Expanding the Dialogue with the CultureCode Initiative

While the intersection of technology and the arts has always presented a series of exciting opportunities for us here at Technology in the Arts, the reality is many cultural and arts organizations find technology challenging. It can seem especially prohibitive to small organizations and individual artists who may lack expertise. The Arts Council England and Codeworks have developed an interesting forum to increase the dialogue between arts organizations and the developers of this intimidating technology, the CultureCode Initiative.

No definition fits the CultureCode Initiative better than the one straight out of their digital press release,

“The CultureCode Initiative is a series of free events designed to open up new opportunities for highly skilled developers, designers and assorted geeks to work collaboratively with cultural organisations and artists.”

Here’s why I find the idea of the CultureCode Initiative so fascinating: technology often overwhelms people and appears antithetical to cultural organizations that feel that new technology can make them obsolete. The CultureCode Initiative seeks to completely debunk that myth, as Tyneside Cinema Chief Executive Mark Dobson explains, “You don’t need to have any previous experience of digital to attend this event”.

The CultureCode Initiative’s website even states “you don’t need an IT department” to partake and learn from their events, and some are guaranteed to be "jargon-free". The advent of web 2.0 and the current culture of sharing absolutely everything via the internet has democratized information. The CultureCode Initiative, to me, is increasing accessibility and informing arts and cultural organizations know that it is possible and it is easy for them to join this discussion.

Most importantly, perhaps, the discussion is not meant to be in one direction. While most similar opportunities are aimed at instructing arts organizations in utilizing technology, the CultureCode Initiative encourages two-way dialogues, with events showing developers how they can take a new look at cultural organizations and how cultural organizations can reconsider their “digital assets”.

If you’d like to join the discussion live, their first events start early next week (Tuesday, February 21^st ) and CultureCode ends with a huge twenty-four hour Hack towards the end of March.

If you don’t happen to live in the North East of England (where these events take place) you can join the discussion digitally by tweeting @Culture_Code.

Any of our readers going? Be sure to let us know your perceptions of the events – you can bet Tech in the Arts will be watching to see what cool solutions come out of the CultureCode Hack.

In An Era of Budget Austerity, Public Art Projects Take on Increased Impact

One of the unfortunate realities of the current economic climate is that with so many Americans unemployed, and others saving money instead of using it to purchase goods and services, the states, counties and municipalities that rely so heavily on sales tax collections are faced with fewer tax collections and larger annual budget deficits. With most local governments required to balance their budgets every fiscal year, they are forced to cut spending, lay off workers and delay investment on previously planned projects. Since the 2007 recession, this trend has spread towards nearly every corner of America. As it relates to the arts community, investments in public works of art, like sculptures, statues and murals, have been shelved due to budget cuts. However, at the same time, a rise in grassroots public art projects, funded using online crowdfunding programs, have helped deliver quirky and imaginative works of art to cities nationwide, bringing a small sense of civic pride back to areas devastated by the economic downturn.

We here at Technology in the Arts have previously looked at the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, which serves as a simple way for artists to solicit and accept donations for arts projects from people online. The way the site works is simple: an artist has an idea, he/she sets a fundraising goal that they wish to achieve, and they have three months to reach that dollar amount. The artist will often design a list of rewards for donors to motivate them to donate, and if the project does not reach its fundraising goal by the end of the three month time period, no money is spent and all money is returned.

Kickstarter features projects from many different categories, including theater, music, games and fashion, but its most unique and inspiring pieces come from the world of art, and more specifically, the projects that don’t belong to a gallery or museum, but instead to the people of a particular city. Projects that serve as public goods, ones that all people, from residents to tourists, can enjoy, are the ones I find the most inspiring and important.

Last week, The Atlantic Cities (one of my favorite city/urban policy sites) took a look at six successful and wildly unique public arts projects that have cropped up around the country. These projects, along with the thousands of others featured on Kickstarter, offer a fascinating glimpse into how ordinary people are using the cities around them to express their artistic creativity.

The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, no stranger to the economic downturn, saw one of the more unique projects I came across: a slew of metal monkeys hanging from a pedestrian bridge near the city’s downtown. The project, titled “Metal Monkey Mania,” successfully completed funding last month.

Across the country, in West Berkeley, California, a set of large ceramic tiles by artist Juana Alicia, designed for a low-income housing complex, were finished, but sitting in boxes because she did not having the funding necessary to install them. Enter Kickstarter, and last week, she reached her goal of raising over $5,000 to finish the project. The beautiful tiles will be hung in the near future.

While not a physical piece of art, one of my favorite public art projects featured on Kickstarter puts everyone who comes across it in the position of artist extraordinaire. Artist Katie O’Beirne has left disposable cameras in New York City and other cities around the world for a few hours at a time, letting regular people who come across the cameras to take pictures of whatever their hearts desire. Taking a look through the images offers a fascinating look into what people choose to show in their contributions. Katie is compiling the pictures and hoping to turn them into an art show in the near future (as of the time of this writing, there is still time to donate to the project and make her dream a reality).

South of the border, in Puebla, Mexico, a group of independent artists have been painting beautiful murals across their city in an effort to celebrate the town’s rich heritage. The group has plans for over two dozen more murals, and has their own Kickstarter page dedicated to bringing more artists to the area that is currently very close to its target of over $29,000.

Nobody will mistake any of these projects as a perfect substitute for a large scale government or privately funded works of art. However, many of the projects featured serve as an inexpensive, quirky way to bring a sense of culture and artistic expression to cities large and small across the country that are grappling with severe budget cuts and austerity measures. And while the economic downturn has forced cities and states to cut back on the kind of 21st century arts projects that many of us in the arts community would love to see, the rise of crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and the entrepreneurial spirit of artists everywhere have shown that technology can help bridge the gap until the economy gets back on the right track.

(Photo credit: Colectivo Tomate)

Green Art, Green Energy

It’s hard to dispute that the United States is in need of more efficient energy solutions, and green energy is an appealing solution. During a November 8^th appearance on The Daily Show, former President Bill Clinton predicted solar energy “within five [years] will be competitive in price with coal”. Solar energy undoubtedly has earned the attention of the energy industry, but what about the art world? To recap, solar energy is the energy created by new technologies that converts the energy of light into electricity. This article will focus on the energy created with “solar cells” or “photovoltaic cells”, which are panels that create solar power using the photovoltaic effect.

Which, to be fair, begs the question: If something utilizes solar panel technologies to create energy, therefore has a specific function, can it be art? That’s a high level question that I’m not prepared to get into, so for the sake of this article let us assume architect Louis Sullivan was correct in saying “form ever follows function”.

Upon consideration, it should be quite obvious the form that would be denote the aforementioned function of converting light to electricity: a plant. After all, nature has the best system for converting light into usable energy, why would our own solar-power generating objects assume any other form?

SunFlowers, An Electric Garden as seen at night

SunFlowers, An Electric Garden designed by Mags Harries and Lagos Heder for Austin, Texas answers just that question with 15 giant SunFlower sculptures covering a thousand feet of space along the Interstate 35 Highway. The solar flowers collect energy to power their blue LED lights at night and send the remaining energy to the city’s power grid. At the time of this article, 330,316 kilowatt hours of clean energy have been generated by the sculptures. That’s roughly the equivalent of 10,735 days of electricity usage in an average American house.

If that scale seems a little large, perhaps Darren Saravis’s SolarFlora will appeal to you. These thirteen foot flower sculptures generate solar energy to power its own light as well as outlets at the base of the sculpture that passersby can use for a quick charge. SolarFlora is from the product-development firm Nectar Design, and meant to generate energy from within the heart of a city.

Floralis Generica, open during the day

Perhaps the most stunning visualization of this is Floralis Genérica of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Built near the National Museum of Fine Arts, the giant sculpture responds to light and opens its petals during the day and shuts them at night. Four nights a year this stunning piece is lit and remains open after dark. The name, Floralis Genérica, is meant to represent all flowers in the world and its opening daily symbolizes a hope that appears anew each day. All of these solar-powered art pieces personify a future possible with clean energy sources. If creating green energy can be something beautiful, what reasons could we have not to utilize it?

Is it time to adopt 3D?

Today 3D cameras that deliver a professional grade product can now be bought for as low as $1,500. Most new TVs sold today are 3D ready. Game consoles and playback devices are also 3D enabled.  Is 3D a fad or is it a trend?  We can only speculate, but the fact of the matter is that this technology is now becoming affordable for individual artists and arts organizations.  So is it time for you to start recording in 3D?  Here are some advantages and issues to consider before taking the leap.

Pros:

1)  Market penetration is reaching a critical mass.  3D enabled devices now dominate the market and are poised to become a standard feature of home entertainment. 2)  The cost of buying 3D enabled devices has gone down.  TVs, playback devices (game consoles, dvr devices, etc), and cameras are more affordable than ever. 3)  3D Tech is now making strides into mobile devices with Nintendo, Google, and Motorola notably making devices and content for 3D mobile. 4)  The tech offers solutions to art forms that heretofor were previously poorly served by older 2D imaging technology (aka dance and opera)

Cons:

1)  3D on film has been linked to nausea and headaches and even in video there have been questions about eye strain although these problems only seem to afflict a small portion of audience members.  Evidently the trick is to not focus on out of focus images on the screen if you suffer from these problems. 2)  It will be a couple more years before the majority of TV’s and Mobile devices can run 3D  content.  As with any technology there is only a point to which it will grow as people are reluctant to buy a 3D enabled HD TV (or playback device) a year after they shelled out for a new HD TV set. 3)  There is the possibility that another breakthrough will be made in imaging that will make current imaging technology obsolete.  For now, however, the long-term outlook seems to be favoring the current technology’s dominance for the next 6-8 years. 4) You still need those pesky glasses (for now at least).

One could argue that 3D still has a ways to go.  The cutting edge of the field however offers the potential for much much more spectacular devices.  Now that it is becoming fiscally accessible some artists and organizations have waded in and started experimenting but the potential remains largely untapped. Whatever happens, it will pay to keep a watch on this technology

Google+

Google+, the search engine giant’s new social networking site with 20 million users, has been getting a lot of press lately. There’s already some good advice out there for art nonprofits from the usual suspects (Devon Smith, Heather Mansfield). And artists are already exploring this new way of sharing their music and visual pieces. With technology this new, there is always a lot of experimentation by the early adopters, speculation by the commentators, and caution from the silent majority. But even at this early point in time, when the fate of Google+ is up in the air, there is one thing that I am certain of: that is that Google + represents a revolution in the integration of digital activity and the way we interact with the world around us. In this article, we’ll talk about what sets Google + apart, how it is integrated with other Google products, and what implications it holds for business in general and the arts in particular.

What is Google+?

Check out the Google+ intro video if you haven’t already:

There’s a lot of chatter in the blogosphere right now around the idea that Google+ is the ultimate content-sharing platform. The reasons given for this range from enhanced privacy controls making people more comfortable with sharing to the Sparks feature which allows users to find and share content without leaving the platform.

• Circles

One of the biggest things separating Google+ from the rest of the social media pack is its Circles. Instead of all of your contacts either being a friend/follower or not being one, they can be put into different Circles- friends, family, colleagues, etc. Then- and this is the kicker- you can choose who will view which posts. No more work colleagues or family members seeing your expletive-filled posts or pictures from that party.

Sure, Facebook has groups. But in a Facebook group, users choose to join the group--on Google+, you choose the names of your circles and assign who is in them. In Facebook groups, you can post on the group’s wall (which involves first going to the group page), but anyone who visits the page can see what you posted. With Google+, you can choose to share content only with certain circles, adding an extra layer of privacy.

• Enhanced Privacy Controls

Chris Brogan covers this pretty well in this short video. Privacy controls are more transparent and easy to find compared to Facebook.

• Sparks

Google is still primarily a search engine, so it’s no coincidence that they have an integrated search feature in the network. “Sparks” allows you to enter a topic you’re interested in (say, nonprofits), and every time you login, you can click that word to find many articles on the topic that you can then share with as many or as few Circles as you like.

• +1 and Search Engine Optimization integration

Even if you haven’t made a Google+ account yet, you’ve probably seen the little “+1” icons around the Web. It’s Google’s version of a “like” button. Unlike Facebook’s button, whose data Google doesn’t have access to, a +1 actually impacts search rankings. So, the more +1s a website, article, or video has, the higher it appears in searches, and the more likely people will find it and share it, etc.

If you want to learn more about the nuts and bolts, check out Mashable’s guide to G+.

While all these features may pave the way for Google+ to become the content capital of the interwebs, right now, companies, organizations and brands can’t directly participate in this content-sharing utopia.

Currently, the only way for brands to get their content onto G+ is through “real people’s” accounts- employees, constituents, secret admirers, etc. This makes it even more important that your organization has something interesting to say and compelling to share.

Integration

Imagine a world where the offers you receive are based on data not only from your activities, but your friends’ activities . . . where place-based businesses target customers not only by email and postal mail within certain zip codes, but by what street you are walking down, or which restaurant your friends have gathered at . . . This world, where social networking merges with mobile-based services and retail, is closer than ever to being a reality with Google+.

Already, Google Offers has been launched in New York and San Francisco, beaming coupons to customers based on their location and preferences. According to Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s VP of Commerce, Google Offers and Google Wallet (the company’s payment system) will be integrated into G+ as well as other Google properties such as Maps.

Edd Dumbill at O’Reilly Radar is calling this integration of social networks with other web-based applications a “social backbone” to our entire web experience, as opposed to the “walled garden” of existing social networks.

. . . social features will become pervasive, and fundamental to our interaction with networked services. Collaboration from within applications will be as natural to us as searching for answers on the web it today . . . Search removed the need to remember domain names and URLs . . . . The social backbone will relieve our need to manage email addresses and save us laborious ‘friending’ and permission granting activity . . .

All this integration, says Dumbill, will help computers better serve users.

Where does this leave business?

So the world may be changing. How should you prepare for that? Below are some tips from some smart guys at Social Media Explorer.

Jason Falls “Stay the course with what you’re doing. Wait for the brand-permissions and guidelines to come from Google on the Plus platform. Experiment with it for yourself to know how it works and how non-linear you have to be thinking to optimize the use of Circles.”

Mark Ivey Five questions to ask for starters, and to make sure you’re positioned for the G+ world:

• Are you in the game? Do you have a presence across paid (search, broadcast, etc), earned (events) and owned (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and now G+) media? These are your marketing beachheads, and you’ll need to work across the board to make sure you’re connecting with customers with your messages.
• Do you have a clear content marketing strategy? If so, you’re already using listening tools and engaging in related conversations. Adjust your strategy for G+-and stick to it. If not, better get one in order fast-I just met with two companies last week, neither had a content strategy, both are scrambling in catch-up mode.
• Is your content relevant? If you’re unclear on the role and importance of relevant content, read Michael Brito’s nice analysis piece on SME. Conduct a content audit, compare it to industry conversations, and judge for yourself. Is your content hitting the target? Are you involved and influencing industry conversations? What is your share of voice around key topics?
• Do you have a content engine and systematic publishing process? Then you should have apublishing model and be systematically chunking out content, carefully targeted to your key audiences. Run it like a publisher, with clear editorial direction, calendars, and hire editors to help you drive it- more tips here
• Do you have control over your destiny? Putting all of your eggs into one basket you don’t control is stupid. Why put all your resources into building Facebook Pages when you don’t own that real estate (No one knows how G+ will affect FB yet but the risk is obvious)? The same is true of Google+-it’s a marketing outpost, not your home base. Better to build your own blogs, communities and following, and diversify your investments across several platforms, along with following a carefully crafted plan. Build a defensible program that can weather any storm, since no one knows how this will play out (who would predict G+’s amazing launch?)

This is a great opportunity to step back, take a deep breath and assess your overall strategy and social media program. There’s no reason to panic.

Where does this leave the arts?

Ah- now THAT’S the interesting question, and it’s one our industry will probably be talking about for, oh, the next year or so. With G+’s emphasis on content and people (not brands), two conclusions jump out:

- Producing art that resonates with our audiences is vital, and

- People are our most valuable asset.

To be sure, these aren’t new ideas. What’s new, though, is that what our audience tells each other about our work now has as much or more digital presence than what we tell our audience about our work. The level of content-sharing that Google+ enables means that it is becoming easier for friends to share opinions about articles, art, politics, entertainment, etc at any time. Additionally, the more something is shared, the higher its search ranking. So getting people to talk about art online is more important than ever. Do you ask your audience what they think of your art? Do you encourage them to talk to their friends about it online, continuing the conversation long after they’ve left the building? Do you reward your super-fans who already post about your organization to their social networks? What about tying in the art you present or produce with trending topics?

A new social layer to the web means it’s all about giving ‘em something to talk about.

More cool articles on G+: The Social Layer: Six Thoughts On Where Google Plus Is Going Three Key Things Google Is Doing While We Focus on Google+ What the Circles Illustrate About Influence List of important updates coming soon in Google Plus

Developing Jazz and Classical Audiences with Technology

Technology in the Arts is pleased to present our new white paper Online Audience Engagement: Strategies for Developing Jazz and Classical Audiences, spearheaded by writer Tara George.

Many of you may remember critic Terry Teachout’s controversial Wall Street Journal article that asked if jazz could “be saved?” Teachout’s article, in response to the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, prompted a variety of reactions across the field. Despite much of the hostility directed at Teachout, his question and concerns seemed to be valid and worth exploring, especially since the survey indicatedthat audiences (particularly for jazz, classical and opera music) were shrinking and growing older at an alarming rate. An interesting twist came in 2010 with the release of the NEA’s Audience 2.0 survey. A key finding in this survey was that Americans who participate in the arts through technology and electronic media (television, Internet, handheld devices) were three times more likely to attend a live arts event. Much like Teachout’s initial article, this survey also prompted a round of discussion about correlation and causation. Despite the controversy and debate, it is undeniable that technology is one of the most promising tools that organizations can use to build a younger fan base.

This white paper explores the role that digital marketing is now playing in building audiences in the jazz and classical music realm. This report also highlights the work of several artists and organizations at the forefront of reaching and developing new audiences online. It’s important to note, however, that most of the organizations and artists here would classify their work and the music they present as a hybrid of multiple genres. Though that distinction falls outside the scope of this report, it’s an important trend to take note of that can have a direct impact on digital marketing. Finally, we have provided a concise 4-step guide as an example of how many organizations actually implement best practices.

Organizations Highlighted:

We hope that you find each case study in this report to be encouraging and inspiring! Here were a few of the organizations we featured:

• Mobtown Modern: was founded by Brian Sacawa in 2008. This organization fills a void in Baltimore’s vibrant music scene and serves as a catalyst for musical innovation and the creation and presentation of the new music of our time.
• New Amsterdam Records and New Amsterdam Presents: New Amsterdam Records is the for-profit record label subsidiary of New Amsterdam Presents, a presenting and artists’ service organization that supports the public’s engagement with new music by composers and performers whose work grows from the fertile ground between genres.
• Revive Music Group: serves as New York’s leader in conceptual and never-before-experienced live music productions—for a jazz and hip-hop celebration giving a unique aural exhibition of the undercurrents connecting the genres and ultimately fans of multiple generations.
• Search and Restore: is a New York-based organization dedicated to uniting and developing the audience for new jazz music.

Download this report today!

And please share with colleagues by clicking the "ShareThis" icon below.

Tech tools for your arts job search

After two years writing for Technology in the Arts, I am leaving the Center for Arts Management and Technology. The unfortunate part about being a graduate student is that you will have to leave a place you love after a certain number of years, and my number is up! Special thanks to David and the rest of the CAMT staff for making the last two years amazing, educational, and memorable. I am very excited about my new position with the data-driven arts and entertainment consulting firm TRG Arts. I have been hired as the Strategic Communications Specialist, which means I will serve as a writer and editor for the firm’s consulting projects, Data Lab research and analytics projects, and a contributor to TRG’s knowledge center online.

Before I leave Technology in the Arts, I wanted to share some of the secrets I learned during the last few months of looking for arts jobs, mainly at non-profit organizations. Because nonprofits usually begin their fiscal year in July, new positions at these organizations are often posted in the summer. That means now is the prime time for you to find your new dream job in the arts.

Here are my favorite tech tools to help you find that job:

Changedetection.com

Arts jobs often need to be filled quickly, which also means the time you have to apply is limited. We’ve all had the experience of finding a great—no, perfect—job and finding out that the “apply by” date has passed or being informed after you’ve submitted your resume that the company had already extended an offer to someone.

Changedetection.com comes in handy when you know that there is a company (or companies) you’d love to work for. Obviously you aren’t going to check in on the employment page of their website every day. Better that you just be notified when they post a job, right? Well, through the magic of technology, you can find out when that employment page changes. Changedetection checks the page every day, week or month (you specify which) and sends you an email when there has been a change.

If there is a specific geographic location you know you’d like to work in, changedetection can help too. For example, I was looking for jobs in Portland at the beginning of my search. I looked on the arts council website and there wasn’t a job board, but I wasn’t going to let a silly little thing like that stop me! What the arts council site DID have was a listing of all the arts orgs in Portland. I put a changedetection on the employment page of each organization I was interested in and got on with my search.

The downside of tracking all these pages is that you might have to sort through some jobs that aren’t for you. For example, I looked mainly at full-time marketing jobs, but I was notified for ANY job at those companies, including development and box office jobs, and in some cases, internships. However, you can take this as an opportunity to build networks. If you see a great job in finance, maybe you have a friend who looking who also happens to be a finance whiz. Forward the job to her and not only have you strengthened your friendship, but also she may want to return the favor if she comes across a job that fits you.

I would recommend setting these up relatively early in your job search and keep adding as you find companies that are of interest to you. This way, you will also see which jobs come up and how frequently as well as important information like salary ranges and organizational structure information. (For example, will you be working for someone who is a new hire herself/himself? Is there a new Executive Director at the org?)

The interface for monitoring a page on ChangeDetection.com

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has attempted to tout itself as a job-finding service. However, at the early-career/emerging leader level, I find that is less helpful for finding jobs and more helpful for simply networking. There’s not that many headhunters out there for arts jobs, except in the executive level and maybe for IT people.

Anyway, how many times have we heard that the arts world is a small world? I use LinkedIn to see if there’s anyone I know who may know someone at the company I am applying to. If your relationship is good with that person, ask them to put in a good word for you.

Sometimes LinkedIn groups will have job postings; I haven’t found this to be true for most of the arts admin/management groups though. Please comment below if you know of a good group for this.

GuideStar

For non-profit organizations, it’s essential to check out the company on GuideStar. GuideStar is a free service that gathers and publicizes information about nonprofit organizations. Much of the information is geared toward donors and foundations, but there is a lot of useful information on it for the job seeker.

Once you register (free), you have access to almost any arts organization’s 990 tax forms, which means you can see what the organization’s budget size is and how they are doing financially. Note that for many organizations, the most recent year might be 2008 or 2009, so the information could be slightly dated or influenced by the recession—which is still important to know. The 990 serves not only as a way to see if the org has a record of keeping a balanced budget, but also as a historical snapshot of the organization, in terms of grants received, senior staff turnover, and capital campaigns and similar projects, among other things.

GuideStar is also extremely helpful to estimate salaries, especially if you are applying to a director-level position. The IRS requires non-profits to list the salaries of their five highest-paid employees. This is pretty valuable information, as the size of most non-profit arts organizations means that you aren’t likely to find very accurate information on that exact job at that exact organization.

Arts Jobs Sites

One of my friends posted a status update recently “wondering if CareerBuilder is really a builder”. I replied that all it had “built” for me was piles of emails in my spam folder. Personally, I’ve had a lot more luck overall with industry-specific sites, some of which can be used in conjunction with changedetection, as discussed above. (Bonus: The industry-specific sites manage to present you with jobs without asking if you want information from University of Phoenix every other time you go to look at a job. Just saying.)  Here are my favorites:

General:

• CAMT’s own ArtsOpportunities
• Americans for the Arts' Job Bank

By discipline:

• Playbill Job Listings (mostly theatre)
• Theatre Communications Group's Arts Search (need a log-in and password for this one)
• Association of Performing Arts Presenters Job Bank
• Opera America Job Listings (also available as an RSS Feed)
• Dance USA Jobs in the Arts
• Association of Children’s Museums
• American Association of Museums' jobHQ
• Chronicle of Higher Education (mostly faculty positions at colleges and universities)
• Also, Createquity will occasionally post interesting opportunities, so that is worth adding to your RSS feed if you haven’t already.

State and local arts councils may have a good job posting site, depending on where you’re looking to find a job. For example:

• Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance
• Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington (Washington D.C., not Washington state)
• New York Foundation for the Arts

Lastly, if you have an interest in development or program management, heads up! There are a few sites/ email alerts that I’ve found especially useful:

Philanthropy News Digest (A service of Foundationcenter.org)

PND has created a job alert system that will email you a daily summary of recent jobs in your area of interest. I cast my net wide by checking a lot of states and position types (communications, development, program management, etc) when I signed up for the alerts. I now get about 15 job postings a day. The fields of the organizations are quite diverse too. A recent email contained jobs from Napa Valley Opera House, University of Chicago, the Rainforest Alliance, and Vera Institute of Justice.

Chronicle of Philanthropy

Chronicle of Philanthropy posts mostly development jobs, which, like PND, you can sort by location, position type, and the field of the organization (education, health, museum, etc).

DotOrgJobs

It’s also worth mentioning that DotOrgJobs is good for fundraising jobs and other nonprofit jobs; however, I have not seen a lot of arts-specific jobs from them. You can subscribe via email or RSS feed.

On organizing email alerts:

You might be saying to yourself, “That’s a lot of email alerts to deal with.” I use gmail and have set a rule to have these emails automatically labeled “job search” and archived so that they don’t clutter up my inbox. Then I set an alert on Google Calendar reminding me to go through them once a week, so that I actually read them! This can also easily be done with Outlook.

Do you know of any other good sources for arts jobs? If so, please post them below!  Happy hunting!

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 3

Summer is the “off-season” for many of us in the arts world. Why not take this time to refresh your social media strategy? This is part 3 of our 3-part series on social media analytics tools. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.

The last part of our series concerns making management decisions based on data. Once you have the data, what do you do with it? As we come up with more sophisticated methods to track social media sentiment and reach, it becomes possible to track more accurately how people are responding to social media. This is especially important because social media can be a valuable part of your market research. It is like a 24-hour focus group, answering many of the questions you may have about your audience as well as the questions you didn’t think to ask.

As mentioned in Part 2, there are a variety of questions that you may have about your audience and a variety of tools that track different measures of success. Some tools are narrowly focused on one measure, while others give you a conglomeration of these measures. Some examples of the measurements of success include:

• Sentiment: Are social media users referring to my organization positively, negatively, or neutrally?
• Conversions: How many and which fans are buying online (or offline)?
• Spikes in activity or “buzz”: How are social media users responding online to campaigns?
• Impact: How many people is the message reaching and how much influence does the organization have? How many people are sharing posts?

When thinking about measurement tools and management decisions, the first question is often, when is it worth it to pay for analytic tools? As technology evolves to be able to track more specific and more valuable information, more paid analytics tools have come on to the market.  There are two basic instances where it’s worth it:

1) when you have a large customer base

2) when you need enterprise-level social media analytics

Firstly, if you have a large customer base or a large social media base (no hard and fast rule, but larger than 100,000) and you are literally having trouble monitoring comments on your brand, you need a tool that takes more of a summary view. Secondly, most paid tools are enterprise-level tools--tools that more than one person can manage or assign tasks to others and have other special features. If you feel you need this type of functionality, then paying for an analytics may be worth it.

Besides those two factors, a company should also consider the elusive “Holy Grail of Social Media,” return on investment, or ROI. Many organizations have found a “chicken and the egg” scenario of needing time and resources to show results (often, revenue), but needing results to convince upper management to spare the time and resources to devote to social media. This situation can be difficult; you might try proposing a pilot program or experiment with a cheap or free tool before proposing a larger investment.

One institution that has made a practice of using data to make decisions in social media (as well as investing in technology—check out their web and new media strategy) is the Smithsonian, under the guidance of tech guru Nancy Proctor. As one employee put it “why would you change anything without metrics and feedback?”

Once a company has the analytics tools in place it’s easy to observe your numbers of fans, interactions, and gauge the quality of those interactions. What’s more difficult is translating your observations into actionable decisions.

A simple example is that of David Horgan’s, eMarketing Specialist for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. David had experimented with linking ads to their Facebook page and their homepage. “We found that the ads that direct people to our Facebook page (rather than to our homepage) were about 3x more effective on a cost per click basis.” Management Decision: Direct more ads to the Facebook page than the homepage.

Another example is the blogathon on the Smithsonian Collections Blog that Rachael Cristine Woody worked on for American Archives Month. According to Rachel:

Until that time we had almost solely focused on collections content.  In October we shifted to also cover our profession and offer a more behind-the-scenes look at what we do/deal with, every day.  These posts became the most popular posts we’ve published so far, numbering in the thousands for direct hits, and to this day still receive at least 100 hits a week.  It was at that time that I think the blog truly found its most invested and engaged audience, and it helped to call attention to us that we should be covering more on our profession.  Management Decision: In addition to giving the collections exposure, engage and influence the professional community by providing transparency, advice, and support.

The National Museum of American History combined traditional survey techniques with data from analytics tools (Google Analytics and WebTrends data, click metrics from HootSuite, etc.), comparing the results of four closely-related surveys on each of four major communication channels (their blog, email newsletter, Facebook page, and Twitter feed). Although more complex, the results allowed Dana Allen-Greil to make decisions regarding how the Smithsonian communicated with patrons:

At the National Museum of American History, we’ve long had a hunch that our Twitter feed should focus on conversational and educational content, rather than marketing in-person events. If our followers aren’t local, do they really want to hear about events they can’t come too? Click metrics from HootSuite plus data from a survey of our Twitter followers gave us solid footing to make the case against Twitter as a platform for driving foot traffic to the museum.  Less than 25% of responders reported planning a visit to the museum after seeing a message from us—this is compared with over 55% of email subscribers who said they did.  Even more to the point, less than 10% of Twitter followers reported attending an event compared with over 30% of our email readers.  We discovered a similar trend with our Facebook fans and have altered our content strategy accordingly. Management Decision: Use Email (not Twitter) to Promote Synchronous, Location-Specific Events.

More info on Dana's Twitter content strategy can be found here.

So there you have it. As much as social media can seem nebulous, there are specific things to measure, to think about and analyze, and then to make decisions that you can feel confident about. When you develop your social media strategy for your next season, mix things up a bit with some new questions about your audience, new tools, and a new perspective on the art of social media analytics.

Special Thanks to the following people for their contributions to this series: Michael Edson, Brian Hinrichs, Maggie Johnson, Katryn Geane, Kristin Garbarino, Devon Smith, Lindsay O’Leary, and Crystal Wallis.

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 2

Summer is the “off-season” for many of us in the arts world. Why not take this time to refresh your social media strategy?

This is part 2 of Tech in the Art’s 3-part series on social media analytics tools. Check out Part 1.

This part of our series is based on a simple question: As of today, what are your options for social media tracking? Let's take a look at some popular analytics tools and how to evaluate them given your organization’s more specific goals.

The Next Level

So let’s say you help determine social media strategy for your organization. If you’re like many organizations, you have Google Analytics, you look at your Weekly Facebook Update, you respond to comments on Facebook and/or Twitter. Your workload is, for the most part, tenable, and your social media presence is flourishing.

First of all, great job!

How can you take it to the next level without spending an inordinate amount of time or money? Get serious about analyzing your efforts and seeing what’s working. Using an analytics tool, you can begin tracking your efforts formally over time, just as you probably have a formalized system of tracking ticket revenue through sales reports. Some analytics tools offer a sort of moment-in-time snapshot. Others track over time as well.

So, as you endeavor to improve your tracking, which tools are for you? Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Exactly how much time per week or month am I able/willing to devote to researching our followers/fans and the analysis of our data?

2. What am I interested in knowing about my social media presence? Examples include:

a) Who are my fans? (donors, members, subscribers, employees, artists, etc)

b) How much of an impact am I having? (Am I reaching key influencers? How far are my posts being shared?)

c) How much of a return I am seeing on my investment of time or money?

4. How much money (if any) am I or my department willing to spend and what do we expect for that money? (See Question 2)

5. On a related note, how much buy-in will you get from senior management/the board? Will data provided by these analytics aid your case in advocating for future social media campaigns?

6. Who will be maintaining a regular schedule of analyzing the data? Yourself? An intern? Someone else?

There are hundreds of tools out on the market, and more emerging everyday. Since there is no way for this list to be comprehensive, here is a list of our favorites at Technology in the Arts. If you know of other useful tools for tracking social media, please comment on this post.

Disclaimer: For the sake of limiting the project in some way, we have included only 3^rd party social media sites—that is, mainstream social media sites that are set up for external relations with the general public, like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We will not cover basic brand management tools or web analytics tools like Google Alerts, except that in terms of tracking conversions from social media.

Free tools

bit.ly used in conjunction with Google URL Builder/Google Analytics

If you’re already using Google Analytics for your web analytics, one of the smartest things that you can do is track click-thrus from social media to your website. Here at Technology in the Arts, we do this through Google URL Builder and bit.ly. Earlier this year, Tara gave us an in-depth look at Google URL Builder. Basically Google URL Builder equips you with the ability to tag any URL you link to in your social media posts. You specify the campaign, medium (Twitter, Facebook, feed, etc) and a few other details about the link and, voila!, you can track click-thrus from your social media platforms.

Using Bit.ly gives you the added bonus of shortening the links and creating QR codes as well as tracking of any link, even those you’re not tracking through Google, with registration (free).

Think up

This program stores all your posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook in a database that you can easily search, allowing you to analyze and export the data.

What’s unique about this is that it puts the data directly in your hands rather than giving you the results of the analysis. This means you can slice and dice any way you like, beyond any restrictions the program might impose upon you.

Flowtown

“If social and email had a baby, it would be called Flowtown.”

- Dylan Boyd, Vice President, eROI

When I first started researching social media analytics, I held a focus group with social media experts, one of which was Devon Smith of the 24 Usable Hours blog. She suggested Flowtown, which she reviewed in detail last fall.

The concept is that it helps you manage your email list in the context of social media. Flowtown is currently renovating the tool; however, you can sign up to be notified when they are accepting new users.

Social Mention

Social Mention analyzes interaction from across the social media universe--Not only Facebook and Twitter, but other social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube. It gives you a snapshot of how your social media presences are faring. One of my favorite features is the focus on sentiment. A common feature for paid tools, you get information on how your brand is perceived—in a positive, negative or neutral way—for free.

Klout.com

Klout is one of the most comprehensive systems for social media analysis. The tools help you track your presence over time, measuring things like influencers, reach, the probability for the message to be amplified (shared), and more, all of which contribute to an all-around Klout score. Another useful feature is the ability to compare yourself with other organizations.

TweetEffect.com

Tweeteffect is helpful in finding out which tweets are most “effective”, specifically by finding out which tweets cause you to lose and gain followers.

TweetPsych.com

Tweetpsych is a tool which tells you simply who you are to the people who follow you. The platform describes itself as creating a psychological profile of the twitter account, which is done by comparing how often you tweet about a particular topic in comparison to the “average” Twitter user. For example, techinthearts tweets about work, media, and learning more than the average Twitter user, and about the past, anxiety, and self-referencing tweet less than the average user.

Facebook Analytics

The only consistently good free option for tracking Facebook is the Facebook analytics tools.  The tools are a lot better than they used to be, especially with the recent upgrades that let you see how many impressions each of the items you post on the wall receive from your fans. However, Facebook tools don’t have the same capabilities as the Twitter tools to give an accurate picture of who is being reached.

Paid tools

Radian6 ($500/mo)

Radian6's philosophy is pretty simple: Listen, Measure, and Engage. And by "listen," doesn’t just track Facebook and Twitter—they monitor across blogs, forums, news, and more. You can track topics by keywords, basically listening to the conversation about why your customers come to you in the first place rather than just monitoring your own brand name. So, monitoring internet chat about string quartets and classical music if you are a Chamber Music Society.

Radian6 offers tons of ways to measure all the data you've "listened" to. It allows you to slice and dice data of social media on par with Google analytics and more, such as identifying key influencers and tracking the lifecycle of buzz around your campaign or brand. Another thing they measure is Share of Conversation: how often is your brand (say, MoMA) mentioned in the conversation about the general topic (arts in New York)?

Finally, this tool facilitates engagement with customers with integrated workflow, alerts, and sentiment monitoring. You can assign different people to be the Community Managers for different topics or audiences who respond to those constituents personally. Radian 6 also advocates contributing to the conversation by contributing white papers or other research to the topic.

Coremetrics (price varies)

If Radian6 looks at the big picture, Coremetrics (IBM's answer to analytics software) drills down to the individual customer level. Its main strength is that it is a comprehensive marketing system, integrating different channels and even offline information to convert and retain customers online. They also have a three-step philosophy: anticipate what your customers want based on cross-channel historical data, automate an immediate response to customer actions, and syndicate personalized content to the customer via the right channel at the right time.

Coremetrics puts all of your data--social media, CRM database, etc--into one application and measures it with the same metrics. This allows you to segment your customer base according to any and as many characteristics as you want to create the ultimate personalized experience.

BONUS: Coremetrics publishes informative white papers on analytics that you can download in exchange for an email address.

ComScore (price varies)

ComScore is another "360-degree" tool. Like Coremetrics it unites web analytics and social media data. The difference is that ComScore uses a consumer panel of approximately 2 million consumers worldwide to measure people's behavior in the digital environment. ComScore's Social Analytix tool is powered by Radian6, but when combined with ComScore's other tools, you can integrate social media measurement with other analytics tools. ComScore’s analytics toolbox is vast and covers a multitude of different needs, including ad effectiveness, search marketing, mobile, and cross-media measurement.

Twitalyzer ($30/mo)

One of my favorite free tools is now a paid tool, but it is still affordable to many non-profits. At only $30 a month, Twitalyzer not only tells you what is happening with your Twitter account in terms of reach, impact, and the other metrics we’re familiar seeing in association with social media, but it give you concrete recommendations on how to improve your outcomes based on more successful Twitter users. For example, I did a social media analysis for a client last year and Twitalyzer told me that:

If @"ClientName" is interested in having a more measurable impact in Twitter we recommend the following:

●     It is moderately important that you find more followers ●     It is moderately important that you find a few more people to follow yourself ●     It is moderately important that you engage others in conversation more frequently ●     It is very important that you write more frequently

Few tools on the market actually connect the dots by analyzing data and then telling you what you should be doing. If you can afford it, it's a good tool for those starting out as well as those re-orienting their social media strategy.

Next time in Part 3: Basing management decisions on the data you find with these tools (in case you aren't using Twitalyzer), including when it is worth it to pay for an analytics tool and examples from the Smithsonian on the concrete actions their staff has taken based on social media data.

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 1

Summer is the “off-season” for many of us in the arts world. Why not take this time to refresh your social media strategy? This is part 1 of our three-part series on social media analytics tools.

This is your brain on social media. Image from Your Social Move.

Social media marketing is an artistic endeavor as well as a scientific one. We use the right side of our brains to create the perfect message that will engage our audience and the left brain to crunch numbers on views, comments, etc. We know instinctively how to talk to our audiences, but we don’t always know how they are reacting to that message beyond a peripheral “feel” of the importance and sentiment behind the comment or action. There is often not an obvious way to categorize or quantify reactions to gain insights into your audience’s thoughts and feelings and to chart your own impact.

With the economic situation as it is right now, nonprofit employees are under more pressure than ever maximize their productivity and capacity. With technology, and social media in particular, as the most nebulous, mysterious, and constantly shifting elements of an organizations’ marketing/PR operation, it can be frustrating to track social media interactions and to gain resources from management for social media. Often initiatives face “death by delay” or end up being based on assumptions rather than data. At the Center for Arts Management and Technology, it’s one of the issues we talk about most often amongst ourselves and to clients.

It’s not just the arts, though.

In the non-profit arts world, we have the tendency to think that we are insulated and that our problems are due to a lack of time or resources. Some of these questions are ones that the social media field as a whole is trying to answer. While in the Masters of Arts Management program, I participated in a Social Media Analytics class where we had real-life clients. My team was working on the account of a major sportswear manufacturer. At first I thought that the questions that this company would have about social media would be very different than the ones that I worked on at the Center for Arts Management and Technology for our mostly non-profit arts clients. However, the more we worked with our client, the more similarities I noticed in the questions they asked about ROI, tracking, and analysis of social media initiatives.

Throughout the research that I’ve done and the conversations that I’ve had, I’ve heard social media right now described it as “the wild west”. Like web analytics was in its infancy, we are just now building the hallmarks and benchmarks for social media analytics. It’s an exciting time, and an extremely fast-paced one. If you have been keeping up with how businesses are using social media for the last five years or so, you’ve seen Facebook dominate MySpace, then Twitter edge its way in. As we moved to mobile, a slew of geo-location platforms arrived on the scene and now we’re trending toward game-based platforms.

As much as social media trends change, it is imperative to have a social media strategy, not just to spend your marketing dollars most effectively, but also to get to know your audience better. How do you get a social media strategy? You need information first. That’s where analytics come in. There is a wealth of information about your patrons hidden in their interactions on social media—like your own on-going focus group. But (A) how do you get to that information and (B) how do you draw conclusions from it?

A. As of today, what are your options for social media tracking? There are thousands of analytics tools out there and more being developed every day. Nonprofit arts organizations are faced with a dual bottom line: to serve the community and to create, present or preserve great art. Which tools are most useful to a nonprofit arts organization in gauging how they meeting the dual bottom line? In Part 2 of this series, we’ll take a look at some popular analytics tools and how to evaluate the tools out there given your organization’s more specific goals.

B. How can you use analytics data to make management decisions? There are many ways to slice and dice the data you might get from those tools. What are some strategies for using the current tools available? How can you make a confident decision about what is essentially a moving target? Given the tools and tactics in the above questions, when is it worth it to pay for analytic tools? In Part 3, we’ll address the problem of structuring your social media tracking efforts to find information relevant to your day-to-day decisions.

4 Tools for Creating Websites on the Fly

Recently, I’ve been hearing about website creation platforms for artists, musicians, and designers. (They are also great for student portfolios!) These days, many people are starting to focus their efforts on mobile apps or websites, but still more may lack a functional, easy-to-use website in the first place or need a secondary site, like a company intranet or a micro-site for an exhibit or show. I’ve found four that are worth checking out if you’ve been thinking about creating a website. The interfaces for these website creation platforms are very easy to use, with no coding required. If you have all your copy ready and your songs or artwork prepped, you can create a professional-looking website in about an hour, hosted by the site. Many of them are cheap or even free. Here’s a four tools for creating a website on the fly: Wix.com: Individual artists and small organizations

One of the easiest, cheapest (free!) options I’ve seen out there is Wix.com. It produces great looking websites, with hundreds of free templates. Best for individuals or small groups, there are lots of options for photographers, designers, or artists here, and I also saw a few modeling/acting pages and a musician page with a music player for musicians or ensembles.

Wix is really good for people who just need something simple and don’t care too much about the site being particularly flexible. For example, I ran into problems posting lengthy text (like a full resume) in the page of the website, because the page sizes are set. Of course, you always have the option to link to an outside page or a PDF if this happens, but it’s important to be aware of the limitations. For this reason, I would recommend this tool to individual artists/ensembles or smaller organizations who just need something simple that they don’t necessarily want to deal with updating very often.

Another disadvantage is that Wix uses Flash, which means that the site cannot be viewed on iPhone, but for sites that will likely be viewed only on desktop/laptop computers or Android phones, Wix is fast, easy, and free.

Google Sites: A helpful collaboration tool

Google Sites (formerly Google Pages) also has some good options for individual artists, but what really impressed me was the templates built specifically for business collaboration. These sites may be useful for arts managers who are working on projects with outside companies or production managers who are trying to coordinate a design team who are working in 5 different cities in the initial planning phases of a production. Google also emphasizes that many businesses use Google Sites for company intranets or wikis.

There are a number of versatile templates, which you can play around with here.

Maestro WebBuilder: Classical Music Organizations, Ensembles and Artists

For those of you who are still hung up on the Flash-iPhone compatibility issue, I have two tools for you: InstantEncore’s Maestro WebBuilder and WordPress. Maestro WebBuilder is part of the InstantEncore suite of tools for classical music organizations and musical artists who primarily play classical music. (We had a fascinating interview with the COO of InstantEncore a few months ago--check it out.)

What’s great about Maestro WebBuilder is that, by building your website through InstantEncore, you are already set up to pull all the information into a mobile website or app. Maestro WebBuilder is a paid tool, but it's cheap, and it gives you the flexibility to easily convert content on your site into a mobile platform and makes it extremely easy to streamline all your social media presences into one system.

Wordpress: A tool for nearly everyone and everything

When you think of WordPress, you probably automatically think “blog”, but you can also build a nice-looking and functional website on the platform. Of course, it is the ideal choice if you want to fold a blog into your site. For example, the Technology in the Arts blog is run on WordPress. The front page is the most recent blog articles, of course, but we also have a number of “static” pages or pages that change less frequently with (shameless plug) resources for the arts field, publications we’ve produced, and webinars focused on ways that arts managers can use technology to meet their mission and goals.

With WordPress, there are thousands of templates out there, some of which are cheap and some of which are free. You can find a very professional-looking one without spending a lot of money. Ceci Dadisman of the Operagasm blog is a big advocate of WordPress as a way for arts organizations to save money.

It's also a good option if you are not a web expert, but want to/are willing to learn the basics of content management and HTML. It's easy to set up and maintain a basic site, but there's room to grow if you decide to get fancy. There are the thousands of WordPress plug-ins out there that you can download to jazz it up. For example, look at the top of this post. See the box with the number of times this article has been tweeted? That’s a WordPress plug-in! Scroll down to the comments section. Disqus pulls in comments from Twitter and Facebook. That’s also a WordPress plug-in! You have lots of options to connect your site with the greater community.

Upcoming Webinar – Inspiring Online Audiences: Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive

The word "engage" gets thrown around a lot. But what does it really mean? Our upcoming webinar takes a look at how arts organizations can inspire their audiences through online platforms by focusing on a case study from Jacob's Pillow, which recently launched their own online exhibit.

Inspiring Online Audiences: Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive May 9, 2011 2pm-3:30pm Eastern Register today ($25)

How can online engagement with arts audiences be meaningful, inspiring, and ultimately worth all the effort we put into the online space? Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival presents their recently launched online exhibit Dance Interactive, a collection of videos from 1930s dance pioneers to today's most visionary artists. Looking through the lens of crafting "inspiration", this webinar will help you define for your own organization what that catch-all term "engage" really means and the greater challenge of how to measure it.

Panelists:

Connie Chin is General Manager of Jacob’s Pillow, an international dance festival, school, archives, community programs, and National Historic Landmark, which recently was awarded the 2010 National Medal of Arts. At the Pillow, Connie’s special projects have included Virtual Pillow, the Nonprofit Finance Fund's Leading for the Future initiative funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation’s Leadership and Excellence in Arts Participation initiative. She has consulted as a Peer Advisor for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and served on grants panels in Connecticut and Westchester. Prior to the Pillow, she was in brand management at Kraft and Ocean Spray; and has also worked at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival and New York Foundation for the Arts. As a dancer she has performed with Bill T. Jones, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Muna Tseng, Sincha Hong, Ze'eva Cohen, and others. Connie holds a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.B.A from Yale School of Management.

Lisa Niedermeyer is an independent consultant currently managing digital projects for Jacob's Pillow, home to America's longest running international dance festival. Lisa also serves on the advisory board of Movement Media, a NYC-based organization that empowers dance artists as curators, creators, and strategists of media. Past project highlights include working with the online marketing team at Soundwalk, an international media firm specializing in sound art and iPhone audio tours, as well as collaborating with Jane Comfort and Company (with whom she performed for 7 years) as digital content director for the company's 30th anniversary rebuild of their website.

Aluminum Foil Stage Curtains & Other Oddities

While cruising the net, trying to find the latest and greatest when it comes to arts management and technology, I tend to run across some pretty strange things. They often don't fit into the realm of the arts management focus of our blog, but dang it, they're just too awesome to keep to myself: I

The most stunning stage curtain, ever.

Artist Pae White has created for the Oslo Opera House what could arguably be the craziest main stage curtain to ever grace a stage. White scanned a piece of crumpled aluminum foil and then used a computer aided loom to weave the curtain out of different colors of cotton, wool and polyester. When standing up close, one can see the individual threads, but stand even just a few feet back and well.....well, just look at the picture below:

I went to Barcelona, and all I got was this crappy mini replica of myself.

BlablabLAB's Be Your Own Souvenir is a far cry from some of the cheap junk that you'll find at most souvenir shops. The group hacked a few Kinects, and with the aid of a 3-D printer, gave tourists on Barcelona's La Rambla Street the chance to scan themselves and create their own miniture statuettes. Check out the video below to see some of the results:

I

Theater? We don't need no stinkin' theater!

Ok ok, I'm sure that was not the sentiment that Urbanscreen had when they set out to make WHAT IS UP?, a virtual site-specific theater piece. The piece is a pre-recorded performance, projected onto the wall of a typical dutch dwelling house in Enschede, Netherland. What makes this a projection a site specific piece, also called Lumentecture, is that the projection perfectly lines up with the architecture of the building. Using this technique, Urbanscreen creates an optical illusion of the building's walls giving way to a hidden theater within. Watch the trailer below to get the full effect:

Choosing a Ticketing System in 5 Easy Steps

The following is extracted from one of our recent reports, the 2011 Ticketing Software Satisfaction Survey. Download the full report here.

Choosing a new ticketing system can be a daunting prospect! There are hundreds of systems out there which offer a variety of functions and features, and it's sometimes difficult to tell which would be best for your organization. In the following article, we have broken down this sometimes arduous process into five "easy" steps, including a list of subject areas to consider when embarking upon a ticketing purchase, as well as sample questions to ask.

2011 Ticketing Software Satisfaction Survey Promo from Technology in the Arts on Vimeo.

Step 1: Determine needs and priorities Because of the wide range of ticketing solutions available, determining your organization’s needs and priorities is the first step to choosing an appropriate software system. It is a good idea to seek input from every department you expect to use the system—not just ticket agents. The following is a list of common organizational needs and priorities:

Step 2: Identify vendors

Your prioritized list of needs will help you begin to identify systems that are more likely to be a good fit your organization. A list of vendors included in this survey is also available on page 41 of the report. Visit their websites and research them to help you narrow your list to a few possibilities.

You might also start by looking at the systems commonly used by organizations in your budget category. The following systems were most commonly used by respondents to our survey:

*Because respondents do not represent a true cross-section of the arts and culture community, this list cannot be used to infer market share.

Step 3: Contact vendors

Once you have narrowed your list to a few possible systems, begin to gather first-hand information from the service providers. You might do the following:

• Ask if there are any hands-on demonstrations that let you experience the system for yourself.
• Request a list of client references in your discipline and budget size, and ask those references about their experiences.
• Request a list of client websites to get an idea of the customer’s experience of ticket purchasing and other transactions, such as donating online.

Technology in the Arts has also compiled a two-page list of questions to ask a ticketing software vendor, on subject areas like pricing, data integration, tech support, reports, and more! It's too long to include in this blog post, but see page 38 of the report for nearly every question you may need to ask a vendor before purchasing a ticketing system.

Step 4: Weighing Your Options and Making a Decision

Revisit your list of  priorities and, based on your findings from talking to vendors and organizations who use your system, rank your top choices. You might also seek input again at this point from people who will be using the system to see if your priorities are still in line with theirs.

Keep in mind that price is not always the best indicator of quality.  Even if price is your organization’s primary concern, it is still worth researching and evaluating other aspects of the system before making your final decision.

Step 5: Prepare for installation

Changing a ticket system is a major organizational change, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Timelines for implementing the new system will vary from organization to organization, but here are some things to consider:

•    How long will it take to transfer your data from the current system to the new system?            •    How many years of data do you want to migrate            from your current system to the new system?            •     Will the data need to be “cleaned” or modified            in any way before transferring it? •    How long will it take to install any software on staff computers? •    How much time will it take to create usernames for staff and adjust their profiles so that they have access to the proper data? •    How long will it take to fully train staff on business-critical functions? •    How close are you to the starting a new season and how long will it take to build a season with the new software?

From these questions, you can determine the best time in your season to install your new system,  migrate any data from your current system, and start to train employees. Remember to inform your patrons of any new features that may interest them, like online subscription sales, choose-your-own-seat functions, or mobile integration.

If you enjoyed this article, you can find more information on ticketing systems in our report. Download the full report here.

QR Codes: What are they and how do you make one? [mini-nar]

Mini-nar

So, what is a QR code and how do you make one? Wonder no more. After watching this mini-nar (mini+webinar), you will have all the know-how you need to create a QR code and stick it... well, wherever you want, really.

Plus, it is explained to you by Tom... in pirate garb.

Technology in the Arts Mini-nar: QR Codes from Technology in the Arts on Vimeo.

Links from this Mini-nar:

bit.ly-bit.ly will not only create a QR code for you, but will also track it. (Note: You have to create an account to track QR codes.)

kaywa.com-kaywa.com will create a QR code not only for a URL, but also for text, a phone number, or for an SMS text message.

We are also looking for ideas for future mini-nars! If you have an idea for a subject that we could cover in about 5-10 minutes, please comment below or suggest one any time via Facebook or Twitter.

Update: For those of you wondering what the giant QR code that Tom referred to looked like, here it is: