Key Success Factors for recovery
How do I create meaningful connective experiences in digital?
To create meaningful connective experiences in digital, ABA recommends arts organizations focus on the following three steps:
Step 1: Define your digital objective.
To design a meaningful digital experience, arts organizations must first ensure that they have a clear vision for what they are trying to achieve. Digital objectives should meet the following three criteria:
Include a named target audience with similar needs
Clarify what behaviors you want to see from that target audience
Defines an experience to help them make progress
The advantage of a digital objective that meets these criteria is that it makes it specific enough for organizations to brainstorm hypotheses about how they might achieve the objective. Once organizations define a hypothesis about how to achieve the objective, they can then devise experiments to try to make progress against the goal. Upon designing an experiment, organizations should then determine a way to measure whether it is achieving the overall objective. By creating more definition around digital objectives, arts organizations are much more likely to engage in digital activities that have enduring impact rather than just “reminder value” to audiences.
Let’s consider an example using the following digital objective (see slide below): “I want current subscribers to continue subscribing.” First, we would consider a few hypotheses on what might make audiences subscribe later. For example, “Maybe they will subscribe later if they feel ‘under the tent’ or in an exclusive group.” Then we would consider digital experiments that would allow us to test that hypothesis. For example, we could offer real time “limited seating” performances to try to make people feel “under the tent”. Finally, we would determine a way to measure whether this experiment is achieving the overall objective for subscribers to continue subscribing when we can fill our halls again. In this example, we would want to create some interim metric to measure that would give us greater confidence about the eventual return. Potential measurement strategies could include A/B testing on whether those “in the tent” are more willing to donate/buy things now or surveying participants/nonparticipants on their likelihood to subscribe. Identifying these interim measures is critical because it allows organizations to refine their strategy as they go.
Step 2: Understand the context into which you are fitting
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 the following question: Do you like pizza or steak? 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 were 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 ABA has been teaching for some time. 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”.
Step 3: Establish a test and learn discipline
The third step to designing meaningful connective experiences is ensuring there is a learning plan in place that enables the organization to constantly improve the value of what it is creating for audiences. By advancing their knowledge about what customers want with each iteration of digital content, arts organizations can be confident that they will develop digital content with long-term value.
Test & learn is not a new concept, but it is something that has become the cornerstone of digital development and a technique called agile development which is expanding from software development where it began, to all types of organizations. One of the core concepts behind agile development is bringing in customer feedback as soon as possible. Hours, days, and weeks can be wasted arguing internally over a feature or approach when the customer will be the ultimate decider of what is necessary or useful. And with digital, it is much less wasteful to build or re-build features since there is not a manufacturing process to stop you.
That concept can be really helpful to arts organizations as they think about wrapping their content in meaningful digital experiences to help audiences connect. It gives organizations the opportunity to learn as they go, rather than having to have a perfectly created experiences from the start.
There are five simple steps for an iterative test-and-learn approach:
Determine a clear objective (step 1 referenced above)
Develop a hypothesis to test
Design and implement a simple experiment
Use that experiment to draw conclusions
Use conclusions to inform your next hypothesis.
To bring this to life, we created an example of how the test and learn process might work if an organization was designing a watch party. First the organization would need to define an objective. In our example, the objective is to determine what features would make a watch party most valuable to audiences. The organization decided to first test if enough of the audience is interested in a watch party that it’s worth trying. Here a simple survey could serve as the experiment. In our example, the organization learns from this experiment that its audiences indeed would rather ‘watch together’ than apart.
The organization would then take this learning to set its next goal. They know their audience is busy, so they want to figure out the best way to remind people before the event? Here they decide to test two different methods - email and texts. In our hypothetical example, text wins. Knowing how to remind people, the organization next wants to look into what kinds of post-show features might be most valuable. Here an A/B test would work well—with one show they use an artist conversation, and for another they offer small group conversations over zoom. They can see the relative participation rates and conclude something about their audience interests.
How We Can Help
ABA Members have access to workshops in key areas of digital such as: understanding arts audience needs in digital, setting digital objectives, building a test & learn plan, and more. Click here to see our workshop agendas and descriptions, then contact your member advisor to schedule a workshop for your team.