Audiences Everywhere!

The people who would love to come to your next concert are out there. But it will require more than just more advertising or deeper discounts to find them and bring them into the fold. Arts consultant Matt Lehrman explains. 

The NEA’s recent survey of public participation in the arts found that 33 percent of adults attended one of a benchmark list of arts activities in 2012 (jazz, classical music, opera, musical and non-musical plays, ballet, and visits to an art museum or gallery), compared with 39 percent a decade earlier.

“Such statistics might lead us to believe that we are heading out onto thinning ice where organizations will inevitably start to fall through,” says audience development consultant Matt Lehrman.  

The good news, however, is that arts organizations have the ability to change the audience climate—as long as they are willing to make audience-building a commitment for the whole organization. Here Lehrman offers a framework for thinking about your chorus’ audience development efforts.

Get to Know Your Prospective Audience

People engage with arts and cultural activities based on two factors: the interest that they have in what your organization is offering and the capacity (in terms of time, money, or opportunity) that they have to attend. With this in mind, Lehrman sorts prospective audience members into four basic categories, represented by the quadrants below.

Audiences Everywhere Quadrant

The vertical axis of Lehrman’s grid skews to the right, because as the NEA study shows, only a third of the US adult population attends arts events at all on an annual basis. That means that the largest groups are either uninspired or asleep when it comes to the programming that arts organizations have to offer.

Conventional approaches to audience development try to move these axes. For example, mass advertising—like the “Got Milk?” campaign—attempts to push the vertical axis to the left by increasing awareness of your product. Mass discounting services like Goldstar and Groupon attempt to lower the horizontal axis and enable more people with limited financial capacity to experience your offerings.  

The challenge with these kinds of approaches, Lehrman finds, is that they are based on the idea that arts organizations have the power to change their audiences. “When it comes to growing audiences, it is much more interesting – and productive – to consider what might be accomplished by making changes to our own organizations instead,” he says.

Lehrman suggests thinking of your organization as occupying a “sphere of influence” that intersects with all four quadrants of the grid. “Organizations are typically deeply rooted in the “devoted” quadrant and branch out to the “oriented” quadrant, but our goal should really be to expand that circle of influence out in all directions,” he says. “To do that, we need to think specifically about the people in each of the quadrants. Who are they and what do we need to do to touch them?”

The Devoted: How Can We Delight Them?

Lehrman identifies the people who are devoted to your organization as the ones who join the board, buy a subscription to your concert season, donate, and volunteer. At first glance, it would seem that they need nothing more from your organization. They are already firmly in your camp. But the devoted folks crave a deeper connection, Lehrman says. They don’t just want to attend – they want to actually LIVE the experience that you offer. Think of a passionate Oakland Raiders football fan in full costume and makeup. “All our devoted patrons look like this – on the inside,” says Lehrman.

Lehrman suggests thinking about your most devoted audience members, and then making a list of ten things you could do in the next 30 days that would delight them. For example, the most devoted audience members of a children’s chorus might be a couple in their late 30’s with elementary school-aged children in the chorus who attend all the concerts, regularly buy tickets for others, and volunteer to head up the annual fundraiser. A list of delights for this couple might include offering a pre-concert restaurant deal for families, a “crying room” for restless children, and a pre-concert talk for siblings who don’t sing in the chorus.

Making a list is just the first step. “Whatever list you come up with for your organization, choose one or two things that you can implement immediately, and then repeat the exercise every couple of months,” Lehrman says. “The value is in paying attention to your devoted fans over time.”

Oriented: Getting People to Hit the Replay Button

Oriented audience members have a high interest in your organization, but less capacity to become engaged. “These are people who scan the arts section in the newspaper or go online looking for things they might want to attend,” Lehrman says. They may feel strongly about the arts in general, or the type of work your organization does, without feeling a strong connection to your organization in particular.

One statistic about arts participation that Lehrman thinks arts organizations need to pay attention to  is the fact that the vast majority of first-time attendees of an arts event never go back again. “The question is: how do we get people to hit the replay button?” he says.

Lehrman suggests this best practice: When someone comes to one of your events, find a way to inform them of something that might interest them other than the next event on your calendar.  It’s natural to want to push marketing messages about whatever is your next priority, but think of a “next thing” that might become a priority for your audience members instead.

That “next thing” may be a concert you are putting on several months from now that has a similar format or includes related repertoire—or even another group’s concert or event. “You have the precious opportunity to make a personal connection for your audience member,” Lehrman says. “You are credible. If you make a recommendation to your audience, it will mean something, and they will love you for it.”

Another idea is to ask: what may be impeding these folks from coming back? Is it something you can fix? “A number of choruses have volunteers who pick up audience members and bring them to the performance,” Lehrman says. “That’s a prime example of a creative solution to a major impediment for increasingly older audiences.”

Uninspired: What Turns Them On?

Think of the word “uninspired” as an opportunity rather than a pejorative, says Lehrman. This population has the time and money to attend your events, but lacks the experience or orientation that would drive them in your direction.

Then think about their reasons for coming to a concert. “Consider, what do they value? What is important to them? What turns them on?” Lehrman says.

One thing that audiences seek, says Lehrman, is emotional connection. That’s perhaps why millions of people attend annual performances of The Nutcracker Suite. “It’s a family tradition,” says Lehrman. “It is how they celebrate the holidays. It’s memories. It’s paying it forward. Their parents took them and now they are taking their kids.”

These reasons have little to do with liking ballet or whether the performance is top-notch. “It’s their values, their family values,” Lehrman says. “The thing you should be asking your organization is, what is the thing you offer where people come for their values more than they come for your values?”

There may be other times of the year when your chorus’ concerts could align with people’s wants and desires—patriotic music around the Fourth of July or romantic music at Valentine’s Day. “Whatever is something that puts you in the path of audiences for their reasons, that’s an interesting conversation,” says Lehrman says.

Audiences also want entertainment. This can be a challenge for arts organizations that see their mission as being “educational.” “If that is your stated purpose,” Lehrman says, “then the audience you seek are people called ‘students.’ But for people are coming in their leisure time, we must never forget that we are in the entertainment business. No matter how noble the music we are performing or the cause we are representing, the audience expects entertainment and we have to give them that.”

Increasingly, people are less content to be passive spectators. They want to be immersed, and arts groups must be in the business of creating extraordinary experiences. That’s what Opera Memphis was after when it commissioned new operas to be performed, not in a fancy music hall, but in an empty Sears warehouse building. The composers researched the history of the building and talked to the customers and employees who frequented it for decades. The resulting performances were unusual and tapped into a part of the city’s history that people cared about. Audiences came.

Asleep: Focus on One Slice of the Pie

There is a large category of people who know little or nothing about your organization and might have difficulty attending even if they were more aware of your offerings. The reasons for that are many. “They may be tired, financially stressed, or it could be that they have never been invited,” Lehrman says.

Arts organizations generally spend very little time trying to reach this group. “Conventional wisdom says that we should go for low-hanging fruit—those people who are already on our lists or are following us on social media,” says Lehrman. “As for the fruit at the top of the tree, we just let it rot, and rationalize our actions by telling ourselves that those folks really aren’t interested, are unsophisticated, aren’t community-minded, or something else.”

But looking at the national statistics on declining arts participation, Lehrman admonishes arts organizations against giving up.  “The arts, nationally, are at a point where we can’t afford to forgo any possible audiences.” says Lehrman.  “Arts organizations have a responsibility for diversity and inclusivity within their local populations, but too many organizations approach this as a one-off effort rather than as an on-going process.”

Arts organizations can make reaching out to their “asleep” audience more manageable, by selecting a very specific slice of the pie and focusing on that slice over an extended period of time. “It could be all the Little League teams that play within a two-mile radius of where you perform, or it could be a church or senior center,” says Lehrman. “The point is to be engaged with other people in your community on their home turf – doing what they already enjoy doing – rather than expecting them to come to wherever you are.”

Keep in mind that you are looking not for an immediate return on investment, but for a long-term relationship. That’s what the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus was after when it decided to sponsor a local softball team as part of the Beantown Softball League, the largest athletic organization open to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and heterosexual people in New England. Community engagement is a core part of the BGMC’s mission, and this is a way for the chorus to collaborate with a new segment of the LGBT community.

Three chorus members play on the BassRunners, and having the chorus’s “face” in the community in this way is important, Lehrman says. “It’s the same reason that presidential campaigns still have busses traveling around the country,” he says. “There is no substitute for having your volunteers show up at a place where people aren’t expecting you, and you invite them to participate on a one-on-one basis, with volunteers who look like the people you are getting to sign up.”  

No More Wallflowers

There are ways to delight, to inspire, to reengage, to wake up audience members, says Lehrman. But the process inevitably leads to a reorientation in how we may be accustomed to operating. “We should not be satisfied with the idea of just attracting audiences,” he says. “’Attract’ makes it sound like we’re at the high school dance. We let folks know that we’re going to be at the dance, but then we stand at the wall just waiting to be asked out onto the dance floor. That is way too passive.”

Lehrman encourages arts organizations to use the word “assert” instead. “Empty seats should get us mad. There is a high cost to empty seats,” he says. “How do we assert our desire to connect with audiences? That means changing not our audience but our own organizations.”


Kelsey Menehan is a writer, psychotherapist, and longtime choral singer based in San Francisco.

This article is drawn from a presentation by Matt Lehrman at Chorus America’s 2015 Conference in Boston and a follow-up interview. Lehrman, the principal at Audience Avenue LLC, helps arts and cultural organizations drive new pathways to greater audience engagement.