The nonprofit performing arts industry in America, along with many performing arts organizations around the world, are facing crises on a variety of fronts. Accordingly, arts organizations must learn new ways to attract the resources they need to sustain their mission and quality. Arts managers must improve their skills in increasing and broadening their audience base, improving accessibility to various art forms, and learning how to better meet the needs of specific audience segments and contributors. To accomplish this, they must develop a better understanding of their own business and of the interests, attitudes, and motivations of their customers. They must professionalize their marketing and management skills and learn to be accountable to all their publics: their artists, their funders, and their audiences. Then they can create offerings, services, and messages to which the target audience will enthusiastically respond, without compromising their artistic integrity.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the nonprofit performing-arts industry in the United States enjoyed unprecedented growth. But in recent years, the arts have been hard hit by shrinking audiences, rising debt, and cuts in government funding. Can arts organizations succeed in this environment and fulfill their own special mission? The authors have observed one way in which they can succeed: through strategic collaborations--intensive, durable commmitments created for mutual gain.