Encouraging participatory experiences of DCA’s programming, events, and activities

Our mission is to produce quality arts experiences. We believe that the impact of arts and cultural experiences can be deepened through a participatory framework. Through social media, we create avenues for participants to engage with our programming in personally meaningful ways and to bring aspects of arts experiences into individuals’ own social sphere.

Hashtag Campaigns Activate Participation

The LA Islam Arts Initiative is a great example of participatory programming that brought together thousands of participants into events and discussion across the world. We designed a comprehensive hashtag campaign (#LAIslamArts) to encourage participants to share events information, individual comments, and thoughts reflecting on the programming.

Hashtags allow participants to record moments in their experience and then publish it. Participants may use a hashtag to access an aggregated list to see how others in the community respond. The technology of tagging or hashtagging is now available on multiple social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., thus making it a great tool for content aggregation and analytic assessment.

We can evaluate the effectiveness of participatory social media engagement by examining the data aggregated by the hashtag. The #LAIslamArts tag spurred participation in our supported programming, having generated hundreds of posts. We can get a sense of the participants’ experience by looking at the #LAIslamArts on Tagboard, a full history of participants’ posts organized by the hashtag.

TagBoard provides an easy-to-read interface bringing together all the hashtagged content. This narrative organizes the content in reverse chronological order and makes it ready for qualitative analysis. The design layout also displays media objects such as photos and video attached or linked to each post. Unfortunately, without a paid account, we can’t access the quantitative information regarding these posts.

Recommendation:

Consider using hashtags to encourage social media participation with public programming. It is critical to use hashtags at the beginning of a public program, so that data gathering can occur as the campaign begins. This two-pronged interactive approach can be used to spread awareness of events; more importantly, it can structure a new responsive feedback loop. With feedback, programming staff and directors can evaluate programming participation and plan for future programming based on actual participation results.

A hashtag campaign can be effective for public, event-based, temporary, and multi-sited arts and cultural programming. To bridge the gap between analog, face-to-face, and digital communications, spread awareness by using a designated hashtag on analog PR materials and websites. This can extend physical participation into the digital and social sphere.

Participation via Shared Content

Followers can engage with Facebook posts by commenting, liking, and sharing. More interactions can provoke discussion and increase the reach of our message.

The idea of virality refers to the potential for content to be shared, interacted with, and sent continuously through many different users and social media platforms. We can measure this by examining the reach impacts of interactions over not only the original post, but also versions of the posted content shared and retweeted by other users. Interactions over shared or retweeted content is referred to as indirect engagement. (Indirect engagement occurs when a user interacts with a share or retweet of a post rather than the original post itself.) The reach impacts of indirect engagement can be greater than the impact of the original post itself.

Below is a graph displaying users’ interaction with the top five highest reaching posts from the Facebook page of Los Angeles Islam Arts. The size of the bubble on the graph corresponds to user interactions over original content, the larger it is, the more interactions over the original post content. The color of the bubble corresponds to interactions over shared content so that the more interactions over shared content occur, the darker the bubble is.

The graph suggests that while interaction on the original post is important, the reach resulting from share-based actions is greater. We see that the highest reaching posts are always the darkest green, whereas they are not necessarily the largest in size. This observation of the relationship between indirect engagement and reach impacts suggest it is imperative to encourage both direct and indirect engagement.

Recommendation:

Foster both direct and indirect engagement. For direct engagement, generate content that is jargon-free and enriched with media. Participatory media begins with content that is easy to relate to, inviting, and distributed with thoughtful, memorable, and sometimes provocative tagging.

To cultivate indirect engagement, establish partnerships with users who could further our reach impacts. These partners can be identified by close monitoring of indirect engagement and identifying end users (individuals or organizations) who show interest in particular cultural subjects or arts disciplines. Keep a record of these past and present influences and integrate them into the content share strategy.