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Month: February 2020

Problems So Obvious A College Student Can Analyze Them In A Week

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Earlier this month, Vu Le at Non-Profit AF made one of those posts you didn’t know you needed until it was written. In it he addressed the stress higher education school projects have on already overburdened non-profits.

It is pretty much a rite of passage so if you haven’t been approached by a university student who needs to complete an assessment of your organization providing you with recommendations for improvement by next week, you need to question  your organization’s existence in the universe and whether it has any meaning at all.

And full disclosure, I was one of those university students as I am sure many of my readers were as well. If you weren’t, you need to question the quality of your education and whether it had any meaning at all.

Since I am referring to class assignments I received about 25-30 years ago,  this practice is probably well over due for revision and Vu Le is just the person to help start the conversation.

Vu Le lists a number of issues with these assignments. If you have generously participated in these exercises, you can probably identify with a number of them.

They are time-consuming

They are poorly coordinated

They stress nonprofit resources

They are usually not helpful

They are sometimes insulting

He expound on each of these with some detail. Read his post for a fuller explanation.

I have two colleagues who are providing feedback for a class which is conducting this sort of evaluation as a semester long project and they have each expressed frustrations similar to those listed above.

One of the issues Le raised that I hadn’t really encountered before, but obviously bears consideration,

They are usually not grounded in equity: Many students want projects at organizations led by Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, people with disabilities, immigrants and refugees, or other marginalized communities. But often they do not yet have the grounding in doing work in these communities without causing harm. Which means additional time and resources must be provided to coach the students and mitigate damage.

Of course, it must be acknowledge that university programs and especially the students often approach these projects with the best intentions. Le quotes Theresa Meyers, Chief of Staff at DC Central Kitchen,

The irony of it all is that society recognizes that nonprofits are understaffed and under-resourced which is part of the reason students are sent our way to ‘help’. [But] In our effort to support nonprofits, we are actually exacerbating the staffing inequities by forcing nonprofit leaders to also be unpaid professors.”

Le has a number of suggestions for improving the experience, which again, I briefly list here and he discusses in greater detail in his post.

Coordinate with nonprofits to figure out the best timing and types of projects:

Give plenty of advance notice

Build it into your budget to pay nonprofits

Make sure students do their research in advance

Have students do preemptive work on race, privilege, equity, diversity, inclusion, implicit bias, etc

Higher ed staff, build relationship with nonprofits

These are all good ideas, especially the one about reimbursing non-profit’s for their time, but I really like this one as a practical matter:

Collaborate on case studies: Often the projects are one-off, benefiting one student or one group of students. Think about more creative partnerships, such as working with nonprofits to create some case studies that multiple students can learn from and that can be used across many semesters.

I think Le envisioned case studies being used across multiple semesters as a way to avoid having to constantly impose upon non-profits. However, I think creating an evolving case study across multiple years in partnership with a single organization would answer many of the issues he mentioned: there would be advanced notice; a basis for advance research and awareness of race, inclusion, etc,; a well-developed relationship; and the capacity to budget funds for the non-profit. A multi-year project could employ a modular approach that made a deeper analysis of a specific area each semester rather than a superficial summary of the whole organization.

Sweetening Incentives To Experience Creativity With Strangers

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Knowing that one of the biggest barriers people experience when planning to go to an event is not having someone to accompany them, five years ago I was inspired by a Brazilian bus company that set aside seats for those who wanted to meet new people. And more recently I wrote about an English town that was attempting to do the same with park benches. There are coffee houses turning off the wifi in an attempt to get people to talk, as well.

I attempted to create a similar program at the performing arts center at which I previously worked. The idea was to match up people who didn’t have anyone to attend events. The results were good, but not exactly as I had planned.

Thanks to some funding by the local community foundation and buy-in from the local arts alliance, we are trying another iteration of this idea. Credit where it is due, my marketing director has pretty much spearheaded the effort (i.e. wrote the grant and is doing a lot of the groundwork) together with the executive director of the arts alliance.

The concept is pretty much the same as I had attempted before, except that it involves all the arts organizations in the community and provides a little incentive to sweeten the deal.

Essentially, the arts organizations will offer free admission to selected events. People will sign up indicating what type of events they would enjoy attending. They are matched up with someone else with whom they attend the event. They are given $20 which they can use to go out to get coffee or drinks, etc and discuss their experience. (Yes, it is a rare grant that allows the purchase of food.) Participants are expected to provide some sort of report back. I am going to nudge my marketing director to suggest that creative responses   (i.e. writing a poem, singing a song, making a video, etc.) are just as welcome as a narrative essay reflecting on the experience.

Our marketing director talks about the whole concept in a video interview if you want to learn more.

Details are still being pulled together, including getting participation from arts organizations. Keep an eye on the old blog here for periodic updates on the progress.

When The Docent Is Just As Storied As The Artifact

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Back in November 2018, I wrote about how the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was hiring refugees from Middle Eastern countries to act as docents for galleries of that region. Last week, NPR ran a story on the program which has expanded to include docents from Africa and Mexico & Central American to guide people through those collections .

The program has proven popular with visitors and peer institutions,

Attendance at the Penn Museum has shot up since the Global Guides’ first tours in 2018. A third of its visitors today attend specifically to take a tour with a Global Guide, according to the institution’s internal research, and the program has attracted attention throughout the museum world. Nearly a dozen other museums have asked about developing similar programs, and there’s already one in place at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford in England.

Something that struck me as valuable to any arts & cultural organization, whether it is a museum or not, was the training these docent received:

The guides received traditional training in archaeology and ancient history. Plus, the museum hired professional storytellers to help the Global Guides lace in personal tales about their lives.

In the quest to make what we do feel more relevant to people in our communities, storytelling is an increasingly valuable skill. I have come to recognize in recent years that while we all have stories which have a powerful resonance for ourselves and others, not everyone is particularly skilled in telling stories. Making storytellers part of staff, volunteer and particularly board training can have some productive results.

Related to that, reading about the museum hiring professional storytellers reminded me of a post I did in 2011 about how the North Carolina Arts Council used folklorists to survey the residents of a county in which they wanted to set up an arts council.

This apparently yielded better results than having a surveying firm canvas the county because the folklorists were able to identify and access niche communities that might normally be missed–especially among those who don’t consider themselves to be artists. So on the flip side, people who are adept at collecting stories may be valuable to surveying efforts.

Folklorists, as it happens, are some of the best trained interviewers out there. They also have a particular advantage when it comes to arts research: folklorists are trained to seek out and recognize creativity in all forms, especially that which comes from people who don’t consider themselves “artists.”

 

 

P.S. Once again, I have missed my blog’s birthday. It was 16 years old yesterday. At least this time I remembered before Drew McManus wished it a Happy Birthday first. Not that this assuaged the blog’s resentment at having its birthday forgotten once again. You know how it is with teenagers

Finally, A Procurement Platform For Non-Profit Arts

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Finally, a dream a decade in the making is coming to fruition!   Though I am sure he doesn’t recall it at all, in a post back in 2010 I had suggested that Drew McManus’ Venture Industries develop a platform upon which non-profit arts organizations could solicit competitive bids for goods and services.

In the past week, Drew has announced just such a service. Starting in mid-March he will be rolling out Non-Profit Bids, a site that will connect vendors with non-profits circulating requests for proposals (RFP) to provide goods and services. Right now he is looking for organizations to submit their RFPs and for providers to add themselves to a list of companies & individuals with available goods and services.

When I wrote my original post, I was working for a state university which required everyone to use their online RFP system to solicit goods costing over a certain dollar amount. We would often use it for goods that fell below that threshold because there could be significant price differences for the same goods.  Even if the price differences are relatively small, soliciting bids online saved a lot of staff time that might have been spent calling or emailing around for competitive bids.

Now as a state institution, we had to go with the lowest bidder or submit a very detailed rationale why we didn’t. You wouldn’t necessarily be tied to accepting the lowest bidder with Non-Profit Bids

On the other hand, we had the buying power of a national consortium of universities behind us to make sure vendors delivered on their promises.

Regardless of how strictly you must adhere to purchasing guidelines, my advice on any RFP you submit is to be as detailed as possible. Do not assume features that are important to you will be included just because the private consumer version with which you are familiar has that feature. If something is mandatory, state that. If there is flexibility or the example you are using is just for general reference, state that as well.

My hope is that Non-Profit bids will really catch on and become perceived as worthwhile to an increasing number of organizations and vendors. Since I wrote the entry 10 years ago, it has become increasingly possible for people to offer services at significantly greater distances so the potential to secure high quality services suitable to your organization and its budget is so much greater.

There Is No Business Case For Social & Cultural Advancement

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H/T to Artsjournal.com for linking to a FastCompany article about the problem with making a business case for diversity. I saw a lot of parallels between the rationale laid out by author, Sarah Kaplan, and the conversations I have been having about trying to justify the value of the arts in terms of economic/educational/social outcomes.

Kaplan writes (my emphasis):

Corporate leaders would be better served if they stopped trying to justify diversity with profit margins and stock charts—a mentality that can ultimately hurt the very groups these policies are meant to help (more on that in a moment)—and instead embrace diversity because it is the right thing to do.

[…]

Why doesn’t the business case work? Recent research suggests that what’s required for transformational action is a moral and legal case. The business case, because it is based in an economic logic, undermines moral arguments and weakens resolve to make anything other than incremental change. Indeed, experiments show that making the “business case for diversity” can increase bias against diverse groups while the legal case can inhibit bias and increase equitable behavior.

The business case for diversity also provokes people to focus more on economic than equality-based metrics of success. As a consequence, when there are downturns in organizational performance, believers in the business case are more likely to see diversity efforts as ineffective and to support dropping the organization’s investment in diversity programs.

Rather than go straight to that 3rd paragraph above, I did want to include her thoughts on justifying and implementing diversity because they are just as germane to the daily operations of arts and culture non-profits as anyone else.

There isn’t necessarily a moral and legal case to be made for the value of arts, culture and creative expression. However, there are similar consequences in using economic based metrics of success for arts and culture as there is for diversity goals. If there is a perceived lack of return in terms of economic activity, test scores, etc., interest flags and attention turns to the next big thing promising results in those areas.

In the long term, becoming adept in advocating the support of forms of creative expression because it is the right thing to do is going to be the better strategy.

One thing I was interested to read was Kaplan’s following thoughts that the business case for diversity is something you arrive at having successfully implemented a plan to achieve it. Her point seems to be, we really don’t know the actual benefits until it comes to pass. All the current rationale behind the business case for diversity are made on assumptions based on observations of the past and are focused on a narrow set of outcomes. Not only that, but it envisions that full diversity will unfold in a vacuum independent of everything else, neither affected by or affecting anything else.

It is worth noting that one of the reasons we don’t yet have compelling evidence about the economic impact of diversity is that we haven’t truly moved to inclusion and belonging. Diversity by itself will not produce the benefits that companies and policymakers wish to achieve. My sense is that by taking principled action, we will find myriad ways that more diverse workforces benefit companies and society. Said differently, we will eventually arrive at the business case; we just can’t start there.

In the same way, every claim made about how arts and culture can benefit the economy, education, social interactions, etc is based on piecemeal efforts supported by intermittent, unpredictable funding.  We have no idea what the real impact a unified, consistent, long term investment in cultivating creative expression will have on economic, education, socio-political fronts. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it were revealed that advancements in diversity were significantly associated with creative expression, and vice versa.

You Can Tap Into The Arts, But No One Will Think It Does Any Good

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In the wake of Kobe Bryant’s death, Dance Magazine related a short anecdote about Bryant taking tap dance lessons to help prevent additional injury to his ankles.

That summer, he researched ways to make his ankles stronger, and landed on tap dancing. “I worked on it all of that summer and benefited for the rest of my career,” he wrote.

Though Bryant continued to suffer from ankle injuries, tap helped him learn to keep his ankles loose and active, which helped prevent injuries elsewhere.

[…]

…Though he stopped dancing after that summer, he says that “for a year there I could tell my feet to do this and they would actually do that.”

Over the last couple weeks I have been thinking about why my initial reaction to this story was that it provides a good example of the value of the arts when I often warn about citing the prescriptive benefits of the arts. Let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more prescriptive than the idea that dance helped Bryant mitigate additional injury.

Ultimately, I realized that as a superb athlete, this was an example of how dance was supplementing his existing capabilities. Often when we hear about arts benefiting test scores, economy, social interactions, etc., there is an implication that the arts are improving things to an acceptable level. That there is some flaw to fix– a kid’s test scores need to be better; the foot traffic in stores & restaurants is tepid; people are having overly aggressive interactions.

With Kobe Bryant though, he is at the top of his field as an athlete and the tap lessons are something he used to provide a benefit his already demanding training regimen didn’t afford. While suffering a problematic injury is just as negative as poor test scores, low economic activity or negative social interactions, I can’t imagine anyone considered Kobe deficient and needed the arts to fix him. Tap was an available option he found suitable to his needs.

The difference between a supplemental activity and a prescriptive one is a bit subtle. In truth, at its base, the supplement is just as prescriptive. The context in which it is presented makes a significant difference. In Kobe’s case, there are no promises of outcome measures that have to be backed by qualitative data. The celebrity association aside, the value of tap dancing and the arts in general aren’t evaluated in terms of his scoring record.

Sure, saying ‘it worked for me” lacks the empirical evidence that people may want to justify funding. (It shouldn’t be used anyway.) Regardless of whether you have empirical data or not, if Shaq and Kobe both took tap together, the benefits each realize will vary based on dozens of variables in their physical, mental and emotional attributes.

For example, Kobe was open to exploring the way people in other disciplines achieve success and employed an approach Shaq probably wouldn’t have. He credits a conversation with composer John Williams for shifting his perception on leadership:

This conversation was held after the Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals. Bryant said the talk helped him become a better leader and that he took some of Williams’ ideas into training camp for the next season. “I felt like there were a lot of similarities between what [Williams] does and what I have to do on the basketball court,” Bryant said. “And some of the things he said to me were fascinating.”

On the other hand, it is assumed that great achievement in one area occurs in a vacuum with no contributions from any other pursuits. You can tell people Einstein as well as myriad other highly accomplished scientists played musical instruments and no one credits any benefit to the music–even if Einstein credits his accomplishments to playing violin.  So even though Kobe said he attributes tap dance for improving his agility and reducing injuries, few people will likely perceive tap as having anything to contribute to basketball.

Because really, no one would consider basketball and tap have any relationship with each other.

 

Pop Music, Now With Less Pep

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Via Arts and Letters Daily is a link to an Aeon piece that claims pop songs have gotten increasingly sadder and negative over the last 50 years.  They lay out their method of analyzing lyrics and data which seems to reinforce this idea. Sadly, all the death metal, goth, emo, etc music my friends and I listened to in my youth didn’t seem to factor in as much as I hoped. It is hard to believe anyone today is titling and singing songs more blatantly depressing than Girlfriend in A Coma.

But I wanted to know why this trend might be manifesting. They posited three factors which might influence this: success bias, prestige bias or content bias. These terms are defined along these lines:

We checked for success bias by testing whether songs had more negative lyrics if the top-10 songs of the previous few years had negative lyrics…

…prestige bias was tested for by checking if the songs of prestigious artists of the previous few years also had more negative lyrics.

…Content bias was checked for by looking at whether songs with more negative lyrics also happened to do better in the charts.

Acknowledging that there is still more work to be done on studying this, they came to the following conclusions at this point in their research:

Although we found small evidence for success and prestige bias operating in the datasets, content bias was the most reliable effect of the three in explaining the rise of negative lyrics. This is consistent with other findings in cultural evolution, in which negative information appears to be remembered and transmitted more than neutral or positive information. However, we also found that including unbiased transmission in our analytical models greatly reduced the appearance of success and prestige effects, and seemed to hold the most weight in explaining the patterns. ‘Unbiased transmission’ here can be thought of in a similar way to genetic drift, in which traits appear to drift to fixation through random fluctuations, and in the apparent absence of any selection pressure

What really interested me was the idea that the decentralization of the recording industry removed a bias for distributing happier language in songs:

Given this preference, what we need to explain is why pop-song lyrics before the 1980s were more positive than today. It could be that a more centralised record industry had more control on the songs that were produced and sold. A similar effect could have been brought about by the diffusion of more personalised distribution channels (from blank cassette tapes to Spotify’s ‘Made For You’ algorithmic tailoring). And other, broader, societal changes could have contributed to make it more acceptable, or even rewarded, to explicitly express negative feelings.

This concept got me thinking about claims that no one wants to see theater dealing with serious themes any more and only want to see big flashy musicals that provide escapist entertainment rather than challenge people to think about their lives.

It could be that the fact people experience music privately through earphones allows them to gravitate toward a personal preference for negative themes that they don’t feel as comfortable engaging with through their public attendance of theatrical performances.

Or it could be that since theatrical production is so centrally controlled, the content that is distributed and marketed has convinced people about the type of shows they want to see. This may be particularly true if people don’t feel as confident in their ability to choose theatrical performances they want to see as they do music they want to listen to. It is easier to defer to the expertise of others.

 

The Socio-Economic-Ethnically Diverse Audience You Seek Is At The Library

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There was an article on the Arts Professional site urging care in the Arts Council of England’s initiative to increase investment in libraries over the next decade. The author of the piece, Hassan Vawda, expresses concerns that attempts to revitalize libraries using arts may unintentionally damage all the beneficial elements of the library environment.

Statistics from DCMS’s Taking Part survey shows libraries are the only space used proportionally more by Black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) audiences than those who identify as White. In contrast, arts organisations and museums are used disproportionately by White audiences – despite more than a decade of language, policy and schemes aiming to support diversity.

[…]

People often have far more input into the way libraries are used as public spaces than they do with arts and cultural spaces – for all their outreach. At its best, the library is an intergenerational resource that adapts and moulds around the communities it finds itself in.

[…]

Outside the professional arts sector, libraries have engendered a trust that has eluded many traditional arts venues – and this must not be lost. The arts can definitely support the development of libraries, and amplify the case for reinvestment. But libraries must not succumb to the fate of the many art and culture-led spaces that have inadvertently become dominated by the middle classes.

As far as I know, there isn’t a similar effort in the U.S. to make libraries into trendy arts hubs. In fact, as Drew McManus pointed out today, the The Institute of Museum and Library Services is up for dissolution right along with the NEA, NEH and PBS.

However,  pretty much all the observations Vawda makes about libraries in England are true for libraries in the U.S. Even if Black, Asian and ethnic minorities don’t use libraries in greater proportion than those who identify as White in the US, I feel pretty secure in saying libraries are visited by a much more ethnically and socio-economically diverse group than most arts entities.

Reading this article it struck me that there is  potential to “get it right,” as it were. As Vawda mentions, arts organizations have a long history of outreach efforts that have had middling results.

The opportunity exists then in  putting a lot of effort into studying very closely the environment libraries provide, both in general and as specifically appropriate to their neighborhoods/communities and implementing radical changes to transform existing arts organizations.

Or, perhaps more pragmatically, arts organizations can bring their resources to libraries and be guided by them about how those resources are deployed.

I say this is the more pragmatic option because in all likelihood, in choosing it, an arts organization is acknowledging the great difficulty established arts organization would have implementing the sort of internal radical change required to cultivate the level of trust engendered by libraries. Even this would be a difficult decision for many since there is no guarantee that a close partnership with the library will ever increase the level of direct participation with the arts organization.

If the organization has the internal will to implement former option of providing an experience with the same sense of openness and user agency provided by a library, partnering with the library would already be part of the plan or the organization would already be hitting satisfying benchmarks and see no pressing need to partner.

Though with as imaginative as people are and as different the dynamics of every community, it is distinctly within the realm of possibility that some few arts organization wouldn’t have to radically change their business model and philosophy.

Pretty much either option requires a recognition that if the people you are dedicated to serving won’t come to you, you need to move toward them and meet them where they are.

The First Rule Of Modern Composer Club, Don’t Talk About Modern Composer Club

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Conductor Robert Trevino had a novel idea of getting people to attend concerts by modern composers…don’t tell people what the program was going to be. Counter-intuitively, the concerts had full audiences.

He got his inspiration from a restaurant in Malmö, Sweden. When you go to have a meal, they ask if you have allergies and then bring you your courses without telling you what you are eating. In this way, you don’t prejudge your experience.

The experience of that meal made me realise that in some way or another we all are pseudo-connoisseurs – by which I mean, many of our experiences in aesthetic, subjective art forms are evaluated – even pre-evaluated – through highly formed expectations and preconceptions. We come to things with well-defined preferences, we don’t usually engage openly and directly with what has been presented.

He said he had proposed a program of modern composers and seldom heard works, but was told no one could attend. He said he believes that this estimation was correct. People would decide the concert was going to contain unpleasant, discordant music and would stay away.

So with a lot of cooperation from the musicians of the Basque National Orchestra, media and ultimately, audiences, all of whom conspired to avoid spoiling the experience for future concert dates, they kept the program a secret. All the concerts in the four states of Basque Country sold out despite all the mystery.

What occurred, remarkably, was a great trust-building exercise between us, our musicians, our audience and the media (who had to be complicit in all of this … The national news channels came and filmed rehearsal but broadcast in such a way that you didn’t actually hear anything identifiable, and I myself presented a promotional trailer for the orchestra where I jokingly promised to finally reveal all, but every time I was about to say a composer’s name we made it look like the signal had failed!

If you watch the video that accompanies the story, (I also include it below), you will notice the concert was a logistical challenge. The musicians come on to the stage at different times, moving into position while playing their instruments. Other times, they move around the stage. Trevino leaves the stage and goes to sit in the audience during the performance of a work.

If audiences are usually uncertain about when it is appropriate to clap, they were pretty much completely lost during these concerts.

But as I approached and saw all the people lining up for their tickets, I saw a look on their faces that you don’t often see in concert halls. It was excitement, blended with total uncertainty about what this experience was going to be like. The energy and curiosity in the hall was palpable. And once I stepped out on stage for that kinetic first sequence of works, the audience didn’t know quite how to behave – in the video you see me encouraging them to clap and celebrate the musicians at various points. When I went to sit with them during one of the pieces, people were shocked at the complete breakdown of the standard concert procedure and yet at the same time they were fixated and engaged and present for what was happening.

If you find yourself muttering, “we could never pull that off here,” because you don’t think your audience is adventurous enough, consider that you might be underestimating them.

Obviously, there was a lot of advance work that went into teasing audiences into being curious about the experience and then into providing an event that was both visually and aurally engaging. It is likely that few would have shown up if a conventional marketing approach was employed and they wouldn’t have been as engaged by a conventionally staged performance.  Everyone involved with the Basque National Orchestra, media and audiences made the effort to deliver on the promise that something interesting was going to happen.

 

 

Reading Rebranding As “You Aren’t Wanted”

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Last month you may have read a number of news stories about the Methodist church in Minnesota with declining attendance that decided to kick out all their old members so they could attract younger members. Except that wasn’t exactly what the church was doing. They just wanted to close the one church for about 18 months in order to do some renovations and rebrand it and were asking members to attend a sister church in the meantime.

The goal definitely was to attract a younger congregation and the new pastor would be about 30 years younger than the current pastor. It sounds like the renovations had the goal of creating spaces in which younger people felt comfortable worshiping.

Shifting all this to the context of arts organizations, there is an eternal conversation about attracting new, younger audiences. However, research shows, arts organizations are actually pretty good at attracting new audiences, but not too good at retaining them so they return with some consistency.

This story about closing and rebranding made me wonder if there is any value in doing so if it makes your organization look more welcoming to a broader range of the community. We know that one of the biggest barriers to participation for people who aren’t already doing so is not seeing themselves and their stories being depicted.

If you were going to pursue closing and rebranding in a similar manner, it would have to encompass more than just freshening up the physical plant with a renovation.  The type of programs the organization offered would need to be revised. Likely the way in which they were delivered might need to be changed. Staff would either need to be retrained and/or new staff hired to deliver on the promises the organization was making.

Is there a good chance that all of this might scare your existing audience away in the same way it is turning off the current congregation of the church? Yep, good chance of that.

In the past I cited a couple of Nina Simon’s talks about providing relevance to the people whom you hope to serve. While she talks about creating metaphorical new doors for people to enter, if you are doing a renovation, you might create physical ones. She notes that it may be difficult for long time supporters to understand that not everything that is being done now is for them, even if nothing has been subtracted to provide experiences for others.

As I wrote:

A new initiative may displace one of regular events. Instead of 10 things designed for you, you only get nine. For a lot of people even 1/10 of a change can result in them feeling the organization is no longer relevant to them. This may especially be true in the case of subscription holders. That one bad grape in ten ruins the value of the whole package.

In this situation it can be a little tricky to say, that’s okay you don’t need to come to that show, we have other discount configurations that may suit your needs. Not only might your delivery of that message be flawed and sound offensive, but even with perfect delivery, the patron may only hear “that’s okay you don’t need to come.”

Even if the new initiatives are additions and don’t displace any of the current offerings, patrons, donors, board members can still feel the organization is no longer the one they value, despite having lost nothing.

Reading the different stories about the church in Minnesota, I got the sense that the current congregants were hearing “that’s okay, you don’t need to come,” in the planned renewal of their church. While that may turn you off of considering making changes for fear of losing what you already have, consider that what you are already doing may be telling a lot more people who have never walked in your door or come once or twice, “that’s okay, you don’t need to come.”

One Does Not Simply Walk Into The Met Opera Orchestra Pit

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Hat tip to Drew McManus for reposting a link to timpanist Jason Haaheim’s summary of his 13 part series on the value of deliberate practice. I figure Drew just reposted the link as bait to me since I have frequently posted about deliberate practice.  Even though I didn’t identify it as such, I think my post on Hilary Hahn’s discussion of daydreaming as part of her practice is a manifestation of deliberate practice.

You may have heard of Haaheim before. He was feted as the scientist who secured a position playing timpani with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. While he says he is not talented, did not go to a major music school and doesn’t have a graduate degree in music, he did not simply walk in off the streets and secure a position the way the stories make it sound. The Met was his 28th audition in field of international orchestras. (He frequently refers to himself as a tenacious loser.)

The fact he wrote a 13 part series on deliberate practice is pretty compelling evidence that he has has invested a lot of time and energy into the act and evaluation of his practicing. He projected his ratio of  hours spent in solitary practice to working under the supervision of a mentor at 112:1

But note, while he says you have to be willing to put in the time, by no means does he claim that they who clock the most hours are the winners. As with the posts I have previously made about deliberate practice, no benefit is accrued if you aren’t paying attention to what you are doing, reflecting upon the experience, collecting feedback from others or by self recording, and analyzing it all. Going through the motions yields very little and may even be harmful if you aren’t paying attention to stress and tension.

In his view, the process of deliberate practice has an exact correspondence with the scientific method where you identify a problem, formulate hypothesis and solution, test, gather data and, analyze.  While that may sound sterile, Haaheim frames many of his posts in pop culture references. For example, the title of one post is: Unless Your Phone Is in Airplane Mode, You Are Practicing like a Nazgûl, in which he compares the influence phones have over minds to the fact a Nazgûl’s will is subsumed by the Dark Lord, Sauron.

So if you have read about the process of deliberate practice but are unsure how to structure a regimen for yourself, Haaheim lays out a pretty thorough road map in his recent post which includes a hyperlinked annotated index of his previous 12 posts on the subject.

Art Helps Get The Buses Running On Time And Where They Are Needed

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Last week Shelterforce had an article about places around the country that are using arts and culture strategies as part of transit planning processes. They provide examples of projects in beginning, middle and final stages in three communities around the country. However, these efforts are occurring in far more communities than that. The article mentioned an inaugural program of Transportation America which placed Arts, Culture and Transit Fellows in three additional communities.

These fellowships are”…designed to give art professionals opportunities for hands-on learning about the transportation planning and design process in their respective regions.’

At a nascent project in Northwest Arkansas, there is an effort to extend the hours and reach of transit lines. What the artists are contributing is collecting stories from

…constituencies whose feedback is often left out of planning discussions. Wilhite says those are the people they will pull in to participate in listening sessions and story circles “to get a conversation going about what’s proposed.”

Wilhite sees their role as artists and storytellers to be not just gatherers of information from a wider range of communities, but gatherers of stories that are more nuanced than what can be gleaned from an online survey. “We get the same answer but make it more complex, which is to [not only] say that people want transit, [but that] it needs to be here, and there.”

[…]

They are planning to facilitate citizen ride audits, in which residents of different backgrounds and transit needs—possibly students, seniors, the disabled—ride and record in various media their transit experience over a period of time. Another planned activity is the production of a theater piece that will be performed on bus lines.

…They will also work with a local arts center to create a temporary bus shelter—there are none in Springdale—in its parking lot. “Our goal is to increase ridership eventually, but [for now], get people excited, familiar, and even just aware [of the buses] maybe for the first time.”

Another project in Nashville helped address concerns about safety at a particularly dangerous intersection. In this case, feedback at community meetings was facilitated by hands on art projects. I am intrigued by the idea that modeling a pedestrian refuge out of clay and pipe cleaners might have directly contributed to the creation of a pedestrian refuge in the street improvement project.

Attendees used Play-Doh and pipe cleaners to create what they wanted to see in the area, be it transportation systems or parks, and on sticky notes they wrote how Nolensville Pike made them feel. The ideas specifically relating to pedestrian safety included adding more crosswalks, pedestrian refuge islands, and separate bike lanes along the corridor.

“Art definitely helped take down that barrier that people have when they don’t know what to say in a public meeting,” Carpenter says. “It helps stimulate people’s thinking about any issue [so they can] participate more in the conversation.”

[…]

The resident and business feedback resulted in change. ENCP was able to secure $1 million from the city budget to make positive changes along Nolensville Pike that included adding a traffic signal, crosswalk, and a permanent pedestrian refuge island in front of Azafrán Park,…

[…]

“I can guarantee that these specific projects … would not have happened were it not for us demonstrating the feedback that we got from people,” Carpenter says. “To have people testifying that they want these kinds of improvements on the Nolensville Pike [was important].”

The third project the article covered is one I have mentioned before, and one of my favorite stories, the use of cultural experiences to mitigate the impact of the construction of the Green Line light rail in St. Paul, MN on area businesses. In short, Springboard for the Arts trained a number of arts groups who went out and did everything from visual art projects to performances in Vietnamese restaurants, all of which helped draw people into area businesses despite the construction.

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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