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Audience Development
As a consultant, coach, and longtime journalist, I know that the most powerful question is: "What did you learn?" You'll get an answer every time that is real, and relevant.
That's why Donna Walker-Kuhne's new book on audience development is a must-read. It’s titled Invitation to the Party: Building Bridges to the Arts, Culture and Community, published by Theatre Communications Group.
Walker-Kuhne makes it real. She shares her challenges, her successes, and her mis-steps in an effort to help the rest of us "engage, educate and activate (primarily, but not exclusively) audiences of color"(p. xii).
Invitation to the Party is a “how-to” book in the best sense of the word. Its case study approach brings theory to life and gives flesh-and-blood to statistics. For anyone new to the field, I would recommend that it be read in tandem with the Wallace Foundation's theoretical modeling of the audience development process and the Urban Institute's empirical research on how communities engage arts and culture.
For policy leaders, Walker-Kuhne's stories of herculean efforts and investments in time and personnel serve to underscore the ongoing challenge to build solid relationships between arts and communities--especially for the majority of arts organizations and independent artists that do not have access to the resources of large institutions like The Public Theater in New York.
Currently, every artist and arts group is left to build its own audience from scratch. The result is haphazard and grossly inefficient. Arts groups are incentivized to compete rather than to cooperate.
Local or regional service organizations are an ideal force for undertaking the kind of relationship-based, long-term, community-embedded audience development that Walker-Kuhne describes. But our infrastructure of service organizations has been left to languish, and appears to be making its last gasps.
In the end, Invitation to the Party challenges us to address the larger question: How can we devise cooperative conduits for audience development, just as the United Arts Fund model, for example, is doing for fundraising?
Want to read the complete review?
Best,
Ann
April 2006