Sunday, November 16, 2014

Twitter tip for State Arts Agencies: lists!!

Hey there,

So I'm in year 2 of working for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Given my knack/obsession/whatever-you-want-to-call-it for social media, although I work in the grants department, part of my responsibilities is directly related to social media.

And that's why I wanted to share one simple tool that has helped me not only monitor grantees, but also provide a resource to our community: Twitter lists. I'm not going to break down the basics, but I'm going to riff on some ideas I threw out there in my first post about lists, back in January of 2013.

For anyone who works at a State Arts Agency, I'd suggest the following lists, if you don't have 'em set up already. And as examples, I've included widgets of the lists I set up for @TheDCArts:

1) As a granting agency, you should absolutely make a list of all your grantees for the current fiscal year:



2) A list of artists in your state:



3) A list of artists and organizations by discipline. To help keep it relatively simple (particularly for individuals), I stuck to how folks self-identified in their bio:



4) And last, but NOT least, a list of organizations by county, or (in DC's case) by ward:



Those are the main ones I wanted to highlight. But check out @TheDCArts twitter for some other lists I set up, including one for all other DC government agencies as well as other local and state arts agencies.

That's it. Hope this not only helps, but maybe gives you some other ideas. Let me know what you think, in the comments!!

- JR