Building Broad Support with a National Arts Day

In late September - anticipating the beginning of Arts & Humanities Month 2011, Barry's Blog posted a call for a National Arts Day modeled after the California Arts Day, now 10 years old. He makes the case that a national day will help to build awareness of the role of arts in community and lead to broader support for the arts. Barry published a response written by Senior Fellow Margy Waller and we cross-post her response here.

The goal of creating a greater sense of collective responsibility for the arts is one our sector has struggled with for many years. Barry's suggestion to create a national arts day to draw attention to the value of the arts is worthy of serious consideration.

In Cincinnati, we have some relevant experience with arts days and an idea to share.

ArtsWave, the local united arts fund, produces an annual free arts festival. Each year, the thousands of people from all over the community come together to experience all kinds of art, dance, music, theatre. In recent years, the Arts Sampler Days included about 150 events in 75 or so venues across the region. In 2011, the festival expanded to six days over 12 weeks -- five Saturdays and one Sunday.

The festival is very important to building awareness of ArtsWave (especially due to a recently changed mission and name) and of all the organizations funded by thousands of contributions to the annual community campaign for the arts.

The Arts Sampler Days has helped to change the way the media and local leadership present our value proposition to the public.

We’ve accomplished this by being very strategic about the way we present the event and its impact on our region. And sometimes that means adjusting the lens of others if we can.

Here are a couple of examples -- and the results of our work in video format.

Just after a recent festival, our Mayor’s chief of staff asked us to quantify the return on investment in terms of economic impact for his State of the City speech. We demurred. Why?

ArtsWave commissioned research by Topos Partners to uncover what approach makes people more willing to take action on behalf of the arts: The Arts Ripple Effect: A Research Based Strategy to Build Shared Responsibility for the Arts . The final report shares an important finding -- that the real value people find in the arts isn’t about dollars and cents ROI. In fact, talking about the dollars don’t help to build broad support.

So instead, we urged the Mayor to take a different approach, one that moves people to a new, more resonant way of thinking about the arts.

What is it? That the arts have benefits that ripple throughout our communities. Theaters and galleries mean vibrant, thriving neighborhoods where people want to live, work, and play. Music, museums, community arts centers and more mean people coming together to share, connect and understand each other in new ways. These benefits are both practical and intangible.

Based on this organizing idea identified by our research, the Mayor’s statement is exactly the kind of broadcast statement about the arts we want.

Second, when a local TV station news producer called to ask about the economic impact of the arts sampler days, we urged him to SHOW the impact by taking a camera around town and watching people walk from a museum to a restaurant, from a theater to a shop, and so on. And he did! The news coverage that night showed the incredible quality of life we enjoy in Cincinnati because we embrace the arts. Even those who don’t go to the venues of the anchor arts organizations themselves readily recognize how our entire community benefits.

You can watch both the early and late news (yep -- two stories!).

We’ve seen the power of the right framing for this issue in our own region. A National Arts Festival Day filled with celebration, highlighting revitalized neighborhoods and emphasizing the power of the arts to connect us to each other would be a powerful reminder of the effects the arts have on all of our communities.

10/17/2011
Pardon us

 We are currently re-configuring our website and access to certain pages and links may be temporarily limited.  Thank you for your patience.

08/11/2011
Problems and Solutions

Marketers work in a highly competitive field, so they are always on the lookout for insights that help them improve their effectiveness.  This week , Business to Business marketing expert Ray Schulz has blogged about recent Topos’ research and how it uncovers important insights for anyone who is working to communicate to their audiences about problems and solutions. 

He starts out:

Want a crash course in how notto position a story? Read the new research from the Child Advocacy 360 Foundation. It shows that bad news turns people off and that good news inspires them.

To put it more precisely, Americans are daunted by horror stories about disadvantaged children. But they’re motivated by coverage of who’s doing what that works, says Hershel Sarbin, the founder of the Child Advocacy 360 Foundation. And this may be true in many arenas—even business.

The research, the first to offer insights into the effect of media coverage on attitudes about children’s issues, is based on online interviews with 2,006 registered voters nationwide, focus group sessions with voters in three states and TalkBack Testing, in which participants were tested on their ability to repeat the core of a message and pass it on to others.

 Schultz then lays out some of the details of the research to show how it applies not just to children’s advocacy, but to any group that is trying to build public support and enthusiasm for change.   

08/10/2010
Seeing CO2 at Skeptical Science

Peter Hogarth, posting at the climate change website, Skeptical Science, gathers what he considers some of the more promising graphics and animations that scientists have been trying out when it comes to atmospheric CO2.   (This is an update on an earlier post on the topic "Visualizations of CO2 levels and CO2 emissions" from February this year.)  The idea is to more vividly represent the problem of CO2 and the heat-trapping blanket that we are forming with our emissions.

When it comes to Global Warming, helping the public grasp just what is happening is one of the great challenges.  It would be fascinating to put some of these approaches into field testing to see how they could be refined or adapted to communications for the average person.

06/01/2010
International Publics Backsliding on Climate Change

The New York Times has a sobering run down of polling in the US and Europe that shows public understanding of global climate change has been declining.  The article credits climate change "skeptics" and cites their ability to rely on the media to amplify every misstep or mistake as somehow discrediting to the consensus on climate change.

We know from long research about the challenges faced by experts trying to engage the public on the topic of climate change -- from the lack of explanatory model for just how our actions result in a "heat-trapping blanket" -- to the lack of a conceptual framework for understanding the kinds of policy tools we will have to wield in order to solve the problem.  The persistent media framing of a "contest" or even "conversation" between two essentially equal sides -- climate change worriers on the one hand, and climate change skeptics on the other -- has not served to move things forward.  On the contrary.

05/25/2010
More on Public Structures

The Progressive States Network, in their report,State revenue increases across the nation continue to ease pain of downturn, discuss progress being made at the state level in terms of increasing revenue (read taxes).  They highlight the importance of Topos' work in building support for funding effective government:

05/25/2010
The “Ripple Effect” continues to spread

Arts Lab, is an innovative technical assistance program for arts organizations in the upper Midwest whose purpose is to strengthen regional arts organizations, and they make a point of recommending strongly that all their partners familiarize themselves with our work, The Arts Ripple Effect. They write:

This research finds that public responsibility for the arts is undermined by deeply entrenched perceptions that have nothing to do with government and everything to do with understanding of the arts. The work explores the underlying assumptions that work against valuing of the arts across sectors of our communities, as well as provide new thinking and a new frame: The Ripple Effect. This frame focuses on community-wide, not private benefits; goes beyond economic value; and focuses on shared emotional experience and a more connected population. The article offers significant food for thought as well as tips for your “elevator speech.” A MUST READ.

05/18/2010
Our Food System is altering Children's Brains

A new study has been published in the June issue of Pediatrics showing a correlation between the pesticide residues found in children’s bodies and a child’s chance of having Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  Organophosphates used in commercial farming are designed to wreck the nervous systems of pests, but apparently they are also damaging the architecture of US children’s brains as they develop. 

This topic grabs our attention, because it’s at the intersection of several streams of our work:  helping the general public become more sophisticated about food systems [link], pesticides [links], health environments [link], early childhood development [link] and brain architecture [link].

Though the evidence being reported on today is clear and provocative and the story has been picked up on by most major media outlets, past research on health and food systems [link to “Not While I’m Eating”] by Cultural Logic and Topos has shown that this kind of “food scare” won't do much to change people’s thinking or behavior.

From reports like this by CNN, with its accompanying pictures of delicious-looking blueberries and strawberries, people get the message that fruits and vegetables are damaging children’s health -- but that they should not stop giving their children fruits and vegetables.  So where is the solution that makes sense to the average person?  There's no indication that farmers are going to stop using these chemicals.  At most parents are told they should buy organic produce and wash it before eating.  

(This "solution" only manages to re-frame pesticide exposure as a problem of parental poverty and neglectfulness!)

Until the public is given a more useful set of cultural and cognitive models about how the food system works, how it can be changed through public policy and what the real stakes are for the developing bodies of our children, people will eventually have to push this terrible news out of their consciousness as they have other similar stories in the past.

05/17/2010
Framing at the Daily Kos

This week on the blog, Daily Kos, NCrissieB posted a trio of essays on frames and framing.  These stimulated a lively discussion among the politically active readers about how cultural frames affect the ways we think and act.

05/15/2010
Science, Politics and Climate Change Policy

250 members of the US National Academy of Sciencespublished an open letterin Science magazine on the need to have science (rather than politics and politically-motivated misinformation) be the foundation of climate policy.

Scientists tend to know that they have a communications problem at least when it comes to conveying their findings in ways that can affect both policy-making and improve public understanding of their topics.   In fact, much of our own work dwells in this very arena – helping experts communicate their knowledge in ways that don’t just bounce off or confuse the target audience.  Sometimes this is about finding ways of framing information so that it can “fit” well enough with people’s pre-existing models to “stick” with people [link].  Sometimes it is about understanding the “information environment” that their findings are being translated into, whether it is the journalistic narratives that the media prefer to use [link], or the distorting power of a legislative session [link].

In this case, their problem is seriously intensified, when scientists and their findings are systematically attacked by a well-funded and sophisticated campaign to discredit their work and confuse the public.

Most scientists get little or no training in how to put their work out into such a hostile information environment, and this is evident in the unhappy fact that despite the increasingly sophisticated and ironclad scientific evidence about the human role in climate change, polls show the US public growing even less knowledgeable about the topic.

It's clear that scientists and their allies (and most especially those active on politically volatile topics), have to be able to counter the disinformation campaigns of their detractors with more skilled and sophisticated communications strategies.

05/07/2010

Topos Posts are written by the Topos principals as well as Andrew Brown, Ph.D., a senior contributor and Research Director for Cultural Logic.