Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

By Ann Marie Miller
Executive Director
Art Pride NJ Foundation

Art and food have gone together over the centuries like French fries and ketchup. From DaVinci’s The Last Supper, to the Dutch Realists’ paintings of bountiful tables, to Cezanne’s still life paintings of luscious fruit, to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art Campbells Soup can serigraphs, food and art have a long and delicious history. Next month the Art Pride NJ Foundation will partner with the NJ Restaurant Association to celebrate the talents of New Jersey women in the visual and culinary arts in a month long exhibit called Inspiring Women that opens on March 5 at Hospitality House in Trenton.

When you think about it for a few more seconds, you’ll see the partnership is deeper than you might imagine at first. Restaurants serve more tables on nights when theaters are open—dinner and a show anyone? Museums increasingly incorporate dining experiences onsite to offer art lovers a respite that satisfies another sense of taste. Ask the staff at Grounds for Sculpture and they’ll tell you how important their renowned restaurant Rats, along with the Peacock Café and special event catering is to a non-profit arts group’s bottom line.

Inspiring Women—A Celebration of the Visual and Culinary Arts, is a first time collaboration between Art Pride and the NJ Restaurant Association. On opening night, culinary delights from restaurants like Assembly Steakhouse in Englewood Cliffs and Kuzina by Sophia in Cherry Hill will greet benefit patrons who browse four floors of paintings and two-dimensional work by fifteen outstanding New Jersey women artists. Tickets are $50 and all proceeds will benefit the Art PrideNJ Foundation, the NJ Restaurant Association and the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition.

Art will range from landscapes and mixed media adorning the NJ Restaurant Association’s period townhouse headquarters on West State Street. A unique silent auction will pair New Jersey artistic and culinary delights. While the featured restaurants are either owned by New Jersey businesswomen or feature the talents of women chefs, ask any restaurant owner of the opposite sex and he’ll tell you how his inspiration came from the culinary talents of a woman–whether she be a mother, grandmother or wife!

We know this is the “start of a beautiful friendship” between Art Pride and the NJ Restaurant Association. Wait—didn’t that movie feature a restaurant, too? I think you get our point, and can see the natural partnership and the many ways that the arts and business interact with and benefit each other. Please join us on March 5 in a delightful way to kick off Women’s History Month with Inspiring Women!

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of Art Pride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

By Ann Marie Miller
Executive Director, Art Pride

Smart New Jersey arts organizations use effective tools to learn the who, what, when, why and where about arts patrons. The Jersey Arts List Exchange & Audience Census is a community patron database that houses data from over 50 participating non-profit New Jersey arts organizations. Its goal is to help arts groups grow audiences and boost revenue by identifying a targeted, qualified and focused group of arts consumers through comparative market analysis. After three years of continued growth, the database currently holds information on nearly one million households throughout the region.

Analyzing data and exchanging lists of active patrons is the cheapest and most effective way to augment an organization’s pool of prospective attendees. A community database provides a tool for quickly and easily sharing audience data while offering a pain free way to keep lists clean—free from errors and duplications—all necessary elements of an effective direct mail marketing campaign. A community database also provides an important research tool for learning about arts attendees and their behaviors within the market. Analyses can obtain demographic and psychographic information about patrons as well as information about how attendees interact within and between each participating organization. This type of research can play an important role in advocacy efforts by learning about those who engage (and those who do not engage) in cultural events.

The Art Pride New Jersey Foundation and TRG Arts, through a co-sponsorship with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, partner to provide the Jersey Arts List Exchange & Audience Census as a service to New Jersey’s nonprofit cultural community. TRG Arts manages a number of similar community patron databases in markets across the country including Philadelphia, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston. The Jersey Arts List Exchange & Audience Census is the first of its kind to serve an entire state.

While the deadline for free open enrollment is January 10, cultural groups of all sizes can opt in at any time for a small fee that quickly returns its value. See what arts leaders have to say about the project:

“We’ve been blown away by how much we’re learning about our own patrons! The more time we spend with the data, the more we realize just how much marketing intelligence we have at our disposal. In fact, we plan to start using the List Exchange a lot more aggressively for targeting donors this year.”

—Mary Eileen Fouratt
Executive Director, Monmouth County Arts Council

“The Jersey Arts List Exchange provides my theatre with marketing intelligence on our patrons that would cost me thousands of dollars to acquire any other way. It also serves as the cornerstone of my direct mail campaigns and helps to keep direct mail the most cost-effective way for us to market our productions to arts-savvy patrons throughout the region. This project saves me time and money, period.”

—Rick Engler,
Director of Marketing, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

For more information on the List Exchange, please follow this link.

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of Art Pride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

By Ann Marie Miller
Executive Director, Art Pride

In this hyper-connected world there are a multitude of online fundraising possibilities now available to non-profit organizations. It’s often dizzying to wade through them (Kickstarter and Razoo are just two) to find the “best fit.” For the last three years the Art Pride New Jersey Foundation has used the online auction as a way to draw attention to not only its programs and services, but to offer a brand new audience a glimpse of the many exciting cultural events happening throughout New Jersey.

Theaters, dance companies, performing arts centers and museums have all donated tickets to help Art Pride continue its work promoting the value of the arts to our daily lives. Art Pride staff took some cues from our astute destination marketing organizations (DMO) by creating tourism packages for the auction that match cultural events with dinners at local restaurants and, in some cases, hotel stays in Cape May, New Brunswick and Princeton. In a few instances, the DMOs donated their own cultural tourism packages, like the one offered by Destination Jersey City that features salon services and an overnight stay along with gala tickets to Art House Production’s annual Snow Ball.

It’s a win-win for all involved. Bidders come from as far as San Jose, CA and Hawaii to bid on getaways, cultural experiences, and unique items autographed by New Jersey artists and entertainers. Savion Glover recently autographed tap shoes for Art Pride’s auction when he performed at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and Maplewood resident and Tony-award winning actor Norbert Leo Butz agreed to have dinner with a highest auction bidder at a local eatery. The range of items for auction is diverse geographically and culturally, showcasing the best that New Jersey arts groups offer all year round.

As with all fundraising special events, the online auction requires board and staff support from hunting down attractive items to answering questions from individual bidders, to assuring that payments are made and items are appropriately delivered. Marketing is essential and Art Pride uses every tool in the box from traditional direct mail, to our blog, to social media channels like Facebook and Twitter to get the word out during an intense two week stretch that includes the annual last minute bidding wars!

Is it all worth it? We think so! The Art Pride New Jersey Foundation has reaped $10,000 from its online auction that is a fun alternative to the traditional annual fund appeal at the end of the calendar year (although you can donate cash through the auction page, too). This year’s auction ends TONIGHT at 8pm on, so check your watch and get your credit card ready to make a bid and give a gift of New Jersey arts this holiday season.

Go to the auction before it’s too late!

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of Art Pride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

By Ann Marie Miller
Executive Director
Art Pride

This week the New Jersey League of Municipalities will host its 96th Annual Conference in Atlantic City from November 15 – 18. This year’s theme is Creating a Community with a Common Vision.

The Art Pride NJ Foundation is proud to partner with the NJ State Council on the Arts, Arts Plan NJ, the Arts Build Communities program of Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning, and Sustainable Jersey to present a panel discussion on “Partnering for Sustainable and Creative Communities.”

Mayor Ed Mahaney of Cape May is the presiding mayor for this discussion that will explore opportunities for municipalities to partner with neighboring towns, higher levels of government, and other community organizations to successfully accomplish sustainability projects. Panelists will share success stories that demonstrate how sustainability and creativity are natural partners.

Panelists include Suzette Dewey, Coordinator for Earthwise Associates, Barbara Fiedler, Assistant Deputy Director of Community Services for the Township of Galloway, Mary Reece, Director of Media and Innovative Programs for the Foundation for Educational Administration (who also serves on the board of trustees for Young Audiences for Learning NJ, and the Steering Committees for the NJ Arts Education Partnership and Creative NJ), and Larry McCullough, the Grants Officer for Woodbridge Township. They will share personal experiences and describe how seniors and youth worked together to build a community garden, how four towns partnered to host a regional green fair, and how one municipality focused on sustainability by developing its creative community assets. Panelists will also focus on how a strong arts education program can not only gain points toward Sustainable Jersey certification, but improve graduation rates and property values.

Mayors and municipal leaders in attendance will receive a resource guide that offers practical ways to incorporate arts education and cultural development into municipal sustainability efforts along with data on resulting benefits. A wide variety of resources that are listed in the resource guide are available through the Arts Build Communities program that offers local government leaders assistance through research and continuing education opportunities.

This is the seventh year that the Art Pride New Jersey Foundation partnered with the NJ State Council on the Arts to present a panel discussion at the NJ League of Municipalities Conference. Previous panels focused on cultural tourism, destination marketing, arts education and cultural planning. Our partnerships in this effort keep expanding and we are happy to widen the net!

Ann Marie Miller is the Executive Director of Art Pride, the premier arts advocacy organization in New Jersey, and a regular contributor to the Dodge blog.

By Whitney Estrin
Capital Campaign Manager
The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

When I arrived at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in July, 2010 one of the first projects assigned to me was to find someone to conduct an economic impact study for us. “We have an out of date study from 2003, but we need something current and deeply quantitative to give to funders” explained my boss, Director of Development, Molly Dunn. “Oh, and we need them to do it for free.” Off I went reaching out to all of the Universities in the area, but very few of them had any kind of program that would be conducive for a project of this nature. It wasn’t until I expanded my reach to Connecticut that I was able to find the Yale School of Management Outreach Club, a consulting group that takes on 20+ projects per school year from not-for-profits in need of pro bono consulting. Our RFP was selected out of a large number of applicants, and an incredible group of graduate students was assigned to our study.

Over the course of eight months I worked closely with our four consultants as well as several key senior staff members to prepare the study. The group made two trips to New Jersey: the first to see the theatre, interview senior staff, explore the Madison area and see a production at the theatre; the second to present their findings to our board and staff. The majority of the data used in the study was collected through surveys taken by our patrons, staff, artists and students. Prior to distribution, we discussed the details and logistics of the surveys at length. What constitutes a statistical sample? What survey distribution method will yield the largest number of responses? Would an incentive “gift” given to respondents sway their answers? Should we use price points or price ranges when asking questions about ancillary spending? Conference calls were often lengthy, and while at times these conversations felt laborious, we knew that these details would guide the overall methodology used for the study, which in turn would directly affect the credibility of the final product. Once these topics were exhausted, five different surveys were crafted, one for each constituent group: subscribers; single ticket buyers; full-time, part-time and seasonal staff; contracted artists; and students who participated in our Summer Professional Training Program. The surveys were distributed electronically.

Once the data was collected, our team went to work analyzing and vetting the data, and compiling it into a readable format. Throughout the process, they sought guidance from their faculty advisors – specifically in the areas of statistics, economics and consumer behavior – to ensure accuracy and best practice. Once we received the first draft of the study, it was interesting to see how many different ways the data could be examined. Lively conversations were born out of the healthy tension between how the consultants read the data as objective outsiders and how the staff, who were more intimately familiar with both the raw data and the Madison community, interpreted the results. In the end we erred on the conservative side, using only the locally focused findings and a very low multiplier in order to make sure that the study was indisputable. The study approximates a $5.7 million annual impact on the Madison area alone – a 138% increase from the previous study. It also showed that audience members contributed $1.5 million in ancillary spending to the Madison area as a result of attending the Theatre and that 62% of the Theatre’s institutional spending goes to vendors located in the state of New Jersey.

In order to get at an impact number with a larger geographical reach, we created a supplement to accompany the Yale study. This document estimates an overall economic impact, including the Madison area and beyond, of at least $9.5 million, gleaned by applying additional tools – including the Arts and Economic Prosperity Calculator, designed byAmerican for the Arts – to the data collected for the study. This significant impact number can be attributed to the ripple effect of not only every dollar spent by the Theatre itself, but by every dollar spent by our audiences, artists, students and staff in conjunction with attending or working for the Theatre.

To-date, we have distributed the study to over 100 local funders, vendors and community leaders, and across the board the reaction has been positive. A study like this allows arts institutions to demonstrate their value as an economic engine for their community, strengthening their case for support. It also illustrates the durability of that impact during a national economic downturn — a point that is arguably one of the most important findings emerging from the data.

Whitney Estrin is the Capital Campaign Manager at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey and a recent graduate of the Theater Management program at the Yale School of Drama. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is a not-for-profit arts institution that brings hundreds of students from all over the country to New Jersey each year, employs up to 200 actors, designers, and staff members, and welcomes 50,000 audience members through its doors each season.

A copy of the study is available upon request by calling 973-408-3685 or email westrin@shakespearenj.org.

Images courtesy the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey