There has been a lot of controversy over the past couple of weeks concerning Google's new privacy policies. No matter how they change, Google is the largest, most powerful advertising system in the world. Have you ever wondered how ads show up next to your search results? How do they choose what ads you'll see? Most importantly, how can you get your organization in front of potential audience members' based on their search results?

What started out as a daunting undertaking turned into a fulfilling endeavor and oft-requested end product. After staring at the stack of audience development research on my desk, I finally decided to turn it into something useful: an Annotated Bibliography of Audience Development Resources. 

The cardinal rule of communications is “know your audience”.  But on social media, it’s sometimes easier said than done.

Seems simple, doesn’t it? If only we could just make very inexpensive tickets widely available, we’d fill our halls every night, right? Wrong. Very few performance venues make a long-term success of low-price presenting without (and sometimes even with) underwriting.

Not long ago, I attended the presentation of a fellow audience researcher, who put in numbers what we have known already for a long time: there is a negative growth of current audiences in the next generations. This means that in the near future there will be fewer people who fit the profile of current arts audiences. In other words, we are running out of audiences who look like the ones we are engaging now.

As a social experiential agency, we at iStrategyLabs  get to play with all sorts of emerging platforms and methodologies for promoting our clients’ brands and events. The following concepts are ones we’ve tested, and which show great promise in being applicable for arts organizations that are looking to market their venues and performances in new ways.

As an industry, the arts suffers from a value problem.This was thrown into sharp relief for me in an interview I had with an artistic leader from rural Wisconsin, who pointed out, “We’re all bean counters because the people we deal with, what they count is beans.” In almost everything we do to advocate for the arts, we place financial worth front and center, and in so doing we allow, even encourage, the people we’re trying to convince of a

If we can’t make our existing patrons happy, we might shortly find ourselves with a more urgent need to find new ones.