One of the biggest issues museums face right now is diminished attendance. Years after most pandemic-induced closures have lifted, the majority of institutions have still seen only a partial return of their visitors—an average of 71 percent, according to AAM’s most recent Annual National Snapshot survey.

Given these numbers, there’s a good chance you’re currently wondering: What does it take to attract audiences? Is it a culturally relevant exhibition? A free or discounted admission day? A lively after-hours program? An Instagram endorsement from a K-pop icon? Of all the sundry strategies you’ve seen floating around, which are worth the hype?

Luckily, a large-scale research project recently wrapped which might provide some hints. The Wallace Foundation’s Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative began back in 2015, when the foundation, troubled by data showing a steady decline in participation at cultural organizations, awarded forty-one million dollars worth of grants for organizations to experiment with new strategies for building audiences. Between that year and 2019, the grantees undertook a wide variety of projects to pursue various target audiences, united by their use of a continuous learning framework emphasizing research, evaluation, and iterative thinking throughout the process. After the grant work ended, Wallace engaged researchers from the University of Texas at Austin to analyze and produce a thorough report of the results, which it published earlier this year.

As the report’s author Francie Ostrower explains, many of the participating organizations went into the initiative earnestly hoping to find the “magic bullet” to building audiences. Sadly, however, they did not uncover any clever “one weird trick,” but instead confronted the many nuances to the practice: Are you trying to grow your audience by numbers, or diversify it by demographic characteristics? Are you satisfied with attracting one-time visitors to special offerings designed to lure them in, or are you more after repeat visitors who will engage with your core offerings? Do you expect these new visitors to contribute to your financial sustainability directly, or is just their attendance enough to attract contributed income and plant the seeds of future support?

Skip over related stories to continue reading article

In other words, there seems to be no one universal strategy for success, and building a sustainable audience long-term may mean taking the time to wrestle with critical, challenging questions first and foremost. But not all hope is lost for those craving some immediate, actionable takeaways. In studying the results, the researchers did observe some revealing general patterns in what consistently worked, what sort of worked, and what consistently did not work. (One caveat, however: The grantees for this particular project consisted of large performing arts organizations, so while the major takeaways likely carry over to our field, there may be some differences between the contexts.)

What Worked: Rethinking Marketing

When you look at your institution’s marketing and communications, you likely see compelling imagery, evocative copy, and tantalizing offerings. But is that what the rest of the world sees?

For virtually all of the organizations participating in the initiative, the answer turned out to be a resounding no. Given the opportunity to seek external feedback through research methods like focus groups, they learned that their marketing was appealing to people who already knew the art form or subject matter well, but not to those with less exposure.

“Images that we thought, from years of being in the arts, were the most appealing…really meant nothing to many of the audience members,” concluded one of the participants interviewed for the report. Another theater discovered its core strategy of hyping “world premiere” performances meant little to most audiences, despite the supposed cachet of premieres in the industry. A dance company learned common artistic lingo, like “mixed rep” or “non-narrative,” confused the majority of the public. At best, these opaque marketing strategies were irrelevant to audiences; at worst, they felt actively unwelcoming, as if they were being “talked down to” about their lack of prior knowledge. As one organizational participant came to see it, it was like they were a restaurant trying to attract diners without posting their menu online.

The antidote, participants discovered, was to post the menu—metaphorically speaking. They learned they needed to say more upfront about what to expect from their experience, both in terms of basic details like price and descriptive information about the contents. (As market research from the study showed, this most often amounted to grasping “a story” behind the production, though not necessarily a detailed plot summary.) Adapting communications to be more “welcoming, informative, and responsive” proved to be the most consistently effective practice throughout the initiative.

One strategy that proved especially effective, for the organizations that pursued it, was producing video trailers giving a firsthand preview of their productions. However, it sometimes took some tweaking to get the tone right—one participant discovered its first attempt at a video promoting an event series aimed at younger audiences read as too “bougie,” leading it to switch to a format interviewing attendees about their experience. Beyond videos, the participants generally succeeded with more refined used of digital communications, such as targeted emails to certain audience segments.

What Sort Of Worked: Off-Site Offerings

If you can’t bring more people to your museum, can you bring the museum to them?

More and more of our institutions have tested this premise in recent years, “distributing” their experience to outside venues like community centers, storefronts, or food markets. Evidently, a similar strategy is on the rise in other cultural organizations, as many of the participants in the initiative based their projects around performances at venues other than their own.

Did it work? Yes and no. First, the bad news: Most of the organizations found the logistics of taking their show on the road were much more burdensome than anticipated, citing challenges like “ensuring an adequate power supply, fire safety, loading a set away from the shop, and obtaining necessary permits.” (While some of these might be particular to the performing arts, it’s not hard to imagine the equivalents for staging museum exhibitions or programs away from the main building.) Furthermore, they consistently found that the strategy did not attract off-site audiences to on-site programs. Those were reasons enough for some organizations to abandon their off-site programs, particularly when they found they were not reaching their target audience effectively to begin with.

But others, despite experiencing the same challenges, considered their experiments a success. They may not have gained new regulars at their venues, but they did engage—and engage with—new communities and formats, and that came to seem like a victory in itself. For example, one participating opera staged a series of small-scale performances at a local restaurant, initially hoping many of the patrons would be moved to book tickets to a mainstage performance. But staff soon realized it was “naivety” to think the chain between taking in a tableside aria and “buy[ing] a ticket to a three-hour opera [to] come sit in the dark with us” could be so short. Nevertheless, “We realized that the conversion to the mainstage…was not necessarily the metric of success, that engaging with them in the form that they wanted to experience the art was okay, and that it still expanded the art. It still expanded the audience,” explained an interviewee.

Another unexpected outcome of these experiments was the discovery that “off-site” might be just a state of mind. Instead of going to the trouble to leave their comfortable, accommodating homes, some participants found just as much success from making tweaks to their own spaces to create a different atmosphere. For instance, one theater that originally went looking for a more intimate setting to stage its performances realized that it could achieve the same effect on its own turf by blocking off some areas with curtains and lowering the lighting. The same likely applies to museums—maybe more people would come to your party (or program, or exhibition, or so on) if you dimmed the lights and played different music (literally or metaphorically).

What Didn’t Work: Crossover Programs

Surely there are untold numbers of future museum fans lurking among the public, and all they need is a good hook to bring them in. Then they’ll keep coming back. Right?

Wrong, at least going by the findings of Building Audiences for Sustainability. A majority of participants pursued special “crossover programs” designed to lure their target audience in, hoping this would translate to them attending core programming once they got to know the organization. For example, one symphony arranged a series of performances where indie musicians played with its orchestra, hoping this would serve as a “gateway drug” for millennials to attend main season performances. But repeatedly, the organizations that undertook this strategy saw no success.

As anyone who’s experienced a blockbuster program or exhibition likely already knows, fair-weather fans can haunt museums as much as sports teams. If you’re a natural history museum that lures an audience of jewelry lovers in with an exhibition on rare gems, you should not expect them to come back for your next one on bird calls. (But fear not—survey data points to a worldwide “birding boom” since 2020.)

But while such “crossover” strategies were a confirmed failure in the initiative, on the basis that the attendees did not in fact cross over, that doesn’t mean the programs were inherently worthless. As with off-site programs, the participants realized such one-off successes were still a way to extend the mission and enhance the overall vitality of the organization. (Those jewel hounds still learned something about science, didn’t they?) You just may need to rethink your strategy to one built on attracting many occasional supporters instead of a smaller number of loyal supporters. Or, scary as it may sound, you may need to rethink what your “core offerings” are in the first place, and whether you want to change them to meet the audience where it is.