Changing audience and arts participation behaviors stems from each arts provider’s commitment to audience and community as a fundamental part of their beliefs and values.

Audiences and arts participation cannot be sustained by any set of tools, techniques or process if the work doesn’t merit sustained engagement. Certain techniques and clever tricks can get audiences, but cannot keep them. Integral to any high-quality arts experience and connection is work that is interesting, thoughtful, appropriately challenging and provocative, well crafted and displayed – indeed entertaining and satisfying. Not everything succeeds, nor do audiences expect constant success. What they do expect is consistency in integrity and effort or they won’t come back, no matter how clever the sales device.

The basis of an audience’s connection to an arts activity or experience is meanings – any person will participate in an arts activity if the activity or experience is meaningful. If anything else is more meaningful, whether playing video games or doing nothing, he will not participate in the arts activity. Today people invest their time, resources and energy in those things that are meaningful personally, culturally or experientially. Consequently our audiences have become so diverse, variegated and complex that assumptions or expectations about a given audience based on outward appearance is no longer useful. Rather, within and across the wide range of audiences, meanings (or that which is meaningful) are far more significant and telling. Perhaps the biggest change in recent years is that what is meaningful defies, even sometimes contradicts, our traditional ways of categorizing audiences by demographics. Today we can understand more by the way audiences behave in pursuit of or in response to meanings than the way that audience looks.

As a practical matter, increasing overall audience participation, in both numbers and repetition, is central to the financial well being and ongoing capabilities of each organization, not to mention the mental health of the arts provider. The long-term demands of increasing and enhancing arts participation cannot be sustained unless the arts provider maintains a healthy and balanced economic equation along with vision and programming ideas.