In our research on audience loyalty, culminating in our Coming Back Stronger Summit, we examined how orienting your arts organization around shared values can increase the engagement of both your most passionate and more casual attendees. One of the strategies we explored was how community partnerships can help strengthen your ownership and delivery of your organization’s purpose. 

In this article, we explore the steps to take when developing a values-based community engagement presence, and show how Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company put it into action with their “Connectivity Core Partner” program.

Shaping Engagement Around Shared Values

Using your core values to frame your community work has clear benefits. First, working with external organizations who connect with your values confers legitimacy to your association with the value – and it has the additional benefit of being true. You can then take success stories from these partnerships back to your digital channels and broadcast them to your audience, strengthening their understanding of what you care about and stand for.

Before you can select the right community partners for your organization, make sure that you have developed an ecosystem that allows for effective relationship building. This should be created around your values. These are a few questions to ask yourself when assessing your organization’s community ecosystem:

• How does your partner ecosystem reflect what you stand for as an organization?

• Does your community engagement behavior naturally attract partners with the same values?

• How would you project authenticity around shared values to a new partner you are trying to engage?

• Does the clarity of your values help you decide which potential partners to say “no” to?

Use these questions to examine the unique ways your arts organization resonates with the community.  Then, you will be ready to create partnerships that have a high impact, in action and messaging.

Finding The Right Community Partners

Once you have built a community ecosystem that aligns with your organization’s values, it is time to pick the right partners. Often, a potential partnership is evaluated through the lens of more tactical questions: will it help you increase your organization’s exposure? Does it appeal to major sources of funding? Could it lead to innovation in your field?

While those questions are important, tying community partnership to shared values opens up an even deeper range of considerations:

Starting A Movement

A useful frame for how to think about purpose-driven community engagement is to consider your organization as the leader of a movement. Once you have a value that drives your organization, finding community partners can be an exercise in finding the people who can help you make your purpose – your movement – happen.

Those first relationships are so important when thinking about how new movements are formed, and how they take flight. The video below shows how a man’s solo dancing gains momentum only after the first person joins him:

As an arts organization, building community partnerships can help you move forward your purpose in one of two ways:

• You can be the leader of a movement in your community, finding partners to act as those first followers; or

• You can act as that first follower for another (perhaps non-arts) organization that is generating a movement, cementing your reputation of being committed to that same value.

Purpose-Driven Movement In Action: Woolly Mammoth

To see what values-driven community engagement can look like at an arts organization, we turn to Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. This organization has a history of risk-taking and community activism, all oriented toward its overall purpose of “radical inclusion.” The moment they strive to catalyze around this value is present across their website language, making it clear that it is ingrained in all aspects of their work.

Woolly Mammoth especially leverages their community partnerships to achieve this purpose. One such program is their Connectivity Core Partners, which is a collaboration with organizations that "share the same values around inclusion, anti-racism, social justice, and the power of art.”

Through these relationships, Woolly Mammoth is not just helping their community, but mobilizing it by holding their partners on equal footing in their inclusion movement. The clear shared purpose between all of these organizations (and the theatre company) legitimize their ownership of their values, and strengthen their ability to affect real change in their community.

While not every arts organization can – or should – start a concrete movement, making decisions as if you are can help drive your strategy towards a purpose that can strengthen your bond with your audiences, donors, and community at large.

Want to dive deeper into the concept of shared values? Read our helpful primer here.