Arts Intranet

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!

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.

Ron Evans

I remember three or four years ago when the big push for many arts groups was the learn to embrace social media. Facebook was booming for both business and personal pages, and nobody wanted to be left behind. Back then, you could still get a good bang for no buck on Facebook if you created helpful, personal posts. Sadly, recent changes to Facebook tell a different story. Facebook can still be an effective visibility tool, but only if you are willing to allocate a budget to Facebook to be able to reach not only new people, but increasingly to reach the people who have already connected with you.

While I think we've all known that not everyone sees our posts when we post on Facebook (Facebook has an algorithm called EdgeRank that defines who will see your posts), we used to be able to reach most people for free. In May 2012, Facebook launched a new feature called “promoted posts,” which allows a user to pay money to make sure that his/her posts will reach his/her audience. For example, if you have 1000 people who had liked your page, and you want to make sure 90% of them see your post, you pay for that service. Facebook is traded publicly and they need to make money, I think we all get that. But what also seems to have happened (although Facebook denies this) is that the percentage of your connections who will see your post if you don't pay has been reduced more and more since then. Some reports claim that as few as 16% of your connections will see a post if you don't pay. That's a big drop from 1000 connections – that's only 160 people seeing your post. While these might be the “top” people from Facebook's perspective, it sure cripples unpaid outreach potential.

But let's forget about percentages for a minute. Let's compare Facebook marketing to email marketing. Say I offered a new, free email marketing service. You put in 1000 email addresses and send out a newsletter. I then tell you that only 160 people on your list got your newsletter, but if you want to pay, you could reach 900 or so of your 1000 like Facebook does. Would that be acceptable to you? I want to reach all my people if I pay. To me, it sounds like a business that wouldn't be in business too long as a free service, and questionable as a paid service. But that Facebook gets away with this shows how powerful many of us feel social media is.

Jeff Poulin

In my last job, I worked to develop audiences. Today, I work in arts education. Many people curiously ask me why and how the two are connected. To which, I respond: “To develop audiences in the long run, a venue must work to ensure that future audience members receive a quality arts education.” This is exactly how I ended up in my previous position, before uncovering a chicken-and-egg style conundrum.

The Task-At-Hand

My work was with a large (2,111 seat) theatre in a European country capitol city. The venue was the first of its kind to bring blockbuster musical theatre to its audiences and capitalized on the new-found economic stability in a post-2008 economy. The time was ripe to be developing robust theatrical calendars, and audiences were justly on board.  However, the question became: how is this sustainable in the long run?  I began my work in the Marketing Department to understand the audience and devise strategies which would deliver on long term audience development goals.

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.

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.