ARTSblog

There’s a story of a farmer who wants to teach his horse to give up eating.  “Think of the money I’ll save,” he boasts to his neighbor.  And every day, the farmer teaches his horse a little more, by withholding a little more food.   A couple of weeks later, his neighbor sees the farmer walking to town.  “Where’s your horse?” he asks.  “Bad luck,” replies the farmer, “Just as soon as I taught that horse to eat nothing at all – he died!”

This isn’t a parable about your marketing budget.  Of course it’s been cut.  It SHOULD be cut.  I don’t know an arts organization that doesn’t need to exercise extreme budgetary prudence.

This is a question about your audience.  How well are you feeding your organization the new audiences it needs to survive?

The essential purpose of every arts and cultural organization is to create a place for the intersection of art and audience.  As a sector, we do not – we can not – exist without a commitment to both.

Today, there’s reason for worry.  The mission of “audience development” has been a perennial challenge for arts and cultural organizations.  It’s a big, noble and important mission which encompasses such long term ambitions as increasing the number of people in a community who participate, diversifying audiences by income, ethnicity, age or other factors and engaging young people so as to cultivate audiences for the future.

Let me say this bluntly:  We can’t afford a perennial challenge right now.

As the sour economy has dampened audience attendance – and with possibility that this may last for years - a new imperative has emerged:  To sustain, engage and attract audiences, we must immediately pursue new audience-raising strategies that are: dramatic, cost-effective, results-producing and collaborative.

I don’t have all the answers.  But I do have lots of questions and an organization that serves as a “laboratory” for this work.  I very much look forward to using this blog to share insights and experiences and prompt further discussion.  My name is Matt Lehrman and I’m the founder and Executive Director of Alliance for Audience & ShowUp.com - an audience development-focused service organization serving a membership of more than 160 arts and cultural organizations throughout the Greater Phoenix region (where, by the way, the sun is shining and the temperature today is a delightful 73 degrees!)

Together, let’s find some new & creative ways to feed the horse.   It’s very hungry.

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