Americans for the Arts

Portland, Oregon is the home to this year’s National Arts Marketing Project (NAMP) Conference: Powered by Community. You can look forward to conversations about audience diversification, strategies for engaging college students, using augmented reality, the top telemarketing tips, and so much more.

This year’s keynote speakers are creative change agents, community builders, and marketing gurus – Kevin Carroll, Matt Stinchcomb, and Pamela Moore. From Matt’s lessons on community building from the D.I.Y marketplace Etsy to Pam’s arsenal of tactics to keep your online communities striving, this year’s keynotes will leave you inspired and recharged to collaborate with your communities on a more meaningful level.

Sean King

Would you send a Vine to your grandmother?

Would you tell your teenager to check out an ad in the newspaper?

OMG, did you really just send that on Snapchat? And what the heck is Snapchat anyway?

Arts marketers have the challenge of providing support for nearly every major facet of our organizations from development to branding, ticket sales to programming, volunteer recruitment to public relations.

But how do we use traditional and social media to reach the generations of our audience through multiple medias, with multiple messages, without being completely overwhelmed and completely alienating our audiences?

Salt Lake City, Utah is the home of this year’s National Arts Marketing Project (NAMP) Conference: Lift Off. You can look forward to exploring digital marketing strategy, audience engagement and retention, brand loyalty, gamification, and experiential marketing, just to name a few.

There’s a very specific reason we pitched a session to the National Arts Marketing Project Conference on behalf of the Philadelphia-based Wyncote Foundation.

In a year’s research in 2014, we set out to understand the conditions and capacities that are encouraging innovation in the deployment of digital technology in the cultural sector, particularly among legacy cultural institutions. 

 

The National Arts Marketing Project Conference is just over 1 month away and I’m thrilled to be both attending and speaking for the very first time. But what I’m most excited about is the theme: “Powered by Community.” Already, I’ve met so many amazing new people online through the conference Twitter hashtag (#NAMPC) and the Linkedin group. And meeting these people has reinforced just how powerful the online world can be in forging meaningful, long-lasting relationships. Furthermore, it has reminded me how crucial participation is to the success of an event, beyond just the act of attending of course. So I’ve rounded up a few of my favorite examples from arts and culture organizations who have successfully encouraged their audiences to participate on a deeper level:

1. American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Tweetups: AMNH understood the significance of Twitter from an early start. Since 2010, they’ve been holding special tweetup events that offer a behind-the-scenes look at various exhibits. Most recently, they held the Whales Tweetup, allowing visitors to view whale specimens and listen to whale vocalizations after hours. And prior to Whales, they invited guests to explore Our Global Kitchen , where guests enjoyed wine, chocolate, and cooking lessons, all while tweeting. These Tweetup events result in hundreds of tweets, with the potential to reach thousands.
2. Diablo Ballet’s Crowdsourced Ballet: At the beginning of 2013, California-based Diablo Ballet asked their Facebook and Twitter followers to suggest ideas for a brand new ballet by tweeting to their page, using the hashtag #DiabloWebBallet. Followers were asked to suggest the theme and mood of the piece, as well as specific dance moves, ultimately resulting in the creation of the first-ever crowdsourced ballet.
   Read More

Over the past few weeks, a new face has been popping up at street fairs and food festivals across the country: an Amazon “food truck,” doling out Kindle Fires alongside neighboring trucks’ hot dogs, hamburgers, and artisanal cupcakes.

Amazon isn’t angling to be a contestant on “The Great Food Truck Race,” though. Rather, it is making an effort to fulfill the needs and desires of today’s changing consumer. Amazon understands that today, technology is as much a part of the fabric of everyday life as eating and drinking, and it is addressing this shift head-on.

What does this have to do with the future of arts marketing?