How can design thinking help cultural institutions deliver greater social value?
In Episode 5 Tandi is joined by Lisa Baxter, founder of The Experience Business, for a deep dive on qualitative research, customer empathy and social purpose. We talk about how to facilitate meaningful conversations between arts organisations and communities, and how that insight can inform everything from our brand values, to our programming, marketing communications, and engagement programs.
This episode covers:
- Why audience experience is at the core of why organisations receive public funding
- How qualitative research puts the humanity into research and why it’s a good idea to have arts professionals sit in on research groups
- The techniques that arts professionals can use to more intensely explore the audience experience
- How the gap between booking a ticket and seeing a show can be used to create greater audience value
- How arts organisations develop their customer knowledge, customer empathy and audience sensibility
- The five-step process of Design Thinking that organisation can apply
- How arts organisations can find their core purpose through conversation, art and creativity exercises
- Why thinking about extracting value from the market is the putting the cart before the horse
- Why arts organisations should ‘do their homework’ about what’s going on in their communities
- How arts organisations can understand their operating context and the aspirations of their visitors
Lisa Baxter FRSA is the founder/director of The Experience Business, working across the UK and internationally in supporting the design of optimal audience experiences.
A pioneer in her field, and an avowed audience champion, Lisa uses innovative facilitative and qualitative research methods to help arts organisations conceive, articulate, design and understand their experiential value propositions. She is increasingly in demand as a speaker on the subject of audience experience design, including keynotes at the Australia Council for the Arts Marketing Summit (2013), the City Cape Town Arts and Cultural Indaba (2015) and the Federation of Scottish Theatres (2017) and the up and coming Connected Audiences Conference in Vienna. Lisa has also guest lectured at the Universities of Leeds, Groningen (Netherlands) and Deakin University, (Melbourne).
A specialist in researching audience and customer experience, she has collaborated with the University of Sheffield on an AHRC/ACE funded programme around innovative methods of enquiry into the audience experience and is published on the subject.
Clients include the National Football Museum (Manchester), the Swiss Science Centre (Zurich), Rockhampton Art Gallery (Queensland, Australia), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), Imperial War Museum North (Salford) and the National Coal Mining Museum for England (Wakefield).
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