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

Looking at Arts and Cultural Organizations and Audiences in Chicago
The arts enrich every aspect of life and helping arts organizations expand participation in arts and culture is one of The Wallace Foundation’s primary goals. Towards this end, in October of 2006, The Foundation awarded $2.9 million in Excellence Award grants to nine Chicago area arts organizations. The Excellence Awards were created to support exemplary arts organizations to pioneer effective practices to engage more people in high-value arts activities. In addition to the Excellence Awards, The Foundation began collaborating with The Chicago Community Trust and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs to create a learning network, Chicago Wallace Audience Engagement Network (CWAEN) to foster arts engagement in Chicago.

The purpose of CWAEN is to help area arts organizations reach more people, capture knowledge about effective practices, and make that knowledge known to a broad constituency of arts professionals. By adding further support to local arts organizations, the collaboration will promote the effective exchange of knowledge - extending the benefits of this work to many other organizations beyond those that receive individual awards. The initiative includes a series of learning circles, roundtables, symposiums, and other forms of technical assistance including market research and evaluation of audience development efforts.

Chicago area audience development research
Over the past dozen years, a number of Chicago area audience research studies have been identified that have relevance to area arts and cultural organizations. A survey to the Arts & Business Council’s list of nearly 400 organizations revealed that there is low awareness and low use of these studies. To raise visibility about these studies and make them generally accessible to area organizations this website resource was developed. It was hoped that bringing focus to these efforts would provide valuable perspective that would contribute to field thinking about audience participation and engagement, as well as encourage further research work in this area. We recognize that there are individual organizations that have and are undertaking important work in this area, but these are not included as our focus was on publicly accessible and field broad material. We would like to acknowledge the leadership of the Arts & Business Council of Chicago with this project, particularly Director of Programs, Andrew Micheli, and Cultural Development & Arts Management Consultant, Cheryl Yuen, who conducted a scan of research and analyzed the identified studies. We would also like to thank all the consultants and organizations who conducted and sponsored the included studies for their assistance and willingness to share their work with the arts community.

The information is divided into four sections. Summaries with links to the full text of cited material is provided with individual listings. These summaries have been developed to provide you a quick snapshot of each study accompanied with the opportunity to explore further if it is of particular significance for your organization. Studies within each section are listed in chronological order starting with the most recently issued to the oldest.

The Overview of Chicago Based Research Studies outlines common themes and insights of key Chicago are audience development studies.

Key Chicago Studies provides annotated overview information concerning seven key studies that directly address arts participation and engagement. For each study, there is a brief summary of study content, key findings, relevant strategies, best practices and/or case studies.

Other Local Research Studies of Interest provide brief summaries of seven arts related studies that provide contextual data about Chicago area arts organizations and activities. In addition, five reports prepared by the Metro Chicago Information Center are outlined and provide analysis and comparisons of key Chicago audience development studies and pertinent data concerning arts issues, extracted from their annual Chicago area study.

National Studies highlights short abstracts of nine National Endowment for the Arts reports and notes prepared by the Office of Research and Analysis which offer a national look at issues of participation and demographics in arts audiences, and 11 studies and reports from ongoing Wallace Foundation research on arts participation and engagement. In addition, a short list of hard copy published resource books is cited.

Among our observations about these studies is that despite valuable baseline information there are still gaps in the research conducted. Generally, they do not provide timely data on audience diversity, motivations and barriers and there has been little attention to new developments that impact audience engagement, such as technology and demographic shifts. We hope that this site will spur interest in more research particularly in these gaps and encourage funders and the arts community to make building greater knowledge in these areas a priority.

This site is offered as a resource for building individual arts and cultural organization knowledge around audience development and engagement and to provide guidance as you develop new strategies to expand your reach and deepen your relationships with your participants, patrons and supporters. We hope that as you try new ideas and find additional resources you will share those with your colleagues so that working together we can expand arts participation and enrich every person’s life.