Is Bottom Up Funding Of The Arts The Next Business Model?

There was another editorial about how the arts should be funded that is getting a lot of notice this week. You may recall I had posted about Isaac Butler’s editorial in the NY Times a couple weeks ago calling for greater public funding of the arts.  This week novelist, playwright and screenwriter Monica Byrne advocated for a bottom up funding model in the Washington Post.

She notes that the artists often get short shrift when it comes to attention and funding. When organizations get funded, it is often administrators and buildings which benefit before the artists do. She doesn’t specifically call for increased federal funding. Given that the culture wars of the 80s basically ended NEA funding of individual artists, that is probably a non-starter. Instead, she is advocating for the creation of works to be driven by artists who decide where to site their performances rather than the venue deciding what they want to do and then contracting artists.

For theater, as we know it, to have any future at all, a new economic model must take its place, founded on a simple principle: fund artists directly. Then let the artists produce their own work, rent their own venues and pay their own collaborators.

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It’s true that scaling down would mean prioritizing certain kinds of theater over others. But this is the case in every era: Some aesthetics thrive while others die out. Instead of a world in which you pay astronomical prices to see another tired revival from the mezzanine, imagine there are a dozen theater cells in your area, performing new work in backyards and parks and city squares and empty storefronts. Art that is fresh, fluid, immediate, accessible and affordable — to make and to see — all because we collectively decided to fund the artists directly.

Is there any place for existing nonprofit theaters in this model? Sure. Reshape them into direct granting agencies and public resources somewhat like libraries, offering artists and companies production slots on a lottery basis…It would also mean that existing artistic directors understand that, not only are they not the ordained curators of culture, they are only useful to the art form insofar they serve artists — the creators of the form.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? The idea of turning theaters into public resources like libraries is interesting on paper. If non-profits were in a place to provide advice and support about audience cultivation and marketing practices attuned to the local conditions, that could be a valuable resource. Though my concern would be that we might end up having the same conversations we currently are about funders having priorities that are out of synch with the changing needs of the operating environment. It may not start out that way, but I could see things creeping toward “arts need to be run like a business” as staff turned over, etc.

More Funding, But For Status Quo Or Difficult Change?

There was a lot of chatter on the Twittersphere last week (which I guess is the X Corp-sphere now?) over a NY Times editorial that Isaac Butler wrote advocating for the federal government to do a big bail out of theater in the face of so many theater organizations failing.

While a lot of the comments on the NY Times article basically said theater is boring, too expensive and good riddance, folks who are more inside the arts either praised Butler’s proposal or suggested propping up a flawed business model would just perpetuate a bad situation. There were many such threads. Here is one:

 

Somewhat loudest among those opposing perpetuating the business model was Scott Walters whose thoughts you can see in that thread. He also wrote a piece on Substack expounding on his thoughts. While I don’t agree with everything Scott says, it will come as no surprise I do fall into the camp of feeling that arts organizations need to do a much better job of listening and cultivating better relationships with a broader segment of their communities. Scott suggests money be put into researching a variety of new business models, but there probably also needs to be a corresponding long term marketing campaign to normalize those approaches so that inertia doesn’t keep the non-profit model as the only acceptable one size fits all default in the minds of donors and possible funding sources.

Similarly, there should probably also be funding for consultants, partnerships, etc., which facilitate cultivating better community ties. Again that would need to be varied in application. In the last community in which I worked, funding would be useful in one way, but in the community in which I currently work, it would be better used strengthening an organization with good connections, but few resources. The stronger they got, the better position they would be in to facilitate the conversations and relationships I need to have with the community.

All that takes a lot of funding so obviously I am with Butler in calling for greater amounts of funding for the arts in general. I didn’t particularly like his comparison the funding levels in England because I have seen so many stories about that becoming increasingly restrictive over the years. I saw a tweet over the weekend from someone suggesting while England was funded the arts at a higher level than the US, it was a bad example because their per capita funding practices were pitiful compared to the rest of Europe. Butler replied that he felt he had to use England as an example because no one would believe him if he cited Germany’s numbers.

Quotas For Low Value Degrees

This morning Arts Emergency, a UK based organization which advocates for the arts & humanities and puts a lot of effort into finding mentors for young creatives, post the following on Twitter:

“Hands up who took a ‘low value degree’ & wouldn’t be where you are without it. Hands up who thinks EVERY young person should have the opportunity to do the same. Hands up who thinks higher education shouldn’t be reduced to ‘produces high earners’.”

This was in response to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s proposal that cap the number of students universities can accept into “low value” degree programs according to The Guardian.

Courses will be capped that do not have a high proportion of graduates getting a professional job, going into postgraduate study or starting a business, the prime minister will announce on Monday.

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The numbers cap is unlikely to affect the bulk of courses offered by Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, whose students tend to go on to “highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree and above-average earnings.

Critics of the move say that it effectively penalises universities and courses with a high proportion of working-class students, who have fewer financial resources or family support and so are more likely to drop out.

“This will effectively act as a red flag to students. Who wants to apply to a ‘low value’ course?” said one vice-chancellor, who added that universities might also become more cautious over admitting students who might be less likely to graduate or want professional careers.

I don’t know if it was the enthusiasm for the topic or the low level of traffic on Twitter, but my feed was solidly filled by this topic with only a smattering of posts on other topics. It was hard to believe this wasn’t listed as trending.  After scrolling and scrolling I was surprised to see I saw still on posts from seven hours prior. I began to worry I would hit the 600 post limit recently announced for people who didn’t pay to be verified before I got to the original post that started it all.

There were a lot of great responses and I probably missed some of the deeper words of wisdom in the mix, but a very clear, obvious response from Milo Harries caught my eye:

I obviously have a ton of thoughts on this, but really they boil down to:

Does anyone that has ever met me really think I’d have added more value to the world if I’d based my career decisions on money?

If you haven’t seen it already, a similar conversation is bouncing around in the US and I suspect other countries around the world. So it is something to which to pay attention.

Will Lunch Conversations & Bespoke Experiences Replace Fundraising Galas

A post by Jason Lewis who writes The Butterfly Effect on substack suggests taking a donor to lunch is going to be a much better investment of time and resources when it comes to doing a better job fundraising than taking a webinar on the topic.

If you really want to understand why giving is down, instead of signing up for a webinar promising an in-depth analysis by a panel of fundraising wizards, how about taking a lapsed donor out to lunch? If doing that is all but impossible because you’re too afraid to pick up the phone, you’re overwhelmed with the amount of data you’d have to sift through to identify that donor, or your boss has you panicked about tablecloths and wine for the fall gala, anything you’re going to hear in that webinar isn’t going to help.

What Lewis essentially says is that like arts and culture audiences, donors are less interested in taking a passive role with their giving and want to be more interactively engaged. An increasing number of people don’t view themselves as socialites who attend big galas and would instead like to have a closer view and relationship with the causes they are being asked to support.

The effect is an irrevocable shift from a broadcast model in which a relative few control the message to a democratized model where the message is co-created. Shirky’s insights about what it means to live in the twenty-first century is why we encourage our clients not to see themselves as master technicians attempting to manipulate and control their donor’s experience and, instead, engage their donors in ways that allow them to play active roles in creating meaningful experiences for themselves.

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Our donors want to play an active role in determining what their giving experiences are; and they, more so than anyone else, are best qualified to explain to us what those experiences might look like. Arguably, the lunch table is one of the best places for having these kinds of conversations.

Based on the plug at the bottom of the post, it appears Jason Lewis is a member of a company that promotes responsive fundraising which presumably advocates for this sort of approach as part of their consulting practice.