“There is one central truth that on its face may seem fairly obvious to you, but which can’t be minimized: our entire world is in the midst of a profound traumatic experience. A return to any semblance of normalcy (and relevance) for the arts and culture fields will require facing and integrating that trauma head-on.”

Within most cultural organizations (like all other businesses), there is still a rightful focus on crisis management and survival during this national period of self-isolation and COVID-related public restrictions. None of us is sure how and when this will end. However, we still must prepare for welcoming audiences and staff back whenever it may occur, and we will need every moment of preparation we can get. It behooves us to start now.

There is no playbook for what the arts and culture fields will experience over the next several years. This era will test the mettle of our leaders in every cultural discipline and will forge many new leaders who will rise to respond to our challenges. Despite the pain along the way, I am grateful for this. As a marketer, I am also grateful for the research underway in several corners of our field that will provide us with descriptive and diagnostic data, so that we can have insights from which to craft new models and strategies that will carry us forward in serving our audiences and communities. But on their own, these are merely data points.

How do we begin to frame strategies when there remain so many unknown variables?

For my part, I urge caution against an overly simplified goal of “bringing audiences back.” Instead, I suggest that organizations focus on the task of re-engaging audiences in a way that helps sustain them while sustaining our organizations. This may not look as it did before for some time, if ever. We will need to be prepared for an entirely new and multi-phased approach to audience and community engagement—both at the organizational and industry-wide levels. When there is no precedent, there is also no case study, so in my own formulation of possible ways forward, I’ve turned to approaches from outside our field and outside of our own literal context. In fact, this ultimately led me back to my training in social work.

There is one central truth that on its face may seem fairly obvious to you, but which can’t be minimized: our entire world is in the midst of a profound traumatic experience. What I suggest in the remainder of this piece is that a return to any semblance of normalcy (and relevance) for the arts and culture fields will require facing and integrating that trauma head-on. In order to do this, I’ll draw parallels to a concept from the behavioral health and human services fields that may provide us a roadmap: trauma-informed care.

Trauma-Informed Care

[A brief aside: While attaining my MSW, I studied and explored trauma-informed care in a community health setting. At the time, I didn’t anticipate applying these ideas so literally to my practice as a cultural marketing consultant and coach—nevertheless, we bring our whole selves to meet every moment, so here we are. I also mention this to make clear that I do not represent myself as an expert on this care model but encourage further conversation among readers who see the natural synergies as I do.]

Trauma-informed care is a prevalent framework in medical and behavioral health settings. It stands on the foundational principle that most (it not all) people carry trauma, and that it is only by acknowledging this trauma that we can devise systems and practices that will protect patients and encourage consistent engagement with services, all while increasing overall efficacy. If these types of safeguards are necessary in a field like health care that is arguably the most essential, where patients are receiving literal life-saving services, it stands to reason that cultural organizations should consider them while anticipating our artists’ and audiences’ justifiable fear and trepidation following our recent life-changing experiences.

Using the model employed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (a subset of the US Department of Health and Human Services), there are six guiding principles to trauma informed care, which I’ll explore below. In their original intended usage, these principles aim to keep patients engaged in care, while minimizing the fear or risk of being re-traumatized that may present a barrier or a disengagement outright. By reframing them for our needs, I am proposing that they can serve as the foundational guiding principles for a robust audience engagement plan.

Application to Audience Engagement and Relationships

The principles of trauma-informed care ensure that we are taking our constituents’ experiences into account and intentionally using their perspective to inform the way we approach and communicate with them—much like a fully-realized and personalized audience engagement strategy should always aim to do. These six principles add a necessary layer to our planning in a time when audiences are feeling exposed and fearful, and if we hope to maintain genuine relationships with them, it is incumbent upon us to be responsive to that and deliberate in our attempts. (Importantly, while this topic is being explored with an audience-centric perspective, it absolutely applies to approaches with artists and staff as well.)

Below, I offer a brief explanation of each principle of trauma informed care, and the application that each can potentially have in devising an audience engagement plan for the reopening of our organizations:

1. Safety: creating spaces where people feel culturally, emotionally, and physically safe, while also conveying an awareness of an individual’s discomfort or unease

Application for the Arts: This conversation is already well under way. How will our practices in regard to cleaning and disinfecting our venues be carried out and communicated, and how can/should we alter the in-venue experience to minimize anxiety and possible transmission (from Purell stations to seating plans)? Additionally, whose duty will it be to receive and ameliorate any health-related concerns for audience members while they are on-site? Are our guest services and house managers properly equipped to field and address these concerns?

2. Trustworthiness and Transparency: providing full and accurate information about what’s happening and what’s likely to happen next

Application for the Arts: How are we communicating our own planning process to our audiences, and making clear the lengths we are going to in order to reimagine all of the factors raised above? An expression of, “we’ve got this” won’t go far enough, and how will we provide a window into that process so that audiences can develop confidence gradually as they consider their return? In these same efforts to instill confidence, how do we still provide transparency about the fact that so many factors are unknown or completely out of our control (such as timelines for public health and civic planning)?

3. Peer Support: peer support and mutual self-help as key vehicles for establishing safety and hope, building trust, and utilizing lived experience to promote recovery and healing

Application for the Arts: How can our venues and our organizations provide a forum for our audience members to connect with one another to process and share the experiences they’ve just endured? Whether centered around an event or exhibition, or purely by providing them with the physical or digital space for mutual aid, what is our role in facilitating these connections?

4. Collaboration and Mutuality: the recognition that healing happens in relationships and partnerships with shared decision-making

Application for the Arts: How are our audience members directly involved in the process of determining “what is best for them” as we approach the next chapters for our organizations, including and well beyond the initial re-opening? In addition to surveys, how can we engage small working groups of constituents from various segments of our audience to serve as advisory councils to help inform the patron experience we offer? And how can these advisory groups serve as ambassadors in building confidence among other audiences?

5. Empowerment Voice and Choice: the recognition of the need for an approach that honors the individual’s dignity, and recognizes the individual’s strengths

Application for the Arts: As with all good engagement strategy, we should seek not just to speak, but to listen. Not every audience member is going to be comfortable coming back in either the first or second season in which we are able to resume in-venue operation. Their knowledge of their own risk tolerance supersedes any opinions we may have. In order to honor each audience member’s choice, how do we plan to identify and segment them to receive offerings that acknowledge and respect that reality? We’re used to segmenting by donor activity, purchase history, and more, but how can our research and engagement efforts translate to a new segmentation model that takes willingness to return to the venue into account? Importantly, how can we do so without being seen as attempting to coerce or convince? On the latter, any poor attempts to do so may result in the closing of that door for good.

6. Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues: moving past cultural stereotypes and biases, offering responsive services, leveraging the healing value of traditional cultural connections, and incorporating policies and processes that are responsive to racial, ethnic, and cultural needs, as well as recognizing historical trauma

Application for the Arts: It is a painful but undeniable reality that COVID-19 has not cut across all segments of our population equally, particularly when considering factors of race, socioeconomics, and geography. In our programming and in our communications, how do we ensure that these disparities are seen and understood, and provide compassionate support to audiences more drastically impacted than others? Many organizations are already appropriately thinking about this in regard to age categories, but my invitation in this moment is to use the disparities of our present crisis to continue the necessary work that we were already being called upon to address in our imperfect and unequal systems pre-COVID. The answer is more nuanced than pricing and traditional access programs and comes back to the very core of how we build and sustain community—by understanding needs, values, and opportunities for service and connection. In short, it demands that we make clear in our actions that we intend to be inclusive for all members of our community in this new era.

Where to Go from Here

This article does not propose answers to the many guiding questions posed above—those answers will vary dramatically for each organization and the communities they serve. However, these points will hopefully provide a framework for your organization to consider in addressing your audience’s needs on the path ahead. It is my hope that the ideas contained here, while rooted in behavioral health, will contribute to a dialogue on how we exist in genuine relation and communion with our audiences in these deeply traumatic times. As both your partner in this, and as an audience member, I remain confident that in our quest to help our audiences heal and return to wholeness, they will help us to do the same.

Additional Resources:

SAMHSA: https://ncsacw.samhsa.gov/userfiles/files/SAMHSA_Trauma.pdf

TOCG now offers remote workshops for teams at arts and cultural organizations to begin employing the framework shared in this article.

Tom O’Connor is the President of Tom O’Connor Consulting Group. TOCG is a New York City-based arts consultancy offering strategy, assessment, executive search, and leadership coaching services to organizations across the US—all with a focus on audiences and revenue outcomes. Tom has spent over 15 years working in the cultural sector, is on the faculty of the graduate Theater Management program at the Yale School of Drama, and received his MSW in Clinical Social Work from Fordham University.