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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.

Kiss Your Local Librarian

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So this week I learned that it is really a good idea to create a good relationship with your local librarians. Google may provide you with a lot of information, but it still ain’t got nothing on the librarians when it comes to pulling the information together and providing it in a relevant form.

We are doing The Miracle Worker this year and I inherited the start of an attempt at a “One Book, One Community” type program. When I reached out to the working group that had been formed prior to my arrival, the public library responded by asking, “Was A Book Selected?”

I responded by saying I assumed it would either be the script or Helen Keller’s autobiography. I wasn’t aware of too many other texts. Certainly, there were other texts but there didn’t seem to be many that were age appropriate for younger children.

Au contraire, both the campus and public libraries metaphorically responded, providing me with a large list of books, videos and other materials with summaries notes on age appropriateness and how they fulfilled state and Common Core standards.

Over half this media didn’t appear on a Google or Amazon search and certainly those results didn’t include anything about recommended age groups and state standards.

I have every library card I have ever owned since I was a kid so I am no stranger to the stacks, but I have to say that I have apparently been underestimating the powers of my libraries.

I look at this list and I begin to think about all the effort putting together educational packets for shows that could have been reduced by working more closely with the local library.

Don’t discount your library!

Audience Development As Disagreement

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In a post Seth Godin made today, he says:

The easiest way to disagree with someone

…is to assume that they are uninformed, and that once they know what you know, they will change their mind. (A marketing problem!)

For a long time that was the mode in which arts organizations operated, believing that once people were exposed to the arts, they would fall in love with them forever and ever.

I really never thought of that view as “disagreeing” with a potential audience member, but I guess in a way that is what it is.

It wasn’t until I read Godin’s post that I realized that the view people would fall in love with the arts once they were exposed is probably based on a longstanding sales philosophy that being told “No” simply meant that people didn’t have enough information.

I don’t know how many jobs I had where I was told that. I always thought it was a pile of baloney because there are plenty of reasons for not wanting to buy something other than lack of information. I suspect it was just a semi-manipulative way of making the sales person blame themselves for not making the sale.

Godin has a couple more levels of difficulty for disagreeing with someone. However, he says (my emphasis)

The hardest way to disagree with someone is to come to understand that they see the world differently than we do, to acknowledge that they have a different worldview, something baked in long before they ever encountered this situation. (Another marketing problem, the biggest one).

There actually are countless uninformed people. There are certainly craven zealots. And yes, in fact, we usually hear what we want to hear, or hear what the TV tells us, or hear what we expect, instead of hearing what was said, and the intent behind it. Odds are, though, that we will make the change we seek by embracing the hard work of telling stories that resonate, as opposed to dismissing the other who appears not to get it.

So while Godin’s answer does sort of embrace the idea that the problem is a lack of information, that deficit isn’t solved by delivering a spiel*. Rather the most effective approach will likely be a long term communication process based on an understanding of the other person–the audience and community in the case of most arts organizations.

(*Mahagonny-Songspiel might work, but I doubt it.)

Oh, You Want Us To Teach It, Too?

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Last month on Americans for the Arts’ Arts Blog, Elizabeth Laskowski, wrote about how she welcomed standardized testing for the arts because it was making her school finally take her seriously.

My first thought was that she was basically embracing the philosophy of the kid who always acts up in class–even attention in a negative context is better than no attention.

Because students will now be tested in the arts area, Laskowski will now receive regular evaluations of her teaching, attending her class will no longer be a “carrot and stick” privilege afforded well-behaved children, students will get up to 135-180 minutes a week with her instead of 30 and the grades in her class will actually count.

It probably goes without saying that I think it shouldn’t take the threat of testing to create a situation where a music teacher is thrilled that:

“We will no longer be simply a prep time for general education teachers, or a way for the kids to blow off a little steam before they get back to work. The arts will be full fledged, real, and valuable subjects, worthy of time, money, and respect.”

Elizabeth Laskowski’s post illustrated for me that it isn’t enough to just advocate for arts in the schools, requiring that they be treated seriously and taught is also apparently necessary.

Parents may have to scrutinize claims of arts classes being offered. It appears all classes are not created equal and one should not assume that three years of music class provides roughly equivalent instruction hours as three years of French.

Little Points of Pride

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I didn’t know what to write about today. I have a bunch of articles bookmarked, but I haven’t read enough of any of of them to do them justice. I have a bunch of stories I want to draw instructive points from, but they involve people who work with me or rent from me so if I talk about them at all, it will be after some time has past.

What I have decided to do is talk about something I am not responsible for but I feel a great deal of investment and pride in. Talking about what other arts people are doing well seems like a good topic for a Wednesday.

Last week the gallery in my building opened a show by the artist Jimi Jones, and I have really been pleased with the whole experience.

The artist was great at the opening, taking people around to talk about the pieces, asking them questions about what different elements made them think about, telling them that their feedback would help guide his future work. I appreciated that he introduced the concept of interactivity between the artist and the viewer since many of the attendees were students.

He also showed up early the next day to talk to another class before running off to his next show. I got a chance to speak with him and ask him questions about his work and he was just as gracious and engaging as he had been the night before.

I got a little bit of an ego boost the evening of the opening when the directors of the local museum commented that they had tried to get the very show our gallery was presenting at a museum they previously worked at but met a lot of resistance from the board and staff.

You have to admit, there is always a little thrill with even the illusion that you are a bit more progressive than someone else.

What I also appreciated was that despite the reputation that young people today aren’t really engaged with the arts as much as they are with their phones, there were a large number of students who walked around with the artist for the better part of 90 minutes while he moved to and fro between the different works. I think he tired out before they did.

One of the visual arts faculty has brought at least five different classes into the gallery that I have seen and gotten her students engaged in a conversation about the art.

There is furniture made from a lightning struck tree in the lobby just outside the gallery and I often sit there and read during lunch. The best conversation I have heard the classes in the gallery have so far included the students’ disbelief that the artist is in his mid-50s rather than a 20 year old based on the contemporary subject matter and feel of the works.

None of this may seem like a big deal to some of you, but I have never worked in an arts center with an active gallery and so many interesting pieces of permanently installed visual art. We don’t have a large gallery, but its presence contributes to the vibrancy of the whole building.

As I said, other than unlocking the door and making sure audiences to our shows could see the sign directing them upstairs to the gallery, I haven’t been involved with any of the decisions that lead to the presence of this work. But I do take a lot of pride and ownership in it being here.

Passion vs. Engagement

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The Drucker Exchange quotes an article in Bloomberg Businessweek claiming “truly passionate U.S. employees” make up “a scant 11% of the workforce.”

My first reaction was to wonder if the arts had a higher percentage of passionate employees than most sectors. The Drucker Institute piece mentions the responsibility of the employee to essentially manage their own careers because companies won’t do it for you.

But it also mentions the need for companies to provide an environment which allow passionate people to thrive. This has been a frequent topic recently in respect to the work-life balance employees at arts organizations seek in addition to their desire to make a difference.

“And yet, for all this, Drucker also recognized that it wasn’t simply a matter of employees seizing responsibility. It’s up to their employers to provide the systems and processes and culture for them to be able to do so. Heavy-handed, top-down organizations—those that “rest on command authority,” in Drucker’s words—don’t create the right dynamics for passion.”

When I looked at the Bloomberg article, I was intrigued by the distinction they made between a passion and engagement.

What’s the difference between passion and engagement? Employee engagement is typically used by organizations to figure out if workers buy into the company’s goals, if they like working for their manager, if they find the company sensitive to work/life balance issues, etc. That serves companies well when they want to scale and have workers “engaged” in the task necessary to expand their particular corporate silo.

The passionate worker—the metaphor Deloitte employs is “the passion of the explorer”—are those who view new challenges as opportunities to learn additional skills. That attitude becomes essential, the consulting firm maintains, because the typical work skill will be outdated within five years. “These people are driven to develop new skills at an ever rapid pace and are thrilled by it,” Hagel says. “Passionate people are the most agile.”

Once you think about it, engagement is a different aspect of employment from passion. You can feel engaged by your company and the environment and opportunities you find in your work, but not necessarily be passionate about advancing your skills and knowledge.

An engaged person could advance within the company by performing excellently, but not necessarily advance the company the way a passionate person will.

But a passionate person may not necessarily advance in the company hierarchy. Bloomberg cites the Andon Cord on the Toyota assembly line which any line worker can pull to stop the line and gather the workers when there is a problem.

Like Toyota though, a company needs to create an environment and culture in which passion is valued.

The end of the Bloomberg article notes that those in marketing and management were more passionate than those in accounting and customer service, as were those making more than $150,000.

However, the Toyota example shows that it can be cultivated at all levels of an organization. (And, one hopes, at arts salaries.)

Info You Can Use: The Writing On The Walk

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So tonight is the first event in the season at my new job, a concert by a group called Cordis which bills their music as chamber-rock.

Now if you are asking, “what the heck is chamber-rock?” thank you very much. I actually used that question as the basis of my advertising campaign for the show because I figured nearly 100% of our audience, including our subscriber base, would be wondering the same thing.

That question was posed at the start of our press releases. I bought time on an electronic sign at the intersection of two major roads that flashed the “What the Heck” question on one screen and then provided contact and web information on the next screen.

A couple weeks before the show we distributed posters around campus and town. Then a week prior to the show, I went out early in the morning with sidewalk chalk to write the “What The Heck..” question, and a web address that contained information and videos, around campus and around town near the businesses that accepted our posters.

I didn’t write it directly in front of the businesses’ doors out of concern that they might find it annoying. (I was more direct on campus.) But I did put it on a general area close enough to the business that anyone entering the business had an opportunity make a connection between the sidewalk chalk and the poster.

Near the museum and the library, I took a slightly different tack and included a suggestion that people go in to find out more. My intent being to send people in to explore those organizations when the might not normally do so.

Here is a sample:

What The Heck Is Chamber Rock

I know this is hardly a groundbreaking idea and it isn’t suited to all performances. But the content of this performance lent itself well to having a little fun.

I will admit that it didn’t seem to spur much increase in advance single ticket sales. I suspect there are a number of other issues at play like price and timing that factor into that.

Walking around campus, I did see students looking down at lot, but it was mostly at their phones rather than the sidewalk writing. Though I did catch a couple stopping to read, there is a decrease in situational awareness to contend with these days.

So I am happy to (pun intended) chalk this up to generating awareness and good will in the community than anything else.

Volunteer….Or Else

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Would you volunteer for a non-profit if there was a better chance of becoming employed? Would you do it if you were forced to?

If you were a non-profit, would you welcome either set of volunteers?

This summer the NEA pointed to a report that showed the value of volunteering in the search for employment.

“The link between volunteering and finding employment appeared strongest among lower-educated people and those living in rural areas. As the authors write, “volunteering may assist in ‘leveling the playing field’ for these individuals, who typically have a more difficult time finding employment, especially during a recession.”

[…]

CNCS suggests that as a result of this knowledge, nonprofits may want to “target those who have the most to gain by volunteering—out-of-work individuals, particularly people without a high school degree or people living in rural areas. Volunteer recruitment may then have two purposeful outcomes: improvements to communities and better employment outcomes for community members.”

[…]

On the whole, volunteers for arts and cultural organizations were found to be better educated than volunteers for all other kinds of organizations, and they generally were more giving of their time than other volunteers.

However, the Non-Profit Quarterly recently noted that “the Michigan Senate passed legislation to require community service for people receiving government assistance such as food stamps and other welfare benefits.”

Non Profit Quarterly quotes The National Council of Non-Profits as supporting

“…programs that promote volunteering activities that mutually benefit individuals and the people served through nonprofits. However, the Council of Nonprofits’ Public Policy Agenda expressly opposes proposals to condition receipt of government-provided benefits on requirements that individuals volunteer at nonprofit organizations.

Such a policy, sometimes called ‘mandatory volunteerism,’ unfairly imposes increased costs, burdens, and liabilities on nonprofits by an influx of coerced individuals.” While the Council’s arguments emphasize “unfunded mandates on charitable nonprofits to accommodate the hundreds of thousand suddenly showing up on their doorsteps seeking unscheduled and unsolicited service opportunities” and the prospect of “name-brand nonprofits and foundations in particular…overwhelmed by sheer volumes of people if such a bill were passed…”

One of the commenters angrily observes that public aid recipients aren’t directed to work at large corporations, but rather to organizations with fewer means to support their presence. At one time it might be claimed that working for free at a large corporation runs into all sorts of labor laws that don’t apply to non-profits. However, with all the lawsuits that came to light this summer about unpaid internships, people have started to suspect the perceived non-profit exception to such laws may not be as clear cut as once thought.

But as the statement by the National Council of Non-profits notes, there is a significant cost to managing volunteers. How much more a burden will there be when the volunteers are compelled to serve?

I suspect that difference in context will engender a resentment that will make those providing community service less valuable as volunteers and less likely to result in the positive outcomes cited by the NEA. Non-profits might ultimately plead that they operate more effectively when these people are kept away from their organizations.

Some commenters cite the value of the WPA programs during the Depression. I am not sure how those programs were viewed in the 1930s, but the program in Michigan seems more punitive than designed as a “Let’s Put People To Work” effort.

And those comments overlook the fact that the government played a large role in the management of the assignment and training of those put to work. If there was a similar program in Michigan that provided preparation, placement and supervision of those doing community service, the experience might be productive.

It is encouraging to know that volunteering can be a constructive experience that can lead to employment. But I imagine the greatest value is derived when volunteering is performed willingly. I would be wary a situation where non-profits became a significant part of a government’s social welfare program without some degree of additional training and support.

In the absence of such support, the non-profit becomes part of the “or else…” stick the government is using, a situation which is counter to nearly every charitable organization’s purpose.

Instead of being viewed as a resource and asset in the community, the non-profit runs the risk of being viewed as an antagonist, or at least party to the antagonism.

Old School Community Engagement

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Apropos of my post yesterday about community engagement, the term has so recently been bandied about as something arts organizations should aspire to, it is easy to forget that it isn’t a new idea.

Bread and Puppet, for example, turns 50 this year. They started out in the streets, in the community giving people bread alongside the performances and involving members of the community in their performance.

They may be viewed as agitprop rabble rousers, but the philosophy founder Peter Shumann espouses about his work pretty much parallels the current thought about how the arts should be integral to a community:

“We give you a piece of bread with the puppet show because our bread and theater belong together. For a long time the theater arts have been separated from the stomach. Theater was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. The old rites of baking, eating and offering bread were forgotten. The bread became mush. We would like you to take your shoes off when you come to our puppet show or we would like to bless you with the fiddle bow. The bread shall remind you of the sacrament of eating.

We want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It preaches sermons and builds a self-sufficient ritual.

Bread and Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto, written 20 years ago, further echoes current sentiments about the value of art.

Cheap Art is not an easy life style though. While the group has endured for 50 years, they haven’t amassed a fortune in the process. From what I have read over the years, their work is fueled as much by passion and sweat today as it was 50 years ago.

The article I link to about the 50th anniversary, suggests Schumann doesn’t feel he has made the impact he had hoped.

While it probably isn’t in the direction Schumann had hoped, his work did have an impact on me. When I was an undergraduate in the late 80s, Bread and Puppet was invited to work with the students to create a performance. If I recall correctly, the piece was protesting the destruction brought about by damming a river to build a hydroelectric plant.

But what impressed me was Schumann’s ability to improvise his show according to the facilities and number of people he had available. My conception of plays to that point was based in the execution of concrete set of lines, stage directions and set pieces.

I recall that the school hadn’t been able to recruit the number of students he had asked for. I thought Schumann would be angry—again based on the idea that shows required a specific number of people. But he and his team just made do and we got an opportunity to work with those great larger than life puppets. The result was pretty visually interesting. (Yeah, I know he didn’t invent improvised performance and the revelation would have certainly come at some point.)

I didn’t go on to protest the construction of environmentally unfriendly projects, but I do still have a poster and the experience has informed programming decisions I have made.

I presented long time Bread and Puppet collaborator, Paul Zaloom at one point. And my college experience with Bread and Puppet was the basic inspiration for a site specific work I commissioned in conjunction with another performance group to provide a similar experience to another set of students. A fair bit of the work I have done in recent years has been about providing a venue for local artists to give voice to elements of their community.

I am sure the memory of that one weekend working with Bread and Puppets has contributed to my conviction about the value of the arts as practice and experience.

At some point in our lives, maybe we all need an encounter with a madman with wild hair who comes with challenging ideas in one hand and a loaf of bread offered in the other.

I was about to suggest that it would be good to sometimes be that madman for our communities, but I realized it takes experience to make the product in both hands palatable.

Info You Can Use: Resources For Developing Community Engagement

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I have been reading a fair bit lately accusing arts organizations of paying lip service to the concepts of connecting and building relationships with the community. The suggestion is this is something of a euphemism for “what is the least I have to do to convince people to see my show?”

While there may be some truth to this, there are a number of arts organizations who sincerely wish to forge stronger bonds with their communities.

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters recently released a resource for those wishing to develop community engagement activities.

The 14 members of the Leadership Development Institute, comprised of presenters from across the country developed the content for “A Cooperative Inquiry: How Can Performing Arts Organizations Build and Sustain Meaningful Relationships with Their Communities?”

They organize the content into the following areas:

Making the Case – Why is it important to know and connect with community?

Building an Organizational Culture – Why is it important to integrate community engagement into a presenter’s mission/strategic plan?

Connecting with Your Community – How should geographic, socioeconomic and political realities of the community inform an organization’s approach?

Involving Artists – How should artists – who are key stakeholders in the arts ecology – be involved in connecting their work with communities?

Evaluating Impact – How can evaluation serve internal learning and enhanced community engagement?

The material gets the old Butts in the Seats seal of approval because it offers practical solutions. Being part of the Leadership Development Institute requires that you discuss the theories, go back and try to implement what you discussed within the context of your organization and then come back and report to the whole group.

As a result, most of the five areas listed above ends with a “How It Works In Practice” section discussing what did and didn’t work for some of the participants. Each area also has a worksheet associated with it to help guide discussions and planning.

The areas that I read with the greatest interest were the first two, making the case and building organizational culture. It seems to me that if you don’t have a clear understanding of your goals and investment by the staff, all your efforts are likely to come to naught.

I liked the five sample generic case statements they provided because they ran the gamut from invoking Aristotelian ideals to the short and practical,

“Unless our arts organizations continually evaluate our missions and evolve our programming to reflect the communities in which we serve, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant and impotent as a force for social and cultural change in our cities.”

I also appreciated that there was one specifically geared to university campus based art organizations.

When it came to making statements about who the community you served was and who you would like to connect to, I liked their suggestion that an arts organization work a little backwards and start by examining a performance or event that you deemed culturally successful and determine what made it important and relevant.

This appealed to me because so often statements about mission and who you serve are very aspirational. That is how it should be.

But often looking at these statements in the context of an event you feel was successful might contradict some of that self-image if the community you think you are serving well isn’t participating in your greatest successes.

On the other hand, you may discover that you have made greater strides in serving a community than you imagined when you recognize that what you identify as the culturally successful event, while not the best attended or financially rewarding, has had the deepest impact in the community. This may manifest in a hundred small ways that aren’t directly recorded on a balance sheet.

When it comes time to try to build organizational culture around the idea of community engagement, that culturally successful event can provide a great starting point.

Staff can be dubious when new initiatives are introduced so having an example of an event that everyone is proud of provides a set of shared values from which to start a conversation about other efforts in which everyone can feel some degree of investment.

Drama Is A Choice

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You may have heard the phrase, “He who yells first, loses.” This is a rule that is often used in beginning acting classes because anger is an easy emotion to go to when faced by the obstacles presented by the other people in your scene or exercise. In order to force the student to explore and exercise all the options available in human interactions, anger is often removed as a choice.

In many instances in real life, this is also the case. Exploding with anger often indicates that a person feels they have lost control of the situation and are trying to reassert control by overwhelming everyone with an exhibition of rage.

Sometimes, people use crying to achieve the same effect. In either case, there is some degree of drama involved.

Seth Godin reminded me of all these things in a recent post where he essentially says people can only process so much drama before a sense of equilibrium is established that allows them to continue to function in the face of it all. (And unfortunately, as we know, if it is a slow news day, people will create a high sense of drama to fill the vacuum.)

The last line is what really drove it home to me.

“But understand that drama is a choice.”

Arts organizations often operate in a sense of crisis and impending doom. It is easy to forget that some of it is of our own making and a result of the way we choose to perceive and process the world around us.

In fact, there was a recent segment on This American Life that dealt with the personal narrative a Bosnia refugee told himself about all the lucky breaks he had received which lead to his current success.

The high school teacher he credits with giving him the one critical break that allowed him to become a renowned economist says his perception of the entire situation and the seminal incident are almost wholly incorrect. However, it isn’t long before he starts to reweave his narrative to support his belief he has benefited from a long series of lucky breaks.

You Wanna Come Upstairs And See My New Etchings?

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There are days like today when I simultaneously feel invigorated to be working in the arts and grossly inadequate for having been remiss in forging relationships and participating in other arts disciplines.

I went to the local museum today to ask them to put up a poster for a show we are going to be presenting in a couple weeks.

I ended up in the executive director’s office briefly chatting about an email I had sent suggesting possibly collaborating on a grant, though I only had a vague idea for a project.

The artistic director  burst out asking if I had wanted to see some pieces they had brought back from New Orleans for a show they were going to put together. Suddenly I found myself in an area of the museum I didn’t know existed looking at African ritual masks and other works.

Apparently a university in New Orleans (I believe it was Southern University of New Orleans) has long been the beneficiary of doctors at various hospitals around New Orleans who have brought back works from research trips to Africa.

The university campus was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and now the building which housed these works was about to be renovated. Rather than store the works in a warehouse for the next few years, the university is placing the pieces in the custody of our local museum. The museum in turn is going to organize the works into shows that will be lent out to other museums.

Most of the pieces are still boxed up, but I was fascinated by the stories of the pieces conveniently at hand they were showing me. In my excitement at having the opportunity, I also felt some regret that I had neglected to really explore the visual arts until the last five years or so.

Granted, I recognize that the experience I was having was as much a confluence of personalities and opportunity as my having taken the initiative to make that first visit to the museum. Not every performing arts facility manager is going to be able to walk into a museum and establish a relationship with the directors that results in an exclaimed invitation to explore the contents of shipping boxes.

(Though I had the romantic Indiana Jones-esque notation of wooden crates with artifacts nestled in excelsior versus the rather mundane Uhaul shipping boxes and bubble wrap.)

The dynamics may not exist where a performing arts director can walk into the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and get a backstage tour of the conservators’ workshops.

Still, the overtures for these relationships probably don’t happen enough. I bet Nina Simon would be all over the right opportunity to collaborate with a performing arts organization around Santa Cruz. Maybe this sort of thing hasn’t happened as a result of a sense of rivalry, perhaps out of disinterest, or maybe like everyone else, a sense of intimidation of an unfamiliar art form.

I think we are all getting the sense that the time when we can comfortably work isolated from each other is coming to a close. At the very least, an improved understanding of the flora and fauna of the greater arts ecology is going to be necessary.

Even if they never find a project to work on with each other, arts people from different disciplines can provide useful feedback to one another.

For example, after hearing the interesting story about each of the pieces, I told the directors I hoped they would include that in the display rather than a small plaque saying “Female Rite of Passage Mask, Ibo Society.”

They already intended to have a much more descriptive display, but I think it is valuable to have someone else reinforce the idea that the story is interesting and important to the enjoyment of a piece. Seeing someone enthusiastic about their work can be infectious and energize you about your own.

And if your colleague is excitedly babbling about something that seems entirely obscure and arcane to you, a close relationship can allow you to point that out and guide them to a more accessible discussion of what is interesting about the piece. You are enough of an outsider to be confused by challenging terminology a colleague in their discipline might not catch, but enough of an insider to know where to start providing guidance.

And of course, you can get a new perspective on your own practices. I implied not liking the sparse plaques in museums, but there is a debate in visual arts circles about how much and what type of information to provide and how much to leave up to the viewer.

Have you ever thought about whether your performances are helped or harmed by the amount of information you provide audiences?  As an audience member/viewer does it affect your enjoyment to learn that your interpretation of a work is diametrically opposed to that of the creator? Would you be happier not knowing?

When Subscription Renewals Was Everyone’s Job

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I know the days of Danny Newman’s subscription parties has probably long past, but I was clearing out some old files a few weeks ago and came across what might be described as an artifact of better days.

I have scanned the front and back of an envelop that was used by community organization that preceded the current community board we work with. The group apparently got a lot of people in the community to call the previous year’s subscribers and solicit new ones. I appreciate the design of the envelop with bits of information about the organization for the callers.

Front of Envelop

For some reason part of the scan always comes out a little broken up no matter what I do. The 3rd bullet point under “This Is The Community Concert Plan” reads “Community Concerts offers a non-profit, no-loss plan. All money collected is spent on the attractions in the coming season and the local presentation expense.”

Back of Envelop

This is the backside with hints for the volunteers. The garbled text at the first hint says, “Go through your address book and greeting card lists for prospects. Are you a member of any service clubs, fraternal or religious organizations? These are excellent sources.”

This hint may be why this particular practice no longer occurs. In this community where everyone knows everyone, it is likely a person would get appeals to subscribe from multiple people which I imagine would become old very quickly.

That said, it makes me a little sentimental for the days when this type of program could be viable. Especially since it appeared to have the involvement of a fairly large number of people. (Or at least aspired to) The idea of many people being invested in getting subscription renewals is greatly appealing.

Assuming this wasn’t the only training someone would get, this little packet could be pretty effective at keeping people organized, on task and equipt with many of the answers they needed in an easily referenced layout.

Truly A Transformational Arts Experience

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I just wanted to share this cool video that truly embodies the term “creative placemaking” courtesy of WFPL.

Artist Matthew Mazzotta used materials from a blighted house in York, Alabama that was being torn down to construct a house that can be “unrolled” to make a 100 seat public performance space on the same lot the old house sat.

You can read about the project and some of the travails it faced, view pictures and watch other videos of the process.

What Will You Do If You Win?

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Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes and other preventative measures so municipalities are finding additional tasks for fire fighters to perform.

What caught my eye was his comments:

“…explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”

This immediately brought two things to mind. First, that this was a good illustration of the value of embracing the idea of building an expiration date into your organization at the time of formation.

The other thing it evoked was the oft expressed warning against chasing funding for projects outside the scope of your core purpose just because the funding exists. Not only does it cause an organization to lose focus, but as Tabarrok notes, it is difficult to evaluate if your work is really effective any more.

It occurred to me that one of the benefits of building a planned expiration into your organization is the ability to declare a win. That is something that non-profits don’t often get the opportunity to do given the way they are often structured.

If you read about the vision behind arts organizations with expiration dates, achieving the expiration condition doesn’t necessarily need to result in an absolute dissolution.

In many cases, it can just be an opportunity to reorganize a similar group of people to address a new project without feeling an obligation to perpetuate anything from the previous entity. In many respects, it contributes to organization evolution by discarding what didn’t work or is no longer relevant and allowing experimentation with some new ideas.

Stuff To Ponder: Quantifiable Data Is For Other People

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I recently got a little lesson in how easy it is to apply criteria to other people that you resist having applied to yourself.

This weekend I was listening to a recent episode of This American Life which was covering the efforts of an organization called Give Directly which gives money directly to the poorest people in a country, in this case, Kenya, on the belief that they know best how to spend it.

Despite all the problems you might assume might arise, things seem to be going very well with the program.

Still, the founders were all grad students at MIT and Harvard so they are all about hard data. They weren’t satisfied with the anecdotal evidence of outcomes they found in their research. The organization is doing exhaustive research conducting surveys that take an entire day to administer to measure the differences in outcomes between those who receive funds and those who don’t.

This American Life also talked to people from Heifer International who give cows and training raising and caring for them, to people in developing countries. Their program sound incredibly beneficial. The cows are so big and healthy, the reporters talked about how intimidated they were by them.

The reporters mentioned that the people at Give Directly would like charities like Heifer International to do studies to determine what program design was most effective. The reporter asks a Heifer representative (around 30 minute mark) if they would consider giving cows and training to one village and then give the money they would spend on cows and training, to another village to see what was more effective.

The woman representing Heifer said that sounded too much like an experiment and you can’t do that with the lives of real people.

The reporter says he imagines the Give Directly people would respond “that we have to do experiments because that is the only way to figure out the very best way to help people.”

The Heifer representative spoke about it not being that linear and that there are some elements that are not easily quantified by the limits of data.

I immediately found myself siding with the Give Directly people. You are never going to be able to serve everyone who needs help. So if you are providing cows to one village and money to another, at least you aren’t setting up a control group that doesn’t get anything beneficial which is the case with most experiments. (control group getting sugar pills, other group getting the medicine).

And actually, that is how Give Directly is conducting their study–with a control group that doesn’t receive any support at all.

However, it only took about 15 seconds to realize that I was hearing very familiar language being used. How often have people in the arts talked about the benefits of what they do not being easily measured and provided anecdotes about smiling faces and lives changed? I know one acting teacher who yelled at a curriculum committee for trying to apply concrete measures to his classes.

Just recently GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the Wise Giving Alliance got together to ask that overhead not be used as a metric for deciding what charities to support.

Yet with the increased focus on quantifiable results with things like K12 test scores and college four year graduation rates, Give Directly’s model may become a more prevalent one in the future.

The good news is that they give money without any application process or strings attached. The bad news is that it is according to their own criteria.

A grass roof on your house qualified you to receive support from Give Directly in Kenya. If you had a better roof, you didn’t receive any money. A very slim distinction the story admits, between the very poorest and the slightly less poor.

I think we can all admit there are inefficiencies in the way non-profit arts organizations are run that could benefit from good evidence based criteria. However, I don’t think it is a self-deceptive rationalization to believe that what is effective for an art organization in Chicago will be quite different from one in the rural southwest.

This is not to say groups like Give Directly will formulate a one-size-fits-all giving formula. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if hard number results become viewed as an increasingly more important measure of success.

As I wrote about two years ago, Warren Buffett’s grandson, Howard Warren Buffett, has been talking about non-profits merging to become more efficient and solution oriented instead of problem oriented.

Warren Buffett’s son, (Howard Warren Buffett’s uncle), recently derided what he called “The Charitable-Industrial Complex” which criticized transplanting solutions with “little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.” He too calls for a better way of doing things.

Both are more directly referring to work that is being done in the developing world, but criteria applied in one sector will inevitably migrate to another. Talking about the unmeasurable benefits of the arts is only going to so convincing. It would be wise to acknowledge problems, pay attention and participate in the conversation so that others are not proposing solutions for you in your absence.

Stuff To Ponder: Focus Exercises For Audiences

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Given that I am working on a university campus, there is always a conversation about how do you get more students to attend performances at the performing arts center. One of the easiest answers is to offer extra credit or have students attend and then write some sort of paper on the experience.

I have reservations about this course of action given many years of experience with such programs. If students are not majoring in the arts, but are taking an “introduction to” course figuring the class will be an easy “A,” the results are often less than desirable.

It isn’t so bad if only a few students are taking intro courses during the semester, but if there are multiple sections of large lecture hall size classes, the students all tend to attend on the night that will least impact their weekend plans and that audience is markedly different from any other audience.

In some respects, it is almost better to play in front of a half empty room than a full room where only a few people respond to the performance.

I should note for the record that this isn’t a great concern of mine on my current campus since the intro classes are smaller and fewer students are being directly induced to attend. However, as I mentioned yesterday I dislike the idea of people viewing attendance at the arts as a trial to be endured.

In the course of a recent discussion, I had an idea for a general assignment related to attending an arts event that took the focus of the requirement off the performance itself and might get them in a receptive frame of mind for the performance

Basically, I was inspired by John Cage’s 4’33”. My thought was to assign students to arrive 15-30 minutes early for a performance. Turn off their cell phones and just sit and observe without speaking or interacting for 4’33”. After that, they could make notes about what they observed and then sit back and take the performance as they found it.

The benefit of this assignment is that it is flexible enough to be used by many liberal arts disciplines. Music students could focus on sounds; actors, sociology and psychology students on how people interact; fine arts students on the light in the room; literature students could use the observations as the basis of a short story or poem.

Students majoring in an arts discipline would need to be paying close attention throughout the evening and prepare to generate more involved papers and presentations.

But for students who may be attending a performance for the first time, their assignment is done before the curtain rises. Hopefully the engaging in the process of focusing on observing what was going on around them ends up puts them in frame of mind where they are ready to receive the performance.

If students are told the assignment only requires them to observe the pre-show activity, but they are free to include observations from the entire performance, maybe that assists in helping people maintain their focus throughout, diminishes resentment about their grade depending on attendance and the desire to check the cellphone too frequently.

I would love to see someone conduct a study to see if there is any noticeable increase in attention or enjoyment for first time or infrequent attendees after performing a simple exercise to focus their thoughts and attention just prior to the experience.

I am sure there are plenty of studies on the benefits of visualization for athletes, but that is based on past experience and a knowledge of ideal performance. It would be interesting to know if there is any benefit for those venturing into unknown territory.

Keep Your Arts Sharp and The Arts Will Keep You Sharp

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I was reading an article on The Atlantic about why employers often have a hard time finding workers even during periods of high unemployment.

I saw the sentence, “And workers now really need to think of learning as a lifelong task.” My mind made a leap and it occurred to me that might be the message the arts need to ride the coattails of.

People are changing jobs more frequently now, either involuntarily, or as we are told of Gen Y, out of a desire to do something meaningful. I am sure there will be a lot of articles and news stories over the next few years about how people need to be more agile and keep renewing and reviewing their knowledge and skills.

Keeping in line with this sentiment, the arts community could talk about how gaining knowledge, skills, comfort with artistic experiences and pursuits is something that is easily acquired over time. (Instead of a panicked crash course at the concert hall doors.)

Two hurdles that must be overcome are the perception that the arts are an indulgence and that learning is an onerous chore.

This provides an opportunity to advocate for arts education by pointing out that learning in an artistic/creative context provides the sense of fun that makes the experience more enjoyable. And in fact, may assist in keeping them engaged in the process of maintaining their professional/vocational skills.

There is a great proliferation of information sources for self-directed learning about the arts that don’t require one to expose themselves to the elements of the event attendance experience that intimidate- blogs, online videos, websites, classes, lectures, master classes and volunteering. People just need to be made better aware of them.

Of Blogs and Boards

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So Minnesota Orchestra Association CEO Michael Henson declared that “blogs are senseless and must be ignored,” and he is right.

At least in the same sense that people think Congress is ineffectual but approve of their own representative. People don’t value blogs themselves, they value the people behind them.

Lynn Harrell hardly posts on his blog, but because of his stature when he posted about Delta taking both his cello’s and his frequent flyer miles, it raised such a ruckus there were newspaper articles about the situation and a segment on the Colbert Report.

The same is true for Bill Eddins, he doesn’t post often, but when he does, people respond.

Drew McManus doesn’t get cited as an expert solely by sitting in front of his computer typing away, he is out there consulting, speaking at conferences, giving interviews…and writing interesting things on his blog.

Emily Hogstad wouldn’t have garnered so much attention about MOA’s pre-emptive domain squatting if she hadn’t developed trust with years productive and interesting work.

Were blogs not to exist, these people wouldn’t be any less smart, talented and worth listening to. The blog medium just makes it easier to do so.

In the same vein, people don’t give to organizations, they give to people. Michael Henson seems to have either forgotten or been unaware of that fact.

Except in this case it is the reverse of the situation with Congress. People don’t value the individual musicians, but they value their relationship with the assemblage of musicians as a whole.

And perhaps unfortunately for Michael Henson and the MOA board, people don’t just value their relationship with the current musicians, but those of the past as well. Henson and the board may think they are bringing a recalcitrant bunch of musicians to heel, but by shutting down the season, they are interfering with a Minnesotan sense of pride in their historical support of arts and culture, including the Minnesota Orchestras of the past.

Now you even have Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton making a statement about the window closing on the two parties after having remained voluntarily quiet on the subject for months.Since there have been calls for the orchestra to return state monies, this may be a harbinger of things to come.

It is heartening that when we have had so many government officials telling artists and organizations what sort of art they should create, the subtext of Gov. Dayton’s remarks is basically to just get back to making art.

There is a conceit expressed by theatre technical staff where they say about actors, “without us, they would be performing naked in the dark.” This ignores the fact that theatrical performances don’t have to occur in a dark room outfitted in fancy costumes.

Sure, audiences LOVE the spectacle, but give them the option of a sun lit live performance in the middle of a cow pasture or an opportunity to listen to a recording of that same group in a 2000 seat concert hall accompanied by a spectacular light show and see where they go. Even if the tickets to the cow pasture are more expensive, people are going to choose the live show over the light show.

Orchestra boards are making the same mistake. They think their job is to get a musical performance for as cheap as possible, but people prefer the substance over the reasonable facsimile.

Now the question of whether people prefer orchestra music over something else is one of programming rather than labor and organizational existence.

Orchestra board members may be important people individually, but as a group they are subsidiary to the musicians themselves. Just as people only come to see the light and costumes in the context of a performance, no one comes to an orchestra concert for the board members.

When board members are feted for the great work they did for the orchestra, it is due to the delight the orchestra brought. The board made it possible for the musicians to deliver that delight, but the board is not the source of that delight.

Boards are praised for helping to construct, support and build arts organizations. Not for making them less. No board has ever been praised for their courage in cutting the oboes.

Boards, like blogs are meaningless of themselves and only gain value by dint of the talent of the people behind them.

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The Minnesota Orchestra cross-blog event is a collection of more than a dozen bloggers, musicians, patrons, and administrators writing about the orchestra’s devastating work stoppage. You can find all of the contributions in the following list and the authors encourage everyone to participate by sharing, commenting, or publishing something at your own culture blog.

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Take Me To The River

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As the summer comes to a close, I wanted to share something that caught my eye back in May. I bookmarked it and looked back at it periodically throughout the summer because I liked the idea so much.

Back in May, as a celebration of the Minnesota River,

“performers staged a “paddling theater production” …The event offered stories, songs and characters from local river lore, presented both as live theater and live-action radio drama in an original production called “With the Future on the Line: Paddling Theater from Granite Falls to Yellow Medicine.”

… Eighteen voyageur canoes, each holding nine audience members and a guide, paddled the 13-mile theater route. Audience members could choose to take part in the theatrical voyage by signing up for a spot on a guided voyageur canoe or by bringing their own canoe or kayak.”

Take a look at the pictures that accompany the article. (Actually it is more photo essay than written text.) It looks to me like the company may have stopped at different points along the river to perform for people gathered there.

I am not sure if they did one scene or the whole story at each stop. From the images, it appears that those of the audience that didn’t take the canoes may have been bussed to the second stop.

I just like the whole concept of using the river as a mode of transport and medium for performance. Even before I read about this project, I had been pondering the possibilities for doing something similar on the nearby Ohio River.

A few years back someone told me a dance concert had been performed on a barge anchored in the Genesee River (or maybe Erie Canal) where those waterways pass through Rochester, NY. The image of people arrayed along the shoreline watching the performance has fired my imagination since.

Even if you don’t live on a navigable waterway, something like this could be possible between towns connected by a railroad or a hiking trail like the Appalachian Trail. It could serve the double purpose of bringing performances to different communities in a novel way and getting those avid about outdoors activities involved.

Imagine your company arriving in town with an entourage of 30-40 hiker-campers. Along the way there could be commentary on the flora, fauna, geologic features and historical sites found along the route.

This is the sort of audience participation and interaction that everyone talks about, only it isn’t dependent on having a physical performance space.

(Not that passively listening to Talking Heads is bad 😉 )

Founder or Flounder? Being An Employee Is Okay

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Hat tip to Jari-Pekka Raitamaa who tweeted an article about mistakes people make when considering founding a tech start up. It occurred to me that the same basic advice could be given to people thinking about founding an arts company of some sort.

The basic premise of article by Jolie O’Dell, Stop founding! 10 signs you’re ‘employee material’ is that many would be founders need to get some significant experience working in a company before they decide to start one. And even then, they may be better suited staying as an employee.

You’ve never tried a real job
[…]
If all you’ve tried so far is freelancing, consulting, or agency work, founding is a pretty big leap. You don’t know about how companies run from the inside, about different management styles. You might have trouble forming and functioning in teams.

Why this is bad for founders: Founding requires commitment and longevity. Regardless of your C-suite title, in day-to-day operations, you’re functioning as a team lead responsible for managing a small crew of professionals. Experience in management with a corporate safety net is a boon.

Along the same lines, if you have only worked as a performer or only done short term administrative work for an arts organization, you may not have the skills and endurance to lead a small group through the rough formative years of the company.

You’ve already failed at one or more startups
We fetishize failure in the startup community, and we especially fetishize failing quickly. But regardless of the lessons you learn or the network you build, failure is still a bad thing.

In and of itself, failure is the universe telling you that your idea wasn’t good enough.
And it’s got nothing to do with execution. It’s your idea. Twitter was really poorly executed at first. It succeeded. Ditto for Facebook and lots of other consumer software. Ditto for a lot of programming languages. You can have wiggle room in execution for a truly great idea.

Why this is bad for founders: A string of bad ideas is more than just “throwing [stuff] at a wall and seeing what sticks.” It might be a sign that you’re jumping in too deep, too quickly. Fail at a few side projects, if you must. But be cautious about rushing into a new venture with nothing but failure under your belt.

The bit about fetishizing failure and failing quickly and often caught my eye (so my emphasis) because non-profit arts organizations are often criticized for their conservative approach and unwillingness to take chances and flirt with failure. To some extent, it may be to your credit to have embarked on a new endeavor and failed.

Still it is easy to fail as a result of ill-informed and conceived choices. The article makes good points about making sure you have learned from your mistakes before proceeding.

You can’t design or code (Translate as “You Can’t Directly Contribute To The Product”)

Lean startup culture says you need three archetypes for a startup: a developer, a designer, and a hustler. Traditionally, the hustler does biz dev, sales, hiring, and management tasks.

But what does a hustler do at a founding-stage startup, really? It often turns into long hours for long hours’ sake, lots of meetings with few outcomes, and boatloads of cheerleading and enthusiasm for a business that’s generating no income and has few or no users.

If you can’t pinpoint your exact skill set — and if your skill set isn’t unique, valuable, and directly related to product creation — you might want to take an employee position at a later stage company.

Why this is bad for founders: Creating a minimum viable product is often Task Number One at a lean startup. Your salary shortens the runway for such a nascent company, and you can’t sell, aka “hustle,” against a product that doesn’t exist yet.

While it might have been good to trim this one down, the bit about the hustler putting in long hours for long hours sake and doing a lot of cheerleading struck a chord.

True, the crucial function in an arts organization ends up being fundraising. But I am pretty sure the time is coming soon if it hasn’t arrive yet, given the expectations created by Kickstarter and its ilk, where it will be difficult to raise any sort of funding without some sort of interesting product example.

I suspect people won’t be as willing to give based only on the idea of a promising group creating good art. Unless you are in a position to pitch in and produce from the get go, your presence may be a hindrance rather than a help.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates didn’t bring Steve Ballmer on to run the business side of Microsoft until five years after the company had been founded and provided its first piece of software.

The arts are already full of people working unnecessarily long hours, don’t add yourself to their number.

Which leads to the next point:

Your big idea is unoriginal

[…]
If the market is saturated with variations on your idea, back slowly away from your drawing board and wait for your next big idea.

Why this is bad for founders: With too many competitors come too many problems. You might not be able to wedge your way into a crowded marketplace. Or you might get suddenly squashed by a drawn-out patent or other IP lawsuit.

Along the same theory that people probably won’t give to groups without a demonstrable product, new funding for old ideas and methods of producing art is probably not long for this world either.

Again, along those lines…

You don’t know what you want

Why do you want to be a founder? This is brutally difficult territory and requires immense passion and Herculean dedication.

Scratch that: It requires Odyssean dedication. You’re on a quest with no end in sight. Every task seems impossible. There are new difficulties around every corner.

So why the heck would you want to do that?

If you don’t have a clear vision, if you’re only running on the heady fumes of startup mania, you will most certainly fail.

Why this is bad for founders: Enthusiasm only goes so far. Only a heart and mind obsessed with a specific mission will be able to sustain you through the hard times that await you.

Again, founding an organization out of simple rejection of the current choices isn’t enough. Your vision can’t be predicated on, “We will different from them and do it better.”

What does that look like in practical terms? It isn’t enough to say you will be nimble and more responsive to change, you have to have an idea of what practices and infrastructure you need to have in place to make it happen.

The other signs Jolie O’Dell lists that I haven’t expounded upon are pretty apparent or closely related to the points I have already made: “You’re young and/or inexperienced”; “You have no network”; “You get bored really quickly”; “You have no net worth”; “You’re the primary breadwinner of a multiperson household.”

I am not saying people shouldn’t found new organizations. It seems pretty clear we need new ideas and new methods. These are just some important things to consider before you undertake such an endeavor.

Trading Time For Tickets

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So here is a question which may seem obsolete in an age of internet and mobile apps: Who is more important, the customer at the window or the customer on the phone?

Even though you may not face this particular problem, the question is one about expectations.

The situation I recently faced arose because our local audiences tend to buy their tickets over the phone or in person from our ticket office rather than online, at outlets or the Ticketmaster 800 number.

A musical act has been doing their Christmas show here for a decade and generally packs the house. This year I had the bright idea to send out postcards to everyone who had ordered tickets in the past. The postcard told them to ignore all the public announcements of tickets going on sale Monday, they could order their tickets the Friday prior in recognition of their loyalty to the group.

That Friday we had a line out the door and the phone ringing off the hook. I had two people at the window and one in the backroom on the phones. So that people didn’t get frustrated by the lack of an answer, I was in another room answering the phone and taking number to call back since we only had so many terminals to sell tickets out of.

After a half hour, we cleared enough of the line at the window to move another person to phone orders and returned calls to everyone on the list within an hour.

The issue is that people on the phone generally had an expectation of parity with the people at the window. If someone left their number with me at 10:15, they expected to get their ticket order in before the person who got online at the window at 10:30 and certainly before the person who happened to get through to the person handling the phones.

The truth is, it is pretty difficult to treat everyone in a completely egalitarian manner. It is difficult to ask the next person in line at the window to wait while you call someone back who called 5 minutes before they got there.

At the same time, you don’t want to give precedence to everyone at the window just because they made the effort to drive in. Many people only have one car or can only make a call during their 15 minute break at work.

Back in the day when the Internet was new and landlines walked the earth, you could put people on hold, attend to the person at the window and then go to the phone and back to the window. I am not sure the people on the phone especially would have the patience for that these days.

I would like to hear about policies and practices people have implemented that made this process seem fairer to both staff and patrons.

But I also wanted to note that Seth Godin actually recently addressed this issue on his blog. (my emphasis)

It seems egalitarian, but it’s actually regressive, because it doesn’t take into account the fact that different people value their time differently. People with time to spare are far more likely to be rewarded.

Another example: Call the company that sells your favorite tech brand and ask for customer service. You’ll be on hold for one to sixty minutes. Why do they do this? They can obviously afford to answer the phone right away, can’t they?

Like the mom who waits for the sixth whine before responding to her kid, these companies are making sure that only people who really and truly need/want to talk to them actually get talked to. Everyone else hangs up long before that.

You can hear the CFO, “well, if we answered on the first ring, more people would call!”

Again, at first glance, this seems like a smart way to triage with limited resources. But once again, it misses the opportunity to treat different people differently. Shouldn’t the really great customer, or the person about to buy a ton of items get their call answered right away? The time tax is a bludgeon, a blunt instrument that can’t discriminate.

Godin straight out acknowledges that people with more free time will get advantages. I quoted some additional text from him to raise the point that most arts organizations aren’t in a position of having the resources to answer calls immediately, but can genuinely be struggling to cover the phones.

I wonder if his suggestion about treating different people differently might be even more valid for those who have fewer resources. It could allow them to prioritize and focus on who is served.

Instead of the preferential donor/subscriber hotline which reinforces the social stratification the arts are trying so hard to distance themselves from, the preference could be predicated, as Godin suggests, on providing service to society.

Putting literacy volunteers and Habitat for Humanity volunteers at the front of the line could certainly show an organizations commitment to serving and improving the community.

The Long Arc Of Artistic Growth

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A few weeks ago the directors of the local museum invited me to an after hours talk by an artist whose work was showing in one of the galleries. Apparently the artist had floated the idea of doing a powerpoint presentation, but ended up talking about her work while walking around the gallery.

I am glad she opted for that because listening to her talk about how her process has evolved while referencing the different pieces in the gallery was much more engaging. Once she was done, everyone went scurrying back to the walls to look at the pieces in the context of her commentary.

For the last few weeks I have been wondering if a performing artist could be as effective and engaging talking about their process. A visual artist has a bit of a benefit in this regard.

When the artist I saw speak noted that she got more comfortable with the idea that she didn’t have to include the limbs in great detail when she was really interested in a person’s head and torso, the evidence was right before you as she compared an early work to a later work.

When an actor or musician says they did something one way in the past and now they do it this way and demonstrates the differences, you never know, they could be lying. Also the way they depict their style of performance in the past is informed (and perhaps infected) with everything they have learned since. They can’t perfectly reproduce their past imperfections.

This dynamism is what makes live performance interesting so we certainly don’t want people trying to ossify their abilities. It just doesn’t have the verifiable elements that visual arts have.

Ultimately, primary qualification for successfully talking about your process is being skilled at talking about your process in an interesting way. The artist I saw could have been just as terminally boring without a powerpoint as with.

I was reading an article in Boston Magazine about the incredible lengths to which a musician was going in order to audition for a percussionist spot on the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Every night he was sending excerpts of his practice to Christopher Lamb, the principal percussionist of the New York Philharmonic. At one point Lamb responds,

“in the case of Ravel’s Boléro, a piece with a famously repetitive snare-drum part — “You’re too young, this is too fast for this old guy … relax, be more inviting.’”

After reading that, I wanted to know what did too young sound like, what does relaxing and more inviting sound like?

Would I, as a layman, actually be able to discern the difference or would I need to be a percussionist practicing 20 hours a day as this auditioner was, to even perceive the nuance?

What is the impact on the rest of the musicians if he is playing too young versus more relaxed, and does it have an impact on the enjoyment of the audience? Or is it just the other musicians who will really notice?

If there was a demonstrable difference between the week before and the week after he got the note, (versus comparing how he played when he was 15 versus today), it might be interesting to audiences to learn about “the change that landed me the job on the BSO.” (Well, he isn’t listed as a BSO musician, but you get the idea.)

In regard to theatre performances, they are often intentionally directed in opposition to previous productions so an actor could be equally brilliant at the same role in entirely different ways simply because the productions had different focuses. There can be both maturation of skill as well as an increased flexibility of approach that an actor can talk about.

All this got me wondering if artists conducting performance talks should move beyond talking about what they did to create the present work and talk about that evolution. The frustrations, mistakes and choices that had been made over time might help break down the perception of talent and inspiration being absolute things that are doled out to some and not to others.

People may be better able to identify and connect with artists who talk about a process of misses, self-criticism and evolution that parallels their own experience. Not to mention realizing that careers are not usually made on reality television shows.

Again it wouldn’t work for everyone. Some people won’t be skilled at keeping the conversation from crossing from self-examination and deprecation over to self-pity and recrimination, alienating their audience.

Anyone have examples of artist talks that they thought were done very well?

SoHo On Erie

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In the wake of Richard Florida’s advocacy for the creative class as harbingers of vitality in a city, a number of locales subscribed to the notation with mixed results.

Things aren’t as simple as providing fallow ground for artists, adding a little water and standing back to watch prosperity grow.

That said, I have been watching an effort in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood with some interest. Maybe the long term plan is to spur gentrification and economic vitality, but right now it looks like they are looking to create an artist colony and inject some vitality into a neighborhood.

They adopted the most aggressive approach I have seen in getting artists there.

What initially caught my eye was their offer of assistance with transportation, hotels and meals to artists across the country to help them attend a Welcome to Collinwood weekend earlier this month.

When artists arrived, there were all sorts of tours and activities for them, including an opportunity to check out houses they could buy for $6500 and fix up.

“Our $6,500 house program is a perfect opportunity for artists who want to create their own live/work space and don’t mind putting a little rehab and TLC into their property. We select houses that are in moderate to good condition, houses where rehab costs will be relatively low, and then give artists 6 months to make any necessary repairs to the property. After those repairs are complete, you own the house outright.”

If you aren’t in to rehabbing a house, they will do it for you at a cost that is less than market price–with a $1500 allowance for appliances.

And it appears they may even give you some work to do via grants for community art projects.

I am not sure how many people attended the weekend and it is far to early to know if anything positive will develop since it only occurred a few weeks ago. Anyone who is interested can contact them to get involved.

Obviously I would like to see this succeed. There are Weed and Seed programs where they offer housing to police officers at low prices and mortgages in order to help stabilize communities. I have no idea whether Collinwood is a high crime area or not, I just draw the parallel in order to express a hope that the introduction of artists to communities is shown to contribute to a similar state.

It isn’t enough to feel secure in your community, pride and excitement are important as well.

Breaking Hearts Away From Broadway

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Broadway Producer Ken Davenport wonders why Broadway doesn’t do an American Idol type audition either having open auditions or putting casting directors on a bus to tour the country.

The basis for this suggestion is that it would get a lot of people engaged in the process–not only the people who auditioned, but all their friends and family as well. And they would remain engaged over a longer period of time, keeping the show present in their mind during the rehearsal period, leaving them primed to want to attend once it opened.

“You don’t think all those people that audition in the coming months will be more enthused about watching Season 13 when it rolls around? They’ll tune in to say, “Who beat me?” And they’ll be proud to tell their friends, “I auditioned for that.” By involving people in the process, they expand their audience.

[…]

Why doesn’t every Broadway show have open calls, allowing anyone and their brother, Equity or not, a chance at Broadway stardom? We did it for Godspell, and we had lines around the block (and collected emails). So many people said it was their dream just to be seen for a Broadway show, and they would never forget it, even if they went back to their day job the next morning. Sure it’s a cost, but you don’t think you’d make that back in press and tickets? And just imagine if you found a cast member from that casting net. Oh the articles!”

One of first thoughts was about all those experienced actors that have been honing their craft and hitting the pavement for years. Where does this leave them? What message does it send about the performing arts?

There is a long tradition of unknowns being “discovered” so I am not put off by the prospect of someone getting a lead role with little effort. It has been known to happen. Much the rest of the cast would probably be comprised of experienced people and the producers probably shouldn’t be looking for the lead parts like “You’re The One That I Want” did for the revival of Grease.

My biggest concern is that in an environment where people think orchestra musicians shouldn’t want to get paid for “having fun” performing, an American Idol type process for casting Broadway shows would send the message that just about anyone could circumvent the hard work involved with performance and just walk into a part.

Where most performers work to become suitable to be cast in a variety of roles and shows, the only thing you could say for sure about a person cast in this manner is that they are suited to play this character in the dynamics of this particular production.

Certainly, they might have the ability to do a credible job in many roles. My concern is that the general public would believe that success in this specific endeavor validated their ability to perform well in multiple roles. There is a big difference between what you need to bring to each role. But it will appear that anyone can be a performer after a few hours of competition and coaching.

Best situation would be if the process wasn’t televised because the meat of the casting and coaching process would be edited out leaving people with the wrong impression of the process. After watching someone get asked about the character choices they have made, why they reacted to another person in the manner they did and if they understood the time period in which the show was set, people would get the sense that there is work involved in preparing for a production.

As part of coaching, this makes for boring television. As the basis of biting criticism from a panel of judges, it might be very exciting, but it is rather far from the mind numbing reality of a real audition process. I am not sure anyone is well served in the long term by injecting that sort of unrealistic melodrama into an audition process.

But an untelevised national casting tour that mixed competitive drama with an emphasis on the fact that this was the exception rather than the rule to having a performance career could be productive.

The title of this entry comes from the old saying “There’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway.” I do agree with Davenport’s perception that people would be happy just to have the opportunity to try out for a Broadway show. That could be turned to a constructive end if an effort was made in conjunction with the auditions to encourage people to become more involved with their local performing arts organizations, reinforced the value of a liberal arts education and disseminated the idea that talented people didn’t/shouldn’t need to go to New York, Chicago or LA in order to work.

Of course, my agenda and that of television and Broadway producers probably don’t intersect in a lot of places.

Of Resumes and Job Applications

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I have only been at work for three months, but already they have me on a search committee. When we were meeting to talk about interview questions before human resources gave us the application packets, I took advantage of the opportunity of working with a new group of people to take a quick poll about a pet peeve of mine that I have referenced before– the resume objective statement.

Like me the other people on the committee found it really unhelpful, thought it often felt stilted and unnatural on an already heavily formalized document, were uninteresting, unhelpful to the process and took up too much room on a document that was supposed to be limited to one page.

And this was from people in a cross section of areas from graphic design, finance, athletics and accounting.

I have come to the conclusion that all those guides that tell you to include objective statements on your resume are doing so at the behest of big corporations who use software to screen applicants based on key phrases in the resume. I suspect there are a lot of employers that don’t find the format really enhances their impression of applicants.

In the arts, a little divergence from the standard suggested format can definitely be an asset.

A long time friend recently asked me to look at his resume and it occurred to me that like so many things that involve selling a product, service or idea, it is the story you tell about yourself that really matters.

Because what you will emphasize differs from employer to employer, I generally provide that narrative in my cover letter and leave my resume to provide the supporting details. Often those details need to be tweaked a bit, but the big variation in applications is in the cover letter based on the job requirements and information about the organization my research has turned up.

Still it is important that your resume be able to tell your story on a stand alone basis. A person should get an idea about what things ignite your passion while they determine how accomplished and suitable you are for the position based on your work history.

What sort of frustrates me as a person working in the arts is that the process I often need to follow suppresses the usefulness of 95% of the expressive tools available these days. You often have the option of submitting materials by email now, but the distribution to search and audition committees is generally by printed hard copies which eliminates the usefulness of links to videos and other materials.

From my own recent searches, I know that committee members will definitely check out blogs and webpages. I would see a surge in visits on Google Analytics and have a sense that I would get a call days, and sometimes weeks, before it was made. It is more difficult for a committee member to accurately type in the URL for a YouTube video.

Sure you can set up a webpage with appropriate links and direct people there. But it is much more organic to be able to cite a project and immediately provide a link to it.

It is also difficult to set up a custom website with an easy to enter URL for every job application you send out. You don’t want to apply to a Children’s Theatre and send them to a site that includes so many links to other types of projects that the employer gets the impression your passion really lies elsewhere.

I am vaguely aware that visual arts organizations make more direct use of digital portfolio review in hiring. I wondered if anyone in the performing arts was conducting their searches in a way that really took advantage of all the available technological opportunities.

Likewise, I wondered if anyone that had recently applied for a job had managed to leverage technology to their benefit as part of their initial application.

One option that just occurred to me would be to create a personal URL for each job search so that each employer only saw the materials you wanted them to see.

Embracing The Feedback Loop

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A few months back, Seattle based artist Clayton Weller, wrote a piece addressing what he feels is a self-limiting outlook held by many artists that theatre is dying and there is no money out there. He confesses to having embraced the same outlook until he worked for a start up company.

Now he advocates for every artist to work for a start up in order to adopt their more nimble outlook. (my emphasis)

When you say the word “business” to someone, especially an artist, they automatically assume you’re talking about something stuffy, rigid, uncompromising, and [insert horrible adjective].

You say “business” but they hear “bureaucracy.” THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING!…

To eschew something because it can be done poorly, is a disservice to yourself, and might rival einsteins famous definition of insanity (look it up plebes!).

[…]

Talking directly to people, iterating ideas before execution, creating a feedback loop with measurable data; it all makes perfect sense.

By doing this you create a real connection with your customer (audience) and develop a product (art) people will not only tolerate, but will clamor for. In terms that an artist would use: your art becomes relevant.

That’s a big deal.

The average artist does NONE of these things. Not only that, they intentionally avoid them. They lock themselves away to pursue their secret “vision.” When they receive negative criticism, they blame their audience (customer). WHAT?!?

For me this addresses some age old debates about artists being more business minded and selling out vs. thinking you know what audiences/customers should like. (the most negative extremes of the spectrum)

Obviously, I like his point about not dismissing options because other people don’t do it well.

I think the complicating factor is the fear is that you too won’t do it well and the process will dominate your time and take you away from your creative work. Or worse, make you resent your creative work for making it necessary to become involved in the business side. For some it may not be a wholly irrational fear.

Still, I think regardless of your fears and regardless of your views about what constitutes selling out and remaining true to your art, the feedback loop Weller mentions is a useful process.

Failure and missteps are things you will face, especially when you are working in the arts. Proper feedback can help minimize this over time. If nothing else, the process can help you identify the proper people to solicit for feedback.

If you start a flow chart from the simple proposition that you want to support yourself with your art. You can ask, do people say nice things about my art? If the answer is yes but they don’t pay for it, you either need to find other people to get feedback from or figure out a different way to monetize your art from the people giving you feedback.

Likewise, if there are a lot of people who criticize your work, but still won’t buy it after you make the changes to the areas in which they say you fell short, then you may need to find other people to solicit feedback from.

Obviously it isn’t as completely clear cut as that. The problem may lie in your execution not being very good. My point is that you can’t depend entirely on your family and friends or trolls for feedback. It is necessary to identify people with the level of discernment you seek whose feedback you can trust and work from there.

You just need to recognize and own the potential implications of appealing to 1,000 versus 100,000. You can make a lot of money from those 1,000, but you need to be producing to a certain standard. Meeting the expectations of 1,000 can be just as burdensome as that of 100,000.

Info You Can Use: Flex Subscriptions And Your Subscriber Base

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I have been pondering whether we should start offering a “Choose Your Own” subscription series in future years. In my past jobs, we never programmed with an eye to filling slots in a series so we offered “Choose Your Own” discounts without any problem. Now I am working in a place which has historically had a number of series and I am looking to offer an additional flexible one.

Since this blog is about discussing practical aspects of arts administration, I thought I would share some of the issues I have been taking into consideration both to solicit some feedback, but also give a sense of the thought process you need to engage in when making these decisions.

The numbers I am using in my example aren’t the actual ticket amounts and they are equal for all events in a series for sake of simplicity. The discount for buying the full season relative to the sub-season pricing is the same though.

Currently we offer a full season of nine shows ($290) and three sub-seasons of three shows each: Broadway ($150); Variety ($105) and Classical ($75).

My idea for a flex subscription is to offer the sub-season pricing if to any three shows or more shows of your choice.

That might break out as follows:

Book1

 

Instead of buying a series, people would pick and choose from among all the series. Because they are picking and choosing willy nilly, we can’t guarantee them the same seats will be available at every performance, but they still get their seats before single tickets go on sale and at a discount.

Usually the idea behind flex subscriptions is to give people who can’t make it to all the shows in a series the ability to benefit from an advance purchase discount.  It is seen as a plus if you can get someone who has historically been a single ticket buyer to commit to attending multiple shows in advance.

But the important issue is the need to factor in the likely behavior of your audience. If there are a lot of single ticket purchases for three or four shows across multiple series in the days right after single tickets go on sale for full price, you need to ask if you think more people will pick up this practice or if you will only end up giving a significant discount to the same group who typically buys tickets at full price months in advance of the show. You could end up losing money in the process.

The same for those who buy the classic series and then one or two tickets to the Broadway series at full price of $65. If there are lot of those, you may end up giving up quite a lot at a $15 difference per ticket.

In our case, our biggest series base is in Broadway with far fewer in Variety and Classic. It wouldn’t represent a significant loss if the Variety and Classic people who buy Broadway  tickets at full price received a discount.

My biggest concern is that we may lose full season subscribers to a piecemeal flex series.  Every year there is a Broadway show people aren’t crazy about so if Full season subscribers didn’t like one show and picked the other 8 individually, that would represent a $10 loss per subscriber. Not a big deal individually, but if many people made that choice it could be problematic.

The same with the Broadway series subscribers. If they dropped one Broadway show and picked up one Variety or Classic show as their third, that is a loss of $15-$25 per subscriber.

Now the easiest solution to keeping Full Season subscribers from becoming  “slightly less than Full Season” subscribers is to place the “Choose Your Own” on the same footing as the other sub-series and limit it to any three events. That way you don’t have to worry about people defecting to a 7 or 8 event subscription.

But if you are in a situation like I was in my last job where you don’t have a large subscriber base, you can go all out and offer discounts on as many shows above the minimum as people care to buy.  You have a fair chance of picking up new subscribers.

I will confess I was pretty gung ho about flex subscriptions and the philosophy of giving people the most freedom to choose in return for making that choice in advance. Organizations that kept their audiences tied into a designated series were adhering to a dated concept of audience relations! But as I say, that was when I didn’t have a fairly reliable subscriber base.

Now that I am in a situation where I am doing an analysis of the pros and cons in preparation for pitching the idea to an organization with an established subscriber base, I find myself being a little more pragmatic. (Though note I am still trying to introduce a flexible scheme.)

So what about you? Thoughts about this? Are there packages you have put together to entice people to subscribe that worked? Some that back fired on you and made you lose income or subscribers?

 

Have A Fulfilling Experience Being An Artist

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Earlier this week, Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group listed an artist residency program that really appealed to me.

Only Australians are eligible to apply, but I just really liked the way the Asialink program at the University of Melbourne listed the expectations for their program.

You can’t use the residency for research or academic study. Instead, (my emphasis)

Each resident is offered a specific amount of funding and initial contacts in the host country. It is then up to the individual to make as much of the experience as possible and to plan and manage their own program.

Key attributes are the ability to cope with sometimes unusual or difficult situations, and to work successfully in a challenging environment while maintaining good working relationships.

That is basically it. The criteria is to have a plan, take advantage of the opportunity, be able to cope with strange situations you may encounter. You have to show that you worked on your project when you return and submit an accounting about how the money is used.

Coming from a higher education environment which emphasizes research and publishing in order to keep your job and an arts environment which has lengthy grant proposal and reporting requirements, this is refreshingly brief and liberating.

Applying will take some work and preparation, and certainly the opportunity isn’t for everyone, but the process doesn’t seem terribly onerous.

I am sure there are other grant programs like this, but I have come across few which state they expect you to have a fulfilling experience.

It makes me a little envious and wish I lived in Australia since the program includes Arts Management experiences.

I offer this in hopes it will inspire others to emulate them. And if some entity is offering something similar and Americans are eligible, I hope someone tells me about it!

Info You Can Use: When It Is Okay To Punish Your Customers

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A couple weeks ago I wrote a post in which I decried the practice of many companies who offer better rates to new customers but provide no reward to long time customers.

Right on cue the next day, MIT’s Sloan Review published a piece that analyzes the transactional relationships people have with different types of business and discusses which can get away with treating long term customers poorly.

They acknowledge the fact that it can often be more costly to find new customers than to retain the ones you have, but note this is not true for all types of business. They use examples of cable and cell phone companies who provide services that are difficult to change versus a highly variable situation where someone may prefer to shop at Lowe’s, but will often purchase from Home Depot because it is move convenient to the drive home.

Lowe’s and Home Depot have to constantly work to retain customers and attract new ones while cable and cell phone companies can get away with raising rates mid-contract. The article authors say even if you are getting an offer to buy a new phone at a discount from your current service provider, it isn’t as sweet a deal as a new buyer is being offered.

Despite using the common terminology of “subscriber,” performing arts organizations don’t have the same luxury to treat current customers poorly that cable and cell phone companies do. I am sure it is no revelation that performing arts organizations operate in a far more competitive environment.

While depressing to contemplate, it was interesting to read the rationale that punishing customers makes good business sense.

Some customers are worth more than others and some customers are a greater drag on resources than others. Even if you don’t act on it, cultivating the ability to identify what policies are causing you to lose money can be valuable.

There might be some good lessons for arts organizations here. For example, some banks have started charging people to use lobby services and for receiving statements in the mail and made using ATM and receiving statements electronically less expensive because it costs more to maintain a physical presence and pay people.

Perhaps performing arts groups should make it more expensive to buy tickets in person versus online, rather than vice versa, as is the case in many places these days.

On the balance sheet, the answer is clear. However, since cultivating relationships are often viewed as the most important function arts organizations can fulfill for their community, perhaps it is better not to provide disincentives to personal contact.

But is that relationship something your customers value or is it something you have decided they value?

You should know the answer to this because if they do value good relationships and service, that is more expensive than just having someone at a desk. The training and retention of staff who provide good service and the database to support them requires a greater investment than just having someone available. If people don’t really value personal service, then maybe it is wiser to push them toward online ticketing and reduce ticket office staffing.

So here is the conclusion the authors came to:

“Specifically, we discovered that, most of the time, rewarding and acquiring new customers creates the most value. Under select circumstances, however, attention should shift to the retention of existing high-value customers….In markets that have a high degree of both flexibility and value concentration, companies should focus on rewarding their own customers — in particular, their best customers.”

The examples they use of high flexibility and value concentration is retail shopping, rental cars and airlines where people have many options to choose from and return customers will often spend greater amounts than just casual shoppers. They suggest reward programs for high frequency customers.

I translate that over to the arts as trying retain and reward subscribers and donors. The arts already acknowledge that these groups are high value individuals and need to be provided preferential treatment. So we have been doing something right all along!

Except that the authors don’t really address the question of what to do when your customer base is aging out. The article really just deals with optimizing your income from customers based on where your product/service falls on the continuum of flexibility and value.

There is an assumption that you have a product for which there is a demand. They address the question of how to treat your customers when you get them, not necessarily how to get them.

It is encouraging that the article validates the basic model many arts organizations use with their customers. The challenge that is still before us is offering a product people want and an rewards program that they value.

What Do You Sell Online?

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Okay, this entry is more a question for readers than any sort of discussion of issues. Basically, I would like to know how many price levels of tickets do you put on sale online?

When I was working in Hawaii, my colleagues at the other campuses and I put most of our base ticket prices for sale online- Adult, Student/Senior/Military, Under 12 and University Student.

When I arrived at my current job, I noticed only the top level ticket price for each area was listed online even though we offer just about the same discount categories as we did in Hawaii. Thinking it a mistake, I asked my box office manager why that was and she told me the software vendor suggested we only offer the highest level because people would take advantage.

[N.B. From a question I received, I wanted to clarify that this listing was on the purchase screen. When it came time to buy the ticket, they were advised to only let people buy full price tickets and not make the other price levels available. The other ticket prices were advertised both on and off line]

This was not my experience at all in Hawaii or other places I worked which also offered lower ticket prices online. Most of the time people wanted to pay the difference when someone couldn’t make it and they brought a person who didn’t qualify for discounts.

I admit I was a little riled when I heard that the ticket office was given this advice because I think that making people call or walk in to buy discounted tickets places a barrier to entry to many. I felt like this went against everything I have been working toward with my own practices and adovocating this blog.

Not to mention that someone can call and misrepresent their eligibility for discounts over the phone as easily as they can place the order online so you really aren’t preventing people who want to from taking advantage.

It’s not that my ticket office can’t ask that the internet site be set to offer more price levels, I just felt this advice reflected big corporate indifference. And that there was no effort on the company’s part to help venues facilitate the process for their customers.

But as I started to look around, I realized that many performing arts venues only seem to offer the highest level ticket online, even if they don’t use the same vendor we do.

So now my question is, what are people’s experiences and practices putting multiple levels of prices online?

Value Is Not Price

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The Drucker Exchange recently noted that the Cincinnati Reds and Michigan Wolverines teams have started using dynamic pricing, scaling prices based on popularity.

The Reds don’t provide much information about their structure, though they promise the price will never fall below whatever the season ticket holder pays. They set their base pricing at the start of the season per anticipated demand and start implementing the dynamic pricing two weeks out so it probably pays to buy early.

The Wolverines basically set their anticipated pricing from the start ranging from $65 for the Akron game, $10 less than last year, to $195 for the Notre Dame game, $100 more than last year. (And by the way, that is the lowest price tickets. Their top tier tickets for Notre Dame are $500.)

The piece on The Drucker Exchange says the mistake companies often make is to ask what customers value. This is aptly illustrated by the secondary market for those Wolverines games. You can get those $65 Akron tickets for $35 on the secondary market, but those $195 Notre Dame tickets seem to be going for about $319 already. (Single tickets go on sale tomorrow, 8/1)

Peter Drucker lamented how few companies recognize the importance of simply asking themselves what their customers value. “It may be the most important question,” Drucker noted in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. “Yet is the one least often asked.”

One reason for this is that companies think they already know. “Value is what they, in their business, define as quality,” Drucker wrote. “But this is almost always the wrong definition.” For example, for a teenage girl, “value in a shoe is high fashion,” while durability and price matter little.

“Another reason why the question ‘What is value to the customer?’ is rarely asked is that the economists think they know the answer: Value is price,” Drucker added. “This is misleading, if not actually the wrong answer.”

For instance, electrical contractors, while famously price-conscious, may prefer one of the most expensive fuse boxes on the market. “To the contractor this line is actually low-priced because it is engineered to be installed fast and by relatively unskilled labor,” he explained.

The ultimate lesson is simple but not easy: “The customer never buys a product,” Drucker wrote. “The customer buys value.”

(My emphasis on that last sentence on the Drucker citation)

There are many intangibles that factor into what people value. Will the Notre Dame game be three times better than Akron? Possibly. By game day in September, there is a fair chance the primary market tickets to the Notre Dame game will be four or five times more expensive than Akron, if not more.

There will be a point where the quality of the actual Notre Dame gameplay can’t be better than that of Akron in proportion to the difference in ticket price.

What people are willing to pay so much more for is the experience of tailgating and attending a potentially great game steeping in the palpable excitement surrounding the long rivalry between the two teams with thousands of others.

I have resistance to dynamic pricing for a number of reasons, many of which have to do with the relationship I feel we are trying to cultivate with our audiences.

The question is, do people really recognize and value that we are making the effort? Is it all pretty much one-sided? Many people don’t really discern between profit and non-profits organizations when making their entertainment decisions.

Are non-profits basically putting themselves at a disadvantage by not using dynamic pricing for shows that clearly will sell out months before the performance date based on a devotion to an audience that has no idea the organization has decided to suffer for their benefit?

There is a need to keep prices low to provide affordable access. If 900 people clearly value attending a performance that they will commit at $25 a ticket between one and three months before the show, do you really owe it to the last 100 people to maintain the $25 rate until they get around to buying tickets?

Or do you owe it to your long suffering staff to try to increase the revenue stream so you can pay them $12/hour instead of $8 by using dynamic pricing?

We aren’t sure about the investment of the community in your organization, but we can be more certain about the investment of your staff.

I am still a little uncertain about dynamic pricing. The issues aren’t as clear as I present them here. However, one issue I don’t generally see people mention in the dynamic pricing conversation is that by not using it you are potentially punishing your staff in the service of an ideal the community may not be aware of much less value.

If customers show they willing to place a higher value on a product, should non-profits acknowledge that by placing a commensurately higher price on it?

Serving The Community, It’s Like Dating

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Continuing with my answers to questions asked by readers, last week Karen asked:

“I’m very interested in how small arts organizations effectively serve their community, particularly in long term collaborations. While I focus on the symphonic and choral space, I’m sure a lot of the wisdom on the topic can be applied broadly.”

Short answer- If I knew that, I would force Drew McManus to make me a partner in his consultancy and we be raking in the money.

The truth is, no one knows because there is no one right answer. Every arts organization is different and the dynamics of each one’s relationship with the community is different. One of choral groups you work with Karen, is associated with a religious entity on a university campus so their goals and target community are quite different from those of symphonies’ with which you work.

Each is going to have a different definition of what effective service means. For some it may mean getting people to attend. For others it might be people paying to attend. Even if the amount of the payment is $5, that small difference will have some significant implications about how the company interacts with the community.

Your question calls attention to the fact there are a lot of arts blogs and articles out there that sing the praises of the idealism of serving the community, but no one really admits that when it comes to the practical aspects they can’t tell you how.

Because we are basically talking about relationships with other people, it is really akin to trying to get advice on how to get someone to love you. There are tons of articles written on the subject every year, but no one has the answer.

The best anyone can ever come up with is “be yourself” and “don’t be a jerk.” The rest is all generalities: be funny, but not overbearing with jokes; get the other person to talk about themselves, but don’t be distant; find common ground, but have different interests that the other person will find intriguing, etc.

In many respects much depends on chemistry, in this case the one you have with your community, not the person you really like.

Everyone knows you don’t want to have your concerts in the slums because the impoverished don’t get invested in classical music— except there is El Sistema.

Why did it work in Venezuela? Can it work here?

Who knows, but there is an example of a long term collaboration. Somehow it endured nearly 40 years with the backing of the Venezuelan government. I suspect it was a few years before it reached the point where the national government became interested in becoming involved.

My advice is to think about who you really want to serve, regardless of whether there is any money in it or grant funding to support it. If you can make it work under those conditions, great. Otherwise, you probably need to compromise and shift your focus a little to those things there is money in.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking, well if we spend resources on this thing that makes money, we will have the ability to help the people we really want to help. Then you are in a situation where you are cultivating relationships trying to serve community B so that you can serve community A which requires cultivating a different set of relationships.

If you have the time and resources to do that, you can probably swing working to serve community A for no money.

I am not saying that you can’t have varied programming and a wide appeal or that your other activities can’t generate revenue to support your long term collaboration. It is just that a small organization really needs to have a singular focus, otherwise they end up unable to achieve any of their goals effectively. (And I would hazard to guess this might be generally true for many organizations of larger size.)

If you are ready to be in it for the long term, then your collaboration with the community starts with developing relationships. If you decide that you want to really focus on bringing music to kids in a specific school district, you want to have relationships with the teachers, principal, superintendent that you are constantly reinforcing and renewing.

Most importantly, if at all possible, find a way to connect with the families in the district. Not only those with kids in the schools, but those with kids who have graduated and who will potentially be giving birth to those enrolling.

Show up at PTA meetings, participate in conversations on the Common Core standards for arts. Be in a position to be a partner and advocate for the community you have chosen to serve.

Go to Chamber of Commerce and Rotary meetings, talk about the group with which you are partnering, but also just meet people and talk about the weather. Get to know people and get known so that when you are in the paper for something your group has done, people already have a relationship with you from the time you brought that great pie to the potluck last New Year’s Eve.

Not only do you make a great pie, but you are doing good things for the school too. That’s great because I (as the person in your community) have to pay property taxes to support the school even though I don’t have kids. I am still resentful about the taxes, but also a little proud that my community has good schools so at least my taxes aren’t being wasted.

That is sort of my ideal vision of what a long term community partnership might look like. It is easier to do in a small city versus a large one because those relationships and connections with people not directly involved with your organization and the community are easier to create and maintain.

Having a relationship that provides a connection to people not directly involved with your organization or the community you serve is an important element in my mind. The goodwill you generate reinforces the sense of identity and worth for your organization and the community you serve.

Think about communities with strong athletic teams, whether it is college or professional. Whether you go to games or not, you walk into stores, you see branded merchandise for sale, bars have the games on television. If you are a student at the college, you get the sense that the whole community supports you even though you aren’t on a team, just by the benefit of your membership in the group.

Even if you don’t go to the games or have ever set foot on the campus, if you go visiting elsewhere and the people there are cheering for the grudge rivals of your hometown’s school, there is a good chance you will feel a tinge of responsibility to be loyal to your hometown team even if you don’t openly say anything.

I think that is the sign of an organization that has made a connection with the community when a person who has made no conscious effort at investment feels a sense of loyalty and duty to the organization.

Of course, unconscious investment ain’t paying the bills so you are always in the process of trying to convert people to being actively involved. You just don’t know if it will be a concert or a really good pie that tips the balance.

What To Expect In Arts Administration Class

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Last week in response to my call for suggestions of topics to discuss, commenter Samara asked,

“I am attending Bellarmine University this fall as a freshman and am the only student as an Arts Administration Undergrad with music being my emphasis. What should I expect in my Arts Admin classes? Besides the fact that I’ll be alone and don’t get a studio until spring semester haha!”

I took a look at the Bellarmine Arts Admin program and the course requirements for the music focus and generated the following response for Samara.

[hr]

Samara-

In terms of exactly what sort of experience to expect, I obviously can’t tell you because every arts administration program is different, even from year to year.

What I can tell you is what to expect from yourself and what expect from your instructors, internship supervisors and other colleagues.

I apologize right from the start there is probably going to be a tinge of condescension in some of what I have to say. It can’t be helped when you are trying to offer general advice to someone you don’t really know.

The first thing to be aware of that you are being taught the skills you will need to be a successful arts administrator, but you are not being taught how to be a successful arts administrator.

Ken Robinson said it best a few years ago when he talked about how schools creativity.  He notes that we never know now what students will need to know decades down the road so the best thing we can do for students today is teach them to be creative, think critically and teach themselves new skills.

Twenty some odd years ago when you were born the world was just being introduced to dial up internet, and 14.4k at that. I remember a guy in 1994 telling me I should use the Macs in a different computer lab because they had this new thing called a web browser which let you see the internet with colors.

No one really had cellphones, cable or wireless modems. We could imagine a time when we would have cellphones, faster internet connections and maybe something like iPods, but social media, texting, Kickstarter campaigns, global warming, American Idol and so many other things that are common today weren’t really on anyone’s radar.

But in the three-four years between 1994 and 1997/1998 we went from web browsers just beginning to appear to everyone expecting that any worthwhile business would have a website and I was learning HTML.

No one really knows what the future will demand of arts administrators even four years down the road so they can’t give you the secret formula for success upon graduation. What they can do is equip you with the skills to discover that formula for whatever company/organization you work for or establish. Every company is different in terms of the goals they have and the customers/constituencies they seek to serve.

What you should expect from your degree program is a lot of opportunities to discuss problems facing the arts and possible solutions. By the time you are ready to graduate, I guarantee there will be entirely new problems to discuss.

You will need to read and talk a lot about challenges, trends and techniques outside of the arts which may be applicable to the arts.  You will have to discern which are likely flash in the pan trends that just have good PR behind them but won’t amount to much and which trends have staying power.

You will be a good arts administrator when you graduate if you are practiced at looking at new situations, generating and evaluating possible solutions and then implementing them.

Note that you may not be a successful arts administrator by many measures because you can certainly still make mistakes, especially when trying something new. But if you have the capacity to evolve ideas rather than fall back on old practices, you will be in good shape.

Given that times are changing quickly,  I won’t assume you will end up working for an arts organization. You could easily be a manager at an online gaming company.

One of the things I am really pleased to see about your degree program is that there are a lot of interdisciplinary seminars. (Though not surprising since Roberto Bellarmino was a Jesuit and the school had a close association with Thomas Merton.)

My hope is that you will be in those seminars with business, science and liberal arts students so that there are opportunities to exchange multiple views. There can be a lot of dangerous insularity in the fine arts.

I see from the degree requirements you will be participating in classes that engage in discussions and field visits to local arts organizations. You will also have a couple semesters of internships.

Take the opportunity to ask questions and make suggestions realizing, that you are going to make some really dumb suggestions. That is just part of the process of learning. It can be painful, but can’t be avoided.

I only stopped saying dumb things six months ago…..

Some of your suggestions will actually be good but the people in charge are afraid of implementing them. You have to be humble enough to accept being told no because you won’t be experienced enough to really discern what really isn’t viable and what people are afraid to consider.

Always assuming that people are too timid to take chances will just make you miserable. Make a list of your ideas and come back to them later. Throw away the ones that were bad and propose or keep the good ones. Repeat.

Or try implementing your ideas yourself on a smaller scale.  The times increasingly offer greater resources that allow people to accomplish thing on their own.

In terms of your internships. Everyone has to make copies and coffee when they are interns. That shouldn’t be the whole of your job though. Talk to people who have interned before to make sure the internship coordinator is ensuring the internships are valuable experiences.

The easiest way to make sure you will have a good internship experience is to know before you go that your internship coordinator actively monitors the environment and is on the look out for your best interests.

Even if you are asked to do a lot of menial work, you can turn it into a learning experience. Interning in the days before email attachments were so easy was both a blessing and a curse. I may have had to run a lot of errands, but many times it was to the lawyers’ office. I knew enough not to talk about it with others, but no one said I shouldn’t read the documents I was couriering while waiting at the red lights…

In terms of useful skills, I would encourage you to pay very close attention in the accounting, finance and law classes. A person who can understand contracts as well as maintain and properly interpret balance sheets and cash flow statements will be valued pretty much anywhere.

The same with the writing classes and communication classes. There are so many channels of communication from email to 140 character texts to image sharing and probably more still on the way. The more that emerge, the more valuable a person who is able to quickly and clearly engage the viewer/reader.

Finally, I would stress the leadership/management and philosophy classes. Effective leadership has more to do with a good understanding of philosophy than with the analytics found in other business courses in my mind.

Ultimately, it is up to you decide what you want to invest and reap from each of your classes.  Worry more about what you are getting out of the class than obsessing about your grades. When I was an undergrad, I was content to get a B or C in a class I enjoyed because I felt like I gained something valuable. The grade was only a measure of my progress at the moment, but the interest the class engendered in the subject matter inspired me to continue to learn more about it.

Good luck.

What Should I Talk About?

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Now that I am back living in the lower 48, I have begun thinking a little more seriously about possibly presenting at some of the national or regional conferences. I had actually thought about it a bit when I was in Hawaii, but distance limited my opportunity to attend many conferences and hampered collaboration opportunities.

That gave me the idea to ask my readers–what do you think I should do a session on? This is actually a double duty question because I am also essentially asking what topic would you want me to write blog entries on to.

I understand that many people can’t attend conferences so I would ultimately be planning on posting whatever I talked about on the blog. And readers might see bits and pieces of what I was working on emerge on the blog as my research brought me in contact with new information.

Rather than to ask what topics I should blog about, I wanted to frame in the context of what do you want to know about so badly that you would seriously consider undertaking the expense of travel, hotel, food, etc to attend a conference where someone was talking about it?

I also suspect I take for granted people’s familiarity with many topics I come across in my daily reading. The reality might be that people are desperate for information. So even if I didn’t do a conference session on it, your feedback will help determine topics I blog about in the future.

Just as examples of conferences sessions to get you started, Arts Presenters is looking for session proposals on Catalyzing Communities around the arts, Making the Case for the Arts and The Art of Transition. That last one seems like it could encompass everything from leadership transition to changing your organizational approach to programming and marketing.

I just found out that I probably will be attending APAP conference this year. Though I am not sure I would get a proposal together by the deadline next Thursday so I am not necessarily looking for a topic that would fit that conference.

I figure I can either lead or contribute to a conversation about:

-contract negotiations, submitting offers, reading contract riders
-closely partnering with multiple arts presenters to organize a tour as a consortium
-partnering with artists to create performance works reflecting stories/values of indigenous cultures

Of course, I can talk about many other topics like marketing, social media, presenting in higher education environments (and bureaucracies) but I feel like a lot of other conference presenters can and have done so before. Though I am certainly happy to produce blog posts on these topics

I feel what I have listed are areas in which I have more specialized knowledge than many others. It is also likely that I am forgetting some too. If there is a subject area which you have come to value my expertise, let me know.

Thanks.

We Have Ways Of Making Your Website Talk

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I don’t know if I have every mentioned it here, but if you haven’t discovered the blog Google for Nonprofits, it is pretty handy for getting tips on using any of the many products Google has created.

Last week, they had an entry about using the Goals feature of Google Analytics. I have long been aware of the feature, but never used it because I always figured I can call up the data for a time period and cross reference the data a bunch of different ways as the questions about visitor segmentation occurs to me.

However, there might be times when you want to achieve a certain goal like raising awareness about a specific show in a certain area within a period of time or increasing traffic from social media sources and you want to avoid the trouble of setting the filters up every day. Setting a goal tracks all that for you, tells you how close you are to achieving the goal and tells you when the goal is met.

The example they use is for volunteering:

“Goals are completed activities that happen on your site, like someone filling out and submitting a volunteer sign-up form. We can easily translate the key performance indicators (KPIs) we designed in our measurement framework into Analytics Goals. For example if your KPI is volunteer sign-ups, you could track it by setting a goal of how many people reach the volunteer sign up confirmation page.”

And they also allow you to track segments of your website visitors.

For example, you could use a custom dimension to segment your website visitors into groups like volunteers and donors. When someone submits a donation your custom dimension will indicate the user is a donor. Or when someone volunteers via your website, they’ll be identified as a volunteer. With that segmentation, we can gather specific data on our donors and volunteers which allows us to measure our KPIs

In regard to the segmentation tracking, I suspect its success depends on people not clearing their web browser cookies cache between visits in order to note their return during subsequent visits.

But if you have been wishing you could learn more about your visitors from your website, this blog is a good place to learn some tricks to making it talk.

Stuff To Ponder: Subscriber Rush Tickets

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Since I have started a new job I am in the process of evaluating every document, process and interaction my organization undertakes. One of those areas is customer service, of course.

For that reason, an article I came across via The Drucker Exchange is really resonating with me. In a blog post titled, The Dark Side of Customer Experience, Monique Reece opens with a joke we can probably all relate to.

The longer version is in the post, but basically a guy dies and is shown heaven and hell and given a choice between the two. On his visit to heaven, everything is sedate and lovely. Hell is a veritable Mardi Gras party. After the doors close on Hell, the guy tells St. Peter he chooses Hell. The doors open and it the scene is the stereotypical hellish landscape.

Upon wondering what happened to the party scene, the man receives the response “Well,” said St. Peter as the doors closed. “The first time you came to visit you were a prospect. Now you’re a customer.”

Reece cites some of my biggest pet peeves– the introductory rate that rewards new customers and makes the person who has been loyal for 10 years, enduring price increases, feel like an idiot for sticking around so long for no recognition or reward. As Reece notes, there is actually more of an incentive to separate your relationship and then renew it.

The performing arts version of this is giving cut rate discount tickets to last minute purchasers, suggesting a certain amount of foolishness on the part of those who planned and purchased ahead of time. Some arts organizations sell large amounts of rush tickets at rates lower than those of subscribers who have committed to many shows in advance.

It just occurred to me moments ago, why don’t performing arts organization offer Rush tickets exclusively to those who have already purchased two or more tickets?

This would have multiple benefits 1- It rewards people who committed in advance; 2- It turns those people into recruiters for your show when they invite their friends along; 3- It gets people you already have a relationship with paying closer attention to your emails or social media account that you are using to communicate this discount, providing an opportunity to get them excited and mention other shows.

My suspicion is that attending a show on a half price ticket thanks to two people who purchased weeks in advance is a better model of behavior than attending alongside two other people who also decided to attend because tickets were half price.

It probably also reinforces many elements of the advance purchasers’ self-image if they know their friends were only able to attend because they were stalwart supporters of the arts organization.

The only real problem I can see with this idea is reserved seating. Offering rush tickets in this way appeals heavily to a social element which is compromised if everyone can’t sit together.

Granted, it illustrates the appropriate outcome associated with paying half price on the day of a performance versus full price in advance. Still the emotional disappointment of not being able to sit next to ones guests could supplant the acknowledgement of this logical consequence.

General admission events are good to go though.

This is not the direction I intended to go in when I started this entry. I like this result better.

We’ll Pay You Twice As Much As The Last CEO (*snicker*)

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Apropos to my post dealing with doing more with less earlier this week, last week Janet Brown, CEO & President of Grantmakers in the Arts wrote about the problems with non-profit CEOs forgoing pay.

She cites an example where the retiring CEO of a performing arts center had only accepted a nominal salary. The savings that represented meant the different between running a deficit. Now with the CEO retiring, they either needed to find someone else who was willing to do the job for free or find the money to pay someone for the job.

The performing arts center should have been booking the CEO’s non-salary as an in-kind contribution all these years, keeping the reality of the expense in the budget. This, of course, would have shown a loss for some years, which (I’m only guessing here) is probably not what the CEO or the Board wanted. So the cycle of under-capitalization continues.

Brown asserts that every organization should strive to be completely transparent financially, not only for the sake of those who inherit leadership positions, but also to retain the confidence of supporters.

Sound business practices are possible in nonprofits but, as I’ve stated before, this demands transparency and leadership that wants to do more than keep the doors open….Our investors in the nonprofit arts world are community members, governments, foundations and corporations who give money because they believe in our organizations, their missions and the good they are doing for our communities. These investors also deserve (and should demand) returns, which include the best artistic product possible and the strongest balance sheet good management can provide.

I guess the lesson here is not to pay your executive director as well as your interns, erm I mean, pay them both!

Info You Can Use: Generating Interview Questions

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I have only been at my new job for six weeks and already they have me on a search committee. Some may groan at the thought, but the position being hired will likely impact my area pretty significantly so I was actually relieved when I was asked to serve.

We had our first committee meeting today which was preceded by a training session on interviewing. In addition to reminding us about the usual forbidden subjects of age, race, religion, martial status, etc, the human resource director talked a little about a new approach the university was using with searches.

It is a little difficult to explain clearly here, but essentially it starts with the committee prioritizing the most important areas of the job (e.g. leadership, communication, experience, strategic vision, collegiality etc).

This would help us determine what questions should be asked at what stage of the process. If leadership and experience are top priorities and were going to make or break a candidate for us, we would ask questions that related to those areas during the phone interview phase rather than exploring collegiality.

At later stages we might have more questions touching on leadership and experience since they are high priorities, add in questions dealing with middling priorities to help us expand our impression of the candidates, but choose to only ask a few questions on low priority items or omit them altogether.

What really impressed me about this approach is that it keeps the early interview rounds focused and theoretically dictates how long latter phases of the interview process actually need to be.

Instead of saying, we should have the candidate meet with Bob because it just seems like a good idea, looking at the prioritization you may realize there isn’t any reason for an official meeting with Bob. If there is, a low prioritization might point to a 20 minute meeting or a meal alongside others rather than an hour long one on one meeting in Bob’s office.

Now, notice I say theoretically. Politics may dictate the candidates meet with Bob even in the absence of a compelling reason. That could be detrimental to the search. The HR director mentioned that searches often fail because highly qualified candidates can identify weak processes like undue focus in irrelevant areas.

There was one slide in the HR director’s presentation that I immediately knew I wanted to feature here on the blog. After the committee had finished its discussions, I ran down to the human resource office to ask her permission to share it with you.

It is a general template for the interview questions.  Clicking on the image will open a new window so you can refer to it and my commentary on it without having to back arrow.

Interview Guide Template. Used with permission. © Shawnee State University
Interview Guide Template.
Used with permission. © Shawnee State University

The bullet points on the left under “Leadership” note general activities the university has identified that person possessing leadership qualities will have/need to engage in.

The italicized text in the center is how these qualities are specifically exhibited in relation to this job. (This being an example document, they are exceedingly general.) Under that are the questions that are derived from this.

The Situation/Obstacle/Action/Results at the bottom allow the committee member to make notes about how the candidate’s answer touched upon these different phases during the situation being described.

What I really like about this format is that it places the elements from which the questions emerged on the same page with the question. There are always going to be answers you never anticipated when you envisioned the qualities of the person fulfilling the job. It is easy to become confused about whether the response illustrates that they are qualified or not.

But if you gaze down and see the answer being given touches upon all the qualities that comprise the foundation of the question, you can feel more confident about their qualifications.

I am looking forward to continuing in this process. I may end up with a different impression later on, though the search chair has used it in a few searches before and speaks highly of it.

Giving, Rather Than Sacrificing

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I was thinking last week about the growing sentiment that non-profit organizations should resist the impulse to do “more with less.” The idea being that it gives funders, boards, government entities and the public an unrealistic view of what the real costs of programs actually are and is likely to cause burnout among employees.

The quality of all programs will probably suffer in an effort to make up for the loss of funding to one, as well.

Although it would really hurt organizational pride and morale, the suggestion is to eliminate the program rather than stretching and stressing yourself even more trying to maintain it. That way, at least the consequences of low funding are unambiguous.

A cynical thought crept into my mind that some organization of younger workers unfettered by concerns of good pay and work-life balance might come along and belie your insistence that the program couldn’t be supported, by happily suffering through its execution.

But soon I got to thinking, why not let them? Not that you should welcome an under-captialized organization with unrealistic expectations, but if there was someone qualified who thought they could do a better job, maybe your organization should hand over your files to them.

I started to wonder if many non-profits had really ever thought of this. Most organizations are aware of people doing similar work in their region, whether they are viewed as competitors or providing parallel services. If you are being faced with having to eliminate a program, but are conflicted and a little guilty thinking about all those whom you serve losing something they valued, perhaps it is best to give your program materials to a group that possesses better resources or sees that program as one of their core competencies.

Once you no longer view each other as competitors, there may be room for constructive partnerships. For example, a performance venue who is seeing their K12 school show program flounder due to decreasing availability of bus money might direct their clients to a group that performs in schools, but doesn’t have their own facility.

The traveling group may benefit from the additional contact list, as well as costumes and props that the venue will no longer be using. In return, however, the traveling group may still do an occasional school show for the venue or may produce a series of weekend family matinees at the venue, allowing the venue to continue offering family programming without having to bankroll the development.

Or perhaps both groups wanted to do an after school program, but neither had all the resources they needed to pull it off. Yet as partners, they do.

By the end of my musing, I started to think that trying to do more with less and hold on all your programs might not only be harmful to your organization, it might also impede constructive partnerships.

Instead of looking around at other groups as competitors for the same pie, which granted is increasingly becoming the case, it may be more productive to evaluate what other people are doing as well, if not better than you, with an eye to possibly having to cede that to them.

Times when things are going well are probably best to consider these issues because it also allows the time to evaluate potential partnership options while free of financial panic.

Perhaps you will decide to transition things away before a critical decision ever needs to be made, when your program still remains vibrant and is a worthwhile addition to another company.

No organization should be in a mode of constantly contemplating its demise. I know many elderly start mentally ear marking who will get what when they die, if they haven’t already started actively giving things away. I don’t think that is a healthy way for a non-profit to operate.

It should know where its strengths lay, what its core functions are and what things occupy a more secondary role. Strive for excellence in everything and shine in the community, but be consistently clear about what the priorities of the organization are.

Boards and staff members are likely to have strong emotional attachments to the work that your organization is doing, and probably rightfully so. An open and ongoing conversation about what another organization is doing well can help to motivate your organization to step their game up and do a little better.

But having an open conversation about the organizational priorities as well as what other organizations are doing well may ease the decision to cede/transition a program away if the staff and board has regularly acknowledged the worthiness of another organization to do the work that is being set aside.

Being Goldilocks

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My hair like Jesus wore it
Hallelujah I adore it
Hallelujah Mary loved her son
Why don’t my mother love me?

These lyrics from the eponymous song of the musical Hair has always struck me as a great expression of the conflict an artist faces.

On one hand, you have to dress and appear professionally enough that you gain the confidence of potential employers, donors and granters.

On the other hand, you have to possess enough of an artistic aura, either in dress or behavior, that people will believe you are an artist. Appear too conventional and you cast doubt on your artistic abilities.

Working on a university campus, I been feeling a little tug of this conflict. It wasn’t a big problem in Hawaii where even bank presidents wear aloha shirts, albeit tasteful $200 silk aloha shirts.

But now I look out across campus seeing administrators running around in dresses, suit jackets and ties (not simultaneously) and I am reminded of these cultural expectations.

Because at the same time, I am out walking down the street every day to get lunch and how I dress as the director of the performing arts center contributes to the perception of what sort of people are welcome as audience members.

Probably nothing to be done to relieve folks in the arts world of this Goldilocks requirement of avoiding extremes.

So don’t neglect to wave those golden locks!

http://youtu.be/7dyl0j3WU6Y

No, Humanities Don’t Suck

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Some of you may be aware that there is a fairly active debate about the utility of humanities degrees in progress. Some governors are proposing students pursuing STEM majors pay a lower tuition than those pursuing humanities degrees.

There are studies that show while humanities majors make less than business and science majors right out of graduation, they end up making more 10-15 years down the road.

“Undergraduate professional degrees frequently lead to relatively high starting salaries and relatively flat pay scales thereafter. Humanities undergraduates may struggle more in the first few years after graduation, but in the long run they frequently find career paths with greater long-term growth potential; the skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking that we all talk about turn out to have real-world uses. Students and the general public legitimately worry about employability, but there’s no reason for us to surrender to the mistaken belief that humanities degrees are a poor investment.”

Studies like this and the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) are helping to collect data to refute the idea that humanities majors are useless.

The technical director for my performing arts center and I were talking last week when the conversation turned quickly to the value of the performing arts as a major that confers real world skills.

If you are reading this blog, you are likely already aware of most of them: You learn to plan a project invested with your own personal vision; research your portion of the project; present and execute your part of the project as part of a team.

Some arts disciplines require you to cross train in both technical and performance roles. All performing arts disciplines require the practitioner to possess some degree of empathy.

These are all skills that pretty much every business desires in an employee.

Then there is the big benefit–the unambiguous deadline.

One of the things I know drives college professors crazy is when a student says they can’t finish the paper and can they hand it in on Monday. If this option is denied, the student often enlists parents and administrators on their behalf. For all the good reasons the professor may have for not allowing this exception, a Friday versus Monday deadline appears to be somewhat arbitrary.

But when the performance time comes, that is the inescapable deadline. Well, I suppose it is escapable, but the time to “hand in” your assignment comes and passes with or without you. Whether it is submitted and what the quality of the work is apparent as are the consequences, if any.

One can always fake it and one’s parents will frequently speak praises regardless of whether they are earned. There is no guarantee a student will graduate with good organizational skills.

However, performance is an area where practical skills applicable to the real world are taught because the end product is meant to be consumed in the real world.

These are all skills that clearly do matter and have real world applications. The message that the humanities don’t matter undermines the teaching of these skills.

In the process of getting someone ready to give a public performance, there are many smaller scale performances conducted in more private environments. The stakes are much lower so it is easier to be irresponsible about handling your contribution.

But each one of these times instills the abilities needed for that big public performance. For many people that culminating event may not be on stage, but pitching an idea in the boardroom of Johnson & Johnson.

Info You Can Use: Is This A Bully I See Before Me?

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With the recent ruling about unpaid internships being illegal kicking up a conversation about the necessity of internships to secure a job, the topic of bullying in the workplace is apropos. Especially for the arts.

Situations like this can bring on a lot of pressure to those trying to cultivate a career. No place more so than in the arts. In fact, unpaid is more often the situation regardless of whether you are in an internship or not. Even if you are getting paid, you might be subject to all sorts of pressure and abuse in the highly competitive arts industry.

A researcher from Chapman University is conducting a survey of people’s experience of bullying in the performing arts.

Those who have an interest in the subject might want to check the survey out. It is being conducted with formal research protocols including informed consent statements.

The only really explicit incidence of bullying I can remember is someone using the cliched line that they would ruin my career before it even started.

There are probably opportunities for conversations about these and more subtle issues. For instance, when does cajoling to stay late, be a team player and help with strike go from group camaraderie to bullying?

Researcher Anne-Marie Quigg has studied this issue, focused primarily on the UK and wrote a book on the subject. There were a number of conversation sessions held in London last month on bullying that occurs in the arts. Some brief notes were posted online for each, including the question “Who looks after the ones who aren’t “artistic?”

I Will Fear No Photoshop

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Last December Seth Godin made an entry on his blog, True professionals don’t fear amateurs in which he says,

“A few years ago, typesetting, wedding photography, graphic design and other endeavors that were previously off limits to all but the most passionate amateurs started to become more common. The insecure careerists fought off the amateurs at the gate, insisting that it was both a degradation of their art as well as a waste of time for the amateurs. The professionals, though, those with real talent, used the technological shift to move up the food chain. It was easy to encourage amateurs to go ahead and explore and experiment… professionals bring more than just good tools to their work as professionals.”

I wrote briefly about creativity on Monday and how different cultures may have different definitions of creative work, some of which may encompass activities that don’t take a lot of thought and effort.

I think Godin’s comment wraps up a lot of the concerns shared by people in the arts. Among those concerns are not only that people are creating things of little value and degrading their work by association, but that people would eventually be unable to discern what real quality was and seek out professionals when the time came as Godin suggests.

I had a conversation recently that illustrates both this fear and Godin’s assertion that there is still a place for work by experienced professionals in this world.

I was in a cafe for lunch and stopped by the table of the muralist who has done all of the floodwall murals in town. I commented that I saw a story in the paper that there was a guy who was also from Louisiana doing a mural in town and wondered if it wasn’t some state industry I wasn’t aware of.

He told me the other guy was actually someone who grew up here locally, joined him in working on the murals and then eventually moved to Louisiana to work for him. It was only in the last few years the other guy had struck out on his own.

He went on to say that murals are getting to be a popular thing these days and there were a lot of people who were selling themselves as muralists. The problem is, not only is it a much bigger undertaking than you realize to work in such a large scale, you also have to know your materials, medium and siting as well as work with the community. As a result, there are a lot of angry communities out there with murals no one visits that are peeling off the walls after a few years.

I had actually been to a talk he had given about painting the murals a few weeks earlier and quickly realized that I had no idea about all the engineering and site and materials preparation that went into creating a mural.

It is also pretty interesting to hear how helpful iPads are in providing research and reference assistance without having to leave the scaffolding.

But as I said, his comments illustrated the value of experience and professionalism in artists. It also showed how difficult it is for people to discern the value of a skilled practitioner.

I guess that is true across all professions. The high visibility and reputation of skilled doctors has never really prevented people touting bottled miracle cures.

Still it may be worth exploring, as Godin suggests, where you can position yourself in the spectrum of practitioners in order to be available when someone of your skills is really needed.

America, The Derivative

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The release of the “Star Wars as Shakespeare would have written it” book, Star Wars, Verily A New Hope had me chuckle a bit at the concept, but also grumble about how derivative the book was.

Then I got to thinking not only about Kirby Ferguson’s Everything Is A Remix video series, but also that derivative works are pretty much what America’s identity is based on.

The upcoming festivities of the 4th of July as an example.

“The Star Spangled Banner” is set to the tune of a bawdy English club’s theme song.

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” set to “John Brown’s Body,” which is at least appropriate given their mutual association with the Civil War.

But then there is “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” set to the tune of “God Save The Queen (King)” less than two decades after the War of 1812 ended. How soon we forget!

That one never fails to get me during the Olympics given all the Commonwealth nations that use it. I am always initially embarrassed for the athletes that the Olympics are playing the wrong anthem…until I remember it was their song first.

Even the music for America the Beautiful was re-purposed from a church hymn.

There may be a big to do about intellectual property rights these days, but the history of the country has frequently involved borrowing, stealing, mixing and mashing other people’s work.

When I was in high school, we got a kick out of singing the poems of Emily Dickinson to the tune of the “Yellow Rose of Texas.” “Because I could not stop for Death” being one of the more popular ones due to the disconnect between the tune and the subject matter.

C’mon, click the link. You know you want to try it.

In closing, I leave you with the trailer of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars.

Are You Happy With Your Creative Time?

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Creativity Post had an interesting piece by Jeffrey Davis who reviews the results of the State of Create study.

Davis notes:

85% of Americans surveyed believe that creativity is key to driving economic growth. Two-thirds believe that being creative is valuable to society. 75% value their own creativity in resolving personal and professional problems.

But here’s where it gets interesting: Only 25% feel they live up to their creative potential.

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

Davis goes into some detail about how people can change this situation by either changing their situation, changing their mind, or both, to make space in their lives for creative pursuits.

My first thought upon reading this was that in the coming years perhaps the real value arts organizations can offer people is guidance and support to essentially become more disciplined…about letting themselves indulge fanciful thought and experimentation.

The other thing I wanted to point out is that this survey was conducted worldwide with 1000 people each from United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan.

The results are pretty dang interesting. There is a summary and infographic that accompany the study. Globally, Japan and Tokyo ranked as the most creative county and city–except among Japanese who don’t see themselves as creative. The U.S. ranked second “except in the eyes of Americans, who see themselves as the most creative.”

I haven’t gotten a chance to really consider some of the results, but there are some really glaring differences in attitudes. On the question “Being creative is still reserved for the arts community.” 78% of Japanese agreed with the statement versus 28% U.S., 35% U.K., 27% Germany and 21% in France.

There is a similar difference in response to the question “Being creative is reserved
for an elite community,” though only 52% of Japanese agreed.

Part of the difference may be attributable to what each culture defines as creative work. One culture may deem adding a funny caption to a picture and posting it on line to be creative while another may only regard someone who has gone through a lengthy apprenticeship and journeyman process to be a true creative.

Some of the responses from the different countries were included. I wondered if they were really representative of the country or chosen because they reinforce a certain image of that country.

Still, it was interesting to think about the following quote from the U.S. in the context of all the conversation that occurs about intellectual property rights.

“So many ideas have already been used, and in variation. When I think of a creative idea that I believe is new and original, it’s likely that it has already been done. I think the internet can often stray us away from our own creativity.”

or this one in the context of the stereotype that Germans are disciplined and time conscious:

“The less time the less is the creative head. Time constraints and pressure to kill creativity in the long run. Artists can only make art because they carry no other job and have this time. Creativity is born out of boredom and fun at the experiment.”

Artisanal ≠ Careless

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One of the questions on “Wait, Wait..Don’t Tell Me” this weekend referenced the fact that fast food giants were instructing their employees and robotic processors (which may be one in the same) to essentially dial back the quality control a bit to make food less perfect and more rustic looking in order to hitch their wagon to the artisanal trend.

Kinda makes you wonder when companies understand artisanal to be investment of less care and effort rather than more.

I metaphorically rolled my eyes (because I was driving at the time), thinking to myself that there are hundreds of performing arts organizations handcrafting works all over the country, but lacking an audience because people will really only pay so much for authenticity. Packaging that provides the rustic illusion at a cheap price will trump quality at the real price a whole lot of the time.

The reality is, there is a very real trend sustained by people who are willing to pay more for authenticity. And they aren’t all hipsters from the trendy side of town. What they value isn’t just the product, but a sense of connection with the creators/cultivators.

Most arts organizations haven’t found a way to do this in an engaging way while getting the marketing department out of the way. I am sure the primary reasons why the Trey McIntyre Project’s dancers are treated like rock stars is because the company has cultivated a public enough profile that people recognize them when they are out running daily errands.

In some cases, with a little imagination and patience, providing that sense of connection may be fairly easy to accomplish.

I went into the local art museum last Saturday. The main exhibit area was empty and the next installation won’t be in until mid-July. However, the new directors of the museum were in painting the walls getting the area ready.

When I finished looking at the permanent collection, I chatted with the directors since they were there and so readily accessible. Since I was senior to them, having started my new job a whole three weeks before they started theirs, I asked them if they had considered changing their Saturday hours, at least for the summer.

They open on Saturday afternoons an hour after the farmers market, which is held 50 feet west of their front door, closes. There are enough people visiting the market that they have to park a couple blocks east of the museum and walk right by the front door. One of the directors assured me that they had already started considering that change.

Then we chatted a little about Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog and some of the ideas for interactive exhibits she has written about. I mentioned the possibility of using some of their spaces for lectures and demonstrations connected with our shows in some of the museum spaces since they are only a block and a half from the performing arts center.

I left feeling good about prospect of future collaboration, but also for the future of the museum given that they were very visible in their space and eager to engage despite how busy they were.

I think this openness will result in an a sense of an “artisanal” experience/connection to those in the community who value it.

Politicans, Can’t Live With ‘Em…

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So I have gotten some nice responses to the question I posed about the Minnesota Legacy Tax at the end of yesterday’s post.

Paul from Minneapolis praises the Legacy tax, saying that everywhere he goes he hears that the event has been supported by the Legacy Tax.

Another commenter who wished to remain anonymous was a little annoyed because everywhere she goes, she hears about all the events in Minneapolis being supported by the Legacy Tax.

She becomes exasperated when she hears the tax is supporting the Guthrie Theatre’s babysitting program while places like Bemidji get very little support (The commenter was not from Bemidji, its just one of my favorite Minnesota place names.)

If you follow the link to the Legacy Tax project tracking website the commenter from Minneapolis provides, you will see that the frequency and amounts of the grants made in southeast Minnesota tend to be higher than the rest of the state. (Though selecting arts only spreads the frequency out across the state, most of the money is still around Minneapolis.)

This brings up the counter-truth of yesterday’s post. Yeah, politicians will give the arts short shrift, but you need them to get anything at all.

When I was growing up in New York, the perception was that only NYC, Albany and Buffalo existed in the eyes of the legislature.

I think I mentioned before on this blog that when I was working in NJ there was a rule that a certain percentage of the arts funding had to be given to the southern counties. The intent was warped a little bit so that providing more money to northern arts organization was rationalized as benefiting the southern half because they traveled south to perform.

It wasn’t until a legislator from the rural south of NJ became speaker of the assembly that this changed.

Heck, the performing arts center I am director of is named for the speaker whose influence aided in its construction. (And actually, I just noticed today is his birthday.)

We all hate thinking about the process of currying favor and politicking, but there are plenty of examples to provide a lesson as to why it works.

Not So Special, Not So Dedicated Arts Tax

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A cautionary tale for the “Beware Politicians Bearing Gifts” file. (A pretty thin file given the relationship between politics and the arts.)

Four years ago, I posted about how the State of New Jersey was trying to ignore a law that guaranteed funding to the arts from hotel tax revenue. This was a particularly unwise move given that cutting funding to the arts meant the tax would go away entirely thanks to a poison pill provision.

In other words, for want of cutting a couple million from arts funding, the state would lose many more millions when the hotel tax disappeared due to making the cut.

The government received a lot of criticism for contemplating the move, including from a former governor.

Now there is a new administration and a new attitude. When the tax was created, it was contemplated that the funding for the arts would increase as tax revenue increased. The problem is where the previous administration had viewed the $28 million minimum funding limit as the floor they wanted to demolish, the current administration sees it as the ceiling they are happy to bolster.

Instead of providing more funding as more revenue comes in to the dedicated tax, the state is raking the excess revenue into the general coffers.

“…the tax generated more than $1.1 billion for state and local governments since it was introduced 10 years ago, but only $184 million has gone to the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the largest of the four agencies that should have received a far bigger chunk of the money.

[…]

It’s a cautionary tale for supporters of a separate bill that would take a slice of the sales tax to fund the state’s open space and historic preservation programs, which have run out of money. It might look great on paper, but without the political will behind it, the promises are hollow.”

This story makes me wonder about the fate of the funds collected as a result of the tax increase that was passed in Minnesota to provide support to wildlife areas and the arts.

I know the Minnesota legislature has been asking if the Minneapolis Orchestra has betrayed the public trust by accepting funding but not providing concerts. My hope is that it is motivated by an appreciation of the arts and a desire to see them produced rather than a desire to scrap the funding.

Can anyone from Minnesota give me a sense of how things have worked out?

When You Invite An Artist To Dinner

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Last week I was invited to dinner to meet with a muralist who is in town painting the floodwall murals. I don’t mean to constantly harp on the small town charm I am experiencing here at my new job, but you write what you know, eh?

I have been thinking recently back to my childhood when my parents would regularly invite our teachers home for dinner. It wasn’t just my family. Every kid’s family seemed to take turns. We were all horrified because not only were our teachers invading our personal sanctums, but given we were Catholic school kids, our homes were being visited by nuns who kept us at the edge of terror!

I am not sure anyone does this any more, but this was the type of grassroots effort that let both the kids and the teachers know the community valued education.

I wonder if it might be effective to do the same thing with the arts where you invited your neighbors over to meet an artist.

I know a few groups that have house concerts by guest musicians as fund raising events. While that sort of intimacy offers a great experience, the type of people invited and the expectations placed upon them by the fund raising format aren’t really conducive to what I have in mind.

Having the party at the biggest mansion in the most exclusive neighborhood probably won’t make the arts appear accessible to new segments of the community either.

But a back yard cook out or dinner you would invite your friends to anyway, but in this instance you say, I would like you to come to dinner to meet this local/visiting artist, provides a low pressure environment that communicates that you value the arts.

The artist doesn’t need to perform or have their work on display. Just the fact they are the guest of honor to whom everyone is introduced at a gathering with good food and good company can be sufficient to influence attitudes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLfb9hgmufI

What’s Your Culture?

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When I assumed my current position, I had hoped that I had escaped the need to complete long annual reports. I was leaving a region whose higher ed accrediting body has the reputation for being the toughest. So I thought, if I did end up having to do an annual report, it wouldn’t be too onerous.

Well, I was wrong. Under the guise of a lunch invitation to meet the rest of the university leadership, I discovered that I would indeed need to do an annual report. And it seems to be more extensive than the one I used to have to do.

In addition, the reporting protocol this year seems to be entirely new, giving rise to thoughts that this is a conspiracy against me by a universe that just won’t let me escape doing annual reports!!!!

While I am not looking forward to the task, one section of the report that I must admit met my approval inquired by department culture:

3. Please answer the questions below addressing departmental culture. As you answer the questions, please include examples from the past year illustrating your points.

a. Describe your department culture?
b. What influences your culture?
c. What theories or practices inform your culture?
d. How do you assess if your departmental culture is impacting the continuous improvement of your department and the institution as a whole?

 

I think reflection on organizational and departmental culture in this way can be important. Even within a performing arts organization, the culture of the tech, marketing, front of house and artistic areas are distinct from each other.

Discerning what influences your culture and how your departmental culture contributes to the organization as a whole can be contribute toward bolstering the positive and making a constructive effort to repair the negative.

It can help recognize the truth of dysfunctional dynamics if a department realizes a prime influence on their culture is acting as a buffer between two other departments to prevent them from throttling each other.

Yeah, acting as a peacemaker is a positive thing, but if the result is to delay or deflect conflict rather than effect a continuous improvement, it isn’t ultimately a constructive contribution.

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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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