Expertise

Trudel | MacPherson is a dynamic consulting duo. We are resourceful, courageous and passionate about our work.

Our colleagues admire our “can-do” attitude, humility as representatives of a prestigious funder, and willingness to learn and grow with every project. Together we have access to an excellent national network and deep experience with numerous arts and arts education programs and a wide range of other social benefit organizations.

We are noted for our ability to synthesize lessons and communicate complex ideas to improve field understanding and practice.

How Strong is Your Social Net?

Our landmark survey–newly out of its baseline phase and now in full national rollout–is measuring arts organizations’ usage of digital and social media nationwide.

We’re doing a series of presentations at conferences and with select participants of the survey (watch our events page for details) and releasing summaries of our findings in the fall (as reported on our blog). Are you interested in having us come to your organization to present a customized report of national findings and targeted local data, or a workshop that helps your organization assess and optimize your use of digital and social media? Please contact us, we’d be delighted to speak with you.

What else is behind Trudel | MacPherson’s offering to arts organizations, collaboratives, public/private partnerships, membership organizations and funders?

Our capability to help organizations stand out from the pack
We’re able to guide groups adrift in a sea of similarity to clarify their mission, define critical brand identity components and develop a branding matrix to inform all communications activities.

Our research perspective
Our experience sharing scholarly research and evaluation findings with the evolving field of stakeholders has heightened our sensitivity to the need to uncover practical implications, synthesize lessons and communicate complex ideas to improve understanding and practice.

Our understanding of user behavior and our commitment to user advocacy
New work in the field of user experience design and user profiling makes it clear that defining an audience segment does not lead automatically to an understanding of that constituency’s behavior or circumstantial needs. Our refined user behavior research techniques allow us to gain insights into how information seekers will interact with content, and we advocate for those users. We are experts in building communities and serving information needs in ways that will attract and retain the best audiences.

Our ability to identify and establish community connections
Often groups are “hermetic” and not engaged with their market environment, cutting them off from rich funding and engagement opportunities. Using environmental scans and stakeholder mapping we help groups identify and connect with target publics.

Our insights on public value help groups demonstrate why they need to exist
We’ve created simple, low cost audience research options to help groups organize programming and communications around building public value and establishing connections to community influencers.

Our evolving toolkit of peer learning opportunities
Over the years of creating grantee best practice exchanges, we have developed engaging options for professional development and collaborative learning. Our goal is to help groups develop work plans and approaches which can guide future audience development and participation building efforts.

Building communities of practice
Our experience designing cross disciplinary learning communities in major US cities has honed our capacity to help groups adapt innovations which cross traditional boundaries and preconceptions.

Developing messaging to communicate a group’s unique value proposition
Our communications value statements are designed to resonate with key audiences, inspire trust, build enthusiasm and support. Using key qualities of making an idea “stick” (Made to Stick: Why some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Random House, 2007) our messaging platforms are elegantly simple, easy to understand and retain, credible yet emotional.

Learn about our strategic interventions.