The Barr Foundation

Persuading the Arts Community to Take More Risks

The Barr Foundation's Arts and Creativity program invests in bold ideas and leaders. One of those bold ideas is providing funding to artists and arts organizations to take a mission-aligned risk for the purposes of learning, growing, and impacting future work.
What We Did

Brand Voice

Challenge

In 2012, Barr and the Klarman Family Foundation launched an initiative to strengthen the long-term financial health of a group of 30 arts organizations by exploring organizational and artistic risk-taking. The compelling stories that resulted could serve as fascinating exemplars for the field of arts funders, art producers, and art exhibitors about the transformational potential of artistic risk-taking, but only if those audiences heard the stories in the first place.


Solution

Adamec Communications teamed with our partners at Hairpin to produce a series of seven video profiles, sharing the journey and impact of artistic risk-taking through the eyes of the arts leaders who were funded. In addition, our team strategized the roll-out of these videos, produced promotional materials to accompany each video's separate launch, and wrote an accompanying blog post for each video in the voice of the original artist.

Results

See the resulting videos and posts at the Barr Foundation's website.

"Shaun was a terrific partner at every phase of this project. He asked good questions that helped us get clear about goals and strategy. And he helped us stay true to these as he skillfully led us, and our many partners, through a very complex process. Along the way, Shaun was responsive and flexible. And we are very pleased with the results."

Stefan Lanfer

Director of Communications, Barr Foundation