Ideas

There’s quite a bit of nerdery happening in the blog post. If you’re new to the conference, you’ll want to read the whole thing. If you’re a vet, you may want to skip toward the end of the post. I hope you find some of my ideas helpful.

If you’ve never been to Digital Marketing Boot Camp for the Arts, let me just say this: you will find your people.

I’m the Director of Marketing, Sales, and Communications at BalletMet, and this will be my fifth year attending, and my first year presenting! Every year, I always find someone new to connect and nerd out with. Want to talk AI? Go for it. Want to chat about strategy for building new audiences? Yes, please! Want to give me a ridiculous amount of amazing information that I can use to do my job better, cheaper and more efficiently? Glory to the marketing geeks and gods.

It has never been easy to run an arts organization. Since our dreams are always larger than our budgets, arts organizations almost always grow to the point where it is uncomfortable. I have never met an arts leader who believes they have enough resources to meet their needs.

We have always fretted about box office revenue and fundraising success. We have always looked to attract new audiences and donors. We have always prayed that an angel donor would fall in love with our work and allow us to make a quantum leap in artistic ambition and budget.

As arts marketers, we invest a lot of time learning the tools of the trade and staying up to speed on the ever-changing technological landscape. But what if one of the ways we can enhance our performance at work is by doing something for ourselves? Namely, getting our financial house in order.

Just like eating a balanced diet, exercising and getting enough sleep, maintaining healthy financial habits is fundamental to achieving and sustaining career success. One reason for this is that financial stress has a direct impact on productivity, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Not surprisingly, about 70% of Americans say that financial stress is their most common source of stress.

Podcasts are a powerful way to connect with your patrons and attract new ones. Like arts buyers, the podcast-listening audience is intellectually curious and active. With 90 million people listening podcasts monthly, the landscape is ripe for more arts institutions to offer podcasts. But is it right for your organization?

Arts administrators from Seattle Opera, The Joyce Theater, and The Rubin Museum of Art answer frequently asked questions about launching a podcast including branding and artwork inspiration, equipment recommendations, and how their podcast ideas came to fruition.

What does it mean to “market” the brand? Some industries are all about brand marketing. The game we play, working in the performing arts, is most often one of conversions - get butts in those seats! I’ve been thinking a lot about brand marketing since I arrived at Carnegie Hall just over two years ago.

An arts organization can have the best digital strategies in the world, but so much of an organization's success comes down to people, culture, and leadership.

Without valuing people, we won’t meet the critical challenges of connecting with our audiences in the 21st century. 

I recently presented a webinar called "Creating a People-First Culture," or if you're a glass half empty person, "The People Crisis in the Arts." I am passionate about this topic and want to share this webinar with you. 

Almost 97 years passed between the first telephone call in 1876 and the first mobile phone call in 1973. In 1991, the World Wide Web became publicly available, and just 13 years later, a couple of kids launched Facebook from their dorm room. Three years after that, in 2007, Apple released the first iPhone and fundamentally altered how we engage with the web and with each other.

The Internet has brought us cat memes and viral ASMR videos, and our mobile devices have made it possible to watch them during meetings. It has brought us more relevant ads and better ways to measure their effectiveness, but it has also brought us data scandals and privacy concerns.

CI to Eye is a podcast for arts leaders who want to reach their full potential. Each episode is created to help you become better at your job so you can help the arts move forward.

Ask the Industry features advice from arts marketers in their own words. We hope you that it will spark new ideas for your organization.

This month, we’re asking, “What’s your advice for an organization looking to start and maintain a blog?”

Calvin Dotsey (Houston Symphony), Jeff Fickes (Seattle Shakespeare Company), and Krystina Tran (Stanford Live) discuss everything from how to feasibly create blog content on a regular basis, to the different types of audiences they write for, and the tools they use to keep everything in line.

Now that all of the ballots from the 2018 midterms are finally (mostly) counted, the election season has come to an end (though the politicking never seems to stop).

Many arts marketers feel the aftermath of an election season, and spend time trying to recover from a downturn in ticket sales. At University Musical Society (UMS), we call this the “election year phenomenon,” and it’s something we’ve been tracking for well over 20 years.

The difference is that we’re using our data to do something about it.