March 2025 Member of the Month
Meet Erin Rolfs, Director of Marketing and Communications, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University!
What’s one thing — either industry/work-related or not — you learned in the past month?
Over the last two years, I’ve been taking online courses through Harvard’s graduate certificate program for Marketing and Digital Strategy and as fortunate as I am to have that opportunity, it can be a challenge to translate the for-profit best practices specifically for our sector where we have a variety of stakeholders: students, the general public, specific communities, employees, volunteers, donors, alumni, faculty, artists, and granting organizations who are engaged through different platforms with different language, enticed by different pay-offs.
So my professor’s refrain was your branding strategy is your business strategy, which I think translates into our world as your engagement strategy is your mission statement (I’d be interested in other translations!) Which to me means at whatever point you interact with your many audiences—via wall text, a funding letter, an Instagram collaboration, school tour—are you signaling the distinct values unique to your mission in a manner that prompts engagement? If not, why not? And if the answer is that your values don’t easily align with the channel, partnership, or audience, or there is no clear route to engagement, then let it go (or have a deep conversation about the mission).
It sounds too simple, but it’s quite easy to dilute the organization’s perspective to appeal to the broadest audience or veer into an exciting opportunity that offers visibility but does little to underscore what makes the place unique. It’s tiny little movements that add up to changing course or not quite getting anywhere at all. I’m lucky at the Moody that our director is quite in tune with this, but the notion clarifies, for me, an order of operations where the intangible values of the institution, the brand, are not just the rubric used to curate and program but the measure by which we manage marketing: how we approve image and copy for display ads; decide what goes on the homepage of our website, etc. When these values transcend the individual personalities of the board, the director, the curator, and the marketing director they can guide institution-wide actions across long periods of time that anchor those disparate audiences. In turn, your marketing efforts become more effective, with fewer resources. Again, it feels obvious to say but tricky to do especially when we have tools that can indiscriminately reach so many people at once, so putting words to the intent was helpful.
What do you value about your membership with AAMG?
I think just sharing the space with others at this intersection of higher education and arts + culture is both a passive and active source of personal and professional joy. I always think about this gem of a statement I took away from my first AAGM meeting: learn how to practice “blameless discernment.” It was such a powerful notion and it came from a university president in conversation with the university’s museum director at the conference. That concept enables a group to pursue exceptionality but not through ego, to be accountable to the conditions but not attribute them to character. And I don’t know where else I would have been gifted this brilliant idea but in a room full of people who care about higher learning and access to arts and culture. I think AAMG facilitates those moments.
If you could trade places with anyone for a day, who would it be?
A really good quantum physicist, honestly. Like I want to have the brain to understand it and feel what it’s like to fully “get it.” But only for that one day and then go back to being earnestly concerned with email newsletters and click-throughs. I don’t think I can do both.
Book/Author suggestion?
I have three that are top of mind right now. Burnham Wood by Eleanor Canton; The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I think I went back and forth between fashion designer and foreign correspondent.
What do you enjoy most about being a part of an academic museum?
The substantive work paired with sincere outreach. We’re not led by being an Instagrammable art experience nor are we interested in being so intellectual that we’re ostracizing people. I love that specific challenge. I am like soulfully committed to helping create more than one entryway to art, as much as I am to ensuring that eventual interaction is meaningful for different people with different levels of interest or exposure. That work is endlessly motivating for me.
What are your hopes for our industry?
I hope that scholars of all disciplines are educated to appreciate artists as fellow researchers. I think if that becomes more commonplace, the silos of funding, publishing, and therefore institutional recognition will change. Once those pathways and incentives materialize there will be more collaboration across disparate fields and we all— the museum, the university, and the world at large—benefit immensely from that.
