Venice Island Performing Arts and Recreation Center
Spring 2024
Fellow: Charlotte Ashley
Katerina Calvo, Mary Kate Fazzino, Juliet Gentilucci, Julia Noone, Noah Tincher
Community Partner
Venice Island is a performing arts center in Manayunk. Their goal is to provide a space to showcase all different kinds of performing arts, as well as promote creative expression. They are also striving to provide for the community of Manayunk and greater Philadelphia by giving people a space to safely express their talents and abilities. Venice Island strives to provide a space for all demographics as there are classes and opportunities for kids, teenagers, and adults. They do this by providing classes for young kids to adults, as well as giving middle school aged kids to adults performance opportunities. We are working with Kelly Orenshaw to improve the public image of the organization, primarily through social media. (Spring 2024)
Design Question
Our design question initially started as How can we effectively communicate the mission and purpose of the organization through the content we produce in conjunction with our partner? Ultimately, our impact that we are trying to create within the Venice Island Performing Arts Center is promoting Venice Island and creating strategies to have the locals feel more welcomed and engaged through the content they are viewing. In order to ensure that this gets done, we have completed possible approaches. First, for Social media: we wanted to create an aesthetically pleasing color scheme throughout the posts In addition, . create a content calendar with templates for all of the posts, and conduct research for the best hashtags to use throughout the posts.For the Website, we wanted to create an updated color-coded event calendar, create content that can be used for different platforms.
Venice Island Performing Arts Center is really a community driven organization that brings children, families, and locals together through events, performances, and classes. Overall, we wanted to ensure that this community feeling is relayed through their social media, and we strove to efficiently promote this.
Imaged below is the Brand Board given to us by Venice Island
Strategic Thinking
The Venice Island Performing Arts Center’s mission is to “enhance and cultivate a deeper appreciation of the arts while improving the quality of creative opportunities for people of all ages interested in participating in diverse programs and to create a space that the community can use for many years.” After discussing with the partner we found that the goal was to market this space in a convenient way for all art viewers and participants.
Venice Island needs to provide a space for local performance groups to have a space to express their form of art; whether it's via a dance performance or a play. Venice Island has been providing a space for people and organizations to hold different events which not only brings the organization together, but also the community and city of Philadelphia together as people go and attend these events and classes.
Sinek says that “People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Providing a community that allows people to gather weekly with their loved ones to attend different events put on by local organizations, automatically makes people believe in the “why”.
Following Sinek’s idea of the Golden Circle, for Venice Island Performing Arts Center the “what” is providing an event space and entertainment for the community to use and hosting classes. The “how” is that the organization rents out the building for easy access for the community. In knowing our how and what, we can better determine the purpose of this project in partnership with our community partner.
The Golden Circle can help us overall as a group and as partners understand the reason Venice Island Performing Arts Center has created an open community. The community the PAC has created has allowed people to feel welcomed and have access to always come and participate with the community around them.
Co-Creation
For this project, there was a lot of co-creation and reciprocity with Kelly. We had bi-weekly meetings with her, to discuss next steps for the project. We wrote questions in advance to ask her in these meetings about what we should be working on in the upcoming weeks. She was always willing to answer our questions and give us feedback about our ideas.
One challenge we faced as a group was clarity on what our project was going to be. Originally during a meeting with Kelly earlier in the semester, we were told to work on a content calendar based on upcoming events held at Venice Island Performing Arts Center. However, upon the start of drafting the calendar we realized Kelly already has a clear, organized, and color coded calendar on the website. Therefore we had to reevaluate what we were creating, and we asked her questions in our next meeting about what we should design instead. Through collaboration with Kelly, we were able to make a plan to design Instagram posts for the Venice Island account. Our group each chose an upcoming event and designed a post for her. Kelly also showed us a lot of trust by giving us the Instagram password. This is a major success, because it shows that we have come a long way in our relationship with Kelly.
I think that from our experience in this co-collaboration process, we have learned that communication is of utmost importance. Without frequent Zoom meetings with Kelly, we would not know what to create. We also learned that it is okay to ask questions with the community partner, because it is a reciprocal process and both sides need to contribute. A strategy for the future would be to get a specific outline at the start of the semester from our community partner, so we have a clear understanding of what our work entails.
Impact Story
Our biggest accomplishment was gaining the trust of Kelly this semester. Being a first time partner, we knew it would take time to do that but we are glad at the stage our relationship is at. We have gained access to Instagram, and have been given the password. Kelly also regularly expresses how much she enjoys our work and she seems to really appreciate the work that we are doing together. Over time, we plan to track our data based on the attendance at events, Instagram statistics and overall engagement on social media. Data-driven insights will measure the effectiveness of the campaigns that we are creating. As of now, we can use the information that Kelly has given us, and show that our work so far has been successful based on how happy Kelly has been with the work that we have created for her.
