Working Web 1 recap

Wil Reynolds from SEER Interactive came by the center yesterday to do the first session of our "Welcome to the Working Web" series on web stats & search engine optimization. (That link's for you, Wil.)

It was a whirlwind. Wil's a captivating presenter, and he moves fast, so you had to really hold on to your head to keep up with him.

Here are some of the bullets from his talk:

--Wil recommends Google Analytics as the best & cheapest way to track your webstats. It's free, but setting it up requires putting a little chunk of code into all of your website pages.

--if you're google-phobic or don't have the means to put that code into your pages, you should check out www.quantcast.com or www.compete.com to get a sense of how your web site is doing.

--Make sure you know *why* you're looking at your web data. Have specific, quantifiable goals that are consistent with your business plan. What exactly do you want people to do on your web site, and how does the data show they're doing it? have one or two numbers you watch, and ignore everything else. This is the cardinal rule.

--Make sure your site is designed to be Search friendly. Avoid flash intro pages!

--The big search engines ignore meta-tags. Don't even bother.

--The content of your home page is key, the title of your home page is even more important. Put your important keywords into the title of your home page, if possible.

--Be aware of the keywords you want linked to your site. Look into Google Grants as a tool for jump-starting your search-based advertising.

--No SEO firm can promise you a #1 search ranking for a given keyword. It's impossible to guarantee that-the search algorhythms change all the time, the environment changes all the time. This promise, according to Wil, is a sure sign of a bad SEO firm. Now a promise to get on the first *page* of a search... that's another thing.

--What you do *outside* your web site is at least as important as what you do *inside.* The more active your organization is on blogs, YouTube, twitter & other web outlets, the higher you will be ranked. Search engine rankings, especially Google's , are based largely on how people *outside* your web site are talking about it & linking to it. So cultivate your web-image outside, and share as much good "proprietary" stuff as you can.

Welcome Gary Steuer

We cannot let pass without comment the announcement that Gary Steuer has been appointed to be the new Chief Cultural Officer for the city. It's beyond our portfolio to opine on the appointment, but it's certainly great to have an office dedicated to arts & culture in this city again. Steuer is a national-level figure, whose work with Americans for the Arts & other organizations promises that he will be... the opposite of parochial. His appointment is consistent with others that Mayor Nutter has made, bespeaking his intention to find the right people for the right jobs without regard to giving or redeeming favors.

One signal I was especially proud of was the one coming from the cultural community--so many people came to the announcement that they had to turn at least a hundred people away, including some of the city's most powerful culture leaders. It must have sent a signal to the Mayor & to our new CCO--and I think we have Peggy Amsterdam & GPCA's formidable advocacy machine to thank for it.

Sometimes you have to sing a little Kumbaya.

Last week PCMI's Leadership Project--a group of "mid-career" arts professionals who have signed up for a pilot program of leadership development--went on a retreat. We spent three beautiful days and two cool nights up at Skytop in the Poconos, working and talking and writing and figuring out what we were meant to do and how we were meant to do it. There was sharing, there was bonding, there was arts & crafts, there was a campfire. There was no singing, but we came close a few times. Always in the back of my head was a line from Ben Cameron's talk at Drexel a few weeks ago, where he said, basically, that burnout in a job wasn't caused so much by long hours or bad management or by being in one place for to long as it was by being disconnected from your core values.

The problem is that we almost never have the time or the energy to really think about and give a name to what those core values are. This, for me, was the basic agenda for the retreat. Find out what's really important to you and how you can arrange your life to honor those values. The other item on the agenda was just to have an amazing group of leaders hang out together for a while and share an experience.

The process of identifying, naming, and talking about core values requires time apart and discussion and openness, as well as trust with others who have the duty of listening to you. There's a lot of sharing. Many, probably most, of the intelligent, urbane, sophisticated people who make up the world of arts leaders in our town regard the prospect of this kind of work with skepticism. at best. They have budgets to make, trustees to placate, families to nurture, and very very little time for sharing. I was terrified about how it was all going to go over.

I needn't have worried--it was a brilliant success, thanks to the shared investment of the group and the skill of our facilitators. It really helped me refocus on the things that are important to me & the things that drive me in my work.

Inevitably, you come home from that kind of experience & try to explain it to people around you and even if only for a second, they look at you like you just came home from Jonestown. But it helps--it has helped people learn how to be in better alignment with their values, and it's connected a group of amazing leaders to each other, and set an agenda for the next year's work.

How to Have a Meeting

A great little article from the Sunday NYT business section about how to run a meeting. That is all.

Thanks for the hit!

Do you have any idea how many people visit your web site? Or your blog?

You should. Your web site is the real front door to your organization, and you can get very good numbers about how many visitors come in that door, where they come from, and what they do there. And you can use that information to make money.

PCMI is bringing Wil Reynolds, the Search Engine Optimization guru of Philadelphia's own SEER Interactive, to the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage for a 2 1/2 hour presentation on how to find, understand, and use web statistics to increase traffic. He can also tell you why your organization doesn't turn up until page 3 of a Google search. Click here to see some of Wil's presentations on YouTube. He's awesome.

It's happening on Wednesday, July 23 from 1:30 to 4. It's free. Register Here.

Young Philanthropists

As a fundraiser, I always found events designed to cultivate people in their 20's and 30's to be a lot of trouble. Like most fundraising events, they succeed or fail based on the strength of the personal network of the person running them. My personal networks tended to have a lot of grad students and artists who liked cheap wine and cheese cubes well enough, but were in no position to be cultivated for philanthropic duty. They were cultivated anyway.

...or, another way to go might have been to look to the children of those who are currently running major foundations. On this subject, the New York Times sheds light. If you can get past the envy, it bears noting how new generations have very different ideas about what kind of organizations to fund, and how that funding should work. This connects to a number of recent discussions about how the rising generation "millenials" will change philanthropy.

To pull this thread a little farther: one of the ideas that stuck with me after hearing Ben Cameron talk last month was his claim that despite all the handwringing and justified grieving over the dire shortage of arts education in public schools, that the generation in school now is perhaps the most creative that the world has ever seen. They're not creating in art classes (which too often don't exist!), but they're creating with YouTube & Garageband. And yes, one of the big ideas we are hearing all the time is that new generations will expect not just interactivity, but co-creativity, or co-production of artistic work. To that end, another article from the NYT, this one on a "crowd-curated" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.