Advocacy

Charm Offensive (Minus The Offensive)

by

I was reading the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) Spring Newsletter today and there was a letter from Alliance President John Haynes (page 2) giving his view of what audience engagement is really about.

He tells a story of his time as a programming executive at CBS TV when he pretty much had an unlimited expense account and could do just about anything that struck his fancy. He would regularly order pizza delivered to his apartment and he could hear its approach long before it got to the door thanks to the singing of the Neapolitan deliveryman. At one point the delivery man confessed he was having a hard time saving his money because he was attending the opera a few times a week. Haynes confessed in turn that he had never attended the opera, a fact that flabbergasted the delivery man.

“He was shocked. Here I was, living the good life in a doorman high‐rise on West End Avenue, three blocks from Lincoln Center, but bereft of the most glorious creations of mankind. He sang longer and with more feeling that night than ever before. Neighbors I’d never met came out of their apartments. He sang his way to the elevator and was still singing when the door closed.”

The next time Haynes ordered pizza, the delivery guy showed up at the door with two tickets to the opera. Haynes attended his first opera, Carmen, with the pizza deliveryman. He says that he has seen his role as an arts administrator to do for others what the pizza deliveryman did for him; expanding the scope of his experience. “And that’s how I came to conceive of my role as an “arts leader. I’m just the pizza delivery man. ‘Wanna see something cool?'”

The pizza deliveryman was an apt model for the arts community. He was clearly passionate about a segment of the arts. Even though he couldn’t believe Haynes did not go to the opera, much less love it, he managed to express it in a humble rather than condescending way. (And like the arts, he was poor and funded his passion through donations/Haynes’ large tips.)

Of course the challenge we face today is that unlike Haynes, audiences aren’t necessarily won over after one exposure. And many of us are expending great effort in the direction of audiences who are not CBS executives with unlimited expense accounts. Regardless, we do have the same opportunity the pizza man had. We can unabashedly share our passion where ever we go and maybe after repeated exposure, people will start to open up to the possibility of sharing whatever it is that makes us (metaphorically) sing. (Keeping in mind that constantly singing songs from Wicked, either literally or figuratively, is going to make people want to throttle you.)

I realize that since this is filtered through Haynes’ recollection, the pizza deliveryman sounds very charming. Someone else might have perceived him as pushy and elitist. Though I have to think he was indeed as earnest as Haynes portrays him.

The pizza man has had his victory. For the rest of us, another challenge is to be charming as we talk about our passions and avoid making people’s eyes glaze over as we yammer on–or worse, harden as they feel alienated by the tone and direction of the conversation.

Most everyone in the arts seems to be invested in this shared goal, but there are few clear tips circulating about how to accomplish it. Perhaps it is as easy as the “be yourself” advice dispensed about dating. But if that were effective, there wouldn’t be 1,000 new dating articles on newsstands and the internet every week.

I’d suggest more practical and specific advice about diminishing the appearance of elitism might be what the arts needs. But like I said, advice on any sort of relationship doesn’t seem to provide much clarity or instill confidence.

Dear Thespis-

There is a woman at the supermarket I would really like to get to know better as an audience member. However, she seems to think I am elitist snob even though the resale value on her five year old SUV is still more than I made last year. How do I get her to even consider looking my way?

Intrinsic Value As A General Value

by

Recently there has been a sentiment that the arts community shouldn’t use economic benefits as an argument for supporting the arts. I agree with this because there are a lot of problems with the argument which can weaken your position. The difficulty is that in trying to reframe the argument in other terms, you are fighting a sort of cultural inertia.

Arts Alliance Illinois Executive Director, Ra Joy retweeted lobbyist Dan Johnson who wrote “Instead of using the phrase “I’m a taxpayer” to legitimize a comment about government, we should use the universal phrase “I’m a citizen'”

We have a consumerist mentality which leads us to feel we get a say in how all our money is used and should expect a certain level of satisfaction. Businesses we make purchases from extend money back guarantees to assure our satisfaction so there is a tendency to apply a similar outlook to other areas of our lives. In addition to those addressing concerns to the government, students often use the my taxes/tuition pays your salary argument with their teachers.

The problem is, people often over estimate how much of the cost their share actually covers. Hamilton College recently launched a campaign at their students showing that after February 23, someone else was paying for their education. As most of us in the arts world know, a taxpayer’s share of the National Endowment for the Arts funding is below fifty cents.

And, of course, in many cases the price of a ticket to a performance at a non-profit organization only covers about 1/3 of the cost of the production.

Johnson’s suggestion to use “I’m a citizen” is essentially the argument for the intrinsic value of the arts. It harkens back to the social compact theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau that influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States. (My first major was Political Science.) It is an argument that the government owes us based on the intrinsic nature of our relationship rather than our dutiful payment of taxes.

The influence of money which drives the concerns over the Citizens United decision and those of the Occupy Movement illustrate the problem of equating economic influence with general worth and merit. It is probably time to emphasize intrinsic value in general and not solely in the arts.

With 10,000 Friends Like These, You Don’t Need Enemies

by

One of the things that makes me cringe uneasily is seeing non-profits running social media “follow me” campaigns where they make the push for the next multiple of 5000 milestone looming a few hundred followers away. Maybe they simply want the appearance of being as cool as all the other kids on the block and show off how popular they are. But to my mind, and perhaps I am erroneously attributing motivations, it appears to be the social media version of “if only they get exposed to our work once, they will fall in love with us forever.”

I should be clear that while I often talk about the “get them in the door and they will won over” reasoning in relation to the arts, I am seeing this practice across the non-profit sector. If the motivation is reaching more people via raw numbers, I think it suffers the same flaw as buying huge mailing lists or extending special offers/programs to get more people through the door. Unless you are making an effort to provide an experience/materials that is relevant to the new people, the effort isn’t productive.

Non-profit organizations are advised to move away from the shotgun approach in their physical advertising and most agree because of cost and recipient resentment over being spammed by snail and email. But social media is both inexpensive and people are choosing to follow you rather than you pushing your material on them. In my view, regardless of how inexpensive a channel of communication is, the goal should always be to have a your information be of interest to a high percentage of those being reached rather than reaching the highest number of people.

Yes it is cheap to greatly augment those numbers of virtual followers, but why are you even making the effort if you have no follow up plans? That’s worse than creating a social media presence just because everyone else is. At least you aren’t actively trying to convince people to buy in to an experience you have no intention of enhancing.

Many of the organizations I follow provide information that is interesting to me as an arts professional, but unless they have 10,000 arts professionals/admirers following them, I doubt most of their followers are as engaged as I. The quality and quantity of one organization’s feed actually dropped significantly after their big push. (Though I suspect the feed was initially created by an intern who left or a staff person who got pulled off the detail because the tone also became decidedly less strident and partisan.)

The other problem is that these “follow us” campaigns encourage existing sincere followers to leverage their relationships with others to bolster your followers. This is akin to asking board members to open their address books to solicit donations from their friends, albeit less intrusive and garnering even less personal investment.

Ask people to evangelize for your organization, by all means. But if you are flogging them everyday to help you reach a specific goal, the number 10,000 has as much relevance to the well-being of your organization as January 1, 2000 had to the end of the world.

If you know most of your followers aren’t going to pay attention and decide not to write to their interests, why the heck did you make so much ado updating the countdown every couple hours for two weeks? If your social media site wasn’t envisioned as a tool to provide information to interested parties and strengthen your relationship with them why does it exist?

I will be the first to admit that I am not using my organization social media sites as often and effectively as I would like. But when I do issue updates, it is to celebrate the success of partner organizations/artists, make followers aware of grant opportunities, national issues with the arts and artists with whom they may be unfamiliar. Yes, when we have a show coming up, I am linking to videos and online stories about the artist, but we aren’t having a show every week of the year.

I know that a large segment of those following are positively inclined toward the arts as both consumers and practitioners. Many are not make the decision to attend a show, but their knowledge and general attitude toward the arts can be positively influenced by all the information we post.

Foundation Data Wants To Be Set Free!

by

Last week Lucy Bernholz posted a collection of links on Philanthropy 2173. One of these was a video of a talk she gave last June on how the information foundations collect is as important to non-profits as the money they give.

She notes that foundations end up being huge repositories of information about successful activities in our communities and across the nation. In the best scenario, these projects get funded once and then filed away in the archives. In the worst scenario, they just get filed away.

As a result of their granting activities, Bernholz notes, the foundations know a whole lot about whatever their areas of interest are. But because the data hasn’t been aggregated into a usable form, even the foundation may not be aware of just how much they know. She advocates for making that data readily available so that groups can collate the information and make everyone aware of just what exactly is going on, what is needed and what the costs of delivering services are.

Bernholz uses the example of looking at all the requests made to Donors Choose, combined with what foundations are funding and the Race To The Top programs to learn exactly what is happening and needed in classrooms.

According to Bernholz’s post last week, there has been some progress since she gave her talk in using non profit data to help organizations.

To my mind, such transparency would probably also promote much more accurate reporting by non profits. It has been noted that grant reports have a tendency to be idealized. All the goals are met or exceeded and there are no challenges or unforeseen problems causing a deviation from the proposal. A system which files such information away and forgets it perpetuates this practice.

However, if the information is out there and circulating and people are repeatedly contacting you to find out how you designed your programs to achieve such wonderful success, there is greater pressure to have your results more closely reflect reality.