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Inspiring Online Audiences

by Lisa Niedermeyer on May 16, 2011

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How can online engagement with arts audiences be meaningful, inspiring, and ultimately worth all the effort we put into the online space? Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival presents their recently launched online exhibit Dance Interactive, a collection of videos from 1930s dance pioneers to today’s most visionary artists. Looking through the lens of crafting “inspiration”, this webinar will help you define for your own organization what that catch-all term “engage” really means.

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1.INTRO SLIDE \na.David Intro\nb.Thank you for joining us today. \nc.I’m Connie Chin, General Manager at Jacob’s Pillow, and with me by phone today is Lisa Niedermeyer – Lisa would you like to say hello so they can hear your voice? \nd.I’ve been director of the overarching Virtual Pillow project since its inception a couple of years ago, \ne.leading a cross functional team drawn from Pillow staff, from Marketing, Development, Documentation, IT, and Preservation, plus our external digital agency, Clearmetrics. \nf.The two people most heavily involved alongside me in driving the process are our Director of Preservation, Norton Owen, who is our main curator on Virtual Pillow; and Lisa whom we are fortunate to have working full time on the project.\ng.I also want to be sure to mention that our initiative has been supported by the Leading for the Future initiative from the Nonprofit Finance Fund, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and we are most grateful for that support.\nh.So Lisa and I today are representing a large number of people.\n\n
CC:\n1.WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF TODAY’s WEBINAR?\na.Our plan today is to share with you some things we’ve learned about online arts audience engagement through our work with our Virtual Pillow initiative.\nb.Throughout we’ll be using our project as a case study for discussion. \nc.We know and want to recognize out loud that many of you don’t have access to funds or as large a team as we’ve been fortunate to have working on this. We’ve tried to derive some learning points or principles that would be applicable to any size project or organization in the hope of this being useful for you. \n\n
1.DANCE INTERACTIVE CASE STUDY. Here’s the table of contents for the day. \na.First I’ll give you a bit of background on Jacob’s Pillow and one of our projects, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive.\nb.And then we’ll both talk about a few learning points about Inspiring Audiences that we’ve derived from our experience launching our project.\nc.Lisa will take you through some discoveries around how we’ve been defining and measuring engagement.\nd.And then I’ll come back and talk briefly about how we’ve been exploring monetization models.\ne.After each of the three sections, we’ll take a pause for any questions and discussion. \nf.When we get to those points, we’ll offer up a discussion question, but please feel free to discuss anything from that section, ask us if you want us to clarify or expand on any particular point, and bring up ideas, examples, and questions, arising from your work. \ng.So as we go along, please think about how our concepts apply – or don’t – in your own work, and we would really love to have some active discussion and examples from all of you.\nh.David will help moderate out of the chat stream. \n\n
CC: \n
CC: Jacob’s Pillow is home to America’s longest running international dance festival (coming up on 80 years). We are located in the Berkshires of Massachusetts on a 163 acre National Landmark. Jacob’s Pillow runs year round with a staff of 27, supporting programs in the mission areas of presentation, education, creation and preservation of dance.\n\na.Jacob’s Pillow’s mission is to support dance creation, presentation, education and preservation, and to engage and deepen public appreciation for and support for dance.\nb.Very briefly, Jacob’s Pillow is America’s longest running dance festival, coming up on 80 years, as well as a professional dance School, community programs and creative development programs. Each Festival encompasses over 300 events, including performances from all over the world on three stages, and an extensive audience engagement series of over 150 talks each season. \nc.We document it all, and more, and have an extensive Archives, including rare moving image documentation from the 1930s up to HD video from the latest Festival and artist residency from last Friday. \nd.Our physical site is a National Historic Landmark, and the institution has a very strong sense of physical place. This raised questions about a Virtual Pillow and whether it could it be as iconic and as strong a brand and experience as the physical Pillow? \n\n
CC:\n
CC: Virtual Pillow is an initiative to build e-audiences for dance and Jacob's Pillow. \n\na.Given the limitations in size and geography of our physical site, a couple of years ago we set out to explore how we might develop an offsite audience for dance and Jacob’s Pillow. This would be a new audience, with people that might not ever visit the physical Pillow. \nb.It’s important to note that this is a mission-driven audience engagement effort. Although marketing people are involved, and of course branding and institutional prestige are always in mind, the objective is not to sell tickets.\n\n\n\n\n
CC: At this stage in title Virtual Pillow also represents the online programming under the initiative including PillowTV our YouTube channel, FORA.tv, DanceClips+ and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive which we will be focusing our discussion around today.\n\na.Our overall Virtual Pillow initiative now consists of several projects, including our branded nonprofit YouTube channel dubbed PillowTV,our branded FORA.tv channel, a successful online fundraising campaign called Save the Stage, an e-bulletin called Virtual Pillow Views and, NEXT SLIDE our latest and largest project, \n\n
CC: Dance Interactive (which your looking at a screen grab here) started out as a kiosk built in 2006.\n\nunique value = curating, archives\nUniquely positioned to scale ongoing “forever”\n\nlaunched March 28th of this year after a preview period with Alumni, Members and contributing artists. We are now 6 weeks into launch. \n\na.Here’s what the welcome screen looks like \nb.Read description: Inside this online exhibit view brief performance excerpts spanning from 1930s dance pioneers to today's most exciting artists. All recorded at Jacob's Pillow, this collection is ever-growing with many paths to explore, meaningful connections to discover, and surprises to share. Welcome.\nc.As we offer up various pages from this site for examples, we will not be running the videos partly due to webcast speed limitations, so please feel free to explore the site on your own later.\nd.If you clicked on ERA on this screen, and chose 2010 – NEXT SLIDE – this is what you’d get. \n\n
CC: 2010 artists shot in HD and each artist included in the collection moving forward\n\na.We selected 2010, so that’s highlighted at the top. The strip on the bottom of the screen offers up three artists who performed in the 2010 season: Jacoby and Pronk, Compania Nacional de Danza Dos, and Trey McIntyre Project.\nb.Let’s say you clicked Ballet Trockaderos project\n\n
CC:\nExample of content page. Some of the best ballerinas in the world, if you look closely this is four male swans.\n\na.The 1-2 minute video clip would be immediately running, with little or no download time, and you are offered an informative, linked text.\nb.If you clicked on the icon, you’d get the HD version of this video clip, large screen. One of the reasons for this was to be suitable for educators to use on classroom screens. \nc.So that gives you an idea what is Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive.\n\n
CC: a.What are a few things we’ve derived from our experience that we thought were worth sharing with you today, and how did we arrive at these learning points? \n\n
CC:a.Today we will bring out and discus three points of learning that we derived from developing and launching Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive. \nb.First, the importance of offering something that only you can offer. What do we mean by this?\nc.ONE When we opened up the idea of Virtual Pillow, everyone who heard of it, from board to staff to funders to patrons, all had a great idea of what it could be. We spent a lot of time sorting through all this, learning about opportunities and what colleagues in the field were also doing. \nd.For example, with the success of dance reality shows, people would say don’t you want to be So You Think You Can Dance? and draw huge audiences with related content, perhaps drawn from our work with hip hop? \ne.I’m all for brainstorming, but when you settle down to evaluate your ideas, beware of the next big thing, be sure to analyze the trendy, “boy it would be cool if we had”. Are these ideas that others can do, are doing, or, even can do better?\nf.TWO Competitive unique selling proposition\n\n
CC: a.What can we uniquely offer to audiences?\nb.THREE Eventually, one of the most important criteria came down to the idea of core competencies. \ni.What does your org do outstandingly well? \nii.What physical experiences you offer are unique and deserve an online parallel existence to gain a wider offsite audience, that can be translated to an e audience? \niii.What makes sense within your brand identity?\niv.What can your staff at its size handle, yes with training and growth?\nv.What fits in your staff and board culture and sensibilities? \nvi.What content is more ready to go and are the quote unquote low hanging fruit?\nc.For us, this meant focusing on curated content and audience engagement material which offers audiences contextualization – an area in which we have a huge live onsite experience base.\nd.For you you might arrive at an entirely different answer, but I would suggest that you’re most likely to succeed if it was something only you could offer.\ne.How did this play out in our project? \n\na.Three ways we stayed close to home.\nb.First, we built on our long time experience in live audience engagement and that influenced many choices we made along the way. Length of bites of content. What we know from physical visitation in the Archives. Visual appeal. Brand look and feel. Many other decisions. \nc.Second, we had things in our Archives that no one has. Rare unique content. \nd.Third, we had a set of content had already been brilliantly developed by our Director of Preservation, Norton Owen, into a physical kiosk, that hundreds experienced when they visited the Festival or one of the handful of New England sites the kiosk went on tour to. How cool to expand that audience to the much broader online audience? And how much easier than starting from scratch. \ne.Here’s an example of unique content. If you clicked into the Genre navigation, and clicked Cultural, here you would be able to view "The only known moving images of Asadata Dafora (1942), regarded as the first artist to present authentic African dance and music on the American stage. Pearl Primus in Spirituals (1950), one of the few moving images available of this groundbreaking artist"\n\n\n\n\n
CC: guided curiosity, principles of gaming (Ella), elements of randomness, discovering, interactive - based on a touch screen kiosk, etc.\n\na.The second learning point we thought worth sharing was to include play and curiosity.\nb.Our thinking started a couple of years ago\nc.in our brainstorming, our Ex and Art Dir Ella Baff brought up a strong interest in games. \nd.In our aud eng work kept coming back to the idea of “guided curiosity” – not research index, not lectures, not pushed at you, but working with a little seed of curiosity, what can we offer to feed that curiosity, an dhelp people become more involved as dance audiences. \ne.Right now a lot of buzz about gamification – David may have comment about that. \n\n\n\n\n
CC: Audiences new to dance might know where to start. We made the entry point playful, easy and instantaneous.\n\nRandom selection (exposure to new things)\n\na.We found the most common action people took here was Dive In. Sometimes too many choices can be overwhelming, for example if you are facing a large index of an extensive Archive. So many people hit Dive In which leads you immediately to a random content plage.\nb.Another extremely popular feature is Guess. You hit it and NEXT SLIDE \n\n
CC:a.You’re offered a guessing game to identify the video.\nb.We have gotten a lot of great feedback about this, that it’s addictive, people’s favorite time waster, that you can revisit shows you’ve seen, or as an educational tool. We were very pleased that the NYTimes commented :the archive isn’t above having a little fun.\nc.This was the most commonly shared page on facebook\nd.I’ll leave you with this teaser and you can go try it yourselves after our presentation.\n\n
LN: Thank you Connie, yes, #3 fulfill an online need\n\n\n\n
LN: Now that we’ve lived for awhile in this amazing new world where everyone and anyone can publish video online we’re starting to experience overload. In particular search overload. \n\nIf I search on YouTube for the founder of Jacob’s Pillow, choreographer “Ted + Shawn” , what you see here are some of the featured videos offered. Now for those of you familiar with Ted Shawn’s early work with his men dancers you’ll know much of it was athletic but hardly WWE Smackdown.\n\nOur interviews with dance educators at the beginning of this project confirmed our assumptions that most of them indeed were using YouTube to expose their students to different styles of dance but were at the same time wincing at the lack of meaningful context or respect of intellectual priority. Let me be clear I’m not a YouTube hater - it continues to be revolutionary in many ways but this state of search overload paired with little to no quality control from the resource helped our team focus in on meaningful context as an online need.\n\nWhich is really good news for Jacob’s Pillow because they do this so well and are very passionate about just that.\n
LN: In comparison, this is the content page if you were to look for Ted Shawn in Dance Interactive.\n\nIn this context the suggested videos are represented by links to other artists (seen here as colored hyperlinks). Artists who influenced Ted Shawn’s work or vice versa. The connections between content are not decided by a search algorhythym or by consumer tastes (which often tend to stick with what they already are familiar with) but by a dedicated team of humans. And it is for this reason that we take special care to refer to Dance Interactive as an online exhibit.\n \nThe idea of meaningful context drove many of our design decisions including a sleek and simple site which placed both the artists work and the text center stage, and of equal weight (not giving the video more weight which is often the case online). We also decided not to include commenting within the platform as we felt it would be hard to keep the comments or discussion meaningful without live moderation. (we have however created a facebook page for these type of conversations to take place).\n\nAgain this is not to speak against other platforms and it is important to mention that dance within a meaningful context online is on the brink of major breakthrus in terms of distribution, Jacob’s Pillow is not alone in identifying this need. Jacob’s Pillow is however uniquely positioned to fulfill that need on a large and satisfying scale ongoing because of the Archives and the relationships with artists and artist representatives which have been closely stewarded.\n\nI believe I can speak for the whole team when I say how exciting it was that the number one response we received to the launch announcement was “thank you” for making this available and confirming that we were indeed fulfilling a need in the field, and hopefully beyond.\n\n“This new resource is an extraordinary contribution to the field and such a wonderful historical compendium of the development of dance. There is no question that this will be such an important resource for our several online courses and will allow students to access dance works that otherwise they will only have the opportunity to read about. Thanks to you and everyone at Jacobs Pillow for making this material available.\n\n\nPenelope Hanstein, Ph.D.\nDirector, School of the Arts, Texas Woman's University\n
LN: These three concepts of Offering something only you can offer, including play and curiosity and fulfilling an online need have proven to be key to the inspired responses we’ve received from Dance Interactive and are intended to be viewed as universal big concepts, not a specific recipe. Both Connie and I are curious to learn from you, concepts you are working with or have seen in the field that address inspiring audiences online. And we can take about 5 minutes here for others to share or respond to what’s been offered so far.\n\nWe should be around 25:00 minutes into the webinar\n
LN: The term engagement gets used a lot to represent many things, it’s the buzziest of buzz phrases in the arts.\n\nWe realized quickly among the Virtual Pillow team that we needed to focus and define online engagement for ourselves. We needed these definitions in order to create meaningful internal benchmarks, as well as to clearly report back to our funders as this is a grant supported initiative.\n\n\n
LN: We’ve defined engagement as actions audience may take in the online space. Specifically the actions Participate. Advocate. and Incorporate. (notice we don’t include Donate. we believe that comes later as a potential result of meaningful engagement not a measurement of engagement).\n
LN: We are 6 weeks into the public launch of Dance Interactive and we are tracking the action of participation via basic web analytics\n\n9,000 visitors from 30 countries view 29,000 videos\nThey are spending on average 5 minutes and viewing around 7 different pages\n35% watch to the end of the video (this is skewed)\n\nUsing Google Analytics and Vimeo Pro Analytics (Vimeo is our video hosting service).\n\nOnce we are out of the launch phase we will be looking closely at return visits. It is our intention to create a resource that isn’t just a flash in the pan, but something people will want to return to.\n\nWe will also be looking closely at opt ins to our email list. This is currently the only way we have to learn more about our online audience as individuals not just IP addresses. This is also our primary tool in communicating what is newly published content within Dance Interactive and other Virtual Pillow programming.\n\nOpti-in measurements will require staff power to compare Google Analytics against Constant Contact reports\n\n
LN: The action of advocating - we are defining as when a person publicly shares and editorializes on the value of our content. \n\nWhich in the online space leads us to listening and responding to social media and the blogosphere.\n\n\n
LN: We could easily do a whole other webinar on social media engagement and measuring. Today I’ll be cherry picking some key learnings.\n\nFacebook has consistently been #1 referrer to Dance Interactive in terms of site traffic. A clear indicator for us that people are talking within their social sphere about their experience. Perspective- NYTimes arts blog\n\nWhen we took steps to direct that facebook energy thru a 3 day launch challenge, facebook fans rallied to get the word out so we could reach our goal of 10,000 video views in 78 hrs. Jacob’s Pillow has made great progress in building a social media fanbase and we are now working towards development and philanthropic messaging in our social sphere throughout 2011. I point this out because we are strategically experimenting with directing advocacy in small ways and this launch challenge is an example of that.\n\nIn terms of twitter, we’ve had some surprising learnings specifically when comparing twitter traffic to Dance Interactive against twitter traffic to our homesite. Dance Interactive is it’s own subdomain of our main site and we are able to track them separately. In the past 6 weeks Dance Interactive has received more traffic from twitter than our homesite received from Twitter in all of 2010. Twitter is a stronger referrer both in terms of volume and time on site when coming to Dance Interactive. There is no way for us to really know why this is the case. Our educated guess is this is partly due to Dance Interactive being tablet and mobile friendly while the homesite is not.\n\nAnd these measurements come from a combination of Google Analytics, Facebook analytics\n\n\n\n\n\n
LN: In terms of advocacy in the blogsphere this is an area we believe to be key in terms of being introduced to completely NEW online audiences that aren’t already tapped into a dance network or fanbase.\n\nGoGirlGlobal story\n\nWe don’t really have metrics to measure the value of this particular type of engagement. We are trying to figure out as a team what benchmarks make sense. You can see I ask “how many...”? Does that really tell us anything? What I can tell you is we are encouraging this behavior, publicly thanking anyone that takes this level action and watching closely to see what the collective impact will prove to be and again focusing on the introductions of dance and Jacob’s Pillow to NEW audiences.\n\n\n
LN: and #3 Incorporate. We see this as when an online audience member incorporates Dance Interactive into something they have created, or builds upon what we have made available.\n
LN: Meet Dorothy MacDonald, she is an 81 year old resident of Brooksby retirement village and she created an iPad class available to all 1,500 of her fellow residents. Dorothy was a recent guest on the TV program produced by and for Brooksy residents. During her TV appearance she demonstrated the iPad as well as Dance Interactive (selecting Gregory Hines who she felt would peak the interest of her community). Dorothy also spoke about why she created the iPad class, incorporating Dance Interactive and the role of online engagement to her generation.\n\n
LN: And I wish you could hear Dorothy say this for herself as she is most articulate and vivacious.\n
LN: \n\nAnother example we would like to share is Karen Krolak, an alumn of the School at Jacob’s Pillow and director of the company Monkeyhouse. Karen recently curated and produced her own mini dance festival “Against the Odds’. She incorporated Dance Interactive by projecting the site in the lobby of her performance venue and creating her own audience engagement on site and in connection to her themes as a curator.\n\nWe’ve also received feedback from educators across the country who plan to incorporate Dance Interactive into their courses starting Fall 2011.\n\nThese examples are hands down the deepest level of engagement we could hope for. In terms of measurement they are priceless and confirm for us decisions such as creating an online experience that is not marketing based and that is free.\n\n
LN: As I mentioned before this topic is rich enough for a webinar in and of itself but these are key concepts, learnings and questions we wanted to share within the field. And again would like to open the floor to see how others are defining online engagement or responses to what we’ve shared so far.\n\nWe should be around 45:00 into the webinar\n
CC:\n
CC: Subscription and Advertising is a barrier to the engagement\n\na.Each of these topics could be a whole webinar, so we’ll just briefly sum up our thinking to date on them. \nb.First, no illusions would make our fortune on the internet. Tempting fantasy to be the next facebook, but we don’t have that kind of risk profile. \nc.Close to mission\nd.One time investment, committed to finding ways to sustain the project, for it to support itself, not build something that would sink the mother ship. \ne.Subscription. Visitors would pay to access content, perhaps after some of it being offered free to hook them. Or they could sign up to have content periodically pushed out to them. This could take many forms, but would most likely be a member login that someone would purchase. We spent quite a bit of time working out quantitative models of subscription models to flesh out if we could create a revenue stream. \ni.These models of course depend on buyer volume to make economic sense. \nii.It seemed that many sites, with established demand for their products were not making this work [what is the NYT doing now?]\niii.And, we didn’t feel right about the idea of charging online for content that is meant to develop dance audiences, and that is therefore offered for free at our physical site. Not put up barrier to engagement. \nf.Advertising was briefly considered and to date rejected on aesthetic grounds. Just as we would not put a billboard on our beautiful historic physical site, we kind of shuddered at the idea of putting an ad on the precious real estate of our online experience. \ng.Walked away from Earned Income models. \nh.Site Sponsorship. Actively pursuing now that we have built an audience \ni.e-donations. Actively working on improving now, based on learning from our successful capital campaign with a strong online element. \nj.traditional support based on mission. \n\n
CC: One of desired results of engagement is support which leads us to our final topic for discussion.\n\nWe should be around 45:00 into the webinar\n\n10 minutes\n
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