Episode 19: TAKE A NUMBER
[RUMSFELD]
"...because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns"
-- Donald Rumsfeld
What many people may have misunderstood at the time was that Donald was trying to communicate the perils of artist-community engagement.
Perhaps he knew that rocking up in a new town like Basrah required a more subtle approach than merely placing a callout in an email or on social media.
Maybe he had figured out that the common forms of community engagement was falling short, especially for the unknown unknowns.
[ORGANISTATION]
There are three main reasons why arts organisations care deeply about their audiences.
The first, as whimsical as it sounds, is true. Many people working in the arts want to share them. They think the arts are fab. They get a tremendous amount of joy from the arts and want everyone to feel that.
Honestly, if you stripped away everything else, this would be the core of every arts organisation. Even a cynic like me recognises that.
Without an audience, art is just a one sided conversation. A broadcast into the void. That isn't satisfying for any artist or organisation.
The second reason is less lovely.
It's money.
The third reason is also money.
As much as arts organisations would love to act through pure altruism, the reality is that it all runs on money. Money to pay staff and artists. Money to keep the building open and pay the bills. The heating. The electricity.
And this money has to come from two main sources. Audiences provide money through buying tickets to shows and getting drunk at the bar during the interval.
This is why, if you are trying to be a true patron of the arts, propping up the bar is your duty.
Your average arts organisation needs to tend to this audience. They need to cater to their needs and tastes, and they understand that audiences need constant upkeep. Sometimes audience members get old, or move away, you need new ones to replace them. Besides, every year there are thousands of young potential audience members being born. They don't even know what the world of art has to offer them yet!
This might seem a little like recruitment. That's because it is.
That said, we like to call it audience development.
Then there's the metric. The way in which funding bodies judge whether an arts organisation is worthy of public money.
The arts in the UK doesn't function without this subsidy. Without it we would only have art made by the wealthy. We would only have art enjoyed by the wealthy, serviced by the lucky.
It would be pretty grim for artists, but much worse for the audience.
The main metric we use to judge whether organisations deserve this money is what we call, "engagement".
It's a vague term, measured quantitatively and qualitatively at the same time.
Is half an engagement still an engagement? No one seems to know, exactly, but it is common knowledge that bigger numbers are better numbers.
Whilst you can just report the number of people in the audience, since it is safe to assume their presence demonstrates engagement, organisations also have to demonstrate that they are making efforts to reach people that don't already engage with the organisation. The reasons why they might not engage are many -- they might not know the organisation exists, they might know it exists, but they might think it isn't for them, they might think it is too expensive, it might actually be too expensive.
Really, community engagement is the twin sibling of audience development. Admittedly one sounds far more altruistic and less capitalistic.
And that leads us to the main question. How do organisations engage with the audiences they know, the audiences that they know they don't know and the audiences that they don't know that they don't know?
How do they Rumsfeld?
The majority of arts organisations are, somewhat necessarily, found at a fixed location. They operate from there in an outwards manner. That is to say, that they expect the audience to come to them.
This is how they interact with the community.
This isn't a bad thing at all. Nearly every social service works in this manner. Public houses, libraries, swimming pools and gyms. It makes sense since the machinery of production -- in the case of an arts organisation, the stage and lights and sound systems -- is difficult to transport, and being in a reliable location helps customers find things on a whim.
There are outliers to this, and many organisations offer a programme of work off-site and via alternative platforms, such as streaming. However, the audience for these offerrings remain similar to the ones that visit the site itself.
This is likely because the ways of publicising these alternatives still rely on the organisational infrastructure... newsletters, subscriber emails.
The people who are already interested in the events at these spaces are the most likely to encounter the events when they happen externally.
There are a few reasons why this isn't ideal for an arts organisation. In an altruistic manner, it means that some people are missing out on a resource in their community. There might be things that they'll miss, not because they wouldn't be interested but because they wouldn't know.
One way of countering this is to devolve the audience engagement to an agent that is far more flexible, lightweight and agile.
Artists.
[THAT'S BAIT]
The similarity between audience engagement and audience development does not necessarily reveal a cynical system, rather a symbiotic relationship.
An example of this is young people engagement.
On one hand there's an opportunity to introduce young people to the arts ecosystem. There are plenty of studies that show early exposure enables these children to grow into adults that feel they have a stake in the arts. It helps get them over that initial threshold and helps them feel ownership.
This aligns with the needs of the schools and educational syllabus. Art as a learning tool, as a vector for abstract and difficult concepts. Art as a focal point.
Plus, teachers might get an afternoon off by handing over a class. You should see the relief in their faces as they devolve the responsibility of keeping a hundred children focussed for an hour.
We might do that a few times a season whislt these soldiers man the trenches five days a week for most of the year.
Meanwhile, the organisation gets a chance to recruit a new generation of audience. An audience that frequently comes with parents too.
The important thing here is that this arrangement has to have value on both sides.
[EXPLOITATION]
Community engagement is not about treating a community as a resource to be mined or exploited. Communities are not the raw material for art.
Opinions, thoughts, feelings and lives should not be harvested in order to be presented back to the people they belong to.
Community engagement should be about providing value to the community the organisation or artist as working with.
And yes, that might be encouraging members of that community over the threshold and helping them to transition into an audience member.
But it might also be about enabling them to take part as co-creators, or facilitating representation in a community resource that is partly owned by them.
It's a tricky line to walk. Artists and organisations have to be especially careful in making sure their actions align with the rhetoric they use to refer to their work in the community.
It's easy for us to get wrapped up in funding speak and forget the purpose of all of this.
[PITFALLS]
If you follow the social media output of an arts organisation regularly you may have noticed something.
The same faces tend to appear in candid shots of community engagement activities.
These people are the known knowns.
They are the folk that regularly show up for events, shows, seminars, afternoon talks, workshops, community arts projects and hastily thrown together engagement sessions.
They have talked to artists about motherhood, aging bodies, the environment, slavery, their working lives, fifteenth century witchcraft, class structure, specific foods, food in general, and their favourite colour.
And this is not necessarily bad, but it is misleading. When an organisation reports back on how many people it has engaged with, these folk are counted multiple times.
The known knowns really deserve an award. They are the beating heart that keeps the arts infrastructure alive. Their reliable presence makes them easy to find, and working alongside them is often a genuine joy, mostly because they have far greater experience of community engagement than the artists that are trying to engage with them.
[THE KNOWN UNKNOWNS]
The main problem with community engagement is one of language.
"Community" is a difficult term. What defines a community? Is it a monolithic entity? Can someone be a member of a community and not want to be? Can someone be a member of more than one community? If you don't identify as being part of a community, does that mean you don't belong to it?
Similarly, "engagement" is a difficult term. What defined engagement? Is looking at something engagement? Is talking about something engagement? Do you have to like something to be engaged by it? Is there such a thing as bad engagement? Is one deep engagement worth more than a hundred shallow engagements, and if so, how do you measure that?
This has lead to a sort of data fetish. In lieu of actual answers, as an industry we've leant towards "bigger numbers are better numbers".
This quantified approach is particularly useful when reporting to funding bodies, since they have word counts on answers, but very few limits on the size of numbers you can type in a box.
As such, tools like the box office software, Spektrix, have become popular.
These tools help organisations analyse the data that they obtain through their box office. It's not just which shows are popular and which are less popular, but also which shows are popular with *who*.
Using postcode analysis and other metadata associated with user accounts, we can identify who isn't showing up at the arts organisations events.
These are the known unknowns.
Some inference can be made about the demographic of these people too. Age, sex, gender, ethnicity, class, household income.
Identifying and classifying these known unknowns is serious business. Spektrix, for example, sells a product that scales with ticket sales with reports of yearly charges between £12.5k to £250k for a single venue, depending upon ticket sales.
And the reason why arts organisations find this an acceptable solution is that it helps organisation evidence impact to funders.
It says so on the Spektrix site.
"Evidence Impact to Funders".
And so, if you identify an area that isn't showing up at the organisation and then make some changes so that they do show up, then you can demonstrate to funders that you are engaging with these communities.
Organisations will do this through a range of means. Structurally, programming and marketing can help. You can piggy back on cultural and religious events, everything from Diwali through to pantomime.
There's always a centenary of something.
Historical events located in those areas can also be featured in the programme, particularly if local schools can tie this into their curriculum.
All whilst making sure that any changes don't alienate the known knowns who already present as an audience.
[EMITTTING]
Unlike the organisations they are working within, artists are surprisingly mobile, in general.
They are expected to travel wherever the audience is, rather than expecting one to come to them.
This means they have just the right skillset that organisations can use to reach those known unknowns.
Using the organisation as a basecamp and working outwards. Wandering into communities and setting up workshops. Going and meeting with people to discuss work. Finding out about the world like an expeditionary force for engagement.
Artists are not normally trained in this. Certainly, some of them have read up on anthropological approaches and ethics of working in communities, but a great many just sort of wing it.
It can be like sending the soldiers to the front without any basic training.
You always know when you have been identified as a region rich in known unknowns when the artists arrive to tell you things about the place you live that you probably already know, but that are surprisingly new and important to them.
I know, I know, my cynicism is showing. But I grew up here with the witches. All my friends grew up here with the witches. Some of them are related to the witches. Yet every ten years an artist from elsewhere discovers the witches and tries to tell us why they are important, and ultimately why they are important for noticing this.
A wonderful discovery of witches.
On the whole though, arts organisations are just trying to get these people interested in art, and much like when starting a conversation with a stranger, it is much easier if you open with a question about what they think.
Hopefully, once you've recruited the new audience member by getting them to talk about themselves, you'll be able to keep them interested as they listen to other voices too. It doesn't always work, and people are more likely to hang around for work that is about themselves, but this isn't about the larger number, this is about reaching that one person who does hang around after the story of them is finished.
[INTERLUDE]
We went to Halfords today to pick up two tonne car ramps. That is to say each car ramp can hold one tonne of weight and that there are two of them.
We know this because we had a long discussion about it with the young person serving us at the till.
It didn't really matter since it is only likely to hold around two hundred kilograms at the most.
We talked about mixing imperial and metric units and why there is something uniquely British in not knowing how to convert them adequately.
The staff member asked us for our car registration number. We would get a 5% discount if we could hand it over.
I don't drive, I replied. We don't have a car.
He looked a little puzzled and asked what we were using the car ramps for.
"Well, it's like this, Gillian is going to stand at one end of a plank and..."
[UNKOWN UNKNOWNS]
It isn't that we are doing nothing. It is more that if it looks like we are doing nothing then we are doing what we are doing perfectly.
You could sit in a room with some people and say, "tell us your thoughts about..." and they would tell you their thoughts.
Many of them wouldn't listen to other people's thoughts because they would be too busy trying to work out what they thought.
They'd maybe even be worrying about whether what they thought made them sound foolish, so they might be subtly changing what they thought to match the rest of the room.
Humans do this. We like to fit in.
It's what make us adorable.
Maybe even the person being asked what they think wants to please us as artists. Maybe they want to give an elegant and artsy response. It might not be a true response, but they'll be helping us, surely?
The problem, you see, is context. By sitting in a room and talking about *the thing* there is no context around it, and often the context is the best bit.
We've got to be careful when trying to engage with people that we don't lead them, whether we mean to or not.
Besides, these methods are only any good at finding people that are known knowns or potentially known unknowns.
How do you encounter the unknown unknowns?
Tangentially.
Accidentally.
Obliquely.
Casually.
But above all, to do it whilst paying attention to the world. Look. Listen.
Strike up conversations everywhere with everyone. Not about what you are doing, or what your work is about, but what is happening for them right then in the real world.
Just talk to people and pay attention. They'll tell you everything.
In the shop talk to the cashier. Ask them how their day is, and listen to the reply.
Again, I can't stress this enough, the trick is to listen, not to broadcast.
Engage in conversation with people in the street. If this scares you, perhaps community engagement isn't really what you should be doing.
We have found the best way is to just go out into the world and move as if directed by Brownian motion. Start somewhere with no plan and see where you get to.
Create the opportunity for randomness. Let yourself be led by the conversation.
Later on, sit and think about it, place it in context. Maybe it it doesn't fit, that's OK too, nothing was wasted because you had a nice time chatting to a stranger. However, I'm willing to bet that in some small way it influenced you, that conversation, as you have gone about your engagement and as such it has influenced your work.
This is how you find the unknown unknowns, because you don't know.
The artists don't know. The arts organisations don't know. The funding bodies don't know.
And most importantly the unknown unknowns themselves do not know.
This is the work of the artist in a community, to discover, to listen and to contextualise. Not to prompt, survey and repackage.
