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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.

The Most Receptive Arts Audience May Be Behind Bars

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Over the last few days you may have read about how the inmates at New York’s Eastern Correctional Facility beat Harvard University’s top ranked debate team.

It caught my attention because that is the prison in which I learned to play chess.

 

 

Yeah, I let that hang there a minute, but it is absolutely true that when I was around 9 or 10 years old, an inmate named Fat Cal with three life sentences for murder taught me to play chess. My parents took us to visit prisoners from the time I was 8 until the time I was about 17. Later, my mother ended up teaching in prisons.

To be honest, my siblings and I thought it was pretty boring because there wasn’t a lot for us to do while our parents talked to the inmates. I can’t say the experience made a deep enough impression on us to keep us out of trouble, but it did prepare us for the hassle of current airport security.

I have written about arts in prisons before. In fact, my last post involved the guard union at Eastern Correctional Facility blocking a theater performance at their prison.

After reading the recent articles about how successful the prison debate team was, it occurred to me that prisons are a good venue for arts organizations that seek to make an impact in a receptive community. As the Wall Street Journal article notes, inmates live a life where few distractions are permitted. As a result, they invest a lot of focus in whatever interests them.

In my previous entry, there were people quoted as saying the inmates should be focusing on developing trade and technical skills which will serve them upon their release. However, a Salon piece discussing the success of the inmate’s debate team notes,

In an oddly backhanded way, the success of these programs reveals the importance of the humanities—those “useless” subjects such as literature, philosophy, and history–which educate the whole person instead of training a worker. For some inmates, Sax writes, their situation may compel them “to think about things more intensely than most people. A crisis like going to prison can move people to question everything in their lives.” As for providing a liberal arts education to inmates, he posits the question: “Are we doing it for the prisoners or for society? Both, but helping the prisoners is a more tangible and immediate goal.”

As for the value of this type of education, the Salon article also notes that the in Bard College program which coached and developed the inmate debate team,

Out of 300 men who graduated from Bard’s program, fewer than 2 percent returned to custody within three years; and Hudson Link’s rates are at 3 percent. Without education, 40 percent of prisoners end up incarcerated again.

Similar statistics are also cited in a Daily Kos piece on the story.

What is really interesting to me is that both time and education were cited as key factors in arts participation by the study I cited in Monday’s entry. The researchers in that study hypothesized that highly educated people who were not highly wealthy had higher rates of participation because they had the time to do so, much as the inmates’ success is partially attributed to having the time to devote an undivided focus on their arguments.

As a couple of the articles point out, despite lack of wealth remaining a factor for most inmates upon release, an earned education appears to be diminishing recidivism. Even though there is a lot of debate about the costs and value of higher education, providing a good education appears to contribute to the general good of society.

It isn’t really appropriate to make facile conclusions about the contributions liberal arts can make to criminal reformation, but clearly it can have an important impact. Nor do I want to make statements about education, rather than wealth or a lack thereof, being a key factor in deterring crime. It is pretty clear wealth and class strongly influence whether you will be incarcerated.

Efforts at introducing arts and education to at-risk communities can certainly also assist in preventing people from ending up in prison. Unfortunately, there are myriad environmental factors which may distract people from achieving the necessary focus that is subsequently forced upon them in prison.

For those who long to make an impact in their community and society, it may be worth considering how well working with inmates might help you achieve your goals.

I am sure there is a lesson in all this about how excellence requires more time and focus than we allow ourselves.

A Plague (Of Phones) On Both Your Houses

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Back in July I came across a blog post titled, “When the Audience Phones It In,” which bemoaned all the recent incidents of audience members using phones and other electronic devices at performances employing the recurring phrase, “Why Are You Here?”

Every time I see the post title in my bookmarks, I keep thinking it applies to a different article from the Wall Street Journal about the problem of performers, directors and conductors using cell phones during auditions, rehearsals and backstage during performances.

Given that the phrase “phoning it in” is often used to refer to performers and the phrase “why are you here” could just as easily be applied to people who purport to be passionate and dedicated to what they are doing, that first blog post wouldn’t need many changes in order to address the issues raised in the WSJ article.

It is a little disingenuous to get indignant at audiences without acknowledging the issue exists backstage as well. Just because there isn’t a perfect silence and twilight ambiance of a performance for the errant glow or ringtone to disturb doesn’t mean artists shouldn’t be held to a similar, if not higher standard, as audiences.

The dynamics of a performing ensemble are as important to the success of a performance as establishing a rapport with the audience.

In musical theater, filling downtime on a device instead of watching co-workers rehearse can limit the cohesiveness of an ensemble, said Broadway choreographer Josh Rhodes, most recently of “It Shoulda Been You,” who has banned phones and starts rehearsals with a speech.

“I tell the actors I would rather have to stop them from talking, laughing and bonding, than from texting. I would rather they annoy each other, talk about me behind my back, fix the show in private,” he said. “Anything that links them together is better than checking Facebook during rehearsal.”

Theater director and Shakespeare expert Michael Sexton agrees. “Whenever there is a 10-minute break, everyone retreats to their phone,” he said. “There is this silent room as opposed to gossip and getting to know each other.”

The change can limit professional and social bonds, said Mr. Sexton: “In theater, you are often in rooms with people you don’t really know and the only time the details of peoples’ lives come out is in breaks.”

I hate to be the crotchety old guy muttering “in my day…,” but I think it says something when a director expresses a tolerance for public disturbances, fomenting discord and insubordination if it helps the ensemble bond and keeps them from retreating to their cellphones.

WSJ acknowledges the constructive uses of cellphones and other devices in preparing for a role and helping to promote the show on social media. There is still a certain element to all this that requires one to get one’s own house in order before criticizing others.

Offenses by audience members are highly visible, clearly apparent and violate established social rules so they are easy to deride.

Backstage/rehearsal use is less visible and the rules are more varied and vague. Not to mention there can be power dynamics that inhibit comment when conductors and directors are the primary offenders.

The WSJ article doesn’t even get into the impact of allowing yourself to be distracted during a performance. There are the obvious things like missed cues. Having a fight with a significant other before heading to a performance can have an adverse effect on one’s performance. Having a fight via text/Facetime three minutes before going on stage ratchets things up quite a bit more.

Arts Participation Tied To Education, Not Wealth

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Some encouraging news coming from Pacific Standard in support of the growing trend to focus on participatory arts experiences over simple attendance. According to the results of a new study conducted in England,

“…most forms of arts participation are strongly correlated not with class, but rather with education. To his surprise, he found that in a large sample of the English population, those with higher incomes were actually less likely to be active participants in the arts.”

Let’s get it out of the way right at the beginning and acknowledge that arts participation may be more integral to the English education experience than the U.S. so this finding may not be completely applicable to the U.S.

Still, it is a factor to pay attention to when looking at the demographics of the people you are engaging and trying to engage. The findings are pretty captivating.

In other words, a certain percentage of people go to the opera in order to be seen, to impress their bosses (or in-laws), or because it’s what their friends and neighbors expect them to do. But if you are actually a member of the opera chorus, it’s probably because it feeds your soul.

[…]

Reeves found that “arts participation, unlike arts consumption and cultural engagement generally, is not closely associated with either social class or social status.”

Indeed, “those with higher incomes are less likely to be arts participants,” he writes, adding that this finding is unexpected and difficult to interpret. Perhaps, he speculates, those at the top tend to work longer hours, and have less free time to devote to creative pursuits.

However, Reeves found education was “a strong predictor of the likelihood of being an arts participant.” After adjusting for the influence of family background, he found that, compared to people who did not participate in higher education, those who had earned a degree were four to five times more likely to play a musical instrument, or be involved in painting, photography, or dance.

It is intriguing to think, even if just speculation, that the practice of providing art to be consumed may have been heavily influenced by the fact that those with the most money only had time to attend. Those who are highly educated, but not as affluent may have an interest in consuming, yet they have a stronger interest and availability in participation, but may feel convenient opportunities are lacking.

If you are in a community where everyone sings in a choir, but few attend a concert by touring artists, you may be witnessing this dynamic in action.

There has long been a criticism of a one size fits all approach to marketing, programming, development, etc., especially in terms of trying to replicate what another organization is doing. Now one needs to consider if an art for consumption model may be incompatible with their community as well.

Then there is this statement to think about:

In any event, the findings can serve as a rejoinder to those who argue the arts are strictly of interest to the elite—an assertion that implies the rich can fund these organizations themselves rather than asking taxpayers to help do so.

Despite the exciting prospects represented by this statement, what is still going to be a million dollar mystery question for most arts organizations is if you shift to providing a more participatory mode of arts experience, is there enough interest to support the organization?

Even though there is potentially a much wider scope of people to which to appeal, the knowledge really affluent people are most interested in arts consumption may deter change.

Advisory Board Functionality

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I was curious to know how many people out there have advisory boards/committees that are not part of the governing board. If you have one, what has your experience been?

The reason I ask is because when I was at the recent Arts Midwest conference, a speaker advised that organizations not have a separate standing advisory committee for the simple reason that they will expect their advice to be implemented.

His general idea was that the governing board is in charge of the organization. They are (or should be) aware and responsible for all the repercussions of decisions that are made. An advisory board focuses on ideal outcomes but has no responsibility for what is involved in achieving those outcomes.  They are not likely to be aware of how their suggestions will tax the resources of the organization.

Yet, by providing them with an official seeming role that is called upon periodically, you create expectations about the influence the group will wield. Better that you solicit feedback from individuals at performances,  Rotary meetings, board meetings for other organization, at football games, etc.

If there is a need for a formal focus group or brainstorming session, the group should be assembled to apply their expertise to a specific topic (meeting state education standards, reaching under served communities) and then disbanded.

You might still contact any one you consult individually as follow up advice or to establish partnerships, etc.  It would be surprising if you didn’t. Most organizational challenges can’t be solved in a few afternoon meetings or on the buffet line.  There just shouldn’t be a standing group independent of the governing board.

It was also suggested that the temporary focus group be picked by the organization’s administration rather than by the governing board in order to avoid having an agenda or existing conflict within the board transferred to the group.

I know that some organizations use the Advisory Committee concept as a way to bolster their prestige, curry favor and funding by appointing celebrities, government officials and other notables to the committee. My impression is, this is largely a vanity appointment and few of these committees ever meet as a group.

Which is not to say that these individuals can’t offer valuable advice. Many certainly have great insight to offer and valuable connections which can benefit the organization. It’s just that they are probably solicited on an individual basis, much like as has been suggested.

Again, as this is a topic that doesn’t get discussed very often. I am curious to know how people have used this structure and if the groups, as a group, have proven to be an asset.

Improving The Artistic Palate

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This past summer there was an article on Vice.com about award-winning chefs who have been interning or volunteering at other restaurants, farms and with food scientists in order to pick up new skills and deepen an understanding of their craft.

My first thoughts relating it to the arts was the ongoing debate about artists working for free for the exposure and experience and whether that is valuable or just exploitation. I held off writing about the article because I didn’t want to wade into that well-trodden subject.

I also thought about the fact that a fair number of established artists will continue to take classes to keep their skills fresh; will take on lower paying roles in order to stretch themselves; and will work with masters of related disciplines in order to pick up new skills. (Then there are those who only semi-willingly gain myriad skills by taking dozens of jobs that provide the flexibility to allow their artistic pursuits.)

There were a few concepts and ideas in the Vice article that could have relevance in instigating change in the arts.

The first is understanding and empathy for how the different parts of the business work. Says the chef interning at a bar with a plan to open one himself:

“I think I’d be a total hypocrite, not to mention foolish, to open a place that wasn’t indicative of my skillset. Also, how can you manage a place, manage personalities, if you don’t understand the product, the job, the work?” Paulin said.

“…I will surely be hiring people when I do open a bar … but nobody respects a boss that doesn’t understand the job.”

One idea that doesn’t get discussed directly right now is whether it is valuable for arts managers to have had experience in the disciplines they are overseeing.

In years past, organizations were founded by artists and others intimately involved in the creation of work for the organization before they became a leader. Today it is more common to have people with arts administration degrees who may or may not have practical experience in that discipline. Frequently, people from outside the arts field and non-profits in general, are brought in to lead organizations.

Has more been lost than gained in this practice? Can the contentious rounds of contract negotiations many orchestras have faced be related to these developments? I am not sure if anyone is tracking the career arcs of current arts leaders, but it would be interesting to know how the demographics have changed over the last 30+ years.

Then there is the opposite dynamic that has been getting some conversation lately–practitioners getting experience in the business side as administrators and entrepreneurs.

Despite all emphasis about practicing artists developing these skills, there aren’t too many training programs that include it in their curriculum, though that situation is improving.

I am also not aware of more than a handful (though I am sure more exist) of arts organizations that provide any sort of classes/workshops where associated artists who don’t intend to enter arts management can gain these skills.

The Vice article mentioned a two week intensive where chefs learn to strengthen their communication skills:

Cooknscribble.com is an online resource of food writing courses founded by O’Neill. “Chefs frequently enroll in these classes with a book, a blog or even merely menu- and press-release- writing in mind,” she said….

In the summers, O’Neill offers a two-week residential immersion course in Rensselaerville, New York. In this two week course, the scholars are basically thrown into a fast-paced editorial office. They write every day. They get instruction in recipe writing, food blogging, memoir, creative non-fiction, food news reporting—with additional emphasis placed in photography, videography, oral history and reporting skills.

“Chefs in particular respond to our mentor-style teaching model, our hands-on approach and the reality-based ‘action plans’ that we insist upon,” O’Neill said.

That sounds like a good model for an arts related training program.

Couple sentences later in the article talks about a chef who is losing his physical capacity to cook who wants to develop a way to communicate his knowledge and expertise. In the same sense, there is untapped capacity in retired arts professions that can be utilized to provide guidance through face to face and online interactions.

Granted, there has been an expected great exodus of non-profit executive directors for 10 years now that hasn’t emerged so maybe there aren’t as many retired administrators as I think. Not to mention, performing and visual artists never seem to stop creating. Still, I am sure more can be done that isn’t being done.

Is Anyone Really Reading This? Three Foundations Want To Know

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A guest post today. Barry Hessenius asked if I would spread the word about study being conducted by the Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and WESTAF who are looking into the ways in which the non-profit arts field communicates.

They are seeking answers to many of the basic questions we all ask like, “Is anyone really reading any of this and is it useful to them?”

Those who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing for an Apple Watch and a separate drawing for a $500 cash award to your organization. Read on to learn more.

The Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and WESTAF are sponsoring a preliminary study on Communications within the nonprofit arts field, and have invited our members to join them by taking a brief national survey.

They want to make absolutely sure that the grantmaking community within our field is adequately represented in this survey.

This study seeks to gain valuable information on:

• How we communicate internally with each other
• How we communicate externally within the sector
• How we manage the growth in all communications
• What the impact is on our organizations of that growth in communications.

No one disputes that communication is at the core of every business, including the arts nonprofit sector. If we don’t communicate effectively success is problematic.

Oddly enough there has never been any comprehensive survey of how we in the nonprofit arts field communicate – internally or externally.

As a field, we have virtually no data at all as to:

• which means and methods we prefer to use to communicate,
• whether or not the means we do choose are effective,
• how we manage our communications
• where we get our information from, and
• which sources we trust.

Moreover, we have no information as to how we are coping with the dramatically increased information that flows from, and to, us on a daily basis.

Do you know if people read the reports, studies, and just general information you send them? Do they scan it or read it all, or do they ignore it if you are not one of their trusted sources?

Do you know if your staff considers the onslaught of information a positive or a negative in doing their jobs?

Do you know how many emails your staff deals with each day and how many hours a week they spend on different types of communications?

They have designed a basic, simple online survey that will give us all some base information on our communications behaviors, habits and perceptions.

The survey is 100% check off answers, with no open ended, narrative responses required or asked for.

It is completely anonymous and designed to take less than 20 minutes to complete.

While they cannot pay a fee nor provide a premium to every person / organization that takes the survey, they will, at the request of each survey responder, enter their name into a random drawing for an Apple Watch. We will also enter the name of the responder’s organization into a separate random drawing for a $500 cash award payable to that organization.

The survey seeks to establish a base line of data and information about communications within our sector, on which can be built further research. The aim is to
gain knowledge that will help us all to communicate more effectively, more efficiently and with a greater awareness of the issues and challenges inherent in all our communications decisions.

To that end they will disseminate as widely as possible the analysis of the results of the survey.
Here is the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Knight-Hewlett-Survey

The survey is open from September 28th to October 16th.

If A Scientist Can Be Creative, So Can A Normal Person

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There was a recent post on the Priceonomics blog about the creative and artistic practice of scientists. According to a recent research study,

It seems avocational creativity discoveries of professional scientists go hand in hand: the more accomplished a scientist is, the more likely they are to have an artistic hobby.

The average scientist is not statistically more likely than a member of the general public to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But members of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society — elite societies of scientists, membership in which is based on professional accomplishments and discoveries — are 1.7 and 1.9 times more likely to have an artistic or crafty hobby than the average scientist is. And Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85 times more likely than the average scientist to have an artistic or crafty hobby.

[…]

The paper’s authors also compared these values to the rates of artistic or crafty hobbies among the U.S. general population. The “average scientist” as measured by the Sigma Xi survey wasn’t any more likely than the general population to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But they were much more likely to be a musician or a photographer than the general population, and also less likely to be writers, visual artists, or performance or theater artists.

That distribution is different among more accomplished scientists. Nobel winners, for example, are 12 times more likely to be writers than scientists in general are.

The charts that accompany the post are pretty amazing in their depiction of how much more likely a Nobel winner, as a percentage of the population, is to have an artistic avocation than the general public.

The post discusses the contributions the mythical combination of right-brain/left brain thinking in the success of the scientists.

I would really love to know if that same mix linear and associative thinking contributes to creative excellence. Except I think the effects would be harder to measure given the differences in the way success is assessed.

Nobel prizes in science are generally awarded for work that is measurable, possesses reproducible results and the where stated benefits are clear and verifiable. Prizes to artists are based on much more subjective, wildly varied criteria.

Excellence in creative fields is not always fairly rewarded. There are most certainly a good number of scientists who might claim the same.

The findings of this study is hardly earth shattering. The artistic habits of many prominent scientists like Albert Eisenstein and Richard Feynman are often mentioned.

It is just that now I have a slightly different perspective in light of the study I posted about last week which found that citing how the arts have a positive impact on academic achievement does not resonate with the public at large. So there may not be any benefit to lauding creative hobbies as crucial to scientists’ ability to achieve great things.

However, since people often perceive art and science at opposite ends of a continuum, scientists can provide proof that anyone is capable of creative expression. Something the study I cited last week said can be important to emphasize. The idea that non-artsy people like scientists can enjoy doing artsy things may convince those who self-identify as regular folks that they may have the ability to create as well.

Really, even suggesting an approach along those lines sounds pretty condescending to me. The actual execution of the message needs to be a little more subtle than, “Hey if logical, dispassionate scientists can be artsy, so can you.” Still it wouldn’t surprise me if some people were encouraged by the image of austere, detached scientists being creative and gradually became more open to the idea that they could be as well.

If evoking that concept actually did set people at least, it would be a testament to just how intimidating the idea of the arts are to people that they would think there might be hope for them if a scientist could be creative.

Not to mention scientists have an image problem if people envision them solely involved with pragmatic, empirical practices.

If there is one thing that arts and science have in common, (other than enabling scientists to kick their problem solving skills up a notch), it is a shared stereotypes of intimidating inscrutability to contend with.

Potentially the danger in seeing art and science at the incomprehensible extreme ends of a continuum makes scientists as much an “other” as creatives. Any sort of messaging that connected the two groups might only solidify the concept that art was something that “other” people did.

Thinking About The Implications Of Local News

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Arts organizations, and really any business, need to be cognizant of different environmental factors that may impact them. It is relatively easy to predict (or blame) the impact of the economy or local unemployment on earned and unearned revenue.

It can be a little more difficult to discern what effect zoning changes in different parts of your city might bring or if the adoption of Common Core standards by local schools is going to good or bad for the local arts over the long term.

Another thing that might not really be on your radar as a potential threat or opportunity is the availability and affordability of real estate in your community. An article predicting a worsening of the rental market on the Atlantic website says the number of people paying between 30%-50% of their income is expected to rise over the next decade.

The researchers estimate that the current rental crunch—the one where vacancies are around 7 percent, about half of renters spend more than 30 percent of their salaries on housing, and one quarter spend 50 percent or more—is only going to get worse over the next decade. Even if housing prices and income rise as quickly as inflation (about 2 percent annually) the number of severely rent-burdened Americans (those paying 50 percent or more) would increase by 11 percent over the decade, to over 13 million people in 2025.

[…]

According to their estimates, the current trend—where fewer Americans opt for homeownership—will continue. And that could be bad news for household finances, since a greater number of Americans will wind up using a major chunk of their income just to pay for housing.

When it is put in these terms, it doesn’t take much effort to understand that there will be less disposable income floating around with so much of it is going into housing. If you are paying 50% of your income for rent, there is that much more motivation to stay at home and get your entertainment bingeing on Netflix series.

Unless you have a lot of housing developers and public policy makers on your board that you can advocate to, there isn’t much an arts organization can do to directly impact this reality. If you see this sort of thing on the horizon for your city, you could be proactive in your next couple 5 year strategic plans to prepare for and lower economic barriers for residents who are challenged by rising rents.

Spoilers To Help You Enjoy The Show

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Slate had an article last month about schools in North Carolina that were flipping the museum field trip.

This is based on the concept of a flipped classroom where you do all the reading, view video lectures, etc on your own. During the normal class meeting period, the instructor helps you apply that knowledge to problems in a similar manner to how students would be expected to demonstrate what they learned by doing homework.

Essentially the lectures are received at home and the work is performed in class instead of the typical mode of learning where this is reversed.

In the case of the museum visit, instead of visiting the museum and then applying what was experienced to classroom work, the classroom work and learning about the concepts preceded the museum visit. In many respects, the museum visit was an ending point confirming the reality of expectations rather than serving as a starting point for a project.

There were a lot of interesting elements of this project, including the pairing of rural and urban schools as partners, trading work and discussing ideas online with people they didn’t meet until both schools visited the museum at the same time.

As exciting as the project sounded, I wondered if the students, or really anyone, would go to the trouble of researching works or performances prior to attending. About the only categories of people I could think of who regularly prepare in advance of an event are attendees of operas and story ballets who want to understand the story being rendered in a language (or movement) they don’t clearly understand.

So while it sounded as if the advanced preparation the students did enhanced their enjoyment of the museum going experience, I couldn’t really think of an effective way to convince people that they take time out of their busy lives to do some preparatory web surfing.

It was only in the last few days that I remembered a research project from some years back which found that spoilers actually enhance your enjoyment of an experience.

In looking for links to include in this post, I found a post by psychologist Dr. Ali Mattu who argues against the study saying that if you have a high emotional investment in an event, (highly anticipating the experience for period of time), spoilers can ruin things for you.

However, he says in cases like literature and art, the study shows spoilers can remove some intellectual barriers and assist in processing the experience.

In non-academic speak, spoilers may help people understand stories. Knowing what’s going to happen might also make things more fun by giving you something to look forward to. This is supported by the research on rereading stories – most people enjoy a story as much, if not more, the second time they read it.

[…]

I also buy the argument that knowledge about a story can help people enjoy it more. As the researchers mention, this speaks to perceptual fluency – the easier it is to understand something, the more we enjoy it. Whenever I see a book to movie adaptation, I always enjoy the movie better if I’ve already read the book. Movie trailers also help me understand what a movie is about. The same is true of non-story experiences – I like museum exhibits better when I already know about the artists and their artwork.

This got me wondering if there is any value to labeling a link on webpages and email blast “Spoilers To Help You Enjoy The Show.” Would that be intriguing enough to get people to investigate in advance. If so, then it is just a matter of discerning whether a Buzzfeed-esque mix of text, gifs and videos is more valuable to your potential audience or if something they can download for future reference would be more useful.

Phhsst! You Think You Are As Good As Me?

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Often when the concept of Professional-Amateurs or the capability of everyone to be creative comes up, there is a feeling of resistance that rises up among arts professionals. The study on creating public will for arts and culture that I have been citing this week addresses that a little.

Finally, our research found A POTENTIAL FOR PUSH-BACK FROM EXISTING CONSTITUENCIES for arts and culture (e.g., some arts leaders, working artists, arts educators, and arts and culture enthusiasts). Here, some respondents expressed concern that a focus on creative expression represents a dumbing down of the conversation about the value of arts and culture. Some artists, for example, chafe at the notion that “amateurs” and “hobbyists” might be lumped into the same category as those who have dedicated years of study, practice, and exploration to their art.

…Rather, the question of framing the subject is not either “creative expression” or “arts and culture,” but both/and. To those ends, our research suggests that framing the discussion in terms of creative expression is an entry point through which more people are receptive, increasing and diversifying the audience for whom the conversation has relevance.

Getting more people engaging in a conversation about arts and culture is a good thing. One of the benefits to people becoming more interested and invested in their hobby or area of interest is that the more they learn, the more they realize what they don’t know.

The only problem is that people are often satisfied with what they already know and don’t seek to learn more. As involved in the arts as I am, when I saw the “I Could Do That” video I included in a post last week, I had new respect for Piet Mondrian’s Tableau I. I wasn’t aware how difficult it is to execute using oil paint.

While I have never been dismissive of the work, I could have gone my whole life unaware of the technical skills necessary to create it.

But it can be valuable to remember that the arts aren’t the only arena in which people underestimate the degree of skill required.

Every year millions of kids around the world play baseball. It is a game that is easy for amateurs to participate in. Everyone understands, however, that only a select few have the skill to hit a baseball traveling in excess of 90 MPH…except for thousands of fans jeering at the ineptitude of the losing team.

Sports are still better served by having leagues of people of various ages, abilities and degrees of organization participating rather than athletes feeling threatened by the idea that people are being encouraged to think they have athletic ability.

It bears noting that participation in sports is waning both among those interested in playing and audiences. There may be a growing opportunity to engage people in creative expression as an alternative pursuit…or this may be a sign of a decreasing trend in participation in all types of activities.

Authenticity In All Your Diverse Dealings

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Yesterday when discussing the Arts Midwest study that is the basis for the effort to build public will for arts and culture, I briefly referenced the finding that promoting authenticity of experience is better than citing cultural diversity.

According to the study:

However, the word “diversity” can be problematic in describing the benefit or outcome of experiencing the creative expression of other people and cultures. Some resist the notion that our communities are becoming more diverse, and others are concerned with the “tokenism” associated with diversity that satisfies itself with quotas or counting or the most rudimentary of contact while failing to connect authentically with other people or cultures.

A similar sentiment to the tokenism concern was expressed in a different, earlier Arts Midwest conference session on Engaging Diverse Communities, facilitated by Kaisha Johnson, Meera Dugal and Robin Hickman.

One of the first points raised in the session is that 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.

In terms of identifying and engaging groups, if one didn’t already have a sense of where to start, the panel’s advice was to seek groups online and via social media. The panel suggested engaging people as fans of a particular group or genre first rather than as a potential seat filler.

Discovering why people are passionate about a genre or group can 1- provide an initial basis for making a personal connection and 2 – can provide insight into what fans value about that person (i.e. it isn’t just about good music, but the political message or perhaps the group’s dedication to other social and environmental causes.)

An convenient source for establishing connections may be your organization’s staff. The panel cautioned that you should allow people to self identify their connections rather than deciding what they are. (i.e. You are a Chinese, bisexual, Millennial so you know all about…)

Once you have established relationships with individuals from an affinity group, the panel advocated for involving them in the curatorial process. These individuals can also help you understand the cultural dynamics and context of performances as well as avoid any potential pitfalls.

Meera Dugal used the example of a Moroccan group she scheduled at Lincoln Center during Ramadan. Thanks to the advice of her contacts, she moved the concert to a time after sundown and had certain types of foods available for participants.

While I had heard suggestions along these general lines before, one idea that never occurred to me but seemed like a no-brainer in retrospect was to commit to using vendors from target communities. While it sounded like the panel was suggesting this in relation to just specific events, it seems constructive to engage in continual commerce with businesses run by members of the community with which you wish improve your relationship.

If the people you want aren’t paying you to enter your doors, pay them to enter your doors instead by ordering flowers, catering, dry cleaning, construction materials, etc.

We often think that the only way to reach people is through whatever our primary product is. You know, the old idea that once they see what we do, they will fall in love with it.

But every transaction provides an opportunity to have a conversation about what our organizations do— “We are using your stuff for X, you ought to come and see.”

Not to mention, it reinforces the sincerity of any other expressed desire to include the group in your activities. (a.k.a. putting your money where your mouth is).

Since the study I wrote about yesterday seems to indicate older, white men appear to be the least likely to be engaged in arts/creative expression, using commerce to cultivate relationships with other groups may be a prudent course toward sustainability.

Arts and Culture Bad, Creativity Good

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Last week I attended the Arts Midwest conference in Kansas City, MO. From what I saw of the city, it can still lay claim to the appellation, “Paris of the Plains.” The Helzberg Hall at the Kauffman Center left most attendees amazed and a little green with envy.

I ended up staying at the gorgeous Hotel Phillips which I was excited to learn has its own artist in residence.

Building Public Will For Arts and Culture

The conference session that unexpectedly grabbed my attention was Arts Midwest President David Fraher’s session on Building Public Will for Arts and Culture where he presented the results of the research findings on the subject.

If nothing else, the session reconfirmed the value of attending live performance over recorded because Fraher provided a good deal of insight and nuance that doesn’t come through when reading the report.

Essentially, building public will for arts and culture involves something of a reversal of the current focus in favor of grassroots efforts. As an example of what is envisioned being needed, Fraher and the report cite the way smoking bans emerged.

The Surgeon General never changed the advertising message that smoking and second hand smoke was bad for you, it was a grassroots desire not to have one’s health impacted by second hand smoke that brought about the change in laws. From the research results report:

For years, those seeking to reduce the incidence of smoking found themselves stymied. Facts and data about the harmful effects of smoking had motivated some to quit, but had failed to create fundamental change in social norms, systems, and policies. The facts were compelling, but they were overpowered by opponents who framed the issue in the context of individual freedom (i.e., “I have the right to smoke if I want to; I’m not hurting anybody.”).

Even the growing body of evidence around second-hand smoke had difficulty finding fertile ground until advocates realized they could reframe the same core argument to their own advantage (i.e., “I have the right to be protected from exposure to smoke.”). Co-opting the individual freedom value—backed by facts and data—allowed the sustainable changes in policies and systems that we experience today.

Fraher noted that currently, the arts and culture community generally put their effort into effecting one time change vis-a-vis staving off government policy decisions rather than long term, enduring change.

When you want to effect immediate change, you put 80% effort into advertising and 20% into grassroots. To effect long lasting change, it is reversed. 80% effort goes toward grassroots effort and 20% effort into advertising. Engaging in the latter course they are advocating will therefore require a shift of mindset and priorities in the arts and culture community.

One of the central precepts in this effort is a focus on community values. This means asking what do the arts have that align with community values rather than focusing on what the arts value and looking at what the community has that aligns with them.

Arts and Culture Are Poison

Among the findings that caused the biggest reaction in the conference session was that the term “arts and culture” is poison and turns people off, keeping them from entering the conversation. The perception is Art is something someone else does. Something to be watched passively that is inaccessible and intimidating. The search found that “creative expression” has a more positive association that opens the door to a conversation that eventually ends up at a discussion of art.

While they don’t suggest scrubbing every mention of art and culture from your conversations and literature, they do say it may be some years before the terminology trends back to a positive association.

People feel that creativity is part of who they are. They may not call themselves creative, but once they start to talk about what they do, they will admit they engage in creative expression. Even if people don’t feel they are creative, they apparently have an easier time envisioning themselves capable of creative expression than envisioning themselves creating art. (Again, the idea that art is something other people do.)

Another term that turned people off was “diversity.” It is better to promote an event as providing an authentic experience rather than providing/promoting cultural diversity.

Personal Health, Not the Economy

When talking about the benefits of an experience, mentioning that the arts improve the economy, make kids smarter and brings safety to communities are arguments that work with policy makers in government and foundations, but don’t really have resonance with individuals.

Generally people believe creativity makes them less stressed, happier, healthier and more connected with family and friends. (One thing Fraher emphasized was that family was family of choice rather than biological immediate family.) It probably comes as no surprise that despite the appearance of hyperconnectivity, research has found that there is currently a crisis of loneliness, perhaps the greatest in history. So promoting arts and culture in the context of health, relaxation and connectivity is more effective messaging.

The study cites the NEA’s finding that not having someone to attend with is a significant barrier to attendance. Fraher commented that they weren’t suggesting arts organizations start a dating service, but since I and others are experimenting with something along those lines, I would suggest not dismissing the idea too soon.

Survey and focus group respondents also had a strong, positive reaction to the idea that creativity helped one connect with oneself, but would back way from their initial enthusiasm out of apparent embarrassment that it made them sound self-centered. (Most frequently among parents with young children.) Appropriate subtlety and restraint may make this another effective approach to take.

Not Everyone Who Values The Experience Is Attending

As the effort to build public will for arts and culture moves forward, the key audiences it will focus on are women, young people and people of color. The study found strong interest among all these groups. Fraher joked that he felt bad for women because according to the study, men didn’t like to do anything. Men would respond that they valued spending time with their family, but when asked what they did with their family, they indicated Nothing in every category.

Fraher commented that there was a disconnect between the groups that say attendance is important and the groups that are currently actually attending. For example, there were a large number of responses in the under 40 category that said attendance at art performances, festivals, etc, were important to them but obviously the demographics found in arts venues track older. The lack of connection is due to familiar barriers of time, money, no one to attend with, etc.

One Message, But Not One Ad, To Rule Them All

The plan for the National Engagement phase for building public will is to develop a more unified message and create tool kits for groups to use. The expectation is that it will take at least 8-10 years before any type of measurable results begin to emerge.

Fraher mentioned a desire to be agile and share the messaging that works in one community with other communities. In what I felt was an indication that they understood what the research was telling them, he re-emphasized the focus on the grassroots nature of the effort saying that there wouldn’t be single national ad buys disseminating whatever the effective messaging might be.

While there was a lot in David Fraher’s presentation that doesn’t appear in the research results report, there are some interesting observations in the report that didn’t come out in the hour he had to talk about it. I am trying to decide whether I am going to do a second post on those parts of the report or not.

But don’t wait for me to decide, give it a look.

(When I originally posted, I identified KC as Paris of the Prairie rather than Paris of the Plains. Chicago and Saskatoon have both been called Paris of the Prairie.)

Get Back In There And Be Creative

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If you have been reading my blog for any span of time, you will know that I have a particular interest in stories that show, to paraphrase Edison, Creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Recently, Pacific Standard had an article where researchers found that persistence is an important factor in achieving a creative break through.

“Researchers report that people consistently underestimate how many creative ideas they can come up with if they continue to work on a problem, rather than giving up in the wake of mediocre initial results.”

The article references two similar experiments where people were asked to brain storm ideas, had a break and were asked to brain storm more ideas. During the break, the participants were asked how many ideas they would come up with in the second brainstorming session. In both cases, the participants underestimated how many ideas they would come up with.

The most interesting thing was that in one case, the participants were all professional sketch comedy performers at a sketch comedy festival.

Remember, this is the sort of thing these people do for a living. And yet they, too, significantly underestimated the number of ideas they would come up with on their second attempt. “This speaks to the robustness of persistence undervaluation,” the researchers write, “and demonstrates that it is not limited to novices in novel domains.”

In a study that didn’t involve the sketch performers, outside evaluators rated the ideas that came from the post-break session as “significantly more original” than those that came from the first session.

Apparently the reason why people underestimate how creative they will be is due to a sense of doubt generated by their initial attempt. Perhaps one of the most important elements in obtaining creative success is a supportive, but firm friend who tells you to get your butt back in there and try again.

Creative thought is a trial-and-error process that generally produces a series of failed associations before a creative solution emerges,” the researchers note. It’s often difficult to know when you’re nearing a breakthrough; that “Aha!” moment may occur immediately following a period of deep frustration.

[…]

…As Thomas Edison said: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

Again we come back to the need to allow for failures in the process of pursuing creativity.

Could You Really Do That? Maybe You Could

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Apropos to my post last week about the value of college fine arts requirement classes, someone on my Twitter feed posted a link to a Huffington Post article about why you shouldn’t dismiss a work of visual art as something you or you kid could have done.

The article is actually based on on episode from PBS Digital’s series, The Art Assignment

Many of The Art Assignment episodes get people to go out and do or find things associated with their topic. However, some like the video above tackle how to relate and interact with art. As such, they provide a good starting point for novices, arts education programs and even arts educators seeking a way to communicate on these topics.

What is great is that everything comes back to the philosophy of experiential learning. So even though they say, yeah it isn’t as easy to do as you think, bub. They immediately follow with, but you should totally try to do it!

Among the videos I found that work along these lines are episodes on How to Critique, what works you can and can’t touch and why, and how (and why) to learn about Contemporary Art.

Recently it appears they have started to an effort to help people understand the work of specific artists in The Case for Mark Rothko and The Case for Andy Warhol.

This looks to be a good resource for visual arts organizations and something to keep an eye on as they continue to develop episodes.

The series leads to the inevitable question– can something this effective and humorous be created for theater, opera, dance, classical music? (Yes, of course it can.) I am sure there are some out there. Even some visual arts ones similar to the Arts Assignment episodes.

Heck, Thug Notes points out things in literature I didn’t catch when I was reading the works and is very entertaining.

So maybe someone is doing it right now and I don’t know about it. Let me know.

Maybe someone is thinking about doing something similar but is worried about the funding and should contact the Venture Arts Incubator.

Don’t Worry, No One Will Call You a Noob

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I just realized this week that one of the hurdles the arts needs to surmount to attract younger audiences may be steeper than assumed. One of the issues people identify as a point of anxiety is not knowing the rules of behavior at an arts event.

I have always equated that with awkwardly feeling out of place, but in the last day I wondered if younger audiences might equate that with the vulnerability one feels when being assailed by strangers online.

For older audiences a worst case scenario might be a few people around you looking askance at your faux pas.

For younger audiences, the worst case scenario might be a perception that EVERYBODY is aware of your mistake and are all preparing to declare their derision on social media. It may seem an illogical conclusion, but social fear generally is and the context for that fear is different for younger generations than older generations.

What brought this to mind was a conversation about explicit and implicit signalling of the rules of behavior at arts events occurring in the comments section of the post I made Monday. My thought is that the ideal is to provide frequent, varied experiences so that you can socialize audiences to the range of rules and move from explicit to implicit signalling.

The conversation we have been having on Monday’s post has been about how much explicit signalling is needed for new audiences unfamiliar with the rules.

As I was considering this last night, I got to thinking how at a certain level of detail communicating how to behave, even skilled practitioners of audience relations are going to sound condescending. Less skilled practitioners, which I will number myself among, are going to sound condescending long before that.

Another issue is that really detailed instructional signage and materials will end up reinforcing what we are trying to avoid, namely reinforcing a perceived division between experienced people and novices. I had the image of people in the know looking at all the explicit instructions for behavior and saying, “stupid noobs need to have their hands held.”

For a moment, it popped in my mind that there really aren’t any people at an arts event who are going to use the term “stupid noob.” Maybe arts organizations need to have a campaign slogan, “Nobody will call you noob” to assure people it was safer to make mistakes at an arts event than online. (Philistine, on the other hand…)

That is when I realized, that the psychological stakes some people associate with making a mistake may be much greater than we imagine. I would really be interested to know if anyone has studied any connection between depth of social media involvement and risk aversion.

All this adds another dimension to question of how much information needs to be delivered to allow people to navigate an arts event confidently and what the best channels of delivery are so as not to draw undue attention to the uninitiated.

Some people aren’t comfortable or aware of how to access information online while at an event. And besides, the hallmark of live experience we keep emphasizing is the whole live thing–being able to ask and answer questions in person should always be an option.

Even if the venue prepares online resources for a show, they can’t provide answers to all possible questions. You can go to a soccer match knowing nothing about the game and google information about the off-sides rule.

It isn’t as easy to get an answer if you type in “Why is the Shakespeare play I am watching set in the 1920s.” (Actually, I lied, while you can’t get a definitive answer using that search term, there are apparently a lot of adaptations of the Bard to the 1920s so articles are available about why the decision was made and how well it works.)

What You Might Learn In That Stupid Arts Requirement Class

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I guess because it is the beginning of the school year, a number of online media outlets are devoting some space to talking about the value of different college classes in one’s life. Slate has a whole, well slate, of stories queued up to address about 16 classes across the week.

A few of them address liberal arts classes so they are worth taking note for the perspective they bring to our little corner of existence.

Yesterday, Dan Check, Vice President of the Slate Group promoted Intro to Acting as a way to get you out of your comfort zone.

Throughout life, we all occasionally feel a lack of competence; college is a great time to practice that feeling, to proceed without mastery or certainty or even talent, and to realize both what effort can do, as well as what it cannot. In the technology world, we often talk about being unafraid to fail, and of failing fast, but very rarely do we find opportunities to practice—that is, to seriously try and seriously fail in a situation where the stakes are as low as a single grade in a single semester outside of one’s major.

This idea about permission to fail comes up relatively frequently in conversations among arts people (at least online). Often it is in terms of there not being enough wiggle room in budgets to allow failure.

It is good to be reminded that one of the things the arts can offer to other areas of endeavor is the experience of failing in a low-stakes environment that involves human interaction. I use this term in contrast to competitive environments like sports or individual efforts like learning a language or physical skill (surfing).

Succeeding and failing at each of these obviously have their benefits as well so people who are comfortable in arts situations like acting need to seek out corresponding experiences that take them out of their comfort zone.

In another piece this week, Mark Joseph Stern acknowledged the complexity of feelings involved when faced with people who don’t share the same degree of knowledge and appreciation of visual art. While he says it makes him feel sad when people dismiss a work of visual art at a glance when ignorance is so easily solved, he admits that encountering a work of visual art can be challenging when we are used to television and video explaining themselves to us.

I once saw a woman stop in front of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, scoff, then turn on her heels and walk away. At the time, I judged her. But in retrospect, I suspect she was simply overwhelmed by its skittering vibrancy—and rather than attempt to process her reaction, she got defensive and gave up.

Second, visual art demands analysis. Most movies and TV shows place plot before all else, allowing shallow, distracted viewing. You can watch, and enjoy, almost anything on TV today without thinking about cinematography or set design or most other visual elements. With paintings, you have to do a little more work, …Learning these skills takes practice—not much, but enough to scare away most museumgoers.

As I implied, these articles aren’t just appearing on Slate. On Quartz this week, Brendan Mathews, asserts that the most useful class you can take in college is a fiction workshop.

Before I began teaching, I worked in marketing, digital media and communications. I saw more than one dot-com boom go bust. And at every one of these jobs, I had to consider new ideas from my colleagues—business plans, market analyses, product prototypes, website redesigns—and provide cogent, meaningful feedback. Back then, I counted on a few simple rules that I learned in my own undergraduate creative writing workshops:

“I like it” and “I don’t like it” are equally worthless. When someone asks you to read a story that they’ve poured their heart and soul into, saying you like it or don’t like it tells them nothing….

No playing favorites. No story in a workshop gets a free pass simply because the writer is a senior and you a lowly sophomore. And no story gets shot down simply because the writer’s last story was a tragically ill-conceived mash-up of gothic horror and My Little Pony fan fiction….

No meanies. Students do not eviscerate each other’s stories for sport, nor do they bestow baskets full of rainbows and sunshine on each other. A good workshop teaches you to put your own issues aside and deliver your opinion—especially your highly critical opinion—with some degree of diplomacy…

And no hard feelings. On the flip side, sometimes you’re the one whose story gets a rough reception in workshop. You expected tears of sympathy; instead you got peals of laughter, or even worse, a shrug. What do you do? You take pride in the fact that you put your work out there, you don’t take it personally, and you vow to do better next time…

Like Dan Check’s piece on acting class, Mathews lays this out in the context everyone wants to know about today–how will this class help me get a job?

Yes, there is a need to emphasize art for art’s sake, but art doesn’t serve a single purpose in life or it wouldn’t have any value as a basic element of human identity. It conveys life skills, economic benefits, aesthetic appreciation and exists on its own merits. Articles like these provide tips on making the case we would just as soon be self-evident for art as it is for accounting, biology, finance, marketing, pre-med, etc.

Signalling Expectations

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Lately I have been seeing many uses of technology aimed at influencing people to drive more considerately and safely. There is a GPS system that will start to give directions in a child’s voice when the vehicle enters a school zone.

On his show, Crowd Control, Daniel Pink put pictures of people in wheelchairs below disabled parking signs and a non-profit in Russia created holograms of people in wheelchairs, both efforts to deter those who didn’t need the spots from parking there.

All these were attempts to use empathy to shape the decisions people made. A question that came to mind was whether technology has desensitized us to needs of others to the point where steps needed to be taken to reassert the need to take care.

Or is the frequency at which people break these rules roughly at the same point it was 20 years ago and this is a case where technology and clever ideas have advanced to the point they can be used to address violators?

As much as I would like to claim we are ceding ever greater amounts of our humanity to technology, I actually suspect in this case the latter is true.

I wanted to use this as a jumping off point to wonder how ideas like these could be used to instill empathy and good judgement in arts audiences. There have been a lot of stories and discussions about talking, texting and other intrusive behaviors in performances.

Two of the ongoing conversations on these matters that I have been following recently are Diane Ragsdale’s Jumper blog and Scott Walters on the Clyde Fitch Report.

One of Walters’ general themes is that the “churchification” of performing arts has made attendance a stale, boring experience.

I am a little wary about what might result from poorly conceived plans to change that, given that people’s online behavior reveals a willingness to do something outlandish to call attention to themselves if they perceive license to do so. But I can certainly see Scott’s point that some sort of social shift is going to be required.

Since every situation will require different degrees of comportment, cultivating a sense of empathy and good judgement in audiences as to what is required and developing a method for performers to signal what the dynamics of the event are, will likely be the crucial element that will make it all work.

Making a preshow announcement and printing the rules in the program book clearly isn’t working so additional methods, channels, whatever, are needed.

Of course, performing arts venues need to do their part by not always having the same rules for every event. First of all, it is difficult to experiment with different ways of communicating intent and expectations if there is no opportunity for practical application. Second, audiences are already probing the boundaries of those rules. Either the boundaries have to loosen from time to time or audiences may defer on entering the boundaries altogether.

Right now some of the more effective and clear methods of communicating that the usual boundaries are not in effect are when people make a curtain speech announcement that riffs on the traditional speech by emphasizing “We ask that you DO take as many pictures as you want. DO tell your friends about the show by making social media posts during the show…”

That is only effective as long as the archetypal announcement exists to riff on. The goal is to ultimately remove it as an archetype even if the rules are still applied in certain instances.

I would suggest that the need to make announcements of any kind will be the indicator that work still needs to be done. The majority of attendees at a classical music concert intrinsically “know” how to behave there just as attendees at a rock concert “know” different rules apply without being told.

When people can enter a room and pick up general clues about expectations from the way the staff and other attendees are interacting and perhaps a glance around for more formal signifiers to confirm, then we are seeing a measure of success.

If events unfold contrary to expectations, either the event host needs consider whether this means they need to do a better job of signalling expectations or they need to do a better job of heeding the audience’s signaled expectations.

Have You Gotten To The Point You Care When People Steal Your Work?

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You know how you are supposed to check the batteries in your smoke detectors every time we go on or off daylight savings time? It may be worth having a similar rule for checking your intellectual property licenses for your online presences. Maybe every time you renew your domain name?

There was a recent story about a photographer who had set his Creative Commons License to allow commercial use with attribution.

When a map company used his image on one of their publications giving him full attribution, he sued them for their use of the image and lost.

The tone of the article is that it was sort of silly of him to be protesting the use of his work in a way explicitly allowed.

But it occurred to me that it would be very easy for many artists and organizations to accidentally find themselves in a similar situation as their online presence evolved.

For example, maybe your website or blog just starts out as a source of information for people about what you are doing. You set your license to require people to quote you with attribution or a link. You aren’t trying to monetize anything and you would be happy if people quoted you all over the Internet.

Later, your organization starts a new exciting program where you are producing all sorts of interesting stuff (or if you are an individual, you take up a hobby/refine your skills and get really good).

You start putting images and examples of your work online, forgetting your license is so permissive and the next thing you know you are seeing your work appearing all over social media, people are selling tshirts and tote bags with your images and are using your video and audio tracks in their own videos.

If you have been publicizing/bragging about achievements and have realized ambitions much greater than when you first established your blog, website, Pinterest, Flickr, etc, presence you may want to go back and review how much permission people have to utilize the content of those pages.

A similar issue may arise if you are featuring other people’s work and their more stringent use requirements aren’t clearly discernible.

Upon review, you may be surprised by how lax your settings are. Or maybe you will despair that no one wants to steal your stuff despite how lax your settings are.

I’ll Love You Foreve…About A Month

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About two years ago, Non Profit Quarterly (NPQ) had a piece discussing the external influences on non-profit organizations.

There are quite a number of external forces that exert pressure on non-profits, but thanks to the ease of communication and dissemination of information, among the latest to emerge are: push for transparency and accountability; the ability of different stakeholder groups to mobilize and influence each other and social media’s ability to make a escalate local issues to national visibility.

While these are all very interesting, the one element that caught my eye dealt with the transitory nature of relationships.

There is much less reliance on cradle-to-grave relationships between people and institutions (no longer the standard). And more free agency and greater reach of communications technology require stronger and more consistently engaging attractors. Maybe a core image here is that of the contracted and relatively unprotected worker—the worker with multiple short-term jobs, or the employee who commutes remotely. Socially concerned people are replicating these shorter term, more tenuous relationships—taking their energy to a Habitat for Humanity construction project one month, a race against hunger the next, and participating in a campaign against constrictive web legislation in between. If you want to compete for people’s attention and money and names, you had better be giving them something that they can get very interested in and over which they can feel a sense of accomplishment and partial ownership. They do not always need to do the work themselves, but they do need to feel engaged at a spirit level.

This struck a chord with me because it illustrates a new stage in the relationship between arts and communities. We have gone from the ability to assume a relatively long and stable relationship that was the hallmark of Danny Newman’s Subscribe Now, to the need to gradual cultivate a relationship through a successive series of steps laid out in the book Waiting in the Wings to this current news that you are lucky if you can get someone to support you for a month.

This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it is a little depressing to see it in print. As to what is to be done, I would say make a consistent effort to communicate what you are doing and why they should be excited and interested to keep yourself on people’s radar.

And be prepared for churn. We know it is more expensive to attract new audiences to performances than to retain existing ones. While it is definitely worth working to maintain the loyalty of existing audiences, churn is likely to be a growing issue and needs to be factored into budgets. From the NPQ piece, it needs to be part of unearned revenue projections as well as earned because that is likely to fluctuate as well.

A big rally of support like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge of last summer can help you advance your cause and expand your service exponentially, but it may taper off just as quickly so be prepared. This month ALS researchers reported on how much progress the $100 million boost they received last summer benefited their efforts. There isn’t any mention about what percentage of those who gave last year continue to do so now.

(To be fair, the report and Ask Me Anything were delivered by the researchers, not the ALS charities)

Eliminated 50 Resumes Immediately? Maybe You Are The Bad Job Candidate

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Last week I wrote about the trend among employers to monetize the apparent happiness of employees. One of the examples I provided was a job listing requiring people to be passionate about cleaning buildings. I pointed out one of the ways this already impacted the arts is the belief employees didn’t need to be paid to perform their roles since they are doing something they love.

But even arts and non-profit administrators who are resolved to pay employees fairly in line with current market rates are apt to have expectations that exceed the reality of their work environment.

A couple months ago Seth Godin made a post regarding, “The fruitless search for extraordinary people willing to take ordinary jobs.”

“It’s unreasonable to expect extraordinary work from someone who isn’t trusted to create it.

It’s unreasonable to find someone truly talented to switch to your organization when your organization is optimized to hire and keep people who merely want the next job.

It’s unreasonable to expect that you’ll develop amazing people when you don’t give them room to change, grow and fail.

And most of all, it’s unreasonable to think you’ll find great people if you’re spending the minimum amount of time (and money) necessary to find people who are merely good enough.”

When I was writing my post last week, I had a vague recollection of reading a post about how too much focus is placed on formal credentials and education when hiring people. I searched around quite a bit trying to find the source. Fortunately, in his post today, Vu Le linked back to the very post he wrote in April I was thinking about.

In that post, he mentions lack of formal education, typos in resumes, short term vision and “grass is greener outside our field” thinking as short cuts employers use to eliminate applicants and make the resume review process easier.

In essence, like Godin, he says employers have high expectations of a process in which they invest minimal effort.

In addition to making the effort, Vu advocates:

Change the philosophy and definition of “qualification”: Qualification should be based on whether a person will do a good job or not in the position. Since we can’t know for sure if they will, we use proxy characteristics, such as formal education, as a predictor of performance. But formal education, as mentioned above, leaves behind a lot of people. Set it in the “Preferred” section if you have to use it. This opens up doors for people who have equivalent working experience.

He also encourages people to be hired based on their passion. That isn’t generally an issue in the arts where people are replete with passion. But he also adds the need to hire based on potential, a sentiment that is echoed in a Fast Company article from a year ago that recommends hiring on potential over experience.

While it’s easier to measure past performance, it’s also possible to evaluate potential, he says. Zehnder looks for indicators such as the right kind of motivation: great ambition to leave a mark in the pursuit of greater, unselfish goals. “High potentials … show deep personal humility and invest in getting better at everything they do,” he says.

Four other hallmarks of potential, he adds, are curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.

[…]

Businesses may focus on hiring someone with eight to 10 years of experience, Seville says, but sometimes that’s really “one year’s experience times eight.”

That emphasis is the article’s not mine. When I read it, my first thought was that it sounds like the description of a large segment of people who work in the non-profit arts. So if the corporate sector starts to orient more toward those qualities, there is a potential for a bigger talent drain away from the arts.

Arts Colleagues, Act More Miserable And Less Passionate!

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Most of us in the arts have probably heard the argument espoused by others that we shouldn’t care if we get paid a lot because we are doing what we love and apparently having fun.

After reading a recent article in the Atlantic, I started to wonder if businesses were trying to use the same psychology on a broader scale to keep employee pay low.

In one section, of the article, writer Bourree Lam interviews author Miya Tokumitsu who suggests employers are trying to monetize employee enjoyment. Essentially making customers feel good about the employees feeling good.

Tokumitsu: When I found that Craigslist posting [for cleaners who were passionate], I was super depressed. You’re demanding that this person—who is going to do really hard physical work for not a lot of money—do extra work. On top of having to scrub the floors and wash windows, they have to show that they’re passionate too? It’s absurd and it’s become so internalized that people don’t even think about it. People write these job ads, and of course they’re going to say they want a passionate worker. But they don’t even think about what that means and that maybe not everyone is passionate.

Later they mention McDonald’s recent Pay With Love effort to have employees and customers trade smiles, high-fives, hugs, dance, etc.

They say there is something of a subtext to all this that if you are theoretically passionate about your work, you shouldn’t be complaining to the boss.

As a contrast they offer the dynamic in Japan where your entire identity isn’t necessarily closely tied the job you do.

Tokumitsu: Japanese work culture is ridiculed in the U.S., [for example] the caricature of the soulless Japanese salary man. It’s not the answer to emulate any one country, but I feel like in Japan there’s a lot more respect for service workers: You do your job, and serve the public, and then you retreat to the private world. I also think there’s a sense of purpose in work that’s not based on achieving yellow smiley-face happiness. There’s a certain satisfaction to be taken from performing a certain role in society, whether you’re driving a taxi or working at a convenience store. “I’m doing something that other people are relying on,”—and that’s such a different way to regard work.

So should arts people bitch and moan a lot more about their jobs to emphasize just how much work it is?

To be honest, even without this article in the Atlantic, some sort of effort that underscored how much work went into the creation of a work was probably necessary. Some form of the “why do you want money, you are having fun,” sentiment has served as a common thread in recent orchestra contract negotiations.

But artists publicly grousing about how awful their jobs are isn’t really constructive for the arts sector.

Well, unless you are The Smiths…

Most people in the arts are genuinely pleased to do what they do. Regardless of whether they get paid a lot or not, they experience a high degree of emotional satisfaction while performing their jobs. There is little to be gained by telling them to pretend to be more miserable.

The fact they experience this emotional satisfaction is one reason people in the arts will accept lower pay than they should. But they are also increasingly realizing that the existence of  emotional satisfaction should have no bearing on their financial remuneration.

You generate your own damn feeling of satisfaction, not your employer. They don’t own it and it isn’t any of their business. They aren’t giving you an opportunity to feel emotionally satisfied by working for them. It comes independently of their involvement.

Being emotionally satisfied and being financially satisfied are two separate things and arts people need to recognize that and not confuse them.

All this being said, it still comes back to the issue that some sort of awareness raising effort is probably going to be required over time to combat the perception that it is all fun and no blisters and sacrifices.

I am not sure what the most constructive manifestations of that might be.

U.S. – German Comparative Fundraising Practices

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I subscribe to the Arts Management Newsletter which provides insights into international arts and cultural issues.

On page 14 of the most recent issue, is an article about the experience Laura Brower Hagood had during an exchange program in Germany as a Bosch Foundation Fellow.

Much to my disappointment, you need to be 40 or younger to apply because it sounds like an amazing opportunity.

Hagood offers some interesting perspectives on the differences between American and German cultural entities based on her five month long work placement with the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation.

Because the US vs. Europe cultural funding models are an ongoing topic of conversation, her observations on the different fundraising practices and capabilities were interesting:

For instance, whereas membership programs are managed in-house in the U.S., friends associations are external to their nonprofits in Germany. How do you develop a major giving program, if you don’t have access to your small donors’ information? How do you “share” donors and their information with another entity?

[…]

My German colleagues were interested in adapting U.S. fundraising practices, but were judicious and thoughtful about cultural differences. Many
conversations centered on what may or may not be effective in a Brandenburger setting. Galas at $10,000 a plate: probably not. Planned giving for individuals who wish to express their values after their death: maybe, yes. Donor interest in arts education: absolutely. This experience helped me distinguish between core, if not universal, fundraising principles, such as the benefits of philanthropic giving and the importance of building relationships, from specific fundraising strategies and tactics. I also came to appreciate that there are multiple pathways to the same optimal result.

In comparing the general operating environment, there wasn’t really anything she says to dispel the widely held perception that the grass is greener in Europe:

U.S. arts nonprofits draw only 9% of their funding from local, regional, and national government sources, which means that, on a day-to-day basis, organizations, audiences, funders, and board members are linked in a tight feedback loop. Most arts nonprofits must make artistic and programmatic decisions based on whether an audience exists to support their work, whether in the form of ticket purchases or private donations. This connection is of such significance to the organization’s sustainability that it must be directly relevant and intimately connected to its community of patrons in order to flourish.

[…]

In contrast, the German system of sustained government subsidies provides real reliability, allowing arts organizations to plan over the long-term and encouraging the production of art for art’s sake, a value rarely articulated in the U.S. The Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation has recently benefited from multi-year capital investment in its 33 palaces and 150 historic structures. As I visited Weimar, Dresden, and Berlin, I learned that Potsdam was only one of many cities restoring their cultural infrastructure with millions and millions of taxpayer Euros. This kind of sustained, long-term investment in culture is for all intents and purposes unheard of in the US and represented for me an exciting and reinvigorating perspective.

She does feel, though, that the necessity of paying close attention to the interests of the community makes American cultural organizations more responsive to their audiences.

However, the links between German organizations, their audiences, and even society at large were less clear, less convincing, than in the U.S. In museum after museum, with a few notable exceptions, I found outmoded display and interpretive techniques that ensured that only German nationals with an intimate familiarity with art history or European history would enjoy seeing them. Almost entirely funded through government subsidies, these institutions are often missing a key feedback loop that ensures responsiveness to their audiences’ needs and wants. And, while American organizations have fully embraced arts education as a vehicle for building diverse and multicultural audiences now and into the future, the German arts sector remains too tentative in realizing this potential.

Two questions that immediately came to mind after reading this were:

1- While American cultural organizations may be more responsive to audiences, are they receiving enough funding to effectively serve their communities? When there was more funding available in the past, arts organizations may have been more lazy about proactively serving their communities. But I would argue that businesses on the whole took customers for granted with the service they provided and the type of marketing and advertising they used.

Given the current business environment in the US, if arts and cultural organizations were better funded, I suspect they would still be working to better connect with their communities in the face of declining participation.

2- While I don’t doubt the museum displays in Germany need to be updated in order to better connect with foreign visitors as well as German nationals, I wondered if the difference in educational systems may have created different perceptions in the size of the gap that needs to be bridged.

Essentially, would an American museum educator go to a German museum and suggest that displays have a number of features and that certain educational programming be added based on an assumption that German visitors were as unaware as American museum visitors.

In turn, would a German museum professional enter an American museum and feel like the displays and programs were simplistic and patronizing based on the fact any German national would be aware of these details from their elementary level education?

Questions like this make me regret being a little too old to participate in the exchange program. One you dear readers needs to apply so I can live vicariously through you. (Though I am not quite clear if they are accepting another round of applications at this time.)

Lightly Stoking The Sense of Wonder

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Last month London’s Royal Opera House posted a video of two young brothers who are attending the opera for the first time and go from apathetic to excited over the course of the recording.

The title of the piece frames the boys’ wonder by quoting their question, “‘How do they hold a note for so long!?” You know from that question that the kids are engaged with the experience.

So why do actors and musicians roll their eyes at a Q&A when people ask how they can remember all those lines or all those notes?

I mean, sure it is cuter when kids say it, but aren’t adults expressing the same degree of wonder at the achievement?

The reason performers roll their eyes is because learning the words and notes is the default expectation for the job they are doing. An actor might be asked if they have any experience in classical acting styles, but no one is ever asked if they can memorize the lines.

There is more skill and technique involved in sustaining a note or doing a credible job portraying King Lear than there is in memorizing lines and notes.

(Though to be honest, there are a lot of different techniques you can use to memorize lines but no drama class teaches them. The actor is left to discover and create a method themselves. It would probably make actors’ lives easier if they did have coaching and a list of techniques to try.)

Three years ago, I highlighted a technique for dealing with the “how do you memorize..” question from a HowlRound piece Brant Russell wrote on post show discussions.  Russell suggests that “how do you memorize…” is essentially a first date type question. You don’t really care about the answer, you just want to get your date (or the actors) talking to you.

Having all be in a situation where we wanted to fill an awkward silence, I am sure we can all empathize with that impulse.

But looking at the Royal Opera House video, I have to consider if maybe the question isn’t also the manifestation of a 10 year old kid inside expressing his/her wonder. Is dismissing the question with a quick “its what we do” type comment stifling the sense of wonder we want to cultivate in audiences to keep them coming back?

Though it seems to have suffered a crisis of formatting, Brant Russell’s piece has some good suggestions of what to do when you are leading a discussion.

But if a question like this gets asked as you are exiting the stage door or some other informal setting and you feel like your process is unremarkable, it might be best to call upon the memory of your earliest effort or that of colleagues for an amusing anecdote.

Saying, “Well my current practice is pretty boring, but when I was starting out I used a tape recorder and this one time…” can keep the sense of interest and wonder alive for people of all ages—if it’s only to comment on how OLD you must be if you used a tape recorder.

…And by Americans For The Arts

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When I am listening to public radio, I often take note of the times when Americans for the Arts is cited as an underwriter. These days it goes something like “…and by Americans for the Arts, for over 50 years….learn more at Americans for the Arts.org.”

The reason I pay attention is because I wonder if the ads are subtly keeping people connected with the arts by reinforcing the concept of the arts contributing to more vibrant and creative communities.

Yeah, I know that having these spots on public radio is sort of preaching to the choir since their audience tends to be inclined to like and support the arts. But you know these days I think every demographic can use all the reinforcement about the arts we can get. People who like the arts are just like everyone else and are susceptible to all sorts of distractions.

Back when they were doing those wacky Van Goghgurt and Raisin Brahms TV and web commercials, I was thinking how great it would be if Americans for the Arts had the budget to consistently run those sort of messages for years aimed at different demographics.

The reality is, none of us individually have the budget to run any sort of general awareness campaign for the arts continuously throughout the year. So the fact that someone is able to do it on a consistent basis, even on limited delivery channels, is really a benefit for everyone in the arts.

Even if the sponsorship message is passing beneath most people’s notice, it is probably infiltrating its way into people’s subconscious.

For example, the title of my post on Monday was an intentional riff on the Hair Club for Men commercial from the 1980s. Believe me, back in the 80s, I was in no need of the Hair Club’s services and didn’t really pay attention to the ads. (Though my mom could have done a better job cutting my hair.) But the “not just the president, I’m also a member” phrase stuck in my head because I was exposed to it so often.

So next time you are listening to your local public radio station, try to pay attention to the number of times the National Endowment for the Arts, Americans for the Arts and various foundations have a message stating their support for the arts and be a little grateful that they are making a statement to the nation that the arts are worth supporting.

And yes, I am a member.

Choosing The Default, Even If It Makes You Miserable

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As part of our effort to upgrade the look and design of our website we have been checking the accuracy of our area restaurants and bars list, verifying which offer discounts to patrons. In an attempt to strengthen our relationship with them, we have been making them aware of the general audiences we expect to attend each event.

For example, we talk about our season opener being something of a date night type show while others are more family oriented. We suggest if they want to put together any sort of fixed menu of selections that are easy to prepare and get audiences to the theater on time, we will be happy to make a notation on our website listing or social media account.

As might be expected, some people are resistant to the idea while others are onboard whole-heartedly.

Then there are guys like the owner of a local coffee house that I spoke to today who basically scoffed at me repeatedly for not being creative enough with these suggestions. He was open for anything I might want to propose that would be appropriate pre- or post-performance. He got into talking about how great it would be to close off parking spots and roast a pig. Rather than a discount, he said would rather charge full price for something and donate part of the proceeds to a cause or something. He was full of ideas.

It got to the point I started wondering if maybe my approach with some of the other restaurants may have been a little too conventional. Even though some of the places balked nervously at some of the most conventional suggestions, would they have been open to ideas that didn’t seem to threaten their bottom line?

I saw a parallel between this situation and an approach that I espoused in one of my very first entries on this blog 11 years ago. I had suggested trying to find a creative solution to respond to people’s dissatisfaction other than the refund. People don’t go to the trouble of buying tickets, getting a babysitter, getting dinner, finding parking, etc just so they can leave with a refund.

Demanding a refund is the default response because that is the solution we are socialized to seek when we are dissatisfied with something. There are often a good number of other options available that will provide a sense of satisfaction better than a refund.

It was in this context that I was wondering if I was thinking to narrowly by suggesting a discount or a fixed menu.

Except, in my experience over the last 11 or so years, it seems no matter how creative and accommodating you get with alternative solutions, people still want the refund even if other solutions create a better result. (Though from what I have read, making the attempt to address the issue, even if the result isn’t what the customer wanted, still generates a higher level of satisfaction than making no attempt at all.)

I think it is a matter of both continued socialization and a certain degree of distrust engendered by companies who do everything they can to avoid refunding your money (i.e. airlines).

In the same way, making suggestions that deviate from the normal procedure, even if they are pretty clearly low risk propositions, can result in resistance. Arts organizations are no exception (and may even embody the practice more than most.)

It can be really difficult to gauge the degree of a person’s receptiveness in advance so it is easier to suggest something familiar and safe and be surprised when someone proves to be more adventuresome than expected.

It’s just that while I celebrate the coffee house owner’s openness and look forward to finding interesting ideas that will benefit us both, it stings a little to be working in the arts and be called out for lack of creativity.

I’m Not Just An Employee, I’m A Member

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Last month Thomas Cott linked to a piece on Classical Music Magazine’s website by Catherine Arlidge where she suggested symphony musicians be more effectively used to evangelize for their art.

The one part of Arlidge’s piece that really caught my attention was when she mentioned the longevity of with the City of Birmingham (UK) Symphony Orchestra and how six members had been with the ensemble for 40 years and 59% had been with the organization for over 10 years.

It struck me that many of the symphony orchestras in the U.S. could probably claim similar statistics–or at least could until the recent trend of management-musician contract conflict which has degraded the membership of so many ensembles.

Arlidge’s point about the “employee retention” rates of these groups being among the most stable compared to most other industries made the recent slow dissolution seem all the more tragic.

Arlidge mentions the pros and cons of governed and self-governed orchestras and then goes on to suggest:

But could there be a third way, a ‘John Lewis’ vision of our UK orchestras, where players and staff are employed and are members? There may not be profits to share, but there would be a vision to share and a collective sense of ownership. If we could combine the best qualities of both orchestral governance models we could create a structure that serves our art better.

John Lewis, by the way, is a department store/supermarket/services company based in London that became employee owned in 1929.

In the context of the aforementioned conflict, a governance structure where everyone in the organization, both staff and musicians, were seen as equal members, has a great deal of appeal. It has appeared that a fair bit of the acrimony that has arisen in situations like the recent Minnesota Orchestra contract negotiations has seemed to be based on a view of the musicians as being subject to the goodwill of the board and administration rather than partners in the organizational goals.

Everyone having more equal standing with equal responsibility for contributing to the organization’s success may change the dynamic enough to avoid those types of situations as well as help the organization evolve to meet changing audience expectations.

Changing the dynamics wouldn’t be easy or quickly accomplished. There would be a lot of historical and cultural inertia resisting efforts. One issue not mentioned in Arlidge’s article is the role and composition of the governing board.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has one, in case you were wondering if it is different in the UK. Though given the arts funding model in England, the board-artist relationship is likely much different than in the US.

One of the benefits possessed by the John Lewis Partnership Catherine Arlidge cites is a strong founding constitution which set much of the culture from the outset.

Still, the idea that management was in charge and above all others was not easy to discard. Even as late as 1957, John Lewis’ son, Spedan, whose idea employee ownership was, insisted it was important that management be concentrated in a single pair of hands, even though he hadn’t been the owner in nearly 30 years. (Granted, the company survived and expanded through the Great Depression and World War II.)

I am aware of some theater ensembles that operate in a membership focused manner similar to the one Arlidge proposes, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, comes to mind. It is fairly common for visual artists to form these type of associations. I have a vague recollection of some dance companies, but none immediately come to mind.

I was wondering if there were any orchestras in the U.S. organized in a similar manner that might serve as a good example. I am not as familiar with the range of ensembles.

They Sacrifice Virgins At The Symphony, Don’t They?

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Back in April Seth Godin talked about how most purchases are either to replenish something you have or are familiar with; or it is exploring something new.

If you sell an exploration, your customer is taking a chance. Sometimes magnifying that chance fits the worldview of the purchaser, and sometimes minimizing the risk is precisely what the purchaser is seeking.
[…]

This is almost never talked about by marketers, but it’s at the core of the strategy choices that follow.

Most of the time in the arts we talk about the need to minimize the risk of new audiences. We need to make our programming, pricing and other elements in our control more accessible so that people are willing to hire a babysitter and make the drive to our event. We don’t want them going home feeling like it isn’t worth it.

I haven’t really heard a lot of conversation about magnifying the risk. I wouldn’t even have thought in those terms except that Godin links “magnifying” to a TED Talk where JJ Abrams talks about how people felt utterly stupefied trying to figure out what the heck was happening on the show Lost.

That is when I realized—people will accept having their risk magnified when they feel like that risk is shared by others. If no one knows what is happening on Lost, everyone bonds over sharing their theories, etc. People are willing to go in to Haunted Houses and ride roller coasters because everyone will be screaming.

On the other hand, when you perceive you will be participating in an activity with group of people already in the know, you are less willing to accept risk. Arts organizations are familiar with the anxiety people have about not knowing how to dress, when to clap, etc. and frequently move to minimize the perceived risk.

Having friends (or a horde of people on social media) provide assurances that you will enjoy yourself, (including helping you understand the experience), can reduce that risk aversity. Arts orgs don’t have too much direct influence in that sphere other than to really promote what others have said about the experience and provide materials that can assist in understanding it.

Is it possible for an arts group to offer a live experience that magnifies risk? You betcha. The first thing that came to my mind was Sleep No More where attendees wander through a building interacting with actors in an adaptation of MacBeth.

It has been wildly popular, but I think my theory about risk tolerance is apt. When the show first opened, everyone was on a level playing field where no one knew what the heck was going on. As I noted in an earlier post the show has become less enjoyable for new attendees because people in the know have begun to hijack the narrative and intercept experiences. This has started to create a little more wariness among those who consider attending.

All this being said, I think people tend to be more risk averse than they once were. Think about it, could the cult of the Rocky Horror Picture Show started up during the last decade or so?

As a person who has never attended you are faced with going to an event held at midnight in a room full of people in costume who are certainly well versed in rituals and responses of the evening. Attention is drawn to all new attendees who are raucously branded as virgins, some of whom are pulled up to participate in a virgin sacrifice. Given the prospect of all of this being posted on social media, would enough new people have gone to keep it sustained for nearly 40 years?

In that context, attending the symphony for the first time seems like a really comfortable choice. But then again, if a symphony gave the appearance of being as fun as attending Rocky Horror, would you chance being the center of attention for a thousand people for 5 minutes? Does that mean the symphony experience is far too tame for its own good?

I think it would be healthy if everyone started to think about what they could do that would magnify the risk for audiences for audiences that look for those type of experiences. Maybe nothing comes of it for a year or five or so, but I feel like it runs counter to the basic impulse of people in a creative field to be constantly thinking about how they can minimize the risk for audiences.

I am not saying that artists don’t go through this thought process, but managers who deal with financial reports all day may be most apt to fall into the rut of minimization thinking. Maybe thinking in the other direction would be better for their mental health. Maybe what you need to do can’t be done where you are working now and a side collaboration with others is the answer.

Oh, Our Orchestra Set Us Up On A Blind Date

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I am still working on developing my Talking to Strangers idea. Unexpectedly, the biggest hurdle right now is finding a mechanism that is easy to attach and detach from theater seats (but stays put) that has an unobtrusive profile so people can move past in the row. I think I am getting close to a solution. Those of you who said you had question ideas for me, you know who you are! Send them in!.

On a related note, you may have heard that there was a production of Once in Toronto that was far more ambitious than I am when it comes to bringing people together. Back in June, they held what they termed the world’s biggest blind date. They ended up having 5000 people apply to be one of 1200 singles who would be paired up at a performance.

Arts events are often touted as being a good date night, but the folks in Toronto weren’t gonna wait for someone to get asked out.

Part of the application process was filling out a questionnaire that enabled a computer program to match you with someone else in the audience. When you arrived, you got the name of your blind date and a corresponding ticket. Intermission was extended 10 minutes to allow people to become better acquainted.

This type of thing is a fun idea even if you have to do it on a smaller scale. Even if people don’t end up falling in love, (or if the goal of your program wasn’t focused on love), those who meet might become good friends and continue to attend events together.

I have to confess, my initial thought was that this was an attempt to draw a younger audience. If you watch the video associated with the article, you will see that participants ranged across many demographics, including age.

Holding such an event allows you to partner with area restaurants and other businesses. Even if, for whatever reason, you can’t work directly with specific restaurants, just being able to say that the uncharacteristically large number of people who filled their tables on an off-night was due to your program, emphasizes your value in the community. (Actually, they will love you more if you alert them in advance to the possibility of a large crowd on an off night.)

Romance, or the possibility of it, lends itself well to a wide variety of partnerships with local businesses.

I think Toronto was smart to hold their event in June. Being so far from the Christmas holidays and Valentine’s Day keeps the stakes low and allows participants to be relatively carefree about the romantic possibilities. If there isn’t even a platonic affinity between two people, it isn’t such a big deal.

So you may want to carefully consider if a blind date program at Fiddler on the Roof might be WAY too much pressure.

It occurs to me that someone hosting this would want to hold it at an event with anticipated low attendance. Not that you would necessarily want to this program to prop up an unpopular show, but if you are going to be matching people up you will want to set tickets at a uniform price. You don’t want the headache of trying to match up people with common interests who also both happened to buy $80 seats.

Since you will have to block off a section of your seating, you don’t want demand to end up being so high that you ultimately regret the fact you could have sold that block of 100 seats for $20 more each. But you also don’t want to set the price so high that people feel like they should be enjoying the interactions with their blind date a lot more than they are.

This said, if you turned it into an annual event held in conjunction with a show of respectable quality, the reputation for having a fun vibe can almost carry the event by itself while potentially seeding better attendance at other events.

Work-Life Balance Trap

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I frequently use the term “work-life” balance when discussing the expectations people working in the arts have, especially potential executive directors.

Recently though, I saw one of Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings about a book that questions the assumptions we have about the features of a work-life balance.

Popova writes that in his book The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship, “English poet and philosopher David Whyte aptly calls “work/life balance” a “phrase that often becomes a lash with which we punish ourselves”…

She quotes Whyte:

These are the three marriages, of Work, Self and Other.

[…]

We can call these three separate commitments marriages because at their core they are usually lifelong commitments and … they involve vows made either consciously or unconsciously… To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.

[…]

We should stop thinking in terms of work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back and working too hard in each of the three commitments. In the ensuing exhaustion we ultimately give up on one or more of them to gain an easier life.

She later offers a corroborating quote from author, Courtney Martin,

There’s never been more pressure to kind of parcel yourself… It’s never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places. Even just to feel like you’re showing up as your whole self in different settings is a pretty rebellious act.

This summarizes not only the societal pressures one feels in face to face interactions, but those in the social media sphere. Who you are is no longer comprised by your identity among co-workers, family and friends but also the identity created, voluntarily or involuntarily, among people we have never personally encountered.

There was one section from Whyte’s book that Popova quotes that seemed to describe the status of every arts professional out there:

Good work like a good marriage needs a dedication to something larger than our own detailed, everyday needs; good work asks for promises to something intuited or imagined that is larger than our present understanding of it. We may not have an arranged ceremony at the altar to ritualize our dedication to work, but many of us can remember a specific moment when we realized we were made for a certain work, a certain career or a certain future: a moment when we held our hand in a fist and made unspoken vows to what we had just glimpsed.

For most arts people, that passage I emphasized falls just short of being a self-evident truth. For us there is no unspoken vow. At some point in our lives, we have all recited aloud some version of “…and that’s when I knew…” Heck, even the introverts have probably told their version of the story a half dozen times.

While Whyte’s book is written for all audiences in general, my perception is that creatives have a relationship with their work that motivates them in an entirely different way from most people. The manifestation and definition of success can be far more internalized and intangible than that of a people who works in law, government, finance.

When you think about it, it is fairly clear how easy it is to become enslaved by the ideal vision of a work-life balance. It may be worse for creative people who live their lives enslaved to an idea already.

As a result, the depth of the conflict they feel while trying to achieve a work-life balance may not been fully comprehended by those around them. (i.e. How could it be, you are doing what you love? Why do you do this, you don’t make money from it?)

Since there is limited room in Popova’s column, it is difficult to know what Whyte’s solution is, if there is one. The exact steps are probably specific to each person. At the very least, one should be mindful of Whyte’s thoughts about it appearing easy to discard one aspect of your life, but ultimately being destructive to one’s self.

Defining Your Terms

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Even though Twitter’s status as a favored and effective mode of communication on social media seems to be in flux, a recent tweet I came across for Mt. Rainer, MD struck me as a smart move.

I thought it wise of them to stake out their hashtags in advance and make an attempt to standardize them so they could more effectively manage and monitor conversations about the city and its events.  Specifying MtRMDlove is especially good if they get a lot of use out of it. Same with letting people know what tag the city was going to use to communicate about #MountRainerDay since it could easily be #MtRainerDay.

Arts organizations may want to establish similar naming conventions for themselves and their events, especially if they sponsor annually recurring events like festivals. Having a consistent hashtag or identifiable phrase or look on social media sites and webpages is a form of branding. Setting this style at the beginning of a season and distributing it to the whole organization helps keep everyone on the same page throughout the year.

Going through the process in advance helps to identify potential areas of confusion. For example, MtRainerDay may be shorter than MountRainerDay, but it has more overlap with the the handles of some Matthew and Michael Trainers out there.  When I was in Hawaii, our social media account names were close to that of a theater in Los Angeles so we had to be very careful about what hashtags and phrases we used.

Going through the process of standardizing terminology in advance can be important even if you have no intention of using social media.

For example, if you are presenting a show with a long title like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, getting everyone using the same shorthand can help maintain a uniform identity for the public. Are you going to refer to it as “The Curious Incident…” in conversation or “Dog In the Night-time”?

It is going to be inevitable that your box office staff is going to shorten it with customers, even if they use the full title when people call about tickets for that “Night Dog show,” so using the terms interchangeably might make people think they are two different shows.

We Get All Types In Here

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Yesterday I talked about some brainstorming that occurred during a post-museum show opening get together. That party was a lot more constructive for me than I expected because it provided fodder for this post as well.

I happened to fall into the orbit of the museum artistic director as she talked about the five types of people who visit museums. I didn’t know until later that these types are all laid out in the book, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience.

I haven’t read it yet, but the artistic director had done a fair bit of reading and writing on the subject and what you need to consider when laying out a museum exhibit.

The general traits of these types manifest in all arts audiences so I saw a lot of applicability across disciplines.

Experience Seeker– As she described it, the experience seeker is the type of person who goes into the Louvre, takes a picture of the Mona Lisa, walks out again and tells all their friends they have been to the Louvre.  While we in the arts hate this person for not taking the time to look at anything else, this person can be very enthusiastic when it comes to discussing their experience with their friends which can drive more visitors.

With this in mind, the artistic director said she uses lighting and really visible signage to highlight one or two select pieces in a gallery. If the experience seeker is only going to orient on one thing, she wants to influence what they look at and what information they absorb because they tend to do a pretty good job of retaining the details and relating them to friends.

Performing Arts entities can do the same thing by highlighting some memorable aspect of the experience. For some places it is going to be the performance, but for others it might be some other element related to the experience or the facility itself. People are likely to remember the skulls and swastikas in Albuquerque’s KiMo Theater, the washrooms at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, or watching Shakespeare under the stars in a replica of the Globe Theater at one of the Shakespeare festivals around the country, even if they forget or were bored by the details of the performance itself.

Facilitator – This is a person who is trying to help others experience the museum.  It could be friends, parents, teachers, etc. Signage is important for these people, but so the ability to procure educational and other support materials that make the experience enjoyable and the works accessible.  Physical layout can be important so that the group can easily transition through an exhibit.

For those arts organizations that don’t offer free admission, pricing can be a factor.

Explorer – This person is probably an arts org’s ideal attendee. They pay close attention and have a methodical approach to the experience. In a museum, they seek out the informational plaques and take some time to consider everything they encounter. Even if the give one piece a cursory glance, they don’t assume the next piece won’t be worthy of their attention.

In performing arts situations, these are the people who make sure they arrive on time and are moving toward the doors when the warning lights blink.  In any situation, they crave information so they will check out the links on your website, read your program/brochure and take it home with them and tend to be interested in educational programs like workshops, lectures, artist talks, etc.

Unlike the experience seeker, they are good candidates to become donors.

Professionals – this group includes dedicated amateurs/hobbyists as well as colleagues from peer organizations. They are looking for an experience and information that deepens their knowledge about the subject matter.  They want to know why an artist was significant to the time they were practicing and what distinctive elements were common to artists from that period.

This is, unfortunately, the audience many press releases and marketing materials are geared to when they include obscure arcana and accolades that only have relevance to this handful of insiders and initiates. If it doesn’t pass the Gal in Starbucks test, save those materials and hand them to these folks.

Even though they are most deeply interested and invested in the content you offer, they only have a low likelihood of becoming a donor. However, they do provide good word of mouth and validation among peer organizations and the general industry.

 Recharger- This is the person who uses interactions with your organization to recharge themselves. In a museum, they may come in and sit in front of the same painting every day for a week. They may be a volunteer who helps out because working in a creative environment helps them get through their 9-5 job.  Understanding how to interact with these people can be a little tricky. A person who is recharged by sitting in the presence of a work of art may want to control their experience whereas a volunteer may want you to guide their engagement a little.

Not charging them admission on their third visit that week or suggesting they may be interested in looking at project you are working on in “Employees Only” area may make you a friend for life.

According to my friend the museum director, rechargers often fly under the radar and remain quietly involved but can have a deep emotional investment with the organization that manifests in things like surprise bequests in people’s wills.

Everyone ends up embodying one of these types at different points in their lives. In a museum you may be an explorer but in a performance venue you engage as a professional. When you bring your nieces and nephews to a show, you operate as a facilitator and realize just how inhospitable some of your policies and practices are to families. At Mt. Rushmore you are an experience seeker and annoy everyone with your attempt to take a selfie that makes it appear you are punching Teddy Roosevelt in the nose.

No space or program can perfectly serve each of these types, but being aware of them allows you to anticipate the different ways you can address the needs of each.

Art Museum Price Is Right

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While socializing post-reception for a show that opened at the local art museum, I got into a conversation with the directors about the type of information you include on the cards/plaques next to each piece.

Things got a little spirited when the executive director suggested that the cost of a piece be listed. His reasoning was that people are interested in knowing this information due to shows like Antique Roadshow.  His thought was that by including this information, you might appeal to an audience that wasn’t currently being reached.

The artistic director was against this idea. She was concerned that if the prices appeared on the cards, people would orient to that information rather than reading about the importance of the artist to a movement, what inspired the piece, notes that draw attention to technique, etc.  For those works that are for sale, she has price booklets available at the entrance of the gallery.

I tended to agree with the artistic director. I pointed out that people might start to equate price with the importance of a work or its intrinsic value. If something cost more, it must be a better quality work or the best exemplar of the movement.

On the other end of the spectrum, I thought it might serve to more deeply entrench the poor impression people had about art. If you are of the opinion that a 5th grader could produce a similar product, what are you going to think when you learn that it is worth $6 million when a piece you like is only worth $20,000?

We also addressed the issue that all pricing is not created equal. Some prices will be what the artist set for them. Others will be market value which may be absurdly inflated thanks to any number of factors.   I have seen shows where the artists are required to put prices on their works and don’t have the option to list it as not for sale so they will assign a price that guarantees no one will buy it.

This debate went on for quite awhile and suddenly we hit upon a bit of inspiration that we thought might serve both sides. It is still in the brainstorming stage and it is really more applicable to an educational program for a school or as a fun alternative in a lecture series rather than answering the question of what to put on the display cards.

The idea is essentially an art museum version of The Price is Right where you call people down to try to guess the cost of a piece of art. However, instead of just having them take random, uninformed guesses, you provide some of the background you would on a display card or in a lecture.

The general concept at this point is that you show a slide of a work and talk about many of the particulars: This work is from X who was an important figure in the Y period. The use of A, B, C techniques was impressive to people at the time. It was purchased by Mr. Jones for his collection and given to his daughter for her wedding. It was purchased by the Philadelphia Museum but has been lent to these museums in England, France and Hungary.

Talking about the provenance of an artwork can be nearly identical to the way the hosts on Antiques Roadshow talk about pieces people bring in for examination.

While the price does get mentioned, the opportunity to note that is what was paid in 1810 or at auction, etc allows it to be put in perspective. While this format doesn’t  allow for the depth and continuity you might get on a lecture about a movement that spanned decades, it can help spur an interest in learning more.

By controlling the release of information, you can get people to focus on elements that might contribute to why it is valued as it is before unveiling the actual price. This can create an environment where a conversation can occur about how unpredictable and illogical market prices can be when few of these elements seem to factor into multi-million dollar auction bids.

As I said, this is still in brainstorming stage and there have been little consideration given to audience, timing, subject matter, appropriateness, logistics and other related questions.  It will be at least 4-5 months before it happens, if they decide to go ahead with it.

If anyone has any feedback, thoughts, ideas, let me know.  I would be especially interested if someone could see a way to do something similar with the performing arts.

I am not sure we could really address price in the context of other factors in as interesting a format.  If you see some other game that might be played to make mysterious aspects of the performing arts more accessible to audiences, I would be interested in hearing your ideas

Prepare For The Swarm

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Since I did a post on ideas that must go earlier this week, I thought it would be a good opportunity to draw attention to a document the Independent Sector put out on Nine Trends Affecting the Charitable Sector.

The document is only 6 pages long so it is a quick read, but the point that caught my attention was #4, “Swarms of individuals connecting with Institutions.”

Individuals will be more strongly aligned with causes and less to the organizations that advance them. As they become increasingly sophisticated at swarming, individuals will often sidestep organizations that are not equipped to partner with them. At home and abroad, swarms will direct their efforts at addressing market and government failures in new ways, with solutions that seek to either fill in the gaps where infrastructure is lacking or provide alternatives to existing services.

…Institutions will need to become agile in a variety of new ways: by listening deeply, responding in real time, providing platforms that enable and accelerate existing swarms, and by leading swarms themselves. In parallel, part of the sophistication that swarms may gain is a far greater ability to draw on institutional capabilities, which could be instrumental for sustaining their impact over time. Associations will face particularly strong pressure as technology makes it easier to connect with peers and access new information and resources with minimal overhead, both at a distance and in person.

As a result, the dominant culture of leadership across society will continue to gradually shift from central control towards broad episodic engagement; being adaptive, facilitative, transparent, and inspirational will be increasingly valued. Particularly in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, leaders will continue to use formal authority as an essential tool, but many will emerge whose power is drawn from informal influence.

While the Independent Sector document couches their predictions in terms that seem applicable to groups seeking change in social, legislative and public health areas, the same expectations may end up applied to the arts once people begin to realize success in these other arenas and begin to expand their ambitions.

The most obvious manifestation might be if professional-amateurs (Pro-Ams) wanting to share their work in a live interactive setting approach an existing arts institution looking for a venue at which to base their project and find that the organization is unable/unwilling to assist them. In that case, the Pro-Ams may develop an alternative method and bypass established entities.

Even though bloggers like myself often write about the arts field as if it is stuck in a rut and afraid of innovation, I actually feel that as a field we actually have a leg up on other types of organizations in the non-profit sector when it comes to being open to either helping someone realize their vision or partnering with them on a small scale to make it happen.

Maybe not on big stuff requiring major investment, but on things like experimental, site specific works in the local park (or parking garage).

The inflexible element will be one arts entities run into  perennially  – the spirit is willing, but the bank account is weak. The answer may be: “Yes, but next year when we can muster resources,” when the swarm members want to accomplish something with more immediacy.

There is no easy answer to that because you can’t just hold money aside on the off chance that someone is going to pop in with a proposal that matches what you can bring to the table. On the positive side, the swarm may be able to rally the necessary support for this one project.

The Independent Sector mentions the episodic nature of these efforts to mobilize so you wouldn’t be able to count on regular support, but the fact you were flexible enough to participate/partner may generate the informally based influence they talk about at the end there. That may be enough to allow you to solicit support from sources whose radar you had never been on before.

Who knows, maybe a local swarm will “direct their efforts at addressing market and government failures” in the arts.

Prepare Now For Your Posthumous Career

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If you spend any time even loosely associated with the visual arts, you have probably heard the argument that if you can’t tell the difference between a forgery and the original and if you get enjoyment from the work, what is the problem if it is a copy? At the heart of this debate is the question of whether value is based on something real or a delusion we all agree to participate in.

Fortunately, we in the performing arts never really have to worry much about this question because the provenance of a performance is generally never in doubt.

But that may not be the case for much longer. Thomas Cott’s unblinking Sauron-esque gaze caught this little story about a company that is developing a technology that will allow the dead to perform from beyond the grave.

Pop music fans who never had the opportunity to attend concerts featuring their favourite musicians may soon be able to do so, even if they died many years ago, thanks to the EU-funded REVIVOS project.

The project is developing a voice synthesiser which can analyse a singer’s voice and then reproduce it in a way that retains their original character and expression.

[…]

‘Imagine Frank Sinatra singing a modern Jason Derulo song but with the expressive style and timbre of Frank Sinatra,’ said Mayor.

Everyone knows Sinatra died when Jason Derulo was 9 years old and won’t mistake the performance as vintage Sinatra.

Tupac Shakur’s productive posthumous career was subject of some skepticism and many jokes, but the fact that enough recorded material existed to produce additional albums means it is easily within the realm of possibility that counterfeit performances can be created thanks to this developing technology.

Mozart’s widow passing off his work as first and final drafts in order raise its value when she was selling it is a centuries old example of how the market for performance works can be manipulated.

People probably record more images of themselves in a single day than Shakur did in his lifetime. It wouldn’t strain credulity if people claimed they had recovered bits and pieces from rehearsal recordings when they actually manufactured entirely new material based on an idea they had last month.

Some artists may want to be careful what they eat if their significant others start assiduously collecting and storing digital files of their work!

So the question comes again. If you were a fan of the artist, enjoyed their newest work and couldn’t discern that it wasn’t an authentic performance until the scandal erupted, were you really cheated?

The other issue that concerned me was whether the 3-D aspect of this technology might cause an even deeper investment in revivals and adaptations of existing works than we are seeing now. Except in the case, it might manifest as a “revival” of performers.

There are already cases where concerts feature performances with holograms or recordings of deceased musicians. What if a movie studio decides they want to license the likeness and voice of Christopher Lee to harness his gravitas for their movies rather than cultivating new talent?

A few years back Ian McKellan warned that the decline of the repertory theatre as a development ground will result in the lack of great actors like himself, Judi Dench and others. There is a chance that recordings of his performances might exacerbate that situation.

The estates of some artists won’t allow it, but others may be pleased to know they can provide for their loved ones after death and establish guidelines in their will for how their likeness may be used.

Heck, some living performers may license the likeness of themselves in their physical prime and live off that in their old age.

While this may seem to be a cynical view of a technology that can certainly have some groundbreaking implications, I can’t help but be depressed that the angle taken in the story is “Hey! We can bring back the greatest performers you are nostalgic for and lend a patina of class to today’s performers.” Rather than, “Hey! We can cultivate, develop and engage people to be more proficient in their pursuits.”

What Non-Profit Arts Idea Must Die?

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Last week I was re-reading a Brain Pickings post I had bookmarked months ago about the book, This Idea Must Die: Some of the World’s Greatest Thinkers Each Select a Major Misconception Holding Us Back.

I planned a post asking my readers what idea they thought was holding the arts back. But before I did, I wanted to get a handle on what I thought was holding us back.

Even though it is in the news often these days, I don’t think forbidding people to use their phones, etc in a performance is holding things back. While it is certainly a point of contention right now, societal expectations of behavior in a performing arts space have evolved over time. I think we are in one of those transitional phases right now and suspect things will stabilize around a set of norms in the next decade or so.

The same with the idea that a performance must happen in a dedicated space or a physical space at all now that virtual options are available. Performances have happened in amphitheaters, pageant wagons, tennis courts, saloons, theater/concert halls, site specific spaces, warehouses, etc, etc. Again while there is currently a lot of angst about the setting, timing and modes of delivery, these factors have been acknowledged and things seem to be progressing, albeit with fits and starts.

Something that did occur to me as a factor holding the arts back was the idea that an arts organization must be a non-profit. There has been a lot of talk about alternative models that are available, but few people have pursued them. While some people will organize themselves as a for-profit entertainment company, the vast majority of people who dream of starting a company seem to default to non-profit.

In that respect, Drew McManus’ Venture Arts Incubator is one of the few places that is specifically saying we will help you develop your arts related business as anything but a non-profit.

With all this percolating around in my head, I had something of an ah-ha moment with Vu Le’s Nonprofit with Balls post about changing the term non-profit sector to something else.

Some of his ideas are more appealing than others. I am partial to the terms “Mission-Driven Sector,” “Public Benefit Sector” or “Community Benefit Sector.”

In the end, Vu suggests the non-profit sector faces more pressing concerns like mismatches between funding priorities and actual needs, overhead and poor work-life balance to be worrying about what the sector is called.

While this is true, a number of the other problems he mentions are related to perception and can be at least partially alleviated by a change. For example, for-profit sector discounts the work of non-profit organizations; people think non-profits–and their employees–aren’t allowed to make money.

Then there is the corresponding belief by non-profit staff that anything less than an 16 hour day shows lack of commitment. Besides, lack of free time helps you save what little money you make since you are too exhausted to do anything.

Yes, superficial changes by itself is not meaningful change.

Except those of us in the arts know that superficial illusion can be absolutely convincing and influence perception. After all, we have people trying to plug their phones into fake outlets. And how many actors who have played doctors have been asked for their medical opinions by fans?

For those who follow politics, I probably don’t need to tell you how many misnomers are applied to laws, policies and positions to make them sound more appealing.

The perceptual issues associated with the terms non-profit or not-for-profit certainly aren’t the only ideas that we need to have die. But if nothing else, a more effective marketing and PR campaign is needed, if only to convince our current and future selves/employees that we are deserving.

So while we are on the subject, what other ideas must die?

Demand Pricing and Extraction Mindset

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This story has been getting a lot of circulation today on social media, but I think it was Thomas Cott who first linked to a story about how a new law in Washington State will prohibit the use of “ticket bots” to buy up all the tickets for a show and then resell them all at higher prices.

In the comment section someone complained about the law saying the venue likely undervalued the tickets if people were willing to pay the reseller’s higher prices. Someone responded noting that perhaps the venue was actually trying to make the show affordable for a wider range of people.

Since the subject of people moving from the corporate world to head up non-profit organizations has been on my mind recently, my first thought was that these two people represent the difference in philosophies between the for- and non-profit sectors. If more people transition to non-profit management, this could be the subject of increased tension.

Except, it is already a focus of debate in the non-profit arts community. There are a number of non-profits who have started to institute demand based pricing for their shows as unearned revenue continues to diminish.

Even organizations that have no desire or technical capability to effectively implement demand based pricing are increasingly pressured to use it. I regularly get contracts that say if the artist is getting a piece of the gate, we will be required to establish milestones at which we will employ demand pricing.

Seth Godin had a post a month ago in which he addressed this exact situation which he termed the extraction mindset.

Thirty years ago, I asked the fabled rock promoter Bill Graham a question that I thought was brilliant, but he pwned me in his response. “Bill, given how fast a Bruce Springsteen concert sells out, why don’t you charge $100 a seat and keep all the upside?” (In those days, $100 was considered a ridiculous sum for a concert ticket).

“Well, I could do that, but the thing is, I’m here all year round, and my kids only have a limited budget to spend on concerts. If I charged that much for one concert, they wouldn’t be able to come to the other shows I book…”

Bill wasn’t just spreading the money out over time. He was investing in a community that could develop a habit of music going, a community that would define itself around what he was building.

Now this was 30 years ago. It is difficult to be sure rock promoters are employing this same mindset anymore.

Though I was actually faced with the same question regarding an annual Christmas show by a national act we present every year. Someone suggested given that we always sell out and have the date for the next year set before the current year’s concert starts, why not sell tickets for next year when the curtain comes down this year.

Problem is, people are so rabid about getting the same seats they had the year before, we were concerned we might force them to decide between buying tickets for the following year or buying Christmas presents. Better that we wait and not put them in that sort of bind.

Godin goes on to talk about the two different economic mindsets that exist today.

The promise of our connected economy was that it would reward the good guys, the long-term players, the people who cared enough to contribute. The paradox is that this very same economy has become filled with people who are easily distracted, addicted to shiny objects and too often swayed by the short-term sensation or by short-term profit.

I think most people embody both mindsets and unless they are really mindful of their actions, don’t necessarily see a conflict between them. People will take advantage of the low prices and convenience of shopping on Amazon and religiously show up to the farmers’ market on weekend mornings because they also value personally connecting to their local producers.

There isn’t necessarily a contradiction in this approach if there aren’t any local companies that make sleeping bags and vacuum cleaners for them to connect with the way they do with the beekeepers, farmers and candle makers.

Even without contractual obligations, when it comes to setting pricing it can be a real challenge for arts organizations to balance economic necessity with access. If you have 1000 seats, gauging whether an additional $10 a seat is going to be an impediment to audiences can mean a difference of $10,000.

If the show sells out easily, there is a lot less labor and expense involved in making that $10,000 than if you have to approach someone for a sponsorship, or write a grant application and final report.

Stuff To Think About: Take My Employee, Please

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Last week I drew attention to Joan Garry’s post for people in the for profit field who wanted to interview for a position as a non-profit executive director.

Since then, I came across a post on Creativity Post where a researcher at Cambridge, Will McAskill, was urging people not to enter the non-profit field right out of college if they truly wanted to make a difference.

His reasons are as follows:

1. Most nonprofits have little impact
A significant fraction of social interventions don’t work, and this means that the nonprofits who implement these interventions don’t have any impact.

2. Poor skill development
Nonprofits are usually small and have a shoestring budget, which means there’s little room for training or career development compared to organisations in the for-profit sector.

3. Poor option value
It’s much easier to transition from the corporate sector into nonprofits than vice versa, so if you want to try both, it’s better to start outside of nonprofits, then enter later.

Instead, he suggests if people really want to make a difference, they should get into a lucrative career like finance and then donate a significant portion of their income. In that way, they will have a greater impact.

Other career paths he suggests are entrepreneurship, research, politics and jobs like consulting that allow you to build your skills. Each of these options will either afford you an opportunity to make an impact, or develop your skills to the level required by highly effective charities.

While McAskill’s findings are mostly focused on social welfare and health related charities, arts organizations need to grapple with most of the same issues. It is difficult for arts organizations to show quantitative impacts; there generally isn’t a budget for training and career development; and the sentiment that the organization ought to be run like a business often sees business people hired into leadership positions over non-profit career professionals.

The other consideration is that we are told Millennials want to make a difference. McAskill’s suggestion that non-profit work come later in life combined with pressure to study business or science rather than the liberal arts could see some of the most talented individuals diverted away from the non-profit sector.

The tough question the non-profit arts world may need to seriously grapple with is whether it might be better if we recruited for profit mid- to late careerists for our jobs. We all bristle at the idea–and not infrequently reality–of someone from the corporate world coming in and telling us we are doing it all wrong.

It might be possible to mitigate that by forming partnerships/alliances with companies to establish a non-profit track where interested individuals volunteer with your organization or take a position on the board. In that way you might solve the challenge of getting younger people on your board and groom people to eventually be a non-profit leader.

Perhaps only 10% of those in the track ever decide to transition from their corporate job, but those that do are more thoroughly versed in non-profit operations. Those that don’t have satisfied their urge to make a difference.

Though perhaps a simpler solution would be to see if your staff could piggyback on a professional development opportunity a local business is providing their employees. They may have a speaker that costs $20,000 to engage for one day so you would never be able to afford that. But if you pitched in $250 per employee, they might let you participate.

The same with conferences. There are a lot of artists that piggyback in on a vendor’s badge allotment at arts conferences or pay the reduced “additional employee” rate. Corporate partners may allow your employees to do the same.

Or as part of your sponsorship request, you could ask a corporate partner to out and out pay for your employee to join their employees at some training event or conference.

True, the content of the conference may not be entirely applicable to the arts–but it may inspire something you might never have considered. Not to mention 80% applicable can be better than no professional development at all.

Tagging along on professional development seminars doesn’t solve all the issues Will McAskill cites, but it does start to address them.

You Are Now Free To Exploit Your Interns

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For the last year or so, non-profit arts organizations have been somewhat nervously wondering whether the criteria being used to define what constituted an internship might be applied to the non-profit industry as well.

The concern arose over a ruling against Fox Searchlight pictures in a case where interns on the film Black Swan where the court found the interns should have been classified as employees instead under the six points of criteria set down by the U.S. Labor Department.

Earlier this month, an appeals panel vacated the decision of the lower court saying the Labor Department criteria was out of date and providing a different criteria.

He argued that the proper way to determine workers’ status was to apply a “primary beneficiary test” — a concept proposed by Fox in which the worker can be considered an employee only if the employer benefits more from the relationship than the intern.

Judge Walker wrote that he and his fellow judges on the panel “agree with defendants that the proper question is whether the intern or the employer is the primary beneficiary of the relationship.”

He further argued that the test should hinge largely on the internship’s educational benefits: for example, whether the internship was tied to the intern’s formal schooling and whether it occurred in an educational setting.

Summer is the high season for internship and apprenticeships in the arts since so many students are out of school. It is fortunate that this ruling came out when it did. Now arts organizations can squeeze more labor out of their interns in the remaining weeks of the summer without any concerns.

Everyone knows that the arts are good for you and that you must suffer for your art. Ergo, any task an intern performs must be more beneficial to them than it is to the employer. Misery and lack of pay constitute authentic experiences for arts practitioners after all.

Yeah well, be that as it may, this is more a case of just because you CAN do it, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Just because the environment is potentially more relaxed than it was last month doesn’t mean proper standards don’t need to be developed for internships to make the experiences more valuable.

Schools like the Ringling College of Art and Design have clear standards (no more than 20% clerical work) and a series of evaluation forms.

There are a good number of people who don’t enter internships under the auspices of a formal training program. In either case, the success of the internship heavily depends on the type of experience the work site provides/creates.

If anything, an internship should be viewed as an additional responsibility the organization is taking on, not a solution to a lack of labor. Even beyond the consideration that staff members will need to take additional time to train an unskilled individual, time and effort to regularly evaluate and provide feedback to the intern needs to be factored in.

Having informal discussions over lunch or at the bar after hours still constitutes work for staff, especially if the need to address problems arises. Of necessity, intern assessment and evaluation needs to be a much more rigorous process than periodic evaluation of employees. (Not that many arts organizations do that very well, but that is a different post.)

Don’t Worry About The Backstage Door, Guard The Electrical Outlets!

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You may have seen this story that has been circulating about the guy who brazenly climbed up on stage just before a Broadway performance in order to plug his phone into the (unbeknownst to him) fake outlet on stage.

Lest you think this an isolated incident, only a few months ago I was in an airport and saw someone plug their phone into at the ticketing kiosk by the gate. Emboldened, other people did the same until there was no more room on the power strip and people started unplugging the computer and ticket printer.

This is another issue arts organizations need to make note of. It used to be you only need to have security standing in front of the stage when the performer was famous enough to warrant it. Now you need to do so when anything appearing to be an outlet is in line of sight! (Just imagine a fan rushing the stage and the lead singer darting away before realizing the guy is making a bee line for an extension cord.)

But in reality, having sufficient outlets and charging stations available may be another amenity, along with things like good parking and opportunities socialize with friends over drinks before/after a performance, that serve as criteria when deciding whether to attend or no.

Arts organizations are frequently frustrated trying to keep up with the changing expectations of audiences and all the options there are for interacting with them. Just when you feel you have your presence correctly aligned on a social media channel, everybody you want to reach shifts elsewhere.

In this case, it’s just as you feel like you your lobby is particularly welcoming and your staff isn’t pressuring people to leave the lobby after the show, you start to worry about whether you have enough accessible outlets and Wifi service.

But of course, people who work in the arts aren’t without sin either. They share the same expectations as their audiences. If you are sitting outside the changing room in a clothing store waiting for your kid to come out, there is a fair chance you are going to be looking for an open outlet, too.

Sometimes there are opportunities to manage scare resources and still keep many people feeling satisfied.

The restrooms in our facility inevitably develop lines at intermission and other periods of high traffic. However, there are some people who know about some seldom used restrooms in an out of the way location. Even though these restrooms are physically less convenient to the theater than the lobby is, knowing the secret about our restrooms and not having to wait on line is regarded as a satisfying outcome.

So by posting a pro-tip about where to find secret restrooms, outlets or whatever on a site like Yelp, you can keep those who value being in the know happy even as they are crawling under a staircase to plug their phone in.

So You Want To Interview For Executive Director

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Now and again the issue is raised about people moving from the corporate to non-profit world without really understanding the philosophical and cultural differences between the two sectors. 

It wasn’t until a posting by Joan Garry, who made the corporate to non-profit move when she became the executive director of GLAAD, that I realized I had never really seen an attempt to provide an understanding of those differences.

Noting that given the demographics of her readership, she is probably preaching to the choir, she encourages people to forward her post to anyone considering making the transition.

She provides her advice in the form of probable interview questions a candidate for a non-profit executive director position will receive.

This also serves a good guide for the type of questions a non-profit board should be asking candidates. She addresses the obvious question right out of the gate:

1. Tell us about your previous nonprofit experience. How do you perceive the differences in the sectors?

This is really important. You need to have played in the nonprofit sandbox in some way. I’m hoping you have volunteered, been involved in a PTA, or in your house of worship. Consider the differences between that and your corporate job.

If you haven’t done any of those things, as a member of the search committee, I am going to be very skeptical indeed.

Later questions address the fact that employees of non-profits are motivated by entirely different factors than those in a corporate setting; the larger number of constituents with conflicting interests that need to be managed; the relationship between board and executive director and of course, the ever present issue of fund raising.

Since these questions are based largely on the questions that were posed to her when she was interviewing, I appreciated that she reflected on the success of some of her answers. She said she admitted she had no fund raising experience, but that she figured if she could get boxing promoter Don King to pay Showtime what he owed them, she could ask anyone for money.

I also appreciated that she recognized that she was weak in some respects, despite being highly qualified in a wide range of areas, and that it was her answer to the question, “Why are you passionate about THIS organization and THIS mission?” that got her the job.

An acknowledgement that there are always skill sets that will need to be developed is pretty much expected for any new job. As a commenter on her post notes, sometimes that isn’t the case and there is a sense that non-profit work is something one deigns to do after they have had a real career.

Substantial Change Comes From Within

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Diane Ragsdale has an extremely interesting post today related to an earlier set of posts she made two years ago about coercive philanthropy in response to change of direction the Irvine Foundation was taking in their funding philosophy.

She notes today that many of the arts groups the Irvine Foundation had traditionally supported did not shift themselves toward the new direction the foundation was encouraging arts organizations to go. She says:

My view, in a nutshell, was (and still is) this: While the Irvine Foundation may have been justified in pursuing a brave new strategy, its grantees were also justified in rebuffing it. I wrote:

Irvine appears to be interested in bringing about a kind of diversity (i.e., change) in the arts sector we don’t often talk about: aesthetic diversity. … However well-researched and justified, Irvine must recognize (and I think it does) that its strategy is out of line with the missions of a majority of professional arts organizations, which were formed to present work by professionals for audiences that come to appreciate that work, not make it. … Irvine needs to recognize that it is endeavoring to coax organizations into uncharted territory. It wants to coerce a change that many cannot make, or do not want to make.

We often speak of arts organizations bending over backwards and stretching their missions and activities in order to make themselves eligible to receive funding so it was of great interest to me to read about arts organizations who were not doing so even though it might be significantly detrimental to their finances.

In one of the posts Diane made two years ago, she talks about the  long time period required to make the substantial change of the type the Irvine Foundation is signalling versus the impatience of most foundations.

She uses the example of Centerstage Theater in Baltimore which made a focused commitment to do a better job of serving the city’s 67% African American population. They initially lost subscribers and supporters before eventually replacing them in the 10 years it took to fully realize this vision.

Ragsdale suggests that substantive change only comes when the leadership is behind it, not when the funding philosophy shifts.

I seriously question whether funding organizations to make them change works. Has any organization that was reluctant to change made substantive long-term change because of a grant? I suspect any change that happens probably has more to do with leadership, other sources of income, and an intent to change that was already solid before the grant arrived.

And when change fails to be manifested? Well, I would wager that a majority of foundations perceive that organizations are at fault in that case (not the grantmaking strategy). And why wouldn’t they? Organizations write proposals in which they promise to change themselves in dramatic ways for ridiculously small amounts of money and over unreasonable periods of time. They lie about what they can do. They choose to do this to get the money. Foundations choose to believe these lies because it’s convenient to believe that it’s possible to change the world in 3-5 year cycles..

In her post today, she provides a insightful illustration of how this manifests. (To understand the reference to moving diagonally across the box, you need to scroll to the Ansoff Matrix graphic in her post.)

If a business is doing well, then (from its perspective) the best strategy is to continue to create the product it knows for the market it knows (market penetration). However, when that market is in decline (and one could argue that this is the case for many professional arts groups at the moment), its least risky move is either (a) to develop new products for existing markets (product development), or (b) to develop new markets for existing products (market development).

Asking arts organizations to develop new products for new markets sends them diagonally into the box marked diversification and is a high-risk move; there can be a significant chance of failure. And while Irvine might be willing to underwrite some of the financial risks associated with experiments in this realm, it can’t underwrite the strategic, operational, compliance, social, and psychological risks associated with such changes—organizations need to be ready, willing, and able to bear these on their own.

This section of her post really helped clarify some fundamental concepts of business strategy for me. It made me realize that when there is a discussion about the need for live performance organizations with middle to older aged audiences  to develop things like video based entertainment in order to engage younger groups, what is being advocated for is a risky proposition requiring a commitment to endure challenges on all the fronts she lists.

The efforts of Centerstage Theater illustrate that even implementing the changes required to develop new markets for the existing product may entail some of the same risks she mentions.

There are many other related issues Ragsdale addresses so the whole post is worth a read.

I realize I should mention her current post is in reaction to a report on a recent study the Irvine Foundation engaged in. Even though Ragsdale is critical of some aspects of it, my general impression is that the Irvine Foundation may be in it for the long haul with their new focus given they have committed to gathering data and studying the issues. Though I guess we will see where things stand in 8 or more years.

Diego Rivera and the Paintbrush of Destiny

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As part of our website revamp, I am in the process of adding content about the various murals located around the building. One of the best pieces is a little removed from the lobby and spans a couple floors so I have made a video and map to help guide people to it.

So it was with great interest that I read a recent piece on NPR about the rights visual artists, especially muralists, can exert to determine the disposition of the buildings in/on which they are painted.

As I started reading, I began to worry that more people might refuse to allow murals to appear on the sides of their buildings if they were aware of these issues. However, the story notes that Philadelphia, which has a robust, formal mural program, has found ways to strike a balance and work with both the artist and building owner to find some sort of accommodation. They are likely a good source for advice on these matters.

Only works created after 1990 enjoy this protection under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). So Diego Rivera’s paintbrush technically hasn’t altered the destiny of any buildings as far as the Act is concerned.

This piece from the National Endowment for the Arts and this one from the Arts & Business Council of Greater Philadelphia do a pretty good job of explaining various aspects of the law.

One thing I think bears emphasizing since many of the commenters on the NPR story get it wrong is that while works for hire are not covered under the VARA, that does not mean that only works created for free are covered. If you are commissioned to create a work as an independent contractor and get paid for it, your work is covered. This is clearly stated in the Arts and Business Council flyer, but I wanted to reinforce that.

The reason I think it is particularly important to be aware of this law is because so many communities are utilizing murals to help spruce up the neighborhood. Often these murals are on abandoned buildings that are good candidates for destruction should those murals generate the the desired positive ambiance and attract new residents and businesses.

Since the rights are retained until the death of the last surviving creator, it might be good to form a general agreement that the work is being created with the expectation (and perhaps hope) that someone will eventually destroy it.

The other thing to note is that the VARA deals with the artist’s moral rights to the work which can never be given away. The artist can transfer ownership, but can’t give up their moral rights. Per the NEA Office of General Counsel article:

“VARA restricts the exercise of the rights of attribution and integrity to the author or joint authors of the artwork, regardless of whether he/they hold title either to the copyright or the artwork itself. Thus while both copyright and physical ownership are property rights which may be transferred, moral rights may not be transferred. Moral rights may, however, be waived. The waiver instrument must be very specific: the creator must consent in a written and signed instrument specifically identifying the artwork, the uses of that work, and with a clause limiting the waiver to both aspects.”

So even if a mural was presented as a birthday present to someone, the next owner of the building can’t immediately bulldoze it as the new owner of the mural. Notice of 90 days must provided to the artist(s) during which period of time they can take whatever action they decide is necessary from a final visit to take pictures before it is destroyed to seeking a court injunction against the demolition.

The one issue that isn’t really addressed is what protections exist for art that someone produces uninvited. People go out and paint over unwanted graffiti everyday….unless it is a Banksy in which case they may chisel out the section of the wall and sell it at auction.

If someone cares enough to chisel it out and keep it, aren’t they admitting it is valuable and not a nuance? So if Banksy (or Banksy’s lawyer) shows up and says the art is site specific (which many clearly are) and may not be moved/destroyed/defaced per VARA, who has the right to determine what happens with the work?

Corralling The Wild Volunteer

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The Wall Street Journal had a story entitled Docents Gone Wild sharing some stories about museum docents going off script, treating visitors rudely or diverting people away from works of art they didn’t approve of.

The take away for me wasn’t so much that you have to keep an eye on those crotchety senior citizens as much as the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation provides an opportunity to mobilize a large cohort of people on behalf of the arts. Only it will require some effort to effectively engage and train them.

In some respects this idea is a complement to the series on arts and aging/healing that Barry Hessenius hosted last month. That series dealt with the idea that there is an unmet need that the arts can respond to that is only going to grow as the Baby Boomer generation ages. However, currently most arts organizations lack the capacity to do so.

In terms of enlisting retirees as volunteer or in a type of semi-retired/second career role, arts organizations’ ability is a little more developed, but can still be improved. These retirees are people who are transitioning out of careers as highly skilled professionals and will likely enjoy a longer, healthier post-retirement lifestyle than their parents had.

They may want to contribute more than just ushering, envelop stuffing and phone answering during their retirement. If they can’t find an activity to hold their interest, they may choose another activity that they feel is better suited to the energy and ambition they feel they have.

Arts organizations may be wary about involving additional older folks on their boards of directors when they are desperately seeking younger voices, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some organizations managed to create special task groups that mobilized to advocate and lobby for them with government entities.

For all the foibles their docents may exhibit, I am pretty impressed by the rigor of the training program these museums have instituted for their docents. Not that I would increase the training we give our volunteers for its own sake, but it makes me wonder if we are investing enough attention to our training as well as care and feeding of our current volunteers even before addressing the issue of being prepared for new arrivals.

As I was I writing this post, I had a vague recollection of some futurist like John Nasbitt (Megatrends 2000), Faith Popcorn (Popcorn Report) or Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) coming out with a book in the last 10-15 years that said retirees would gather into fairly insular communities termed something like Yogurt Communities because they would value “active cultures” or cultural activity. I wonder if anyone can remember it because I can’t find it. I was curious to do a check back to see if predictions were coming to pass.

Marketing Begins At Home

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I do a lot of talking about how marketing is the business of everyone in the organization, not just the department bearing that name. Everybody needs to be invested in the organization and its goals. I often use the example of telling your organization’s story while you are in line at the supermarket.

A lot of what I and others write about in this vein stresses the importance of relating your story to external audiences. But I have slowly come to recognize the success of those efforts really depends on your success in relating that story to internal audiences first.

Even if the whole organization is supposed to be responsible for telling the story, its likely that the story may only remain fresh and alive for the people in the marketing department who deal with it everyday. They are the ones that have to take the full page press release and compress the information and concepts for consumption on webpages, social media, 30 second PSAs, posters and print ads. They are constantly having to distill information in order to maintain its essence.

Something I have noticed in my own experience is that staff and board members who helped with the programming and writing of brochure descriptions don’t seem to know as much about the performances as I do. Then I realized it was because I am interacting with marketing materials and having conversations about opportunities for interesting education services on a weekly basis.

Despite being deeply involved with the process for a fair amount of time, other board and staff members end up months removed from their efforts.

Arts organizations advertise and send out emails to remind the general public about events we previously announced in an effort to engage them as the time approaches. There probably needs to be a corresponding internal effort as well. You can send staff emails, briefing sheets and talk about events in board and staff meetings, but emails get deleted and people often just want to get out of those meetings.

However, people often have a tendency to avoid work, right? Water cooler type conversations about why upcoming events are going to be interesting can make a deeper, more lasting impression on people and help to make them better advocates. Especially because instead of receiving a general announcement, they are getting the message customized for them.

Even if other employees are insiders to a degree, they can often serve as the initial sounding board/guinea pigs for approaches you will use with the general public. Volunteers may especially be valuable in this regard since they are probably invested enough in the organization to provide feedback, but may be disconnected enough from the inner workings that they are only slightly more aware of the organization’s activities than the average attendee.

In many respects, marketing definitely begins at home. Even if everyone is working together to make every event a success and are clearly invested in seeing everything come off well, it is far too easy to assume everyone is equally as knowledgeable about the value of the event.

Marketing may be the business of everyone in the organization, but there are always going to be people who know more and are more passionate about events than others. Whether they are officially part of the marketing or artistic team or not, it is always going to be incumbent on them to pass on the knowledge and instill the passion in the other employees to enable them to be effective representatives.

Donor Achievement Unlocked- Screaming Fan

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I had made a suggestion to the community board we partner with on our presenting season that they think about changing the names of their giving categories. My rationale was that the current categories are strongly oriented toward classical music, but that genre only compromises 10%-20% of the programming in any season.

They asked me to provide some suggestions at the board meeting in August. Since I want to have names that give a broader, more diverse sense of the type of programming we partner on, I have been jotting ideas down in a pretty stream of consciousness manner.

At one point, I realized some of the terms were likely unfamiliar and might require explanation. I considered that could be a good thing. If positioned correctly, it might help donors to more closely identify with the work we do.

By this point, I was thinking that what I working on might make for a good blog post so when I say, “help donors to more closely identify with the work we do,” I mean all of us.

That is when it occurred to me that a revamp in donor categories to include a description might be another area that could contribute to the effort of shifting focus toward the donor/audience that Trevor O’Donnell advocates for with arts marketing.

To a degree, this idea partially resembles the “Achievement Unlocked” motif of video games and some of the categories and stretch goals on Kickstarter. I am also pretty sure I have seen some arts organizations who employ this basic concept.

In no particular order, here is some of what popped into my head for a handful of the terms on the list I have assembled. Some or none of these may get used as inspiration strikes me.

Green Room – This is where all the energy gathers before exploding on to stage
Screaming Fan – With you cheering us on, we never run out of energy.
Stage Manager – Though you are behind the scenes, nothing runs smoothly without you
Running Crew – You do the heavy lifting and make sure the spotlight focuses on everything great on stage.
Comedy Team – Like Abbot and Costello, Stiller and Meara, Key and Peele, we do our best work when we have a great partner supporting us.

It occurs to me that if fund raising efforts were approached with a sense of the next level of giving being an “achievement” to unlock, it might encourage giving from younger people and lead to increased giving over time.

What that would look like is a lot of categories at the lower end of the scale at very small intervals ($1-$25, $26-$50, $50-$100, $100-$200) so that people felt they were progressing quickly through (or skipping) levels early in their giving history. At the higher end of the scale, the intervals between levels of giving would be much greater ($2500-$5000, $5000-$10000) which pretty much reflects the process of advancement in games.

If anyone has ideas for category names, descriptions, etc, I would love to hear them.

Who Are The Must Reads In The Field…..

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…and how do you know?

I frequently promote ideas Seth Godin posits on his blog and show how they connect with the arts.

I do it so frequently, you may be astonished to learn this ain’t one of those times.

And really, someone probably isn’t worth reading if your thought processes always align.

Last month he made a post essentially calling people out for not being aware of the leading voices in their area of endeavor.

He ends the post with:

The line between an amateur and professional keeps blurring, but for me, the posture of understanding both the pioneers and the state of the art is essential. An economist doesn’t have to agree with Keynes, but she better know who he is.

If you don’t know who the must-reads in your field are, find out before your customers and competitors do.

Too much doing, not enough knowing.

While I am secure in the knowledge that I am undoubtedly one of the must-reads in my field and need only listen to the voices in my head if I wish to be enlightened, even I have to ask who the heck has the time to identify and follow all the must-reads in their field.

Twenty years ago, it was possible but now there are so many insightful minds expressing themselves I have a hard enough time keeping abreast of everyone I follow. I often discover to my chagrin that the people I thought I had included in my Twitter and news feeds aren’t in there.

I would agree with the general concept that arts professionals could do a better job staying abreast of new ideas and trends that will help them work smarter over shorter hours.  I will also concede that my ability to read a lot of material and distill it into blog posts is partially attributable to the fact I, (by way of metaphor), have a small lawn to mow and I don’t devote a lot of time weeding my flowerbeds.

I don’t know how the rest of you manage.

There are two main problems with institutionalizing the concept of must-reads.

One that is significant for the arts is the attitude of “how could you not know about X?” which has, fairly or unfairly, contributed to the image of the arts as elitist.  (Do such people exist in great numbers? While I have often been intimidated by the idea of their disapproval, I have rarely encountered them outside of the “no clapping between movements” crowd.)

The second problem is that when you create a list of must-reads, you inevitably omit a worthy or include an unworthy, the focus turns to the validity of the list and it ceases to be useful as a guide.

For most people, the must-reads are going to be those who direct you to other interesting thought leaders. While I am eschewing list making, I think everyone can agree that my blog You’ve Cott Mail fits this description of a must-read and is a good place to start seeking people to follow.

 

Post-Graduate Education Is The Answer

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Createquity tweeted a piece on Pacific Standard covering a study investigating the way musical taste reflects class divisions.

Despite the claim music streaming services are helping to dissolve genre labels, the study found “even among people who expressed liking for several different types of music, Veenstra found a clear delineation between “highbrow” genres enjoyed by educated, upper-class people, and “lowbrow” ones favored by others.”

(My emphasis)

To a large extent, this divide falls along educational lines.

“In regard to highbrow tastes, appreciation for classical, choral, jazz, opera, and world/international music was especially common among people possessing higher educational credentials,” Veenstra notes. “For example, the odds of postgraduates claiming to like classical music in my sample was more than three times as high as the odds of people with less than a high school diploma claiming the same.”

In a mirror image of those results, “the odds of disliking classical music was more than eight times as high for the least educated respondents as for the best-educated ones,” he adds.

Whether this reflects differences in upbringing, culture, a preference for simplicity vs. complexity in entertainment, or an instinctive identification with what “people like us” listen to remains an open question. Perhaps it’s a mix of all of the above.

The title of this post notwithstanding, post-graduate education obviously is not the simple answer. It is more a matter of correlation than causation.

I wonder how and when this shift happened. I know within the last two generations there are people who will recall parents or grandparents who would regularly listen to classical music or opera either on the radio or records. Most of these people held blue collar social status.

I wrote about a similar dividing shift in the appreciation of Shakespeare and drama about six months ago (based, I just noticed, on another Pacific Standard piece). I wonder if the shift in musical taste followed the same general arc.

I am not sure if musical taste division would easily parallel the division in theater. According to the musical survey results, lowbrow music is viewed as falling into the categories of “country, disco, easy listening, golden oldies, heavy metal and rap.”

At one time enjoyment of many of the songs that currently comprise the easy listening and golden oldies categories were viewed as a mark of culture and sophistication whereas rock (now currently in the highbrow category) was viewed as vulgar and low class.

Some of the results may be characteristic to Canada where the survey was conducted. I was surprised to see reggae identified as in the highbrow category given its associations with drug and beach culture. In Canada it may be more strongly identified as world music.

How Many Agents Have You Broken Up With?

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Everyday I get a flurry of emails from the agents of performing artists letting me know when the performers are available cross the course of the next year or two.  Often I notice that artists with whom I am familiar have moved under the representation of a different agent.

After my post yesterday about the evolving career prospects for non-profit executive directors, I idly wondered if anyone studied the reasons why artists change representation.

I know there is the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) study which looks at the employment experiences of graduates of arts degree programs. However, I don’t think it really examines interactions with agents.

Of course, the larger issue is that not every practicing artist graduated from a degree program and wouldn’t be included in the survey.

The two major reasons artists and agents part company are either the artist doesn’t feel the agent is able to represent them well due to lack of initiative or contacts, or the agent doesn’t feel they can provide the artist with the support they need.

From conversations I have had with agents, I know that latter case can often include essentially firing the artist as a client due to feedback the agent receives about their personality or lack of organization. There are some agents who have painstakingly tried to instill good personal and business practices in their clients to no avail.

The idea that artists need to be cognizant of at least some aspects of the business side of their practice, if not take an entrepreneurial approach, has been bandied about to some degree for at least a couple decades now.

I think it would be helpful for all those involve if there was a clear picture of what leads to an artist and agent parting ways and that can be prevented or make the relationship more constructive.

A study may find that artists are choosing the wrong agent for them or vice versa and suggest steps that lead to a more enduring relationship. It may find that artists need better coaching and training at certain milestones in their career.

Agents can be a good resource for artists because they know a great deal about the employment environment and provide advice customized to the individual. (versus general advice on websites/books).

On the other hand, because agents are in competition with each other, there isn’t a lot of incentive for them to collaborate on a uniform process. (Though many certainly have worked together to establish strong standards of behavior for the industry.)

To a certain degree, this study would be about how to increase employment opportunities for artists. There have been many studies about why audiences aren’t attending performances and how to fix that. There aren’t really any studies I can think of that look at why artists aren’t being hired and how to fix that.

Its not entirely a direct result of lack of audiences because there are some performers who are getting more offers than they can accept and they aren’t all super marquee names.

My suspicion is that just as there are studies saying foundations need to change their funding philosophies to reflect the realities faced by non-profit organizations, such a study would reveal a need for presenters, casting agents, gallery directors etc., to change their approaches as well.

One of the things I would be curious to know is the comparative rates of turn over in artist-agent relationships for stage actors, screen actors, visual artists, instrumental soloists, dance companies, music ensembles, etc. I would bet there is a wide variety in the range with the standard for some being a matter of a couple years whereas others being measured in decades.

THOUSANDS OF NON-PROFIT EXECS READY TO RETIRE!!! (maybe…someday)

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For about 7 years now I have been paying attention to the basic concept of leadership transition in non-profits. At first there the conversation was about the lack of transition planning with dual concerns about “older executives” not trusting emerging leaders to take the reins and the perceived lack of work/life balance in the executive position.

About 4 years ago, the conversation didn’t focus as much about the old folks getting out of the way, (even though most of those who said they planned to retire hadn’t). There was still concerns about lack of both succession planning and opportunity for work-life balance.

Even more recently, it has been noted that the expected mass exodus of non-profit executives still hasn’t happened. There was still a concern about succession planning, though the need for boards to pursue good governance started to come into focus.

Last week Non-Profit Quarterly (NPQ) drew attention to a study of non-profits conducted by Third Sector New England that examined the issue of executive transition.  The study findings reflect further development of the trends seen in past studies.

Actually, the one finding that hasn’t changed is that “Nearly two-thirds of responding leaders said they will be leaving their jobs within five years, and 30% are planning to depart in the next two years.”

The report notes that number has been consistent for at least a decade and the expected exodus hasn’t occurred yet.

The way things are going, discussion about leadership dying off is going to eclipse comments about audiences dying off.

But per NPQ, there really isn’t a great push for current executives to move aside to allow new blood to take over. Partially because there isn’t a lot of new blood interested in taking over.

…the troubles in leadership transitions may be on the “demand” rather than the “supply side.” In other words, the challenge may not lie in the supply of competent emerging leaders, as has been heralded in the past, but with the attractiveness of the job of executive.

Whether  a result of a realization of this fact or a recognition of the larger issues at hand, the focus has shifted from a need for a succession plan to replace a single person to the need for a plan to sustain the organization as a whole. (my emphasis)

“SHIFT the framework for succession planning to deep sustainability.

“It is time to change how the sector thinks about and approaches succession planning. Succession planning is not just about preparing for an individual leader transition; nor should it be viewed as a technical fix or a transactional exercise. Rather, it is about ensuring organizational sustainability by identifying and addressing key vulnerabilities so that the organization is not dependent on any one leader, funder, strategy, or way of thinking. Succession planning touches on everything from framing choices for the future (including asking whether the organization should exist), developing sustainable business models, to strengthening staff and board leadership—in essence, all the core activities needed to support the success of the organization’s mission and its leaders over time.”

As part of the recognition that the success of the organization doesn’t revolve around identifying and hiring a single talented leader, the report also extends the concept of the importance of focusing on board governance.


SHIFT the vision for governance.

The expectations and responsibilities of boards need to shift in favor of governance over fundraising, and that means developing a shared vision for the organization, along with strategies to implement that vision, achieving operational excellence, and, yes, finding the resources to support the work. A short-term focus on fundraising undermines long-term sustainability and leads to continued dissatisfaction between leaders and their boards. This shift will not only require a shared understanding of what is effective and impactful governance, it calls for a higher level of engagement and learning together between leaders and boards – changing what may be a transactional partnership into a generative and transformative one…

This will likely be an important step in making the role of executive director an attractive undertaking again. Per NPQ:

“Among the notable findings of this report is that approximately 23 percent of respondents reported being recruited into what was essentially a turnaround situation—slightly more than reported taking over a stable organization.”

Given only 22% reported taking over stable organizations, the other 78% were in iffy to dire circumstances. That takes a toll on the existing leadership and makes for unattractive prospects for potential leaders. The biggest concerns respondents had were focused on work-life balance and personal health factors.

There are other interesting findings and suggestions contained in the study. One significant area of recommendation is abandoning overhead ratio as a measure of effectiveness. Momentum seems to continue to grow around that issue.

Gala Going

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Seth Godin recently linked back to a post he wrote in 2011 about the economics of fund raising galas. To heavily summarize what many of us already know, he points out that it is difficult to get someone to give money to a cause, but if you wrap it in a social occasion, people are willing to spend a large amount of money with the knowledge that some of it will go to a good cause.

Of course the issue is, there is a lot of time and money being spent on organizing the event. When it is all over, there may be a significant amount left over to put toward the cause, but there would have been a lot more had there not been such a large amount of fundraising cost involved.

But that brings up the simple question about whether fundraising can be decoupled from the social element. The basic development office truism is that people give to people, not organizations. Donors need to feel a personal attachment and investment to the cause.

There is an event called an Un-Gala where you are supposed to stay at home and make a donation. But if you Google the term, you will find that a lot of people sort of missed the memo and are having big flashy events.

At the same time, donors are increasingly looking at the overhead costs of non-profit organizations. Organizations like GuideStar, Charity Navigator and BBB Wise Giving Alliance are pushing back against using overhead ratio as a measure of a charity’s effectiveness.

Then there are some like Dan Palotta who are really pushing back against the concept of overhead ratios and advocate for spending large amounts of money to fund raise enough to pursue big solutions.

He has no desire to decouple the social aspect from fundraising. The more galas, 5k runs and promotional efforts you can muster in order to raise awareness and forge a connection or investment with the cause, the better in his mind.

I find a lot I agree with in Palotta’s philosophy. His thoughts about people taking too conservative a view about fund raising bear considering. Maybe my next statement is reflective of that mental malaise.

I am not sure most non-profits operate at a scale on which his ideas would be viable. I think he is envisioning the steps large cause based charities focused on cancer, poverty, diabetes, environment, etc. An arts organization would probably have to adopt a vision on a statewide scale rather serving a city or town to be operating on the scale required to viably follow the approach he advocates.

I have generally viewed Kickstarter and similar crowdfunding services with a semi-skeptical eye. However, reading Godin’s post on gala economics, I have to admit crowdfunding is superior in some aspects. It does reduce the cost of the social element to some degree. There are costs associated with producing a video appeal and producing and fulfilling the donor benefits, just as with a gala event. However, the costs aren’t likely to be as great as for a fundraising gala.

I have heard some horror stories from people who severely underestimated the amount of labor and cost involved with meeting their crowdfunding promises, but I can attest to the fact people do the same with their gala events. Crowdfunding sites allow an opportunity to experiment and relatively quickly refine your approach over various iterations. Something that is not easily done when you are talking about organizing successive social events.

So it is possible in time people will become as adept at creating engaging crowdfunding presentations as they are with gala auctions.

While most crowdfunding sites are focused on projects rather than being optimized for annual seasonal fundraising events, I imagine that design might evolve over time. Just as likely, non-profit organizations may find the idea of anchoring fundraising around an event on a single day is inferior to a series of longer term appeals customized and delivered to specific groups.

A recent article on Nonprofit Hub notes that donor fatigue is not real. People are willing to entertain multiple requests for donations. The thing that wears on people is poorly designed request and follow processes. A targeted, online approach to both may be the solution and allow for more frequent solicitations.

The other little nagging consideration is if people are increasingly having their cultural experiences at home or on a handheld screen, what will be the future of gala events? Granted, everyone loves a good party and may show up for gala events when they never darken the door at any other time of the year.

I would be interested to know if anyone has studied whether people whose only connection with an organization is these semi-annual events donate as much as someone who involves themselves more frequently. It would be difficult to measure. The infrequent attendee could easily be swept away by the emotion of the night (and perhaps a sense of regret for not participating more often) and give quite a bit. Someone who participates often may not give as much because they are not wealthy, but attend the gala because they do feel a significant appreciation for the experience they have had.

The reality is, both approaches may ultimately be necessary. Currently crowdfunding sites tap as much into the participant’s wider social network as much as it does their direct connection and interest in the project. Live events appeal more directly to a person’s connection, but provide an opportunity mingle and have an enjoyable social experience that a video on a website can’t provide.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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