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Making It Easy To Find Your Org From The Couch

by:

Joe Patti

Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience share some of the latest data regarding how people are becoming increasingly invested in spending their free time at home.

She starts by reminding readers that it wasn’t so long ago that even when you planned to stay in, you often had to leave your house to grab videos from the video store. Even in the early days of Netflix you often had to invest some time in picking what DVDs you wanted delivered to you.

Compared to those times, there is even less effort or commitment required. She notes that many people will be flipping through things on their phones while having a show or movie running on an in-home big screen.

She presents data showing that Americans in general have expressing an interest in staying home during the weekend has increased 56.8% since 2011.

The statistic of bigger concern is that among those with a high-propensity to visit cultural organizations, (both visual and performance based), the increase since 2011 is 79%.

In short, high-propensity visitors are the people who actually do visit, want to visit, or are likely to visit cultural organizations – and their preference to stay home over the weekend has risen a whopping 79% since 201

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An approach Dilenschneider et. al. suggest is the same one that was advocated when people were involuntarily required to stay at home–activities, opportunities, marketing, etc., that keep your organization at the top of people’s minds. She writes that when people make decisions to engage in out of home activities, they gravitate toward those activities that are most familiar.

In a chart comparing how people were spending their time in 2021 with the first three quarters of 2025, the percentages are roughly the same for at-home activities so the trend has been relatively consistent. (Though fewer people are doing home repairs and gardening.)

While people are spending more time online, they are interacting with cultural organizations a lot more online as well. In a chart comparing end of year 2019 with third quarter 2025, visits to websites and social media pages has increased quite a bit in that time. Word of mouth and recommendations from friends are fairly high up in responses, though tend to be higher for performance based entities vs. exhibit based entities.

Having online resources which are easy to navigate and discover desired information is increasingly important.

…..the trend of increasingly high expectations for digital competence wasn’t created entirely by the pandemic but was accelerated by it. Audiences were already seeking out information about cultural organization experiences primarily via the web, mobile web, and social media before the pandemic and continue to do so today, particularly as AI enters the conversation. The hard work that cultural organizations have put in to engage their audiences online and show their relevance beyond their walls in the past five years has elevated those expectations even further.

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Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Marketing/PR

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How Many Seconds Til Its Not Fair Use?

by:

Joe Patti

Recently entertainment lawyer Gordon Firemark made a couple posts on Fair Use rules for creators on social media, podcasts, and films. The second one dealt with music sampling on content created for those platforms.

One of the common issues he addresses is the minimal amount of sampling you can do while still being able to claim Fair Use.

Spoiler: The answer is zero.

Fair Use Myths That Get Creators in Trouble

Let’s debunk a few persistent myths:

“If I change it a little, it’s transformative.”
Adding commentary or critique might be transformative. Just slapping on filters, cropping, or re-uploading isn’t.

“I only used 10 seconds, so it’s fair use.”
Nope. There’s no magic number of seconds or percentage that makes a use automatically fair.

“I gave credit to the original creator.”
Nice gesture, but credit isn’t a legal substitute for permission.

“I’m not making money, so it’s fine.”
Non-commercial use helps your case but doesn’t guarantee fair use. Plenty of hobbyists have faced takedowns.

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He explains that Fair Use covers a pretty narrow set of circumstances. It is perhaps most important to understand that there is no right of Fair Use of other people’s work. It is a defense against an accusation of infringement.

Firemark goes into detail about Fair Use and consequences of infringement claims in his two posts. The safest options are either licensing/getting permission from the rights holder or entirely using royalty free content.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Legal Topics, Working In The Arts

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Wait, This Is A Seminar Description And Not A Blog Post?

by:

Joe Patti

A couple weeks ago I saw a blog post from Museums as Progress talking about how staff expertise isn’t necessarily relevant to visitors. The point they made was just because expertise is important to us as insiders, doesn’t mean that is what visitors directly value.

The visitor taking pictures of their kid having fun isn’t there to learn about your discipline. The couple on a date isn’t asking for engagement programming. People come to museums to relax, connect with others, discover something about themselves — and, yes, sometimes learn something new along the way or “engage” with the museum — but for most people, most of the time, the goals are manifold and your expertise matters only to the extent that it helps them achieve what they’re actually trying to accomplish.

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Except I eventually realized what I was reading wasn’t a blog post, but a six paragraph description of a session they are holding next Thursday.

For a moment I wondered how effective such a long session description would be in attracting participants. But that was through the lens of thinking people have too short an attention span to bother reading six paragraphs promoting an event.

The fact is, they were informing people about the problem the session was meant to address and what type of conversation they could expect.

” — expertise becomes a shield against harder questions about relevance and impact. If we admitted that people’s goals differ from ours, we’d have to become students again, learning what actually matters to the communities we claim to support.

The challenge isn’t whether your museum has valuable expertise — it does. The question is whether that expertise can serve community progress in ways that generate institutional returns

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In the first paragraph of this post I mentioned expertise may not be something visitors directly value. But I do think people value the product of that expertise without consciously realizing it.

I have mentioned that research has shown people perceive cultural organizations as more trustworthy than media outlets, government entities, and other NGOs. It is likely due to the care and exercise of expertise that has led people to regard cultural organizations in that manner. While people may not be driven to attend to learn more about biodiversity and colonial history, they probably want to be confident that what they do learn about these topics while visiting is reasonably accurate.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Working In The Arts

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Need To Be Someone, Not Just Anyone

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin reinforced a conversation that has been circulating in the arts world with greater vigor over the last five-six years —people have so many options these days you need to distinguish yourself and your value.

People don’t need to enter your business, or even interact with a person, to get their direct need satisfied which is why arts orgs need to emphasize all the ways in which they solve other problems people face.

Ruth Hartt advocates for employing this approach both in the way organizations market themselves and in the organizational culture they create to reinforce this in every plan and public interaction.

Godin writes:

Good, fast and cheap used to be the goals of a typical small business. Today, there’s probably a giant, heartless competitor who is gooder, faster and cheaper than you.

The way forward is simple: Be worth the trip. Be worth the price.

“You can pick anyone, and we’re anyone” isn’t going to be helpful going forward. Be someone instead.

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While people may not need to enter your physical space or interact with your staff to acquire what they need, one practice that is likely to become valued is having someone with whom they can interact. As much conversation as there is about AI being the way of the future, there seems to be increasing recognition that the available tools are not meeting our expectations.

There is currently a competitive advantage in saving people from depending on some of the information delivered by web searches.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Management Philosophy, Marketing/PR

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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