Connecting Through Creative Expression
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Presented Saturday, May 9, 2015, at 9:00 a.m.
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Connecting Through Creative Expression
- 1. Creating Connection: Linking the arts to public values David Fraher, President & CEO Arts Midwest May 9, 2015
- 3. Word cloud of Opera America program book
- 4. increasing civic impact = creating public value
- 5. What is “public value”? • Concept originated in public sector • The value that an organization contributes to society in the short and long term • Favors action and entrepreneurism over passive implementation
- 6. START book
- 7. A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012. National Endowment for the Arts: January 2015.
- 8. Tax credits CC BY 2.0
- 9. Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Group
- 12. • Seeks long-term, sustainable shifts in cultural norms • Aligns an issue with existing core values • Integrates and prioritizes grassroots outreach over mass media
- 13. Partners and Supporters • Doris Duke Charitable Foundation • City of San Jose • California Arts Council • Rosenthal Family Foundation • The David and Lucile Packard Foundation • William and Flora Hewlett Foundation • Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs • James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation • Meyer Memorial Trust • Oregon Arts Commission • Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation • Oregon Community Foundation • Regional Arts and Culture Council (Oregon)
- 14. Clockwise from top left: Stack CC BY 2.0; Impassion Afghanistan CC BY 2.0; Texas A & M CC BY 2.0; Ryan McGilchrist CC BY 2.0
- 19. Perceived importance of various activities: BY AGE (survey respondents identifying each as “important”)
- 20. Perceived importance of various activities: BY GENDER (survey respondents identifying each as “important”)
- 21. Perceived importance of various activities: BY RACE (survey respondents identifying each as “important”)
- 22. Perceived importance of various activities: BY PARENTAL STATUS (survey respondents identifying each as “important”)
- 25. To provide a common message that can be advanced across the field … enabling arts and culture agencies and organizations, advocates, educators – as well as new champions – to “speak with one voice.” Intended to serve as a strategic foundation upon which messaging is built, not to provide specific language (at least, not yet …). Strategic Message Framework
- 26. CONNECTIONTHROUGH CREATIVE EXPRESSION Sharing creative experiences – and expressing our own creativity – helps us connect with others and ourselves. MESSAGE FRAMEWORK CORE
- 27. CONNECTIONTHROUGH CREATIVE EXPRESSION Sharing creative experiences – and expressing our own creativity – helps us connect with others and ourselves. MESSAGE FRAMEWORK Family & Relationships Health & Well-being Learning & Self-Improvement COREVALUES
- 28. GROWTH CONNECTIONTHROUGH CREATIVE EXPRESSION EXPRESSION HAPPINESS WELL- BEING Sharing creative experiences – and expressing our own creativity – helps us connect with others and ourselves. Expresses our unique talents and ideas Reflects, contributes to, and advances our culture and heritage Provides outlets for our creativity Is fulfilling Teaches us something new Helps us understand and appreciate other people, perspectives, and cultures Fosters critical thinking, problem- solving, and collaboration skills Helps us find balance Connect with self Reduces stress Energizes us Makes us happy Can be fun Creates lasting memories MESSAGE FRAMEWORK COREBENEFITS Family & Relationships Health & Well-being Learning & Self-Improvement VALUES
- 29. What’s Next?
- 30. Next steps Translate the message frame into tools and resources Build dynamic partnerships with primary audiences and influencers Drive adoption of values and frame through training and technical assistance Disseminate the message frame Evaluate and evolve
- 31. Public Value | Public Will
- 32. Policy makers, philanthropic community, media Creating Public Value Organizational Value Assets Impact
- 33. Building Public Will Public Personal Values Behaviors Desires
- 34. Building Public Will Public Personal Values Behaviors Desires Refinedmessaging,responsiveprograms
- 35. Building Public Will Public Personal Values Behaviors Desires Refinedmessaging,responsiveprograms
- 36. Building Public Will Public Personal Values Behaviors Desires Policy makers, philanthropic community, media Refinedmessaging,responsiveprograms Increased civic impact
- 37. FOR MORE INFORMATION “Creating Connection: Research Findings and Proposed Message Framework to Build Public Will for the Arts” www.artsmidwest.org/creatingconnection David J. Fraher Arts Midwest david.fraher@artsmidwest.org 612.341.0755
Editor's Notes
- (Thank you’s --- Marc Scorca, Chairman Jane Chu, Ilir Zherka) My goal today will be to introduce you to work that Arts Midwest has been involved with over the past two plus years regarding the development of a national movement to build public will for arts and culture -- a project that has a great deal of resonance with the theme of this session, “Civic Health: The Intersection of Opera And Society” and your conference theme of “increasing civic impact.”
- As I will explain, building public will has a great deal of synchronicity with increasing civic impact. That said, there are subtle yet significant differences between the two strategies. However, as I am going to show, if we have effective intersection and progression of both approaches, our field will be stronger, more inclusive, and better positioned for vitality in the coming decades.
- To begin this conversation, I thought it would be helpful for me to consider what you’ve been discussing over the past few days. Just for fun, we developed this word cloud, pulled from the session descriptions in your program book. Thankfully and appropriately, you’ve placed “opera” at the center of your work. But core to your discussion have also been themes around community, engagement, civic impact, audiences, trust, sharing, family, and exploration. All of these speak to a field in the process of reconsidering its relationship to its community and its audience, which is healthy. [DF applauds]
- Specifically, your discussion around increasing civic impact relates closely to work that Arts Midwest has also been addressing to help arts organizations create and communicate public value. And it’s complementary to – yet distinguished from -- our current efforts to build public will. Before I get into a discussion about those linkages and distinctions, I’d like to revisit our concept of creating public value.
- The term creating public value was originally coined by Harvard professor Mark Moore, whose book “Creating Public Value” outlines how public sector managers (that is, the administrators, commissioners, directors, etc. who lead government agencies, provide public services, and distribute public funding, among other activities) –how these “public managers” can rethink their role in the greater policy ecosystem. Moore suggests that in order to understand and create value for their agencies, public managers must shift from a traditional role of being passive implementers who simply facilitate the distribution of public resources to meet organizational goals and fulfill operations – into a more active role in which he or she uses imagination and innovation to influence organizational goals and fulfill operations, and also to drive conversations and change at the policy level. This shift in emphasis places the manager in a more entrepreneurial role – one in which he or she is actively contributing to the common good, rather than passively taking and implementing direction. It also affords the opportunity for public agencies to engage proactively in creating and providing enhanced value to their communities and constituents.
- So, how does this relate to the arts? Between 2001-2005, with support from the Wallace Foundation, Arts Midwest engaged Professor Moore in applying this theory to the work of state arts agencies and the arts community. Here, we took the concept from the broader public service model and applied it to the programs and services of state arts agencies. Historically, most state arts agencies perceived their primary constituency to be the arts organizations and artists which they funded. In fact, through the creating public value process, they began to understand that their constituency was the broader community and that arts organizations and artists were vital and critical partners in the process of delivering public value to that community. Thus, while continuing to nurture and support the arts infrastructure to every extent possible (thereby ensuring healthy partners), it eventually became an expectation of public funders that these same organizations embrace, understand, and demonstrate their value to their constituencies. In effect, there was a growing emphasis on “increasing civic impact.” This approach has been hugely helpful for many state agencies and organizations across the arts sector in re-envisioning their position in their communities and shaping new expectations about their involvement in policy decisions. It has also made those institutions more accountable to their constituents – requiring active engagement with and response to shifting community demographics. And it has provided a communications platform for organizations to demonstrate to their “authorizing environment” (that is, policy makers, appropriators, and other funders) how well they are addressing the widespread needs of the community. But at a certain level, creating public value or increasing civic impact is still a bit of an inside-out approach. While organizations successful in creating and communicating their public value are often both responsive to community needs and active contributors to local vitality, the messages they are sending are still based on their own internal perception of the value they provide to society. And while policy makers and appropriators might concur with their value perceptions, there is little evidence that the broader public will find resonance with those messages.
- For all of our work in creating and demonstrating public value, the arts continue to struggle in broad public terms. As we all know, the most recent report on arts participation to emerge from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), sets a grim outlook for engagement with the “benchmark” arts – those institutions that offer jazz, classical music, opera, plays, ballet, and visual arts exhibitions. Here, researchers found that only 33% of Americans attended a benchmark activity in 2012, compared with 39% a decade earlier. While engagement with other types of arts activities rose during this period (71% of Americans used electronic media to watch or listen to art and 44% created, practiced, performed, edited, or remixed art), the trend away from the attending formal performing and visual arts activities is troubling for the future of our field.
- Public funding for the arts isn’t faring much better. When taken at face value, raw data suggests that we’ve witnessed a 19% increase in public funding for the arts over the past 20 years. But when adjusted for inflation, these levels actually reflect a 30% decrease. These realities often put the arts on the defensive -- repeatedly expected to prove relevancy during budget and policy negotiations, suffering from declining participation rates, and often perceived as a low priority for busy lives or tight household budgets. In short, the arts are perceived as a nicety, rather than a necessity.
- This “nicety” perception has lingered in spite of considerable efforts to shift expectations around arts and culture. We have witnessed many advocacy initiatives over the years—some successful, others not—that employ high-cost marketing tactics focused on assuring the public that the arts are essential to education; a critical part of our nation’s heritage; a driver of urban and rural development; or that they help us become better human beings; among many, many others. Yet, it hasn’t quite been enough. Each of the advocacy arguments may be true and many initiatives have achieved at least partial or short-term success in preserving public investment in the arts (even at a diminished level). But these successes tend not to last, or to translate into future victories. We believe this failure is rooted in: A focus on short-term wins (that is, passing an initiative or defeating a budget reduction) rather than long-term shifts in normative expectations around arts and culture; Our use of messages that resonate well with existing arts patrons, cultural workers, and audiences, but which fail to connect to or motivate the broader public, and; Our reliance on arguments that focus on delivering facts or data – especially economic impact data -- which rarely influence attitudes or behaviors on their own and which, frankly, are not unique to our sector
- Faced with this frustration, several years ago Arts Midwest began to explore other approaches to broadening public support for the arts. Our exploration led us to the theory of building public will—an approach grounded in the notion that policy agendas are influenced by what the public thinks, cares about, and values. An effective public will movement requires listening to that public to understand its desires and behaviors. To those ends, a building public will approach uses a combination of research, messaging, media, and grassroots engagement strategies to understand existing public values and then communicate the connection between those values and an issue area.
- Unlike traditional advocacy strategies, which often seek to motivate a one-time change in attitudes or behavior, building public will campaigns seek to create lasting change. When applied by other industries, this approach has catalyzed shifts in community expectations around smoke-free public spaces, improved water quality, hybrid vehicles, and organic foods, among others.
- The shift around these industries was achieved by connecting people to an issue through their existing, closely held values, increasing the likelihood they will adopt a new attitude, understanding, or behavior that is sustainable over the long term. Tactically, this model integrates grassroots outreach with traditional mass media tools to communicate a compelling narrative and calls to action through authentic messengers whom people trust. This approach leads to deeper public understanding and ownership, and creates new and lasting community norms that shape the way people think and act.
- Realizing the potential for this approach on advancing the state of the field—and with the support of a broad array of funders—we embarked on a multi-year project to build public will for arts and culture. As with any building public will movement, we first set out to understand what the general public truly values and to use those findings to draw connections between their values and the potential benefits of engaging in arts and cultural experiences. Our ultimate goal in this endeavor is not small. It is, ultimately, to make arts and culture a more recognized, valued, and expected part of everyday life.
- To begin this work, we undertook an intensive research process that included a thorough literature review of prior research; a national public survey of values, priorities, and behaviors; and series of more than two dozen focus groups and conversations. And we uncovered the following core findings about public values and their intersection with arts and culture…
- First, creating connection is a key motivation driving personal behaviors. Connecting with family and friends is the dominant, closely-held value and decision driver for the public. And it is the value most clearly associated with the achievement of our goal. Connecting with ourselves and connecting with others (via opportunities to experience and learn from different people and cultures) are also important to many people in our survey and focus groups.
- Second, the phrase “creative expression” is a more effective message frame than “arts & culture” for most people. We found that the term “creative expression” was more successful in motivating the public to take action to recognize, value, and expect opportunities for the arts to be present in their lives. Here, people define “creative expression” broadly to include everything from problem-solving to artistic inspiration, expression, and traditional concepts of “the arts.” Just to clarify, we are not recommending a wholesale abandonment of the words “art” or “culture” from all messaging, marketing materials, or even brands in the field. (For example, I am not going to go home and change the name of Arts Midwest to “Creative Expression Midwest.”) Neither do we intend to undermine the contributions of professional artists by “dumbing down” the field and equating their practice with amateurs or hobbyists. Rather, we are suggesting that the use of “creative expression” invites more people into the conversation, and is therefore a strong entry point for diverse audiences that may not have immediate resonance with the phrase “arts and culture.”
- Third, the perceived benefits of engaging in or experiencing creative expression are very personal and very real to the broader public. Research participants talked openly about the benefits of creative expression, often describing them in very literal and physical terms (for example, creative expression “reduces stress,” “helps me unwind,” “makes me happy,” etc.).
- Fourth, while not congruent with audience attendance patterns, we learned that people under 30, women, parents of younger children, and people of color are in fact key audiences for whom engagement with creative expression is a priority. Existing “core” audiences (including the “baby boomers” and arts enthusiasts that we see filling our concert halls, venues, and museums) are certainly important pathway messengers for our project. But, an effort that focuses exclusively on them is not likely to broaden support for arts and culture.
- Let’s take a quick look at some of the data behind this finding… (Age)
- (Gender)
- (Race)
- (Parental status)
- Shifting back to our findings, the last theme to emerge from our research was that barriers to increasing engagement with creative expression and arts activities are considerable, but not insurmountable. For most people, arts and culture are perceived as a luxury, rather than an essential aspect of everyday life. This is related to perceptions that the arts are expensive and that it’s difficult to find the time to engage. While these aren’t necessarily new findings, what we did uncover in our research was that audiences are finding their experiences at arts institutions too passive. Certainly there are many of us who still enjoy the opportunity to experience arts and culture from the quiet of a gallery bench or a seat in a theater. But others are looking for more opportunities to engage actively in experiencing or creating art. When individuals don’t find these opportunities at benchmark or other institutions, it reinforces the perception that arts and culture are not relevant to their lives.
- These five core findings shape a strategic message framework, which, at its most fundamental level, communicates a core understanding about creative expression being a critical vehicle to connect with the people we care about and to connect with ourselves.
- Our message framework is intended to serve as the strategic underpinning for all messaging around advancing creative expression as a recognized, valued, and expected part of everyday life. It is not intended for use verbatim with external audiences, rather it’s the foundation on which external messages will be built. As we move forward with this project – out of the research phase and into a new phase of engaging with the sector, connecting with influencers for our priority audiences, and launching traditional and social media strategies --we will use this framework to craft new messages that reflect the identified values, articulate benefits to specific audiences, and communicate the core concept of connection. Let’s examine the message frame.
- First, the core message itself, “sharing creative experiences – and expressing our own creativity – helps us connect with others and ourselves” serves as the foundation of our narrative and will be incorporated into all aspects of our communication. If our audiences and stakeholders remember nothing else, they should be able to remember and relate to this core message.
- Next, all of our messaging and communication will incorporate words, metaphors, and imagery that resonate with the core values of “family and relationships,” “health and well-being,” and “learning and self-improvement” – all of which were deeply held values expressed by our identified audiences and were also values which had a perceived linkage to or relationship with “creative expression.”
- Lastly, our framework will communicate the perceived benefits that our prioritized audiences and stakeholders value with regard to their creative, artistic, and cultural experiences and activities.
- So, what are we doing with this framework? In the coming two years, we anticipate launching an intensive outreach, messaging, and engagement initiative that will develop and disseminate this framework and build grassroots support for arts and culture. Here, we will build on our existing research as well as the complementary yet separate advocacy, marketing, and audience development efforts taking place in the field. We will also harness knowledge beyond our sector, connecting with stakeholders who are not traditional arts advocates or allies as we create and launch our messages, tools, and grassroots engagement strategies. This work with “unusual suspects” as messengers will both ensure that our efforts do not simply “preach to the choir” and that we are using the appropriate pathways to carry our messages to new audiences.
- Our activities will include: Creating support materials for the field to use in print or online platforms that help communicate the relationship between their work and these core public values of connecting through creative expression. Conducting further analysis of our priority audiences to identify their “influencers”—the organizations and institutions trusted by these audiences as well as the media and social platforms that resonate with them. Offering training and technical assistance for arts institutions and influencers on how to apply the message framework and incorporate it into their communications, audience development, and programming activities. Using targeted media placement strategies to begin to shift the narrative around the arts. These efforts will not include formal ad placements, rather we will use multiple earned (traditional) and social strategies to disseminate messaging to our primary audiences. Our work in this phase and throughout this project serves to strengthen the entire arts field—including national opera, dance, jazz, presenting, and theatre fields (among other visual and performing arts disciplines) by providing you with proven messages and strategies that demonstrate the connection between your offerings and existing values. In this regard, we see you as both beneficiaries of as well as a core partners in our project—benefitting as you accrue value from increased public openness toward and support for your work, and partnering on our efforts to strengthen the collective field through message dissemination and engagement with American values.
- So let’s return to our opening discussion of creating public value and building public will.
- Creating public value or increasing civic impact produces meaningful and important benefits for communities and the people who live in them. It strengthens the reputation of the organizations providing the benefits -- especially among policy makers, funders, appropriators, and media. It also may increase the link between the public directly benefitting and the organizations. That said, it may not result in a broadly-based recognition of the critical importance of arts and cultural organizations in society.
- Building public will, which is initiated through a process of intense and engaged listening and learning about closely held value of the broad public, provides a platform upon which our field can potentially strengthen and deepen its relationship with community.
- Based on our listening, we craft new refined and authentic messages to the public and also refine our programs to embrace the values and benefits that the public seeks. Many of these programmatic refinements may already be underway through the work that you are doing as you seek to increase your civic impact. Others may require further thought, evolution, and continued listening.
- However, when the process is successful – that is, when our values and behaviors are aligned with the closely held values and behaviors of our communities -- broad publics will begin to expect, recognize, and value arts and culture in their everyday lives.
- For us, then, building public will and creating public value (or increasing civic impact), are not either/or, but in the words of Chairman Chu, “both/and.” And when we have both of these strategies in play – when we’re in a cycle of listening, evolving, and messaging – we will have nurtured an environment in which policy makers, philanthropists, community leaders, and the media will recognize that there has been a tectonic shift in public expectations around arts and culture. And they will see that these expectations are not one-off, but a lasting change in the way that arts and culture are being recognized, valued, and expected in everyday life. (Thank you.)
- I just want to add that from 10:45-11:30, I will be in Salon H for a Q&A session about this project. I also invite you to contact us with any questions about building public will, and to download our research report with more detail on our survey and focus group findings, on our website (listed here). Thanks again.