Dispatch from the NAMP front
This past week I spent 4 days in Houston at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference – better known as NAMP. Produced by Americans for the Arts each year, the conference is a unique chance to share best practices and bright ideas in arts marketing. This year, due to popular demand, the conference included development sessions to strengthen the link between fundraising and marketing and encourage professionals in both camps to work together.
It was extremely useful on a number of levels, and I’m still sorting through my notes to figure out how to put the lessons into play, but here are a few ‘big ideas’ to chew on:
- Beyond the obvious common thread that marketing and fundraising both serve to communicate your message to a wider audience, linking the two departments can help define your arts group’s identity, ensuring that all your materials “speak in one voice” as Karen Brooks Hopkins so eloquently suggested.
- Think about fundraising from a “branding” perspective – that to get funders’ attention you need to know your organization’s identity and communicate it clearly. This is basically just a reminder that all the tenets of good marketing (Research / Strategy / Results) hold true for fundraising as well, and that without a targeted strategy stemming organically from a strong arts “brand”, you are unlikely to secure support from institutions or individuals.
- Finally, collaboration is essential. It’s an approach that Fractured Atlas has long embraced: by assessing our strengths we consistently create partnerships with other organizations that ultimately benefit our artist members in ways that we never could have accomplished alone. The idea of collaboration was in the air at NAMP, partly because the theme for next year’s conference is “CollaborACTION”, but also because it has been acknowledged by organizations and funders alike that if the arts community is going to survive the economic crisis with anything like our current capacity to serve, we must find opportunities to work together. If each of us treats the crisis as a chance to revisit our individual missions and seek out synergy with other like-minded groups, the result will be a community that is more invigorated, efficient, and relevant than ever before.