Americans for the Arts

Melanie Harker

After such an amazing experience last year in Portland, I am delighted to be returning with fellow dog & pony dc conspirator Rachel Grossman to Americans for the Arts' National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Atlanta. This year’s conference theme of “all the places we’ll go” caught my eye for two reasons; first due to the well-executed Dr. Seuss reference, and second because of the definition of “we.”

Who is the “we” in “all the places we’ll go”?

The obvious “we” is the arts administrator. The marketer. The engagement manager. The managing director. The donor relations associate. The small army of hard working people who work tirelessly to make sure the art happens, that it has a space, and that people hear about it.

Jordan Silton

There are lots of buzzwords in web analytics. Attribution and big data get a ton of attention, but there are several things you can do right away to upgrade your organization's analytics abilities. The following seven steps can help your arts organization get the data you need to make better decisions about your digital marketing campaigns.

(1) Audit Your Implementation

The first step to upgrading your analytics is to ensure you are confident in the quality of your data. Arts organizations have more data than ever to inform decisions about their digital presence. It's nearly impossible to get "perfect" data, but with a tag audit, you can ensure tracking code is properly placed throughout your website and your analytics platform is configured to deliver results you can count on.

The Arts Marketing Association (AMA) has spent the last two years encouraging the best digital marketers in the UK cultural sector to work in an agile way. But is it truly beneficial for busy marketers to build experimentation into their daily practice?

The Digital Marketing Academy (DMA) is an entirely virtual learning programme that brings together the best digital marketing experts in the UK arts and cultural sector with a host of amazing international mentors.

Jessyca Holland

There are a lot of obstacles a person must overcome during any given day to engage in your art: traffic, finding a babysitter, transportation - the list can go on. Sometimes people are just plain tired. It is much easier to order up entertainment at home with on-demand options readily available through just a few clicks. So how do we overcome the forces that block patron engagement?

“Get out of the building!” It is the mantra of serial-entrepreneur, Steve Blank, and the cornerstone of “lean” marketing principles further popularized by Eric Reis in his book, The Lean Startup. Both Blank and Reis focus on a concept known as customer discovery. In short, customer (patron) discovery is about solving the customer’s needs by testing product concepts. For artists and arts organizations, this may involve conducting customer interviews, creating prototypes, gathering feedback and validating the right market. In other words, the patron is integral to the process and the focus of the creative offering (the art itself).

Brianne Logan

I can’t lie to you all about this, nor can I really explain my reasons. Whenever the field gets into one of those spectacular debates about the place of selfies, or photography, or technology in artistic spaces I find myself gleefully watching it all unfold on twitter, reading the resounding “no way” opinions penned by, often British (to my delight), art historians, or the “experimentation is healthy for forward motion” responses written by the more digitally native arts marketers among us.

I find the fear of the archetypal selfie-snapping hordes of visitors—of course, besmirching the integrity of fine arts experiences with dumb poses--to be such a fascinating thing. The issue has raised real questions for the field on what it means to be present in an artistic space.

While visiting my family in Indianapolis this year, I learned that the excellent Indianapolis Museum of Art admission would now be $18 for adults, $10 for youths ages 6 to 17. This doesn't seem like terribly much - until you realize that it had been free for several years. 

Admittedly, the IMA has been addressing financial issues since losing about $100 million - approximately a third of its endowment - in the 2008 financial crisis.