5 Ways Collaboration Can Foster Growth in Your Organization

I am a firm believer that arts organizations are not in competition with each other. In this day and age, our biggest competition comes from Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming giants that offer endless entertainment from the comfort of our own homes. So where does this leave arts organizations? Well, it opens up the opportunity to create exciting performances with other organizations that grow your own organization while giving patrons a compelling reason to turn off their television. Here are 5 ways collaboration can foster growth in your organization.

1. Expand Your Audience Reach

What is collaboration? To put it simply, collaboration is the act of working jointly to create something. When it comes to the arts, it means pooling fiscal and artistic resources with another organization to maximize both of your organizations’ efforts to create interesting programs, reach each other’s audiences, and maximize your budget. Maybe this means partnering with another community choir or joining forces with a children’s choir for your upcoming St. Matthew Passion, or maybe it means joining up with a chamber orchestra for your upcoming performance of Handel’s Messiah.

Collaboration allows you to explore new venues, new geographies, and tap into other established networks and marketing channels. Much like getting people off the couch and away from the endless loop of streaming television, sometimes it takes a little extra effort to expand your reach and get people to buy tickets to a performance outside of their local neighborhood offerings. But if your organization is collaborating with a children’s choir a few towns over, your organization has the means of getting in front of these people at their home symphony and turning them on to the amazing performances you’re doing back on your home turf.

Cross-promotion, a marketing strategy where both organizations join together to promote each other, is a powerful tool that can double your marketing efforts without doubling your budget. I like to think of it as a way to share materials that help introduce your organization to another’s audience, and vice versa. Whether it’s cross-posting on social media platforms, trading email lists, exchanging physical mailing lists, or spotlighting each other in your e-blasts, cross promotion with other local organizations can drastically expand your marketing reach and target patrons with overlapping interests and buying habits.

I’m the Executive Director of Musica Sacra, and at my organization, we have seen collaborations have a profound impact on our audience reach. A normal self-produced season reaches roughly 3,500 patrons, but through collaborations, we have been able to reach over 20,000 additional patrons in a single season. Coming out of the pandemic, this had a huge impact on building back our audience after seeing many patrons move out of the city or change their concert buying habits.

2. Improve Access to Your Organization

One of the most important questions facing organizations is how we can be more accessible. Collaboration can break down barriers that may have previously prevented certain demographics from engaging with your organization. By creating new opportunities for audience engagement, you can make your programming more accessible and inclusive.

Nina Simon, author of “The Art of Relevance,” aptly describes this concept. “Insiders are in the room… Outsiders don’t know your doors exist… If you want new people to come inside, you need to open new doors—doors that speak to outsiders—and welcome them in.” This metaphor beautifully illustrates how partnerships can provide new points of entry for people to discover and connect with your organization.

At Musica Sacra, we recently partnered with two other organizations to provide free concerts at the Oculus in New York City. These concerts were completely free to the public and presented for anyone passing through this major transportation hub. Through this collaboration, we were able to offer performances at no cost in a highly visible and easily accessible location, removing financial and geographic barriers, and allowing a broader audience to experience our music. Sometimes one of the hardest challenges is convincing someone to spend money on an experience they aren’t sure they’ll like or at a venue where they aren’t sure they’ll be welcomed. But music is for everyone. Sometimes it takes us bringing the music to the people to create the door.

Maybe you’re not offering free concerts with your collaboration, and that’s fine. But in almost all collaborative situations, you will find a community the partner organization is serving that you would like to attract and include in your future programming. Through collaboration, you’ll get an invaluable inside look at how a partner organization creates their doors of entry, which can teach you a lot about how to authentically and respectfully open doors to new demographics in your own organization.

3. Increase Diversity in Your Organization

Collaboration can also be a powerful—and necessary—tool for fostering diversity and inclusion within your organization. By partnering with organizations or leaders that serve diverse communities, you can establish new and authentic relationships.

First and foremost, these partnerships allow for the exchanging of ideas and best practices for inclusive programming. These conversations and exchanges can help your organization better understand and address the needs and interests of various communities. That being said, I’d like to take a moment to mention how important it is that anyone venturing into this area needs to be sure they do their research and understand the other organization (i.e. “do the work”), especially when it's a group that might not be of your own personal experience. It’s up to you to learn how to be thoughtful and inclusive of the organization you are working with - it’s not on them to teach you. Going into the conversation informed, curious, and open will go a long way towards establishing a long healthy relationship.

In the wake of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, we wanted to act on our DEI statements. If there was a silver lining to the pandemic, it was that it made us look at ways we could be more reflective of the beautiful and diverse city that is New York City. One of the ways we strived to diversify our organization and our programming during the pandemic was by partnering with diverse ensembles and composers of color. At a time when we weren’t able to hold live auditions, we were able to partner with Just Friends, an all-black ensemble, to produce a virtual choir performance combining both of our groups. As we returned to live performances and were able to hold auditions again, we also partnered with choral contractors of color and community leaders to bring singers of color into our audition rooms (and ultimately our chorus).

4. Enhance Education

Collaborative efforts in education can significantly expand the reach and impact of your organization’s initiatives. By joining forces with educational institutions, you can bring high quality music education programs and workshops directly to students who might not otherwise have access to these opportunities. These specialized programs bring music to a wider array of students, and bring music to underserved communities and schools where music funding has been drastically cut or is non-existent. This not only enriches the students’ educational experience, but also helps cultivate future audiences and supporters of the arts.

At Musica Sacra, this collaboration takes the form of partnering with Title 1 Schools in New York City where schools have very limited musical resources. During the pandemic, Musica Sacra partnered with Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem to offer virtual workshops to enhance their distance learning. These workshops included musical feedback, vocal pedagogy, and most impactfully, working with students to guide them through writing and composing their own songs which were then performed by Musica Sacra singers. These workshops have continued post-pandemic, bringing our musicians into the classrooms for workshops and then bringing the students to our performances.

The options are endless when it comes to educational engagement, but it cannot be overstated how essential these programs are for enriching the lives of the next generation and growing your organization’s future audience—and future singers.

5. Foster Artistic Collaboration

Artistic collaborations can lead to innovative creations that push the boundaries of your organization’s typical output. By working with other artists or organizations, you can blend different perspectives, skills, and resources to create truly unique experiences.

Co-creating new works or performances allows organizations to share the costs and risks associated with commissioning new pieces. This can make it possible for organizations to undertake more ambitious projects that might be beyond the scope of a single organization. You’ll often see this in opera, where major productions are shared by 2-3 opera houses, but it’s no less relevant for choral organizations. Moreover, the collaborative process often results in works that reflect a broader range of influences and ideas simply from having more voices coming together.

Interdisciplinary collaborations, such as a partnership between a chorus and a ballet can produce extraordinary performances that combine different art forms. These collaborations offer audiences a novel way to engage with your music, whether it’s hearing choral music at a ballet, or performing in an art gallery where the artworks have all been inspired by the music being performed. At Musica Sacra, we have collaborated on a few different interdisciplinary collaborations, working with the New York City Ballet for their performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Les Noces and working with The New York Philharmonic and the University of Michigan for their live film screenings of classic movies such as Amadeus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s important to stress that these collaborations don’t need to be on such a large scale. It can be something as simple (and thrilling) as having a dance company choreograph a piece to a song by Eric Whitacre.

Collaboration between different types of musical ensembles, such as a chorus and orchestra, can also be mutually beneficial. It allows each group to expand its repertoire and tackle more complex works that require diverse musical forces. For a smaller size chamber choir, this can provide a means for exploring oratorio works that require a full orchestra. This type of collaboration can also provide opportunities for musicians to work with a wider range of performers and conductors, enhancing their skills and versatility. Maybe you’ve done this in the past. If you haven’t, I find it to be one of the most accessible means of collaboration, and if you have, I would encourage you to do it again and think outside the box and get creative with how you build a relationship between a chorus and an orchestra. We are in an age where people are looking for unique experiences beyond the standard offerings.

Collaboration is a powerful catalyst for growth and innovation in any organization. By expanding audience reach, improving access, increasing diversity, enhancing educational efforts, and fostering artistic collaboration, you are providing unique experiences that allow organizations to  not only grow in size, visibility, and impact but also in relevance and creativity. In our interconnected world, the ability to collaborate effectively may well be the key to long-term success and sustainability. Embrace the power of collaboration, and watch your organization thrive in ways you never thought possible.

How has your choir benefitted from collaborations? Do you have a collaboration example you might share with us? We want to hear and learn from you! Tell us in the comments below.