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 was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA. 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.

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Always A Vacancy

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My wanderings across the digital landscape brought me to a study on the Compass Point website. (they provide services to the non-profit sector.) The study, Help Wanted: Turnover and Vacancy In Non-Profits, is about four years old, but it examines why it is so tough to keep a non-profit organization fully staffed. (There is a similar one studying the challenges of Executive Directors, too)

The study was performed in the San Francisco Bay area and encompasses all non-profits from arts to social services, but there are some very interesting lessons to be learned.

From the executive summary, we learn the following facts:

-8% of the paid staff positions at nonprofits are vacant.
-30% of these positions have been vacant for four months or more.
-24% of the vacancies are management positions.

Which employees are leaving and why
– A striking 47% of the people leaving nonprofits are non-program staff: administrative assistants, bookkeepers, CFOs, development directors, etc. Executive directors report that the three most common reasons for staff resignation are: a great job offer elsewhere, dissatisfaction with compensation, and the cost of living in the Bay Area.

So okay, the whole cost of living in Bay Area isn’t applicable elsewhere.

There were some interesting results about where people are going.

Where exiting employees go:
The most common destination of exiting nonprofit employees is other nonprofits; 34% move on to another nonprofit agency. Moving to the for-profit sector accounts for only 20% of nonprofit turnover.

This is a good news/bad news thing. While it is great that people are sticking to the non-profit sector and continuing to enhance the sector’s ability to serve the public as a whole, non-profits are not only competing with each other for funding and, in the arts, audiences, but now have to compete for personnel as well.

Other additional interesting facts-
Of those organizations surveyed, only 13% had a person dedicated to human resources. Most everyone else had the fuctions shared by one or more other people. 47% of the respondents indicated that the executive director was the sole person developing hiring, recruitment and retention strategies.

What I found most interesting because I had never stopped to think otherwise myself is that executive directors felt a 0% turnover rate was an ultimate goal. And really, I would have immediately agreed. The study also said that EDs didn’t have any expectations that some positions would turn over more frequently than others.

The truth of the matter is, the study showed “certain positions as having a normal turnover rate of 60% per year, while other positions may have a turnover rate of 15% per year.” The study notes that obviously high turnover in some positions (or dependent on the size of the organization, any position) can have a more adverse effect than turnover in others.

Different plans for retention and replacement need to be made with realistic projections about how swiftly a change is expected. According to the study, the reality of the day is that many people view being in the same job for over 5 years as letting their careers stagnate. People are going to move around despite best efforts at keeping salaries and benefits competitive.

Knowing this fact doesn’t make life as an executive director any easier though. Many EDs interviewed were reluctant to discuss the impact of this prevelant trend with their boards because they felt a high turnover rate would reflect badly on their management skills. Many people in the study admitted they held on to incompetent folks because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to find a replacement at all. The other problem with a tight labor market is that programs the non-profit planned on offering have to be limited or cancelled outright for want of staff people.

So an executive director, anxious that their board will learn about the high turnover rate keeps ineffectual workers, distributes the work of the vacant positions as well as a portion of the inefficient ones’ to the rest of the overworked staff. In order to relieve the pressure on them, the ED has to cancel other programs which brings the demoralizing realization that the organization isn’t as effective as it once was. (And lets face it, most non-profit workers are surviving on their idealism, not their pay.) It is any wonder the report on executive directors says that while EDs are just as likely to stay in the non-profit sector when they too move on, they don’t take executive director positions.

The end of the report offers strategies for avoiding turnover where it can be, accepting and planning for it where it can’t be and minimizing the impact when it does happen. These recommendations are across the board to boards of directors, non-profit organizations and funders/providers of technical assistance.

Unified Marketing

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Found an interesting report on the Knight Foundation website about an initiative they funded trying to provide a central arts marketing support system for communities.

What is nice is that the case studies of the communities they worked with really run the gamut so they have lessons for everyone, including funders looking to replicate the effort in the future. One project was anchored in a new performing arts center, another was a stand alone with hopes of getting for and non-profit business, some were cooperative efforts with media companies and convention and visitor bureaus, others were focussed on arts districts.

In some cases, communities received money for planning, but either got turned down for implementation funding or decided not to apply and went forward with the plan without Knight Foundation funding.

Ambitions also differed. In some places, the funded programs tried to be the marketing resource that the small arts organizations couldn’t afford. In other places, there were too many organizations with too varied priorities and interests to serve and so the program opted to create a centralized resource for information dissemination instead.

The results were also varied. In some cases things fell apart when the grant funding stopped. In another case, it didn’t even come together but inspired organizations to explore cooperation in a new direction. In still other cases organizations continue to receive their grant funding so, while the future looks promising, it is too soon to know how they will fare when it stops.

Among the lessons the Knight Foundation learned for those of you who might be seeking to participate in a replication of their efforts on a smaller scale:

-Cooperative marketing programs may work best when they focus mainly on producing collective benefits for the local arts and culture community as whole, rather than on trying to build marketing capacity of individual organizations.

-Cooperation may be easier when local arts groups can be united around a common external challenge that can reduce their inclination to compete with one another.

-Marketing cooperation may also be easier in larger markets because of the greater potential for economies of scale, which can reduce the cost of cooperation to individual organizations and third party funders.

-Intentional efforts to be inclusive when planning a cooperative marketing venture may buy goodwill that can provide legitimacy for later decisions.

The one thing about the study results that was dispiriting was that fact that creating a central entity that functions as an arts marketing agency for those without the resources for their own staff didn’t work.

This sort of set up has always been a minor dream of community arts organizations. If it were easy to accomplish, people would have done it already all over the place to be certain. It is great that the Knight Foundation took this on because it reveals pitfalls that subsequent attempts can address in planning similar projects. It would just be nice if success were a little easier to realize, especially in smaller communities and organizations that would benefit most.

Give Me A Teen!

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By way of Ben Cameron’s July 2005 Field Letter, I discovered an interesting program Berkeley Rep is doing with teens called their Teen Council.

More than just an advisory council, the theatre provides opportunities for teens to participate in poetry slams, play readings, one act play festivals, playwrighting contests and trips to Broadway.

Though it isn’t mentioned on the theatre website, Cameron’s letter talks about a recent Teen Theatre Conference the rep sponsored where students participated in panel discussions and seminars, some lead by peers, others by working professionals. Topics covered concerns about drama programs in the student’ high schools and race as well as discussions about “Stage Management, Directing Your Peers, Developing your Presence as a Theater Artist, Auditioning, Fundraising and Designing Marketing Materials.”

Even without the support of Target Stores, I think any organization could adapt some of the strategies Berkeley Rep uses here to get younger people more involved with them than just having reduced ticket night. I don’t seem myself able to do many of these things directly, but their program has sparked some interesting ideas in my brain to attract the old and young alike.

Presenter VS. Manager/Agent

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About a month ago, I talked about some changes proposed for the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) Conference which the organizers hope will provide the members with the opportunities they need to do business.

Last week, WAA posted the results of Key Person’s Interviews they had conducted on the discussion board of their website. The discussion board is password protected for members only, but I have received permission to reference the results here. I offer this information to my readership at large more or less as information about trends rather than specifically offering a lot of opinion and analysis (though I will offer some!)

Artists agents/Managers and Presenters were interviewed and the results really begin to illustrate, at least for me, why WAA felt the need to change the format. In certain areas there really exists a fairly large gulf between the two groups. Some of it can never be fixed because as a member of one group, you have priorities that you can’t share with the other group and still do your job.

In other areas there is room for coming together.

One of the main goals of attendance for presenters is networking with other presenters-

“While exhibitors come to the conference with presenters as leads/prospects/targets, presenters come to the conference first and foremost for peer-to-peer interaction with other presenters.
“…opportunities for casual, relaxed, and face-to-face conversations with colleagues, including ‘deep discussions about art,’ seem to be very high on the list of presenter priorities at the conference.
” Face-to-face networking is one of the most significant factors in the curatorial process (III)…Comments to the effect of ‘�WAA should be about relationship building’ were very common.”

Artists/Managers/Agents however feel they are in an adversarial position in some instances with presenters. Many felt that presenters didn’t understand the economics of being an exhibitor as well as the artist/agents understood the economics of being a presenter. There are also mentions of a “cliquey” nature of the conference contributing to the Us vs Them atmosphere.

Others commented that they felt the presenters attending were viewing the conference as a vacation rather than a place of serious business. I wonder how moving it to Los Angeles from places like Albuquerque and Spokane will impact this feeling. There was a comment that presenters at APAP in NYC are much more business like, but I wonder if that is just because there are so many in attendance, no one notices if people have wandered off to go shopping or see a Broadway show.

On the other hand, maybe they weren’t attending WAA to conduct business but rather just scouting. There was another group of responses that exhibitors felt the people from presenting organizations in attendance weren’t empowered to make decisions.

Even more distressing perhaps for the artists/managers, among the results of the survey of presenters was that there was little relationship between showcasing and deciding to contract performers. I wonder how many people will showcase next year knowing that presenters aren’t necessarily making booking decisions as a result.

One thing both sides could agree upon was the despairing lack of ethics some presenters were exhibiting, particularly in terms of breaking contracts and agreements. Of course, no one considers themselves unethical so the last two conference sessions I have attended on ethics have been sparsely attended.

Some interesting state of the arts type results from the interviews, some of which will surprise few people.

” Presenters are moving toward more conservative programming choices because the ‘bottom line’ is factoring into programming in a much more significant way than prior to 9/11…

o Exhibitors seem concerned, even resentful, that presenters seem to be booking more pragmatically these days…

o Many exhibitors perceive presenters, particularly those in the West, are making a shift to more thematic programming and programming that is more intricately tied to arts education programs and/or arts programs within presenters’ host institutions.

I actually wrote about an aspect of this last trend right after I returned from the WAA conference. Ironically, all the schools mentioned in the article are on the East Coast so if it isn’t a trend they are noticing there yet, they will quite soon.

One last bit to mention before I am done. I have saved the best for last. There was one bit of feedback from artist/manager/agents that knocked my socks off and I wonder what it portends.

“Many exhibitors believe that the business has not changed for them, although they see it changing around them. Most exhibitors had a clear idea of their mission or vision. They’ve been doing what they’ve been doing, their niche, their network of peers and presenters, etc. were all slowly evolving.”

I really wonder what this means. It can’t be that everyone else is changing but them. Are they simply too close to the changes they are going through to notice. Or perhaps it is true that their niche is changing and they aren’t and they are feeling the adverse effects of deciding to resist the change but don’t feel they have the skills to compete in the changing world. Instead of admitting things are changing, they hold the belief it is not for them because in that scenario, they continue to be successful.

There were some additional results that might bear this out.

“A few younger exhibitors/firms clearly were aggressively seeking a continued path of growth and evolution. It was this group of exhibitors who articulated the desire to be part of WAA but not the need to be part of WAA. These are the ‘change agents’ of the industry, typified by gaining their experience at larger agencies, going out on their own and aggressively sticking to their business plan, or constantly re-aligning their business plan to respond to outside pressures/dynamics. They are agile, fearless and most like their contemporaries in other industries.

So young folks, seeing the direction things are going, leave a big agency they have worked at for years and start their own business with an eye for responding to the ebb and flow of the shifting marketplace.

Of course, there are the other guys–

“The antithesis to these ‘change agents’ were the ‘old school’: [the] impression is that some don’t see/feel the need to change their small, niche business even while they are keenly aware of how small the marketplace is for their art form and how much economic pressure the presenters are facing.