Asking the right questions and listening to what your audiences are saying can help arts organizations better understand their customers, challenge assumptions, solve problems, and uncover new opportunities for growth. Here are three approaches that have worked for me.
Arts organizations spend an enormous amount of time trying to understand their audiences. We analyze ticket sales, track email engagement, monitor social media, examine website traffic, and debate why certain programs sell out while others struggle. We have plenty of data telling us what audiences are doing.
But when was the last time you actually asked them what they think? Or why do they behave a certain way?
Sometimes, the simplest way to understand your audiences is to ask them. What do they love about your organization? What would they like to see more (or less) of? What's keeping them from attending more frequently? And what could you be doing better?
I'm certainly not suggesting that you send a survey every time someone opens an email. Nobody wants to feel like they're in a perpetual focus group. But creating opportunities for meaningful audience feedback should be part of every arts organization's marketing and audience development strategy.
And it doesn't necessarily require a big budget. Depending on what you're trying to learn, you might need nothing more than a five-question survey. Or you might discover that it's time to invest in a comprehensive audience study.
Here are three approaches, ranging from quick and inexpensive to more ambitious, and when to use each.
1. Post-show surveys: Keep it short and useful
Post-show surveys are one of the easiest ways to gather regular feedback from your audiences. They're inexpensive, relatively simple to administer, and can provide valuable insights into both the artistic experience and the customer journey.
The trick is keeping them short. Really short.
Aim for no more than five questions, ideally multiple-choice or rating-scale questions that take less than two minutes to complete. You can always include an optional open-ended question at the end for anyone who has something specific to share.
What should you ask? That depends on what you're trying to learn, but consider questions that address the overall experience:
How would you rate your experience?
How satisfied were you with the performance or exhibition?
How would you rate your experience purchasing tickets, visiting the venue, or interacting with staff?
How likely are you to attend another performance or recommend the organization to a friend?
What could we do to improve your experience? (Optional, open-ended.)
You might also include a couple of optional demographic questions, such as age range or ZIP code, particularly if your CRM doesn't already capture this information. Just be mindful of how much you're asking people to share.
A few additional considerations: Send the survey shortly after the experience, while it's still fresh. Avoid asking questions you already have answers to in your database. And don't try to learn everything about your audience in a single survey.
Most importantly, make sure someone is actually reviewing the responses and creating some kind of chart or dashboard that can be easily reviewed. Collecting feedback that nobody looks at is a waste of everyone's time.
Over time, even a handful of consistent questions can help you identify patterns. Are satisfaction levels declining? Are first-time attendees having a different experience from repeat visitors? Are certain aspects of your customer service generating recurring complaints?
And remember that survey respondents are self-selecting. Their answers are useful signals, but they don't necessarily represent your entire audience.
2. Targeted polls: Stop guessing and start asking
We've all been in those meetings.
Attendance is down. Registrations are declining. A particular program isn't performing as expected. Everyone around the table has a theory about why.
Maybe it's the pricing. Maybe it's the programming. Maybe people's habits have changed. Maybe the neighborhood is changing. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde.
Before spending weeks debating the possible explanations, why not ask the people whose behavior you're trying to understand? Targeted surveys and polls are particularly useful when you're trying to solve a specific problem or considering a change that will directly affect your audiences.
At Mark Morris Dance Group, for example, we had started seeing declining registrations in certain children's and teens' dance classes. Internally, we discussed several possible explanations, including changing neighborhood demographics and shifts in families' habits following the pandemic.
All reasonable hypotheses. But they were still hypotheses.
So we surveyed our families, including both current participants and families who had recently stopped enrolling their children. This last group was particularly important. Your existing customers can tell you why they stay, but former customers can often tell you why people leave.
The feedback helped us understand that our class offerings and dance styles needed to evolve to reflect changing demand. By adjusting the mix of classes and making some changes to the faculty pool, we were able to respond to families' preferences and help bring some of the registrations back up.
The changes didn't require us to reinvent the organization or abandon its artistic mission. They simply helped us adapt our offerings to better serve our community.
And that's an important distinction.
I'm not suggesting that arts organizations should let audiences dictate their artistic programming. Your mission and artistic vision are what make your organization distinctive in the first place. But there's often considerable room to adapt how you deliver that mission, what complementary programs you offer, and how you make those programs accessible.
The same approach can be applied to all sorts of questions. Are your performance times convenient? Would audiences be interested in a new membership model? Is your ticket-buying experience unnecessarily complicated? Are there barriers preventing people from attending more frequently?
A targeted survey can help answer these questions before you commit significant resources to a solution.
Be thoughtful about whom you ask. If you're trying to understand why people stopped attending, surveying only your most loyal subscribers won't get you very far. And be careful not to frame questions in ways that confirm what you've already decided.
The goal is to challenge your assumptions, not validate them.
3. Comprehensive audience studies: Time to look at the bigger picture
Sometimes, a five-question survey simply isn't enough.
If your organization hasn't taken a serious look at its audiences in the past decade, particularly since the pandemic, it may be time for a comprehensive audience study.
This is especially relevant for organizations experiencing declining attendance, aging audiences, difficulty attracting first-time visitors, or challenges reaching communities beyond their established audience base.
An audience study goes considerably further than asking existing patrons whether they enjoyed their last performance. It examines who your audiences are, how they behave, what motivates them, what prevents them from engaging more deeply, and, crucially, who your potential audiences might be.
Depending on your organization's needs, a comprehensive study can explore several areas.
Audience demographics, psychographics, and behaviors. Beyond age, income, and geography, what interests, values, motivations, and habits characterize your audiences? How do they discover cultural experiences? What influences their decisions to attend?
Market potential and opportunities for growth. How many potential audience members exist in your market? Which communities are you currently reaching, and which are underrepresented? Where are the greatest opportunities to expand your reach?
Audience segmentation and personas. Can you identify distinct audience groups based on their behaviors, motivations, interests, and likelihood to engage? How might these insights inform more targeted marketing and communications?
Strategies for attracting new audiences. What would encourage younger audiences or people from communities you're not currently reaching to engage with your organization? What barriers might be preventing them from doing so?
Audience lifecycle and customer journey mapping. What does the journey from initial awareness to first attendance, repeat engagement, membership, or donation look like? Where are you losing people along the way?
A sustainable framework for ongoing audience insights. How can you continue learning from your audiences after the study is complete, rather than repeating the exercise every ten years?
A comprehensive study should also look beyond your existing database. If your goal is audience growth, you need to understand the people who aren't currently engaging with you, not just those who already know and love your organization.
This is where professional market research expertise becomes particularly valuable.
Unlike a simple post-show survey, a large-scale audience study requires careful research design, appropriate sampling, sophisticated analysis, and often the ability to recruit respondents outside your existing audience base.
For that reason, I'd generally recommend working with an experienced independent researcher or market research firm.
An external partner can also bring objectivity to the process. Organizations tend to have deeply held beliefs about their audiences, and it's useful to have someone who isn't invested in those assumptions examining the evidence.
The research is only half the job
Here's something that often gets overlooked: An audience study is only as valuable as your ability to act on its findings.
You can commission a beautifully designed research report, complete with audience personas, sophisticated segmentation models, and dozens of strategic recommendations. But if those insights never make their way into your marketing strategy, CRM, programming discussions, and day-to-day decision-making, you've essentially purchased a very expensive PDF.
Before commissioning a study, think carefully about implementation.
Who's going to translate the research into actionable marketing strategies? Can your CRM accommodate the new segmentation? Do you have the data, technology, and staff capacity to identify and communicate with the audience groups you've uncovered? How will you measure whether your new approach is working?
At Jazz at Lincoln Center, we undertook a large-scale audience research initiative that combined audience surveys, discussion panels, and other research methods to develop a deeper understanding of existing and potential audiences.
An important part of that process was thinking about how the findings could inform our marketing strategy and ultimately become actionable through our audience database and marketing tools.
That's the critical connection: moving from understanding your audiences to actually changing how you engage with them.
If your organization doesn't have the internal technical expertise to translate research findings into CRM segmentation and marketing workflows, consider including that capability in your project budget. Ideally, your research and implementation partners should work together from the beginning.
And don't underestimate the organizational implications. Audience insights shouldn't live exclusively within the marketing department. They can inform decisions across programming, education, development, visitor services, and organizational leadership.
The most valuable research is research that changes how an organization operates.
Closing the loop: Show your audiences you're listening
Regardless of whether you're conducting a quick poll or a major research initiative, there's one final step that organizations often overlook: closing the feedback loop.
When people take the time to tell you what they think, let them know you've listened.
That doesn't mean implementing every suggestion. Sometimes the feedback will be contradictory, impractical, or inconsistent with your mission. But when audience feedback leads to a meaningful change, communicate it.
If you've adjusted class schedules in response to families' needs, tell them. If you've improved the ticket-buying experience based on customer feedback, let people know. If your audience research has informed new programming or community engagement initiatives, share some of those insights.
It's an opportunity to demonstrate that your organization values its audiences and sees them as participants in its evolution, rather than simply people who purchase tickets.
And one more thing: Don't limit the conversation to people who are already engaging with you. Some of your most valuable insights may come from people who attended once and never returned, abandoned a purchase, or have never considered visiting your organization in the first place.
Parting Thoughts
Your audience data tells you what people are doing. Asking them directly can help you understand why. You need both.
Whether it's five questions after a performance, a targeted survey to solve a particular problem, or a comprehensive study that reshapes your audience development strategy, make listening a regular part of your marketing practice.
You might be surprised by what you learn. And you might discover that the answer to a problem you've been debating for months is something your audiences could have told you all along.
Stop guessing. Start asking.