Cultural Alliance President Maud Lyon's 2015 Annual Member Meeting Closing Remarks

Cultural Alliance President Maud Lyon's 2015 Annual Member Meeting Closing Remarks

Today, we’ve given you insight into the health of the sector.  We’ve also launched our effort to imagine the future.  Bottom line, your mission is to preserve, present, and otherwise create and share arts and culture.  Our mission, as the Cultural Alliance, is to help you to thrive in doing that.  To close our meeting today, I want to tell you what the Alliance is doing this year to support you. 

On your way out, you will receive a handout that lists all of our upcoming programs and the many resources and member benefits that we provide for you.  I know you are eager to get to the reception, so I am only going to highlight a couple of this year’s programs.

The Cultural Alliance supports you in four ways.  First, we make your organization stronger and smarter.  Our professional development programs help you to stay at the top of your game.  

Just one example:  Techniculture.  We want to help you to embrace technology, and to be technically sophisticated.  Last year, TechniCulture brought together Greater Philadelphia’s arts and tech communities and we were all inspired by how technology collaborates with and enables arts and culture!   

This year, we are focusing upon the process of integrating technology with your work.  We’ve recently announced the three recipients of our first TechniCulture Innovation Residency Awards: Philadelphia Young Playwrights, Tiny Dynamite, and Christ Church Preservation Trust. 

Each of these organizations has been paired with a technologist to help launch a project or application that will further their mission.This April during Philly Tech Week, our residency groups will share their projects and the process of innovation.  

Second, the Alliance connects people to your programs through Audience Engagement and Marketing.  This supports your all-important earned revenue, but also broadens audiences, as we do with our STAMP program, which gets teenagers to visit museums.  

This November, we’re launching Phillyfunperks, the country’s first collective arts loyalty program. Thanks to lead support from The Barra Foundation, the goal of this new program is to go beyond Phillyfunguide, and Funsavers, and actively reward our audiences. 

In Funperks, people will earn points for purchasing tickets and for sharing your events on social media.  They can then redeem those points for “Funperks,” bigger prizes and rewards from your institutions, like backstage passes and after-hours tours. We’ll also be able to study exactly which events consumers are attending across the community, building profiles to help you target them more effectively in your marketing efforts.   Funperks supports our goal to help your organization to be knowledge-centric.

Third, we are your advocate and staunch defender, working with government at all levels to maintain grant programs and to develop policy that supports arts and culture.  For example, we already shared our cultural policy recommendations with mayoral candidates Jim Kenney and Melissa Murray Bailey. I recently met with Jim Kenney to discuss our recommendations, which include strengthening arts education, as well as the need for a comprehensive cultural plan. We are glad to see he is a supporter of arts and culture.

Advocacy is not only about government, however.  In meeting with community leaders this year, I have noticed a lack of civic champions for arts and culture.  For example, when the Philadelphia Business Journal gave awards to some twenty businesses for their philanthropic work, none of those projects benefitted and arts and culture or even used arts and culture to advance a cause. We need to share the social impact of our work in more compelling ways.  

You can help!  Sign up for GroundSwell, if you haven’t already, so you will receive our advocacy alerts.  

Fourth, the Alliance is exploring ways to get arts and culture back into every child’s education.  This is a very big goal, but it is also essential.  It is critical to demonstrate our social impact.  

If arts and culture nonprofits could expand support for schools, it would help the students; it would demonstrate the value of arts and culture to the community, and it would build tomorrow’s audiences for everyone in this room.

But, many of you know from personal experience that working with public education is a daunting task.  So our first step will be to ask you, this winter, to share your experiences, and we will also survey school educators, to help us chart the right path. 

The Alliance is also part of the Greater Philadelphia STEAM Initiative, a collaborative effort to support arts access and arts education led by The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education.  Other partners for STEAM include the School District of Philadelphia and several of our members, including the Independence Seaport Museum.  

There is an old saying, “may you live in interesting times.”   Greater Philadelphia is doing well – growing in population, with rising levels of higher education degrees, and a general optimism about the future.   Arts and culture is widely credited for playing a major role in that success – making our region a tourist destination, and attracting Millennials and empty-nesters.  We have an abundance of cultural organizations, and you are all doing wonderful work.  Earned revenue is up, and so is attendance.

But the storm clouds are gathering.  This year, we have seen some organizations close and one has declared bankruptcy.   Both local and national foundations are shifting their priorities.  Individual giving is down.   Two in five arts and culture organizations have deficits in any given year.  We are not in a time when we can take anything for granted.  We are also not in a time when we can simply work harder – we have to work smarter, to be creative. 

The good news is, many of you are already doing just that. Opera Philadelphia has announced a new business plan. Lantern Theatre is inspiring donors by doubling what it pays actors. Several organizations are working together in new ways, and a few are considering joint operations.

However, if ever there was a time for the cultural community to work together, this is it. Our most pressing issues can only be solved through collective action. We are a creative, collaborative sector and there is a lot that we can accomplish if we work together.   

To make arts and culture part of every child’s education, we have to work together. 

To build audiences, we have to work together. 

To develop the next generation of donors, we have to work together to show the relevance of arts and culture, so we are on the “must have” list of what healthy communities need.  

WE, all of us today: WE are the Cultural Alliance.