Page 168 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

168It was a true celebration that flew in the face of deep funding cuts and company closures. It presented an opportunity for theatres to shout about the great work they do, reach wider audiences and forge relationships and collabo- rate with other venues and stage companies from across the world.an unintentional but brilliant microexample of the ingredients required to create a powerful professional community around the arts: a pinch of fun, glugs of severity and professionalism, lashings of participation, spoonfuls of authority and curation, plus a coating of purpose to top it all off.CPN is a living, breathing online community and resource for arts and culture professionals.So how did we do it? How did we go from just two newspaper journalists to the global (and now annual) phenomenon that is #LoveTheatre day? In this essay I hope to outline just that, by revealing my own experiences of working on and managing the network over the past three years, the importance of creating professional communities around content, what trends and challenges relate to networks like CPN, plus some insights and lessons around what makes for a healthy and satiated community.What is the network?The Culture Professionals Network is one of the youngest in a much larger family of Guardian professional network communities.6 From health and social care to sustainability, global develop- ment, education and many more, these networks were not all created for the same reason. Some, for example, were seen as commercially viable opportunities: sites that could partner with sponsors and brands to bring relevant contentto niche audiences for commercial gain. OthersThe event was a great success and testament to the power of the community we had brought together over the previous three years. Twitter UK revealed the following morning that more than 40,000 tweets published during the day contained the#LoveTheatre hashtag which, as reported by the social media team at Dewynters, achieved just shy of 300m impressions worldwide. To putthat into perspective, it took Coca Cola’s award- winning “Share a Coke” campaign six months to achieve 330m global Twitter impressions.5 We almost beat it in one day.While most certainly a collaborative effort, #LoveTheatre was a perfect example of the spirit of CPN and the power of its community. It wasCultural business models on the InternetThe Guardian Culture Professionals Network: a case study in professional community publishing