Boost Your Engagement by Activating Outdoor Spaces
Here in St. Louis, we are enjoying our second week of warm weather after making it through the cold temperatures and winter storms that affected most of the United States. Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the winter chill, people everywhere are excited to get outdoors and enjoy fun spring activities. This presents an incredible opportunity for nonprofits and cultural attractions to bring in new visitors and engage with new fundraising strategies in safe and innovative ways. A certain way to stand out and boost engagement is to offer outdoor activities. To do this, organizations need to activate their outdoor spaces effectively.
Throughout the pandemic, outdoor activities have been recognized as safer and more welcoming than gathering indoors. Putting the pandemic behind us, outdoor spaces are great places to bring your community together. Taking events and attractions outside is a perfect way to ease the minds of visitors and enjoy some beautiful weather.
How to Activate Outdoor Spaces
One effective way to bring together more visitors is to partner with other organizations, businesses, or individuals in order to activate outdoor spaces. Partnering with other organizations makes it easier and more attractive to take your organizations outside of four walls. Below, we check out some great ways to activate outdoor spaces:
Cultural attractions have just that, attraction. Museums, performing arts centers, educational organizations, and more all have something that attracts visitors. These organizations can bring an attraction outdoors and then build an event around it to boost engagement. Art museums can activate outdoor spaces by bringing art outside and then boost the engagement by inviting amateur artists to feature their work. Add in food, beverage, and music, and a simple outdoor exhibit now has much more power to attract visitors.
For parks, you are not an attraction dealing in artifacts and other offerings, but you can still bring something to the table, your space. While outdoor space is always activated in parks, temperate weather and a population excited to get outside present an opportunity to boost engagement. Parks can provide the space for food trucks, live music, and local vendors to come to one area in order to bring visitors together in an outdoor and safe environment. This boosts park engagement and supports local businesses and arts.
For example, here in St. Louis, Tower Grove Park put on an event where they offered the space, and it was filled with live music and vendors throughout the park. The event was a huge success. One pavilion had live music, and the remainder of the park had vendors selling everything imaginable. Kids had areas to play in, adults listened to live music, and vendors were busy selling food, art, and more. Parks offer free space for visitors and vendors to distance themselves for the safety and comfort of all.
The options are seemingly endless. From creating space for fledgling artists to display and sell their work to providing activities for children or even just a fun space for food, drink, and music, activating outdoor spaces opens up engagement and fundraising opportunities tremendously. From pop-up beer gardens featuring local breweries to farmer’s markets, the options for activation are numerous.
How Do I Make This Happen for My Organization?
These ideas are able to work because your organization brings something essential to the table (space, attractions, credibility, etc.). Partnerships then provide the opportunity to develop complementary features around it. In order to activate an outdoor space, finding what your organization can offer and how that can help develop the partnerships you need is key. A museum can offer the art or even just the credibility to invite young artists, and a park can offer the space to gather local vendors. Think about what compliments your offerings and go from there. In a time where the pandemic and cold weather has restricted everyone—businesses, museums, parks, artists, performers, and visitors—are all eager to organize and make a safe, fun outdoor event possible.
Want more ways to improve your engagement strategies? At NMBL Strategies we have extensive experience operating many different forms of cultural institutions and promoting their engagement within their communities and globally. We offer these same innovative strategies to our clients. Reach out today to learn how we can boost engagement for your organization