Measure What Matters: Arts Administration

We are now starting a new book in my social media class, “Measure What Matters: Online tools for understanding customers, social media, engagement, and key relationships.” This book by Katie Delahaye Paine gives step by step guidance on how to measure relationships as a small business or organization, focusing on the importance of data of all kinds. Just through reading the first few chapters I am seeing tips and tricks which apply to arts administration and it also reiterates things I’ve already learned in my other classes.

I especially see the connection from this book to what I’ve learned about arts administration with the emphasis on the importance of surveys. Communicating with your audience or customers through surveys is crucial to any organization but I see it and learn about it first-hand with arts organizations. In order to keep a non-profit arts organization blossoming, you have to be making your audience happy, make them feel heard, and be constantly evaluating what’s working and what’s not. If you want to know, why not just ask them? I work at the Freed Center box office and we are constantly collecting data from our audience in some kind of survey format. With every ticket transaction, we are ask the ticket buyer, “How did you hear about the show?” Just this simple one-question survey gives us insight to what advertising sources are working, what demographic we are attracting most, and who keeps coming back and why. I expect to learn a lot more about collecting this kind of data from “Measure What Matters.”