From the road: conversations about intrinsic impact, part 1

For the past couple of weeks, I've gotten to travel to five of the six cities that are taking part in our big intrinsic impact study, and it's been a truly fascinating process. As a part of this work, we are sitting down with the artistic, marketing and management staff of each of the participating theaters for two hours to talk through the survey protocol and, more generally, to talk about where research, and specifically research about audience feedback, falls into the artistic selection process. Boy, do responses vary.

In some cases, the staff seem to have a healthy conversation going with their audiences, creating what researcher Alan Brown, who is conducting the study via his firm WolfBrown, calls a "feedback loop." In other cases, the response seems muddy, and often indicates that the internal conversation about this question hasn't yet happened - or at least that a coherent consensus hasn't yet been reached. And then there are the companies that have a very clear view of things, and that view is that audience feedback sits nowhere near artistic selection.

I don't know that there is a right answer here, although coming at it from a marketing point of view I see some real downsides to not at least taking audience feedback, especially the type of "intrinsic effects" feedback we are talking about in this study, into account at all. After one of the meetings, Alan talked to me about how he is fascinated by those maverick artistic directors who don't really engage in a conversation with their audiences, but manage to succeed (sometimes fabulously). Artists like that exist, and their existence is fantastic - they are able to build experiences that audiences don't even know they want. These people remind me of visual artists like Pollock, Picasso and Van Gogh, who created from their own vision, and who managed to tap into the public's vision over time.

What is hard for me is that it seems clear that for every Van Gogh, there are thousands of artists out there who don't quite hit the zeitgeist, but think they will. When you loop it back to theatre, these are the leaders of theatre companies who think they are thisclose to being visionaries, to creating monumental work, but are in fact creating a bunch of insulated work that isn't really connecting. Maybe these artists are aware of this problem but don't feel that changing is a valid way forward. Or (more likely, I think) maybe these artists don't actually know whether or not their work is affecting in the ways they want it to be.

Ultimately, of course, the work becomes unsustainable if no one will pay to see it. But what if incorporating just a little hat tip to the audience's emotional, intellectual and social connection - seeing how, as we will be able to do with this intrinsic impact study, the audience's experience matches up against the goals of what theatre companies want them to experience - could shift that trajectory and make that many more successful pieces, that many more affecting experiences?

I'm interested in hearing how the conversation evolves over the year, and discovering who uses this information and how. We are prepared for some companies to simply set these results on a shelf and never look at them, though we hope that won't be the case. But even if in the end the leaders of a company decide that this type of work isn't their cup of tea, hopefully they'll figure out why they are resistant, and what the perceived threat is, and how real it is. That's a conversation, and in this case, that's success.

Taking Intrinsic Impact to the Next Level

This morning, in You've Cott Mail (which if you aren't subscribed to, you should be!), Thomas Cott highlighted an article from the Guardian UK about some work being done there on measuring the emotional response of audiences to theatre. What was so interesting about the article is that it mirrors some major research we’re about to launch here at Theatre Bay Area and in six cities across the US.

The article is a summary of a new effort in the UK to measure the emotional response of audiences to art. Working with WolfBrown, the research firm that piloted a lot of this intrinsic impact research (as it’s called), we’ll be building a similar survey and doing follow-up research with 25 theatre companies in six cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New York, and Charleston). Throughout the 2010/2011 season, we, with arts service organization partners in each city (LA Stage Alliance, Theatre Puget Sound, ART/New York, League of Chicago Theatres, League of Charleston Theatres), will be working with the theatre companies to set intrinsic impact goals for three productions in a season, measure the effect of each of those productions using the survey, and then generate a final report for each company and work through, with the artistic, administrative and marketing staff, the implications of the research and how it matches (or doesn’t match) the company's hoped-for goals.

In addition, as part of this work, we’ll be developing a web-based interface that we hope will eventually allow any theatre across the country access to an affordable, fee-for-service program in intrinsic impact. Companies will be able to produce the survey themselves, learn how to set goals for the various axes of intrinsic impact, and then log the results themselves and see how they stack up. They’ll be able to develop a portfolio of their impact on their audiences, with a lot of possible implications as more companies participate. Over time, by making this an affordable service [which it currently decidedly is not – this research project, with projected generous funding from three national foundations and assorted local foundations (more news on that once the contracts are signed), will have a total budget upwards of $400,000], we hope to provide companies with a new way of measuring the effectiveness of their work on audiences. In addition, we hope these measurements eventually will become an alternative way of demonstrating worth to funders, audiences and trustees.

Our work will begin over the summer as staff from Theatre Bay Area and WolfBrown begin traveling to the partner cities, identifying theatre companies with the partner ASOs, and beginning the induction process. We’re incredibly excited about this new work – especially now that we see that there’s a parallel effort going on in the UK. We expect to be able to report out on this, at least preliminary results, in time for our Annual Conference next spring, and plan on doing final reporting on the project at TCG and NAMP in 2011.

P.S. As some of you know, we did a pilot of this project a few years ago around Free Night. The results of that pilot are available here. It’s the report called "Assessing the Intrinsic Impact of the Bay Area Free Night of Theater Program."