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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.

Door To Seat As Important As The Quality Of The Event

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All right. A little gripe time here. I have been nursing a sense of dissatisfaction for a couple weeks now but it sort of came to a head when I saw the title of Ceci Dadisman’s recent post, “Unpopular Opinion: It is our job to remove barriers to engagement.” She talks about removing perceptual barriers, but the source of my dissatisfaction is related to physical barriers.

I had submitted a grant this past Spring and recently had an opportunity to listen to the panelists discuss our application over the internet. There were a number of criticisms which I can concede as deficiencies with our application. There were other places where panelists misread what we wrote, but I can understand that given the number of applications they read. (Though I did panic momentarily as I scurried to find the document we submitted.)

What annoyed me was a criticism of our response to a question about a recent program that had an impact on the community. Being new to my position, I had spoke with staff, board members, volunteers and long attending audience members about what events had made an impact. This resulted in some good conversations about the distinction between impactful experiences and popular, well-attended experiences. I wrote our grant response about the performance program that many people had mentioned had an unexpected impact.

Then, because I had the room, I mentioned that something that can’t be discounted was the impact a renovation to the physical spaces of the facility had on the community. I discussed the fact that it is very easy for people to make the decision to stay at home and every element associated with going to a live event from restaurants, to babysitters, to parking must align conveniently for people to make the decision to go out.

I went on to talk about the pre-renovation experience where the line to the women’s restroom in our facility was so long that it extended out the front door and the men’s room often had to be closed to men in order to accommodate women. Still intermission would need to be extended. I spoke about the restroom renovation garnering the most effusive response from people. I explained that as amusing as it might be to think toilets are the most popular part of a renovation, this represented a very real impact on the community perception of the venue and shouldn’t be dismissed especially given most attendance decisions and arrangements are predominantly made by women.

My mention of the impact of the renovations met with some criticism by the panel. What annoyed me most about this was that the panel was comprised of artists or those associated with arts entities drawn from throughout the state.  I could understand if panelists drawn from the general public didn’t understand the importance of the physical environment in arts and cultural experiences.

I intentionally wrote about the importance of environment in order to introduce the idea to funders and policymakers.  What I hadn’t expected was a dismissal by arts and cultural practitioners.

As Ceci mentions in her article, as insiders, arts and cultural practitioners can be blind to some of the perceptual barriers we erect around and experience.  I guess there also needs to be more frequent mention of the influence tangible physical elements play on the experience, just to be aware of these factors even if you can’t exert control over them.

 

Loving Work, Fearing Leisure

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There is often conversation about how people employed in arts and cultural pursuits overwork themselves (or are overworked) and are seeking to throttle things back to achieve a work-life balance.

However, a recent FastCompany article suggests that people across the board are overworking themselves. In describing the situation, they draw parallels to the type of longing for meaning associated with spiritual or religious pursuits.

“We have spiritual lives, we have physical lives, we like to have intellectual stimuli in our lives, we have our communities and our families and friends; humans are complex, and to have a really healthy balance, it requires all of those components,” says Rachel Bitte, Jobvite’s chief people officer. “Expecting all of that to come from your work could be an unrealistic expectation.”

The authors mention that at one time it was assumed that the more affluent people became, the more leisure time they would pursue. In the 1980s, that was generally the case. Yet in the last 30 years, the opposite has happened and work is valued over free time to the point where we actually fear having work taken away by automation.

Thompson adds that this concept of pursuing passion through work can be beneficial to many–and he includes himself among them–but a majority aren’t able to pursue meaningful work, and the expectations placed on work are often unrealistic.

“We expect to realize our full humanity in work, within the job, rather than other parts of life. That is new,” says Benjamin Hunnicutt,..

Hunnicutt adds that the fear of automation replacing human labor would have been unimaginable to the philosophers and thinkers who questioned the meaning of work throughout history. “Before, the promise of technology was labor-saving devices,” he says. “Now it frightens us. We can’t imagine an alternative to work.”

As I read this, it occurred to me that there was another nuanced dimension to the belief that artists don’t work because they are doing what they enjoy.

In the context of few people finding fulfillment in their work and the concept that people fear “forced leisure,” the idea that artists find fulfillment in something that appears to be a leisurely pursuit probably frightens people on a subconscious level.

At one time people welcomed the advancements of automation on an assumption that robots would create things of value for the benefit of general society. But when work itself is valued to the point where survival is only available in exchange for work, then robots are perceived to be stealing work from you and transferring the benefit to a few.

Instead of pursuing leisure, you have it involuntarily thrust upon you and want to be rid of it so you can support yourself again.

When artists appear to voluntarily be doing what many would long to do if they could have leisure without fear, AND ask to be paid, there is a suspicion that something is amiss. The only way this situation could exist is if there were some secret cheat those artists are keeping to themselves, right?

Yes, it takes many fewer words to encapsulate this long-winded discussion as “you are doing something fulfilling and fun, you shouldn’t be paid for it…”

But if you think about it, you would realize that phrase wouldn’t be thrown in your face so often if the benefits of automated labor were more widely welcomed and shared, removing 40++++ hours work as a critical element of survival.

People may think that those in the arts are following their bliss while they live in fear of their livelihoods, but honestly I get a little anxious about our livelihoods when I read articles evaluating the ability of artificial intelligence to create viable prose, music and visual arts compositions.

That shift in attitude didn’t happen so very long ago. Perhaps an opportunity exists to reverse that trend over the next 30 years.

That Great Experience Two Years Ago? Seems Just Like Yesterday

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A confluence of events and information made me realize that it might be time to revisit the subject of one of my favorite posts.

Last week I was talking to one of my staff about who to include in our season announcement mailing list. I told her we should reach back at least 2-3 years and then cited the fact that people maintain an emotional investment with an arts organization for 2-4 years after a visit.

When I mentioned this, I was thinking about a talk given by Andrew McIntyre  back in 2011 that I wrote about.  He talked about a number of people in focus group conversations that gushed about the great experience they had at a show last year….except that it was 2+ years ago. In their minds, they were still connected with the organization and considered themselves frequent attendees and supporters.

Thanks to Arts Midwest for maintaining the video link, you can watch it. Still very much relevant today and caused me to re-evaluate the concept of butts in the seats to be brains in the seats.

When I was catching up on reading my backlog of blog posts by others this weekend, I saw that Colleen Dilenschneider recently covered the same topics in two recent posts.

In the first, she mentions this same idea about people re-engaging on a roughly two year cycle (her emphasis):

We at IMPACTS often encounter a myth among cultural executives: That audience retention means that people come back every year… and if they’re not coming annually, then you aren’t retaining them as visitors.

As it turns out, this is a high bar – and one that does not line up with actual visitor behavior.

Museums have members and performing arts organizations have subscribers who may visit specific organizations more than once per year. In reality, most people who visit cultural organizations do not visit another organization of that type in two or more years.

She goes on to talk about how there is a disconnect between thinking about attendance in annual terms and actual human behavior. This can be an important consideration in regard to efforts to increase inclusion and diversity. Measuring success on an annual basis may cause you to misinterpret flat attendance as failure. The fact may be that you have doubled the number of people who feel invested in the organization over a two year period– it is just that attendees from the first year may not have started to cycle back to the organization. Your efforts may not bear visible results for three or four years when people begin returning in larger numbers.

In her second post, she warns arts organizations not to assume that people who buy memberships but don’t use them are disengaged with their organization. For many of the most highly engaged people, purchasing a membership is viewed as one of the best ways to support their organization. They are motivated by their passion for the organization, not by the availability of membership benefits.

Not only are the infrequent visitors more likely to buy a more expensive membership than those who regularly attend, they are also more likely to renew.

One reason these members aren’t visiting may be because they don’t live near the organization. (We’ve found that the more admired a cultural organization is perceived to be by the public, the higher percentage of non-local members it has.) Like non-visiting members, non-local members buy more expensive memberships and are more likely to renew them!

[…]

People believe the single best way to support a cultural, visitor-serving organization’s mission is to become a member. (Yes, even more than becoming a donor.)

We also know that mission-based members – people whose primary motivation to become a member involves supporting the organization and its mission – are particularly valuable

As Dilenschnedier is wont to do, the second post has a video that wraps up the concepts of both entries pretty well so be sure to check it out.

From The Why Hasn’t This Been Standard Practice For Decades File

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I recently wrote a piece for ArtsHacker about the emerging role of intimacy direction for productions on stage and screen.  When I first read about intimacy direction a few years ago, it was at a time when there were revelations about people exploiting their position or opportunities without the full consent of others.  The role of intimacy director seemed to be about ensuring a level of protection and security.

However, the more I have read about the role, the more I realized it is really addressing a long neglected part of the creative process. In every instance when performers are exerting themselves in close quarters with each other, whether it is dance or stage combat, movements are rehearsed and scrutinized in detail until it is right. Then someone is assigned to make sure everyone warms-up and rehearses those motions prior to every performance.

When it comes to intimate moments, performers are often told to go off and figure it out themselves or given vague direction. This lack of proper attention can result in a very awkward moment or an all too authentic moment, both of which jar the audience out of the established reality.

The customary practices surrounding dance and fight choreography may be tedious and boring, but they have a goal of providing audiences with a consistent quality experience while ensuring no one gets hurt in the process. In this context intimacy direction is about addressing a long standing lack of attention that has risked these objectives.

When you think about it, you can almost credit the problem as an extension the oft observed phenomenon where people are unfazed by scenes of massive death and destruction but recoil at hints of nudity or intimacy. Perhaps people have been more comfortable micromanaging fights, but prefer to distance themselves from intimacy.

While intimacy directors are increasingly becoming part of the production process, demand far outstrips supply so if you are interested in getting trained, check out Intimacy Directors International to find out more.

Also check out the ArtsHacker post for additional links, videos and examples.

Preparing For A Kiss Like An Eviscerating Slash – As Boringly As Possible

If You Were Really Passionate You Would Let Me Exploit You

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Big tip of the hat to Sarah Carleton for tweeting about research that proves what we long suspected — people are more likely to exploit the labor of those viewed as pursuing their passions.

Even the biggest companies try to leverage “do it for exposure” or pressure people to accept goods as compensation rather than cash.

As KQED first reported in March, despite reaching a valuation of $1 trillion last year, tech giant Apple doesn’t pay the artists performing in its stores, compensating them with low-end merchandise such as AirPods and AppleTVs instead.

A recent study at Duke University provides some research to support all the anecdotes shared among the creative community.

Through eight different studies with over 2,400 participants, researchers discovered that people find it more acceptable for managers to ask passionate workers to work extra hours without additional pay, sacrifice sleep and family time, and take on demeaning tasks outside of their job descriptions

[…]

Furthermore, when reading about a graduate student subjected to verbal abuse and unreasonable deadlines, participants rated him as more passionate than someone who didn’t experience mistreatment.

“When people read about the exact same job but learned that the person enjoyed their work, they think it’s more fair, or less illegitimate, to have them do things that would objectively be considered approaching exploitation,” says Kay.

Pay attention to those last two paragraphs. When someone was subjected to abuse and unreasonable deadlines, they were perceived to be passionate. When people were told that someone enjoyed their work, exploitative treatment was perceived as “more fair, or less illegitimate.”

I think you could probably hold a day long conference just discussing the implications of those two sentences.

The fact that people think your suffering is okay if you are smiling is enough to diminish that smile, if not transform it to a pained grimace.

It is one thing to feel like the time and effort you invested in developing a skill is being undervalued or dismissed. Having some confirmation that they feel their exploitation is validated by your enjoyment of the work you do is pretty damn depressing.

So yes, apparently the whole world does want you to be miserable at work.

More Creative Expression That Touches The Divine

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This is turning into a video heavy week with my posts. With all my talk about helping people recognize their capacity for creative expression, this seemed to be a ready made example.

The BBC website hosted a short documentary video of women in southern India drawing kolam. (Unfortunately, the video doesn’t embed well so you will have to follow the link.)

Every morning they will create intricate designs with rice flour near the thresholds of their homes. Foot/car traffic, weather, animals and birds wear it down/consume it over the day and they start again the next morning. (Though the materials seem remarkably resistant to smudging and dissipation as vehicles drive over it.)

There is a belief that the practice will bring protection on the household. One of the women interviewed says it is a great stress reliever for her. The women also see the designs they create as an expression of their inner selves.

The two women who are the primary focus of the video participate in a competition so you will definitely want to watch to video to get a sample of the broad array of designs the dozens of competitors have developed.

Does Gazing Out From The Belly Of A God Provide New Perspective?

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There was an interesting video on Shanghaiist in the last week about a hotel whose architect designed three giant deities for the facade to combat rumors that the building was constructed on a cemetery.

The three deities, Fu (福), Lu (禄), and Shou (寿), represent the three attributes of a good life, “prosperity,” “status,” and “longevity,” respectively. They were added to the design of the 40-meter-tall building by a local architect to compensate for rumors that the structure was being built on top of an old cemetery.

I will let you take a look at the video first. (Let me just say I present this mostly as a diversion and basis of idle musing rather than subject for serious analysis.)

 

One of the first thoughts I had was, if this was in the US, would this be considered some form of artwashing? For example, if someone had used positive imagery on a hotel constructed on a toxic waste site or some other dubious association as a way to assuage fears.

I am not trying to conflate toxic waste with human remains. Personally, I would have no problem staying in this hotel. I have worked in enough theaters that were purported to be haunted or built on sanctified land that this doesn’t bother me. The placement of the hotel and anticipated repercussions appears it has a much stronger social and cultural significance in China than it might in the US.

I just found myself musing about cultural differences. Would something along these lines this be viewed with skepticism in the US while in China it might be viewed as an appropriate gesture given the history of the plot of land.

I also wondered why a hotel might choose to go to the expense of the extra construction. Presumably people coming from out of town wouldn’t be aware of the rumors. Though if it is the sort of place that gains more business from people visiting local residents or conducting business with government or local companies rather than tourism, they might depend more strongly on word of mouth.

I was amused by the comment made by one of the residents that the building unexpectedly became a distinctive feature of the community. I was thinking to myself, how could three 120 foot high deities NOT become a distinctive feature of the community? If nothing else, you could navigate the streets in relation to where it was on the horizon.

Perhaps people did initially see the statues as a cynical use of spectacle to make money but ended up finding that it created a unique sense of place in the neighborhood.

Thinking about all this made me start to wonder how efforts at creative placemaking might appear from the outside through the lens of other cultures. Does it appear like we are trying to manufacture a sense of community where one doesn’t exist organically? (I get the image of some foreign visitor paraphrasing Regina George “stop trying to make community happen, it isn’t not going to happen.”)

Better Civic Pride And Well-Being Is Just A Short Walk Away

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CityLab ran an article from The Atlantic today discussing how the availability of amenities like libraries and cafes within walking distance of your home bolstered civil society and personal well-being in that neighborhood.

A new study shows that living near community-oriented public and commercial spaces brings a host of social benefits such as increased trust, decreased loneliness, and stronger sense of attachment to where we live.

If this sounds interesting, read the whole piece because it offers much more detail about how this situation increases civic participation and trust in neighbors and local government.

These issues were on my mind Saturday as I was attending a block party in the nearby Pleasant Hill neighborhood here in Macon, GA. Pleasant Hill has been a historically black neighborhood since the professional class started building homes there in the 1870s. However, in the 1960s the neighborhood was bisected by the construction of I-75 and portion of those buried in the cemetery were disinterred. Conditions began to worsen as people moved out of the neighborhood.

Now with the widening of I-75 carving more of the neighborhood away there is attention and effort being paid to improving the conditions. A colleague of mine has been an energetic crusader in this regard and has been awarded a number of grants in support of her proposed projects.

The block party on Saturday was part of one of these projects. She and some others had gone door to door asking people what they would like to see happen with an abandoned community space. Five designs created based on that feedback were on display at the block party on Saturday. People were invited to vote for their favorite design by placing a colored dot on a poster board.

Since I know that there is often a lot of will behind building a space, but less support for operations, I was evaluating the plans for sustainability. All of them had some elements associated with artistic programming, but some emphasized the creation of community gardens. Another had some retail space with barber shops and nail salons. Another was oriented toward counseling services, study spaces and writing programs. Two of them were totally about artistic expression. There were dance studios; spaces for painting and drawing and performance spaces.

Most of the dots were ending up in the columns of these heavily arts spaces. I sighed inwardly. Those would be some great spaces, but they didn’t seem optimized for self-support. One of those designs might get built, but was there a plan to support it? (Good lord! This sounds just like the funder rational I often criticize. I have been infected!)

Besides, didn’t they already have activities like that at the much larger community center across the street?

No, actually they didn’t.

I walked across to see what was in the community center and it was quickly clear there hadn’t been any activities or staff of any kind in there for quite a few years.

This might be even more of an argument for a self-sufficient design, but it also possibly provided insight into the preferences of the voters.

People were drawn to the project designs that would provide them with what they didn’t have — a place to participate in some basic creative expression. Kids were congregating in front of the pictures of people taking dance and art classes because they didn’t have access to anything of the sort.

I was considering whether I wanted to write about this today as I walked back to my car on Saturday. The article on CityLab decided me because the idea that such places create stronger community bonds and a sense of identity aligned so strongly with what I felt I was observing.

I Probably Don’t Really Know What My Audience Values Even Though I Am In The Lobby Before, After, And At Intermission

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I bookmarked a guest post on Museum 2.0 a month ago. Now I feel guilty for not circling back to it sooner. Nina Simon invited Martin Brandt Djupdræt, a manager at Danish museum,  to write about how his organization has all the decision makers interact with visitors as part of their audience research effort.

Their approach is super simple, though a little time consuming. A member of management approaches a random visitor and asks if they can follow the visitor around to observe where they go in the museum and what they interact with. Three weeks later they give the visitor a call and ask:

• why they chose this museum,
• what they noticed especially during the visit,
• whether they interacted with anyone, and
• whether they had talked to anyone about the museum after the visit, and what about

Every decision maker in the organization seems to be required to participate, from management to curators. Djupdræt says the goal is to get managers up and away from their desks interacting with people with whom they wouldn’t normally come in contact.

As you might imagine, what the managers and curators were sure people valued about the museum wasn’t quite accurate. Even those with more direct contact with visitors were surprised by what they learned.

The curators were surprised by how important other parts of the museum besides the historical content were for the visitor. The F&B manager and the head of HR were surprised by how many objects and stories the visitors were absorbed in. This has also given us insights into the work of our colleagues and made us appreciate their work to a larger extent. Now we all have useful and inspiring stories about visitors’ choices and the impact the museum had on them.

Another observation was the importance of food and drink. In our trackings we could see how much time the visitors spent on the museum’s eating places and the great social importance these breaks had. Something we learned about food through the interviews was that the guests consider the food at the museum as part of the museum’s storytelling. This insight has encouraged us to focus on food and food history as a priority topic at the museum, and a colleague is going to work particularly with that subject.

[…]

Visitors have always been a focus for the management, but the research have personalized our audience and they are discussed differently now. As the head of finance described it: “I normally look at whether a task is well done, financially possible and efficient, but now I also consider more seriously how a visitor would feel and react to the changes we plan.”

I especially wanted to include that last section as a reminder that measuring success by efficiency and expense doesn’t necessarily equate to providing a fulfilling experience.

One thing Djupdræt didn’t cover that I was curious about was why they waited three weeks to follow up. I didn’t know if that was a social practice in Denmark where it was rude to immediately survey people about their experience or if it was calculated to see how much of the visitor experience still made an impression three week later.

The whole article is a reminder not to depend entirely on surveys as an evaluation tool. Yes, it is an important practice to have people in the back office interacting directly in a focused manner with the people the organization serves, but there is also the shift of perspective this practice brings. You would assume a food and beverage manager would have fairly extensive interactions with visitors and would be paying close attention to trends.  That person at the Djupdræt’s museum still found themselves surprised by some of the insights they gained.

Dark Side of Word of Mouth

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I participated in a work session for the development of a cultural masterplan for the county today. My table was focused on ideas to attract creative professionals to the community. There was a pretty good cross-section of arts disciplines plus a couple people from the general community involved in the discussion so the quality of the conversation was surprising informative.

Some of the conversation revolved around the lack of infrastructure to ensure a consistent transition for creatives through all stages of their development. People could gain education up to a certain point, then had to leave to continue their education, but could return because there were some opportunities suited to that education. There was discussion about how to fill in that gap with things like mentoring or apprenticeships.

There was a similar conversation related to the frequency of film productions in town who had to leave to do editing and scoring elsewhere because there were no facilities for that locally. Yet there are a number of highly skills musicians capable of contributing to film/tv/video game scores. There are two product that might be of mutual benefit to each other, but nothing to bind them together.

As much as discussions like that raised my awareness about resources, there were some parts of the conversation with which I was all too familiar. A big impediment to attracting new creatives to the community was the lack of value placed on the artistic product.

People want musicians to play for free. People want to pass very little for lessons, apparently unaware of the rent and material costs associated with teaching visual arts disciplines.  Local people view the work on display at the major ceramics show as overpriced while people from out of town swoon at getting great work so cheaply.

Something that did catch my attention was mention that it is apparently difficult for new arts schools to make people aware of their existence due to the decline of traditional media channels and the way social media like Facebook has prioritized information from friends over ad content and news.

Basically, in a place where there is good word of mouth advising people where to send their kids for lessons, it is difficult for new players to break in.  From what I was told, the person trying to open a new school found that those yard signs people put up during elections were pretty effective. Unfortunately, zoning laws prevented where they could be placed and for how long. There are 3-4 existing schools in the same category and they apparently all said they don’t advertise and depend solely on word of mouth to get business.

Now theoretically, some good search engine optimization should provide the new kid in town with some exposure for anyone randomly searching for lessons. But sometimes even new residents try to tap into the local reputation network as they get themselves set up rather than doing general searches. One woman mentioned she was a long time resident of the community, but a friend just moving into the area told her where she should be looking for schools and services for her family. The newcomer had been investing a lot of effort soliciting word of mouth recommendations.

Learning this was a small peek into the dark side of word of mouth. I haven’t thought about it and paid attention to behavior enough to make any pronouncements about implications for arts and culture in general. If this is a reflection of what is happening in many communities, then a dependence on word of both in the context of a national fracturing along socio-political lines could be quite concerning. But if this is a dominant factor in my community and only associated with extra-curricular activities, then it probably isn’t a big deal.

It still may be worth paying attention to how reputation networks are operating in your communities.

Big Kids Play With Bigger Blocks

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I saw an article on Gizmodo in the last couple weeks about scientists who designed 3,900 pound concrete structures that can be moved by a single person. As I read about cuts to arts in schools and the elimination of recess, I figured there was a need to toss out an example in support of unstructured free time.

There are a bunch of fun to watch GIFs on the article’s page, but here is a video of what they did:

As some of the commenters to the article point out, yes it is one thing to roll pre-cast objects over a concrete floor and another to quarry stone to transport over muddy ground. So while this may not entirely explain how Stonehenge, the pyramids and the Moai of Rapa Nui were created, there is some proof of concept upon which to base the design of structures to be used in emergency situations.

From my point of view, the development of the objects people are moving around have some basis in playing with Legos or other building materials and may move on to increasingly practical applications. I am sure that at some point in the past, at least one person who contributed to the design of the project was afforded the time to juggle things around in their hands to see how it all fit together and explore the properties of what they made were. Leaps of imagination and experimentation occurred until someone made a video of people rocking two ton chunks of concrete around with a light push.

Time to play with the simplest objects can result in new insights. But that is difficult to accomplish if you grow up thinking there is no value in such activities, exploration and curiosity.

This may not be the first time you heard about someone gaining insight into ancient construction techniques. A retired construction worker in Michigan demonstrated some much more compelling theories about ancient construction techniques some years ago. (I couldn’t find any better quality video than this.) He employed the same design elements of rounded/beveled edges to great effect, especially considering he was moving blocks across less prepared surfaces and using tools more readily available to anyone.

Though to use his techniques in an emergency situation, you would need much more knowledge to construct barriers and structures than with the prefabricated concrete objects in the first video.

Path To Promotion Doesn’t Necessarily Have To Be Vertical

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You have probably heard some form of the Peter Principle expressed before. At its most cynical, it is usually defined as, “A person will be promoted to their level of incompetence.”   While this has often been used somewhat tongue-in-cheek, according to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, some researchers set out to test if this was really the case.

Studying more than 40,000 sales people at 131 firms, they found this was largely borne out. It has often been assumed that the skills that made people successful at sales would be transferable to management roles, even though there are metrics that are reliable predictors of managerial effectiveness. In fact, the effectiveness of salespeople under the supervision of an improperly promoted supervisor is often inhibited.

…we find evidence that firms systematically promote the best salespeople, even though these workers end up becoming worse managers, and even though there are other observable dimensions of sales-worker performance that better predict managerial quality.

[…]

What is striking, however, is that – among promoted managers – pre-promotion sales performance is actually negatively correlated with managerial quality. A doubling of a manager’s pre-promotion sales corresponds to a 7.5% decline in manager value added; that is, workers assigned to this manager will see their sales increase 7.5% less than workers assigned to the manager who was a weaker salesperson.

What drew my attention to the Marginal Revolution post was the discussion of how to motivate people to perform well without necessarily promoting them to a position which is a mismatch to their strongest skillset. Non-profits often don’t really have the option of providing the increase in pay that would generally accompany a promotion. In many cases, people applying for positions at non-profits are motivated by tangible and intangible factors other than money. (I shouldn’t need to add that this is not a license to normalize paying ridiculously low wages.)

This is good because the first thing the researchers suggest as an alternative to promotion is incentive pay and that may not be a viable option for non-profits. They do caution about totally eliminating promotion as an option since some workers are more motivated by promotion than salary increases. What they do suggest is decoupling job performance in a current position from a set career ladder associated with that position.

So for example, in a non-profit setting you may not look to promote an event coordinator working in the Development Office to assistant director of development if they don’t have the best social skills. Instead, you may want to shift them toward a management or director position in an operational role in recognition of the superior organizational and planning skills they exhibited with events.

Some Reasons Acquiring New Customers Can Be Expensive

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As so often is the case, Seth Godin recently made a post many elements of which are often cited as mistakes arts organizations make.

It should be noted that the things Godin lists are not meant to apply specifically to arts organizations. As often as we talk about how it is not appropriate for non-profits to be run like businesses, it is important to remember that since we are both trying to appeal to human beings to use a product or service, there are still a whole lot of problems we have in common.  The over arching philosophy and motivation which guide the responses to these challenges is what often differentiates non-profits from for-profit entities.

The fact the post is titled, “When your project isn’t making money,” doesn’t mean it is aligned to businesses with a profit motive. Non-profits need to make money to pay their expenses, after all.

Of the 16 or so issues he identifies under the “It might be that your costs of acquiring a new customer are more than that customer is worth” subheading, only about 4-5 aren’t directly applicable to non-profit operations, and it only takes the slightest bit of imagination to see parallels.

Here are some of the more significant issues he lists. You have probably seen many of them mentioned before.

Because there’s a mismatch between your story and the worldview of those you seek to serve.

Because the people you seek to serve don’t think they need you.

Because it costs too much to tell these people you exist.

Because the people you seek to serve don’t trust you.

[…]

Because you’re focusing on the wrong channels to tell your story.
(just because social media is fun to talk about doesn’t mean it works)

[…]

Because the people you seek to serve don’t talk about you, thus, you’re not remarkable.

Or the people you seek to serve don’t like to talk about anyone, and your efforts to be remarkable are wasted.

Because your product doesn’t earn traction with your customers, they wouldn’t miss you if you were gone–the substitutes are easy.

Because even though you’re trying hard, you’re being selfish, focusing on your needs instead of having empathy for those you seek to serve.

Issues of lack of awareness, lack of trust, selfishness, competing substitutes are all topics of discussion in the non-profit arts community.

In fact, you may not associate some of Godin’s points with for-profit businesses. Do you immediately associate empathy with those whom you seek to serve as a characteristic of a for-profit business?

If you think about it, when call a customer or tech support number with a sense of dread and get your problems solved within five minutes, you may have been dealing with a company employing empathy for those they seek to serve. (Or at least one making an effort to retain your loyalty)

When You Try To Break Out Of Siloed Thinking, You Suddenly See Them Everywhere

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When I was looking at Arts Professional UK for yesterday’s post, I saw an article by Lucy Jamieson about rewiring your thinking.

One of the things she talks about is eliminating silos both within an organization (i.e. development is responsible for fund development, and marketing does marketing work, and programming does programming), and between organizations.  The latter being not only the elimination of duplication of effort by multiple entities but also exploring things like where the interests of arts, social justice and climate change advocacy might intersect.

One section of Jamieson’s piece caught my eye:

We talk a lot at the moment about resilience, about being agile and adaptable, about scalability… Yet sometimes it feels as though the more we say the words (resilience, agile, adaptable), the more we’re convincing ourselves that we’re actually doing and being those things.

Back to the Naomi Klein talk. She spoke at one point about the fairly recent shift from the idea of the individual as part of a collective movement, to the individual as a brand (think social media influencers)…

The parallel I’m drawing here is that if we really do want to be ready for change, and therefore resilient, we should also be prepared to instigate that change. And we’re far more likely to be able to do that by partnering up with someone else, no matter how small the change may seem.

I have been helping review grant applications over the last few weeks. Something that struck me recently was that both here in Georgia and in Ohio where I also served on grant panels, there are some amazing, well-designed after school writing programs targeted at helping kids living in difficult circumstances express themselves.

I get excited when I read about the contexts some of these programs connect with writing. Often these are the type of situations where you’d be grabbing a pen and paper in order to participate, never thinking it was a writing exercise and never raising the common student objection about when you would you ever use this skill in real life. Then there are other assignments that definitely asked you to write with intention and introspection.

Reflecting on this last week, I couldn’t help wondering why these techniques weren’t being used in school or why these groups weren’t being brought in to teach a class and give the teachers a break. Some programs I have come across have been sited at schools, but even those were conducted after hours.

The kids participating in these programs are, almost by definition, not handpicked cream of the crop who have a better chance of exhibiting positive outcomes. So schools can’t cite the programs as being inappropriate for their student demographics.

The only reasons I can think for these programs not being in schools is that either:

1- No one made the logical jump that these techniques or groups might be an effective tool for instruction. Perhaps it is a result of siloed thinking that teachers teach in schools during school hours and non-profit groups conduct their activities at other times or are a special, occasional presence in schools. It may also be that while funders are willing to support the time and labor intensive process of writing programs for non-profits, many don’t consider doing the same for schools (or letting them know they are interested in doing so.)

2- The other reason might be that they have different measures of effectiveness. While some of the non-profit grant applicants reference improvements in grades or behavior, by and large they are focused on helping participants feel personally empowered to express themselves. Schools measure effectiveness in terms of test scores which is a secondary or lower ranked concern for the non-profits.

Do They Know They Are Hard To Reach?

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On the Arts Professional UK website, Imrana Mahmood, discusses her experiences becoming a creative producer in a manner that reminded me of two other speakers/authors I often cite. Mahmood’s experience seemed to be at the crossroads of Jamie Bennett’s TEDx Talk about people not recognizing their capacity to be creative even though they already engage in creative activity and Ronia Holmes’ piece on how disinvested communities aren’t bereft of creative and artistic practice.

Mahmood’s article immediately recalled Holmes to me thanks to the title, “A Seat at The Table.” Holmes had talked about how people in disinvested communities are often offered a small seat at the big table by other organizations  when they actually own the entire table in their own communities. Mahmood’s article starts along much the same lines (my emphasis):

As a British Muslim woman of Pakistani heritage, I grew up with an intrinsic love of the arts, including qawwali, henna, calligraphy and poetry. It was therefore a surprise to be labelled as being part of a hard-to-reach community with low arts engagement, as I struggled to reconcile the reality of my lived experience with an inaccurate perception of my identity.

She was encouraged to apply for funding as an “emerging creative producer,” but says she was initially reluctant “to view myself as an arts professional.” I attribute this to her mention earlier in the piece that

“…a career in arts was not considered to be a proper job. This was despite spending much of my spare time running community arts projects as well as having a keen interest in visual arts and live performance.”

Throughout the rest of the article she mentions experiences which involved perceived tokenism and gatekeeping as well as instances when she felt she and others had license to express themselves on their own terms.   If you take one thing away from this article, it should be her call for organizations to reflect on their own inaccessibility.

Paying lip service to diversity and only conversing with creatives of colour as though we exist as a monolith is hugely problematic. It is time that organisations committed to engaging hard-to-reach communities reflect on the reality of their own inaccessibility.

Along those lines, I have some reluctance in citing Ronia Holmes’ original piece as if it were a monolithic representation of the needs and sentiments of all communities, but I often return to it because it for its perception of all the dynamics motivating arts and cultural organizations.

The Gallery At The End of The Rainbow

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There was a piece on Hyperallergic last month that seemed to be continuing an ongoing conversation about the fact that most university based arts programs seem to be oriented toward training students to enter a narrowly defined career path. Where theater programs seem focused on Broadway and music programs on orchestras, Sharon Louden suggests visual arts programs identify gallery shows as the goal.

I hadn’t really thought about visual arts programs promoting unrealistic expectations about an ideal career path given the myriad media suggest so many options to pursue, but it makes sense that one might exist.

Louden says that for most visual artists, gallery sales are not a stable source of income. Many artists have become adept at diversifying their income streams and gallery sales isn’t at the top of the list of revenue sources most pursue. She argues that by subscribing to an emerging centralized MFA Fair, artist training programs are sending a message that gallery sales should be the central ambition of graduates.

Louden’s second objection really caught my eye because she says art schools are doubly profiting from their students by advancing participation in the MFA Fair.

We are all likely aware of the incredibly high cost of enrolling in MFA programs around the country. If universities end up paying for booths and/or taking a percentage of money from recent MFA artists, shouldn’t that be considered a form of double-dipping? Students who often have to take out huge student loans to pay for their education are now going to provide work to their alma mater so it can take a commission from sales of that work?

If a training program is profiting off the labor of students, Louden asks, doesn’t have a greater incentive to cultivate students’ whose work is more marketable and suppress those who push boundaries and take chances? As she says, time in a training program is the period when artists should have the most permission, (if not insistent prodding), from their mentors to diverge from the commercial motive.

How does the institution-turned-gallery decide who gets to show? Will they only accept artists who make conservative work that’s most likely to sell? What happens to the artist who makes work that is not easily accepted in the gallery paradigm? And most darkly, what happens when a former student sues a university for not including them in this fair?

Finally, she asks, if the metric of number of students selling work at an MFA Art Fair becomes a recruiting tool in the same manner as US World Report university rankings, does this not create pressure for non-participant training programs to join or suffer from the inability to guarantee “employment” upon graduation granted by the imprimatur of having a small percentage of students sell works?

Don’t forget there is a growing general societal pressure that university students pursue majors with proven career paths. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that training programs will look to accentuate the successes of graduates by arranging high profile opportunities.

Lollipop Philanthropy

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When I was at the Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit last week, one of the other participants asked if there was a way to communicate to funders that they can’t just fund a program and forbid using the money to pay the people who will actually run the program.

I spoke up and mentioned she wasn’t alone,  this was a big topic of discussion among non-profits and cited Vu Le’s Non-Profit AF blog as a place where this is frequently addressed.

Along these same lines, I was happy to see FastCompany (h/t Artsjournal.com) is refuting the non-profits should be run like a business argument.  The case they lay out isn’t anything you haven’t heard before. They too mention the prohibition on paying people to run the program. It is good to see a business oriented magazine criticizing the practice. It helps circulate the topic outside non-profit circles.

One of the main things raised in the article is that while for-profit success is measured by effectiveness at making a profit, non-profits’ successes are measured by doing everything from treating drug addiction and diminishing gang violence to education about climate change and music lessons.  There is no easy metric for any of these, nor is there any relevance in comparing reduction in gang activity to an increase in musical aptitude.

(my emphasis)

…that hasn’t stopped some deep-pocketed donors from trying. In one case, a venture philanthropy denied a grant to the founding board member and chair of an organization that works with homeless kids because the “cost per life touched” ratio was too high, despite the fact that there was no analysis of how the group compared to others in its area. “Ratios seem rigorous, when in fact it was an inappropriate comparison, given the expense of reaching the different populations,” he says. The measurement didn’t take into account all the benefits that could occur in communities if these life changes stick either. To simplify the argument: “My friend said, ‘I could give everybody in the city a lollipop, and I would have touched a lot of lives.’”

That lollipop metaphor is a tangible illustration of the problem non-profits have been facing with some philanthropic entities. There is a desire for a large quantity of touch points on the cheap. Fleeting impact on thousands this year feels more satisfying than enduring solutions for hundreds over a decade.

Take It From The Folks Who Have Done It 7000 Times –Short And To The Point

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A piece from Artsy regarding what they had learned writing 7000 bios for visual artists came across my radar a few weeks ago and I quickly tagged it as something I to which wanted to circle back. Now that I have done so, I realize it was written about 3 years ago.

The basic observations they make about artists’ bios are worth the attention of anyone in any arts discipline to when it comes to writing promotional copy for websites, brochures, etc.

They found that the sweet spot is between 80 and 140 words with the ideal being 120.  Any more than 150 and people’s attention starts to waver. While they have observed this in relation to gallery labels, it is probably all the more true for websites. They go further to say that a tightly written 80 word bio is better than a 120 word one with repetitive or filler content.

Some of the points to consider when writing an artist’s bio are specific to visual arts but are relatively simple to transfer to any arts discipline. As I mentioned earlier, these rules are just as applicable to describing a performance involving 40 people as it is for one person.

As with most things, the most important element is a strong opening:

The bio should open with a first line that encapsulates, as far as possible, what is most significant about the artist and his or her work, rather than opening with biographical tidbits, such as where the artist went to school, grew up, etc. For example: John Chamberlain is best known for his twisting sculptures made from scrap metal and banged up, discarded automobile parts and other industrial detritus.

Though in the case of promoting a performance or other event, I would start with a sense of why people will enjoy themselves rather than any sort of biographical information. Even if they know the show, no one is going to get excited about seeing Phantom of the Opera if it opens with “Written by the man who revolutionized the musical theatre form with shows like Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Evita, Starlight Express….”

Among the mistakes they say are the biggest people make when writing bios are some familiar faces: hyperbole, laundry list of accomplishments and “artspeak”:

It can be tempting to sing your artists’ praises. We’ve noticed, however, that readers do not respond positively to unsubstantiated claims about an artist’s import (e.g. “Artist X is considered one of the most important artists of the post-war period,” or, “Artist Y is widely regarded for her beautiful work”). Most readers will see right through trumped-up language …The best way to maximize the power of a good bio is to try to educate, not “hard-sell,” your reader. Numerous studies have shown that the hard sell doesn’t work, especially for younger audiences (read: tech-savvy collectors), who respond most positively to simple and authentic messages.

[…]

Impressive as these may be, these laundry lists are tedious to read in prose format. They also take up precious real estate, which you could otherwise devote to a real discussion of your artist’s practice.

There are certainly instances where it makes sense to include one particularly outstanding prize or exhibition, for example, an artist’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale. In this case, try to find a way to naturally include mention of the distinction in the normal flow of the text.

[…]

Instead of trying to impress other curators, academics, and galleries, focus on your audience of new collectors who may be completely unfamiliar with your artists. Readers want to glean information from your writing, and the best way to do that is to use simple language. A good rule of thumb is to impart one idea per sentence.

Obviously that last point should be applied to new attendees rather than new collectors. I would doubly apply the caution about artspeak to the injunction about laundry lists. As insiders, there are a lot of prizes, associations, and accomplishments we might deem particularly outstanding that means nothing to a newer attendee.

Trevor O’Donnell often invokes the “person in Starbucks test” where you recite your promotional copy conversationally to someone in a Starbucks. (or any other random casual encounter.) If they look back at your uncomfortably, he says your text needs a rewrite. Before you even get to that point, you might want to ask a person in Starbucks if a particular accolade means anything to them and leave it out of the description if they look at you cross-eyed or clearly as pretending it sounds familiar.

Is Creative Placemaking The Poor Man’s Gentrification?

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Part of last week I was attending the Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit for the South and Appalachian region.

I am sorry to say that one of the biggest impressions I came away with is that poverty is the rule rather than the exception in this country. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. I grew up in a rural town and spent a good part of my youth consuming government cheese, rice and powdered milk. I worked in an Appalachian community that was notorious for pill mills and opioid addiction nearly 20 years ago before it was considered so much a crisis that organizations started refusing donations from pharmaceutical companies.

But these all seemed to be generally isolated instances compared to the whole of the country. More and more I am not so sure.

I spent three days last week listening to the majority of the presenters talk about the great projects they have enacted in communities where the median income for a household of four hovers between $19,000 and $32,000 a year.

One of the questions in the first session I attended was about whether placemaking was happening predominantly in rural and impoverished communities. At the time I was thinking about all the urban gentrification that has been going on so I didn’t think that was the case, but by the time I got to the end of conference, I started to wonder if anyone was using creative placemaking as a tool in affluent urban communities. More and more it seemed like Creative Placemaking is something people turn to in order to improve economically depressed communities.

I began to suspect the effort to improve in big cities it is just termed development. If there is any creative element that emerges, it is in compliance with percent for art requirements forcing projects to add artistic elements.

Most of the presenters and attendees seemed to be from small communities. There were some people from Miami and Alameda County, CA at the conference but they talked about how their projects were improving lives in impoverished neighborhoods and creating more positive relationships with the police.  No one was talking about projects on the scale of New York City’s Highline or Hudson Yards

I will confess that this is a large chunk of cynicism talking right now. So much of what is accomplished in smaller communities is definitely due to governments, developers and community advocates entering in conversations to find innovative solutions that improve the status of the entire community. Maybe bigger cities aren’t attending these conferences because they don’t feel the need to participate since they already have developers salivating to build something. As a result, I am hearing the stories of communities with fewer resources.

At the same time I listen to people talk about all small projects they bootstrapped into being viewed as a vast improvement because it added a small walking trail and pole barn pavilion. The fact that this trail is touted as something people can use to spend time with their families after a 10 day of work almost has undertones of those commercials telling us we can improve the lives of people overseas “for pennies a day.” Except that it isn’t overseas. It is kinda dispiriting.

I don’t have to tell those of you in the arts community that even when a project clearly has improved conditions, it isn’t necessarily valued. Germaine Jenkins talked about the farm she and her colleagues at Fresh Future Farm created in North Charleston, SC, transforming an empty lot into a garden with a store that charges people on a sliding scale according to their need. Her lease is up in September with no indication of whether it will be renewed.

There was a time when people were criticizing the superficial understanding of Richard Florida’s observations of the relationship between Creative Class and vibrant communities. There was a sense that you just needed to attract creative people to place and they would take care of the rest. I feel like Creative Placemaking reflects a more sophisticated understanding that a complex mix of factors from public policy, community dynamics, business and cultural resources, etc need to be in place and requires constant attention and balancing.

Yet I am starting to wonder if people see the success of creative placemaking efforts elsewhere and perceive it to be the panacea for the problems that plague their communities.

Yet, perhaps this is what is needed at this juncture– the example of success elsewhere as a model of what should be done locally. Last week Notre Dame cathedral burned down and people apparently recognized that there was a spate of recent church burning in the US that had not received the attention and support that the cathedral did and started donating toward the restoration of those US churches. The people who are undertaking these project understand that there is a lot of hard work and consensus building required. Maybe the examples of others will bring a positive result in the long run.

Gather Your Neighbors For A Castle Raising

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I am always up for spreading around awesome ideas that people execute. I wanted to give a shout out to my old collaborators, at the Creative Cult. They have been involved with all sorts of cool stuff since I moved away from my previous job, but recently they did something I knew I needed to call attention to.

They partnered with a group who was showing, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the documentary film about Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to add a little something to the attendance experience.

In advance of the show, the Creative Cult sent out a call informing people that they would be building a cardboard castle in the spirit of Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make Believe.

Roger. Legends say of him that he wrote every show until his very last. He will be dearly missed. WE WILL BUILD THE…

Posted by Creative Cult Lives – cmar on Tuesday, April 2, 2019

And of course, they got people to help them build it and turned it into the primary entry point for entering the screening.  Seeing stuff like this makes me ask, why haven’t I thought of something like that? Don’t tell them—I am definitely gonna steal the idea 😉

https://www.facebook.com/creativecultlives/posts/1249691825197286

Theater Seeking Animation With Creative Vitality

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Something I thought might be interesting to readers.  The City of Douglas, GA has issued a request for proposals (RFP) to purchase and run a historical theater.  You don’t see this that often so it was interesting to me the type of things that go into an RFP to run a theater.

The 750 seat Martin Centre was constructed in 1939-41 as a movie house but was renovated to accommodate live performances. The city is looking for someone to purchase the venue for at least $200,000 and continue to operate it as an arts venue.

The City is seeking proposals with the following indicators:

a)Recognize the historical significance of the building and maintain architectural characteristics of the theater’s façade.

b)Honor all upcoming rental contracts where the lessee has paid deposit and/or rental for the booking.

c)Deliver a use that will further promote Downtown Douglas as an entertainment and cultural destination location in South Georgia and Georgia and be cohesive with existing downtown uses.

d)Clearly demonstrate economic feasibility.

e)Demonstrate a positive economic benefit to the downtown Douglas area and the City of Douglas.

f)Offer a purchase price of at least $200,000.00.

As part of the proposal, they essentially request that the applicant outline how they will accomplish all these things. They also list how each criteria will be weighted.

For me, it was interesting to see how the RFP reflected the hopes and ambitions for what the Martin Centre might be for the city. They highly encourage people to discuss potential use of an adjacent plaza as part of the proposals. They are definitely hoping the new owner’s vision extends beyond the physical walls of the space.

Since I expect the listing to go off line after the May 6 deadline, I am archiving a copy of the PDF here for future reference for RFPs along these lines.

The Games That Are Played In Cultural Facilities

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Hate the fact that your city will provide millions to fund an arena that only gets used 20 times a year but not arts organizations that each host hundreds of events a year?

Concerned that the availability of home entertainment systems with huge screens and gaming systems are keeping people at home rather than participating in cultural activities?

Well now your fears and concerns are combining to haunt you even more!

According to CityLab a $50 million eSports Arena is being constructed in Philadelphia. There are other eSports facilities around the country, but this will be the first standalone facility.  Just to be clear, I am not sure if the local government has subsidized the construction of this arena. According to the article, it is being built by Comcast Spectror.

Some might see this as an unnecessary shrine to a niche subculture. But for fans of esports (or professional video-game competitions), this was an inevitable next step. An estimated 250 million people watch esports, although most do so from the comfort of their homes. Global revenue is slated to hit $1.1 billion this year, and the industry is growing into a more social, spectator sport.

This article didn’t catch my eye because I perceived eSports arenas as a threat to arts and cultural organizations. Actually, I see some potential in providing a venue for gaming.

I was at a meeting a couple months ago and someone said they had started hosting video game related activities in their facility. They identified people living within a certain radius of their facility who posted game walk-through videos on YouTube and Twitch and set up sessions where local residents could come in and play against them.

They were only charging about $5 a person, but the overhead was low and they also earned money from concessions. They saw getting a new group of people walking into the facility and feeling comfortable as a win. Plus they got an opportunity to get a sense of what the people might be looking for in terms of programming.

I have started talking to staff about trying to set up something in our facility. One of my tech crew is a professional gamer who travels around the country competing. We haven’t lined anything up yet. If anyone else has had success and has some tips, let me know.

People might be horrified that a performing arts space is being desecrated by such base activities as video game tournaments.

I am not actually raising a hypothetical situation here. A director of the state opera house in Kyrgyzstan was fired for allowing a video game tournament in the building.

Many people were aghast at the thought of the competition in that space, but others felt that it was both relevant and fiscally responsible:

Liberal opinion leader Bektour Iskender disagreed in a January 21 Facebook post:

Hello?! A Dota tournament at the Opera and Ballet Theatre is one of the coolest ways of advertising opera and ballet. And its not as if you can just find 180,000 som (the total Beeline paid to rent out the building) lying on the ground.

Note: 180,000 som is about $2,600

Accepting Donations Is Increasingly Complicated Business

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While I have written about this before, of late it seems that the decision to accept a donation from someone is increasingly one requiring deliberation. An article on The Conversation lays out a case for either having a morals clause or time limits on any donation that involves naming rights.  Citing the number of non-profit arts, cultural and educational institutions who have refused to accept donations from the Sackler Family due to their ownership of opioid maker Perdue Pharmaceuticals, author Terri Lynn Helge notes it is easier to refuse a donation than to refund one.

As a nonprofit law scholar, I have seen that it’s much harder to sever prior arrangements with donors embroiled in scandals than it is to stop taking money from donors who are the object of public outrage.

[…]

When these scandals strike, charities face a dilemma – keep the money given by the now-tarnished donor or return the tainted funds. But returning the funds may be easier said than done.

Once the money is given away, it’s committed to charitable use. Returning that money just because the donor’s reputation is now sullied may get the charity in trouble with state regulators.

Helge mentions donations from Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby as cases where organizations began to experience negative perceptions of their brand and were faced with refusing a donation or making public statements distancing themselves from the donors.

Increasingly these are issues non-profits of any size need to consider as they accept and recognize donations from a variety of sources. Both returning the donation and grinning and bearing the bad publicity can be equally bad options:

They can give the money back, perhaps with interest. They can suspend programs or professorships named after the donors whose names have become an embarrassing burden, perhaps with threat of litigation from the donor for not fulfilling the charity’s end of the bargain. Or, they can continue to maintain the donor’s name and face public outrage.

[…]

Once the cost of doing nothing gets too high in the long run, charities may implement costly options to terminate the association.

That is why in my view, museums and other recipients of the drug-making family’s philanthropy could eventually redirect their donations. But that won’t happen until what they lose by honoring Sackler gift agreements becomes more exorbitant than satisfying all of the anti-Sackler movement’s demands.

That Story Was Old When Gilgamesh’s Grandpa Told It

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One arts marketing phrase I have always hated, and thankfully I seldom see it these days, is “…illustrates what it means to be human..” I often dislike the rationale that something tells a universal story as a justification for programming the classic works.   The themes may be the same, but the context in which they are presented determines how easily people can relate to and receive the material.  Sometimes new stories have to be told in order to remain relevant.

There is a pretty fascinating essay in Harpers about storytelling which illustrates how core stories get reframed to suit the needs of different times and cultures. People have been researching the linguistic DNA of stories like Red Riding Hood and have discovered some of them are incredibly old. Variations on a theme split and converge across geography. Other times, the same story persists relatively intact for a very, very long time.  While the context of the stories differs in order to emphasis different cultural values and mores, there is an argument to be made for the commonality among humankind. (my emphasis)

The results provided a new resolution to decades of debate regarding the origins of “Little Red Riding Hood.” An ancient story preserved in oral traditions in rural France, Austria, and northern Italy was the archetype for the classic folktale familiar to most Westerners. On a separate limb of the tree, the story of the goats descended from an Aesopian tale dated to 400 ad. Those two narrative threads merged in Asia, along with other local tales, sometime in the seventeenth century to form “Tiger Grandmother.

[…]

Tehrani and Silva discovered that some had existed for far longer than previously known. “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” for example, were not just a few hundred years old, as some scholars had proposed—they were more than 2,500 years old.

Another folktale, known as “The Smith and the Devil,” was astonishingly ancient. Multiple iterations—which vary greatly but typically involve a blacksmith outwitting a demon—have appeared throughout history across Europe and Asia, from India to Scandinavia, and occasionally in Africa and North America as well. “The Smith and the Devil” became part of Appalachian folklore, and it’s a likely forerunner of the legend of Faust. Tehrani and Silva’s research suggests that not only are these geographically disparate stories directly related—as opposed to evolving independently—­­but their common ancestor emerged around five thousand years ago, during the Bronze Age.

Anthropologist Jamie Tehrani says that when he is reading bedtime stories to his children, it occurs to him that the stories are older than the language he is using to relate them.

For those in the arts and cultural sector that don’t necessarily feel that the work they do is particularly valued in society, there is some anecdotal evidence that points to storytelling being something of core value in society. In 2014 anthropologists working with the nomadic hunter-gatherer Agta of the Philippines conducted a survey.

To their surprise, storytelling topped the list—it was even more prized than hunting skills and medicinal knowledge. When they asked nearly three hundred Agta which of their peers they would most like to live with, skilled storytellers were two times more likely to be selected than those without such talents, regardless of age, sex, and prior friendship. And when they asked the Agta to play resource allocation games, in which they could keep bags of rice or donate them to others, people from camps with talented storytellers were more generous, giving away more rice, and esteemed storytellers were themselves more likely to receive gifts. Most profoundly, Agta with a reputation as good storytellers were more reproductively successful: they had 0.5 more children, on average, than their peers.

“There is an adaptive advantage to storytelling,” says Migliano. “I think this work confirms that storytelling is important to communicate social norms and what is essential for hunter-gatherer survival.”

Authentic Air Safety Kabuki Theatre

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Okay, a little break from my weighty opining on the value and philosophy of art.

I caught this on the Forbes site recently. All Nippon Airways (ANA) has employed kabuki actors to appear in their safety videos. The video showcases a lot of the characteristic elements of kabuki performance, including, as Forbes notes, male performers in female roles.

I always think it is great when countries showcase their traditional arts for a broader audience. (Which by no means diminishes New Zealand’s Lord of the Rings themed air safety announcements). The internationally familiar context of an air safety announcement assists in the sharing of this cultural practice. You need not speak Japanese or English to understand what is occurring.

Andrew Bender does a good job in the Forbes piece pointing out some of the common devices from kabuki performance, including the places where they diverge from tradition. Read the article if you are curious to learn more about what you are watching.  There are a ton of other symbols present like color and gestures, the meanings of which I once knew more about but which are pretty vague in my memory now.

If nothing else, perhaps people will stop randomly labeling activities as kabuki theatre after seeing a sample of what a performance actually entails. (Okay, so yeah, probably not.)

Bender mentions there is a behind the scenes video which is shown upon deplaning. I tried to find it on the ANA YouTube site in order to learn a little bit more to no avail.

 

 

 

Kids Might Be Motivated To Learn If They Aren’t Always Stuck In A Classroom. Imagine That

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Last month there was an article in Forbes about the benefits of field trips and arts education. It started out in a way I dislike, discussing test scores and neurological development as if arts and cultural experiences were a special fertilizer you sprinkled on to get stuff to grow better. However, it soon moved on to discuss how field trips and arts education provide a broader context and relevance for learning. Essentially, acknowledging that learning doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

Author Natalie Wexler notes that reading comprehension especially is greatly facilitated by life experiences that provide context to a passage. For many children this experience is gained in after school and family activities. For children who don’t have those same family opportunities, in school education and field trips are important for filling the gaps.

The focus of the latter part of the article isn’t that arts and cultural experiences magically help raise test score but help solidify abstract concepts. It isn’t miraculous that children learning about watersheds or historic events have greater mastery of the subject matter after visiting a river or historic site.

While the Forbes piece doesn’t acknowledge this directly, one of the articles Wexler links to does,

In the Woodruff Arts Center experiment we actually found an increase in math and reading test scores for students who went on multiple field trips after the first year of the experiment. I’m not sure I fully believe that result given that it is simply implausible that students learned significantly more math and reading when they saw a play, visited an art museum, and heard the symphony. My only explanation for the test score increase, if it is not a fluke, is that test results are partly a reflection of what students know, but also partly a reflection of their motivation to acquire that knowledge and to show it to us on a test. Feeding students a steady diet of math and reading test drills may not nurture student motivation to learn as well as these enriching activities. And as Core Knowledge proponents have long emphasized, students become more advanced readers by having more content knowledge and knowledge about the world. Field trips clearly provide that.

For arts people there might be some value in learning that a live performance about a topic seems to connect better with students than watching a video on the same subject. Not to mention, they are more likely to bring their families back with them.

We also see that students absorb a high amount of content knowledge on these field trips. In the theater experiment, for example, students learn the plot and vocabulary of the plays much more fully than if they watch a movie of the same story. Lastly, we find that students have a stronger interest in returning to these cultural institutions in the future. In the Crystal Bridges experiment, for example, we tracked coded coupons that we gave to all participating students and observed that students who visited the art museum on a field trip were significantly more likely to return with their family over the following half year.

You Are Never Too Young To Start Producing Shows

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So given the context of all the deserved gushing over a North Bergen, NJ’s stage version of the movie Aliens with a $5,000 budget and recycled materials,  Ken Davenport’s suggestion that high school productions have general managers and press agents doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable.

Davenport’s  motivation is to get as many kids involved in a production as possible. Everyone knows the larger cast you have on stage, the larger an audience you are likely to have as friends and family show up to support students. But he also notes that being involved in administrative roles opens people’s eyes to a much wider range of career opportunities than just actors and technicians. (his emphasis)

Because whether a student decides to pursue a career in the theater or decides to be a lawyer, I firmly believe that there is no endeavor in the world that teaches collaboration better than putting up a musical.

[…]

They’re probably the type that thinks putting on a musical is just a hobby.  Because no one has told them any different. But you and I know it’s a business . . . just like any other.  And that businesses need all sorts of talents to make a show a success.

He outlines the following as tasks students could pursue in the different roles.  Davenport encourages everyone to pass the post link on to any high school teachers who might be interested in pursuing this. He says he will even write up the job description and list of duties so the teacher doesn’t have to.

The Producer would be in charge of overseeing the production, of course, as well as fundraising.  Yep, give him or her a goal of raising $X and let them find a way to do it (car washes, bake sales, Kickstarter and more).

The General Manager would learn how to put a budget together for the show and keep everyone on a budget.

The Press Agent would try to get articles written in the newspapers, online, and even invite people like me to come to see it.

The Advertising and Marketing Director would get the word out to sell tickets, get a logo designed, manage the social media, and more.

The Casting Directors would schedule the auditions, run them, put out the offers and maybe even convince the high school quarterback that he’d make a great Teyve.

A Splash Of Color And The Hope That One Day Prince Will Come

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I was half listening to a TED Talk given by Amanda Williams where she spoke about turning abandoned homes in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago into art. She would check the city’s register of houses slated to be demolished and then would descend upon them over the weekend, painting them in a bright monochrome to change a blighted building into a beacon of color in the neighborhood.

As her palette, she choose colors that had relevance to black residents of Chicago: Ultrasheen conditioner; Pink Oil Moisturizer; Harold’s Chicken Shack; Currency Exchange and Safe Passage signs; and Crown Royal bags.

I started paying somewhat closer attention when she talked about how a passerby thought the house painted in Crown Royal bag purple was a sign that Prince would be descending on the neighborhood to do a concert.

And though that block was almost all but erased, it was the idea that Prince could pop up in unexpected places and give free concerts in areas that the music industry and society had deemed were not valuable anymore. For him, the idea that just the image of this house was enough to bring Prince there meant that it was possible…And once I revealed that in fact this project had absolutely nothing to do with Prince, Eric nodded in seeming agreement, and as we parted ways and he drove off, he said, “But he could still come!”

He had assumed full ownership of this project and was not willing to relinquish it, even to me, its author. That, for me, was success.

I loved that Williams had this experience. It reminded me of the poem, “The Secret” by Denise Levertov which also mentions the viewer taking ownership of a work.

But I really perked up and paid attention to what Williams said next (my emphasis)

I wish I could tell you that this project transformed the neighborhood and all the indices that we like to rely on: increased jobs, reduced crime, no alcoholism — but in fact it’s more gray than that. “Color(ed) Theory” catalyzed new conversations about the value of blackness. “Color(ed) Theory” made unmistakably visible the uncomfortable questions that institutions and governments have to ask themselves about why they do what they do…. One of the neighborhood members and paint crew members said it best when he said, “This didn’t change the neighborhood, it changed people’s perceptions about what’s possible for their neighborhood,” in big and small ways.

The value of her artistic/creative/community building activity couldn’t be measured by any of those usual metrics. How can you measure the benefit of a splash of bright color that brings a moment of hope that someday Prince will come? Not to mention the secret hopes and joys that may have been kindled within the hearts of neighborhood residents that they would never admit on a survey?

Enacting Your Solution Or Your Funder’s Solution?

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Often when we talk about arts and cultural organizations applying for grant funding, there is mention of how organizations might try to recast what they are doing in a context that makes it appear that their work aligns with that of a funding organization. There might also be a mention of an organization creating a new program in order to qualify for funding with an eye to doing the least possible in order to use that funding for their core operations.

When there is discussion about how foundation agendas are shaping what type of work get done, it is often in the context of the contortions non-profits will go through to secure the funding or how they need to piece support together based on narrow criteria of what an organization will or won’t fund.

While we all agree this situation is bad for non-profits because it diverts resources from the organizations core activity, less discussed is whether funder agenda is shifting the core activity of organizations in an nonconstructive manner.

Non Profit Quarterly had a story about the research Megan Ming Francis conducted on the relationship of the NAACP and one of their first major funders, Garland Fund.  Based on records of the interactions between the two organizations, the NAACP reluctantly ended up shifting away from their efforts to get state and federal entities to address lynching and mob violence to align with the Garland Fund’s education and unionization agenda because Garland was one of the few groups willing to fund them.

From a Vox piece on Francis’ research,

Garland’s organization also started out with a firm commitment to not “attempt by promise or by the setting forth of conditions or by any other means to control the policy of any group or individual entrusted with this money or a part of this money.” That, though, eventually changed, according to Francis.

The Garland Fund was most interested in education and organized labor, two areas it saw as the most important foundations for improving society. Over time, according to Francis, it discouraged the NAACP’s work on racial violence in favor of a focus on black education, and effected a swing in priorities that still guides the NAACP today (though the fund stopped operations in 1941).

[…]

Francis points to evidence that black leaders at the time didn’t think of desegregation as the pivotal success that we see it as today. Other researchers have emphasized that the fight for Brown was somewhat out of step with what black communities prioritized at the time.

Francis refers to this shift in priorities as “movement capture.” In the podcast interview that accompanies the NPQ article, it seems little has changed in the grant application process. Francis paraphrases an NAACP member writing to a member of the Garland Fund, “I have no pride of authorship. I basically just regurgitated what you wanted me to write.”

If you work in an arts and cultural organization, you may not think that some of the programming you are doing is counter to your interest. After all, if schools aren’t offering arts programming, your organization needs to pick up the slack by going into schools or adjusting operations to allow for school group visits and matinees. Children are the future of the arts, right? But might it not be more in the interest of museums to be open later in the day to better accommodate visitations at night when people got off of work?

I don’t know that museum operating hours are really dictated by a perceived need to be available for visitation by school groups. Megan Ming Francis suggests that the influence of funders have in shaping standard practice is underestimated.

She worries that funders often assume they have a better picture of the problem when they might not — and she thinks funders underestimate the costs to the movement of grassroots organizations aligning themselves with the funding zeitgeist.

I hadn’t set out to draw the connection when I started this post, but I realized the question of whether your organization would be focused on school outreach if educating wasn’t such a priority among funders is related to an frequent topic of this blog of late: Would your operations and activities look different if you didn’t have to justify your value in terms of economic impact and test scores?

If this line of thought intrigues you, check out the NPQ article and listen to the accompanying podcast interview with Megan Ming Francis where she discusses movement capture and wonders how funding may change the goals of groups like Black Lives Matter.

And You Thought Developing A New Performance Piece Was Hard

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Watching the latest webinar on the Creating Connection initiative from ArtsMidwest, I am pleased to see the progress that is being made. The Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs has embraced it and has made it a central part of their efforts, organizing seminars and training sessions throughout the state.

I don’t mean to gloss over and skip quickly past the work that is going on in Michigan, but the second organization featured in the webinar, Mixed Blood Theater had some challenges rolling out a project that echoed my post yesterday.

Mixed Blood’s neighborhood in Minneapolis has a large Somali population. Like the Oakland Museum of California I spoke about yesterday, Mixed Blood has ambitious goals of improving the well-being of their community. They created an initiative they named Project 154 with a aim of:

“bridg[ing] cultural gaps between residents, health providers, promote preventative care, increase trust of health providers and promote personal narrative to boost personal confidence and increase community self-advocacy, using theatre as a core tool to achieve this.”

They had initially hoped to record 154 stories of residents discussing their health. They quickly realized that they didn’t have the degree of trust from the community required to achieve that.

They decided to move to story circles where they provided food, tea and a financial incentive to participants. While they had more people interested in participating than was practical if they wanted to limit the circle size, they ran into some cultural barriers. Women wouldn’t speak with men present, especially in regard to their health; younger people wouldn’t speak in the presence of elders; and interactions were somewhat burdened by the need for translation.

The next attempt at hosting story circles, they had the assistance of a Somali speaker recently hired as a project coordinator. He helped them better understand the cultural nuances of the neighborhood residents. These story circles were lead by a member of the community who had knowledge of the health care system. The circles were separated by gender and age. The groups were smaller and the conversations were more extensive. This allowed Mixed Blood to develop better relationships and trust with participants.

It was at this point they were able to move to the stage of recording the stories of community members. Their goal is 20 instead of 154. Mixed Blood shared these videos with healthcare providers to help them better understand the concerns and perceptions residents had about health care.

As you can see, there was a lot of work involved getting to the point where people would be willing to participate in a video recording. Ten of the 20 have been shot and Mixed Blood has only just recently had women agree to being recorded. All this is part of an ongoing effort much broader than I have described here.

Much as the Oakland Museum did in the article I referenced yesterday, Mixed Blood has identified a problem in the community and how they can contribute to solving it.

In some respects, what they have tried to accomplish has taken a similar amount of time and effort as developing a new performance piece from scratch, workshopping and revising it. The difference is that many of those participating in the many stages of development are generally invested in cooperating toward the same goal. Mixed Blood had to overcome a number of barriers to get to where they are today.

Webinar below. Michigan Council starts at about 8:45 mark, Mixed Blood Theatre around 30:30 mark.

 

In Order Have Social Impact, They Had To Kill The Social Impact Statement

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If you haven’t seen it already, it is worth reading Joanna Jones’ piece on Medium about how the Oakland Museum of California developed and then abandoned their social impact statement.

One of the central identity problems non-profits face is generating statements of mission, goals, etc that are meaningful and alive for the organization. Creating these statements is seen as a necessary evil for strategic plans, grant applications, etc and are filed away until it comes time to revise them for the new strategic plan or copy it down on a grant application.

But people join non-profit organizations with the hope that they can make a difference. Even if it is contrary to whatever is written on the reference document gathering dust in the filing cabinet, every organization should have some aspirational statement of purpose they are telling new hires that actually aligns with the organizational practice.  (Making enough money to meet payroll doesn’t count.)

Now, the thing that everyone thinks they are doing that keeps them coming to work every morning still may not be the most practical and realistic. That was the issue that Jones says the Oakland Museum quickly came to recognize. In 2017, they created a social impact statement that, “OMCA makes Oakland a more equitable and caring city.”

Focus groups asked whether a museum could really solve the problems contributing to the lack of equity and caring in the city. The museum’s internal stakeholders also questioned the viability of the statement.

The museum invited six experts on social impact to spend two days participating in convenings and museum activities. While these experts were excited and energized by the reach and inclusion of museum events, they too were skeptical about the social impact statement. They wondered how the museum could ever meet the myriad concepts people would have about what equity and caring looked like.

After a lot of work, conversation and introspection, Jones writes that they realized they didn’t actually need a social impact statement,

Rather, we simply needed to articulate the problem our community is facing that we are uniquely suited to address, the best solution we believe exists for that problem, and the concrete and tangible outcomes we’re going to measure that will demonstrate our positive social impact.

The problem we’re trying to solve is social fragmentation.

The community of Oakland is presently undergoing significant fallout from inequities within institutions, the state, and civil society resulting in a decline in social cohesion and an increase in social exclusion.

Our contribution is facilitating greater social cohesion.

[…]

We will know that we are achieving that impact–creating greater social cohesion–when our Museum visitors say that they:

  • feel welcome at OMCA
  • see their stories reflected at OMCA
  • connect with other people at OMCA, and
  • feel comfortable expressing their own ideas and are open to the ideas of others at OMCA

What I valued about this piece was the discussion of the process they went through to come to this realization. There are statements of purpose non-profit organizations are obligated to have. There are some statements/actions organizations may feel self-obligated to enact in order to adhere to trends or to remain relevant. But these may not be relevant or constructive to the developing organizational identity. I was glad to see they recognized that while it was valuable to enunciate a clear purpose, their statement didn’t necessarily need to conform to a specific definition.

Don’t Forget That Failure Is An Option

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It has only been in recent years that a message of embracing and talking about our failure has been part of a public conversation among arts and cultural organizations. I am not sure how many people are including these stories in their reports to funders, but little by little people are willing to admit that not everything has gone has planned.

Still, we don’t see a lot of articles and case studies where people are analyzing where they went wrong. It was for that reason that Madhavan Pillai’s account in Arts Management Quarterly drew my attention. Pillai had experienced great success with a walking project which drew attention to the polluted ecosystem along the Cooum River near Chennai, India. Buoyed by this success, he wanted to create an arts festival along the river to inspire people to take ownership in the well-being of the river.

The project concept was well received among partners and supporters, the goals and objectives were crystal clear. A proposal was written, presentations were made, budgetary details worked out, teams were set, their roles and responsibilities were defined and agreed on. A strong network was established without leaving a single stone unturned including a focus on public relations and advertisement. With all ingredients for a very successful international festival in place, the project failed

Among the factors Pillali attributes to the failure was actually not acknowledging that the project might fail. The other was using a democratic leadership style that sought the consent of all the partners. (my emphasis)

The overemphasis on democratic leadership, which is otherwise considered to be a best practice, turned around to become disastrous…During the high-point of crisis I was consulting team members and addressing everyone’s concerns….A consent with all members could never be reached. The mode of action instead geared towards an apologetic atmosphere with self-satisfied and settling egos within the team.

Based on this experience, I think that leadership should be trained to face failure as the most powerful source for know-how and understanding. It teaches survival, renewal and reinvention of yourself and the organization you are leading, but this learning about failure should be built in education. If the control over the team and partners is not strong, the leadership is forced to accept new ideas that emerge every day.

The lack of factoring the failure left no room to fight the crisis and I was left alone with unnerving thoughts, waiting for a miracle to happen. Irrational and persistent fear of failing kept me towards pushing my limits and digging inside to explore….As the famous proverb goes “success has hundred fathers, failure is an orphan”, I was abandoned.

A lot of interesting thoughts here. In addition to the text I bolded regarding how experiencing failure makes you stronger, Pillali’s mention of being paralyzed by fear and waiting for a miracle were not unfamiliar. I have seen a good number of arts and cultural organizations where miracle seeking in the face of a paralyzing crisis has been the default mode of operation. I have felt fortunate that I was not on the inside of those organizations because I have had the unfortunate experience of being on the inside of organizations that operated in this way.

Even Art Works Undergo High Stakes Testing

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In a literal case of one person’s trash is another’s treasure, New York Times had a piece about museums grading the works in their collection to decide what to liquidate.  It has long been acknowledged that museums often only display a small fraction of their collections. As they continue to acquire more pieces, the likelihood that some pieces may ever be displayed decreases. At the same time, the need for temperature controlled storage space increases.

The NY Times piece has an interview with the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Charles L. Venable, who halted plans for a $14 million expansion of storage. Instead, he had the museum staff grade 54,000 pieces in their collection from A to D. Those pieces receiving D grades will be sold or given to other institutions.

The NY Times article has an interactive quiz where you can try to guess which pieces received an A and which received D. The whole process forces one to revisit the unenviable questions of “what is art” and worse, “what is good art?”

The criteria used by the museum was “A being a masterpiece,” … “and D being maybe onetime in the distant past this was a valuable object for us but we probably shouldn’t hang on to that.”

The whole process of deaccessioning is so cumbersome, it is almost easier to retain and store. In addition to the issues mentioned by the NY Times below, recently there has been a lot of concern about art finding its way into private collections where it can be even less accessible than before. (Even when not displayed in a museum gallery, scholars are able to study works.)

Deaccessioning, the formal term for disposing of an art object, is a careful, cumbersome process, requiring several levels of curatorial, administrative and board approval. Museum directors who try to clean out their basements often confront restrictive donor agreements and industry guidelines that treat collections as public trusts.

The article details some of the exacting requirements made by donors which have intentionally and unintentionally firmly cemented the presence of certain works at different institutions. Some works will never be placed in storage other than the time it takes to effect repairs and restoration thanks to donor stipulations.

There are also some instances where museums accepted nearly everything that was offered during their early years in an attempt to build the collection. Many times, not only did the institution lack the means to care for the works, the quality of the work was rather inferior. As time went on, the institutions had to determine how best to divesting themselves of works they probably shouldn’t have accepted in the first place.

If nothing else, take the interactive quiz to get a sense of how works are judged and graded.

Things To Ponder When Endeavoring To Tell Other People’s Stories

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There is a lot of conversation about the need for people to see themselves and their interests reflected in arts and cultural experiences if arts and cultural organizations were going to remain relevant.  I saw an article on Arts Professional UK that gave examples of what organizations across the Pond were doing along these lines. Many of the observations about the challenges involved which are just as true in the US as the UK.

Tamsin Curror opens by citing, Glenn Jenkins, who has collaborated on projects with her organization,

“Imagine a scenario where all of the creative choices in your own home, the colour and style of the decor, the music you play and the films you watch were all up to somebody else to decide. This would be pretty disempowering, yet in our neighbourhoods or collective homes this is exactly how it is…”

This is the perception people can have when entities create a work purporting to reflect the experience of a group of people without the involvement and input of those who are/were part of the experience.

As much as we in the arts and cultural sector believe that what we offer contains a degree of universality with which everyone can identify, that may not be the perception in every community.

Project Director, Nancy Barrett, says: “A lot of touring work didn’t ‘speak’ to diverse urban communities and we needed to create something that would resonate with the intended audience.”

As I was reading that I wondered if this has always been the case and the greater arts and cultural community hasn’t recognized it because the focus of work has been so oriented toward a middle-class, Caucasian experience. Or if perhaps the isolating effect of social media has magnified the feeling that no one else shares your experience.

If you are only seeing the best selves of those around you rather than engaging in conversations about the boring, difficult situations they face, and therefore don’t feel you have much in common with your neighbor, it may be doubly difficult to discern shared universal themes in a creative work.

It isn’t saying anything new to observe that the time and energy required to build an authentic relationship with the communities with whom you wish to be involved in telling their stories is pretty prohibitive for most non-profit arts and cultural organizations. Added to that is something I hadn’t fully considered – the disconnect between relationship building and the funding cycle. (my emphasis)

“You need to build good relationships with people on a permanent basis, not just be pulling people in…. because if they think you’re just someone that comes in and then goes… you’re a one trick pony,” said a resident of Mereside Estate in Blackpool.

We’ve learnt that you can’t underestimate the time needed to really listen, facilitate and build mutual trust and respect. Being transparent and open about the process and budgets is also key. There’s got to be a genuine, long-term approach, and this raises questions about responsibility to the communities we work with and how to sustain this work over long periods within shorter-term funding contexts.

If You Like Classical Music And Are In A Movie, You Just Might Be The Depraved Villain

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This past weekend, Artsjournal.com had a number of articles on the benefits of the arts.

One in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked if Mozart could make you a better runner. The basis of the author’s argument was more about beats per minute helping to set your pace than attributing any special benefit of classical music. You could do worse than downloading the suggested classical music playlist to accompany your exercise routine.

Another piece in the Pacific Standard discussed a recent study in Florida finding the benefits of integrating arts into classwork. I write a lot about the problems associated with valuing the arts for their instrumental value. I won’t reiterate it here. Apparently pairing having students sing, etc lesson content helped students who struggle retain content for a longer period.

“Overall, the researchers found no significant differences in the amount of content the kids retained, regardless of which version of the lessons they received. But the arts-infused approach had a positive effect on “struggling readers.” Ten weeks later, those kids “remembered significantly more science content learned through the arts” than those who were taught using conventional methods.”

The article I wanted to draw attention to today was the observation that movie characters who listen to classical music are often the central villain. This has been pointed out before, but in The American Scholar, Theodore Gioia, has an interesting theory about why that is.

Evil is a byproduct of brainpower. The implication is that aesthetic sophistication and psychopathic violence spring from the same mentality, a decadent hyperintelligence that becomes so cultivated that it savors homicide as a refined pleasure like Baroque cello. Slaughtering civilians and appreciating Vivaldi are depicted as two forms of the same psychosis, a connection hammered into the popular imagination in film after film, scene after scene, for the past quarter century.

[…long snip…]

Why do our films depict sociopaths murdering to Mozart and not Metallica? Why must master criminals always time their nuclear strikes at curtain time? The answer runs deeper than box-office populism and derivative filmmaking. How a society pictures its villains is a revelation of its own anxieties. Opera-house assassinations, while a familiar trope, still strike a chord of Everyman angst deep in the American subconsciousness: a vein of populist paranoia that suspects the shiny trappings of high society—galas, gowns, orchestras—exist to disguise the brutal source of its wealth. Decorum is an accomplice to depravity. That we imagine secret cabals planning world domination at Tosca rather than Davos exposes something about our unspoken apprehensions, tells us that the public does not fear perversity or power so much as deception. These scenes materialize the phantom suspicion that the real threat to the Common Man is not the raving lunatic in the streets but the polite psychopath in the opera box. We mistake malevolence as sophistication because it’s wearing a suit and a tie.

Gioia goes on to relate a “we need younger audiences” conversation he had with a front office employee of the San Francisco Symphony. Gioia says they covered the usual culprits of cost, lack of diversity, strange rituals, no arts in schools, etc,. In retrospect, he wondered if a shift from classical music accompanying Looney Tunes cartoons to decades of accompanying depictions of maniacal criminality might be fueling a subconscious distrust of the music.

Public Restrooms As A Metaphor For Accessible Cultural Experiences

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Four years ago, I wrote about how the government of India, in an attempt to end public defecation by 2019, was building over 1 million toilet facilities in households around the country. However, due to a general belief that it was healthier to defecate outdoors, most people receiving government constructed toilets were using them for storage or living spaces instead. India started sending out inspectors to ensure the toilets were being used for their intended purpose and encouraged people to report on their neighbors.

I used this situation as a metaphor for expecting people to participate in arts events just because they were being held or a facility existed. The benefits of the arts may seem just as self-evident to arts people as the benefits of a robust sanitation infrastructure, but social inertia can be difficult to overcome, even with mandatory education campaigns (i.e. arts in schools).

This idea has made “toilets in India” a short hand metaphor friend of the blog, Carter Gillies and I use when we discuss the ways in which the value of the arts are perceived and measured.

Because that article from 2015 is never far from my mind, I was interested to read about a private effort in Pune, India to transform old buses into public restrooms for women. In addition to public restrooms often being poorly maintained and/or unavailable, women in India are averse to using public restrooms due to the possibility of being assaulted when using them after dark and stigmas associated with menstruation and pregnancy.

The people behind the project confirm that it took months to reverse the common perception and convince people that public restrooms could be safe and sanitary. The mobile restrooms are definitely on the higher end of any portable toilet set up you would find in the US. They have video screens with personal health information, a cafe outside and an alarm button to alert a full-time attendant if you feel unsafe.

The project creators discovered there was a much larger unmet need than they expected.

“Our aim initially was to build toilets for mostly lower or middle-income groups, but the gap between the demand and the supply must be so huge that women from all classes are using them,” Sadalkar noted.

I still believe, as I did in 2015, that it isn’t enough to provide opportunities and space for arts and culture, assuming the benefits will be self-evident and people will change their behavior in accordance with that realization.

Now that I have become more involved with Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection effort to build public will for arts and culture, I can appreciate the need for a consistent, long term approach to shifting perceptions and attitudes such as the efforts of those behind the portable restrooms. Those involved with the portable restrooms couldn’t just talk about the benefits of a clean, well stocked place, they had to understand and address the perceptual and physical barriers that their demographics faced.

So You Are Saying An Intern Isn’t Supposed To Improve Productivity?

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I was really excited today when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the headline, “Diversity organisation celebrates placing 1000th paid intern.” The concept that some entity was able to secure PAID internships for over 1000 people in creative field was amazing to me.

I was a little disappointed upon realizing moments later that the organization was in England, not the US. But it is great that they have been effective at finding internships for low income young people from diverse backgrounds.

Just as in the US, there has been recognition in England that having an internship is beneficial for career development. Unfortunately, only people with the means to support and transport themselves while receiving little to no pay are able to avail themselves of this opportunity.

The organization that has conducted these placements, Creative Access, says that 90% of their participants secure roles at the end of the internship. Since they offer to provide support finding a job when the internship is over, presumably not everyone secures a position with the place at which they interned.

The interns receive at least the equivalent of the National Living Wage of £15,000 a year (US $19,764.45). It helps that all interns in England must be paid the equivalent of the National Living Wage so Creative Access doesn’t need to spend a lot of time insisting their applicants be paid.

Still, it isn’t easy matching and monitoring internships across dozens of organizations. In addition, Creative Access provides training and mandatory monthly masterclasses to their participants to help them prepare for their careers.

If you are thinking about how great this is and wondering why it isn’t happening in the US, part of the difference is that in addition to the payment requirement, there are other rules and regulations in England governing internships that ensure the experience is valuable. Many of them are actually mirrored in US rules governing internships, but appear to be more clearly defined. (see “What Constitutes a Training Role“)

For example, both the US and England say that an intern is being paid to learn, not to provide a service, and therefore can’t replace an employee. The rules in England extend that idea further by prohibiting termination on the basis of poor productivity or income generation. Interns can only be terminated for behavioral issues like tardiness, negative social interactions, etc.  So essentially you couldn’t terminate an intern for taking too long to process a ticket order, rewiring lighting instruments incorrectly or failing to proofread something that went to print.

Actually, while the implication in the FAQ section is that these are the rules governing internship termination, I couldn’t find mention of them in the documents linked to by Creative Access. However, I think structuring an intern’s experience in the context that they can’t be fired for lack of productivity shifts the dynamics of the relationship and avoids viewing them as a replacement for an employee, a situation which is spelled out in US law regarding internships.

Passion Is Work

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Seth Godin had an interesting post recently challenging the notion of passion preceding the decision to commit.

“Offer me something I’m passionate about and I’ll show up with all of my energy, effort and care.”

That’s a great way to hide.

Because nothing is good enough to earn your passion before you do it. Perhaps, in concept, it’s worthy, but as soon as you closely examine the details and the pitfalls, it’s easy to decide it’s better to wait for a better offer.

We see this sort of thing manifest in any attempt people make to invest themselves in something new whether it is volunteering or new job tasks; getting audiences engage with new experiences; or people wanting a thunderbolt, love at first sight moment before dating.

Godin suggests turning it around to a place where people seek an opportunity to contribute and then passion grows from doing the work.

Work before passion measures our craft in terms of contribution, not in an idealized model of perfection.

Passion comes from feeling needed, from approaching mastery, from doing work that matters.

While this is almost an appeal to the individual not to discount an opportunity as something you aren’t passionate about, the “don’t knock it until you tried it,” argument doesn’t have a high conversion rate.

In addition to how doing work that matters strongly motivates people to work for non-profits, what immediately popped into my mind was that this might be an argument for the value of providing an participatory experience to audiences.

Just as people think that creativity is a matter of momentary inspiration gifted by an outside source or inherent genius rather than developed over a long process, it is a pretty good bet that people believe their passion is an inherent quality of themselves rather than the end result of effort and attention invested over a long period of time.

That whole bit about doing something you are passionate about and you will never have to work a day in your life evokes a sense of effortlessness. That can certainly be true if that passion is a result of short bursts of exposure/effort every day over 10-20 years. Even if you decide to fervently devote yourself to a rekindled childhood interest, the joy and groundwork laid in years past buoys you even when you are sweating toward proficiency.

It is when we feel that adding anything new is a zero sum game, where something of a current selves must be sacrificed, that we use resonance with our passion as a filter. As Godin suggests, it makes it easy to say no based on an insufficient effort by others to get us excited.

Godin’s post is more a call to the individual to change their perspective than to organizations to offer more opportunities to become involved. However, once people start looking for ways to become involved in work they feel could develop into a passion, arts organizations need to be there with opportunities to offer.

Art As A Lubricant For Better Business Practices

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Americans for the Arts had a post on their blog last week that hit a lot of the right buttons for me. Steve Sanner and his partners have the Jiffy Lube franchise for Indiana. He writes about how placing murals on their buildings and becoming involved with other mural projects has benefited and redefined their business approach.

He says from 1985-2015, he and his partners basically approached their marketing from the assumption that the advice of husbands, fathers and boyfriends were what motivated women to visit Jiffy Lube locations. Therefore most of their marketing was aligned toward men even though women comprised 50% of their customers.

In 2015, we made a conscious decision begin speaking directly to women about the virtues of Jiffy Lube. We wanted women to know they could trust us to handle their maintenance needs and that they wouldn’t be subjected to chauvinistic or condescending mechanics.

A chance encounter with an arts group put them on the road to placing murals on some of the 48 Jiffy Lube shops they own. The first three murals were designed as paint by numbers stencils so that community members could participate in their creation. A mural calling attention to mental illness involved flying a graphic novelist out from Seattle to hold panel discussions and resulted in a fundraising effort that benefited the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The first three murals attracted the attention of the Arts Council of Indianapolis with whom they partnered on six murals in 2018 with another six planned for 2019.

Sanner says from a purely business perspective, this has been a smart move for them:

Vehicles are going longer between oil changes and many only need one or two oil changes per year. This makes it easy to forget about your neighborhood Jiffy Lube. In addition, sign ordinances have become stricter, making it hard to identify our locations easily. By painting these murals, we are giving people an organic reason to talk about and pay attention to our stores.

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you know what he said next was the part I love the most (my emphasis):

Internally, we have been surprised at how many artists we have working for us. Our employees are now showing off their own talents through sketches, vehicle graphics, and tattoo designs. We are planning museum tours and art classes designed to help our people further develop their artistic skills, understanding that this will help drive creativity in our own business. Employee retention is a huge issue for many businesses these days, and we are no exception. People want to be proud of who they work with and they care more than ever about the mission and purpose of their employer.

A Good Community Is An Asset To An Arts Organization

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I frequently urge people not to focus on the value of the arts in terms of economic impact on the community. Not only do the arts bring other forms of value to the community, but what is frequently un(der)mentioned is that the community provides reciprocal value to the arts organization.

We had the tour of a Broadway show come through a couple weeks ago. I was speaking with a local store owner who I know is a big fan of Broadway musicals and had attended the show. He mentioned that a number of cast members had come into his store and he had been thrilled to engage in some pretty lengthy conversations with them.

In fact, on the return visit of one person, the shop owner almost inadvertently revealed the purchase of a Valentine’s Day gift in front of the customer’s wife who was accompanying him at the time. The shop owner reveled in the experience of quickly changing what he was saying mid-sentence and sharing a knowing look with the husband.

The shop owner had mentioned local attractions, including a national monument, which the visitors were excited to learn about.

Based on this anecdote, I figured there must have been numerous other interactions with individuals and businesses throughout town and posted a general thank you on social media to everyone in the community who had shown the cast and crew kindness and hospitality during their visit. I mentioned the shop owner had directed some people to the national monument and tagged both the shop and the monument. At the very least, I thought it was good PR to employ outwardly focused messaging.

I didn’t necessarily think that the cast members had visited the monument.  They apparently did and identified themselves (or were recognized) because the folks at the national monument replied about how nice the cast and crew members were and their interest in information about the monument. The shop owner also posted his delight upon learning they had taken him up on his suggestion.

I have had similar experiences in other places I have worked. Local residents have been thrilled to have conversations in passing on the streets and coffee shops. I have had visiting artists express how friendly and helpful local residents were to them without knowing who they were.

One of my most favorite stories is from when a flamenco group and the guest services manager of a hotel struck up such a strong friendship, the guest services manager went to visit them in Spain a few months later. I never had any problems with getting performers early check in for years after that so it was a big win for everyone.

Bottom line though. As much as great events can bolster the reputation and appeal of your organization in the community, a good community can bolster the reputation and appeal of your organization among performers. A pleasant neighborhood with a wide choice of shops and restaurants isn’t just an asset to promote to attendees who want to grab something to eat before the show, visiting performers value those amenities as much, if not more.

Don’t think word and personnel don’t circulated among artists. I was trying to describe our wardrobe facilities and green room to a company we had never worked with before in an email and one of the guys responded that he had been here before and sent pictures he had on file of our wardrobe facilities and green room.

Every little thing counts.

Don’t Solicit Ads For Your Program Book

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Thanks to Drew McManus for remembering that Butts In The Seats turned 15 this weekend. Hard to believe I have been writing for 15 years now. Hopefully readers have found the content worthwhile.

Speaking of which….

Over on ArtsHacker today, I had a post on a very worthwhile subject– Unrelated Business Taxable Income.

I know, you are fighting to keep your brain from shutting down right now.

What that translates to for non-profit arts organizations is, among other things, any advertising you may have in publications, playbills, social media and web posts, etc., is considered an activity unrelated to your organizational purpose which means you need to pay taxes on it.

Now before you panic too much, placement of sponsors logos and contact information is permitted within the scope of your non-profit status. While advertising versus sponsorship may sound like a distinction without a difference, there are strict guidelines you need to follow.  There can’t be comparative or qualitative language, no pricing, no inducements/endorsements to use/purchase a product/service.

If this sounds like something you have run into trying to promote an event on a public radio station, that is exactly what it is. At one time I thought it was a characteristic of public broadcasting charters so they didn’t compete with commercial broadcasting. In fact it is a characteristic of non-profit status so it also includes school yearbooks, neighborhood sports leagues, community newsletters, etc.

The post I made isn’t a comprehensive discussion of the matter. I didn’t even try to tackle the recent change that made providing employee parking something non-profits need to pay taxes on. It is a good place to start before following up with an accountant or attorney.

On a semi-related topic, I also made a post about the detail to which a non-profit needs to go when valuing and acknowledging a gift from a donor.   Even if you think you know a lot about this subject, it is worth checking about because money from donor advised funds are viewed differently than those received directly from the donor. Given the growing popularity of donor advised funds, there are likely things you will want to learn more about from an accountant or lawyer.

You Need To Pay Taxes On Program Book Ads

Valuing and Acknowledging Donations

History of Public Libraries & Questions Cultural Orgs Face Regarding Inclusion

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Check out this visual storytelling piece on CityLab about the history of libraries in the US.  As arts and cultural organizations struggle with the question of inclusion of under-represented communities in our spaces and on our boards, the efforts people to which people went to gain access to books may provide some insight into the issue. Especially given that the meaning and value of libraries today is no longer directly tied to books. (In fact, 150+ years ago the role of libraries was already expanding beyond a source of books.)

It is generally acknowledged that Ben Franklin started one of the first libraries in the United States, but it was privately funded and by invitation which excluded white women, blacks and poor people.  According to the graphics in the CityLab piece, this just lead those groups to form their own clubs like the Phoenix Society of NY established to, (I love this phrase), “Establish Mental Feasts” and “Establish Circulating Libraries for the Use of People of Color on Very Moderate Pay.”

Women’s Clubs were established along the same lines, and when they excluded Jewish, black and working class women, those groups created their own clubs.

I think I may have mentioned before that I currently work in a historic theater that has the dubious distinction of possessing one of the best preserved Jim Crow balconies in the country.  A few blocks away from us is a theater established by a black business man to serve the black community due to the lack of access in my building. Reading about a parallel history in libraries is pretty relevant to me.

Before Andrew Carnegie started to endow libraries across the country, many of these library projects were already embracing social issues like literacy, anti-lynching, and suffrage. Bookmobiles were bringing books to rural communities.  Even with Carnegie’s funding and the expansion to public access, according to the graphic, it was women’s clubs that helped drive the construction of libraries to the point where having one was a staple of every community.

Even still, there was a lot of exclusion by race:

As I was reading through the CityLab piece, I saw echos of many of the questions arts and cultural organizations need to face regarding their identity.

For example, at one point the stated purpose of many libraries was to promote “desirable middle class values.” While this isn’t as explicitly stated by many arts organizations these days, it is present quite implicitly.

First Rule Of Arts Club–Talk To Everyone About Arts Club

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I came across a study conducted in the UK where the researchers found some benefit to new attendees of arts and cultural events having the opportunity to participate in peer-lead audience exchange conversations.

They were pretty particular about excluding someone with (perceived) expertise from the group as including such a person either led to people deferring to the person’s expertise or feeling too intimidated to contribute to the conversation. The researchers drew comparisons with book clubs, but encouraged arts organizations to facilitate the formation of such groups since people rarely organize themselves. (emphasis from original)

Deborah (DX): “It’s really nice to talk about it afterwards. Rather than just sort of taking it all home with you”.

Bridget (IKG/BCMG): “[…] at the contemporary music thing, it was quite nice to sit down at the end and talk with other people about the experience [agreement] because otherwise you sort of wander away with a couple of inane comments, and sort of forget about it. But sitting down with people is an interesting way of reflecting –” [Doris: “It can add to the experience.”]

This deepening of experience through conversation was also evident in the group discussions themselves, as participants wrestled with their own responses to an event and sought insight and reassurance from others in the group. They emphasised that the particular kind of discussion they had enjoyed in the audience exchange was not the same as the conversations with performers sometimes offered by theatre or concert providers, where Doris (IKG) felt she “would feel a bit intimidated about saying something not terribly deep and meaningful – but this doesn’t intimidate”.

Some of the commentary the researchers recorded was very interesting to learn. I was trying to figure out how an arts organization could go about capturing this data without being there. An obvious answer is to record it if that doesn’t impact what people are willing to say. Otherwise, asking someone to take notes. Among the comments the researchers recorded were ones about the marketing materials organizations were putting out.

Even while the new audience members struggled to find a vocabulary to talk about their response to a concert, some felt that the language being used by the arts organisation also failed to capture their experience, with too much of an emphasis on analysis and not enough on the emotional impact of the music:

Bryony (E360A): “For me that description of tonight doesn’t make it sound very exciting – it makes it sound a bit rubbish!” [laughs].

Adam (E360A): “Especially the Martinů one, like that was my favourite one, and it says it ‘exhibits the flute to great effect’ [laughter] but to me it was the violin that was really interesting, and the variations in the music”.

These sort of discussions can be helpful for new attendees because they can validate the reactions they have. Some of the discussions revolved around feelings of guilt about being bored or having one’s mind wander. Someone else in the group piped in defending her “’right to daydream’, expressing the view that if the music encouraged her into personal thoughts and memories, this was in itself a response to the performance and not one for which she should feel apologetic.”

What They Lack In Talent, They Make Up With Social Media Followers

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For a long time when people offered advice to those hoping to be actors, they would say something along the lines of, “No matter how talented and good looking you are, there are 10 others just as talented and good looking.” The unspoken subtext was that there were a bunch of others who were even more talented and better looking so the ten of you and tens of others were out of work.

Perhaps we need to add “….and have as many, if not more followers on social media,” to the list of qualifications.   Arts Professional UK relates a number of anecdotes from actors who were disheartened to be asked about their social media handles and follower numbers after they auditioned.

“But the girl that went in after me had 20,000 more followers on Twitter and she got the role. I mean, you can actually just do your homework privately, can’t you? Look it up for yourself, but don’t ask me that after I’ve just given you my best bit of acting,” she added

[…]

Actor Joseph Batchelor said he had recently attended a casting for a fast-food restaurant commercial and added: “Even though the role was just as a walk-on supporting artist, I was still asked for my social media handles, which I thought was ridiculous.”

Similarly, Bethany Fenton said she had auditioned for a non-speaking featured role in a furniture advert, and had been asked for her Instagram handle and number of followers.

“It should be about talent, but I suppose followers are often a sign of social currency and popularity, which businesses like Netflix or furniture companies want,” she said.

I am not going to speculate about whether this sort of thing happens in the U.S. I have been in the room when the decision to feature someone in a theater performance came down to social media following.

I do wonder how prevalent it is across the country and disciplines. I know orchestra auditions are blind and assume information on social media following wouldn’t be available to a committee. But what about chamber ensembles or other musical genres. Does social media following give an edge to less talented people in other auditions? Do dancers get a leg up, pun intended? Do visual artists get chosen for gallery shows because there is a likely to be better attendance at the opening due to a good social media following?

I suspect this is the case to a greater or lesser degree in many cases. Which means social media presence likely has an impact on whether one gets representation. An agent or gallery owner only gets paid if a person is hired or their work sells. If social media numbers translates into greater professional exposure, that may impact whether one gets representation or cultivating a following may be a condition of representation.

Granted, for a lot of people growing a social media following is probably going to be the least difficult and intimidating aspect of managing one’s career. But perceiving yourself to be in an arms race with other artists may lead people to some ill-advised decisions which will grow their following, but diminish their personal brand.

Anyone seeing this creep into calculations?

New Study of Impact of Arts Ed On Social Skills

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I frequently urge people to be careful about making statements regarding the benefits of arts on educational outcomes so I am happy when I read about some rigorously conducted studies that present some positive results. Via Dan Pink is a report on a randomized study conducted in Houston with 10548 students at 42 schools. (They actually had far more schools interested in participating than they had room to accommodate which is a positive sign for arts in education.)

 

…the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students’ compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students’ scores on writing tests.

[…]

The positive effects on writing test scores, discipline, and compassion were small to moderate. Students’ disciplinary infraction rates, for instance, fell by 3.6 percentage points. But these results are particularly encouraging because the cost to schools was fairly small — about $15 per student. (This did not include costs borne by the program as whole or by the cultural institutions that donated time.)

As always, pay attention to the specific findings and degree to which the positive benefit was observed. At the same time, remember that there may have been factors external to the school environment that was negatively impacting students’ ability to take tests well, maintain self-discipline and feel compassion.

When the researchers comment on the areas in which the initiative didn’t make significant difference, they made an observation worth considering about the idea that providing arts content and testable content are mutually exclusive.

On other measures, the initiative didn’t make a clear difference. That includes reading and math scores as well as survey questions about school engagement and college aspirations. Still, the survey results were mostly positive, though largely not statistically significant.

“It could have come out negative. It could have been, look, they did this extra stuff where they learned more in these other domains but their math scores went down, so here’s the tradeoff,” said Kisida, one of the researchers. “We don’t see evidence of a tradeoff.”

That’s especially notable because some have feared that pressure to raise test scores has squeezed arts out of the curriculum in many schools (though there’s limited empirical evidence on whether that’s actually happened).

I haven’t read the full study results yet but plan to do so. In the meantime, take a look at either the summary article or the study because there are a number of other observations, including the role arts opportunities play in the social growth of students.

Tell A Creative You Love Them This Valentine’s Day

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As we come up on Valentine’s Day, a little reminder that there are a lot more ways to say, “I Love You,” than speaking those specific words.

A couple years ago Gavin Aung Than created a cartoon on his Zen Pencil’s site illustrating the sentiments of filmmaker Kevin Smith that, “It costs nothing to encourage an artist.”

Here is a small screenshot from the comic. I won’t spoil the ending, but according to Smith something is lost when you discourage an artist.

If The Metric Is Valued, Someone Is Probably Trying To Game The System

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Okay, so I promise I am not seeking out articles that discuss the problems with depending on quantitative metrics to determine effectiveness and value. They just keep falling into my lap. This one is via Dan Pink and is kinda fun to read thanks to some animations.

The piece in The Hustle has us follow the “career” of  Otis has he moves from being a cashier to sales to online advertising to programming to surgery in order to illustrate how the use of quotas and efficiency metrics permeates every industry and every profession to incentivize gaming the system in order to generate the best appearance.

But Otis came to learn that metrics weren’t inherently bad — his bosses had just failed to grasp two important economic principles:

  • Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” and
  • Campbell’s Law: The more a metric is used, the more likely it is to “corrupt the process it is intended to monitor.”

He realized that when his performance was measured with a specific metric, he optimized everything to hit it, regardless of the consequences that arose. As a visiting professor at the London School of Economics told him, improper targets could:

  • Encourage “gaming” the system (e.g., bagging free groceries)
  • Incentivize the wrong aspects of work (e.g., writing trivial code)
  • Erode morale (e.g., writing clickbait)
  • Harm customers (e.g., turning away critical surgery patients)

And so, Otis decided to start his own company — a company where metrics would serve their true purpose: To motivate and align. Efficiency, Otis finally realized, isn’t just output; it is the value of what is produced.

If you think about the measures being applied to non-profit arts and cultural organizations like overhead ratio, economic impact, test scores, etc and pay attention to what organizations are doing in order to meet those metrics, you will probably start to see behaviors that conform to those listed above.

It could manifest as massaging numbers in financials and research; chasing funding that doesn’t align with mission and strains capacity; superficial efforts that check desired boxes; pursuit of a narrow segment of community rather than a focus on broader inclusion. I am sure readers can think of many examples from their own experiences.

Cons Of Starting An Endowment

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Recently there have been some conversations around my organization and town in general about whether it is worthwhile to try to bolster an existing endowment. People have mentioned that there has been a trend away from establishing endowments in recent years. I started wondering what the thinking behind that was and what the alternatives might be.

It just so happens Non Profit Quarterly reprinted a piece that talks about the pros and cons of establishing and endowment.  On the con side is the issue is the idea that you are locking up money the organization could use now and disbursing it in the future when the same dollars don’t buy as much. Thirty years ago it may have seemed really attractive to learn that the organization would be receiving $25,000 a year from the endowment. In 1989 that could cover the salary for a position, but that money doesn’t go as far today. (Though there are plenty of places offering $25,000 as a salary.)

Current needs is the one that at least one of your board members will bring up, and is very possibly the reason why your board will vote not to have an endowment. “Why should we put a million dollars in a bank account when we can use that to serve a million more lunches?” Or buy a hundred thousand more books. Or facilitate a thousand more adoptions. Or renovate the façade of the theater. Many nonprofits are in dire need of more money, and most can at least think of an immediate way to use more….Some people go so far as to say it’s not ethical to lock money in the bank when there are so many necessary ways to spend it now. Before you know it, you have bad press and declining donations—and you wish you’d never thought of raising an endowment.

You may look jealously upon organizations receiving large payouts from their endowments, especially universities, but by and large these groups have a staff that is actively managing an endowment. A staff is required to grow an endowment to the size it yields enough to support your activities. But you need to have started with a large enough endowment to support a staff in the first place.

What Is The Value Of Fire? How Do You Know?

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Friend o’ the blog, Carter Gillies recently had a piece appear in the Arts Professional UK noting some of the problems with focusing on the instrumental value of the arts.

One of the issues he raises is the danger in making general claims about the value of the arts based on individual examples. One thing he cites that has been noted in other conversations on this topic is that if you tout the benefit of the arts to solve problems, you run the risk of something else coming along that does a better job and can be adopted as a replacement for the arts solution.

However, he points out that this also applies to employing problematic examples to make general statements about the lack of worth of arts and culture,

In fact, scepticism about the arts often does make exactly this type of argument: doubting their value in general, because there are obvious examples of offensive artistic work. They take these instances as being representative of the arts as a whole, when clearly they are not. And if we are combating such scepticism merely with the idea that some art actually does benefit society and individuals, then we have made the same mistake. The general case is not made or defeated with individual examples.

He also warns that an instrumental view of arts and culture can easily lead to the parsing of which forms of expression in particular are more effective at solving a particular ill. What is best at improving test scores? Does the same thing work for economic stimulus? (my emphasis)

Let’s think about what would follow if the point of art is its instrumentality. If it turns out that painting rainbows and unicorns is the most beneficial artistic practice, then we should start emptying museums right now. We have all the justification required to shed collections of Rembrandts, Picassos, and more.

My point is that the arts are valuable far and above their instrumental benefits. They weren’t invented to improve health and wellbeing outcomes. That they do is a happy coincidence. The arts aim at many things, and hardly ever directly at a particular cause. That is far too narrow a scope for understanding what the arts are, and why they matter.

As I have said many times, just because you can measure an effect doesn’t mean that measurement reflects the actual value of something. If there were more hot dogs and beer sold at the Super Bowl this week than the previous year, does that mean it was a better football game? Whether it is true or not is only a happy coincidence as Carter says, but it has no bearing on why people play or enjoy football to begin with.

Kids don’t organize games in their backyard or try out for local teams in the hopes of increasing hot dog sales in their community. Sure they had a winning season and exciting games before sold out crowds, but most people insisted on bringing potato salad from home instead of buying at the field, so sports are bad for the community by that measure.  You may laugh because it seems ludicrous to use the sales of picnic food as a measure of success, but it is easy to get confused when presented with a measurement that is very important in some instances that isn’t necessarily relevant in others.

Which is the worse forest fire? The one that totally burns 50000 acres where no one lives or 50 acres with 15 houses valued at $2 million each?  Which is more likely to cause people to denounce the value of fire in our lives?  There are so many factors that contribute to forest fires and the discussion of management and prevention is complicated and nuanced. Not only can’t you use a few examples to make general statements about forest fires, the use of fire is so integral and entwined with our lives and who we are that you can’t use forest fires as a measure of the value of fire.

Collecting More Data Isn’t Necessary Better

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Seth Godin offers a very relatable example of why more data isn’t always better by emphasizing the need for vigilance when setting an alarm clock in a hotel room. If you set the alarm for 7 am before going to bed at 10 pm but don’t notice that the clock currently reads 10 am, you aren’t going to be woken by the alarm clock the next morning. (I am sure we have all done this at least once.) He suggests the am/pm setting is an extraneous bit of data serving as an impediment to the clock fulfilling its purpose.

This is a very simple illustration of a point I bring up often on the blog — just because you can measure something doesn’t mean the data is useful for your goals and, in fact, may be an obstacle to understanding the relevant data. Just because you can measure the economic impact of the arts doesn’t mean economic impact is a valid measure of the value of arts and culture.

This concept also has relevance in terms of the regular practice of surveying audiences/attendees. Just because you can ask a question doesn’t mean you should or that what you learn will be useful.

As Godin writes,

The metaphor is pretty clear: more data isn’t always better. In fact, in many cases, it’s a costly distraction or even a chance to get the important stuff wrong.

Here are the three principles:

First, don’t collect data unless it has a non-zero chance of changing your actions.

Second, before you seek to collect data, consider the costs of processing that data.

Third, acknowledge that data collected isn’t always accurate, and consider the costs of acting on data that’s incorrect.

All this being said, my staff usually starts out surveys asking a question for which the answers will be useless as data points, but for which the goal is to establish a connection and willingness to respond in the survey taker. Basically, we figure people are more apt to answer 4-5 questions if the first one is a fun question about themselves. So for example, if we are doing Man of La Mancha, the question might be, “what is the impossible dream you dream?”

There are times when it is okay to collect data when it won’t shape your decision making and there might be a cost to collecting and processing it if doing so advances goals in other areas.

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