Executive Director's Note
by Brad Erickson

Impact!

It has been said that the real challenge to the American theatre is not a financial emergency but a crisis of relevance. As a field, we have become very good at measuring things financial. But financial data tells only a fraction of the story. A theatre company may be financially sound, but is it really moving and exciting its audience?

In 2004, the RAND Corporation published "Gifts of the Muse," an important examination of the public and private benefits of the arts. The study categorized benefits as either "instrumental" or "intrinsic," with instrumental benefits being "important, measurable benefits, such as economic growth and student learning." Such benefits, said the study, "are instrumental in that the arts are viewed as a means of achieving broad social and economic goals that have nothing to do with art per se." Intrinsic benefits, on the other hand, entail intimately personal responses to an art experience. As "Gifts of the Muse" states, "People are drawn to the arts not for their instrumental effects"--no one goes to the theatre so the restaurant next door will get more business--"but because the arts can provide them with meaning and with a distinctive type of pleasure and emotional stimulation." Over time, arts organizations and arts advocates have become adept at measuring and describing the instrumental impacts of arts experiences. What we lack is a common and widely used tool for assessing the intrinsic impact of arts experiences on individuals.

When the researcher Alan Brown wondered to a national funder if it was even possible to measure the intangible effects of arts experiences, the funder responded with a kind of challenge: "If you can describe something, you can measure it." The question was, "How?" How to create a generally accepted and widely used metric for what matters most--the intrinsic value of the theatre experience?

A first stab came in 2005 when Brown was commissioned by a group of 14 university presenting venues to create and conduct a study measuring the intrinsic impact of their multidisciplinary performances on their audiences. The pilot study produced intriguing results that have been presented at a number of major conferences.

Last year, in connection with the national launch of Free Night of Theater, Theatre Bay Area secured funds from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to commission Brown to conduct a new intrinsic impact study, this time focusing on audiences attending Free Night performances. Brown and his team at WolfBrown looked at 86 theatres participating in the Bay Area Free Night campaign and gathered more than 2,000 survey responses.

Results from last fall's study--the first ever directed at a single arts discipline--have garnered intense interest both here in the Bay Area and nationally. We have presented the findings at convenings in San Jose, San Francisco and Boston, and at the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) conference in Baltimore in early June. Later that month, we published a full report of the study on our website--and a flurry of response was sparked in the press, in the blogosphere and in the community.

One Bay Area theatre critic, Chloe Veltman, posted to her blog the most crucial question for this research, asking, "Great study, but what is it for?" While we have had our own hunches, the best answers came streaming in from the study participants themselves. A large organization told us it intends to retrain its ushers, using these frontline representatives to more effectively welcome and prepare the audience for the play they are about to see. Others saw implications for their marketing efforts (one of the study's key findings correlates the audience member's expectations with the impact the work ultimately makes). Several participating theatres expected to engage their audiences in deeper learning and extended conversations around the work, live and online. One artistic director even began to rethink her programming choices for the next season.

If theatres are to regain a place of profound relevance to the American public, they must be able to determine how successful they are in artistically engaging their audiences, and they must understand what factors influence the effect of the work presented. Theatres must be offered a way to set measurable goals for artistic impact, to track results, to test innovations and measure again for effectiveness. Our bet is that by measuring intrinsic impact, theatre leaders can discover new ways to recalibrate the relevance of their art for their audiences. Artistic directors can use a new tool in designing artistic programming. Marketing directors can find new ways to attract and retain their audiences. Managing directors can point to new evidence supporting the value of their institutions, and arts advocates can employ new arguments for the public value of theatre and the performing arts.

During this moment of economic worry, while we are carefully watching our fiscal well-being, it's crucial for us to remember the core challenge to American theatre is indeed one of relevance, not finance. Let's be certain that while we're counting our pennies, we're also measuring the deepest things that matter the most.