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Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice. I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/) My most recent role is as Theater Manager at the Rialto in Loveland, CO Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

How Do Arts Administrator Practice To Get Better?

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Sometimes a good headline is all it takes. When I saw a link to a New Yorker piece about “Bassoonfluencers,” I knew I had to at least take a look.

It turned out to be an article about a woman who posts her daily bassoon practice sessions on Instagram. She was inspired by violinist Hillary Hahn’s online posting of 100 days of her own practice regimen. The bassoonist, Morgan Davison, feels that being accountable to her followers to make a daily posting helps keep her motivated and evaluating the quality of her recordings has kept her on a path to improvement.

Readers may recall I made a post back in January about Hillary Hahn’s use of daydreaming as part of her practice routine.

I have long been interested in the process of practice and improvement so the article about Davison and other musicians using social media as part of their practice intrigues me.

On the other hand, it isn’t exactly a new idea for me. I have long felt writing this blog and having an accountability to my readers aids my effort to be a better arts administrator. The need to seek out new material to write about keeps me abreast of all sorts of developments in policy, theory, and practice. Additionally, it helps me perceive connections that wouldn’t seemingly intersect with arts and culture.

I would be interested to know if anyone else has a practice they feel improves their proficiency as an arts administrator.  Performers have long used recordings as a way to reflect upon and improve themselves. Posting those sessions on social media is only the newest manifestation of that.

Except for reading, going to conferences and networking, I am not sure if arts administration has had a similar tool to use. These things don’t provide for easy reflective assessment. Keeping a journal might be the best method.  It might be that there hasn’t been a perceived need for self-improvement in arts administration, but the challenges and speed of change over the last 20 years or so have revealed a need for it.

Teamwork? We Got Tons

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I read stories celebrating the fact that Covid-19 is finally making businesses recognize the benefits of telecommuting, confident that there will be this great revolution that will see people working from home in the future. To me it seems like it will be a terrible situation which will create greater class divides and income inequality.

I don’t think it takes a great deal of imagination to see how telecommuting will enable companies to more easily classify workers as independent contractors and not provide any health benefits. Because employees won’t be seeing and interacting with each other on a regular basis where they can compare notes about wages, work loads and other expectations, it will make it easier to underpay employees and prevent them from organizing to demand better pay.

Already employees are subsidizing the companies they work for by bearing the cost of electricity and internet connections. I know at least one person who is paying for her own mobile hotspot in order to do her job because the internet speed in her location is not fast enough.

Yes, it may provide greater work opportunities to people living in rural areas and may even improve the economies of some rural places as people move there, but again those places will need to have good technology infrastructure in place to support those workers. And not everyone will have the resources to move to places with a lower cost of living, nor will the potential pay for the work they are qualified to do justify the move.

Which is not to say the current work environment is any more beneficial. I just feel that except for people with higher status jobs, a move to telecommuting is potentially a worse situation unless accompanied by some strong worker protections, especially in regard to health insurance.

But the intent of this blog post isn’t really to get into a debate about socio-political-economic policy as much as it is to provide a context for potentially the biggest drawback of telecommuting — a degradation of creative interaction and teamwork.

Steve Jobs famously designed Pixar’s offices so all the restrooms and mailboxes were in a central location so that people working in disparate departments and projects would engage in casual “what are you working on?” conversations they wouldn’t otherwise have. His hope was that this would drive innovation and result in creative leaps.

Today on the CNN site there was an article titled “Minneapolis theater community uses stagecraft skills to support businesses of color in the aftermath of protests” One of the people interviewed made what is probably a very familiar comment to many of you:

“For anyone who has arts training, they are taught early on how to collaborate with people. And that collaboration comes with the ability to quickly organize and problem-solve,” said University Rebuild organizer Daisuke Kawachi, who pointed out the valuable stagecraft skills volunteers are now applying to their community.

And as with Pixar, physical proximity makes others more aware of resources than they might have normally been:

Kawachi estimated University Rebuild has supported more than 200 businesses. He said the number could be higher, because some requests have come on the spot while volunteers are in the field.
“We’ll go to a business and then their neighbor will say ‘come over.'”

Because we are steeped in the culture, a lot of us take a collaborative team environment for granted. As much as businesses have been saying that creativity is one of the top things they look for in employees, if telecommuting becomes widespread, collaboration and teamwork may become a greater competitive advantage as well.

Do We Need Hysterical Strength To Bring About Required Change?

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It appears Indiana University’s Center for Cultural Affairs was having some sort of virtual convening around the topic of New. Not Normal: Artists, the Creative Sector, and Innovation after the Pandemic. I only became aware of it because I was starting to see the videos recorded by some of the featured speakers appear in my Twitter feed today.

I watched the videos by economist Tyler Cowen and self-described philanthropy wonk Lucy Bernholz, both of whom had some thoughts about what the post-Covid future held for the arts. However, the person who envisioned the greatest necessity for transformational change was artist/activity Marc Bamuthi Joseph.

His suggestion was that instead of paying artists to create new works, they should be contracted to lead organizational leadership and stakeholders through a process of envisioning the role the organization should play in the community. In his words, rethinking theater as a site for creative wellness. This is based on the assumption that performing arts organizations can no longer exist with the goal of filling every seat. Even absent restrictions by governments, people will be reticent to return.

As an aside, something that has occurred to me that one has mentioned. If there is any group that turns out to attend performances in sufficient numbers to make an event financially viable, assuming they don’t become severely ill, their influence on what happens in arts and cultural may be cemented for decades to come. Depending on who constitutes that group of attendees, it could either be productive or detrimental in the long term.

Joseph says the smart performing arts entities will be those that embrace

“…social practice artistry, public health, fiscal health, brand expansion, digital production, embodied creative commons…how could currently empty theatres and music halls be utilized in service of social health, used as food service platforms, or testing sites or polling places or spill over waiting rooms for hospitals.”

Near the end of his video, citing the superhuman feats people are capable of when faced with a situation of alarming urgency, he suggests that the pandemic provides both the motivation and “hysterical strength” to rescue the collective arts and culture community from the threat being faced. Though he likens the strength of courage to that of survival so he may not be suggesting we are experiencing a type of disaster that gives rise to instinctive terror.

 

Many Stages Of Covid Coping

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I don’t know about everyone else, but not having a slate of performances on my schedule has kept me just as occupied as actually having events. While I am definitely grateful to still have a job, albeit warily eyeing its status, I have never not had enough to keep me occupied on an Monday-Friday, 8 am-5 pm+ basis.

It almost seems like we are going through the many stages of coronavirus coping analogous to the stages of grief. I am not sure how many stages we will go through for coronavirus, but this how I have partitioned my experience thus far:

First came the frenetic activity of crisis management, review of force majeure clauses, cancellations, communications and processing of refunds.

Then came the scrutinizing of governor’s orders and generation of seat maps, processes and shopping lists of sanitizing product in order to comply with what we anticipate the rules will be once we are permitted to re-open, whenever that may be.

Now things seem to be in the phase when organizations facing the prospect of cancelling their signature events try to formulate alternative plans. Their primary intent is to have something in place so that when they say they are cancelling their big event, they can simultaneously announce what smaller endeavors they will engaged in instead. The underlying goal being to create a situation where they retain relevance in the minds of community members in the absence of their big event.

I stayed late at work today to participate in my third Zoom meeting of the day to brainstorm contingency plans with a community organization. When I asked one of my staff if she would be on the meeting, she said she couldn’t because she was participating in the same conversation with another organization.

At the same time, it surprises me that some organizations are adamantly sticking to their traditional practices and ticketing policies–or at the very least, are doing a poor job communicating with their audiences. This week we had a spate of angry phone calls mistaking us for an organization in another part of the country that has a similar name. My guess is either something happened recently or some information was released that made 3-4 people so angry they didn’t realize the phone number they googled was at a place 800 miles away.

Though my understanding is that some ticketing services’ policies have exacerbated the refunding process so the blame may not lay entirely with venues.

In any case, I think it is clear to most everyone that you can’t take it for granted that you will retain the goodwill and reputation you may have built up. Those with poor reputations may find that a shift in personal priorities means there is no longer a begrudging tolerance of poor practices accorded them due to their stature and influence.

 

 

Your Zoom Meeting Is Really Just An Early Performance Experience

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At the end of last month, Nina Simon did the lead presentation for Opera America’s virtual conference. (Or perhaps it was just the lead presentation for the topic of “Creating Real Belonging.” I just saw there was a panel discussion on the topic that followed.)

She only specifically referenced opera for about 3 minutes of her 30 minute talk and some of her best ideas of the talk were in those three minutes so the whole thing is definitely applicable to any cultural discipline.

As you may or may not know Simon left her job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History to devote herself full time to Of/By/For All, an entity whose goal is “to help civic and cultural organizations matter more to more people.”

If you have read my previous posts about her, you know she espouses efforts to be more inclusive and welcoming by creating new doors both in a physical and metaphorical sense through which more members of the community can enter and participate with the organization.

Lest people worry about carving up their physical spaces to literally install more doors, what that really means is that the context of space can be very important to how welcome people feel. For a show they had on surfing, people gathered at the beach. For a Día de los Muertos program her museum had hosted annually, people asked why the heck it was happening there rather than the historic cemetery the museum managed.

Perhaps the most immediately relevant issue tackled was what our audiences might look like post-Covid-19. She mentioned that there was an immense opportunity right now to shift who in the community felt included and welcomed at your organization.

She also astutely pointed out that regardless of what you do, in all likelihood your organization will have no choice in who feels welcome at your organization post-Covid-19. There are going to be people who no longer feel secure entering the public sphere to the degree they had before.

She notes that a lot of organizations are using social media to keep their March 2020 core audience engaged during a time they can’t physically be present. She says now is the time to use social media to begin building relationships with the new groups whom you want to feel welcome rather than just doubling down on retaining those who already like you.

And social media provides a two way street — because people can’t be out and about, they are talking about what matters to them and what they are looking forward to doing on social media at a volume they hadn’t before. Organizations can learn quite a lot about those groups with a little resourcefulness and effort.

Simon encourages organizations to be very specific about who they are targeting. She says it shouldn’t just be “teenagers,” but rather “teens who love to sing,” “teens who love fashion,” or “creative misfits seeking an outlet for expression.” Being curious about people on social media is a good place to start to figure out what makes them feel welcome in a place like yours.

The one suggestion she had in regard to opera made me laugh because it ran contrary to all current performance and Zoom etiquette. As many people have noted, historically attending a performance was a pretty raucous affair. Citing some similar commentary about an early performance at La Scala, she suggested holding a virtual opera performance on Zoom where all the attendees were unmuted.

As always, she said interesting stuff I haven’t covered so watch the video.

 

Guides For Reopening Planning

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Last week I had a post on Arts Hacker featuring the Event Safety Alliance’s (ESA)  Reopening Guide for live event venues. You may have already seen the guide being passed around by a lot of people. Given the times, I feel like distribution hasn’t reached the point of over-saturation. When I start seeing it more frequently than ads for the presidential campaign, I’ll know it is time to stop.

In my Arts Hacker post, I focused on the idea of legal duty of care. I had been on a webinar with Steven Adleman, a lawyer who serves as Vice President of ESA, and he addressed the concerns many people had regarding their liability if people were exposed to Covid-19 while at their event.

In addressing that, he said firstly, that if someone is social enough to attend a live event, they probably interacted with others so much that it would be difficult to prove your event was the source of their illness.

None of which excuses you from sanitizing the hell out of everything in sight and implementing diligent operating practices.

Which bring us to the ESA Reopening Guide’s statement about a duty of care. I suspect Adleman wrote it because much the same content appeared in the webinar he conducted. I quoted it in my ArtsHacker post, but feel it is significant enough to repeat here:

“As a matter of common law, everyone has a duty to behave reasonably under their own circumstances.  Consequently, there is no such thing as ‘best’ practices.  There are only practices that are reasonable for this venue, this event, this crowd, this time and place, during this pandemic.  Because few operational bright lines would make sense, The Event Safety Alliance Reopening Guide is designed to help event professionals think through their own circumstances.  In the order than one plans an event, the Reopening Guide looks closely at the health and safety risks involved in reopening public spaces, then proposes risk mitigation measures that are likely to be reasonable under the circumstances of the smaller events and venues that will reopen first.”

Even though it just appeared last week, I wrote and submitted my Arts Hacker post around May 15. In the interim, the Performing Arts Center Consortium (PACC) released their own reopening guide. It is a little nicer than the ESA guide, especially in regard to the color coded charts outlining what should be done in different phases of reopening.

I am not going to even pretend to hide my annoyance at the existence of these two guidebooks released around the same time.

It would really have been great if the ESA and PACC guides had been combined. Lest you think they were separate efforts developed independently of each other, the PACC board of advisors is listed as contributors to the ESA guide, together, in the exact same order as they appear in the PACC guide. There is no excuse that they were unaware of the separate efforts.

In the past, I would just shrug at similar duplicative efforts by competing groups. But during these times when half the day is spent trying to figure out how our organizations and/or individual practices might manifest in the next normals and the other half of the day is spent trying to understand how to keep employees/co-workers/family/friends safe in the face of uncertainty about the threat the virus poses, the need to be aware of and expend effort to track down two sources of advice contributes to the problem, not the solution.

 

 

Meeting Your Legal Duty Of Care In Post-Covid Reopening

Keep Up Your Long Distance Relationship With Audiences

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Thanks to funding from a mysterious third party, today my state presenter consortium was able to participate in a webinar lead by Collen Dilenschneider and her colleagues at IMPACTS where they discussed the data Colleen has been writing about on her blog.

If you have been following her posts, or my posts on her posts, you know that she is currently releasing weekly updates about people’s willingness to participate in cultural events. By and large, that is what she shared today, including data from  her most recent post on factors that will drive participation.

If anything her research reinforces a concept that has been discussed for years now — the programming doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the experience and relationships associated with your organization. While people will be willing to participate in an environment where they can exert greater control over their experience earlier than one where they feel they have to cede control (i.e. gardens/museums/historical sites before crowded theaters), every other factor she listed in the webinar and her post today are about relationships.

There will be data they will release next week showing that observing what others in ones community are doing now replaces government declarations about reopening by a slight margin as the #2 contributor to confidence about attending.  If the general tenor of the community is open to re-engaging in communal life, people are more likely to start attending sooner.

Another big factor she mentioned in the webinar and her post today was the importance of keeping awareness of your organization at the forefront of people’s minds. If you have been quiet as a way to save marketing funds, it may prove detrimental to your ability to re-engage people’s participation in the future. Just providing content on social media or sending out regular emails with status updates is better than totally hunkering down and going silent.

Dilenschneider also mentioned that the trust you engendered when making the decision to shutdown to help flatten the curve can contribute to people feeling secure about returning. If the last impressions people had before you shutdown were that you were taking steps to sanitize surfaces and keep them safe, they will feel more assured that your decision to reopen reflects a confidence that your plans and procedures will provide a safe environment.

Obviously, not everyone will feel safe about returning at the same time and the appeal of what is being offered will definitely always be a factor, even in times when risk and reward are more in balance. The overall quality of one’s relationship with the organization will always loom large.

Dance Got Them Through Tough Times Before

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There was a piece on Vox today that I jumped on with interest because the title seemed to imply it was about a family run dance school applying for the Paycheck Protection Program.  I should have just read the subtitle more closely. There are only a couple of sentences about their interaction with the PPP near the end of the article and the subtitle summarizes it pretty well:  The bank rejected them for not having a pre-existing business relationship and now they are waiting on an application submitted through an online broker.

The rest of the piece is worth reading because it emphasizes the importance of developing relationships with your constituency. The mother and daughter running the Connecticut dance school have adults and children paying to take dance class via Zoom. (The other daughter also teaches in the school, but is on maternity leave and wasn’t interviewed.) I have talked to dance schools in my local area and they bemoan the difficulty of teaching over video. One woman says her non-touch screen video display has fingerprints all over it because she keeps trying to correct her students’ postures as she would for an in-person class.

For the CT dance school in the Vox article, they had an outstanding obligation to offer the children’s class because parents had pre-paid through June. The adult classes are run on a drop-in basis, but there is enough of a demand for both live and taped classes for that age group. According to the owners of the school, there is a lengthy social period built in before and after the formal class session where students catch up with each other.

From how they talk about the evolution of their school, it appears this sense of community developed over years of their in-person classes.

Founder Linda Freyer says,

So we started teaching adults in the morning and children in the afternoon — and the adults wanted this art form, they wanted to learn classical ballet, and they became passionate. I have adults that started, who never had dance training as children, and with a lot of work and discipline I got them en pointe. In toe shoes. They never believed that could happen! I have women who are still dancing with me 25 years later. We have gone through deaths of parents, we have gone through breast cancer, we have gone through brain tumors, we have gone through divorces, we have gone through so many life-changing crises, and they find solace coming to this ballet class.

[…]

We are such a community — I was teaching a class on the morning of 9/11, and it was adults, and people were drifting in saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear?” We were shell-shocked. And I remember one dancer saying, “Do you want to just cancel class?” We were speechless. And one of our students looked at the group and said, “Please teach us, Linda. I have a funny feeling this class will be the highlight of the next period of time.” So I turned off the news and I taught that class, and I will tell you — the gals who were in that class still talk about it.

Petra, the daughter who was also interviewed for the article mentioned she had danced all the way through college, but started a career in finance before deciding it wasn’t for her and pursued training in dance education. Petra’s story along with her mother’s discussion of adult students developing their skills to a place they could dance en pointe reminded me of a post I wrote on Lisa Mara who started a dance company for people who loved dance enough maintain their dance practice, but were pursuing other avenues as a career. The interview in Vox made it sound like the dance school had similarly cultivated an environment for adults who wished to rigorously pursue an avocation in dance.

At Least You Can Put Your Feet Up On The Seat In Front Of You

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There has been a lot of conversation among my peers about how to revamp our venue seating charts to comply with social distancing. Some people were seating in every other row with 3-4 seats between every single person, the latter part which seemed crazy to me.

At my venue, we worked up a plan that skipped every other row and had four seats open and four seats blocked so that families could be seated together. We found a way to set our ticketing system so that if you bought two of four open seats, it would immediately block the adjacent open seats so strangers couldn’t buy the seats next to you.

I figured it would be a month or two before any state got to the point of allowing live performance events to occur.

To my surprise, someone already put this general model into action. I was reading a piece in San Francisco Classical Voice because it extensively quotes Adaptistration author Drew McManus when I came across this bit of information:

In fact, the first test of a live-concert in the U.S. was to have taken place May 18, with a socially-distanced performance by country singer Travis McCready at TempleLive in Fort Smith, Arkansas. However, on May 12 the state’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, announced the state’s health department would be issuing a cease-and-desist order for the concert due to the extension of the state’s coronavirus lockdown measures.

Had the concert proceeded, it would have taken place in a hall with a capacity of 1,100 reduced to 229. The audience would have had their temperatures taken when they arrived, been directed to their seats along one-way walkways, with a limit of 10 people in the bathroom at any one time. Seating would be in “pods,” defined as “small gatherings restricted to friends and relatives comfortable with sitting together.” Each group, between two and 12 in number, would be seated together while the rest of the audience sat six feet from one another other. In addition, the concert’s Ticketmaster page said TempleLive planned to sanitize the venue using fog sprayers and would require masks to be worn by the audience and staff. The three-member band would maintain social distancing onstage but had not planned to wear masks.

Even with these limitations, the concert was sold out. Would it have been a preview of coming attractions?

Other than feeling allowing up to twelve people who didn’t regularly live in close quarters to sit together might be problematic to efforts to control the spread, I sort of wish the concert could have happened so we could start to get some tips on traffic control through the different spaces.

Since I am clearly wrong in my assumption no one would be trying to do it yet, has anyone heard of any other instances where someone has actually executed a post-Covid revised seating plan?

Update: Thanks to reader Rachel Condie who pointed out that the concert in Ft. Smith did happen after the venue challenged the governor’s order as inconsistent with the standards applied to churches. A New York Times article provides the details of their audience flow process.

Data Driven In Word, Not Deed

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Interesting article on Harvard Business Review site titled Is Your Business Masquerading as Data-Driven?

Now you probably feel that when are stumbling blind through an environment everyone says is without precedent, no existing data will aid in productive decision making. I suggest this is actually the perfect time to both scrutinize the data you do have on hand very closely to provide you with insights you may have been overlooking for years and to create processes and procedures to more effectively collect and analyze data moving forward.

I have written about data driven decision making before, as has Drew McManus. In most of these posts we both focused on the influence of Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) which often overrides data informed decisions and focuses on simple numbers absent of context and analysis.

The Harvard Business Review takes a different approach focusing more on employees vs. supervisors/board members. In both scenarios, people are acting in a manner that is not conducive to a company wide culture of data.

These organizations are “masquerading” as data-driven, meaning they have the data, technologies, and even the expertise, but their culture and processes are not aligned with those elements to produce the best outcomes. For example, data might be a part of every decision made, but employees may be making decisions first, then looking for data to back them up.

Factors like these explain the disconnect between investment levels and the disappointing results some companies report seeing. Businesses have more data than ever, but a culture rooted in top-down decision making and traditional tools like weekly reports and preconfigured dashboards means they cannot take full advantage of it.

Among the factors the authors say contribute to this situation are:

“Your Employees are Making Decisions Based on the Tyranny of Averages” – this encompasses modeling the average of all cases as the optimal approach rather than making note of significant differences. For example, if you determined in 2013 there was no need to ensure your website looks good on phones because the average ticket buyer uses a desktop computer, not only would you have created a barrier for younger users, you are creating a situation that will reinforce desktop users as an average user because phone users will have no interest visiting the webpage. Given the demographics of people using phones to navigate the web have broadened since 2013, your online purchases would probably have dropped even as the average remained steady.

Everyone Has Their Own Version of the Truth When employees argue that “my truth is better than your truth,” it’s a sign you’re masquerading as data-driven. Each team may be acting on data, but if they have different information, they are bound to disagree and some may even be misled…Getting stakeholders to agree on which data is important establishes a common source of truth to guide decisions and strategy.

More broadly, data should be available uniformly throughout an organization so all teams have access to the same information. The goal is outcomes, not ownership, and this may require a cultural shift that loosens the grip on data among senior managers.

Decisions Precede Data – this is the aforementioned scenario where you make a decision and then seek the data that confirms you are correct.

Employees Have Misguided Incentives – For many organizations this could be a focus on an ingrained subscription model or on optimizing the experience for high level donors which disincentivizes flex/single/group sales or cultivating young professional social groups or significantly changing the way people experience the organization. The way some museums in Philadelphia are using guest docents or with the same cultural background as the artifacts on display immediately comes to mind.

Some Things To Consider Before Getting In To Performance Streaming

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The challenges of Covid-19 raise for arts organizations has resulted in a number of valuable resources being produced. When I came across them, I am often torn between writing about them on this blog and creating a post for ArtsHacker. Since the latter is more specifically focused on resources for arts professionals, I often opt to write something up for that site.

Let me tell you, it often hurts me to make this decision because I am inevitably trying to find something to post about on Butts In The Seats and it means I gotta keep looking. But fortunately, I can point to the Arts Hacker article at a later time here.

That is a long way round of saying…I am going to be pointing you at a few ArtsHacker pieces I wrote over the next week or so, dear reader.

The most recent one is on the legal considerations for streaming content. I think I am pretty secure in saying that as revenue from live performance rights decline, organizations that administer performance rights are going to start paying closer attention to what is being performed in people’s living rooms.

The Alliance of Performing Arts Conferences issued a guide on The Legal Landscape of Live Streaming that covers a lot of the questions about livestreaming content as well as providing good information about what the pros and cons of different streaming services, depending on your goals and needs.

On the legal side, one of the first things you need to know is that your live performance license, whether it was for music, musicals, plays, etc doesn’t cover live streaming. Your live streaming license in turn doesn’t cover the rights to make a recording of your live stream available for later viewing. None of the above covers permission required from the content creators be they performers, designers, arrangers, etc., or the various unions that might be involved.

Since your streamed content is reaching a much larger audience than the room capacity of your venue, there may be profanity laws of other jurisdictions as well as intellectual property rights of any brands, logos, and trademarks which may appear to consider as well.

Check out my post and the guide for more info.

 

Legal Considerations For Live Streaming Performances

Marquee Messaging For Morale

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A number of theaters around the country have started posting messages on their marquees to bolster the morale of their community. Here at my venue, we were trying to think of a message to post on our marquee so my marketing director did some research and gathered these images. I identified the ones I know or could figure out. I apologize for not knowing every place. I offer this as a bit of inspiration for other places that might want to do something similar.

I wanted to figure out messaging that was more tailored to our community. We discovered that Little Richard, who had been born here in Macon, had said “I love Macon. I love it better than anywhere I’ve ever been in my life,” so we came up with the following images. We had the images up on Friday, May 1 and then Little Richard died a week later which made the whole thing a little bittersweet for us.

The third screen about picking up the beat was something we developed in consultation with the local convention and visitors bureau.

Creativity Is Not The Last Thing People Need

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When I mentioned organizations addressing issues of health and safety in my post yesterday, I was thinking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Between high school and my first couple years of college, I felt like every class except for foreign language and mathematics brought Maslow’s hierarchy up as a way to open up a conversation about what motivates humans. If you aren’t familiar with the pyramid below, Maslow’s theory said that the lower needs on the pyramid below had to be satisfied before people could move on to higher concerns. So you need to be secure in physiological and safety needs before you can work on intimate relationships.

It should be noted that despite the popularity of this model, there is no scientific data to back it and studies have found that different cultures prioritize needs differently.

 

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

I mention these criticisms of Maslow’s hierarchy because it is easy to look at this pyramid and get the impression that creativity has to wait until all these other needs are met. This reinforces the idea that arts and culture are a luxury that should yield before all the necessities have been addressed. I think we all know there will always be something else that needs to be solved if you subscribe to that thinking.

I will confess that I engaged in that mode of thought at one time. I was elated by the idea that being able to engage in creativity was a sign that you were approaching your fullest self, but depressed when I realized you pretty much had to be independently wealthy if you were going to check-off all the lower levels in order to get to the peak.

I think the case can easily be made that creativity has an important role at lower levels of the pyramid. Shared creative activities contributes to belongingness. Social groups or clubs whether oriented around religion, service, sports or creative activities all create a sense of belonging.

So too does creativity contribute to the next level up, esteem. Feeling that you have mastered a technique or have enough of a grasp of the fundamentals to metaphorically start drawing outside the lines with confidence can bolster self-esteem.

Continuing to develop all your skills, be it creative, personal, emotional, professional, etc eventually leads you to self-actualization as defined by Maslow and others. However, creativity for its own sake, (as opposed in pursuit of securing safety and physiological needs), begins to factor in much earlier.

So don’t be fooled by this popular image into thinking that creative activities are the last thing that people need in their lives.

Can’t Comp And Discount Your Way To An Audience

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You may have seen the video message by Guthrie Theatre artistic director Joseph Haj last week where he laid out why the Guthrie wouldn’t be offering their content virtually as other places had chosen to do. Instead, they will be producing three shows from March through August 2021.

In the video, he makes the case for the value of live performance based on the shared experience. Apparently there was a study in 2017 that showed audiences hearts beat in unison during live performances which generates a sense of trust and empathy you don’t experience when watching a video. (You also don’t get footnotes. I would really be interested in learning more about that study.)

I don’t know about you, but last week I started having a hard time remaining focused on Zoom sessions that were providing content that was of great importance and interest to me and my organization. Lord help me if I had pets or children around to distract me as well.  Trying to deliver educational content is likewise experiencing problems with participation and retention of information.

Granted, the fact that people are trying to use a virtual platform in the same way they conduct face to face meetings is probably to blame for this disconnection. In the future we may see presentation techniques and technological features that will make the experience more valuable. Think about the fact that the first motorized vehicles literally were horseless carriages because that was the dominant mode of transportation at the time. There has been quite a bit of refinement since then in terms of design and use.

The biggest cause for concern should be that human contact and empathy is what will be refined away as the virtual delivery experience improves. While there is definitely a romance to horse based transportation and the internal combustion engine has created environment pollution problems, I don’t think there were concerns that traveling swiftly and smoothly in an environment of improved climate control was going to undermine societal bonds. (Though certainly, it may have eroded the human-equine relationship.)

If anything, the challenges of these times is probably going to really clarify where the true value of the arts resides. It is going to be the relationships that organizations build with their audiences that will bring them back. Once organizations answer the questions of health and safety, the opportunity to share an experience with others is going to be the compelling appeal, not discounts and comps.  It is going to be important to listen and pay attention to what people expect of their experience. The expectations probably won’t be exactly the same as they were in January. The demographics of those most interested in inhabiting  spaces and participating in activities may be quite different as well.

 

Lottery With Your Latte

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There was an article on Arts Professional UK a couple weeks ago that presented an intriguing idea–the use of receipt lotteries to fund arts & education.

Receipt lotteries started in Taiwan in 1951 as a way to prevent under reporting of sale tax collections. Basically, every sales receipt you receive has a series of numbers printed on it. Every couple months, they have a drawing to determine a winner. A number of other countries have set up similar arrangements.

However, it doesn’t have to be done every couple months. Things could be set up so that there was a drawing for smaller prizes every Saturday and you just needed to go online to check if you won something.

There are many benefits of this. First, there isn’t a concern about gambling or that that lower income people are targeted for participation if everyone is entered when they buy groceries or go see a football game. So if your state arts and education funding comes from the lottery, you may feel less discomfort about benefiting from a problematic situation.

Second, it encourages loyalty to retailers that offer the lottery numbers on their receipts. This can be a boon for states who are concerned that online retailers are not remitting sales tax properly. If consumers prefer to buy their products from an online business that provide them a good chance to win $200 at the end of the week, retailers have an incentive to register, and therefore remit taxes, with each state.

Obviously it would be good to have a handful of lottery services that states used in common rather than requiring retailers to register individually with the 40 or so states that have sales taxes of some sort. Most places who use receipt lotteries have seen an increase in sales tax revenue.

I believe I read that in Taiwan, if you aren’t interested in participating in the lottery, there are collection boxes in to which you can drop your receipt and they will be given to charities.

Obviously, the biggest flaw in this sort of arrangement is that in times like these when no one is buying anything, then the funding available to arts and education drops to nearly nothing. But it is highly likely very little money is going to be allocated to the arts by state governments through the usual legislative process anyway.

The other problem, like with most lotteries, is that there is no guarantee the state government won’t divert the revenue being set aside for arts and education to some other cause on a regular basis either.

Alas, Germany Didn’t Allocate $54 Billion In Relief Funding To The Arts

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You may remember reading that Germany had rolled out €50 billion ($54 billion) in funding for the arts a few weeks back. The news was touted as putting arts funding in the US to shame. While it may ultimately still be the case that aid to arts will put the US to shame, the claim that all that money is going to the arts is not accurate.

I had received an email about some arts research from long time friend of the blog, Rainer Glapp, who lives in Bremen, Germany. I asked him how things were going with all that funding. He responded that there was a big misunderstanding about all the money being focused on the arts and culture.

He explained the money is intended for small businesses and freelancers. While artists can apply, the money is intended for rent of venues and other expenses and not for personal expenses. He told me that primarily, direct funding for arts comes from the 16 states rather than the federal government.

As I went back to find articles about the €50 billion I had seen, I discovered that pretty much every website references the same ArtsNet article. There is a correction to that article dated March 27 which reads:

The government has clarified a point of confusion in its press release and previous reports in the media, stating that the aid package for small businesses and freelancers in culture, art, and media will come from a larger package for solo self-employed people and small businesses that totals €50 billion.

So artists and arts organizations won’t be benefiting as well as first impressions had indicated.

Rainer graciously dug up some articles on the situation which are written in English. One on the Deutsche Welle website illuminates the problems artists are facing:

But on April 7, the Alliance of Freelance Arts, representing 18 branches, replied that freelance and solo artists and their small business teams had “hardly any” access to such federal measures.

“This is due on the one hand to the lack of federal guidelines on the recognition of work-related living expenses as business or employment expenditures and on the other hand to the fact that the [16 German] states tend to interpret administrative leeway to the disadvantage of freelance artists,” said the alliance.

[..]

Already, the German Music Council (Deutscher Musikrat/DMR) had demanded a monthly basic income grant of €1,000 ($1,088) for “all freelance creative professionals” over the next six months.

Another website Rainer shared provides a chronology of how the coronavirus impacted cultural activities in Germany. It reinforces the fact there is no federal relief funding focused on helping cultural entities and illustrates just how varied the support for artists is in each of the states.

However, there is no specific federal support programme designed to meet the specific needs of the cultural sector. This is still being demanded by the German Cultural Council (April 22), the Cultural Council of North Rhine-Westphalia (April 16) and other associations, in the form of a cultural infrastructure fund.

[…]

The possibility of claiming support services — in addition to the instruments at the federal level — is also very much dependent on the state the applicant lives in…. Baden-Württemberg have an emergency aid programme for freelancers that allow them to apply for EUR 1180 grant money for up to three months, Bavaria offers EUR 1,000 a month in basic payments, but only for members of the artists’ social fund. In Hamburg, self-employed can apply for EUR 2,500 in addition to federal funds. In Bremen, artists can apply for up to EUR 2,000 in emergency aid (in addition to a purchase programme for visual artists); in Saxony-Anhalt EUR 400; and in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania there are bridging grants for artists available in the amount of EUR 2,000. The support fund for artists supported in NRW (EUR 2,000 per month) was only equipped with a total of EUR 5 million, so that only a small proportion of the applicants could take advantage of this fund. Other federal states (e.g. Berlin and Saarland) had to discontinue their support programmes due to over expenditure. In other federal states there are — in addition to the federal programme — no state programmes, for example Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia.

Things To Consider As States Start To Re-Open (#1 Buy A Tape Measure)

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There are a lot of stories out there about how some US states are allowing businesses to open. To my knowledge, none have reached the point of allowing live performance venues to open yet, but a lot of people are caught between feelings of anticipation and anxiety.

It would be great to get back to work even on a small scale and then gradually ramp up, but there are lot of things to consider, including public reaction to your decisions.  While you are pulling out your tape measure so you can figure out what your seating/attendance capacity will be if you need to maintain six feet of distance, you may want to check out a post I did on Arts Hacker about resources created by the Downtown Professionals Network to help Arts & Cultural entities prepare their spaces.

There is also guidance for restaurants and retail if you happen to have food service and merchandising operations.

The special website also has resources to help people in community leadership roles. If you haven’t already taken up that mantle, this is the time to do so. Whatever emerges as the next normal, you want to be taking a proactive role contributing to policy and practice as well as reinforcing the value your organization contributes to the community.

Guidance On Covid-19 Re-Openings, Even If Only Virtually

Always A Good Sign When Survey Respondents Crash Your Website

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Some encouraging news for all you data hungry folks. The special Covid-19 version of the Culture Track survey I mentioned last week launched today…but only for some communities.

Apparently there was such a large last minute surge of interest in participating (thank to my blog post, I am sure) that they realized their servers could crash if even a portion of those receiving an email tried visiting the survey site this morning. As a result, my organization has been asked to wait until Saturday to distribute our link.

If that many people are being surveyed, this portends good things for collecting valuable data.

My staff and I had an opportunity to take a look at the survey before it went live. Any data we entered would have been wiped last night in preparation for the actual roll out. The interface was easy to use and was set up so you were often only asked a question relevant to a previous response. For example, if you indicated you weren’t interested in going to a live performance after local restrictions were lifted, the survey would ask what motivated those concerns about live performances but wouldn’t ask about museums if you indicated a willingness to go there.

I was happy to see they were asking questions from previous surveys with an eye to identifying what activities people viewed as cultural events. Like the survey results from 2017, categories like going to the park, eating/cooking food and attending food festivals were in there.

I definitely look forward to seeing the results.

However, if you can’t wait for the survey to finish, head over to Collen Dilenschneider’s blog if you aren’t visiting already. I have seen and heard her weekly updates on survey data mentioned in emails and Zoom meetings dozens of times in the last two weeks. I confess a secret satisfaction at having read the blog for several years now.

The Culture Track survey asks many of the same questions Dilenschneider’s does about how open people are to participating in cultural activities and how long they think it might be before they engage/re-engage. There are really promising signs in the responses she has been getting. While interest in returning is not uniform across all types of cultural organizations, the interest in participation continues to increase.

However, there are a number of steps organizations need to take and communicate to potential audiences to allow them to feel confident about showing up.

 

 

What Questions Are You Asking That Result In Good Conversations?

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I don’t know about everyone else, but I started feeling like the phrases “unprecedented time” and “we’re all in this together” got overused pretty quickly these last couple months.  This may sound cynical, but if you really want to communicate empathy, you need to sound like you are actually making an effort instead of mouthing empty platitudes. (A phrase which itself is overused.)

Granted, it can be difficult to express original sentiments when you are feeling pressured by the times. Fortunately, there are some creative people providing us with some useful resources.

There was a piece on Quartz by Elizabeth Weingarten where she supplies, “20 questions to ask instead of “How are you doing right now?” She notes that even in the best of times, that question comes off as rote recitation of pleasantries and right now we need to be exhibiting greater care for each other. These are good questions for developing closer relationships with everyone – family, friends, co-workers, audience members, funders, etc.

Some of the 20 questions she listed that I really appreciated:

What part of your shelter-in-place residence have you come to appreciate the most?

What habit have you started, or broken, during the quarantine?

What are some things you have realized that you don’t really need?

What’s something that you miss that surprises you? What’s something that you don’t miss that surprises you?

What’s the most generous act you’ve seen recently?

How do you want this experience to change you? How do you think it will?

What do you hope we all learn or take away from this experience?

I guess a good 21st question, (and naturally, there are many more), is which of the 20 questions resonate most with you?

It wasn’t until I started cutting and pasting these into the post that I realized the ones I was selecting were strongly oriented toward self-improvement outcomes.

Weingarten wants to know what sort of conversations result from using these questions. Her email is at the bottom of the article so bookmark it so you can report back.

The Visuals Of Open Arts Organizations As A Sign Of Economic Vibrancy

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I noticed something very interesting on Friday morning as I was checking out different news sites. It appears that on at least a subconscious level a number of news outlets equate theaters with a return to economic vibrancy.

On the NBC News site, there was a picture of the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta.  Except for a single mention that movie theaters could open starting today, the entire piece was about the concerns hair salons, tattoo and massage parlors had about being permitted to re-open last Friday. Everyone interviewed for the story was associated with one of these businesses, no one from a theater involved in the story.

palace theatre atlanta

Within five minutes, I came across another article on Vox.com that was about unemployment benefits in Georgia, but used a picture of The Fox Theatre which had no association with the article at all other than being located in Georgia.

I sent an email out to the members of the state presenting consortium pointing out the use of theatre images as a type of shorthand for a return to vibrancy. I suggested we remember this fact when we moved to an operating environment which felt like the next normal. I don’t know if it is the result of good advocacy work by local, regional and national arts entities, but if there are positive associations between the arts organizations re-opening and socioeconomic vibrancy, it is something to leverage in communications with the community, donors, funders, and government.

In response to my group email, a colleague in Marietta, GA sent out a picture of his theater as it appeared on NBC Nightly News the evening before. Again, he said the broadcast didn’t mention the theater directly.

It can definitely worth paying attention to the images being associated with positive narratives to see if arts organizations are included. Perhaps even something to invite if the opportunity presents itself.

Give Seth Godin A Guest Pass And He Will Bring 80 Friends

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Capacity Interactive’s Erik Gensler scored a podcast interview with Seth Godin to discuss what the post-Covid-19 future for the arts might look like.  There is a transcript of the interview available if you would rather consume the content in that way.

I always wondered why so many of Godin’s blog posts had resonance with arts and culture. I was unaware that Godin’s father worked for the Studio Arena Theatre and his mother was on the board of the Albright-Knox Museum, both in Buffalo, NY.

He says what will be valuable as we emerge into the next normal after Covid-19 concerns abate will largely still be what is valuable now – connection, scarcity and the sense of being an insider that comes from scarcity. He doesn’t feel digitizing the great art of the world and putting it online has sufficient value for people. The ratio of people who line up to take a selfie with the Mona Lisa far outweighs the number of people who look at the Mona Lisa online. Even though a huge number of people have shuffled past the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and the experience isn’t scarce in terms of absolute numbers, having a selfie provides the “here I am, and your not” sense of being an insider.

Godin takes on the common claim cultural organizations make that their audience is “everybody” rather than having a sense of who your content is for. He says that basically to sell out, you only need to attract about 1% of the population in your community. (Given the population of NYC, that number approaches zero.)

So, if all you need is one percent, what that means is, you would benefit by actively ignoring what 99% of the people say they want. Do not compromise anything for them because if you compromise something for them, the ones who weren’t going to come anyway, the ones who might’ve come aren’t going to come, either. And this is the myth of the Broadway show with a TV star in it because the Broadway producer says, “I don’t have a TV star; I can’t get people to come to my show,” but when you do the math—and I’ve seen the report—more than half the people at a Broadway show on any given night go to several Broadway shows a year, maybe 10. So, you’re not actually trying to get someone who is so unaware that they’re only willing to come if it’s a TV star. You’re trying to get someone who’s going to come because it’s good

Initially I was a little concerned that his injunction against compromising anything was a rejection of the necessity to change experiences and add program variety, but pretty soon it was clear he was against any sort of explicit or implicit message that people did not belong or weren’t welcomed.

Godin used the example of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He said if the company was smart, they would never pay for an ad Gensler would see because he isn’t their target audience. The one thing Harley-Davidson knows is that ads don’t sell their bikes, Harley riders do. The riders insist their friends join them.

Godin says the art is the marketing. Marketing isn’t happens after the art is created. When the Harley rider is inviting others to participate in something they value, there is no distinction between the product and the marketing.

While not everything can be promoted successfully by word of mouth, Godin is basically criticizing the practice of putting marketing and fundraising in distinct silos, divorced from the creative process.

Of course, the product consumed isn’t the art, it is the whole experience. Which is why there is such a push to events using more images of audiences enjoying an experience with family and friends rather than performers posing artfully with props or musical instruments.

This is the part of the podcast Gensler and Godin started talking about some really great ideas that have been implemented.

Gensler talks about how the Cleveland Orchestra creates connections with first time attendees:

…when someone is a first-time visitor to see a concert, they will send someone over to the seat with a box full of goodies and let them choose some branded merchandise and say, “Thank you for coming. I hope you enjoy the concert.” They did research and found that those people that get that experience of being seen are three times more likely to come back in six months than the people who didn’t get that experience,

Godin uses the example of the Museum of Modern Art which allows members to bring guests in an hour before the museum opens. He asked if there was a limit and was told no, so he brought 80 people and gave them a personal tour of the museum. He said the staff clearly were not prepared for this, but that the museum should be encouraging this sort of thing.

“And the question is, why isn’t this a feature? Why is it a bug that creating a way for members to act like big shots if they bring groups with them is what we’re talking about here. That is handing your biggest fans a megaphone. How can you make it easy for them to do that and impossible for anyone else to do it because it’s the scarcity that creates the value, right?”

Godin suggested something that hadn’t be implemented anywhere that could be used in connection with live performance.

“…what happens if, after a live performance, everybody in the room—remember they all have cell phones; they’re all waiting for their car at the parking garage or on the way home—gets an email and it says, “We’re doing an after show talk just for you. Two of the actors are in the dressing room, taking their makeup off. Click here to see it,” and live 30, 40, 100 people tune in and they’re commenting on what went right and what went wrong that night on stage, letting us feel like something magical actually happened, something live. It opens the door to the next thing. It gives us one more thing to talk about.”

Gensler said that a lesson they learned at Capacity Interactive was that people have much more potential to influence participation by others after they have purchased tickets. He said they used to stop showing people ads once they made a purchase, but realized that was a bit shortsighted because people can become more engaged after they have made the decision to participate and once they have attended, are ready to be enthusiastic recommenders. So they provided more content to people who have seen the show in the hope they would put their stamp of approval on the event by forwarding on to others.

There’s one campaign we did where the content from after they saw the event was nine times higher than any of the content we show them before and it’s that exact reason, because they’re passionate. And the crazy thing is, we thought our metric for that kind of campaign was getting people to share it and we’re like, “Oh, wow, hundreds of people are sharing this. This is great.” But we didn’t expect was the amount of money that those posts make. Certain campaigns will … those will sell way more tickets.

As text and quote heavy as this post has been, there is a lot of their conversation I skipped over. Give it a listen/read as there is likely to be something in there that will inspire you.

Get Legit Data About Covid-19’s Influence On Your Audience

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N.B. I just noticed the deadline to apply to participate in end of day, Thursday, April 23 so if you have an interest, send an email to Matthew Jenetopulos listed at the bottom of the Culture Track page.

Long time readers of the blog know that I am a big fan of the results of the Culture Track survey conducted every three years to gauge shifting attitudes and perceptions about cultural activities. The people behind the survey, LaPlaca Cohen are teaming up with Slover Linett Audience Research to conduct a special Covid-19 version of their research project and are looking for arts and cultural organizations to help distribute a survey to their audiences.

While you may be reluctant to ask your audiences to complete a survey during challenging times, it can be quite worth your while to participate because Culture Track will provide you with the results for your mailing list in the context of national trends.

You’re probably interested in this study because you want to understand your audience’s and community’s needs at this crucial time, and because you want to be able to earn their continued engagement and support. We’re working to develop an online interface that will let you log in to view your audience-members’ survey responses and download that data for your own use (with no visibility into the data of other organizations’ survey respondents). We’re hoping that this tool will also let you compare your data to the U.S. population averages and to the aggregate of other cultural audiences nationally. Of course, we’ll also be creating a series of special-edition Culture Track reports and web materials based on our analysis of all the data, which will be freely available online.

I had gotten an email about the study a week ago but it slipped my mind amid all daily challenges we face so I have to credit Nina Simon for reminding me and getting me moving on it. (And also for providing a title for this post)

The Wallace Foundation is funding the effort so there will be no cost to you. They will provide you with a unique link to send to a segment of your mailing list. Segment is the operative word. They ask that you send the survey link to people who have both high engagement as subscribers/donors/multi-year ticket buyers, as well as those who have only attended once or twice across a couple years or may be on your email list but haven’t attended yet.

They want participation from the entire range of cultural entities,

of every size and focus — including community-serving, culturally specific, and socially engaged organizations — from art museums, history museums & historic sites, science centers & natural history museums, and botanic gardens to theaters, orchestras, dance companies, opera companies, film festivals, folk festivals, libraries, and the like.

In another part of the webpage, they reference people who provide writing classes or use art in healthcare environments so they definitely want everyone.

They would like the first wave of survey links to go out on Wednesday, April 29 so if any of this sounds appealing to you at all, check out the informational webpage and figure out what you need to do to make it happen.

Setting Up A Legal Meeting When You Can’t Legally Meet

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June 30 is the end of the fiscal year for a lot of non-profits. In light of that, non-profit organizations generally have board meeting around this time of year in an effort to report where things stand to their boards of directors and generally get things wrapped up.

But of course, currently no one is supposed to be meeting in large groups. An online virtual meeting is the obvious answer. By now people have attended quite a number of webinars and meetings online and are starting to feel comfortable with the whole process (albeit there are STILL people who don’t mute their microphones!!!)

Except….if your bylaws don’t already acknowledge online meeting and voting as valid methods of doing business, any actions you take can be subject to challenge. Likewise there could be an issue if your state laws don’t explicitly recognize virtual meetings or explicitly forbids them.

Last week I made a post on ArtsHacker to help people consider how to address these issues. In many respects this is uncharted territory for a lot groups so it might ultimately require consulting a lawyer to get the most accurate picture. The post will help start people on the road to thinking about what questions they should be asking and what processes might need to be put in place.

 

 

Online Meetings & Open Meeting Laws

Might Be About Time To Get Back In The Fundraising Saddle

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If there has been any benefit from the Covid-19 shut down it is the sheer number of webinars being offered to help businesses and other non-profit organizations connect with resources. I am sure we would all have been happier if life hummed along as before rather than necessitating the need to agonize over what loan or grant programs our organizations might qualify for and trying to get applications processed.  However, it also feels like networks of information and resources are being constructed and strengthened through this all. Hopefully they will persist beyond this period of time and become an asset.

By my last estimate, I have participated in 10-12 sessions in the last two weeks. One I found particularly interesting that is generally applicable was the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s session on “Communicating and Fundraising for Preservation in a Time of Uncertainty.”  (slide deck) Since I run an historic theater, I thought there might be information on resources available for our facilities.

What I found helpful was their advice on fundraising during these difficult times. Basically, they opened by saying just like the many stages of grief, there is going to come a point in the way you are processing your current situation where you will start to focus on the future. Part of that will be getting back to fundraising.

They said you can approach donors now, but just for the purposes a check-in with them.  The conversation should focus on how they are doing and what they are hearing about how other non-profits are doing. This will give you a sense of their priorities at the moment. You are also maintaining relationships and laying the groundwork for the future.

In terms of when you can make an ask, you need basically be sensitive enough gauge when the time will be right. But when you do make the ask, the webinar presenters emphasize being worthy, not needy. You should make the case in terms of your worth rather than in terms of your desperation for funding. They also strongly advise against shifting your focus to chase the direction dollars are flowing at the moment.

Here is the relevant slides from the presentation.

The point about being accommodating is in respect to acknowledging priorities might not be focused on your causes at the moment. In terms of hosting events, they point out that this might be a good time to host a virtual meeting or information session. Those that are invested in your success want to hear how you are doing.

I should mention, today my staff and I had a consultation with Michael Kaiser from the DeVos Institute of Arts Management. You may remember he is the former president of the Kennedy Center who was hailed as a “turn around king.” He is offering free one hour consultations to arts organizations about how to cope in these times. (~380 and counting). He provided the same advice about focusing conversations with donors and funders on how they are doing.

He also made a similar suggestion about hosting a virtual meeting on Zoom or other platform. In our case, it would be to discuss our process in planning our upcoming season since our contracting and scheduling process is delayed, not to mention no one really knows when we will be able to assemble in large groups again. Based on the type of calls we have been getting, this type of meeting is likely to help strengthen our relationship with our audiences and assuage their concerns. We are waiting until all the refunds for cancelled shows have been processed so that topic doesn’t dominate the conversation.

Thought Exercises About Your Revamped Future Organization

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Non-Profit Quarterly recently wrote about the big impact the closure of libraries during coronavirus has had on communities. In recent years there have been people who have opined that libraries don’t serve a purpose because nobody reads, etc. and should be shutdown. Now everyone gets to see the implications of that.

In addition to being a place where people grab books and do their homework, libraries have long provided a raft of community services from available meeting spaces, use of computers, mentoring, shelter for homeless, life skill classes. When I served on a library system board of directors, I was always amazed by the amount of income came in a nickel or dime at a time during this time of year as people photocopied tax forms.

All those services are inaccessible now. My local libraries are boosting/relocating their wifi modems so that people can sit in the parking lot and use the internet. Staff is also streaming themselves reading books for kids. If you have access to the right devices, you can download ebooks. But all the historical archives and other resources are locked away.

According to the NPQ article, some libraries are using their 3D printers to make facemasks for the community and medical staff.

I bring this to your attention because as pointed out in the Wired article NPQ links to, during bad economic times the budgets of libraries get cut. So as bad as things are now, the situation may not get much better once the libraries open their doors again. Everyone knows they can’t access these services now, but once the library opens, people will be looking to use them again and they may not be there.

In some cases, budget cuts may literally create a situation where a library is literally no longer there. Certainly that may be the case for a lot of arts & cultural non-profits.

As a person in the creative field, you may be pondering how your organization or how you as an individual might have to change your business model or scope of activity to reflect the changes the current situation may create. There are indications things will change and we won’t be able to go back to doing business as we had in the past. As you are thinking about that, you may want to consider what your potential might be to fill voids left by shuttered libraries or other organizations.  Do you have large unused spaces? Relationships with service providers and educators you might be able to leverage if need be? Technology or material resources?

It certainly isn’t something we may be comfortable contemplating, but if there is another entity’s program you admire and think the community would be the worse off for its lack, you may want to perform a thought exercise about your capacity to absorb the program and what conditions might have to exist to allow you to do that.

For example, there are a lot of foundations out there that recognize the situations nonprofits are in and are deviating from their normal procedures to make it easier for non-profits to retain and report (or not report) on the use of fund. It may not be out of the realm of possibility that a conversation with the foundation about how you are assuming responsibility for an amazing after school program might allow it to retain full funding on top of the funding you already receive from that foundation. (Well, you can hope.)

A Pandemic Is All The More Reason To Resist “For The Exposure”

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One of the concerns I have had with so many artists providing their talent and content for free over the internet while people are sequestered at home during the coronavirus epidemic is that there would be an expectation that it would all continue to be free as we transitioned away from this situation.

I have seen a couple articles addressing the practice of artists contributing their talents to the general effort to combat the virus.

The first comes from Arts Professional UK which drew attention to a call to artists from the UN. The UN is looking for creative ways to communicate the necessity of good hygiene & social distancing practices as well as dispel different myths to people in different cultures.  While it is prudent to craft messages that are specific to each culture rather than one size fits all, the issue is that the UN wanted the creatives to do it for the exposure.

“You have the power to change the world”, artists have been told, and “the UN needs your help to stop the spread of coronavirus.” It is asking creatives to submit “a range of creative solutions to reach audiences across different age groups, affiliations, geographies and languages”.

No fees are being offered for the work, which is viewed as an opportunity for creatives to contribute to the global fight against the pandemic while raising their profile across the world, including among major corporations.

While the company coordinating this for the UN says they “…would normally be the first to champion the payment of proper fees to artists and creatives, it feels like this is the one time to make an exception,” this still sounds a little exploitative during a time when artists are experiencing a difficult time. Exposure is only gonna get you sick without the ability to pay your bills.

On the other hand, a felt a little differently when I read about an effort by Broadway Cares to stream a concert of Disney show recorded back in November as a fundraiser for a Covid-19 emergency assistance fund.  The Actors’ Equity & SAG-AFTRA unions agreed to waive fees but the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) refused to do so despite the willingness of the 15 musicians who performed in the concert and the president of the local to allow it to be streamed without a fee.  The musicians had been paid for the performance back in November, but AFM president Ray Hair felt that in these times in which artists find themselves in difficult financial straits, the organizers should be willing to pay.

The result is, the fundraiser won’t be able to go forward.

If you are going by the general standards I espoused in the UN example, you should want the artists to be paid. The fact were already paid once shouldn’t necessarily factor into it as there are a lot of unfair situations which deprive artists of royalties on recorded content. Nor should the fact the musicians are willing to forgo payment necessarily make it okay since there are plenty of artists in the UN example who are willing to do it for the exposure when they really ought to be paid for their work.

These two examples show how difficult it is to employ uniform standards in relation to fair remuneration for artists.

For me, there was an option Broadway Cares presented that I felt should have provided a fairly equitable win-win situation for everyone. Because of most favored nations contract clauses, Broadway Cares can’t pay the musicians without then needing to pay members of the other two unions who participated in the November event. However, Broadway Cares offered to make a $25,000 payment to the musicians’ emergency fund on top of the $50,000 it had already given to musician assistance programs. This amount would have been more than they would have paid the 15 musicians and benefit a wider range of musicians who were facing these difficult times.  That offer was also refused.

Changes To Butts In The Seats Email Subscriptions

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Hey loyal Butts In The Seats feed subscribers! This weekend we are changing the service that delivers posts by email. Everyone who has subscribed to the feed will be added to the new system. Since the emails will be coming from a new source, if you don’t see a post from me come Monday evening, you may want to check your spam folders to check things didn’t get caught up in there.

If the post isn’t in there, contact me via the link on the blog and we will get you set up.

You also may get an opt-in email from the blog which you will need confirm before you receive posts.

If you have been toying with the idea of having my posts delivered to you but haven’t pulled the trigger yet, you can sign up using the Subscribe button floating at the bottom right hand corner of your screen. I’d advise waiting until after the weekend so you don’t get overlooked when we migrate email addresses to the new system.

Thanks for all your support.

While You Worry About Business Slowing Down, Prepare For A Sudden Ramp Up

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The Conversation site had an article about the impact of Covid-19 on entertainment venues and events last month. (h/t to Artsjournal.com)

Authors Chris Gibbs and Louis-Etienne Dubois urge event managers to be cautious about making decisions to lay off or idle staff.  You may have seen similar warnings in other places about losing people who represent institutional memory and crucial relationship points with audiences and donors. The authors additionally note that dismissing the wrong people may hinder responsiveness and agility when everyone ramps up their activity all at once.

Live events and entertainment are people-based businesses that rely on the creation of emotional experiences and human interactions. Shedding too many employees, or the wrong employees, may impede the ability to resume operations when the crisis ends.

The author of an article in Harvard Business Review about management in uncertain times also suggests taking pragmatic actions and cultivating emotional steadiness in order to support employees and make them feel better than doing nothing.

In addition, a common response to crisis is to maintain customer engagements so that they return when the conditions allow. This is even more critical now knowing that companies are likely to relaunch all at the same time and engage in a costly battle for audiences’ limited attention. Employees should be encouraged to keep their companies’ name out there by connecting with customers in surprising and unexpected ways.

Many organizations are already doing a lot in the way of providing content and other touch points which will help keep them at the forefront of people’s minds.

My staff has been having conversations trying to anticipate whether audiences will be clamoring for something to do as soon as restrictions are lifted or if they will be hesitant to venture out until a few weeks later. That is why I have been following Colleen Dilenschneider’s surveying on that question so closely.

The other thing we are concerned about is whether we will have enough stagehands to work larger events. Supermarkets and Amazon are looking for more employees. If people in our stagehand pool find work in these places and decide to stay once things loosen up, it will be great for them to have more consistent employment, but that will impact us.

And if there is a flurry of activity from summer concert series in the region trying to return to activity, we will be competing for staff against organizations with potentially deeper pockets than we possess. So even as we worry about how the epidemic is impacting current operations, we have to be thinking about all the implications a return to activity might hold.

Public Policy Has Broader Influence On Attendance Than You May Realize

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I had mentioned before that Colleen Dilenschneider was making weekly posts on an ongoing cycle of surveying about how Covid-19 is impacting intention to visit cultural organizations.

The post she made yesterday was especially interesting because she included a regional breakdown of attitudes. She grouped the different states according to similarity in attitude. She pointed out that while Washington, Oregon and California have similar attitudes, for some reason North Carolina residents are distinct from South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

For all her data sets, she provides survey results from the same time periods in 2019 as a basis for comparison.  In 2019, the data for NC, SC, GA, & FL were roughly equal.  This year the difference in attitude is much larger.

She hypothesizes that these differences result from the fact Covid-19 is not impacting every region equally and the public policy of each region also varies.

While the national data is helpful for a broad diagnosis of the sector as a whole, COVID-19 is not impacting regions equally at the moment. New York has seen over 3,500 deaths and is bracing for a particularly difficult week, but Georgia’s governor has reopened its beaches and South Carolina is one of the few states still holding out on a stay-at-home order at the time of the data collection. These sentiments may be informed by what’s happening on the ground (i.e., how dire is the situation in the local communities), and by prevailing public policies.

She says some of the good news is that the overall survey results are stable over the last couple weeks. If you look at the bar graphs, everyone, regardless of region expect a return to normalcy at the three month horizon onward.

Just in general, I think this survey data indicates something we have probably long suspected –that government policy at every level creates a context which impacts our successful operations. It isn’t just funding decisions, but the aggregate influence of policies that apply to everything from infrastructure, licensing, agriculture, food, housing, transportation, education, and on and on.

All the more reason to have close ties with your chamber of commerce, convention and visitors bureau to become aware of decisions that are being made. Look for opportunities to learn about and provide advocacy for areas of the local & regional economy that may not seem to have a direct impact on you. If you are on webinars with other local government, business and community leaders trying to figure out if you are eligible to apply for funding available to small businesses, take opportunity note of who is in the virtual room, especially if any appear across multiple sessions, with the goal of  cultivating relationships at some point in the future.

You Know You Have Developed Good Relationships When A Coal Miner Supports A Solar Power Project

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About two years ago I briefly mentioned a presentation made by Ben Fink at a conference about a community solar project Appalshop was working on in the heart of Kentucky coal country. Fink recently had a piece on the Brookings Institution website that went into detail about the where the effort stands today.

I wanted to point to it as an example of a cultural organization working in productive partnership with a community whose politics might strongly differ from their own .

The solar project wasn’t something Appalshop decided to do whole-cloth because they thought it was the right thing for the community. It was built on the relationships and trust developed over the course of years while working in partnership on other projects that aligned with the interests and needs of the community.

Results of this community wealth-building work have included expanding an award-winning farmers’ market into a community kitchen, reviving Kentucky’s oldest community square dance, and starting a brick oven bakery where neighbors recovering from addiction and incarceration could find work.

Despite being in the middle of coal fields, one of the biggest challenges facing companies and organizations was rising energy costs that threatened the existence of everything from the local markets to the volunteer firehouse.  While solar provided a solution to this ironic situation, being located in the middle of coal fields also made it a hot button issue.

Bringing solar to coal country was risky. Coal had been king for generations, and there was plenty of propaganda accusing solar supporters of siding with “elite, anti-coal activists.” It would have been easy to assume “the community” would oppose the project—except for the fact that the community was the one running it….

[…]

But the relationships built through the CCED process remained strong; the fire chief, a former strip mine boss and lifelong right-winger, continued to champion the project.

This work is not about changing residents’ political views. It’s about neighbors coming together across differences to create a new story about the place we all live in and love. To some, it’s a story about saving the planet. To others, it’s about saving money or fighting an energy company. But to everyone, it’s about supporting our communities and the centers that keep them strong.

The reference to the fire chief remaining a supporter was a testament to the strengths of the relationships they built. The fire house was a partner in the solar project but backed out when a gas company guaranteed the firehouse would never lose its gas supply. The fact the fire chief remained a supporter illustrates that his involvement wasn’t just motivated by desperate need.

Fink suggests that the relationships they formed helped overcome the perception that life in their community was a zero-sum prospect where what was better for someone else meant you lose.

I Figured This Was Highly Unlikely. What A Difference A Month Makes

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Early last month I bookmarked an article by Jeremy Reynolds in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette intending to come back to address it in a blog post in some manner. In the article, Reynolds was arguing for shorter classical music concerts.  At the time, I figured it would never happen broadly due to the inertia of tradition.

Now with public events shutdown and artists and organizations streaming their performances, I strongly suspect a lot more people are going to be open to exploring the basic concepts Reynolds espouses.

If concerts were shorter, the quality of musicianship could increase significantly. I often chastise classical groups for bloated, unnecessarily long recitals. An hour of tight, balanced, in-tune playing is vastly preferable to a two- or three-hour slog of mediocrity.

While some organizations say a program should fill an evening, offering quantity over quality is a poor strategy even if funders tend to favor inventive and diverse programming.

He also accuses ever lengthening intermissions of impeding the momentum of the experience. Since his article opens with him advising friends to go home at intermission, I imagine he would be all for a short, intermissionless performance which would solve two problems at once.

He addresses the idea that you have to give people their money’s worth:

I realize that the cost of ticket prices (which I recently argued are too expensive given how little revenue tickets generate) causes some groups to feel they need to hit a minimum threshold of time, but this is arbitrary. Maybe it’s not about the length of the program, but what an organization does with it that matters most.

[…]

The New World Symphony, a forward-thinking training ensemble in Miami, rolled out a series of concerts years ago that ran for 30 minutes and 60-75 minutes.

“The trick is not to think you have to fill an evening,” orchestra President Howard Herring said. “The question isn’t just: What music do I want to bring forth? but What is the uncompromised artistic experience that only we can provide?”

Now that groups and individuals are streaming their performances, they are almost certainly getting a lot of exercise evaluating and providing a highly focused uncompromised artistic experience. If things ever move back to the former semblance of normal, I think it would be a safe bet that those who continued to employ the “muscles” they developed while focusing on delivering an uncompromised experience will be on a firmer path to success.

Being Generous With Your Creativity

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Since I have been on the topic of arts and cultural organizations broadly providing content to anyone who happens by virtually, I figured there is space to point to another voice in the conversation.

Seth Godin made a post recently titled Generous isn’t always the same as free.  I raised the idea yesterday that maybe providing all this content isn’t in the best interests of creative entities in the long term.

Godin’s idea of generous not being the same as free may hold a key to resolving questions about this. He uses examples of a doctor taking the time to understand your needs, a waitress anticipating your needs and a boss who provides the challenging work you need.

In this last case, the generosity might actually result in you working longer and harder than before in order for you to grow. It may be a few years before you recognize that bit of generosity was beneficial and required more of your boss than they need have invested in you.

I don’t bring this up to transition to an argument about suffering contributing to the eventual growth or appreciation of creative organizations or those that participate in their activities. Lord knows there has been plenty of “suffering for your art” conversations throughout history.

Rather, I wanted emphasize Godin’s point that the common element in each of his examples is the contributions to stronger relationships.

Gifts create connection and possibility, but not all gifts have monetary value. In fact, some of the most important gifts involve time, effort and care instead.

[…]

In this moment when we’re so disconnected and afraid, the answer might not be a freebie. That might simply push us further apart. The answer might be showing up to do the difficult work of connection, of caring and of extending ourselves where it’s not expected.

When you are pretty anxious about the future of your organization, you may not feel you have the luxury of the deliberative, multi-week process Nina Simon laid out in her blog post I excerpted yesterday. You should have the time, though, to consider whether choices made and effort expended are generous gestures that will contribute to a relationship, albeit over a long term, or a simple freebie.

Streaming And Providing Content Is Well And Good, But What’s Next?

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Last week in reaction to my post about Colleen Dilenschneider’s suggestion that cultural non-profits continue their marketing efforts during the Covid-19 shutdowns with a shift in focus, Carter Gillies made a number of comments on my post warning about making the marketing all about the organization rather than outwardly focused on the needs of the community.

So it seems absolutely vital that we take as much of the cues for misperception off the table. Even if we are not actively ‘selling’ anything, we can’t let the public be confused that our motivation at this point is somehow still about ‘us’. The Starbucks CEO was absolutely terrified that his attempts to remedy racism would be seen as more marketing. Marketing in normal circumstances is, well, normal. In a climate where the focus is so narrow, as it is today, we must pay special attention to doing what is right FOR the community, whether-it-is-right-for-us-or-not. If we are perceived as merely doing what it takes to promote our own identity and importance this will quickly backfire. Even saying organizations should be “maintaining high levels of awareness and being top of mind in the meantime” sounds offensive and selfishly oriented.

When I was writing about Dilenschneider’s post, I was envisioning that she was encouraging organizations to provide content on social media about streaming events, online activities, creative projects you can do at home, pretty much as they are doing now.

Keven Karplus chimed in with a comment pointing at such a home activity that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History had recently posted.

So it didn’t really surprise me when the erstwhile director of Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Nina Simon, made a post on Medium wondering if this spate of event streaming and online activities was really the best approach. I had been harboring the same questions about whether the rush to provide content would ultimately be in the best interest of the arts and culture community.

Part of my concern was that organizations might be providing validation that a virtual experience was as good as an in-person experience. If the organization is able to pull this sort of thing out of their back pocket in a week, then they have the capacity to provide it on a continuous basis, right? Many people may not realize that a lot of the content is archival and was never intended to be seen by an audience.  American Theatre has a great piece that talks about many of the factors that are weighing on people’s minds as they make content available.

In her post Simon writes,

And it makes me wonder: is this the most meaningful way cultural organizations can contribute — or is it just the fastest way?

I’m not opposed to these offerings. I can see the hope and pleasure small snippets of art, music, history, and nature provide. But why are we doing it? Are we doing it based on some kind of expressed community need? Are we doing it with an eye towards serving communities that are struggling most? Or are we doing it to assure ourselves that we are “doing something,” to assure our donors we still exist— and that our jobs are worth keeping (which is in itself important!)?

You could argue that these organizations are contributing what they do best. But we’re a creative sector, and I think we could get more creative. In the race to deliver, I worry we may distract ourselves from the potential to envision and deliver true community value.

She lays out four steps she is using to figure out how to best contribute. As I read them, there was nothing I hadn’t heard before regarding connecting with new segments of the community. Only, now that there is less activity in our organizations, we have more time and energy to focus on following these steps.

1 – Select A Community Focus – she gives the example of homeless, elderly, nurses, but they can be any group.

2- Listen To The Community – While you can’t physically meet with people associated with your chosen segment, you may have the time to use social media to research, identify leaders, resources and challenges that face the community

3- Map Your Skills and Assets – I have to quote Nina directly here because she points out assets you may not think of (i.e. lending a lonely family member your dog)

If you’re exploring this as an individual, you might have assets like your time, your bilingualism, or your ability to cook. As an organization, you might have assets like a building, a digital following, or the ear of the mayor.

For me, the most important part of this step is creative dot-connecting. How can you use your creativity to make unexpected connections between what is desired and what you have? These connections don’t have to be huge to be meaningful

4- Check Your Assumptions – Nina points out she didn’t just drive to her sister’s house with a 70 lbs dog and drop it off, she had a conversation first. Nor should you decide what the segment of the community needs from you before marshaling your energy and resources.

Toward the end of her post, she encourages moving fast when there is an obvious way to contribute, but move slow when the path is not obvious or creativity could yield better results. She lays out a deliberate approach she is using in applying the four steps above and estimates it will be three-four weeks before she comes up with something concrete and useful.

As I do with many of my posts, I encourage readers to read her whole post in depth rather than relying on my imperfect synopsis. Especially since she lays out her argument much more convincingly than I have.

Imagine That, Creative Expression Retains And Increases In Value In Difficult Economic Times

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By now you have probably heard about all the residents of cities around the world who have emerged on balconies and rooftops to sing together or provide impromptu concerts to those in their neighborhoods.  Imagine all the economic value they are generating with this creative activity! Surely it will help sustain the commerce of their communities in this difficult time.

Except, no it won’t. No one is doing any of this to bolster the economies of their communities, they are doing it to bolster a sense of hope and solidarity among their neighbors.

If there was any time to illustrate that the value of creative expression is independent of economic outcomes, it is now.  People are singing together across streets and alleys. Libraries are streaming their staff reading books. Organizations are providing creative activities that families can do at home together as downloads or video demonstrations. I saw a link to a public radio story about a group in NC who will provide a 30 minute virtual concerts to loved ones.

The biggest danger is the one that  has always existed–the assumption that if you were willing to provide this content for free during tough times, you can find some other means of support during better economic times.

Yet there is also the opportunity to turn around and say, when people were scared and panicking about whether they had a sufficient supply of toilet paper, expressions of creativity forged bonds between citizens, buoyed their spirits and gave them hope.  Artists provided a great service in maintaining the mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being of their community in a time of national angst. While this activity normally does yield economic benefits in a ratio significantly greater than the funding inputs, the real value creatives provide is unrelated to the economy.

While we may say these things all of the time in different ways, right now there are a lot of examples floating around broadcast and social media one can reference when making the case for support to funders.

In addition, while you wouldn’t necessarily want to continue doing something for free indefinitely, there is also an opportunity to leverage processes and expertise you may have developed communicating and providing content from afar into a more significant program. (i.e. You never had the time and resources before to stream content until your priorities were shifted for you.)

Likewise, once the current crisis is over, there will be an opportunity to hopefully solidify any relationships your activities for those in isolation have helped you develop.

In the meantime, pay attention to all the ways in which creative expression is exhibiting its value to society and take notes for later use.

Not Only Is Marketing Everybody’s Job, It Has To Be Done All The Time–Even Now

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I highly recommend watching Collen Dilenschneider’s Know Your Own Bone site over the course of the Covid-19 epidemic. Every Monday she is posting data about intention to visit cultural entities in as the epidemic unfolds. She says her company is receiving data in real time. I am surprised to learn people are taking the time to respond to surveys.

In any case, it appears people anticipate going to cultural entities in the next 3-6 months. That didn’t significantly change between March 16 and March 23, but she warns we may see a shift in the next week as the reality of the situation begins to sink in.

With this in mind, she is cautioning people against letting their marketing efforts flag during this period of time and offers suggestions about how to shift the focus of those efforts from “visit now” to keeping yourselves on people’s radar.

Because there can be pretty large time gap between when people decide to visit an entity and when they take action to visit, marketing you do now is informing people who will arrive months down the road. She also points out that it often costs more to re-engage audiences than it is to retain them.

At the end of her post, she offers 4 suggestions for re-focusing marketing efforts:

A) Strategic deferral in paid media to local audiences

In response to the observed decline in immediate-term intentions to visit among local market members, it makes sense to selectively defer campaign spending for paid media that targets audiences with relatively short lead times….

To be clear, this does not at all mean ceasing all marketing and not communicating with local audiences. It means strategically deferring select paid media efforts for this market, and holding these funds in abeyance for deployment at a more opportune moment.

B) Replace investments aimed at immediate activation (“visit now!”) and focus instead on maintaining top-of-mind status and broad awareness

…However, the current environment suggests more of a “maintenance” approach that intends to preserve awareness of what your organization does and stands for in order to keep your cultural institution at the forefront of people’s minds.

Unaided awareness and top-of-mind metrics are measurable –… Organizations want to be ready to immediately reactivate audiences when they reopen, and that means maintaining high levels of awareness and being top of mind in the meantime.

[…]

C) Meet people where they are right now: Online

{…]

There is a terrific opportunity for creative connection right now that proves relevance far beyond your walls – from providing resources for parents aiming to home school or keep children busy, to conducting events with staff experts on social media, to sharing penguins exploring their empty aquarium to give a sense of what’s still happening behind the scenes. The opportunities for creative and engaging ways to execute our missions and connect with our communities are seemingly endless. They are a good idea right now.

Finding ways to execute missions, support communities, and stay top of mind are strategic initiatives that position organizations to better succeed when their doors reopen.

D) Be responsive – not reactive

…This is not the time for knee-jerk reactions and short-sighted “gut instinct.” This is the time to think through opportunities and the current condition so that cultural entities are in a position to succeed when their doors reopen. This may be especially difficult as executives field calls from fear-driven board members demanding speedy, unfounded, and feelings-based actions.

[…]

In regard to marketing investments during this time, an immediate instinct may be to achieve significant short-term savings. Some may even consider going dark. Be careful. Data suggest that doing this without considering how these cuts are likely to increase costs and reduce attendance revenue upon reopening may be a financial problem rather than a solution.

Your organization has likely worked hard to show how you elevate the community. You’ve cultivated a level of awareness. You’ve worked hard to achieve top-of-mind status for certain audiences.

Now is not the time to let people forget that your organization exists.

Now is the time to show people how effectively you stand for your mission and your community – both when your physical doors are open and when they are closed.

 

Encouraging Creative Expression At A Social Distance

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I took a little break from social media this weekend. When I logged in this morning I was surprised to see how many local musicians had streamed concerts over the weekend. I have also been pleased to see libraries streaming staff reading books to kids and museums giving tours and demonstrations.

However, as I am wont to do even in better times, I wanted to encourage organizations not to just push content out for passive viewers. The only thing worse than having people sit quietly in your dark room and watch something is providing the opportunity to do the same thing in a more comfortable dark room at home.

I have been encouraging organizations to provide opportunities to actively participate at face to face events for a couple years now. The same should hold even in times of social distancing. There are still plenty of opportunities to use technology to have people exercise their creativity.

You can do everything from having people send in video of themselves singing a song which you edit into a whole. Likewise for performing parts from a play or poetry reading.

Character limits on social media sites like Twitter lend themselves well for “what happens next…” participatory storytelling where you build on what the previous person wrote while under the discipline of a character limit (can’t make sequential posts!) Obviously can do the same thing with Facebook posts.

Or get really up the game and do sequential visual storytelling with pictures or video on sites like Instagram or TikTok where you can edit other people’s work into your own to simulate interacting with them.

Arts Professional UK has a Creative Communities page which looks like it is being updated with activities every day.

Today it has links to a BBC project soliciting short scripts,

…between 5-10 minutes in length whose 2-4 characters now find themselves in isolation, but connecting via video conferencing. They may be friends, lovers, neighbours, colleagues, family or strangers. But they’re all alone together and using modern technology to stay connected.

And there are face mask art projects:

The Turban Project has published step-by-step instructions for creating and decorating a personalised lightweight face mask for adults and children (see examples). Care Wear has published instructions for making a decorative fabric cover for a protective N95Mask, intended for reuse after laundering if needed during a severe shortage of masks.

While I am at it, here are a couple other projects with participatory content.

Voluntary Arts is curating a daily update of creative ideas – by and for creative workers – to be explored and enjoyed in response to the coronavirus.

Nonsuch Studios are launching Creative Quarantine, a daily email of creative activities for people to do in their own home. Led by a group of artists and creatives who’ve been sent home, they will be sending two different emails with content appropriate to adults and to children and families, which will include extra educational features for children who are off school.

If you know of any US based projects doing something similar, let me know in the comments. Or just tag me on Twitter @buttsintheseats

 

What Is Being Done In Your Name While You Are Away From The Office?

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I flipped my notepad over today and realized there was an important point I omitted from my discussion of the Americans for the Arts webinar I cited yesterday. Important enough that I am doing a very rare Thursday post.

Mollie Quinlan-Hayes from ArtsReady made participants aware that there are already scammers out there raising funds in the name of arts entities and other non-profits. The fact so many people are working from home and not staffing office phones or regularly monitoring social media traffic may leave organizations unaware that there is suspicious activity going on in your name. At the very least, be sure you are paying attention to any use/mentions of your organization on social media so you are aware of how your name is being used.

Some other important, though less crucial tips that came up in Mollie Quinlan-Hayes’ section of the webinar yesterday that I didn’t mention was suggestions organizations work on some of their emergency planning resources. Like:

•Drop Dead Book – document of processes and procedures someone else can follow if you were to drop dead.
•Bug out Bag/Box – if you need to evacuate your office quickly, can you grab what you need to work remotely in a short amount of time

Another suggestion was to do cross training having staff interview each other about their jobs so that there isn’t only one person who knows how to do the work.

 

 

Small, But Growing Resources & Ideas For Live Streaming Your Covid-19 Displaced Events

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As I mentioned in my post yesterday, Americans for the Arts hosted a webinar on the impact of Covid-19 today. At its peak, there were over 800 participants.

With all those people watching, there were a lot of serious questions posed. If you have the time, it would be worth watching the recording when it is posted in the next 24 hours or so. Pay particular attention to the chatroom because people were trading a lot of useful links.

I wanted to share some of the links because a number are very helpful if you are considering livestreaming events.

But first, Americans for the Arts and others are trying to collect information about the impact the current crisis is having on arts organizations so they can do some lobbying for relief. They are asking people to complete the survey found here. There are also a lot of other resources on that page so check it out.

Association of Performing Arts Professionals also has resources and appeals for Congressional action.

If you have visa questions about foreign artists, Covey Law has updates about consular offices and answers about visa extensions.

In terms of streaming resources.

•Someone posted this flow chart for musicians to help them decide what streaming service to use based on whether they want to monetize the experience or not.

•A really good resource about deciding to stream, what do use for video vs audio, and whether you want to monetize or not can be found in this Google doc. I am not clear who is updating it, but they are providing a great service. There is also an calendar of some upcoming livestream events toward the bottom. Even if you aren’t interested in the content of the event, it could be worth seeing how people are structuring their livestream to get tips for your own effort.

•A participant also pointed to this Better Lemons page that has resources and ideas for viewing parties, etc

•Someone also created a Facebook group, (on the fly during the webinar, I suspect) where you can list your livestream event as well.

Upcoming Webinars: Guidance For Arts Community During Covid-19 Crisis

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Americans For The Arts is hosting a couple webinars to help the arts community deal with the situation surrounding Covid-19.

It appears that both will be archived for those who can’t watch live.  If you follow the links in the titles, you can register to participate.

I have seen the link to this first meeting shared by multiple groups so it is likely to be heavily attended.

We Are Stronger Together: Navigating Crises and Sustaining Healthy Relationships in the Era of Coronavirus

March 18, 2020 at 3:00 PM EST

As a result, the performing arts presenting, booking and touring industry is navigating uncharted waters, as we look to both contracts—and to each other—for direction. Join the partners of the Alliance for Performing Arts Conferences (APAC)*, as we host an informative, field-wide conversation with presenters, agents, artists, and legal and emergency response experts around the current business, legal, financial, ethical and relational realities we are facing TOGETHER.

The second webinar appears to be more focused on organizational plans and policies during the crisis, including providing support for staff and others who may be experiencing anxiety.

Arts and Culture Sector and the Coronavirus: What we Know and How to Move Forward

March 19, 2020 at 3:00 PM EST
Join members of Americans for the Arts’ staff, Ruby Lopez Harper, John Rubsamen, and Narric Rome, with Jan Newcomb, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Arts’ Preparedness and Emergency Response, Barbara Davis, Chief Operating Officer of The Actors Fund, Rhonda Schaller, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, and a representative from the National Endowment for the Arts to hear current information about actions to take, including: planning to consider, handling grant funded projects, managing stress during moments of crisis, and continuing to support artists. This briefing will also include an update on the status of congressional action on economic impact and stimulus funding and how it relates to the arts and cultural sector.

Event Contracts, Postponements, and Cancellations in Light of Covid-19

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If you are looking for some guidance about how to approach event cancellation/postponements in relation to everything shutting down due to Covid-19, I had a post go up on ArtsHacker today pointing to some advice and resources.

I cite some advice provided by arts lawyer Brian Taylor Goldstein as well as an FAQ issued by North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents (NAPAMA) which appears to be in the process of continual updates as things unfold.

 

Handling Contractual Elements of Event Cancellations Due To Epidemics & Other Crises

 

Gotta Keep Reading, Even Though You Hate To

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With all the anxiety being generated by news surrounding COVID-19, you probably don’t want to continue reading about the decisions groups are making about whether to continue events or not, and if they are continuing, what steps they are taking.

However, reading about what steps other people are taking can make you more aware of your options for moving forward and communicating with audiences.

I have probably read a good 20-25 articles since Monday in addition to an equal number of messages on our state consortium discussion group.  Still after all that, I saw an American Theatre article on the topic today that raised a point I hadn’t considered or seen anywhere else.

It was just a single mention about theaters no longer offering same-cup refills at concessions, but that wasn’t something that had entered our discussions at my venue. We are sanitizing left and right, but we had forgotten that by encouraging people to bring their theatre branded tumblers with them to help avoid creating plastic and paper waste, we raise the risk of cross contamination if they come back to the bar more than once in a night.

So as unpleasant as it may be to constantly read articles about responses to the virus, it is worth reading and paying attention in order to ensure you have a more comprehensive plan in place.

…..Damned if it isn’t going to be galling to ask people not to recycle.

 

Respecting The House Rules As A Guest

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While looking for something totally different, I happened upon a tribute to the recently deceased executive director of Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo Service Center, Dean Matsubayashi. What attracted me to the article was the title, “Welcome to Little Tokyo, Please Take Off Your Shoes.”

I wanted to know what that was all about. My intuition about the intent of slogan was pretty much on the money.  Apparently when she was a student, Christina Heatherton, coined the phrase which was seen as a something of a counterpoint to bumper stickers declaring “Welcome to California, Now Go Home.”

The author of the tribute article, Josh Ishimatsu said the “Welcome to Little Tokyo” slogan embodied the goals the Little Tokyo Service Center had in

…being true to the underlying values of anti-gentrification and anti-displacement. In a piece that Dean and I wrote about LTSC’s role in the larger Sustainable Little Tokyo project, we said:

For LTSC, the challenge was to frame a vision of anti-displacement work that did not reify NIMBYism… How do we honor the past, prevent erasure, AND welcome the new in respectful ways… And, most of all, how can we do all this in ways that are equitable, sustainable, and empowering?

[…]

The slogan “Welcome to Little Tokyo; please take off your shoes” expresses the ethos that newcomers are welcome, but need to acknowledge and respect that they are entering a place with a pre-existing identity and normative culture. In this spirit, the Sustainable Little Tokyo planning process not only includes the participation of longstanding community stakeholders but also involves new residents who appreciate the role that the neighborhood has played (and continues to play) as a cultural hub and in supporting the community’s most vulnerable residents.

I feel like that last paragraph above not only embodies the approach people should have when entering a new neighborhood, but also one arts and culture organizations should embrace when approaching a new demographic/geographic area they previously haven’t served or feel they have under served.

I have written about this recently in relation to the concept of “arts deserts” and groups that don’t see themselves as hard to reach or having low arts engagement. The basic idea being that people who are deeply invested in the cultural traditions and practices of their community won’t necessarily welcome people coming in with a pitying attitude and offering to lift them up to respectability.

Portland, OR Art Tax Update

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Back in 2012, Portland, OR approved a $35 tax to supports arts education and arts organizations around the city. In 2017 I wrote a post about how overhead was starting to cut into the amount of money available to distribute to programs. Part of that overhead was attributable to the fact people weren’t paying the tax and so funds had to be diverted toward enforcement.  Last week, via Artsjournal, is another article mentioning that the tax hasn’t proven to be the boon supporters hoped it would be. For one, people still are resistant to paying it.

The art museum, like the rest of the big five, never received the targeted 5 percent support.

That’s in part because the tax has never brought in the $12 million a year voters were told to expect. (Revenues were $9.8 million the first year and peaked at $11.46 million in 2016.)

Portlanders have been reluctant to pay it. Although the city’s population has risen nearly 12 percent since November 2012 and tax receipts should have increased proportionally, figures show revenues still never reached levels proponents forecasted.

A point I want to clarify. The article makes it sound like arts funding for schools has diverted money that was intended for non-profit arts organizations. However, from my earlier posts, it appears the law that was passed intended to fund the schools first and then the non-profits would receive funding. In fact, this recent article says when the measure was passed in 2012, funding the schools was politically more attractive to voters than funding non-profits. While the arts organizations had been pushing the art tax idea for a long time prior to the vote, when the time came, the resolution being voted upon was written to fund the school first.

The other thing the article notes is that between the collection effects and the art tax name, there are public relations and perception issues which have proven problematic.

While arts leaders all favor more Portlanders paying the tax, some worry the city’s zeal to collect is counterproductive. “You get pinged with a letter, you get pinged with a postcard, you get an email saying time to pay the arts tax,” says Portland Center Stage’s Fuhrman. “That’s where I think the bad PR comes in.”

Andrew Proctor, executive director of Literary Arts, which produces the Portland Book Festival, says the public’s ill feeling has a cost. “Even the name ‘arts tax’ sounds punitive,” he says, “and it misleads citizens that in paying the tax they have supported arts institutions. They haven’t. It can damage our fundraising efforts and can polarize the conversation.”

[…]

Hawthorne, the former RACC official, says he fears the public may believe the tax works. “Ten to 12 million is a lot of money,” Hawthorne says. “People may perceive the arts have had their influx and now it’s time to focus on more pressing needs.”

The whole article provides a lesson for those considering advocating for an arts tax of some sort. The basic idea isn’t bad, but the way it is structured and executed needs to be thought out. The example of Portland points to things people want to avoid. The name; the way in which it is collected, structured and discussed; all call negative attention to it.

It is worth reading the whole article because it also mentions the Regional Arts and Cultural Council’s (RACC) initiative to provide more equitable funding for smaller arts organizations. Back in 2012, RACC was starting to require more diversity on the boards, staff and eventually audiences of Portland’s arts organizations. In January, I had written about how the Arts Council of England was instituting similar requirements, forgetting that Portland had been working toward that goal for nearly a decade now.

Last year, RACC shifted their funding model to better align with this philosophy which includes size and economic diversity among its criteria. As a result, the larger organizations in town receive less of the art tax money than they once did.

Leaders Call For Disarmament Of Weapons Grade Elitism

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I think there is probably enough overlap between my readers and Drew McManus on Adaptistration that I am not bringing anything new to the table when I point to his most recent post.

But man! It is so much in my wheelhouse that I wish I had written it. And with a title employing the phrase, “Weapons Grade Elitism,” it is hard leave it alone.  It pushes all the right buttons.

Drew had an encounter with program notes for a concert that were so dense, even as an orchestra insider with decades of experience wasn’t quite sure what the author of the notes was referencing. I think some of the content was worse than anything Trevor O’Donnell has criticized.

Long time readers know that I often cite findings of the 2017 CultureTrack survey and frequently discuss how the language in promotional and informational materials can be alienating to people who are just starting to be curious about different creative disciplines. I was pleased to see Drew invoking both ideas in his final paragraph summarizing his experience with the program notes:

In the end, these program notes do far more harm than we probably realize. When the CultureTrack ’17 report showed the number one barrier to engagement is people feeling like “it isn’t for someone like me,” we should actively revolt against practices that result in program notes like this. If someone with a music degree feels alienated upon reading them, imagine how the rest of our patrons will react.

Weapon’s Grade Elitism In 800 Words Or Less

Discount Unto Others As You Would Have Others Discount Unto You

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Collen Dilenschneider is increasingly becoming my go-to source for general data about audience behavior in relation to pricing. Last month, she posted about the perception and attitudes free, discounted and full price engenders among attendees.

She had previously written, and summarizes in this recent post, that discounts tend to bring people who are already engaged with the organization back through the doors rather than achieving the goal providing additional access to people who can’t easily afford entry. She suggests that part of the reason is that the discounts are communicated through the same channels that made existing audiences aware of the organization rather than through channels and techniques that reach the desired additional audiences:

Thus, it’s often the people who already know that the experience is worthy of their time who take up a general discount. Also, general discounts – even if they are intended to pique the interest of income-qualified audiences – are often promoted using the same channels as every other outbound message, resulting in more awareness of access programs amongst people with household incomes greater than $250,000/year than individuals with household incomes of less than $25,000/year. (Here’s more on this topic.)

The new data she presents surprisingly indicates that the lower the price, the lower the value people place on the organization and experience.

In terms of satisfaction which influences whether people will return, tell their friends and have a higher value-for-cost perceptions,

This may surprise some. (“How can people who get discounts be more satisfied than people who paid no money at all to attend!? They got in for free, for goodness sake!”) What may surprise folks even more is that average satisfaction is notably highest of all among people who paid full admission prices for their experience.

In terms of likeliness to endorse the organization to others, it is much the same.

General admission visitors were significantly more likely to endorse an organization than those who got a discount or attended for free.

As it turns out, when organizations provide a general discount, visitors generally discount them right back.

Perhaps most importantly, what people paid for admission influences the perception of how dedicated the organization is to its mission.

When an organization discounts its onsite experience through free or reduced admission, it impacts how visitors perceive the organization’s mission, too. What happens onsite doesn’t just stay onsite

That’s why this finding may be the most important of all in this article.

People who paid full admission price believed much more strongly that these entities were effective in executing their missions. The difference is dramatic.When an entity discounts its admission price, it changes how the public perceives its mission and what it stands for.

She doesn’t say all discounts and free admissions are bad. As implied earlier, a disciplined, focused strategy of communicating discounts to a specific target audience rather than to the broader constituency can achieve the desired aims. However, it takes time and energy to cultivate relationships with the right people and direct money and resources to the correct communication channels.

Don’t Ignore “Can’t Use My Tickets” Posts On Your Social Media Page

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I wrote a post that appeared on Artshacker today about ticket scams occurring in the comments section of performing arts organization social media accounts.

Essentially, what happens is that a short time out from an event, posts start appearing in the comments section of your organization’s Facebook page apparently from people who need to get rid of their tickets because they have a conflict with the date.

The biggest, most immediate tell-tale sign that this is a scam is realizing there are more tickets offered for re-sale than have been purchased. In the screenshots I posted as examples, the $5 movie we were offering only had 16 advance tickets sold but there were at least 54 tickets being offered for sale. This doesn’t count all the offers we deleted.

You also need to wonder about the promised heavy discounts people were offering on a $5 ticket that made it worth texting or sending a direct message to a stranger.

Another thing I see if I don’t catch the fake post in time is tickets being offered for free that suddenly have a price attached if someone responds with interest.

The answer, of course, is that most of these accounts were bots.  If you follow the link back to the poster’s account, you might find pictures of the person with family and friends which make it look legitimate (and I suspect some were real accounts that were hijacked) but others you notice some big inconsistencies like the fact their residence is in Sweden and they work for a company in Spain.

As I note in my Arts Hacker post, the simplest solution of shutting down commenting or requiring every comment to be approved can impede spontaneous reactions and conversations that create a sense of trust and community. Not to mention, it is difficult to conduct engagement campaigns if people are limited in their interactions.

Additionally, if people do get caught in a scam, it is likely to result in a negative association with, and perhaps distrust of, the organization on whose social media page the scam appeared.

If you knew you got a virus on a website or had your credit card number stolen on a gas pump skimming device, you would probably avoid returning, right?

One thing I didn’t mention in my original post but won’t probably come as a big surprise to many is that it is nigh-impossible to get the social media site to shut the scams down. We had a recent case where a person/bot posted their ticket offerings on their own page and tagged our page. I have to think this was a mistake and couldn’t have been effective because when we visited the page, there were more than 50 identical posts from a “woman” whose husband was deathly ill and couldn’t make dozens of monster truck rallies, concerts at bars, events at performing arts centers, many of them occurring at the same time across Canada and the United States.

We reported the page to Facebook. Even if it wasn’t a scam, a personal page was being used to conduct commerce. The response we got was that it didn’t violate any rules.

Anyway, check out the post on Arthacker, if nothing more than to see the screenshot examples of the type of posts you might encounter. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same names popped up on your social media pages.

Scammers In Your Social Media Community

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.

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