Little Silver Linings in the Arts World

I’ve been thinking and reading and tweeting and posting a lot about the effect of the recesssion on arts organizations in the last week or so.

A link to my post led me to a terrific blog by smArts and Culture by Maryann Devine in Philadelphia that focuses almost entirely on the arts and social media. Maryann wrote last week about the Cultural Engagement Index created for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Maryann writes about a few key findings from the report including:

• A high correlation between civic engagement and cultural engagement;
• Arts engagement in any form (e.g. music lessons) leads to other forms of arts participation; and, the most interesting data point;
• Hispanic and African Americans in the survey sample scored very high on the civic engagement scale.

A very interesting index ripe for replication in other cities.

A few other nuggets:

• One of my favorite Tweeters is the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra whom I first came across when they gave one of the first tweet-outs about the GiveList back in December;
• The Brooklyn Museum is reaching out to families and younger patrons using social media in creative ways. In particular, check out Target First Saturdays and 1stfans. As Will Carey, the membership manager of the museum wrote to me last fall, “It’s the relation to our community-centered Mission here at the Brooklyn Museum that inspired us to create our new “socially-networked” 1stfans Membership program. It’s a paperless, $20 Membership that offers monthly events and exclusive online access to artists and the Museum’s staff through facebook, flickr, and twitter.”
• And here is a terrific post from Beth on the ingenious ways that the Arts Museum of Indianapolis is using its web site to transparently share its social media success on a variety of different platforms.

So, just as one good day for the Dow Jones won’t end the recession, these glimmers of creative uses of social media by arts organizations won’t end the loss of arts organizations in communities. But, as I say to older folks who come and hear me talk, “You’re not dead yet!”

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