The ArtPride New Jersey Foundation has discovered that one of the best ways to stay connected not only to the nonprofit arts community, but our constituents and potential constituents is through social media. While we are reinventing our website (stay tuned, the new artpridenj.com will be unveiled VERY soon), we found that our Facebook page is a dynamic way to share spur of the moment happenings and ways to inspire through the arts. Our 1,000th liker even received a special handmade gift (and sent us the photo above of her wearing it for our Facebook page). ArtPride’s Facebook page has gone past virtual to IRL (in real life) to feature an annual gallery exhibit for those who “like” us. This year’s exhibit is coming up in August, so if you’d like a FREE opportunity to show your two-dimensional artwork in the exquisite Lyceum Hall Center for the Arts in Burlington, NJ, be sure to be an ArtPride liker.
Twitter has offered ArtPride a way to extend our reach beyond in-person convenings for Arts Day in May and most recently at the Thrive conference held at Princeton University in early June. Our conference space was limited to 150 participants, but by coordinating “Twitter Teams” who tweeted notes using a common theme, or hashtag (#NJThrive12), we were able to reach over 15,000 people as far away as California and Canada with takeaways from the professional development conference that featured expert presenters on topics including advocacy, building audiences, and the use of hyperlocal media.
Most recently, ArtPride has ventured into the world of Pinterest, which seems like a natural fit since its intent is to share visual media based upon personal interests. We’ve created a Pinterest board that links to our programs and another that is called “Inspiration Station,” containing posters and quotes for those days you just need more than another cup of coffee to keep you going. Another Pinterest board holds infographics on clever ways to boost your social media profile and analytics (a topic for another blog post), many from one of our favorite social media gurus, Beth Kanter.
ArtPride Advocate Members, who enlist through the Jersey Arts Member Center, have become a special online audience and receive a dedicated e-newsletter called “The Inside Track,” that offers exclusive insight into arts related issues and happenings including periodic “Movers and Shakers” events throughout the state. While ArtPride will continue to evolve online socially, we vow to never lose sight of opportunities to bring virtual friends, members, likers, and pinners together to network, interact, and come together in community—exactly what the arts does best!
Images: ArtPride
Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of ArtPride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog