Your Audience Doesn’t Owe You Anything
I used to work in a cultural heritage institution. Truth be told, I was blessed to work in one that was generally ahead of its time when it came to the ways of human-centered design and audience value. During that time, I learned a valuable lesson — one that I may not have had words for before but eventually crystallized in my own perception: Your relevance is not guaranteed, and audiences owe you nothing.
Allow me to elaborate.
Challenging assumptions in the face of uncertainty
In the years leading up to the most recent era, cultural heritage institutions like museums saw dwindling revenues, patronage, and brand loyalty. Dollars that might have once been spent on recreation and consumption of intangible experiences were shifting toward other human needs, and eventually, museum-going was largely viewed as a luxury past time rather than a necessary staple of modern education or societal celebration.
It wasn’t hard to understand why. Content creators and the internet had made it easy and convenient to find education from the couch and in your pocket, and the $700-1000 price tag for the newest smartphone put you in greater contact with a world around you than a bus ticket to your local history museum. In short, museums started becoming outmoded entities. The new content creators of the internet recognized that they had to compete for eyeballs and were diligent to work to retain that attention as they saw themselves in competition with each other, within television, with movies, etc. The attention economy of the modern man and woman was changing, and modern content houses found themselves having to embrace the times and make changes to either gain or maintain an offering that audiences would want to spend their attention, time, or money on.
Museums, however, often saw themselves as immune to this shift. Many may have relied upon their endowments, their trusts, or their connections to weather the storm that was happening around them. But then something happened. We experienced a crisis in the form of the now legendary COVID pandemic. Personal economies of not only attention and time, but also money were being squeezed and the modern man, woman, teacher, child found themselves becoming more conscientious and less loose with their way they spent those personal budgets. It was telling for me when a coworker at my museum employer cited a statistic that, as dollars spent on something as niche as recreational boating were waning, so too were dollars spent on cultural heritage experiences (and I was working in a maritime museum at the time, so this was especially relevant).
But this post isn’t about museums (I promise). It is about businesses in general. Bear that in mind as I share two examples of museums that took very different approaches to relevance and audience value in the face of uncertainty.
Example: a successful pivot
The first example is from the institution where I worked. In 2017, we started talking about the importance of “eating what we kill” when it came to financial solvency and the way we funded our own efforts. We were not a state funded organization, and we originally kept cranking out content (because EVERY business is actually a content house whether they realize it or not yet) with no real expectations on whether that content needed to have a monetary return. But we also were drawing from entrusted funds, having sizable reserves available to us, to offset our costs as a regular practice. There was a small undercurrent of “thankfully, our offerings can be designed without revenue or ROI in mind since we are an NGO rather than a for-profit”.
The shift
This changed when, in 2017, our museum’s president and CEO looked at the current cultural landscape of political, racial, and economic turmoil in our community and decided that we could and should do something to contribute to the reconciliation our community desperately needed. But when we looked at the customers coming through the doors online and in person, we noticed there was a missing demographic (or many) from the community we sought to serve. Only those with seemingly disposable income (and the largest budgets in time and attention) could afford to participate in what our museum had to offer.
So we did two things:
We adopted a new mission statement that spoke to and reinforced our commitment to serve our audiences with a “we move first” attitude.
Through a series of experiments, we dropped our admission price to $1, ceasing to pass some of our costs onto the visitor.
The change begins to reap a return
The mission became “The Mariners’ Museum and Park connects people to the world’s waters because, through the water, we are connected to one another”.
Easy. Intriguing. Most importantly: not vain. I couldn’t quote our mission before that day, and most people couldn’t either. But this one spoke to our commitment to DO something, not our commitment to continue to BE something. The slippery slope if we had done the latter would be that we could commit to BEING self-important, seeing ourselves as honorable stewards of an immensely vast collection and intellectual property. Remember I said we had also shifted to an “eat what we kill” mentality. Like any other business, we started to look at monetary ROI as a strong indicator of perceived audience value, and rewarded ourselves and invested in ourselves with a measure that was commensurate to that ROI. And the experiment to drop the cost of admission? That was coupled with a decision to also flood the floor with staff from the C-Suite to the intern pool who would give direct service to the visitor, answering and asking questions and engaging with them where they were.
And it paid off.
The first month we ran this experiment, we made more money from admission than we had done in any month for the last several years. At $1 per visit. We went from seeing maybe a few hundred people per week to a few thousand. The audience spoke of their eagerness to return at every chance they got, and they brought more people to us every day. When we ran the experiments the next year, we saw the same results. When we extended the experiments, we continued seeing the same thing. Our time spent with the audience greatly influenced our design of our programmatic and experiential offerings inside and outside our walls. Suddenly, we developed a brand that resonated with everyone — a brand that said the Museum cared about you, that we were here for you, and we were committed to you. Cherry on top: the maritime stories we had to tell were also pretty cool. And now more people were able to see that as well.
Once COVID hit the world, when other institutions folded or struggled, amazingly, we thrived. We had built social capital for so long with so many, and donors and partners approached us to invest in our mission and support our work. Ultimately, someone even elected (unsolicited) to endow $1 admission with a $10M gift. When you factor in the interest on this gift, the Museum would likely not have to consider passing the cost of admission onto its visitors again. The Museum found its relevance and committed to maintaining it through continual evaluation and iteration.
A bruised landmark
Another museum did not fare so well. At an institution that I won’t name, the story began somewhat similarly. Everyone who visited our state knew the name of this place and its historical significance to the region as well as our country. It operated on this established importance for many years, and enjoyed some measure of continued relevance during seasons of celebration and consistently saw groups of students young and old venturing onto its grounds for a meta experience to accompany historical education in schools.
Over time, however, the institution would make waves concerning its decisions to cut costs (sometimes in the form of whole programs, sometimes personnel) in response to changing times. Then things went a bit sideways one day. The leader of that organization put out an open letter to the community stating that it had no choice but to cut costs in this way because “history isn’t valued in schools anymore” and (paraphrasing) “audiences just don’t seem to recognize or understand why we are important”.
People weren’t coming or buying their services, and the blame for the challenges the organization was facing was being placed on… the customer?
Coupled with a deliberate ask for monetary support, while citing how these challenges had existed for years unchecked, the perception of this business suffered greatly. Audience responses conveyed that this institution failed to realize that the importance and relevance you place on your own business and offerings are not “required reading” for the general public.
I’m not sure how that institution is doing today, but I think you see the difference in these two stories.
Relevance is earned, not guaranteed.
So what have we hopefully learned? Name recognition, pre-existent brand loyalty, and past success are NOT sturdy foundations to build a business on. Every day, motivated entrepreneurs and savvy organizations find themselves grappling with a need to gain or grow relevance and are recognizing that there will always be a competition for dollars, time, and attention. See the need to pivot, make the change. Don’t fight the currents and don’t pretend they don’t or won’t apply to you and what your business offers. Otherwise, it will be the audience that teaches you that you were wrong. Relevance is earned, not guaranteed.