Americans for the Arts

I have always wanted to be a cowgirl.  Never mind that I was a very tall Chinese American kid in a Jewish Italian neighborhood in Queens.  I still longed to be a wild and free cowgirl with great looking boots of course.    OK, there were not a whole lot of role models out there for me so I had to reinvent myself and my reality to fit my dream.
I still do.

Why is this important?
A lot of what I am hearing at this conference has to do with exactly that.  Reimagining, reinventing or experiences that we want to share with our audiences on all levels - marketing, the creative process, technology.  There is one idea that has struck me as something extremely unexpected and surprisingly effective.

Try this, design for failure.
Accept that whatever you do successfully today will be a failure tomorrow.  So plan to fail at strategic intervals where you can learn quicker, reinvent yourself and get a newer product out in the marketplace fast.  Consistently.  That is how you build presence and consumer confidence.  It is counterintuitive on all fronts.

Clayton Lord

As artists and arts advocates, we all know, deep down, that Art Matters.  But we continue to grapple with how best to talk about that value, to "justify" (a loaded word) or "prove" that the continued investment in infrastructure, arts education outreach and daily artistic input into the population-at-large is necessary to the creation of a tolerant, educated, empathic and energized society.  The great work of Randy Cohen and Americans for the Arts on the economic front, including the creation of the Arts and Economic Prosperity Calculator, have gone a long way towards standardizing the arguments around economic impact of arts and culture, and has essentially gotten us all on the same page.  But, and this language is getting to be a cliche, economic impact is only part of the answer - half of the answer at most, really - and getting to the point where we can talk about the intellectual, emotional, social, empathic impacts of the arts in the same specific, data-driven way as we can talk about the economics may open up a brave new world of advocacy for money, time and respect from the government, the funding establishment, the education system and our patrons.

Chloe Veltman

Every day I read articles in the press about how important it is for anyone involved in the arts world (or indeed, any world) to use social media as a way of marketing one's "product". I know how useful tools like Twitter and Facebook are from what I'm told by others. And technologies that enable organizations to mail out information to select members of their mailing lists or entire lists at the touch of a button has revolutionized the way we spread the word about what we're doing, reach new and familiar audiences, generate enthusiasm and even build funds.

What I struggle with though, is finding the time and mental capacity to both keep track of others' social media outpourings and develop my own. I've been feeling a bit stressed about it lately because I keep getting emails from Twitter telling me that someone wants to "follow" me via the tool, but I just can't bring myself to add tweeting to an already overwhelming amount of daily activities from writing this blog and filing articles to newspapers and magazines to doing all the fundraising, producing and hosting of a weekly public radio show and teaching.

Let me begin this post by saying: If you're an arts marketer but aren't on Twitter, get an account before next year's conference in Louisville. I promise you that you will have a richer conference experience because of it. Seriously.

Why? Twitter brings people together. It's such a powerful, real-time communication tool that naturally facilitates dialogue. One of my favorite experiences at this conference is actually meeting people in person that I follow on Twitter. In a way, I actually feel more of an affinity towards them because of the fact that I've read their tweets! We're not just tweeting back and forth and never engaging in conversation in real life; if anything, Twitter is an online tool that actually facilitates face-to-face communication at events like conferences.

Twitter's also a great way to experience other parts of the conference, like other sessions or roundtables that you're not able to attend. It's pretty easy to take a general snapshot of how attendees are feeling just by monitoring what's going on with the event hashtag (which is #NAMPC10 for this conference). If there's a strong reaction, positive or negative, to something that's said in a session, you will know about it. You'll know what funny quotes are said, valuable insights are shared and random observations are made. Thanks to Twitter, I know I'm not the only one who was confused by the cricket chirp ringtone in one of the sessions!