Panlogic recently released a report called Digital Philanthropy for the Arts. It’s good – thorough and well-explained and worth recommending to clients as reading material.
The key findings are as follows (and taken directly from the executive summary):
Emotion is the key reason why people give. Arts organisations need to optimise the giving process to give donors reasons to feel good and to look good in front of their peers
Technology has changed who gives and how. As a result, Arts organisations need to overcome their demographic prejudices, that too often still focus on monthly direct debits from baby boomers. The Arts world is moving from a model of fewer, high level donations to many, smaller donations.
Mobile giving is the way forwards. We believe that a national mobile-giving platform (allowing donors to text the amount they wish to donate to an organisation-specific number) would help drive significant impulse donations. Vodafone are leading on this with their JustTextGiving service.
Arts organisations need to ensure that all the ‘hygiene’ factors within the giving journey are ticked. They must be visibly unflashy and efficient. Their appeals must be explicit and proactive, ideally leveraging their creative talent
The main reasons for not giving fall within the Arts organisation’s to resolve – so ‘don’t put barriers up’
Elsewhere, I’d recommend the list of barriers to entry cited by organisations (p8) and things that might go wrong (p32). I’d also suggest you read the reasons why people do (pp9-12) and don’t (pp14-16) give and the best practices with regard to donors, digital (generally) and social media (p20 onwards).
The breakdown of the Southbank Centre’s email supporting their Pull Out All The Stops was interesting (and not unfair at all, criticism doesn’t come much more constructive).
Neil‘s talk set the scene for the day ahead, laying down a few broad themes. He produced an awful lot of case studies, mainly drawn from the world of multinational brands (Old Spice, VW Sao Paulo, Rainbow Warrior and so on). Amusingly, a slide presenting one of the more modest-looking case studies came with a note at the bottom saying it was achieved “on a slim budget of $100,000″.
Susan gave the sense of what it’s like for a small team working at a large institution. One of the first things she flagged up was the need for guidelines and policies to make staff aware of what they could and couldn’t do.
seems like first two speakers contradicting each other. One is all about plans, schedules etc, the other about being nimble
I don’t seem to have taken all that many notes from Susan’s talk, although I did note that they like using SocialFlow. I also thought it was interesting that they chose to work with Improv Everywhere on a small stunt – an organisation that brings a huge online following with them.
After that and a coffee (decaf – I’m still enforcing my arbitrary November caffeine ban) we split off into different seminars. I went to…
Seminar: Using Social and Digital Media to Reach and Engage Audiences
Kingsley was up first, talking about the way in which Sadler’s use video to sell tickets to their shows. He showed this video (NB possibly NSFW) as an example of the kind of thing that he has to sell. The point being that it can be tricky to write about some of the work they present so video is very important to them.
He talked about the different types of video content they produce, showed what happened when the previous video was uploaded to another user’s account, referred to YouTube as being good for international brand building and ended on a few takeaway points:
Comms should be the driver, not tech.
Make sure your content is fit for purpose
Share your content widely and keep it up on your site afterwards
Be prepared to hold on loosely (or even let go sometimes)
Make video central to your social media strategy
He was also cynical about mobile applications, saying that to be worthwhile they need to serve a useful function, ring-fence content or be a source of regularly updated content.
Tate’s social media strategy is online for all to see, but Jesse was also very generous in showing how that strategy is put into effect on a daily basis using Google Analytics, Hootsuite Pro, weekly planning meetings and a trusty excel spreadsheet.
He talked about content planning to ensure a spread of tone and subject matter as well as how they go about evaluating which content strands work best. He described the latter activity as ‘essential’.
Sam came from the perspective of working with artists and organisations with more limited resources and talked openly about what had and hadn’t worked on a couple of campaigns that they’d run. There was the fickleness of UGC and the success of seeking out bloggers in areas other than the arts – in one case, food bloggers. Her tips were to:
MoMA has 2.8m visitors a year with 21.7m website visitors and a relatively small crossover between the two. There’s also a shedload more who interact via social media. Their approach used to be all about supporting the museum with a website, but there’s now an extent to which they want to serve an online audience, irrespective of whether they come to the building.
Allegra is based in MoMA’s IT team and works with comms, marketing and other departments – she said it’s a benefit not to be based within just one of those other departments.
She walked through some of the online functionality that they have in place and some of the campaigns that they’ve run. These included audio tours (which have moved from devices handed out to visitors to content visitors can download to their own devices), iPhone apps, an iPad app (with feline promotional vid) and a books app. There was also Talk To Me and I Went to MoMA and…
Rachel Coldicutt pointed out that MoMA’s underlying foundation is very sensible. Allegra showed this in a strategy slide near the end of her talk – they have reasonably centralised content that can then be pushed to a variety of platforms, no matter what devices, applications might come along.
After her talk (and another break) we went back into seminars. I’d picked the Keynote in conversation session, where there were some good questions asked and answers given. I’ve no notes from that, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
***
As I always conclude with these things, the real value is in meeting people during the breaks and over lunch, so hello to the people I met and thanks for the good conversations. Thanks also to the AMA for organising the event and to Sadler’s Wells (the hosts) and Spektrix (the sponsors).
Here’s how the project worked: researchers worked with small focus groups to understand their associations with arts and culture organizations and developed several framing arguments for public support of the arts. Then, they interviewed 400 people by phone and online, presenting them with a short framing argument (80-120 words), followed by a series of open-ended questions intended to determine how memorable the argument was, how it influenced their perception of the public value of the arts, and how likely it was to inspire action
The Doofer Call: On [that] day, 4th October 2011… pt 1 - “All in all we launched a new brand, the beta of the all-new IWM website, a re-skinned image licensing site, overhauled e-shop, redesigned print sales website, and phase 1 of a new system for delivering collections information to our public digital interfaces”.
I like the kind of post where someone creates something unexpectedly popular and then blogs about why they think it was good. In this case, simple rules for designing slides
When you go to the theatre why don’t you see trailers?
This question’s been bugging me for a few weeks now. After all, when was the last time you went to the cinema and didn’t see trailers? Why the difference? In both cases you’ve got a captive audience of a few hundred (or maybe even a couple of thousand) people all facing the same direction and open to being entertained.
It’s not just the theatre either (and I’ll include plays, musicals, opera, dance and comedy in that). There’s rarely anything at concerts or gigs where the crowd is left standing around for 30-45mins waiting for the next band to set up.
Content
Actually, ‘trailers’ is probably a bit misleading. I get that a noisy video trailer for an upcoming show might not hit the the right tone, but there are all sorts of things that can be put on a screen.
How about a (silent) slideshow of upcoming events? That wouldn’t be so invasive, would probably do the job and needn’t be too time-consuming or expensive to pull together.
Or you could put up:
info about fundraising campaigns (perhaps with a JustTextGiving code) or educational/outreach projects the venue is involved in.
mentions of social media channels people could subscribe to – many of them will be sat there with mobiles on them, after all.
links to extra info about the show. You could even put up a big QR code if you thought you could handle that much ugly all at once (not that many people would know what to do with it).
commercial adverts – sorry to get all money-grabbing, but why not?
I’m sure that, given five minutes thought, you could come up with all sorts of creative/fun/useful alternatives for those screens.
Feasibility
Setting up a screen (or projecting on to something else) temporarily can’t be that difficult – after all, I’ve seen more impressive things done on stage. At the Hippodrome alone I can think of three different ways I’ve seen screens used recently:
I saw Carlos Acosta there a few weeks back and at one point in the show there was a massive video piece projected on to a screen that filled the stage.
For my sins, I saw Strictly Come Dancing last year and that featured video contributions from one of the judges, with a screen wheeled on stage quickly each time it was needed.
The Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Royal Gala Performance I saw last year (I know, get me) featured large TV screens placed all around the theatre.
Come to think of it, the NME used to bring screens to the O2 Academy for their tours. Between bands they showed promos for the magazine, the tour sponsor and the bands.
What I’m saying is it can be done and in various ways. Of course I’ve really not got much of an idea of the cost/logistics involved so am ready and willing to be shot down mercilessly in the comments.
Finances
I remember when we were offered the unit in the Bullring for the Created in Birmingham shop, the alternative was for the shopping centre to sell the window space to a display advertising company who would serve up adverts to the passing crowds. Those screens would have paid for themselves very quickly indeed.
Would the same be true for theatre screens? There might be a direct financial benefit in terms of tickets sold and funds raised. I’ve no idea about the logistics involved, there are some happily established cinema advertising networks out there. I wonder what it would take to tap into those.
What’s the obstacle?
Is it artistic? Financial? Logistical? Is there some indication that audiences would object?
Inside auditorium I haven’t met a director that would allow. In foyer I guess it’s a resource (lack of) thing
Which was interesting because, come to think of it, I can think of a few larger arts centres that use screens in and around their foyers, making their absence from auditoriums that bit more glaring.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t an amazingly revolutionary idea – someone must have looked into this before. Or someone must be doing it. I realise I don’t know much about the practicalities involved here and it’s been bugging me, so if anyone could shed any light I’d be grateful.
Typical. I hit publish and minutes later find this post from LondonDance.com about Sadler’s Wells (a client, no less) trying out cinema-style trailers of upcoming shows in 2009. I wonder how it went. Are there any more examples?
Having instigated the project, they coordinated efforts between 17 cultural organisations, with the aim being:
to help the sector to improve the way that online cultural activities are evaluated so that we can better understand online user behaviour and hence improve the quality and reach of all of the sector’s online services
If you read nothing else…
The report makes two top-line recommendations:
Be clear ‘what’ you are trying to do online and ‘who’ it is for
Focus your online investment
Expanding on the latter, they say:
if we wish to develop our audiences we need to change the focus of our investment in our online platforms; invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) first, then mobile versions of websites and then social media.
The key recommendations
The report makes ten key recommendations:
Adopt Google Analytics for basic reporting to government along with central government use of an ISP level alternative (such as Hitwise) for balance. Widespread adoption will allow for in-depth sector analysis and benchmarking.
Adopt this report’s guidelines on best practice for configuring Google Analytics software to ensure consistent reporting. This should cover basic health checks, user segments and goal definition.
Revise the ‘whole’ suite of metrics you care about and also the tools you use to measure them. Google Analytics and Hitwise are not the solution; they must be used as part of a multi-tool solution that will require good problem definition before we start.
Engage with and consider ways to enhance Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) through investment of money and/or time. This is still the main source of most of your traffic.
Consider where, when and how you use social media to be most effective. Investment can buy you popularity but it can’t buy you engagement.
Define your online audience targets specifically and map them to your overall business objectives and targets. Online access for everyone is simply not good enough.
Don’t think about digital activities as something separate from the physical. Build links between your overall mission and business strategy and all your activities. Define your overall strategy before you deploy any specific tactics – digital or otherwise.
Build links between your web team, your marketing dept, those who create your content and your executive. Work together to define shared goals that can be used for reporting.
Get ready for mobile. Ensure your website is mobile friendly and you can respond to the growing trend of mobile access. Consider what your users want to on the move?
Remember to look at the patterns, not just the numbers. Small can be beautiful.
All of which sound perfectly sensible to me. As I said, if you’re interested in this sort of thing then the report is well worth your time.
The Conference
The report was launched at a conference held at Bristol’s Watershed. In the morning, Tom Uglow and Matt Locke (in the pic above) spoke about the general context into which culture fits online. Culture24′s Jane Finnis then gave an overview of the findings of the report and various participants in the project generously shared examples of digital efforts they’d made that had fallen a little flat but had taught them some good lessons.
In the afternoon we had the choice between sitting in on the ‘crit room’ where websites had been submitted for review by Channel 4′s Adam Gee and two UX experts, or flitting between the ‘talk tables’ I went for the latter and spoke with people from Culture24, Building Digital Capacity for the Arts and the people responsible for the social media aspects of the report.
Other bits and pieces
I had a chat with one of the people behind The Ice Book, which is a lovely little thing. They’ve been brought in to work on a stage adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle, so that’ll be interesting. I also went a bit fanboy when I spotted the man behind this talk. Only a little bit, mind.
D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Spezify – “Spezify has just launched with an impressive and different take on delivering search results. It’s primarily a visual search-engine aimed at designers and creatives, but also slips in relevant text and audio links”. Wow. This is nice
blip.tv (beta) – You can upload videos to blip.tv using FTP and if the connection drops out then you can resume (within 10 mins). This may be useful when working somewhere with a potentially iffy connection
Shift Happens by Mark Ball – “In January I was privileged to be invited to Perth by the Department of Culture and the Arts to participate as a Major Production Fund panel member and to meet with arts organisation to discuss the potential opportunities brought about by the rapid proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies, in particular Social Media tools”. Mark Ball, ex of Fierce and the RSC, now of LIFT talks arts and social media
I’m often on the look-out for ways of presenting the concept of what social media ‘is’, especially animated ones (I’m an absolute sucker for animation in its many guises). Here are a few easily-digestable faves:
I only came across this one the other day. It was produced by Michael Reissinger for Scholz & Friends which is a PR agency, hence the slant towards the challenge traditional marketing faces.
Rather more straight-laced and slightly more corporate, again with a PR edge to it. ‘The Online Media’ has been put out by RealWire, a company specialising in online PR, based in Lincoln.
Commoncraft are pretty much the masters of clear, simple visualisations. This isn’t quite their finest but it’s still pretty good and captures something the first two don’t.
I’ll give a nod to Michael Wesch’s ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us too, which sketches the evolution of the web to what is often known as Web 2.0.
If there are any others worthy of a mention please drop a link in the comments.
This post accompanies a short talk I gave at a conference for Student Union Events Officers, arranged by CID Music. I spoke about about how to use social media and online tools to promote events.
My talk was only 20 minutes long so I rattled through many of the websites and services listed below – this post is for further infomation and in place of notes.
The talk and this blog post have been written to apply particularly to music events but most of this will apply to promoting many other sorts of event.
Is someone out there enthusing about your night and telling people about it? Give them free entry, an exclusive mixtape for them to distribute, etc – help them to help you
The lovely folk at Colour have written a long post on how to promote a gig, both online and off. It’s well worth reading – they actually do this stuff.
Your suggestions
I’ve been far from comprehensive. Using each of the above is a blog post/talk in itself but the intention was to get people started. What did I miss?
