Kerry Lengel
June 14, 2009

Fizzling arts fundraiser offers lessons

"I perform for you. Now it's your turn."

It was a call to action to help the Valley's beleaguered arts and culture organizations through a financial crunch. But public response to the grass-roots campaign by MyArtsCommunity.org was underwhelming.

Near the end of its six-week run, the project had raised about $22,000, a scant return on an investment of $100,000 to get it up and running.

"The dollars coming in are less than expected," said Mike Cohn, one of two local business leaders who put the campaign together. "In hindsight, we've learned a lot that can be very useful. . . . The media campaign and the buzz it has created have succeeded tremendously in terms of awareness."

Launched with multimedia fanfare on May 1, MyArtsCommunity.org was inspired in part by Barack Obama's Web-savvy presidential campaign, which created a vast online network of individual donors. The idea was to use social-networking technology as well as traditional advertising to target young culture vultures who might not be in the habit of contributing to the arts but could afford a small gift of $10 or $50.

Visitors to the Web site may choose to donate to one of 16 of the Valley's largest cultural non-profits, including the Phoenix Symphony, Ballet Arizona, the Heard Museum and Desert Botanical Garden, or to a fund supporting all of them.

The final day of the campaign is Monday. Organizers are still hoping for a strong finish, but as of Wednesday, more than five weeks in, only 387 people had made donations through the Web site, and the total raised, $22,258, had been fattened by a handful of large gifts.
The social-networking component also failed to live up to billing. At last check, 208 people were following MyArtsCommunity.org on Twitter.

So, what went wrong?

Timing, first of all. The arts community has been hit hard by the recession, but so has everyone else.

"People are very concerned about the issue of basic needs, food and shelter and clothing. The arts are sort of on the sidelines," said Robert F. Ashcraft, director of Arizona State University's Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation. Even more crucially, the project's short time window clashed with its ambitious goals, he said: "Six weeks is not a lot of time to create a whole new giving demographic."

Or, for that matter, a new model for arts fundraising, said Joni Flatt of the public-relations firm Flatt and Associates.

"There could potentially be a class of donors for whom the arts generally are very important, and they may donate using the United Way model, for instance. But most donors are going to give to a specific organization, and one that they already have a relationship with," said Flatt, who sits on the board of directors for Arizona Theatre Company, Childsplay and the Mesa Arts Center, all of which were part of the MyArtsCommunity project.

Although the project's promotional campaign, including television and newspaper ads as well as billboards around town, ends Monday, the Web site will continue running. It will be up to the participating organizations to continue building an online community around the site.
"We didn't realize how much the social-networking effort takes ongoing time and energy and effort to make it successful," said campaign co-creator Cohn, managing director of CFG Business Solutions, "which is why we think the charities will be better off incorporating that into their own systems."

Despite the disappointing bottom line, participating organizations are upbeat about its potential to make a difference in the long term. Although it's impossible to measure the extent or value of "raised awareness," Elizabeth Curran, marketing manager for Free Arts Arizona, said she has received numerous e-mails in response to the ads, as well as some new donations that didn't come through the Web site.

"The connections between the organizations are much more established, and that's a direct result of the campaign," she said, paving the way for possible collaborations on fundraising in the future.

"I haven't seen anything done like this since I've lived here," said Kevin Moore, managing director of Arizona Theatre Company.

"I moved here from Cincinnati, which has a united arts fund. That's what this reminded me of. This is the beginning of that kind of idea."

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com