Courtesy of Arts on Sunday National Radio

Gerri Morris, arts consultant and director of UK Arts Management and research consultancy, Morris Hargreaves McIntyre.

Presenter (Lyn Freeman): Getting audiences to arts events is something we looked at in the first Arts on Sunday. Our arts organisations have just had a chance to talk with a British expert in what's called growing audiences. Getting bums on seats is really what we're talking about. Creative New Zealand invited arts marketing consultant, Gerri Morris here as part of its audience and market development programme. Geri says arts organisations she's visited from Europe to Asia to Australasia are all trying to boost audiences but for different reasons.

Image: The English National Opera perform at the Glastonbury gathering - blurring the boundaries between pop and high culture.

Gerri Morris (UK. Arts Marketing Consultant): I mean some for economic development reasons, some for sort of inclusion and access reasons, some because organisations are suffering from a withdrawal of state funding and have realised that they need to generate income from ticket sales, so generally the countries that I've visited have all shared the commitment to developing audiences but are driven by different imperatives and so that's where the difference come in.

Presenter: Have they shared the same sort of thing that we're seeing here in New Zealand: that audiences tend to be ageing and consequently shrinking and it seems to be harder to get the younger generation involved?

Morris: I think that is an issue certainly with more westernised cultures I think. There is a sense that audiences are shrinking, but I think there can sometimes be a sort of misapprehension, you know, that audiences may be growing but for different types of art form and different definitions of culture are coming online and the sort of blurring of boundaries between popular culture and high culture. And I think what our research sort of tends to show us is that audiences are definitely - they're dying for orchestral music and very, you know, elderly greying audience, but audiences at the theatre can go up and down and I think modern audiences are looking for different things from theatre and so you get certain productions which are very very successful because they've locked into short shows or big names, but they can still be about challenging subjects and provocative scenes, you know. So I think the pattern changes all over but mostly there is a desire to enable more people to share in what culture can bring to people and greater benefit, more widely experienced.

Presenter: It's interesting what you say about audiences. This is an area... I know in the UK it's been of particular concern, our orchestras here have looked at a way of bringing young people in by combining forces with some popular singers, contemporary singers, bands and soloists, like Split Enz was one of our most successful groups and they did an ENZO concert with the NZSO and that was hugely successful so I guess it's... so it's - creative thinking is one way of approaching this I guess.

Morris: Well I think that's one of the things that marks out a successful arts marketing from non-successful arts marketing. I think one of the problems that we come across in travelling around, and it's certainly a problem that we have in the UK, is a lack of creativity in arts management thinking which doesn't complement the level of creativity that's on stage, and that is... you know, it's really that that's holding a lot of organisations back in the UK. I'm not saying that that's the case elsewhere, but when you do get a combination of creativity from an audience focus point of view going on at the artistic level and that that then radiates itself out to thinking creatively at a marketing and communications level, then you get some really good formulas that brings people in. Recently in England the English National Opera performed at Glastonbury and they did a massive sort of presentation of the Ride of the Valkyries and that's a nice blurring of boundaries between popular culture and high culture, and introduced a whole load of young people to the fact that opera could be exciting and accessible.

Presenter: What do you say then to people who consider that if people aren't going to... if audiences aren't going to events, how much should we be putting on what people want to see in responding to the audience desires?

Morris: I think that is the sort of... there is an assumption that the moment you become audience facing [phon] then you have to actually have to be audience led and I don't think that is the case. Mostly people are intelligent, sophisticated and are waiting to be inspired and so they look to arts organisations to come up with the wonderful ideas and then the key is the power of our persuasion, in terms of persuading people that there are benefits to be had from participating in the arts so I think the key, and the message that we try and put across is, that you can be audience focused but you can still be artistically led. You can still hold onto strong artistic vision but the challenge is to make that as accessible to as many people as possible and you know, we know from our research that people go to the arts for a wide range of different reasons: they go for social reasons, they go for intellectual reasons, they go for emotional reasons and they go for spiritual reasons. I think the big danger comes when arts organisations under-estimate their audiences and think that they have to speak down to them and think that they have to patronise them or think that they can only give them popular types of programmes and in fact people want much more than that and there are plenty of people who want to be challenged and provoked and want to be stimulated. So it's a matter of bringing those things together and making sure that publicity and communication is actually being persuasive and sometimes it just rather assumes too much and assumes that people are already switched on. It seems that people are already proactive and very well informed and what we find is that €” well in the UK €” is that for every one person that already goes to the arts there is really another person who would love to but hasn't got the opportunity, they haven't got the people to go with and they are a little bit shy about making the first step, so it's about how we reach those.

Presenter: You've been here in New Zealand talking about Audience Builder, A Mile in the Visitor's Shoes,[phon] which are principles really, concepts that you've come up and work through. I'm interested to know what sort of questions you've received from your New Zealand institutions, having travelled so widely around the world...

Morris: Well I think the nice thing about being in New Zealand was just how... it was a real sort of experience of sharing experience. It wasn't an experience of me coming into a very passive and receptive audience. There are people in New Zealand who are actively working hard at developing audiences and there are some very good examples of excellent practice in New Zealand. There are people who are already applying principles that we're sort of communicating in Audience Builder and really what they've been struggling for is a key to unlock an approach they've already taken. Audience Builder is really a way of getting into your database and mining the information in the same way that supermarkets do. You know, we hold an enormous amount of information about the people who book tickets for our shows and we often ignore 80 percent of the people on our databases because they don't come often enough and Audience Builder, rather than keep the emphasis tuned in on the 20 percent of people who are frequent caller attenders [sic], Audience Builder helps you segment and understand the needs and motivations and drivers behind the behaviour of the 80 percent of people who don't come very often and helps you communicate with those people more effectively, helps you encourage them to see other aspects of your programme that might be appealing to them and gives you the tools for encouraging them to engage more deeply, to come more often, to get more out of it and to just generally increase the frequency with which they attend shows.

Presenter: So largely database?

Morris: It is largely database but then we have other tools, test drivers as a way of helping those people who are a little bit reticent to enter into arts organisations, to sample them for the first time in a structured way. In England test drive has helped bring 1500 people from non-attenders of an orchestra to becoming subscribers within a year. We've done test drive for 43,000 people and converted 13,000 of those into regular attenders, so test drive has worked as an audience development tool and people here are looking at adopting that, some of the audiences we've spoken to, and then teleprompt is another one, which takes very infrequent attenders in through a personalised telephone information service; helps them overcome the sort of risk factor and take the gamble to book for more events and that, you know, for every €” in England with the projects that we've worked on €” for every pound that you spend in marketing Test Drive you get an instantaneous three pound back and so very quickly it's paid for itself and you've got people coming more often and selling more tickets. And talking to people about those tools it's obvious that organisations in New Zealand, there are plenty of organisations that are just ready to start applying them, if they're not applying the principles already, you know, that there are some interesting cases in New Zealand that have applied its marketing thinking, which is great to see.

Presenter: Gerri Morris, arts consultant and director of UK Arts Management and research consultancy, Morris Hargreaves McIntyre.

Courtesy of Arts on Sunday National Radio - 27th November 2005