Yesterday, the Flinn Foundation announced a grant to Alliance for Audience for which we are incredibly excited and grateful!  See their announcement here:  http://www.flinn.org/news/1038

In brief, the grant is going to allow us to conduct a audience engagement science experiment using the new Arizona Arts & Cultural Census/Community Database.

Step 1 – TRG will conduct a “market modeling” analysis on the records in the community database to that will identify a core demographic or “sweet spot” of current and active arts & cultural patrons.

Step 2 – Then, TRG will identify 20,000 households in Maricopa County that MATCH that demographic “sweet spot” but that are not arts & cultural participants.  (In essence, that will be a list of households that are not arts & cultural participants – but, judging by their demographic profile, SHOULD BE!)    That group will then be split in two – with half set up as a control group – to which nothing special will happen; and an active group that will be the recipients of multi-faceted year-long marketing efforts.

Step 3 - In the first 4 months, Alliance for Audience will invite a select few organizations (to be strategically recruited based on the Step 1 demographic analysis) to make the active group the subject of their own marketing efforts - and AFA will underwrite those marketing expenses.  We’ll be monitoring the response rate of those efforts very closely.

Step 4 – Beginning at month 6, we will open up the active group list as a mailing list to ALL organizations participating in the Community Database.  (Obviously, with some structure to assure that they don’t receive everybody’s materials all at the same time.)  Since organizations that are participating in the community database have the ability to analyze the demographics of their own audiences, this can be a rich resource for organizations that wish to strategically test their own new audience-engagement efforts.   

Step 5 - A year from now – we’ll compare the rates of participation of the active and control groups.  Our hypothesis, of course, is that the active group’s participation will be higher.  What we are especially interested to learn is HOW MUCH HIGHER?  

This is an incredible learning opportunity – not just for Alliance for Audience but for Arizona’s entire Arts & Cultural sector.  Expect to see (many) more posts about this project as it progresses.

Please note that this experiment purposefully focuses on a single demographic target (to be determined based on the Market Model analysis) so as to design, administer and measure results most clearly.  A key point of this experiment is that its methodology must be replicable for future efforts with other demographic target audiences, as future audience development efforts must continually pursue priorities for audience diversity.

If you haven’t signed up yet to participate in the Census/Community Database – it’s not too late!  The next deadline for new organizations to sign the participation agreement is November 9.  CLICK HERE for more info.

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