Professional Development at Creative Waco

Got questions about how to protect your creative work from copyright infringement? Attend this free webinar.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Learn About the Copyright Claims Board: Copyright Alliance, TALA, and ASMP Panel. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. On May 16, from 2pm to 3:15pm ET (1pm - 2:15pm CT), the Copyright Alliance and Texas Accountants and Lawyers for the Arts (TALA), in partnership with the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), will host a panel titled "Learn About the Copyright Claims Board". The Copyright Claims Board (or....

Is social media marketing all it's cracked up to be? Or could it even be counter-productive to real business goals? See what Tara McMullin, founder of What Works, thinks.

Today's technology teaches us to treat more & more activities like games: exercise, social interaction, meditation, and marketing—just to name a few. So what is a game? And how do they impact our actions? Games are temporary environments where the goal is clear, and we know what to care about based on the "points system." Games provide a satisfying break from our complex and often confusing reality. But real life isn't really a game—even if gamification is all the rage. C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher who thinks about games and, by extension, gamification. He says, "gamification threatens to change the target." Because real life is complex, rich, and hard to measure, we develop metrics that help us make sense of things—the way a points system does in a game. Our deepest motivations and strongest values get reduced to objectives, strategic choices, and finally simple metrics. That's fine as low as we keep it in context! But Nguyen explains that we end up getting hijacked by the clarity & simplification that metrics provide. So we try to rack up as many points as we can and forget about the original objective. In marketing a business, that can mean "helping more people" quickly turns into "get more likes"—even with no proof that "more likes" leads to helping more people. Nguyen calls this "value capture." Rich, hard-to-express values are reduced to quantifiable metrics so that they're easy to display, compare, and share. But, in the process, we treat the metrics as more important than what they symbolize—and the goal becomes to game the metrics instead of pursuing the original aim. Marketing is a complex task with plenty of unknown variables. But the metrics we track—likes, page views, follows, conversion rates—help us reduce that complexity. In the process, the metrics change the target. We post for likes, rather than for what's good for business. We hope the simplicity of these metrics will make the task easier because we have a sort of psychological clarity about what we need to do to win the game. But instead, we end up spending time and money racking up points instead of actually investing what matters. More in Episode 377!

"Marketing Your Art Business Online," another interesting-looking, affordable web series to consider.

:: CCI :: Event Calendar :: Join us for a series of virtual workshops to help artists, arts workers, and creative entrepreneurs present your work online and connect with the audiences that resonate with what you do.

Trying to figure out how to maximize Instagram for your creative business? This looks like a good opportunity at a reasonable price ($25).

Instagram for Artists Creating authentic Instagram content can be a challenge–even a chore. In this workshop for visual artists, Robin Cembalest will review strategies for posts, Stories, Reels, hashtags, highlights, and for maximizing the power of that mysterious algorithm.

"Art is a form of devotion, and, like all acts of devotion, it is not functional or sensible. It is a kind of tending, a cultivation. It is medicine. It is both price-less and priceless: a poor fit with monetary value and beyond monetary value. What art making earns is best measured in invisible, invaluable currencies. Connection, awareness, reverence. Reinvention, possibility, truth telling."

artists keep going OK, y'all. Two things I'm doing these days: I talk to artists one-on-one, and lordy, it is damn moving and reassuring. The struggles, the devo...

"Do you use apps like PayPal, Venmo, or Square to accept freelance business payments? If so, you’ll need to pay close attention to the new tax reporting changes affecting these platforms that go into effect this month, especially if you do a significant amount of business through them."

What's new for freelancers in tax year 2022? Updates from the IRS on tax due dates and other changes for 2022.

Have tax questions about your arts business? Attend this free two-part webinar!

The Art of Taxes – Webinar, Part 1 Presented in partnership with Fresh Arts and Austin Music Foundation TALA’s popular annual seminar is back for 2022 with a two-part online webinarfeaturing TWO CPA’s. Join us for both nights to get the complete content. It’s important to be up to date with...

Have a legal issue or question? Talk to an attorney for free through TALA's Arts Legal Line, coming up 5:30-7:30pm February 1.

2022 Arts Legal Line | TALA Participants can call from anywhere in Texas between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. to get arts related questions answered by a TALA volunteer attorney.

"[Makers] are able to achieve stability on their own terms, if their lives aren’t disrupted.... For all the forces arrayed against them, it’s amazing how resilient artisans have been over the course of centuries, readily adapting to adverse circumstances."

Risky Business | American Craft Council In an unstable gig economy, does craft offer a remedy?

This is a great resource from CERF+, The Artists Safety Net, which helps artists recover from and prepare for disasters and emergencies of all kinds. The toolkit is designed primarily to help visual artists and craftspeople "protect the health and safety of themselves, their studios, and their art businesses" but performing artists will get a lot out of the material as well.

Studio Protector - CERF+ Studio Protector is our toolkit for artists looking to protect the health and safety of themselves, their studios, and their art businesses.

These and other classes offered by Springboard for the Arts are on Zoom, free, and AMAZING. Start your arts business strong this year by investing some time in learning.

Springboard is open! Join us this month for Work of Art’s J-Term Business Skills for Artists series, Art-Train Individual Artist Training, Small Business Law workshops for BIPOC and Native creatives and much more.

Explore this month’s offerings and sign up at https://springboardforthearts.org/events/

From Immersive Everything to the Rise of Museum Unions, These 7 Trends Defined the Art World in 2021—and Will Shape the Year to Come Ben Davis looks at the movements that defined 2021 in the art world, and how they may evolve in the year ahead.