3 Smart Audience Engagement Tactics

I’m increasingly interested in tactics – tangible actions – that we can use to make our audiences feel welcomed into the process of building our creative home. 3 smart tactics that I stumbled across recently:

– Theatre As Community Newspaper: I know, having a theatre publish a newspaper sounds like Stegosaurus grabbing onto Triceratops as they both sink deeper. But according to ARTSblog, the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts is finding success as a publisher of a community newspaper in Clayton, WI. In both cases, the Center is serving as a conduit for the community’s stories, and generating additional revenue, to boot. This probably wouldn’t work in media-saturated NYC, but the philosophy of serving your community through an innovative, mission-based, revenue generating service is smart.

– Theatre As Story Telling Hub: David J. Loehr, one of the folks behind the impressive 2AM Theatre blog, and one of the best theatre Tweeps out there, has a great idea for hosting informal story sessions called 360 Storytelling. The money quote? “They didn’t get a look at the process. They were the process.”

– The Monkey Says Thank You: I left the kinetic joy that was Piper McKenzie’s Craven Monkey and The Mountain of Fury not quite ready to leave that crazy, warm-hearted world. So imagine my happiness when I was tagged by Piper McKenzie in a photo of a monkey on Facebook with the phrase “The Monkey Wants To Thank You”. I went to their Fanpage and saw they’d done the same for everyone who was already a fan. And now, I’m off to vote for them for the NYITAwards, and not just because they deserve it, but because that funny little tag of gratitude makes me want to take that extra step for them.

Any other smart audience-loving tactics out there in our land of monkeys and newsies?