A key component of The Essential Journey of Audience Building has been capturing and utilizing data to make informed organizational decisions. The ABR has created a resource library — a knowledgebase — that contains the learning gleaned from experts in a variety of fields and from the very important peer interaction that has been the cornerstone of the ABR.
In the age of COVID, The Essential Journey of Audience Building continues to be a practical journey focused on the eyes-wide-open, adaptable, data-driven leadership that guides organizations – and people – through extraordinary times.
WABE's City Lights featured the Audience Outlook Monitor Study on September 18. Lois Reitzes interviewed Alan Brown of WolfBrown (who leads the study,) about the results. The Blank Foundation sponsored the study in Atlanta. Twenty-one Audience Building Roundtable organizations are participating. The study examines audiences’ comfort levels about returning to theaters and other cultural venues and has been going on since May 2020 around the world.
To listen to the interview and for more information about the study:
https://www.wabe.org/blank-foundation-survey-looks-at-audiences-comfort-levels-returning-to-theaters-cultural-venues/
The National Endowment for the Arts is offering the following guidance, based on a review and compilation of promising measures that arts organizations are taking to address COVID-19 to date. The list is not prescriptive or comprehensive. It does not supersede guidance from local, state, and national public health authorities.
This report is the fifth in the Kelton COVID-19 Consumer Pulse series, featuring data from the fifth and sixth waves of the ongoing study.
From Creative Mornings, April 14, 2019
By Elizabeth Labbe-Webb, Executive Director
Core Dance is celebrating our 40th anniversary. It’s quite an accomplishment. We’ve been a fixture on the Decatur Square for more than 35 of those years. We’ve seen Decatur change and grow to be one of the most vibrant parts of the Greater Atlanta area and we’ve managed to make ourselves an undeniable part of that vibrancy. Our studio space on the square is our home, our creative center, and it’s a resource for our community because we make it available for rent to other artists and nonprofits at very, very affordable prices.
By Stephen Brown, President, Cookerly PR
As The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation reconvened its Audience Building Roundtable for a “COVID-19 Pivot,” I had the opportunity to talk with more than 50 arts and culture organizations in the Roundtable about ways they can stay top of mind with their audiences during a 2020 which has thrown curveballs to nearly every American institution.
The week ending June 12, 2020, the twelfth week of national arts and culture data expert Colleen Dilenschneider’s research about “intent to visit” has now intersected with societal unrest in the wake of tragedies and protests related to systemic racial injustices, capturing the attention of Americans and the world at large, with people indicating that they intend to return to their usual attendance behaviors within about three months, but with some redistribution of demand.
By Ariel Fristoe, Artistic Director, Out of Hand Theater
I want to share something extraordinary and unexpected that came out of Out of Hand Theater’s audience building journey. Out of Hand works at the intersection of art, social justice, and civic engagement. We spark conversations to build a better world by using the tools of theater to support and enhance the work of community partners. Through the generosity of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, we have taken several steps on our audience building journey, starting with our neighborhood, Old Fourth Ward.
Following a $32-million renovation, the Alliance Theatre opened the Coca-Cola Stage this past January. Even as construction was being completed during the 2017–2018 season, the show had to go on, and leadership at the Alliance made the untested (and rather bold) move to produce 12 shows in different locations around Atlanta, selecting venues that complemented themes of the work being produced. The hope was that they could meet Atlantans where they lived and bring them back to the newly renovated stage once it opened.
By Adam Fristoe, Out of Hand Theater
Thanks to a scholarship provided by the Arthur Blank Family Foundation’s Audience Building Roundtable, Out of Hand Theater’s Co-Artistic and Marketing Director Adam Fristoe was able to attend the 2018 National Arts Marketing Conference in Seattle, Washington.
Over the past five years, Out of Hand has focused our work toward social justice, civic engagement and community building in Metro Atlanta. In Seattle, Washington, both the city and King County have policies in place that make a commitment to equity, in particular to racial equity, including taking into account historical inequities. In Seattle, I was specifically looking for guidance and best practices in implementing such a commitment at Out of Hand, as well as for strategies to advance advocacy for these policies in Atlanta.
With very special thanks to Veronica and our friends at the Atlanta Contemporary, it is a great honor to accept the Nexus Award on behalf of my colleagues at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, plus our champions for the arts at the Blank Foundation, and everyone here, who works for—or supports—an arts organization in our community.
The word “nexus” in this context has particular meaning for me, because in my experience, success has come from positioning myself at the intersection, or nexus, of many extraordinary individuals who, if I’m lucky, share some of their talent and wisdom with me. A large part of leadership derives from following others we look up to…
By Joy Johnson, The Georgia Ballet
Are you responsible for the financial health of your organization?
Have you been through some hard financial years in your organization? Well, I certainly have.
When I arrived at The Georgia Ballet (GAB) in early 2013, the organization had been through an entire management change with most of the staff leaving. Why this happened is a story for another day. Suffice to say that there were many past due invoices and no documentation. At that point, money was everything — we were just trying to keep the doors open.
By Darlene Hamilton, Assistant Director, Marketing & Communications
Rialto Center for the Arts at Georgia State University
The Rialto Center for the Arts at Georgia State University was among five arts organizations chosen to participate in the second cohort of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s Audience Building Roundtable Patron Analysis: Putting Data into Action. We were thrilled to participate in the study. Each organization provided three years of data on Single Ticket Buyers (STBs), Subscribers, Members and Donors.
By Laura Flusche, PhD, Executive Director, Museum of Design Atlanta
In 2017, when the Audience Building Roundtable of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation offered member organizations an opportunity to be part of a second cohort working with TRG Arts to analyze patron data, MODA jumped at the chance. We have an expansive database — we use Blackbaud’s ALTRU — but didn’t feel that we’d developed enough effective methods for analyzing that data and using it to build audience.
By Lara Smith, Managing Director, Dad’s Garage
Our “Social Spaces” project addressed one of the primary reasons people don’t attend arts and cultural events: They don’t have someone to go with! We want our theatre to serve as a community gathering space, and we currently host birthday parties, game nights, volunteer appreciation events, fundraisers for other organizations, neighborhood meetings, and many other events. “Social Spaces” took this one step further and identified groups we could engage with our unique brand of arts programming, with fun events before and after our shows.
By Gevin Reynolds, Fellow, The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation
At the Audience Building Roundtable workshop on July 27, 2018, the Alliance Theatre presented the results of their Audience Building Innovation Grant, awarded by the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to fund innovative audience building initiatives in their 48th, 49th, and 50thseasons. Below is a summary of their presentation.
By Gevin Reynolds, Fellow, The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation
At the Audience Building Roundtable workshop on June 22, 2018, Theatrical Outfit presented the results of a study that they completed thanks to a grant from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. The study was a partnership between Theatrical Outfit, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), the J. Walter Thompson agency, and six other arts organizations along the MARTA rail line.
By Gevin Reynolds, Fellow, The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation
The Audience Building Roundtable (ABR) workshop on May 17, 2018 was “A Refresher on Audience Building Practices that Work” presented by TRG Arts, a national arts and culture consulting firm that has been presenting workshops to the ABR since the inaugural summit in November 2015. At the close of the workshop, 76 of the 103 attendees from ABR member organizations completed a survey with the following prompt: The workshop by TRG Arts provided me with at least one audience building idea that I can adapt for use in my organization.
By Rhonda Davis, Board Member, Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance (SEFAA)
The Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance (SEFAA) received a scholarship grant from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s Audience Building Roundtable to attend the National Arts Marketing Project Conference on November 11-13, 2017.
The opening keynote was “You, Your World, Your Future.” The speakers spoke about diverse cultures and how organizations need to gain understanding of different cultures in order to effectively market to diverse audiences. The main theme—in the keynote and throughout the remainder of this conference—was diversity and inclusion.
My first session was “A/B Testing Your Way to Success.”