Organizational Stability Grant

Funding through this grant will help the Downtown Duluth Arts Collective (DDAC) to continue to serve the Downtown Arts Community. Many individuals and groups across the Northland benefit culturally from the distinctive programming created by downtown Duluth artists and arts groups.This funding will help us to promote the work created in this unique arts community, as well as help us in creating an online archive, documenting the work that is happening here during this historically significant period of pandemic, a period in which artists are finding resilient ways to survive and thrive. In addition, as DDAC is committed to paying stipends to area artists to help in the creation of the virtual assets (videos, Zoom Happy Hours/Workshops, virtual concerts, etc) that will allow us to promote the downtown arts community, funding will directly help to sustain individual artists, many of whom. We will continually search for new ways to measure if we are attaining our goals. After each event we will compare the Insights from our Social Media platforms (Instagram, Facebook) and our website to track online interaction with our pages (is it a positive trend?). For example, over the March 27th Virtual DDAW weekend on Instagram, we reached 515 unique accounts (norm was 122 over a week period), and had 5,187 impressions (compared to a norm of 161). On Facebook, we reached 5,192 accounts, with 1,186 post-engagements, and 40 new page likes. Each video post-had an average of well over 200 views after just one weekend, a good response! We will track attendance for virtual and live-streaming events. We will continue to reach out to DDAC members and diverse segments of the community through feedback surveys, emails, and sometimes phone calls, to see how people think we are doing. We hope to encourage community members to share their own creative projects through a group page on Facebook.