Laura Kakolewski

Arrive early. Be Prepared. Wear something memorable. Have a firm handshake.

Recognize these phrases?

These are just some of the common practices that we all know and memorize when trying to get the most out of any in-person networking event.

Each year at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference, I am reminded that networking is both a powerful tool and advantageous activity; some of the most exciting activities the conference offers are the stellar networking events. And the activities in Louisville this year are sure to follow suit.

The conference’s networking events provide attendees with a platform to constantly engage and share fresh ideas while getting to know their colleagues from different sides of the country.

Will Lester

How well do you know your audiences…really?

Before the curtain goes up you can undoubtedly pick out that valued donor or long-time subscriber in your audience. Or, at every exhibition opening, you probably know the faces and names of the most important and dedicated members attending. But who are all the rest of the people coming through your doors? Are the majority of people who have been to your organization before, or are they new? And are they new to the arts or just new to you?

The team at TRG Arts was curious about this too. What we found is that, in a given season, about 50% of the people coming to your arts events are people you have seen before. The other 50% are new to the organization, although maybe not to the arts.

Subscribers, members, and other regular attendees actually only comprise about 37% of the typical database. Another 14% are “reactivated” patrons—patrons who have some sort of buying history, but haven’t bought in the last two years.

Clayton Lord

As the marketing and communications director at an arts service organization, I’m often approached by marketing directors at our over 300 member companies with questions about various channels of marketing and communications.

Recently, a frazzled executive director at a small company (one of those that often doesn’t have a dedicated or even semi-dedicated marketing person) contacted me to have a conversation about social media. She had a board member who thought they could expand their reach dramatically by reaching out through social media, and she wanted to know how to create a Facebook page to do that.

I was sad to have to tell her that that strategy probably wasn’t going to work. The truth of the matter is that social media, like all the tools in the marcomm toolkit, has a specific spectrum of usefulness—and unfortunately, the type of social media interactions she was talking about just weren’t going to get her very much traction with people who didn’t know or care about her organization already.

Whenever I think about a marcomm plan, I work in my head with a very basic and non-scientific spectrum, stretching from what I term “engagement” (i.e. making those who already know you feel more engaged with you) to “development” (i.e. making those who don’t know you, well, know you).

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.

Chip Heath

Sybarite5 has a dream—to change the face of chamber music across the globe. They want to be the first string quintet to perform in all 50 states.

They have a strategy to make it real. Like many artists across the country, they are seeking potential investors around the world by launching their  "play in 50 states" campaign on Kickstarter.

Sybarite5

Sybarite5—Sami Merdinian and Sarah Whitney, violin; Angela Pickett, viola; Laura Metcalf, cello, and Louis Levitt, bass—recently shared what it is like to be emerging artists seeking support through innovative ways, with the 20+ philanthropic leaders at the Americans for the Arts Seminar for Leadership in the Arts at the Aspen Institute last week.

The concept is simple: they create a short video about the project; people watch it; if they like it, a couple of clicks and they can pledge their support. If pledges reach $9,000 or more within 30 days, the project is funded—if not, $0.