I woke up this morning with a thought about audience development.  This is not uncommon, but today’s thought is shareable.

Why do we keep insisting that the audiences come to us?  And, because of this mentality, many of us are in artscentric circles with no real communication and relationships with people outside of the arts world.

It is getting better.  There are more community arts events.  I am seeing more outreach. We have more interesting venue choices.   There has been more effort working with the business sector.  We are doing more collectively.

However, are we ourselves as individuals making the effort to expand our worlds beyond the arts circles?  Let me give you a few examples.

We had a couple of conferences happen over the weekend.  Conference season is among us.  When it comes to arts advocacy, I feel that we keep talking amongst ourselves. We get inspired at these conferences, and then a little bit of momentum happens.  What might be better is if we as individuals would have more conversations with people outside of our arts circles and really fill in the gaps that we are missing by listening to others.

Another example, my region had an arts week.  For our first year, it had its share of successes.  The big downfall was when I asked people outside of the arts circles if they have heard about arts week, and they all said no.  This means that despite mass marketing efforts, people that would enjoy the arts, but do not look for the arts, were not in the know and not in attendance.

I’m wondering how many of us have non-arts friends.  Are we as individuals meeting people outside of our own arts world and building relationships with these supposed non-arts folks?

I find that going to Meetup groups with non-arts related topics (although most do relate back to the arts ;O) ) is a great way to meet people in your community and spread your circle beyond the arts world.

We can as individuals look for opportunities, via our other interests, to form relationships with people that are not already in our arts world.  This shift can make a huge difference.  Not only may we be able to find and build relationships with people who like the arts, yet do not find the arts, and we can then help them to connect with the arts, but we can also have the conversations about the arts that we keep only having with ourselves.

Getting other viewpoints is crucial right now, and in order to do so, we have to go to them.

Cheers to happy and loyal audiences,
Shoshana

Shoshana Fanizza
Chief Audience Builder

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