Notes

Many arts organisations are mesmerised by their databases, often expecting the rest of the world to look the same. But positioning your brand in clear space can attract new audiences and differentiate you from competitors. So how can you open up that new territory and track your impact?

Garry Blackburn, of the multi award-winning Rose Design, talked about inspiration, cut-through, and placing the audience at the heart of your design executions at our Albert Hall Brand Works seminar.

Lots of direct mail letters started landing in the autumn of 2021 as theatres, orchestras and galleries came back to life… So I wrote one of my own.

This article was first published under the headline ‘How might the marketing and communications of arts organisations evolve post Covid-19?’ in the Arts Fundraising & Philanthropy e-magazine Now, New and Next in February 2021.

The arts marketing community is pretty generous in sharing ideas, insights, concerns and benchmarking, so we were delighted to have four leading experts talk about their own brand journeys at our Brand Works seminar.

Just before Covid arrived in March 2020, we held our first Brand Works seminar, kindly hosted by the Royal Albert Hall in their opulent Prince of Wales Room. Our first guest was Lucy Sinclair, now at Google, whose previous arts marketing career saw her lead great change at the Royal Opera House and at the BBC. 

This was first published at the Tessitura Conference in Chicago in the summer of 2019 – happy pre-Covid days. But lots remains relevant…

Who really likes hearing about success? …really? I’m always suspicious of “Big Breakthrough” presentations, or “How We Triumphed” strategy posts. The repeated frustrations we all wade through daily are far more interesting. They help us learn, keep us hungry for improvement, and build resilience. (This was first published just as I finished a long stint as Marketing Director at Birmingham Hippodrome in 2019).