Americans for the Arts

As an industry, artists and arts organizations have always had to get creative about how they communicate their craft to demonstrate their value beyond aesthetics.

The refrain I heard at NAMPC 2010 was "prepare your audiences for their arts experience and they will have a better time."

With all of the places you can spend time and money to advertise, why go with Google AdWords?

How do we defined our best customers and how does that definition change depending upon which department was asked.

When it comes to defining the Latino audience, we need to look at the needs, goals, and sentiment of multiple generations living in the United States.

In most of the arts world, but particularly in my world of the nonprofit arts, there is an understandable desire to bring in a new, more diverse, audience.

The pursuit of cultural equity is a journey of mountains and valleys, someone once told me. It is a series of hard climbs, brief moments of celebration, if you’re lucky, and then the progression begins again. It is the type of work we do against our comfort, because it is necessary.

What can a church show us about marketing . . . How about a slew of audience development activities that could serve as a model for arts organizations?

There are two groups standing on opposites sides of the parking lot. Bruised and battered, knuckles taped up, and ready to go at it again. If it’s your first time, you almost always have to fight. This is the fight club that sometimes happens between the artistic and Marketing departments after a production fails to sell well.

Andy Horwitz, writing in the Atlantic, concludes that the federal government, because it has not adequately supported the National Endowment for the Arts, is contributing to the weakness of the culturally diverse and ethnic arts organizations in the country. He misses two key points and, I believe promotes the wrong solution.