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On the day I am writing this, there is a short piece in The New York Times that people living in parts of the country where Yankee Doodles, Yodels, Devil Dogs and Ring Dings are not sold have a reason to celebrate. There is now a Web site for ordering them.
This news is on the heels of the announcement by my first cousin that his week-old daughter now has her own Web site, and far-flung family members can tune in to the vital statistics and images 24 hours a day.
These kinds of uses for the Internet were barely a gleam in anyone's eyes in January 1995 when the 22 corporations and foundations who comprise the Arts Challenge Fund were determining how to award our pooled $1 million in grant monies.
Our mission was to fund "new ways of doing business," and we were looking for proposals that held promise for the Arts in New Jersey for how schools valued them, audiences supported them, patrons strengthened them, politicians funded them and the public had access to them.
Only a handful of us even had E-Mail addresses when the New York Foundation for the Arts proposal came up, and for most of us the details in the proposal were almost a foreign language. Teach groups to design their own "home page?" What was that? A workshop on <HTML> language? Huh? Audiences buying tickets "over the web?" Who would do it?
I give great credit to our manager, Eduardo Garcia, and our colleague at Bell Atlantic, Peter Ventimiglia, for seeing what the skeptics and Luddites among us could not: the Internet was here to stay, and would be an enormous boon for arts organizations looking for "new ways of doing business." (My own resistance broke down when Peter asked if perhaps I'd like to go back to the chisel and tablet.)
Two years later, you hold the results of this grant in your hands. The Arts Wire program of The New York Foundation for the Arts provided eight workshops to 54 New Jersey arts organizations, and by the completion of the last one this past January, 131 people had been trained at the state's computer lab in Trenton.
We knew we'd hit a nerve even after the first workshop, when Challenge Fund members started getting calls from grateful attendees expressing delight at learning how to design their own Web page and discovering how the Internet could dramatically improve marketing, audience development, volunteer recruitment and arts appreciation in general.
But there are thousands more of you who want and can use the information, and thus this manual. We are sending it to 1,000 not-for-profit organizations in New Jersey so they, too, can catch the wave. Inside is all the information needed to get started, to learn HTML, and to plan, design, install and evaluate a web page. We hope you find it useful in helping your organization meet its mission.
And we hope it will enable arts organizations to be among the standard bearers for how the Web gets used, and the content it brings to all our lives.
Alexandra Christy
The Arts Challenge Fund
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