How to understand and communicate the value of your programmes
How to understand and communicate the value of your programmes
By
Alan Brown
Can you say what value your organisation adds to people's lives? How do you use that knowledge strategically to build lasting relationships with audience members? How we think about and talk about the art we produce has a direct impact on the levels of support we can expect from our audiences; here we find out how to harness and articulate that value effectively.
Alan began by asking everyone to imagine going into an elevator and being asked by a person, ‘What value do your programmes create?’ If you’d be able to manage a response, imagine if the same question were asked of your colleagues and think about whether they would say the same thing. It isn’t easy to talk about how art acts on us, how it transforms us. It’s even harder to describe how an individual’s experience can in some way benefit the person next to them or their whole community.
Benefits and Value are the real outputs of arts organisations, yet why do we only talk of our benefits in terms of dollars and attendance figures? The reason for this is that people struggle with the language of benefits and value. There are subtle differences between the two, although sometimes they can be interchangeable.
