Please come back soon!

Arts Council England’s Arts Audiences Insight¹ segmentation, which splits the English population into 13 segments based on their arts engagement, makes it clear that over two thirds of the entire population has some level of arts engagement, and lots of people in this group have the potential to increase their arts attendance further. However, many arts organisations spend the bulk of their time and resources attracting the small number of people who are already engaged (just 7 per cent of the population according to Arts Audiences Insight). Of course this makes commercial sense: marketers know that it is more cost-effective to reach regular audiences and many arts organisations rely on a small number of very frequent audiences to generate the majority of their income.

We need to step out of our comfort zone and try different approaches

But is it also a bit of a cop-out? These frequent attenders are people like us, they know our jargon, they can decode our messages and they can recognise a picture of Robert Wilson. We are well within our comfort zone when communicating with them. As a result, we are potentially missing out the vast majority of the population, people who are positively inclined towards the arts and are already attending – perhaps an annual theatre trip for a special occasion, a night out with friends or spending time with their children at a festival. Our arts offers, messages and communications do not seem to be working particularly well for them. We need to step out of our comfort zone and try different approaches if we genuinely want to engage with people who consider themselves arts goers, but who just do not get around to doing it very often.But why should we? Infrequent attenders offer enormous potential in terms of volume and financial value (not to mention helping us achieve our social objectives as recipients of public funding). If we could persuade some of these audiences to attend just once or twice more per year it could have a significant impact on our visitor profile and our earned income.
We know that infrequent attenders are looking for arts experiences that are high quality and entertaining, that are value for time and money and provide an opportunity to spend social time with friends and family. Risk and confidence are crucial factors – infrequent arts attenders may not come often, but they are loyal, sticking to a particular venue or artform. So reassurance that it will be good, that they will enjoy it and it is for people like them is important.
For an individual organisation it is important to back up this general awareness with research of your own audiences and to really get to know what is important to them. Once you have identified the needs, wants and motivations of your infrequent attenders, the next step is making changes to the marketing mix based on what you have discovered.
In my research for case studies for the ‘Come here often?’ workshops² I came across a number of organisations and initiatives doing interesting work in this area: from English National Ballet who undertook research to understand the popularity of different programmes among their audiences; to the ss Great Britain, whose culture of risk-taking enables it to successfully experiment with audience development initiatives; to Warwick Arts Centre which is trying new approaches to reach receptive local audiences; and London Orchestras which worked collaboratively to present a menu of concerts to infrequent attenders.
So, why not try a different marketing approach tailored to the needs of your infrequent attenders. Just one extra visit from this group could reap significant rewards.

Sarah Boiling is Deputy Chief Executive of The Audience Agency.
www.theaudienceagency.org