The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year was an international jamboree for all things mobile – a industry much more hopeful for the year to come than much of the arts at present. With 2011 declared the “year of mobile” by no less than Google CEO Eric Schmidt the focus on the stages and exhibition stands of MWC this year was especially sharp. The cultural sector, needing to find new funding streams and secure existing ones, should pay close attention too – after all, it is now our members they are talking about.
Amidst all the gloom of recent months the emergence of crowd funding has been a rare chink of light – connecting arts audiences in a new way using the web.
Platforms like We Did This, Pozible, We Fund and Sponsume offer a truly innovative route to engage donors, coming on the heels of the success of Kickstarter in the US. The model is a simple one. A group or single artist appeals for lots of small donations for a project - if the project reaches its target the work happens but if not the pledges are returned to the donor.
Whilst the technology may be new, the aspects that determine success are much the same as they have always been – the ability to engage people in the story of your work, and ideally develop some kind of emotional pull. Whilst this activity is a great way to source finances for individual projects it is far from guaranteed to generate much in the way of a relationship to your organisation – still less convert givers into members. If we are to do that we should look at connecting audiences to organisations in a new way, through the mobile web.
One of the interesting aspects to emerge from the Mobile World Congress was that our phones were fast becoming key for creating trusted, personal relationships between brands and consumers – if we can apply these techniques to the relationship between arts organisations and audiences a huge opportunity emerges. It also poses a challenge to us. How can membership go mobile?
Though the sector has not really been at the forefront on non-profit innovation on mobile, have a look for ihobo project from DePaul UK for an example of that, the sector does understand the power of mobile content.
In museums and galleries the audio guide is already a well established tool for converting visitors into members. At the Met Museum in New York gallery visitors are not only given content on the full benefits of membership in the tour but the route they are guided on feeds them to return their handset directly to a membership sales desk.
With newer technology arts organisations have often embraced creative ideas for using mobile platforms, but haven’t connected that activity up to create a lasting connection.
The explosion in art gallery and museum apps over the last year shows the appetite for cultural content on the appstores – the Museum of London’s Streetmuseum app alone has reached 150,000 downloads. At the same time arts organisations have had real success through social media sites and so have, in effect, established some mobile presence – as 40% of all tweets are created on a mobile phone.
The impact of this is far broader than you might suspect. A Kantar study in 2010 showed a 52% rise in people over 50 using social networks via mobile. There are few membership profiles not already, in some form, using mobile tools in a quite engaged way.
Looking outside the sector we can see much about how to take this forward. In particular sports brands have sought to utilise the qualities of mobile to gain not only new fans but more loyal ones. At the Dallas Cowboys they have directly used their art collection to build a distinctive identity through their Art at the Dallas Cowboys app. Closer to home, and with a sharper eye on the short-term bottom line, English Premiership football clubs have used mobile to turn broad support into a more transactional relationship through distinct ‘mobile membership’ schemes with real success.
Arts organisations have remarkable, and constantly changing, stories to tell – and so should be well placed for this supposed ‘year of mobile.’ If we seize the opportunity and take membership mobile we may yet have some good news, amidst a very difficult year.
Nick Sherrard is Founder & Senior Consultant at Involve and Create, an incubator for new thinking in the ways cultural organisations work with audiences