Team: Alan Brown, Rebecca Ratzkin, with Sheena Johnson
The arts program staff of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation partnered with WolfBrown to support a cohort of grantee organizations in building capacity for audience research. The three-year Audience Research Collaborative (ARC) initiative stemmed from the foundation’s desire to better understand who benefits from its investments in grantees’ programs—and from a desire to support grantees in understanding who they serve and how their audience relates to the larger Bay Area population.
The capstone report from this initiative, “Building Capacity for Audience Research: Reflections on the Audience Research Collaborative,” takes stock of the ARC initiative for the benefit of other funders who might consider supporting similar capacity building programs in the future. It is not a formal evaluation, but an attempt by the project team to reflect critically on three years of work.