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Joe Patti

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

How Green Was My Wicked Witch

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There has been an ongoing debate about whether simulcast performances from the Metropolitan Opera or London’s National Theatre will serve to erode audiences for live performances. According to research over the last few years, the answer isn’t entirely clear.

I have been thinking in the last couple weeks that one event I wouldn’t mind having the opportunity to live stream is the proceedings of BroadwayCon. The first Con a couple weeks ago seemed to exceed expectations despite the snowstorm that hit NYC.

The fact that so many people traveled great distances to meet each other, dress as their favorite characters and pick up new skills indicates there is potential to serve the large number of people who can’t make it. A live stream or two from the major speakers and panel events would allow groups across the country to organize their own local convention around the main convention schedule.

Sure, regional conventions like those organized for gaming, comics, anime, etc could be hosted independently around the country to tap into the enthusiasm a different times of the year. However, a live stream from the NYC Con (or other significant Con that subsequently pops up) could help provide performing arts entities in smaller communities that aren’t going to be able to attract celebrity guests an opportunity to organize people in their area.

This sort of event might serve to get people into their venue in the first place and create an energetic and friendly environment to introduce people to live theater. When major events aren’t being broadcast, workshops, panels, meetups, costume contests and such can be conducted where the rabid fans and the relatively uninitiated could mix together without a high intimidation factor. (Though debates over the correct shade of green to accurately depict Elphaba pose their own challenges.)

The biggest question would be the cost of streaming. I think it would be in the best interest of the BroadwayCon organizers to keep it low. Even if they lost money on streaming the event, they would likely be stoking the desire attend in person in people across the country.

For those who are tired of NYC and Broadway being held up as the be all and end all of theater in the country, I am completely with you there.

But my thought is that if you have a horde of people in your venue, some of which have never been there, and you are having classes in costume construction, giving tours of your fly gallery, holding acting classes and hosting karaoke sing alongs, not only have you found a way to fulfill your mission but they have new incentive to come back in the future.

That is, of course, dependent on you providing events and activities that are appropriate to their interests. It can’t be exciting times once a year and then a return to a situation that has little resonance with that same demographic the other 51 weeks. (Or other 11 months of the year in the case of Black History month programming.)

After a month or so when the dust settles, I was considering dropping the BroadwayCon organizers a line to see if they might entertain this idea. Anyone have any thoughts or ideas on the matter?

One of the first things that popped in my mind given the weather this year was whether there would be a way to avoid paying for the stream if snow forced you to cancel your local branch of the convention.

They Are Us, We Are They

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Seth Godin made a post in which he listed some of the following features of crowds:

[…]
The crowd gets on its feet when your band plays the big hit, and sits down for the new songs….

The crowd will always pick the movie over the book.

The crowd would rather wait in line for the popular attraction.

The crowd likes to be chased.

[…]

The crowd’s favorite words include fast, easy, cheap, fun, now and simple.

The crowd needs a deadline.

The crowd is the group of people who don’t get what you do, who loom on the horizon as the reward for making your work more popular.

And yet, the crowd continually gets more than it deserves, because people like you make work that matters. Work that you’re proud of.

Many of us can identify with that final line. We are under appreciated for the work we do in our communities.

It is important to remember, we too, are the crowd.

Most of these sentiments can apply to each of us as well in regard to that bakery, bookstore, school, fund raiser, festival, etc., that we think is really great but we don’t have the time, energy or opportunity to frequent as much as we would like. There are people who complain about our lack of engagement with them as much as we complain about theirs in regard to us.

I used to like to say, “Customers are idiots, I should know because I am one.” There is an incident that occurred at a Tesco in Ireland eight years ago that I am still not sure if I was being a stupid, clueless American or the employee was being inattentive. (I suspect I was being stupid and clueless regardless of nationality but there is room for doubt.)

It is impossible to be as attentive and have the same level of priorities as every struggling entity needs us to have. Working in the arts and non-profit sector, we are able to be a little more empathetic and mindful than most of the consequences our choices have on others.

As members of the crowd, we are also cognizant of the fact that it can be really difficult to inspire and motivate us contrary to our taste and priorities.

It is just that we forget that or wish it to be otherwise when it comes to other’s lack of investment in our work which is clearly better than they deserve.

Removing Overhead Ratio As A Measure Is Not Enough

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On Non-Profit Quarterly Claire Knowlton wrote a piece advocating for moving past a focus on overhead costs and direct program expenses in favor of full funding of non-profits by foundations. (Or at least recognition of full costs incurred by a non-profit.)

She seems to start from the premise that programs undertaken are essentially jobs non-profits do to further the interests of the funders. This sort of shifts the whole dynamic from a situation where non-profits cast about to find money in order to provide services to one where foundations seek skilled entities to solve problems for them.

Imagine if your personal paycheck were like a restricted grant. Instead of representing your value and level of responsibility in the company, your paycheck is based on a predetermined line-item budget that details exactly how you can spend your earnings. A portion of your paycheck can be used for rent, some for utilities, but most is earmarked for business attire, transportation to work, and coffee to keep you productive throughout the day. The thinking here is that by tying your paycheck to the expenses that contribute to your work, the company is making sure that you will show up on time, appropriately caffeinated, and properly dressed. It’s as if every penny of your paycheck is spent before you cash it.

To some extent, you had a say in your paycheck budget. In fact, you had to present a proposed paycheck budget when you applied for the job. Your friends on the inside said no one who spends more than 20 percent of his or her paycheck on rent has ever been hired. To get the job, you cut your rent line item. That means making do with an efficiency unit above an all-night bowling alley, but it’s better than not having a job at all. Some line items were nonnegotiable from the start: As a policy, your company won’t pay for haircuts; but that’s okay—you can let your hair grow long.

She goes on with this analogy noting that the “company” wants to make sure you are working effectively so they require you to generate reports–except that the cost of doing so will cause the ratio of time you devote on administrative tasks vs. the central tasks they are paying you to accomplish to skew higher. The employer won’t like that.

Because every penny of your paycheck is pre-spent, there is nothing left over for the future or to take care of retirement, emergencies and replacing your aging car (equipment).

In terms of a solution, she says:

“If we start to fully fund nonprofits for their day-to-day program and overhead expenses, and abandon overhead measurements as a proxy for mission fulfillment and efficiency, it’s the equivalent of giving nonprofits control over their paycheck.”

But she says the term “full costs” include:

Day-to-day operating expenses + working capital + reserves + fixed asset additions + debt principal repayment = full costs

In addition to laying out her argument, she makes suggestions to both non-profits and foundations about how they can change the conversation and practices.

Full funding of costs according to her definition would allow non-profits to be more focused on outcomes rather than compliance in order to survive.

This distinction is important. One of my initial thoughts when I read this was that what Knowlton was talking about would primarily be applicable to social service non-profits because fewer foundations would be interested in funding an arts non-profit primarily focused on creating performances.

The thing is, many performing arts organizations are just as focused on compliance and survival as any other non-profit. There are a lot of sincere ambitions that get abridged and curtailed because there isn’t possibility of revenue or funding.

I don’t know how many conversations I have had that started enthusiastically but were quickly ended by the phrase, “…unless we can get a grant to cover it.” Enthusiasm to do a week long residency with multiple interactions turns into a single lecture-demo for lack of funding. Opportunities for single lecture-demos get turned down for not being revenue generating. The outcome focused on is surviving another season.

After awhile, no one even entertains exciting ambitions and settle for minimal token gestures that will garner them a little bit of funding.

A situation where both the organizations and foundations embrace philosophies that make a complete assessment of what would be required to fully fund an arts non-profit could yield amazing outcomes from some.

In addition to funding capacity building for the organization so that everything from the board governance to hiring practices were strengthened, a rigorous study of what the local market would bear in terms of pricing, (including the optimal pricing spread for events), would provide a clear picture of what the capacity is for revenue.

This way there is a good basis for decision making by the organization as well as stronger justification of the funding that is needed to offset the difference between earned revenue, donations and program expense.

While I am skeptical full funding will happen, articles like this one and the conversation about eliminating overhead ratio as a measure of effectiveness are indications that there is potential for a shift toward more constructive policies.

More Discussion On The Value Of The Arts

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Since I was on the subject of how people value the arts yesterday, I thought I would call attention to a post that appeared on HowlRound last summer. Edward Einhorn wrote about Money Lab, a show his company put together that involved the audience in money related games and activities.

One of the things they instituted was a patronage auction.

It was not a commission. The artist would have the full freedom to create whatever he or she wanted to create, in the manner he or she preferred. The patron would merely be providing funding for one hour of that artist’s time, during which the artist would create…something. The only obligation of the artist: afterwards, a “grant report” (a short email) would be sent to the patron, giving an account of that hour of creation time.

When I conceived of the patronage auction, I expected we’d be pushing it to reach $20. Still, I thought, $20 an hour is a pretty good salary for an artist, in our society.

The lowest the hour of artist’s time went for was $42. The highest was over $200.

Over the course of the production run which took place at a number of venues, about 2/3 of the time the audience instigated/requested a change of format that turned the patronage auction into a crowdfunding effort.

Einhorn mentions when they moved the show from Brooklyn to Manhattan, the amount raised by the patronage auctions were low at first which was disappointing.

To me. Not to the artist involved. Because no matter what the amount, the money said to the artist: You are valued, so much so that an audience member, more often than not a complete stranger to you, was willing to give away his or her own money to ensure that you had at least one hour in which you could create, without the pressure of economic reality hanging over you.

…But I do know we only experienced one low total during our final week of performance. It was the performance when an economics class had bought out over half of the house.

“Why should we bid?” I heard one pondering after the show. “What value do we get in return?”

It’s a good question. What value did the patrons get in return? All they were promised was an email two or three sentences long. It’s a question I confront all the time, when looking for funding for my theatre company and my own work. Grant applications constantly ask me to justify the value of what I do, by filling out forms in which they ask me to explain not only my artistic but also my social value. In return, I sometimes get a small sum which, when combined with other similar sums, can add up to enough to create one underfunded project.

The whole Money Lab project is pretty interesting because it explores the psychology of our relationship with money, including the sunken cost fallacy which influences people’s decision to attend performances.

The Willingness to Pay question comes up again as people who have probably paid for admission to a show exhibit willingness to spend additional money to fund an artist during the show. Is it because they are having a good time? Is it due to peer pressure or desire for social recognition? Is it because they can see and immediately identify with the artist being funded?

Does having people pay after they have seen all or part of the show bear further investigation? You may recall I wrote about a Spanish theater that was using facial recognition software that only charged you if you smiled/laughed.

Giving to charities often spikes during the times of tragedies and often online/via social media. I am not suggesting arts organizations trot out their emaciated performers and tell their audiences they can help feed them for only dollars a day.

I really dislike lengthy curtain speeches where you are enjoined to donate, but perhaps I should reconsider. People often respond to the immediacy of things right in front of them and social media giving makes it easier to do so than ever.

How Much For A Year Of Your Cultural Enjoyment?

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Last week I briefly noted that people and businesses often value being in a community in which arts organizations are present, even if they don’t participate in their activities. I mentioned this constitutes an intangible value that the arts organization has in the community.

That reminded me of a post made by Sunil Iyengar, NEA Director of Research and Analysis about a novel approach being used to assess the value of cultural institutions in the UK.

Rather than using Willingness to Pay as a measure of how much people valued an arts/cultural institution (as in, how much would you be willing to pay for…?), they asked how much people would be Willing to Accept in order to maintain quality of life in the temporary absence of that organization.

Crucially,” the report explains, “compensation is only offered to those who previously indicated that their life satisfaction would decrease if the institution were temporarily closed.” To these respondents, a questionnaire asks:

“Now imagine the following situation. Suppose that in order to compensate you for not being able to visit the [cultural institution] during one year, you were given a cash compensation. How much money would you have to receive, as a one-off payment, to give you the same life satisfaction that you have now (not better nor worse, but just the same) during this period until the [institution] re-opened? Think about this for a moment please.”

Think about this concept for a moment and run the hypothetical scenario through you mind. First ask yourself how much you would be willing to pay at your favorite performance hall or museum. Now think about how much you would ask for if someone said they would compensate you for your loss of life satisfaction while that favorite place is closed for a year.

I don’t know about you, but if I am being honest that second number is at least 1.5 times more than the first, sometimes 2 times as high as the first.

Kinda gives you pause to think about your real priorities and values, doesn’t it?

The full research paper evaluating this as a viable approach to researching how much people value a cultural institution notes a few problems with using Willingness to Pay (WTP) as a measure. Among them:

Last, but not least, some have raised ethical concerns about the appropriateness of using WTP at all to value services like health and culture. This may, for example, be because value is related to ability to pay and the prevailing income distribution may be seen as inequitable; or because using money to value health and culture may send an undesirable signal (namely that health and cultural services are just like any other commodity bought and sold in the market place) (Fujiwara and Dolan, 2014)

and when Willingness to Accept may be provide a valuable measure:

…there are times when WTA could be warranted. This may be when respondents come from very poor backgrounds, say, such that their WTP amounts are severely constrained and they feel uncomfortable about being asked to pay (even if they might be prepared to pay a small amount), and hence offer a protest zero. Another scenario which may warrant use of a WTA question is when property rights are such that respondents can be judged to have some intrinsic right to the good/service – and what’s more they recognise this. This may be especially relevant for cultural activities and institutions.

The researchers compared WTP and WTA in relation to the Tate Liverpool Gallery and National History Museum and the differences weren’t as great as I imagined. The mention of intrinsic right to good/service made me wonder if there would be a difference between the U.S. and UK in that the more subsidized access to art of the latter might cause residents of the UK to take access to culture more for granted.

It could be equally possible that as an arts professional, I value arts and culture more highly than regular citizens of either country might.

The paper evaluating WTA as a tool goes into such detail about the relevance and accuracy of data obtained that I felt a little out of my depth trying to understand it all. I would suggest not trying this at home without deeper study because it is not something to blithely toss into audience surveys.

It can be useful as thought experiment (or blog post) to drive a conversation and self examination about how we value arts and culture in our lives.

The prospect of an arts organization’s absence from the community for a year may not be a cause of concern for individuals and businesses that don’t participate in activities, but like the idea of living in a community that provides those activities. If there is going to be any method that comes close to quantifying the intangible value a cultural institution has in the community for these groups, this may it.

Do I Really Need A Degree For That?

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Dan Pink called attention to publisher Penguin Random House’s recent decision to no longer require job applicants to have a university degree. From what I see in corroborating stories, the little catch is that this seems to be limited to the publisher’s UK operations.

The firm wants to have a more varied intake of staff and suggests there is no clear link between holding a degree and performance in a job.

[…]

Last autumn, professional services firm Deloitte changed its selection process so recruiters did not know where candidates went to school or university.

Ernst and Young has scrapped a requirement for school leavers to have the equivalent of three B grades at A-level or graduates to have an upper second class degree.

The accountancy firm is removing all academic and education details from its application process.

PricewaterhouseCoopers earlier this year also announced that it would stop using A-levels grades as a threshold for selecting graduate recruits.

As you might imagine from the references to A-levels, these decisions all appear to be limited to the UK operations of these companies.

Still, it got me wondering with all the recent conversation about the legality and morality of unpaid internship practices in the U.S., as well as data showing that arts internships appear to benefit people with higher socio-economic status, should this be the sort of practice the arts should be considering?

My thinking here is that while you don’t need to have a degree or be enrolled to do an internship, internship plus degree tends to have better job prospects which represent a larger financial investment. I’d venture to guess many of the jobs college degree holders are getting can be accomplished by someone with a high school degree and an internship/short training period.

There are definitely different philosophical approaches to job training between the U.S. and the UK. For example, the school leaver program for Deloitte and Ernst and Young make not going to university appear preferable to attending and promises a rigorous 5 year training program. These are typical choices for students in the UK. A quick search for school leaver programs shows similar ones at IBM, Rolls Royce, Pret A Manger and others.

Two years ago I wrote about the UK’s National Skills Academy apprenticeship training programs for creative industries.

These sort of training options are not as widely available in the U.S. The closest we have are co-op programs, which are few and far between and barely promoted as an option.

But while the method of delivering training may be different, the question about whether a university degree best provides that training still remains, regardless of which country we are talking about.

One observation made in the story about Penguin’s decision resonates pretty strongly in relation to the challenges faced by the arts. (my emphasis)

Neil Morrison, human resources director, says they want talented staff “regardless of background”.

“This is the starting point for our concerted action to make publishing far, far more inclusive than it has been to date,” says Mr Morrison.

“We believe this is critical to our future – to publish the best books that appeal to readers everywhere, we need to have people from different backgrounds with different perspectives and a workforce that truly reflects today’s society.”

There is already a conversation about how paid internships help to open up opportunities to people from a wider socio-economic range. Perhaps the next aspect of the conversation needs to include an examination into whether a degree really is absolutely necessary to success in the job or not.

The arts are frequently accused of being irrelevant because people don’t see themselves and their stories being portrayed. Penguin saw requiring a university degree as literally inhibiting their ability to do just that.

The Stakeholders Are Watching

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In Non Profit Quarterly, Ruth McCambridge wrote a pretty involved comparison between the stakeholder revolts which reversed board decisions to close San Diego Opera and Sweet Briar College.

There is a lot to be gleaned about how popular support has apparently turned things around for the two organizations. It is worth reading on that basis alone.

There were a few things that popped out at me as general lessons, not necessarily dependent on these scenarios, about the environment in which arts organizations are operating.

First was an observation by current San Diego board chair, Carol Lazier, that:

“…the community was absolutely furious. We had a great opera company, a cultural jewel, and no one wanted to lose it. We had people who didn’t even go to the opera who were fighting closure, saying, ‘This is not right—this is owned by the public; this is not owned by the small group of people on the inside.’”

It is easy to have mixed feelings about this response because indignation by people who never attended doesn’t pay your bills. Yet we clearly know that arts organizations are viewed as a community asset by both individuals and businesses. People may not actually participate in your activities, but they like the idea of living in a community that has an opera, symphony and art museum. Businesses and individuals will relocate to places with these amenities.

While the presence of your arts organization is definitely an intangible asset, the value of which is difficult to quantify to politicians and others who want to cut arts funding, this type of reaction does allow you to answer the question about how your community would be impacted if your organization didn’t exist.

Another observation made about San Diego Opera board governance provided some insight into a downside of a “Get, Give or Get Off” policy of board membership.

The San Diego Opera was one of those organizations where having a large number of people on the board was a function of fundraising. You pay x amount of money and you’re on the board, and no one wants to alienate any of those folk with contentious conversations that cause discomfort. But that is certainly not a good modus operandi for an organization facing the whitewater of the twenty-first-century cultural organization. And, it was not only the business model that had to change but the governance model, too.

The implication that a non profit needs to have a governance structure that allows it to be nimble is something to seriously consider. Scrutiny of non-profits is shifting focus about the role of a board away from fund raising and toward effective governance.

The San Diego Opera board went from 53 to 24 in the course of a few days due to resignations. A quick look at the opera website shows it continues to maintain those numbers two years later.

Not only is there no correlation between the ability to make large donations and the ability to effectively govern an organization, some people may have no interest in doing so. This made me recall a story told by an executive director about a large donor who showed relief when presented the option of NOT serving on the board because they didn’t see it as a reward at all.

Finally, in relation to the Sweet Briar closure, I was quite intrigued to learn that generally those who most supported the closure were from among the earliest graduates. When they attended, a women’s college was the only option for higher education. Now that a woman could attend anywhere they wished, they didn’t feel single gender higher education was relevant any longer.

It is the younger generations that intentionally chose to attend Sweet Briar when hundreds of other options existed that have been the most invested in keeping the institution open.

This information brought to mind the question that arts organizations have increasingly been challenged to ask themselves over the last few decades: Given that so many other options exist for people, are you providing those who intentionally choose to engage with the arts a reason to continue to do so?

The example of Sweet Briar seems to illustrate that answering in the affirmative is what turns people into invested stakeholders.

Reaching The Unknown Non-Participant

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I almost threw money away, literally.

I received piece a mail last week bearing the logo of a state university indicating a survey was enclosed. I was just about to throw it away when I became curious to see if they were doing a market survey to gauge the educational needs of the community.

When I opened it, I saw it was a public health survey. Just as I was about to throw that away, a $2 bill fluttered out on to my coffee table. I understand why they may have chosen to include the money as an inducement to complete the survey, but I wonder how much money has literally been thrown away in unopened envelopes around the state this week.

I feel some empathy for those administering the survey because this illustrates the effort and expense you have to go in order to reach people with whom you don’t have a relationship.

One of the challenges the arts have is to have a conversation with those who aren’t participating in order to learn why they aren’t. There will always be people who will never participate in an activity, regardless of what you do, but there are many who will be willing but do not participate for various reasons.

These reasons might be lack awareness; currently lacking the time due to child rearing obligations which will abate in a few years; perceive they lack the time, knowledge, etc, for whom opportunities exist and can be communicated or created.

Reaching these unknown people to survey them or even communicate with them is even more difficult now than a decade or so ago. So many people lack landlines that there is no destination for even an annoying robocall to reach.

Thanks to the option to receive financial statements, bills and other communications online, it is much easier to identify the few pieces of postal mail that is relevant to you without even opening them. (Those emails about winning $5 million in the Irish-Nigerian lottery that was liberated after a palace coup dispossessed the prince of an oil rich nation still almost fool me.)

As we can see, even trying to bribe people to participate is fraught with its own challenges.

My feeling is that an effective campaign to reach the unreached is going to require much more personal interactions either with organizations reaching out to individuals in an involved, relationship building effort or calling upon people with whom they already have a relationship to reach out to people and encourage them to at least respond to a request for information.

Certainly, technology can facilitate this by allowing people to spread the word quickly over social media. A degree of trust in all involved parties needs to be there. I am thinking, in part, about the post I made last week about a greater lack of willingness to trade privacy for benefits than we have been lead to believe.

It would be great if someone could figure out how to create survey that engaged as many people as asking about what color lightsaber you would wield while yielding, effective, meaningful, actionable results. (Which of Yo Yo Ma’s cellos are you?)

Until then, it may take a lot of asking.

Arts Need A Standardized Curriculum To Combat Patron Anxiety

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Last summer Vox had a post, Everyone can be an opera buff. Here are 7 steps to get started.

It got me thinking that creating page like this on an arts organization’s website could be a much more constructive approach to engaging audiences than the “How To Act When You Visit” lists found on many arts organizations’ webpages.

While a number of arts orgs have very entertaining and humorous approaches to such lists, a page like Vox’s can serve multiple purposes. For example, while answering the question about seats, Vox includes a picture of the audience with most people wearing tuxes and dresses, but also features a young woman in a football jersey and someone taking pictures with their camera.

This image provides a clearer sense of what people might expect when attending a performance. The website may say it is okay to wear jeans, but the reality may be, if the venue doesn’t manipulate the photo shoot to reflect their aspirations, most people in the orchestra section aren’t wearing jeans.

What I appreciated about the Vox article was the way the advice about approaching opera was given. One of my initial thoughts was that a venue could appeal to younger audiences by creating a page that replicated the feel a Buzzfeed listicle with its animated GIFs.

What the Buzzfeed format lacks, however, is the additional depth of an informational article.

The first suggestion takes an entirely practical approach, for example:

1) Pick your first opera for maximum fun, not for what the curriculum says

Picking your first opera can be paralyzing, but don’t just choose one from the canon. When you take a kid to her first movie, you’d opt for a kids’ movie rather than jumping into Citizen Kane. Same here. You don’t need to earn a PhD, you need to get your money’s worth — and that means picking a show you might like.

Since your opera options depend on where you live, look at what’s offered and get some advice. “Call the company,” Plotkin suggests. He says the box office will be happy to simply tell you which opera in a season is best for a neophyte…

Also, see if there’s something you have a natural affinity for. To take one example, this season the Washington Opera is premiering a revised version of Philip Glass’s Appomattox. You won’t find that on any Wikipedia lists of classic operas — but if you’re obsessed with the progression of civil rights or the sound of Philip Glass, it’s probably a better first opera than a classic like Carmen.

and from the Third suggestion (my emphasis):

3) Listen to the music and Wikipedia the plot

Avoiding spoilers is the wrong approach for opera. Often, operas are in another language, so you want the plot in your mind already. That will help you appreciate the performances, setting, and spectacle instead of trying to parse who’s actually talking. Your program book will have a summary, too, but it’s best to just glance online the night before you go.

We’re trained to expect prestige entertainment to have emotional nuance, challenging intellectual themes, and difficult narratives. Opera doesn’t have that. It’s like the best episode of Scandal you’ve ever seen, so just don’t sweat the plot and enjoy everything else. People who like opera can make their enthusiasm seem pretentious, but opera isn’t pretentious at all. It’s literally screaming for you to love it.

I have been debating for awhile whether to tackle this subject as a post here or on ArtsHacker as an idea people might try. I decided to post here because it occurred to me that the idea could do with a little more development before it is used.

Specifically, it might be good if each arts discipline develop some standard concepts they wanted reinforced so that no matter what website people visited, they would receive the same underlying message. So there might be five standard concepts an arts organization would intersperse with 3-4 localized tips that draw attention to some feature of the physical setting or program enhancement.

I guess what I am suggesting is almost akin to standardized education curriculum, without the baggage that subject seems to have acquired. Everyone wouldn’t use the same content since every locale and organization has its own character. They would make an effort to include messaging on the chosen topics.

It would really just be a matter of addressing discipline wide anxieties people may have. Many arts organizations do a pretty good job of addressing the concern about what to wear, but aren’t as effective with questions about enjoyment and comprehension. Uniform guidelines and sharing suggestions may help change that.

The Vox article about opera deals with those questions indirectly when it advocates reading and listening ahead of time; urges not worrying about spoilers; saying opera is “like the best episode of Scandal you’ve ever seen”; and “Appreciate the things that make opera like a Broadway show on steroids.”

It is smart to handle these ideas indirectly. It is one thing to be direct when answering a question about what to wear, but it can be incredibly easy to come off as condescending and offensive when directly answering “What if I don’t understand it or enjoy it?”

Of course providing a webpage isn’t the only option available. There are some great video resources as well like the one on visiting a museum I noted last month.

So let it percolate in your mind. What are the basic issues your discipline needs to address? What are effective direct/indirect ways of getting that message across?

No, Everyone Is NOT Giving It Up For Free Stuff

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Last Wednesday I made a post about non-profit arts organizations deserving to expect a little more of their customer relationship management (CRM) software. I briefly referenced the fact that collecting a lot of data on people could potentially become creepy and intrusive.

This drew the attention of Drew McManus who expounded upon the idea in a post of his own, saying:

I can’t remember the last time ethics were part of a discussion about CRM capabilities but it is never a bad idea to ask “just because we can use technology to do a thing, does it mean we should?” Consequently, it’s good to see these questions work their way into larger discussions about features and functionality.

This idea dovetailed well with a recent study that suggested marketers are misrepresenting the American’s public willingness to trade privacy for discounts.

“..a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data—and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs…Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.

By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable.

Among their findings are that:

• 91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that “If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing.”

• 71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that “It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge.”

• 55% disagree (38% of them strongly) that “It’s okay if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the services they provide for me.”

The authors of the study note there is an inconsistency between these responses and actual behavior. Contrary to the third finding, when it comes to supermarket discount cards, 40% of those who don’t agree with the third statement participate in grocery store discount programs. The authors say this inconsistency arises from both the sense of resignation and a lack of understanding about what merchants and websites are legally allowed to do.

Among the examples they give are that 49% of people think a supermarket and 69% think a pharmacy needs your permission to sell your data. 65% think that if a website has a privacy policy, it means they won’t sell your data. All these are untrue.

“55% do not know it is legal for an online store to charge different people different prices at the same time of day.” (The same erroneous belief is held by 62% of people regarding off-line/physical stores.)

The study is interesting to read because it discusses how the research conducted by marketing and consulting firms finds people express a strong discomfort with the way personal data is handled. Observing the inconsistency between the expression of discomfort and action, the firms have chosen to interpret this as consciously choosing to trade privacy for benefits. While the study authors suggest that the irrational choices are due to resignation and ignorance, it is difficult to clearly discern the truth.

If nothing else, like teen promiscuity statistics, this trade off study helps to provide a sense that no, everyone else isn’t necessarily doing it.

I almost wish I had held off writing my post on CRM last week because a day later, I had a real life illustration of what the study was suggesting. I was presenting our board of directors some examples of the CRM capabilities available through the ticketing software services we had been considering. The examples contained a list of tickets and donations made by a hypothetical customer along with standard address information and notes about relationships with some people and employers.

Because the example was meant to illustrate the history of an avid attendee over the course of a number of years as they purchased tickets, merchandise and made donations, the bulk of the information was rather repetitive and mundane. For example, there were a lot of $2 donations for what was either a tacked on restoration fee or the guy rounding up his bill by donating to that fund.

The issue was, this made record of activity rather long and cover a few pages. People were concerned about amount of data that appeared was being collected on a person (all be much of it in $2 increments). It didn’t take long for someone to point out that far more data was being collected by Amazon, other retailers and websites than actually appeared on the sample profile I had provided. By then other people had already begun expressing resignation that this sort of thing was inescapable.

This reaction left me a little anxious that my hopes of making fundraising and marketing efforts more effective with better data collection and evaluation might get impeded right from the start. Later, thinking about it in the context of the trade-off study, I could see some benefit in providing some transparency and actually encouraging some oversight of the data usage by the board. That way they could better understand the process and provide assurances to the greater community that we were handling the information responsibly. Hopefully such assurances would result in increased confidence and support of the organization.

Info You Can Use: Getting Meaningful Feedback From Your Community

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Last month, I wrote about attending a session at creative industry conference where Marc Folk, Executive Director of The Arts Commission in Toledo, spoke about learning that one needs to go out to the community as a guest, asking to be hosted at meetings, gatherings, etc.

At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly how that idea translated into practice. Initially I envisioned something akin to the  electoral process in NH where people host intimate meetings with political candidates in their homes or perhaps being invited to speak at a community or church meeting.

I also thought that he might have meant participating as a true guest at first where you weren’t necessarily the focus of attention as a speaker, etc, but just invited to sit quietly and observe the first time out.

Marc had mentioned sometimes there was a tendency to view yourself as “riding in on a white horse” to save a community so I thought being the guest of honor at a meeting might reinforce that conceit.

Just last week, Margy Waller addressed the same issue in an Americans for the Arts blog post, “We Are From the Arts and We’re Here to Help.”

“In one of the sessions, a group of participants had a passionate discussion on using the word “help.” They noted that it really isn’t possible to have a conversation about an equitable community if one party is offering to help the other. The word help itself implies that one group has more than the other—more to offer, more knowledge, more resources, more capacity, and so on. Using the word help shifts the perceived balance of power—in a way likely to shut down true collaboration and partnership efforts.

The solution? If you find yourself using the word help when talking about the role of arts in community, stop. Listen carefully and ask whether this is really the way toward an equitable community.”

Curious about the process he and his staff used, I reached out to Marc just prior to the holidays to learn more, summarizing my impressions and assumptions noted above. With his permission, I am reprinting a portion of his response:

Our approach utilized a combination of techniques, including what you listed above.

As far as process we first identified a local community partner.  If possible, it was a community center or arts center in the neighborhood.  We then reached out to the leadership of the center or another community group if the center did not have leadership, or there was no center and asked for a meeting.  We then met with them and/or their board leadership to ask for their help in organizing a community meeting.

Once a meeting was called, we went back into the community centers/host venues and held “a listening tour” if you will.  An important technique was that we hired a facilitator/consultant that facilitated these sessions.  This created a degree of separation between the Arts Commission staff and the community issue and allowed for a more open and candid dialog from the community.

Out of this, we became more connected with “culture” or activities in these neighborhoods which has led to the building of genuine relationships.

A copy of the plan can be found here.

The reports from the neighborhood conversations can be found at the back of the plan.

I think the most important lesson is about language syntax/communication and authentic relationship development.  My point at the conference about the white horse or “going into these neighborhoods” revealed much about our perspectives and gave great clue to where we needed to start our work.

For those that are interested, the neighborhood reports start around page 50 of the strategic plan.

I greatly appreciate Marc taking the time to outline the process for me. The importance of involving a facilitator was something I suspected in the back of my mind that he confirmed.

Based on his response, I have already started a conversation with my board president about how we might adapt this in our own community. I have mentioned to colleagues at other arts organizations I had some ideas I wanted to run past them in the hopes of establishing a cooperative listening tour.

What Is On Your Customer Relationship Management Wishlist?

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At my day job, we have been looking into the possibility of getting a new ticketing system. We have passed the RFP (request for proposal) deadline and are evaluating the submissions. One of the areas we are really focusing on is customer relationship management (CRM) features because keeping track of all the ways a person interacts with us is increasingly important…and increasingly difficult.

This whole process reminded me of an article that caught my eye last summer, Why Nonprofits Deserve CRM Innovation. Author Gabe Cooper’s central thesis is that there is nearly $340 billion in donations being directed toward non-profits annually, yet the available CRM tools are oriented toward business sales rather than building relationships that connect with a donor’s passions.

“Charities and social enterprises face growing pressure to cut through marketing clutter and connect personally with younger Millennial donors. Their software can no longer afford to see donors as “leads” or “transactions”; instead, they must focus on the personal passions of each giver.”

He identifies five areas in which improvements to CRM will benefit non-profits.

Generosity-specific predictive data analytics. Nonprofit CRMs must predict and customize each donor’s experience. Successful systems will combine tried-and-true fund-raising data analytics with social media signals and even current events to create a holistic, personalized relationship with each giver.

Giver-managed relationships. Nonprofit CRMs must enable two-way communication and create open conversations with givers about the success of individual projects. Nonprofits can no longer report on cold institutional metrics.

Completely removing the “sales” paradigm. Nonprofit CRMs shouldn’t be modeled on sales/transactions. Instead, they should focus on long-term relationships around generosity, social engagement, advocacy, etc.

Open APIs and integrations. The days of monolithic donor management systems are over. Nonprofits want to use best-in-breed tools for email marketing, donation processing, etc. The new CRMs should embrace these choices and provide easy integration.

Increase efficiency and decrease overhead. Nonprofit CRMs must help reduce the unnecessary costs common to charities. Back-office tasks like donation importing, gift receipting, and foundation giving management can suck up hours of staff time and create massive overhead. The new CRM needs to understand the very specific needs of nonprofits and provide efficiency tools that allow charities to go about the work of accomplishing their mission.

I am sure there would be a lot of people cheering if the activities listed in his last point became much easier. Given that donor acknowledgment letters need to go out this month, it would probably move to the top of everyone’s wish list.

I had also been thinking that it might be useful to be able to record notes from every interaction whether it be phone call, face to face interactions, emails and social media. These things may already be possible in a way that doesn’t treat them as sales calls.

I wondered if any existing tool allowed you to record indirect signs of investment in your organization like people mentioning or tagging you on social media. Can you take screenshots of positive comments and electronically file them away?

I was a little leery at the mention of combining “fund-raising data analytics with social media signals.” That phrase made me wonder if he envisioned a system that tracked the social media activity of anyone who engaged with you and sent you tips noting what a person was passionate about. I could see that getting really stalker creepy fast.

On the other hand, if you have entered keywords into someone’s file regarding what they were passionate about and the system alerted you when a related topic was trending on social media, that might be okay. Or if the system collected keywords from the social media profiles of people who engaged with you and then spit out a report letting you know 58% of those people are passionate about animal rescue, Indian food and bluegrass music, that could also be help inform strategy development without feeling overly intrusive.

Are there any features on your wishlist you would love to see as part of a CRM package?

What To Unlearn To Be More Creative

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Dan Pink tweeted a story by Art Markman on the Inc magazine site, “4 Things You Learned in School That Make You Less Creative.”

I often talk about how artists and arts organizations can exhibit their value to the business community by providing training in various areas like conflict resolution and creativity. As I was reading this article, I recognized that it provided a good basis for conducting a training session. The content can be useful to either to overtly say, these things you learned as a kid run counter to what we are trying to achieve or just to help a trainer understand some of the socialization and training people have received which makes it difficult to embrace the creative process.

One of the things that really ought to be acknowledged is that there is a degree of “do as I say, not as I do” when it comes to arts classes. The assessment structure in most school classrooms (versus classes you might take at the local arts center) impose expectations that actually run counter to, and may impede, the creative process. Students are told creativity is a gradual process by which you learn from your mistakes–so hurry up and make sure it happens by the time grades are due.

Even people with formal arts degrees need to keep some of these points in mind so they don’t pressure themselves with unrealistic expectations.

The first lesson Markman lists is, There is an answer. Find it and move on. He makes the point that creativity is about finding answers to questions no one has thought to ask and that there are many potential solutions to a problem.

This is probably the one lesson that runs entirely counter to life experience. There is rarely a single answer to a problem in life. Even if there appears to be, you can’t discard it the moment you have used it. At the very least, you have to have a sense of what to do when your go-to solution fails.

Markham notes that schools teach us to be risk/mistake averse. Basically, the fewer mistakes you make on a test, the more successful you are regarded as being. Risk taking is frequently mentioned these days as an crucial element of the creative process so it may not come as news that this important for people to embrace.

Markham also mentions the class room lessons of Study what is going to be on the exam and Make steady progress. Both are intertwined with the previous two lessons. Schools value being able to perform with few mistakes on demand, but don’t emphasize retention of information and skills as strongly. Not only is retention not highly valued, but applying knowledge in a novel manner is barely encouraged at all. Yet that is considered the very definition of creativity.

Accepting mistakes requires that you accept that your progress won’t be steady. Even when you aren’t making perceptible mistakes or experiencing setbacks, creativity requires patience with status quo long enough for your mind to make the leap to another of the many potential solutions.

When I write about creativity, I often emphasize this last point about creativity requiring time and patience. The tools we may use like brain storming sessions, free play, improv, change of venue, etc are merely ways to carve out time and brain processing power for creative endeavors. They don’t guarantee a creative outcome of themselves.

Being open to making mistakes and accepting slow progress may be the most difficult elements of creative practice to teach because minimize mistakes and making steady progress are two lessons that are rewarded in life. If you produce work quickly without many mistakes at your job, you can set yourself up to receive a promotion and more challenging projects.

When Honesty Is Better Than Doing Your Best

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Back in September, Seth Godin wrote a short post on the idea of doing one’s best.

It’s a pretty easy way to let ourselves (or someone else) off the hook. “Hey, you did your best.”

[…]

By defining “our best” as the thing we did when we merely put a lot of effort into a task, I fear we’re letting ourselves off the hook.

[…]

It’s entirely possible that it’s not worth the commitment or the risk or the fear to go that far along in creating something that’s actually our best. But when we make that compromise, we should own it. “It’s not worth doing my best” is actually more honest and powerful than failing while being sort of focused.

Since it is the beginning of the new year, a time of making resolutions to do better, I thought it was an appropriate time to call attention to this idea.

(By the way, what does it say that I took a short post about doing your best and abridged it further, thereby lowering expectations of the reader’s attention span?)

I chose this post of Godin’s and edited it as I did because I wanted to focus on the sincerity inherent in being realistic rather than being idealistically aspirational.

There is already a lot of idealism in the non-profit arts, especially when it comes to creation, and there is nothing wrong with that. If there is, I am among the chief offenders.

There is also a lot of idealism in non-profit arts organization mission statements that promise to offer the “highest quality, best-in-class, world-class, superior” etc., product or experience.

In the face of declining donations and revenue generating attendance, groups often don’t have the resources to provide the highest quality product and experience. Instead of making a resolution for the new year to strive for some nebulous standard of excellence†, I think it is worth engaging in a little self-examination along the lines Godin suggests and acknowledge where you are not providing the best.

For example, are you offering the very best events your budget will allow, even though that means there will only be four events a year? Or are you making compromises so that you can offer a wider variety of experiences over the course of 8 events?

Is your staff trying to do more with less or have you scaled back services due to budget constraints?

An honest assessment of this situation rather than continuing to mouth platitudes about offering the highest quality interactions may help you better understand the implications of these trade offs. If you can say, yes we decided it wasn’t worth keeping the office open as many hours six days a week, you take responsibility for choosing not to serve a segment of your community or at least choosing a course that makes it difficult for some to receive service.

While it can be disappointing to face the areas in which you are falling short, it is a more constructive approach than claiming you are at a loss to know why attendance is falling or a demographic of the community is failing to engage with you. You can better address these issues if you have a good sense of the causes behind them.

†If you have a well-defined plan for achieving excellence with criteria, milestones and resources dedicated to achieving it, by all means go for it!

What Does It Take To Do Your Job?

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So here we are on the crux of a new year. People start toying with the idea of changing their lives and perhaps their careers.

What would you tell someone who wanted to enter your career about your job?

Yes, in many disciplines supply outstrips demand and there may not be a lot of respect for artists so the first thing many people would say is either have a high tolerance for disappointment and poverty or find some other line.

At the same time, one of the reasons why there isn’t a lot of respect for artists is that people don’t understand what the job requires. People in the arts industry aren’t particularly adept at talking about their career path. The general public really only perceives instant successes when someone emerges on the scene and not the 10 years of mistakes and experimentation.

That said, when you think about the answers to the following, think of it in terms of minimum qualifications for anyone, not the qualifications you hold.

What educational background is required/expected?
Where are good places to get that education?

What kind of experience is required/expected?
Where are good places to get that experience?

Where are the jobs? Who does the hiring?

Will there be jobs in this field in 5 years? 15 years?
Should I be pursuing skills in those areas instead or concurrently with skills for today’s jobs?

What are the “big names” in the field?
Who are the people I should be using as role models if they aren’t the same people or are not suited to my goals.

What personal characteristics are needed for success in this field?
Include mental, emotional and spiritual if necessary. Does one need to work well in a team
or tolerate long periods of working alone in a studio under their own motivation?

What physical characteristics are needed for success in this field?
Are there are any people who have achieved success without those characteristics? (dancer’s body, pianist’s fingers, etc)

What are common misconceptions about this job/field and what it takes to be successful?

Any other questions you would suggest? Any answers you want to offer that may run counter to common expectations?

Practical Aspect of Grail Quests

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Some years ago I wrote a “road less taken” entry encouraging people not to measure their worth against the progress others have made by quoting a passage from Joseph Campbell recounting a story about the start of the Holy Grail quest:

‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’

“No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”

Much of what I said in that entry stands, but there is the practical side of me that says such idealism is all well and good, but hacking a new path through the forest is tough work. Who is doing the hacking? Has someone been hired to help? Who is paying, feeding and sheltering them? How are they supporting themselves?

Are villagers following them, donating to support their holy endeavor or are they scoffing at them for blazing a trail to places no one in the community is particularly interested in traveling?

Grail quests are fine when it comes to the individual but get increasingly complicated the more people you start to get involved.

The one advantage non-profit arts organizations have over the grail seekers is that there was only one goal for the latter to pursue. Arts organizations can choose from many grails and myriad paths to tread that others have not.

The lessons of my initial post still stand, however. When a quest is lead by a committee, it is easy to get bogged down with discussions about changing the focus of the quest and taking what appears to be an easier, well traveled, path given the wear and tear of the last few years on people and equipment and what supplies remain.

It is easy to be distracted (and almost seduced) by false representations of success if you don’t have people to keep you on track.

Resolve To Be More Respected in 2016

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As I was looking back in my archives for some content to post about, I came across Dan Gioia’s 2007 commencement address at Stanford.

He acknowledges there had been a little controversy about his choice as commencement speaker due to his lack of celebrity.

If you weren’t aware he was the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003-2009, you may have proven his point.

He notes that at one time, public figures came from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

[…]

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Gioia doesn’t entirely blame the fickle nature of the media and general public:

Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

It started me thinking that perhaps things have improved marginally since 2007 given that astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson has developed a profile as a public figure.

Now as we move into 2016, I was thinking that between the current thought that artists need to embrace more entrepreneurial practices and the fact that control of media and communication channels are so decentralized, it may be possible for a wider array of artists and intellectuals to realize success investing more effort increase their profile.

It may not necessarily be “themselves” that they need to put forth

Dali may have received recognition for his talent as a visual artist, but he also cultivated DALI! as a separate persona from Salvador Dali.

Similarly, there is the Lady Gaga who wears skirt steaks as a skirt who is slightly different from the Lady Gaga that sings Sinatra and duets with Tony Bennett who is different from Stefani Germanotta.

Granted, sustaining those persona takes a lot of will, energy and time and not everyone is interested in that. Nor do they necessarily need to.

For 2016 it will be enough to resolve to raise your personal profile among those who live around you. Raise awareness among those who don’t know you, let those who do, know you better.

When You Hit The Sculpture, Break Right Past The Expressionists

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I am traveling to see family for the holidays so I have a couple retrospective posts scheduled to cover my absence.

If you are traveling or just have a little time off over the holidays, maybe you might want to try something new like visiting a museum or visiting a museum you haven’t been to before.

Back in 2007 I posted an entry that contained links to posts that Tyler Cowen and Donald Pittenger had written about how to walk through an art museum.

About a 18 months ago, The Art Assignment made a video about visiting art museums.

The primary content of each is interesting, but there is some really great stuff in the comments sector of each, especially The Art Assignment video.

If you ever wanted proof that how people enjoy art is dependent upon their relationship with the idea of art and the people with whom they are experiencing it, it is all there.

Everyone has a different rules for themselves when entering a gallery, but it is clear that the social rules they set for themselves also influence their enjoyment.

One person writes that because his style and that of his significant other differ, he spends a lot of time waiting for her at the portal to the next gallery. Another person says their rule is not to accompany or wait for each other at all other than to rendezvous at an agreed upon time.

After reading all the content, I started to think that anyone who says viewing art is a passive experience is a prisoner of their own rules and expectations because there are plenty of options available. (One of the more extreme essentially advocated a zone defense of whatever you were looking at to prevent others from encroaching) May those options need to be promoted more widely.

I’m Selling Out!

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Erm, I mean, I am featured on Goldstar’s Selling Out blog. A post with an interview they did with me went up online yesterday.  I had a lot to say and I give them credit for including it all.

They contacted me with the request right after Thanksgiving so it is been hectic preparing for that, plus writing my own blog postings, doing Christmas shopping….

In addition, Barry Hessenius asked me to write a guest post about what I had learned over the course of my career for Barry’s Blog.

Keep your eyes open for it. My guess is that it will come out some time around the new year. I guess I still have a lot to say because there is only about three sentences overlap between the post I did for him and the Selling Out interview.

I will be heading off to visit family for the holidays starting tomorrow. Not to worry, I have prepared and scheduled posts to appear as normal.

Hope everyone has a great holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

It’s Not About Our Great Dark Ale

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About a week ago I was at a conference that was addressing creative placemaking and revitalizing communities. Mary Cusick from TourismOhio made a presentation on the new tourism campaign that is being worked on.

As she talked about marketing the state, I was interested to see how similar the attitudes research participants expressed about Ohio were to attitudes people express about the arts.

While people were generally neutral about Ohio, having no positive or negative associations about the state in general, they did feel there was a degree of tribalism. If you aren’t plugged in to the Ohio State University culture, erm I’m sorry, THE Ohio State University culture, you feel left out. In addition to the stress on THE, there is also the O-H—I-O cheer, among other identifiers that one can invoke at any occasion over a fairly large geographic area and receive a response.

We know that people have similar feelings about the arts with language, behavior and particular dress code which feel exclusive.

Another thing that Mary Cusick noted is that nearly every travel destination ad features the beauty and majesty of their outdoor attractions with people doing outdoorsy stuff.

However, research shows that people are aspirational in their responses about what they want to do on vacation. When you ask people about their plans, they talk about outdoors activities, but when you sit them down and ask what they actually have done and what the most important goal of a vacation is, the answers are a bit different.

And by sit them down, I mean literally. The tourism office research involved talking to people from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania in their living rooms. They showed us video excerpts of the interviews.

I had a sense that the responses on arts participation surveys may also be on the aspirational side and was a little depressed that there wasn’t funding to do deep research like TourismOhio did. (I will say that part of me suspects arts participation surveys have included that degree of deep surveying. It’s just that seeing even brief video of the process during a presentation made a deeper impression than being told 100 people were surveyed in their homes)

What was important to people when they traveled on vacation was that it was an opportunity to de-stress and connect with family and friends. These are exactly the reasons given by people surveyed about what they valued from participation in an arts or creative activity. (graphics on pages 10 & 13).

Cusick reinforced Trevor O’Donnell’s constant message about advertising focusing on the patron/participant/consumer experience when she talked about the philosophy behind the ad campaigns being developed. She said it wasn’t about the great roller coasters, microbreweries and awesome ice cream shops in the state. It is about getting scared out of your wits, sharing your darkest secrets with your best friend over a pint of dark ale, and ice cream mustaches on your kids’ faces.

The print and broadcast pieces she showed us were all right in line with that approach.

Interesting and valuable insights to think about moving forward.

If You Were Really Creative, You Would Already Be Embezzling From Me

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About a week ago, I think it was Dan Pink that tweeted a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article titled “Why Creative People Are More Likely to Be Dishonest.” I bookmarked it, but before I moved on I retweeted the link with a comment that this was an aspect of creativity we shouldn’t tout too frequently.

Creativity is getting a lot of attention these days. When I saw Tom Borrup speak yesterday, he mentioned that one of the few sectors not spending a lot of time researching creativity was arts and culture. Business, he said, sees creativity as an important asset in the effort to gain a competitive edge and is investing in studying it.

The researchers in the HBR article found that people who believed creativity was something only a few possessed were more likely to be dishonest than those who felt creativity was a talent everyone shared. The researchers said for the less honest people it appeared the idea they had a rare skill lead to a sense of entitlement that different standards applied to them.

In order to combat this, the researchers suggest companies should create a sense that creativity is something everyone shares and can tap into; focus on the team being a collective of creative individuals that succeed together; don’t give people special treatment and

Carefully define what creativity is and is not. Our results demonstrate that the definition of creativity is not fixed and can be changed. While creativity involves a certain degree of risk-taking, managers should make clear that taking risks does not mean ignoring the rules and moral guidelines.

I was pleased to see the idea that everyone can be creative being promulgated. If the arts and cultural sector is going to have a long term goal of disseminating this concept, it is helpful if the message is being spread by entities and in situations that are not perceived as being aligned with arts and culture organizations.

I emphasized the point of defining what creativity is and is not because it often feels like I read about businesses who equate creativity with the risk taking and out of the box thinking that is going to catapult them to the next stage or whatever. Most of the time creativity doesn’t really step out of the box at all but reinterprets the contents of the box to emphasize different elements.

Nearly every social media app can be described as providing the ability to share images, videos and short messages with friends. What separates Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Pintrest, Snapchat etc from each other is what features each focuses on.

It is probably important to point out, as the people in the article’s comment section do, that not all creative people are dishonest and not all dishonest people exhibit creativity outside of being adept at masking their dishonesty. It is also easy for people to feel entitled for reasons unrelated to recognition of their creativity.

In a number of past posts, I have noted that there is no magic formula that will engender creativity in people and organizations over the course of a short seminar. Creativity is gained by practice over time, a sentiment echoed by HBR article commenter Linda Adams.

Raise your hand if you have had an experience that resembled the first sentence:

A lot of people think creativity is simply brainstorming a bunch of ideas and that’s it—that’s where writers get “I’ve got this great idea. You write it and I’ll split it 50-50.”

But creativity is far more than coming up with ideas. It’s executing them—which is a skill that can take years or decades to learn–and taking the dynamic leaps into the unknown to see if something works. It’s taking a risk because something that we try might not work at all, but trying itself is part of the creative process and a learning experience. But most people are not going to take that much effort, and those who try are sometimes surprised about how much hard work it is.

Humility In Service

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I was attending a creative industry conference today which gave me a lot to think about. One of the topics that came up was creative placemaking. Right now that is a big push for improving communities around the country. ArtPlace is one of the bigger efforts to this end.

However, one of the things keynote speaker Tom Borrup noted was that often placemaking has an element of placetaking.

It is widely acknowledged that gentrification displaces artists which planted the seeds for vibrancy within neighborhoods. The process of placemaking seeks to improve conditions in neighborhoods which may end up displacing a wider spectrum of residents beyond artists. Even if it doesn’t immediately displace them, the placemaking vision may implicitly be imposing a different type of art and culture than already exists there.

Borrup suggested one of the most important questions to ask is whose art and culture is being employed in the placemaking effort. Should there be an effort at placekeeping? That is, an intentional effort to determine what should be left in place rather than replaced.

This reminded me of the woman I wrote about two weeks ago who was selling a condo in San Francisco’s Mission District at below market rate. She was requiring the condo buyer to commit to a cultural promissory note to contribute to the community. One of the conditions I hadn’t mentioned was that she required the buyer not to complain about the Day of the Dead celebrations.

Whether that is a reasonable expectation of a property buyer or not, this shows a concern that the existing culture of the neighborhood not be disparaged or displaced by new residents.

Along the same lines, in another session Marc Folk, Executive Director of The Arts Commission in Toledo noted that arts people often talk about the necessity of going out into the community since the community doesn’t come to them. He said that he often approached that as if he was metaphorically riding out on his white horse to save the community.

He said after a time he learned that really first you needed to go out as a guest and ask to be hosted at meetings, gatherings, etc. which is a much more humble approach. I had visions of the electoral process in NH where people host intimate meetings with political candidates in their homes. Though I also suspect he may have meant being a true guest and not being the focus of attention at all the first few times out.

Similarly, in another session a panelist noted that after experiencing a lot of resistance from educators, they finally asked what they were doing wrong. They were told that generally arts organizations come along and ask the schools to participate in their programs rather than asking what initiatives the schools were pursuing that they could participate in. (I guess in some cases, arts organizations put schools into grants as program participants without even consulting with the schools.)

This general sentiment reminded me about the diversity panel I attended at the Arts Midwest conference this past Fall.  When I wrote about the session, I noted:

..the focus of engaging diverse communities has been on how the arts/cultural organization can benefit from the inclusion. This can make the effort feel disingenuous and leave people feeling marginalized. Few organizations can say why engaging diverse audiences is meaningful beyond seeking to expand sources of revenue.

The first step then is to articulate why it is important and what the organization’s concept of diversity is given that the term can encompass cultural, ethnic, social, sexual and other affinity groupings.

The Arts Midwest panel talked about consulting representatives of the segment that aligns with your concept and letting them tell you what is relevant to the community rather than engaging an artist or program and expecting/telling that segment they should find your offerings relevant to them.

If you think about what is required to do any of this, you realize that you need to take the approach of truly serving the community rather than doing things you think the community will like.

Internships, The Paid and The Unpaid

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I recently got around to reading the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) special report on internships in arts fields.

There is a lot of interesting findings in the 23 page report, including the (to me) dismaying news that 87% of those who did at least one arts administration internship were unpaid. That is the highest rate of unpaid internships in any of the categories.

What I was most interested in learning was the reality of the claim that the ability to participate in an internship was dependent on receiving support from families. Sure enough, even though there was negligible difference in the amount of debt accrued by students who did an internship and those who did not, those who could depend on support from families more frequently participated in an internship.

Sixty-seven percent of recent alumni who did not intern while enrolled in school indicated that parents or family helped pay for their education; the figure is 8% higher (75%) among alumni who did intern.

The gap in family support is similar between recent alumni who had unpaid internships and those who did not; 75% of former unpaid interns indicated they received such support, compared to only 67% for alumni who did not undertake an unpaid internship.

Gender, race and socioeconomic status also were factors in choosing to do an internship and whether it was paid or unpaid.

Women were more likely than men to have undertaken an internship during their undergraduate education (56% compared to 51%). While women and men were equally likely to ever have done paid internships, women were much more likely to have been unpaid interns (57% compared to 46% for men).

Black and Hispanic/Latino alumni were less likely to have done internships than their White and Asian counterparts. Black and Hispanic/Latino graduates were also slightly less likely to have done paid internships and more likely than White alumni to have done unpaid internships.

First-generation college graduates were less likely than non-first-generation college graduates to have been interns while enrolled in school (51% compared to 56%) as well as before or after graduation (paid or unpaid)…

SNAAP data are consistent with many commentators’ concerns about the intern economy in that women, Black, Hispanic/Latino, and first-generation college graduate arts alumni all appear to have held a disproportionate number of unpaid internships—which, as will be considered below, are tied to significantly weaker career payoffs than paid internships. However, one possible explanation for this over representation might be that these demographic groups tend to cluster in majors in which unpaid internships are more common than paid ones. For this reason, to further investigate the findings above, our study considered the subsample of recent design alumni

The report authors note that in the design sub-sample, the demographic trends are even more pronounced than within the general sample. (Page 9 if you want more detail.)

Most interestingly was their finding that paid internships were more valuable than unpaid internships when it came to finding jobs. Those who did an internship were more successful at finding a job than those who did not (66% vs 57% four months after graduation, 86% vs 77% one year after graduation.)

However, the authors,

“…find that paid internships are even more closely related to finding a job than unpaid internships.

[…]

Figure 6 shows that having an unpaid internship does not appear to be related to finding a job more quickly after graduation. Conversely, having a paid internship has consistently been related to finding a job more quickly after graduation. Recent graduates (2009–2013) who have done paid internships, during school or outside of school, have fared especially well compared to alumni who have never been paid interns, with 89% of the former finding work within one year of graduation compared to 77% for the latter.

Simply securing a paid internship doesn’t necessarily guarantee a job. The authors note that ambitious, talented internship seekers who secure a paid position may apply those same traits to a job search.

They may also be securing the paid internships thanks to family connections and a familiarity and ability to navigate social interactions and systems that first generation students and other demographic groups don’t possess or are comfortable with.

There is a lot of interesting data in the report. If nothing else, you can get a sense of what percentage of undergraduates in your discipline intern and what the paid versus unpaid numbers look like.

With the current conversation about inequity and exploitation related to internships, it can be easy to overlook the finding that those who participate in internships report a higher satisfaction with their training and education experience than those who don’t participate.

Which is not to say they wouldn’t be that much more satisfied if they were paid and treated a little better.

Oh Please Let Someone Start Singing Ode To Joy In The Produce Aisle

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On my Twitter feed I got a link to an announcement that a documentary on Knight Foundation’s Random Act of Culture program won a regional Emmy. As I watched the first brief video where Dennis Scholl talks about first getting the idea from a pop up opera performance in Valencia, Spain where they ended by holding a sign saying “So You Don’t Think You Like Opera?,” two questions came to mind.

The first is I wondered why people reacted so positively to having performers throw off their “mundane” identities and burst into action in public spaces, but will pass by Joshua Bell or Tasmin Little in street clothes playing in a railway station.

I am on record expressing disdain for the way the Joshua Bell situation was set up because it seemed positioned to allow the journalist to call out people as uncultured philistines. I wrote about a great three part podcast (which alas has disappeared) where the contributors discussed how important setting and context are to creating a receptive mindset in people and how these things are not present in rail stations.

But people aren’t naturally placed in this mindset in shopping malls and supermarkets either. People may be less harried than when they are rushing to work or to connect to another form of transportation, but they generally aren’t going shopping secretly hoping the crowd will burst into “Ode To Joy.” Yet people are immediately delighted when it happens. Why is that?

The difference may be the scale. Walking up on a busker or group of performers on the street is a different experience from having the people around you start to participate in something. You have more permission to enjoy yourself if 40 people standing around you start singing versus seeing the 40 people nearby stride with determination past buskers.

There is also a different sort of theatricality involved with flash performances than busker setting up an open instrument case. If Joshua Bell had flung off his jacket with a flourish and dove into a lively piece as he descended the escalator at the Metro station, it might have engaged the curiosity of more people.

The second question that occurred to me was the one posed at the end of the performance in Valencia about not liking opera. It probably is easy to be open to liking opera in a 5-10 minute segment when everyone around you seems to be participating. It may not seem as enjoyable to go to an opera house and try to follow the plot of an entire opera in a foreign language. Heck, it may not seem enjoyable if a group did a pop up performance of the entire opera, blocking the aisles for two hours while you were trying to buy groceries for your family.

This isn’t a criticism of the Random Acts of Culture program. Inciting curiosity and showing people they have the capacity to enjoy opera, dance, etc., is an asset to the arts.

We just can’t acclaim that particular tactic as the answer to getting new audiences hooked. It’s no more the solution than the idea that people only need to see our work once before they are hooked.

In fact, it may be less so. For people who are not frequent attendees, the experience of going to the opera after seeing a pop up performance may seem like a bait and switch. For people who work in the field, it can be difficult to imagine how stark the contrast may seem to them.

Thankfully, many in the field are able to imagine that performance attendance experience may be losing its relevance for today’s audiences and there is a fair bit of conversation occurring about what alternatives are possible.

On the other side of the equation, when arts practitioners advocate for taking art and culture to people where they live, it should be remembered that these experiences are only a delight because they are unexpected, infrequent and in small doses. Too much of it and you are an unwelcome intrusion on people where they live.

It would be better if arts practitioners could find a place nearby where people could gather and be delighted that doesn’t interfere with the daily flow of life.

Oh wait, there are already a bunch of those. They are the places nobody under the age of 60 seems to want to go to have an arts experience.

Clearly, there has to be a medium between the two environments and it is going to take some work to determine what it is exactly.

One of the things I suspect, but I would be interested to see a study confirm, is that the pop up performances like those in the Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture may make spectators more confident in their own ability to be creative. Even though the person standing next to them who started singing may have many years of training and rehearsed for five hours in order to make everything look effortless, the illusion is there that the average John or Jane has the potential for excellence. A concept that is reinforced by shows like American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.

Since we are seeing signs that the concept of personal creativity is more appealing than the concept of art and culture, pop up performances could be one of many tools used to encourage people toward participation in creative endeavors. That can’t be the only tactic used and the execution has to come off more organic than just planting performers in the audience.

To whit:

Companies No Longer Want To Sponsor Simply For The Exposure

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The most recent issue of Arts Management Newsletter has a translation of a piece written by Wolfgang Lamprecht about the death of corporate sponsorship.

Citing the number of corporations disengaging from their support of a host of international venues and events, Lamprecht says the days of sponsorship as publicity is past. The value of sponsorships to a corporation needs to be framed in different terms.

Just as many artists are rebuking job opportunities that provide “exposure” as the only stated benefit, so too are companies no longer interested in arrangements that simply puts their logo in front of eyeballs.

Here’s the thing: today, entrepreneurial cultural engagement is less about image or about customer loyalty than it is about the central asset of trust. Our current crisis of confidence cannot be overcome with programs for the needy, nor by logo placements.

[…]

Art and culture have the particular advantage that, on the most part, they generate a basic element of trust. Trust and confidence are crucial for securing the stability and legitimacy of the economic system, but they must be produced discursively. The disadvantage of culture lies in the fact that art and culture are viewed as being marginally important and therefore have to fight for their social relevance.

Lamprecht notes that as the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility has gained currency, it has expanded to encompass the concept of Corporate Cultural Responsibility (CCR). He takes pains to emphasize that “CCR is therefore part of the social (= societal, not charitable) responsibility of a company.” So conversations soliciting support should focus more on social good and responsibility versus charity and tax benefits.

Of course, this also means that the organization soliciting the support needs to make sure they present an image that embodies cultural asset.

In short, cultural engagement of a company has to follow the belief that the support of arts and culture is not simple fun and communicatively truly brings all that which impact research and marketing departments have so eagerly argued for in the past (image, customer loyalty, employee motivation, etc.). Above all, it is an important contribution to social responsibility that a company should, if not must, provide to maintain a balanced and civilized society, as well to the long-term sustainability of its own success.

[…]

The goal remains the same: against the backdrop of a massive lack of trust through saturated markets and products that are similar, corporations are, in the competition for clients, forced to approach their stakeholders differently than by common means. CCR presupposes the desire to stand out from the competition and, particularly in the field of corporate communication, to secure confidence, competitive advantages and verifiable income. The following measures have been defined for CCR: corporate sponsoring, corporate giving, corporate secondments / corporate volunteering, events, cultural commissioning, product-/image placement, cause-related marketing, public private partnerships, impact investments.

My only concern with this approach is that it starts to smack of artwashing/culturewashing and greenwashing. An arts organization can damage their image long term by having an association or accepting a gift from an unsavory individual or company. It would be worse if they were perceived as openly courting anyone who wanted to remove a blemish on their reputation.

Something Lamprecht wrote seemed to suggest this approach should be used with individuals as well as companies.

“…a key advantage of the model described here is no longer the need to decline and perpetuate the terminologically worn demarcations (CCR measures) between sponsorship, patronage, donations, etc. as a prerequisite for entrepreneurial legitimacy of individual cultural support measures.”

If individuals are not widely solicited for support in Austria, I may be misreading this to suggest that the idea of social responsibility should be applied to all efforts to garner support, including individuals. I know from reading other pieces in the Arts Management Newsletter that fundraising in Germany is conducted in a different manner than in the US. It may be similar in Austria where Lamprecht works.

But it is interesting to consider that rather than saying individuals donate and corporations sponsor, a single term and rationale for giving might be used.

Is there any benefit to trying to recast the rationale for why an individual in the US should donate? My impression is that different people are motivated to donate by different arguments. But if you change the message from donate to help a poor child experience art (charity) to donate to help a child develop into a better cultural citizen (social responsibility), is that better?

My suspicion is that “cultural citizen” will work with foundations and governments whereas “charity for the under served” is more compelling to an individual. But maybe I haven’t thought of the right terms yet.

Best Effort Yet And I Missed It

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I didn’t know about NBC’s recent live broadcast of The Wiz until it was over, and that worries me.

It isn’t because I necessarily really wanted to see it. It’s the idea that if a company with the resources of NBC couldn’t make a person in the arts like myself aware that the show was going on, what hope do I, with my comparatively minuscule advertising budget and resources, have of reaching members of my community?

I haven’t had a television for about 5 years now and I don’t watch or rent video through Netflix or Hulu. If I did, maybe I would have seen something if NBC promoted it there.

As it was, I had no inkling NBC had even chosen to do The Wiz as their next project, much less when it would air. In all the blogs I read, all the webpages I visit, all the Twitter posts I read in the course of the day, I saw no mention of it until a bunch of people started gushing about how great it was during and after the performance. If there were banner ads on webpages I visited, I missed them.

I should mention, I did notice ads for a performance of Phantom of the Opera at some place in South Carolina. I wondered why I was getting what appeared to be retargeted ads since I am so far away geographically and never visited their webpage. There is a good chance I would have noticed something similar for The Wiz.

This challenge of reaching audiences as so many disparate channels of communication proliferate isn’t a new one. It has been the subject of discussion for a long time and many blogs and articles offer tips for using social media and other strategies to reach audiences.

While my experience (or inattention) isn’t necessarily indicative of a nation trend, as I say the fact that The Wiz broadcast went entirely under my radar caused me great concern. I guess for as engaged in the conversations of the arts field as I am, I am still joining the legions of the disengaged.

Cultural Promissory Notes

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I was reading about a woman who put her San Francisco home up for sale at 2005 prices with the condition that the buyer sign a “cultural promissory note.”

Finally, they had to offer a 10-year “cultural promissory note”: a legally binding, decade long commitment to provide something of cultural value—theater tickets, writing lessons, organic produce from “your uncle’s farm in Salinas”—to the community or Lee herself.

San Francisco being San Francisco, the seller received bids from prospective buyers who promised to put in a decade of volunteer journalism for El Tecolote or donate 30 bottles of wine a year to a nonprofit organization. In other words, value: Buyers were promising their time, skills, assets, or donations in kind in place of cash up front.

I just love the opportunities the term “cultural promissory note” hints at.

Separate from any sort of real estate dealings, I wondered if there were any advantage to arts organizations providing an option to sign some sort of similar cultural promissory note or be a potential beneficiary of a cultural promise.

For example, in addition to requiring someone to help with administrative and maintenance work in exchange for studio space or access to resources, have people submit a proposal stating what other contribution they will make to the organization or general community.

By the way, the winning bid on the San Francisco condo included:

…a yearly free writing conference at Modern Times bookstore; a “bestseller visionary” membership to Litquake; tickets to cultural events of Lee’s choosing to the tune of $660 a year; a course at Stanford Continuing Studies, where Watrous teaches; and a donation to La Cocina, a Mission nonprofit that helps low-income women open food businesses.”

As a way to offer rewards/incentive for committing to a cultural note, perhaps people would get guaranteed orchestra section seats for back row prices, access to classes or rehearsal space, etc in return for a significant commitment to serve the interests of an arts council, cultural trust, arts district. So instead of a corporation or individual getting donor benefits at one place, they receive something for advancing the interests of multiple organizations.

I think this is probably thinking too conventionally compared to the possibilities people could come up with on their own. The people who ultimately purchased the SF condo probably put together a more varied and interesting bid than the seller might have proposed. It was also more appropriate to their abilities and general availability than anything the seller might have asked them to do.

A cooperative approach to receiving/delivering on a promissory note might be attractive to large business like a law firm that commits to working on zoning issues, property acquisition or lobbying for the creation of a cultural district. The families of their employees will have varied interests and will likely find the offerings of multiple organizations more appealing than a single entity.

The approach could also be focused on a more individual scale. For example, perhaps an incentive the Boys & Girls Club uses to hire a new director is tickets/membership donated by an arts facility. If the Boys & Girls Club is already paying to attend shows or take classes from the arts entity, those tickets/memberships may help over the long run as budgets get tighter and a decision needs to be made about what activities to cut.

Even if there isn’t an active relationship between the two organizations, that membership helps to start getting the new director invested in the community, perhaps even before they make the move and start their job.

As I say, given time and more minds, there are certainly many more intriguing possibilities that exist. The concept of “cultural promissory note” seems replete with so much potential that different places could easily create entirely different definitions of what one entails.

What would it mean to you?

Dozen-ish Views On Etiquette

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Audiences today, they just don’t know how to behave!

You have probably seen a lot of conversation on this subject crop up whenever something egregious occurs and makes the news or social media rounds.

UK based What’s On Stage decided to tackle the subject of etiquette from all angles over the last week.  There is a full index of all the articles on their site.  It can be worth taking a look through because while they have the usual perspectives from actors, annoyed audience members and the obligatory post about how things only got staid and passive during the Victorian era, there are some voices that aren’t commonly heard.

For example, an usher writes how they and their compatriots are the public face of the theater and bear the heaviest expectation to enforce the rules but don’t receive the support necessary to carry out their charge.

What the usher has to say probably isn’t news, but is a reminder to examine whether we are providing our front line staff/volunteers with sufficient support.

A theater manager writes:

I do think audience behaviour has changed recently. People feel they know their rights more and don’t necessarily have to think about other people. It’s all about them: ‘this is ridiculous, I shouldn’t have to queue’. There is a sense of entitlement. It always seems to be: ‘I’m traumatised now, and what are you going to give me?’

People are angry when they get disrupted by phones, but it also works the other way. The person on the phone says: ‘What’s your problem? It’s my phone and I am busy.’ There’s no sense of being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes.

He/she notes that so often a balance has to be struck, especially when it comes to assessing whether dealing with a disruption will cause a bigger disruption than is already occurring.

Then there are those who like their audience rowdy and involved and a woman who was dismayed that the audience at a performance at Mamma Mia! was so polite, she couldn’t manage to get them to sing along with the performers.

If nothing else, the series is a good reminder that the question of etiquette is one encompasses an entire range of people, not just those in close proximity in a single moment.

Not As Simple As Subtracting The iPhones

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I was really interested to read how a coffee house in NYC was using conversational prompts in an effort to get customers talking with each other. It seemed quite similar to the program a Brazilian bus company created to get people on their buses chatting with each other and inspired me to try something similar at my performing arts center.

It was only when I read the story a little closer that I realized the reason the prompts exist is part of a philosophy which also involves keeping the Wifi off until 5 pm. Turning the Wifi off helps the coffee house serve more customers because fewer people are camping out at the tables all day, but it is also about creating a communal space.

“We truly believe that coffee shops were created for people to engage with one another, and meet new people, and be community hubs,” says Birch Coffee co-founder Jeremy Lyman. “When everybody has their face in their laptop, that can’t happen. We’re trying to create a way for people to be a little more vulnerable.”

Initially I thought to write something about how every time I encounter another anecdote about personal electronic devices causing people to disengage from normal interactions, it offsets arguments about the benefits of allowing their use. Sure they may tell their friends about their experience or research upcoming shows, but is short term economic benefit worth the erosion of social interactions?

But as I re-read the quote above about coffee houses being community hubs where people engage with and meet new people, it occurred to me that this is often the same language arts and cultural organizations use when touting their benefits. This made me question, if the primary format being offered is sitting quietly in a dark room, is there a lot going on that is staving off the erosion of social interactions?

Sure, the fact people have come out and are in physical proximity with strangers rather than at home watching Netflix is fast approaching the point where it will be considered a major victory. Is it really raising the bar and setting a new standard for enabling community involvement and interaction? Subtracting iPhones doesn’t automatically increase a participant’s engagement in an event.

Granted, the primary purpose of a cultural organization is not to stimulate social interactions. Then again, nor is it the primary goal of coffee shops. If it is a value you embrace or claim to bring, it needs to part of the planning.

Recent studies have started to suggest that the term “creative expression” is viewed more favorably than “arts” so arts groups may need to offer more opportunities for interaction and creativity. This is not to say that current practices needs to be abandoned. Rather alternatives will need to be provided if group are going to claim they are a community resource and bemoan the decline of social interactions.

One example that pops to mind (or more accurately, my salivary glands) is the Bach, Bacon and Biscuit event in Chattanooga that Holly Mulcahy recently wrote about.

Think about it-

-Free samples of a new biscuit?
-With BACON!?
-Free Concerto Concert?
-With BACH-ON?

What’s not to like? f that isn’t a recipe for bringing people together and getting them to interact…

Tell Stories For Thanksgiving

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When you are eating Thanksgiving dinner with your family and you get asked when you are going to get a real job, or something to that effect, instead of trying to justify yourself with logical arguments and statistics from studies on the value of the arts, simply try telling stories that illustrate why you love what you do.

Maybe it isn’t even related to your discipline and maybe the one incident you talk about isn’t significant enough to convince people your life devoid of career prospects is worthwhile.  The one thing arts people do well, but need to learn to do better outside of their preferred circumstances, is tell stories.

Just to give some examples.

-In the last 12 months, we have had some great shows and offered great experiences at our performing arts center. Among the highlights were a great stage combat workshop that seamlessly involved 25ish people from 10 year olds to college sophomores.

-Last March there was a terrible snow storm that forced us to cancel a performance. Fortunately, the group was willing to perform the next day. While they were waiting, they wandered around town. The owner of the coffee shop still tells me how charming they were.

-The three year old grandson of one of our patrons has to walk by the performing arts center a couple times a week on his way to and from daycare and still asks if he can go inside and see the Tuvan throat singers that performed here over a month ago.

-A couple weeks ago I went to the local museum to listen to an artist demonstrate how she created the effect on her work using encaustic. It was a lot of fun, especially when she started to debate the relative merits of hair dryers, heat guns and embossing tools as part of the fusing method. Afterward many of us went to a local rib place and had dinner.

I kept these examples brief and left out many of the compelling details in the interest of holding a reader’s attention. As a subject of conversation the last story about the encaustic workshop might be the best simply because I am not a visual artist and know as little with about the discipline as those with whom I am having dinner. There is less danger of using language or focusing on minutiae relevant only to insiders. (Though you probably had to be there to understand the heat gun v. hair dryer v. embossing tool conversation.)

I think relatives around a dining table can relate to stories about: artists skilled enough to involve participants of all ages; artists who are committed to seeing a performance happen and have positive interactions with community members; strange, unfamiliar singing styles from other countries that even excite little kids; visual artists who are accessible in the explanation of their work and as potential dining partners.

Even if you don’t do the best job telling your stories and your relatives don’t quite get it, you can simply say you are thankful that you have been able to provide opportunities where people learned interesting things and enjoyed themselves. If they are interested, you would be able to involve them in the future.

This Post Did Not Emerge Fully Formed Like Athena From My Skull

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A topic I frequently like to write about is the misconception that artistic inspiration is the result of a lightning bolt moment rather than the product of long term effort.

In the past, the examples I have given have focused on how creative people subscribe to this notion. However, Howard Sherman retweeted an article today that pointed out how society at large reinforces this belief.

In the article Rebecca Atkinson-Lord draws attention to the language used when describing playwright Katherine Soper’s winning the Bruntwood Prize for Playwrighting. Like many people in the arts, Soper has a second job she works in order to provide financial support for her writing efforts. Many media outlets described her as a “shop assistant,” “perfume seller,” and “first time writer.” (She is a trained playwright and this isn’t her first effort.)

Atkinson-Lord writes,

By perpetuating this myth of the ‘Big Break’, our media culture teaches those outside the arts world that to be a successful artist is easy, that there’s no need to aim for excellence, no need to push yourself harder, to educate yourself and develop key skills to be the very best you can be. It makes the arts look easy. And easy is cheap.

In turn that undermines the case for proper funding of the arts – if anyone can make excellent art, then there’s no need to pay artists competitively or fund its development. Presenting Katherine as (just) a shop assistant also conceals the stark reality that most theatre makers have to do ‘money jobs’ to survive while disguising the systemic flaws in how the arts are funded and theatre makers are employed.

She goes on to note that the headlines also make subtle class assumptions about a shop assistant’s capability to create award winning art work and certainly that is another factor at play here.

According to the article, Soper mentioned on social media that included her second job in her bio as a way to emphasize that artists are balancing multiple roles. It appears that got turned around a bit on her.

While media channels really need to be more responsible about researching and honestly reporting on a creative person’s existence and career before their big break, it isn’t likely to happen. The romance of the humble origins in a garage is just too compelling a story, even if it isn’t true.

birth athena

Thankfully, We Don’t Have To Settle

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Over on ArtsHacker, the contributors talk about what they are thankful for as arts managers.  Often the spoken or unspoken source of gratitude is the fact that we still have jobs and that people continue to be interested enough in what we do to support our work.

There was a post on Vox.com by Dennis Perkins, a guy who, until recently, worked for a video store in Portland, ME. Yes, apparently there are still some around, though fewer every day.  The store lasted as long as it had thanks to the exceptionally knowledgeable, curatorial and customer service practices of the owner and staff.

Perkins offers some sobering insights that may be instructive for the future of  performing and visual arts organizations.

1) Video stores are about investment
The enemy of video stores was convenience. The victim of convenience is conscious choice.

[..]

If you’re actually in a video store, the stakes are different. You’re engaged. You’re on a mission to find a movie — the right movie. You had to get out of bed, get dressed, and go to a store. You had to think about what you want, why this movie looks good and not that one, perhaps even seeking guidance or advice….Before the film even starts playing, you’ve begun a relationship with it. You’re curious. Whether you’ve chosen well or poorly, you’ve made a choice, and you’re in it for the duration.

With online streaming, we don’t decide — we settle. And when we aren’t grabbed immediately, we move on. That means folks are less likely to engage with a film on a deep level; worse, it means people stop taking chances on challenging films

Similarly, attending an event is an investment and involves a relationship that the attendee has begun to develop. This isn’t news. There has long been a conversation about eliminating barriers to making that choice since it can also involve arranging for a babysitter, eating a meal and finding parking.

In some respects, the “settling” behavior represents a deepening manifestation of having 500 channels and finding nothing on,  because it continues to normalize having low expectations.  (And settling is pretty common, Mashable satirized it.) This situation is worse because it couples low expectations with the perception there is no alternative.

When it was just 500 cable channels, you had the option of going to a video store and getting recommendations. As Perkins notes, an algorithm suggesting new options can’t replace a human. Even if it isn’t just factoring in your “settling” choices and tosses in unexpected options to push you in new directions, an algorithm doesn’t exert the influence/peer pressure of another human being. It doesn’t care if you choose to settle.

Turns out, those snarky, smug video and record store clerks who looked down on your choices provided a valuable service.

Perhaps most disheartening about Perkins’ piece is his assertion that excellent customer service, high customer loyalty and efforts to reach people via social media won’t save you.

Videoport had loyal customers, customers who didn’t abandon us, even at the end. Sensing the air of growing unease at the thinning lines at the store made some regulars come in even more, sometimes dragging friends along and extolling our virtues. There was an elderly couple who loved my recommendations so much I’m genuinely worried they’re just staring at a blank screen right now. But video stores — like bookstores, record stores, and arthouse theaters—have died as the lure of online convenience overcomes even the most stalwart patrons

[…]

I started a weekly blog/newsletter for the store. I intended it to be a place for customers and staff to continue the ongoing movie conversation through movie reviews, debates, and think pieces about the store and movies in general. In theory it was, apart from being a chance for me to exercise my brain and writing skills, a way to bind customers to the store by giving them a sense of ownership in the place. In practice, as the customers drifted away, it became more like a running, increasingly desperate 10-year argument as to why our video store deserved to exist, written by me.

Now my intention isn’t to be a downer as we move into the holiday season. One of the significant differences between performing and visual arts organizations and video stores is that the former has the ability to change the way customers experience their product where video stores can’t.

Watching a DVD is always going to be the same experience, but seeing a performance can happen in a performance hall, a coffee house, a park,  a shopping center, an airport, etc. It can involve a high level of interaction or barely any at all. After the central activity is over, you can meet the creators/performers if you haven’t already and the opportunity to hang out at a bar exists if the parties are willing.

A DVD or streamed program does have the benefit of being experienced on one’s own schedule and can be stopped and started according to the vagaries of life. An arts event has the potential of becoming one of those vagaries of life you hit pause to participate in.

The conversation about making an arts experience more participatory rather than passive has been going on for awhile now. As we start to move into the new year and planning the next season, it might help to start thinking about our ability to provide a participatory experience as the competitive advantage we possess rather than focusing on all the ways a live experience doesn’t allow for the flexibility of recorded content.

In that sense, Perkins’ piece isn’t necessarily a sobering warning about the future of the visual and performing arts, it is a caution against offering an experience that isn’t discernibly different from watching a movie.

 

When A Top Tier Performing Position Isn’t The Goal of Your Education

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Last month I pondered if there was any worth in giving up a little time in the conservatory/university training of arts students in favor of providing instruction/experiences in career management. Instead of graduating and then seeking out instruction in accounting, contracting and self promotion, etc., they would have a base in those skills but may need to seek out “finishing” training in their discipline.

The benefit to this is that given their lengthy training within their discipline, they would have the tools to identify and assess the value of educational opportunities and resources. Whereas, they might not have ability to assess the value of instruction in accounting, contracts, marketing services, etc if their conservatory training didn’t include it.

The other benefit is that once graduates are out in the world and can better understand where their interests lay, they can complete their education in a way that is appropriate to those pursuits and market demand.

About a week after that post, you may have seen an article in Cosmo that was getting a lot of circulation throughout the arts social media community. The story was about Lisa Mara, who had a strong affinity for dance,  hadn’t pursued formal university/conservatory training, but still felt a need for dance as part of her life and ended up starting two dance companies for like-minded individuals.

Her story is something of an intersection between the idea I state above and emergence of the professional-amateur.  Lisa Mara never wanted to be a professional dancer.

I danced about five hours a week and still did all of my studies. I still knew that I did not want to be a professional dancer. I wanted to pursue a career in something that I thought would have a better trajectory of business and job security. Being a dancer, you need to have an awareness of “Are you good enough?” And I don’t think I was good enough. The dancers who pursue dance as a full-time career should be the top 10 percent. Otherwise, you’re going to just get the door slammed in your face at auditions time after time.

Yet she loved dancing enough that she got a spot as a back up dancer for Brittany Spears, she auditioned as a dancer for the Washington Wizards and Boston Celtics basketball teams. Even though she never became a dancer for either team, she eventually utilized the business management experiences she picked up in the other jobs she held to plan and incorporate her first dance company in Boston.

I wanted to create a dance company for young professionals who were just like me. The target audience I was reaching was high-caliber dancers who wanted to continue dancing and choreographing into their adult lives. Many of our dancers have full-time jobs. Many of our dancers are dance teachers, but this is their opportunity to dance for themselves.

The success of that company spurred the creation of a second company with the same philosophy in NYC.

I don’t think there is anything in her story that implies the dancers in her schools could replace those who have focused their training on dance as a career.  I do think it is a good illustration that deferring some training in an artistic discipline doesn’t automatically make you unemployable.

Granted, just as not everyone will be cast on Broadway, secure a position in a top tier symphony or ballet company, not everyone is going to be able to create the opportunities for themselves at Lisa Mara has.

Opportunities do exist outside of the conventional career paths. If Lisa Mara’s experience is any indication, there may be a large unmet need of adult enthusiasts looking for a creative outlet.

A Moment of Congruence

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Hat tip to Carter Gillies who spotted a wonderful congruence between the posts both I and artist Whitney Smith made yesterday.

Reading Whitney’s post, it almost feels like she wrote it to provide practical illustrations for my ponderings about how the arts community views worth and entitlement.

Where I end my post with a quote from Seth Godin about sharing your work, Whitney mentions it right from the start in the title of her post.

Sharing art work can be weird. Last weekend, when I had a party and sale at my studio, I put all the paintings I’ve been doing on the wall. I didn’t put prices on them because I told myself that I just wanted to show them. But the truth is I didn’t want to put prices on them because I was afraid if I did that, people would feel sorry for me because obviously the paintings are awful and it’s just a little pathetic that I actually thought I could sell them.

She goes on to talk about how she personally likes her “awful” paintings and really enjoyed executing them. As it turned out, some people did want to buy them which put her in a tough spot trying to decide on a price.

I guess this is a lesson to always have a sense of your work’s worth in case people are actually willing to pay you for it. This isn’t really a nudge at Whitney. It happens all the time.

Not more than a month ago I was at a gallery opening where one artist expressed his exasperation that one of the people showing wasn’t prepared to provide a price for his work. Of course this raises questions about whether the guy was really prepared to part with it.

Just as I talked about how sharing and impacting the community is cornerstone of arts philosophy, Whitney echos the idea. (I debate whether I even need to state and give an example of something that is so well known, but there are worse ideas gaining traction through repetition.)

Sharing is part of the artistic process. I believe art is there to give something to humanity– something to think about, a new idea, a connection, a moment of beauty, even a moment of transcendence. If the art isn’t shown, it can’t do its final job of changing people’s hearts and minds. If your art is just for one person– for yourself– maybe there is a good reason for that. But I don’t know what that would be.

Selling is another thing. I don’t think art has to be sold, but there is something to be said for moving it along…

So often the debate about the value of a work of visual art is conducted in the context of a gallery, museum or auction. Rarely, at least in the places I frequent, do we read an artist’s internal debate about the value of their work, when it is considered “done,” when to sell it and what to sell it for.

For All Your(e) Worth

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Seth Godin had a post on entitlement versus worthiness a couple weeks ago. There was a lot in there to unpack and I am not sure I have wrapped my head around it enough to know if what he posits is entirely true or not, but I thought I would toss it out there for general discussion.

There is a lot in the post that is applicable to the arts. Perhaps most obvious is the following:

Both entitlement and unworthiness are the work of the resistance. The twin narratives make us bitter, encourage us to be ungenerous, keep us stuck. Divas are divas because they’ve tricked themselves into believing both narratives–that they’re not getting what they’re entitled to, and, perversely, that they’re not worth what they’re getting.

At first I wondered if it were really true that divas felt like they weren’t worth what they were getting. Then I thought about all the conflicting narratives associated with art.

On the one hand you have the entitlement ideas: the prescriptive view that arts are good for everyone; if people just saw our work once, they would be hooked; arts participation as a sign of maturity and culture; one’s practice being “true” art versus that of others.

Compare that with the sense of worth associated with the arts: low pay; suffer for your art; making money=selling out; arts education isn’t important in schools; arts careers are dead ends.

In that context, it is easier to see why you can feel both entitled to more, but worth less, than you are getting.

Godin continues with some concepts that have likely passed through the minds of many in the arts on more than one occasion. (emphasis mine)

The entitled yet frightened voice says, “What’s the point of contributing if those people aren’t going to appreciate it sufficiently?” And the defensive unworthy voice says, “What’s the point of shipping the work if I don’t think I’m worthy of being paid attention to…”

The universe, it turns out, owes each of us very little indeed. Hard work and the dangerous commitment to doing something that matters doesn’t get us a guaranteed wheelbarrow of prizes… but what it does do is help us understand our worth. That worth, over time, can become an obligation, the chance to do our best work and to contribute to communities we care about.

When the work is worth it, make more of it, because you can, and because you’re generous enough to share it.

Those last couple sentences about contributing to communities and making more because you’re generous to share it are essential cornerstone sentiments of the non-profit arts.

Where I pause is at the question of, “are you generous enough to share it” for free? There is a lot of debate in the arts about working “for the exposure” that Godin’s post brushes up against.

While his stressing the that hard work does help us understand our worth does imply that one should be receiving their worth, the way he ends his post doesn’t definitively settle the question about whether you should hold out for what you are worth.

“I’m not worthy,” isn’t a useful way to respond to success. And neither is, “that’s it?”

It might be better if we were just a bit better at saying, “thank you.”

This Is Not The Ticketing Site You Were Looking For

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As the holiday season approaches, I am remind of the less than altruistic truth that others are eager to make money off your success..even if you don’t perceive yourself as successful.

Close to two years ago I wrote about a compliant I was called to the box office to address which turned out to be the result of another ticketing site masquerading as ours.

In the last day Thomas Cott tweeted a similar story about the Colorado Ballet’s Nutcracker tickets being bought up and sold at up to $1,100 for $155 tickets. In this particular instance, with tacked on fees, two tickets cost $3,000.

Even though the Ballet has received its money, the problem, as the Ballet’s ticketing manager says, is one of access.

Part of the problem comes when audiences can’t afford overinflated ticket prices and then stop considering going to the ballet altogether.

“We love supporting our community and we have our ticket prices set so that… every family that wants to come see The Nutcracker can,” Clark said.

This article was particularly timely because I recently noticed that the top Google results for our theater was a site with the pattern “theatrename.box-officetickets.com.” They are selling some of our events at 4.5 times the face value.

It isn’t just us. I did a little more searching with common theater names and Ohio Theatre in Columbus, Fox Theatre in Detroit and Bijou Theater in Knoxville all have sites with the same URL pattern that show up.

Lest you think that only big productions at famous venues are vulnerable, my theater is located in a rural area and the show in question two years ago was an Elvis impersonator. There was a good crowd scheduled to show up, but it was hardly the most heavily in demand event.

It doesn’t take much effort to check the Google results for the search terms including your theater name and location and see what shows up as selling your tickets. In addition to the theatername.box-officetickets.com address, I have also seen theatername.ticketofficesales.com as a common site names. I am sure there are others.

It can be good to remind potential and existing customers of the official ticket outlets. The fact that these are not the official websites are quickly apparent to many people, but to those not accustomed to navigating the internet and purchasing things online, it isn’t as clear.

At the prices some of these places are charging, all it takes is just a couple of people making purchases to make it worth their while.

N.B. In the comments, Marc Fleming shares a link to a video the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust created to combat this issue.

I Love The Smell Of Bach In The Morning

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This month’s New Yorker has a story about researchers who have discovered how interdependent our senses are when it comes to enjoying an experience. (h/t Tyler Cowen)

For example, people’s perception of how crispy potato chips are when they eat them is dependent on what type of sound they are listening to. People will perceive foods as more bitter, sweet or satiating depending on the color, shape, texture, weight of the vessels they are consuming them from even if the product doesn’t change.

…Spence asked people to sample a dark Welsh ale: one sip while listening to a light, tinkling xylophone composition, and the second to the sound of a deep, mellifluous organ. When the second piece of music stopped, the audience had fallen silent.

“Wow,” a girl near me in a vintage houndstooth dress said. I knew this particular trick of Spence’s—I had watched him perform it multiple times—but it still worked on me. With only a change in the background music, the deep-brown beer had gone from creamy and sweet to mouth-dryingly bitter.

While these techniques have been used to help market food and other products, they can also be used to promote healthier eating.

He noted that other researchers have shown that the elderly, when eating tomato soup, must add more than twice as much salt as a young person does in order to achieve the same taste. Why not mitigate that increased salt consumption, and its attendant health hazards, by presenting the soup in a blue container, a color that Spence has shown can make food seem significantly saltier?…The effect could be used similarly, Spence said, to design soundtracks that replace some of the lost flavor of food for the elderly.

[…]

This year, he began working with a children’s cancer center in Spain, to experiment with plating, lighting, and acoustic tweaks that could counter the pervasive metallic taste and nausea that are common side effects of chemotherapy.

Since performing and visual arts are a sensory experience, the article got me wondering what the benefit would be in engaging a fuller range of senses at performances, museums, galleries, etc.

Most specifically, I wondered what might be helpful in making the experience more welcoming and less anxiety inducing for new attendees. My first thought was the subtle smell of chocolate chip cookies or homemade bread wafting from somewhere.

Beyond that I can’t think of too many other specific examples of sights, sounds and textures that would be conducive to an experience. (Although according to Holly Mulcahy, in Chattanooga, Maple Street Biscuits are hands down the way to go.)

Many arts venues will often have music playing and the lights adjusted to create a specific mood for visitors and attendees. Artists are already plugged into the impact of color, light, sound, and sometimes smell, as tools and possess a little insight in this regard. But often this insight is focused on the impact of the presentation on the viewer rather than the viewer’s total experience.

Clearly, you can go mad trying to determine if the curve of the arm rests on your seats best enhances the experience of Shakespeare or Arthur Miller. It could be helpful to keep this research in the back of your mind and think about what obvious opportunities to engage a fuller range of senses might exist. It may involve changing default lighting schemes or soundtracks in favor of more suitable ones.

Positive Signs For Reimbursement Of Overhead Costs

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You may remember back in January that I wrote about the new rules promulgated by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requiring that any entity receiving federal funds much cover at least 10% of a non-profit’s overhead costs.

Don’t worry, its okay if you don’t remember. But this is relatively important and bears repeating.

One of the concerns at the time was that state and local governments and other funders might pressure non-profits with whom they contract or provide grants to waive a their right to receive overhead costs. The OMB rules prohibit this, but if a non-profit isn’t aware of the rules or are afraid to advocate for themselves, the problem may continue.

Given this context, it was a positive sign when the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the OMB guidelines and to write a letter to the state government to do the same.

It may not seem significant for a governing body to agree to adhere to the conditions under which federal funding was allocated, but as Non-Profit Quarterly notes there are “rob Peter to pay Paul” concerns about how funding may be manipulated.

Rules do not implement themselves without strong nonprofit monitoring and oversight—hopefully, as in this case, in partnership with government authorities. In this case, not only are the supervisors talking to state officials, but they will also be developing an implementation strategy in consultation with Los Angeles nonprofits, which we presume, based on what we have seen as policy statements from CalNonprofits, ought to address how to ensure that higher indirect cost reimbursements do not occur at the cost of lessening service delivery.

As I had noted in my earlier post, the National Council of Non Profits created a guide to educate organizations about the rules and provide responses to assertions from funding entities that the rules don’t apply.

One thing I had mentioned was that arts organizations should note that these rules likely apply to the funding you receive through your state or regional arts organization:

One- it doesn’t matter whether it is called a contract or grant or any other term, the rules are based on the substance of the transaction.

Two – Sub-recipient non-profits who are required to acknowledge part of the funding is received from the federal government are covered under these rules.

Arts Make For Good Medicine

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There is a recent article in the Boston Globe about Harvard Medical School requiring its students to take arts courses that bears reading. (h/t Thomas Cott)

The Yale School of Medicine, for instance, requires students to scrutinize paintings in a museum to improve their skills at observation and empathy — a program that has been replicated around the country, including at Harvard and Brown. At Columbia, incoming medical students are required to complete a six-week narrative medicine course.

[…]

They are “a tool to help doctors understand people and their conditions.” They help doctors see beyond the disease, the “narrow biological aspect,” to the illness, which includes anxiety, fear, and the whole human experience of being sick, he said.

If there were ever a good illustration of the benefit of arts participation and practice to society, helping doctors be more effective diagnosticians, communicators and bring more empathy to anxiety inducing interactions with patients is pretty compelling.

And if it can do this for highly trained medical professionals who work under extremely stressful environments, well then it can probably provide similar benefits to elementary and high school kids as well.

I am not making an unwarranted leap of logic when I say this. The med student quotes in the articles could as easily be attributed to a high school learning environment. Insert the term high school in the following sentence and you can probably find something similar in an interview with a high school student.

“Medical school is so intense,” she said. “There’s a lot you have to suppress in yourself.” The more students learn to express their feelings through the arts, she said, “the less traumatized you will be.”

I was especially struck by a piece about the Comics and Medicine course at Penn State College of Medicine linked to in the Globe article.  I had never thought about the use of graphic novels to help doctors to understand the point of view of their patients, but also as a medium to tell their own stories.

Now they are registering based on recommendations from other students. Trey Banbury, a fourth-year medical student at Penn State who took Green’s course, said he was surprised when a comic helped him understand what mania looks and feels like for psychiatric patients.

“The graphic novels we were asked to read were simply incredible,” he said. “There are many things that cannot be said, but have to be shown.”

Students in Green’s class are required to do two things: read graphic novels and talk about them, and create their own graphic narrative. “What I help them do is take a story from their med school experience and turn it into a comic,” Green said.

Expert designers and artists are brought in to help students craft their comics. Like many in the course, Banbury had no prior experience in drawing. His comic, Perspective, shows how med students struggle with the stressors of medical school.

There are many layers to the benefits here. First, the doctors gain insight into what their patients are experiencing from reading graphic novels. Then they have to deal with the challenge of explaining themselves to an another person who will execute their comic, much as a patient has difficulty communicating their problems to a person who is not experiencing them.

As the large Baby Boomer generation ages, the type of skills these exercises develop in doctors will become increasingly important.

Are You Running Your Arts Org According To A 19th Century Social Movement?

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Last month Non-Profit Quarterly had a piece on four impulses that shape non-profits. These impulses often contradict each other to some extent which results in the internal philosophical conflicts those of us in the non-profit arts often experience.

While the results are familiar to many of us, you may not be aware of some of the underlying causes and historical movements which have shaped general perceptions and expectations of non-profits.

The four impulses author Lester Salamon identifies are voluntarism, professionalism, civic activism, and commercialism. He describes tensions between them as this:

“They are not-for-profit organizations required to operate in a profit-oriented market economy. They draw heavily on voluntary contributions of time and money, yet are expected to meet professional standards of performance and efficiency. They are part of the private sector, yet serve important public purposes.”

On occasion it is noted that the 501 (c) (3) section of the tax code doesn’t mention the arts at all. The stated purpose is for “religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes, or for testing for public safety, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.”

When Salamon discusses the historical precedents of the four impulses, most of the examples revolve around the charitable care of medical, mental health and economic problems. In the context of this history the reason why the tax code might primarily focuses on caring for social issues and doesn’t mention the arts becomes a little clearer.

The end result is that the arts have essentially inherited the political and social expectations of the entire sector. For example, Salamon notes that conservatives idealize non-profits as charity performed by passionate volunteers supported by private donations rather than government support. Liberals, he says, focus on the limitations of non-profit effectiveness to call for more government involvement.

Salamon provides an extensive chart mapping out how the four impulses manifest in areas like objectives, strategies, operating & management styles, and organizational structure. Even though non-profits have proven to be very resilient, you can see how trying to serve the different impulses can result in a hodgepodge approach that may rob the organization of its effectiveness.

For example, in terms of management styles. When working with volunteers who are donating their time, there is a need to be informal and flexible. However, to address legal and fiduciary requirements, a level of professionalism is needed which involves formal rules and processes. Yet in the arts especially, people want to arrive at decisions collaboratively by group consent (civic activism). But then there is an expectation of commercial viability (run like a business) which can demand a tight, disciplined structure that can respond to a changing operating environment.

I can think of some examples of commercial entities who have managed to be successful about adopting the positive outcomes described above, but I can’t think of a non-profit arts organization that has been able to do all of those things well. The general consensus is probably that non-profit arts organizations fall short of having the discipline to adapt to changing environments and maintain commercial success.

Though to be fair, that describes a great number of commercial businesses as well. Many non-profit arts orgs never really aspire to economic success. Often increased funding/revenue means the ability to expand access while maintaining the same profit/loss balance (or defraying some of the existing deficit). That is an outgrowth of the four impulses.

I am not necessarily advocating that non-profits decide which impulse(s) they need to jettison in order to operate more realistically. Though it may be valuable to at least engage in some examination and consideration. Knowing the history that influences the philosophy of non-profit operations can help you recognize if you are saddling yourself with expectations that really aren’t valid to your particular endeavor.

Essentially, now that you know that they grew out of 19th century social service theory that has no relation to what your organization is all about, are you perpetuating some unproductive practices because you thought that is what good non-profits are supposed to do?

Can You Care In An Unreasonable Way?

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Seth Godin says he figures Apple computers reached their peak about three years ago.

Since then, we’ve seen:

Operating systems that aren’t faster or more reliable at running key apps, merely more like the iPhone…

Geniuses at the Genius Bar who are trained to use a manual and to triage, not to actually make things work better…

Software like Keynote, iMovie and iTunes that doesn’t get consistently better, but instead, serves other corporate goals. We don’t know the names of the people behind these products, because there isn’t a public, connected leader behind each of them, they’re anonymous bits of a corporate whole.

Compare this approach to the one taken by Nisus, the makers of my favorite word processor. An organization with a single-minded focus on making something that works, keeping a promise to users, not investors.

Mostly, a brand’s products begin to peak when no one seems to care. Sure, the organization ostensibly cares, but great tools and products and work require a person to care in an apparently unreasonable way.

If you are nodding your head in agreement upon recognizing that Apple’s achievements have sort of leveled out, stop a second and think about whether you are running things to make them better or just to triage and serve organizational goals.

When I read the sentence about the software not getting better but serving other corporate goals, Trevor O’Donnell’s posts about marketing reinforcing the arts organization’s image of themselves, rather than reinforcing the customer’s image of themselves having a good time, came to mind.

Obviously there is more involved with offering consistently better experiences to those who participate in the events and services you provide than good marketing. Good service, good marketing, good environment are all interdependent.

It is difficult to recognize issues that exist when you are close and involved with them which is why the Apple example is so useful. When we realize that some elements of a highly successful company have leveled off, it becomes a little easier to perceive parallels in our own operations.

The real challenge comes in the last sentence of Godin’s I quoted. What are the areas in which you and your staff can care in unreasonable ways?

What does that mean? What does it look like for your organization? Your customers can probably give you a hint if you ask (they may be already telling you, emphatically and unsolicited).

There may be people in your organization already invested in something with an unreasonable degree of care who are assets to your organization. It may not be necessary for everyone in your organization to all care about the same thing in order for you to be successful.

Given the number of hats worn by people in non-profit arts organizations, it would be a blessing if you had even a few employees that exhibited unreasonable care in different areas in a manner that was balanced within the organization and within themselves. (Trying to channel unreasonable care into all your areas of responsibility is likely to drive you crazy).

You Want To Do Better, But Aren’t Sure How

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A week ago I wrapped up my final post about the arts entrepreneurship training programs being developed in colleges and universities by pointing out that there was still the unmet need of artists who had already embarked on their careers.

I think the challenge faced by artists is summed up pretty well in the comments section of an article in The Guardian titled “Creating wealth: how artists can become inventive entrepreneurs”

Here is screenshot of the comments:

guardian snip

While there is a constant refrain that artists and arts organizations need to handle themselves in a more business-like manner, there aren’t a lot of sources of information and training that is tailored to the needs of creatives.

Wendy McLean’s comment is a reaction to the fact the story was framed as coming from members of the Guardian’s Small Business Network group, but when she went to sign up, the questions asked gave the impression it wasn’t really suited to her at all.

As the second commenter OddBodkin points out, any time you spend trying to distill lessons from generic information sources in order to discern what might be applicable to your situation, that is time you aren’t spending on your core creative focus.

It can be difficult to create a training program that is suited to artists. A regular schedule of classes may not work well for people with varying rehearsal and performance commitments that have them traveling all over a region or for artists who get so focused on creating they don’t look up until 11:00 pm.

Online resources that one can consult at their own pace can be very helpful, but guidance and clarification from a live person is just as valuable. Networks of colleagues can solve this problem, but frequently you simply don’t know what you don’t know.

I don’t have any clear cut solutions to suggest. You know I will share them when I find them.

There are good resources like Fractured Atlas that are revved and ready to help creative folks develop their careers.

I also want to put a plug in for ArtsHacker. (As you may know I am a contributor there.) While the site offers tips generated by the writers, it also solicits questions and problems readers for which readers would like solutions.

When the site opened about 11 months ago, I thought we would be fielding bunches of questions before long but there haven’t been too many. I know you all have burning questions you want answered, so get asking!

Throw A Big Fat Fake Wedding

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A few weeks ago I read an article about how a company in Argentina is doing good business throwing fake weddings. Apparently most young people aren’t getting married or are only having civil ceremonies. Feeling that they missed out on participating in a big flashy wedding, people pay about $50 to attend a fake wedding.

The fake wedding company, Falsa Boda, contracts with real wedding locations, caterers and DJs to throw an all night party interspersed with dramatic vignettes.

If you think this sounds familiar, there is a popular environmental/interactive theater piece called Tony and Tina’s Wedding set at an Italian wedding and reception.

As the Argentina percolated in my mind, I realized this is a good general framework for arts organizations to engage the public in any number of activities. One of the things recent surveys conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest found was that people are interested in actively participating and creating rather than sitting statically in a dark room.

There is a lot of opportunity in a wedding scenario to have people create things like the invitations, dresses, centerpieces, flower arrangements, etc. Ceramics classes can make plates, vases, etc. You can get people to vote on meal choices, DJs, brides maid dresses, etc.

Some of these provide an opportunity to partner with local businesses. When you ask people to vote on meal choices, you could get caterers, restaurants and wineries together to create a tasting event that people pay to attend.

Awareness of these businesses is raised at a fun social occasion which creates a buzz for the culminating wedding event. It probably wouldn’t hurt if a result was thatbusiness owners viewed the arts organization as a valuable asset in the community.

To create additional buzz, many other preliminary events can be staged in the preceding months. For example, the “dress fitting” can be scheduled a month or so ahead of time at a local dress shop. The bride, family and bridesmaids introduce some plot points which continue at other preliminary events like the bachelor(ette) parties and don’t get resolved until the wedding. The public can show up at these events and watch the drama unfold (perhaps an ex-boyfriend comes to the fitting and declares his love…or the groom’s ex-girlfriend comes and denounces the bride).

While attendance at these preliminary events are free and open, it might be smart to schedule them at inconvenient times (Wednesday 4pm versus Saturday 4pm), in places with low capacity for spectators, or at unannounced pop-up occurrences (fight in the mall food court or diner) so that people have to query their friends on social media about what happened and swap theories about what might happen next.

Finally, a big plus is that the subject matter and format would definitely appeal to a younger audiences.

Taken at its most ambitious, this idea could take a lot of time, effort and money to plan. But it could also involve a collaboration between multiple arts organizations of different genres which could provide operational staff support and sites for plot points. (Bride and groom pick out music at a chamber orchestra concert. Contentious bidding for a piece of art at a museum or gallery for a wedding gift.)

A less ambitious itinerary could be pulled off by a smaller group with much of the drama unfolding on social media (hmm, when she said she is making pesto, is that the actor talking about her personal life or should I keep an eye on this tonight to see if a romantic dinner unfolds for her character?)

There is are a lot of possibilities to this general framework. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a wedding. You could have a spy drama unfold the same way and encourage the community to report any “secret” meetings they observed. Or you could dramatize the life of the newlyweds annually with a sped up timeline seeing their kids and grandkids grow up and get married over 15-20 years.

Whenever I read about how people want to participate rather than to sit quietly as a spectator, I always think about all the performing arts facilities that are essentially designed at great expense for people to sit and observe. The need to utilize the very expensive facility in the manner it was designed creates a disincentive to create interactions that stray too far from that situation.

What I like about this idea is that it provides for a main event (the wedding) to occur in a physical space where people sit and watch, but it isn’t necessary that it does. Meanwhile, people have had the opportunity to contribute and participate actively and will have a strong sense of ownership in the final outcome.

Where Arts And Creativity Have Been Part Of Long Term Solutions

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I have recently started to become a little more vocal about one of my pet peeves about how the arts are viewed. It is no news to anyone that most career paths that involves pursuing a creative endeavor are dismissed out of hand in favor of a real job with real prospects.

I don’t have any illusions about arts careers being a difficult path to take. If anyone wants someone to help them combat fanciful notions people have about how they are different and will succeed where others have failed, I will be happy to help talk about the realities and the importance of the entrepreneurial mindset about which I spent all of last week writing.

What annoys me is that there is so little recognition by those who dismiss a creative career path that the group they dismiss are the first people called when a disaster strikes and there is a need to encourage people to donate to a relief effort. A couple weeks ago, This American Life had an ad agency suggest getting Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to do a TV ad to help offset the negative associations people have with Volkswagen.

All this being said, I think it is only fair to acknowledge that there are a lot of people out there that recognize the power of the arts to address social problems and make a long term commitment to embracing arts and creativity as part of their solution.

Last week on CityLab, Brentin Mock pointed out that a reduction in violence in the Bronx and New Orleans 40+ years ago were a result of people competing through creativity rather than physical force.

The subtitle of the piece reads, “Hip-hop dialed down street violence in the Bronx. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indian gangs made peace through craft. Why is culture such an underrated civic tool?”

The article doesn’t really address the reasons behind why culture is an underrated civic tool. It focuses more on how a peace meeting in the Bronx helped give rise to hop-hop culture and a similar effort inspired fanatical devotion to outdoing other groups in Mardi Gras parades resulting in more fingers stabbed by sewing needles than people stabbed with knives.

Essentially the article points out that it is the problems, not the enduring solutions that end up getting money. Despite the success of these programs in keeping the peace, little funding is directed to improve the communities in which they originated.

Another article I came across earlier this month in FastCompany drew attention to an artist who shutdown a freeway in Akron, OH and served dinner down the middle of the road to 500 people in an effort to bring the people of the city together.

When the freeway was originally built, it divided neighborhoods. Now the road is used less frequently and plans are to tear it down. The dinner was an effort to mobilize people to influence what will replace the space left vacated by the freeway.

“They’re shutting it down to traffic next year and opening it up to development, but there’s no concrete idea of what it will be—if it will be a park or whatever,” says Franks. “So this seemed like a very unique opportunity to help people reimagine this space.”

As people ate, they talked about the future of the area. They also just got to know people they otherwise may have never met. Franks spent a year working with volunteers from each neighborhood to plan the event and to bring 10 people from each neighborhood. The plates at the meal, designed to go home with each guest, were printed with favorite recipes from neighbors.

Granted, not really a solution that has been used long term, but it does seek to take advantage of a change to ameliorate what has long been an impediment.

The meal was a kick off event for the project which will continue by giving people toolkits to help them plan similar meals in their own communities. And lest you be skeptical about whether that many people might do it, there is already a sense of growing community in the city. Akron is the site of the PorchRokr Festival where homeowners give over their porches and front yards to concerts.

What Do We Mean When We Say Entrepreneur?

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Final day of observations on last weekend’s Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE)  conference.

The Terms We Use Matter

Some of the best observations about teaching students entrepreneurship were made by Jeffrey Nytch from the University of Colorado-Boulder. There is a lot of conversation going on about how students need to be taught to be entrepreneurial with attendant ideas of what that means, but Nytch’s observations provide some grounding for that discussion.

He noted that what entrepreneurship is not, is pounding the pavement and marketing one self.  Entrepreneurship is creating value and implementing solutions to meet needs, which by definition is not primarily focused on getting yourself employed, but serving others. Among the other characteristics he listed were recognizing opportunity, customer focus, flexibility/adaptability, risk assessment (taking calculated risks), resourcefulness and an ability at storytelling.

He also emphasized that teaching entrepreneurship  has to focus on being strategic rather than providing prescriptive solutions like this is how to do marketing, this is how to apply for grants, this is how you get non-profit status etc.

When talking about teaching students to be entrepreneurs, it is probably important to be clear about what outcomes you are envisioning when you use that term. As a result of Nytch’s presentation, I have been careful to use phrases like “entrepreneurial mindset” and “teach students entrepreneurial skills” in previous posts in an attempt to delineate these activities from a engaging in a full entrepreneurial venture.

Mentoring Is Local and Global

There was another conversation about using mentoring to transition students to entrepreneurship.  A good deal of the focus was on helping people after they graduated.

Something that came up often during the conference was that university career service offices have a hard time working with arts students because their career path is so nebulous. It is easy to direct students with business, education, science, teaching, pre-law and pre-med degrees because career progression is fairly well understood.

In much the same way, it can be difficult for career services to provide support to entrepreneurs because by definition they seek to walk the road less traveled.

Among the suggestions that were made, most of them by a recent graduate, was using social media to create connections between entrepreneur programs across the country. One could easily find their ideal team members living elsewhere and you don’t necessarily all have to be located in the same geographic area to be productive.

Along the same lines was a suggestion for providing some basic support and access to graduates of partner programs. A person may graduate in one place but move elsewhere to start their venture so it would be good to be able to tap into the list of local mentors another program had identified. (Imagine how great it would be to be recognized for bolstering the local economy by “stealing” graduates of other programs from those communities thanks to your mentor and incubator network.)

It was also suggested that students be invited to the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) conferences so they can share their experiences with the assembled educators. Especially in terms of what aspects of their training did and did not prove valuable to avoid reinventing the wheel or replicating the same mistakes as someone else.

Miscellaneous Thoughts And Resources

Michael Bills who directs the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Ohio State University said they were only offering entrepreneurship as a minor at the undergraduate level because they felt that entrepreneurship is a graduate level pursuit. (I should note this is a university wide program out of their business school rather specific to an arts entrepreneurship program.)

This is based on the concept of the T shaped skills. Briefly, the vertical bar of the T represents the depth of your skills, the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines. Their thought is that you develop your depth as an undergrad and then really focus on your ability to collaborate as a graduate.

I have heard similar philosophies about fine arts disciplines and know there are some universities that won’t teach arts administration as an undergraduate major based on the same concept.

DePauw University recently created a site called 21CM.org (21st Century Musician) as a resource and place for conversations among musicians about developing an entrepreneurial mindset. It is intentionally devoid of any mention of DePauw other than the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. The About section makes no mention of the school and the conference presenters pointed out the site doesn’t bear DePauw’s colors.

The school took the same approach in establishing a public music space for “courageous music making” in their hometown of Greencastle, IN. The space isn’t branded with DePauw’s name or colors (it actually appears to use the 21CM.org colors) though the website uses DePauw’s domain.

In both cases, the goal is for the community of participants to take ownership of the respective resources.

That is generally the extent of my notes from the conference that fit into the general theme of these three posts. It will be interesting to see how SAEE grows as an organization and how the whole concept of artist as entrepreneur (and how best to teach those skills) evolves over time.

Even as there is a need to introduce this type of instruction in undergraduate/graduate/conservatory training, there is also the obvious unmet need to train people who have passed that stage, may have some career experience and wish to acquire additional skills or engage in a venture of their own.

The Question That Is Going To Take Awhile To Answer

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As promised yesterday, today I am going to continue discussing my observations from attending the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) conference this weekend.

I think it bears pointing out that the organization and its efforts are very new. This is only the second conference they have held. There are a lot of questions to answer and to date there hasn’t been a lot of opportunity to do research and have these conversations.

I preface my observations with this because the one question I really wanted to see discussed was how to carve out time in an arts training program to teach students entrepreneurial skills. With few exceptions, it seemed like most of the courses in this area were being offered as an option rather than part of the core part of the training. Unfortunately, due to time constraints this question never came up as a main topic.

The conversation during closing plenary which I thought would be the most opportune forum to discuss this issue was tightly controlled and focused heavily on questions of research. (Again, I know there are a lot of questions still to be asked, and I didn’t expect a definitive answer. This is the danger when you get too many academics in the same room! 😉 )

One person who did indirectly address the subject was Emily Ondracek-Peterson from Metropolitan State University in Denver. She presented the results of a survey conducted with conservatory graduates asking what parts of their training had prepared them well for pursuing a career and which areas they felt their conservatory preparation had fallen short.

The pool she drew from for her interviews and surveys were string players from five top tier music conservatories that had graduated since 1995 so other people’s experiences may vary.

She covered a lot of ground so my notes are probably lacking regarding some of her results.  To summarize, she essentially found the focus was on preparing students to perform at a high level in orchestras and as soloists. There wasn’t a lot of instruction on how to teach or establish a studio even though nearly every music conservatory graduate ends up teaching to some degree, regardless of whether they get a place in an orchestra or not.

Respondents were dissatisfied with the lack of training in other genres, improvisation and collaboration with musicians of other genres or artists of other disciplines.  Respondents also found that they spent a lot of time in the support work related to performing – contracting, doing taxes, accounting, self-promotion, etc., but that the necessity of gaining these skills was rarely discussed during training.

As she spoke about conservatories training first tier musicians, I wondered if there was any benefit to teaching students to be second tier musicians in order to make room for training in career management skills. They would have a high level of excellence, but would be prepared in other areas. My suspicion is that conservatories would say that sort of approaching is okay for other schools, but would be a waste of their time and the time of their highly talented students.

I am surely not the first to have this thought. People who have attended a conservatory for music, dance, theater or visual arts can better attest whether some of the instruction they receive is better dropped in favor of different type of training. Regardless of how much instruction you receive in school, there are always going to be skills you will need to acquire and grow after graduation.

The question is, what do divert focus from during your formal training that you may need to make up for after graduation? Some students may prefer to be prepared to manage their career so that they have a better idea of how to support their pursuit of technical training after graduation.

Given the level of competition in their field, how will they have to adjust their ambitions as a result of this decision?

I had more to say on this subject than I expected so one more post on a variety of shorter thoughts tomorrow.  It will tie back to this entry because the answer to how a graduate might adjust their ambitions might be found in entrepreneurial pursuits.

I do want to note before I finish today that despite reading so often how music schools are doing a disservice to their students by not preparing them with career management skills, it seemed like the discipline most highly represented at the SAEE conference was music. There wasn’t anyone from the very top tier music conservatories at the conference that I saw, but it did seem that people from the music field are beginning to take some action to address these concerns.

Teaching Arts Students Entrepreneurial Skills, It Has Begun

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This weekend I attended the annual conference of the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) at Ohio State University. Even though my university doesn’t have arts entrepreneurship or management classes, I wanted to attend because there has been a lot of conversation recently on the topic of training artists to have a more entrepreneurial mindset.

I took many notes on the sessions I attended. I expect there will be at least two posts this week covering what I learned.

What made one of the greatest impressions on me was learning about the Arts Entrepreneurship program at Millikin University. The heart of their program is a series of student run ventures in music publishing, a visual arts gallery, a theater space, a printing press, a publishing house, a printmaking studio and a radio station.

There is actually another venture not listed on their website that just started to get going in the last couple weeks.

You might expect this many student run ventures at large universities with established programs like Ohio State and Southern Methodist University. The fact that Millikin has so many with an enrollment of about 2100 says something about what can be accomplished with the buy-in of faculty and administration.

Given there is a greater expectation that universities better prepare students with practical career skills in their fields of study, Millikin may end up being a good model for smaller schools seeking to meet those expectations. Which is not to say there aren’t other great programs out there. OSU seems to be on a very promising track–but they have a lot of resources which isn’t the case everywhere.

If this sounds intriguing, you may want to attend the SAEE conference next October because it will be hosted by Millikin University.

The faculty which advise the courses/ventures that run the theater space, retail art gallery and poetry printing press were at the conference. One of the common threads that ran through discussions of their respective endeavors was that they allow the students to fail quickly and often–and the students are held accountable for the results and to each other.

Currently, the theater venture, Pipe Dreams Studio Theatre is running into some revenue problems due to decisions they made about how they were going to handle ticket sales. Even though the first production appears as if it may lose money, the instructor Sarah Theis, says the venture usually ends up comfortably in the black.

Which is good because they apparently don’t get bailed out by the school. The course is repeatable and the requirement to be on the management team is to take the course for three semesters. This tends to engender some accountability since the decisions made earlier impact what resources a student has to work with when they end up on the management team.

Julienne Shields, who supervises the downtown retail art space, Blue Connection, spoke of the panic and conflict that inevitably occurs during the initial stages. She turns these occurrences into learning opportunities.

I am not sure what the mix of majors in the other student run ventures are, but the art retail space is a mix of arts students and business students, both of whom express misgivings about why they need to take the class at all. Both groups basically embody their respective stereotypes. Just having them learn to understand and work with each other almost justifies the reason for the class by itself.

Shields said the arts students will get inspired and want to start working at midnight while the business students are more aligned with the 9 to 5 schedule. The business students will happily grab the numbers the arts students are struggling with and help make sense of them, but they won’t understand the story behind the numbers.

While the arts students are initially happy to have the numbers taken out of their hands, because the class structure forces the students to ultimately be accountable to one another, they can’t avoid dealing with the numbers forever. In the end, the business students have a better understanding of the story behind the numbers and the arts students can see how the financial elements align with the story of the art.

Since all these endeavors are essentially group projects, the biggest challenge for the instructors is to create a grading rubric that accurately evaluates whether everyone is pulling their own weight. There was some brief discussion of this and from what I derived, the focus really is on the success of the group rather than parsing precise degrees of credit and blame. After all, in real life if the company fails, it doesn’t matter who only gave 60% effort, everyone is out of a job.

Tomorrow I intend to cover the challenges faced by art entrepreneurship programs that conference attendees identified. One of the biggest being that the effort is really just in the infancy stage.

Making Ticket Refundability The Customer’s Choice

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When conversations about demand based pricing for the performing arts comes up, there is often a comparison made to the airlines and the way they factor in dozens of variables when they price their seats. One airline practice that doesn’t get mentioned is the refundable fare where you pay more in return for the right to cancel the ticket.

The right to exchange, and sometimes even get a refund for tickets, has long been a benefit extended to performance subscribers. Now that subscription sales are fading, perhaps it is time to think about applying it to single tickets?

The thought came to me when I was reading an story on a Microsoft blog about Jet.com The company is heavy into dynamic pricing to the point where the price of an item changes while it is in your shopping cart as variables are factored.

One of the ways people can lower the price of an item is to agree not to return it.

At checkout, customers can waive the right to return certain items, driving the cost down further; choosing one credit card over another — or paying directly from a checking account — takes dollars off, too. The system also suggests purchasing combinations that can save customers money.

With greater control over these variables, shoppers can strike their own personal balance between cost and convenience, something Lore’s team saw as missing in the industry. “The whole concept of Jet is to make transparent all of the costs that go into an e-commerce transaction, and then empower consumers to pull out costs as they see fit.

So what if you offer the opportunity to return tickets for an extra $5-$10 per ticket charge?

Generally the motivation for not allowing returns is fear of not being able to resell a ticket. There are also the labor costs and credit card transaction fees associated with processing a refund. Having different pricing makes the economics of all this more transparent and shifts some control to the purchaser.

If you do decide to allow a refund on a ticket sold as non-refundable, the rationale for a fee is clear. I know some performing arts organization charge an exchange fee which can seem punitive. In the context of this type of discount program, it can seem less so since the customer was offered the choice and the price difference has already been discussed.

I am not advocating this as a new source of income. There are social and emotional transactions that occur during the refund process, the results of which may not be directly correlated to whether a full refund was granted or not. It is better when the subject never comes up, regardless of whether you are generating any income from the exchange.

Still, it is something to think about. Especially if the choice of a discount in exchange for waiving the ability to make a return becomes more widespread and familiar.

If such an approach is implemented, it would definitely need to be handled at the time of sale from the positive perspective of “All our tickets are refundable, but you can get an additional discount if you don’t think you will want to exchange/refund,” rather than a more negative, “it will be an additional $10 if you want to be allowed to get a refund.”

Airlines handle it in the latter manner. Just think how much happier you would be if the $500 ticket were only $300 if you waived the right to a refund.

Airlines can’t really it that way because people initially hunt for the lowest price. They gain advantage from advertising the lowest price and adding costs as you choose options.

Price hunting doesn’t factor as much into the decision about which production to see so arts organizations have a little more flexibility in that respect.

I would be curious to see if a higher level of satisfaction might result from implementing this type of pricing. Would people feel more satisfaction secure in the knowledge they can either get a refund at any time or having gotten a great discount to something they fully intended to see anyway?

I imagine it would depend on the demographics of the community. Younger people and families might appreciate the low risk flexibility. More established audiences might view the unorthodox approach and additional level of pricing as confusing.

Just Pray Your Grandma Doesn’t Run Against You For Homecoming Queen

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Recently I have been seeing more stories about shared use of public buildings. In Bremen, Germany, the city philharmonic is sharing space with students in a local school building. In Cleveland, music students from the Cleveland Institute of Music live in a retirement community.

Now I see a Massachusetts school near Boston was shares space with the local senior citizen center.

But during the early phases of planning, as his team met with officials, they realized that the needs of the town’s elderly overlapped quite neatly with those of its teenagers. At the time, the senior center was using a small Victorian house that fell far short of accessibility standards.

The senior center had a strong dance program, Poinelli recalls learning. “We said, ‘Well, we have a dance room in the high school.’ In the winter, they took seniors in a bus to a local shopping center to walk—I said, ‘Well, we have this huge field house, you could use that.’ There was so much overlap, and it just seemed to make sense.”

[…]

Members of a knitting circle taught several students to knit, for example, and high-school sports teams give presentations to the senior men’s group, sharing their strategy for the upcoming season. Kids in need of community-service hours help serve lunch at the senior center, and veterans have been asked to talk to students about their service. The senior center gets 25 free tickets to every high-school performing arts event, and last year, the seniors’ dance team performed at the high-school talent show.

I was immediately struck by how this arrangement helps keep arts in the schools. It increases the demand for, and use of, arts facilities which helps justify their expense.

Even more importantly, it connects the interests and political clout of the largest generation as they retire to those of public education.

There is likely to be less grumbling about property taxes and not having any kids in school if people have an emotional connection to the students. They may also be more likely to advocate on behalf of the students. If retirees are using the same facilities as students, I suspect they will be better maintained.

If there is frequent contact between students and retirees, there may be subtle positive impacts on behavior and attendance thanks to the socialization.

Ah! The Problem Is Your Show Is Like A Chicken Sandwich With Mashed Potatoes and Gravy

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The first segment of this week’s This American Life episode offers proof that marketing departments everywhere run up against the same challenges, regardless of whether they are in the for or not-for profit world, whether they are selling art and culture experiences or hamburgers.

How many times have you said, this is a really great product/experience, but I don’t think there is a market for it?

That is what the marketing team for Hardee’s says about a mashed potato, gravy and chicken sandwich they are sampling from the company’s test kitchen. The taste and texture are really great, they think anyone who bought it would really like it, but they don’t think there are enough people who will make that initial decision to buy a sandwich with mash potatoes on it.

This is exact conversation that occurs when many arts events and performances are first conceived or proposed. It’s great. Anyone who experienced it would like it. Is there enough to it to impel people to that choice?

Really folks confess, how many of you have made a sandwich that included mashed potatoes at some point during the holidays? It was good wasn’t it? You might not want to order it in public though.

Here is a picture by the way.

Source
Source

 

My guess is the arts run into the same issue to some degree. People are curious or have experimented creating something similar themselves, but are reluctant to  be seen publicly participating.

What correspondent Zoe Chace says the Hardee’s team has to do is figure out the story they are going to tell that makes all the weirdness make sense.

They offer some interesting insight into customer psyche, at least in terms of food. The Hardee’s marketing team says that a macaroni and cheese burger is an easier sell than the chicken sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy because it only adds one unfamiliar element-macaroni. People are used to cheese on their burgers.  Their gut tells them that Mashed Potatoes AND Gravy on a chicken sandwich may be too far a leap.  (That said, from what I can find it appears they market tested the mashed potato sandwich but not the macaroni and cheese burger.)

I am not sure if that offers anything that can be applied to the arts, but it might bear paying attention to how many variations from an expected norm an event that sells well has versus one that that doesn’t sell well.

Another thing the Hardee’s team talks about is the importance of naming to the image you are trying to project. They discuss how they tried selling a burger with pulled pork on it three times. It wasn’t until they included the term “Memphis Barbeque” that it started selling well, they assume it’s thanks to the cachet Memphis has as a source of good barbeque.

I can completely relate to that. Once I presented a performance that was extremely high quality. The challenge was that it was a collaboration of artists from different disciplines, in a format that was unfamiliar to audiences. This made the show difficult to quickly explain and the title of the event didn’t help matters.

About a year later, I saw the show advertised elsewhere with a title that was much more representative of the content. I contacted the manager and asked if it was the same show with the same principal artists. I assumed one of them had left and so the show couldn’t be advertised in the same way.

It turned out it was the same exact show and they hadn’t been particularly invested in the title they had been using. They were happy to call it whatever helped sell it best.

Ninety-five percent of productions, the title is an immutable part of the brand identity.  At least once a year since learning a performer was flexible about the event name, I have been able to negotiate some minor alterations on the name or description of a show to make it sound more appealing and accessible specifically to my local audience.  It never hurts to ask.

In the third segment of the podcast, This American Life asks advertising agencies how Volkswagen can extract themselves from their current difficulties. While many say VW is in trouble because it broke faith with its customers, everyone they asked had sentimental feelings for VW based on the company’s past ad campaigns.

There is something to be said for generating good will.

One company suggested a documentary style self-examination. Another suggested VW appeal directly to the consumer, saying their focus was on what they thought over any governmental or industry investigation–essentially throwing themselves at the mercy of the Internet.

A third suggested building a plant in Detroit to bolster jobs there and have Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton do a TV ad in the style of their Broadway show (mixing hip hop and Constitutional themes). It is a little strange to listen to the audio of their sample ad as they transition from lyrics drawn from the Constitution to mentioning the importance of environmental stewardship.

The thought that annoyed me though, and this has nothing directly to do with the podcast, is that the arts are dismissed as a viable career path—until it comes time to rally goodwill around a billion dollar international company or some other tragedy.

This isn’t a direct criticism of VW or ad agencies, both of which know the value of creative artists. I just feel like I need to call attention to these situations as a bit of counter messaging.

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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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