HERE Arts Center
Audience Activist | 2018-2020
New York, NY
HERE artists are bold, innovative, and groundbreaking. They are multidisciplinary and expand genres of theatre, dance, puppetry, visual art, media, and more. #HEREfans are curious, supportive, and ready to take creative risks with our community. HERE aims to provide a nurturing home to artists, theatre-makers, and arts enthusiasts of New York City. Since 1993 HERE has produced and presented over 1,200 original works; served over 15,000 artists; and welcomed over 1,000,000 audience members.
Take Note:
This portfolio begins with several select projects that I initiated during my time at HERE. These are followed by a breakdown of successful social media campaigns and platform snapshots.
SELECT PROJECTS
listenHERE
listenHERE: Short, thoughtful conversations between HERE’s Audience Activist (me) and HERE artists. I launched listenHERE in 2019 as a means of developing content that allowed audiences to engage more deeply with our artists and their work. These video interviews are conducted, recorded, and edited by me.
Tools: Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects
HEREart Artist Spotlights
During my time at HERE, I recognized video interviews as a means to increase awareness and understanding of HEREart and the visual work shown in HERE’s physical gallery space. These videos are either created and edited or directed by me in collaboration with HERE Marketing Interns.
Tools: Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects
HEREedu
Since the November launch of the 2019-20 season, HERE has welcomed over 150 college and high school audience members, and hosted an additional 75 visiting university, high school, and primary school students for tours, exclusive performances, and programming. This is the result of my individual outreach efforts, social media strategy, supporting artists in educational programming, and the development of HEREedu, a growing monthly email list that provides thematic content, discounts, playlists, and other digital materials.
From what I HERE — student engagement is still on the rise thanks to my initiatives!
Select HEREedu Emails
Tools: Adobe Photoshop, Constant Contact
41.2% Open Rate
16% Average Open Rate
16% Industry Average
29.6% Open Rate
16% Average Open Rate
16% Industry Average
SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT
Facebook audience reach increased 20% during my first year at HERE, and saw a 231% increase during our COVID-era Programming. Video viewing increased from 6K to 14.3K mins viewed in my first year at HERE.
Campaign Highlights
Sometimes a few bucks goes a long way. Formalizing outreach of our HEREedu programming took some strategizing. This animated ad was a successful attempt to spread the news about free and discounted student/educator tickets.
Weekly artist talks, live performances, and screenings showcasing resident artists and community members made up the majority of HERE’s 2020 virtual programming. Notice that this post received 1 negative feedback. I chose not to hide this because one, this is a rather low stat, and two, negative feedback is always helpful. It’s not unusual to lose followers as you hone in on your brand. At the end of the day, not everything is for everybody. The goal is to first find audiences who are genuinely interested in your content, and then provide content that they want to keep coming back to!
With every HERE event, I managed a campaign featuring a series of individually crafted artist spotlights. These consisted of bios, quotes, videos, and social media takeovers, and includes organic and boosted ads. This lead to a consistent increase in post engagement during my time at HERE.
While I worked with an incredibly talented team, all video content was directed by me in collaboration with interns and other team members.
Launched during the NY on PAUSE in response to COVID-19, #stillHERE was a series of interviews and virtual engagements that allowed HERE artists to connect with audiences through virtual and/or socially distanced outdoor programming. In this program, Gelsey Bell offered a soundwalk for Green-Wood Cemetery.
A cross-platform campaign is the key to successful marketing. As each platform attracts different demographics and serves different types of media, success is dependent upon creating customized content for each platform. Steady growth in audience and engagement on Instagram has been the result of consistent branding, aesthetic consideration, Instagram takeovers, daily use of stories, monitoring analytics, advance scheduling, and responsiveness to comments, messages and tags.
30-Day Snapshot
Post samples
Campaign Highlights
Artist Spotlights
From left: Avi Amon Quote: Animated by me with Graphic Design by Alex Lee; Langston Darby Interview: Shot, Edited by me
Yearly average Impressions increased from 20K to 81K during my first year at HERE, 2018-19.
30-Day Snapshot
Campaign Highlights
Audience Engagement / Curatorial + Programming
In addition to social media management and marketing initiatives, much of my time at HERE was spent supporting show-specific programming in the form of post-show talkbacks and developing thematic materials, in collaboration with show creators, for audiences to engage with during and outside of production. Click on the images below to view the content. These are samples of projects that I managed. While I have Graphic Design experience, HERE is lucky to have a talented Graphic Designer. You can see some of my design experience in other elements of my portfolio.
