Rob: Y’know Alice, I’ve always thought that life was a journey, not a destination.

Alice: Actually, I think Ralph Waldo Emerson thought that, but go on.

Rob: …But now I know that if the journey to the destination is rubbish and a bit annoying then the experience is ruined.

Alice: Are you trying to say that arts organisations need to look into journey mapping to enhance their customer experience?

Rob: Indeed I am, Alice. Journey mapping looks at the way an organisation ‘touches’ their audience. For example, if someone picks up a flyer for an event and that flyer is badly designed and confusing, then it’s likely that person will not bother going to the event. By identifying this problem and making the flyer clearer, you will make it easier for your audience to engage.

Alice: Sounds interesting. What else can you apply journey mapping to?

Rob: From where pregnant women can park in the car park to how you’re using Twitter, anything can be journey mapped – it’s like wallpapering. It’s looking at all the points in your company where someone comes into contact with you.

Alice: Oh, OK. Why would you bother?

Rob: Because everything you do will be scrutinised, consciously or subconsciously, by your audience. Whether it’s an uncomfortable seat in your theatre or bad telephone manner from a member of staff – any negative experiences, however minor, will influence your audience’s overall impression of your organisation.

Alice: Shall we look at how organisations can do their own journey map using this rather natty template I made earlier?

Rob: Let’s…

Alice: So, start by making a list of all of your touchpoints. (In case you missed the link above, we have made this free handy downloadable PDF to help you do this!) Your touchpoints are everything your audience will come into contact with when using your organisation. This can start before they’ve even walked through the door and continue after they’ve left.

Here are some examples of the sort of touchpoints an arts organisation might have:

Before

• Advertising (online and offline)
• Media coverage
• Email newsletter
• Website usability
• Word of mouth / reputation
• Social media interaction
• Booking tickets
• Personalisation

During

• Your location / Parking access
• Affordability & ticket price
• Membership schemes
• Disabled access / Baby buggy access
• Cloakroom
• Quality of venue eg. Cleaning, Toilets etc
• Staff manner
• Experience of the event / exhibition
• Signage
• Shop / Merchandise
• Cafe / Bar

After

• Collecting feedback
• Audience sharing their experience with your organisation on social networks or blogs
• Documentation of events
• Encouraging audience to revisit

Download a free Journey Mapping for Arts Organisations guide (PDF)

Alice: Above are some scenarios, which include arriving at a gallery by car or public transport (touchpoint) and finding there is no disabled parking and no clear bus routes (negatives). To overcome these problems assign a disabled parking bay and add a clear map of bus routes on your website (actions).

Rob: Journey mapping is an excellent way for identifying and ironing out the annoying problems that will affect your audience. But when you’re thinking of your own touchpoints you have to be honest.

Alice: Every company has flaws, but telling the boss his car park plan stinks is a bit risky in these stringent times. A good way to get around his wrath is to conduct an anonymous survey among staff and customers. Survey Monkey is an easy way to do this. Its basic model is also free to use.

Rob: Good.

Alice: Can journey mapping help with arts funding?

Rob: There’s no concrete evidence to suggest it does, but it seems common sense to think that if you make your audience user experience better then you’ll increase visitor numbers which in turn may secure or increase your funding.

Alice: Shall we recap in handy bullet point form?

Rob: Let’s:

• Use journey mapping to enhance your audience user experience
• Think about all the ‘touchpoints’ – the moments people come into contact with your organisation – that you could improve
• Identify the negatives associated with these touchpoints
• Take action!
• Be honest when it comes to identifying flaws within your organisation
• Use Survey Monkey to gather anonymous tips about customer experience from your staff and customers

The post Wired Canvas discuss… Journey Mapping for Arts Organisations appeared first on Wired Canvas.

Any more entries for our @mrscruff comp?! You’ve got approximately 20mins left to enter! Grab that pencil and draw yourself as a human bean!

— Warwick Arts Centre (@warwickarts) November 22, 2012

All you had to do was submit yourself as a “human bean”. With just minutes to spare before the deadline (literally), I grabbed my sharpie and knocked up this beaut:

An Alice Ralph original

So you can imagine our utmost excitement/disbelief when… *drumroll*… we won!

(Erm, technically only two people entered so the odds were hardly against us, but we’re ignoring that part.)

Sinéad from Warwick Arts centre emailed us to tell us the wonderful news and asked us to send a photograph over for Mr Scruff to work from. We grabbed our most elegant hats…

…and then yesterday we were delighted to find this amazing (and accurate) original Mr Scruff portrait in amongst our post, featuring an enormous Jaffa Cake.

Thank you Mr Scruff and Warwick Arts Centre! It is truly an honour. We are getting it framed and it will take pride of place over the ‘cool table’ in our office.

The post Mr Scruff portrait – Floating on a Jaffa Cake… appeared first on Wired Canvas.

About b-side

b-side is an arts organisation that produces a biennial multimedia Festival in Weymouth & Portland. They commission new site based work in live art, sound, installation, film and visual art – the work created is shown in non-traditional, non-gallery spaces and places.

We have worked with them for a couple of years now and are currently working on their new website which will be launching very soon. We are all really excited about this year’s festival which promises to be a big year for b-side. This year the Olympic Games are coming to Weymouth & Portland, so everyone is on a mission to make 2012 the best Festival ever!

The Newspaper

Working with b-side and design impresario Neil Leonard, we will be producing a Festival newspaper. The newspaper (sort of a zine as well) will include a mix of cool, contemporary and cutting edge photography, graphics, illustration and artists prints. It will include strange, odd and sometimes downright weird articles that comment on the Olympics directly, features on b-side artists and spin off ideas that will conjure the newspaper into life and make it THE alternative Olympic souvenir that everyone wants!

And what’s more the final product will be produced, printed and ready for distribution in the first 48 hours of the Olympic Games, with thousands of copies being handed out for free amongst the many visitors expected to descend upon this seaside town over the following couple of weeks.

How you can get involved

This is a pretty unique opportunity, a chance to get your work seen by the world (we’re not exaggerating – 65,000 Olympic sailing tickets have been sold and that doesn’t take into account the worlds press and media, 15,000 additional visitors are expected to be in Weymouth & Portland per day during this time, not to mention the online voyeurs).

We are looking for talented designers, illustrators, photographers, artists, writers, journalists and editors to create work for the zine that reflects b-side’s more subversive and playful side. We’ve got some ideas that you might want play with or you might conjure up a deliciously ‘b-side’ idea of your own.

What are we looking for?

Brilliance! In all its beautiful, thoughtful, satisfying and laugh out loud form… Maybe:

• A ‘Hello’ style “at home” feature with one of our artists
• An Olympic agony aunt page
• A photo story
• A pull out poster
• Alternative horoscopes
• Top tips page
• Features on local people involved in b-side (e.g. Weymouth Mah-Jong Club, Phoenix Bakery)

But maybe not. B-Side have created a Pinterest board that shows graphic styles that they like here:

http://pinterest.com/bsidefest/b-side-festival-fanzine

Sign me up!

If working with b-side sounds like the sort of thing you would like to do then please get in contact. We need to see up to 5 examples of your work and hear about what you would like to create for the fanzine/newspaper. Send your initial ideas to:

Sandy Kirkby
producer@b-side.org.uk

Please submit by June 8th 2012.

Got questions?

Just email the address above, we’re quite friendly! We will select ideas that we are interested in and we think will work well and contact you by June 15th. Final artwork needs to be completed and sent to us by July 13th 2012.

Download the full brief

To get a copy of this brief in all it printable A4 glory, download it HERE.

The post The b-side newspaper needs YOU! appeared first on Wired Canvas.

You must admit: Pinterest has been pretty hard to ignore over the last few months. In December last year it became the 10^th largest social network in the world and at the beginning of this year became the first website ever to hit 10 million monthly visitors. All this – and it’s still “invite only”. These are impressive figures by anyone’s standards, and it’s easy to see why everybody is talking about it.

So how does Pinterest work?

Imagine Pinterest as a communal scrapbook of beautiful, funny, interesting or just plain weird images, all curated by its members. It’s effectively a digital pinboard in which you can bookmark – or “pin” – images that you like or find online and organize them into your own “boards”. The boards can be on any theme that you like; perhaps ‘Places‘ or ‘Art‘ or even something very specific like ‘Green Tea‘! Any images pinned from the web automatically create a link back to the original source, or if you upload your own images then you can add a link back to your site and drive more visitors to your website. Users can also “repin” interesting images that they like and pin them to their own boards; meaning that, with a bit of luck and some great images, your content could go viral.

It’s easy to see how Pinterest could become a rather dangerous procrastination tool. All of those funny or inspiring photographs that you see shared on Twitter and Facebook, all collected in one place. But it could also be a powerful tool for your business. Here at Wired Canvas we work mostly with creative industries, ethical travel companies and independent businesses who are ideally suited for Pinterest, so we have put together this guide to how your company could use Pinterest as a business tool.

Use Pinterest to promote your products

A little known feature of Pinterest is the ability to add a price tag to your pins. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) have created a board called ‘MuseumStore‘ full of pins from their online shop, and Pinterest helpfully automatically adds a little price banner in the top corner of each image that has a price in the caption, whilst the image links through to the online store where users can purchase the product.

To add a price tag to your products, just type the price with a £ or $ sign before it, and Pinterest will automatically add the price tag.

Use Pinterest to promote your exhibition, event or festival

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery were one of the first museums in the UK to sign up for Pinterest, and have been using it as a way to both document their past exhibitions as well as promote upcoming exhibitions.

Promote upcoming events and exhibitions

Their major exhibition Children’s Lives is running from March 24^th to June 10^th and they have been building a buzz around it by pinning selected pieces from the show in their dedicated board.

Document past events and exhibitions

They have also been documenting past exhibitions with dedicated boards, allowing their previous work to be easily shared and viewed online.

If you are an arts organisation or a charity with a big archive of images, this would be a great way to continue sharing your past work with a larger audience – although don’t forget to add a link back to your own website so that it drives more visitors back to see your current work! To manually add a link to a pin that you’ve already uploaded, just click ‘Edit pin’ and add the URL:

Use Pinterest for Fundraising Ideas

If you are a charity who relies on donations, a ‘Fundraising Ideas’ board would be a great tool to inspire your supporters. There are so many simple crafty projects on Pinterest that link through to ‘how to’ guides, or recipes for cakes/biscuits that people could sell at fundraising events.

Sharon Black created this great board of fundraising ideas for Breast Cancer Awareness, full of different recipes for pink cake recipes, pink craft project how-to guides and other general fundraising ideas.

Why not start by searching for fundraising guides online (eg. how to organize a fundraising concert) and pin them on your fundraising boards with an inspiring image from your archives.

Use Pinterest to brainstorm ideas for design briefs

We are currently working with B-Side Multimedia Arts on the marketing materials for this summer’s festival. We created a board called B-Side Pinspiration and uploaded some examples of existing B-Side graphics. You can invite other contributors to your boards via email, so we invited the B-Side staff and we all started pinning other examples of design that we liked. Eventually we had a large and eclectic mood-board, which has been a great way of gathering inspiration and ideas for this years designs.

Image of the Day Pinterest Boards

charity:water are a non-profit organisation who use Pinterest to great effect. Their ‘Photo of the Day‘ board now has nearly 2000 followers, and each image links back to their original blog posts – a fantastic way to engage new visitors with their blog.

The guys at charity:water have also cleverly included the story behind the image (with names of the people in the picture, wherever possible, which adds a very personal touch) in every photo caption – meaning that all those great photos that you have sitting on your hard-drive can now become miniature blog posts in themselves. It takes 30 seconds to post a pin, so if you prepared a folder of images and captions in advance it would not be a huge undertaking to update an ‘image of the day’ board over your morning coffee each day.

Is your website optimised for Pinterest?

Ask your web developer to add ‘Pin This’ buttons to your blog and website. Also, be sure to test that your website works with the Pinterest browser plugin, so you don’t miss out on any opportunities for people to share your website with others.

A word of warning!

Pinterest actively discourages people from using their service as a self-promotional tool. The whole point of it is to contribute to a global collection of inspiring and exciting images and content, so if you just use it to purely promote yourself then you may be excluded from Pinterest – and you probably wouldn’t gain any followers anyway. Nobody likes spam; people will only follow you if you post engaging content.

To make the most of Pinterest, be sure to share the love and repin other people’s pins that you think your audience would enjoy, leave comments on pins and follow people who share similar interests.

An important word of warning though: Pinterest does not take responsibility for any copyright infringement. If you pin an image then Pinterest assumes you have gained permission from the owner to upload that work and holds you accountable. Be careful that you don’t create new pins of any artists or photographers work without permission first. Repinning existing pins seems to be an ongoing debate around the web currently, so do your research and plan your Pinterest strategy with this in mind.

Get Pinning!

Hopefully this guide will give you lots of ideas of how your arts organisation or charity business could use Pinterest to raise your profile online and increase your audience. If you want to know more, Jenni Fuchs has put together a useful guide for museums using Pinterest, and curates a regularly updated list of museums who already use Pinterest where you might find a few more ideas.

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The post Using Pinterest for Arts Marketing, Charities and Small Businesses appeared first on Wired Canvas.

The Bootsydillo Mug – by Rob:

Rob decided to channel the spirit of Bootsy Collins and opted for a funk-influenced avant-garde approach, even going so far as to include some Funkadelic lyrics:

Meanwhile…

The Spectacled Bear Mug – by Alice:

Alice (that would be me) opted for a somewhat ‘busier’ approach with lots of random doodlings influenced by day-to-day life at Wired Canvas. References to: the fly infestation / electric fly swats / cake / tea / Movember / books / stationery / music (the cassette is merely symbolic) / the office mouse / biscuits / jaffa cakes / brochures… to name but a few.

Here are some images of the arrival of the new mugs…

If you are one of the many many people who have literally begged us for a mug in the past few months (you know who you are!) – keep an eye out!

Or if you would like to buy your own, why not visit the shop…!

The post Mugs – 2nd Generation appeared first on Wired Canvas.

“It’s a bike race, it’s in the bush near wildlife areas, it’s wacky, kids are involved, it’s hot, very local and fun, the mountain has a very distinct shape, man-eating lions of Tsavo, warthogs…”

I replied “so a warthog riding a bicycle?” (meant as a joke) but it turned out that was exactly what he was after. So I drew one:

The temptation to add some spectacles was almost too much to bear.

UPDATE!

The race took place last week and was a huge success! Here are some photos from the day…

You can view the entire Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/campsinternationalafrica/sets/72157628294673719/ (Thanks, Dipesh!)

The post Warthog on a bicycle appeared first on Wired Canvas.

First up was Bob and Roberta Smith selling their weird and wonderful signs, under the guise of “The Bob Shop”:

Who is Bob Smith? D&AD 2010. from Immprint ltd on Vimeo

There were a lot of the sort of things that you might expect from a “fair” (perhaps not a carboot), including a raffle:

…not quite falling into the “expected” category was Gavin Turk signing eggs:

…his head looks a bit like an egg. Just saying.

I particularly loved what these girls were doing (I didn’t get their names, anybody know?) – aside from the adorable letterpress stationery on sale, they were also typing Mills & Boon-inspired mini stories onto little cards, ie. “Naughty Notes”… while you wait! I like to think that they were made up on the spot but I can’t be sure:

Then quite excitingly I got to have a milk-bottle signed by Holly Freeman, who had driven her piece, ‘Afloat‘, all the way from Tooting at 15mph. This was definitely one of my favourite stalls at the sale – funny, tongue-in-cheek, affordable, personal and very friendly!

I got a neon pink milk bottle, which Holly kindly signed for me:

Cassart! and Oliver Gut Watkins were running an Art Improvement Clinic, where students from RCA or St Martins would ‘improve’ your artwork in need of love…

Penguin were running a cute stall where you could buy these amazing deck-chairs (<<< note to anybody who ever wants to buy me an amazing gift) and also some classic novels with blank covers so you could design your own, for just £1! I bought The Great Gatsby and Alice In Wonderland to decorate myself. Penguin have also got some bands to decorate the covers, with varying results…

Oh and then there were these nutters…

This was a group of artists called Bert Industries who were spanking volunteers with some terrifying looking padded arms. Needless to say, I didn’t volunteer (but I did film it for Wired Canvas blog readers’ viewing pleasure):

Spanking at the London Art Car Boot Fair from Wired Canvas on Vimeo

Finally, The Girls (Andrea Blood and Zoe Sinclair) were there with Posted – a temporary exhibition celebrating post and the dying art of letter-writing. This is something that I am personally a total geek over as a serial stationery-nerd, letter-writer and Swap-botter, so I loved this stall:

I bought myself a lovely new commemorative royal Oyster card holder (with The Girls as Bea & Eugenie / Wills & Harry):

…genius! There was loads more going on that I didn’t get round to photographing but at that point the heavens opened so we legged it to the pub. All in all, definitely worth a visit in 2012!

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Luke Elwes on Turner’s ‘The Evening Star’ from Luke Elwes on Vimeo.

We built artist Luke Elwes’ website a while back, and just stumbled upon this video of his talk at the National Gallery on Turner’s painting ‘The Evening Star’.

The post Luke Elwes on Turner’s ‘The Evening Star’ appeared first on Wired Canvas.

Bow Arts Trust are shortly throwing open their doors to the public for their Open Studios programme, so nosy parkers like us can explore the artists’ studios. We’ll be there Friday night, hopefully see you there.

The post Bow Arts Open Studios appeared first on Wired Canvas.

Firstly, Dorset’s youth contemporary dance company Portrait took over Debenhams for an afternoon, after working with choreographer Carly Reader:

B-Side Encounters have also hit the streets, with some rather subversive and provocative pasted street-art, inspired by the likes of Banksy, created by young people from Littlemoor working with artist Peter Snelling. They have been tackling the subject of economic prospects for young people and plastered the streets of Weymouth with their own unique visions – including a life size human pyramid attempting to reach a ten pound note, and a million pounds being thrown in the air and vanishing into the gutter. My favourite part of this is that they pasted it to the side of a bank… pure genius.

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