I was recently drawn to the story of Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia opening a retail dancewear store out of their location. They spent $150,000 renovating a space that used to contain two offices into a street level store space. The director of the school noted most dancewear stores stock up to $150,000 in pointe shoes alone and they haven’t reached that level of stock quite yet.
Business Insider had an interesting video in December about the London based pointe shoe maker that supplies the NYC Ballet and the staff at the ballet that maintains the stock.
Rock School made the decision to open the store based on success they have had selling to their own internal constituencies and the fact that a number of longstanding dancewear stores had closed. Those stores had not only supplied the dance community, but also the intricately costumed participants of Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade.
They saw an opportunity to diversify their revenue stream in what they anticipate to be increasingly challenging financial times.
“There’s this perfect storm of already having a successful boutique, seeing the need in Philadelphia, and the potential for a new revenue stream to enable us to do our good work,” he said.
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As a nonprofit, the goal is not to make money, but to cover expenses including maintenance of the buildings. It can be a struggle, says Stark.
“We are anticipating that struggle could get more challenging with what we’re seeing in some of the proposed changes on a federal level,” he said. “We want to be ahead of that, and we don’t want to wait until there’s a problem. We want to proactively step forward and have a solution so that we can keep doing our good work.”
[…]
“Really we’re trying to monetize our asset to support our mission and to support the scholarship and the outreach programming that we do,” he said.
There is a lot of conversation among arts organizations these days about the need to create connection and show the value of arts organizations to the community. I worked with an artist this weekend who really exemplified this aesthetic.
We presented the Masters of Hawaiian Music which is typically George Kahumoku and a rotating roster of 2-3 other notable musicians from Hawaii. In this case it was Herb Ohta, Jr. and Sonny Lim. Kahumoku has been hosting the Maui Slack Key show for over 20 years and has been a musician for far longer than that. He was trained as a visual artist, but is also a farmer, cook, writer in addition to being a sculptor and printmaker. Definitely a renaissance man.
When I initially contracted the show, the local museum was planning having a quilt exhibition around the same time that was going to have 2 out of 20-30 quilts from Hawaii. Over the course of the year that evolved to 100% Hawaiian quilts. I arranged for Uncle George Kahumoku to speak about quilt making the night before the performance and then join the members of a local organization for a potluck and mini-cultural exchange.
The local organization said there would be 15-20 from their group at the talk and potluck and the museum didn’t know how many would attend from their mailing list.
We got to the museum and there were already 40-50 people gathered in the gallery. Uncle George turned around and told me to go back to his hotel room to get his guitar. He really enjoyed the experience because he had never seen so many Hawaiian quilts in one place. He would watch his grandmother and her friends make quilts for every newborn, but he had never seen one placed on a bed and used because they were treated as heirlooms.
He joked when he inherited his father’s quilt, his dad let him look at it and then closed the chest up a few minutes later and told him to never open it again. He didn’t mention if he gave his son the same instructions when he passed it on.
Later at the potluck, upon learning some students of hula came an hour to hear the museum talk, he made everyone move the tables and told them to dance while he played familiar songs on his guitar.
The next night, before the show he was out in the lobby greeting audience members and handing out slips to fill out to “win stuff.” The slips were obviously a way for him to collect address so he could contact people in different parts of the country to attend his shows when he was in the area. But he was also very much making himself available to the audience to chat with him rather than delegating this job to subordinates. (Okay, so he pressed me into helping him so maybe there was a little subordination going on.)
He was back out in the lobby at intermission with Ohta and Lim chatting with the audience. (I had to nudge them back on stage.) Then they were back immediately after the show until everyone left.
It is difficult to communicate the vibe and dynamic via text. His agent may have explained it best when she mentioned his instinct leans toward creating connections and socialization. She mentioned he was likely in his happy place at the museum talk and potluck more than even at the concert.
As much as he was trying to gather people’s contact information, his goal wasn’t to optimize that process. He started drawing names to give things away as soon as I introduced him rather than waiting until the end of the show and taking the opportunity to gather more names at intermission.
Also at some point he managed to collect the names of every staff member and volunteer in the building and acknowledged them all before the performance started. The morning after the public show, I got a long text from Uncle George telling me how much being able to see the quilts meant to him and how he would write about the experience in his memoirs. Again he praised our staff.
I knew by then that he was an exemplar of the level of sincerity and investment that arts organizations need to manifest in their interactions with their community.
In my post yesterday I briefly referenced research Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience have released showing that arts and cultural organizations have gained an increased perception of trust since the relaxing of pandemic restrictions.
Generally, exhibit based organizations (zoos, botanical gardens, museums) are regarded as being entertaining. That isn’t as true for performance based organizations. (my emphasis)
Other than live theater, performing arts organizations are on the whole perceived to be less entertaining than exhibit-based organizations.
But before you panic, symphonies/orchestras and other performing arts organizations, remember that these data represent market research, which includes perceptions from people who both do and donot attend these types of organizations. Those who visit with regularity tend to rate the entertainment value more highly … This finding may represent one of those perceptual mismatches between “insiders” and the broader market, where regular attendees who are more familiar with the type of experience offered will likely find it more engaging than those who do not know what to expect…Seeking out opportunities to increase relevance and help potential attendees engage with experiences may offer a potential pathway forward for creative performing arts leaders.
There is a similar result in terms of perceptions of being welcoming to people like me and likelihood to recommend. Live theater is perceived as being more welcoming and have a higher tendency to be recommended than orchestras and other performing arts organizations.
Interestingly, when it comes to perceptions of being assets to the community, live theater and orchestras are about on par with each other with other performing arts organizations trailing slightly. They attribute this to a mix of high level of trust performing arts and exhibit based organizations enjoy, perception of being educational, and existence as a venerable community institution (for longer established orgs, naturally.)
I am skipping over an immense amount of content they provide. I have almost completely omitted data for exhibit based organizations and probably could have written an entry three times as long based on the performing arts data alone. Additionally, after they provide a macro level view of these trends they drill down on each of the 11 organization types with a short description and infographic summarizing the perceptions that act as headwinds and tailwinds for each.
Last month, Forbes website hosted an article “6 Things That Arts Leaders Should Do Right Now” It is written in the context of all the funding cuts and policy changes being promulgated on the federal level.
Except for the suggestion to emphasize the economic impact of your work in the community to garner the support of local businesses and community leaders, the advice is generally to move away from transactional relationships with the community and focus on your core cause and role in society.
Identify the role that your organization has in society.
Magladry, who advises a number of museums, recounted how many museum directors are reviewing the various role that museums can play in communities (e.g., truthteller, protagonist, convener) and how their institutions can act in these roles. This strategizing might require more collaboration between managers and board members as well as artists and community members.
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Many of these recommendations are echoed in Alex Sarian’s book, The Audacity of Relevance, … Sarian argues that arts leaders must ask themselves: What are we good for? rather than What are we good at? In order to answer those questions, arts organizations should have a viable value proposition that tells people why they might engage with the organization and choose its goods and services over other institutions in a clear expression of its plans to address their wants and needs.
Karen Brooks Hopkins, formerly president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, suggests that arts organizations need to move away from thinking in terms of only philanthropy to thinking in terms of investment. “When communities that have a density of arts organizations are successful – economically, socially, and of course, artistically – then there is a reason for cities and municipalities of all kinds to make an ongoing financial commitment to them,”
The also article emphasizes the importance of changing the internal culture and structure of the organization to be less siloed so that everyone is working collaboratively to achieve these goals.
Break down siloed work environments.
Adapting to new challenges will require more internal collaboration between departments and more partnerships with other organizations in finding ways to serve audiences and communities. Reaching out and being open to new ideas and approaches may result in finding new funding sources and new audiences for your work.
Wow! I didn't know that there were places forcing the use of smartphones. You'd think theaters would want to encourage…