Finding and Demonstrating Shared Values: What is Your Higher Purpose?
Week 2 Q&A Session Recap and Recording
Last week during the Summit we focused on building an understanding of the concept of a shared value. This week we are focusing on how organizations can articulate their shared value. Though we realize every organization may not be ready to embark on a transformational journey, it is undeniable that right now it is particularly valuable to at least understand and communicate your organization’s emotional core to your audiences and other stakeholders.
Determining Your Shared Value: A Forensic Exercise
Your organization’s shared value should be an intersection of your distinctive value, mission, and origin story and what your audience cares about above the level of your genre. It’s first helpful to distinguish how your shared value is separate but related to similar concepts, such as your vision, mission, and values:
Consider a shared value to be the highest level. It is a belief that both your organization and your customers have about a higher purpose, passion, or philosophy that has meaning in your lives beyond your specific genre or the arts in general. Your shared value informs your vision – a portrait of a future that could exist if the shared value you believe in were instantiated in the world and that you intend to work to help create. That vision then defines your mission which is a statement of the path you intend to take to bring that future vision into existence. And finally, your core values are a set of behavioral principles that you expect your staff, your stakeholders, and your outside partners to adhere to.
As you start on the journey to identify your organization’s shared value, consider it a bit of a forensic exercise in which you seek input from various stakeholders:
Staff/Alumnae: Consider the origin story of your organization – what were you created to do that is different than similar organizations? If your organization does not have a clear origin story, consider points in your history where you have taken a risk to stand up for something – or even a time when you missed an opportunity to stand for something. You can also look at your existing staff – what is the reason that they came to your organization? What makes them get out of bed each morning to achieve through your organization?
Audience/Visitors: Ask your audiences what they think of you. What do they think that you stand for?
Other Stakeholders: Finally, use your community partners as an input to this process. They might have a story to tell that would explain their belief of what your purpose is. Your board is another great input – what do they believe you stand for?
Understanding Your Audience’s Values Requires a Different Type of Research
As implied in the term, your shared value needs to be shared with your audience. So, while we recommend you start with your organization to define your shared value, it’s also critical to do the work of understanding what your audience cares about. This requires a different type of research than what most organizations traditionally use. Typically, we survey our audiences to understand their feedback to changes we’ve made or to our specific performance or experience – these tend to tell us about audience satisfaction or usage. A level above that is ethnographic research that looks at behaviors or habits that illuminates behaviors in certain – but still does not reach the level of values. And then finally, there is beliefs and values research that can uncover insights about the progress people are trying to make in their lives at the level of personal values core to their identity. This type of research requires a different set of questions. And while it may feel a bit foreign or even awkward to engage in this type of dialogue with your audiences, it will not only provide critical insight about your audience’s values, but it can also be very energizing for your organization. These conversations can help you and your staff see the passion you have devoted your lives to through the eyes of others.
How Utah Symphony Uncovered Audience Values
A couple of years ago Utah Symphony took on a project to conduct the type of values research described above. Prior to 2018, their marketing communications focused primarily on programming. However, when they surveyed audiences they found that it was rare that this was how they heard about a concert. Their marketing was not memorable. They realized they needed to change something and wanted to find a way to connect with audiences emotionally rather than programmatically.
As a starting point to this effort, they reached out to loyal audience members and asked them to bring 10 images that represent the symphony to them. The catch was that none of the photos could include the concert hall, musicians, or instruments. They wanted to move beyond those obvious images and get to images that represent audience members’ feelings about the symphony. During the interviews with these audience members, Utah Symphony used the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET). In this interviewing style, you ask interviewees to connect the photos back to their feelings. There are a variety of probing techniques to do this. For example, you can ask them to tell you why they brought the photo – how it represents the symphony to them. You can also ask if there is feeling where they couldn’t find a representative picture. All of the probing techniques are used to get to the emotional associations audience members have to the symphony. If this interviewing technique sounds daunting, a similar but simplified approach is an interviewing style called “The 5 Whys”. In this approach, you continue asking “why?” to get to audience members’ deeper feelings about the image.
Once Utah Symphony completed these interviews, it was time to organize what they learned. ZMET uses a concept called laddering, where you start with the product features mentioned by interviewees and ladder those up to product benefits which then connect to personal benefits and finally to values. Once Utah Symphony completed this work, they used the identified values to inform their marketing communications, moving from program-based marketing to values-based marketing. Their head of marketing said the work also shifted how they talk internally about their patrons and how they make decisions related to the patron experience. Upon implementing the change, they saw an increase in ticket sales, revenue, and reactivated buyers.
If you are interested in additional information on ZMET, here are a couple of additional resources:
Harvard Business Review video on ZMET with a case example from banking
Reflections from a market researcher who was interviewed by the New York Philharmonic using ZMET
Honing the Shared Value Message
Once organizations have looked into themselves and spent time understanding their audiences, the work then turns toward honing the message to be resonant, relevant, and differentiated. There are two key steps to doing this:
Balancing the level of the shared value to ensure it’s high enough to be aspirational, but specific enough to point back to your organization. For example, we’ve seen brands try to claim something like “excellence”. While excellence is important, it fails on nearly every dimension of the 5 characteristics of a shared value. It’s hard to express emotionally without direct reference to artistic skill. It’s so lofty that it’s hard to make it relevant in people’s lives. It’s hard for an organization to own “excellence” or be differentiated from other organizations based on this alone. So again, while excellence is certainly important, it’s not going to emotionally bond your audiences to you.
On the other hand, you don’t want to go too narrow. The “too narrow” example we discussed in the session was “educating children in the Philadelphia area”. This is likely a characterization of current behavior, and that’s not what we’re looking for. We want the value to be an exciting guide start to reach toward that will motivate our staff. And while educating children is emotional, it likely won’t have a lot of emotional tension for an individual audience member. We offer some guidance here to test whether you are achieving the right balance: Would audiences say we are credible? Does it feel like a bit of a stretch compared to our current behavior?
Contextualizing the value so that it has meaning for our audiences. This means that we identify the specific emotional tension our audiences experience and how we can help to resolve it. And we make sure that we are offering authentic support for the value. We saw that in the Dove commercial last week. You could see people being self-critical in those videos and the emotional release when they were allowed to see themselves through other people’s eyes. That’s what we mean by tension and resolution.
To help organizations gauge their progress in getting to a strong shared value, we put together a set of questions that can be found on Page 53 of the pre-work deck. Additionally, ABA will be offering workshops for organizations looking for support in developing a shared values statement.
As a reminder, all Summit materials can be found here on our website.
