Getting projects off the ground. My first experiences.

In the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of working closely with a good buddy of mine on a new project.  He had the idea of starting a concert series in a local Philly neighbor called Fishtown.  Fishtown is a pretty artsy community, but it has very little classical music (if any) available to its residents.  So our goal with this new project is not only put classical music in this neighbor, but also to get as much of the local economy and arts scene involved as possible by inviting them to participate in some way with each concert.  To kick off this new series we are putting on a holiday concert with an orchestra and the church choir will be joining us for some carols as well.  In our efforts to make this project a success, we have started doing some serious hustling (marketing?) around the local community.

I do a fair amount of reading on entrepreneurship and marketing, but this is my first time actually doing it so it's been a lot of fun to try out.  My buddy and I have both made a list of things we need to accomplish to make this happen and we have been finding that the most important thing right now is to just get the message out to the community.  Since this is my first time really doing this, I took the time to sit down and create list of questions for myself to answer moving forward with this project.

Here's what I came up with:

-What is the goal of this project?
-Who is the audience?
-Why should they care?
-How can we effectively reach them and engage them in our project?

Answering each these questions with a very defined response really helped give me a clear direction to go in.  Since our audience was the local community around the church, I started this process by going to the area and walking around.  I stopped in local businesses, talked to owners and anyone around that was interested in what I had to say.  It was incredibly insightful to just talk with my barber, the guys at the pizza shop, and local art galleries.  Everyone had great things to say about our project and seemed more than willing to help in anyway they could.  That's a good start.

Anyways, I'll keep posting about my progress as we get closer and closer to the first performance.  A link to the FB event can be found here.

Also, if you're interested, I go more in depth on my ideas from this list on my new Squidoo page.  That can be found HERE.  

Until next time...

-Seth