An overemphasis on data-driven work within the nonprofit sector has been shown to result in cycles of disempowerment, driven by third-party data demands of funding bodies.. This compounds due to the many market orientations nonprofits need to adopt, particularly prevalent among the arts. A key to navigating these markets and funder requirements lies in identifying a specific data culture best fit for your organization and investing in resources and training in order to achieve that framework sustainably.
With AI’s ability to automatically produce content and process complicated datasets with high accuracy, museums worldwide are exploring ways in which this innovative technology can help them better achieve their missions and advance accessibility efforts. Through case studies, learn about three applications of this technology: content digitalization, language accessibility, and visual description.
Artificial Intelligence, Public Policy, News & Announcements
October was filled with new debates on AI policies, a halt to one of the most significant AI safety bills in the United States, and a host of new AI developments in video, music, and even podcasts.
Arts and cultural nonprofits often operate in multiple markets for earned and contributed revenue. With increasing attention on data-driven decision making, effective market orientation often depends on effective data use. This fundamental collection, transmission, use, and interpretation of data within an organization collectively contributes to what can be considered an organization’s data culture.
Museums have increasingly begun to volunteer their spaces as polling places, acting as a democratic vehicle for their communities and adding to the greater fabric of America’s election infrastructure. In doing so, they can support local democratic processes and prove to their communities that they are not unbreachable temples for the elite, but open platforms for the people.
The word "engage" gets thrown around a lot. But what does it really mean? Our upcoming webinar takes a look at how arts organizations can inspire their audiences through online platforms by focusing on a case study from Jacob's Pillow, which recently launched their own online exhibit.
How can online engagement with arts audiences be meaningful, inspiring, and ultimately worth all the effort we put into the online space? Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival presents their recently launched online exhibit Dance Interactive, a collection of videos from 1930s dance pioneers to today's most visionary artists. Looking through the lens of crafting "inspiration", this webinar will help you define for your own organization what that catch-all term "engage" really means and the greater challenge of how to measure it.
Panelists:
Connie Chin is General Manager of Jacob’s Pillow, an international dance festival, school, archives, community programs, and National Historic Landmark, which recently was awarded the 2010 National Medal of Arts. At the Pillow, Connie’s special projects have included Virtual Pillow, the Nonprofit Finance Fund's Leading for the Future initiative funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation’s Leadership and Excellence in Arts Participation initiative. She has consulted as a Peer Advisor for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and served on grants panels in Connecticut and Westchester. Prior to the Pillow, she was in brand management at Kraft and Ocean Spray; and has also worked at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival and New York Foundation for the Arts. As a dancer she has performed with Bill T. Jones, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Muna Tseng, Sincha Hong, Ze'eva Cohen, and others. Connie holds a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.B.A from Yale School of Management.
Lisa Niedermeyer is an independent consultant currently managing digital projects for Jacob's Pillow, home to America's longest running international dance festival. Lisa also serves on the advisory board of Movement Media, a NYC-based organization that empowers dance artists as curators, creators, and strategists of media. Past project highlights include working with the online marketing team at Soundwalk, an international media firm specializing in sound art and iPhone audio tours, as well as collaborating with Jane Comfort and Company (with whom she performed for 7 years) as digital content director for the company's 30th anniversary rebuild of their website.
When I was working in the trenches of a theatre company in the Midwest about a year and a half ago, the arts orgs in town got together to have a round-table discussion about social networking.
At the time, I had grown my theatre’s social networking from mere presence to full-blown strategy and was seeing our friend numbers grow exponentially. I was proud of my Facebook page and our (at that time) fledgling Twitter site, but the MySpace page was the real shining star of the bunch, with almost twice as many friends as the Facebook page and three times as many as Twitter. Most intriguingly the people on MySpace didn’t feel like the people on the other networks at the time. They were much more diverse in terms of race and age. They didn’t have a professional feel like Linked-In or Twitter (in some cases). It was a network open to everyone, one that didn’t start as a “gated community” catering exclusively to historically white colleges and universities like Facebook. Best of all, they were asking questions through private messages that indicated that they hadn’t heard of the theatre or weren’t sure how to get information on shows.
At the meeting we went over the popular social networking sites and discussed how MySpace was losing its market share and how some of the orgs had abandoned it. I raised the question "But is MySpace really and truly dead?" to which about five people in unison responded "YES!" and someone said "let's move on". Ok, then...
Now around the same time, I read that MySpace was still growing, just at a slower pace than Facebook and Twitter, but that it was the social network of choice for African-Americans and other ethnic minorities. (This is referenced in Hispanic Trending and in the below video.) Interesting, huh? But I didn’t speak up again. I figured, the people have spoken. I became disenchanted with the MySpace page, still checking it, but not putting in much effort. Since that time, the very thing that made MySpace a great social network—its openness to all users—also led to its demise in popularity. (Although a study from FSU from July 2009 showed that the ill-favored network was still quite popular with English-preferring Hispanics, preferred more than 2:1 to Facebook.) However, the fact still remains that I gave up on something that at the time, for our org, had brought us close to those elusive “interested, but unaware” prospects that could be tomorrow’s patrons.
I didn’t put the two incidents together until Martin Luther King Day last week when I was thinking about diversity in the theatre. We shouldn’t just be thinking about audience diversity on MLK Day, or Hispanic Heritage Month, or when our grant proposal is coming due, but some organizations do. For most orgs, audience diversity is something we might value, but it often isn’t a part of our social media strategy or even a part of the marketing strategy. It’s easy to write off, because it is very difficult to track based on race or ethnicity. Maybe we don’t have the time or staff. Maybe we’re not completely sure how to do it effectively. But, the fact is, the world in which arts orgs operate is changing and not just because of the technology that has revolutionized that way we entertain ourselves or engage with the world.
The make-up of U.S. culture is changing. The census bureau projects that, by 2050, the Asian and Hispanic populations in the U.S. will have tripled. The percentage of African-Americans in the U.S. population will also continue to rise, at the same time they grow more affluent. Perhaps because of this, the for-profit business community has begun to recognize African-Americans as the hot emerging niche market, even profiling behaviors to help advertisers reach this audience. And, as Dr. Eszter Hargittai prophesied in the video above, the playing field for minorities in social networking is getting more level.
The past few years have seen the rise of niche social networking sites for African-Americans as well as Hispanic Americans. Additionally, the 2009 study at Florida State University referenced above found that equal percentages of English-preferring Hispanics, Asians, and non-Hispanic whites under the age of 35 now access social media sites 2-3 times a month. The study concludes with the following paragraph:
"Few marketers are proactively targeting ethnic minorities online and even fewer are leveraging social media to do so. A first mover advantage is available for those that devote the time and resources to engage these critical audiences in ways that they find meaningful. The fact is that we now have an unprecedented ability to reach and interact with ethnic minorities; and companies that deliver value to this segment today will be rewarded with the long term loyalty of this market."
So what are arts groups doing to build audience diversity in this market? In Part Two, I’ll "take to the streets" and chat with marketing directors (including Thomas Cott of Cott Mail), a media buyer, and more. Stay tuned!
There's been a vibrant debate going on in the arts blogosphere about diversity, how to best reach new audiences and the relevance of American theatre. Here are a few of the posts:
Connie Chin is General Manager of Jacob’s Pillow, an international dance festival, school, archives, community programs, and National Historic Landmark, which recently was awarded the 2010 National Medal of Arts. At the Pillow, Connie’s special projects have included Virtual Pillow, the Nonprofit Finance Fund's Leading for the Future initiative funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation’s Leadership and Excellence in Arts Participation initiative. She has consulted as a Peer Advisor for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and served on grants panels in Connecticut and Westchester. Prior to the Pillow, she was in brand management at Kraft and Ocean Spray; and has also worked at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival and New York Foundation for the Arts. As a dancer she has performed with Bill T. Jones, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Muna Tseng, Sincha Hong, Ze'eva Cohen, and others. Connie holds a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.B.A from Yale School of Management.
Lisa Niedermeyer is an independent consultant currently managing digital projects for Jacob's Pillow, home to America's longest running international dance festival. Lisa also serves on the advisory board of Movement Media, a NYC-based organization that empowers dance artists as curators, creators, and strategists of media. Past project highlights include working with the online marketing team at Soundwalk, an international media firm specializing in sound art and iPhone audio tours, as well as collaborating with Jane Comfort and Company (with whom she performed for 7 years) as digital content director for the company's 30th anniversary rebuild of their website.