Check out our recorded webinars and video footage from past events to learn practical skills, listen to inspiring stories, and stay digitally connected and informed.
2023 Artists and Makers:
Karin Spitfire, Poet Laureate
Poet Laureate, Karin Spitfire shares her poetry to kick off the 2023 Artists and Makers Conference.
2023 Artists and Makers:
Living a Creative Life
Hear from artists Nina and Joe Devenney (daughter and father) with two different perspectives in business models, generations, and genders. The discussion revolves around questions such as: What decisions about your lifestyle affected your business model? What did it look like to commit to making full-time? How do you build community for your business? What is working well and what is difficult? What strategies do you have that enable you to foster joy and stay flexible?
2023 Artists and Makers:
Where is the Money?
In this interactive crash course with Kim Bernard, participants learn where to find grants for creative projects, how to write a compelling grant proposal, what’s in a budget and other support materials to prepare. Tips on running a successful crowdfunding campaign and finding fiscal sponsorship are also covered.
2023 Artists and Makers:
New Directions in your Work
This session is designed to hear from artists and makers who are navigating different media across a customer base. How do different materials allow you as an artist to fully express your vision? What is both challenging and fulfilling about being a multidisciplinary artist? How do you share and speak about vastly different looking bodies of work with customers? Simon uses drawing, carving, throwing, printing, painting to engage his mind on a journey. Stephanie specializes in netting sculptures, based on the ancient skill of knotted netting. Sal is Rockport-based photographic artist and writer who uses various photographic media in a personal narrative that explores themes around memory and belonging.
2023 Artists and Makers:
Minding Your Business
What feeds you (literally, income $$$) and how does that relate to your maker soul? Using some mindfulness prompts and an artist’s one page business plan, this session addresses how to follow your passion while running a thriving business now and in the future. Starting where you are: what is your baseline NOW and what customers’ needs or wants do you satisfy? With growth in mind, we evaluate how that might change as we brainstorm how to use success to build a plan. We examine challenges, fears, and anxiety about future business building and allow those to frame our planning conversation. Participants define business milestones and develop meaningful measurements that will carry the business forward. We draft some critical business elements that will help you to take stock of where you are and better define where you want to go, achieving milestones along the way while following your maker passion.
2023 Artists and Makers:
Marketing for Non-Marketers
If you love to market, this isn’t the seminar for you. Instead, this is a seminar for people who want to do the least amount of marketing they can and still grow a successful business around their craft or art. Understanding marketing basics is the first step to building a marketing program geared to your budget and time commitment. Marketing boils down to two statements: First, people don’t know you exist unless you tell them. And second, once they know who you are, if you want them to buy from you, you must stay on their radar. My goal is for you to market smarter, not harder.
2023 Artists and Makers:
Public Art Projects
Hear from artists about a variety of public and community art projects in Maine as artists share experiences building community through engagement with art.
2023 Artists and Makers:
I Want to Open a …
In this session, we explore the idea of opening a direct to consumer space to allow you to sell directly to your customers. What do you need to know to get started? How can you get started? What resources are available? Colin Page, Emmy Andersson, and Marian Baker share insights, resources, and stories from their experiences in starting a retail space. We also explore challenges and lessons learned along the way.
2023 Artists and Makers:
Pecha Kucha Presentations
Host: Jean Linn Thompson. This Pecha Kucha-style presentation includes quick structured speeches from speakers including George Pearlman, Ian Trask, Brian Smith, Carol Rowan, and more! Sponsored by CMCA.
2021 Artists and Makers:
Instagram Office Hours
As a follow-up to her “Instagram Worthy” webinar, Hannah Richards, brand content strategist at Ethos hosted an hour of open Q&A to help artists and makers put everything they learned into practice, and discover further tips for using the strategies and tools discussed for themselves and their businesses.
2021 Artists and Makers:
A Conversation with Gabrielle Melchionda
In this special virtual keynote, Gabrielle Melchionda, owner of Mad Gab’s, shares the many lessons she’s learned throughout her journey in starting, growing, and running her 28-year-old business. She also discusses how she brings creative practices to her work and how she works on her creative life at home—all while running a successful business, mentoring employees, raising kids, and engaging in communities to support other women and young girls.
2021 Artists and Makers:
Instagram Worthy
Hannah Richards, brand content strategist at Ethos in Westbrook, Maine, walks us through the ins and outs of Instagram, and how to use it as a tool to tell your story. Instagram’s highly visual and multi-functional platform is an incredible tool for artists and makers looking to tell their story and showcase their work. In this session, we talk about Instagram strategy for artists and makers, the various publishing tools available on the platform, and best practices for how and when to use each feature to reach, engage, and sell to your target audience.
Building a Resilient Business in Uncertain Times
This virtual panel discussion cut across sectors and brought together Maine business owners and community leaders working hard to respond effectively to the global pandemic. During this video conference, a panel of local business leaders addressed the pivots and innovations they worked through at the start. Hear what they did to be agile and resilient during this time of uncertainty.
Developing Your Marketing Plan of Attack
Small Business Marketing Series with Shannon Kinney
Every successful endeavor starts with a plan. In this free webinar, we walked through how to develop your plan of attack for the holiday season and beyond. This workshop reviews how to set goals, where to prioritize your time, and steps for success with your website, social media, search, email and other advertising. This session also includes an outline and specific direction for you to create your own plan.
Driving Results and Sales with Online Marketing
Small Business Marketing Series with Shannon Kinney
In this virtual session, we’ll help you execute your plan of attack to drive sales for the holidays and beyond. We will offer quick tips for success in driving sales on social media, on your website, with email, and paid advertising tactics that drive results. This session also includes how to measure your results and tips to increase sales.
What’s Your Best Business Structure — S-Corp, LLC, or Sole-Proprietor?
Entity selection is a crucial decision made by business owners early in their company’s life. While some entity options allow for growth and expansion, other entity options could come with burdensome costs and unexpected consequences. In this free webinar, we covered the different types of entity options used by most small businesses and the pros and cons of each entity from a legal and tax perspective.
How to Get Paid Online
In our increasingly cashless world, and during the global pandemic, small businesses have been trying to find ways to get cash in the door. Join Nicole Ouellette for this overview of the various ways to take a payment using the power of the internet.
2019 Artists and Makers Conference: Branding Best Practices
Alex Steed of Knack Factory, Gabrielle Melchionda of Mad Gab’s, and Josh Rogers of Heritage Seaweed, share their experiences with branding, re-branding, and telling your story to engage your audience.
2019 Artists and Makers Conference: The Importance & Impact of Email Marketing
Rich Brooks of flyte new media offers this presentation on why email marketing is still the king of generating sales, and provides tips for how to build a list, best practices to encourage optins, open rates, and responses to calls for action.
2019 Artists and Makers Conference: What Is an Artist’s Obligation to Society
Robert Shetterly and Kenny Cole lead a conversation about the role of artists in society. What is the artist’s relationship to culture, marketing, and audience? The most important thing for an artist is passion for your own work and vision, so how and when do you—if you do—conform your vision to fit an audience, place, or culture?
2019 Artists and Makers Conference: Americans Who Tell the Truth: An Evening with Robert Shetterly
Robert Shetterly has been painting the series of portraits “Americans Who Tell the Truth” for almost 20 years. The portraits and narratives in this project highlight citizens who courageously address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness. By combining art and other media, it offers resources to inspire a new generation of engaged Americans who will act for the common good, our communities, and the Earth.
In this special presentation from the 2019 Artists & Makers Conference, Shetterly talks about his history as an artist and shares some of his work as well as his process for how he chooses who to portray.
2019 Artists and Makers Conference: Suhail Bisharat – Keynote
Suhail Bisharat describes the honorable and challenging task of curating and building a collection of contemporary art from across the Arab and Islamic world, the role of national leadership, artists, and the private sector as they came together to create the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman. Inaugurated in 1980 by the late King Hussein and Her Majesty Queen Noor, the permanent collection includes the work of more than 800 artists from 59 countries.
In this keynote presentation from the 2019 Artists & Makers Conference, Bisharat describes the process of filling 10,000 square meters and covering 1.5 million years of history, and how the art and sculpture within the museum seeks to tell the stories of Jordan and its unique role geographically, historically, and artistically.