As a blogger, I think I’m supposed to begin the New Year with reflections and projections. But the traumas of 2020 are still too fresh for me and the way forward, while bringing hope, is far murkier than it has been at the beginning of almost any year of my life. So I won’t try to do either.
What I will do is suggest that at least one question I’ve seen raised about the nonprofit arts industry in 2021 is the wrong one. Roughly put, it is “How will post-pandemic life impact us and our work?” To me, this illustrates the self-defeating artcentricity that plagues us.
Effective marketing (but don’t misunderstand me, this is not a post about marketing) understands that it makes no difference what the provider of a good or service thinks they “sell.” What is important is what the potential “consumer” of the good/service thinks it is. So, an automobile is not the nuts and bolts that its engineers might imagine; it is (to name but two) a means of transportation or a lifestyle statement. The car is what its buyers perceive it to be.
In this highly fraught moment, our question should not be about what it all means to us. It should be about the impact of 2020 and any opening up that happens in 2021 and beyond on our communities and how that impact will affect their view of/interactions with us.
Will we be seen as an important part of healing and renewal? Will we be seen as a nice diversion from the indescribably difficult 2020 and it’s aftermath that we’ve all faced? Or will we be seen at all by enough people to have an impact on our viability over the next decade?
Here I will risk a small bit of prognostication.
- There will be an initial surge in participation by many of our true believers, although some percentage will probably still be gun shy about getting out again; but I don’t think that surge will be sustained for long and that we will eventually settle back at about where we were before.
- There will be new participation by the curious who are eager for social contact, but unless we are doing things differently, I don’t imagine our retention rates will be much better than in the past.
But the critical issue for us is whether we will be seen at all and, if so, will we be seen in a positive light by enough people to overcome the profound economic forces that have loomed as existential threats for so long. At the risk of redundancy, to be viable for the long term our industry must substantially expand its reach. I fear that unless we significantly alter our thinking about and relationships with the new communities that are vital for our survival, we will not be seen at all. Or, perhaps worse, if we continue to be seen as adjuncts of the elite we will be less appealing than we were before. Communities have been hurting and they have seen that they fared far less well than those with money and power.
So our questions should be, first, “What are our communities feeling/ experiencing?” and second, “How can we help them?” Once we have our questions right, we will need to position ourselves to be of help. In order to do that, we must first Connect and then Matter. As you might suspect, those topics will be for another day–very soon.
In the meantime . . .
Engage!
Doug
Photo:
“Connect and then Matter”
Brilliant.
Should be the new mantra for every arts organization.
I have been spending a lot of time thinking about this, and there seems to me a huge opportunity for arts to lead the way back to defining what our new normal is going to be. There is built up demand for arts to bring us back together as a community across the lines that social distancing drew, there is huge demand for outdoor spaces (one of the few places we felt safe the last year already) and outdoor community arts instillations to facilitate interaction as we phase in vaccines. There is a new migration of millennials outside the larger cities to smaller communities as they seek space, and I am hoping that the cultural proclivity travels with them – bringing the want for more music and more performance, bringing skills, or even just using our mid-life pandemic crisis as the excuse to try something new and start taking more classes like pottery and new languages. Etsy is even bigger than ever, they were huge for face masks that defined us instead of the medicinal/reusable ones.
So maybe there is a benefit in arts organizations not just thinking about what their community needs, but anticipating the universal challenges we are about to face as a community as we phase again together the next six months to a year – making them an invaluable part of the community more likely to receive broad financial support.