Recap: Bringing Shared Values To Life (Session 3)
January 15 (Replay at end of page)
For our last session of the Mini Summit, we focused on bringing your shared values to life in everything you’re doing right now: in engaging audiences, staff and community, and in your partnerships. This is a time when you can use your masterful storytelling skills to explain how your gift of the arts serves a higher purpose.
By sharing examples of companies engaging with shared values well at various levels, we saw how arts organizations can begin to take steps down this path.
What’s in the Way of a Shared-Values Approach?
Fully embracing shared values is not without its risks — but the benefits are worth it. We kicked off our session with an exploration of the brand Patagonia, which many of our attendees named as an example of a company living its values. They have a clear message around living sustainably, and they encourage this value even when it conflicts with the company’s near term revenue interests, such as advertisements discouraging customers from buying their clothing but rather shopping used.
There may be stakeholders for whom these actions are unappealing: some may not be interested in sustainability, and others could balk at the potential risk to sales. There is also now a high expectation that Patagonia will take certain actions to live out these values. However, it’s precisely because Patagonia is willing to risk taking a hit that it is admired for taking a stand. And we’ve seen over and over again that the benefits of attracting a loyal fan base consistently outweigh the risks of driving people away.
There are four main concerns we have heard arts organizations express:
The first three are related to the risks and challenges of prioritizing one shared value now. Narrowing down your organization’s purpose can feel like a daunting task. We showed two examples of large companies that were able to choose one. Nike’s value — “the pursuit of greatness” — is specific, yet acts as an umbrella to include any person who seeks to be great through their actions. They then were able to take an edgier approach by highlighting Colin Kaepernick’s activism, which led to an uptick in sales despite controversy. We also looked at American Express and their commitment to “thinking small,” which has completely differentiated them in the market by highlighting their connection to the emotional act of supporting small business.
Focusing in on one particular value is especially important in the arts field, where we have seen that the strategy of trying to appeal to everyone has not worked — in fact attendance has been on a downward trend for years. Appealing to everyone means you appeal to no one. So this time of crisis truly is the moment to use shared values in an effort to turn this around.
Shared Values: Why Now?
Shared values is a big concept; however, getting started does not have to be a large undertaking. There are ways to start small, and build your organization up to a true shared value. These small steps can still have impact.
Certainly, the more you commit to it the more you reap the benefits - but even building in emotional messaging and communicating what you are doing in education and community engagement is a great start.
Starting our journey towards shared values now can, in fact, have huge benefits towards differentiating ourselves in a crowded landscape of digital art. We saw the example of the San Francisco Symphony, whose music director now thinks of his organization as a “media house.” We’ve seen this type of digital transformation across the arts industry. But we can’t all be Disney+, creating countless instances of attention-grabbing content. Instead of working under the assumption that each piece of content we put out will have enduring value on its own, a better way to think about it is that each digital object is a piece of the puzzle that signals our shared values message.
We saw the power of context in the example of items sold at a Marilyn Monroe memorabilia auction: items that could have a bit of interest on their own, but, once you connect them to something that people care about, are of much higher value. Shared values work the same way. You may create some creative digital content. It may even be well reviewed. Your passionate audiences will be really excited. But to others, you might need to connect it to something they really care about —something they view as part of who they are. For “not yet loyal” audiences (who, as we saw in our earlier session are crucial to engage now), our digital work is likely to have much more value as signal than as content, and it is consistent messaging of our shared value that provides the signal.
Living Your Values
To illustrate how to put shared values into practice, we looked at two arts organizations who clearly demonstrate their purpose in their digital outreach. At the Barnes Foundation, their social media posts signal at every turn their value of making art accessible to people from all walks of life. And at the Austin Ballet, every piece of online content is connected to one of the pillars of the organization’s “Be Well” initiative, which springs from its purpose of “helping you stay active, creative, curious, generous and happy.”
Why does this work so well? Research shows that thematic reinforcement of values increases memorability. While each item only gets a few views or shares on social media, combined they reinforce the shared value or purpose of the organization.
With this in mind, there are five shifts to make to boost the signal value of your digital content using the concepts around shared values:
Draw “non-arts lovers” in along with your faithful audiences
Organize and communicate digital efforts under a common theme related to your shared value
Focus on emotional resonance against the theme when curating content
Communicate the usefulness of your content in helping your audience make progress in “struggling moments”
Tell the community what you stand for in digital
Partnerships & Community Engagement
The same thematic consistency that can help your digital strategy resonate can be useful when creating community partnerships. Working with external organizations who connect with your values confers legitimacy to your authentic association with the shared value, and it has the additional benefit of being true. You can then take success stories back to your digital channels and broadcast them to your audience, strengthening their understanding of what you care about and stand for.
We looked at two arts organizations whose partnerships demonstrate their values. Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth theater company. Their “Connectivity Core Partners” program includes a group of organizations who have clear links to Woolly’s purpose of radical inclusion and social justice within art. The framing of these partnerships shows that Woolly is working to start a movement around these values. In the dance world, the American Ballet Theater partnered with Payless Shoes to offer affordable ballet shoes to children, following through on their mission to democratize dance.
Both of these examples show the key element to building activities and partnerships that align with your shared value: audiences must see what you are a champion for. With this and the following evaluation questions in mind, you can reinforce your commitment to your value.
Employees: A Shared Values Asset
Our final discussion of the session was around how arts organization staff members can be powerful advocates for your shared value. We first saw the impact of having a clear purpose on employee engagement and performance.
Part of the secret to how these purpose-driven companies remain so focused is that they co-opt employees into the articulation of their purpose. We saw how Shell transformed into a purpose-driven organization by including employees in the articulation of the company purpose. In interviews they asked two key questions:
Why did you join Shell?
When you retire, what will you leave behind as a result of your work here?
This way, Shell was able to understand if their strategy was effectively reflecting their purpose.
Fortunately for arts organizations, stories are one of the best ways to bring a company’s purpose to life. We explored two examples of corporations who used storytelling as a way to create a company culture around their core values, engaging employees in the process. Leaders at both Costco and Lowe’s created programs for their workers to share stories of their efforts to truly embody the values of their company. This creates a sense of gratification, as well as ensuring that the organization’s shared values are understood and being lived out every day.
Getting Started with Shared Values
Shared values may seem like a tall mountain to climb, but as we saw from the inspirational story of Greta Thunberg, you have it in you. And we have gathered a list of easy ways to take the most important step: getting started.
On the left you’ll find things you can do to develop your shared values message, and on the right things you can do to live your shared values.
We closed with the key takeaways from the week:
Our ability to recover quickly and sustainably from the pandemic depends on our ability to bring back not-yet-loyal audiences back to our venues when it’s safe.
There’s a clear lesson from consumer brands about how to increase the loyalty of casual buyers — emotional differentiation.
The most intense form of emotional differentiation, and therefore the most successful at building loyalty, is connection around shared values that both we and our audiences both believe to be part of “who we are.”
Anything we can do right now to connect emotionally and communicate the impact of our community engagement efforts to audiences represents an advance over our current programming-dominant approach.
The biggest benefits come when our work transcends marketing, and we become known in the market as a champion for a higher-order shared value whom audiences can rely on to help them make progress in their lives.
Now is an especially opportune time to get going, both because of the urgency of our need, the void left by lack of in-person programming, and the range of emotional needs that exist for audiences in quarantine.
We are so grateful to everyone who participated in our Coming Back Stronger Mini Summit, and are excited to continue working with you, during this challenging time and beyond.
Additional ABA Resources
The following is a list of tools and resources we will be offering as follow-ups for the mini summit. If you are interested in any of these items, contact your member advisor.
Shared values checklists & diagnostics
2-hour virtual shared workshops
Recording of our December deep-dive session on our audience data
Additional Summit-Related Resources:
Join our summit LinkedIn group
Review additional materials on our Mini Summit page
Watch the Recording Here
