Some plays, concerts, and exhibitions make you feel cooler just for being there.

This is often the case at gallery openings. (Free wine helps.) It almost never happens at a Broadway show, unless it’s an early preview of a play that promises to be a hit, and someone like Parker Posey or Jennifer Jason Leigh happens to be sitting in your row.

One place you can count on getting this feeling is at BAM — formally, the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Whether the program is an all-male, Russian-language “Twelfth Night,” Pina Bausch’s latest dance-theater creation, or a concert by the rapper Mos Def, the audience at BAM is always one that you want to be part of. Racially diverse, varied in age, arty- and international-looking, it’s a crowd whose energy tells you that you are in the right place.

How has BAM attracted this audience, and how might other performing arts institutions imitate that appeal? It’s a valuable secret, since a good crowd and good energy are self-perpetuating, while the lack of them is a significant marketing disadvantage.

Everyone wants to know what will lure young people to the theater or to dance or musical concerts. Price is certainly a factor, but it’s not the only, and maybe not even the most important, one. The major obstacle is ambience, and whether the many aspects of the evening — the performance, the physical environment, the pre- and post-show activities, the crowd — add up to an appealing experience. When you’re in your 20s or 30s and work long hours, you want your evening activity to be socially, as well as intellectually and artistically, gratifying. Even if that gratification is just the vibe in the room, the feeling that you’re among peers and sharing an experience, that’s enough. It’s the same feeling you enjoy at a bar or a club: the sense that you’re part of a scene.

So what lessons does BAM offer?

BAM’s major achievement is to have created a distinctive and highly marketable brand. The brand begins, of course, with the programming. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, BAM’s then-leader, Harvey Lichtenstein, presented premieres of works by innovative artists such as Robert Wilson, Eliot Feld, Peter Brook, Merce Cunningham, and Steve Reich. That dabbling in the avant-garde evolved into a full-scale commitment with the founding of the Next Wave Festival, BAM’s signature fall season, in 1983.

Developing that niche, BAM’s current president, Karen Brooks Hopkins, said in an interview, “was really about survival: What you could do in New York in large theaters that would draw audiences [without being just] a Lincoln Center wannabe?” Over time, she said, “we refined it, we celebrated it, we expanded it, and we made it into a lifestyle.” Everything from the marketing materials to the signage in the buildings to the “unfinished” look of the BAM Harvey Theater is intended to reinforce the message of being on the cutting edge.

An institution such as New York City Opera could learn from this approach. The incoming general manager and artistic director, Gérard Mortier, has said he wants to exploit and reinforce City Opera’s identity as the “the people’s opera.” What about partnering with the successful Opera on Tap series — a group of young singers who perform once a month at venues like Freddy’s Bar & Backroom in Brooklyn — to co-present some free, late night concerts?

BAM has found smart ways to bring young audiences through its doors and encourage them to hang out. In 1997, Mr. Lichtenstein redid the upstairs of BAM’s main building, creating a café dominated by an oval-shaped bar. It’s an appealing place to hang out before a show and is the venue for BAM Café Live, a series of free Friday and Saturday night concerts by emerging and renowned musicians.

Mr. Lichtenstein also transformed a former theater into a four-screen cineplex—a brilliant move, since it draws a young audience that may then return for live programming.

Ms. Hopkins called the cinema “a built-in marketing bonanza,” and said she is surprised that more performing arts centers haven’t added one. “The cinema business has the cheapest tickets, the youngest audience, and it puts you in business 365 days a year,” she said. Attendance at BAM Rose Cinemas has grown steadily, to 195,000 people in the most recent fiscal year.

Other institutions, to their credit, are also trying to create inviting spaces. The leaders of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts hope that their redeveloped campus, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will encourage people to linger before and after a show. The campus will include, among other things, a restaurant, with a sloping lawn on its roof where people can lounge or picnic, and a set of benches shaded by trees.

“What we put on the stage is utterly necessary but not sufficient to be the kind of destination we want to be,” Lincoln Center’s president, Reynold Levy, said in an interview earlier this year. “Sufficiency resides in creating environments that people want to mix and mingle in. That includes dining and [places where people can] talk to each other.”

Another of BAM’s smart moves has been to form relationships with local institutions that cater to emerging artists and youthful audiences. Last February, BAM launched “Brooklyn Next,” a weekend of concerts presented in collaboration with around a dozen Brooklyn music venues, including Galapagos Art Space, Pete’s Candy Store, Southpaw, and Barbès. “It [tied] BAM to all the edgiest venues, which was good for us,” Ms. Hopkins said, noting that the smaller venues in turn benefited from the extra financing and marketing provided by BAM.

Following this model, the more established nonprofit theaters might benefit from forging links to younger companies. Lincoln Center Theater, for example, whose artistic director, Andre Bishop, plans to build a third, small theater for emerging playwrights and directors, could form an alliance with a youthful, buzzed-about company like 13P.

Of course, one of the greatest of BAM’s advantages today is Brooklyn itself. The borough is full of young people and families, émigrés both from Manhattan and from around the world. Over the last 10 years, the proportion of Brooklyn residents in the audience has grown significantly, to more than 40%, from around 25%, BAM’s vice president of marketing and communications, Lisa Mallory, said. (About 85% of the audience, in total, comes from New York City.) Ms. Mallory said she attributes this not to a change in BAM’s marketing, but to its audience simply moving to Brooklyn from Manhattan. Which raises the question: Could other institutions better attract a young, adventuresome audience from locations in Brooklyn?

Some institutions are planning to do just that. The palpable energy in the borough is one reason that two organizations, Theatre for a New Audience and Danspace Project, have decided to build new homes in the BAM Cultural District, a $650 million development project that, while named for BAM, is overseen by a group called the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, with substantial involvement from the city. Theatre for a New Audience will have its own theater, designed by Frank Gehry, on the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Ashland Place. Foundation work is scheduled to begin in December. Danspace will have a flexible-layout theater and four to six studios, which will be rented out at affordable rates as rehearsal space.

The artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz, said he sees Brooklyn as the future for his organization and others, because there is still real estate available, and hence room to create a performing arts scene. “In Manhattan, there is no more space,” he said. “Joe Papp [the founder of the Public Theater] got the Astor [Library Building] from the City for a dollar, and Ellen Stewart [the founder of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club] got her theater [also for a low price]. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

Brooklyn’s diversity, Mr. Horowitz added, creates an attractive potential audience. “I think there’s a capability in Brooklyn of creating a different atmosphere in a theater, an atmosphere that is less formal,” he said.

Another option is for institutions looking for room to grow to create satellites in Brooklyn, just as the Whitney is now planning an expansion in Chelsea. There are obstacles, to be sure. Mr. Bishop of Lincoln Center Theater, when asked by e-mail if he would consider building his third theater in Brooklyn, said no. The logistics of running theaters in two boroughs would be too difficult, he said, and he expressed concern that the small theater might feel separated from the company’s two main theaters. “Also,” he added, “I refuse to believe — call me hopeless and naive — that all the youthful action is now taking place outside of Manhattan. I feel we can infuse new energy right here in Manhattan, even in marble-walled Lincoln Center.”

That is certainly a worthwhile goal, and one that Lincoln Center’s redevelopment aims to achieve. But BAM, which has already captured an audience to make other institutions jealous, can be seriously studied as an example. It’s a place young people want to be. Shouldn’t other performing arts institutions be, too?