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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.

Want To Pursue A Creative Career?..Uhm, The Brits Will Help You Decide

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Finder of interesting things, Thomas Cott, tweeted a link to an article about creative apprenticeships in the UK. While unpaid non profit internships are not against the law in the U.S., they have been something of a hot topic in England.

According to the article Cott linked to, the creation of the National Skills Academy is not a reaction to the internship scandal, but given that many businesses in creative industries heavily depend on unpaid labor, it does provide a response to that problem. Essentially, it allows young people to gain the skills they lack in professional settings and provide organizations with some labor without running afoul the law.

I am not quite sure how this is arranged. Apprentices are entitled to a special apprenticeship minimum wage. Whether the company using their labor pays it directly or indirectly, or the training program does isn’t clear to me.

What interested me was some of the things the National Skills Academy was doing to provide training. Whereas getting a degree in the arts is increasingly seen as not marketable in the U.S. given rising tuition, the National Skills Academy has done their research and are working with creative industries to answer the demand. They have even built a training and rehearsal facility.

We’ve encouraged a shift in education away from courses of over-supply towards training that fulfils a clear demand from the industry. In the theatre and live music sectors, our members told us they needed new backstage staff more than anything else (and they weren’t at all worried about performers). But lots of colleges were offering over-subscribed performing arts courses first and foremost. We had a look at this, and our education members now deliver quality backstage courses approved by industry and popular with students.

Our members also felt the live events, music and theatre industries needed somewhere to train and rehearse. Together we made the case for a £13m investment to build an industry-spec new building for industry and students, The Backstage Centre.

The situation in the UK isn’t that much different than in the U.S. in terms of what is needed to do the job. One section of the site observes that even though 58% of those working in creativity industries have degrees, they ironically valued experience over education because there are gaps in the education people are receiving.

They also observe, as in the U.S., unpaid internships are not a viable option for people who don’t have the money to support themselves while they work. They strive to shift that dynamic.

But that’s not what we’re being told – a quarter of employers we asked said they were experiencing skills gaps and shortages in key areas. As a result, we’ve seen a rapid growth in unpaid internships – now much longer than the traditional three-month placement.

We’re concerned that there’s a disconnect here between employers and the education sector supplying them with staff. We’ve also seen that unpaid work is unsustainable for anyone without private support.

The overall picture shows under-employment, unemployment and unfair access.

Changing recruitment culture

Our membership network led the campaign to encourage a change in recruitment culture. In 2009, we created the first specialist apprenticeship frameworks, to supply employers with staff who have the specialist skills they want.

There are whole sections on associated websites devoted to helping young people make decisions about what creative careers they might want to pursue and what opportunities are out there. There are two sites devoted specifically to theatre work and another to music.

It is not just online resources, they have a series of in person sessions around the UK young people can attend. Some are targeted at students as young as 13. Many of them are fully booked.

So if you are like me, your first reaction is probably something along the lines of “Why don’t we have something like this in the U.S.?” I think even with all the talk about how the arts councils are continuing to be defunded in the U.K. and how cultural organizations may have to look to the U.S. model of garnering private support for their work, there exists an immense fundamental gap between how arts and culture are valued in the respective countries.

This program was only created five years ago and it already has 1,800 apprentices and the Backstage Centre built. Now admittedly, it remains to be seen whether there are jobs for all these people. My suspicion is that they expect/hope some of these people to end up creating their own companies and to help drive a shift to a creative economy.

Can You Pursue The Intrinsic Value of Arts Alone?

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There was a post by KCET columnist Corbett Barklie last fall that has had me thinking and wondering if there hasn’t been enough conversation about this topic.

In short, Barklie feels that arts organizations are sacrificing a focus on the intrinsic value of art in the pursuit of “social service” related activities. (my emphasis)

Arts groups exist to interpret the past, elucidate the present, and imagine the future. To borrow from Dewitt H. Parker’s The Principles of Aesthetics, “The intrinsic value of art must be unique, for it is the value of a unique activity — the free expression of experience in a form delightful and permanent, mediating communication.”

Nonprofit arts groups and the artists that run them are not reactionary entities. They are visionary entities.

You may be thinking, “But what about art groups who work in schools? Artists who work in hospitals?” In my opinion, those are arts service organizations — a rarely made but critical distinction. Arts service organizations exist to create and provide ancillary programs that help fulfill the missions of social service nonprofits such as schools, community centers, hospitals, etc…

[…]

Because no distinction has been made between arts groups and arts service organizations, the general arts and arts policy conversation (set by funders and designated leaders) is getting more and more muddled. And artists who exist in organizations that are only concerned with artistic excellence are beginning to feel marginalized.

[…]

Unless and until arts groups find their voice of disagreement and set aside fear of funding or political ramifications long enough to speak up for themselves, the conversation will continue to focus less and less on challenges facing arts groups that are committed solely to artistic excellence. Eventually these arts groups will fade from view completely.

My first thought was, but isn’t an educational component the way it is supposed to be? Most non-profit organizations are organized under the aegis of the education part of 501 (c) 3. In a time when there is less arts education in schools, isn’t it in our best long term interest to be providing educational services? But then again, by Barklie’s definition, I have been working for arts service organizations for the last 20 odd years so this is the normal for me.

So my question to my larger audience; is it as Barklie suggests (and most recently echoed by Diane Ragsdale), have funders and others lead the arts in this direction?

After all, at one time, art was presented for arts sake and there wasn’t any efforts to supplement the efforts of education and health care.

Is this an improvement or a dilution of our effort? It can be argued that pursuing education programs helps put arts organizations in touch with their and constituencies, helping to remove ivory tower mentality and acculturate the community.

But there is also the issue of diverting resources from the core competency and mission of the company. For profit businesses aren’t expected to do this. Many get immense tax breaks with no expectation that they serve the public good.

Is it the new normal that arts organizations must split their focus in order to maintain their existence? Is there an egotism inherent to believing you should be able to pursue the intrinsic value of art alone?

Shaping oneself as an arts service organization seems about the only option for garnering foundation funding and mollifying governmental entities who want something more than pursuit of artistic excellence as a justification for being.

Thoughts?

Info You Can Use: Development Directors Need Love Too

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You may be aware of the recent report commissioned by the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and conducted by CompassPoint about the careers of development directors. I already had a pretty good idea that development was a thankless task and there was a lot of turnover, but Under Developed: A National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising, brings the reality to the fore.

I was astonished to learn that a quarter of development directors were novices or had no experience in the field at all. My guess would have been closer to 5%.

One in four executive directors (24%) say their development directors have no experience or are novice at “current and prospective donor research.” Among the smallest nonprofits, the number rises to 32%. When it comes to securing gifts, executives report that 26% of development directors overall—and 38% among the smallest nonprofits— have no experience or are novice.

Half of all development directors vs. 34% of executive directors contemplate leaving development in two years. 22% of development directors had either given notice or were actively looking at the time they were surveyed. 40% of those surveyed said they weren’t sure they would stay in development as a career.

A quarter of executive directors reported firing their previous development director for performance or incompatibility with organizational culture.

As might be expected, organizations with bigger budgets reported greater retention rates. Being able to offer better salaries enabled them to attract talented people from other organizations. Some of these organizations reported something of an arms race with the best development professionals being able to name their own price in the face of an ever shrinking talent pool driving costs up across the board.

I have given some attention to the difficulties with attracting and retaining executive directors over the years so I thought it important to turn some attention to the development arm.

In fact, the report makes many of the same recommendations you will find in respect to the executive director positions: recognizing and celebrating emerging leaders, having better training/mentoring and having transition plans.

One of the central things they suggest is nurturing a culture of philanthropy. If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know a common refrain I have is that marketing and development aren’t the sole province of those departments followed by an inevitable link here.

The report talks about the need not to silo responsibilities. They define culture of philanthropy as:

Most people in the organization (across positions) act as ambassadors and engage in relationship-building. Everyone promotes philanthropy and can articulate a case for giving. Fund development is viewed and valued as a mission-aligned program of the organization. Organizational systems are established to support donors. The executive director is committed and personally involved in fundraising.

While they specifically mention executive director in the definition, the board is mentioned frequently enough in their discussion of the concept they probably should appear as well. They acknowledge at length that asking for money is a difficult endeavor for all those involved. They felt the fund development process would be much easier if the goal permeated all areas of the organization because it would naturally bring more support and resources to bear and make the director feel more empowered.

“I think the fundraisers don’t always manage up because they think, ‘It’s all on my shoulders.’ They forget that you’ve got 20 some board members and another group of volunteers, an executive director, and other direct staff — that this is a partnership.
—Executive Director

This is the one area in which smaller organizations can be compete with larger ones. While they may not have the money to pay high salaries and support the newest development software, (and the software gap is getting increasingly smaller and affordable), the more close-knit working environment can have the staff more easily integrate with development than in larger organizations where the function is more departmentalized.

There are some depressing findings in the report, but I think it is worth reading because I suspect it will also reveal that the problems one faces in ones organization aren’t as uncommon as you might think. That realization will hopefully allow people to feel a little freer to discuss these issues rather than assuming they face them alone and everyone else is operating effectively.

Info You Can Use: Leveraging Transitions Well

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So I really hadn’t intended to write too much more about my job change until I left my current job or took my next one. However, the assistant theatre manager who is chairing the search committee is using some activities which I think are really beneficial to my organization and the community.

Today she held a meeting with various stakeholders to discuss what they wanted from the person who would replace me. I wasn’t included, but I eavesdropped on the conversation rising to my office off and on for about 15 minutes.

The group was comprised of about 15 people, some of which who are members of the search committee. Among them were faculty from music, theatre, visual arts; chair of Arts and Humanities; Dean of our division; our theatre staff; community artists; representatives of three renting organizations; volunteers; and our development officer.

They started out writing down what things they valued about the theatre, focusing especially on what will be missing if the theatre didn’t continue operations. Then they took turns talking about what they had written and sticking the post-it notes up on the wall in themed groups so that they could see what values people gravitated toward.

Later they moved on to some group activities to generate suggestions.

I spoke to some people after the meeting and they seemed pleased with the process. They were especially happy that the assistant theatre manager kept things moving along.

What I thought was really great about this exercise was that it brought so many different constituencies together who never meet each other. Each one became aware of what the other did in the facility and why certain elements of the facility and the services offered were relevant to them.

More importantly, this was all done in front of college administrators and the development officer which helped them understand the wide range of activities that occurs in the facility and why its existence was important.

It sounds strange to say, but I think this process was successful because I am leaving.

If we had tried to gather a group of people to talk about why they loved the theatre, I am not sure as many people would have shown up or been as eager to participate.

I think the sense of immediacy and the opportunity to influence the type of person chosen as the new theatre manager garnered far more investment in the process.

While part of me craves melodramatic gnashing of teeth and wailing, “Oh what shall we do without you, Joe? You are our source of inspiration and have that musky, Victor Mature-like scent,” I am really happy to see the transition turning into such a constructive process.

Just offering it here as an example something other organizations might try.

Oh, and I forgot, they fed the group Valentine’s Day cupcakes. That probably helped, too.

Info You Can Use: Are You Prepared to Weaponize Your Storytelling?

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Hat tip to P. Martin for the link to Chris Brogan’s guest post on Copyblogger about Content Marketing. I will confess that I think the term content marketing is a phrase devoid of much meaning. In the comments section of the post, Brogan agrees but says he just uses the terms that everyone is Googling.

It was hard to pass by this post though due to Brogan’s very quotable declaration that “Content marketing is weaponized storytelling.”

Brogan says that he used that phrase at a conference, but he isn’t sure that he really believes it and amended it to the admittedly less evocative, “Content marketing is sales-minded storytelling.”

His premise is that content marketing isn’t branding. He feels that only really big companies with large budgets can afford to build brand awareness. The little guy has to depend on content marketing which is aimed at “helping your market make a decision of some kind.” This doesn’t mean constantly making a hard sell.

Your site/email newsletter/podcast/whatever should consist of something like this:

Some posts that are just friendly and storytelling.
Some posts that are gentle pushes towards a next action or an ask.
Some posts that are pure selly-sell, as I like to call it. Apparently over here they call that an offer.
Some (but very few) totally off-topic posts.

This would be true of a blog, an email list, or whatever. I believe that the real goal of content marketing is to advance your business.

[…]

This is where it’s tricky. Because the business goal just might be entertainment. The business goal of my writing a guest post on Copyblogger is to get you to consider signing up for my awesome free newsletter.

Based on this great post (okay, decent post), you’re supposed to now think, “Wow, I really like what Chris had to say. I think I’ll give his newsletter a try.”

Did I charge you any money? No. Did I tell you about my product or service in the body of this post? No. What I did was start what I hope to be a relationship with you and I’ve invited you to get my awesome newsletter. That’s me content marketing.

Do you feel dirty? No. (You might already be dirty, but that’s awesome, and yet, not my fault.)

One of the commenters on this post felt Chris was wrong and made too many generalizations. His company has focused on positioning themselves as experts in the industry and gets great response from that. He said the only time responses have flagged was when they tried to inject content. Chris agrees that different industries and markets require different approaches.

Acknowledging that, I have to think that Chris’ approach is more aligned with the needs of arts organizations which largely employ storytelling to engage their customers/audiences.

At my theatre, we don’t do it with our newsletters as much as I would like. They have been mostly focused on communicating information about shows with interesting visuals and language and keeping text to a minimum. We are still evolving that approach.

However, our Facebook page has been a place where we share all sorts of information about the arts in general along with information about the shows. We have done this somewhat out of a desire to keep people engaged with the organization during the gaps between shows.

We want to give people a reason to continually visit our Facebook page, but also communicate information about arts careers and opportunities to the students and artists whom our facility serves. We have a television monitor with information about our shows in the lobby and it just occurred to me that would also be a great place to share some of the interesting tidbits we post on our Facebook page alongside our show information.

Many of these ideas can be offered free to the public without making a hard sell or talking about your company. So think about it. What resources are available to you? What can you do?

Then What Are We Fighting For Anyway?

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The quote that this entry’s title comes from, Churchill’s response to the suggestion that funding for the arts be cut to save money during the Second World War, is unfortunately apocryphal.

He did however, refuse to send the art from the National Gallery to Canada on the belief that the Axis powers would be beaten.

The closest to the quote that he got was in 1938:

“The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life. The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them….Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.”

Granted this is before the war started so he may not have felt as strongly about cutting funding once hostilities got underway.

However, funding art during troubled times has been seen as a way to reassure the populace. I found the following on the National Performing Arts Convention website:

“In the third year of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln ordered work to go ahead on the completion of the dome of the Capitol. When critics protested the diversion of labor and money from the prosecution of the war, Lincoln said, ‘If people see the capitol going on, it is a sign that we intend this Union shall go on.’ Franklin Roosevelt recalled this story in 1941 when, with the world in the blaze of war, he dedicated the National Gallery in Washington. And John Kennedy recalled both these stories when he asked for public support for the arts in 1962. Lincoln and Roosevelt, Kennedy said, ‘understood that the life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose- and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”

–Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

While Churchill may not have advocated for arts funding during the war, the predecessor of the Arts Council of England was formed and funded in those early years with John Maynard Keynes leading the organization.

…In December 1939, in a world darkened by war, winter and blackout, a small group of civil servants and educators met to discuss the crisis in the arts. Great museums and galleries were empty, their contents packed off to safety from bombing. The theatres were shut, orchestras about to disband. The committee agreed that it was essential “to show publicly and unmistakably that the Government cares about the cultural life of the country. This country is supposed to be fighting for civilisation.”

In 1940, with an initial budget of £50,000 (about £2 million in today’s values) the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, mother to today’s Arts Council, was born. The Daily Express thundered: “What madness is this? There is no such thing as culture in wartime.”

When the earthquake struck Haiti a couple years ago, one thing I noticed during the news stories was that people were coming together and singing. It didn’t stop the bleeding or miraculously heal broken bones, but it brought people together and gave them strength to hold on until help arrived.

And when people were rally help for Haiti and those impacted by Hurricane Sandy, musicians and other artists and professionals were the public voice and face of the appeal in so many instances. These people didn’t just emerge from a vacuum fully formed, they are a result of environments which cultivated and valued their talent across decades of careers.

Ian McKellen was recently quoted as saying there will no longer be great actors of the calibre like himself, Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench because the repertory theatre movement which cultivated these people has died out.

Sure, it may be a case of a septuagenarian complaining “kids today…” but he reminds us that he and his colleagues weren’t born fantastic and imbued with gravitas but worked toward it over time.

Granted, it is difficult to plan and invest resources long term at the expense of the present. By the same token, laying a little bit away now for the future sends a message you have a vision of a future worth investing in. There is value in that on many fronts.

Take My Job, Please

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Come May I will be leaving Hawaii to assume the position of Director of the Vern Riffe Center for the Arts in Portsmouth, OH. The University of Hawaii has posted my current position today and I thought I would draw attention to it since the classification of “Public Information, Public Events Planning and Publications” doesn’t quickly catch the eye of arts administrators.

My dean is rewriting the job description a little so the title is presented more naturally in the job ads. It will be posted on arts job sites shortly, but I thought I would give my faithful readers some advance notice so you can apply or pass the posting along to colleagues.

As you may have surmised from the illuminating job title, bureaucracy with all its arcane rules is the biggest impediment to the expedient execution of duties in this job. However, if you are well organized, good at planning ahead and adept at navigating bureaucracies, you can do well in this position.

The positive points about this job are numerous and are centered on the people.

The chancellor of the college is extremely supportive of the arts here. In fact, I was trying to keep a low profile about my job change but he found an article online announcing my new job and sent it around to all the deans and vice chancellors at the college. The dean of our division is also a very amiable and supportive guy who wants to help the theatre thrive.

As you may have read in some of my blog posts, there is a lot of cross-discipline activity that occurs almost spontaneously in the building. The tables in our backstage are a very social area where students and faculty from theatre, music and visual arts are often found chatting and offering advice about different projects.

Being able to engage in that conversation is key to the success of the theatre manager position. I may depart my office at a certain time, but often don’t leave the building until an hour later. Many of the problems and concerns for the facility get addressed during that period.

There will be a $7-8 million renovation of the facility potentially starting in the next year. I have overseen a large part of the planning and design. The goal was to be shovel ready once the funding became available.

Even if the renovation doesn’t happen in the next year, the theatre will be celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2014. I have started some very preliminary planning and grant writing to support some great events.

The assistant theatre manager is really well organized and has a good instinct for design. Our website was much more “blah” when I was making the design decisions. She will actually be chairing the search committee.

The theatre collaborates with the Performing Arts Presenters of Hawaii, a statewide consortium of presenters which leverages their collective power to negotiate contracts and write grants together. I have served as an officers on the board for the last 8 years. While you can contract artists alone, you definitely get more bang for your buck cooperating with the group.

It takes some patience and tenacity when advocating for artists. Sometimes dates and artistic mix don’t synch up for everyone at the same time. In some cases, you may have to reintroduce the artist over the course of multiple years to get the buy-in you need to make the tour happen.

On the other hand, you have people who are familiar with the intricacies of your organization bringing you well-qualified suggestions, many of them great performers you weren’t really acquainted with before. In many respects, they are helping you shoulder the responsibilities that are associated with booking a season.

The theatre also has a very active rental business with over 350 public events a year (not counting classes that schedule time on the stage). There are a lot of perennial renters who can almost run the show themselves. There are also many first time renters whose vision outstrips their budgets whom you need to teach about organizing their production. Fortunately, the technical directors have a deep commitment and long experience in doing that sort of thing.

Representatives from all these constituencies will be on the search committee–theatre staff, drama instructors, visual arts instructors, a representative of the booking consortium, perennial renters, a community artist. I believe the committee numbers about 8-9 right now.

Then, of course, there is the obvious benefit of living in Hawaii and interacting with the confluence of cultures which live and visit here.

So why am I leaving? Well many of the things I value about my current job are present in the one to which I am moving. The university president and many of the staff are really wonderful people. A community board has an amazing relationship with the university and shares in a great deal of the presenting responsibilities. I am absolutely looking forward to joining the organization.

So in short for those interested, the theatre manager position is suited for a mid-career arts professional with a solid background in performing arts who is prepared to act assertively to advance the interests of the theatre.

Please don’t apply if your qualifications don’t meet this level and are not entirely sincere. The school declared two failed searches before the search that resulted in my hire so they are not about to settle.

So write a great cover letter that inspires and expresses your vision. You will be writing to a group of arts people who want to be excited by the next theatre manager.

…Just realize those arts people are constrained by a pedantic bureaucracy that makes them go down a check list of the minimum qualifications. If they can’t find evidence you meet the qualifications in your cover letter or resume, it doesn’t matter how inspiring you are.

Also pay VERY close attention to the transcript requirements. If you submit online transcripts, the committee has to evaluate whether your experience is equivalent to a degree.

I am happy to answer any questions people may have. Just submit them through the contact link atop the page.

Age And Artistic Taste–Discuss

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Writing about the concept of music discovery, Tyler Hayes suggests that after a certain age, most people are pretty set in their music tastes and in terms of paying for recordings of music, are better served by buying and owning rather than “renting” the music from a service like Spotify.

He argues that technology currently does a poor job of creating an environment for music discovery.

The problem with Pandora is that it may replace the radio for some, or a lot of people, but there is no spark the same way when a friend says “Hey, you should check out this band, they’re great.” A computer can’t replace that, yet. There will be an app or site or service that does fix and solve discovery… But that isn’t now or even this year.

Music discovery should be a verb or an accident, through active looking or serendipitous stumbling, but it shouldn’t be paraded around only as a marketing term.

A number of thoughts that occurred to me as I read this. First was that idea that new music discovery tapers off after a certain age. There are studies that show that people often mature into an appreciation for classical music. But I wonder if the ground work for that appreciation isn’t laid when people are younger and attend live performances in general with their family and classmates.

Yeah, I know the arts for the kids discussion has been beaten to death. I am just suggesting that even though you turned out okay and appreciate art even though you had minimal exposure when you were younger, the general environment has greatly changed since then.

If you are in your 40s as I am, or older you and your parents watched many of the same television shows because that was all that was available. Even though I didn’t go to many Broadway shows in my youth, my mother would often play Fiddler on the Roof, Camelot and Godspell records. I would dance around singing the chorus of “If I Were A Rich Man” when I resented having to do chores.

Your parents had a fairly strong influence on your taste and you shared many of the same experiences. While it may have been to a lesser degree, you probably gravitated toward some of the same general arts genres your parents did as you got older. Even if you rebelled against sharing their aesthetic taste, you were still engaged by art to some degree.

I am not sure we can necessarily count on the same effect with the current generation. Lacking any exposure from any quarter, their tastes may solidify as they are and never include traditional/classical art forms as they mature.

I am open to hearing counter arguments, but if you are older than 30ish, be honest, are you as voracious a consumer of music/art as you were when you were younger or are your choices pretty much explorations along general lines you established in the past with some interesting, but not radical deviations?

Second thing I began to ponder was whether terms like audience/community engagement and discovery are largely marketing terms that are being used to add a little luster to the same general programs as before or if arts organizations have started making a more directed effort in these directions. This isn’t something I can opine upon even generally because I don’t have any really solid data. It is a good question to ask ourselves, though.

I do think that the thing arts organizations offer over any other entertainment form is the opportunity to experience the frisson of personal discovery. I love Tyler Hayes’ definition of musical discovery as “a verb or an accident, through active looking or serendipitous stumbling.”

You absolutely miss something when you try to experience it via a small screen or ear buds vs. going into a performance hall or gallery. Even if you don’t understand Dali, you have an experience standing in front of one of his wall sized works that you don’t by seeing a picture of it.

The challenge has always been trying to communicate that through media insufficient to the task without under or overselling it. The other part of the challenge is whether people will continue to value the seeking process.

Americans Need A Cultural Stipend?

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Via Marginal Revolution, we learn Brazil’s Congress has approved a monthly Cultural Stipend for poorer workers.

“Now we are creating food for the soul; Why would the poor not be able to access culture?” the minister said.

Suplicy said the new incentive, approved by Congress and endorsed by Rousseff late last month, is expected to be introduced some time this year. “The money will be put in the hands of the worker who will decide how to spend it, by going to the movies, to the theater, to an exhibition or the museum,” she explained.

Other possible uses include purchases of books, music or DVDs.
[…]

Employers will cover 90 percent of the cost of the stipend but can then deduct the amount from their income tax. Workers will pay the remaining 10 percent, but can opt out if they choose to do so.

The first time I read about it, I thought it was a government funded program and might be hard to implement on a national level in the U.S.

However, since it is largely employer funded, the plan could actually work quite well in the U.S. since it allows the businesses to write it off their taxes much like companies and individuals can write off charitable donations in the U.S. I am not sure the government would have to create any new laws to make it possible. Though their encouragement would certainly help. The arts community could just make a big push for companies to declare their participation.

I imagine it would be great publicity for companies since they could collect testimonials from employees about the enjoyment they derived from books, music, performances and museum attendance thanks to their employers’ involvement.

Since employees have to contribute a little bit toward putting money on their culture cards, it gets potential audiences in the habit of paying to participate but doesn’t place the entire burden on them.

Granted, audiences may not end up using the money to purchase experiences at non-profit arts organizations. This won’t absolve arts organizations from the responsibility of making their offerings relevant and interesting. But along the lines of my letter to the president post, it starts to institutionalize the idea that all citizens should participate in cultural experiences.

When I did think this was a government program and was trying to devise a way to adapt it to the U.S., I thought about the dividend Alaska pays to its citizens from the oil proceeds. With that in mind, I was going to propose NY State use some of the tax money it collects from its great native resources- Broadway and Wall Street- to offer these cards to all citizens of NY. The population of the state has been dwindling so I thought it would be a great way to reward those who stayed and hopefully stimulate arts organizations in other parts of the state.

I suspect much of it would find its way back to Broadway. Though parts of Rochester NY are one of America’s Top 44 ArtPlaces so I wouldn’t count other parts of the state out.

Letter To The President On The Occasion of His Second Term

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The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

Four years ago, I wrote you on the occasion of your inauguration to ask you to consider implementing tax laws that would provide more flexible framework within which arts organizations could operate. Looking back, I think many of these ideas I outlined and cited are interesting and still relevant.

However, things have changed in the national arts and culture environment in the last four years. The movement for creative placemaking, for example, has the potential of improving the national arts and cultural landscape by fostering greater connections with communities.

However, there are some distressing trends as well. Many arts organizations, especially orchestras, have effectively ceased operations. In the case of the orchestras, this has come after some contentious contract negotiations between boards of directors and musicians.

I am not advocating for the government to prop these organizations up. As much as the closing of arts organizations is regrettable, not all companies can operate in perpetuity and must close.

My concern is that while every organization is different, these orchestras seem to be following very similar paths toward dissolution. It appears that, knowing no other way to proceed, people are looking to the example of other companies and organizations in similar situations for their cues on how to approach their difficulties. Overall there haven’t been many productive results.

What I am advocating you do during your second term is provide some direction and support for leadership training to the non-profit arts sector. I believe some of these difficulties arise from the fact that non-profit boards of directors and executive leadership often don’t receive the best education about their roles and options. With the best intentions in mind, what little funding an organization receives is directed toward delivery of programming and services rather than toward education and professional development.

The Small Business Administration provides all sorts of programs and mentoring for small business owners. Given their focus, I am not sure they are best equipped for training non-profits. Nor do I think something like this a core competency of the National Endowment for the Arts, but I am sure they know organizations who can properly administer and design the studies and training necessary.

But the services the Small Business Administration offer provides a rough model for creating something similar for non-profit organizations. Non-profit organization as a whole, not just arts and culture, are important to the national health. They provide services in many niches throughout the country.

The visibility element is extremely important. Whomever is tasked with providing the training and support should receive funding and direction to publicize their available resources on a national level: Non-profits are important to the health and vibrancy of the country and educated leadership is important to the non-profits.

As you may be aware, many states are actively trying to eliminate and defund their state arts councils. While state arts councils can certainly be conduits for the information, they may not be in a position to be the primary channel of dissemination to the arts sector. There needs to be an overall national campaign.

Whatever entity is administering this program can turn around and provide feedback and guidance to the government about the challenges non-profit organizations face and what might be done to help them help the country. Presumably the directors of the National Endowments already do this for their respective areas. A report from someone concerned only with the business/legal operating environment of non-profits will provide a valuable supplement to them and hopefully prove to be less politically controversial.

Many boards of directors are generally aware of their responsibilities for their organizations, but are uncertain how to properly pursue them. The spectre of the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations being applied to non-profits looms at the periphery of their awareness, but most are at a loss of how to proactively implement good governance to be in compliance. The fact it may be applied can discourage people from considering serving on boards.

Rather than wait for some incident that prompts lawmakers to enact greater regulatory measures, it would be preferable to help non-profits become educated about how to effectively lead and administer their charges.

I hope, Mr. President that you will consider this. By stepping forward to provide leadership in this area, you will raise the profile and awareness of the value non-profits provide to our country and the importance of strong and informed leadership to their continuance.

Sincerely,

Joseph Patti

Info You Can Use: Discovering Your Ideal Customer

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Last June I came across a useful article by Sarah Arrow about identifying your ideal customer. According to her, there is are a very narrow profiles which constitute a business’ ideal customer then the people who are secondary customers who influence your ideal customer. Her article is mostly aimed at writing different blog posts for the ideal and secondary customers, but it is just as easy to substitute “ads” or “social media updates” for blog post.

In the non-profit world there are many constituencies we serve: audiences, boards, government officials, students, parents, performers, ethnic groups, etc. In performance based arts, we talk a lot about diversifying our audiences to attract a wide range of people. There are also very limited resources available with which to communicate ourselves to these groups.

In light of all this, it can be difficult to decide who to target and so opt for trying to appeal to everyone in general. This may be largely ineffective because it engages no one specific very well.

Arrow runs through a process which can help identify an ideal customer. The example she uses are baby strollers. (my emphasis)

Imagine you sell buggies (strollers for my US readers), your marketplace is people with babies and toddlers – new mums, dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles. And the chances are you don’t just sell one type of buggy, but multiple types and styles so you can meet the needs of your customers.

That’s a big marketplace,…

When you have the ideal customer you get a better picture of how to market your buggies to that person. If your mum is a health nut, she’d love the buggy that you can jog with, Dads are often taller and buggies with adjustable handles will speak to him… but here’s the thing, a new mum tends to spend more than a second time mum, she’s the ideal customer in that big marketplace. You have to market to her first and get a relationship started with her swiftly before someone else does.

Arrow continues noting that first time grandmothers are also a lucrative market, but their concerns are much different than that of first time mothers so you need to provide a separate and different approach.

Secondary customers (in this case, the mother’s female friends) keep an eye open for the interests of the primary buyers and influence them. While they may not buy things themselves, Arrow says refer a friend offers are helpful because they still allow people to take action, even if it isn’t making a purchase.

So think about your audience. Can you whittle it down to three important categories like this? That becomes a little more manageable when it comes to producing materials, right?

And remember, they may not all require the same format. Older people read the physical newspapers more than other demographics so only one message may be needed for that medium. Other audiences may follow closely on social media so two or three different messages targeted at them may be required. Social media isn’t as cheap as people imagine, but also tend not to be as expensive as print and broadcast media.

The trouble might be identifying who the ideal customer is. First question that popped into my mind was that it is often women who provide the impetuous for ticket buying. Are they the ideal customer or the influencer? I suspect a little of both.

I think a far bigger problem for arts organizations will be an unwillingness to trim the list down. There is such a strong impulse to identify everyone as the primary customer and avoid being perceived as exclusionary. It doesn’t help that granters and foundations reward with funding those who can claim an impact on the widest possible field.

The truth is, the profile of the best people to pursue is probably much narrower. This doesn’t necessarily exclude the diversity funders seek. For some organizations, the ideal customer may be K-5th grade school teachers who in turn will bring diverse groups of students.

For other organizations, that same diversity might be more difficult to achieve. However if they have done the right job identifying and crafting a message to their ideal customers, the positive response rate should be higher than before.

Who Really Values Diversity In The Arts?

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Last month Springboard for the Arts tweeted that the attendance at the Guthrie Theatre’s attendance last year exceeded the Minnesota Vikings’ home game attendance, 425,932 to 421,668.

Springboard Executive Director Laura Zabel blogged about these numbers suggesting the 400k Guthrie audience members should manifest their love for the theater in the same way Vikings’ fans do–jerseys and facepaint.

One of my first thoughts, based on some of Zabel’s observations, was about whether tax dollars were better spent building a stadium which is only used 8 times a year by 400,000 people or a theatre which is used hundreds of nights a year by the same number.

But I quickly remembered the big to do about the lack of diversity in Guthrie’s current season. I wondered if the attendance numbers reflected any push back against that.

Based on a calendar year comparison, it hasn’t. At the end of 2011 their attendance was 421,982. That, however, was down from 2010 when their attendance was 435,877.

I don’t have any numbers comparing their seasons which run September – August. There could have been a precipitous drop off September – December 2012 that isn’t readily apparent. My suspicion, however, is that audiences by and large don’t care about diversity, or the lack thereof, as much as people in the arts sector do.

Diversity is an internal concern driven by economic and philosophic motivations rather than by external audience demands. Audiences do want works that speak to them so arts organizations pursue diversity in order to bolster attendance by expanding the appeal of their works.

Non-profit arts organizations are also widely motivated by their educational mission to expose their audiences to new ideas which is often manifested by who is chosen to perform and whose ideas are chosen to be presented.

While arts organizations have to be responsive to the tastes and interests of their audiences, the audiences take a pretty passive role when it comes to programming. They aren’t widely clamoring for their local arts organizations to bring in new faces and new ideas.

If they were, it would actually be easier to program a season because you would have an idea of what people wanted instead of having an empty theatre teach you what they didn’t.

The Guthrie’s artistic director, Joe Dowling noted that many of the shows in their current season were brought to him by the directors. That is how the programming decisions of most arts organizations are driven, artists and agents, rather than audiences approach decision makers with ideas.

In fact, one of the things artistic directors probably cringe most at is being approached by an audience member who says “I know this group…” I would have sworn it would never come to pass, but this season we are actually doing a show based on a usher coming up and essentially saying, “I am in this band…” It does happen, but often audience suggestions don’t reflect an understanding of the organization’s artistic and business models.

Just the same, that feedback can provide insight into the type of experience the audience member is looking for. Presenting Lady Gaga may be totally wrong for the Guthrie Theater, but a show where the audience can vicariously identify with the protagonist’s rise to celebrity might work great.

As you are all well aware, arts organizations are in the unenviable position of having to figure it all out. It is difficult to pursue any one agenda as wholeheartedly as you might wish. Program too conservatively and audiences will say the arts are arrogant and out of touch for telling them they ought to value antiquated works by Mozart and Shakespeare. Program too progressively and audiences will say the arts are arrogant for telling them they ought to value works challenging notions of gender, race and politics.

I don’t mean to champion a middle of the road approach. I could easily argue, as many people did regarding the Guthrie’s season, that I have far more diversity on my stage and in my audiences just by cultivating locally available artistic resources. I also know that may be harder to achieve in the next job I hold. A balance between leading and following has to be struck and recalibrated all the time.

Info You Can Use: In House Professional Development

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I came across a piece by the Bridgespan Group about creating professional development opportunities for non-profit organization staff members when you don’t have the money to send them to conferences.

Some of their suggestions included cross-training, job shadowing and stretch assignments which give people responsibilities outside their usual scope so that they can begin to develop in areas they are lacking.

One thing that caught my attention was the suggestion that employees be given the responsibility for organizing internal gatherings. In addition to having employees take turns organizing and running staff meetings, the article discusses companies where the staff arranges for speakers and other activities for in house professional development, training and team building exercises.

As I was thinking about this idea and who might the staff invite to speak or provide training, it occurred to me that this practice might be helpful in promoting greater understanding between non-profits, their boards and the community.

One of the first thoughts I had was that board members might either attend or be speakers at these events. The experience might either be very informative and help the organization move forward or reveal the gaps in understanding.

This is where things might get tricky. In the best possible situation, board members might come to an understanding of how the organization is run and the challenges it faces. Staff might learn new practices for the way forward.

On the other side, people may realize there is a huge lack of understanding. Staff may realize that a board member presenting a talk has no concept of the business model non-profits follow as they encourage the organization to embrace practices to move them toward greater profitability. How to approach them diplomatically and clarify matters may not initially be clear. However, it may provide a realization that a better board education program is needed.

The same thing can happen involving the public sphere. Staff may become aware of new trends applicable to their organization. Using these talks as an example, the non-profit staff could turn around and create/join a speakers bureau to raise awareness about their organization.

Finally, having read many excellent arts social media postings and blog entries by arts leaders, it is clear there are many very intelligent, well informed people out there in the non-profit world. If they are able to get up in front of their own company and speak objectively (rather than with a subtext about where the staff is failing to live up to expectations) about general philosophy and practice in their industry, I would bet those they work with would see them in an entirely different light.

It is so easy to get bogged down with the day to day details of running the organization, few in the organization may be aware of breadth of knowledge and passion their colleagues have. People may suddenly realize they have a unexpected source of expertise and inspiration readily available.

Of course, no matter what you do, you run the risk of he internal development/training sessions being entirely inappropriate and boring. But you can get that at a conference you pay to attend, too.

Price Higher Than You Are Prepared To Pay?

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Angry White Guy in Chicago, Don Hall, recently re-printed a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to an aspiring writer. It made me think a bit about the definition of the professional vs. amateur both in 1938 and today.

Quoth Fitzgerald: (my emphasis)

“I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner….

[…]

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming — the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

[…]

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

One of my first thoughts was to wonder how Fitzgerald might react if he were alive today when it seems that the public will accept and reward the work of artists who haven’t paid the price and have really only committed to half measures. While people won’t become invested in the soldier who is only a little brave, flash can be substituted for substance.

I am sure Fitzgerald would have said the same about some people during his time and maybe we would like to think that back in his day, even the worst would possess better qualities of some of the most highly acclaimed today. We don’t know if that is true or not.

I do think that regardless of the time, we can all agree like Fitzgerald that a professional has honed his skill that she makes everything look easy because they have internalized their skill. Amateurs are left trying to replicate the outer appearance of what professionals do.

But if the audience can’t discern between the two or aren’t bothered by the difference enough not to reward the lesser quality? Does the difference matter?

I am not just referring to what is produced by experienced and inexperienced individuals. Music played over an iPod loses a lot of the qualities that can be experienced with a bigger sound system but people are willing to sacrifice quality for portability. Now we have music being intentionally recorded so it sounds good on iPod that is bereft of the subtleties that made past compositions intriguing and exciting.

Fitzgerald’s post script gave me a little chuckle. Being a little talented and charming like being in good physical condition is rare enough to be recognized. But not so rare that like those admitted to West Point, there aren’t 1000 or so others possessing the exact same qualifications.

But as we know, diligence and talent isn’t enough to set you apart, nor does the lack guarantee obscurity.

Still, Fitzgerald’s letter reminds us there is a difference even if it isn’t recognized and so a reason to remain a little humble and continue to hone our skills.

Religion vs Arts, Who Wins The Battle Of Orthodoxies!

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Since the very beginning of the blog, I have been keeping an eye on the intersection of performing arts and religious communities. A recent NY Times article seems to include quite a number of places where this occurs.

It starts by describing a warehouse space that has the

“trappings of a revitalization project, including an art gallery, a yoga studio and a business incubator, sharing the building with a coffee shop and a performance space.

But it is, in fact, a church. ”

If you look at the website of this art gallery-cum-yoga studio-cum-etc-cum church, it might take a couple glances to realize it is a church.

You can say a lot about the importance of adhering to propriety and doctrine that should be part of sacred institutional practices and how the approach of many organizations isn’t invested with appropriate due seriousness.

But you can say the same thing about churches, too.

Oh wait, I mean arts organizations. Wait, which one was I talking about? This is so confusing.

You may be surprised to learn that not only has church attendance been falling lately, but there is a churn rate of about 40% annually.

Sounds a lot like the plight of arts organizations, eh?

Not only that, there is a real bias toward entrepreneurship

“For new leaders coming out of seminary, “the cool thing is church planting,” Mr. Bird said. “The uncool thing is to go into the established church. Why that has taken over may speak to the entrepreneurialism and innovation that today’s generation represents.”

Sounds a lot like the sentiments of performing arts kids coming right out of school that want to start their own company.

Like arts organizations, there is a push to connect with the communities in different ways, some going so far as to remove references to “church” and “services” in favor of “gatherings” and “communities.” One group has seen some success with centering their spiritual communities in coffee shops and is preparing to franchise their coffee concept.

As strange as a chain of spiritual coffee houses sounds, the trend seems to be away from the huge mega-churches, many of which have been foreclosed on, toward smaller multipurpose spaces that can be turned toward earning revenue rather than being empty six days a week.

In some respects having a church be the center of community center is a return to old practices. Chartres Cathedral was a bustle of commercial activity both inside and out.

One of the prime questions that emerges for me as I read this article is how religious/spiritual groups, which I believe stand to suffer much more from embracing the trappings of popular culture and entertainment than arts organizations do, seem to be a bit more nimble than the arts community at experimenting with new approaches?

I realize that many trends reported on by the NY Times are often not as widespread as the paper makes it appear, but as a person who rents a facility to religious services, I can attest that the article isn’t many degrees different from my experience.

It amuses me to think that the arts community self imposed idealism about selling out and becoming too commercial might actually represent a more inflexible orthodoxy than those embraced by religious communities possessing texts containing rules of behavior.

Though it isn’t as if the arts community isn’t having this same conversation. This is what Creative Placemaking is really all about. What these churches are doing may provide some interesting models and even potential collaborators in the pursuit of placemaking.

Our Stories

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My mother has been doing some hardcore genealogy research for years now. There was a trip to Ireland a few years back, last Christmas we were in FDR’s Presidential Library, this Christmas I got a calendar with pictures and stories from my maternal grandfather’s side of family all over it.

But she isn’t alone, with shows like Who Do You Think You Are tracing celebrity genealogy, the increased use of DNA testing for various ends and Ancestry.com’s growing subscription rolls, show that people are increasingly interested in their heritage.

From what I have read, interest in genealogy usually increases as people enter retirement which is what a lot of baby boomers (including my mother) have started doing.

It occurs to me then that it might be meaningful to many communities if arts organizations made an effort to help them tell their stories through performance, exhibitions and participatory activities.

The one type of show that has pretty consistently done well for my theatre are those that resonate with groups that maintain a fairly strong cultural identity. Some of it has been related to ethnicity, but others have crossed ethnic lines and been more about the shared experience of place.

Even if you don’t have the capacity to produce/commission/organize a performance, I think there are plenty of opportunities for involving the community in interactive experiences.

By default, I think of those Nina Simon does at her museum, but something could easily be organized around a big 4th of July picnic where everyone sits around and tells family stories about the immigrant/frontier experience. Those stories can be collected/recorded/interpreted in some way and displayed.

My intuition tells me these activities that might even abet community building during a time where electronic devices are making people a little more insular.

There Go The Brains of The Operation

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I had been pondering on whether to post on this topic but Thomas Cott’s link to a Bloomberg News story about how leaders of arts organizations in the U.S. remain in that position far longer than colleagues in the UK.

The story weighs the benefits of leaders having long term relationships with donors vs. concerns about leadership becoming staid and slow to be responsive to changing times.

My concern comes from a slightly different, though related, direction. Over Christmas I received an email from a long time friend saying she was leaving the performing arts sector to take another job. We had been students together and I had initially modeled my career path after her’s until I realized I really didn’t want her career path. She was essentially the founding executive director for her organization and had held the job for over a decade before deciding to make the job change.

I have heard similar stories from other colleagues, including those in my cohort at Arts Presenters’ Emerging Leadership Institute. People ended up leaving performing arts, some only a few years after having earned a master’s in arts administration.

While I am pleased to see that a master’s in arts administration can get you jobs in other sectors, I am a little concerned about what this bodes for the future. I am not calling for long term arts leaders to vacate their positions and let others get their chance, though that is something that is frequently mentioned.

My concern is that there is going to be a huge leadership gap when the long time arts leaders do retire. My long time friend had about 20 years experience before she made her decision to leave the arts sector. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her assume a state or regional arts policy leadership position. Granted, she could easily return to assume such a role in the future. I wouldn’t discount it happening.

My knowledge of people leaving the arts is anecdotal and not backed by hard statistics, but I have to imagine there are quite a few others out there of whom I am not aware who are likewise leaving the arts. If so, there is a going to be a huge gap to fill if people with 10-20 years experience leave the sector with only those with less than 10 years experience to replace them.

And lets not forget, there is research showing that many people don’t want to become executive directors. There may be few of any level of experience who are willing to step up. This is where the research and the reasons given by my colleagues intersect–lack of opportunity and work-life balance are dissuading people.

I have written about this topic a number of times before throughout the years, but it was largely theoretical. Now I begin to see signs of the problem impacting my own experience and the repercussions become less abstract and more worrisome.

In terms of a solution, I look back to my post last month on the executive leadership as my best suggestion at this juncture. There I suggested there might be benefits in adopting emerging business models and changing job descriptions so that responsibility and involvement in marketing and development permeate the entire organization rather than being siloed.

Context And Environment Matter

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NPR recently teamed up with the TED people to present the TED Radio Hour which takes three TED talks on a similar theme to revisits them with the speakers. The one I heard run this weekend was about how our brains trick us and confuse us about what we value. It was the second segment with psychologist Paul Bloom which caught my attention because it deal with how so much of what we value about art depends on the context.

It started with the story about Joshua Bell playing in the subway station and no one paying him much mind or money, for that matter. When I talked about this experiment before, I mentioned that context and the environment played large roles in people’s enjoyment.

Bloom talked about the Dutch art dealer who was convicted of treason for selling Hermann Goring a Vermeer–until he confessed and proved the painting was a forgery–after which he was deemed a hero.

Bloom also spoke about Marla Olmstead who was painting works at 3 years old that people were paying tens of thousands of dollars for until 60 Minutes came to visit and it was discovered her father was prompting (and perhaps even helping) with the painting.

A common question was raised about each of these. If Joshua Bell is such a great performer which people pay great amounts of money to hear perform, why wasn’t his quality recognized as an anonymous performer in a D.C. subway? Why is it treasonous to sell a Nazi a real Vermeer but heroic to sell him a fake if you can’t tell the difference between the paintings? If you like the painting, why does it matter if a 3 year old or a 30 year old paints it?

The answer has to do with authenticity, the story which accompanies the experience and a willingness to receive. Classical music doesn’t have to be experienced in a formal performance hall or art in a museum gallery. There are successful programs that bring classical music and opera to bars.

But people go to those events expecting to listen to music. There are entirely different expectations and agendas as you move through a subway station which inhibits a person’s readiness to receive the experience.

Art like wine and food is more enjoyable and valuable when the authenticity of provenance is beyond question. You are buying the story as well as the physical object and that makes all the difference. According to Bloom, there are parts of the brain that light up when you believe you are drinking expensive wine that don’t light up when you believe you are drinking cheap wine even if it is the same wine. So it isn’t that you think it is better, you are actually having an entirely different experience.

The lesson for arts organizations and performers is to help your audience to that mindset. Whether you are in a formal performance space or not, there are things you must do in respect to the environment and interactions to help transition people toward the experience.

You could argue that flashmob performances don’t do that with their audiences and they are often well received. But I would say it isn’t the quality of the performance that people are necessarily responding to but the quality of the planning and execution that brought them the experience.

It is akin to crossing a stream and finding a diamond ring in the water. It is the enjoyment of finding an unexpected treasure that pleases. I think you would find people react just as delighted if an accomplished high school orchestra popped out of the woodwork as they would for the Philadelphia Orchestra revealing themselves in the same manner.

What I really appreciated was Bloom’s late addendum to his TED Talk. In the radio program he said the thing he didn’t emphasize enough in his TED Talk, and was pleased to be able to now, was that most people see it as a glitch or flaw that our perceptions and values can be manipulated by such factors. If we were perfect, these things wouldn’t sway us so easily.

Bloom’s view is that this “flexibility” actually allows us to experience more pleasure in life. He feels that taste can be developed through study and learning. The more you know, the more pleasure you can derive. So if you want to get more pleasure from wine or art, you need to do more than just expose yourself by drinking lots of wine and seeing lots of art, you need intentionally educate yourself.

That seems to align with the findings of the Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music report from six years ago which said exposure in the form of lecture/demos didn’t seem to have as long lasting impact on participation and attendance as participatory programs including instruction.

This, of course, reinforces the importance and sense of desperation to get art back into schools.

2012 Year In Review

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I often tell people that it surprises me what postings take off. There are things I write that I think are really insightful that barely get any notice. Other posts that I just dash off after hours of trying to think of something pithy to write about will garner all sorts of attention.

I pretty much see it as a parallel for the whole non-profit arts experience so I don’t take it personally if I don’t get a lot of attendance at the stuff I deem to be brilliant masterpieces.

However, looking back at the posts that garnered the most attention in 2012, I am assured that my dreck isn’t rising to the top.

The most traffic by far went to my post Forget Dynamic Pricing, Use Placebo Pricing

The Next Most Visited Page was The About Me page (you like me, you really like me!)

But the second most visited post was Your Mouth Says Innovative, Your Pictures Say Status Quo

Third, is unexpectedly, Dramaturgy Is Everyone’s Responsibility. In the coming year I may have to explore the subject more often.

Fourth and Fifth were June’s Embracing The (Cost) Disease and last month’s Expectations Feed The Disease. I wrote about Baumol’s Cost Disease three times last year and two of those entries popped into the top 5 so apparently the subject is of some interest.

What I was most inspired by this year was an animated typographic video of Ira Glass’ advice about creativity. The post I included it in is a little long and doesn’t do justice to the frisson I experienced when I watched the video so I won’t link to it. However, I used the video in a couple presentations this year, including a middle school career day.

My favorite line is right near the beginning where he talks about how when you first start out, what you are making isn’t really all that good, “But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer.”

Like Glass, I wish someone told me that when I was first starting out.

Do Arts Really Need A Tax Status Of Their Own?

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Today is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. If you saw Spielberg’s movie, Lincoln, you will know that there were many concerns about the legality of trying to make the proclamation stick, especially upon reunification of the country, which necessitated the adoption of the 13th Amendment to ensure the abolition of slavery.

The movie actually reminded me a lot of an episode of The West Wing where legislative wrangling was set against the backdrop of a president’s daily national and personal concerns. Either the job hasn’t changed a lot in 150 years or Spielberg was presenting the story in a familiar context.

Let me state clearly from the outset I don’t want to equate slavery with non-profit art organizations. The anniversary and the relationship between the proclamation and 13th amendment is just a convenient excuse to revisit a topic.

The concept that a situation only had tenuous legal support has parallels in the non-profit status most arts organizations enjoy. There is no mention of arts organizations in the 501 c 3 tax code. I made note of this in an open letter post to President Obama on the occasion of his inauguration four years ago.

In that post I asked the president to help the non-profit arts sector by providing a specific, better designed tax structure in which arts organizations can operate. Thinking back I wondered if that was still necessary given the continued emergence of the L3C model, B corporations and the crowd funding/investing options allowed by the JOBS Act.

Don’t get me wrong, none of these options are well suited to arts organizations. I just started wondering if the arts are really best served if the government legislates a specific structure within which they must operate. Experimentation with planned organizational expiration may do more to cultivate viable, community/situation specific models than asking for one to be legislated.

Having arts organizations making common cause with for-profit corporations and other interests to advance laws and regulations they mutually favor may do more to raise the profile of arts organizations in general than had the arts groups worked among themselves to carve out something specific to the arts sector.

Just something to think about at the start of a new year and a new presidential term since many ideas and opportunities have emerged since the last one.

New Year’s Resolution: Play With Your Family

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A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I often mis-credit my role in my 8th grade play as the start of involvement in performance and that it all really started when my siblings and I put on plays for the rest of our family.

Back in November there was a great article by Lawrence McCullough on Creativity Post about how families can use play making as a communication and learning tool. I was interested to see him suggest this is something you could do with kids as young as four.

Even if you have been in the performing arts for 15 years and think you know what you are doing, it is worth reading the article. These are your kids, not adult professionals or even students you are working with and the goals for the activity are much different. For example, one of the things McCullough warns against is getting an idea and then casting the show before you have any dialogue written.

Even though you don’t work that way professionally, it might be something you would be apt to do with a story the while family knows–telling the story of why Santa delivers presents and deciding who will play Santa, the elves, etc.

If you cast before you know what characters are going to say or really be about, you’re painting children into a corner, locking them into thinking about just one part of the play when they should be exercising their creative abilities to the max.

McCullough talks about many of the benefits of these activities from showing events from your kids’ points of view to providing a tool for resolving problems and, of course, nurturing creativity.

The thing that I oriented most on was his suggestion of using playmaking to tell the family’s stories. I wondered how many families really communicate their stories these days. Are grandparents fulfilling their stereotypical roles of telling stories about the old days for their grandkids to groan about? Since 60 is the new 40 (or whatever) grandparents may be leading too active a life to bother their grandkids with such things.

Yet there is a lot to be learned and bonds to be formed by these stories. My family has a lot of stories: my Sicilian great grandmother being “taught” to speak English resulting in her cursing out her work supervisor instead of wishing him good morning; my father being rewarded for helping out a customer after he clocked out for lunch; my mother and her roommates at an all-girls Catholic college being far more mischievous than my father and his college drinking buddies.

I credit my knowledge of these stories and their attendant lessons to the fact there was no cable television, much less internet when I was growing up. Nowadays, you probably have to make a special effort just to bring everyone together to communicate your family’s struggles and triumphs. Which is why I am suggesting this as a potential New Year’s Resolution.

Stuff to Ponder: Get Thee To A Start Up Weekend!

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I was intrigued to see that the Scion car company is running a contest to help cultivate new entrepreneurs. Scion has always positioned themselves as a lifestyle brand, (disclaimer: I own one of the first 100 Scions sold in my state.), but I thought this was an interesting approach for them.

Basically, they will fly up to 50 semi-finalists to LA to participate in a three day event where they attend seminars, meet up with mentors and receive advice on writing press releases, forming LLCs, getting loans, soliciting investors and copywrighting ideas (I am guessing they mean trademarking since you can’t copywright ideas.) The semi-finalists then rewrite their proposals and finalists are chosen from the best revamped proposals.

I am sure there is a lot Scion will get out of it, but free advice directly applying to their own business isn’t one of them. One of the first restrictions on the contest is that it can’t be related to the car industry or Scion’s business activities.

This idea isn’t new. There are tons of entrepreneurship competitions out there as well as start up weekends where people from all sorts of background come together to meet and potentially launch a start up in the course of 54 hours.

The Scion contest got me thinking about two things- First, could an arts oriented project end up as a finalist in one of these type of competitions? Could someone go into one of the Start Up Weekends and emerge with a viable arts oriented company and business model after tapping into the brains of those present?

My second thought was from the other direction–should arts professionals participate as advisers in these sort of events in order to exhibit the value of the arts in the community beyond just entertainment? This might go a long way toward making the case not only for arts organizations, but perhaps more importantly toward the value of arts in education, if it was shown that it can contribute to the development of products and ideas that are indeed marketable.

The success of the design school teams over the business school teams in a University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management challenge already started to provide some indications of this.

I have written about articles on what private enterprise can learn from non-profits.

I also pointed that it is important to note that the value of many of the creative exercises arts organizations can offer business lies not so much in the superficial motions of the activity as the fact that performing them means you are carving time out of your day to devote to creativity.

Wizard of Christmas Lights

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I am guessing (and hoping) people have more on their mind this Christmas Even than arts administration. I will pick up with posting on that topic on Wednesday or thereabouts.

In the meantime, take a gander at this wild light display. It is a labor of love by a guy in Dardenne Praire, MO who has been doing these shows for 6 Christmases now. He has a low power FM transmitter set up so that people driving by can hear the music that the lights are synchronized to.

He says it takes him 3 hours to do 15 seconds of the program. He has 36 songs this year, some of which are from previous years, but he adds about 3-6 new songs each year.

As you might imagine, people come from miles around and the line backs up for blocks so he limits the hours it runs. I am guessing in part so that his neighbors don’t lose the Christmas spirit.

Best wishes for the holiday season and a prosperous new year.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ehUqpwrnU&w=420&h=315]

Info You Can Use: Fundraising Must Benefit The Group, Not The Individual

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The approach of the holidays provides me with a little more free time so I have been catching up on my “come back to and read” list. I got to reading a piece by Non-Profit Law blogger, Emily Chan addressing activities athletic booster clubs engage in that may endanger their non-profit status.

Since these clubs are organized under 501 (c) (3) just like arts organizations, I became a little concerned because I see similar things happening with some arts organizations.

The potential conflict Chan addresses is in making the amount of money a person raises directly correlate with the benefit to an individual like crediting against the payment of tuition/dues or travel expenses.

Furthermore, such a credit system still raises private benefit concerns regardless of whether a parent is considered an insider or even involved in the booster club. Lois Lerner, the Director of Exempt Organizations at the Internal Revenue Service, recently affirmed that crediting amounts raised by a participant against that participant’s costs (e.g., dues, travel expenses) is a private benefit violation that may jeopardize the organization’s exempt status.

What immediately came to mind is that a lot of dance schools have their students sell tickets, Entertainment coupon books, etc., keep track of what each person sells and rewards the kids. I don’t think there is any problem with one child only getting to choose glitter stickers because she sold less than the child who was able to claim a stuffed animal.

However, if those sales determined who got to perform or helped one person defray more of the cost of going to see a show in New York than another, there could be a problem. If it defrays the cost of everyone equally, or even a specific class within the group like sending the cast of a show to perform at a festival, then it isn’t problematic.

Really, it is mostly a matter of benefits specific to individuals. This also likely includes fund raising to benefit a specific individual, say the medical expenses of a musician who was in a car crash.

Individuals should not be soliciting contributions from donors with any suggestion or intention that the contribution will be directly used for that individual who solicited the gift. Additionally, the booster club should not accept any contributions that have been earmarked by the donor for a particular individual. Not only would such contributions not be tax-deductible for the donor, the booster club would likely be acting as a conduit in violation of the federal tax laws regulating private inurement and private benefit by allowing such money to pass through the organization to the individual without having exercised any control, oversight, or discretion over those funds

I wonder how this might apply to organizations that try to forge a deeper connection with donors by having them sponsor a student. Keeping in mind that I am not a lawyer, my guess is that if the organization is selecting the student being sponsored, there isn’t a problem. The money went into a general pot with no specific expectation of which student would benefit.

But what happens if the student drops out and the donor has taken a shine to another student and wants the sponsorship applied to her as a replacement? This is a tricky situation if you are hoping for the long term, continued support of the donor.

I also wonder if something changes with the student’s status that requires more funding than for any other student, say their place of residence changes so they must pay higher out of state tuition, can the donor be solicited or even direct additional money to benefit a specific student without endangering the non profit tax status?

What If They Don’t Want To Be An Executive Director?

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On the Harvard Business Review blog site, Anne Kreamer asks “What If You Don’t Want to Be a Manager?” (h/t Daniel Pink) where she talks a little about the alienation one might feel moving from being a producer of material to a manager. While she talks about an experience in a corporate environment, it was easy to see the same situation cropping up in the arts when someone moves from creating content to producing revenue reports and reviewing labor laws.

One of the options Kreamer suggests, other than leaving the company and striking out on your own, revolves around changing the existing work environment. It was her last two sentences that resonated with me (thus my emphasis).

This is something more companies need to address. To remain globally competitive, organizations need to devise innovative ways to encourage and reward creativity. The unorthodox titles embraced by start-ups — directors of fun, ministers of information — can seem ridiculous, but the emphasis on improvising new ways of doing business is important. Furthermore, research conducted by Office Team found that 76% of employees did not want their boss’s job. If employees are no longer responding to the old carrots, it’s time for companies to establish new means of rewarding talent.

This reminded me of the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead reports I had written on in the past that reported young arts leaders were chomping at the bit to gain greater responsibility in their arts organization, but didn’t necessarily want to assume an executive role.

It got me to thinking that while there is a lot of discussion about exploring new business models for arts organizations like the B Corporation and L3C, maybe there needs to be a corresponding discussion about changing arts job descriptions so that people actually want to assume the roles.

Two issues that seem to rise to the top for executive directors is work-life balance and that the position seems 75% about fundraising and increasing. It may be time to institutionalize the idea that marketing and development aren’t the sole province of those departments by spreading the responsibility around in job descriptions.

I have read a lot of criticism of Michael Kaiser’s ideas, but I have never seen anyone say he is wrong when he advocates for paying attention to the interests of potential donors and connecting them with your corresponding needs rather than viewing them as the source of a lot of money to answer the need you have prioritized.

With the proper training and expectations declared at the outset, marketing, education and artistic staff could take a more proactive role in identifying, engaging and meeting with donors than they do at present. Hopefully freeing the executive director to balance their personal and professional lives, improve their job satisfaction, connect back with the parts of the organization that excite them, and perhaps encourage others to crave their position.

The same can obviously be done with marketing where development, education and artistic, etc. are more active in expressing and advancing the organizational message.

I think people are already cognizant of this interdependent need based on a Twitter exchange between Adam Thurman, Howard Sherman and others this past September.

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Dancing On The Street Where You Live

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Producer David Binder did a short TED Talk about arts festivals. He mentions a number of new festivals which are engaging directly with communities in site specific events.

However, it was the first one he mentioned, Minto: Live Sydney Festival 2011, that fired my imagination most. The people of Minto, accompanied by some cooperating artists, performed on their lawns, driveways and garages as the audience moved by. I am not sure if it was planned or spontaneous, but one story Binder relates almost sounds like some residents who weren’t part of the original tour got caught up in the spirit and began performing on their lawn.

I saw a lot of applicability to the current discussions about creative placemaking and community engagement.

But what I saw as the most compelling element of this practice is that it reinforces the value of the arts and play for kids right where they live. When asked about what got me started in the arts, I often refer back to a role in my 8th grade play.

But like a lot of people in the arts, the reality is, my siblings and I would perform for our family and friends at gatherings.

A festival like this would demand greater sophistication, but heck with arts in schools, performing at home would reinforce the value of the arts for the kids, the parents and the whole community literally right where they live. It would be interesting to see if residents of Minto felt the experience changed their perception and participation in arts activities.

Just as annual tours of historic homes emphasizes the value of their presence and engenders a sense of pride in the neighborhood, (though perhaps some resentment in the kids who have to help clean their home in preparation), a neighborhood arts festival could advance the cause of the arts, inspire pride and perhaps surprise people with the hidden talents of their neighbors.

I don’t really think this would or should be a substitute of arts in schools, though it might spur renewed community interest in offering instruction. Rather, I was thinking that at one time a home piano was once the center of family activity. Participation in a neighborhood arts festival might serve to fill that absence to a small degree.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rttG3xyHcw&w=560&h=315]

Info You Can Use: Too Many Calls To Action

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I had meant to post this link a few weeks ago, but you know how things get around the holidays. Back in May, Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now listed 20 Mistakes that Drive Away Donations. He saw the applicability to fund raising of the same list by Greg Digneo on Copyblogger who listed 20 Mistakes That Undermine Calls to Action in commercial marketing.

Given that so many non-profits are making a fund raising push for the end of the calendar year, I thought the list might be valuable to look at. The good thing about the list is that it covers mistakes that the beginner, intermediate and advanced practitioner will make.

One thing that caught my eye from Digneo’s list,

6. Multiple Calls to Action

What’s the one thing you want readers to do on your blog?

Do you want them to sign up for your list? And click on ads? And buy your products? And go to your social media profiles?

When you have too many calls to action on your site, your readers become paralyzed by the choices and leave your site.

Pick one or two actions you want your readers to take, and build your design around that. Don’t leave readers confused about what they’re supposed to do next.

Since a performing arts organization’s website is generally used for provide information that will move people toward buying tickets, as well as donating and perhaps a number of other things, it can easily devolve into something that does none of those well. I think it is good advice to focus on having your website call to visitors to take a couple actions and let everything else take the backseat.

At this time of year, many performing arts organization present shows that sell themselves well: Nutcracker, Christmas Carol, Handel’s Messiah, etc., it might be worth temporarily diminishing the ticket sales focus of home page a little and shift the emphasis to donations.

Digneo lists other mistakes that are worth pondering that might be applicable to your operations: Wrong Offer, No Urgency, No Empathy, No Social Proof; as well as some reminders about smart graphic design and positioning.

Stuff To Ponder: The Fairness and Transparency of Ticket Lines

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Seeing and hearing about people queuing up this year for Black Friday sales on the Monday prior reminded me about an article Tim Roberts wrote on Fullhouses.org this September. In it, Roberts asked if making people line up for theatre tickets was really the fairest way to distribute them.

I am sure the British Commonwealth nations who sponsor Fullhouses.org don’t experience the homicidal shopping frenzy that is Black Friday, but it occurred to me that it is something of a double standard to expect arts organizations to be fairer than retail stores.

It isn’t fair to have to take time off of work to stand in line for theatre tickets, but people camp out for a week to get $50 off a flat screen TV and no one blinks, eh?

Arts organizations are expected to operate more like businesses, aren’t we? Why not make people line up and wait? We may be worried about hurting our relationships with our patrons, but it doesn’t seem to hurt retail stores even when customers know they are being manipulated with sale prices.

Shakespeare in the Park in NYC has a long history of making people line up to get free tickets to their shows. And from their website, apparently people are queuing up before 6 am to be online for the 1 pm distribution. My suspicion is that their policy of randomly distributing seats rather than giving the closest seats to those at the head of the line is probably meant to dissuade people from lining up even earlier. It probably also keeps things from getting as emotionally charged as the Black Friday conflicts.

I did a couple posts on the subject a few years back. Now that I look at their site again, it appears they now offer an online lottery of sorts for tickets. While there are some alternative options, I am guessing your best bet is probably still going to be on the line in the park.

I know there have been some grumblings about the Shakespeare in the Park ticketing process, but I think their long history of requiring people to line up proves it is a viable model.

Back to the original question, is it really important to be fair? People generally have no awareness of whether the organization they are buying from is for-profit or non-profit. They are mostly motivated by the content of the show and tolerate quite a bit of unfairness.

People will go online to buy tickets and are poised to make a purchase at the exact moment they go on sale only to find they are all snatched up in a blink by automated processes. The fact people will still crave those tickets at a higher price on the re-sale sites empowers the very practice people say they despise.

A physical line is actually solid proof of your relative standing. If the line snakes down 5 blocks and you don’t get tickets, you may be disappointed but you could see that there really were 500 individuals ahead of you who had invested more time and effort than you did into making the purchase. While more inconvenient, it would seem a much more transparent and fairer option than online and over the phone ticket sales.

What I think the defining factor is is what your audience values as the basis of your relationship with them. In terms of retailers, the whole relationship is based on price. JC Penny found out people don’t care if they are being manipulated, just so long as the price is right.

So even if most people don’t discern between for and non-profit performing arts events, as a non-profit you can’t pursue a relationship based on price for the simple reason that price conscious people don’t make $1000 donations on top of their ticket purchases.

Patrons of non-profit organizations also don’t generally encounter having all the available tickets disappear in a matter of moments so aren’t likely to crave the transparency of physical lines.

Ultimately, how you handle the process of ticket sales is going to depend on your community and what they value. As a non-profit you are working on showing value in areas retailers often ignore.

There is part of me that thinks that if people are willing to queue up to buy something, either physically or virtually, it is hard to buy the sort of buzz and publicity that generates. It may be ill-advised to try to replace that in deference to some sense of fairness if people are not resentful about it.

Even if they are, it could be the sense of excitement inspiring that resentment. People are more likely to be angry that they have to go to work rather than standing on line to buy tickets if they drive by and there is a line of people threatening to buy up all the tickets before lunch break. Without that line, there is less urgency to see the show.

Before Thanksgiving I was listening to NPR as they interviewed people who had already planned to skip Thanksgiving dinner with their families in order to camp out in line–or they made arrangements to essentially tailgate their Thanksgiving dinner. As much as I thought they were crazy, it was clear even over the radio that people viewed the whole thing as a rite of passage type bonding experience.

I don’t think it was that long ago that people regularly did this sort of thing to get tickets for concerts too. I am betting there is an element of the concert tasting all the sweeter for the effort invested too.

The more I think about it, if you are going to have a physical line up, I think Shakespeare in the Park’s solution of providing a chance to be selected to receive tickets provides the best balance. You get the uncertain convenience of online acquisition balanced by the inconvenient certainty of gaining a ticket of your own merit by lining up early. I am not exactly sure how Shakespeare in the Park handles it, but if they keep the percent of the house they are releasing online a secret, they can vary it according to demand and maintain their attendance numbers.

We DO NOT Need Another Abraham Lincoln

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Last month, Drew McManus posted that we need another Abraham Lincoln. He didn’t go into many details, but I wonder what he could be thinking. Since he suggests replacing Henry Ford with Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar, perhaps he is implying musicians need to be freed from the slavery of assembly line performance where standardization makes one concert interchangeable with any other concert.

All Abraham Lincoln exemplifies is lead from behind disengagement. When Republicans met in Chicago to nominate someone for president, Lincoln was in Springfield content to let his surrogates drum up support. After he was nominated for president, he didn’t even hit the campaign trail, again content to let surrogates like Henry Seward, a former rival for the nomination, speak for him while he sat in Springfield never making a speech.

Heck, Lincoln was so disengaged, he wasn’t even going to go vote on election day until someone pointed out it was his civic responsibility to do so for state and local races also being run that day.

This is not the type of leadership the arts need, especially orchestras. They need leaders who are engaged and involved with all their constituencies.

You may say that this is unfair and the Lincoln was only following the custom of the time and you would be correct. In Team of Rivals , Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential race, Stephen Douglas,

“Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country…becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”

Even though Douglas was supportive of the spread of slavery, shouldn’t we look to him and the strength of character it took to break with tradition and face criticism when the country was at the brink of a national crisis as an example of leadership for the arts?

All right, so…. admittedly I am exploiting the fact Drew was a little vague about what characteristics of Lincoln are needed and quoting from a book whose premise is that Lincoln was a good organizer of people rather than a solitary leader to refute Drew’s thesis. Lincoln was faced by challenging circumstances which forced him to alter his position and practices throughout his career. That is what makes it so easy for those with opposing political view points to claim him as their own. It is easy to cherry pick from different periods of his life.

Not to mention that some people’s strength lies in mobilizing capable subordinates while others are really only effective when they step to the fore. There is probably more blame to be attached to bowing to pressure and adopting practices that run counter to your leadership strengths than to resisting popular expectations in order to operate effectively.

The fact that I was being intentionally inflammatory doesn’t diminish the fact that we are at a crossroads in history that will demand changes in behavior. Some aspects of how we operate may never change.

Lincoln stayed at home and didn’t make speeches because he didn’t want to commit to any course of action or give the newspapers anything to misconstrue. Today we expect presidential candidates to make an appearance everywhere, but they still try their hardest not to commit to anything specific and fear what the media may make of what they say.

For his time, Lincoln was actually rather politically savvy and aware of all the different constituencies he needed to please. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the reasons why Henry Seward didn’t get the nomination was because he spent the summer touring Europe while Lincoln was shoring up his support among key groups.

The changes the arts world need to effect are numerous or else there would be little for myself and hundreds of other arts bloggers and writers to talk about. So in effect we DO need someone like Lincoln as a leader, one who can recognize they stand at the crux of complicated times that requires one to change and respond in a nuanced manner.

There is a lot to admire in Henry Ford. He did much to improve the lives of his workers, but like the parts of his automobiles, they were viewed as parts that could be replaced without any impact to the viability of the company. Ford created a system where the means of production was low skilled labor. That is not necessarily the case with the arts.

If You Believe In What I Am Doing

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Some data on the most successful of President Obama’s fundraising letters is really destroying what I thought I knew about constructing emails. It turns out, the most informal subject lines garnered the biggest donations. His campaign would do extensive testing on dozens of variations in the formatting, amount requested, tone, etc before discovering a winner they would send to the millions.

According to the campaign, the less professional the email looked, the better. They were a little incredulous at how good a response the most ugly emails received (my emphasis)

It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “ ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million.

Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.”

Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild curse words such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks. But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life.

In light of this, I am starting to wonder if perhaps I am working too hard on the monthly newsletters we send out with information about upcoming shows.

Actually, the real lesson here isn’t that the pared down approach works but rather than you will never really be able to predict what will connect with people and you need to be constantly testing.

With as many people sending out as many emails as the Obama campaign had, none of them seemed to be able to accurately predict what approach would work best and even then, the appeal quickly waned. Which I am sure can be partially attributed to the sheer number of emails that people were receiving each day. I suspect a performing arts groups could probably experience success with the same approach over the course of a few emails.

One question I had given that my email list does not measure in the tens of millions was how large a sample size do you need to accurately measure the effectiveness of an approach? Has anyone worked with A-B testing enough to know?

By the way, the title of this entry is stolen directly from Obama’s list of effective subject lines. I will be interested to see what the response rate is.

Release The Theatre Ninja!

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The Boston Globe recently had an article on theatre etiquette listing strategies for audience members to use when attending performances to avoid causing any problems and to deal with those that arise. It ends noting that a cinema in the UK has started to employ lycra clad “ninja” to sneak up on ask patrons to be quiet.

What I found most interesting was a comment on the Globe article made by “jwinboston” who related an experience attending Handel’s Messiah. A family with 4 kids were making quite a fuss in the front rows. When she spoke to the father at intermission, he reacted indignantly feeling that his kids were being attacked. She spoke to an usher and found the family wasn’t there at the end of intermission. Others in the audience thanked her for speaking up.

However, she says,

“Over the years I’ve thought about that incident and I’ve come to the conclusion that I was actually in the wrong. I went to that concert with the same expectations that I have when I attend any classical concert, however, a Christmas season performance of Messiah is not any classical concert. Different people with different expectations attend these concerts and they are the target audience, not serious classical patrons. So at this time of year if you are going to attend one of these performances you need to do it in a relaxed and tolerant frame of mind. You’re there for the event, not the performance.”

I think most people would say she originally handled the situation quite reasonably as it was and wouldn’t have found any fault with her. To have this level of self-reflection is quite commendable. (And in fact another commenter does commend her.)

This is one of those times where theatre and religion have a lot in common in that the performances/services during the respective holidays are often well attended by people who normally don’t participate at other times of the year and aren’t quite familiar with the rituals.

Performing arts groups are probably more aware of the events that will attract these more diverse audiences than their regular patrons are. Since I saw this article, I have been trying to think of a way to beg the tolerance of regular patrons in a way that doesn’t sound condescending to one of the segments. If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them.

(Don’t make your ideas too good though. I really want to fit my ushers with ninja costumes.)

Expectations Feed The Disease

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Thai-Klingon cellist Jon (J’onn) Silpayamanant commented today on a post I did on economist Tyler Cowen’s discussion of Baumol’s cost disease as it relates to the arts. He quickly followed up with another comment apologizing because he assumed I was talking about piece Cowen did in 1996 rather than a more recent post on his blog where he makes much the same point.

I started to write a slightly snarky response wondering if Cowen had been more efficient writing the more recent piece because he had better technology and 16 years of thinking about it to back him up or if he was subject to cost disease because it took just as long to write four or five as it did back in 1996, inflation has made his time more expensive and he had to distill down 16 years more experience into a thoughtful entry.

At that point it occurred to me that every time people talk about cost disease related to the arts, they do it in connection with the actual performance. Other parts of creating art has actually benefited from greater efficiencies. Computers aid the design of performance elements as well the transmission and discussion of those designs allowing them to be received and acted upon much quicker than in the past. The marketing and advertising of the performances are likewise aided by technology in terms of design and dissemination. LED lights promise to cut electricity bills by an enormous amount once the ability to control and insure the quality of the light improves.

The quality of the performance itself also has much more potential of benefiting from technology in terms of the amount of research the performers, directors, choreographers, conductors, etc can do in preparation. Every aspect of the performance can be informed by concepts promulgated half the world away. In many respects, the audience is getting a much better product than they were years ago and it is made possible less expensively than in the past.

In fact, they are in a position of being far more informed about a performance they are about to see than a person with the same level of experience with the arts 10 years ago might have. Of course, the whole issue we have is whether the audience values that experience or not.

Had Cowen used this approach in support of his argument that the arts aren’t really impacted by cost disease, I might have been a little more receptive to it.

In some respects, I think that non-profit performing arts have done a great job of employing technology to keep their costs under control, (often to the detriment of the artists, orchestra musicians in particular these days), in comparison with the movie industry where technology has resulted in sky rocketing costs. They employ wide spread distribution options like movie theatres, DVDs and streaming as a substitute for economizing.

It is often said there is a lesson in that for the performing arts but just like the independent film maker, the small arts organization would have to depend on a relationship with a big company with the resources to replicate something on the scale of the Metropolitan Opera and National Theatre broadcasts.

Of course, many times audiences demand the spectacle that technology brings to the movies and some of that carries over to even the solo artists that Silpayamanant mentions. While touring solo might have been a cost cutting measure at one time, that often isn’t the case any more with the huge tours many major acts take on the road.

As an aside, I wonder at the economics of J-Pop groups like AKB48 which has 66 active members spread out across four performing teams. Even though they don’t tour, that is a lot of people to support.

But getting back to the discussion of Baumol’s cost disease, even though people cite the fact it still takes as long to perform a particular work as it did X hundred years ago, it probably really isn’t those two hours of performance that is the costliest part of the process, it is everything else that surrounds it. Because of audience expectations about their experience more preparation precedes the performance, much of which involves salaries and benefits.

As I noted above, technology has brought efficiencies and quality to many parts of the preparatory process. What is it coming down to now is balancing the expectations about the quality of the experience and the cost of delivering it with what people are willing to pay. Right now the focus seems to be on how much of the product can be trimmed back before people notice and become concerned with the drop in what they value.

While this is translating into seeing how many musicians an orchestra can cut before people figure the music is suffering, you see the same thing manifesting in other areas of your life as well. Just try to buy a half gallon of ice cream these days. You will find it is 1.75, maybe 1.5 quarts.

I don’t think that is really a sustainable practice. There should be an corresponding push to shift customer expectations too, and not toward accepting less ice cream and music for the same price, but rather expecting a slightly different sort of experience surrounding a quality performance. I am not sure exactly what it would look like. I know I would like it to be less structured and more educational than what we have now.

Fuel Your Growth Or Ignite Your Destruction?

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Thomas Cott’s recent round up of stories raising questions about whether arts organizations should accept funding from energy companies which are poisoning the environment through oil spills and hydraulic fracking reminded me of the semi-controversial sponsorship of dance by Altria.

I haven’t been able to find it online, but some years ago there was a feeling that the relationship of tobacco giant Altria, neé Philip Morris, to dance was a little unseemly bordering on co-dependence due to the fact that dancers often resorted to smoking to curb their appetites and maintain their desired weight and figure.

They supported a great number of arts organizations, including Lincoln Center, but had a particular affinity for dance. It might have emerged as an issue in the wake of the anti-corporate sentiment of the Occupy movement last year if Altria hadn’t withdrawn their support of the NYC dance scene a few years back when they moved their headquarters to Richmond, VA.

Altria still provides support for the arts, a theatre in Richmond will be named for them in 2013, but their profile of support isn’t as visible since they have left New York.

It does raise the question about what elements should factor into a decision to accept corporate sponsorship or not. Many times corporations provide the sponsorship to bolster their image in the community. At the same time, an arts organization will be concerned about how the image of the corporation reflects on them in the community.

A theatre in Virgina or North Carolina will probably worry less about how their community will react to them being sponsored by Altria than those in NYC since tobacco has a long history in those places. But then Altria may have less incentive to provide sponsorships in those communities in order to bolster their image.

There is also the funding source to consider. Is there less of a stigma associated when Altria’s employees are directing where the funding goes?

This isn’t about Altria. You can substitute the name of an oil company for Altria and oil rich states like Alaska and Texas for tobacco growing states and the situation will be about the same.

In fact, with the stories about how big banks are mishandling money and putting the screws to people over their mortgages, accepting money from banks in some places may not endear you to the community. And since your community is in poor financial straits, banks may be the only significant source of funding enabling you to provide free and low cost services to the self same community.

Given all these factors, it may be wise for arts boards to draft policies and procedures for assessing sponsorship and donation opportunities which may arise.

If you are thinking these issues don’t really matter or don’t feel you even know where to start in developing criteria to evaluate opportunities, you may want to take a look at the blog post by Chris Garrard that Cott links to. There, Garrard addresses what he sees as the weakness of statements like: “But the arts sector needs the money…”; “But historically, the arts have always taken money from big business or sponsors… Why should things be any different now?” and “If we engage more people in the arts to learn about life and philosophy, then that has to counteract issues with where the funding came from…”

I am not necessarily saying Garrard is completely correct. His responses are highly idealistic. But these are all issues that need to be considered.

Your Mouth Says Innovative, Your Pictures Say Status Quo

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Yesterday I alluded to one of my pet marketing peeves, the claim that a work of art reveals “what it means to be human.” The phrase has mercifully fallen out of frequent usage these days (or at least I am not being sent those press releases and brochures any more).

However, Lucy Bernholz at Philanthropy 2173 reminds us about the importance of such buzz phrases to the non-profit arts community. She cites the (tongue in cheek) grant proposal by Michael Alexander of Grand Performances. Here is a taste:

“The Innovative Art Jargon Creation Project – An Activity for the New Millennium”

Project Synopsis
Grand Performances respectfully requests a grant of $37,500 to manage a program to develop new Art Jargon which will be necessary for effective grant writing in the next century.
[…]

HISTORY OF NEED
Each passing decade since the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts has seen a geometric growth in the number of “buzz words” used by arts grant writers in their applications. To date, there has been no formal development program to insure consistency of quality of these new phrases, nor a system for dissemination to insure that grant writers throughout the country had access to the new phrases at the same time, often giving grants writers in one geographic region or one discipline an unfair advantage over those writers not familiar with the new phrases. Certain regions and certain disciplines have been consistently underserved due to their grant writers’ inability to gain access to the new phrases in a timely manner.

…During the national economic recession of the early 1990’s grant writers hit “a brick wall” as funding decreased for the arts and the available supply of new “buzz words” diminished…A privately funded study involving independent arts grant writers, arts consultants and representatives from government funding agencies from throughout the country provided evidence that one of the major causes of the diminished funding was a scarcity of exciting and useful “buzz words” that could be used in arts grant applications.

I got some pretty good chuckles off this.

However, over on ARTSblog, Megan Pagado reflects on her experiences attending the National Arts Marketing Project Conference noting that the choices arts marketers make often perpetuate the status quo even as they express a desire to change it.

“Slowly, though, the conversation shifted from marketer-created messages to marketer-perpetuated messages. A picture of an all-white, male orchestra elicited the most memorable response: “They’re all dudes!”

Therein laid the dilemma for many of us in the room: What is our process of reviewing materials from artists? What if an artist doesn’t have a better, less stereotypical photo for a marketing team to use? And, as Amy Fox (@museumtweets) tweeted: Do artists always understand the stereotypes they perpetuate when they create?

Some marketers walked away with an action item: creating a diverse committee to review artist materials, for example.

But I think many, including myself, walked away with more questions than answers: How can I be inclusive while avoiding tokenism? When does utilizing inclusive language achieve its desired goal of making all feel welcome, and when does it simply brush issues under the rug and avoid conversations that need to be had?

I will admit I had never really thought about whether an image an artist supplied was perpetuating a stereotype. Most frequently my concern is whether the image communicates that the performance will be interesting. I just had this conversation today about an image in which a pianist appears to have dozed off at the keys.

Taken together, these two blog posts remind us to be cognizant of the impression conveyed by the words and images we employ to promote our organization and activities. Are we saying we are innovative because we are or because innovative is the trending term? Do the images we use back up that claim?

I think it can easily slip our notice that while we may be explicitly saying, “we want to include you,” the images we use may implicitly be saying “No we don’t.” Certainly the environment and attendance experience in a performance hall can communicate this as well. But I think people recognize that dress code and knowing when to clap are already sources of anxiety and have taken steps to address this. It is probably time to start paying attention to the pictures too.

Fine Line Of Being For Art And Humanity

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A story on the Slate website revived the question of “what is art?” for me covering a “No Longer Art” exhibition at Columbia University. On display are damaged works which insurance companies no longer consider to be art.

“To give a brief explanation of art that is no longer art: Sometimes the cost of restoring a work of art exceeds the value of the work, in which case the insurer declares a total loss, and the work is declared no longer art—that is, of no market value. The damage can range from obvious to subtle—from a ripped painting or shattered sculpture to a wrinkle in a photographic print, or mold damage which can’t be seen at all. As it wouldn’t do to send the not-artwork to the crematorium—the work might be of scholarly value, or might one day be worth repairing, or might one day be more easily repaired—the work is stored, not dead, but in a state of indefinite coma. The Salvage Art Institute, Elka’s curatorial brainchild, collects and exhibits not-art.”

This seems to imply the work was art based on the intent of the creator and its state at the time of purchase. Often you will see a piece comprised of broken objects, whether they were intentionally damaged or found in that state. Because the artist assembled the broken items with a conscious intent, the piece is considered whole.

Like the philosophical question about how much of your body can you lose before you are no longer considered human, at what point does a work cease to be art then? If a piece of broken glass attached to canvas falls off while it is being mounted, does it cease to be art if that is one piece of 10,000? What if it is one piece of 10? What if it is a piece of blown glass that becomes detached and shatters on the floor?

What of the performing arts? If a playwright or choreographer was explicit in their directions, does a work cease to be art if the lines or movements are intentionally changed by a performance group? What if the performers try to stay true to the original but make mistakes? Are those flubs equivalent to rips, wrinkles or unseen mold damage?

We often talk about giving credit to artists if their work is sampled, but what about the other side of the situation? How much can be changed before the performing group needs to stop referring to the work as the creation of the playwright, composer or choreographer?

Should Baz Luhrmann have called his Romeo and Juliet by some other name since West Side Story smelled just as sweet? Should Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein called West Side Story, Romeo and Juliet?

And then there is the question about who gets to decide if it is art any more? Should we trust an insurance company’s judgement if an artist says a new dent on a beaten piece of metal is inconsequential and it would have had the same appearance if he had decided to swing the hammer 51 times instead of 50? Do we heed the artist if the roles are reversed and he says the piece is ruined; if he had intended 51 blows, that is how many times he would have struck.

I know this conversation has gone round and round many times without conclusion, but I think this is the very core question which connects art with being human. Any other claim of “What it means to be human” is just marketing B.S. This question asks wherein resides the essence and soul of a piece of art. It is just as difficult to determine where humanity and the soul resides in a person.

The great example from college philosophy courses relates to Star Trek transporters which disassemble and reassemble humans. Once Captain Kirk is broken down to billions of atomic pieces, can the being that is reassembled be the same Captain Kirk? Where is that same point of no return for art where what is taken away removes that quality of being?

Tale of Two Husbands

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I am traveling for Thanksgiving so no lengthy post today. I am sure most of my readers are eager to enter the arms of their loved ones.

One of the small pleasures I receiving during my morning commute is catching the broadcast from StoryCorps. If you don’t know about StoryCorps, they set up booths across the country and get people to interview each other about events in their lives. All the stories are archived in the Library of Congress.

This week two guys who were married to the same woman talk about their relationship after the woman suggested that she and her second husband have Thanksgiving at her ex-husband’s house…

It is a good story for sharing at Thanksgiving. Hope you and your family create some good Thanksgiving stories this year.

We Have To Destroy Our Arts Organization To Save Our Arts Organization

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The news of Hostess Bakeries making good on their threat to liquidate in the face of a baker strike reminded me of You’ve Cott Mail’s “Is bankruptcy the answer for arts money woes” round up from this past August.

Back then Thomas Cott linked to a story about how the Barnes Foundation let everyone believe they were going bankrupt in order to make the case for moving the art collection to Philadelphia easier. Another story recalled how the Philadelphia Orchestra also declared bankruptcy in order to help with their contract negotiations and relieve their pension obligations, suggesting that the stigma of doing so may be dissipating and other orchestras may be following suit.

Cott included an article by Terry Teachout acclaiming the success of the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) in getting the citizens of three counties to agree to an increase in their property taxes (called millage) in return for free admission to the museum.

There was some talk that millage might especially be the wave of the future for funding the arts.

Yeah, not so fast. According to Judith Dobrzynski, the DIA might want to give a thankful prayer for their blessings. Residents of Ann Arbor, MI voted down millage to support a comprehensive public art project.

With that in mind, I wouldn’t necessarily count millage out as an answer. I suspect the biggest difference between Ann Arbor and Detroit was that DIA is a specific, visible entity, the benefits of which are easy to experience by walking in the door. If they were forced to close, it was clear what would be lost. Ann Arbor was looking to support art yet to be created which can be more difficult to become mentally, emotionally and socially invested in.

What I would really like to see is an arts organization successfully sell a community on a wide-ranging public support option like millage in the absence of a scenario of imminent demise. I have seen so many appeals in the face of an apocalypse that I wonder if it is even possible to rally significant community support for a healthy, stable arts organization.

Have we trained people only to respond to dire predictions? Or perhaps they have trained us that they will only respond to appeals couched in those terms.

Bankruptcy and tales of woe really isn’t the most constructive way to develop a relationship and confidence from your community. It impacts credibility and people soon become inured to news of financial crises. In this Hostess liquidation, the only person who wins is Little Debbie. (Come to find out, Hostess owns Drake’s Cakes)

The best evidence that you will not mishandle donated funds is that you are never in the position of telling people about the void that will open in their lives if they don’t rally to support you. It is harder to suggest people should have confidence in your business plan and financial practices if you are in dire straits, but more people seem ready to increase their giving in these instances because it is easier to be passionate in short bursts.

Yes, I know Joni Mitchell told us we take the things we love for granted many years ago, but there is nothing to say we can’t rally to change that behavior.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIuP7zEVeM&w=420&h=315]

Info You Can Use: Negative Feedback As GPS Data

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In my last entry, I cited the pitfalls of providing too great a forum for feedback and expectations about how that input will be addressed. I think we all recognize though that as arts organizations, we need to solicit feedback in order to better serve our communities.

How you receive the feedback is just as important as how you ask for it. It is easy to dismiss feedback we don’t like or be paralyzed/depressed by taking it too much to heart. FastCompany recently had an article addressing how to take negative feedback on an individual level, but the advice can scale up to the organizational level.

The article talks about using negative feedback to make yourself more successful. I was interested to learn that openness to feedback is actually a significant factor in an employee’s success.

“A recent study found that 46% of newly hired employees will fail within 18 months. Of those that fail, 26% do so because they can’t accept feedback,…

[…]

“People who are at the bottom 10% in terms of their willingness to ask for feedback–their leadership effectiveness scores were at the 17th percentile,” says Joseph Folkman, president of Zenger Folkman… “But the people who were at the top 10%, who were absolutely willing to ask for feedback, their leadership effectiveness scores were at the 83rd percentile.”

One of the problems a lot of people face with negative feedback is that they see it as an indictment of them as a person rather than, say an indication of their poor typing skills. I don’t know for sure if it is any worse in the arts sector than any other sector, but I imagine given that those involved in the arts tend to derive so much emotional satisfaction from their work, negative criticism may be more apt to be taken personally.

Article author Denis Wilson suggests just treating the feedback as a single piece of data among many to guide your personal development rather than orienting specifically on it. He cites an apt analogy made by Joseph Folkman that a GPS device needs 3-4 sources of information to accurately track your progress. For the same reason, Folkman also cautions against relying entirely on your own perceptions.

The article goes on to suggest a number of ways to handle the feedback, again by mostly focusing on the facts of the situation rather than emotions involved. A patron may complain angrily and indicate that they have lost faith in you due to problems with their experience. Your focus should be on solutions to those problems rather than fixating on and reacting to the anger.

Of course, it it often no small feat to remain centered on the facts of a situation when on the receiving end of emotionally delivered criticism. Remember that being able to do so contributes to your personal growth.

There is nothing to say the person delivering the criticism will be satisfied with your composed reaction and apology. Just reading the comments to the article, it is clear some people have an expectation that those on the receiving end of the criticism will be contrite and cowed.

Careful What You Ask

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One of the primary rules of surveying people is to avoid asking questions about things that you have no intention or ability to follow through on. A corollary to that is; and don’t do it on the internet.

The White House is probably learning this lesson after promising to respond to any petition receiving more than 25,000 signatures on their We The People website. If you haven’t heard about this already, people from every state in the union have petitioned to be allowed to secede.

Puerto Rico on the other hand just had a non-binding resolution to become a state.

As of this writing, Texas has over 100,000 signatures on their petition and a number of other states like Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee have exceeded 25,000 signatures.

Austin, El Paso and Atlanta have counter petitions to secede from their respective states to remain part of the U.S.

There are various other counter secession petitions listed as well including everything from exiling people who signed the secession petitions, making seceding states reimburse the U.S. for taxes and forcing Papa Johns and Pizza Hut to give everyone who remains in the U.S. free pizza if Missouri secedes.

There are actually some petitions that probably approach the intention of the website: asking the US to use its influence to gain the freedom of political prisoners, creating unified standards for redistricting, and justice for populations displaced by the U.S. government.

These are a little harder to find amidst all the demands for dissolution, impeachment and vote recounts.

I have read some articles that suggest that while the White House promises a response, it may resemble the form letter you get from a company after complaining: “Your concerns are important to us and we appreciate the feedback of our citizens. However, at this time the administration has no plans to dissolve the country. Be assured, we will keep your suggestions on file against the time that we might make such a decision and will contact you for your input into the process.”

I usually keep away from general politics for the simple reason that as the last election showed, there isn’t all that far to fall down the slippery slope before reaching the mud.

However, I think this is a great example, writ large, of the dangers inherent to soliciting feedback over the internet. It doesn’t take much thought about the consequences to jump on a petition signing bandwagon. Often you will get suggestions from people who have no concept of your business model, audience and organizational history.

However, if something in the input solicitation process leads them to believe there is a good chance of some action being taken and it isn’t, a simple “what do you think?” can turn someone who was generally positively inclined toward your organization into someone who has a bad impression. Better not to have asked in the first place.

The people who signed those petitions are probably expecting the White House to at least acknowledge their requests and start the process of exploring whether their state should be allowed to leave the Union. If nothing of the kind happens, people who merely grumbled “we should show them and leave the US” over a beer before may perceive the whole website as an empty sham and become even more resentful.

And sure, lets face it, that is pretty much what we have come to expect from promises politicians make. This will just be another one of those cases and nothing significant will likely come of it.

However, we do expect more from the businesses with which we interact. This petition system is just a really clear example of how you should watch what you ask, how you ask it and what expectations you create about your response.

All Your Dance Are Belong To Us

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Thomas Cott recently included a link to a story about dance and visual arts that I found extremely intriguing. The article starts with a quote from Ralph Lemon, “I wait,” he said, “for the day when a museum acquires a dance.”

My first reaction was that this could be valuable for cross audience pollination. I thought back to an entry I did last February where the coordinator of a visual and performance art festival observed that there was little cross over between her audiences and that of a theatre oriented festival even though they had many of the same artists in common.

Then I started wondering about the logistics and arrangements involved for a museum to acquire and present dance. Fortunately, the article addresses all these things.

Apparently dance and museums are not strangers. A choreographer received top honors at the Whitney Biennial this year. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is featuring a 3 week dance series organized by Ralph Lemon. I was surprised to learn that both MoMA and the Guggenheim own several dance pieces and have paved the way for museums to collect “ephemeral works.”

Apparently working in a gallery space challenges choreographers to think in new ways about the visuals and use of space. Museums find they need to think differently about performance arts. (my emphasis)

“But dance isn’t performance art, as Jens Hoffmann, director of San Francisco’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, well knows; he encouraged Mr. Sehgal to transition out of dance, and pursue an audience in the art world.

…Naked on a stage, Mr. Sehgal “re-danced” moves from famous choreographers. “I thought it was interesting that he was turning himself into a museum of dance.” Mr. Hoffmann invited him to participate in several shows in Berlin and Dusseldorf.

Mr. Sehgal, who also has a background in economics, is adamant that his work be treated like any other work of visual art—bought, sold and exhibited. To exhibit one of his pieces, an institution must follow certain contractual obligations—the piece must be shown for a minimum of six weeks, during which time it is presented all day, every day, like any other art exhibition.

[…]

According to Ms. Breitwieser, the rise in interest in dance does parallel a similar rise in interest in live art, or art like Mr. Sehgal’s. Since visual art has become so conceptual and predicated on a kind of “de-skilling,” live art, including performance, dance and theatrical works, she said, present an element of “re-skilling” that audiences crave. Awwnd dance presented in the white-cube context of a museum presents a new challenge to both choreographers and viewers that dance in conventional theater doesn’t offer. “The museum’s position is to write history,” Ms. Breitwieser said. “This makes one look at a piece of live art differently.”

How the dance is treated and viewed is of some concern to those in the dance community. If the relationship is to continue, the situation will likely have to move beyond one-offs and short run exhibitions. Tino Sehgal’s insistence that his work be experienced by visitors with the same degree of persistence as any other art work in the museum may become something of a precedent.

According to Judy Hussie-Taylor, the director of Danspace Project, there is chatter in the dance community over whether museums are co-opting dance without fully understanding what it takes to support dancers. There’s also concern that financial resources that now go directly to choreographers and dance organizations may be diverted to museums and visual arts institutions.

“Selling a dance performance as a work of art is an interesting proposition,” she said, “primarily because it’d be great for choreographers to have the same kind of economic control of their work and its distribution [that visual artists have].”

As I said, for me this whole discussion is intriguing to me. I haven’t even been able to imagine all the implications. What does it do for museums which have heretofore always been the site of static art work if they are regularly offering art that is transitory in nature?

One of the big selling points for the performing arts has always been that it happens only for a moment in time. What is the impact of being able to see it 9-5, Monday – Friday in a MoMA gallery? Even though there is still a higher degree of randomness inherent to 50 live performances than 50 viewings of the same YouTube video, do all those repetitions diminish the value of the performance?

On the other hand, does the fact that MoMA has exclusive rights to an exciting, highly acclaimed dance piece and no amount of begging and money can get it performed in Minneapolis enhance the value of both the museum and the company?

Your Personal Board of Directors

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The Drucker Exchange has an animated interpretation of a speech Jim Collins (Good to Great, Built to Last) delivered in 2009. The speech is titled “Ten To-Dos For Young People” but I am pretty sure it is good advice for people of any age.

The first thing Collins suggests is getting a personal board of directors where the members are chosen not for their accomplishments but for their character. These people don’t necessarily need to know they are on your board of directors.

This struck me as an oft overlooked aspect of personal development. We are often told to find mentors and network to advance our careers, seldom does the character of these mentors and the necessity of moral and value guidance get mentioned.

People in the arts often need this type of guidance because establishing a career is so difficult and subject to so many conflicting pressures. It is not only a matter of whether you appear nude in an “art film” to pay the rent but also the question of whether you are a sell out if you faced with an opportunity for commercial success. Are you a bad person for choosing either of these paths? Professional mentors may not provide the same advice as personal mentors.

He also proposed examining yourself as objectively and dispassionately as a scientist would a bug. Just as a scientist doesn’t make judgments about how the bug would be better bug if it only worked harder or learned more, you should just look at yourself as you are at this moment and simply catalog the features you and others observe.

I thought this was especially apt advice for people in the arts since so much self evaluation is derived from qualitative, often emotionally based criteria. Detachment can be difficult to achieve, but the results can be both valuable and comforting.

Although I have often heard the advice to perform objective self-evaluation and had it compared to a scientific approach, I found it helpful to be reminded that a scientist doesn’t generally wish the insects they are observing were as fast as cheetahs and intelligent as dolphins. They hunker down and try to discover what the bug can teach us about the world.

I also liked Collins advice to look at your statement to question ratio and see how you can double it. He says he was once told that he was spending a lot of time trying to be interesting and that perhaps he should shift his effort toward being interested.

Now I will say that while there is that stereotype of the self-impressed artistic type who makes statements about the “true meaning” of something, I think this is part of the learning process. Often these statements are just an attempt to test one’s view of the world.

I think everyone is allowed to be an unsufferable egoist for while to work themselves out. The problem arises if you don’t realize this is a method of learning and not the default mode of social interaction.

Collins advice is apt both personally and professionally as a method of teaching yourself how to learn from everyone you meet. I think this dovetails well with my post last week about the importance of asking audiences and the community about their experience with the arts rather than telling people what their experience will or should be.

Finally, (and if you have been counting, you know I have covered fewer than 10 points–watch the video it is only 4:30 minutes long and a cartoon for goodness sakes), Collins advice is to find something that you have so much passion for you are willing to endure the pain.

If you are involved with the arts, you have probably already made this decision. Even if Collins wasn’t thinking specifically about the arts when he said this, the animation team was and depicted this point with a ballerina dancing and then massaging her feet.

Getting “A Real Job” Thanks To Your Arts Job

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Last month the LA Stage Times had a two part series on work and the arts. One was on jobs at alternative theatres, but the one that piqued my interest was about the benefits former arts managers felt their arts experiences brought to their for profit finance jobs.

As much as I am sad to hear that people can’t support themselves in arts related jobs, I am always interested in information that makes a case for the value of the arts. Whole entries can be devoted to the brain and talent drain the arts sector suffers due to inability to pay a living wage, but I won’t delve into that here since the two profiled who left for the for profit sector are still very invested in the organizations they left.

One gentleman stepped down from his position, though he stayed on the organization’s board, to pursue an MBA and eventually work for Citibank. He felt his experience helped him develop interpersonal skills that enhance his value to the bank. Returning to work in the arts using the skills he learned in banking is always at the corner of his mind.

“But Tarlow observes how his managing director experiences at Celebration still feed into his current job. “Because it’s not only numbers now,” he says. “It’s about meeting with people and doing things more like I did at the theater. Building relationships…I have to work with people in the same way.”
[…]
“[Celebration] was a lot of work, but the rewards I got from it were a great gift,” reflects Tarlow. “When you get to do that kind of theater, you really make what you want out of it. It was a gift for me.” And it’s possible that this “gift” could eventually return him to theater — but in a better-paying job. “I have thought about becoming the finance director of a large arts organization someday. The skills I’m learning at the bank are definitely preparing me for a role like this.”

The second person profiled is also still very much involved with the theatre group he started out with and uses his day job as an auditor to inform the advice he gives to his arts organization and vice versa. Talking to arts people with no background in accounting and finance about those concerns helps him become a better all around communicator on the subject.

“His position takes him to a wide range of companies, both non-profit and for-profit, in all parts of LA. “I’ve worked on audits for much larger arts organizations with ‘real’ budgets,” he says. “Then I look at the smaller Rogue budgets and see where we have opportunities for…growth,” he adds.

Seeing differences between for-profit and non-profit models on a regular basis puts Maes in a constant state of noting challenges for the Rogues, and most small theaters, particularly in terms of keeping theater staff and managers focused on fundraising.

[…]

With his added CPA training and work experience, Maes imposes a tougher financial regimen on the Rogues than he did in the beginning. He is particularly geared toward thinking in terms of risk management, a quality he recommends for all small theaters, where even the smallest mishap — such as a show’s underperforming box office or an unforeseen loss of assets — can wipe out a company’s already anemic bank account.

[…]

Maes wants every theater company to remember that financial people engaging in a small non-profit are most likely not there because of the numbers. Personal meetings and being involved with creative people is what makes the arts rewarding for everyone, not just the artists….

…It’s also helpful being a good communicator and coming from a communication-driven art form. Being able to explain accounting to artists helps me even if I have to talk to someone with an accounting background.”

The third person profiled has worked in the arts sector for a number of years but is now wondering if she should parlay that experience in marketing, development and producing into a job in the for profit sector or continue working for non-profits. She has the confidence that the skills she brings from her non-profit experience can land her a job in a pro-profit studio or marketing firm and finds herself caught in the classic “passion or pocketbook” internal debate.

How Audiences Are Like The Electorate

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Now that the election is drawing to a close, I think all non-profit arts organizations, especially those in battleground states, should go out tomorrow and ask media companies for donations. There has been so much money spent on advertising during the campaigns, those companies are going to have a big tax burden this year if they don’t find some worthy cause to donate to!

Alas, Hawaii is not one of those states. Neither presidential candidate visited this year even though rumor has it one of them was born here. While we did have a 2 term Republican governor, the state is pretty solidly Democratic. The State Senate has 24 Democratic members and 1 Republican.

Voting participation is so bad, CNN did a long study about why the state is dead last.

This where “all politics are local” comes in. There are some situations characteristic only of Hawaii. There isn’t another state where a sizable part of the population views statehood as the result of an illegal overthrow of the monarchy and won’t vote because they feel it legitimizes the occupation government.

Due to the distance from the rest of the continental US, a person living in Hawaii can actually hear the winner of a national election called by 5 pm local time, providing less incentive to vote. (Though Alaska is in the same situation and has 8th highest voter turnout.)

Two things I took away from the CNN article that applies to the arts.

First, the importance of giving people an opportunity to talk about their experiences. I mention engaging people in conversation about their experiences with the arts pretty consistently in the blog, but the CNN article shows it in action.

A group canvassing neighborhoods trying to get people engaged and signed to vote didn’t get much traction with conventional survey questions, but when they asked what was personally important…

“…At least she’d have to look at us before saying no.

Do you vote?

No.

Would you like to register?

No.

Last-ditch effort: Is there an issue important to you?

The volunteers explained that Kanu is asking candidates questions based on the issues identified by the people they meet while canvassing. If the candidates addressed her concern, they told her, they’d report back.

“Oh!” the woman said. I could almost hear her tongue loosening.

She launched into her life story….

…The volunteers asked again. Wouldn’t you like to vote? Your voice could be heard.

After some discussion, the woman, Marlene Joshua, 58, said yes.

The other lesson I came away with is that simply inviting people to attend a show could possibly be surprisingly effective.

“He never cast a ballot himself until age 34. No one had ever asked him to, he said, and politics just wasn’t something he thought much about…. But then, in 2010, he saw a link to Kanu’s website shared via Twitter. He clicked it and found a page that asked him to make a pledge to vote for the first time.

For whatever reason, he said yes. That decision was the start of an incredible transformation. It led to his current hobby: spending weekends convincing other people that their votes matter.”

and in another part of the article:

Michelson, from Menlo College in California, told me that some groups — racial minorities, recent immigrants and residents of low-income neighborhoods — don’t feel like people who are supposed to vote in U.S. elections. But if you ask them to participate, she said, that can all change.

“It doesn’t really matter what you say. It doesn’t really matter who asks you,” she said. “The important thing is the personal invitation to participate.”

We know that like people in these groups, there are those who also don’t feel like they are the type of people who go to see live performances. Changing that mindset may start with something as simple as a personal invitation. That gesture at least starts to confirm that they are perceived as the type of person who attends a live performance.

Perform In One Place, Teach In 100 Places

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Digital media seems to creep ever more closely to threaten the practice of physically attending live performance. Last month I got an email soliciting submissions for the WiredArts Festival, what they describe as a month long Fringe Festival which will be live streamed.

“there the audience is global, seating is unlimited and viewers can participate in live chat discussions, interact through twitter and facebook, while the performance is happening….We believe that THE SMALL THEATER AUDIENCE ISN’T IN DECLINE, IT’S ONLINE.”

The reasons they give for participating and the services they offer include:

-Instantly provides a platform to take your company and your art to a global audience.

-Opens the doors to online conversations that expand the work for everyone involved.

-Multiple cameras provide professional, high definition quality and creative, dynamic story telling.

-Increases opportunities for support and funding.

-Engages your company more deeply in social media community and the possibilities of social media networking and marketing

-Is fun, exciting and the wave of the future of the performing arts.

-Drives online audiences to the live theater.

YOUR PROGRAMMING SLOT FEE INCLUDES:
1 high-definition, multi-camera edit of your live performance
Social Media Marketing training sessions
3,000 square foot performance space at The Secret Theater
Opportunity to invite your own audience to the Secret Theater
4 camera setup and professional camera operators
Live-Streamed Director
1 Production Manager
1 Sound (for streaming) Technician
1 Board Operator

I am a little skeptical of their claim that this will drive online audiences to live theater given that the trend seems toward individuals increasingly isolating themselves. If positioned and presented correctly I imagine it could entice people to live performances, but it would have to be an active effort rather than passively depending on people liking something so much they decide to check it out live. People in general are too used to experiencing their entertainment via some form of mediation to feel there are some experiences that must be savored live.

Appropriately enough, three days after receiving this email the topic of You’ve Cott Mail was “The Future of Arts in a Digital Age.”

Included in Cott’s email was a piece by Andrew Sullivan basically saying only suckers eschew digital readers like the iPad and Kindle for print, a sentiment somewhat belied by the widespread power outages on the East Coast. A little difficult to read your Kindle by candle light, a feat I managed with an old fashioned print book in Mongolian yurt this summer.

Thomas Jefferson read by candlelight, by gum. It should be good enough for everyone!

Such smug assertions have a pretty short shelf life, though. The benefits of digital format will surely continue to increase.

The question is, what place does a performing arts venue have as this future unfolds? Will the role be like that of The Secret Theater where theatres facilitate the live streaming performance of arts groups by providing space, personnel and technology? And what differentiates this performance from a television show or a YouTube video for the viewer?

The organizers of the WiredArts Festival seem to acknowledge a live audience to provide genuine feedback is important and I suspect it always will be, but this may mean the end of large performing arts venues in favor of smaller 100-200 seat venues. (As point of context, The Daily Show studio seats about 300 people and Colbert Report about 100 people.)

Will those who are skilled at curating and producing these sort of events become recognized as the hottest performance venues potentially shifting the artistic center of gravity away from places like NYC and LA? There is a lot of interesting stuff happening in Cincinnati thanks to the efforts of groups like ArtsWave. As physical location becomes less important to gaining recognition, more creatives may start to gather in cities that provide high quality technology resources/support and low cost of living.

Given that artists will be reaching a global audience, live interaction in the form of workshops/residencies/master classes may become more valued if artists promote that as a service they can offer. Going on an extended tour with a dance company may be less common but the opportunity to work in a small group with a compelling artist may increase in desirability. (So I guess a base of operations in a city with a low cost of living but good airport will be essential.)

This may seem a remote possibility but the Andrew Sullivan article I referenced earlier pointed out people are buying the work of talented individuals rather than trusted institutions these days.

It may just be a matter of making people more aware that personal contact and instruction is possible causing the whole model to become inverted. Instead of touring a performance to 100 places and teaching in a few, you live stream one or two big performances a year from your base and the notoriety it generates supports sending skilled members of the company all over the world to spend a few weeks teaching people how to perform like they saw in the broadcast. If you have the talent and vision to parlay the longer term exposure and interactions with all these different people and cultures into a new creative expression that wows the world, you can keep the cycle going.

This version of the future would dovetail very well with the Pro-Am movement because it would help people nourish their avocation and still acknowledge the value of pursuing the arts as a vocation (though certainly a Pro-Am could just as easily travel about providing educational experiences at cut rate prices).

Care And Feeding of Development Directors

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Hat tip to Rosetta Thurman for linking to a valuable article about the care and feeding of Development Directors on the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Carol Weisman wrote “5 Ways to Lose Your Development Director in 2 Years or Less,” decrying the poor treatment and lack of support development staff receives.

An excerpt of her list:

1. Pay a ridiculous salary. A friend recently pointed out an ad on Craigslist for a development director. The position requires an MBA and five years’ experience or a Certified Fund Raising Certificate. There is a list of 15 responsibilities, including manage all aspects of individual giving, manage Web site, lead $3-million capital campaign, design and write the newsletter, recruit and manage volunteers, represent the agency at community events, and the list goes on. Salary: $40,000. I mean, really.

2. Reward great performance with unrealistic expectations. A friend of mine works at a university. The department she works in raised $350,000 in 2011. She raised $1.2-million in fiscal 2012. The goal she was given for fiscal 2013, $2.5-million. The additional staff support, financial support for meetings and training: zero. After a highly successful year, she is reading the want ads.

3. Provide absolutely no board support.

4. Don’t provide funds or the time for developing additional streams of revenue.

5. Avoid recognizing the work of your development professional.

Weisman expounds upon points 3-5 in the article. I didn’t want to get into reproducing the whole thing here.

As you might imagine, this is a sore subject with fund raisers. There were many comments on the article. One of the first, by a person using the sobriquet “helpfor501c3s,” related the following:

“When I have interviewed for Director of Development positions, I do my homework and read the organizations’ 990s prior to the meetings, anticipating the question about salary expectations. I have found that seeing the previous years’ compensation paid to CEOs and VPs is a helpful guide to preparing for a realistic response. Quite often when a CEO asks me for salary requirements, I am met with a response “That’s almost what I make!”

CEOs and Executive Directors have to get over the notion that they are the only employees that should make a high salary. When the Director of Development is the one responsible to raise the support to pay the CEO, a bit more consideration should be given to amply compensating an experienced and skilled Director of Development.”

I quote “helpfor501c3s” first to advocate for using 990 filings as a pre-interview preparation tool or for pre-application research if you are uncertain if an organization can meet your salary needs. I also cite “helpfor501c3s” for making the point that the development office is frequently responsible for raising the funds that pay the CEO and should therefore be highly valued by those in the C suites.

More than just a pleas to be nicer to Development Directors, both the article and the commenters talk about the importance of including fundraising in board training and education. There was a sense of letting the development office help the board get better at helping them rather than a declaration of “give, get, or go.”

As I read the article there seemed to be this feeling that development offices were expected to go out and raise money without depending on anyone else in the organization. Almost as if the marketing and promotions people were expected to gather information about a play or musical piece and all the artists without asking the artistic staff.

If you don’t think that is an apt comparison of the conditions in development offices, read some of the examples given in the article and the comments. It will probably be difficult to avoid seeing at least some similarities to your organization.

Every department in an arts organization suffers some injustices that need to be corrected, that is no surprise. You may not think about what they might be in relation to your development people that often.

Patrons With Old Wounds

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A month ago while discussing audience participation and Great Lakes Theater Company Artistic Director’s feeling that babyboomers rather than young people craved interactive experiences at performances, I wondered aloud:

“It occurred to me that as people with training in the arts, we know about the history. But do our audiences in general know? Do they yearn to shout praise or insults and stay away because they can’t? Is the ability to do so something people would value so much they would start attending if they could?”

I was reminded today that while those who may value interactive experiences may not explicitly state their desires, those who would prefer more passive interaction definitely voice their opinions on the matter.

I had sent out an email newsletter yesterday mention an upcoming performance of Alice in Wonderland. In response I received an email from a patron stating the last time she attended she had an unpleasant experience due to people being allowed to be loudly interactive with the performers. Because she did not want to chance another bad experience, she wouldn’t be attending our performances any time soon.

I looked up her purchase records to try to discern what show might have offended her and found that our last attendance record is 4 years old. All that means is that she hasn’t purchased advance tickets in four years. She could have easily purchased tickets at the door or come with a friend and we didn’t capture her name.

My suspicion is that she probably attended one of our free end of semester student performances which tend to be pretty raucous or a Mexican music concert a couple years ago where the band encouraged the audience to sing along. Those are the only performances I can recall where we have received complaints similar to hers. We have also received praise from attendees who enjoyed the high energy atmosphere of these shows.

However…she was obviously so upset by the experience that she continues to be bothered months, if not years, later and she wanted to let us know that she still holds it against us.

I don’t want to advocate for maintaining the status quo, but I do think it is important to remember people like this woman when you start to consider moving toward more interactive experiences. Ask yourself who is more loyal, the people who will hate the changes or the people who will embrace them? Is there a way you can gradually phase in a change of dynamics or do you feel the shift is desperately needed to retain or attract an audience?

If you have read my blog for any length of time, you have probably gotten the sense that I don’t think there is anything to gain by completely catering to those that value the status quo. Pacing of a change over a long period of time can signal a commitment to the new course to your existing supporters without alarming them and assure your target audience that the changes aren’t a superficial attempt to pander to them.

We know people are staying away because their perception of the attendance experience isn’t appealing, but we don’t know how many would regularly attend if changes were made and how apt they would be to return on a regular basis. We know much more about those who do attend on a regular basis, but as the oft spoken mantra goes, they are dying off or retiring to Florida.

The bigger challenge to most arts organizations is discerning the a constructive course of action based on feedback. Those who support your course of action are rarely as vocal about it as those who despise it and it is hard not to react to the stronger emotional response. Supporters who feel you are on the correct course will say nice things in the lobby. Six months later, they may respond to a mailing with “looking forward to the show” which fade in the face of “I am never coming to see a show again based on my six month old experience!”

Stuff To Ponder: MyStage Accounts

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Hartford Courant columnist Frank Rizzo recently suggested an interesting subscription alternative, MyStage Accounts, that is something akin to the flex subscription or monthly membership pass.

Rizzo’s idea is basically like a savings account or gift card that the patron can use as a basis for purchasing tickets. (my emphasis)

Tell theatergoers that for the new season coming up they can simply open an account and from that account they can buy any ticket at any time. Simple as that. Write a check for $100, they’ll get get $115 worth of tickets; $200 and they get $240; $300 they can get $400 worth of tickets; $500 they get $700; $1,000 they get $2,000. Or whatever discounted percent those spreadsheets tell you is viable.

No muss, no fuss. (Is there an app for that?) The more they give, the better the deal (up to a point.) And there could be promotions where the theater can add to some accounts for whatever clever reason their marketing staffs come up with.

Rizzo’s thought is to provide a win-win situation. The theatre gets the money up front just as they do with any subscription and the audience member gets the flexibility of choice. I don’t know that this is any better or worse than the flex subscription or monthly membership model, it just provides another option that might appeal to your community.

What I like about this idea is that: First, it gets people invested in your organization when they think about the amount they have in their “bank account.” If you had a way to easily do an email merge out of your ticketing database you could send people their balance on a monthly basis during your season to keep them engaged.

The other thing I like is Rizzo’s suggestion that you might add to people’s accounts for various reasons. I think this ties in very well with the practices of social media and online gaming sites which give you bonus points and achievements for reaching certain milestones (very often based on use which encourages people to keep using!) or awards bonus points for playing during a certain time of the year.

Obviously a theatre might award bonus points for attending a show that they think would have low attendance but people would soon recognized bonus points signaled a lack of confidence. A successful program would also award people bonus points for seeing shows they want to see anyway like the annual production of A Christmas Carol.

That can actually provide an incentive to single ticket buyers to to open an account. They won’t derive any benefit from the Christmas bonus if they don’t have a MyStage account to deposit it into, after all.

Now For Something Completely Different

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Last year my assistant theatre manager gave me a calendar of Japanese wood block prints from MFA Boston. Most of the works included are several hundred years old and have really enjoyed looking at these past months.

Many of you may be under the impression that art from this period was very stylized and refined, and you would generally be right.

However…the subject matter which artists dealt with is another subject altogether. A scroll created by an unknown artist of the Edo Period, quite aptly named “He Gassen” tells the story of the “Great Fart War,” pre-dating Monty Python by about 200 years.

The scroll was digitized by Waseda University and all the images can be viewed on their website. Note that the proper sequence requires you to start at the top right and proceed left across the page.

While the scroll’s key demographic may strike you as being an eight year old boy, you might find yourself bookmarking this page depicting Japanese men in various degrees of undress discharging their attacks from atop horses, attempting to erect protective barriers and “recharging” around great pots of food, as something of a guilty pleasure.

You may not have credited the Japanese of the Edo period with this sort of humor. To some degree you would be correct, this period was characterized by strict Japanese isolationism. The He-Gassen scrolls are said to have reflected the anti-Western sentiment of the time.

Again, not unlike the sentiments expressed by the Frenchman toward the Englishman in the Monty Python video.

Believe it or not the “fart battle” was a fairly common subject of the time. Christie’s auction house sold fart war scrolls by another artist for about $1,500.

Fleeing The Tiger Is No Time To Get Creative

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There was a recent series of posts about creativity and children on the Creativity Post website that have made some concepts gel for me.

In September Dr. Peter Gray made a post about declining creativity scores in school aged children. In part he blames an education system which increasingly focuses on the concept that solutions are either right or wrong rather than providing free time to experiment and play. Given the research he cites, parents that over schedule their kids’ time also share some of the blame.

As much as we in the arts tout the benefits of creativity, you may be surprised to learn how important it is to success in life and how significant the decline is:

According to Kim’s analyses, the scores on these tests [Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)] at all grade levels began to decline somewhere between 1984 and 1990 and have continued to decline ever since. The drops in scores are highly significant statistically and in some cases very large….

…but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average Elaboration score on the TTCT, for every age group from kindergarten through 12th grade, fell by more than 1 standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. Yikes.

[…]

Indeed, the TTCT seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.

In a post this month, Gray continues on this theme discussing how important it is to allow a child to create in a non-judgmental environment. He cites some interesting research on the impact of judgement in home environments on the creative development of children.

My ah-ha! moment came after Gray discusses how people will generate a more creative product if they don’t know their work will be evaluated. People tend to edit themselves in order to please the evaluator and out of fear and anxiety about being judged. (my emphasis)

“If a tiger is chasing you, your best bet is to use well-learned or habitual ways of escaping from the tiger, not to dream up new creative ways of doing so. Creative ways always run the risk of failure, so we are biologically constructed to cut creativity off when failure has serious consequences.”

Many in the arts, myself included, have written about how important it is for arts organizations to embrace the risk of possible failure by experimenting with new approaches to the creation of art, audience/visitor experience, marketing, pricing, etc.

In the context of Gray’s observation, it isn’t that arts organizations are simply risk averse about new experience the way kids are worried about the first day of school or audiences are anxious about attending their first classical music concert.

Rather the fear engendered by financial consequences evokes a hard wired primal fight/flight reaction that actually shuts down our ability to think creativity.

The idea that this situation is biological was as illuminating to me as Neill Archer Roan’s observation a few years ago that emotional satisfaction engendered a diminished sense of responsibility for self-/professional development in arts professionals.

I think it is helpful for arts organizations to be aware the fear of experimentation in the face of perceived threats is not only probably irrational, but also a genuinely visceral reaction. Knowing this, they can endeavor to create a decision making environment where the influence and presence of these threats are diminished.

Likewise, it is important for arts organizations to know these things when providing and advocating for arts education. Creativity is cultivated by arts instruction that provides opportunity for wholly free expression alongside direction and evaluation.

Gatekeeper Processes

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The annual program review is a process we go through at the college both to provide evidence for our accreditation and to measure the general effectiveness of the programs in order meet organizational goals. This process helps the school identify “gatekeeper courses.”

Some colleges and universities use gatekeeper courses to weed students out of certain degree programs by making it very difficult to pass.

For our purposes, the designation is used to indicate courses possessing some characteristic which makes it very difficult for students to acquire basic skills. Make no mistake, the professors will bridle at any suggestion that the standards be lowered in any manner.

Often the solution lies in things like re-ordering the sequence in which concepts are introduced so that the class builds knowledge toward a complex concept in a different manner or perhaps providing hands on demonstration of the complex concept. There are many strategies one can use.

In the arts we talk about very much the same thing when we speak of removing barriers to entry for audiences. We look for alternative ways to communicate, allow people to purchase tickets, find parking, etc–anything that facilitates the decision to attend and makes the experience of doing so more pleasant.

There are many aspects of the process an arts organization can’t and won’t compromise, but there are alternatives the organization can pursue or implement. For example, people may have to pay for parking, but the performing arts center can arrange to paint a distinctive logo on the columns of the municipal parking garage as a signal to patrons the best side of the building to park reach the lobby.

During our preparations for the accreditation site visit, I realized there are many aspects of an organization’s operation that can constitute a “gatekeeper” preventing full participation of all the groups you hope to serve and even hamper the effectiveness of the organization itself.

The organization may pride itself on its accessibility to the public but there may be portions of the art class registration process which you see as helping you collect data for your grants which cause segments of the community you are eager to serve to opt out of participation.

You may view the procurement process you have instituted as central to your attempt to control spending but your staff may see it so onerous it constitutes a disincentive to suggest and develop new programs and as a result, your organization is viewed as staid and unresponsive to changing times.

I have talked many times about marketing being the responsibility of everyone in the organization and that everyone needs to feel like what they do is contributing to the success of the organization and its mission.

But I think it is very easy for departments not in direct contact with those identified as the prime constituency -performers, students, audience members, gift shop customers, etc to feel divorced from the mission.

Human resources may say “we hire the people that make our audiences happy” but sees their purpose as making sure no one exposes the organization to any sort of liability, causing employees to be perpetually anxious.

The business office may say “we help acquire the resources to create the stuff of which dreams are made…” but view their mandate as not allowing the idealistic artistic staff to spend too much money.

Just like with the gatekeeper courses, no one would advocate that staff not be fully trained about sexual harassment and limits of labor laws or that purchasing practices not be properly documented and monitored. However, it is worthwhile to evaluate what parts of your practice are impeding the pursuit of the mission.

Can the material in the employee training program be communicated and reinforced in a different manner than a video at orientation and dire lectures on sexual harassment scenarios? If people are having a hard time remembering purchasing subcodes, is there a better way to organize and list the codes? Or maybe the codes should be an intuitive alphanumeric sequence instead of an incomprehensible series of numbers?

Most importantly is how that department defines their relationship to the overall mission. A change in philosophy will lead to the type of changes I mention. I read an example of this, I think it was in Peter Drucker’s Managing the Nonprofit Organization, about two state social service offices. One got much higher satisfaction ratings than the other because it started from a place where it saw itself as helping people access services while the other saw its role as denying services people weren’t entitled to.

Even if the first office had a lower standard for awarding benefits to clients than the second, but I don’t think an organization has to necessarily compromise the rigor of its standards to engender a sense of satisfaction from others. My choice of the phrase “started from a place…” was intentional.

The context from which you start reframes the whole experience for both the employee and customer even if the final answer is “No.” It isn’t that everyone feels happier because the interaction started on a positive note. Rather, decisions were made long before that customer arrived that effected changes to the physical environment and procedures the office felt were necessary to meeting its perceived mission.

Visitors to both offices might have to fill out Form 46B, but the visitor to the former one might understand the necessity and feel generally optimistic about the outcome, while a visitor to the latter may perceive it as yet another test of their worthiness based on capricious standards.

I have strayed a little bit back toward customer service with this example. But I really want to advocate for looking inward at the company policies and procedures that might be acting as gatekeepers and making employees jobs difficult.

I think arts organizations are generally cognizant of the importance of providing good customer service, even if they aren’t doing it well. Internal evaluation doesn’t happen as frequently and admittedly the true source of problems can be difficult to identify. In the classroom, test scores give a pretty good indication that something is wrong.

It is harder to recognize that inefficient delays in the production department can be solved by providing staff with a company credit card with daily spending limits–a move that empowers the technical staff to acquire minor resources so they can continue working while assuaging the business office’s fears of uncontrollable cost overruns.

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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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