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Audience Relations

This Isn’t Your Grandpa’s Retirement

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I guess I should have waited a few more days before making last week’s post about today’s graying audiences not being the same graying audiences of two decades ago. Toward the end of last week I saw that Jimmy Buffet is launching Margaritaville branded and themed retirement communities.

Even if you view this as a cynical way to capitalize on the name, you have to admit that the Margaritaville name defines a lifestyle. There is a specific demographic who identify with this lifestyle and most of them weren’t retiring 20 years ago.

This reinforces the point I made last week that while the proportion of gray heads in the audience may seem to have remained constant for the last two decades, the current cohort that comprises your older audiences have distinct characteristics and interests.  Their parents wouldn’t want to live in a Margaritaville retirement village in significant numbers, nor would their grandchildren. (Their kids, maybe.)

Ultimately, the differences between the Margaritaville communities and those already being built by the company Buffett is partnering with may be superficial. It might be the same ground plans with different color schemes, furniture and soundtrack, but the company is telling retirees that they understand they have different expectations of their retirement experience than previous generations.

More to think about, eh?

Where Have All The Hunters Gone?

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I am pretty open about admitting when I made a wrong call. While I consistently counsel against investing too many resources into the hottest fad, even I have to admit that the Pokemon Go! craze and the associated suggestions about how businesses could tap into it to attract customers faded out a lot faster than I would have predicted.

Back in July, I wrote about the swarms of people running around near our building and anticipated the opportunities that might emerge as the game features were developed. There were tons of articles like this one about how people were strategizing about how to use the game to connect with a new, larger segment of people.

Yes, there are still bunches of people playing the game. Its keeping people more active than they normally would be. And they are wandering into places that others would prefer they not be.

But even places that are paying to partner and attract people to their locations don’t appear to be getting many visits from their participation.

For me this just reinforces my sense that it is prudent to watch a fad and evaluate it as it matures to see if it still appears to be relevant to your goals.

These Aren’t Your Grandpa’s Old People

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For the last 20-25 years, audiences have been getting grayer and dying off.

We have all heard that statement multiple times in our careers. We have probably made that statement multiple times in our careers.

But have we really thought about the logical implications of that statement as we repeat it?

Last week I was on a conference call planning next year’s Arts Midwest conference when someone made a comment that was head smackingly obvious. If you break down that initial statement you realize over the last 20-25 years, people who didn’t have gray hair now do. And a lot of people have indeed died off.

So right now we are interacting with an almost entirely new generation of people we describe as “older audience.”

What the person said was essentially that the gray haired people today were a lot more rock n’ roll than the previous gray haired crowd. The tongue-in-cheek comment was that the new old people aren’t like the old old people.

Observations have been made that often people age into an appreciation of classical arts and culture- orchestra, opera, ballet etc., but let’s not forget that they aren’t necessarily aging out of the experiences and interests they had when they were younger. If the icons of their youth are still able to rock, they are ready to rock along with them.

While you may be well aware of all this, ask yourself if you aren’t viewing older audiences’ tastes today through pretty much the same lens as you did with older audiences 20 years ago. It can be easy to do because some members of that older crowd from 20 years ago are still around. They have been loyal to you for 20 years so you want to meet their expectations and keep them around.

But if we aren’t supposed to treat millennials as a monolithic group, we can’t treat older audiences as one either.

The bulk of your current loyal audience is not the same as the loyal audience of the past. It is likely that the current audience’s loyalty manifests in a different way. They may not be subscribing to the full season, for instance, but they still feel invested in your work and tell their friends.

The comment about the “new old people” wasn’t made in connection with a proposed conference topic, but the concept caused a little discussion. I would be interested to see if it got developed into something. It is one of those ideas that immediately strikes one as relevant, but creating a productive conversation around it that doesn’t subscribe to old assumptions or condescending stereotypes is another thing.

Cross-Sector Training, So Hard To Get Instructed By You

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Last Fall Grantmakers in the Arts published a summary of key findings from a study about community arts training. The study focused on the increasing focus of local arts agencies into cross-sector partnerships/efforts.

What I found encouraging was the expanding view among local arts agencies about their roles and the constituencies they serve. (my emphasis)

2. Cross-sector arts partnerships are becoming a core activity for increasing numbers of local arts agencies. So, the question arises: Is this just a new funding fad that is likely to dissipate as soon as its national champions switch channels? Here are a few reasons why we think this is not the case:

74 percent agreed that cross-sector arts partnerships are central to their mission.
85 percent identified organizations from other community sectors (e.g., human services, public safety, health care, community development) as a key constituency, and 75 percent were actively partnering with them.
75 percent said their recent strategic planning process addressed “broadening the impact of the arts beyond traditional arts activities and venues” as a priority.
78 percent agreed with the statement, “we see ourselves as a change agent in our community.”

From our perspective it would be a mistake to interpret this level of collaboration and commitment outside the bounds of the typical local arts agency mission as solely opportunistic. In fact, we see this as a possible indication that some local arts agencies are shifting their mission focus from “arts-centric” to community-centric. Specific evidence of this showed up when we asked respondents what they regarded as the most critical issues facing their community. Most responses reflected problems and concerns affecting the broader community as well as (but much more than) those relevant solely to their arts constituencies.

The article notes that demand for training outstrips supply. They found that 79% of respondents were interested in receiving training in effectively working cross-sector, but only 18% of organizations were supplying that training. The report itself noted that rural respondents especially felt underserved, finding training was “…generally inaccessible, due to time, money and travel…”

If you are interested in finding training in this area, there is a list of programs of all types from page 13-42 of the study.

Something not in the study that I was pleased to see in the Grantmakers in the Arts piece was an “Implications for Funders” section.  They advocate for patience and funding for training over the long term and emphasize the need for infrastructure investment beyond just training.

One paragraph really struck me as an important lesson for arts organizations as well as funders, namely involving the community to whom you hope to bring benefits in the plan. (my emphasis)

Vague nomenclature is potentially damaging. By definition community arts practice advances the notion that the work is going to affect people’s lives. As such, the fusion of art making and community development is often a morally and ethically complex enterprise. In our work at the Center we have found that when the institutions supporting the work are vague or ambiguous about their intentions or definitions of success, this lack of clarity can migrate to the work itself and harm the communities involved. Here is one reason why. Labels like social practice, placemaking, and community cultural development all imply community involvement of some kind. In too many instances we have found that scant attention is being paid to what this means exactly. At a minimum funders and practitioners alike should be considering some critical ethical questions as a part of their basic practice. How are the people who will bear the consequences of a project’s success or failure going to be engaged? If some public benefit is part of the deal, is there any accountability built in? And when the curtain closes, who will be there to either sustain the good work — or pick up the pieces?

Post title inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s “Cross Town Traffic” Couldn’t find a video that wasn’t a cover.

Stuff To Ponder: Familiarity As A Proxy For Certainty

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Two years into a six year research project, Ballet Austin has started learning things about their audiences that run contrary to their assumptions. While the audiences in every community are different, what they have learned provides a lesson that you may not know your audiences as well as you think you do.

One of the biggest assumptions Ballet Austin made was that audiences became more open to new works as they became more familiar with them and thus followed a roughly linear progression of attendance. What they learned was that people were open to a cross-section of genres and the biggest determinant was how confident people were that they would enjoy the experience.

In other words, the market research suggested that encouraging people to attend the ballet more often was less about increasing their familiarity with productions and more about bridging an uncertainty gap. “Familiarity is about information,” notes Martin, “whereas uncertainty about how an experience will feel is much more personal. You can give somebody a lot of information but that’s not necessarily going to reassure them that they’re going to belong in that audience.”

[…]

Audience uncertainty partly grew out of how Ballet Austin was presenting information about its productions. The research showed that images as well as the language used in promotional pieces, ads and even program titles, often created a disconnect. “What we thought we were saying was not what people were hearing,” Martin says.

The problem was especially glaring for abstract productions. Based on the promotional materials in some cases, prospective audience members simply couldn’t fathom what they would be seeing. An ad for a recent program, “To China With Love,” featured an image of two dancers seeming to float among clouds, which many found ambiguous. One person mistook it for a mattress ad. The confusion made Loignon wonder if Ballet Austin should consider cutting back on print ads for abstract ballets and investing more in online videos that show the work itself.

The fact they were considering focusing more of their resources on having video representations and eschewing print was interesting to me. If you have ever read Trevor O’Donnell’s thoughts on the imagery used in print marketing by arts organizations, you know that he is pretty solidly against depictions like that of the two dancers floating in the clouds for the very reason Ballet Austin discovered.

Ultimately though, I was encouraged by the recognition that familiarity was a proxy for certainty. Audiences can be open to adventure if they receive help in feeling confident about their choices.

If you read the whole piece you can learn about the various tactics Ballet Austin has employed in an attempt to close the uncertainty gap for audiences.

Another process I was interested to read about was how they created social interaction experiences. There is often a lot of talk about the need to create social situations to attract millennials. Ballet Austin’s experience doing this really illustrates the importance of constantly tweaking and perhaps defining success by quality of experience rather than quantity.

Though it has taken various forms, an event known as Ballet Bash! is meant to facilitate social gatherings before a performance and during intermission. One time, Bash! included a DJ for a pre-performance party with refreshments. The cost outweighed the benefits, however, so Ballet Austin cut the DJ and instead offered carefully selected music in an area at the Long Center with spectacular views of Austin’s expanding skyline. That iteration was modestly attended. For a later production, Ballet Bash! was replaced by a social lounge in a smaller, more intimate wing of the Long Center’s mezzanine. At recent performances, around 15 people were sitting in small groups during the hour before the performance and intermission, which Ballet Austin considered a promising start.

There are other imaginative social and interactive experiences Ballet Austin created for their audiences that attracted larger numbers. I wanted to include the paragraph above in order to ask the obvious question about whether your organization would consider the participation of 15 people a promising start. From the context of the paragraph, I would assume this approach balanced their goals for cost with desired outcomes.

As a cross-reference to this research, you can also check out California Symphony’s Orchestra X blog and this post in particular about what their research discovered. In short, it was nearly every other element of the experience except the programming that was an impediment to audience enjoyment. Ceci Dadisman provides some perspective on this on ArtHacker today.

Viral Needs A Plan

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I came across an interview Daniel Pink did with Derek Thompson, Senior Editor at The Atlantic where Thompson gives The 5 Rules for Making a Hit.

Now I want to say from the outset that the title is a bunch of baloney and I hope we all know enough to be heavily skeptical of anything the purports to offer a simple set of rules/tricks to success.

That said, there are some valuable points made. I wonder if Thompson actually packaged his answer in terms of five simple rules or if that was an editorial decision on behalf of Heleo which presented them.

The parts of the article I found valuable dealt with the tendency to equate economic success and public recognition with quality/talent/wisdom/authenticity/veracity, etc.

Rule #2: Virality is a myth — pay attention to dark broadcasts instead

People want to believe that their best work can go viral, because great ideas are self-distributing. You make something that’s inherently wonderful, and then you’re done! No more work. Just give it to a few people, they’ll pass it on, and eventually it’ll become the biggest thing in the world.

But the evidence from network science suggests that virality as most people understand it is a myth. Practically nothing goes viral, even the things that we call viral. Genius needs a distribution plan.
[…]
I see this sometimes at The Atlantic. When most readers see a video or an article go crazy online, they might say, “that thing went viral.” But our website has technology that can tell us exactly how all this information spreads. When an article has exploded, we can see that what’s often happened is that there has been one, or a series of, blasts sending traffic to the piece. Perhaps it’s hit the front page of Reddit, or Drudge, or lots of people are clicking on the article on our Facebook page. The article is going “viral” because of a broadcast.

You can get similar insight into what might be driving traffic to your website by using Google Analytics. ArtsHacker has a number of articles about how to set Analytics up to measure and report on various criteria. Social media services like Youtube and Facebook have their own analysis tools to provide insights into why a post or video is particularly popular.

While you can’t necessarily control what becomes popular with great consistency, you can gain a better understanding of what channels and methods can be effective for garnering the attention you want.

His other rule is:

Rule #5: Keep swinging

People want to believe that quality is destiny. They conflate “good” and “popular” in both directions. They think if somebody writes a great song, other people will inevitably find it and love it; or if a song becomes extremely popular, that means it was inherently worthy.

[…]

Understanding that hits are probabilistic argues for a gospel for perseverance. Sometimes people talk about luck as if it’s debilitating, that nothing you do matters — but if cultural products are probabilistic, think of it like batting. Even with the best batters, there’s a 30% chance they get a hit in every one at bat. As a result the key is to give yourself as many at bats as possible. There is an antidote to luck, in terms of personal effort. It’s perseverance. It’s the only answer.

This one is a little tricky because I think we can all cite examples where perseverance just isn’t enough and the benefits of connections, synchronicity and a good support network of family and friends make all the difference. On the other hand, there is a case to be made that you can achieve a high degree of success through perseverance but it may not conform to the degree success you believe you should have.

If anything, this is a better argument for the fact that failure is a more frequent occurrence in any endeavor than people want to admit. It is just that satisfaction of infrequent hits tend to drive out the recollection of the misses for everyone.

This Is What You Said, This Is How We Are Fixing It

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If you haven’t seen the first iteration of ArtsHacker’s Most Creative People In Arts Administration, hop over there now and check it out.

Or actually, wait until you read the rest of my post, then go over there…

If there was one thing I learned as a member of the review panel, it was that there are a lot of unrecognized arts administrators doing great work out there. This year Juan José Escalante, Executive Director of José Limón Dance Festival and Aubrey Bergauer, Executive Director of California Symphony both deservedly tied for top honors.

One thing that impressed me about Bergauer’s nomination were support documents that included the symphony’s blog. To be certain, there are only a few entries on the blog, but the one I appreciated the most discussed the results of discussion sessions they conducted with Millennials and Gen Xers.

The post reviews all the issues the discussion participants raised and then lists what the symphony has done to address these issues. This is important because one of the key rules of surveying is don’t ask for a feedback on an situation you don’t intend to take action on. Not only did they take action, but they used the blog to communicate what that action is within the confines of their operating environment. (i.e. They don’t control the ticketing system of the venues at which they perform.)

The blog post is a treasure trove of great feedback for any arts organization since there is very little that is specific to the California Symphony. The things discussion attendees wanted to know but weren’t finding easy to access included things like: why is this music a big deal?, how long will it run?, what will the experience be like?, what are each of the instruments called?

The music selected for the program mattered least.

There were a lot of quotable sections of the blog. Here are some of my most favorite favorites.

Read the Manual:

Then, they get to step 4): make a decision on why they want to attend a specific concert, and our response is essentially “WHY CAN’T YOU FIGURE OUT WHY RACHMANINOFF’S SECOND SYMPHONY IS A BIG DEAL? LOOK IT UP IF YOU WANT TO KNOW!” (marketing failboat — why do we set up our sites this way, and then wonder why the sales funnel is getting choked up at the add-to-cart step?).

Everyone Else Is In The Know:

One participant asked if there is “a separate webpage for younger people we could make?” What was so interesting about that comment is that this person assumed that they were in the minority as far as understanding answers to these types of questions. The assumption was that other, older people are much more familiar with the symphony when in reality, there is no magical age at which one suddenly becomes an aficionado.

Comment from a discussion participant:

“It was so impressive — I didn’t expect it to feel THAT different than Spotify.”

On Pricing:

Even the discussion group brought up (on their own, without any prompting) the idea that they’ll all shell out big bucks for Taylor Swift. So price alone is never an isolated issue; it’s all about the perceived value one is receiving in exchange for that price. What we did find interesting was the comment of, “I’m more likely to go to three $25 performances than I am one $75 or $100 performance.” Many others chimed in with agreement to that statement.

Okay, now you can go over to the Arts Hacker site. Thanks for reading.

Anthropologist Eye For The New To Dance Guy (or Gal)

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About 8 years ago I received a copy of Presenting Dance by Mindy N. Levine, a book that provided some great insight about dance gleaned from conversations at National Dance Presenters Leadership Forum at Jacob’s Pillow between 2002 and 2006. I the post I wrote in an attempt to summarize the ideas therein, I repeatedly bemoaned the fact the text wasn’t available online. It still appears the text is only available as a physical document.

What I really appreciated were the suggestions for demystifying dance that the book contained. There was very little in there that couldn’t be adapted directly or minimal effort to music, theater or visual art.

One of the main suggestions was to have people approach a dance piece with one of a variety of lenses. As I wrote:

The chapter suggests presenting different ways for audiences to approach a dance piece, with a Journalist’s Eye, Anthropologist’s Eye, Linguist/Grammarian Eye and Colleagues and Conversation. Now I think using these terms with audience members probably will add to their anxiety but the suggestions in each area are geared toward getting people past “I liked it,” “I didn’t like it,” or “I didn’t understand it” and on to discovering why.
[…]
For Anthropologist Eye, the audience approaches dance as if it were an unknown culture being discovered. An attitude which may actually fall closest to the mark. Questions suggested in this area might be whether men move differently from women, if movement is in isolation or groups, are their forces that bring people together or separate them, are there rules applied to the movement and if so, are they flexible or rigid?

In the post I summarize all the listed lenses, but as I suggest, the Anthropologist Eye is probably the one with which a new attendee might most closely identify.

Donor Baggage Revisited

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I am going to be away for about a week for the holidays. As always, I have prepared some posts to fill in for my absence.

Since we are coming to the end of the year and non-profits are making last minute pushes for donations, I thought a piece I wrote in June 2008 about the baggage donors bring to giving requests might be particularly appropriate.

Particularly the following:

In any case the advice generally focuses on a somewhat formulaic planned approach. Just as dating tips rarely acknowledge that other people have the baggage of past dating experiences which will impact the relationship you are trying to cultivate, I rarely hear/read a similar acknowledgment in connection with fund raising.

One of the anecdotes mentioned in the story was about a wealthy developer who never gave more than $1,000 at a time to Temple. When Fredricks asked why, she discovered that even though he could afford to give more, he harbored fears about running out of money that went back to his childhood.

She recognizes that the people who ask for money like presidents and trustees also have varying degrees of comfort with the subject. “They should be treated the same way donors are—as individuals with different emotions about money—and given simple requests, she said. Instead of giving a reticent board member a list of prospective donors, Fredricks suggested starting out with the names and biographical information of two current donors and then asking the trustee to call them to say thank you.”

Rethinking The Term Business Model

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In Arts Professional (UK), José Rodríguez recently wrote about how non-profit arts organizations frequently misunderstand what a business model is.

The first misconception he lists is that only businesses need business models and since non-profit arts organizations aren’t businesses, ergo, they don’t need a business model. I don’t think I have ever heard a non-profit in the US suggest they weren’t a business, but he talks about a perception of “business” as a dirty word which is definitely something I have heard in the arts community.

The misconception he addresses that is worth attention is that business models are not necessarily related to moneymaking. My emphasis.

2. Business models are only about money

There are many definitions of business models, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand what we are actually talking about, but what most of these definitions have in common is the central role of value creation. And here lies the main difference with what people usually think about business models. It is not only about how your organisation makes money, but about how it creates value and organises itself around its value propositions.

Value is defined as ‘the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth or usefulness of something’. Value can be money, but it can also be many other things. Value is what is important for you and your stakeholders. And for being able to create value, we need to understand the desires, needs, challenges and problems of those that we are trying to serve: audiences, community, employees, volunteers, customers, funders, sponsors, etc. Keep it in mind: Business models are not (only) about money, but about value.

[…]

So what is a business model?

A business model is a vital concept determining the success of any organisation and not a complex formula relating to its profit-making mechanisms. A business model is just a story explaining who your audiences and customers are, what they value, and how you will be able to sustain the organisation in providing that value.

At its most basic, every business model has three components, which respond to a few simple questions:

  • Which stakeholders do we serve? Which of their needs do we seek to address?
  • What do our stakeholder groups value? How do we create that value for each one of them?
  • How do we generate income, and attract other necessary resources, to be able to create value for our stakeholders in a sustained way?

Since it is in the last paragraph of the article, it can be easy to miss but an important feature of business plans is that they are temporary. Since the stakeholders you serve may change, the things your stakeholders value may change or the way you are able to create value for your stakeholders may change, then of necessity your business model must change.

By his definition, making changes to your business model doesn’t necessarily mean a change to your tax status unless you significantly change the way you generate income. Conceiving of business models in this context may help you operate in a more flexible, nimble manner since it moves you away from thinking you need to act in a set way to stay within certain strictures.

Be True To Your Audience Just Like You Would Your Girl Or Guy

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Last week I was initially dismayed to read 85% of audiences in Washington D.C. patronized one theater. I try to promote the concept that all arts organizations in a community need to work together to illuminate all the opportunities for cultural participation, but news like that can cause people to scramble and jealously cling to whatever audiences they can get.

The people quoted in the article admit as much:

That means encouraging audiences to go to any theater, following the “rising tide lifts all boats” philosophy. It can be a bit counterintuitive for chronically embattled nonprofit arts organizations long in the habit of primarily looking out for themselves.

“It’s the fear that if I introduce you to my friends, you’ll like them better than you like me,” Woolly Mammoth managing director Meghan Pressman says.

However, there are a number of people quoted in the piece that feel the study underestimates how broadly people already attend other organizations, in part because the study that was conducted only included seven of the many theater groups in the Washington D.C. area. Some of the groups in the survey do have 20%-30% overlaps between their audiences. In surveys others have conducted for Signature Theatre and Round House Theatre, found even greater overlap:

In the two-year Round House survey, 43 percent of single-ticket buyers had been to four or more theaters within a year, 59 percent went to three or more, 76 percent to two or more, and 91 percent went to at least one theater other than Round House. That does not include attending the big touring houses (the Kennedy Center, the National Theatre, the Warner Theatre), which further raises the figures.

Perhaps more encouraging is that the theaters are already collaborating on projects and not defensively guarding their audiences.

Examples seem to be growing. Signature and Round House cross-promoted the musicals “Jelly’s Last Jam” (recently at Signature) and “Caroline, or Change” (with Signature talent working at the Bethesda stage). Round House just partnered with Olney Theatre Center on a co-production of the two-part, seven-hour “Angels in America,” presented at Round House and geared to moving patrons between the two troupes. Next year, the organizations will team up again — sharing infrastructure, artists and audiences — for a show at Olney.

So obviously by the end of the article I was breathing a little easier and had a more optimistic view of things.  Though admittedly the idea that there were audiences that felt such a high degree of loyalty to a single theater was encouraging. (Assuming it was loyalty and not lack of awareness or other barriers that kept them from attending other places.)

Something from the middle of the article worth of note was an observation made about how theaters cultivate audiences:

For Robinson, the issue is keeping audiences the first time they visit. She describes a “magic math” that happens when patrons can be lured to more than one performance, and to more than one theater, per year. Repeat attendance jumps and attrition dives, yet the art of keeping audiences is often lost, as organizations fret about attracting fresh faces.

“It’s a gong that we clang,” Robinson says, warning against too much “prospecting” for brand-new clientele. “If we date, and you don’t ask me out again in a few weeks, I’ll forget how cute you are.”

Even if your stance is to glare at others and try to retain what audiences you have, you do well to remember not to take those audiences for granted. To extend the dating example, good communication and attentiveness are a necessary part of retaining audiences.

Improving Survey Results, But Not The Experience

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Two days ago I wrote about how “experience” is increasingly valued by consumers over things like brand, product and opportunity.  Hopefully you noticed that I attributed my enjoyment largely to the service elements of the experience and not the available amenities.  That is an important distinction because that is often what really matters.

Back in 2015 The Atlantic wrote about how hospitals with high patient satisfaction scores had some of the worst mortality and reinfection rates in the country.  Tying reimbursement rates to patient satisfaction surveys has lead to a focus on patient comfort and demands to the detriment of their medical well-being.

Many hospitals seem to be highly focused on pixie-dusted sleight of hand because they believe they can trick patients into thinking they got better care. The emphasis on these trappings can ultimately cost hospitals money and patients their health, because the smoke and mirrors serve to distract from the real problem, which CMS does not address: Patient surveys won’t drastically and directly improve healthcare.

But research has shown that hiring more nurses, and treating them well, can accomplish just that. It turns out that nurses are the key to patient satisfaction after all—but not in the way that hospitals have interpreted.

 … And University of Pennsylvania professor Linda Aiken found that higher staffing of registered nurses has been linked to fewer patient deaths and improved quality of health…When hospitals improve nurse working conditions, rather than tricking patients into believing they’re getting better care, the quality of care really does get better.

Now obviously, people don’t usually die if they have a negative reaction to an arts experience. An arts and cultural organization rarely has a situation where there is as clear a distinction between what a customer wants and what they need as in a hospital.

One thing we can take from the article is that just as teaching to the test doesn’t necessarily result in higher quality graduates, adding glitz and glamour in order to improve survey results doesn’t guarantee people will really have a fulfilling experience.

The Atlantic article talked about how hospital administrators were concerned that patients gave the food low scores. They blamed the nurses for doing a bad job at making it sound appetizing rather than trying to improve the food. There are some pretty clear parallels between that and blaming the marketing department for failing to make a show sound appealing while neglecting to evaluate the programming choices.

To a degree, the need to focus on programming choices and training staff to offer a positive experience should be encouraging to non-profit arts organizations that don’t have the resources to offer a lot of fancy amenities. Notice that providing sufficient staffing was important. The resources to accomplish that can be a challenge for many.

I was fortunate to be at a table with the head of my state arts council yesterday to hear her say she wanted grant reports that were honest about what did and didn’t work rather than telling the arts council that everything was going great, just as they expected. There was a sense in her comments that the arts organizations in the state needed to be stretching themselves to try different things and figure out what did and didn’t work.

(She also allowed me to evangelize a little on Building Public Will For Arts and Culture!)

At the conversations I had at the event yesterday, I was happy to see that colleagues across the state had already begun to sense that the focus was shifting to providing creative experience without it necessarily being explicitly stated.

The one question from The Atlantic article I still haven’t quite resolved is whether audiences surveys really have a lot of value or not. You may not receive effusive responses if your efforts on focused on competence rather than spectacle. The results may be good, but not so enthusiastic that you can take pride in moving the average score significantly.

If people aren’t moved by a strong reaction, they may not complete a survey and you won’t be completely sure how you are doing. You also don’t want strong reactions driving your decisions so you are basically left with either begging people to complete surveys honestly or don’t conduct surveys and just blindly hope you are headed in the right direction.

My suspicion is that there are alternative methods to soliciting and collecting information that don’t involve surveys. My further suspicion is these methods require more effort and resources to employ effectively than do surveys.

Who Cares About Losing & Freezing, I’m Having Fun

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Last week Drew McManus posted about the difficulties sports teams are having filling their seats. The reasons for this problem are very similar to those faced by the arts –an approach that assumes a community owes us their attention and a focus on product, positioning and image over the customer’s experience.

Drew’s post actually helped me coalesce some thoughts I had when I was attending a football game at Notre Dame last month. At the time the team’s record was 4-7. The weather had gone from mid-60s the day before to 20s with snow the day of the game.

Despite this, the campus and the stadium were PACKED with people.

My first thought as I wandered around was that Notre Dame football had cachet that is independent of win-loss records and weather. I don’t know if this level of investment become entrenched early by movies like  Knute Rockne and Rudy or thanks to generations of Catholic priests making sly mention about the team needing their congregants’ prayers.

While these factors might be significant in generating loyalty and involvement, the school invested a lot of attention in the game attendance experience. Entering and leaving the parking lots was well organized and took a reasonable amount of time.  The line in the bookstore had AT LEAST 25 switchbacks before you got to the register but the line moved so quickly that you were rarely standing still and staff members were cheerleading and high-fiving people in line.  Entry into the stadium also went quickly.

If you got too cold you could take refuge in the athletic center next door and watch the game on large screen monitors.

The only sour note was the food service inside the stadium was abysmally organized and their money handling discipline raised grave concerns.

Well actually, the fact Notre Dame screwed up their three touchdown lead to lose the game was pretty disappointing as well.

I am going to remember the food service experience as the worst part because everything else, including the loss, was interesting and enjoyable. (As far as I am concerned, braving the frigid cold is as integral a part of the experience as tailgating.)

While my outlook is not necessarily shared by everyone, perhaps it is illustrative of the point Drew and those he cites are trying to make. You don’t have to necessarily have the highest quality, most glamorous product if you are providing an enjoyable experience in general.

Are You Willing To Read One Blog Post or Two?

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In the course of 24 hours, two different articles about how to manipulate people into doing what you want came across my Twitter feed.

Okay, it isn’t totally mind control but rather how using the right word can make people more receptive to the choices you offer them.

Seth Godin mentioned “Wheeler’s Which,” a term I had never heard before. Elmer Wheeler is the guy who coined the idea of selling the sizzle rather than the steak. His “which” involves asking a question that includes two “yes” options rather than an opportunity to answer “no.”

[…Elmer Wheeler was a sales trainer nearly a century ago. He got hired by a chain of drugstores to increase sales at the soda fountain. In those days, a meal might consist of just an ice cream soda for a nickel. But for an extra penny or two, you could add a raw egg (protein!). Obviously, if more people added an egg, profits would go up. Wheeler taught the jerks (isn’t that a great job title?) to ask anyone who ordered a soda, “One egg or two?” Sales of the egg add-on skyrocketed.]

Personally, while I find the frequent question, “would you like to add X for $Y more,” annoying, I think I would be angered or insulted at the assumption I would purchase something extra. I would counsel using this technique sparingly for that reason unless you think most of your customers are less ornery than I.

There are opportunities to use “Wheeler’s which” in ways that don’t pressure people. For example, “how many of you will be attending our free playtalk” or “will you be accompanying your child to the children’s’ activities or having coffee in the parents lounge?” Using the question in this manner can help increase attendance numbers for outreach events on your grant reports.

The other magic word came from a New York magazine link Dan Pink provided about the power of “willing.” (my emphasis)

When a request framed in more direct terms is turned down, a follow-up with a willing will often get the other person to cave:

Are you the type of person to mediate? Yes or no. What was really interesting about the mediation “willings” is that if you ask someone “Are you interested in mediation?” they might say yes or no. But if you ask them if they’re willing to mediate, that requires them saying something about the type of person that they are.

[…]

With a caveat: “‘Willing’ works best after resistance, so it shouldn’t be your opening gambit,” she said. If the first approach fails, though, the trick can be a persuasive backup strategy. Now go forth and bend the world to your will.

If someone is really opposed to something I am not sure asking if they are willing or not will overcome that resistance but I thought it interesting that the question of willingness introduced the question about what sort of person you are. Are you the type of person that is open to trying something new or exploring an alternative.

Again, I don’t feel like you can just slip “willing” into any question and have it be effective. There are plenty of sentiments you can express involving willingness that will offend and anger, but just as many that can help open them to an option. My suspicion is that used repeatedly over the course of many interactions, “willing” might gradually reduce resistance.

How Much Would You Pay For A Selfie With Me?

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Some concepts have been banging around in my head for a little while that haven’t quite firmed up yet. I am hoping writing it down and getting some feedback from others might help to start develop it.

I have begun to think that as time goes on, the most valuable commodity a public figure/artist, etc might have is their time, not their performance or merchandise.

In a talk Seth Godin gave at Carnegie Hall, he mentioned that when he goes to book signings, fewer people are buying books (around 28 minute mark).

Instead, they want a selfie with him. Since getting a selfie eats up so much time, he has tried to hire a professional photographer who can supply the images to people, but they insist on taking a picture with their own phone. He says the picture itself is worth nothing, it is the ability to reflect on the experience and share it with friends from your own handheld device that has value.

Obviously, one must provide some sort of notable experience or product that inspires people to want to take that selfie with you in the first place. It could very well be that increasingly the most valuable element will be that opportunity to meet the person and take a selfie. The challenge may be how a person manages that to their benefit whether it be monetarily or preservation of their sanity.

There was an article on Vice about how meet and greets as currently conducted suck for everyone. Fans frequently pay hundreds of dollars for the opportunity to meet with someone, but they only get a second with them. Many fans try to squeeze in more time through various tactics, among them trying to grab a selfie when it isn’t allowed. For their own part, the artist is under pressure to participate in interactions with hundreds of fans in a small period of time. In general, all parties can end up dissatisfied.

My first thought is that these artists or their management are trying to make as much money as fast as they can. There has already been some minor backlash so I wonder how much longer this might be sustainable. As the Vice article says, the more famous one gets, the more of you the fans feel they are entitled.

Is there a better way to handle this knowing that the personal interaction and selfie may be viewed as the most valuable part of the experience? Instead of $350 tickets to a performance, does it make sense to charge $150 to everyone and $750 to a meet and greet that only admits a limited number of people but guarantees you longer interaction time?

The problem with that is 1- scalpers will probably still be able to ratchet the tickets up to $1000 on the secondary market unless a solution is found and 2- A high meet and greet price limits access to wealthier people. ($750 is already about a median price of what people are paying for meet and greets so an extended meet and greet pass could easily start at $1500+.)

Many public figures/artists are philosophically opposed to putting up different types of barriers to fan interactions with them. Whether it be limiting numbers, time period or charging for access.

Ultimately, for a lot of public figures I think it may bear examining what part of the experience is most valuable to people and adjusting the experience accordingly.

Unfortunately, while I do get recognized at conferences and other gatherings as the genius blogger I am, few people have been asking for a selfie with me so perhaps I am just coming at this from a place of selfie-envy.

Anyone out there have any predictions on what the nature of public figure-fan interactions will look like in the future? Ideas on how to manage it with things like policies and emerging technologies?

Not Everything Is For You

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There is a video of Nina Simon speaking at the Minnesota History as part of her Art of Relevance book tour early this month. Many things she said jumped out at me and I am going to pass the video along to a couple other people in the hope of starting some conversations.

Around the 47 minute mark she talked about responding to organizational insiders who are dissatisfied by programming that seeks to attract new audiences.  She uses the metaphor about going to a restaurant and how you don’t suddenly decide to boycott the restaurant if they start adding vegetarian and heart healthy options to their regular menu.  In her particular experience long time insiders complained about interactive programming and community festivals, she pointed out that the new people coming to those events weren’t complaining that the museum was offering programming and opportunities that insiders valued.

When she talked about that, it occurred to me that often resistance to new programming is  rooted in the belief that everything should be for oneself. The truth is, everything isn’t for you.

Granted, some times new programs are part of a zero sum equation, especially in a performing arts situation where there are finite resources and dates. A new initiative may displace one of regular events. Instead of 10 things designed for you, you only get nine. For a lot of people even 1/10 of a change can result in them feeling the organization is no longer relevant to them. This may especially be true in the case of subscription holders.  That one bad grape in ten ruins the value of the whole package.

In this situation it can be a little tricky to say, that’s okay you don’t need to come to that show, we have other discount configurations that may suit your needs. Not only might your delivery of that message be flawed and sound offensive, but even with perfect delivery, the patron may only hear “that’s okay you don’t need to come.”

Even if the new initiatives are additions and don’t displace any of the current offerings, patrons, donors, board members can still feel the organization is no longer the one they value, despite having lost nothing.

Or at least lost nothing but the desire to keep the delight they feel to themselves. Nina addresses that a couple minutes earlier with the response, wouldn’t you want to share the joy you feel with everyone else? She says even though in their hearts they want to say, “No way!” it is difficult to admit it aloud.

Even though Nina makes it sound easy. Even though she cites examples of people who are excited to see new vibrancy come to the organization they value, it isn’t easy to go against the inertia of thinking that everything that is being done is being done for you.

Regularly reinforcing, gently and diplomatically, of course, the sense that “What We Do, We Do For YOU (collectively)” rather than “for you” (singularly) is important….even though we do want everyone to feel individually invested.

I think Nina’s restaurant metaphor is a useful one. Most of the time restaurants make menu changes and it barely registers notice from people. You can assure people that while it may feel like the organization is metaphorically changing from a steakhouse to a vegetarian restaurant, that isn’t what is happening. Besides, you may find you some of the vegetarian offerings appeal to you.

(As any vegetarian will tell you, if there is a delicious vegetarian option available on a buffet, it will be cleaned out immediately by all the meat-eaters.)

 

Only $25 For A Ticket?….We Must Be INSANE!!!!

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In a recent post Seth Godin proposed two ways of approaching your business, “Either you dazzle with as much hype as you can get away with, or you invest in delighting people, regardless of how difficult it is.”

It was the example that he used to support the idea of hyping the hell out of something that left me incredulous.

Years ago, I asked fabled direct marketer Joe Sugarman about the money-back guarantee he offered on the stuff he sold through magazine ads. He said 10% of the people who bought asked for their money back… and if any product dipped below 10%, he’d make the claims more outrageous until it got back up. He told me that this was a sweet spot, somewhere between amazing people with promises and disappointing them with reality.

The idea that someone decided they aren’t being outrageous enough if a certain percentage of people aren’t asking for their money back sort of blew my mind. It goes against the whole concept of customer service. As Shakespeare writes in the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing, “…the fashion of the world is to avoid cost [trouble], and you encounter it.”

But this got me to wondering if a super-hype approach might work for the arts. Trevor O’Donnell is constantly saying that arts marketing doesn’t focus on the audience member and instead references concepts and accolades that are only relevant to insiders. Hyping an event like a cheesy used car commercial would break people of that habit.

I am sure there would be a lot of outcry that this approach was demeaning the work, but if it is successful at attracting a larger following, it might be worth considering.

Note–I am not suggesting anything be changed about the event. People often express concern about dumbing down an experience. I am only suggesting the advertising be dumbed down.

Yeah, I know even that would be a hard sell. I can imagine what my board might think if the advertising strayed from portraying a certain image of the organization.

Recent conversation has focused on the need for the arts community to move away from the conceit that all people need is one exposure and they will be hooked on the arts. I think that is the right mindset.

However, if people arrive with the expectation they are going to leave amazed and so ecstatic they will barely be able to walk straight for an hour afterward, they may convince themselves that they are having a better time than they would have without being primed by the hype.

Of course, there are going to be people who are disappointed, but that is part of the calculation. In fact, adopting this philosophy, you are paying close attention to make sure that ratio doesn’t fall below a certain point.

Probably the biggest difference between circa 1979 when Sugarman’s company was operating at its peak and now is that people can more easily share their dissatisfaction with each other.

Also, most arts events are communal experiences vs. the individual experience of purchasing something from direct marketing. If 10% of 1000 people are upset, everyone is going to know it immediately and it will sour the experience of the other 900.

There is nothing to say you need to make utterly ridiculous claims and aim for a 10% dissatisfaction rate. If you stage pictures and write copy giving the impression audiences are enjoying themselves five times more than they actually are, you probably still won’t be flirting with fraud – but you will be focusing more on audiences. (If your audiences already look like they are having an awesome time, just hype it by a factor of 3 😉 )

If you do resort to a used car type ad, talking about how you must be insane to sell tickets to such a great show for so low a price or for letting people into your museum to see art for FREE! ….well if you balance charm and humor it might help you make progress convincing people that you are a true, worthwhile asset in the community.

Yes, I suppose arts organizations might double down on talking about how great they are instead of how great a time the audience will have. I have to believe there is a limit they will reach where the only option to escalate the hype is to start focusing on audience interests.

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When Serving Bad Food To Patrons Can Solidify Their Loyalty

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Over the years I have made many posts riffing on the idea that marketing it is the responsibility of the entire organization, not just a single department. For that reason, I was happy to see a recent case study report TRG Arts posted on that topic.

Working with Performing Arts Fort Worth (PAFW), they emphasized the need for everyone to be involved in the effort by simply including everyone in the conversation.  PAFW started having patron loyalty meetings where they discussed the issues at hand, including the cost of retaining long time supporters versus attracting new individuals.

That’s when it clicked, and the floodgate of ideas opened up! House management said they were going to make patron loyalty a regular topic at their usher meetings. Someone suggested they send patrons a voucher for a free drink in their birthday month. Someone else suggested they turn the process for testing new concession products into a tasting event for loyal patrons. There were many more ideas that came up, and there were a number of people who said they would take responsibility for implementing ideas. “I never was a part of that process” quickly became “I understand our shared goal and I want to help.”

I particularly liked the idea of involving loyal patrons in a tasting of new concession products. Even if the new options weren’t tasty, the idea that your input was valued could go a long way to cementing a patron’s relationship with the organization. I am curious to know if PAFW has implemented that idea.

There was one thing the TRG piece mentioned that caught my attention:

And yet, there were legitimate operational questions that needed to be answered. If a VIP Presenter would like their complimentary drink in a souvenir cup, whose budget gets charged for the cup? How far can I go (and should I go) to make a patron happy?

The sentence evoked a memory of an episode of the West Wing when newly appointed chief of staff CJ Cregg is running into a lot of opposition from the Secretary of Defense over some new initiative (I think it was accepting the nuclear bombs form the Republic of Georgia). She has a realization that his resistance is based in the fear that the funds to implement this will come out of his budget.

As idealistic as you may be, there is always a cost of some sort associated with every good idea. So if you insist that marketing is everyone’s responsibility, you are insisting that everyone bear some degree of additional cost to implement this directive. The cost may be in time, resources or money.

It will be important to communicate that marketing/patron retention/whatever you call it, is a priority for the organization and allowances (and perhaps allocations) will be made to enable the achievement of this goal. Otherwise internal resistance may thwart your efforts from the start.

Wherein Resides The Identity of A Group?

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When I was taking a college philosophy class we got into the classic debate about where identity resides in a person or thing. If you have a boat and gradually replace every board over the course of five years, is it still the same boat? When did it become a different boat?

The same with humans, if you replace every limb with prosthesis, when does the person cease to be themselves and become a cyborg? When are they essentially a machine?

Sci-Fi really lends itself to the debate: if Capt. Kirk is completely disassembled into atoms and beamed to a planet in a matter transporter and his atoms reassmbled, is he still the same Capt. Kirk that left the Enterprise?

I got to thinking about this topic when I saw the new version of The Magnificent Seven this weekend. There were some significant plot points shared by both the original version and The Seven Samurai, which inspired the original, that weren’t really featured in the newest version. The boastful young gunslinger was missing, for example, but there was a similar plotline in the Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, which also has a lot of common plot points with both versions of The Magnificent Seven. Westerns in general probably share a lot of the same plot lines with each other if we get right down to it.

I am really only stopping off at The Magnificent Seven to pose a question about the ethics of presenting a group with a famous name which is comprised of few, if any, of the original members.  Just because a group has the legal right to use a name, and the controversies over who gets to do so can fill a few blog posts, when does it become an issue of misrepresentation when it comes to audience expectations?

Yes, everyone probably knows that Glenn Miller and all of the members of the original orchestra are no longer playing together when they go to a concert. (There are, in fact, four different groups around the world licensed to use that name.) On the other hand, the keyboardist for the band War is the only original member still performing with the group.

There are some very public debates that rage about whether a band went downhill after a key member left or if the group was better off without the bum, but for the most part people aren’t terribly aware of the shifting line ups of most groups over the years.

If you are thinking of presenting such a group, you may have the unenviable task of determining if the soul and identity of the group has departed and deciding whether to pursue the engagement.

Then there is the related question of, what are people buying? Are they buying an opportunity to relive memories of what they were doing when they heard this song and the line up doesn’t matter so much?  Or are they buying a return to their past fandom when they originally saw the group in concert and details do matter?

This isn’t just a question that nags at popular music. What if the conductor who is closely identified with an orchestra and creating their distinctive sound moves on?  Or even going back to the original idea, if there are 80 odd musicians who were part of the ensemble that created the signature sound of the orchestra, as each departs over the years, what is the tipping point where a new orchestra exists?

How much do any of these things matter? Well, in terms of popular music, there is potential for issues as members of groups die and the prospect of a reunion of the originals wanes. Not everyone can afford whatever preservation techniques The Rolling Stones are using.

Is it just the case that people need to move on and accept progress?  Is this true in all scenarios? How do you know which scenario is a bridge too far in terms of faithfully and ethically providing what you are advertising?

All Your Trend Are Belong To Us

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Over the years I have frequently cautioned against becoming invested in the current hot thing that everyone is doing because the fad could pass quickly and you will have spent a lot of time and resources on something that is no longer viable.

One important thing I have never really been able to define is how to determine the difference between a long term trend and a passing fad.

Fortunately, Colleen Dilenschneider provides some intelligent guidance on the subject on her Know Your Own Bone blog. (my emphasis in green, rest is her’s)

So how can your organization figure out if something is a fad or a trend? A helpful trick may be to consider that trends inevitably affect some form of the organization’s engagement strategy, but fads usually influence tactics. This isn’t a fool-proof trick, but it can help your organization think strategically about the differences between both fads and trends.

For instance, social media use is a trend and that affects your engagement strategy, but selfies affect how you can carry out that strategy. Screaming “YOLO” and going gluten-free are things that folks may be doing these days – and, in order to remain relevant, your organization may benefit by embracing them for now. But these fads affect your organization’s tactics (and messages and programs), not its strategy. Data-informed management affects your strategy. Embracing transparency affects your strategy. The trend toward personalized interactions and programs thanks to our increasingly individually-tailored world is a trend and also deeply affects our strategies.

So by this definition, fads don’t really become trends in the same way ponies don’t grow up to be horses. (In fact, wanting a pony for your birthday is just a fad for most of us.)   But to confuse things, what social media tells you are trending topics are really just fads. (Whereas “all your base are belong to us” riffs are memes)

My advice in the past has generally been to wait, watch and evaluate whether something is going to endure and whether it is suited to your organizational goals and identity.  Dilenschneider takes a slightly different approach essentially saying it is okay to jump on the latest bandwagon, just don’t mistake it for an interstate shuttle.

Dilenschneider makes a valid point that it can be just as detrimental to be averse to adopting innovation as it is to waste time and energy chasing the latest fad.

If you have the time and resources, jumping into something knowing that it will be a short term project you will eventually discard can be useful in identifying new potential audiences and partners, and gauging your capacity to execute different sorts of activities. Essentially, something akin to rapid prototyping in software.

For example, you may never have considered the possibility of mounting performances or a festival in dance clubs. Yet over the course of playing with a lot of fads, you connected with demographics different from your core audience and had done some minor promotions with local bars. All this gave you the inspiration and confidence to do shows in bars.

Just remember though, this is an ideal outcome. It is very easy to become involved with a fad that becomes a long term detriment to your organization. Remember when Groupon was hot? Everyone was excited by it, but it became a nightmare for a lot of companies who lost money through discounting and never gained return business or loyalty. I know someone who still uses it regularly to find things to do, but never returns to a company unless there is another discount offer.

What Oskar Said

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The keynote speaker for the recent Arts Midwest conference was Oskar Eustis who is current artistic director at the Public Theater.  Tweets in reaction to his speech have been Storified if you want some insight.

A lot of what he spoke about centered on the value of government support of the arts and the value of non-profit arts organizations, especially in his career.  One of his first jobs in the arts was supported by a CETA grant. National Endowment for the Arts money supported the development of Angels in America which he commissioned and directed.  Lin Manuel Miranda’s invitation to perform at the White House saw him perform a song that eventually became the opening number for Hamilton which Eustis developed at the Public Theater.

He also mentioned how he was sitting with Julie Taymor at a session of Aspen Ideas Festival when Michael Eisner stood up and said he thought too much importance was placed on the value of non-profit theater, citing how he had bolstered Taymor’s career when he choose her to direct The Lion King. Eustis said before he had a chance to throw down with Eisner, Taymor pointed out she only developed the skills to direct a show of the caliber The Lion King thanks to the experience she had in non-profit theater.

Like me, a lot of these topics are close to Eustis’ heart. He spoke of how worried he was that as a country we have equated having a market economy with having a market society. That is, that we judge the value of what we do based on how financially successful it is.

If you have been reading my recent posts about economic value of the art and culture vs. intrinsic value, you know this permeates societal thinking beyond just the idea that arts organizations need to be run like businesses and support themselves.

Eustis said that he had been pushing for the Public Theater to present more of its work for free as they do with Shakespeare in Central Park, but his board was reticent because they didn’t feel that people would value something they got for free. Eustis acknowledged that might be the case with some things, but given that people were camping out overnight just to get a spot on line to see Shakespeare, he was pretty sure the Public Theater’s work would be sufficiently valued. In the upcoming year, the Public Theater will mount their first free production at one of their regular spaces.

He also mentioned despite doing so many free productions in Central Park, they discovered only their prison program and the shows they trucked out to the five boroughs of NYC were the only programs that were serving a mix of people that reflected the demographics of NYC.

During the Q&A after his address, Mario Garcia Durham, President and CEO of Association of Performing Arts Presenters rose and expressed his dismay that the Kennedy Center was essentially telling people that they would need to buy subscriptions to two seasons if they wanted to get tickets to see Hamilton when it came to Washington D.C.

Durham was concerned that this would place the show out of reach of the demographics with which Miranda most wanted the show to resonate and plead with Eustis to ask Miranda to arrange auxiliary programming to accompany the show that the general population would be able to access.

Eustis replied that while he really didn’t have any control over the decisions made by organizations that presented the show, he did have a right to sit at the table and provide guidance when policies were being shaped. He said if he had his way, when it came time to make the show available for amateur performance, it would only be licensed to only high schools in perpetuity and would never be available for production by theatrical organizations.

I am embarrassed to admit there were some other noteworthy things Eustis said that I can’t recall. They were so noteworthy I tracked down  Arts Midwest President David Freher to discuss them. I figured I needn’t make note about them since they were so vivid in my mind.

If anyone else was at the keynote and was impressed by anything else they heard, please share because it may jog my memory.

You Can’t Tell A Lot About The Value Of Art Based On The Audience With Which It Is Associated

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If you have been following my posts closely for the last couple months, you know the topic of the prescriptive value of the arts to fix various problems has been on my mind lately. Often we see people argue about how the arts stimulate the economy, help students do better in school or contribute to a reduction in crime.

It wasn’t until I was looking back at some old entries that I was reminded of a less frequently discussed measure of success — are the right people being served.

Back in 2008 I wrote about a speech given by Frank Furedi where he criticized the apparent perception that a performance wasn’t successful unless it was attended by the right demographics.

[Britian Cultural Minister Margaret] Hodge had nothing to say about the musical experience of listening to performances at The Proms. Instead she focused entirely on the audience. She observed that ‘the audiences for many of our greatest cultural events – I’m thinking in particular of The Proms – is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this’. In essence, she was arguing that one should judge the merits of a concert on the basis of who’s in the audience.

…For Hodge, and other supporters of the politicisation of culture, the value of classical music is called into question by the fact that apparently the ‘wrong’ people listen to it. ‘The main problem with classical music is its audience’, wrote Sean O’Hagan in the Observer. That’s another way of saying that because its audience is predominantly middle class, classical music is an unreliable instrument for promoting social cohesion and community regeneration.

I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be more opportunities for a wider demographic range of performers and artists. Nor am I suggesting potential audiences should learn to appreciate the standard cultural expressions of the country in which they live.

I feel a lot of progress has been made, especially in the last year, in terms of calling attention the narrow choices that are being made in casting and programming. That shouldn’t be impeded or reversed. There is still a lot of stubborn inertia to overcome.

However, in the process of expanding opportunities, it will be easy to judge something as less valuable because it doesn’t resonate with the correct audiences.

It is just as bad to say Western classical music is less valuable than a Taiko drumming performance because it won’t attract as many Japanese audience members that your funders desire as it is to decide to cast Scarlett Johansson as The Major in The Ghost in the Shell movie because she is more marketable than a Japanese actor.

As Furedi suggests, the view that a work by a Western artist won’t resonate with someone who doesn’t come from a Western background does a disservice to them and underestimates their capacities. (As is the assumption that Westerners won’t enjoy something that isn’t from the Western canon.) Just because someone is thrilled by an experience that tells them more about themselves doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate an experience that has more relevance to another than them.

Yes, steps need to be taken to make audiences more demographically diverse. Judging the worth of a work based on whether it helps you achieve that diversity is misdirected.

Can You Deliver On The Promise of Clean Restrooms?

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Yesterday evening I was hanging out at the local coffee house participating in a send off of an artist who has been creating murals for a public art project in the city for over 20 years now.

I got to talking to the owner of the coffee house about his management philosophy. Which, when it comes to employees, can be pretty much summarized as, cultivate the good workers and cut loose the deadwood.

He pays his employees a decent wage and involves them in as many aspects of the business as they are comfortable or interested. For example, when considering any potential new menu items, everyone participates in the preparation and pricing to make sure it makes sense in terms of the time and resources it requires.

Sometimes I don’t agree with his choices, but he always good at explaining his rationale to customers. I was on hand when a woman suggested they have loyalty punch cards like other coffee houses and he laid out the alternative approach he had chosen that provides value to the customer.

As closing time approached, the gathering adjourned to the patio so the employees could go home. I made a trip to the restroom and was confronted by this sign.

deserve restroom

When I mentioned the sign to the owner, he said it was there more for the employees than the customers. It communicated the standard of cleanliness they were expected to maintain because god help them if he got a call.

I thought it was pretty damn audacious. It doesn’t just say contact the manager if the restroom isn’t clean. It tells the customer they DESERVE a clean restroom and promises they will get it.

Question to ask yourself: Does your organization operate at a level that you can promises this standard of service?

This isn’t a literal promise about clean restrooms, it has figurative implications about the service you should expect to receive during every interaction while you are on the premises. It plays into the adage about being able to judge the cleanliness of the kitchen from the state of the restrooms, but goes beyond that.

Even with only a handful of customer contact points, it takes a lot of effort and attention to achieve this standard. If you really sit down and make a list, there are more contact points with customers than you think.

Can you tell your customers, figurative clean restrooms are hard to find, but they deserve them, and then deliver on that promise? It is pretty daunting.

Why Would We Not Want More?

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I frequently write about why arguing the benefits of the arts based on their instrumental value (e.g. improves economy or test scores) is a bad approach because it depends on an absence of a substitute which is effective at accomplishing the same ends.

The alternative is to talk about the intrinsic value of art, or art for arts sake. The problem with this approach is that it lacks that concrete data that everyone says they base their decisions on.

Or rather, it lacks the concrete data that everyone insists they are faithfully basing their decisions upon. If you have paid any attention to the way decisions are made in the political or educational arenas, you know that isn’t true. Still, if you want to make your case, you have to do it in a convincing manner in terms which people can relate.

Teacher Peter Greene had an entry on Huffington Post about a year ago which performs this task pretty effectively in regard to defending music education. It probably isn’t the exact approach to take if you are called to provide testimony at your state legislature, but he provides a general ground plan.  (my emphasis)

Music is universal. It’s a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch— music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?

[…]

Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?

Music is freakin’ magical. In 40-some years I have never gotten over it — you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin’ magical.

Even though the “Why would we not…” questions are not completely based on logic, it shares many of the same motivations that drive scientific inquiry.

We are surrounded by sun, air, earth and water, why would we not want to study them to better understand how they impact things like agriculture and help us prepare for drought, fires, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes?

As I said, while Greene’s reasoning doesn’t provide quantitative measurements to support it, it does provide what Carter Gillies says is often lacking in such rationale – it begins to teach people why we value the arts – and it does it with language that captures attention and starts to fire the imagination.

Dances With Seedlings

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Via Non-Profit Quarterly is a brief story about the Farm to Ballet Project which is taking agricultural themed ballet to about nine farms throughout Vermont this summer. (Their second season, I should mention.)

When I first started reading about this project, The Wormfarm Institute and their various programs like the Fermentation Fest and Roadside Culture Stands immediately came to mind. There has been a concentrated effort over the last decade or so to call more attention to arts programs in rural settings.

The Farm to Ballet Project partners closely with the farms and reinvest profits either into the farm or other agricultural non-profits.

But he also has a passion for local farming, and the Farm to Ballet Project has allowed him to connect the not-so-obvious dots between dance and agriculture. The project supports the farming community because 75 percent of ticket sales from each performance go to the host farm or to agriculture-related nonprofits. Local farm products are highlighted in other ways, too. For example, at a recent performance, “many in the 300-plus audience of adults and children also enjoyed dinner beforehand made from locally grown ingredients.”

They perform a story ballet that follows farm plants, animals and soil over the course of a year. The dancers in the first video below talk about being lettuce, cucumbers, goats, bees and various other creatures in the performance which occurs outside in the farm fields.

In the second video below, two of the dancers talk about how much they have come to appreciate impact of different grass types (and cow patties) on what sort of movements they can safely execute.

In addition to bringing ballet to communities in a context the audiences have never seen before, they are also providing an opportunity for people to renew an artistic practice that had been interrupted by other life events.

In the interview below, a woman talks about how she never expected to be able to perform classical ballet again after having started a family. This season their youngest company member is 17 and the oldest is 73.

This comment reminded me of a post I made last year about a woman who started two dance companies in different cities for people who had trained in dance to a high level, hadn’t pursued dance as a career, but wanted to continue dancing and choreographing.

This interview is additional evidence that there is an unmet need for an outlet of creative expression in dance and probably other disciplines.

They mention a benefit of performing in a farm field they hadn’t initially anticipated is that kids can follow their impulse to get up and start dancing off to the side without really interrupting the performance.

Finding Things Out Only Adds

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Since I seem to have started on a philosophical kick this week, how about we consider Richard Feynman’s “Ode To A Flower” commentary in the video below? You can also see it illustrated in an awesome Zen Pencil’s comic.

Like Feynman’s friend, I remember being in my high school science class and thinking that it was robbing life of all its wonder. I would rather be entranced by the fictitious stories that made things seem magical than to learn the dull truth that it was all a result of chemical reactions.

Later, I came to appreciate, as Feynman points out, that science actually gives you the tools to extend your wonder and experience the delight of discovery.

For example, one of the things I have wondered about for 20+ years is whether squirrels in Florida hide nuts for the winter since there is no danger of food scarcity. If they don’t, if you transported a Florida squirrel to Boston, would instincts kick in and lead it to hide nuts or would it be in danger of starving?

It may sound like a silly question, but I keep it tucked away in the back of my mind in case I meet a scientist who can provide the answer. I find it exciting to know that I can discover that answer and receive additional interesting revelations with follow up questions.

Feynman’s short comments illustrate just how valuable the skill of communicating what you do to the uninitiated is. Feynman was great at explaining scientific concepts to people. A lot of scientists aren’t.

By the same measure, a lot of artists and arts organizations aren’t really good at explaining art and the value of the arts either. I wonder how much of that is due to simple lack of practice and how much is due to fear of being accused of selling out or dumbing things down.

I had a recent email exchange with Carter Gillies about this subject. I wondered if the scientific community felt Neil DeGrasse Tyson wasn’t a real scientist because he used his public profile to explain science to the general public. Is he accused of dumbing things down for a general audience? Do people suggest he can’t have time to engage in real scientific work due to all his media appearances?

I assume I don’t need to cite any parallel sentiments in the arts and cultural sphere.

Unfortunately, in these days when people have a high degree of control over the information they receive and are able to more easily ignore and filter out what they don’t want to hear, explaining the value of a subject becomes more difficult even for highly skilled communicators.

Frequently the initial encounter with the revelations and new questions that emerge isn’t easy or comfortable to bear.

Even with the tools to communicate your message to a wide range of people, getting someone like the high school me to accept a less magical view of the world in exchange for one that still had a lot of potential for wonder requires a retail, one-on-one, effort.

While Feynman gave physics lectures to packed lectures halls, the “Ode To A Flower” comment came from a series of one on one discussions he and artist Jirayr Zorthian had about art and physics over the course of eight years.

As an added aside: There is frequently discussion about people needing to see people like themselves on stage. I can’t express the thrill I got when I first heard a New York accent coming out of the mouth of a person acknowledged to be a brilliant scientist. I think it can be easy to underestimate the impact of those types of experiences.

Slightly Exceeding Expectations As An Ideal Outcome

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A recent post on Ken Davenport’s The Producer’s Perspective caused me to engage in a bit of internal debate.

Ken says a one of the worst things you can do is greatly exceed audience expectations:

“..But it also means that before they step into the theater, they have no clue what they’re about to see . . . and they aren’t expecting it to be anything to write home to Mama about.

Exceeding an audience’s expectations isn’t a creative problem. It’s a marketing problem. It means that however you are promoting your show, from the title to the blurb to the website, it’s not generating enough excitement with your potential buyer. And, unfortunately, when audience’s expectations are low, that means that most of them won’t make a purchase. People buy tickets to things that they expect to be good great. They are buying entertainment, remember? They want to be entertained. And in 2016, with the cost of tickets as high as they are . . . entertaining an audience isn’t enough. They want to be wowed.”

This is all contrary to the outcome I want.

One of the greatest pleasures I get from my job is when people enjoy a performance they didn’t expect to. There isn’t a lot of financial remuneration in non-profit arts, but hearing people say “Wow” when they leave the performance hall…and having them continue to talk about their experience weeks, months and even years later, is pretty gratifying.

The mission of most non-profit arts organizations is to provide an opportunity for exploration and learning versus the profit making goals of Broadway shows, so you might argue that you aren’t going to want to emphasize the entertainment value of the event.  If you aren’t charging Broadway prices to enter the door, then the burden of expectations is relatively lighter as well.

The problem is, most people, even those who attend your events, don’t know you are a non-profit organization. They aren’t discerning between the entertainment or education value your organization is offering versus those of a profit seeking entity. Chances are, it is all the same to them.

Regardless of whether you think people want to come for the entertainment value or to learn new things, Davenport has a point that if people are arriving not knowing what to expect, then you are probably under- or mis- communicating the event to the wider community.

Note, he is just talking about generating enthusiasm for being there. People may have an entirely wrong concept about the event and have their minds blown and that is okay. If they are tentative about being there in the first place and hoping they have a good time, that is another thing altogether.

The reasons why non-profits aren’t doing a better job at this are myriad. In some cases, it is a matter of bad decision making when it comes to allocating money and personnel to marketing efforts.

There is often a desire, and perhaps a sense of obligation, to invest money in the artistic product rather than advertising and personnel, both of which can be regarded as overhead expense.

As has been noted many times before, donors and funders want to know money is going toward results and impact, delighting people and changing their lives.  Even though marketing isn’t explicitly listed as something most foundations doesn’t fund, there is less support and tolerance for the costs to reach those people and generate interest and excitement in them.

It definitely requires a careful balancing act. Some organizations are good at it, some aren’t and some probably aren’t really making an effort.

It really feels strange to read Davenport brag that his team did such a good job marketing Altar Boyz, seeing the show only slightly exceed audience expectations. But if the audiences truly expressed a high level of satisfaction with the experience and seeing the show only slightly added to that, then it a measure of success if their satisfaction extended hours, if not days prior to, and after the performance.

Is that a feeling your arts organization can lay claim to generating?

Even though the discussion inevitably circles back to issues of time, personnel and money, these questions and ideas are worth regularly revisiting, regardless of your situation. Sometimes just thinking about them provides a little inspiration about a resource or opportunity specific to your community that can be tapped into.

Data Is Nice, Stories Are Better

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It is pretty much an accepted truth that if you want to secure funding for the arts from a government entity or foundation, you need to marshal a lot of data to prove you are having an impact, especially an economic impact.

However, in a recent interview Kresge Foundation President & CEO Rip Rapson seems to indicate that story rather than data may be more important in influencing decisions and policy.

Rapson speaks about a conversation he had with former NEA Chair Rocco Landesman about the ArtPlace initiative. (my emphasis)

And I said, well, I agree with that, but how about the data, and how about the quantitative elements of all of this? Isn’t that what will tip the scales?

And he just laughed. He wore these big cowboy boots, and he stood up, and he pounded the floor, and he said, you know what? I walk into every congressional office in the United States House of Representatives, and not one asks me about the data. They all want to know a story about what happened in one of their neighborhoods, one of their communities, one of their cities.

He doesn’t say that data isn’t important. My suspicion is that politicians especially like to have data to corroborate their decisions if anyone questions them. Rapson says one of the goals of ArtPlace is to help discover:

“Is there something between the highly rigorous, systematized generation of data about how many dollars per square inch an arts activity generates and all of these millions of points of light? When are the data important? When are the stories important? How do you aggregate the stories?”

A little later he gives an anecdote that illustrates how people overlook the arts in their lives and just how invested they are in their practice. He speaks of a very conservative wardperson in Minneapolis who thought the arts were a waste of time. (my emphasis)

“He actually hauled me in front of the city council committee to explain why in heaven’s name we would accept a grant like this.

So, I said, well, Walter, could we have the very first conversation in your ward, and he kind of grumbled and said all right, all right. So, we had it. It was at his Ukrainian church where he went every Sunday. We were able to identify the woman who sewed the vestments, the man who had done the mural painting on the altar, the three women, who every year created the Ukrainian Easter eggs. We got the choir director. You get the drift.

And Dziedzic walked in and saw these13 people in his congregation, and I said something to the effect of “I want to introduce you to your arts and cultural community, Walter.” And they all talked about how art became central to the way this Ukrainian church practiced, and of course he was toast; he became the biggest single advocate of how arts and culture sort of shaped community life. Now, I could have brought him all sorts of data, I suppose, but, having him sit with 13 or 14 of his congregation members talking about Ukrainian eggs and choral concerts, was really quite wonderful.

So in trying to convince people of the value of the arts in their lives, it may take focusing on impacts on a very granular level. Not just things that happen in the district or town that they identify with, but how it manifests directly in places they are deeply invested and care about.

A program that served 1000 school kids may not be as important as the joy it brought a single kid.

While the implications of that single sentence could lead to a whole debate about influence, wealth disparities, urban vs rural funding, etc., remember that not all the hearts and minds you need to influence are politicians, funding organizations and individual donors. Just shifting the general perception for a greater number of people in a community can be a victory.

Are You A Cultural Omnivore If You Take Very Careful Bites?

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Here is an interesting insight from Stanford University Graduate School of Business (h/t Marginal Revolution blog). According to some latest research, cultural omnivores may be as rigid in their thinking as those they disdain as monoculturalists. (Though I guess they don’t use that term.)

That is, those dubbed “cultural omnivores” — because they eat Thai for lunch, play bocce ball after work, and stream a French film that night — are the very ones opposed to mixing it up. No hummus on their hot dogs, forget about spaghetti Westerns, and do not mention Switched-On Bach. Those offerings are not considered culturally authentic. They are a hodgepodge to which these folks would likely wrinkle their collective noses — as they did in 1968 when Wendy (nee’ Walter) Carlos electrified J.S. Bach. Today’s cultural elites approve only if the experience is authentic, which means eating pigs’ feet at a Texas barbecue passes the test and slathering a taco with tahini does not.

[…]

Today, a higher status accrues to those who are perceived as open to new experiences, and those who oppose experimentation are dismissed as narrow-minded monoculturists, or worse, rednecks, Goldberg notes. Therefore, the elites resist anything that undermines their identities as social and cultural leaders, and that means they are more likely to maintain boundaries.

So I guess the way to read that is that today’s snobs are just snobby about a wider range of things?

While there are probably boundaries that cultural omnivores maintain, I suspect it isn’t as simple an example of hummus on hot dogs. My guess is that Korean Taco food trucks are acceptable to a wide range of cultural omnivores even though on paper the concept is as strange as hummus on hot dogs.

The article does suggest that there is a small segment of people who are open to change so perhaps they normalize things like food trucks for the wide range of omnivores.

If this research is accurate, the larger question this raises for me is what constitutes an “authentic experience” for cultural omnivores? Recent research cites finding that people want to have an authentic creative/artistic experience.

In the context of the Stanford piece, I become a little more concerned that perception of what an authentic experience is may not match the reality of an authentic experience. (And not only in respect to silly manifestations of preconceived notions of authenticity.)

When a performing arts group presents a chamber music concert in an edgy, new, boundary breaking format, do the musicians need to be conservatory trained or will the music ensemble from the local community college be acceptable?

If you say the former, why does an unorthodox approach require such a high level of training in order to be deemed acceptable? If the effort fails (succeeds), will you be more satisfied with the experience knowing the performers were highly trained?

I do think it is important that people who invest time and study to render an authentic experience of a certain genre or culture be in a position to delineate themselves from people providing a superficial representation of those things and labeling it authentic. Though the discussion of who gets to call themselves authentic practitioners is an entirely different can of worms, especially in regard to cultural and ethnic practice.

But as I am reading the Stanford article, it almost sounds as if it could be just as problematic trying to provide an acceptable authentic experience to people who describe themselves as cultural omnivores as it is to those who consider themselves to be purists of a certain genre of artistic expression.

New audiences may feel the experience is just as elitist when they overhear others expressing disdain for a show they liked as they would when people glared at them for clapping between movements of a musical work.

The Stanford article says Big Data will provide needed guidance, but I am not sure how many arts organizations will have the resources to access and interpret the data effectively. (I would happily be wrong if in 5 years there was an app for that.)

Not So Simple As “Just Ask What They Want”

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Seth Godin has a post today that seems like it is written just for arts organizations.  Obviously, that is just my ego that views the arts as the center of my universe talking because the assertion in the title, “You can’t ask customers want they want,” applies to every company.

My first thought upon reading the post was Malcolm Gladwell’s story about how Prego achieved dominance with spaghetti sauce by doing a lot of experimentation with sauces that did not conform to the stated preferences of consumers at the time.

Godin says you can’t make a breakthrough in the product you are offering because customers have a difficult time imagining a breakthrough product. Instead, you have to do a lot of risky experimentation.

You ought to know what their problems are, what they believe, what stories they tell themselves. But it rarely pays to ask your customers to do your design work for you.

So, if you can’t ask, you can assert. You can look for clues, you can treat different people differently, and you can make a leap. You can say, “assuming you’re the kind of person I made this for, here’s what I made.”

There are a lot of little details in there that we have heard before in terms of arts organizations needing to know about audiences, what their impediments to participation are and what stories they tell themselves about the type of person they are.

There is an element of Godin’s post that replicates the “fail early and learn” philosophy being bandied about quite a bit lately.

I don’t have to tell you there isn’t a lot of room in arts organization budgets for experimentation and constructive failure. Alas, to a great degree, that is the only option available any more. As he suggests, experimentation doesn’t have to be scattershot, you can make educated guesses from clues and change the way you interact and execute with different people who use your product/services.

I think that last sentence I quoted emphasizes that not everyone in your community is going to be your market. What you made is only going to connect with a certain type of person. There may be 10,000 of that type of person within your reasonable reach or there may be 10.

Goodness knows we think we are making an educated decision about what will appeal to a large number of people only to have our efforts fall flat. Other times, we are delighted to gain an overwhelming response with little effort, but are confounded to figure out how to replicate (or avoid) those mysterious conditions in the future.

You can probably find no greater verification that not everyone in a community is part of the same market by dedicating a month to walking down a supermarket aisle or past a display that you don’t buy from. Every time you go past, notice how much the product is turning over.

Maybe it is the sushi you don’t buy because are not the type to buy sushi that isn’t freshly made moments before in front of you. Maybe it is some strange food from the ethnic food aisle. Perhaps it is the Uncrustables PB&J sandwiches in the freezer case (I mean, how the hell is a PB&J sandwich you have to defrost more convenient than making the sandwich?).

You have a lot in common with thousands of other people in that you both shop at that supermarket rather than another one, perhaps based on your shared self image, perhaps simply due to geography. Yet there are thousands of items in the store that the manufacturers would be happy if you bought, but also understand that you are not in their target market demographic.

Do People Support Tax Status Or Results?

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Whew! Memorial Day is past which means we are officially in summer. Finally some time to relax a little and gather our strength for the next season. (Unless you run a summer festival in which case you’re just getting busy.)

This may also be the time for a little introspection to examine how you are operating and presenting yourself to your community.

Something I have often mentioned is that by and large most people aren’t aware of a cultural organization’s non-profit status. However, I didn’t have any hard data to show exactly what those numbers were.

Back in January, Colleen Dilenschneider at Know Your Own Bone addressed this issue with some hard data and a helpful summary video. (Should I be worried that every time I visit the site there seem to be more bones in the picture? Could she be related to Alferd Packer?)

In a survey of 98,000 people barely 40% of non-attendees knew a particular organization was non-profit. Of attendees, not even 50% knew the organization was non-profit. The highest percentages in both cases were in relation to history museums. Other museums, zoos, orchestras and botanic gardens had lower recognition rates.

Regardless of the reason for the misperceptions, more than half of visitors to ALL cultural organizations do not believe that they play any role in keeping these organizations healthy or alive after walking in the door. Beyond paying admission (to what they consider a business) or paying their taxes (to an organization with free admission because their taxes fund a government-operated entity), the majority of visitors risk believing that there is no further need for their support.

In the accompany video, Dilenschneider notes that with corporate social responsibility becoming a new norm, the differences between tax statuses becomes even more blurred. The defining factor is effective execution of mission to make a difference vs. tax status.

In her post Dilenschneider argues for focusing on difference making vs. a “come visit us” appeal. (my emphasis in green)

..There are countless articles on the importance of for-profit companies “doing good.” It is a key tactic for gaining more customers. And that’s interesting because there are still some cultural organizations that do this weird, outdated thing where they try to overlook their social advantage and exclusively promulgate “visit us today!” messages (and even offer discounts that devalue their brand and cause even more sector confusion for cultural organizations). It’s like some of them are trying to be like Disney World…

Being good at your mission is good business. Data demonstrate that organizations highlighting their missions outperform organizations marketing primarily as attractions. Perhaps, in all of our “But we are a nonprofit” excuse making, we missed the true differentiator that has provided us that tax status in the first place: Our bottom line of making a difference.

Our key differentiator is not our tax status, but that our dedication to making a difference is embedded in the very structure of how we operate. There’s a thought that we need to run “more like for-profit companies” (and in some ways we do, but the blanket directive is an ignorant miss). But look around. For-profit companies are actually trying to be more like us in the sense that they want audiences to know that they stand for something that makes the world a better place.

As the summer unfolds, think about how you can make little changes in your regular messaging that includes how you are making a difference. Difference-making can’t dominate the message because that can obscure the details of how people can participate in your activities. If difference-making is effective at attracting more participation, it is going to be more constructive for the organization than focusing on discounting to attract audiences.

Return To The Valley of Intrinsic Impact

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the important thoughts Carter Gillies had about the concept of the intrinsic value of the arts.

In light of that, I wanted to look back at where the idea of intrinsic value of the arts all began. Well, at least for me.

The first attempt to measure the intrinsic value of the arts I was aware of was a study by WolfBrown on behalf of the Major University Presenters consortium.  I wrote about WolfBrown’s presentation of the study results, Assessing the Intrinsic Impacts of a Live Performance at the Arts Presenters conference back in 2008.

In writing about the report at that time, I related the concerns expressed by then president of Arts Presenters, Lisa Booth,

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.

I am not sure if it is fortunate or unfortunate that funders aren’t focused on improvements in intrinsic value measures.

If you want a quick primer of WolfBrown’s process and how they define things like readiness to receive, self-actualization, captivation and social comfort level, you can take a look at the website they have created for the intrinsic impact portion of their consultant work. (It looks like they have refined some of their terminology in the last 8 years.)

In terms of whether one can accurately assess any of these things so that it results in a meaningful measure of intrinsic impact, I don’t know. Even if it does, it is likely to lack the relevance to policy makers and others who are not involved and invested in the arts that Carter talks about.

What I do think their process does is get closer to bridging the communication gap between why arts people like the arts and those who don’t see any value in the arts. When you are having conversations with people where you are paying attention to things like Emotional Resonance, Captivation, Intellectual Stimulation and Social Bonding, you can start to find common language that communicates value beyond economic stimulus and cognitive development.

The Few Times The Audience Is Too Demonstrative

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Around 9 years ago I wrote about a response someone had gotten from the head of a dance program while trying to revive an annual dance festival.

The head of the program said he didn’t want to expose his students to our audience whom he compared to the crowd at a football game. I had followed up to see if there had been miscommunication or misunderstanding. As I wrote at the time:

He felt the audience, which is generally comprised of family and friends of the dancers, needed to be educated about how to behave. He admitted he didn’t know how that might be accomplished as lecturing folks before a performance on decorum would probably make people resentful.

Reading that, I got to wondering if that type of attitude might have changed in the nearly decade since. Given all the conversations about changing the general environment in performance halls to allow audiences to feel more actively involved and less passive, has anything changed?

This is one of those rare occasions when new audiences aren’t intimidated by the thought of disapproving looks from those more experienced and knowledgeable than themselves.

Since I am not longer working at an arts organization with a dance program or a reputation for presenting dance, I need to throw this question out to the readership. Have there been any changes?

In the situation 9 years ago, the person objecting lead a university based training program conferring graduate and undergraduate degrees. The approach such a program might take to dance is likely to be different from that of a dance company that was started by someone who received their training at Urban Dance Camp.

If you want to respond to this, give us a little context about your practice or the expectations you recently experienced.

There is also the issue that an overly boisterous environment can create an unnerving experience for people who are participating in their first public performance after having just started learning dance. Often the cheering is a much about the audience member calling attention to themselves and their connection to the performer as it is about supporting the performer.

The other question is, how do you communicate the need to keep it dialed back without offending people who are making a rare visit to a performing arts venue whom you want to see more frequently?

Let P.T. Barnum Be Your Guide To Business Ethics And Industry

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Via Kotte.org is P.T. Barnum’s short book, Art of Money Getting. If you are like me in thinking Barnum said “there’s a sucker born every minute,” (he didn’t), you may be surprised at how forthright and industrious his advice is.

I was interested to note just how little has changed since 1880. Barnum’s first piece of advice is along the lines of doing what you love.

Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation. Yet we see many who have mistaken their calling, from the blacksmith up (or down) to the clergyman.

His second bit of advice is location, location, location.

Number 6 includes the value of failing early and often.

“…and he will find he will make mistakes nearly every day. And these very mistakes are helps to him in the way of experiences if he but heeds them. He will be like the Yankee tin-peddler, who, having been cheated as to quality in the purchase of his merchandise, said: “All right, there’s a little information to be gained every day; I will never be cheated in that way again.” Thus a man buys his experience, and it is the best kind if not purchased at too dear a rate.

Number 7, Use the Best Tools he applies to investing resources to retain the best employees, but Drew McManus also just talked about the same thing in a recent interview. Drew related it to not trying to skimp and get by on scaled down student or trial version of software

If you think it is difficult get your marketing efforts to connect with people amid all the things vying for their attention, Barnum says in 1880 a person has to be exposed to your ads or mention of your product/service seven times before they buy.

He has 20 rules in all that include many sound bits of advice like treating your customers well; being charitable; not gossiping; not falling prey to get rich quick schemes; preserving your integrity; working hard; being focused; having sound processes but don’t become enslaved to them; and being both hopeful and practical.

Barnum was definitely a showman and hard charging promoter that was eager to perpetrate hoaxes in order to make money. The more I read about him, the less smarmy he appears to be. He did a lot of work in public health and safety, for example.

There seems to be a tendency to blame him for random unattributed cons. The 2001 episode of The West Wing that claims he was able to sell white salmon by claiming it will never go pink in the can may actually be the first time his name is connected with an apparently widely cited, likely apocryphal, 100 year old tale.

Great Expectations For Middle of the Road Food

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It is probably no surprise to learn that food brings communities together. CityLab recently had a piece about a group in Tallahassee, FL that received a grant from the Knight Foundation to support a project called “The Longest Table,” intended to bring 400 strangers from all parts of the city,

“…to use the dinner table as a medium for generating meaningful conversation among people of diverse ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds.”

I was thinking this sounded a lot like a project I wrote about last fall that occurred in Akron, OH that also set up tables down the middle of the road in order to bring 500 people together for a meal and discussion about how a highway that was being closed down might be re-purposed.

It turns out on closer investigation, not only was that also sponsored by the Knight Foundation, there was an earlier iteration of the Tallahassee meal that occurred last October within a week of the one in Akron.

I think this is secretly a plot by the Knight Foundation to identify the best cooks around the country for some nefarious end!

Actually, an element of that was central to the Akron 500 Plates project. (the identifying good cooks part, not nefarious plotting)

The artists and collaborators collected recipes from each of the 22 neighborhoods in the city and printed them on each of the plates so that everyone went home with a recipe from someone in the community. Then they built tables and distributed them to each of the neighborhoods to provide a gathering point at which conversations and community meals could continue.

500 Plates has made the recipes and toolkit for replicating this in the neighborhoods and other cities available on their website.

The participants in both projects talk about how the format lends itself to discussing somewhat sensitive topics because the environment sets people a little more at ease. This type of event may help arts organizations come in contact and start a conversation with the elusive demographic of people we never meet in order to learn what their barriers to involvement are.

Music To Repel, Redeem and Raze By

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You have probably heard stories about how people blast classical music to scare drug dealers out of their neighborhoods, homeless out of train stations and teens away from convenience stores.

There was recently a story in the Wall Street Journal about a town in India that is using drummers to shame people into paying taxes.

Among my first thoughts were that it is pretty awful for a guy who has been playing drums since he was two to have his performance used to punish people. Thinking of my post yesterday, it occurred to me that this may be another manifestation of the disconnect between people who value the arts and those who see little value at all. Assumptions are made about the utility of the arts as well as about how undesirable elements of society will react when exposed to them.

There is a little more nuance to the story than that. The drummers play the same music they are hired to play at weddings and birthday parties. So as the article suggests, the drumming may indeed be more about calling attention to scofflaws than torturing them. (Though the classical music being blared in train stations to scare kids away is the same music chamber groups are hired to perform at weddings, so that isn’t proof in itself.)

Also the inclusion of the musicians is accompanied by an effort to create a safer environment. Often tax collectors are beaten up. The musicians and the collectors are accompanied by security guards bearing a banner with the city coat of arms.

On the other hand, since 1/3 of the population doesn’t pay their taxes, they assume the effectiveness of the drummers will wear off soon. They next plan to send transgender women, who are believed to be able to impose hexes on people, to perform mocking dances in front of houses. Again, using a group to shame others solely on the basis of their identity or practices makes me a little uneasy.

It is difficult to begrudge those who need money for their participation in efforts aimed to force social compliance.

It really does say something about the way the arts are perceived that people think it can be used in a prescriptive way to separate the desirable from the undesirable; improve cognition and behavior and a host of other things.

Would Walter White suddenly find stores and other places he frequented that played classical music repulsive after he started cooking meth and dealing drugs?

Of course not. If we have learned anything, its that every James Bond villain or psychopathic killer is attractive, cultured, loves classical music and wants to watch the world burn.

Clearly then, while classical music keeps riff-raff away from train stations and 7-11s, it attracts megalomaniacs to concert halls in droves.

Gives you second thoughts about Drew McManus looking so suave and sophisticated in the pictures on his orchestra consulting website, doesn’t it?

(Yeah, he only wishes he was filthy rich enough to have sharks with freakin’ laser beams attached to their heads.)

Undiscerned Value Hidden In The Cracks and Corners

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There have been a lot of library closings in the UK over the last few years so VICE went around and asked people what libraries meant to them and how they were using them.

People they spoke to valued libraries as quiet, distraction free study spaces; as a location to organize meetings; resources for learning and internet access; and as a plain old place to get reading materials and fire the imagination.

This reminded me of a post I wrote around 18 months ago about how the Columbus (OH) Metropolitan Library surveyed patrons asking what libraries meant to them in their youth and what they anticipated it would mean to them in the future.

By and large, the responses from Columbus were similar to those in the UK in that people valued the ability to access information and conduct the important activities of their lives.

As I quoted from a CityLab article in that post:

“The physical library will become less about citizens checking out books and more about citizens engaging in the business of making their personal and civic identities.”

One obvious question I didn’t raise in my earlier post is whether arts organizations can effect a similar change in the relationship the community has with their facilities. A frequent criticism of performance venues and stadiums are that they are only used when there is a performance resulting in a type of waste whereas museums are used more consistently.

While the location of some performance venues is not conducive to easy use due to the lack of sidewalks, foot traffic and general environmental dynamics, there may be other opportunities that would position the venue as more of a resource to the community.

On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes it is difficult to know if trying to improve the environment might be counterproductive. For example, I noticed an increase of people hanging out in our lobby sitting/laying on benches reading and listening to music on headsets. I had considered getting some cafe tables and chairs people could sit at so they had a surface to work on. Since people have mentioned they value the quiet, I wondered if adding more amenities might attract more activity and ruin the environment people had sought out.

In the last two years, I started noticing people hanging out in strange locations that I couldn’t imagine were comfortable to sit in. Even though there were outlets in these places, the people who consistently staked them out as their own didn’t often have devices plugged in. I think it was the fact it was even more quiet and private than the lobby.

Then there is the woman who occupied a slightly more private, though still visible nook to practice yoga.

If someone came by and asked for a room to meet/study in or a place to hold a yoga class, that would be difficult due to the level of activity in the building. But if someone only needs a corner for themselves and a few others, it is available, provided they aren’t picky.

It is in those minute, almost imperceptible circumstances that an arts facility can have the opportunity to alter the manner in which they are useful to the community.

Social Status: Where Cold Rises and Warmth Flows Down

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I was really intrigued by the results of a recent study coming out of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs that shows “managers play down their competence to appear warmer to their subordinates while the subordinates hide their own warmth in an effort to appear more competent.”

According to the researchers, because people are uncomfortable with discussing/acknowledging the differences in social status in the workplace, they tend to match a stereotypical image they have of the other person in an attempt to connect by trying to act against the stereotypical image of their own status.

Past studies have shown that managers are typically seen as competent and cold, while lower-status employees may be seen as warm, but not entirely competent.

[…]

“In doing this, people might actually talk past each other, making people have more of an awkward misunderstanding,” said Jillian Swencionis, lead author and doctoral candidate in psychology and social policy at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

[…]

The stereotypes people hold about others may not necessarily be true, so when they’re trying to ‘match’ the other person, they’re matching what they think the other person is like. These kinds of diverging impression management strategies may be one reason for misunderstandings or otherwise awkward situations people have in these interactions,” Swencionis said.

The researchers intend to do the same study with students in higher and lower ranked universities to see if they get similar results.

The study made me wonder if the same thing might be in operation in the arts.

  • Do arts organization personnel who interact with audience members and donors they perceive as higher status try to mirror a stereotype they hold about the patron, but end up making a poor impression?
  • Do audience members of lower social status do something similar when they feel they are interacting with other audience members, staff and perhaps artists that are of higher status?
  • What about in the opposite direction, do audience members, donors and staff who perceive themselves of higher status change their behavior when they are interacting with people of lower status?
  • What are the stereotypes each seeks to embody about the other? Do people of lower status in an arts environment try to appear reserved, refined and educated when dealing with someone of higher status?
  • Do people of higher status make an effort to be enthusiastic, effusive, warmer and solicitous when dealing with someone of lower status?

Does any of this contribute to/reinforce the image of the uncultured poseur vs. the snooty and condescending?  Those trying to embody higher status stereotypes may come off as inauthentic and trying too hard. Those trying to be warm and welcoming to people of a lower status may come off as condescending.

As the Princeton researchers note, competence and warmth are not mutually exclusive traits (nor are incompetence and cold personalities). These are all interesting questions to think about and to observe in our own behavior in respect to employee and audience intra-actions and interactions.

A Future Without A Ticket Office Window

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When I read a post on Marginal Revolution blog about high end stores hiding cash registers in favor of roving sales associates with mobile checkout devices, I immediately wondered if there might be some type of benefit in eliminating or diminishing the physical box office for the arts attendance experience.

As such this is largely an intellectual exercise. I don’t pretend to have thought through all the benefits and repercussions.

Tyler Cowen makes the following observations about the Wall Street Journal article that described this retailing practice. There seemed to be an idea that not having to stand in line was one element that gave online retailers a competitive advantage.

1. Waiting in line is described as “unenlightened.”

2. I enjoyed this remark: “We’re downplaying that last transactional part of the experience…” And this: “”Researchers have identified a concept known as “the pain of paying,” said Ziv Carmon, a professor of marketing at Insead, a business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. “Doing away with the queue and even with the register makes the upcoming pain of paying less salient,” he said.”

3. When customers are not waiting in line but rather having their purchases processed “privately,” salespeople are encouraged to socialize with them and get to know them better. And: “Stores say sales associates are expected to sense when a shopper is ready to pay.”

Positioning staff to socialize with customers and get to know them better is definitely a plus for arts organizations.

I did see a couple factors that would make it difficult to replicate the experience of a retailer.

First, unlike retailers, people are looking to make a purchase the moment they walk through the door at an arts event. On the other hand, the fact that many may have already purchased tickets in advance means that when service reps aren’t busy they can engage patrons in conversation in a manner they couldn’t behind a ticketing desk.

Second, the physical design and experience of performance spaces means a person is likely to have to stand online at some point- getting in/out of the theater, buying food at concessions, getting out of the parking lot.

In terms of benefits for performing arts environments, one of the first applications I thought of was for admission to outdoor music festivals. Since people people often queue up early, roving sales people can allow the people who showed up at 3 am stay at the very head of the line without needing to pass through the box office position.

Multiple delays can be avoided if people are able to purchase tickets while waiting to pass through a security checkpoint, rather than waiting on the ticket line and then the security line, etc.

The other thing I envisioned for arts facilities was having large monitors mounted off to the side and overhead similar to how airports have the flight status boards. That way people can gather around them and view up to the second seating status and discuss where they would like to sit. If they have questions or have made their decision, they can gesture to a sales person hovering at the fringes. (Ideally, the sales person will have read their body language and approached them already.)

When the sales experience is designed in this way, those who know what they want aren’t held up in line behind people who are debating the relative benefits of different seating arrangements. This can also help further physically separate the will-call line from the purchasing line.

It would probably be best for cash sales to occur at a physical box office since staff pocketing thousands of dollars while wandering the lobby is both awkward and a huge security risk. There might be some issues if the wifi signal carrying credit card authorizations wasn’t secure, but on the whole a larger number of cash less transactions and mobility of technology can eliminate the annoyance of yelling through plate glass to buy tickets.

By Abesty (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By Abesty (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Now, of course, this requires a certain level of technology. In order to sell tickets in this manner, a sales person would have to have access to a small printer they could carry around that printed a sales receipt and slips of paper the purchaser could use for admission. Or a small kiosk/pedestal nearby that they could retrieve the receipt and tickets from.

You wouldn’t necessarily need large monitors mounted in the lobby if the roving ticketing staff could check ticketing status on a tablet computer and point out available seats on it or a printed seating chart.

It also assumes the lobby is large enough to accommodate these sort of activities. On the other hand increased mobility could allow for sales in parts of a small or strangely shaped lobby that a full box office and associated line wouldn’t be able to fit. That in turn might open up the flow of people through the lobby and make the experience more welcoming. (Especially if congestion in the lobby previously force people to stand out in the weather.)

Any insights, inspiration or concerns about this idea?

The Need For More Marketing To Older Audiences

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Last week there was an article on Salon with the click bait-y title, “Stop buying old Bob Dylan albums: “Every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians.” I started to get a little worked up thinking that money not spent on reissues wasn’t automatically going to be redirected to newer releases.

As you might have inferred, the argument being made was a bit more complex than that. The article was an interview with Wall Street Journal pop music critic Jim Fusilli who suggested one of the reasons why you think the music of your youth was better than the crap they are playing today is that:

I don’t think the industry knows how to market music to grown-ups. When you reach a certain plateau in life and you have family and a career, when you’re involved in your community, you measure things in a different way and your affiliation with pop culture doesn’t matter as much anymore. So music ceases to be a part of your identity. It’s just music. You’re not looking for heroes at a certain stage in life. You’re just looking to hear something that excites and stimulates you. And I don’t know that the industry knows how to talk to those people. I don’t think the industry knows how to hand a grown-up a piece of music and say, This is really good for the following reasons, and none of those reasons has anything to do with clothes or hair or who they’re dating or whatever.

[…]

Maybe this is an unfair example. I don’t know the guy, so I’m not picking on him. But Don Henley put out that album last year, and it got a lot of buzz. Why did it get a lot of buzz? Because he used to be in the Eagles. Anybody who follows Americana and traditional country can tell you that there are 50 better albums than “Cass County.” Totally accessible work, with traditional storytelling, great vocals, great arrangements, absolutely proving that the art of songwriting is still alive. But then there’s Don Henley everywhere. Maybe this is harsh, but maybe the industry thinks it should throw a bone to grown-ups. Rather than saying this is an excellent album by a new artist, they just say, Here’s the new Don Henley.

If nothing else, Fusilli’s arguments deserve some consideration and reflection to determine how valid they are.

When I was thinking about this interview over the weekend, I wondered, with all the complaints about how arts marketing and programming are so focused on the older generation, did I really want to write a post saying the music industry needed to do more to connect with the older generation?

In some respects, it makes good sense and might be beneficial for arts organizations. If you can raise interest for recent music in your current, older audience demographic, it is easier to make a case for those groups to boards of directors/programming committees. Maybe this results in programming that is attractive to the wider age demographic everyone says non-profit arts orgs should be serving.

Frequently the conversation about marketing the arts is about attracting a younger audience to works enjoyed by an older audience. Or the focus is on providing programming that the younger generation can connect with.

What I think may be the unspoken thought behind these idea is wanting to have programming that our current audience likes that also has an appeal to younger audiences. How often is the converse employed as a programming philosophy– what the younger audience likes is what we try to make appealing to older audiences?

Being realistic, it is safer economically to try to supplement your core audience with those that may have related interests than the reverse. You can also find success by deciding to focus an event entirely on a non-core audience without any attempt to involve your core audience.

But deciding you are going to start to do a little programming for a non-core audience and try to generate buy-in from your core audience? That can be risky and scary. Not to mention it might force an examination of the double standard behind expecting young people should be open to experiencing ballet but not expecting older audiences to be open to experiencing b-boying/b-girling.

How the shift in music marketing implied in the interview might be accomplished, I am not entirely sure. I feel like it could be more easily accomplished nowadays when distribution channels and gatekeeping are more decentralized than in the past. However, those same conditions also provide the opportunity for a greater focus on appealing to a specific niche to the detriment of uniting the larger community behind an artist.

Arts organizations would still need to change aspects of their marketing in order to correspond to the larger effort to attract a wider audience. My guess is different aspects of an artist would be magnified for different audiences. As Fusilli points out, grown-ups identity isn’t as tied to music as it is for young adults.

I wonder if there were any lessons for music companies to be learned from the attempts arts organizations have made to attract wider audiences. I suspect there are a lot of excellent ideas out there that have suffered from lack of both resources and ability/will to commit long term.

This Painting Best Viewed From Downward Facing Dog

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With the news that people are increasingly valuing a degree of interactivity in their cultural experiences sitting in the back of my mind, I have been keeping my eyes open for interesting practices.

One thing that recently came to my attention was a program the Spartanburg Art Museum is creating for “art-savvy senior.”

Yeah, everyone is concentrating on attracting younger audiences, but you can’t ignore the fact the Baby Boomer generation is retiring and looking for things to do.

There is much to like about this new Classic Contemporaries program. Perhaps one of the most appealing aspects is that there really isn’t any of the usual cliche terminology in the name that implies it is for senior citizens. This may impede some of their communication efforts, but for those who feel 70 is the new 50, it may resonate more closely with their self image.

The first event connected with the Classic Contemporaries program is the museum’s Cognitive Dissonance show.

“Four main components within the Classic Contemporaries program bring education, socializing, and creative exploration together. Participants will take part in a presentation that gives some historical background to the medium of ceramics, followed by a tour of the current exhibition, Cognitive Dissonance. Lunch is served, and for those feeling encouraged to stretch their creative muscles, there is time to learn about working with ceramics in an informal studio setting.”

Their planned activities include elements things that people value in an arts and cultural experience – expanding knowledge, socialization, opportunity for hands on participation and food.

Poking around the rest of their site, I was interested to see they offered a class in making ceramic sushi serving trays, plates, soy sauce dishes and tea cups culminating in a sushi party at the last class meeting.

Apparently every other Wednesday, they hold yoga classes in their gallery amid the art works. If nothing else, Uttanasana pose will give participants a new perspective on the works around them.

I am sure there are a lot of arts organizations out there offering a lot of fun and interesting activities that I haven’t heard of. My guess is that many readers haven’t heard of them either so please feel free to share some ideas and examples.

Artists Make Great Tour Guides

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A couple days ago, CityLab had an article about a fledgling sharing economy start up called Lokafy that pairs tourists with local residents willing to act as tour guides to the “real” areas of their city. Lokafy is so fledgling that it is only in Paris and Toronto with plans to shortly start the service in New York City.

What grabbed my attention about Lokafy was that they value people with artistic temperaments as guides.

Samra recruits “Lokafyers” through the “creative gigs” section on Craigslist. “I think it’s really great for travelers to meet the artists in a city because artists are the ones who kind of step back and interpret life and soak in what’s going on around them,” she says. She views the local guides as something between a tour leader and a friend.

Travelers can expect to see the hidden gems, says Samra. In Toronto, one Lokafyer took her guests to St. Lawrence Market by way of side streets so that they could see street art they may have overlooked.

This concept appealed to me on many levels. It provides a little flexible employment for people, especially artists. It exposes tourists to the work of local artists and helps them become invested in the city in ways they might not have on the usual tourist circuit.

It also gives creatives an opportunity to practice talking to regular people about art, allowing them to make mistakes and get feedback in a relatively low stakes environment.

As with other sharing economy services, I wondered in the back of my mind if this service would be able to scale up and still maintain its intimate connection with tourists. Just as real estate companies have come to dominate AirBnB listings in some cities, tour operators may end up taking advantage of the Lokafy’s image to the point where tourists frequently find that their local tour guide has ushered them on to a full tour bus.

It occurred to me that the value of this idea goes beyond tourism. Even if Lokafy doesn’t take off or spread to smaller cities around the U.S., a similar service sponsored out of the chamber of commerce, local arts council or convention and visitor’s bureau would be great for new residents.

Just moved to Columbus, OH; Birmingham, AL; Chattanooga, TN and want to get to know your city but don’t really know where to begin?

What if you could get a pre-screened personal guide to take you around to many interesting corners of the city, point out hidden treasures and provide historical insight into things you see everyday on the way to work, deepening your appreciation of your new home in ways the printed/web visitors’ guides can’t?

Only problem I see with this program becoming popular is that either: 1) You become good friends with the person who hired you as a tour guide. So should you be charging them to hang out tomorrow? or;

2) Your current friends think you are so awesome they want you to give tours to their friends and family for free, or;

3) Just like with your art practice, people think you shouldn’t need to be paid to have fun, ignoring the fact that you have spent time scrupulously assembling notes and plans for different neighborhoods.

If you have been reading my blog for the last year or so, I see this as an extension of the general “talking to strangers” concept I have been collecting and making attempts to implement.

How Green Was My Wicked Witch

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There has been an ongoing debate about whether simulcast performances from the Metropolitan Opera or London’s National Theatre will serve to erode audiences for live performances. According to research over the last few years, the answer isn’t entirely clear.

I have been thinking in the last couple weeks that one event I wouldn’t mind having the opportunity to live stream is the proceedings of BroadwayCon. The first Con a couple weeks ago seemed to exceed expectations despite the snowstorm that hit NYC.

The fact that so many people traveled great distances to meet each other, dress as their favorite characters and pick up new skills indicates there is potential to serve the large number of people who can’t make it. A live stream or two from the major speakers and panel events would allow groups across the country to organize their own local convention around the main convention schedule.

Sure, regional conventions like those organized for gaming, comics, anime, etc could be hosted independently around the country to tap into the enthusiasm a different times of the year. However, a live stream from the NYC Con (or other significant Con that subsequently pops up) could help provide performing arts entities in smaller communities that aren’t going to be able to attract celebrity guests an opportunity to organize people in their area.

This sort of event might serve to get people into their venue in the first place and create an energetic and friendly environment to introduce people to live theater. When major events aren’t being broadcast, workshops, panels, meetups, costume contests and such can be conducted where the rabid fans and the relatively uninitiated could mix together without a high intimidation factor. (Though debates over the correct shade of green to accurately depict Elphaba pose their own challenges.)

The biggest question would be the cost of streaming. I think it would be in the best interest of the BroadwayCon organizers to keep it low. Even if they lost money on streaming the event, they would likely be stoking the desire attend in person in people across the country.

For those who are tired of NYC and Broadway being held up as the be all and end all of theater in the country, I am completely with you there.

But my thought is that if you have a horde of people in your venue, some of which have never been there, and you are having classes in costume construction, giving tours of your fly gallery, holding acting classes and hosting karaoke sing alongs, not only have you found a way to fulfill your mission but they have new incentive to come back in the future.

That is, of course, dependent on you providing events and activities that are appropriate to their interests. It can’t be exciting times once a year and then a return to a situation that has little resonance with that same demographic the other 51 weeks. (Or other 11 months of the year in the case of Black History month programming.)

After a month or so when the dust settles, I was considering dropping the BroadwayCon organizers a line to see if they might entertain this idea. Anyone have any thoughts or ideas on the matter?

One of the first things that popped in my mind given the weather this year was whether there would be a way to avoid paying for the stream if snow forced you to cancel your local branch of the convention.

They Are Us, We Are They

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Seth Godin made a post in which he listed some of the following features of crowds:

[…]
The crowd gets on its feet when your band plays the big hit, and sits down for the new songs….

The crowd will always pick the movie over the book.

The crowd would rather wait in line for the popular attraction.

The crowd likes to be chased.

[…]

The crowd’s favorite words include fast, easy, cheap, fun, now and simple.

The crowd needs a deadline.

The crowd is the group of people who don’t get what you do, who loom on the horizon as the reward for making your work more popular.

And yet, the crowd continually gets more than it deserves, because people like you make work that matters. Work that you’re proud of.

Many of us can identify with that final line. We are under appreciated for the work we do in our communities.

It is important to remember, we too, are the crowd.

Most of these sentiments can apply to each of us as well in regard to that bakery, bookstore, school, fund raiser, festival, etc., that we think is really great but we don’t have the time, energy or opportunity to frequent as much as we would like. There are people who complain about our lack of engagement with them as much as we complain about theirs in regard to us.

I used to like to say, “Customers are idiots, I should know because I am one.” There is an incident that occurred at a Tesco in Ireland eight years ago that I am still not sure if I was being a stupid, clueless American or the employee was being inattentive. (I suspect I was being stupid and clueless regardless of nationality but there is room for doubt.)

It is impossible to be as attentive and have the same level of priorities as every struggling entity needs us to have. Working in the arts and non-profit sector, we are able to be a little more empathetic and mindful than most of the consequences our choices have on others.

As members of the crowd, we are also cognizant of the fact that it can be really difficult to inspire and motivate us contrary to our taste and priorities.

It is just that we forget that or wish it to be otherwise when it comes to other’s lack of investment in our work which is clearly better than they deserve.

How Much For A Year Of Your Cultural Enjoyment?

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Last week I briefly noted that people and businesses often value being in a community in which arts organizations are present, even if they don’t participate in their activities. I mentioned this constitutes an intangible value that the arts organization has in the community.

That reminded me of a post made by Sunil Iyengar, NEA Director of Research and Analysis about a novel approach being used to assess the value of cultural institutions in the UK.

Rather than using Willingness to Pay as a measure of how much people valued an arts/cultural institution (as in, how much would you be willing to pay for…?), they asked how much people would be Willing to Accept in order to maintain quality of life in the temporary absence of that organization.

Crucially,” the report explains, “compensation is only offered to those who previously indicated that their life satisfaction would decrease if the institution were temporarily closed.” To these respondents, a questionnaire asks:

“Now imagine the following situation. Suppose that in order to compensate you for not being able to visit the [cultural institution] during one year, you were given a cash compensation. How much money would you have to receive, as a one-off payment, to give you the same life satisfaction that you have now (not better nor worse, but just the same) during this period until the [institution] re-opened? Think about this for a moment please.”

Think about this concept for a moment and run the hypothetical scenario through you mind. First ask yourself how much you would be willing to pay at your favorite performance hall or museum. Now think about how much you would ask for if someone said they would compensate you for your loss of life satisfaction while that favorite place is closed for a year.

I don’t know about you, but if I am being honest that second number is at least 1.5 times more than the first, sometimes 2 times as high as the first.

Kinda gives you pause to think about your real priorities and values, doesn’t it?

The full research paper evaluating this as a viable approach to researching how much people value a cultural institution notes a few problems with using Willingness to Pay (WTP) as a measure. Among them:

Last, but not least, some have raised ethical concerns about the appropriateness of using WTP at all to value services like health and culture. This may, for example, be because value is related to ability to pay and the prevailing income distribution may be seen as inequitable; or because using money to value health and culture may send an undesirable signal (namely that health and cultural services are just like any other commodity bought and sold in the market place) (Fujiwara and Dolan, 2014)

and when Willingness to Accept may be provide a valuable measure:

…there are times when WTA could be warranted. This may be when respondents come from very poor backgrounds, say, such that their WTP amounts are severely constrained and they feel uncomfortable about being asked to pay (even if they might be prepared to pay a small amount), and hence offer a protest zero. Another scenario which may warrant use of a WTA question is when property rights are such that respondents can be judged to have some intrinsic right to the good/service – and what’s more they recognise this. This may be especially relevant for cultural activities and institutions.

The researchers compared WTP and WTA in relation to the Tate Liverpool Gallery and National History Museum and the differences weren’t as great as I imagined. The mention of intrinsic right to good/service made me wonder if there would be a difference between the U.S. and UK in that the more subsidized access to art of the latter might cause residents of the UK to take access to culture more for granted.

It could be equally possible that as an arts professional, I value arts and culture more highly than regular citizens of either country might.

The paper evaluating WTA as a tool goes into such detail about the relevance and accuracy of data obtained that I felt a little out of my depth trying to understand it all. I would suggest not trying this at home without deeper study because it is not something to blithely toss into audience surveys.

It can be useful as thought experiment (or blog post) to drive a conversation and self examination about how we value arts and culture in our lives.

The prospect of an arts organization’s absence from the community for a year may not be a cause of concern for individuals and businesses that don’t participate in activities, but like the idea of living in a community that provides those activities. If there is going to be any method that comes close to quantifying the intangible value a cultural institution has in the community for these groups, this may it.

Do I Really Need A Degree For That?

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Dan Pink called attention to publisher Penguin Random House’s recent decision to no longer require job applicants to have a university degree. From what I see in corroborating stories, the little catch is that this seems to be limited to the publisher’s UK operations.

The firm wants to have a more varied intake of staff and suggests there is no clear link between holding a degree and performance in a job.

[…]

Last autumn, professional services firm Deloitte changed its selection process so recruiters did not know where candidates went to school or university.

Ernst and Young has scrapped a requirement for school leavers to have the equivalent of three B grades at A-level or graduates to have an upper second class degree.

The accountancy firm is removing all academic and education details from its application process.

PricewaterhouseCoopers earlier this year also announced that it would stop using A-levels grades as a threshold for selecting graduate recruits.

As you might imagine from the references to A-levels, these decisions all appear to be limited to the UK operations of these companies.

Still, it got me wondering with all the recent conversation about the legality and morality of unpaid internship practices in the U.S., as well as data showing that arts internships appear to benefit people with higher socio-economic status, should this be the sort of practice the arts should be considering?

My thinking here is that while you don’t need to have a degree or be enrolled to do an internship, internship plus degree tends to have better job prospects which represent a larger financial investment. I’d venture to guess many of the jobs college degree holders are getting can be accomplished by someone with a high school degree and an internship/short training period.

There are definitely different philosophical approaches to job training between the U.S. and the UK. For example, the school leaver program for Deloitte and Ernst and Young make not going to university appear preferable to attending and promises a rigorous 5 year training program. These are typical choices for students in the UK. A quick search for school leaver programs shows similar ones at IBM, Rolls Royce, Pret A Manger and others.

Two years ago I wrote about the UK’s National Skills Academy apprenticeship training programs for creative industries.

These sort of training options are not as widely available in the U.S. The closest we have are co-op programs, which are few and far between and barely promoted as an option.

But while the method of delivering training may be different, the question about whether a university degree best provides that training still remains, regardless of which country we are talking about.

One observation made in the story about Penguin’s decision resonates pretty strongly in relation to the challenges faced by the arts. (my emphasis)

Neil Morrison, human resources director, says they want talented staff “regardless of background”.

“This is the starting point for our concerted action to make publishing far, far more inclusive than it has been to date,” says Mr Morrison.

“We believe this is critical to our future – to publish the best books that appeal to readers everywhere, we need to have people from different backgrounds with different perspectives and a workforce that truly reflects today’s society.”

There is already a conversation about how paid internships help to open up opportunities to people from a wider socio-economic range. Perhaps the next aspect of the conversation needs to include an examination into whether a degree really is absolutely necessary to success in the job or not.

The arts are frequently accused of being irrelevant because people don’t see themselves and their stories being portrayed. Penguin saw requiring a university degree as literally inhibiting their ability to do just that.

The Stakeholders Are Watching

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In Non Profit Quarterly, Ruth McCambridge wrote a pretty involved comparison between the stakeholder revolts which reversed board decisions to close San Diego Opera and Sweet Briar College.

There is a lot to be gleaned about how popular support has apparently turned things around for the two organizations. It is worth reading on that basis alone.

There were a few things that popped out at me as general lessons, not necessarily dependent on these scenarios, about the environment in which arts organizations are operating.

First was an observation by current San Diego board chair, Carol Lazier, that:

“…the community was absolutely furious. We had a great opera company, a cultural jewel, and no one wanted to lose it. We had people who didn’t even go to the opera who were fighting closure, saying, ‘This is not right—this is owned by the public; this is not owned by the small group of people on the inside.’”

It is easy to have mixed feelings about this response because indignation by people who never attended doesn’t pay your bills. Yet we clearly know that arts organizations are viewed as a community asset by both individuals and businesses. People may not actually participate in your activities, but they like the idea of living in a community that has an opera, symphony and art museum. Businesses and individuals will relocate to places with these amenities.

While the presence of your arts organization is definitely an intangible asset, the value of which is difficult to quantify to politicians and others who want to cut arts funding, this type of reaction does allow you to answer the question about how your community would be impacted if your organization didn’t exist.

Another observation made about San Diego Opera board governance provided some insight into a downside of a “Get, Give or Get Off” policy of board membership.

The San Diego Opera was one of those organizations where having a large number of people on the board was a function of fundraising. You pay x amount of money and you’re on the board, and no one wants to alienate any of those folk with contentious conversations that cause discomfort. But that is certainly not a good modus operandi for an organization facing the whitewater of the twenty-first-century cultural organization. And, it was not only the business model that had to change but the governance model, too.

The implication that a non profit needs to have a governance structure that allows it to be nimble is something to seriously consider. Scrutiny of non-profits is shifting focus about the role of a board away from fund raising and toward effective governance.

The San Diego Opera board went from 53 to 24 in the course of a few days due to resignations. A quick look at the opera website shows it continues to maintain those numbers two years later.

Not only is there no correlation between the ability to make large donations and the ability to effectively govern an organization, some people may have no interest in doing so. This made me recall a story told by an executive director about a large donor who showed relief when presented the option of NOT serving on the board because they didn’t see it as a reward at all.

Finally, in relation to the Sweet Briar closure, I was quite intrigued to learn that generally those who most supported the closure were from among the earliest graduates. When they attended, a women’s college was the only option for higher education. Now that a woman could attend anywhere they wished, they didn’t feel single gender higher education was relevant any longer.

It is the younger generations that intentionally chose to attend Sweet Briar when hundreds of other options existed that have been the most invested in keeping the institution open.

This information brought to mind the question that arts organizations have increasingly been challenged to ask themselves over the last few decades: Given that so many other options exist for people, are you providing those who intentionally choose to engage with the arts a reason to continue to do so?

The example of Sweet Briar seems to illustrate that answering in the affirmative is what turns people into invested stakeholders.

Reaching The Unknown Non-Participant

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I almost threw money away, literally.

I received piece a mail last week bearing the logo of a state university indicating a survey was enclosed. I was just about to throw it away when I became curious to see if they were doing a market survey to gauge the educational needs of the community.

When I opened it, I saw it was a public health survey. Just as I was about to throw that away, a $2 bill fluttered out on to my coffee table. I understand why they may have chosen to include the money as an inducement to complete the survey, but I wonder how much money has literally been thrown away in unopened envelopes around the state this week.

I feel some empathy for those administering the survey because this illustrates the effort and expense you have to go in order to reach people with whom you don’t have a relationship.

One of the challenges the arts have is to have a conversation with those who aren’t participating in order to learn why they aren’t. There will always be people who will never participate in an activity, regardless of what you do, but there are many who will be willing but do not participate for various reasons.

These reasons might be lack awareness; currently lacking the time due to child rearing obligations which will abate in a few years; perceive they lack the time, knowledge, etc, for whom opportunities exist and can be communicated or created.

Reaching these unknown people to survey them or even communicate with them is even more difficult now than a decade or so ago. So many people lack landlines that there is no destination for even an annoying robocall to reach.

Thanks to the option to receive financial statements, bills and other communications online, it is much easier to identify the few pieces of postal mail that is relevant to you without even opening them. (Those emails about winning $5 million in the Irish-Nigerian lottery that was liberated after a palace coup dispossessed the prince of an oil rich nation still almost fool me.)

As we can see, even trying to bribe people to participate is fraught with its own challenges.

My feeling is that an effective campaign to reach the unreached is going to require much more personal interactions either with organizations reaching out to individuals in an involved, relationship building effort or calling upon people with whom they already have a relationship to reach out to people and encourage them to at least respond to a request for information.

Certainly, technology can facilitate this by allowing people to spread the word quickly over social media. A degree of trust in all involved parties needs to be there. I am thinking, in part, about the post I made last week about a greater lack of willingness to trade privacy for benefits than we have been lead to believe.

It would be great if someone could figure out how to create survey that engaged as many people as asking about what color lightsaber you would wield while yielding, effective, meaningful, actionable results. (Which of Yo Yo Ma’s cellos are you?)

Until then, it may take a lot of asking.

Arts Need A Standardized Curriculum To Combat Patron Anxiety

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Last summer Vox had a post, Everyone can be an opera buff. Here are 7 steps to get started.

It got me thinking that creating page like this on an arts organization’s website could be a much more constructive approach to engaging audiences than the “How To Act When You Visit” lists found on many arts organizations’ webpages.

While a number of arts orgs have very entertaining and humorous approaches to such lists, a page like Vox’s can serve multiple purposes. For example, while answering the question about seats, Vox includes a picture of the audience with most people wearing tuxes and dresses, but also features a young woman in a football jersey and someone taking pictures with their camera.

This image provides a clearer sense of what people might expect when attending a performance. The website may say it is okay to wear jeans, but the reality may be, if the venue doesn’t manipulate the photo shoot to reflect their aspirations, most people in the orchestra section aren’t wearing jeans.

What I appreciated about the Vox article was the way the advice about approaching opera was given. One of my initial thoughts was that a venue could appeal to younger audiences by creating a page that replicated the feel a Buzzfeed listicle with its animated GIFs.

What the Buzzfeed format lacks, however, is the additional depth of an informational article.

The first suggestion takes an entirely practical approach, for example:

1) Pick your first opera for maximum fun, not for what the curriculum says

Picking your first opera can be paralyzing, but don’t just choose one from the canon. When you take a kid to her first movie, you’d opt for a kids’ movie rather than jumping into Citizen Kane. Same here. You don’t need to earn a PhD, you need to get your money’s worth — and that means picking a show you might like.

Since your opera options depend on where you live, look at what’s offered and get some advice. “Call the company,” Plotkin suggests. He says the box office will be happy to simply tell you which opera in a season is best for a neophyte…

Also, see if there’s something you have a natural affinity for. To take one example, this season the Washington Opera is premiering a revised version of Philip Glass’s Appomattox. You won’t find that on any Wikipedia lists of classic operas — but if you’re obsessed with the progression of civil rights or the sound of Philip Glass, it’s probably a better first opera than a classic like Carmen.

and from the Third suggestion (my emphasis):

3) Listen to the music and Wikipedia the plot

Avoiding spoilers is the wrong approach for opera. Often, operas are in another language, so you want the plot in your mind already. That will help you appreciate the performances, setting, and spectacle instead of trying to parse who’s actually talking. Your program book will have a summary, too, but it’s best to just glance online the night before you go.

We’re trained to expect prestige entertainment to have emotional nuance, challenging intellectual themes, and difficult narratives. Opera doesn’t have that. It’s like the best episode of Scandal you’ve ever seen, so just don’t sweat the plot and enjoy everything else. People who like opera can make their enthusiasm seem pretentious, but opera isn’t pretentious at all. It’s literally screaming for you to love it.

I have been debating for awhile whether to tackle this subject as a post here or on ArtsHacker as an idea people might try. I decided to post here because it occurred to me that the idea could do with a little more development before it is used.

Specifically, it might be good if each arts discipline develop some standard concepts they wanted reinforced so that no matter what website people visited, they would receive the same underlying message. So there might be five standard concepts an arts organization would intersperse with 3-4 localized tips that draw attention to some feature of the physical setting or program enhancement.

I guess what I am suggesting is almost akin to standardized education curriculum, without the baggage that subject seems to have acquired. Everyone wouldn’t use the same content since every locale and organization has its own character. They would make an effort to include messaging on the chosen topics.

It would really just be a matter of addressing discipline wide anxieties people may have. Many arts organizations do a pretty good job of addressing the concern about what to wear, but aren’t as effective with questions about enjoyment and comprehension. Uniform guidelines and sharing suggestions may help change that.

The Vox article about opera deals with those questions indirectly when it advocates reading and listening ahead of time; urges not worrying about spoilers; saying opera is “like the best episode of Scandal you’ve ever seen”; and “Appreciate the things that make opera like a Broadway show on steroids.”

It is smart to handle these ideas indirectly. It is one thing to be direct when answering a question about what to wear, but it can be incredibly easy to come off as condescending and offensive when directly answering “What if I don’t understand it or enjoy it?”

Of course providing a webpage isn’t the only option available. There are some great video resources as well like the one on visiting a museum I noted last month.

So let it percolate in your mind. What are the basic issues your discipline needs to address? What are effective direct/indirect ways of getting that message across?

Info You Can Use: Getting Meaningful Feedback From Your Community

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Last month, I wrote about attending a session at creative industry conference where Marc Folk, Executive Director of The Arts Commission in Toledo, spoke about learning that one needs to go out to the community as a guest, asking to be hosted at meetings, gatherings, etc.

At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly how that idea translated into practice. Initially I envisioned something akin to the  electoral process in NH where people host intimate meetings with political candidates in their homes or perhaps being invited to speak at a community or church meeting.

I also thought that he might have meant participating as a true guest at first where you weren’t necessarily the focus of attention as a speaker, etc, but just invited to sit quietly and observe the first time out.

Marc had mentioned sometimes there was a tendency to view yourself as “riding in on a white horse” to save a community so I thought being the guest of honor at a meeting might reinforce that conceit.

Just last week, Margy Waller addressed the same issue in an Americans for the Arts blog post, “We Are From the Arts and We’re Here to Help.”

“In one of the sessions, a group of participants had a passionate discussion on using the word “help.” They noted that it really isn’t possible to have a conversation about an equitable community if one party is offering to help the other. The word help itself implies that one group has more than the other—more to offer, more knowledge, more resources, more capacity, and so on. Using the word help shifts the perceived balance of power—in a way likely to shut down true collaboration and partnership efforts.

The solution? If you find yourself using the word help when talking about the role of arts in community, stop. Listen carefully and ask whether this is really the way toward an equitable community.”

Curious about the process he and his staff used, I reached out to Marc just prior to the holidays to learn more, summarizing my impressions and assumptions noted above. With his permission, I am reprinting a portion of his response:

Our approach utilized a combination of techniques, including what you listed above.

As far as process we first identified a local community partner.  If possible, it was a community center or arts center in the neighborhood.  We then reached out to the leadership of the center or another community group if the center did not have leadership, or there was no center and asked for a meeting.  We then met with them and/or their board leadership to ask for their help in organizing a community meeting.

Once a meeting was called, we went back into the community centers/host venues and held “a listening tour” if you will.  An important technique was that we hired a facilitator/consultant that facilitated these sessions.  This created a degree of separation between the Arts Commission staff and the community issue and allowed for a more open and candid dialog from the community.

Out of this, we became more connected with “culture” or activities in these neighborhoods which has led to the building of genuine relationships.

A copy of the plan can be found here.

The reports from the neighborhood conversations can be found at the back of the plan.

I think the most important lesson is about language syntax/communication and authentic relationship development.  My point at the conference about the white horse or “going into these neighborhoods” revealed much about our perspectives and gave great clue to where we needed to start our work.

For those that are interested, the neighborhood reports start around page 50 of the strategic plan.

I greatly appreciate Marc taking the time to outline the process for me. The importance of involving a facilitator was something I suspected in the back of my mind that he confirmed.

Based on his response, I have already started a conversation with my board president about how we might adapt this in our own community. I have mentioned to colleagues at other arts organizations I had some ideas I wanted to run past them in the hopes of establishing a cooperative listening tour.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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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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