DR. ISMAIL MAHOMED CULTURAL CORNER: Thoughts and Experiences- Audience Engagement Strategy

In an address to young arts managers in 2017 I said to them: 'if you’re spending your entire marketing budget on posters, banners, handbills and other forms of advertising collateral to promote your shows then you are channeling your company into irrelevance and you are sailing on a sinking ship. You can save your company by moving the marketing budget that you spend on advertising collateral to spending it more on giving the artists, your company and the people who work in it a more human face.'

Portrait Illustration of Dr. Ismail Mahomed. Photo Credit: Facebook

The budget that you spend on paying an artist to participate in a post-show discussion or a walkabout or a writer to attend an opening night of his play gives you bigger returns on investment than what you spend on glossy street posting or billboard advertising. In very simple words it is called “Audience Engagement Strategy”.

Patron loyalty is less dependent on them coming to a show because the show is widely advertised than it is about patrons being able to engage with an artist and the people who work in the company. Loyal patrons are forgiving about an occasional flopped show because the personal relationship that they enjoy with the arts company allows them to be critically honest with the artist and the company. Loyal patrons will value your company when you have the courage to say to them, “Sometimes artists succeed and sometimes they fail. This time they were not successful but thank you for coming to see the show. Your support makes it possible for us to invest in artists who want to take creative risks.”

Patrons who do not enjoy this kind of personal relationship with the arts company will be lost forever because they’ll feel ripped off when they discover that the advertising budget that you spent on a flopped show was far more than the fee that you paid to the artist for sweating it out; or that you binged on hiring a dramaturge who could have bettered the script before it was rushed to the stage.

Loyal patrons don’t want to be a statistic in the box office records of an arts institution. They want to buy the right to shake hands with the artist and with you, to talk to the artist and with you, to know the people who work in your company and to know that, as patrons, they too will be recognised by you and your team when they walk through the door.  More importantly, that they are stakeholders in your success and empathetic supporters who can hold your hand even when things don’t go as anticipated. 

Loyal patrons want to share in your successes and in your failures. They want to be engaged by you. They are the pillars that keep your organisation afloat. Expensive advertising doesn’t!

Make a shift in what you’re selling. It’s not the individual production that you’re selling. It’s the values of your arts institution that you want patrons to buy into so that they live with you through the ups and the downs.

Dr Ismail Mahomed is the Director for the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is a multi-award winning and multi-published arts management strategist and playwright with more than 35 years’ experience in cultural leadership positions.