How to Establish Working Relationships With Your Creative Partners

Creative Partners, formerly known as Arts for CHicago, is an innovative collaborative effort by professional artistic directors, actors and musicians to give professional, artistic fundraising to Chicago non-profit arts organizations. Launched in January of this year, Creative Partners works with local performing arts companies, allowing each artistic organization to prioritize the artistic projects that drive their development and create the funds needed to create more and newer work. By collaborating creatively and sharing individual creative ideas, artists are able to support their own artistic projects while also sharing the wealth of experience of professional artistic directors and producers in the performing arts. Artists who choose to work with a Creative Partner have many benefits over working on a project alone such as:

Creativity: The relationship between creative partners can help artists focus their artistic vision on meaningful conversations with creative partners, rather than on the logistics of a given musical or performing art production. In turn, creative partners can use their past experiences with other artistic endeavors to serve as an ongoing source of support. Working with creative partners instead of managing them is also a way to increase musical and performing art business knowledge, experience, and wisdom. As an artistic producer, I have often seen companies begin with the best intentions of developing creative relationships when, in fact, we have instead developed more problems than creative opportunities. Through my work with creative partners, I have witnessed countless creative relationships and creative difficulties and have gained insight into how companies can become increasingly self-sufficient when they work with a good partner.

Trust: Through working with musical and performing art companies, I have realized that the most important factor in artistic success is trust. In musical and performing art world, "trust" is one of the most difficult things to obtain, especially for non-creative partnerships. This is why musical and performing companies typically approach artistic relationships more productively and use their past successes with other artistic partners as a foundation. However, I have found that by involving creative partners early in the process, especially during the early stages of development, many problems can be solved before they arise.

In fact, I often find that companies that do not initially communicate well with creatives but who become increasingly open and communicative as the relationship develops are usually those companies that benefit most. One way to foster open communication is to give creatives regular updates on progress, allowing them to feel as if they have a say in how the creative process is going and giving creative's a sense of ownership over creative services. Another way to foster creativity is to make sure you have a large number of creatives involved in a creative services chain. By pooling creatives together, it allows for multiple, even remotely connected, creative projects; something that can provide a huge amount of creative inspiration for a company.

Flexibility: The most successful creative service chains make use of numerous collaborate spaces, and this creates a strong synergy and allows for creative teams to collaborate effectively. However, it can be difficult for smaller businesses to create such networks, and even when established creatives may lack a network of like-minded colleagues. For these companies, it is also very helpful to have a creative partner that can be sent on a temporary assignment or hired on a long term basis to help out during a particularly sticky period.

Collaboration: When establishing creative networks, it is important to understand the difference between collaboration and service provision. Service provision refers to any business activity designed to further the interests of one business unit over another. For example, a blog is a good example of collaboration because it is used to bring a company's voice to the world. On the other hand, collaboration describes something more along the lines of writing, film, art, music, etc., which is primarily done by one company to support another. The most effective creative partner will understand what type of work they can do to support your business interests.

Collaboration and service provision are two sides of the same coin. In order to be truly successful, both must be managed effectively. A creative partner will bring their individual creative skills to the table that can add tremendous value to your creative team. On the other hand, a creative team that works as a team will bring their technical skills to the table that can add incredible value to your creative process. It is the perfect marriage of two teams working together toward a common goal.

To establish and maintain healthy working relationships with your creative partners, you need to pay attention to the way in which you interact with each. Do you allow your partner to make input; are you critical? If you are critical, are you willing to look at their ideas critically before implementing them? agency interact with each other as a professional working relationship will create great content and long lasting working relationships between you and your creative partners.