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Chicago Area Audience Development/Engagement
1996 to present
OVERVIEW OF CHICAGO AUDIENCE RESEARCH STUDIES

Over the past 12 years, a number of field wide, publicly available audience and demographic research studies have been conducted for the Chicago metro area that have insights which can inform current audience development efforts in nonprofit arts and culture. Included are studies that explore the demographics of audiences and organizations, leisure time patterns for arts patrons and non-patrons, and barriers and motivations to attendance by all types of participants from heavy consumers to occasional. One supportive addition to this body of work has been investigation into the connection between active participation in arts making and attendance at arts and cultural activities as audience.

Themes and Insights of Chicago Studies

People in the Chicago area are active consumers of the arts – be it as participants or as audience members. In Metro Chicago Information Center’s 2006 report which reviewed overall cultural participation statistics from a multiple set of sources, it deemed residents of Chicago as “cultural overachievers” participating in cultural activities at a higher rate than the national average. In its comparative study it cited that 60% of residents reported some type of involvement in cultural activity and found that Chicagoans have the highest level of consumer spending as a percent of household expenditures on entertainment fees and admissions in ten large metro areas. In fact, as citied in other studies, active arts participants are more often than not also active in civic and community activities.

Early and ongoing exposure and participation in the arts contribute significantly to motivating attendance. 76% of respondents in the Informal Arts study were cited to be more incline to attend arts activities because of their direct involvement in arts; two-thirds of those surveyed in the 2002 Marketing for the Arts in Chicago claimed to engage in personal art making and a strong correlation was found between performing arts attendance and art making. In addition, Get in Step with Dance Audiences cited that 57% of dance attendees had taken classes growing up, while only 35% of non-attendees had. On a slightly different but related tangent, adults were motivated to attend activities, particularly among African Americans and Latinos, when it involved taking their children or family focused activities. This rang true from heavy to occasional adult participants in the arts.

Arts consumers are willing and do cross over arts disciplines in their participation. Market for the Arts in Chicago cited that cross over attendance is a prominent pattern; those who actively attend make arts related activities an important part of their lives. Among dance attendees surveyed in Get in Step with Dance Audiences, it was observed that they not only attend performances of dance in their genre of greatest interest, but also cross into other dance types and other arts at high rates. These findings among others cited, indicate that there might be a single market for the arts rather than isolated by discipline.

Demographics only reveal part of the picture of arts attendance. Motivations matter.
Concentration on the demographic profile of arts audiences is a common focus of audience development efforts. Of these, educational level, not ethnicity, was demonstrated to be the strongest differentiator among those who attend and those who do not. Interestingly, income level is a determiner in frequency of attendance, but generally arts inclined audiences range the whole gamut. In Informal Arts, this is echoed in a profile of participants with up to 80% having some college education and 50% in the $30,000 to $75,000 income range. More importantly, multiple studies demonstrated that efforts to enlarge audiences need to be rooted in information about potential attendees’ motivations: why people attend that type of cultural event, where they attend, with whom they attend and the experiences they hope to have. Within this scenario, understanding the benefits desired, the perceived and real barriers to attendance and value of the experience become critical components to designing audience development initiatives. The balance and interplay of these factors can be visualized in this simple equation posed in Barriers and Motivations to Increased Arts Usage Among Medium and Light Users: Total Value = Total Benefit – Total Cost.

Barriers to participation that are universal are lack of time, the high cost to attend, and lack of spouse or peer interest. Market for the Arts in Chicago further indicated that lower prices would increase attendance among those who already participate with little impact on non-attendees, but among those who attend less frequently, 40% indicated that they would go more often if a spouse or friend was willing to go.

Diversifying audience report: progress has been made, however there is still a ways to go. Diversifying Chicago’s Arts Audiences brought focus to the issue of diversifying arts audiences in 2000. Billed as a progress report, it set the stage for the field to step forward. In that light, Mapping Cultural Participation reports on that progress. The good news is that African-American and Latino populations appear to be actively engaged with smaller, ethnic and diverse arts organizations. Additionally, here is evidence in multiple studies that ethnically based groups attend programming that resonates with them culturally, regardless of the type of presenting organization. However, with large Chicago cultural institutions, using data directly from these institutions, indications are that limited progress has been made as their participation remains primarily from white and high income areas.