Audiences are the best ambassadors - Empower them to take action!

Goal

Include an advocacy message in the development and marketing work you are already doing.

Commitment

Find three ways to integrate advocacy into your organization’s communications in the next six months.

Action Steps

• Report your commitment to Dance/USA
• Take stock of all the communication you do with your audience
• Brainstorm ways that advocacy messaging can be integrated into your organization's communication
• Pick the best three, and execute!
• Report back to Dance/USA on what you did, what worked, and what didn’t.

Here are a few ideas to get started.

• Include an arts advocacy fact at the bottom of your organization’s business cards.
• Identify an arts issue in your community (funding cuts at the state level) and create a Facebook group or cause to spread the word. Invite all your friends/fans to join.
• Connect a Performing Arts Alliance Action Alert or an Americans for the Arts Action Alert to a specific activity of your organization, and send it to your email list.
• Include a series of arts advocacy facts on your website – perhaps as a flash script that cycles different facts through the same space when a user is paused on that page.
• Create an arts advocacy facts playing card deck to offer to donors as a membership premium.
• Include an arts advocacy fact in the signature of your emails – change it once a month.
• Get Twittering! Once you’ve opened an account and amassed followers, intersperse arts advocacy facts with information about your organization.
• Get specific – use Surveymonkey or other online tools to find out how your constituents like to be contacted – email? Snail mail? IM? – and make sure to contact them in the way they prefer. Use this information to determine what kinds of advocacy ideas will be most effective for your audience.