Lessons from Nina Simon's The Art of Relevance for Understanding Audiences

Over the weekend, I finally read Nina Simon’s book The Art of Relevance.

What took me so long? I mean, here I am writing nearly every day about relevance, progress-focused research, contextual inquiry, on and on, and I haven’t read this book?

Maybe I was avoiding reading the book because I didn’t want to ruin my own party.

I remember when we used to go to Oklahoma to visit my grandmother and she would cook spaghetti. We loved it, but it was closer to plain noodles and ketchup than anything we would recognize as spaghetti today. We would never bring a real chef to grandma’s house and have them cook spaghetti with her. Sure, you’re going to get a better product, but what about grandma? What about her feelings?

“If the pasta tastes a little saltier than usual, it’s just because I’ve been crying over the stove.”

Anyway, last week, I decided enough was enough. I took the ketchup off the burner and bought the book.

I went through a few highlighters while reading it and thought I’d share some notes with you (emphasis added).

Get out of the building

Going outside helps you empathize with the challenges of being an outsider. It helps you identify the doors that others are offering into their own experiences. If you are trying to understand how to build a door for a particular community, the best way to do it is to see what kind of doors that community willingly, joyfully walks into in other contexts. You won’t learn what’s relevant to them on your turf. You have to do it on theirs.

Yes. This is the sort of contextual inquiry I’ve been advocating for. (Surprise! I’m not saying anything new! :-) Better to see what people are doing today (not what they say they prefer or like) and from that identify what deeper goal they’re fulfilling in pursuing those activities.

Let’s stop taking the shortest path to nowhere

Outsiders are not experts about your site or the experiences you offer. They are experts about their own experiences and preferred sites—and that’s the most valuable thing for you to learn more about.Instead of asking about your institution, ask outsiders about the things they find relevant. Ask about their interests, desires, and decisions. Ask: how do you choose what to do with your free time? Where in our community do you feel most welcome and connected? What’s missing in your community? What issues keep you up at night?

They’re not experts on museums, so why ask them questions like “how are we doing?” or “what should we do next?” or “how can we improve?” That’s especially true of non-visitors, which is probably another reason why many organizations struggle to understand non-audiences — Simple, direct questions won’t help us improve.

Better to understand how people go about choosing to spend their time — the question Paul Kortenaar is asking as he builds a new children’s museum in El Paso. And map the paths people have taken to successfully enter into your organization’s orbit — That will help you understand how and where you might pop-up into their world. Nina shares a great example of that early in the book:

When the New World Symphony in Miami wanted to connect younger, urban residents with classical music, they created a new language for their concerts. They presented outdoor ”wallcast” productions, pairing visual art projections with live orchestral performances. Their marketing staff headed down to South Beach on the weekend to hand out “day of” advertisements for symphonic concerts alongside marketers pushing flyers for clubs and bars. The concert content was classical, but their form spoke the language of their urban, hip community.

Demographics vs life goals

When we talk about outsiders—people we don’t yet engage—there’s a tendency to collapse down to the most simplistic shared attributes with little regard for the intricacies alongside them. We tend jump immediately to demographics. We want to reach teens, or young adults, or the Asian-American community.These are painfully broad descriptors. Do you want to reach young adults who are unemployed, frustrated, and struggling to get out of their parents’ basements? The jetsetters building high-powered global careers? The ones who are trying to balance love and life and art and work in a brand-new city on their own?Just as you treat your insiders as complex people in overlapping communities, think of your outsiders the same way. Try to find the outsiders who have some credible link to what you offer—people who almost come as opposed to those who will never come. “Almost comes” are inclined towards your content but can’t see your door. They are foreign, but they share some values with your insiders. A passion for nature. A curiosity about history. A desire to belong. They are outsiders who can become insiders if you can build doors that speak to them.

Reading paragraphs like these felt like an affirmation of the questions I’ve raised here around the value of demographics as a primary way of understanding or segmenting audiences. I’ve tried to promote audience goals (or Jobs) as a better way of understanding the audience, which seems to be what Nina describes above.

At other times, I felt like everything I’ve said about this tension between demographics and life goals has been overly simplistic. Let’s revisit that another day.

Relevance and Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)

Toward the end of the book, Nina describes The Kitchen, a Jewish community in San Francisco:

Rabbi Noa is fighting irrelevance by presenting Judaism as something you do, not something you are. From Rabbi Noa’s perspective, the traditional emphasis on identity over action makes Judaism sound impossibly effortful. As she put it: ‘If yoga studios asked people to become yogis as a condition for taking classes, those studios would lose much of their popularity. But yoga is marketed as something one can just do; it doesn’t necessitate an identity shift. As a result, people feel comfortable trying it out. Of course, once they try it, some continue in their yoga practice and it becomes a part of their lives. The same operative principle is true for us — if we want people to grow Jewishly, we need to encourage them to do Jewish first.’

This made me think of Kathy Sierra’s book, Badass: Making Users Awesome, which I’ve written about before, sometimes channeling Eleanor Roosevelt. The premise is that the more an organization’s products or offerings help people make progress in their lives, the more successful the organization will be. Organizations that go beyond surface appeal and keep people’s fundamental goals in view will be more successful than those that only seek to achieve people’s surface expectations — like being entertained or having fun.

Sure, if you hand someone a questionnaire that asks what they want from a museum or why they visited and one of the choices on the list is “to have fun,” they will pick that option in droves. Who is going to vote against fun?

But at least some of those people are not there only to have fun. A college student takes his date to the museum and not the bowling alley — maybe he views both as fun destinations — but he chooses the museum because he wants to appear more cultured and perhaps be more cultured. A parent takes his child to play at the museum instead of the playground because he wants to appear to be a better parent and maybe because he wants to be a better parent. Not all parents, perhaps, but some.

Something is relevant when it is connected to where a person wants to go. What you want to know. Who you want to be.

Are we trying to welcome more visitors or are we trying to help people realize some progress in their lives? I think Nina’s book points us the latter while helping us achieve the former.

As always, reply to this email and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for reading,
Kyle

P.S. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been considering (what feels like) a big change for SuperHelpful Letters — Guest writers.

Yep, rather than listen to me yammer on week after week, you may be seeing other people’s faces and names pop up from time to time in your inbox and on the blog. We’ll stay focused on topics related to audience research and development, but you would hear from people with different stories to tell and different points of view.

I have a number of people in mind who I would like to invite as contributors, but right now I’m more interested in who you are reading these days. Who is talking about the audience-related challenges cultural organizations face today? Who is doing it in a way that has surprised or impressed you?

Let me know in a reply to this letter. I’ll be glad to hear from you.