Key Success Factors for recovery
What do audiences want from digital?
Early in the pandemic, when most of the world was under stay at home orders, digital consumption behaviors increased significantly, with activities like video streaming and both professional and personal online video chatting increasing most. To meet the moment, most arts organizations quickly put out increased amounts of digital content. Over time, we saw a shift from organizations streaming archived content to building content specifically for digital. As it’s now clear that most arts organizations will not be able to return to business as usual for quite a while, many are taking a harder look at their digital approach and thinking about how they transition it from a short-term band aid to a longer-term strategy that can provide enduring value for the organization.
Understanding What Audiences Need Right Now Is Critical
We have seen some incredible examples of digital creativity in the industry, with organizations pushing into non-traditional channels, creating digital-first productions, and innovating around platforms. However, there is not quite enough out there to signal what is really working, and what audiences need or want in this time. To build an effective long-term digital strategy, organizations need a deeper understanding of what audience members need from them right now.
This past spring, ABA partnered with La Placa Cohen and Slover Linnet on a survey to help arts and culture organizations understand what their audiences were experiencing in the pandemic. The data showed that among those participating in digital activities from arts and cultural institutions most of them rated them favorably. In the slide below you can see the percentage of Americans participating in each activity (orange boxes) and the percentage rating the content as a 4 or 5 (purple bars).
However, we also conducted in-depth interviews with arts audiences to learn more about their engagement with digital content from arts organizations during the pandemic, and those interviews revealed a more nuanced story. During these interviews we asked people about what they were consuming, what they missed, where they need help, what’s providing meaning in their lives, and what’s replacing the role that arts and culture played in their life pre-Covid. Our interviews revealed that while most interviewees appreciated the effort arts organizations were putting forth in providing digital content, it wasn’t providing the meaning they typically received from arts organizations in person. The slide below highlights some of the feedback we heard during our interviews.
Difficult to Deliver Traditional Value Proposition
There are several factors that make it difficult for arts organizations to deliver their traditional value proposition in this environment. Most consumption takes place on the computer (where audiences receive emails about digital content), which is not the easiest way to view the content. And many people are ready to put their computers away at the end of the day after working. People’s days are also highly fragmented, with kids at home or spouses working nearby. It’s hard to find time to sit down and really experience a performance to its fullest. It’s also difficult to compete with habits - people are accustomed to sitting down and watching Netflix in the evenings – they already know how to do that. Another thing that struck us from our interviews was the most people we talked to could not easily recall where the content came from that they did watch. Our interviews revealed a clear difference between what people were finding enjoyable versus meaningful or impactful.
Differentiating What Audiences Were Looking for Pre-Covid and Now
To dig deeper into what audiences want from their online experience, we used the “Jobs to be Done” interviewing technique, which in simple terms, seeks to understand the progress people are trying to make in their lives in a given circumstance, and in our case, during Coronavirus. We combined this data with the La Placa Cohen/Slover Linnet survey previously mentioned, as well as a large-scale survey we completed before Coronavirus that was focused on understanding audience members’ typical motivations to attend a live performance (again, a jobs focus in that survey).
First, let’s consider what our pre-Coronavirus survey revealed about audience members’ motivations to attend a live performance. A third of audiences came to the hall simply to see art performed at the highest quality level, which was by far the highest motivation. Beyond that, our data shows that there are a wide variety of motivations arts organizations need to cater to. But what do arts organizations do when it’s not possible to fulfill the job of seeing art performed at the highest quality level?
Our interviews revealed many new jobs that have emerged in the pandemic and several jobs that have increased in importance. There were three key messages that we took away from those new jobs:
The quarantine environment makes it very hard for audiences to find a truly immersive experience that engages their full attention and “leaves them spent”, as one interviewee put it. In fact, when we asked audiences to tell us how they were immersing now, they were likely to name non-arts and culture activities
Most people were using arts organizations’ archives like a familiar TV show. That’s OK, but it’s not exactly fulfilling most organizations’ missions. Arts organizations want to inspire, challenge, enrich, unleash the spirit, not compete with an episode of Cheers.
Audiences are looking for connection – with family, friends, broader social groups, with some larger sense of purpose. It’s at the bottom right of the chart below because audiences are not getting that connection from arts organizations reliably.
Audiences are looking for connection and not currently receiving it
Our survey data from the La Placa Cohen/Slover Linnet Culture in Crisis survey really underscored the importance of that third message that centers on connectivity as a critical job for arts organizations to help fulfill right now. When asked what they miss most about cultural experiences during closure, audience members’ number one response was spending quality time with friends and family. Experiencing artworks or performances in person ranked only 6 out of 10 factors. However, audiences do not feel they are getting this connection through digital cultural experiences right now. In fact, the largest gap in terms of what audience members miss most about cultural experiences and what digital experiences are currently providing is spending time with friends and family. The message from both our data sources is clear: our audiences are craving connectivity with others, and we are not currently delivering it.
What Connection Actually Means
To build connections for audiences, we must first consider what leads people to feel connected online. We looked at what psychologists say helps people feel connected online and boiled it down to four things:
Share experiences: shared experiences create a feeling of connection, especially if you are sharing the experience with someone important to you. An example of this would be a ‘watch party’.
Collaborate: working on something together creates a feeling of connection. To foster this, arts organizations could ask audiences to create cooperative art.
Help others: helping or thanking others makes people feel connected to them. Arts organizations can support this by enabling audiences to support artists.
Understand others: while more passive than others, simply understanding others achieves a feeling of connection. An example to support this would be artist behind-the-scenes videos.
We’ve seen several arts organizations doing an excellent job of providing opportunities for these types of connection, which you can access in the slide below.
It’s important to emphasize that the connection audience members are looking for is not connection with arts organizations – audience members want to be connected to each other, to their community, and to something bigger than themselves and they want arts organizations to facilitate that. So, while it may be important for organizations to send out backstage videos or live streams, these do not support connectivity between people or with the community. Arts organizations must focus on creating opportunities for true peer to peer connection to deliver value to their audiences through digital.
How We Can Help
To help spark discussion in your organizations about fostering connection with audiences and the community, we created a set of ideas tied to each of the four themes of connectivity (see slide below). Additionally, we would be happy to run a virtual workshop with your team on building a digital strategy.
Click here if you are interested in learning more about the workshop.