The hall is filled for the concert of the Netherlands, by flickr user Alessandro Grussu

One of Createquity’s primary areas of investigation centers on disparities of access to the benefits of the arts: we believe that large numbers of people face barriers to participating in the arts in the ways they may want to. Not only are those people unfairly missing out on opportunities for a higher quality of life, but the quality and diversity of the cultural products and experiences available to the rest of us – and to our descendants – suffer as well.

Why We Care

In our view, a healthy arts ecosystem maximizes the arts’ capacity to improve the lives of human beings in concrete and meaningful ways. While the evidence base for the benefits of the arts is continually developing and evolving, we feel that participation in the arts offers value to a large majority of human beings, and that arts participation (especially more active forms of participation such as creation or performance) can be deeply consequential, even life-changing. While we do not assume that everyone will or needs to benefit from having the arts in their lives, we do believe that the only way to determine who can gain the most is through widespread and varied exposure to the arts. Thus our model of a healthy arts ecosystem envisions a basic level of access to the arts for everyone.

Furthermore, we believe that opportunities requiring an investment on the part of society – like preparation toward being a professional artist – should be distributed as fairly as possible, by prioritizing those who would create the most value for others through their participation. Thus, when we speak of “access,” we do not just mean opportunities to experience art as an audience member; we also include access to artistic training and related resources.

Below we outline what arts research has shown us about the broad frame of arts participation, encompassing who participates, their motivations and barriers – and what we can do to identify disparities of access and close the gaps.

What We Know

… about the role of economic disadvantage in mediating access to the arts:

Research data paints a consistent portrait of lower participation by people with lower incomes and less education (low-SES) in a wide range of artistic activities – including not just attending classical music concerts and plays but also less “elitist” forms of engagement like going to the movies or dancing socially. (Indeed, surveys show that education is the strongest factor in determining arts engagement rates – more so than income, race/ethnicity, geography, or other demographic variables.) This is despite the fact that low-SES adults, on average, have more free time at their disposal. While cost is a sometimes a barrier to participation, it isn’t the only one: if we could somehow make it so that low-SES adults were no more likely to decide not to attend an arts event because of cost than their more affluent peers, it would likely not greatly change the socioeconomic composition of audiences.

With that in mind, free admission is not a silver bullet to reducing barriers to participation and increasing access. In the museum world, available research suggests free admission doesn’t do much to engage underserved audiences, and communication strategies play a more crucial role than price itself driving attendance patterns.

What about active arts participation (i.e., performing or making art as opposed to passive audience engagement as a spectator)? Research shows that active arts participation is also strongly correlated with education: in other words, while less-educated adults are more likely to sing to themselves or dance with friends than see the opera, the same is true of people with college degrees and well-paying jobs. The evidence for a relationship with income is less clear – data we’ve uncovered from United States indicates that so-called “informal” arts activities do not see proportionally more participation from low-income adults, but research from the UK shows lower-income adults actually engage more when you isolate art-making.

A major contrast to this dynamic is television. The for-profit commercial TV industry is far more effective than subsidized nonprofit arts organizations at engaging economically vulnerable members of our society. Not only do low-SES adults watch more TV, low-SES adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than low-SES adults who do.

… about motivations and barriers to arts participation:

Motivations to participate in the arts vary greatly between different people for different types of cultural experiences. In one survey, more than half of attendees of performances such as music concerts say they went to see a specific artist; less than a tenth of attendees of art exhibits said the same, instead citing a desire to learn something new.

For “interested non-attendees” at arts events, barriers for participation include time, cost, transportation, and social support. Nearly half blamed a lack of time as a reason, almost 40% cited cost, 37% indicated difficulty in getting to the venue, and 22% didn’t have anyone to go with.

Despite a strong interest in arts participation, many retirees, empty nesters and older adults in poor health are disproportionately missing out. Among the chief factors keeping them home: transportation issues (difficulties in getting access to the venue) and social isolation (not having someone to go with). Meanwhile, the opportunity to socialize is paramount among motivators for participation among seniors. These findings are of particular concern given that there is a healthy body of evidence expounding on the benefits of arts participation for older adults.

… about how to measure engagement:

There are many ways to define arts participation, and broadening the definition can be revelatory. Providing an open-ended query about interviewees’ creative activities opened up the playing field about what could and should be considered in a study on “The Cultural Lives of Californians,” which helped to reflect a much broader range of arts participation than even the national Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

Different results between these similar surveys might be explained by a range of other factors, including data collection methodology and sampling. The SPPA was part of a larger survey led by the U.S. Census Bureau – the Current Population Survey (CPS) – and respondents agreed to participate without knowing they would be asked about their arts engagement habits. By contrast, “The Cultural Lives of Californians” synthesizes lessons from a statewide telephone survey that transparently communicated its interest in people’s cultural lives, so people who engage more in cultural activity may have been more likely to respond.

What We Don’t Know

Using the broadest definitions, we can confidently say that most people do participate in arts and culture – it’s just that not everybody participates in the range of activities that intersect with the work of nonprofit arts organizations. Many people get their primary cultural fix from things like listening to the music soundtracks of popular TV shows or attending their child’s band rehearsal – activities that do not involve the nonprofit sector at all. The big unanswered question: would nonprofit arts organizations offer a better or more varied type of experience for the people who aren’t currently being reached by them? Does watching a popular television program like Empire foster the same benefit to those audience members that attending a live stage play does? And if it does, what is the policy justification for subsidizing the cost of providing the latter, but not the former?

Our research has revealed several other “known unknowns,” including:

• Are arts organizations that are relatively free of commercial considerations – i.e., having to constantly fundraise, trying to sell tickets, aiming for a blockbuster – able to take more artistic risks? Do they create and offer a greater variety of programs that provide more value for more people?
• What strategies have been most effective in attracting “interested non-attendees,” and why? Are any of these scalable solutions that could ultimately serve a greater proportion of the population?
• What is the real value of infrastructure – i.e., funding, formal organizations, etc. – in contexts and locations that have historically flourished without it? What strategies are most appropriate to support arts participation in settings that are infrastructure-poor, but culturally rich? Who is best positioned to carry out those strategies?

What You Can Do With This Information

Questions to consider and actions to contemplate:

For arts administrators and artists

• How can you connect to leisure activities that people already engage in, particularly near-universal ones like watching television? Although you might view the couch as competition, it is also a potential connection point.
• How can you ramp up the social component of the experience, either through communications and marketing, or through adjusting programming or setting?
• What are ways you might address barriers such as transportation for audience segments that may not have easy access to their own?
• If your goal is to make your work more relevant and accessible to a socioeconomically diverse audience, consider that a blanket free admission policy may not yield the results you’re looking for.

For funders

• How might you support an ecosystem that recognizes a broader range of activities in its definition of arts and cultural participation? Are you unintentionally privileging certain modes, venues, genres, and cultural traditions in your current programming?
• Commission research to promote greater understanding of the benefits to audiences of different types of arts participation (particularly broken down by sectoral context – i.e., for-profit vs. nonprofit), and the distribution of those benefits across different populations and places.
• Be wary of supporting audience engagement programs that rely on free or reduced prices as the primary strategy for expanding access.

For researchers

• Ask questions about arts participation broadly, avoiding the term “arts” if possible, and encourage open-ended responses to get the fullest picture. “The Cultural Lives of Californians” shows how being expansive in defining arts activities, even letting the respondent lead the conversation, allows for a richer and more nuanced picture of participation.
• Engage in research about the benefits of different kinds of arts participation, especially as it relates to nonprofit arts organizations as providers.

Resource List

Why Don’t They Come (2015)
It’s not just the price of admission that’s keeping poor and less-educated adults away from arts events.
This article explores arts participation rates of people with lower incomes and less education; motivations and barriers among participants; the realities of television engagement; and where we can go from here.

One Size Fits All Does Not Fit “The Arts” (2015)
An NEA report looks at motivations for and barriers to arts attendance.
In probing the motivations of “interested non-attendees” – people who expressed participatory interest in arts events but did not follow through – this report reveals barriers including cost, convenience, and time; it also reveals cultural patterns across artistic disciplines.

Learning from “The Cultural Lives of Californians” (2015)
A survey of Golden State residents reveals lessons in arts participation and how we measure it.
With its broad scope in defining arts activities and use of open-ended prompts, this survey shows the range of ways Californians engage with culture and the significant effect of age on art-making (as distinct from attendance of arts events).

Taking Art Into Their Own Hands (2016)
Audiences who won’t visit your museum may be enthusiastic amateur artists in their spare time.
This article indicates that arts participation is strongly correlated with education, but not with social class or social status – and active participation in art-making is actually inversely associated with income.

Capsule Review: Taking Charge at Museums (2017)
A research study on the effects of charging or not charging for admission on attendance, visitor experience, and funding among UK museums.
This study explores the differences between museums that charge and those that don’t, and emphasizes the importance of effectively communicating changes in charging policies.

Arts Policy Library: Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions (2012)
A survey of rural and suburban populations exposes participation in a broad range of cultural activities.
Among other things, this study shows that while the home is a hugely important setting for arts engagement, funders and nonprofits have virtually ignored it as an arts space.

Arts Policy Library: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (2012)
A summary, history, and analysis of the influential NEA survey.
This article traces how the SPPA survey tracked various kinds of arts participation for both audience members and creators.

Arts Policy Library: Gifts of the Muse (2009)
A close look at the implications of a far-ranging report on the benefits of the arts.
Gifts of the Muse laid out one of the first frameworks for understanding the effects of arts participation, as well as the evidence supporting that theory.

The Myth of the Transformative Arts Experience (2010)
If we are searching for a life-transforming experience at an arts event, we may have come to the wrong place.
This essay explores the idea that we often place overly high expectations on the effects of the average encounter with art.

Empty stage in expectation of performance, by Flickr user renewleeds

If all the world’s a stage, who can compete with Broadway? While gathering research as a doctoral student at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, Mirae Kim interviewed numerous arts organizations about funding issues. She spotted a pattern among local nonprofit venues: “Many theaters in New Jersey mentioned their need to compete against Broadway theaters in New York City – which perfectly made sense since they are only about ten to 20 miles away from Broadway,” Kim recalls. “They mentioned they cannot compete against Broadway theaters in the traditional way because of the different financial sizes, so several of them highlighted their community basis as a way of differentiating themselves from ‘commercial’ theaters.”

Kim’s curiosity about this distinction led to an intensive research study – Characteristics of Civically Engaged Nonprofit Arts Organizations: The Results of a National Survey – which she completed over a three-year period while working as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs. She broadened her inquiry to survey myriad nonprofit arts organizations throughout the United States, focusing on what differentiates the groups with a 501(c)(3) status from commercially driven ventures.

“It intrigued me whether the need for survival prompted nonprofits to highlight their civic engagement role – or if there were other reasons,” Kim explains. “One of the findings I didn’t expect was the role of associations and collaboratives in encouraging nonprofit arts organizations to recognize ‘civic and community engagement’ as one of the critical factors they should embody.”

A Winning Formula

Another unexpected outcome for Kim: her study won the inaugural Createquity Arts Research Prize, entitling her to a $500 cash award and a platform for sharing her work with a wider audience. In our review of more than 500 arts research studies for the Research Prize, Kim’s publication rose to the top for several reasons: a high-level methodological design, the use of previously validated survey instruments, a widely representative sample, and a topic with resonance in the arts community. This work exemplifies Createquity’s interest in encouraging arts institutions to prioritize community needs ahead of their own prosperity.

First published in 2016 in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Kim’s article includes and draws on a wide-ranging literature review. The study relies on a varied and robust combination of instruments and data sources including:

• structured interviews with 21 nonprofit arts organization directors
• a survey of 900+ arts organizations, with questions based on the qualitative interview results
• financial data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics to uncover income-source patterns

The survey was used to place arts organizations on a matrix measuring “civic roles” and “market roles,” based on a validated index of organizational behaviors developed by other researchers. Kim used the above methods to test hypotheses about the relationships nonprofit arts organizations have with other types of community organizations, their peer organizations’ emphasis on civic duties, the level of bureaucracy in their governance, and their reliance on program fees for revenue.

Key Findings

Kim uncovers several notable ways in which civically engaged arts organizations differ from more market-driven arts organizations, including:

• they maintain stronger networks with other community organizations such as schools, senior centers, etc.
• they consider civic engagement a key force driving the mission
• they’re consciously aware of their nonprofit status

The study finds that charging and receiving a higher share of program revenue negatively correlates with civic engagement. Indeed, revenue sourcing is one of the inquiry’s driving concerns. Noting that arts nonprofits often rely on a mix of contributions and selling tickets, Kim poses a central question that arts nonprofits confront: “How can they maintain marketable programs and share responsibility for the wellbeing of their community without compromising either?”

Many nonprofits surveyed reported high levels of involvement in both market roles and civic roles, so Kim conducted additional analysis taking market roles into account. She finds a greater correlation between network diversity (the number and variety of other organizations worked with in the past year) and civic engagement, when an organization performs both roles. Interviews with directors reveal that work with outside community groups and organizations helps arts nonprofits implement civically relevant programming and reach new audiences within their markets.

Perhaps surprisingly, “Characteristics” does not find a significant correlation between an arts organization’s reliance on government funding and its level of civic engagement. Kim points out in her literature review that several studies hypothesize a negative relationship between the two, while others argue for a positive correlation – and that empirical results are mixed. (At any rate, as Createquity has noted, the vast majority of arts organizations’ budgets comes from the private sector rather than government funding.)

Kim also hypothesized that a rigid and bureaucratic governance structure would be negatively associated with civic engagement. In fact, however, the survey responses indicate the opposite relationship. Because this finding conflicts with some of her interview data, Kim recommends more research in this area before a conclusion is reached, noting that this study does not establish a causal relationship between these factors.

Room for Growth

Kim notes that these findings cannot tell us definitively whether collaborating with other organizations causes nonprofits to be more civically engaged, or if civically engaged organizations are more likely to seek out collaboration. It also does not shed light on how effective the efforts of civically minded nonprofits are in achieving outcomes. However, the article does make a strong argument that partnering with other types of organizations will strengthen ties with communities and potential audiences.

The study’s survey instruments themselves contain a bit of wiggle room in terms of reliability. For example, respondents were asked to rate their involvement in various activities on a scale of 0 to 100, a huge range with no clear benchmarks that may have been vulnerable to bias in unpredictable ways. Future research on this topic would benefit from a lower reliance on self-reported, subjective measures like these.

Nevertheless, we find much to praise about the innovative approach that “Characteristics of Civically Engaged Nonprofit Organizations” uses to uncover and elucidate some of the key questions and priorities that nonprofit arts organizations face in the real world.

“I hope this encourages researchers to study the role of arts nonprofits, as they are critical elements to improve our civic life,” says Kim, now an assistant professor at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. “And I hope it helps arts nonprofit managers recognize the role of associations and informal networks in influencing program decisions at individual organizations.”

Image by Florent Lemieux

If you’ve read a study about arts participation in the United States in the past few years, it’s a fair bet that it was authored, co-authored, or influenced by Jennifer Novak-Leonard. The University of Chicago researcher has maintained a breathtaking pace of output recently, nearly all of it focused on better understanding the ways in which people engage in and feel about arts and culture, broadly defined. The first five months of 2015 alone have seen the publication of no fewer than five texts listing Novak-Leonard as the lead author, picking apart arts participation statistics in every way imaginable over the course of some 250+ not exactly beach-reading pages.

The James Irvine Foundation, which has been a critical enabler of this work for nearly a decade, came out this spring with a cluster of arts participation studies by Novak-Leonard and others. Chief among these is “The Cultural Lives of Californians,” which synthesizes lessons from a new telephone survey of 1238 Golden State residents specially designed by Novak-Leonard and her colleagues at NORC at the University of Chicago. This so-called California Survey is an attempt to model a different approach to measuring cultural participation by offering a broader take on what “counts” as arts and culture than the statistics we typically hear about. Rather than limit the inquiry to questions about specific types of participation, the survey begins with an open-ended prompt about what role arts and culture plays in the respondent’s life:

People are involved indifferent types of activities that they enjoy or that are important to them. Please briefly tell me about any creative, cultural or artistic activities that you do.

If stumped, respondents were encouraged think broadly, with suggestions like “You could include anything you do that involves making music, dancing, roleplaying or telling stories, writing or making art. Also think of activities when you make something, or build, customize or repurpose something to your liking.” The resulting range of activities recorded is highly illuminating, and includes such seemingly off-the-wall responses as sandblasting mirrors, customizing old cars, and my favorite, making bowties that incorporate people’s personality characteristics. Clearly, Americans (or at least Californians) define cultural participation very broadly indeed. Importantly, about 15% of the responses had no correspondence with later closed-ended questions in the survey that asked about a range of specific types of participation, meaning that surveys that rely solely on closed-ended questions, such as the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, likely miss a substantial portion of the cultural activity that goes on. Yet even with this open-ended (and, let’s face it, highly leading) approach, a little over 6% of respondents to the California Survey either only mentioned sports-related activities or couldn’t come up with a single way in which they engage culturally, which probably sets a pretty hard upper bound on the percentage of the population that is culturally active for reasons elaborated on below.

While the bulk of “The Cultural Lives of Californians” is devoted to findings that are familiar from previous participation literature, a few new perspectives are offered. In particular, the report brings valuable attention to a consistent pattern of lower participation among immigrants, even those of the same ethnic background as non-immigrants. The authors explain that immigrants work more hours and have less leisure time than the rest of the population, which could account for the difference. “Cultural Lives” also documents a significant pattern of decreased art-making (as distinct from arts attendance) as people age, which overshadows the effect of income and education on that particular form of participation.

More than anything, the report repeatedly emphasizes the wide range of ways in which Californians engage with culture, and makes an argument for funders, researchers, and arts practitioners to use a wider aperture in conceptualizing participation. In particular, art-making activities that take place inside the home or outside of traditional arts spaces receive much attention from the authors, and the survey provides data on the demographic breakdowns of participants in such activities at a greater level of detail than we’ve seen in any other study.

Informal Yet Not (Fully) Inclusive

It turns out that “The Cultural Lives of Californians” is very timely for Createquity’s research process for that reason. A big question running through our investigation into socioeconomic status and arts participation earlier this year was whether poor and less-educated adults are less likely to participate in the arts generally, or just have different patterns of participation that don’t show up as readily in surveys and market research that focus on traditional nonprofit institutions. It’s long been an article of faith in the community arts field that the latter of these two assumptions is true; in other words, that the people who are not coming to the symphony or the ballet are instead experiencing music, dance, and other art forms in their homes, places of worship, and other “informal” contexts.

Despite its explicit goal of uncovering the hidden ways in which Californians participate in culture, there is not a lot of evidence in “Cultural Lives” to suggest that poor and less-educated adults are more likely than others to engage in the informal arts. For example, 60% of respondents with less than a high school diploma spent time with friends or family making music, compared to 73% with an advanced degree; there is a similar slightly upward trend by income associated with that activity. While we don’t see the kinds of dramatic differences across education and especially income as we do with various forms of physical attendance – the ones noted above are within the margin of error for the survey – there is no category of participation that demonstrates a clear pattern in the opposite direction, of higher participation by adults in the bottom income quartile or who never attended college. Put another way, while poor and economically disadvantaged adults may be more likely to sing to themselves or dance with friends than see the opera, the same is true of people with college degrees and well-paying jobs.

Survey Says…Don’t Trust (Most) Surveys?

Discussion about “The Cultural Lives of Californians” will no doubt focus primarily on its content and findings, but the study is no less notable for what it has to teach us about survey methodology and the art of measurement.

The project of which “Cultural Lives” is a part represents an ambitious and serious bid to move the practice of measuring cultural participation forward. In addition to the survey and accompanying analysis, the Irvine Foundation has also published a technical appendix that is longer than the report itself; a review of theoretical constructs and issues in arts participation research; and an entirely separate analysis of the California-based respondents to the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). This last bit is especially important because it provides for direct comparisons between the “old” and “new” ways of measuring participation – the researchers even used the exact same question wording across surveys in many cases in order to facilitate such comparisons.

As a result, and because of the tremendous level of transparency provided by the authors, we can learn a lot about the effects that survey design and administration have on cultural participation data. Fortunately for the sake of making this article interesting, but unfortunately from the perspective of researchers and practitioners, it turns out that conclusions can differ substantially depending on the choices made in constructing the survey.

In her forward to “Cultural Lives,” Irvine Foundation arts program director Josephine Ramirez declares, “the new narrative is not about decline! Californians actually have a deep interest in the arts and lead active cultural lives.” While the report can’t comment one way or another on decline since there is no longitudinal component to the data, what I take Ramirez to mean here is that when you broaden the definition of what’s included in arts and culture, all of the sudden you see a lot more people participating than you did before. That is true, but it turns out that much of that apparent increase is attributable to the survey itself.

The values observed in the respondent set to “Cultural Lives of Californians” are consistently higher than seen in comparable questions in the SPPA and other data sources, sometimes dramatically so. For example, the California Survey reports a prevalence of acting six times higher than California respondents to the SPPA; four times higher for purchasing or acquiring art; and double the rate of attending a cultural fair or festival. These are not deceptively small adjustments within the margin of error; some of the differences here approach or exceed 30 percentage points. To their credit, the authors noticed this pattern and even made a table to summarize some of the most eye-popping differences in the technical appendix:

By way of explanation, Novak-Leonard et al. cite the broader frame of the California Survey as a whole (although this doesn’t explain the difference in directly comparable questions), and credit the open-ended question about participation at the beginning of the survey and example prompts throughout for jogging respondents’ memories. Most notably, they cast doubt on the methodology of the SPPA, implying that the abrupt transition to the set of questions about arts and culture as well as the switch in recall period from the past week to the past year are confusing for participants and result in false negatives.

These explanations are quite plausible and (with the exception of the broader frame, as discussed above) very likely account for at least some of the gap between survey results. However, the authors seem to go out of their way not to consider another possibility, which is that the California Survey may suffer from increased nonresponse bias. The response rate to the survey is substantially lower* than that of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which opens up a higher risk for bias in light of the targeted nature of the survey. The SPPA is an attachment to a larger, multi-modal measurement exercise called the Current Population Survey that is administered by the Census Bureau; thus, respondents to the CPS agree to participate in the survey without knowing that they’re going to be asked questions about their arts engagement habits. By contrast, the California Survey is a telephone-only survey that was upfront about being interested in people’s cultural lives, with the result that people who have richer cultural lives may have been more likely to respond. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the discussion of volunteering for an arts organization, as follows:

Forty-one percent of California adults donated money, goods or services to an arts or cultural organization or project and almost one-third (30 percent) otherwise volunteered to help an arts or cultural organization….These rates of support are substantially higher than those generally seen in other studies that ask about support for arts and culture….In addition, a report released by the United States Census Bureau in early 2014 finds that approximately 26 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 and older volunteered in any way…

In other words, the California Survey found that adults in California volunteer for arts organizations at a higher rate than adults nationally volunteer for anything!

This is not the first time that we’ve seen this phenomenon in evidence with participation data. In 2008, Irvine published the results of a survey by Novak-Leonard (then known as Jennifer Novak) and Alan Brown that purported to measure cultural engagement patterns among Californians living in the state’s inland regions. Createquity’s analysis of that report noted the following:

While most of WolfBrown’s measures cannot be compared with those in the SPPA, many that do show significantly higher levels of activity. For instance, 30% of Cultural Engagement respondents said they “regularly” attend stage plays; only 12.5% of SPPA respondents in the Pacific region claim to have done so even once in the past year. Six percent of Cultural Engagement respondents perform dances, but just 2.1% of Pacific region SPPA respondents do.

Now, with even more direct comparisons possible with the SPPA, we see such differences persisting or even expanding. Is the variance the result, as the authors suggest, of the SPPA not giving people enough to go on as they try to think of ways in which they’ve participated in the arts? Or is the culprit nonresponse bias, meaning that the California Survey’s numbers are inflated? My guess would be that it’s some of both, and that “true” participation rates are somewhere in between these estimates. Seemingly mundane details like where a question appears in a survey have indeed been shown to have surprisingly large impacts on results in some cases. However, in its 2012 review of the threat of nonresponse bias to public opinion surveys, the Pew Research Center observed, “survey participants tend to be significantly more engaged in civic activity than those who do not participate, confirming what previous research has shown…This has serious implications for a survey’s ability to accurately gauge behaviors related to volunteerism and civic activity. For example, telephone surveys may overestimate such behaviors as church attendance, contacting elected officials, or attending campaign events.”

Regardless of the explanation, the fact that two different surveys asking the exact same questions of the exact same target population could come up with such disparate results has important implications for anyone who uses survey research in their work. Ultimately, the lesson here is that survey results are much more sensitive to both design and administration choices than we would like to think. And with response rates for surveys getting worse and worse, there seems to be a strong suggestion that even with a random sample and a professional approach, a survey that signals too strongly the subject under study can bias results if part of what’s being measured is interest in that subject. That should be a heads up for every arts organization that surveys its own audience members, an extremely common practice throughout the industry. If your market research relies on people taking the time to tell you whether they’re interested in what you have to offer, odds are you’ll be hearing from the most interested people.

Fortunately, all hope is not lost for cultural participation research. As if publishing five reports in five months wasn’t enough, Novak-Leonard has been working closely with the NEA for several years now to address some of the deficiencies in the SPPA and introduce more inclusive questions. A marriage of the more thoughtful survey design elements from the California Survey with the increased resources for ensuring a representative data set that the federal government can provide would result in the best cultural participation data we’ve yet seen. Let’s just hope that those government statistics-gathering efforts can survive political pressure and budget cuts long enough for that vision can come to pass.

* NORC researchers actually calculated two versions of the weighted response rate, each of which used different assumptions for estimating what percentage of telephone numbers that didn’t result in a completed survey were eligible to be included in the first place. The higher of these response rates, 31.6%, is the one shared in the report’s technical appendix. Following a lengthy email exchange with two individuals at NORC who worked on the survey, my sense is that the lower number, 9.9%, is likely a better estimate. I am happy to share the details of the exchange with anyone who is interested. By comparison, the response rate to the Current Population Survey, of which the SPPA is a part, is 75%.

NEA Infographic: Why Do People Attend the Arts?

If your events and exhibitions have seemed just a bit…emptier lately, you’re not alone. The National Endowment for the Arts’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) reveals that only 33.4% of U.S. adults attended one of seven “benchmark” arts activities—ballet, opera, musical plays, nonmusical plays, classical music, jazz, and visiting museums or galleries—in 2012, down from 41% in 1992. Though many a tooth has been gnashed over these statistics since they were released a year and a half ago, on their own they don’t provide much guidance for arts managers desperately trying to stem the tide. In an effort to better understand the reasons for the decline, the NEA decided to sponsor a set of questions on the arts as part of the 2012 General Social Survey (GSS). Administered by the National Opinion Research Center based at the University of Chicago, the highly-regarded GSS has been collecting data on a random sample of nearly 3,000 adults biennially since 1972.

The resulting report, titled “When Going Gets Tough: Barriers and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance” and released last month, provides an unprecedented level of insight into the motivations of “interested non-attendees,” that is, individuals who indicated interest in attending a specific performance or exhibition in the given twelve-month period, but ultimately did not follow through. (It’s important to note that the definition of arts participation used in the study excludes film and literary arts, as well as remote and home-based participation modes. A survey with these disciplines and contexts included might tell a different story.)

Just over half of survey respondents had attended either a performance or an exhibition within the past year, and an additional 13.3% fell into the category of “interested non-attendees.” Among attendees, performance patrons were most likely to credit socializing with others as the reason for attending an event, while nearly nine in ten exhibit-goers indicated that “learning something new” was a motivator for their attendance.

Among people who didn’t attend an event or exhibit but would have liked to, nearly half blamed a lack of time as a reason for their lack of engagement (particularly an issue for parents with children under six), 37% indicated that the venue was too difficult to get to, and 22% just didn’t have anyone to go with. Almost 40% of these interested non-attendees cited cost as an issue, and although it was not mentioned as often as time, the people who were concerned about affordability were much more likely to see it as a major obstacle than other barriers. Importantly, this figure enables us to arrive at a reasonable estimate for the number of people in the United States who are impaired from accessing one form of common arts experience due to economic disadvantage: just over 5% of the adult population, or 12.4 million people.

That fun and intrigue motivate participation in anything an arts event seems pretty obvious, and that cost, convenience and time are barriers to attendance will not be news to administrators who for years have struggled to address these very obstacles. Where the report really gets interesting – and concretely useful to the field – is in the somewhat unexpected variations between disciplines and among categories of attendees that it surfaces. This research supports the notion that individuals have different relationships to different disciplines, and get different things out of them. For example, 65% of performance attendees, and an even higher proportion of those attending music events, were motivated by the opportunity to see a specific performer, whereas just 6% of those attending art exhibits went to see artworks by a specific artist. Instead, as noted above, the vast majority of exhibit goers were motivated by the desire to learn something new – almost twice the rate of performance attendees. There were some interesting variations in motivation for audience members within the performing arts themselves, as well: 64% of theater-goers cared about experiencing high-quality art, compared with 52% of both dance patrons and music fans. Performance attendees were also more likely to bring somebody along. Interestingly, the number of respondents citing socializing as a motivating factor was much higher than the number attending with a friend of family member, implying that many patrons went to these events with the intention of seeing or meeting other people without necessarily bringing anyone with them.

Finally, the report shows that attendance patterns can be shaped not only by perennial cost and time issues, but also by cultural context. For example, African Americans and Asians are more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to attend performances supporting community events, and 79% of first-generation Hispanic immigrants saw performances and exhibitions as an opportunity to celebrate their cultural heritage. (By contrast, only 4.4% of US-born non-Hispanic whites mentioned cultural heritage as a motivating factor.) Several intriguing education-related findings included the fact that more than three-quarters of individuals with less than a high school diploma or GED indicated “learning something new” as a motivation for attendance, compared to 63% of those who had finished high school.

“When Going Gets Tough” confirms that reasons for non-attendance are complex and personal, and even (or especially) when armed with lots of data, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to improving participation across all disciplines and individuals. The “arts” are not “The Arts,” a homogenous monolith with homogenous strategies. Rather, “the arts” are a mosaic of disciplines and sub-disciplines, of artists and thinkers, of administrators and producers and curators, of venue owners and critics, and of audience members – each with their own unique relationship to the field. Still, there is much practitioners can learn from the statistics unearthed here by the NEA. The Venn diagram of sorts that emerges from the data put forth can be extremely specific, if we want or need it to be, and we now have an actual idea as to why, for example, a first-generation, retired, working-class Hispanic individual might attend a community concert, or what spurred the mid-thirties, middle-class mother of two to bring her kids to the MOMA. The first step, of course, is figuring out where in that Venn diagram our audience for a particular event sits (or where we want them to sit.) And the second, that of addressing the needs and expectations of interested non-attendees – and actually getting them in the door – might turn out a bit more successfully when armed with reports such as these.

Cover image of a gallery show by flickr user Brainfloat, via flickr Creative Commons license.

Summary

Published in 2011, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social web-inspired approach to museum exhibits and partnerships and serves as a handbook for museum professionals for engaging in participatory projects. The Participatory Museum looks at how audiences participate in online platforms such as YouTube and Flickr and extends those principles to visitor participation in a museum. The first section of the book presents the theoretical framework for participatory design, and the second lays out practical tips for designing participatory exhibits and programs including types of projects, evaluation tips, and advice on how to build institutional capacity for participatory projects.

Four main ideas make up the theoretical part of the book:

Scaffolding places clear parameters through design into an exhibit that help frame the visitor experience and the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding guides visitors and keeps requests for participation from being too open-ended.

Me to We Design, a recasting of Simon’s earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through personal entry points to make connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals. Those connections take many forms.

Social technographics are a concept borrowed from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement, audience profiles are based on types of activity and include creators, spectators, critics, joiners, collectors, and inactives. Good design considers how the actions of each audience type can enhance the experience of others.

Social objects function as a conduit for participation allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Giving objects a social dimension can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative.

In the second section, one chapter each is devoted to four types of participatory projects—contributory, collaborative, co-creative, hosted—three of which come from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE). Simon added a fourth type, “hosted,” to accommodate projects that are done by outside groups within the museum. The participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants but needn’t be attempted in any particular order. She even demystifies choosing among models through a handy chart.

Analysis

At first, I was skeptical of the book’s wide applicability. Would it work well in the field regardless of museum type, location, or resources? As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions.

• The Participatory Museum is dense in practical information. Tips are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation.
• The examples are diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum
• Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it was clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

The theories underlying The Participatory Museum appear to be sound even if not originating in or having been formally tested in a museum environment at the time of publication. Simon translates what assessment does exist into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like. The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to incorporating participatory design into an institution.

Implications

Simon’s book has had an undeniable impact on the museum field, reigniting debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. In the four years since its publication there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation. And even within the field, participation and the principles laid out in the book have become the focus of conferences, institution-wide training sessions, and professional development workshops. Though participation does seem to be where the field is headed, the principles have met with some resistance from proponents of the more traditional museum experience and design and the absolute control and authority of the institution.

At the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques? The Particpatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

(For a briefer edition of this analysis, check out the abridged version.)

“This may sound messy,” Nina Simon, engineer turned experience designer, writes of participatory projects. “It may [also] sound tremendously exciting.”

Summary

Written in 2010 as a handbook for museum professionals who want to engage audiences in deeper forms of participation, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social, web-inspired approach to exhibits and partnerships. At the time of writing, Simon was a highly sought-after experience designer whose philosophy was made popular through her blog, Museum 2.0. Part argument for participation and part toolbox, The Participatory Museum aims to inspire readers’ enthusiasm about participatory design and prepare them to launch their own successful projects.

The book itself is the product of a participatory project. Simon used an online wiki format to allow readers to submit relevant case studies and assist with writing and eventually editing. The online version of the book features linked footnotes for the examples used throughout the text.

Taking cues from social websites like YouTube, Netflix, LibraryThing, and Flickr, The Participatory Museum explores how brick-and-mortar institutions can learn from virtual participatory experiences. Simon defines a participatory cultural institution as one in which “visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content.” Participation encourages multidirectional content experiences: a museum, rather than limiting itself to sending information in the direction of visitors, can encourage those visitors to contribute information to the institution and even share among themselves. Participation also encourages more equitable relationships among all stakeholders, making objects and entire institutions more accessible.

All of this requires an adjustment in thinking about authority, the role of the visitor, and the flow of information between individual and institution. In participatory projects, museum staff members used to holding absolute authority in the interpretation of objects must cede some of that power to visitors. Simon asserts that the very process that makes participatory projects rewarding for museum audiences is often a source of apprehension for museum staff. Done right, according to Simon, “participatory projects create new value for the institution, participants, and non-participating audience members.”

Drawing by Jennifer Rae Atkins

Using the example of how interactivity has transformed entire organizations such as the Boston Children’s Museum, Simon imagines a future where some institutions are “wholly participatory.” The Participatory Museum advocates for the power of participatory design to fulfill idealistic mission statements about engagement, connection, and inspiring action. Nevertheless, Simon is careful to include the caveat that this new method of design isn’t meant to supplant traditional techniques but to augment them, and argues that the two can peacefully coexist.

Structure and scope

The book is organized into two sections. The first, more theoretical part lays out several participatory design principles, and the second details how four different models of participation can work in practice.

Participation in theory

For Simon, the first and perhaps most important point that undergirds all successful design is a clear connection between the institution’s mission and the benefits to be gained from a participatory project by the institution, participants, or audience. No one will be engaged – or fooled – if a museum halfheartedly invites participation because it has become trendy. To reap the rewards of participation, staff and leadership must understand how the project will advance the museum’s core purposes. This grounding in mission and clarity of benefits makes everything else possible.

The Participatory Museum identifies “two counter-intuitive design principles at the heart of successful participatory projects” that reappear throughout the book. The first is scaffolding, the guidance and constraints given to visitors to help frame the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding is necessary to set up a safe environment where audience members feel comfortable sharing and interacting with each other. Simon juxtaposes the completely open-ended request for participation with the thoughtfully narrow one.

Compare, for example, the open-ended dialogue program of British artist Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq,with the Human Library, an event first held for youth at the Denmark Roskilde Festival in 2000. It Is What It Is attempted to encourage visitors to ask questions of people who had served in Iraq by creating a large gallery with provocative images from the country and installing living-room-style seating. At points throughout the exhibition, soldiers, translators, and others were on hand to answer questions from visitors. Simon argues that It Is What It Is lacked “sufficient scaffolding to robustly and consistently support dialogue”: the two times she saw it at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, there were just two guests sitting on couches next to a powerful object.

The Human Library explores similar terrain: it is intended for “anybody who is ready to talk with his or her own prejudice and stereotype and wants to spend an hour of time on this experience.” Participants select a “book” from a catalogue of stereotypes, such as a black Muslim, a cop, a Goth, or a quadriplegic; once at the “checkout counter,” they encounter a person embodying their chosen stereotype for a discussion lasting anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. The experience was more carefully crafted, and it was a success at generating the kinds of provocative discussions the designers hoped for. The framing of the event as a library eased some of the expected reluctance in confronting visitors’ own prejudices, allowing participants to choose their own book provided a personal entry point into the activity, and even restricting the time helped set people’s expectations. Simon reasons that limitations make people more likely to participate and that better-defined parameters lead to higher-quality and more relevant participation.

Good scaffolding alone doesn’t automatically result in amazing social participation. Truly social interaction, Simon says, has to start with the individual, who begins to climb a participatory ladder from a personal entry point, her second design principle. “Me-to-We” design, a recasting of her own earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through those entry points to connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals.

Not everyone will always want to engage with others socially, even if an exhibit is designed to allow it. To categorize the different styles of participation, Simon looks to statistics on American adults from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement.

Forrester Research’s social technographics participation ladder.

In this framework, audience profiles are based on types of activity. Creators make up a small part of the participation pie, whereas critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives represent the majority in social platforms – and all but the last two (not just creators) count as truly participatory. Good design acknowledges the mixed composition of audiences and provides an outlet for each role to be involved, enabling the actions of each audience type to enhance the experience of others.

Simon devotes considerable attention to two other elements of design: technologies for social experiences and social objects. Each of these concepts is meant to aid in moving toward the “we” end of design. Simon asserts that mediating technologies can make people “more comfortable socializing with strangers” within the physical space of the museum. For example, Internet Arm Wrestling, an exhibit set up concurrently in several science centers around the U.S., enabled long-distance personal interactions. Visitors at one institution sat behind a metal arm and a computer screen and arm wrestled someone elsewhere at the same center or hundreds of miles away at another. The exhibit succeeded in engaging audiences in types of behavior they would not normally try within a museum or, probably, anywhere.

Simon doesn’t neglect the role of objects themselves in prompting social interaction. Simon argues that “social objects,” a concept taken from engineer and sociologist Jyri Engestrom, perform a similar role as mediating technologies, allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Social objects differ from regular ones in that they tend to spark interactions among audience members who see them. Simon uses the non-museum example of her dog, who serves as a focal point for social exchanges with passersby when she is out for a walk. Harnessing social potential is as much about good design choices as good object choices, and giving objects a social dimension is an art. It can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools such as panels and labels to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative..

Participation in practice

Shifting to the practical considerations for participation in the second part of the book, Simon borrows three categories of participation from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) and supplies a fourth of her own. One chapter is dedicated to each of the participatory models:

• Contributory
• Collaborative
• Co-creative
• Hosted

Simon describes contributory projects as “casual flings between participants and institutions,” with the most common form being the comment box or feedback wall. As the name suggests, these projects solicit contributions from visitors, which can take the form of opinions, stories, or personal objects such as photographs. Of the four participatory models, contributory projects are the simplest to execute and can involve the most people. Even though these projects are relatively casual, scaffolding still helps institutions ask for and receive meaningful contributions through thoughtful questioning and modeling desired behavior. The London Science Museum incorporated visitor-donated toys into the exhibit Playing with Science, and visitors reported feeling a sense of ownership and pride in seeing their toys on display.

In collaborative projects, institutions still take the leading role in project development, but they work side by side with community members to create new exhibits, programs, and services. These projects usually require a higher level of commitment from participants than those in the contributory category. The National Building Museum in DC runs an annual program that collaborates with local youth to create an exhibit based on the photography and creative writing of community members. Participants take part in twelve classes and have the opportunity to “partially self-direct” an exhibit at the museum. To Simon, though, the exhibit is just the beginning. She asserts that the real measure of success for these projects is what happens after they end – specifically, whether participants remain involved with the institution beyond the project. Simon suggests establishing four non-overlapping roles for the management of collaborative projects: project director, community manager, instructors, and client representatives. Each of these roles balances different levels of authority and intimacy with participants, so keeping them distinct, Simon argues, is important to project success and staff sanity.

Co-creative projects may be undertaken at the initiative of outside participants. On the surface, these projects may look very similar to collaborative projects, but the key difference lies in the share of power between the institution and participants. Co-creative projects are demand-driven and “require institutional goals to take a backseat to community goals.” The special sauce that makes these projects successful is a mixture of non-specialists equipped to accomplish both community and institutional goals, and institutions genuinely desiring community input and leadership. Seattle’s Wing Luke Asian Museum uses the co-creative model exclusively in developing their exhibits. Wing Luke staff members facilitate the development of the themes, content, and form of the exhibits by a team of advisors from the community.

In hosted projects, outside participants have almost complete power. One of the most common of these is a late night social event or reception sponsored by an external organization, although some museums may turn over a set of rooms for exhibitions controlled entirely by someone else. In all of these projects, the outside partner carries out their own project within the museum’s space. Despite the near-total abdication of power in these projects, creative constraints are still useful in ensuring a degree of consistency between community-led projects and those led by professional staff.

While the participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants, Simon believes that they needn’t be attempted in any particular order and shouldn’t be seen as a progression. She has even demystified choosing among models through a chart that walks through assessing your commitment to community engagement, desired control over the project, preferred level of leadership, availability of staff, skills gained by participants and benefits to nonparticipants.

Toward the end of the book, Simon devotes chapters to evaluating and sustaining participation. Evaluating participatory projects can be especially tricky because it must focus not just on results for the multiple beneficiaries but also on the process itself. And even the best design can crumble with inadequate institutional support and management structures. Simon suggests a few methods to get staff comfortable with taking on more challenging participatory projects, such as encouraging them to “spend time on the front lines with visitors” or conduct audience research. She also offers several strategies for keeping momentum going with newly started participatory projects, including hiring a community manager and cultivating a participatory culture from the very top.

Analysis

After reading The Participatory Museum, museums and their staff, regardless of their size or resources or content, should be able to begin their journey to reinvigorating themselves, right? What’s good for the web must be good for the galleries? I have to admit that at first I had my doubts.

Specifically, I was skeptical that the book’s techniques would work in a museum like mine, the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Laos: tiny, few staff, little money, no technology, almost no repeat visitors, and in a developing country. Forrester Research’s social technographics data draws on audiences in North America, Europe, Australia, Metro China, Japan and Korea – all relatively developed places. If any setting could test the limits of this model, it would be here. As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions about its applicability.

Many books meant as guides meander through abstractions and skimp on specifics, but The Participatory Museum is as dense in practical information as in theory. Tips (“Generally, a platform that has one-fourth to one-half of the space open provides a feeling of welcome and encourages visitors to share”) are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation. For example, in the section on collaboration, she shares her involvement with The Tech Virtual Test Zone, a 2007 project of the San Jose Tech Museum that did not turn out as expected. Simon’s own personal example of participatory failure was a poignant reminder that even seasoned designers don’t get things right all the time.

The examples are also diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum—some, even, from organizations similar to mine. To cite just a few cases, Simon presents an advice booth set up in the University of Washington-Seattle Student Center, a community photo-documentation project at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME), and a participatory book-tagging experiment in the Netherlands.

I also saw the applicability of Simon’s approach to the developing world firsthand recently, when my museum undertook a community-based participatory project similar to the VME’s. This work brought a flood of enthusiasm among community members previously untapped through traditional design methods. And a colleague in Indonesia recently quoted the book in justifying decisions she made within her museum. Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it’s clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

But can we trust the theories underlying The Participatory Museum’s recommendations for practice? While an exhaustive review of primary sources upon which the book draws is outside of the scope of this article, Simon certainly seems to have done her homework: her central typology of participatory projects (contributory, collaborative, co-creative, and hosted) is taken from the literature on public participation in scientific research. She deftly adapts it to the somewhat different context of museums, and added the final category (hosted) herself to account for the use of a museum’s space by an outside organization, where she argues persuasively that the principles of successful participation still apply.

That said, readers should be aware that most of the theory underlying The Participatory Museum had not been formally tested in a museum environment at the time the book was published. Simon speaks forcefully about the need for more and better evaluation of participatory projects; she calls the lack of it “probably the greatest contributing factor to their slow acceptance and use in the museum field.” The Participatory Museum seemingly does a good job of enlisting what assessment does exist and translating it into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like, but the evidence presented in most cases is anecdotal. (There are exceptions, such as a 2002 impact study of Glasgow’s Open Museum, which lent objects to visitors in the community.) Purely on the basis of what was known in 2010, it is hard to be sure what tradeoffs would be involved in manifesting Simon’s ultimate vision of a new, wholly participatory kind of museum, or exactly how best to do it. Even so, The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to starting that process at an institution.

Implications

Whether you love or hate it, the impact of Simon’s book on the museum field is undeniable. With over 250 citations in books and journal articles, and required reading status in graduate museum studies programs, The Participatory Museum is widely touted as a must-read for museum professionals. The book has inspired conferences, institution-wide discussion sessions, and professional workshops around the country, and reignited debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. Simon continues to experiment with these principles at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, where she has been executive director since 2011.

It’s hard to know how much credit The Participatory Museum can claim for this, but there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation in the four years since its publication. The Economist recently noted that museums were almost completely unrecognizable, having changed from being places “where people look on in awe” to being places “where they learn and argue.”

But is participation for everyone? There is a tension in The Participatory Museum between Simon’s utopian vision of wholly participatory institutions and her call for balance between traditional and participatory design. Writing about her divergent experiences during a visit to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming in 2008, she admitted:

I am an elitist when it comes to national parks. I like my parks hard to access, sparsely populated, and minimal in services…I believe in lowering barriers to access and creating opportunities for visitors to use museums in diverse ways. On this trip, for the first time, I truly understood the position of people who disagree with me, those who feel that eating and boisterous talking in museums is not only undesirable but violating and painful.

If participatory design is not the only worthwhile kind of design, where is the proper balance? How do institutions and staff know when they’ve hit the participatory sweet spot and when they’ve gone too far?

Indeed, the principles Simon advocates in her book have met with resistance from some quarters. While many institutions have begun transforming themselves into the new kind of museum that Simon envisions, others hold to their support of quiet contemplation and traditional design and seem to believe that they can meet their missions effectively and satisfy their audiences without these design techniques. Bruce Bratton, a Santa Cruz resident, and Judith Dobrzynski, a New York Times writer, are the most recent standard-bearers of the camp that is critical not so much of The Participatory Museum as of the concept of participatory design itself. Dobrzynski believes that the participatory trend, or as she calls it, “the quest for experience,” has led to a field-wide identity crisis in which entertainment has taken over the previously quiet and contemplative environment for which museums were known. Bratton’s more personal attack took aim at Simon’s own museum, calling it a “hobby circus” and claiming that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History had devolved into a community center under her leadership.

The Participatory Museum does acknowledge these concerns about audience members who don’t want to take part themselves or feel that others’ participatory experiences are intrusive. Early on in the book, Simon argues that the segment of the audience seeking a more traditional experience should not be left out of the process of “mapping out audiences of interest and brainstorming the experiences, information, and strategies that will resonate most with them” that is foundational to audience-centric design. The research profiling participant types notes that “passive” participants outnumber creators anyway, and through strategic design they can still benefit from others’ contributions. But at the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques?

For all the accolades and buzz it’s received, The Participatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? Are there gaps between perception and reality on this front? (For example, the book presents little evidence that participatory design can make museum audiences less white.) Finally, how can we most effectively take Simon’s advice to put the audience first in any design, given the varied desires and priorities of individual members of that audience? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

Further reading:

• Nina Simon’s blog, Museum 2.0
• Jessica Shoemaker, A review of The Participatory Museum
• Sarah Jesse, What Would the Internet Do?
• University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center, Participatory Museum workshop
• Collections Link, Participation Portal
• Archaeology, Museums, & Outreach; Moving from Me to We
• Mike Murawski, Developing Questions for Visitor Participation
• Interviews with Nina Simon about the book:
  • Huffington Post, Nina Simon and the Participatory Museum Model
  • National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Five Question Q&A
  • Smithsonian Magazine, Nina Simon, Museum Visionary
  • Information and Design, The Participatory Museum

• The IRS has proposed a new Form 1023-EZ, which would allow some smaller organizations to apply for tax-exempt status with much less hassle. The National Association of State Charity Officials has objected out of a belief that completing the longer form is an important educational experience and a fear that applications could skyrocket.
• A report from the R Street Institute argues that copyright terms, which have ballooned while patent terms have barely inflated, are so long that they are not only stifling to creativity but actually unconstitutional.
• With the recent passing of Cornelius Gurlitt, hoarder of over 1,000 works of art suspected to be looted from Nazis, the official investigation into the provenance of the artworks in his collection ended. Unexpectedly, Gurlitt bequeathed his trove to the Kunstmuseum Bern, reopening legal and ethical questions surrounding the new acquisitions.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• MacArthur President Robert L. Gallucci will step down when his term expires on July 1. Julia Stasch, VP for US programs, will act as interim president while the board searches for a replacement.
• Jarl Mohn, chairman of Southern California Public Media and former MTV executive, is the new head of National Public Radio. Mr. Mohn has the enviable charge of pulling NPR out of its deficit, sowing harmony among member stations, and figuring out how to fundraise in the post-pledge drive era.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Knight Foundation has awarded Theaster Gates $3.5 million to transform an office space on the south side of Chicago into an incubator “where neighborhood residents will come together with artists, designers and urban planners to work on revitalization projects through art.”
• Reflecting on the Hewlett Foundation’s recent announcement of the end of its Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative, Tony Proscio wonders whether the funder pulled the plug too soon. Meanwhile, in another frank self-assessment, Hewlett undertook a field scan of evaluation spending and found room for improvement in its own practice, particularly regarding embedding evaluation strategies in the early life of programs. As a result, the foundation plans to up its evaluation spending from roughly 1.2 percent to 2.3 of its overall grant budget.
• Bad news for “cultured professionals” looking to buy art at auctions: the average price for fine art has doubled over just four years, leaving many to settle on prints. And in other art market news, between 2012 and 2013 online art purchases increased 83 percent. Total sales have finally exceeded $1 billion.
• Angie Kim summarizes the origins and history of the 5 percent payout rule for foundations and argues a variable payout rate, based on a foundation’s performance over 25 years, would better ensure that foundations’ wealth does not grow disproportionately to their support of the greater good.

IN THE FIELD

• The San Diego Opera’s financial situation is looking up: in the last two weeks, the organization has raised more than $1 million through a crowdfunding campaign and received a $500,000 matching gift challenge – although, in the other column, the city is expected to cut its funding for the opera by $223,000. The Opera’s new board leadership’s desire to save the company now has the vocal support of the members of the San Diego Opera Association and the solo singers’ union. They aren’t out of the woods yet, though, since a 2015 season will still require about $2.7 million in additional funds.
• After seven years, the Seattle Dance Project is shutting down as artistic director Timothy Lynch moves to Ohio’s BalletMet. And the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra‘s next season will be its last after over 100 years of performances in Wisconsin.
• Say what? The Colorado Symphony Orchestra will host a series of bring-your-own marijuana events in collaboration with Edible Events, a pro-pot company, as a way to be more inclusive and raise money for the orchestra.
• We have no idea how much Comcast and Verizon are charging Netflix for more direct access to users’ homes – and that’s not a good thing.
• Some remarkable numbers from the academic field about the extent to which hiring for administrators has outpaced the hiring of professors. A similar dynamic to arts organizations, perhaps?

BIG IDEAS

• As Piketty-mania continues to drive interest in income inequality, a comparison of the prices of various goods in the United States over the last ten years yields grim insights about its effects. While the cost of education and health care — i.e. services that can’t be outsourced — has risen dramatically, the cost of electronics, clothing, and other personal goods has fallen. One commentator sums things up nicely: “Prices are rising on the very things that are essential to climb out of poverty.”
• Mania being what it is, it’s not surprising that some conversations about income inequality have taken an interesting turn, suggesting that the widening gap between rich and poor may be good for artists. As at least one author has pointed out, that argument fails to demonstrate that the arts are “more dynamic under high inequality than… under conditions of low inequality,” and even if great art has been produced in awful social conditions, that by no means justifies those conditions. Add to that mix confusion about the difference between rising wealth creation and wealth inequality, and you’ve got a growing debate on your hands.
• Design methodology is increasingly used to solve unwieldy social problems at a policy level in the European Union, but the US has been slow to catch on. The National Endowment for the Arts contracted the Design Council to organize a webinar addressing how to use design “to create public services around the people who use them, to introduce new methods into the civil service skill set, and as a tool to aid the process of public policy development” as part of the Learning from Abroad series.
• The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has launched Philamplify, a collection of in-depth assessments of the top foundations in the country. Assessments of the Lumina Foundation for Education, William Penn Foundation, and Robert W. Woodruff Foundation are included at the moment, though the site plans to add about one hundred more within the next few months. Website visitors can indicate whether they agree with Philamplify’s recommendations for the foundations and add comments.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Arts marketing specialists LaPlaca Cohen released the sixth edition of their CultureTrack report on participation in cultural events and held a panel discussion about it. The report characterizes American audiences as promiscuous (we range across media) and social (we hate to go alone, and personal recommendations and invitations are among the main drivers of participation). The verdict on attendance is mixed: more people are attending museums, musical theater, and classical music each year (though not straight plays, theater, or opera), but overall they are going less often.
• A new study by researchers at the London School of Economics concludes that engaging in the arts makes people happy – as happy as if you paid them $100-150 per month. Michael Rushton, as is his wont, argues caution.
• The NEA has an update on three current projects that aim to support continuous learning in the field: 1) an assessment of the artistic excellence of grantees’ work products, 2) a pilot survey of grantee organizations’ audiences, meant to measure the extent to which they were engaged and moved by arts experiences, 3) a new evaluation by the Urban Institute of the the NEA’s Arts & Livability Indicators.
• inBloom, a massive educational data collection effort supported by the Gates Foundation, is shutting down following mounting concerns voiced by parents regarding their children’s privacy. Besides serving as a cautionary tale of how philanthropic efforts can stumble when they lack appropriate buy-in, the example may portend a backlash against collecting data on children — and arts audiences of all types.
• Of 7,000 Victorian novels, only a few dozen are read today. How does an author pass the test of time? Salon interviews cultural historian Franco Moretti, who uses big data to analyze bad books.
• Speaking of not getting read today, do you ever feel like posting reports online is adding to a virtual wasteland of PDFs that will never be opened? You’re probably right. The World Bank decided to test that feeling by running analytics on its website and discovered that a whopping one-third of its research reports have never, ever been downloaded. Only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times.

ETC.

• Positive reviews on sites like Yelp and Amazon translate into real money for businesses – even though as many as a third of reviewers may be fake and the real ones may not be representative of customers.
• The Gray Lady suddenly appears to find itself in the business of hiring actors, thanks to a new “Verbatim” series that features “recreations of actual events from the halls of law and government” by “transform[ing]… legal transcripts into dramatic, and often comedic performances.” The first one comes courtesy of a 2010 lawsuit involving photocopying public records. It has to be seen to be believed.

• And, we try again: as expected, the FCC is proposing new net neutrality rules. They are similar to the previous rules, which were recently invalidated by a federal court, but depend on a different legal rationale. Those who are concerned the rules (old and new) do not go far enough to protect content creators they have their chance to persuade the Commission – the public comment period has just opened.
• Even as the Detroit Institute of Arts contemplates privatization, the private Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC is planning to cede most of its collection of 17,000 artworks to the National Gallery of Art and other museums across the country. The move, following years of financial crisis, would also see the Corcoran’s building and College of Art and Design taken over by George Washington University.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Marin Community Foundation has named Larry Best to the business-card-bending position of Program Director for Arts & Culture, and Social Justice & Interfaith Understanding. His predecessor, Shirin Vakharia, has become Program Director for Community Health and Aging.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Boston-based Barr Foundation has joined the ArtPlace America coalition, bringing 2014 commitments to $28 million – just in time for Artplace’s announcement of this round’s finalists.
• Continuing the trend toward transparency in artist earnings, cellist Zoë Keating has shared a breakdown of all her income from music sales and streams in 2013. Of the $75,341 she made, 92% was from sales; a single track bought on iTunes was worth 160 Spotify streams, which was in turn worth seven YouTube streams.

IN THE FIELD

• Heads up to the country folk: a new rural arts blog salon and webinar series put on by Americans for the Arts shines light on how rural communities can and have used the arts for economic growth.
• The art world was abuzz recently with the news of an artist/vandal who destroyed a work by Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei in the middle of a museum – mimicking Ai’s own actions in photographs posted in the gallery. Are Maximo Carminero’s actions a harbinger of participatory disaster? Nina Simon weighs in on how to bring clarity to the messy transition towards museums as “living” institutions.
• For those prone to screw up targeted marketing, NewMusicBox breaks down how not to become the Abercrombie and Fitch of music.

BIG IDEAS

• The Dallas Museum of Art’s unusual membership program, instituted in January 2013, provides free membership to individuals willing to let the museum track their activities as they enter and explore the galleries, offering points and rewards along the way. In addition to reducing barriers to joining, it has given museum leadership valuable insight into visitor behavior. The information is then used to attract new donors. So far, it seems to have worked out well for everyone involved; is this the future of memberships?
• In an interview, Deeksha Gaur, Director of PR and Marketing at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in DC, talks about the digital audience engagement innovations that have been called “a glimpse at the theater of the future.”
• Grant panels meet American Idol? Back in 2013, the Arizona Commission on the Arts shook up its grantmaking by identifying and supporting arts-based entrepreneurial ventures via an “Art Tank” competition in which applicants had six-minutes to “pitch” their proposals to experts and a live audience. Executive Director Bob Booker offers interesting reflections on the process. Meanwhile, Barry Hessenius considers what might happen if arts funders acted more like venture capitalists: more active involvement with grantees beyond funding, and greater weight on leadership in evaluating proposals.
• Writing the next great American novel? Consider finishing it on a train. Amtrak, in a move that’s left authors everywhere drooling, quietly launched a residency program that allows writers to travel its long-distance rail routes for free while working. While undoubtedly cool, the initiative has caused some to wonder whether the resident writers have an obligation, explicit or implied, to make sure Amtrak benefits from the arrangement.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• Registration for “Creativity and Innovation in Public Education,” this year’s Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) Cultural Symposium, is full – but the event will be livestreamed on March 4. E-participation is free.
• Anupama Sekhar offers a personal account of her experience at January’s 6th World Summit on Arts & Culture in Santiago, Chile.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In the latest study about the streaming music service Spotify, Music Machine looks at musical preferences by state.

ETC.

• Seeking an opportunity to relax, kick back, “hear and think about what is heard”? Join the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (yes, it exists) at a three-day symposium in Portugal. If you’re already of the acoustically ecological persuasion, consider submitting a presentation or artwork on anything from noise control policies to “the study of soundscapes as social and political intervention.” Proposals are due March 15.

In recent years participatory culture has subverted consumerist habits, mass media production, and even our social interactions. People who wouldn’t previously have considered themselves creative are getting opportunities to become true collaborators in producing what they consume in fields where once they could only serve as audience members. Nowhere is this more true, arguably, than in the San Francisco Bay Area, the birthplace of parklets, Twitter, and Yelp. It’s clear that the lines between producer and consumer are being blurred in arts administration and education as well. Organizations of vastly differing sizes are adjusting to our changing culture in their own ways, altering how they interact with the public and how the public interacts with them.

Viewed from the outside, the two organizations I work for could not be more dissimilar, and yet both find themselves enveloped in this trend. Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative, where I head the gallery and serve on the board of directors, is a small, community-run bookstore and art gallery open since 1989; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), meanwhile, where I work in the education department, is a large, international collecting institution of modern and contemporary art. Both are at crucial points in their history, and progressing in divergent directions in their vision for public participation and assessment of their educational goals. SFMOMA is reaching to be more experimental, more integrated into daily life, and more collaborative, while Adobe Books is realizing that it must become more like a museum in many ways (more organized, more curated, with a developed mission statement) in order to stay afloat. These organizations are evolving slowly towards each other, providing us with a unique window into how cultural institutions are balancing educational priorities with dueling needs for top-down curation and creative collaboration.

Both Adobe Books and SFMOMA are known as culture makers, information disseminators, and artistic/cultural venues in San Francisco. And both, in the past year, have left their longtime homes. SFMOMA has decided to infiltrate the city and beyond with creative programming and artist projects, “on the go” until 2016 while the museum is closed for an expansion, and Adobe Books was pushed out of its longtime home on 16^th Street due to rising rents and gentrification, recently relocating to a cozier space on 24^th Street. The similarities end there. SFMOMA has over 200 employees, and has the resources to maintain a strong presence in the city, with or without an actual building. Adobe Books, by contrast, could not survive without a store; it is known locally as “the living room of the Mission,” and providing a space for people to meet and for the public to gather is a crucial part of who we are. Though Adobe Books’s art gallery is now fiscally sponsored through Intersection for the Arts, the bookstore portion is still just that, a store, with goods to sell.

Adobe Books at its new location on 24th St. Photo by Tiffany Seinz.

The Story of the Community Bookstore

Clay Shirky argues in his book Here Comes Everybody that organizing without organizations is the modus operandi of the 21st century, writing that “unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.” Adobe Books, though a sole proprietorship for nearly 25 years, has seemingly always operated on a community-run, collaborative model. By stepping back from curation and allowing community members to give life to the space, former owner Andrew McKinley was able to establish Adobe Books as a safe harbor for ideas, a place for meeting and doing, and a spot of artistic intervention for many.

Adobe Books is a natural spot for self-directed learning. Despite a more tightly curated selection of books in our new, smaller spot on 24^th Street, as a mostly-used bookstore with an ever-fluctuating inventory, most customers come in with the expectation of finding something they didn’t yet know they wanted. Because the programming is mostly developed by the visiting public, free programs happen easily and often. Only just recently has the Board of Directors created an online events calendar, or a website at all for that matter. Yet, as Shirky might have predicted, this lack of organization did not deter people from coming into the space; if anything, it fueled widespread neighborhood involvement. People came to the Adobe space on 16^th Street for the books, the people, and the likely chance that something was going on: an art opening, music performance, poetry reading, etc. This scarcity of management also gave the makers and doers of the community a sense of comfortable ownership over a space where they could speak their peace, make their mark, host a party, or even take a nap.

In 2013, however, with a rapidly gentrifying Mission District and steeply rising rents throughout San Francisco, time was running out for a bookstore that operated more like a community center than a for-profit business. Transitioning into a cooperative business with a fiscally sponsored gallery seemed to be the only option for survival. With significant seed funding from a successful Indiegogo campaign, Adobe Books has financially found a new lease on life. At the same time, as a cooperative with a managing board of directors, we struggle with how much to curate the space rather than let the community dictate our programming.

The new 24^th Street incarnation of Adobe Books is a bit more reserved than before. With 14 directors full of their own artistic ideals, the pressure of fulfilling the promises of a successful crowdfunding campaign, and the gallery’s new fiscally-sponsored status, we feel the responsibility to be organized and thoughtful about our decisions. As an administrator by trade, I must admit I garner some pleasure from drawing up loan agreements, event MOUs, and vendor contracts. I like that we maintain a calendar, and that price negotiations on all book sales is no longer the norm. As I happily file reimbursement forms, I do wonder if all of this “organization” is slowly killing the community space that Adobe Books used to be.

Artists in the Adobe Books gallery often give me sideways glances when I hand them a loan agreement—the sort of formality that has never been instituted before. More and more inquiries about book readings, concerts, and other events are being directed to a single events manager, which is just as convenient for us as it is inconvenient for the person inquiring at the front desk who has to remember to scribble down the correct email address. Adobe is learning to be more top-down, and all the while asking ourselves if this structure is worth the exclusion that often comes with this sort of organizational map.

SFMOMA takes programs “on the go” with Mark di Suvero’s sculptures on Crissy Field. Photo by Dominic Santos.

A Museum On the Go

In contrast, SFMOMA is ever so slightly turning bottom-up, and learning that providing arts experiences with a listening ear can be more relevant and valuable to today’s population than white walls with a system for dispersing information about objects.

At SFMOMA, even the education department has a directive to curate its offerings for the public in a more or less top-down way. As with any museum, we have both the task of engaging the public as well as protecting a historical archive. However, SFMOMA is unusual in our commitment to becoming part of urban life for the residents and visitors of San Francisco. In the 2.5 years of its closure, the museum has committed to activating the city in exciting ways, perhaps echoing the recent rise of socially engaged art. Projects like Project Los Altos in the town of the same name and our decentralized exhibition of the 2012 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) awards insert art into everyday life. David Wilson’s SECA piece literally directs viewers to follow itineraries through San Francisco to find secret art interventions, with all journeys commencing from the closed museum doors. While some SFMOMA departments may see the temporary displacement as a hindrance, asking questions like “how will we keep membership numbers up with no museum admission?”, the education department frames it as an opportunity to do what we’ve always wanted to do, reaching out into neighborhoods, schools, and communities to participate in art projects and programs that reflect the dynamics of our city.

Rather than taking a soapbox approach to its educational programs, SFMOMA is developing two-way partnerships with schools and creating new public programs that rely heavily on audience participation. This year we are piloting several school projects that are part artist commission, part school curriculum, and part student-driven learning. These efforts are still in their infancy, but show promise in that both parties seem willing and excited to collaborate to bring contemporary art to the classroom in dynamic new ways. Our public educational programs are evolving as well. As part of our Project Los Altos exhibit, the Education Department is asking artists who participated in the exhibition to create a series of participatory art instructions to be printed in the Los Altos Town Crier, the local newspaper. Responses and documentation from those who choose to participate will be documented on the web as well as a few printed in the following week’s paper. After decades of hearing the likes of Paulo Freire and Sir Ken Robinson tell us that creativity and two-way communication between the educator and student are essential for dynamic learning, educators and education administrators are finally translating these ideals into actual teaching practices. We’re seeing the rise of Visual Thinking Strategies and other inquiry-based learning methods, evidence of the impact of participatory trends in our culture on museum education. The fact that education as a discipline has been at the vanguard of this shift means that museum educators are freer to adapt more quickly.

“You Do Have to Relinquish Some Control”

Forging new community partnerships is crucial to the health of  SFMOMA while it is without a building. Whether this comes as a welcome change or not, our 2.5-year closure may be exactly the catalyst necessary to transform SFMOMA into a leading 21^st=century institution, one thoroughly and intentionally engaged in its community. On the other hand, newly burdened by rising rent and the bureaucracy of organizing a cooperative (by-laws, articles of incorporation, etc.), Adobe Books is pushing hard to be structured while still maintaining its grassroots spirit. Both of these organizations have been molded by San Francisco’s unique, evolving culture, and transformed in recent months by both strong community support for the arts as well as by the money and change that comes with the city’s most recent tech boom.

This climate seems to have pushed San Francisco organizations to experiment with new methods of community collaboration, to search for the perfect balance between curatorial control and open source content. To stay relevant in today’s San Francisco, I suspect that more organizations will be striving for this middle ground—less “institutional” than the stuffy collecting museums of yore, yet more bureaucratic than the scrappy organizations that were once able to maintain cheap spaces in the city. As J.S. May, Chief Advancement Officer of the Portland Art Museum, recently said at the National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture, “You do have to relinquish some control.” Just how much control to withdraw remains a pertinent and ongoing question for each individual institution – and as San Francisco’s experience demonstrates, large and small organizations have much to learn from each other across the resource divide.

Launched in April, CultureHive currently hosts over seven hundred resources organized into four categories: guides/toolkits, research, case studies, and articles. The AMA has a team of experts gathering resources and creating new ones on a freelance basis, and users are encouraged to submit their own examples of good practice as well.

The platform itself looks great and couldn’t be simpler. The homepage highlights the most recently added and the most popular resources, but it’s really all about the search box, which stretches the length of the page.

I tried typing “youth” into the search box, hoping to find resources about marketing to and engaging young people, and up came fifteen results, all downloadable pdfs. Narrowing the results further to case studies, there were nine choices left that covered pricing strategies, membership structures, orchestra models, family concerts, libraries, and museums, all with a special focus on young people.

Three things seem to set CultureHive apart. First, while CultureHive isn’t the first online repository of helpful resources for arts marketers, it might be the first to balance specificity about marketing for cultural organizations with relevance to diverse corners of the arts sector. In the U.S., for example, the Theater Communications Group and the National Guild for Community Arts Education have online collections of marketing resources, but they cater to their particular slices of the arts world, so they lack broad applicability – and they provide limited access for non-members. Conversely, some sources do cover multiple arts fields but go a bit too broad, neglecting arts-specific information in favor of something akin to Marketing 101. This seems to be the case for the one-size-fits-all marketing resources provided by many state arts agencies, such as those in North Carolina and Texas.

Second, simplicity and speed are paramount in CultureHive’s design – the site is extremely easy to use. Americans for the Arts’s Arts Marketing Project has an online resources section with a lot to offer, but it’s not keyword searchable and can require some digging to locate what you need.

Finding this combination of breadth, depth, and user-friendliness in a single place is rare and could make CultureHive a go-to site, but I would argue that its success is contingent on the third distinguishing factor: an emphasis on sharing. At the bottom of every single page is a link that says, “upload a resource.” The fact that this is a living collection of materials sets the site apart most of all – but only if it keeps growing. Since launching in April, the site has been getting about one submission per week. For CultureHive to really take off, this pace will probably need to pick up considerably.

We’ll have to wait and see if CultureHive lives up to its promise. I’m also curious whether arts marketers outside the UK will find the site useful. At present, the resources available are largely for and by UK arts marketers and organizations. There are some resources featuring examples from the States – including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Providence Performing Arts Center in Rhode Island, and the San Jose Symphony Orchestra – and CultureHive hopes to expand its bank of U.S. information over time. (American readers, feel free to lend a hand with the internationalization: head over to CultureHive and upload away.)

For the moment, in a world where a Google search of “arts marketing to youth case studies” will get you nearly 22 million hits, it’s nice to search for exactly what you’re looking for in a catalogue of material vetted by experts. CultureHive provides a valuable service that will only improve as its pool of resources grows. In the best case scenario, CultureHive could help spur more effective marketing across the arts sector, leading more people to buy tickets, take classes, visit exhibitions – and hopefully like what they hear, see, do, learn and feel enough to keep coming back.