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Recap: The Case For Shared Values (Session 2)

January 13 (Replay at end of page)

In the second session of our mini summit, we dug deeper into the concept of shared values to understand its importance and the power it can have to engage our loyal and not-yet-loyal audiences alike. We focused on two main ideas:

  • What you stand for as an organization

  • What your audience aspires to

Together, these lead us to articulating our shared value as a higher-order benefit that audiences value.

How To Find Your Shared Value

To start, we reviewed the 5 key components of a shared value from our first session of the week. A good shared value is:

  1. Emotional

  2. Higher Order

  3. Relevant

  4. Credible

  5. Differentiated

With these qualities in mind, we are able to move forward to the important task of identifying the shared value that is most resonant with your organization.

 
 

There are two parts to shared values: you and your audience. This, naturally, is what makes them shared! Identifying what this value will be starts with you — it must be linked to your unique offer as an arts organization. Then, it can be connected to what your audiences care most about.

Distilling your organization’s purpose can certainly feel like a daunting task. One place to start is by speaking with the people who make up your community. You’re likely to find clues to your purpose by searching through your organization’s past, it’s origins, major inflection points, and by understanding the meaning that your organization has in the lives of stakeholder groups—everyone from your staff, to artists to audiences to community members. 

 
 

Not all feedback from stakeholders will relate to your shared values, but, as a whole, the feedback should provide directional clues to your purpose.

Your organization’s origin story can also be a powerful tool in determining its purpose. To illustrate an example of this, we took a look at the Barnes Foundation, whose history is as a space dedicated to making arts accessible through immersive learning. This history translates well into a purpose: “We believe that people, like art, should not be segregated and that people from all walks of life deserve access to the transformational improvement possible through appreciation of the arts.”

With your organization’s purpose in place, you can move on to the next element of a shared value: your audience.

 

Understanding Audience Values: A Structured Approach

To highlight ways in which an arts organization can learn about their audience’s values, we looked at the case study of the Utah Symphony (you can explore this story further by watching our webinar with the Symphony’s Vice President of Marketing & PR, Jonathan Miles). Several years ago, the organization found that audiences were not responding to their programmatic advertising. They realized that there was an opportunity they’d missed to connect with concert goers on a more emotional level. So they set out to figure out how.

The approach the Utah Symphony team took to gain a better understanding of their audience’s emotional connection to the organization was through a series of interviews. In these conversations, the team used the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), in which they asked interviewees to bring photos unrelated to the symphony and describe how those pictures connect back to their thoughts and feelings about the symphony. Through probing questions, these interviews led to the emotional associations, beliefs and values underlying their choices.

If this method feels too intimidating right now, there is also the “5 Whys” technique:

 
 

The Symphony used the results of these interviews to make links between the functional and emotional elements of the experience, and create a large “value map.” The map takes product features and connects them to core values through product and personal benefits. This allowed the team to gain a deeper understanding of what was important to audience members on an emotional level.

So what did the Utah Symphony do with this information? The interviews uncovered three values they decided to amplify: accomplishment, beautiful world, and inner harmony. The team then worked with an advertising agency to create an emotionally resonant marketing campaign around these values. And it worked: the values-based marketing brought a 7% increase in ticket sales of the Masterworks series, 16% increase in revenue and an 18% increase in reactivated ticket buyers.

 
 

Considerations For Your Own Shared Value

We closed our session with a reminder of the 5 components of a strong shared value, and some questions arts organizations should consider when looking for their own. These include:

  • Higher Order: is it above the level of your genre (theater, opera, etc.)?

  • Relevant: can we translate the value into personal benefits?

  • Credible: have we demonstrated our support for this value in the past?

  • Differentiated: can another organization like us claim this value?

  • Emotional: is there an underlying tension we can resolve?

This last point is particularly important, as it is crucial to identifying the emotional core of what you stand for. Shared values resonate most when they resolve negative emotions. We created a set of aspirations - basic human needs that people strive for - boiled down from several standard psychological frameworks to help you work through the emotional aspect of your shared value.

 

Once you’ve reached a hypothesis about what your shared value is, you can test it against these aspirations and tensions to see if you can articulate which one (or ones) characterize your organization, and try to name specific ways that your organization uniquely helps them overcome.

Pushing your shared value all the way to these moments of tension and resolution is crucial to ensuring that we create the emotional resonance that will bond audiences to us.

 

Additional Summit-Related Resources: 

Watch the Recording Here