This repost fits perfectly with a series of posts that Doug Borwick and Amelia Northrup-Simpson are featuring this week on the relationship between engagement and marketing.

FILLING THE EMPTY SEATS FIRST II

In my first post in this series we talked about the last seat sold, the empty seat next to it, and what the person who showed up and the one who didn’t quite make it have in common. We in the arts talk a lot about new audiences, but we seldom take time to focus on exactly who these people are, how much they care about us, or why any of them might want to buy what we’re trying to sell.

And at the same time we complain bitterly about churn – the tendency among contemporary audiences to sample our wares without becoming regular or dependable customers. Having built our institutions on audiences of loyal, stable, committed patrons, we tend to view churn as a problem that needs to be overcome and we’re reluctant to accept the fact that churn and new audiences are essentially the same thing.

I used this diagram in my book to describe the place where churn and new audiences meet. The inner circle is the arts organization, of course, and everyone professionally associated with it. The first ring is the core support system of members, donors, subscribers and loyal patrons. The second ring is the somewhat less avid, but nonetheless vital population of regular patrons. And the third is the fickle, least avid, least committed audience of frustrating churners. So far, it’s a picture of the audience segments I described in my last post.

But the ring I’m most interested in is the outermost ring – the thin, light gray ring just beyond the third that identifies the relationship between old and new audiences. The folks who occupy this adjacent space are more likely than others to give us a try, but for some reason they haven’t yet stepped across the boundary to become part of the active third ring. Nothing, as far as I’m concerned, is more important than understanding how to motivate these people to cross that line.

I chose to illustrate new audiences this way for four reasons:

1. It is imperative that we begin thinking about audiences in terms of relative avidity – the further you move from the center, the less avid the customer’s interest in the product. New audiences who inhabit the fourth ring are even less avid than our third ring churners, but compared to the rest of humanity, they’re the only people out there who are likely to participate. This places them in a very specific position relative to our existing communities of customers.

2. The closeness of new audiences tells us exactly where to look for them. A lot of arts professionals dream of ideal but as yet untapped new audiences that look and act just like our super-avid base – but who exist in some mysterious realm that we haven’t yet figured out how to contact. Realistic marketers, meanwhile, know that new audiences lie just beyond the ragged, chaotic fringes of our universe of tepid dabblers.

3. Everything we need to know about motivating the fourth ring, we can learn from the third ring. Those who occupy the churn zone have the most in common with those who lie just beyond its boundaries so the more we know about churners and the more actively we use that knowledge to persuade new audiences, the more newcomers we’re likely to pull into the fold.

4. Our job as arts professionals is to persuade everyone within our four-ring universe to move toward the center. If we direct our persuasive energies to the outermost ring, it will naturally influence the inner three rings and draw everyone within our sphere of influence closer. But if we apply our persuasive energies only to the first two rings, which is what most of us do now, the third and fourth rings will remain uncommitted and elusive.

The lesson in all of this is that we have to love the churn. We have to create as much of it as we can, we have to learn everything it can teach us, we have to use what we learn to forge stronger bonds with uncommitted churners, and we have to apply what we learn to unpersuaded outsiders so we can lure more of them into the zone.

Or to put it in community engagement terms, we have to know and love the folks in – and just beyond – the churn zone as well as we know and love the folks in the super-avid base. Then we have to relate to them in a manner that is as personal, relevant and meaningful as the way we’ve been relating to avid arts lovers for the last fifty years.

I know it’s counterintuitive. No serious arts professional wants to believe that our future is dependent on investing in people who don’t currently care all that much about what we do, but it is. Our job now is to convince them we’re worth caring about – and then give them a damned good reason to continue caring once they’ve passed thorough our doors.

Churn, learn, love and earn.