CultureTalk: Why Arts Marketers Must Become Audience Champions featuring Katy Raines from Indigo

By CultureSuite

SUMMARY

Indigo CEO Katy Raines reveals why 50% of first-time cultural visitors never return, how to move beyond demographics to understand real audience needs, and why arts marketers must become audience champions to transform their organisations. A CultureTalk interview from CultureSuite.

In our latest CultureTalk episode, we sat down with Katy Raines, CEO of Indigo, to explore one of the cultural sector's most overlooked problems: 50% of people who visit a venue for the first time never come back.

"If we could get even 5-10% of those people back just once more in a year, that would make the biggest difference," Katy explains. "It's five times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one."

One particularly striking insight was about whose voices shape cultural organisations. "It's easy to just hear the voices that shout the loudest," Katy says. "The people that are there in the foyer chatting, the people on the friends committee – those are the voices that you can hear the loudest. But they're usually about 2 or 3% of the audience."

The conversation also explores why classical music concerts mystify newcomers (hint: it's not the music), how arts marketers can become audience champions, and whether the sector's power structures are fundamentally elitist.

Despite the challenges, Katy sees hope in the future: "The creative sector is going to be the answer. It's going to be the antidote to AI."

Watch on YouTube. Running time: 55 minutes.