Hey,
So last week I had the pleasure and privilege of joining a panel put together for this year's
Emerging Arts Leaders DC's (EALDC) annual Creative Conversation. This year's topic? Fundraising in the Millennial Age.
A quick disclaimer, just in case you didn't my post from August: I was asked to join the steering committee of EALDC and accepted. I
started my tenure a couple of months ago. Since then I've co-hosted one of our monthly First Friday lunches, and I ended up on this panel after volunteering adding my own two cents to the conversation, as someone who has successfully implemented two
Kickstarter campaigns to produce
Capital Fringe shows.
But I digress. Our hosts for the evening were two of my fellow committee members,
Tim Mikulski (Communications and Content Manager at Americans for the Arts) &
Emily Travis (Communications & Government Affairs Associate at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Emily was also our moderator for the evening, and a wonderful one at that.
And so let me introduce my fellow panelists. Going from left to right, after Emily, we had Shannon Siemens, the assistant director of membership at the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts as well as one of the foundations' liaisons with their
Club 66 (young professional) membership program. Then there was me in the middle, next to whom sat
James Li, entrepreneur and co-founder of a relatively new fundraising platform
Encore. And last, but certainly NOT least was Ryan Holladay, a trustee of the
Awesome Foundation's DC Chapter,
manager of new media of Artisphere, as well as half the electronic music due known as
Bluebrain.
Emily kicked off the convo with a question to Shannon, getting a sense of the state of fundraising, and she shared her experience and insights, particularly with demographics and retention rate. This was a perfect segue to discussing Wolf Trap's club 66 program, and was a great way to set the context for the evening, Fundraising in a Millennial Age.
James added to the conversation, and how Encore is helping to fill a need and bridge a gap. He provided some great information from the recent Millennial Impact Report, which you can
check out at their blog. One phrase he used, which I love and relates to similar conversations about brandraising (thank you
Big Duck!), was "top of mind". My takeaway was how important it is to stay present and relevant between the arts & cultural events which are the heart of any arts organizations' programs.
Social media inevitably came up and some of the major points included making sure that one had goals and that you focused on good, quality content, and not necessarily some of the easier to grasp, quantifiable stats.
Honestly, with the diversity of panelists and experiences, it's really hard to share everything that was discussed and covered. I say this as I attempt to even think about how I can share a nugget of what Ryan contributed, and I can't. His and everyone else's experience was a healthy serving of humble pie, for me.
Even what notes I managed to take probably only covered 10% of the conversation. So I'll skip to the end of the panel section, and try to paraphrase what I thought was important to leave the evening with.
I reiterated how important it is with social media to be transparent, to integrate those tools with an overall communication plan, and to really cultivate those one-to-one relationships and interactions. Social media is ultimately just a tool, not a strategy.
So after the panel, we broke off into small groups each given a different scenario of an arts organization in crisis, and they had to develop a solution based on the evening's conversation.
And this was just as important, if not more so, than the panel, otherwise it's not much of a conversation.
Overall a great evening with over 20 attendees. Looking forward to future ones, like the one I'm working on now.
After the First Friday Lunch I co-hosted, where there were a number of development people present, they expressed interest in a workshop/training/whatever much like many that the
Foundation Center in Washington offer, but specifically for those at arts organizations. I went on to contact them, and talked with Kim and, although their training calendar is full through the rest of the calendar year, we're looking into a spring offering.
I've even touched based with the
DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and have word from their Executive Director that they are certainly on board for whatever we work out. I thought it'd be great to hear from them, not just about granting opportunities, but leveraging those grants to go after other sources of funding.
Anyway, really excited to be part of this team at the Emerging Arts Leaders DC and this community of artists and arts organizations in the DC Metropolitan Area. Glad to have had the opportunity to participate as a panelist in our Creative Conversation, and stoked to bring other similar events to local arts professionals, to help us all move forward,
- J Street JR
