Brand & Identity

Audience Building Roundtable Workshop Livestreaming or Hybrid: What’s Right for Your Organization? December 3, 2020

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation was pleased to present the final workshop in the Audience Building Roundtable COVID-19 series. This workshop also marked the final workshop for the Audience Building Roundtable, although the website resource will remain in place. The workshop features a panel discussion about sponsorship and funding for non-traditional content, a “how to” about livestreaming and hybrid content, and how to decide on a delivery method. Panelists are:

  • Scott Williford, President, vLink Solutions

  • Chelsea Steverson, Director of Marketing & Digital Engagement, Dad’s Garage Theatre

  • Megan Schmitt King, Director of Development & Strategic Partnerships, Camp Southern Ground

    • Moderator: John Bare, Senior Vice President, The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation

Presentations modeled on the Audience Building Roundtable’s “Essential Journey” took place throughout the workshop, with presenters discussing what’s working for their organizations (and what’s not) relative to livestreaming and hybrid approaches to delivering content to audiences. Presentations were made by the following organizations, and each of their presentations is attached here.

Stay top of mind during partial re-openings without losing lessons learned during the “great pause”

By Stephen Brown, President, Cookerly PR

As The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation reconvened its Audience Building Roundtable for a “COVID-19 Pivot,” I had the opportunity to talk with more than 50 arts and culture organizations in the Roundtable about ways they can stay top of mind with their audiences during a 2020 which has thrown curveballs to nearly every American institution.

The week ending June 12, 2020, the twelfth week of national arts and culture data expert Colleen Dilenschneider’s research about “intent to visit” has now intersected with societal unrest in the wake of tragedies and protests related to systemic racial injustices, capturing the attention of Americans and the world at large, with people indicating that they intend to return to their usual attendance behaviors within about three months, but with some redistribution of demand.

Preparing to Open: A Public Health Discussion with the Experts from Georgia State University School of Public Health, June 5, 2020

Dr. Gerardo Chowell, Department Chair, Population Health Sciences and Professor of Epidemiology

Dr. Lisa Casanova, Associate Professor of Environmental Health

Dr. Rodney Lyn, Interim Dean, Moderator

THE THURSDAY RETHINK: Amplifying Your Messaging Across Channels, presented by Cookerly PR, May 28, 2020

Presented by Stephen Brown, President of Cookerly PR

Download:
ABR Thursday Rethink Amplifying Your Message 5-28-20 Cookerly PR.pdf

Stephen Michael Brown, APR, is president of Cookerly Public Relations. He helps ideate for consumer and corporate campaigns, develop social media programs and strategize for all facets of integrated marketing and lead generation. Favorite recent assignments have included brand activations for nationwide clients at the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, the Kentucky Derby and the Academy Awards.

Stephen is in his element facilitating brainstorms and branding workshops, leading media training sessions and coaching executives for public speaking. He recently spoke at Social Media Week about the intersection of mixed reality on communications disciplines. Some of Stephen’s notable campaigns include the introduction of Coca-Cola Freestyle technology and the McCafé line of coffees to U.S. restaurants; celebrations of The Home Depot’s pioneering work in the DIY industry and InterfaceFLOR milestones in sustainability; and social media activations for Mercedes-Benz, General Mills, LexisNexis and Procter & Gamble.

A graduate of the University of South Carolina and of Leadership Atlanta, Stephen is past president and a board member of PRSA Georgia, chairman of the board for Actor’s Express and involved in advisory boards for Alliance Theatre, Serenbe Playhouse and Center for Puppetry Arts. He is a fan of theatre and movies. He resides in the creative enclave of Pinewood Forest in south Atlanta.

THE THURSDAY RETHINK: Building Your New Information Infrastructure, presented by Cookerly PR, May 21, 2020

Presented by Stephen Brown, President of Cookerly PR

Download:
ABR Thursday Rethink Session Building Your New Information Infrastructure CookerlyPR 5-21-20.pdf

Stephen Michael Brown, APR, is president of Cookerly Public Relations. He helps ideate for consumer and corporate campaigns, develop social media programs and strategize for all facets of integrated marketing and lead generation. Favorite recent assignments have included brand activations for nationwide clients at the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, the Kentucky Derby and the Academy Awards.

Stephen is in his element facilitating brainstorms and branding workshops, leading media training sessions and coaching executives for public speaking. He recently spoke at Social Media Week about the intersection of mixed reality on communications disciplines. Some of Stephen’s notable campaigns include the introduction of Coca-Cola Freestyle technology and the McCafé line of coffees to U.S. restaurants; celebrations of The Home Depot’s pioneering work in the DIY industry and InterfaceFLOR milestones in sustainability; and social media activations for Mercedes-Benz, General Mills, LexisNexis and Procter & Gamble.

A graduate of the University of South Carolina and of Leadership Atlanta, Stephen is past president and a board member of PRSA Georgia, chairman of the board for Actor’s Express and involved in advisory boards for Alliance Theatre, Serenbe Playhouse and Center for Puppetry Arts. He is a fan of theatre and movies. He resides in the creative enclave of Pinewood Forest in south Atlanta.

Out of Hand Builds Community - & Audience - Thru Equitable Dinners, Now Virtually

From IAMO4W to Equitable Dinners:
Out of Hand’s Unexpected Journey of Audience Building

By Ariel Fristoe, Artistic Director, Out of Hand Theater

I want to share something extraordinary and unexpected that came out of Out of Hand Theater’s audience building journey. Out of Hand works at the intersection of art, social justice, and civic engagement. We spark conversations to build a better world by using the tools of theater to support and enhance the work of community partners. Through the generosity of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, we have taken several steps on our audience building journey, starting with our neighborhood, Old Fourth Ward.

Race, Equity & Advocacy in the Arts: Attracting Diverse Audiences

By Adam Fristoe, Out of Hand Theater

Thanks to a scholarship provided by the Arthur Blank Family Foundation’s Audience Building Roundtable, Out of Hand Theater’s Co-Artistic and Marketing Director Adam Fristoe was able to attend the 2018 National Arts Marketing Conference in Seattle, Washington.

Over the past five years, Out of Hand has focused our work toward social justice, civic engagement and community building in Metro Atlanta. In Seattle, Washington, both the city and King County have policies in place that make a commitment to equity, in particular to racial equity, including taking into account historical inequities. In Seattle, I was specifically looking for guidance and best practices in implementing such a commitment at Out of Hand, as well as for strategies to advance advocacy for these policies in Atlanta.

Audience Building Innovation on Display at the Alliance Theatre

By Gevin Reynolds, Fellow, The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation

 At the Audience Building Roundtable workshop on July 27, 2018, the Alliance Theatre presented the results of their Audience Building Innovation Grant, awarded by the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to fund innovative audience building initiatives in their 48th, 49th, and 50thseasons. Below is a summary of their presentation.

Strategies that Succeed

By Sara R. Leonard, Founder and CEO, Sara Leonard Consulting

As any client of mine and any attendee of the February 2018 Audience Building Roundtable (ABR) meeting will attest, I always remind organizations I’m working with that there is no silver bullet in audience building. If there were, all of the brilliant and diligent nonprofit arts administrators I see would have found it and put it to use. There is no single strategy or tactic that will be successful for all organizations. Each has a different identity: different missions, different values, and – of course – different audiences. But it occurs to me that when we make the time to create really good audience development plans, we’re equipping ourselves about as well as we possibly can.

Aspiration over Desperation

by: Rebecca Danis, The Atlanta Opera

How is a brand significant in the lives of its users? Cynthia Round (former senior vice president of marketing for The Metropolitan Museum of Art) posited this question during her session – “Can We Make Our Cultural Institutions Irresistible?” – at the American Marketing Association Nonprofit Marketing Conference in Washington D.C. in July 2017. Thanks to a scholarship from the Audience Building Roundtable of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, I attended on behalf of The Atlanta Opera.

The National Black Arts Festival: Communicating with our Audience

By Vikki Morrow, President & CEO

In early 2016, faced with a declining audience base, the National Black Arts Festival (NBAF) looked to better understand who our audiences are, why they support us and how we are serving them.

Current Situation: Our 30th Anniversary

One of our challenges is a change in programming that NBAF implemented during the last several years, moving from a festival season to year-round programming...

JUNE 2017 ISSUE: Core Dance-Building our Audience

CORE DANCE

Building our Audience 

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This year at Core, we have spent quite a bit of our audience building effort on our brand development. In this huge endeavor, we have managed to change our logo, add graphics to our building, change our colors, our fonts, our website and much of our language. We have also added new positions to our staff and have more company members than we have had in the past 4 years.

Through all of this effort that Core Dance has taken to re-brand and re-fresh, communicating our changes is the most challenging part. Our social media pages have new photos but our page still looks the same and the followers are still growing at a very slow pace, the same with our e-blast clicks and open rates.

 

FUELING THE CHANGE AT NAMPC

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I begin to search the website for the National Arts Marketing Project, the title of the 2016 conference caught me immediately! “Fueling the Change” It was exactly what I needed, with an emphasis on social media marketing.

As I moved through the different sessions at the NAMPC, one of the universal messages I took away is that, this marketing world changes with each minute of the day and it’s moving as fast as our technology. We have to keep up. It is 2017 and we are marketing like it’s 2011. Just think of your cell phone now and the Blackberry you had 6 years ago, and what about the technological advances of your 2012 Toyota Corolla to your 2017 Corolla, it probably has wifi now, backup cameras and push button start, to name a few. It all became clear to me that the effort I was making to communicate wasn’t as fresh as our new branding.

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TRIAL AND ERROR

Re-branding took a year of planning and research. That is the groundwork that needed to be done and the same needed to be done for our communications. Since the department is staffed by one person, and we are in the middle of the season, I knew this would be challenging. So I started with social media because it's at the majority of society's fingertips. I began by implementing a few tips I received from the social media breakout session.

I tried the light-hearted, funny post, because people like to laugh and enjoy social media for leisure. We receive minimal engagement from this post. It didn’t speak to Core Dance's audience.

I tried the 80/20 rule—80% of your content should be entertaining or about community—not be a hard sell—and 20% should be about Core Dance and our events. They were hit or miss, depending on how well I could relate to our audience.

I realized that I wasn’t engaging our audience because I didn’t really know them. I needed to go back to the drawing board, put a plan together, research and put the same energy into communicating that we did with our branding.

THE BEGINNING

I am at the beginning of the planning work. I began by working with our current tools to figure out where we are in our audience engagement. I looked through Facebook Insights and found that our most engaging posts are those that are directly related to the community, with no ulterior motive. This was also true of our e-blast data.

WHAT DO WE WANT?

This data was useful in learning what excites our current audience. Then it was time to set goals. How much do we want to grow, how quickly and what do we want our audience to know about us or how do we want them to see us? These are all questions I need to answer before I can set goals for our audience engagement. I will be taking these questions to the whole organization on an organization-wide planning day, so we can work in the way that our values dictate: in collaboration. At this session I will conduct an internal focus group about where we are currently, and together we will strategize on goals we should set for audience engagement through social media.

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TAKE IT TO THE STREETS

Once the internal focus group is completed, the external focus group will be held. This is where the challenge lies. How do we get audiences that we have yet to engage to participate in a focus group and what groups do we use? The answer is “the lowest hanging fruit:” the group that goes to dance performances, just not ours; the group of art lovers or creators—the group that has come close to engaging and for some reason just didn’t get around to doing it. We need to do research, find out who that group is and approach them at their level. Once I get the information I need from our current and prospective audience members, the plan is to create content based on speaking to the audience we want to market to. I will continue to test different ways to communicate throughout the summer months until we have a solid plan in place for the next fiscal year. Our plan will include a content social media calendar and scheduled posts.

WHAT DO WE WANT?

This data was useful in learning what excites our current audience. Then it was time to set goals. How much do we want to grow, how quickly and what do we want our audience to know about us or how do we want them to see us? These are all questions I need to answer before I can set goals for our audience engagement. I will be taking these questions to the whole organization on an organization-wide planning day, so we can work in the way that our values dictate: in collaboration. At this session I will conduct an internal focus group about where we are currently, and together we will strategize on goals we should set for audience engagement through social media.

SOCIAL MEDIA ~ MAKE IT YOUR MISSION

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My advice to my fellow Audience Building Roundtable members is to set aside dedicated time to develop your social media: let it be your mission and be sure that it is strategic. It isn’t just a simple marketing tool, it isn’t something that we can leave to a volunteer or intern to plan and implement. Don’t just post on social media, but engage, share and comment on others if you want that engagement in return. Start off with mastering Facebook, because it's the most utilized platform and managing more than one won't be as effective, quality over quantity. Lastly, try, if you can, to hire someone specifically for social media. It is a job all its own.

We look forward to growth in audience and engagement through our new information, new tools, and knowledge that we gather

What Need Does our Audience “Hire” us to Fill?

A Conversation with Marguerite Hannah, Associate Producer, Horizon Theatre Company

Marguerite Hannah attended the November 2016 National Arts Marketing Project Conference with a scholarship provided by the Audience Building Roundtable initiative of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. Marguerite shares her insights from the conference in this blog.

My biggest takeaways from the National Arts Marketing Project Conference are (1) the importance of living your brand, and (2) being empathetic to the needs of our audience.

Brand vs Vision: Embracing Your Brand

By Tricia Ekholm, Chief Marketing Officer, Atlanta Ballet

In August 2016, Gennadi Nedvigin joined the Atlanta Ballet as the third artistic director in its 89 year history. His arrival provided the marketing team with both a challenge and an opportunity. 

The challenge: shifting our brand to reflect a new artistic vision and aesthetic. 

The opportunity: put renewed energy behind our brand.

What’s the Missing Piece in Audience Building?

This post is excerpted from the plenary session of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s November 2, 2015 workshop, Art of Change: Building Your Organization for Audiences. This is from an exchange among Dr. Bob Harlow, the moderator and lead researcher for the Wallace Foundation’s audience building initiative and three panelists, all of whom were participants in the Wallace initiative:  Ellen Walker, Executive Director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet; Magda Martinez, Director of Programs for the Fleisher Art Memorial; and Christopher Taylor, President of The Clay Studio.

Building the Organization for its Audience

When the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation convened a workshop on November 2, 2015 to talk about audience development, I was struck by the tagline they chose: “Building Your Organization for Audiences.”

Building the organization for its audience. The phrase seems just right, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said that way before. We talk so often about how to build audiences for our arts organizations, but that seems to separate

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