The Carousels of New York’s outreach plan can be organized into three phases based on temporality and target communities.

Phase 1: Research Assistance

Phase 1 takes place while we’re completing our research. Our plan is to find specific contacts and email/call them we develop our work to get more expertise on our research. The target demographic for this phase will be professionals and academics who can provide guidance and assistance for this project. In general, this will include researchers in programs for Urban Planning, Architecture, History, Anthropology, Art History, Digital Humanities, Data Analysis and Visualization, and Urban Education. We may also potentially present this project at future academic conferences.

This phase does not require us to complete any of our public-facing materials as we’re using this phase to continue building the project.

Phase 2: Carousel Patrons

After we’ve finished a full draft of the project and published it, we want to make sure that actual patrons of the carousels see it as soon as we can! This includes tourists, families, carousel enthusiasts, and fans of whimsy. This is highly intertwined with our social media plan, but outside of that we plan to connect with NYC online groups/forums and contact organizations to spread the word.

Additionally, we want to make sure that we contact the carousels themselves. When we go to them, we hope to leave them with flyers to hang up and retrieve contact information for carousel representatives and employees who may be able to help us. This way, our work visiting each of the carousels in-person can help us collect more data and spread the word about our project!

This phase requires us to have already completed preliminary research on all carousel locations and a completed version of the website.

Phase 3: Outreach for Change

After our project has had some time to settle and we’ve had time to analyze the data, we want to try to reach out to whoever we can so that we can advocate for areas that have no carousels. Our overarching goal is to either bring carousels to the new area or make the existing carousels more financially accessible. This would include reaching out to city developers and organizations. This would include NY Carousel, non-profits like the Prospect Park Alliance and Central Park Conservancy, or other carousel related organizations. 

This phase requires us to have a social media presence and a more finalized version of our research.