Artsline

Artsline- Winter 07

Artsline Winter 07

This issue of Artsline focuses on new marketing techniques used by non profit organizations to generate new audiences and target younger generations.  Arts organizations are learning to use online tools to captivate these new audiences.

Viral Marketing for the Arts? Adapting and Implementing Core Strategies of Red Bull and other Marketing Pioneers

Image of Eric Haeker, an arts consultant and founder of Arts in Motion, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit devoted to the evolution of classical music.

Over the past century, the chasm between popular culture and the traditional arts has widened dramatically, pushing in part by the increasingly "safe" decisions of arts presenters. If the heritage arts are to thrive rather than survive, arts marketers must look beyond existing audiences and work in tandem with producers to create truly exciting events.

At a time when opera houses and concert halls struggle to maintain graying audiences, who can deny that the subscription model, although dominant since the 1960s, is showing its age? Are we surprised to see diminished returns from a strategy that requires an entire season's commitment to old or unknown works months in advance when less that $10 buys access to the latest buzz-worthy blockbuster?

4th Annual Emerging Artists & Emerging Arts Leaders Auction

The 2007 Emerging Artists & Emerging Arts Leaders Auction was a great success! The Arts Administration Graduate Association would like to thank the artists, cultural organizations, corporate sponsors, volunteers, and attendees for their support of this great event. This support helped raise over $4,400 and send 12 arts administration students to Arts Advocacy Day in Washington D.C.

Behind the Scenes: Please Touch Museum® at Memorial Hall

Image: Memorial Hall photo courtesy of Please Touch Museum®.

Recently, thirteen Drexel Arts Administration students, faculty and friends received a behind the scenes tour of Memorial Hall, the future home of Philadelphia's Please Touch Museum®.

Memorial Hall is one of the few surviving structures from the Centennial Celebration of 1876. Located in the picturesque Fairmount Park, Please Touch Museum® is scheduled to open the facility in the fall of 2008. The building is currently undergoing a three phases renovation with refurbishment of original architecture, modification and improvement to house Please Touch's trademark exhibits and the addition of a glass Carousel House, which will house a 1924 Dentzel Carousel.

Embracing Social Media

You know that things have changed when you find yourself reading the Metropolitan Opera's blog.

Arts marketing professionals are now communicating in a world in which your patrons TiVo past TV ads, buy individual music tracks instead of whole albums, and then mix their own playlists, and customize the Web experience with personalized home pages featuring the news and information they crave most. Arts lovers text-message and live-blog in the concert hall, record dance performances to upload to YouTube, and express their opinions, both pro and con, through blogs, podcasts, social networking sites like MySpace, or even become artists themselves in Second Life, an online 3-D virtual community. Your patrons are in charge, they've entered the conversation, and there's no going back.

College Audience Participation Study: Survey Finds Viable Arts Audience is Unrecognized

A concern on the minds of many arts marketers is the continuously declining base of subscribers. As the population ages, the core group of devoted audience members is weakening, and the ominous reality is that a younger audience has not yet stepped up to replace them, especially in the performing arts. It has been posited that perhaps college students are exactly that young, savvy crowd to whom arts marketers should be looking. To investigate this theory, the students of our Fall 2006 Audience Development course, led by Professor Ximena Varela, surveyed college undergraduates on their behavior and attitudes regarding their social lives and arts attendance habits. The results of this survey are quite promising for arts organizations.