Americans for the Arts

With economic gloom dominating the news, it’s invigorating to focus on joy and beauty. At the end of September, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and the Metro Nashville Arts Commission launched Artober Nashville, the city’s most expansive celebration of the arts and everything creative.

Mayor Karl Dean received a lesson in African Drumming from Tulip Grove second graders Jaidyn MacAdoo during his visit to the school for the launch of Artober Nashville on September 29.

Artober Nashville showcases all artistic genres through more than 250 galleries, music venues, cultural organizations, and neighborhood festivals and more than 550 activities in October. The hope is that Nashvillians will experience “Arts. Everywhere.”

During the month, the city will showcase the International Bluegrass Music Festival and the International Black Film Festival, and additionally, our Grammy Award-winning Nashville Symphony hosts a free day of music, the Frist Center displays Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum; and the Rep, the Opera and Ballet will stage unforgettable classics.

David Schillhammer

The Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra’s ticket sales are up again this year, shattering local and national sales trends.

With several months left in the year, our box office is already seeing a 10 percent increase in subscriptions over this time last season, and renewal rates for freshman subscribers are over 53 percent and growing. This is the fifth year in a row we’ve had such gains.

Subscriptions to the orchestra’s “Super Series” have been steadily rising over the past five seasons. So far in 2011-2012, the orchestra has sold over 3,432 subscription packages, 300 more than this time last year, and a huge increase over the 1,500 sold in 2006-2007.

Our recipe for success? Marketing, innovative programming and outstanding customer service.

In the fall of 2007, we began working with freelance arts marketing guru Jack McAuliffe, president of Engaged Audiences, LLC, who pushed us to stop devaluing tickets through “buy one, get one” offers, and focus on marketing subscriptions. Specifically, he challenged us to convert one-time concert attendees into two- and three-time attendees, and then into long-term subscribers. So in 2007-2008, we began a targeted effort to grow subscriptions.

Here’s our method:

Scott Provancher

My colleagues and I at the Arts & Science Council (ASC) have been closely following the national and regional trends that affect the health of the arts industry.

In particular, several trends have caught our attention: 1) arts giving in America continues to lose market share to other charities; 2) recent analysis showed that 85 percent of cultural patrons (ticket buyers, visitors, etc.) are not donating to the organizations they patronize; and 3) the traditional fundraising campaigns of the arts community seem to be making little progress in reversing these challenging trends.

A little over a year ago these trends were the topic of ASC’s annual board retreat. As one of the largest united arts agencies in the nation, we owed it to ourselves and the field to be a leader in addressing these issues both at a local and national level. Our board wholeheartedly agreed and we left the meeting with a firm commitment to develop and invest in innovative ideas that could change how the arts engage new donors in the future.

A year and a half later, ASC launched a new website called power2give.org, which we believe will change the way we do business forever.

Jeff Scott

With the recent release of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and several other bios scheduled to come out in the near future, there’s a lot of discussion on what kind of a manager Jobs was.

While the management of a publicly-traded tech company and that of a nonprofit arts organization may seem worlds apart, there are some basic kernels that arts leaders can take from Steve Jobs’ career.

We’ve heard a lot about Jobs’ so-called “reality distortion field.” He pushed his employees to the max, believing that work that normally would take a month could be done in a few days. While the pressure was too much for many employees, others said it caused them to do some of the best work of their careers.

For arts managers working with limited resources in terms of people, time, and money, the notion of a reality distortion field is probably a familiar one. So many times we find ourselves making something out of almost nothing and hopefully that something is a brilliant work of art. But what is perhaps more significant is how Jobs handled his employees. Not only did he believe that a particular task could get done a certain way in a certain time frame, he believed that his people would be able to accomplish it.

The world is in constant change and is becoming more dominated by technology. Therefore, you should use all of your “technology weapons” to stand out from the crowd and create a successful arts marketing campaign.

Why is it important that we get these terms right? As we work to communicate the value of the work that we do, it’s important to paint an accurate and authentic picture. It is only once we acknowledge the work we are currently doing that we are able to grow.