Written by: Rani Haywood & Edie Demas

September brings with it many things. Here at TOCG we’re thinking about new seasons kicking off around the US and being announced in Australia. At many performing arts organizations, new seasons bring the hope of new audiences, often in the form of community engagement efforts. Drawing on our vantage points as marketing and arts education leaders, we’ve been reflecting on how arts organizations can do this work well and ensure it has an impact both for an organization and their community.

Building Relationships, Not Just Selling Tickets

Often we see organizations engaging in this work around a single event or production, and under these circumstances, community work more often than not feels like a ‘one-off’ effort to increase sales. As box office pressures mount, audience development often in the guise of community engagement becomes something that marketing teams are charged with. In other scenarios community engagement will fall to the education team to ‘tick the boxes’. These transactional or one-time approaches to community engagement do not serve arts organizations well in the long term.

The preferable, and more authentic, approach places emphasis on developing relationships and building audiences over a long period of time. A great example of this is our client Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, Australia, who consistently creates works with and of communities led by artists with deep connections in those communities, and ensures that those communities are invited in as audience members. Belvoir is specifically commissioning work with long term audience development and community building in mind.

The takeaway from Belvoir and companies like them is that true community engagement needs to start with programming and artistic planning. This work can’t fall too late in the process with the marketing or education team expected to produce results where no authentic connection or relationship has been established within the communities the company is looking to engage with.

Being Authentic To Your Values

If you want to engage with new and different audiences, you first need to ask yourselves:

How does this work fit into your organization’s mission, vision, values?
Does this community want or need to engage with your organization or is the organization’s interest primarily transactional?
Are your efforts by and with the community you hope to reach? Or, are they focused on or to those potential audience members? Does your organization understand and care about the difference?

These questions speak to the importance of organizational values and responsibility as foundational to community engagement.

Values-based institutional storytelling can be the foundation of an organization’s ability to build relationships with its community. Communicating these values is not the sole purview of the marketing team. Nor is the engagement part of community engagement the sole responsibility of the education team. If this work and these relationships are indeed a core value, then it must be an organization-wide responsibility.

An All-Of-Organization Approach

This is why this work should be the responsibility of the entire institution, drawing on the strengths of the teams within it. The education team is naturally skilled in engagement. They are used to building long-term relationships and developing programs and resources around productions. Development departments’ work is all about relationship building. The front of house and box office teams are those welcoming people into “your house.” From curation to marketing to engagement to relationship building, to offering and sustaining a welcoming experience, a unified, authentic, values-centered experience matters. Community engagement and authentic audience development is the sum of all of the parts.

For community engagement to be successful, it's got to be an organization-wide effort with clear roles and responsibilities for each department. Everyone needs to buy in. Everyone needs to be clear what the outcomes are for the company, and why this work is important. It demands a shared language and should be positioned as a core value and a core strategy, not “additional work.”

Community engagement definitely will not succeed if it’s just about revenue. We’ve said from the beginning, authenticity matters. Otherwise you’re on the fast track back to transactional, one-off sales. Community engagement has to come from a real place. It needs to sit in your organization’s center, not on the outskirts only to be considered when tickets aren’t moving. Audiences know when something is authentic. It’s a vibe. And that vibe kicks off from the moment you start engaging with them.

Rani Haywood is the Senior Vice President of Tom O’Connor Consulting Group. For over fifteen years Rani has held senior marketing roles at an array of performing arts and cultural organizations in Australia and the United States, including at The Metropolitan Opera, Roundabout Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company.

Edie Demas is the Vice President, Organizational Strategy of Tom O’Connor Consulting Group. Edie has led Executive and Senior leadership searches for a range of organizations and has spent 20+ year in arts leadership across a variety of art forms and settings, ranging from performing arts venues to festivals to community and academic/school environments. She served most recently as Executive Director of the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York. She holds an MA and PhD from NYU’s Program in Educational Theatre.