Arts Intranet

Ian David Moss

I have to admit it's a little strange to be part of this excellent blog team on the subject of arts marketing. I've never pretended to be any kind of expert on the practice of marketing; though I've done a lot of it, I've frankly shot blanks a lot more often than I've hit gold. (Among my more brilliant ideas was to advertise that there would be no alcohol provided at my twenty-first birthday party. One person showed up.) What I do know is how to look at the big picture when it comes to the arts. And I know from having done a whole lot of that over the past few years that all of you arts marketers are way more important to the future health and success of the professional arts than you may realize.

One reason for this is that the live professional arts have always appealed most to a relatively small niche of society. The recent NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts shows that in the year leading up to May 2008, less than 35% of Americans participated at least once in "benchmark arts activities," which collectively cover the bulk, though not all, of the disciplines and genres we have traditionally considered to be part of our field. That means that nearly two-thirds of American adults went the entire year without seeing a single classical music or jazz concert, attending a single musical, play, opera, or ballet, or visiting a single art gallery or museum. Let me repeat that in case it wasn't clear: 65% of American adults did none of these things at any time in 2007-08. (By contrast, fully 99% of American households have at least one television, and there are actually more TV sets than people in this country!) Lest you think this is a recent phenomenon, in NEA surveys stretching back to 1982, equivalent arts activities never reached more than 41% of the population, and a landmark 1966 study of the economics of the performing arts by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen found that audiences for classical music, theater, and dance in the early 1960s were similarly unrepresentative of the general population in both the U.S. and Britain. Then, as today, participants in the arts and culture are disproportionately socioeconomically privileged: almost half of arts attendees made at least $75,000 a year in the 2008 NEA survey, compared to 30% of the overall population, and arts attendees were nearly twice as likely to have a college degree as the general public.

Mary Trudel

I’ll be moderating a NAMP session on Saturday, November 13, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm featuring up to the minute presentations by colleagues Rory MacPherson, Ron Evans and Ayokunle Omojola on how arts organizations can harness their creativity to develop apps and use existing mobile platforms to build connections with audiences. We’ll also engage with representatives from Bay Area organizations: the Center for Asian American Media about creating custom applications for the iPhone and  Yerba Buena Center for the Arts which has forged a community of supporters using mobile-accessible Twitter and Facebook feeds.

One concern I’ve heard is that technological ways of connecting with arts organizations might limit or compete with live participation.  But to quote Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus:  “The old idea that media is a domain relatively separate from ‘the real world’ no longer applies…to any of the myriad ways people are using social media to arrange real-world action.”  And the latest NEA research report, Audience 2.0, contains surprising, reassuring news: More is Better!  People who engage with art through media technologies attend live performances or arts exhibits at TWO to THREE times the rate of non-media arts participants.

On behalf of Americans for the Arts, I would like to thank all of our readers for stopping by our first ever arts marketing blog salon.  With almost 6,000 views, 73 comments, 15 bloggers, hundreds of tweets and retweets, and hundreds more of Facebook likes, the salon was a perfect way to jump start the National Arts Marketing Project Conference: New. Tech. New Tools. New Times.

I also want to extend a huge thank you to our bloggers:

• Chad Bauman
• Ben Burdick
• David Dombrosky
• Ron Evans
• Susannah Greenwood
• Amy Kweskin
• Clayton Lord
• Ian David Moss
• Amelia Northrup
• Deborah Obalil
• Brian Reich
• Kyle Semmel
• Brian Solis
• Mary Trudel
• Chloe Veltman

All their contributions were thoughtful, smart, relatable, and well presented.  They shared their ideas with ease and honesty, and I can’t wait to hear what they all have to say when they present at the NAMP Conference in San Jose, November 12-15.

Amelia Northrup

As a writer for the Technology in the Arts blog, I am constantly thinking about which topics will appeal to which artistic disciplines, which specialty, which skill level… and on and on. But the more I have to think about the segmentation of the arts management audience, the more I realize how broad many of the issues we discuss are.

A few months ago, I interviewed Alan Cooke of the e-fundraising company Convio, and we talked at length about the problem of organizational silos. In arts organizations, as in any company, conflicts often arise between different departments and may develop into an “us against them” mentality. As arts organizations become more prevalent in the social media space, it becomes easier to see which organizations have truly good internal communication between marketing, communications, box office and development departments.

We also tend to think that orchestra problems are unique to orchestras, theatre problems unique to theatres, and so on. For example, a few months ago I was at an opera conference listening to a presenter from another artistic discipline, when a colleague leaned over and whispered, “Ok, but what does this have to do with opera?” Unsure how to respond, I sort of nodded in agreement, but later, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. True, it didn’t have much to do with opera, but, I would argue, the point of the conference was to learn new things, not to be told about things we already know.

Amelia Northrup

The world of arts management is changing, as all industries are changing, with the proliferation of technology. Especially with the increasing popularity of online media, we as arts managers have had to reconsider the way we see our performances. Is online video footage merely a vessel for our product? Or is it, in fact, our product? Or, can it also be a means to an end?

Many see social media and its democratization of internet content as the tool that will restore relevance to the arts, which critics claim is no longer present.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen changes in the social media landscape that make the issues surrounding performance footage all the more relevant. Twitter is adding video embedding capability. YouTube will soon be able to handle streaming video for content partners. These are signals of a trend that is already in progress—a movement of online video footage becoming not only accepted, but commonplace. Like it or not, online video is here to stay.

BY: Terry S. Davis, UNM Center for the Arts

What do you do on a Monday night in Montgomery, Alabama?

If you had been like a lot of locals this week, you would have gone downtown to see the touring production of Fiddler on the Roof. On a Monday night. In Montgomery, Alabama.

I got to the Montgomery Performing Arts Center, pictured above, about 20 minutes before curtain surprised to see a crowd of people in the lobby. So many people were there that I could not make my way to the Will Call window to pick up my ticket.

They had not opened the house yet — some minor technical difficulties with the show that had arrived that morning and would depart after the curtain came down — which meant that all of us were packed into the lobby, which was quite large. A lot of people had come out on a Monday night in Montgomery, Alabama, to see a show.

What brings us out of our homes to the theater?

If I knew that answer, I’d be a featured speaker at the National Arts Marketing Project in San Jose. (It’s been a week of travels.) Several dozen arts marketers are going to gather in a room today to start discussing that very question. As long as I’ve been in this business, I confess I don’t always know the answer. Nor do the others who I will share a room with today, experts though many of them are.

Certainly we understand that people come out for the shared stories of theater, to hear, for example, the tale of a poor Jew in Russia struggling with maintaining balance and traditions in an ever-changing world. But why on a Monday night? Or, more to the point, why not?

In spite of the packed nature of their lobby, the Montgomery Performing Arts Center (MPAC) had not sold out the performance. The question for those of us in San Jose today will be what might we have done, had we been marketers for MPAC, to fill those seats that went empty that night.

Or the seats that went empty on Sunday night in Kansas City’s Music Hall for the performance of Cats I saw. Or the vacant seats in Bass Hall in Fort Worth for Spring Awakening on Tuesday. Or the unsold seats in Popejoy Hall we will have for many of our shows yet this season.