Archive for March, 2007

I’ve just received an email from the Museum Detective about a new podcast on their blog about the high-risk venture of stealing art. The Museum Detective is one of the few blogs I’ve found on NZ culture, and it’s got me wondering …

Are cultural sector organisations taking up this channel for communicating with their audiences? Are we reluctant to blog?

Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to imagine why a cultural organisation would need a blog. Or is it because of the commitment required to maintain one? The difficulties of measuring the effectiveness of a blog, maybe?

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I’ve been meaning to post about an excellent workshop I attended in early March. Jerry Yoshitomi from California presented on marketing strategies for increasing audiences at arts events. The Audience and Market Development team at Creative New Zealand gets big ups for holding this free workshop, which was a follow up to a programme they ran in 2006 called ‘Engage Now!’.

It seems to me that Jerry’s ideas are useful across the cultural sector. To encourage repeat attendance, Jerry emphasised the importance of finding ways for your audiences respond to cultural experiences. Collecting reviews, quotes, images and video of audience feedback and posting it on your website is one way - the Auckland Theatre Company did just this when they invited the audience to be ‘theatre critics’ and submit reviews on the play Sweet Charity.

Jerry’s exacting focus on what works for the customer - understanding the social reasons for why people go to events - got us talking about how to cater for the time-poor executive (short events scheduled after work), the unmotivated ‘friend’ of the arts (engage their professional interest in your work and use them as advocates), and so on. 

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I’m back at base after visiting Auckland yesterday to hold a workshop in the glorious Civic Theatre. We sought feedback from cultural organisations on NZLive.com, as well as ideas for future development. This workshop was preceded by one in Dunedin last week - lucky me, I even got to surf at St Clair beach at the end of the day!

We’ll post a summary of the outcomes after next week’s workshops in Christchurch and Wellington. Some trends are emerging: the new cultural funding guide is popular, and organisations are finding the admin tool easy to use. 

Some of the suggestions from participants included new features (such as event reviews, event photos and online exhibitions, itineraries for various locations, mapping that lets you see events on around you), improving the site navigation and providing data on the number of ‘views’ of organisations’ events entries. More on that to come.

Another area of interest for workshop participants has been how we are marketing NZLive.com. Getting the word out there about NZLive.com will bring more people to events.

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From future gazing to funding, from mobile technology to marketing - NZLive.com wants to hear from cultural organisations. We’re travelling to the main centres to find out what you think of www.nzlive.com and what you want to see happen next. We want to know what we can do that’s going to benefit the sector and your organisation.

Workshops will be held from 2-4pm at:

Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 12 March
Auckland: Civic Theatre, 21 March
Christchurch: Mona Vale, 26 March
Wellington: Carter Observatory, 30 March

If you work in marketing or communications in your cultural organisation, come along. Email us for more information. We’ll let you know the outcomes of the workshops on this blog. The good news is that later in the year, we’ll be holding more workshops in different locations.

Kia ora and welcome to NZLive.com’s blog. It’s for everyone engaged in New Zealand’s cultural sector, whether the reason is work or play. We’ll be discussing what’s new in the sector and what’s happening at NZLive.com, as well as exploring marketing, research, social networking and technology ideas and issues. We’ll have guests on board from time to time. Feel free to have your say, too.