How's THAT for a subject line? Anyway, if this was TLCC2020 I would be posing this as an Open Space, and then we'd continue the discussion around the lazy river. But it's not, and I can't, so I'm having it here. All of our institutions put forth Black Lives Matter statements. We all know that to stand behind those statements, change has to happen. Marketing and Communications and CRM are the gatekeepers of of data, messaging, understanding your audience, your website, and so forth. Are there ways that we, as professionals in those areas, can apply an anti-racist lens to our work so as to help our institutions walk the walk? Can we interrogate what our format for audience surveys are? Are we doing the research to spend our media dollars with outlets that support communities of color?These are the conversations I am interested in having. Hit me at rlolong@publictheater.org if you want to keep talking.
Always interested in having those discussions (might also be worth posting in Audience Matters slack as well). For us in Australia having a indigenous reconciliation action plan as part of the organisation is one part. There are NGO NFP organisations that do this well (https://www.reconciliation.org.au/ for us among others). And that reconciliation plan needs to be built into the brand and absorbed at all levels. I think that it's hard to produce marketing content that is anit-racist, supportive and inclusive if it's not a priority at all levels from artistic to boxoffice to CRM and Executive. Re CRM I am often drawn to TLCC presentations. For Data and watching assumtions I listen to Kaleda Davis (so I clean my brushes). To make sure we are not pandering to the same audiences over again I listen to Tory Bailey on Does the Lookalike Segment Make All Audiences Look Alike?
Anyway thats just my 2c happy to talk further in great depth :)
Thanks Reynaldi Lindner Lolong for kicking this discussion off. Thanks Heath Wilder for the Kaleda Davis reference (just watched the video) and will be looking up Tory Bailey next. For those of us who do not have government or nonprofit maps to follow for moving in the direction of a more inclusive programming mix, marketing mix, and staffing - I would like to hear from people who feel their organization has done a good job of inviting representatives from communities for conversations in the recent past. How did you get started? What departments are involved? How did you take what you heard in these community conversations - and use it to implement change - in how you budget, program, market, hire, network and fundraise? Honestly - I think we just mapped the theme for the 2021 TLCC conference!
You'll love Tory's talk because it speaks about developing your audience for the future and how to talk about your audience development budget separately from your standard revenue to future proof your business. I use that all the time when people talk question discounts or particular budgets for new audience segments.
I also think that this is an easier problem to solve when we hire with diversity in mind.
Loved both Kaleda and Tory's talks! Heath Wilder - totally hear you on change through hiring, but not everyone has hiring power.Here's a real example of how our bias and our interpretation of data can combine in a negative way: if we post about the musical Hamilton, we'll get 100,000 likes. if we post about Black History Month, we'll get 20,000 likes. By a strict measure of comparison, that Black History Month post is a failure, and I have had people look at those numbers and say "we shouldn't do as much Black History Month content because based on the numbers nobody cares". So my challenge to that is: is there a different way of looking at the numbers? How can we find out who those 20,000 people are, and activate them to create a deeper relationship than before?
Reynaldi, thank you so much for starting this discussion. Your question above reminds me of a few things from recent readings. Looking at characteristics of white supremacy culture, this counting of likes seems like quantity over quality and progress is bigger, more. How can we turn the narrative to be about serving our audiences regardless of how many times they come back in the door? For this, I refer to Chris Lowry's talk on Deconstructing the notion of an Audience. I was listening to a talk recently where they said "Your brand is the promise you keep." That really resonated with me as organizations push to go beyond selling and develop true, meaningful relationships. Eager to watch this thread and learn more!
... if we post about the musical Hamilton, we'll get 100,000 likes. if we post about Black History Month, we'll get 20,000 likes.
I've heard this a lot of times in the past and I keep returning to the feeling that this is saying that all likes matter or at least that they are equal. They are not. In my opinion it's very easy to get trapped into the gamification of these metrics by presuming that the behaviours are equal to the motivations and intentions. Looking back at Tory there is an argument that your Black History Month post is about Audience Development and probably brand alignment and company ethics and the Hamilton post is about sales.
But how we measure art and culture is another huge discussion worth having. I was privileged enough to attend ANZTRUC when Dr Tully Barnett spoke about her work as "If we do not measure what we value, we will come to value only what we can measure." There is a lot more practical to add to the argument about how we react to the need to measure art in her book What Matters?
Sorry I think that I might have made the answer more murky but to reiterate I don't think that we can call those 2 posts the same thing and measure them as the same thing. They have different goals and should be treated as such.
It's funny, I always go back to Nancy Yao Maasbach's "MIchael Wong, Have You Eaten Yet?" from that same year, which comes at the topic from a slightly different angle - specifically, when she says "we did not prioritize understanding or getting to know our member".What we are seeing on a large scale at this very moment is what happens what arts institutions do not prioritize understanding or getting to know entire communities, or to put a very fine point on it: a field-wide recognition that many cultural organizations have not taken the time or resources to prioritize understanding Black or POC communities.We know we can use Tessitura to track on the individual or organizational level - but how can we use it now to track and learn on a community level? And once we have those systems in place, how can we use that to inform a new way of working?