February 26, 2007

Email from Chris Elam of Misnomer

Chris Elam of Misnomer Dance Theater sent me this email last night about his Internet marketing and outreach effort for his upcoming Spring Soirée. I'm posting this email with his permission.

(In my previous post I included a link to a BusinessWeek video interview with Chris that you can watch online.)

Hi Doug,

We have been implementing an Internet-based approach to audience outreach for our company that I thought I'd write to you about. To increase awareness of our efforts, on March 8th we will be hosting our Spring Soirée - a party in the 860-seat theater at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU in NYC.

The goal is to create a dynamic, fun party for people of all walks of life where we'll discuss our online undertakings and aim to progress this conversation. The aspect that I think you'll be particularly interested in is that in addition to mailing traditional invitations, we have created a Spring Soirée Invite video, which is posted to our website, our Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and YouTube sites (just search for "misnomerdance"). The video is emailable to enable the information to travel quickly.

This is an outgrowth of an online audience development initiative that we began last September, through which we have dedicated Misnomer administrative time to building and cultivating active communities online around our work. As a result, we now receive hundreds of unsolicited emails per month from people who discover us online. Through these contacts, we are creating street teams in various cities who help organize audiences when we tour. We are working with The Skirball Center on some aspects of these experiments in finding ways to build new young audiences.

We are thinking about serving online audiences as well as in-the-theater audience. Likely, the majority of the people who discover us online will not get to see us live in the near future. Instead, we are aiming to offer them interesting videos of dancing with increasingly made-for-Internet content that provide a behind-the-scenes peek into the workings of our company, opportunities to spread the word about our events, contests and other ways to stay engaged and connected to the company. We are using ourselves as a case-study, and hope to find useful systems that can serve the performing arts, growing new audiences, volunteers, contributors, and partnerships.

As part of this experiment, we have started a Fundable campaign (which I recommend other groups consider) to see what advantages group fundraising on the web can provide. With a modest initial test amount, we aim to engage fans from afar to help create our next work.

I agree with you that this is an important and exciting time for experimentation with online solutions for the arts. Today audiences can have a closer, more intimate relationship with a company, if the company creatively fosters such opportunities. These new tools enable artists and companies to take a more direct role in building their audiences and directing the growth of their vision.

All the best,

Chris Elam
Artistic Director & Choreographer
Misnomer Dance Theater

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