Audience engagement: A blinding flash of the obvious

What are audiences buying into with their time, money and attention when they engage with your organisation?

The art, you might say. Or the programme. Or the exhibitions.

Right? Well no, not really.

If all audiences are buying into is the art, your organisation is reduced to a receptacle or vehicle for that art, with everything else serving as a wraparound to extend and monetise people’s visit.

Ring any bells?

What audiences are actually buying into with their precious time, attention and money is their experience of everything you are and do, and the meanings and impacts that follow. THIS is your core product. The reason why you exist. It’s also your differentiating value proposition, of which the ‘art’ is just one [albeit significant] part.

When I point this out to arts and cultural professionals it is usually received like a blinding flash of the obvious.

Doh.

It follows then that if your holistic audience experience is your core value offer, it needs to be crafted as carefully as the work on your stages or your exhibition spaces. Done well it becomes a distinctive expression of brand, will appreciably evoke your core values, and connect with audiences at a deeper level because your ‘world’ feels right and offers something of value, including and beyond the art.

There is a lot that gets in the way:

• The prevailing view that the ‘art’ is the product.
• The positioning and treatment of audiences as purchasers rather than experiencers.
• A limited understanding of the depth and dimensions of the audience experience and its potential, when well crafted, to engage and inspire loyalty.
• Siloed practice which dislocates the delivery of what should be a seamless, holistic audience experience.
• Visitor experience strategies [where they exist] that focus primarily on service delivery.
• A lack of the requisite skills and frameworks with which to proactively and astutely manage the audience experience.
• More attention being paid to extracting maximum revenue from the audience rather than optimising the value offered to them.

That’s why I set up The Experience Business, to shift the paradigm and embed the skills required to conceptualise, design and manage differentiated, brand-infused, audience-centred and holistic experiences. Experiences that are appealing, enjoyable, relevant, and potentially transformative. Experiences that eclipse the shallow commercial playing field of the experience economy to offer some of the most authentic and meaningful experiences of all.
And you know what, all of this makes a big difference to your audience’s emotional investment in, and their decision to spend their hard earned cash at, your organisation. Investment in experience design is a no brainer … isn’t it?

So how far down the line are you in becoming an audience-centred, experientially focussed organisation?

Thought Exercise

• Do you have an organisation-wide understanding of the core experience you want to deliver for your audiences?
• Do you have a supportive strategy to deliver that core experience?
• To what degree do your individual departments understand how its work contributes to the seamless delivery of that core experience?
• How well do you understand the degree to which audiences are actually having the core experience you ideally want for them?
• Do you have an agile mechanism, fuelled by audience insight, with which to continually improve your core experience?
• And do you make time to engage in new product and service innovation to keep you ahead of the curve?

Lisa Baxter, Founder, The Experience Business