Today we interviewed two of our generous sponsors: Oliver Wise and Eleanor Hanson Wise of The Present Group. The Present Group is a great resource for artists, collectors, and educators, and they’ve just added a new service for creative professionals: web hosting! Their hosting packages are affordable, include easy portfolio templates and awesome tech support, and part of the proceeds go towards supporting other artists. It’s no wonder we jumped at the chance to have them host the CCE site! Get to know Oliver and Eleanor a little better below:
1) Who is The Present Group?
The Present Group is an organization that works to create new ways to fund and distribute artist projects. We started with our subscription art service, which is like a CSA for art. Subscribers contribute to a pool that funds four contemporary artist projects throughout the year and then they receive limited edition artwork in return. Our most recent project is Web Hosting: the profits from hosting are used to create an artist grant that is voted on by all the hostees.
2) What made you decide to start offering web hosting?
The art world is going through a transitional moment as far as funding goes. Non-profits are struggling and galleries have a tough time finding collectors. There has been a movement to find alternative strategies for arts funding, and some of the most successful ones take advantage of things that people pay for anyway like food, drinks, or in our case, web hosting.
All artists need a website, so it make sense to utilize that payment structure to give back to artists. And, to be honest, some of the other web hosting companies’ TV commercials–that they pay millions of dollars to put there–were making us sick. We wanted to create an alternative for people to do good with their dollars.
3) What makes TPG Hosting better for creative professionals than other web hosts?
Firstly, we want creative people to succeed and for their websites to be great. We answer questions as promptly as possible and it’s us answering questions, not someone at a call center in India.
Secondly, we’re creating a community of people that want to support other creative people. Each grant period we choose a theme, allow all our hostees to nominate people within that theme, and then we all vote on who gets the grant.
4) Why did you decide to sponsor CCE?
We want to support people’s creative endeavors. Oliver and I started this organization in our living room and we know how hard it can be to figure out the entrepreneurial landscape. One of the things we try to do with The Present Group is create community, and that is what this conference is about as well: supporting one another. Our web hosting project is another way of doing that, so it seemed like a perfect fit.
