tribal fundraising

I've been meaning to get this down from week now, since hearing Chris Brown speak at the Engage Your Community conference.

The abstract for Brown's presentation didn't really sum up what he spoke about. Brown is director of brand & PR firm Sputnik and co-author with Jill Caldwell of 8 Tribes: The Hidden Classes of New Zealand, a "values-based social anthropology of New Zealanders".

The 8 Tribes analysis breaks New Zealanders down into eight groupings, based on the values they espouse and lifestyle they lead:

The North Shore tribe
The Grey Lynn tribe
The Balclutha tribe
The Otara tribe
The Remuera tribe
The Raglan tribe
The Cuba Street tribe
The Papatoetoe tribe

You can do an online survey to establish your own tribe (in the interests of transparency, I'm half Grey Lynn and half Balclutha)

Now, before you start yelling at me about insensitive stereotypes and pseudo-social-sciences, it's not my book, and it's certainly not The Book.

What it is though is an interesting way for galleries to look at the audiences they wish to engage when they're on a fund-raising drive. This was the best bit of Brown's EYC presentation.

For example. The North Shore tribe are the "ambitious, hard-working, heavily-mortgaged inhabitants of the great suburban jungle". For them, "looking good and keeping up appearances" are really important. This is your audience for black tie celebrity auctions.

Or the Balclutha tribe: "the tribe of the Kiwi heartland, the provincial conservatives, who see themselves as a source of stability and commonsense, bearers of on-going connection with the land – solid, reliable and down to earth, but also deceptively smart". Will lend time and expertise (get them along for a working bee, or help with your accounts) but unlikely to throw cash your way.

Or the Grey Lynn tribe (I reckon this is your hard-core art patron grouping). They're the "highly educated intelligentsia who value ideas above material things and intellectualise every element of their lives." They "prefer to be “challenged” than entertained, seek out authentic experiences". Give them access to important intellectual figures (visiting curators/writers/critics) and artists (not that I'm saying that artists can't fall into the 'intellectual figures' category)

Of course this is just one way of looking at your engagement and fund-raising activities. But a little analysis never hurt anyone. Check out this blog post on the application of 8 Tribes thinking to green politics.

Web muster

Starkwhite reports on charity art auction fatigue, and comes up with some good alternatives. I imagine being hit up by people all the time for donations must get on artists' nerves, and wouldn't exactly thrill their dealers either.

Over the net sticks with the table tennis motif, announces opening of the On the table exhibition space on 19 November.

The Collections Australia Network is running a careers seminar for people interested in the Australian museum/gallery industry - I wonder if this would work in NZ? I wonder what speakers would say? I wonder if there are enough new jobs in the sector each year to warrant it?

The annual Science Communicators Association NZ conference wrapped up yesterday, and I wish I'd been there. Hopefully, with the Humanities Council moving over to the Royal Society (with its terrific Science Media Centre) we might see things like the Aussie's Transformations in Cultural and Scientific Communication Conference happening over here. In fact, given that sometimes the only way to make something happen is to work on it yourself, I might add that to my 2010 'things to explore' list ....

Two typos and a conference

1.

In a comment on yesterday's post, Duncan left a link to a 2003 lecture by designers Jessica Helfand & William Drenttel, 'Culture is not always popular'. As well as some periodic table eye-candy, Helfand and Drenttel were posing a pretty interesting question - but desingers need to understand the subject matter of what they're visually communicating?

2.

I have a big crush on typographers Hoefler & Frere-Jones, so you can imagine my (thankfully internal) shriek of girlish glee when I found them on Twitter

3.

Spaces are still open on next week's Engage Your Community conference & workshop day in Wellington. If you want a really good, astoundingly well-priced introduction to contemporary web communications, get in there fast.

10 things

I picked up this link to Ten things every journalist should know in 2009 on Twitter a few weeks ago. If I was a consultant, I'd be ripping it off and running an expensive workshop for gallery and museum directors and HR mavens faster than you could could say "churnalism".

In the list, John Thompson notes that journalists should:

-- be using Twitter and RSS feeds to find readers, monitor news, and build community

-- understand that you don't need to own (or hell - even understand) the technology that will let you mingle with your readers online

-- acknowledge that "Multimedia for multimedia’s sake rarely works, and is often embarrassing."

Here are the adaptations I'd make:

-- before you employ a comms person nowadays, you should ask to see examples of their work with social media, as well as their traditional print work.

-- if your comms team/person isn't using RSS feeds to monitor mentions of your organisation and its work online, they're missing out on immediate and informative feedback that you should be using.

-- beware of boundless enthusiasm for all things Web 2.0*. Your comms team/person should know who should be putting what content on which platform, and why.

-- your comms team/person should be trusted to respond to blog posts, tweets, Flickr photos and whatever other online chatter appears relating to you & your work. They should also know when to respond, when to just listen, and when to use another approach (Flickr mail rather than a comment, etc).

-- any of your staff members who are using any form of social media site and talking about any aspect of their work are now your comms people as well. Don't freak out at them. Support them by offering simple and fair guidelines, and encourage them to share their enthusiasm for their job & their workplace.

*In fact, beware anyone who uses the phrase Web 2.0 without any irony. Especially if they pronounce it "Web Two Point Zero".

Now it comes in 'pretty' too

I have endless admiration for the way the scientific community has gone all out to build awareness of its work and the issues it feels the public should know and care about.

Often this has been through a mutually beneficial relationship with the media. Many years ago I went to the talkfest that launched the New Zealand Humanities Council, and the only thing I remember from that day was Russell Brown saying that the arts and humanities could do a lot worse than to look to the example of the scientists when it came to building useful relationships with the media. Take for example the Royal Society of NZ's collaborations with Radio New Zealand and the Science Media Centre, a web service connecting journalists with scientific spokespeople. Otago Uni even has a masters degree in science communication.

Some of my favourite science communicators include Luca Turin and Atul Gawande, and I've blogged before about my love for these annual science writing anthologies.

Over the weekend I found a new intellectual crush: particle physicist Dr Brian Cox. As a member of the team working on the Large Hadron Collider, which goes live in a matter of days, he's been all over the media, including this interview with Kim Hill on Saturday. He's an immensely talented communicator, and I have to say, it doesn't hurt that he is also very easy on the eye.