How do you end a program with personal ties? You throw a party and, in the case of 1stfans, that will be our annual rooftop ice cream social where we watch the sun go down; this was the scene at last year's event.

The program was announced in December of 2008 and was created for the Brooklyn Museum visitor who wanted something a little different than the traditional Membership structure.  That very idea was the program’s greatest strength, but also its biggest weakness.

1stfans allowed us to see that most individuals looking to truly support us are interested in a deeper and more personal connection with the Museum and, often, people are looking for a more social experience within the structure of events and their relationship with the institution.  It was the deep engagement of the program that was incredibly successful, but 1stfans was its own entity that was never fully integrated into the Membership structure. This separation made it difficult to gain awareness for the program and, as such, the growth rate stalled.  Most importantly, this separation made it difficult to move 1stfans up the membership ladder—something that’s incredibly important in development and the lifecycle of membership growth. Simply put the program was too separate for its own good; keeping the program in a silo was the primary reason the program couldn’t succeed.  The challenge for us moving forward will be to take what we learned about deep engagement and create new programs that both scale well and will be more a part of the institution as a whole—we’ve got some news on that coming next week.

I’ve already written a lot about our use of various social platforms to run 1stfans.  If you remember, we found utilizing Facebook and Twitter to be overwhelmingly time consuming and shifted to Meetup.com in late 2010. The shift to Meetup made the administration of the program much easier for us and solved many issues, but in the end the choice of platform didn’t matter much outside of the administration of it.  The growth rate was pretty much consistent from one platform to the other and the personal nature of the program remained as successful no matter which site we used.  The age old finding that different people are on different platforms rang true—as we moved from one setup to the other, we saw a lot of new faces while many from the original disappeared. Moving platforms did shift the membership base, but the personal nature remained the same and the growth rate almost parallel.

At conferences, people always ask me how do you end something like this when you’ve got all these personal relationships and strong ties.  My response has always been, “with transparency…and then you throw a heck of a party.”  As 1stfans comes to a close, we’ve written each Member personally and our final event will be the ice cream social on the roof where we gather to watch the sunset from one of the best views in the borough.  This event is the party that 1stfans look forward to all year and we’ll be sunsetting the program with a literal sunset.

For those of you who have supported the Museum by becoming 1stfans at one point in our program’s history, we can’t thank you enough; your support over the years humbles me personally.  So many of you have become friends and are faces that I’ve come to look forward to seeing at our monthly meetups.  I’m looking forward to sharing the roof with you one last time.

It’s because of this all of this that we are shifting focus to better accommodate the in-person meetup and changing the use of technology to support that goal. At the end of November, we will be discontinuing the use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr groups for 1stfans and we’ll be moving our online operations to Meetup.com.

At the 1stfans meetup in June 2010, Tash managed to get a Key to City and we all got to open the secret door on the 5th Floor.

This is a long story of creating a program, learning as you go and finding the right technological fits along the way.  I’m going to run down the specifics after the jump.  If you are one of our readers that is new to 1stfans and would like to get caught up, you might check out Will’s introduction to the program and Nina Simon’s interview with the two of us during early days.

Twitter Art Feed:

As much as we loved the Twitter Art Feed, it wasn’t working and we were not seeing much user engagement.    You may remember one of the artists, Joanie San Chirico, actually created an entire project to try and engage the folks that were quietly lurking in the background—a direct response to the issue at hand.  In some ways, since many of the artists featured were 1stfans, the feed provided a way to get to know certain members through their projects, but overall user engagement was low and if the point of 1stfans was to socialize and get to know one another, Twitter didn’t work.   Why?  Well, simply put, Twitter is setup for a one-to-many communication and while it’s possible to have a many-to-many communication there, it’s not the norm and is difficult on the scale we need.  Compared to what we were seeing in the building, the feed felt alien—like it wasn’t part of the program. Though we are sad to see it go, we couldn’t be more thrilled that Dennis Bass is going to send us off.  We got to know Dennis after he became our Foursquare Mayor and he’s been a great supporter of ours—his project, which looks at our permanent collection, tagging and his own photography, is going to provide a lovely close to the feed.  We’d like to take this time to thank the artists who contributed to the feed over the past two years—they created some amazing projects and utilized Twitter in very innovative ways. If you are curious for more, each project has its own blog post detailing the project and to celebrate them, we are making the feed public so you can scroll back through and take a look at these projects before the feed is deleted entirely.

Communication:

We setup Facebook, Flickr and Twitter for communication, but problems cropped up continually.  As much as people are on the social networks, they are not consistently on them all the time and when they are there’s a flood of information coming their way as they try and catch up.  Our communication and meetup announcements were getting lost in that wave. Also, the Facebook group structure (even with recent modifications) makes it difficult for people to get to know one another and communicate together.  Too often, people have their profiles locked down, so if you are curious about somebody and click on their profile, you are faced with this brick wall:

Would have loved to get to know Nick a little bit, but are we really ready to be FB friends?  Not sure I’m ready for that commitment!

If Facebook was difficult for communication, the use of Twitter bordered on comedy.  You can’t DM users on Twitter unless you mutually follow each other.  Too often, people were confused about the Twitter Art Feed being closed to members only.  When they tried to follow, we had no way to communicate with them to explain and ask them to join.  Here, this says it all. Twitter has these restrictions in place for good reason—you don’t want strangers soliciting you, especially when you could have your DMs going to your phone via SMS, but it stymied communication and there was no way around it.  After November, these groups and feeds will be replaced by a single point of entry at meetup.com, which allows for better communication.

Administrative Overhead:

The online benefits have been difficult to manage internally.  With private groups and feeds, we had to work hard to get people setup initially and you can imagine what a renewal cycle was like.  For every member who didn’t renew, we’d have to go in and find their account to remove them from the group. This was an astounding time drain.  While this could have been partially solved by allowing these groups to be public, that would have created other problems.  For instance, if you open the Twitter Art Feed so anyone can join, what’s the point of it being a benefit of membership?  There’s no good answer here, but since the Twitter Art Feed wasn’t working in other ways, we have a direction to go in that works to solve both problems.

Online Transactions: 

The use of Google Checkout made it much easier for our members to join and renew, but it made things very difficult to manage internally.  When members would join, we’d have to input their data by hand into Raiser’s Edge, the business system we use for tracking development and membership. In addition, we’d have to send reports from Google to our fiance office, so they could properly reconcile the transactions.  This created too much overhead, so we’ve switched to using RE:NetSolutions, which is a product that integrates with our internal systems.  To say we agonized over this change is putting it lightly.  RE:NetSolutions provides a downright awful user experience, but it’s a change we felt we had to make for the 1stfans workload to become more manageable.  At some point we will be able to dump RE:NetSolutions in favor of something better for transactions across the institution, but until then we are stuck {curses}.

Movin’ to Meetup: 

You might be asking why moving to Meetup is going to make all this better.  I’ve been using the site personally for a while and it’s hard to list all of the awesomeness it provides.  I’ll start by saying Meetup has absolutely nailed getting people together in physical space and giving them just enough of an online push to help them do so.  Here are just a few reasons why Meetup works so well:

1stfans has been on Meetup just a few days and it’s been heartwarming to see visitors finding us there and filling out their profiles so we can better get to know them. The Meetup.com structure facilitates this incredibly well and it is simply awesome.

• As a group admin, you can ask your members a few questions about why they are joining your group.  Everyone who belongs to the group can see these answers and get to know them a little bit in context.  This is not a major online relationship commitment—it’s just enough information to help all the members get to know each other and facilitate conversations at the events themselves.
• As a member, I can set my own privacy levels.  I can elect to show which groups I’m a part of or not.  I can decide if I’d like to allow other members to contact me via email and I can do this on a group by group basis.  Ditto for my online life—I can share my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr handles if I want to, but otherwise keep it private or only share it with certain groups.
• Meetup has single sign-on using Facebook Connect, so I can use my FB credentials without the need of another account.  Alternatively, if I’m not on Facebook, I can just use a meetup.com account. For people wary of Facebook and its problems with privacy, this is incredibly helpful.
• Meetup sends event announcements and reminders via email and allows members to export events into any number of calendar formats.  I can adjust my email settings on a per-group basis.  When I RSVP to an event, I can elect to share it to my social networks, but this is not forced and doesn’t happen by surprise—I know exactly what I’m sharing and when I’m doing it.
• Meetup allows each member to create widgets, so they they can help support us by spreading the word on their own blogs and sites.  In addition, organizers can create name tags to be used at the event from the RSVP list, which saves a lot of time.
• As a group admin, I can greet every new member when they join which is one of the most important things one can do to make people feel welcome and facilitate community growth.

Overall, Meetup has created an experience that can be customized for each group member and I feel like my privacy is protected—I share what I want to, when I want to and it’s clear to me (very clear) what those options are.  It feels like I’m a respected user and that, in turn, makes me feel safe going into real-world meetups and that’s how we want our members to feel.  Bravo.

We are excited about these changes and when I scroll back through all of the 1stfans blog posts, I find myself incredibly proud of how much work we’ve collectively—the staff, the artists and, most of all, the members—put into the program.  I’m looking forward to this next chapter and meeting new 1stfans and seeing old friends at our next meetup.

According to Dennis:

My project will link tags from the museum collection to daily photographs I take for my personal blog. This will allow the museum collection to directly inform and inspire my personal photography.

Brooklyn Museum tagged “Red”

Starting with an item in the museum collection, I will review the tags, and the daily photo I take for my blog will match one of these tags. Next I search for other items in museum collection with this tag, from the search results I will pick a new piece and begin the cycle again. At the end of the project I will resend the images and tags in a chronological collection.

Dennis Bass, Red

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

Her proposal for the Twitter Art Feed deviates from her current studies, however, and instead touches on her training and love of photography. In her own words:

In high school, I discovered a passion for photography. I continued this passion while working on my Masters in Arts and Humanities. This is when I realized my hobby and passion was more and meant more to me than something I just did for fun. I decided to take my art into a new direction. As a photographer and artist I’m always looking for new ways to take a photo of something. I want to spark conservations with my images, and I want to explore and share the things that I love. I love food, so why not combine the two. My feed will include discussions of food for 1stfans. Since food is a very broad topic, I will have weekly themes: week one will be about calories, week two about sharing and discovering recipes, week three  will include photos while dining out, and our final week will be random food topics inspired by 1stfans. This can include anything from photos of food to Halloween candy, the topics are up to you.

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

Whether it’s through tweets, photographs, or ruminations that sometime exceed 140 characters, this character is intriguing not only because of the seemingly omnipresent reports on art and museum happenings around the world (though primarily focused on New York), but also because it reflects a highly personal, and unadulterated, take on everyday experiences with works of art. For the Twitter Art Feed this month, Museum Nerd launched a community project that is an ode to-what else?-museums that will unfold throughout the month for our followers. I’ll let Museum Nerd explain further:

“This month, I’m extremely excited to be Brooklyn Museum’s 1stfans digital artist in residence. Initially I conceived of this project as a collective “love letter” to “museums.” I posted a message on twitter asking if anyone who “loved museums and could lick a stamp” wanted to be involved in an art project and used the hashtag #MuseumArt. Since the 1stfans artists are kept under wraps until their project launches, I wasn’t able to explain exactly what #MuseumArt involved, but people were excited nonetheless. I asked them to send me postcards showing museums and to write what they loved about the museum on the back.

Since @MuseumNerd is a secret identity, I enlisted the help of museum world friends who tweet for their museums. They received the postcards on my behalf and I went on several #SecretMission operations to meet them and attain the postcards. On one #SecretMission I visited four museums in four NYC boroughs to pick up postcards. In part I wanted to give recognition to the real people behind museum twitter feeds and remind folks that museums are not monolithic unapproachable institutions.

This project falls into critic Ben Davis’s “Greimasian Semiotic Square” as a “social art collaboration,” and was partly inspired by artist An Xiao’s explorations of the relationship between digital and analogue communication, especially in her 1stfans twitter art feed. What started as a brief digital message evoked dozens of analogue communications (postcards) which will now be posted again as digital scans, but with my own creative intervention. These will be in the form of simple word bubbles which reflect my obsession with words and words in art (e.g. Ed Ruscha). This is part of a body of work that celebrates “museums” themselves as the wonderful inspiring places they’ve been for all the participants in #MuseumArt and millions of others.”

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

Despite popular belief, museums are not proverbial ivory towers situated high upon hills, filled with curators and staff meticulously tending to their objects in sterile offices worthy of forensic crime television. In fact the truth is quite the contrary: the offices of a museum are crowded, cluttered and storied places often as interesting and convoluted in appearance as objects in the collection.  Throughout August I will conduct an exposé, wherein “portraits” of various museum offices will be posted to twitter.

Danny’s “self-portrait”

This idea came about through a conversation with a friend about the Brooklyn Museum.  Without a museum background, this friend assumed, as I think many people do, that museums exist in a bubble.  It was clear that people’s perception of museums as clean whitewashed spaces full of beautiful, pristine objects protected by high security extended to the perception that curators and staff work in similarly pristine conditions. This project is an opportunity to show that the reality is quite different and that often the work spaces of the collectors can be as interesting as the objects they collect.”

Please feel free to tweet your own desk to compare.

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

July’s Twitter Art Feed artist is Brian Piana, who, in his own words, creates works “from the Internet, for the Internet,” several of which used Twitter as their base. While Brian often uses Twitter as a source for his works, one project called Tweeting Colors is particularly unique in that it puts control of the work into the hands of the public rather than his own. To elaborate, Tweeting Colors is a web page that displays vertical bars of varying color and width, but each of these bars is determined by the tweets of various unknown Twitter users.  In order to add a bar, one’s tweet has to include a few specific elements that designate the bar’s size and color. The Web page itself auto-refreshes a few times per minute, so that new bars are added from the left to create an ever-changing online visual.

If some of this is sounding familiar to 1stfans, you may be aware that Tweeting Colors is not only part of the Rhizome ArtBase, but it also played a part in ArtDialogue: conversations in images, January’s Twitter Art Feed project by Nina Meledandri. Nina’s work encouraged online conversations through the use of images, in response to various themes. When Nina introduced the theme of “Home,” some 1stfans deviated from using a straight image, and instead, employed Tweeting Colors to create a group portrait of the colors found in their homes.

Because Tweeting Colors is determined by people’s individual tweets, it wholly relies on the personal involvement and collaboration of a variety of people to maintain and manipulate the work. Much like Nina’s project, it is this collaborative nature that made Brian’s project so appealing to Shelley and me for the Twitter Art Feed. For the first time, Brian is going to customize Tweeting Colors and create a separate Web page for our followers. The private link to 1stfans Tweeting Colors will be announced within the Feed tomorrow, where you can then follow the simple instructions and add color bars of your liking. In the beginning, 1stfans are encouraged to play freely with the work, and as the month goes on, Brian will announce different themes and introduce new color palettes to the mix to encourage your participation. One thing 1stfans may notice when they first access 1stfans Tweeting Colors, is that it includes the Brooklyn Museum’s eight signature colors, all of which happen to be used in our multi-colored 1stfans logo (as vertical color bars, no less!).

See why this is a perfect match?

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

The upfront nature of this work, however, provides an interesting contrast to the fact that Mike also likes to tells stories. When we approached him about participating in the Twitter Art Feed, Mike explained that he’s always been amused by how much credibility Twitter has a source of information and being the satirist that he is, he wanted to play on that idea. I don’t want to reveal too much about what Mike is going to do—Shelley and I think it will be a lot more fun to let 1stfans figure out his project through the progression of his tweets—but I can say that it’s going to be focused on Museum and it will definitely keep you guessing. I’ve been amazed by the variety of ways in which Twitter has been used as a medium so far, and it will be interesting to see how Mike experiments with this medium while giving 1stfans a completely new way to engage with his work.

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

Nitasha Kawatra, who will now be Interim Membership Manager, will now be running the 1stfans program with Shelley. Those of you in 1stfans may already know Tash, since she’s usually at the Target First Saturday meetups and is a 1stfans member herself. In the spirit of an open transition, what follows is a quick interview with Tash, which we hope will allow 1stfans to get to know her better and serve as my official departure from the group.

Tash, tell me how you have been involved with 1stfans so far.

I’ve been helping manage the 1stfans groups on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, and often help out with the First Saturday meetups. That’s actually one of my favorite aspects of 1stfans because I really enjoy talking about the program with our First Saturdays visitors who are interested in signing up. It’s also been especially fun to get to know the 1stfans who come out every month because they are so enthusiastic about participating in all of our events, and it’s been amazing to see how their relationships have grown not only with our staff but also with each other.

You mentioned the meetups. Which has been your favorite, so far?

My favorite meetup was when we launched 1stfans with the Swoon interactive printing event.  I felt like I was already getting to know our new members pretty well because the materials they chose to print on were indicative of their personalities (the pizza box was particularly great). I was also just blown away by how many people came out to support the program that night.

Unlike me, you actually live in Brooklyn. What made you decide to move here, and what do you like most about your ‘hood?

It really was a quality of life decision to move here. After living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for a few years, I was looking for a neighborhood that was a little more laid back but still has a lot of personality and Cobble Hill just seemed like the perfect fit. I live right on Smith Street so it’s really lively and eclectic, but I love that I can always duck onto one of the quiet tree-lined streets nearby (mostly to lust after all the beautiful brownstones).  I haven’t lived here that long, but have totally drunk the Brooklyn kool-aid.

What’s your commute like? This is my favorite question in “Brooklyn’s Finest,” so I want to be sure we have you on the record.

I’m fortunate to have a really convenient commute on the B71 bus, at least for a few more precious weeks (It’s one of the buses that got sacrificed in the MTA cuts). One of my fellow riders started a petition this morning to save the route though, so I have a glimmer of hope that I’ll get to stick with my above-ground commute.

As the most experienced “foodie” on the membership staff, what are your favorite haunts around the Museum?

Give me a fish taco from Chavella’s any day of the week .  The food there is so incredibly fresh and delicious there and the homemade hot salsa will bring tears to your eyes (which is a good thing, in my opinion). I’m also pretty attached to Cheryl’s Global Soul. Not only do they have the friendliest staff, but the fact that they were able to make a carnivore like me so addicted to their vegetarian chili is pretty impressive.

Lastly, anything you want people to know about your new role with 1stfans? And what do you like about membership work, in general?

From the beginning I’ve felt really privileged to be part of such an innovative Membership program with you and Shelley, and I’m looking forward to continuing to grow the program and connect more personally with all of our 1stfans. In general, Membership work appeals to me because I really enjoy coming up with ways to open up the Museum as much as possible to our most loyal donors—it’s important to me that our Members see exactly where their support is going.  Members can start to get to know me on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, or get in touch with me by e-mail.

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To meet more of our staff, visit the Brooklyn’s Finest Flickr set.