09/24/2026
Today I’ve been named a LinkedIn Top Voice, selected by LinkedIn’s editorial team for my work in arts & culture. I’m kind of stunned.
I started posting here in 2021 because I wanted to test a few ideas. Could customer-centric frameworks from top business thinkers like Clayton Christensen, Bobby Moesta, and Mark Schaefer translate to the arts sector? What would that look like?
I started with “arts marketing ignores the customer” and kept digging.
Many of you have been on this ride with me as my research and writing took me through customer-centric marketing, the customer-centric value proposition, and the customer-centric business model.
Five years later, I’ve operationalized these ideas into an actual system: need-based segmentation, one-to-one personalization, and closed-loop impact measurement. A system that, in its first real-world pilot, resulted in 2.9x the buyer conversion rate of traditional arts marketing.
That would not have happened without all@of you following along.
Over the last five years, so many arts leaders have been willing to engage, to ask questions, to poke holes in arguments, and cheer me on. Writing forced me to get more precise about what it actually means to be a truly patron-centered arts organization.
And this year, all of this exploration became Cindr, a software platform that enables arts leaders to actually do the customer-centering work themselves, starting with the most crucial unit of value, the customer outcome.
What a wild ride!
