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New "intrinsic impact" survey method helps marketing, development

By Danyel Siler, Lyric Theater of Oklahoma

This past fall I attended the National Arts Marketing Project Conference with 450 of my peers from across the United States and was inspired by the work they are doing. One of my biggest takeaways from the conference was how to update our surveying system to get vital results for marketing and development.

The session that drew my attention at the conference focused on an intrinsic impact study done by WolfBrown (research and consulting firm) with Theatre Bay Area. During the session, it was also mentioned that the National Endowment for the Arts sees the value of intrinsic impact and may start requiring organizations to utilize this evaluation tool as part of their grant evaluations for the programs they support.

"Intrinsic impact" is the intellectual, emotional, social and aesthetic effects of art on an individual. IntrinsicImpact.org serves as a free resource to learn about this type of assessing the arts and we used it as a guide to get started on this project.

Evaluating our programs was not a new concept to me or my colleagues at Lyric, but the questions this type of survey asked had us intrigued. Would our patrons take the time to answer these types of questions? Would we gain any valuable information from our patrons? While we devised a way to do this with no hard cost, was it worth the staff time spent?

As we soon found out after sending out our first survey, it was well worth it for the information we received from our patrons who were eager to participate in giving us feedback.

During A CHRISTMAS CAROL, emails were sent out to audience members within 24 hours after they attended with a link to an online survey. The survey had 4 different sections:

  1. General Data
  2. Before attending the production
  3. During the show
  4. After attending

By using different ways of posing the questions such as multiple choice, scales to rate, and open-ended questions, audience members gave us a general overview as well as specific quotes to assess our art's affect on them.

General data collected included gender, age range, and were they a season ticket holder. Fortunately for us we had already done a study on the demographics of our patrons and did not need to collect lots of information from this survey, we formulated these questions as a check to make sure we were reaching a well-balanced representation of our patron base.

Questions that focused on "before attending" the production included a variety of questions to assess how they became aware of the productions and how they prepared prior to attending. Specific questions included:

To assess "during the show," questions focused on how they connected with the production. We included questions such as:

The "after attending" section may have been the most valuable data collected. The following questions gave us vital information on our patrons' perspective as they left the theatre:

What were our results? In one word - AMAZING.

Our response rate was just over 25% and the majority of the responses included great details in the open-ended questions.

For marketing - The results confirmed we were right on track with our marketing plan we had in place for the production and we were able to use some of the responses for engaging our audience on our social media channels.

For development - The results were used to report back to the main funder on how the audience responded to our production. The results will also be used in future grant requests and reports. Lyric receives direct funding from the National Endowment for the Arts almost every year, and we wanted to be proactive in our efforts.

Moving into 2012 we decided it was important to continue with this surveying system for our other productions. It is an easy, effective way to evaluate our programs, it provides invaluable information that we can use to develop target marketing, and we feel it is important to get our patrons thinking about art in a meaningful way.

Going to this ONE session changed how we get feedback from our audience. I hope that reading this ONE blog can inspire you to visit the Intrinsic Impact website and adapt the information to see how you can make a lasting impact on your organization!

You can also follow the conversation on Twitter using #newbeans, and personally, I am looking forward to reading the book about the study called "Counting New Beans."

Danyel is the marketing director for Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma.