Ruth Hartt, Founder of Cindr

Monica Holt: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Monica Holt. “Arts and culture organizations aren’t failing. Their business models are.” At least, that’s what Ruth Hartt believes, and she has the receipts to prove it. Ruth is a strategist who came up through opera and has spent the last several years applying demand-side economics to the art sector’s key problem: relevance. She’s not asking organizations to dumb down the art. She’s asking them to wise up about why people need it, and that might require a whole new vocabulary around value. Our conversation is about what changes when you stop marketing your art and start speaking to the human needs that people bring through your door in the first place. I hope today will challenge you to think differently about conversations you might be having on audience development and what your organization’s value proposition really is. Let’s get into it.

Ruth Hartt, welcome to CI to Eye. Thank you so much for joining us today. I could not be more excited to finally be talking with you.

Ruth Hartt: Thank you, Monica. I have been looking forward to this all week.

Monica Holt: Same here. I remain and have been such a fan of your work, and the provocations that you put out to the field are so useful, both in the expert context that you lend to them, but also just in helping make sure that the field is thinking beyond what has been and into what could be.

Ruth Hartt: Thank you. That means a lot.

Monica Holt: Well, we will get more into that, but I’d love to go back to the beginning and get started with you telling us a little bit about what brought you to music and the arts. I know you grew up in a big musical family in rural Maine. Can you talk a little bit about what music felt like in your home when you were growing up?

Ruth Hartt: This is such a fun journey down memory lane. I started my musical journey on a little toy piano at the age of five. And my parents pretty quickly realized that I was serious, and so they bought me a real piano and enrolled me in piano lessons.

Monica Holt: Amazing.

Ruth Hartt: And I remember walking through the woods to the home of the local piano teacher who lived on the street next door. I also remember having to fight my way past the guard ducks that she kept in her yard.

Monica Holt: Wait, guard… ducks? Like, quack quack?

Ruth Hartt: Yes, ducks. And at five years old, that was a little terrifying, but I suppose at least they weren’t moose, right?

Monica Holt: Very fair.

Ruth Hartt: But playing an instrument was kind of a given in my family. So after school, you could walk into the house and you would hear my brother practicing violin in the basement and my sister on the flute in the kitchen, my older sister playing French horn in her bedroom. And then there was I playing piano in the living rooms.

Monica Holt: This is my kind of reality show.

Ruth Hartt: Yeah, really.

Monica Holt: Yeah.

Ruth Hartt: Yeah. And my older siblings, I was remembering, they would often bribe me to accompany them during their practice sessions. And they also brought me along to play for them at adjudicated festivals up and down the coast of Maine. So I was very well versed in Mozart horn concertos and Chaminade flute concertinas. So it was quite a musical upbringing.

Monica Holt: I have to ask, did you all ever come together and play one piece or do a living room concert?

Ruth Hartt: Of course. Of course. Especially at Christmastime because our extended family was also very musical, so we had sort of a little mini orchestra. We did that a lot.

Monica Holt: That is delightful. Tell me a little bit about then from that very musical upbringing, how that led you to opera and your more formal musical training that sprung from that.

Ruth Hartt: It started with choral music. My first real choral experience was in the All State Chorus as a high schooler. And somehow way up in the Pine Tree State, we were lucky enough to sing under some of the most incredible conductors in the country, like Eph Ely and André Thomas and Rodney Eichenberger. And so what I experienced in that environment was really life changing for me, what they created, not only in the way that they held the room, but the perfect blend of voices and that collective pursuit of perfection, that collective creation of beauty. I think that was really the time that I understood what music making could do. And it really just electrified me as a high schooler. And I think I’ve spent the last couple of decades chasing that feeling.

Monica Holt: So then from there, you get that first taste of what that feels like to be participating in that way and using your voice. So then from there to opera.

Ruth Hartt: Yeah. So I kept up with my piano all the way through undergraduate, but I was devoted to vocal music. So it was choral first and then art song and then opera. My first time seeing an opera live was when I was studying abroad in London and my flatmates for my birthday took me to see Mozart’s Così fan tutte at Covent Garden. And that was it.

Monica Holt: You were done.

Ruth Hartt: I was done. That was what I wanted to do. And for me, it just seemed to be the absolute pinnacle. The combination of foreign language and acting and vocal technique and ensemble. It was just something I could immerse myself in and it just was magical.

Monica Holt: So then as you learn that and you start to go into performance training, what are some of the things that you recollect about that time or maybe skills that you learned then that you’re still thinking about and using today?

Ruth Hartt: Yeah. I actually, so I got my undergraduate degree in music education. That was a requirement of my parents because it was the practical route.

Monica Holt: Sure. Because you could teach if you could not perform. Yep.

Ruth Hartt: Exactly. But later it became quite clear that I just could not shake the performing bug. So I got my master’s degree in vocal performance at Boston University and I did what most artists do. You cobble together a career in music. I did everything from running an independent voice studio to conducting choral ensembles, directing musical theater, and then of course performing as a concert soloist on the opera stage. I joined the Young Artists Program with Opera Maine and then also did the Gerdine Young Artist Program at Opera Theater of St. Louis. So for quite a stretch of time, this was my life. The stage was where I lived. But when it comes to training, what I always go back to, what was hammered into me is that it was crucial to understand the character’s deepest motivations, to understand their relationship with every other character on the stage and the emotional context of each scene because without that connection, you’re just standing there making beautiful sounds in a costume.

Monica Holt: Well said.

Ruth Hartt: The concept that my teachers always came back to was this idea of specificity. So every gesture and every facial expression, every inhale, every angle of your body had to mean something specific and a vague gesture wasn’t just wasted effort, it was actually going to make the audience lose interest.

And one of my least favorite classes that I had to take in graduate school was improv for the opera singer. Our improv teacher had us doing over and over the most ridiculous things, like miming, cooking a batch of cookies, and she would call us out whenever she saw a gesture that wasn’t specific. And it seemed so irrelevant to my work as an opera singer, but I remember when it all clicked for me and I realized why we had to do that. I was playing the role of Juliet in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, and I was singing alone on stage, looking out at a full house. And I had this incredible feeling of being intimately connected to every person there. And it was because of how much specificity I had brought to the stage. And I have just never forgotten that feeling. It was this idea that connection isn’t accidental and every choice I had made inspired something in the audience and I knew it because I could feel it in the energy coming back at me from the house.

So that was the big idea that I took with me from all of that training.

Monica Holt: The puzzle pieces start to fall into place as we learn a little bit about how everyone got where they are. You made a pretty significant shift then from performing into teaching and business innovation. What was happening at your life that drove you to make that choice?

Ruth Hartt: So honestly, the transition was not at all strategic, specifically into business innovation. I had just started a family, and a career built around evenings and weekends just wasn’t going to be sustainable, so I needed something different. And I came across a job posting for the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, which was a think tank founded by Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen. And I was not familiar with his work at the time, but I read through their website and something sparked for me. I’ve always been someone who needs to understand why things work the way they do and also why things don’t work. And I’ve always needed to know, why was this designed this way? And the bigger question, could it be better? And that is exactly what the institute studies. So they look at why organizations succeed and fail at the system level and also what it is that drives customer behavior and not at the surface, but deep down at the causal level. So right away, I was intrigued.

Monica Holt: And Clayton Christensen is famous for his Jobs To Be Done theory. Can you share a little bit about what that is and when you first encountered that framework, what clicked?

Ruth Hartt: Yeah. I read his book, Competing Against Luck, which is his seminal book on Jobs To Be Done theory. And it’s all about understanding what the customer is struggling with, what they’re trying to accomplish so that you can then speak with specificity and build connection with the audience. And that was where I was hit with this feeling of, oh, this feels very familiar. This is the same thing I was doing on stage. This is the very insight that my acting teachers had been drilling into me just now in a completely different arena. So that was really electrifying for me. In the business sector, this is called demand-side thinking. And if you want to sell something, you have to start by understanding the customer’s needs and struggles. That’s how you get them to care. And it’s all about shifting the focus from what you make, which is your product, to the outcome that your product makes possible because what drives consumer behavior is that need, right?

It’s their search for a specific outcome. So then as I looked out at the art sector and how arts organizations were communicating, I could very clearly see the same problem across the sector. We have this extraordinary product, but we’re using very vague gestures when it comes to marketing and not a lot of specificity.

Monica Holt: That’s right. And so as you put those pieces together and you’re like, oh, I think there’s something here that I could be helpful in translating, let’s say, to arts organizations and seeing what the problem was, at what point did you decide you were going to be a person who brought that to the art sector and that you were going to look at businesses from that lens?

Ruth Hartt: You know what? It was COVID. Yeah. It was when COVID hit. I started hearing from my opera singer friends about the thousands of dollars they were losing in their canceled gigs. And I started watching arts organizations shut their doors and I started seeing real fear about whether the sector would survive. And so I started digging in a little bit more. I started digging into audience trends and not just the pandemic trends, but what was happening in the 40 years before COVID actually showed up. Because I wanted to understand how this marketing disconnect was playing out. And so I thought, “You know what? I have tools that could help with this. I have frameworks that could actually address this structural problem and I can’t not share it.” So that’s when I started my blog.

Monica Holt: Can you talk a little bit about those first steps and the responses you got when you started sharing some of these ideas more broadly?

Ruth Hartt: Yeah. I mean, for me, it was just the sense of, there’s something here that needs to be explored. And so I’m going to buy this domain for my blog and started posting on LinkedIn. And on a personal note, it was a really incredible way to get back into the arts, which I had left behind for a number of years. And so it was that reconnecting to folks in that space, but also bringing these ideas to the sector. And it definitely felt like people were very hungry for a different lens, a different way to look at what was happening, and it just grew from there.

Monica Holt: That’s right. And I mean, now you’re working with arts and cultural organizations across the globe. From my perspective, I see your work is centering on understanding why people might come to our venues, what that value proposition is. Can you share a little bit about, in your research, what you have learned about what audiences are seeking?

Ruth Hartt: Yes. And this is where the Jobs To Be Done approach really flips audience research. The right question from the perspective of demand-side thinking is not ‘Why do you come to the opera?’ or even ‘What do you walk away with when you attend?’ but ‘What do you need in your life right now?’ And it’s very a product-agnostic question because this is where you push aside all of the answers you might get about the product and you get down to the causal mechanism — I’m using Christensen language here — the tangible need that drives the customer’s behavior. And once you know that, once you know about their need, you can start to craft more specific messaging that resonates on a much deeper level. So where I usually start is at the macro level, looking at what is national consumer research saying right now about what consumers are struggling with.

And then I look at all of the latest research on arts outcomes and find where that intersection is between what the arts can provide and what consumers right now today are seeking. So it’s really all about honing in on the real needs that people are already telling researchers that they have, that the arts are already uniquely positioned to meet. I think you were curious about what it is that audiences are seeking. I’ve got about eight specific segments that I work with, but there are three that really rise to the top. Those are stress relief and social connection and digital detox.

Monica Holt: That all sounds spot on to anecdotal. So I’m glad to see some actual strength behind the data too.

Ruth Hartt: Yeah. And these segments, they work not only for patrons, but for people who have never walked through your door because you’re not asking them about their arts experience or their arts knowledge. You’re asking about their human needs and everybody has those.

Monica Holt: That’s right. Well, and it’s interesting to hear you talk about these types of segments because I think you make a strong case in that from moving beyond demographic segmentation. Can you talk a little bit about what might feel limiting about the way the arts world traditionally segments their audiences?

Ruth Hartt: Yeah, this is the simplest way that I like to explain it. Let’s say you have two women in your database. They’re both 40 years old. They have roughly the same income. They live in the same zip code and they both previously bought tickets for the same show. Your database is saying they’re identical, but they’re not. One comes for a night of fun with friends and the other comes to disconnect from daily stress and your CRM has no way of knowing the difference. So that kind of data describes who someone is. It doesn’t tell you why they came or how to get them to come back. And in fact, it often leads us to make assumptions based on someone’s age or income or zip code or based on what they’ve purchased in the past, which is a dangerous path to go down. So I think what’s missing with those approaches is the upstream intelligence, the intelligence that lets you meet the patron where they are right now.

And then if you want to pull in the demographics and the transactional segmentation, it just makes it richer.

Monica Holt: So how do you get to having information on someone who might be coming as stress relief versus someone who’s coming for a night out with friends?

Ruth Hartt: You ask. Yeah. It’s really all about finding the right way to ask. And zero party data is the new phrase in town. Zero party data is when you deliberately ask a question and the patron voluntarily responds and gives you information about their life or about themself or about their needs. And so it really is just asking, what do you need right now? And providing researched options for them to choose from. And it’s simple. And I think it’s also a little scary because it feels personal. It feels a little bit scary to ask something that personal that isn’t necessarily related to art, but it’s amazing how consumers these days really want to be seen and are eager to share that kind of information.

Monica Holt: Very well said. When you were thinking about all of this, how did you land on personalization specifically as the growth lever that you wanted to look at?

Ruth Hartt: Yeah. Well, when you know someone’s need, it changes everything downstream, right? It enables what I like to call one-to-one relevance. It becomes the foundation for personalized emails and personalized landing pages and tracking outcomes post-event, identifying donors and things like that. So it changes how you ask and how you message things, but the catch is that personalization is hard to do well when all you have is demographics and transactions.

There’s a stat out there that says something like nearly half of consumers say that kind of personalization feels creepy, and that’s the word they used. And it’s not because they don’t want to be known and understood, but it’s because being targeted based on your age or your zip code doesn’t feel authentic. It feels like you’re being profiled. So the question I kept asking was, what kind of data would actually make personalization feel helpful rather than invasive? And it comes back to asking what they need.

Monica Holt: Yeah. When we say it like this, I know it sounds so simple and it feels that way. And yet we know that organizations, to embark on this type of journey, will have to make changes to how they’re currently looking at things, changes maybe to their own infrastructure. One thing I really appreciate is that you are asking arts organizations to rethink some very long held traditions. On LinkedIn, sometimes you’ll start with a very provocative sentence and even I will think, “What on earth? What does that mean?” And yet it is always in service of a purpose. I’m curious where you have seen the most resistance to some of the ideas that you are provoking or teaching about at this point in time.

Ruth Hartt: I would probably need to go back to business models and talk about that a little bit, because my journey from “arts marketing is bad” to “we actually need to completely shift the business model” took time. And so I understand that it’s going to take other people time, too. But I think what it all really boils down to is what the marketing is built on and every organization is built on a business model. This is the system that determines how you are creating value for the people you serve and also how you are sustaining yourself in the process. And the foundation of that business model is what’s called the value proposition. And internally, it serves as your organization’s north star. So it guides your entire strategy and it aligns your team around a specific purpose. Externally, the value proposition is meant to ensure your relevance by tying what you do to what consumers need.

So it’s how audiences understand why you matter in their world. It really answers the question, why should I care? So for most traditional arts organizations, the value proposition has long been some version of, “Well, you should care because we make excellent art.” And that worked until the digital revolution and the demographic shifts that we’re seeing really changed how consumers seek out value and how they define value.

So when a value proposition is not aligned with the world that it lives in and the people that it serves, everything built on top of it, for example, your marketing, your programming, your fundraising, is fighting an uphill battle. And so really for me, the work is not to change the art and that probably is the biggest resistance that I’ve come up against. People are saying, “Wait, you’re telling us we have to shift the focus from the art to the customer. You’re telling us we have to dumb down the art.” And I am saying, “Not at all.” In fact, artistic excellence is key to ensuring that the outcomes we’re promising actually do take place. So it’s not about changing the art. It’s about changing how the value of the art is understood and communicated in the context of people’s lives today in 2026 because people don’t make decisions based on what you make or your product.

They’re making decisions based on what it makes possible for them. So yeah, I would say definitely that resistance of shift in focus or the turning of the lens onto the customer is something that people feel uncomfortable with. There’s all of these different barriers that people bring up. Well, what about awareness and representation and access, right? But you can know about something and you can have access to it and you can even see yourself reflected in it and still feel like it’s not for you.

And so what I’m saying is we need to find a way to communicate that value. And I think if you start with relevance, that really determines whether any of those other strategies actually work.

Monica Holt: I think that’s well put. One thing you said recently, discussing some current events around an arts organization, is, “An endowment buys time. It doesn’t buy relevance.” And man, if we could stitch that onto a pillow and sell it on Etsy, I think there would be a dime a dozen for the number of arts administrators who that would resonate with. Can you talk to me on that just a little bit about how you got to that — I think it’s such a succinct, important phrase — and what you mean by that specifically.

Ruth Hartt: Yeah. I think when your financial situation is not dire, when you’ve got the cash you need to fill the holes, you don’t have the urgency to look at what isn’t working and to start to think about what needs to shift.

Monica Holt: Yeah.

Ruth Hartt: You’re sort of protected from change that is actually quite crucial. And across all the other sectors, business leaders have been through that with the digital revolution and they know what it looks like when the world changes and the model doesn’t change. And so I think for arts organizations, it does come down to that idea that, when is the moment where we decide, even if we are kind of doing okay right now, what are we going to do to protect the future of the organization?

Monica Holt: Right. Yeah. And relevance is that key. I’m curious how measuring things like relevance and impact changes the way organizations think about success.

Ruth Hartt: Yes. And measuring specifically how much people were impacted, not just impact itself, is what I think is really crucial. This is really all about closing the loop between the customer need and the customer outcome. Did they actually experience what they came for? Because someone can say on a post-event survey, they were very satisfied or they felt really good afterwards, but without the measurement, the before and after comparison, you don’t have data that can actually guide decisions. You don’t know who experienced the greatest transformation, who walked in feeling really low on connection and walked out feeling really high on connection. You don’t know what aggregate impact you deliver to your community. And so what happens is you end up soliciting donations with a mass appeal instead of being able to make a targeted ask around the impact that someone self-reported. And then when your grant season arrives, you’re using anecdotes instead of evidence.

So measuring that change that happens really shifts the conversation from “How many people came?” to “What did we do for them?” And that shift, it matters enormously when you’re sitting in front of a funder or a board or you’re writing a grant. And it also is incredibly valuable for marketing when it comes to social proof to be able to literally say, our patrons report that they walked away feeling 25% more connected. We served 10,000 patrons is a fairly weak argument for investment, but we reduced stress levels by 25% in our community this season, as reported by our patrons… That’s a completely different conversation.

Monica Holt: I mean, how compelling. And the avenues that saying that opens for conversation, for further collaboration, it’s really night and day from, as you say, the 10,000 people served.

Ruth Hartt: Yes. And I think this is where the arts stop being a luxury and start being a public health resource.

Monica Holt: Back to our choir model. We’re singing from the same songbook on that one, so I appreciate that. Would you mind sharing just a favorite kind of case study or example of this?

Ruth Hartt: The case study that I am most excited about right now is the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts. They are an incredible organization. They have always been very focused on community and connection, and they have so many incredible things happening there in terms of programming and outreach and pre-concert activities. But they started piloting this entire framework in January of this year. So the need-based segmentation, the zero party data collection, the personalized email sequences, measuring outcomes post-event. And the results are really exciting. They have 6% of their patron list now segmented by need, and that continues to grow. And while they’re promoting the same exact concert and sending emails at the same time, now they’ve got this different group getting something totally different. So instead of getting the standard broadcast emails, they’re getting emails that are personalized to reflect their self-stated need. And then they’re getting sent to landing pages that do the same.

So anyone who said, “My primary need right now in my life is stress relief.” All of the messaging, all of the subject lines are pointing towards that struggle, and then sending them to the concert landing page as the solution. It’s not demographic or behavioral personalization. We’re not even using first names because like many arts organizations, those are sometimes not in the CRM. Also, really importantly, the group that is segmented by need, it excludes high propensity engagers. So we’re excluding current subscribers and ticket holders. So it’s not just very engaged, established patrons.

Monica Holt: That feels important to really call out here.

Ruth Hartt: Yes. This group actually has more new and early stage patrons percentage-wise than the broadcast group. So what we’re doing here is we’re doing a test. We’re doing a mini pilot to say, “Okay, all of the data points to this being a really good place to invest our time and resources. Is it actually going to play out that way?” What we’re seeing 12 weeks in is that these personalized emails are outperforming on every metric. Open rates are 133% higher and click rates are 264% higher and ticket purchases are 1.8 times higher among these need-segmented patrons. That is only across two concert cycles so far. So all of this is early, but very directionally exciting.

Monica Holt: Very directionally exciting. Yes.

Ruth Hartt: Absolutely. And one of the most exciting things that we have seen is their March concert. So their music director had programmed a Dorman percussion concerto and a Charles Ives symphony. And these are not typical fan favorites, high ticket-selling types of repertoires. So as you can imagine, ticket sales were not doing very well. But what they discovered when the final sales report came in was that ticket purchases for the need-segmented patrons for this particular concert were 3.2 times higher than the broadcast group. So that really underscored for me how much that barrier of repertoire that we’re always talking about appears to dissolve when you start to speak to the needs that drive patron behavior.

Monica Holt: This is very exciting. I can’t wait to hear more as you continue this work. It’s interesting because all of this has really laid the groundwork for your newest venture, Cindr. Do you want to share some details about that platform?

Ruth Hartt: Yes. So everything that we have talked about today is operationalized in a platform that I have built called Cindr. And Cindr is a customer intelligence platform that is built specifically for arts organizations. It runs on this zero party data that we’ve been talking about, the needs that patrons tell you directly. And then it uses that data to power personalized communications and outcome measurement and donor identification. I built it because I wanted to enable arts organizations to test this need-based segmentation and to gather the data that they need to be able to tell their board, we need to shift because look what’s happening when we start to really speak to customer needs and it enables you to gradually rebuild your business model around this new value proposition.

Monica Holt: Yeah.

Ruth Hartt: It’s very exciting. It’s currently in limited pilot phase, but if folks are intrigued and want to learn more —

Monica Holt: I think they will be.

Ruth Hartt: They can go to cinder.co, C-I-N-D-R.co, and read more or schedule a demo.

Monica Holt: All of this is so exciting. If there was one first small shift that an organization could make, if this way of thinking is intriguing them, but also feeling overwhelming, what would you recommend?

Ruth Hartt: I absolutely get that it’s overwhelming. Here’s what I say. You don’t have to replace anything at first. You just have to test it. Run a small pilot, see whether patrons want to share their needs and then start to test this need-based segmentation and see what changes. And the data is going to be your strongest proof if and when a larger shift should be made.

Monica Holt: As you’re thinking about all of this, where are you hoping that the arts and culture field will be headed in the next five to 10 years?

Ruth Hartt: In five to 10 years, I would like to live in a world where the arts are the obvious choice.

Monica Holt: Ooh, I like that.

Ruth Hartt: So not the elite choice, right? The obvious choice. When you are stressed, when you are lonely, when your community is disconnected, when AI makes everything feel manufactured, you know for sure that the arts are going to help. And we just need to build the systems to make that obvious. And that’s really what drives me.

Monica Holt: I think that is something all of us should take to heart, and [it’s] a dream that I hope we see realized even sooner than the next decade.

Ruth Hartt: Agreed.

Monica Holt: Ruth, this has been wonderful and informative and I hope instructive for folks. We have reached our quickfire culture section, which is how we love to end every episode. So to start with, what is one piece of culture — and that’s a TV show, a book, a TikTok trend, whatever it might be — that you are currently obsessed with?

Ruth Hartt: Okay. This is such a difficult question to answer.

Monica Holt: I know, but that’s why it’s fun, right?

Ruth Hartt: Because I am obsessed with so many different pieces of culture. I think what I would land on today in this conversation is that I am still very obsessed with the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show.

Monica Holt: Cosign.

Ruth Hartt: Yeah.

Monica Holt: What celebration. What a moment we all needed to have together.

Ruth Hartt: Yes. And I expected the usual spectacle, but I was totally transfixed by what I can only describe as ministry.

Monica Holt: Yes.

Ruth Hartt: And I’m going to come back to that word specificity again. Every gesture, every transition, every prop was chosen with extreme intentionality. And that was so powerful. And I saw a celebration of cultures that have been under siege and it was a celebration through specificity. With every element, there was a message that was being sent to those cultures, and that message I think was, “You are not invisible. You are not small and your ordinary life is sacred.” Talk about an artist who is centering the people that he serves.

Monica Holt: A beautiful reminder. Is there a free resource in any field that you think everyone should be availing themselves of?

Ruth Hartt: Well, I think the best resources that I have encountered in my life are the ones that really close the gap between understanding something and actually being able to act on it. So I’m going to plug my recent webinar.

Monica Holt: Great.

Ruth Hartt: It walks you through this entire infrastructure that I have been talking about, that I’ve been piloting with the New Bedford Symphony — so everything we’ve been talking about today — out in detail.

Monica Holt: And I want to say I fully support this. We will also link to it in the notes for the podcast as well if people want quick access because I think it’s really quite helpful.

Ruth Hartt: Perfect.

Monica Holt: Of course. And finally, if you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leadership teams, staff, boards and artists, thousands of arts organizations, what would that message be today?

Ruth Hartt: I would say loneliness is an epidemic right now. Healthcare is in crisis. Society is fractured, and this is our moment.

Monica Holt: Yes.

Ruth Hartt: We have the tools to meet this moment. So center the people you serve, meet them where they are, because I think our sector’s future and society’s healing are really the same mission.

Monica Holt: Excellent. Thank you, Ruth. What an absolute pleasure to spend some time together. Thank you for all you are doing for the field and for all that you shared today. And I cannot wait to see how your impulses continue to have ripple effects throughout the industry over the next many, many years.

Ruth Hartt: Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

Monica Holt: Thank you for listening to CI to Eye. If you enjoy today’s conversation, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover the show. And if you haven’t already, click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve got some great episodes coming your way and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. A huge thanks to our team behind the scenes, including Karen McConarty, Yeaye Stemn, Stephanie Medina, Jess Berube, and Rachel Purcell Fountain. Our music is by whoisuzo. Don’t forget to follow Capacity on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for Capacity’s newsletter at capacityinteractive.com. And I hope you’ll reach out to us to let us know who you’d like to hear from next on CI to Eye. I’m Monica Holt. Thanks for listening.