR

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Reducing The Crowd Doesn’t Increase Satisfaction By Itself

February 3, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Last week The Guardian had an article about people being so dissatisfied with their attendance experience at The Louvre, they were determined never to visit again.

It isn’t just the crowds, but also poor signage, flow of attendees and long waits despite holding timed admission tickets which upset people.

On Monday, a 74-year-old clinical psychologist from Paris, who said she had been a regular visitor to the Louvre for 40 years, exited the popular temporary exhibition, Figures of the Fool, feeling battered.

“I’m leaving in a state of extreme fatigue and I’ve vowed never to visit again,” she said, declining to give her name. “The noise is so unbearable under the glass pyramid; it’s like a public swimming pool. Even with a timed ticket, there’s an hour to wait outside. I can’t do it anymore. Museums are supposed to be fun, but it’s no fun anymore. There’s no pleasure in coming here anymore.

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A day earlier I had seen a piece on the NBC News site where French President Emmanuel Macron announced a major renovation to the aging museum facility which would include moving the Mona Lisa to a space “accessible independently of the rest of the museum.”

I am not sure if that means it would be permanently located in a separate space or if it is only temporary for the term of the renovation. Given that many people only visit The Louvre with the express intent of viewing the Mona Lisa and leaving, it may be wise to maintain that arrangement.

As I was reading these stories, I recalled that I had written a post about organizations discovering during the pandemic that visitor satisfaction increased when capacity restrictions were in place. I had remembered that Disney had decided to limit park attendance rather than go back to pre-pandemic levels in an attempt to preserve that level of customer satisfaction.

I had forgotten that the article I cited also mentioned the Louvre was scaling back admissions from 45,000/day to 30,000/day for the same reason. I had wondered if they had reverted to admitting larger numbers again, but upon re-reading the NBC News piece, apparently they had maintained the lower capacity numbers.

In 2021, des Cars became the first woman to head the Louvre, a symbol of French culture around the world. Since then, she has introduced several measures to make the museum more accessible, including a cap on visitors in 2023 to reduce overcrowding, extending opening hours, and pushing for the creation of a second main entrance.

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If they are admitting fewer people, have an additional entrance, and longer operating hours, I wonder if the dissatisfaction is more a matter of their timed ticketing being out of synch with the flow of people into and through the museum. Perhaps they aren’t spreading admissions out over a long enough period of time. (They may have extended hours, but people are still buying admission tickets during a super concentrated period of time and later hours are fairly easy to get.) Or perhaps as people say, the signage and directions are so poor, people are taking longer to move through the galleries once they are admitted and things get backed up.

Arts Facilities, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Working In The Arts

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It Takes A Village To Get Everyone To Take Vacation

January 29, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Another interesting research piece that Bill Byrnes included Management and the Arts was related to burn out in non-profit organizations. A brief excerpt recounting the efforts the behavioral design firm ideas42 embarked on in 2018 appeared on Behavioral Scientist website in September 2024.

What the ideas42 team found was that staffs were engaging in a lot of performative work activity. They would address tasks that were easy to tick off lists or engage in work that made them look busy. The result was that by the end of the day, they were just starting to address the big project they were supposed to be working on.

There is probably a lot in the article that reads like an argument for allowing work at home. Among the things that were slowing people down were calls, emails, and people just dropping by to chat. It took workers an average of 23 minutes, 15 seconds to reset and refocus on their work after being interrupted. Another issue was getting called into meeting that weren’t necessary.

Among the factors contributing to performative working was the mistaken impression that co-workers and supervisors were working as much, if not more, than themselves and they needed to keep up. In fact, others may have been taking lengthy breaks from work and were checking in hours later.

At work, all people see are others working. When they see late-night emails or texts, they often assume that their coworker or boss has been working all day and night without interruption, when in fact they might have been walking the dog or having dinner with their families. That life outside work doesn’t register because they don’t see it. (Often people don’t want to share their lives outside work with coworkers and bosses to preserve the busyness myth that they’re always working.)

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The folks from ideas42 worked up a number of initiatives to shift the work culture of the organization. One of the things they found was that the interventions that worked least were focused on solving work-life balance issues for an individual whereas the ones that worked best were focused on solving the issues for the whole organization. Essentially, the work-life balance doesn’t get better for the individual if they perceive they are out of synch with the overall behavior of the whole.

Among the things they implemented were having supervisors model they behavior they wanted for the whole organization: visibly going to lunch, taking vacation time, talking about the time they are spending with family and friends. Eliminate the late night emails and texts. Similarly, the number of meetings and those needed to attend the meetings should be reduced.

People should be encouraged to schedule more slack time in their weeks to allow for the fact that tasks will take longer than expected. That way you don’t feel like you are behind because there is unscheduled time in which to make progress. Along the same lines, people were encouraged to schedule vacation months in advance when the future calendar is not cluttered with projects and meetings. Those scheduling time off a couple weeks in advance often try to do so around things already populating their calendars and will either take less time off or feel anxious about doing so and work from their vacation.

Along those lines one of the most interesting intervention ideas mentioned in the article was “vacation roulette.” Everyone that hadn’t taken vacation in a 90 day period would get a note copied to their supervisor listing their vacation balance and encouraging them to take time off.

They then sent them an invitation to take a random Monday or Friday off and signed the note, “From your vacation fairy godmother.” Often, the managers would encourage workers to take a break.

[…]

….during the “vacation roulette” intervention—where managers were copied on an email encouraging employees with high vacation balances to take a day off—participating organizations saw a boost in days off for over 20 employees, and the highest rate of vacation taking for India-based employees in 5 years.

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Art(ist) Education, Business Models, Leadership, New Initiatives, Working In The Arts

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