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.
Cyndi Suarez wrote a piece for Non-Profit Quarterly that bears considering as non-profit organizations make an effort to have the demographics of their staff and boards better reflect that of the communities they serve.
In writing about the challenges faced by people of color entering organizations predominantly staffed by Caucasians, she notes, (my emphasis)
“…they’re expected to both bring a particular value as a person of color and fit into the dominant culture. This puts the person in what one described as being at odds with “the truth in my heart.” The organizations don’t expect to have to change, and it’s extremely difficult for these people of color to address the challenges from within the organization, in isolation from others like themselves or any other support.”
Seems a little silly doesn’t it given how often the phrase, “change starts from within,” is blithely thrown around?
While I have heard discussions about the disconnect between wanting to expand involvement and participation by groups without considering that it will mean changing things about the organization, I hadn’t considered that the following problem also exists:
“…even though that person of color is a symbol of the potential change that often ushers in the money, she usually has no decision-making authority over how that money is used, and it is rarely presented as a budget at her disposal. Or, even worse, as with Carlos, the person is expected to take the lead in identifying the money himself.”
An organization in the initial phases of trying to expand involvement and participation may not be in a place to put a new hire in direct budgetary control of funding, but there should be consideration of creating a strong relationship between the funding and the scope of the new hire’s responsibility/decision making in its use.
Suarez makes other worthwhile observations about the changing dynamics in the work place in her piece. These are the ones that primarily jumped out at me.
Earlier this Fall I had a friend who was relatively new to the business of presenting performances. An agent had rattled off a series of numbers as part of the performance fee deal an touring group was looking to get and my friend had no idea how to interpret those numbers.
I realized these type of arrangements probably confuse a great number of people in the business, both presenters and touring artists, so I wrote an Arts Hacker post about some of the more common deal structures for performances.
If you are a presenter and you don’t know what $40,000/10% NBOR/60-40 split on overages refers to, it is difficult to decide if you can meet your budget for the show.
Likewise, if you are a musician going into a music venue and they are offering you a percentage of net deal, before you accept you’ll want a pretty good sense of what the potential gross is and just what expenses the venue will be subtracting out before you get paid.
While I was at the Arts Midwest conference in November, Joanna Taft, Executive Director of the Harrison Center for the Arts, spoke about the “porching” culture that had developed in Indianapolis and spread across Indiana.
Taft focuses on an active return to traditional uses of porches– just sitting outside and chatting with neighbors and passersby.
I will be honest when I first heard about this, I wondered if people were trying to turn hanging out on the porch into a thing by verbing a noun. According to Taft, the practice is outside the experience of so many people that she and her collaborators created step by step guides and videos to help people get organized.
What I did appreciate was that Taft and the Harrison Center recognized that porching on a weekly basis might end up excluding some neighbors for various reasons and made efforts to find solutions.
…it became evident as we monitored social media posts and attended neighborhood association meetings that many longtime residents were being left behind. The neighbors participating in #PorchPartyIndy were sorted by their financial ability and energy level to host a porch party. We wanted to make our porching initiative more inclusive.
…we realized the time had come to not only encourage residents to host their own parties, but for the Harrison Center to intervene and host porch parties for some of our neighbors.
[…]
Before the party, we organized a group of Harrison Center interns to visit the homes of residents we had met through neighborhood association meetings. At those meetings, we noticed that some of these neighbors expressed strong opinions and concern for their community and this convinced us that they had powerful stories to tell. We queried them about their favorite foods and colors to ensure we catered to their porching style.
For instance, we discovered that a neighbor named Miss Terri loves purple, so we arrived with a table for her front yard covered with a purple tablecloth, and served purple carrots, purple chips, and grapes. Miss Jimmie turned 101 and was tired of the same old cake, so we put candles in her favorite dessert, a pecan pie.
Almost by chance I came across a piece on Shelterforce from about two years ago relating how turning a community room in Harlem housing community into a gallery lead to the intentional inclusion of galleries and museums in future construction. As they learned about how people used and gathered around the spaces, subsequent construction increasingly focused on arts and educational spaces. The most recent project in 2015 essentially built the housing around a museum.
This was all very intriguing as I have never heard of a housing construction project being planned around a staffed arts & culture space.
Back in the late 90s, Ana-Ofelia Rodriguez, the director of community affairs for Broadway Housing Communities (BHC) decided to turn a community room into a gallery.
Artists would set up their displays at night, and before Rodriguez could enter the building the next morning, she says tenants had critiques for her of the work that had been installed. “We realized that it had to be a permanent fixture because it had a kind of healing property. It made people talk to one another—they didn’t have to like the art, but they were talking and looking forward to the next artist,” she said.
That first effort, The Rio Gallery, was one of the first galleries in North Harlem and is still thriving today. It is visited by both residents of the housing community and people those from greater neighborhood and beyond.
The success of that gallery lead BHC to include a gallery and pre-school in the construction of the next project completed in 2003.
Seeing how the inclusion of galleries and instruction spaces was encouraging greater interaction internally and externally between residents and the larger community, the 2015 completion of The Sugar Hill Project included both the Sugar Hill Museum Preschool and the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling.
The museum features art exhibitions by Harlem and northern Manhattan artists, and its programs are designed “to nurture the curiosity, creativity, and cognition of children ages 3 to 8,” with a heavy emphasis on storytelling.
[…]
With the museum’s target audience of children ages 3 to 8, “the programming should engage both adults and children,” says Baxter. She notes that Charlene Melville, now BHC’s education director, works with museum staff to develop new methodology to engage adults. “Some parents are more familiar with engaging in play and art-making, and some are not. It’s about being flexible and creating lots of diverse opportunities—including through music and storytelling,” Baxter says.
There is probably a lot in this story that runs counter to beliefs about those most interested and willing to participate in creative activities.
There is also probably a lot in this story about how influential elements that are the intentional focus of a community can be in the lives of the residents.
It is no news flash to even casual readers of the blog that I am involved with Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection program to build public will for arts and culture. Last week, they ran a webinar just to present the basic research and program. In recent months they have been featuring two case studies where people talk about how their organizations are putting the research and messaging into practice. This session was aimed at giving people more complete information about the program.
As much as I have been a fan boy cheer leading the program, what I really appreciated about the webinar last week was the number and type of questions people were asking of the presenters.
It was an indication of just how serious people were thinking about implementing the research that webinar attendees were questioning the research methodology. I think people in arts and culture field are wise to scrutinize whether a new approach to doing business is a popular fad soon to fade or has some rigorous thought behind it. They have little enough time and resources as it is and don’t want to waste it on initiatives lacking substance.
What I really appreciated was when one person, identified as Zi Li, asked about case studies on failed programs because they were interested to learn why those program failed. My friend Carter Gillies often mentions the problem of survivorship bias where you only study the successful cases rather than gaining insight from those that failed.
The music on the Awesome 80s radio station is always going to be better than the music today because you are comparing the cream that rose to the top and endured the last 30 years to all the music being performed today, both good and bad.
If you are new to the concept of Creating Connection or just want a refresher, take a look at the video from the webinar which includes all the questions and comments made that day.
A couple years ago I was serving on a grant panel which made me aware of an arts and culture organization that was running “breakfast raves,” for lack of a better word.
They were getting people together on Friday mornings around 5 am to have a dance party and breakfast before they ran off to work. I thought it was a great idea, especially for getting people who didn’t identify as night owls engaged and meeting new people in the community. Not only that, it was another way for performing arts organizations to use space that was usually only occupied at night. I thought it would make for a great study to see if people who attended morning raves were more productive and creative when they went to work that day.
In the past week I came across a story in CityLab about Daybreaker, a company that is doing much the same thing in cities around the world. The writer, Sarah Holder, attended a session in Washington DC that involved yoga and then a silent dance party (because they meet outdoors and can’t blare music in early morning hours.) Looking at the Daybreaker website, this is pretty typical – work out, followed by a dance party, followed by breakfast. Apparently they will also have performances.
They reach a pretty wide range of people:
….target cohort as “adventurous” people who “share the common interest of waking up at 6 a.m. to dance.” Most attendees are between 25 and 45 years old; a fact sheet provided by the Daybreaker team says the demographic breakdown is 68 percent women, 32 percent men, and “100 percent human.” Forty-seven percent are single.
The Daybreaker people also see themselves as an important conduit for building connection:
And they, like a surprising percentage of the crowd, were middle-aged: Kia was 42.
That’s significant, because, if loneliness is a nationwide epidemic, it’s particularly pronounced among older people, says Agrawal, based on observations she made on her book tour. Almost a third of Americans over 45 are socially isolated, according to AARP. “Many people in their 60s and 70s came to my book event to share their feeling of loneliness,” Agrawal said. “And how—to quote their words—invisible they feel.”
Of course, the sense of loneliness is shared across all generations so gatherings like these are great for everyone. Given that people in their 40s, 50s, 60s grew up on rock and other high energy music, there may be an unmet potential in programming morning dance parties aimed toward those demographics. I am thinking, in part, about the ubiquitous “dancing grannies” in China who are up at the crack of dawn participating in the activity for both exercise and socialization. (And often drawing the ire of younger people upset that their elders are blaring music at 5 am.)
When I first saw this story, I was interested in the concept as a way for arts and cultural organizations to diversify their offerings and help remove perceptual barriers about what it means to enter a creative space. However, one part of the article emphasized the fine line between sincere and insincere motivations for creating community when revenue is involved.
Note the bad association the word “community” has gotten.
But finding zen by paying to party with strangers on the roof of my office building (conveniently, I also work in the Watergate) seemed a little painful and inauthentic. Agrawal says she understands. “The word community has been kind of bastardized already,” she told me. “It’s just another word for ‘users’ by marketers.”
But with Daybreaker, she’s tried to cut through the bullshit. The “belonging” the brand creates isn’t a commodity, she says, nor is it a coincidence.
Back in September, Non-Profit Quarterly (NPQ) pointed to a new research study which has found overheard ratio is not a valid measure of organizational effectiveness. In fact, it there is a slight negative correlation between overheard ratio and commonly used measures of efficiency.
“…but our work is the first to approach it using efficiency theory—and we were able to demonstrate the problem using real-world data.”
….“In short,” Coupet says, “this demonstrates that not only is the overhead ratio bad at assessing efficiency, but also that using it to assess efficiency may actively mislead donors. We argue that nonprofit scholars, managers, and donors should move away from concepts and measures of efficiency based on financial ratios, and toward ones that embrace maximizing what nonprofits are able to make and do.”
NPQ says according to the study, overhead ratio is a poor measure of effectiveness because it doesn’t reflect what organizations are doing with their resources or what they “are accomplishing with their non-overhead spending.”
In other words, like I have written so often before, the value of what a non-profit does is not reflected by transactional data, economic impact numbers or test scores.
This being said, another part of the article raises the intriguing idea that if a non-profit is supposed to be working for the benefit of their community, shouldn’t they be focusing on buying locally rather at chain stores or wholesale warehouses? If so, the higher cost of buying locally would raise their costs a bit and impact their overhead ratio. But it may be worthwhile to do so.
Should we stop looking for cost savings that benefit our bottom line but lead to purchasing that harms the greater community? In other words, should nonprofits be considering (and be supported to pursue) their own “buy local” policies?
‘Nonprofits should be shouting about how much of their spending happens at locally owned, minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned or disabled-owned businesses. There is a multiplier effect in spending locally that shows that for every $100 spent at a locally owned business, $45 of that is re-spent locally, while national chains only spend $14 of that sale locally.’
This is an intriguing idea that has this author (a nonprofit executive who manages purchasing) feeling the financial pinch of a cogent ethical argument: If buying local supports healthy communities, and the mission and values of my organizations are tied to relevant healthy community outcomes, why am I doing my shopping at big box (including online) retailers?
This broadens the scope of what it means to be a non-profit in service to the community. Touting how much is being spent at locally owned business won’t necessarily smother the use of overhead ratio as a standard, but it has the potential to blunt the ratio’s use in an argument of a non-profit’s worthiness.
Seth Godin made a post earlier this week comparing Persistence with Consistent wherein he starts with the statement “Persistence is sort of annoying.”
He goes on to talk about the way in which consistent is the desirable opposite side of the coin,
Consistent with your statements, consistent in the content you create, consistent in the way you chip away at the problem you’re seeking to solve.
Persistence can be selfish, but consistency is generous.
And the best thing is that you only have to make the choice to be consistent once. After that, it’s simply a matter of keeping your promise.
In this context, persistence seems to be about performance of a specific action whereas consistent is policy. In this sense persistence is approaching a challenge in the same way until it is worn down to the point you can pass. Whereas consistent is more about dedication to finding a way past that obstruction.
While both approaches never falter in achieving a singular goal, the latter entertains options regarding the methods by which this can be accomplished. In fact, consistent may be better equipped to recognize that surmounting the barrier isn’t the goal but rather getting to the place beyond the barrier and therefore there may be no reason to engage with this particular barrier at all.
What actually drew my attention to Godin’s post was that last line about keeping a promise. Working in the non-profit arts sector is often such a struggle that we feel like we can only survive with dogged persistence. Perhaps what is really needed is a focus on consistency.
If our promise to the community we serve is to provide a certain experience, a persistent approach may keep you locked into executing an approach and methods which have decreasing relevance. A determination to offer a consistently valuable experience can lead you to place more importance on needs of those you intend to serve rather place importance on the methods by which you accomplish it.
Think about it this way. If you want to keep a promise to provide excellent customer service do you do the same thing today as you did five years ago? Do you use the same approach for small groups as large? Kids as for elderly? Film audiences as for Broadway musical audiences? 2500 seat theater as for 150 seat theater?
Sure you will still make bad choices, but a consistent approach to great customer service is likely better able to take the differences of time, place, environment and expectations into account than a persistent approach.
If you are like me, Emerson’s line, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” might have come to mind when you first saw the term. In that context consistency has a negative connotation. After reading and pondering Godin’s post I wondered if it might have been better said as “a foolish persistence.” Though I learn toward consistency is a better word choice.
It should also be noted, Emerson never mentions what the characteristics of wise or non-foolish consistency are. Consistency is not necessarily negative in and of itself. Persistence isn’t either, but it does have implications of a single-mindedness that can quickly become problematic.
You may have noticed I didn’t make definitive claims about persistent being one thing and consistent being another. Ultimately, of course it isn’t about what word you use as much as what practice you embody.
With today being Election Day you may be thinking about the need to keep dishonest and problematic people out of office…or at least keeping the more dishonest and problematic people out of office.
Creative and arts oriented people may see their vocation/avocation as a relatively virtuous one compared with that of politicians and other pursuits.
They cite the famous story about the development of Post-It notes as an example of successful dishonesty:
Seeing potential value in the product, Fry reintroduced it to his superiors. They panned the idea, and ordered that he cease working on the project.
Nonetheless, Fry defied those orders and continued with the project. He built a machine to produce the Post-it notes, distributing the prototypes to 3M’s secretaries, who loved them. Fry ignored his managers’ requests, used company property without permission, and bypassed the established protocols of the company – all to pursue his idea.
The author of the article, Lynne Vincent, says that her research has shown that people who aren’t objectively creative, but think they are can develop a sense of entitlement based on the feeling that their ideas are worthy of notice, rule bending, and reward.
As I suggested earlier, what can be somewhat amusing is that dishonesty can actually result in creativity,
The irony is that these negative behaviors may spur more creativity. Francesca Gino and Scott Wiltermuth, a professor at USC, found that being dishonest can actually promote creativity. In this study, participants who cheated on a math and logic task by looking at the answers performed better on a subsequent creativity task than participants who did not cheat. When someone is dishonest, it often requires he or she to break a set of rules; yet this rule-breaking may promote creativity because it allows people to flout convention and expectations
Of course, if you have worked for any length of time in a creative field you know that the willingness to break convention and move counter to expectations is a hallmark of creativity. There can be a fine line, however, between coloring outside the lines and crossing the line where your actions deplete the value of something for others.
Just like with my post last week about actors being preserved digitally for eternity, I wondered about the implications of this technology.
While the physical mural has permanence, there is a lot that can be done with augmented reality to either enhance or degrade the experience of any work of art or physical location without the permission or awareness of creators/owners/caretakers.
By the way, lest you think the title of this post was mistyped, the term being used is ARt emphasizing A(ugmented)R(eality). (Though I suppose there is some redundancy in the title).
There is even an app that helps you paint murals on surfaces with the use of your phone, apparently the higher tech version of overhead projection. (I think your arms would be less tired using an overhead projector.)
This is one of my favorite uses among those I found:
If we thought it was a problem that older arts administrators were resisting retirement and making it difficult for newer people in the field to advance and gain valuable skills, actors may end up having it worse. According to an article on MIT Technology Review, actors are digitally preserving themselves which would allow them to perform even after they die.
“It’s sort of a safe bet for the people with the money. It’s a familiar face,” says Ingvild Deila, who was scanned by Industrial Light and Magic for her role as Princess Leia in Rogue One. “We like to repeat what’s worked in the past, so it’s part financial, part nostalgia.”
Earlier this year Last Jedi visual-effects supervisor Ben Morris told Inverse that the Star Wars franchise is now scanning all its leads. Just in case. “We will always digitally scan all the lead actors in the film,” says Morris. “We don’t know if we’re going to need them.”
The article talks about some of the technical difficulties that have been encountered during efforts to retroactively create images of people from old video footage supplemented by motion capture from body doubles. The fact that actors are proactively working to collect a plethora of information about their gestural nuances and inevitable improvements in technology mean that an actor’s career can be extended for a long time.
There are all sort of thorny questions that this raises. On the positive side the technology may be an equalizer for women who have often found their careers truncated as they age or start being offered parts as mothers of male actors only a few years their junior (or in the infamous case of Angelina Jolie and Collin Farrell in Alexander, one year her junior). Of course, that opens a whole can of worms akin to the controversies about retouching magazine photos if the digital recordings of women are used to “de-age” them more than their male counterparts.
Regardless of gender there is the question of authenticity and believability that can arise.
Not to mention, the matter of whether humans are needed at all if an AI can create a digital simulacrum that can deliver a believable, evocative performance.
I am not sure fans’ desire to interact with a live personae would necessarily prevent a digital creation from achieving peak stardom since the online and recorded presence already constitutes a significant portion of so many people’s relationship with those they admire.
If fans need a real life person upon which to shower praise, perhaps it will end up being the directors of design teams that will be the prime recipients of adulation for their masterful manipulation of wholly digital constructs.
The more I think about this issue, the more problems I can think of. My brain is already writing the plot of a movie where a studio kills off an actor so that they can’t contract their likeness to a rival studio, thereby making their recording at the peak of the actor’s powers the most valuable.
I anticipate court cases where heirs lose a lawsuit over the use of their great-grandparent’s likeness because the law governing such matters was underdeveloped in 2020.
This month has been a reminder to me that people have all sorts of motivations for engaging with your performing arts organization–and often those motivations don’t have a lot to do with your primary purpose.
This month, a local magazine has featured a piece focused on the ghost stories associated with the historic theater at which I work.
As we were locking up Friday night following a double feature of the silent films, Nosferatu and the The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, there was a haunted places tour group standing outside talking about the ghosts that haunt the theater.
And on Wednesday, when we are handing out candy as part of the downtown trick or treating program, we will have people on hand ready to relate stories about the ghosts in our building.
Granted this isn’t too far off our core activity of storytelling as I imply, particularly in terms of making cultural history vivid and vital for people. In this case, it is literally about bringing vitality to ghosts.
I am learning that those ghost stories are part of what makes this place special for people. I am told even when the focus turns to another holiday in a few weeks, kids in the cast of Nutcracker always like to hear the ghost stories too. (Though we make sure to wait until the end of the Nutcracker run in case kids get nervous about entering the building.)
As I often mention, the value of an arts experience isn’t solely derived from the experience you are intentionally offering. Over the years, people create value spending time with others, discovering new things, being delighted by what they encounter—which is sometimes an inexplicable encounter with a disembodied entity.
Earlier this week I wrote about the negative impact casino construction can have on the viability of performing arts entities in a region. I mentioned the steps a coalition of performing arts organizations took to mitigate those effects in NY State.
Even as I was mentioning this model at the meeting I attended to those discussing the casino related lobbying efforts, I was thinking that a model similar to the one in New York might be attractive to state legislators if they thought they could have gambling revenue replace state funding for arts and culture.
This could be a problem for a number of reasons. For a long time state lotteries have been sold as a way to provide funding for education, but the results have often been mixed with some believing the lottery funding has allowed state governments to shift funding elsewhere leaving education funding generally flat.
This is because budget decisions are made in context of scarcity, in which allocating resources to one arena of state policy limits the ability to fund other programs. Therefore, when lottery earmark revenue emerges, state lawmakers may use lottery earmark revenue to supplant instead of supplement education funding so that they can free up general fund money for other purposes that matter to their constituents and avoid raising taxes in the process.
Since its introduction in the mid-1990s, the UK National Lottery has made a lot of poor people slightly poorer while equipping Arts Councils to enrich an arts sector that disproportionately serves the better-off. It is not hard to picture an old woman applying coin edge to scratch card, with no more chance of winning the jackpot than of stepping inside the gallery she has helped to build
[…]
Arguing for public funding for the arts would be much easier if our tax regime were more progressive, and those engaging with the arts more reflective of society as whole…. Thanks to an austerity-induced accounting trick, the replacement of tax by lottery funding means that the least well-off increasingly shoulder the cost of rich people’s pursuits. A lot of well-meaning and progressive people continue to benefit from this arrangement, but it is not fair and needs to be questioned.
Which is more preferable when it comes to seeking an increase in public funding, making yet another appeal to supporters to contact their representative about bolstering arts funding or encouraging supporters to play more blackjack?
One of the guides talks about how he played soccer in the ruins of the ancient city of Ur and it wasn’t until he grew up that he gained a sense of the enormity of the history that occurred beneath his feet.
The museum’s education director said the guides provide knowledge and context that he and other staff simply couldn’t provide.
“At some point in almost every tour somebody will say, ‘What about today? Do they still eat these things today?’ Or, ‘Is this place still a place people go?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I can’t answer your question.'”
The guides can also engage in more nuanced conversation on issues of theft of antiquities by colonial occupiers versus the intentional and collateral destruction of historic sites by conflicts throughout the Middle East
When I see stories like this, I am reminded of the museum scene at the start of the Black Panther movie and wonder if efforts like this are coincidence, intentional, or subtly influenced by the movie and similar discussions about acquisition and ownership of cultural artifacts.
Earlier this month Non Profit Quarterly wrote about how the Metropolitan Museum of Art had placed Native American art in its American wing. In the past Native American art exhibits had been placed in African, Oceania or Americas wings. NPQ says it was only due to the insistence of a donor that the art was placed in the wing of its country of origin.
“That is hard to hear—that it was the requirement of a donor that enabled a long-overdue shift away from a colonialist positioning so exclusionary that Native Americans were relegated more easily to galleries devoted primarily to other nations.”
These stories may give rise to some conflicted feelings as we struggle with long held practices. But these stories are also part of a growing recognition that for some there is value in perspectives that aren’t necessarily informed by highly educated study of topics. For example, not long ago I wrote about Jawnty tours at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia which were being led by a range of community leaders, comic book store owners and artists.
As I had written, what often happens is that a casino is in a position of offer a lot more money to artists thanks to their revenues from gambling and hospitality. So an artist you could contract for $25,000 for a single performance can now get $40,000 a night for a week at a nearby casino.
Even if the artist might be willing to accept a lower fee at your venue, exclusivity clauses in their contract may prohibit them from performing in a 50-75 miles radius 90 days prior and 60 days after their casino engagement.
When I wrote that post four years ago, a commenter asked that I keep up on the efforts of the performing arts organizations, Coalition for Fair Game and update readers. I have been thinking I needed to circle back to the story and write another post.
The topic got brought to the top of my attention today at a meeting of Georgia performing arts presenters where a group that has been lobbying legislators on this issue gave a report on their efforts.
One of the things I did not realize is that many states are requiring that casinos earn a certain portion of their income from non-gambling sources like entertainment and hospitality. To some degree then, casinos are being forced to move into competition with non-profit performing arts organizations.
The guy reporting on the lobbying efforts said until they started talking with lawmakers about the repercussions of this requirement, it never occurred to the government officials that these requirements would have a negative impact on arts organizations locally and statewide.
So if your state is starting to look to legalize gambling or increase the presence of large casino complexes, it may behoove you to start conversations with lawmakers about the implications of these decisions.
As the discussion of the problem and lobbying efforts was occurring, I did a quick online search to learn more about what might have happened in upstate NY over the last few years. It just so happens, a newspaper wrote a pretty detailed story on the subject last month.
According to the Poughkeepsie Journal, the Coalition for Fair Game has received $500,000/year to help offset the impact of the casinos’ entertainment operations.
“If there wasn’t an agreement and this ongoing, open dialogue, we’d be constantly broadsided,” said Silva, who runs the Bardavon, presents shows at UPAC and Hutton Brickyards in Kingston and is currently president of the theater coalition. “We could be negotiating in good faith for an act and make an offer and get bumped because the casino gave $10,000 more.”
[…]
The money is designed to offset any negative economic impact that the casino’s headlining entertainment could have on the Bardavon and Bethel Woods. Resorts World Catskills allocates the funding to the theater coalition, which emerged in 2013 and includes venues from Albany to Elmira.
Similar deals are in place elsewhere in the state and can be found in Massachusetts.
In addition to the cash, this deal gives the Bardavon and Bethel Woods a say in the size, scope and number of entertainment offerings at Resorts World Catskills. The agreement and the casino licenses last 10 years and the payment from the casinos to the coalition is not affected by any fluctuations in gambling revenue.
Armed with the knowledge that the arrangement in upstate NY was working, I asked the speakers if they were aware of this arrangement and if they contemplated creating a similar situation if legislation went forward to authorize construction of proposed casinos.
They were aware of the arrangement in NY, but said while it was by far the best arrangement of its kind in the country, it is still an imperfect situation and that they would endeavor to carve out a better environment for the state.
Seems like something to continue to keep an eye on.
When I saw there was going to be a similar effort in Macon, I signed up to participate on my second day on the job here.
(Just a little disclaimer, the major funders of the local On The Table, the Knight Foundation and Community Foundation of Central Georgia, fund my organization.)
Instead of a discussion occurring in a single place at a set time, there were dozens of discussions occurring across the community with the first ones starting at 7:00 am and the last one beginning at 8:00 pm. The topics covered everything imaginable, including some which were specifically intended as forums with government officials. People agreed to act as hosts in parks, private homes, business offices, libraries, churches and community centers. In total, there were over 1500 seats available around the community.
While the general concept emerged from the idea that community bonds are forged over meals, the organizers were empathic that “It’s not about the food.” I imagine this was in part to prevent those who volunteered as hosts from feeling obligated to provide a gourmet experience for dozens of people. Also so that participants weren’t focused on attending the sessions with the best food choices versus the most engaging topics.
Other than wanting to be part of the basic experience, my motivation for participating was to get a sense of the community to which I had recently moved. The first session I attended was at the public library where the topic was “Preserving Ethnic History.”
Readers of this blog know that I often talk about people desiring to see their stories depicted by arts and cultural organizations. Since I helped Hawaiian artists tell their stories through performance, I wanted to learn if similar opportunities for partnerships might exist in this community.
As much as I was interested in the topic, I as concerned that the subject might have too much niche appeal to attract many participants. I need not have worried as the table quickly filled and needed to accommodate some chairs at the corners. The conversation that emerged was very interesting as the group had to tease out the differences between culture, ethnicity and identity before we could really define what it was exactly that was important to preserve.
A comment made by a woman who has taught manners and etiquette all her life cut across all subjects and seemed particularly applicable to arts and culture practice. She said her mother always emphasized that she and her siblings were to always consider themselves as sharing something rather than giving because both parties gained from sharing whereas one party always lost something in giving.
The second session I attended didn’t have an announced topic and instead employed some of the prompts provided by the On The Table organizers.
The third session was lead by a group that is trying to educate people about the state budget and how it is allocated. That conversation was focused largely on where the priorities of the society should be rather than talking specifically about the state budget. Those materials were available as hand outs to review at home.
Below is the prompt card from the session yesterday. If you were interested in doing something similar, you might check out the Chicago Community Trust On The Table website. I had read somewhere that they started the effort which has been replicated elsewhere. Certainly, you might want to search out the websites of the different communities that have hosted these events. Every community is different so some iterations may match your community better than Chicago’s.
I was skimming some entries on the Americans for the Arts blog when a couple sentences made my eyes visually screech to a halt and shift into reverse because I wasn’t sure if I read what I thought I did.
Lawrence Brad Anderson, Executive Director City of Salina KS Department of Arts & Humanities related a story about a prospective grant applicant in a situation I think we can all empathize with–though with a very atypical ending.
Our new staff member did an excellent job reviewing the grant guidelines and preparing him for the process, but as the meeting was wrapping up, I saw that something was still missing.
“May I share an observation with you before you go?” I asked. “Sure,” the artist quietly replied.
“I sense that you feel you may not be worthy of funding for your expressed need. This couldn’t be further from the truth. You have prepared as a professional in your field, you are active in musical performances, and your passion for what you do is evident. In addition to your own individual expression, I want for you also to consider being a mentor and artistic leader in this community. We need people like you to be a positive voice as an artist and a valuable member of this town. We may not always be able to anticipate your exact needs, but you have my permission to push us, ask questions, and encourage your peers to step up their game and get engaged.”
As I completed my statement he lifted his head and I could see that he was silently weeping. Whether this recognition was the cause, or as a man of color in a largely white community, he was unaccustomed to being affirmed in such a strong way. The experience served as an important reminder of the role and responsibility arts administrators serve in their community.
As I say, I think we can all identify with feeling despondent that our programs or organization is not suited to the particular criteria of a funder.
But it is pretty dang rare for a funder to tell us explicitly that we are well suited for their program, challenge us to expand our leadership role in the community and encourage us to push them as funders.
I think we would all join the artist in silently weeping.
I have been extremely busy preparing for the sponsor reception capping off a $3 million facility renovation at my day job. (It really well tonight, thankfully)
I wanted to briefly call attention to an article Michael Rushton cited about the literal prescriptive use of the arts. What caught my eye was the following sentence:
Doctors will each be able to assign up to 50 museum prescriptions over the course of the pilot project.
Rushton goes on to point out the problems inherent in making this comparison:
My problem with these sorts of stories, though, is not just the hyperbole. It’s about what it says about “art”. The story has not one single mention of any work of art these doctors’ patients might encounter at the MMFA (save for a photo indicating there is a Calder retrospective currently on exhibition). The actual works have no importance, it’s just “art”, or, as they say, whatever. The museum is a place with hallways and rooms that have framed pieces of canvas with paint on them hung from the walls.
And we can see why this is the approach, for what if we did pay attention to what art? What happens if researchers discover (as we know they ultimately will) that impressionist works increase the viewers’ levels of cortisol and serotonin more than do works of post-expressionism? That landscapes generate more hormone secretion than abstract works? Will doctors then start to advise the museum on its curatorial policies? Will the arts council?
[…]
…A part of the hidden, evil genius of “economic impact” studies was to embed the claim right from the start that the actual art itself doesn’t matter at all, so long as money is spent on it. But I don’t see how advocacy on health benefits, or empathy, or entrepreneurial creativity, would be able to get away with that.
In July I wrote about an artist who created a fake campaign promoting the restoration of El Paso’s trolley system as a thesis project. That campaign garnered so much enthusiasm, the trolley system actually ended up being restored. The artist parlayed that success into a successful campaign for a seat on El Paso’s city council.
Now over in Dallas, an artist who started using pinata houses to draw attention to the way gentrification was displacing the Latino community has declared his intent to run for Dallas city council.
According to another article in the Dallas Morning News containing more detail, as part of the project the artist, Giovanni Valderas, leaves the back of the pinatas open and has placed postcards with the same sad house motif bearing the message, “All I want for Christmas is affordable housing,” that people can mail to the mayor. (Though he said he also leaves the back open so people can see there is no reason to break it open for candy.)
Valderas, thinks more artists should become involved in politics.
…since placing the houses and doing a few other artistic projects around the issue, his neighbors began asking him what’s next.
“I wish more artists ran for office, because they are often the most creative problem-solvers,” Valderas told the Dallas Morning News. “We know how to run a shoestring budget. Through art, we already know how to engage and motivate people. This city could benefit from more creative people running. We can’t leave it up to developers and business people who are all about the money aspect of things. Imagine how much a community could change with an artist at the helm. There would be some crazy ideas, but it would be pretty fantastic.”
Americans for the Arts just rolled out their Social Impact of the Arts pinwheel this week. Instructions and ideas about how to use it may be found in a blog post and/or video made by Clay Lord, Vice President of Local Arts Advancement.
As you know, I apply a pretty critical eye to anything that might make prescriptive claims regarding the ability of the arts to solve all sorts of problems. As always, I am concerned about people using data like property values increasing 20% due to the presence of a cultural organization and a correlation between taking arts classes for four years scoring 100 points higher on SATs as a primary measure of value of the arts.
I will say that it is clear A LOT of effort went into assembling the data and putting these materials together. It can provide a valuable resource when advocating for the arts and finding practices to emulate. Between the amount of data points and ease of use, my pinwheel of arts power moniker is pretty deserved.
The topics covered are much wider than the economic and educational benefits we often see cited in relation to the arts. There are sections on diplomacy, innovation, faith, infrastructure, health and wellness, social justice and yes, culture, economics and education. Each of the 26 “slices” of the pinwheel brings up a “Learn More” button in the center that allows you to download a printable PDF specific to the topic with footnoted sources that you can bring to meetings with policy makers to show them what is backed by research.
Arrows on either side of the center hub will take you to examples of practice, reading lists and organizations associated with the topic. According to the video presentation Lord made, they were still populating that content. Since that video was made at the conference back in June, they have likely added a lot more content since then. I haven’t checked every slice of the pinwheel, but haven’t been able to find an area that lacks any of those three categories.
The downloadable PDFs have reading lists, examples of practice and organizations included, but the respective categories accessed via the pinwheel hub provide more direct access to the information in each section.
My hope is that the easy availability of data and examples of impacts in a wide range of applications will enable people to advocate for the arts cross a broader spectrum of rationale. Likewise, I hope people find it easy to draw inspiration from the successes organizations have had making artistic and cultural practice part of their effort to create connections and impacts in various endeavors.
Yesterday BikeWalk Macon sponsored an Open Streets event in town. Open Streets is a program that started about 30 years ago in Columbia. It closes streets down and turns it over the use of the community. (There is also a Play Street program I wrote about that started in London that appears to have a similar aim.) If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know this is the type of thing I am definitely into checking out.
Fortunately for me, one of the streets they chose to shutdown was right in front of my building so I didn’t have to go far. There were a lot of activities set up along the streets that were closed down – corn hole games, yoga classes, line dancing, skateboard obstacles, sidewalk chalk, etc.
As you might imagine, one of the biggest activities enabled by shutting down the streets was bike riding. I wasn’t sure but it appeared the local bike repair shop or someone might have brought down loaner bikes for people who didn’t have one because there was a big collection around their tent.
As I rode around, I was amazed by just how large a swath of street they ended up closing down. There was a significant section of a major northeast-southwest road that was shut down. Just when I thought I was reaching the limit, I realized I was only approaching a soft closure where cars were allowed to cross through an intersection.
Having such a long distance without vehicular traffic was a great opportunity to get some exercise, but I almost felt like too much was closed down. As many activities and tent as there were, it couldn’t fill all the available space. As the only one ranging that far out, I felt somewhat guilty blocks upon blocks of street were being shut down for my own use.
After I got tired of riding around, I grabbed a chair from my apartment and just sat and watched people move by. The formality of creating an occasion to use a space seemed to provide an opportunity for people to get out an meet their neighbors in ways that wandering or riding your bikes downtown on a Sunday afternoon wouldn’t normally afford.
The organizers might have worked out something with the local transit company to help people who lived outside the area come downtown to play because I saw people loading their bikes on a city bus that didn’t seem to be immediately departing on a set route.
One thing I was most interested in checking out was the inclusion of Pokemon GO augmented reality in the Open Streets experience. The Knight Foundation has formed a relationship with Pokemon Go developer Niantic and partnered on a fellowship program. (Disclosure: My organization receives funding from both The Knight Foundation and Community Foundation of Central Georgia, both of which provided funding for the Open Streets event.)
After listening to what they were telling people waiting on line at the tent and speaking with the Macon fellow for 7-8 minutes about what they were trying to achieve, I was a little disappointed because it just seemed like they had set up an enhanced Pokemon GO experience where there would be more Pokemon to hunt than usual. I thought they might be doing some more along the lines of the projects in the Knight Prototype Fund where they would experimenting with new ways to use augmented reality.
But then I saw this tweet this morning that said they were using augmented reality as part of a scavenger hunt to help people become more aware of historic locations and public art.
This is the sort of application of the technology I had envisioned might be happening. I don’t know if there was some sort of miscommunication between myself and the fellow where he assumed I knew the scavenger hunt was highlighting history and art and I assumed it was about finding the Pokemon on the posters they were handing out. Had I known it was the former, I would have accepted his offer to join the hunt so I could investigate the experience.
I may have the opportunity to speak with the local Knight Foundation officer in a week or so and hope to ask her for some clarification about what people were being lead to do.
If you are interested in bringing the Open Streets program to your community, you can learn more about it on the project website where they have toolkits to help you get started.
In his response in the comments section of the Arts Professional article, Carter employs some evocative imagery to support his contention that just because you can measure something doesn’t mean the metric tells you anything of value.
There is an ancient Greek Myth that shows the dangers of confusing our measures with something subject to measurement. In it Procrustes guarantees that the visitors to his inn would fit their beds perfectly…. But Procrustes turns the situation on its head and instead measures the fit by how well the people are measured *by* the bed. In other words, the people are stretched out if they are too small or chopped down if they are too long. Gruesome!
…Do we strap the arts into a framework that satisfies specifically non-artistic values, force a conformity that exists only in conformity obsessed minds? Do we sacrifice all that art can be merely to satisfy a diminished version that is neat and tidy, but itself merely a butchered example of what art does and what it should aim for?
If Arts Council England wants to impose a quality metric for the arts, they have a bureaucratic right to do so. Unfortunately. What they do not have is a right to speak for what things count as quality in the arts, or by extension what the arts themselves are or should be. If they want to take on the role of Procrustes let them be honest about it. But don’t let them tell you that what they are imposing is really what counts as the arts…
Now before you start mumbling indignantly as you recognize how government funders, foundations, etc are applying irrelevant measures in an attempt to define the value of art, recall that we all ultimately end up creating personal definitions and measures of what is and is not worthwhile art. It is just that most of us don’t wield the money and influence that broadly shapes policy and practice for other arts and cultural organizations
I was recently listening to an episode of This American Life on church planting and found it a little strange to be listening to people use venture capitalist terminology to describe efforts to build new worship communities as “target the unchurched.”
Reporter Eric Mennel mentions attending a conference where the conversation is
“…about “kingdom return on investment.” Or “evangelistic networking” is one I’ve read, or “corporate renewal dynamics.”
“Launch” is a big word that they use in both worlds. They talk about “launch Sundays” and “launch budgets” in church planting. And the framing of what they’re doing is in business terms, right?
As I continued to listen, they started to mention that these efforts were heavily bankrolled by established churches,
So a lot of the startup capital comes from the biggest denominations. The Southern Baptists– they spend tens of millions of dollars a year on church planting. But a lot of church plants actually get their funding directly from megachurches– established churches that have thousands of members.
That got me thinking that you don’t see many large arts organizations doing something similar where they provide seed funding to enable more nimble arts organizations to go out to target the un-artsed.”
Perhaps I should have known there would be parallels with the arts because This American Life titled the episode, “If You Build It, Will They Come?” evoking the “Field of Dreams” mentality we have been urged to abandon.
However, what I really found fascinating was the parallels between the problems one church planter had with diversifying the demographics of church planting and those of arts organizations trying to do the same thing with their program participants.
This American Life (TAL) spoke to Watson Jones III who became really excited by the church planting model, but noticed that pretty much everyone at this church planting conferences was Caucasian. The TAL reporters confirmed that most church planting happens in gentrifying or affluent urban neighborhoods or suburbs.
Jones felt things were wide open for planting churches in urban neighborhoods for people of color. As I referenced before, there is some surprising infrastructure for church planters. Jones got training in budgeting, fundraising, creating a business plan and mission statement for his church, plus an 18 month residency at a church plant site. He ended up landing about $100,000/year funding for three years to support his planting efforts.
They ended up doing a lot of things arts organizations do when trying to attract new audiences– handing out flyers and candy on the streets trying to get people to attend gatherings at homes, coffee houses and other non-traditional venues.
While the non-traditional worship services at funky, cool locations are pretty much the core identity of the church planting process that helps attract new members, it had the opposite effect for communities of color.
Watson Jones
….And one lady told me– she said, you guys are a cult. You call me when you get a church. Especially, I think, among black people, the more out of the box or avant garde you are, the less likely you are to be trusted.
Theologically, we say all day long, the church is the people of God. The people in your city, in your neighborhood, does not understand church apart from a building, a preacher, a choir or a praise team, and something that looks like a church service, period.
[…]
AJ Smith
Yeah. I mean, we were going to be the people who were out there on the streets, pastors who were very much present with the people. And that’s how we’ll grow the church. That didn’t work.
As I am listening to all this, I can’t but help think about how this is literally out of Nina Simon’s TEDx Talk on the Art of Relevance.
I mean look at this still. If you can’t see the stenciled sign on the bottom of the slide she is showing, it says “House of Worship In A Den of Sin.”
Nina uses this picture to discuss how some people will see this as a welcoming place and others will see it as scary.
These guys trying to plant a church are running into a similar situation where the lack of a formal building and familiar experience was an impediment to people’s willingness to commit to this fledgling church. (Unfortunately, even when they did get a physical place in which to hold services, they had problems attracting a consistent group.)
This podcast provides many things to think about regarding the efforts of arts organizations to diversify the groups they serve. The foremost of which may be whether the design and execution of impromptu experiences in non-traditional spaces reflect affluent Caucasian ideals about what outreach efforts to those underserved by the arts looks like and subsequently serve to largely appeal to a similar demographic.
Copyright may seem like a pretty dry subject, but the court cases that lead to the development of the law and theory surrounding copyright law can be pretty interesting. HowlRound posted the transcript of Michael Lueger’s podcast discussion with Dr. Derek Miller about some of the early copyright cases that applied to theater and music performance.
One of the interesting cases they discuss is competing expressions of the iconic melodrama train track scene where someone escapes just as the train arrives. Apparently playwright Augustin Daly was the first to write such a scene and playwright Dion Boucicault copied the idea. The courts ruled in favor of Daly saying that even though every other element of Boucicault’s play was different, the common action was key to the drama and thus was protected.
(By the way, according to Atlas Obscura, contrary to the trope, Daly’s play, and even many silent films, had a man on the tracks and the leading lady rescuing him.)
Interestingly, when the guy producing Boucicault’s play tried to reach an early settlement by licensing the train effect from Daly’s show, “The court actually says, no, no, no. The effect is not something you can copyright, … You can’t own the effect, but you can own the action.”
This general concept holds to today where you can copyright the expression of the idea, but not the name or the idea itself. You can, of course, trademark names and patent effects, but those are different types of protections than copyright.
Another fascinating situation happened when Thomas Hamblin’s Bowery Theatre was doing poorly but Charles Thorne’s Chatham Theatre around the corner was doing great. Thorne was getting ready to do a play by Joseph S. Jones so Hamblin goes to Jones and makes a deal to open Jones’ play on the same night in an attempt to put Thorne out of business. They were planning to have Jones sue Thorne “for violating your [Jones’] rights to produce the play.”
However, the courts say since Jones was working for a Mr. Pelby when he wrote the play, Pelby had the right to sell the performance rights to Thorne.
But what came next is really interesting:
I’ve got a lot of evidence here from the New York Herald, which goes all in for Thorne, and they argue that by trying to shut down Thorne’s production, Jones and Hamblin of the Bowery Theatre are limiting the audience’s ability to compare the artistic products at the Chatham and the Bowery. It’s sort of a free trade argument that they’re making.
In other words, according to Thorne and to the Herald … Thorne actually writes an editorial that appears in the Herald … if the productions are allowed to compete with each other, both theatres are going to do even better artistic work than they would otherwise. They say Hamblin is trying to shut down artistic competition and to give you a bad product, but we’re in favor of a good product and letting Thorne do the play. Legally, actually, the case is sort of a weird, unimportant footnote, in terms of the legal precedent it establishes, but it helped in studying this case to teach me how theatrical copyright battles get both parties thinking about the relationship between a work’s artistic value and its monetary value.
It is interesting to me that they get into this argument that having competing versions of the same production going on around the corner from each other is providing people with a choice and opportunity to decide which is the better production.
Nowadays, when you try to license performance rights you can run into all sorts of restrictions because a 2000 seat venue 200 miles from you planning to do the same production 12 months after you mount your production in a 200 seat theater.
While that is kind of extreme, I think the basic idea that people are willing to pay a lower price for a discount version of the same product and cannibalize your potential audience is a real concern.
Even in 1841 when Thorne and Hamblin were butting heads, if people wanted to see a show a significant number would probably accept lower production quality for 25 cents at the Bowery versus paying $1 at the Chatham.
Carter Gillies shared the unabridgedversion of a piece he wrote for the Arts Professional UK on his website this weekend. As Carter is wont to do, he examined statements about quantifying and measuring the value of the arts made by Simon Mellor, the deputy chief executive for arts and culture at Arts Council England.
I was particularly drawn to Carter’s second entry where he addresses this statement by Mellor (my emphasis):
“At its heart, the Quality Metrics system is about enabling arts and cultural organisations to enter a structured conversation with audience members and peers about the quality of the work they are presenting. It allows them to capture valuable data that they can use to understand how their intentions for the work are aligning with the experiences of their audiences and peers and, hopefully, to use that information to plan future programmes and improve the quality of their work. It will also enable those organisations to provide more evidence to current and future funders about the quality of their work.
Let me first state that I don’t believe these metrics will really have any ability to measure the quality of the work done by the arts organisations. If you have read any of my previous posts on the matter you probably knew that already.
I was taken by the idea expressed in the bolded sentence above. One of the biggest challenges facing arts organizations in the last few years is the recognition that what they are doing might not align with the interests of the community. In surveys like Culture Track, people say they aren’t attending arts events because they don’t see themselves or their stories depicted on the stages, walls, and spaces. They don’t preceive what is happening in arts spaces to be relevant to them. Nina Simon wrote a whole book about making experiences relevant for people.
So if the Arts Council of England could actually deliver some real insight into how to make the experience more relevant for people, that would be a pretty valuable service.
However, as Carter points out later in that second entry, there are many examples of artists whose work was initially rejected before being lauded. Some died before others began to recognize the value in the work they missed before. We see this sort of thing happen all the time in our lives. Movies and shows that did poorly both critically and economically suddenly become cult classics.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show became immensely popular after it initially flopped. But it is also a good example of something whose value exploded after people were able to participate and take ownership of the experience.
Even if it is an accurate reflection of how people are receiving something, the research is only going to be valuable to a point.
The problem, however, with creating a metric is that often that metric becomes fetishized as the measure of value rather than one element among many that can help us understand how an art work and the experience surrounding it is received.
As Carter notes, quoting Oscar Wilde, even when we talk about a metric someone else is using, the meaning of that metric may not be shared by both parties. Thus the #NotMyMetric title of this post.
(my emphasis)
There is a reason bean counting number crunchers have so much authority in the arts, and mainly it is for the good. The arts are a business and need to function as such. But it is also important to not let that world view overreach itself. We need to be careful in not putting the cart before the horse. In many ways the arts are the exact opposite of what the counters are, and see, and value.
The ever impish and ironical Oscar Wilde understood this predicament:
“When Bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When Artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money.”
There is a mutual interest, in other words, but neither does it mean a banker thinks of art as an artist does, values it for the same things in the same way, and equally true of artists’ attitude towards money, but especially that this does not mean they should be left in charge of one another’s concerns. A ‘dinner table’ acquaintance is insufficient for the real work that needs to be done.
Don’t misread my previous posts about how to improve the conference attendance experience as disgruntled criticisms of any conferences I have attended or contributed to. I was approaching the topic in the same spirit as I approach arts attendance experiences: questioning what it is that conferences, like the arts orgs they serve, need to do in order to provide participants with a valuable experience.
Hessenius’ post is especially useful for first time attendees because their conference experience is going to be all about networking. He identifies common features of arts conferences and provides advice about how to exploit these dynamics to best effect.
For example, regarding the plenary luncheons:
I never sit at just any table, nor am I the first one to seat myself. I wait until the tables begin to fill, quickly identify a table occupied by people I might want to talk to and those I might want to get to know. Even if your seat mates are serendipitously determined, that’s ok, because often times you end up meeting someone who will make an excellent contact. Note too that keynote speakers are often inspiring and motivating, but few keynotes will offer you much practical advice that you can use, and thus the before, and during conversations with those at your table may be more valuable to you in the long run.
The one bit of advice I felt was valuable for people of any level of conference attendance experience was in regard to preparation:
One final piece of advice: there is a lot of talking that goes on at conferences. Learn to listen and listen well. And please, if there are recommended reading materials and / or research available before the conference for a session you might want to attend, don’t put that off until you are on the plane. Do your homework, if there is any, beforehand. If you give yourself more time to think about the subject, you’ll get more out of the presentation, and you’ll be able to formulate good questions to raise. Relax on the plane.
If there is one phrase I have heard at conferences over the last decade or so it is along those lines. People say they meant to review a text in advance or they downloaded the book planning to read it on the plane or listen to the audio content as they drove but didn’t get to it.
I understand that. For a whole lot of people attending a conference means cramming all the work you aren’t going to be around to do into the last few days before the conference. There is even less time than usual available to preview conference content.
But as Hessenius implies, you are carving out time to attend a conference to help yourself be better at your job. If you only have a precious few days in which to do that, it is worthwhile to prepare the soil in which this valuable content can thrive and grow.
Back in July there was an interesting piece in The Atlantic examining the value of the claim “find your passion and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
As I was reading the article, I saw that this concept had a lot in common with the idea that artistic achievement is the result of inspiration or genius rather than the result of a long period of practice, experimentation and experience. I have written about this idea often in the distant and recent past. The study reported on in The Atlantic piece continues to extend and add evidence to my thinking on this topic by suggesting you develop your passion rather than being struck by it in a momentary flash.
Another reason not to buy into the fixed theory is that it can cause people to give up too easily. If something becomes difficult, it’s easy to assume that it simply must not have been your passion, after all. In one portion of this study, the students who thought interests were fixed were also less likely to think that pursuing a passion would be difficult at times. Instead, they thought it would provide “endless motivation.”
[…]
People who have a growth mind-set about their own intelligence tend to be less afraid of failure, according to her research, because they believe smarts are cultivated, not inherent. Interests are related to, but distinct from, abilities, the study authors told me: You can be interested in something but not very good at it. “I’ve been playing guitar for 25 years, but I can’t say that my abilities have gotten that much better in the past 10 years,” O’Keefe said.
Dweck told me that “find your passion” has a laudable history. “Before that, people were saying, ‘Find your genius,’ and that was so intimidating. It implied that only people who were really brilliant at something could succeed,” she said. “‘Find your passion’ felt more democratic. Everybody can have an interest.” But this study suggests that even the idea of finding your “true” interest can intimidate people and keep them from digging further into a field.
I was particularly interested by this idea that “find your passion” developed out of a desire remove the intimidation factor inherent in “find your genius.” It seems like something of an admonition to pay attention to the inherent implications of any new phrases that crop up to replace “find your passion.”
I have suspected it before, but now I really am convinced that Seth Godin is reading my mind. Right after I made my post about perceived value of conference professional development sessions last week, Godin posts a retrospective of past posts where he talked about how to make conferences more valuable for attendees. (He drills down to ideas for meetings between two people so they are worth a read.)
Of the four posts he links to, I think my favorite is the skewering of the 10 person banquet table. He says those tables are ideal for the catering manager, but counterproductive for forging relationships with other conference attendees which is the whole reason for spending so much money to show up in person.
If you have ever been crammed at a table with 9 other people I need not enumerate the disadvantages of this set up.
In my experience–I’m sharing a hugely valuable secret here–you score a big win when you put five people at tables for four instead. Five people, that magical prime number, pushes everyone to talk to everyone. The close proximity makes it more difficult to find a place for the bread basket, but far, far easier for people to actually do what they came to do, which is connect with one another.
[…]
If you want to let the banquet manager run your next event, by all means, feel free. Just understand that his goals are different from yours.
Another one I liked was his post on how to organize a retreat. In it, he lists all sorts of atypical activities for people to engage in. He hooked me with his prohibition on having people go around the room and name their favorite vegetable.
Instead, a week ahead of time, give each person an assignment for a presentation at the event. It might be the answer to a question like, “what are you working on,” or “what’s bothering you,” or “what can you teach us.” Each person gets 300 seconds, that’s it.
Have 11 people present their five minutes in an hour. Never do more than an hour in a row.
This idea was from a 2010 before the pecha kucha became a fixture at conferences. I think the concept of using it in the place of going around the room asking people to make off the cuff statements is a much more constructive approach.
Some other ideas from that post:
Solve problems. Get into small groups and have the groups build something, analyze something, create something totally irrelevant to what the organization does. The purpose is to put people in close proximity with just enough pressure to allow them to drop their shields.
Challenge attendees to describe a favorite film scene to you before the event. Pick a few and show them, then discuss.
Serve delicious food, weird food, vegan food, funky food. Just because you can.
In a third post, he deals more directly with the physical setting and technology employed in a conference. Some of his suggestions like not forcing people to listen to a speaker in the same room they eat a meal because, “No one ever heard a speech that changed their lives when sitting around a round table having just eaten a lousy lunch,” probably will please a lot of people.
Other suggestions like holding sessions in too small a room and forcing people to stand in order to ratchet up the energy level probably needs to be applied with a degree of caution lest you face a mutiny.
Jackson makes a good observation about the appearance of involving and engaging diverse members of a community vs. the practice of engaging those diverse members. (my emphasis)
However, just as sitting in a diverse crowd at a baseball game doesn’t necessarily create social bridges, merely standing around at an art opening together isn’t social bridging, either. For these bridges to truly form, an exchange of conversation and ideas is vital. Most importantly, it cannot happen successfully when one group is thought of as irrelevant. And though bridging may entail making resources available to those who need it, it is not the same as charity. You give and you take; it is not one-directional.
We claim credit on grant reports for counting new and different faces entering our venues, but we may not have created any sort of new, authentic connection with those people.
Jackson writes about an event she attended at Bronx River Art Center where people got to smack away at pinatas created by over 20 artists. Tell me you don’t want to steal this idea or adapt it to your own purposes.
The organizers, artists Blanka Amezkua and Ronny Quevedo, made sure the event took place later in the evening so that local people with jobs could attend. Not only were there artists of different races present at a time when so many openings were attended by self-segregating crowds, but the room was alive with cousins and uncles and grandparents from the neighborhood, who came despite it being in the dead of winter, just after New Year’s Day. I marvelled as everyone took turns handing off the bats to one another, joyously breaking open the piñatas together.
Jackson also relates some steps her organization, Bronx Documentary Center, has taken to solicit gain insight and act as a connector in their local community,
For example, during an exhibition on Mexican photographers chronicling American life, the gallery created a working group of “community curators” culled from local Mexican-American organizations, who provided context and feedback on how the photographs might be presented.
And during an installation of an exhibition examining the war in Iraq, it came to the BDC’s attention that one of the soldiers who discovered Saddam Hussein in hiding lived within walking distance from the gallery. This might have presented an opportunity to organize a public program highlighting how global issues hit close to home. However, since he struggled with anxiety related to PTSD, we invited him to participate in a way that would feel most comfortable to him: by having a quiet meeting in the gallery with the Marine and the journalists behind the exhibition, all of whom had also spent significant time in Iraq.
I appreciated her use of the Iraq veteran as an illustration regarding how an initial instinct about the way an installation ties to the local community may not be sensitive to the needs of the community members. While the quiet meeting she described may not have had as wide reaching an influence in the community as a public program, it sounds like it was probably a meaningful experience for those that were involved.
There are other examples in her article about ways to ford social divides, some as simple as lending snow shovels and folding chairs and it worth a full read for those ideas.
While I wasn’t scheduled to sit on any panels at the ArtsMidwest conference last week, I did end up leading (or at least shepherding) one.
Actually, I made a tongue-in-cheek claim I was hijacking the session because it was originally cancelled but I decided it should go on if there was enough interest. What had been scheduled was a book club type discussion of Nina Simon’s The Art of Relevance. The person who had been scheduled to lead the session couldn’t make it so I decided if enough people walked up and expressed disappointment at seeing the cancellation notice, I would pull the sign down and make sure it happened.
Sure enough, two other people quickly came up and said “awww” so I pulled down the sign and took over the room. We ended up having about 15 people attend, half of whom had read the book and the other half who intended to read it and wanted to know more.
Given that mix of experience and perspectives, it was pretty easy to provide a valuable and informative session. (Though if I had had more notice, I might have tried to get a computer so we could show one of Nina’s TEDx talks)
Earlier in the week, there was another session that had been cancelled because the presenter couldn’t make it. This one was geared toward helping people take a look at the physical surroundings of an arts venue from a different perspective to identify what features might be sending unwelcoming messages to some groups.
From the session description:
“Oftentimes the greatest asset of any arts program is its physical space, and yet it’s frequently overlooked when it comes to access, inclusion and diversity…if we aren’t paying attention we can inadvertently send the wrong messages. Like tourists with fresh eyes participants will go on a walking tour of the Indiana Convention Center and explore how to identify and mitigate the psychological, emotional and physical reactions that occur in response to a physical space.”
I had seen this at previous conferences and had conflicts so I intended to participate this year and I was a little disappointed that it got cancelled.
I overheard a number of other people express similar disappointment at it being cancelled and then rhetorically ask if the conference couldn’t have just found someone else to run the session instead. My feeling is that being sensitive to and aware of these problematic features is a pretty specific skill set. It isn’t as easy to find a suitable substitute as it was for me and others to step in and lead the book club discussion.
I mentioned this to a couple of those making these comments and they seemed pretty reluctant to concede this was the case. This reaction made me wonder if conference attendees perceived the content of these sessions to be marginally valuable BS that presenters spouted and therefore was easily substituted on short notice by other people who happened to be around.
And yes, granted a lot of times conference content can be full of empty platitudes about how everyone must love the arts but sessions like these are more about specialized practical skills and less about advocating for the value of the arts.
I suppose a more charitable read could be the perception that everyone in attendance but oneself is a highly qualified expert practitioner and therefore could step in to provide illuminating perspective on the problem.
But if it is the assumption that half of what you are hearing is B.S., then arts conferences have a challenge about communicating their value for professional development.
I went to the Arts Midwest conference last week and I am still sorting out all the notes and brochures, etc that I picked up.
There were a couple general bits of observations I wanted to share.
Blake Potthoff, Executive Director of the Fairmont Opera House in Fairmont, MN gave me permission to share something he said in one of the professional development sessions. He opened his comments by expressing a problem totally opposite of the one the rest of us face–he wanted advice attracting older generation audiences to his shows, specifically those from Generation X. Apparently he isn’t having problems attracting millennials.
Later, he mentioned that one of the ways they evaluate how their shows were being received was by convening an advisory group every other month and asking them whether they felt a show in the season had been programmed for impact or for dollars.
In other words, once people have seen the show, the organization asks their advisory group if they felt the inclusion of the show in the season had been purely motivated by money or if they felt the show had been meant to have some impact on their lives.
What didn’t come up in the professional development discussion was the fact that the arts org can often lose more money on what people perceive to be a cash cow than on a lightly attended event.
Potthoff said these discussions have really impacted how the organization plans their season and experiences.
The approach was pretty intriguing for me. This isn’t a question we generally ask our audiences.
Usually, the rule is not to ask a question if you don’t intend to act on the answer. In this case, I am not sure what my response would be to the answers I would get.
If my goal is to have an impact on people’s lives, does it matter if people think a show has a commercial motivation and turn out in sufficient numbers to support it? If people answer that a show was impactful, but too few people show up to make it financially viable –well this situation is what we generally assume. Things that aren’t popular are still worth doing for the impact.
If people feel a show was both motivated by commercial success and feel the show was highly impactful for them, that might provide some direction, especially if I felt the show was mostly feel good fluff without much value. I just have to put my snobbery aside a little and explore what contributed to people feeling this way.
Then there is the final option where none of our expectations are met – what we intend to be impactful is viewed as commercial and what is intended to be a money maker is viewed as impactful. Some answers may lead you to place where you resent your audience for being out of tune with your intent.
In some respects, this may be a question that you ask not knowing exactly what you will do with the answer–except that you resolve to be open minded and not reflexively decide the answers are irrelevant.
Because you probably also need to ask, does your community care whether something is meant to be a money maker or impactful? Do they have negative associations with their concept of what the intent to make money entails?
When they perceive something was intended to be impactful, do they feel that it has improved their lives or that they viewed it like vegetables–they know they are supposed to consume it for its cultural value, but they really prefer something else.
Even beyond the question of profit vs. impact, it may be enlightening to generally ask people what they perceive our organizational motivations to be.
If you have ever doubted the contributions niche artistic & cultural practices can make to greater society, read check out this story on the BBC site recounting how puppetry helped preserve the Czech language.
…intellectuals, who had initially resisted the German language, followed suit. Even Czech actors began to perform in German as an official mandate.
[…]
[wood carvers]…started making puppets for the actors of Bohemia soon after Ferdinand II came to power, as puppets were the only remaining entities that had the right to speak Czech in public places. While the rest of the country and its people adhered to the newly imposed German language, wandering actors and puppet-masters spoke through the puppets in their native Slavic tongue.
It might seem unlikely that a few hundred puppets and puppet-masters could safeguard a language, especially through a loophole, but the people’s last remaining legacy to their past was tied to the puppet’s strings.
It’s easy to see why these marionettes have found a home in Czech hearts, and why the magic of puppets continues to permeate the city.
It is often the case that a dominant culture tries to undermine, perhaps with the intent of forced assimilation, the identity of other cultures by outlawing popular practices. Occasionally niche cultural practices are tolerated because they are not taken seriously or because they don’t appear to have broad impact.
Something similar happened in Hawaii (as well as other places, I am sure), where there was a strong bias against speaking the language and close to an outright prohibition against hula, with which chant is inexorably bound. It was only due to individuals performing and practicing in private that cultural practices were preserved until public practice was allowed. Even still, a lot had been lost and is still in the process of being reinvigorated in the shadow of influential pop culture.
Indeed, currently reclaiming and participating in traditional practice is increasingly valued. Some of it is certainly motivated by the prestige of being associated with “bespoke” craftsmanship. But that desire drives a demand for people to actually master the skills to produce quality sought after goods, services and experiences.
Apparently ideas like this occur and are developed somewhat in parallel because for the last two weekends, the theater department here at Mercer University has been using the basic framework of Dungeons and Dragons to create a heroic saga with the participation of audience members.
Martin Noyes of Savannah College of Art and Design had experimented with the idea on a smaller scale in the classroom, but this was the first time he employed the concept as a full production that unfolded across seven nights.
The experience was very intriguing to me because it both required creating a sophisticated framework of rules and allowing the performers (and audience) a lot of freedom to introduce unpredictable elements into the performance.
The technicians supporting the performance had to be prepared to create the appropriate ambience on the fly. In many cases, they had to be just as inventive and resourceful as the actors. It was quite telling that Noyes would often be surprised that they found an appropriate image to project or sound effect to use as part of the action. He wasn’t completely aware of what they had available in their repertoire.
In addition, there was a musician on violin accompanying the performance creating a soundscape on the fly as well.
The performance, called Vengeance and Veritas, was presented in a blackbox space. The set looked something like this:
As you might imagine, flexibility and imagination were employed more frequently than realistic set pieces.
The cast consisted of four main characters, plus four others that took on various roles and helped with some of the mechanics of the performance. Noyes acted as the game master and portrayed many of the allies and antagonists, providing direction or challenges to the main characters. Audience members were pulled up to be ancillary characters and with a few whispered notes from Noyes, were called upon to make decisions to either thwart or assist the central characters in their goals.
By the finale, there were about 12 audience members up on stage alongside the actors either manipulating the rudimentary puppets of one of two dragons or depicting female warrior-monks.
If that wasn’t enough uncertainty added to the proceedings, the 20 sided dice so iconic to Dungeons and Dragons were used to determine the outcomes of many decisions. Oversized dice were distributed throughout the audience. When called upon, they threw the dice into the performing area. Often multiple dice were thrown simultaneously forcing Noyes to indicate which die would rule as it skittered across the floor.
There was a lot I loved about the design of this production.
First, I loved that it developed into something larger than expected. Noyes apparently didn’t think things would develop as far as they did, forcing him to create more narrative guidelines between performance nights. In the heat of the action, he would often forget where on stage he put his notebook down, providing an amusing delay while he retrieved it to consult his notes.
The actors were free to make decisions about their involvement within the confines of the narrative. Noyes had a couple of out of character exclamations of “oh shit” when the actor portraying a vampire turned up deciding to be the hero, thwarting the plans of the villainous character Noyes was portraying.
At the same time the nigh unkillable vampire kept becoming a liability to his allies as the dice roll incited his bloodlust to attack wounded allies.
There were also times where well-reasoned character development and choices by the actor was allowed to trump the dice roll.
While a performance built within the framework of a game like Dungeons and Dragons does require you to have some degree of insider knowledge, unlike many arts experiences, the audience was often more knowledgeable than the creators. Noyes had to admonish the audience to silence as it became clear the actor portraying the vampire was about to make a decision that would benefit a regular person but is deadly to vampires.
This particular approach to creating dramatic narrative answers many of the objections people make about performing arts – it is never the same performance each night, the outcome is unpredictable, the audience is actively engaged and doesn’t have to be cajoled into participating.
Another great thing was that the episodic nature of the performance induced people to return to see the show again. (Anyone who performed got a little gift at the end of the night too) Where they may not have participated on the first night, a lot of people were ready to jump up and take part on subsequent nights.
Because the cast didn’t know how the performance would unfold every night, no one knew when the show would end each night either. Noyes had to judge a good cliffhanger point to stop at.
One conversation we had (my staff provides the ticketing for the performance) is that if this type of show is ever done again, we need to offer special multiple performance pricing to make it easier for people to attend as many nights as they like.
The process also provides artists and technicians with the opportunity to explore new approaches to story creation; become nimble and resourceful in executing complex tasks on the fly and evaluate what does and doesn’t work. There may be a number of practices in common with comedy improv performances, but there are a lot more moving parts involved.
Because of the performance environment, the unintentional pauses, rough edges and problems in the shows I attended only served to provide a greater sense of intimacy and connection for the audience. (How often do you see a director exclaim his pleasure when something is unfolding well or preface a performance by telling an audience how his ultimate goal is to destroy a good portion of what he labored so hard to create?)
In a different physical spaces, the expectations might be for a more polished product. In that case, the performers might have to run through a scenario a couple times before an audience encounters it—but still introduce a mechanism of unpredictability to keep things feeling exciting and fresh.
Since I didn’t expect to see roleplay driven storytelling manifest so quickly and in such a way, I am obviously excited to see what else might emerge.
I am going to be attending the Arts Midwest conference this week so I started scouring my archives for content for Wednesday’s entry. Instead, I came across an old post that is a bit more appropriate for Labor Day.
Back in 2009 I wrote about a New Republic piece that suggested one of the reasons manufacturing has diminished in the US is that business schools started focusing more on finance and consulting back in 1965. So while countries like Germany and Japan have constantly made advances in manufacturing, the US hadn’t been able to keep up.
“Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background….But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”
I made the following observation about how this situation was finding its way into the arts.
…realized that this describes exactly what people are afraid will happen if arts organizations are “run more like a business.” The fear is that decisions will rest entirely on return on investment and will be divorced from the manufacturing process as it were.
There was a time I would not have imagined that any arts organization would have a disconnect between the administration and the artists…
Nearly five years ago, I cited observations that orchestra administrations were disassociated from the performances and performers. Given all the conflicts and closures since then, I don’t think the overall environment has gotten any better since.
With the increased focus on STEM subjects, I wonder what this portends for the future. Will an emphasis on research and experimentation lead to more innovation in general and have an influence on the arts in the form of data based decision making and technology driven innovation?
Or will the value of the arts continue to be evaluated in terms of quantitative measures?
The fact that the arts community was pretty quick to start insisting that STEM become STEAM to include the arts makes me optimistic for the former scenario, but we need to pay attention to what areas our schools focus on.
What’s particularly noteworthy about voters approving this property tax is that Genesee County’s seat is Flint, MI.
When the topic if government support of the arts is discussed, the question often arises how you can justify support for arts and culture when there are so many other problems to be addressed. Flint, MI has been known for the social and economic challenges it faces in addition to some significant problems with the municipal drinking water supply.
Yet, voters saw some value in supporting a millage proposal that would enhance the arts and cultural environment in their county. Why is that?
Van Voorhis, who grew up in Flint, expresses confidence that the residents of Genesee County will find their quality of life improves as the financial support of the arts and cultural organizations continues over the next decade. She cites a study showing a similar effect in Cleveland when they passed taxes in support for arts an culture.
One of the insights and suggestions she pulls out of the Cleveland study will be familiar to those of you who have been reading my posts on Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection initiative to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture.
Insight #1: Long lasting change involves shifting the way people think
[…]
Try this
Work backwards. Go talk to the people you’re trying to influence and ask them what they care about. What are their biggest challenges? What changes are they trying to effect? Ask them if there are particular ways arts and culture could be helpful to them (or if they’ve even considered arts and culture as part of the equation). All of this information better positions you to illustrate how arts and culture can be woven into and make a difference in those things they care about. Ultimately, you’ll be better positioned to articulate exactly how investment in arts and culture will yield concrete benefits from an angle they already understand.
Creating Connection emphasizes that lasting change requires changing the way people think and that the effort to shift the thinking requires effort over the long term.
Note that Van Voorhis’ suggested approach starts with focusing on the community first rather than the organization. Consider and address their challenges first.
Earlier when I asked why it was that people voted for the millage proposal, what I suspect is the answer is that arts and culture connects with a deep need people have. That need transcends specific arts organizations so it is incumbent upon arts organizations to pay attention to serving that need.
There are more things from the study that she cites and what she cites is only a small segment of the whole study so if you are interested in making a similar case in your community, it may be worth taking a look.
Torres and Tamari talk about the lengths they went to provide grant applicants with as much information about how they were applying their criteria as they could.
When we embarked on refining the application process for the NCPF in 2015, we asked ourselves: “How do we benefit by holding our cards close to the vest?” There was no benefit! As a result, we sought to provide thoughtful explanations for why we needed information in a certain format. We also pushed ourselves to remove as much jargon as possible.
[…]
At the next stage of our process (where approximately 7 percent of applicants were invited to submit a full proposal), we made the process more open by providing all applicants with what we’d actually be looking for in the full proposal and site visits. This is the same material we provided to panelists who reviewed all the projects and provided funding recommendations.
However, they said, in their effort to be as clear as possible about the criteria they would be employing in evaluating proposals, they also provided people additional information with which to game the system.
This showed up for us in 2016 when we chose to publish that we were particularly interested in projects focused on community development sectors underrepresented in our portfolio to date. We received hundreds of submissions in which applicants attempted to alter the goals and strategies of their projects into one of the sectors we listed as being “of special interest,” believing this would make them more competitive in the funding process.
More often than not, these projects would have been strong had they been framed in a community development sector more authentic to the work, instead of the ones we stated as priorities for the year. As a result, these proposals were received by our peer review panel as round pegs attempting to fit into square holes, and ultimately decreased their competitiveness.
There are frequent conversations in articles and blogs like mine about how organizations will undermine their operational effectiveness by pursuing grants that ill fit their organization and then by going through the contortions trying to execute grant activities alongside the core programs for which they really wanted the grant money.
Less frequently do funders tell the non-profit community that it was clear to them applicants were proposing something for which they were ill-suited and they would have been more effective taking an approach that reflected their core strengths.
As one who has served as a grant panelist, I can tell you it is often clear that organizations are trying to change color to suit the grant program criteria. It is just that few organizations will come out and generally encourage applicants to avoid taking that approach.
By the same token, the unequal relationship dynamics and opacity Torres and Tamari say the National Creative Placemaking Fund (NCPF) was working so hard dismantle does encourage people to try to game the system.
If you aren’t clear what a granting entity wants, there can be a perceived benefit in correctly guessing the secret combination of words that the granting entity has determined will unlock the funding. There may not really be a narrow set of phrases the granter is looking for, but the opacity of the process means that getting funded reinforces your confidence in your superior ability to read between the lines of proposal guidelines.
Basically, I think in some respects applicants have been conditioned to try to game the system as much as possible. Faced with funders who say they are being completely earnest about what they are looking for, some applicants will be convinced there are some unspoken criteria with which they will align and enable them to gain funding.
Earlier this month, F. Javier Torres and Leila Tamari wrote a piece on shared power and transparency in grant making for Inside Philanthropy. They were reflecting on some of their practices over the last decade at ArtPlace America’s National Creative Placemaking Fund.
One of the things that caught my eye was their discussion of memorandum of understanding (MOU) with grantees. I had written about MOUs vs Contracts for ArtsHacker about three years ago where I mentioned that MOUs generally aren’t legally binding where contracts are.
Despite the fact they were granting significant sums of money to people, Torres and Tamari say it is that non-binding characteristic that lead them to use an MOU versus a grant agreement.
…we developed customized memorandums of understanding (MOUs) instead of using grant agreements. We chose MOUs because they are intended to be jointly negotiated. They allowed us to share power and build consensus about our relationship and expectations of each other (beyond the financial investment). Through this back-and-forth process, funded projects could request non-financial resources in support of their goals.
While using MOUs was a step in building a more equitable power dynamic, funded projects rarely took advantage of this opportunity, and we recognized we still had the ability to “reject” a request as the holder of resources.
Even though the use of MOU didn’t solve issue of an unequal power dynamic as they had hoped, it struck me that this was a benefit of MOUs I hadn’t spoken about in my original ArtsHacker article. Though as I had written in another ArtsHacker article, even though contracts are supposed to formalize an agreement at the end of a discussion rather than be used as a sort of bludgeon at the start of the conversation, contracts are often employed in this latter role.
So if you want to avoid having either party feel like their options are being limited from the outset, perhaps starting the conversation with the intention of creating an MOU is the best approach. As the conversation evolves, you may feel that the relationship is better formalized with a contract instead.
Granted this is probably overly complicating things because both parties are likely to realize their arrangement really requires a contract from the outset, but starting with an MOU mindset may be more conducive to a constructive relationship.
While I was spending my days last week apartment hunting as part of my move to a new job in Macon, GA, I was spending my nights at the Macon Film Festival. It was suggested it would be a good opportunity to check out the various theater spaces around town.
One thing I encountered that I hadn’t really seen at other film festivals I have attended is a growing number of fulldome and virtual reality films. There were workshops about how to make films for both formats.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to view any of the fulldome films, but I did see a number of VR films on an Oculus VR rig. They ranged from the psychedelic trippy to animated shorts to documentaries about prison life and all female brigades fighting ISIS.
As you might imagine, among my primary thoughts while viewing the movies was the question about whether the technology posed a threat to live performances.
Currently, I don’t think what I experienced does as the viewing rig got uncomfortable after a time and there were frequent glitches. Also, as viewers our movement was confined to spinning right and left and looking up and down. (Admittedly, more range of motion than permitted in many live performance experiences.) It is only a matter of time though before those problems and limitations get ironed out and the techniques for creating compelling experiences and narratives develop and mature.
Whether that can ever replace the tactile and social experience of live performance, I don’t know.
I was interested to see that similar questions were posed in the session description for the film festival’s introduction to VR film making session:
Can VR generate empathy? Does it isolate us or create a deeper sense of community?
The marketing director at my new job was discussing the potential of using geofencing with me today and then lo and behold, the first article on my social media feed when I got home contained a link to an article on that very subject.
Geofencing can be used to track someone’s movement by where they carry their cellphone and send messages to them based on their behavior. As the article on Tao of Sports explains,
Geofencing also follows customers around for up to thirty days, which means beyond the initial purchasing period, it can also showcase whether the fan receiving the message then went to the stadium or not. With addressable geofencing, conversion zones can be setup as well. So if a fan crosses into a conversion zone, say a specific venue which advertised to them within the last thirty days, it will show on the report.
[…]
For secondary brokers, geofencing technology also adds an additional way to catch fans as they are entering the stadium parking lot, by hitting their phone with a last minute advertisement for concert or sports tickets. Image getting them right before they hit the window with a credible advertisement that beats the venue price.
Like any technology tool, geofencing is something of a double edged sword. It can provide you with much more accurate data about the way people are behaving than asking them about their habits or trying to observe it in other ways. But there is also that creepy Big Brother is Watching element.
The tweet by Roger Tomlinson that brought the article to my attention notes that geofencing is not legal in Europe without permission.
Last month when I was suggesting conference session topics for the Non Profit Technology Conference, I alluded to the issues surrounding geofencing in one of my topic ideas:
Ethics of Using Geofencing For Marketing – i.e. I can geofence a local theater and target people based on the idea that they enjoy attending performances or with the intent of stealing the audience.
I don’t doubt that the use of geofencing or something like it will become increasingly prevalent. I suspect that a number of bad actors will cause people to become very protective of how their movements are tracked to the point that even if a law isn’t passed requiring you to ask for permission, in practice that is what you will have to do in order to gain the data you want.
I mentioned last week that I was in the process of moving. Today I started a new job at the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.
I am really excited by this opportunity. The Grand is a storied theater having undergone many evolutions, and renovations over its, depending on how you count, 134 or 104 year history.
One of the other things that really excites me is that Macon is a Knight Foundation community. Over the years I have written about the interesting programs they have initiated and supported in their chosen communities. I am looking forward to experiencing some of this first hand. (As you might imagine, I now need to insert a disclaimer that The Grand Opera House benefits from their support.)
I will apologize in advance that my posting schedule might be a little irregular as I tackle the challenges of my new job. Not to mention, my furniture has yet to catch up with me and blogging while sitting on my living room floor presents some challenges.
Still, I anticipate having new perspectives and insights to offer readers in the coming months.
Back in 2009 I wrote a series of articles on the book Human Sigma after I had heard someone at a conference remark that arts administrators were often so emotionally satisfied with their work that they didn’t feel the need to keep up on current literature and attend to professional development. I had asked the person where he heard that and he directed me to Human Sigma.
Human Sigma is actually more about interactions between customer facing employees and customers than professional development so what the authors, John Fleming and Jim Asplund, have to say is pretty applicable to arts organizations.
Emotional connection and satisfaction are very important when building a relationship with customers. As I wrote about one of my biggest revelations I received from the book:
What surprised me was that those who are rationally satisfied “behave not any differently than customers who are dissatisfied.” They use the example of a credit card company. Those who were emotionally satisfied spent an average of $251/month and used the card 3.1 times a month. Those who were rationally satisfied spent an average of $136/month and used the card 2.5 times each month. Those who were dissatisfied also spent $136/month and used the card 2.2 times.
What informs people’s emotional satisfaction is often tied to a perception of fairness. While the definition of fairness can differ from person to person, one thing that is true for pretty much everyone is that anything that appears to make the interaction easier for the business than the customer is perceived as unfair.
I wrote prime example of this,
…is the phone queue with the recorded message about your call being important leaving you to reconcile how this can be if the place is so poorly staffed the average wait time is twenty minutes. What the authors say about this really struck me, (my emphasis) “From the customer’s perspective, any process or system whose primary purpose is to solve a business problem rather than a customer concern is unfair.”
They also note that treating people equally can appear unfair. If your customer service staff follows the exact same scripted process with customers not recognizing that the script can’t cover all eventualities, the result may make you look incompetent and patronizing for asking questions or suggesting solutions which obviously do not apply to the situation.
The importance of handling complaints well is extremely important. As the authors write,
“customers who encounter a problem and are extremely happy with how the company handled the problem often have levels of emotional attachment equal to—and in some cases exceeding– those who have no problem at all.”
[…]
They say that customers don’t expect a business will always resolve a problem to their liking, “but they do except the company to handle them in an exemplary way.”
[…]
They have found that people who have a high emotional investment are likely to give a company the benefit of the doubt when a problem arises viewing it as an honest mistake or even pondering how they may have contributed to the situation. Those with low engagement are more likely to place heavier blame on the company for the problem making it more difficult to please them.
Here are the six steps to addressing customer complaints they suggest as I first wrote in my post:
First is to acknowledge the problem exists. Second is to apologize. They are quick to add that apologizing is not accepting the blame.
[…]
The third step they suggest is “Take ownership of the problem and follow up, even if the problem is unresolved.” Promising to follow up by a certain time or date is better than a vague “as soon as possible” because the customer may feel they have to continue checking in on your progress.
[…]
Suggestion four is to handle problems on the spot rather than bumping it to a supervisor.
[…]
Their fifth suggestion is have a process which quickly brings the problem to the attention of a supervisor or manager.
[…]
The last suggestion is to leave people better off than they were before the problem occurred.
In the next post I wrote, I noted that Fleming and Asplund said the best way to achieve this is to empower the employees to find the best way to solve customer problems rather than create a formal process/decision tree. Essentially, tell the employees the end goal and then let them figure out how to get there. Employees are evaluated on achieving the end goals rather than how well they adhered to processes.
His post is from almost a decade ago so maybe people aren’t still saying these things,…but I wouldn’t count on it. Some of it reads like the Twitter feed of Shit Arts Administrators Say.
Here is a sample of his list:
[…]
Children are transformed by simply walking into ____________ (performance venue–you can fill in the blank).
Famous Artist and Board Member of Unsaid Institution
The integration of the arts cannot be done at the high school level.
School District Administrator
[…]
We like arts because there are no wrong answers.
School Principal
We do not like the arts because there are no wrong answers.
CEO
Parents are the key to arts education.
Foundation Staff Member
Parents are a waste of time.
The very same Foundation Staff Member
Parents in low income areas don’t care about the arts.
Arts Education Consultant
Parents in low income schools understand that the arts are part of a well-rounded education.
Grass Roots Organizer.
Low performing students shouldn’t be required to have the arts.
School District Official
[…]
There would be no arts education without cultural organizations.
Arts Administrator
There is no arts education in our schools.
Elected Official
This year is going to be another great year for arts education.
City Official (in the same school district as the elected official)
[…]
We must do something about ensuring that artists entering schools have basic training.
Director of Arts Education/Cultural Organization
After all the training artists have already received, why should we have to receive additional training? We’re not teachers; we’re artists.
Teaching Artist
I am in the process of moving so I am shifting in to “throwback” mode for a week or so.
I thought I would look back at a post I made about one of Ian David Moss’ contributions of a blog salon.
In his contribution Moss wrote took the view that arts education put children on the track to careers that the socioeconomic environment couldn’t support. (my emphasis)
Much of the literature that advocates arts education as a strategy for cultivating demand for the arts assumes that students who have invested thousands of hours of their lives in perfecting a craft during their formative years will happily set all of that aside as soon as they turn 18 and 21, become productive members of society with skills that they somehow picked up while practicing piano for four hours a day, and donate all of their expendable income to their local arts organizations. Really? Don’t you think that some of them might be a little bitter about having to leave their dream behind? Don’t you think some of them might continue on and spend their parents’ life savings on three graduate degrees in a quixotic quest for fame and glory that never materializes? Is this the best use of our collective human capital?
In my post at the time, I disagreed with the view writing,
Or rather, I don’t think operating on the assumption that not everyone will become an arts practitioner completely nefarious. No one expects every kid who participates in Little League, Pop Warner Football and various soccer leagues will go on to become a professional athlete after all the time they have invested in practicing. Though certainly a situation where a college athlete isn’t expected to devote themselves to their studies is not something to be emulated.
Your analogy to Little League sports is a good one. Sure, some of the participants dream of being professional football players, but most simply enjoy playing and the experiences they have with friends. For some reason, artists don’t recognize that this is the case for the arts as well. There are other reasons to do it than going pro — reasons that are just as fulfilling (I’d venture to say, in the current arts climate, oftentimes MORE fulfilling)… what an arts education promotes is a rich life that includes the possibility of creative expression as an end in itself, not a means to an end. This was the message of the “Gifts of the Muse” report, for instance: the INTRINSIC value of the arts. Lets not get lost in arts education as existing solely for the creation of professional artists or the creation of paying audience members. There is a more active and vibrant alternative to those roads.
In the intervening years, as I have begun to really think about the intrinsic value of art vs. the instrumental value, I have grown to appreciate Scott’s comments all the more. Reading this old post, I feel like this might have been a formative moment when I started thinking about arts education and making people aware of their capacity for creativity.
However, there is a lot of validity in Moss’ argument that universities and conservatories are taking the money of a lot of people with mediocre ability and preparing them for a traditional career path in the arts. This problem has been recognized for quite awhile now.
But also note my intentional use of “traditional career path” because there are an ever broadening array of ways in which creative abilities can be applied. Training programs aren’t doing the best job of preparing students to pursue those options.
Just this week I read a CityLab piece about another voucher program that people who are at least 18 years old can participate in –voting and political campaigns.
Based on the success Seattle has seen with their Democracy Dollars program other cities like Albuquerque, NM and Austin, TX are looking into handing out campaign finance vouchers as a way to get a broader segment of the community involved with the political system.
…eligible residents vouchers totaling $100 to donate to the local candidate of their choice. Candidates who opted in to the program had to agree to strict guidelines on how to spend the money they received. The idea behind the pilot was that giving the equivalent of money to constituents who don’t usually have the resources to support their candidates—pensioners and the homeless, for example—would spur greater political participation.
These stories got me thinking that having a similar voucher program that people could use to donate to their favorite arts organization might inspire a broader range of the community to become involved with arts organizations. It may even help bring funding to organizations that have been marginalized or don’t have the resources to apply for formal grants.
According to the CityLab article, studies conducted on Seattle’s program did see participation by a more economically diverse segment of the community. However,”…voucher use was greater for older, white, and middle- and high-income voters.”
Surveys have shown similar results during free admission days for museums. Rather than attracting people who don’t normally visit the museum, most free admission days are patronized by those who are already visiting the museum.
The fact that voucher use was greatest by older, white, middle/high-income voters doesn’t mean that there isn’t potential to involve a broader range of people. It just may take more time and effort to help people feel empowered to participate.
“Yet low-income voters who did participate said they appreciated the opportunity: “It feels like I’m more a part of the system,” one voucher user told the Seattle Times in 2017. “People like me can contribute in ways that we never have before.”
While I express optimism that vouchers would help spread funding around to arts and cultural groups that don’t normally receive it, I imagine some government entities might require groups to officially register as approved recipients. This type of requirement potentially poses the same barrier to organizations as needing a grant writer.
It obviously doesn’t need to be that way. The Italian government’s voucher scheme was intended to be used for a wide range of things like buying books, taking classes and admission to events.
Though admittedly since they distributed the funds via an app, being able to accept the voucher funds may have required registration and paperwork. On the other hand, just as cell phones and tablets have lowered the barrier to being able to accept credit cards through a simple swipe, the same app that displays a voucher’s QR code could also be employed to scan codes and accept payment. All of which is probably less work than writing a grant.
This summer I have been seeing a lot of California Symphony Executive Director Aubrey Bergauer popping up in places like videos of conference talks she has been giving. It has been over a year and a half since I wrote about her Orchestra X project so I figured it was time to revisit and reacquaint people with the work she has been doing.
Recently she had a blog post following up on the conversations her organization has been having with the communities they serve. She mentions a theme I keep seeing in formal survey results and collected anecdotes — audiences aren’t clamoring for a change in programming as much as they are intimidated and confused by the decision and experience of attending a cultural event.
The bigger issue, she says, is that those of us on the inside forget what it was like being entirely unfamiliar with information or an experience. Even when we are faced with a new-ish experience, our past experiences allow us to make logical leaps that total novices can’t.
What we learned was that a “basic” level of understanding about the symphony or classical music does not exist among newcomers. Some people didn’t even know the names of the instruments in the orchestra, which to me, the person who had played an instrument all growing up and who wanted to manage a symphony since age 16, was pretty much unfathomable (remember hindsight bias?). The good news, we discovered, was that this group of smart people desperately wanted to learn about everything related to classical music though. And through the discussion we learned that the way we layout and present information on our website made it very difficult for them to do that.
[…]
Virtually every person in the room expressed the sentiment of “awe” when describing the art they saw and heard. No one said, “I need a shorter concert,” or “I need to hear more movie music.” They very much wanted to learn about all facets of the repertoire and were emphatic that the art is incomparable.
Bergauer says that now that California Symphony stopped stressing about programming mix and started focusing on retention versus new audience acquisition. Last season, their new attendee retention rate was over 30%.
Take a closer look at the post. She talks a little more about how rich experiences make us unable to anticipate what new attendees really need to know in order to enjoy themselves.
Broadway Producer Ken Davenport is singing my song. I know you know this tune, but based on my experience, it bears reiterating.
He talks about how he often gets pitched ideas for new Broadway shows.
One of my stock questions to anyone pitching me anything is, “Who do you think the audience is for your piece?”
This question not only helps me determine whether the Pitcher and I are on the same page, but it also gives me some insight into the business acumen of the person who wants me to get involved in their project.
The red flag answer to this filtering question of mine?
“This show is for everyone!”
While I appreciate the bullish answer, the fact is . . . no show is for everyone. And the more you try to make it for everyone, the more you water it down and make sure that it’s for no one.
[…]
…Your first marketing exercise when you embark on producing a show or building a career is as follows.
Identify exactly who your audience is.
Find that audience and exploit them and only them.
If your audience spreads to “everyone” from there then great, but it’s much easier to market to a niche than it is to the world.
I am sure pretty much everyone has run into a similar pitch or had staff/board members make a statement about a show being for everyone. What is often frustrating is that many people who say this own or work for businesses which are pretty clear on who their customer base is and isn’t.
Even funeral homes which about 98% of us will likely end up patronizing on behalf of deceased loved ones likely each have a demographics to which they appeal more than others.
Davenport’s advice to have a focus that moves from the specific to the general is a pretty good guideline when it comes to marketing decisions.
I suspect people feel that they are conceding a flaw in the product if they admit it isn’t for everyone. Saying a certain group will REALLY like it and everyone else will probably like it to might provide the psychological out needed to identify those it is realistically for.
I was reading a piece in CityLab about Repair Cafes which strike me as a good complement to MakerSpaces and creative activities that arts and cultural entities may host. The concept was started in Amsterdam by Martine Postma who was disturbed by how much repairable equipment was sitting at the curb on trash day. She sells start up kits that allow you to use the Repair Cafe logo and puts you in touch with the other Repair Cafe’s around the world.
But beyond reducing what is sent to the landfill, personal empowerment plays a large role in the Repair Cafe concept:
What she’s discovered was that it wasn’t that people liked throwing away old stuff. “Often when they don’t know how to repair something, they replace it, but they keep the old one in the cupboard—out of guilt,” she said. “Then at a certain moment, the cupboard is full and you decide this has been lying around [long enough].”
[…]
For the time being, communities are doing what they can to encourage people to fix things. Libraries like the one in Howard County, for example, have started renting out tools and creating “makerspaces” where members learn to both repair and create. Elsewhere, cities have hosted MakerLabs, FabLabs—short for fabrication lab—and Innovation Labs for both adults and children. Bike shops and nonprofits alike have fished scrapped vehicles from the landfill to repair and donate to the underserved community.
The social and personalized elements of the Repair Cafes, makerspaces, etc may be part of the value and appeal. After all, you can watch a YouTube how-to video to fix something that breaks. If you don’t have confidence in your ability to effect the repairs, having someone available to teach you the skills to do so in the process of fixing your stuff might motivate you to act. This despite the fact it is more trouble to haul your broken equipment somewhere versus tossing it in the trash.
It is also easier to toss stuff away rather than hauling it to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but people donate goods to non-profits all the time because they know it is better not to let things go to waste.
Just as recognizing your capacity to be creative is empowering, learning to fix items can instill a degree of pride and self-satisfaction which is why I feel it is such a close companion effort to creative activities.
About two weeks ago, I saw a story about their Barnes Jawn(t)s program where they hand over the tours to unconventional guides. People can choose to take a tour with seven different guides who will provide their own perspectives on the Barnes’ collection.
(It appears technically, there may be 9 guides. According to the article, the first tour was conducted by “Madhusmita Bora, a classical Indian dancer, and Ashley Vogel, a staff member with the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.”)
The jawn(t) program is described as:
Join us for evening tours full of make-believe as we play fast and loose with everything you thought you knew about the Barnes. In Philadelphia, jawn is a catch-all word for anything. A Barnes Jawn(t) is an anything-goes tour of the collection with a fascinating Philly personality as your guide. These off-the-cuff, sure-to-run-off-the-rails tours are led by a diverse array of community leaders, artists, and comic-book nerds—all experts in their fields. No two tours will be the same. After taking a Jawn(t), you’ll never look at the Barnes the same way again!
My read on the project is that they are, in part, trying to combat the idea that visiting the Barnes Foundation “isn’t for people like me” by having people with whom you might better identify lead the evening tours.
You may recall a few months back I wrote about Museum Hack which conducts themed tours in various museums around the country, also billing themselves as an unconventional approach. The Barnes approach seems to be in the same vein, but much more focused on the perspective of the individual guide.
I was wondering if the fact these tours start an hour after closing time was intentionally chosen so attendees’ potentially first visit to the institution would involve a more intimate group rather than interacting with the large number of daily visitors–or just a matter of convenience to accommodate people getting off of work.
Actually, I just noticed all the tours are on Tuesday when the Barnes is closed making me additionally wonder if some portion of experience is being customized and prepared for the tours earlier in the day. (Given the stipulations Albert Barnes made about how the art was to be displayed, I would suspect nothing about the galleries themselves is changed.)
Contributing to the impression that there might be some special customization going on is that they list a local group as the organizer:
Based in Philadelphia, Obvious Agency is an interactive design collaboration between Joseph Ahmed, Arianna Gass, and Daniel Park. The agency works with cultural institutions to explore new ways to engage audiences through custom games and interactive performances. The group also produces the artistic work of its members, including Go to Sleep, a real-life adventure game about insomnia. Commissions include the Diamond Eye Conspiracy through Drexel and Temple Universities.
I was interested to see this partnership/collaboration with an outside group as an indication of possibilities for other arts and cultural organizations.
Another month, another helpful webinar from our friends at Arts Midwest where different venues around the country talk about how they are integrating the Creating Connection practice into their operations. This time around people from San Jose’s Teatro Vision and Red Wing, MN’s Sheldon Theatre.
Teatro Vision talked about an interesting project they conducted in conjunction with Day of the Dead activities. They had audiences respond to a number of prompts and then took the responses and used them to create poems which they posted in the lobby. Then they surveyed audiences about whether the poems helped to enhance the experience of the performance.
I had been looking forward to the Sheldon Theatre’s portion of the program for nearly a year. Anne Romens, the Creating Connection program coordinator, had been referencing their work in webinars and the professional development conference session we worked on last year so I really wanted a deeper dive into what they were doing.
If you have been reading up or hearing about Creating Connection over the last year or so, you know one of the basic, but crucial concepts is a focus on the audience and experience. The Sheldon has gone whole hog on that. Check out their website and you can see that plainly. Tell me you don’t want to be there.
Starting at about the 28 minute mark in the webinar, they talk about how there were no humans in any of the archival pictures of their building. Everything had been focused on the architectural beauty of the building. The 16-17 brochure was the first time an audience member attending a show was depicted in any of their promotional materials. If you watch their before and after pictures, you can see what a difference “populating” the building makes.
Executive Director Bonnie Schock talks about the concern her board and community members had that this shift in focus would undermine the value of the organization. But when they talked to their audience, themes of togetherness and shared experiences emerged as primary measures of value over the quality of performances and artistry.
They started to develop experiences surrounding performances- everything from meet and greets with artists to tea parties for performances of Alice in Wonderland. During a celebratory event at the start of a season, they handed out “emergency confetti” packets as people left for use when they were feeling down.
One technique I have seen nearly every group presenting a Creative Connection use is a white board/post-it note board for audience feedback. Not only did the Sheldon use this, they also “surveyed” audiences by having them drop little pom-poms in jars labeled with different sentiments (~40:45 mark).
A lot of great ideas presented by both groups, don’t let my prior interest in learning about one of them keep you from watching the whole thing.
So in the spirit of getting more stuff I am interested in learning about proposed, I am gonna give you a list of some of the things I think would make good topics in the hope some of you will submit something.
Data Privacy and Security From Perspective of Communities of Color – I have already reached out to one of the people who made a presentation for the Hispanic National Bar Assn in NYC, but anyone with an interest should submit on this topic. Given that non-profits serving communities of color often need to establish a relationship of trust, this seems like an important subject to address.
Analyzing The True Cost of Programs – favorite topic of mine. Related idea:
Using Evidence/Data to Rebutt the Concept of Overhead Ratio As A Measure Of Effectiveness
Shared /Online Procurement Goods/Services
Effective RFP Generation – both internal & external processes
Using Geofencing To Better Understand Target Communities – can geofencing help you better understand a community based on where they travel around the community?
Ethics of Using Geofencing For Marketing – i.e. I can geofence a local theater and target people based on the idea that they enjoy attending performances or with the intent of stealing the audience.
In-Person/Conference Based Professional Development vs. Online/Technology Delivery. Are there some subject areas better suited to one format over the other?
Shared services/technology arrangements – in terms of both back office and program delivery
Delete the Facebook Account? – Communication strategies when faced with a concerted social media assault
Use of technology to provide regular cues to keep strategic plan alive and relevant – i.e. using software/apps to periodically to nag/remind you of milestones in time line, provide encouragement, remind you of ideas you had during the planning session
Effective Hiring – from job description to orientation/training this topic is large enough to be multiple sessions can hit on everything from online job boards/job app apps to new state laws requiring salary range and forbidding asking about salary history
There are plenty more ideas where these came from, but I feel like this is a good broad range of subjects. I have already reached out to a few people encouraging to propose based on topics they are well-qualified to address.
If any of this inspires you in any sort of direction, submit a proposal. If you got questions, let me know. Like Drew, I am on the conference session committee. Honestly, the conference organizers are really good about providing opportunities for people to ask questions at scheduled office hours and open Q&A sessions, and an online proposal prep group in which you can solicit feedback on proposals you are developing. All these resources are listed on the proposal pages.
Santa Cruz Shakespeare has several tiers of benefits for donors/members. Some, like season-announcement parties, are open to several tiers. Some,…