Can arts and culture make waves with ‘Ripple Effect’?

The U.S. arts-and-culture sector has been searching for a long time for the most effective way to tell its own story – the story that will finally and reliably convince Americans that arts and culture matter tremendously to our society, provide real benefits for everyone and deserve to be nurtured and taught, practiced and promoted and, above all, financially supported.

How can the Joe Six-Packs and soccer moms of the 50 states be persuaded to care about cultural enrichment so much that they’ll write checks and vote for more taxes?

Opinions on that have changed over the decades. In the 1960s, arts and culture were perceived and/or positioned to represent the values of great European civilizations American G.I.s had seen first-hand in World War II and the Great Society they hoped to build at home: They were the marks of a gifted, prosperous and benevolent people. Over the next 40 years, as the pendulum of political and economic reality has swung between closed minds and tight fists on the one extreme and orgiastic abandon with money and self-expression on the other, arts and culture have gone from extolling their effects on soul, spirit and status to emphasizing their impacts on economic development and students’ academic success. 

The latter arguments have been working pretty well in some communities lately, especially with civic leaders and elected officials desperate to help their cities survive the current recession and the larger transition to high-tech knowledge economies requiring trained creative workforces.  But those arguments are rather complicated – and the general public doesn’t respond to complicated terribly well.  What it responds to is the likes of “Eat Mor Chikin.”  

So now the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati, Ohio, believes it has discovered a simpler and better message for arts and culture – one that will make the difference with its own community and others. A study the fund released Monday finds that the phrase “Ripple Effect” best and most vividly conveys to the general public the idea of benefits spreading from arts and culture to everybody. In addition, it finds that two specific kinds of good effects prove most inspiring to members of the public and most likely to elicit their financial support for arts and culture. First: that vibrant, activity-filled neighborhoods result from arts and culture. Second: that arts and culture can connect and bring together a community’s diverse residents. 

The study closely resembles a business-branding process. It used focus groups of diverse area residents to test what arts benefits and catch-phrases captured people’s imaginations, gave them the message that arts and culture make their community better, and fired enthusiasm about “sharing responsibility” (i.e. financially supporting) arts and culture.

” ‘Ripple effect’ is a kind of shorthand – people have a common understanding of what that is,” said Margy Waller, vice president/arts & culture partnership for the Fine Arts Fund. “It’s a way of starting a conversation with them. People get very excited about it.”

The two particular ripples that move them to take action on behalf of the arts? Connectivity among people and vibrant neighborhoods.  These imply a kind of economic benefit – the benefit of neighborhoods where there’s a lot of good, engaging activity going on among residents and visitors- but they don’t stress dollars-and-cents issues or training and educational outcomes. That’s because those issues tended to elicit undesirable responses from the focus groups, the report explains: Pitching educational benefits led people to zero in on the needs of children, not the  broader community, while the topic of economic development resulted in people thinking about other economic factors, such as jobs  and natural resources, that they believed were more important than the arts.

The study concludes that the “Ripple Effect” concept has the power to reorient people’s perceptions of arts and culture, that it “positions arts and culture as a public good – a communal interest in which all have a stake – and provides a clearer picture of the kinds of events, activities and institutions that we are talking about.”  Once the two specific ripples of vibrant neighborhood and connected residents have enlisted people’s enthusiasm and active support of arts and culture, then the community conversation can expand to include other arts-related benefits, Waller said.  

 The study may represent the first time anyone has scientifically applied a standard business-branding process to arts advocacy. But arts advocacy has long embraced the very similar processes of political and advertising campaigns in trying to get legislation passed, tax issues approved and candidates elected.

What’s at all new about the “Ripple Effect” seems to be the specific tweak given to the arts-and-public-benefit argument. And whether the study’s conclusions are borne out or not will depend on how the Fine Arts Fund and other cultural groups put that tweaked message to use, said Tom Schorgl, president and CEO of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Questions such as where the ripple message will be aimed geographically within Cincinnati, what kinds of neighborhoods will be targeted, and what success will look like need to be answered before the ripple concept can be called effective and useful, Schorgl said.

Americans for the Arts, the national service organization for the arts and culture sector which has been following the development of the study, will likely help get word out about it by providing information to Americans for the Arts members, said Mara Walker, the organization’s chief operating officer. In trying to get people to recognize the value of the arts, she added, “you need as many arguments in your pocket as possible.”

That means the way to reach community leaders about arts and culture may still be through economic development and education, even if the “Ripple Effect” ends up favorably influencing the general public. Because which argument works best, Walker said, really depends on who you’re talking to.

Mek Mor Rippuls