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Registration Type | Member Price |
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Early Bird Registration (Sept. 11-Oct.3) | $750 |
General Registration (Oct. 4-Oct.17) | $850 |
Registration Type | Member Price |
---|---|
Early Bird Registration (Sept. 11-Oct.3) | $750 |
General Registration (Oct. 4-Oct.17) | $850 |
Registration Type | Member Price | Non-Member Price |
---|---|---|
Early Bird Registration (Sept. 11-Oct. 3) | $750 | $850 |
General Registration (Oct. 4-Oct.17) | $850 | $950 |
Not a member? We'd love to have you join us for this event and become part of the Chorus America community! Visit our membership page to learn more, and feel free to contact us with any questions at [email protected].
Registration Type | Non-Member Price |
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Early Bird Registration (Sept. 11-Oct. 3) | $850 |
General Registration (Oct. 4-Oct.17) | $950 |
Think you should be logged in to a member account? Make sure the email address you used to login is the same as what appears on your membership information. Have questions? Email us at [email protected].
Registration Type | Price |
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Individual Session | $30 each |
All Four (4) Sessions | $110 |
*Replays with captioning will remain available for registrants to watch until November 1, 11:59pm EDT.
Member Professional Development Days are specially designed for Chorus America members. If you're not currently a member, we'd love to welcome you to this event, and into the Chorus America community! Visit our membership page to learn more about becoming a member of Chorus America, and please don't hesitate to reach out to us with any questions at [email protected].
Registration Type | Price |
---|---|
Individual Session | $30 each |
All Four (4) Sessions | $110 |
*Replays with captioning will remain available for registrants to watch until November 1, 11:59pm EDT.
Registration Type | Price |
---|---|
Individual Session | $30 each |
All Four (4) Sessions | $110 |
*Replays with captioning will remain available for registrants to watch until November 1, 11:59pm EDT.
Member Professional Development Days are specially designed for Chorus America members. If you're not currently a member, we'd love to welcome you to this event, and into the Chorus America community! Visit our membership page to learn more about becoming a member of Chorus America, and please don't hesitate to reach out to us with any questions at [email protected].
To better understand how to engage new audiences and deepen relationships with current patrons, consider wiping the slate clean and taking a fresh approach. Reexamine old assumptions. Redefine terms. Reacquaint yourself with your audience. Allow yourself to dream.
When performing arts people bring up the subject of audience development, I’m usually reminded of Mark Twain’s famous comment about the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.
We frequently discuss the needs to “sell more tickets” and “grow audiences,” and recognize their fiscal imperative. But other than devote more of your already scarce resources to advertising, what else is your organization actually capable of doing?
Or to look at your situation from another perspective: How does your organization conduct its audience development efforts differently from its practices, say, five years ago? (I bet that not much has changed. Am I right?)
Don’t be discouraged! Whatever may have been attempted previously, there should be no doubt that your insights, creativity, and determination are precisely what your organization needs to advance its responsibility for audience development. Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them,” and that means your fresh approach has the potential to make a world of difference.
To help, let’s break your challenge down into actionable pieces:
The words “audience development” often speak to a variety of intentions. So, every time the subject is raised in your organization, it’s wise to confirm which aspect you’re specifically discussing:
The Five Facets of Audience Development
The clarity you’re seeking is more than just a choice of words. It’s about setting a cohesive priority of expectations, which means doing the hard work of deciding what efforts will yield measurable results toward what important purposes, and in what period of time. No single facet is your cure-all. Your audience development challenge deserves to be addressed, in full, over time.
Here are three phrases that deserve to be eliminated from audience development discussions:
And here are three phrases that deserve to be added to your audience development discussions:
Before you can understand how to attract new audiences, it’s essential that you learn what your recent audiences know and say about you. If you’re willing to approach this exercise with pure intentions (that means, you promise to attach no sales pitch to this and also that you promise to listen without getting defensive when you hear something with which you disagree), then there’s great insight to be gleaned from calling up a dozen (or more) real-live audience members and asking:
What is one piece of advice you’d offer about how about how we might increase the size of our audiences?
Before you can understand how to attract new audiences, it’s essential that you learn what your recent audiences know and say about you. If you’re willing to approach this exercise with pure intentions (that means, you promise to attach no sales pitch to this and also that you promise to listen without getting defensive when you hear something with which you disagree), then there’s great insight to be gleaned from calling up a dozen (or more) real-live audience members and asking:
It is always a mistake to think of an audience as a single entity. True, they have an experience with your organization in common, but that doesn’t mean the people in your venue—or on your mailing list—share the same motivations, preferences, or priorities.
Try this framework of four audience types on a grid where vertical represents the CAPACITY to participate (i.e., time, money, physical ability, and opportunity) and horizontal represents their level of INTEREST:
This audience development framework is grounded in the belief that arts organizations are equally responsible for advancing their art and for engaging their audience. Steve Jobs’ assertion that “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” is a poor (but oft-used) rationalization by artistic leaders who prefer to focus solely on the art itself. Though a visionary, Steve Jobs didn’t innovate in a vacuum. His quote would be more accurate if he had said, “People don’t know what they want until you understand them so incredibly well that you can show it to them.” Arts organization leaders would be well served by this lesson: It compromises neither artistic mission nor commitment to technical excellence to assert that your organization should be intentional about the journey you are offering to your audience and your community, over time. Use this framework to guide you in four practical directions.
Hunkering down may at times be an essential skill for those who run nonprofit arts and cultural organizations. With good reason, we strive to avoid risk, preserve precious resources, and calm the provoked. Those almost instinctive reactions, however, pose a grave danger to our organizations’ viability amidst the profound demographic shifts, seismic political stresses, and dramatic technology advancements taking place all around us.
Without adjustment, do you really expect that your organization can sustain its artistic relevance, financial viability, or audience loyalty in the face of so much other change?
I say this without cynicism: The nonprofit arts and cultural sector cannot survive if positioned merely as the beneficiary of a community’s generosity. Today’s imperative is for arts and cultural organizations of every size and genre to assert themselves as meaningful drivers of the economy, education, and inclusive spirit of their communities.
Audience development is not a marketing challenge. It’s a relevance challenge.
This is the fork in the road: One path is straight and steady. The other is filled with gut-wrenching twists and turns and the possibility of countless dead ends and frustrations. The former is a slow march to oblivion. The latter is the path of innovation, vitality, and relevance.
The road you choose decides your path to audience development.
© Audience Avenue LLC, Used by Permission
The principal of Audience Avenue LLC, Matt Lehrman helps arts and cultural organizations energize their pursuit of artistic mission, financial viability, and audience engagement. [email protected]