The answer: No and Yes.

The answer is no because audience development is mainly about building relationships and using the 4 C’s: Connections, Collaborations, Community and Caring. The purpose of audience development is to get more people involved and engaged so they become more happy and loyal audience members, which will ultimately increase your support.

I think I already addressed whether or not audience development is marketing in disguise. However, can you turn a marketing program into an audience development program? Absolutely! I will talk more about this next week.

With using audience relations programs, the purpose is to build relationships to a level that a community is formed surrounding your art form and organization, and so you become part of your overall community as well. This will naturally have you looking at numbers to see how you are growing…

The answer is yes because one of the goals of audience development is to build more support for your organization to continue to carry out your mission, meaning, you are looking to increase audiences, subscribers, donors, sponsors, volunteers, etc.

The numbers will naturally increase with the use of audience development, and they serve as a guide that you are indeed building relationships and community through your well implemented audience development plans.

These numbers are also used to obtain grants. A show of strength for using the 4 C’s, and an increase in audiences and donors (members, subscribers, etc.), will help you win more grants and other financial support opportunities.

Let’s face it! If you don’t build audiences into happy and loyal supporters, your organization could end up standing still, or worse yet, bankrupt or out of business completely. We are still arts businesses, and we need to be healthy to carry out our missions.

In conclusion, the answer is No and Yes! The numbers are part of the goal of creating healthy arts organizations, but the main purpose of audience development is always about the relationships. Keep engaging!

Cheers to happy and loyal audiences,
Shoshana

Shoshana Fanizza
Chief Audience Builder, Audience Development Specialists

Coming Soon:
We need more…
Turning marketing into audience development
2017.2018 Case Studies

Work with me! Summer is Evaluation time!