Like the Nature Conservancy, the subject of Part 1 of this series, Charity: water’s website features a personalized, social media-inspired interface for contributors to track their personal impact on the organization’s mission. Users can quantitatively monitor the extent of their support in real-time, whether they donate, raise funds from and/or with others through a campaign, or spread awareness through (digital) word of mouth. Participants can organize themselves into groups that can run their own campaigns and set collective donation goals in order to fund specific projects, such as a well installation in a village. One of Charity: water’s unique campaign frameworks is The Birthday Project, which encourages people to leverage their birthdays and challenge those they know to donate their age in dollars.

In order to report finished projects, Charity: water uses a Google Maps-powered map to show the exact locations of each completed project with GPS coordinates, completion dates, and the number of people who benefit from the project. To date, there are over 4,000 projects featured on the map across four continents. By literally showing where funds are being used, Charity: water promotes a sense of personal satisfaction in having contributed to a global cause, despite the physical distance between donors and beneficiaries.

Takeaway: Charity: water’s website suggests that the organization values transparency and awareness, allowing donors to educate themselves about the organization’s efforts and track progress throughout the 18-month time frame that is typical to complete such projects. Currently, we tend to measure success in our fundraising efforts by the total amount raised, but Charity: water demonstrates that there are opportunities to strengthen relationships between organizations and our contributors by also acknowledging their individual impact.

1) WNYC’s online feedback page
New York-based news station WNYC (home station of “Radiolab”) includes a listener feedback forum on their website that goes beyond the typical online “comment-box”-style form. The feedback posts are visible to the public, regardless of how positive or critical they may be. Other visitors can comment on these posts and vote in agreement with the original feedback (think Facebook “likes”). While some organizations might seek to remove the most critical ones to avoid potential bad PR situations, there is a wide range of sentiments and topics represented, suggesting that WNYC wants to create an environment of transparency.

Takeaway: Don’t be afraid of letting patrons offer feedback in their own words! People appreciate knowing that  organizations value the opinions of those they serve on an individual level. Implementing a forum-style feedback page  can make it easier for an organization to figure out what issues need to be addressed most immediately: it can be as simple as looking at how many people voted in favor of a specific comment. Also, online feedback forums encourage two-way interaction between an organization and the public, as well as between constituents themselves, even without a physical venue.

2) WBEZ’s CuriousCity
With their CuriousCity project, Chicago’s WBEZ news station (home station of “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” and “This American Life”) takes the concept of user-contributed content a step further: users suggest questions and issues relevant to the Chicago community for the station’s news team to investigate and report on. Every one to two weeks, listeners can choose from three issues that they would most like to see investigated. Users can then closely monitor the investigation status of each issue in real time on an interactive timeline, or even add to the ongoing investigation by posting their own insights on the issues.

Takeaway: Gathering ideas from your patrons is great, but actually implementing those ideas in a highly visible way is all the more meaningful in terms of giving your constituents an enriching, relevant experience. A possible equivalent strategy for the performing arts, for example, might be letting audience members suggest or select repertoire for an upcoming event.

3) WQXR’s QCard
WQXR, the classical music arm of New York’s WNYC, offers a premium to donors and members that might be even better than a tote bag. The QCard grants online access to a restricted part of the WQXR website that offers cardholders benefits at businesses and arts organizations in the New York area and beyond. Participating organizations and benefits rotate on a monthly basis. Offering these types of external benefits creates a feeling of community and space for the station’s core audience base, which can be especially challenging for an institution whose main “venue” is the radio waves rather than a concert hall or museum. By partnering with outside local organizations, the station not only provides long-term incentives to donate, but also transforms the cerebral experience of radio into something more tangible and participatory.

Takeaway: Member and donor benefits for arts organizations tend to focus on internal, venue-based perks, such as free parking for events or personalized ticketing services. The QCard suggests that there are ample opportunities for expanding the range of loyalty benefits well beyond the “bubble” of our own organizations.

Photo credit: http://www.npr.org/about-npr/177066727/visit-npr

• American Opera Projects (Have a Voice), Brooklyn, NY
• Arizona Opera (¡Viva Opera! ), Phoenix and Tuscon, AZ
• Florentine Opera (Bohème Society), Milwaukee, WI
• Los Angeles Opera (Newcomer Project), CA
• Madison Opera (the Madison Opera Center), WI
• Opera on the James (GET REAL), Lynchburg, VA
• Opera Memphis (30 Days of Opera), TN
• Opera Theater of Pittsburgh (My First Time), PA
• San Franscico Opera (Community Open House), CA
• Sarasota Opera (Summer Screening Series), FL
• Seattle Opera (the Preferred Subscriber Program and Select Your Own Seat), WA
• Syracuse Opera (IDEAS Collaborative), NY
• Vancouver Opera (Transporting Opera Audiences), Canada

The thirteen grantees were selected from a pool of 67 companies competing for support from Opera America’s new ‘Building Opera Audiences’ grant program. In its first year, this new program is made possible by funding from the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. The thirteen companies selected are pursuing innovative projects to increase attendance through use of  technology and social media, special activities for the community, or meaningful discussion with community members to better understand the barriers that prevent the public from attending and listening to opera. Opera America will evaluate each program and project awarded.  Congratulations to the grantees- we look forward to following the outcome of these projects and programs!

A description of each opera companies’ specific project can be found in Opera America’s press release.

Gamification can be message, channel, and even marketing education.  A game can be a marketing channel of its own for your organization or it can reside within a number of other channels.  As a marketing tool gamification is usually best tasked at enticing a specific market segment to engage in a free portion of your programming or educational efforts.

As barriers to participation abound, free, at least initially, is essential.  The free doesn’t necessarily have to last forever and there are plentiful articles about the freemium model, its merits and faults for you to consider.  Free is important because there are many, many other games out there that compete for discretionary time, although these games aren’t necessarily in competition with your game.  For example, a geocacher, may or may not be interested in other types of games but is probably interested in other scavenger hunts.  Similar to all other segmentation, games have their market segments and it is uncommon for market segments to blur.

As part of moving into engaging audiences, test or otherwise, you will need to design the instructions for how to play the game.  As with the game, you will need to test the instructions for clarity and user-friendliness.   If you find the instructions getting too long (over a page at the longest) consider breaking them up into smaller portions and feeding them to the audience incrementally.  For live action games you will need to test out your instructions by reading them aloud to a group to check for clarity.

To start using gamification as marketing you will need to plan.  Begin in advance of your regular marketing cycle and work out the game before you include it in your marketing plan for the year or target period of time.  Given that whatever game you create will be an experimental effort within a larger marketing campaign it should be apportioned resources as befits any experimental effort:  aka don’t stop doing what works in favor of using a gamification idea, rather use the gamification idea to engage with segments that are 1) likely to engage with games (have been proven to like the type of game and the format you are exploring), 2) are at least somewhat likely to engage with your project/program/organization and 3) that you have a way of reaching effectively.

In order to effectively market in a gamification project you will have to choose your mechanics wisely.  The goal, under a large umbrella, is to sell your art:  performance, education, or visual art.  In past posts mechanics have been covered briefly but to see a larger overview of mechanics check out the SCVNGR list of 47 game mechanics.  Each of the mechanics discussed in the article have a purpose and some work better for marketing (a shell game, viral game mechanics, leaderboards, countdowns, and disincentives)  than others  (endless game play).

Don’t forget to set goals.  You have to realistically predict measurable effects to your efforts, just like with all things marketing.  This is best done after you have tested the game on a sample group or two.  What do you want the audience for your game to walk away with?  Do you want the game to just familiarize a new market segment with your organization, aka inform them?  Do you want the game to inspire them to buy tickets to your shows in the future or admissions to your museum?  Whatever the goal of the gamification project, make sure it fits into the big picture:  your marketing plan.

Some ideas around goal setting:

1)  Measure income vs expenditure for the project but bear in mind that since the idea isn’t to make money, at least immediately, try not to go crazy on the rewards side of things (limit expenditure)- rewards often times work best when they are unexpected (aside from the ultimate goal reward of course)

2)  Look into measuring attitude and  perception, pre-game and post-game, either through quick polling or through self assessment

3)  Re-engagement should be a major part of your goals:  getting the people who played the game to re-engage with your organization, and not just for the purpose of playing a game

It is worth reminding would be project managers at this point in time that the number one objective of any game project should be the fun of the participants.  This should be a higher priority than any of the others.  It would defeat the purpose and create more work for your campaign to surmount, ultimately fun gets a lower priority and you end up turning  your participants off.

Oddly, in order for the project to be effective and boost your marketing efforts, you will need to market and promote the game.  Once that you have your market segment and delivery method worked out, your game designed, and your goals settled on, you then need to move into implementation territory.

Like with any marketing efforts you need to have the infrastructure to manage both the product, the gamification project, and the potential response.  Make sure that you have things in place so that the participants of the game can then start engaging in the appropriate product that you are using the game to promote.  Also make sure you have the resources to make the game go smoothly without adversely impacting your organization’s primary activities.

From a business perspective, big data enables companies to mix their patron data into a broader pool of consumer data and extract correlations that help them know with unprecedented specificity who are most likely to respond to their appeals. The great thing about data is that it replaces guesswork with facts and gives these corporates reliable answers, clear directions and predictable results. The not-so-great thing is that it replaces personal expertise and human intuition with cold hard math, a process that arts administrators who’ve built their careers on creative management practices might have trouble getting used to. Big data often has a negative connotation in the arts, a field where emotion and personal choice are highly valued. But does going with your gut necessarily lead to a more innovative arts organization?

Recently, arts administrators are taking advantage of the data revolution and gradually forming several predictions towards the whereabouts of arts.

Arts organizations should seize on big data opportunities and use them to improve their efficiency and build vibrant communities of interactive participants or supporters. This will help them generate more earned revenue, more individual contributions and larger, more avid support systems, thus giving themselves a better chance of surviving as audiences for traditional art forms continue to diversify.

Many organizations that embrace big data, however, use it to send traditional marketing messages to wider audiences and will probably fail to fully maximize their opportunities. Mining data to find more people who are willing to respond to half-century-old messages is a zero sum game, but the arts industry has a well-established history of neglecting to update its strategic message content. History also suggests that some organizations will consider data an end rather than a means. The goal of using data is to identify individuals with whom organizations can forge deeper, more meaningful human relationships, but many arts organizations will be satisfied with initial transactions and treat new customers as data clusters rather than as individuals. We do this now with small data. Big data will simply compound the efficiency with which we separate the humans who work in arts organizations from the humans who consume artistic products.

In the era of big data, many arts leaders are likely to find that their personal opinions, anecdotal observations, favorite styles, or even final executive decisions are not necessarily relevant contributions to the marketing process. That’s because data is asking art orgs to focus on professional, quantitative bottom line-driven strategies. Ultimately, data will end up being a temporary fix. A mining process that extracts leftover gas and oil from spent wells; data can only help managers squeeze more productivity out of a finite resource. Audiences for traditional art forms are likely to continue their decline and no amount of analytics will enable these orgs to manufacture new demand.

As to audience engagements, some administrators are predicting that audiences are diminishing largely because currently, many art orgs fail to make direct, meaningful, personal, human connections with the younger, more culturally diverse people on whom our futures depend. Hence, under the concept of “Big Data”, arts managers may be able to use data to make more efficient contacts with audiences, but if they fail to immerse themselves in their cultures and just let managers be influenced by the audience, they probably risk having used the whole investment in big data for the smallest of returns. The best outcome would be, art orgs have better ideas of audience through data; at the same time, they can leverage the information they gained and lead the audience.

The Nature Conservancy’s website includes a portal to individual user pages called My Nature, which can be customized upon creating an account on the site. My Nature’s content categories, as well as the tone of its written copy, somewhat emulate those of major social media platforms – namely Facebook. News feeds (sound familiar?) can be personalized based on interest categories selected by each user, including birding and photography. A showcase of member-submitted photos and “Why I Give” stories from supporters invite further browsing and contribution, and ensure new content for repeat visitors. Clear calls to action, whether that “action” consists of exploring and sharing content or taking larger steps like making a monthly donation, make it easy for visitors to deepen their personal engagement with the organization and make a difference in whatever way they choose.

Those calls to action are assembled into a badge system very similar to Foursquare’s: as users complete certain tasks related to engagement or support, they earn badges that are displayed on their my.nature.org homepage.

Gamification is a topic that we’ve discussed extensively here at Technology in the Arts, and its effectiveness is well demonstrated in this case. Among the game dynamics behind this badge system are:

1) Ownership: collecting “tangible” (in the digital world, that is) rewards for completing tasks

2) Achievement: having one’s accomplishments be recognized

For the Nature Conservancy, the tasks currently included in the badge system are primarily virtual (e.g. “find out more about conservation in our e-newsletter”), but arts organizations might be able to expand the “game” to include real-life actions too. What about offering a badge for new patrons to commemorate attending their first performance, or to reward a loyal pre-concert lecture attendee?

The Nature Conservancy has a history of implementing creative, proactive web initiatives that create a true sense of community and socialization while still being informative. Their encouragement of conversation and active participation reinforces the universal relevance of environmental conservation issues: everyone is both affected by and capable of aiding the cause, and they may not even need to leave their laptops to show their support.

Even in this age where social media has developed into a powerful conversation forum, many websites still focus more on providing content than on inviting it. As the Nature Conservancy demonstrates, this one-way relationship does not have to be the case. How does your organization use its website to invite patron engagement with its brand and mission, or even with each other?

Featured photo credit:
This work by Michelle Cheng is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Today we consider our first option, Artful.ly, from Fractured Atlas. Self-described as “a simple, elegant way to keep track of events, people, and your everyday work,” this online system is designed to facilitate and manage ticket sales, track contributions (cash and in-kind), and store personal contact information for each individual with whom your organization interacts. Its ticket-selling and fundraising functions work on an organization’s existing website, creating a streamlined interface for the user rather than navigating away from the organization’s site in order to complete the transaction. And Artful.ly’s recent integration with MailChimp allows individual email addresses and communication history to now be stored in the same patron record alongside sales, donations, and personal information.

For the nano-nonprofit, the chief attraction of Artful.ly is likely to be its price. Structured as six modules (“kits”),  Artful.ly is free to install, and three kits—People Management, Free Event Ticketing, and MailChimp Integration—bear no cost to use. The remaining kits—Paid Event Ticketing, Charity Donations, and Sponsored Projects (for organizations that receive fiscal support from Fractured Atlas)—incur processing fees for each transaction. The customer is charged a $2 handling fee per ticket, and Artful.ly deducts a 3.5% credit card processing fee from the base amount of each sale. So for a paid event with a ticket price of $10, the customer pays $12, Artful.ly receives $2, the credit card company receives $0.35, and the organization receives $9.65.

In addition to being cost-friendly, the nano-nonprofit will likely appreciate the accessibility of this online solution. Situated in the cloud, multiple users can link to the organization’s account, which can be accessed from any online device. For the small or beginning enterprise without a permanent physical office or still in the process of obtaining personnel, this flexibility translates into critical ease of use. Similarly, while a short piece of code is provided by Artful.ly to install its sales and donation widget onto an organization’s website, nano-nonprofits without a unique website can utilize those features by directing patrons to a hosted online storefront.

The caveat for nano-nonprofits considering Artful.ly is the system’s relative newness. Launched in September 2011, Artful.ly is still in beta mode, and while the status of requested fixes and features is updated regularly, limitations exist. An example: Data can be easily imported as CSV from existing systems, and Artful.ly will automatically match records by email address to merge duplicate patrons. However, the user is left to manually merge any other duplications that exist and because patron records cannot be sorted alphabetically, visually scanning for potential duplicates is a challenge.

The good news is that Artful.ly incorporates substantial arts industry feedback into its design and is extremely prompt in responding to customer inquiries. When we inquired about the inability to delete actions entered in an individual record (eliminating the option to correct data entry mistakes), we received thorough and thoughtful replies, suggesting that nano-nonprofits requiring technical support will find ample assistance.

Finally, potential users should know that Artful.ly is in the culminating phase of a significant redesign of its People Management module, which will address several existing limitations as well as add the ability to include social media handles, lifetime value, and prioritized actions to individual patron records. In the meantime, a “dummy” account may be a useful way for nano-nonprofits to experiment with Artful.ly to determine if this inexpensive, online system is a good fit for its organizational needs.

Coming up next: Patron Manager

But for the fast facts…

Who: The National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst) and 11 additional Danish art museums.

What: HintMe is a shared mobile platform with the aim of opening up museums’ collections by making content re-useable and freely sharable. At the same time, the platform has the potential to increase user engagement with the museum, its artwork, and between visitors themselves. Here is why it is brilliant: HintMe makes use of an existing platform, Twitter, and a style of communication that has become increasingly familiar and popular, the hashtag. #sohotrightnow

Users can access HintMe on their mobile device to comment on a work of art in the gallery or read what others have said. Users can participate and engage with the shared content, giving each work of art a “human” voice. Not only is this content valuable for the museum, but it also offers a creative way for visitors to participate with the collection. The project provides proper “scaffolding” so users feel confident enough to participate- they understand and are familiar with the platform, the purpose of the mobile tool, the rules, and their options. Because of the platform, HintMe is inclusive, not exclusive, allowing all types of participants to engage- from those who want to contribute to the conversation and #hashtaglikecrazy to those who prefer to read the content others have generated.

When: Now. It is currently a pilot project. Though Beta tests and suggestions from users, the museum continues to discover opportunities to enhance the existing platform. They are open to feedback on how to improve the user experience.

How: HintMe uses the “open” collection model. Works of art have open licenses and can be shared freely and re-used. In order to encourage dialogue between museum visitors regarding pieces in the gallery, HintMe uses Twitter’s API. While in front of a painting, a viewer can access, read and respond to the comments of visitors past and present.

Thoughts on the case? On opening up collections and making content re-usable? #GetAtUs #TechInTheArts

Featured Image Photo Credit: Rikke Baggesen

Spoiler alert: I can - the Rijksmuseum.Yes, I am on a Rijksmuseum kick.

In honor of the Rijksmuseum’s gorgeous restoration, let’s talk about how an art museum with an extensive traditional collection can successfully leverage good website design. I would argue that a contemporary or modern collection is not a prerequisite for an engaging website.

The Rijksmuseum is no stranger to blending their historic values with modern aesthetics. Their renovated space presents the collection in an entirely new way – with only Rembrandt’s The Night Watch returning to its original position. This aesthetic is also clearly visible on their website.

The Rijksmuseum website is sophisticated, functionality wise (we’ve talked about how great Rijksstudio is before). The look is stylish yet mature, and appropriate for the collection it reflects (highlights of which appear in a rotating banner on the landing page). The three navigation bars convey appropriate and necessary information in a simple layout that does not feel simplistic. Perhaps the only criticism I can offer is a lack of centralized navigation – there’s no one location for all the links on every page. But, I am an adult and can use the back button and found the page easy to navigate.

Even as the renovation of the Rijksmuseum is an even further return to “tradition” – original ceiling arches have been restored, the original mosaic floors uncovered – their website stands as a wonderful example of what a museum website should be. It’s easy to navigate, visually appealing, and represents who the museum really is. So check it out – and if you’re in Amsterdam, get tickets to their reopening, April 13, 2013.

Can you think of any other museums with great websites?

In a video below, Flipboard founder Mike McCue picked up a magazine built by a fan of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. It looked pretty neat, full of news and stories about artists performing at the event, together with relevant videos and even music that you can tap on and have playing in the background. Everyone can comment on the magazines.

It may look a bit like Pinterest at the first glance, and indeed it is a feature that will appeal to those who enjoy creating collections. This could be a useful tool for arts managers to create stories about each exhibition or show. Many arts organizations have realized the value of using social media platform, including Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. However, given the information on these platforms is extremely scattered, arts managers need to reorganize these information and make it more meaningful to the audience. Making a logic story about the concept of a show by integrating the use of video, pictures, words, and audio can help audiences comprehensively understand the meaning behind an art activity.

This new feature provides a preview of Intelligent Content, which is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable, for both magazine creators and readers. One advantage of Intelligent Content is that it can help arts organizations create content in a more cost-efficient way. Instead of obeying the rules of printed media, arts organization can offer an always-on and continuously updated experience by creating a magazine online while saving money on printing. Moreover, audiences can access the magazines wherever and whenever they want and share them with their friends.

More importantly, this new update enables arts managers to predicate which artworks will bring in a much-needed audience by analyzing the big data that comes from reading, creating and commenting behavior. Recently, an MIT team has developed an algorithm that can predict trending topics on Twitter hours in advance. Similarly, arts managers can use the data that comes from the audience’s responses to the magazines to identify emerging popular topics. Arts managers can also encourage the audiences to create their own magazines that are correlated with the shows. This way, arts managers will be able to create content with almost a certain return on investment.

Arts managers who recognize this design-and data-driven future will have a head start. Flipboard is just a start. Arts managers can experiment now with new ways to deliver content and measure how the audiences engage with it. The data in turn is a great asset to help them deliver even more engaging art experiences in the future.

“Inspiration came from the idea of viewing the patient journey as a ‘Nature Trail’, where the hospital walls become the natural canvas, with digital look out points that reveal the various ‘forest creatures’, including horses, deer, hedgehogs, birds and frogs, to the passerby.”

The LED panels were placed at various, low-level heights throughout the hallway. The light patterns, along with the wall paper, create the effect of movement through the forest. At low heights, the display is accessible to young patients, aged 1-16 years old, allowing them to move with the animals and engage with the magical lights. The aim of the ‘Nature Trail’ is to distract young patients from their upcoming operations and to temporarily relieve them from their anxieties.

This project is exemplary for a number of reasons: it is an innovative implementation of affordable technology in an existing environment; it creatively services and meets the needs of its target audience; it reflects a strong relationship and thoughtful collaboration between a designer, the participants, and a philanthropic organization; and it offers a replicable model, not only for hospitals.

Read the article： 50 Ways To Integrate Art Into Any Lesson

The first step to creating a game for your marketing or development project is to brainstorm.  Using the previous two posts on games and gamification ask yourself about your audience and about who (what market segments) are likely to engage in your game project.  Use what methodology works best for you at this point:  flip charts and a facilitator, sticky notes that everyone puts on the wall, mix and match concepts where there are two groups and one generates game ideas and the other generates market segments, or any other technique that works for you.  Don’t work at this process for too long, about an hour is as long as you will remain creative.

Game playing, is something that many people (in your area) are very very good at.  Almost every community you can easily find dozens or hundreds of people who are adept at playing games, either electronic or in the non-virtual world, and can potentially help you with testing your concepts.  Test your ideas before you move into implementing a full scale game!  Testing means taking your game concept and having individuals or small groups of people try to play it and then give you feedback on what works, what doesn’t – and how they both work and don’t.  This will, in turn, give you information on how you may modify the game, re-balance it for speed and pacing, fairness, fun, encouragement, and efficacy towards your ends.

Here, for example, are three ideas for dynamics with subordinate mechanics, target market segment, and an idea around pacing/time flow:

1)  An external game – A competition between your patrons (target ages 18- 30 as discerned by the type of prize you are giving out):  for ten weeks, every week you post a riddle that once solved provides a clue about a grand prize.  Competitors can cooperate but if they do they have to share the prize at the end of the competition.  Only the first three people who arrive for the clue receive the clue and the results each week are posted via leader-board or on social media.  The competition culminates in an event that, to get access to the participants must have registered and competed during the ten weeks.  The winner(s) are announced, the prize is given out, and the next game is announced during the event as well.

2)  An internal/external game – A competition between your volunteers (target ages 40-60 as discerned by the type of prize, again):  for an entire year you give the patrons that walk through your lobby a token that they can drop in a station near a volunteer post (with there being 4-5 total posts).  Volunteers are always posted at the same stations and work as teams.  Each month a eye catching (be it gaudy, glamorous, or just beautiful) trophy is moved to the station that received the most tokens from patrons.  Rules are set to govern how far the teams can go in order to earn the tokens from patrons.  Each time the trophy is moved it is announced via your website, social media, and via your newsletter/e-newsletter (if you have one).  At the end of the year you give out additional prizes or badges for things like:  most creative station team, most wins, longest streak of wins, and best month’s effort.

3)  An internal game – A anonymous competition between teams comprised of a member of each department as well as two donors/volunteers at an organization set over the span of a week.  The competition would be judged by a panel of community members who select the winner based on appeal, creativity, and  quality.  The internal contest would be to come up with a name, creative slogan, and a mascot for in order to get funding for a new program or effort in the next year.  The judging would happen in phases with the winner of each round being announced after each one along with feedback for all teams.  The overall winning team would be announced at the end of the week at a party and would be crowned.

When designing a game there is tremendous freedom of choice.  Here is a way of framing the creative process, first choose what dynamics you want;

Competition:  Do you want people to compete?  Can this be anonymous?  Do you want competition to be the driving idea?

Cooperation:  Will you make it necessary or advantageous to team up in pairs or groups  either for the duration of the game or temporarily?

Ownership:  Either online or in the non-virtual world you can inspire greater levels of engagement by allowing or encouraging players to create names or personas of teams or individual characters.  You can encourage or require them to create fictional back-stories or non-fictional profiles and reward them for the completeness of their actions.

Achievement:  Rewards, either by recognition, by granting advantages, or by payout for the motivating factors.  You can use this to create a feedback loop (Loops described in this helpful article by Andrzej Marczewski) and balance a game while it is being played.

For more in-depth information on game design check out The Art of Game Design, A book of lenses by Jesse Schell (from the Entertainment Technology Center here at Carnegie Mellon University) or Game Design Workshop, A Playcentric Approach to creating Innovative Games by Tracy Fullerton.  The Gamasutra website also has lots of good information.

LACMA is making waves with their new collections website – featuring 20,000 high resolution images of works from their permanent collection. Users can download the images to their desktop or save them into LACMA’s “My Gallery” system. They can search for images by subject, genre, or even by location in LACMA’s physical space. On their Tumblr, LACMA challenges their followers to be creative in their use of the images.

Dear Tumblr-verse,

Merry Christmas: we just gave you 20,000 high-resolution images, for free. Now we have just one question: what are you going to do with them?

There are certain stipulations that come with the collection of mostly public domain images, including the creator’s name and the source (LACMA, obviously). LACMA’s Amy Heibel expounds upon the reasoning behind releasing the collection in their blog. Undoubtedly, this is a major step forward in the democratization of art and images.

This trend is global: the Rijksmuseum of the Netherlands has a large collection on their website too. Similar to LACMA’s “My Gallery”, the Rijksstudio allows users to save their own curated collection of art, whether an entire piece or just a cropped section. Visitors can also order prints of the pieces directly from the collection site and download images for their own use. Users can share the products they create in their own Rijksstudio sets.

To learn more, the video below is in Dutch, but you can create your own Rijksstudio on their English version of the site.

Overall, this is an interesting trend for museums – a type of institution whose biggest asset is usually their collection. It allows users to experience and engage in the art in a brand new way – and I do not think it will ever be something that competes the actual museum experience. Stairs and escalators may both take a person up, but they’re different experiences.

These digital collections capitalize on the need to collect. Ever notice how many people take pictures of art in museums? Humans feel a compulsion to “collect” the art on the walls in a museum, and with the advent of the camera phone, it’s easier than ever. My Gallery and Rijksstudio allow visitors and non-visitors alike to collect better images than their iPhones would ever capture. And if visitors know they can find it online, they might put down their phones in the galleries and pay more attention to the art.

Image Credit: Still Life, Apple and Chestnuts, by John Francis, from www.lacma.org

Regardless of exactly how soon mobile device Internet browsing will overtake PC browsing, we as an industry recognize the importance of evolving with our patrons’ behavior and preferences.  However, the actual decision-making and implementation processes can be more complicated, especially with the added challenge of the limited budget that is all too common in the arts sector.  Focusing your resources on a great mobile website can often be a more cost-effective route than creating an app.  The Kennedy Center demonstrates the full potential of a mobile-optimized website with an efficient interface designed with patron usability in mind.  As long as mobile tech remains a relatively new outlet for reaching our constituents, there are countless things we can learn from their example, but here are 4 to get you started:

1)    Providing multiple ways for users to navigate the website accommodates their individual interests and thought processes.  It is obvious that in designing their mobile site, the Kennedy Center considered the diversity of their audience base as a multidisciplinary arts center.  Some of their patrons might be enthusiasts of a certain art form – such as ballet – so they can “Browse by Genre” to see only that type of event.  Those that prefer to base their search on their availability can “Browse by Date” to view a calendar that includes full event listings for each day during the month.  With this structure, users can choose what layout is most fitting and intuitive for them.

2)    Keep as much important content “above the fold” as possible to minimize scrolling.  Ideally, a mobile website has condensed information that is conducive to browsing on smaller screens, but in many cases, users may still need to scroll in order to read the entire page.  The Kennedy Center design addresses that problem by presenting as much content as possible “above the fold” (i.e. visible to the user without having to scroll vertically).  This is especially apparent on the main menu page, where all six buttons and a picture can be seen without the user having to touch the page.

3)    Include a link to the full HTML version of the website so users have complete access to your web content.  Since designing a mobile-optimized website almost always includes omitting certain information for the sake of efficiency, it is essential that users be able to see the full site if they do not find what they are looking for on the mobile version.  Although most of the major content in the Kennedy Center’s mobile website appears above the fold, the information below the fold is equally important: the header contains contact info as well as a link to the full site.

4)    Minimize the users’ need to type.  In mobile optimization, the goal is to help users make decisions more quickly, whether those decisions include finding parking information or buying tickets.  The Kennedy Center mobile site’s donation option features a 3-question form that only requires users to manually type in the amount they would like to contribute.  The other two questions consist of a drop-down menu for choosing a recipient and an on/off toggle switch for opting in or out of donor benefits.  By streamlining their online contribution process this way, the Kennedy Center has not only made it easy to donate, but has opened up possibilities for new types of donors as well.

What are your experiences with the user-friendliness of mobile-optimized websites?  Or, if you’ve already embarked on a mobile optimization project, how has the concept of user-friendliness guided your design?  Sound off below or at @TechInTheArts on Twitter!

Featured photo credit: Karey Helms’ design portfolio

If marketers, including arts marketers, still believe in only the shallow metrics—the number of total followers when creating an influencer program, they can hardly get success. To ensure a successful social marketing campaign, arts managers need to invest more time and energy in understanding the power of potential influencers before working with them.

Here I want to share with you two steps to identify and work with your true influencers.

The First Step: Research and research before finding a true influencer.

An Extensive and in-depth insight into influencers is the prerequisite for successfully identifying your true influencers. To start, you can employ a quantity research to gain context to an individual by using influence tools like Kred, Klout and PeerIndex. More importantly, you need to know the following qualitative information about the influencers before commencing on a long-term engagement.

1. What are their interests? Knowing influencers’ interests helps arts marketers ensure brand and content alignment. One way to get this information is to analyze his/her past feeds or tweets. From example, if a person just posted an artwork from your organization that he/she has never been to, you would know he/she would love to visit the organization.
2. What is your influencers’ audience interested in? Exploring their followers interests enables an organization to evaluate the quality of the influencers’ social circle and to ensure if there is alignment to the overall marketing objectives.
3. What are the metrics you want to set up to measure the success? By leveraging the social analytics, arts marketers can predict the reach, engagement and impact of the influencers before working with them. This information ensures you are promoting a program based on information rather than a “Klout” score that could have been gamed.

The second Step: Work with your influencers in a two-way street.

It’s a collaborative process. To build relationships with social influencers, instead of being so precious about the brand identities, arts marketers need to think about what they can do for the audience they want to reach. Influencers need to take a more positive approach to things—a relationship with a brand does not erode their position among their community. Take the time to work out and give what the audience is interested in is much more important than offering them what you are interested in. According to Will Stevens, an SEO specialist and an online journalist ,“Giving someone who has already engaged the niche you are targeting a great exclusive will boost your profile and theirs-who wouldn’t want that?”

Have you noticed that the concept of influence has become skewed in social media? It isn’t about how many followers you have, instead, it is about the quality of your content and the way you communicate.

Sources: http://readwrite.com/2013/03/06/social-marketing-the-3-big-problems-working-with-influencers

The first installment aired on March 6th with a discussion of how to teach engaging online courses with the Director of Digital Learning from the Museum of Modern Art. For a schedule of upcoming talks, additional details on the discussions, to post a question to be answered or to comment, visit Google’s event page.

And secondly, this:

The next Google Art Talk will be held today, March 20th, at 8pm ET from the National Gallery in London (the last talk was just over one hour long). If you miss it live, you can view it afterward on Google Art Project’s YouTube channel. Tune in and let us know what you think of the quality of the discussion and forum.

One of the examples lies in the jewelry industry.  The jewelry designers are rethinking their manufacturing practices, using state of the art computer software programs for designs that they would have done by hand previously. The reason why traditional methods are left behind is these computer-assisted designs can be produced faster and cause a proliferation in the market.

Though the technology of Computer-assisted design (CAD) sounds familiar to most people, it is very unique for designers to apply the CAD technology to the production of art pieces and enhance their market values. In this field, CAD describes the process of creating a technical drawing with the use of computer software, which could assist in the creation, modification, analysis or optimization of a design. There are options such as “Emerald Builder,” “Cluster Builder,” “Bezel Builder” and additional palette tools to construct jewelry features onto an evolving, three-dimensional design. After rendering an intricate piece of virtual jewelry, the software can also display how it would look in different materials, such as silver, gold or platinum, with rubies, or sapphires or garnets. Even when using CAD or Matrix programs, the designer can add handmade touches at any point in the process, so that each piece is unique, or slightly irregular, or possesses a rough, or human, look and feel.

This may sound like computers, or at least computer programmers are taking over the art design world. But the traditionalists still don’t give up. While CAD can offer structural advantage to some pieces, the designer needs to know how to set and place various bits, whether using CAD or working by hand, so the art piece does not fall apart. As for jewelry’s charm, much of that is the result of an artist’s imagination and original design, which may or may not be enhanced by a computer screen, depending how fanciful or practical the piece may be.

Technology can make all of this happen. It will facilitate the production and the relentless march of computer-assisted technology could drive down the value of the art pieces because there is more supply than demand in the market. As the art and content becomes less and less commercially and economically viable, it can support fewer artists. As this happens, talented artists will enter other pursuits and endeavors with the original arts’ nostalgia. They keep thinking a question.

Are arts dying? Is technology killing them?

Barbara Becker, in her research paper of “On the Relationship between Art and Technology in Contemporary Music” gives her point. She said, “Certain preconceptions need to be dropped in order to allow for a creative use of technology in art today. The artist should not any longer be regarded as the sole source of artistic ideas but may appear as a mediator in the attempt to articulate them aesthetically. This leads to a different approach towards technology and appears to be the prerequisite for its creative potential to become accessible.” The technological possibilities could be explored in a playing manner in order to guarantee that they can be integrated into the artists’ expressive repertoire. Becker thinks this way of employing technology may result into a richness of nuances and a diversity that is in clear opposition to the technological habit of mind ruling our present culture.

Artists have been fascinated with robot capabilities, such as manipulation and locomotion, because of their precision and speed. Industrial robot arms have been programmed to draw, or to perform with dancers. There is also a growing interest in human-like robots and insect-like robots. In recent years this interest has heightened with robotics and associated technology being represented in many contemporary works of art. Arts technology is maturing and becoming an integral part of everyday life. Reciprocally, robotic art is pushing the frontiers of robotic research in many new directions processes, which is narrowing the socio-cultural gulf between the technologies and its end users, the society at large.

In a reversal of common belief and expectation, the boundaries of technological applications appear to be pushed not so much by relevant science or engineering but artists. One example is certainly the social virtual reality of Second Life, which was explicitly created to mimic the Metaverse described in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. A leading role for art is also evident in human-centered robotics. When it comes to fathoming the depths and shallows of our future dealing with our new companion, the robot, artists have jumped the queue ahead of technical and commercial realization and have introduced robots into our lives. While there is an abundance of fiction literature and movies with robots as protagonists, here we refer to the performance art that have integrated robots in some way or another in their performances or even made the robot the work of art itself.

A good example is the enduring reappearing robot human symbiosis in the work of Australian performance artist, Stelarc. In such manners, artists ask questions about the future directions of robotics before the field itself might have become aware of them and have also envisioned robots that are yet to come. Another example lies in Carnegie Mellon University, which has launched arts-based robotics program
to increase technical literacy in the Pittsburgh region for four years. This establishment not only encourages individual efforts to connect art concepts with artificial intelligence, but also emphasizes educational and creative opportunities in robotics.

The CMU party, which we gave the tongue-in-cheek name Innovation City: Tomorrow’s Destination… Today, was co-hosted with the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and we used the late night event as an opportunity to showcase our city’s rising position in the modern U.S. economy. Pittsburgh was recently named by the National Venture Capital Association as one of the top cities for tech startups.

Distinguished service professor and director of the CIO Institute at CMU’s Heinz College Ari Lightman and I were on WESA 90.5’s Essential Pittsburgh last week talking about SXSW and the Pittsburgh party. You can listen to our interview online to learn more.

Listen Now >>

There were a few dominating trends at SXSW this year, one of which was an emphasis on hardware. This is unusual for a conference historically focused on software and mobile applications. Probably the most buzzed-about tech this year was the MakerBot Replicator 3D Printer, a desktop device that literally turns a 3D design into an actual, plastic item. (Allow me to offer a quick humblebrag, because we had three MakerBot Replicator 2 machines at the Innovation City party, courtesy of Pittsburgh’s new TechShop location.)

Geek heaven.

This was definitely the year of home 3D printing at SXSW. Sure, you’ll shell out more than $2,000 if you want a top-end device like the Replicator 2.0 (and more for the software required to create your designs), but when you think about the possibilities for artists and arts organizations, that’s really not breaking the bank. For instance, an artist could digitize his or her sculptures and sell scaled down versions at gallery shows.

Another supercool highlight of SXSW 2013 that had me geeking out was the Leap Motion controller, which employs hand and finger gestures for computer interaction. Remember in the movie Minority Report when Tom Cruise’s character waved his hands and moved things around on a transparent screen? Well, this is… not exactly like that, but we’re getting closer. The Leap Motion controller opens up a new world of opportunity for digital modeling and computer gaming. The elimination of physical devices like the mouse and keyboard is also great news for germaphobes!

Check out the Leap Motion controller in action:

Finally, I want to draw attention to a presentation I attended that was a bit off the beaten SXSW path. Katie Hill and Scott Stulen gave a truly engaging and inspiring talk, #catvidfest: Is This the End of Art?, about the Walker Art Center’s first ever Internet Cat Video Film Festival. More than 10,000 people showed up for the Walker’s festival, which was held in an open field beside the art center last summer. In fact, the event was part of the Walker’s “Open Field” initiaive, which is a summer endeavor that was launched as a relaxing and creative “gathering place.”

Through the cat video festival, Hill and Stulen made a very important point — even in our modern world of on-demand entertainment and online communities, we still crave physical interaction. The Walker has found an inventive and hilarious way to comment on modern “art” in this YouTube era, while taking the online offline and bringing people together in celebration of a common interest.

I encourage you to take a moment to read this piece from Jezebel by Madeleine Davies, who initially intended to rip the Walker’s Internet Cat Video Festival to shreds through online mockery. Davis discovered that “we’ve gotten to the point in which people gathering together and celebrating something positive is considered lame.”

Read the full Jezebel article >>

Speaking of cats, Mashable was at SXSW offering the opportunity for attendees to have their picture taken with the Internet’s famous Grumpy Cat. People waited longer than 3 hours. Seriously.

Grumpy Cat did not approve.

I’d love to hear from some of you. Are you using 3D printers, or have you experienced any cool artistic uses of them? Do you have ideas for the Leap Motion in your organization? And are cat videos art? Would you wait in line for hours to have your picture taken with a cat?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Painting Portal is connected to a set of public domain images of classic paintings, hosted by WikiMedia. The app acts as a “portal” to these images, and allows users to view and peruse them at their leisure. The app has four general “modes”, so to speak. The Home screen, a Catalog, Information, and the Game modes. Unfortunately, there are no in app instructions, but most functions are fairly intuitive. There is a Tutorial Video on their website, but if you’re playing on your iPad, it is hardly convenient to close the app and pull that up.

The Short Version:

The App: Painting Portal, $6.99 from the App Store

The Good: Great learning tool, featuring a diverse load of classic paintings and easy search functions. Game creates instant flashcards and is a great study tool for art history nerds.

The Bad: Doesn’t allow searches by painting style, lacks instructions, and isn’t the flashiest app out there.

The Verdict: My complaints are nitpicky – if you need a great art history study or teaching tool, or just love to learn, this app is for you. It’s a great resource.

The Home screen exists for viewing images. Users can bookmark specific images, zoom in and out, and play a slideshow of them from here.

The Catalog is where it gets real. Users can search for a painting or painter, or, if they have no practical knowledge (like me), search from a bevy of options. Users can search from paintings by date range, country of origin, or painter. The date range function is nice because it breaks it down by century, and also into 25 year increments for the more discerning user. A small preview image appears on the screen when the painting is selected – clicking it takes the user back to the home screen, where they can zoom, bookmark and create slideshows.

After selecting a painting, users can hit the Information tab. This tab brings up Google results for the painting or painter, and users can easily switch between the two. It’s an easy and quick way to get more info on a piece, without requiring a curated expertise by the app creator. It’s smart – and frankly, where I researching these pieces, how I would begin anyways. The Information tab is just saving users a few steps.

The real gem of this app is the game function –  again, without instructions I was a bit perplexed, but it becomes immediately clear that this would be a very useful tool for art history students. The “game” shows the user an image, and asks for the painter, name of the painting, country of origin, and date range that it was created in. A series of multiple choice answers appear for each question, and users have a short amount of time in which to select answers. After each round, the correct answers are displayed, along with a score and an average score for the user overall. Since users can select for the game to only display bookmarked images, it very quickly becomes a set of digital flashcards. A valuable study tool to be sure. I didn’t get a chance to test out the two-player mode, but I imagine it’s similar and would allow for competition between users.

There are a few drawbacks to this tool, besides the aforementioned lack of instructions. It’s not a very pretty app, with a very utilitarian design – but this demands the question of form versus function, and there’s no doubt in my mind that its functionality is far more important. Of course the paintings in the app only extend to 1925, again because of public domain usage, so those seeking later works are out of luck. The only real functionality improvement I can think of would be if paintings could be searched by style. Since styles usually correlate to the date of creation, I can see why it would be left out, but it would be a much easier search if I could call up all the impressionist paintings in one query.

Overall, it’s a good app. It runs smoothly, and I found it easy to understand once I was inside. It would make a great study tool for students and teachers alike. It’s available from the App Store for $6.99 now.

When most people conjure the image of a gamer they generally think of the past:  a nerdy 18-25 year old male, probably white.  The face of gaming has changed significantly over the last twelve years and now both men and women, young and old, and people of all races are engaged in games on a regular basis.  Simply put, almost every conceivable group of people is now engaged in gaming, just not all groups are engaged in all types of gaming.

According to a report put out in 2012 by the Entertainment Software Association, the average American households have at least one dedicated gaming consul, PC, or smartphone and 49% of US households have an average of two.  Roughly a third of game players in the US  are over the age of 36, one third are between the ages of 19 and 35, and the remaining third are 18 and under (meaning that two thirds of gamers in the US are adults and that the average age of a game player in the US is 30!)  Also, gender wise game players are now split evenly with 47% of all electronic gamers being women.

“What we are seeing in games is art at a world class stage design that is almost unmatched anywhere else.  It has been very exciting to me to see so many ideas that integrate social good and efforts to make the world a better place through games.”  -Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States

The way in which people are engaging with games is changing.  Console gaming (Microsoft X-Box, Sony Playstation, and Nintendo Wii) has been on the decline over the last couple of years while social media gaming and mobile device gaming has been on the increase.  Similarly board gaming has also been on the rise (according to the 2011 US Census section on Arts, Recreation, and Travel) for the last twelve years with the explosion of number and quality of titles and has drawn increasing numbers of ‘board game geeks’ who wish to connect with people in person in the face of an increasingly electronic world.

So who plays games?  What games do they play?  Electronic gaming wise, women tend to skew towards games like The Sims (which is the “World’s Biggest-Selling Simulation Series”, and “Best Selling PC Game of All Time”), dance and fitness games, and social media gaming.  Men tend towards first person shooters, strategy games, and sports games.  Both men and women tend to engage in role playing games in roughly equal numbers.  In the board gaming world less information is out there about consumption and engagement but it can be assumed, somewhat safely, that similar propensities exist throughout different platforms.

How can the arts harness this?  As arts groups such as The Tate, The Royal Opera, Jacob’s Pillow, and other groups explore game like content and applications they can use this data to fine target the apps they create towards market segments.  As an industry, any arts group can use a game dynamic in order to drive deeper engagement in marketing or development.  Activities such as the Glass Hunt on the Oregon Coast have proven successful at driving interest in art through a game layer, in this case, a scavenger hunt.  Other groups such as 2am theatre have used applications such as scavengr to drive similar efforts in a combined physical and electronic fashion.  In the arts, a typical marketing campaign has a one way thrust:  “buy tickets, come see our show”.  With games, can be enticed to have longer involvement time-frames and be induced to repeat engagement.

Has your organization explored the possibility of using a game dynamic?  Was it through social media, an app, or through an old school scavenger hunt?  What did you find successful?  What were your challenges?  This series will continue in two more weeks with an exploration of how to approach game design, test games, and implement them.  If you have questions regarding this topic or any others please ask them in the comments section!

The aim of Libro express is to increase accessibility of the city’s libraries for those too busy to frequent the brick-and-mortar structure. It does so by offering a selection of books in a vending machine on Platform 1 of the city’s main train station, Cercanías de Sol. It operates 7 days a week and is completely automated. The vending machine stores 135 books (popular titles) which can be accessed, selected, and taken out using its touch screens. Readers can browse the titles while standing at the machine or take one of the fliers nearby, catch their train, read through the listed titles, and select a book on their way home. Train riders can take out a book with their Bibliometro card, library card or Community of Madrid identity card (DNI).

The books have a 15-day lending period at which time they can be returned to the machine, renewed online or renewed at the machine for an additional 15 days. It offers a number of user-friendly services such as a receipt function to confirm the return of a book, a telephone and e-mail hotline to use in the event of an issue with the machine, and the option to renew titles online.

Within its first twelve months, more than 3,500 users borrowed over 10,000 titles from Libro express. Statistics from its first year indicate that 65% of the users borrowed a book using their DNI. This data suggests the majority of users are not habitual library patrons. As such, the lending machine did in fact meet its intended aim to make reading and books more accessible to Madrid’s working and commuting population- those without the leisure time to browse through the library’s stacks.

Why Madrid? According to a 2011 study on the Reading and Book Buying Habits in Spain, 34.6% of Madrilenians read on public transit, compared to the national average of 16.6%. Additionally, 70.2% of Madrilenians read in their free time, compared to the national average of 57.9%.

The Community of Madrid offers additional library-extension programs, reaching over 140,000 users who borrow more than 750,000 titles.

A number of similar projects have sprung up in Canada and the United States. We want to know who is using one and if it has been successful in increasing library patronage and readership.

Photos courtesy of: Elena Delgado Castro at the Consejería de Empleo, Turismo, y Cultura

Recent years have seen a burgeoning of Constituent Relationship Management systems (CRMs), about which a wealth of literature is available. But what data options exist for the smallest of artistic enterprises, those organizations in the early years of operation, with annual budgets under $60,000, and/or having a paid staff of 5 persons or fewer (if not entirely volunteer-run)? For these nano-nonprofits, what resources are most suited to their size and scope of operations?

Over the next 6 to 8 weeks, we will explore several CRM options through the specific lens of the nano-nonprofit, considering particular needs, constraints, and advantages of artistic organizations of that size. As we do, we invite readers to comment on what systems, if any, their small organizations use and what they most need help figuring out how to do.

Perhaps you’re one of the nearly half of all small and mid-sized organizations that store patron information in 4 or more places: Excel sheets, Word documents, the backs of money envelopes…the memory of your founder:

Source: Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council

Maybe the “Constituent Chaos” quadrant of Paul Hagen’s Relationship Matrix is all too familiar:

Source: Paul Hagen, Idealware, May 2006

Or maybe you’re still trying simply to capture the names and addresses of those who attend your events, ticketed or otherwise.

Whatever the current state of your patron information, the first step is to figure out what it is your organization seeks to accomplish. Who are your constituents? What do you want to know about each one? What type of support do they need? How do they attend events? Do you provide physical tickets? Where is patron information currently kept? Or is it? Who is in charge of maintaining those files? Are they digital or physical, stored on a hard drive or in the cloud?

If the task seems overwhelming, take heart. The small size, and often relative newness, of nano-nonprofits ideally positions them to take advantage of CRM potential. Institutional memory is young and easier to access; pertinent data are, typically, of a manageable proportion; and operational capacity is more agile compared to that of larger, established endeavors. All of these factors make it the perfect time for a small enterprise to get its information house in order. So come with us as we navigate the data jungle, and attempt to discern best practices for the artistic nano-nonprofit in the process.

“Most nonprofits have a ton of text, which is great information, but isn’t needed.”

- 2012 Millennial Impact Report

Now I’m not saying you need to run out and grab a Susan Sontag book, but we do need to discuss our current visual culture. The powers and nuances of the internet have become extremely sophisticated – and the same is true for visually-based social media. What do I mean by that?

A visually-based social media is one where videos or pictures are the main form of communication. Facebook may have extensive photo sharing capabilities, but that’s not really what you use Facebook for, right? There are so many other things that Facebook can do. The trend we’re currently watching, however, is the emergence of social media devoted to visual. That’s why Pinterest is popular, why Facebook bought Instagram, and why Vine has literally exploded on the scene.

If you’re unfamiliar with Vine, it’s the new video sharing service from Twitter. Users can share six second video clips – it’s fun, kitschy, and literally did not exist when I started writing this article. Twitter is a social media that is based on the written word, if only in 140 character increments. I think the development of Vine is a real sign that there is a demand for a way to communicate visually. Spektrix has an entire post about the possibilities of arts marketing with Vine.

Not only do users flock to these new visual tools, they’re furious when these tools are taken away from them. For example, the explosion that shook the net when Instagram disabled its Twitter card. Essentially, Instagram photos no longer appear in Twitter streams, now users have to follow links to see the images. What’s meant to drive traffic to Instagram is really only infuriating people who want what they want and they want it now.

This is not a radical idea for internet users, either. Almost half of internet users create content, picture or videos, and post them online. A Pew report about visual media as social currency refers to these people as “creators”. Additionally, the report found that over 40% of users share or repost images online with their networks. The report referred to these users as “curators” – which is another whole issue – but whether they’re “curators” or “aggregators” these individuals can be a powerful force on the web.

Take George Takei for example. Most of you probably know what I mean – either you or someone you know follows him on Facebook or Tumblr and shares or likes his posts. For those in the dark, George Takei, of Star Trek Fame, has found a unique niche on Facebook as an aggregator of memes. Three and a half million fans hang on his every post, which has allowed him to craft a book deal and champion personal causes. His posts are so popular that Facebook Stories, which profiles people using Facebook “in extraordinary ways”, created these marvelous visualizations of how some of Takei’s posts spread over a three month time span.

And all he does is post funny pictures – usually with a short witty pun or line introducing the piece. And in true internet fashion, most memes do have writing on them. It’s important to recognize that pictures can be meaningless if they do not have text attached to it. Images need credit and context to be relevant to your audience, to draw them in.

This is especially important if you’re looking to capture the Millennial or younger demographic. The number of “curators” on the net jumps to 52% when you look at those aged 18-29.

Why should you, the hypothetical nonprofit organization care about that demographic? It’s something I’ve said over and over and one of the greatest ignored facts – the Millennial generation is one that likes to donate. 75% of them did, in 2012.  They like to learn about non-profits and donate to non-profits online.

So maybe you should start speaking their language: which is entirely visual. Here’s some tips to help you get started:

3 Easy Tips for Non-profits

Lead with the picture

• I know it seems obvious, you’ve heard it before, and you probably already do it, but a picture will be the first thing that entices someone to your content. Also consider the importance of page breaks with your posts. A few lines of text gives your readers context and pulls them in, then hit them with a “read more”.

Consider a visual social media

• Is your organization on Pinterest? What about Instagram or Vine? If you’re using Facebook, Twitter or a blog to share pictures, you may be able to integrate more visual elements into your social media strategy.

Recognize your Curators and your Creators

• You’re probably tracking the buzz created by your posts, but who’s creating that buzz? Obviously it’s important to recognize those who share your work with their networks – and who’s sharing work back with you. It’s good to show these devoted folks love, especially when it relates back to your organization.

Is your nonprofit using visual social media in an interesting way? Why isn’t your organization making the choice to do so? Is it ironic I wrote an entirely text post on how important pictures are? Leave a message in the comments below or tweet us, @techinthearts!

An engineer who had the opportunity to try out the Google Glass released a video showcasing how she will use Google Glass in the future:

The tech giant has set up a competition on Twitter and Google+ to explore potential ways to use the new product and give some lucky winners the shot at owning a pair of Google’s glasses. “We’re looking for bold, creative individuals who want to join us and be a part of shaping the future of Glass” writes Google. If you didn’t think Google Glass may could impact Arts Management, you sure might after reading the following 10 interesting ideas posted @Twitter #ifihadglass :

• I would use it to show people how I make it through life and do to work on my art,missing my right arm.
• I’d treat the world as my canvas; I’d share the art that is the human experience, and rejoice in music, travel, life and love!
• I would record the process start to finish as I make new pieces of art.
• I would show the galleries and art exhibits for others to see the art if they don’t have time, and the art scene in San Francisco.
• I’d give free guides to tourists explaining the history and meaning of obscure pieces of art.
• I would like to use google glass in Art museums to pull up all information and references for each artwork I viewed
• I would be excited to test potential uses for museums, immersive experiences and digital learning about art, culture, history.
• Analytics and Art. Figuring out what parts of the day my brain drops from memory, where its focusing, and why.
• Explore the combination of the virtual and the real through performance art. Collaborate with fellow artists through what I see.
• If I had glass, I would redesign the way that we shoot videos and take photography, helping viewers immerse themselves in art.

One of the most amazing impacts of Google Glass would be that Google Glass  has the ability to offers a new perspective for audiences to appreciate art—from an artist’s perspective. Google Glass enables an artist to record and show the whole process of making an artwork, offering opportunities for audiences to watch every minute change the artist makes in the work. Imagine this, if Van Gogh had recorded his process from start to finish when he was painting “Sunflower”, how amazing it could be if his audience saw how Van Gogh mixed colors, sketched on canvas, drew lines, or grabbed a painting brush. Everyone is likely to think as an artist if he/she could watch the birth of an artwork from an artist’s eye. I believe that by appreciating artworks from an artist’s perspective, audiences will be moved and surprised by details that cannot be seen from the final artwork, or noticed from curators’ words, since the power of art lies in the creation process more than the final “product”.

Simply put, a game project will take time and resources.  The payout, ostensibly   is a deeper level of engagement in your programming, fundraising efforts, as well as social media.  Setting expectations around a project of gamification is an integral part of its success.  Gamification can work as part of, not replacing, a marketing or development campaign.  It is best used to supplement efforts that are effective at getting patrons through your door.  When approaching a gamification project look at the following organizational capabilities:

• The timing of the project:  what activities at your organization fit best with the market segments that would be most likely to engage with a game layer?
• The time that the staff has available in the proposed development, launch, and during ongoing maintenance of the project.
• The fiscal resources available:  extremely important if you are looking at an electronic game or app.
• The skill and knowledge related resources available to the project.  If the game project is electronic or app based, do you have IT and/or game savvy staff, volunteers, and consultants/vendors to assist with development and testing?

After an initial assessment of your organization, you will need to take a look at your patrons and ask a similar series of questions:

• Do you have an accurate assessment regarding the demographics of your patron base?
• Which patron market segment do you want to engage?
• Is this market segment ready to engage?  In other words, do they have the desire and means to engage in the medium of your game?  Are they online?  Do they download free mobile apps?  Do they pay for mobile apps?  Are they doing geocaching?
• Do you have an effective means of communicating your project to the market segments in question?  (If not then you would be well served by building lines of communication and doing community building before proceeding.)
• What does successful engagement look like?  How many people would you like to have participating, downloading, out in the field, etc by what time?
• What are competing factors for this market segment’s time?  What are the similar activities that would distract them from your project, how successful are they, and can you realistically compete?

A misconception is that all games compete with all other games.  Studies have shown that gamers tend to focus their interests towards specific genre or platforms of games. For example, take the Sims series and the Halo series:  both have had multiple different iterations and are extremely popular but the overlapping audiences between these two are minimal.  Similarly social media gamers have very little overlap with geo-cachers.

The next installment in this series will take this idea of market segmentation and dive into the data.  What kinds of games do men tend to gravitate towards as opposed to women?  How do age, ethnicity, and education effect what games people play?  There are tons of data sources out there, and with the information at hand, you shouldn’t have to do nearly as much guess work.  If you have questions about gamification, please leave them in the comments!

Tony Smith of Melbourne’s Open Source Developers Club states that apps are ideal for “narrowly defined repetitive tasks” (Fruit Ninja, anyone?), likely due to their standalone and sometimes offline nature.  Another unnamed source quoted in Van Bree’s article establishes two contrasting scenarios in which apps are successful: 1) broad “mass-market” platforms such as the major social media outlets, and 2) robust, specialized tools intended for professional industry usage.  From this information, van Bree makes the case that arts organizations may not benefit from building an app because their needs occupy the middle ground.  Specifically, many arts institutions are largely defined by their location and surrounding community, which disqualifies them as “mass-market” by its basic definition, and their intentions for mobile technology are more engagement-driven than meant for industry use.

Van Bree suggests responsive design – a website whose layout and content adapts to the constraints of the device that accessed the site – as a potentially powerful option for arts organizations.  (For an example of responsive design, compare the Starbucks website on your various devices!)  He also provides a comparative chart outlining the benefits and shortcomings of mobile apps, mobile-friendly versions of websites, and responsive design.

In summary, mobile apps excel in the “User Experience” category, which includes criteria such as ease of use and the possibility of offline access.  However, the app’s one major drawback in this category is the challenges of distribution compared to mobile sites.  Responsive design dominates in the “Management” (i.e. back-end maintenance and ROI measurement) category, meaning that updating content and analyzing metrics are relatively easy.  Mobile websites perform strongly in the “Development” category, meaning that they are the least expensive of the three in terms of time, money, and flexibility across platforms.

Significant to a non-profit’s bottom line, van Bree’s argument is one worth considering in one’s decision whether to invest their time and financial resources in an app or a mobile/responsive design website.  As mentioned above, van Bree’s comparison chart ranks apps as the most expensive type in terms of development, money, and content maintenance, so creating one might not be the best investment if a mobile-optimized website could perform the same intended tasks.  Many performing arts organizations in particular have already deployed highly functional and well-designed apps, some of which even boast convenient in-app ticket purchasing features, but overall there is substantial content overlap between apps and websites.

Before embarking on any kind of mobile tech development project, it is important to assess your organization’s unique goals and needs, with the understanding that an app is not the only available possibility just because everyone else seems to be jumping in on the trend.  Regardless, apps are still a relatively new and valuable channel for arts organizations to investigate, especially if they move beyond mere transactional and informational function and into a role of active patron engagement and conversation.

Featured photo credit: mashable.com

• Rachael loves the Tumblr iPad app – “How else would I share gifs of Beyonce quoting Sweet Brown keep up on arts and technology news?”
• Twitter user @DoeMiSo mentioned using she’s got  #techlove for using iPads to teach music!
• Our newest correspondent, Michelle, cites the Melbourne Symphony App as a fun way to learn!
• Of course, our correspondent Vivi likes to ger her music from Songza - from the app on her iPhone.
• Brett is remodeling her kitchen and all about the Pinterest app – could the performing arts better use it as a promotional tool?
• Twitter user @CStarek shared this story about technology and the creation of music - and we are all about it.
• Our correspondent Grace loves Fruit Ninja – can your organization add gamification to programming?

After over four years as an “unprofessional, professional tech blogger” covering both Chinese Internet and tech industry news and analyses, Lu didn’t feel right offering up advice to entrepreneurs if he himself did not have start-up experience. With his background and passions, social marketing seemed the logical choice for him, but it was only the beginning.

“There was one time that I realized, I might be able to combine the high-tech business action with a designing touch. And I found the business cards are important in China. They can express one’s personality,” says Lu. “Be it for business or personal use, we want to encourage users to ‘exchange their brand’ face to face. More importantly, developing that brand with us online.” 

Therefore, Kuukie, an online custom cards printing service came into people’s eyes. The key feature that differentiates it from other online printing service is that users can customize both sides of each card, which means EVERY card printed can be different from each other on both sides.

“Although high-quality card printing is our main revenue source at this moment, but we define us as an Internet company, ” says Lu. He and his team established partnerships with a few popular social media sites in China to launch its social-media-only marketing strategy, like Weibo (Chinese Twitter), Jiepang (the LBS service) and Yupoo (image-sharing service). Lu added his exclusive strategy in social marketing to the value proposition of Kuukie, which creates a multi-functional online platform for cards distribution.

Defying all stereotypes of the elusive tech geek, Lu, a longtime lover and supporter of the arts, joined forces with creative collaborator NeochaEDGE, to put another “edge” to his online printing service.

NeochaEDGE is a bilingual, Shanghai-based agency, which made a name for itself in China’s creative community a few years ago. Acting as an online link between Chinese artists and their consumers, NeochaEDGE showcases and promotes the nation’s independent artists throughout the Mainland and abroad. Going beyond the everyday printing service, this artsy alliance between Lu’s team and NeochaEDGE offers clients the option to customize their own products and print with a bit of artistic muse — pulling from designs of NeochaEDGE’s Chinese creatives. With NeochaEDGE’s artists posting their work for businesses and people across China to use as they network, a new medium has organically developed for people to support the arts community. Adding a new spin to online marketing, everyone including local artists of all fields, including those outside of the mainstream, can now build their own platform to promote their work, and even more importantly, get paid.

“Most consumers, including businesses, want to be creative and love the idea of having arts and special design on their cards, but usually don’t know where to start. This is the service we provide,” says Lu. Once people order, that’s where the social media aspect of the project kicks in. “The way we market our service is very high-tech,” explains Lu.

“When users receive their cards, we encourage them to have a strong online presence,” he continues. The site is built so people can interact with other users and the artists they’re supporting. “We not only want to promote the Chinese independent artists to the Chinese and the global market,” says Lu. “We want to find a way to both promote and monetize the artists’ work.”