ArtsMarketing.org

We got started with two rules for building your research plan earlier this month. Click here for a refresher on beginning to think strategically and holistically about research. So you've figured out whet you want to do with your research, and thought about creating a culture of evaluation in your organization. What next?

3. Consider all your audiences, current and potential.

Your first instinct may be to research the people who are already coming through your doors (ticket buyers, visitors) and especially those who already have a committed relationship with your organization (subscribers, members). But as you develop your research plan, give some thought to those who aren’t yet attending (potential customers), as well as those who are important whether or not they themselves attend (donors, influencers, community leaders, and so on). Ask yourself whether the actions you want to take require a better understanding of those audiences, and what you might be able to learn from each of them.

It’s sometimes helpful to picture your full potential audience as a set of concentric circles (see diagram). The outer circle is the population of the region or community you serve. Some proportion of that population are cultural consumers. Some of those cultural consumers attend your offerings at least occasionally. Some of those attend regularly enough to be subscribers or members. And some proportion of those affiliated audiences are donors or other kinds of supporters.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. You’ll also want to think about a variety of audiences whose definitions that cut across these concentric groups, such as underrepresented ethnic communities, young audiences, tourists to your area, and so on.

The point is that any audience that is on your mind when you’re making marketing or programming decisions should also be on your mind when you’re setting research priorities.

4. Use a mix of research methods for a comprehensive picture.

When most people think of market research, they picture a survey of some kind, whether it’s a paper questionnaire inserted into a theater or dance program or a web survey hosted on a site like Survey Monkey. Those are important tools, but here too it pays to consider your full range of options. Sometimes the insights you’re looking for are best obtained through qualitative research, such as focus groups.

To put a complex issue in a nutshell, surveys and other forms of quantitative research (so-called because the results are analyzed statistically) are good for times when you want to compare different segments of your audience, measure the prevalence of certain issues or outcomes that you’ve already identified, rank or rate various possibilities (again, that you’ve already defined), or track changes over time.

Focus groups, in-depth interviews, and other forms of qualitative research (based on conversation and analyzed thematically) are good at identifying those issues in the first place, exploring subjective perceptions and emotional factors, understanding processes or responses, and generating ideas.

As this diagram suggests, one big difference is that quantitative research is largely “closed-ended,” meaning the audience can only answer the questions you’ve asked, and their responses are limited to the choices or scales you’ve specified. So you need to be sure that the questions are relevant to the ways they think, not just to how you and your colleagues think. Qualitative research, by contrast, is open-ended, meaning that the audience can bring up issues you didn’t think to ask about, and you (or your research partners) can probe with follow-up questions to get the full story.

There’s also a third category that’s becoming increasingly common in the arts and has long been part of the corporate world’s research and evaluation repertoire: ethnography. This fancy term from the social sciences refers to observational research, where instead of asking questions and listening to the ways people think, you’re watching what they actually do. The idea is to bypass the rational, consciously-processed interpretations people make about their own decisions and get straight to what we’re all really interested in understanding and influencing: how they experience your arts organization, from the ticketing process to the post-show discussion.

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With those four rules in mind, you’ll be able to take a fresh, strategic look at what you need to know from your audiences and how to go about asking them. There will still be many decisions to make and new skills to learn. But you’ll be starting down the research road in the right direction, and the insights you uncover will have a lasting impact on your organization.