Flipping the Script: Approaching Businesses with Opportunity Instead of an Ask

Recorded On: 12/09/2020

Overview
Speaker(s)

About this Webinar

Arts organizations often come to businesses with their hand out asking for funding support instead of approaching them with mutually-beneficial opportunity. In a COVID-19 world when all are feeling pressure, creating a partnership around shared purpose is even more critical than before. In this discussion, explore how you can “flip the script” and meet prospective business partners where they are by speaking in their language, about their interests. Learn how to help your corporate colleagues think about the arts as a way to meet their business goals, not just a place for charity.

Learning Objectives:

Learn how to be more effective at engaging the corporate sector in your communities.
Learn about tools and best practice examples that spotlight exemplary innovative arts and business partnerships.
Explore how to adjust a pitch or ask into an approach focused around reciprocal benefit, partnership, innovation and their business goals.

Mark Nerenhausen

President/CEO

Hennepin Theatre Trust

Mark Nerenhausen is the President/CEO of Hennepin Theatre Trust. Prior to the Trust, he served as founding director and professor of practice of the Janklow Arts Leadership Program at Syracuse University. Before that, he served as president and CEO of the $354 million AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, where he secured AT&T as a naming sponsor, raised more than $4 million in the first year of operations, created a governing board and instituted an integrated business information platform. He also brokered strategic partnerships with regional and national organizations, several of which were devoted to minority arts, and initiated the Jazz Roots series.

From 1998 to 2009, Nerenhausen led the Performing Arts Center Authority in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with responsibility for managing the multi-venue Broward Center for the Performing Arts and five other performing arts venues, fashioning it into a catalyst for tourism, economic development, education, industry innovations and cross-cultural exchange. Under Nerenhausen’s tenure, the Broward Center’s main concert hall consistently ranked in the world’s top 10 venues for ticket sales, according to Pollstar and Venues Today magazines.

Nerenhausen has held other major positions at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center in Kahului, Hawaii (1993-98); the Oshkosh Grand Opera House in Wisconsin (1990-93); the Bijou Theater Center in Knoxville, Tenn. (1987-89); the Milwaukee Performing Arts Center in Wisconsin (1985-87); and the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville (1983-85).