The Intrinsic Impact project, commissioned from WolfBrown by Theatre Bay Area, is generously supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grants, the City of San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, the California Theatre Network via the California Arts Commission, Theatre Development Fund, A.R.T./New York, Arts Midwest, the LA Stage Alliance, the Helen Hayes Awards and the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia.

Intrinsic Impact News: January 2011

Rolling Along

As of March 10, over 17,000 surveys had been taken home by patrons, and over 7,000 had been returned. That's an amazing response rate – 41%!

We are currently working to process all of the surveys, and will be rolling out the dashboards for each company as we complete the data entry.

Response Rates by Company by Show 

 Success Spotlight: The Pearl Theatre Company

Aaron Schwartzbord, the marketing director at the Pearl Theatre Company in New York City, had a conversation with me about their work doing in-person interviews to supplement their intrinsic impact survey results. Here's what he told me about the wonderful experiences they've been having during their interview process:

"Every time we have interviewed people, they have been so amazing. The first time we did it we got so many people that we had to start turning them away –people were getting offended that we couldn't let them in!

"I think that the interviews, what they're doing is—some of the things they say are surprising, some aren't—but the interviews certainly give us the opportunity to sit and pay attention for a minute to our audiences. We're such a small company with such limited resources, and this opportunity has been really enlightening, to have to do it.

"We've been able to get such great responses. People want to participate, and the conversations—they become both about the company and the play. For the first play, Rosmersholm, which was incredibly political and timely, the conversations became really about the content of the play, what people were seeing, how they were relating it to themselves. People started having small arguments, one person saw things one way, another person saw things another way.

"With the second play, The Misanthrope, it really became about the company. It was Moliere, much lighter, and when we were asking about the show, the group got turned around and the interviewees started asking us the questions! They started probing us about the company and how and why we do what we do. They were so into it, and they wanted to know more and more about us.

"Doing the interviews has meant that we've really been able to see some of the differences in our audiences. One of the questions, for example, is something like, "Are you noticing the people around you, are you paying attention to them?" In one group, we had mostly older people and one younger person, in her thirties, and she was the only one paying any attention to the people around her. I'm also in my thirties, and I find that I definitely notice the people around me. Her response said something to me about how younger people see theatre as opposed to the older audience – that really enlightened me.

"We've just had a great time with the interview process, and it's getting us in front of people that we don't generally have a face to face conversation with. We spend so much time with our donors and our patrons, but just having a regular subscriber sit down and talk to us, and for us to get to thank them in person – it's something we just don't do regularly, and so it's been wonderful. And people really want to be heard. 

"It's not just about us learning, it's about letting the audience members express themselves to each other, too. They really get going, and I think that's what's exciting."

New Funding!

Theatre Bay Area is very excited to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has joined with the other major funders of the Intrinsic Impact research with a generous grant to aid with the dissemination and ongoing development of the online dashboard. The official release will come out shortly, but Theatre Bay Area and WolfBrown would both like to extend a very grateful "Thank You" to everyone at Mellon for the support of this important work.

Talking Up Intrinsic Impact

If you're looking for more information on intrinsic impact, you don't have to look very far!

• In February, Alan Brown and his associated Jennifer Novak-Leonard presented a webinar for Americans for the Arts on measuring intrinsic impact. You can check out the webinar by visiting http://www.americansforthearts.org and logging into the Members Only section (you must be a member of AFTA to see the webinar). It's located in the archives.
• In March, I contributed to blog conversations at both ArtsMarketing.org and ArtsUSA.org with thoughts on Intrinsic Impact, once in terms of advocacy and then as part of a series on arts education. You can check out "We Need New Beans to Count" here, and "The Space Between Stories and Numbers" here and "How Do We Make People Care?" here.
• Also in March, Theatre Bay Area's Executive Director Brad Erickson presented on Intrinsic Impact as part of a panel called "Messaging, Language and the Power of Stories" at the Association of Performing Arts Service Organizations conference in Austin, TX.  You can find his PowerPoint here.
• I also just spoke with David Dombrosky at Technology in the Arts, which is based at Carnegie-Mellon University for a podcast about the intrinsic impact project in general, and the web-based dashboard in particular.  You can listen here.
• Coming up, I will be presenting on Intrinsic Impact not once but twice at Theatre Bay Area's Annual Conference on May 23, and will also be taking part in a panel on the implications of intrinsic impact measurement on funding at the Americans for the Arts conference in San Diego, and both Alan Brown and I will be speaking on a panel around the possibilities for small- and large-scale advocacy using intrinsic impact data at the Theatre Communications Group conference in Los Angeles – both of those are in June.

Do you have conferences in your cities that you think might be a good venue for presentations on intrinsic impact?  Email Clay and we'll see if we can arrange to get out there – or to have one of our local partners present on the work! 

Intrinsic Impact News: January 2011

"Talk to any artist, and you'll hear absolute conviction that their work matters to their audience, but until now they've had no way to measure and prove it." -Brad Erickson Executive Director, Theatre Bay Area

Off to a Great Start!

As of January 18, seven of the 18 theatres have completed collecting survey responses (results are summarized in the table below). Overall, out of 5,811 surveys taken home by patrons, 2,467 surveys were returned for an average 43% response rate. This is double the 20% anticipated response rate we expected at the beginning of this study, and a great start!

Literally hundreds of surveys are rolling in now from many of the other theatres that have also started the data collection process – we're looking forward to continuing this momentum.

Response Rates by Company by Show

What's Working? Tips to Maximize Response

Getting response rates up is a combination of multiple factors. Based on what we've seen so far, we think you should think about doing the following:

1. Make the curtain call speech personal; share your interests and goals for the study. Consider talking up the national prominence of the study and specifically your role in representing your community.
2. Post information about the survey everywhere – the lobby, the bathroom, the concession stand.
3. Train volunteers and survey captains so that they can talk about details of the study.
4. Have a senior-level person work the crowd – it really helps!

Success Spotlight: La Crosse Community Theatre

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons: the La Crosse Community Theatre overcame the late arrival of surveys and record-breaking snow (remember, that's the storm where the roof of the Metrodome collapsed) to get a phenomenal 90% pick up rate and 49% return rate on their first show, It's a Wonderful Life. Located three hours outside of Minneapolis/St. Paul in La Crosse, Wisconsin, LCT was producing It's a Wonderful Life for only two weekends, and a glitch at our mail house meant that LCT's surveys didn't arrive in time for the first weekend, leaving them with only five performances to survey.

"We pushed hard," says LCT executive director David Kilpatrick. The company management put prominent notices on the front door of the theatre, in the lobby and in the restrooms about the survey, specifically pushing that fact that LCT was the only community theatre in the study, that the results would be featured alongside major theatres like the Public Theater and Berkeley Rep, and that given the snow and the small number of performances, every single survey counted.

"We taped the surveys to the seats, all of them," says Kilpatrick, "so that as many as possible were distributed. We then spent a few minutes at our curtain speech talking about how important this survey was, how privileged we were to be invited and how valuable our audiences' opinion was to this survey and to La Crosse Community Theatre. Our audience did the rest."

They made gathering the 300 completed surveys they needed a full-audience effort, and Kilpatrick was able to tell it was working when people who had been at the show approached him later in the weekend to check in on how the responses were going—they took it as a challenge, and wanted to make sure they succeeded. In the end, nine out of every ten patrons that saw the show took a survey home, and over 400 of those patrons took the time to return the survey.

Kilpatrick doesn't know whether the per-performance response rates will be as high on the next shows, but he's okay with that. He's just happy that he'll have three weeks of performances to work with – and hopefully, no snow!

Dashboard Update

Last week, the research and development team on this study got to see the first live demo of the website interface through which we'll be sending all of you your results. Powered by Sequel Server Reporting Systems and featuring fantastic full-color graphs by Dundas, the website will allow all of the participating companies a chance to see and investigate their survey results by choosing from a variety of filters.

The web interface is being developed in conjunction with the British firm Baker Richards, and promises to allow great flexibility for marketing, management and artistic staff interested in understanding more about their survey results. Ultimately, companies will be able to look at all of their productions simultaneously or one at a time, and to understand how staff and audience expectations stacked up against each other on a variety of levels.

We're looking forward to launching the beta version of the dashboard in time for companies to see their first productions' results, probably sometime in late February or early March. Watch your inbox for more!

The Buzz: People Are Talking About Intrinsic Impact

In November, Brad and I participated in a panel at the National Arts Marketing Conference to unveil the Intrinsic Impact study. The session, which was attended by over 120 people, got a lot of positive buzz and great marks in post-conference reviews. Here are a couple comments from session attendees' evaluations:

"It was refreshing to see that research is finally being conducted on the long-term value that the arts has on community. This type of value is often perceived as "warm and fuzzy," but these researchers are beginning to show how those who participate in and support the arts are more likely to be active pillars in various aspects of the community."

"I loved this session. It was fascinating to hear about the study and it was exciting to think that one day our organization would be able to conduct such a survey in an efficient manner."

In December, Ian David Moss also listed the Intrinsic Impact study as one of "The Top 10 Arts Policy Stories of 2010" in his Createquity blog. We're thrilled to be able to bring this research to theatres around the country.

Intrinsic Impact: General Information

We are excited to be moving forward with one of the most ambitious projects that we've ever tackled here at Theatre Bay Area - a nationwide study of the intrinsic impact of live theatre on audiences! Spanning 18 theatre companies in 6 cities across the country, this work will ultimately, as always, come back to the Bay Area, providing our companies and individual artists with a new set of tools, developed over the next 18 months, to measure and understand the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and social impact of your work on the people who watch it.

The real challenge to the American theatre, and all the arts, is not a financial emergency but a crisis of relevance. As a field, we have become very good at measuring "things financial;" any theatre knows how to count heads in the house and dollars in the box office till. Studies are regularly conducted by major funders and service organizations to assess the aggregate financial well-being of the sector. Advocacy groups commission research to extrapolate the mega-economic impact of the arts on communities and the nation as a whole.

But financial data tells only a fraction of the story. A theatre company may be financially sound, but is it really moving and exciting its audience? Is it connecting to its audience in a fundamental (i.e., intrinsic) way? And can that connection be deepened? How can artistic staff understand the impact of their programming decisions, and what, if anything, can they do about it? We have come to see that the theatre field lacks a generally accepted and widely used metric or "outcome rubric" for what matters most: the intrinsic value of the theatre experience.

What is Intrinsic Impact?

In 2004, the RAND Corporation published "Gifts of the Muse," an important examination of the public and private benefits of the arts. The study divided benefits between "instrumental" and "intrinsic" benefits.

"Intrinsic" benefits, as described in the study, entail intimately personal responses to an art experience. Researcher Alan Brown uses the image of a footprint in the sand as a metaphor for the impression left on an arts participant. The effect of art, Brown says, is invisible, much like an animal that has departed but left behind a track. We may not be able to see the animal itself, but we can measure the footprint left in the sand. Once we have ways to measure and describe these "footprints," we have new and powerful tools to talk about the importance of the arts, to market our offerings, and to increase the impact of performances on audiences.

Theatre Bay Area has commissioned research firm WolfBrown, led by noted researcher Alan Brown, to complete this work, and will be working alongside the firm to develop the toolkit to allow theatres to do this work themselves in the coming years, at a fraction of the cost.

What will be measured?

As the largest and most comprehensive attempt to date to measure the intrinsic impact of performing arts experiences, this project will take a significant step toward quantifying what has until now been unquantifiable: the lasting impact of live performance on audience member.

Researchers at WolfBrown have developed six indices to measure intrinsic impact: intellectual stimulation, emotional resonance, spiritual value, aesthetic growth and social bonding.This study will encompass 18 theatres in six cities across the country (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia), surveying 3 productions per theatre. Each theatre will have the opportunity to customize a section of the survey in order to capture impact data specific to their artistic goals as well as related data on other factors that impact audience experience (pricing, parking, restrooms, etc.).

Who is participating?

18 theatres, 6 cities, 3 productions per theatre (about 50,000 surveys distributed in all)

What are the goals of this study?

• To clarify/understand intrinsic impact – how we memorize and tag arts experiences, how we choose to return or not return for more, and how we engage as audiences.
• To give companies a potential tool for measuring the effectiveness of work in order to better it
• To understand the current methods of valuing work and the limits and inequities of those methods, and where intrinsic impact can fit in
• To democratize intrinsic impact by creating a web tool kit, lowering the cost, increasing access, developing baseline statistics so people can set goals, increase understanding of the tools, encourage measurement and interaction and engage the community in a conversation

What are the specific deliverables?

This study will look at 18 theatres in depth, but will also include a variety of supplemental, community-wide tools and activities to stimulate conversation in each of the study regions. These other deliverables will include:

• A web-based interface to eventually allow any company to do their own impact study at minimal expense
• A series of community-wide conversations around intrinsic impact and audience engagement in general
• A set of data that will be useful for artists, administrators, advocates, funders and audience members
• A final report and accompanying set of national conversations designed to really tackle how best to talk about the arts in a way that isn't economic

What is the timeline?

We will begin surveying in the fall of 2010, and plan to complete surveying by summer 2011. The final report and website should be completed before December 2011.

Who can I talk to for more information?

This project is being managed by Clayton Lord, the director of communications and audience development at Theatre Bay Area. You can email him at clay@theatrebayarea.org.

Other resources

Gifts of the Muse - published by the RAND Corporation
"Assessing the Intrinsic Impact of Live Performance" - the original study conducted by WolfBrown in 2007
"Assessing the Intrinsic Impact of the Bay Area Free Night of Theater Program" - conducted by Theatre Bay Area and WolfBrown in 2008