ARTSblog

David Dombrosky

For years now, we have been talking about the latest tools and the best practices for incorporating these tools into our marketing and communications strategies. Of course, this is a necessary conversation in which we need to continually engage, but there is a corollary discussion that also needs to take place regularly.

As technology advances and communication-based behaviors adapt to these advances, arts marketers find themselves adding new tactics to their marketing strategies in order to stay current in meeting audience expectations. So the corollary discussion that we need to have is, “If we need to add new tactics to keep pace with changing technology and patron behavior, then which older tactics can we afford to lose?”

During the past five years of leading online technology workshops for arts managers, one of the most frequent concerns expressed by participants has been the ever-increasing workload. We’ve added social media to our plates, as well as mobile applications, broadcast emails, SMS campaigns, and more. But what have we taken away? Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Reich

Everyone talks about the transformational power of digital and social media, the contribution that technology and the Internet are having on our society – but for all the changes and advancements, most of the important things about our society seem to be largely operating as they have for a long time.

The promise of new technology is scale, reach, and efficiency. Just because we can move faster doesn’t mean that work should take priority over developing relationships and providing value to our audiences.

We have prioritized telling a quick story that suggests progress over investing in long-term impact that changes the world and drives people towards deeper commitments to organizations. We have become too accustomed to measuring success based on the size or popularity of an organization and not the value that a community of supporters places on the work that groups are doing.

As long as groups continue to focus on the wrong opportunities, our efforts to address serious issues will continue to stumble. Read the rest of this entry »

Drew McManus

It’s great to see how much technology is integrated into this year’s National Arts Marketing Project Conference. Out of the three conference categories (audience actions, technology treasures, and eye on income), technology occupies a full third and among the others, many of the session panelists are from technology-focused businesses.

And of all the tools available to arts marketers, technology solutions provide some of the most powerful advancements in recent years to effect positive change.

At the same time, technology providers have a responsibility to resist overselling products and services; something I fear is beginning to get out of control to a point where some arts organizations are beginning to suffer from the pursuit of improved technology solutions.

It’s become so commonplace among web and IT professionals in the field that dissolution is fodder for satire. For example, I received the following text from a colleague the other week who had this to say about the onset of a technology implementation project at her arts organization:

“…always fun to watch as people realize [Technology-X] doesn’t cause gumdrops and lollipops to fall from the sky…” Read the rest of this entry »

Cornelia Carey

Nearly a month has passed since Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene blew up the East Coast affecting 17 states and territories from the Virgin Islands to Maine.

The deep river valleys of New York and Vermont were among the most severely impacted. And just as those communities were beginning to dig out, Hurricane Lee caused another round of flooding in parts of Pennsylvania and New York.

Further, drought fueled wildfires had homeowners, businesses, and firefighters scrambling for control earlier this month in Texas. In Bastrop County, TX, alone 34,068 acres burned with 1,553 homes destroyed.

Needless to say, it’s been a busy time for those of us who work as emergency responders. While Montpelier, VT, where the CERF+ office is located, narrowly missed devastation, experiencing the disaster from the front lines has been a humbling and heartbreaking experience for our staff.

Recently, Laura Scanlan, director of state and regional partnerships at the National Endowment for the Arts organized a conference call for all of the states and territories affected by Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene. The news coming out of the states and territories, with the exception of Vermont and Puerto Rico (and with a few states not on the phone) is that arts organizations fared relatively well. Read the rest of this entry »

Kristen Engebretsen

I hope that everyone has enjoyed reading the thoughts from leaders both in and outside our field during this blog salon in honor of National Arts in Education Week.

As we design and teach our youth programs, we need to keep the end in mind. Where are our students going to end up? How can we help them get there? Our schools’ guidance counselors can’t do everything—they are overburdened, have little arts content expertise, and limited interaction with each student.

That means that it is up to teachers, parents, community members, and those of us that work at arts organizations to guide our students. We need to give students real world experiences, provide them field trips to community organizations and businesses, inform them about career options, and guide them to areas where they are motivated and can excel.

During the salon, we heard examples of how this is already happening:

1)     Alyx’s story about helping students with their first job.
2)    Deutsche Bank’s collaboration with the Partnership for After School Education to create a comprehensive Youth Arts Career Guide. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the "100 Faces of War" portraits by Matthew Mitchell

On September 11, 2001, the Animating Democracy team was on a conference call with New York-based colleagues when a faint newscast on one of their TVs emitted something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

What started out as a call to fine tune preparations for a national convening of Animating Democracy grantees slated to be held two days later morphed inevitably into cancellation plans, then into disbelief and mourning with the rest of the country.

Two months later, we reconstituted our plan. More than 100 grantees and guests gathered in Chicago to resume our intended work of exploring the role of the arts in fostering meaningful and productive civic dialogue.

With 9/11’s still raw emotions beating in our hearts, we asked artists Marty Pottenger and Terry Dame to help us make sense of it all, particularly the questions that had begun to infiltrate the American psyche: What does it mean to be an American? What is your relationship to America right now? What course should the U.S. take?

Terry’s slow, distorted, eerie, yet beautiful rendition of “America the Beautiful,” played on a homemade gamelon, created a different kind of space in which we moved ourselves physically, psychologically, and intellectually, guided by Marty’s creative facilitation around these questions.

This arts-based dialogue exemplified the potency of arts and culture to create a space, an invitation, and a spark for meaningful dialogue.

It was just what was needed as this collection of arts practitioners, leaders, and their community partners considered how they too could and would animate and strengthen democracy in their own communities around issues affecting people’s daily lives. Read the rest of this entry »

John R. Kilacky

Online social media has radically transformed news coverage. Tweets, Facebook posts, and amateur videos were essential in the coverage of the Arab spring, Japanese tsunami, bin Laden’s death, and Hurricane Irene. Public radio and local newspapers are now multimedia companies, crowdsourcing listeners and readers in co-authoring content.

Arts organizations, surprisingly, are behind the curve. Audiences today are drawn, not merely to a performance, but to an arts experience in which they participate. The experience does not begin and end at the performance curtain, but long before and after: at home, in the lobby, online, and sharing with friends.

Word of mouth has always been potent for box office, so it is essential that the arts marshal the power of online participatory media. However, this calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about what cultural participation means for audiences, live and viral.

At social media workshops, the conversation still defaults to using these platforms as a one-way transactional marketing medium: pushing out more marketing messages. Totally wrong! Read the rest of this entry »

Harlan Brownlee

I recently attended the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in San Diego and I return from these conferences inspired and energized.

Of particular relevance to our work at the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City is the changing role of the arts in community development.

We often talk about how nothing like the arts can serve to build community. The arts create multiple points of view and bridge the gaps between social class, race, gender, and even political differences. The arts are a great unifier, allowing us to experience our common humanity.

The convention confirmed that there is a growing movement across our country in which arts organizations and arts councils, in particular are serving a meaningful and significant role in the building of community. The arts sector can work in partnership with community development agencies to be a part of the solutions needed for a neighborhood, a city, or a region.  Read the rest of this entry »

Mary Kennedy McCabe

For those of us who call Kansas home we have one more opportunity to suffer Thomas Frank’s oft-quoted book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?.

Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA), my organization, has been struggling for months with how to handle the elimination of the Kansas Arts Commission (KAC) since this situation is unprecedented in the 47-year history of state arts agencies in America. We are an alliance of six states (Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas), serving a part of the country with tremendous arts participation but minimal political capital for the arts.

We are deeply concerned for the artists, arts organizations, arts educators, and arts participants and audiences, who will undoubtedly be affected by the loss of the KAC support and leadership. There is no doubt that individuals will lose their jobs and organizations will go out of business as a result of Governor Brownback’s action. Read the rest of this entry »

Taboo Cards

Some artists, if you mention the word “business” at all, they recoil, but let us play a field-wide game of Taboo, and have a brainstorm discussion about the future of the arts sans these words or any derivation of them:  “innovation” and “business models.”

Could the private sector keep itself from using all the jargon accumulated in business school and really talk about what they want to accomplish and how to do it?

So often, organizations of all kinds create job descriptions or individuals write their resumes hiding behind platitudes of these perceived “good” business skills without being specific. That or trying to identify a new direction for one’s organization can feel like when we were little kids and played “office” or “school” or “house.” You weren’t exactly sure what you were supposed to be doing, but you emulated what you saw and played out whatever notions you had about working in such a place.  Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Huttler

[During last week’s Private Sector Blog Salon], fellow guest blogger Diane Ragsdale got me thinking after she posed the question: what would have happened if the nonprofit regional theatre movement had embraced (and had the opportunity to embrace) the L3C instead of the 501(c)(3) corporation?

This is an interesting and subtly radical thought experiment. Diane is effectively proposing that we rewind history and build what we now think of as the nonprofit arts sector as a socially-conscious for-profit arts sector instead. Has the horse left the barn or is it really possible to reinvent ourselves at such a fundamental level?

In truth, I’ve always believed that the alleged conflict between artistic purity and commercial success was largely overblown. If anything it’s a healthy tension, not an insurmountable chasm. Certainly there are arts organizations whose missions are to push aesthetic envelopes and operate at the leading edge of craft and artistry. They will always need philanthropic subsidy to survive, and so they should probably be 501(c)(3)s regardless. But these brave, unpopular pioneers are the exception, not the rule. Most of us operate in the vast middle ground between Broadway and The Wooster Group.  Read the rest of this entry »

Jeanie Duncan

(Note: This post is a continuation of Part 1 and Part 2 posted earlier this week)

Implementation: A Strategy-Focused Business Model

Our closest stakeholders and constituents had been a part of the research and discovery process with us along the way, participating in information gathering and report-out sessions. While we had been together through this process, changes were going to be significant, and nothing makes reality more sobering than implementation. The change, while it wasn’t easy, was supported by the voice of our community-at-large.

We rolled out our new plan and its supporting tactics beginning in spring 2009. Most notably, we:

•    Recruited new leadership reflecting the diversity of our community.
•    Formed teams to work on launching advisory groups for Hispanic/Latino, African American, and young adults with the goal of building relationships and engaging people in these sectors.  Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Vogl

Does anyone play fantasy sports?

I was in a fantasy basketball league last year. I did terribly – came in last place, a very distant last place.

I got into it partly because I have some interest in following the NBA, mostly because a friend of mine needed a 12th person for his league. But there was a little part of me that decided to try it because I thought I could learn something about how using data can drive decision making and, hopefully, result in success.

For those that haven’t played fantasy sports, it’s a game played with data (or so I thought). The fantasy is that one pretends to be the general manager for a team – hiring and firing players throughout the course of a season. One gains points and competes with others in the fantasy league by selecting real-live players and adding up the various statistics they collect in a week of real-live playing. So, for example (and I promise that I will bring this back to the business of the arts topic that I was asked to write about), if I have Lebron James on my team (you’ve heard of Lebron, right?) I collect points not just for every basket he makes, but for every assist, every steal, every three-pointer, blocked shot, and free throw.  Read the rest of this entry »

(This title and entry is not meant to insult any one artist, institution, or dog.)

From my perspective, many artists originally incorporated because they saw other people doing it; other people getting grant monies to support their work and determining 501(c)(3) must be the way to go. These same artists somehow persevered, endured, and/or emerged as institutions thirty or forty years later and feel the nonprofit ball-and-chain is something that somehow happened to them. Is this need for alternative models a real issue or is it a midlife crisis for the incorporated arts field?  Read the rest of this entry »