Using the Web to Empower Your Union

The Arizona Opera Orchestra Musicians Association (AZOOMA) had a bit of an identity problem.

We regularly perform in a semi-closed pit under the stage and are heard but not seen by the public. When asked, our audience members presumed that we were either the Phoenix or Tucson symphony orchestras. Because we perform operas in both cities and are mostly out-of-sight in the pit, we heard this a lot.

For years this issue was just a small nuisance and only a minor concern. We would roll our eyes, sigh and shrug our shoulders – that is, until our collective bargaining agreement expired and negotiations lingered on for months under new management.

What was at first only a minor annoyance was now a huge concern. We really needed public support to secure our jobs but our public didn’t really know who we were.

When a committee chair contacted me for help, I jumped at the chance. Besides being a horn player in the opera orchestra, I am also an experienced web developer. In this capacity I am accustomed to aggressively selling things online and, when asked to help AZOOMA, I wanted to follow the same methods used with any other commercial website. AZOOMA needed to be sold like a product to our community.

Since then, our musician website has evolved into a rather large-scale project involving a main website, a blog, social networking and even YouTube videos. I devote myself to it because I love playing opera, strongly support my fellow musicians and my negotiation committee, and hope that it will contribute to a positive outcome for the entire company.

Perhaps it will even set an example for our entire industry.

At the time of this writing our negotiations are still ongoing. While it cannot be said that our efforts were a complete success, it is my hope that our example might inspire and motivate other musician organizations to use the web in a similar manner to empower themselves and gain success where we may have failed.

At the very least, in spite of how our contract negotiations end, I believe AZOOMA has succeeded in one aspect – we have made a big wave. In a very short time the Arizona Opera Orchestra Musicians Association – a small, part-time regional orchestra – has managed to rise from being nearly anonymous to being a more widely-known, branded organization.

We are “the little engine that could.”

Chain of Command

The technical process of constructing a website is way too detailed to get into in a short article. Besides, there are countless books and online resources that can guide you better than I can. What I do hope to relate is a broad overview of how our small, regional opera orchestra coordinated itself to produce its strong online presence.

On the Internet, it only takes a few determined people grouped into a coordinated effort to make a big wave. In AZOOMA’s case, this began with a very clear chain-of-command. Because AZOOMA is in contract negotiations, our Negotiations Chair became the de facto “Editor-in-Chief.”

As the web developer – the “Publisher” and content developer – I purposely stay away from any official committee positions. So I rely heavily on guidance from the “Chief.” I do get some insider information (that I keep confidential of course) in order to effectively plan our online strategy, but otherwise I stay out of it.

This approach has worked well for us. Unburdened by the details of negotiations, I am in a better position to focus on making a strong website. It helps me to focus on producing creative content and not worry about accidentally revealing any negotiation strategies.

My experience in the commercial realm has shown that involving too many “cooks” in designing a website can “spoil the stew,” and our simple, two-person method assured a quicker online presence unburdened with debate and doubt. Our negotiation committee had its hands full dealing with management, and we wisely avoided the trap of making our website a full committee affair.

Besides, because a website is a flexible medium, it can be easily edited and updated later if any objections arise to something we published.

Getting Started

Using personal funds and some AZOOMA funds raised by our annual $35 membership fee, we secured a domain name, web host and hosting package. These days, website startup costs are quite small and, in the interest of the greater good, a few individuals stepped up and covered most of these basic costs. The main expenses involved in creating a strong online presence are time, dedication and determination. While time can sometimes be an issue we struggle with, we certainly had plenty of dedication and determination.

My first few questions to the Chair were the same questions that I ask every commercial client. These are the most important things to get started on when creating a solid online presence. As it happened to be for AZOOMA, these three basic questions struck at the core of our public identity problem.

1.) Do you have a logo?

Like any business, an attractive, appropriate logo is the first step in creating an image. While to some this detail may seem irrelevant or trivial, to me a logo on a website goes a long way towards establishing public credibility and securing a “brand” identity.

My goal for the AZOOMA logo was to create something that reflected and complemented the Arizona Opera\’s logo, yet established us as a unique and separate entity. The Arizona Opera logo uses a decrescendo and crescendo theme, suggesting the expressive range of operatic productions.

To reflect on this concept I chose an image with two simple half-notes, one with an accent and the other with a fermata.

In my mind, these expressive markings in our logo represent AZOOMA’s unity, resolve and determination. It seemed appropriate.

Towards this end, I didn’t get too hung up on whether the logo was “good” or not – this really doesn’t matter too much in getting started. What matters is that the public eye has a visual symbol to use that identifies your organization as something unique and special.

Besides, logos can always be updated later under the auspices of “re-branding.”

2.) The next basic question is – Do you have a mission statement?

While the players committee had its bylaws, it didn’t have a specific mission statement. Like any other commercial business this is a crucial thing to have – it functions like a mantra for what the organization is about and what it wants to accomplish.

A straight-forward, three-pronged statement that illustrated support for both the musicians and the management was formulated. It became the basis for our vision – to support our musicians and our company, and to do whatever we can to reach out to the public in support of both.

Along these lines, I was wisely advised right away that inflammatory language of any kind was strictly taboo. While AZOOMA wanted to make a strong statement, the main goal was to promote positive spin whenever possible to gain public support. This approach has helped to sell AZOOMA to our community-at-large, and has also been a great thing for orchestra morale.

From our mission statement, a slogan was derived – a “tag” line. I came up with the three X’s: expression, experience and excellence – as a suitable catch phrase and we went with it. This is used not only on the website, but also on our business cards, pamphlets, blog and social network spaces.

Much like a logo, a simple catch phrase like this adds strength and lends legitimacy to the cause. It adds viability to the brand we are trying to sell.

In AZOOMA’s case we needed to move fast. We chose something and stuck with it. Like the logo, a slogan can always be updated later if it doesn’t work out. The main point is to get something going for now, then move on.

3.) The final question I ask commercial web clients – Do you have any content that I can use?

Without content – text, pictures or graphics – a website is pretty plain.

Our venture for text content began with the Negotiations Chair implementing an extensive survey for the opera orchestra musicians to complete. Through dogged persistence, he managed to get 46 of our 48 contracted musicians to complete and turn in the survey. From this, he constructed a comprehensive and concentrated “FAQ” – a list of thirteen “frequently asked questions.”

This FAQ became the foundation for almost everything in our entire the website. With the FAQ in hand, I made it my first goal as the webmaster to spread out and expand upon every nook and cranny of its contents. The idea behind this was to generate a wide variety of content to catch a wide variety of public interests.

In constructing websites – and in commercial marketing in general – redundancy like this is a good, rule-of-thumb. Most of AZOOMA’s main points are repeated over and over again, in many different ways, within a wide variety of articles and blogs. The goal of this redundancy method is that even if a visitor reads only one page of our website, s/he will go away with at least one or two crucial tidbits of information.

Adding Photos and Graphics

Another element we needed was pictures and graphics to add visual appeal. Like a logo and slogan, these details may seem trivial to some, but to the public, pictures and graphics add essential “eye candy.” It generates stronger interest and staying power and, in my opinion, is as important as the text. No matter how strong the message, if a website looks boring, people will not stick around for very long.

As a web developer, graphics were no problem for me to create. If I was feeling lazy or was short on time, I could even buy royalty-free artwork from online resources such as iStockPhoto.com (one of my favorite resources for photos, illustrations, animations and graphics).

But what we really needed on our website were pictures of our musicians. Statistics show that pictures of people on websites – especially of their faces looking into the camera – make visitors feel more comfortable and feel like staying around. People seem to connect better to a website when there are faces looking at them, standing out behind the words.

Otherwise a website like ours – one that promotes an organization made up of people – could look pretty bland and might feel “cold” to an outsider unfamiliar with our cause.

Fortunately for us, we had an excellent photographer in our double bass section. Over a period of weeks, she diligently snapped lots of pictures – in the pit, outside the hall, backstage – wherever the musicians were. She captured lots of great moments, and most importantly, smiling faces of musicians looking directly into the camera.

These were exactly the kind of pictures we needed to engage website visitors and to form stronger emotional connections to AZOOMA.

Everyone in the orchestra was informed ahead of time of course, and after a few weeks the photographer had release forms for everyone to sign before any pictures were used online. With these releases in hand, I was free as the webmaster to get to work. Besides sprinkling these pictures throughout the web site, they were put into an online Google Picasa photo album for everyone in the orchestra to download and enjoy. Later, they were even used in YouTube videos.

Because several tracking and statistical tools are installed on our site, I have witnessed the “proof in the pudding.” As more and more “eye candy” and content is added to the AZOOMA site, our average visitor’s stay increases. At the site launch, it was about four minutes; now the current average is around eleven minutes.

News reporters have recently been visiting our site. One reporter stayed for over two hours. That alone made the effort worthwhile.

Blogging and Social Networking

Beyond these three basic elements, I spent a great deal of time researching what other musicians associations and music-oriented websites were doing, picking and choosing concepts that I liked and that would work for AZOOMA.

In a short time, I discovered blogging and social networking. These seemed like excellent avenues to explore. I was new to these things and was honestly a bit intimidated by it all.But in the interest of preserving our orchestra, I rolled up my sleeves and decided that it was about time to start learning about what everyone was talking about.

Blogging, I quickly discovered, is an excellent way to get the word out.

I was directed towards Google’s Blogger.com platform, an excellent platform for a variety of contributors to write articles and post them online in a safe, secure way. It is free and because it is associated with Google, anything blogged about gets indexed into the Google search engine – a tremendous advantage.

Social networking is another excellent way to get the word out. With minimal effort it is possible to reach a very wide audience. Over time, AZOOMA has accumulated a broad network of friends who have helped us to spread our wings even further.

YouTube Videos

Lately, I have taken things to the extreme and have produced short, 2-minute promotional videos, and have posted them on YouTube. With the huge resource of information that the AZOOMA website had become, I thought that converting some of our content into a visual medium would attract even more attention and more visitors to our site. It began as an experiment in something I had heard about but never tried – a “viral” campaign. Resembling television infomercials, these videos have made a tremendous impact. The combination of music, video, animation and voice-overs allows AZOOMA to effectively communicate a strong message in a very precise and memorable way. It began as a means to spread general information about AZOOMA, and has evolved into a very powerful negotiation tool. With a cleverly scripted video it is possible to “say” things without really “saying” them. Rhetorical text and symbolic imagery can take on a new and powerful life of their own; it is possible to relay messages that go beyond the page and really stick in people’s heads. I will spare you the exhaustive details of how this was technically accomplished, but feel free to contact me if you want more information.

The Little Engine That Could

The AZOOMA website has been a great success on many levels. Besides raising public awareness of our organization, it has proved to be an excellent tool for orchestra morale and for negotiating with management. It unifies and gives the musicians hope during the roller coaster ride of negotiations. Just a decade ago, this kind of thing would have been unheard of. In the 21st century however, as more and more people of all ages gain access to high-speed Internet connections, a website can be a very powerful tool for musician organizations. For example, in a short time AZOOMA has managed to rise from being nearly anonymous to establishing itself as a widely-known, branded organization, both locally and nationally.

In the “big picture,” whether or not AZOOMA’s online efforts ultimately succeed in a contract resolution is really a moot point. What is important here is that musician organizations no longer need to remain silent, anonymous or afraid to make their positions known and heard. We can implement the same marketing tactics that managers use. Media outlets are no longer limited to the traditional newspaper and television models of the past. The Internet “levels the playing field” and provides exciting, new opportunities unheard of in the previous century. While management may have its marketing experts, all it takes to compete with their expertise is a handful of determined individuals willing to roll up their sleeves, take a risk, and dive in.