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Joe Patti

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

There Isn’t A Template For That

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I was really grateful for Aaron Overton’s very first post on ArtsHacker last week.  Aaron is a programmer with a lot of experience in website development for performing arts organizations. (Disclosure: He did some work on the ticketing integration for my day job website.)

In his ArtsHacker post, he talks about how much work goes into making it easy to keep an arts organization website updated and looking good. I had a conversation about that very subject the day before his post appeared. Had I know his piece was coming out, I would have delayed my meeting a day and used the post to bolster my argument.

Because performing arts organizations have an ever changing cycle of events, it can take a lot of work to keep your website current, attractive and put the most relevant information in front of site visitors’ eyes.   Publishing platforms like WordPress make creation and maintenance of websites much easier than it was even 5 years ago, but there is still A LOT of coding that has to occur to make the process of adding and removing content quick, painless and in many cases, automatic.

The back end of my day job’s website has a nice set of orderly field that I can plug event information and images in to and everything appears in its proper place on the website.  About a year ago, I noticed a less than ideal placement of some information and asked my web guy if he could fix it. I was sitting next to him when he made the fix and even though it was easy to accomplish, I got enough of a look under the hood to realize how much work went into making things so simple.

At the time I even remarked that all those ads for build your own website in minutes services like Wix and Squarespace probably made people underestimate how much work went into making websites work well.  Certainly, those sites provide a great service to people and businesses to help them get up and going. But there may come a time in your personal/professional/organizational development where they won’t be enough.

And I made a similar comment in the meeting I had last week.

If you take a look at the first example in Aaron’s post, he mentions desired features that are likely common to many performing arts organizations:

…display headshots of the cast for an event. The set of headshots might have color-tinted photos with the actor’s name displayed on the bottom and some sort of rollover effect that slides in from the bottom when the user hovers or taps.

The client needs to have a pool of actors and be able to build “teams” that can be attached to events. The headshot photos may have many purposes, so they won’t necessarily have a uniform size or aspect ratio.

But to make that happen, he had to consider the following factors:

  • Provide a way for a site manager to create team member profiles with a large headshot photo.
  • Provide a team builder to group team members into ordered lists and note their roles on that team.
  • Create a way to easily place that team on a page for display, along with a few options to allow for different usages.
  • Crop the provided headshots to the right size and aspect ratio.
  • Style the output to account for converting the photos to tinted grayscale.
  • Accommodate different screen sizes and devices so that the final output looks good whether on a desktop or a mobile device.

These are only some of the tasks. During development, many other tasks have revealed themselves as necessary, most of which may have little to do with the final display seen by the site visitor but are necessary to making sure the feature not only works, but is efficient and doesn’t slow down the user experience.

The purpose of Aaron’s post isn’t to tell people to be prepared to pay a lot for a good website. He provides a number of tips about how to approach the design process and conversations you should have with your programmer early on so that you don’t end up paying too much.

Yes, You Do Understand Art

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Last night I gained some additional assurances that everyone has the capacity to comprehend art at a basic level when they encounter it.

Some recent university grads started a “creative cult” here in town. Every month they have some sort of activity at a different place. The specific activity is never announced in advance, only the basic theme. The first one was the “Induction Ceremony,” the second was “World Building” and last night was “The Definition of Art.” These are quick, fun group activities that run about an hour and attract 40-50 people each time.

Last night attendees were split into three groups, each which assembled near a table full of found objects. We were given a prompt and told not to reveal it to any of the other teams. We were told to brainstorm for 5-10 minutes and write and sketch what that meant to us on large sheets of butcher paper. Then we were set loose to construct something representing our prompt using the objects on the table.

Every table had different supplies. Among the things are on our table were card board, a watering can, a golf club, magazines, Christmas ornaments, bubble wrap, drone bumpers, string, birthday decorations, scissors, tape and glue.

After the assembling period was done, we were given another sheet and told to rotate counter clockwise to the other team tables at set intervals to discuss and write down what we thought their piece represented.

When that phase was done, the teams that didn’t create a piece talked about what they thought it was all about.

Let me just say, given the materials on hand and time available for construction by committee, there wasn’t much opportunity to create realistic depictions of the prompts.  In fact, at one point, we were told that all the materials we were provided needed to appear on our table in context of our piece which probably further muddied the waters.

Not only did the guesses for each piece have commonalities, but some of the options suggested either hit the target exactly or were close enough that game show judges would have accepted the answer.

Not every individual’s initial guess was correct, but as a group walking around and discussing each piece, a reasonable sense of the concept behind it emerged.  Looking at the pieces through the lens of the “wrong” answers often made them more interesting than the correct ones.

The guys who organized the event were really pleased because they weren’t sure that people would be able to accurately discern the source prompts when they created the activity.  I was excited by their excitement over achieving their goal.

Part of their goal was exactly as I suggested earlier — to show people that they had the capacity to comprehend some basic things about an abstract representation.

I would say they also wanted to show people they had the capacity to communicate concepts via abstract representations except the underlying goal of the whole creative cult effort is about empowering people in regard to their creativity.

While obviously not as good as having been there, here is a little bit of video taken of the pieces after the event. I was going to see if readers could guess what the prompts were, but the guys put them in the description.  In order of appearance, Batman, the Lincoln Memorial and Wendy’s 4×4 (we guessed Wendy’s)

Supporting Coverage Of The Cultural Organizations You Support

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Yesterday on ye olde Twitter feed came a story about how two Buffalo, NY area arts & culture funders were helping to establish an arts and culture desk at a local public radio station.

I don’t recall who distributed the link but what drew me to it was the question in the post about whether this might be a new mode of funding for arts coverage.

In case you missed it, both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal announced last year that they were constricting their arts and culture coverage, joining other news and media sources that had made the same decision in the past.

A press release about establishing the news desk says the intent is to cover groups, disciplines and topics that often get overlooked:

…Arts Services Initiative of Western New York Executive Director Tod A. Kniazuk said. “The establishment of this desk means that culturals of all sizes and disciplines, and artists in all mediums and stages of their careers, will have a greater opportunity to get the message out about their work and its impact.”

…explained Stanton H. Hudson, Jr., Executive Director of the TR Site…And, through a dedicated arts and culture news desk at WBFO, artists and cultural organizations will be provided enhanced opportunities for listeners to experience their work, which often address historical and contemporary social, religious, political, and cultural issues and provide a framework for exploring challenging and difficult subjects.”

A column on the Artvoice paper site applauded the decision, citing the importance of coverage for small cultural groups and how they sustained Buffalo through the tough times

This can be a particular threat to the smaller, edgier, scrappier, low budget venues, tucked into warehouse or storefront spaces, hidden in basements or abandoned social halls. These venues depend upon coverage in mainstream media to attract new audiences.

In Buffalo, where small venues have arguably sustained the city through its hard times and fueled its burgeoning renaissance, it is dangerous to neglect or abandon this aspect of a diverse and lively arts scene.

To get back to the question that lead me to the article, is this a sign of things to come? Will community foundations need to support some sort of system of coverage for the arts and cultural organizations in their community?

Will arts and cultural organizations kick in funding to support such coverage? If so, it might be best funneled through an arts council in order to avoid accusations of favoritism to those who paid the most or the emergence of a pay for review system that caused a controversy in Los Angeles.

While I do wonder if reviews are really as important as word of mouth/social media any more, and it might vary by community, I do think general coverage of news, activity and trends can be important for the cultural health of a community. Reviews and stories about specific events only provide a snapshot of an instance. Conversations about long term initiatives, trends and developments can be particularly of value because they communicate overarching information that can be missed when we are so focused on what is immediately in front of us.

I am not saying subsidized coverage of culture shouldn’t call attention to particular groups and events. Just that it is often easier for an organization to catch and engage momentary attention than it is to communicate the arc of progress or illuminate the entire cultural ecology of a community. That is where the real value of coverage by a media organization can lie.

Arts Aren’t Great Because Great Men Say They Are

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Since the news started going around last week that the Trump administration was looking to de-fund the NEA, NEH and PBS, there have been a ton of memes circulating quoting Winston Churchill refusing to defund the arts during the Second World War saying, “…then what are we fighting for?”

Except, as I wrote four years ago, that story is completely apocryphal. He never said that. He said some things close to that and the precursor of the Arts Council of England was formed in 1940 ““to show publicly and unmistakably that the Government cares about the cultural life of the country. This country is supposed to be fighting for civilisation.”

Yes, it may be a little pedantic to call out the error, but given that fake news is a topic of frequent discussion these days, I think accuracy may be the best policy.

As I was re-reading that post of four years ago, I noticed that included a story about how Lincoln insisted on completing the dome of the Capitol during the Civil War so that people could see the government would continue. And how Roosevelt cited that story when he was dedicating the National Gallery. And how Kennedy cited both Lincoln and Roosevelt when asking for public support of the arts saying they,

“‘understood that the life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose- and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”

I was left hoping that the Lincoln story was true because it was the foundation of rationales made by subsequent presidents.

But the real question is, are the arts only great because important people have said they are? Do the arts become less worthwhile if we can’t find important people to vindicate their value? If Lin-Manuel Miranda decides next week it is all about fly fishing, will arts, culture and creative expression be abandoned in droves? (More likely than not hordes of people would track Miranda down to a stream in Montana and serenade him.)

Famous people can be the focus or public face for will and effort, but they are not the will. Often that famous face is not required. What famous people did all the marches of this past weekend coalesce around?

Creative expression doesn’t need a famous face behind it to matter. It doesn’t need a million people to march before it matters. Though those numbers certainly make a cause compelling and something you ignore at your own peril.

I don’t look at the folder of supportive comments I collect for grant reports and think wistfully it would be great to have a quote from a famous person instead of these 50 comments from nobodies.

I am pretty cynical about this perennial threat of defunding arts and culture. I see it akin to an older kid holding a toy over a toilet bowl and threatening to drop it in. Whether they ultimately drop it in or not, the kid seems to revel in the reaction the threat elicits.

I don’t think an argument accompanying a picture of Winston Churchill is any more compelling to decision makers than a picture of any one of us saying the same thing so we might as well get in the practice of standing behind our own sentiments.

In terms of getting people to act to support the arts, I suspect for a large percentage of people on your social media feed, your picture and statement of support is going to be a lot more compelling than Winston Churchill’s.

Does Creative Placemaking Work? It’s Complicated

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Back in November Slover Linett released the results of a multi-year study on creative placemaking. The study was primarily focused on the impact that music pavilion and band shells that the Levitt Foundation has constructed or renovated across the country.

In the process of discussing the results of the study, the study authors made some very interesting statements about the process and goals of creative placemaking. In particular, they say that measuring the economic impact of creative placemaking is not an accurate measure of the value of creative placemaking in the community.

If you have been reading this blog over the last few months, you probably know that I have been increasingly advocating that the value of the arts should not be measured in terms of impact on economy, education, etc., so these statements were of particular interest to me.

In the executive summary they talk about how assessments of creative placemaking effectiveness have changed:

At first, creative placemaking assessment efforts were focused on developing “indicators” of change and success: new frameworks for bringing together a variety of data points that are related to intended creative placemaking outcomes, which can be tracked over time to gauge the impact of the investment in creative placemaking initiatives. But it has since become clear that the indicators approach has real limitations, especially with respect to connecting changes in the indicators with specific features or activities of any given creative placemaking project

As the authors looked at creative placemaking and the research that has been done in regard to it, they found that there were myriad factors inherent to each neighborhood that contributed to any improvement or lack thereof so it was difficult to credit placemaking for improving conditions. Also no one is consistently gathering data on some other factors that have relevance. (my emphasis)

One objection was that, because data for the indicators is usually collected on a relatively broad geographic level as well as a broad, somewhat abstract conceptual level (based on hard-to-define notions like economic vitality, vibrancy, and livability), it’s virtually impossible to connect any given creative placemaking project with observed change (or lack of change) in the indicators. Another concern was that defining the indicators at such a broad, conceptual level failed to respond to each creative placemaking project’s unique goals, vision, and starting point. [Ian David] Moss argued that there was essentially no mechanism for connecting the Endowment’s investments in Our Town projects to the indicators one sees. A project could be entirely successful on its own terms but fail to move the needle in a meaningful way in its city or neighborhood. Or it could be caught up in a wave of transformation sweeping the entire community, and wrongly attribute that wave to its own efforts. There’s simply no way for us to tell.

Now if this is the case for creative placemaking efforts, it raises a question about whether one could truly draw a connection between construction/renovation/expansion of a facility or introduction of a new program initiative and positive economic outcomes in a city or neighborhood. To some extent these statements seems to suggest that many claims of economic impact by arts entities outside of their direct spending are on shaky ground and may need to be re-evaluated.

On the other hand, a placemaking effort could appear to have had no benefit when measured in terms of economic impact, but had a substantial positive social impact. Of course, a positive economic impact may have a negative social impact as residents are dispossessed by gentrification.

In our view, the indicators systems also often unintentionally favored economic vitality and livability over outcomes related to building a community’s social capital, in large part because there is little or no national, regularly collected data on levels of empowerment, self-efficacy, social bonding, or social bridging—concepts which may be more subjective than economic indicators but are central goals of many creative placemaking efforts and are widely considered critical components of the social health of a place. As a result, some practitioners argued that the indicators-based approach to measuring the impact of creative placemaking could privilege projects that are economically beneficial but may actually diminish the social capital of a community and its members—for instance, by highlighting the economic impact of creative placemaking investments without reckoning with unintended consequences like gentrification on those who might be displaced because of rising property values.

If you think I have been overly idealistic in advocating for a consideration of the intrinsic value of art, here is a little bit of evidence of a shift toward seeing the less easily quantifiable impacts as valid and worthy goals.

As I am sure my frequent interlocutor Carter Gillies would point out, valuing the arts for positive social impact is still something of a prescriptive view of the arts rather than prizing the intrinsic value. But it feels like a step in the right direction to look at the benefits to human relationships over commerce.

I Am Not Really An Artist, But…

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I often talk about the difficulty people have in seeing themselves as creative or as regularly participating in a creative pursuit. I was reminded recently that it can be the off-handed depreciating remarks we make that can reinforce this view.

Yesterday we were meeting with the outside consultant that is going to help us with the arts listening tour we are conducting in our community. The consultant listened to us talk about our goals for the sessions and perceptual, economic and physical barriers people experience that we hoped to learn about.

At a certain point in the conversation she stopped us and said that when she taught class she often gave assignments that required some creative component, in part because reading and grading multi-page papers is pretty burdensome.

She said after listening to us talk, she recognized that when she would give an assignment, she would often preface it by saying, “I’m not an artist….” or “I can’t draw…” She realized that was contrary to the her goal in giving the assignment. In addition, it was giving people permission/excuse not to really try.

She said in the future she would stop using those phrases and instead say, “I don’t have formal training as an artist, but this is how I represent this concept/process visually and it makes sense to me.”

We often say if we can change the life of even one person, we will be content. We haven’t even executed our project and we have already had an impact!

When we comment that we can’t draw, act, dance, sing, etc, it is often to excuse our perceived lack of ability. Or, as is the case in this classroom setting, in an attempt to alleviate any pressure people may feel about needing to produce something of quality on demand.

But it also perpetuates the idea that we are not possessed of any ability whatsoever. That isn’t true. Who hasn’t doodled in their notebook, sung in the shower, lip-synched, danced and pantomimed like no one was watching?

I don’t know if our consultant’s alternative phrasing is the most ideal. I would love to hear other people’s thoughts. But I think it is a start in the right direction.

Perhaps more importantly, her moment of self-reflection forced me to recognize that even as a person who works in the arts, I have probably prefaced an attempt at creative expression by saying “I’m not a…” I am sure I am not the only one either.

Asking Boards What They Think Of Themselves

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A few arts organizations in my community are partnering to conduct an arts listening tour where we will go out into the community and try to get a sense of what the barriers to participation for different groups might be. We met with the outside facilitator today so she could get a sense of what we wanted to do and help us avoid inhibiting honest discussion.

She mentioned that one of her major focuses is non-profit boards and that research on board effectiveness is almost exclusively conducted by talking to the executive officer of the organization rather than the board members. She said if you asked the boards themselves they would probably have a different view about their effectiveness.

She told us this to emphasize the importance of including the people we wanted to know about as listening tour participants rather than asking other groups why they thought people in those demographics weren’t engaged. The need to involve those who were not already engaged in our activities has been at the forefront of our mind since we started planning this project.

Later in the day the facilitator’s anecdote came back to me and lead to me to wonder, how many executive officers ask their board to reflect on their effectiveness. How many boards ask it of themselves? How many discuss the differences and similarities between the directors’ and executive officer’s perceptions?

I know this gets into uncomfortable territory. I actually stumbled into it recently when I mentioned my perception of my board’s decision making process to the board president, citing specific examples. To her credit she thanked me for reflecting something they were too close to see and brought it up at a board meeting.

Not all issues are that easily addressed and not all board dynamics allow for these sort of discussions. Perhaps the first step is to work on changing the dynamics.

If it is true that most of the research about the actions, attitudes and effectiveness of boards of directors is derived from what the organizations’ executive officers say about them, maybe the boards have been unfairly maligned and should be given an opportunity to respond.

(And I know there are a lot of people reading this thinking, no they haven’t and no they shouldn’t, but try to get past that.)

Today being the observation of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, it is appropriate to think about all of our relationships that seem antagonistic to some degree and make us feel uneasy and fearful about acting to resolve. Not all movements need to be large and public impacting thousands. Sometimes they can be small, private and personal impacting a handful.

Theatre of Education

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There is a lot of conversation in the performing arts about potential audiences not seeing themselves or their stories up on stage. If this is something that concerns you, you may want to take some pointers from a New Yorker article about an immersive play experience in Chicago.

Set in an old school, Learning Curve, was created in cooperation with “fifty teen-agers … drawing on their own experiences, and on dozens of interviews with teachers, parents, administrators, and peers” in an attempt to communicate what it is like to attend Chicago city schools.

Similar to other immersive theater pieces like Sleep No More and The Donkey Show, attendee-participants follow a “choose-your-own-adventure” track through the experience.

Each scene lasts just a few minutes but manages, with depth and candor, to make a serious point about the personal and political stew that is public education.

My track that evening brought me to a chaotic advanced Spanish class, where a flustered teacher fought for control of her students while impatiently accommodating a timid new pupil. A real teacher in attendance remarked afterward, “Yup, that’s exactly what school’s like.” Next, I visited a distracted guidance counselor, who informed me that several of my classes were no longer available owing to budget cuts. “You can thank Rahm for that,” he said, referring to Chicago’s mayor. In another intimate scene, I spied a teacher cheating on standardized tests. When caught, she defended herself. “What am I supposed to do? Let the state slap you in the face and call you failures?” Later, I took this same test, frantically filling in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil while tortured by the ticks of an amplified clock. How quickly that very particular brand of panic returns! But then I assisted in a clever prom proposal, in a janitor’s closet, complete with a guitar and a disco ball, and remembered that, for all of high school’s angst, it provides many small moments of wonder.

While the work was intended to illustrate the experiences of the students, whom the article author terms “silent shareholders,” it engendered “sympathy for the elusive authority figures in their lives” among the student creators. Teachers, seeing students depict them, in turn recognized some of their choices contributed to the stresses their students experience.

Looking at the immersive format in this context, it seems obvious (though it hadn’t occurred to me earlier) that it can be used for more than presenting exciting re-imagined tellings of Shakespearean stories and be a tool for dialogue and social change.

Did anyone in the Chicago area happen to see the show and wants to share their own impressions?

Volunteering Ain’t Free

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Somewhat apropos of yesterday’s post, Non-Profit Quarterly had a post about Phoenix Comicon’s recent decision to charge volunteers to work their convention.

I am not sure this is really a scandalous decision given that many outdoor festivals I know have had this policy for going on two decades. The more controversial aspect might be that the Con is a for-profit company that was requiring people to become members of a 501 (c) (7) non-profit for which the Con leadership were officers in order to become volunteers. Many objected that this was a major conflict of interest.

But as the Non Profit Quarterly noted (and as I suggested yesterday), co-ordinating the work of volunteers ain’t cheap:

Finally, for charitable nonprofits, or 501(c)(3) organizations, requesting payment for volunteering is an increasingly popular practice, and one that helps organizations sustain their operations—and, in particular, recruit, manage, and sustain the volunteer workforce they often rely upon. While it can feel counterintuitive for volunteers to pay to serve, the effort required for nonprofits to absorb and deploy a volunteer workforce is significant. As both formal corporate volunteer programs and solo entrepreneurs looking to build up their client base increase, volunteers are a plentiful resource for 501(c)(3) organizations. It’s critical to balance the value these volunteers deliver with the cost it takes to engage them.

Another reason to charge volunteers many event organizers, both for and non-profit, will cite is that it shows investment and provides incentive to actually work their shift. As someone who has run an outdoor music festival, I can attest that there is always a segment of the volunteer base that sign up just to get free admission to the event. According to a re-post of a letter by Phoenix Comic-con’s director, combating no-shows and reining in ballooning staffing was the primary reason for pursuing a pay to volunteer model.  In the last few days, they have re-evaluated their decision to have volunteers register as members of the aligned non-profit.

If You Give Me More Helping Hands, Give Me More Cash

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The idea of mandatory national service gets bandied about a lot, especially during presidential election years. This year it seemed to pop up more frequently due to the proposals for free college tuition being floated by some of the candidates. People were suggesting at the very least those who received free tuition needed to reciprocate in some fashion such as national service in the military, Peace Corps, Americorps, etc.

Last week a discussion held by a local public radio station on the pros and cons of mandatory service came across my social media feed. The host and his guests made a lot of good points about the cons, not the least of which is that people are supportive of the idea for younger people, but when you suggest a mandatory service of even one hour a month for all citizens, there is fierce resistance.

Most of the negative outcomes they mentioned were from the point of view of those who would be providing service. Something they overlooked was the fact that there is expense involved in administering a service program, regardless of whether the participants are being paid or not. This is true whether the service is military or civil. I am going to mostly address it from the civil side, but the basic factors are almost identical. This issue is overlooked pretty much everywhere I could find a national service discussion online.

Supervisory infrastructure, materials, equipment, space, facilities and dozens of other details are necessary if there are any expectations of a meaningful experience with meaningful outcomes from a mandatory service experience.

Mandatory service on a national or even state level can be a boon to the work that non-profits and other service organizations do, but it will require a significant increase in capacity building funding from some combination of governments and foundations. Otherwise having service workers becomes more of a hindrance than a help to an organization.

This issue needs to be raised a lot more emphatically when these ideas are discussed. Otherwise, people will be looking askance at the non-profit sector wondering how it could be screwing things up so badly when they were being provided with the service of 3 million high school graduates every year.

I think it is too easy to equate added labor with industrial productivity and revenue generation and see mandatory service as a boon to organizational sustainability. But very little work non-profit organizations do generates revenue. Being able to teach more children will require more space and instructional supplies. Being able to feed more homeless or elderly will require more food, vehicles and food preparation equipment. Being able to provide health services to people will require more space, medicine, diagnostic equipment.

More capacity to do these things means more money than ever will be spent. Unfortunately, the organizations’ capacity to generate the money to cover these costs probably won’t increase a whit.

The only area in which I could see any sort of return on investment would be in terms of the old WPA type infrastructure projects. If you have people planting trees that can be harvested decades down the road, clearing/creating parks that can be used to generate revenue or gentrify an area to increase the tax base, then you might tie a tangible result to the service. However, a lot of the needed services have intangible results.

So yes, ultimately the nation would be more unified and healthier for having a stronger ethic of service. But getting there ain’t free.

If You’re Happy Cause Your Boss Knows It Clap Your Hands

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Here is a little topic of discussion for you– Does having a boss that is an arts industry insider make for a happier work environment than working for one that comes from outside the arts?

In Harvard Business Review, researchers found that having an insider for a boss made for a happier environment.

Using these three measures of supervisor competence, we found that employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business. This suggests that received wisdom about what makes a good boss may need some rethinking. It’s not uncommon to hear people assert that it’s a bad idea to promote an engineer to lead other engineers, or an editor to lead other editors. A good manager doesn’t need technical expertise, this argument goes, but rather, a mix of qualities like charisma, organizational skills, and emotional intelligence. Those qualities do matter, but what our research suggests is that the oft-overlooked quality of having technical expertise also matters enormously.

[…]

When we look closely at the data, a striking pattern emerges. The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction. Even we were surprised by the size of the measured effect. For instance, among American workers, having a technically competent boss is considerably more important for employee job satisfaction than their salary (even when pay is really high).

[…]

Moreover, we saw that when employees stayed in the same job but got a new boss, if the new boss was technically competent, the employees’ job satisfaction subsequently rose.

I am sure we can all think of personal experiences that reinforce or disprove these findings.

Something I was wondering as I read this article was what category to use when define deep expertise for a non-profit arts executive. Is it “arts” or “non-profit”? I have noticed that if they didn’t come up through the ranks in an arts field, non-profit arts executive directors and presidents often seem to come from the healthcare field.

Since the job description of non-profit CEOs seems to focus so much on fund raising these days, the non-profit category is probably the defining characteristic for the financial health of the organization, but what impact, if any, does that have on work satisfaction in the organization? (Obviously, I mean when the leader comes from any non-arts non-profit. I am not picking on healthcare.)

We often hear rumblings about the arts being too insular and needing outside perspectives. Is it really the case that arts people don’t have the capacity to innovate in their approach or is it the case of received wisdom akin to engineers not leading other engineers?

Thoughts?

This Is What You Said, This Is How We Are Fixing It

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If you haven’t seen the first iteration of ArtsHacker’s Most Creative People In Arts Administration, hop over there now and check it out.

Or actually, wait until you read the rest of my post, then go over there…

If there was one thing I learned as a member of the review panel, it was that there are a lot of unrecognized arts administrators doing great work out there. This year Juan José Escalante, Executive Director of José Limón Dance Festival and Aubrey Bergauer, Executive Director of California Symphony both deservedly tied for top honors.

One thing that impressed me about Bergauer’s nomination were support documents that included the symphony’s blog. To be certain, there are only a few entries on the blog, but the one I appreciated the most discussed the results of discussion sessions they conducted with Millennials and Gen Xers.

The post reviews all the issues the discussion participants raised and then lists what the symphony has done to address these issues. This is important because one of the key rules of surveying is don’t ask for a feedback on an situation you don’t intend to take action on. Not only did they take action, but they used the blog to communicate what that action is within the confines of their operating environment. (i.e. They don’t control the ticketing system of the venues at which they perform.)

The blog post is a treasure trove of great feedback for any arts organization since there is very little that is specific to the California Symphony. The things discussion attendees wanted to know but weren’t finding easy to access included things like: why is this music a big deal?, how long will it run?, what will the experience be like?, what are each of the instruments called?

The music selected for the program mattered least.

There were a lot of quotable sections of the blog. Here are some of my most favorite favorites.

Read the Manual:

Then, they get to step 4): make a decision on why they want to attend a specific concert, and our response is essentially “WHY CAN’T YOU FIGURE OUT WHY RACHMANINOFF’S SECOND SYMPHONY IS A BIG DEAL? LOOK IT UP IF YOU WANT TO KNOW!” (marketing failboat — why do we set up our sites this way, and then wonder why the sales funnel is getting choked up at the add-to-cart step?).

Everyone Else Is In The Know:

One participant asked if there is “a separate webpage for younger people we could make?” What was so interesting about that comment is that this person assumed that they were in the minority as far as understanding answers to these types of questions. The assumption was that other, older people are much more familiar with the symphony when in reality, there is no magical age at which one suddenly becomes an aficionado.

Comment from a discussion participant:

“It was so impressive — I didn’t expect it to feel THAT different than Spotify.”

On Pricing:

Even the discussion group brought up (on their own, without any prompting) the idea that they’ll all shell out big bucks for Taylor Swift. So price alone is never an isolated issue; it’s all about the perceived value one is receiving in exchange for that price. What we did find interesting was the comment of, “I’m more likely to go to three $25 performances than I am one $75 or $100 performance.” Many others chimed in with agreement to that statement.

Okay, now you can go over to the Arts Hacker site. Thanks for reading.

Don’t Go To Abilene Unless YOU Really Want To

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One of the more famous illustrations of the perils of group behavior is the Abilene Paradox. I wrote about the issue some years back but in short, its a story management expert Jerry Harvey told about how he and his in-laws all took a trip to Abilene that none of them wanted to take because none of them wanted to speak their mind.

As I wrote:

There is an article by Harvey that illustrates how the paradox can manifest itself in various situations and also contains suggestions on how to avoid taking a trip to Abilene. In what might appear to be the most extreme case, he suggests that the instigator of the misguided trip may need to step forward and declare their misgivings about their own project in order to break the fear which keeps the cycle of reinforcement intact.

“… we frequently fail to take action in an organizational setting because we fear that the actions we take may result in our separation from others, or, in the language of Mr. Porter, we are afraid of being tabbed as “disloyal” or are afraid of being ostracized as “non-team players.”

This is why I felt arts organizations might be especially vulnerable to trips to Abilene. Members aren’t simply employees/volunteers/board members but assumed to be true believers in the cause. There could be a fear, real or imagined that disagreement with the group equates to lack of commitment to the greater ideals rather than merely disloyalty to the company.

If you see yourself or your organization as particularly susceptible to making metaphoric trips to Abliene, you may want to resolve to resist doing so in the new year.

Coach or Mentor?

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Looking back through my archives, I rediscovered a piece I wrote on the concept that most mentoring programs are really coaching programs.  The piece by Rebecca Ryan I link to is no longer available, even on her updated site but the longer article on the difference between mentoring and coaching still is active.

From that post:

Coaching essentially consists of helping someone fulfill their function for the company whereas mentoring is more of a customize relationship aimed at growing the person.

In Ryan’s view, most mentoring programs are essentially buddy programs. Whereas:

“True Mentoring occurs when an elder’s intention is to entrust another with the welfare of her or his estate (or something similarly significant.) In business, this means that one generation of leaders takes the next generation under its wing and over time, teaches them everything they know….So you see, Mentoring is intended to occur alongside a transfer of responsibility. Most Mentoring programs have no such intention.”

The problem she feels lies in the fact that companies try to use mentoring to fill in gaps but don’t commit to designing and implementing the program resulting in low retention and burn out.

So as we move into the new year, if you are mentoring someone or are considering doing so, think about what results are are intending to achieve.

Anthropologist Eye For The New To Dance Guy (or Gal)

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About 8 years ago I received a copy of Presenting Dance by Mindy N. Levine, a book that provided some great insight about dance gleaned from conversations at National Dance Presenters Leadership Forum at Jacob’s Pillow between 2002 and 2006. I the post I wrote in an attempt to summarize the ideas therein, I repeatedly bemoaned the fact the text wasn’t available online. It still appears the text is only available as a physical document.

What I really appreciated were the suggestions for demystifying dance that the book contained. There was very little in there that couldn’t be adapted directly or minimal effort to music, theater or visual art.

One of the main suggestions was to have people approach a dance piece with one of a variety of lenses. As I wrote:

The chapter suggests presenting different ways for audiences to approach a dance piece, with a Journalist’s Eye, Anthropologist’s Eye, Linguist/Grammarian Eye and Colleagues and Conversation. Now I think using these terms with audience members probably will add to their anxiety but the suggestions in each area are geared toward getting people past “I liked it,” “I didn’t like it,” or “I didn’t understand it” and on to discovering why.
[…]
For Anthropologist Eye, the audience approaches dance as if it were an unknown culture being discovered. An attitude which may actually fall closest to the mark. Questions suggested in this area might be whether men move differently from women, if movement is in isolation or groups, are their forces that bring people together or separate them, are there rules applied to the movement and if so, are they flexible or rigid?

In the post I summarize all the listed lenses, but as I suggest, the Anthropologist Eye is probably the one with which a new attendee might most closely identify.

Donor Baggage Revisited

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I am going to be away for about a week for the holidays. As always, I have prepared some posts to fill in for my absence.

Since we are coming to the end of the year and non-profits are making last minute pushes for donations, I thought a piece I wrote in June 2008 about the baggage donors bring to giving requests might be particularly appropriate.

Particularly the following:

In any case the advice generally focuses on a somewhat formulaic planned approach. Just as dating tips rarely acknowledge that other people have the baggage of past dating experiences which will impact the relationship you are trying to cultivate, I rarely hear/read a similar acknowledgment in connection with fund raising.

One of the anecdotes mentioned in the story was about a wealthy developer who never gave more than $1,000 at a time to Temple. When Fredricks asked why, she discovered that even though he could afford to give more, he harbored fears about running out of money that went back to his childhood.

She recognizes that the people who ask for money like presidents and trustees also have varying degrees of comfort with the subject. “They should be treated the same way donors are—as individuals with different emotions about money—and given simple requests, she said. Instead of giving a reticent board member a list of prospective donors, Fredricks suggested starting out with the names and biographical information of two current donors and then asking the trustee to call them to say thank you.”

What We Know And How Well We Know It

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Createquity just released a valuable tool for arts advocates. They compiled the data from all the studies they could find to provide a comprehensive report on Everything We Know About Whether and How The Arts Improve Lives.

I haven’t had an opportunity to dig deeply into the data and ponder what it all means. What I find most helpful is their graphical depiction about where findings about the value of arts fall on two axis – how strong the quality of the evidence is and does the evidence indicate that a benefit exists.

So you can easily see that there is low evidence that cultural engagement can help encourage healing after traumatic events and that the quality of the evidence is weak. On the other hand there is strong evidence that arts participation in early childhood promotes social and emotional development.

The good news is that no survey found that there is an absence of benefit to the arts. Some people may be disappointed to learn that there is very mixed evidence, leaning toward negative, that arts education may improve scholastic attainment in terms of test scores, grades, etc and that the quality of the research backing that is very strong. As recently as 2016 research has “found no or minimal effects for arts and cultural participation or education on attainment measures.” Even the positive research say “overall, the impact of arts participation on academic learning appears to be positive but low.”

I had heard things along these lines and had started collecting information to verify if this might be the case and assess how valid the findings were. Fortunately, the folks at Createquity have done a lot of the heavy lifting in this regard.

Despite what may seem like disheartening news, a large amount of the findings fall into the “evidence that a benefit exists” category with many having medium to high quality levels of research in support of the findings. Many of those in the low quality evidence sector are only there due to lack of research on the subject.

Createquity admits this project is a work in process. As more evidence emerges, they will update it. If they find that the basic premises and interpretations of the researchers is flawed, they will revise the materials.

So often we hear about so many different research findings about the arts it is difficult to assess the value of the findings. Createquity provides a much needed degree of clarity by putting the research on a continuum. Advocacy becomes much easier when you know what you are saying is corroborated with evidence and you know just how strong the evidence is.

Rethinking The Term Business Model

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In Arts Professional (UK), José Rodríguez recently wrote about how non-profit arts organizations frequently misunderstand what a business model is.

The first misconception he lists is that only businesses need business models and since non-profit arts organizations aren’t businesses, ergo, they don’t need a business model. I don’t think I have ever heard a non-profit in the US suggest they weren’t a business, but he talks about a perception of “business” as a dirty word which is definitely something I have heard in the arts community.

The misconception he addresses that is worth attention is that business models are not necessarily related to moneymaking. My emphasis.

2. Business models are only about money

There are many definitions of business models, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand what we are actually talking about, but what most of these definitions have in common is the central role of value creation. And here lies the main difference with what people usually think about business models. It is not only about how your organisation makes money, but about how it creates value and organises itself around its value propositions.

Value is defined as ‘the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth or usefulness of something’. Value can be money, but it can also be many other things. Value is what is important for you and your stakeholders. And for being able to create value, we need to understand the desires, needs, challenges and problems of those that we are trying to serve: audiences, community, employees, volunteers, customers, funders, sponsors, etc. Keep it in mind: Business models are not (only) about money, but about value.

[…]

So what is a business model?

A business model is a vital concept determining the success of any organisation and not a complex formula relating to its profit-making mechanisms. A business model is just a story explaining who your audiences and customers are, what they value, and how you will be able to sustain the organisation in providing that value.

At its most basic, every business model has three components, which respond to a few simple questions:

  • Which stakeholders do we serve? Which of their needs do we seek to address?
  • What do our stakeholder groups value? How do we create that value for each one of them?
  • How do we generate income, and attract other necessary resources, to be able to create value for our stakeholders in a sustained way?

Since it is in the last paragraph of the article, it can be easy to miss but an important feature of business plans is that they are temporary. Since the stakeholders you serve may change, the things your stakeholders value may change or the way you are able to create value for your stakeholders may change, then of necessity your business model must change.

By his definition, making changes to your business model doesn’t necessarily mean a change to your tax status unless you significantly change the way you generate income. Conceiving of business models in this context may help you operate in a more flexible, nimble manner since it moves you away from thinking you need to act in a set way to stay within certain strictures.

Giving Without Getting In Return

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No, this isn’t a moral posting about how it is better to give than get during Christmas.

I have been writing a lot recently about the transactional view of arts and culture, namely value is based in economic exchange either directly or in terms of the economic activity it may generate.

Given that context, I was interested to read Joan Garry’s video/blog post expressing a similar view about fund raising and the belief people won’t give unless they get something in return. She uses the example of two hypothetical pitches to a friend. In the first, she asks someone to attend a $500/plate fund raising event, extolling the virtues of the organization it it will support. In the second, she simply asks for a $500 donation, again citing the value of the organization it will support.

Okay. There they are, both of them. One of them is going to cost… If he buys a ticket $500. It’s going to cost the organization at least thirty cents on every dollar. On the other hand, maybe I bought him a cup of coffee, maybe he even paid. One of those gifts will stick and one of them will not. If Joe’s not available next year he won’t go to that gala, right? If he gives the gift of $500, what happens? Then about six or nine months from now I have a touch point with him where I tell him something remarkable, a great story about something that happened at the Ronald McDonald House and at the end of that email I will say, “Your fingerprints are all over that work.”

Hear the difference? Feel it? See it? For some reason it’s so much harder for board members. They think selling a ticket to an event that it’s a I can’t ask somebody to spend $500 unless I’m giving them something in return. What they’re missing is that by making that $500 gift out right Joe is getting something in return. Right? The donors get as much as they give. Maybe more, because they get an opportunity to be invited into a community of people who care about an issue that is meaningful in Joe’s community. That should be easier than selling them a ticket to an event, where there might be a b-list celebrity.

I am sure she is not unaware that some times people attend big gala fundraiser in order to leverage being seen there by others into some sort of advantage. A large number of non-profit organizations would probably be happier to remain focused on their central goals and employ a direct ask with a higher ROI rather than diverting staffing time, energy and money toward executing an event.

If we want to argue about cost effectiveness and overhead ratio as a basis of giving, this might be one area in which these conversations have some validity. But it is probably also the area in which that economics based argument would fail in the face of a board or staff’s emotion based conviction that people won’t give otherwise.

Despite it being widely known that one person will give without expecting anything in return…

What Am I Going To Do With All These Skills?

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I was recently talking to a conservatory trained pianist who has taken a position teaching at a liberal arts college this last semester. He was complaining about the politics and bureaucracy involved with working in a university system. At one point the conversation turned to him complaining that he didn’t understand why his students had to study math, history, foreign language, etc, asking what use was that to musician.

Someone else at the table turned the topic in another direction before I had the opportunity to point out that he was a pretty clear illustration that even conservatory trained musicians probably need to acquire diverse skillsets in order to advance or supplement their careers.

There was recently a piece in Elle Magazine about Alexandra Ansanelli who was a principal dancer with the NYC Ballet and Royal Ballet, but decided to retire at age 28. Now she works as the director of operations and communications for her father’s medical practice.

In the course of the article there were the usual anecdotes about the pressure of being a dancer and issues with body image that dancers experience.

The article mentioned how poorly prepared for retirement many dancers are both mentally and economically.

Dancers are notoriously bad at planning for their second acts. They underestimate the age at which they’ll retire (the average age of retirement is 34), overestimate the amount of money they’ll earn, and misjudge the forces that will end their careers. More than one-third of the dancers in a 2004 survey were driven to retirement by an injury; only 5 percent left because they actually wanted a new career. When dancers enter the workforce in their thirties, many are woefully unprepared. Only 3 percent of current dancers say that teaching dance is their preferred post-retirement line of work, but it’s the most common fate: 53 percent end up teaching dance in some capacity.

“We know of no other occupation that requires such extensive training, that is held in such esteem as a contribution to culture, and that pays so little,” the authors of the 2004 survey write. Even during peak earning years: in the U.S., an average dancer’s annual total income is just $35,000—about half of which comes from non-dance activities. Even stars might not earn much more, or find themselves better equipped for life on the outside.

What I had never really considered was that the cloistered conservatory type environment which continued into the years of her professional practice delayed her social development as well. (my emphasis)

Though she spends many of her days in an office, she says she’s not an office person. Learning to communicate verbally has been a challenge. “I didn’t realize how introverted I was. I had been so used to emoting silently and physically.” Nonetheless, she is seemingly ahead of many of her peers. She is aware of the limitations that her career imposed, and actively working to overcome them.

When I ask her how her personal life has changed, she answers, “It exists now.” But it’s hard to catch up on everything her peers went through as teenagers and young adults. “I feel I’m learning all the time, what to do, what not to do.” She worries about what new acquaintances will think of her past. “It’s freaky to a lot of people,” the way she left her career. “Did she have some kind of mental breakdown?” she imagines they wonder.

Obviously, her experience and personality is not indicative of everyone’s. It is just that the longer I continue my career in the arts and the more I think and learn about the training process, the more I wonder if long term well-being is being sacrificed for short term definitions of achievement and excellence.

There are many factors that feed into this situation. Training programs are responding to external demands for quality. However, we also know that supply exceeds demand in terms of quantity.

There is already a lot of conversation about low pay and graduating more people than can find jobs, but a lot of those issues are related to the fact that students are being prepared for traditional jobs rather than provided with the capacity to re-cast their skills as appropriate for emerging jobs.

Yes, I know I am flirting very near the argument that an artist’s value is only worth what they are paid for their product, but positioning your skillset for wide applications is different than doing a better job marketing your product to a narrow set of applications.

Be True To Your Audience Just Like You Would Your Girl Or Guy

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Last week I was initially dismayed to read 85% of audiences in Washington D.C. patronized one theater. I try to promote the concept that all arts organizations in a community need to work together to illuminate all the opportunities for cultural participation, but news like that can cause people to scramble and jealously cling to whatever audiences they can get.

The people quoted in the article admit as much:

That means encouraging audiences to go to any theater, following the “rising tide lifts all boats” philosophy. It can be a bit counterintuitive for chronically embattled nonprofit arts organizations long in the habit of primarily looking out for themselves.

“It’s the fear that if I introduce you to my friends, you’ll like them better than you like me,” Woolly Mammoth managing director Meghan Pressman says.

However, there are a number of people quoted in the piece that feel the study underestimates how broadly people already attend other organizations, in part because the study that was conducted only included seven of the many theater groups in the Washington D.C. area. Some of the groups in the survey do have 20%-30% overlaps between their audiences. In surveys others have conducted for Signature Theatre and Round House Theatre, found even greater overlap:

In the two-year Round House survey, 43 percent of single-ticket buyers had been to four or more theaters within a year, 59 percent went to three or more, 76 percent to two or more, and 91 percent went to at least one theater other than Round House. That does not include attending the big touring houses (the Kennedy Center, the National Theatre, the Warner Theatre), which further raises the figures.

Perhaps more encouraging is that the theaters are already collaborating on projects and not defensively guarding their audiences.

Examples seem to be growing. Signature and Round House cross-promoted the musicals “Jelly’s Last Jam” (recently at Signature) and “Caroline, or Change” (with Signature talent working at the Bethesda stage). Round House just partnered with Olney Theatre Center on a co-production of the two-part, seven-hour “Angels in America,” presented at Round House and geared to moving patrons between the two troupes. Next year, the organizations will team up again — sharing infrastructure, artists and audiences — for a show at Olney.

So obviously by the end of the article I was breathing a little easier and had a more optimistic view of things.  Though admittedly the idea that there were audiences that felt such a high degree of loyalty to a single theater was encouraging. (Assuming it was loyalty and not lack of awareness or other barriers that kept them from attending other places.)

Something from the middle of the article worth of note was an observation made about how theaters cultivate audiences:

For Robinson, the issue is keeping audiences the first time they visit. She describes a “magic math” that happens when patrons can be lured to more than one performance, and to more than one theater, per year. Repeat attendance jumps and attrition dives, yet the art of keeping audiences is often lost, as organizations fret about attracting fresh faces.

“It’s a gong that we clang,” Robinson says, warning against too much “prospecting” for brand-new clientele. “If we date, and you don’t ask me out again in a few weeks, I’ll forget how cute you are.”

Even if your stance is to glare at others and try to retain what audiences you have, you do well to remember not to take those audiences for granted. To extend the dating example, good communication and attentiveness are a necessary part of retaining audiences.

Improving Survey Results, But Not The Experience

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Two days ago I wrote about how “experience” is increasingly valued by consumers over things like brand, product and opportunity.  Hopefully you noticed that I attributed my enjoyment largely to the service elements of the experience and not the available amenities.  That is an important distinction because that is often what really matters.

Back in 2015 The Atlantic wrote about how hospitals with high patient satisfaction scores had some of the worst mortality and reinfection rates in the country.  Tying reimbursement rates to patient satisfaction surveys has lead to a focus on patient comfort and demands to the detriment of their medical well-being.

Many hospitals seem to be highly focused on pixie-dusted sleight of hand because they believe they can trick patients into thinking they got better care. The emphasis on these trappings can ultimately cost hospitals money and patients their health, because the smoke and mirrors serve to distract from the real problem, which CMS does not address: Patient surveys won’t drastically and directly improve healthcare.

But research has shown that hiring more nurses, and treating them well, can accomplish just that. It turns out that nurses are the key to patient satisfaction after all—but not in the way that hospitals have interpreted.

 … And University of Pennsylvania professor Linda Aiken found that higher staffing of registered nurses has been linked to fewer patient deaths and improved quality of health…When hospitals improve nurse working conditions, rather than tricking patients into believing they’re getting better care, the quality of care really does get better.

Now obviously, people don’t usually die if they have a negative reaction to an arts experience. An arts and cultural organization rarely has a situation where there is as clear a distinction between what a customer wants and what they need as in a hospital.

One thing we can take from the article is that just as teaching to the test doesn’t necessarily result in higher quality graduates, adding glitz and glamour in order to improve survey results doesn’t guarantee people will really have a fulfilling experience.

The Atlantic article talked about how hospital administrators were concerned that patients gave the food low scores. They blamed the nurses for doing a bad job at making it sound appetizing rather than trying to improve the food. There are some pretty clear parallels between that and blaming the marketing department for failing to make a show sound appealing while neglecting to evaluate the programming choices.

To a degree, the need to focus on programming choices and training staff to offer a positive experience should be encouraging to non-profit arts organizations that don’t have the resources to offer a lot of fancy amenities. Notice that providing sufficient staffing was important. The resources to accomplish that can be a challenge for many.

I was fortunate to be at a table with the head of my state arts council yesterday to hear her say she wanted grant reports that were honest about what did and didn’t work rather than telling the arts council that everything was going great, just as they expected. There was a sense in her comments that the arts organizations in the state needed to be stretching themselves to try different things and figure out what did and didn’t work.

(She also allowed me to evangelize a little on Building Public Will For Arts and Culture!)

At the conversations I had at the event yesterday, I was happy to see that colleagues across the state had already begun to sense that the focus was shifting to providing creative experience without it necessarily being explicitly stated.

The one question from The Atlantic article I still haven’t quite resolved is whether audiences surveys really have a lot of value or not. You may not receive effusive responses if your efforts on focused on competence rather than spectacle. The results may be good, but not so enthusiastic that you can take pride in moving the average score significantly.

If people aren’t moved by a strong reaction, they may not complete a survey and you won’t be completely sure how you are doing. You also don’t want strong reactions driving your decisions so you are basically left with either begging people to complete surveys honestly or don’t conduct surveys and just blindly hope you are headed in the right direction.

My suspicion is that there are alternative methods to soliciting and collecting information that don’t involve surveys. My further suspicion is these methods require more effort and resources to employ effectively than do surveys.

Now That I Hear You Say Aloud Like That…

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There has been some trepidation among members of the Kentucky arts community following the governor’s recent dismissal and reconstitution of the state arts council. Gov. Bevin dismissed all but four of the council members, reduced the size of the council from 16 to 15 and accepted the resignation of the executive director according to a recent report.

The main cause of concern is the arts council’s newly stated focus,

In a news release, Secretary of the Cabinet of Tourism, Arts and Heritage Don Parkinson wrote: “The new arts council will focus on ensuring that Kentucky artisans have the skills and knowledge to develop and successfully sell their products.”

[…]

“The reorganized council strikes the appropriate balance of expertise in the arts and entrepreneurship,” he said. “The new arts council will focus on ensuring that Kentucky artisans have the skills and knowledge to develop and successfully sell their products.”

A more explicit entrepreneurial focus may seem innocuous …. But some worry the shift misconstrues an artist’s role in his or her community.

[…]

“Crafts, sculpture and paintings, for example — and Bevin simply plans to amplify that relatively narrow and crude approach to the arts,” Day says. “This assumes, with such deep misguidedness, that the primary value of the arts is the price they demand.”

This revisits a oft-discussed topic of this blog, what is the purpose and value of art?

Perhaps more immediately for me, I realized how the call for artists to be more entrepreneurial can very quickly be leveraged to the detriment of the arts and culture community.

When I have invoked “entrepreneurial” in the past it was with the intention that those in the arts community acquire the skills to manage their careers, not be cheated by others and make opportunities for themselves rather than wait for it to be provided by others.

In the context of this story, the same terminology almost sounds like, “helping artists make a constructive contribution to society.”

Certainly the execution doesn’t have to be that cynical. Arts Business incubators could be a boon for many communities provided they were sited in rural and other underserved areas employing a model similar to Kentucky’s Appalshop, rather just in places real estate developers wanted to gentrify.

It was instructive for me to have ideas and language I and others have used in relations to arts practice essentially repeated back to me. There is often a line that pops up in television and film comedies that goes something like “well now that I hear it said aloud like that, yes, I guess it is a little ridiculous.”

I am not saying the idea that people should acquire a set of entrepreneurial skills is silly. Rather, hearing the same terminology used in this case makes it clear that when efforts and initiatives for the arts are discussed, care must be taken to provide clear context and definition of the primary value that will result. Economic, intellectual, social, spiritual, etc. benefits may accrue, but the core creative expression has value independent, and regardless of, whether any of these benefits emerge.

Who Cares About Losing & Freezing, I’m Having Fun

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Last week Drew McManus posted about the difficulties sports teams are having filling their seats. The reasons for this problem are very similar to those faced by the arts –an approach that assumes a community owes us their attention and a focus on product, positioning and image over the customer’s experience.

Drew’s post actually helped me coalesce some thoughts I had when I was attending a football game at Notre Dame last month. At the time the team’s record was 4-7. The weather had gone from mid-60s the day before to 20s with snow the day of the game.

Despite this, the campus and the stadium were PACKED with people.

My first thought as I wandered around was that Notre Dame football had cachet that is independent of win-loss records and weather. I don’t know if this level of investment become entrenched early by movies like  Knute Rockne and Rudy or thanks to generations of Catholic priests making sly mention about the team needing their congregants’ prayers.

While these factors might be significant in generating loyalty and involvement, the school invested a lot of attention in the game attendance experience. Entering and leaving the parking lots was well organized and took a reasonable amount of time.  The line in the bookstore had AT LEAST 25 switchbacks before you got to the register but the line moved so quickly that you were rarely standing still and staff members were cheerleading and high-fiving people in line.  Entry into the stadium also went quickly.

If you got too cold you could take refuge in the athletic center next door and watch the game on large screen monitors.

The only sour note was the food service inside the stadium was abysmally organized and their money handling discipline raised grave concerns.

Well actually, the fact Notre Dame screwed up their three touchdown lead to lose the game was pretty disappointing as well.

I am going to remember the food service experience as the worst part because everything else, including the loss, was interesting and enjoyable. (As far as I am concerned, braving the frigid cold is as integral a part of the experience as tailgating.)

While my outlook is not necessarily shared by everyone, perhaps it is illustrative of the point Drew and those he cites are trying to make. You don’t have to necessarily have the highest quality, most glamorous product if you are providing an enjoyable experience in general.

How Wound Into Your Identity Is Creativity?

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My post on Monday about employing a new definition to distinguish between amateurs and professionals garnered a couple comments and multiple loooonnnng emails (you know who you are!) in response.

At the core of these responses, including the original piece I was blogging on, were questions of how one views themselves, upon what criteria are these determinations being made and whether there is any validity for these criteria and terms in the first place.

The influence of psychological, developmental, sociological, scientific and philosophical forces were mentioned in these conversations. They are all so tightly entwined with each other I don’t know that any satisfying conclusion can be reached…or at least this week.

But this idea of how people in general perceive art as part of their identity is compelling to me. It is one of the reasons I am so interested in the effort to build public will for art and culture. The effort is all about asking people to examine to what degree creative expression comprises their identity.

I also frequently cite Jamie Bennett’s TEDx Talk observation that people are more easily able to see themselves on a continuum with sports figures than to identify themselves as an artist.

This is even a bigger issue than whether people are labeled amateurs or professionals. If people who are spending time after work and on weekends engaged in some creative activity don’t consider themselves artists for some reason, that has to be addressed before even getting to the questions about whether they are a professional or amateur.

If you played baseball or went flyfishing in high school but haven’t in 10 years, are you still a baseball player or fisher today?  If you were part of the drama club, art club, choir or band in high school but haven’t done any of those things in 10 years, are you still an artist today?

Outside of picking up your instrument, I would argue it is more likely that you effortlessly employed dramatic, singing and visual arts ability during a conversation, marketing presentation or staff meeting in that 10 year interval and have in fact exercised those skills and done so more easily than you could baseball and flyfishing.

If creative expression is this deeply ingrained into your existence, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say you are an artist before an athlete?

Of course, this gets us right back to questions of value. How how much attention and worth society places upon these skills. How much we value them in ourselves.

These questions of identity and creativity almost certainly don’t apply to readers of this blog who are likely to already have some sense of the answer. The answer to the title of this blog post is we need to tease out of others.

Are You Willing To Read One Blog Post or Two?

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In the course of 24 hours, two different articles about how to manipulate people into doing what you want came across my Twitter feed.

Okay, it isn’t totally mind control but rather how using the right word can make people more receptive to the choices you offer them.

Seth Godin mentioned “Wheeler’s Which,” a term I had never heard before. Elmer Wheeler is the guy who coined the idea of selling the sizzle rather than the steak. His “which” involves asking a question that includes two “yes” options rather than an opportunity to answer “no.”

[…Elmer Wheeler was a sales trainer nearly a century ago. He got hired by a chain of drugstores to increase sales at the soda fountain. In those days, a meal might consist of just an ice cream soda for a nickel. But for an extra penny or two, you could add a raw egg (protein!). Obviously, if more people added an egg, profits would go up. Wheeler taught the jerks (isn’t that a great job title?) to ask anyone who ordered a soda, “One egg or two?” Sales of the egg add-on skyrocketed.]

Personally, while I find the frequent question, “would you like to add X for $Y more,” annoying, I think I would be angered or insulted at the assumption I would purchase something extra. I would counsel using this technique sparingly for that reason unless you think most of your customers are less ornery than I.

There are opportunities to use “Wheeler’s which” in ways that don’t pressure people. For example, “how many of you will be attending our free playtalk” or “will you be accompanying your child to the children’s’ activities or having coffee in the parents lounge?” Using the question in this manner can help increase attendance numbers for outreach events on your grant reports.

The other magic word came from a New York magazine link Dan Pink provided about the power of “willing.” (my emphasis)

When a request framed in more direct terms is turned down, a follow-up with a willing will often get the other person to cave:

Are you the type of person to mediate? Yes or no. What was really interesting about the mediation “willings” is that if you ask someone “Are you interested in mediation?” they might say yes or no. But if you ask them if they’re willing to mediate, that requires them saying something about the type of person that they are.

[…]

With a caveat: “‘Willing’ works best after resistance, so it shouldn’t be your opening gambit,” she said. If the first approach fails, though, the trick can be a persuasive backup strategy. Now go forth and bend the world to your will.

If someone is really opposed to something I am not sure asking if they are willing or not will overcome that resistance but I thought it interesting that the question of willingness introduced the question about what sort of person you are. Are you the type of person that is open to trying something new or exploring an alternative.

Again, I don’t feel like you can just slip “willing” into any question and have it be effective. There are plenty of sentiments you can express involving willingness that will offend and anger, but just as many that can help open them to an option. My suspicion is that used repeatedly over the course of many interactions, “willing” might gradually reduce resistance.

Does The Professional/Amateur Divide Come From Within?

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About 10-15 years ago, the idea of Pro-Ams, emerged. Pro-Ams are essentially amateurs who pursue an avocation with such diligence it was difficult to discern them from people who employed the same skills as a vocation based on degree of knowledge and practical execution.

Since that time there has been some occasional effort to clarify the distinction. Partially, I think there has been concern that sub-par products and services by amateurs not be mistaken as representative of the ideal by those having little familiarity with those products and services.

Most of the attempts to define the distinction have fallen short. The economic definition about professionals being paid and amateurs doing it for the love was problematic even decades prior to the Pro-Am term emerging. Using years of formal training or experience practicing the skills as a measure also falls short.

In both cases, you can find notable exceptions to the rule you don’t dare include in one category or the other lest you insult or overpraise. It also doesn’t take much before elitism and condescension creeps into the process.

In looking for a link about Pro-Ams for a post I did last week, I came across a piece on Medium that offers a definition of the differences that doesn’t involve any of the aforementioned criteria. It doesn’t answer the concerns about sub-par work, but I can attest from recent experience that there are companies with long history, great amounts of experience in their craft and millions in receipts each year who are managing to provide sub-par experiences and products without amateurs serving as poor examples.

Jeff Goins’ Medium piece, The 7 Differences Between Professionals and Amateurs, depends more on internal motivation than external definitions of achievement to draw his distinction.

Even if it wasn’t already highlighted, the following would probably naturally jump out at you:

If you want to be a pro in your field, you’re going to have to break this terrible amateur habit of looking at what people have without paying attention to what they did to get it. Chasing the results without understanding the process will lead to short-lived success, if not outright failure.

I have touched on this idea before. Even though the phrase “success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration,” is well known to the point of cliche, everyone has this idea that success is the result of a rare element – genius, talent, lucky big break – rather than developed as a process. Yes, natural ability often factors in, but people often believe that there is an easy recipe for results rather than the requirement of effort.

Among his seven differences are the following.

1. Amateurs wait for clarity. Pros take action.
You have to know what you are before you can figure out what you want to do.
[…]
In my case, I spent too long waiting for someone to call me a writer before I was willing to act like one. Now I’ve learned that clarity comes with action. We must perform our way into professionalism. We must first call ourselves what we want to become, and then get to the work of mastery.

2. Amateurs want to arrive. Pros want to get better.
You have to become a student long before you get to be a master.
[…]
For the longest time, I just wanted to be recognized for my genius. It wasn’t until I started putting myself around teachers and around the teaching of true masters that I realized how little I knew and how much I still had to grow as a writer.

3. Amateurs practice as much as they have to. Pros never stop.
You have to practice even, maybe especially, when it hurts.

It’s not enough to show up and work every day. You have to keep challenging yourself, keep pushing yourself beyond your limits. This is how we grow.

[…]

6. Amateurs build a skill. Pros build a portfolio.

You must master more than one skill.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a jack of all trades, but you must become a master of some. For example, all the professional writers I know are good at more than one thing. One is a great publicist. Another is really smart at leadership. Another is a fantastic speaker.

For creative professionals, this doesn’t mean you have to work at your craft uninterrupted for eight hours a day — at least not for most professionals. It means you will spend your time getting your work out there through a variety of channels and mediums, or that you’ll work for part of the day and master something else with the rest of your time.

I don’t know that this is the final word on amateurs vs. professionals, but I feel it is a constructive line of thought to pursue, if only because it get away from the practice of judging the worthiness of others.

Perhaps one benefit of these criteria is that you can be a professional at some pursuit, move to amateur status as other things draw your attention (perhaps a focus on professional status in another endeavor), and return to professional status later in life when you decide to rededicate yourself to it.

In this way, one need not sigh regretfully at once having been a “professional” with no hope of returning to that status because you have fallen out of synch with the latest philosophies, techniques and knowledge. Yes, regaining technical expertise later may be a challenge, but if professionals take the long view toward knowledge acquisition, that mindset puts you halfway there and may have kept you from falling too far behind in the interim.

Thoughts? Have you come across other definitions that are better in whole or in part?

Stuff To Ponder: Expanded Approaches To Pay What You Want Pricing

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A few weeks ago economist Alex Tabarrok wrote about a strange “pay what you want” promotion a shoe company was running. It struck him and many commenters of the Marginal Revolution blog as a psychological experiment with a goal of getting most people to select the set middle range price.

In that same post he linked back to 2012 post where he provided an analysis for why “pay what you want” can make sense for charities and performing arts organizations. The analysis may be difficult to understand, but the bottom line is:

Probably more importantly, pay-what-you-want pricing is going to be advantageous when the seller also sells a complementary good, such as concerts, which benefit from consumption spillovers from the pay-what-you-want good.

Basically, when you offer an option to pay what you want, there should be accompanying options like food, merchandise, other participatory activities that you can earn revenue from. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the movie theatre model where a bag of popcorn is $10. Offering pay what you want simply because you think it is a good idea without any sense of how you can offset the loss of revenue isn’t prudent. If end up with a higher per ticket price than you had before, that is great, but don’t plan on it.

One of the commenters on the 2012 post noted that the site HumbleBundle allows you to pay what you want, but also posts the average price paid in real time.

Currently, if you pay more than the average of $4.14, you can unlock additional content and if you pay more than $14 there is another level of content you can receive.

Having some sort of bonus content or access people will receive for exceeding the average is a smart idea. It rewards those who act early before the average increases as a result of people paying to receive that content (or just being generous). This content or access could be better seating, merchandise, concessions, meet and greet opportunities, invites to other organizational activities, etc.

I got to thinking about how my ticketing system can tell me what the average selling price of my tickets are on demand. I could theoretically manually update that information on the lobby screens simply as a point of information at various intervals just as a bit of psychological social pressure on people to pay close to that or a little more. While I might also choose to update that information on our website, I am not sure the sense of social pressure would be as significant for online sales.

However, if ticketing software providers created a way to export that information to update in real time like HumbleBundle does, it might be possible to create a sense of tension and excitement in lobbies just prior to performances. (Or if handled correctly, even online). Granted, it could be done manually but I know I have better things for my staff to do than constantly run reports and post data to a public screen.

Watching it tick steadily up with every purchase is much more interesting. Especially if you are experience the dual satisfaction of seeing how much money was being raised for the organization while knowing you got access cheaper than a lot of other people – “Whoo hoo!! We collectively moved the price to $15.63 (but I got mine for $4.85!)”

Thoughts? What experiences, if any, have you had? I know a number of places are doing pay what you want/can, but I am not clear if they are supplementing their income with related goods and services or if they have found a way to energize audiences around the practice in a productive manner.

The Real Competition Is Inaction

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As he often does, Seth Godin is speaks right to the arts and culture industry when he suggests that we welcome an environment where there is a lot of activity similar to our own rather than viewing it as competition. (my emphasis)

But for the rest of us, in most industries, it turns out that the real competition is inaction. Few markets have expanded to include everyone, and most of those markets (like books and music) have offerings where people buy more than one.

This means that if there’s more good stuff, more people enter the market, the culture gets better, more good work is produced and enjoyed, more people enter the market, and on and on.

So encouraging and promoting the work of your fellow artists, writers, tweeters, designers, singers, painters, speakers, instigators and leaders isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s smart as well.

I think we can all see the truth in the statement that the real enemy is inaction, not the other organization down the street. The big concern more than anything else these days is that people will stay home and disengage.

I believe I have mentioned it previously, but when I am asked to speak to groups about what my organization is doing I take the opportunity to speak about how all the arts and cultural organizations make the community a great place to live. Even if people don’t patronize all the groups, at the very least it engenders some pride and loyalty to the community. At best, my description of what is enjoyable and valuable about these places may inspire a visit.

The other factor is that the existence of other arts and cultural entities helps attract and cultivate a talent pool that you can benefit from.

When I started in my current job, I was a little disappointed in how few students were initiating their own projects compared to where I came from. It took me awhile to realize that the students with whom I previously interacted were regularly working together on projects at four or five other organizations, plus doing a handful of one-off projects for other people in the arts community. Not only had they developed a close rapport among themselves, but they had many hours exposed to a variety of concepts, techniques and processes working for other people.

I bristle at the suggestion someone invest their time and talent for the experience and exposure, (getting paid doesn’t inhibit the absorption of new skills after all), but I certainly saw their abilities and judgment develop as a result of their effort and discipline.

Moreover, my organization benefited from them having gone through this process. It was only later that I realized how much.

This basic concept then supports the idea that perhaps Professional-Amateurs aren’t the threat to “professional” artists that they have been perceived to be.

If You Give A Teen $100….

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Recently James Doeser wrote about a program the Italian government started where they granted a culture voucher worth €500 to anyone who turns 18 before December 31.

It can be used to buy books, pay for entry fees to parks, museums and archaeological sites, and instead of cash for theatre, cinema and concert tickets. The euros in the app are spent by the young people and the arts organisations then reclaim this money off the state.

There is something wickedly disruptive as well as very elegant about this idea. If it works, it will have a profound impact not just on Italian cultural policy but also how other governments around the world approach the issue of arts funding.

Whereas a voucher scheme like the one underway in Italy is an exercise in ‘demand-side’ economics, the vast majority of our cultural policy in the UK is on the ‘supply side’.

While Doeser generally applauds the program as a way to avoid giving additional benefits to people who can already afford them, (it is pretty well recognized that free admission days are attended by people who already attend, not new audiences), he notes some potential issues:

While ‘supply-side’ interventions have their shortcomings, ‘demand-side’ ones are not without complications. There is a host of interesting effects that a scheme of this sort might unleash on the cultural marketplace: ticket price inflation; the prospect of resale (if I am an arts lover and can get €300 of your unused credits for, say, €100 in cash, then we’d both be better off if we can do this deal); and finally whether there will be low take-up and the Italian government is operating like your gym, confident that people will not use their entitlements.

Of course, I got to thinking about how this might be implemented in the U.S.

Ideally, teens would use the money to indulge their curiosity and expanding their horizons buying books, going to museums, taking classes/lessons, buying paint, visiting historical sites, etc,. But the reality is that they may just use the money to pay for additional months of Netflix subscriptions and buying music from the same people they already are without expanding their experience.

There might be a temptation to specify what the money can be spent on that aligned to a definition. However broad the definition was, it would still delineate what was worthwhile and what wasn’t. My only consolation would be that as restrictive as the arts community’s definition of what constituted arts and culture might be, it would still be orders of magnitude broader than that of the politicians authorizing the funding.

Politics aside, allowing the funding to be use for all the activities the NEA defined as arts participation their 2012 survey of public participation in the arts would provide some excellent insight into what types of activities people were actually engaging in. Every time a voucher number was used, it would provide useful data about people’s actual practice rather than their self-perceived practice.

True, if people had a sense that their use was being tracked they may only use it at a museum rather than when they indulged their guilty pleasure marathon viewing of The Three Stooges movies. While their self consciousness may slightly skew the results, it may engender a growing appreciation of arts and cultural activities that may not fully manifest until 20 years later when they are in their 40s.

Certainly, the program could just serve to further enrich big corporations like Apple, Comcast, Google, Time Warner, Disney, etc and not help non-profit arts organizations much at all.

While we can watch what happens with the Italian program, the reality is our cultural norms differ to a large enough degree that we basically can’t use their experience to project what might happen in the U.S. It comes down to something of a thought experiment about how much we trust U.S. teens (or all citizens if you wanted to expand the program) to spend money exploring. How much tolerance would we have for people who didn’t spend the money as we thought they should?

Yes, I know this doesn’t even factor in that there are hundreds of thousands of teens out there that have a much more dire need to use even a $50-$100 subsidy for food, shelter and medical care.

And yes, there is also the fact that right now the goal of most arts advocates is to have federal arts funding equal $1 for every citizen so $50 is a pipe dream. Since the population of 18 year olds is only a small segment of the population, the grant could be more than $1, but it would likely still divert a lot of funding from somewhere else even if the federal budget were raised.

But ignoring the fact that the current federal arts budget is far from sufficient and that social services for teens and families are also lacking in comparison with places like Italy, would it freak you out to think about what the 18 year old population of the U.S. would likely spend $100 culture voucher on?

Parents will likely recognize that the title of today’s entry is inspired by “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie…” While the kid in the story is run a little ragged in the book I bet most arts organizations would be thrilled to have an audience as engaged and participatory as the mouse.

Frank Discussion About Outreach, New Audiences Efforts In The Community

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A couple of good articles on the influence non-profits in the community came out this week. CityLab noted that in some communities, non-profits were exhibiting greater influence and leadership than politicians that represented those districts.

Based on his observations, he argues in the journal American Sociological Review, the role of nonprofits in disadvantaged city neighborhood has been changing. They’re no longer just extensions of the state or representatives of a few interest groups. They’re “legitimate representatives of poor urban neighborhoods,” and in many cases, “supersede” elected officials.

[…]

What’s happening now is that these organizations are directly negotiating for resources from public and private sector entities that hold the proverbial purse strings. Community organizations are now authoritative voices at the table, and often regarded by both private companies and bureaucrats as more invested and deeply knowledgable representatives of the neighborhoods. In Boston, “district-based elected officials, by contrast, attended ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings but were largely absent from substantive discussions of redevelopment planning,” Levine writes.

When I read this earlier this week, I thought it was interesting but didn’t think most arts organizations were deeply involved enough in their communities to wield this type of influence.

As luck would have it, I didn’t have to think too long about how I might express this in a blog post because Ronia Holmes does it so well in a post that came out today on TRG Arts’ blog.

Her post, “Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why” is a must read if your arts organization conducts outreach activities or talks about attracting new audiences. I plan to distribute it to my board and partners in other arts organizations.

She makes some very frank statements which may be uncomfortable to read, but they are reasonable and empathize with the position in which arts organizations find themselves.

Almost too much to quote but I will try to keep it brief:

Disinvested communities are not devoid of arts and culture. In America particularly, communities who historically have been excluded from the table have responded by building their own tables, using whatever resources could be scraped together. Marginalized communities have established organizations that don’t treat them or their cultural output as deviations from the norm to be celebrated for diversity, but as fundamental components of society. The organizations they created, and continue to create, are replete with artists, leaders, decision-makers, and workers who look like and are part of the community they serve, who share similar lived experiences, and have a deep understanding of what programming will truly resonate.

Referring to arts organizations which are not native to these disinvested communities:

Rather than grapple with these deeply ingrained failings, most organizations have opted to substitute narrative for action. They have amended their written missions and values in order to recast themselves as inclusive organizations meant for all. They turn to the community and say, “Now we’ve got a space here for you!”

And they fail to hear this critical question: “Why should we abandon our own table for a small chair at yours?”

The following about seeking new audiences really grabbed my attention:

There is a pervasive idea that a “new” audience must be a “diverse” one, and community-building is co-opted as a tactic for patron acquisition. The hard truth is that the disinvested communities targeted by so many outreach programs simply do not have the resources to—or, frankly, the interest in—sustaining these organizations. The model of operation on which most organizations operate need constant and high influxes of cash, and the lion’s share of affluence still rests with white patrons.

The reality is that most arts organizations don’t need a “diverse” audience—they need an audience with discretionary income. Yet the almost maniacal focus on community-building keeps organizations trapped in cycles of trying to sell to—not engage with, but sell to—audiences that don’t have that resource. In the meantime, organizations are unable to concentrate fully on patron retention and loyalty, and identifying and building audiences that are able and willing to fill the funding gaps.

[…]

Every year, organizations jump through hoops to secure restricted grants that necessitate yet another outreach program or diversity week or community partnership, hoping that if they impress the funders enough they will be given money that can be used for what the organization actually has a mission to do.

If real, authentic, genuine community building isn’t central to your mission, if it isn’t your raison d’être, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Because chances are that not only are you doing it badly, you’re doing it at the expense of your real mission. The mission of most arts organizations—the real mission—is simple: to present an art form. And that’s ok. We need organizations that prioritize preservation, development, and presentation of an art form, and I for one don’t think any organization should be penalized for it.

As much as I quoted here, there is a lot I left out. Even though I probably flirted with tl;dnr eight paragraphs ago, I hope this sample is enough to make you want to read more of what she said.

While it is not the final word on the subject, I think we probably recognize the truth in what she says about outreach efforts. The futility of grant chasing has been acknowledged for quite awhile. These are ideas that need continued discussion.

While we would like to be in a position where our organizations are viewed as leaders in the community like those in the CityLab article, most arts organizations really lack the resources and mission to fulfill that role.

How Do I Know If I Should Be Impressed?

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I was intrigued by an article in The Guardian last month that wondered if we enjoy art when it is anonymous, without any preconceived expectations about what we will experience. During the Dance Umbrella Festival at Sadler Wells, one event featured a mix of well-known and unknown choreographers being presented anonymously.

The concept is to allow (or force, depending on your point of view,) people to evaluate a performance on its own merits absent of any bias about whether they are supposed to like what they see.

This idea chimes with broader research in neuroscience on how influential our beliefs are in creating our experiences. For example, put people in a brain scanner and do a blind tasting with two different brands of cola, and you get a fairly even split in terms of preference. But tell them what brand they’re drinking and their brain’s pleasure centres actually light up more if they think it’s their preferred drink. Brand loyalty is a powerful thing. And perhaps what’s true for fizzy drinks follows for Mozart, Godard or Merce Cunningham. Psychologist Paul Bloom writes in his book How Pleasure Works that this leads to a feedback loop. You think you like Pinter. Because of that you get more pleasure from watching his work, which reinforces the idea that you like it. And a fan is born.

The responses to this gambit were a little mixed. Critic Judith Mackrell reeeaallllyyy wanted to know who did what, though she also found it liberating.

Sarah Bradbury at The Upcoming seemed to be able to focus more on the dance and didn’t really reflect much on the experiment.

It got me wondering if there is benefit in doing similar experiments at other events. For example, if you dress actors in Elizabethan clothing and have them perform a period piece by Moliere or Oscar Wilde, would people who subsequently went to see a Shakespeare comedy find they enjoyed it more thinking they had already seen a Shakespearean play?

The reason I suggest Moliere and Wilde is because the language and behavior would be a little more formal and stilted than contemporary conversation so audiences would perceive it as strange, but accessible. Note that I did not suggest outright telling people they were seeing Shakespeare. Outright deception like that is a thorny question I haven’t quite resolved yet.

Thinking along these lines also raised the question of whether people would enjoy a Gilbert & Sullivan light opera if it avoided the stigma of the word opera and was referenced as a musical.

But from another point of view, does calling it a light opera cause people to be more open to seeing opera? The Most Happy Fella really straddles the line between opera and musical. Porgy and Bess is usually placed firmly within the opera category. Would injecting a little category flexibility based on one’s agenda help lower perceptual barriers for opera?

I am not entirely clear how this might work for visual arts, but there might be some good opportunities inherent to leveraging a little ignorance. I recall when I visited the Salvador Dali Museum that many of the works on display are not what people initially envision when they think of his work. Using that sort of anonymity might be a good place to start.

Getting people to consider whether they like the piece more before they know it is a Dali (or whomever) or after may help people recognize that there may be something of value in work they are dismissing simply because a famous name isn’t attached to it. I am not sure this realization will slow people down as they rush past galleries to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre or a special exhibit at their local museum, but maybe they linger a little longer on the way out.

Works that aren’t instantly identifiable as a particular artist’s can also help illustrate that creation is a process. Dali did a lot of sketching and other relatively unremarkable work before he developed his distinctive style.

Any thoughts on this? Have you ever stumbled across a performance, movie, piece of music or work of visual art that you liked but didn’t know the creator? Upon learning his/her identity were surprised you enjoyed the work of someone you had intentionally been avoiding? Has a positive experience you had acted as a gateway to trying a related experience you were previously pretty sure you wouldn’t enjoy?

Those Experiences Don’t Need To Be More Like Our Experiences

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On blogs like mine that address the concerns of non-profit organizations there is frequently discussion about how we bridle under the suggestion that non-profits need to be run more like businesses.

I was reading a couple articles in the recent issue of Arts Management Quarterly that reminded me that the arts world applies a similar set of standards internally.

An article by Victoria Durrer, Raphaela Henze and Ina Ross, “Approaching an Understanding of Arts and Cultural Managers as Intercultural Brokers,” comments,

Rather than engaging in a more nuanced cultural understanding of consumption in these economies, such approaches pejoratively view and address these customers as being 20 years ‘behind’ American or European consumers in their needs and habits. Similarly, a museum in Asia or Africa is typically viewed as needing to be ‘brought up’ to a level in line with the most recent stage of western modernity.

The authors go on to note that many countries are recognizing the need to raise standards and professionalize operations but the way in which these standards are applied and manifest are quite different than in Western countries.

This perception doesn’t only emerge between arts managers of Western and non-Western countries, but within countries as well. In a separate piece “How Globalization Affects Arts Managers,” Raphaela Henze discusses the situation in Germany,

Many of the arts managers explained that the reason for their efforts is to foster ‘integration’…The term has the paternalistic notion of allowing those that are not familiar with the rules to play the game in case they learn and then stick to the rules laid out by those that are already playing.

My guess is that I didn’t really need to mention she was referring to Germany because we can see how this applies in the U.S.

The implications for the United States are probably clear: Existing ideas about what an arts experience should look like should not be forced upon groups expressing an ethnic or cultural identity that differs from the mainstream, including standards of behavior in those situations. Basically, there shouldn’t be statements that something is or is not a valid experience based on existing standards.

In an even larger perspective, this view needs to applied to all experiences regardless of whether they originate from a group expressing an ethnic or cultural identity. The NEA has already started us down this path by expanding their definition of what an artistic or cultural experience is.

I don’t think this concept is particularly new to anyone. However, not only is it useful to remind ourselves of this necessity on occasion, I think it is helpful to do so in the context of a sentiment we dislike—The proper way to run a non-profit is like a regular business. It gives you something additional to think about when making statements of judgement.

Clarifying Pricing Practices

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Colleen Dilenschneider made some really important points about misunderstood concepts that lead non-profit organizations to make poor decisions and policies. The “Six Concepts that Visitor-Serving Organizations Confuse at Their Own Risk,” she discusses have subtle distinctions that can be difficult to clarify.

It is somewhat akin to the differences between PR, Marketing and Advertising. Even if you have taken the 101 course in any of these subjects, others around you may use the terms so interchangeably that you may find yourself having to stop and say, “No, that is advertising, not marketing.”

Among the concepts she mentions are Fads vs. Trends, which I had cited her on before; Market research vs. audience research; High-propensity visitors vs. historical visitors and key performance indicators vs. diagnostic metrics.

Personally, I don’t frequently get into regular discussions about visitor propensity or indicators vs. metrics, but they are worth reading about because you may think about issues related to those general terms and she makes some great observations.

What will cause me to keep this post bookmarked for future reference were her observations about Admission Pricing vs. Affordable Access and Discounts vs. Promotions.  The points she makes are great for getting pricing conversations in board and staff meetings re-oriented and properly focused.

In terms of Admission Pricing vs. Affordable Access, she says:

Admission pricing is the cost of admission for folks who visit your organization. It is an intelligently determined price point that contemplates what high-propensity visitors (people who are interested in visiting cultural organizations) are willing to pay in order to take part in your experience…. Admission price is an economically-sound business imperative for many organizations and admission pricing is not an affordable access program if your organization relies on paid admission in some capacity.

Affordable access (that is effective) is generally rather expensive for cultural organizations and it takes real investment that is usually made at least partially possible by gate revenues…When organizations lower their optimal price point in hopes of “being more affordable” or “reaching underserved audiences” they aren’t truly doing either of those things…Successful affordable access programs are targeted so that they truly reach folks who are unable to attend – not people who would generally pay full price but are just looking for a deal. Admission pricing and affordable access are two completely different means of access that play completely different roles in the sustainability of visitor-serving organizations.

Her thoughts on Discounts vs. Promotions run along the same lines:

Discounts are when an organization offers free or reduced admission to broad, undefined audiences for no clearly identifiable reason. Discounts do a lot of pretty terrible things for visitor-serving organizations. Simply, offering discounts devalues your brand….When an organization provides discounts, it often results in five not-so-awesome outcomes that you can read about here.

Promotions offer a targeted benefit for certain audiences for an identifiable reason. The biggest difference between promotions and discounts may be how they are perceived by the market. Promotions celebrate your community. Promotions demonstrate why an organization is offering free or reduced pricing in the communication of the promotion…In the end, one approach is more about an organization’s flailing attempts to hit specific attendance numbers at the expense of its brand and mission (and long-term ability to hit those numbers), and the other is more about your organization’s relationship with target audiences and communities.

As I suggest, the issues covered by these four concepts often come up in organization discussions and the lack of clarity between them often yields ineffective results.

Dilenschneider’s post started me thinking about what other concepts and practices might be confused and in need of clarification. A couple of ideas have come to mind, but I haven’t fully developed them yet.

If anyone has any suggestions or has thought about similarly confusing concepts they have already created distinct definitions for, I would love to hear them.

Of Thee I Sing (Baby)

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On this fairly tense Election Day, I wanted to offer a little levity by drawing attention to the 1931 Gershwin brother’s musical, Of Thee I Sing.

The university theater department presented it this year because it is a satire of the presidential elections.

The plot is somewhat prescient in that Presidential candidate, John P. Wintergreen, is induced to run on a platform of “Love.” His campaign committee comes up with the stunt that involves him marrying the girl who wins a beauty pageant held in Atlantic City.

I might be too eerily similar to our current situation except that Mr. Wintergreen falls in love with a secretary he meets backstage at the pageant based on her ability to make great corn muffins. They are indeed great corn muffins since they also convince the Supreme Court to rule in Wintergreen’s favor when the pageant winner sues for breach of contract.

Given that the domestic skills of women are valued and repeatedly praised in the show, the pageant winner is rejected partially because she can’t cook, I think it is safe to say they didn’t envision a woman running for president at the time.

Just as a bit of trivia, President Cleveland and Buchanan were single when elected. Cleveland married after taking office, Buchanan remained single throughout his term.  I think it may be difficult to envision an unmarried man running for president these days too.

Here is a jazzy version of the title song by Ella Fitzgerald for ya,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN5-xbKAGn8

Funding Requests As Panhandling

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I have been listening to On The Media’s series on the way poverty is covered in America and suddenly came to the realization that the language associated with the poor has many similarities to the way Non Profit With Balls blogger Vu Le describes funders perceive non-profits.

Proud of this realization, I went to Vu Le’s blog to grab some passages to cite…only to realize he made that exact point back in July.

As I was thinking about the parallels over the weekend, I really started to wonder if arts organizations need to find another tax structure to organize themselves under so that they didn’t have these negative associations to the work they did.

Granted, this is sort of abandoning the issue rather than trying to shift the perception. Arts organizations metaphorically moving out of the tax status neighborhood doesn’t help social service organizations who are painted with the same brush as the impoverished people they seek to serve.

Except that the perception can infect the social service charities as well which shows how unhealthy it is.

In one On the Media episode, Linda Tirado is interviewed and discusses how her family’s belongings were destroyed when their apartment was flooded. Eight months pregnant, she calls a social service organization looking for a chair so she would have a place to sit.

She was told she could have the chair, but she would need to take a resume writing workshop before she could pick it up. The charity wanted to make sure she was trying to better her situation. The only times the workshops were available were when she had to work so she would essentially end up putting herself in danger of being fired for want of a chair.

That is what personal responsibility means to somebody on welfare. It means here are these stupid hoops that we’re gonna make you jump through and then we’re going to give you a solution that absolutely won’t work for you. It’s that kind of just over and over beating your head against these ridiculous regulations and these double-blinds that don’t make any sense. And the whole thing is set up specifically to humiliate you as much as possible because what we need poor people to do in America more than anything else in the world is know their place.

Compare to a similar passage from Vu Le’s post:

The No-Free-Lunch: There have been idiotic proposals by clueless politicians designed to punish the poor for violating whatever ridiculous expectations are set out for them. Like taking away food stamps if their kids don’t get good enough grades or if they’re not volunteering or seeking out employment, despite the fact that there are only so many volunteer and paid positions to go around. In our sector, our funding gets threatened if we don’t comply with various requirements, such as working toward “sustainability.” A colleague mentioned a grant that won’t pay for staff wages and other indirect expenses, and applicants have to demonstrate that they will be completely self-sustaining within a year. That gave us all a good chuckle.

If people see non-profit arts organizations in the same light as welfare recipients, is it any wonder they don’t want their kids going into the arts? If they aren’t going to be constantly asking their parents for support, they will be asking society for support and what self-respecting parent wants that right?

I am not sure people equate the two in exactly that manner, but there is possibly a greater stigma associated with non-profits than we expect. Because people’s perceptions of poverty often has a very strong emotional element, merely surveying people about their attitudes may not be effective since they may not be entirely aware of how much their unconscious associations influence them.

About five years ago, it was relatively common to see people talking about the need for arts to adopt a different corporate structure. Many different options were debated but to my knowledge, no one ever restructured or organized a new arts organization under one of the alternative models. (Though we would really only start to see proof of concept now after five years of operation.)

While the idea that arts organizations need to distance themselves from those that society looks askance at may be immediately satisfying, not only does it not really appear to be viable, it doesn’t really solve the greater issues that arts organizations and non-profits in general face.

I have written before about the effort to build public will for arts and culture which seeks to change general societal perceptions about the arts. I have to imagine that a shift in the negative associations people make with the way arts are supported and funded would integral part to that.

How Much Would You Pay For A Selfie With Me?

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Some concepts have been banging around in my head for a little while that haven’t quite firmed up yet. I am hoping writing it down and getting some feedback from others might help to start develop it.

I have begun to think that as time goes on, the most valuable commodity a public figure/artist, etc might have is their time, not their performance or merchandise.

In a talk Seth Godin gave at Carnegie Hall, he mentioned that when he goes to book signings, fewer people are buying books (around 28 minute mark).

Instead, they want a selfie with him. Since getting a selfie eats up so much time, he has tried to hire a professional photographer who can supply the images to people, but they insist on taking a picture with their own phone. He says the picture itself is worth nothing, it is the ability to reflect on the experience and share it with friends from your own handheld device that has value.

Obviously, one must provide some sort of notable experience or product that inspires people to want to take that selfie with you in the first place. It could very well be that increasingly the most valuable element will be that opportunity to meet the person and take a selfie. The challenge may be how a person manages that to their benefit whether it be monetarily or preservation of their sanity.

There was an article on Vice about how meet and greets as currently conducted suck for everyone. Fans frequently pay hundreds of dollars for the opportunity to meet with someone, but they only get a second with them. Many fans try to squeeze in more time through various tactics, among them trying to grab a selfie when it isn’t allowed. For their own part, the artist is under pressure to participate in interactions with hundreds of fans in a small period of time. In general, all parties can end up dissatisfied.

My first thought is that these artists or their management are trying to make as much money as fast as they can. There has already been some minor backlash so I wonder how much longer this might be sustainable. As the Vice article says, the more famous one gets, the more of you the fans feel they are entitled.

Is there a better way to handle this knowing that the personal interaction and selfie may be viewed as the most valuable part of the experience? Instead of $350 tickets to a performance, does it make sense to charge $150 to everyone and $750 to a meet and greet that only admits a limited number of people but guarantees you longer interaction time?

The problem with that is 1- scalpers will probably still be able to ratchet the tickets up to $1000 on the secondary market unless a solution is found and 2- A high meet and greet price limits access to wealthier people. ($750 is already about a median price of what people are paying for meet and greets so an extended meet and greet pass could easily start at $1500+.)

Many public figures/artists are philosophically opposed to putting up different types of barriers to fan interactions with them. Whether it be limiting numbers, time period or charging for access.

Ultimately, for a lot of public figures I think it may bear examining what part of the experience is most valuable to people and adjusting the experience accordingly.

Unfortunately, while I do get recognized at conferences and other gatherings as the genius blogger I am, few people have been asking for a selfie with me so perhaps I am just coming at this from a place of selfie-envy.

Anyone out there have any predictions on what the nature of public figure-fan interactions will look like in the future? Ideas on how to manage it with things like policies and emerging technologies?

If We Build It, Please Don’t Come

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I am interested to see that artists are gaining an increasingly sophisticated view of their role in gentrifying neighborhoods. Non Profit Quarterly reported on a gathering in Miami to discuss the issue.

According an article in the Miami Herald, there was a sense among attendees that

“Artists find themselves in the uncomfortable and confusing position of feeling as if they have become inadvertently complicit in driving gentrification, even as they are also being victimized by the trend.”

One of the big topics of discussion was that gentrification is happening so quickly now that artists aren’t even able to set down roots before they are displaced. One Miami non-profit art space has had four homes in six years. Another artist claims to have been “priced out of 10 neighborhoods on two continents, from New York to Paris to Miami.”

Artists are beginning to recognize that not only are they getting displaced by gentrification, they are taking long time residents with them and are now essentially seen as harbingers of doom.

Some who contributed to the conversation in Miami were openly hostile to the idea of artists entering their neighborhoods, perceiving them to be an intentional element of a gentrification effort known as Artwashing.

Sensitive to this, some arts entities are working with the community. The Herald article mentions that Opa-locka Florida listened to residents’ feedback and built a park before building an arts center.

There are also accusations of artists being focused only on themselves rather than the impact they have on the communities in which they take up residence. Thinking back, I have to admit that the earliest writing I did on the subject of gentrification was about how artists were being displaced rather than how the neighbors were impacted.

Though to be fair, many of the first places artists were inhabiting were abandoned industrial and warehouse areas rather than residential districts and gentrification was only largely affecting them. The impact of gentrification on residential areas may be comparatively recent, say in the last 10-15 years. If areas are becoming gentrified more quickly than before, it may also be the case that developers are identifying and exploiting trends in neighborhoods that much more quickly than they had.

In the past I have written about how arts organizations can’t be egoistical and think that if they build it, the audiences will naturally come without any effort on their part. However, there are cases when artists may build it and fear what is to come. (Along with their neighbors.) They may not necessarily benefit too much from the increased economic activity prior to being displaced.

I am interested to see what comes of this growing awareness of cause and effect. What choices artists and communities make to manage, mitigate or resist.

Gasp! Orchestra Strike Post That Doesn’t Devolve To “Overpaid Bums”

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On the Marginal Revolution blog, economist Tyler Cowen quotes bits of a Wall Street Journal article on orchestra strikes by Terry Teachout and ends with what seems to be an implication that many orchestra musicians and conductors are being paid too much.

I had expected many of the comments that followed to state orchestra musicians are overpaid bums, but to my surprise very few of the nearly 100 comments did. Instead, there were some of the most interesting discussions about the proficiency of orchestra musicians and ensembles I have seen outside of an arts related news source.  If anything, some orchestra might be tempted to cite these commenters in their negotiations.

There were multiple mentions of musicians today being more skilled than those in the 1950s and 1960s and easily able to tackle compositions with which their predecessors struggled.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra had a number of fans and comments about them emphasized their proficiency:

26 Tununak October 25, 2016 at 11:47 am

The only time I heard the Chicago Symphony live was when I was in Chicago for a conference years ago. They played Petrouchka, and to this day I remember the flute solo as being absolutely breathtaking. I had never really thought about that solo before that moment. There really are differences between the delivery of the very top performers and the rest, and they aren’t necessarily marginal differences.

27 Steve Sailer October 25, 2016 at 7:46 pm
Yup.

For example, I attend a minor league opera series in Los Angeles called Pacific Opera Project that is wildly entertaining and quite moderately priced. They’ll do anything for a laugh. It’s great entertainment value per dollar.

The only problem is when they spring for a really good singer and he suddenly reminds you that the rest of the singers in the production aren’t really good and you are missing out on a whole world of unbelievable singing because you can’t afford it.

Steve Sailer October 25, 2016 at 7:17 am

[…]
That raises an interesting question: if the next time the CSO goes out on strike, if management could secretly fire everybody and replace them with Lyric Opera musicians, how many season ticket holders would notice that diminution in quality?

I’d guess maybe less than 50% but more than 10%, but I’m just making those numbers up.

Since I am living in Ohio, I can’t let Cleveland’s praises remain unsung:

96 Faze October 25, 2016 at 10:25 pm

The insecurity of Clevelanders is reflected in the Cleveland Orchestra’s signature sound, which is perfection. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a looser, scrappier sound. But Cleveland can’t afford to let its hair down. Night after night, year after year, they pump out pure, transcendent perfection. The exquisite tone of the string section alone can leave you gaping. But as one Russian music student of my acquaintance said, “Eeez borink. I don’t learn from them. They have no mistakes.”

I was interested to see the following comment for the very Industrial Revolution assumptions it makes about the purpose of unions:

29 BC October 25, 2016 at 10:11 am

If musicians are that differentiated and not interchangeable, then why unionize and collectively bargain? Most unions represent interchangeable labor and indeed actively discourage differentiation (merit pay, employee evaluation, etc.). When labor is undifferentiated, unionization creates a monopoly. If musicians are individually differentiated, then each musician already has a monopoly on his or her own talents.

Professional athletes’ unions are an exception and their demands are correspondingly different than those of unions in other industries. In professional sports, the unions are pro-market, demanding things like free agency, and the owners are anti-competition, demanding things like salary caps, luxury taxes, etc. Are the musicians striking to end anti-competitve and collusive practices of orchestras or are they acting more like traditional labor unions, just asking for uniformly higher pay?

Discussions about the arts on an economics blog can yield some interesting points of view. There was a comment earlier in the thread where someone said something similar, asking why oboists, for example, didn’t hold out for more than clarinetist in communities where clarinetist were common.

It makes me wonder if part of the difficulty orchestra musicians face is this concept that unions exist to insure a supply of skilled, interchangeable cogs. I don’t think it is necessarily the term “union” that is the problem, any collective effort would likely be regarded as a union even if they called themselves more lighthearted like a Musician Clan.

From the comments and general observations, I think there is an underlying sense that talented individuals can negotiate the best deal for themselves and mediocre individuals join collective bargaining groups in order to get better pay than they would be able to get alone.

Really it is more a matter of what value is placed on the work being done than on the talent and skill of the person doing it. People initially formed unions to get better pay for work that has low value associated with it.

Whether you think orchestra musicians are overpaid or not, to read the comments in this post it appears a number of people feel that the musicians of many orchestras are to be commended for their pursuit of excellence in performance.

Not Everything Is For You

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There is a video of Nina Simon speaking at the Minnesota History as part of her Art of Relevance book tour early this month. Many things she said jumped out at me and I am going to pass the video along to a couple other people in the hope of starting some conversations.

Around the 47 minute mark she talked about responding to organizational insiders who are dissatisfied by programming that seeks to attract new audiences.  She uses the metaphor about going to a restaurant and how you don’t suddenly decide to boycott the restaurant if they start adding vegetarian and heart healthy options to their regular menu.  In her particular experience long time insiders complained about interactive programming and community festivals, she pointed out that the new people coming to those events weren’t complaining that the museum was offering programming and opportunities that insiders valued.

When she talked about that, it occurred to me that often resistance to new programming is  rooted in the belief that everything should be for oneself. The truth is, everything isn’t for you.

Granted, some times new programs are part of a zero sum equation, especially in a performing arts situation where there are finite resources and dates. A new initiative may displace one of regular events. Instead of 10 things designed for you, you only get nine. For a lot of people even 1/10 of a change can result in them feeling the organization is no longer relevant to them. This may especially be true in the case of subscription holders.  That one bad grape in ten ruins the value of the whole package.

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

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

Or at least lost nothing but the desire to keep the delight they feel to themselves. Nina addresses that a couple minutes earlier with the response, wouldn’t you want to share the joy you feel with everyone else? She says even though in their hearts they want to say, “No way!” it is difficult to admit it aloud.

Even though Nina makes it sound easy. Even though she cites examples of people who are excited to see new vibrancy come to the organization they value, it isn’t easy to go against the inertia of thinking that everything that is being done is being done for you.

Regularly reinforcing, gently and diplomatically, of course, the sense that “What We Do, We Do For YOU (collectively)” rather than “for you” (singularly) is important….even though we do want everyone to feel individually invested.

I think Nina’s restaurant metaphor is a useful one. Most of the time restaurants make menu changes and it barely registers notice from people. You can assure people that while it may feel like the organization is metaphorically changing from a steakhouse to a vegetarian restaurant, that isn’t what is happening. Besides, you may find you some of the vegetarian offerings appeal to you.

(As any vegetarian will tell you, if there is a delicious vegetarian option available on a buffet, it will be cleaned out immediately by all the meat-eaters.)

 

Too Much Art To Learn, No Time For Managing You?

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One last post about the arts entrepreneurship conference I attended a couple weeks ago. Tomorrow it will be on to other things.

There are increasingly productive efforts being made toward teaching/mentoring/instilling, (whatever term you want to use), artists to manage their own careers.  I purposely didn’t use the term entrepreneurial practices because there are those that rankle at the idea artists need to measure their success in terms of economics and commerce. I have written enough about the idea that arts organizations should be run like a business to agree with that point.

On the other hand, everyone can use some sort of guidance about how to manage their lives and careers, even if it doesn’t have a commercial focus.

You Interview For A Job, Not A Career

An issue that came up at the conference was that career development offices, especially those at universities and colleges, tend to operate with a 20th century orientation on preparing to interview for a job rather than creating a career for one self. This is least helpful for students in arts disciplines where interviewing often doesn’t occupy a central role in career advancement.

The thing is, when parents come on a college visit with high school students, they ask the admissions office how many graduates get a job, not how many graduates started their own businesses or independent careers. Most parents would likely be terrified at the thought of what might happen if their defiant 16/17 year old tried to start their own company. The focus of career offices are partially driven by the expectations of tuition paying parents.

You Don’t Know You Want To Know It Until You Do

The other difficulty with trying to teach students to be more entrepreneurs mentioned at the conference is that they often aren’t in a place where they are receptive to forced instruction in that topic. One of the panelists spoke about how a visiting artist held a Q&A after conducting a master class and said she wished she had learn more about the business side in school. But she also admitted that she probably wouldn’t have paid attention at the time.

Once students have a project they become personally invested in, then they become interested in learning what is involved in making it a reality. That may be the advantage Millikin University has in having experiential learning as an institutional value. They put students in a position where they become invested in the success of something while they are in school.

Many people don’t have that experience until after they graduate and lack the easy access to advice and resources an academic setting affords. That was one of the central topics of discussion on a panel lead by Millikin professor Dr. Mark Tonelli. He presented a series of quotations from research he conducted with students and graduates.

Lives Are Ruined, Others Are Not

One graduate’s response reflected their perception of what their education lacked:

“We have a jazz degree, but no idea how to go about teaching private lessons ourselves, we have no idea how to adapt our jazz skills to the popular music scene (i.e. gigs that pay), having our heads buried in self-indulgent art music leaves us completely out of touch with current trends in music, we don’t know how to negotiate contracts, when to hire an agent, how much to pay people, where to find legal advice, we don’t even know how to do our !@#$%&* taxes…this is pathetic for a university-level bachelor degree.”

While my first impulse upon seeing this was to become indignant about how schools are failing to prepare students, there were others who presented a more moderated view.

“I feel I was fully prepared musically and artistically…it was my understanding that my degree would not encompass any business elements [so] I cannot hold it against the degree. I do feel that more business would be helpful to most students. At the same time, I am somewhat comfortable with the notion that it is an arts only degree and those who wish to make a living can sink or swim by learning business in the real world…I remember some professors saying that while the business was very important, there is just so much art to be learned that it is better to do a great job of that than diluting the degree with a mixture of art and business.”

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, of the respondents Dr. Tonelli quoted simply said they wished they could just play jazz and not have to worry about the business side at all.

Beauty Now, Sharks Later Is Not The Only Option

As a person who works on the business side of the arts, I was a little annoyed by the student being told there is so much art to be learned it is better to put off learning about business until later. If you are learning to be an artist, is learning about the business side a dilution or is it a holistic approach to the subject?

Is there so much art to be learned that some can’t be learned later? I am pretty sure there is an assumption you will need to continue honing and gaining skills after graduation. Performers take voice and acting lessons throughout their careers. Visual artists pick up new techniques and skills. Musicians study additional technique.

The way the student characterized those wanting to make a living as having to sink or swim illustrates quite a bit about how business skills are viewed.  Do instructors and mentors really want their charges to think they will be fully informed about the thing they are most passionate about in life, but if they want to do anything with it, they are on their own with the sharks?

A university/conservatory education provides the basis upon which you continue to develop over the course of your career. So why aren’t some general career management skills part of that, again with the assumption that one will need to continue to learn? If that were the case, the first graduate cited might be less discontented with their degree: aware of the basics but knowing there was more to know and having a sense of what they potentially needed to know more about.

The idea that career management skills are something separate you pick up later if you need it seemed divorced from how artists have historically managed their careers. Worse, it places the artist in a passive role, waiting to be discovered by someone else who will promote and manage them or give them a job. Certainly at a certain point one needs managers, accountants and agents to handle one’s business—but until you get to that point one really needs to be aware of how to perform many of those tasks for oneself. To be active and in control rather than simply waiting.

Very few artists have achieved success as hermits passing their work through a partially opened door to an agent. There plenty of instances when an artist has found themselves in a difficult place because they didn’t have the skills to monitor how their agents were handling their business.

Can’t Brag About Them And Not Invite Them To The Table

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I attended a presentation by Mosaic Education Network about their efforts working in conjunction with the Barnett Center at Ohio State University to provide some entrepreneurship workshops for artists in the Columbus, OH.

One of the things that impressed me was that they seemed to have made an effort to attract a more inclusive range of artists than might usually be served by such gatherings. When they spoke about how the different artists came to realize that the challenges they faced weren’t exclusive to their discipline, they mentioned that some attendees thought it was just a problem DJs were facing and visual artists likewise thought it was specific to them.

It got me thinking, how many individuals or organizations seeking to convene artists to talk about entrepreneurship would include DJs on their invite list? If I had been a little quicker with this realization, I might have thought to follow up and ask about the range of disciplines and practices that were invited.

The National Endowment for the Arts expanded their definition of what constituted arts participation when they conducted a study a few years ago. If arts organizations are going to tout those statistics to prove what a wide range of Americans are engaged with arts and cultural activities, it is probably only logical and fair to put practitioners of those disciplines on the literal and figurative invite list.

What they planned to do was hold a Create-a-thon modeled on the hack-a-thon events common in software coding, emphasizing the brain storming practices. This creative event was meant to lead off an 8 week series of workshops people would attend.

What actually ended up happening is a combination of a cautionary lesson and a testament to their nimbleness and willingness to revise their plans.

Associating the Create-a-thon with the software hack-a-thon model resulted in unanticipated expectations among some attendees. People came assuming there would be venture capitalists present and that those who gathered would help them develop their business model. That wasn’t what the organizers envisioned.

I have seen a lot of people advocate for adopted the hack-a-thon for arts and culture. I think I wrote about it myself some years ago. This problem never emerged on my radar which probably means I don’t know nearly enough about hack-a-thons to be stealing the idea.

Clearly if you are considering something along these lines it is very important to communicate exactly what will be occurring or evoke an entirely different model so that people don’t make the wrong assumptions.

They had 40 people attend the first day, but only 20 people came the second day. The presenters clarified the drop in attendance wasn’t due to the absence of venture capital at the event. Some people already knew they wouldn’t be able to make both days.

I wouldn’t normally even bring up the drop in attendance on the second day except that it helps to underscore how successfully they ended up. By the completion of the eight week series of classes/workshops, they ended up serving 76 people. While the interest initially seemed to flag, they attracted additional people through word of mouth and continued attempts to increase awareness.

But it wasn’t just good advertising. They attributed their ultimate success to their willingness to recognize the mistakes in their initial assumptions and take action to alter their plans.

They had assumed that those who were interested in taking their workshops would attend all eight weeks. They learned it was better to think about the classes in a modular fashion and allow people to attend the sessions by which they felt they would be best served.

For example, Week One focused on the Mission Statement; Week Two on Vision; Week Three on Value Proposition the artist brought; Week Four on Marketing, etc.  People only attended the workshops they felt they needed.

While they had planned to offer the classes during the day, they quickly realized that most everyone who had an interest in the workshops had day jobs and shifted to offering them in the evenings.

The presentation by the partners from Mosaic and the Barnett Center was successful by the measure of leaving me wanting to know more.

They seemed to be both working with people and embodying an ethic which are appropriate to the times and environment.

For example, you may have groaned inwardly at the mention of the Mission Statement workshop. Everyone writes these big impressive sounding statements that they can’t remember and never refer back to.  They took one artist’s wordy, paragraph long statement and boiled it down to “I manipulate fabric for curious people.”

That may sound too informal, but it is easy to remember and probably fits more organically with the artist’s vision and value proposition than most arts organization mission statements. Just try memorizing your mission statement and the fabric artist’s. Tomorrow morning I bet you can recite her’s more easily than your own. I bet her’s even fires your imagination better than your own.

In a marketing project they spoke about, an artist had been updating his Instagram followers about the progress he was making on a visual art piece. When it was done, he told them it would be hidden somewhere at a festival and provided clues about where to find it. This helped the artist promote his work and helped build a relationship with the festival when he was able to show how he had driven attendance to their event. Of course, it also contributed to the relationship the artist had with his supporters.

Finally, one of the things the Mosaic Education Network and Barnett Center presenters emphasized for those planning to do Art Entrepreneurship training for their communities went right to the heart of the big debate about paying artists.

Don’t talk to artists about how their art should be profitable and how you are teaching them to be successful, while simultaneously asking those who are helping you provide the workshops to do so for free/the exposure.  No one doubts it is difficult to find funding to support training programs like this, but the people who are helping you should profit from working with you.

Why Is This So Tiring If The Students Are Doing All The Work?

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Yesterday I wrote about the exciting things happening at the student-run ventures at Millikin University. Something I should mention, all these ventures are being run at the undergraduate level. You might naturally assume that students in the school’s MBA program were the impetus behind some of these efforts, but they are all undergraduate run.

While these programs are certainly worthy of emulating, one thing to be aware of is that when you are in the role of the supervising faculty member, it can take as much effort to restrain yourself from interfering or “fixing” things for a student venture as it does to teach the subject in a classroom setting.

Julie Shields, Director of the Center of Entrepreneurship, oversees the Blue Connection gallery located in the Decatur Arts Council building in downtown. I asked her if the software the information systems class developed to help Blue Connection I mentioned in yesterday’s post was used after that initial semester. Among the things the software did was cross reference sales records with weather and social media campaigns to help the gallery staff make decisions about marketing and inventory.

She said that every semester she has the students write a page of advice and wisdom for the next class. At the start of the next semester, she puts the paper in the middle of the room and tells the students it is available for their use so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel or repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. In all the years she has been teaching the class, no one has picked up the paper.

She said that it is difficult for her not to step in and fix things. When she has fixed things, she has regretted it because it was difficult to get the students to assume the degree of responsibility they should. She said students have often thought she was mad at them because she opted to bite her tongue and walk out of the room rather than submit to her impulse.

Coming from a performance background, my first inclination is to attribute the decision to eschew the advice of the earlier classes to the fact that visual artists often work alone versus the more cooperative theater environment. I am pleased as heck that the students in the Pipe Dreams Theatre company I spoke about yesterday engage in long term planning.

A visual artist vs. theater artist comparison isn’t really fair because the gallery is run by both business and visual arts students, creating an entirely different dynamic than that of the theatre company.  Not to mention, no two businesses ever operate identically.

Both the visual arts students and business students start out expressing stereotypical sentiments. The visual arts students wonder why they need to know the business stuff and the business students want to know why they have to be involved with art.

In addition, each has different working habits. The business students are ready to leave at 5 pm while the visual arts students may get inspired and come in at midnight to rearrange the displays. However, they have to work together to establish plans and procedures, including operating hours during which they will staff the gallery. I didn’t ask, but my guess is that there is a minimum number of hours a week they are required to be open. The one mandatory period of operation is during the First Friday gallery walk.

Julie Shields has some anecdotes about semesters where things gelled well. One business student admitted he didn’t know much about artistic quality, but he was able to provide a great analysis of sales trends that lead to one of the more financially successful periods.

Again, I think Millikin University is doing a lot of great work in enabling these student run ventures. The emphasis is definitely on Work.  I am not going to even try to tackle how they establish criteria for grading except to say there isn’t a direct relationship between financial success and a passing grade.

One additional case I wanted to mention which is not a student venture but taken along side them might be an indication of a burgeoning arts industry in Decatur, IL. During the conference, we visited the Heroic Age Art Center which is planned as something of an arts incubator. The original intention was to develop a video production center in the bottom floor and then create artist space upstairs. There was so much interest and demand, they ended up renovating the artist spaces first and all that space has been rented. Millikin plans to have a presence in the center at some point, but they will have to wait for the rest of the renovations to be completed first.

Why I Was So Excited To Spend The Weekend In Decatur, IL

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As I had mentioned yesterday, I had been looking forward to participating in the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference at Millikin University for a year due to their student run venture program which include in music publishing, a visual arts gallery, a theater space, a printing press, a publishing house, a printmaking studio and a radio station.

These are part of the Arts Entrepreneurship program, however the university has long had a philosophy of experiential learning.  The essence of what many university faculty and staff members expressed over the weekend was that students were told not to wait for someone to give them permission, but to jump in and try an idea out.

The work the students are doing and the results being accomplished are very impressive. As you have probably guessed, I was very excited to see it all first hand.

While ideally the decisions and responsibilities for each of these ventures would be borne by the students, the extent to which this happens seems to range between ~80%-98%, dependent on the program.

For example, one of instructors in the music publishing area spoke of how much time running the music label took and his efforts to get the students to bear more of the responsibility. On the other hand, he noted students worked very autonomously in other parts of the music production program.

There was a session in which an information systems professor spoke of a project his students had done with the student run gallery as a client. His classes worked on many similar projects for other departments and some external clients. Noticing that these clients were left without software support at the end of every semester, students created a venture independent of any class to service the software.

The conference was held during the university’s Fall Break so unfortunately we really only got to speak with students involved with the Pipe Dreams Theatre venture and the Blue Connection visual arts gallery.

I brought my camera with me so I could take pictures of what I experienced, but looking at the images I realized that these places look like any other theater or gallery space you might find anywhere. There is nothing to distinguish them from any other such place. That is probably to the students’ credit that you can’t easily discern that they are in charge.

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I did want to share this one image from a presentation the Pipe Dreams students gave. They made this sign so I don’t know if the course objective is officially “To run the company in the general direction of not into the ground.”

The work load is the same whether you are taking the class for one credit or three. Everyone does get paid. According to the instructor Sara Theis, the most people have been paid is about $120. Other times she has cut checks for around $2.50. This is all determined by the students.

Pipe Dreams seems to be the venture in which students are more involved and invested.  They hire staff, they buy the equipment, do the marketing, write the grants, choose and cast the shows.

The space they occupy is slightly off campus. Other than the university covering the heat and the salary for the instructor, the students are responsible for everything in the building.  When one season loses money, the next cohort needs to deal with the deficit.

What probably impressed me most was that the students involved with Pipe Dreams are mindful of what the next group will inherit and make long term plans for the viability of the organization. For example, I thought the requirement that a student be involved for three consecutive semesters before they could be part of the managing board was dictated by the instructor, Sara Theis. She assured me that was entire the students’ decision because they saw the need to ensure continuity.

These long term plans include replacing aging equipment. One of the things they mentioned was that it took about three cycles of students before they were able to get ETC to grant them new dimmer system for their lighting.

There was a disagreement about whether the theatre seating was acceptable or not. After learning from an audience survey that people were uncomfortable, they created a plan to purchase new seating.

When they do midnight shows for students, they conduct a risk assessment in advance and institute bag checks.

In a separate panel of current students and alumni of Pipe Dreams, the students were well aware of the value of the experience. They appreciated the opportunity learn to fail and fail a lot in the relative safety of a university setting. They were also pleased that they could walk into a job interview with some realistic experience on their resumes.

Another young woman said that the experience over the years completely disillusioned her about a career in the arts. She said she was grateful because she might have spent 7-10 more years pursuing a career and ending up miserable. I think it is to the program’s credit that they put students in a position where they can really come to that realization as a consequence of choices they freely made for themselves rather than through the direction/requirement of faculty.

They were proud of what they accomplished. One spoke of the way the cohorts he belonged to gradually changed the dynamics of the Pipe Dreams company from safe, pandering programming to the more challenging content they produce now.

Some of their marketing campaigns caused the university to institute new rules about how student events can be promoted. One of students said they make no apologies for trying out new ideas.

They also have gotten some flack from the Millikin Theatre program for snatching up valued members of the campus acting pool which I think is awesome.

While turnover of students impacted continuity, they said it also brought new perspectives and skillsets to address problems the company faced.  They hold retreats every semester to help orient new students and one of their recent projects has been to create procedure manuals in each of the areas of responsibility to hand down to future generations.

Since this post is getting a little long, tomorrow I will offer some insights about some of the other student run ventures. The Blue Connection gallery provides a good contrasting examples to the Pipe Dreams venture.

Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Accounts Ledger?

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This weekend I got to do something I waited an entire year to do…go to Decatur, IL. Your first response may be to wonder why the heck I was looking forward to that for an entire year. The reason is because the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference was being held at Millikin University.

At last year’s conference, I had learned about Millikin’s student run arts businesses and was eager to see it in person. I will just say the experience did not disappoint. Though I am still slogging through my notes from various sessions at different student run ventures so my readers will need to be patient for at least another day before learning more about that portion of the experience.

What I wanted to discuss today is a session I attended on one of the bugbears central to arts entrepreneurship — financial literacy. When people talk about artists needing to be more business minded, that is probably one of the top three issues they envision needing attention.

Of the seven people on the panel, two were accountants that work closely with artists, Jessica Jones and Elaine Grogan Luttrull. It was something that Jessica said that really gelled the whole subject for me. She mentioned that there is an emotional and cultural barrier everyone experiences when it comes to money and finances. It isn’t just people in the arts and it isn’t about numbers being inherently intimidating. She said that she has helped engineers and scientists who work with numbers all day and they have the same issues as everyone else when it comes to finances.

I don’t remember if it was Elaine or Jessica who mentioned it, but they were somewhat opposed to the concept that people should learn “basic skills” because the term means different things to different people. A CPA can look at materials and identify revenues sources in seconds whereas other people need to make an effort and consider the skills far from basic. Jessica commented that you can’t just carve out a top 10 or 20 list of things people need to know, rather people need to become comfortable with the language, concepts and terminology so they know what to ask and how to understand a conversation about their financial situation.

Ken Weiss from University of North Carolina reinforced this idea saying that it isn’t just important for people to know terminology, but the relevance. His school does a session on intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, etc. with a guest speaker who gets the students engaged by helping them understand how these issues help their career.

This idea emerged multiple times in different sessions at the conference. People discussed how their students had the “a-ha!” moment when they came to the realization that they needed to know something for themselves and not just because the professor said they need to know it.

One of the two CPAs spoke about how helpful it was for people to learn what resources were available in terms of things like software to handle accounting, sales records, etc., and then create operational plans and procedures based on whatever resources were most suited to their needs.

That way you aren’t constantly faced with the prospect of processing your numbers and you can spend the majority of your time doing the work you love. Sometimes the biggest impediment is being unaware that these resources exist and being intimidated by the thought of keeping track of it all. Ultimately it comes back to haunt you when it comes time to report your income for taxes.

Others on the panel commented that some arts disciplines were worse than others in recognizing the need to teach students skills to help manage their careers. However with the general concern about university students taking on so much debt, many schools are moving toward making financial literacy a skill that all students must possess.

What Arts and Cultural Concepts Should Every American Know?

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The Aspen Institute has a project in which the arts and culture community might want to participate. They are asking “What Every American Should Know.” They acknowledge right off that the project name might be controversial because it evokes E.D. Hirsh’s book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know which sparked a lot of debate.

I have a clear memory of picking up the book while house sitting for a professor and subsequently having a conversation with him about his objections to some of the topics on Hirsh’s list.

The Aspen Institute asks,

In our sweeping and turbulent nation, how can we cultivate a sense of shared culture and identity? The more fragmented we become, the more necessary it is for us to have a common vocabulary – a shared set of cultural and historical references – that we can all collect and understand.

I think the way the current election campaign is being conducted probably underscores the necessity of the type of thing they are doing.

The Aspen Institute list is an extension of an essay Eric Liu, executive director of the Aspen Institute American Citizenship and Identity Program wrote. In it, he defends the utility of Hirsh’s effort, in part because even protest movements need to employ the shared vocabulary of the culture they are opposing in order to be effective. He also acknowledges that a new list of 5000 topics needs to be constructed for today’s American citizens.

They have set up a website where you can contribute your top 10 topics. They have a selected lists from various distinguished persons such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, David Henry Hwang, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as examples. I hope they eventually make more lists public. I know 90% of the topics on the selected lists, but the other 5% are new to me so I am curious to know more about what I don’t know.

It probably says something about the validity of Top 10 lists on the Internet that I only started to consider this to be a serious effort when I saw they are scheduling in-person sessions at libraries to discuss the idea of “What Every American Needs To Know.” (scroll to the bottom to see if they are coming to a library near you.)

Obviously I think a lot of arts and culture topics should appear on some lists so the more people that contribute, the better. My only question is what will be done with the lists and will it contribute to effecting the change they seek.

Maybe it is enough just to have conversations in libraries. That may plant the seeds for change that are needed by getting people to talk and relate to one another. Whether it can counteract the bile one finds online remains to be seen.

Only $25 For A Ticket?….We Must Be INSANE!!!!

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In a recent post Seth Godin proposed two ways of approaching your business, “Either you dazzle with as much hype as you can get away with, or you invest in delighting people, regardless of how difficult it is.”

It was the example that he used to support the idea of hyping the hell out of something that left me incredulous.

Years ago, I asked fabled direct marketer Joe Sugarman about the money-back guarantee he offered on the stuff he sold through magazine ads. He said 10% of the people who bought asked for their money back… and if any product dipped below 10%, he’d make the claims more outrageous until it got back up. He told me that this was a sweet spot, somewhere between amazing people with promises and disappointing them with reality.

The idea that someone decided they aren’t being outrageous enough if a certain percentage of people aren’t asking for their money back sort of blew my mind. It goes against the whole concept of customer service. As Shakespeare writes in the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing, “…the fashion of the world is to avoid cost [trouble], and you encounter it.”

But this got me to wondering if a super-hype approach might work for the arts. Trevor O’Donnell is constantly saying that arts marketing doesn’t focus on the audience member and instead references concepts and accolades that are only relevant to insiders. Hyping an event like a cheesy used car commercial would break people of that habit.

I am sure there would be a lot of outcry that this approach was demeaning the work, but if it is successful at attracting a larger following, it might be worth considering.

Note–I am not suggesting anything be changed about the event. People often express concern about dumbing down an experience. I am only suggesting the advertising be dumbed down.

Yeah, I know even that would be a hard sell. I can imagine what my board might think if the advertising strayed from portraying a certain image of the organization.

Recent conversation has focused on the need for the arts community to move away from the conceit that all people need is one exposure and they will be hooked on the arts. I think that is the right mindset.

However, if people arrive with the expectation they are going to leave amazed and so ecstatic they will barely be able to walk straight for an hour afterward, they may convince themselves that they are having a better time than they would have without being primed by the hype.

Of course, there are going to be people who are disappointed, but that is part of the calculation. In fact, adopting this philosophy, you are paying close attention to make sure that ratio doesn’t fall below a certain point.

Probably the biggest difference between circa 1979 when Sugarman’s company was operating at its peak and now is that people can more easily share their dissatisfaction with each other.

Also, most arts events are communal experiences vs. the individual experience of purchasing something from direct marketing. If 10% of 1000 people are upset, everyone is going to know it immediately and it will sour the experience of the other 900.

There is nothing to say you need to make utterly ridiculous claims and aim for a 10% dissatisfaction rate. If you stage pictures and write copy giving the impression audiences are enjoying themselves five times more than they actually are, you probably still won’t be flirting with fraud – but you will be focusing more on audiences. (If your audiences already look like they are having an awesome time, just hype it by a factor of 3 😉 )

If you do resort to a used car type ad, talking about how you must be insane to sell tickets to such a great show for so low a price or for letting people into your museum to see art for FREE! ….well if you balance charm and humor it might help you make progress convincing people that you are a true, worthwhile asset in the community.

Yes, I suppose arts organizations might double down on talking about how great they are instead of how great a time the audience will have. I have to believe there is a limit they will reach where the only option to escalate the hype is to start focusing on audience interests.

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If You Can’t Poach ‘Em, Praise ‘Em

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A few months back when Ceci Dadisman and Drew McManus first floated the idea of recognizing Creative Arts Administrators to the rest of us ArtHacker authors, my first thought was that the project shouldn’t just be about who is doing a great job, but rather who you would love to poach from another company.

I have mentioned this idea in something of an off-handed way in my posts from time to time. We frequently hear about people being lured or headhunted away in relation to for-profit companies. A recent discussion my board had about recruiting new members cited the fact that one woman was pursued and lured to a new job by another company in town as part of her qualifications and value to our board.

You rarely hear this sort of thing in the non-profit realm. I don’t know if people are concerned about being perceived as cutthroat. Perhaps more likely, they don’t feel they can offer pay, benefits or work environment competitive enough to entice people to leave their current job. Intangible factors like idealism about the work being done might also come into play.

All this being said, having a more competitive job market can be beneficial. First of all, it can raise employee morale if they are being courted or see colleagues being courted. It gives a sense that someone external to the organization is paying attention and recognizes their contribution. Not to mention contributing to the sense that a path to advancement exists within the industry.

This type of competition can also help justify the organization’s overhead ratio and funding requests if they can do more than cite the hypothetical need to offer good salaries to retain people. If you are losing talented people to poaching by other non-profits, that says something. (Granted, if you are losing people to poor salaries, that says something as well.)

I should note that I am not just daydreaming about how great it would be if non-profit arts organizations had to compete for the best talent. Drew McManus and I recently had a conversation where we both observed that search firms were increasingly being listed in job postings.

We were a little wary about whether this was a good thing since some of the firms don’t appear to have any experience conducting searches in the arts and culture field. This could be another indication of boards of directors looking to run the arts “more like business” and may result in organizations being lead by people with little practical background in the arts.

But it could also be an indication that arts organizations are seeing the need to have the recruitment and hiring process handled with greater care and alacrity than they possess.

So in time news that people are being actively headhunted away from an organization may come with greater regularity. Depending on what generalizations about Millennials you subscribe to, this may have the effect of attracting a greater number of very talent people to non-profit work as they pursue a desire to do meaningful work. But with that may come a lot more job switching than arts organizations are used to.

So granted, there is a fair degree of speculation in all this. Bottom line though. If you know someone in the arts you would really love to have working with you, but don’t feel like you could snatch them away —Nominate them on ArtsHacker.

And if you are working with an amazing person right now and having them snatched away would break your heart, nominate them on ArtsHacker and let them know their work is valued.

And if you are afraid calling attention to a person’s awesomeness is going to see them headhunted and it is better to keep the person hidden from sight, well you may already be creating an uncomfortable work environment that will cause them to leave anyhow.

When Serving Bad Food To Patrons Can Solidify Their Loyalty

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Over the years I have made many posts riffing on the idea that marketing it is the responsibility of the entire organization, not just a single department. For that reason, I was happy to see a recent case study report TRG Arts posted on that topic.

Working with Performing Arts Fort Worth (PAFW), they emphasized the need for everyone to be involved in the effort by simply including everyone in the conversation.  PAFW started having patron loyalty meetings where they discussed the issues at hand, including the cost of retaining long time supporters versus attracting new individuals.

That’s when it clicked, and the floodgate of ideas opened up! House management said they were going to make patron loyalty a regular topic at their usher meetings. Someone suggested they send patrons a voucher for a free drink in their birthday month. Someone else suggested they turn the process for testing new concession products into a tasting event for loyal patrons. There were many more ideas that came up, and there were a number of people who said they would take responsibility for implementing ideas. “I never was a part of that process” quickly became “I understand our shared goal and I want to help.”

I particularly liked the idea of involving loyal patrons in a tasting of new concession products. Even if the new options weren’t tasty, the idea that your input was valued could go a long way to cementing a patron’s relationship with the organization. I am curious to know if PAFW has implemented that idea.

There was one thing the TRG piece mentioned that caught my attention:

And yet, there were legitimate operational questions that needed to be answered. If a VIP Presenter would like their complimentary drink in a souvenir cup, whose budget gets charged for the cup? How far can I go (and should I go) to make a patron happy?

The sentence evoked a memory of an episode of the West Wing when newly appointed chief of staff CJ Cregg is running into a lot of opposition from the Secretary of Defense over some new initiative (I think it was accepting the nuclear bombs form the Republic of Georgia). She has a realization that his resistance is based in the fear that the funds to implement this will come out of his budget.

As idealistic as you may be, there is always a cost of some sort associated with every good idea. So if you insist that marketing is everyone’s responsibility, you are insisting that everyone bear some degree of additional cost to implement this directive. The cost may be in time, resources or money.

It will be important to communicate that marketing/patron retention/whatever you call it, is a priority for the organization and allowances (and perhaps allocations) will be made to enable the achievement of this goal. Otherwise internal resistance may thwart your efforts from the start.

Wherein Resides The Identity of A Group?

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When I was taking a college philosophy class we got into the classic debate about where identity resides in a person or thing. If you have a boat and gradually replace every board over the course of five years, is it still the same boat? When did it become a different boat?

The same with humans, if you replace every limb with prosthesis, when does the person cease to be themselves and become a cyborg? When are they essentially a machine?

Sci-Fi really lends itself to the debate: if Capt. Kirk is completely disassembled into atoms and beamed to a planet in a matter transporter and his atoms reassmbled, is he still the same Capt. Kirk that left the Enterprise?

I got to thinking about this topic when I saw the new version of The Magnificent Seven this weekend. There were some significant plot points shared by both the original version and The Seven Samurai, which inspired the original, that weren’t really featured in the newest version. The boastful young gunslinger was missing, for example, but there was a similar plotline in the Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, which also has a lot of common plot points with both versions of The Magnificent Seven. Westerns in general probably share a lot of the same plot lines with each other if we get right down to it.

I am really only stopping off at The Magnificent Seven to pose a question about the ethics of presenting a group with a famous name which is comprised of few, if any, of the original members.  Just because a group has the legal right to use a name, and the controversies over who gets to do so can fill a few blog posts, when does it become an issue of misrepresentation when it comes to audience expectations?

Yes, everyone probably knows that Glenn Miller and all of the members of the original orchestra are no longer playing together when they go to a concert. (There are, in fact, four different groups around the world licensed to use that name.) On the other hand, the keyboardist for the band War is the only original member still performing with the group.

There are some very public debates that rage about whether a band went downhill after a key member left or if the group was better off without the bum, but for the most part people aren’t terribly aware of the shifting line ups of most groups over the years.

If you are thinking of presenting such a group, you may have the unenviable task of determining if the soul and identity of the group has departed and deciding whether to pursue the engagement.

Then there is the related question of, what are people buying? Are they buying an opportunity to relive memories of what they were doing when they heard this song and the line up doesn’t matter so much?  Or are they buying a return to their past fandom when they originally saw the group in concert and details do matter?

This isn’t just a question that nags at popular music. What if the conductor who is closely identified with an orchestra and creating their distinctive sound moves on?  Or even going back to the original idea, if there are 80 odd musicians who were part of the ensemble that created the signature sound of the orchestra, as each departs over the years, what is the tipping point where a new orchestra exists?

How much do any of these things matter? Well, in terms of popular music, there is potential for issues as members of groups die and the prospect of a reunion of the originals wanes. Not everyone can afford whatever preservation techniques The Rolling Stones are using.

Is it just the case that people need to move on and accept progress?  Is this true in all scenarios? How do you know which scenario is a bridge too far in terms of faithfully and ethically providing what you are advertising?

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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