This week I was part of a panel discussion and brainstorming session with members of the Vancouver technology community and WESTAF, the Western States Arts Federation.
Quote: From the About Us: WESTAF is a nonprofit arts service organization dedicated to the creative advancement and preservation of the arts. Based in Denver, Colorado, WESTAF fulfills its mission to strengthen the financial, organizational and policy infrastructure of the arts by providing innovative programs and services to artists and arts organizations in the West and nationwide.
WESTAF is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; the state arts agencies of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming; private and corporate foundations; and individuals.
Basically WESTAF is trying to figure out how to better use their existing web properties and technology to support the arts organizations they represent. They have some really interesting tools such as ArtJob Online for job seekers and ArtistsRegister.com. But they also have online tools for helping arts agencies and funding bodies put out electronic calls for submission and online ways to review grant applications and entries.
For privacy reasons I don’t want to post my full presentation notes, but I think some of the basic points are things that all arts organizations and artists could consider. Here’s a summarized version.
Quote: What I notice working with arts agencies and funders is that umbrella arts organizations are good at communicating with their member arts organizations, those organizations are good at communicating and building relationships with the artists they represent, and the artists are good at peer-to-peer networking.
At each level there is a certain amount of promotion of artists and services to the public. But arts organizations are seeing a decrease in audience attendance, in book sales, in season tickets, in arts funding in schoolsówhatever it is.
So somewhere along the line weíre missing the key step, which is getting artists or arts orgs networking not just with other artists but with a fan base (so finding fans, creating a fan base, engaging with them, giving fans tools for word-of-mouth or buzz marketing–basically increasing public awareness and enhancing the value of the arts in the mind of the public).
Sometimes it is easy to see how individual artists can use the web to do this type of social networking, but it’s more difficult to figure out what you as an organization can do.
The challenge is to get arts funders, arts agencies, etc. to understand the importance of online tools and services and how they have an impact on the end result, which is selling more ideas, content, lifestyle.
Itís not about the physical product: books, artwork, season tickets. You sell the physical product by building communities of interest through networked effects. [There was some discussion about this, which also came up in my SFU presentation this week. More on that later.]
The first thing to understand is that the ways people use the web today is different than the ways they were using it five years ago. Remember also the web is only 15 years old. A lot of sites we talk about [Flickr, Digg, delicious–sites launched in the last 1-5 years] might not seem relevant at first glance, but understanding the nature of the web is going to help drive the changes you make to your existing products and to help make decisions about what you want to do next.
Look at the websites that are successful or have a commanding presence: Flickr, delicious, Gmail, Google Adsense, eBay, Wikipedia, BitTorrent; all these sites have things in common: good content, user participation, engagement, a viral effect.
The objective is to get organizations or artists to look at their digital assets and find ways
1) to make content PARTICIPATORY, both in content creation and content consumption.
2) to use the Web to ENGAGE with their target market.
3) And to create a VIRAL effect. Whatever they/you are doing online needs to be cool enough or interesting enough or important enough for people to pass on to their friends or colleagues (most likely in the form of links).
So how do make you (as an arts org) make your existing content participatory? What might that look like? [Here we had a discussion based on some suggestions particular to WESTAF.]
I was really thrilled to be a part of this panel. I enjoy understanding industries that are related to my own and looking a the overall strategy. It was mentally very stimulating and I thank Darren Barefoot for inviting me along.