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Audience Relations

It’s Just Something I Was Trying

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A few weeks ago I posted about an orchestra in Bremen, Germany which is based out of an elementary school. The situation has been something both the students and musicians have found to be constructive and enjoyable. In addition, the partnership has helped improve the reputation of that part of town.

In reaction to this story, there were a few “we should do that here” type of comments made in a handful of places. Recently, I was pleased to learn that a somewhat similar program exists in Cleveland where some music students of the Cleveland Institute of Music live in a retirement home.

The arrangement was born out of a lack of housing at the Cleveland Institute but has grown into a more formalized program. Students from the institute perform for, and occasionally with, residents of the retirement home. The students take their meals and interact with the other residents. On the whole, the arrangement seems to have had a positive and somewhat therapeutic impact on the lives of the regular residents.

So this is great! Music students will gain a better understanding of potential audiences!

At least that was my initial reactions until I recognized, as we often joke/bemoan, residents of a retirement community are the main demographic attending symphony halls and chamber concerts.

While these students may potentially develop insights and skills for better interacting with potential audiences, the truth is arts students live, work and play with those on the lower end of the coveted “young people” age range in university dorms and apartment complexes for years at a time and don’t necessarily develop these skills.

To a greater or lesser extent, we all live among members of our target demographics, but it doesn’t guarantee we will learn to relate with these groups and talk about our work in a way that interests and engages them.

Perhaps part of what is required is to take a page from Bremen and Cleveland and just go out and practice in plain sight.

I say practice because a performance in the park, flash mob in a train station or shopping center can have enough formality associated with it to prevent people from approaching you lest they disturb you. While being a familiar figure frequently visible in the park or other common area, pausing and restarting your practicing, can incite some curiosity and conversation.

The years one is in school probably provide the best opportunities an artist has to understand how to present themselves and interact with their peers.

Operating within the context of an educational environment may give both the performer and the observer the most permission they will ever have to ask stupid questions and give awkward answers. In other words, both get to learn to talk about the arts.

There is a lot of conversation about the need to teach arts students to be entrepreneurs, but I am thinking an important part of that might be requiring students to spend X amount of time each month practicing their discipline outside of rehearsal studios and practice rooms in places like dorm quads, university center lounges, sidewalks, green spaces etc.

During this time, they should be departing from discipline and orthodoxy of the classroom to play along with music on a boombox, create an impromptu soundtrack for actors performing a scene, paint/sketch an interpretation of the music/dance/acting piece being performed.

You know, essentially embodying the cliched movie plot of the kid who has the skills to be great, but wastes their talent rebelling and involving themselves in some expression of pop culture.

Except this time, it is instructor approved effort in experimentation, collaboration and conversation.

After a few minutes of playing with an idea, they can turn to any spectators and ask “what do you think?”

That can be the start of a conversation that can gradually contribute to the development of both performer and spectator. If the spectator says, “I don’t know,” and the performers says “I don’t know either, it was just something I was trying,” that is perfectly fine because it gives everyone involved permission to be imperfect in execution and understanding.

If spectators jump in to participate in some way, that is great because it provides the basis of a conversation between people who have a connection to the performance/interaction.

There is always the possibility that a spectator will launch into a scathing critique in an attempt to humiliate the students practicing. That is something else all artists need to learn to deal with.

Chances are, the face to face encounter won’t be as harsh as a criticism on social media. Though instructors need to recognize the potential for their students to be recorded and belittled on social media.

Really, unless they are trying something extremely ambitious, kids wiping out on their skateboards or while attempting a parkour move are much more interesting fodder for a video of Epic Fails.

Even if no great, incisive conversations ever develop from an arts student’s efforts, just the fact that it made seeing an artist perform/create as normal as seeing a skateboarder can have a long term positive effect.

There may even be a greater impact if it is a high school/college age peer performing/creating masterfully. After all, a teenage skateboarder is a lot cooler and impressive than a 45 year old skateboarder (Tony Hawk notwithstanding.)

Doing It Alone: Reader Participation Edition

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Okay dear readers, I need your help.

Buoyed by the amount of traffic and social media sharing on my “Talking to Strangers” post back in February and encouraged by the recent research finding that people underestimate how much they will enjoy doing things alone, I plan to work over the summer to develop a program to encourage single attendees .

If you recall from my Talking To Strangers post, I, (and I assume a bunch of the rest of you), was inspired by an effort in Brazil which reserved seats on buses for strangers who were interested in meeting new people. To facilitate the process, they had Post-It notes with suggested topics of conversation for participants to use.

Given that an NEA study said a significant impediment to event attendance respondents identified was the lack of someone to go with, I suggested a program similar to the one in Brazil might be helpful for arts organizations.

I had talked to my staff a couple months ago to get them brain storming, but I thought I would enlist readers’ to provide input as well. I figure this can be helpful to everyone, after all.

So here are some questions to consider:

-What are the guidelines for participation?

If you are setting aside special seats for the program, obviously people can’t buy two at once unless they are interested in sitting in two separate locations.

-How best to promote the program to explain it clearly without sounding condescending?

You don’t want to imply people are losers and have no friends–unless you can do it in such an amusing manner it endears people to your organization.

-What are good general conversation topics to use?

Obviously, each event lends itself to specific questions, but what consistent elements might you direct people to discuss?

Not just plot and composition of a piece, but for example, physical features of the theater you might want to draw attention to. For this program, it may be better to get people speculating about how the fresco on the ceiling was painted than to tell them outright.

-What is a good way to mount the questions on the back of seats?

This is a bit of a puzzler at the moment. It has to be durable enough that it doesn’t fall off as people brush going to and from their seats. It has to be removable since you may change the seats for the program from event to event or rent the facility to groups that don’t have a talk to strangers program.

But it can’t have metal hooks that will gouge into the back of the person sitting in the seat it is attached to. Magnets might work, but not everyone has seats with metal backs.

-What are logical extension to this program?

While I saw this as a way to remove a psychological barrier from a single ticket buyer who might otherwise decide to stay way, single subscribers may want to be paired with other single subscribers. You might hold an after performance events to help people solidify their new friendship. People who already attend frequently and with friends may want access to the conversation starter questions to join in the fun with their group.

All this would be great because it provides an opportunity to engage people in other ways.

What Else?

There are other factors to consider, but I throw these out to start people thinking.

Dear Arts: It’s Not Your Challenge Alone

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Last week Createquity published an analysis looking at why people in lower socioeconomic status (SES) don’t attend arts events. Their research challenges the common assumption that price, lack of time and geographic proximity are the main factors in the decision not to attend, at least among this demographic.

Unfortunately, the real impediment might be deeply instilled cultural behaviors that present a problem in areas beyond the arts.

The piece, Why Don’t They Come? is thought provoking and occasionally surprising. It has started a good deal of conversation both on the Createquity site, and also on economist Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog where it dominates the discussion on a post of assorted links.

I say that instilled cultural behavior is an potentially an impediment because overcoming it will take more than programming changes, lower prices/free events and taking events to different neighborhoods.

Createquity’s questioning of the argument that arts are elitist is somewhat depressing as it points out the lack of low SES involvement in even low cost and solitary pursuits.

Data from the survey shows that fewer low-income individuals attend pop and rock concerts than their wealthier counterparts, and significantly fewer of them attend visual arts festivals and craft fairs. In fact, people with lower incomes and less education are less likely to read books, go to the movies, take an arts class, play a musical instrument, sing, dance socially, take or edit photographs, paint, make scrapbooks, engage in creative writing, or make crafts.

Granted, if an effort to change programming, address costs and increase geographic access is made over a long period of time, attitudes may change in the direction arts organizations hope. Even if those measures aren’t effective in influencing low-SES people, the barriers they respond to may be decisive for people in other socioeconomic strata and therefore important for arts organizations to continue to address.

But when it comes to people in low SES, this relationship/outlook is not unique to the arts. Two days after “Why Don’t They Come?” was published, the New York Times had a story about low SES people and food that had many elements in common with the Createquity piece.

The Times story talked about efforts to bring grocery stores to “food deserts,” places where residents didn’t have easy access to high quality food and produce. The idea was that if people didn’t have to walk miles or ride the bus for hours to get to a grocery store, they would make better choices about what they ate. However, it didn’t work out that way. People continued to buy what they were in the habit of eating. (my emphasis)

It turned out that food preferences dominated. When the researchers looked at shoppers with lower levels of income and education living in richer neighborhoods with more accessible healthy food, their shopping mimicked that of low-income, less educated people in poorer neighborhoods. (And the reverse was true, too: Richer, more educated shoppers in poor neighborhoods looked more like rich shoppers in rich neighborhoods.)

“When we put supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, people are buying the same food,” said Barry Popkin, a professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina, who participated in an Institute of Medicine review of food desert research in 2009. “They just get it cheaper.”

[…]

It’s possible that poverty itself explains a lot of the shopping variation. In general, fresher, healthier food is more expensive to buy than less healthy processed food. It also takes more time and resources to cook, and keeps for fewer days.

If people can’t afford healthier foods, then it would be reasonable to think that just giving them a better store wouldn’t solve their problems. But Ms. Handbury’s paper found that the education of the shoppers was much more predictive than their incomes. Poorer families bought less healthy food than richer ones. But a bigger gap was found between families with and without a college education. Those results, Ms. Handbury said, suggest that improving people’s diets will require both making food accessible and affordable and also changing people’s perceptions and habits about diet and health.

Like the NYT story, Createquity also mentioned that education level is generally a predictor of participation in an arts event. Though the folks at Createquity state that income is also a predictor of arts attendance, they later note that cost is not terribly significant in keeping low-SES people away.

Roughly speaking, this simulates what would happen if every exhibit and performance in existence could be attended for free. The result? Only 7% of the chasm in attendance rates between rich and poor, and between college-educated and not, would be bridged.

Though by now we know that “if you build it/perform it, they will come” is an unwise approach, even removing other barriers in addition to convenience and proximity isn’t enough:

Indeed, according to our model, even if all barriers to participation were removed for low-SES populations and every person who wanted to attend an exhibit or performance in the past year were able to do so, it would still not close even half of the gap in attendance rates.

The authors of “Why Won’t They Come?” acknowledge no one knows why low-SES people make the decisions they do. Among the reasons they suggest are that it could be the group appreciates TV more, it may be a matter of learned behavior, a belief that they are not the type of person who likes the arts or that the general perception that arts are too expensive keeps them from seeking low cost and free opportunities.

The lemonade out of lemons takeaway from this is that it isn’t a problem unique to the arts. Look back at the sentence I bolded earlier- accessibility, affordability, change perceptions – all sentiments familiar in discussions about the arts.

Anyone working on helping low-SES people make better decisions about their lives is a potential ally and partner. (Though the adjuration against defining what is good for people found in Createquity’s post after the art gallery picture is well taken.) A social service organization can help an arts organization gain more direct access to the demographic and an arts organization can help the social service partner structure their training in an engaging manner. Often people in the arts feel like they are going it alone and face challenges no other sector faces, but that is not necessarily so.

Your Bad Customer Experience May Be A Feature, Not A Bug

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About a month ago I bookmarked a post Seth Godin had made about customer service. Since it is a little longer than usual, I waited until I had the time to come back to read it.

Now I sort of wish I had read it earlier because it pretty much runs counter to every customer service best practices article I have ever read and provides a lot to think about.

Essentially he says there are different types of customer service and a company should own the type they practice rather than pretending they are striving for something they ain’t.

Customer service is difficult, expensive and unpredictable. But it’s a mistake to assume that any particular example is automatically either good or bad. A company might spend almost nothing on customer service but still succeed in reaching its goals.
[…]
Organizations don’t accidentally run ads, don’t mistakenly double (or halve) the amount of cereal they put in the box. They shouldn’t deliver customer service that doesn’t match their goals either.

and at the end of the post [my emphasis]

Every single person who makes budget decisions, staffing decisions and customer service decisions must to be clear about which strategy you picked, needs to be able to state, “we’re doing this because it’s congruent with what we say customer service is for.”

Obviously, you can mix and match among these options, and find new ones. What we must not do, though, is plan to do one thing but then try to save time or money and do something else, hoping for the results that come from the original plan without actually doing it.

Customer service, like everything an effective organization does, changes people. Announce the change you seek, then invest appropriately, in a system that is likely to actually produce the outcomes you just said you wanted.

Between those two passages I quote, he points out ten different uses of customer service. There are some most of us aspire to. There are some that we complain about.

We read a lot of articles about how businesses need to engage with customers. So when we have an unsatisfying interaction with a company, we may complain about how they did not take the opportunity earn our loyalty. But as Godin points out, they may be reaching their goals without interacting with us in the way we want them to.

As customers, we may be like the school kid who says, I am really nice, helpful and loyal to them, why won’t they like me? Liking you may not be important to their goals.

We all probably assume this is part of airlines’ calculation, but reading Godin’s post you realize there are a lot of other companies that have decided they are doing just fine without doing much more.

My suggestion as you read his post is to take a different approach than you might normally.

Instead of thinking about all the things you need to change about the way you do business in order to meet customer expectations, be honest and consider whether the way you handle customer service isn’t just the way you want it after all.

If it isn’t the way you want it, consider what approach would fulfill your vision of success rather than what approach the articles you read say you should be using.

Whatever philosophy you adopt needs to be inline with your philosophy on programming, education, pricing and operations. Any misalignment will be apparent.

You can’t change your pricing in an attempt to attract under served audiences but have programming, education and operations oriented to serving a different demographic.

Likewise, you can’t aspire to certain goals without directing training and funding to support it.

Once you have decided what your philosophy is and what resources you can afford to direct toward accomplishing it, then you need to own that reality rather than pretend to be doing something else.

Follow My Curious Example

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Fast Company had a quick piece on the habits of curious people. I didn’t get past the second sentence, “Answers are more valued than inquisitive thought, and curiosity is trained out of us,” before I started wondering how arts organizations could engender more curiosity in potential program participants.

Moving from the statement that “curiosity is trained out of us”, it is easy to immediately blame the problem of declining audiences on the education system for valuing correct answers over inquiry and exploration. In a sense though that is just a reflection of society as a whole where having the wrong opinion on social or political issues can see you pilloried in your community or on social media.

Add to that the rising cost of attending performances and it becomes a little easier to understand why people may be averse to new experiences without some assurances that they will enjoy themselves and not be challenged too much.

One of the lines from the article that follows about “…the average teacher, who peppers kids with 291 questions a day and waits an average of one second for a reply,” reminded me of my teacher education classes where we were counseled not to be afraid of the silence between asking a question and getting an answer.

I have often mentioned that there are no special techniques or theater games that will make someone more creative. The techniques and games are useless in themselves, it is the act of taking the time apart to engage in “non-productive” activities that has value.

That time might be spent playing games, sitting quietly or contemplating how the segments of your sidewalk were formed to leave space for a tree. The leaves, bark or texture of concrete might give you insight into how to design a new type of fabric—or result in nothing at all (at least today).

But people see value in acquiring these skills for their workplace. How do you inspire people to want to become more curious? As they say, you can’t make a person change, they have to want it for themselves.

I am not sure there is a clear way of doing so other than modeling the practice for others.

Ironically, it may best be accomplished by replacing silence with silence.

Yeah, that is a little glib, but what I mean is replace the absence of an opportunity to ask questions and explore with the silence that follows asking a question.

Some of the best Q&A sessions I have experienced with an artist are when they ask: what did you think; what questions do you have; what did this make you feel? And then they waited, unafraid of the silence that might follow. Generally what happens is that after a few tentative questions, people decide it is okay to raise their hands and you end the session with unanswered questions.

But the artist or facilitator or tour guide has to be skilled at handling these interactions. A way of modeling curious behavior is to use some of the suggestions in the FastCompany piece – asking audience members/participants questions about what they think, how they felt, why they had a reaction, and encouraging them to turn those questions back on the facilitators. When the facilitators answer that they don’t know and lead the participants to hypothesize, they serve as a good example of curious behavior.

You may be thinking, we do Q&As and tours of our facility all the time, it isn’t really helping matters.

A couple questions for you though–how well do you promote these opportunities? As much as you promote your shows?

I’m sure like me, you have had people come up and say, I have lived here all my life and this is the first time I have been in this amazing building. Or this is the first time I have been in a performing arts center/museum, etc in my life.

Now with all the advertising and marketing of shows you do, you know you have been unsuccessful at getting a lot of people in your community in your doors.

Just think then, if you aren’t pushing the Q&As, lectures, tours, workshops, classes, as hard as you do your central activities, there are probably people who regularly attend your events who probably aren’t aware these activities are available.

Just last year I had someone who attended a Q&A who was amazed by the very concept of being able to have a Q&A with performers. Not with those particular performers, with the fact that the opportunity even existed. I took it for granted people knew arts organizations did this sort of thing from time to time when the chance presented itself, but that was a mistaken assumption.

As I sit here writing this post, I thought about the board meeting we are having on stage in two weeks. My guess is that 3/4 of the board members probably haven’t been backstage even after years of service on the board and I should probably have staff on hand to help give tours and stimulate their curiosity.

In some respects, encouraging people to be curious can be as easy as letting them into the less public areas of your building and allowing them to touch an old piece of scenery you walk by everyday to get to the microwave.

The Kids Ain’t Given Up On Facebook Yet

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Citing a Pew Research Study about teen use of social media and technology, Quartz drew attention to a finding that wealthier kids like Instagram while less affluent kids like Facebook.

And while there has been intermittent hysteria over the past few years about Facebook becoming uncool, the Pew Center also reported that 71% of teens continue to use it—even as the same percentage say they use more than one platform.

Here’s where wealth comes into play, according to Pew:

The survey data reveals a distinct pattern in social media use by socio-economic status. Teens from less well-off households (those earning less than $50,000) are more likely than others to say they use Facebook the most: 49% of these teens say they use it most often, compared with 37% of teens from somewhat wealthier families (those earning $50,000 or more).

My first thought upon reading the Quartz article was that using a targetted boosted post on Facebook might be an effective way to reach lower income, underserved kids in order to make them aware of free/low cost performances, workshops, summer camps, scholarships, etc.

Looking at the Pew Research study findings provides some greater insights about the devices and social media sites on which teens frequently interact.

…African-American teens are the most likely of any group of teens to have a smartphone, with 85% having access to one, compared with 71% of both white and Hispanic teens. These phones and other mobile devices have become a primary driver of teen internet use: Fully 91% of teens go online from mobile devices at least occasionally. Among these “mobile teens,” 94% go online daily or more often…

African-American and Hispanic youth report more frequent internet use than white teens. Among African-American teens, 34% report going online “almost constantly” as do 32% of Hispanic teens, while 19% of white teens go online that often.

Income and race also often determine whether someone has access to a desktop or tablet computer. In any case, it seems increasingly important to make sure your website design is mobile friendly (h/t Drew McManus) if you want teens to have positive interactions with it as that is increasingly the platform of choice.

Gender also plays a role with females having a large representation on visual social media like Instagram, Pintrest, Snapchat, Tumblr and males spending a lot of time playing games on their phones, computers or consoles.

As always,  knowing the good places to reach a demographic is easier than knowing how best to interact with the group.

Info You Can Use: Can You Talk About Your Arts Org’s Secret Sauce In Less Than Two Slides?

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A little while ago Entrepreneur website had an infographic Guy Kawasaki created of the “The Only 10 Slides Needed When Pitching Your Business.”

I bookmarked the article because even though most non-profits don’t pitch investors the way a Silicon Valley company might, they still need to convince various constituencies to support them and doing so in a simple and effective manner can be important.

Or in other words–how to do a presentation without using a massive Powerpoint presentation. Kawasaki’s infographic maps out the order in which 10 slides (15 maximum) should be presented.

At first glance, you may not think every slide is applicable, but just think about the grant applications you make. How many of them ask about your business model, strategic planning, problem you are addressing, promotional plans, evaluation method, list of board and staff members and justify why you receive funding based on past successes? All of that is in the infographic by other names.

If you are talking to potential audience members or volunteers, you can eliminate some of these slides. The question still remains, can you go out into the community and talk about the programming and opportunities you offer in a simplified and interesting way, or are you going to have a slide for each of your events?

The slides can be metaphorical by the way. This is more about tight organization of thoughts than the availability and use of a projector and screen at a presentation. Trying to include too much content in your presentation is akin to trying to cram as many images from your upcoming season in one slide in order to limit it to 10 total. It reduces the effectiveness of the whole.

Right at the top of the infographic is says, the low number forces you to focus on the absolute essentials…the more slides you need, the less compelling your idea.

Kawasaki’s chart has one slide for the Value Proposition – “Explain the Value of the Pain You Alleviate or the Value of the Pleasure You Provide,” and one slide for the Underlying Magic – “Describe the technology, secret sauce or magic behind your product…”

These are the bread and butter areas of the arts. Arts organizations are all about the pleasurable experience and magic. But can you make that case in just a couple slides, even if you were allowed a total of four slides between these two areas?

Can you do it a way that is focused on the pleasure the audience/participant will receive? Nobody buys secret sauce that only the cook thinks tastes good. People have to know they will enjoy the secret sauce as well.

Obviously, this practice is transferable to other areas of the organization, especially marketing. Can you communicate the essence of what your event is in a poster, broadcast or print ad, social media post, email blast, etc? Can you make the case for donating in a brief curtain speech or solicitation letter? Can you give a gallery tour/play talk/concert lecture that makes people want to come back and learn more or do their own research?

Draw Me A Picture of An Arts Attendee

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Even though the articles on Non-Profit Quarterly’s website are relatively short, I found an article last month about fundraising for the homeless gave me a lot to think about.

According to the article, homeless charities are essentially forced to pander to the image of the homeless as old men living on the street in order to raise money even though the truth is 36% of homeless are families and 65% don’t live on the streets.

Research published in the British journal Sociological Research Online noted (my emphasis)

“Given the homogeneity of the images produced in this research, and further studies which show complex, contextual information can lessen the impact of a fundraising campaign, we could argue that charities are acting rationally in continuing to fundraise in such a way, even though in rooflessness they are focusing on a relatively small element of the overall problem of homelessness: ‘the public must be given what they appear to want: images of charitable beneficiaries that fit comfortably with widely held stereotypes about ‘victims’ and which prompt the largest amount of donations.’”

The article talks about how some charities recognize the need to balance educating the public about the truth while also acknowledging that “you also have the way that people perceive that problem and what they perceive the solutions to be…”

Reading this, I saw some parallels with what arts organizations face. There has been a lot of conversations in recent years about the mismatch between what arts organizations need funding for (i.e. operations) and foundation funding priorities.

What really got me was the idea that non-profits are often slaves to the image the public has of the constituencies it serves. The British researchers had people draw what they envisioned when they thought of homeless people and many people drew the whiskered old guy sleeping on the street. (I should note the study sample size isn’t terribly large so the results may not be entirely conclusive.)

I wondered if arts organizations were to ask their patrons or people in the community to draw their concept of an arts event attendee, would the pictures be of people in suits/tuxedos and evening gowns even if the reality was jeans and khakis with barely a necktie in sight?

In light of this research, I started wondering if arts organizations might be better served by embracing the high society stereotype they are trying to escape, at least when it comes to fundraising efforts.

If regular event attendees end up rendering an image that diverges from reality of the experience, it may be that they associate their self image with the one on paper. In that case, you may not want to do anything to disabuse them of that notion.

Though this is a complicated situation. They may have drawn the pictures they did because all your marketing materials feature performers in tuxedos and evening gowns reinforcing that image even though your audiences largely don’t dress in that manner or identify with that image.

In this case, continuing an effort to have marketing and fundraising materials and events attempt to diverge from the high society stereotype and more closely align with the audience reality may ultimately garner better attendance and donations.

While there are a lot of nuances of audience psychology to factor in, the rather obvious element in all this has always been that wealthy people make large donations that help keep everything operational so the image arts organizations have tried to project is one that appeals to them.

Like those who serve the homeless, arts organizations may be trapped into perpetuating an image that attracts the most donations versus presenting an image the best reflects the reality or ambition of their activities.

All that being said, I am still intrigued by the idea of asking people either to draw or describe the type of person who attends an arts performance. I have this feeling that a survey requesting a picture might actually end up with a higher response rate than a typical survey.

And it may provide some insight into the image the organization should be projecting in order to appeal to the community. (I have to confess, I had an amusing vision of a crayon stick figure drawing of a man in a top hat and woman in an evening gown slamming the door of theater in the sad faces of two less finely dressed people.)

If anyone tries this, I would love to hear what the results are. This isn’t out of line with what people are asked to share on social media sites and there are arts organizations who are already engaging people in this manner. Nina Simon could ask of visitors at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History to do this and no one would think it particularly novel.

What Does Your Recommendation Cost You?

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Seth Godin had a great post about word of mouth last week that really bears reading and thinking about. We all know that word of mouth referrals are often more powerful than any piece of advertising you can create.

In fact, back in 2003 a Harvard Business Review piece suggested that if you only had an opportunity to ask customers one question, “would you recommend this to a friend,” was the most effective measure of satisfaction.

Given that people are abandoning traditional forms of media, arts organizations are increasingly dependent on word of mouth, especially in the form of social media.

Godin lists six reasons why people may be reluctant to give a business a referral, but the three that seem to most closely apply to art organizations deal with the basic concern of “what does this referral say about me?”

Do I want to be responsible if my friend has a bad experience? Will I get credit if it works, blame if it doesn’t?
[…]
How does it make me look? Do people like me recommend something like this? When I look in the mirror after recommending this, do I stand taller?

Is this difficult to explain, complex to understand, filled with pitfalls?..

These seem to be issues an arts organization needs to address most given that the arts are often viewed as an elitist pursuit that is not easy to understand.

Even if you are passionate and excited about what you saw, if your friends don’t seem to have the same level of interest and curiosity in the arts that you do, you may be reluctant to encourage the experience in case they don’t enjoy it as you have; think you are an elitist snob for enjoying the arts; or think you don’t share the same values because you enjoy and understand such dense, complicated material.

The one benefit I see to social media is that it allows you to commit to different levels of referral. If you are really anxious about what people will think about you, you can simply Like something. If a friend is incredulous about your apparent interest in modern dance, you can save face by saying a couple of the moments in the video were interesting or you thought one of the dancers was particularly attractive.

But really, since everyone will like anything with little prompting, a Like can help you test the waters and perhaps even introduce your friends to the concept of liking the arts without being too detrimental.

If you are feeling a little more confident that your friends will enjoy something as much as you do, you can share without much comment. Again, if your choices are challenged, you have some room for deniability.

If you are really confident, you can post or share with comment about how much you like something.

In this respect, social media provides insulation from the negative results of an in person recommendation.

Of course, we know that insulation goes both ways. If people are going to react negatively to something you are passionate about, they may say worse things about you online than they would in person and their scorn can linger for all to see.

Godin’s last line pretty much confirms what we already know about making arts more accessible to people. Having a high quality product isn’t enough, the whole experience has to be great as well.

“Being really good is merely the first step. In order to earn word of mouth, you need to make it safe, fun and worthwhile to overcome the social hurdles to spread the word.”

There is a lot that can contribute to “safe, fun and worthwhile.” It can the social experience and the crowd you attract. Ease of parking and finding your building can be a factor. Educational programs and materials can contribute. Every community and situation is different so you need to figure out what that means for you.

Marketing Vs. Practice. No, Marketing IS Practice

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There is a piece on the Forbes website discussing a recent study IBM did on customer satisfaction.

The article title says “IBM Study Finds Consumers Are Disappointed By Marketers.” But as I read the article, what really appeared to be the problem was that the companies weren’t delivering the product or experience the marketers were promising. Either the marketers were promoting something that didn’t exist or the company as a whole wasn’t maintaining the standards it set for itself.

The Forbes author, Kimberly Whitler writes, “I wonder if this is a soft warning bell to marketers—and those that hire them.”

It seemed to me that real issue in this case isn’t hiring the wrong people in marketing, it is that these days everyone in the company needs to embrace the idea that marketing is everyone’s responsibility. If you have been reading the blog for any length of time, you know I frequently return to this theme.

Most of the time, the failure of marketing is that it doesn’t resonate with you in the first place. If marketing leads you become a customer of a company, it generally isn’t the marketing that loses you, it is the disconnect between what the marketing causes you to expect and the the experience you have.

I believe this quote at the end of the first page sums it up best.

I think we’re at a point where the challenge isn’t perfecting the technology or unifying our data. The real challenge now is human,” said Stefan Tornquist, VP, research at Econsultancy. “We want to build long term relationships with people but our thinking is short-term and selfish. Most companies want to differentiate through customer experience, but most will only take half measures because really devoting themselves to what consumers need means rebuilding from the inside out.”

This seems much more an issue of execution and practice rather a failure of marketing.

About the only case I can think of where marketing might lose you as a customer is if they decide to shift the demographic focus of a product. If marketing has brought you to a product or service by positioning it as something that is hip and edgy and then they decide to go after your parents (or if the product starts to appeal to your parents despite the marketers efforts to the contrary), then the marketing can be blamed for losing you.

One thing Whitler wrote that I fascinating was the following (my emphasis)

“The research reminded me of a visit I made to a sophisticated, CRM-based entertainment firm a decade ago. They had state-of-the-art systems and tools to understand behavior. It was quite impressive at the time. They could predict when a customer would defect. The problem was, they couldn’t figure out how to stop the consumer from defecting. Their marketing team was comprised of “quant jocks” who could describe but not sell. Perhaps this research is a reminder that marketing is not just about insight, but the ability to use that insight to create change.”

I take some solace from the fact that a company with the resources to do a lot of data analysis couldn’t figure out how to stave off customer defection. If massive CRM data crunching isn’t the sole answer, then there is hope for non-profit arts organizations that don’t have those resources at their disposal.

Whitler indirectly confirms the idea that marketing is a function for the whole company by noting this company’s team could “describe but not sell.” It shows the importance of having better integration between those doing the analysis of customers and those interacting with customers.

Getting that integration right is incredibly hard. Those interacting with the customers may have a skewed view of what the problem is based on the feedback they are getting and need a dispassionate analysis to show that the real problem lies elsewhere and the complaints received are just the easiest way to express that dissatisfaction.

But if the data is not being collected in the correct way, it may be impossible to arrive at the correct analysis. Given their limited resources, gaining that understanding of a customer base can be a problem for arts organizations.

On the other side, a good analysis can identify the problem, but it requires an effective practical execution to bring about satisfaction and that can be difficult to pull off. Just think how many times you have thought that an intention behind an effort was good but the execution was flawed.

Again, lack of resources can hamper arts organizations.

But putting data analysis aside and getting back to the original idea of this post, an important question to consider is whether the organizational practice is fulfilling the promise of the marketing.

I will leave questioning whether your marketing is resonating with the audience you want to reach to Trevor O’Donnell who address that better than I can. One of his frequent basic themes is that advertising should show the audience having fun rather than focusing on how awesome your organization is.

All art administrators know that if they show people having fun, then people should have fun at your events.

But does the rest of the organization know that? Is that value reinforced? Are they encouraged to point out opportunities to increase fun and decrease disappointment?

Again, marketing is part of everybody’s job. All employees (not to mention board members, audience members and donors) reinforce and embody your brand.

Dynamic Pricing Backlash

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I learned today via a post on Twitter from TRG Arts that the University of Michigan will stop using dynamic pricing at their football games as a result of protests from the general public.

The article talks about negative feedback from alumni and students as well but much of that relates to a separate issue with season and student tickets which were more expensive, but not subject to dynamic pricing.

Living as I am in Ohio, I am obligated to suggest that this only goes to illustrate the inferiority of the Michigan football program.

What really interests me about the policy change was that two years ago I wrote about how University of Michigan and the Cincinnati Reds were going to be using dynamic pricing for their games. I took a quick check of the Red’s website and they will continue to use dynamic pricing during their 2015 season.

My post two years ago emphasized that value is not price presenting some thoughts on that concept. As I looked into University of Michigan’s decision to eliminate dynamic pricing, my effort to determine where the balance between price and value became further complicated.

If you look at the bottom of this article, you will see students protesting with signs invoking tradition over money and the university brand. But if you read my original article, I note at the time tickets were already on sale on the secondary market for far more than the published price, prior to single tickets going on sale. At that point, the only ones who had them were season ticket holders and maybe some students.

While not everyone is going to try capitalize and sell their tickets to hot games on the secondary market, it is clear that some of the tickets are more valuable than what you paid for them. Shouldn’t you be happy about getting such a great deal?

As much as you may want to complain about students and alumni being malcontents who want to maintain the status quo rather than acknowledge increasing costs and value, there really isn’t any difference between them and the people who comprise your audiences.

Except maybe they are much more passionate about football than your programming. (Which is why I can’t have shows on Saturdays in the Fall.)

I suspect one of the biggest factors in whether people will tolerate dynamic pricing or not is the level of investment they have in the activity and how strong the sense of community is. The Cincinnati Reds and Broadway shows can probably get away with it because people expect to pay more or less dependent on the popularity of the event.

College football isn’t just a sporting event, it is entwined more deeply with personal identity. For students and alumni, it is directly associated with your occupation for four plus years. You didn’t just live in a locality with sports teams, all the buildings you occupied all day in were owned by the entity that owned the team. All the people you worked, ate and played with everyday were members of that entity.

There is going to be so little distinction between value, price and identity that change to any one of these will result in a strong reaction.

It probably doesn’t help that the university was requiring $150 donation to be considered for season tickets with no guarantee you would get some and no refund if you don’t. (And this is a very common practice among larger university sports programs, even ones that don’t perform very well.)

I don’t think University of Michigan’s decision should dissuade an arts organization from considering dynamic pricing in itself. I think it points to the fact that you need to consider the level of investment your potential audience has in your work and what the tenor of that investment is.

For some, a higher price may only increase the sense of investment as it indicates a greater level of personal prestige. Not surprisingly, for others it will be a sign of exclusionary elitism. Other communities may barely notice the prices changed since they weren’t paying attention to begin with.

Info You Can Use: Should I Make Video Ads?

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Thomas Cott recently drew attention to a post on Capacity Interactive encouraging people to eliminate a print ad in favor of creating a video. Erik Gensler makes many points worth considering about the value of a video to the promotion of a performance.

Something I learned was that Facebook provides far more organic reach to videos uploaded to their site over posts with links from YouTube. Still, given that I can’t post a Facebook video on my website, Twitter feed or in my email blasts, Facebook has some work to do if they really want to be YouTube’s competitor.

A couple things to remember about video advertising is that

1- People receive video and print through very different delivery channels and process the information in different ways. Gensler seems to acknowledge this when he encourages people to cut a print ad, singular, rather than ditching the format altogether. With some populations, print may still be effective.

2- While organic reach on Facebook may be free, the cost to make the video is not. If you already have some footage on hand or available from another source, the cost in time and labor to edit it into something usable may be the same as what a graphic designer might spend. Creating something from scratch is a more involved undertaking.

In that regard, Non Profit Quarterly recently posted an article that addresses the practical considerations and mistakes non-profits make with video.

The piece is somewhat geared toward video made for fund raising and reporting purposes, but the warnings and suggestions are equally valid for promotional videos as well. Among the points that made me nod in agreement were those about the CEO possibly not being the best spokesperson and a reminder that your board of directors is not the audience for the video. I am sure we have all seen videos where it was obvious these parties had far too much influence.

In terms of the practical aspects of video making, the Non-Profit Quarterly article reinforces the need to be clear about the story you are going to tell and the goals of the video you are making because it is going to demand a lot of time and resources from your organization. But much of that is about the editing side. They also encourage people to think about all the possible applications of the information and keep the raw footage around for other purposes.

8. Thinking your video is a one-time gig

Video costs are primarily driven up by the number of days shooting, so it’s OK to double-dip and repurpose raw footage for other videos and projects. Use interviews, visuals and even finished videos on more than one occasion and maximize your return on what often becomes a significant investment. Showing a video at your annual dinner? Post it on your website, too. Making an informational video? Show it at recruitment events, and link to it online afterward. Nonprofits should always think about how to strategically leverage video content.

9. Reacting instead of pro-acting

Creating a video is an intensive process that requires full attention from you, your staff, and your beneficiaries. If you choose to make a video, make sure it’s the right time for the organization. A classic mistake is entering the production process for political reasons. If you do, you may find yourself struggling to find the right story and wasting a lot of time and money.

Some Parts Of This Post May Be Boring

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I was going to hold off featuring this in the blog until a later date, but Carter Gillies comment on my recent Distract Me From My Distraction post decided me.

Maria Popova recently assembled the thoughts of many luminaries on Brain Pickings, In Defense of Boredom.

Years before the internet, video games, cell phones and the like, people were already thinking about the value of boredom in shaping us as individuals.

Popova’s opening thoughts probably won’t be news to anyone.

Today, amid our cult of productivity, we’ve come to see boredom as utterly inexcusable — the secular equivalent of a mortal sin. We run from it as if to be caught in our own unproductive company were a profound personal failure. We are no longer able, let alone willing, to do nothing all alone with ourselves.

She quotes philosopher Bertrand Russell:

We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.

Perhaps most applicable to the arts are the words of Susan Sontag:

People say “it’s boring” — as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us.

But most of the interesting art of our time is boring. Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc.

Maybe art has to be boring, now. (Which obviously doesn’t mean that boring art is necessarily good — obviously.)

We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art.

Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye— but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring … e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented). Possibly after repetition of the same single phrase or level of language or image for a long while — in a given written text or piece of music or film, if we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).

Sontag’s thoughts bring up a whole host of questions. Some are familiar like whether it is appropriate to have the expectation of art to be entertaining. The concept of being in the wrong mode or modes of attention is new to me. I have certainly been to performances and encountered works of visual art where I understood it was less about the meaning than the general sensory experience.

But I don’t recall consciously deciding I needed to make that shift. It leave me wondering if I should have asked myself if I was operating in the wrong mode when I was bored. I also wonder how you educate audiences about making this shift without sounding superior and condescending. (i.e. The reason you didn’t like it is because you didn’t realized you weren’t supposed to search for meaning and understanding, you were supposed to focus on the holistic sonic and visual experience.)

Writer and filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky echoed a sentiment made by Bertrand Russell about the need to learn to handle boredom. His last sentence is definitely worth some consideration.

I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

This idea that it is important for children to learn to navigate boredom appears again in the words of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips who like Russell and Tarkovsky characterizes it as a crucial milestone in personal development.

How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him — as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.

I call attention to all this because one of the central challenges the arts face is this innate, growing fear that boredom means something is wrong with your life. Since this issue has been commented on for 200 years, to some extent this fear is a natural part of being human. The problem is that since stimulation comes at an ever increasing rate, the interval after which a person decides they are bored becomes increasingly shorter.

Since parents and general socialization continue to reinforce this concept of boredom, there is likely little the relatively “slow” format arts and culture organizations can do to combat it other than repeating a mantra of “it is okay to be bored.”

I am sure he is amused that I keep bringing this up, but I think one of the most effective efforts in Drew McManus’ “Take A Friend to the Orchestra” campaign was when he took a guy to a concert at Carnegie Hall and told him it was okay to get bored and Drew admitted that even he gets bored at concerts.

Introducing the possibility that parts of an experience might be boring by giving someone permission to be bored might bias them against the experience from the outset. It is highly likely they were already afraid they might be bored anyway, (along with every opportunity in life that presents itself, it ain’t just you), so being given license to dislike some aspects might be a relief.

Distract Me From My Distraction

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I frequently cite Seth Godin’s blog posts because so much of what he writes is applicable to arts organizations and an observation he made last week was no exception.

He says we spend too much time teaching people technique when it is really commitment to endure failure and frustration that allows people to become skilled at something.

But most people don’t want to commit until after they’ve discovered that they can be good at something. So they say, “teach me, while I stand here on one foot, teach me while I gossip with my friends via text, teach me while I wander off to other things. And, sure, if the teaching sticks, then I’ll commit.”

We’d be a lot more successful if organized schooling was all about creating an atmosphere where we can sell commitment (and where people will buy it). A committed student with access to resources is almost unstoppable.

I think most people in the arts can identify with the feeling that they are being challenged to capture and hold people’s attention while they engage in some other activity. While distracting people from what they are doing has always been something of a function of advertising, these days arts organizations are faced with the unspoken challenge at their own events of “try to distract me back from my distraction and maybe I will pay attention.”

Teaching in the framework of commitment rather than technique would probably have profound implications for the education system because it would diminish the mindset of retaining knowledge long enough to pass the test. It might necessitate the elimination of the vast majority of tests. (I say “might” since Japan has a culture that emphasizes committed pursuit of excellence in an endeavor and they also have a lot of testing in schools.)

The people shaped by an education focused on commitment might not be any better disposed to the arts than people are today, but presumably those who did attend a performance or enter a museum would arrive with the intent of directing their attention to the experience.

Godin doesn’t really say what commitment focused education would look like. I think it would be easy default to repetition of task. But playing the piano for hours or sitting outside the kung fu master’s house in the rain is only proof of commitment, it doesn’t instill or model it as part of the education process.

I would think experiential learning would be a part of it. Witnessing people go through a process and going through a process yourself begins to give you a sense of the level of attention and commitment  involved.

The arts can play a big role in this as preparing a canvas, working with clay and rehearsing for a performance are all labor intensive and time consuming. But the same can be said for preparing for a science experiment and that fact can be underscored by visiting labs or formulating your own experiments.

A slight shift in emphasis in talking about history can add a conversation about the effort someone went through to research, assemble and restore an artifact to a discussion of the history of the artifact. Again, reinforcing the importance of dedication rather than just emphasizing dates and facts.

Of course,  skill of delivery will still determine whether anyone is interested in learning about history.

Shirtless Men As Institutional Marketing

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Oklahoma City Ballet Executive Director Shane Jewell wrote a piece recently on the Clyde Fitch Report discussing the ways in which his organization has used performance and institutional marketing to promote itself.

In discussing the familiar practice of performance marketing, Jewell goes to some length to distinguish the video they did for their production of Cinderella as a trailer rather than a commercial. What might be confusing is that in the next sentence he states the commercial won Gold at the Oklahoma City ADDY Awards.

After re-reading the post, I assume he wants to emphasize that they didn’t view it as a commercial because it diverged from the expected pattern of

“…live-performance footage with voiceover and text. This is possibly a company’s biggest waste of time and money. The only people who would enjoy this type of commercial are those who are already fans of ballet, and more than likely they do not need a commercial to alert them of upcoming performances… The goal of performance marketing is to attract new audiences.”

My initial concern was whether the trailer might set up unrealistic expectation in people who were not familiar with ballet. (Though on the other hand, we pretty much expect trailers won’t be completely accurate representations of movies so it probably isn’t a big problem.)

What I really want to focus on though is the ballet’s handling of less frequently used institutional marketing–essentially the effort of demonstrating that your organization is a part of the community rather than apart from the community.

Noting that their community is very athletically oriented, the ballet created a print ad using their dancers to depict the fierce cross state rivalry between Oklahoma State University and University of Oklahoma. (You can see the ad in Jewell’s post.)

They also created a video emphasizing the athleticism of their dancers which they ran during the portion of the year they weren’t performing.

Oklahoma is a sports state so we played to the athleticism of our dancers and you don’t even realize you are watching a ballet commercial when it begins.

Here is the ad. Whether it was intended or not, I felt like the “Oklahoma City” graphic at the end with “Ballet” only popping in for the last second, communicated a sense of “we are you.”

After seeing these ads, it probably won’t surprise you that Jewell’s last bit of advice is- “know your audience. And have your men take their shirts off.”

You may be looking at this videos and thinking it must be nice to have the production budget to be able to make these videos. Jewell said the ballet trailer increased ticket sales enough that they covered the expense of making it.

While it is true that you often have to spend money to make money, I can personally attest it can be very easy to direct funds toward ineffective efforts. It can be extremely difficult to justify spending money on marketing that is not connected to a revenue generating activity. That is money you could use for that very purpose three months down the road.

There are opportunities for institutional marketing that don’t necessarily involve producing ads. I am reminded of the activities the Trey McIntyre Project engaged in around Boise, ID. In addition to their concerts, they generated flash mobs, danced at the local NBA farm team basketball games and participated in an art installation in a local hotel (starting around 3:30).

Certainly these type of things demand resources of their own. Time spent on them is not being spent on rehearing or creating, but the option is there.

And there is always having your men take their shirts off.

Info You Can Use: Talking To Strangers

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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.

Bring Your Own

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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.

Ah January, When The Conferences Flock To NYC

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Broadway producer Ken Davenport recently noted that the very first BroadwayCon would occur next year.

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.

The International Society of the Performing Arts (ISPA) is meeting January 12-14. Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) is meeting January 15-19. Three days later, in the exact same hotel as the APAP conference, BroadwayCon is meeting -January 22-24. (This being BroadwayCon it should go without saying it is held in NYC)

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.

By Faith Alone

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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.

Grind Your Teeth and Then…?

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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.

You Bet Your Art!

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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.

This year it was the Seattle Art Museum and New England’s Clark Art Institute. Last year it was the Seattle Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum. In 2011 it was The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

I am not sure when this practice started, but I have been hearing about these wagers for a number of years. My first recollection was the 2010 bet between Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

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.

Pick-up Trucks Singing Karaoke

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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.

To wit I give you the karaoke singing pick up truck.

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.

If You Got The Data, She Wants To Study It

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Reader Heather Grob responded to my recent post asking about more information regarding propensity score matching to learn more about arts audiences.

Heather, an associate professor in the St. Martin’s University School of Business writes,

Hi Joe,

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.

If They Don’t Know J.F.K. & M.L.K, Why Would They Know Y.O.U.?

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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.

Is It Still Possible To Slow Down And Pay Attention?

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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.

Strive To Advertise With The Highest Quality Generics

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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.

Back in October, Trevor O’Donnell made a post on his blog about a video advertising an Android phone. He perceptively pointed out that the content of the Android ad focused almost wholly on the consumer and their enjoyment rather than on the product itself. He encouraged his reader to do the following:

Watch it and pay close attention to these things:

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.

Low Cost and Low Expectations

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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.

What Do You Know About Propensity Score Matching?

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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.

In the process, I came across Measuring Cultural Engagement: A Quest for New Terms, Tools, and Techniques which is a summary of a symposium of “Cultural researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from the U.S., the UK, and other countries” held in June 2014.

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.

Community Is Free

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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.

Dabbling In The Revolution

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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.

Where The Boys (And Girls) Are

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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.”]

http://youtu.be/iDcvmrHV9Jc

People Are Talking (Just Not To Me)

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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.

It’s A Wonderful Arts Organization

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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?
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.

The Phonebooth Returns! (Sort Of)

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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.

(Of course, these stations don’t solve the problem of restoring locations for Clark Kent to transform into Superman.)

Single Cute Person I/S/O More Than Just I Need You

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“I Need You” used to mean something at one time according to Seth Godin. Perhaps that was back in the 70s when the phrase was just a song by the band America. Since then, says Godin, the phrase has gone through some overuse and abuse.

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.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbB72GCXiqc

Don’t Wait Up, I’m Going Cruisin’ With The Actors

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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.

All In The Timing

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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?

You Can Enter The Museum Without Entering the Museum

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I was quickly scanning a story about Harvard University president Drew Faust arguing for the value of university art museums when I was brought up short by a remark made by Director of the Harvard University Art Museums Thomas Lentz in anticipation of the reopening of the museums next month after a long renovation.

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.

The Harvard Art Museums, during renovation and expansion, showing the Calderwood Courtyard.

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.

Keeping Audience’s Minds At The Event

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David Dombrosky was the plenary speaker at the Ohio Arts Presenters Network conference I attended this week.

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.

Same Old Library Building, Different Content

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CityLab had an article on the changing role of libraries in communities which was based on a longer piece about the Columbus (OH) Metropolitan Library (CML).

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.

The CityLab article uses CML’s results to complement a report released by the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries. Among the findings that CityLab emphasizes are:

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.

All You Can Smile For Just $25!

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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.

Why Here? Why Now?

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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.

I have looked at reporting on this event on Huffington Post, NPR and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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?

Wherein I Speak of Chocolate Chip Cookies and Zombies (But Mostly Cookies)

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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.

Transform Into…SUPER THEATER!!!!!!!

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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
Artist conception of rival theater companies competing for market share

Community Now, Arts Education Later

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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.

We Make Cancellations Look Easy

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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.

Not Ready For Some Football

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If you are wringing your hands over the difficulty you are having attracting students to your performances and events, you are not alone– university football programs are having difficulty, too.

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.”

First Cut Is The Deepest

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Nod to Thomas Cott for calling attention to a post on TRG blog about Mission versus business models.

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.

Best Practices In Audience Drowning

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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.

In The Guardian article, Myf Warhurst wonders if audiences are really up to the job of being part of a performance.

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.

In the Irish Times article, Peter Crawley wonders “Are we, the audience, drowning in immersive theatre,” referring to how prevalent the format is.

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)

Info You Can Use: Treating Different Audiences Differently

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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.

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