Forget audiences. Should cultural organisations be building fandoms?

Swifties swap friendship bracelets. Football supporters cross continents to follow their teams. Gamers build communities around worlds that do not even physically exist.

So why do theatres, opera houses and museums still struggle to inspire the same sense of belonging? Ahead of Communicating the Arts Ottawa–Gatineau 2026, we ask whether the cultural sector has been measuring loyalty all wrong 

There is something peculiar about the word audience. It describes people in relation to something else: watching a stage, listening to a concert, standing in front of an artwork. It says little about what happens afterwards.

Fan is different. A Swiftie remains a Swiftie when Taylor Swift is nowhere nearby. A football supporter does not stop caring about their club between matches. Gamers spend almost as much time discussing their favourite worlds as playing in them.

Yet much of the performing arts and museum sector still operates around a simple exchange: we create something, you come to experience it.

The next-day problem

The curtain falls, the applause ends, the theatre empties, and the last visitor leaves the museum. What is the relationship between those people and the organisation the following morning? Pop culture is extraordinarily good at occupying the space between experiences. A match lasts 90 minutes; being a supporter can last a lifetime. That does not mean theatres need friendship bracelets or museums should celebrate every branded tote bag they sell. The more interesting lesson is about identity. Why do people say, “I am a Swiftie” rather than “I listen to Taylor Swift”? What turns an interest into an affiliation?

At Communicating the Arts (CTA) Ottawa–Gatineau (13 to 16 October), that question moves from pop-culture curiosity to cultural strategy.

Ivonne Chand O’Neal, researcher, cultural strategist and Minnesota Opera board member, puts it at the centre of her workshop, From Spectators to Stakeholders: Fandom as a Force for Audience Activation, at CTA.

Her premise is deceptively radical: fandom is not reserved for celebrities. Its mechanics – identity, belonging, co-creation and emotional investment – could offer cultural institutions a different way of understanding their relationship with the people they serve.

Would you let your audience own part of your story?

Here is where things get difficult: fans are unruly. They create memes, invent rituals, reinterpret stories, criticise decisions and talk to one another without waiting for the communications department to approve the message.

Cultural institutions, by contrast, like authorship. Perhaps the hardest lesson from fandom is that belonging requires surrendering some control and trusting people with part of the story.

A community is not simply an audience receiving more content. It develops its own language, memories and relationships. The question shifts from what can we tell people? to what can people do with what we give them?

Are our best customers really our biggest fans?

Consider two people. One renews a subscription every year, attends six performances and rarely talks about them. Another attends an event twice, brings friends, shares content and feels personally invested in the organisation’s future. Who is more loyal?

Ryan Taylor, President and General Director of Minnesota Opera, approaches the question from another direction. His CTA session, Measuring Impact Beyond the Box Office: Building Trust Through New Work in Opera, examines Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative and attempts to rethink authorship, community participation and cultural value.

Importantly, the story includes what did not work: inadequate evaluation models, internal resistance, governance challenges and community scepticism. Inviting people in means little if their presence changes nothing.

What if CRM stood for relationship, not transaction?

At Ottawa’s National Arts Centre (NAC), Anna Thornton, Senior Director, Executive Office and Corporate Affairs, and Kondwani Mwase, Executive Director, Brand & Audience Engagement, will explore another transformation.

Their session, The Space We Make: How Culture is Cultivated When Concrete Meets Community, explores the NAC’s evolution from an imposing Brutalist structure into a transparent, public-facing building.

But glass alone does not make an institution open. The deeper change has involved programming, visitor experience, communications and community engagement, with an ambition to shift loyalty “from subscriptions to relationships”.

For years, cultural organisations have used data to understand what people buy. The next challenge may be using it to understand how people belong.

Return, participation and advocacy matter. Perhaps the most valuable audience member is not always sitting in the most expensive seat.

The question after the applause

CTA Ottawa–Gatineau’s 2026 theme is “Building Trust, Bridging Worlds”. At its strongest, fandom gives strangers something in common and sustains conversations long after the original experience has ended.

So what might that mean in practice? Cultural organisations could create opportunities for audiences to meet one another; invite communities to interpret and respond to their work; recognise advocacy alongside attendance; create rituals that continue between visits; and use CRM systems to understand relationships rather than simply record transactions.

The goal should not be to manufacture fandom. Fandom cannot be programmed into existence. Institutions can only create the conditions in which it can grow: identity, participation, shared rituals, relationships and enough freedom for people to make the experience their own.

The performing arts and museums do not need to imitate Taylor Swift, football or K-pop. But they might borrow one question from them. Instead of how do we persuade people to come back? Perhaps the better question is what are we giving them that they want to belong to?

Perhaps the ultimate measure of a cultural organisation is not whether people would miss its performances or exhibitions if they disappeared.

It is whether they would miss each other.