How much is enough?

There is one particular moment in pantomime that I’ve enjoyed throughout my panto-going lifetime. It’s the moment when the villain is engaged in a shouting match with the audience. They shout “Oh know you won’t.” He retorts, with a hand cusped around his ear, “I can’t hear you!” This goes on for some time. With each exchange the amused exasperation of the audience builds and builds. It’s a situation that can’t go on forever. Either the actor will lose his voice or, even worse, the audience will get bored and give up engaging with him. The actor bows out and moves back on with the plot or on to another gag.
In the arts, audiences are always telling us how they feel. They do this in a number of ways. The most vocal will call, email or write in, or if it’s at a performance and they feel passionate they will speak to a company manager or member of front of house staff. However, as we know, audiences can also let us know how they feel by keeping silent. Silence, a lack of activity or engagement, is an equally powerful way to send a message. Our audiences (as we refer to them) or customers (as they in many cases think of themselves) will always be telling us, one way or another, what we need to know. It’s therefore crucial that we listen to this information and use it to serve the people we work for, the audience. It’s a basic point and one all of the sector understands. It is one that we must never forget, and one that no organisation can afford to be ignorant of. One day an audience member will (like a panto audience when the routine has gone on too long) have shouted long enough, and become bored, give up and leave. Getting them back once this has happened is, as we know, very difficult indeed. We must consistently ask ourselves, are we still listening intently or we forming our own conclusions?
 

At Welsh National Opera (WNO) we, like most arts organisations, are good listeners. Whether it’s calls on the direct line into the marketing office, the ‘have your say’ section of our website, or the audience interviews we film after first nights, we positively encourage feedback. This is not so that the information sits in a file, but so that we can act on it and so that it can inform our marketing activity and messaging. Such intelligence is vital on a day-to-day basis, but it is only fragmentary. It was by understanding that we were only looking at pieces of the picture that we became aware that whatever we knew about our audiences we needed to know more – much more. If WNO was going to build and, crucially, sustain audiences, we needed to see as much of this picture as possible. We have therefore launched a research programme. The first step was a series of conventional but necessary focus groups designed to find out (amongst many other questions) why attenders have lapsed, why they have come back and how WNO makes them feel. The second stage is a project which aims to segment our audience according to attitude rather than by purchase history. This project will uncover the drivers of consumption and will reveal to what extent consumption is motivated by social factors extrinsic to the artform. Whatever we know, we can never know enough. However, we must continue to act on this vital information.