Audience development

What is it?

Audience development is relationship building at its best.

It is utilising people power and the power of people to increase exposure and awareness of your art form and organisation. It is building existing and potential audience bases, fan bases, patron support (donors and volunteers) by focusing on relationships, which will get the right kind of people more involved with your art form or arts organisation.

Audience Development, in a nutshell, is all about relationship building to achieve the “power of people” to support your art form. Consider it as building positive energy, people energy, to attract more support for you.  Audience development does take time to see results. It is a building process. Real audience development is not “bums in seats,” but rather “people in seats.” You want to get to know your audience and connect with them. If they feel connected and cared for, they will want to become more involved. It will take effort and persistence, but you will see the relationships you build start to form a positive community around your art. This community is the key to succeeding!

So who needs audience development?
Every artist and arts organisation needs audience development since every artist and arts organisation needs people power and the power of people. Every artist and arts organisation needs support.

Why do we need audience development if we are already doing marketing and pr?
Right now many people view audience development as an additional expense.  “If I already have marketing, why do I need audience development?”  or “We are needing to cut back, I simply can’t add audience development right now.”  or “I applied for a grant for audience development and received funding. We are working on doing it ourselves (but we are not sure what to do).”

Audience development is different from marketing because it uses the '4 C’s'.  If you do not have elements of connection, community, collaboration or caring, you are going to fall short on gaining the right audience for your art and/or organisation.

Is audience development expensive?
It may cost a little bit for hiring someone to guide you and help you with planning, but the overall costs are less than marketing. Now, if marketing is not working as well as it used to (mainly due to getting inundated with so many marketing pitches every day), why not try something different?  Why not try shifting some of your marketing budget into an audience development line?  You will not have to spend extra money. Instead you will be using your budget more wisely, placing money on a plan and programs that actually will work for a fraction of the cost of typical marketing.

The best way to use audience development is hand in hand with marketing, or at least with pr. Many artists and organisations decide to drop placing ads completely and simply use audience development combined with pr. And you know what? These artists and organisations are actually increasing their audiences and saving their budgets at the same time!

This information is extracted from an article by Shoshana Fanizza from Audience Development Specialists (ADS) in Colorado, US