Americans for the Arts

In this moment of substantial change, most companies are looking inward to determine what adjustments need to be made to their business models to flourish in today's new economic climate. Significant shifts need to be made to address the new reality, and that new reality includes taking a hard look at how consumers get information about the arts.

Since the mid-1980s, newspaper circulation has been declining in the United States, but the current economic crisis has thrown gasoline on the fire, causing huge losses for newspapers nationally. Just recently we have seen four major newspapers cease print publication: the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Tucson Citizen and the Christian Science Monitor. Additionally, four newspaper companies including the owners of the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer, have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Even before the rapid failure of many printed newspapers, arts coverage in many daily newspapers was shrinking, going from 912 column inches on average in 1998 to 702 column inches in 2003 according to Reporting the Arts II, a study conducted by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.

A huge shift in communications is about to occur away from organizations pitching stories to mainstream media for coverage and toward setting up institutional distribution channels to cover stories themselves. We have seen this in the past decade as the ways we communicate with our customers have become cheaper, quicker and more segmented. We now have e-mail lists, websites, direct mail, telemarketing, social networking, online video distribution, podcasts, photo streams, and blogs. Some large organizations can currently reach more than one million people using these distribution channels. Considering the New York Times has a circulation of 1.6 million, these distribution channels which used to be considered on the fringes of communications have become almost as powerful for some companies as their local newspaper.

Since it feels like Halloween just passed, it came as a bit of a shock to me that it’s already December. With Thanksgiving now also behind us, the celebration of the holiday giving season can begin. I know that I do not have to remind you that it is a great time to give last-minute donations to your favorite arts organizations, but it is also a perfect time to support your local artists.

As I have been catching up on my Google News searches from the past week, I noticed a number of articles in both major and local newspapers encouraging people to buy their holiday gifts at local craft fairs, galleries, and the like. While the members of the arts community might think of this as a no brainer, a simple letter to the editor from a local arts council chair or statewide arts organization director encouraging the rest of the public to do the same could do wonders for the individual artists who have scraped by through this interminable recession.

On-line events calendars and community arts portals – like those created and run by numerous arts councils, service organizations and other local partnerships – are widely recognized as today’s “state of the art” collaborative strategies for raising visibility and increasing arts and cultural participation.

Today, I'm delighted to share news (and invite participation) in a Mellon Foundation-funded “planning process” – www.ProjectAudience.org – whose aim is to envision the next generation of technology and practices for such collaborative, community-level audience development work.

written by Ron Evans

At the recent NAMP Conference in Providence, a lot of focus was put onto Twitter, and what use it could be to connect with patrons and have them join in on the conversation. Those of you who use Twitter already know how quickly life flies by tweet by tweet (if you're new to the idea of Twitter, read up on an excellent article on what Twitter is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter). A few days ago, a female blogger who goes by the name "Broadway Girl NYC" wrote a post called "The BroadwayGirlNYC Dating Service: Let Love Shine on Broadway." Her blog and her original post can be found here and her twitter page is: http://twitter.com/broadwaygirlnyc

On a whim, she designed a contest of sorts -- she challenged her single Twitter followers to write a tweet and add the hashtag "#SingleOnBway" (a hashtag is a way for Twitter people using the same term in their post to find other people who want to talk about the same topic) as a way for single folks to find each other and potentially make a connection via public messages on Twitter. If there was a spark, they were told to send a tweet back to BroadwayGirlNYC, and she would choose two winners to give two free tickets to MCC Theater's "The Pride" for a "blind date."

The response has been amazing.

"I hate marketing."

I hear that a lot.

Of course when people say that they are also saying some version of the following . . .

I hate money or I hate when people come to see my work.

They are basically the same thing.

But the truth is you probably don't hate marketing. You hate what you think marketing is all about.