Arts Intranet

Danielle Williams

We’ve already talked about how important it is to do your due diligence when taking on a website redesign – figuring out your audiences, securing buy-in from your leadership, selecting good partners and vendors, the importance of quality content for your website – and we’ll be diving in deeper later in this blog salon about working with staff to create and revise quality content.

As you continue to bring together all these great resources, it will be helpful to compile them in a format that will be useful to your team and your vendors. During our website redesign, we ended up creating a number of documents that helped us fully scrutinize and contemplate all of our options. No stone was left unturned, which helped our stakeholders feel more comfortable with some of the drastic changes we were suggesting.

Talia Gibas

Last week I had the privilege of attending “The Arts and Passion-Driven Learning,” a three-day institute with Harvard Project Zero. Brilliantly, the institute was presented in collaboration with The Silkroad Ensemble; after treating us to an inspired performance, Silkroad musicians joined us as facilitators and learners for the full three days. Thanks to them, the sessions prompted frank and moving conversations about rehearsal as a learning environment, how artistic risk-taking can feel like liberation and/or transgression, and how cultural differences manifest in unexpected and uncomfortable ways.

On the morning of our second day, I had an uncomfortable thought. I was attending the institute as neither a classroom teacher nor an artist, but as an arts education administrator. Understanding how to keep teachers and students engaged obviously informed my work. But I wondered – can arts administration be as “passion-driven” as teaching and learning? If I believe teachers should be given license to examine how and why they stay invested in their teaching practice, shouldn’t I do the same for my own work as an administrator?

True confession: I am not a strategic evaluator. Anyone else want to come clean? Try this easy quiz:

• Do you churn out Survey monkey questionnaires the day before your workshops begin?
• Do you frantically google “student evaluation rubric” as the touring van pulls out of the theatre loading dock?
• Do you regularly practice post-event justification, working backwards through your program as you rush to complete a final report for a funder the night before it’s due?

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.

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.

Raheem Dawodu

The time has come. You’ve done your research to find out your audiences, figured out how to create great content to meet their needs, and you’ve convinced your organization’s staff and leadership that it’s time to build a new website.

Now it’s time to involve your staff in the process - since they are the issue experts that should work with you to create or revise your website’s content. At Americans for the Arts, though everyone on staff has an interest in the success of the website, only some of the people on our 70-person staff are what we call “content creators” – the ones who write the content.