Last year the Wyncote Foundation released a report about how cultural institutions were using digital technology, Link, Like Share: How Cultural Institutions Are Embracing Digital Technology. The report goes into some best practices for putting digital resources and personnel at the center of your organization’s focus. This includes having the digital department drive some of the decision making.
I was pretty interested to read their section on focusing on capabilities, not projects. They noted cultural organizations need to be looking at long term capabilities and only focus on “fast-fail” experimental projects to help them achieve the long term goal of developing capabilities. This section spoke of the need for grant making to shift to supporting capabilities rather than short term projects.
What really caught my eye was their discussion of the implications that a digital orientation had on development efforts.
“Meanwhile, the legacy cultural sector in the U.S. still relies on what one of our study organizations called “the tyranny of the purchase funnel.” By that he means that the dominant logic of the sector is based on the user’s progression from awareness to sampling, then on to occasional and eventual loyal user, committed contributor and finally to the legacy bequest. This patron development pipeline is in the mind of nearly everyone at a legacy institution because it has been a proven route to revenue.
But digital is the new frontier, the Wild West. Legacy enterprises area vulnerable to new entrants who are digitally nimble, lean and responsive. It’s an unruly and unpredictable environment where major players, new and old lose major money. So why invest? And why not invest cautiously? Why risk effort that could be put toward the known and use it for the unknown?
My feeling is that while we have been talking about how arts and cultural organizations need to be innovative and nimble in the way they interact and communicate with their communities, how fund raising may need to change hasn’t been part of that conversation.
Think about how much you may have been focusing on the former while operating under the assumption that development would still be a gradual process.
The need to revise the approach to the development process has been implicit in the conversation, but never explicitly stated beyond providing ways for people to donate online and possibly needing to use services like Kickstarter as a fund raising source.
There is a lot of earned revenue oriented discussion about what changes people expect from their attendance experience, but not as much about how there may be an evolution in the method of cultivating and persuading toward greater investment in the organization.
The long arc of relationship building may no longer be viable. As cynical as it may sound, getting someone to donate as much as you can in the moment via their phone may emerge as the most successful strategy.
On the optimistic side, we are told the millennial generation wants to be involved with something they feel makes a difference so the challenge may be in finding ways to involve and engage them even more than your organization has in the past.
The issue that may emerge might be that the definition of what is meaningful may be strongly influenced by a person’s social network and shift accordingly.
For example- How many people are doing the ice bucket challenge or making donations now? How many people have become involved with supporting ALS related organizations?
I actually don’t know the answers to either of these questions. But if support has fallen off, is it due to the failure of ALS organizations to engage people or because the cause has slipped out of vogue?
The vast majority of arts and cultural organizations will likely experience fewer extremes in community involvement during the evolving digital age. But at this point, it may be difficult to know whether the fluctuations in personal investment are something wholly in your control or if it will be subject to the vagaries of popular taste.