I recently had the opportunity to meet with leaders of several arts groups in Seattle. One was Gus Denhard, executive director of Seattle's Early Music Guild. In the course of the conversation, he told me about a fundraiser his organization has been involved in. Ordinarily, I am not enthusiastic about fundraisers as community engagement activities since they usually simply involve giving a portion of an event's proceeds to some worthy cause with … [Read more...]
Public Policy and Community Engagement
Over a two month period last year, TRG Arts and Engaging Matters partnered on a series of posts examining relationship building as the foundation of effective fundraising, marketing, and community engagement. (Relationships All the Way Down) Coincidentally, in the midst of that series, voters in Cuyahoga County overwhelmingly approved (by a 3:1 margin! Yes, you are reading that correctly.) the renewal of a tobacco tax specifically earmarked for … [Read more...]
Relationships All the Way Down
This is the last of a series of blog posts in conjunction with TRG Arts on the interrelationships among marketing, development, fundraising, and community engagement. (Cross-post can be found at Analysis from TRG Arts.) Two months ago, Jill Robinson and Amelia Nothrup-Simpson of TRG Arts and I (OK: the commercial–of ArtsEngaged) began exploring the fact that almost every important facet of arts administration is (or should be) rooted in … [Read more...]
Farmer and the Cowman Redux
Three years ago I published a post titled The Farmer and the Cowman in which I acknowledged an epiphany about the relationship between arts marketing and community engagement. In the past six months I have, on several occasions, been re-confronted with the truth of their close relationship (when both are being done well). This was really driven home to me in the highly flattering (and most embarrassing) post written by Trevor O’Donnell Taking a … [Read more...]
Artcentric Engagement
In Parsing "Engage" I addressed the fact that the meaning of the word engagement is dependent upon who is engaging with whom toward what end. This is a quick followup to that meditation. I recently ran across the following headline in an arts newsletter: "2015–The Year You Become Engaged in the Arts." This fairly clearly shows that the intent is to bring people who are outside in. There is no indication of an awareness of a need for the arts to … [Read more...]
Lessons from a Grocery Chain
It's amazing where one can find inspiration. In May NPR did a feature on a Southwest Philadelphia grocery store that I immediately tweeted. Then as I read it in more detail I discovered I simply had to write about it. The story concerns opening a grocery store in what was considered to be a "food desert"–an urban area that ostensibly will not support a traditional grocery store with fresh produce and associated "middle class" staples. When Jeff … [Read more...]
AftA Thoughts 2015: The Arts and . . .
This is the final installment in a series of posts reflecting on last June's Americans for the Arts convention in Chicago. (But don’t get too hopeful, there are several other impressions from the event percolating that I won’t label with this group.) A focus of Americans for the Arts over the next several years is going to be pairing of the arts with other disciplines. Conversations and work around the arts and medicine, the arts and … [Read more...]
AftA Thoughts 2015: Bait and Switch
As I said in my last post, in June I attended Americans for the Arts convention in Chicago. As part of my annual reflections on that experience, I wanted to comment on something that's been on my mind for years. In plenary sessions videos and performers were featured that demonstrated the power of the arts to transform lives and make communities better places to live. Stories like those are what originally brought me to this work and continue to … [Read more...]
You Have to Go to Them Sometimes
Source: http://blog.thereadingroom.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/thesinglewoman.jpg I've said it much less well in many more words numerous times before. Engage! Doug … [Read more...]
“Of” the Community
In May I had occasion to attend two music festivals of very different kinds. One was a country music event titled HoustonFest held in Galax, VA. The other was Greensboro, NC's 29th Annual Carolina Blues Festival. I went to the former largely for family reasons. The blues festival was one I've been wanting to take in for a long time. The back-to-back juxtaposition of two such focused celebrations inevitably led to a number of comparisons and an … [Read more...]