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Arts in an Age of Technology

Are You Living Where You Should Be?

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Richard Florida, who rose to fame alongside his Rise of the Creative Class figures you should evaluate if you are living where you should be. As I read the reviews and summaries of his new book, Who’s Your City?, I get the impression that it may have just gotten harder to attract the creative class to one’s area.

Of course, it has always been difficult or easy without Florida saying it. But from what I read and what he talks about in this newspaper article, it seems like there is an underlying vibe a lot of places that attracts (and repels) certain types of folks. If your community doesn’t already have a certain nascent characteristic, it is going to be tough to cultivate a change in that direction. There is a certain inertia to some places that will hinder efforts if local government/Chamber of Commerce, etc is trying to push things in an opposite direction with the intention of attracting the treasured creatives. He even implies an entropic influence on people drawing their values and attitudes closer to being in line with the general community over time. (Though most people who are considered the loony liberal or raging conservative probably won’t ever be wholly converted short of consciously willing it.)

Florida talks about certain communities being suited for people at different phases in their lives and lists the “best of” in large, middle and small regions. I haven’t read the book but if I were to hazard a guess, given that creatives, like all mortals age and mature in their outlooks, attracting them is probably a matter of exploiting the aspects of your community that best suit a certain demographic rather than aiming for the young and hip (unless your community is a burgeoning hip place.)

What appealed to me more than the top five list was another section of the website that poses 20 questions to help you decide what communities are best for you. This is great for me because I am young and hip in atypical ways. The strength of the place finder is that it makes you examine your criteria for your ideal community and forces you to do a little research to answer all the questions.

You plug in where you live and up to four places where you want to live. It then asks you to rate each city on typical things like economy, geography, climate, available jobs, health care, arts, schools and housing costs. But it also asks you to rank them on things like trustworthiness of politicians and business leaders, availability of technology, diversity of leadership and community and openness of the community. In the end you may discover that while you always dreamed of living in Seattle, you are better off living where you are.

I suspect the place finder might even be help people focus their thinking when they consider founding an arts organization. (Maybe the NEA or Americans for the Arts should adopt a similar tool specifically for the arts.) Even without his book being published, I don’t think I would be suggesting anything earth shattering were I to say that founding an arts organization that doesn’t resonate with the underlying vibe of a community is a bad idea and probably destined to result in one muttering about philistines. If communities can target the wrong group of creatives, creatives can certainly target the wrong communities.

Technology Tip- I Am Dumb

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No, no, no wait. The tip isn’t that I am dumb, it is actually that I am occasionally reminded that I shouldn’t assume a tip I am considering writing on is so self-evident and elementary that I am insulting people by posting it.

I was checking up on Chad Bauman to see how he was faring in his effort to get people to cross the Potomac River to see Arena Stage productions in Virginia. I had posted on his use of Personalize URLS to direct people from their driveway to his driveway. It appears the effort was well worth it as they “have had less than 1/2 of 1 percent of our subscribers ask for a refund.”

In the same entry he talks about a practice he adopted from Repertory Theatre of St. Louis that made me thwak my head for not perceiving the logical extension of things we already do. Essentially Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and now Arena Stage have pages (click on the preceding theatre names in this sentence) containing links so you can tell your friends about a show on the different social networking sites and via email as well as bookmark the page for future reference.

This was the part that convinced me that I shouldn’t think something is too simple to mention. What made me say “Duh” is the fact that while my theatre does offer people the opportunity to send email messages with a performance description automatically inserted into the message body and have a Myspace page allowing people to send event information to Myspace friends, we haven’t it possible to send Myspace alerts from our organizational web page and vice versa. I figure if I missed something this logical, other people may have has well.

There is certainly no wisdom in assuming the Myspace people only get their event information through that site. As with all things technological, I do think there is a limit to the number of modes of communication an arts organization should offer website visitors. The clutter and the surfeit of choices can be alienating.

Like the aforementioned theatres, our stated policy is that we don’t store the email information. At least insomuch as we don’t record any of the information in our databases. A copy of what is sent does get forwarded to my email address alone. Given the tensions I have witnessed arise from students who felt they were miscast, I wanted to make sure no one was using our system to send out messages disparaging cast members by creatively rewriting my show descriptions.

Lately, I have considered making a small alteration to our policy. Since there is usually one person who organized most of the details of any couple/group outing, I was thinking that perhaps we should institute some reward system for those who are recommending our shows to their friends. It wouldn’t be a publicized program. I don’t want people spamming their friends with our show information in order to get prizes. What we would do is simply contact the person and offer them free tickets or something for being so supportive of us.

The change to our policy might be something along the lines of “We will not store the recipient’s email address or the content of the email in any form. We may keep a simple tally of how many times a sender as recommended a show and contact them no more than once a year to inquire on the quality of their experience.”

I am sure I am missing some other logical way that will facilitate attending a performance. If you see it, speak up and submit a comment!

Its What It Doesn’t Have That Is Most Important

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It has been a busy couple days here at Butts In the Seats so I have brief offering for folks to ponder.

An illustration about how technology is changing our expectations and how tough it can be to keep abreast of the changes. When I was at the Arts Presenters conference in January I overheard people on no less than 5 occasions express a sentiment along the lines of “If only we could figure out how to use text messaging to promote our shows.”

My assumption was that the difficulty people were facing is that you can only send about 160 characters via SMS and it is pretty tough to make your case and provide your contact information in that short a space. Given that many cell phone users pay per text message, they might tolerate one text message from you but sending multiple ones as a modern day Burma Shave advertisement could cause quite a bit of ill will. But since most young people don’t view email as a their primary communication tool vs. texting, figuring out how to best use it is important.

I mentioned this problem in an email to Drew McManus and in his reply he essentially pointed out that with the abilities of the iPhone, the SMS format is probably going to be abandoned soon. Not everyone may buy an iPhone, but the features it contains will generate an expectation that new phones contain similar abilities. Since the iPhone does support email, perhaps that will become a valued form of communication with young people again.

But rather than re-emphasizing the use of existing channels of communication, I have a feeling we will see arts organizations scrambling to replace email blasts with distributed videos that are perhaps tailored to deliver different appeals for the same performances to various age or interest groups. The fact that the iPhone web browser doesn’t support Flash images which is an element of many webpages but does have a special YouTube video player is pretty telling about the areas Apple expects to be important in the future. Steve Jobs didn’t put 3.5 inch disk drives in the iMac because he didn’t think that was the direction things were going. Now, even if you do have a 3.5″ drive on your computer, do you use it?

But this just goes to show how quickly technology moves. It wasn’t that long ago that we started seeing research that most young people eschewed emails for texting. Now just as arts managers start to think about how they can tap into that trend, a change in the favored communications channel seems likely.

Professionals and Pro Ams

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In her column in this month’s American Theatre, Theatre Communications group Executive Director, Teresa Eyring talks about the recognizing the growing number of Professional Amateurs in our society. Now this topic is nothing new. I have posted on the subject of Pro Ams. Andrew Taylor has done so on a number of occasions. His students did a research project on the topic. Charles Leadbetter and Paul Miller who coined the Pro Am term, wrote a book on the subject.

What makes Teresa Eyring’s comments special is that she leads a major service organization and therefore is in a position to exert greater influence when she says it is worthwhile to heed a trend. (Though she was certainly influenced by all this discussion of Pro Ams.) What she has to say hasn’t impacted my thoughts about Pro Ams in any direction. But it is good to see an arts leader like her encouraging people to explore the possibilities.

So if the words of all the aforementioned folks haven’t gotten you to ponder the concept, maybe Eyring’s will. She acknowledges that a transition that embraces Pro Ams can be difficult.

“If these shifts are irreversible and true, the question for professional arts organizations is how most effectively to embrace and respect audiences and potential audiences as they self-identify as creators, with a capacity for meaningful involvement in the artistic process that has often been closely held by professional theatre artists and organizations.”…

“…For theatres and theatre artists, this trend presents questions that are both practical and semantic, such as: What do we do with the word “professional”? In the 20th-century arts world, this word has often been used to instruct the public, critics and funders to expect an experience qualitatively superior to that which is non-professional or amateur…”

“…However, with the growth of a pro-am culture that goes beyond art into science, technology and other realms, the power of a professionals-only province continues to fade—or at the very least, the nomenclature is less effective and meaningful. Some of the teeth-gnashing over this development has to do with how the public will know the difference between what is excellent creative expression and what is merely average…”

“…if theatres can find ways to tap into the growing interest among individuals in participating in the actual creation of art and the arts experience, perhaps we can move this trend to a tipping point of sorts, bringing theatre into a new period of cultural ferocity and ascendancy.”

Prisoners Creating Our Own Dilemmas

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Taking a gander over at the TED website to see what talks have been released since last I visited. Apropos to yesterday’s entry is this talk from Howard Rheingold about collaboration and cooperation. It is a short piece, only 20 minutes, but if you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, move the handle down to the Cooperate=Wealth section of the index that pops up when you move the cursor across the bottom of the video.

He addresses the idea that if survival is all about competition, there wouldn’t be so many humans. At some point, humans began to cooperate and that helped them thrive. The benefits of cooperation are generally understood, even across cultural lines. He speaks of how players of the ultimatum game seem to innately know that proposing a 50/50 split offers the most likely path of greatest reward. (At least among Americans, Europeans and Japanese. Rheingold notes that slash and burn folks in the Amazon, pastoral herders in Central Asia and other countries proved to have different sense of fairness when playing the game.)

He also briefly addresses the Tragedy of the Commons, the idea that unless there is a way to restrain overuse, humans will exhaust a commonly held resource. He cites a counter study that found that people are only captives of what is essentially a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma if they view themselves as such. Those who are able to successfully break out do so by “creating institutions for collective action” with common design principles.

As his talk draws to a close, he cites the example of how some of the most cutthroat competitive corporations like IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems are open sourcing their software and some of their patents to be worked on by the commons. He mentions that Eli Lilly has “created a market for solutions for pharmaceutical problems.” Though he doesn’t mention it, I assume that is also an open source type effort. He also cites Toyota which works to make their suppliers more effective even though it means increasing supply efficiency for Toyota’s competitors. EBay has solved the prisoner’s dilemma by introducing a mechanism by which two people who can’t necessarily trust each other can make an exchange. He says they are doing it because they have realized that a certain degree of cooperation is beneficial for the bottom line.

So my obvious question is, if multinational corporations can extend a little trust to cooperate, can’t arts entities from the service organizations down to the smallest theatre/dance/music/visual art company find a way to do it as well? While large organizations might be most immediately influential by providing an example for many others to emulate, technology allows the successes of smaller to be disseminated as they couldn’t even a handful of years ago.

I Just Invented the Wheel! Whadda You Mean You Did Too?

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My thanks to David Dombrowsky of the Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carnegie Mellon who commented on a recent entry. In response to my entry on how well things were developing for the Emerging Leadership Institute, he suggested that instead of independently inventing the wheel arts organizations like APAP, Americans for the Arts and the Southern Arts Federation which all have leadership programs combine their efforts to offer greater opportunities for learning and conversation.

He isn’t the first to express this sentiment. Andrew Taylor said the same thing two years ago when I did an entry on Southern Arts Federation’s National Arts Leadership Institute. As Andrew noted, there are many such programs throughout the country. I listed a sampling here.

Someone in my Emerging Leaders meeting at APAP suggested that it might be logical and beneficial to open a channel of communication with the American for the Arts Emerging Leaders program alumni.

I had a brief email exchange with David about causes and solutions. We generally both agreed a little bit of ego and territoriality came into play. As Andrew Taylor noted in his comment, we are often enjoined to partner and collaborate by these service organizations but they may not be providing a good example for their constituents.

One thing I mentioned to David was that change in outlook might have to come at the grassroots level and technology made such things possible where it hadn’t been before. I will make no promises or idealistic statements about success at this juncture, but I am going to talk to some people and do some research and see what develops. Given that I don’t know exactly what success will look like other than people engaging in effective communication and exchange of ideas, I can’t be more committal about what my plans are. If people have any suggestions about who to speak with or want to get involved in organizing an effort, as nebulous as it might be at this point, drop me an email.

Arts and the Law

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While looking around at the sites on my blogroll when I came across a link (On Theatre Forte I think) to Theatre and Entertainment Law blog. The blog and associated podcast are created by Gordon Firemark who answers entertainment and intellectual property law questions.

I have addressed legal issues in the past, but obviously he is better at it and speaks with greater authority. His blog and podcast cover some of the basic issues everyone asks about like “Can I make a video tape of a play whose rights are controlled by a publisher?” He also addresses more complicated problems like negotiation and enforceability of non-compete clauses.

A little warning before you listen or read his work, while ignorance of the law is no excuse, it also brings bliss. You may be a little depressed to learn just what your responsibilities are in obtaining permissions for what seem to be the most innocuous activities like showing videos in a dorm lounge. Granted he is a lawyer so his suggestion that you do things like get a different release from a model every time you change your shooting location is all about covering every possible contingency that might arise. (He has the requisite minute long disclaimer in the middle of the podcast, of course.) Still, it is good to be aware of the issues you might face in the course of doing business.

Engage Your Art — Will It Be A Happy Marriage?

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While I was in the Learning to Lead session at the APAP conference, Steven Tepper was discussing his new book Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation in America’s Cultural Life just next door. It was tough deciding which session to attend and I eventually stayed in Learning to Lead and bought the audio recording Tepper’s session.

There were a number of interesting insights from his book that Tepper shared. One of the things people are concerned about is that arts audiences are disappearing but according to Tepper, participation is dropping all over. There are declines in church attendance, voting, involvement in formal political processes and even major league baseball games.

But says Tepper, It’s not that like sports less, its that we like a little sports more….It may not be case that we like arts less we may actually like arts more.” He doesn’t expound, but I think he is referring to The Long Tail economic model which essentially deals with selling a lot of niche items at higher volumes. His implication, as I understood it, was that people will value a lot of small experiences over the larger, more formal ones in the future.

Something he pointed out was that there is a shift in where people are getting their arts experiences. They aren’t just getting it on the internet and TiVo, but also in places like churches which are bringing arts experiences to their constituents both within services and independently of them. He suggested that churches could be potential partners for arts organizations.

Tepper cited survey results that said high quality art wasn’t a prime motivator for attendance. Rather celebrating heritage, socializing and supporting their community bigger motivation than quality. Social connections have long been a strong factor in arts attendance and apparently remains so. This is one of the reasons why churches could be strong partners. Not only do people who attend church participate more often in other areas of life, but churches provide a social connection.

This may be more true now than ever before given that many churches now offer counseling and assistance with things like job placement, parenting and child care in addition to sponsoring social gatherings for demographic groups. The church that rents my theatre has niche social groups for every permutation of age, marital status (and desire to be married), employment/student status and gender.

Though it does sound like one of those jokes about ordering coffee in Starbucks when a pastor introduces someone as a member of the Thirtysomething, professional single women social group. Yet if the Long Tail situation is indeed developing, services focused to these type of divisions may be what people desire. (Despite the fact that you will either go insane or print up different labels for the same product trying to serve every possible group.)

There are signs that there is a growing interest with involvement in artistic creation. UCLA administers an annual survey to students about their aspirations. Over the last decade there has been a small but noticeable increase in the number of students with a “desire to create, write something original or be accomplished in a performing art.” Tepper acknowledges that what they create might not be worth experiencing. He notes that students are experiencing frustration. Colleges and universities are having a hard time responding since the classes addressing the myriad creative areas are only available to majors. Students are coming to school with creative hobbies but don’t have a formal way of advancing their skill/knowledge.

So perhaps the role that arts organizations can fill in the future is responding to this need to hone one’s creative skills that schools are not able to provide. In the best situation, arts organizations will be partnering with schools to provide the types of experiences students are looking for rather than competing or duplicating efforts.

I have talked about the Pro Am — professional amateur — trend in earlier entries. (Not surprisingly in relation to a piece Tepper wrote before.) People are investing a great deal of time in their interests these days and technology is making it easier for them to gain expertise. There was a time when this was not so and the learning curve for amateurs was so much greater.

It may not longer be the role of the arts organization to employ those who have acquired a high level of skill in their field to exhibit it to others, but rather to invite these Pro-Amateurs to become partners/participants/students in the creation of art. I have often wondered what the next phase for arts organizations is going to be. I don’t think the future would be too bad if this was the role arts organizations played. The scary part for existing arts organizations is figuring out what their organization is going to look like and making the transition.

**Apologies to regular readers for falling off my regular posting schedule. Engaging my constituents (look for posts next week) and problems logging in to my blog contributed to my delay**

PURLs of Wisdom

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I have been aware of the emergence of new technologies that are allowing companies to offer an experience that is tailored specifically to an individual for awhile now. For the most part though, it has been on the edge of my awareness until this week when I got smacked square in the face with it.

I received an email with a link to a survey for the conference I recently attended and I was warned not to forward the link to anyone else because it was keyed specifically to my email address. I don’t think it was associated directly with me since I had to fill name fields. If it was associated with my identity, that was pretty annoying to have to fill out my name and organization info.

Today I received an email from an artist agent that contained a Personalized URL that took me to a webpage listing all the artists the agent had suggested might be appropriate for my venue. The page contained little modules with photos and information about the artist and links to additional materials. The information was specific to me and didn’t include any extraneous information about other performers that might overload me with too much information and cause me to close the page.

I have heard of some arts organizations using personal URLs to provide ticket buyers with directions to the theatre from their homes and other helpful information. It is clear though that the potential hasn’t been plumbed yet.

As exciting as it might be to think about adopting these technologies as tools for your organization, in keeping with my philosophy that not all new stuff is appropriate for everyone, I want to point out why. First of all is the need to have someone creating and monitoring the basic content that is offered with these links. Even with the help afforded you by the companies who offer Personal URL service, doing something like this is going to consume time, personnel and resources.

Another problem with these services is that knowing your activity is being tracked can be a little off putting. I can’t answer the survey anonymously because it is linked to me. While it might take some digging to find out who I am, the survey could have been easily set up so that it was directly associated with my identity rather than my email.

The personal URL offers even less anonymity. It would take the agent almost no effort at all to see how many times I visited the page he set up for me and which artists I clicked through to the most times. Even if I shared the link with other people, it is most likely going to be those associated with my organization in the course of soliciting opinions about artists. When making a follow up call the agent will have a good idea which performers to steer the conversation toward based on the number of visits made to each page.

The other problem with personal URLs is that they can provide too narrow a selection of information. With my special link to a listing of 10 performers, I don’t have a lot of motivation to look at the other people the agent represents. Of course, I would have probably given the full website a cursory glance anyway given the number of people the company represents. If the agent has gauged my organization correctly with the questions he asked, he has probably improved my chances of contracting one of his performers by isolating these 10 from the masses.

Of course, not all uses of personal URLs will yield secret information about the user. Visits to the directions link may merely tell you that your patron loses directions a lot. Or it could indicate that they are not sure of where they are going which may inspire a phone call to check if they need any additional information. One of those cases where having insight into your audience’s need can be helpful or a little creepily intrusive.

So, as I have advocated before– When implementing the newest trends, procedures, technologies, etc., think about whether it really is appropriate for your organization and audience and how it might be received/perceived. This includes thinking carefully about how you integrate the use of these trends and tools in your operations. As I noted, it is one thing to call someone up asking if they need any additional information and another to mention that you noticed they were clicking on the directions section of their personal URL a lot this past week.

New Metrics To Damn Ourselves With

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I haven’t had a chance to read through the report WolfBrown put together for the Major University Presenters on Assessing the Intrinsic Impacts of a Live Performance but I did just finish listening to the audio recording of the presentation on the work that Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak did at the Arts Presenters conference.

What was most interesting to me about the study they did was their ambition in collecting information about audience experiences. They randomly surveyed people during the period between the time they arrived and the start of the show about their readiness to receive the performance they were about to see and then asked the same people to take home a survey and return it within 24 hours.

I hope to address the study in more detail in another entry. I wanted to address the comments one of respondents on the session panel had about the study. Artist agent and APAP Board President Lisa Booth had mixed feeling about the report. She was happy that there was a measure of success being developed that didn’t evaluate an artist on the number of bodies he/she attracted to the venue but rather on impacts in other areas.

On the other hand, she worried that some presenters might use the report to justify serving only a small group rather than the larger community. Providing experiences of high intrinsic value for 10 people is anti-ethical to most arts organization’s purpose.

And while she was glad that there was a new metric of success being developed that wasn’t based in dollars or butts in seats, she was also concerned that in the eagerness to justify the value of the arts in some quantifiable way, the arts community was trying to measure what can not be measured.

This last bit was very interesting to me because Lisa Booth seemed to recognize the inevitable if these measures became widely used. If foundations and governments start basing their funding on the intrinsic value a performance has for a community, arts organizations will probably try to measure everything imaginable to show all the levels on which a performance meets funding agendas. Just as the arts aren’t well served by showing economic impact, they probably will be equally ill-advised to create numeric values for changes in things like self-actualization, captivation, social comfort level and questions raised.

As it was at least one person in the room at this convention of presenters, agents and artists had nagging doubts about the value of art in today’s society. One of the questions submitted to the moderators on an index card that was read but left unanswered was “What is the value of these impacts in a world with global warming and war?” The fact that the moderator choose to read the question as he announced time was up rather than ignoring it entirely is an acknowledgment that questions about our priorities as a society are ever present.

There is no short simple answer for the question but I offer this- After September 11, 2001 people were saying there would be no more comedy or laughter ever again. When I heard that I knew with 100% certainty that it was wrong and that even with the destruction of the Twin Towers hovering in our consciousness, recovery would come sooner than people expected. I had been through enough tragedy and grave problems in my life that I knew people couldn’t exist in with the absence of artistic expression in some form. My current concern isn’t that the arts will disappear. It is that I have no idea what media/channel/form it will best express itself in the future.

Send Me Your Press Releases…Now!

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I don’t know how wide spread this experience is, but there is one area where I assumed that technology was making a window of interest smaller that I think it is actually expanding it– Press Releases.

One of the cardinal rules of writing press releases has always been to keep the subject matter timely. This often means releasing your information within a certain window where it is not so early that news people have more immediate events to cover and not so late that you miss the deadline.

As Internet connections got better and sending images and releases by email rather than hard copies through regular mail became more prevalent, there was a brief period where sending out information closer to a performance night seemed wiser and preferred.

Now I am getting calls from newspapers 4-6 weeks before a performance asking me for a release and images. It is a minority that seems to prefer the information two weeks or so out from the performance. My theory is that technology has made it easier for news outlets to organized stories. I am guessing I get the calls because they have inputted the calendar listings I send out in the Fall into some sort of software that reminds them to call me for information. I also guess technology is helping them put their story together and lay out part of the issue it will run in weeks ahead of time.

In a certain respect, my job has actually gotten harder because I need to be thinking about these shows weeks early than I used to so I have a release ready for the asking. I also need to be bugging the performance groups for information to support what I write and images to send to the press. With some artists and agents who are not well organized, this can create a problem.

There is a standard line in most every contract I get that says press materials will be provided to me a month before a performance. I have begun toying with the idea of researching the amount of information available about an artist online and changing that to 60 days for those with a dearth of materials.

Has anyone else had this experience or am I just surrounded by a well organized, zealous media?

How Do Leaders Learn

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Next week I will attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in NY. Unlike last year where I was there for a week attending the conference and Emerging Leadership Institute, this year I am in and out very quickly in a weekend. I cringe at the thought of all that time on the plane. Once I get there, I know I will wonder why I ever resisted the idea because I get so much out of the experience. I enjoy the opportunity to see showcases, talk to artists and learn about new trends and philosophies in performing arts.

One of my biggest motivations for attending this year is to continue what was started last year in having Emerging Leadership alumni involved at the conference and advance an agenda. We have meetings and social gatherings planned this year. We were going to sponsor an issues session until we learned that Andrew Taylor’s students at the Bolz Center were going to be presenting findings from a study that was generally aligned with our purpose.

We also encouraging our membership (and anyone else interested in the topic) to attend the session at the conference, Learning to Lead: Where And How to Arts Professionals Extend Their Knowledge and Advance Their Craft. Andrew has a post about it on his blog today. Even if you aren’t going to attend, if you are an arts leader, please consider filling out the 15 question survey that will inform the discussion and findings of the session.

The survey asks questions about where one goes looking for knowledge and help in solving problems. Though it could probably comprise an entire research session of its own, I would have liked to see some questions asking people to measure the value of the guidance/help they receive. From conversations I have had over the last year, I suspect a good many people would comment that they weren’t getting the guidance they needed or perhaps were having a hard time identifying a trustworthy person with whom to discuss their problems.

And though it wouldn’t be scientific and might have been a little more time consuming, it would have been interesting if they asked where people got their initial training in the arts. I am just curious how many people have formal education and how many were mentored and learned on the job.

In any case, while Andrew will undoubtedly have an entry discussing the session, I intend to do one as well to present my perspective. I usually try to avoid duplicating the subject of his posts since I assume we share a lot of readers. But I am making a very long flights in very short time. I am gonna earn the right to bloviate a little. I am sure my approach will differ from Taylor’s to some extent any way.

For 25 cents More You Get A Large Coke And Opera Glasses

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The NY Times covers the Metropolitan Opera’s high definition broadcast of Hansel and Gretel to movie theatres throughout the country. One of the questions they ask is whether the experience will translate into people going to see the opera live.

By some coincidence, I received a brochure from the Philadelphia Orchestra today offering me the opportunity to host a high definition broadcast of up to five performances this year. Except that I have a 15 year old sound system in my theatre, I could easily host one of these events. Actually, since their fees are fairly reasonable, I could rent sound equipment and probably still finish in the black.

I don’t foresee hosting one of these any time soon. But I have to think, if I got one of these brochures and I don’t program classical music, who else around here has gotten one? There are plenty of other places that could hold a screening. And even though I don’t intend to present one of these, there is nothing to say that someone may not rent my facility and a sound system to do so.

So what does this mean for my local symphony whose musicians haven’t been paid in over a month? Or any symphony whose audience is faltering or, like Jacksonville, is enduring a protracted strike?

Is seeing a projection of the renown Philadelphia Orchestra for $15 in a movie theatre on speakers set to make explosions sound good (and perhaps has said explosions bleeding in from next door) preferable to hearing the local symphony for mediocre $50 seats amplified only by the building’s natural acoustics? Do sticky floors and popcorn go better with Wagner than reserved seating and wine?

Philadelphia is fully supporting the program with all sorts of promotional materials and ideas, study guides, interactive discussions and post-performance online discussions in which audiences can participate.

And like the NY Times article asks, could the Philadelphia Orchestra inspire people to see the local symphony? Or because of the money and support they enjoy, are they setting the bar so high now that local orchestras will never be able to compete? The fidelity of sound may not be as good as a live performance, but Philadelphia may be providing the environment and interactivity that people expect from their arts attendance experience these days.

Humans being social animals, I have always been a little skeptical of the idea that 100 inch flat screen televisions, TiVos, video game systems and the Internet would ever replace the appeal of the group experience. However, if attending a video feed of an orchestra performance accompanied by a bucket of popcorn constitutes the new definition of “going to the symphony,” performing arts organizations of all stripes may have to reconsider the medium through which they are delivering their product.

Charity Giving In A Gift Card

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Last week there was a story on NPR about charity gift cards. Essentially, they allow you to buy a gift card as you normally would but then the recipient can go online and choose to which charity they would like to donate.

Charity Navigator, which is mentioned in the story, has a link to the Network for Good card. The other organization mentioned, ‘Tis Best, has their own card that they offer.

Of the two, Network for Good has the most arts and culture organizations, though they tend to be individual organizations while ‘Tis Best offers the opportunity to donate to larger service organizations like Artspace, Chamber Music America, Dance/USA, Mr. Holland’s Opus, and the Assoc. of Performing Arts Presenters.

It is too late to get involved for this holiday season, but is just the right time to explore how to do so for next year!

Simple Gestures, Big Results

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Knowing that my customer service skills can be lacking, I try to keep my eyes open for practices that answer customer needs well. One of the cardinal rules for relations with anyone, be it your boss, relatives, friends or patrons is to try to anticipate the needs of the other person.

Last week I came across an instance of what to do and wanted to share it with the readers. It is a small act, but it can make a big difference.

I have been emailing back and forth among two other alumni members of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Emerging Leadership Institute about some activities we want new and alumni members to participate in as part of our attempt to enhance the value of attending the institute.

One person emailed the rest of us a draft letter addressed to the new and returning ELI members alerting them to conference sessions and social events where concerns members had would be addressed. The format was pretty simple with a listing of the event and the time. It looked fine and I replied to that effect mentioning that I would have to research one session a little more because the title made it look interesting.

The next email I received had a revision of the previous letter. This time each session listed had a full description of what the session was all about. What had impressed me was that she took a cue from my comment that I intended to research a session that sounded interesting to provide me the information herself. Obviously, she didn’t do it for me alone. If I was curious, others would be as well.

Actually, since I am praising her rather than criticizing, I don’t mind mentioning her by name- Laura Kendall, Assistant Director of Community Engagement and Learning at the Lied Center in Lincoln, NE. There, now maybe she will get a raise.

You would naturally expect someone with a title like hers to make that connection and act on it, but it is a rarer quality than you would think. It is easy to enter a mindset that the community you are engaging and educating is only your own and that you only need to do so within the context of programs planned in conjunction with performances.

And maybe she doesn’t pick up on the unspoken messages all the time either. However, I emailed her back last week praising her for recognizing that additional information would make a better letter. She said I made her day so I will bet she will be more conscious of these cues in the future regardless of how well she noticed them before.

Anticipating and answering needs people didn’t really know they had is what will help set an experience at an arts organization apart from other experiences. People are able to gain the information they want more and more easily these days. Global positioning directional units were one of the hottest selling items this Christmas season. But information sources like GPS units only provide what you ask for and not only is the information sometimes incorrect, it also lacks wisdom and discernment to advise well.

But this is only one example of good practices arts organizations should be embracing. Keeping alert for everyday occurrence that can adapted and applied to become your standard procedures is the real point of this entry. Often it isn’t that you come across a new practice as you encounter something that makes you question if you are doing it well enough.

More On Cultivating Creative Minds

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Apropos of yesterday’s entry, a commenter, who some call Tim, brings this great article about the dangers of dwindling imagination to my attention.

It is fairly well sourced and talks about the subject far better than I can. In fact, it even addresses my concern that maybe I was channeling my grandfather by referencing “back in my day.” Even if you are in the arts, you might be creating an environment that doesn’t challenge your kids/nephews/students to be creative. It is worth a read for that reason alone.

Cultivating Creative Kids

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More and more frequently we read about how the next phase of the economy will be the Creative economy. It is in major magazines, the subject of conferences, and the topic of study for state and regional arts organizations.

But I am wondering if the U.S. as a society is adequately preparing the next generation to take part in this economy. I am not referring to the disappearance of arts from schools or the fact that fewer people are reading. These things are important, to be sure. I am beginning to wonder if children today are even being challenged to use their basic imagination.

As a commute to work and run errands, I often see televisions playing DVDs in cars and SUVs. I hate to lapse into a round of “in my day”, but I wonder if these kids are going to want for not being challenged to entertain themselves on trips around town, much less on long vacation trips. When I was younger, my mother would actually hide our toys about 6 weeks before a long trip and then give me back to us so that they would be new to us and keep us occupied during the trip. (I must have inherited my frugality and cleverness from her.)

Although it tests parents’ patience, there is something to be said for having to develop the self-control not to antagonize your sisters. And there is something to be said for having to invent strange games to keep yourself occupied during the trip. My sisters came up with some rules about holding your breath while passing a cemetery and lifting your feet when crossing train tracks. My father would then pretend to pass out from lack of oxygen while driving by large cemeteries and rolling to a stop on train tracks because his feet were no longer on the accelerator.

Now I will admit that not everyone is as blessed with my ability to read in moving vehicles. I will also never suggest that the television sets on airplanes be removed. I like the distraction of those itty-bitty screens just fine.

DVDs and video games are starting to tout themselves as educational and they might be. But are the games sharpening and improving creativity? Maybe, but I think it is too soon and too tough to tell.

One thing I do know is that boredom, like necessity is the mother of invention. Certainly, much of what I produced while a bored child was destructive as much as it was constructive but there is little gained and learned in the absence of taking that risk. I had acres and acres of fields and forests upon which to wreak havoc without the distraction of color television much less cable to distract me.

Many kids today may not have the physical space to explore and experiment that me and my friends did. But I also suspect and fear that some of the limits they face are barriers of imagination that they haven’t learned to surmount.

Sharing the Gold and Fleece

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In years past I have written about how the members of my block blocking consortium leverage our purchasing power by proposing a tour to performers and their agents. Given the difficulty of finding workable time slots among 3-6 different organizations across the state, we often earn our discounts.

One thing I hadn’t found was a good example of producing organizations who cooperated to cut costs. Among presenters like my consortium, the questions that come up are mainly date and cost related–when are the artists available, are there openings on members’ calendars, can we afford the terms the performers seek.

Among producing organizations, there are so many more questions many potentially related to the artistic differences among the organizations- who does the casting, who designs costumes, lights, sets. Will the artistic quality and value reflect what patrons have come to expect of their local theatre. Will the other theatres have input into any of these elements? How much of the sets travel and how much is built by each organization? Given differences in stage sizes, what set pieces may be cut and still maintain the vision of the directors and designers?

How is it going to be paid for? If the theatres each normally operate under different Equity pay rates, will the actors be paid differently in each theatre?

Presenters face some of these questions on occasion, but to very limited degree compared to groups that are co-producing.

A blog entry on the McCarter Theatre website sheds some light on some of these questions. They are co-producing Argonautika with Berkeley Rep and Shakespeare Theatre Company. The show was rehearsed and first opened in San Francisco though the show was cast from auditions at all three locations. All three organizations are sharing all rehearsal costs (including the brush ups when the show moves) and presumably a portion of many of the other costs.

I liked McCarter Producing Associate, Adam Immerwahr’s reasons for partnering with other organizations.

1) it allows what would otherwise be a local production to have a much broader impact;

2) it allows an artist to continue to develop their work over time (allowing them another chance to make adjustments with each production);

3) it can be a cost-saving measure, allowing each of the theaters to share common costs (like the set, costumes, rehearsal time and casting expenses);

4) it is a way for multiple theaters to each share their expertise (new play development, mounting musicals, building big sets, etc.).

I especially appreciated the final point about shared expertise. I have been talking about cooperative efforts for a long time and while cost-savings is certainly going to be important in increasingly difficult financial times, I have always felt sharing knowledge and effort was going to prove crucial to the survival of many arts organizations because so little occurs among arts entities to begin with.

TOILETS SWIRLING DOWN A HOLE TO CHINA

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I won’t get in to why I came across this website. Suffice to say, some people in the office got sick over the Thanksgiving holidays. The anti-diarrhea medicine maker, Imodium A-D had a fun little feature on their website I hadn’t expected to find– a way to locate public restrooms in the U.S.

They are careful to assure you that you won’t need the map while using their product, but it is always good to know where you find facilities while traveling. You don’t want to depend on the map because it isn’t comprehensive. Imodium grabs the information from a site called The Bathroom Diaries which allows people to rate restrooms across the world. People don’t tend to share those experiences as much as say, hotel stays.

It wouldn’t hurt if you were like the Portland (Oregon) Center for the Performing Arts and had people evaluate your restrooms and point out that there was a long bench that was handy as a changing room. Or perhaps you could write something yourself. In searching for a city that had an arts organization reviewed, I noticed that every Old Navy across the country was listed as “A great place to go” and every Starbucks included the observation that “The pleasant Starbucks barristas are cool. You should buy a drink but if you don’t, they won’t mind. Ask for a key if its locked.” Apparently these corporations thought mention of their restroom situation was important enough for their business to have someone place a duplicate entry for every one of their locations. (Or at least up to a point. None of the branches of either company in my city are listed.)

There are many websites out there at aggregate obscure data into interesting data that clever arts organizations can use to their benefit. For example, this site answers the question it asks “If you dig straight down, where will you end up?” Fortunately, I never completed that hole in my backyard. I just discovered I would have ended up in the ocean about 3000 miles southwest of Perth, AUS. instead of China. It turns out, the most direct route to Beijing is through Argentina.

This handy “hole through the world” map can be employed during shows like Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing where a character begs to be sent on an errand to the Antipodes in order to avoid someone. It can be fun (and educational) to use the site to illustrate for audiences that if he had traveled to the literal antipodes of Messina (where the play is set) or London (where it was originally performed), he would have ended up in the ocean east of New Zealand.

Unfortunately, with two exceptions, there is no place in North America that corresponds with land at its antipodal point. It would be fun to point out the location opposite the theatre where the show was being performed. The antipodes of North America is the Indian Ocean. Only the State of Hawaii which corresponds to Botswana and a corner of Namibia and a point in the Alberta plains just north of Montana which corresponds to the French and Southern Antarctic Lands match up with any landmass.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t fun to learn that you can’t reach China by digging in your backyard. It can just be interesting to have a connection with a people and land opposite you. Maybe you can research the best public restrooms in their city! (Though they don’t flush in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere.)

The real moral of this entry is that it can be useful to bookmark websites with goofy, but interesting information because you can never tell how it might be useful in creating a connection with your activities.

Succession Expectations

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The cultivation of young, emerging arts leaders is a topic of growing importance these days. Two weeks ago, Andrew Taylor quoted as speech by Ben Cameron of the Doris Duke Foundation in which Cameron noted

“….expectations from young people around higher compensation, shorter hours, in essence less patience for the sacrificed lives of dignity and the financial masochism that were the givens for so many in my own generation — this conversation brought to my ears, at least, a new strand: the unwillingness of emerging leaders to be mere custodians of organizations they inherit.

“There are plenty of us eager to give ourselves to the arts.” they said, “But unless we are given the same authority to reinvent and reshape organizations as you yourselves were given, we are not interested.”

The current issue of Inside Arts magazine addresses the same topic. (free registration required) The article, Leading into the Future, starts out talking about a young woman who becomes involved with an arts organization, ends up working 90 hour weeks and finally quits and starts working for a finance firm because the pay and opportunities to pursue her musical interests are much better. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending as the woman ends up working for the Future of Music Coalition.

The general theme of the piece is that arts organizations need to recognize what the interests and goals of young people in the arts are. While the arts can’t offer good pay, the industry can provide people with a means of expressing themselves. Only, they need to be allowed the time to do so.

The article quotes Andrew Taylor in his role as head of the Arts Management program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We have an astounding resource in terms of the value and power of the work, but we’ve created rigid structures that are not the kind of places young people want to work. My students are passionate, skilled and trained, but when they get into a place with an apprentice mindset, and they don’t get meaningful work for the first three to five years, it’s a waste on both sides.”

and later is quoted as saying

“Some experienced leaders say there aren’t people ready to step up, but that’s because they don’t see people exactly like them,” Taylor said. “The perception is that the younger generation is not as committed . . . [but] there are young people all over the place who are passionate and ready to lead.”

This is definitely an area to keep an eye on. As arts leadership approach retirement age, succession issues are going to come to the fore. Questions will emerge about not only who will take over but how these new leaders expect their organizations to operate in relation to employees.

Prepare to Lose Your Shirt

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So the stagehands strike on Broadway is going so poorly, the producers canceled the entire next week of shows because they don’t believe there will be a resolution any time soon. I read somewhere that the folks who own and manage the theatres had been building up a war chest for a number of years so they could weather the next big strike.

Unfortunately, none of that hoarded money will go toward paying off the investors in the shows that have shut down. As far as they are concerned, everything is going to hell.

But investing in Broadway shows has always been a risky proposition. The expectation is that you will lose all your money and it is a shock when you actually see some return whereas most investments operate on the opposite assumption. The only thing you are generally guaranteed as an investor are tickets to opening night and an invitation to the opening night party. (Unless things go south before the show opens.)

If you have ever wondered about the mechanics of investing in a Broadway show, the Franklin Weinrib Rudell & Vassallo law firm website has an article on the subject. While the law doesn’t protect you from losing your shirt, it does limit losing ones shirt to those who won’t be left destitute by the loss. New York State has very stringent laws regulating investments in Broadway shows. If the total investment being solicited is in excess of $5 million, which most are these days, the show is subject to Federal Securities law. Since compliance with NY State laws can be very expensive due to all the legal fees involved, it is preferable to be subject to the Federal statutes.

Even if the total investment sought is under $5 million, a production can avoid being subject to the stringent NY State laws if “potential investors must be furnished with a thorough disclosure document (unless all the investors are accredited, in which event no particular type of information is stipulated); and there may be no more than 35 unaccredited investors, all of whom must demonstrate that alone, or together with a purchaser representative, they have the financial knowledge and experience necessary to evaluate the merits and risks of the offering.”

An accredited investor is “defined as an individual with a net worth in excess of $1 million, or who, in each of the last two years, has earned income in excess of $200,000 per year (or $300,000 with spouse), with a reasonable expectation of reaching that amount in the current year.”

Investing in Broadway shows is not for the risk averse or financially insolvent. The article discusses many of the financing structures that are used when investing in productions. The more money one brings to the table, the better deal one can negotiate–including a percentage of the producers profits above the normal investor’s cut. So if you are interested in the intricacies of funding a Broadway show, give the piece a read.

Philanthropy Clearinghouses

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Back at the end of September a large meeting of people in the philanthropy world was held sponsored by Union Square Ventures which was recorded on their blog under the title Hacking Philanthropy. They posted the transcript of the meeting but given that there were about 40 people at this all day session, it is mighty long. Even after reformatting it so I could read and reference it a bit better, I haven’t had the time to tackle it.

One of the principals at Union Square Ventures posted his reflections on the meeting last month. One of the interesting things he observed was is that the relationship between individual donors and recipients.

“Historically, philanthropy has been dominated by organizations that gather funds from donors based on mission statement and a prior track record and then distribute those funds to those in need. Once the check was written, the donor’s work was done….

Recently we have seen the emergence of a new type of charity, one that radically changes the relationship between donors and recipients. Nonprofits like DonorsChoose and Kiva behave more like marketplaces than traditional charities. This new model allows people in need to post a request for a gift or a loan to the site, and donors to chose which of those needs they would like to fund….

….But information technology also makes it possible to have a much more immediate relationship with the person in need. The appeals to sponsor a child have always had a deep emotional resonance, but it was not possible to put every child’s picture in an ad in the NY Times magazine. Today, it is possible to host hundreds of thousands of pictures and stories on the web and to provide tools to for donors to quickly find the appeals that speak most directly to them.

Organizations like Kiva and DonorsChoose vet the recipients and certify there is no fraud involved and groups tools to promote their needs. DonorsChoose focuses on helping schools sends disposable cameras to teachers so they can document the good the donations are doing then passes the pictures and handwritten letters from students on to donors.

The next 10 years may see a growth in this model of fundraising. The core of an arts organization’s annual campaign may be focused on maintaining the organizational profile on donation clearinghouses rather than direct (e-) mailings and phone banks. It would be interesting to see if larger foundations farm out fraud monitoring activities to companies like Kiva and DonorsChoose as these latter entities grow their proficiencies in this area.

I hope to post my thoughts on the full transcript of the meeting some time soon. The stout of heart might want to take a look themselves.

I Know What You Said Last Summer!

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There are those who feel Google has the potential of becoming Big Brother for all the information it collects and stores. However, Google will deliver some of its information horde to you without requiring you to create an account.

One of these services is Google Alerts. If you have any interest at all in what is being said about you or your organization on the Internet, this is the service to have. Every time one of their little indexing bots comes across a mention of the terms you specify, you receive an email with a link to that instance.

I do suggest encapsulating your search terms in quotes to keep your results as specific to your organization as possible. You can enter a number of different term groupings at once. For example, I have seen my blog referred to as Butts In Seats so I have specified those words along with Butts in the Seats for my search.

As an experiment, back in August I entered a request for alerts on search terms for my theatre. Some of the initial results that came back were for our webpages and old newspaper articles on past shows. In recent weeks I have been beginning to get links for newspaper stories on our current season.

The interesting thing I have learned is that the major newspapers have been printing up stories about my events in the neighborhood specific inserts that come out about 10 days before the performances. The listings are only appearing in the inserts specific to the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of my building so I don’t actually see the listings in the paper I get at home.

I had an inkling that this had been happening because we occasionally get calls from people who say they have seen something in the newspaper a week before our ads or the feature stories appear. There have been times we have chalked it up to people saving the Fall/Spring Arts pull outs, but now we know that could be an erroneous assumption.

This knowledge does help me make decisions about the timing of my ad placement and underscores the need to get good pictures out early. It has also shown me the value of learning to write well since my press release appeared verbatim in the neighborhood editions this week. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me so I have become a big believer in making it easy for the papers to cover your event by providing an interesting release ready to be dropped in.

Possibly the greater value of Google Alerts is that they trawl through blog entries as well. If a newspaper doesn’t like your work, their bad review will by and large be civil. Not so with blogs. The alerts help you keep an eye on conversations occurring away from the mainstream media.

If someone is saying nice stuff about you, you may decide to cultivate them and link to their work to show you are friendly with bloggers. If people are complaining about their experience, you can look into addressing the problem. If they are eviscerating you out of pure malice, you can at least monitor what is being said. (Unless you can figure out how to address the situation without exacerbating it.)

“People Gonna Talk” as the song says. You might as well know what they are saying.

So Would I Be Buttsintheseats.ArenaStage.org?

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Chad Baumann, new Director of Marketing and Communications at Arena Stage has an interesting situation. In his blog, he notes that the Arena Stage will be closing down for the next two and a half years to construct a new $125 million theatre complex.

During that time, the organization will perform at two separate spaces in Virgina! Chad’s problem is that for the last 50 years, people have been attending performances in Washington, DC and are now faced with crossing the Potomac, a much bigger psychic obstacle than physical one.

Chad understands that if he doesn’t make the river crossing as painless as possible for the quarter million people who attend every year, he may lose a significant portion of them. He is working on getting signs erected along the route but is also creating personalized webpages for all subscribers and ticket buyers. Chad describes them as an electronic direct mail piece and says the ones they will create will contain “step by step directions from their house to the new theatre, a seating diagram showing them the location of their new seats, promotional offers from local restaurants, and an opportunity to sign up for our e-newsletter.”

Reading about Personalized URLs, it doesn’t seem to be as difficult to pull off as it first sounds. It does involve an investment of money and staff time, as one might imagine.

It will be interesting to see how successful the campaign is. I am reminded of the Museum of Modern Art’s move to Queens when they renovating and how important public relations and image were to that transition.

I would also be interested to see if Arena Stage picks up more people than they lose from Virginians who didn’t attend because they didn’t want to cross the Potomac.

Selling You Everything, Including the Server That Processed Your Order

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It looks like Amazon has decided since they have gone to the trouble of putting together a sophisticated purchasing system to sell goods, they might as well make money giving people access to their system and computing capacity.

According to Non-profit Tech blog, Amazon’s offer of access to their Flexible Payment System can be a boon to non-profits. As a person who is familiar with these types of systems, Allan at Non-Profit Tech Blog clearly sees more possibilities than do I. I suspect that the opportunities I see are too grounded in what is already being done rather than what is possible.

The benefits I can immediately see are that the system they offer uses their already familiar interface. If a person has an account with Amazon, they can use the credit card on file to purchase from you.

Because of all the options and conditions you can impose upon sales, it appears as if it would be easy to create all sorts of discount packages based on innumerable combinations of things people ordered. Helpful for subscription ticket packages as well as museum gift shops.

From what I can tell it would be a great tool to use with donors who want to spread their donation out across many months because it allows you to automatically charge people on a regular basis.

The people I think it might be a real valuable tool for are central arts councils in rural or suburban areas that fundraise for member organizations who don’t have the resources to do their own development. The Amazon tool allows for the transfer of money from one person straight to a third party.

So a donor could visit the arts council website and have their donation go into Small Town Historical Society’s bank account. The arts council can choose to have a percentage removed to help pay the IT person who keeps the donor system running if they like.

If you have a savvy IT person on staff or on your board of directors, it might be worth having them look at the entry and Amazon’s page to determine what the other possibilities might be.

Be Flexible. Play Your Own Stuff

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Due to an errant keystroke and my uncharacteristic failure to save periodically, my entry for yesterday was swallowed by the abyss. I am not sure if I have faithfully recreated my thought process but hopefully this will inspire some pondering just the same.

I was listening to the radio on Wednesday as they talked about the death of Hilly Kristal, the owner of the club CBGB and I was struck by how this man owed the success of the club to the flexibility of his expectations. For those of you who don’t know, CBGB stands for Country, Blue Grass, Blues, which were Kristal’s favorite music styles and what he expected to present in his club

Instead the club ended up as the launching pad for punk and new wave bands such as the Ramones and Talking Heads. One of Kristal’s main rules for performing at CBGB was that the bands had to play original material and not cover anyone. Part of the audio NPR played for their story included his advice that bands not seek success in copying another group’s sound.

Given that the average lifespan of a club is about 2-3 years, I wonder if CBGB owed it’s longevity to being on the leading edge of music styles (though the income from merchandising didn’t hurt.) If not for a disagreement last year with the landlord over a rent increase, the club would still be open.

I am hesitant, however, to advocate that arts organizations emulate nightclubs and change with the latest trends. Clubs are structured to take advantage of the latest trend, not to serve the community. When tastes change and business wanes, they fold up shop and often reopen after a renovation that positions them to conform to whatever is en vogue.

Even the iconic Studio 54, for all its popularity faded away as tastes changed. Though the case could be made that it owes its existence to flexibly changing with the times. The building used to be a theatre, then it was a television studio for CBS, then it was the famous nightclub and now it has come full circle as a venue for Roundabout Theatre (though it does have 2 full service bars, some things are too valuable to get rid of!)

Arts organizations trying to respond to the latest trends might change their programming from a classical focus to a contemporary one or vice versa. I can’t see too many closing their doors to renovate a black box theatre into a proscenium set up as tastes move in that direction. Or rather, those who can afford to do so probably have the resources to weather the shift until it moves back toward their configuration again.

The decision to change the focus of an organization to accommodate the latest tastes and thinking is certainly based in the environment and situation. Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre with its 56,000 subscribers (yes, that’s right) probably isn’t going to consider changing the way they do things any time soon.

There is growing sentiment in various discussions about the state of the arts that the current economic model the arts follow is no longer suitable and a change is needed. It may come to pass that arts organizations end up with a life span of a couple years and only those agile enough to reinvent and restructure their public manifestation will endure.

As cynical as it may sound, you can only serve a community as long as they value being served in the manner you offer. I honestly believe that people can tell when a company is catering to their latest whims and when the company is in it for the long haul. I believe they won’t give much thought to abandoning the first when they have grown bored and will show more loyalty to the second. However, I also believe that as life moves ever faster, that the effective lifespan of even the most sincere arts organization is going to shorten. Some companies like the Walnut Street may command intense loyalty forever but the dynamics of other communities may result in greater rates of change.

In closing, I will repeat the sentiment I have stated many times before–like Hilly says, play your own stuff and don’t look for success being derivative of other groups. Yes, I linked to a seminar where the Walnut Street folks will tell you what they did to go from 0 to 56,000 subscribers in 25 years. More power to ’em, but they can’t guarantee you can do the same in your community. Believe me, no one wishes they could more than me. It would simplify things a great deal. On the other hand, I am pretty sure a good portion of what they have to say would be of some value so I would be ducking in to check them out and figure what I could use and what I couldn’t.

Good Acting and Voice Skills Wanted, Will Provide Body

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Second Life is getting a lot of buzz these days as the medium through which people will interact and perhaps get their entertainment in the future. Political candidates have offices and give speeches there. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will give the opening concert of their season there next month motivated by the desire to be the first to do so.

But I heard something today that is motivating me to keep my eyes and ears open for some other alternatives. A student who has had a long association with the theatre came in today and announced she was going to move to Spokane, WA in January to work for Cyan Worlds, creators of the Myst games.

She has been playing Myst Online for sometime now and decided she was going to visit the company this summer. She apparently told them she was coming, when she got there she announced she was going to work for them. Judging from the number of pictures she got with the founder and other employees, they did nothing to dissuade her ambitions. (It also doesn’t hurt that they are advertising for the job she wants.)

I was mostly amused as she talked about her visit. (“The woman in this picture doesn’t know it yet, but she is going to hire me.”) But my ears really perked up when she mentioned that the reason she liked the game was that it was like theatre and performance art. Every month a new chapter in the story is introduced by the game staff to drive the plot forward similar to a TV series. In the interim, the players work together to perform tasks and solve the puzzles for which the Myst games are famous.

I won’t pretend to know much more about the game beyond what I have read online. A couple things I did come across got me thinking that the dynamics of the game might have some lessons for the future of performing arts.

First of all, while players will have the ability to influence the storyline and submit created content, the game administration still retains control of how things proceed. This is in contrast with games like World of Warcraft where there is almost no attention paid to the plot. Second Life allows people a great deal of control over the environment to the point where people are developing and selling real estate in the virtual world. However, that control also equates to the ability to vandalize and destroy property which has been purchased in real dollars at some point in the process.

User created content may be all the rage, but as Andrew Taylor pointed out back in May, there are a lot more people are watching the content rather than creating it. At this point there is still a large majority who want to see well made content (or at least videos of people making fools of themselves) and don’t necessarily crave a high degree of control from the experience.

Live performance in the future may come to mean interacting with virtual avatars of performers. Acting may regress a little. Since appearance will be a function of good design and rendering, the most highly paid actors might be those who have good voices and improvisation/acting skills necessary to interact with people rather than those who look good.

It would be a sort of reversal of the emergence of talking films where people who looked good but had bad speaking voices found themselves out of a job. You have to look no further than Tony Jay who wasn’t a bad looking guy but had a gorgeous voice. He got a lot more work as a voice over artist for cartoons and video games than for his physical presence so it is not tough to see that the real money for performance may soon be in having a good voice and a sense of drama.

Get Fed At the Forte

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Back when I first started my blog I frequently sought out arts related blogs and had a hard time of it. Lately, much to my pleasure, I have noticed more and more arts blogs appearing on the blogrolls of a number of sites I visit.

I was rather delighted to come across the Theatreforte blog last week. Working out of a secret bunker in Columbus, OH, the folks at Theatreforte host a rather large number of theatre blog feeds as well as create entries of their own. They break down the blogs by region which is helpful if you are looking for like minded souls nearby.

They have the largest number of feeds I have seen since ArtsFeed shut down for renovations a couple years ago and never reopened. If you have a blog whose feed you think they should host, send them an email. There is still a need for more good arts bloggers, especially since a couple theatre bloggers got a little burned out and signed off last month.

I also wanted to acknowledge that the Forte site looks to be a labor of love attached to another labor of love, Available light [theatre]. Amazing how many things love can power these days.

Its The 80s All Over Again

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I was getting my 80s fix on YouTube watching Kate Bush’s video for “Running Up That Hill.” Even though the song is fairly old in MTV years, the comments section was very active with responses as recent as an hour before I viewed the piece. (Which serves to confirm that I have good taste in music.)

The video features a lot of modern dance (which was probably even more modern in 1985). While I imagine most everyone was coming for the music, I was trying to think if there was a way to have a high rate of success in juxtaposing a little arts performance with something a lot of people wanted to watch/listen to on YouTube. For every coolness factor I could think of, there was a possible negative influence that would suck the cool right out so I am not quite sure what the answer is.

While looking around YouTube to see if any other dance companies had put anything intriguing up, I found an interesting effort by the Cincinnati Ballet. The have posted YouTube video contests corresponding to each one of their shows. Each video asks you to cast a vote between three possible choices and when you do, you get $10 off a ticket to that show.

The most recent contest had people voting to decide which of three slobs turned suave would get to take the artistic director to the ballet. Over 3500 people voted which isn’t too bad a result. I would be interested to know how many of those who voted weren’t regular attendees. Even if they didn’t end up going to the show, they visited the ballet’s website which is a good first step.

You can take a look at some of their earlier episodes here. My personal feeling is that they did a good job for a first time out. I didn’t like the textures applied to the Twyla Tharpe video because it made it hard to watch. The “Smackdown Ballet Style” was a fun idea to promote Bolero but I think it went on a little too long to engage an curious new attendee’s interest.

The one I liked the best was the “Nutty Dance” where three people from the community (music reporter, musician and vice mayor) were pitted against each other trying to do a segment from The Nutcracker. Each did a credible job and put their own stamp on the piece.

Remembering some of the first music videos on MTV back in the 80s, I don’t fault them for the somewhat rough first attempts. I salute them for their imagination and initiative and hope they and others will work to refine their technique in using tools like YouTube to promote their work. I am betting these clever folks devise an entirely different approach to marketing their product altogether.

Time for Shows Online?

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It is not everyday that I get an email from Switzerland, especially one asking me to promote a performance that is in turn promoting the release of a Swiss watch. I gave a snort of derision of some corporation trying to get me to help them advertise their product. I hardly believed the subject line that implied the release was an exclusive for my blog.

But I have to emit a beleaguered sigh, grit my teeth and help the watch makers out in the process of admitting there might be something to be learned from their approach.

The event is the virtual performance of Kevin Spacey in The Interrogation of Leo and Lisa on May 16. The International Watch Company is launching a new Da Vinci line so the show is about Da Vinci and Mona Lisa. Along with a short blurb about the show were some photos for my use in any post I might make about the performance.

It is not outside the realm of imagination that we will see more of this type of event where delivery of a performance over the internet is underwritten by a single sponsor with a related product to sell. BMW had their online film series not so long ago doing the same thing.

I was torn about whether I should wait to post on this until after the play premiered online, thereby blunting whatever promotional benefit my entry might provide IWC. But I also thought it important to give people the opportunity to assess how well the premiere is executed.

Right now the links to the Play and Making Of videos are not active but will presumably have content on the 16th. You can access still photos of the performance right now. According to a number of articles I found online, the show was taped at the SIHH Watch Fair where it was performed at the gala. Although the IWC website doesn’t clearly indicate it, other articles covering the premiere noted that it can be viewed at 4 p.m. Central European Time, 7 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 10 p.m. Japan Standard Time.

A few interesting things to note if you are going to try this yourself. The website has mechanisms whereby you can remind yourself and tell friends, two features that are pretty much de rigueur on websites offering any type of information and services these days.

Their online program book has been translated into 10 languages, including two versions of Chinese. Granted the watch company has a more diverse audience and greater resources than most theatres. I suspect that in the future, much sooner than later in many parts of the U.S., providing information in multiple languages is going to be de rigueur itself in the pursuit of removing barriers to attendance.

There are many larger questions this whole situation raises like is there any point to taping a live performance? Is the format too much like TV for those who love the live experience and too limited for those who prefer the special effects possible with TV and film?

Is there some element of live performance the camera can capture that makes it worth taping? If so, then why aren’t recorded performances more popular? Do the camera people need to film from more exciting angles rather than straight on? If so, won’t the crouching cameramen interfere with the enjoyment of the live audience?

What I would really be interested in seeing is if the video of the performance is available outside of those time slots. It would be rather ironic if a watch company sponsored an event that you didn’t have to be prompt to participate in. If it is available at other times, was there really any value in generating a buzz to get people to watch on May 16? If it were Spiderman 3 being released, people would certainly flock. Kevin Spacey grilling historical figures probably doesn’t have as great a draw.

Just because it isn’t outside the realm of imagination that we will see more of this sort of thing doesn’t necessarily mean it is an idea with long term viability. Still the whole effort bears watching in order to ask these questions which all stem from a central question of Should We Consider Doing This and What Will It Look Like If We Do?

Sing and Split

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My recent entries on the statistical analysis and general content of the Knight Foundation Magic of Music Final Report has gotten me thinking quite a bit lately.

I am looking forward to the report the Rand Institute produces about their study of the creation of effective arts education programs for children. I am wondering if they will present any findings about the effect of the programs on learning and the students’ lives.

One of the things I have been wondering about is the impact of modeled behavior on much debated meaning of the statistic claiming that 74% of orchestra ticket buyers had played an instrument or sung at some point in their lives.

The music department at my college holds about two choral concerts a year to which the director invites community and school choral groups to participate. This is not a competition and is programmed for balanced content. The event usually starts and ends with performances by the college groups.

Inevitably, many friends and family come just for the performance of their loved ones and then depart, sometimes paying to see someone sing for 20 minutes. Often people arrive 90 minutes into the performance having missed the first time their loved one sang–or missing them altogether. This is the case for friend/family of middle/high schoolers and college students alike.

It is entirely common to see parents taking their children home immediately after the performance. (Shades of the Joshua Bell/Tasmin Little experiments. Perhaps there is something to the claim of parents dragging kids away!-scroll down to words “The Second Issue”).

I wonder if the parents of the people surveyed by the Knight Foundation supported their activities and encouraged them to attend performances aligned with their interests when they weren’t performing themselves. (Though granted, the survey question encompasses people’s entire lives which might also include college glee club and church choir, etc).

So I likewise wonder if participation in these activities by young people today will have as strong an influence in attendance (if it does) as it did on previous generations. If parents are giving their kids the message that other people’s performances don’t warrant attention, the students may not be motivated to hone their skill or appreciation by watching another. They may also not feel that their performances have any value to the general public since so many people exit between groups. Finally, they may not have any interest in seeing someone else perform when they reach adulthood.

I have a suspicion that the Rand report on arts education may find that truly effective programs have a strong element of parental investment if they think to factor that in. Though parental support won’t necessarily resolve this problem. Many of the students I have seen get a lot of support and encouragement from family and friends making it necessary for us to shush the loud photo sessions in the lobby during the performance prior to going home.

What is interesting to me is that after 6-8 of these concerts, I have never heard anyone complain about the shifting audiences. If people are focussed on paying attention only to their loved ones, they don’t seem to be insisting that others do so as well. It would be interesting to know if this behavior and expectations of the rest of the audience is specific to the local culture or if various regions of the country act differently.

Modeling Consumer Behavior

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Over at Adaptistration, its Take A Friend to the Orchestra Month (TAFTO). I am not writing this year, but I am participating in a sense. The orchestra will be performing in the theatre I run.

Drew prefaced today’s entry with a promise that it would wow readers with the concepts it was presenting. I have to say it certainly did for me. Bill Harris of Facilitated Systems creates a computer model to test if Drew’s TAFTO program is beneficial for orchestras in comparison with paid advertising.

Now since he is dealing with statistics and computer programs, it isn’t the easiest of reads. On my first read through I absorbed enough to realize it was providing enough valuable insights to read through again a couple hours later. If I understand correctly, one can copy the program he has written and use it in the simulator he suggests to produce results specific to ones organization.

I was intrigued by all this so I followed a link back to Bill’s blog and came across an entry on the Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music Final Report. Not two weeks ago I had cited a portion of the finding of this report to a group and now I see Mr. Harris telling people to be careful about the conclusions they drew from it.

He quote from page 32 of the report-

In trying to profile the factors that might predict a ticket buyer, one statistic stood out: 74 percent of them had played an instrument or sung in a chorus at some time in their lives.

What he says this appears to be saying is,”the probability of someone having played an instrument or sung in a group, given that they were a ticket purchaser, was 0.74.”

But what he says you really want to know is the probability that someone will buy a ticket “given that they played an instrument or sang in a group.” That may be what you assumed the report was saying because you hope that people who play instruments and sing (or perform in a play, paint, etc) will patronize your organization.

My assumption about the findings in the Knight report was that people who had music in their background might be inclined to attend later in life, but I didn’t see a cause and effect relationship. It merely seemed that people with a musical background shared were an affinity group within symphony attendees.

However, under the suspicion that inclination to attend wasn’t any different than cause and effect assumption, I posted a comment to Harris’ latest blog entry asking if I was making an erroneous assumption.

We shall see what he says. In the meantime, the lesson here is to read those statistics with a careful, critical eye.

Your Acting Is A Little Transparent

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Just this week I was thinking back to an article I did an entry on back in 2004 where MIT students were trying to create a system whereby the Miami Symphony would be conducted by a hologram of a conductor standing in Germany. Unfortunately, the article I linked to back then is no longer available. But I was wondering whatever came of that effort.

Today via Artjournal.com there is an piece on Discovery News about how an actor in Orlando, FL and actors Canada both performed onstage in Illinois via the wonders of the internet. The Floridian and Canadians appeared on screens and not as holograms, but it looks like technology and practice might be moving in that direction.

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. Back in June I did an entry about Play On Earth, an effort which had actors on three continents interacting with each other. “An object hurled in Singapore flies halfway round the world and hits a character in Newcastle,” reports a Guardian article.

Who knows, by the time the technology to create viable holograms is developed, efforts like the two mentioned here may have changed the whole dynamic of live performance — not to mention the definition of what constitutes “live.”

There Goes the E-Neighborhood

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If you are thinking about buying a plot of land in Second Life or creating a presence on Myspace.com, you may want to ponder your approach and consider what value doing so might have.

Okay, so a Myspace account is free, not much too lose. But there are always issues endemic to every new communication channel to be mindful of when making forays.

Via Artsjournal.com comes this article about the growing resentment against corporate presence in Second Life. Stores have been vandalized and destroyed and avatars of people shopping in the virtual versions of some corporations have been shot.

Granted, this type of thing happens all over–sans the bombings and shootings–whenever something goes from having niche to widespread appeal. Quoth the article:

“It’s a path well-worn by SL’s online ancestors, from The Well, a proto-online bulletin board community founded in the ’80s through chatrooms, message boards and networking sites Friendster and MySpace. Early adopters shape the community as they wish, then have no choice but to stand by and watch it endlessly reshaped by the chaotic deluge of new users – some troublemakers, some commercial exploiters – that flood in as it gains popularity…

“That’s how it’s always been with these spaces,” Walsh says. “The new come in, the old get disgruntled and move on.”

This is something of a similar sentiment echoed by a 17 year old, (who started a blog at 12. She is an old hand at online interactions), in a New York Magazine article about the fluidity and openness of the younger generation’s identity online. (An interesting read if you want to gain insight into the emerging rules.)

I ask if she has a MySpace page, and she laughs and gives me an amused, pixellated grimace. “Unfortunately I do! I was so against MySpace, but I wanted to look at people’s pictures. I just really don’t like MySpace. ‘Cause I think it’s just so

Revisiting Interactivity for the Future

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Back in November I had an idea for making theatre performances more interactive by inviting people to send or bring in music in support of a show. (Follow the link for the details.) I received a lot of support for the concept via email and links from other sites.

Even without the expressions of support, I was determined to see it attempted one way or another. Since the whole concept is experimental, I didn’t think I had the audience or people with the right artistic alignment to implement the idea at my facility. I broached the subject with a director who possesses both at another venue. He was intrigued with the idea but needs time to ponder it and find a show and approach that would make the idea viable.

I wanted to toss the whole concept out to the ether again. New people have started reading this blog since I first proposed it. I would be interested in any suggestions or ideas people may have to execute it.

From the technology perspective one would need a high speed internet connection in order to receive submissions via email or some file sharing software and then a computer with enough processing power to manipulate the music and then burn it on to a CD or other medium from which it can be played during a performance. Obviously, one would also need a speaker and amp system in place connected to said medium.

On the personnel side, a person in the technology integrator position I mentioned in my earlier entry would need to be part of the artistic team and involved in making choices among what is submitted. I suspect that one might be faced with the artistic choice of whether to use some fantastic pieces that don’t fit with the mood of the rest of the show or using some really good pieces that do fit.

One of the reasons I am proposing a separate position from the director and even the musical director is that while an arts organization might start by having people submit music in advance for use in one spot during the show, if the organization refines their technique they may be integrating music brought to the performance on an iPod 20 minutes before the show starts into the whole performance.

The novelty of having their musical choices included in a show may be enough to inspire people to send in material days in advance of the show at first. As the practice becomes more prevalent, people will make the decision to attend closer to the performance time and will want the opportunity to have their contribution included in the show. The person in charge of processing these submissions will have to be more like a club DJ than the traditional music director and be able to make decisions on the fly about what music works well with the director’s vision of the show but also doesn’t clash stylistically with the other music he/she is using that night.

This sort of scenario really infuses a live performance with a sense of excitement and danger. The actors never know what music is going to be played that night and how it is going to change the atmosphere and dynamic of the performance. It will become abundantly clear if actors are just reciting their lines and slightly altering their approach so it is more appropriate to the energy the music has created.

Stage managers and the tech integrator need to work incredibly closely so that the stage manager knows when to call the next cue. The music may be fading out later one night than it did earlier due to the integrator’s desire to sustain a motif a little longer.

Performing arts venues often promote the unpredictability of live performance as a selling point. Attempting what I propose will make this energy palpable to audiences.

Speaking of promoting events. I can’t imagine that an arts organization would have too much success explaining what they were trying to do and appealing to audiences for musical submissions through newspaper stories. This type of thing is so far removed from the usual experience that I fear newspapers would report the project incorrectly and readers wouldn’t quite understand the process.

Emails and letters to ticket buyers might be better. I suspect an appeal to people over social networking sites like Myspace by those involved with the production might initially produce the greatest yields until audiences had a chance to experience a performance.

As much as I hate to imply that someone my age may be too obtuse to be an early participant as a contributor, young as I am, I think the younger set would have a quicker, more intuitive understanding of what was involved and would contribute far more interesting compositions.

There are hundred of consequences and implications I have already envisioned. As I have already implied, some are a matter of upsetting an established order and can be resolved with flexibility and good planning. Other problems will be unique to each performance and require sound artistic judgment.

But what am I missing? What other technological tools and personnel requirements have I overlooked? What suggestions would make this concept better and more practical to execute? Is there a technology out there that seems ready-made for this type of idea?

Email me or comment below!

Start That Grant Early

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If you are considering applying for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Humanities, or any program run by the government, you will have to go through Grants.gov. My last grant application went in just before they implemented this new program through which all US government related grant applications must pass so I haven’t had to negotiate the system myself.

I did try to get the registration portion of the process out of the way when I got the email telling me that my next grant would have to go through that process. The complexity made my eyes cross and I decided to forgo my usual “get it done well in advance” ethic.

A couple days ago I saw an account of the hair-tearing frustration a woman at Hood College went through trying to assist a colleague submit a grant. I figured maybe I should warn others about what is involved as well.

If you go to the applicant FAQ page on the Grants.gov website you can start to see where the problems arise. First, you can only use Internet Explorer and Windows operating system as that is only thing the grant application software runs on. (Didn’t the government sue Microsoft for monopoly practices?) Firefox is out. If you have a Macintosh, you need to log on to an emulation program that only accommodates so many people at once. (They suggest logging on between 10 pm and 10 am.)

Then you need a DUNS number, register with the Central Contractor Registry from which you will get a Marketing Partner Id Number and will be able to designate an e-Business Point of Contact. Then you need to register with the Credential Provider who will give you a username and password so you can register with Grants.gov as an authorized organization representative.

You may feel lucky if you discover your organization has already acquired all this information. Of course, now you have to discover who it is that has all this information and who Grants.gov recognizes as the person authorized to authorize you as a user. And pray that they have saved all the usernames and passwords for the hoops mentioned above.

All this before you actually get to fill out the grant application. The government really doesn’t want to give you any money. Now I understand better why the United States Artists group I mentioned previously is focusing on funding individual artists. It is said that the best artists are troubled and tormented to some degree. This application process will push those artists over the edge and make mediocre artists better.

Why Don’t The Arts Have This?

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Over Christmas Break my theatre was more or less empty so in the interests of not turning on lights I didn’t need, I pretty much ended up eating lunch at my desk. On a whim I started perusing the Chronicle of Higher Education’s forums.

It wasn’t long before I was asking myself why there was nothing like this in the arts world. These forums are a great resource for people in higher education. It is mostly geared for professors, but grad students and administrators have their places too. The different areas deal with various issues from how people spend their free time to thorny ethical issues over student cheating and plagiarism.

One of the areas I think is strongest is jobs. The posters pose and answers questions about interviewing- how to dress, what to expect at a conference interview vs. campus interview, what a job talk might entail, what foods you should avoid during a meal interview- it really runs a gamut. People even solicit advice about particular towns and institutions.

What really impressed me is that there seem to be a couple of Wikis created by the forum members rather than by the Chronicle staff. One is essentially a collection of the basic wisdom covered in the forums about where to find a job and what to do when called for an interview.

The other, quite interestingly, acts as a status board about what stage different jobs are at. Since many institutions are pretty bad about communicating where a job search is at and may not even start committee review until months after the deadline, the forum members make notes about when they hear anything about a job. If there is a note saying they are calling for interviews and you don’t get a call, at least you know where things stand for you.

If one of the prominent arts entities hosted these types of forums, it would be fantastic. There could be discussions about everything-advocacy, marketing tips, law, unions, interviewing tips, technology, audience relations, fundraising, board relations, philosophy. I could really go on and on. In addition to helping arts organizations make their external relations more effective and efficient, it might bring about an improvement to employee relations too. After some posts saying “you ain’t going to be paid well anywhere in the arts so if you gotta starve, you couldn’t find a nicer group to starve alongside,” some places might experience a little bit of a brain drain.

Some of the large entities like Americans for the Arts and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters do have listservs but they are only open to the membership. I have access to a couple and they are like ghost towns. I have more discussions with people who comment on my blog. I think part of the problem is that access is closed. The other is the old chicken and egg thing. There is no discussion because nobody posts and nobody posts because there isn’t enough discussion to get them visiting.

It won’t be long though before the up and coming youth who are used to holding long conversations online start showing up and looking for some place to talk. Absent any place to do so, they will start creating their own discussions. The problem with that is the discussions will be decentralized. I can start a forum right now. The software comes with my blog account. My forum would add to the conversation and be an improvement over the present status, but not as much as one at a more highly trafficked site would.

A central forum should be started now and all the bugs ironed out so that it is ready for when the next wave of artists, managers, designers and technicians arrive on the scene. They will have a certain set of expectations from their experiences with MySpace, YouTube, internet chat, texting and whatever else may come next. If they are disappointed in what they find and go elsewhere, an opportunity to harness their energy is lost.

Whatever organization creates a good forum for discussion can have a hand in directing the energies of artists. I understand that these things take resources and that is why some of these organizations are limited access to dues paying members only. Whomever does this well will gain at the very least tacit recognition of leadership. Giving it away for free could garner greater membership and support than keeping it locked away will. Which is why I think a group like Americans for the Arts should do it. Though I wouldn’t discount ArtsJournal.com from stepping up and making a success of it.

Maybe there are highly active forums out there and I missed them. I would love it if someone could point me in the right direction. Before writing this entry, I checked out Americans for the Arts, the NEA, TCG, ASOL, DanceUSA, and Arts Presenters.

I also hit regional presenting conferences and the regional arts granters- NEFA, Mid-Atlantic Arts, WESTAF, and Southern Arts.

(All of these have great resources to check out though which is why I am going link crazy here.)

I even checked out the Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carniege Mellon University. They will license forum and listserv software to you, but they don’t actually host any public forums that I can see.

On the other hand, they don’t list Butts In The Seats as an arts management resource, so really, how good can they be?!

Anyhow, I really feel strongly about this so I am going to ponder a little more, put together a nice letter making my case and contact some likely hosts suggesting something like what I am proposing. I might enlist some of my gentle readers to lobby alongside me if I discover any promising opportunities.

I know that all solutions do not solve the problems of all people. What is creating great discussion for educators may not work for the arts world. But seeing as how no one has really tried it yet, it is worth turning over the stone and seeing what we find. Maybe there are forums in Butts in the Seats’ future.

Movie Interrupts Cellphone

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For all those who have had problems with cellphones during a performance and haven’t been to the movies lately, attend upon my tale!

I went to see a movie yesterday and during the preview saw something that filled me with great delight. One of the ads featured a guy at a table on a cell phone essentially telling his girlfriend he can’t live without them. Suddenly Sidney Pollack comes in and starts talking about how the scenery is all wrong because the colors are too bright. Then he tells the guy on the cell phone he should be red eyed and pacing around the room instead of sitting.

The guy on the cell phone gives Pollack an incredulous look and Pollack says “I’m sorry, is my directing interrupting your cellphone conversation.”

I was cackling with laughter and was a little envious that the film format allowed them to do this sort of thing. I am half tempted to have my technical director move the rear projection drop downstage so I can project that little ad on it before the shows.

Though I have to also acknowledge there were 3 additional announcements to turn of cell phones – one before and two just after this Pollack piece. One of them was a screen that sat there static for a minute or so while a voice asked people to turn off cell phones a few times. As funny as the Pollack piece was, it might have been too subtle an approach. (Of course, it too plainly asked for cell phones to be turned off.)

It certainly didn’t appear that people understood that the cell phone requests also extended to cessation of all noise. A woman behind me kept chatting in what sounded to be Tagalog for the first half-hour or so of the movie.

A number of theatres have gotten a little clever and produced CDs with cell phone rings that they play preceding a performance to catch people’s attention and ask them to deactive the tones. Heck, the Chicago Sinfonietta even integrated them into a performance. But sometimes it seems like a losing proposition to request people turn them off, no matter how many times you ask.

Shrinking The Universe

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As you read or listen to the news you probably hear a lot about how MySpace.com is getting bigger and bigger and even bigger still. You may also hear about how the whole point of joining is to see how many friends you can accumulate.

It may come as a surprise to you that Six Apart, the folks who brought you the Typepad, Movable Type and LiveJournal are offering a new social network service intended to limit what you blog to a small number of people. (Though that was the intent of Myspace.com too)

It took me a few minutes to realize that Six Apart was doing the smart thing and not trying to compete with MySpace.com but rather was going after the market of people who didn’t want to be associated with MySpace’s size and controversies.

The new free service called Vox promises highly customizable privacy features which lets you set limits on specific entries, photos and videos or globally restrict everything you do.

If this is true, there are some great applications for arts organizations. It can be used for a members-only site to let subscribers know about specific specials offers coming up. Not that I would encourage any more appearances of stratified levels of elitism in the arts, you could also set different levels of access for different groups of people. One area for subscribers only, another for donors who subscriber perhaps. (Although it appears that the only categories you can use are the pre-set family and/or friend, I will bet future versions will have customizable categories if they are smart.)

Another use might be for inexpensive project management and information sharing. Directors and designers located around the world geographically could share information at initial stages of performance planning. Script revisions can be posted as they are produced. Design sketches can be shared. The light grid and stage dimensions and inventory lists can always be stored there for continual reference. A choreographer can film what he/she envisions for dance and fight scenes and post it for comments.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that something like what I proposed in my last entry can be viable. Whether it is something open to the whole world like Myspace, smaller like Vox or all the blogs and websites in between, people want to express themselves to others. It’s in the music collections on iPods, YouTube videos included on webpages, and lists of favorite everythings in the margins. People are curating what they like and want to show it off.

People may view a chance to do live collaborating with a noted arts group as an opportunity to have a little respectability rub off on them and may jump at the chance. Some may be a little more reticent to become involved. Just as there is a place on the web for people who want to boast about having lotsa friends, groups that tailor their interactive programs for the talented but shy can find interested audience-partners, too.

Connections and Transfers

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Potentially coming to a municipality near you is another effort by Google to help you get where you are goin’. Currently Beta testing in select cities is Google Transit.

Punch in where are, where you are going, what time you want to leave or arrive by and Google Transit will tell you the next 4 times buses pass by your start address, how long the transit will be with transfers (if any) and how much money you are saving vs. driving.

There are a few bugs to work out. For example it told me to get off the bus at a stop 3/4 mile farther away from work than I needed to and really underestimated the walk to work. I chalk it up to the data Google was provided by the transit company since the more distant stop is listed on the schedule and the closer, heavily used location is not.

The benefit for arts organizations, once the service is more refined and wide spread, is that it will help remove a barrier to attendance. You can encourage people to take the Rte. 42 bus, but if they are uncertain if the line near their house intersects conveniently with 42 they really need to be motivated to attend. This is especially true for weekends and nights when buses run less frequently.

For now, tuck it away and keep it in mind as a future resource you can direct patrons to so they can get to you.

Grandeur Reduced to A 20 Inch Monitor

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Another story from the “Could This Be The Wave of The Future?” file, (and the “Don’t Dismiss It Until You Ponder It” subfolder), NPR had a story yesterday about museum collections going online. The story starts out talking about how many smaller museums with interesting collections have had to either scaleback activities or close their bricks and mortar presences due to lack of funding. Now the only way to view the collections of some of these museums are online.

There is, in fact, a website called MoOM–the Museum of Online Museums which lists all these collections. They range from noted museums like the Smithsonian, MoMA and The Art Institute of Chicago to more obscure and interesting sites like The Gallery of International Cigarette Pack Graphics and The Grocery List Collection which boasts the largest collection of found grocery lists.

Now if you are asking how some of these sites qualify as museums and if images existing only as 1s and 0s in the ether of the internet can be considered a collection, you aren’t alone. (After all, everyone could boast they had the Mona Lisa in their museum with a little work.) The NPR story tackles the debate about what constitutes a museum and what it means to curate a collection.

The guys who run MoOM absolutely believe that seeing art in a physical museum is often a necessity and can be a transforming experience. But they also believe there are a lot of interesting collections of material out there that people should see, but that they wouldn’t necessarily ever want to drive to. They also point out that one would never have the time to visit all the bricks and mortar museums out there either so having the art online provides welcome and needed access.

But does a cool webpage of scanned skatepark passes deserve the appellation “museum”? NPR quotes Wilson O’Donnell, director of the museology program at the University of Washington in Seattle as saying no. His analogy that an online museum is no more a museum than Wikipedia a valid source of information is a little out of touch (Peer review of articles by the journal Nature found it as accurate as Brittanica.), and his reasoning quoted by NPR isn’t completely compelling.

My blog and others have countless examples of how being well trained doesn’t necessarily ensure the production of a quality product. I think the same could reasonably be said of a curator at a prestigious bricks and mortar institution. The inclusion in the story of a professor of Native American Indian studies saying that mainstream museums haven’t done a good job representing Native American cultural groups futher clouds the concept of who is qualified to assemble a collection. (Additionally, the professor is quoted as saying most tribal groups resist the term museum in favor of cultural center because it connotes something that is old and dull.)

If you really start trying to identify the elements that separate a museum from a really neat collection, I suspect you will eventually get frustrated and be reduced to paraphrasing Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it.” It is no easier to do than making a similar list comparing a bench and a coffee table. Is the collection of magazine covers featuring the US Flag from one month 1942 more valid than the site featuring steel and coal magazine ads from all of 1966 simply because the former is on the Smithsonian site?

This story encapulates the whole dilemmia of technology and art. In some ways, technology throws open the doors to opportunity enabling possibilities and a reach previously unattainable. Concurrently, technology threatens to dilute or isolate us from the potency and relevance of works.

But damned if you can definitively say where the line between the two is.

Search For Sitar Video, Book the Sengalese Singer

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I noticed something very interesting yesterday. As I was looking around for some final acts to round out next season, I happened upon an agents website and clicked on the link for video.

I was taken to the Google Video site. The agent had been clever on two counts. First, he doesn’t have to pay to maintain or store the video on a server. Second, now whenever someone looks up a topic related to one of the groups he represents (World music, for example) the video of his client will show up and perhaps garner some additional business for him.

I suspect we will begin to see more of this sort of attempt to position performances as video services like Google and YouTube.com become more prevalent and easy to use..and as it gets easier to make videos.

Ball Thrown Round The World

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I don’t know if anyone caught this Guardian article on Artsjournal.com in the last day or so. The story covers, Play on Earth, an effort by performance groups on three continents to create and interactively perform with one another with the help of technology. I had previously mentioned a related effort by MIT in an entry a couple years ago.

The Guardian article presents what may be a preview of the format the performing arts may take in the future. It seems quite ripe with possibility. It could be exciting to see how directors might exploit the real time chronological differences in clever ways.

The danger element inherent to having separate directors and casts who have never met each other might provide a draw to audiences as an alternative to the well-edited movie or television show. We often talk about one of the appeals of live performance being that anything can happen and this certainly reintroduces that concept. The irony is, it is the instability of network connection that contributes to this sense that catastrophe may be imminent. As technology improves, performances may have to up the ante in other areas to maintain the ambiance.

A Door Closes, A Window Opens

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Last week Wes Platt, owner of the online text based multi-user game Otherspace announced that in 2008 on the 10th anniversary of his game, he was shutting it down.

So what does Otherspace have to do with non-profit arts organizations you ask. Well, quite a bit if you take a look.

For one, Otherspace is definitely non-profit. It is completely free to play and runs on donations and merchandise sales (tshirts, hats, mugs and some other things I will soon mention). My first thought was that his move provides a good example for arts organizations for looking at a project that is doing well and deciding to phase them out and replace with something else that advances the organizational mission. It is no easy thing for any organization, online or not, to develop a new project while maintaining the current ones. (Platt also has two other games with different themes he runs.) It is even tougher to decide to do in an uncertain financial climate.

I also thought it was pretty gutsy to do it on an anniversary when he could get some additional mileage out of it. On the other hand, he can get some mileage out of the anniversary connected shutdown by simultaneously introducing the new project he has promised as he and the game’s following toast out the old.

The other thing of note about Otherspace is that it is a roleplaying game with well-designed large story arcs to involve the players. The first six years had 17 story arcs according to the website. Wes Platt has actually published a novel based on the world concept with another book on the way.

What he has also done though is taken the roleplaying logs provided by some key players and edited them into books as well. The sale of these books on Amazon.com also helps to support the game and keep them free. In essence, the actions and choices of the players placed in certain scenarios help to create works of fiction. Their incentive for playing in a compelling manner is that the sale of their recreational activities continues to make their enjoyment possible.

Obviously, it is just a new twist on an ensemble developing a performance piece. It would be interesting to see if expanding this idea of technology assisted could be turned into the next big thing.

The last thing that seemed valuable for arts organizations to note is that the game has a Wiki associated with it. Since the theme of the game is that of a space opera with strange alien races and terminology, there is a need to identify these elements to newcomers. The specific wiki for the game offers descriptions of the worlds, races, organizations, technology, culture as well as How To information for new players.

I would think the term alien terminology by itself would be enough to explain the value of a wiki to an arts organization. The benefit of a wiki over a list of glossary terms on your website is that a wiki is dynamic. As a professional in an arts field, you can’t always anticipate everything your audience thinks it is important to know.

With a wiki, you get a little help from existing members of your audience because they have a pretty clear idea of what they didn’t know at first that they found helpful to learn. Because anyone can contribute to a wiki, anyone can update entries on playwrights, composers, actors, tips on getting good tickets, protocol on behavior and dress in different scenarios whenever they realize they have something to contribute.

Of course, this strength is also a weakness since people can vandalize your wiki with ads for viagra, obscenities and bad reviews. In this regard, a wiki takes more effort than a static page on your website. Even if people are making well-written, objective neutral (the basic standard for wiki entries)contributions, someone always has to be monitoring the updates to ensure they meet standards.

The good news with wikis is that the someone doing the monitoring doesn’t have to be a staff person. In fact, it is a mark of a wiki’s success if it isn’t a staff person doing all the work. Wikis allow for the quick reversion to previous information by contributors. It is a testament to how invested your audience is in the success of your organization when supporters remove offensive material on your behalf before you know it is there.

And since wiki contributors tend to skew younger than the average performing arts event demographic, you know you are moving in a good direction when you have a number of people enthusiastically running defense and contributing on your wiki.

What The Future Brings

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I have been pondering the implications of my post yesterday on the status of arts organizations.

It seems clear that larger arts facilities may find themselves either owned by large media conglomerates or closely associated with artistic offerings over which these large corporations exercise influence. Large facilities may end up affliated with companies like Clear Channel and Comcast just as television stations are with networks and be guaranteed the exclusive right to present specific tours/exhibits in the region.

Smaller arts groups may lose access to these artists altogether, but gain other advantages by exhibiting flexibility. The limited niche appeal of the Professional Amateurs mentioned in yesterday’s entry may be a boon for smaller organizations and provide opportunities that hadn’t be available in the past. Museums for example, may not have large performance spaces but can certainly host a steady stream of mildly famous people each weekend while attracting attention to their collection. Perhaps a noted online director will screen his film to 100 interested people in the community this weekend and then a singer-songer writer next weekend.

Granted, some museums already do these things. But as the definition of concepts like the process by which one becomes an authority on a subject becomes blurred, so too perhaps will the idea that museums offer one type of recreational activity and film houses and theatres another.

Other than investing in technology appropriate for presenting art whose genesis is virtual, probably the most important element for success will be to include opportunities and floorplans that are conducive to socialization. If I want the experience of staring straight on at a performance framed by the square of a proscenium, I could watch the film or concert on my computer.

The impulse of organizations to add opportunities for socialization to attract younger groups is probably a good one. These initiatives might not currently be jibing easily with the performances with which they are associated. I have a feeling the socialization opportunities are here to stay and the format of the performances are what will begin to change.

Until technology is able to virtually replicate biological responses to environmental stimuli, exploiting the advantages of being physically present will increase in importance as the motivating factor for event attendance. Since the advent of broadcast media and film this has been true. It is just that the increased ability to direct one’s experience has started shifting the definition of what these advantages are. Right now I think we are in a transitional period where the validity of the current motivating elements is waning but the emerging elements haven’t become defined enough to identify.

I Know I Should, But How?

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As you read my blog and others out there that touch upon arts and technology, you will notice that there are a lot of suggestions about why you shold integrate technology into marketing, community building, transaction processing, etc., operations. The thing is, you might be left asking how? If you don’t have a tech savvy person on staff, you may never get an answer.

Unless you are reading Extension 311. I don’t suggest you innundate Greg Beuthin with requests to advise you on all your technology needs. Unless, of course, you are willing to pay him for his time. He doesn’t offer step by step instructions about integrating technology. (Well, at least not always.) He is the only person I have found at this point who offers some concrete advice about things to consider and pursue when attempting to use technology in non-profit settings.

Yesterday he provided some thoughts on what type of people should be given responsibility for certain tasks when a non-profit tries to establish an online community. He feels that organizations are apt to incorrectly assume that with donated equipment and volunteers the project can run itself inexpensively. People fail to accurately project the resources and oversight necessary for the endeavor. He lists a number of roles necessary for running such a community and notes which should be handled by an in-house person and which might be trusted to a volunteer.

Via his website, I came across Net2Learn offers resources like Blogging For Non-Profits a helpful page that includes, among other things links to articles like Top Blogging Tools for Non-Profits, How Can Blogging Help Your Non-profit and Top Ten Reasons Why Non-profits Should Consider Blogging.

Hmm, I see I am getting back to the topic of Why you should use technology rather than the How.

But before I end, I wanted to toss one last slightly unrelated link out there that I found on Extension 311– Theatre Without Borders. Granted, it isn’t too original a name given all the other Without Borders organizations . I do like the purpose statement on the mainpage quoting Michael Fields from Dell’arte International- “Theatre Without Borders is like a dating service for international collaboration. I think it is becoming an essential connective tissue in the global theatre workplace.”

As The Drill Spins

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I have come to the conclusion that tartar control toothpaste does not operate as advertised. There is no other explanation for the inordinate amount of time the dental hygenist spent on my teeth today after all the dedicated brushing and flossing I do.

Reclining as I was gave me some time to ponder however.

One of the things I was pondering was The Artful Manager calling attention to a book excerpt by Guy Kawasaki. I especially liked Kawasaki’s concept of replacing mission statements with mantras. He is right on the money, I think, with all the reasons he gives for this.

I went to Kawasaki’s website intending to read the chapter Andrew Taylor was citing from. Instead, I got a little sidetracked and ended up reading a high school commencement speech Kawasaki gave a decade ago. It too has some interesting points, but the one I pondered whilst my teeth and gums were tortured was the anecdote about the ice harvesters. (#8 on his list of things for grads to do)

I actually cited this story about ice harvesters putting put out of business by ice makers who were put out of business by refrigerators back in August. While the guy who told the story to me came to less dire conclusions, he also delivered a message close to the one Kawasaki does.

You would think that the ice harvesters would see the advantages of ice making and adopt this technology. However, all they could think about was the known: better saws, better storage, better transportation.

Then you would think that the ice makers would see the advantages of refrigerators and adopt this technology. The truth is that the ice harvesters couldn’t embrace the unknown and jump their curve to the next curve.

Challenge the known and embrace the unknown, or you’ll be like the ice harvester and ice makers.

I tell you, this is one of the core concerns of my career. If this blog is a stool, the pursuit of how to successfully take what my readers and I are doing to the next stage is a leg. I am convinced I won’t really know the right steps to take until I look back on my life and identify what they were. Heck, the correct tactic might end up being something I write but don’t do that ends up inspiring someone else who pioneers the next phase.

Heck, this guy might represent that new place. He does a video blog on his commute to work and interviews people on his drive. According to a Boston Globe article he is absolutely dedicated to remaining within the constraints of his commute. He picks up interviewees on his normal route and the interview only lasts the duration of his drive.

It might be emulating and drawing inspiration from this sort of project which will form the building blocks of the next direction of things. Creators of art are always talking about communicating Truth with their work. These interviews during a drive in greater Boston get closer to reality TV than the edited to make it interesting versions we have on television today.

Will people grow disillusioned by the manipulated version of reality and flock to the theatre in droves? Probably not. Will the disillusioned defect in a large enough number to revitalize a reconfigured arts? Maybe.

Kawasaki says there is value in making an educated, well planned attempt.

Oh, by the way. I don’t have any cavities.

Playwriting and Tulips

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It seemed to be so close to being added as an afterthought that I almost skipped over it, but in his Field Letter this month, Theatre Communication Group Executive Director Ben Cameron touches on the fact that people are staging readings of plays without negotiating royalties.

“Please understand that this represents a grave misunderstanding of legal obligations – any public reading of a play, whether admission is charged or not, requires negotiated rights and payments of royalties to writers.”

I worked for a play publisher once upon a time so I know the details of this requirement. Often I had to point out to people that it was their decision not to charge people and that had no bearing on the cost of producing the play. You paid the hardware store for wood and paint and the theatrical supply place for costumes and gels even though you aren’t charging admission. With a little creativity you can do the play without any of these things and yet the person you don’t want to pay is the person whose vision provided the outline for what to build, paint and light.

Intellectual property theft is really big in the news and I can’t help but wonder if in 20 years or less we will have an entirely different view of intellectual property rights. Despite all the high profile cases about music piracy, I don’t know if stricter laws and aggressive prosecution will ultimately prevail. I suspect this will become even truer as the media and formats in which property stored becomes less and less tangible.

Around the same time I read Cameron’s letter, I read an article about tulips on Slate. Before you ask what tulips have to do with IP rights, let me assure you, quite a lot in both a literal and allegorical way. The article mentioned a memoir by a professor at Wesleyan University who saw a student picking tulips from her flower garden. She chased after the student and challenged the act.

You don’t own them,” one student said to her, “they’re nature. God made them.”

“God made them?” said Rose. “You think God made them? Did God call White Flower Farm and order the bulbs? Did God put it on his credit card? Did God dig holes for the bulbs in the fall and mix bone meal in the dirt to feed them and cover them with mulch in the winter? If you think God did that, you’re an idiot!”

The student told Rose to “chill.” Then, she writes, they spent “several vivacious minutes, engaging in what the Wesleyan Bulletin calls education outside the classroom.”

(And just as an aside, if you read the article you will realize God never intended tulips to be in North America. The lengths to which the Dutch go to simulate the conditions of eastern Turkey’s mountains where the flower originates are astounding.)

If this is the attitude of some about tangible objects, just imagine how they might view material that exists digitally and is easily transferred to other people or copied. It is much more difficult to conceive of the effort that went into creating a book these days than it was when monks painstakenly copied tomes.

This is not to say that people have no concept of the value of labor invested to create digital media. There is a multi-user game called Medievia that has long been the target of derision by members of the online gaming community for using a widely available code base called DIKU to create their game and then removing the credits required by the license. Medievia made the claim that the game was completely re-written but an investigation showed the changes were superficial. The length of debate on the legality and enforceability of the DIKU license is quite amazing and mind boggling. But it goes to show that there is some healthy respect for the effort people put in to creating works.

It should be noted that the creators of DIKU didn’t make much, if any, money on their creation. People are allowed to use the software for free if they don’t charge for the product either. The esteem people have for the rights of intellectual property creators may be indirectly proportional to the amount of money they make off the product. If Microsoft had created DIKU, you probably wouldn’t hear a peep.

The whole subject of IP rights is so fraught with complex issues it is impossible to try to address in one night’s entry. My purpose in posting tonight is to posit this idea–If we assume that in future years protection of artistic expression as we know it today will be nonexistent in practice if not in fact, what can artists do to shape the new situation?

Since the creations of people who don’t profit from their work seems to enjoy some protection among online society, artists seem to already be in a position to take advantage of the new world order.
Though between an opportunity to reap millions off your creation and having people jump to your defense online, I figure artists will still dream of money.

In a world where the open source model is creating operating systems like Linux and reference “books” like Wikipedia and popular music is often comprised of borrowed bits of other people’s music, can an artist hope to be much more than first and most honored among many contributors?

I surely don’t know. If anyone comes across a person or group who seem to be providing a model for the future on how to assert your identity and retain credit for your labor without resorting to ultimately futile stopgap measures, I would love to hear about it.

Mailing Your Stamp of Approval

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I had a “what a great idea” moment this evening which turned to “good idea with reservations” a few minutes later. I will share the idea with you in hopes that someone out there will have the influence with the right people to make this happen (or start up a company to do so).

I got a Valentine’s Day card from my nephew today mailed with a stamp with his picture on it. Apparently, Stamps.com has a service that allows you to place photos on a stamp template and produce legal to use first class mail stamps. The drawbacks are that you pay about $10 for the privilege ($17.99 for 20 vs. 7.80 of the regular kind) and you have to wait for them to be mailed to you.

What popped into my mind was that it would be great if arts organizations could create stamps with images/logos connected with the organization. Not only could the organization use the stamps, but they could make the images available to supporters to use for their own stamps. Given that a lot of greeting cards get mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, the stamps could help support end of the year donation drive with a slew of stamps saying “We Support X Theatre” or some such.

One of the pesky additional problems I mentioned before is that unlike Kodak’s Ofoto.com, Stamps.com doesn’t allow you to store your images online and then allow your friends to access them. You could get around this by emailing images to interested supporters, but then they would have to place the image and format the stamps. It isn’t hard to do, but if you aren’t comfortable with technology, it could be a disincentive.

I wonder if Kodak could get in on this less expensively than Stamps.com. They offer a dozen stickers for $3.00 so 24 would be $6.00, toss on $7.80 for postage and $13.80 is cheaper than Stamps.com with four more stamps. It would just be a matter of arranging for the Post Office’s sanction. Still because you have to wait for the stamps in the mail, it might not be cheap or immediate enough to garner widespread patron support.

It would be really great if people could print out the stamps from their home computers. You can already print out postage without images from your home computer and printer. Probably the only thing holding this back is the fact most people don’t have high enough quality printers at home to produce a decent looking image. Once they do, you will probably see homemade postage become more widespread. It would actually be a little more secure than the current black and white print at home postage which has to be monitored for photocopying.

Of course, will we still be mailing things then?

Keeping the Name You Got

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Back in September Drew McManus wrote about the importance of buying all important variations of your internet domain name address.

I just want to mention the importance of keeping the domain name you got. Within the last month, I visited the site of an agent and a performance group and both had let their name registration lapse.

As a result, no one could make an offer on any of the agent’s performers (especially given that he was on the road) or check out any of the other acts he represents. Nor could he receive any email because his address was his domain name which was now defunct.

For the artist, neither I nor anyone else interested in getting background information on the group could do so. All the information that would support press releases, all the video and music clips and all the pictures that will get audiences excited that the performance is coming to their town–it is all inaccessible. They too were on the road with their manager so getting support materials sent was difficult. Like it or not, the internet is the way prospective clients and patrons research performers and venues.

I contacted both entities pointing out that their internet presence was gone. I discovered in one case, the answer to why it lapsed was fairly simple but it is a cautionary tale for others.

The main reason why domain renewal gets overlooked is because no one is getting the reminders. The people who handle the registry of names are pretty organized and are eager to remind you to renew as far as 90 days before it is due. Because renewal is fairly cheap a lot of people pay for multiple years up front. The problem is, if the person handling those arrangements for your organization leaves and you delete his/her email address, you might never receive the reminders.

The lesson here is insist that the contact person email address be set to something generic like webmaster@yourdomain.org that passes to each new person in that position.

The registry companies will also try to reach you by regular mail too. However, if that address is incorrect or you moved or got a new PO Box and your forwarding has expired, you miss out again. Even if you do get the piece of mail okay, the companies have lot of services they want to offer you so the mail tends to look like junk mail. Especially if it is addressed to a person who worked there a year ago or is addressed generically to Webmaster.

Heck, if you aren’t a tech saavy person, even registering online is confusing. Check out GoDaddy.com . How quickly can you figure out how to register a domain name for the first time? How about renewing it?

Also, another reason to have email go to a generic address that can be passed around. It is two years after the old tech guy left, you don’t know the password for the account associated with your domain name. You can have your password sent of course–but it is going to the old tech guy’s email address which was deleted. (Of course, you could just recreate his email address with your own password, but the example wouldn’t be as scary.)

The worst case scenario is that the domain name is allowed to lapse for so long it goes up for auction and is purchased by someone else who then offers to sell it back to you for $10,000 or more. Though if you go that long before someone points out your website isn’t working, it probably wasn’t helping your organization’s public image and relations to begin with. Or people don’t think enough of your company to point it out.

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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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