Americans for the Arts

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).

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?

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.

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!

For more than 50 years, Americans for the Arts has been dedicated to building broad public support, strong leadership, and increased resources for arts and arts education. The pARTnership Movement, which was launched in 2012 by Americans for the Arts’ Business Committee for the Arts, bridges the gap between the businesses world and the arts world, and helps businesses understand that partnering with the arts can have real strategic value.

A number of trends discussed at the 2015 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention resonated with my personal experience as a teaching artist. One trend arose frequently, in a number of different contexts: we all need to consider it since it is clearly top of mind in our field, and prominent in our experimenting with change.  Different presenters used different words to describe this trend, but the gist is: the longtime silos of practice and identity within the greater arts field are coming down. We have stayed within them too long, and now necessity and good strategy are bringing them down.  

This past June, I had the opportunity to present at the first Cultural Equity Preconference at the 2015 American for the Arts (AFTA) gathering in Chicago, IL. Over 100 people spent three rigorous days thinking about art, diversity, and their own communities. Each presentation created space for me to consider, reflect, and question. From chats over lunch about gay zombie theater to bus rides investigating the urgent need to include dialogue about ability and accessibility in social justice movements, every interaction was steeped in expansive conversations.

It’s that time of year – summer is here! As we say goodbye to another school year and take the next month or two to regroup, plan, and hopefully enjoy some much needed R&R (preferably on a beach), here are a few (mostly free) really great professional development resources to help refuel, recharge, and inspire our creative minds. The bonus is they’re all available online!

Editor’s Note: Ashley McDonald, Membership Associate at Americans for the Arts, interviewed our member Felicia Shaw about her work in the arts field. At the time of this interview Felicia was in the process of transitioning from her role as interim executive director of Young Audiences of San Diego to her new role as executive director of the Regional Arts Commission (RAC) in her hometown of St. Louis, MO.

AM: Can you describe your role at St. Louis Regional Arts Commission (RAC)?

FS: My job at RAC will be to assume the leadership role of a local arts agency that has had an impressive 30-year history of growing the arts and culture community throughout the St. Louis region. I’ll be working to preserve the vitality of a successful organization that is ready to grow to the next level, particularly at a time when St. Louis is turning the corner and looking to the future. I am charged with establishing a vision for RAC and strategically moving the organization forward in a new and impactful way for the next decade and beyond.

I was thrilled to sit in on the “Vocabulary for Arts and Arts Education” session at Americans for the Arts' Annual Convention this year. All three presenters—Christopher Audain, Kevin Kirkpatrick, and Margy Waller, along with moderator Margie Reese—were all on point for the session and I perhaps overtweeted in my enthusiasm over what they shared.

As I left the session, I started focusing on what Kevin presented on changing the conversation about arts and culture. Arts Midwest recently released the study Creating Connection: Research Findings and Proposed Message Framework to Build Public Will for Arts and Culture, which examined how existing attitudes and values of our audiences connect with our field’s message output. The study suggests reframing arts activity to be “creative expression” will have a more effective connection to broader audiences, and that connecting with others, with their families, and with their inner selves is their largest motivation for participating in arts and culture.

This article has been co-written with Michelle T. Boone, Commissioner with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and originally published by The Huffington Post on June 12, 2o15.

Deplaning at Chicago's O'Hare, it's easy to daydream of the world-famous art that awaits: the gleaming, 100-ton stainless steel Cloud Gate, Grant Woods' iconicAmerican Gothic, historic architecture and the homegrown Chicago blues.

It’s my favorite time of year – spring is here! The season of rebirth and awakening is finally upon us. We shed our layers, watch everything and everyone come back to life, spring-clean our nests, update our calendar with upcoming culminating events and pay our taxes too.

As part of my annual tax prep, a digital spring-clean ensues. Every year I set aside some time (less than an hour every few days for about a week) to comb through the previous year’s email. I move important messages and archive them in labeled folders; Google Drive is awesome for this task.

Last week, we heard several leaders call for and outline new directions for the arts field – the directions may be viewed as revolutions or simply a guided evolution from the current status quo. Nevertheless the ideas presented offer a vision for the field where diversity, authentic engagement, funding parity, branding, audience data, play, blurred divisions, and catalytic professional networks, among other things, give arts administrators a greater understanding of a communities’ needs, wants, and aspirations in order to ensure we are serving as well as leading all segments of our community with and through the arts.

Let's talk about starting a revolution. For rising arts leaders, we have a unique time period when our voices are not only valuable and needed as employees, but also make up a desired audience. Many of our institutions want to engage the young professionals and, hey, that's us! The world is changing and our organizations are trying, desperately, to catch up. The idea of "audience engagement" seems to be subjective but constantly discussed in our industry as a must-have. But what would be the best way to bridge our work with our peers?

In Boston, a nonprofit organization called the Theatre Offensive came to the conclusion that the work they were doing – the work that their mission mandated – was stale. When the company was founded, it was a challenge to find live performances that addressed LGBT issues and contained LGBT characters. TTO strove to make that comment widely available in Boston. Now that theatre addressing sexual orientation and gender identity has become common in Boston proper, TTO’s adherence to its mission - to make queer-themed plays accessible - suddenly feels out of touch with the energy behind its founding.

Lubbock, Texas has a metropolitan area of about 300,000. Lubbock is also about a six-hour drive in any direction from the next major city. The isolation of Lubbock could be considered a disadvantage – limiting collaboration, diversity, and ideas. Graduates from the local university often leave the city seeking jobs and more money in bigger markets.

However, the isolation may also be one of Lubbock’s greatest assets. Lubbock has a mentality of – “if we want it, we are going to have to build it – ourselves.”

In December of 2013, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies released a fact sheet about support for individual artists. They began the report with the following:

“Artists form the foundation of a state’s creative environment. They act as creators and individual entrepreneurs who provide many of the products and designs that drive innovation and shape a state’s cultural character. Many artists also work as educators, providing training in creative skills and passing on cultural traditions from one generation to the next.”

This is a descriptive, not a prescriptive statement. This is something that many, if not most, if not ALL of us, can probably agree with to some degree. And it is important to keep this in mind, as arts administrators, when it comes to artist advocacy. Because artist advocacy is a matter of culture and values.

Cards Against Humanity is marketed as a party game for horrible people. It is essentially a politically incorrect, dark humored game of mad libs. Gameplay with Cards Against Humanity is very simple. Each round someone asks a question from a black card and each player responds with his or her funniest white card. There are holiday, 90’s nostalgia, and science expansion packs available. While there is currently no official arts management expansion pack, arts management education is preparing an increasingly diverse student population to handle the smorgasbord of circumstances, from hilarious to heartbreaking, that arts administrators tackle every day.

When was the last time that you were told to “play harder”? Unless you happen to work at an extremely progressive workplace such as this one—where employees can mentally recharge in a gallery-turned-ball pit—the possibilities for play tend to disappear as we grow older. While arts nonprofits tend to acknowledge that creative thinking and experimentation propel innovation, resources are rarely allocated towards opportunities for staff to regularly weave play with work.

Arts administration needs a bit of revolutionary thinking for the continued health of the sector. The future of the arts is already here, being ushered in by arts leaders who test norms, continuously evolve, and keenly anticipate tomorrow.

New audiences, technologies, and competition require successful arts leaders to implement new models, develop cross-sector partnerships and allies, and stay focused on their vision. The revolutions in our field do not appear to be complete departures from what we are doing. That is to say most of the fundamental work functions of arts administration remain (e.g. production, marketing, and fundraising). What is in flux are how these functions are carried-out. These new methods and considerations require some revolutionary minds.

Those of you who read my periodic blogs know that I have a real passion for Tulsa. As I've described the Brady Arts District where the Hardesty Arts Center, Guthrie Green, Philbrook Downtown, and Woody Guthrie Center reside along with a growing number of arts-related venues, restaurants, and boutiques, I've received comments from a number of readers that they had no idea Tulsa had so much going on in the arts.