Who’s reading TRUST now?

by Jini Stolk

I’ll end the year by sending grateful thanks to all of you who’ve told me that you read, enjoy, and learn from the Toronto Arts Foundation Creative Trust blog. It makes me happy, encourages me to keep on writing, and often gives me ideas for new posts.

If you think your board members would also benefit from the latest professional research and sector overview in the newsletter please ask them to sign up, or send me their contact info and I will add them to our list. They’d be in good company.

As I was saying to a friend last night (thereby surprising the hell out of her), I’ve been studying our Google analytics and am amazed at the growth and breadth of our readership. Here are a few of the highlights:

The newsletter is now mailed out to almost 2,000 individuals approximately twice a month. An average of a third of our readers each month click through to the Creative Trust website to read our blog more closely. 50% of our visitors live in Toronto, followed by London, and then Montreal. 77% are from Canada – but this also means that 23% are from across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. People who read the blog frequently click on the outgoing links, reading and learning from the wide variety of expert voices and opinions I link to in the posts.

Surprisingly, we get a high percentage of new visitors to the website each month. Our new visitors tend to be curious about our work, and look at the “About” page first. But our most-viewed web page is “Resources”, where people are finding information on a wide range of topics including Boards and Governance, Arts Education, and Fundraising. Our visitors are also looking at and using our new Tool Kits: this couldn’t please me more.

The goal of the Creative Trust Research Fellowship at the Toronto Arts Foundation is to share resources and learnings from the Working Capital for the Arts program and beyond – providing artists, arts managers and board members with up-to-date and useful information on how to do their work better.

It’s a gift to be able to continue doing this work.