Key Success Factors for recovery
How do I build a digital strategy with enduring value?
Across the pandemic, we have seen a progression of arts organizations’ digital efforts, moving from an initial focus of getting art out into the world and staying connected with audiences to building digital-first content. And now, with many facing cancelled seasons and closed doors for the foreseeable future, arts organizations have come to terms with the fact that digital is here to stay. As a result, they are reconsidering the goal for their digital efforts. If digital is going to be the primary way they can provide art and culture to their audiences, arts organizations must make sure they are satisfying audiences’ needs in a meaningful and valuable way and creating digital content of enduring value. So how do they achieve this?
Setting a clear digital objective is a critical first step
Across the summer we asked our membership about their objectives for digital during closure. What we heard from most could be paraphrased as, “Keep top of mind with current audiences (especially subscribers/donors) to accelerate their return and avoid long term attrition.” On the face of it, this all seems very sensible. The problem is that the statement is so general that it doesn’t help organizations decide what to do or, importantly, what NOT to do. Put simply, this statement is saying that the goal is to keep everyone engaged in order to drive behaviors that are infinitely far off and to achieve this by reaching out with regular touches. Arts organizations need to focus their digital objectives in a way that enables them to create specific value for audiences now, rather than marketing their future value when it is ok to return to the halls. To create an actionable digital objective, we recommend arts organizations take the following three steps:
Name target audiences with the same needs – to create value, you have to help people accomplish something that’s important to them
Clarify what behavior you want from your audience – this should be something you can observe in a relevant timeframe so you can make adjustments.
Build experiences that help them make progress – this requires you to understand audiences’ situations enough to understand HOW you deliver value.
The slide below provides an example objective that includes these three components. ABA would be delighted to help your organization define its digital objective. Click here to learn about our digital objective workshop.
Understanding the difference between content and context
To achieve the third component referenced in the digital objective above – building experiences that help audiences make progress –arts organizations must understand the context in which they are fitting.
Consider this question: “Which food do you prefer: steak or pizza?”
Most people find this difficult to answer, since most people like both. Many would find it easier to answer the question, “When do you prefer steak, and when do you prefer pizza?”. This is because the second question asks you to think about food and context together. While you may love a good pizza, if you are having an expensive meal with a large donor and someone swaps out your steak for pizza, you’d likely be disappointed. Alternatively, if steak was served at a six-year old’s Harry Potter birthday party, it wouldn’t feel right either. In both cases the “content” doesn’t change, but the value from the content does.
Products don’t have inherent value. They have value when customers use them to make progress. This is the “jobs to be done” work that we’ve been teaching for some time. [Click here to watch a virtual learning module on jobs to be done]. To put this in the frame of an arts organization, digital content is what organizations make, but what it means to audiences depends on context. To make digital content meaningful, arts organizations must understand the context in which audiences will be experiencing it, so they can 1) adapt the content to fit audiences’ needs and 2) improve the overall experience so that the content and the context enhance one another. The goal is to help audiences do an important “job” better than an alternative they could “hire”. Our research has shown that right now the most critical job audiences want help on is connecting with friends and family.
Let’s consider an example focused on the job of connectivity to examine the difference between providing content only compared to content and context. For the purposes of our example let’s say you have decided that you want to learn something new with friends during the pandemic. You land on learning how to make authentic Mexican street tacos.
Example 1: Content Only
You find a YouTube video of someone making Mexican street tacos who looks engaging and has a lot of likes. Next you work on scheduling a time that works for everyone. One friend asks what ingredients they will need so you go back through the video and write them all down. Once everyone is on the call, one friend is a bit slow, and it holds everyone up. So, while the concept was a good one and you were excited to get to try something new with friends, the execution details made it difficult and all the work fell on your shoulders.
Example 2: Content and Context
Let’s contrast that experience with an example from AirBnB, an organization that has put a lot of thought into helping its customers accomplish their “jobs to be done” and mastered context. When the pandemic hit and people stopped travelling, AirBnB found they had many hosts with time but not many guests and they wanted to offer an experience people could enjoy at home. They already had branched into experiences to help people enjoy a new city, so this was a natural expansion - virtual experiences
One of the experiences they offer is cooking Mexican street tacos with a pro chef. Every step of the experience is designed to help you learn something new with your friends. There’s a scheduling page with a calendar, a list of ingredients of what you’ll need, and the site is explicit about what to expect and what you will get. During the class you can talk with the chef over Zoom and she goes at the group’s pace rather than her own. While it’s the same fundamental content of the YouTube video, every step of the process- from thinking about what to do so you can connect with friends, to scheduling, to preparing, to executing, to savoring the experience, is made easier and more meaningful. AirBnB clearly understood why customers might want an experience, what progress they would want to make in their lives and built the app to make that come true.
Job maps are essential to designing meaningful experiences
To design experiences that provide that level of meaning does not require a significant monetary investment or a slick app. It requires deep customer understanding. Organizations that do this well, like AirBnB, all do the same thing: they make job maps. A job map captures the steps customers take when they are trying to make progress in a particular circumstance—when they’re trying to do a “job”. Job maps capture the following steps: define, prepare, execute, adjust, and conclude. Across each of these steps, the map should include:
A description of the step: what steps does the customer have to go through to complete the job?
Unmet expectations: where does the experience miss the mark in each step?
Opportunities: how could the step be made more meaningful?
The job map enables organizations to identify opportunities to enhance the customer journey, lift burdens from their shoulders, and dial up emotional resonance. The map is quite simple – it’s not going to reveal a hidden step that organizations have never considered. But what is revelatory about using the map is that it forces organizations to think about the entire customer journey with the same eye that is generally only devoted to the execution stage. For arts organizations, this would be the moment when audiences view their digital content. But if arts organizations only focus on creating interesting content and telling audiences where to find it, they are putting a lot of work on their audience’s shoulders and they are missing opportunities to infuse the experience with real meaning.
Mapping the Job of Connectivity
As mentioned above, feeling connected to friends and family is a critical job for audiences right now. But this focus on feeling connected to others was rising in importance before the pandemic. With increased amounts of remote work and an increasing percentage of the population reporting feelings of loneliness, the pandemic accelerated a trend that was already in motion. Because of that there are many reasons to believe that arts and culture will have an important role to play supporting connectivity online for years to come, even after the pandemic - and that audience members will want arts organizations to play that role. But what does it mean for arts and culture organizations to play that role? Let’s take a look at an audience member to find out.
We interviewed a woman named Lily as part of our jobs-to-be-done interviews. She lives in the DC area and had two different occasions where she was trying to accomplish a connectivity job. The first was early in the pandemic. Lily was looking for an occasion to mark the days when they felt a little indistinguishable. She was in a ‘bubble’ with her mom so she thought it would be fun if they could figure out something to do at home together. The second was about a month later — Lily signed up for a rally run by an organization called Tsuru Rising, commemorating the end of the internment camps for Japanese Americans. She noted that it was an issue important to her family and friends. The rally was moved entirely online so she participated in various parts of the two-day event. We’ll contrast her two experiences using the job maps.
For the first experience, where Lily wanted to have fun with her Mom, she decided to sign up for an arts organization’s virtual gala. However, across the experience, Lily had many unmet expectations. As she prepared, she had several moments of uncertainty, not knowing what to expect or what it meant to have a virtual gala. The technology was also complicated – she needed to figure out how to mirror her screen phone to the TV. Most importantly in the execution phase of the event (when she was participating in the gala), she didn’t feel like she was a part of it. There was one moment that stood out when the theatre showcased all the people watching from home, but other than that there was nothing that helped her feel like she was part of the event.
You can imagine all kinds of ways this could have been more meaningful. The theater could have been clearer about what to expect from the gala. They could offer more technical help or options to view on TV. But most importantly, they could improve the feeling of community throughout the gala - profiles of others in the gala, shared moments with zoom cameras on, breakouts or synchronous actions and conversations. Click below to see the job map for Lily’s first experience.
Now, let’s consider Lily’s experience in attending the virtual Tsuru Rising rally. In this case, her job was to connect with other over a movement. Prior to the event the organization shared what it would take to participate in the event – the agenda, the moments that were interactive and the choices she would be able to make. Next, the rally asked the participants to do an activity out of solidarity. In this case, it was making cranes. Crane-making is a traditional Japanese activity for healing. Lily felt incredibly connected to this movement and to her friend who joined her to make cranes. Then when it was time for the rally itself, there were two key parts to its connectivity. First, she observed several videos that showcased the work of the group and highlighted the social and connective aspects of the event. Second, she participated in small group ‘healing circles’ with 10-15 people and a facilitator after joining some of the large sessions. She was able to really participate in the rally and left feeling a sense of purpose and had some clear next steps to support the movement as well.
Lily found one video that played during the event to be particularly impactful. Prior to the event, participants could learn the Obon dance and post videos of themselves dancing. By highlighting collaboration, participation, and social conversations throughout the video, the organization created a connective piece of static digital content that provided significant meaning to participants.
How we can help
ABA has several resources available to help your organization get started on building meaningful digital experiences and implementing connectivity into your digital efforts:
Checklist for what organizations need to think about before during and after the experience
Guidance on understanding your audience better
Virtual workshop on designing digital experiences
