For cultural and performing arts organizations

A fifteen-year-old festival shouldn't have to explain what it is.

If yours does, the problem isn't reach. Most arts organizations that stall aren't unknown. They're aimed at the wrong room. We find the gap between the audience you're speaking to and the one that actually buys tickets.

Three views. The gap between them is where a season underperforms. That gap is what we come to find.

The three views that almost never match

Artistic leadership

Has the vision.

Front of house

Has the operational reality.

Ticket buyers

Have an experience.

Most consultants speak only to leadership. The interviews that matter are with the people running the box office and the people buying the tickets.

The tell

You've heard yourself say one of these.

If any of these sound like something said in a board meeting or on a Monday-morning debrief, the diagnostic is what settles it.

“We're doing everything and none of it is working.”

“We keep posting and boosting and the numbers don't move.”

“We've been here fifteen years and people still think we do something else.”

“I'm spending on marketing and I can't tell you what it's doing.”

“I'm honestly not sure if the problem is us or the audience.”

Same method, two cultural cases

What a diagnosis looks like before the results.

Case cards prove outcomes. These read as the actual sequence: what the organization walked in believing, what the interviews found, what changed once the aim was corrected.

Cultural festival · SING! Toronto Vocal Arts Festival

“A festival that had never sold out.”

The diagnosis

Their content was made for other a cappella singers, not for the people who buy tickets. The audience they were speaking to was their own community of performers. We rebuilt the targeting around ticket buyers.

Sold out. First time in fifteen years.

Sold outFirst time in the festival's 15-year history.

“OCIDM turned this festival around. We sold out. Screaming crowds. They brought expertise, strategies that actually increased ticket sales.”

PatriciaChairSING! Toronto Vocal Arts Festival

Cultural event · Caribana Ignite, Kitchener

“They thought the message was accessibility.”

The diagnosis

The community wasn't looking to be told the festival was open to everyone. What they responded to was their own history in this region being recognized. We researched what the city had actually done for the Caribbean community, built the content around that, and promoted the event to the people who engaged with it.

15,000 people through the gates, organizer-reported.

15,000Attendees, organizer-reported

“The corporate identity that carried this festival was designed by OCIDM.”

Davina Reed2024 ChairCaribana Arts Group

See what the diagnostic costs

Straight answers

Frequently Asked Questions

Because your marketing team is downstream of a decision no one has explicitly named. Usually the picture of who your audience is. They're producing against inherited assumptions about ticket buyers versus the community of performers, and the picture may not match the market anymore. The diagnostic is one round of structured interviews and audience research that produces the picture in the open. Your team keeps their job; they get an aim to build against that they can defend to the board.

Because they see what artistic leadership never does: the actual objections, the returning-vs-first-time patterns, the reasons a subscriber lapsed, the questions asked at the will-call counter. Leadership has a vision. The frontline knows what happens when the vision meets a real audience. Skipping their interviews is the reason most strategy decks land in a drawer.

One document: a plain-language ideal-ticket-buyer profile with the evidence for it. Who they are, what they already believe about your category, which competing options they're actually comparing you to (other festivals, a night in, a Netflix subscription, none of the above), and which segments the organization should stop trying to serve. Plus a 90-minute session where we walk your leadership and marketing team through the findings. Short on purpose. If it doesn't fit on your desk, no one reads it.

The diagnostic scales with the interview count, so a festival with three staff and a small board scopes differently than one with fifty employees and touring programming. The method is the same; the scope changes. If it isn't honest for your situation, we say so on the scoping call before you commit.

One scoping call.

We'll tell you whether the diagnostic will surface something worth paying for. If it won't, we say so.