Community Engagement

A.D.E.I has to be more than checking a box

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My colleague and frequent collaborator Ann Marie Sorrell is fond of saying that engagement with diverse communities must be more than “checking a box” and she’s absolutely correct.  Ann Marie and I are long-time collaborators in this work, starting with a multi-year initiative many years ago at Palm Beach Opera. As National Black Business Month has just concluded, I’m reminded of an article in The New York Times which brought this concept to the front of my mind once again. It shines a light on the sometimes performative nature of A.D.E.I work, … Read more

Show Me What You Love About The Arts Without Using Pictures Of The Arts

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Advisory Board for the Arts sponsored a webinar discussing how Utah Symphony shifted its marketing focus to emphasize emotional factors and shared values.  Karen Freeman, Executive Director of Research at Advisory Board for the Arts, observed that this approach can be effective because “people make choices based on emotional factors but justify it with rational considerations.”  Essentially, how this might manifest is you may choose what car to purchase based on an emotional association but decide it is a good choice based on things like gas mileage, dealer incentives and utility to … Read more

Plan For An Inclusive Post-Covid Cultural Experience

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In mid-December 2020, LaPlaca Cohen and Slover Linett Audience Research released an analysis of the data they collected in the Covid edition of the CultureTrack survey through the lens of race and ethnicity. The three broad categories of change the survey results indicated are: • Becoming more inclusive and community-centered is the most widely desired category and includes greater diversity of voices and faces, greater focus on localness (local artists, local nonprofits, and the local community), more engagement with young people, treating employees fairly, and being friendlier to all kinds of people. … Read more