Episode 1: Audience Feedback and Artistic Reflection with Alan Brown and Wendy Were

Written By Patternmakers

What is the role of audience feedback in an artistically driven organisation?

In this episode Tandi is joined by renowned audience research Alan Brown, and Executive Director, Strategic Development and Advocacy at the Australia Council, Wendy Were. They discuss how arts organisations gather data from audiences and how negative feedback can be fuel for great conversations.

Large Blog Banners (4).png

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

Guests

Alan Brown

Alan Brown is a leading researcher and management consultant in the non-profit arts industry. His work focuses on understanding consumer demand for cultural experiences and helping cultural institutions, foundations and agencies see new opportunities, make informed decisions and respond to changing conditions. His studies have introduced new vocabulary to the lexicon of cultural participation and propelled the field towards a clearer view of the rapidly changing cultural landscape. Alan is the founder of CultureLab, an international consortium of arts consultants who aim to build a bridge between academic research and everyday practice, and to speed the diffusion of promising practice into the cultural sector. 

Prior to his consulting career, Alan served for five years as Executive Director of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, where he presented Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and many other artists. He holds three degrees from the University of Michigan: a Master of Business Administration, a Master of Music in Arts Administration and a Bachelor of Musical Arts in vocal performance.

Wendy Were

Dr Wendy Were was appointed the Executive Director, Strategic Development and Advocacy at the Australia Council for the Arts in 2014. Previously CEO at West Australian Music, Business Advisor with the Creative Industries Innovation Centre, Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Sydney Writers’ Festival. Wendy also holds a PhD in Literature.

Wendy has wide-ranging experience in arts management, curation and business development and a track record in championing the development of sustainable career paths for Australia’s artistic workers. She has worked in the sector for 20 years.

Key points

This episode covers:

  • The role of audience feedback in artistic decision-making

  • Whether arts managers should be required to be researchers

  • How to prepare yourself for negative feedback from audiences and what it means

  • Why some artistic leaders are hungry for audience input, and others aren’t

  • The potential for audience feedback data to be misused by funders and funded organisations

  • Why achieving a state of flow is the gateway to impact for audiences

  • Where it's really helpful to get audience feedback, and where it isn’t

  • Why building the critical skills of your audience is a long-term investment in your organisation.

Links

Key resources mentioned in the episode:

 

All episodes

Transcript

Tandi:               Today my co-interviewer is Wendy Were, Executive Director of Strategic Development and Advocacy at the Australia Council for the Arts. Thanks for joining us on the podcast, Wendy.

Wendy:            Thank you for having me.

Tandi:               Now, I understand you were previously CEO at West Australian Music, Business Advisor with the Creative Industries Innovation Centre, and Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Sydney Writers Festival. I also know that you have a PhD in Literature.

Wendy:            All of that is true.

Tandi:               In my second life I think I would like a PhD in Literature. What kind of attracted you to your role at the Australia Council, and for those who don't know what does that involve?

Wendy:            So, to answer the second question first, I was asked to ... my role involves a number of things. I affectionately refer to it in the very technical way of the non-grantee bit. So, my colleagues in the executive team have oversight over organizational funding, and funding in competitive grant rounds, and [fascinations] arts, and my area is the bit that looks at the strategy and development in the short-hand. So, I look after communications and advocacy. I look after research and knowledge management. I look after international development. I look after capacity building, where we run some very successful leadership programs. I have strategy and planning, and I also have government relations.

Wendy:            So, I think that's the kind of roll call. And in terms of what attracted me to the Australia Council, it's interesting because I've worked in the sector for 20 years and you've mentioned a few of the roles that I've had. I've always been ... my father was an engineer and my mother was an artist. I think I've had those two worlds collide in me. So, I can do the CEO stuff, but I can also do the artistic direction and piece as well.

Wendy:            And when I was approached to join the leadership team for the Australia Council when it was being re-made, after the 2012 review, that seemed a pretty exciting opportunity to take up. So, I joined almost six years ago and I've been on the roller coaster that is the Australia Council ever since.

Tandi:               Fantastic. Well, it sounds like a big job. A fun job, and a job I'm sure many in the sector will aspire to have one day. Look, thanks for coming along to the podcast. Today we're going to be interviewing Alan Brown, who is somewhat of a legend in audience research, among audience research.

Alan:                I hate being called "a legend."

Tandi:               Well, according to your bio, you are a leading researcher and management consultant in the non-profit arts industry. Your work focuses on understanding consumer demand for cultural experiences, and helping cultural institutions, foundations, and agencies see new opportunities, make informed decisions, and respond to changing conditions. And I love this part ... your studies have introduced new vocabulary to the lexicon of cultural participation and propelled the field towards the clearer view of the rapidly changing cultural landscape.

Tandi:               I think that's certainly true and I know your work has been a great inspiration to many of us [geeks] and it's a real pleasure to have you join us today, Alan.

Alan:                Thank you, Tandi. It's delightful to be here in Sydney and to see you.

Tandi:               So, Alan, to start us off, can you tell us a little bit about, what inspired you in this career and sparked your interest in audiences and audience research, and how that's kind of propelled you forward over time?

Alan:                How much time do we have? Thank you. Well, I started life as a singer. I'm from a kind of musical family and being involved in choir really saved my childhood, it gave me something to do. I was a really monumental geek, nerd; very introverted child. And being involved in choir from a young age really changed my life. So, I followed that track through high school and into university as a voice ... vocal performance major. There was only one little problem with that, which is I had no talent at all.

Alan:                But my favourite subject in college was Schenkerian analysis of atonal music. You know, where you paste up musical scores on the wall and you sort of draw circles around sections and you sort of analyse music in a visual space, and there was something about that just fascinated me, and really all of music theory. So, I graduated ... my college training prepared me for a career in food service, which is actually true. I graduated and worked in restaurants for a couple of years.

Alan:                I was so fortunate to get a job running a small arts festival when I was 26 years old. I was mentored by an amazing man who was so incredibly generous. At the time I didn't realize how fortunate I was. But I had to learn the whole business of presenting; how to book theatre, dance, music, artists; how to market them, how to fundraise, how to liaise with the board of directors, and all at a very young age. That was just an explosive growth opportunity. I was so fortunate.

Alan:                The highlight of my young career as a presenter was presenting Ella Fitzgerald in concert, and meeting her, and just being touched by her greatness was amazing. But I went on to university back for a business degree, and it wasn't until I wandered into Statistics 101 that I discovered what the Lord designed me to do. And literally, I mean, we all have our calling and I didn't really find mine until I was really 30, almost 30 years old. I just discovered that I could do data analysis and I was really happy spending time in spreadsheets and eventually SPSS and statistical analysis. So, I just naturally found that and then got a job as an entry level consultant, working in a small arts management consulting firm.

Alan:                I did grunt work on feasibility studies for new arts facilities for years. And just naturally drifted into research. And taught myself methods. I mean, it's really scandalous, I should have a PhD in sociology. And I regret not having more schooling in research methods, because I had to learn myself.

Tandi:               I think it is never too late.

Alan:                That's right. Exactly.

Tandi:               Maybe an honorary qualification is more up your alley at this stage.

Alan:                Yeah. So, I gradually drifted into research, learned methods, learned from scholarly researchers through collaborating and at the time there were not ... arts research really wasn't a thing in 1990. And it's really still an emerging field. But it's diversified. There's so many wonderful researchers now all around the world doing wonderful work. So, I kind of live in the space between research, the theory of research a scholarly pursuit, and the front line arts researchers much like you, Tandi, who are actually running arts organizations and need to make very practical decisions about what to do and trying to empower arts practitioners to be curious and to reach out to research, and to just be curious and to learn as much as they can from research.

Tandi:               Now your practice over the years has involved a lot of I guess what we would call in the sector, quant, or quantitative analysis, surveying, I know-

Alan:                Yeah.

Tandi:               ... is one of your key ... Can you tell us a little bit about some of the techniques, I guess, that are really common in your work, and exactly what goes on in, kind of, executing that?

Alan:                Yeah. Well, there's so many different areas of research in our little niche sector, you know? There's obviously studying audiences and even within that there's whole different veins of work. But there's also studying communities and in the realm of quantitative analysis, really designing surveys for the general public to share their patterns, their interests, their participation patterns, their own creative interests. And developing a body of work around sort of profiling the general public in terms of their arts interests has been an area of work of mine for a number of years; not so much anymore.

Alan:                I mean, we have the big national studies of arts participation, but you know, that just scratches the surface of what people really do. But then in the area of applied research ... and applied research just means that research that's done with a specific practice in mind to really kind of address the practice of a specific organization, or the field. We've really developed lots of tools over the years of surveying patrons about their experiences as audience members. And that's been one vein of my work, has really been engaging patrons in expressing the experience they had with art. How are they affected emotionally, socially, aesthetically, intellectually with art?

Alan:                But also that's of interest to some arts organizations, maybe not so many others, but there are other applied research methods for audience members. So, for example, profiling audience members in terms of how they like to prepare and how they like to make meaning from the work afterwards. And sort of the whole idea of engagement. Which is really kind of a whole area of inquiry that is not well developed. We're seeing very different typologies. There are a lot of people who actually don't want to prepare at all, because they prefer to go in with this sort of blank slate to be ... to allow for the element of surprise. So, they're very consciously not preparing. And then there are other people who love to prepare. They want to read everything in advance. They want to know not just the plot if it's a play, but they want to have the background on the comp- you know?

Alan:                There's very different modalities of engaging. And then afterwards there are people who just want to be quiet and go home and reflect privately. And there are other people who want to dive in and argue with their spouse about what was it that we just saw? And they want to make meaning and ... So, I think as a whole field this is a really rich area of trying to understand human behaviour around arts and how do people make sense of arts. How do they want to manage the experience? So, that's an area of inquiry. We develop survey protocols to get at that, and develop using cluster ... sorry, geeky stuff ... cluster analysis, factor analysis, to develop typologies of arts patrons in terms of their engagement preferences.

Alan:                But also, really, the deepest frontier, I think, is understanding people's preferences and tastes for art. Like, lord only knows we all need a better sense of how public taste and art are shifting, because it affects every organization. And audiences show up to arts programs having all these experiences in their lives, watching television shows, you know? It's like what is the effect of the reality television shows on public tastes in art? Right? I mean, good, interesting question. I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that.

Wendy:            I am equally interested in that, Alan. I think the other thing that is intriguing me at the moment is in a world where our tastes are being curated increasingly by algorithms and what that means for us being able to explore and experiment with new forms of art, is the likelihood that we're going to be continually fed a steady diet of what an algorithm thinks we like …what’s your thoughts on that?

Alan:                Yeah. Wow. Well, before I die I'd love to do a study of the effect on the human brain of listening to music in random order, which is how billions of people are listening to music; with an algorithm as their DJ and they don't know what's coming next. I think literally our brains change when we're listening to music. It's like, sorry, the title of that study ... I've already worked it out. It's called Jackpot, because I actually believe it's gam- it's the psychology of gambling of random reward.

Alan:                And sometimes you're listening to music and actually the next piece that comes on actually is your favourite piece and your brain secretes serotonin and it changes your brain chemistry. I think this is ... anyway ... so interesting. I think it has a profound effect on orchestras and how they program, chamber music ensembles ... how they think about playing music and formats that are continuous where the last note of one song is the first note of the next song. Anyway, there's so much rich territory there for research.

Alan:                But back to your question, you wanted ... Anyway, we've developed, over the years, tools. I mean, Tandi, you and I collaborated on a study ten years ago.

Tandi:               Coming up that long, I think.

Alan:                For the Australia Council, the Australia Council was interested in impact and intrinsic impact and specifically developing, piloting methods of surveying audience members about their experience right afterwards. And we did it ... was it the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra?

Tandi:               The TSO and State Theatre Company of South Australia.

Alan:                Right.

Tandi:               ... were our pilot organizations.

Alan:                And we were just starting and we had developed the surveys and then we didn't even have a dashboard tool at the time. We just worked in Excel and anyway, it was a great experience. But that work has gone on and developed and we now have really solid online tools that link directly to the survey software. We use Survey Gizmo through an API, and so the dash- audience members take the survey, the data goes into Survey Gizmo, it's extracted into our dashboard tool, and arts managers can show up at work the day after and log in and see what audiences are saying about last night's performance in their dashboard tool. And their data just aggregates over time in the dashboard and it becomes a resource. But now we're requiring arts managers to actually be researchers, because they have to look at data, and they have to query data, and they have to actually conceptualize questions to ask their dashboard.

Alan:                That's a skill I'd love to talk about with you. Are we asking too much of arts managers to be researchers in this way? Is this a reasonable request? What do you think?

Tandi:               Well, I think that's a topical thing to talk about. I certainly can see many of my colleagues in arts management are under enormous ... working with very limited resources, they're short on time, they're delivering 110% constantly. So, it seems like to ask one more thing of them is kind of too much sometimes.

Alan:                Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tandi:               But on the other hand, I think it's already happening. I think everyone is doing it. So, for instance, in my sessions at the recent Performing Arts Centres conference I just got a straw poll of people who are involved in audience surveying and literally 95% of the hands in the room went up. So, I think it's kind of a moot point whether or not that's the right approach. It kind of is what it is. It's already the state of play.

Alan:                Right.

Tandi:               And so I think really the question is how can we do that in a way that we can ensure those insights are reliable and that arts managers are supported to interpret that data, I guess, is where I think there's a lot of interesting kind of things to talk about. If the audience results ... if the results of the audience surveys say that that captivation levels were low in a particular work or a particular program what does that then mean?

Alan:                Oh yeah.

Tandi:               And what do we do about that, if anything? It's quite fascinating isn’t it?

Alan:                I have a favourite example of that. I was working with a presenter in the US and one of the programs that they surveyed was a contemporary dance company. I won't name the company. And it was a real chore for the audience, based on the survey. We ask ... one of our questions on the surveys is just about emotional resonance and then we ask people, "What emotions were you feeling as you left the hall? Please answer in one word. You have up to six opportunities to ..." Because we were fuelling a word cloud. And this organization looked at their word cloud for this artist and the biggest word in the word cloud was "disappointed," and "angry," and "confused."

Alan:                It was a perfect example of data that requires you to clarify why you're asking these questions in the first place. Right? Does that kind of a response from an audience ... how do you receive that as an organization? Does it mean you made a mistake curating that artist? I don't think necessarily it does, but it certainly suggests that you might have done more to prepare your audience. I think there are takeaways from that. Some organizations ... how long can you disappoint an audience before they stop coming? And just what is the tolerance for that? So, it was a great example of research, of impact research having negative findings and causing some real soul searching.

Tandi:               Wendy, I'd love to ask you in a moment, I guess this kind of raises some interesting questions about how we understand audience experience, when is it appropriate to kind of reflect on that, and from a funding perspective, I mean, to what extent should artists and arts organizations care about audience experiences and feedback like that?

Wendy:            I think it's something which is growing in awareness. I remember, it was probably about three years ago in mid-2015 when I was sitting down at a ... it was a board gathering of the Australia Council, and we'd invited John Daley, who many of you know from the Grattan Institute, and a well-known proprietor, and a very, very smart researcher. We were talking about things along these lines and he said, "Well, Wendy, are you the Australia Council for the Arts, or are you the Australia Council for the Artists?"

Wendy:            And those are two quite different things. And that's one of those ... it was probably, for John, being the man with the brain of his size, it was a throw-away line, but for me it kind of got into my ear and it wormed its way into my brain, and I thought that's actually a fundamental question. And for this moment in time it's a particularly relevant one as we think about what it means to be an arts council. And when paradigms are shifting in so many ways, whether it's about making art, whether it's distributing art, and also about receiving art, what does that mean for the arts council of the future?

Wendy:            So, I've thought a lot about that since then. And it certainly made us think about the ways that we should be investing in artists and art and also that comment came probably about six months before we got the findings from a significant survey that we'd done of stakeholders. So, we were looking ... we've got rich data from the public, so we know how the public are experiencing arts, then we got significant amounts of data coming through from our primary beneficiaries within the Australia Council for the Artists, so from the artists themselves. And then also a lot of sort of data coming in from other stakeholders, like government and so on.

Wendy:            And what was really interesting was the disparity between what the public was looking for in terms of arts investment and what the artists were looking for in terms of arts investment. And it was so radically different. I thought that's a chasm which needs to be bridged, because you can't continue to operate ... artists will highlight things like experimentation and risk and all those kinds of things as the critical piece, where our audiences will often ... they'll look for the transformative, transcendent kind of moments, which may or may not be associated with those things about experimentation and risk.

Wendy:            I think as a funder, it's a very interesting situation where you are putting public investment for a public good, which is arts and creativity, and then the public's response to it has to be a part of the conversation. So, I think in days when you're expecting public investment in your art creation you actually do need to think about the audience and failure to do so will lead to a lack of relevance and potential demise.

Alan:                Right. But isn't there also a danger that audience feedback data could be misused by funders?

Wendy:            Definitely. And I think that idea that the data, the immediate response from a work or someone and using that as the determination about whether or not an arts organization should receive on-going funding or even indeed funding for the next project grant would be very dangerous indeed.

Alan:                It really ... the core question is what is the role of audience feedback in an artistically driven organization? And I think really organizations need to do their own soul searching on that, because I think the answer is very different in different organizations. You know? And I've worked with both, the extremes. I've worked with theatre companies, very illustrious companies, where the artistic director was so hungry for the data and just ate it up. It was an input, one of many inputs, to her decision making, and it was an amazing experience.

Alan:                Then I've also worked with other organizations where they just say, "We really just don't need to know this." For them it's like static. It's just noise, because it's not going to affect their artistic process. And it's been really hard as a researcher to accept that as legitimate, but I honestly think it is. And don't ask questions you don't want the answers to. And I think it's also very dangerous for funders to require people to ask questions that they don't want the answers to.

Tandi:               As you're talking, I'm kind of thinking about how it may come down to individual preference whether to engage with the process, audience experience, surveying, and when that might be appropriate. And I'm kind of curious about what conditions you think there are or are there particular features of certain environments where you think it works well and how do you create a kind of safe space for ... and where it is empowering and inspiring and provocative and challenging, but is kind of safe?

Alan:                Right. Well, impact research particularly I think there's ... I think of impact research actually as audience engagement. So, coaching people, allowing people to express their reaction to a work of art is actually an investment in them as an audience member, and can dramatically enhance the value they take away from a work of art.

Alan:                It's all about the questions. What questions are you asking? You know? We never ask people, "Did you like it?" Or "Did you hate it?" No, we're asking how did it affect you? I think we as a sector can do a lot more to teach and nurture audience members to have a critical reaction. And how to do that, how to express yourself. Because the danger is that actually a lot of audience members just don't unpack their experiences that much. We're asking them all these questions that make distinctions, subtle distinctions between social impact and cognitive impact and emotional impact, and they just don't ... they just know they liked it or not. They have a gut sense of how they felt about it and they don't necessarily even want to unpack it.

Alan:                So, there's a danger of over-reaching, I think, in research and we always have to check ourselves, I think, on that. But on the other hand, I mean, many organizations do these post talkbacks. That's research. That's engagement. And if we can just create better methods for facilitating these conversations there's little difference between that and filling out a survey. I see it as the same activity.

Tandi:               I kind of ... what I'm reminded about is actually what was in your bio, and that is that your work has given a new vocabulary to talk about audience experience. And can you talk a little bit about some of the dimensions of what is your experience?

Alan:                Yeah. Well, the most provocative concept ... we've developed theoretical constructs for impact and I won't go into it, but I think the gateway is captivation. And there's a wonderful psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and he's a guru who wrote a number of books about flow. The name of it is "Flow: The Theory of the Optimal Experience," I think. And basically, he says that achieving a state of flow when you're completely absorbed in any activity you're doing, whether you're cutting the grass or doing the dishes, or sitting in a theatre; that being fully absorbed is the root of happiness. He's really developed a whole scholarly body of thought around that.

Alan:                I think when we apply that to the arts it makes so much sense in terms of creating the circumstances where audience members can get fully absorbed. There's so much arts groups can do. The way we welcome people into our facilities. The lighting. The temperature. The seat comfort. The introduction. I mean, there's so much we can do to create the conditions where audience members can go into this full state of absorption. What Csikszentmihaly asserts, really, is that when you achieve this flow ... and I honestly believe that people go out to achieve a state of flow, that's our fancy language, but they go to get lost and lose track of their problems and forget about work and forget about all of the things that are agitating them.

Alan:                We allow people, now, in the digital age this opportunity to concentrate on something for more than a minute. And I think this is what we're doing, in a way, as a whole sector, is we're teaching people to pay attention. When there are so many forces pushing us in the other direction. I don't think we necessarily talk about that as a sector. But achieving flow, for me, is the gateway to impact, because if you're distracted, if you're not paying attention, if you're uncomfortable in your seat, if someone next to you is wearing too much cologne or perfume ... I mean, it's just like there are a million things that could take you out of flow ... but when you're in that zone you really do ... that's when the artwork can really cast its magic on you. And you lose track of time. And you get fully absorbed. Then you're experiencing this work of art with hundreds of thousands of other people and everyone is laughing together or holding their breath together, and you have this collective response. It's amazing what the impact.

Alan:                But achieving a state of flow is the gateway to impact. It's just one example.

Tandi:               Fascinating. I'm reminded of your knack for inspiring, I guess sparking curiosity. Yeah, there's few people who do it quite the way you do it, Alan. Let's talk about how the tool is being applied. Can you share some of the interesting examples over the years of where you think it’s been, I guess, successful or interesting?

Alan:                Well, yeah, I guess impact assessment is just kind of a quirky niche of research. And I don't presuppose that it's for everyone. We do have, I don't know, maybe 50 or 60 organizations now that we support. Impact surveying is a peculiar variation of audience. You know, a lot of organisations just collect demographic information and motivations and buyer behaviour stuff and where are you sitting, and maybe some satisfaction questions. There's a lot of energy now, believe it or not, on Fred Reichheld's net promoter score. Would you recommend us to a friend? I just can't believe we're still using ... I'll get in trouble for saying this, but really? We're still using that as an indicator.

Alan:                But there's a lot of energy around that now. So, I try to be open-minded about that. But we're surveying for American Ballet Theatre, their Lincoln Centre audiences. And they have a star dancer named Misty Copeland and so it's so fascinating to see the audience in the survey results say that they came to see her and then ... they're not even surveying about impact, though, really. But organizations like the Chicago Symphony. They mostly survey their new work. Most organizations really don't need to survey everything. But it's the stuff around the periphery, the experimental stuff, the new stuff when they're developing new programs, where it's really helpful to get audience feedback. That's kind of where a lot of the activity is.

Alan:                Particularly we're doing a lot of survey work with children's theatre and we're experimenting with how to survey kids. Which is tricky. It has all sorts of ethical issues around it also. But we generally, we've been doing this with the New Victory Theatre in New York City, is we actually hold the kids in the hall. There's a talk-back right after the show every performance. The kids are handed the surveys during the talk-back and they actually take the surveys during the talk-back. And then they hold them until they're done with the surveys and then they let them go. (laughs) It's a little hostage-taking, but ... if you really want to collect data from kids you have to ... you can't make it optional.

Alan:                So, anyway, there's a wide range of stuff. Not all impact needs to be quantitative, I think. It's so deeply qualitative to start with. I would encourage arts groups to maybe ... if they don't want to survey, is to just recruit a panel of audience members, maybe 20 or 30 audience members, who just meet with you after some performances and give you feedback. That's technically called a "panel study," where you pre-recruit a panel and then you meet with them repeatedly. I'm seeing this actually, in the theatre field where some theatres are doing this. They don't call it a panel study, they're actually ... it's part of their patron engagement where they recruit a group of audience members who just want to learn about the theatre and they bring them there and they explain their process and they get to become sort of experts about the theatre. But for me that's just a step away from a panel study.

Alan:                I think a lot of arts groups would benefit from having these little panels of audience members who give feedback. I mean, imagine just from a marketing ... like being able to test your brochure copy, or test which photograph to put on the cover of your brochure. How handy it would be to have this little panel that you could convene quickly, either online or in person and ask questions?

Tandi:               What are some of the things that an organization might want to consider that were going to do something like that? To make it meaningful and robust, I guess.

Alan:                Well, it's all about who you're talking to and if it's truly a random cross section you'd need to randomly recruit people. And then I think you can ... there are, in any group, people who talk too much or who are not going to be helpful or disruptive and you can replace people sort of hone the group. But you always have to push back against bias. My favourite term, "acquiescent response bias." People tell you what they think you want to hear. We just always have to push against that. And invite people to criticize us. And let them know how helpful it is when they do.

Tandi:               Hmm. Hard to do when you're close to the work.

Alan:                Mm-hmm. Yeah, and when the CEO is sitting right behind the table. But you know what? Arts audiences are fearless. I can't tell you how many times I do that and people just rant, right in front of staff members. So, I think with a little ... with the right set up you can get good data.

Wendy:            I think that it's a really important proposition because in Australia, particularly, we've suffered a great ... significant reduction in the amount of arts criticism. So, whether it's reviewers or theatre goers. The number of people that are actually doing it. A lot of people I know who were ... who had imagined that that might be their vocation quickly changed midstream around about the age of 30 when they realized there was not going to be any work in this field anymore.

Wendy:            But I do think it is interesting because I think having an informed perspective is important as well as opposed to the public perspective and that's something that's really challenging right now for many organizations.

Alan:                Yeah. Well, we, I think, languish for lack of criticism. I think it's a big structural problem in our whole sector because people learn from critics. I think arts groups should be distributing links to critical reviews to audience members. And especially reviews that aren't good. You know? They just ... arts groups instinctively want to distribute positive information about their work, but it's actually helpful to audiences to have actually differing opinions. Because no one has the last word. Right?

Alan:                It's like every human has a different reaction to a work of art. And critics are special, because they're experts. Right? But even critics are wrong sometimes. So, if I were a theatre company, I would be sending out two reviews with different opinions to my audience and ask my audience to run their experience against these two different viewpoints on the work. Building the critical skills of your audience is a long-term investment in your organization.

Alan:                I mean, that's why audience engagement is so strategic to our whole field. It's not just about magnifying the impact of the work. That actually is a huge piece of it, but it's actually investing in audience members' capabilities to have critical reactions to art. And that's a lifetime investment.

Tandi:               Alan, I know you've worked with a number of different trusts and foundations in the US and internationally, and with funding bodies. What do you think the role of funding bodies and grantors is in this field? And are there interesting examples that you can share with us?

Alan:                Is this the segment about speaking truth to power? Oh god, that's such a complicated topic. Foundation funders in the US play a huge role. We don't have the government support that you have here. I think there's really big differences between government support and philanthropic support from private foundations. I've been working with a Canada council recently and learning so much about what the world looks like through the eyes of a federal funder distributing public money and all the responsibility that comes with that. And you have here this model for sort of multi-year operating support, which we don't really have.

Alan:                But funders, whether they're government or phil and private really exercise an enormous amount of influence over arts organizations. And that influence can be used for good or it can be manipulative and dysfunctional. I've seen both. But I think funders, especially government funders, really have a role to play in encouraging arts groups to sort of up their game in terms of management practices, good capitalization, how to train board members ... I mean, there's just so much capacity building work that ... our sector is so decentralized. It's a mess. You know?

Alan:                It's like our whole sector is like a huge multi-national corporation with thousands of branch offices and no headquarters. You know? So, we have all these groups doing their own thing and we just need more glue. We need more backbone as a sector. So, government agencies serve as that backbone, and I think that's incredibly important. I'm not just saying that because you're here, Wendy. I truly, truly believe that.

Alan:                In the US we have philanthropic foundations and they all have their own quirky guidelines and I see a lot ... I call it the "dance of mutual deception," between funders and arts groups, where promises are made that are false and both parties believe the falsehoods and are comfortable deceiving each other. Sorry, that sounds horribly cynical. But arts groups operate, are allowed to operate at structural deficits and they go to the foundation marketplace for project grants. I'm using my fingers to make air quotes around "project grants." Which really become operating grants, because the money is just sucked into working cash. And then they have to perform on their project and they're doing as little as possible sometimes to make that happen. And then I get called in as an evaluator and you've had this experience and you're trying to establish accountability and do evaluation work.

Alan:                I like to say that arts groups getting grants from foundations is like a snake swallowing a pig. Right? What's left when the snake digests the pig but a fatter snake that's very hungry for another pig. This is the story of the dysfunctional relationship between funders and arts groups. Sorry, that's a little poignant. An overly poignant metaphor there. But this is a podcast, so we want people to have poignant images.

Tandi:               And to giggle, too. I think it's a fascinating area to consider and so much of it comes down to resources, doesn't it?

Alan:                Yeah.

Tandi:               About how much we can achieve and how little we have.

Alan:                Yeah. Well, but also, I don't know why but there's ... no one is ever allowed to talk about downsizing. Like, when we do strategic planning, at least in the US, I won't project this on Australia, is strategic plans is just a roost for fundraising planning. We just need more money to do what we do. No one is even allowed to talk about downsizing in a planning context. It's so unpleasant because it means people would lose their jobs. And so, we just have this growth. We have success equals growth. And then people become unsustainable and then philanthropic foundations are complicit in that sometimes. And we really need funders who actually reward organizations for downsizing or rightsizing, or even going out of business. We use the term "fundertaker."

Tandi:               I like it.

Alan:                Where is the philanthropic pool of money to help people elegantly end? And become something new? Or different? You know? In a natural eco system there is birth, competition for resources, and regular dying. We do really well at birth, and we do really well at competition for resources, but we're really lousy at dying. We don't know how to do that. And I think this is where leadership in the funding sector could really come in.

Alan:                Sorry, we've gotten very philosophical.

Tandi:               We have, we have. Alan, this has been a fascinating discussion. We could be here all day.

Tandi:               If people would like to find out more about your work, where should they go?

Alan:                WolfBrown.com is our website. We do blog from time to time.

Tandi:               You do. A wonderful semi regular newsletter that I always look out for in my inbox with some thought leadership [crosstalk] often.

Alan:                Yes, look for my forthcoming autobiography, Speaking Truth to Power. No, actually I'm not writing that.

Tandi:               [crosstalk] that would be at the end of your career.

Alan:                Maybe at the end, yeah.

Tandi:               Wendy, if people want to find out more about the Australia Council's work in terms of arts development, what can they look out for?

Wendy:            They can go to our website, AustraliaCouncil.gov.au and they should check out our research portal Arts Nation, which has recently been revamped if anyone hasn't been there and it's a whole lot of amazing work in there, and you can search well on it.

Tandi:               Fantastic. Yeah. I think the Australia Council has probably the best quality research out there on the arts, in terms of both audience participation, artistic careers, and arts practice, and some really landmark research on first nation's programming and audience development, which I think every Australian arts worker should really read and immerse themselves with. I'm really excited that this year is the data collection year for the National Arts Participation survey, and we shall have up to date, accurate picture of arts attendance and attitudes in the next 12 months, 6 months or so?

Wendy:            Look for it in July 2020.

Tandi:               July 2020. Excellent. Hopefully we'll have an up to date picture on many of these trends and more when that comes out, and we're really looking forward to it. That's all we have time for. Thank you so much you both for joining us today.

Alan:                Thanks, Tandi. Thanks, Wendy.

Wendy:            Thank you, Tandi.

Tandi:               We'll see you next time.

Patternmakers
Previous

Episode 4: Economic Impact and Market Forces with Jeremy Thorpe
Next

Episode 3: Cultural Democracy and Leadership with John Knell and Simon Abrahams