Happy to share my interview with Aubrey Bergauer with you all today.Aubrey is the former executive director of the California Symphony and current vice president of strategic communications & executive director at the Center for Innovative Leadership at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In this interview, we discussed:Different views of audience engagement,The role of UX research with regard to audience engagement and the impact of UX research on the California Symphony,Defining audiences in terms of behavior rather than (only) demographics,and a bunch more. While Aubrey’s expertise is in leading performing arts organizations, I think you’ll find her experience and views of audience engagement are highly relevant to museums and other cultural organizations.You can learn more about Aubrey’s work on her website, and on be sure to check out Aubrey’s articles on the long haul model on Medium.As always, reply to this email to let me know your thoughts, leave a comment below, or share your feedback here.KyleSign up to receive future interviews in your inbox.TranscriptKyle:Aubrey Bergauer is the vice president of strategic communications and executive director at the Center for Innovative Leadership at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Aubrey, I've really been looking forward to this. Thanks so much for talking with me today.Aubrey:Good to be here.Kyle:So we're just going to dive right in and I'm going to ask you, when I say audience engagement, what comes to mind?Aubrey:There's so many ways we can answer that question. I think audience engagement is everything. Everything about really user experience is how I would translate that. So that means everything from the very first interaction we have with a potential patron because if they're not a patron yet because it's their very first interaction, what is that? Probably something online is the answer.Aubrey:All the way through cultivating that relationship, that online journey, that first ticket purchase, that first in person visit when they come and that visitor experience. All of that is audience engagement. Then if that's just sort of the beginning, then it's how do we continue to engage and audience engagement means how do we build a relationship over time? How do we make sure that a first visit isn't a one off bucket list thing and instead it's the beginning of something that somebody wants to repeat and form a habit of. So I think audience engagement is all of those things.Kyle:Yeah. One of the things that I find so compelling about your perspective is that you're thinking about things sort of persistently over time. I don't know if this has been your experience, but sometimes I find that when people think about audience engagement, they look for clues in the moment. I think of people looking at like, well, how are people behaving in a moment, which is a little bit different.Aubrey:I see what you're saying. Yeah. I guess if we're talking museums, could this exhibit get more attendance or interaction or could this online post to get more engagement, quote unquote. Is that what you mean? It's normally like a snapshot that we sort of look at.Kyle:Yeah, a snapshot is a good way to put it. Are they asking questions on the [inaudible 00:02:17]? Things like that.Aubrey:Yes. I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Kyle:Whereas, what I find so interesting about in these articles that you've written that I'll link to again in the show notes, you're looking at things over this extended period of time. I'd be curious to hear how that sort of took root for you and what were any of the obstacles that you encountered in trying to implement that vision?Aubrey:There are many statistics definitely in the performing arts industry. So hopefully I'll share some of these and there might be parallels that come to mind in the museum world. But statistics that have just been really alarming to me and in my opinion should be alarming to the whole field, which was the impetus for thinking about this model. So those are statistics such as at orchestras nationwide in America, 90% of first time attendees never come back again. That's crazy. When we say we need new audiences, we need younger audiences. That's not true.Aubrey:What's true is we're actually very good at attracting new audiences and we are very bad, 90% bad at retaining them. So that's one statistic that made me really think, okay, it's not about acquisition. It's about engagement over a longer term, is that we've got to have them come back again. Otherwise we're just in the single ticket business and that's in no way setting us up for in the performing arts, it'd be subscribers and then ultimately donors. So of course museum equivalent, members, donors.Aubrey:So another statistic that was sort of bubbling in my head was we know in the performing arts, if we can get somebody to attend a second time within 12 months of their first visit with us already their lifetime value skyrockets. Just a second visit within a year of their first visit makes such a difference. I thought, okay, that means that the next step for somebody who comes once is to get them to come back again, not solicit for a donation, but come back again. So then you put that with other stats in the industry. Okay. If we do get somebody to become a subscriber, which if they've been twice in a year, again, their loyalty does increase and they are more likely to be a subscriber.Aubrey:Okay. Once somebody does become a subscriber, those season ticket holders, first year season ticket holders don't renew at about 50%, so that's another big drop off point. We've done so much work to get somebody to subscribe and then to know that half of them in their first year will not come back. That's a real red flag. So you start putting all of that together. Then lastly, the number one prospect for donors in the performing arts are those season ticket holders.Aubrey:So to me, when I start training all of that together, the model sort of screams at me of like, we have got to be developing these next step relationships and how do we get somebody to engage again? Then what does that look like again? Then what does that look like next after that? So from there I felt like, okay, I've got a really clear plan emerging in my mind of what is that journey I want? Or if you use our word, what does engagement look like over time? In my words, I'd always say over the long haul.Kyle:You mentioned UX research there at the beginning. How has that played out for you?Aubrey:In my whole career, I feel like I've been a part of a lot of research, sort of in air quotes, meaning patron surveys, focus groups, working with firms to do all of that. That's fine and there's a place for all of that. But at the California Symphony, what I did in terms of user experience research is went to truly new people. Again, it was that same statistic, 90% of them aren't coming back. I thought, why? Why is this happening? So instead of a survey, which we always send out to the people we already have in our databases, it sort of becomes this echo chamber of like, okay, it's already the people who have engaged answering the survey.Aubrey:The people who are most connected to us and most engaged really are the ones responding to the survey. So surveys just have such a response bias issue that I've become very uninterested and in those results to answer this question of why aren't you coming back and designing for experience. So we sought out to find people who truly were new. You are the type of person who should come to the orchestra. Meaning you are smart, you're culturally aware, you have expendable income, you do go to other live entertainment options. We said if that's you, but for whatever reason you don't come to the symphony, we want to hear from you.Aubrey:Through doing that and really speaking to truly new people, the answers we got in a focus group were so different than any other quote unquote survey or research tool I had used before in my life. So that became just a real turning point for me professionally of realizing, wow, there's so much we do starting online with that first visit all the way through the ticket purchase path and then all the way to the onsite experience that was so off putting, unwelcoming, unfamiliar to somebody who is trying to engage with us for the first time.Kyle:So the challenge that you raised there is one that I hear so often among museum folks, which is like, the habit is to issue these surveys and as you point out they're always going to the same people who are already there. So how did you overcome that obstacle of getting to those new audiences?Aubrey:This is a social media success story. We made a little blog post saying this is what we're going to do and pretty much literally as I just spell it out for you is what we put online. If you're this type of person, should go to the symphony but don't. All that. We said, "We really want to hear from you," and we told them this is what we're going to do. We said, "We want you to come to some performances." There's one in particular that's a required performance just so that there would be a shared experience from which to base the discussion.Aubrey:We said, "We'll feed you pizza and beer and guide you through this discussion when we all meet." So, like I said, pretty much just spelled it out, posted that online. I got to say, you want to get a bunch of people sharing something virally online, say you want feedback on how to make the orchestra better. So probably you could swap that out with museum and I imagine that there will be just as many people, saying, "Yeah, I want to speak up and tell you how I feel about this." So just very organically that spread. We had people reaching out going through the channels we had put out there to tell us they wanted to participate, saying, "Yeah, I'm in."Kyle:When you propose that or you started doing that, what was that like? I mean, did you encounter any resistance?Aubrey:Resistance, you mean in terms of participants or internally or board?Kyle:Internally.Aubrey:Okay. Internally, no. I was the executive director, so that helped because I was able to say this is what we're doing. The board was fine. I mean, to be honest, I just told them we're going to do some customer research. They were like, "Oh yeah, that sounds good." I had a board that was very allowing of me to, that was sufficient for them to hear and that was fine. So it is nice when you get to make those decisions from the top, and I think they should often be made from the top.Aubrey:I would say if somebody is interested in doing a project like this and not in the top leadership role and then therefore does have to sort of manage up this idea, I think it is useful to use this as a case study. It's useful also there are different ways to do this. We did this for almost no cost at all. It's like the cost of pizza and beer essentially is what it cost us.Aubrey:At a bigger organization, maybe somebody would want to hire a facilitator and I've been in those positions too, where we have hired somebody to lead focus groups for us. So I just say all this to say that I think there are different ways to shop the idea around to make it palatable and easy, hopefully to shop around internally.Kyle:One of the things that was so compelling to me about your long haul model, that article, was that you were describing this challenge of measuring engagement. Can you describe some of the sort of radical steps I think you took to get there, to get people on sort of the same page, quote unquote?Aubrey:I think so often in our institutions we do try to measure engagement by what I would say are probably the wrong metrics or wrong KPIs. So I'll start with that and then share what I did to try to combat that. I think so much of the time we're looking at total attendance, whether that's at a performance or at an exhibit or annual attendance or whatever, it's like how many people are we serving? Is that growing?Aubrey:Okay. Well, if we serve a lot of people once and our mission, collective mission, is to cultivate lifelong loyal lovers of the art we produce, serving a lot of people once is a really bad metric. So there's that.Aubrey:I think also organizations measure things like how many people were on that solicitation, whether that's a single ticket postcard or a development appeal to give some examples. We say how many people did this go out to, or how many organizations did I do that list trade with, and how many people did we get on this quote unquote prospect list?Aubrey:Instead I would contend that a better metric is, how are we building a prospect list so that our response rate is higher than before? In other words, how are we creating a list that has qualified leads, not just quantity of leads. So for us that meant, and in terms of the long haul model, it meant really paring down those lists actually. So we were saving a lot of money in terms of who we were mailing to, both on the marketing side and on the development side and seeing our response rates go up because those lists were more qualified.Aubrey:So it was like we were saving money on the expense side, generating equal if not more amounts of money on the revenue side. Very quickly that became sort of this flywheel of success that we were then willing to enable to invest back into the user experience and addressing some of these issues that we had heard from the focus group. So hopefully that sort of gives the idea of the right metrics or wrong metrics. I guess to summarize, I would say it's metrics that measure loyalty or engagement. That's what we should we be looking for.Kyle:I'm going to put on my museum educator hat here for a second and say, I'm not in marketing or development. I'm all about meeting our educational goals and making sure that we are engaging the community on that level. So I'm not sure how all these metrics add up for my goals.Aubrey:That's a good question. I think in some ways the goals should be aligned, maybe in many ways. Because really what I'm talking about when I think about the user experience, that's not just a marketing thing or a development thing. That is really an institutional mind shift and for most organizations an institutional culture shift. So I would say then for the education team, I believe education is in many ways synonymous with marketing.Aubrey:If we are doing our jobs, educating people at any age, then if we're doing that well, we are priming that group to be ready to enjoy the artistic experience we are offering. Therefore if they enjoy that experience, if they're coming in with more familiarity about what we're doing, they're more likely to enjoy that and they want to come back again. So I think when you look at it that way, suddenly education becomes almost the foundation for the entire long haul model because it only helps us build and be more successful on top of that.Kyle:Tell me a little bit about, because what I'm starting to envision as I hear you talk is these sort of silos between these different departments. Marketing has their objectives, education has their objectives. How do you tackle that?Aubrey:I talk a lot about breaking down silos. I think for all kinds of nonprofits and arts organizations within the nonprofit sector, we are so siloed in what we do just as you described. In order to do this work well we've got to break those silos down. I'll give two examples.Aubrey:My last job and my current job. My last job I created a director of patron loyalty and that person was over both marketing in the traditional sense, as well as over low level annual fund. So they were seeing the relationship from single ticket buyers to season ticket holders to first time and low level donors. So it redrew those department lines that are normally very, very siloed development marketing. The reason for that is I believe that annual fund, especially low-level annual fund, is very similar to marketing.Aubrey:All the skills are the same, in fact. When you think about they're both mass communications, they both use the same mediums, meaning direct mail, maybe some digital online to support that email support, sometimes calls, whether it's tele funding or telemarketing. So all those mediums again are the same. The sort of transactional process is the same. All of those things are designed to elicit an emotional response that drives a transaction, whether that's ticket sale or donation.Aubrey:So I really think that low level annual fund, the skills are so synonymous with strong marketing. So I grouped all of that into one and then where the breakdown, or not break down, break happens in terms of organizational structure is when we start moving donors up the ladder and moving them into more one-on-one relationships. So moving them toward those major donor relationships.Aubrey:Then that is a different skill set which is why then I broke that out into the different sort of remaining development team, major gifts, institutional fundraising, grants, corporations, all of that I kept sort of as more and more traditional development. But that's one way that the silos can be broken down. It's just really considering what are the functions and what are these outcomes and how do we align our institutional structure org chart to work toward that?Aubrey:Here now that I'm at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, of course I come in and they say, "Aubrey, what are we going to do? You talk about the long haul model, what do we do at a higher ed institution?" So what we're working toward and haven't completely rolled out yet is also some sort of position that is between marketing and advancement and what does that look like? When we start thinking about breaking down silos, Kyle, it does get a little messy because it's like, do they report to both? What do we do?Aubrey:It's like, okay, this is a problem that can be solved. It is okay if we work together and create a joint position that serves both departments. In fact, the whole position is designed to do that and designed to steward those relationships. Here, because there's not a huge revenue goal attached to tickets, it almost means that the entirety of the ticket sale is really to be that pipeline to go straight into the advancement.Aubrey:So many of these principles are the same except it's just there's less revenue attached at the beginning of the relationship. So it's like, okay, is there a position that can do some of these things for us? Invite people to come back again, invite them to whatever the next step here is as a higher ed institution. So anyways, I just say all that to say that yeah, it takes people to do this work. I think that means sometimes looking at how do we draw or redraw our department lines.Kyle:That's so great. As I hear you talk like a theme sort of throughout this is I hear you talking about behavior over and over and over again. What I haven't heard you say yet is anything about this or that demographic quite so much, even though that could be valuable. What I hear is the emphasis on the behavior. Can you talk about that?Aubrey:That's a great observation. So many times people say, well what have you done to reach, fill in the blank demographic? Whether that's an age demographic, what have you done for younger audiences? Or an ethnic demographic, what have you done to reach minorities in your community? I could definitely talk about some ethnicity specific work we've done, but as a whole, when we look at trends and consumer behavior, there are trends that are far and wide that can help us in this work.Aubrey:At the end that makes our work easier because I'm not saying we'll go form the young patrons club to try to reach millennials. I'm saying, no, there are things we can do and how we design for the outcomes we're wanting, which is loyalty, repeat engagement. There are things we can do that affect humans no matter what their age or ethnicity or whatever. So I think, yeah, I think that's a great observation that I really am focused on behavior and really believe that there are ways we can design for the desired behaviors we want it.Kyle:The random thought bubbling up in my head. Something about maybe that I read in an article you wrote something about blind performance review. I'm going to use the wrong word because I'm not in the symphony world, but I think it was something about blind performances or something.Aubrey:Probably blind auditions is what you were thinking of.Kyle:Yes. Yes. Thank you. So that makes me think the same thing. Like, okay, so we're sending the, I mean behavior is a little mechanical, but we're blindfolded. We're studying what the performances to guard against appearances in a sense.Aubrey:Yeah. So in the orchestra world, blind auditions, just for anybody who's not familiar with that means that when a player is taking an audition for an open chair in the orchestra, almost always, it's definitely for professional orchestras, always this is the case. They're performing behind a screen so that their identity is concealed and that has led to greater gender parity, a little more underrepresented backgrounds coming into our orchestras.Aubrey:It's usually used as a case study in like almost every business book as an example of a fair and equitable hiring practice. It's not perfect, but I'll spare you guys on getting into the weeds but it has shown to move the needle. So what I think is interesting is how could we use that in our work for off stage positions or non artistic positions. So we did that a couple of ways at the California Symphony.Aubrey:We had a composer in residence, and instead of all this normal stuff, submit your resume, submit your scores, we said do all that. But your name has to be, any identifying information has to be redacted. So we sort of did this anonymous review emulating blind auditions and sure enough, the first round applicant pool, in this case we were trying to get more women to apply for that program, our first round applicant pool went from 5% women to 20% women. Then with every round of blind review, 20% females advanced, sort of revealing to us that yeah, I think this was an equitable and fair process given that that representation helped through each round of review.Aubrey:I think also for our administrative jobs, we could totally do that. I would love to be at an organization where, I spend the time working with HR so hopefully I will get to that here at San Francisco Conservatory eventually where we say, okay, can we review all first round applicants with all identifying information removed? Even in a world where that's not possible, if we're at an organization that just doesn't have that infrastructure, I think there are definitely tips to help with that.Aubrey:We know research shows when somebody applies and they are either a racial minority or they are other in some way. If there's only one of them or few of them who sort of fit that category, then they don't advance through the different interview rounds as quickly. So there's a way to combat that, which is to say when we are building those first round interview pools, if we only have one person who's a woman or one person whose name looks like they are of a different ethnicity, go back to the stack.Aubrey:If we want to be forward thinking, unbiased individuals, go back to the stack and say, who else like that can we add? Because all the research shows when you have more than one woman in the candidate pool, there's more odds that a woman will advance through the round. Same thing, if we have more than one black person, if we have more than one [inaudible 00:24:15] person, all of that. So anyways, I don't mean to get on my soapbox about it, but I just think there's so much we can do towards building teams equitably and trying to work around our own conscious or unconscious bias.Kyle:Absolutely. Yeah. There is some sort of virtuous cycle I think you're describing there, which is, I mean in this case it's blind auditions brings in more diverse performers and then to staffing and then you get into audience. I think that there feels like there's some sort of nice circle of, yes.Aubrey:Absolutely. It starts internally. When we start to diversify our internal teams, then we have the representation needed to be reflective of the communities we serve.Kyle:Audrey, I know we are out of time. Thank you so much for chatting with me. Where can people go to find out more about your work?Aubrey:My website is aubreybergauer.com or on social media, Aubrey Bergauer on, pick your channel of choice. I'm on all of them.Kyle:Great. All right. Aubrey, thank you. I look forward to seeing what comes next.Aubrey:Well, thank you, Kyle. It was a pleasure. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at letters.superhelpful.com/subscribe
