The Cultural Experience Framework: Climate

Place matters

The environment in which a person is born, raised, and lives influences the way in which they see the world. In our earlier post we posed the question, where does the journey of the patron actually start? In this post, we suggest that it is actually a host of exogenous factors that influence how a person begins this journey.

We define Climate as the cultural, political, and social environment that a person is in. It is important to recognize that this Climate is independent of a customer’s choices and requires no action on the part of the individual. Some questions to ask in order to best understand this portion of the journey include:

• How much state or local funding goes to arts and culture in the target demographic’s community?
• How much is art and culture part of the social atmosphere of the target demographic?
• How many theaters or arts and culture organizations are present in the target demographic’s community?
• How represented are arts and culture in the target demographic’s public education system?

 Questions like those above help to understand the ambient exposure an individual has to arts and culture in their community. This can be a major influencer in whether they decide to take the next step to developing an active curiosity. 

SMU’s DataArts project has a host of arts related data. A great tool to get a sense of climate is their Arts Vibrancy Score. This is an interactive tool so I suggest clicking HERE to get a better view. 

An example here might be the difference between someone living in a small, rural community with little or no public or institutional arts and cultural funding and someone who is living in a large, urban metropolis in a country with a substantial infrastructure for supporting arts and culture and a rich public education system that integrates these ideas into their youth from an early age. This is not to say that someone from an environment without a strong arts and culture Climate can’t become more curious about the subject or a specific event, only that the Climate, as defined above, has a substantial influence on how and when people make this step.  

Another mid-sized performing arts organization recently shared with me that approximately 70% of their ticket buying audience had had a class in the arts at some point in their lives. In a previous post that I wrote, I shared how it was an elementary school field trip to the local theater and a production on PBS (Public Broadcasting Station) that sparked something in me that has led to a lifetime in the arts. These anecdotal examples illustrate how having art and culture present in your environment can lead to a deeper engagement with the experience in the future.

Barriers

This is also the first place where communities start to diverge in the ways they experience arts and culture. Our industry often asks why certain communities are underrepresented in their audiences and in their artists. Climate plays a major role in this. We know that public funds for art are not evenly distributed throughout all communities. This division happens on racial, economic, and urban / rural boundaries. Articles like, Dilara Sayeed’s, “Rural Education: Addressing a Tension Point in the Great American Divide", and white papers like Bridgespan’s, “Social Mobility in Rural America”, have drawn attention to the economic divide between urban and rural communities in regard to education social mobility. There is a huge body of work detailing the funding disparity in education between predominately white and non-white communities. The U.S. Department of Education points out that students in higher poverty communities have less or no access to arts education. This all suggests that rural communities, communities of color, and other historically economically disadvantaged communities are receiving less access to arts education – if any.

Similar numbers hold true for private investment in arts and cultural activities. More affluent communities have more resources to support arts and culture programs outside of public funding. On top of all this, based on survey results from the 2008 Census, over half of Americans had never moved outside of their state and that trend was up from previous census data. This all translates into a cyclical divergence in experience from day one. Children that are born into communities with low or no public arts education funding have a higher barrier to access to arts as teenagers and adults. The majority of these adults do not leave the areas they were born in and these communities are increasingly more populated by politicians, businesspeople, and other decision makers that have had little or no direct access to arts education or its value.

So why does any of this matter? For cultural institutions looking to increase their relevance in new communities, they need to be investing and lobbying long-term to ensure that the general arts Climate they are doing business in is supported. This work will increase the level of access to culture at all levels and give individuals a higher probability to develop a personal curiosity in the art. The framework we are talking about acts something like a funnel and Climate ensures that the most people possible enter the funnel to begin with.

In Andrew’s post on Climate, he talks about how important it is for institutions to understand this Climate and how it affects the tastes and preferences of patrons. Check it out and get a feel for how this concept plays out on the ground.

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The Cultural Experience Framework is a series of blog posts written by Michael Greer, Executive Director at Oregon Ballet Theatre and Andrew Recinos, President of Tessitura Network. Each topic contains a post from each of us and approaches the material from our different perspectives. We hope you will read both posts to get the full perspective on the material. We have really enjoyed sharing our thoughts and experiences with each other and hope that they encourage your own thoughts, feedback and ideas. Most of all, we hope that something in these posts can inspire others to continue their work in arts and culture, better engage with their communities, and progress their mission.