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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.

Art=Lemons

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I just finished Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion wherein a group sails from the Philippines to California around the start of the 18th century. Not quite knowing how to get there, the crew is stricken by scurvy on the long voyage. I got to thinking about how these days you never really worry about how you are going to obtain vitamin C, but the lack of it could eventually result in your death.

It struck me that this was actually a good metaphor for the place artistic and cultural expression plays in society. We often talk about the power of the arts in a prescriptive sense. While it won’t really cure all ills, it does play an important part in our health as humans. Yet because we don’t experience a distinct sense of the benefits at every encounter, it is easy to discount its value in our lives.

I had some orange juice this weekend and while the cool tangy flavor was a nice counterpoint to the savory flavor of the sausage I was eating, I didn’t necessarily recognize any redemptive qualities. If not for the orange juice and health care lobbies which tout the healthy benefits of drinking orange juice, the idea that it might be bolstering my health wouldn’t enter my mind. Right now I am investing no thought about seeking more sources of vitamin C.

The same is likely true for most of people. Their opportunities for artistic and cultural expression and experiences are probably frequent enough that they don’t take much note of it. As the NEA has recently noted, these experiences are varied and often informal. Even if they enjoyed their last experience, they may not be actively seeking their next one. Because the arts lobby has weaker market penetration than the citrus growers, people may be unaware of the benefits the arts bring to their lives.

While a month without vitamin C begins to result in severe deterioration in health, the symptoms related to insufficient artistic and cultural experiences aren’t as clear as malaise and lethargy, formation of spots on the skin, spongy gums and loss of teeth. (Well I mean, those are my symptoms of arts withdrawal, but I am assuming not everyone has that experience.)

A year ago, Newsweek printed an article about how creativity was in decline. While the researchers who conducted the study discussed in the piece say the arts have no special claim to instilling creativity, they note there will be repercussions if the decline continues.

University of Chicago Professor Martha Nussbaum recently warned that neglecting the arts and humanities in favor of technical skills may threaten democracy. Whether you subscribe to that view or not, we often hear about how businesses value creativity as well as technical skill in their employees and are concerned with any potential declines.

The arts are important on an even more basic level than that. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake when people were surrounded by devastation, they came together and sang songs. The songs didn’t clear the rubble and rebuild what had fallen. The songs didn’t set bones and stop bleeding. But it did dull the physical, mental and emotional pain people felt until aid could arrive. The arts are not a cure all, but their expression brings people together and binds them in a common story that helps them relate and provide comfort as a group in a way they can’t as individuals.

Society may discount the value of the arts in their lives, but they weren’t asking the accountants to rally the public to raise funds to provide relief to Haiti or even Japan in the wake of their recent earthquake. It was the artists they looked to. Artists of various disciplines helped provide a focus for soliciting and delivering aid to people in need.

The accountants were no less important to the task of directing aid to disaster areas. Most of the artists who helped raise the money probably personally lack the skills to effectively process the proceeds. Neither the accountant or the artists are likely to be as adept as the Red Cross at delivering the services that are needed. Different groups contribute to the eventual success of the whole endeavor.

It is pretty much unthinkable that artists would refuse to perform. (In fact, recent article on the BBC reveals some musicians feel emotionally blackmailed into participating.) No one is ever faced with the full consequences of no artists supporting a cause. While I could speculate, I don’t think anyone can really fully predict the results of devaluing and diminishing the presence of artistic and cultural expressions.

In fact, for as much as we talk about them, I am not sure those of us in the arts completely understand the benefits people derive.

Stuff To Ponder: Ticket Office Openness Vs. Security

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Currently I am involved in talking with architects to plan a renovation for our theatre. Part of this will involve razing and moving our ticket office. In the course of other theatre design projects with which I have been involved, as well as those related to me by colleagues, there seems to be a desire to have a more open and friendly ticket acquisition experience for audiences.

Since people are purchasing online and using credit cards to purchase tickets, the thought is that the reinforced bank teller window (an image recently invoked by Rocco Landesman) can give way to a more open concierge desk set up with an aperture to a secure backroom available for deposit of cash receipts.

Thinking this might be an option we should consider, I emailed the theatrical architect with whom the lead architect is working. The fact our ticket office is located outside rather than in our lobby adds a little twist to the concept. My concern was mostly with how to secure the desk area and keep it clean when we aren’t using it without resorting to bulky contraptions or unattractive steel roll up doors. Though sheltered from the rain, we would have to figure a way to avoid having money fly away in a breeze. I thought with some good design and procedures, we could overcome these hurdles and provide a more welcoming atmosphere for our patrons.

The problem is that while the move toward cash-less transactions enables us to move toward a more open and friendly experience, thieves are making corresponding changes in the tactics they use to exploit the new transaction formats. We may end up right back behind the reinforced teller windows again before too long.

With his permission, I am sharing part of the response I received from architect Paul Luntsford of PLA Designs.

“Due to the increasing problem with skimmers and RFID scanners, debit and credit card transactions are moving to the secure and controlled window. By the way, this skimmer/RFID scanner thing is really getting bad. We went to see Les Mis tour show last Friday at our huge, union run, city-owned 3000 seat theater. I used the ATM in the lobby to get some dough to buy junk during intermission. That night, or technically the next morning at 3AM, my debit card was used online at the Apple store to attempt a $1 test purchase by some unsavory character who had managed to compromise my RFID data from my card when I used the ATM in the lobby! So, you need to consider that all electronic transactions happen behind a window, and that window has an embedded wire mesh that is bonded to ground and acts like a Faraday shield to prevent capture of RFID data when the card is processed by one of YOUR people.”

While the credit card company may be at fault for not properly encrypting information, that fact will be of little comfort if people start to associate your brightly lit lobby with a dimly lit alleyway in a bad neighborhood where they may be preyed upon. As security of the cards improves, (and hopefully theft techniques lag), we can hopefully look to maintaining a more open transaction environment. If not, along with good cash handling procedures, you may end up having to train employees on safe credit card handling procedures like not passing the card back out side the Faraday cage without replacing it in a protective sleeve.

Examining Your Non Profit Career

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Rosetta Thurman posted her 15 Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Nonprofit Career Many of her questions dealt with personal ambitions and what image you had of ideal situations.

The questions that engaged me the most though were numbers 11-14 which challenge you to look at the factors which are causing you to operate less than effectively.

“11. In which areas am I holding back in sharing my true gifts with my organization and community?
12. Am I making a real difference in my current role or position?
13. What’s really keeping me from deepening my level of commitment to my organization or cause?
14. What is the biggest opportunity I have in my nonprofit career right now that I’m not taking advantage of?”

Number 12 reflects a common sentiment that probably enters the minds of all people who work in non-profits. Probably especially those who work in the arts who may tend to wonder if their devotion to their art may be better applied focused on the ills which plague the world. Often when you are seeking funding, you are competing for money with the ills of the world so it is difficult to not wonder about such things.

But the other questions– holding back your gifts, not being fully committed, not availing oneself of opportunities– these are some real interesting questions. One of the first things I thought of whether these questions are different when pursuing a career in the non-profit sector versus the for profit sector.

If you have low self confidence then there may not be any difference. In either case you may not feel you are qualified enough or appreciated enough to have your abilities valued. You may think that others are more deserving of training or opportunities to work on career enhancing projects than you. Perhaps you don’t feel you get paid enough and so the business doesn’t deserve your full commitment of energy and talent.

But if you are more assured and confident and have a sincere commitment to your job and the work of your company, there are areas where there can be a real difference between non-profit and for profits. You may not invest yourself and your talents more because you are afraid you may be asked to do more without any additional compensation or even increase in scope of your authority.

This can easily be true in both the for profit and non-profit spheres, but I am specifically thinking about the reports of how many non-profit leaders were reticent about ever taking on the position of executive director perceiving it as a thankless job with little support and poor prospects for a work-life balance.

In terms of taking advantage of opportunities, even the most self-confident person may be reluctant to take advantage of professional development opportunities for fear that they are diverting resources away from the core purpose of the organization. The result is that some extraordinarily talented people may lack the training and guidance to become truly effective and never develop a network of contacts who can act as a support network and knowledge base. Even if concerns over the cost of attending conferences and seminars is never stated, an organizational culture of always economizing may make people feel guilty that time and money is being invested in them.

Meanwhile, an employee at a for profit is probably more likely to view the professional development opportunity as an investment by the company in their career and perhaps even something they deserve in return for their dedication to the business.

I would really be interested in seeing a survey done to learn if there is a large difference in the way non-profit and for profit employees approach employer sponsored professional development opportunities.

I am sure there are other reasons and motivations that factor into all these questions–and Rosetta Thurman is too. She is asking people to share their answers to at least one of these 15 questions on her blog. If you have something to say, by all means stop by.

Info You Can Use: Correct Organization Of Personnel Files

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Hat tip to Emily Chan at Non Profit Law blog for sharing a link to a Blue Avocado piece on how personnel files should be maintained. More specifically, what information should not be stored in a personnel file, if retained at all, and what should be kept in separate files.

Some of the prohibitions made sense given the need to maintain privacy of medical records and the fact that some documents must be released to federal inspection and it is inappropriate to provide access to the details of an entire employment history. It makes sense that nothing should be placed in the file that employees aren’t aware of.

There are some other factors I don’t know I would have ever considered when setting up a system of personnel records.

Following are the most important items to exclude:

* Any writing regarding the employee’s performance that the employee has not seen should not be in the file. For example, while the performance evaluation that was presented to the employee should be in there, a complaint memo from a department manager about an error the employee made that was never shown to the employee should not.

* Working notes or logs that a supervisor has kept for her own benefit, usually to assist in the drafting of a performance evaluation. The notes should be destroyed after documenting anything of importance in the annual performance evaluation.

* Any medical information (including drug testing information) about the employee from any source should never be in the employee’s personnel file, but rather in a separate, more restricted confidential medical file. This separate medical file could also include any medical-related information such as documents related to Workers’ Compensation, FMLA and ADA.

* Complaints or investigation reports (harassment, discrimination, ethics, licensing etc.). Any complaint about an employee that is subject to an investigation should not be in the employee’s personnel file, but in a separate complaint file. For example, if an employee is accused of sexual harassment, the only thing that should be lodged in the personnel file is any disciplinary action taken against the employee or a substantiated report of wrongdoing — but not the original complaint or investigation notes.

* These items also should not be kept in a personnel file, but in separate, confidential files:
o Hiring Documents, such as letters of reference, background investigation reports, or I-9s
o EEO Statistical Information for the EEO-1 Report
o Payroll records

In short, to manage all of this personnel information we suggest four sets of files:

1. A personnel file for each employee
2. A separate medical file for each employee
3. One folder that has Forms I-9 for all employees
4. A file (or set of files) for all employee payroll records

Ellen Aldridge, who wrote the Blue Avocado piece, also provides a downloadable check list of items to include. She follows the material cited above with information about what things employees can add to their files, how long you need to keep information, how to store the files and suggested policies and protocol for accessing and reviewing files.

The one thing I questioned, (literally-I ask about it in the comments section of the article), is the suggestion that notes a supervisor has been keeping to base a performance evaluation on be destroyed. The supervisor might be documenting incidents of absence, mishandling of cash or even episodes when customers praised an employee to a supervisor or were witnessed using exceptional judgment and initiative. Wouldn’t you want to retain this evidence if the employee challenged a poor evaluation or to defend the employee against potential layoffs?

There hasn’t been a response to my comment as of publication time. Perhaps the the advice will be to formally include these records as part of the evaluation and the destruction advice refers to informal handwritten notes versus a spreadsheet the supervisor has been maintaining.

If anyone has insight or wants to share their own best practices, I would be interested to learn the answers. My guess is that a modified version of these practices should be applied to volunteer records as well.

Goodwill Benefits Of The Arts

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In the course of this blog I have posted about great customer service experiences I have encountered. I have also mentioned some superlative performances to which I have been witness. Never before have I had occasion to discuss how a great performance has earned me extended good customer service.

Last winter we had a flamenco group perform in our theatre. We had a great audience and some really good outreach events, one of which earned us the commendation of a program officer at the state arts foundation. For this alone, I would be happy.

By some confluence of events, the group and the guest services manager at the hotel we use really hit it off. I am not sure what exactly happened. The group asked us to set aside tickets for about six of the hotel staff. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it isn’t completely rare. In fact, some times I have given comps to shows front desk people have wanted to see.

This time was different from the past. In the course of the group’s stay, the front desk and they really bonded. When the group returned to Spain, they sent the guest services manager a gift. When I met with the guest services manager last week to talk about our room needs for the coming season, she mentioned that she was planning to visit the flamenco group during a vacation to Europe.

As I write this, I almost feel ashamed to admit that I have benefited from this burgeoning relationship. I haven’t pressed any advantage, but the good will the guest services manager has felt has facilitated my operations since then.

Because of flight schedules, just about every group we had perform since last winter has arrived before noon and the check in time was 3:00. In the past we were told that the hotel would try to fit them in, but it was likely they would have to wander around for awhile until the rooms were ready. This past Winter and Spring we were told the first rooms available would be theirs. No one ended up having to wander around and kill time until the rooms were ready.

As a result, the artists were more settled and rested than in the past. They were able to arrive at the theatre at the appointed time and didn’t feel rushed to set up. I can’t say they performed any better than they would have had they been obliged to wait a few hours before they checked in. I do think they left having a more positive view of our organization than they might have.

They had no idea they were the beneficiary of the good will generated by those who preceded them. From the tenor of my meeting with the guest services manager, it is likely the benefits will be extended to artists in our next season as well. Hopefully none of them will cause things to sour.

To me this is one of the intangible benefits the arts bring to the community. If I was just another company bringing a lot of business to the hotel, they would certainly make an effort to ensure all our needs were met. I don’t know that they would be as personally invested in my organization if our entire relationship was based on commerce. How we might benefit from this is a lot harder to measure than economic or even intrinsic benefits. (Though accountants will try to figure it out for you.)

Late To The Confession

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I have only just gotten around to following up on my bookmark of John Killacky’s Regrets of A Former Arts Funder. If you hadn’t read it when it came out in late June, Killacky reflects on some of the practices he engaged in when he was a program officer at the San Francisco Foundation.

Most of his regrets focus on how he and other funders provided support to culturally specific organizations. Among the problems he identifies was the creation of a two tiered funding model that had different criteria and funding levels. It ultimately was not constructive for those organizations relegated to the second tier and tended to perpetuate and reward mediocrity on the first tier (or at least provide no incentive for taking chances). In fact, he also acknowledged, much as Scott Walters recently noted, that grant panels frequently employ evaluative criteria that punishes projects where success is not clearly assured.

I was intrigued by his suggestion that foundations adopt an approach more akin to that of venture capitalists (though not surprising given he worked near Silicon Valley, the VC capital of the nation)

“Maybe philanthropy should have taken a page from venture capitalists’ playbooks, investing more deeply at a significant level over a five- to eight-year time frame, as well as offering a range of non-cash, value-added assistance by sitting on boards, mentoring, and coaching of senior managers, in addition to artistic support. This is not hands-off, outsourced grantmaking. Focus on the triple bottom line and then get out!”

and later

When setting up these programs, I reminded the trustees that not all projects would come to fruition. For many venture capitalists, there is a rule of thumb regarding start-up investing. It suggests that on 1/3 of your investments you will lose all of your investment. On another 1/3 you may make or lose a little. The other 1/3 is where you make your money, and one or two is probably where the bulk of the return is. Unfortunately, this kind of risk-taking would seem foolhardy to funders.

I thought the second paragraph apropos to my posts of the last two days about admitting the arts experience can be disappointing.

One of the commenters to Killacky’s piece expressed concerns about the first paragraph I cited. The idea that foundation officers might come in to an organization that did not serve a traditional arts audience and tell them how they should be doing things seemed to strike the commenter as being even more detrimental than poorly funding the group.

This isn’t an unfounded concern. Venture capitalists often impose their own hand picked management teams on businesses in which they choose to invest and make demands about the way the company should be run. Depending on how it is handled, it either be a constructive or traumatic experience for the start-up that wooed VC support.

Foundations would presumably be entering a relationship with a fledgling arts organizations without the same sort of profit-driven motivation, but could still end up stifling the creative spark with too heavy handed an approach. The feeling that any attention is better than no attention being the stuff on which abusive relationships are made, arts organizations may bow to the demands of foundation officers, grateful that at least they can depend on their support over a number of years.

But obviously it can be a constructive situation for both entities if approached in a careful and deliberate manner. Being that intimately involved with an organization can give a foundation a much clearer picture about the needs and challenges faced by the sector they support than the sugar coated final reports they are getting and allow them to respond accordingly.

If foundations provide technical support and mentors over many years in the form of other working professionals rather than out of their own staff, the foundation can help arts organizations form support networks which will persist after their direct involvement ceases. As they share the fruits of their experience and own best practices, the mentors in turn can gain a deeper view of how different arts organizations operate than interactions at conferences and meetings can afford them.

Info You Can Use: Acknowledging The Arts Experience

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Welcome readers of You’ve Cott Mail and myriad other places. I appreciate your interest in the blog and yesterday’s entry about speaking more honestly about how an arts experience can occasionally be disappointing.

It is with some chagrin that I have discovered NEA chair Rocco Landesman talked about this very subject at the Chautauqua Institution about two weeks ago. One always likes to fancy they have stimulated lively discussion through the introduction of a timely subject. But of course, even I have made posts on the subject before so I can hardly expect to be the only one thinking about the subject.

If nothing else, the fact that Landesman has been speaking about it gives some indication that it is indeed timely and worth discussing. I have tagged this entry as part of my “Info You Can Use” series because Landesman mentions a number of ideas for better audience relations as well as noting some approaches that arts organizations have already put into practice.

“We might see an organization with an artistic director and a co-equal audience director. Rather than a manager of visitor services who reports to the director of external affairs who reports to a deputy director.

We might see fellowships for audience members…What if we complemented artist residencies with audience residencies, where we paid some audience members to attend exhibitions and performances? Or, better yet, what if arts organizations gave stipends to “audience fellows,” so that the fellows could go see whatever they wanted to see at other arts organizations?”

This last bit about encouraging audiences to see performances at other arts organizations isn’t as far fetched as it may initially sound. Back in 2006 the Marketing Director of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts made a comment on the blog about the organization’s plan to let patrons know about performances at other venues. Looking at their website, I can’t quite tell if they are still providing this information, but it looks like the marketing director is still there and hasn’t lost his job over the program.

More from Landesman: (my emphasis)

I visited the Seattle Art Museum, and they now offer “highly opinionated tours,” in which people paid by the museum walk through the galleries talking about the things they like, but also the things they don’t like. One of these docents led a tour in which he explained why Seattle’s Pollock isn’t really a very good Pollock at all.

We need to stop pretending that every single audience member needs to like every single thing we do.

Nick Hytner at the National in London, actually has his box office staff track subscribers’ likes, dislikes, and preferences, and has them e-mail the members and suggest some of the plays they way want to skip. I think acknowledging the viewers’ own tastes—in addition to curators’ and directors’ tastes—is absolutely key.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago put it extremely well. She said that arts professionals need to learn how to maintain their expertise, while relinquishing control. Madeleine will always have more expertise in contemporary art than I do, but I am still entitled to my own relationship with it, my own experience of it….”

Admittedly, some of these steps are a little bolder than we might be comfortable taking. This is info you canuse, but I make no claims about whether you will wantto use it. Certainly, one probably doesn’t have to adopt something as extreme as advising people not to attend a show. Just acknowledging that the arts experience can occasionally be disappointing in the course of normal conversation may earn good will through its simple earnestness.

Landesman covers other topics in his talk which might be worth a listen to many–especially for the flash mob performance which interrupts it midway. Much of the rest of his talk revolves around the same general theme of the need to support artists and artists needing to eschew the role of being separate and special to become more involved and present in their local communities.

Yeah, Sometimes It IS Boring

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I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to post about today, but Adam Thurman at Mission Paradox decided me with his post today about reducing the opportunities for audiences to be anxious about their attendance experience.

He starts his post:

When I picture someone entering a live performance venue I imagine a thought bubble above their head. Here’s the thought inside that bubble:

“Man, I hope this doesn’t suck.”

Interestingly enough, that is what I was thinking when I was driving to see a dance show this Saturday. I didn’t have too much basis for real concern since I knew the curators who put the show together and had worked with close to half the groups who would be performing. On the other hand, the event was billed as cross cultural and you never really know how successfully performers will execute their vision of what that means.

I think most of you with any experience in the arts know what I mean. Like me, I am sure you have seen some pretty awful stuff performed right after some pretty good stuff and are uncertain how the night will turn out.

Question is, do most people in our audience members know we have the same concerns abut enjoying the as they do? Do they know we can be worried about not liking the performance or being bored?

I suspect they don’t. I suspect they feel our disappointment with a performance will be expressed in terms of the failure of its attempt to illuminate the futility of the post-modern vision against the fin-de-siecle fatalism of the last decade.

Andrew Taylor once wrote he felt it was counter productive for arts organizations to never admit any program supported by a grant did not perform as planned or better.

“It’s an insight as old as theater — conflict, flaw, and tension are what make narratives compelling. And yet, read through most arts marketing materials or grant applications and what will you find? Perfection, triumph, success, and positive spin. Their performances are always exceptional. Their audiences are always ecstatic. Their reviews are always resounding (or mysteriously missing from the packet). Their communities are always connected and enthralled. In short, they are superhuman, disconnected, and insincere.”

I would say the same is true with audiences. We advertise everything we do as the most exciting and seminal work they will ever see but never concede audiences may not be in ecstasy every moment they are in the theatre. As a result, audiences expect to be in ecstasy and may either decide there is something wrong with them for not feeling amazed or decide they have been had by a bunch of B.S.

One of my favorite episodes in Drew McManus’ “Take A Friend To The Orchestra” program came about 6 years ago when Drew took the brother of WNYC Sound Check host, John Schaefer, to a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Jerry Schaefer had never been to an orchestral concert before. One of the parts that impressed me the most was that Drew admitted that he often gets bored at times during a concert and that it was okay to be bored at times.

I am not suggesting a full confessional after every performance outlining everything that went wrong. One common theme on this blog has been the idea that we need to speak about the arts experience in everyday life –when we are waiting online in the supermarket, at parties and picnics, in elevators and on buses. I am not talking about announcing your boosterism aloud in public places, but rather getting people to talk about their experiences, fears, anxieties, passions, etc., in relation to the arts. Part of that conversation needs to be acknowledging that, yeah sometimes it is boring; sometimes is it bad; sometimes it is confusing, even for those of us with a lot of experience.

The benefit people in the performing arts have as audience members when it comes to artists who are not household names is that we may often know more about the artist’s reputation than most. We can enter a performance space or gallery with a higher degree of confidence about the experience than others might.

This isn’t a peculiar characteristic of the arts, it just comes with exposure and experience. Sports fans will know what match ups are likely to be most exciting than will a new attendee to a game. Sports fans will recognize when a high stakes situation is developing while a novice allows their attention to wander.

While there are entire cable channels and sections of newspapers dedicated to educating people about why certain sports match ups will be exciting, the Arts and Entertainment channel shifted its focus in other directions and newspapers are dropping their culture reporting. The arts have to mostly rely on word of mouth and those with the most knowledge aren’t really speaking often or in a compelling manner that acknowledges the beauty and the flaws that make the beauty all the more remarkable.

And believe me, I include myself among those not communicating in a basic, honest manner devoid of marketing spin.

Funding The In Between Places

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Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas has been looking at how the National Endowment for the Arts distributed funds for its “Our Town” grant program. In the last three posts on the topic, he has been critical of the way the granting process is structured and executed, perceiving a surprising bias against rural communities given that it takes its name from Thornton Wilder’s play set in a rural location.

Scott’s initial criticism sort of deflated my sails when, by his criteria, the award to the Wallkill River School, Inc. in Orange County, NY where I grew up was not being made to a rural arts organization given the population of the county. I was excited to see that their project whose purpose is “To support the development of economic strategies for long-term, sustainable partnerships between the arts and agriculture in Orange County,” was funded.

I have to concede that the population has increased quite a bit since I was growing up and its psychological distance from New York City has diminished since then. (Though it still qualifies as “way upstate” in minds of NYC residents.)

I was also happy to see that the Trey McIntyre Project (TMP), headquartered in Boise, ID had gotten a grant. (Full disclosure, we will be presenting the dance company in Spring 2012.) Though it isn’t rural per se, Boise qualifies as fly over country in many people’s minds. I have found Trey McIntyre’s decision to locate there rather than NY, Chicago or L.A. to be commendable—and so has the population of Boise who treat them like celebrities. The group has made great efforts to expand the concept of a dance company’s place in the community by appearing anywhere and everywhere from flash mob like performances to dancing at the local NBA farm team games to creating their own art installation in a hotel room (forward to 3:30 to hear McIntyre talk about the installation)

I was also very happy to see a local burgeoning effort in support of Hawaiian culture was funded as well. I can probably devote an entry explaining how valuable this award is going to be in planting seeds for greater things.

All this being said, I felt Walters did a credible job in his entry today arguing that many elements of the application and review process placed rural arts organizations at a disadvantage.

As Walters acknowledge in his analysis on Monday, the NEA did make an attempt to enlist the participation of arts centers in rural areas and didn’t receive a very strong response. However, in reviewing the comments on his failed grant application, Walter notes that the criteria being used to evaluate his application wasn’t appropriate for the project he was proposing.

“When I consulted the NEA as to why my own “Our Town” grant was not funded, the notes from the review committee focused on excellence: WHO is going to be providing the art, and what are their credentials? Notice that my proposal was for a participatory arts program, and so the artists would be members of the community, not imported “professionals” from outside the community. Participatory arts, as the NEA knows from having recently published it own studies on the subject, is about enhancing the creativity of the citizenry. Credentials and press coverage are irrelevant.”

He also notes that since rural arts organizations don’t have large staffs, the three weeks notice they were given between being invited to apply and the deadline was barely enough time to compose a proposal. When they made it past the first stage, they were given only a month to assemble a complete proposal, an immense task given the length of the application and the limited staff with which to do it. These small staffs may also lack the experience and advisers to guide them in infusing the grants with the polish that granters like the NEA have come to expect.

I actually faced a similar situation here. A grant program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities specifically focused on community colleges was announced in June with a deadline in August. One of the things they are looking for is involving up to 12 other colleges in a partnership. So not only do you need to try to assemble a work group of professors and administrators on your own campus during the summer after everyone has scattered to the winds, you have to get buy in from the same nearly non-existent groups on other campuses as well!

Via the citation of a comment by Ian David Moss, Walters wonders if the NEA is suited and equipt to directly pursue its mandate of geographically diverse funding. He discards Moss’ idea of directing more funding to trusted partners in rural states and letting them make decisions in favor of asking the NEA to become more accountable by cultivating stronger relationships with organization that work closely with rural arts groups and making a better effort to recruit people with an understanding of rural arts operations to serve on grant review panels.

While I disagree with Walters’ criteria about what constitutes rural, I am generally with him about the need to make the grant process more accessible to arts organizations in small communities. A decade ago, heck, even 5 years ago, I would have said the NEA faced an immense task trying to identify and reach out to rural organizations. But with email and social media, it is fairly easy to create focused email lists and Twitter feeds with which to deliver information to these groups.

It is just a matter of enlisting the rural arts service organizations that provide support to these groups to assist them in making them aware of the channels the NEA will be using to communicate with them. As Walters suggests, a time table and structure that recognizes both the limitations and different array of opportunities specific to rural arts organizations. Given how few organizations applied, even an increase of participation by a handful of groups will allow the NEA to claim a many fold percent growth in rural program support.

Is It The Mastery Of The Medium Or The Idea That Makes Good Art

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Daniel Grant had a piece on the Huffington Post about a new trend in visual arts M.F.A. programs where training is tailored to students’ particular interests. He references the programs at New York’s School of Visual Arts which has a traditional program and a multi-disciplinary degree in arts practice.

“The traditional MFA is media-specific; you are a painter, you are a sculptor, you are a printmaker, and you study those processes intensely,” said David Ross, the chairman of the Art Practice MFA program. “The Art Practice program is for artists working in more hybrid areas, incorporating a number of different media or selecting the particularly medium based on what they are trying to accomplish at a given time. Many schools now see artists choosing to define themselves post-conceptually, in which the idea comes first and the medium comes second, and these artists are more difficult for the traditional program to accommodate.”

There seems to be similar programs at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University which has an MFA in Visual Art and Public Life. Grant describes the students in the Herron School program:

“Their focus is not so much creating something that can be exhibited in a gallery or even in a public square as it is developing projects in association with various business, community, cultural or governmental partners.”

I haven’t quite figured out what I think about these developments. My first thought was to wonder if perhaps these programs might be an outgrowth of the Pro-Am movement. If not directly related to or a result of Pro-Am, perhaps these programs are an expression of a general sentiment of people who are not complete experts but who are looking for a way to better express themselves.

Obviously, people who are seeking training at master’s level have a desire to be a little closer to the professional end of the scale. With a primary focus on the expression of an idea over mastery of a medium, there is much they have in common with the Pro-Am view of art creation and expression.

What I find encouraging is that these artists are looking to develop partnerships with different entities in the community. Their approach to art may result in people viewing it as more accessible and less intimidating. It looks like there is more inclusiveness in the process these artists use. It also appears as if these art students are being trained in business and social skills that can help with their careers upon graduation.

What contributes to my uncertainty is a concern that having a secondary focus on the medium will mean the students will lack the mastery to create truly innovative works. I know that the value of an art work is often more than just the adept use of materials. On the other hand, people wouldn’t value a Stradivarius if making a violin was just a matter of assembling wood well. Experimentation and understanding of how different materials interact when you combine or treat them in different ways can be a crucial to one’s development as an artist.

I am not suggesting artists be relegated to the solitary confinement of their studios. I don’t believe that is ultimately constructive for artists and their work. I also don’t think that the jack of all trades, master of none approach is valuable to artists in the long run.

I am thinking of a recent blog post by Tom Loughlin suggesting that BFA degree programs in Musical Theatre should be eliminated. In the post he points out that in the current state of the industry, those trying to train themselves to be a triple threat- someone who can act, sing and dance – will be beaten out by people trained to be specialists in those areas.

I am not saying that the generalist artist won’t create interesting works of artistic merit. I read the quote by Kenneth Krachek, director of the community arts program at the Maryland Institute College of Art where he says, “all the programs are supportive of each other, but they each have their own momentum and solar system.” Other MFA fine art students at the school “don’t interact much with us,” and that didn’t sound like an ideal dynamic to be cultivating.

I wondered if it might not serve people in both the traditional and new degree tracks if they were encouraged as students to follow a process where the generalist is mentored by the specialist of a specific discipline in the creation of a project. If this was continued when the students graduated and went out to work professionally this collaborative arrangement could be beneficial to both. The specialist would bring experience and knowledge of working in a particular medium. The generalist would bring a the experience of working with community entities and creating work for them rather solely for a gallery.

My Butt Among The Seats

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Thanks to the hard work of Inside the Arts mother hen, Drew McManus, Butts in the Seats has a new look.

And if I can figure out how to fully exploit some of the new features I see on the new post creation page, hopefully it will result in a better experience for readers.

Some elements of the new look represent a bit of an evolution/maturation in the way I view my online presence. When I started the blog, I wanted to maintain a sense of being an Every Man, or in this case, Every Arts Manager. I didn’t want people to read the blog and think that the things I was talking about only really applied to one particular discipline of the performing arts or one particular geographic region.

As a result I tried to stay vague in some of the details of my writing, often to protect the identities of some of those I was criticizing, but also to try to give readers a sense that the same situation might apply to them. The gymnastics I had to engage in to avoid providing details was often tougher than writing the posts themselves and probably added an element of awkwardness to my prose.

My plan is to move away from that a bit more. Some generalization is likely to remain in my writing, but I will try to provide more identifiable and specific references in the future.

I am also more identifiable on my blog. Except for a small headshot in my section banner on the central Inside the Arts site, there wasn’t any indication of what I looked like. On the new site, there is a 3/4 body shot of me in my theatre in the About the Author section. I make no warranties about whether knowing what I look like will enhance your reading pleasure, but there it is.

I have also found myself coming across a number of interesting links related to the subject of arts management lately. However, there is more information than I can blog on in a timely manner so I have finally relented and created a Twitter account for the blog at http://www.twitter.com/buttsintheseats. Links to my blog posts will appear there alongside other information pertinent to arts management I wish to share.

Hope you like the new look. Thanks for reading!

Info You Can Use: Variety of Thoughts On Dynamic Pricing

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It seems like dynamic pricing may start to creep into the non-profit performing arts sector as a common practice. Stories about it are starting to crop up more and more frequently. When the topic of changing prices based on market demand comes up, people often use the phrase “like the airlines do.”

So should I be surprised when today I saw a story about how Opera Australia got advice about dynamic pricing from the airline Qantas?

In the beginning of July, there was a story about dynamic pricing in the Los Angeles Times. Chad Bauman at the blog Arts Marketing did a good job addressing the recent move toward dynamic pricing in a post earlier this month.

Of course, who knows. Maybe dynamic pricing is just a hot story because newspapers see others during stories on dynamic pricing. Still, it is a conversation non profit organizations need to be having, if only to decide it isn’t for them.

I actually started a discussion on the Performing Arts Administrators’ group on LinkedIn back in May. I had some concerns about the approach to pricing suggested by a guy I was partnering with on a show. It ended up that I misunderstood what he was proposing.

There were only a few responses and the conversation appeared to have run its course when I went away on vacation at the beginning of June, but when I returned I found a slew of new responses. I think it reflects some of the concerns and thoughts people have about the practice.

One of the first responders, Mark Wladika, said the practice of variable pricing left him feeling manipulated, though allowed if people were aware from the outset that “hot shows will see an increase,” it might represent a middle ground. Another commenter, Omar Miller, noted that if the maximum variation was only going to be $5-$10, the potential revenue gains may not be worth the loss of good will if audiences felt manipulated. A concern for the good will of the community was echoed by a number of commenters.

As the conversation went on, the need to communicate the policy clearly seemed crucial as well as limiting it to single ticket purchasers and exempting subscribers. It was noted that lowering ticket prices at the last minute has the potential to alienate those who bought earlier at a higher price and end up reinforcing a procrastinating behavior.

Joanne Bernstein, a Chicago based arts consultant, advised that the decision to change a price be based on a rise in demand rather than proximity to a performance date. She argues that people are busy and should not be penalized for not being certain about their plans just because it happens to be less than 24 hours before a performance.

Maggie Christ brought up the legal issues surrounding variable pricing citing NYC laws that require if a range of prices is implied, the maximum price as well as the minimum price is required. For example, you can’t say tickets starting at $15 without noting that the top price is $500. Which, of course, gives a pretty good indication about the cost of most of the tickets and the probable location of those $15 seats.

Toronto based arts consultant, Linda Rogers, pointed out that some arts organizations are limited by the capacity of their ticketing systems. Airlines and many Broadway houses using services like Ticketmaster and Telecharge have a greater ability to alter their ticket structure in response to demand than most arts organizations. I have to agree there because the process we have to follow to charge a higher price on the day of the show is pretty clunky.

One comment I particularly liked came from Kara Larson, an arts consultant from Portland, ME.

“Two important points: 1) People value what we do differently. Correctly differentiating initial prices and dynamically raising them in response to demand allows people to decide for themselves what seats, timing, and price is right for them. The ones who want to wait for a sure-fire hit will often happily pay for the privilege. 2) Being responsible stewards of the organizations people charitably support means making the most of opportunities to earn revenue given our programming. Passing up opportunities to make revenue means asking for more donated support. And vice versa.”

In a later comment she made a pretty thought provoking suggestion about a different way to approach dynamic pricing:

“The base interest is understanding demand in our markets well enough to price ALL our tickets optimally. Building a rational projection model and adjusting it when we discover errors should be our first and most important task regarding pricing. Only when we err (significantly, in my opinion) do we need to correct by pricing dynamically. Dynamic pricing is an admission that we got the prices wrong in the first place, so badly that it’s worth it to the bottom line to invest in a new system for correcting them.

At the last arts center where I implemented dynamic pricing, the revenue increase was significant in the first season and less in the second. To me this was good news, because we had taken what we learned in year one and applied it to the base ticket pricing, so had less correcting to do at the last minute. Remember, whenever you price upward dynamically, you’ve already sold some (and often most) of your tickets at the wrong price.

I suggest that instead of spending what seems, industry-wide, to be an increasing amount of time debating the merits of dynamic pricing we all spend some time collectively developing much better predictive models for pricing in the first place.”

Some members of the group are moving forward with using dynamic pricing. Steve Carignan, Executive Director of the Gallagher Bluedorn at the University of Northern Iowa says he is moving forward with dynamic pricing this season. He asks,

“Performing arts has for a long time been linked to a discount mentality (devaluing our product and trying to cut our way to a smaller loss). Is it our customers who are uncomfortable or us?”

Liz Olson of the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts made a comment that gave me cause for concern.

“…I don’t think that foundations or donors will look at variable ticket pricing fondly. They like when we are able to show self-sustainability but from what I have seen donors tend to punish non-profits they deem as operating “too much like a for profit.” (as seen in the endless debate about overhead costs and executive pay at nonprofits.)”

Does anyone have any insight into the validity of this? Have any foundations made comments of this general sort? Another commenter said she didn’t feel this was the view foundations and donors viewed attempts at dynamic pricing. However, neither offered much in the way of explicit evidence for either view. I hate to say that from what I have read, either could be the dominant perception at this time. Or perhaps the practice isn’t wide spread enough that foundations have developed a clear policy and approach.

Info You Can Use: Shall I Pay Thee?

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Our friends at the Non Profit Law Blog linked to a presentation intended to be a guide about compensated time for non-profits. The reason the presenter, Veneable LLP, this is so important is because issues related to compensable time are becoming increasingly prevalent.

– Employers are failing to identify, record, and compensate “off-the-clock” hours spent by employees performing compensable, job-related activities.

– One third of surveyed respondents indicated that their organization had been hit with a wage and hour claim in the past year.

– Today, wage and hour class actions outnumber all other discrimination class actions combined.

– According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than 80 percent of employers are out of compliance with federal and state wage and hour laws.

The presentation is in PDF format so you can proceed at your own speed and there is a helpful chart at the end that summarizes it all. The laws about compensable time are a little tricky, especially related to travel.

Among the topics the presentation addresses:

      -If an employee works unauthorized over time, do you have to pay them? (Yep)

-Waiting time vs. Off Duty – Do you have to pay an employee who is waiting for a task? (phone to ring, machine to be fixed, package to arrive)

-Difference between compensable and non-compensable “on-call” statuses

-Are employees paid when they attend lecture/training/conference/meeting?

-How comp time can be used in lieu of over time pay

-Are employees paid if they are encouraged to perform work/volunteering for a charity?

-Is your internship program legal?

-What types of travel require compensation? What types don’t? Are employees paid for work they complete on their laptops while traveling?

-If an employee is required to take their work-issued Blackberry or other work related equipment home with them, is any compensation needed?

-Do you have to pay employees if a snow storm makes the street impassable for two days?

As I mentioned, some of these issues are a little tricky and nuanced. Those dealing with employees who do a lot of traveling may find it useful to download the guide as a quick reference. I could quote you back the answers on a lot of these issues, but I would be hard pressed to explain all the travel rules.

Trespassing Won’t Make You Many Friends

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The Non Profit Quarterly had a piece by Simone Joyaux which I suspect reflects what will be the necessary practice in fund raising for the future.

She asks fund raisers to stop asking their board members to trespass on their family and friends.

Trespassing is when you ask your friends or colleagues to give gifts and buy tickets . . . just because they are your friends and colleagues. This is the personal and professional favor exchange. This is obligation to a person rather than a cause. It’s a lousy way to raise money. It’s offensive. It alienates the asker and the askee. And it’s not sustainable.

[…]

How often have you, as a fundraiser, asked your board members to name names? How often have you asked them to bring in a list? Did you ask your board members to write notes on the letters that you planned to send to their list?

I say again, trespassing is a bad idea. It alienates board members. It alienates the friends and colleagues of board members. It doesn’t produce loyal donors or sustainable gifts.

Joyaux advises asking board members to suggest those they believe might be interested in supporting one’s organization and then inviting them to learn more about the organization. In the process of interacting with these people, one can gauge whether they are interested in what the organization does and perhaps what specific manifestation of the mission they may be disposed to supporting. From there you can work on cultivating a relationship with them that may see them more involved with the organization.

This suggestion isn’t terribly earth shattering or new. I have heard Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser say this is essentially what he does to garner support for the organizations he leads. When I first heard him speak about how he evaluates what people may be interested in and only really approaches them in relation to their interests, it seemed a less daunting and more considerate approach than soliciting everyone for every cause, even though it is much more time consuming.

As Joyaux notes, existing supporters like board members are probably going to be more comfortable implementing an organizational relationship building approach. After all, they invested the time to develop their personal relationships with friends and colleagues. While they may be willing to donate the fruits of that investment to their favorite non-profit, those relationships were built on entirely different circumstances which may not be entirely compatible with a request for support of a non-profit.

Now that social media allows people to be approached for their support every time they turn on a computer or pick up the phone, it is likely that only those organizations that take the time to cultivate a relationship with people will earn sustained support.

Not that social media won’t be a good tool for keeping people engaged with the organization’s work. It may just not be the strongest method for the organization and individual to gain a good mutual understanding and appreciation of each other’s priorities.

N.B. My apologies. Some how I ended up omitting the link to Joyaux’s piece when I first posted this entry.

Info You Can Use: Federal Employees As Board Members

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Well this one falls under the heading of, “I did not know that.” The Non Profit Quarterly reports that the Office of Government Ethics has proposed changing a rule that prohibited federal employees from serving as officers on a board without getting special permission.

I had no idea that federal employees faced that sort of restriction. I guess we either never approached a federal employees to be on the boards of the organizations at which I worked.

Actually, according to a link on the OGE’s website, until 1996 “a number of agencies had a practice of assigning employees to participate on the boards of directors of certain outside nonprofit organizations, where such service was deemed to further the statutory mission and/or personnel development interests of the agency.”

In 1996, the Department of Justice issued an opinion that a section of the US Code prohibited this type of activity. The restriction was based on concerns about board officers having fiduciary responsibilities that might conflict with the loyalty owed the United States.

But the Office of Government Ethics feels times are a changin’

“In an era when public-private partnerships are promoted as a positive way for government to achieve its objectives more efficiently, ethics officials find it difficult to explain and justify to agency employees why a waiver is required for official board services that have been determined by the agency to be proper,” OGE wrote. “The potential for a real conflict of interest is too remote or inconsequential to affect the integrity of an employee’s services under these circumstances.”

The comment period for the rule ended early this month. I wasn’t able to determine what the time line for the next phase of the rule making might be.

I don’t imagine non profits will line up outside federal buildings throwing their best come hither looks at employees when the OGE issues their final ruling. (Okay, I lie. I can imagine non profits lined up giving federal employees come hither looks. It is very amusing.) But if you have tried to recruit a federal employees before or have been thinking of doing so, the opportunity may present itself in the near future.

Info You Can Use: Arts in Medicine

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A commentary by Dr. Gary Christenson on the Minnesota Medicine website offers the most complete listing of the benefits of arts in medicine I have yet seen. Whether the piece inspires you to partner with medical services or not, it provides evidence of the benefits of the arts to use alongside illustrations of the intrinsic, economic and educational values.

The commentary starts out relating an anecdote about an actual emergency “stat” call for musicians in a hospital. While acknowledging that such an incident is a rare occurrence in medicine, Dr. Christenson shows that the arts are already playing an important role in the practice of medicine:

(my apologies for the length of the citation. While I did pare it down to a large degree, there were just so many exciting and compelling examples, it was difficult to decide what to excise.)

“Although some might be inclined to dismiss the arts as a triviality, luxury, or unjustified expense in a time of concern over rising health care costs, research is showing that use of the arts in health care can be cost-effective. For example, a recent study done at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare demonstrated that using music therapy when preparing children for CT scans significantly reduced use of sedative medications, associated overnight stays, and nurse time, and resulted in a cost savings of $567 per procedure. It also decreased the need for repeat CTs because of poor-quality scans. When extrapolating those numbers to all pediatric CT scans done in the United States, researchers estimated a potential savings of $2.25 billion per year.”

1. Studying the arts makes medical students into better doctors.

“In our state, storytelling and theater have been used to teach students how to effectively take a medical history. Last year, for example, Mayo Medical School and the Mayo Clinic Center for Humanities and Medicine partnered with the Guthrie Theater to offer the one-week selective “Telling the Patient’s Story,” which drew upon improvisation and storytelling to teach students to take and report patients’ medical history.”

“Harvard Medical School has found that training medical students in the visual arts can help them develop their clinical observational skills. Students who participated in formal training consisting of art observation exercises, didactics that integrate fine arts concepts with physical diagnosis topics, and a life-drawing session demonstrated better visual diagnostic skills when viewing photographs of dermatological lesions than students who only received conventional training.”

“The arts also can convey lessons in ways traditional lectures cannot. It isn’t surprising that the top-rated lecture by first-year medical students on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus for seven consecutive years was a reading of physician and playwright David Feldshuh’s Miss Evers Boys by Guthrie Theater actors. The play, about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, illustrates ethical issues related to informed consent and human experimentation.”

2. The arts have therapeutic benefits.

“Museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts have programs for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and memory loss that use visual and cognitive stimuli to evoke memories. Dance has been shown to improve the mobility of patients with conditions such as fibromyalgia and Parkinson disease.”

“Storytelling has been noted to improve the quality of life for cancer patients,10 increase lung function associated with asthma, and reduce symptoms and doctor visits. One report noted that regularly playing the Australia didgeridoo decreased apneic episodes for patients with obstructive sleep apnea.”

3. The arts can help prevent disease.

“..a campaign to decrease heart disease in England found that people were much more responsive to the message, “Dance makes the heart grow stronger” than to “Exercise makes the heart grow stronger.” Dance is one of the best ways to improve health on a number of levels. In addition to its physical benefits, dance enhances social engagement, which is important to overall health and well-being, and it’s one of the best activities for delaying the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”

4. The arts can improve the patient experience.

“…a body of research has shown that patients tend to be less stressed, less anxious, require less pain medication, and ready for discharge earlier when their environment includes views of the natural world.”

“Bedside visits by musicians and artists also distract children from pain and help them explore their feelings about their illness.”

5. The arts can promote physician well-being.

“…Although many physicians were involved in the arts before entering medical school, they put those activities on hold during their training. University of Minnesota medical students have an opportunity to keep those interests alive… The program…provides students with a small financial award to pursue and develop their interests and skills in such diverse areas as painting, drawing, singing, clowning, photography, and playing an instrument as a way to find relief from the rigors of medical study.”

Using the arts to reduce costs, provide relief and focus to patients and produce more effective doctors, what isn’t to love? As with all things, arts are only one part of bolstering well-being and providing better medical care. There is certainly a potential for it to become a much more important element in providing better medical care if employed and studied to a greater degree.

Dr. Christenson provides 20 footnoted references for his commentary which seems a good place to start for those looking to develop programs and partnerships to integrate the arts in medicine. The research is also obviously a good basis for advocacy about the value of the arts.

Building Cathedrals, One Budget At A Time

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In something of a complement to my post on Wednesday regarding the factors influencing decisions about providing arts classes in higher education, Friday I attended a retreat on budgeting with the rest of the college leadership.

Now if that sounds like something you would dread attending, I was right there with you. I had a copy of The Economist in my portfolio just in case things got too boring. However, it was really a very engaging and educational experience. I have a feeling that the facilitator that was hired to run the session probably anticipated the dread with which we were approaching the day because she started out by telling us we needed to change our perception of what we were doing.

She began with a story/parable about walking along a road and seeing two emaciated men banging away at blocks of stone. Asked what he was doing, the first man sighed that he was chipping stone. The second man seemed to be working with a greater spirit than the first and when asked what he was doing, the second answers with a beatific look on his face, “I am building a cathedral.”

I had heard that one before, but I had to admit that it did pretty much describe how most of us probably approach budgeting–as a burdensome chore. The fact is, we can approach it thinking about what doing a good job on the budget can enable us to accomplish. Its hard work, but no harder than constructing, painting and lighting a set for a play.

The problem for most of us is that no one admires what a good job we did on the budget like they will for the set. Few of us had the guidance of experienced people in crafting a budget. I have clear memories of the different areas of knowledge imparted to me by technical directors and master electricians and carpenters. My memories of practical instruction in budget and finance by mentors is a bit more hazy.

And, of course, it is easier to dream of building cathedrals when you actually have money to budget toward that goal, small as it may be.

In any case, inspiring parables aren’t going to keep morale high very long if things turn mind numblingly boring. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case. We soon broke up into groups. By luck of the draw, (actually, they had us count off by fives), I ended up in a group with the two people whose decision making most impacts my budget. The topic was–what aspects of the process most impact your budget and operations.

Since the theatre does a pretty good job of supporting ourselves with earned revenue compared to other areas, I don’t receive much of my budget from them. However, some years they will take money from our revenue, some years they won’t. But I never know. I said this sort of thing made it very difficult to plan and gave me no incentive to have money left over at the end of the year. Fact is, we could actually be more self supporting and engage in an equipment replacement program that would not require us to ask them for money if our surpluses were allowed to accumulate.

No sort of action or solution was suggested. Nor did I expect one. It was good to have a fairly safe forum in which to address this situation. It probably helped that I was relating a “building a cathedral” opportunity where I envisioned our small annual surplus being used toward a bigger goal.

The day was full of shuffling around to other groups to address other aspects of the budgeting process. One particularly interesting session had us looking at the strategic plan which is what is supposed to be guiding funding priorities. We were tasked to boil each section of the plan down to a sentence that provided a helicopter view of the section so that anyone in the organizational chart could read it and understand how their work contributed to the plan. One of the results was that the language we used to describe our section was similar to that of a couple other groups. This was encouraging because obviously, you want a degree of unity between parts of the strategic plan.

The problem was, that the facilitator was initially unclear about the significant differences between three of the sections. There was something of a suggestion that parts of one section really should be organized under the umbrella of a different section. I was rather impressed by the effectiveness of the exercise in revealing that some clearer delineation might be needed so that everyone in the organization understood their place.

The last phase of the day was creating a common set of criteria for funding that would be shared across the organization as budget requests were passed up the ladder.

These criteria were:

-Aligns with strategic goals
-Leverages resources, strengths and opportunities
-Possess motivation and capacity to implement
-Has data justifying the need and plan to assess the impact

One of the biggest problem faced in the current budgeting process is apparently the lack of supporting data. Requests were being passed up without sufficient rationale based on numbers, industry needs, etc

Then we looked back at the problems with the budgeting process we identified at the beginning of the day and tried to determine if the criteria we had created would help address them. In the end, the problems we felt they couldn’t address were the result of either external factors we didn’t have control over (i.e. the way the overall state system operated and things they required). The other general area was the mysterious process by which things that never even entered the budgeting review process got funded. A working group was formed to address how to make that process more transparent and perhaps more aligned with the common criteria. I am optimistic about the ultimate outcome of the efforts. I don’t think we will ever be rid of funding that circumvents the process, but I am fairly confident there will either be more transparency or less of it occurring.

Most of all I was quite pleased with the entire experience. It is certainly an exercise an art organization might use in order to get everyone invested in the budgeting process and discover the problematic areas related to the practice. It definitely needs a skilled facilitator to lead it. Money has great potential to be a contentious issue and it is easy to get side tracked by specific issues rather than working to identify the root causes.

To Cut Or To Keep Arts Classes

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I am starting to wonder if the same forces that are seeing the arts disappear from K-12 schools are starting to encroach upon university level education to the same effect. There have been recent articles about eliminating the liberal arts degree. Given the amount of debt you get into going to a 4 year university, there is a concern about having a degree in practical fields like business or science one can translate directly into a job.

But I am seeing first hand that there are pressures to even retain arts classes. We just had an acting faculty member retire and I was talking to the chair of his division about when the ad to replace him might go out. Unfortunately, replacing him is not going to be automatic because there are a number of factors the upper level of administration considers before giving approval for a search.

The first is whether the class can pay for itself. It isn’t a surprise to anyone that instruction in the arts is more expensive than in other disciplines because the student – teacher ratio has to be smaller in order to be effective. One professor to 16-20 students instead of 30+. When it comes to arts classes then, general arts classes like survey world music are preferred over specialized classes like piano, voice, violin, etc because the ratio can be higher.

I should also mention for those who aren’t aware, my facility is located on community college campus so the price per credit is $95 versus $350 a credit at the system’s 4 year campus. It’s much more affordable for students to take classes here, but the college has to serve a lot of students to generate appropriate levels of revenue.

The decision to replace the acting teacher won’t entirely be made based on money. The fact is, many students who take performing arts classes are apparently not graduating. No one is suggesting there is causation in that. It looks like the type of student that are taking the courses aren’t persisting.

The courses aren’t filling up until nearly the end of the registration period which means that many in the classes may not have the organizational skills and motivation to be there that other students in the college have. Whether they have procrastinated their decision to enroll or just recently moved to the area, they may be in the class because their first preferences were full. They may not be fully invested or even able to commit to pursuing a course of study through graduation due to personal motivation or external forces.

Whatever the reason, if you are an administrator making a decision about what courses to offer and you notice that even if people have done well in a course, they aren’t likely to persist in their studies, it may not be entirely unreasonable to ponder if resources were better directed.

Some of the solutions mentioned in my conversation with the chair were not unlike those suggested for the arts in general. One was having the value of the class to students redefined in the course listings–what skills are you going to come away with, what requirements does this course fulfill, etc. Just as we talk about the value of the arts to communities.

Another was basically just increasing word of mouth advertising. Essentially talking to the counselors about steering students toward the classes earlier in the enrollment process. One potentially promising development is that the college had made orientation mandatory for all students recently and the process starts with an hour long presentation in the theatre. Since many attendees have appointments with counselors soon after their orientation, hopefully the presentation with its goofy skit will result in students being more inclined to want to register for arts classes.

At the very least, I hope the orientation sessions will end my experience where alumni tell me they graduated from the college and didn’t know there was a theatre.

This situation has been the cause of a lot of thought for me. It is easy to damn people who make decisions to cut the arts purely on the basis of return on investment. Saying a course in the arts can’t help a person get a good job will raise a chorus of howls as people reach for studies that may show otherwise. For a lot of college arts programs across the country, this may be the prime criteria for cutting or keeping.

I have a harder time finding an argument against a fairly loose definition of success like is the person likely to graduate. Talking about the value of the arts to bolster creativity and learning capacity will fall flat against that.

These students aren’t the ones getting caught up in the arts lifestyle devoting all their time to their art rather than attending to their other classes. Those guys are familiar to me because they are always hanging around the theatre. I know which ones have started getting Ds and Fs. Which ones are doing well. Which ones had to remove themselves from that life so they could turn their lives around. Which succeeded and graduated and which failed.

There are a whole bunch of others that I never really see until they get up on stage for the final performances at the end of the semester and perform before an audience for the first time in their lives. No matter what their motivation for registering for the class in the first place, they are up there now demonstrating what they have learned. If they aren’t graduating, I hope they are at least taking something constructive away from the experience.

What’s Good For The Grágás Is Good For The Arts Organization

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I was reading that Iceland is in the process of updating it constitution and is soliciting feedback from its citizens. The constitutional council is posting drafts of each section online and are integrating some of the responses into the constitution. Actually, because so much of the activity is occurring online, they have suggestions from an international audience via their Facebook page. I am not sure if they have implemented international suggestions, but the people running their Facebook account seem to be doing a pretty good job of responding to those who post about the process.

I was thinking that this might be an approach that an arts group looking to serve a community might use as they began to generate an organizational structure. There seems to be some wisdom in getting everyone involved at the point of constructing the framework and having them continue to feel invested in the organization years into its operation because it has taken the community’s needs into account. A barn raising of the Internet age, if you will.

Of course, the tricky question is the degree to which you involve everyone. Trying to please everyone on a committee doesn’t end up pleasing anyone as we well know. There has to be a small group of people deciding what the focus of the discussions will be about. That is the function the 25 member constitutional council in Iceland serves.

On the other hand, going into the process with a lot of pre-conceived notions around which you will plug in community suggestions might also yield a product that no one really gets excited to be involved with. Deciding from the outset the organization will do Shakespeare when the community indicates a live music and visual art center is needed, for example.

Crowd sourcing feedback is probably never going to be a substitute for the good judgment based on hard work and research that starting any business requires. A serious look at demographics may show that the population can’t support a music and visual arts center for more than five years versus the prospects of a destination Shakespeare festival. However, using social media tools to disseminate information about why a music and visual arts isn’t going to viable may garner a good deal of faith and respect in the burgeoning organization when the community clearly sees they have done their homework.

Obviously, the same process can be used by existing organizations to strengthen their place in their community or even realign themselves with the existing needs. Iceland isn’t starting from scratch, after all. But there has to be real conviction in the organization to effect change. There can be a lot of organizational inertia trying to keep things from truly changing. If the change is coming due the realization that the faith and investment of the community has been lost, there could be a lot of resistance to overcome before truly constructive conversations about changes can transpire.

By the way, Grágás refers to the Grey Goose laws of Iceland that were in use until the 13th century. Therefore, I took some poetic license in the title of the entry to make it fit the goose-gander saying. The constitutional council using social media is known as Stjornlagarad.

Those Daring Leaders Of Non Profits

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A nod to our friends at the Non-Profit Law blog for noting that CompassPoint Non Profit Services and the Myer Foundation who teamed up three years ago to bring us the report I blogged on, Ready to Lead, studying trends in emerging leadership of non-profits, has come out with a new Daring To Lead, studying the status of non-profit executive directors.

The last time they studied this topic was 6 years ago, before the recession. Their new findings are worrisome in terms of the lack of succession planning but encouraging in respect to the amount of enthusiasm and lack of burn out the majority of executive directors feel in the face of the recession. Their three main findings deal with those topics: succession, the recession and executive director morale.

Finding 1
“Though slowed by the recession, projected rates of executive turnover remain high and many boards of directors are under-prepared to select and support new leaders.”

Due to the recession impacting their retirement plans, fewer executive directors left their positions than planned. A small percentage (9%) of respondents cited the lack of an appropriate successor as a reason for remaining. So while there hasn’t been as large an exodus as was once feared, little has been done to prepare for that eventuality.

“Executives and boards are still reluctant to talk proactively about succession and just 17% of organizations have a documented succession plan. Even more problematic is the extent to which many boards are unfamiliar with the dimensions of their executives’ roles and responsibilities. Just 33% of executives were very confident that their boards will hire the right successor when they leave. Performance management is a critical means of being in dialogue with an executive about success and its metrics, yet 45% of executives did not have a performance evaluation last year…Without consistent, meaningful engagement in what the job requires, many boards are under-prepared for their critical role in executive transition.”

The report also cites some numbers which indicate a series of mishires by boards and unclear expectations by boards and executives. One of the biggest challenges executive directors face is establishing an effective partnership with boards and getting the support they need in the early years of assuming the new role.

“It appears that many boards see executive transition as ending with the hire, when in fact leaders—nearly all of whom are in the role for the first time—need intentional support and development as they build efficacy in the executive role.”

Finding 2
The recession has amplified the chronic financial instability of many organizations, causing heightened anxiety and increased frustration with unsustainable financial models.

Hardly a surprise that many non-profit leaders are worried about whether their organization will continue to exist in these difficult economic times. Many executive directors reported having less than 3 months of cash reserves. According to the report, the common guideline is to have between 3 and 6 months. Many first year leaders are faced with the most daunting of situations.

“Thirty-two percent (32%) of executives in their first year on the job have less than one month of operating reserves; in other words, those on the steepest part of the learning curve often have the smallest margin for error.”

It it any wonder than that a listening tour by Building Movement in 2004 found a lot of prospective leaders in the next generation, while chomping for greater responsibility in their organizations, were reluctant to assume the executive position. (My post on their report here)

Finding 3
Despite the profound challenges of the role, nonprofit executives remain energized and resolved.

The very encouraging news in the face of all this.

“Forty-five percent (45%) reported being very happy in their jobs, and another 46% reported that they have more good days than bad in the role. Levels of burnout, especially given the economic climate, were low; 67% of leaders reported little or no burnout at all. In fact, leaders distinguished between burnout, which they associated with disengagement and ultimately leaving the job, and the realities of fatigue and elusive boundaries between their work and personal lives that go with the job. Forty-seven percent (47%) of executives reported having the work-life balance that’s right for them, while a significant minority (39%) said they did not.”

One of the biggest challenges executive directors reported they faced was human resource management. Attracting people, retaining them once they were trained and had skills to find better work and motivating those that stick around toward a unified organizational goal comprise a tough task for these leaders. There seemed to be a loose process of delegation and sharing of responsibility that didn’t approach formal mentoring.

“And a large majority (81%) reported having someone on staff that they trusted to make important organizational decisions without consulting them. Explicit executive mentoring of other staff was a relatively infrequent practice, with 31% of executives reporting being in an explicit mentoring relationship.”

The leaders themselves eke out a rough system of acquiring leadership training/mentoring/coaching/peer networking to improve their own skills.

Few executive leaders spend significant time interacting with boards of directors. 55% responded as spending less than 10 hours a month on board related activities which is at best 6% of their time. According to the report, other studies have found that executive directors who spend 20% of their time on board related activities are most satisfied. Most of those responding to the Daring to Lead survey were dissatisfied with their board relations.

As succession planning has been one of my favorite topics, you know I am going to suggest people should read the results. It is only 20 pages long. They make suggestions at the end about how to improve the overall situation. The general thrust of their advice is clear before you reach it–basically boards need to do a better job of succession planning and find ways to support and engage with the executive director more frequently and effectively.

One area that isn’t really covered in the body of the report but that is mentioned in the calls to action at the end is for funders to recognize the role they play in perpetuating the current situation and how their initiatives can move things in a more constructive direction.

Can You Buy At The Price You Are Selling?

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I often have arts professionals in their late 30s-early 40s ask me for comp tickets or ask me to request comps on their behalf at another performance space. Their whole decision to attend is based on whether they can get the comps. Since the ticket prices have been in the $10-$30 range and some of these people have stable incomes, on a couple occasions I have opined that this sort of request is to be expected when you are a poor college student, but didn’t they think that at this stage in their career and level of success it wasn’t time to start paying for tickets and free up those comps for starving college students.

This post isn’t about deadbeat mid-career artists who should have long ago started attending shows to support the arts and not because they get comps. As fun as ranting on the subject might be, I am pretty much done now.

I started with that little gripe to catch attention and segue into my real topic of wondering how many artists actually can’t afford to attend/buy the sort of art for which they are being paid. The thought occurred to me as I was wandering through the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art and I saw a couple notations about some of the artists owning pieces by other notable artists. I wondered if that were still the case. More to the point, are artists, who sell one of their pieces for a certain price, buying the works of other artists at comparable prices. If not, is it because of an unwillingness to do so or because they can not afford to do so.

Following the latter train of thought, it isn’t news that people in the arts don’t get paid very well–especially those producing the art. (Drew McManus’ recent Compensation Reports illustrate this for orchestras.) I am sure some people are eager to liken artists to third world sweatshop workers who could never afford to buy the clothing they make, but I am pretty sure things aren’t that bad. Many performing artists can probably afford to see a couple shows at the level people are paying to see them perform, but perhaps not as many as they might like or would be helpful toward advancing their craft.

I have no idea where visual artists stand in this regard. My guess is that for the time it takes to create a piece, many probably make below minimum wage and have many mundane bills to pay before they can think about acquiring works of their own. But honestly, I have no idea about the art acquisition statistics for visual artists. Does anyone have any insight or links to research on this matter?

Actually, while I am thinking about it… I have seen a lot of surveys being done about engaging audiences, marketing to audiences, measuring how involved the general public is in the arts (and the need to redefine what activities count as engagement), and even the SNAAP survey which tracks the “lives and careers of arts graduates.” But as far as I know, no one has really surveyed artists to see how involved they are in attending/purchasing the work of others.

I think it would be especially interesting to see the results in terms of cross-disciplines– how often do theatre people attendance dance, how often to dancers go to museums, how often do sculptors go to the symphony? I would also be interested to find out if that changes as a person gets older and advanced in their careers. Do arts people only go to see stuff from other disciplines when they are young and poor and their friends are doing a thing in an abandoned warehouse or do they continue throughout their lives and consume a wider variety?

There would probably be elements of the results that were satisfying as well as some that were depressing. In any case, they could be used to mobilize action. At the last National Performing Arts Convention, people had so many ideas about what to do but were paralyzed about how to do it. Maybe the first, best and simplest step would be to look at the results of a cross-discipline survey mobilize a grassroots support effort by either saying, “Hey, you guys don’t support each other enough in your communities, get out there and see stuff,” or “You guys are really supportive of each other. Now we are are going to train you to advocate to your neighbors for your disciplines and those of your colleagues of the other disciplines. We succeed when we all stand together.”

It’s Yesterday Once More

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Tip of the hat to Don Hall (aka Angry White Guy in Chicago) for linking to the Everything Is A Remix web series, some thing of a labor of love by NY film maker Kirby Ferguson. Parts One and Two came out a while back. Part Three just came out a week ago. The last part is due out this fall.

As I have been thinking about intellectual property rights recently, the series struck a chord with me. As you might imagine, the premise of the series is that there are no original ideas. The first video makes that abundantly clear by examining music, especially that of Led Zeppelin, who didn’t make a lot of effort to change any elements of the songs they were appropriating and very little to credit the original artists either. The second video talks about movies like the Star Wars series and the Kill Bill movies and the influences they tapped.

In the third part, Ferguson starts to talk about how creativity and inspiration are based on the work of others, standing on the shoulders of giants, as Isaac Newton famously said in the 17th century. (Though Bernard of Chartres apparently referenced the metaphor in the 12th century.) His example that most startled me was noting that Xerox created a graphical interface computer with a mouse, desktop, pop up menus and other familiar features, Alto, in the 1970s. It was mostly used by Xerox and some universities and was never released for commercial use. Apple made improvements to the design and interface as well affordability and released the Lisa and Macintosh in the early 80s and that eventually morphed into the iPads people are running around with today.

There is actually a transcript and links to all the music and video Ferguson used for each video chapter, should one wish to purchase any of it.

One thing I appreciate about a lot of blogs and other online venues is that people often make an attempt to at least make a passing reference to the source of their information and the jumping off point for their posts. I feel a little bad for Xerox. Sure, they failed to really exploit the technology they developed for nearly a decade before Apple took off with the idea. Because of this their name gets lost in history if not for people like Ferguson. I am sure Apple probably would have faced a law suit if they had made a public nod in their direction.

Still, it is nice for people to acknowledge that they got their good ideas from you. The tracking data for this blog often shows people from universities reading for a long time. I often wonder if my ideas are making it into a paper–and if I am being credited. Or maybe someone just left their browser window minimized behind their chat window for a long time.

The discussion about intellectual property rights, etc is a pretty lengthy debate and even though I recently talked about the issue, I actually wanted to take another tack with this post and ask:

Are we in the arts standing on the shoulders of those who came before and moving ourselves to innovation?

Again, a subject of lengthy and long debate where the current thinking is probably leaning toward an answer in the negative.

But it strikes me that maybe things aren’t so bad as they seem. Or at least perhaps some of the steps that need to be taken may not be as intimidatingly far away as they seem. If, as Kirby Ferguson says, innovation doesn’t come mostly with a flash of divine insight but rather after an onerous road littered with failures and mistakes, then maybe it is just a matter of recognizing how the past is manifesting itself today. (Albeit probably requiring hard work and likely failures.)

I think I have mentioned before that when I was in grad school getting my MFA in Theatre Management, my class read Danny Newman’s Subscribe Now! was unworkable in current times when so much competed for people’s time and attention. He suggested having subscription parties where key people in the community would invite their friends over for tea and would help convince them to subscribe to your season.

Seems pretty difficult to replicate these days if you think about it in literal terms. But this is exactly what happens on different social media platforms and sites like Kickstarter. Key people in the community present your cause/organization to their friends and convince them to become involved. It is tougher to identify specific influential people than in the past when planning subscription parties. But for the same effort you invested in cultivating relationships with those people, you can disseminate information about your organization in a manner that convinces people to become interested and involved with your organization. They may not become as deeply invested as people did in the past, but you can potentially reach far more people than you did in the past.

I will grant that some innovation that moves past recasting the old in familiar terms will be required for the arts to successfully innovate for the future, but it doesn’t all have to be created nearly whole cloth from scratch.

(In the interests of correctly referencing things. The title of this blog is from a Carpenters song)

Info You Can Use: Social Media Tips

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In May Tech Soup hosted a series of Monday Twitter chats on the topic of Social Media. They provide a summary of the discussions on their forums. The discussions covered the use of Twitter, Facebook and Videos. Since I have read a fair bit on the use of these, I was most interested in their final discussion which covered the effective use of Tags.

I add a lot of tags to posts I make both here on the blog and connected to social media sites I use at work. I am just never sure if what I am tagging is actually effective. It seemed like being fairly generous with tags was good everywhere except Twitter.

“Blogs, photos, video, and bookmarks can benefit from the use of many tags when they are uploaded. Twitter, again, distinguishes itself, however, by favoring a “less is more”and approach to tagging. It is an accepted convention on Twitter that too many hashtags is unhelpful and, in fact, makes a tweet look too busy and difficult to read. Use tags to not only find content but to identify individuals or organizations who are creating or sharing useful information and, in the case of Twitter, to engage in actual real time conversations or tweetchats.

Individuals who are new to tagging might find themselves asking what tags are best to use for their content. For starters, it is worth considering what types of words might be used to describe your content. A helpful question to ask is, “who is this content intended for?” Understanding who your intended audience is and what terms they might use to seek out your content will help you narrow down on the most appropriate tags to use.

If you are just beginning to use tags, it is often helpful to explore and use tags on broad topics such as “nonprofit,” “art,” and so on, to reach out to a broad audience if you are not familiar with more specific tags for your content. As the article Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging suggests, “be a lemming” and follow what others are doing which can also help you discover more specialized, niche tags.”

I found the advice at the end regarding paying close attention to what other people are using to be particularly valuable. Even if you think you know the hot buzz words from your industry, they may not be the most effective on social media. Tech Soup links to a piece, 40 Hashtags for Social Good which notes that nonprofit is a more popular tag than nonprofits. In the chat about Twitter, Janet Fouts cautions people to research the hashtag they intend to use in case someone else’s of it results in a collision of messaging.

I found the recap of the chat about Twitter to be helpful just because it can be very difficult to get your point across in the limited number of characters and I can also use more guidance. On top of that, the advice is to be as brief as possible in order to leave room for other people to comment and interact with you. Tech Soup also suggests a number of tools that allow everyone in the organization to share the burden of monitoring and creating tweets.

Your experience may vary, of course, so read whatever might be helpful.

Protecting Yourself Into Obscurity

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The debate about intellectual property rights rattled around my head while I was visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art and later the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was somewhat surprised to learn they permitted photography provided it was for private use and flash was not used. Video is forbidden. As a contrast, in most live performance settings, you can’t use any sort of recording device at all.

Now let me acknowledge from the start that there are marked differences between the two settings. In a gallery one has greater leeway in the timing of photographs. You can wait for a group to move away from a piece before taking a picture. In a live performance, great moments are fleeting. And because it is more difficult to properly frame people in motion, you often feel the need to take multiple pictures in a short time. This sense of urgency can inevitably put the photographer at a live event in a position where they are impinging on the enjoyment of other attendees far more frequently than the museum photographer. Unless most everyone is participating in recording the event, the distraction of the attempt is generally undesirable, even without flash.

But outside the time when the performance is occurring, almost every element of the performance is protected. Whether you are in the audience before the show or on a backstage tour, you can’t take pictures of the set, lights or costumes because they are considered protected intellectual property. Performers also reserve the control of their likeness.

Yet when I was at the Metropolitan Museum there was an exhibition of costumes by Alexander McQueen and unless I missed the sign, the rules about photography were the same as the rest of the museum. Perhaps it was because his designs were considered fashion and therefore meant to be photographed. But what about all the other works in the museums which are still protected by copyright and whose creators are still very much alive? Are they not being harmed by people taking pictures of their work? Maybe there is a debate raging in the visual arts world that they are. I have only really started reading about visual arts issues in earnest over the last year. Perhaps I have missed the conversation.

Heck, will my posting images from Storm King Art Center dissuade people from visiting them? If so, the genie is out of the bottle Google Maps actually lets you view photos of each piece as it is positioned on the ground. I am guessing that isn’t about to erode attendance because I saw a large number of tweets about visiting Storm King the last few days.

It got me to thinking that all these restrictions are seriously impeding the cause of the performing arts. The elements I am referring don’t even enter the discussion about whether a bootleg copy of a performance replaces a possible sale. This doesn’t approach the question about whether agreeing to allow a promotional video to be broadcast on television also gives permission for the video to be posted on YouTube, if it deserves additional compensation and if it is eroding one’s brand. These are already issues of debate and clearly worthy of discussion on their own.

Few people are going to make the decision to skip the show because they saw a close up picture of a costume or the unattractive back side of a flat. Yeah, so the illusion is broken, but for a lot of people it is exciting to compare the reality with the illusion that fooled them. Are designers going to suddenly be forced out of work or their reputations ruined when photos of the show start appearing online? Will those pictures threaten to allow less talented people to replicate the designs at a lower cost? How is this more a threat to a designer than to a visual artist? Yes, there may be proprietary technology involved. However, most people on a backstage tour don’t have the means to replicate it and if those that do can recreate it from passing photographs, they probably have the means to acquire the information with relatively little effort anyway.

What is being protected? Is the value of whatever is being protected actually enhanced by doing so? Or is the fact that so few are ever exposed to it mean that its perceived value is generally insignificant?

Summer Vacation 2011, The East Coast

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So I am back from my vacation! From the traffic statistics, it looks like a fair number of people enjoyed reading some of the back catalog of posts to which I provided links. My travels this year took me and my friends back to the East Coast to visit the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (access is regrettably much more restricted since 2001 than when I was growing up); Niagara Falls (I may actually be in a video promoting Ontario); the Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg; Philadelphia, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and New York City, which included visits to some Broadway shows and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One of the centerpieces of the trip and something many readers may not be familiar with, was taking a canal boat on the Erie Canal.

Erie Canal
View of the Canal

Admittedly, the coolest part was going through the locks.  Fortunately for me, the diesel engine drown out my singing of the Erie Canal Song or I am sure my friends would have tossed me overboard.

 

That’s The Way We Came In. The water was all the way up there at the top of the wet line
That’s The Way Out After a 25 Foot Drop

 

Another place we went early on in the trip was Storm King Art Center, a 500 acre sculpture park just north of NYC. I actually grew up in the same county but I never had the occasion to visit. As I wandered about, I wondered why my schools never had a trip to this place. The sheer enormity of the park and many of the sculptures would have won over most of my classmates who really would have wanted to go to an amusement park instead.

Zhang Huan, Three Legged Buddha
Menashe Kadishman, Suspended
Alice Aycock, Three-Fold Manifestation II

I guess it is true that those who live near sites of cultural/historical significance or just major attractions don’t end up visiting them because they are so easily available. I ended up traveling 5,000 miles to visit a place that was only about 45 minutes from me most of my life.

Looked Better On My Blog Anyway

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I will be back from vacation soon, I promise you!

In the meantime, have a gander back in time once more. In 2005, the Wallace Foundation commissioned a study which came out, “Gifts of the Muse – Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts” Artsjournal had a week long discussion about the study.

I made a comment on the discussion which I ended up reposting on my blog because HTML links were forbidden at the time. I have to say, I still like the idea I expressed at the end of the post about community arts groups cooperating on a shared showcase space.

Conversation During Controversy

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I think I have re-linked to this story a number of times over the course of my blog, but Neill Archer Roan’s recounting of how the Oregon Bach Festival engaged their community in a conversation about the controversies surrounding a performance of Bach’s St. John’s Passion has always seemed to be a great example of what arts organizations can do at their best. Granted, it requires a whole lot of courage, especially in these days where social media can generate furor in a matter of moments. I fear the conversations wouldn’t have been so constructive had this happened this year.

Roan’s original post is regrettably no longer available, but I believe my post does a good job of relaying enough basic information to generate discussion within one’s organization.

Pro-Am Divide

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Today I harken back to a time when the discussion of Pro-Ams as a term had yet to really take off, but people had started to get a sense something was going on in this respect that was worth talking about. In this entry, I make a tongue in cheek assertion that mismanaging arts organizations is best left to the professionals.

Cost of Making Things Free

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So I am off on vacation for a couple weeks. Regular readers fear not! I have set up a series of entries to appear according to my usual posting schedule.

Since summer officially started, I thought it appropriate to take a look back at my post about how the Public Theatre manages to offer Shakespeare in the Park for free. Please be sure to read to the comments section in the entry where my misunderstandings were corrected by a reader two years after the post. In my defense, the Shakespeare in the Park website still doesn’t do much to clarify that.

News You Can Use: Musicians Are Delicious

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If you're ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you're ready for any emergency. emergency.cdc.gov

As you can see in the above, the Centers for Disease Control have finally acknowledged the threat of a zombie apocalypse. Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for bringing this important government service to my attention.

From the CDC website:

“If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control (including isolation and quarantine)…Not only would scientists be working to identify the cause and cure of the zombie outbreak, but CDC and other federal agencies would send medical teams and first responders to help those in affected areas.”

Actually, while this is really on the CDC site, they use the subject of a zombie attack to reinforce the need to have good emergency plans and supplies prepared for any disaster. Some examples:

“First Aid supplies (although you’re a goner if a zombie bites you, you can use these supplies to treat basic cuts and lacerations that you might get during a tornado or hurricane)”

“Pick a meeting place for your family to regroup in case zombies invade your home…or your town evacuates because of a hurricane.”

“Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.”

While the whole zombie attack craze may have peaked and is already on its way out. (Yeah right, zombies are not that easy to kill!) The tongue in cheek approach mixing “fiction” (the government will never really seriously admit the zombie problem we face) with the real message they are trying to communicate–and offering social media options to spread the word–could easily be used by arts organizations to communicate their core message.

On a related topic, a study was recently released providing information that will be of great importance to arts people when the zombie attack comes. According to the Freakanomics website,

“A new study argues that musicians have more highly developed brains than the rest of us….New research shows that musicians’ brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation.”

So when the zombies come, all you really need to do is be faster than the musicians or point out the location of their delicious, highly developed brains to the zombies. Of course, given that musicians have a heightened alertness and calmness, they will likely possess the composure needed to effectively flee themselves, so you will have to be especially canny.

(Thank god for the CDC. I was wondering how I was going to address the Freakanomics piece without feeding the egos of my Inside the Arts brethren who are mostly musicians.)

Solving Other People’s Problems

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Daniel Pink recently wrote a piece in The Telegraph about how people are more effective at solving problems if the problems are not their own. In a recent study, those who were told they were solving a problem for someone else found more effective and creative solutions than those who were told they were solving the same problem for themselves.

In another study, people were asked to choose a gift for themselves, for someone close to them and for someone they barely knew. The less familiar the person, the more innovative the gift that was chosen.

Over the years, social scientists have found that abstract thinking leads to greater creativity. That means that if we care about innovation we need to be more abstract and therefore more distant. But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view. We draw closer rather than step back.

That’s a mistake, Polman and Emich suggest. “That decisions for others are more creative than decisions for the self… should prove of considerable interest to negotiators, managers, product designers, marketers and advertisers, among many others,” they write.

[…]

And while much of our business world is ill-configured to benefit from Polman and Emich’s insights, the rise of crowd sourcing and ventures such as Innocentive (which allows companies to post problems on a web site for people around the world to solve) suggests that the moment may be right for reconfiguring the broader architecture of problem-solving.

Pink offers five suggestions for either seeking the independent viewpoint of others or try to disassociate oneself from their business. A commenter, Lowell Nerenberg, talked about mentally calling on the spirit of his dead father to help him with his writing which I thought was an interesting approach.

What popped most prominently to mind, however, when I was reading the article was the question- If this is true, why aren’t non-profit boards more effective at leading and finding better approaches to doing business? While non-profit boards do essentially run and have ultimate ownership of an organization, most board members have a generally disassociated view of their relationship to the organization. This is essentially built into the basic design of non-profit boards. They generally don’t meet to discuss the business of the organization more frequently than once a month. According to the research, they should be fairly well positioned to generate creative solutions to the problems their organization faces.

And maybe they do come up with grand ideas. From what I gather from the research Pink references, no one looked into how often a solution generated by an outsider was actually compelling enough to be implemented. Good ideas may be generated, but perhaps there are impediments to actually putting them into effect. People may not feel confident enough in the idea to champion it. There may not be sufficient collective will to effect the necessary changes, especially if some sort of sacrifice was required. Or perhaps the board might feel it is the place of the senior staff to provide leadership in bringing about the change.

Operating under the assumption that non-profit boards of directors do possess the mental distance necessary to generate creative solutions, we get back to the oft mentioned discussion about training/creating a board which is knowledgeable and empowered about its role and responsibilities and is providing effective guidance and direction to the staff.

If the board finds it is too close to the problems of the organization to address them, then obviously the counsel of disinterested parties mentioned by Pink is likely to be necessary.

One implication of these studies I don’t even want to consider is that the nosy neighbor who is always butting into your business and giving unwanted free advice might actually be saying something of value. (Though likely they are too closely involved in monitoring our lives to enjoy the proper perspective of distance.)

Info You Can Use: Speak Passionately, Persuasively…and Briefly

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I love it when, in the course of a few minutes, I come across different web pages that seem to go together like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese Peanut Butter cup.

In this instance one link was provided by Drew McManus who noted Harvard Business School’s “Elevator Pitch Generator.” Based on the old scenario that you might get lucky enough to gain access to a powerful decision maker in a place away from their gatekeeper staff like an elevator, enterprising people are encouraged to find a way to talk about their idea or business in a compelling way in under a minute. The pitch generator coaches you through the process of formulating that pitch.

After answering who you are, what you do to bring value, why you are unique in delivering value, what your immediate goals are and how the listener is involved in those goals, the generator analyzes the pitch. The generator tells you your word count, how long it might take to deliver it and notes how many times you repeated words. You have the opportunity to revise your pitch or email/print it off for use.

The second web page I came across (I apologize for not properly noting the source of the link) was on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog. Katya Andresen references Charles Green’s Trust-Based Selling where he talks about the six toughest questions customers ask sales people.

Katya uses this to create the 5 Toughest Questions Donors Will Ask:

1. Why should we choose to donate to your organization?
2. What makes your organization different?
3. What experience do you have?
4. We aren’t interested, why should we pay attention to you?
5. Why is your overhead so high?

She provides suggested answers to each and acknowledges there may be more toughest questions to add by asking readers what tough questions they have been asked.

The response I liked the best was to the last one, probably because it was expounded up at length in a separate blog post of its own.

“This is not about salaries. This isn’t about overhead. It’s about your heroic staff, creating amazing arts programs that transform the people you touch. The end results of your efforts is the story you tell in your fundraising pitch. That’s not self-serving! Your CEO talking about the lives you change is not self-promotion—it’s the beating heart of your mission. Say it loud and proud.

If I were at your arts organization, I’d tell an incredible story about one child touched by a single performance. And I’d say what made it possible was my small, dedicated team. With a donor’s support, more of that magic can happen.

You raise money by talking about the impact of your work—not about budget line items. If a donor demands to see the numbers and asks about pay, tell a great story about one of your staff to illustrate my point: that nothing wonderful happens without a creative, committed team. (I assume your staff isn’t being paid $1 million a piece—that’s something I can’t spin.)

The bottom line: Don’t be afraid of talking about your people. They aren’t overhead – they are change agents. If they do great work, put them front and center in your stories of transformation. To use a theater term, they deserve center stage.”

There is so much focus on minimization of overhead as a measure of a non-profits success, mostly brought on by a very small number of charities paying executives a great deal of money, that it is helpful to have a little guidance on the subject. Mostly, she is reminding us that it is the work that really matters and that is what should be talked about. Saying we need to pay a liveable wage to retain talented people may sound too similar to the arguments banks make that they need to pay big bonuses to retain the top talent for people to make a distinction. It is probably better to focus on the fact you are employing people who bring both talent and passion to effect change and follow Katya’s advice not to focus on the money.

It seems to me that you can use the elevator pitch generator to hone how you talk about your organization, especially to donors. Talking about how people have been affected may need to take longer than a minute to be properly persuasive. But while you don’t want to gloss over a compelling anecdote in order to tell the story of your organization in under a minute, what is said still needs to be lean and to the point.

Info You Can Use: Tix, Pix, Kits and Internships

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I am a busy, busy boy this week which is why I ended up not posting yesterday. Hopefully things will calm down a little by next week. So by way of recompense for not posting yesterday, I offer you four links to practical information for use in your arts organization. I am sure at least one of these links will prove useful to you.

First up, Richard Kessler recently posted a toolkit for getting parents involved in arts education, Involving Parents and Schools in Arts Education: Are We There Yet? What is special about this guide is that it is written by parents for parents. Presumably, parents will know what best motivates them to get involved. As Kessler says, “You have to admit, there’s something to be said about a guide that emerges directly from the work of parents, educators, and partners, rather than from staff.”

I haven’t gotten a chance to look at the whole thing, but I am encouraged that the second chapter is “Understanding Parents” and the fifth chapter is “Motivating Parents” with the “Educating Parents” in between. In the arts I think we often want to skip past the understanding and educating parts and move straight to motivating audiences into the action of attendance. The handbook reminds us of the proper order of things. The guide is 45 pages long. Fifteen pages are devoted to interacting with parents, the other 30 odd are sample forms, checklists and templates to use in organizing parents toward a school arts event.

Next, a link from our friends at the Non-Profit Law blog to the Department of Labor’s fact sheet about what is allowed during an internship under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It should be noted that these rules only apply to for-profit businesses at the moment, but a footnote they state (my emphasis) “Unpaid internships in the public sector and for non-profit charitable organizations, where the intern volunteers without expectation of compensation, are generally permissible. WHD is reviewing the need for additional guidance on internships in the public and non-profit sectors.” So it might be prudent to design your current internship program with the for-profit guidelines in mind.

Chad Bauman talks about a plan that the Arena Stage formulated to wean people off student discounts. They used to offer $15 tickets to people under 30 during the week prior to the performance. The problem was, once they turned 31, their ticket price went up to $60. It appeared this steep price jump was discouraging people from continuing to attend.

Now their plan is to offer a “pay your age” pricing for 3% of the seats starting two months before the first performance. The hope is to not only create the idea of paying an increasing amount as you age, but also emphasize the importance of buying tickets early rather than the week of the performance.

This program is still only available to people under 30. You don’t pay $85 if you are long lived. In the comment section of the entry, Bauman addresses the potential sticker shock a person might get upon turning 31 and finding they now have to pay $60 instead of $30. I really appreciate his view of cultivating a person over 10-15 years.

“Once a patron turns 31, and we have already gotten them into a pattern of buying early for a discount, we would then offer them a 3-play preview subscription acquisition promo probably in the range of $99 for three plays (or $33 per ticket). After they “age-out,” my next major priority is getting them to subscribe. Then once they subsribe, I will work to get them to upgrade their subscription packages. This is a long term strategy that really looks at the customer over a span of 10-15 years. From first time PYA buyer to full season subscriber and donor will probably take 15 years.”

Finally, if you use images from the internet and are confused about the difference between royalty free and copyright free images or aren’t really even sure about acquiring images to use, Tentblogger has a good comprehensive guide (with supporting images, of course) dealing with all these questions and more.

Change Content For Specific Audience? Good Question

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Last month, Ken Davenport over at Producer’s Prospective issued a “you make the call” challenge to his readers and it ended up the most read and commented on post of April. People were still adding their opinions as of last Friday. Here is his scenario and challenge.

I have a division at my office that sells group tickets to Broadway shows. A few weeks ago we got an inquiry from a group of 500 people that was looking for a show. Yep, 500! That’s 1/3 of a big Broadway house, which means quite an impact on a weekly gross….

The group came back and said there was one show that they specifically interested in. “Great,” we said and started to place the order.

There was just one problem.

The group explained that there were a few moments in the show that they thought were objectionable, and unfortunately, because of the mission statement of the organization, they would not be able to book their group (of 500!) if those moments were in the show.

Insert dramatic chords here.

The “moments” weren’t specifically plot-related, nor would they involve a great deal of work to alter them.

But would the show make the alterations to satisfy this group?

Insert more dramatic chords here.

Obviously there are a lot factors that would be involved in this decision, like when the group is looking to come (what time of year and what performance during the week), how well the show is doing, how much the group is paying, etc.

But if you’re a commercial theater producer, the question is whether you would be willing to ask your creative team to make the changes to their work to accomodate this bonus to the bottom line?”

The responses to this challenge fell into some general camps- Sure if it isn’t that complicated; What about the fact that 1000 other people paid to see the original show? (sub-set response to this was, Sure if they want to buy the whole house); The artistic choices made were deliberate and that vision should not be compromised, stick to your guns; If you do it once, you create a precedent to do it again.

A couple of interesting points made by a commenter going by Julia was that shows often compromise their content on the basis of an audience’s physical situation: modulating strobes for epileptics, adding illumination for signed performances, captioned performances, audio described performances. Each of these changes the appearance of the performance from the original or alters the experience of other audience members who are not targets of the services.

I haven’t really addressed the issue of changing an artistic choice based on audience feedback since discussing Neal Archer Roan’s tough decisions about Bach’s St. John’s Passion and anti-Semitism. Since the discussion was still ongoing over on Davenport’s blog, I thought it might be appropriate to draw attention to the issues and get people thinking about how they might handle it.

Of course, if we are all to be honest, how we say we would handle it often diverges from how we actually handle the situation when faced with its impact on our own reputation and budgets.

One question I would add to the mix. Are you more likely to make the change if your show is on Broadway or presented by a non-profit organization? Broadway has much more profit motive to their show. The saga of Spiderman with the never ending previews, the rewrites and reissues have shown that Broadway is open to revamping content in response to criticism. (I am surprised no commenter on Producer’s Perspective mentioned that.) While they do it for more than one show, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility a permanent change might not be implemented if appeal to a wider market was perceived.

On the other hand the income from 1/3 a house means a lot more to a non-profit organization than a Broadway show. Though most Broadway shows have less flexibility in doing so, that Spiderman could afford to shutdown for a few months for rewrites is fair evidence that Broadway probably has a little more ability financially to refuse the change on principle alone.

Ford’s Fresh Angle On The Arts

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One of the activities the Ford Foundation is engaging in as part of their celebration of 75 years is a series of forums focused on issues of social justice. The first of these, held on May 4 had an arts focus. I have been watching the videos of the sessions on the site and still have a few more to go but I wanted to reflect on what I have seen. The event utilized Cover It Live to aggregate the observations of the social media people who were present so you can review their record of the proceedings as well.

In the lunch time discussion between NEA chair Rocco Landesman and former NY Times journalist, Frank Rich, called “Roccing Out: A Lunch Conversation” (sorry, no direct link you will have to scroll down the page), they went over a number of issues, including Landesman’s now famous comments about supply of arts exceeding demand. What I found most interesting was Landesman’s discussion of his efforts to create a private-public partnership between the NEA and private foundations to better serve the arts constituencies.

I found myself wondering if the association would constrict private foundations’ vision toward that of the U.S. government since they are obviously an influential player or if the NEA’s vision would broaden to more encompass the myriad aims of the private funders. I could see the NEA funding possibly expanding as its chair goes before Congress to mention that influential foundation X was bringing Y amount to their partnership. Or it could backfire and Congress could decide it only proved there was plenty of private money out there. Though if GE and oil companies can make billions, not pay taxes and still receive subsidies, there has to be a way to successfully frame the argument.

Landesmann also discussed how he is trying to work with other departments of the federal government to get them to emphasize and use the arts in their programs. He described his efforts as being the coo-coo bird who lays his eggs in other bird’s nests for them to raise since they have more resources than he does. Two examples he used were aligning the arts with transportation projects and housing and urban development.

The other session I watched was “Sharing the Stage: Globalization and Cultural Might.” The thing that grabbed me was the discussion of how construction of arts and cultural centers were seen by countries as a symbol of having made it. Having such buildings were seen as conferring credibility as an accomplished, modern culture and society upon the country. The problem is that some countries haven’t thought about actually inhabiting the buildings with art.

Michael Kaiser of the Kennedy Center talks about traveling to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and walking around a magnificent art center located far from the population that has never really had any performances in its 15 years of existence. He mentioned another large facility being constructed in the same country where they have projected no operating costs because it will be run entirely by volunteers. Vishakha N. Desai, President of the Asia Society, mentioned that China has plans for building hundreds of museums, but when she asked the mayor of Shanghai what would be put in them, she was told they would figure that out.

The point they were making was that there was something of a misunderstanding in governments in whether the value in art resided in the buildings or the artists. There was some discussion, especially when they opened up the floor for questions and comments, about the importance of having places to exhibit and perform work as well as to train managers to properly empower and enable the work of artists.

My first reaction to this talk about the building bringing prestige was the thought that this is what comes of promoting the economic value of the arts. This came mostly as a result of thinking about all the money and resources that went into the construction. I soon realized though that what the governments really sought was not the tangible value, but to trumpet the intangible value of their country’s culture. They have world class facilities in which to feature world class artists, heavily represented by artists of their own country.

In the US we have been arguing that arts and culture are one of the things about our country that make it great and strengthen the national character. It is difficult to criticize a government who agrees with that and wants to invest huge amounts of money to draw world wide attention to that fact.

Except, of course, that the Field of Dream expectation that if you build it, the artists will come to inhabit the facility and bring life to it is somewhat erroneous. It takes some significant effort and planning to cultivate an artistic life for a facility. My strong suspicion is that the construction of these facilities didn’t involve a lot of input from artists who represented the type envisioned to perform/use the building and the facilities may not be suitable to their needs at all necessitating some immediate renovations.

Info You Can Use: Volunteer Liability

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An appreciative nod to the Gene Takagi at Non Profit Law blog for linking to a Charity Lawyer post about a non-profit’s liability in respect to volunteers.

Guest blogger Deanna Rader notes that a non-profit may be liable for the actions of their volunteers under a doctrine known as respondeat superior which holds that an employer can be responsible for the acts an employee commits in the course of executing their duties. Some states have extended this concept to include volunteers.

In this context, Rader suggests that care be taken in selecting and training volunteers.

* How will volunteers be utilized? The risk of liability increases as the volunteer is given more responsibility and independence. Carefully choose the responsibilities that will be given to volunteers. Also, there should be a clear delineation between the tasks performed by employees and those performed by volunteers.

* What selection criteria should be used? You should use care to ensure that the volunteers selected are fit to serve in the positions at your agency. Your selection criteria may differ based on the responsibilities given to different volunteers. If you are using volunteers to serve children, disabled individuals, or other vulnerable populations, your selection criteria may include a background investigation and criminal history check. If your volunteers sort food for a food bank serving adults, however, a background investigation may not be required.

* What training is necessary? Before putting volunteers to work, they need to be trained to perform the assigned tasks. Otherwise, you could be held liable for their negligent performance of those tasks if it causes injury to others. Also, the nonprofit organization could be held liable if a volunteer who is not properly trained injures himself or herself because of inadequate training.

* How will the volunteers be supervised? Volunteers should have appropriate supervision based on the tasks assigned. A warehouse volunteer who is performing physical labor may not need close supervision, whereas volunteers dealing with vulnerable populations may need to be closely monitored.

* How will problems be addressed? Although good volunteers provide invaluable assistance, bad volunteers can expose you to substantial liability. Do not be afraid to address problems head-on and terminate the volunteer relationship if a volunteer exhibits inappropriate behavior.

Rader also address injury that a volunteer might take in the course of the service to the non-profit. Employees are covered under worker’s compensation laws while volunteers are not. However, it is important to clearly delineate between the two categories of workers. In addition, employers have a responsibility to provide a safe work environment to everyone who may enter their premises, regardless of employment status.

“An employer also has a duty to maintain safe working premises for an employee. Many states have applied this doctrine expressly to nonprofit organizations, requiring them to maintain a safe place for volunteers to work or finding them to be negligent in failing to provide a safe place for a volunteer to deliver services. This duty can apply even if the volunteer is working off premises while providing services for the nonprofit organization, making the nonprofit corporation liable for the actions or inactions of a third party.”

Among the steps Rader recommends taking are having volunteers sign a general waiver and release that informs them about the possible hazards they may face. She also mentions having volunteers work with a buddy or a team so they are never alone.

All this seems very valuable for the performing arts. I have worked in places where volunteers have done everything from ushering to construction to driving farm tractors. There has been ample opportunity for them to injure themselves or each others. We rent our facility out to groups and have had other people’s volunteers damage equipment on a number of occasions for which we held the renter liable.

On the flip side, performance groups often don’t have their own facilities and have their volunteers meet them at an unfamiliar place like my theatre to help them put up a show. In such a situation, you are dependent on the performance facility’s maintenance program and good practices to keep your volunteers safe.

Degree or Equivalent

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The Americans for the Arts ArtsBlog had a contribution from Zack Hayhurst, a candidate for a Masters in Arts Administration at American University. His entry talks about the benefits an arts management degree confers as well as what it doesn’t.

One of the things he says it won’t do is be beneficial to those who already have an established arts management career.

“My own experience has been that those who come to the degree program with a few years of arts management experience under their belt, are likely left feeling under-challenged. The reason for this is not because what the programs teach is not valuable or correct, but because the perspective from which subjects are taught are often taught from an introductory perspective. This is fine for people like me; however, for someone who has worked in the field – who has dealt with boards, who has managed a strategic marketing plan – the academic instruction of these subjects might seem a little too, for lack of a better word, “academic.”’

His experience at American University may be quite different than what one might find at arts management programs in other places. I know at one time the Bolz Center at the University of Madison required people to have some professional experience before entering their program. From the bios of their current students, I assume that is still the case. They probably gear their instruction accordingly.

But something I have noticed fairly often these days is that arts management jobs are saying some sort of masters in arts or cultural management is a desirable qualification these days. In such a case, what is a person without such a degree to do? Often the position will mention equivalent experience as being acceptable, but I know many organizations, including my own, will put a lot more stock in the degree over the experience.

As a person with a masters in arts management I can say that a year of experience is probably more valuable than a year of instruction, though the instruction certainly shortened the learning curve in acquiring that experience. I suspect most people who have earned an arts management degree would say that more or less. So why is the degree valued so much more?

Well, it is much easier to quantify. With a degree, I know exactly what a job candidate was required to learn. I can’t know exactly what skills a person picked up in acquiring their experience. One person in a relatively unknown theatre in a Colorado might have taken a lot of initiative and performed the functions of many positions in the understaffed theatre and has an incredible depth of knowledge. Another person working in the same position title at Lincoln Center may have acquired fewer skills because they were never challenged to expand their role. How am I to know unless the person from Colorado does a super job of outlining this experience in a cover letter and resume? The applicant has to do a great job communicating and I have to commit to listening and reading between the lines carefully to get past the prestige of Lincoln Center.

But really, even if neither of these people worked at a Lincoln Center and I wasn’t familiar enough with any of the places on their resumes to know what was demanded of them, how do I choose between them? Maybe I don’t have to if someone else has a degree in arts administration and a little bit of practical experience. I have hired people on the basis of experience over degree and had to write a long justification pulling apart every applicable line on their resume to explain why it was just as good or better than a degree. Being relieved of this necessity can be a powerful incentive to favor a person with a degree. It may be fear of this situation that will drive people with respectable amount of experience to enter masters programs as they see more and more jobs listing a degree as a desired qualification.

The question is, will it be a boring, financially wasteful experience for these people, or will arts administration programs provide a sort of alternative track that Hayhurst alludes to? Perhaps more valuable to people with significant experience might be shorter certificate programs, that are not necessarily based in higher education, geared toward those of their status that can supplement their knowledge in areas where they are weaker. It would just be a matter of getting employers to recognize these as qualified certification of substantial ability.

If The Kids Can Do It, So Can You!

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So in a follow up to my post yesterday about giving people permission to express themselves, Daniel Pink posted today about a teacher who applied the idea of FedEx Day to instructing his sixth grade classroom. The teacher in question, Josh Stumpenhorst, called the effort “Innovation Day” and created an environment to let his students direct their learning for the day.

There was some prep work involved in getting the students focused and prepared for what they were going to do, of course. On the whole, it was pretty dang successful and the kids really got invested in the process. Among the projects the kids undertook were:

We had a student:

• Writing and performing his own guitar solo
• Creating a model out of wood of the Sears Tower
• Writing her own historical fiction short story
• Creating a Rube Goldberg machine
• Designing and creating a replica suit of Roman Armor (out of tinfoil and cardboard)
• Creating a how-to tutorial on baking a cake
• Painting a still life on canvas of a nature scene
• Writing and performing a one-man comedy act
• Researching and presenting on the concentration camps of the Holocaust
• Creating a video highlight reel of basketball moves and plays
• Building a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa
• Writing a biography of his favorite teacher Mr. Stumpenhorst (<—–ok, I made this one up!)
• Creating a video documentary of Innovative Day
• Building a model of Big Ben
• Choreographing and performing a dance
• Researching Walt Disney and creating a model of the Epcot Center
• Creating a model of numerous World War II battles
• Building a model of the Eiffel Tower
• Researching and creating countless Power Points, posters, and Photo Stories

I wondered yesterday how an experience that cultivated a sense of permission to express oneself might be designed for adults. I think this project might be a good basis to start from, especially since there was a lot of natural collaboration emerging. Granted, these kids and teacher already had an existing daily relationship with each other in which there was a certain level of structure and trust. The same environment may not exist for an arts organization and a constituency that spends the majority of its day in school or at work. It might take some time and effort to get to this point–if you wanted to get to this point at all. A project that evolves in an entirely different direction based on the dynamics of the community is eminently possible.

Permission to Express Yourself Is Granted

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Our assistant theatre manager put a small mirror on his desk facing the door. I have no idea where he got it or why he put it there. As a bit of a joke, I put a piece of paper printed with the classic zen koan, “What was your face before your mother and father were born.” When people came in to buy tickets or meet with us, they look into the mirror and read the paper and often decide there is some great statement being made. It makes me reluctant to admit that I was making fun of attempts to manufacture profound statements like that.

But there is also the assumption that since we are an arts organization, we will surround ourselves with profound and nuanced statements. Even though we might get called out as elitist for attributing deeper meaning than is readily apparent, we still have permission to do nonsensical things in public and have it generally acceptable. I dare say it is expected.

I worked for an organization that ran a residential arts and music summer camp. Every year the kids would come in and let their hair down–many times quite literally– and include the liberal application of colored dye. During the rest of the year they felt like they had to subsume these impulses while in school and around their families. At camp, they were part of the normal group rather than the outsider.

That sense of permission to experiment and play is probably the biggest gift the arts can give people. I am still all for keeping the arts in schools and instilling people with the discipline and discernment to practice and experience the wide variety of arts in all disciplines. But failing that, if we can get people to realize they can have permission to express themselves, then there may be a small victory in it. And right now, we gotta take those small victories when we can find them.

Getting people’s butts in the seats is a short term solution to our problems, but I suspect that the arts needs to replace “if only they would come see our show, they would love it” with “if only they would try to create and express, they would love it.” The latter option is a lot more time and resource intensive a proposition though.

Confidence to step out and express oneself even in a formal setting is going to spring from increased mastery of one’s discipline. But most people probably aren’t going to have the time to devote to that. I have to think a shorter term hands-on encounter with creating art that teaches people that they have permission to experiment is going to be an important part of arts advocacy, especially if they spread the word and get friends involved. How do you present that in a balanced way? The usual approach with a lot of arts disciplines is that you have to master the rules before you can break them. It might be challenging to encourage people to have fun experimenting while instilling an understanding that there is still more to learn.

Actually, the best example I can think of is skateboarding. There is a lot of falling involved but the very people who are occasionally snickering at you when you fall are those providing you with the incentive to improve. I am not suggesting that derision be part of the approach an arts organization takes. But there may be something to an approach that creates informal cohorts of colleagues who are learning the “tricks” together. In such situations the gap in ability between members can often serve to motivate rather than intimidate, perhaps because everyone is enjoying the experience together.

No program is going to convert a large proportion of the population. Online content creation is produced by only a small percentage of people with a much larger proportion consuming it. On the other hand, that small proportion still accounts for a lot of people and the consumers for an even larger number. It could be that knowing you could create and participate if you wanted to even if you don’t, is empowering enough a concept to remove some of the intimidation factor of attending an arts event.

Of course, the expression is most accepted when a certain context is created. I don’t know anything about visual art, but my silly little display with the mirror is accepted in the context of an arts building. People working in the arts understand how to create that context regardless of the setting by manipulating mood and environmental factors. Perhaps greater success is to be found in teaching people how to do that along with formal performance techniques. By which I mean, give them the tools to create an environment in which self expression is acceptable.

As to how to accomplish all this as a practical matter, I don’t know. It may start with offering classes but ideally will expand beyond that in order to underscore the idea that expression can happen outside of a formal setting. You may dedicate your organization to creating opportunities now but not really feel that the concept has been realized in its fullest for 10 years. And at that point, people may decide that their favorite mode of expression doesn’t include your organization.

Yeah, I am not doing the best job of selling this, huh? But really, this is what we are asking of schools when we advocate for more arts education. We want them to create fallow ground in which we can cultivate patrons. Our mission statements say this is what our purpose is too, but really we want them to stick around. The most effective arts education programs in schools schools involve students in the arts experience rather than providing an experience. Perhaps where arts organizations have gone wrong is not providing enough opportunities for people to continue to be involved once they have left school.

Stuff To Ponder: Transparent Community Driven Grant Processes

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The Hawaii Community Foundation just recently completed the first round of granting for their Island Innovation Fund. I was really very impressed by the way they went about their very transparent granting process. Instead of having a grant disappear into the bowels of the foundation offices, they got the community involved in the process of providing feedback and guidance at every step.

The blog for the local technology radio show, Bytemarks Cafe, did a good job last October of summarizing the approach they took.

On my preview, the proposal review was a 4 step process. The first step in the process is the Concept, where you submit your idea and any associated material, be it photos, video, documents or presentations. There is an open period for submittals and a deadline to meet.

Next the process enters into the Collaboration phase where proposal material is made public (public as in registered users of the site). The public has about 30 days to comment or ask questions. Applicants are able to respond to comments and make improvements to their Concept.

During the third phase, HCF personnel will review the revised Concept. Projects that best demonstrate the principles and goals of the Island Innovation Fund will be ask to submit a Proposal.

Finally in phase 4 the Omidyar Network and Hawaii Community Foundation staff will review and evaluate Proposals. The most compelling proposals get invited to present a 15 minute presentation to an independent panel of judges for final selection. This judging is open to the public. Winning proposals will be announced one week after the final presentations.

I listen to the radio show pretty regularly, but I must have missed the show where they originally discussed this because I would have definitely participated in the feedback portion of the concept phase. I think that is the best part of the entire program. Not only does it allow applicants to understand what the community needs are and adjust their application accordingly, but it also provides the Hawaii Community Foundation (HCF) with a better understanding of what the community needs from them.

It is something of a win-win for everyone. Even if the applicants aren’t proposing something that fits into the HCF or fund goals, they get valuable feedback about their concept should they wish to pursue it with another granting organization. Those who are invited to proceed, but don’t get funded also receive important feedback and I believe some will be allowed to reapply for the next round. Being able to walk away knowing how to make your proposal better and speak about it effectively is valuable in itself because you often don’t get any feedback in that vein from granting organizations.

In understanding what the community needs, HCF can begin to think about their own approaches and priorities, including assumptions about community needs they may have made. Perhaps some of the proposals didn’t adequately address how the specific submitter would effectively approach a need in the community. The need still remains and now HCF may be able to bring resources to bear having read the feedback on the community forums suggesting what considerations need to be made in effecting a solution.

I should also note that even the final presentations to the independent panel was conducted very publicly and was streamed live over the internet. The video may still be viewed on the Island Innovation Fund website.

Now in a bit of serendipity, Diane Ragsdale addressed the pursuit and funding of innovation in the arts on her blog today. She mentions that receiving funding for innovative work can actually destabilize an organization as they try to meet the heightened expectations that such recognition brings.

But she also notes that often the most innovative work is passed over in favor of more tame versions because real innovation risks failure by necessity:

“Finally, it’s perplexing and annoying to others in the arts sector when funders give ‘innovation grants’ to projects and organziations that are not, actually, innovative–particularly when one knows the projects that did NOT get funding. I’m not sure how this happens but I suspect it is in large part because ideas that are truly surprising, that may even defy written rules and conventions, are unlikely to make it all the way through the grantmaking process at most risk-averse foundations (in no small part because they make lawyers nervous).”

I am not going to claim that those awarding money from the Island Innovation Fund, even given their intriguing granting process, are any less risk averse than any other foundation out there. However, I would think that efforts toward innovation in the arts would benefit from a granting process like the one they conducted. The one benefit I hadn’t mentioned yet about this program is that even if one isn’t an applicant for the grant, just participating in the question and commenting phase can help a person refine their own nascent ideas and understand how better to execute them.

Mutant Business Models Are Coming! (Embrace Them Before They Embrace You)

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Apropos to yesterday’s post about non-profit business models is a piece by Saul Kaplan on the Harvard Business Review discussing how every organization that offers some sort of service needs a business model regardless of whether you are a non-profit, NGO, government entity or for profit business.

If you have never thought about your organization’s business model but figure it is about time you did, you may found Kaplan’s comments about the mutability of business models a little disheartening.

“If you ask any ten people in your organization how it creates, delivers, and captures, will the answers even be close?

If not, it’s probably because, in the industrial era when business models seldom changed and everyone played the game by the same set of well-understood industry and sector rules, it wasn’t as important to be explicit about business models. Business models were safely assumed and taken for granted.

That won’t work in the 21st century when all bets are off. Business models don’t last as long as they used to. New players are rapidly emerging, enabled by disruptive technology, refusing to play by industrial era rules. Business model innovators aren’t constrained by existing business models. Business model innovation is becoming the new strategic imperative for all organization leaders.”

He goes on to talk about the need for new, hybrid business models that blur the existing lines. I take some comfort in the fact that business models are currently a hot topic of discussion among various arts administration blogs. It means we are staying current with trends rather than following far behind.

One thing in particular I took away from Kaplan’s post was the importance of keeping involved in the conversation about business models given that existing lines of separation between profit and non profit are likely to become less distinct.

“Perhaps the most important reason for developing common business model language across public, private, non-profit, and for-profit sectors is that transforming our important social systems (including education, health care, energy, and entrepreneurship) will require networked business models that cut across sectors. We need new hybrid models that don’t fit cleanly into today’s convenient sector buckets. We already see for-profit social enterprises, non-profits with for-profit divisions, and for-profit companies with social missions. Traditional sector lines are blurring. We’re going to see every imaginable permutation and will have to get comfortable with more experimentation and ambiguity.”

Wait, What Is This Guy Actually Talking About?

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In the morning when I look at all the Twitter streams I follow, I often click interesting looking links and then come back to the web pages when I am done with all the new tweets. The result is often a long series of tabs on the Firefox browser and often I don’t quite know who suggested what story when I get around to reading it.

Since most of those I follow have an association with arts and culture, you might understand why I initially thought the blog post I was reading was on that subject. It wasn’t until I got to the sixth point that I had any inkling it was on another industry altogether and the eleventh before I was sure.

RULES FOR BUSINESS MODELS

* Tradition is not a business model. The past is no longer a reliable guide to future success.

* “Should” is not a business model. You can say that people “should” pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.

* “I want to” is not a business model. My entrepreneurial students often start with what they want to do. I tell them, no one — except possibly their mothers — gives a damn what they *want* to do.

* Virtue is not a business model. Just because you do good does not mean you deserve to be paid for it.

* Business models are not made of entitlements and emotions. They are made of hard economics. Money has no heart.

* Begging is not a business model. It’s lazy to think that foundations and contributions can solve news’ problems. There isn’t enough money there. (Foundation friend to provide figures here.)

* There is no free lunch. Government money comes with strings.

* No one cares what you spent. Arguing that news costs a lot is irrelevant to the market.

* The only thing that matters to the market is value. What is your service worth to the public?

* Value is determined by need. What problem do you solve?

These sentiments are actually about news delivery and found on Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog. For awhile there I thought an arts blogger was replicating Adam Thurman’s posting style on Mission Paradox. I had to go back to my Twitter account to try to figure out where the heck I got this link, finally discovering it was the Artful Manager, Andrew Taylor.

Honestly now, if I hadn’t alluded to the fact it wasn’t about non-profit arts and cultural organizations, would you have known it wasn’t? Every point made is a topic of conversation that has come up regarding the arts. Hopefully, they are conversations you have had at least with yourself, if not the staff and board of your organization.

The fact that news organizations are facing these same questions is of some comfort–at least we know the arts are not alone in the challenges being faced.

At the same time, the fact these questions can be asked of the news industry only serves to confirm their wider relevance. These are questions any business must ask. The arts are not special in this regard.

As much as I feel my practical side provides a good balance to my idealism, it is tough to think about the arts not being the exception. Every time I scroll up to re-read these points and see “Virtue is not a business model,” and “Business models are not made of entitlements and emotions,” there is a part of me that says, “Yes, but the arts are different.” In many respects this is true, but the arts in the U.S. operate in an environment where what is written above is also true to a great degree and must be acknowledged.

Rather than try to talk all of us out of our belief in the sublime experience the arts can bring to every day existence, I will merely stress the need to be mindful of the aforementioned truths and not allow our aforementioned belief in the power of the arts to dismiss the stark reality they represent.

I’m Not Standing Here Acting For My Health, It’s For Your’s

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I always keep an eye open for stories about people using arts in health care in some fashion. Mentions of organized programs seem to be pretty rare though…or perhaps I am not looking hard enough.

I almost skimmed by it, but thanks to a job listing for a managing director I became aware of the NiteStar program at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. The program has been around for nearly 25 years with a mission of using “the performing arts and peer education to help young people make informed decisions, providing options for changing attitudes and prejudices, and creating opportunities for promoting healthy behaviors.”

Their programs address issues of “sex and sexuality, domestic and teen violence, substance abuse, and multiple health threats, including teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases.” A 1996 PBS documentary, Sex and Other Matters of Life and Death, chronicled their efforts over the course of a year.

While it might not be the subject matter everyone would want to tackle, I wanted to note their efforts because their basic experience developing and delivering programs in diverse venues in conjunction with health services could help those with similar ambitions avoid reinventing the wheel.

Info You Can Use: Beware Non-Profit Identity Theft

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Non-Profit Law Blog editor Gene Takagi encourages all non-profits to take note of a recent investigation by Forbes magazine that uncovered someone redirecting non-profit registrations to a post office box in Las Vegas. The majority of the registrations have been for religious organizations, but the weakness in the IRS’ system could be exploited to hijack nearly any non-profit’s registration.

Someone has hijacked the tax identity of more than 2,300 tiny or defunct nonprofits, apparently taking advantage of a hole in a new electronic Internal Revenue Service filing system to list the same person as a charitable official at the same mail box drop in Las Vegas.

[…]

A search on Melissa Data of nonprofits in that zip code produced 2,370 listings. A random spot cross check by Forbes of dozens of them on the official IRS site listed Alexander and the N. Rainbow Blvd. address in every instance. The nonprofits originally were located elsewhere all across the country.

[…]

Another nonprofit listed by the IRS as being led by William Alexander out of Las Vegas is Godsline Ministries. The clothes-donation charity used to be located in McMinnville, Ore.–and died there about seven years ago, according to Rob Rabon, who ran it with his then-wife. “It only lasted two or three years,” he said. “We went to the state and filed papers dissolving it.”

Yet the IRS proclaims Godsline alive and well, with the same tax identification number as when the Rabons ran it.

The problem has its roots in the recent requirement that non profits making less than $25,000 file a statement to that effect. If you recall, there was a big panic last year that these small non-profits would lose their status because they were unaware of the requirement. Since these small entities don’t have a lot of resources, the IRS endeavored to make it easy for them to verify their status with a simple postcard or online filing.

Because so few details are required in the filing, there isn’t a lot of verifiable data being supplied to the IRS. This makes it easy to slip in and replace the authentic organization. The Forbes articles notes that the names of the small non-profits in danger of losing their status were published in an attempt to make people aware of the impending change, but in fact may have been serving to let fraudsters know which organizations were vulnerable to identity theft.

Info You Can Use: CultureTrack Survey Results

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Welcome SoundNotion fans. Come in, take a look around while you are here.

I just got around to reviewing the results of the recent Culture Track Survey. As always with surveys, there were a couple interest tidbits to be gleaned. I looked at the Cultural Track report and then the longer research report. Both are pretty easy to read since the bulk of the pages consist of a graph and a few sentences reflecting on the findings.

One result that caught my eye was in regard to corporate sponsorship. I don’t often see audience perceptions surveyed on this subject.

 

Perceptions of Corporate Sponsorship

If you are making an economic argument for the value of the arts, you should probably be pitching it to businesses as well as governments as a way to enlist corporate support both in your lobbying and fund raising efforts. Just be careful not to make the case so strongly that you start to encourage people to use your organization to charity-wash their reputation lest you become a little tainted by association.

The report talks about barriers to attendance, what motivates people to be subscribers, how influential social media is on the attendance decision (not as much as you might think, though growing). The finding that didn’t jibe with my experience at all was that people plan their attendance well in advance.

“Both visual and performing arts audiences have become significantly less spontaneous and are planning their attendance much farther in advance.

· Only 5% of 2011 respondents visit a museum or exhibition on the same day they make the decision to attend, compared to 17% in 2007.
· Just 3% of respondents attend a performing arts event on the same day of their decision, down from 9% in 2007.”

The only way I can reconcile these numbers is if these reflect planning only and not acting to purchase tickets. Even broken down by subgroups, both infrequent attendees and young seasoned omnivores are planning well ahead in the 50% range and a few days in advance in the 37% and 44% range, respectively. I suspect people may plan in advance, but purchase later.

If there is truth in this, then I am feeling a little more secure in how early I start to promote events. I have often wondered if I am wasting time and money by not just concentrating most of the efforts to the last 5 days before a performance. The results say being able to access information well in advance of an event is highly valued.

The research report had more detailed results about the survey. If you are particularly interested in specific data about the ways different groups are using social media and technology to learn about events, you may want to take the time to study the results (PDF pages 20-33, 37-41).

Some results not related to social media/technology that you may know about, but bear repeating-

-Watching and listening to the visual and performing arts often occurs outside the exhibition / performance hall

-Enjoyment, spending time with or supporting loved ones, and interest in programming play roles in decisions

-Cost, lack of interest, and inconvenience are all barriers to entry

-No one factor contributes to the subscription buying process more than others, but exclusive events are less important than other benefits (last bit is interesting to know-Joe)

-For those that visit cultural organizations less, the reduction is focused on cutting expenses rather than a loss of relevance

-Frequency of attendance is a better indicator than income in terms of determining likelihood of contributions

-On site information helps enrich visits to cultural organizations

One response that interested me was: “Respondents from cities were significantly more likely to indicate that their home city should be considered a cultural center.”  I am intrigued by the idea that city dwellers more than suburban and rural residents place a high level of importance on being perceived as living in a cultural center. If you live in a rural area, you probably have priorities that don’t emphasize a cultural life. I guess the same is true of the suburban experience. Perhaps suburbanites value having their homes within easy commuting distance of work and great culture and don’t have a high expectation of a great cultural life in their town.

 

The Farmer and the Cowman (and Restaurateur) Can Be Friends

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Last week we hosted a food sustainability conference sponsored by our culinary program. Sustainability and local food sources is a big deal in Hawaii because between 85%-90% of all our food is imported. If there was a cataclysmic event which prevented food from reaching the ports, there is only about 10 days of food available to feed the population.

I have seen a number of arts bloggers draw a connection between the slow food movement and the arts so I listened closely to what was said hoping to gain a little insight from the practices of other industries.

Since the conference was organized by a culinary program, they approached the subject from the view of how restaurants can source more of their food locally and sustainably. The panels consisted of farmers, ranchers and restaurant owners talking about some of their practices.

Culinary Convening
Farmers, Ranchers and Restaurateurs Convene

There were some inspiring examples of some farmers operating almost completely off the grid with a high degree of recycling. They farm tilapia, circulate the water through lettuce and other plants which help filter the water and send it back through to the fish. Because of a rain catchment system, they haven’t had to draw from the public water supply in many months. Some of the effluvia gets diverted to a nursery which includes fruit trees to provide fertilization. One of the chefs at the gathering said he managed to put a dinner together for a party thrown by the governor where all the ingredients were grown within 100 feet of each other by sourcing them at the farm.

What struck me as applicable to arts and cultural organizations is the stories of some of the mutually beneficial relationships restaurants have created with farmers and ranchers. Chef Roy Yamaguchi of the Roy’s restaurant group convinced a farmer who was just weeks away from closing down his farm to grow a mesclun mix and required all his restaurants to use it. This allowed the farmer to stay in business.

Another chef, Peter Merriman, said that early on he made the conscious choice not to try to guard his food sources. While it undermines his ability to lay exclusive claim to offering high quality ingredients, he recognizes he is helping to keep his suppliers in business by telling people where he gets his ingredients.

Chef Alan Wong, who was in attendance at the convening, has been a long time proponent of using local ingredients. He spoke about how he held a beef tasting at one of his restaurants as part of an effort to convince restaurateurs to support ranchers by buying local beef.

The tasting ended up solving a big problem the ranchers had. The high end restaurants would buy the prime cuts of beef and leave the ranchers with the rest on their hands. A person from a local restaurant chain at the tasting had the presence of mind to ask what was happening with the rest of the cow. Now that chain consumes 250,000 lbs of local beef a year. Because the ranchers can sell the whole cow, the price is lower for everyone and there is incentive to the ranchers expand their operations.

Every arts organization has a different operating environment so I hope people can find something analogous to their own situation in these examples. The most obvious one to me is the oft mentioned fact that the regional theatre movement was intended to employ artists locally and still can if people commit to creating an climate in which this can happen.

One of the ways might be to duplicate Alan Wong’s tasting and actively invite colleagues to see different artists, not with the intent of “selling” them as so many showcase performances do, but with the approach of highlighting and celebrating local resources in an attempt to keep and cultivate them. There is an entirely different ambiance present in the latter scenario versus the former and I suspect one would be far more receptive to the idea of employing someone because of it.

I have to imagine given current trends that there is some mileage to be gotten out of boasting that the casting of a show produced a smaller carbon footprint because no one flew/drove a long distance to New York or Chicago to hire a person and the person didn’t have to travel far to appear locally. Arts organizations can celebrate their fiscal prudence by noting that they don’t have to pay for housing and per diem as they do with “imported” artists because the person already lives nearby. Therefore, much of the ticket revenue is going back into the community as artists buy goods and pay their mortgage and taxes. Perhaps the artists can make a statement about how they appreciate how the deliberate cooperation between a handful of organizations has created an environment that provides enough opportunities to live locally and raise a family rather than hustle for jobs in the big city.

Another idea would be to grow a network in which to share productions. Some theatres already invest in productions together, sharing the development costs and planning to have the show appear in both places. However, some of the members of my consortium produce shows for their own audiences while suggesting the other members might be interested as well. In most cases, each producing organization is partnering with a local performance group to develop the show already and a cost sharing agreement is already in place. Acquiring additional bookings in other parts of the state is just an added benefit for both. Having other venues willing to present the show can also assist with grant writing to support the development of  the production and support touring. I have had two shows I produced go on tour and I have hosted three that originated with consortium partners.

This sort of arrangement is easier when there is a longstanding relationship between organizations in place and they know they can trust that a quality product will be created when they commit themselves  in the conceptual stage. I think that is the sort of relationship that has been developed between the restaurants and the farmers and ranchers. The restaurants know what they are going to get from the suppliers and the suppliers know they have dependable buyers for their products.

One of the other challenges restaurants said they faced with local beef is that grass fed beef tastes different than corn fed beef. A representative from Roy’s Restaurants talked about how she has had to deal with indignant customers who demand to know what the restaurant is trying to pull when they first eat the meat. She spoke about how Roy Yamaguchi decided to not only note that the beef was grass fed in the dish description, but also put a section in the menu that explained about the beef and what it was the restaurant was trying to accomplish.

This immediately sounded like the challenge arts organizations face when trying to introduce audiences to anything outside their experience. The advantage the beef has over the arts is that while both steak and certain segments of the arts have an elitist aura about them, there is a perception that being adventurous with food is a mark of distinction while sampling a new arts experience is either intimidating or the mark of a snob. Do the arts need their own version of Anthony Bourdain to incite exploration?

(By the way, the title of this entry is a nod to the musical Oklahoma!)

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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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