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Jim Hirsch

Jim Hirsch is the Executive Director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, a mid-sized orchestra that performs subscription concerts in River Forest, Illinois, and at Symphony Center in downtown Chicago. Jim founded chicagoclassicalmusic.org, an audience engagement Web site owned and operated by 15 Chicago-based classical music organizations.

The Sum Is Greater Than The Parts
Chicagoclassicalmusic.org
by Jim Hirsch

This story begins in the fall of 2006. The MacArthur Foundation had called together a group of 40 arts leaders to discuss a variety of subjects. Towards the end of the meeting, Jonathon Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, opened the floor for general comments. At the time, I had been thinking a lot about how the arts community had embraced e-mail as a marketing tool, but ignored the Internet’s amazing “community-building” properties. Remember, this was a time when MySpace was generating a lot of buzz. I challenged everyone at the table to figure out how to use the Internet to better engage audiences.

After the meeting I was approached by Joan Gunzberg, Executive Director of the Arts & Business Council of Chicago, to meet and discuss this further. Joan offered to help find funding for the idea of engaging audiences through the Internet and asked if the Chicago Sinfonietta would collaborate on pushing this forward. I agreed to do so....

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Here are the results from last month's poll, which asked:
On which medium does your organization spend the MOST money each year?

This month's question:
What percentage of your marketing budget do you spend on e-marketing (e-mail and your Web site)?

Click here to answer & see results

Here are a few recent posts from Gene Carr's Patron Technology blog. If you would like receive updates as they are posted, click here to subscribe.






Generational Shift Indeed
When the Kennedy family endorsed Barack Obama [last week], the rhetoric was all about generational change. And that change is no better demonstrated than in Obama's deft use of the Web...

Super Web Tuesday
Today's short post is merely to call attention to an excellent article in The New York Times, which compares and contrasts the Clinton and Obama Web sites. The article, titled "Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?" summarizes what I have been saying (and writing about) for the last few months...


Click here to read the blog, and submit your e-mail address in the upper left-hand corner to subscribe to e-mail updates.