Americans for the Arts

The most important part of content today (besides telling an incredible story) is how audiences are able to engage. Engagement is one of the primary keys that has bolstered the success of digital content. 

City Lights Theater Company treats patrons, artists, staff, and board members with the utmost warmth, respect, and what we call “radical hospitality.” Since we have established this core value, we have seen a significant increase in ticket sales, season-pass holders, individual contributions, and board engagement. 

Let’s talk about all the work you’ve put in during the last year. Your successes. Your failures … er … learning opportunities. I can’t stress enough how valuable this information is to your peers. If you’ve found something that works, let the sector know! 

Simply by attending this year’s NAMP Conference, you’re already identifying yourself and your organization as interested in being at least a bit more like Iceman: you are undoubtedly interested in picking up some best practices on how to run your organization or department better over the long term. 

Despite the fact that minority communities are the emerging majority, diversity in the arts isn’t growing at the speed of reality. This paints a very troubling picture of what can be the “future” of arts in America—a future which, if trends continue, is less diverse than the American public.

Many nonprofit arts organizations would say they are just like REI—driven by values, and focused on the community. But as a unique co-op retail business, REI has succeeded in showing their members what it really means to belong to something bigger than themselves.

As an arts marketer, if you're not getting great at social media, you are cheating yourself, your organization, and your audience. Saying that the interfaces and jargon aren't relevant is comparable to blowing off email in the 90s, the fax in the 80s, or telephones before that.

Only when arts organizations seek to grow the loyalty of every person who walks through the door—from the first-timers to the long-timers—will we see the sustainable revenue that allows us to innovate and grow.

Crowd-sourced genomic data, 3D printed hearts, robotic surgeries, dramatic shifts in medical education and population health–the future of how we think about, define and create health is exponentially changing–which is why we are pioneering new roles for artists in this ever-changing industry and societal landscape.

At Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine conference, co-founder Peter Diamandis said, “You are the CEO of your own health.” But, when there is systemic racism in clinical trials, inequality in access to care, and discrepancies between how medical practitioners define health and how different communities do, new approaches must come forth which empower both people and systems to fully realize a culture of health.

Arts organizations should be benefitting from the rise of social media more than anyone – the arts are all about storytelling.

And the numbers emerging from social media research are astonishing. 65% of adults use social media, and according to one study, millenials spend 5.4 hours on social media daily.

Here are a few examples of recent social media campaigns that illustrate what social networking can do for us as arts marketers and advocates – you’ll be amazed at the fun you can have.

Just this October, our venue presented Orpheus in the Underworld (Virginia Opera) that got a rave review in a major newspaper.  But, by the time the review hit, the set was struck and it was too late for those readers to see the production. This is our challenge every week. Our audience members leave feeling inspired. We receive fantastic feedback immediately about our programming. Presumably, they leave our venue and tell their friends about their recent arts experience. The word is spreading! But, the artist was only on our stage for one night or at the most one weekend. The buzz is too late to sell those tickets and engage more audience. 

There are two questions that are on many of our minds these days:

1. How can we create a holistic vision of our interdisciplinary work and lives?
2. How do we extend our creative impulses into marketing our art?

Hi, I’m Lena, and I’m MAD. I do marketing, art and development work.

Strategic planning is a key component of building a sustainable, effective arts organization. I believe that to the core of my professional soul and when the arts field began moving in that direction about 10 years ago, it was a relief.

As a consultant, I’ve worked with numerous groups over the past twenty years on transitioning from annual to strategic planning and for a number of years those projects produced terrific results; but somewhere along the way, the field became awash in a sea of theory and visioning to a point where a critical skills gap began to emerge.

It’s a scientifically proven fact that some of the most interesting things that happen at a conference occur outside of the meeting rooms. 

They happen in the hallways.

They happen in the hotel rooms, if that’s how you roll.

And they happen at the bar.

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 banner is dying. It has served us well, but after two decades in the spotlight, its time is coming. Don’t get me wrong, banner ads continue to be extremely effective, but something has arrived that aims to blow banner out of the water. Welcome, Native.

Native advertising has been around since the early days of print media. They are ads that read like content, an advertorial. 

Data. The word casts an attentive hush on any crowd gathered in a subdivided hotel ballroom. Data. The solution to every problem, the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, the alpha and the omega, the Holy Grail. Data. It will make your marketing smarter, faster, better.

Well, yes and no. There are variables to whether or not your data-driven marketing strategies are good ones. One of those variables is the “heftiness” of your data, and the “heftiness” of your data depends on the source(s).

As the year 2016 approaches, as arts marketers we can look back and reflect on the variety of social media networks that we have seen succeed as effective platforms for engaging audiences: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, to name a few.

On the other hand, we’ve seen just as many flop. From Friendster to MySpace to Google+, these platforms fell short somewhere along the social media road to success. For example, Friendster lost the race to Facebook and MySpace when these two placed their emphasis on social sharing and connection. Then, MySpace -- even with its tag line “a place for friends” --- sunk when it gradually became an advertising platform for bands rather than a network for connecting with people.

A few weeks ago, I attended a show that wasn’t very good. It wasn’t bad, I guess, but it was an arty bit of esoterica that I only would have had the attention span for in my twenties. I couldn’t focus. While ostensibly watching the performance, I started thinking of ways to expedite my tax filings, pondered the purchase of an energy efficient refrigerator, and wondered how it was that NSYNC’s music videos haven’t aged very well relative to how timeless they once seemed. By the conclusion of the evening-length work, I was bored, depressed, and thankful that I wasn’t the poor schmuck arts marketer whose job it was to communicate a rationale for such meh art.

It’s no surprise that my #NAMPC coaching sessions about creating surveys are always filled. When it comes to surveying, you, like most people, probably have the most trouble with simply getting started. These five tips should help you, if you do them in order.

1.Set your objectives.

What’s the real purpose of your survey? Your first step should always be getting clear on what your results will be used for and who will use them. Questions to ask yourself:

Will results be used internally or externally?

What decisions can be made based on your survey results?

Remember the good old days of marketing? When a catchy phrase and a few colors were all you needed? When dancing popcorn and soda would convince you that you did, in fact, need a treat from the lobby? Those days are long gone. Modern marketing is a battlefield, a war for attention. Rest, even for a moment, and you’re lost in a sea of digital combatants. Sure, there is room for error because enough information is being pushed out all of the time that your mistakes will most likely be forgotten. Or will they?

When actor Kevin Spacey took to the stage at last year’s Content Marketing World conference, he reminded the audience of marketers that their customers want great content, no matter the platform. YouTube and Netflix are two bold examples of platform agnostic approaches to content consumption. Audiences no longer discern between watching “House of Cards” on an iPad or “Between Two Ferns” on a Smart TV. Audiences just want to consume their content. If your brand isn’t providing it, they’ll look elsewhere.

Are you a contextual marketer? Probably.

Chances are, you’re doing some form of contextual marketing already. If you’re a marketer, you’ve made some effort to understand your patrons and match their needs to what you’re offering.

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.

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.

Call it collaborative consumption, the peer economy, or the sharing economy- all titles describe the force that is disrupting business as usual and carving space for some of the most unique and lucrative independent ‘businesses’ of the time. From E-bay to Lyft and from Airbnb to Taskrabbit companies are leveraging their futures on the crazy idea that people will trust other humans, often more readily than they do the brick and mortar façades of organizations. One may think this would be good news for arts organizations that, after all, traffic in things that are purely human – humanly devised, made, and delivered. And yet, the arts have aligned themselves so rigidly with outdated business structures that it’s a daunting task to do what should come naturally – build trusting relationships with our communities through being truthful and transparent with our work. 

Every empty seat in a theatre isn't simply lost revenue; it's a lost opportunity to tackle one of the biggest challenges we can expect to face in the arts and culture business today - talent development.

I am not an expert by any means on the process or state of arts funding in America, but I can clearly see the dysfunction in our government at all levels. In today’s education system, there is a significant lack of equity regarding access to a quality arts education, often due to the location of the school. 

Your users are telling you that your website is broken. They’re telling you what content they like and what they don’t. They tell you who they are and what they need. They’re even telling you how to prioritize your web initiatives. You have their stories and the ability to listen to them. Those stories, of course, are contained in your data.

Web analytics is often defined and accepted as measurement and reporting – numbers that tell us about traffic volumes and website performance. Although measurement is one of the more powerful components of digital (the ability to cheaply measure things in fine detail, with high accuracy, and in a real-time basis should not be overlooked), that on its own does not define analytics.

Context is king.  I know, I know.  You thought content was king. Nope, it’s context.

It’s an honest mistake.  Content is incredibly important to arts marketing.  But context makes sure that we’re getting the right message (and content) to the right patrons via the right medium at the right time.

The theme for this year's NAMP Conference is Lift Off! We will be exploring a variety of new techniques and technologies for audience building and obtaining more overall support of our organizations and the arts in general. Before we can Lift Off!, it is wise to look back over the year-to-date and see what has been occurring in order to create our checklist to get ready for Lift Off!