The Power of Communication Through Art
This week, our community conversations took a big step forward! Building on the powerful dialogues we started last week, we brought together community artists, youth, and residents to talk about a shared vision for our future. The focus was on one of our biggest challenges: communication. In our small, aging community, it can be hard to reach everyone and share what’s happening. We’re exploring how we can use the arts to bridge those gaps and connect with each other in new ways.
One of our main goals this summer is to start ramping up our digital presence by posting at least one piece of content per day. As Jamie wisely noted, it’s less about posting every single day and more about the practice of using these tools. This daily activity will help us build our skills and get comfortable with the technology. We’ll start by collecting and sharing community photos and stories—simple, but incredibly important. And for each photo, we’ll always have a short post of some kind.
Learning to use these tools effectively is a major challenge for many small organizations, and this practice will make us more confident and capable.
To help us with this, we’re getting a major upgrade! We recently connected with the other Arts Incubator hubs in Nunavut, Manitoba, and Minnesota, who have generously offered to set us up with our own community platform. This isn’t just a regular website; it’s a specially modified version of WordPress, designed with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse. It includes custom plugins and databases built to help small arts groups like ours “work smarter, not harder.” The best part? They’ll host it for us, so we don’t have to worry about the technical side of things. This means we can finally move away from old, static web pages and have a dynamic site to share our stories and connect with the community.
WordPress and the World of Content Management
So, what is WordPress and what is a Content Management System anyway?
Right now, many of our community’s programs rely on very old-fashioned, outdated methods of communication. We’re still using static websites that are difficult to update, and a lot of information gets passed through word of mouth or bulletin boards. This makes it hard to share our stories, promote events, and connect with people, especially those who aren’t physically in the community. There’s a real need to modernize our approach and get on the same page as the rest of the world.
A Content Management System (CMS) is a software application that allows users to create, manage, and publish digital content without needing to write code. Think of it as a user-friendly interface that simplifies the entire process of running a website. Instead of dealing with complex code and files, a CMS provides a dashboard where you can easily upload text, images, videos, and other media. This is really important for small organizations and community groups who don’t have a dedicated IT person or a lot of resources, as it lets anyone contribute to their online presence, making sure the content stays fresh and relevant. Centralizing all your content, a CMS also makes it easier to keep a consistent brand voice and manage different user roles, so multiple people can collaborate on a single project without getting in each other’s way.
For arts groups and collectives, a CMS is a game-changer. It democratizes the web, allowing artists and community members to share their stories, showcase their work, and connect with their audience directly. Platforms like WordPressare especially popular because they are highly customizable and scalable. An arts collective can use it to build a beautiful online portfolio, a blog for sharing project updates, or an events calendar for upcoming shows. With the right plugins, they can even integrate e-commerce to sell art or tickets, or connect with databases to manage their collections. By using a CMS, arts groups can focus on what they do best—creating art and building community—rather than getting bogged down by the technical complexities of website management.
Tomorrow, we’ll get into more details about how we plan to use these new platforms and capabilities to help us build capacity, and we’ll have some great examples of other community projects and programs that have taken this approach.
Join in and Take Part
We meet every Monday at 10:00 in-person and online. Contact Us for more information or how you can participate. All are welcome!
About the Author
