The Art of Relevance

If you work with groups of people at all (audiences, customers, communities, whatever) you should read this book.Nina Simon does a fantastic job of talking about how people relate to each other and find meaning with clear, strong arguments. It's very tempting, when writing about deep cultural or aesthetic experiences, to overdo it, or to get sloppy with your terms, your thinking, or your argument. Many people writing about this stuff end up declaring that their way is the solution to all of your problems.This book talks about tricky, elusive, powerful experiences that change lives. But it does it without overstepping the impact that a museum, or any organization you happen to work at, can actually have.Also the stories are great and the examples concrete. You can learn a lot of useful things on your own terms just from the anecdotes included to illustrate the author's points.If I were teaching marketing, this is the textbook I would use.

This is a must-read for anyone working with and within communities. Many people working in organizations that aim to serve communities of any and all types struggle to engage those very communities in deep, meaningful, mutually-beneficial, and long-lasting ways. In "The Art of Relevance", Nina Simon doesn't just tell us how to do this, she shows us. She makes incredibly important points and offers them to the reader in tasty, digestible morsels peppered with intriguing real life examples. This book is an enjoyable page turner that you can't wait to get through and yet want to savor. Nina makes what many find challenging and even impossible to do, possible. She breaks down our own barriers so that we, and our organizations, may become (more) relevant.

I am not sure that there was anything that I did not like about the book. It was recommended to me by a marketing professional. However, I found that the information in this book was relevant to me with the many hats that I wear. I found meaning not only as a professional, but also as a mother, wife and member of multiple communities. Reading this book was a great experience.

Imagine an engineer turned Executive Director of a museum. A great read and observation of what is and what becomes relevant to people and how we connect to the things we do. Given the desire for companies to connect with consumers and the need for people to remember how to connect with one another, The Art of Relevance was eye opening, interesting and a great read from a holistic, human, art, culture and overall perspective. The opening story of historical surfboards and their surprising relevance to Santa Cruz hooked me.

When trying to fit the round peg of an arts organization into the square hole of the Twenty-First century's attitudes towards classical entertainment, Nina Simon hits a home run. I don't use these cliches lightly; Simon demonstrates how to take an existing medium and reshape it to fit a community's busy entertainment palette without altering the original product. Whether you call it spin, presentation, finding your niche market or simply making your product more approachable, The Art of Relevance is a good guide.

This book provided the perspective so many of us need to look beyond ourselves to find creative and impactful ways to engage our current and future stakeholders.

This book is excellent and a fantastic tool for an organization to use as a starting point for very important conversations.

The Art of Relevance provides compelling and practical examples of how organizations can begin to shift their thinking on "outreach". Meeting communities where they are and determining where interests connect offers the more equitable invitation to participate and to build a relationship. Easy read that I was able to finish on a coast to coast plane ride. Already passed along to everyone in my organization.

Following on from 'The Participatory Museum', I knew I would enjoy Nina's writing style. Her succinct explanations, richly layered with examples, analogies and personal anecdotes that demonstrate her points exactly, make the content very easy to digest. I read it from cover to cover in just a couple of hours and will definitely be referring back to it.Nina's points are about humans and human-to-institution interactions and therefore can be applied to many situations. In my opinion this book would be useful to anyone in curatorial/comms/marketing/design/cultural roles.

Our exhibition strategy has been changed to take on board some of Ms Simon's issues and suggested courses of actions. While the book is strongly focused on institutions, it is relevant to organisations without premises. It helped give different perspectives to drafting fund raising approaches

An interesting read for anyone interested in audience engagement.