Speaker

Sarah Lutman amplified

What’s fear got to do with it?

In 2014 the Wyncote Foundation commissioned Lutman & Associates to research digital adoption by legacy cultural institutions. The resulting study, Like, Link, Share: How cultural institutions are embracing digital technology, showcases the awesome creative work of 40 cultural organizations and shares common themes and lessons learned among these leading practitioners.

When I spoke about the report at conferences and meetings, arts leaders’ responses were frequently that they knew they “should be” engaging digitally, but they feel overwhelmed about beginning. Surprisingly, the most frequent response from arts leaders was not excitement, but instead fear. Fear of missing out. Fear of getting started. Fear of not knowing what to do after beginning. Fear of making mistakes. Fear of not having enough time or money. Fear of incompetence. Fear of adding more stuff to do on top of already busy jobs.

We were intrigued by the intensity and consistency of this reaction and wanted to provide support. As a result, discussions with Wyncote led them to commission Wayfinding and Wandering: Navigating the Digital Engagement Landscape, or Wanderway, for short.

Launching this week, Wanderway is a free online course in seven parts, designed to walk users through the necessary steps toward creative and sustainable digital engagement. The goals of the course are to provide encouragement, build confidence, and offer useful tools and know-how so that arts organizations, artists, and creative small businesses can connect with, engage, and serve more people in the ever-evolving online environment. It is designed with the resource-strapped in mind.

Wanderway is a different kind of course.

Wanderway focuses on engagement and relationship-building. It aims to help you expand your reach and develop substantive interactions with fans, allies, and collaborators using the wide range of digital tools available today. These transformative possibilities are available to those who overcome their fear of digital technology and commit to the process of learning new tools and ways to connect.

There are plenty of courses available that provide technical knowledge and skill-building exercises, such as the Google Analytics Academy, or courses available through Coursera or Khan Academy. Many are written with the assumption of a higher level of basic knowledge and experience on the part of the user.

Also, most existing online courses target sales and marketing objectives – using digital tools to get more money, more transactions. Wanderway was created with the belief that while more contributions or ticket sales can be a by-product of digital engagement, they are not the goal. Engagement can be significantly more meaningful and have greater impact if audiences are treated as conversation partners and collaborators rather than customers and consumers.

Digital engagement as creative practice

Wanderway addresses the emotional life of digital practitioners by approaching engagement as a creative practice. In creative practice we begin, try things, learn, and start again. A beginner’s mind is a necessity and a strength, not a liability. Creative practice expects “mistakes”—they’re part of the process. Iteration is constant. It’s how we learn. And fear is something most artists and creative workers know a great deal about because it is their constant companion.

Fear doesn’t stop the creative artist. Or as poet Carolyn Forche puts it, “Courage does not mean you are not afraid; courage means a door opens and you walk through.”

So, open the door and walk through

Wanderway invites your participation. We also invite your feedback. Please check out the course, try the exercises and reflections, read the interviews, and, if you like it, share these resources with others.

Thanks to the amazing collaborators who built the course with me: Beck Tench, independent educator, writer, speaker, and practitioner, whose work explores creativity and experimentation in digital engagement; and Jessica Fiala, company member of Ragamala Dance Company, independent scholar, and colleague.

We’ve had a lot of fun packing the course with tools that are free and accessible to anyone, and getting to know the dozens of artists and organizations whose work we feel privileged to highlight.

Does your organization need a Chief Experience Officer?

A big part of our choice of favorite products and companies comes from the quality of how they engage us. My favorite coffee shop not only has the best coffee in Saint Paul but also the best playlist going in the shop, the best free Internet access, comfy chairs, an entertaining and useful Facebook page, and multiple ways of interacting with writers, visual artists and local food producers. It’s a sole proprietorship that’s curated by its owner in every sense of the word. Apple tries to do this on a global scale (and in my opinion, fails in many ways, but that’s a different blog post). Today’s successful companies not only develop services and products that are pleasing and useful but also curate our experiences with their people and their products to create (what they hope is) a unique brand.

Our larger performing arts organizations have a tough time curating what I’ll call “the total experience.” There’s no one person who has both the authority and the responsibility to curate the multiple ways an organization interacts with its public and to do so in ways that are interesting and unique; in cultural organizations, different aspects of the audience experience are handled by different departments. Artistic directors have their hands full dealing with what’s on stage. Marketing directors are focused on filling houses. So who is focused on the experience? And by this I do mean the total experience – from advertising to social media to how it feels to be in the house to how I am engaged before, during, and after a performance. I mean how I am greeted and treated, how things look from outside and inside, what food you sell me, and whether the program book is engaging or dull as can be.

As commercial enterprises get really imaginative at this, arts organizations are failing their audiences by not taking this curation as seriously as they do the curation of the work itself. What’s more, in an environment where so much engagement – both live and digital —  is smart and fun, a lot of arts organizations are coming off as boring and stuffy, no matter how great the work is once the show begins.

A few recent performances I’ve attended have me thinking about this, experiences where the sum total of my experience didn’t equate or align with the qualities of what was on stage. It’s as though the only thing that matters is the work once I’m seated and after I’ve read my program book – not all the experiences I have leading up to the moment the lights are dimmed or after the performance ends.

Some big corporations have an executive position called Chief Experience Officer (CXO). This is a new-ish (past 6-7 years) position for an executive in charge of the way people experience the company. A lot of what you can read about these positions is written in business-speak, but my take-away is that these people work cross-functionally to ensure that employees, customers, and shareholders receive the experiential value the company wants to create.

How could we define a position like this in the cultural sector? I imagine a sort of interactive curator or interactive producer, who applies intelligence and imagination to the total experience of a cultural organization. This person would need to work across artistic, marketing, development, and HR functions to help everyone work together and think about how to make total experiences as lively, creative, and engaging as possible.

Couple of questions for you. Do you think about the total experience when you go to an arts event (or exhibition)? Do your experiences fall short of ideal, or not? Are there organizations you know that do pay attention to the total experience? I’d love to hear from you about this.

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