Blog Post #4 Plans for Revision

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After some good feedback on my literature review, I feel I have a strong foundation for my proposal. In terms of my plans for revision, I need to my narrow my focus and develop a plan for how arts nonprofits can best employ comics as a form of technical communication. One of the main issues facing arts nonprofits today is consistent attendance, people are not visiting these spaces, especially art museums. As I learned in the Arts Administration program at SUU, this is predominantly because many arts nonprofits are not diversifying their outreach, their audiences are small and mostly white, middle class people. Using comics as a method of participatory design and reaching out to diverse communities in the areas these nonprofits represent will provide an excellent opportunity for community building, and alleviate blind spots that arts nonprofits may have when it comes to getting to know the communities that the nonprofit represents. 

For example, Southern Utah Museum of Art’s mission statement claims they are an educational resource for the SUU students and the entire Southern Utah community, however the museum does not always succeed at representing the diversity that comprises SUU’s student body, or Southern Utah as a whole. Reaching out to diverse members of the student body, and the wider community and asking for their help in developing a comic book provides SUMA a better opportunity of achieving their mission. This outreach experience will provide different departments at the museum the opportunity to get to know the people they represent and how best to reach out to different groups within the community. The main question will be, and what my proposal needs to define, is what will the intention of comic book be? Potential questions that the survey method might answer are: What types of exhibitions do LGBTQ and BIPOC members of the community want to see at their local art museum/nonprofit? Do they want to know about BIPOC artists in the Permanent Collection? Would an exhibition guide in the comics format help attendees better understand the information and get them to consistently attend the museum? 

My revision plan will focus on developing strategies to best answer these questions. 

Comments

  1. Mike CreerNovember 2, 2022 at 3:07 PM

    I think that a survey is a good way to go toward finding out what will get these and other audiences into this and other museums. As a marketer, I always have questions about how to view audiences demographically, and how to best reach them using their preferred methods. What percentage of the local population do these groups make up? What about non-local tourist populations? Do they respond to comics in particular? Does the response to using comics in museum messaging vary significantly with age?
    As a matter of outreach and inclusion, I believe more effort should be made to offer an experience that's enjoyable for them. It kind of feels like a complex project though:
    -identifying and describing and measuring the audience and their preferences/ what would make them want to attend
    - understanding how comics would or would not help (based on literature and based on survey response)
    n
    Also, regarding scope, are you aiming to focus your survey to one particular museum or city because the situation is likely to vary widely between an area like Southern Utah and another like Washington, D.C., where I'm from, where both racial demographics and museum attendance are very different?

    ReplyDelete

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