In the United States, calls for more diverse, equitable, and inclusive cultural organizations pre-date the murder of George Floyd in 2020, but many organizations began to pay particular attention to those calls after that focusing event. As a result, many organizations have engaged in professional development and strategic planning focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). However, many of those organizations failed to make meaningful and sustainable change (Heidelberg, 2020). Instead, a significant number of cultural organizations engaged in various forms of fakequity – where they made claims about what they intended to do, but never fully acted upon those promises (Okuno, 2015). Other organizations engaged in good faith efforts but lacked the capacity to identify and address inequitable practices in ways that allowed any progress they made to be sustainable (Heidelberg, 2019). This paper argues that a significant factor of failed equity attempts are tactics that are incongruous with the organization’s culture.

This paper connects research on organizational culture and change with the literature on organizational assessment to address a gap in organizational equity investigations: methodological approaches that identify and assess both organizational culture and organizational equity. The paper weaves together organizational change management and organizational assessment literatures to discuss how organizations invested in making meaningful and sustainable change must identify and incorporate institutional history and organizational culture. This is especially true when crafting managerial and procedural changes designed to increase elements of diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the organization. This paper discusses the construction and testing of an organizational assessment tool designed to unearth information about both the organization’s culture and its capacity for sustainable equity work. The paper first introduces the theoretical framework for the tool then focuses on how the tool was constructed and has been used in seven different cultural organizations. The paper then provides follow-up information on how each organization has fared in their equity efforts after receiving results. The paper concludes with recommendations for further exploration into how organizational culture and organizational assessments can be used to further organizational equity work in cultural organizations.

References:
Heidelberg, B. 2019. “Evaluating Equity: Assessing Diversity Efforts Through a Social Justice
Lens.” Cultural Trends 28:5, 391-403.

Heidelberg, B. 2020. “Artful Avoidance: Initial Considerations for Measuring Diversity Resistance
in Cultural Organizations.” In K. M. Thomas, ed., Diversity Resistance in Organizations, 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge.

Okuno, E. 2015. Equity Matters. Accessed November 22 2023. https://fakequity.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/fakiequit5.jpg.

This paper presents findings from a multi-method, multi-year study of a five-year audience-building initiative. National statistics on arts attendance in the United States show stagnant or declining attendance at multiple art forms in which nonprofit organizations work (NEA 2015, 2018). The Wallace Foundation’s Building Audiences for Sustainability initiative (BAS) awarded nearly $41 million in grants between 2015 and 2019 to explore audience-building challenges and the connection between building audiences and financial sustainability. The Foundation awarded grants to twenty-five large nonprofit performing arts organizations from different artistic disciplines to try to engage new audiences while retaining existing ones and to see whether audience-building efforts contribute to organizations’ financial health.
After awarding the BAS grants, The Wallace Foundation awarded a grant to The University of Texas at Austin to independently study the implementation and outcomes of the organizations’ audience-building projects (the author is study’s Principal Investigator). The aim of the study was to help advance the current literatures (on audience building and on the relation between audience building and financial health), and to identify insights from these organizations’ experiences that could help other arts organizations seeking to expand their own audiences. That said, the BAS organizations were large, established nonprofits, whose issues clearly resonate more widely with similar organizations, but not necessarily for other types of arts organizations.
The study followed the organizations over the five-year period and beyond, with final data collection efforts concluding in 2022, permitting us to see what became of their efforts after the initiative’s conclusion, and in the wake of dramatic changes in circumstances due to COVID-19 pandemic closures. As part of the study, we undertook three major sets of qualitative and quantitative data collection. This included conducting over 300 in-depth personal interviews with organizational staff and leaders (e.g., executive directors, artistic directors, marketing staff, board heads and others); collecting survey data for almost 20,000 arts attendees; and compiling multiple years of ticket database data. This multi-method approach allowed us to explore project implementation and outcomes, and to examine the goals and perspectives of the organizational leaders and staff in the projects. The multi-year nature of the study permitted us to explore changes over time.
Participants included theater companies, dance companies, opera companies, performing arts presenters, and symphony orchestras. Organizations’ projects differed, as did the audiences they sought to recruit, which variously included millennial and Gen X audiences; more racially and ethnically diverse audiences; audiences for new and less familiar works; geographically based audiences; infrequent attendees (hoping to motivate them to attend more often); and others. All organizations, however, worked within the initiative’s continuous learning framework, involving an iterative process of project design, analysis, and assessment of changes needed for improvement. Within that framework, many approached grant funding as risk capital for experimentation with new and varied approaches.
This paper presents overarching findings from the study’s forthcoming final report and considers approaches that proved to be effectives and equally important, those that proved not to be. The paper presents findings related to:
• Assumptions, perspectives, and goals informing audience-building efforts among these large nonprofit performing arts organizations.
• Opportunities and challenges experienced with various audience-building approaches (such as those involving, marketing content and vehicles, programming)
• Audience-building experiences and outcomes associated with pursuit of different audiences (such as efforts to attract millennial and Gen X audiences, audiences for new work—see above).
• Relationships between changes in the “target audiences” the organizations specifically sought to attract and overall audience changes.
• Financial correlates of audience gains.
When organizations completed their projects in 2019, little could anyone imagine that performing arts venues would soon be shuttered by a global COVID-19 pandemic. As performing arts organizations have re-opened, the challenges of audience and financial sustainability remain all too relevant. We hope findings can help inform conversations about addressing these challenges. And on a closing note: In our literature reviews for the project (Ostrower and Calabrese 2019) the International Journal of Arts Management turned out to be the journal with the largest number of articles on audience building, so I would particularly welcome the opportunity to share study findings at AIMAC.


References Cited in Abstract*

National Endowment for the Arts. 2015. A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002–2012, NEA Research Report Number 58. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts.

_________.2018. U.S. Trends in Arts Attendance and Literary Reading: 2002–2017: A First Look at Results from the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts.

Ostrower, Francie and Calabrese, Thad. 2019. Audience Building and Financial Health in the Nonprofit Performing Arts: Current Literature and Unanswered Questions. Austin, TX: University of Texas.

Ostrower, Francie. 2020. “Nonprofit Arts Organizations: Sustainability and Rationales for Support,” Chapter 19 in Walter W. Powell and Patricia Bromley, eds., The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook Third Edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

*References are for citations in this abstract. The study involved an extensive literature review (see Ostrower and Calabrese above), with a list of references that would exceed the allotted space (but may be found at https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/pages/audience-building-and-financial-health-nonprofit-performing-arts.aspx)