Lisa is the Executive Director of the Cultural Alliance of Western Connecticut, an organization whose mission is to bring greater awareness and develop a stronger community for the arts in Western Connecticut. On any given day Lisa could be working on marketing materials for upcoming exhibits or performances, leading a networking event for area artists, or producing educational workshops for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
Transcript
My name is Lisa Scails and I'm the executive director for the Cultural Alliance of Western Connecticut, and we are a regional service arts organization based in Danbury. We're a member organization. We have 300 members. Of those, about 50 or so are organizations, performance art organizations, museums and history groups, libraries even. And then the rest of our membership represents visual and performing artists, framers, architects, designers, and things like that. Marketing is a huge priority in our region, particularly in the area that we serve with everything being all spread out. So we market the region through a product that we have called Arts Western News and Events. It's an online publication once a month. So if anybody wants to know what's going on in the area, we're a really great place to find out. And then the second thing is we provide leadership development for our members and the greater business community, particularly creative entrepreneurs. We partner with other stakeholders in the area like SCORE and other business leaders. Microsoft is another example. And we provide workshop business development opportunities for either organizations or creative entrepreneurs to take advantage of. Programming development is a big part of what we do for our workshops and for our networking opportunities. So reaching out to the community and finding experts to be able to provide professional development is important. A lot of what we do is all about engagement. It's important for us to stay connected to the community in order for people to either find out about what we're doing or stay up-to-date with what we're doing. And we do that in a variety of different ways, physically being out in the community, networking with business professionals, and maintaining relationships with the arts community, the arts leadership in all 10 towns. But we also do it online through digital channels, social media and email and things like that, so technology is an important part of how we get things done.
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