Getting Your Crowd Involved – Increasing your business potential for individual artists and arts organisations

What is the SWITCH System?

We wanted to ensure the system was as easy to remember as possible.  We wanted to make it memorable.  The SWITCH System discovers the Self that defines your way forward by getting your audience Involved.  By telling your story, you will Create a movement that makes change happen repeatedly.

S – defining your SELF, who, why and what you do

W – finding the WAY, sharing your uniqueness & your work

I – getting your crowd INVOLVED, find out who they are

T– TELL your story that engages people to what you do

C – CREATE a movement, move your crowd

H – Making change HAPPEN, and keep it happening

INVOLVED – Getting Your Crowd Involved

So now I want to look at getting your crowd involved. What we are trying to do is to take the WAY that we looked at last time and identify exactly who it is you are trying to get involved, what they look like, who they are, where they meet etc. – So basically, you could say we are looking at Persona’s and in some ways you would be right.

Defining Who is Your Crowd?

But we also need to look at who your influencers are.  They are the prominent people who connect with the part of the sector you are working in. These people can help you move your work, project, and service forward.

As well as influencers we also need to look at champions, people you already have in your network who can champion what you do. 

So to summarise – Who are you trying to reach? What does your crowd look like?

•    Define your target audience

•    What do they look like?

•    Where do they get information?

•    Who are the influencers/champions you need to reach?

Personas

Just touching briefly on Persona’s Who is your crowd?  You need to know who they are to be able to take them on the journey with you.  You might ask yourself, look I know who my crowd are, why does it matter? Well it matters because, eventually you will be looking to engage not only your crowd but people who are like the ones you engage with at the moment.  You will be LOOKING TO ENGAGE a wide range of PEOPLE.

UNDERSTANDING their DIFFERENT NEEDS will IDENTIFY what THEY NEED to guide them to MAKE A DECISION! As I said before we want to engage with and people want to engage with you because we share common goals, values and interests. These goals, values and interests align with what we are doing.

So how do we define a Persona, well we have 3 types of data that we can use – data that we already have namely: 

•    Existing Data

•    Social Media Interactions

•    Real Life Interactions

We can construct 3 or 4 personas from this data based on the following information.  From this we can then determine how there people interact with us, why they interact and where they interact – then we can contact them. 

Mind you, and I will come back to the last section on Defining Yourself, that “Without knowing who you are, what you do and most critically why you do something then you cannot expect to achieve your goals or truly align to your (and most critically) your crowds goals, aims, interests and expectations.”

So unless we know our Why then there is no way we will be in a position to move our crowd or get them involved.

So what are Personas – well they are FOCUSED on the ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES of particular PEOPLE that YOU are GOING to try & ESTABLISH a RELATIONSHIP with.  

Information that we need to have for each Persona is:

•    What are their demographics?

•    What is their lifestyle?

•    What are their interests?

•    What influences their decisions?

•    What are their personal goals?

•    What are their past behaviours? – buyer / audience?

•    Why do they interact with you?

•    Where are they looking for information?

•    Where are they when they look for information?

Once we have this, and only once we have this can we start to think how we can get our crowd involved.

Getting your crowd INVOLVED

Asking them to come on the journey?

Goals | Define | Plan | Execute | Measure

In this instance, when we talk about goals, we are talking about the work goals, not your personal ones.  We need to create these goals and find the objectives for them.

Marketing objectives are goals set by a business when promoting its products or services to potential consumers that should be achieved within a given time frame.

In other words, marketing objectives are the marketing strategy set in order to achieve the overall organisational objectives.  Therefore, we need to outline what your OBJECTIVES are, make them TIME bound – state when you will achieve your objectives – and make a PLAN and SCHEDULE to know wether we have achieved them.

When thinking about objectives and goals think about what is it we are asking our customers / audience to do? Therefore we are looking at what our call to action (CTA) is? Whilst we are talking about CTA’s make sure that you keep each CTA to just one at a time – don’t confuse your audience with more than one at a time.

Getting The Message Out There

How are we going to get the message out? Which Channels are we going to use? Who are we going to talk to?

Firstly and this is why is it so important to define exactly who your crowd is.  Without knowing who we are talking to then we have no idea of how to get the message to them – we don’t know if they get information online or offline, from social media or emails, newspapers or TV – by defining our personas we can work this out which will give us an indication of how, which and who we are talking to.

So basically, we need to consider the CONTEXT in which your audience will view the content, and alter the content accordingly.  The HOW and WHERE your audience is consuming your content is just as important as the messaging – there is no point in sending out the greatest message you can if none of your crowd is going to see it.

Once we have defined who we are talking to we can look at which channels we are going to use, as I said above this really depends on where your crowd is – and offline is just as applicable as online.  So we need to look at distribution channels. Basically these should take into account:

Analysis – your current “situation” to determine where you can have the most impact with your story.

Channel objectives – which ones might be most effective

Content/conversation Plan (how you’re telling your story)

Metrics – what are will you measure and how

Personas addressed – don’t create too many

Editorial calendar – when you will post and new ideas

Budget – do you have one?

Creating Content

For now we will just have a quick look at what to consider when creating the content you will send on the various channels.

All your content should be, no matter if you are using offline or online channels:

•    Findable

•    Readable

•    Understandable

•    Actionable

•    Shareable

Metrics / Measurements

Finally we have to consider the metrics, or measurements we are going to use to show success or failure. Just because you can measure just about anything these days, doesn’t mean that you should. 

At the core, your measurement activities should strive to answer some pretty basic questions:

•    What’s working?

•    What isn’t?

•    What do we need to do to make it work next time?

But One Thing To Consider 

We all know that the amount of information we receive on a daily basis is huge at the moment, so why should our crowd engage with it? – we all seem surprised when we find out they don’t but yes guys sometimes the very people we want to see the information and share it, don’t do what we expect them to do – frustrating. What we need to ask ourselves is, was the CTA clear enough? Was the content engaging enough and foremost, did the intended crowd receive the information in the first place? 

And another thing to consider is this, as I mentioned above the amount of information around at the moment is huge, imagine that if forecasts are correct, the amount of data is due to rise by 6X come 2025!!!! And that’s 6 times from the amount we have today.  So how are we going to get our content read? How are we going to cut through the noise? – We need to think differently, we are creative people after all so we need to think creatively – outside of the box, twist the rules – we need to get our content / information read.

Help with business development in the arts sector.

Letcombe Production is dedicated to the arts, creative and social enterprise sectors. Our website has dedicated reels on running your creative or artistic practice as a business, articles and opportunities for artists. In addition, we can organise digital media, marketing, project management, grant writing, application assessment, and tools to help you run your creative and artistic practice.

Working predominantly with arts and social enterprises, Letcombe Production can assist in all getting projects from idea to distribution. We can look after any size of project.