Welcome to Measuring the Immeasurable, a newsletter helping arts and culture leaders understand the relationship between arts and public value. I am continuing with the theme of threes this week: Useful, bite-sized frameworks for your consideration. This week I explore some of the convergence between evaluation and arts marketing.
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Back in 2009, the Australia Council for the Arts held its seventh biennial arts marketing summit. Ben Cameron, the Arts Director of a large philanthropic organisation from New York (managing an annual budget of $13m), held a presentation titled ‘On the Brink of a New Chapter: Arts in the 21st Century’ in which he argued that arts organisations can no longer “think of themselves as producers or presenters of cultural product, rather they are orchestrators of social interaction with communities who are seeking opportunities for interactivity, participation, access and engagement.”
The Council’s Arts Marketing Summits have returned to ideas of ‘community’ and ‘engagement’ like a catchy refrain. These are also words that evaluators love to use, since they speak to the general social good. At any other marketing summit, the key word would be ‘selling.’ In the arts, it is ‘valuing.’ Cameron’s comment, as well as contemporary arts marketing more generally, then suggests that there are clear links between good evaluation and good marketing. In short: If marketing is communicating value, then evaluation is demonstrating value. In marketing, value is assumed, in evaluation, value is questioned.
Cameron’s speech also called conventional ideas of the value of the arts into question. If we are simply “producers or presenters of cultural product(s)” then our job is simply to get bums on seats (or feet on floors) by whatever means necessary. The value of the experience is assumed, and it simply needs to be made widely known. This is partly why arts marketing has long held more security and status in the sector than arts evaluation: we have typically not called our own value into question. However, if our job is to orchestrate social interaction with communities, then our work is a little bit more complex and our value cannot be taken for granted. We are called to demonstrate and communicate our value to stakeholders.
For overworked arts organisations, this can feel like an excessive and burdensome demand. Every arts organisation longs for a world in which their value is simply taken for granted and they can get on with things. There is nuance to this, of course. My position on this, which I gestured to a few weeks ago, is that it is entirely possible for arts organisations to do better evaluation in less time1. I’ll have more to say on this in a few months with a framework I am (slowly) putting together. For now, we can rely on a rather simple framework that Ben Cameron suggested in his Council speech.
Cameron offered three simple questions that any arts organisation can use to reflect on its value. This could be considered simply a reflective framework (following a production, annual season, festival, or project), but I think it could be considered as part of an evaluation framework if it was conducted with some rigour. Those questions were2:
To the best of our knowledge, what value did our organisation bring to the communities we work in?
What is the unique value that our organisation brings or brings better than anybody else?
How would things be different for our community if we had never come into existence in the first place?
These questions can help us discern what is uniquely ours and what we can reasonably claim credit for. For Cameron’s purposes, they also sharpen our marketing by encouraging us to consider what is distinct about our work. When we deeply reflect on and consider our value, it helps us to communicate it better.
See Data is the New Oil.