Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management
NewsRoom Contact Us

Talk About How Your Cancelled NEA Grant Impacts Your Community

by:

Joe Patti

This weekend Margy Waller posted a guide for arts and cultural organizations to use to talk about the termination of your National Endowment for the Arts grant.

The guide is based on research the Topos Partnership did about how to talk about arts with your community. Waller says not to just focus on the dollar amount, but the impact it will have on the community.

What was the goal? What impact would it have had on the community? How is it specifically relevant?

Waller goes into detail on each point, but the common through-line was communicating the relevance and impact to the community rather than the arts organization. This is very much in line with how folks like Ruth Hartt advocate for marketing arts experiences in terms of the benefits and outcomes for the audience rather than using artist or organization focused language.

For example, when discussing the community impact, she advises:

Second: What did you expect the grant to do? How can you describe it in a common-sense way, in one sentence? Try leaving out the jargon and insider language that requires explanation to people outside the ‘family.’ What is it? Explain HOW you will accomplish the goal you established, for example: Paying artists to…

-Put on a show that will bring people into the neighborhood where they will connect with others and enjoy drinks or dinner too

-Make art that tells stories of your place

-Develop events that build neighborhood connections and engagement

-Create campaigns about health services

Source

Related to this, artist and director Annie Dorsen created a Google doc which crowdsources all the entities that had their NEA grants rescinded. Its apparently gotten such heavy use they are now requiring people to fill out a form with their responses. Arts Analytics has been crunching the numbers from the Google doc and provided an analysis as of May 20.

There were a lot of familiar names on the crowd sourced list. One of the ones that made me cringe the most was Springboard for the Arts’ losing $150,000 for a project meant to combat the mental health crisis in rural and urban Minnesota. I have been a fan of the work they do for decades. Springboard Executive Director Laura Zabel was among the arts leaders interviewed by PBS Newshour a week ago.

Advocacy, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

No Comments

Test Driving Seats Without The Pressure Of Performance

by:

Joe Patti

I had purchased tickets from the Straz Center in Tampa, FL as a gift for family members earlier this year so I ended up on their mailing list.

This week I received an email inviting me to a sort of open house they are hosting (below) in a couple weeks where people can “test drive” seats they want to sit in at Broadway shows.

I would be interested to see how many people attend the event. I am sure there are quite a few people who are seriously invested in where they sit, but there are also likely to be quite a few people who will take advantage of the opportunity to wander through the hall without the pressure of needing to push through a crowd to find their seats before a show.

I offer this as an interesting marketing tactic others may want to emulate in some degree.

However, on a personal level I will say that I had a difficult time and faced so many barriers in purchasing tickets, including having the staff offer solutions and then contact me the next day to rescind that solution, offer an alternative and subsequently rescind that offer the following day. The recipient of the tickets also needed to navigate some hurdles.

I rarely complain aloud about an experience I had on my blog but the issues I faced were so bad that I am doing so. If other customers faced problems similar to those I did, I feel like this test drive offer isn’t going to create better relationships with the audience. Their time would be better spent on fundamentals like tightening up policies and procedures before employing an approach like this.

Audience Relations, Marketing/PR

No Comments

Will Cultural Prescriptions Come To NYC?

by:

Joe Patti

Earlier this week Hyperallergic had an article about the cultural plans of two candidates for NYC mayor, Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani. From the article, it appears Lander has a more detailed plan, though polls of Democratic primary voters are more favorable to Mamdani and former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Part of Lander’s plan includes ““…cultural prescription program” that would allow doctors to “prescribe” art to promote holistic health. I have written about similar programs in Canada and Europe before. These programs generally take the form of passes to organizations and places.

Lander also wants to create more funding for smaller organizations and marginalized communities and create a deputy mayor for the arts and culture

He also wants to improve lease terms for creative spaces to address displacement; increase the membership of the Cultural Institutional Group (CIG) receiving funding from the city, which currently includes primarily major museums and organizations; and boost public school art programs.

Source

Mamdani is similarly focused on providing better accessibility to spaces for artists and organizations:

Mamdani emphasized the importance of affordability for artists in the city and reiterated his plans to build more affordable housing. Mamdani also said he would prioritize preventing New Yorkers from being “priced out” of the arts and securing more funding for arts education in public schools. 

Source

I will confess that my initial inclination was to wonder if these were just idealized plans and if the candidates had any concept of how they would be paid for. But then I was reminded that Lander is the NYC Comptroller so he is actually intimately familiar with the city’s budget and how it is spent.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Government Relations, Leadership, State of the Arts

No Comments

These Are Not The Fans You Are Looking For

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin recently made a post about fans which can sort of hit close to home for arts organizations. His observations also serve to illustrate that the relationship dynamics experienced by arts and cultural organizations are not exclusive to that sector.

He states not every fan of an entity, product, or franchise necessarily contributes to their continued success. He says the cranky fans:

And the cranky fans, who know that they have found a place where they will be heard, and who use that opportunity to split hairs and find something to be disappointed with. They are cranky because they care, but they’re also cranky because it gives them power.

They’ll happily pirate the software, argue about a launch strategy, demand comp tickets to the event and reserve their conversations for other insiders, instead of spreading the word.

[…]

“I’m your best customer” is what they might say, when they’re not at all.

Source

One of the reasons I used the term franchise before is because Godin seemed to be pretty much describing the fans of so many superhero and sci-fi movie/tv series..

But when he mentioned these fans reserving conversations for insiders rather than spreading the word, I realized that there can be a lot of overlap with insiders at arts and cultural organizations.

The bigger realization I had was that while these groups may be speaking passionately and at great length about arts and cultural organizations they may not be spreading the word. And that is probably running counter to our best interests.

Godin says as much in the penultimate paragraph when he emphasizes the importance of choosing your fans. What he describes is cultivating a relationship with and for fans rather than taking a transactional approach:

…some creators and small businesses respond to early fan response by doing things to the audience (cashing out) as opposed to working to do things with and for them (leading). It puts some fans on the defensive, even if this particular creator has made the difficult decision to stick with the mission.

[…]

At the same time, I see small businesses and creators that I care about struggling, simply because their fans are not only taking them for granted, they’re becoming entitled and insular as well. When fans commit to a movement and help it grow, they benefit.

Source

Audience Relations, Leadership, Marketing/PR

No Comments

123…773 Next
Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

/ Find It!

/ Recent Comments

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