You put a lot of work into your programming and your events, and the people who would genuinely want to be there should actually know about them. We build the communications tools that make sure your announcements reach the right people, reliably, without someone on your team having to chase it every time.
If your website doesn't really reflect what your organization is doing right now, or if it's become something that only one person knows how to update, that's worth fixing. We rebuild sites so they actually represent your work properly and so your team can keep them current without needing to call a developer.
Content direction: site redesign/rebuild, migration from legacy platforms, ongoing maintenance, bilingual support.
Simplify
Most cultural organizations have small teams and the communications work just keeps expanding. We build tools and automations that handle the repetitive parts, so your staff can spend their time on the things that actually require their judgment and expertise, like programming and community relationships.
Content direction: automation, admin dashboards, reducing manual processes, tools built for non-technical teams.
M
Who does this
Motikon is run by a working artist who has been exhibiting, organizing, and building things for arts organizations for a long time, not as a service provider but as someone who has dealt with the same challenges you're dealing with.
I understand what it's like to work with a small team and a limited budget and still want your public-facing communications to look as good as the work you're presenting. That's really what Motikon is about: building the infrastructure that lets organizations like yours focus on their actual mission while the communications side runs properly in the background.
Start
If any of this sounds like what you're dealing with, I'd be happy to talk it through. I'm not going to send you a proposal template or a capabilities deck. I'd rather just hear what's going on with your organization and see if there's something I can actually help with.
Set in Sora & Source Serif 4
Reach
How it works
Email that goes out without someone having to remember to send it.
We set up email systems that handle the things that should be automated: event announcements, exhibition reminders, registration confirmations, newsletter digests. The kind of communications that need to happen on schedule and shouldn't depend on one person remembering to press send on a busy week.
One clean list, organized so different groups hear the right things.
A lot of organizations end up with messy contact lists that have grown organically over the years. We help sort that out so you have one well-managed audience with sensible groups: members, donors, artists, press, general public. Each group gets the messages that are relevant to them, at a frequency that makes sense.
In practice
We worked with an arts organization that needed their quarterly exhibition announcements, monthly newsletter, and annual fundraising campaign to reach three fairly different audiences. We set up a single system that handles all of it, runs on schedule, and takes their coordinator about 20 minutes per send to review and approve.
Simple reporting that actually tells you something useful.
You should be able to see whether your messages are landing without having to interpret a wall of analytics. We set up straightforward reporting that shows you opens, clicks, and list growth, and what those numbers actually mean for your organization.
Fix
How it works
A website that actually represents what your organization is doing right now.
A lot of cultural organizations end up with websites that were built a few years ago by someone who has since moved on, and the site has gradually drifted away from what the organization actually does today. We redesign and rebuild these sites so they're contemporary, fast, and genuinely easy for your team to keep current.
Moving off a platform that's become more trouble than it's worth.
If you're on WordPress or Squarespace or something else that's gotten complicated and expensive to maintain, we can migrate you to something simpler. We handle the transition carefully so nothing gets lost and the whole thing is less stressful than you'd expect.
In practice
We built a bilingual site for an artist talk series that needed speaker bios, event registration, mailing list signup, and an admin panel that their program coordinator could manage on her own. It took a few weeks to build, and it costs less than $5 a month to host. That kind of economics matters when your budget is tight.
Someone to call when something needs attention.
You don't need a retainer or a maintenance contract. When something on your site needs updating or something breaks, you just get in touch and we take care of it. We know your site because we built it, so it's usually straightforward.
Simplify
How it works
Admin tools that your team can use without technical training.
We build custom dashboards for managing events, content, and communications that are designed for people who aren't technical and don't particularly want to be. The kind of tools where you can sit down and figure out what to do without reading a manual or watching a tutorial video.
Automations that save real hours every week.
Things like event reminders that go out on schedule, registration confirmations that send instantly, and follow-up sequences that run on their own. These are tasks that someone on your team is probably doing manually right now, and they add up to a surprising number of hours over a season.
In practice
We worked with a gallery that has a two-person staff, and they were spending something like eight hours per exhibition just on communications: invitations, reminders, social posts, website updates. We built a system where they enter the exhibition details once and everything else flows from that single entry. It's not glamorous work, but it gave them back a meaningful amount of time.
The point is to free up your team for the work that actually needs them.
There's a lot of communications work that requires human judgment and relationships and creativity, and that's where your staff should be spending their energy. The repetitive, schedulable, rule-based stuff should just run in the background without anyone thinking about it.