In this brief, arts researcher Francie Ostrower and her team at the University of Texas in Austin capture the organizations’ experiences and lessons learned in their efforts to attract millennials. One finding was that while organizations struggled with this audience group at first, some saw a pay off when they moved beyond the blanket category of millennials and started asking themselves, “Which ones?” With 70 million millennials in the United States, as reported in April 2020 by the Pew Research Institute, this approach made sense to many of the grantee arts organizations.
It is important to note that the initiative research concluded in 2019. That was before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic shuttered live performances, affecting an already difficult financial landscape for performing arts organizations, and before the movement for a deeper reckoning with racial justice emerged, demanding a response from almost all sectors in U.S., arts included. The authors write that they hope the experiences shared and questions raised in their brief can add to the dialogue brought about by these developments.
The brief is the third report from Ostrower and her team on the initiative. A 2019 literature review finds little research about the effectiveness of various audience-building strategies, but highlights questions organizations might want to consider in their efforts. Another short brief, Data and Deliberation, focuses on how the initiative arts organizations used data. More reports are expected in 2021.
Source: Report description
