The recent NEA report on why people don’t attend arts and cultural event mentioned not having someone to attend with was a barrier to entry. Daniel Pink recently tweeted a story that gave me an idea for alleviating that issue.
Seats on buses in Brazil are being reserved for “making new friends.” You sit in the seat if you are open to having a conversation with strangers. There are Post-It notes attached to the Reserved Seating signs with conversation starters provided.
Even though the content of this video is in Portuguese, I am pretty sure no translation is necessary-
The application for arts organizations is probably pretty evident. Reserve some really great seats at an attractive price for people who are open to having conversations with strangers.
You would want to sell them individually so friends couldn’t grab them themselves or at least sell them in odd numbers if you think you can trust two people who are acquainted to include the individual sitting next to them in a conversation.
The museum version might be having stickers people can wear or a bench at which people can wait in order to pair/group with like minded strangers and wander the galleries together.
Like the bus program, you can provide conversational prompts that are both generic ice breakers as well as specific to the event people were attending.
But don’t hand the ice breakers out to participants at the box office. Having little signs and Post It prompts attached to the backs of the seats in front of the participants is a good way of promoting the program and it gives other passersby an opportunity to grab some questions for themselves.
If you can provide an after event socialization opportunity in the lobby, local restaurant or bar, so much the better.
And if you can provide discounted tickets for a year to anyone who participated in your “Make New Friends” program, even if they only come back alone, that would be really great!
Having to increase the number of seats available to your “Make New Friends” program because former participants kept returning in order to extend their year of discounts wouldn’t be the worst problem to have.
Having them return with their newly made friends is no problem at all.
I wasn’t aware until recently that airlines have started to strip all the video equipment from their planes and have begun requiring people to bring their own personal devices and headphones in order to enjoy some form of entertainment during a flight.
Passengers on United can tap into the Wifi for a price if they want to go online or into the onboard entertainment system signal for free.
While the onboard system offers a fairly large library of videos, this development requires people to bring a personal viewing device with a full charge and manage the power so they can watch something for the duration of the travel.
As much as this situation depresses me from the perspective of how much enjoyment is disappearing from air travel, it occurs to me that if airlines normalize this practice for the public at large, it may be possible for arts organizations to extend the “bring your own…” trend for its own uses.
The benefit to the airlines is that they don’t have to place television screens on the backs of seats along with all the wiring to serve them. All that is needed is wifi transmitters.
In the same way, arts organizations can provide different “channels” of ancillary material in support of a program within their walls. This might be especially useful for museums which may want to provide visitors with a choice of a video talking about the artist, the subject of the painting, the historical period and artistic period in which a painting falls—or the history of the entire museum for those who suddenly find themselves curious in the middle of a gallery.
Instead of physically displaying text or a video screen which all those standing before a work must share, the museum can offer any of these immediately upon demand and at the speed the visitor requests. Granted, many museums already offer something similar, but there is always opportunity for refinement and scaling things up.
A performing arts organization might offer similar supporting materials during a pre or post show event or on demand as the audience files in prior to the show.
However, there might be a bigger benefit to performing arts venues. As I was thinking about possible opportunities, I recalled something Alan Brown said about how a venue might need five or more rooms to meet the different expectations people how about what their experience would be.
He said he asked them to describe what they would envision as a perfect jazz club. They said it would be a coffee house during the day but a bar at night with a separate room where those who wanted to be full immersed in the music could go. However, there would also be an anteroom where people could talk with friends and still listen to the music and still another anteroom where people could interact with friends more and listen less.
It seems like a tall order to design a building to provide this experience. However the impression I took away from what Brown had to say was that people at every age really desire an experience at an intermediate stage between listening to a recording and fully attending a formal concert. He described this as a place to drop in and hang out and get more information.
That was from a post I wrote seven years ago. Since then, technology has advanced to the point where a venue need not provide five different rooms to cover all expectations.
If people got used to the idea of bringing a personal device with them they could sit in a single additional room with friends and simply chat with the music coming faintly from the performance space. They would have the option of turning part or full attention to the video and audio feed coming from the other room via their personal devices without leaving their friends.
This provides a fair bit of flexibility to a performing arts entity because they can provide a performance in a number of venues without needing to bring video monitors or audio equipment to create a listening experience where the visibility and volume suit everyone equally. They might still have to haul wifi nodes around with them, but it can be easier to set up and there is a fair possibility a venue may already have an in-house system.
The thing I don’t like about this idea is that it validates experiencing a performance through a meditating device over the value of attending live. The way live performance attendance becomes valuable is when the accompanying materials or information stream being provided is only available during the live performance.
For example, a simulcast from backstage where the audience can witness every entrance and exit, set change, interaction. Though there is a danger that knowing you are always “on” might inspire more interesting performances backstage than on stage.
Davenport envisioned that many participants would follow the practice of the Comic Book Conventions and dress as their favorite Broadway characters.
They’re planning on roundtables, master classes, autograph sessions and a whole lot more. And please tell me that people are going to dress up like their favorite Broadway characters. I’m dying to see a convention center filled with Mormons, Elphabas and a bunch of giant Pumbaas.
[…]
It’s going to be a great opportunity for fans to come together in person (instead of in a chat room – imagine that, actual offline communication) and share their love of all things Broadway.
And it’s going to be a great opportunity for shows to market to those fans, because they’ll be in one specific place.
BroadwayCon is still in the early planning stages so many of the speakers and other activities haven’t been publicized. I was encouraged to see that they anticipate a younger crowd since they require that anyone under the age of 18 must attend with a registered parent or have a notarized permission form.
This all sounds like a lot of fun and will help people connect more closely with the performing arts.
However, I did notice something that was somewhat disappointing. BroadwayCon is happening in January, right around the same time as two other major performing arts conferences.
Being the first year for BroadwayCon I wouldn’t really expect them to plan cooperative efforts with other conferences. It is just that having them scheduled so closely seems like there will be missed opportunities.
That said, I will admit to a bias toward ISPA and APAP. Since the scope of the performing arts is so broad, I don’t think either ISPA or APAP will benefit from the increased presence of Broadway show promoters at their conference. APAP is already attended by a number of agents representing Broadway shows and artists.
My ulterior motives are for the people attending BroadwayCon to be exposed to the variety of artists that perform during the earlier conferences. This may certainly still be a possibility even for the upcoming 2016 BroadwayCon.
The Under the Radar Festival often overlaps with ISPA and APAP dates and work with these conferences to offer discounted tickets to attendees.
While some onsite performances associated with the APAP conference are generally closed to the public, the off site ones often tend to be public performances to which conference attendees are invited and have a mix that leans heavily to the general public.
Similar opportunities could be afforded to attendees of BroadwayCon.
Though I suspect the Broadway producers like Ken Davenport will be offering attendees very enticing opportunities of their own so it might be difficult to motivate someone who has traveled to NYC for BroadwayCon to go to a flamenco performance instead.
Yesterday I wrote about the need for grace in the face of criticism. It must have struck a chord with some folks because the traffic to that post exploded (I am sure a great deal of credit goes to Thomas Cott, though.)
Today I wanted to touch upon the equally frustrating, but much more gratifying “that was amazing, too bad more people weren’t there,” event.
To be clear, this isn’t the show that your staff and arts insiders from your community thought was excellent for its artistic quality. This is the show at which 100 regular members of the community filtered into your 550 seat theater and absolutely loved it.
You know they loved it because right at intermission as you move to use a urinal a total stranger thanks you for taking the time to visit his group and tell them about the show.
(If you are a guy, understand just how much he must have loved the show that he couldn’t adhere to the unspoken rules about not holding a conversation with a stranger at the urinals.)
You know they loved it because strangers keep coming up to you at restaurants and supermarkets for weeks later to tell you how excited they were.
Not to mention the social media conversations that you may catch.
This is the type of reaction that makes a career in the arts worthwhile. Few other professions get this sort of heartfelt thanks.
Except, you know, you would probably be okay trading a “that was awesome” for “that wasn’t bad” if it meant having 300-400 more people in the audience.
That brings me to the real purpose of this post, which is to ask a question.
There is some received wisdom that once people learn they can trust your organization to provide a quality experience, they will be more willing to take a risk on unknown and unfamiliar shows.
So my question is, is that really true? Can anyone point to a case where their local community grew to trust their judgement and attended unfamiliar events in sustainable numbers based on faith?
I am not talking simply about growing an audience. I increased attendance at dance concerts when I was in Hawaii. But that was more about marketing and making dance programs and schools more aware of performances and talking to them about what we were planning for next year.
While this certainly generated trust in our work, it was more a matter of effectively tapping into an existing interest group than cultivation.
I have also definitely had people who have said they weren’t sure about a performance, but attended because they knew we did quality and interesting work.
The problem is that their numbers were relatively small and while they may have represented the unexpressed sentiment of a larger group, attendance often made it clear there weren’t numbers to be sustainable.
At the base of this is the necessity of taking a critical look at whether pursuing audience trust as a long term goal is realistic or is it a pleasant ideal to which non-profit arts organizations have subscribed.
Research has shown that audiences in general don’t discern between whether an event is being held by a for-profit or non-profit entity when choosing what to attend. With that in mine, are there that many in our communities that really appreciate that you are pursuing excellence when others seemingly are not?
It is likely that audiences aren’t thinking in terms of excellence as much as having an awesome or amazing experience, and that is fine. But we all know that it is relatively easy to provide an experience that will be evaluated in these terms by offering a commercially recognizable name.
So again I come back to the question, after having mastered marketing and awareness building, has anyone managed to grow a following/loyalty/what have you, in your community based on faith in your work? How did you do it? Where did you do it? What is the scale of the program?
I don’t doubt that success is possible in cities and communities where the underlying dynamics encourage curiosity and experimentation. But a lot of those places can have higher costs of living so question about being self-sustaining becomes relevant.
Since there is rarely anything in the arts that is truly self-sustaining, what I mean is a program central to the organization’s operations that has become increasingly less dependent on grant support or infusions from other parts of the program. An after hours program doing edgy programming in the black box theater seating 80 is being subsidized by all the other events that keep the organization in business.
A company that has gone from not paying anyone and depending on everyone to costume themselves to paying a stipend equivalent to $1.12/hr and costuming from Goodwill is an improvement, but probably isn’t a proven model yet.
Sometimes I think Seth Godin is writing just for me because one of his recent posts about graciously accepting critical feedback came across my Twitter feed shortly after we got a “you don’t advertise enough” comment on a survey.
My suspicion is that since she is a season subscriber and doesn’t need to pay close attention to our advertising, the digital billboard at the center of town and the special emails her husband receives are probably slipping under her notice. Those are just the communication channels I know with certainty they encounter.
Getting this type of feedback can make you grind your teeth in frustration. But for a commenter of the type that Godin previously labeled the Generous Skeptic, providing this type of feedback because you care about the person or business can involve a degree of vulnerability.
When the generous skeptic speaks up, she’s taking a risk. If you respond to her generosity by arguing, by shutting down, by avoiding eye contact or becoming defensive, you’ve blown it. You’ve taken a gift and wasted it, and disrespected the gift giver at the same time.
[…]
“Tell me more about that,” is the useful and productive response, not, “no, you’re wrong, you don’t understand.”
There’s always time to ignore this feedback later. Right now, dive into it, with an eager, open mind. It’s a gift you’re not often offered.
In his previous post about the Generous Skeptic, Godin spoke in the context of individuals interacting. In his most recent post, he illustrates how the interaction might manifest between a business and an individual.
You can react to the feedback by taking it as an attack, deflecting blame, pointing fingers to policy or the CEO. Then you’ve just told me that you don’t care enough to receive the feedback in a useful way.
Or you can pass me off to a powerless middleman, a frustrated person who mouths the words but makes it clear that the feedback will never get used. Another way to show that you don’t care as much as I do. And if you don’t care, why should I?
One other option: you can care even more than I do. You can not only be open to the constructive feedback, but you can savor it, chew it over, amplify it. You can delight in the fact that someone cares enough to speak up, and dance with their insight and contribution.
Your first reaction to getting criticism may always be to grind your teeth. As bad that might be for your dental bills, you have a choice about what you do next, either as an individual or a company.
In recent years, after every Super Bowl, the city whose team lost not only loses a great deal of pride, but an art object of great value. When you think about it, some of the most expensive bets on the Super Bowl are made by directors of art museums. They both wager a work of art and the museum that loses the bet lends the work to the museum that won.
It occurs to me (and I am embarrassed to admit it has taken so long) that such bets are a good way to raise the profile of arts organizations in a community and shouldn’t just be limited to the Super Bowl.
What better way for an arts organization to show they have the same investment and pride as everyone else in a local team, be it high school, college, Triple AAA baseball team, or big league team, than to enter into a bet with colleagues at an arts organization in the opposing community?
If much ado is made in both communities when the performers or art work leaves/arrives in order to pay off the bet, both organizations can benefit from the increased attention. There might be a fund raising opportunity available to enable an organization to support the trip to the other location.
Because you know, those guys are gonna make you suffer and gloat about their team’s victory all through the performance, so we need your support!
Of course, the reality is, if the visitors are received with grace at a big picnic/dinner with lots of pictures taken to post online, bonds can be formed between organizations and communities that are potentially constructive in the future.
Howard Sherman tweeted an article today by Jake Orr about theatre being intellectually inaccessible. I mention this only as a reference point for a comment on the article. I will probably circle back to write about this issue on another date.
What I wanted to address today is the conflict arts organizations often feel between appearing accessible to all potential audiences while simultaneous attempting to project an image that justifies high priced tickets and retains long time donors and subscribers.
One of the commenters on Orr’s post, Mark Shenton related his thoughts about London’s Royal Opera House possessing an ambiance that is intimidating even to veteran arts attendees.
…So often we all feel ‘excluded’ from the club, whether it be a theatre, or a sports event (I’m sure I’d feel the same as your partner if I was taken to a football match….) But the trouble is when the VENUE welcomes the exclusivity and sense of its own (self) importance.
I once had a conversation with the head of PR at the Royal Opera House, and said to him that, as a (relatively!) sophisticated theatregoer (well, it is my job and I do around 5-6 times a week!), I feel intimidated still by going to the ROH. His answer? “I can’t deal with your psychological problems!”
So, it was MY fault that the Opera House feels intimidating! A couple of years ago, I was at the ROH — for the Olivier Awards, as it happens — and seated next to the Reece Shearsmith. And he looked around and marvelled at how beautiful it was, and said to me, “I’ve never been here before!” Now Reece, too, is a sophisticated theatregoer — and a cultural figure in his own right — and for him to have never been here struck me as very revealing.
I reckon that the venue is a club, and a lot of us feel VERY disconnected from it.
This isn’t a new idea. There have been a number of studies and surveys that have emphasized the importance of physical environment to an attendance experience. Ten years ago, I wrote about an Urban Institute study that found not liking the venue along with not having an enjoyable social experience as the factors that would keep people from attending again.
But as I mentioned, there is also a need to create an environment that speaks to the quality of the performance product to long time donors and subscribers that value this type of experience.
Now before anyone starts sputtering about how this perpetuates an exclusionary ideal that alienates people, I would like to suggest that it is actually a matter of almost elementary consumer psychology.
Engines in trucks and high performance vehicles are so efficient now that their natural noise profile is much quieter than in the past. In response, car and truck manufacturers are using sound enhancing tail pipes or digital sound effects to replicate a throaty engine noise.
Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away.
Softer-sounding engines are actually a positive symbol of just how far engines and gas economy have progressed. But automakers say they resort to artifice because they understand a key car-buyer paradox: Drivers want all the force and fuel savings of a newer, better engine — but the classic sound of an old gas-guzzler.
I think it is easy to brand arts lovers as being snobby and elitist for wanting to maintain a traditional experience. If we are honest in the context of this article, the reality is that they are manifesting the same attitude toward the arts attendance experience as people who value the traditional images experience of driving F-150s and Mustangs. Neither is really that distant from the other in the continuum of basic human psychology.
For arts and cultural organizations, I think the last sentence in the quote above provides a key concept: People want advanced features, but the illusion of a traditional experience. I started this blog on the premise that technology was creating evolving expectations of their experience, but that there were still traditional elements that they still valued.
Learning what that ever-shifting balance is, is the challenge arts organizations face. What is important to remember is that not all elements of traditional experience need to be discarded in the name of expanding accessibility.
The article on sound enhancements for vehicles has sums up that conflicting issues arts organizations face pretty well.
“Karl Brauer, a senior analyst with Kelley Blue Book, says automakers should stop the lies and get real with drivers.
“If you’re going to do that stuff, do that stuff. Own it. Tell customers: If you want a V-8 rumble, you’ve gotta buy a V-8 that costs more, gets worse gas mileage and hurts the Earth,” Brauer said. “You’re fabricating the car’s sexiness. You’re fabricating performance elements of the car that don’t actually exist. That just feels deceptive to me.”
Since the arts often involve the creation of illusion, I am not sure they need to worry about coming clean with audiences about fabricating the sexiness of an experience. But both organizations and customers that value traditional experiences need to be aware there is a trade off in trying to maintain them exactly.
It is possible to provide a high quality experience. Technology enables some of this at increasingly lower costs every day. But there comes a time where one has to settle for an acceptable illusion or pay the higher price for the real thing.
Yes, I have used propensity score matching in a different venue than the arts. It was in a study looking at workers’ compensation pension outcomes. When you have a subject where there are selection biases (for example, that the more educated are more likely to participate in the arts) then propensity scoring can help to control for the outcome to more precisely estimate the effect on outcomes.
I think you explained it pretty well to a lay audience. I imagine it would be useful to use when you have a lot of data on attendees and non-attendees (or season ticket holders and not is more likely).
If anyone has data they want to “play” with, let me know. I’m interested in doing more studies on socioeconomic phenomena in the arts. –Heather
I wasn’t sure anyone would respond to the post with more information much less be interested in getting their hands on data to study. If someone is interested in learning a bit more about their audience and potentially their community, if the data is available, you may want to follow up with Heather.
You want quick proof that the performance you are doing probably has no relevance to those in their 20s and 30s? Hand them a famous historical speech and have them analyze it.
Last semester I was teaching a public speaking class and had to do a little work explaining why certain references were important. Students missed the significance of
“I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for 18 years that still lives with the vitality and the force, and the hope, and the determination of the city of West Berlin.”
supporting the theme of freedom in JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Living in a time after the wall fell, they were unaware of the geography that isolated West Berlin within East Germany, much less the politics and history that necessitated the Berlin Airlift.
Similarly, there was a lack of awareness about the foreboding element in the final lines of Martin Luther King’s “I Have Been To the Mountaintop,” where he speaks about not being afraid of the threats against him the night before he is killed. (The date of the speech aside, there was a slight lack of awareness he was slain.)
So what chance does your performance have if people aren’t aware of the relevant underpinning in the speeches of a guy who has his own national holiday?
You can bemoan the lack of knowledge and blame the state of the education system today. But the fact remains, this is the audience base that needs to be communicated with and related to.
The fact also is that you don’t need to know about these things to be aware that you are reading/watching a powerful and significant moment unfold. In the same way, you don’t need to be aware of all the original references and political undercurrents which infuse Shakespearean plays to enjoy them.
The question of relevance for the audience member has never really been so much about “Am I watching something significant?” as “Why should I make the decision to direct my attention to this?” Most of those students never really considered these speeches because there was no reason to do so. (Admittedly, I also learned a fair bit more for having taught the speeches.)
Barry Hessenius points this out in his recent review of the latest reports from the National Endowment for the Arts:
“It wasn’t that people were looking for ‘transformative’ experiences and couldn’t find any; it wasn’t because there was any perceived dearth of ‘excellence’, it wasn’t because there wasn’t any opportunity or choice — it was instead mundane issues.”
These mundane issues are lack of time, inconvenience, price and no one to go with.
A couple years ago, Seth Godin notes what is has probably become abundantly clear to us all– people are looking for abridged versions of pretty much every activity so they can “acquire” an experience without having to spend the time having the experience.
There is a self-perpetuating cycle set up by the media and internet which has generated the demand by creating expectations which in turn forces them to ratchet things up a bit to fulfill the expectations they helped to create.
“A performance artist was on the local public radio station the other day. He didn’t want to talk about the specifics of his show, because giving away the tactics was clearly going to lessen the impact of his work. No matter. The host revealed one surprise after another, outlining the entire show, because, after all, that’s his job–to tell us what we’re going to see so we don’t have to see it ourselves.”
Godin had an interesting observation though about the exception to this.
My full-day live seminars have impact on people partly because I don’t announce the specific agenda or the talking points in advance. It’s live and it’s alive. I have no certainty what’s about to happen, and neither do the others in the room. A morphing, changing commitment by all involved, one that grows over time.
To some degree I think all seminars, not just his, result in people feeling like it has an impact on their lives because the format itself forces people to slow down to the speed of the proceedings. (Though they may be living at a slightly different speed via their tablet computers and phones throughout the seminar.)
Godin makes a similar claim about audiobooks changing people’s lives because they can’t skip ahead and still get the full story.
This dynamic may be why the Serial podcast became such a hit. People had to navigate the story at the speed it was being delivered and no one had any idea what the ending would be.
The performing arts have long touted the uncertainty of live performance as a selling point. You never know if someone is going to flub a line or the first chair violinist will kill off the second chair by bowing too vigorously. (Don’t pretend you haven’t imagined it.)
But it seems that this level of uncertainty just isn’t enough to interest people any more. The arts may need to kick it up a notch.
Ah, but what is the answer? Certainly the endings of many performance pieces are well known or can be discovered. Even if a performance company devoted themselves to offering entirely new works all the time, it wouldn’t be long before the show is summarized and reported.
In some communities it could be more detrimental to have a new work panned on social media by a couple people than to present a well known old warhorse.
More free formatted, choose your own adventure type shows like Sleep No More offer an alternative. Except there has been a problem when people discover the outcomes designed into those shows and try to impose themselves upon the different pathways.
On a smaller scale and performed over a limited time, I imagine that this model could still prove successful for many performance companies.
I obviously don’t know the answer, but I am intrigued by the basic idea Godin presents about how an experience that forces people to travel at the pace it unfolds and evolves can have a significant impact on the participants.
This describes the experience the performing arts have always aspired to and at one time, often achieved– people walking out of a performance feeling moved by the experience. People obviously have that reaction these days too, but at one time it was happening in greater numbers and in response to content rather than spectacle.
Many aspects of those days are certainly behind us and we shouldn’t seek to restore them because they were a product of a different social and cultural environment.
The Serial team may not be able to replicate the success of their first effort, but the fact that so many people became invested in the podcast suggests it is possible that people will slow down and pay attention if you create the right product.
About a year ago, this video was making the round essentially pointing out how we are often being unconsciously manipulated by imagery in television and video ads.
[vimeo 89527215 w=500 h=281]
I have been kept it bookmarked intending to use it in a post at some point. It is fun to watch because you realize how often you have probably fallen prey to the feelings the imagery is trying to evoke. In the context of the video, the images are basically tropes.
I had a vague sense that I would probably use the video to make fun of common generic arts marketing phrases like “takes you on a musical journey” and “exploration of the human spirit.”
It has been awhile since I last watched it so I saw it in an entirely different context when I rewatched it this weekend.
The ratio of content featuring customers vs. content featuring the product
The fresh, down-to-earth, colloquial, customer-centric language
The emotional impact of customers engaging with the product
The emphasis on YOU (meaning the customer)
The diversity of the customers shown enjoying the product
The fresh, professional, contemporary production values
Then he suggested people apply the same criteria to their last season brochure and see how it fared.
As I was watching the “This Is A Generic Brand” video again this weekend, I realized the reason these general images were so successful at influencing people no matter how many times they appeared in ads was because so many of them focus on the consumer and subjects with which they identify, value or aspire (even if it has no basis in the reality of their lives).
Watch the video again with Trevor O’Donnell’s criteria in hand and see how many of them it hits. It shouldn’t be difficult since in some cases, the voice over almost states each outright.
So while the video has a cynical tone, it also provides an illustration that a good deal of arts marketing is behind the curve when it comes to appealing to audiences in the manner in which they respond.
Yes, I hate to admit it, but it appears even in the use of generic advertising techniques, arts organizations aren’t using the highest quality product.
I once had a situation where I got a call from an artist agent who wanted to change the date of our performance. The alternative date he suggested was really inconvenient based both on which days of the week are best for audiences and where it fell in our calendar.
When I talked about these issues, the agent suggested that given the really great price we had been given for our original date, we didn’t have a lot of basis for complaining. And this is true, we had been given a really great price since the artist was looking for a fill date between shows (which subsequently shifted, of course).
This came to mind when I was reading a New Yorker article last month that suggested airlines are essentially employing “calculated misery” to get people to pay to be more comfortable.
But the fee model comes with systematic costs that are not immediately obvious. Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.
Later the article reports that an unnamed airline is considering an “economy minus” class of even narrower seating than they currently provide.
I don’t mean to suggest that the agent changing the date was an intentional diminishment value because we had received a good price. I don’t doubt the price made it easier for them to ask for the change, but ultimately I think they were trying to find balanced solution that served all parties well.
The point I wanted to illustrate is that we will often compromise our standards when we feel we are paying below the going rate.
There are frequently conversations about how cutting budgets will adversely impact the end product. Orchestras cutting musicians will cause quality to suffer. Trying to do more with less will mean staff will be over worked and may burn out or quit.
What isn’t talked about as much is how we may not feel we can demand better because we know a person isn’t getting paid enough. How often do you decide a press release or design is “good enough” because an intern or dirt cheap freelancer created it? Is your customer service not up to the standard you would like because you don’t feel like you can demand more from front of house staff for the same reason?
Most often arts organizations experience this reticence with volunteers, including board members. You don’t feel like you can ask people to work harder or commit to making difficult decisions because they are providing assistance for free.
In my experience, the conversations about volunteers not meeting standards occurs more openly. Staff will talk about how they might nudge a cranky usher into being a little more civil or trying to motivate an unengaged board member. Maybe the required action doesn’t necessarily follow, but at least the consequences to the organization are publicly acknowledged.
When it comes to paid staff, while everyone will grouse and joke about not doing it for the money, the conversation about compromising expectations doesn’t happen as much. The decision not to ask for a revision can tend to be individually internalized rather than openly acknowledged among peers.
Think about it a little. How often have you said to another person in your organization, this isn’t quite what I wanted, but I didn’t feel like I could ask for better since we give him/her so many responsibilities and can’t provide professional development opportunities. How often have you just kept that thought to yourself?
This is an under recognized consequence of trying to do more with less. We know that this will result in what staff we have being asked to shoulder more work and the quality will suffer. But there isn’t really a recognition that we may gradually accept the slippage in quality in a way that institutionalizes it as the standard.
Perhaps this is another reason to be resolved to do less with less when funding drops rather than killing yourselves to maintain your level of service. Probably 95% of arts organization have something akin to “to provide the highest quality…” in a mission statement or similar document.
When budgets get tight and cuts need to be made, the decision to be less ambitious and cut quality in order to maintain the same number of services is often chosen instead of maintaining ambition and quality and providing fewer services. There are many good arguments for this, including maintaining visibility in the community and fully utilizing a facility.
All that is publicly acknowledged. However, because everyone is working harder and has less time to for introspection, there is rarely an open conversation about whether the organization has started to tacitly expect less of itself in 1000 unacknowledged ways and ask its community to do the same.
Arts organizations are not airlines. The demand for service is not the same. Airlines can (unfortunately) get away with institutionalizing increasingly low expectations for low prices.
While it was relatively quiet in the office over the holidays, I made an attempt to catch up on reading reports that I had downloaded and bookmarked over the last few months.
Instead of telling you about what I read and evaluating it, I actually wanted to ask- Does anyone know anything about Propensity Score Matching?
Well, obviously I guess I probably should do a little explanation for people.
It is a statistical method that has been around for about 30 years, but this is the first I have heard of it. It’s application to the arts is discussed on page 18 and sounds pretty interesting, but I am not quite sure if it is something an individual arts organization could engage in themselves.
According to Measuring Cultural Engagement (MCE):
“The Norman Lear Center adapted PSM to evaluate the impact of media and arts programming. The idea is to isolate a piece of media or arts programming to assess whether audience members who were exposed to it were more likely to demonstrate a shift in knowledge, attitude, or behavior compared to very similar people who did not encounter the programming”
The reason this technique can be valuable to the arts is because it is often difficult and expensive to identify a representative sample group of people who have participated in a niche event. Yet arts groups often need to gather data from people in support of grants and it is often difficult to get the data you really need: (my emphasis)
“One key problem in measuring cultural engagement is confusing outputs with outcomes. It is easier to tell funders how many seats or tickets were sold or the number of “likes” on Facebook than whether a particular arts or cultural event had a substantial impact on an individual or a community. Since many cultural agencies and organizations, including the NEA, talk about the benefit or value of arts and culture to individuals and communities, it is essential that the research community develop pragmatic tools to help these groups demonstrate that their mission is being accomplished. Using PSM in this way, arts organizations can focus on outcomes instead of outputs, measuring the impact of their work on individuals and communities.”
The example used in MCE is evaluating whether people who saw the movie Food, Inc had a experienced a change in knowledge and attitude. The Normal Lear Center used surveys distributed through social media groups and email lists affiliated with the film and production company. They received about 20,000 responses.
MCE acknowledges that one of the weakness of Propensity Score Matching is that it requires a pretty large sample size, but that the Lear Center has been able to get good results from as few as 1,000 surveys. This is one of the reasons I was wondering if it is at all viable for an individual arts organization.
Being able to get results focused on outcomes rather than outputs sounds great–if it is something that can reasonably be done. Has anyone out there had any experience with Propensity Score Matching?
Something MCE mentioned that intrigued me but wasn’t expounded upon enough was (my emphasis):
“Seventeen statistically significant variables were identified that predicted the likelihood of seeing a film like Food, Inc. Of these, only three were demographic. This surprised the film’s marketing team as demographics usually form the basis of film marketing. The three variables focused on whether a survey participant was employed in certain industries or had children. Individuals were more likely to see the film if they did not have children. This was contrary to what the marketers expected.”
I really wanted to know what the nature of the other 14 significant variables were if they weren’t demographic. Arts marketing focuses pretty heavily on demographics as well so it would be really interesting to know what types of factors made up the majority of the significant variables if they weren’t demographic.
I was in a local comic book/table top gaming store a couple weeks ago talking to the owner about providing tickets as a prize for a Magic: The Gathering tournament. While we were chatting, a kid comes in and says it is his first time in the store. As he looks around admiring the things on sale and talking about what he would like to acquire, he mentions he just moved into town and is living at the shelter.
The first thing that popped into my mind was that if he is living at the shelter, he should be focusing on using his money for something else besides buying more Pokemon cards (his preferred game.)
A couple moments later, the 2010 Haitian earthquake came to mind. Back then one of the things that struck me was that amid all the devastation and loss people experienced, people came together and started singing. The singing didn’t help to feed anyone or clear the rubble, but it did provide a sense of community and security for people who lost so much.
In the five years since that earthquake, I often think back to that incident when people talk about how irresponsible it is to spend money on the arts and culture rather than on things like medical supplies and equipment.
But it is just as important to provide people with the opportunity to have a communal experience with others as it is to heal their bodies.
Despite all the merchandise he was admiring, the kid in the store wasn’t opening his wallet to buy anything new. He was primarily there to find a place where like minded individuals met. While buying cards may not be free, the opportunity to sit at a table and play with other people using whatever he has is free.
A lot of times what arts organizations have to offer isn’t free, some times it is. Regardless, it is important to remember that often what you are providing people goes beyond what you think you are specifically offering at that moment.
This week we made our first foray into the Classical Revolution movement with the help of CutTime Simfonica. Mr. Cuttime, or Rick Robinson, as his friends call him, helped us coordinate this in conjunction with the formal concert by CutTime Simfonica we presented last night.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Classical Revolution (CR), it is an effort to remove the intimidation factor from classical music by taking it out of the formal concert hall setting and bringing it to bars, clubs, houses, etc. The idea being if you find classical music doesn’t make you uncomfortable in your local watering hole, it might be something you will enjoy in a more formal setting.
Formerly a bassist with Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Rick helped to found a CR chapter in that city. (And got a Knight Foundation grant to expand it.) He encouraged us to invite local musicians to essentially “jam” with CutTime Simfonica so I started reaching out to the local wind symphony last summer and followed up with flyers and contacts throughout the last month (as did Rick).
Unfortunately, a major Christmas concert got scheduled for the same night as our Classical Revolution session so we didn’t get many outside musicians participating. (Though that concert rescheduled in order not to conflict with our formal concert Tuesday night, so we can’t complain.)
However, we did have a 15 year old flutist show up to join in so he got a lot attention that night.
Click to view full album
(The poor guy was so nervous he couldn’t eat his hamburger during the three hours of the Classical Revolution. Thankfully, the pub brought out a fresh one.)
Being Christmas time, there was a little bit of audience participation required in order to create a “stereo surround sound” jingle bells experience for the audience.
I am not sure that the CR event generated any additional ticket sales for the concert hall performance the next night, but it did seem to change some perceptions. The morning after the CR concert, we went on the radio to promote the show. The radio show host said her boyfriend was a little reluctant about attending, but 2.5 hours later she was ready to leave and he wasn’t.
She admitted, she never really understood classic music but her boyfriend’s insight was that it is like reading a novel, there are different plots and stories being interwoven.
What crystallized the experience for me was at the end of a Brahms piece, Rick Robinson commented “man, that is one sexy piece of music.” I could see there was something about it he was discovering as he played. When I mentioned this to him, he said he often didn’t get to play the cello part. So to a degree there was a discovery element for him. I loved both the verbal and non-verbal expression of delight experienced in that moment.
The formal concert the next night had the same sort of light hearted element to it that the Classical Revolution performance did the night before. As I watched, I realized there was a lot of potential for resentment in linking Classical Revolution events to more formal concert hall experiences.
People attending a CR event where they have a great time interacting with the musicians might feel like they experienced a bait and switch if they were actively encouraged to show up to a full symphony orchestra concert where the musicians barely acknowledged their presence.
While the CR and formal concert were both essentially chamber music experiences, Rick Robinson took it a step further by polling the audience about their past interactions with classical music. He had extra seats set up on stage and invited a rotating group of audience members to come up and sit close enough to “see the musicians sweat.”
As each group left the stage, he asked them what they felt. One woman said she felt like she needed to get back to playing the violin. One man commented it was interesting watching the facial expressions and interactions, especially the percussionist anticipating where he would need to come in.
The diversity of the programming also helped, running from familiar pieces by Mozart and Beethoven to the Martin Luther King movement of Duke Ellington’s “Three Black Kings.” Rick also included three of his own compositions and explained the stories behind them.
His association of music with food generated vivid imagery for the audience. He spoke of his “Pork N’ Beans,” as; taking a bite of spicy pulled pork, then a mouthful of hot beans, the heat rising in our hero’s mouth until a forkful of cole slaw cools it down. At both the concert and the Classical Revolution event, people said they could tell when each mouthful came, especially the cole slaw.
Today, as I reflected back, I realized that there is a lot of attention and conversation on doing programming that will attract younger audiences. There isn’t much discussion about transitioning existing audiences toward acceptance of that programming.
When the subject comes up, it is usually to discuss the dichotomy between what new and existing audiences like. The perception is that existing audiences are alienated by the content that appeals to new audiences. Seldom is there discussion of a long term vision to gradually segue existing audiences toward the programmatic point that may appeal to new audiences.
I am thinking about this because I am wondering what the conversation will be at the next board meeting. What feedback have they received about an event in which the transitions between high quality music performances by Columbus and West Virginia Symphony musicians were filled with some unconventional audience interactions?
The responses I received last night and today from members of the audience have been very positive. But many of those were the people who went to sit on stage.
It started to occur to me that despite a few rough edges here and there, Rick Robinson might be developing a format that bridges that gap – palatable to existing audiences and intriguing to those looking to experiment with a classical music experience.
Since we are in the middle of the holiday shopping season, I thought it would be a good time to draw attention to a Business Insider article from October on the digital behavior of teens.
On the assumption that there might be a chance of engaging today’s teens in live performance as they get older, I thought I would offer the following for consideration:
Compared to last year, a greater percentage of teens boys say they prefer to shop online than in stores.
Meanwhile, teen girls seem to be reverting back to stores to do their shopping.
This behavior likely shows boys’ preference for the convenience and privacy of e-commerce, while girls are more likely to shop socially in stores. In nearly every Piper Jaffray survey since spring 2012, more male teens have said they shop online than female teens.
There has already been an acknowledgment that women are generally the ones that primarily motivate the decision to attend live performances. If current behavior and preferences perpetuates itself as these teens get older, (and is transferable from shopping to participation at events), arts organizations may be well advised to place a stronger emphasis on designing programming, advertising and promotional deals to appeal to women.
Other observations made in the article are that females are attracted to a variety of content heavy sites like Pinterest and Net-A-Porter whereas males pretty much prefer the one stop shopping convenience of Amazon. (Since I hated to go store to store in the ancient pre-Internet age, this basically appears to be an Internet age manifestation of the eternal differences between the genders.)
Again this reinforces the sense that providing a visual and tactile experience is important to engaging women as consumers.
It won’t come as a surprise that teens are streaming a lot of video and playing a lot of video games. These forms of entertainment have always loomed as a threat to location based events since they allow people to remain in their homes.
One small glimmer of hope might be in the fact that there has been a significant increase in the number of teens who are hoping for a Go-Pro camera for Christmas. (Significant in that it went from no mention to 1%, which granted is still very small, but bears watching.)
These cameras were designed to be used by practitioners of extreme sports as they surfed, flipped, jumped, etc. The fact that they are gaining mainstream appeal could be a further reflection of the desire to record oneself engaging in different activities.
Though we may hate the idea of people pulling out social media devices to emphasize themselves over the event, it bears considering that the best opportunities may exist in the future for events that cater to that desire to record oneself participating.
[No slight intended to women by the post title. Clearly the post is focused on the importance of the female consumer, but no one made a song entitled “Where the Girls Are.”]
In the last day or so, Howard Sherman tweeted a story on CNN about the number of websites choosing to shut down the comments section on their websites in favor of social media interactions due to the number of abusive and spammy comments that appear in the comment boxes.
I momentarily panicked wondering what the implications might mean for my efforts to collect audience feedback as grant support if people got out of the habit of leaving comments on webpages.
The I realized–nobody is posting comments on my organizational website, just on my blog. All the feedback about the performances at my arts center already comes through social media.
But that actually brought another issue to mind for which I hope, dear readers, you might have some suggestions. (And in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I will certainly thank you.)
While we do get some nice comments on our Facebook and Twitter pages, I find that most of the really good comments are being made on my staff and board members’ personal Facebook pages. I have encouraged them to take screenshot, send me links, etc, but everyone doesn’t always remember.
The problem I have is that these comments made by people who attended a performance to board and staff members are pretty high quality, with a much more sincere and detailed feel than responses on surveys.
And I don’t know they are being made.
I have keyword searches on Google and Hootsuite for my organization related terms and all the shows we are doing each season, but these comments don’t appear in the results.
With Facebook saying they will throttle Facebook Pages content starting in January, I am concerned that even “What did you think of the show” posts might get filtered out of our followers’ newsfeeds making it more difficult to gather feedback and making me more dependent on the goodwill and memories of staff and board members.
In fact, I wonder if the throttling has already begun because we didn’t half the reach or responses to the follow up post for a sold out show two weeks ago that we have gotten for shows with half the attendance.
Any one have any ideas and thoughts on how to gather the good comments and prepare for less social media exposure?
I should note that board members receiving better comments than the organizational social media site presents an opportunity rather than a problem. It provides something of an obligation to provide them with sufficient information and support to be good brand ambassadors for the programs. I won’t have as much control of the message as I would through our organizational social media accounts, but I can enhance the value of what the board members are already doing naturally and willingly on and offline.
We in the arts are frequently enjoined to ask ourselves what value we have in the community and whether we would be missed or the community would be worse off if we closed.
The subtext, at least when I hear and read this, is that arts organizations better make sure they are providing some service their community views as valuable whether it is shows, classes, outreach events, providing expertise and resources to others–whatever the case may be.
I think this is driven by a final grant report/justify your government based funding mentality. The concern that you aren’t doing enough to be of value to your community could easily be a matter of lack of data collection rather than lack of doing on the arts organization’s part.
Basically, it is the “It’s A Wonderful Life” problem. George Bailey doesn’t realize what a positive impact he has had on the community until he gets to see what life would be like if he weren’t around. He lacked knowledge of what sort of impact his presence had in Bedford Falls.
No one can ever really know the full repercussions of their presence or lack thereof without the help of an angel interpreting cause and effect. If you had asked the residents of the depressed Bedford Falls if their lots would have been better with a George Bailey around, they wouldn’t have had any concept of the extensive differences between the two timelines.
Still, people do have some idea of what would have happened had they not had certain opportunities available to them. George never asked and was never told how important his building and loan was to the community.
Well, at least not until the end of the movie which results in a scene very familiar to many arts organizations– People in the community react to the imminent closure of their beloved organization and donate a large amount of money in the hopes of staving off disaster.
Bedford Falls or An Arts Organization You Know?
Optimally you don’t want to wait until a crisis to find out how much your organization really means to the community. Gathering the responses from a wide range of people is required, asking those who don’t participate as well as those who do. It is often suggested that those who don’t attend or participate be queried so that you can figure out how to better serve them.
While this is true and important, there are people who will never attend or participate in your programs. However, they may still value the presence of your organization in the community. For example, I don’t participate in Habitat for Humanity construction projects, but I certainly know that life in the community would be worse if they weren’t around.
What I don’t know is what are the best questions to ask. The things that immediately pop to mind are reminiscent of high school kids trying to find out if that other person likes them too. My impression is that the questions need to investigate what people value in the cultural ecology and how your organization fits in to it rather than “what do you like about us? what is it that we do that you would miss if we stopped doing it?”
My other impression is that this is the sort of questioning that has to be done in person rather than in a written survey because a conversation can force deeper consideration than an opportunity to jot down a response. Engaging in deeper consideration will probably cause the respondent’s feelings on the matter to acquire a deeper resonance as well.
Despite this being a labor intensive process, since you are collecting the data to assess the perception of your organization in the community and not to provide results by a deadline for a grant report or to decide whether to being a new initiative, it is possible to conduct this process in a relatively informal way.
The purpose is to get a sense of whether people would miss your organization if it closed so you are constantly asking your questions and paying close attention to the responses. The process never ends.
It occurs to me that if you are being honest and asking both those who support you and those you don’t, you can end up identifying non-participants you will want to formally survey to find out if there is something you can do to serve their needs.
There is an initiative starting in NYC that I hope is really successful and catches on in smaller cities and communities because it can help under served communities and potential provide arts organizations a central communication channel to these demographics.
According to a CityLab article, all but three pay phones in NYC will be replaced by eye-catching Links stations. These stations will provide free public Wi-Fi, free phone calls anywhere in the US, free charging for mobile devices and serve as sources of information (maps, directory of city services, etc.)
The services will be paid for by advertising and public services messages displayed on the screens on the sides of the structures.
But what caught my eye was that the acknowledgment that these stations need to be placed in poorer neighborhoods. I agree with them that is where these stations are needed most. (my emphasis)
But if what the service providers are aiming for is the big bucks, could they bypass poor neighborhoods in favor of spots that attract high-end advertisers?
City officials say no. About half of the pay phones that will be transformed are in the lower-income outer boroughs, says Anne Roest commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications .
“There’s an assumption that poor people don’t spend money,” she says at the press conference. “One of the tricks is to figure out the advertising that’s providing what folks in all communities of New York are actually buying.”
Low-income individuals are more likely not to have expensive mobile phones and data plans, and may be more likely to need links to make calls or access the internet.
As I said, it would really be great if this model proved to be successful in NYC and became attractive enough to replicate in other cities.
It is unclear to me in the section I bolded if they are oriented on finding a one-size fits all neighborhoods advertising approach or will work on studying and segmenting the advertising. If they pay attention to what different approaches to advertising worked in each community demographic, perhaps the basic lessons could be applied elsewhere.
With that data in hand, companies can use specifically targeted advertising on these Links stations and have better insight into what general services these communities desire versus those in more affluent neighborhoods.
As the saying goes, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. I have no doubt that usage data will be collected, crunched and sold. There is no reason this data can’t be crunched to provide social benefit as well.
I suspect the perceived value of these stations in low income communities which lack Internet, WiFi access and wide spread access to the amenities of smart phones, would generate positive associations making them valuable advertising vehicles.
It can be tough to get your advertising viewed on people’s individual televisions, computers and phone screens. There aren’t central communal sources of knowledge like there were when there were only a few television channels, broadcast radio stations and newspapers.
In addition to learning how to better design programs to suit the demographics of an area, this is the opportunity to raise awareness of your programs at the place people gather to make calls or charge their phones. (If you have ever been in an airport with charging hubs, you know demand won’t be an issue.) This could be the best chance to get low cost events and classes on to the radar of people whom you might not be able to reach in pretty much any other way.
Competition for advertising time in places like NYC might make the costs prohibitive there, but it could be more reasonable around the rest of the country. The success of this program is something worth keeping an eye on for a number of reasons.
YOU doesn’t mean you in particular. It actually means, “anyone.” Anyone who can see this site or read this email or drive by our billboard. If you’ve got money or clout or attention to spare, sure, we want you.
Political fundraisers have turned this from an art to a science to an endless whine. So have short-term direct marketers with access to a keyboard and the free stamps of internet connection.
We used to have our ears open to anyone we loved or trusted whispering, “I need you.” It’s been overwhelmed lately, though, by selfish marketers shouting, “WE WANT ANYONE.”
This should sound like a familiar concept to many people in the arts. For years now the message being communicated that we hope everyone learns is you can’t define your target market as everybody living within a 50 mile radius of your venue. Yes, in the ideal world, everyone would be interested in traveling to see what you are offering, but that isn’t realistic so you need to focus your efforts.
To a certain extent, it is somewhat comforting to know that political groups and marketers are making similar mistakes to those made by non-profit arts organizations. Until, at least, you consider they have a lot more money to burn on such foolishness than you do.
But really, it does go to show how difficult it is to appeal to people who aren’t already involved with you. It is easy to make political ads that appeal to your base or to your existing customer base. It is more difficult to craft a message that is appealing to those who are uncommitted to any one candidate or product.
Which is why so many people resort to the shotgun “I Need You” approach Godin mentions. It probably comes as no surprise that people have gotten really good at tuning those appeals out. Eye tracking studies show that people have cultivated “banner blindness” (scroll down about 5 images) automatically tuning out banners on webpages.
Godin alludes to the solution in that last sentence where he mentions “that we used to have our ears open to anyone we loved or trusted.” I don’t think people stopped listening to those they love and trust. The list of those they trust has gotten smaller due to the barrage of appeals.
Even though people often put more stock in online recommendations from people they don’t know rather than those they do, those personal relationships matter. All the recent conversations in the arts community about connecting with the community boils down to the goal of cultivating trust with people.
Just like retail politics is expensive and time consuming, because it is conducted in a relatively personalized way, it is often more effective than a shotgun approach. While this doesn’t deter political campaigns from engaging in both a personal and widespread effort in an attempt to get votes, they only require a commitment that lasts until election day.
Arts organizations generally need to secure something a little more long term.
If you are in the entertainment business, it appears Netflix is shaping up to be the major nemesis. HBO is going to let you stream their series without cable as a way to respond to people dropping their cable subscriptions and shifting toward Netflix. Movie theaters are vowing to refuse to screen the new Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon movie because it will be released on Netflix at the same time.
So what are live performance companies to do? It is pretty difficult to be ready to perform on demand. Sure recording your performance and posting it on YouTube is always an option, but you’re trying to perpetuate the benefits of attending events in person.
Well, I don’t know if it is THE answer, but one possible model for study might be found in a post on the HowlRound website this past July. Jean Ann Douglass and Eric John Meyer do theater in a truck. People buy tickets online and at 4:00 pm on the day of the show, they receive an email about where to find the truck. Such an arrangement allows for the possibility of having a show centrally located to the bulk of your audience.
Now granted, with a capacity of only 15 people, the scale is a little small. However, as they point out, it allows a great deal of flexibility in positioning a performance.
Another appealing aspect of this work is the freedom it affords us as producers and presenters. We can rent our venue anytime, anywhere across the country
One of the key elements of their performances are bars with bathrooms. While the performance could theoretically be performed in any parking lot, the audience needs restroom facilities. At intermission, the audience is sent off to a nearby bar and when they return, they view a second, entirely different play. Then after the performance, you can have a drink with the performers.
There is a lot of potential for symbiotic relationship between bars, restaurants and other businesses in this performance model. There are probably a good number of places that would be happy to have a guarantee of 15 customers coming in at a known time.
Obviously, weather is a consideration since it can get too hot or cold in the back of a truck. However, I imagine anyone who was really serious about bringing performances into different neighborhoods in on a consistent basis would make the necessary alterations.
As I sit here, I have visions of the invention of entirely new ways to staging shows to accommodate the form of tractor trailers and shipping containers. Not to mention the rise of companies specializing in taming the acoustic qualities of these spaces.
After working wonderful performance halls, it is probably depressing to even contemplate having to resort to such rough conditions to provide the experience of live performance. But let us not forget that wagons were the primary delivery mode for performance once upon a time.
With the convention of performance hall audience behavior out the window, entirely new possibilities might open up with people using electronic devices and social media to interact with the performances. The novelty of going cruising with a performance troupe might be very appealing to people.
While I was at my state presenters’ conference last week, I was speaking to a colleague at a theater a couple hours away about possibly collaborating on advertising on public radio stations in whose coverage area both our theaters are in. My thinking was that people might be confused by separate ads. They might think, was that on Tuesday here in town and Wednesday 90 miles away or vice versa?
In the course of conversation, she mentioned they hadn’t announced that part of their season and would be waiting until January. (This was something of a relief for me because I hadn’t seen the show on their website and was afraid they backed out.)
She said they decided to break up their season and only announce half at one time in order to generate renewed excitement about the theater’s offerings. Unlike my venue, they don’t have any subscribers from whom they are seeking an ongoing investment. It sounded as if this is the first year they will be trying this as a bid to renew momentum for their programming so I don’t have any sense of how successful the approach is.
I was wondering if any one else had done this sort of thing and if they had any success with it. Are there any tips that you might have for catching attention and getting people excited, especially during the first year or two when people aren’t expecting to hear about a raft of new shows?
I just anticipate I may end up adopting similar tactics one day and there are probably a number of other readers who are ready to give it a try right now.
Many theaters are experimenting with different types of ticketing models from choose your own seasons, themed mini-seasons, punch cards allowing you to see any show in their season as many times as you like up to a limit or fewer times/shows with as many friends as you like.
I haven’t really heard about people playing with the timing of announcing groups of events in order to find an idea spacing. People would quickly become inured if you ANNOUNCED! EVERY! SINGLE! SHOW! WITH! GREAT! FANFARE!
But I am sure there are timing tricks that haven’t been widely explored. I imagine in snowier climes, if you announce a whole new group of offerings in January after the Christmas buzz has worn off and the winter doldrums have set in, your announcement might gain some traction.
Television networks abandoned announcing new seasons of series every Fall decades ago in favor of floating starts throughout the year. Is there a viable way to do something similar for live performances?
During the question and answer session, Lentz responded to a question about what Harvard’s reopened museums will offer by saying that the new museums are designed to be more accessible to students and community members.
“You can enter through one entrance and go out the other without actually entering the museum. The courtyard is going to be a new public gathering space,” he said. “We don’t want it to be a static treasure house.”
What caught me was the phrase about entering without entering the museum. After I went back to re-read the sentence, I realized that he meant you could enter the building complex without actually entering the museum.
I did try to find out more about these plans, but most of the other articles about the design didn’t really talk about how the building would be used by visitors. Harvard Magazine did have a pretty good story about the all around use of the facilities.
The courtyard Thomas Lentz seems to be referring to is this one. Nearly every article I read about this project features this space.
I have been having conversations with my staff about making our lobby a more welcome gathering place just to provide a sense of belonging to those who may enter or pass through. One of the advantages we have is that there is a parking lot on one side of the lobby and the rest of campus on the other side.
So yes, you can enter through one entrance and go out the other without actually entering a theater space.
Over the last few months, I have been paying attention to what other arts organizations and businesses who provide public gathering spaces do to make these spaces welcoming. One thing that has become very clear is that no matter how nice the amenities you offer, if people don’t have a reason to enter, it is all for naught.
Its that whole issue about “Field of Dreams” being a movie. If you build it does not guarantee anyone will come.
From the pictures of the Harvard Museums, exterior surroundings I am not sure if there is a reason someone would pass through one door and move toward the other on the way to somewhere and be enticed to linger. Certainly curiosity about the renovations and word of mouth about how interesting the courtyard environment is may be enough to get things started. After activity reaches a critical mass, it can be self-sustaining.
A month ago I wrote about the Taipei Performing Arts Center and what a cool idea the public loop through the building with unprecedented views of backstage activities was. But even as I wrote about it, I wondered if people would really enter the building and avail themselves of the opportunity, even with the entrance extending over the street.
I haven’t been to Taiwan, but if their behavior is even half that of their mainland brethren, there is a pretty good chance the public loop will be packed with people.
For the rest of us though, people are only slightly more likely to flock to our lovely public lounging places than to our formal performances unless they have a reason to do so. Often the biggest factor in that decision is just the physical location and layout.
If it is difficult to park nearby and the location isn’t conducive to foot traffic, people may not wander in during the day or come early to relax prior to a performance. Nor may they linger long afterwards if their drive is long and traffic problematic.
On the other hand, creativity and an eye for opportunity in your particular environment might provide a solution. I had a colleague whose performance space was too small for any sort of pre- and post show gatherings. However, an empty storefront with convenient access to the theater turned out to be great as a coffee lounge situation, provided a sense of greater activity on the street and put a little money in the property owner’s pocket.
It probably goes without saying that while it is a marked improvement to increase the number of people passing through and lingering in your public spaces, you still need to give them a reason to engage with your programming. It doesn’t matter how good the courtyard of the Harvard Museums are, they can still end up being a “static treasure house” if people don’t have any reason to pass through the next threshold.
At one point in his presentation, he used a chart that seemed very familiar and my first impulse was to wonder where he had grabbed it from. As I peered closer, I realized it was from a white paper his company, InstantEncore had put out this summer that I had downloaded but hadn’t made time to read yet.
Attending a conference is an expensive way to catch up on your reading….
Drombrosky talked about the growing prevalence of mobile devices, how they are the primary mode in which people are interacting with websites and how this is changing people’s expectations about their arts experience.
Dombrosky spent a fair amount of time underscoring the importance of responsive web design, a common topic of conversation lately. Drew McManus has been a long time proponent of it in the arts.
Drombrosky’s talk focused on the experiences being offered audiences, before, during and after an event. While he did mention tweet seats in passing, he didn’t really advocate for providing that type of experience.
He spoke about using technology to maintain a long held philosophy about what it should mean to attend an arts event, namely that the audience should be leaving the real world behind for a time. He related the words of one of his university instructors who talked about people disconnecting from the troubles of the world and being funneled into the world being created in the performance hall.
The problem is now that people can reconnect with the troubles of the world too easily at intermission. He suggested thinking about what sort of content that could be offered to keep audiences connected with the event. Among his suggestions were online program notes (which might replace the need to print programs), trivia about the artist, links to videos, places where albums can be purchased/downloaded. Perhaps create a forum or hashtag related to the event where people can discuss their experiences.
The availability of these resources can help keep people engaged while they are at the performance and allow them to continue to be connected to the performance and your organization after the event if they wish to do so.
He mentioned the Austin Symphony Orchestra has an “ask the conductor” program where you can submit a question during the show and the conductor will return a response. (Though in reality it is probably someone standing next to the conductor transcribing his response, of course)
Apparently the Detroit Symphony Orchestra encouraged people to take selfies around the concerts which not only kept people engaged with the event, but changed the symphony board’s perception of the audience demographics.
I haven’t read the white paper InstantEncore produced, but from what Dombrowsky said, more details about these case studies are included in it.
As I have mentioned before, I frequent my local library so often that the staff anticipates my needs (or they are stalking me) so I am a big fan of the institutions already.
What caught my attention was the informal survey the Columbus library did asking people on Facebook “to share five words describing their childhood libraries and five words describing how they imagine libraries two decades from now.”
The word clouds that resulted from this survey appear in both articles. While books, reading, information, research and learning figure heavily in the childhood word cloud, community, technology, information, entertainment, access and meeting emerge for the libraries of the future. While some of the childhood words lose their prominence in the vision of 20 years hence, their weight is still on par with strongest future concepts.
The Facebook survey CML used seems like an interesting exercise to engage in for trying to discern how your community sees their relationship with your organization changing. Paper or in person surveying might be required if you don’t have the 36,000 Facebook likes and 800,000 card carrying members that CML has.
People: The library must “shift away from building collections to building human capital.” This not only refers to the users of the public library but also its librarians, who will act as curators of the library’s content.
Place: The public library of the future is both a physical and virtual place. While the latter gets emphasized—perhaps overly so—in discussions about the future, the physical structure of the public library will remain vital to its community. But its purpose will change: “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.”
[…]
Platform: America’s public libraries should become community learning platforms. They should serve as a jumping-off point for users to create, learn, and innovate…
If this language about staff acting as curators; the role of space and how it is used; and providing a jumping-off point for creativity, innovation and learning sounds familiar, it is probably because the same concepts have been bubbling around conversations in relation to the arts.
So it may bear paying attention to what libraries are doing these days and consider whether it is worth partnering closely with them to reach common goals.
When the entertainment tax in Spain skyrocketed, attendance at shows fell precipitously. To lure people back, one comedy theater company instituted a program where people would only pay if they laughed. According to an article on Springwise, the seats were outfitted with cameras and facial recognition software.
Every time you laughed, the account associated with your seat is charged 30 euro cents. So that people wouldn’t intentionally restrain themselves as the show progressed, the charge was capped at 80 laughs or 24 Euros.
They also instituted a season ticket where you bought “laughs” rather than performances. Since other theaters around Spain are adopting this system, I wonder if the laughter season tickets are redeemable at any participating venue.
The video accompanying the article suggests a pay per cry for tragedy and a pay per WTF! when attending an avant garde piece.
While those last suggestions are a little tongue in cheek, the system helped the theater raise their income by $28,000 Euros over what was normally taken.
Now certainly this specific system isn’t suitable for all genres of performance. It wouldn’t work for symphony concerts unless you were charging for all the time people weren’t fidgeting, coughing or consulting their cellphones. (Though penalizing people for pulling out their cellphones does have a certain appeal!)
However, the general concept does answer what is often a significant barrier to participation in an unfamiliar experience–“What if I don’t like it?”
I also like the idea that you could purchase “experiences” that might be transferable from venue to venue. That way a state arts council or tourism board could sell experiences redeemable at all the arts organizations around the state.
Then if you lived near a museum, you could go in on one day and visit a couple galleries and only be charged per gallery you entered or by each work you viewed for more than a few minutes. You could come back a week later and visit another gallery. By the time you are finished, you feel you have gotten your money’s worth on your own schedule and didn’t have to pay multiple times for re-entry. (I am specifically thinking of the recent complaints about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s voluntary admission fee.)
All this being said, I am not sure how best to accomplish this operationally. If there is going to be pay for reaction, I think it has to be more streamlined and elegant than attaching iPads to the back of theater seats as seen in the video. Though I do see the value in allowing people to see themselves reacting and share it on social media, I would be concerned about damage or theft.
What might be viable are some sort of disposable medical sensor placed on the face to determine when muscles formed a smile or heart rate changed or when someone stood up and started dancing.
The more I think about this, the smarter I think it is. If you cap out the cost at the price you would have normally charged, if people reach or exceed that cap, there is quantitative data to back up the fact they enjoyed themselves…or that they got a bargain and should have paid more for enjoying themselves as much as they did.
You may have seen that the St. Louis Symphony experienced a pop-up protest urging a change of attitude in light of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.
None of them answered the biggest question that came to mind–Why did they choose to do this at a St. Louis Symphony concert? Are there people from Ferguson who attend the concert that they hoped to influence?
The Washington Post article quotes one of the organizers as saying they wanted to “speak to a segment of the population that has the luxury of being comfortable,..”
But I wondered if that was their only aim or if they are hoping for something more. It seems like a lot of effort to jar people out of the comfort zone.
My assumption, which may be incorrect, was that it was perceived that people of influence in general attend symphony concerts and the planners of this intermission event hoped to mobilize the attendees to act either directly or indirectly. Is this at least a partial acknowledgment that a symphony still wields some relevance?
Perhaps their aim was simply to reinforce their parting message that black lives matter.
I doubt the answers to any of these questions are clearcut because there are complicated issues of racial and social demographics and power dynamics entwined with Ferguson, the symphony attendees and the flash mob.
As to whether they were successful or not is a matter of gauging whether more people were applauding than were visibly displeased.
Two weeks ago I wrote about my participation in an NEA webinar that stressed the value of the arts in healing communities. As I watched the video of this flash mob today, I wondered if the St. Louis Symphony had been recruited to serve as a convener for a conversation without their knowledge.
Is this an opportunity for the St. Louis Symphony or some other arts organization to facilitate a conversation about the issues facing the greater community?
My mother sent me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies today. This sort of thing has been going on for a few years. She has been finding these new cookie recipes which she swears are better than the old recipes and she sends them to me.
Frankly, I am not having it. Maybe it is due to the temperature differences en route to my house, but when I eat the cookies she mails me, I can’t believe she is claiming these are better than the ones I grew up on. It isn’t just the taste. The texture and general consistency of the cookies are all wrong.
I will eat other cookies, but when it comes time to make cookies to give to others, I am sticking to the old proven recipes in my book.
I am sure we all have something in our lives we are attached to in this manner. Something that we have an emotional attachment to for which we will accept no substitutes.
And maybe you can see where I am going with this. I bring this up to remind you that this is a powerful factor to contend with when we are trying to energize programming with new and challenging content.
Last week we opened the season with a guy who does a great job channeling Frank Sinatra who was joined by three guys who used to be in some of the Motown groups of the 60s. It was a great show and a lot of fun. I was dancing in the wings backstage. We had a great sized audience. As an opening show it really set the tone for the rest of the season.
As people left the performance they were telling me it was the best thing they had seen in a long time here. I have been hearing the same thing over the course of the last week. It hasn’t just been people who attended the show. Their friends and kids have been telling me they were told the same thing.
My perception is that it was a great show, but the best thing that has appeared here in a long time…I don’t know about that.
Though I admit I was backstage so I didn’t get the full impact of the show. Those guys all understood the power of showmanship and connecting with the audience so I don’t doubt everyone felt they had a quality experience.
We can talk about innovating our programs, educating and engaging audiences with new ideas. It is easy to forget that there is often a “homemade chocolate chip cookies” grade emotional attachment involved in some of the content we offer.
By no means do older audience members lack the interest and curiosity to participate in innovative approaches to art. They certainly have expectations of their experience that are rooted in the present.
But they also tend to have a much stronger emotional investment in their experience than younger audiences.
After the show last week, I received a call from a long time attendee who told me what he liked and disliked about the performance and then proceeded to complain about last season. One of his objections was to the profanity in West Side Story, a show that first hit Broadway over 50 years ago when this gentleman was in his 20s.
Yes, he may be a cranky old man that needs to recognize that honest portrayals of life include profanity. Maybe it isn’t healthy to be dwelling on gripes for 6+ months, but it is also a sign of an investment in what we do that isn’t exhibited by younger audiences.
It may be that we need to shift thinking and practices to engage younger audiences instead of being entrenched in practices of the past that appeal only to older audiences. But it also may be that societal dynamics have shifted to a place where it is unrealistic to expect that level of investment from people any longer.
Just think about how long bands like the Rolling Stones have endured. Then try to identify a group that has emerged in the last decade that has engendered a relationship with audiences that will sustain their zombie corpses.
Current efforts to sustain performing arts organizations may or may not correctly be compared to attempts to keep a corpse animated. I think we talk so much about the financial aspects of keeping an organization operational that it is easy to forget that it is more than just money keeping things going.
There is an emotional investment that accompanies the money and in some respects, it is much easier to find alternative sources of funding than it is to replace the value of that emotional investment.
Andrew Taylor tweeted today that he would be speaking about theater spaces this week in Taipei and linked to a video of the Taipei Performing Arts Center.
At first I thought Andrew was going to be speaking there, but then realized the building hasn’t been completed yet.
Watching the video, I was interested to see that the design by Rem Koolhaas addresses many recent discussion points about how building design can either engage or alienate audiences. Starting at around 1:35 the video talks about how the street runs right into the building. Even more intriguing is the inclusion of a “Public Loop” which allows the general public to pass through and apparently peek in on the different performance and production work spaces around the building.
I imagine they would have to have some well trained staff present to prevent flash photography of a performance while allowing passersby to view what was transpiring. But more importantly than that, it seems to allow the public an opportunity to see what transpires backstage in the scene shop, costume shop and perhaps even in the fly system of a theater.
The public loop doesn’t seem to be comprised entirely of darkened hallways that visitors shuffle through. There appear to be open spaces where visitors can sit and relax for a time.
One element that came as a bit of a surprise was their “Super Theater” configuration mentioned around 4:30. It allows them to take down the walls between two of the spaces to create a massive warehouse like space. They cite the fact that B.A. Zimmerman’s Die Soldaten requires a 100 meter stage. (Yes, that is right, approximately the length of a football field.)
It may seem like a lot of construction expense to accommodate a niche use until you recall that productions like Sleep No More,The Donkey Show and their ilk use large open spaces like this.
The building exterior is rather strange looking and has its detractors. My immediate concern was if the difficulty and cost of transforming the building might make such a transformation more of an aspiration than a reality.
As I wrote this post, I recalled another transforming theater, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. It turns out that facility was also designed by Rem Koolhaas so his company has some experience with this process. As you can see in this video, it takes 11 stagehands six hours to transform that the Wyly Theatre. I imagine Taipei might require more people and closer to a day, but that probably isn’t an impediment.
I wrote about the design of the Wyly a few years back. As you can see in the video where Joshua Prince-Ramus explains the design, that building also highly flexible and has many engaging elements to it. It allows people to enter or exit through its very walls, or perhaps even sit outside and watch a performance (or rehearsal) inside.
In the context of all this, I am curious to learn what Andrew Taylor talks about in Taipei this week. Not to mention how successful the Taipei Performing Arts Center is at engaging their formal and informal audiences.
Artist conception of rival theater companies competing for market share
I listened in on an National Endowment for the Arts webinar today that was billed as addressing arts education. But the reality was, the speaker, Richard Harwood of the Harwood Institute seemed to feel arts education shouldn’t be a primary concern in most communities. From what I understood, he felt that the arts had much more immediate assets they could provide to communities and arts education was a focus for a later stage.
The NEA will post a more complete version of the webinar in a couple weeks. However, if you are interested in learning more immediately, there is a captioning transcript available of the session. I was monitoring it while I took notes of my own to help me keep up. Be warned that there are some omissions and mistakes. [NB the audio is now available online]
As a result, I will mostly be paraphrasing here unless I am confident that what I am quoting is reasonably accurate.
Harwood echoed part of the current conversation about making arts relevant in a community, namely that the focus has to be on the shared aspirations of the community and not on those of an individual organization or group of organizations.
He mentioned how he would often hear comments from people wondering why a program that worked for a community down the road didn’t work for their own. The reason is that you can’t borrow something from another community that is not aligned with the shared aspirations of your own.
“Communities that move forward the fastest are ones who align around shared aspirations, not simply coordination of programs…”
As he has traveled the country, Harwood said the number one issue he hears people mention isn’t foreclosure of homes, inability to pay college tuition or that they have lost their jobs. The top concern was that we need to restore our belief that we can come together to get things done.
Harwood strongly urged listeners
“…to think about what it is that enables us to create the belief we can come together to get things done. I think there are ways to change our efforts so we embody that belief. We need to pay attention to the narrative of our communities. I don’t need to tell you how important this is.”
Among the narratives that have to be worked against are the idea “we tried that 30 years ago, why would we try it again?” or “I am waiting for the next mayor to get elected.” He said that Americans have retreated from public life because “They didn’t see their reality reflected in public discourse. Belief starts with a notion something you care about that I care about matters.”
This was really the first time I heard someone talk about the challenge facing arts and arts education in the context of a societal malaise. Looking at it in this context, the cultural wars of that 80s that have seen a recent resurgence aren’t so much about people hating arts and culture. It is that arts and culture is being used as a whipping boy for something much larger.
In a sense, I think we all know that, but until Harwood spent close to 30 minutes talking about the problem without really mentioning the arts at all, I didn’t recognize that the tensions really aren’t about the arts at all. It is about a lack of trust and belief in one another. The way he talks about it, arts and culture have bigger contributions to make than providing music lessons and an enjoyable Friday date night. The arts can be instrumental in mending society.
He says every community has a multiplicity of competing narratives. The question isn’t how to resolve the competing narratives, but rather to illuminate them. Explore how we understand the narratives. What do the arts bring to them and what do arts bring to how people express these narratives.
He uses an example of Youngstown, OH where his company was brought in after the public schools were taken over by the state. As they engaged adults around education they heard that the adults were afraid of the kids. They crossed the street when they saw the young people. When they looked into the eyes of the children, they didn’t see the essential qualities needed to succeed. All they saw were troublemakers who would end up behind bars. They didn’t see them as the future of the community.
When they talked to the kids, they basically agreed that this was how the adults saw them. It is at this point that Harwood explicitly says that if we are really concerned about kids and arts education, the kids need to be engaged around who they want to be and how they see adults in their lives.
You might ask about arts education, but Harwood says he would never start with the arts. It is the job of the arts community to figure out how the arts can fit into what they want to become so they can reach their potential, become creative, innovative and express themselves.
Basically, you don’t try to figure out how to get them to fit into the arts.
When it comes to involving children and the arts, Harwood feel that what the arts offer that few others don’t is the power to convene. They have the power to bring people together in these conversations.
He says, (and I hope I am getting this correct because the transcript is a little spotty), he “thinks the arts, unlike a lot of other things, is not fundamentally about policy disputes. It is about creating something.” Due to this, he feels the whole focal point begins to shift because the fact art is about expression can help create norms for kids. Including the norm of what does it mean to create something.
He notes, arts deal with the whole child. So much else only deals with one piece so addressing the whole child can be a huge calling card for arts in education.
Obviously, a lot of interesting things to think about. As I suggest, putting arts education as part of a later step after other divisions have been healed shifted my perspective. I realized that culture wars conflict about the arts is really a symptom of something much bigger.
As narcissistic as many arts professionals may be, I think we can survive knowing it ain’t all about us in this case.
It is fortunate that I am not often able to relate how I personally handled a crisis. However, we recently ran into a situation where we had a signed commitment for a show and the attraction backed out.
We were fortunate in that the event falls near the end of our season so we have plenty of time to communicate the change. In addition, we were able to replace it with another performance around the same date.
This sounds all very simple which is great for public relations because it appears that everything is being handled with grace and aplomb.
The reality is, you don’t realize the limitations of your ticketing software until you try to do a refund of one event on a subscription package. I am glad I had created a choose your own flex subscription package this year. Otherwise, our only option would have been to cancel all the seats for the subscriber and replace them with full price tickets–not something that maintains good relations with the audience.
Obviously, had it not existed already, we could have gone in an retroactively created a structure similar to what we had in place for the flex subscription.
The other issue is that now these people who got refunds are not recognized as subscribers by the ticketing system so their seats won’t automatically carry over to next season. We have had to keep track of those subscribers so that we can lock in their seats again next year.
I don’t list all this in order to vent my frustration at the ticketing system we use, but rather to illustrate some of the hurdles involved with problems like these. (I haven’t even mentioned the difficulties of trying to process cash refunds through a university system.)
The audience should never know about these problems. There was a moment where people in the box office were saying “Well, we will have to tell the subscribers that next year they will have to….” I emphasized the steps we would do instead so that the concept that asking for a refund might result in the loss of seats one held for 10 years was never introduced to the subscriber.
In order to inform our ticket buyers about the change, we sent out releases and went on the radio to make people aware of the substitution and ask them to watch their mail boxes for letters outlining their options. After the letters went out, we followed up a week later with an email mentioning the same options.
One positive element to this situation was that we could use the tickets we already issued for the replacement show. The ticket scanners will register them correctly. Since many people consult their tickets for the show dates, we included pre-printed stickers in the letters that could be placed over their tickets to remind them about the correct date.
Since most tickets to this event have been purchased by full season subscribers, we offered the option of either buying tickets to one of two non-season shows at a steep discount or receiving a refund.
Now my hope was that by putting the refund option last, we wouldn’t get a lot of people who wanted refunds. Out of the hundreds of tickets we have sold already, we have only had to refund around 10 which represents about 5-6 people, but that still is more than I would have liked personally.
My other goal in offering discount tickets was to generate good will and awareness. I figured there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy with the replacement show and wouldn’t want a refund. However, by apologizing for the inconvenience and offering a discount on other shows, we will hopefully rise in their estimation.
In addition, there have been some who were not aware that these shows weren’t part of their season subscription despite our efforts to differentiate them so the letter helped reinforce this.
We haven’t had too many people take advantage of the discounted tickets at this point. While I always want to be selling tickets, our immediate goal was to at least maintain goodwill.
One last thing we did was set a time limit on when you could request a refund or purchase discounted tickets. Since the show is more than 6 months away, we didn’t want to have a deluge of people calling for refunds a week before because they decided not to attend at the last minute. The date we set was 6 weeks after the letter was mailed out and I expect we will be flexible through a few weeks after.
Whether this stance ends up creating problems for us remains to be seen when the show arrives.
An article on Inside Higher Education’s website reports some pretty significant drops in attendance by students at football games.
Student attendance at major college football games is declining across the country. By how much varies greatly at each institution, but a recent Wall Street Journal analysis of turnstile data at 50 public colleges with top football programs found that average student attendance is down more than 7 percent since 2009.
In 2013, the University of Georgia’s designated student section was nearly 40 percent empty. The University of California at Berkeley has sold about 1,000 fewer student season tickets this season than last year — a season that already saw a decline from the previous one. Since 2009, student attendance at the University of Florida has dropped 22 percent. Three-fourths of the University of Kansas’ student tickets went unused last season.
The article blames cold weather, lack of cellphone/wifi signals and alcohol in stadiums, along with the option to watch the game on a wide variety of media as reasons why attendance is dropping.
And by the way, none of these problems are new. A little over a year ago, Jon Silpayamanant wrote about the exact same attendance issues facing professional sports. Inside Higher Ed mentions that universities are using many of the same solutions the professional teams were adopting including more robust wi-fi, better access to food and beer, and more promotions and giveaways.
One of the concerns expressed about the lack of student attendance is the poor image it provides on television.
“Fundamentally, students are part of the show and that’s something that folks don’t always recognize,” Southall said. “If you watch a college sports telecast, where do the cameras go for in-crowd shots? The cameras are in the student section. If that section is not there, it’s like having a movie without enough extras to walk in the background of the shots. I always joke to my students, ‘You understand you’re paying to be extras. You’re just there for the show, so everyone else can keep consuming it.’ “
The long term concern is that disinterested students will become disinterested alumni who won’t support the athletic program and the university down the road.
As always when we talk about sports and the arts, there are a number of parallels here. One of the big one being the concern that the lack of interest/exposure as “kids” will translate into lack of investment as adults.
This article made me wonder about the real viability of Tweet Seats programs. If students aren’t motivated to attend a football game by the opportunity to be on television or, at the very least, being able to make “I am here participating” posts on social media sites, then are Tweet Seats programs really valuable as a way to attract and retain young audiences?
Given that many Tweet Seats program segregate social media users to their own section, the participants may feel even less engaged than students in a stadium surrounded by tens of thousands of others. (Though I suppose they could feel like they are part of an exclusive group if the environment is right.)
In the great battle of sports versus arts, among the advantages sports had were the ability to be a loud part of a large group at an event where the outcome was unknown. I found it somewhat worrisome that even with these advantages, sports were losing its audiences. What chance do the arts have then?
If you have been reading the results of audience research studies over the last decade or so, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the answer university athletic departments have arrived at is focusing on the audience’s experience, not on the “performance”.
“…according to a recent survey conducted by Ohio University’s Center for Sports Administration and stadium designer AECOM. The top three priorities for that spending — enhancing food and beverage options, premium seating, and connectivity — all focus on the experience of fans, rather than the players.”
I will cut right to the chase and say that I honed right in on their discussion of making a “cut list” of things to stop doing that are diverting resources and energy away from revenue generation.
If you’re a president, CEO, or executive director, you must align with your colleagues and focus your team on the sustainability of your business model and getting the revenue results that will support your mission. Insist on a “stop doing” list. Your non-profit status does not mean that you must exhaust staff time and resources with every initiative, regardless of return on investment.
They give examples of three theaters that have started focusing on audience retention in some fashion. Obviously, the area of focus could be anything.
I think the statements with the most impact were made in the comment section by Paul Botts.
During my years as a program director at an arts funder I adopted a habit that was driven by that “stop doing everything” idea. When presented with an organization’s new strategic plan my first question was always, “Tell me something which expresses your mission, which you could do and should do and really want to be doing, but which you aren’t going to do right now.”
If the response was a blank or shocked look then my feedback was that they didn’t have an actual plan they simply had a laundry list. If you haven’t made any actual choices then you haven’t done any real planning, etc.
Botts goes on to say that he follows up relating his own experience as managing director of an arts organization that tried to do everything their mission called for only to end up in bankruptcy. Even having gone through this uncomfortable experience, he still has to remind himself of lessons learned, indicating it is not an easy thing to keep yourself and your organization focused.
In the past I have often posted about diluting your efforts by adding programs as a way to chase foundation funding. But the situations TRG talks about are less clear cut and potentially more difficult to identify. The examples they give aren’t a matter of adding children matinees in order to get arts education funds. They talk about the Guthrie Theater deciding not to flyer the Mall of America in favor of focusing on getting first time attendees to come back for another visit.
Passing out flyers in a busy place is the sort of thing it is difficult to identify as a cut because it is a visible effort that looks like progress. It is the sort of thing audiences and board members will fault you for not doing in the face of declining attendance.
For some arts organizations, it might be the right strategy to increase attendance because the conversations accompanying the activity serve to increase a connection. In other communities, the connection may exist for as long as it takes to find a trashcan for the flyer.
The other thing that makes the cutting decision difficult is that there may be things that don’t appear to be effective because they are less public, more difficult to measure and might be among your organization’s least favorite activities. Just because you are really motivated to cut them may not mean it is constructive to do so.
Like a paper cut, what appears to be the least significant cut may tend to hurt the most.
As immersive arts experiences become increasingly prevalent, there have been some interesting introspective reflections of the experiences recently in The Guardian and Irish Times.
Both pieces mention the competitiveness of returning audience members souring the experience. I wrote about this issue to a greater degree in March so I won’t get into it much here.
One the one hand, she seems to feel that an immersive experience can help shift the awareness and focus of a participant in a manner the participant wouldn’t on their own. Citing Marina Abramovic’s installation 512 Hours where participants count rice grains one by one, Myf observes,
“Sure, I could have a stab at this while home alone by switching my phone off and counting the grains from my half-used pack of SunRice. But would I really do it without Abramović’s prompting? I enjoy being part of something creative, conceived by an inquisitive mind, because I know I can’t create such work myself. I like being included in the art-making.”
But she also seems to feel that people may conflate participation under someone else’s guidance and vision with being a creator. (my emphasis)
And I’m starting to think that us regular folk might not be up to the job. Are we really clever or interesting enough to be driving the narrative? I’m not sure I am. I like how art makes me feel like an outsider in someone else’s conversation, how it pushes me to think beyond myself and my own ideas. Is it healthy to be made to feel like we’re now special enough to be included in everything?
[…]
What is it about humans, at this particular time in history, that makes us think we’re special enough to be part of art without having done any of the work to develop the emotional, intellectual or craft level that artists have strived to achieve? Perhaps inviting the audience in isn’t always for the best. Even though I like being included, I’m just not sure I’ve done the hard yards to deserve it.
Granted, the vast majority of the theater going public in both the UK and US probably haven’t really encountered an immersive performance experience. Crawley’s reflections urge a consideration that the way these events are executed may promote a self-centric view of what should be a communal experience.
It is not just that audience members have started fighting each other in order to be in a position to be involved in the story.
What you, the audience, have always known is that to sit, watch, engage and reflect is not passive. In an insightful takedown last week of the radio personality Ira Glass, who dismissed Shakespeare’s King Lear as “not relatable”, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead argued that while art is a mirror in which we see ourselves, the demand for “relatability” is lazy and vain: art as a selfie.
That sounds like the toxin of our age and, perhaps, a reason to switch off the immersion. “You, the audience”, sounds like a command. “I, the protagonist”, feels lonely. Isn’t it supposed to be about us?
Crawley didn’t link to Rebecca Mead’s article, but I have included it for reference since I was interested to read what she said.
What seems to be relevant to Crawley’s statement was this (my emphasis):
But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.
To appreciate “King Lear”—or even “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Fault in Our Stars”—only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare.
What might be an obvious solution is to design the experience as a metaphorical Ropes course where people can only advance/gain access cooperating as a group. Perhaps some, having sacrificed themselves for the good of the group, might get the satisfaction of watching the result of their actions from a hidden room on the sidelines.
But I am sure there are plenty of people like me who are content to watch and ponder and who don’t like to get dragged into participating in the first place. Having to participate and do so as part of a team in order to witness interesting content might be even more off putting. (Though I would much rather participate in a group than to be singled out as an individual.)
(Yes, I intentionally wrote a provocative post title intentionally using another definition of immersion in the spirit of Drew McManus’ little experiment)
It often seems one of the hardest things to do in the performing arts is to correctly anticipate audience interest in a show. Related to that is gauging the best way to market and position an individual show to a specific audience segment.
I recently faced a situation where anticipating audience interest wasn’t difficult, but an opportunity to fumble the marketing and interaction with the target audience segment presented itself. This seemed like a good illustration of what is meant when we talk about understanding and treating audience segments differently.
Every year my department and a community arts organization partner on a nine show presenting season. This year there are a few shows that I wanted to do outside the season. Since our season brochure is one of our best tools for promoting the shows, I decided to list those two events as extras that could be purchased in addition to a season subscription.
There is a whole separate potential issue we may face with people thinking those shows were part of their season subscription. We used an entirely different color scheme and separated the events on the order form with explanatory text. We won’t know if that is sufficient until those events come up in the Spring.
The community organization’s board of directors asked if I was including those two shows, why wasn’t also including our annual concert by the Oak Ridge Boys as well. I explained that the audience for our subscription season was different from our Oak Ridge Boys audience. The board member noted that she attended the Oak Ridge Boys and the subscription series. I replied that the concert audience had different expectations and needs, trying to avoid saying that the Oak Ridge Boys audience was a lot more enthusiastic than our subscription audience.
I wrote her an email later explaining that it was better to keep the Oak Ridge Boys concert listed separately for a number of reasons. The first is the enthusiasm of the Oak Ridge Boys audience. The day we open sales, they flood the phone lines and line up out the door. They are used to hitting redial over and over until they get through. A subscriber would likely become angry if they were trying to resubscribe on the same day as Oak Ridge Boys tickets go on sale and the phone rang busy for an hour.
On the other hand, because we mail the brochure out at non-profit bulk rate which has a variable delivery rate, the Oak Ridge Boys fans would become angry if they received the brochure after the on sale date. Since we hold a subscriber’s seats from the previous year for 6-8 weeks after the re-subscription campaign begins, the brochure arrival date is not problematic.
What we do for the Oak Ridge Boys fans is mail a postcard to everyone who purchased the year before announcing a special pre-sale date that falls before the date announced on our website and in the newspapers.
Today was that special presale date and we were swamped. We sold more tickets in one day than we have sold in 4 weeks to the most popular Broadway show in our series, a show I expect will sell out.
Even though the subscription campaign started a month ago and the box office staff had been calling the last 25 people reminding them to resubscribe for two weeks, someone showed up this morning to renew their subscription and got caught in the horde. She was fine with having to wait awhile and a little incredulous at the crowd and the ever present din of the telephones.
As I stood watching over the activity in the box office today, I was reminded about that meeting where it was suggested I put Oak Ridge Boys in the brochure. In truth, it had occurred to me before anyone even suggested it. But I realized it would have been a mistake to treat the Oak Ridge fans like our season subscribers. While subscribers are generally content to keep the same seats year after year, the Oak Ridge Boys fans largely strive to get better seats than those they had last year.
I suspect there are expectations characteristic to people who only subscribe or buy single tickets to our classics, broadway or variety series that I could be doing a better job of fulfilling. Those might be difficult to identify because they have been wrapped up so closely with other subscribers for so long that they may not really think about needing to be treated differently.
However, one of the two additional shows I am doing this year is targeted at high school and college students with the intent of developing an additional series tailored to them. They definitely have different expectations of their experience that I will need to learn to meet.
And even people who fall into one segment may exhibit entirely different behaviors as members of a another audience segment. That board member who mentioned they were both subscribers and Oak Ridge Boys attendees– her husband was 4th out of around 75 waiting when we opened the ticket office this morning.
A few days ago, NPR’s Planet Money ran a story asking why there isn’t demand pricing for movies where you pay more for blockbusters and less for the stinkers. Among the suggestions the correspondents made were having some movies free with a two popcorn cover.
They spoke to a movie theater owner who expressed concerns about low prices signaling that a movie was bad. Not to mention he worried that people would pay for the stinker and sneak into the blockbuster.
The biggest impediment to demand based pricing, however, is the movie studios. As the reporters mention, no studio wants to invest tons of money into making and advertising a show only to have a movie theater price it at $1.
If you are not aware, something similar occurs with many of the big Broadway touring shows, especially those that are getting a percentage of the gate. Theaters have to submit proposed ticket pricing and a marketing budget for the production company’s approval.
One interesting fact that came to light was that the term “B-movie” actually refers to an early practice where movies were graded A, B, C, etc and had corresponding pricing. The practice has fallen by the wayside, but the B movie term stuck around in common parlance.
One of the problems live performances face is the ability to provide such transparency in its pricing for audiences. The price for single perform doing a solo acoustic set might be low because the cost to the theater for one person is low. On the other hand, if that single performer is Eric Clapton, the ticket price is going to be commensurately high.
But a ticket price may be low because the theater has good funding, or will take a loss to encourage people to attend or because the quality stinks. The audience member doesn’t know why prices are the way they are and there isn’t really an elegant way to communicate it, should the arts organization so desire.
As I listened to the reporters asking if movie theaters weren’t foolish not to institute demand based pricing, I wondered if we might be approaching a place where audiences would be psychologically ready for arts organizations to implement similar pricing strategies for their own events. The whole question of demand pricing has been hotly debated by arts organizations and the fact that the subject is popping up in various forms indicates the topic isn’t going away any time soon.
If things are quiet for you over the summer, it might be a good time to evaluate your interactions with donors and customers. A few years back, I brought attention to a number of interesting findings about customer interactions.
One was that
“perceived indifference by a company causes far more people to sever their relationship with a company than cost and quality issues.” and “It’s important to note here that indifference only be perceived. People cannot know other people’s motives; they can only deduce them from the actions they see. So you can care passionately and still be perceived as indifferent.”
The third dealt with using industry standard language in materials for customer/donors that not only have no relevance to these groups, but can ultimately be alienating.
Over the weekend I read a very interesting blog post by Nick Kokonas who implemented a system where people would buy tickets to his restaurants.
One of the problems he faced was that they were employing 3 people full time just to call people back and tell them there were no seats for Friday or Saturday at 8 pm. They were also losing a lot of money due to no-shows or partial no-shows because they couldn’t call their long waiting list of people to tell them they could be seated in 15 minutes.
What they did was create a demand based pricing structure with non-refundable tickets and put the whole system online. That way patrons could see exactly what was available and see that weekend nights were much more expensive than Tuesday nights and make decisions accordingly.
This creates a lot of transparency and trust with customers because the restaurant doesn’t have to overbook to hedge against no-shows and then divert people to the bar if more people keep their reservations than were anticipated.
They also differed their operations from other online services like Open Table. Most restaurants don’t put their entire seating online and customers have figured that out and call in to the restaurant anyway. Since Kokonas wanted to avoid paying his employees to say “No” all the time, they basically put everything they intended to offer online giving people no reason to call in and try to wheedle a seating.
Their no-shows dropped precipitously and even if only a partial table shows up, they have already collected the cost of the meal from them.
I should note, the restaurants offer a fixed menu so there is not a lot of variability in people’s orders. They do have one bar-restaurant with a more variable menu where they collect a $20 deposit which is applied against your bill and no-show dropped immensely there as well.
But reading this got me thinking– this is a situation where people pay a uniform price in advance to consume a similar product and the the result was a greatly reduced no-show rate.
This sounds lot like going to a live performance. Only when I have looked at the sales versus tickets taken at the door (or just eyeball the audience at a performance) I see more no-shows than I would like.
I wonder at the reasons behind this. It could be that many are subscribers and they forgot they had tickets for the show or they have decided this is the show in the series they are least interested in and want to skip it.
I know this doesn’t just happen to me because I have attended otherwise sold out performances where a significant swath of prime seating remains empty.
While subscribers have the right not to occupy the seats they have paid for, as conversations about demand pricing for seats at performances continue, you have to at least consider whether you are setting prices high enough.
This is absolutely a consideration at sold out performances where you might really have an opportunity to increase your earned revenue in the face of decreasing support from foundations and individuals.
It is also a consideration in less well attended performances where too low a price might not provide enough incentive for people to attend. I have seen a decision to go from free to a $5 charge fill performances. If you are intentionally keeping prices low so a target audience can attend and they buy tickets but don’t attend, then the effort is as much as failure as if high prices dissuaded their attendance.
There are dozens of other factors that can account for the difference in no-show rates between Kokonas’ restaurants and performance venues. The social cachet of eating at a high demand restaurant that only seats about 90 being a significant one.
Even without considering the success Kokonas’ has realized, there are dozens of factors that make ticket pricing decisions very difficult for arts organizations. Still, it is always interesting to see how pricing is used to good effect and ponder what lessons might be derived.
Seth Godin had a post today reflecting on a woman he noticed in front row seats at a concert being given by jazz bassist Christian McBride. The woman was fidgeting, checking her watch and fiddling with stuff, entirely disengaged with the concert.
Says Godin:
McBride seemed to be too professional and too experienced to get brought down by her disrespect and disengagement. Here’s what he knew: It wasn’t about him, it wasn’t about the music, it wasn’t a response to what he was creating.
[…]
Do your work, your best work, the work that matters to you. For some people, you can say, “hey, it’s not for you.” That’s okay. If you try to delight the undelightable, you’ve made yourself miserable for no reason.
It’s sort of silly to make yourself miserable, but at least you ought to reserve it for times when you have a good reason.
We all know that ideally, this is the best philosophy to embrace. We know that the arts aren’t for everyone and that you have to allow people the time and space they need in order to eventually find that your work resonates with them. If it is going to resonate at all, that is.
But we don’t live in an ideal world and we receive a lot of messages that our audiences need to get it, and get it quick. This obviously manifests in ticket sales reports and the requirements of just plain old pride in wanting to have seats full of people enjoying themselves.
There is a lot of subtext that our funding depends on it as well. We are asked about the diversity of our audience. What are the numbers and percentages of racial groups, students and seniors?
Some times there is no subtext at all. I am currently working on a final grant report that asks what we did to engage the community to participate; what did or will we do to remove perceptual, practical and experiential barriers; what motivates patron, board members and volunteers; and to provide a first hand account of how the programming has made an impact on an individual or a group.
Faced with questions like that, you have a lot of motivation to start thinking your audience, board and volunteers need to experience something that moves them, and they need to have that moving experience during the current grant period.
Its no wonder we have ushers patrolling the aisles and glaring at people pulling out their iPhones. Not only can’t we afford to have the individual become disengaged from the performance, we need to make sure the glow of the phone isn’t constituting a perceptual or experiential barrier to a dozen other people around them. These are all black marks against us that our funders expect us to address.
Now as a practical matter, foundations aren’t infiltrating mystery shoppers into our audiences to make sure we are properly identifying these problems and proposing solutions in our final reports. Their questions are meant to inspire some self-examination in grant recipients about procedures and operations.
Questions like these on a grant report indicate the type of activity and outcomes that are valued in grant recipients. These expectations are somewhat in conflict with the long view non-profit arts organizations are enjoined to embrace in respect to cultivating their audiences.
When Christian McBride plays The Blue Note, the venue worries about whether they sold enough tickets, food and alcohol to cover costs. The Blue Note certainly wants all the patrons to have a good time and come back again, but they don’t concern themselves too much with whether people have attained a new level of personal growth.
When McBride plays at a non-profit arts center’s jazz series, the organization worries about all those things The Blue Note worries about, but also has to concern themselves about recognizing potential barriers to entry, the diversity of the audience and whether they have been inspired.
It can be something of a psychic burden to try to balance all the requirements of a non-profit existence. You have to be cool, put your best work out there and not worry about delighting the undelightable.
But at the same time, you wonder how you have failed that person. What barriers have you been complicit in maintaining? Is she really undelightable, or is that a convenient way for writing her off when you should be patient and try harder? How can you change your programming and outreach efforts so she feels engaged and included?
It got me wondering what sort of terminology do people use when they have a positive or negative experience after an arts or cultural experience. Looking back over some surveys we have, I couldn’t see any patterns. I imagine it is because we have such a small sample size and often people aren’t very verbose with their responses, providing short commentary like “It was great!”
It would be interesting to see what the results might be from a literature review of past arts and culture surveys.
Even without such a study, there are some observations from the restaurant language study that might provide clues for arts and cultural organizations. For instance, people who wrote negative reviews really didn’t talk about the food as often as they commented about the experience. Reviewers used terms like “worst, rude, terrible, horrible, bad, awful, disgusting, attitude and mistake.”
According to the study authors,
“one–star reviews were overwhelmingly focused on narrating experiences of trauma rather than discussing food, both portraying the author as a victim and using first person plural to express solace in community.”
As mentioned earlier, the positive reviews were split in the types of terms they used. Addiction terminology was used for cheaper food that fell into a general category of sweet or starchy comfort type food purchased from a cafe, diner or food truck.
“…addiction, crave/craving, chocoholic, jonesing, binge/binging. It also includes phrases in which drugs are described as a metaphor (drug of choice, like a drug, new drug, favorite drug, etc.) and phrases describing food as the drug crack (including made of crack, food crack, edible crack, etc.).
Reviews would use the first person singular, “I”, showing a personal investment in the opinion.
Most terms used in more expensive sit down restaurants revolved more around sensual aspects of the food:
Reviews for more expensive restaurants tended to be longer and use more complex words.
In terms of negative reviews for arts and cultural events, we do know that the experience surrounding the event often plays a large factor in whether a person enjoys a performance. So if you are seeing language like that, positive or negative, it is something to pay close attention to. Even if they praise the ease of parking today, you know that might be an area of complaint if road construction impedes it next time around.
I am not sure sexual or addiction terminology in reviews is a dependable criteria for judging a review to be a positive one. However, the type and complexity of words used in a positive may give a hint as to whether your audience views your events as a guilty pleasure or a high value experience.
Or lack of complexity in a response could mean that people simply lack the knowledge and confidence to provide sophisticated commentary.
The language of decadence is used in relation to food 100 times a day for everything from a diet snack to a master chef’s entree on a cooking show. No one will really judge a person for making an inaccurate or uninformed evaluation of a cheap piece of chocolate.
But even if someone has watched every season of American Idol, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, etc, etc, they may not feel qualified to critically evaluate a performance the same way the judges on those shows do. Both the language and the practice of talking about these experiences is infrequent and uncommon for most people.
In fact, it is expected that you immediately express your delight upon eating something you approve of, but that you delay your response until an appropriate time at many performances.
The effusive vocabulary applied to a meal will probably never develop for a performance. Still, a closer reading of the terminology used in surveys, comments and lobby chatter might provide some insight.
Last week I participated in a Twitter conversation about curtain calls and curtain speeches sponsored by HowlRound. They had the whole thing storified almost before I thought about doing it myself.
The hour went by so quickly and there were so many opinions on the matter, I figured it was a great topic to bring up on the old blog here.
I will start by stating my position on curtain speeches and am happy to have people argue for or against.
If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have a curtain speech. At worst, they are long, disorganized rambles that are often more about people giving money to support the organization than conducive to experience the audience is about to have.
That said, I see them as a necessary evil. I don’t see that as a contradiction, but rather as something of a corollary to the idea that the best king is the person who doesn’t want the job because they will be least intrusive in the people’s lives.
Many localities require fire exits, etc pointed out to audiences. Given that I have worked in locations that are tornado and earthquake prone, I feel it is important that such an announcement be made. People tend to pay more attention to a human than a recording so I will often do the curtain speech.
There is also the issue of reminding people to turn off cell phones, etc. I have seen great video announcements at movie theaters that get that point across, but those videos don’t often fit with the atmosphere of the evening and again since people will pay closer attention to a live person, I see it as another reason to do the speech.
But at least once a year I end up leaving it to the audio announcement because my presence prior to the show doesn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the event.
In the Twitter chat some people said they like curtain speeches that are made in the theme of the play. One of the most recent I saw had the actor playing the stern housekeeper in the show severely warning audience members about cell phones, etc.
I agree that this can be a clever device and hold attention, but sometimes it too clever by half and ends up detracting from the play itself when people associate the character with the person who made the curtain speech rather than with the role they play in the performance.
The other necessity I see associated with curtain speeches is supporting grants. Not only do you need to acknowledge sponsors and funders from the stage as well as in print, but granting organizations want hard number research. Again, it is more effective to have someone on stage enjoining people to fill out a survey than having it written somewhere or announced by a disembodied voice.
Some times it is just a matter of making people aware there is a meet and greet with the performers after the show. People miss the notice in the program and tend to be grateful for the opportunity. The more people attend, the better outreach attendance data for your grant report.
In some of my past posts I have written that I often use curtain speeches to forge connections with the community. They see me on stage and then I am in the lobby at intermission and the end of the show for them to deliver praise or complaints to.
As I have mentioned, I also try to impart some information about the show that people are unaware of that may enhance their enjoyment. This past year, I feel like my most successful attempts were talking about the impact of A Christmas Carol in shaping holiday traditions we take for granted and reminding people that The Miracle Worker only deals with the first of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan’s accomplishments.
Other curtain speeches aren’t as successful. It takes a little while to understand what information might resonate most with audiences.
I try to keep all this to 3-4 minutes and start right at the performance time so that the curtain speech is covering the stragglers in the audience who are trying to find their seats. That way my delay and the interruption of late comers cancel one another out.
If I didn’t do my speech, the audience would still be disturbed by those latecomers, so better they have my entertaining presence to focus on. The important element of this strategy is to get house management to give the go ahead for the speech when they estimate there are only about 2-3 minutes worth of people left in the lobby.
To make the curtain speech quick, effective, informative and not negatively impact audience enjoyment takes some work. I think the reason why people hate curtain speeches is due to the lack of preparation by those who do them. The reality is, the curtain speech is as much a tone setting first impression as the interaction a customer has with your ticket office staff or office receptionist. Equal attention must be paid.
I am often jotting notes about a performance in a Word document months before the event. Some will be part of a social media post, some will be part of a press release and some will be part of the curtain speech for that show. I usually have a good idea about what I am going to say a few days before the performance. I am waiting in the wings 5-10 minutes before the show starts staring at the floor going over what I intend to say.
Sometimes it is great and sometimes I screw up a little because I try to speak extemporaneously with only a few jotted notes. The goal is always to get a little better, a little more engaging and a little more adept each time.
Things you will notice I have not included: fundraising pleas and promoting other shows. Certain times of the year I might mention one of these topics- i.e. Telling people when to expect the new subscription brochure at the closing show of the current season. I don’t make it a habit to regularly talk about future shows because it can undermine the current show if I am praising the next show on the schedule. (Hamlet will be amazing! Oh, and enjoy tonight’s show…)
There are a lot of great thoughts in the chat. I didn’t see half of them when the discussion was in progress.
What do you think? Can any of this be handled more effectively some other way?
I apologize for the lack of posts last week. I learned about a death in the family the Friday before last and I didn’t have an opportunity to schedule posts to cover my absence.
On my flight back I missed a connection and spent the night sleeping on the floor in O’Hare airport. The initial cause was a weather delay, but it was exacerbated by some other incidents. When we were queued up to take off, we pulled out of line because of weather over Chicago. Shortly thereafter, a guy in front of me started mouthing off to the flight attendants. As a result, we rolled back to the gate and he was put off the plane. The captain announced anyone else who wanted to get off could.
Then we rolled back to the holding area and after 10-15 minutes, the captain comes on and says someone else wants to get off the plane. We roll back to the gate and this time a number of people choose to get off. Finding the luggage for everyone who had left took a long time. As soon as we were done (and watched the safety video for the 3rd time) we basically rolled right from the gate to the runway and took off.
Even though my connecting flight had been delayed in taking off, I still arrived a half hour after it left and ended up sleeping in the airport due to a lack of available hotel rooms and rental cars.
The question I pondered as I eyed my name inching up on the standby queue was what this willingness to go back to the gate twice portends for customer expectations and demands in the future. I understand the security concerns associated a hostile passenger that had us return to the gate the first time, the second return seemed to be motivated more by a simple request.
I wonder at the calculus that made returning to the gate a second time and potentially adding to the mass of people stranded at an airport and the ill will that would generate seem preferable to getting in the air at the first possibility.
Worse, I wondered about what sort of precedent this would set for future flights I might take if people felt they had license to request a return to the gate when they got tired of waiting for the plane to take off.
What is the possible impact of airlines making these decisions upon the changing expectations of our audiences?
One statement I heard at a seminar on customer service that always made sense to me was that no customer really wants their money back. That is just the easiest and most assumed option thanks to repeated claims of “satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back.”
But who spends time and money driving/flying somewhere, renting a hotel, getting a babysitter, paying for meals and making whatever other arrangements are required to reach a destination or purchase a product, assured by the knowledge that they can always get their money back if they are dissatisfied?
They go to all this trouble because they expect to have a problem free experience. Giving them their money back doesn’t really compensate for all the other expenses and effort that was required. So if you are the source of disappointment, you should work to make the situation better and hold the refund for later when other options have been exhausted.
In some respects, the returning to the gate is a better solution than giving money back. But my feeling is that if they made being on the plane a more comfortable, positive situation to start with, people would be less interested in getting off. It is a sorry state of affairs when getting off and going nowhere is viewed as the preferred option.
The same is likely true of attendance at performing and visual arts events.
But this is where buying things online and receiving your entertainment in your house is so attractive. You don’t have to make the time and financial investment required for a destination based product or experience. If you are not satisfied, you can ask for your money back. You may not be entirely happy, but at least you don’t feel the bad experience has cost you in other areas.
My concern about the impact of this “go back to the gate” practice is less about people thinking they can get up and leave whenever they want to if they are dissatisfied. That practice is decades old. My worry is that this advances the idea of individual desires over the good of the collective group and will manifest in ways worse than people talking and texting on phones during a performance.
In short, he had the restrooms and other important building features placed in a central hub so that people from different parts of the company would run into each other. About a year ago I wrote a little about other arrangements that replicate this basic idea.
Today he made his final post on the places where creative class workers are segregated from everyone else. Even if you are skeptical about Florida’s theories about creative class bolstering the economies of different communities, the research results are interesting to consider. I had never even thought about segregation of creatives as a problematic condition.
You may have heard of the term “town and gown” referring to the distinct cultural line that often develops between people who live in a community with a college and those who attend and work there. The depth of this cultural divide is one of the factors that feeds into the creative class segregation, but there are many others as well.
The metros where the creative class is most segregated include the nation’s largest metros and many of its leading knowledge-based economic centers. Los Angeles tops the list, followed by Houston, San Jose, San Francisco, New York, Austin, San Antonio, San Diego, and Chicago.
When we expand the list to include all metros, a number of smaller ones also show substantial levels of segregation. The creative class remains the most segregated in Los Angeles, but Trenton-Ewing, New Jersey (which includes Princeton University) takes second place, and Salinas, California is the third most highly segregated metro in the country on this score…The creative class is also highly segregated in college towns like Ann Arbor, Durham-Chapel Hill, Tucson, Gainesville, and College Station. As I wrote a few weeks ago, many of these smaller college towns also experience high levels of segregation of educated residents.
There were some results from the research that I saw encouraging to my hope that vibrant cultural experiences could be built in smaller communities.
Conversely, the metros where the creative class is least segregated are mainly in the Midwest and Sunbelt. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul is the least segregated large metro on this score, followed by Rochester, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Providence, Milwaukee, and Hartford. Jacksonville, Tampa, and Virginia Beach in the Sunbelt round out the top ten large metros where the creative class is least segregated.
The metros where the creative class is least segregated are all smaller ones. In fact, there are more than 150 smaller and medium-sized metros where the creative class is less segregated than their counterparts in the least segregated large metro. Many of these places, especially in the Northeast and the Midwest, are cities where levels of the creative class are fairly low. Mankato, Minnesota, has the lowest level of creative class segregation in the country, followed by Lewiston-Auburn, Maine; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Joplin, Missouri; and Rome, Georgia.
There are a number of reasons why segregation is higher in large metropolis, often having to do with gentrification raising rents and longer commuting times, both which inhibit different groups from interacting with each other.
So getting back to the question I posed yesterday about what scenario might be better, this research got me wondering if a situation might arise where a lot of people are doing creative work in a large city, but they may be doing it in enclaves distinct from the general population. That dynamic may actually be better for your personal creative growth, but the work being created might also be more disconnected from the community than that being created in a smaller metro area.
It may be more difficult therefore to attain the goal of “serving the community” in a larger metro than a smaller one. Even though greater numbers of people are experiencing your work, you may be serving a far smaller segment of the population than an artist in a metro area of 50,000. Two arts organizations in the smaller metro may serve a far more economic, educational and racially diverse segment of their general community than 20 arts organizations in a larger city.
As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t really thought about segregation of creatives as being a problem. I wonder if it is perceived as such. Is this manifesting in a negative manner for cities with high segregation like New York, Austin and Chicago, which are all recognized as having relatively vibrant cultural scenes? Do they see untapped potential in more integrated living conditions?
The protests in San Francisco against tech companies like Google would seem to be a reaction against creatives living amongst the population. (The issues are more complicated than that, really.)
On the other hand, the low segregation communities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Rochester, Buffalo and Cincinnati all generally recognize and appreciate the benefits their arts scenes bring to the livability of their respective cities. And lest you think that smaller communities necessarily means less available financial support for the arts, ArtsWave of Cincinnati just raised “$12 million in contributions– the highest amount ever raised by any community campaign for the arts in the country.”
Last week I was thinking about alternative category names for giving levels because our current names lean heavily toward classical music while that is only a small portion of our programming.
As I got to thinking about it, I wondered if anyone had thought about changing the names of their giving levels from season to season both as a way to do some A/B testing on what types of category names might inspire people to give more and to appeal to a younger generation of donors.
People who are used to giving through Kickstarter with all the exciting images and rewards at different support levels might not be motivated by a static list of giving levels like: Donor, Supporter and Benefactor.
Category titles that changed every year and aligned with the season might be more engaging. If you were going to give $450, would you increase it to $500 to be listed in a category employing Henry V’s “We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers” as a giving level? Or the aforementioned “Riding With the Valkyries”?
Unless you were being tongue in cheek, you would probably want to stay away from a The Merchant of Venice “Pound of Flesh” as a category. Though “As You Like It” might be a good category for a giving level that garners many perks.
If you are clever about it, you might actually have people opening their donor solicitation letter to see what names you came up with as eagerly as they flip through the season brochure to see what shows are being offered.
While there is no guarantee they will give, they will at least be a little more engaged with the process.
I have been keeping a Createquity post about gamification and arts events bookmarked on my web brower for while now. I liked some of the ideas suggested there and hoped to refer back to the entry for inspiration in the future. I was surprised to realize the post was actually created nearly two years ago. It seems so much more recent.
I came across another article recently that underscored the necessity of paying close attention to the design of any experience you may gamify. As with any game, some times people get a little more competitive than we might like.
In a post recounting the different experiences she and her friends experienced attending Sleep No More, Megan Reilly talks about how some of the repeat attendees have been using their knowledge to try to force certain outcomes. This tends to negatively impact the experience of other attendees, especially first timers.
My other friend, Amanda, got to have the same Hecate experience that I described above – having the ring put on her finger, and going through “Is That All There Is?” When Hecate turned to choose someone else for her 1:1, however, that selected person apparently tried to take the ring off my friend’s finger! I really want to know what was going on in that person’s head, to make him think that this behavior was ok. And this is not the worst behavior I’ve heard of on the part of the audience – just the worst that has happened to someone I know
and later
Many people by now have had so much experience visiting and revisiting “Sleep No More” that they are becoming like gamers, saving and restoring and attempting something new to experience something they KNOW is there but has so far been hidden from them. They try to find the secret combination of moves that unlocks the 1:1 with Hecate, and get visibly frustrated when they are not the chosen ones. They don’t care that someone else next to them might be experiencing the show for the first time – they want their experience/interaction/hidden secret scene, dammit. After all, they paid roughly $90 to play this game (or more, if like me you are not in NYC) and they want to win.
I love the parallels between “Sleep No More” and games, I really do. I love being responsible for my own journey through a story, and having to do some work in order to discover a narrative. I love that there are little errands and quests within the show that are given to different lucky audience members. I don’t want the 1:1 experiences to be removed. But how do you let the audience of 400 something people a night know that the experience of the show doesn’t have to include any one of these things? That their ticket price does not entitle them to a specific experience? And that the other audience members and the performers are not non-playable characters?
I would encourage people to read the whole thing, even if you have no intention of ever gamifying your experience. Megan Reilly’s discussion of what elements work and why it is so exciting might change your mind.
In some respects, what she talks about are the hazards of attending a public performance writ large. The person who pulls out their cellphone in the middle of a conventional performance and starts talking may be the same person who pushes you aside at Sleep No More. The percentage of the general population who will impinge upon the enjoyment of others is probably going to remain constant.
Another issue one of Reilly’s friends faced seemed to simply be a function of letting the audience interact with each other. There was a lot of non-verbal signalling that something was going to happen when experienced audience members watched the rest of the audience for their reaction or all started rushing in a certain direction.
When people are all seated quietly in a theater facing in one direction, the anticipation of those who have seen the show before is less apparent. But that experience is certainly also less interesting and probably doesn’t encourage as much return business as the Sleep No More experience, even at $90 a pop.
Monday night I went to the library to return a couple books. I had finished the second book in a series and wanted to read the third, but I had checked and knew the library didn’t have the third book. I went to the reference desk to see if I could request the book from another one in the state.
I was told the system to check if another library in the state had the book was down, but if I wanted, I could request that the library buy it. That way, I could have the book for a month rather than 2 weeks via interlibrary loan. Since I read quickly and didn’t want the library to buy a new book on my account, I said I would request the book via interlibrary loan during another visit.
This is where things got interesting.
The librarian decided to check if they had already ordered the book given that they had the first two volumes. She discovered that not only had they ordered the book in the last week, but my name had been flagged as a person to inform when the book came in based on my borrowing habits.
I left the library muttering under my breath that I really needed to start looking seriously at customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Here was a library serving a rural county of 78,000 whose services I use for free that had bought a book for me based on tracking my use of their services. (Yes, I suppose other people may have read the series too, but they ordered it right after I took out the second book so as far as I am concerned, they bought it for me.)
The way I see it, if they invest so much effort into serving a person who uses their services for free, how much disservice am I doing to my patrons who are paying me $30-$50 to see shows if I am not closely tracking their preferences and trying to figure out how to serve them better?
The way I see it, that last sentence there is a crucial one. There is a difference between the way Amazon uses software to track my activities in the interest of trying to sell me a book and the way the library tracks my activities in interest of buying a book for me.
While I would certainly use the software to suggest shows a person might be interested in seeing based on past history, I would also want to think about ways I could use data we collect to shape our programming to serve their interests.
[N.B. Well, I wrote this post on Monday evening knowing I wouldn’t have time to do so on Tuesday because we had a show. I just happened to see one of the librarians after the show and asked her what CRM system they used. She tapped her head.
Turns out, she had noticed what books I was taking out and order the third book in the series. I had specifically asked on Monday night if it were she that had ordered the book and was given an answer that made me think it was all tracked by software. This just goes to show that the best customer relationship software is caring employees paying attention and making notes.]
“It’s too expensive,” almost never means, “there isn’t enough money if I think it’s worth it.”
Social entrepreneurs are often chagrined to discover that low-income communities around the world that said their innovation was, “too expensive” figured out how to find the money to buy a cell phone instead. Even at the bottom of the pyramid, many people find a way to pay for the things they value.
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Often, it actually means, “it’s not worth it.” This is a totally different analysis, of course. Lots of things aren’t worth it, at least to you, right now. I think it’s safe to assume that when you hear a potential customer say, “it’s too expensive,” what you’re really hearing is something quite specific.
There is a sentiment commonly expressed around arts organizations, especially ones that are trying to attract college age attendees, that college students who say a ticket is too expensive will generally spend twice as much on beer on the same Saturday night. While a performance and a beer are transitory experiences, everyone knows beer is more transitory of the two. (The old saying, you don’t buy it, you rent it.) But, of course, it is the social environment that accompanies the beer that people value.
More from Godin:
Culturally, we create boundaries for what something is worth. A pomegranate juice on the streets of Istanbul costs a dollar, and it’s delicious. The same juice in New York would be seen as a bargain for five times as much money. Clearly, we’re not discussing the ability to pay nor are we considering the absolute value of a glass of juice. No, it’s about our expectation of what people like us pay for something like that.
Start with a tribe or community that in fact does value what you do. And then do an ever better job of explaining and storytelling, increasing the perceived value instead of lowering the price. (Even better, actually increase the value delivered). When you don’t need everyone to buy what you sell, “it’s too expensive” from some is actually a useful reminder that you’ve priced this appropriately for the rest of your audience.
Over time, as influencers within a tribe embrace the higher value (and higher price) then the culture starts to change. When people like us start to pay more for something like that, it becomes natural (and even urgent) for us to pay for it too.
That bit I bolded caught my eye. In theory the arts already deal with a tribe or community that does value what it does. That tribe tends to be affluent and influential, but we all know the common refrain is that these people are dying off. Whatever influence they have, it isn’t continuing to motivate too many others.
I am not sure the answer is just better storytelling and waiting for influencers to help shift the culture. I think there has to be a corresponding shift in product features to something consumers value as well.
This isn’t just about the arts. In the cell phone example Godin uses, the phone’s value in the developing world goes beyond just being able to talk to other people. It allows people to gather information about crop prices and choose which market to travel to and acts as a medium forcurrency exchange.
Without these benefits, I don’t imagine as many people in the developing world would own phones as do today. They are buying Nokia phones with long battery life rather than iPhones because electricity sources are so scarce.
In terms of the arts, I have no doubt that it is entirely possible to avoid compromising on price. I likewise believe that there are many groups out there offering what people want, but who suffer from lack of good storytelling.
Yet just as phone companies know they will sell more Nokia phones in Kenya than Apple and Samsung phones, even though those two companies are duking it out for domination in the rest of the world, very few arts organizations are going to be exempt from aligning their “product features” to suit local conditions.
There was a TED Radio segment that aired back in October that hit so many of the conversation points in the arts today: recognizing failure, serving communities and funder priorities.
The topic was aid work in Africa. Italian aid worker Ernesto Sirolli reveals that pretty much every aid effort in Africa has failed. Some failures are attributable to arrogance of thinking you know what the solution is, but are equally attributable to the fact that no one will admit their failures, leaving others to replicate them.
SIROLLI: Every single project that we set up in Africa failed, and I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed.
RAZ: How did every single project fail?
SIROLLI: And they still do. See, the first reaction was, let’s not tell anybody we made a mistake. Let’s not tell anybody about this project. I really thought that it was one bad project that will never be repeated, which, I think, is what the Americans in the Peace Corps are thinking right now. That they are in a bad project, but it’s unique. So what they do, they don’t tell anybody what they’ve done because there must be lots and lots of lot good projects out there.
But if they had the chance to go and find out what their colleagues are doing around Africa, they will discover that, in fact, the norm is failure.
What caught my eye was the assumption by each group that their failure was unique based on the assumption everyone else was succeeding. Not surprising since everyone was reporting successes.
Sirolli says that everyone sent back reports to the home office talking about how great things were going when everything was actually going to hell. While the rosy reports were submitted to one office, another letter was sent to him begging him to come help the distressed aid workers.
I think the arts world faces a similar problem, it is just that our budgets are a bit smaller. The failures get a lot more publicity though, if you take a look at all the orchestra negotiations that have broken down and the failure of companies like City Opera in NYC.
Actually, that is not really accurate. We only know the very end results in each of these cases. We don’t know enough about the failures that lead to these situations to learn from them. There isn’t much to be learned from “Don’t Run Out of Money.” A little more transparency and frank discussion may be helpful.
When Sirolli talks about the Enterprise Facilitation system he invented, I felt like his approach was both a lesson to arts organizations and funders.
SIROLLI: … And I invented the system called Enterprise Facilitation where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion. The servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. So what you do, you shut up, you never arrive in a community with any ideas and you sit with the local people. We don’t work from offices. We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. We have zero infrastructure. And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do…
…The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. And then we help them to go and find the knowledge because nobody in the world can succeed alone. The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. So years and years ago, I had this idea – why don’t we, for once, instead of arriving in a community to tell people what to do, why don’t, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn’t exist.
Art organizations can probably take a cue from him about learning about the community by hanging out in cafes and talking to people rather than holding community meetings. Both funders of arts organizations and the arts organizations themselves might find value in simply helping people to connect their passions with the knowledge they need to realize their passion.
Any entity with resources to offer will probably find it difficult to just step back and not try to motivate people or impose their ideas on the people they hope to help. I am sure Sirolli and his people had that problem when they started. It is extremely difficult to surrender your ego and expectations, especially when you are bringing money to the table.
But the thing is, that is exactly what the best actors are able to do. They set aside their expectations about the way a scene should go and open themselves to the infinite possibilities that might occur. That way if a line is flubbed or delivered differently than it has been in the past, they can respond appropriately to the situation.
Bad actors chug on heedless of unexpected change or are caught short by it. In either case, they call attention to the problem.
This isn’t the best analogy because Sirolli’s people don’t react in order to serve their motivations the way actors do. Still, his people need to strive toward the same goal of suspending judgment in the same manner as actors do.
Playwright Mike Lew criticizes the logic behind blaming a lack of arts education for a decreasing attendance at arts events.
Take the basic argument of “We need more theater in schools so more people will go see theater later in life” and substitute comparable forms of entertainment where young people are already dropping boatloads of money. The very logic of the construction collapses.
Consider the following assertions:
-No one likes cooking anymore because we stopped teaching Home Ec in the schools.
-We need more video game training in classrooms to ensure the next generation of Xbox users.
-If we don’t teach kids how to listen to standup comedy, Louis CK will go bankrupt.
-Kids who never played live music in school just plain won’t pay for a Jay-Z concert.
Now consider the converse, swapping out theater for things that we do teach in schools:
-Good thing we taught kids biology, because zoo attendance is up 50%.
-Colonial Williamsburg is popping thanks to US History classes.
-Now that we have English in schools, bookstores are saved!
-My classroom had a PC, therefore this ipad is nonsense.
Some of his examples are a little flawed. Whether it is due to the lack of home ec classes or not, people actually aren’t cooking.
Much like cooking, arts attendance and participation is influenced by the example provided by parents and educational environment. I would argue with both the arts and cooking, the more you know, the more you will be willing to experiment with unfamiliar fare.
But as Lew points out, interest doesn’t depend on you being introduced to the arts in school. People will make the decision to attend if the opportunity appears interesting enough.
While his contentions that the problem is based in inflexible timing of performances, dearth of social opportunities, programming choices that don’t resonate with the lives of young people and general lack of hospitality are not new arguments, it doesn’t mean he is wrong.
As I was reading some of his examples, I thought that it wasn’t logical to draw a direct line from biology to zoo attendance and English classes and bookstores because there are plenty of other positive outcomes that can result from these classes. The same can be true of the arts. English, sociology and anthropology can as easily lead to the arts as directly arts education when you think about the stories people tell and the way they express themselves.
Give his post a read, he makes many interesting points in his contribution to this ongoing discussion.
Last summer there were a number of stories about how the Seoul city government installed a giant ear sculpture into which citizens could make comments. The ear was served something of a dual purpose as a comment box and art installation. The comments were recorded and then played inside city hall. Sensors measured how long people stopped to listen, archiving those that gave pause for potential further action and composting (term the article uses) those that aren’t popular into music.
It has taken about 6 months of that percolating in the back of my consciousness for the obvious to occur to me. Duplicating this effort would be a visually and procedurally interesting way to collect feedback from the community about what you should be doing. If your organization is in a high traffic area, you could put it out on the sidewalk or move it around your community setting it up at the mall, fair grounds, park and other public places so that people could tell you what they thought about your organization, the programming, outreach efforts, etc.
Basically, it might provide a good opportunity to hear from the people who never set foot near your organization. Some big sculpture is probably much more interesting and engaging than having a survey firm cold call every phone number in town in order to reach those in your community you aren’t already serving. Granted, the feedback from a phone survey can provide more scientific results, but it probably wouldn’t be as effective at building relationships and goodwill.
The other obvious use is to plop it down in your lobby to try to capture some responses from attendees who won’t provide responses to your written or online surveys. Just the novelty of interacting with whatever figure you choose to use might elicit a number of responses.
Of course, if you go the talking Paul Bunyan statue route and have a staff member get your sculpture to respond, you might actually be able to (gently) guide the discussion to topics to which you are interested in getting answers.
"Though while the author wishes they could buy it in Walmart..." Who is "they"? The kids? The author? Something else?…