Going Social: Arts Groups Amplify Online Audience Engagement

December 2011

Social media has helped spark movements for change, from the Middle East to Wall Street. Building community, collaboration, and sharing communication both near and far, social media has changed how we capture and tell stories, how far and wide our stories reach, and how we engage the world.

Culture and technology are expanding opportunities in ways we never imagined. We live in an increasingly technologically interactive world with more opportunities for engagement.

Over the last few years, as part of The Wallace Foundation Cultural Participation Initiative, we’ve partnered with regional funders and local arts organizations to support their work in fostering a more engaged and participatory culture that shapes and expands their opportunities to share stories across communities.

This month, as part of that partnership, The San Francisco Foundation granted $187,500 to 31 Bay Area arts organizations to support using social media and marketing to engage diverse audiences. Through grants and trainings on social media strategy with experts like Beth Kanter, we’ve offered tiered support from organizations with little or no social media background to organizations seeking to enhance their social media impact.
 
Our Leveraging Social Media grantees have several exciting plans under way, including:

•   Oakland Asian Cultural Center will focus on promoting the organization and its 2012 activities (including a Lunar New Year celebration) through a series of YouTube videos that will be disseminated through various online channels.
•   La Peña Cultural Center will develop their blog as the “glue” of a social media experiment that encourages cultural and social justice activists to connect via mobile applications.
•   AXIS Dance Company will engage the local dance and disability communities in creating comprehensive marketing materials that will promote the organization’s social media presence and train their staff, dancers, and collaborators to engage communities online.
•   SOMArts Cultural Center will promote their “real-life,” commons-style approach to arts exhibitions and programming to an online audience. By sharing personal stories and offering platforms to ask questions via VYOU.com, a tool for conversational video, SOMArts hopes to break down walls between audiences and the communities that create and present art.

As The Wallace Foundation Cultural Participation Initiative in the San Francisco Bay Area draws to an end in 2012, we look forward to seeing how burgeoning technologies are supporting arts organizations in engaging and building relationships with new and supporting audiences, as well as individual donors.