Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 23, 2008

I'm prepping for a workshop on Social Media and wanted do a round up of recent compelling examples of arts organizations using social media strategies and tools. I've covered arts organizations and social media here and there over the past three years and last winter co-wrote a cover story article with Rebecca Krause-Hardie for ArtsReach.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

Museum 2.0

JUNE 27, 2012

A year ago, I wrote a post speculating about whether events (institutionally-produced programs) might be a primary driver for people to attend museums, with exhibitions being secondary. And so, in this post, a few findings, and more questions. Many museums, big and small, thrive on events. This isn't true for every museum.

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Museum Arts Dallas History 53

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Gretchen Jennings convened a group of bloggers and colleagues online to develop a statement about museums'' responsibilities and opportunities in response to the events in Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. Museums are a part of this educational and cultural network. Schools and other arts organizations are rising to the challenge.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

Recently, we''ve been talking at our museum about techniques for capturing compelling audio/video content with visitors. It made me dig up this 2011 interview with Tina Olsen (then at the Portland Art Museum) about their extraordinary Object Stories project. We ended up with a gallery in the museum instead.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (s ee minute 2:20, above).

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. Over the past three years, we''ve tripled our attendance, doubled our budget, and, most importantly, established deep and diverse relationships with community members, artists, and organizations across Santa Cruz County.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 12, 2011

This week, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released a new paper by Holly Sidford called Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. The majority of foundation funding for the arts goes to large, established organizations that present work that is based in the European canon for a primarily white, upper-income audience.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums.

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

Last week, Douglas McLellan of artsJournal ran a multi-vocal forum on the relationship between arts organizations and audiences, asking: In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more?

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Museum 2.0

APRIL 2, 2014

There are many artistic projects that offer a template for participation, whether a printed play, an orchestral score, or a visual artwork that involves an instructional set (from community murals to Sol LeWitt). Beck talks about this in the context of learning to play music as a young artist. There are twenty songs in Song Reader.

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Participatory Arts Music Learning 52

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. Many people would look at the world''s oldest mechanized silk mill and say that the core content of the museum is silk.

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 23, 2011

An exhibiting artist approached me recently at an evening event at the museum. But it's a question that many museums seem to address inadequately. It's interesting to me that so many museums debate admission fees but don't get comparably riled up about open hours. What questions should I consider in examining this?

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 24, 2011

Two recent events have got me thinking about pranks and unauthorized activities in museums. Improv Everywhere staged an event at the Metropolitan Museum in which an actor posing as King Philip IV of Spain signed autographs in front of his portrait, as painted by Diego Velazquez in the 1620s. I feel like it's more complicated than that.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

The book of the same title that he edited is rocking my world, both as a museum professional who cares about inclusion and as a new mother. My biggest question for these social psychologists is this: how do we apply their lessons to our work? I realize that I may sound like a college freshman who just discovered Psych 101, but heck.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Neon CRM

AUGUST 25, 2023

It’s been a rough couple years for arts-based nonprofits. As pandemic aid has run out without patrons returning in pre-2020 numbers, many arts nonprofit across the country have had to shrink programming, cut staff, or close altogether. This includes summer art camps, museums, theaters, art galleries, and more.

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Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2016

They wanted to help museums and galleries across the UK make significant, sustained changes in the ways they engage community partners and visitors as participants in their work. The result, Our Museum , is an extraordinary funding program with a focus on community participation. didn't mince words. Here are my three top takeaways.

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Museum 2.0

AUGUST 29, 2012

Earlier this month, the Detroit Institute of Arts was "saved" by a voter-approved property tax (called a "millage") in its three surrounding counties. Residents in the three counties that pay the millage will receive special benefits : free admission to the museum and expanded educational programming.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 8, 2014

This question launches Howard Mansfield''s fascinating book about historic restoration, The Same Ax, Twice. How does this question play out in museums? At the 2013 American Alliance of Museums annual conference, a group of exhibition designers explored authenticity in a session called Is it Real? Does he have the same ax?

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Artist Museum Washington Arts 55

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 1, 2012

That contemporary art museum is on the front of the LA Times again," she said. I can't believe that an art museum can be front page news in LA for days." LA MOCA has indeed been front page news, especially in the art world. The discussion then shifted to the overall direction of the museum.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

Detail on distribution of artworks in the Tate collection by birthdate of artists, visualized by Florian Krautli. What does "big data" look like for museums? The Tate is providing metadata about artworks and artists in its collection--over 70,000 artworks in all. These visualizations are fun. They are beautiful.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Is that a Zen graffiti artist? Marnie asks a great question about the organizational structures needed to actualize abundance: So, if we are building organizations on the abundance of goodwill, energy and eager hands — and if we are thinking of ourselves, organizationally, as platforms for change rather than agents for change.

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Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

One of the greatest gifts of my babymoon is the opportunity to share the Museum 2.0 First up is Beck Tench, a "simplifier, illustrator, story teller, and technologist" working at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham, NC. As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 10, 2013

Here in Santa Cruz, we''re brushing off our tents and lining up the counselor whistles for Hack the Museum Camp , a 2.5 We have 75 campers here from around the world who will be working in teams to develop exhibits based on artifacts from our permanent collection that challenge museum conventions and traditional exhibit design practice.

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Museum Artist Project Team 48

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2013

Last week, my museum hosted Hack the Museum Camp , a 2.5 day adventure in which teams of adults--75 people, of whom about half are museum professionals, half creative folks of various stripes--developed an experimental exhibition around our permanent collection in our largest gallery.

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Museum Arts History Professional 49

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 12, 2014

I''m part of a cohort of ten arts organizations in California funded by the Irvine Foundation to strengthen our work to engage low-income and ethnically-diverse people. ON TACKLING A STUCK THING// Deborah Cullinan (Executive Director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ) spoke about the change process. We meet in person twice a year.

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act , about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. It is framed as a kind of study guide; pop-outs provide questions that tease out opportunities and tensions in the narrative.

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Participatory Arts Report Case Study 50

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 5, 2016

Yesterday, the local paper in Santa Cruz published a great article about my new book, The Art of Relevance. I've learned so much from my dad about making art, putting on a great show, inviting audience participation , and navigating celebrity. I loved the piece. Here's that chapter. The painting is what it is. The work is the work.

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Arts North America Music Hawaii 20

Amy Sample Ward

JUNE 21, 2011

The speakers for this panel include: Tracy Fullerton – Electronics Arts Game Innovation Lab. Ruth Cohen – American Museum of natural History. Jason Eppink – Museum of the Moving Image. Ruth Cohen – American Museum of natural History. Jason Eppink – Museum of the Moving Image.

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Game Culture Museum Change 140

Museum 2.0

APRIL 15, 2015

"The arts are future-making." I wrote this down when Deborah Cullinan said it at a meeting of arts leaders about a year ago. Deborah''s vision for the arts leading the way to stronger future inspired me. But I couldn''t fully imagine how a museum or an arts center could embody it. A fitness trail for urban life.

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San Francisco Arts Design Marketing 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2007

But I’d been scribbling notes for an art museum label post for awhile, and then yesterday, the NY Times had a review of a new show at MOMA, Comic Abstraction. And it ended with this: No wonder it [MOMA] ends up showing shallow, label-dependent art rather than work that offers deeper, more contradictory encounters. Sounds great.

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Arts Museum Artist Audio 30

Museum 2.0

MAY 25, 2010

Margaret shared these thoughts about "museums for use" on her blog , and I asked her to adapt a version for the Museum 2.0 Should a museum be a destination or a place for everyday use? During my time at RISD studying industrial design, I developed relationships with two museums on campus: the Museum of Art and the Nature Lab.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 25, 2008

Which has more social impact: the place frequented by educated art lovers or the one populated by blue collar joes? Over the last several weekends, my husband and I have been visiting a different kind of art institution: a tattoo parlor. I love having a permanent piece of symbolic art on my arm. People ask questions.

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Museum Arts Artist Culture 23

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 6, 2014

This was the question at the heart of last week''s MuseumCamp. MuseumCamp is an annual professional development event at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in which teams of diverse, creative people work on quick and dirty projects on a big theme. We encouraged teams to think like artists, not researchers.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JUNE 14, 2010

In his question to create the storage battery, he conducted 10,000 experiments before arriving at a method that worked. On Friday, I facilitated the final face-to-face workshop for the Social Media Lab for 25 arts organizations inspired by Thomas Edison’s approach. Contemporary Jewish Museum. What were the results?

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

How do you help visitors know what they can and cannot do in your museum? Most museums have this figured out: they have signs, they have guards, they have cases over the objects. I used to think these were easy questions to answer. Art, however, does not come to museums pre-hardened. Engagement with local artists.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

She is a fabulous and thoughtful artist. Two weeks ago, we inaugurated a Creativity Lounge on the third floor of our museum. It's a little living room in a lobby area that invites people to lounge on comfortable chairs, leaf through magazines and books related to art and Santa Cruz history, and generally hang out.

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