ARTSblog » Blog Archive: So much attention is paid to the time leading up to Election Day that people often forget about how valuable the time is after the election to the when the winners are sworn in. This is an excellent opportunity to reach out to the newly elected and an excuse to reconnect with incumbents. Here at Americans for the Arts, we encourage our members to adopt the following “schedule” after any election.
3 comments:
I think that the methods laid out in this article are rather aggressive, though effective. However they come with a caviot- if an organization goes through the trouble of doing all of this to make their elected official aware of their organization, they should be ready to follow up once the term starts with issues that they want to discuss and ways that the elected official can help. You have to give them something to work with, its not just about making a contact. I think the lack of those initiatives is one of the main reason a lot of performing arts organizations are bad about reaching out to their public officials- we have yet to come up with something they can truly help with (besides grant money, which really isn't a congressman anyway). The one thing they can lend is support to the theater through their presence- having an elected official at an event does increase the legitimacy.
I think these are generally really good ideas, for local elections, and more specifically, for a locally elected position that will somehow affect or have the power to affect your company or cause. Electing someone who believes in the things you do (let's go with keeping the arts in schools for an example) isn't necessarily going to change anything. The people representing us need to hear from us as well, in order to, you know, fully represent our interests. It's important in general, especially for a significant organization, to have contact with political representatives, and it's definitely a good strategy to congratulate them after they get elected, establish a relationship, and go from there. I don't know to what extent theatre does this or needs to do this, but there were definitely some proposed local laws in my hometown that could have been really hard on the community theatres if they had been voted in.
When people complain about how they don't feel their vote counts in elections, I like to ask them who their state representative is. Most of us have no clue, and yet we feel dis-empowered by a mysterious cabal of politicians whose names we don't even know. This is the problem with modern politics. We think voting for a president is a big deal because the TV doesn't shut up about it for 6 months every four years. But the truth is out local and state officials have very direct relationships to how our lives are lived, what happens in our communities, how our tax dollars are spent. And luckily, most of them are just regular schmucks like you and me. You can even usually go see them in their offices and often they are even happy someone gives a shit enough to know they have an office, or a name for that matter. I agree with everything this article says. Now, who's my representative again?
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