For the past two months, in every conversation I’ve had with industry colleagues, their primary focus has been on delivering a digital program while their venues or events are shuttered. During my career in arts marketing, I have always – like many of you – found myself the owner of ‘digital’ and ‘web’ by default. To date, this has made sense. In the early 2000s the web was a transactional space, and with the advent of social media, it became the place to tell our (marketing) story. The question is: what happens when the web becomes your venue, and the only place that your organization currently operates?

There has always been a tension between the ownership of digital content in the organizations I’ve worked in. Is it generated by artistic and simply posted by marketing? Or does marketing need to control the story we’re telling because ultimately the web is a transactional space to draw people to our venues and events? If the latter no longer exists, then is the web the artistic department’s domain? Artistic and programming teams are in the business of producing. Is this the moment to finally shift ownership of producing digital content over to those teams?

Regardless of where your organization lands with this question of ‘ownership’, there is no doubt that the marketing team will be – as ever – drawn upon to manage channels and platforms, and the promotion of the digital content being produced. And the question for me is whether the marketing teams (including the agencies we lean on in some cases) are prepared for the place we now find ourselves in.

It’s been inspiring to see so many companies leap into new forms of digital content delivery over the last couple of months, and I have been an eager participant. But now as we settle into the reality that digital may be our only form of delivering programming for the foreseeable future – and I would argue will become a supplementary way of delivering programming from now on – there are a few questions we need to ask ourselves as marketers:

What is the role of the marketing team in the delivery of programming online?
Will our delivery platforms be managed by marketing or by our producing teams?
What are the new roles we really need in this new reality, and where do those roles report into?
What is the revenue model for digital programming?

The last question is a big burning question for me. The majority of digital content being produced by arts organizations is currently available for free, and as a consumer I can see some concerted efforts to tie donations to content access. But if in the coming months, and possibly years, we find ourselves with an audience unwilling to come to our venues or events, who choose to consume our content digitally, we need to create models that enable our organizations to monetize digital content. And I would argue that we need to be figuring out how to address this soon, before we train our audiences to expect digital content for free.

The work of our consultancy focuses on helping you answer these types of questions, with an inherent focus on team structure and resourcing. As we grapple with the new challenges facing us, these are conversations that all arts marketers should be having with their industry colleagues (be it consultants like us or your peers) and be leading on within their organizations.

Rani Haywood is a Senior Consultant at Tom O’Connor Consulting Group. TOCG is a New York City-based arts consultancy offering strategy, assessment, executive search, and leadership coaching services to organizations across the US—all with a focus on audiences and revenue outcomes. For over fifteen years Rani has held senior marketing roles at an array of performing arts and cultural organizations in Australia and the United States, including at The Metropolitan Opera, Roundabout Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company.