Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management
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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.

We Need CRM Software To Manage Our Relationship With Our Own Creativity

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Dallas Museum of Art Deputy Director, Robert Stein recently made an argument about the value of museums, and by extension, the arts, as a counter to philosopher Peter Singer’s suggestion that philanthropic giving to the arts means that many more people are fated to remain disabled.

I was actually surprised to learn that Singer is a philosopher because it seemed to me that he was making clearly erroneous assumptions that those giving to the arts aren’t also giving to health and social causes as well. Likewise, it is incorrect to assume that absent the opportunity to give to the arts, all those only giving to that cause would choose to support health and social causes instead.

Indeed, I admittedly always assumed that given the choice between healing the sick and feeding the poor and funding the arts, the sick and poor would tend to win out. The fact Singer was essentially implying arts and culture held a greater allure for philanthropists made me wonder if there were appealing elements of arts and culture I was overlooking and needed to exploit more.

Now just because I find Singer’s approach to be weak doesn’t mean that arts organizations don’t have work to do in communicating their value. Stein’s piece is involved and makes a number of compelling arguments about how arts institutions need to position themselves and their value to the community.

In fact, I have ultimately decided to break up my original post and address different portions of Stein’s piece over the course of two days.

I was most drawn to the following concept:

Consider what could happen for a moment if Museums were able to document — like universities do — our creative alumni? With the technology currently at our disposal, why are we only so focused on patron management systems (CRM by another name) that track the money people donate to us? What if we focused instead on keeping a catalog and evidence of the creative imprint our audiences are exposed to and the impact they make on the world. Such a catalogue could effectively illustrate the museum’s imprint on the formation of creative ideas and creative professionals and their resulting innovation across a multitude of fields. This alumni creativity database could be a proof-text for the role of museums in the formation of creativity and a boon for fundraising linked to this important outcome.

This idea that arts organizations really needed to be assembling a database of cultural experiences as sophisticated as that in a customer relationship management system shook me because really, those experiences are the true assets of our organizations and many arts organizations allow their connection with them to dwindle once they pass.

We cross reference giving and attendance history, know where people like to sit, how they like to be addressed and what their social and professional relationships are. Many arts organizations can pull that information up in moments and spit out a report or mail merged letter tailored to a person’s interest.

But our creative record is often contained in banker boxes and file cabinets that we have to sift through for hours in order to derive any value from it. How many people can pull up the program, images, video, interviews, notes by the creative team/curators and feedback from event attendees in a short period of time?

We make statements about putting the art and artist at the center of our work, but do we really cherish and reflect on what we have done the way a child cherishes a favorite teddy bear and the way an adult wistfully remembers that teddy bear? Or is the work filed away alongside expense reports and tax returns and only pulled out for grant reports and anniversary displays?

Near the end of his piece Stein says,

Only by measuring and counting the difference we make in people will we live up to our potential to change lives. Without it, we risk being relegated to the periphery of contemporary society as mere treasure houses for the wealthy in need of a tax-break.

If we give up on the idea that we can know for sure that our museum makes a difference, then Peter Singer is right, we’re not worth supporting.

He is referring to a commitment to investigating the impact work on outsiders that experience it. But it occurs to me that there might be an element of “if you want someone to love you, you must first love yourself,” in all this. Maybe only by making the totality of our creativity, past and present, central to our focus can we really convince the world of our organization’s value to them.

Raising The Roof On Art Class

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This past weekend I went to my 5 year old niece’s gymnastics class. The school she goes to is apparently one of the country’s national training centers. The way things were laid out in the building, I wondered if a similar format in an arts academy might be conducive to generating interest and excitement in families about being involved in performing and visual arts.

Basically, pretty much all the activity in the school was on display and happening at once. The building was essentially a large warehouse space with mats down everywhere. Nearest to the entry area on the left side was an open space where gymnasts were practicing flips. On the right side were trampolines and balance beams.

Dead center of the room were pommel horses and rings with uneven bars nearby. There was a sort of divider across the middle of the room and beyond that were other balance beams, vaulting pits and other equipment you would know from the Olympics. To one side along the dividing line there was a loft platform with a sign indicating it was “kiddie world” or something along those lines.

As I said, pretty much every area was being used at the same time. They had groups starting every 5 minutes with stretches and then moving on to some section of the room to start learning.

My niece’s class was only about 30 minutes and my assumption was many of the higher level students had started much earlier and would be sticking around much longer. My guess would be that there was probably a flurry of activity for about two hours a night with families bringing young kids in for 30-60 minute classes and then the serious students had the place to themselves again.

What impressed me about the whole arrangement was that parents waiting for their kids in the raised observation gallery would be sitting there watching all this bustle of activity and could visualize their kids advancing around the room until they were executing the precise motions of the students along the back wall.

Or perhaps like me, they might be impressed by the number of boys enrolled in the program, having had no conception there were that many 10-14 year old boys interested in gymnastics. Not to mention that they would have the upper body strength to work on the rings at that age.

Sitting there, it was easy for me to envision classes in dance, improv, acting, painting and other activities all occurring before me. Perhaps they would be partitioned off from each other a little, but everything would be visible from the parents’ raised view. (I confess, I am not sure how musical instruments or voice might be effectively integrated, but I am sure a music educator could find an easy solution.)

The biggest plus in my mind was the opportunity to take arts classes of many disciplines out of closed classrooms and studios and put them on display all at once, providing information about all the options that are out there.

No one is going to mistakenly believe a great ability in an artistic discipline could be cultivated in a half hour class. On the other hand, kids can be fearless and impress you with their progress as my niece did for her mother and I.

An arts school that brought together all that energy and excitement with a little bursting of preconceived notions could create positive impressions for both parents and kids about the arts while both are at the start of their relationship. Maybe it results in increased attendance at arts events or the kids and parents taking additional arts classes later in life.

As a parent, in this scenario your experience with your kid’s class isn’t that dreaded recital. It is watching your kid have fun doing something. If they don’t appear to be having fun in that painting class, seeing that other kid having fun over at the dance class suggests an alternative. Maybe seeing other kids and parents having fun painting together makes you want to join in. (If only you can get your kid to want to take that instead of dance!)

Can You Increase Attendance By Raising Your Prices?

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Over the weekend I read a very interesting blog post by Nick Kokonas who implemented a system where people would buy tickets to his restaurants.

One of the problems he faced was that they were employing 3 people full time just to call people back and tell them there were no seats for Friday or Saturday at 8 pm. They were also losing a lot of money due to no-shows or partial no-shows because they couldn’t call their long waiting list of people to tell them they could be seated in 15 minutes.

What they did was create a demand based pricing structure with non-refundable tickets and put the whole system online. That way patrons could see exactly what was available and see that weekend nights were much more expensive than Tuesday nights and make decisions accordingly.

This creates a lot of transparency and trust with customers because the restaurant doesn’t have to overbook to hedge against no-shows and then divert people to the bar if more people keep their reservations than were anticipated.

They also differed their operations from other online services like Open Table. Most restaurants don’t put their entire seating online and customers have figured that out and call in to the restaurant anyway. Since Kokonas wanted to avoid paying his employees to say “No” all the time, they basically put everything they intended to offer online giving people no reason to call in and try to wheedle a seating.

Their no-shows dropped precipitously and even if only a partial table shows up, they have already collected the cost of the meal from them.

I should note, the restaurants offer a fixed menu so there is not a lot of variability in people’s orders. They do have one bar-restaurant with a more variable menu where they collect a $20 deposit which is applied against your bill and no-show dropped immensely there as well.

But reading this got me thinking– this is a situation where people pay a uniform price in advance to consume a similar product and the the result was a greatly reduced no-show rate.

This sounds lot like going to a live performance. Only when I have looked at the sales versus tickets taken at the door (or just eyeball the audience at a performance) I see more no-shows than I would like.

I wonder at the reasons behind this. It could be that many are subscribers and they forgot they had tickets for the show or they have decided this is the show in the series they are least interested in and want to skip it.

I know this doesn’t just happen to me because I have attended otherwise sold out performances where a significant swath of prime seating remains empty.

While subscribers have the right not to occupy the seats they have paid for, as conversations about demand pricing for seats at performances continue, you have to at least consider whether you are setting prices high enough.

This is absolutely a consideration at sold out performances where you might really have an opportunity to increase your earned revenue in the face of decreasing support from foundations and individuals.

It is also a consideration in less well attended performances where too low a price might not provide enough incentive for people to attend. I have seen a decision to go from free to a $5 charge fill performances. If you are intentionally keeping prices low so a target audience can attend and they buy tickets but don’t attend, then the effort is as much as failure as if high prices dissuaded their attendance.

There are dozens of other factors that can account for the difference in no-show rates between Kokonas’ restaurants and performance venues. The social cachet of eating at a high demand restaurant that only seats about 90 being a significant one.

Even without considering the success Kokonas’ has realized, there are dozens of factors that make ticket pricing decisions very difficult for arts organizations. Still, it is always interesting to see how pricing is used to good effect and ponder what lessons might be derived.

Could You Hurry Up And Get Delighted?

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Seth Godin had a post today reflecting on a woman he noticed in front row seats at a concert being given by jazz bassist Christian McBride. The woman was fidgeting, checking her watch and fiddling with stuff, entirely disengaged with the concert.

Says Godin:

McBride seemed to be too professional and too experienced to get brought down by her disrespect and disengagement. Here’s what he knew: It wasn’t about him, it wasn’t about the music, it wasn’t a response to what he was creating.
[…]
Do your work, your best work, the work that matters to you. For some people, you can say, “hey, it’s not for you.” That’s okay. If you try to delight the undelightable, you’ve made yourself miserable for no reason.

It’s sort of silly to make yourself miserable, but at least you ought to reserve it for times when you have a good reason.

We all know that ideally, this is the best philosophy to embrace. We know that the arts aren’t for everyone and that you have to allow people the time and space they need in order to eventually find that your work resonates with them. If it is going to resonate at all, that is.

But we don’t live in an ideal world and we receive a lot of messages that our audiences need to get it, and get it quick. This obviously manifests in ticket sales reports and the requirements of just plain old pride in wanting to have seats full of people enjoying themselves.

There is a lot of subtext that our funding depends on it as well. We are asked about the diversity of our audience. What are the numbers and percentages of racial groups, students and seniors?

Some times there is no subtext at all. I am currently working on a final grant report that asks what we did to engage the community to participate; what did or will we do to remove perceptual, practical and experiential barriers; what motivates patron, board members and volunteers; and to provide a first hand account of how the programming has made an impact on an individual or a group.

Faced with questions like that, you have a lot of motivation to start thinking your audience, board and volunteers need to experience something that moves them, and they need to have that moving experience during the current grant period.

Its no wonder we have ushers patrolling the aisles and glaring at people pulling out their iPhones. Not only can’t we afford to have the individual become disengaged from the performance, we need to make sure the glow of the phone isn’t constituting a perceptual or experiential barrier to a dozen other people around them. These are all black marks against us that our funders expect us to address.

Now as a practical matter, foundations aren’t infiltrating mystery shoppers into our audiences to make sure we are properly identifying these problems and proposing solutions in our final reports. Their questions are meant to inspire some self-examination in grant recipients about procedures and operations.

When heckling at a performance is unchallenged by house staff and results in the cancellation of the run as recently occurred in California, it signals the need for a review of procedures in event spaces across the country.

Questions like these on a grant report indicate the type of activity and outcomes that are valued in grant recipients. These expectations are somewhat in conflict with the long view non-profit arts organizations are enjoined to embrace in respect to cultivating their audiences.

When Christian McBride plays The Blue Note, the venue worries about whether they sold enough tickets, food and alcohol to cover costs. The Blue Note certainly wants all the patrons to have a good time and come back again, but they don’t concern themselves too much with whether people have attained a new level of personal growth.

When McBride plays at a non-profit arts center’s jazz series, the organization worries about all those things The Blue Note worries about, but also has to concern themselves about recognizing potential barriers to entry, the diversity of the audience and whether they have been inspired.

It can be something of a psychic burden to try to balance all the requirements of a non-profit existence. You have to be cool, put your best work out there and not worry about delighting the undelightable.

But at the same time, you wonder how you have failed that person. What barriers have you been complicit in maintaining? Is she really undelightable, or is that a convenient way for writing her off when you should be patient and try harder? How can you change your programming and outreach efforts so she feels engaged and included?

Finding The Cream of the Local Crop

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I attended an event at the local art museum which I thought was structured in an interesting way in terms of generating relationships between the museum, museum patrons and local artists— and making some money for the artists in the process.

The event was called “Cream of the Crop” and is run by the museum every other year. They invite artists within an 85 mile radius of the museum to submit works of art. Then, before the art is delivered, they ask people in the community to commit to spending a certain amount on purchasing a piece which they haven’t seen yet.

After the jury has decided what pieces get to be in the show and which won’t be included, those who have pledged to buy a piece are invited in to take a look and choose which pieces they wish to purchase.

The purchasers are allowed to peruse all the pieces that have been submitted, both those which have been chosen for the show and those which have not. So even if an artist’s piece doesn’t make it into the show, the experience can still be rewarding if their piece ends up selling.

I was one of those who committed to buy a piece this year and I can assure you, there were a number of pieces that didn’t make it in that were on my list of potential purchases. Inevitably, there were a number of pieces that were not included that I and others wondered at the reason why.

Last Friday was the opening of the show. People from the community, the artists who submitted and those who had purchased all gathered to review the works. There were ribbons by those pieces that were deemed the best of the show.

Different colored ribbons were placed next to the pieces that had been purchased which served to call some attention to those as well.

Unlike the conversations at openings for the work of one or two artists, most of the discussion at this opening revolved around the talent hidden in the local community. Given that most of the artists were present, the show held some surprises for people’s friends and neighbors.

On the whole, it was a good opportunity for local artists to showcase their work. Some of them were motivated to do only that. While it was required that every piece submitted be for sale, it was the artists that set the prices and it was clear from the amount being asked, there were some artists who had no intention of parting with their creation.

Unfortunately for some of the attendees, these were some of the more striking pieces. There were a couple works by one artist that people would stand before and mutter that they would buy it if it were priced at half of what it was.

This sort of event may be common at museums across the country and I just am not familiar with it. This isn’t the type of thing performing arts organizations can do because their product is ephemeral by design. Probably the closest parallel might be some form of fringe festival that restricted itself to performers residing in the region.

Though I guess there might be potential in having someone commit to buying a certain amount in tickets and then choose, via video, from among artists selected by a jury panel to perform. That might bump an artist to a larger venue than they might normally have performed in if they were selected by someone who committed enough to buy 200 seats.

Though hopefully the gracious patron could arrange to have them all filled. Few artists are satisfied with a lot of empty seats, regardless of how much they might be paid.

What I appreciated most about the museum event was that the structure got a different cross section of the community into the museum than normally attend the openings. The artists they were talking about reside locally rather than having been chosen from a distant place by curators. This reinforces the local connections as well as the concept that everyone as the potential to be an artist.

Secret Art In Minnesota

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The always cool people at Springboard for the Arts (and that isn’t a commentary on Minnesota weather) recently got to do a “TV Takeover” where they explained how they serve the artistic community in Minnesota. They chose the theme of “Your Secret Art” to emphasize the idea that a lot of people have artistic talent which may not immediately be apparent.

There were two parts of the show I liked, both dealing with “artists taking care of business.” At the 51 minute mark, artists talk about pricing their work and their initial reluctance to ask to be paid or to charge what they were really worth.

The artists that were interviewed note that it is natural to make the mistake of undervaluing your work, but that you need to quickly move past that. Pricing is not only based on your time and materials, but a result of doing market research and understanding how similar work is valued.

This was an important topic for artists and one that is rarely broached in interviews with artists about their careers.

The other part of the show I liked was at the 24 minute mark where artists talk about their work as a business. What really grabbed my attention was the statement made by Uri Sands of TU Dance in answer to the noisome assertion that art is not a profession because you love doing it. Sands says if you have a talent, you have a responsibility to your gift. It requires enormous work whether you are a mathematician, athlete or dancer.

Art requires more of him because he does love it. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have to think about it and could clock in/clock out. But because he loves it, thinking about dance inhabits all his free time as well.

I thought that was a fantastic answer because it is so absolutely true that artists often aren’t easily able to stop investing themselves in one part of their lives come 5:00 pm.

Visual artist Anna Metcalf talked about how valuable it was to refer to creating ceramics as her job. She spoke about having a business plan which helped her establish priorities and also legitimized her art practice as a business. It sounded to me as if this might provide her with a little self-discipline, but there also seemed to be a subtext that the frame work might help keep others from viewing her work as a hobby.

I couldn’t quite catch the name of the third artist interviewed in this segment. Even though she was surrounded by puppets, it sounded as if her practice encompassed many disciplines. Since I just wrote about mentors yesterday, her comment that when was was younger she assumed mentors would find her grabbed my attention.

She said that she now recognizes the need to seek out and cultivate people to be mentors. This made me realize that yesterday’s post really didn’t touch on the idea that you could have multiple mentors at anyone time and that it can be smart to cultivate relationships now with people who could potentially be a mentor in the future.

A corollary to the idea that not everyone is suited to be mentor is that not everyone is suited by knowledge or temperament to be a mentor at every stage of your career. You will outgrow some mentors and grow into others.

Springboard for the Arts and the people they serve are doing some pretty interesting things. I can be worth the time to watch the whole thing.

Either A Mentor or Mentee Be

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Since I am in the mood for suggesting what people should be re-evaluating professionally over the summer, I figured I might talk about finding a mentor today.

I actually don’t know if I have ever written on the subject before. There was an article for arts and culture professionals I found useful on The Guardian website back in March.

I think one of most important steps to take when seeking a mentor is discarding the “those who can’t, teach/if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich” mentality. As the article points out, just because someone is successful, it doesn’t mean they can be an effective mentor. Inversely, just because someone hasn’t achieved commercial recognition for their work, doesn’t mean they can’t be an effective mentor.

You see the truth of this most clearly in sports. There are plenty of coaches who weren’t elite athletes, but who have studied coaching and their specific field of endeavor closely enough that they produce effective teams and individuals.

And like a good coach, a good mentor will challenge you to push yourself in new, possibly uncomfortable directions.

It occurred to me as I was reading the article that I am unaware of any program that trains arts professionals to be good mentors for people outside the workplace. If you are in the position of mentoring someone in your workplace, some of your time is going to be devoted to teaching them to navigate the organization and contribute to the organization’s success.

Mentoring someone with whom you don’t already work is a different situation altogether. In some respects, it is a purer form of mentorship because you don’t have to concern yourself with workplace politics or being evaluated on how effective your mentee becomes.

When I read the article’s suggestion to:

“Also ensure the meeting ends with clear and positive actions. Importantly, as a mentee, make sure you do your homework, otherwise when you meet again you’ll end up going over the same ground.

I wasn’t sure I would have thought to formally establish a course of action to take prior to the next meeting with someone I was mentoring. Granted, every mentor relationship is different and some mentees may require concrete goal setting where others do not.

In the context of a shared work environment, goal setting is obvious. As I thought about it, I was not sure I would have immediately considered it as one of an assortment of tools a mentor could use to guide someone with whom they did not work.

Mentoring in the arts and culture field seems like a worthwhile topic for conference sessions, magazine articles or blog posts. Does anyone know of anyone who has effectively tackled the subject?

What Do You Know About Your Emails?

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If you are like me, you may be taking time this summer to re-evaluate some of your practices like email marketing. Last year, I came across an interesting set of email marketing myths.

Now I know, these sort of articles are pretty common so I did a search for similar stories and actually found this list popped up fairly frequently. That must mean this list of myths is true…or that they have a really good email mailing list. In either case, they must know what they are talking about, right?

Two of the “truths” that caught my eye were for myths 2 & 3 – 85% of opens happen within two days of receiving an email, but only 21% of purchases happen during that period. 32% happen two weeks after. And “20% of your annual openers do so after being inactive for 6 months.”

First, let me say for the record I can’t believe any company is actually ceasing to send me emails after I fail to respond or take action for 6 months. It is hard for me to believe any company thinks they should give up after 6 months and actually does it.

That said, the basic idea that people are engaged by your communication and your organization long after you might assume they are hearkens back to the research presented by Andrew McIntyre a few years back that indicated people often felt a close association with a company/arts organization even after 2-3 years of inactivity.

This is just another bit of evidence from a different quarter that reinforces the concept of not giving up hope that a person will continue their participation in your activities.

The facts for myths 4, 5 and 6 were interesting to me. The fact that fewer than 1 subscriber in 2000 will tag an email as spam was interesting me. I don’t think I ever tagged a non-Viagra related email as spam myself, but I always worry that recipients might be liberal with the spam button. I am less concerned now.

I was also surprised to learn “sending four emails a month instead of one doubles the number of consumers opening one or more emails..” Post author Mark Brownlow explains,

“Don’t get misled by changes to rates. All things being equal, if you double your frequency and average click rates drop 20% that’s a win.

1000 mails/month at 10% CTR = 100 clicks

2000 mails/month at 8% CTR = 160 clicks

The converse is also true. If you remove 60% of your list and see click rates double, you’re actually losing.

1000 mails at 10% CTR = 100 clicks

400 mails at 20% CTR = 80 clicks”

In responding to myth 6 about shorter subject lines being better, Brownlow encourages people focus on being efficient with subject lines, but give yourself permission to use whatever words are necessary to make your impact. The infographic presents some interesting data about subject lines – less than 60 characters increase opens, but those over 70 characters increase clicks.

Of course, as they say, your mileage may differ and you really need to pay attention to the characteristics of those you are reaching. Brownlow cautions in the comments section, “…Many recommendations are based on scenarios or averages that may not fit your particular situation. As you say, testing is important…”

If you are apt to dismiss the data in the infographic as not matching your experience, then you can’t cleave to the myths as being true in turn because they aren’t likely to be true for your situation either.

Even after decades of using email, it is extremely difficult to calibrate its use as a marketing tool because the way people use the technology is constantly evolving.

I am keeping one eye turned toward Adam Thurman over at Mission Paradox blog. Last month, he was looking for guinea pigs to test and provide feedback on his email marketing class. I am interested to see what he may have developed.

Was Your Show Like Sex, Drugs or a Punch In The Nose?

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I recently read about a study that analyzed the language used in restaurant reviews. They found that negative reviews often used the language of trauma. Positive reviews either used drug addiction terms for cheaper restaurants or sexual/sensual terms for more expensive restaurants.

It got me wondering what sort of terminology do people use when they have a positive or negative experience after an arts or cultural experience. Looking back over some surveys we have, I couldn’t see any patterns. I imagine it is because we have such a small sample size and often people aren’t very verbose with their responses, providing short commentary like “It was great!”

It would be interesting to see what the results might be from a literature review of past arts and culture surveys.

Even without such a study, there are some observations from the restaurant language study that might provide clues for arts and cultural organizations. For instance, people who wrote negative reviews really didn’t talk about the food as often as they commented about the experience. Reviewers used terms like “worst, rude, terrible, horrible, bad, awful, disgusting, attitude and mistake.”

According to the study authors,

“one–star reviews were overwhelmingly focused on narrating experiences of trauma rather than discussing food, both portraying the author as a victim and using first person plural to express solace in community.”

As mentioned earlier, the positive reviews were split in the types of terms they used. Addiction terminology was used for cheaper food that fell into a general category of sweet or starchy comfort type food purchased from a cafe, diner or food truck.

“…addiction, crave/craving, chocoholic, jonesing, binge/binging. It also includes phrases in which drugs are described as a metaphor (drug of choice, like a drug, new drug, favorite drug, etc.) and phrases describing food as the drug crack (including made of crack, food crack, edible crack, etc.).

Reviews would use the first person singular, “I”, showing a personal investment in the opinion.

Most terms used in more expensive sit down restaurants revolved more around sensual aspects of the food:

“erotic, food porn, lust, lusted, lusting, naughty, orgasm*, pornographic, seductive*, sensual*, sex*, sinful, sultry, tempt, temptation, tempting, voluptuous, wine porn.”

Reviews for more expensive restaurants tended to be longer and use more complex words.

In terms of negative reviews for arts and cultural events, we do know that the experience surrounding the event often plays a large factor in whether a person enjoys a performance. So if you are seeing language like that, positive or negative, it is something to pay close attention to. Even if they praise the ease of parking today, you know that might be an area of complaint if road construction impedes it next time around.

I am not sure sexual or addiction terminology in reviews is a dependable criteria for judging a review to be a positive one. However, the type and complexity of words used in a positive may give a hint as to whether your audience views your events as a guilty pleasure or a high value experience.

Or lack of complexity in a response could mean that people simply lack the knowledge and confidence to provide sophisticated commentary.

The language of decadence is used in relation to food 100 times a day for everything from a diet snack to a master chef’s entree on a cooking show. No one will really judge a person for making an inaccurate or uninformed evaluation of a cheap piece of chocolate.

But even if someone has watched every season of American Idol, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, etc, etc, they may not feel qualified to critically evaluate a performance the same way the judges on those shows do. Both the language and the practice of talking about these experiences is infrequent and uncommon for most people.

In fact, it is expected that you immediately express your delight upon eating something you approve of, but that you delay your response until an appropriate time at many performances.

The effusive vocabulary applied to a meal will probably never develop for a performance. Still, a closer reading of the terminology used in surveys, comments and lobby chatter might provide some insight.

Info You Can Use: Legal Tips

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A couple weeks ago, Gene Takagi of the Non-Profit Law Blog made a post cautioning lawyers about issues to consider when representing a nonprofit.

As you might imagine, every one of his tips were important for members of a non-profit board and leadership to know as well. Some of his traps and tips are frequent points of conversation in the non-profit arts community: don’t write a mission statement that is too restrictive; be sure you have a viable business plan and don’t assume non-profit status is your only option; boards members should be aware they have a very real governance role; non-profit doesn’t mean tax-exempt or no-profit; all overhead is not bad; get board and directors insurance.

There were also some topics that are less frequently discussed:

Traps
1. Failing to inform the client at the outset of representation that you represent the organization and not any individual directors or officers.

4. Including “non-voting directors” in the organization’s bylaws (under most states’ laws, there is no such thing as a “non-voting director” and, subject to very limited exceptions, each director has the right to vote on all matters before the board).

5. Providing in the bylaws that the board of directors may combine in-person votes at a meeting with email votes to take board actions.

6. Reinforcing the myth that nonprofits should always minimize overhead expenses (even at the expense of building an appropriate foundation on which to build the organization’s operations).

7. Failing to inform the client about the differences among volunteers, independent contractors, and employees, and the risks of misapplying these classifications.

10. Failing to discuss with the client the benefits of having organizational policies that address the legal and management implications of conflicts of interest, proper gift receipts, misuse of social media, expense reimbursements, acceptance of noncash gifts, document retention/destruction, and whistleblowers.

For me, that first one about the lawyer representing the organization and not you always strikes me as worth repeating. I have never had the ill-fortune of being in a situation where there was a even the whiff of legal action. However, when I am reviewing contract clauses that make me uneasy or am faced with a potentially contentious encounter, I will find myself thinking that the legal department will cover me if worse came to worse. Then I have to remind myself that in fact, they won’t necessarily have my back because they serve the interests of the organization, which may not include protecting me.

Point #5 about mixing in-person and email voting is a reference to a prohibition in California law. However, reading the rationale behind the illegality of such action, it seems reasonable to expect other states would have a similar restrictions.

Since I have heavily summarized his post, it is worth taking a look at everything Takagi cautions and advises for the legal health of a non-profit

Grant Panels Talk About The Best Ideas

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A couple weeks ago the Ohio State Arts Council streamed the deliberations of one of their grant panels. We had submitted an application for a new project so I decided to listen in.

The review started around 8 am and our application didn’t get addressed until around 3 pm, but by 10 am I had a pretty good idea that our application was going to fall short of the mark.

Even though I had run the application past the institutional grants person, there was a lot of silly omissions I could see we had made. By which I mean, we had the data or had envisioned activities as part of our discussions about the project—but we didn’t include it in the grant application. It was one of those cases of being so close to a project you were filling in the blanks and making leaps with your mind.

The problem is, the grant panel didn’t have the benefit of that knowledge or being mind readers. When our turn came, I took notes and now we will do better in the future.

Part of the intent of this post is to encourage people to listen into these deliberations, if available, to help you avoid the mistakes I made and just help improve your grant applications in general.

My other motivation was to encourage people to listen to these deliberations just so you can find out what colleagues in other locales are doing. I heard some really great ideas from the comfort of my office chair.

To some extent this is even more valuable than reading arts related blogs because grant review proceedings bring the details of diverse arts projects to one forum. Then you have people critique the idea, raising questions about things applicants possibly failed to consider, including whether they have been realistic about anticipating the resources and time that will be required.

Of course, you hear comments about what makes an application and an idea exciting to the grant panelists as well.

The one project that really caught my attention was the Highland Square neighborhood of Akron, Ohio’s proposal for their 3rd annual Porch Rokr and Art in the Square Festival.

They have over 100 performers appearing on the porches and front lawns of people throughout the community. You can see pictures from last October’s Festival on their Facebook page.

It appears they have a central area where visual and craft artists can sell their work as well.

This is the sort of event that strengthens ties and cultivates pride in a community

What To Do About Curtain Speeches?

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Last week I participated in a Twitter conversation about curtain calls and curtain speeches sponsored by HowlRound. They had the whole thing storified almost before I thought about doing it myself.

The hour went by so quickly and there were so many opinions on the matter, I figured it was a great topic to bring up on the old blog here.

I will start by stating my position on curtain speeches and am happy to have people argue for or against.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have a curtain speech. At worst, they are long, disorganized rambles that are often more about people giving money to support the organization than conducive to experience the audience is about to have.

That said, I see them as a necessary evil. I don’t see that as a contradiction, but rather as something of a corollary to the idea that the best king is the person who doesn’t want the job because they will be least intrusive in the people’s lives.

Many localities require fire exits, etc pointed out to audiences. Given that I have worked in locations that are tornado and earthquake prone, I feel it is important that such an announcement be made. People tend to pay more attention to a human than a recording so I will often do the curtain speech.

There is also the issue of reminding people to turn off cell phones, etc. I have seen great video announcements at movie theaters that get that point across, but those videos don’t often fit with the atmosphere of the evening and again since people will pay closer attention to a live person, I see it as another reason to do the speech.

But at least once a year I end up leaving it to the audio announcement because my presence prior to the show doesn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the event.

In the Twitter chat some people said they like curtain speeches that are made in the theme of the play. One of the most recent I saw had the actor playing the stern housekeeper in the show severely warning audience members about cell phones, etc.

I agree that this can be a clever device and hold attention, but sometimes it too clever by half and ends up detracting from the play itself when people associate the character with the person who made the curtain speech rather than with the role they play in the performance.

The other necessity I see associated with curtain speeches is supporting grants. Not only do you need to acknowledge sponsors and funders from the stage as well as in print, but granting organizations want hard number research. Again, it is more effective to have someone on stage enjoining people to fill out a survey than having it written somewhere or announced by a disembodied voice.

Some times it is just a matter of making people aware there is a meet and greet with the performers after the show. People miss the notice in the program and tend to be grateful for the opportunity. The more people attend, the better outreach attendance data for your grant report.

In some of my past posts I have written that I often use curtain speeches to forge connections with the community. They see me on stage and then I am in the lobby at intermission and the end of the show for them to deliver praise or complaints to.

As I have mentioned, I also try to impart some information about the show that people are unaware of that may enhance their enjoyment. This past year, I feel like my most successful attempts were talking about the impact of A Christmas Carol in shaping holiday traditions we take for granted and reminding people that The Miracle Worker only deals with the first of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan’s accomplishments.

Other curtain speeches aren’t as successful. It takes a little while to understand what information might resonate most with audiences.

I try to keep all this to 3-4 minutes and start right at the performance time so that the curtain speech is covering the stragglers in the audience who are trying to find their seats. That way my delay and the interruption of late comers cancel one another out.

If I didn’t do my speech, the audience would still be disturbed by those latecomers, so better they have my entertaining presence to focus on. The important element of this strategy is to get house management to give the go ahead for the speech when they estimate there are only about 2-3 minutes worth of people left in the lobby.

To make the curtain speech quick, effective, informative and not negatively impact audience enjoyment takes some work. I think the reason why people hate curtain speeches is due to the lack of preparation by those who do them. The reality is, the curtain speech is as much a tone setting first impression as the interaction a customer has with your ticket office staff or office receptionist. Equal attention must be paid.

I am often jotting notes about a performance in a Word document months before the event. Some will be part of a social media post, some will be part of a press release and some will be part of the curtain speech for that show. I usually have a good idea about what I am going to say a few days before the performance. I am waiting in the wings 5-10 minutes before the show starts staring at the floor going over what I intend to say.

Sometimes it is great and sometimes I screw up a little because I try to speak extemporaneously with only a few jotted notes. The goal is always to get a little better, a little more engaging and a little more adept each time.

Things you will notice I have not included: fundraising pleas and promoting other shows. Certain times of the year I might mention one of these topics- i.e. Telling people when to expect the new subscription brochure at the closing show of the current season. I don’t make it a habit to regularly talk about future shows because it can undermine the current show if I am praising the next show on the schedule. (Hamlet will be amazing! Oh, and enjoy tonight’s show…)

There are a lot of great thoughts in the chat. I didn’t see half of them when the discussion was in progress.

What do you think? Can any of this be handled more effectively some other way?

Stop The Plane, I Want To Get Off

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I apologize for the lack of posts last week. I learned about a death in the family the Friday before last and I didn’t have an opportunity to schedule posts to cover my absence.

On my flight back I missed a connection and spent the night sleeping on the floor in O’Hare airport. The initial cause was a weather delay, but it was exacerbated by some other incidents. When we were queued up to take off, we pulled out of line because of weather over Chicago. Shortly thereafter, a guy in front of me started mouthing off to the flight attendants. As a result, we rolled back to the gate and he was put off the plane. The captain announced anyone else who wanted to get off could.

Then we rolled back to the holding area and after 10-15 minutes, the captain comes on and says someone else wants to get off the plane. We roll back to the gate and this time a number of people choose to get off. Finding the luggage for everyone who had left took a long time. As soon as we were done (and watched the safety video for the 3rd time) we basically rolled right from the gate to the runway and took off.

Even though my connecting flight had been delayed in taking off, I still arrived a half hour after it left and ended up sleeping in the airport due to a lack of available hotel rooms and rental cars.

The question I pondered as I eyed my name inching up on the standby queue was what this willingness to go back to the gate twice portends for customer expectations and demands in the future. I understand the security concerns associated a hostile passenger that had us return to the gate the first time, the second return seemed to be motivated more by a simple request.

I wonder at the calculus that made returning to the gate a second time and potentially adding to the mass of people stranded at an airport and the ill will that would generate seem preferable to getting in the air at the first possibility.

Worse, I wondered about what sort of precedent this would set for future flights I might take if people felt they had license to request a return to the gate when they got tired of waiting for the plane to take off.

What is the possible impact of airlines making these decisions upon the changing expectations of our audiences?

One statement I heard at a seminar on customer service that always made sense to me was that no customer really wants their money back. That is just the easiest and most assumed option thanks to repeated claims of “satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back.”

But who spends time and money driving/flying somewhere, renting a hotel, getting a babysitter, paying for meals and making whatever other arrangements are required to reach a destination or purchase a product, assured by the knowledge that they can always get their money back if they are dissatisfied?

They go to all this trouble because they expect to have a problem free experience. Giving them their money back doesn’t really compensate for all the other expenses and effort that was required. So if you are the source of disappointment, you should work to make the situation better and hold the refund for later when other options have been exhausted.

In some respects, the returning to the gate is a better solution than giving money back. But my feeling is that if they made being on the plane a more comfortable, positive situation to start with, people would be less interested in getting off. It is a sorry state of affairs when getting off and going nowhere is viewed as the preferred option.

The same is likely true of attendance at performing and visual arts events.

But this is where buying things online and receiving your entertainment in your house is so attractive. You don’t have to make the time and financial investment required for a destination based product or experience. If you are not satisfied, you can ask for your money back. You may not be entirely happy, but at least you don’t feel the bad experience has cost you in other areas.

My concern about the impact of this “go back to the gate” practice is less about people thinking they can get up and leave whenever they want to if they are dissatisfied. That practice is decades old. My worry is that this advances the idea of individual desires over the good of the collective group and will manifest in ways worse than people talking and texting on phones during a performance.

Do You Underestimate The Customer’s Journey?

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Inc Magazine recently had an article of 100 Great Questions Every Entrepreneur Should Ask. As you might imagine, there was a lot in the list that have relevance to non-profit organizations.

Some deal with topics that continually arise in conversations about the arts like relevance; allowing a pursuit of funding to divert the organization from its mission; and what metrics are being used to define success.

1 How can we become the company that would put us out of business? -Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group

2 Are we relevant? Will we be relevant five years from now? Ten? -Debra Kaye, innovation consultant and author

52. If our company went out of business tomorrow, would anyone who doesn’t get a paycheck here care? -Dan Pink

6. What trophy do we want on our mantle? – Marcy Massura, a digital marketer and brand strategist at MSL Group
Massura explains, “Not every business determines success the same way.Is growth most important to you? Profitability? Stability?”

7. Do we have bad profits? -Jonathan L. Byrnes, author and senior lecturer at MIT
Byrnes explains, “Some investments look attractive, but they also take the company’s capital and focus away from its main line of business.”

8. What counts that we are not counting? -Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality and head of global hospitality for Airbnb
Conley explains, “In any business, we measure cash flow, profitability, and a few other key metrics. But what are the tangible and intangible assets that we have no means of measuring, but that truly differentiate our business? These may be things like the company’s reputation, employee engagement, and the brand’s emotional resonance with people inside and outside the business.”

Others focus on customers/audiences.

10. Are we paying enough attention to the partners our company depends on to succeed? -Ron Adner, author and professor at Tuck School of Business
Adner explains, “Even companies that execute well themselves are vulnerable to the missteps of suppliers, distributors, and others.”

17. Which customers can’t participate in our market because they lack skills, wealth, or convenient access to existing solutions? -Clayton Christensen, author, Harvard Business School professor, and co-founder of Innosight

21. Who, on the executive team or the board, has spoken to a customer recently? -James Champy, author and management expert

32. Do we underestimate the customer’s journey? -Matt Dixon, author and executive director of research at CEB
Dixon explains, “Often, companies don’t understand the entirety of the customer’s experience and how many channels may have already failed them. They don’t understand that the customer goes to the website first, pokes around but can’t find the answer to their question, and then tries to start up a chat with an agent, only to get frustrated by the delayed response. Only then do they go to the Contact Us tab and call. From the company’s perspective, the call is square one. The customer sees it as, you’ve already wasted 15 minutes of my time.”

62. Do we say “no” to customers for no reason? -Matt Dixon
You may have created your customer policies at a time when you lacked resources, technology wasn’t up-to-snuff, or low service levels were the industry norm. Have those circumstances changed? If so, your customer policies should change to

Number 17 needs no explanation. I actually was somewhat reassured by the fact that for-profit business faced the same challenges about education/skills, access and wealth that non-profit arts organizations do.

I was drawn to #32 because it is so easy to be unaware of all the hurdles a customer faces when dealing with you.

Number 62 also strongly grabbed my attention because it emphasizes the need to constantly revisit and revise your policy. It had particular significance to me because I recently discovered that a practice I assumed was due to technical limitations was erroneous, and was in fact just a matter of history and habit. As a result, we will be selling new subscriptions two weeks earlier this year than in the past.

Number 10 I read both as not giving customers what they need to have a successful experience, but related to partners and colleagues as well. Are you paying attention to the health of businesses you depend on as well as that of other arts organizations in the community? Even if they are doing fine, could more clearly communicating your needs to them lead to a more efficient outcome for both of you? Could mutually beneficial partnerships result, strengthening both organizations?

Some of the question were focused on strengthening your company internally in terms of thinking, planning and self/employee development.

3. If energy were free, what would we do differently? -Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos
Hsieh explains, “This is a thought experiment to see how you would reconfigure the business if you had different resources available or knew that different resources would one day become available. Another question might be, what if storage was free? Or what if labor costs half as much or twice as much?”

9. In the past few months, what is the smallest change we have made that has had the biggest positive result? What was it about that small change that produced the large return? -Robert Cialdini, author and professor emeritus of marketing and psychology at Arizona State University

16. If no one would ever find out about my accomplishments, how would I lead differently? -Adam Grant, author and professor at Wharton

22. Did my employees make progress today? -Teresa Amabile, author and Harvard Business School professor
Amabile explains, “Forward momentum in employees’ work has the greatest positive impact on their motivation.”

37. Am I failing differently each time? -David Kelley, founder, IDEO

The last one about embracing failure is a familiar topic of discussion even in the arts community today.

These last few (though there are many like them in the article) remind business leaders to be introspective of themselves and their companies. It is easy to overlook things like the change that made the biggest impact, or even attribute the impact to something else unless you stop and think about the true source. Certainly paying attention to progress of employees is one way small changes can manifest as big impacts over the course of a few months.

Perhaps the toughest of these last handful of questions is #16 because it challenges you set aside your ego in order to be a more effective leader.

The Tao of Data

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Following a little on the theme of my post last week about being well-rounded, The Drucker Exchange recently had a post about balancing quantitative and qualitative mindsets.

Because there is such a focus on the quantitative these days with people encouraged to enter STEM fields and schools’ value being judged on the basis of test results, the arts community has been pushing back by touting the value of the arts. Though often it is in the context of these same quantitative measures: test scores, economic impact and earnings.

The Drucker Exchange post, as well as the Wall Street Journal column by Thomas Davenport that inspired it, note that like the peanut butter and chocolate of a Reese’s cup (my metaphor), quantitative and qualitative are most effective together.

Despite years of work at providing both knowledge and quantitative analysis to decision-makers, there is scant evidence that we have really improved decisions—so we have our work cut out for us.

At heart I think the historical separation of knowledge and numbers people is a “Two Culture” problem, made famous by C.P. Snow. Knowledge management people are humanities/liberal arts types, and analytics people are math/science types. We need to get them together, however. Almost all key domains of business–including customer insights, understanding the broader business and economic climate, and various approaches to performance improvement—involve both qualitative and quantitative content. The best decisions and the best organizations will make effective use of both.

In my post last week, I suggested that the scientists quoted in the Salon article felt their scientific investigations were enhance by their artistic pursuits. Peter Drucker apparently said much the same thing, but observed the same is true for someone in the humanities in relation to science.

“We will have to demand of the scientifically trained man that he again become a humanist; otherwise he will lack the knowledge and perception needed to make his science effective, indeed to make it truly scientific,” Drucker warned. “We will have to demand of the humanist that he acquire an understanding of science, or else his humanities will be irrelevant and ineffectual.”

From time to time, I also write about what value arts organizations might bring to businesses. Thomas Davenport talks about how people with the qualitative mindset can help the analytically minded tell a clearer story about their data.

Knowledge people are good at dealing with text, and some would probably be able to extend their skills into text mining and analytics. Knowledge management practitioners are also good at capturing insights, and there are many analytical assumptions and results that are never recorded. It’s also likely that some good knowledge analysts could help quants “tell a story with data,” which is something almost every organization is looking for these days.

The companies Davenport is talking about would employ such people full time so it wouldn’t be an opportunity an arts organization could do on the side. Though it certainly points to possible career opportunities for those with a liberal or fine arts background.

Something along these lines could provide a coaching/advisory opportunity on a smaller scale for arts organizations. Ultimately, thinking about how you can help a business tell the story of their data will probably help a non-profit organization do a better job telling the story of their own data on grant applications and marketing materials.

Arts organizations are probably all too close to their own data and tend to see grant reports as a chore. Helping a company in an unrelated field tell their story for an entirely different purpose could cause a shift in perspective that increases their effectiveness in talking about themselves.

Impressive Debut (a.k.a Draft #250)

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Seth Godin had a post today about origin stories, noting that each of the successes he cites has a different origin story. They didn’t follow the same path as someone else to achieve wide spread recognition.

That reminded me of a similar passage in one of Joseph Campbell’s books where he recalls a particular story about King Arthur and his knights setting out on their Grail Quest.

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

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

I have actually used this quote before, but it has been about 7 years. It is far overdue to be mentioned again.

One of the toughest things about running a business of any sort is being able to balance between embracing best practices and slavishly replicating case studies in success.

Following best practices prevents you from wasting valuable time and energy developing processes and repeating the mistakes someone else has already encountered and overcome.

On the other hand, attempting to replicate someone else’s wild success by imposing their apparent development framework/pathway upon your own company will probably have the same uncomfortable, non-productive results as trying to wedge your feet into their custom built shoes.

Part of the problem is that even when the founders of the wildly successful company talk about their path to prosperity, they aren’t telling you the full story of all the dynamics at play. They may not be entirely aware of all the factors that fed into their success, or they are ignoring and omitting some details that don’t make for a good founding mythology.

In the opening segment of a This American Life episode titled, Origin Story, they discuss the “started in a garage” mythology for companies like Hewlett-Packard (whose origin Godin cites) and Apple.

Ira Glass
This is from a promotional video that Hewlett-Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started what is now the largest technology firm in the world.

Dan Heath
In 1938, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company. They had a few hand-operated punches, a used Sears Roebuck drill press that had just made the trip west in the back of one of their cars, and they had a rented flat with a garage.

[…]

Ira Glass
Even Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard weren’t exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and at Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Litton Engineering. He let them use equipment that they didn’t own themselves yet. Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett-Packard when they started Apple in Job’s garage.

Pino Audia
And, for example, in the case of Steve Jobs, he benefited greatly from the support that he got from the Atari people, because they introduced him to investors.

If you listen to those first few minutes of the episode or read the transcript, you’ll see that a bit of romance gets injected into the founding stories of a lot of companies.

This is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of sweat and creativity invested in getting these companies off the ground. Just like the hot new artist that explodes on the scene, no one really talks about the years of testing, revision, hustle and lucky breaks that went into the impressive debut (a.k.a Draft #250).

There is a lot of valuable advice you can take by paying attention to someone else’s process- performing due diligence, avoiding undesireable contract stipulations, generating appropriate plans and budgets and being bold with marketing plans.

Just don’t expect to achieve the same results by following exactly the same steps as someone else. You have no idea who or what conditions may have been helping mount those steps. Ultimately, you might be better off carving your own steps or even rappelling down an entirely different mountain instead of trying to climb behind someone else. (Or simply ignore vague metaphors about achieving things altogether.)

Are The Creatives Among Us?

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One situation I meant to acknowledge in my post yesterday about whether proximity to others doing creative work spurred your own innovation was (for want of a better term) Steve Jobs’ design of Pixar’s studios.

In short, he had the restrooms and other important building features placed in a central hub so that people from different parts of the company would run into each other. About a year ago I wrote a little about other arrangements that replicate this basic idea.

Richard Florida has been writing a series of five articles for The Atlantic Cities on different types of economic segregation in metro areas around the country.

Today he made his final post on the places where creative class workers are segregated from everyone else. Even if you are skeptical about Florida’s theories about creative class bolstering the economies of different communities, the research results are interesting to consider. I had never even thought about segregation of creatives as a problematic condition.

You may have heard of the term “town and gown” referring to the distinct cultural line that often develops between people who live in a community with a college and those who attend and work there. The depth of this cultural divide is one of the factors that feeds into the creative class segregation, but there are many others as well.

The metros where the creative class is most segregated include the nation’s largest metros and many of its leading knowledge-based economic centers. Los Angeles tops the list, followed by Houston, San Jose, San Francisco, New York, Austin, San Antonio, San Diego, and Chicago.

When we expand the list to include all metros, a number of smaller ones also show substantial levels of segregation. The creative class remains the most segregated in Los Angeles, but Trenton-Ewing, New Jersey (which includes Princeton University) takes second place, and Salinas, California is the third most highly segregated metro in the country on this score…The creative class is also highly segregated in college towns like Ann Arbor, Durham-Chapel Hill, Tucson, Gainesville, and College Station. As I wrote a few weeks ago, many of these smaller college towns also experience high levels of segregation of educated residents.

There were some results from the research that I saw encouraging to my hope that vibrant cultural experiences could be built in smaller communities.

Conversely, the metros where the creative class is least segregated are mainly in the Midwest and Sunbelt. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul is the least segregated large metro on this score, followed by Rochester, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Providence, Milwaukee, and Hartford. Jacksonville, Tampa, and Virginia Beach in the Sunbelt round out the top ten large metros where the creative class is least segregated.

The metros where the creative class is least segregated are all smaller ones. In fact, there are more than 150 smaller and medium-sized metros where the creative class is less segregated than their counterparts in the least segregated large metro. Many of these places, especially in the Northeast and the Midwest, are cities where levels of the creative class are fairly low. Mankato, Minnesota, has the lowest level of creative class segregation in the country, followed by Lewiston-Auburn, Maine; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Joplin, Missouri; and Rome, Georgia.

There are a number of reasons why segregation is higher in large metropolis, often having to do with gentrification raising rents and longer commuting times, both which inhibit different groups from interacting with each other.

So getting back to the question I posed yesterday about what scenario might be better, this research got me wondering if a situation might arise where a lot of people are doing creative work in a large city, but they may be doing it in enclaves distinct from the general population. That dynamic may actually be better for your personal creative growth, but the work being created might also be more disconnected from the community than that being created in a smaller metro area.

It may be more difficult therefore to attain the goal of “serving the community” in a larger metro than a smaller one. Even though greater numbers of people are experiencing your work, you may be serving a far smaller segment of the population than an artist in a metro area of 50,000. Two arts organizations in the smaller metro may serve a far more economic, educational and racially diverse segment of their general community than 20 arts organizations in a larger city.

As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t really thought about segregation of creatives as being a problem. I wonder if it is perceived as such. Is this manifesting in a negative manner for cities with high segregation like New York, Austin and Chicago, which are all recognized as having relatively vibrant cultural scenes? Do they see untapped potential in more integrated living conditions?

The protests in San Francisco against tech companies like Google would seem to be a reaction against creatives living amongst the population. (The issues are more complicated than that, really.)

On the other hand, the low segregation communities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Rochester, Buffalo and Cincinnati all generally recognize and appreciate the benefits their arts scenes bring to the livability of their respective cities. And lest you think that smaller communities necessarily means less available financial support for the arts, ArtsWave of Cincinnati just raised “$12 million in contributions– the highest amount ever raised by any community campaign for the arts in the country.”

Being Great No Matter Where You Are

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When it comes to stimulating your creativity to create new work, is it better to live in a place that bustling with other creative activity or working alone outside of the influence of others?

This is something I have been thinking about for the last month or so, spurred by some contradictory observations I encountered lately.

When I was in NYC last January for the Arts Presenters conference, a person I was wandering around with observed that the work of NYC based artists, even relatively unknown ones, was more innovative than in other areas of the country. He attributed this to the fact that the artists are surrounded by so many others who were experimenting and striving with new ideas.

When I was living in Hawaii, someone who moved back from NYC made a similar observation that ideas that were new in NYC seven or eight years before were just gaining currency in Hawaii.

But earlier this month, in an interview choreographer Trey McIntyre noted that basing his company in Boise, ID had

…bolstered his creativity.

“Being surrounded by other artists and companies is more of a challenge than being away,” he says. “As a choreographer when you watch someone else’s work, especially if you respond to it … that’s the culprit for how a lot of work gets to look the same. I’m appreciative of being cut off that way. There are so many other things to be inspired by.”

Certainly, there are a number of non-mutually exclusive scenarios that can be true. You can be an artist in NYC that is doing exciting work that looks a lot like the exciting work everyone else is doing. Below a certain level of saturation, you can be both exciting and derivative.

Another plausible explanation is that people of talent can and will be creative anywhere. It is just that you get a lot more recognition of your genius in larger cities. Being a groundbreaking genius in Spokane doesn’t make you any less of a genius. It is just that only the residents of Spokane know about it.

I have started wondering if exposure to new influences via internet and social media channels can replace the need for traveling and living in the cultural centers. Especially if you are mindful about exposing yourself to work you feel is outside your taste. Because really, you run the same risk of having a blinkered approach to your art form whether you only view videos that appeal to you and your friends taste or only attend performances that appeal to those same tastes.

Granted, you have a better chance of receiving unsought ideas from street corner/subway performers as you travel about the city and meet new people than if you get all your ideas from your laptop in your bedroom.

My hope is that technology will allow interesting and innovative work to be developed in smaller cities and towns around the country. I confess that my interest in seeing this happen was redoubled this morning by a cynical reading of the news that theater companies in New York City’s five boroughs are now eligible to receive the Regional Tony Award.

The regional Tony was “created to honor theaters that did outstanding work outside of the unofficial industry capital of New York City…” My first reaction was that now the judges no longer have to bother looking at anything outside the city. Instead of rolling these theaters in with the Broadway houses or creating a new category, they put them in competition with every other theater in the country.

(This said, the American Theatre Critics Association members which vote on the award are dispersed throughout the country and NYC based critic Terry Teachout regularly sends out a call for suggestions of theaters around the country that he should visit.)

I will also admit that my first reading of the phrase “widen the pool” in the sentence: “administration committee changed the rules for the regional theater Tony to widen the pool of candidates and give Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway companies a shot at the recognition, which can help with fund-raising and publicity,” was that there were insufficient candidates in the rest of the country to give the award to.

Knowing that there are many theaters that are struggling across the country, my reaction to that was that there needs to be a reversal of that trend and a cultivation of theaters on a more local level. I later realized that I may have been reading too much into that, but maybe I wasn’t.

Ultimately, whether another theater outside NYC wins the regional Tony award doesn’t matter to me as much as investigating and hopefully perpetuating evidence that you can consistently produce creative, innovative, work in interesting, livable communities across the country and attract attention (and hopefully visitors) to your work there.

Being Well Rounded Is Not A Back Up Plan

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Last week Drew McManus wrote a post about the value society places on arts practitioners. He referenced an article he saw in a You’ve Cott Mail newsletter about a teacher who urged kids who wanted to pursue creative careers to have a back-up plan and asked if anyone could provide a link.

I did remember the article and tried my darnedest to find it again. I didn’t have it bookmarked as I had thought, but had done so with a similar article on Salon that started with an anecdote of a parent who was panicked when her son said his favorite subject in school was art.

That article noted that while people assume innovation comes from the science lab, it is the artistic habit which often fuels that innovation.

The external binaries of right and wrong don’t exist in art as they do in most subjects. In math, the answer to the problem is correct or incorrect. In history, a sequence of events is true or false. In art, only the student can decide what critique to listen to and what to ignore. Art is the arena of activity where we develop the skill most required to innovate — the ability to harness our own agency.

Artist and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard P. Feynman put it this way as he distinguished between teaching science and art: in physics, Feynman said, “we have so many techniques — so many mathematical methods — that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can’t say, ‘Your lines are too heavy,’ because some artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines.” In that moment, the art student is learning the validity of their choices, their own direction, and innovative results.

This particular section resonated for me because it seems that education is promulgating the idea of answers being right or wrong as testing becomes more prevalent and valued.

The Salon article goes on to cite a number of scientists who have artistic avocations which they credit with contributing to their scientific accomplishments. This isn’t new, we have often heard about how Einstein played the violin. Probably the biggest failing of the arts community is constantly going to Einstein as their example rather than citing a wider variety of scientists like astronaut Mae Jemison who is quoted in the article saying that the imagination that fueled the creation of sculpture and dance got the space shuttle flying.

To my mind, saying artists need a back up plan is really just an indelicate way of saying they need to be well rounded. I am not trying to inject some political correctness here because the truth is, everyone needs to be well rounded. I think it is Sir Ken Robinson who points out we have no idea what skills people will need 30 years in the future so it is best to teach everyone to be curious and teach themselves.

While there are plenty of artists who engage in a myopic pursuit of their discipline, in my view, the liberal and fine arts education community on the whole does a better job of making its members well rounded than science and business disciplines. Perhaps because few people tell science and business students they need to broaden their experience by having a back up plan.

Just last week a student was sitting in the lobby telling her music professor that she wanted to go to a conservatory so she wouldn’t have to take English and Philosophy courses. He informed her that wasn’t necessarily so since he attended a conservatory and had to take those classes. There was also the issue that as an acting student, those courses would actually inform her work down the road.

Only a week or so earlier, this same student listened to a pianist who had performed a concert for us talk about how she double majored when she was at the Peabody Institute both because she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be a pianist and she had many other interests. While she ultimately committed to the piano, she said she felt that her other course work gave her an advantage over her other classmates in terms of the opportunities she had available.

But last week our student was thinking about the difficult time she was having in class, not about this bigger career picture. Students need to be pushed to take a wide variety of classes rather than taking the path of least resistance. Framing this in terms of “a back up plan” does a disservice to their interests because it diminishes their passion for the arts.

But it also diminishes the “back up plan” by playing into that binary sense of right and wrong. If you think the arts taste sweet, then setting up anything else as the “back up” option when you fail at being an artist makes it the bitter pill that has to be swallowed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea that an interest in the arts results in a zero-sum outcome is what feeds the purist idealism that allowing yourself to be interested in anything else is a sign of lack of seriousness about your art or selling out.

If you really wanted to be an artist but were told you needed a back up plan, wouldn’t you perhaps unconsciously redouble your efforts toward your art and avoid any involvement with any possible back up option?

Then when you succeed, it is your single minded passion and talent in the face of nay sayers that won out. If you fail, then I guess they were right all the time. You meet their expectation of being a failed artist since you never allowed yourself to exercise your other interests.

When you are young, there often is no conflict between an interest in reading Popular Science, making plays to entertain your family, playing baseball, running a lemonade stand and learning to program a computer. But then you are asked to choose…

If you “correctly” choose law, medicine, business or science, there probably won’t be a societal perceived conflict in continuing with your interests. It is only when you choose the arts that you may be pressured to choose one of your other interests instead.

The truth is, interest in the arts is not a zero sum game. If there are physicists who feel their artistic pursuits enhance their practice of science, there are certainly artists who can find their pursuit of science and technology will enhance their creative output.

I am sure there are accountants who also feel their professional practice is informed by their artistic hobbies. Its just that no one believes accounting can be made more interesting. (Though there are unfortunately too many stories of accountants getting creative in the wrong ways.)

If anything, Drew McManus is great example of being able to cultivate interests and strengths in multiple areas as a musician who has built an arts related business on an understanding of technology and analysis of business practices, including financial filings.

Shakespeare on a Boat

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I am sure by this late hour of 6:00 pm EDT, everyone must be aware that today is the observed 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. This morning I caught a story on NPR about Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London embarking on a 2 year odyssey to perform Hamlet in every country in the world. There was discussion in the story about the hazards they may face in places like Syria, Central African Republic and Ukraine where there has been either recent or ongoing unrest.

My first reaction upon hearing they were going to perform Hamlet was wondering why they chose to present the longest of the plays. Sure there is a lot of exciting action, but there is also a lot of brooding.

But it appears that they have trimmed the show down to 2:40 and perform on a bare bones stage with 12 actors. I thought about this in connection with Shakespeare’s Globe Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole’s comment that,

“We’re going to be very free and open. The set is basically the suitcases that the whole thing travels around in, so it spills out of its own suitcases. And we’re going to be playing in some very prestigious national theaters in some countries, but we’re also going to be playing on beaches on Pacific islands. The idea is that it’s infinitely adaptable to wherever we want to put it up.”
 

I actually hoped that their plans were to set up in front of or in the parking lots of some of those prestigious national theaters instead of inside them. Dromgoole talked about how a tour of Hamlet was performed on a boat off the coast of Yemen in 1608, noting that the play was always meant to be performed on tour in the manner they are undertaking.

My thought was that it would be a pity if they were performing on beaches and village squares only when there was a lack of a “proper” facility. Looking at the schedule it does appear that they are performing inside the bulk of the time.

As a person who has worked outdoor Shakespeare festivals and music events, I can understand the desire for a stable environment to perform in as you try to keep your world tour on schedule. You can’t perform in places like the Copan Ruins in Honduras every night.

As we have often discussed, the thing that has allowed Shakespeare to endure for 450 years, and will allow the arts to remain relevant, is to bring it to where the people live. I had hoped there would be more of that.

I will admit to being a little self-centered. When I saw that they would be performing around the world on a rudimentary stage, I hoped they would keep a detailed blog so that I could gain insight into how different peoples interacted with the show when it appeared on their streets, without a lot of effort on my part. I was interested to learn where people would stay to watch; where they might wander in and out of the audience; where they might actually wander around curiously behind the stage.

These observations might provide ideas for how to make the attendance experience more interesting for our own audiences. I don’t know that we would get as much of that in the more controlled theatre environment.

On the other hand, thanks to the Globe tour, I have become more aware of the existence of Shakespeare focused theaters in places like Bremer, Germany and Gdansk, Poland.

What Is Best In The Arts?

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The Spring Issue of Arts Presenters’ Inside the Arts is out. When I first got the hard copy version, I quickly scanned through to see if there was any mention of my former colleague, Lehua Simon’s talk. At first, I only saw the picture on the back cover.

I started to get a little miffed when it didn’t appear like any mention was going to be made in the recap of the conference. How could they ignore an event that made such an impact!? Finally, I saw the coverage in a few paragraphs on the last page of the recap article.

I excitedly reported this to Lehua and other former colleagues who later informed me I missed probably the most prominent mention of all, APAP President Mario Garcia Durham’s lengthy discussion of Lehua’s impact upon the conference in his letter.

I have mentioned before that walking into a conference and quickly achieving recognition seems to becoming Lehua’s forte. The fact that people are able to come from relative obscurity and in 5 minutes energize others by presenting themselves is what excites me about the arts. There was no invocation of politics or attempts to elevate one group to the detriment of another. Lehua just talked about experiences that made her passionate about the arts and it resonated with a large group of people.

While those five minutes are longer, (though less bloody minded), than Conan the Barbarian’s famous statement about what is best in life, it can be helpful to remember that it doesn’t take long to inspire passion in others, be it other arts people or audiences.

What I appreciated most from Mario Garcia Durham’s letter was when he wrote:

“When Simon walked on to stage, she represented leadership activated in the moment. She embraced the risk, took up the challenge and succeeded.

Simon is a fine example of individual leadership that makes an impact through personal creativity, determination and empowerment. She didn’t get to APAP on her own, but she took all the steps to get there and was ready in real time to participate in ways she hadn’t imagined.”

This encapsulates a lot of what we say about being leaders in the arts- embracing risk and being agile and open enough to participate in whatever possibilities present themselves.

 

Care and Feeding of Arts Workers

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There was a good example of the importance of good leadership and management in the context of orchestras in a recent post on The Drucker Exchange.

Although the post starts out using the example of basketball teams, it ends up citing Peter Drucker’s observation that as a knowledge based institution,

“A great orchestra is not composed of great instrumentalists but of adequate ones who produce at their peak,” he wrote in Managing in the Next Society. “When a new conductor is hired to turn around an orchestra that has suffered years of drifting and neglect, he cannot, as a rule, fire any but a few of the sloppiest of most superannuated players. He also cannot as a rule hire many new orchestra members. He has to make productive what he has inherited.”

The passage in Managing the Next Society that is quoted is preceded a few paragraphs earlier with “In a traditional workforce, the worker serves the system; in a knowledge workforce, the system must serve the worker.”

Orchestra musicians may not appreciate being characterized as “adequate,” but they all know that their ensemble thrives as a group, not on the specific talents of each individual. It is the music director or similar leader who often creates the environment which allows the whole to thrive.

This is much the case in arts administration staffs. There are very few superstars that multiple organizations engage in a bidding war to woo away. (Though I grant it might be helpful to have more exemplars people strive to be. Drew McManus can’t bear the adulation by himself.)

Most arts organizations are staffed by adequately skilled employees who are on the cusp of becoming great with the help of the right management of their talents and work environment. Some of that management is probably going to require better pay and professional development opportunities. It may also require scrutinizing organizational culture, shifting job responsibilities and revamping the physical work environment.

While the focus of all this seems to be on identifying good leaders and managers who will point the way to success, recall that Drucker points out that the workforce has to generally be left intact. They are the core resource of the organization with which the leader must work.

Knowledge workers aren’t like gold fish which will thrive if fed and put in a bigger, cleaner fish bowl. Dealing with them is far more complicated. It is by their will and agreement that success occurs.

A good leader or manager is merely one who perceives how to best structure the system to serve the workers. A leader shouldn’t conflate their ability with the value of the organization. Ultimately, audiences will come to see a bad orchestra before they come to see a music director in an empty room.

Info You Can Use: Evidence vs. Emotion In Fundraising

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This week Marginal Revolution blog linked to a study addressing the claim of many donors that they are motivated to give by the effectiveness of the charity.

The researchers worked with the charity, Freedom from Hunger, to send out two nearly identical letters.

In the first experimental wave, the control group received an emotional appeal focused on a specific beneficiary, along with a narrative explaining how FFH ultimately helped the individual. The treatment group received a similar emotional appeal (trimmed by one paragraph), with an added paragraph about scientific research on FFH’s impact. The second wave was identical in design, except that the treatment group narrative included more specifics on the research, and briefly discussed randomized trials and their value as impact assessment tools.

They found that adding the scientific data didn’t have an impact on whether someone donated and how much they donated in the full sample. However, the full sample includes previous donors as well as those who had never donated before.

There was a significant difference when they looked at just those who had previously made a donation. (I have inserted a paragraph break to the original text to provide easier reading)

We find that presenting positive information about charitable effectiveness increases the likelihood of giving to a major U.S. charity for large prior donors, but turned off small prior donors. This heterogeneity is important, we believe, and is consistent with a model in which large donors (holding all else equal, including income and wealth) are more driven by altruism and small donors more driven by warm glow motives.

Altruistic donors, we posit, are more driven by the actual impact of their donation, and thus information to reinforce or enhance perceived impacts will drive higher donations. On the other hand, for warm glow donors, information on impacts may actually deter giving by distracting the letter recipient from the emotionally powerful messages that typically trigger warm glow and instead put forward a more deliberative, analytical appeal which simply does not work for such individuals.

Now whether the results for a large national human services charity will be consistent for a smaller, regional cultural charity, is uncertain. The fact that larger donors may be motivated by evidence of effectiveness and smaller donors by emotional appeal and turned off by effectiveness data is definitely something to think about.

Classical Music, Out standing In The Field

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I wanted to call attention to John Luther Adams today. It may have escaped your notice that he won a Pulitzer Prize for Music yesterday for his composition, “Become Ocean.” (sample here). It certainly escaped my notice.

I had a faculty member come to my door talking about how he spoke to Adams today and how he has known the composer for awhile and Adams had played his music on his radio station in Alaska. I think the faculty member assumed I knew about the Pulitzer, which I didn’t. I thought he was just going on about a buddy of his.

It was only after the faculty member left my office and I Googled Adams’ name on a lark, that I discovered he was a big deal. Adams’ work was much more accessible than the faculty member’s comments lead me to believe. (Especially in the context of some of the music samples he has given me in the past.)

As I looked around for some other samples of Adams’ work, I found this video of his “Inuksuit” at Park Avenue Armory which really excited me. As Alex Ross mentions in his article on the performance, Adams never intended for the work to be performed indoors, but saw a lot of possibility in the cavernous armory. He set up 76 musicians throughout the drill field, catwalks and adjoining rooms and encouraged the audience of 1300 to wander among and with them.

What excited me was that we so often talk about getting orchestral music out of the concert hall and here was a piece that was never envisioned to be indoors.

There was the recent question of whether American orchestras are ignoring American music. Between Adams’ Pulitzer win and his willingness to have his music played under the sky, there is incentive to pay some attention.

Concerts like this will generate a clear dividing line between those who yearn to listen in acoustically perfect halls and those who don’t. Symphonic  and chamber music wasn’t written for warehouse spaces so I don’t advocate trying to impose the “Inuksuit” format on them.

“Inuksuit” seemed to be much more about experiencing the music than listening to it. I would guess concerns about coughing, opening cellophane candy wrappers and cellphones ringing in the middle of the show never emerged. For all the people who were up and walking around, it seemed like at any one time the majority actually sat/laid quietly and let it all wash over them. And the audience definitely did experience and respond. If you look at the last 2 minutes of the video, as the sound produced decreases, so does the physical movement in the room and nearly everyone stands still.

I don’t think anything about this negates the value and need for quiet moments in music found in conventional orchestral pieces. Listening to “Become Ocean,”  Adams definitely has an appreciation of silence, as you might expect of a composer who takes nature as his inspiration.

In fact, there seems to be an impulse for “Become Ocean” to escape the room.

From his NPR interview it almost sounds like the walls are a hindrance (my emphasis):

“It’s scored for large symphony orchestra, a bunch of percussionists, a large string section, full woodwinds and brass and even four — count them, four — harps. The orchestra is deployed as three separate ensembles. It’s really a piece for three orchestras. The different instrumental choirs are separated as widely as possible in the performance space.”

X Degree + Y Experience = Happy Employer?

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Over at Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen draws attention to two studies, one that suggests that internships are more valuable than business degrees when it comes to finding a job. The researchers sent out over 9000 fictitious resumes to jobs  in banking, finance, management, marketing, insurance and sales. Some applicants had business field degrees, others had arts and sciences degrees like history, English, biology and psychology.  As a liberal arts major, I am encouraged by the first sentence.

Despite applying exclusively to business-related job openings, we fou nd no evidence that employers prefer to interview job seekers with business degrees over applicants with nonbusiness degrees. In addition, there is no advantage, in terms of job opportunities, associated with a particular degree; that is, students with particular business degrees (e.g., finance, marketing) fare no better than students with particular non-business degrees (e.g., english, psychology). However, we fi nd strong evidence that internship experience improves employment prospects in economically and statistically signi cant ways. Applicants who were assigned a three-month internship (Summer 2009) before they graduated with their Bachelor’s degrees (May 2010) receive about 14 percent more interview requests than those who were not assigned internship experience. The “return” to internship experience is quite large for both business and non-business majors, but it is economically larger for non-business degree holders than that for business-degree holders…More research is needed to better understand the channels through which college degrees and internship experience aff ect employment prospects.”

There has been a lot of discussion about unpaid internships in the arts, including one last week on HowlRound. These discussions often raise the point that the internship system favors those with the financial and familial support to survive while making little to no income.

The question I wanted to address in the context of this study, however, is whether a degree or experience is more important for the practice of arts management.

A good number of job listings out there require an MFA. If they will accept experience in the place of an MFA, it is as much, if not more, time than would have been required to complete the MFA.

For instance, a recent job posting for the Executive Director of Buffalo Studio Arts requires “Master’s Degree, plus 2 or more years experience at a not-for-profit organization, preferred; Bachelor’s Degree, plus 5 or more years experience at a not-for-profit organization, acceptable”

Another for the Executive Director of the Graham Center at Florida International University required “Master’s degree in an appropriate area of specialization and eight years of experience; or a bachelor’s degree in an appropriate area of specialization and ten years of experience. ”

Now given that a Master’s degree can take 1-3 years to earn, with an MFA being 2-3 years, these jobs can be viewed as requiring slightly more or equivalent experience from a person without a Master’s.  With the first description only deeming a Bachelors and experience as acceptable, it seems you are at an immediate disadvantage without that Master’s. This verbiage is not at all uncommon.

As for the second description, if a person with a BA has 8 years experience, there probably isn’t much more to be gained in those additional two years to bring them on par with a person with a Master’s degree. They are either as good or better at year 8, or they aren’t.

In the Buffalo example, I think the determining factor comes down to opportunities which translates to experience. A person with a Master’s and two years of good opportunities is  going to be preferable to a person with a BA and five years of poor opportunities. But a person with a BA and three years of good opportunities is easily going to be preferable to a person with a Master’s and three years devoid of practical experience.

But is that how arts employers approaching hiring? Perhaps they do and just use that Master’s = Bachelor’s + Experience to signal expectations and encourage people to self select out of applying. Not that it keeps 50 unqualified people from applying for every qualified person.

My suspicion is that many arts employers adhere closely to that equation to make it easier to sort through the 100s of resumes by preemptively tossing whatever doesn’t neatly fit.

It isn’t fair to single arts employers out in this regard. Any degree serves as a imprimatur for a job applicant in any field. It is a shortcut people use as a guarantee of quality which is why so many people seek to get a college degree even though they may not be suited for college.

Does this bring about the best result for the organization? That is something each has to answer.

Now, it should obviously be acknowledged that I have an MFA so I tend to pass that initial test of fitting into the equation.

I have hired people who didn’t fit neatly in to the equation and benefited from it. Some times there was a large element of faith involved, but that is true in all cases regardless of degree attained.

Again we come back to that first question, how much do the degrees matter versus experience? When I go to conferences and interact with agents, artists and other presenters, I don’t care about the degree anyone has attained. I don’t get better service from people with master’s degrees than those without.

However, I do care and can tell if someone is inexperienced. Experience does have bearing on the quality of service received.

Of course, I am only interacting with people for a short period of time. Degree earned may have a significant impact on the experiences of boards of directors, organization staff and audience base who have to live with them.

As a person who has earned a Master’s degree, I could point to how my degree had a positive impact on the organizations I have worked for. I can also point out how my lack of experience had a negative impact on the organizations I have worked for, even after earning the degree.

Thoughts?

Boards! What Are They Good For?

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Some interesting thoughts on the purposes of boards in the blogosphere today. Laura Zabel makes some “bored assumptions” about the primary purpose of boards suggesting that passion about the mission should come first with fund raising being a distant second or third or fifth…

“I’ll be blunt here: if you’re not thinking about how your board represents your community then you’re not building a relevant organization. When we are looking for new board candidates at Springboard there are two criteria:

-do you love and understand the mission deeply?
-will you energetically represent the organization to your community and your community to the organization?

Swim Pony Performing Arts artistic director Adrienne Mackey says much the same thing in a post of her own today.

“Which means that were I to incorporate the mission my board would be responsible for is “To make Adrienne’s work the most Adrienne it can be.”

But Mackey, whose organization is not incorporated as a non-profit and who states from the outset “I am generally anti non-profits for the majority of content generators, especially for small ensembles and individual creators,” asks

“Are there any artists who, if given the choice, would actually want to keep a board of directors if they didn’t have to? I know that many of my peers have talked to me about learning to find meaning and usefulness and sometimes even joy in the people they’ve invited to be part of their non-profit board. But if they weren’t required to find a way to live with this set up, would they still do it?”

She asks this predominantly in regard to companies that exist to promote the work of a single artist rather than in the service of promoting or curating types and genres of art or to provide “a habitat for artists to plug into.”

The basis of this is the belief that (my emphasis):

“..artists should get input from the outside about how their work is best made and how it might be financially sustainable and responsible. But at the core, I don’t agree that the final responsibility for a creator’s product can be located outside of the creator.”

For me, both posts are further evidence of the sentiment that has been simmering over that last few years that the current structure needs to be replaced. Adrienne Mackey makes a good case for situations when you should not view non-profit status as the default and only choice.

We have seen the appearance of Benefit Corporate structure in an increasing number of states over the last few years as a way for companies to effect positive social impacts. Readers of my blog know that I am intrigued by the idea of arts organizations being created with expiration dates.

But I think there is just as much validity in Laura Zabel perception that there is nothing necessarily wrong with the current structure, but the that assumptions and dynamics of board relations need to be altered.

 

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Today’s post title inspired by Edwin Starr. I should note, I am not advocating for the dissolution of boards a la the “absolutely nothing” lyric. It is often difficult to think of a title for my posts and it was just too good a reference to pass up.

 

Arts Residency In Santa’s Cabin

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Came across an interesting artist residency program that is currently soliciting applications about two weeks ago. Cabin Time describes itself as “a roaming creative residency to remote places.”

The residency program takes 12 creatives to remote parts of the U.S., allowing each to work on some sort of project. They host both a summer and winter session. This August they are going to be in Santa, ID. In previous years they have been onsite in places like Desolation Canyon, Green River, Utah and Rabbit Island, Lake Superior, Michigan.

Cabin Time has videos and photos from each residency that make it difficult not to want to go out and create something amid all the natural beauty.

If this sounds interesting and you qualify as one of those “Cabin Time invites artists, designers, writers, musicians, scientists, sign-painters, bird-watchers, cheerleaders, schemers and dreamers to make site-specific work in cooperative intentional isolation,” you might consider submitting an application. Deadline is noon on June 2.

Ride With The Valkyries

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Last week I was thinking about alternative category names for giving levels because our current names lean heavily toward classical music while that is only a small portion of our programming.

As I got to thinking about it, I wondered if anyone had thought about changing the names of their giving levels from season to season both as a way to do some A/B testing on what types of category names might inspire people to give more and to appeal to a younger generation of donors.

People who are used to giving through Kickstarter with all the exciting images and rewards at different support levels might not be motivated by a static list of giving levels like: Donor, Supporter and Benefactor.

Category titles that changed every year and aligned with the season might be more engaging. If you were going to give $450, would you increase it to $500 to be listed in a category employing Henry V’s “We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers” as a giving level? Or the aforementioned “Riding With the Valkyries”?

Unless you were being tongue in cheek, you would probably want to stay away from a The Merchant of Venice “Pound of Flesh” as a category. Though “As You Like It” might be a good category for a giving level that garners many perks.

If you are clever about it, you might actually have people opening their donor solicitation letter to see what names you came up with as eagerly as they flip through the season brochure to see what shows are being offered.

While there is no guarantee they will give, they will at least be a little more engaged with the process.

On Your Mark…Get Set…Sketch!

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Just as an interesting look at how things are done elsewhere, here is a picture of prospective students taking an entrance exam for art school in Hainan.

Clicking on the image below will take you to the China Daily site where there are more pictures of the 1901 students taking the sketching exam. That is indeed a lot of butts in the seats.

 

hainan

I confess, my first reaction upon seeing the pictures was that it was a little dehumanizing. However, having seen hundreds of auditions for both performances and academic programs, I am not sure there is a lot about the process of evaluating the work of hundreds of people that doesn’t have an alienating effect, even if it is done individually.

I am not sure how many of the 1900 students were admitted. I believe this is the national exam being administered to residents of the province rather than for admission to a single university.  I am not sure how this factors into the admission process since the fabled gaokao (National Higher Education Entrance Examination) which nearly all high school students have to take is usually administered in June rather than January.

Toward A System Of Organizational Critiques

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In a Guardian article last summer talking about the intersections between art and science, “scientist with one foot in the arts” Simon Kirby noted of culture of peer review in the sciences:

(“It’s all about surviving the gauntlet of people trying to tear your ideas apart – that doesn’t happen with an arts audience”)

That one line got me to bookmark the article and think about whether a structured peer review process might be beneficial in the arts.

Let me state from the outset that I am in no way proposing any sort of scenario where a panel snickers behind their hands that what was exciting in NYC Dance seven years ago is just becoming hot in Madison, WI. Nor would I desire a situation where an arts organization with a $20 million budget smiles condescendingly at the excitement expressed by an organization with a $20,000 who got 1000 people to attend their event.

At the same time, we could all use some advice about what we could be doing better outside of anonymous posts on the internet.

With many funding organizations inviting applicants to attend panel reviews of their funding requests or streaming the proceedings of the panels and their process online, it might be logical to offer reviews and critiques of other aspects of organizational operations.

The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival has a long running program of having adjudicators travel to productions in each of the 8 regions to provide critiques of performances. Some of the productions and actors are nominated to perform at each of the regional conferences.

Perhaps a similar system might be set up to review and critique different aspects of an arts organization’s operations from the customer experience to board relations. This wouldn’t involve any element of competition that would get you invited to a conference outside of presenting interesting case studies and discussing best practices.

However, it would give arts organizations an objective view of their practices and procedures without the stakes of accreditation hanging over the experience. Adjudicators would gain the ability to apply the same critical eye to their own organization as well as have an opportunity to observe and learn from peer organizations.

Ideally, an adjudication team would include at least one person from a discipline unrelated to the organizational activities so that theater people are learning a little from visual artists, visual artists from classical musicians, musicians from dancers and so forth.

It’s All In How They Play The Game

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I have been keeping a Createquity post about gamification and arts events bookmarked on my web brower for while now. I liked some of the ideas suggested there and hoped to refer back to the entry for inspiration in the future. I was surprised to realize the post was actually created nearly two years ago. It seems so much more recent.

I came across another article recently that underscored the necessity of paying close attention to the design of any experience you may gamify. As with any game, some times people get a little more competitive than we might like.

In a post recounting the different experiences she and her friends experienced attending Sleep No More, Megan Reilly talks about how some of the repeat attendees have been using their knowledge to try to force certain outcomes. This tends to negatively impact the experience of other attendees, especially first timers.

My other friend, Amanda, got to have the same Hecate experience that I described above – having the ring put on her finger, and going through “Is That All There Is?” When Hecate turned to choose someone else for her 1:1, however, that selected person apparently tried to take the ring off my friend’s finger! I really want to know what was going on in that person’s head, to make him think that this behavior was ok. And this is not the worst behavior I’ve heard of on the part of the audience – just the worst that has happened to someone I know

and later

Many people by now have had so much experience visiting and revisiting “Sleep No More” that they are becoming like gamers, saving and restoring and attempting something new to experience something they KNOW is there but has so far been hidden from them. They try to find the secret combination of moves that unlocks the 1:1 with Hecate, and get visibly frustrated when they are not the chosen ones. They don’t care that someone else next to them might be experiencing the show for the first time – they want their experience/interaction/hidden secret scene, dammit. After all, they paid roughly $90 to play this game (or more, if like me you are not in NYC) and they want to win.

I love the parallels between “Sleep No More” and games, I really do. I love being responsible for my own journey through a story, and having to do some work in order to discover a narrative. I love that there are little errands and quests within the show that are given to different lucky audience members. I don’t want the 1:1 experiences to be removed. But how do you let the audience of 400 something people a night know that the experience of the show doesn’t have to include any one of these things? That their ticket price does not entitle them to a specific experience? And that the other audience members and the performers are not non-playable characters?

I would encourage people to read the whole thing, even if you have no intention of ever gamifying your experience. Megan Reilly’s discussion of what elements work and why it is so exciting might change your mind.

In some respects, what she talks about are the hazards of attending a public performance writ large. The person who pulls out their cellphone in the middle of a conventional performance and starts talking may be the same person who pushes you aside at Sleep No More. The percentage of the general population who will impinge upon the enjoyment of others is probably going to remain constant.

Another issue one of Reilly’s friends faced seemed to simply be a function of letting the audience interact with each other. There was a lot of non-verbal signalling that something was going to happen when experienced audience members watched the rest of the audience for their reaction or all started rushing in a certain direction.

When people are all seated quietly in a theater facing in one direction, the anticipation of those who have seen the show before is less apparent. But that experience is certainly also less interesting and probably doesn’t encourage as much return business as the Sleep No More experience, even at $90 a pop.

Don’t Pay To Boost That Post Quite Yet

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Long time readers will know that I frequently counsel not jumping on the newest technological gizmo bandwagon too quickly lest you dilute your efforts fruitlessly across too many efforts.

While Facebook isn’t the newest kid on the block, some recent research by the Pew Research Center reveals the value of visitors brought to your page by Facebook and search engine results is pretty low. You may want to rethink any plans to buy ads.

The research was conducted on news sites so the validity may vary depending on how much more engaging you feel your website is versus the top 26 news sites like CNN, Fox News, BBC, NPR and BuzzFeed.

Pew Research found that people visiting a site directly stayed longer (4:36), looked around more (24.8 pages) and returned more often (10.9 visits) than those arriving via Facebook (1:41, 4.2 pages and 2.9 visits)

Even sites such as digital native buzzfeed.com and National Public Radio’s npr.org, which have an unusually high level of Facebook traffic, saw much greater engagement from those who came in directly.

The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do

Reading the report, you may notice that the results are all based on desktop and laptop user data because the mobile data collected by the major analytics firms are not as detailed and thus are unable to support as granular an analysis.

However,

While the main analysis does not include mobile traffic to these sites due to comScore’s smaller mobile panel size, the overall findings translate to the mobile realm as well. As Patrick Cooper, NPR’s Director of Web and Engagement told Pew Research, “The big thing publishers should take
away from the desktop data, even if desktop is going away, is that: 1) method of entry matters to the experience and 2) they can’t control method of entry.”

Remember, these numbers reflect the behavior of people who are visiting a webpage based on something they see elsewhere on the web. This research doesn’t address whether Facebook is a good tool for developing relationships with people.

The act of typing in the direct address of a website (or clicking on a bookmark) implies a certain level of engagement with the website already. The fact is, The New York Times may have tens of thousands of people who choose visit the NYT Facebook page faithfully everyday by typing in their Facebook address, but who don’t linger long or look around much when they choose to click through to the website to read a story.

There may be thousands of people who feel loyal and engaged with the New York Times via their Facebook page that the research is viewing as lightly engaged due to their habits upon visiting the webpage.

Arts organizations can just as quickly describe a show and provide supporting video on a Facebook page as their webpage and don’t need to depend on the same attention span as a news site would to read an article. (Which may mean some visitors may have too short an attention span to watch a performance, regardless of where they see it listed.)

So, lacking evidence to the contrary, Facebook may still be a good tool for providing information to people who are already following your organization. My take away from the research though is that buying ads, having people like your posts or reposting your information may bring you a surge in traffic, but not necessarily increase the number of people engaged in your work.

When Customer Relationship Management is Pull Rather Than Push

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Monday night I went to the library to return a couple books. I had finished the second book in a series and wanted to read the third, but I had checked and knew the library didn’t have the third book. I went to the reference desk to see if I could request the book from another one in the state.

I was told the system to check if another library in the state had the book was down, but if I wanted, I could request that the library buy it. That way, I could have the book for a month rather than 2 weeks via interlibrary loan. Since I read quickly and didn’t want the library to buy a new book on my account, I said I would request the book via interlibrary loan during another visit.

This is where things got interesting.

The librarian decided to check if they had already ordered the book given that they had the first two volumes. She discovered that not only had they ordered the book in the last week, but my name had been flagged as a person to inform when the book came in based on my borrowing habits.

I left the library muttering under my breath that I really needed to start looking seriously at customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Here was a library serving a rural county of 78,000 whose services I use for free that had bought a book for me based on tracking my use of their services. (Yes, I suppose other people may have read the series too, but they ordered it right after I took out the second book so as far as I am concerned, they bought it for me.)

The way I see it, if they invest so much effort into serving a person who uses their services for free, how much disservice am I doing to my patrons who are paying me $30-$50 to see shows if I am not closely tracking their preferences and trying to figure out how to serve them better?

The way I see it, that last sentence there is a crucial one. There is a difference between the way Amazon uses software to track my activities in the interest of trying to sell me a book and the way the library tracks my activities in interest of buying a book for me.

While I would certainly use the software to suggest shows a person might be interested in seeing based on past history, I would also want to think about ways I could use data we collect to shape our programming to serve their interests.

[N.B. Well, I wrote this post on Monday evening knowing I wouldn’t have time to do so on Tuesday because we had a show. I just happened to see one of the librarians after the show and asked her what CRM system they used. She tapped her head.

Turns out, she had noticed what books I was taking out and order the third book in the series. I had specifically asked on Monday night if it were she that had ordered the book and was given an answer that made me think it was all tracked by software. This just goes to show that the best customer relationship software is caring employees paying attention and making notes.]

Price and Value

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Seth Godin recently made a post that provides a good summary of how value influences the way consumers view price.

“It’s too expensive,” almost never means, “there isn’t enough money if I think it’s worth it.”

Social entrepreneurs are often chagrined to discover that low-income communities around the world that said their innovation was, “too expensive” figured out how to find the money to buy a cell phone instead. Even at the bottom of the pyramid, many people find a way to pay for the things they value.

[…]

Often, it actually means, “it’s not worth it.” This is a totally different analysis, of course. Lots of things aren’t worth it, at least to you, right now. I think it’s safe to assume that when you hear a potential customer say, “it’s too expensive,” what you’re really hearing is something quite specific.

There is a sentiment commonly expressed around arts organizations, especially ones that are trying to attract college age attendees, that college students who say a ticket is too expensive will generally spend twice as much on beer on the same Saturday night. While a performance and a beer are transitory experiences, everyone knows beer is more transitory of the two. (The old saying, you don’t buy it, you rent it.) But, of course, it is the social environment that accompanies the beer that people value.

More from Godin:

Culturally, we create boundaries for what something is worth. A pomegranate juice on the streets of Istanbul costs a dollar, and it’s delicious. The same juice in New York would be seen as a bargain for five times as much money. Clearly, we’re not discussing the ability to pay nor are we considering the absolute value of a glass of juice. No, it’s about our expectation of what people like us pay for something like that.

Start with a tribe or community that in fact does value what you do. And then do an ever better job of explaining and storytelling, increasing the perceived value instead of lowering the price. (Even better, actually increase the value delivered). When you don’t need everyone to buy what you sell, “it’s too expensive” from some is actually a useful reminder that you’ve priced this appropriately for the rest of your audience.

Over time, as influencers within a tribe embrace the higher value (and higher price) then the culture starts to change. When people like us start to pay more for something like that, it becomes natural (and even urgent) for us to pay for it too.

That bit I bolded caught my eye. In theory the arts already deal with a tribe or community that does value what it does. That tribe tends to be affluent and influential, but we all know the common refrain is that these people are dying off. Whatever influence they have, it isn’t continuing to motivate too many others.

I am not sure the answer is just better storytelling and waiting for influencers to help shift the culture. I think there has to be a corresponding shift in product features to something consumers value as well.

This isn’t just about the arts. In the cell phone example Godin uses, the phone’s value in the developing world goes beyond just being able to talk to other people. It allows people to gather information about crop prices and choose which market to travel to and acts as a medium for currency exchange.

Without these benefits, I don’t imagine as many people in the developing world would own phones as do today. They are buying Nokia phones with long battery life rather than iPhones because electricity sources are so scarce.

In terms of the arts, I have no doubt that it is entirely possible to avoid compromising on price. I likewise believe that there are many groups out there offering what people want, but who suffer from lack of good storytelling.

Yet just as phone companies know they will sell more Nokia phones in Kenya than Apple and Samsung phones, even though those two companies are duking it out for domination in the rest of the world, very few arts organizations are going to be exempt from aligning their “product features” to suit local conditions.

What’s It Take To Do Your Job?

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From the “We Should Steal This Idea…” file, The Guardian has been running a series that is essentially the newspaper version of a career day, called “How Do I Become…”

I was originally attracted to the series when I saw the “How do I become…a set designer.” article. The series covers a lot of arts related careers, including ones you might not immediately think of like perfumer, embalmer and bellmaker.

With all the discussion these days about the cost of going to college, and whether attending is appropriate for everyone, a series like this that draws attention to a whole range of career options people might not immediately consider can prove a good resource.

The thing I really admire about the Guardian series is their ability to provide good summaries about the skills a person needs to acquire for each profession in the subtitles. I have done a number of career days for schools and it can be difficult to boil your job down to a few interesting words like:

“Preparing food, washing up, sweeping floors – start low but aim high and you might find yourself styling food for the big names.”

“Eyeballs and chipolatas should be fun-filled not fearful, in a profession where learning on the job is the only way to cut it.” (butcher)

“Filming is neither fun or glamorous, says cameraman Joel Shippey, which is why you need commitment, the right attitude and a love of people.”

“It’s taken more than a decade for David Stewart to learn how to ‘nose’ whisky, and that patience is a big part of being a malt master and blender”

It’s difficult to break in to and not for the faint-hearted, but the joy and excitement of dealing in gems provides ample compensation.

Obviously, one of my prime interests in a series like this would be to promote arts careers and bring people to a better understanding about what is involved with the jobs.

For as much as this may be a good idea, I am not exactly sure about what the right delivery channel would be. Given that newspapers are on the wane and aren’t read by a lot of young people approaching career decisions, a series like this would ideally be delivered online and through schools.

I am just tossing this out there to see if it sticks on anything or inspires anyone.

How Dare You Refuse That Money?

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Really interesting story out of Australia via Non Profit Quarterly. The Arts Minister has asked the Australia Council to develop a policy penalizing arts organizations who refuse private funding based on idealistic or political motivations.

Refusing funding from tobacco companies is mentioned in a couple instances, but this was brought on by artists in the Sydney Biennale objecting to its association with a company involved in a controversial detention center used to house asylum seekers.

Senator Brandis responded to that by saying, “What I have in fact asked the Australia Council to do is to develop a policy so that it would be a condition of the receipt of Australia Council funding that the arts organisation concerned not unreasonably refuse or unreasonably terminate private sponsorship.” When pressed on who would be responsible for deciding what is to be considered “unreasonable,” Brandis replied, “I don’t frankly have a fixed or dogmatic view about whether it should be the Australia Council or whether it should be the Minister or whether it should be some third party arbiter.”

We can only hope that the option adopted is not the current Minister. Brandis has since said that while it was reasonable for arts companies or festivals to reject corporate funding if they had concerns about a sponsor’s financial credentials, it was unreasonable for them to refuse sponsorship on political grounds.

While the funding model in the United States is different than that of Australia and the amount of support U.S. arts orgs receive from government sources is comparatively small compared to private and corporate support, I can easily see a similar rhetoric being used politically in the U.S.

“X Theater has been on the public dole (equal to 2% of its budget) for years and they are perennially saying they are in financial straits. But just last year they refused a donation from Y Company (seeking to charity wash its reputation after that last scandal), even after they offered to double their usual donation. Where do they get the nerve to ask the people of this great state for more of their hard earned money after refusing Y Company’s generosity?”

To a certain extent, refusing money from tobacco companies might be easy because there has been a decades long nation wide campaign about the problems brought on by smoking. With other companies, issues like environmental damage and sweatshop like conditions with low pay may be mitigated by widespread employment and improvement in the general standard of living, causing more ambiguous views about refusing support on ethical grounds.

I think it would be difficult to pass a law or rule to this effect in the U.S. because it is easy to see how that there will be no end of trouble. (How can such a poor school afford to refuse Playstation’s sponsorship in return for painting their gym and cafeteria with the logo?!)

Just merely employing the rhetoric to equate arts organizations refusing private funding with the unemployed refusing a crappy job can be damaging enough.

Aid and Expectations

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There was a TED Radio segment that aired back in October that hit so many of the conversation points in the arts today: recognizing failure, serving communities and funder priorities.

The topic was aid work in Africa. Italian aid worker Ernesto Sirolli reveals that pretty much every aid effort in Africa has failed. Some failures are attributable to arrogance of thinking you know what the solution is, but are equally attributable to the fact that no one will admit their failures, leaving others to replicate them.

SIROLLI: Every single project that we set up in Africa failed, and I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed.

RAZ: How did every single project fail?

SIROLLI: And they still do. See, the first reaction was, let’s not tell anybody we made a mistake. Let’s not tell anybody about this project. I really thought that it was one bad project that will never be repeated, which, I think, is what the Americans in the Peace Corps are thinking right now. That they are in a bad project, but it’s unique. So what they do, they don’t tell anybody what they’ve done because there must be lots and lots of lot good projects out there.

But if they had the chance to go and find out what their colleagues are doing around Africa, they will discover that, in fact, the norm is failure.

What caught my eye was the assumption by each group that their failure was unique based on the assumption everyone else was succeeding. Not surprising since everyone was reporting successes.

Sirolli says that everyone sent back reports to the home office talking about how great things were going when everything was actually going to hell. While the rosy reports were submitted to one office, another letter was sent to him begging him to come help the distressed aid workers.

I think the arts world faces a similar problem, it is just that our budgets are a bit smaller. The failures get a lot more publicity though, if you take a look at all the orchestra negotiations that have broken down and the failure of companies like City Opera in NYC.

Actually, that is not really accurate. We only know the very end results in each of these cases. We don’t know enough about the failures that lead to these situations to learn from them. There isn’t much to be learned from “Don’t Run Out of Money.” A little more transparency and frank discussion may be helpful.

When Sirolli talks about the Enterprise Facilitation system he invented, I felt like his approach was both a lesson to arts organizations and funders.

SIROLLI: … And I invented the system called Enterprise Facilitation where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion. The servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. So what you do, you shut up, you never arrive in a community with any ideas and you sit with the local people. We don’t work from offices. We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. We have zero infrastructure. And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do…

…The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. And then we help them to go and find the knowledge because nobody in the world can succeed alone. The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. So years and years ago, I had this idea – why don’t we, for once, instead of arriving in a community to tell people what to do, why don’t, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn’t exist.

Art organizations can probably take a cue from him about learning about the community by hanging out in cafes and talking to people rather than holding community meetings. Both funders of arts organizations and the arts organizations themselves might find value in simply helping people to connect their passions with the knowledge they need to realize their passion.

Any entity with resources to offer will probably find it difficult to just step back and not try to motivate people or impose their ideas on the people they hope to help. I am sure Sirolli and his people had that problem when they started. It is extremely difficult to surrender your ego and expectations, especially when you are bringing money to the table.

But the thing is, that is exactly what the best actors are able to do. They set aside their expectations about the way a scene should go and open themselves to the infinite possibilities that might occur. That way if a line is flubbed or delivered differently than it has been in the past, they can respond appropriately to the situation.

Bad actors chug on heedless of unexpected change or are caught short by it. In either case, they call attention to the problem.

This isn’t the best analogy because Sirolli’s people don’t react in order to serve their motivations the way actors do. Still, his people need to strive toward the same goal of suspending judgment in the same manner as actors do.

Why Educate Your Palate If All They Serve You Is Hamburgers

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Playwright Mike Lew criticizes the logic behind blaming a lack of arts education for a decreasing attendance at arts events.

Take the basic argument of “We need more theater in schools so more people will go see theater later in life” and substitute comparable forms of entertainment where young people are already dropping boatloads of money. The very logic of the construction collapses.

Consider the following assertions:
-No one likes cooking anymore because we stopped teaching Home Ec in the schools.
-We need more video game training in classrooms to ensure the next generation of Xbox users.
-If we don’t teach kids how to listen to standup comedy, Louis CK will go bankrupt.
-Kids who never played live music in school just plain won’t pay for a Jay-Z concert.

Now consider the converse, swapping out theater for things that we do teach in schools:
-Good thing we taught kids biology, because zoo attendance is up 50%.
-Colonial Williamsburg is popping thanks to US History classes.
-Now that we have English in schools, bookstores are saved!
-My classroom had a PC, therefore this ipad is nonsense.

Some of his examples are a little flawed. Whether it is due to the lack of home ec classes or not, people actually aren’t cooking.

Much like cooking, arts attendance and participation is influenced by the example provided by parents and educational environment. I would argue with both the arts and cooking, the more you know, the more you will be willing to experiment with unfamiliar fare.

But as Lew points out, interest doesn’t depend on you being introduced to the arts in school. People will make the decision to attend if the opportunity appears interesting enough.

While his contentions that the problem is based in inflexible timing of performances, dearth of social opportunities, programming choices that don’t resonate with the lives of young people and general lack of hospitality are not new arguments, it doesn’t mean he is wrong.

As I was reading some of his examples, I thought that it wasn’t logical to draw a direct line from biology to zoo attendance and English classes and bookstores because there are plenty of other positive outcomes that can result from these classes. The same can be true of the arts. English, sociology and anthropology can as easily lead to the arts as directly arts education when you think about the stories people tell and the way they express themselves.

Give his post a read, he makes many interesting points in his contribution to this ongoing discussion.

The Curse of the Experienced Eye

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Ken Davenport recently talked about how he enjoyed Broadway shows much more when he was younger. Part of the reason he has a harder time now is because he analyzes the show with the eye of a producer. The other reason is because when he was younger, he was often ignorant about disparaging news about a show in the absence of social media and websites and thus approached each show without any bias.

I am much the same way. I can’t attend a show at a place I have worked earlier because I feel left out of the social interactions and behind the scenes activity that I was once an initiate of. I also have difficulty watching a show that I have contracted in because I want to be backstage checking things out.

As Davenport says “As a theater pro, I know I’m enjoying a show when I’m not thinking about what went in to making it.” In my case, it is a question of whether the show is of sufficient quality and interest to me that I want to sit in the audience for the whole show rather than watching from the wings or attending to various details.

I was wondering if other arts people out there had a similar experience to Ken Davenport and my own.

I don’t have any problem attending and watching the entire performance I don’t feel personally invested in. But there are other complications that have resulted from my training.

Attending shows first became a chore when I had to write a critique of it from some perspective. With the onus of either taking notes or trying to remember what went on, the shows weren’t as enjoyable any more.

Today, without that responsibility, it is easier to enjoy a performance. Except, now I dread being asked what I thought of the show as soon as the curtain comes down. I usually beat a quick path to the door so that I can have the time to digest what I have seen without being pressured to respond.

Often I know there was something I didn’t like about the show, but it can be difficult to pin down what it is exactly in the moments after the performance.

Then there is the issue of knowing the show wasn’t great quality and watching everyone else fly to their feet to give a standing ovation. It is times like this that I wonder if it is better to have a discerning, critical eye and know the show barely deserves enthusiastic seated applause, much less a hair trigger standing ovation or would I be happier having not developed that skill so I could just sit there and enjoy the show without reservation.

It is something of a two edged sword since the same skill will reveal delightful, intriguing choices that deepen your appreciation of artists’ work.

Some of this is unavoidable and just the cost of growing up and experiencing the world. My high school science teachers removed some of the magic from my childhood by explaining the reality, but later that same knowledge was the basis of a different sort of awe about the world.

So does anyone else face issues like this? Do you have similar circumstances where you can enjoy yourself and then others that require a degree of self-restraint?

Whisper Sweet Nothings In My Ear

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Last summer there were a number of stories about how the Seoul city government installed a giant ear sculpture into which citizens could make comments. The ear was served something of a dual purpose as a comment box and art installation. The comments were recorded and then played inside city hall. Sensors measured how long people stopped to listen, archiving those that gave pause for potential further action and composting (term the article uses) those that aren’t popular into music.

It has taken about 6 months of that percolating in the back of my consciousness for the obvious to occur to me. Duplicating this effort would be a visually and procedurally interesting way to collect feedback from the community about what you should be doing. If your organization is in a high traffic area, you could put it out on the sidewalk or move it around your community setting it up at the mall, fair grounds, park and other public places so that people could tell you what they thought about your organization, the programming, outreach efforts, etc.

Basically, it might provide a good opportunity to hear from the people who never set foot near your organization. Some big sculpture is probably much more interesting and engaging than having a survey firm cold call every phone number in town in order to reach those in your community you aren’t already serving. Granted, the feedback from a phone survey can provide more scientific results, but it probably wouldn’t be as effective at building relationships and goodwill.

The other obvious use is to plop it down in your lobby to try to capture some responses from attendees who won’t provide responses to your written or online surveys. Just the novelty of interacting with whatever figure you choose to use might elicit a number of responses.

Of course, if you go the talking Paul Bunyan statue route and have a staff member get your sculpture to respond, you might actually be able to (gently) guide the discussion to topics to which you are interested in getting answers.

We Are Audience, You Will Be Assimilated

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Often we use some really general terms when referencing the people who support our organizations which tends to make us think of them as monolithic entity. Having written this blog for 10 years now, I bear more than my share of guilt despite my continuing effort to conceive of them as brains, rather than butts in the seats.

Blogger Nick Sherrard offered a little kick in the pants back in December with a post titled: Hey Arts Organisations, I am not Audience: Why arts organisations should stop talking about people behind their backs

He sums it up best in this passage (my emphasis):

The fact of the matter remains that ‘audience’ does actually mean people who take part in turning up, tuning in, or downloading what you do.

If you don’t believe me go ask them.

Turn to the nearest person who doesn’t work in the arts and ask them what an audience is.

I think that describing people in terms they wouldn’t understand themselves is generally not a good idea —its talking about people behind their backs.

He goes on to point out that what we term as our audience is actually a group that is comprised of different segments, each of which have different expectations of their relationship with our organizations.

He uses the terms customers, fans, superfans and collaborators, but there are obviously many gradations as you care to define. The first step toward that though is recognizing there are differences and discerning what the expectations of each are.

Artists Need Not Apply?

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I hadn’t really intended for this to be a “Government and the Arts” themed week on my blog when I wrote about the search for a director of the NEA yesterday, but it seems to be shaping up that way.

Today the Ohio Arts Council posted a tweet saying they were looking for a new deputy director. Curious, I followed the link and was surprised by the minimum qualifications outlined in the job description.

– Completion of undergraduate core program in social or behavioral science or pre-medicine; 30 months experience in delivery of human services or medical assistance in governmental, community or private human support services agency or medical provider; 12 months experience in management; 18 months experience in supervisory principles/techniques.

– Or completion of graduate core program in social or behavioral science or medicine-related field; 24 months experience in delivery of human services or medical assistance in governmental, community or private human support services agency or medical provider; 12 months experience in management; 18 months experience in supervisory principles/techniques.

Wait, what?

I will concede that you don’t necessarily have to be an arts person to do an effective job in an arts related field. I have seen some people argue that a person with general experience in a role can be better than someone with a strict arts background (e.g. call center supervisor as a box office manager). I could see requiring a public policy degree instead of an arts degree, but this medical/social services orientation seems a little bit of a stretch.

Going by the position description, you don’t even need a passing familiarity with the arts to qualify.

Knowledge of social or behavioral science or pre-medicine; program planning for human service organizations; social program & policy analysis; personnel management and policies; agency & governmental laws, rules, regulations & procedures applicable to particular social program; supervisory principles/techniques; management; accounting, finance or budgeting*. Ability to deal with many variables & determine specific action; prepare & deliver speeches before specialized audiences establish professional atmosphere as administrator; handle sensitive inquiries from & contacts with officials & general public.

* May be acquired after employment

Now, let me just say all my interactions with the Ohio Arts Council have been top notch. They have been far more enthusiastic and responsive than we deserve after all the questions and problems that we posed regarding our final grant report as I transitioned into my job last summer.

Not only that, they have been proactive about addressing potential problems, giving me a call when they noticed me doing something online in a new grant application that might cause difficulties down the road.

If this is a result of hiring people using this apparently mismatched job description, I fully endorse it. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

If the price of getting this sort of service from a government agency is to advocate for public health degrees over arts degrees, I will be the first to say we all should have entered the healthcare field, instead.

The truth is, there are plenty of people working for the Ohio Arts Council who have arts backgrounds, like the new executive director. The public information director has a background in arts journalism. The current deputy director had a visual arts background before she joined the arts council and later transitioned into the deputy position.

I am sure I would find similar stories for many of the arts council staff.

I reached out to one of my contacts at the arts council about the job description, her response (which came quickly, of course), was as I expected.

That job description is pretty standard for a broad class of deputy director positions across the entire state government system. It was the same way when I was working for the state of Hawaii, except we could insert the appropriate field of study.

The question is, does this really get government and the citizens the most effective employees? Speaking from experience, these descriptions get applied strictly during the initial screening of resumes so chances are an arts person is only going to get an interview if they just happened to get one of these degrees. It isn’t outside of the realm of possibility that a few good people have the qualifications and interest in the arts, but it isn’t an ideal situation.

But even if these criteria weren’t applied strictly, would someone with an arts background or interest in the arts even apply for this job in the first place after reading it? It sounds as if the applicant would be dealing with public health concerns rather than public art.

If someone with the exact public health qualifications applies and gets the job, would they be happy in a role when they expected to be involved with hospitals and health clinics rather than dance performances and art installations?

We Expect Great Things! (just not too great, please)

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Near the end of 2013 I started seeing quite a few blog posts and tweets criticizing the Obama administration for not appointing someone to replace Rocco Landesman as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The administration may have been slow to act, but I wonder how much of the delay was due the difficulty of finding someone the administration felt they could live with and whom felt they could live with the administration.

In an opinion column in the Washington Post, a social science professor writes about her experiences as an appointee to the National Council on the Humanities.

She said there were two reasons she was rejected,

“First, taxes. In 2009 and 2010, the years of my divorce, I filed my taxes late — four weeks and 10 days, respectively. Second, I was not willing to commit to never criticizing the administration, nor to restricting my publishing agenda to topics that were unlikely to be controversial. There is just no point trying to be a public intellectual if you can’t speak your mind. This requirement was conveyed and discussed through phone calls; I have no written record to prove it. But that was how it went.”

Every government entity is risk averse to any flaw in an appointee at any level these days. This American Life recently ran a story about a student whose appointment as the student representative on the Wisconsin Board of Regents was publicly announced and then rescinded. The student absolutely impressed everyone. It was only after his appointment that it was discovered he signed a recall petition in solidarity with his mother who was a teacher.

People will say they value creativity, but they are actually uncomfortable with the fact that creative people don’t conform and will figuratively color outside the lines.

So the Obama administration may have been having a hard time finding someone who would agree not to rock the boat while they held the position. Rocco did raise some controversy with this comments about some arts organizations needing to close, but most of the yelling was within the artistic community. Given the political environment in Washington those sentiments probably comforted a good many members of Congress.

The administration may have gotten what they wanted in the nomination of Jane Chu. Many articles I have written about her imply she won’t cause trouble. The LA Times used the phrase “low profile” to describe her in an number of articles, including one that used “low profile” in the headline.

The Kansas City Star described their city’s resident as “Quietly efficient, guardedly passionate.”

This isn’t to say Chu won’t rock the boat and bring about sweeping change. There have been a number of popes, the current one included, that were assumed to be “safe” choices but proved otherwise.

But right now, Chu is being painted as a rather inoffensive choice for the position which is exactly what you want in an appointee.

Some type of statement will be made about expecting great things of her, but there will be an unspoken subtext that they hope it will not be too great.

What If Your Painting Doesn’t Fit In The Deposit Envelop?

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One of the more intriguing ideas I have come across in my 10 years of blogging is the Artist Pension Trust which has artists deposit their work into across the course of 20 years with the proceeds of the sales going to fund their pensions.

When I first wrote about this back in 2006, I didn’t have too many of the details, but a recent story examining the success of the trust as it reaches its 10 anniversary provides many more details.

I was interested to learn that only 20% of the 2000 participating artists were from the United States. Though given that the number one rule of investment is diversification, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Basically, it works this way:

Participating artists donate 20 of their works over a planned 20-year period (two per year during the first five years, one per year for the ensuing five years and one piece every other year for the remaining 10 years) to the trust. There are regional directors and selection committees, consisting of independent curators, artists and collectors but not dealers (“they bring a conflict of interest,” Moti Shniberg, a former high-tech entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Mutual Art, the parent company of the Artist Pension Trust, said).

The trust “cultivates” the investment by lending them to museums and art festivals. Keeping them locked in storage for 20 years wouldn’t help enhance their value, after all. While the plan is to keep the works for 20 years, some have already been sold when their value increased significantly.

Other artists have withdrawn and asked for their art to be sold when they were short on money.

While the ideal of pooling art for the long term benefit of all is admirable in theory, in practice human nature caused the trust to slightly alter their original plan.

“David Ross noted that his original idea was for all the proceeds of sales of artwork be placed in the general pool, but a number of the artists he had approached, “who all believed that they were going to be successful in their careers,” were unenthusiastic about supporting less accomplished colleagues. “Dividing the profits—40 percent for the artist, 32 percent for the general pool—made the idea easier for them to swallow.”

As noted earlier, there are no dealers on the committees because they have a vested interest in selling an artist’s work rather than letting it be deposited in a trust for 20 years.

I look forward to checking in again on this in 10 years when the trust starts to sell the works of the first depositors in preparation for paying out pensions. How well will those artists who have been had the patience and discipline to participate in this program fare?

Info You Can Use: Rural Arts

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Last week, Americans for the Arts held a blog salon on Rural Arts.  There were a lot of familiar names and faces with posts by Wormfarm Institute and Springboard for the Arts’ rural offices, but there were more people with whom I was unfamiliar.

There were three posts that jumped out at me, likely because they were aligned with my penchant for practical knowledge. Two were by Savannah Barrett with Art of the Rural which is coordinating 2014 as Year of the Rural Arts.

Her first post suggests working with Cooperative Extension Services in your community as a method of developing the arts. Cooperative Extensions in many states operate arts extensions as part of their services and apparently the national 4-H has recently started placing a greater emphasis on communication and expressive arts according to Barrett.

Her second post lists federal and philanthropic resources that are involved with rural arts.

The third post was made by Shannon Ford from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He lists 6 characteristics which he has identified as making arts rural programs successful. Most of the characteristics are common to pretty much any activity planned by an arts organization- clarity, sustainability, evaluation. However because resources are often particularly scarce in rural communities, the need to be focused on these areas is especially important given the small margin of error.

This is why he emphasizes visibility and partnerships as a way of leveraging good will and shared resources as a way to communicate your goals to many corners of the community and achieve investment.

His last characteristic, authenticity, seemed most important of all given that the values of a rural community are shared. By which I mean in the general sense and in the course of conversation. Even if two people aren’t of like mind about your efforts, whatever you do is going to be a topic of  their conversation. As Ford notes, “No good ever came of ignoring your community’s cultural context or norms, and rural perspectives have a long history of being ignored.”

If you are interested in learning more, Americans for the Arts is hosting a three webinars on the rural arts starting Wednesday, February 26, each at 3 pm EST.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014: Economic Development and Art in Rural Communities

Thursday, February 27, 2014: Resources For Rural Arts

Friday, February 28, 2014: Placemaking in Rural Communities

10 Years O’ Blogging

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So Drew McManus beat me to it, Butts in the Seats turned 10 on Sunday. It was February 23, 2004 when I made my first post. Now here I am nearly 1500 posts later, still going pretty strong.  Back then there weren’t many people blogging about the arts. I actually took my initial inspiration from Andrew Taylor’s Artful Manager blog.

While I started blogging just as the activity and the term blog was starting to enter popular culture, I just came across an article on The Guardian that says blogging is actually 20 years old this year. Though back then, blogs were more akin to personal webpages and diaries where you had to make a conscious, and often complicated, effort to have your posts appear in some sort of chronological order on a webpage. The tools that made it easy to make posts without having to handcode HTML were still many years away.

My first few posts were made on space provided by Earthlink. But after two or three posts, I quickly realized that was not going to work at all and moved over to MovableType.  I joined the Inside the Arts family on December 13, 2007, but still maintained my blog independently on MovableType for some years before moving to WordPress with most of the rest of the Inside the Arts blogs.

There have been a lot of changes in the 10 years I have blogged, both in terms of the subject matter I tackle and my outlook about the arts. But also in terms of some of the metrics that are important to me as a blogger. At one time, I would watch my Technorati rating closely as well as the stock price of my blog on a blog stock exchange I can’t even find anymore. Now I check out trends on Google Analytics and reports via my blog desktop.

I had thought about doing a retrospective of my favorite posts or listing the top most visited posts but ultimately decided not to. I may do so in another context at a later date.

I did want to reflect on the value I think blogging has had relative to my initial motivation for starting the blog. Basically, I was looking for a job when I first started writing my blog. I thought that as an up and coming technology, it would be important for me as an arts professional to be involved in blogging.

Believe it or not, two days after starting my blog I got a call to interview at Wayne State University. I can’t attribute the interview to my starting the blog, though I think there were some people who were intrigued that I had started one. Even though I didn’t get the job, that experience convinced me that I should be blogging about arts management.  I know for a fact that my blogging got me my job in Hawaii and contributed to getting my current job and other interviews. (Spikes in Google Analytics frequently preceded a call, though some times a lack of a call.)

Really, the very act of blogging has helped me develop and evolve my thoughts about the arts and made me better at the jobs I have held, even if none one is reading the posts. It helps if people do read the posts and comment because they contribute their own thoughts and point out weaknesses in my philosophy.

A show just opened in the local museum featuring an artist from the region. He has held to a discipline that he will paint every day and continued to do so even during his honeymoon back in 1956. Looking at his work, you can easily see his technique evolve.

I think it is important for everyone to have that sort of discipline in order to become better at what they do. It isn’t enough to simply do your job day after day. I don’t have to tell you that because you are so closely involved in it, there is little time to stand back and reflect on how to do it better unless you carve the time out for yourself.

For me, part of the time I carve out is invested in writing this blog. Even though I only post about three times a week now, I employ time on other days reflecting, reading, or doing activities to continue my development.

I have no idea if I will still be blogging 10 years from now, but I do believe I will be involved in some sort of daily activity that is continuing my development in whatever area I value.

My thanks to all of you who have been reading my blog on a consistent basis whether you started 10 years ago or 10 days ago. I hope that you will find my writing valuable in the coming years.

Put The Keg Under The Dali

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I ended up with an interesting juxtaposition of articles today. After clicking on interesting looking links in my Twitter feed, I had an article asking whether children should be allowed in museums come up in a tab next to tab with YouTube videos about the student art rental program at Oberlin College.

The article about banning kids from museums was a reaction to parents letting their child crawl all over a sculpture worth $10 million at the Tate Modern. Compare that to my realization that Oberlin has been renting out their priceless Dalis, Picassos, Chagalls, Calders, etc to their students for $5 and has been doing so since 1940.

Apparently they haven’t had any lost or damaged in all that time. There is a lot of competition for the paintings with the students camping out all night to be near the head of the line and consulting maps of where the pieces will be located in the room to strategize what they will grab first. (They are limited to 2 pieces though)

Given that Frank Almond recently had his violin stolen coming out of a concert hall, it is amazing to me no one has targeted the student dorms to grab the painting.

And it should be noted, contrary to what is initially claimed in a blog on the Oberlin website, these pieces are not works that would otherwise remain out of circulation. These works are particularly set aside for this rental program and distributed and returned every semester without much incident.

Between the two situations comes the question about the best way to instill a respect for art. Do you keep kids out of the museum until they are mature enough or try to engender respect throughout their lives? Frankly, I recall wandering the Museum of Natural History on my own when I was in 10 or 11 years old so my feeling is that most kids can handle themselves if properly trained.

Presumably college students are mature enough to appreciate art in a museum, but do you dare let them take it and hang it in their dorm room?

Well, clearly you can at Oberlin at least. But the practice of lending out priceless art works like library books hasn’t caught on  with museums in any widespread way, despite Oberlin’s 70+ years of success with it.  I simultaneously cringe at the idea of a museum doing so and feel slightly ashamed at being so distrustful with so little evidence that people who would borrow can’t be trusted.

Everyone Doesn’t Have To Like You

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Today I saw a post on The Creativity Post that had me thinking back to my piece yesterday on Seth Godin’s vision of what constituted an elite.  In The Gorgeous Reality of Not Being Liked by Everyone, Jordan Bates addresses the individual who tries to please everyone, but much of what he says can apply to groups and organizations.

We all know we can’t please everyone, but still we either try to do so, or pretend we are doing so. The simple fact is, regardless of what you are writing on your grant applications, everyone in your community can’t be your market. You simply can’t be all things to all people.  Just as Godin says trying to convert someone who doesn’t want to be is a near fruitless effort, trying to appeal to everyone can result in diluting your effectiveness across a broad swath, serving no one well.

Certainly, for arts organizations the motivation to serve all that you survey is driven by the funding system we have. No one source provides you with enough support so you have to position yourself broadly enough to garner support from 20 different sources.

As I read Bates’ advice to the individual, I see a lot of similarities for arts organizations.

2. Take Minor Social Risks – Start doing a few things that you normally wouldn’t do because of your fear of what others would think or say…

3. Live by Your Deeper Values – ... The more you seek to align your actions with what you feel in the heart of your being, the less you will invest in the opinions of the mud-flingers.

4. Focus on Actual Outcomes – ..

5. Love Your Good and Bad – Give yourself permission to not be the things you wish you could be. Embrace the fact that all of your qualities — both your boons and shortcomings — are essential to the equation that is you…

There is a fair bit of discussion these days about arts organizations needing to take more risks, focus on outcomes, embracing and acknowledging failure as well as success.

I wonder if it is possible to sit down with your funders and say, “Look, you have been funding us for a long time now so you know we are effective, but we want to narrow our focus on serving X. We anticipate much better outcomes than we are seeing currently and they will be deeper and more meaningful than the results we are currently reporting. Can we count on your continued, and perhaps increased support?”

I feel like there is a  bit of a precedent for this sort of thing given the current focus on placemaking  by the NEA and other influential funders. You can point to them and note that focused investment in one’s community is being highly valued by funders.

My initial impulse was to say, you have to avoid the perception of catering only to the wealthy. But as I thought about it, I wondered if part of the problem for some organizations has been a divided focus in trying to appeal to both the wealthy and the not so wealthy. Both groups end up feeling that the organization has neither of their interests at heart.

Arts organizations end up being Archie trying to alternately please both Betty and Veronica, except the results are not as hilarious  in real life.

Now other than the Metropolitan Opera which has a waiting list miles long and people willing their seats to descendants, I don’t think any arts organization really has an interest in providing a premium product to a wealthy audience. It is the perception that you have to cater to one group based on their money and the other based on your mission that causes the uncomfortable division.

I know in my community the elitist active seekers that Godin describes cut across all social strata and income levels so there is some sense in his suggestion that the focus should be on serving them.

Of course, the question comes up about whether it is sustainable. There is a real possibility that people will have to be let go in order to serve this narrower focus. An organization I once worked for closed down their performing arts program of 20 years to focus on their core competency of over 50 years. This was motivated  more by economic need rather than philosophic outlook, but in either case the organization has to examine its priorities. Better to make this decision of your own will than to have it forced upon you.

Even among the curious, everyone is not going to have the same interests and like everything you do. The current environment where most people are buying single tickets rather than subscriptions has changed the relationship and expectations the community has of arts organizations. It can be easier to concede and have them accept that they won’t like everything you present in your efforts to engage whomever you identify you want to serve.

It is likely they will accept that premise if there appears to be a corresponding attempt to discover what does interest and excite them and shift things in that direction. (Remembering the distinction between wants and needs)

 

Re-Defining Elite

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Seth Godin is talking about us. Well, actually I think that is a little narcissistic to think he is merely talking about people in the creative fields. I am pretty sure his comment encompass American culture as well as that as that of a number of other countries.

His post titled, “I’m an elitist” addresses a lot of topics we in the creative fields get conflicted about:

Lowering the price at the expense of sustainability is a fool’s game.

Only producing tools that don’t need an instruction manual takes power away from those prepared to learn how to use powerful tools. And it’s okay to write a book that some people won’t finish, or a video that some don’t understand.

Giving people what they want isn’t always what they want.

Curators create value. We need more curators, and not from the usual places.

Creating and reinforcing cultural standards and institutions that elevate us is more urgent than ever.

We write history about people who were brave enough to lead, not those that figured out how to pander to the crowd.

Elites aren’t defined by birth or wealth, they are people with a project,…

These are all issues that are constantly being bandied about in the arts today. Pricing seems to always be a topic of conversation.

Diane Ragsdale and Nina Simon recently challenged us to think about wants versus needs.

While Godin never promises you that someone will pay for it, he encourages the creation of challenging work because to do otherwise is a disservice those who are ready to be challenged.

He actually developed that idea in a post he wrote about 4 years ago and links to in his current post.

While Godin does acknowledge that affluence does play a role in ones ability to become an elite by providing free time to pursue knowledge and the tools to communicate and process that knowledge, he states that birth, class and affluence do not make one an elite.

The number of self-selected elites is skyrocketing. Part of this is a function of our ability to make a living without working 14 hours a day in a sweatshop, but part of it is the ease with which it’s possible to find and connect with other elites.

The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from.

Once you identify this as your mission, you save a lot of time and frustration in your outreach. If someone doesn’t choose to be part of the elites, it’s unclear to me that you can persuade them to change their mind.

Two things that come to mind. If we define elites as he does, people who are willing to be challenged, rather than worrying they are the people we are focusing too much upon because they possess interest and ability to support our endeavors, what will need to change in order to engage and coordinate this new constituency? And is it sustainable?

Not the first or last time this basic question has been asked, probably even in the last week given all the conversations about how the non-profit arts sector needs to change themselves. Following Godin’s suggestion to look in new places to find curators may be a start down the right road.

Second question is about that last paragraph of Godin’s that I quote. How do you determine if someone is unwilling to embrace the challenges that are a hallmark of an elite and shift your attention elsewhere? This seems to a difficult proposition because we are not always the most objective.

As I noted at the start of this entry, there is a degree of narcissism in the arts, really just about every industry, where we see people who don’t experience the world in a similar way as we do as an outsider. Lawyers view the world differently from engineers who view the world differently from computer programmers and visual artists. Those who do not value what we value are not valued.

Yet there are groups in each who are furrowing their brows and generating a lot of sweat, tackling problems with the gusto of Godin’s elites. We know they are fellow travelers in pursuit of progress, but we want them to pay attention to us right now. It may be 15 years* before their pursuits orient them in our direction and into our orbit looking for solutions.

I am sure Godin’s definition of outreach is much wider than what arts organization define as outreach, but even if your efforts embody his definition, 15 years is a long time and it is easy to give up on someone (or a group) that is clearly engaged and actively pursuing productive projects simply because they aren’t engaged and active with you.

As a whole, arts organizations currently don’t have that sort of patience. Even if they don’t expect people to fall in love with the arts after one exposure, they still want it to happen fairly quickly and investment to manifest in frequent interactions. Otherwise, organizations wouldn’t purge their mail lists after a year or two of apparent inactivity.

On the other hand, if you take up Godin’s challenge, take the approach that you value seekers and restructure to serve them in all the ways they want to interact with you, both on- and off-line, maybe it doesn’t take 15 years.

 

*I use 15 years because it was about 15 years ago that friends from grad school took me to an art museum when I was visiting them in NC, as did another pair of friends when I was visiting them in OK. However, it was only about 4 years ago that I started going to art museums of my own accord and on a regular basis. I figure if it takes a person with a career in the arts around 15 years to start to do that, it may take someone who is not in the arts around that long as well to go from infrequent to occasional and we need to wait for them.

What I Learned In The Hospital

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Yesterday I was at our local hospital attending some presentations on different aspects of the hospital’s operations. One of the people spoke about the processes the hospital follows to ensure good customer service. Because there are so many steps and people involved in scheduling a patient’s test, handling their arrival at the front desk, directing them to the proper part of the hospital and then administering the test, there are many opportunities for patients to be upset or frustrated.

The hospital has a whole process set up for each face to face interaction which include a greeting, mention of employee’s name, confirmation of details of visit, pointing out the restrooms and a number of other things I don’t recall. They have an acronym 7-8 characters long that they use to remember all the steps.

The woman who is in charge monitoring customer service followed patients through the process for about a week and conducted some phone surveys as well.

It was interesting to learn that a frequent complaint across the different areas was that people were laughing. One person was upset by people laughing in a backroom and talking about breakfast as she was checking in. Another didn’t like the fact people were laughing in the halls. This is understandable as people going into the hospital would be anxious about any sign that staff wasn’t serious and focused on their jobs.

Arts organizations can probably get away with a lot more cheerfulness in front of clients in the course of their duties, but like any business, would also need to reflect an attentive and efficient demeanor.

One practice the customer service director noticed impacted each patient’s visible level of comfort was when staff did what she termed “managing up” as they passed a patient on to another person. The way she used the term seemed to deviate from the standard definition. It might be more accurate to say they were managing patient expectations.

Essentially, as a patient was handed over to someone else, the escort would introduce the new person and say something complimentary – “she is really friendly,” “he is the best radiologist in the state,” “her nursing team is very attentive.” The hospital encouraged the staff to do this in order to assuage the concerns of patients who were probably anxious about just being in the building even if they felt fine.

I mention all this because one thing she noticed was that the doctors were horrendous employing any of the gestures which are pretty much mandated for the rest of the staff, including simply introducing themselves by name. Obviously, some were extremely personable, but on the whole the general staff was better at remembering to “manage up” than the doctors were when they handed a patient on to technicians or nursing staff.

I started wondering if the same might be true of an arts organization. I would wager that the lower echelons of staff in arts organizations are better at saying complimentary things about their supervisors than executive administration are when they pass clients/customers back to staff for assistance.

There is a lot of focus on the importance of the box office and house staff as a first line of contact for customers and training them to comport themselves well. But rarely do we talk about the importance of other parts of the organization bolstering the image of these areas.

Advertising will talk about how great the performers are, but does anyone else in the organization publicly comment on the quality of the front of house staff? A lot of service oriented companies like airlines and hotels will have advertising which feature friendly, energetic faces eager to make your experience comfortable. But rarely do you see an arts organization emphasize their service as a selling point.

I wonder how much greater the satisfaction of audiences will be if you were to comment, “This is Michael our box office manager, he is a crackerjack at troubleshooting these complicated problems.” or “This is my favorite usher, Mabel, she’ll make sure you find the rest of your party.” (It probably wouldn’t hurt employee and volunteer relations either)

One last thing I learned during my visit to the hospital: A hospital may be really generous making a donation to your organization, but you are only doing half your job if you are just talking to the people who can write you a check. You can enter into a mutually beneficial relationship if you cultivate a relationship with the physician recruitment staff.

Doctors may be primarily concerned with the state of the hospital facilities, but their families are going to be the ones living in your community. They don’t care about how many stents the cardiac unit implanted last year and the mortality rate, but they do care about what activities are available in the community.

The families have a strong influence on whether the doctors stay in the community so the hospital has a vested interest in making sure the families are happy. Our local hospital actually sponsors date nights where they will babysit the kids while the parents go off and do whatever they want until 11 pm. The more amenities the physician recruitment staff knows about, the better for everyone.

While we were on break, one of the hospital staff commented she just learned that the local museum had summer arts classes. Another commented she never knew that and the first observed that a lot of times different organizations have their summer arts camps the same week and she wished they would spread them out.

It just so happened someone called me that afternoon to say they were thinking of starting up a summer arts camp and I saw the directors of the museum at lunch today. I advised both to make sure the recruitment staff knew about their summer plans and try to arrangement them so they didn’t overlap the same weeks.

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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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