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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.

Even More Live, Live Performance

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A lot of people are going to be entering a dark room and putting on blindfolds. No, I am not talking about fans of 50 Shades of Grey.

ArtPride NJ tweeted an article today about a Sensory play being offered in Jersey City.

The Shapeshifter,” a sensory play by local writer Meg Merriet, is designed for sight-impaired audiences and uses fragrance, atmosphere, texture and sound to bring the story to life. Sighted audience members, on the other hand, are blindfolded.

[…]

“I realized that the theater world was very much in need of a catch-up when it came to ADA-compliance and accessibility,” said Levie. “The goal of No Peeking is to create a new experience by taking away the privilege of sight and adding other sensory elements to live arts, be it theater performance, poetry readings or live music.”

As I read this article, it occurred to me that this was an arena in which live performance could compete with recorded and digital media. Perhaps organizations offering live performance need to double down and offer more “food for the senses” by asking people to deprive themselves of sight.

Because most people are so dependent on sight, it wouldn’t take much effort to create interesting and tantalizing experiences. All that would be needed was a hint of something and let people’s imaginations fill in the blanks.

Then there would be the overwhelming desire to look at one’s cellphone on top of the already overwhelming desire some people have even when they can see.

Although, even that could play a part in a sensory play if someone created an app that connected the phone to the action (or provided attendees with some other device they could hold) that would synchronize programmed sensation with the action.

A sensory performance need not depend solely on removing people’s sense of sight. Providing earphones that pumped white noise to remove a sense of hearing or provided audio that synched with the action, but not in the way someone might expect is also an option (think Pink Floyd-Wizard of Oz synchronicity in Dark Side of the Rainbow, only intentional.)

Because of allergies, I would imagine choices for smell, taste and touch would be very limited. But as the process was refined, a wider range of options might open up. (Just imagine a theatrical supply companies opening up entire new lines of hypo-allergenic products.)

All this being said, the idea of providing sensory experiences isn’t new. Movie theaters tried smell-o-vision and seats with rumble packs to provide different sensations. The results were not very good. Technology has come some way in solving this, but accurate mass delivery of the same experience is going to be expensive.

But as I said, the advantage live performance has is that living element. There is no need for fancy sound equipment to simulate someone walking from right to left, because they are. The idea of a person being hit and falling is much more present for you when it is live rather than closing your eyes in a movie. The prospect that someone might even be moving closer to you, even if it is only 3 feet, is experienced in ways that even the best surround sound system can’t replicate.

By Faith Alone

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Yesterday I wrote about the need for grace in the face of criticism. It must have struck a chord with some folks because the traffic to that post exploded (I am sure a great deal of credit goes to Thomas Cott, though.)

Today I wanted to touch upon the equally frustrating, but much more gratifying “that was amazing, too bad more people weren’t there,” event.

To be clear, this isn’t the show that your staff and arts insiders from your community thought was excellent for its artistic quality. This is the show at which 100 regular members of the community filtered into your 550 seat theater and absolutely loved it.

You know they loved it because right at intermission as you move to use a urinal a total stranger thanks you for taking the time to visit his group and tell them about the show.

(If you are a guy, understand just how much he must have loved the show that he couldn’t adhere to the unspoken rules about not holding a conversation with a stranger at the urinals.)

You know they loved it because strangers keep coming up to you at restaurants and supermarkets for weeks later to tell you how excited they were.

Not to mention the social media conversations that you may catch.

This is the type of reaction that makes a career in the arts worthwhile. Few other professions get this sort of heartfelt thanks.

Except, you know, you would probably be okay trading a “that was awesome” for “that wasn’t bad” if it meant having 300-400 more people in the audience.

That brings me to the real purpose of this post, which is to ask a question.

There is some received wisdom that once people learn they can trust your organization to provide a quality experience, they will be more willing to take a risk on unknown and unfamiliar shows.

So my question is, is that really true? Can anyone point to a case where their local community grew to trust their judgement and attended unfamiliar events in sustainable numbers based on faith?

I am not talking simply about growing an audience. I increased attendance at dance concerts when I was in Hawaii. But that was more about marketing and making dance programs and schools more aware of performances and talking to them about what we were planning for next year.

While this certainly generated trust in our work, it was more a matter of effectively tapping into an existing interest group than cultivation.

I have also definitely had people who have said they weren’t sure about a performance, but attended because they knew we did quality and interesting work.

The problem is that their numbers were relatively small and while they may have represented the unexpressed sentiment of a larger group, attendance often made it clear there weren’t numbers to be sustainable.

At the base of this is the necessity of taking a critical look at whether pursuing audience trust as a long term goal is realistic or is it a pleasant ideal to which non-profit arts organizations have subscribed.

Research has shown that audiences in general don’t discern between whether an event is being held by a for-profit or non-profit entity when choosing what to attend. With that in mine, are there that many in our communities that really appreciate that you are pursuing excellence when others seemingly are not?

It is likely that audiences aren’t thinking in terms of excellence as much as having an awesome or amazing experience, and that is fine. But we all know that it is relatively easy to provide an experience that will be evaluated in these terms by offering a commercially recognizable name.

So again I come back to the question, after having mastered marketing and awareness building, has anyone managed to grow a following/loyalty/what have you, in your community based on faith in your work? How did you do it? Where did you do it? What is the scale of the program?

I don’t doubt that success is possible in cities and communities where the underlying dynamics encourage curiosity and experimentation. But a lot of those places can have higher costs of living so question about being self-sustaining becomes relevant.

Since there is rarely anything in the arts that is truly self-sustaining, what I mean is a program central to the organization’s operations that has become increasingly less dependent on grant support or infusions from other parts of the program. An after hours program doing edgy programming in the black box theater seating 80 is being subsidized by all the other events that keep the organization in business.

A company that has gone from not paying anyone and depending on everyone to costume themselves to paying a stipend equivalent to $1.12/hr and costuming from Goodwill is an improvement, but probably isn’t a proven model yet.

Grind Your Teeth and Then…?

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Sometimes I think Seth Godin is writing just for me because one of his recent posts about graciously accepting critical feedback came across my Twitter feed shortly after we got a “you don’t advertise enough” comment on a survey.

My suspicion is that since she is a season subscriber and doesn’t need to pay close attention to our advertising, the digital billboard at the center of town and the special emails her husband receives are probably slipping under her notice. Those are just the communication channels I know with certainty they encounter.

Getting this type of feedback can make you grind your teeth in frustration. But for a commenter of the type that Godin previously labeled the Generous Skeptic, providing this type of feedback because you care about the person or business can involve a degree of vulnerability.

When the generous skeptic speaks up, she’s taking a risk. If you respond to her generosity by arguing, by shutting down, by avoiding eye contact or becoming defensive, you’ve blown it. You’ve taken a gift and wasted it, and disrespected the gift giver at the same time.

[…]

“Tell me more about that,” is the useful and productive response, not, “no, you’re wrong, you don’t understand.”

There’s always time to ignore this feedback later. Right now, dive into it, with an eager, open mind. It’s a gift you’re not often offered.

In his previous post about the Generous Skeptic, Godin spoke in the context of individuals interacting. In his most recent post, he illustrates how the interaction might manifest between a business and an individual.

You can react to the feedback by taking it as an attack, deflecting blame, pointing fingers to policy or the CEO. Then you’ve just told me that you don’t care enough to receive the feedback in a useful way.

Or you can pass me off to a powerless middleman, a frustrated person who mouths the words but makes it clear that the feedback will never get used. Another way to show that you don’t care as much as I do. And if you don’t care, why should I?

One other option: you can care even more than I do. You can not only be open to the constructive feedback, but you can savor it, chew it over, amplify it. You can delight in the fact that someone cares enough to speak up, and dance with their insight and contribution.

Your first reaction to getting criticism may always be to grind your teeth. As bad that might be for your dental bills, you have a choice about what you do next, either as an individual or a company.

Donor Cultivation In The Digital Age

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Last year the Wyncote Foundation released a report about how cultural institutions were using digital technology, Link, Like Share: How Cultural Institutions Are Embracing Digital Technology. The report goes into some best practices for putting digital resources and personnel at the center of your organization’s focus. This includes having the digital department drive some of the decision making.

I was pretty interested to read their section on focusing on capabilities, not projects. They noted cultural organizations need to be looking at long term capabilities and only focus on “fast-fail” experimental projects to help them achieve the long term goal of developing capabilities. This section spoke of the need for grant making to shift to supporting capabilities rather than short term projects.

What really caught my eye was their discussion of the implications that a digital orientation had on development efforts.

“Meanwhile, the legacy cultural sector in the U.S. still relies on what one of our study organizations called “the tyranny of the purchase funnel.” By that he means that the dominant logic of the sector is based on the user’s progression from awareness to sampling, then on to occasional and eventual loyal user, committed contributor and finally to the legacy bequest. This patron development pipeline is in the mind of nearly everyone at a legacy institution because it has been a proven route to revenue.

But digital is the new frontier, the Wild West. Legacy enterprises area vulnerable to new entrants who are digitally nimble, lean and responsive. It’s an unruly and unpredictable environment where major players, new and old lose major money. So why invest? And why not invest cautiously? Why risk effort that could be put toward the known and use it for the unknown?

My feeling is that while we have been talking about how arts and cultural organizations need to be innovative and nimble in the way they interact and communicate with their communities, how fund raising may need to change hasn’t been part of that conversation.

Think about how much you may have been focusing on the former while operating under the assumption that development would still be a gradual process.

The need to revise the approach to the development process has been implicit in the conversation, but never explicitly stated beyond providing ways for people to donate online and possibly needing to use services like Kickstarter as a fund raising source.

There is a lot of earned revenue oriented discussion about what changes people expect from their attendance experience, but not as much about how there may be an evolution in the method of cultivating and persuading toward greater investment in the organization.

The long arc of relationship building may no longer be viable. As cynical as it may sound, getting someone to donate as much as you can in the moment via their phone may emerge as the most successful strategy.

On the optimistic side, we are told the millennial generation wants to be involved with something they feel makes a difference so the challenge may be in finding ways to involve and engage them even more than your organization has in the past.

The issue that may emerge might be that the definition of what is meaningful may be strongly influenced by a person’s social network and shift accordingly.

For example- How many people are doing the ice bucket challenge or making donations now? How many people have become involved with supporting ALS related organizations?

I actually don’t know the answers to either of these questions. But if support has fallen off, is it due to the failure of ALS organizations to engage people or because the cause has slipped out of vogue?

The vast majority of arts and cultural organizations will likely experience fewer extremes in community involvement during the evolving digital age. But at this point, it may be difficult to know whether the fluctuations in personal investment are something wholly in your control or if it will be subject to the vagaries of popular taste.

You Bet Your Art!

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In recent years, after every Super Bowl, the city whose team lost not only loses a great deal of pride, but an art object of great value. When you think about it, some of the most expensive bets on the Super Bowl are made by directors of art museums. They both wager a work of art and the museum that loses the bet lends the work to the museum that won.

This year it was the Seattle Art Museum and New England’s Clark Art Institute. Last year it was the Seattle Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum. In 2011 it was The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

I am not sure when this practice started, but I have been hearing about these wagers for a number of years. My first recollection was the 2010 bet between Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

It occurs to me (and I am embarrassed to admit it has taken so long) that such bets are a good way to raise the profile of arts organizations in a community and shouldn’t just be limited to the Super Bowl.

What better way for an arts organization to show they have the same investment and pride as everyone else in a local team, be it high school, college, Triple AAA baseball team, or big league team, than to enter into a bet with colleagues at an arts organization in the opposing community?

If much ado is made in both communities when the performers or art work leaves/arrives in order to pay off the bet, both organizations can benefit from the increased attention. There might be a fund raising opportunity available to enable an organization to support the trip to the other location.

Because you know, those guys are gonna make you suffer and gloat about their team’s victory all through the performance, so we need your support!

Of course, the reality is, if the visitors are received with grace at a big picnic/dinner with lots of pictures taken to post online, bonds can be formed between organizations and communities that are potentially constructive in the future.

It Is About Time, All The Time

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You have probably been hearing or reading a lot about the recent National Endowment for the Arts survey results, particularly about why people they don’t participate in arts activities.

I was recently looking at some old articles I had bookmarked and the statistics from a study on creativity caught my eye. Curiosity sent me scurrying back to the NEA report to see if my suspicions were true.

In 2012, StrategyOne surveyed 1000 people each in the U.S. UK, Germany, France and Japan about their relationship with creativity. It is graphic heavy and very interesting to read.

A couple years ago, Jeffrey Davis summarized the StrategyOne results for the U.S. on Creativity Post.

When Americans were asked what their biggest challenge to being able to create were:

For the Americans surveyed, self-doubt (27%), other personal obligations (29%), other work obligations (22%), and one’s age (13%) ranked fairly low.

That leaves two self-perceived blocks: Time and Money.

54% of surveyed Americans claimed they didn’t have the financial resources to let them create. 52% perceived that lack of time kept them from being able to create.

But when you unpack this question, its potential answers, and the actual responses, much if not all of it comes back to time.

Our perception of time is tied to how we view our obligations. If we think we don’t have enough money to create, this means in part that we think we don’t have enough money to be freed up from other obligations to afford us the solitude and “off-time” necessary to be “on” creatively.

If you look at the NEA study results about barriers to attendance 47% said time, 38% said cost, 37% said access.

I suspect there is a stronger relationship between time and money being the top answers in both surveys than I can imagine. One of my initial thoughts was that creativity is seen as a frivolous pursuit.

With so many other activities that are perceived to be more important, creativity gets lowest priority and so of course there is no time left to pursue it as an attendee, participant or self-directed creator.

As much as I would like to damn society for giving people this message and encourage everyone to free their minds like me, if I am honest I have to confess to feeling the same pressure.

This past Christmas when things were quiet, I felt guilty about catching up on professional reading when I should be doing something constructive like writing press releases. What I was reading were materials provided by our state arts council and still I felt like I was avoiding my real responsibilities.

That is a pretty insidious mindset, eh?

Fortunately, I was able to make up for it and flex my artistic tendencies by blasting music and singing at the top of my lungs since there was no one else on my floor.

Something to think about though. The challenge may not be as simple as getting people to make time to see shows, it may be about getting them to make time for the more fundamental task of being creative.

I suspect if you succeed at the second battle, you will have already made great headway on the first. But that second one is a real doozy to try to accomplish.

Pick-up Trucks Singing Karaoke

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Howard Sherman tweeted an article today by Jake Orr about theatre being intellectually inaccessible. I mention this only as a reference point for a comment on the article. I will probably circle back to write about this issue on another date.

What I wanted to address today is the conflict arts organizations often feel between appearing accessible to all potential audiences while simultaneous attempting to project an image that justifies high priced tickets and retains long time donors and subscribers.

One of the commenters on Orr’s post, Mark Shenton related his thoughts about London’s Royal Opera House possessing an ambiance that is intimidating even to veteran arts attendees.

…So often we all feel ‘excluded’ from the club, whether it be a theatre, or a sports event (I’m sure I’d feel the same as your partner if I was taken to a football match….) But the trouble is when the VENUE welcomes the exclusivity and sense of its own (self) importance.

I once had a conversation with the head of PR at the Royal Opera House, and said to him that, as a (relatively!) sophisticated theatregoer (well, it is my job and I do around 5-6 times a week!), I feel intimidated still by going to the ROH. His answer? “I can’t deal with your psychological problems!”

So, it was MY fault that the Opera House feels intimidating! A couple of years ago, I was at the ROH — for the Olivier Awards, as it happens — and seated next to the Reece Shearsmith. And he looked around and marvelled at how beautiful it was, and said to me, “I’ve never been here before!” Now Reece, too, is a sophisticated theatregoer — and a cultural figure in his own right — and for him to have never been here struck me as very revealing.

I reckon that the venue is a club, and a lot of us feel VERY disconnected from it.

This isn’t a new idea. There have been a number of studies and surveys that have emphasized the importance of physical environment to an attendance experience. Ten years ago, I wrote about an Urban Institute study that found not liking the venue along with not having an enjoyable social experience as the factors that would keep people from attending again.

But as I mentioned, there is also a need to create an environment that speaks to the quality of the performance product to long time donors and subscribers that value this type of experience.

Now before anyone starts sputtering about how this perpetuates an exclusionary ideal that alienates people, I would like to suggest that it is actually a matter of almost elementary consumer psychology.

To wit I give you the karaoke singing pick up truck.

Engines in trucks and high performance vehicles are so efficient now that their natural noise profile is much quieter than in the past. In response, car and truck manufacturers are using sound enhancing tail pipes or digital sound effects to replicate a throaty engine noise.

Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away.

Softer-sounding engines are actually a positive symbol of just how far engines and gas economy have progressed. But automakers say they resort to artifice because they understand a key car-buyer paradox: Drivers want all the force and fuel savings of a newer, better engine — but the classic sound of an old gas-guzzler.

I think it is easy to brand arts lovers as being snobby and elitist for wanting to maintain a traditional experience. If we are honest in the context of this article, the reality is that they are manifesting the same attitude toward the arts attendance experience as people who value the traditional images experience of driving F-150s and Mustangs. Neither is really that distant from the other in the continuum of basic human psychology.

For arts and cultural organizations, I think the last sentence in the quote above provides a key concept: People want advanced features, but the illusion of a traditional experience. I started this blog on the premise that technology was creating evolving expectations of their experience, but that there were still traditional elements that they still valued.

Learning what that ever-shifting balance is, is the challenge arts organizations face. What is important to remember is that not all elements of traditional experience need to be discarded in the name of expanding accessibility.

The article on sound enhancements for vehicles has sums up that conflicting issues arts organizations face pretty well.

“Karl Brauer, a senior analyst with Kelley Blue Book, says automakers should stop the lies and get real with drivers.

“If you’re going to do that stuff, do that stuff. Own it. Tell customers: If you want a V-8 rumble, you’ve gotta buy a V-8 that costs more, gets worse gas mileage and hurts the Earth,” Brauer said. “You’re fabricating the car’s sexiness. You’re fabricating performance elements of the car that don’t actually exist. That just feels deceptive to me.”

Since the arts often involve the creation of illusion, I am not sure they need to worry about coming clean with audiences about fabricating the sexiness of an experience. But both organizations and customers that value traditional experiences need to be aware there is a trade off in trying to maintain them exactly.

It is possible to provide a high quality experience. Technology enables some of this at increasingly lower costs every day. But there comes a time where one has to settle for an acceptable illusion or pay the higher price for the real thing.

Info You Can Use: Figuring Out True Program Cost

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After reading my post yesterday about how the federal government is requiring that non-profits receive at least 10% of grant/contract funding to cover indirect costs, you may be wondering how to accurately determine direct and indirect costs for your programs.

Getting an accurate picture of program costs is not only important for making sure you get proper allocations from government funded programs, but also for working toward a larger goal of providing boards of directors, funders and the general public with an accurate picture of the true costs of programs.

Providing an accurate picture is key in the campaign to diminish the use of overhead ratio as a measure of non-profit effectiveness.

In a piece on Social Velocity, Nell Edgington, emphasizes the need to present an accurate picture of costs and “break out of the nonprofit starvation cycle”

She also notes that it can help decide what programs really needs to be cut.

But don’t stop there. Turn this new knowledge about the financial impact of each of your programs into a strategic tool. Once you figure out what each individual program fully costs, you can compare the financial and social impact (how well it contributes to your mission) of each program to each other, like this in order to understand how well your entire program portfolio contributes to the money and mission of your nonprofit. Through this analysis you can determine what programs you should expand, which you should continue, and which you may need to cut.

She provides links to a rather detailed guide to determining the true costs of programs published by Bridgespan.

It isn’t an easy process. The estimated timeline in the guide is at least a month. Smaller organizations with fewer programs will take less time.

The guide discusses each stage of the process in detail, suggesting what staff roles need to be involved. It also provides some clear definitions and examples for what needs to be considered.

For instance, indirect costs:

Indirect costs can include general administration and management expenses (e.g. management staff salaries and benefits), infrastructure costs (e.g. rent and utilities, transportation, equipment depreciation, technical licenses), and other costs that are incurred for the benefit of all the programs within the organization (e.g. marketing costs, advocacy expenses).

It addresses questions about determining whether some salaries like those of the executive director and human resource personnel should be allocated across different programs or not.

(Just a note – The guide is about six years old and some of the internal links to templates and examples no longer work, but don’t be discouraged, most of them may be found in the appendix.)

Since there seems to be a slowly developing trend toward removing the stigma of overhead costs (that may evolve into a demand for a high level of transparency), nonprofits may want to start to invest in practices that will allow them to evaluate the true costs of their activities.

Info You Can Use: Know Your Funding Rights

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An event of note to be aware of is that last month the federal Office of Management and Budget said “that when governments hire nonprofits to provide services, those nonprofits legitimately need to incur and be paid for their “indirect costs”—which is government-speak for overhead and administrative expenses.”

According to Chronicle of Philanthropy, non-profits should receive at least 10%, if not more, “of the direct costs of their grant or contract to pay indirect costs.”

Given that non-profits are frequently anxious about revealing their true overhead costs for fear of having it count against them with donors and foundations, this mandate is seen as a victory because it starts to institutionalize the practice of covering those costs.

However, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy story, the enforcement of these rules may depend on the self-advocacy of non-profits.

While the new rules are now the law of the land, the indirect-cost regulations must be interpreted and applied consistently by tens of thousands of individuals in fragmented departments, agencies, and offices at “pass through” entities (usually state and local governments and large nonprofits) that use federal funds to hire nonprofits to provide services in their communities.

The regulations are already in effect, but the multiple levels and layers of government have not learned about or communicated the existence of the new rules, let alone provided consistent training programs, to employees scattered across these pass-through entities.

Making matters worse, there has been no transition time for the thousands of jurisdictions to purge and modernize their outdated statutes and regulations to enable them to comply with the new federal requirements.
[…]

Unless we all take concerted action, it’s quite possible that we will slide back to what had been the status quo: inconsistencies in our nation’s archaic, patchwork government-nonprofit grants and contract “system” that have left nonprofits at the mercy of often contradictory policies and practices of disconnected federal, state, and local government departments, agencies, offices, and employees. Arbitrary, unjustifiable caps on indirect costs could remain routine.

The author of the piece, Tim Delaney, chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits, encourages foundations to lend a hand with this advocacy. He points out that often grant makers end up filling the indirect cost gap that government entities may refuse to cover. Correct practices could mean a savings for grant makers who would no longer need to provide this assistance.

As an arts organization, you may be thinking that you don’t have any government contracts so this doesn’t apply to you. However, notice that these rules apply to pass through agencies which, depending on the program, may include arts councils and other organizations receiving funding from places like the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Council of Non-Profits has put together a guide to help people know their rights and advocate for them. It presents different scenarios where you may be told these new rules don’t apply and how to respond to them.

Two points brought up in the guide that lead me to think these rules apply to state and regional arts councils: One- it doesn’t matter whether it is called a contract or grant or any other term, the rules are based on the substance of the transaction.

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

If you have been required to acknowledge part of the funding is received from the NEA, these new rules are applicable to that program unless specifically excluded by by legislation.

If You Got The Data, She Wants To Study It

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Reader Heather Grob responded to my recent post asking about more information regarding propensity score matching to learn more about arts audiences.

Heather, an associate professor in the St. Martin’s University School of Business writes,

Hi Joe,

Yes, I have used propensity score matching in a different venue than the arts. It was in a study looking at workers’ compensation pension outcomes. When you have a subject where there are selection biases (for example, that the more educated are more likely to participate in the arts) then propensity scoring can help to control for the outcome to more precisely estimate the effect on outcomes.

I think you explained it pretty well to a lay audience. I imagine it would be useful to use when you have a lot of data on attendees and non-attendees (or season ticket holders and not is more likely).

If anyone has data they want to “play” with, let me know. I’m interested in doing more studies on socioeconomic phenomena in the arts. –Heather

I wasn’t sure anyone would respond to the post with more information much less be interested in getting their hands on data to study. If someone is interested in learning a bit more about their audience and potentially their community, if the data is available, you may want to follow up with Heather.

The Good, The Bad of The Ugly Glasses

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Even though most news outlets have only been carrying the announcement that Google was stopping sales of Google Glass in the last few days, for some reason I have known about it for a month or two now.

When I did originally hear about the decision to review and revamp the glasses in light of problems and negative perceptions, I had a moment of schadenfreude because I bristle at the intrusiveness of Google Glass on privacy. I was pleased by the news that I wouldn’t have to contend with people either engaging with me in ways I didn’t approve of or using the technology to further disengage from their surroundings.

This being said, I will concede that wearable technology is inevitable and something the non-profit performing arts community needs to develop policies and procedures for.

There are definite benefits of this type of technology for arts organizations. Arts and Management Technology Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University put out a paper this past summer about the positive and negative implications of wearable technology in a performing arts environment.

Some applications mentioned in the paper, “Performing Arts in the Wearable Age,” are fairly obvious because they take what is already happening with handheld devices and tablet computers and move them to platforms like Google Glass. Among these are: allowing musicians to get rid of music stands and have score scroll past their eyes; providing background information about the show and performer being looked at to audience members and replacing supertitles with your choice of language translation before your eyes.

The authors also talk about providing point of view experiences to audience members, something I imagined in one of my first blog posts. Imagine being able to see what the actor sees both on stage and backstage. Even more, imagine being able to “perform” opposite your favorite actor and be kissed, slapped, slain, etc by them.

What I hadn’t envisioned was its use as an evaluation tool, allowing students to see themselves perform through the eyes of their instructors or see what their instructors see when they themselves perform.

What never occurred to me was how useful this sort of technology might be for interactions at front of house. The authors mention better fidelity of communication between different staff members versus walkie talkies. They also note that individuals would be able to provide service to customers without directing them to a house manager or the box office because information would be fed directly to their devices.

“Virgin Atlantic has been testing Glass in certain airport terminals since February 2014. Once the customer identifies themselves, gate agents and staf members can aces flight information, seat details, and personal preferences. The result is streamlined, personalized service: the customer receives individualized information suited to her particular journey and needs, with the airline employee processing check-in more quickly and efficiently.”

As soon as I read that, I envisioned a situation where a volunteer usher could do a much more effective job if a glance at a ticket immediately scanned the people as attending and coached the volunteer with directions either visually or with an in ear audio cue. (i.e. Ah, you are through the even side door on the right, go through the door marked row L-O, your seats are about 2/3 of the way toward the center.”

Not only that, I imagined late seating could be facilitated if the customer was wearing something like Google Glass. All they would need to do is glance at their tickets before they entered the theater and the glasses would cause their seats and the one at the end of the correct row to “glow” when they looked at them. Ushers wouldn’t need to try to point them out in the dark with a flash light and it would be apparent someone else was sitting in the seats before the late comers started edging down the row.

Now you may be thinking that your ushers are a bit older and might be uncomfortable with handheld scanners without trying to access information through worn technology. My thought is that each unit would be programmed for a certain task so that the ticket ripper would only check people in and get directional cues while someone else’s accessory would perform more tasks. That way you assign people with different comfort levels to specific roles or specific devices.

While this is all exciting, issues of intellectual property and privacy would need to be resolved and the authors of “Performing Arts in the Wearable Age,” acknowledge many of them. The tricky thing, of course, is that nearly every piece of technology ends up getting used in a manner the creators never envisioned so trying to anticipate all the implications for the performing arts are nearly impossible.

If a performer is transmitting what they see as they walk backstage, then obviously greater operating discipline needs to be instilled backstage (language and state of undress being only some of the issues.) But what happens when someone hacks into a piece of wearable technology that everyone thinks is off and the result appears on tabloid websites?

If They Don’t Know J.F.K. & M.L.K, Why Would They Know Y.O.U.?

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You want quick proof that the performance you are doing probably has no relevance to those in their 20s and 30s? Hand them a famous historical speech and have them analyze it.

Last semester I was teaching a public speaking class and had to do a little work explaining why certain references were important. Students missed the significance of

“I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for 18 years that still lives with the vitality and the force, and the hope, and the determination of the city of West Berlin.”

supporting the theme of freedom in JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Living in a time after the wall fell, they were unaware of the geography that isolated West Berlin within East Germany, much less the politics and history that necessitated the Berlin Airlift.

Similarly, there was a lack of awareness about the foreboding element in the final lines of Martin Luther King’s “I Have Been To the Mountaintop,” where he speaks about not being afraid of the threats against him the night before he is killed. (The date of the speech aside, there was a slight lack of awareness he was slain.)

So what chance does your performance have if people aren’t aware of the relevant underpinning in the speeches of a guy who has his own national holiday?

You can bemoan the lack of knowledge and blame the state of the education system today. But the fact remains, this is the audience base that needs to be communicated with and related to.

The fact also is that you don’t need to know about these things to be aware that you are reading/watching a powerful and significant moment unfold. In the same way, you don’t need to be aware of all the original references and political undercurrents which infuse Shakespearean plays to enjoy them.

The question of relevance for the audience member has never really been so much about “Am I watching something significant?” as “Why should I make the decision to direct my attention to this?” Most of those students never really considered these speeches because there was no reason to do so. (Admittedly, I also learned a fair bit more for having taught the speeches.)

Barry Hessenius points this out in his recent review of the latest reports from the National Endowment for the Arts:

“It wasn’t that people were looking for ‘transformative’ experiences and couldn’t find any; it wasn’t because there was any perceived dearth of ‘excellence’, it wasn’t because there wasn’t any opportunity or choice — it was instead mundane issues.”

These mundane issues are lack of time, inconvenience, price and no one to go with.

Welcome and Thanks

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Welcome to everyone who has started to follow this blog in the last few months.

Whether you started based on Barry Hessenius’ recent listing of this blog as one of the 15 that have bubbled to the top of his reading list, his list of Top 50 Influential people in Non-profit arts, some other source or just by serendipity, I am glad to have you here.

If you haven’t checked out Barry’s list this week, you may want to do so. It is an interesting collection of sites. I believe, not including my own, I read 12 of those blogs on a weekly basis.

I am pleased to have been included on these list. As of February, I will have been writing this blog for 11 years. While I think I have made some great posts over the past decade, part of me has felt like I have really only hit a good stride in terms of quality in the last 3-4 years.

Of course, it is all really relative. In 4 more years if I have continued to refine my skills, I will probably feel these last few years haven’t measured up to what I may be producing then.

As I sit here a few days after appearing on a “my favorites” list, it is probably ironic that in the pursuit of providing a better user experience to my readers, I have deleted my blog roll.

It may reappear again at some time. But I have let it languish for years, constantly swearing that I would delete or revise it “next weekend.” Many of the sites have long since disappeared or changed their addresses so the list was continuing to decrease in value to readers.

In the future I am going to try to do a better job of providing a good reading experience and useful resources for my readers.

On that subject, thanks to the recent efforts of Drew McManus, as you can see from the mockup below, people using tablets and phones to read the blog should have a much easier time reading and navigating this site. (So if you aren’t reading on those devices, you can start now!)

Butts In The Seats Mobile

In terms of providing useful resources, I should take this opportunity to point everyone to the newly launched ArtsHacker website where I am a contributor.

As that site expands its content, you will find an increasing number of tips useful for all the hats you wear at your job. But don’t wait for us to suggest a solution for your pressing concerns–use the contact form on the right of the ArtsHacker site to ask a question.

Of course, if you have a question for me, ask it in the comments section or use the contact tab at the top of this page (or near the side on your tablet!)

Thanks again to everyone for your support.

Is It Still Possible To Slow Down And Pay Attention?

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A couple years ago, Seth Godin notes what is has probably become abundantly clear to us all– people are looking for abridged versions of pretty much every activity so they can “acquire” an experience without having to spend the time having the experience.

There is a self-perpetuating cycle set up by the media and internet which has generated the demand by creating expectations which in turn forces them to ratchet things up a bit to fulfill the expectations they helped to create.

“A performance artist was on the local public radio station the other day. He didn’t want to talk about the specifics of his show, because giving away the tactics was clearly going to lessen the impact of his work. No matter. The host revealed one surprise after another, outlining the entire show, because, after all, that’s his job–to tell us what we’re going to see so we don’t have to see it ourselves.”

Godin had an interesting observation though about the exception to this.

My full-day live seminars have impact on people partly because I don’t announce the specific agenda or the talking points in advance. It’s live and it’s alive. I have no certainty what’s about to happen, and neither do the others in the room. A morphing, changing commitment by all involved, one that grows over time.

To some degree I think all seminars, not just his, result in people feeling like it has an impact on their lives because the format itself forces people to slow down to the speed of the proceedings. (Though they may be living at a slightly different speed via their tablet computers and phones throughout the seminar.)

Godin makes a similar claim about audiobooks changing people’s lives because they can’t skip ahead and still get the full story.

This dynamic may be why the Serial podcast became such a hit. People had to navigate the story at the speed it was being delivered and no one had any idea what the ending would be.

The performing arts have long touted the uncertainty of live performance as a selling point. You never know if someone is going to flub a line or the first chair violinist will kill off the second chair by bowing too vigorously. (Don’t pretend you haven’t imagined it.)

But it seems that this level of uncertainty just isn’t enough to interest people any more. The arts may need to kick it up a notch.

Ah, but what is the answer? Certainly the endings of many performance pieces are well known or can be discovered. Even if a performance company devoted themselves to offering entirely new works all the time, it wouldn’t be long before the show is summarized and reported.

In some communities it could be more detrimental to have a new work panned on social media by a couple people than to present a well known old warhorse.

More free formatted, choose your own adventure type shows like Sleep No More offer an alternative. Except there has been a problem when people discover the outcomes designed into those shows and try to impose themselves upon the different pathways.

On a smaller scale and performed over a limited time, I imagine that this model could still prove successful for many performance companies.

I obviously don’t know the answer, but I am intrigued by the basic idea Godin presents about how an experience that forces people to travel at the pace it unfolds and evolves can have a significant impact on the participants.

This describes the experience the performing arts have always aspired to and at one time, often achieved– people walking out of a performance feeling moved by the experience. People obviously have that reaction these days too, but at one time it was happening in greater numbers and in response to content rather than spectacle.

Many aspects of those days are certainly behind us and we shouldn’t seek to restore them because they were a product of a different social and cultural environment.

The Serial team may not be able to replicate the success of their first effort, but the fact that so many people became invested in the podcast suggests it is possible that people will slow down and pay attention if you create the right product.

Strive To Advertise With The Highest Quality Generics

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About a year ago, this video was making the round essentially pointing out how we are often being unconsciously manipulated by imagery in television and video ads.

[vimeo 89527215 w=500 h=281]

I have been kept it bookmarked intending to use it in a post at some point. It is fun to watch because you realize how often you have probably fallen prey to the feelings the imagery is trying to evoke. In the context of the video, the images are basically tropes.

I had a vague sense that I would probably use the video to make fun of common generic arts marketing phrases like “takes you on a musical journey” and “exploration of the human spirit.”

It has been awhile since I last watched it so I saw it in an entirely different context when I rewatched it this weekend.

Back in October, Trevor O’Donnell made a post on his blog about a video advertising an Android phone. He perceptively pointed out that the content of the Android ad focused almost wholly on the consumer and their enjoyment rather than on the product itself. He encouraged his reader to do the following:

Watch it and pay close attention to these things:

The ratio of content featuring customers vs. content featuring the product
The fresh, down-to-earth, colloquial, customer-centric language
The emotional impact of customers engaging with the product
The emphasis on YOU (meaning the customer)
The diversity of the customers shown enjoying the product
The fresh, professional, contemporary production values

Then he suggested people apply the same criteria to their last season brochure and see how it fared.

As I was watching the “This Is A Generic Brand” video again this weekend, I realized the reason these general images were so successful at influencing people no matter how many times they appeared in ads was because so many of them focus on the consumer and subjects with which they identify, value or aspire (even if it has no basis in the reality of their lives).

Watch the video again with Trevor O’Donnell’s criteria in hand and see how many of them it hits. It shouldn’t be difficult since in some cases, the voice over almost states each outright.

So while the video has a cynical tone, it also provides an illustration that a good deal of arts marketing is behind the curve when it comes to appealing to audiences in the manner in which they respond.

Yes, I hate to admit it, but it appears even in the use of generic advertising techniques, arts organizations aren’t using the highest quality product.

Low Cost and Low Expectations

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I once had a situation where I got a call from an artist agent who wanted to change the date of our performance. The alternative date he suggested was really inconvenient based both on which days of the week are best for audiences and where it fell in our calendar.

When I talked about these issues, the agent suggested that given the really great price we had been given for our original date, we didn’t have a lot of basis for complaining. And this is true, we had been given a really great price since the artist was looking for a fill date between shows (which subsequently shifted, of course).

This came to mind when I was reading a New Yorker article last month that suggested airlines are essentially employing “calculated misery” to get people to pay to be more comfortable.

But the fee model comes with systematic costs that are not immediately obvious. Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.

Later the article reports that an unnamed airline is considering an “economy minus” class of even narrower seating than they currently provide.

I don’t mean to suggest that the agent changing the date was an intentional diminishment value because we had received a good price. I don’t doubt the price made it easier for them to ask for the change, but ultimately I think they were trying to find balanced solution that served all parties well.

The point I wanted to illustrate is that we will often compromise our standards when we feel we are paying below the going rate.

There are frequently conversations about how cutting budgets will adversely impact the end product. Orchestras cutting musicians will cause quality to suffer. Trying to do more with less will mean staff will be over worked and may burn out or quit.

What isn’t talked about as much is how we may not feel we can demand better because we know a person isn’t getting paid enough. How often do you decide a press release or design is “good enough” because an intern or dirt cheap freelancer created it? Is your customer service not up to the standard you would like because you don’t feel like you can demand more from front of house staff for the same reason?

Most often arts organizations experience this reticence with volunteers, including board members. You don’t feel like you can ask people to work harder or commit to making difficult decisions because they are providing assistance for free.

In my experience, the conversations about volunteers not meeting standards occurs more openly. Staff will talk about how they might nudge a cranky usher into being a little more civil or trying to motivate an unengaged board member. Maybe the required action doesn’t necessarily follow, but at least the consequences to the organization are publicly acknowledged.

When it comes to paid staff, while everyone will grouse and joke about not doing it for the money, the conversation about compromising expectations doesn’t happen as much. The decision not to ask for a revision can tend to be individually internalized rather than openly acknowledged among peers.

Think about it a little. How often have you said to another person in your organization, this isn’t quite what I wanted, but I didn’t feel like I could ask for better since we give him/her so many responsibilities and can’t provide professional development opportunities. How often have you just kept that thought to yourself?

This is an under recognized consequence of trying to do more with less. We know that this will result in what staff we have being asked to shoulder more work and the quality will suffer. But there isn’t really a recognition that we may gradually accept the slippage in quality in a way that institutionalizes it as the standard.

Perhaps this is another reason to be resolved to do less with less when funding drops rather than killing yourselves to maintain your level of service. Probably 95% of arts organization have something akin to “to provide the highest quality…” in a mission statement or similar document.

When budgets get tight and cuts need to be made, the decision to be less ambitious and cut quality in order to maintain the same number of services is often chosen instead of maintaining ambition and quality and providing fewer services. There are many good arguments for this, including maintaining visibility in the community and fully utilizing a facility.

All that is publicly acknowledged. However, because everyone is working harder and has less time to for introspection, there is rarely an open conversation about whether the organization has started to tacitly expect less of itself in 1000 unacknowledged ways and ask its community to do the same.

Arts organizations are not airlines. The demand for service is not the same. Airlines can (unfortunately) get away with institutionalizing increasingly low expectations for low prices.

What Do You Know About Propensity Score Matching?

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While it was relatively quiet in the office over the holidays, I made an attempt to catch up on reading reports that I had downloaded and bookmarked over the last few months.

In the process, I came across Measuring Cultural Engagement: A Quest for New Terms, Tools, and Techniques which is a summary of a symposium of “Cultural researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from the U.S., the UK, and other countries” held in June 2014.

Instead of telling you about what I read and evaluating it, I actually wanted to ask- Does anyone know anything about Propensity Score Matching?

Well, obviously I guess I probably should do a little explanation for people.

It is a statistical method that has been around for about 30 years, but this is the first I have heard of it. It’s application to the arts is discussed on page 18 and sounds pretty interesting, but I am not quite sure if it is something an individual arts organization could engage in themselves.

According to Measuring Cultural Engagement (MCE):

“The Norman Lear Center adapted PSM to evaluate the impact of media and arts programming. The idea is to isolate a piece of media or arts programming to assess whether audience members who were exposed to it were more likely to demonstrate a shift in knowledge, attitude, or behavior compared to very similar people who did not encounter the programming”

The reason this technique can be valuable to the arts is because it is often difficult and expensive to identify a representative sample group of people who have participated in a niche event. Yet arts groups often need to gather data from people in support of grants and it is often difficult to get the data you really need: (my emphasis)

“One key problem in measuring cultural engagement is confusing outputs with outcomes. It is easier to tell funders how many seats or tickets were sold or the number of “likes” on Facebook than whether a particular arts or cultural event had a substantial impact on an individual or a community. Since many cultural agencies and organizations, including the NEA, talk about the benefit or value of arts and culture to individuals and communities, it is essential that the research community develop pragmatic tools to help these groups demonstrate that their mission is being accomplished. Using PSM in this way, arts organizations can focus on outcomes instead of outputs, measuring the impact of their work on individuals and communities.”

The example used in MCE is evaluating whether people who saw the movie Food, Inc had a experienced a change in knowledge and attitude. The Normal Lear Center used surveys distributed through social media groups and email lists affiliated with the film and production company. They received about 20,000 responses.

MCE acknowledges that one of the weakness of Propensity Score Matching is that it requires a pretty large sample size, but that the Lear Center has been able to get good results from as few as 1,000 surveys. This is one of the reasons I was wondering if it is at all viable for an individual arts organization.

Being able to get results focused on outcomes rather than outputs sounds great–if it is something that can reasonably be done. Has anyone out there had any experience with Propensity Score Matching?

Something MCE mentioned that intrigued me but wasn’t expounded upon enough was (my emphasis):

“Seventeen statistically significant variables were identified that predicted the likelihood of seeing a film like Food, Inc. Of these, only three were demographic. This surprised the film’s marketing team as demographics usually form the basis of film marketing. The three variables focused on whether a survey participant was employed in certain industries or had children. Individuals were more likely to see the film if they did not have children. This was contrary to what the marketers expected.”

I really wanted to know what the nature of the other 14 significant variables were if they weren’t demographic. Arts marketing focuses pretty heavily on demographics as well so it would be really interesting to know what types of factors made up the majority of the significant variables if they weren’t demographic.

You Can Build A Toilet, But You Can’t Make Me Use It!

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There may be no greater evidence that increasing arts in schools won’t create more arts patrons/lovers than the fact people in India won’t use toilets.

Yes, while that statement may be a cheap ploy at getting you to read the rest of this post, there is some truth to it.

According to a CityLab article, even though the government of India has gone on a huge toilet building campaign in order to improve sanitation, so many people refuse to use the commodes that the government is pondering a monitoring program to make sure people do. (my emphasis)

In a recent survey of 3,200 rural households by Delhi-based Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, half of respondents who didn’t have a toilet believed that “defecating in the open is the same or better for health than using a latrine.” Most people who owned a government-constructed latrine still chose to use the outdoors. Some end up using their loo for storage or extra living space.

Many people in the article talk about the use/non-use as a factor of cultural and religious values and advocate for everything from education campaigns to social pressure and spying in order to achieve the goal of no public defecation by 2019.

It can be perplexing to read about the difficulties this effort faces despite the clear and nearly immediately demonstrable health benefits of sanitary practices (Not to mention the government will do the construction.)

We might think that the benefits and importance of using a toilet would be self evident, but apparently that is not the case in India. In that context, saying something that is far from self-evident like arts education improves test scores starts to sound a little weak as an argument.

Comparing toilets in India to Arts in America is probably rife with more flaws than I am immediately imagining. But there is a similarity in the societal inertia that needs to be overcome. Because India is a situation outside our experience, we can examine it with some objectivity and recognize some of the common issues we face.

Parents and schools providing arts experiences to kids certainly contributes to socializing young people to participate when they get older. When I look at India, it reinforces my sense that any effort to help people recognize the presence and importance of arts in their lives is going to involve a lot more than just advocating for more arts teachers in the schools.

Info You Can Use: Good Fellowship Opportunity

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Tomorrow as the new year dawns and you make a resolution to be the best darn arts administrator you can be, you might want to consider starting an application to Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s new arts administration/leadership fellowship.

According to American Theatre, the Paul Nicholson Arts Management Fellowship is meant to increase diversity among arts leadership.

The seven-month fellowships are for professionals interested in a career in arts management and artistic leadership. Candidates need only be interested in leading an arts organization; a background in theatre is not required. The chosen fellow will work in close capacity with OSF managing director Cynthia Rider, and will lead projects across multiple administrative departments.

Johka emphasizes that while the Paul Nicholson Fellowship is designed to give potential leaders of color an opportunity to develop professionally, the application process is open to all, not just candidates of color.

“You can’t make a claim to have a commitment to diversity and inclusion while maintaining that in order to bring people in, they must have a long history in a field that has been traditionally all white,” Johka adds. “You have to open up your criteria to accept and value all kinds of transferable skills.”

Just in case you breezed over the sentence I bolded above, it is not necessary that you have a background in theatre.

Deadline is February 1 and the fellowship, which includes housing, transportation and a stipend, begins March 31, 2015. Application is accepted online.

Seems like a great opportunity. My only nitpick is that the application process requires three letters of recommendation to be attached at the time of submission. I realize this is likely to be a highly competitive process and there needs to be a weeding out process. However, if the goal is to attract people of diverse backgrounds, requiring three letters of recommendation may end up excluding people who have advanced along the less traditional path with “all kinds of transferable skills” they are seeking.

Getting quality letters of recommendation for your application file in a timely manner is often even a difficult task for university doctoral students who operate in a culture in which they are de rigueur.

Not As Simple As Adding an “A” To STEM

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When the concept of teaching a STEM curriculum in schools started to take off a few years back, I was among those who quickly started advocating for turning STEM into STEAM.

However, a thoughtful piece on Education Week gave me pause and made me realize blithely calling for the arts to be inserted without really understanding what the curriculum was all about is somewhat akin to deciding an English teacher directing a play after school is sufficient to meet arts standards.

According to author Anne Jolly, the arts isn’t something you can or should simply plug in to STEM like a Lego block. (my emphasis)

Recently, the idea of adding the arts to STEM programs has been gaining momentum. Surprisingly, I’ve heard push-back from both camps:

1. From STEM proponents: STEM lessons naturally involve art (for example, product design), language arts (communication), and social studies and history (setting the context for engineering challenges). STEM projects do not deliberately exclude the arts or any other subject; rather, these subjects are included incidentally as needed for engineering challenges.The focus of STEM is developing rigorous math and science skills through engineering. How can you focus on other subjects (such as art) without losing the mission of STEM or watering down its primary purpose?

2. From arts proponents: Engineering and technology can certainly serve the artist and help create art. But if we’re talking about how one can use art in engineering… as an artist, it seems we’re missing the point and devaluing, or not realizing, art’s purpose and importance. We have it backwards.

Jolly goes on to make some suggestions about how the arts can have a place in a STEM program, but none of them really feel like a clean melding of ideals, and she admits as much. As she points out numerous times in her writing, a good STEM program will never exclude an artistic component.

“Just one word of caution, though. Art is often touted as a method of adding creativity to STEM—but keep in mind that engineers are rarely lacking for creativity and ingenuity. Just look at the world around you for proof. The purpose of STEAM should not be so much to teach art but to apply art in real situations. Applied knowledge leads to deeper learning.”

This is one of those articles where every commenter has something insightful to add to the conversation. No one manages to come up with the definitive approach, but they draw attention to the issues that need to be considered in order that neither Arts or STEM get short shrift in a relationship.

Community Is Free

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I was in a local comic book/table top gaming store a couple weeks ago talking to the owner about providing tickets as a prize for a Magic: The Gathering tournament.  While we were chatting, a kid comes in and says it is his first time in the store. As he looks around admiring the things on sale and talking about what he would like to acquire, he mentions he just moved into town and is living at the shelter.

The first thing that popped into my mind was that if he is living at the shelter, he should be focusing on using his money for something else besides buying more Pokemon cards (his preferred game.)

A couple moments later, the 2010 Haitian earthquake came to mind. Back then one of the things that struck me was that amid all the devastation and loss people experienced, people came together and started singing. The singing didn’t help to feed anyone or clear the rubble, but it did provide a sense of community and security for people who lost so much.

In the five years since that earthquake, I often think back to that incident when people talk about how irresponsible it is to spend money on the arts and culture rather than on things like medical supplies and equipment.

But it is just as important to provide people with the opportunity to have a communal experience with others as it is to heal their bodies.

Despite all the merchandise he was admiring, the kid in the store wasn’t opening his wallet to buy anything new. He was primarily there to find a place where like minded individuals met.  While buying cards may not be free, the opportunity to sit at a table and play with other people using whatever he has is free.

A lot of times what arts organizations have to offer isn’t free, some times it is. Regardless, it is important to remember that often what you are providing people goes beyond what you think you are specifically offering at that moment.

Blog On Short Hiatus

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I am feeling rather poorly today and have had some difficulties typing straight. I am going to take a break for Christmas and pick back up in a week on January 29.

Best wishes to all for joyous and relaxing holidays.

Dabbling In The Revolution

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This week we made our first foray into the Classical Revolution movement with the help of CutTime Simfonica. Mr. Cuttime, or Rick Robinson, as his friends call him, helped us coordinate this in conjunction with the formal concert by CutTime Simfonica we presented last night.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Classical Revolution (CR), it is an effort to remove the intimidation factor from classical music by taking it out of the formal concert hall setting and bringing it to bars, clubs, houses, etc. The idea being if you find classical music doesn’t make you uncomfortable in your local watering hole, it might be something you will enjoy in a more formal setting.

Formerly a bassist with Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Rick helped to found a CR chapter in that city. (And got a Knight Foundation grant to expand it.) He encouraged us to invite local musicians to essentially “jam” with CutTime Simfonica so I started reaching out to the local wind symphony last summer and followed up with flyers and contacts throughout the last month (as did Rick).

Unfortunately, a major Christmas concert got scheduled for the same night as our Classical Revolution session so we didn’t get many outside musicians participating. (Though that concert rescheduled in order not to conflict with our formal concert Tuesday night, so we can’t complain.)

However, we did have a 15 year old flutist show up to join in so he got a lot attention that night.

Click to view full album

(The poor guy was so nervous he couldn’t eat his hamburger during the three hours of the Classical Revolution. Thankfully, the pub brought out a fresh one.)

Being Christmas time, there was a little bit of audience participation required in order to create a “stereo surround sound” jingle bells experience for the audience.

 

I am not sure that the CR event generated any additional ticket sales for the concert hall performance the next night, but it did seem to change some perceptions. The morning after the CR concert, we went on the radio to promote the show. The radio show host said her boyfriend was a little reluctant about attending, but 2.5 hours later she was ready to leave and he wasn’t.

She admitted, she never really understood classic music but her boyfriend’s insight was that it is like reading a novel, there are different plots and stories being interwoven.

What crystallized the experience for me was at the end of a Brahms piece, Rick Robinson commented “man, that is one sexy piece of music.” I could see there was something about it he was discovering as he played. When I mentioned this to him, he said he often didn’t get to play the cello part. So to a degree there was a discovery element for him. I loved both the verbal and non-verbal expression of delight experienced in that moment.

The formal concert the next night had the same sort of light hearted element to it that the Classical Revolution performance did the night before. As I watched, I realized there was a lot of potential for resentment in linking Classical Revolution events to more formal concert hall experiences.

People attending a CR event where they have a great time interacting with the musicians might feel like they experienced a bait and switch if they were actively encouraged to show up to a full symphony orchestra concert where the musicians barely acknowledged their presence.

While the CR and formal concert were both essentially chamber music experiences, Rick Robinson took it a step further by polling the audience about their past interactions with classical music. He had extra seats set up on stage and invited a rotating group of audience members to come up and sit close enough to “see the musicians sweat.”

As each group left the stage, he asked them what they felt. One woman said she felt like she needed to get back to playing the violin. One man commented it was interesting watching the facial expressions and interactions, especially the percussionist anticipating where he would need to come in.

The diversity of the programming also helped, running from familiar pieces by Mozart and Beethoven to the Martin Luther King movement of Duke Ellington’s “Three Black Kings.” Rick also included three of his own compositions and explained the stories behind them.

His association of music with food generated vivid imagery for the audience. He spoke of his “Pork N’ Beans,” as; taking a bite of spicy pulled pork, then a mouthful of hot beans, the heat rising in our hero’s mouth until a forkful of cole slaw cools it down. At both the concert and the Classical Revolution event, people said they could tell when each mouthful came, especially the cole slaw.

Today, as I reflected back, I realized that there is a lot of attention and conversation on doing programming that will attract younger audiences. There isn’t much discussion about transitioning existing audiences toward acceptance of that programming.

When the subject comes up, it is usually to discuss the dichotomy between what new and existing audiences like. The perception is that existing audiences are alienated by the content that appeals to new audiences.  Seldom is there discussion of a long term vision to gradually segue existing audiences toward the programmatic point that may appeal to new audiences.

I am thinking about this because I am wondering what the conversation will be at the next board meeting. What feedback have they received about an event in which the transitions between high quality music performances by Columbus and West Virginia Symphony musicians were filled with some unconventional audience interactions?

The responses I received last night and today from members of the audience have been very positive. But many of those were the people who went to sit on stage.

It started to occur to me that despite a few rough edges here and there, Rick Robinson might be developing a format that bridges that gap – palatable to existing audiences and intriguing to those looking to experiment with a classical music experience.

Info You Can Use: Minimalist Design and Slide Decks

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I just finished teaching a public speaking course this semester. One of the pieces of advice I tried to emphasize for my students was not to fill your Powerpoint slides with tons of text.

It was difficult to accomplish this goal.  I must confess part of me was secretly pleased that members of the visually oriented Millennial generation were having the same struggles with simplifying their presentations as those who pioneered the use of Powerpoint.

This being said, the minimal look is definitely in.

Drew McManus has been advocating for flat and responsive web design for awhile. You can also see the increased use of a page spanning dominant image on sites like TED.com

ted example

and the Weather Channel

weather channel example

 

The SlideShare blog recently featured slide decks that Guy Kawasaki promotes for aspiring entrepreneurs that translates this minimalist approach to slide decks. The first has a lot of great examples of text heavy slides that were heavily trimmed down and had a single central concept set against a single dominant image. (requires Flash)

[slideshare id=295996&doc=sample-slides-by-garr-reynolds-1204852162670051-5]

Slide number 5 provides a good example of how to transition from what might be your current practice to a more minimalist approach, taking an image of President Kennedy from the corner and making the slide all about the image and his “Ask not…” quote. Many of the other slides are an example of an entirely revamped approach to a topic.

The other slide deck that caught my eye was the third. It provides a template to help a marketer create a presentation about different customer personas.  It is created as something your organization or company can use immediately to present what you know about the different demographics that comprise your customer.

When I immediately, I mean it is pretty much designed so you can download it right now, delete the instructional and example slides, plug in the relevant data and images and use what remains as a basis for a presentation if you want. (requires Flash)

[slideshare id=30601327&doc=buyerpersonatemplate1-140129195502-phpapp01]

Does Your Venue Policy Include Terrorism Insurance? Knowing Might Become Important Soon

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We get a lot of alerts about Congressional actions that might impact arts organizations all the time. Something that wasn’t really on my radar at all was the (non) renewal of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. Basically, the federal government provides guarantees for insurance companies that end up having to pay out terrorism claims. If the act isn’t renewed by January 31, it is likely that terrorism coverage policies will be cancelled.

What is making this a big deal is the claim that the Super Bowl won’t happen if this isn’t renewed. This has been an issue before in 2006 with the World Cup when there was difficulty obtaining coverage that was not prohibitively expensive. (By the way, NBC says the game will go on regardless.)

I am not sure if this would impact performing arts centers or not, but I suspect larger stadium shows and outdoor summer festivals like those held in NYC Central Park and Chicago’s Grant park might be at risk.

According to an article on The Hill website, as of 11:00 am this morning, there was still some disagreement between the House and Senate on the details of the renewal.

This is one of those issues that can end up impacting you without you even being aware that it is looming. How many people know if they have terrorism insurance included in their commercial policy? When was the last time you read the updates to your policy?

I will confess, I don’t often read updates to my auto policy but recently did and discovered changes that are clearly aimed at keeping me from using my vehicle for ride sharing programs like Uber or Lyft.

Like it or not, the possibility of terrorism is calculated into so much of what we do. It’s issues like the renewal of this bill that comprise the thousand little things we aren’t aware may have a big impact on our operations.

I wonder, was there ever insurance against nuclear attack during the height of the Cold War? I have recently been listening to ’80s music and realized there are a surprising number of references to nuclear war. I thought I was just anxious because I was a teenager. I guess the absence of an actual strike prevented anyone from realizing what the potential payout might have been.

Basic Intro To Finance Options

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When I was at the Ohio Arts Council conference yesterday, I attended a session on finance for arts and culture. This is unknown territory for me because I am familiar with grants and fundraising, but don’t really have any significant experience with finance.

One of the things I learned were the differences between Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFI) and Community Development Corporations (CDC). (Which is to say, I know slightly more than the textbook definition, but enough to start paying attention and learning more.)

There were representatives of each of these type of organizations as well as banks and venture capital firms talking about somewhat familiar financing options like bonds. There were also tools that I had no idea a non-profit organization might consider like the EB5 program which provides foreign investors with a fast track visa process.

While I had a sense that a non-profit might get funding from a revolving loan fund, I had no idea that a non-profit might actually run one. One option mentioned during the panel was possibly partnering with people to run your fund and coming in as a second layer on a loan that a bank was underwriting.

The panel made us aware of New Market Tax Credits which CDFIs sell to banks to encourage them to fund/invest in projects in low-income, high-poverty, high-unemployment communities at a lower rate. They encouraged us to Google the terms “New Market Tax Credit Arts Culture” to see what sort of projects popped up in order to get a sense of what was possible.

There were some main points the panel wanted those seeking financing to walk away from the session knowing about:

• Investors want to know how your project fits into the overall vision of: your city, foundations providing support, other funders, the community and your own organization.

• Even if they don’t explicitly say it, economic developers are looking for how the project provides cohesion in terms of issues like market change, safety and stability in the community. Economic developers don’t concern themselves about the health of an arts and cultural organization except as an attractor of new business and enhancer of quality of life. They noted one of the reasons businesses are starting to orient back toward downtowns is because the density of activity provides for connectivity and innovation.

• They emphasized that no one source will provide 100% of the funding. It is going to have to come from a mix of economic development entities, banks, public and private grants and donations.

• As a result, you need to have all parties at the table, even ones that you won’t necessarily need immediately. You don’t want to be in position where you realize you will need extra funding and go to someone at the last minute saying you need money, trying to explain your project to them and get them connected to your story.

• The panel explicitly said, if you start talking to these entities when you have a project in mind, it is already too late. You need to be telling your story and have people aware of it years in advance of soliciting support for a project.

Ultimately, it seems like you have to be telling your story every day, all the time to your immediate community in order to gain short term support for your projects and to anyone else who may ever remotely be of any use to you for a hypothetical project.

To heck with “Always Be Closing,” you need to be “Always Be Charming” (Yeah, that stinks. Anyone has a catchy phrase, let me know.)

An interesting suggestion about bolstering confidence in your organizational story was to devote part of your annual budget to enriching your endowment in order to show potential investors that you are investing in yourself.

It was notable that the first question asked after the presentation was about the shame directed at non-profits for overhead and the fact they might try to pay people a living wage. One of the panelists said people shouldn’t be ashamed and that foundations should know better.

However, I felt like he was sort of hedging when he said to break down administrative cost by task rather than by roles and titles. For example- assessment,  program administration, engineering, capacity building.

I didn’t feel that overhead cost was of particular concern to the people on the panel. Their criteria for good governance and success seemed more aligned with the for-profit sector. So the fact this came up immediately may be a sign that the subject of judging an non-profit organization by overhead costs will become a more prevalent topic in the next couple years.

I Get A Better Understanding Of Creative Placemaking

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A short post today. I spent most of the day at a conference organized by the Ohio Arts Council to discuss the Arts and Cultural Ecosystem in the state and there was a lot of driving involved.

The keynote speaker was Jamie Bennett, Executive Director of ArtPlace America. The start of his speech was essentially the same one he gave for TEDxHudson that I wrote about last month.

However, then he went on to talk more about what ArtPlace was trying to accomplish which gave me a much better understanding of the creative placemaking concept. (Which is why a time limited TED Talk can’t replace substantial conversation on a topic.)

Bennett pointed out that the concerns faced by any community basically fell into broad categories of medical, education, housing, transportation and public safety. If you are the mayor, council person or other government executive/legislator, these are the areas that are important to you. If you work for a community development corporation, again, the quality and availability of these things are among your concerns.

What ArtPlace and creative placemaking wants is to put arts and culture at the table as something government and community development entities, among others, include in conversations and planning.

It is not that these things aren’t recognized as assets in the community. In a session I attended on finance, representatives of banks, venture capital firms and community development organizations all acknowledged that even if people have no intention of attending an opera, they want to move to a community with an opera because it is a signifier of quality of life.

The reason arts and culture are often absent from planning and other conversations seems to be more about lack of understanding how arts and culture contributes and how to bring about involvement.

Bennett said creative placemaking isn’t about creating more creative organizations, but to bring creativity to what is already in place in the community. I may be paraphrasing badly from my notes, but the essence seemed to be that the focus is outward from arts and cultural organizations rather than development of something internal to the organization.

Bennett said the projects should delineate a community (literally drawing lines on the map came up a couple times), identify a challenge, propose an arts intervention and know what success looks like so you know when to stop.

The example he gave of a really successful project was one Springboard for the Arts did in conjunction with the construction of the Green Line in St. Paul, MN. I had heard bits and pieces of this, but until today it wasn’t enough to understand the full scope.

Basically, given that the construction of the rail line was going to disrupt business and make residents feel miserable about the inconvenience, Springboard for the Arts’ solution was to train artists in placemaking and collaboration. According to Bennett, they turned about 120 artists loose telling them they could do whatever they wanted, as long as it was along the train line.

Over the course of two years, the number of positive phrases used to refer to the area far out numbered the negative. Instead of staying away from the construction, people converged on it.

According to an article written last month, this small effort resulted in deeper ties between the artists and the community. In one case, an artist’s effort was adopted as a mascot for the neighborhood.

An outcome of this type lends some credence to the idea that you can help yourself by helping your community.

On Board With Constructive Dissent

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About two weeks ago, I posted about organizational behavior and included a quote from Peter Drucker about the value of dissent in decision making. Since then I came across another article specifically focused on the constructive use of dissent when serving on a board.

The article by Newton Holt acknowledges the power of groupthink and the pressure to always be in consensus I had noted earlier. It goes on to note that this can be an even greater issue with volunteer boards because there is a sense that the members are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts so you want to avoid conflict which may lead people to seek another way to spend their free time.

The piece also quotes BoardSource’s founding president, Nancy Axelrod, who notes that the infrequency of meetings and the turnover of part of the board membership every year or so makes it difficult to establish a culture of constructive dissent. Informal communication outside of meetings and the structure of meetings are important.

Given that building such a culture does take time—something in short supply for boards—Axelrod and others note the importance of frequent communication, formal and informal, among board members. A quarterly meeting simply isn’t enough to build the sorts of relationships needed to foster and maintain an environment of open dissent…

Sometimes, the procedures organizations establish to keep board meetings moving along do their jobs a little too well. “One of the biggest laments of most board members is that board meetings are boring,” says Axelrod. “They’re scripted, they’re ritualized, and their outcomes are predetermined. People are really not given much of an opportunity to weigh in, much less dissent, on important issues. The way a board meeting is structured and choreographed will have a profound impact on whether healthy debate and even dissent are tolerated on the board.”

The article spends a considerable amount of time discussing how you can tell the difference between constructive and destructive dissent. Briefly, the former focuses externally on influencing trends and decisions that will advance the cause. The latter is more internally focuses on personal power and authority. They will tend to see support or lack of support as reflection on them.

I thought the following a particularly interesting observation about why it can be so difficult to know the difference between constructive and destructive dissent. (my emphasis)

Tecker comments that part of the reason people have a hard time distinguishing between constructive and destructive dissent is because neither group, destructive or constructive, does a particularly effective job in presenting dissent. This is critical: For dissent to be effective, for it to be something besides an alarm bell or a cry of disapproval, the dissenter needs to make his or her case gracefully. Dissent takes “a lot of self-confidence,” says J. Clarke Price, CAE, president and CEO of the Ohio Society of CPAs. “It takes political savvy, because you could either be viewed as a lunatic or as a concerned, committed member. And the cultural challenge is to make sure that once you go through the dialogue, you can move on to the next issue and not have grudges carry over.”

[…]

Constructive influencers, says Tecker, “tend to be sufficiently thoughtful, and their own natural inclination is to look at situations from a multiplicity of perspectives … they tend to constantly examine the advantages and disadvantages of every position. Dissent for them will occur when they believe there is an alternate view that is not being given adequate attention. They usually will recognize that when someone identifies the disadvantage of an option, it’s not necessarily because they oppose the option—it’s just that they see a disadvantage. They will also recognize that when someone sees a particular advantage to a choice or an option, it’s not because they are advocating for it—it’s just that they see an advantage.”

I really appreciated the way they tackled the subject of dissent on boards. I had not seen it approached as thoroughly or from the perspective that constructive dissent requires a great deal of self-confidence. It is rather evident when you think about it. I just have not seen it addressed from that context.

High and Low Brow In A Cultural Garden of Eden

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We are often told that at one time Shakespeare bridged the gap between high and low culture and classical music composers were the rock stars of their time, pandering to popular taste. These statements generally imply there once existed a cultural garden of Eden where no one knew they were supposed to sit quietly until Wagner asked for the lights to be turned off. I am always interested to read researched accounts of what conditions were actually like at the time.

I was intrigued by a recent essay on Pacific Standard by Noah Berlatsky about how the divide between high and low culture developed. At one time, material like Shakespeare was enjoyed and valued by people from all walks of life.

In Philadelphia, Levine writes, there were 65 Shakespeare performances in the single year of 1835.

It wasn’t just Philadelphia either, as Tocqueville testified: “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” Levine writes that even illiterate men, like the famous scout Jim Bridger, would have Shakespeare read to them so they could memorize passages. In San Francisco, following the opening of the Jenny Lind Theater in 1850, “Miners … swarmed from the gambling saloons and cheap fandango houses to see Hamlet and Lear.” If the miners couldn’t come to the big city, Shakespeare came to them; major Shakespearean actors like Edwin Booth traveled out to mining camps where they acted from cobbled together stages.

However, a garden of Eden state of innocence didn’t necessarily exist. The way people experienced Shakespeare differed. There were those who valued pure Shakespeare for its sophistication and mastery of language. Others enjoyed wild adaptations that changed the endings, added ribald humor and mixed and matched plot and character, “Just as studios feel comfortable reworking stories about Spider-Man or Batman ad infinitum…”

“And over time, the intellectual elitists won; Shakespeare was purged of his pop associations, and became an elite pleasure.

This was in part because of changes in technology and preference—the growth of literacy, for example, ironically sapped the oral culture in which Shakespeare performance and recitation had been so natural. But the sacralization of Shakespeare was also, Levine says, pushed along by highbrow critics and patrons, who wrote against lowbrow theater-going habits, and created venues where Shakespeare was presented seriously, without melodramatic advertisements or farces.”

According to Berlatsky, some times the clashes between high and low brow were quite violent with mobs being fired upon by militia. Makes the effort to remove the intimidation factor associated with arts events seem relatively easy by comparison. While the situation obviously calmed down, the result was that high and low culture stopped communicating with each other and ultimately progressed to a point where they were unable to comprehend/tolerate what the other enjoyed.

Berlatsky notes a view expressed by Lawrence Levine that high and low culture began to converge once again in the 1980s. Berlatsky cites the example of

“directors like Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, and the Coen Brothers slide cheerfully from art to genre and back again, sometimes in the same scene; on television, high-quality shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men deliberately tackle serious issues in the format of serial melodrama.”

Depending on your opinion of these directors and shows, there is cause for optimism that our society is gradually mending the rifts that developed.

Where The Boys (And Girls) Are

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Since we are in the middle of the holiday shopping season, I thought it would be a good time to draw attention to a Business Insider article from October on the digital behavior of teens.

On the assumption that there might be a chance of engaging today’s teens in live performance as they get older, I thought I would offer the following for consideration:

Compared to last year, a greater percentage of teens boys say they prefer to shop online than in stores.

Meanwhile, teen girls seem to be reverting back to stores to do their shopping.

This behavior likely shows boys’ preference for the convenience and privacy of e-commerce, while girls are more likely to shop socially in stores. In nearly every Piper Jaffray survey since spring 2012, more male teens have said they shop online than female teens.

There has already been an acknowledgment that women are generally the ones that primarily motivate the decision to attend live performances. If current behavior and preferences perpetuates itself as these teens get older, (and is transferable from shopping to participation at events), arts organizations may be well advised to place a stronger emphasis on designing programming, advertising and promotional deals to appeal to women.

Other observations made in the article are that females are attracted to a variety of content heavy sites like Pinterest and Net-A-Porter whereas males pretty much prefer the one stop shopping convenience of Amazon. (Since I hated to go store to store in the ancient pre-Internet age, this basically appears to be an Internet age manifestation of the eternal differences between the genders.)

Again this reinforces the sense that providing a visual and tactile experience is important to engaging women as consumers.

It won’t come as a surprise that teens are streaming a lot of video and playing a lot of video games. These forms of entertainment have always loomed as a threat to location based events since they allow people to remain in their homes.

One small glimmer of hope might be in the fact that there has been a significant increase in the number of teens who are hoping for a Go-Pro camera for Christmas. (Significant in that it went from no mention to 1%, which granted is still very small, but bears watching.)

These cameras were designed to be used by practitioners of extreme sports as they surfed, flipped, jumped, etc. The fact that they are gaining mainstream appeal could be a further reflection of the desire to record oneself engaging in different activities.

Though we may hate the idea of people pulling out social media devices to emphasize themselves over the event, it bears considering that the best opportunities may exist in the future for events that cater to that desire to record oneself participating.

[No slight intended to women by the post title. Clearly the post is focused on the importance of the female consumer, but no one made a song entitled “Where the Girls Are.”]

http://youtu.be/iDcvmrHV9Jc

Honest Planning Isn’t A Game

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One of the common elements between the non-profit arts world and the gaming industry are the long, dehumanizing hours for little to no pay. There is actually a web comic dedicated to satirizing the work conditions at gaming companies. It allows people to submit their horror stories. Incredible as it may seem, if the stories are true, working in the gaming industry might actually be more dehumanizing and exploitative.

There is one post that sounds hauntingly familiar as it recounts comments from friends and family along the lines of “you are doing what you love, how can it be work?”

Makes me think the arts need a web comic/war story board to gather around.

Last month we had a video gaming conference in our theater. One of the speakers was talking about the stages of putting a game together from pre-production through testing and release.

What he said was, if you did your planning right and maintained discipline so that you didn’t get sidetracked trying to integrate some new cool technology or idea someone had, you wouldn’t end up doing a lot of 60-80 hour weeks of crunch time.

He said it was important not to allow your or your team to put in too many 16+ hour days because when it came to planning out your next project, you would forget/ignore the true cost in time the project would require. Yes, you were able to complete that stage in four weeks last time, but it involved your team working 80 hours a week during those four weeks.

And guess what, the new project will require everyone to work 80 hour weeks for a month as well. By trying to adhere to a reasonable schedule, you will inevitably recognize that you really need 6 weeks to complete that stage (not 8 weeks because your team will likely be more effective well rested than exhausting themselves every day.)

I often hear theater staff talk about the fact that renters often underestimate the amount of work their event will require because everything appears to occur so effortlessly and simply. But the truth is, a lot of theater staff don’t really acknowledge the true effort either because they push themselves over long hours to get a project done or people are pulled in from other departments to lend a hand.

Often this results from the gradual push to do more with less as the organization tries to maintain the same level of service as their funding gets cut.

Just as often, if not more often, this practice has been part of the organizational culture from the beginning. Everyone happily worked the long hours or stepped in to lend a hand on that first show and no effort was ever made to evaluate the planning process to create a schedule that was more conducive to good physical and mental health.

Then either the number of projects increased or new people joined in who weren’t part of the original core group and they start feeling a little resentful about the work load.

Those who have been around longer start complaining about the work ethic of youngsters these days, never really noticing that the founding culture might have been fine at the time, but it really wasn’t a sustainable planning and working model.

There is a lot of talk about work-life balance these days. The solution you may came up with is to allow people more time off. What you might really need to do is pause for a second and think about whether the assumptions you are bringing to your timeline planning is flawed.

If giving one person more time off means you are shifting more responsibility to someone else, that can be great in the short term if it is helping someone develop new skills. However, if in their enthusiasm over being trusted with new responsibilities they start working longer hours, it just hides the problems with the planning process until they get burnt out or the person who replaces them complains.

A good, hard, honest look at the true cost of time and resources being expended in order to fulfill annual or project plans may be required if you are going to effectively provide a good work-life balance to everyone.

People Are Talking (Just Not To Me)

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In the last day or so, Howard Sherman tweeted a story on CNN about the number of websites choosing to shut down the comments section on their websites in favor of social media interactions due to the number of abusive and spammy comments that appear in the comment boxes.

I momentarily panicked wondering what the implications might mean for my efforts to collect audience feedback as grant support if people got out of the habit of leaving comments on webpages.

The I realized–nobody is posting comments on my organizational website, just on my blog. All the feedback about the performances at my arts center already comes through social media.

But that actually brought another issue to mind for which I hope, dear readers, you might have some suggestions. (And in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I will certainly thank you.)

While we do get some nice comments on our Facebook and Twitter pages, I find that most of the really good comments are being made on my staff and board members’ personal Facebook pages. I have encouraged them to take screenshot, send me links, etc, but everyone doesn’t always remember.

The problem I have is that these comments made by people who attended a performance to board and staff members are pretty high quality, with a much more sincere and detailed feel than responses on surveys.

And I don’t know they are being made.

I have keyword searches on Google and Hootsuite for my organization related terms and all the shows we are doing each season, but these comments don’t appear in the results.

With Facebook saying they will throttle Facebook Pages content starting in January, I am concerned that even “What did you think of the show” posts might get filtered out of our followers’ newsfeeds making it more difficult to gather feedback and making me more dependent on the goodwill and memories of staff and board members.

In fact, I wonder if the throttling has already begun because we didn’t half the reach or responses to the follow up post for a sold out show two weeks ago that we have gotten for shows with half the attendance.

Any one have any ideas and thoughts on how to gather the good comments and prepare for less social media exposure?

I should note that board members receiving better comments than the organizational social media site presents an opportunity rather than a problem. It provides something of an obligation to provide them with sufficient information and support to be good brand ambassadors for the programs. I won’t have as much control of the message as I would through our organizational social media accounts, but I can enhance the value of what the board members are already doing naturally and willingly on and offline.

Lies of Restraint

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Non-Profit Quarterly recently tweeted a link to a really insightful article they ran in 2005 about the lies organizations tell themselves as a result of group behavior.

The author, Erline Belton, starts out by acknowledging that our basic instinct is for safety and well-being and so we tend to either lie or restrain our comments when confronted with conflict and risk. We often want to maintain a stable environment against our personal better judgment and comfort.

The problem is when people are avoiding conflict, nothing get changed because the problems with the organization are never brought out and discussed. Belton lists different ways these things manifest from groupthink where everyone goes along because they don’t want to rock the boat; imaginary conflict where people imagine consequences and act to avoid them regardless of whether it is based in reality; and hidden agendas where people fail to disclose what they believe is true.

Perhaps the reason this article resonated so strongly with me is my grad school memory of organizational behavior class where we discussed the Abilene Paradox where everyone participates in an activity no individual wanted to do. I have always tried to remain alert for those sort of situations.

Belton goes on to list all the ways everyday lies can infect discussions and weigh down the company. She goes on to list practices that support the truth and build a stable working environment.

Belton provides a particularly potent illustration about how groupthink hampered the work of a non-profit (I broke up paragraph for ease of reading):

In one organization I know, the staff was asked about the biggest lie inhabiting the organization. After much hemming and hawing, one man finally blurted out, “The lie is that we provide good services that the community wants. We don’t and we treat any client who complains like a troublemaker.” He went on to provide examples. Everyone else around the table nodded agreement immediately.

Consider the enormous cost of having kept this silent for years! This was a key organization, serving an isolated immigrant community. Unfortunately the dialogue group did not include the executive director or board members who later did not allow the conversation to progress further. This was seven years ago, and to this day, funders see the organization as “chronically in trouble.”

While it is a rather provocative question, asking about the biggest lie inhabiting your organization seems to be an effective way to cut right to the topics you wish to address. Since it is one of those things that makes you wonder, do I dare ask this, you almost have to in order to prove you aren’t succumbing to the type of thinking you are trying to eliminate.

This reminds me of something Peter Drucker said about decision making:

“A cardinal rule in decision-making is that you don’t make a decision until there is disagreement. If everyone agrees, you can’t tell what the decision is about. Maybe there is no decision to be made at all. So get disagreement.”

I have seen this quote or something similar related to the idea that if there is not disagreement, you probably aren’t getting everyone’s true thoughts on the matter and need to solicit opinions until someone does voice a conflicting view.

Door #1 or Door #2 And $400,000?

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If you haven’t heard about it yet, it is worth checking out a recent story about two successful Broadway shows vying for the same theater.

Some time back, the producers of The Audience, starring Helen Mirren reserved the Schoenfeld Theater starting in February 2015 as part of the plan to bring the show over from London.

In the meantime, the theater was empty so the producers of It’s Only A Play booked the Schoenfeld with the plan of moving out on January 4.

The problem is, It’s Only A Play got wildly successful and the producers planning to extend the run, naturally wanted to stay in the Schoenfeld.

This part of the story isn’t so news worthy, this sort of thing happens frequently enough on Broadway. What came next isn’t.

Because the theater right next door, Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, has an opening in January, the producers of It’s Only A Play, suggested The Audience move in there and offered The Audience $400,000 to do it. The It’s Only A Play folks figured it would cost them $800,000 to move, so if they could stay put they would offer half the cost they saved.

The configuration and amenities of both theaters are very similar, except that the Schoenfeld was more recently renovated.

Despite the large production costs that Broadway shows incur, the producers of The Audience declined to even discuss the arrangement. All their plans call for using the Schoenfeld.

Adding an interesting dimension to this whole story is that Ken Davenport is a producer on It’s Only A Play so he writes about the issue on his blog, The Producer’s Perspective.  His account of the exchange doesn’t diverge from that of the NY Times story, but he asks his readers what they would have done.

I thought most people would be incredulous that the producers of The Audience would leave that much money on the table. Who wouldn’t want Door #2 plus $400,000 when you already know what is behind door #2.

But the comments actually run about 2:1 in favor of The Audience taking up residency in the Schoenfeld.  The fact that Helen Mirren is in the show and that it has broken records in London factored into many opinions that the production should be in the place that best showcased its attributes rather than compromising artistic vision.

A case might actually be made in the other direction. It is not unheard of for West End hits to bomb on Broadway and vice versa. Since The Audience is about the rise of Queen Elizabeth II from 1952 to present, the show may not have the same draw for American audiences as it did in London.

This is not to say that both Queen Elizabeth II and Helen Mirren don’t enjoy a great deal of good will and respect in the United States. Just that as a hedge against a lesser degree of interest, it might be best to position the show in the best environment possible. Physical surroundings are a big influence on audience enjoyment.

This whole situation provides some good PR for both productions. The Audience has the reputation of being so certain of their success that they could turn down $400,000.  And now there is additional attention cast on the success of It’s Only A Play  for extending their run and making a gutsy offer that might have allowed them to stay put.

It’s A Wonderful Arts Organization

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We in the arts are frequently enjoined to ask ourselves what value we have in the community and whether we would be missed or the community would be worse off if we closed.

The subtext, at least when I hear and read this, is that arts organizations better make sure they are providing some service their community views as valuable whether it is shows, classes, outreach events, providing expertise and resources to others–whatever the case may be.

I think this is driven by a final grant report/justify your government based funding mentality. The concern that you aren’t doing enough to be of value to your community could easily be a matter of lack of data collection rather than lack of doing on the arts organization’s part.

Basically, it is the “It’s A Wonderful Life” problem. George Bailey doesn’t realize what a positive impact he has had on the community until he gets to see what life would be like if he weren’t around. He lacked knowledge of what sort of impact his presence had in Bedford Falls.

No one can ever really know the full repercussions of their presence or lack thereof without the help of an angel interpreting cause and effect. If you had asked the residents of the depressed Bedford Falls if their lots would have been better with a George Bailey around, they wouldn’t have had any concept of the extensive differences between the two timelines.

Still, people do have some idea of what would have happened had they not had certain opportunities available to them. George never asked and was never told how important his building and loan was to the community.

Well, at least not until the end of the movie which results in a scene very familiar to many arts organizations– People in the community react to the imminent closure of their beloved organization and donate a large amount of money in the hopes of staving off disaster.

Bedford Falls or An Arts Organization You Know?
Bedford Falls or An Arts Organization You Know?

Optimally you don’t want to wait until a crisis to find out how much your organization really means to the community. Gathering the responses from a wide range of people is required, asking those who don’t participate as well as those who do. It is often suggested that those who don’t attend or participate be queried so that you can figure out how to better serve them.

While this is true and important, there are people who will never attend or participate in your programs. However, they may still value the presence of your organization in the community. For example, I don’t participate in Habitat for Humanity construction projects, but I certainly know that life in the community would be worse if they weren’t around.

What I don’t know is what are the best questions to ask. The things that immediately pop to mind are reminiscent of high school kids trying to find out if that other person likes them too. My impression is that the questions need to investigate what people value in the cultural ecology and how your organization fits in to it rather than “what do you like about us? what is it that we do that you would miss if we stopped doing it?”

My other impression is that this is the sort of questioning that has to be done in person rather than in a written survey because a conversation can force deeper consideration than an opportunity to jot down a response. Engaging in deeper consideration will probably cause the respondent’s feelings on the matter to acquire a deeper resonance as well.

Despite this being a labor intensive process, since you are collecting the data to assess the perception of your organization in the community and not to provide results by a deadline for a grant report or to decide whether to being a new initiative, it is possible to conduct this process in a relatively informal way.

The purpose is to get a sense of whether people would miss your organization if it closed so you are constantly asking your questions and paying close attention to the responses. The process never ends.

It occurs to me that if you are being honest and asking both those who support you and those you don’t, you can end up identifying non-participants you will want to formally survey to find out if there is something you can do to serve their needs.

The Phonebooth Returns! (Sort Of)

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There is an initiative starting in NYC that I hope is really successful and catches on in smaller cities and communities because it can help under served communities and potential provide arts organizations a central communication channel to these demographics.

According to a CityLab article, all but three pay phones in NYC will be replaced by eye-catching Links stations. These stations will provide free public Wi-Fi, free phone calls anywhere in the US, free charging for mobile devices and serve as sources of information (maps, directory of city services, etc.)

The services will be paid for by advertising and public services messages displayed on the screens on the sides of the structures.

But what caught my eye was that the acknowledgment that these stations need to be placed in poorer neighborhoods. I agree with them that is where these stations are needed most. (my emphasis)

But if what the service providers are aiming for is the big bucks, could they bypass poor neighborhoods in favor of spots that attract high-end advertisers?

City officials say no. About half of the pay phones that will be transformed are in the lower-income outer boroughs, says Anne Roest commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications .

“There’s an assumption that poor people don’t spend money,” she says at the press conference. “One of the tricks is to figure out the advertising that’s providing what folks in all communities of New York are actually buying.”

Low-income individuals are more likely not to have expensive mobile phones and data plans, and may be more likely to need links to make calls or access the internet.

As I said, it would really be great if this model proved to be successful in NYC and became attractive enough to replicate in other cities.

It is unclear to me in the section I bolded if they are oriented on finding a one-size fits all neighborhoods advertising approach or will work on studying and segmenting the advertising. If they pay attention to what different approaches to advertising worked in each community demographic, perhaps the basic lessons could be applied elsewhere.

With that data in hand, companies can use specifically targeted advertising on these Links stations and have better insight into what general services these communities desire versus those in more affluent neighborhoods.

As the saying goes, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. I have no doubt that usage data will be collected, crunched and sold. There is no reason this data can’t be crunched to provide social benefit as well.

I suspect the perceived value of these stations in low income communities which lack Internet, WiFi access and wide spread access to the amenities of smart phones, would generate positive associations making them valuable advertising vehicles.

It can be tough to get your advertising viewed on people’s individual televisions, computers and phone screens. There aren’t central communal sources of knowledge like there were when there were only a few television channels, broadcast radio stations and newspapers.

In addition to learning how to better design programs to suit the demographics of an area, this is the opportunity to raise awareness of your programs at the place people gather to make calls or charge their phones. (If you have ever been in an airport with charging hubs, you know demand won’t be an issue.) This could be the best chance to get low cost events and classes on to the radar of people whom you might not be able to reach in pretty much any other way.

Competition for advertising time in places like NYC might make the costs prohibitive there, but it could be more reasonable around the rest of the country. The success of this program is something worth keeping an eye on for a number of reasons.

(Of course, these stations don’t solve the problem of restoring locations for Clark Kent to transform into Superman.)

Single Cute Person I/S/O More Than Just I Need You

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“I Need You” used to mean something at one time according to Seth Godin. Perhaps that was back in the 70s when the phrase was just a song by the band America. Since then, says Godin, the phrase has gone through some overuse and abuse.

YOU doesn’t mean you in particular. It actually means, “anyone.” Anyone who can see this site or read this email or drive by our billboard. If you’ve got money or clout or attention to spare, sure, we want you.

Political fundraisers have turned this from an art to a science to an endless whine. So have short-term direct marketers with access to a keyboard and the free stamps of internet connection.

We used to have our ears open to anyone we loved or trusted whispering, “I need you.” It’s been overwhelmed lately, though, by selfish marketers shouting, “WE WANT ANYONE.”

This should sound like a familiar concept to many people in the arts. For years now the message being communicated that we hope everyone learns is  you can’t define your target market as everybody living within a 50 mile radius of your venue. Yes, in the ideal world, everyone would be interested in traveling to see what you are offering, but that isn’t realistic so you need to focus your efforts.

To a certain extent, it is somewhat comforting to know that political groups and marketers are making similar mistakes to those made by non-profit arts organizations. Until, at least, you consider they have a lot more money to burn on such foolishness than you do.

But really, it does go to show how difficult it is to appeal to people who aren’t already involved with you. It is easy to make political ads that appeal to your base or to your existing customer base. It is more difficult to craft a message that is appealing to those who are uncommitted to any one candidate or product.

Which is why so many people resort to the shotgun “I Need You” approach Godin mentions. It probably comes as no surprise that people have gotten really good at tuning those appeals out. Eye tracking studies show that people have cultivated “banner blindness” (scroll down about 5 images) automatically tuning out banners on webpages.

Godin alludes to the solution in that last sentence where he mentions “that we used to have our ears open to anyone we loved or trusted.” I don’t think people stopped listening to those they love and trust. The list of those they trust has gotten smaller due to the barrage of appeals.

Even though people often put more stock in online recommendations from people they don’t know rather than those they do, those personal relationships matter. All the recent conversations in the arts community about connecting with the community boils down to the goal of cultivating trust with people.

Just like retail politics is expensive and time consuming, because it is conducted in a relatively personalized way, it is often more effective than a shotgun approach. While this doesn’t deter political campaigns from engaging in both a personal and widespread effort in an attempt to get votes, they only require a commitment that lasts until election day.

Arts organizations generally need to secure something a little more long term.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbB72GCXiqc

Follow Us Here…And Here…Here Too…And Oh Yeah, Here

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Thomas Cott shared Colleen Dilenschneider’s recent post about the futility of using social media for the sake of using social media.

“…spending copious time on the newest social media features (that none of your audiences are using), measuring success by vanity metrics, and building out features that nobody is asking for…why do organizations do these things? They don’t help support bottom lines like getting folks in the door, building affinity, increasing donor support, or sharing knowledge if they aren’t relevant to your market or strategically integrated into an engagement plan…. and yet organizations brag about these useless endeavors to their boards and at industry conferences.

Many organizations seem to be feeling so “peer pressured” to be utilizing social media that they are using it to do stupid, time-consuming things for audiences that don’t matter”

I am right there with her. I have often suggested organizations shouldn’t be jumping on to the latest social media bandwagon. Especially since news of these apps/tools is often self-perpetuating out of proportion to the percentage of the population actually using them. Once a critical mass is reached, they get reported on because everyone else seems to be reporting on it making it seem like far more people are using it than actually are.

However, I can understand why arts organizations are doing it. Yesterday the Here and Now program on NPR interviewed Amanda Palmer and the conversation got around to referencing Taylor Swift’s story about two actresses being up for a part and the one with the larger Twitter following getting it.

While Palmer goes on to talk about a large following not equaling depth of engagement just as Dilenschneider mentions, the idea that breadth of exposure is better than depth with a few people is still the dominant criteria.

Print, broadcast and online media still talk about the number of eyes and ears they can deliver when trying to sell you advertising.

Grant reports will often ask about the number of hits your website received during the grant period. I called one funder to clarify criteria to use for indirect exposure because it almost felt like an invitation to wildly estimate using a contagion theory. My guess is that some of the sources of their funding have proved to be impressed by these numbers so we are being encouraged to provide them.

And actually, when I looked up contagion theory to make sure I was using the term correctly, I found out complex contagion theory is a term associated with social media. So it isn’t entirely unreasonable that funders are interested in reporting about a shotgun approach.

The same thinking that motivates a movie or stage production to cast the actor whose commentary on their involvement in the project will reach the most people, influences the values of arts organizations and their funders. If an organization is trying to expand its reach with using the hottest new toys, don’t they appear more ambitious and progressive than the organization that has a solid 500 people savoring their every post on a single social media site?

Visit the Facebook pages of two arts organizations in a city you have never visited. When you decide which is better are you basing it on how cool their header image is and the number of likes? Or did you actually take the time to evaluate the quality of their posts?

Colleen Dilenschneider is fairly accurate in her assessment about how these efforts will not provide any meaningful results, wastes time and potentially sets your efforts back. The answer to her question about why organizations engage in futile social media efforts is that the illusion of progress is valued.

To some extent, you might ask the same question about why people use alcohol as a social lubricant instead of working on changing themselves to become more adept at handling these situations. Except that the illusion generated by this activity is widely expected and accepted. (Insert your own joke equating the idea of wasted resources and the need to use the restroom after a beer.)

Keep Board Members Heart And Soul (You May Need Them In The Future)

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This being Veteran’s Day, I thought I would point to Simone Joyaux’s recent piece on Non-Profit Quarterly dealing with veterans of smaller scale conflicts- ex-board members.

Simone enjoins people to remember that most former board members still believe in your cause even after they have served and shouldn’t be treated like a generic donor. She lists many ways to keep former board members involved and in the loop, including enlisting them to help with board recruitment and fund raising efforts.

This article caught my attention because last week I had attended a board meeting of the community organization with which we partner. During the meeting, they dealt with the departure of one board member, the conferring of emeritus status on another (she is 103 years old, she earned it), and the approval of 4 new board members.

The board member who was leaving said he envisioned remaining involved with the organization whether he liked it or not given that he has never left job where he didn’t end up continuing to provide advice.

You often don’t get someone explicitly saying they want to stay involved like that, but you should make the effort to keep them in the loop and provide the opportunity.

Of the 4 people who will be joining the board, 2 have served before.

Which illustrates something that Simone didn’t mention–you want to treat a former board member well because it is likely that the set of people in your community willing to serve on non-profit boards isn’t so large that you won’t end up asking former members to serve again.

The Artists, They Live Among Us

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I didn’t really know much about Jamie Bennett when he was chief of staff at the National Endowment for the Arts or when he was appointed as executive director for ArtPlace America, but after watching a video of his talk at TEDxHudson, I figure he was the right person for the job.

There were a number of moments during his talk where I nodded my head and thought “this guy gets it.” (And not just because as kids we apparently both had our first Broadway experience seeing the same production of Peter Pan with Sandy Duncan)

He talks about growing up in Honesdale, PA and encountering the idea that art was something done by people who lived far away. He speaks of a colleague performing a study for the Urban Institute who went out and asked people who the artists in their community were, only to be told there weren’t any despite all the participation in singing and dancing going on.

He relates another experience in Aspen, CO where people in the audience readily self identified as golfers and tennis players, but not as artists. He comments that he doesn’t know:

“why we can so easily see ourselves on a continuum with Serena Williams and Tiger Woods, but we don’t think anything we do has anything in common with Sandy Duncan.”

He goes on to list all the encounters he had with artists growing up in Honesdale. He admits it even took him 30 years to realize there were practicing artists in his hometown.

He continues saying what we have probably all realized by now, that this perception of artists as an “other” is deeply rooted in society. He cites a study which found that “Although 96% of Americans value art in their communities and lives, only 27% value artists.”

When he says that the study lead to the formation of United States Artists which took the tagline “Art comes from artists,” people laugh. But I couldn’t help thinking that such an obvious statement might be required.

Since people have a concept of creativity and inspiration as something that flows from the ether into blessed individuals rather than something that everyone can participate in and get better at with some effort, just like your tennis backhand, a blatant statement of the basic definition of an artist could be necessary.

I suspect this sense of special insight has been propagated by artists. If you are going to be poor and starving, it helps a little to be able to wrap yourself in an aura of uncommonality, in touch with the muses the way monks are infused with spirituality.

Bennett likens the situation to the food world which has made people more cognizant of the source of their meals leading to the concepts of eating local and farm to table, among others. He extends that idea to making people aware of the local sources of art, including themselves.

The second thing Bennett said that made me sit up and take notice was that the typical conversation about the arts in this country is about the lack of money and resources. “We open with our lack and spend every conversation with our hand out.”

He talks about the purpose of ArtsPlace America being to turn that around to draw attention to the asset common to every community-artists.

“Not every community has a waterfront. Not every community has strong public transportation. Not every community is lucky enough to be anchored by a hospital or university. But every community has people who sing and dance and tell stories.”

I don’t know that the dearth of resources is what entirely dominates my conversations, but I am going to keep a more attentive ear on what I say in the future.

Bennett goes on to talk about other benefits of the arts in communities. He touches on some concepts that were familiar to me, but provides slightly different insights about the positive ripple effects of arts participation, especially among groups of people who may not be perceived as artists.

Curatin’ Ain’t Easy

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It is ten years this month that Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller first started talking about Pro-Ams, the Professional-Amateur whose dedicated pursuit of an avocation brought them on par with professional practitioners. I have written a fair bit upon the subject over the years.

When the topic comes up for discussion in the arts, one central question often arises (or lurks shallowly in the subtext) about whether amateurs really can perform to the standard professionals possessed of a keen eye honed by experience and education can.

Essentially, if we let the amateurs get involved, will quality and artistic merit be supplanted by work that panders to popular tastes and doesn’t require any effort to understand?

This is a question that Nina Simon, Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of History and Art has had to struggle with as a practical matter. While she has increased the fortunes of her museum since assuming the director role, her means have not been without criticism.

Recently her programming decisions were discussed in in a Wall Street Journal article, Everybody’s an Art Curator. The article uses Simon’s museum as the basis of discussing a national trend of involving the community in curatorial decisions. The article mentions the departure of one of Simon’s curatorial staff and disagreements with an artist over the context in which her show was hung. The article discusses friction at other museums around the country as they attempt to enact similar programs.

Nina Simon posted about the WSJ article on her Museum 2.0 blog this week, linking to two more in depth considerations of the idea of outsourcing curation broached in “Everybody’s an Art Curator” by Ed Rodley.

As I read all these posts and articles, it occurred to me that there is a high likelihood that a lot of the blame for the weaknesses of involving amateurs probably lies with the arts organization itself.

As Rodley observes:

“I think if you were to look at a large sample of museum projects with participatory elements, you’d find plenty that had poorly thought out and articulated goals and dubious educational value. Which is something that the field as a whole could stand to look at closely.”

Arts organizations have a history of not investing enough patience and resources in a new initiative. Common discussions in the field involve the misguided expectation that new audiences segments will respond positively and feel they are being served on the basis of one event aimed at them a year. What is required are accompanying outreach efforts, conversations, and shifts in making the attendance environment more appealing to your target groups.

Chances are, Rodley is right on the money when he suggests that insufficient attention has been paid to program design.

On the other hand, arts organizations frequently run into a lack of understanding about how difficult their work is to accomplish. I have frequently encountered renters who start a conversation which “Oh it is just a simple…,” having not considered how everything is going to fall into place.

Nina Simon makes a similar observation about the perception that amateur curators are a strategy aimed at reducing and replacing staff.

“Community is not a commodity. We don’t involve people in content development to “boost ticket sales.” It’s neither “quick” nor “inexpensive” to mount exhibitions that include diverse community stories. Yes, community involvement is at the heart of our shifted, successful business model. But that business model requires experienced staff who know how to empower people, facilitate meaningful participation, respond to community issues and interests, and ignite learning. It’s not cheap. It’s not easy. It’s the work we feel driven to do to build a museum that is of and for our community.”

I feel like Simon’s efforts at community involvement actually help educate people about the work that goes into putting a show together. For example,

“Hack the Museum,” a show that invited a mix of outside professionals to live at the museum for 48 hours and build a new exhibit from the permanent collection.”

Yes, the results of their efforts may be mixed. But how exciting is it for people to camp out in a museum for two days and learn the process? I can’t imagine that giving 75 people a tour of the curatorial department would be as effective in helping them understand the process. Nor would it likely engender the investment that the participants felt. Nina made some posts about it here and here and the participants looked like they had a blast.

I am fairly certain she isn’t passing off the work of community participants as professional choices since that would be counter to her goal of convincing all visitors that their involvement with the museum is meaningful.

Those of us who work in the performing arts will often grouse that so much gets a standing ovation or accolades of “as good as professionals” when it doesn’t deserve it. However, the performing arts may have an advantage over visual arts in that there is a rough sense of a continuum between elementary school recital and full blown concert by a professional symphony orchestra.

The criteria by which to judge and classify visual art in terms of quality is less distinct, and not only because so many people think their kids could produce what they are looking at.

How many people outside of the gallery and museum world know what standards are applied in curating a show? Where exactly does your Pinterest page fall between the refrigerator and the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Where do you go to find out?

You could do worse than a sleepover at a museum.

Don’t Wait Up, I’m Going Cruisin’ With The Actors

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If you are in the entertainment business, it appears Netflix is shaping up to be the major nemesis. HBO is going to let you stream their series without cable as a way to respond to people dropping their cable subscriptions and shifting toward Netflix.  Movie theaters are vowing to refuse to screen the new Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon movie because it will be released on Netflix at the same time.

So what are live performance companies to do? It is pretty difficult to be ready to perform on demand. Sure recording your performance and posting it on YouTube is always an option, but you’re trying to perpetuate the benefits of attending events in person.

Well, I don’t know if it is THE answer, but one possible model for study might be found in a post on the HowlRound website this past July. Jean Ann Douglass and Eric John Meyer do theater in a truck. People buy tickets online and at 4:00 pm on the day of the show, they receive an email about where to find the truck.  Such an arrangement allows for the possibility of having a show centrally located to the bulk of your audience.

Now granted, with a capacity of only 15 people, the scale is a little small. However, as they point out, it allows a great deal of flexibility in positioning a performance.

Another appealing aspect of this work is the freedom it affords us as producers and presenters. We can rent our venue anytime, anywhere across the country

One of the key elements of their performances are bars with bathrooms. While the performance could theoretically be performed in any parking lot, the audience needs restroom facilities. At intermission, the audience is sent off to a nearby bar and when they return, they view a second, entirely different play. Then after the performance, you can have a drink with the performers.

There is a lot of potential for symbiotic relationship between bars, restaurants and other businesses in this performance model. There are probably a good number of places that would be happy to have a guarantee of 15 customers coming in at a known time.

Obviously, weather is a consideration since it can get too hot or cold in the back of a truck. However, I imagine anyone who was really serious about bringing performances into different neighborhoods in on a consistent basis would make the necessary alterations.

As I sit here, I have visions of the invention of entirely new ways to staging shows to accommodate the form of tractor trailers and shipping containers. Not to mention the rise of companies specializing in taming the acoustic qualities of these spaces.

After working wonderful performance halls, it is probably depressing to even contemplate having to resort to such rough conditions to provide the experience of live performance. But let us not forget that wagons were the primary delivery mode for performance once upon a time.

With the convention of performance hall audience behavior out the window, entirely new possibilities might open up with people using electronic devices and social media to interact with the performances. The novelty of going cruising with a performance troupe might be very appealing to people.

Guest Post: The Overhead Solution

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Back in June 2013, I wrote about the release of a letter by GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and BBB Wise Giving Alliance urging funders to discontinue the use of overhead ratios to measure the viability of non-profit organizations. They felt the number was an inaccurate assessment of  an organization’s effectiveness.

Since then, the subject of overhead ratio has appeared a number of times in my posts.

Recently, the GuideStar, Charity Navigator and BBB Wise Giving Alliance have released a second letter. This one is aimed at non-profits asking them to assist in the effort by educating their funders about the true costs of the programs and by providing alternative narratives about program effectiveness.

I was approached by GuideStar with a request to host a guest post on the subject. As this has been an area of interest for me, I was pleased to do so.

 

A Message From GuideStar President/CEO Jacob Harold

In 2013, I joined with partners at the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and Charity Navigator in writing an open letter to the donors of America explaining that “overhead ratios” are a poor way to understand nonprofit performance. We named this campaign “The Overhead Myth.”

I’m glad to report that the response to the campaign, including the original Overhead Myth letter to the donors of America, far exceeded our expectations. More than one hundred articles have been written about the campaign. It comes up every time I hold a meeting or give a talk. For many in the field, it’s been a deep affirmation of something they’ve known a long time. And, indeed, many leading organizations– the Donors Forum, Bridgespan, the National Council on Nonprofits, and others — have been working on the issue for a long time.

But we also know we have a long road ahead of us. The myth of overhead as inherently “wasteful” spending is deeply ingrained in the culture and systems of the nonprofit sector, and it will take years of concerted effort for us to move past such a narrow view of nonprofit performance to something that fully reflects the complexity of the world around us. That effort is essential, however, if we want to ensure that we have a nonprofit sector capable of tackling the great challenges of our time.

That’s why last week the CEOs of Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and I released a second Overhead Myth letter—this one addressed to the nonprofits of America. In that letter, we suggest a set of steps nonprofits themselves can take to help dispel the Overhead Myth. We all share responsibility for allowing things to have reached this pass.  And it will take all of us to fix it.

We direct this letter to nonprofits not because we feel they are the originators of the Overhead Myth but because they are in the best position to communicate with their donors and funders. We want to recruit nonprofits to help us retrain donors and funders to pay attention to what really matters: results.  In the end, that means nonprofits have to throw away the pie charts showing overhead versus program—and step up to the much more important challenge of communicating how they track progress against their mission.

In simple terms, we must—collectively—offer donors an alternative. In the letter, and on the accompanying website, we call on nonprofits to do three things as their part of this evolution:

  1. Demonstrate ethical practice and share data about their performance.
  2. Manage toward results and understand their true costs.
  3. Help educate funders (individuals, foundations, corporations, and government) on the real cost of results.

We have provided a list of tools and resources related to each of these goals. These tools give nonprofits tangible steps they can take to engage their stakeholders around this critical issue. As the sector develops new resources and tactics, we will add them to the website.

We believe it will take a shared effort to focus donors’ attention on what really matters: nonprofits’ efforts to make the world a better place. It doesn’t matter whether you work at a nonprofit or donate a few dollars to a favorite charity every year, please join us as we seek to move from the Overhead Myth to the Overhead Solution.

For more information, or if you have a resource related to this issue that can help advance the cause, please email overhead@guidestar.org.

 

— Jacob Harold is the president and CEO of GuideStar, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that connects people and organizations with information on the programs, finances, and impact of more than 1.8 million IRS-recognized nonprofits. GuideStar serves a wide audience inside and outside the nonprofit sector, including individual donors, nonprofit leaders, grantmakers, government officials, academic researchers, and the media.

This letter original appeared on PhilanTopic blog and is shared with their permission.[divider]

Art of Mathematics (Be Sure To Show Your Work)

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A recent building renovation on my campus by the math department offices saw the installation of blackboard walls. The goal was to provides students with a place to study and work on projects as a group.

Math hall

 

I am not sure if it was part of the original vision, but many of the boards have been used to illustrate the utility and beauty of math.

math answers 002

 

These are nowhere near the best examples of some of the content that has popped up. Since this hallway is in the administration building, I have had frequent occasion to pass by these boards.

As a person who has been confounded by math, I have been impressed by what an asset they seem to be for demystifying the subject. I have only understood about 1/3 of what has been posted, but the explanations that accompanied that 1/3 were often very entertaining as they facilitated my comprehension. The 2/3 I don’t understand at least gives the impression that it is interesting and enjoyable.

There has been one section that has stuck in my craw a bit…

if it is too hard...

 

I am not sure if this sentiment was created by any of the math students. Even though this particular hallway goes directly into “math territory” (the other hallway passes the offices of the Dean of Arts and Sciences and Office of University Communications), the general content is less mathematically focused.

This has been up for the last 8-10 weeks now and has remained unchanged while other sections have been erased and altered. One of the reasons it sticks in my craw is that it is immediately visible upon entering the administration building door so it is the first thing I have seen.

When this got posted on Facebook, someone pointed out the irony of this appearing on a wall full of art. And for that reason, it is a little difficult to justify going up and erasing it both as a matter of free speech and art censorship. There have been a number of works that either explicit or figuratively had a message that art sucks/is stupid.

I have nudged the chair of the fine arts department to deploy some students for a little counter-propaganda, but nothing has happened yet.

Perhaps the students are hard at work with their time consuming projects and rehearsals.

It comes as no surprise to anyone that arts disciplines face this bias. No one needed President Obama to make a comment about STEM majors being better for careers than art history, to come to this realization.

Ultimately though, the irritation I feel when I see this sentiment upon entering the administration building disappears when I make a left down the other hall and see the multi-colored attempts to use art to illuminate the mysteries of mathematics.

It really doesn’t matter if people are using these boards to insult the arts because the boards represent an effort to use a multi-disciplinary approach to education that has long been advocated for.

As we learned long ago on the internet, the intent of any effort that allows the for unmoderated contributions is bound to be co-opted at some point.

All In The Timing

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While I was at my state presenters’ conference last week, I was speaking to a colleague at a theater a couple hours away about possibly collaborating on advertising on public radio stations in whose coverage area both our theaters are in. My thinking was that people might be confused by separate ads. They might think, was that on Tuesday here in town and Wednesday 90 miles away or vice versa?

In the course of conversation, she mentioned they hadn’t announced that part of their season and would be waiting until January. (This was something of a relief for me because I hadn’t seen the show on their website and was afraid they backed out.)

She said they decided to break up their season and only announce half at one time in order to generate renewed excitement about the theater’s offerings. Unlike my venue, they don’t have any subscribers from whom they are seeking an ongoing investment. It sounded as if this is the first year they will be trying this as a bid to renew momentum for their programming so I don’t have any sense of how successful the approach is.

I was wondering if any one else had done this sort of thing and if they had any success with it. Are there any tips that you might have for catching attention and getting people excited, especially during the first year or two when people aren’t expecting to hear about a raft of new shows?

I just anticipate I may end up adopting similar tactics one day and there are probably a number of other readers who are ready to give it a try right now.

Many theaters are experimenting with different types of ticketing models from choose your own seasons, themed mini-seasons, punch cards allowing you to see any show in their season as many times as you like up to a limit or fewer times/shows with as many friends as you like.

I haven’t really heard about people playing with the timing of announcing groups of events in order to find an idea spacing. People would quickly become inured if you ANNOUNCED! EVERY! SINGLE! SHOW! WITH! GREAT! FANFARE!

But I am sure there are timing tricks that haven’t been widely explored. I imagine in snowier climes, if you announce a whole new group of offerings in January after the Christmas buzz has worn off and the winter doldrums have set in, your announcement might gain some traction.

Television networks abandoned announcing new seasons of series every Fall decades ago in favor of floating starts throughout the year. Is there a viable way to do something similar for live performances?

You Can Enter The Museum Without Entering the Museum

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I was quickly scanning a story about Harvard University president Drew Faust arguing for the value of university art museums when I was brought up short by a remark made by Director of the Harvard University Art Museums Thomas Lentz in anticipation of the reopening of the museums next month after a long renovation.

During the question and answer session, Lentz responded to a question about what Harvard’s reopened museums will offer by saying that the new museums are designed to be more accessible to students and community members.

“You can enter through one entrance and go out the other without actually entering the museum. The courtyard is going to be a new public gathering space,” he said. “We don’t want it to be a static treasure house.”

What caught me was the phrase about entering without entering the museum. After I went back to re-read the sentence, I realized that he meant you could enter the building complex without actually entering the museum.

I did try to find out more about these plans, but most of the other articles about the design didn’t really talk about how the building would be used by visitors. Harvard Magazine did have a pretty good story about the all around use of the facilities.

The courtyard Thomas Lentz seems to be referring to is this one. Nearly every article I read about this project features this space.

The Harvard Art Museums, during renovation and expansion, showing the Calderwood Courtyard.

I have been having conversations with my staff about making our lobby a more welcome gathering place just to provide a sense of belonging to those who may enter or pass through. One of the advantages we have is that there is a parking lot on one side of the lobby and the rest of campus on the other side.

So yes, you can enter through one entrance and go out the other without actually entering a theater space.

Over the last few months, I have been paying attention to what other arts organizations and businesses who provide public gathering spaces do to make these spaces welcoming. One thing that has become very clear is that no matter how nice the amenities you offer, if people don’t have a reason to enter, it is all for naught.

Its that whole issue about “Field of Dreams” being a movie. If you build it does not guarantee anyone will come.

From the pictures of the Harvard Museums, exterior surroundings I am not sure if there is a reason someone would pass through one door and move toward the other on the way to somewhere and be enticed to linger. Certainly curiosity about the renovations and word of mouth about how interesting the courtyard environment is may be enough to get things started. After activity reaches a critical mass, it can be self-sustaining.

A month ago I wrote about the Taipei Performing Arts Center and what a cool idea the public loop through the building with unprecedented views of backstage activities was. But even as I wrote about it, I wondered if people would really enter the building and avail themselves of the opportunity, even with the entrance extending over the street.

I haven’t been to Taiwan, but if their behavior is even half that of their mainland brethren, there is a pretty good chance the public loop will be packed with people.

For the rest of us though, people are only slightly more likely to flock to our lovely public lounging places than to our formal performances unless they have a reason to do so. Often the biggest factor in that decision is just the physical location and layout.

If it is difficult to park nearby and the location isn’t conducive to foot traffic, people may not wander in during the day or come early to relax prior to a performance. Nor may they linger long afterwards if their drive is long and traffic problematic.

On the other hand, creativity and an eye for opportunity in your particular environment might provide a solution. I had a colleague whose performance space was too small for any sort of pre- and post show gatherings. However, an empty storefront with convenient access to the theater turned out to be great as a coffee lounge situation, provided a sense of greater activity on the street and put a little money in the property owner’s pocket.

It probably goes without saying that while it is a marked improvement to increase the number of people passing through and lingering in your public spaces, you still need to give them a reason to engage with your programming. It doesn’t matter how good the courtyard of the Harvard Museums are, they can still end up being a “static treasure house” if people don’t have any reason to pass through the next threshold.

Keeping Audience’s Minds At The Event

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David Dombrosky was the plenary speaker at the Ohio Arts Presenters Network conference I attended this week.

At one point in his presentation, he used a chart that seemed very familiar and my first impulse was to wonder where he had grabbed it from. As I peered closer, I realized it was from a white paper his company, InstantEncore had put out this summer that I had downloaded but hadn’t made time to read yet.

Attending a conference is an expensive way to catch up on your reading….

Drombrosky talked about the growing prevalence of mobile devices, how they are the primary mode in which people are interacting with websites and how this is changing people’s expectations about their arts experience.

Dombrosky spent a fair amount of time underscoring the importance of responsive web design, a common topic of conversation lately. Drew McManus has been a long time proponent of it in the arts.

Drombrosky’s talk focused on the experiences being offered audiences, before, during and after an event. While he did mention tweet seats in passing, he didn’t really advocate for providing that type of experience.

He spoke about using technology to maintain a long held philosophy about what it should mean to attend an arts event, namely that the audience should be leaving the real world behind for a time. He related the words of one of his university instructors who talked about people disconnecting from the troubles of the world and being funneled into the world being created in the performance hall.

The problem is now that people can reconnect with the troubles of the world too easily at intermission. He suggested thinking about what sort of content that could be offered to keep audiences connected with the event. Among his suggestions were online program notes (which might replace the need to print programs), trivia about the artist, links to videos, places where albums can be purchased/downloaded. Perhaps create a forum or hashtag related to the event where people can discuss their experiences.

The availability of these resources can help keep people engaged while they are at the performance and allow them to continue to be connected to the performance and your organization after the event if they wish to do so.

He mentioned the Austin Symphony Orchestra has an “ask the conductor” program where you can submit a question during the show and the conductor will return a response. (Though in reality it is probably someone standing next to the conductor transcribing his response, of course)

Apparently the Detroit Symphony Orchestra encouraged people to take selfies around the concerts which not only kept people engaged with the event, but changed the symphony board’s perception of the audience demographics.

I haven’t read the white paper InstantEncore produced, but from what Dombrowsky said, more details about these case studies are included in it.

Info You Can Use: When Is Your Arts Career Not A Hobby?

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There was a very interesting article on the Forbes website which explored the point at which the IRS determines your arts career is actually a job and not a hobby.

Since you can deduct job related expenses to a greater degree than hobby related expenses, the distinction is rather important to an artist.

And while a taxpayer may deduct expenses of a trade or business in excess of the profit earned by the business, thus generating a net loss, a hobby may only deduct its expenses to the extent of the profits of the activity; in other words, the hobby cannot generate a net loss.

The article author Tony Nitti, lists the 9 point test that the IRS uses the make the distinction. In the article he discusses a specific case where the IRS was challenging the filing of an artist and provides examples of how each question of the test would be applied in this case.

Later, he talks about how this particular artist’s career met the criteria of each of the test questions.

Something I found notable was that usually in these cases, a person has a steady job and then engages in a side activity which they subsidize with the income from their regular job.

In this artist’s case, she was an artist for about 20 years before she was hired on to the faculty of a college. The IRS was suggesting that her artistic career which preceded the steady job was the hobby.

This is one of the reasons I feel the article is valuable. For a great many practicing artists, this will be the path their career takes. It is only when they have proven their worth after some period of activity that they may be offered work on a consistent basis.

Now I should note, as Nitti does, that the reason the IRS was looking at this artist was because of the types of things she was claiming are expenses. That issue still has to be resolved in a separate hearing. Most artists probably shouldn’t worry about being targeted by the IRS.

The hearing about whether her artistic career was a career or a hobby has been completed. Nitti’s discussion about why her activities met the criteria is an important read. Even though this case addresses the career of a visual artist, it doesn’t take much effort to see how it applies to other disciplines.

Basically, if you keep adequate records, educate yourself about the market, consult with market experts, price your work to make a profit and have an expectation that work you are currently doing (which I suspect would apply to rehearsing and practicing) will eventually make a profit, then you might have a career as an artist!

Obviously it isn’t as simple as that summary so read the article.

Info You Can Use: Take A Look At The Broadway Books

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Though I don’t cite him very often, I keep an eye on the blog of Broadway producer Ken Davenport because he tends to ask questions about how Broadway can do a better job of serving the public.

We often see Broadway as a monolithic behemoth to whose gravitational pull most theaters are subject to some degree. It is interesting to see someone talking about how the business process in NYC might not be living up to its potential and gain insight into some of the inner workings.

In the next two weeks Davenport is going to conduct webinars breaking down the budgets of a Broadway show. These will be held on October 22 and 29, both from 7-8 pm EDT with a recording posted afterward. (my emphasis)

Over those two nights, I’ll walk you through my philosophies of budgeting, a strategy to make sure you come in under budget on every single one of your shows, and most importantly I will walk you through each and every line and page of an actual Broadway budget.

In other words, if a budget is the engine of a Broadway show, I’m going to pop the hood, take apart the motor piece by piece, and then put it back together again . . . so you not only understand how it works, but so you can build your own.

[…]

It’s going to be fun, and if you’re a numbers guy/gal, you’ll really love it. If you’re not a numbers guy/gal, well, all the more reason for you to sign up, because budgeting is where so many shows go wrong. It is the business blueprint of your production.

I emphasize this second to last sentence because even if you never think you will ever mount a Broadway show, this is an opportunity to have someone talk about a budgeting process for a performance.

For everyone who talks about transitioning away from the non-profit arts business model, this is a good opportunity to gain insight into what factors you need to consider in the commercial realm, even if you are already pondering a third (or fifth) alternative.

Info You Can Use: Change That Contract!

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I thought I would talk a little about performance contracts today. It may not have been in relation to performance contracts, but I recently read that many people are under the impression that when they receive a contract they either meet the conditions or no deal is possible.

This may be true for the terms of service presented with every computer app and service out there, but isn’t necessarily so in a great many areas of life.

The reality is that contracts for performances are often a lot like dating. There are non-negotiable conditions and then there is a lot of aspirational conditions reflecting an ideal scenario. Knowing which is which is a matter of experience, but you won’t get that experience until you start to ask.

For example, when we do Broadway shows, there are certain stage dimensions that the tour requires. Most of the time, we are pretty close, but if we aren’t we can still do the show. It is just that the production makes a decision about what set pieces will remain on the truck.

Similarly, nearly every Broadway show technical rider we receive asks for a 36 foot tall Genie lift and 2 sets of washers and dryers. We have a lift that can reach 19 feet and only one washer and dryer set. No one has ever balked about doing the show based on that.

There are some stages which will be too small to accommodate a show or lack sufficient equipment, but productions know that every venue is different and will undertake all sorts of contortions to make the show happen.

On the other hand, if they say you have to have 50 people with various qualifications onsite at 8:00 am to help unload and set up the stage, they mean it. They will either fine you for not having enough stagehands or stop constructing the set until enough people are present–often both.

These guys left a venue at 2 am the night before and arrived on your doorstep at 8 am and tonight they will be leaving at 2 am to start it all over again. They have little tolerance for situations which will make their job harder or more hazardous.

In terms of the legal content of the contract where it talks about liability, force majeure obligations and indemnifications, you might feel a little intimidated by the formality of the language and feel you have little recourse but to accept.

In fact, this is the place where you should be looking very closely to make sure you are not placed at a severe disadvantage. Most force majeure clauses I have seen are reasonable and equitable in acknowledging the impact of severe weather and other unavoidable emergencies. Then there are some where you could have a meteor smash into your building and you would have to make payment in full plus an additional inconvenience fee.

Be careful about taking a claim of “industry standard clause” at face value.  Ask colleagues or post a question on a discussion forum if you are uncertain or confused about a section of a contract.

However, there are people working at standardizing performance contracts. The Broadway League has created a form booking contract that now seems to accompany every tour of a Broadway show we present.

Given that these contracts are among the longest I deal with, having nine pages which is the same from show to show is a great boon. You make your changes, save it and send it along with every new show. Then you are only left with combing through four-five show specific pages and 15-20 pages of the tech rider. That may seem like a lot of work still remaining, but the nine pages of the form booking agreement tend to have most of the complicated legal language.

Don’t get overly worried if your changes to a contract make it look like a rainbow spiderweb of insertions, deletions, reversals and counter signatures. It is not uncommon for a contract to look something like the below.

contract capture

This is just a visual example of what a marked up contract might look like only. Most of the change notation placements make little logical or legal sense. I applied them very loosely and even obscured other parts of the contract. These are just examples of the type of notations that commonly appear on a contract and how crowded it might appear with deletions, additions and alternative language proposals.

The STET by the way means to reverse the change. It is often used to indicate that a person doesn’t agree with the change in its entirety and wants it restored to its previous state. (Which, it should be noted, may not necessarily be its original state.)

Every change that is made should be initialed and dated by both parties before either signs off on the contract. It is also wise to keep a clean copy of the original document and save each version of the contract as a separate file. I strongly suggest springing for Adobe Acrobat so you can edit PDF documents electronically and easily reverse them. Otherwise you will go crazy trying to replicate all the changes for every iteration.

Of course, there is no guarantee that your changes will be accepted. You should just feel you have an ability to negotiate reasonable conditions.

While this entry is only meant to address a small segment of contracting and to do so from the presenter point of view, I was considering using this as a basis for an entry for Drew McManus’ ArtsHacker project.

With that in mind, I would be interested in knowing what other information would make this or a related entry useful to a reader. What questions might you have?

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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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