12. How well are arts organizations targeting key audiences?

Digital and social media provide tremendous opportunities for audience segmentation and delivering messages crafted specifically according to constituents’ needs and interests. However, our results showed that most organizations are not making full use of this potential. All questions related to which audience segments respondents were targeting (whether related to age, geography, or behavioral factors) received a response of 90% or more (so, read as “everybody”). Organizations had their primary targets worked out a bit better, but this area also shows a lack of focused prioritization and a blanketing effect.

This paints a picture of organizations using digital communications somewhat indiscriminately, with respondents seeing the potential of these channels to reach larger audiences, but not necessarily more specific ones. We predict that this will change significantly over the course of the next few years as arts organizations begin to measure where they’re getting their highest levels of engagement, and attitudes catch up to the interactive nature of digital media.

Encouragingly, organizations are making use of digital channels to engage their fans and build communities of interest, mitigating the blanketing nature of the outgoing communications by showing a growing strength and commitment of resources in the area of interaction. A significant number of respondents are building communities of interest around education (31.1%), performance and programming (28.5%), and ticket offers (29.7%).

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