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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.

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?

Same Old Library Building, Different Content

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CityLab had an article on the changing role of libraries in communities which was based on a longer piece about the Columbus (OH) Metropolitan Library (CML).

As I have mentioned before, I frequent my local library so often that the staff anticipates my needs (or they are stalking me) so I am a big fan of the institutions already.

What caught my attention was the informal survey the Columbus library did asking people on Facebook “to share five words describing their childhood libraries and five words describing how they imagine libraries two decades from now.”

The word clouds that resulted from this survey appear in both articles. While books, reading, information, research and learning figure heavily in the childhood word cloud, community, technology, information, entertainment, access and meeting emerge for the libraries of the future. While some of the childhood words lose their prominence in the vision of 20 years hence, their weight is still on par with strongest future concepts.

The Facebook survey CML used seems like an interesting exercise to engage in for trying to discern how your community sees their relationship with your organization changing. Paper or in person surveying might be required if you don’t have the 36,000 Facebook likes and 800,000 card carrying members that CML has.

The CityLab article uses CML’s results to complement a report released by the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries. Among the findings that CityLab emphasizes are:

People: The library must “shift away from building collections to building human capital.” This not only refers to the users of the public library but also its librarians, who will act as curators of the library’s content.

Place: The public library of the future is both a physical and virtual place. While the latter gets emphasized—perhaps overly so—in discussions about the future, the physical structure of the public library will remain vital to its community. But its purpose will change: “The physical library will become less about citizens checking out books and more about citizens engaging in the business of making their personal and civic identities.”

[…]

Platform: America’s public libraries should become community learning platforms. They should serve as a jumping-off point for users to create, learn, and innovate…

If this language about staff acting as curators; the role of space and how it is used; and providing a jumping-off point for creativity, innovation and learning sounds familiar, it is probably because the same concepts have been bubbling around conversations in relation to the arts.

So it may bear paying attention to what libraries are doing these days and consider whether it is worth partnering closely with them to reach common goals.

Everybody Gets To Learn From Their Mistakes

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An underlying theme of many of my posts has been about the importance of acknowledging that failure and mistakes are part of the artistic development process. A recent post by Justin Brady on The Creativity Cultivator reminds us that the same allowances need to be made across the whole of an organization.

Brady likens the situation to a type of corporate helicopter parenting:

He hired some brilliant people, but brilliant people are the result of many years of learning through failure. These brilliant employees weren’t aloud to perform the very human trait that made them brilliant to begin with: Judgement free failure and the freedom to fix and learn from that failure. Jim’s a great guy, and we all have blind spots, but his constant monitoring and willingness to “swoop in” and fix everything was making a culture where trust is more scarce than my dog’s obedience training when a guest comes over.

Employees pick up on patterns like this and begin to not even trust themselves. Upon the first sign of frustration they will just let Jim fix the problem. This creates a very “busy” culture, where Jim is constantly being pulled in every direction putting out fires. It also causes great employee to begin to resent their leader and each other.

Whether the back office is staffed by “true believers” of your discipline or not, the tolerant, patient culture has to permeate all levels of the organization and not stop at the studio/rehearsal hall door.

Encouraging those identified as artists/creatives to experiment and not be afraid of failure and holding everyone else to regimented procedures creates two classes of employees. Certainly different groups within the organization need to be treated differently according to their function, but if you view some jobs as disposable functions that anyone can do, then the result is likely to be disposable.

As I write this, I realize that one of the problems we are currently facing with two people who have rotated into our building is probably that they view their function as interchangeable with colleagues in other parts of the university. In fact, we keep telling them that the function they serve for us is important and noticed.

When you are hiring new staff, regardless of the position, you need to know that you are looking for the right person for your organization and you need to make the new hire aware of that fact as well. (Presumably those qualifications aren’t entirely a willingness to do the work of five for the pay of three-quarters of a person.) Then you have to do as Brady suggests and give them the room to fail and make things right for the organization.

All You Can Smile For Just $25!

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When the entertainment tax in Spain skyrocketed, attendance at shows fell precipitously. To lure people back, one comedy theater company instituted a program where people would only pay if they laughed. According to an article on Springwise, the seats were outfitted with cameras and facial recognition software.

Every time you laughed, the account associated with your seat is charged 30 euro cents. So that people wouldn’t intentionally restrain themselves as the show progressed, the charge was capped at 80 laughs or 24 Euros.

They also instituted a season ticket where you bought “laughs” rather than performances. Since other theaters around Spain are adopting this system, I wonder if the laughter season tickets are redeemable at any participating venue.

The video accompanying the article suggests a pay per cry for tragedy and a pay per WTF! when attending an avant garde piece.

While those last suggestions are a little tongue in cheek, the system helped the theater raise their income by $28,000 Euros over what was normally taken.

Now certainly this specific system isn’t suitable for all genres of performance. It wouldn’t work for symphony concerts unless you were charging for all the time people weren’t fidgeting, coughing or consulting their cellphones. (Though penalizing people for pulling out their cellphones does have a certain appeal!)

However, the general concept does answer what is often a significant barrier to participation in an unfamiliar experience–“What if I don’t like it?”

I also like the idea that you could purchase “experiences” that might be transferable from venue to venue. That way a state arts council or tourism board could sell experiences redeemable at all the arts organizations around the state.

Then if you lived near a museum, you could go in on one day and visit a couple galleries and only be charged per gallery you entered or by each work you viewed for more than a few minutes. You could come back a week later and visit another gallery. By the time you are finished, you feel you have gotten your money’s worth on your own schedule and didn’t have to pay multiple times for re-entry. (I am specifically thinking of the recent complaints about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s voluntary admission fee.)

All this being said, I am not sure how best to accomplish this operationally. If there is going to be pay for reaction, I think it has to be more streamlined and elegant than attaching iPads to the back of theater seats as seen in the video. Though I do see the value in allowing people to see themselves reacting and share it on social media, I would be concerned about damage or theft.

What might be viable are some sort of disposable medical sensor placed on the face to determine when muscles formed a smile or heart rate changed or when someone stood up and started dancing.

The more I think about this, the smarter I think it is. If you cap out the cost at the price you would have normally charged, if people reach or exceed that cap, there is quantitative data to back up the fact they enjoyed themselves…or that they got a bargain and should have paid more for enjoying themselves as much as they did.

Of Lab Mice and Men

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I was listening to the radio yesterday when they mentioned the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. I was amazed to learn the researchers had gained some insight in to how we navigate the world around us. The whole concept seems too ineffable to be grasped. But indeed the researchers gained at least a toehold on it.

What really got me was that this development was based on a discovery one of the researchers made in 1971 and then bolstered by a discovery the other two award recipients made in 2005.

Now I am sure each has experienced many other developments in their research and that these discoveries informed other areas of research. But it left me pondering at the patience and belief involved in scientific research to wait over 30 years for some other piece of research that complements and validates your own. Then wait nearly a decade more for people to vet both pieces of research and recognize the significance.

Again I am not saying this is the only thing the researchers have accomplished in their careers and that they only received validation when they were awarded the Noble Prize.

I just feel somewhat humbled by the idea that research is being done with the faith that it may contribute to a profound discovery.

Scientists and artists pursue their vocations differently so it isn’t fair to try to compare the two directly. Still, how many of us in the arts, practitioners and funders alike, are instilled with a vision of what we want to accomplish that spans decades and have the patience to see it through?

Certainly the arts operate much more reactively than science as times and tastes change.

When you are worried about next year’s funding, it can be difficult to cleave to a long term vision of where you want to be.

I am not sure if scientists have a grand master vision either rather than focusing on progressing from one project to the next. My perception is that there is a greater acknowledgment that progress takes time and there is a greater willingness to accord them that time.

On the other hand, artists can be sustained by a similar thought that a performance given today may plant seeds that manifest into something of international note decades down the road.

Why Here? Why Now?

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You may have seen that the St. Louis Symphony experienced a pop-up protest urging a change of attitude in light of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.

I have looked at reporting on this event on Huffington Post, NPR and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

None of them answered the biggest question that came to mind–Why did they choose to do this at a St. Louis Symphony concert? Are there people from Ferguson who attend the concert that they hoped to influence?

The Washington Post article quotes one of the organizers as saying they wanted to “speak to a segment of the population that has the luxury of being comfortable,..”

But I wondered if that was their only aim or if they are hoping for something more. It seems like a lot of effort to jar people out of the comfort zone.

My assumption, which may be incorrect, was that it was perceived that people of influence in general attend symphony concerts and the planners of this intermission event hoped to mobilize the attendees to act either directly or indirectly. Is this at least a partial acknowledgment that a symphony still wields some relevance?

Perhaps their aim was simply to reinforce their parting message that black lives matter.

I doubt the answers to any of these questions are clearcut because there are complicated issues of racial and social demographics and power dynamics entwined with Ferguson, the symphony attendees and the flash mob.

As to whether they were successful or not is a matter of gauging whether more people were applauding than were visibly displeased.

Two weeks ago I wrote about my participation in an NEA webinar that stressed the value of the arts in healing communities. As I watched the video of this flash mob today, I wondered if the St. Louis Symphony had been recruited to serve as a convener for a conversation without their knowledge.

Is this an opportunity for the St. Louis Symphony or some other arts organization to facilitate a conversation about the issues facing the greater community?

Wherein I Speak of Chocolate Chip Cookies and Zombies (But Mostly Cookies)

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My mother sent me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies today. This sort of thing has been going on for a few years. She has been finding these new cookie recipes which she swears are better than the old recipes and she sends them to me.

Frankly, I am not having it. Maybe it is due to the temperature differences en route to my house, but when I eat the cookies she mails me, I can’t believe she is claiming these are better than the ones I grew up on. It isn’t just the taste. The texture and general consistency of the cookies are all wrong.

I will eat other cookies, but when it comes time to make cookies to give to others, I am sticking to the old proven recipes in my book.

I am sure we all have something in our lives we are attached to in this manner. Something that we have an emotional attachment to for which we will accept no substitutes.

And maybe you can see where I am going with this. I bring this up to remind you that this is a powerful factor to contend with when we are trying to energize programming with new and challenging content.

Last week we opened the season with a guy who does a great job channeling Frank Sinatra who was joined by three guys who used to be in some of the Motown groups of the 60s. It was a great show and a lot of fun. I was dancing in the wings backstage. We had a great sized audience. As an opening show it really set the tone for the rest of the season.

As people left the performance they were telling me it was the best thing they had seen in a long time here. I have been hearing the same thing over the course of the last week. It hasn’t just been people who attended the show. Their friends and kids have been telling me they were told the same thing.

My perception is that it was a great show, but the best thing that has appeared here in a long time…I don’t know about that.

Though I admit I was backstage so I didn’t get the full impact of the show. Those guys all understood the power of showmanship and connecting with the audience so I don’t doubt everyone felt they had a quality experience.

We can talk about innovating our programs, educating and engaging audiences with new ideas. It is easy to forget that there is often a “homemade chocolate chip cookies” grade emotional attachment involved in some of the content we offer.

By no means do older audience members lack the interest and curiosity to participate in innovative approaches to art. They certainly have expectations of their experience that are rooted in the present.

But they also tend to have a much stronger emotional investment in their experience than younger audiences.

After the show last week, I received a call from a long time attendee who told me what he liked and disliked about the performance and then proceeded to complain about last season. One of his objections was to the profanity in West Side Story, a show that first hit Broadway over 50 years ago when this gentleman was in his 20s.

Yes, he may be a cranky old man that needs to recognize that honest portrayals of life include profanity. Maybe it isn’t healthy to be dwelling on gripes for 6+ months, but it is also a sign of an investment in what we do that isn’t exhibited by younger audiences.

It may be that we need to shift thinking and practices to engage younger audiences instead of being entrenched in practices of the past that appeal only to older audiences. But it also may be that societal dynamics have shifted to a place where it is unrealistic to expect that level of investment from people any longer.

Just think about how long bands like the Rolling Stones have endured. Then try to identify a group that has emerged in the last decade that has engendered a relationship with audiences that will sustain their zombie corpses.

Current efforts to sustain performing arts organizations may or may not correctly be compared to attempts to keep a corpse animated. I think we talk so much about the financial aspects of keeping an organization operational that it is easy to forget that it is more than just money keeping things going.

There is an emotional investment that accompanies the money and in some respects, it is much easier to find alternative sources of funding than it is to replace the value of that emotional investment.

The Arts Are For Swingers

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Do you ever sit in your office, thinking wistfully of the days when you were a kid and you would run around the playground, playing games and swinging on the swings?

Do you think your audience is thinking the same thing?

Well apparently some folks at Boston’s Convention Center were thinking along those lines because they built a temporary playground for adults on one of their lawns.

The playground is temporary because the convention center plans to expand on to that land in about 18 months. However, it is being used as something of a proof of concept testing ground.

The BCEC, Sasaki and Utile figured, why not test out some concepts for what should be the permanent park, further south on D Street towards residential South Boston?

The playground contains a “set of 20 lighted oval swings, bocce, ping pong, beanbag toss, Adirondack chairs, a sound stage, and open-air bar” and has become wildly popular.

Like the community ovens I wrote about a week or so ago, this is another idea for the type of thing that can be done to increase community engagement.

Now, according to one of the commenters on the article, the playground in Boston cost around $1.1 million which seems a little expensive for a project with an 18 month life span. Though maybe the equipment will migrate to the permanent park.

Many cities are seeing quick pop-up parks appearing on their streets.

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation in Philadelphia set up an amazing looking pop up park for the summer. It was slated to close September 1 but got extended an entire month due to popular demand.

Brooklyn’s Prospect Park has a pop-up Audubon program aimed at kids. Huntsville, AL will have activities popping up along their streets this month.

If you look at the pictures associated with each of the projects, you will see that they run the gamut from ambitiously expensive to simple and versatile.

Pop up events like this can be used to inspire community action as well as a tool for direct engagement. While reading about pop-ups, I learned that a community in Dallas dressed up a street with benches, trees and pop up shops for a day to provide evidence for its potential. (If you are looking to use this for community improvement, check out Better Block.)

One of the commenters on the Boston Convention Center park story shared this video of a fun installation on the streets of Montreal where people generated music as they played on the swings.

[vimeo 97090808 w=500 h=281]

Montreal’s 21 Swings (21 Balançoires) from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

Transform Into…SUPER THEATER!!!!!!!

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Andrew Taylor tweeted today that he would be speaking about theater spaces this week in Taipei and linked to a video of the Taipei Performing Arts Center.

At first I thought Andrew was going to be speaking there, but then realized the building hasn’t been completed yet.

Watching the video, I was interested to see that the design by Rem Koolhaas addresses many recent discussion points about how building design can either engage or alienate audiences. Starting at around 1:35 the video talks about how the street runs right into the building. Even more intriguing is the inclusion of a “Public Loop” which allows the general public to pass through and apparently peek in on the different performance and production work spaces around the building.

I imagine they would have to have some well trained staff present to prevent flash photography of a performance while allowing passersby to view what was transpiring. But more importantly than that, it seems to allow the public an opportunity to see what transpires backstage in the scene shop, costume shop and perhaps even in the fly system of a theater.

The public loop doesn’t seem to be comprised entirely of darkened hallways that visitors shuffle through. There appear to be open spaces where visitors can sit and relax for a time.

One element that came as a bit of a surprise was their “Super Theater” configuration mentioned around 4:30. It allows them to take down the walls between two of the spaces to create a massive warehouse like space. They cite the fact that B.A. Zimmerman’s Die Soldaten requires a 100 meter stage. (Yes, that is right, approximately the length of a football field.)

It may seem like a lot of construction expense to accommodate a niche use until you recall that productions like Sleep No More, The Donkey Show and their ilk use large open spaces like this.

The building exterior is rather strange looking and has its detractors. My immediate concern was if the difficulty and cost of transforming the building might make such a transformation more of an aspiration than a reality.

As I wrote this post, I recalled another transforming theater, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. It turns out that facility was also designed by Rem Koolhaas so his company has some experience with this process. As you can see in this video, it takes 11 stagehands six hours to transform that the Wyly Theatre. I imagine Taipei might require more people and closer to a day, but that probably isn’t an impediment.

I wrote about the design of the Wyly a few years back. As you can see in the video where Joshua Prince-Ramus explains the design, that building also highly flexible and has many engaging elements to it. It allows people to enter or exit through its very walls, or perhaps even sit outside and watch a performance (or rehearsal) inside.

In the context of all this, I am curious to learn what Andrew Taylor talks about in Taipei this week. Not to mention how successful the Taipei Performing Arts Center is at engaging their formal and informal audiences.

Artist conception of rival theater companies competing for market share
Artist conception of rival theater companies competing for market share

Community Now, Arts Education Later

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I listened in on an National Endowment for the Arts webinar today that was billed as addressing arts education. But the reality was, the speaker, Richard Harwood of the Harwood Institute seemed to feel arts education shouldn’t be a primary concern in most communities. From what I understood, he felt that the arts had much more immediate assets they could provide to communities and arts education was a focus for a later stage.

The NEA will post a more complete version of the webinar in a couple weeks. However, if you are interested in learning more immediately, there is a captioning transcript available of the session. I was monitoring it while I took notes of my own to help me keep up. Be warned that there are some omissions and mistakes. [NB the audio is now available online]

As a result, I will mostly be paraphrasing here unless I am confident that what I am quoting is reasonably accurate.

Harwood echoed part of the current conversation about making arts relevant in a community, namely that the focus has to be on the shared aspirations of the community and not on those of an individual organization or group of organizations.

He mentioned how he would often hear comments from people wondering why a program that worked for a community down the road didn’t work for their own. The reason is that you can’t borrow something from another community that is not aligned with the shared aspirations of your own.

“Communities that move forward the fastest are ones who align around shared aspirations, not simply coordination of programs…”

As he has traveled the country, Harwood said the number one issue he hears people mention isn’t foreclosure of homes, inability to pay college tuition or that they have lost their jobs. The top concern was that we need to restore our belief that we can come together to get things done.

Harwood strongly urged listeners

“…to think about what it is that enables us to create the belief we can come together to get things done. I think there are ways to change our efforts so we embody that belief. We need to pay attention to the narrative of our communities. I don’t need to tell you how important this is.”

Among the narratives that have to be worked against are the idea “we tried that 30 years ago, why would we try it again?” or “I am waiting for the next mayor to get elected.” He said that Americans have retreated from public life because “They didn’t see their reality reflected in public discourse. Belief starts with a notion something you care about that I care about matters.”

This was really the first time I heard someone talk about the challenge facing arts and arts education in the context of a societal malaise. Looking at it in this context, the cultural wars of that 80s that have seen a recent resurgence aren’t so much about people hating arts and culture. It is that arts and culture is being used as a whipping boy for something much larger.

In a sense, I think we all know that, but until Harwood spent close to 30 minutes talking about the problem without really mentioning the arts at all, I didn’t recognize that the tensions really aren’t about the arts at all. It is about a lack of trust and belief in one another. The way he talks about it, arts and culture have bigger contributions to make than providing music lessons and an enjoyable Friday date night. The arts can be instrumental in mending society.

He says every community has a multiplicity of competing narratives. The question isn’t how to resolve the competing narratives, but rather to illuminate them. Explore how we understand the narratives. What do the arts bring to them and what do arts bring to how people express these narratives.

He uses an example of Youngstown, OH where his company was brought in after the public schools were taken over by the state. As they engaged adults around education they heard that the adults were afraid of the kids. They crossed the street when they saw the young people. When they looked into the eyes of the children, they didn’t see the essential qualities needed to succeed. All they saw were troublemakers who would end up behind bars. They didn’t see them as the future of the community.

When they talked to the kids, they basically agreed that this was how the adults saw them. It is at this point that Harwood explicitly says that if we are really concerned about kids and arts education, the kids need to be engaged around who they want to be and how they see adults in their lives.

You might ask about arts education, but Harwood says he would never start with the arts. It is the job of the arts community to figure out how the arts can fit into what they want to become so they can reach their potential, become creative, innovative and express themselves.

Basically, you don’t try to figure out how to get them to fit into the arts.

When it comes to involving children and the arts, Harwood feel that what the arts offer that few others don’t is the power to convene. They have the power to bring people together in these conversations.

He says, (and I hope I am getting this correct because the transcript is a little spotty), he “thinks the arts, unlike a lot of other things, is not fundamentally about policy disputes. It is about creating something.” Due to this, he feels the whole focal point begins to shift because the fact art is about expression can help create norms for kids. Including the norm of what does it mean to create something.

He notes, arts deal with the whole child. So much else only deals with one piece so addressing the whole child can be a huge calling card for arts in education.

Obviously, a lot of interesting things to think about. As I suggest, putting arts education as part of a later step after other divisions have been healed shifted my perspective. I realized that culture wars conflict about the arts is really a symptom of something much bigger.

As narcissistic as many arts professionals may be, I think we can survive knowing it ain’t all about us in this case.

You Got Questions, We Got Answers

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Last Wednesday was Ask A Curator Day in which over 700 international museums participated, answering questions about their collections and museums in general.

The effort reminded me of an article I saw on The Guardian’s website last summer suggesting arts and cultural organizations use Reddit as a way to talk about their organization.

I will admit that other than viewing a few AMAs (Ask Me Anything) by notable folks over the course of a year, I don’t visit Reedit too much.

Which is not to say it wouldn’t be valuable for me to do so or be something more suitable to your circumstances than mine.

If you visit the Theatre reddit, you will see there are all sorts of messages from audition questions, advertisements, obituaries and a couple people mentioning Howard Sherman’s article about the high school teacher who got fired over Spamalot.

There are a number of related sub-reddits associated with theatre that provide discussions with a more specific focus.

One of the features the Guardian article really focuses on is the Ask Me Anything section where people make themselves available to have others ask questions of them. Right now at the top of the list is a Holocaust Survivor, a nun who help women victimized by the Lord’s Resistance Army and the actor Simon Pegg.

There are also EMTs from Pennsylvania, professional mountain bikers and an American kid playing football in England listed so the topics don’t have to be weighty or the participants famous in order to participate.

Reddit AMAs provide a better forum for Q&As than Twitter because there is more room and you don’t have responses scrolling up your screen as you and the participants type and the discussions can occur over time. You can provide a link to your AMA so that people know where to find you and they can view a record of the conversation when it is over if they are unable to participate during the scheduled period.

Let Them Bake Bread!

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At a loss about how to forge closer bonds between the community and your organization? Let them bake bread!

Not only do you have the example of Bread and Puppet Theater, to inspire you but there is a growing trend of communal ovens across the country.

I recently read an article about how such an oven was helping to revive a dilapidated park in Toronto.

This caused me to recall a seeing Braddock, PA Mayor John Braddock discuss a similar community oven his city set up. The oven was one of the cornerstones in the city’s plan to revitalize itself.

When I conducted a search to see where things stood now, I came across a story of a Torontonian studying nearby in Pittsburgh who was working on the Braddock oven as part of a fellowship.

If you read the article, you will see that like any project, a community oven isn’t quite as simple as it seems. The Braddock oven is being rebuilt/replaced because it isn’t as efficient as it could be. People have to be trained to use it correctly. The wood has to be seasoned and of the right type.

At the same time, the Canadian grad student, Shauna Kearns, has helped to forge community partnerships to get the rebuild accomplished.

With sustainability becoming an area of increased focus, (that was the basis of Shauna Kearns’ fellowship), participating/partnering in a community oven can be bolster organizational identity in the community.

Info You Can Use: You Can Hack Being An Arts Administrator

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Drew McManus is fulfilling one of my ambitions.

When I was first starting out this blog, I envisioned creating some sort of repository of information about arts and arts administration that people could consult.

It should be noted that I was unemployed when I started this blog nearly 11 years ago so I had a lot of time on my hands to be ambitious. That plan never panned out. Getting a job and getting really busy sort of diverted my focus from that.

However, despite being quite busy with his job as a consultant, Drew McManus has deluded concluded that trolling through 990 filings and evaluating the effectiveness of orchestra websites aren’t monopolizing enough of his time.

Drew has decided to create an Arts Administration version of Lifehacker. He is looking for people to be contributors to this effort. If you are interested, sign up on his website.

To my mind, everyone has something to contribute. If you are a student in college, you can contribute tips on engaging your friends and colleagues.

If you live outside the U.S. there are plenty of challenges we face in common and plenty of insights from your particular experiences that can be of value.

In that vein, I wanted to call attention to a course being offered free online by Stanford “How To Start A Start up” It is being hosted by Sam Altman of the venture firm Y Combinator. The course speakers are a who’s who of Silicon Valley.

It isn’t directly arts related, but there will obviously be some commonalities with arts business. Among the topics are building company culture, how to operate, how to manage and how to raise money. Everyone keeps talking about the need for a shift in thinking in the arts and this may spur some different approaches.

After learning about this class, I did a survey of all the Massive Open Online Courses being offered by different entities around the country -MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Coursera etc. No one offers anything related to arts administration that I could see. The only online arts administration program I am aware of is the Certified Performing Arts Executive program at University of New Orleans.

[N.B. Dang it! Nina Simon made a liar of me pointing out this course on arts innovation. It didn’t show up on my search because it started the day before.]

Given the lack of any centralized source of information, tips and tricks related to arts administration, a resource like the one Drew is proposing is sorely needed.

Please consider signing up to make a contribution. With your help, a lot of people will be able to hack being arts administrators

We Make Cancellations Look Easy

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It is fortunate that I am not often able to relate how I personally handled a crisis. However, we recently ran into a situation where we had a signed commitment for a show and the attraction backed out.

We were fortunate in that the event falls near the end of our season so we have plenty of time to communicate the change. In addition, we were able to replace it with another performance around the same date.

This sounds all very simple which is great for public relations because it appears that everything is being handled with grace and aplomb.

The reality is, you don’t realize the limitations of your ticketing software until you try to do a refund of one event on a subscription package. I am glad I had created a choose your own flex subscription package this year. Otherwise, our only option would have been to cancel all the seats for the subscriber and replace them with full price tickets–not something that maintains good relations with the audience.

Obviously, had it not existed already, we could have gone in an retroactively created a structure similar to what we had in place for the flex subscription.

The other issue is that now these people who got refunds are not recognized as subscribers by the ticketing system so their seats won’t automatically carry over to next season. We have had to keep track of those subscribers so that we can lock in their seats again next year.

I don’t list all this in order to vent my frustration at the ticketing system we use, but rather to illustrate some of the hurdles involved with problems like these. (I haven’t even mentioned the difficulties of trying to process cash refunds through a university system.)

The audience should never know about these problems. There was a moment where people in the box office were saying “Well, we will have to tell the subscribers that next year they will have to….” I emphasized the steps we would do instead so that the concept that asking for a refund might result in the loss of seats one held for 10 years was never introduced to the subscriber.

In order to inform our ticket buyers about the change, we sent out releases and went on the radio to make people aware of the substitution and ask them to watch their mail boxes for letters outlining their options. After the letters went out, we followed up a week later with an email mentioning the same options.

One positive element to this situation was that we could use the tickets we already issued for the replacement show. The ticket scanners will register them correctly. Since many people consult their tickets for the show dates, we included pre-printed stickers in the letters that could be placed over their tickets to remind them about the correct date.

Since most tickets to this event have been purchased by full season subscribers, we offered the option of either buying tickets to one of two non-season shows at a steep discount or receiving a refund.

Now my hope was that by putting the refund option last, we wouldn’t get a lot of people who wanted refunds. Out of the hundreds of tickets we have sold already, we have only had to refund around 10 which represents about 5-6 people, but that still is more than I would have liked personally.

My other goal in offering discount tickets was to generate good will and awareness. I figured there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy with the replacement show and wouldn’t want a refund. However, by apologizing for the inconvenience and offering a discount on other shows, we will hopefully rise in their estimation.

In addition, there have been some who were not aware that these shows weren’t part of their season subscription despite our efforts to differentiate them so the letter helped reinforce this.

We haven’t had too many people take advantage of the discounted tickets at this point. While I always want to be selling tickets, our immediate goal was to at least maintain goodwill.

One last thing we did was set a time limit on when you could request a refund or purchase discounted tickets. Since the show is more than 6 months away, we didn’t want to have a deluge of people calling for refunds a week before because they decided not to attend at the last minute. The date we set was 6 weeks after the letter was mailed out and I expect we will be flexible through a few weeks after.

Whether this stance ends up creating problems for us remains to be seen when the show arrives.

Not Ready For Some Football

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If you are wringing your hands over the difficulty you are having attracting students to your performances and events, you are not alone– university football programs are having difficulty, too.

An article on Inside Higher Education’s website reports some pretty significant drops in attendance by students at football games.

Student attendance at major college football games is declining across the country. By how much varies greatly at each institution, but a recent Wall Street Journal analysis of turnstile data at 50 public colleges with top football programs found that average student attendance is down more than 7 percent since 2009.

In 2013, the University of Georgia’s designated student section was nearly 40 percent empty. The University of California at Berkeley has sold about 1,000 fewer student season tickets this season than last year — a season that already saw a decline from the previous one. Since 2009, student attendance at the University of Florida has dropped 22 percent. Three-fourths of the University of Kansas’ student tickets went unused last season.

The article blames cold weather, lack of cellphone/wifi signals and alcohol in stadiums, along with the option to watch the game on a wide variety of media as reasons why attendance is dropping.

And by the way, none of these problems are new. A little over a year ago, Jon Silpayamanant wrote about the exact same attendance issues facing professional sports. Inside Higher Ed mentions that universities are using many of the same solutions the professional teams were adopting including more robust wi-fi, better access to food and beer, and more promotions and giveaways.

One of the concerns expressed about the lack of student attendance is the poor image it provides on television.

“Fundamentally, students are part of the show and that’s something that folks don’t always recognize,” Southall said. “If you watch a college sports telecast, where do the cameras go for in-crowd shots? The cameras are in the student section. If that section is not there, it’s like having a movie without enough extras to walk in the background of the shots. I always joke to my students, ‘You understand you’re paying to be extras. You’re just there for the show, so everyone else can keep consuming it.’ “

The long term concern is that disinterested students will become disinterested alumni who won’t support the athletic program and the university down the road.

As always when we talk about sports and the arts, there are a number of parallels here. One of the big one being the concern that the lack of interest/exposure as “kids” will translate into lack of investment as adults.

This article made me wonder about the real viability of Tweet Seats programs. If students aren’t motivated to attend a football game by the opportunity to be on television or, at the very least, being able to make “I am here participating” posts on social media sites, then are Tweet Seats programs really valuable as a way to attract and retain young audiences?

Given that many Tweet Seats program segregate social media users to their own section, the participants may feel even less engaged than students in a stadium surrounded by tens of thousands of others. (Though I suppose they could feel like they are part of an exclusive group if the environment is right.)

In the great battle of sports versus arts, among the advantages sports had were the ability to be a loud part of a large group at an event where the outcome was unknown. I found it somewhat worrisome that even with these advantages, sports were losing its audiences. What chance do the arts have then?

If you have been reading the results of audience research studies over the last decade or so, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the answer university athletic departments have arrived at is focusing on the audience’s experience, not on the “performance”.

“…according to a recent survey conducted by Ohio University’s Center for Sports Administration and stadium designer AECOM. The top three priorities for that spending — enhancing food and beverage options, premium seating, and connectivity — all focus on the experience of fans, rather than the players.”

May A Large Donation Destroy Your Rating!

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This story can’t be allowed to pass uncommented upon. Or at least, I feel the need to comment more extensively than did Thomas Cott when he tweeted this link.

In a case of damned if you have too much overhead and damned if you don’t have enough, ALS Association is in a panic about their rating as an effective charity due to the windfall they received thanks to the ice bucket challenges.

Since they didn’t expect such a surge in donations, they don’t have a plan formulated to use it. As a result, they are in danger of having their rating fall from a B+ to an F.

“You can get in trouble for having too much money in the bank,” said Daniel Borochoff, founder and president of Chicago-based CharityWatch, part of the American Institute of Philanthropy. “We want to see that there is a plan for spending down this money.”

[…]

Borochoff said having so much cash and no plan for what to do with that money could lead to an automatic F. Newhouse said those plans are in the works, which I ‘ve written about here in a separate post.

Concern over a potential downgrade lead ALS Association CEO Barbara Newhouse to take a peremptory step of writing to three rating agencies asking them not to penalize the association.

So let me get this straight. A commercial business makes five times their normal annual income and they are celebrated for it. Even if someone takes a close look at how this amazing feat was accomplished and sees something fishy, it is often difficult to get regulators, who wield legal authority, to take effective action. (Not to mention the business can sit on the cash as long as they want.)

However, a charity experiencing unprecedented largess starts to react with panic that the judgment of unofficial entities may result in bad will for them. This despite the fact that the process by which this funding is acquired is transparent, public and clearly unexpected.

The one glimmer of hope is that two of the three rating agencies she sent letters to, Guide Star and Charity Navigator, were signatories to the letter sent out last year urging donors not to use overhead ratio as a prime criteria for giving.

Hopefully there won’t be any problems for ALS Association as they consider their next move.

Otherwise, we may see spiteful people leveling the curse of prosperity in this post title.

How Green Is My Theater

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Last week we were having a conversation to create a repair and replacement plan based on life cycle expectations for our performing arts facility. Of course, there are already a number of issues that needed to be addressed with some immediacy. The head of facility operations mentioned that these days there is little funding to be had for capital improvements. The only way to get much needed repairs and upgrades accomplished is via energy savings performance contracts. (ESPC)

The wikipedia description I linked to about performance contracts being a program for federal government entities is a little narrow. Nearly every state has a similar program, (Oregon has a good description), for themselves and their municipalities and many companies with large physical plants can benefit from them as well.

The benefit of a performance contract is that there is no up front cost to your institution. The company doing the work takes out loans and guarantees that the project will save you money in energy costs. Over the course of 25 years, you pay off the contract with the money you save.

As to whether ESPCs might be an option for arts organizations, I have looked at the programs of about 4-5 states. Other than Oregon’s which suggests a minimum of $100,000 in annual energy bills, there isn’t any clear guidance about what level of energy expense is appropriate to undertake such a project. Presumably your current bills should be relatively high as should the potential for energy saving to make it worth the while of your organization and the company undertaking the work.

You don’t necessarily have to be a governmental entity to have the work done. A couple of the vendors who provide ESPCs list retail and libraries as potential customers. Granted, they may be thinking supermarkets and libraries in need of excellent climate control for their collections rather than clothing stores and my neighborhood library.

But I think about the power use of theaters in particular with all their stage lighting and the energy savings that can be realized. LED lighting still has some color temperature and control issues which make them unsuitable for some uses, but the improvements come very quickly. Many theaters can benefit from upgrading their general lighting and HVAC systems.

When I was working in Hawaii the lighting in our lobby, offices, scene shop and exterior were all replaced. The illumination levels went up and the power use dropped immensely. My only gripe was that even with diffusion filters, the LEDs in some of the exterior stairwells were so sharply defined that it felt like you were furtively moving between pools of light.

My state arts council just sent out a survey yesterday and one question was about how they could better serve my organization. It wasn’t until after I finished the survey that it occurred to me to wonder if state arts councils couldn’t act as coordinators and guarantors on energy savings performance contracts.

Since many foundations aren’t providing capital improvement funding any more, this might prove to be a viable alternative. If a single organization wouldn’t realize enough savings to make a contract worthwhile, perhaps serving the needs of two or more organizations in the same community would be. The organizations could then turn around and use their energy savings to pay off the arts council (if not the energy contractor).

I am not sure what would happen if the organization went out of business or moved before the contract was paid off, but I am sure those considerations are already included in contracts for hospitals and other businesses.

Obviously, I am not fully acquainted with all the details of ESPCs to know how viable this would be. However, given how energy efficiency is becoming an area of increasing concern, I would not be surprised at all if the incentives for upgrading systems improved so over the next 10 years that it became easy for many arts organizations to do.

[Title of the post comes from the novel and movie, How Green Was My Valley]

Hey Did You Hear About…

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I was really surprised to find my name tucked at the bottom of Barry Hessenius’ 2014’s Top 50 Most Powerful and Influential People in the Nonprofit Arts (USA) In fact, since I read his blog via Feedly and had caught up with my subscriptions on Saturday, I might not have read the post for another week if it weren’t for someone tweeting that Robert Bush from Charlotte’s Arts and Science Council made the list.

It’s not that I don’t think what I produce is worthwhile, it is just that I don’t perceive the old blog here as having that high a profile.

Now, of course, there is pressure to meet the standard set by the company I am listed in.

But Barry’s list dovetails nicely with the subject I intended to address today: cooperation and competition in the arts. Last month, Seth Godin observed that authors don’t compete with each other.

Yet, not only do authors get along, they spend time and energy blurbing each other’s books. Authors don’t try to eliminate others from the shelf, in fact, they seek out the most crowded shelves they can find to place their books. They eagerly pay to read what everyone else is writing…

Can you imagine Tim Cook at Apple giving a generous, positive blurb to an Android phone?

And yet authors do it all the time.

It’s one of the things I’ve always liked best about being a professional writer. The universal recognition that there’s plenty of room for more authors, and that more reading is better than less reading, even if what’s getting read isn’t ours.

It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an infinite game, one where we each seek to help ideas spread and lives change.

Even though the limits of funding, revenue generation opportunities and audience free time make existence as an arts organization or artist seem like a zero sum game, my experience starting about 15 years or so has been that arts people are generally pretty supportive of the work of colleagues in both word and action. They will tell their friends about interesting events and invite them along when they attend.

That hasn’t always been my experience. About 20 years ago, I feel like there was a lot more “us vs. them, we do the real art in this town” attitude. It has seemed over time the people I have worked with have espoused this view less and less.

Which isn’t to say that people aren’t envious of other organizations’ funding base; think other organization’s programming needs to be more diverse; think the annual awards ceremony for their community is all political; and aren’t befuddled by the more abstract and conceptual extremes of artistic expression.

Godin cites the intense rivalry of Pepsi and Coke as the antithesis of the relationship authors share. I mean, be honest. Haven’t you held your breath a moment when pouring Coke into a cup printed with a Pepsi logo, imagining the cup will melt? Have you ever mixed Pepsi and Coke together, standing at arm’s length expecting a reaction similar to dropping Mentos into a bottle of diet Coke, if not an explosion? That is how apparent the rivalry of the two companies is to the general public.

It would be hard to imagine Pepsi or Coke tweeting about members of other companies showing up on a list of the most influential and powerful people in the beverage industry.

But watch who calls attention to Barry Hessenius’ list over the next couple days. I bet you will find that the majority of those who do, don’t work for the same companies and organizations as those named. There may even be former employers and co-workers celebrating the attention someone has received. As Godin noted, there is a recognition that the success of one enhances the prestige and fortunes of the many.

Hey did you hear that Nina Simon, Laura Zabel and Donna Collins made the list?

Creativity for Creativity Sake

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You may have seen this recent piece in The New Yorker on creativity. My state arts council linked to it and now I see multiple others have as well.

Author Joshua Rothman asks, “How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing?”

That question gave me pause because in most of the posts I have done on the subject of creativity, it has almost always been about the product of creativity rather than the actual value of the process itself. I frequently invoke (as does Rothman) the IBM survey in which thousands of corporate CEOs said that creativity is one of the things they most highly value. I often talk about how the arts community can show their value to businesses, and by extension, the rest of the world via training and discussion of the creative process.

As Rothman points out, there was a time, (The Romantic period of Coleridge and Woodsworth), when there wasn’t an expectation that what was going on in your head would assume some demonstrable manifestation. (my emphasis)

It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age. We live in a consumer society premised on the idea of self-expression through novelty. We believe that we can find ourselves through the acquisition of new things…Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach. Even as this way of speaking aims to recast work as art, it suggests how much art has been recast as work: it’s now difficult to speak about creativity without also invoking a profession of some kind.

Even before I got to this paragraph near the end of the article, I started to think that we really aren’t allowed to make art for arts sake any more. There is both overt and subtle messaging that if your efforts aren’t advancing your career or marketable skills in some way, then it is frivolous.

It can absolutely be a lot of fun to try something new with the idea that you might be able to integrate it into your work. But how often do we allow ourselves to walk through mountain meadows and imagine making airplanes out of the flowers we see around us? If we allow ourselves to do that, how often is it being used to serve work in the sense of unleashing our creativity Rothman mentions: to surmount a creative block or as a vacation to refresh ourselves to go back to work bright eyed and clear headed?

Given the dynamics of our lives these days, I don’t know that we can ever return to the ideal state of the Romantics Rothman cites. In some sense, as a society we may be better off than the Romantics because more people have the leisure time to indulge their creativity than did in Coleridge’s day.

At the very least, we have the opportunity to open ourselves to fits of fancy and imagination. The exemplar that immediately popped to mind for me was when I was working in Hawaii and had the pleasure of driving Laurie Anderson around. She kept expressing her amazement at how blue the sky was. She may have noticed a dozen other things, but that is what sticks out in my memory. I was so struck by her enthusiasm, that I took her on a detour so I could share the panoramic vista of a scenic overlook with her.

First Cut Is The Deepest

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Nod to Thomas Cott for calling attention to a post on TRG blog about Mission versus business models.

I will cut right to the chase and say that I honed right in on their discussion of making a “cut list” of things to stop doing that are diverting resources and energy away from revenue generation.

If you’re a president, CEO, or executive director, you must align with your colleagues and focus your team on the sustainability of your business model and getting the revenue results that will support your mission. Insist on a “stop doing” list. Your non-profit status does not mean that you must exhaust staff time and resources with every initiative, regardless of return on investment.

They give examples of three theaters that have started focusing on audience retention in some fashion. Obviously, the area of focus could be anything.

I think the statements with the most impact were made in the comment section by Paul Botts.

During my years as a program director at an arts funder I adopted a habit that was driven by that “stop doing everything” idea. When presented with an organization’s new strategic plan my first question was always, “Tell me something which expresses your mission, which you could do and should do and really want to be doing, but which you aren’t going to do right now.”

If the response was a blank or shocked look then my feedback was that they didn’t have an actual plan they simply had a laundry list. If you haven’t made any actual choices then you haven’t done any real planning, etc.

Botts goes on to say that he follows up relating his own experience as managing director of an arts organization that tried to do everything their mission called for only to end up in bankruptcy. Even having gone through this uncomfortable experience, he still has to remind himself of lessons learned, indicating it is not an easy thing to keep yourself and your organization focused.

In the past I have often posted about diluting your efforts by adding programs as a way to chase foundation funding. But the situations TRG talks about are less clear cut and potentially more difficult to identify. The examples they give aren’t a matter of adding children matinees in order to get arts education funds. They talk about the Guthrie Theater deciding not to flyer the Mall of America in favor of focusing on getting first time attendees to come back for another visit.

Passing out flyers in a busy place is the sort of thing it is difficult to identify as a cut because it is a visible effort that looks like progress. It is the sort of thing audiences and board members will fault you for not doing in the face of declining attendance.

For some arts organizations, it might be the right strategy to increase attendance because the conversations accompanying the activity serve to increase a connection. In other communities, the connection may exist for as long as it takes to find a trashcan for the flyer.

The other thing that makes the cutting decision difficult is that there may be things that don’t appear to be effective because they are less public, more difficult to measure and might be among your organization’s least favorite activities. Just because you are really motivated to cut them may not mean it is constructive to do so.

Like a paper cut, what appears to be the least significant cut may tend to hurt the most.

Info You Can Use: Artists U

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Springboard for the Arts recently profiled Artists U, an artist lead, artist centered professional development and planning project.

The project started in Philadelphia and has spread to Baltimore and South Carolina. Since they train artist facilitators to lead workshops elsewhere, their sessions may be coming to a location near you.

Artists U grew out of founder Andrew Simonet’s observation that:

“I went to so many [professional development workshops for artists] when I started out and so much of it was useless,” Simonet says. Workshops were often run by arts professionals, not artists, who didn’t understand or address the real struggles that artists face.

After attending a Creative Capital Foundation development workshop, Simonet “says he was “blown away” by “how wrong artists are in their vision of the world.” So one of the focuses of the training sessions and part of the Artists U website is to change the thinking and practices which undermine artists’ efforts.

The website also has a free to download book, Making Your Life As An Artist which addresses these issues in greater depth.

I have only generally skimmed the book thus far, but a section that immediately caught my eye was suggestions on reframing the way you discuss your work so that it will be engaging rather than alienating to most human beings. This is an area in which every artist and arts organization needs to evaluate their practices.

Take a look..

modern dance
click to expand
figurative
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Eclipsed By Your Cause

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Two weeks ago my neighbors were gathered around their pool talking excitedly about doing the ice bucket challenge. One of the kids asked five or six times what ALS was throughout the conversation before someone answered, “Lou Gehrig’s disease or something like that.”

This was a good illustration for me about the hazards of having a cause explode in popularity. Often the symbols associated with the cause become valued more than the cause itself.

The Non-Profit Quarterly has been covering some of the skepticism that has been expressed about the long term usefulness of the social media trend.

Writing for Time, Jacob Davidson, whose father died of ALS, found the ice bucket campaign initially attractive, but then had misgivings. “When I looked closer, I became uneasy,” Davidson wrote. “No wonder it took me weeks to learn the Ice Bucket Challenge was linked to ALS. Most of its participants, including Kennedy and Today’s Matt Lauer, didn’t mention the disease at all. The chance to jump on the latest trend was an end in itself.”

Davidson also mentioned the somewhat negative structure of the campaign, that if you choose not to donate, you dump a bucket of ice water on your head. “The challenge even seems to be suggesting that being cold, wet, and uncomfortable is preferable to fighting ALS,” he noted. If the strategy of dumping cold water was meant to increase awareness of the disease, the strategy has a built-in contradiction: “ALS needs all the awareness it can get, but somehow I doubt many learned a whole lot from contextless tweets of wet celebs smiling and laughing,” he added.

Despite Stephen Hawking and having seen Pride of the Yankees, ALS might not be strongly on my radar if my father hadn’t died from it about 20 years ago. Even if that hadn’t been the case, I still would be a little concerned about how centered the campaign is on the self rather than the disease.

Seth Godin noted that about 90% of those mentioning the challenge or posting video/images of themselves taking the challenge haven’t donated. That is certainly their right.

He goes on to point out the double edge to the situation. Specifically that a positive impact has been to spread the word about a little known disease. (I guess Stephen Hawking isn’t famous enough himself.) The other point Godin makes is that it is normalizing charitable giving.

This has been great for ALS related charities which have seen more giving in a few months than they see in many years. Even if 90% aren’t giving, the 10% who are are having a significant impact for these organizations.

On the other hand, Godin points out that there are some things to watch out for:

1. Good causes in need of support are going to focus on adding the sizzle and ego and zing that gets an idea to spread, instead of focusing on the work. One thing we know about online virality is that what worked yesterday rarely works tomorrow. A new arms race begins, and in this case, it’s not one that benefits many. We end up developing, “an unprecedented website with a video walkthrough and internationally recognized infographics…” (actual email pitch I got while writing this post).

2. We might, instead of normalizing the actual effective giving of grants and donations, normalize slacktivism. It could easily turn out that we start to emotionally associate a click or a like or a mention as an actual form of causing change, not merely a way of amplifying a message that might lead to that action happening.

Along the lines of Godin’s mention of a fundraising arms race, Non Profit Quarterly quoted Emmanuel College research fellow William MacAskill who expressed concerns that flash could easily obscure the need to do due diligence on the recipients of a donation.

His second point more directly addresses the issue of the seriousness of the charitable decision, that such “donor-focused philanthropy…regards all causes as equal…We should reward the charities that we believe do the most good, not those that have the best marketing strategy, otherwise the most successful charities will be those that are best at soliciting funds, not those that are best at making the world a better place.”

Of course, the truth is people give to people, not organizations. To be a successful charity, you have to be good at both soliciting funds and making the world a better place.

I don’t think anyone would really mind if there was a groundswell of support that rallied attention to their cause, even if the attention didn’t translate into material support. Attention is extremely valuable. I can say with a high level of confidence that there are people in my community right now that speak well of my organization that don’t attend our events. If they inspire others to become involved, that is great for us.

The thing to watch out for is when the cause escapes your control and is co-opted for other purposes. Probably the biggest example of this is pinkwashing where companies use the goodwill of breast cancer awareness to sell products and burnish their image with little or no benefit going to breast cancer research.

Random Thoughts About Problems and Practices

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I got recruited at the last minute to teach a public speaking class this semester. After a week, I have already started to make my problem their problem.

I asked the students, in a time when technology adds so many distractions on top of everyday concerns, how did they see themselves rising above or breaking through the noise of these distractions to communicate what is important to them.

What would they do to connect with people and convince them to become invested in the same thing they are? Would they try to use the media that was providing to be so distracting or would they do something different to set them apart?

In many respects, people trying to advocate for early childhood education, political candidates and delivering a speech at a conference all face the same challenges as arts organizations do in terms of trying to find an effective method of communication. People are distracted by cell phones, watch content online, skip ads on a DVR, read fewer newspapers and magazines, all of which makes it difficult to target your message effectively.

My students didn’t have an answer. I have just gotten them started thinking about these issues. They may not be aware that it will be a recurring theme throughout the year.

Another little anecdote I wanted to share. Last week, the drama department held auditions for the first show. I asked one of the students to perform her monologue for my students today so they could get a sense of what it is all about. It seemed to be a good experience.

However, one thing I started to notice over the last year was that the cast list is no longer being posted on the call board. Everyone is contacted via email. I feel like this robs something from the process for the rest of the community. There is no opportunity for even those who didn’t audition to stop by the board to at least mentally celebrate with those who got cast and commiserate with those who didn’t.

I am sure email or text is much more efficient for the directors. They can inform people and get a response relatively quickly rather than having to continually check if someone swung by the call board to initial next to their name and then chase them down to find out if the lack of an initial meant the actor was too lazy to check or they were affronted to be offered a part they felt was beneath them.

But the situation makes it harder for a person like me who is interested and part of the arts community to get invested in the show. I can’t ask cast members how rehearsals are going in passing because I have no idea who is in the show. I am going to have to make an effort to find out.

When I do know someone has been cast, seeing them on the streets or at gatherings reinforces my association of them with the production and as an artist in general.

I wonder if not posting a cast list becomes one of those tiny changes that alters the dynamics for the performing arts. Without insiders closely invested in a production, does that weaken the bonds the general public feels with the arts since word of mouth from people with expertise becomes weaker?

Or am I just perceiving it that way because I haven’t been connected to anyone in the casts via social media like a normal person would be?

I’ll Make It Worth Your While To Quit…

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Back in January, I wrote about some of the intriguing aspects of Netflix’s human resource policies. One of these policies was that they provide generous severance packages to people they don’t feel are performing at a superior level. (Look for the reference to slide 22)

Back in April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent a letter to investors outlining his company’s policy to offer warehouse employees up to $5,000 if they decided to leave the company.

While the Amazon offer based on a voluntary decision, like Netflix the policy it is based on the idea that an employee who isn’t motivated or completely proficient at their job is a threat to the long term health of the company.

So the question for a lot of companies and organizations is, is there an employee whom you might wish would take advantage of this opportunity if it was presented to them? If the answer is yes, the question that follows is, then why do you keep them around?

For non-profits, the obvious answer probably is that there are a lot of things you can accomplish with that $5000. You can’t just tie up that much money for even a portion of your employees against the day they decide to quit.

The amount of the severance pay doesn’t matter. The whole premise behind Netflix and Amazon’s policy is that they stand to lose more than they will payout if an ineffective person remains with their company. Figure out what that number is for you over the course of 5 years or so, and you have your severance pay.

If your answer is that the person means well and is enthusiastic, then you have to consider if you are actually acting as a good steward of the trust and funding invested in you by your supporters by employing a person who is not operating at close to the potential of someone in that position.

If your answer is that they are willing to work at less than market rate so you save money, then the question might also be if you are subjecting your clientele to poorer treatment than they deserve in the name of saving money.

The hiring process is an expensive one in terms of time, money and other resources so no one wants to be engaging in a replacement search every few months. This all goes to underscore the importance of high quality human resources and hiring practices right from the outset so you are attracting and retaining the right people. If the local talent pool doesn’t appear strong enough, it might require identifying overlapping applicable skillsets possessed by people outside your immediate field.

Stuff To Ponder: When Not To Tell Your Story

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Createquity may be in reruns right now while they reorganize, but they have great timing. Today they featured a post from 2011 which was something of a complement to the post about pricing and story I made yesterday.

Where my post yesterday addressed using a resonant story to get people invested in paying a little more to participate in an arts event, Createquity featured a guest post by Margy Waller suggesting that when it comes to public funding for the arts, the lack of a publicized story might be the best bet.

Members of the public typically have positive feelings toward the arts, some quite strong. But how they think about the arts is shaped by a number of common default patterns that ultimately obscure a sense of shared responsibility in this area.

For example, it is natural and common for people who are not insiders to think of the arts in terms of entertainment. In fact, it’s how we want people to think when we are selling tickets or memberships. But, in this view, entertainment is a “luxury,” and the “market” will determine which arts offerings survive, based on people’s tastes as consumers of entertainment. Consequently, public support for the arts makes little sense, particularly when public funds are scarce.

Perceptions like these lead to conclusions that government funding, for instance, is frivolous or inappropriate. Even charitable giving can be undermined by these default perceptions.

The second paragraph aligns squarely with Seth Godin’s thoughts on pricing that “Some goods are difficult to understand before purchase and use, and most consumers undervalue them and treat them like commodities.” And later “In situations like this, our instinct is to assume that the thing is generic, a commodity, not worth extra.”

Waller suggests that given the perception that public support of the arts is frivolous, by making the fight to restore/increase funding public, arts organizations are choosing a battlefield where they are at a disadvantage.

Politicians can leverage public opinion that the arts are a luxury. When the conflict is covered by the media, it is in the context of a political fight rather than say, a matter of societal value, education and cultural identity.

Because the big fight in the default way of viewing the arts is very losable. And in our efforts, we’re forced to expand a precious resource: the time and energy of staff and key supporters who have to work so hard to convince public officials that they won’t suffer consequences in the next election.

Moreover, every time the fight is public, we’re likely to be reinforcing the dominant ways of thinking about the arts that are getting in our way now. When attacked, we rebut with facts, and the media covers the issue as a political fight with two equal sides – both seen through a lens that sets up the arts as a low priority on the public agenda. And as we know, this can have the effect of making people defensive and hardening existing positions. Of course, it should be no surprise that even officials who are friendly to arts funding are reluctant to be in the middle of that kind of coverage.

Waller suggests a strong, but quiet lobbying campaign, citing the success of just such an effort in Ohio. When you think about it, she has a valid point because quiet lobbying is exactly how plenty of entities who would prefer to avoid public resistance to their plans get things accomplished.

I am sure we can all envision some program that slipped by under our radar and we would prefer not to be associated with those sort of tactics. But the reality is, not every act of governance is preceded by a rancorous public debate. I am sure many arts supporters would be happy not to gird for battle every budget cycle if their goals could be accomplished quietly and efficiently.

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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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