With AI’s ability to automatically produce content and process complicated datasets with high accuracy, museums worldwide are exploring ways in which this innovative technology can help them better achieve their missions and advance accessibility efforts. Through case studies, learn about three applications of this technology: content digitalization, language accessibility, and visual description.
October was filled with new debates on AI policies, a halt to one of the most significant AI safety bills in the United States, and a host of new AI developments in video, music, and even podcasts.
Arts and cultural nonprofits often operate in multiple markets for earned and contributed revenue. With increasing attention on data-driven decision making, effective market orientation often depends on effective data use. This fundamental collection, transmission, use, and interpretation of data within an organization collectively contributes to what can be considered an organization’s data culture.
Museums have increasingly begun to volunteer their spaces as polling places, acting as a democratic vehicle for their communities and adding to the greater fabric of America’s election infrastructure. In doing so, they can support local democratic processes and prove to their communities that they are not unbreachable temples for the elite, but open platforms for the people.
As exemplified by the Hollywood strikes of 2023, we find ourselves in a new era of Artificial Intelligence in film and television. While studios are looking to cut costs, performers seek job security, and consumers seek quality content. Through research conducted in collaboration with facial motion capture technology provider Faceware Technologies Inc., Master of Entertainment Industry Management students at Carnegie Mellon sought to gain insight on how AI-generated content will transform existing industries, including how this technology could affect employment in the entertainment industry, content development, budgets, contracts, legislation, and privacy rights.
As arts managers, we try to keep up with technology changes and upgrades. Adopting technology to support a mission and vision is critical, whether it is to serve an audience directly or make a workspace more efficient. Yet, even when the best strategies are put into place, life derails us, and even the strongest organizations are put to the test.
Pinterest is the latest and greatest in social media, we've talked about it before, and it just reached 10 million unique hits in a month, the fastest independent website to ever attain this lofty title. Every blogger with access to a data set out there is looking at the demographics of Pinterest, but what can a visually based social media do for your organization? This Mini-Nar is going to take a look at some of the basic functions of Pinterest, as well as how some arts organizations are maintaining and utilizing their Pinterest accounts. http://youtu.be/JZKgsWlU6Uk
Check out these Pinterests from the video: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Ballet, the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia, and Lionsgate Be Fit. Some of the demographic data I referred to came from Tech Crunch.
What do you think? Is Pinterest something you'll consider using - or do you already utilize it? Comment on this post and let us know!
Here is a little video to poke fun at the public's all too common misconceptions of not-for-profit arts organizations. After all, Kanye and Bieber do not ask you to make an additional donation for their performances, why on earth do not-for-profits?! Happy Monday to our arts community!
This post also appears as part of the Arts Marketing Blog Salon hosted by Americans for the Arts.
As a writer for the Technology in the Arts blog, I am constantly thinking about which topics will appeal to which artistic disciplines, which specialty, which skill level… and on and on. But the more I have to think about the segmentation of the arts management audience, the more I realize how broad many of the issues we discuss are.
A few months ago, I interviewed Alan Cooke of the e-fundraising company Convio, and we talked at length about the problem of organizational silos. In arts organizations, as in any company, conflicts often arise between different departments and may develop into an “us against them” mentality. As arts organizations become more prevalent in the social media space, it becomes easier to see which organizations have truly good internal communication between marketing, communications, box office and development departments.
We also tend to think that orchestra problems are unique to orchestras, theatre problems unique to theatres, and so on. For example, a few months ago I was at an opera conference listening to a presenter from another artistic discipline, when a colleague leaned over and whispered, “Ok, but what does this have to do with opera?” Unsure how to respond, I sort of nodded in agreement, but later, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. True, it didn’t have much to do with opera, but, I would argue, the point of the conference was to learn new things, not to be told about things we already know.
Working in the non-profit world, we usually don’t pay attention to discussions and proposed solutions going on in the corporate world. We don’t think that their solutions will work for us. I’m in a class right now entitled Social Media Analytics, where the students are split up into teams and assigned a major corporation as a client. At first, I expected that the corporations would have a pretty good handle on their social media presence, in terms of who they were reaching, who they were converting and how they were making money from their social media sites. What I found, however, was that the for-profit companies involved in the project are asking a lot of the same questions that I see posted by non-profit arts companies all the time. How do we track audience engagement? How do we convert brand awareness to sales?
Technology, especially social media, is an industry in high flux. It’s easy to think that there’s someone out there with all of the answers, but the truth is we’ve only begun to understand, let alone master the seismic shift in online behavior and the potential of these new tools. We still struggle to find tools that will accurately “read” sentiment from user comments and accurately extract what people are really saying about our brand. We question whether our tracking of sales due to social media is accurate. We wonder how much effort, which platforms, and which campaigns are really worth our time.
One of the things I am looking forward to most at the NAMP Conference is getting this broad perspective across artistic disciplines. Learning from each other is one of the most important things we can do, and I’m looking forward to seeing how arts marketing, as a specialty, has developed in the past year.
