Audience Engagement-Careful What You Wish For

One of the biggest topics of discussion these days is about engaging audiences. Often during these discussions, people talk about the way things used to be when audiences weren’t expected to sit passively in a dark theatre with the suggestion that maybe things need to move back in that direction.

I came across a link to a very interesting book on the subject, The Making of American Audiences by Richard Butsch. Last week, someone linked to the chapter on the decline of audience sovereignty (I apologize for not noting who.) What parts are online made for a very interesting read.

I backed up to the earlier chapters about the rowdy working class “b’hoys” who were very engaged, moreso than we might like. They would get up on stage with the actors at times and chase each other around. They would make actors repeat sections of the performance that they liked, often dozens of times, before they allowed the show to continue. If they didn’t like something the actor or manager did, they would call them out on stage for an explanation and apology. Edmund Kean refused to perform in Boston when audiences were small. When he returned four years later, people remembered the slight and audiences in New York rioted both inside and outside the theatre. He was met with the same reception in Boston a month later.

Imagine audiences that were so invested in theatre that people in one city were offended on behalf of another four years later.

The relationship between audience and performers wasn’t always so destructive. Some greenhorns, “green’uns”, believed so strongly in the reality of the performance they might climb on stage and offer money to characters suffering destitution. The b’hoys would attend performances regularly and were knowledgeable about the different works and familiar with the actors of the companies. While they might challenge an actor’s interpretation of Shakespeare when it differed from their own, they would also provide prompting when a line was forgotten out of a desire to see that the show went off well for the newer attendees. There could be a strong sense of ownership and rapport with the actors who appreciated the interactions.

However, in time, the actors became adept at managing the interactions with the audience, taking some of their control away. The b’hoys in turn became so invested in their favorite actors, they began to demand respectful treatment from the audience on their behalf, thereby ceding some of their ability to make demands on the performance.

Despite whatever control the working classes were exerting over their fellows, it was still too vulgar for the wealthier gentry classes. They began to move to theaters frequented by better classes of people and then abandoned theatre entirely in favor of opera. Respectable people did not go to the theatre.

According to Butsch, the focus was about opera as a place where respectable people gathered moving away from attending a performance because of a star. The orthodoxy of class was enforced by the dress code. Working class folks could go to some of the better theatres, but the requirement of kid gloves, good clothes and a clean shave helped to exclude them. “The introduction of reserved seating also made the exclusion of undesirables more manageable.”

Later chapters chart the shift of arts attendance away from being a male pursuit to one associated with the female gender.

It was very interesting to read about how our current attendance environment gradually developed. There was certainly a separation of the wealthy elites and the working class. However, even the working class had its own insider groups who were in the know and enforced certain expectations of behavior and knowledge upon those who were new to their community.

Really, this is a function of human nature and not specific to the arts. Not long ago IT departments were the source of frequent jokes because of their stereotypical disdain for those who hadn’t used computers enough to know how to troubleshoot simple problems. Now that people have more technology experience and there isn’t a need to enter arcane commands at a DOS prompt, that stereotype isn’t as prevalent. I think that is the state people in the arts are aspiring to when they talk about engaging audiences–getting them involved and familiar enough with an arts experience to dispel some of the negative stereotypes.

My “careful what you wish for” title to this entry doesn’t really anticipate a return to those wild and wooly times when performers had to dodge projectiles. It may only just feel like you are inviting that sort of chaos as you approach the process of audience engagement. It may result in the 21st century equivalent of calling the manager or actor on stage to explain themselves. This currently happens with celebrities’ personal lives where they are expected to respond to allegations about what they were doing at certain times and places. It doesn’t happen as much with their professional choices because the general public doesn’t feel empowered enough to be invested in caring.

But what if they were taught that it was an area in which their involvement was valued…

70-10 Split Of Board Learning

I have been on a few board-staff retreats and have always been a little skeptical about whether any significant change will come from them. Admittedly, in some cases some small changes have followed the retreats which grew into larger initiatives. Big changes in governance were a little harder to achieve.

Debra Beck at the Laramie Board Learning Project provides some commentary on board learning that made sense to me. Board Retreats aren’t necessarily bad practice, but rather, as they say, needs to be part of your balanced breakfast erm, approach to board learning.

The faulty assumption is that boards can only learn if (a) they are called together for a formal training event and (b) that experience is led by an all-knowing instructor who will pour all of the “right” answers into their heads. When that is accomplished, poof. Our boards will miraculously get their act together, achieve some governance perfection, and stop holding us back.

It may sound good in theory, but there’s just one problem: not only is it not how most adults actually learn, it’s not even the way they learn best…
[…]

In an earlier “overheard” favorite links post, I referenced the 70:20:10 framework of learning, which draws on research about the role of informal adult learning. In a nutshell, the 70:20:10 model says that:

70 percent of what adults learn comes through experience and real-life situations, e.g., through project-based work, collaborating with others, trying new things, practicing more advanced skills, etc.

20 percent of what we learn comes through others, e.g., mentoring, debriefing, networking, discussion, and team tasks.

10 percent comes from formal learning events, e.g., workshops/training, e-learning, and games-based learning.

It probably won’t be too surprising to learn that Beck says boards only get better at governing when that 70% block is used to practice governance and directly observing the work of the organization.

The 20% learning from others doesn’t really involve consultants at board retreats. Rather, it involves having a mentor on the board or an opportunity to observe and discuss the processes the board uses to make decisions, including questions whether a diversity of viewpoints is represented.

It is the 10% portion that includes learning from expert sources including seminars/webinars, workshops, conferences, and of course, formal training for new board members about their responsibilities.

Debra Beck probably gets the percentages right. The hardest task to accomplish in obtaining a better board is getting all the members to work effectively and be engaged in the business of the organization. People may groan about board retreats, but it can be easier to get a fair number of people to attend than to  commit to implementing changes due to the perception (and hope) that things can be substantially fixed in the course of a few hours time rather than require the investment of many hours over the course of months and years .

Info You Can Use: Standards For Your Website

Apropos to my post yesterday about standards for arts marketing personnel is today’s a review of arts organizations’ online marketing efforts. Drew McManus unveiled his 2011 Orchestra Website reviews today.

Drew has been doing this for a number of years now. Bless him for it because it is a pretty time and labor intensive effort. From the number of social media reactions to the post, it is pretty evident that his efforts are appreciated by a large number of people. Drew will actually be on a panel at the National Arts Marketing Project this weekend called “Your Website Is Ugly.”

So don’t let yourself think that you can’t learn anything from the reviews, the standards he uses are applicable to pretty much anyone who is trying to communicate information and sell tickets using the internet as a medium. Basically everyone then.

The great thing to take away from the report is that you don’t need a big budget to be effective. Two of those who appear the top ten rankings are ensembles with smaller budgets.

Tomorrow (11/9) Drew will take a more detailed look at the scoring for the different organization. If you don’t have time to read the reviews, here are some of the things which kept some sites from getting better scores-

“A lack of direct buy tix links for events featured on the landing page.
-A convoluted donation shopping cart (some systems actually required users to remove ticket purchases before they could add a donation).
-A lack of search features and/or sitemaps.
-No social media share buttons on convert event pages.
-Concert calendars that displayed nothing more than an event’s name (no what/where/when details, no “buy tix” link, etc.).
-Inefficient optimization for tablet platforms.”

Now that I have a person with the time and ability to implement the solutions to some of these problems, I am forwarding Drew’s posts on to her.

Info You Can Use: Arts Marketing Standards

Thanks to Tim Roberts at Arts Research and Ticketing Service Australia who recently linked to UK Arts Marketing Association’s new Arts Marketing Standards. The standards outline what abilities you should have at four different stages of your career:

Level 1 – Assistant – officer
Level 2 – Senior Officer – new manager
Level 3 – Manager
Level 4 – Head of department/director

These standards are rigorous and thorough. Level 1 standards run 130 pages and each subsequent level adds about 20 pages. Actually, since some of the standards don’t apply to Marketing Assistants, there are many pages that just read “It is not anticipated that Marketing Assistants will have responsibility for…” and it isn’t as intimidating as the 130 page count may seem. On the other hand, the head of department/director has 190 pages entirely full of standards they might be expected to meet.

They also have devised some toolkits to help different entities use the standards:

Employer’s Toolkit
Marketer’s Toolkit
Trainer’s Toolkit
Job Description Templates

The employers toolkit suggests the following use for the standards:

“This booklet outlines how the standards might be used by those working as employers of arts marketers within cultural organisations across the UK to:
•Plan the marketing role/s and job descriptions needed in your organisation.
•Carry out a performance review, building understanding of where the current strengths and skills are within your marketing team and gain a clearer insight into skills gaps within the team
•Input into appraisals and planning of staff training and development

There are eight modules that comprise the full standards. I will leave the reader to explore them all. To give a sample of what is contained,  the first module, “Provide marketing intelligence and audience, visitor and participant insight” has 3 subsections the first of which is, “Assess the marketing environment.”

That in turn has three subsections, the first of which is “Map organisations within their current and future marketing environment.”

The standards for that look something like this (click to enlarge):


So the obvious question is, would these sort of standards be helpful for U.S. arts organizations to adopt?

Actually, I don’t think there is any doubt that they would. The true question would be whether they could and would be effectively applied on a large enough scale to bring about meaningful and significant change.  If so, should similar standards be developed for other roles within arts organizations?

These standards in conjunction with the toolkits might be of the most help to some of the smallest arts organizations who might have the least experience with marketing. The toolkits provide grids noting the general expectations for different positions normally found in a marketing department including box office.   It can help them construct expectations that are suitable to the needs and resources possessed by their organization and make more appropriate hiring decisions.  In other words, people may think they need a director of marketing when they need someone to perform the tasks of a manager or senior officer.