Creating Demand

Consider the following facts:

1.  The number of nonprofit arts organizations have increased significantly over the last few decades.

The NEA Survey on Arts Participation gives us the following:

2.  The majority of participants for the arts they surveyed are white, well educated and have incomes between 50K and 150K or over.

3.  Participation in the arts are in decline across the field.  There are a few exceptions, like musical theatre, but mostly decline.  

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Peter Drucker, a legendary management guru, said that a good business creates demand.

All the evidence points to a simple conclusion, the arts are not creating demand. 

There are some exceptions to this of course, some groups are actively creating demand, but as a collective field we still struggle with this.

We are building more and more organizations to serve the existing, shrinking, demand for what we do.

When I talk about diversity in the context of the arts, what I'm really talking about is creating new demand for art.

The bread and butter audience, the middle aged, relatively wealthy, audience is tapped out.  That's to be expected.  They have been filling our seats and dealing with our funding requests for more then three decades now. 

Many of them are just plain tired.

Tired of our continous need for funding.

Tired of being invited to 100 artistic events a year that they can't possibly make it too.

We have dipped into that particular demographic well over and over and over and over again.

Our future depends on our ability to find new "wells" and embracing diversity is a key part of that effort.

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The good news is that when your audience is as homogenous as ours typically is there are plenty of places where you can go to create demand.

You can leverage your diversity efforts toward age, class, gender, race, socio-economic background, whatever.

But not doing anything simply isn't a good option.  All that does is leave you in a fight for a piece of a small pie.

And since you are going to be having that fight with organizations that are better known and more resourced then you, that's a tough fight to win.

Create your own definition of diversity and pursue it.  Look at other fields and see how they have had success in diversifying their workforce and other areas.  Call your colleagues in the field that are having some success and ask for advice.

Note:  At my day job the diversity efforts had led to increased audiences and recognition from Actor's equity .  Want to know how it happened?  Email me and I'll tell you everything I know.  I'm a little biased, but I really do think my day job does it right.

The future is in front of us.  Let's make this decade the time when we embrace it.

Comments

[Damon Runnals]

I run a small theatre company in Minneapolis. I'd be very interested in how you made the recognition happen. I don't have your email address so I'm posting a comment here. Please feel free to email me with your "biased" opinion. :)

[Adam]

Damon, email me at mission.paradox@yahoo.com

Adam