Reaching The Unknown Non-Participant

I almost threw money away, literally.

I received piece a mail last week bearing the logo of a state university indicating a survey was enclosed. I was just about to throw it away when I became curious to see if they were doing a market survey to gauge the educational needs of the community.

When I opened it, I saw it was a public health survey. Just as I was about to throw that away, a $2 bill fluttered out on to my coffee table. I understand why they may have chosen to include the money as an inducement to complete the survey, but I wonder how much money has literally been thrown away in unopened envelopes around the state this week.

I feel some empathy for those administering the survey because this illustrates the effort and expense you have to go in order to reach people with whom you don’t have a relationship.

One of the challenges the arts have is to have a conversation with those who aren’t participating in order to learn why they aren’t. There will always be people who will never participate in an activity, regardless of what you do, but there are many who will be willing but do not participate for various reasons.

These reasons might be lack awareness; currently lacking the time due to child rearing obligations which will abate in a few years; perceive they lack the time, knowledge, etc, for whom opportunities exist and can be communicated or created.

Reaching these unknown people to survey them or even communicate with them is even more difficult now than a decade or so ago. So many people lack landlines that there is no destination for even an annoying robocall to reach.

Thanks to the option to receive financial statements, bills and other communications online, it is much easier to identify the few pieces of postal mail that is relevant to you without even opening them. (Those emails about winning $5 million in the Irish-Nigerian lottery that was liberated after a palace coup dispossessed the prince of an oil rich nation still almost fool me.)

As we can see, even trying to bribe people to participate is fraught with its own challenges.

My feeling is that an effective campaign to reach the unreached is going to require much more personal interactions either with organizations reaching out to individuals in an involved, relationship building effort or calling upon people with whom they already have a relationship to reach out to people and encourage them to at least respond to a request for information.

Certainly, technology can facilitate this by allowing people to spread the word quickly over social media. A degree of trust in all involved parties needs to be there. I am thinking, in part, about the post I made last week about a greater lack of willingness to trade privacy for benefits than we have been lead to believe.

It would be great if someone could figure out how to create survey that engaged as many people as asking about what color lightsaber you would wield while yielding, effective, meaningful, actionable results. (Which of Yo Yo Ma’s cellos are you?)

Until then, it may take a lot of asking.

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

CONNECT WITH JOE


1 thought on “Reaching The Unknown Non-Participant”

  1. I answer a lot of surveys, because I’m the sort of person who likes making his opinion known.
    There are many surveys, however, that I don’t finish filling out.

    The ones that stop me soonest are the ones that ask “have you stopped beating your wife” questions—questions that can’t be answered without accepting the dubious assumptions of the questioner. This includes almost all politically sponsored surveys.

    Another set of surveys that stop me are forced-answer surveys. Surveys that ask me to express a preference between two things I don’t care about, or that ask me an overly personal question, result in my refusal to answer a question. If the survey won’t accept a blank answer, that results in my leaving the survey.

    A lot of the survey software out there is shit, and a lot of surveys people are putting on the software are really badly written. So I end up starting a lot more surveys than I finish. I’ve no idea whether the half-completed electronic surveys are included in the results or discarded, but the half-completed paper ones end up in the recycling.

    Reply

Leave a Comment