Summer’s here, and as the song says, the time is right for dancing in the streets. It’s also right for just about every other type of creative endeavour, and that’s because the arts-festival season is kicking into high gear. This summer, nonprofit organizations across Canada will be staging a wealth of festivals showcasing such diverse artistic disciplines as music, painting, crafts, theatre, cinema, comedy, photography, literature, magic, dance…even cooking.

This is the first of three articles in which we’ll look at some of the innovative ways festivals of different sizes reach out to the public and make their mark on the artistic landscape.

Luminato: Lighting up the arts in Toronto

Arts festivals in Canada receive millions of dollars in funding each year from all levels of government. Add to that often quite generous patronage from corporate sponsors and private donors, as well as festival revenues generated by ticket and merchandise sales, and we’re talking big business.

But beyond money, strategic partnerships with other cultural entities can be just as vital for festivals, and this year, one of the country’s biggest ones — Toronto’s Luminato — unveiled an unrivalled partnership with one of the world’s most prestigious cultural brands, The New Yorker magazine.

“To this point,” says Mike Forrester, Luminato’s vice-president of consumer and corporate relations, “The New Yorker has never engaged directly as a content provider to another organization.”

Luminato is a multidisciplinary extravaganza that takes place for ten days each June. It was founded in 2007 by Tony Gagliano, executive chairman and CEO of St. Joseph Communications, and the late David Pecaut, who was a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group. The festival stages 100 to 200 events (many of them free) at numerous venues across the city, drawing more than one million visitors annually and operating on a budget in the range of $10 – $12 million.

In its short life so far, Luminato has hosted dozens of Canadian and international celebrities such as Leonard Cohen, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Ann-Marie MacDonald. Highlights of this year’s festival (which runs June 10 – 19) include a massive motion-responsive architectural installation titled Sargasso, by Canadian architect Phillip Beesly; a theatrical reinterpretation of One Thousand and One Nights by British director Tim Supple and Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh; readings by novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Jeanette Winterson; and collaborative performances by the renowned San Francisco-based string ensemble, Kronos Quartet, and the Alim Qasimov Ensemble, performers of Azerbaijani sung poetry known as mugham.

The benefits of collaboration

Such talent is the stuff of dreams for most arts festivals, but the real gem in Luminato’s crown this year is the new literary partnership with The New Yorker. Founded in the 1920s, The New Yorker is a weekly publication renowned for its erudite and entertaining mix of reportage, fiction, poetry, criticism and clever cartoons. Its pages have been graced by works from such famous writers as E.B. White, Dorothy Parker, J.D. Salinger and John Updike.

“Through this New Yorker program, Luminato furthers its commitment to collaborating with extraordinary international partners,” said Janice Price, CEO of Luminato, in a statement released in April. Price, says Forrester, cemented the partnership late last year during a lunch meeting with New Yorker publisher, Lisa Hughes. The meeting was set up by advertising executive Bob Dodd, of Dodd Media, who represents The New Yorker‘s parent company, Condé Nast, in Canada.

“Bob Dodd approached us about doing some things in and around The New Yorker,” says Forrester. “He had some sense that there may be a deeper interest than what might normally be possible with respect to Luminato. It all came together fairly quickly and quite frankly, for a Canadian company and for a five-year-old festival, it’s a real coup.”

The partnership generated a program of four special events designed to loosely mesh with two of the festival’s main themes this year: the Arab world and storytelling. On June 12, New Yorker editor David Remnick will lead an international group of writers in a discussion entitled “Rewriting the Narrative of the Middle East.” Also on June 12, bestselling author and New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell will present a lecture entitled “Paradoxes of Innovation.” On June 13, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead will speak about her lifelong obsession with George Eliot‘s classic novel, Middlemarch, while Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker‘s fiction editor, will lead novelists Colm Tóibín, Chris Adrian and Allegra Goodman in a discussion examining the idea of sacred texts. The four New Yorker events expand Luminato’s literary line-up to 12 events, over last year’s nine.

Each fall, The New Yorker itself holds an eponymous arts festival in Manhattan, and Luminato’s curator of literary programming, Devyani Saltzman, says that the partnership with the magazine is meant to bring a taste of that festival to Toronto. “We’re building bridges,” she states. “Not only is Luminato reaping the benefit of The New Yorker brand, but the partnership leads to a co-creation of awareness in both organizations. And Luminato has something to offer as well. It’s a young festival, but it is becoming increasingly cutting-edge within the arts world and I think it’s great for New York audiences to know about that.”

There is no arrangement for a reciprocal scenario, where The New Yorker or its festival would draw on Luminato’s larger programming for content, but the Toronto festival received significant exposure in the magazine in the weeks prior to the festival, including a four-page insert the week of June 16 and a double-page ad the next. Online, promotion appeared on The New Yorker On the Town , a website run by the magazine to showcase its advertisers.

Financial sponsorship is key

Underwriting all of this, as well as the cost of bringing in the talent for the four events, is lead sponsor The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). Forrester would not divulge the amount of money RBC contributed, but he says their stake is sizeable. “It isn’t an inexpensive prospect, that’s for sure,” he states. “All you have to do is look at what national magazine ad rates in the US look like.”

According to their current media kit, a four-page insert in The New Yorker costs $179,416. Forrester says that, without the partnership with the magazine, supported by RBC’s sponsorship, such costly promotion would be out of reach for the festival. “Luminato is big,” he states, “but our advertising dollars are heavily leveraged.”

Regardless of the size of a festival, Saltzman says that strategic partnerships can create a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts — and it doesn’t always take deep pockets.

“We are achieving a lot on a budget you’d probably be surprised by,” she states, “so I really do feel fortunate for strategic partnerships, and I’m not just talking about The New Yorker, I’m talking about things like the public library. Whenever you can do things that are beneficial for two organizations, sharing the load and raising the profile of both, that always works nicely.”

Successful promotion requires a smart online strategy

The alliance with The New Yorker is being strongly promoted by Luminato in its advertising campaign, as well as on the Internet. Forrester says that the magazine did not place any expectations on Luminato beyond the regular promotion stream. Both Saltzman and Forrester state that social media has become essential for cross-promoting any events generated by such partnerships, especially if a massive traditional media platform like The New Yorker is not in the equation.

“If you’re really smart in how you use social media and the Internet, you can almost level the playing field,” says Forrester. “A lot of it is just focusing time and attention on how to deal with online strategies, search engine marketing, click through rates, and using great care with bloggers and outlets like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. You can leverage a lot of energy if you’re really focused. For smaller festivals that don’t have a lot of dollars to spend, concentrating in that area is a wise thing.”

Luminato maintains a fairly robust website, which they archive online each year. It is linked to a ticketing system as well as to all of the festival’s social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and a dedicated YouTube channel. With the exception of the ticketing system, which Forrester says can be quite expensive to maintain, even the smallest festival can establish a similar presence on the web at relatively low cost. And if two organizations are working at it together, they’ll reach that many more people.

But Forrester adds one caution: when promoting your festival via social media, clarity is vital.

“Be really, really clear about what your message is,” he states. “What are you about? Who do you serve? What do you do? What is your purpose?”

Regardless of any strategic partnerships, without such focus, any arts festival — large or small — can get lost in the cyber crowd online.

Shaun Smith is a journalist and novelist in Toronto. He was co-founder of the literary event series This Is Not A Reading Series, and he has written extensively about books and the publishing industry for such publications as The Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, The Globe & Mail and CBC.ca. His YA novel Snakes & Ladders was published by the Dundurn Group in 2009.

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