The numbers are in, and they tell a complex story.
Across North American arts and cultural organizations, audiences are returning. Relationships are growing. In many cases, organizations are reaching more households than they did before the pandemic.
But there’s a bit of a catch.
Those households are behaving differently. They’re attending less often, buying fewer tickets at a time, and giving at levels that aren’t keeping pace with inflation. The result? Revenue growth is harder to achieve, even when engagement is rising.
In our latest Benchmark Briefing webinar, we analyzed transactional data from 163 arts organizations across the U.S. and Canada, tracking trends from 2018 through 2025 (with all revenue adjusted for inflation).
Here are four key takeaways shaping the sector’s outlook.
The good news: arts organizations are reaching more households than 2018.
The challenge: those households are attending fewer events.
Average orders per household dropped from roughly 1.5 orders per year in 2018 to 1.45 in 2025, a seemingly small change that scales significantly across large audiences.
At the same time, the proportion of single-ticket buyers attending only one event per year has grown, while attendance among multi-event attendees has declined.
Graph 1: Households vs Orders per Household (2018–2025)
What this means:
Audience recovery is real, but frequency hasn’t recovered at the same pace. For many organizations, the path to stronger revenue isn’t just finding more people. It’s increasing the engagement of the audiences already in your database.
Compared with 2018, organizations are selling about 9% fewer tickets across the benchmark dataset. Yet total ticket revenue is only down around 4%.
Graph 2: Orders and tickets per order (2018-2025)
The difference comes from per-ticket revenue growth, with the average amount paid per ticket increasing roughly 5% above inflation over the period.
Graph 3: Per Capita Revenue / Average Ticket Price Paid (2018-2025)
What this means:
Pricing strategies have helped stabilize revenue, but they can’t fully offset declining attendance.
Subscriptions remain one of the most significant structural shifts in the sector.
Across the benchmark data:
Graph 4: Subscriber households and tickets (2018-2025)
What this means:
The subscription model isn’t disappearing, but it is evolving. Organizations are slowly rebuilding subscriptions, while remaining subscribers are committing to larger packages.
Philanthropy is seeing a similar pattern to ticketing. More donors are giving, but average gift size has declined when adjusted for inflation.
This creates a familiar challenge: more relationships, but less financial impact per donor.
What this means:
Fundraising strategies may need to evolve, particularly around:
Without this, growth in donor numbers may not translate into sustainable revenue growth.
Taken together, the benchmark data suggests that the sector has, in many ways, rebuilt its audience relationships, but not yet its engagement depth.
More people are attending. But they’re attending less often.
And that single behavioral shift has implications across ticket revenue, subscription recovery, and donor development.
If frequency is a key missing piece of the recovery puzzle, strategies may need to focus less on acquisition alone and more on behavior change among existing audiences.
That could include:
The organizations best positioned for the future will deepen relationships, not just attract new audiences.
Sector benchmarks highlight aggregate trends. The real opportunity is understanding what’s happening in your own audience data.
Questions worth asking right now:
The answers already exist in your data. The challenge is turning them into action.
If you’d like help exploring what these trends mean for your organization, the TRG team would be happy to walk through your data with you.