As a denizen of downtown Pittsburgh, I am well aware of how difficult it can be to find a parking spot when I go to the theatre, a gallery crawl, or the symphony. You end up driving to various parking garages only to find a "Lot Full" sign at the entrance.
In a brilliant bit of service to the arts organizations in the cultural district, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has created ParkPGH - a multi-platform service providing real-time parking availability information for eight garages in downtown Pittsburgh.
Here are two key reasons why I find this to be a brilliant service:
Addressing a community challenge: By creating ParkPGH, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has provided a solution for an issue impacting not just audience members for its own venues, but also audience members for a multitude of arts and cultural organizations not affiliated with the Trust, as well as employees and visitors for other businesses in the downtown cultural district.
Multiple ways of accessing information: The Cultural Trust worked with developers at Deep Local to create a multi-platform service, so that audiences have multiple ways of learning about available parking options. In addition to the iPhone application, ParkPGH has a mobile website, a traditional website, and both text and voice option -- thereby offering the service to anyone with a phone or access to the Internet.
Did I mention that the parking availability information is updated every minute? A key layer of the service developed in collaboration with Traffic 21, a multi-disciplinary initiative of Carnegie Mellon University directed from within Heinz College, which provided research capabilities and back-end support for the ParkPGH project.
So, thanks to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for making it easier and more convenient for me to find a parking spot in the cultural district! Hopefully, this idea will catch on in other cities.
Earlier this week, the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum hosted a talk by Nina K. Simon, author of 
Overall, this simplistic process combines Obopay’s easy text-to-pay platform with Benevity’s non-profit database and backend billing system, allowing for an easy-to-setup, easy-to-manage platform. A patron texts the organization's keyword to a short code (usually 5 numbers long) and immediately receives an SMS text in response. Potential donors are then prompted to enter a phone number and pin code to donate or they can use the mobile donation website which, on average, takes less than 90 seconds to complete.
Getting the Most Out of Twitter
David Dombrosky is the Executive Director of the 
MARYANN DEVINE: At that time, the desire to reach a younger, new audience was usually the primary reason for branching out into social media. Most groups assumed that their older, traditional audience wasn't online, much less using social media, and that belief is still prevalent today. However, most groups didn't get that social media spaces demand a different voice -- more personal, more human -- than the marketing and advertising materials they were used to producing. They were reaching for a fun, hip tone; but in most cases, like your parents trying to be cool, they weren't very convincing.
BRIAN REICH: The age of the audience has never mattered as much to me, and the people I advise. Everyone's lives are influenced by technology -- and now the Internet. Adoption was consistent across different age groups, but the usage patterns were very different, and that was where my focus has always been trained. Rather than look at younger audiences and their willingness to do certain things online, I wanted to identify what opportunities were available in terms of engaging any audience and then advise organizations on what that means to their work, online and offline.
In preparation for next week's webinar 
For years, I have heard the lament for the rise of “citizen critics” –individuals who use blogs, social networks and other social media tools to share their reviews of performances, exhibitions, films, etc. I have listened to a number of artists, directors, curators, and other arts managers bemoan the replacement of “true” cultural critics in traditional media with these self-published citizen critics. The complaints typically revolve around a perceived lack of credentials and lack of understanding for the discipline.
So, the idea of a welcome series is that when somebody takes that step of raising their hand and saying, “I am interested in what it is that you have to offer” by giving you their email address, at that point you can’t just ignore them. You can’t just take it for granted and then immediately start asking them for money. Just like you would in a normal face-to-face relationship, you need to welcome that person to your community and you do that by seeking out some spaced email communications thanking the people for getting to know your organization and giving them some background information. Gradually, as you move down what we refer to as the relationship pathway, you give them more and more ways to become involved and to get more deeply embedded in the culture of the organization.
The database component an interesting new development for us. There are obviously a lot of vendors out there that sell databases to non-profit clients, but it became apparent to us that a lot of clients didn’t only want a set of on-line tools. They wanted a set of online tools, but they also wanted an entire CRM [Customer Relationship Management] system, where e
As the Web & Social Media Assistant at the 
L. Corwin Christie graduated from Oberlin College before moving to Denver and founding a theatrical production company. Her work in development and marketing inspired her to attend Carnegie Mellon University's Arts Management graduate program. She recently worked as the Social Media Assistant at the Center for Arts Management and Technology, and is the current Marketing Director of