||| June 28, 2025 by Maureen Burns

Game Changers: What We Learned from the Arts Engagement Exchange

How has the Arts Engagement Exchange 4-year investment in audience engagement impacted the way participating organizations relate to their customers? We calculated the numbers and listened to the stories.

AEE was an innovative 4-year initiative to build arts audiences in Chicago.

After four years of audience development and support for Chicago's arts and cultural community, the Arts Engagement Exchange (AEE) has come to a close. This website, only one part of the initiative, will continue to remain accessible, functioning as an archive for the peer learning, sharing, and resources developed throughout AEE's run (2007-2011).

AEE was an innovative 4-year initiative to build arts audiences in Chicago. The program was established in 2006 with a grant from the Wallace Foundation to the Chicago Community Trust in partnership with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events to support the arts and cultural community by creating audience appreciation and a demand for the arts.

More than just a granting program, this initiative brought a unique mix of funding, collaboration, and resource support to the awardees, as well as to the city's local arts community. AEE programming was comprised of five core components: Open Forums, Learning Circles, Roundtables, grants and the AEE website. These programs offered on topics related to audience engagement, often utilized the expertise of high-profile arts leaders and were created by the city partners and offered to local arts organizations at no cost. For more information about the forums and workshops offered, including a list of resources from each event, visit the resource section of this website.

In the fall of 2011 as AEE wrapped up, an impact study was conducted among participants to find out just how well the project's goals were met. The AEE Impact Study was an attempt to define and quantify results experienced across the diverse array of participating organizations from 2007 to 2011. It is hoped that the findings of this study might be useful not only in identifying and validating areas of impact of the AEE's multi-facted approach on the broad scope of audience development and engagement work being done by Chicago's arts groups, but also in providing some input for the development of acceptable measures for subsequent research for future and similar initiatives.

Some of the conclusions and implications found by the study are:

1. The core audience development goals on which AEE built its programs were to broaden, deepen, and diversify audiences. Nearly one-half of all respondents across programs, felt AEE knowledge and resources helped their organizations broaden their audiences, 45.5% felt audience engagement was deepened and 34% said their audiences became more diverse.
2. Among AEE participants overall, audience size trended slightly upward across the active period of the initiative, while revenue trended downward. This is another good indicator that the audience development and engagement focus of the initiative was on goal by helping organizations sustain, expand, or grow audiences. Participants also report that they see more diversity, engagement, and growth in new audiences that, while the impact on revenue may not be clear or consistent today, may well bear more and better fruit over the next two to five years. In fact, this will be the real test of audience engagement as a key to the fiscal vitality of arts organizations that participated in initiatives like AEE: how and to what degree does audience growth and engagement translate to revenue growth and stablity?
3. Institutional change within the arts organizations that participated in AEE programs is a major area of impact that was not necessarily a direct intent of the initiative. It helped break down silos among staff to create more collaboration and transparency across departments, shifted the core mission from being overly programming-focused to more audience-focused, and helped retool traditional strategies, especially relative to audience development and marketing.
4. AEE effectively attracted arts managers across genre, size of organization, and location to multiple types of programs throughout the four-year period. About 76% of participants were involved in two to four of the AEE's different program components. This created a compounding impact across the various learning opportunities and other program platforms over time.
5. AEE effectively reached organizations' leaders and decision-makers in order to help foster lasting change within organizations. The participants in AEE were often organizational or department directors, managers, presidents, and CEOs (86%), indicating that the topics and content presented were hitting the right ears.
6. Investing both time and money proved to be a powerful combination resulting in new strides in audience engagement and shits in the institutional culture among arts organizations that participated. In fact, time and resources from and provided by funders may have been just as valuable as money. It was participation in the learning activities and interaction with peers that may have the most enduring impact on those arts organizations involved, whether they received a grant or not. This indicates that the shift to more resource-based grant programs that provide a combination of tools, access to industry experts, platforms for peer interaction and a consistent message and call to action can be much more productive and impactful in cultivating audience development than just grant funding alone.

With AEE now closed, one important finding made by the study is that there is a need for affordable learning programs for art professionals that offer both breadth and depth in scope and content over longer periods of time. It was the impact of the AEE learning network and resources on the professional skills, institutional culture, strategic planning approaches, and use of audience research that appear to have lasting impact among participants. The majority of participants attended or took part in multiple programs across the four-year period of the initiative, indicating that the multiplicity of programs, repeat attendance, and the compounding effect of time will be the keys to true sustainability of the programs developed under the Wallace/AEE initiative.

To read the full report, click here.

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