A night at the Lyric Opera – with Neil Steinberg?

Neil Steinberg may be one the best things to ever happen to the Lyric Opera, where publicity is concerned. His Jan. 19 column (“A night at the opera”) not only promotes 100 free tickets soon to be available through the Chicago Sun-Times for the Lyric Opera’s Feb. 18 performance of “Pagliacci” and “Cavelleria Rusticana,” but, just as important, addresses misperceptions of consumers who have never attended an opera. This kind of media coverage, whether in print or online, is pure gold for fine arts and very difficult to obtain. I call it “PR beyond the review” — promoting fine arts performances to people who don’t read reviews or read the arts section or follow arts coverage on the Web or pay much attention to fine arts at all.

Yet anyone who has seen an opera knows that it is not nearly as high-falutin’ as the ticket prices might suggest, and many operas require a severe suspension of disbelief. Dying of tuberculosis?  No problem — you can still sing an aria (“La Boheme”). Ditto for dying of anything else, including lack of oxygen (“Adia”) or going insane (“Lucia di Lammermoor”) or being freshly stabbed (numerous) or perhaps hit on the head by a statue (“Don Giovanni”). Steinberg’s column covers such concerns as the dress code (casual is fine unless you like to dress up), the foreign languages (purists don’t like surtitles, but everyone else finds them helpful) and the length (it ain’t necessarily so long, with a few exceptions). Tickets prices can be steep, but where else can  you get blood, sex, violence, ridiculous plots, incredible stage sets and fantastic music? Now if we could only convince Steinberg and non-arts columnists like him to cover chamber music…

Free arts marketing tools = good!

Returning from a festive family holiday break, I am trying to maintain a positive outlook for arts organizations this year despite the challenging fundraising environment. One thing that helps is that there are many free or low-cost Web tools available for arts marketers facing shrinking budgets. Here are a few that I have found:

WordPress.com — Free blogs like this one! With lots of handy back-end tools for managing posts.

BrownPaperTickets.com — This low-cost event listing and ticketing service gives you the option of charging consumers or your org for the ticket processing. The fee is less than $2 for a $25 ticket, which is a vast improvement over TicketMaster.

TechSoup.com — Registered 501(c)3s can obtain major discounts on major and minor software applications from leading providers, including Microsoft and Adobe.

NVU.com – NVU is a free HTML editor that is great for people like me, who occasionally build very simple websites, but are not accomplished programmers and have no software budget for things like Dreamweaver. NVU is Mac- and PC-compatible, easy to use and reasonably stable.

Yahoo Small Business Web hosting – Many affordable Web hosting services have cropped up over the last 10 years, but I prefer Yahoo because 1) even if the company is acquired, I will probably still have reliable service; and 2) it costs about $12/month for hosting and email services, and the service includes fantastic back-end administration tools for updating pages. It also includes a Web site-builder tool (but only for PCs). Some of the smaller Web hosting services have been acquired, merged, abandoned, etc., since the dot.com bust of 2001, so knowing that your Web service provider will still be in business next year is a great comfort. FYI, Google offers Web hosting and applications as well, but I found it was more than I needed (albeit priced competitively).

CombinePDFs – This is a free, small and easy-to-use application for combining PDFs into one document, and for removing, adding and reorganizing pages. Created by MonkeyBread Software.

CyberDuck – There are several free FTP programs out there, but I happen to use this one because it is very reliable and easy to use. And it is has a cute rubber ducky icon that is easy to spot when you are looking at a long list of applications.

Adobe PhotoShop Elements — PhotoShop is an amazing program, but not everyone needs the costly professional version. Elements is about $60 and includes everything you need to clean up and crop photos, or even do simple graphic design work for postcards or Web sites. If you are not a professional graphic designer or Web designer, but need to do simple design and photo work, Elements is great. (I found it easy to use, especially with the online help, but you can buy a reference book separately if you want to learn more.)

These are the  important tools that come to mind. I’m sure there are other tools available and will be blogging about them if I come across any that are especially useful!