Measuring engagement

For decades, marketers have been trying to understand their customers’ experiences. Mason Haire first talked about ‘selling the sizzle not the steak’ way back in 1950.

And it’s not just marketers. Retailers worry about their customers’ emotional experiences when shopping because they know that improving the ambience of the shop means people buy more. Designers worry about how people feel when they use their products because they want to create things that work. There’s a whole research field academics have named ‘funology’ that tries to understand what makes a computer game engaging. Producers of political documentaries have borrowed techniques from the researchers who test TV ads so they can measure the impact of their films on people’s political beliefs. There’s a big debate going on among the geeks who design social networking sites about how to measure the depth of engagement that people have with their sites rather than just its usability. Mark Ghuneim from Wiredset identifies four levels of engagement from bookmarking at the shallowest level to creating a fan community at the deepest…

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Reaching the unreachable

Engaging with hard-to-reach groups is, after all, what tackling social exclusion is all about. But how do you reach the unreachable? Heather Maitland makes some suggestions.

Some arts organisations exist to reach people no-one else engages with. Engaging with hard-to-reach groups is, after all, what tackling social exclusion is all about. But how do you reach the unreachable?

The government has set its agencies working with young people the target of reducing the proportion of 16 to 18 year-olds not in education, employment or training (NEET) by two percentage points by 2010. NEET young people are by definition hard to reach as they are not engaged with any part of the formal infrastructure. It reports that “the reductions [to date] in the proportion of NEET young people are the result of a wide range of organisations working effectively together to target the issue.” This multi-agency approach is adopted by most arts organisations who form partnerships with groups already in contact with NEET young people. But this means that arts organisations only work with young people already engaged in some way with the support system. Should they be targeting the genuinely unreachable instead of focusing on partnerships?

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