Recent Engagements – January – March 2024

Assisting Middle Grades Partnership with Data Evaluation for Further Funding Opportunitie

We’re pleased to embark on a new partnership with the Fund for Educational Excellence and Middle Grades Partnership (MGP) based in Baltimore, Maryland. Beginning in March 2024, WolfBrown’s Principal and Director of Research for Youth & Families, Dr. Steven Holochwost, will work with MGP to evaluate the impact of their educational programs. MGP serves middle school students in grades 5—9 from Baltimore’s public and private schools. They provide academic programming that reverses summer learning loss, provides enrichment, leadership opportunities, and civic engagement. MGP brings students, teachers, and communities from diverse communities together in meaningful ways. MGP reports that over 90% of their students from their public schools get into the city’s top academically competitive high schools.

Learn more about Middle Grades Partnership at their website.

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Continuing Evaluation Support & Services for City Lore’s Arts Programs

In 2024, WolfBrown’s principal researcher, Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf, is extending a long-term collaboration with City Lore, an urban folklore organization in New York. The collaboration now has two branches. The first is the documentation and evaluation of a partnership with the Library of Congress: Primary Sources in Schools Program. In this partnership, City Lore teaching artists will be using the library’s resources, plus original resources of their own, to teach humanities in middle and high schools throughout the city. The program engages young people as original researchers side-by-side with teachers and artists. The program is already sparking powerful discussions of the ways in which archives, collections, and labels carry judgments and beliefs.

In addition, Dr. Wolf will continue to evaluate City Lore’s Homer 2 Hip Hop program, a poetry curriculum, funded by the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, that honors the powers of listening and speaking, especially tuned to the strengths and needs of the city’s growing number of multi-lingual learners. The work will result in materials that acknowledge and support speaking multiple languages – a necessary celebration in a city that continues to be the most linguistically diverse in the contemporary United States.

For more information about City Lore, visit their website.

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New Engagement with Imagination Stage

WolfBrown is pleased to be working with Imagination Stage, an arts and culture nonprofit in Bethesda, Maryland which empowers young people “to discover their voice and identity through performing arts education and professional theatre.” Collaboration includes an assessment of the impact of its Theatre for Change program on the students, teachers, and teaching artists who participate. Specifically, through theatre arts and education, “Imagination Stage’s Theatre for Change program explores complex social justice issues to help build a new generation of compassionate, collaborative children who are capable of changing the world.” Evaluation and implementation of new methodologies will take place over the 2023-2024 academic school year. 

For more information about this year’s Theatre for Change touring productions, visit their website. 

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New Audience Experience Survey

Through our Audience Outlook Monitor program, WolfBrown has launched the Audience Experience Survey. This survey will inform your work providing fulfilling experiences for audience members before, during, and after your programs. We’re excited to announce that 9 arts and cultural organizations from across the U.S. will participate in the initial survey.

The following organizations opted in to the Audience Experience Survey Open Cohort:

• Ballet Arizona
• Cal Performances
• Childsplay
• Houston Ballet
• LA Opera
• Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
• St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
• Tucson Symphony
• UMS

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New Post-Event Feedback Survey

Through our Audience Outlook Monitor program, WolfBrown has launched the Post-Event Feedback Survey. This survey is a flexible, easy-to-implement tool for gathering feedback directly from audiences immediately after they attend a performance. We’re excited to announce that 12 arts and cultural organizations from across the U.S. will participate in the initial survey.

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National Arts Centre Takes a Deep Dive into the Concept of Loyalty

National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada has awarded WolfBrown a contract to study the theory and practice surrounding customer loyalty (“Loyalty Concept Exploration”), and to examine different models for building affinity and loyalty, with an eye towards diversifying NAC’s relationships with its public.

The work will include: 1) understanding the present-day marketplace dynamics of affinity; 2) taking stock of past experimentation by arts organizations with new models of loyalty/affinity/frequency; and 3) an exploratory survey of value, affinity and loyalty.

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New Survey About Communications and Media Use

Through our Audience Outlook Monitor program, WolfBrown has launched the Communications and Media Use Survey, which allows organizations to forecast where communications spend has the highest probability for measurable results, based on the specific ways their unique audience interacts with local, regional, and national media landscapes. We’re excited to announce that 16 arts and cultural organizations from across the U.S. will participate in the initial survey.

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The Kennedy Center’s Turnaround Arts program and WolfBrown Collaborate on New Resources for Pilot Year

WolfBrown is pleased to announce a collaboration with the Kennedy Center’s Turnaround Arts program where we’ll support staff and educators in their newly redesigned program. WolfBrown consultant, Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf, will collaborate on developing new resources that include an enhanced framework with a focus on art and belonging and how to document program and school growth; development of an implementation plan for the pilot year; develop arts-informed strategies for participating educators to document their development; develop a pilot design for Turnaround Arts national anchor projects; and suggest indicators for charting the success of the initiative.

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New Survey About Demographics and Buyer Behavior

Through its Audience Outlook Monitor program, WolfBrown has launched the first cohort of the Demographics and Buyer Behavior Survey, which generates a multi-dimensional profile of ticket buyers. We’re excited to announce that a cohort of 17 arts and cultural organizations from across the U.S. will participate in the initial cohort.

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Immersive and VR Spaces with Philadelphia and Charlotte

Two orchestras have recently engaged WolfBrown to facilitate a process of identifying promising new programs in the augmented/immersive/VR space for future investment. Alan Brown and Marco Bruscoli will work with leadership of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Charlotte Symphony Orchestra throughout 2023 to ensure that future investments in new programs are both artistically exciting and strategic from a business model standpoint.

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New Strategies and Research

Nonprofit arts organizations are turning to WolfBrown for support with strategy and research as they navigate their way out of the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re pleased to be working with Paper Mill Playhouse of Millburn, New Jersey on a study of new, recovered, and lapsed patrons to better understand drivers of purchase and non-purchase behaviors. Similarly, Marin Theatre Company of Mill Valley, California has retained WolfBrown to investigate its current and potential positioning in the crowded Bay Area theatre ecology and to understand audience perceptions of the theatre. This work takes on yet another dimension in our work with Washington Concert Opera, a DC-based presenter of operatic repertoire presented in concert format, to assist its board and staff with insight on drivers of attendance and competitive positioning among both users and non-users.