Addressing Audience Decline: Taxonomy of Approaches

November 2022

The pandemic has fundamentally reshaped customer buying habits, and the arts are no exception. ABA members report sluggish audience return to in-person experiences. The implications extend well beyond near-term earned-revenue challenges. Increasingly, organizations are finding it necessary to justify their business models to boards, funders and others by bringing back their bases quickly and by demonstrating their relevance to future audiences.

Thinking expansively about audience development is hard for businesses used to operating within a traditional model.  To wit, arts organizations often default to programming as their principal lever for appealing to today’s audiences and to the next generation.

To expand thinking about the range of available audience-building levers, ABA has developed a taxonomy of audience-building approaches. Our briefing breaks down audience development into four broad categories: product, experience, marketing, and community-building. For each area, we provide further categorization as well as examples from across countries and arts genres in order to your stimulate thinking.

Click below to download the briefing — and consider this a starter kit. We’d love to know what categories you would add and what examples have inspired your own audience development approaches.