Why community is the arts sector’s most powerful strategy

Imagine being able to invigorate and expand your customer base while simultaneously having a profound impact on the health and wellbeing of the people you serve. This is the extraordinary value of building community—a strategy that arts organizations are well-positioned to implement at a time when the need for connection has never been more potent, and the need for audience growth has never been more urgent.

Faced with steady audience decline and a rapidly changing world, it’s tempting for arts organizations to throw everything at the wall: join the race to expand digital offerings, hire the most renowned artists, engage the best—and most expensive—marketing agency. 

What if the solution isn’t pursuing the next big thing, but instead focusing on what’s not changing?

Centering customer needs

This is the strategy to which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos attributes his company’s astronomical success. The question he repeatedly returned to when building his empire was this: “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?” 

Unlike so many business leaders that spend their time fretting over an ever-evolving industry landscape and scrambling to incorporate the next great innovation, Bezos kept a laser focus on building a strategy around customer needs that remain constant over time. For Amazon, that meant low prices, vast selection, and rapid delivery—a three-pronged focus that helped Amazon reach a market value of $1 trillion in 2020.

This customer-focused approach offers business leaders a powerful compass, especially in times of uncertainty or rapid change. But for arts organizations, it’s a particularly powerful question: What audience needs will never change, no matter what disruption comes along?

Like our preferences for low prices and speedy delivery, our basic human desires for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness are never going away. Could addressing one of these elemental needs help arts organizations reverse audience decline?

Marketing expert Mark Schaefer says, emphatically, yes. In his 2023 book, Belonging to the Brand, Schaefer presents compelling evidence that companies who are struggling to attract and retain customers can breathe new life into their brands by providing a solution to the deepest human need: the desire to belong. 

“The profound crisis of belonging,” he writes, “has become a global health disaster.” 

An epidemic of loneliness

According to a 2019 survey by YouGovAmerica, the number of Americans who say they often feel lonely has risen from 20% in the 1980s to 40%. In fact, a full 22% of millennials say they simply have no friends. 

Nowhere is this issue more profound than with teens. According to the Journal of Adolescence, adolescent loneliness doubled across the globe between 2012 and 2018. And that was before the COVID-19 shutdowns.

What’s behind this surge in loneliness? Theories abound—many of them centering around the rise of technology and social media—but one thing is certain: “Our experience of community has changed in a single generation,” writes Charles Vogl in The Art of Community.

Traditional social institutions have been eroding for decades. The time that the average American spent in “organizational life” decreased by more than 30% between 1965 and 1995.

The result? 

While the size of our social media networks has increased exponentially, the average American’s real-life social network has decreased by one-third, says a study in the American Sociological Review. 

It’s a stark contrast to the days before social media, cellphones, and the internet. In How We Gather, Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston describe a cultural shift where “virtual interconnectivity is more immediate than the ‘real’ world,” and millennials feel more comfortable “setting up a Kiva loan to a farmer in Kenya than bringing chicken soup to a neighbor.”

Yet, science shows us that the human need for social connection is “a biological and social imperative rooted in thousands of years of human evolution.” In short, we are wired to connect—because being in community with others helped our early ancestors survive. Literally.

In 2023, our physical and mental wellbeing still hinges on connection. “Our bodies read isolation,” writes U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, “as an emergency.”

Your target audiences urgently need meaningful community. And this is really good news for the arts sector. Arts organizations who are seeking innovative ways to increase their relevance and grow their audiences now have an opportunity to step into this gap and play a critical role in addressing this crisis of belonging. 

It’s time for a change

Let’s face it, our collective attempts at arts marketing and audience development in recent decades have provided lackluster results at best. 

For years, the arts sector has grappled with the leaky bucket of negative substitution—in short, consumers who fit the profile of the typical arts patron are leaving the market faster than arts organizations can replace them. As communities get more and more demographically diverse, there are increasingly fewer potential patrons who fit that traditional profile.

The arts sector has clung to an “in the world but not of it” approach to marketing for years, centering their strategy around artistic excellence and cultural refinement. But this approach is no longer working with our increasingly diverse communities, who define culture much more broadly than previous generations.

Arts organizations are also struggling with the fact that consumers have become increasingly resistant to any kind of marketing, actively seeking ways to bypass or ignore it. The rise of ad-blockers, subscription-based content platforms, and on-demand entertainment reflects this growing rebellion. 

Mark Schaefer argues that consumers are craving authentic connections and meaningful experiences, demanding that brands earn their attention and trust. This shift in consumer behavior demands a fresh approach that discards one-way promotional messages in favor of genuine engagement and relevance.

Meaningful community, Schaefer says, is the only path forward.

A following is not a community

A word of caution: Do not tally your thousands of social followers and conclude “we’ve got a vibrant community!” A following is not a community. Here’s how Mark Schaefer explains it:

Brand connection and loyalty is measured on a continuum. The weakest end of the continuum is your social media following. This is your reach, and it merely represents your potential. Just because they follow you doesn’t mean they will buy a ticket, subscribe, or donate. However, each of your followers has the potential to transition into the next level on the continuum.

In the middle of the connection continuum is your audience. These people have opted in to your message; have agreed to allow you to put your content directly into their inbox. This is a more direct, reliable connection. You can track if they’re actually engaging with your emails, and you can contact them directly.

On the other end of the continuum is community—the highest level of emotional connection to a brand or organization. A true community provides a safe space for meaningful conversations with like-minded people. It provides consumers the opportunity to get to know each other—the chance to “see and be seen”—around a common purpose or shared values. It’s about bringing people together and building relationships.

As Charles Vogl writes, “People don't feel connected to your community because they joined a big crowd…They feel connected because of the individual conversations, private moments, and vulnerability that they experience with other participants.”

The ROI of community

What benefits can an organization glean from investing in community building? Mark Schaefer points to several.

First, a community provides the opportunity for brand differentiation—which is especially valuable for organizations that find themselves lost in the homogeneous ecosystem of classical music. 

A community also allows for better market relevance. Knowing your customers well provides ongoing inspiration for customer-centric innovation. Plus, it’s much easier to engage in social listening—and to gather data about your customers—when they’ve opted in to a community.

Additionally, in a world where younger audiences are leaving social platforms in favor of more intimate communities, both online and in person, a brand community provides easy access to this demographic.

Organic advocacy is another result of investing in a brand community. Members who are benefiting from the connections they’ve built are going to talk about it! And research shows that consumers are much more trusting of communications that come from other consumers than that which comes from the brand directly. An added benefit: community-generated advocacy can reduce traditional marketing costs significantly.

Involvement in a brand community also creates a sense of ownership which builds an eagerness to collaborate and contribute to the brand. This provides the opportunity to cultivate volunteers, board members, and community advisory boards.

Finally, loyalty becomes a valuable factor to customer retention. An engaged community member is going to think long and hard before saying farewell to the relationships and social capital they’ve built in your brand community.

In short, writes Schaefer, “When customers belong to your brand, they’ll stick with you in hard times, spend more, and spread your story better and farther than any advertising you could ever buy.”

Building real community

Here’s the good news: While younger generations are shirking the traditional institutions of the past, according to ter Kuile and Thurston, they are seeking—and creating—new ways of gathering. They’re gathering in makerspaces, co-working hubs, dinner parties, fitness boot camps, and fan communities.

What drives them? The desire for community, personal transformation, social transformation, purpose, creativity, and accountability. They’re seeking ways to invest in themselves and their world.

So how can arts organizations build authentic community that addresses these needs in meaningful ways?

Because, unfortunately, there are countless examples of arts organizations promising “membership” or “community” but not delivering on that promise. Advance ticket ordering, discounts, access to working rehearsals, free ticket exchanges, or even behind-the-scenes experiences does not amount to real community.

As Ana Andjelic writes in Harvard Business Review, “Loyalty programs—that effectively bribe people into buying more of your products—are lazy. In the modern aspiration economy, people develop true brand affinity only when it gives them a sense of community.”

Brands who build a loyal customer base understand the difference between convincing customers to buy products—a merely transactional connection—and inspiring customers to invest in themselves—a much more powerful emotional connection.

A meaningful community that creates this emotional connection, writes Charles Vogl, helps members grow, feel more connected, work together toward a shared goal, and have fun doing it. And he outlines seven principles that make this possible.

To read Part II, click here.