Zero-Party Data: How arts organizations win in a privacy-first world

We’re living through the biggest data shift in 20 years. Arts leaders face a choice: know your audience deeply, or lose them to organizations that do.

The inflection point came in 2021, when Apple blocked cross-app tracking. Overnight, the digital advertising ecosystem began to fracture.

Third-party data is disappearing.

The targeting and attribution systems organizations once relied on to reach new audiences efficiently are now increasingly more expensive and far less accurate.

Second-party data creates a false sense of demand.

List-sharing recycles the same shrinking group of high-frequency, look-alike attendees. It doesn’t expand your market—it fatigues it.

First-party data is descriptive, not predictive.

Demographic and transactional data describe patron profiles and what they did in the past—not why they attended. Relying on this data to predict future behavior leads to faulty assumptions.

So are we stuck cycling between expensive inaccuracy and recycled demand? No.

Despite the noise about privacy, people want to be known—on their own terms.

74% of consumers will share personal information with brands they trust, and 57% will share it for meaningful personalization. They're not rejecting connection—they're rejecting noise.

They’re not saying, “Don’t know me.”

They’re saying, “Stop sending noise. If you’re going to speak to me, speak like you know me.”

And there IS a way to do that:

Zero-party data.

The information people choose to share with you—through tools like microsurveys—is the most powerful data available today. But the arts sector has been focused on the other types.

This isn’t new.

McKinsey’s social sector research has long shown that demographic and transactional segmentation fails to capture the “why” behind engagement—leading nonprofits to waste resources and miss opportunities to grow relevance and support.

The bottom line: If you want your organization to thrive, you can’t skip zero-party data. It’s what makes need-based segmentation possible in practice.

And in today’s world, it isn’t just more accurate than demographic or behavioral guesswork—it’s the only category of data people actively want to give you.

The real challenge is that most organizations don’t have the infrastructure to operationalize it.

Until now.

Ready to build the zero-party data infrastructure that actually moves the needle? Join my webinar to see the framework that turns trust into behavior change