About DANCECleveland
DANCECleveland has been presenting dance in Northeast Ohio for nearly 60 years. Its annual season of four to seven events at PlayhouseSquare in Cleveland and at the University of Akron’s EJ Thomas Hall, features a diverse range of national and international dance companies, as well as educational and community programs. DANCECleveland reaches an audience of approximately 11,000 annually.
About the Project
DANCECleveland created a 15-member Dance Advance Team (DAT) to serve as its ambassadors in the community. Comprised of dancers, choreographers, teachers and other dance professionals, Dance Advance Team members serve as active advocates, working through their own personal networks—called “affinity groups”—to publicize DANCECleveland events, bring audiences to dance performances, and promote learning about dance.
Starting Conditions
Recent closures in the dance community in Cleveland had left DANCECleveland alone in the landscape—the only area organization solely dedicated to the presentation of national and international modern dance. Despite its own success in maintaining and even growing a core mainstage audience of nearly 7,500, DANCECleveland staff saw the potential erosion of an audience that was predominantly older, affluent and white. Niche marketing and careful programming had helped to diversify the audience on a performance-by-performance basis, but staff were having difficulty converting these single ticket buyers into consistent patrons.
Good data about the audience—which the organization had in abundance—could only go so far, and staff knew they needed more manpower to do the kind of grassroots, personal outreach that could help overcome the community’s general ambivalence about dance. Pam Young, Executive Director of DANCECleveland, says she wanted to know more. “There’s so much about those single-ticket buyers that we don’t know,” she says. “What motivates them? How can we increase their loyalty to us? We had never really analyzed them in depth.” As they began to drill down, Young says they identified a critical “social factor.” People were “game to go because someone was inviting them,” she says.
At the same time, Young knew that the audience was “a moving target,” and building audiences, especially among 20 and 30-year-olds, was “a really new focus for us.” Young describes a sense of urgency about developing new language and communication approaches to reach this audience. “We realized that if we didn’t start bringing people into the performance for a first experience, then they were never going to come back for a second.”
The problem was finding a practical way of making these personal invitations in an organization that was understaffed and not particularly diverse itself. Wondering where they might get help, staff came up with what Young calls “a half-baked idea” to use dance professionals to help them spread the word in an organized way. Would it work? Young says they didn’t know, but the Incubating Innovation program gave them the time and space to begin imagining what such a program might look like.