In a new, groundbreaking report, Pollenite Sarah Lutman tackles the questions, challenges, and opportunities surrounding leadership and organizational capacities required to enable the pioneering work of cultural institutions that are investing in digital technology.
Digital innovation presents special challenges for centuries, or generations-old cultural institutions.
Converting long-standing internal systems for patron development, audience engagement, and content management is a major undertaking that requires long time-lines and significant expense. At the same time, the skills and mindset needed to participate fully and nimbly in digital culture are outside the career experiences of many senior staff and governing boards in these institutions.
As community and audience expectations for engagement change, and contemporary artists and practitioners forge new definitions of their practice, legacy institutions can struggle to adapt.
Like, Link, Share: How cultural institutions are embracing digital technology
This report and web gallery released early in January launches a new effort by the Philadelphia-based Wyncote Foundation to understand and learn from legacy cultural institutions that are successfully embracing digital media in their work, whether in artistic creation and artistic programs, audience engagement activities, fund development, operations, or in all of these.
Foundation staff, policymakers, journalists, and peers helped identify the forty field leaders the report explores. During summer 2014, site visits to organizations such as the Philharmonia Orchestra (London), The Exploratorium (San Francisco), the Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Henry Ford (Detroit) were made in order to see the work first hand, talk with organizational leaders, and learn what conditions are fueling their innovation.
THE FINDINGS
Many legacy institutions are forging bold new paths in digital culture, paths that are resulting in new avenues of public service and landmark artistic projects. Among the benefits are larger and often younger audiences, deeper audience engagement, new community relationships, new revenue, and renewed program vitality.
Discussions about the report’s themes and findings are scheduled for upcoming arts and media conferences around the U.S. (Stay tuned for one in the Twin Cities metro.) If you’d like to talk about the report or get a printed copy for the downloadable report summary, Lutman suggests dropping her a line at sarah@lutmanassociates.com.