DivergencyMcr Day Four, #CreativeCase

So, with the initial invitation out there by email, blog post and website, where to next? Social Media seems the next obvious port of call, but here we thought we should pause a minute. If we are genuinely looking to reach new people, then just contacting hÅb's normal social media isn't going to help - i.e. hÅb's social media is going to only reach the usual roster of artists, who aren't the specific target market for this project - so we made the decision NOT to use our accounts (@HazardMcr, @WarnMcr and Word of Warning/Tamsin Drury's Facebook) and JUST to use STUN's social media accounts. Here, however, our 'secret weapon' comes truly into her own! hÅb's intern, Afreena Islam, is a young artist with very good contacts with a younger generation of artists, many of whom are from diverse backgrounds, and for whom 'artform' may be more fluid, but haven't been reached by STUN to date.

A targeted campaign of both personal contact of key individuals by STUN's Board and staff, plus a personal and social media push via Facebook by Afreena seemed to be a positive way of reaching the right people.

Returning to the existing data via STUN's wordpress site, the registered users cite the following artforms:

Live Art 1

Music 3

Site Specific 2

Spoken Word 8

Storytelling 1

Theatre 12

Childrens Theatre 1

No response 17

The high proportion of 'no response' may be down to the need to choose just one form, a choice which may be invidious for some, a technical issue that may merit revisiting. Our somewhat forensic exploration has shown some other areas to be explored as STUN develops - chiefly around bringing together the registered users, the published web profiles and the mailing list members which will simplify communications in the future. At present there is a sense that some of the more historically more active mailing list members haven't made the jump to become registered wordpress users and this would merit some work to really establish who the membership is and to re-engage with the organisation's new facilities.

Back to the task at hand - encouraging people to take up our invitation... we've had our first acceptance, a key person who's also getting on board with spreading the word!