Our own evolutionary path would be very different without the power of collaboration that's found virtually everywhere in the natural world. The outcomes of our work, more broadly speaking, more often benefit from team effort.

You’re walking down the street on a lazy summer afternoon. A signboard announces a performance in a former auto repair shop, you and your friend look at each other and say, Why not? Instead of finding a ticket-taker, you find you’re going to pay for the performance … by performing something back. Or writing, or drawing, or talking. Or coming up with some other experience-in-the-moment.

Previous posts from the “Nonprofit’s Aren’t Broken” series include discussions on the importance of outcome and evaluation systems and some ways that the sector could do that better, as well as why we should stop trying so hard to "be like a business". This week the focus is innovation, that extremely elusive and slippery-to-define idea that gets everyone excited, but often fails to materialize in the form of execution on innovative changes to programs, practices and organizations.

For most creative professionals, we have a tendency to live within the limitations of our labels: copywriter, web designer, filmmaker, illustrator, and author. Those are the things we do and we get paid for.

Manchester Camerata orchestra is pioneering music projects in care homes; now academics are to study whether the sessions do more than just entertain participants

Though new social networks continue to be launched and some disappear, the “big three” among both consumers and marketers continue to thrive and dominate. As noted in this article, Instagram is taking off while Google+ is struggling. Learn more about those findings and many others in these 49 noteworthy social networking facts and stats.

Photography has always been an integral part of marketing and social media. Not only are a lot of stock photos tacky, but some of them cost money! Thankfully, there’s been a growing number of websites with beautiful stock photography popping up all over the web. Best of all, they’re free.

Running a marketing team at a nonprofit is tough because you’re dealing with two of the toughest challenges to tackle: achieving big goals and operating on a shoestring budget.
At face value, it may seem like nonprofits have an uphill battle to fight. In a world where big CPG brands have infinite dollars to spend on marketing, how can the smaller players keep up and compete for attention spans that are already spread thin? How can nonprofits afford marketing when their organizations are, by definition, not structured around ROI?

The current state of the arts in this country is a microcosm of the state of the nation. Large, mainstream arts institutions, founded to serve the public good and assigned non-profit status to do so, have come to resemble exclusive country clubs. Meanwhile, outside their walls, a dynamic new generation of artists, and the diverse communities where they live and work, are being systematically denied access to resources and cultural legitimation.

Here’s the inherent problem with Google’s vision – social media marketing is not cookie cutter. One size does not fit all. Strategies differ, platforms shift based on targeted audiences and demographics, and most importantly: branding nuances are so specific that relying on an automated system such as this robs a user of the opportunity for real brand-customer relationships.

Through innovative partnerships and bold approaches, the Bloomberg Philanthropies arts program increases access to culture using new technologies. It aims to strengthen and empower artists and help cultural organizations reach broader audiences.
The chief digital officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sree Sreenivasan joined Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Kate Levin for a wide-ranging conversation with the foundation’s staff about how digital technology is changing the way audiences engage with culture.

While it’s questionable if millennials are sincerely appreciating the art in their Instagram photos, they are certainly drawing crowds, attention and revenue for museums. Social media has ignited a renewed interest toward museums and art, increasing attendance figures as a result. Interest in the “Rain Room” at LACMA exhibit has increased visitor attendance by more than 24 percent as compared to figures in past years for this period. The Broad museum, recently opened in downtown L.A., drew 177,264 visitors in the first 12 weeks.

The rise of social media means that artists are expected to be in the spotlight and interacting with their fans 24/7. While this is all well and good for the attention lovers, such a prospect is decidedly unappealing for the more introverted musician. Here, we offer some sound advice for the attention shy on how to navigate social media's choppy waters.

 “By the end of the walk,” he said, “they were hugging me, hugging each other and just feeling a general sense of joy after having accomplished a seemingly impossible task by trusting in each other and in their nonvisual senses.” In a very Marcel Duchampian way, this was art because an artist was in charge of it.

Leading up to his election in 2008, President Obama was widely hailed as the social media candidate, as his use of platforms like Facebook and Myspace helped propel him into the White House. In 2015, he built on that reputation by getting his own personal accounts on Facebook and Twitter.
Now, POTUS has seemingly completed the social media trifecta—with the debut of the White House's new Snapchat account.

Shoppers are more likely to buy products that have higher average ratings. It seems obvious. But a recent study from Power Reviews and Northwestern University’s Spiegel Digital and Database Research Center found that the relationship between the average star rating of a product and its sales is not linear. Simply stated, the likelihood of a product being purchased doesn’t necessarily increase as its star rating increases.

Red Bull has long been the strongest example of this mentality, developing a nuanced content studio that employs hundreds of people and produces high-quality movies, music, live broadcasts, original photography, and even a respected print magazine. But in 2015, a number of other companies like General Electric, Marriott, and Starbucks joined the club, competing with and, in some cases, outclassing what we expect from traditional media outlets.

Arts organizations should be benefiting 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, millennials 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.

One of the things I miss about living in a city with a subway system is the myriad thoughtful design elements that go into managing a perpetual flow of tourists and commuters. New York’s subway map presents us with an iconic tangle of interlocking tributaries resembling diagrams of a circulatory system. The NYC system’s ingeniously simple graphic presentation of lettered and numbered trains, encircled in their corresponding colors, can be read by most anyone with a rudimentary grasp on the English alphabet—from a new language learner to a small child.

In 1920, Helen Keller traveled the Orpheum Circuit and was able to tell her story the way that Hollywood wouldn’t. She, along with many performers with disabilities, found her voice on vaudeville and in sideshows.
But some time within the last century, the prospect of watching performers with rare traits in sideshows turned from an awe-inspiring experience to something associated with exploitation and fear.

It feels weird admitting this, too: We as a Buffer marketing team—working on a product that helps people succeed on social media—have yet to figure out how to get things working on Facebook (especially), Twitter, Pinterest, and more.
And that’s super scary to admit.

I love attending digital marketing conferences and professional development workshops. The conversations with peers and masters of the digital trade never fail to inspire me. Between multiple hits of caffeine and favoriting hilarious conference Tweets, my head fills with big ideas...video trailers...user-generated content...audience engagement. I leave inspired to do more, create more and build the gosh-darn best, most creative AND profitable digital marketing campaigns the arts world has ever seen.

Marketers have been hearing this pretty regularly since 2008. And while the prediction has become old news, the trend toward a more mobile world continues to evolve. So how can we better understand our mobile site visitors to create a better experience for them? With Google Analytics, of course.
The two standard Mobile reports available in Google Analytics -- Overview and Devices -- offer us a plethora of information about the people visiting our website via mobile devices, what device they used to get there, and how long they stuck around.

Four years ago, home decor brand One Kings Lane launched a typical blog where staffers would pen two or three posts per week. Traffic was decent, but the site had yet to really take off in a way that would make the publishing efforts stand out.
Now, however, much has changed. The content hub, called the Style Guide, has all the trappings of an upscale lifestyle magazine—high-quality photography, engaging articles, and even a curated section of daily home decor inspiration that’s shoppable.

There’s always something new to learn, an innovative strategy to uncover and a potentially successful hypothesis to use in an experiment. But in the midst of the ever-evolving infrastructure of the online world, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: visual content is the way of the future.
Sure, written content will still have its place -- at least for the next few years. But entrepreneurs that are refusing to get on board with this new frontier of visual content will almost certainly miss out.

In the Middle East, Coca-Cola's is looking to promote a world without labels and prejudices by starting with its iconic can and ditching its own logo. Of course, the label is still red and has the white swirly bit so no one's going to mistake it for a Pepsi but this is metaphor, people.

It’s tough to get millennials to think about their finances. Understandably, they can’t be persuaded to trudge through complex jargon, let alone plan for something that might not affect them until retirement. So how do you arm 3,000 financial representatives across the nation with the tools they need to reach this increasingly valuable audience?

All month long in October 2015, Curbed and National Trust for Historic Preservation are teaming up on #ThisPlaceMatters, a social campaign highlighting the most beloved places across America. Our motto at Curbed is "love where you live," which ties in succinctly with the National Trust's mission to highlight everyday buildings and places alongside those officially earmarked for historic preservation. We're looking to you, our readers, to submit photos of your favorite places, preserved or not, on Instagram and Twitter by tagging them with #ThisPlaceMatters.

At the heart of every nonprofit is a story. Inspired by an idea, born from a moment, and created from experience, your nonprofit’s story is the foundation of your organization, and the platform from where you drive donor engagement, cement community involvement, and generate measurable change. For many nonprofits and their nonprofit websites, the intuitive approach would be to tell their story in the “About Us” section, where visitors go to learn about a nonprofit.

The theme of this conference is inclusion. All weekend, we've heard uplifting stories about amazing work you all are doing to involve people from all walks of life in museums. And yet. Here's my beef with inclusion: it's too good. No one is "against" inclusion. There is no other museum conference going on somewhere else in the world today where professionals are sharing proud case studies and helpful tips on how to exclude people. But museums do exclude people. All the time. If everyone is "for" inclusion, does that mean it automatically happens? No.