Strategies applied by different arts and cultural organizations for their audience development: A comparative review

Abstract

A set of mutations in social, educational, and political roles as well as in the economic contexts of the “arts and cultural organizations” over the past decades have highlighted their need to work on their relationship with audiences. The aim of this paper is to investigate the current debated available in the literature on the “audience development” in four types of “arts and cultural organizations”, namely, museums, theatres, libraries and music institutions, with the goal of identifying and comparing the applied strategies by these organizations for their audience development. An exploratory literature review was conducted using the databases: Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar, in addition to the websites of concerned organizations. Nine strategies of “audience development” were identified: Digital Technology, Partnerships, Physical space development, education, audience segmentation, public engagement, audience research and marketing.

Keywords

• Audience development
• Strategy
• Museum
• Theatre
• Library
• Music