Thistle's the Way: Performing Arts in the Concho Valley

This is a multi-part series to provide insight on the Performing Arts industry and what I've learned in two years as the Executive Director for SAPAC.    Non-profit performing arts management is a challenging profession that I have likened to being in the armed forces.  It is a dynamic environment that requires near term coordination and execution, long term planning, risk mitigation, operational assessments, and area analysis.  Every event is similar to a military training exercise.  Planning usually begins 6-8 months out, and sometimes 1-2 years depending on the size of a show.  During this planning and coordination phase, we finalize contracts and do initial coordination; this includes developing a marketing plan.  Everything has to be in place either at the start of a season or at least 3 months out from the show.  However, as planning for the upcoming season takes place, you're executing the for the current season of shows.    ...

Musings by the Executive Director of the San Angelo Performing Arts Center. Yukio Kuniyuki Technology keeps us on the edge of our toes.  This weekend we managed our first Zoom call broadcast on Facebook Live and projected on a screen in one of our theatres.  We had never done something like this, but were asked by an event organizer to help figure out how they could reach more people during a Cancer awareness event. So we did it.  It wasn't perfect at first because we had to work out a few networking issues, but we had it going within 15 minutes.   Today is another test of technology to meet the evolving demands of the information domain.  We hear marketing professionals say that organizations need to improve their Search Engine Optimization.  They say that blogging is the way to go, but they don't often say which blogs to use.  As with some other non-profits who created a blog on their website, we followed suit.  But I got to thinking, is th...