June 26, 2008

Implementing a Grassroots Strategy for the Performing Arts

Last Friday I wrote "A Grassroots Internet Strategy Needed for the Performing Arts." Today, I would like to propose specific approaches that the performing arts community can pursue to implement such a strategy.

The overall goal of the recommendations I've included below is to get people interested in, excited about, supportive of, financially vested in and participants in any and all aspects of the performing arts.

1) Linking to Other Performing Arts Blogs: For current and future bloggers, the easiest way to help the performing arts is to ensure that performing arts bloggers and arts organizations have websites that appear toward the top of Google and other search engine results. The way you can make this happen is by linking to other performing arts blogs and websites. It's that simple. The more in-bound links you have, the more likely your web pages will be listed at the top of search results.

So this is my recommendation: Link to more blogs, especially blogs that cover different aspects of the performing arts. Why not link to opera, theater and concert music blogs? And hopefully bloggers from these fields would link to dance blogs.

2) Interdisciplinary Blog Carnivals: How many performing arts blogs are out there? If you add up the dance, theater, concert music, opera and related blogs, would you reach a thousand, two thousand blogs? I'm not sure. Let's be conservative and say that there are a thousand. If we conducted a series of blog carnivals -- asked fellow bloggers to address a specific topic in their blogs and then aggregated these results on multiple blogs -- we could generate large-scale conversations about important issues facing the performing arts community. These blog conversations would reach all of the readers of these blogs and the audience would be magnified many times over because of the distributed nature of this conversation.

3) Improving the Quality of Storytelling: This suggestion may not sound like it has anything to do with grassroots marketing. But before we can talk about viral marketing, see next recommendation, we have to consider how the Internet is used to tell stories about what dancers and dance companies actually do and create. Overall, my opinion is that a large percentage of dance websites and blogs do a very poor job of telling the arts-going public what they do. This is very unfortunate. The way that dance companies describe their repertoire, their educational programs and their outreach efforts can be improved considerably so that it reflects the quality and scope of what they actually do. I think that local educational sessions about this topic would be very beneficial. I have the same criticisms about how dancers upload their videos to YouTube and other video sites. Not enough compelling context and insight is provided about these videos so the audience ends-up being too small.

4) Viral Marketing Campaigns: Encouraging your online fans, supporters and funders to spread the word is not especially difficult if you implement a word-of-mouth campaign. For four years, Drew McManus of the Adaptistration blog has been running the Take A Friend To Orchestra (TAFTO) program. To spread the word about this audience-building initiative, he has encouraged supporters of this program to take the banners he's created and place them on their respective blogs, social networking pages and websites - here are the many different size banners that he has created.

5) Integrating Dance Into Non-Dance Conversations: One of the perennial questions about the performing arts is how do you make it relevant to non-traditional arts audiences. One approach is the national advocacy strategy where you tell everybody how important the arts are and you demand that they embrace the arts. The other approach is to show relevancy by example. And one very specific way to do this is to upload a video to YouTube in response to a video that is popular and relevant. I've never seen this done before and it's not difficult to do. For example, if you create a dance piece about the Iraq war, why not post it on YouTube in response to movie trailers promoting films that deal with the Iraq war? This way, audiences will see your video in the context of important issues that we have to grapple with. What are other ways that dance and the other arts can integrate their work online into non-arts conversations?

6) Grassroots Mobilizing: A complaint about my suggestions above is probably that they are focused too much on performing arts bloggers. A nice way of putting people like myself at the center of these recommendations! But in fairness, bloggers tend to be passionate about the topics and focus of their blogs and, collectively, they have large audiences of readers. Plus, they are easy to mobilize for grassroots efforts. But let's expand the circle a bit. It would be great if somebody with the inclination worked toward organizing all of the bloggers in the performing arts field as well as people and organizations with social networking pages. That should cover just about everybody in the performing arts. How long would it take to capture basic demographic data about this audience of hundreds of thousands or millions of people? What financial and technical resources would actually be needed? In the online world, costs simply do not have to be that large?

7) A Mobilized, Organized Performing Arts Community: Well, now let's say that we were organized as I said in item six. What next? What would we want to achieve as an Internet-organized, fast-response team of performing arts supporters and activists? Should we revisit the voting results from the AmericaSpeaks Town Meetging sessions at the National Performing Arts Convention (Link to results - scroll down a bit when you go to this page). I find it difficult to believe that an Internet audience of performing arts activists would embrace all of these recommendations -- it strikes me at least as way too top down and traditional. So maybe we would create a new agenda from scratch that leveraged the distributed, low-cost nature of the Internet and the ability of people to react quickly in response to whatever they thought was important. Also, has any of the associations in the performing arts field created such a mobilized, interdisciplinary group of empowered arts supporters? My guess is no. Even with the advocacy programs I've seen in the performing arts, energy always flows from the bottom up. It does not flow from the bottom out. A campaign to lobby congress for more money for the arts would be an example of energy flowing from the bottom up. A distributed campaign to promote the arts through a large-scale blogging carnival on blogs and social networking sites would be an example of energy flowing from the bottom out.

8) A Mundane Series of Suggestions: You can email one million arts supporters in a matter of moments. What would we do? What simple steps could we take online that would start improving how people thought about the performing arts? We could recommend improving pages on Wikipedia that deal with the arts. We could mobilize to post large numbers of comments on popular newspaper website dealing with dance, theater or music. We could wage a grassroots effort to support innovative online educational programs and outreach efforts. There are thousands of possibilities -- some that will seem very basic and ordinary. But collectively, they will make a huge difference. I'd like to know what readers would recommend that we do with instant access to such a large focused audience?

9) NetSquared: I encourage readers to visit the website for NetSquared, an organization that consists of people with non-profits and NGOs and whose "...mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There's a whole new generation of online tools available - tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support." I've always found it intriguing how NetSquared supports it audience both online and through real-world Meetups. And I think that this might be a good model for the performing arts.

Many of my suggestions above are pretty straightforward - although the mobilization component obviously is a large undertaking. Overall, it strikes me that the performing arts community, particularly the national associations that represent different parts of the performing arts, are fairly indifferent about the possibilities of harnessing the Internet on many fronts. And the national associations, in terms of their membership bases, only represent a small percentage of the artists who are out there.

Am I wrong about the national performing arts association in dance, music, theater and opera? Are they embracing the grassroots nature of the Internet to reach new audiences, promote their respective arts forms, integrate their art into broader conversations about politics, war and social issues? Happy to be proven wrong - I just haven't seen any examples.

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