Durham Arts Council

Come face-to-face with the arts in Durham.

A Practical Guide to Audience Development

CUSTOMER SERVICE

In this section we offer a customer service diagnostic tool which may be freely copied from this website and used to help your organization assess its customer service "fitness." Three essays on customer service follow the diagnostic tool. These essays were commissioned by the Durham Arts Council as a means to document the proceedings of "Shaping the Moment: A Customer Service Workshop" help in the summer of 2000 for the arts community in the region.

The keynote speaker for "Shaping the Moment," Marcia Bradley, titled her remarks "Introducing and Sustaining Organizational Change" because the consistent pursuit of a particular strategy -- whether it is reworking the way you use your phone system or your web site; regularly surveying your audience; rethinking the assumptions behind your program schedule and venues; or how frequently you check the toilet paper in the bathrooms -- requires organizational change to sustain it. All of these resource and ideas are not stand-alone solutions to audience development. They have power as they are absorbed into the daily thinking of an arts organization trying to increase, diversify, and deepen its audience.

You can download the essays in pdf format by clicking here. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader (a free download) to view the document. Click here to download the Reader.

The Customer-Centered Arts Organization: A Staff Assessment Tool

Essay #1: Customer Service as Fire Prevention

Essay #2: Shaping First Impressions

Essay #3: In the Service of Our Art / The Art of Service