Frequently Asked Questions

Anything related to arts and culture, including but not limited to:

  • Places like museums, theaters, art galleries, performing venues, artist studios, etc.
  • Art-related businesses like framing, costume and set production, fine art printing, recording and rehearsing studios, art restoration, rental art spaces, etc.
  • Open calls for art submissions, auditions, public art RFPs, grant programs, etc.
  • Events like art fairs, theatrical performances, open mic nights, exhibitions, book signings, concerts, etc.
  • Other resources like classes and workshops in any type of art, art rental, etc.
  • Local arts and culture organizations and government agencies

No need to register first. You can just submit the listing directly on this page or by clicking a big blue button ADD LISTING in the top menu.

After submitting the listing, the system will automatically create an account for the email address you used during the submission process. You may use that account for any of your consecutive listings. Keeping all the listings under one account makes it easier to manage them as needed.

To submit the listing, go to this page or click a big blue button ADD LISTING in the top menu. Fill out the form completely, check the boxes for the terms and conditions and privacy policy at the bottom, and click “submit”.

It usually takes 1-2 business days for your listing to be reviewed, optimized for Google search, and approved.

Here are a few tips for a successful listing:

  • Provide a detailed description. The more you write in the description the easier it will be for others to find your listing by keyword. It also makes it easier for us to optimize your listing for Google.
  • Use visuals. One image is required for submission, but you can upload more images and even add a YouTube video to your listing. Not only make it more exciting for the viewers, but it will also give us variety for the newsletter and social media promotion.
  • Don’t skip the date feature! If you are promoting any kind of event, choose the “event” category in addition to any other relevant category. If you are promoting the opportunity with the submission deadline, choose “open calls” in addition to any other relevant category. It will populate the date/time area in your listing submission form.

Static listing is a listing for a business (online or brick-and-mortar) or organization:

  • Describe your products and services
  • Add your address and/or contact information
  • Add your hours of operations
  • The listing will never expire
  • You can edit the information at any time through your account
  • You can encourage your customers to submit 5-star reviews to improve your listing’s performance

Dynamic listing is a listing for a temporary event, like an exhibition, performance, open call, or other temporary opportunity:

  • The listing will set to expire shortly after the event/open call is over
  • Add the details of the event, like location, dates and times
  • Add URLs to where people can learn more and/or purchase tickets and RSVP
  • If you are promoting a series of events or a longer event (i.e. a month-long exhibition) choose the date of its beginning or an opening event. Our team will manually set the expiration date for AFTER its full duration
  • It’s best to submit dynamic listings for at least 10-14 days prior to the event to allow us time for the newsletter and social media promotion.

Anyone can submit a listing.

You don’t need to be an owner of the business or an organizer of the event to share the information about it with the community! Remember: sharing is caring!

Run a quick search on the platform to make sure no one else has shared it yet. Feel free to let the owner/organizer know that you are sharing their info with the community.

The owner/organizer can claim ownership of the listing by reaching out to us at beseen@sandiegoartdirectory.com. After a quick verification process (if needed), we will transfer the ownership of the listing to their account, so they can edit and manage it going forward.

YES! The San Diego Art Directory is a local nonprofit organization that provides a free resource for our local arts and culture scene to be promoted to the residents and visitors of San Diego County. It is free to browse and post on the platform for everyone, forever.

An account allows you to have one dashboard for all your listings. For example, if you own a gallery and you put out open calls and exhibitions, you may have a static listing for your gallery and additional listings whenever an open call or a new exhibition comes out.

If you have more than one listing, and the viewer wants to see what else you have in stores, they can browse through your profile by clicking on your name under one of your listings.

Besides having your listing posted on the platform, every newly submitted listing is added to our weekly newsletter and posted on our social media accounts.

COMING SOON: paid Google promotions. Stay tuned!

SDAD is designed to promote listings rather than authors’ profiles. But we know how important it is for our local artists to be visible!

Here are a couple of things you can do to make yourself seen:

  • Create a static listing for your art business. Add a detailed description, the location of your studio, the services you provide, and your contact information;
  • Whenever you have a show coming up, a new series launch, or classes and workshops to offer, post them as separate listings to take advantage of our newsletter and social media promotion;
  • Create an Artist Profile on our sister-platform San Diego Artist Network where you can post regular updates about your art practice in your own “mini blog” for everyone to see. You can also join the groups and communicate with other artists on the platform.

A listing is an ad for your business or event.

A profile is your dashboard to manage all your listings in one place.

Although you are not limited to how many locations and categories you can assign to your listing, the best practice is to keep them limited to 1 or 2 primary ones. Choosing too many categories and/or locations for a single listing might be confusing for the viewers.

If you are submitting a duplicate dynamic listing before the previous one expires or a duplicate static listing, it will likely be declined in the review process.

If you want your listing to be promoted more than once, please just email us at beseen@sandiegoartdirectory.com, give us a reason why you need additional promotion, and we will try to accommodate your request depending on our promotion schedule and capacity.

We want to help everyone in the arts community, but we are also trying to give everyone an equal chance with the resources that we have.

After you submit the listing, it will be manually reviewed by our platform administrator to make sure it complies with our terms and conditions and also to give it a proper optimization for Google search. The review process usually takes 1-2 business days, so if you submit your listing on Friday night it is not guaranteed to be posted before Monday. Please, be mindful of your timing.

Here are some reasons the listing might be rejected:

  • It doesn’t relate to arts and culture. We view arts and culture as broadly as we humanly can, so your listing is unlikely to be rejected if it promotes arts and culture in any capacity. For example: traditional foods festival promotes arts and culture, but commercial photography services don’t.
  • It is out of our geographic scope. We promote arts and culture in San Diego County and also in Tijuana. We do not promote events and businesses in Orange County, Imperial County, or LA County. But we do promote SD branches of out-of-the-county business and SD events by out-of-the-county organizers.
  • Duplicate listings. If we spot that your listing is a duplicate of another active listing on the platform it will be rejected.
  • Listings without a description or with insufficient description and/or details. This decision is up to our platform administrator. That said, we are striving to give everyone an equal chance to be seen, but generally description of fewer than 50 words is considered insufficient.
  • Promotion of hate and violence. This should go without saying.
  • Political content. We believe that arts and culture are beyond politics and should serve the universal good of the community regardless of individual political affinities.

If you disagree with the rejection of your listing, please send us your reasons via email at beseen@sandiegoartdirectory.com and we will review your appeal ASAP.

If you don’t see the category that works for you, here’s what you can do:

  • Post your listing anyway with a category closes to what you need
  • Shoot us an email at beseen@sandiegoartdirectory.com with the request for a new category and the title of your listing
  • We will create a new category and manually assign it to your listing during the review process

If you don’t see your city or neighborhood under “locations” while submitting your listing, you can add it directly to the submission form.

Please, keep in mind that only the cities and neighborhoods are counted as locations. The names of the venues will be edited out and the closest neighborhood will be assigned to your listing during the review process.

Although we would love to help everyone in the arts and culture community, we simply don’t have the capacity to post listings manually. We are working hard on promoting active listing and keeping up with the further platform development to make it easy to navigate and easy to use. We are also working hard on making our sister-platform San Diego Artist Network and fully functional promotional resource for individual artists and on producing In The Art Scene Podcast to shine more light on our local art scene.

If you are having trouble navigating the platform, we are happy to walk you through the submission process to help you be more confident when you submit a listing next time. Shoot us a message at beseen@sandiegoartdirectory.com and we will help you out.

If you still have questions, just shoot us a note via the form below!

Or email us at beseen@sandiegoartdirectory.com