DivergencyMcr: Day Two

And so... hard on the heels of our first post... another day has gone by!

A day of getting practical.  What are we actually going to DO? And what are our resources?

To start with we have STUN - a membership organisation supporting BAME creatives. STUN is an organisation in development, having just opened its own physical studio theatre space and office hub, but still operating on limited staffing resources.  So let's use this opportunity to bolster those resources for a day or two to get to know the membership a bit better - or rather to get to know what STUN knows about the membership!

So Day Two is about exploring the membership.  Who are the members? How many are practising artists and what do we know about their artform practice?

...insert long pause... this one could run and run... 

Inevitably it involves technology, and technology means time: 

websites and code, log-ins and plug-ins, mailing clients and databases, comparisons of lists and data protection and lots and lots of typing! And beyond that the human history of who has come to be on what list and what their current relationship to the organisation might be - so meetings with board members with an overview of that history...

No one wants to read about the mechanics of all of this - it's truly not exciting... but the work's happening and, I suspect, will continue to happen over the course of the residency, hopefully to inform longer term developments for how STUN works with its members.

But so far we think they are reaching approx 400 people through mailings, of which possibly 50 would define as practising artists. Extracting the information held about that 50 however will take some code and some expert input which will take a day or two more.

So next steps... what shall we say to the membership? And how might we entice them to look again - or even for the first time - at a form with which they might not be familiar?