Selling The Benefit

There’s a good post from arts marketer Ruth Hartt where she recounts how difficult it is to find an arts and culture website that features a homepage hero section that focuses on patron over program. Customer centric advertising is anything but new, but Hartt hits the nail on the head when she laments about how few arts and culture organizations put that approach into practice. Having said that, she recently came …

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Sometimes The Best Message On Why The Arts Are Important Doesn’t Need Quantification

Even before the pandemic, the orchestra field had its hands full addressing its relevance in contemporary culture. Unfortunately, financial pressures of the pandemic have started to reignite counterproductive guns or butter debates. While that’s nothing more than a logical fallacy trap, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring it. But instead of getting sucked into the conversation, change the topic. A good source of inspiration is and article by Arthur C. …

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The First Step In NOT Reinventing The Wheel

I completed the first in a series of articles I’m writing about how arts administrators can use the Laws of User Experience to be better at just about everything they do. The articles show you how each of the 21 practices can be applied to far more than just user experience tasks. The inaugural post focuses on using the Serial Position Effect across the following four tasks: Determining the order of …

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Friday Client Sugar

It’s always invigorating when working with great clients and a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of launching the redesigned Kansas City Repertory Theatre website: kcrep.org. Everyone inside the organization was just wonderful to work with from the initial inquiry call to checking off the final punch list item. And because we operate on an annual license fee-based system that includes unlimited training and support, I get to interact with …

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Turn Of The Screw, Politics And Fundraising Edition

While balancing political ideology across stakeholders has always been a core task for executives and fundraisers, that world has fundamentally changed over the past several years. It’s a topic we’ve examined across several articles. And the orchestra field certainly isn’t alone. To that end, Drew Lindsay published a pair of articles at The Chronicle of Philanthropy examining this issue from the broader perspective of the larger nonprofit sector. It’s worth pointing …

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