Audience Building and Financial Health in the Nonprofit Performing Arts

Report
Audience Audience Building and Financial Health in the Nonprofit Performing Arts
Report: Audience Audience Building and Financial Health in the Nonprofit Performing Arts

This essay is the first in a series of publications to be released as part of a study of the audience-building efforts of the 25 performing arts organizations in The Wallace Foundation's $52 million Building Audiences for Sustainability initiative. The initiative awarded grants to the organizations to try to engage new audiences while retaining existing ones and to see whether these audience-building efforts contribute to organizations' financial health. The foundation then commissioned and funded The University of Texas at Austin to conduct an independent evaluation of these audience-building efforts. The lead author of this essay is the study's principal investigator. Future publications will present findings from this research. This report reviews an extensive amount of literature and presents its major themes and arguments, identifies gaps in the literature, and suggests areas for future research to address unanswered questions. We provide extensive references for the reader who wishes to pursue individual publications in greater depth. In the case of the audience-building literature we found many relevant publications but not acohesive line of inquiry whose studies reference and build upon one another. In the case of financial health, we found so little literature specifically on the performing arts that we considered other potentially relevant literature on nonprofit financial health more generally. With respect to the relationship between audience building and financial sustainability, we found virtually no literature. 

Research Topic
Management and Governance of Nonprofit Organizations