If you work for everyone, you work for no one

The Crowdbuilder is a conversational guide that helps European music venues build strategies for audience development. I helped develop it for Live DMA and now that the tool is available, I am on a bit of a promo tour.

This week that tour brought me to the MIL conference in Lisbon. In the impressive old storage silo of the Beato Innovation District, some 20 music professionals and I went through the six steps of the tool.

There is a provocative bit I often do during these workshops. I find it captures much of what matters in audience development. It goes like this. There are two stupid questions in the arts. The first one is: what do we stand for? This enormous question of why we do what we do has a nasty habit of sending teams down a path of existential dread. The second stupid question is perhaps even more popular. How do we make money?

I call them stupid questions because in isolation they do not provide us with clarity.

In my experience, the most important question is not directly about mission or money, but about your audience. Who do you want to work for? This audience-oriented question holds many of the answers about your mission and financing, and weaves them together.

These are the groups we choose to work for and these are the products we can offer them.

You have to be picky about the groups you work for. “We work for everyone” simply makes no sense. If you work for everyone, you work for no one. Even worse is that self-referential audience: we work for everyone who likes our work. That way organisations end up organising concerts for people 'who like concerts' and releasing records for people 'who like records'.

Vagueness is not your friend when building audience strategies.

That's why the first question in the Crowdbuilder is specifically about the audience you want to reach. During the workshop we clarified vague target groups until they became actionable.

• Inhabitants of the island where we do our festival.
• People who would like to explore contemporary music but feel unsure where to begin.
• Young people from Lisbon who believe that the local music business can be a lot better.

Once you have a clear focus on who your target audience is, you have the ability to develop specific strategies. If you know who you work for, the next step is to figure out what you can do together.

In the Crowdbuilder that means you are ready to move on to step 2.

More on that step later.