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Audience Relations

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.

Movie Theaters and Demand Pricing

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A few days ago, NPR’s Planet Money ran a story asking why there isn’t demand pricing for movies where you pay more for blockbusters and less for the stinkers. Among the suggestions the correspondents made were having some movies free with a two popcorn cover.

They spoke to a movie theater owner who expressed concerns about low prices signaling that a movie was bad. Not to mention he worried that people would pay for the stinker and sneak into the blockbuster.

The biggest impediment to demand based pricing, however, is the movie studios. As the reporters mention, no studio wants to invest tons of money into making and advertising a show only to have a movie theater price it at $1.

If you are not aware, something similar occurs with many of the big Broadway touring shows, especially those that are getting a percentage of the gate. Theaters have to submit proposed ticket pricing and a marketing budget for the production company’s approval.

One interesting fact that came to light was that the term “B-movie” actually refers to an early practice where movies were graded A, B, C, etc and had corresponding pricing. The practice has fallen by the wayside, but the B movie term stuck around in common parlance.

One of the problems live performances face is the ability to provide such transparency in its pricing for audiences. The price for single perform doing a solo acoustic set might be low because the cost to the theater for one person is low. On the other hand, if that single performer is Eric Clapton, the ticket price is going to be commensurately high.

But a ticket price may be low because the theater has good funding, or will take a loss to encourage people to attend or because the quality stinks. The audience member doesn’t know why prices are the way they are and there isn’t really an elegant way to communicate it, should the arts organization so desire.

As I listened to the reporters asking if movie theaters weren’t foolish not to institute demand based pricing, I wondered if we might be approaching a place where audiences would be psychologically ready for arts organizations to implement similar pricing strategies for their own events. The whole question of demand pricing has been hotly debated by arts organizations and the fact that the subject is popping up in various forms indicates the topic isn’t going away any time soon.

One Person’s Passion Is Another’s Indifference

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If things are quiet for you over the summer, it might be a good time to evaluate your interactions with donors and customers. A few years back, I brought attention to a number of interesting findings about customer interactions.

One was that

“perceived indifference by a company causes far more people to sever their relationship with a company than cost and quality issues.” and “It’s important to note here that indifference only be perceived. People cannot know other people’s motives; they can only deduce them from the actions they see. So you can care passionately and still be perceived as indifferent.”

I linked to another entry on Donor Power blog that asked the provocative question –“What are you doing to persuade your donors that you aren’t human?”

The third dealt with using industry standard language in materials for customer/donors that not only have no relevance to these groups, but can ultimately be alienating.

Can You Increase Attendance By Raising Your Prices?

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Over the weekend I read a very interesting blog post by Nick Kokonas who implemented a system where people would buy tickets to his restaurants.

One of the problems he faced was that they were employing 3 people full time just to call people back and tell them there were no seats for Friday or Saturday at 8 pm. They were also losing a lot of money due to no-shows or partial no-shows because they couldn’t call their long waiting list of people to tell them they could be seated in 15 minutes.

What they did was create a demand based pricing structure with non-refundable tickets and put the whole system online. That way patrons could see exactly what was available and see that weekend nights were much more expensive than Tuesday nights and make decisions accordingly.

This creates a lot of transparency and trust with customers because the restaurant doesn’t have to overbook to hedge against no-shows and then divert people to the bar if more people keep their reservations than were anticipated.

They also differed their operations from other online services like Open Table. Most restaurants don’t put their entire seating online and customers have figured that out and call in to the restaurant anyway. Since Kokonas wanted to avoid paying his employees to say “No” all the time, they basically put everything they intended to offer online giving people no reason to call in and try to wheedle a seating.

Their no-shows dropped precipitously and even if only a partial table shows up, they have already collected the cost of the meal from them.

I should note, the restaurants offer a fixed menu so there is not a lot of variability in people’s orders. They do have one bar-restaurant with a more variable menu where they collect a $20 deposit which is applied against your bill and no-show dropped immensely there as well.

But reading this got me thinking– this is a situation where people pay a uniform price in advance to consume a similar product and the the result was a greatly reduced no-show rate.

This sounds lot like going to a live performance. Only when I have looked at the sales versus tickets taken at the door (or just eyeball the audience at a performance) I see more no-shows than I would like.

I wonder at the reasons behind this. It could be that many are subscribers and they forgot they had tickets for the show or they have decided this is the show in the series they are least interested in and want to skip it.

I know this doesn’t just happen to me because I have attended otherwise sold out performances where a significant swath of prime seating remains empty.

While subscribers have the right not to occupy the seats they have paid for, as conversations about demand pricing for seats at performances continue, you have to at least consider whether you are setting prices high enough.

This is absolutely a consideration at sold out performances where you might really have an opportunity to increase your earned revenue in the face of decreasing support from foundations and individuals.

It is also a consideration in less well attended performances where too low a price might not provide enough incentive for people to attend. I have seen a decision to go from free to a $5 charge fill performances. If you are intentionally keeping prices low so a target audience can attend and they buy tickets but don’t attend, then the effort is as much as failure as if high prices dissuaded their attendance.

There are dozens of other factors that can account for the difference in no-show rates between Kokonas’ restaurants and performance venues. The social cachet of eating at a high demand restaurant that only seats about 90 being a significant one.

Even without considering the success Kokonas’ has realized, there are dozens of factors that make ticket pricing decisions very difficult for arts organizations. Still, it is always interesting to see how pricing is used to good effect and ponder what lessons might be derived.

Could You Hurry Up And Get Delighted?

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Seth Godin had a post today reflecting on a woman he noticed in front row seats at a concert being given by jazz bassist Christian McBride. The woman was fidgeting, checking her watch and fiddling with stuff, entirely disengaged with the concert.

Says Godin:

McBride seemed to be too professional and too experienced to get brought down by her disrespect and disengagement. Here’s what he knew: It wasn’t about him, it wasn’t about the music, it wasn’t a response to what he was creating.
[…]
Do your work, your best work, the work that matters to you. For some people, you can say, “hey, it’s not for you.” That’s okay. If you try to delight the undelightable, you’ve made yourself miserable for no reason.

It’s sort of silly to make yourself miserable, but at least you ought to reserve it for times when you have a good reason.

We all know that ideally, this is the best philosophy to embrace. We know that the arts aren’t for everyone and that you have to allow people the time and space they need in order to eventually find that your work resonates with them. If it is going to resonate at all, that is.

But we don’t live in an ideal world and we receive a lot of messages that our audiences need to get it, and get it quick. This obviously manifests in ticket sales reports and the requirements of just plain old pride in wanting to have seats full of people enjoying themselves.

There is a lot of subtext that our funding depends on it as well. We are asked about the diversity of our audience. What are the numbers and percentages of racial groups, students and seniors?

Some times there is no subtext at all. I am currently working on a final grant report that asks what we did to engage the community to participate; what did or will we do to remove perceptual, practical and experiential barriers; what motivates patron, board members and volunteers; and to provide a first hand account of how the programming has made an impact on an individual or a group.

Faced with questions like that, you have a lot of motivation to start thinking your audience, board and volunteers need to experience something that moves them, and they need to have that moving experience during the current grant period.

Its no wonder we have ushers patrolling the aisles and glaring at people pulling out their iPhones. Not only can’t we afford to have the individual become disengaged from the performance, we need to make sure the glow of the phone isn’t constituting a perceptual or experiential barrier to a dozen other people around them. These are all black marks against us that our funders expect us to address.

Now as a practical matter, foundations aren’t infiltrating mystery shoppers into our audiences to make sure we are properly identifying these problems and proposing solutions in our final reports. Their questions are meant to inspire some self-examination in grant recipients about procedures and operations.

When heckling at a performance is unchallenged by house staff and results in the cancellation of the run as recently occurred in California, it signals the need for a review of procedures in event spaces across the country.

Questions like these on a grant report indicate the type of activity and outcomes that are valued in grant recipients. These expectations are somewhat in conflict with the long view non-profit arts organizations are enjoined to embrace in respect to cultivating their audiences.

When Christian McBride plays The Blue Note, the venue worries about whether they sold enough tickets, food and alcohol to cover costs. The Blue Note certainly wants all the patrons to have a good time and come back again, but they don’t concern themselves too much with whether people have attained a new level of personal growth.

When McBride plays at a non-profit arts center’s jazz series, the organization worries about all those things The Blue Note worries about, but also has to concern themselves about recognizing potential barriers to entry, the diversity of the audience and whether they have been inspired.

It can be something of a psychic burden to try to balance all the requirements of a non-profit existence. You have to be cool, put your best work out there and not worry about delighting the undelightable.

But at the same time, you wonder how you have failed that person. What barriers have you been complicit in maintaining? Is she really undelightable, or is that a convenient way for writing her off when you should be patient and try harder? How can you change your programming and outreach efforts so she feels engaged and included?

Was Your Show Like Sex, Drugs or a Punch In The Nose?

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I recently read about a study that analyzed the language used in restaurant reviews. They found that negative reviews often used the language of trauma. Positive reviews either used drug addiction terms for cheaper restaurants or sexual/sensual terms for more expensive restaurants.

It got me wondering what sort of terminology do people use when they have a positive or negative experience after an arts or cultural experience. Looking back over some surveys we have, I couldn’t see any patterns. I imagine it is because we have such a small sample size and often people aren’t very verbose with their responses, providing short commentary like “It was great!”

It would be interesting to see what the results might be from a literature review of past arts and culture surveys.

Even without such a study, there are some observations from the restaurant language study that might provide clues for arts and cultural organizations. For instance, people who wrote negative reviews really didn’t talk about the food as often as they commented about the experience. Reviewers used terms like “worst, rude, terrible, horrible, bad, awful, disgusting, attitude and mistake.”

According to the study authors,

“one–star reviews were overwhelmingly focused on narrating experiences of trauma rather than discussing food, both portraying the author as a victim and using first person plural to express solace in community.”

As mentioned earlier, the positive reviews were split in the types of terms they used. Addiction terminology was used for cheaper food that fell into a general category of sweet or starchy comfort type food purchased from a cafe, diner or food truck.

“…addiction, crave/craving, chocoholic, jonesing, binge/binging. It also includes phrases in which drugs are described as a metaphor (drug of choice, like a drug, new drug, favorite drug, etc.) and phrases describing food as the drug crack (including made of crack, food crack, edible crack, etc.).

Reviews would use the first person singular, “I”, showing a personal investment in the opinion.

Most terms used in more expensive sit down restaurants revolved more around sensual aspects of the food:

“erotic, food porn, lust, lusted, lusting, naughty, orgasm*, pornographic, seductive*, sensual*, sex*, sinful, sultry, tempt, temptation, tempting, voluptuous, wine porn.”

Reviews for more expensive restaurants tended to be longer and use more complex words.

In terms of negative reviews for arts and cultural events, we do know that the experience surrounding the event often plays a large factor in whether a person enjoys a performance. So if you are seeing language like that, positive or negative, it is something to pay close attention to. Even if they praise the ease of parking today, you know that might be an area of complaint if road construction impedes it next time around.

I am not sure sexual or addiction terminology in reviews is a dependable criteria for judging a review to be a positive one. However, the type and complexity of words used in a positive may give a hint as to whether your audience views your events as a guilty pleasure or a high value experience.

Or lack of complexity in a response could mean that people simply lack the knowledge and confidence to provide sophisticated commentary.

The language of decadence is used in relation to food 100 times a day for everything from a diet snack to a master chef’s entree on a cooking show. No one will really judge a person for making an inaccurate or uninformed evaluation of a cheap piece of chocolate.

But even if someone has watched every season of American Idol, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, etc, etc, they may not feel qualified to critically evaluate a performance the same way the judges on those shows do. Both the language and the practice of talking about these experiences is infrequent and uncommon for most people.

In fact, it is expected that you immediately express your delight upon eating something you approve of, but that you delay your response until an appropriate time at many performances.

The effusive vocabulary applied to a meal will probably never develop for a performance. Still, a closer reading of the terminology used in surveys, comments and lobby chatter might provide some insight.

What To Do About Curtain Speeches?

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Last week I participated in a Twitter conversation about curtain calls and curtain speeches sponsored by HowlRound. They had the whole thing storified almost before I thought about doing it myself.

The hour went by so quickly and there were so many opinions on the matter, I figured it was a great topic to bring up on the old blog here.

I will start by stating my position on curtain speeches and am happy to have people argue for or against.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have a curtain speech. At worst, they are long, disorganized rambles that are often more about people giving money to support the organization than conducive to experience the audience is about to have.

That said, I see them as a necessary evil. I don’t see that as a contradiction, but rather as something of a corollary to the idea that the best king is the person who doesn’t want the job because they will be least intrusive in the people’s lives.

Many localities require fire exits, etc pointed out to audiences. Given that I have worked in locations that are tornado and earthquake prone, I feel it is important that such an announcement be made. People tend to pay more attention to a human than a recording so I will often do the curtain speech.

There is also the issue of reminding people to turn off cell phones, etc. I have seen great video announcements at movie theaters that get that point across, but those videos don’t often fit with the atmosphere of the evening and again since people will pay closer attention to a live person, I see it as another reason to do the speech.

But at least once a year I end up leaving it to the audio announcement because my presence prior to the show doesn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the event.

In the Twitter chat some people said they like curtain speeches that are made in the theme of the play. One of the most recent I saw had the actor playing the stern housekeeper in the show severely warning audience members about cell phones, etc.

I agree that this can be a clever device and hold attention, but sometimes it too clever by half and ends up detracting from the play itself when people associate the character with the person who made the curtain speech rather than with the role they play in the performance.

The other necessity I see associated with curtain speeches is supporting grants. Not only do you need to acknowledge sponsors and funders from the stage as well as in print, but granting organizations want hard number research. Again, it is more effective to have someone on stage enjoining people to fill out a survey than having it written somewhere or announced by a disembodied voice.

Some times it is just a matter of making people aware there is a meet and greet with the performers after the show. People miss the notice in the program and tend to be grateful for the opportunity. The more people attend, the better outreach attendance data for your grant report.

In some of my past posts I have written that I often use curtain speeches to forge connections with the community. They see me on stage and then I am in the lobby at intermission and the end of the show for them to deliver praise or complaints to.

As I have mentioned, I also try to impart some information about the show that people are unaware of that may enhance their enjoyment. This past year, I feel like my most successful attempts were talking about the impact of A Christmas Carol in shaping holiday traditions we take for granted and reminding people that The Miracle Worker only deals with the first of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan’s accomplishments.

Other curtain speeches aren’t as successful. It takes a little while to understand what information might resonate most with audiences.

I try to keep all this to 3-4 minutes and start right at the performance time so that the curtain speech is covering the stragglers in the audience who are trying to find their seats. That way my delay and the interruption of late comers cancel one another out.

If I didn’t do my speech, the audience would still be disturbed by those latecomers, so better they have my entertaining presence to focus on. The important element of this strategy is to get house management to give the go ahead for the speech when they estimate there are only about 2-3 minutes worth of people left in the lobby.

To make the curtain speech quick, effective, informative and not negatively impact audience enjoyment takes some work. I think the reason why people hate curtain speeches is due to the lack of preparation by those who do them. The reality is, the curtain speech is as much a tone setting first impression as the interaction a customer has with your ticket office staff or office receptionist. Equal attention must be paid.

I am often jotting notes about a performance in a Word document months before the event. Some will be part of a social media post, some will be part of a press release and some will be part of the curtain speech for that show. I usually have a good idea about what I am going to say a few days before the performance. I am waiting in the wings 5-10 minutes before the show starts staring at the floor going over what I intend to say.

Sometimes it is great and sometimes I screw up a little because I try to speak extemporaneously with only a few jotted notes. The goal is always to get a little better, a little more engaging and a little more adept each time.

Things you will notice I have not included: fundraising pleas and promoting other shows. Certain times of the year I might mention one of these topics- i.e. Telling people when to expect the new subscription brochure at the closing show of the current season. I don’t make it a habit to regularly talk about future shows because it can undermine the current show if I am praising the next show on the schedule. (Hamlet will be amazing! Oh, and enjoy tonight’s show…)

There are a lot of great thoughts in the chat. I didn’t see half of them when the discussion was in progress.

What do you think? Can any of this be handled more effectively some other way?

Stop The Plane, I Want To Get Off

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I apologize for the lack of posts last week. I learned about a death in the family the Friday before last and I didn’t have an opportunity to schedule posts to cover my absence.

On my flight back I missed a connection and spent the night sleeping on the floor in O’Hare airport. The initial cause was a weather delay, but it was exacerbated by some other incidents. When we were queued up to take off, we pulled out of line because of weather over Chicago. Shortly thereafter, a guy in front of me started mouthing off to the flight attendants. As a result, we rolled back to the gate and he was put off the plane. The captain announced anyone else who wanted to get off could.

Then we rolled back to the holding area and after 10-15 minutes, the captain comes on and says someone else wants to get off the plane. We roll back to the gate and this time a number of people choose to get off. Finding the luggage for everyone who had left took a long time. As soon as we were done (and watched the safety video for the 3rd time) we basically rolled right from the gate to the runway and took off.

Even though my connecting flight had been delayed in taking off, I still arrived a half hour after it left and ended up sleeping in the airport due to a lack of available hotel rooms and rental cars.

The question I pondered as I eyed my name inching up on the standby queue was what this willingness to go back to the gate twice portends for customer expectations and demands in the future. I understand the security concerns associated a hostile passenger that had us return to the gate the first time, the second return seemed to be motivated more by a simple request.

I wonder at the calculus that made returning to the gate a second time and potentially adding to the mass of people stranded at an airport and the ill will that would generate seem preferable to getting in the air at the first possibility.

Worse, I wondered about what sort of precedent this would set for future flights I might take if people felt they had license to request a return to the gate when they got tired of waiting for the plane to take off.

What is the possible impact of airlines making these decisions upon the changing expectations of our audiences?

One statement I heard at a seminar on customer service that always made sense to me was that no customer really wants their money back. That is just the easiest and most assumed option thanks to repeated claims of “satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back.”

But who spends time and money driving/flying somewhere, renting a hotel, getting a babysitter, paying for meals and making whatever other arrangements are required to reach a destination or purchase a product, assured by the knowledge that they can always get their money back if they are dissatisfied?

They go to all this trouble because they expect to have a problem free experience. Giving them their money back doesn’t really compensate for all the other expenses and effort that was required. So if you are the source of disappointment, you should work to make the situation better and hold the refund for later when other options have been exhausted.

In some respects, the returning to the gate is a better solution than giving money back. But my feeling is that if they made being on the plane a more comfortable, positive situation to start with, people would be less interested in getting off. It is a sorry state of affairs when getting off and going nowhere is viewed as the preferred option.

The same is likely true of attendance at performing and visual arts events.

But this is where buying things online and receiving your entertainment in your house is so attractive. You don’t have to make the time and financial investment required for a destination based product or experience. If you are not satisfied, you can ask for your money back. You may not be entirely happy, but at least you don’t feel the bad experience has cost you in other areas.

My concern about the impact of this “go back to the gate” practice is less about people thinking they can get up and leave whenever they want to if they are dissatisfied. That practice is decades old. My worry is that this advances the idea of individual desires over the good of the collective group and will manifest in ways worse than people talking and texting on phones during a performance.

Are The Creatives Among Us?

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One situation I meant to acknowledge in my post yesterday about whether proximity to others doing creative work spurred your own innovation was (for want of a better term) Steve Jobs’ design of Pixar’s studios.

In short, he had the restrooms and other important building features placed in a central hub so that people from different parts of the company would run into each other. About a year ago I wrote a little about other arrangements that replicate this basic idea.

Richard Florida has been writing a series of five articles for The Atlantic Cities on different types of economic segregation in metro areas around the country.

Today he made his final post on the places where creative class workers are segregated from everyone else. Even if you are skeptical about Florida’s theories about creative class bolstering the economies of different communities, the research results are interesting to consider. I had never even thought about segregation of creatives as a problematic condition.

You may have heard of the term “town and gown” referring to the distinct cultural line that often develops between people who live in a community with a college and those who attend and work there. The depth of this cultural divide is one of the factors that feeds into the creative class segregation, but there are many others as well.

The metros where the creative class is most segregated include the nation’s largest metros and many of its leading knowledge-based economic centers. Los Angeles tops the list, followed by Houston, San Jose, San Francisco, New York, Austin, San Antonio, San Diego, and Chicago.

When we expand the list to include all metros, a number of smaller ones also show substantial levels of segregation. The creative class remains the most segregated in Los Angeles, but Trenton-Ewing, New Jersey (which includes Princeton University) takes second place, and Salinas, California is the third most highly segregated metro in the country on this score…The creative class is also highly segregated in college towns like Ann Arbor, Durham-Chapel Hill, Tucson, Gainesville, and College Station. As I wrote a few weeks ago, many of these smaller college towns also experience high levels of segregation of educated residents.

There were some results from the research that I saw encouraging to my hope that vibrant cultural experiences could be built in smaller communities.

Conversely, the metros where the creative class is least segregated are mainly in the Midwest and Sunbelt. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul is the least segregated large metro on this score, followed by Rochester, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Providence, Milwaukee, and Hartford. Jacksonville, Tampa, and Virginia Beach in the Sunbelt round out the top ten large metros where the creative class is least segregated.

The metros where the creative class is least segregated are all smaller ones. In fact, there are more than 150 smaller and medium-sized metros where the creative class is less segregated than their counterparts in the least segregated large metro. Many of these places, especially in the Northeast and the Midwest, are cities where levels of the creative class are fairly low. Mankato, Minnesota, has the lowest level of creative class segregation in the country, followed by Lewiston-Auburn, Maine; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Joplin, Missouri; and Rome, Georgia.

There are a number of reasons why segregation is higher in large metropolis, often having to do with gentrification raising rents and longer commuting times, both which inhibit different groups from interacting with each other.

So getting back to the question I posed yesterday about what scenario might be better, this research got me wondering if a situation might arise where a lot of people are doing creative work in a large city, but they may be doing it in enclaves distinct from the general population. That dynamic may actually be better for your personal creative growth, but the work being created might also be more disconnected from the community than that being created in a smaller metro area.

It may be more difficult therefore to attain the goal of “serving the community” in a larger metro than a smaller one. Even though greater numbers of people are experiencing your work, you may be serving a far smaller segment of the population than an artist in a metro area of 50,000. Two arts organizations in the smaller metro may serve a far more economic, educational and racially diverse segment of their general community than 20 arts organizations in a larger city.

As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t really thought about segregation of creatives as being a problem. I wonder if it is perceived as such. Is this manifesting in a negative manner for cities with high segregation like New York, Austin and Chicago, which are all recognized as having relatively vibrant cultural scenes? Do they see untapped potential in more integrated living conditions?

The protests in San Francisco against tech companies like Google would seem to be a reaction against creatives living amongst the population. (The issues are more complicated than that, really.)

On the other hand, the low segregation communities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Rochester, Buffalo and Cincinnati all generally recognize and appreciate the benefits their arts scenes bring to the livability of their respective cities. And lest you think that smaller communities necessarily means less available financial support for the arts, ArtsWave of Cincinnati just raised “$12 million in contributions– the highest amount ever raised by any community campaign for the arts in the country.”

Ride With The Valkyries

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Last week I was thinking about alternative category names for giving levels because our current names lean heavily toward classical music while that is only a small portion of our programming.

As I got to thinking about it, I wondered if anyone had thought about changing the names of their giving levels from season to season both as a way to do some A/B testing on what types of category names might inspire people to give more and to appeal to a younger generation of donors.

People who are used to giving through Kickstarter with all the exciting images and rewards at different support levels might not be motivated by a static list of giving levels like: Donor, Supporter and Benefactor.

Category titles that changed every year and aligned with the season might be more engaging. If you were going to give $450, would you increase it to $500 to be listed in a category employing Henry V’s “We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers” as a giving level? Or the aforementioned “Riding With the Valkyries”?

Unless you were being tongue in cheek, you would probably want to stay away from a The Merchant of Venice “Pound of Flesh” as a category. Though “As You Like It” might be a good category for a giving level that garners many perks.

If you are clever about it, you might actually have people opening their donor solicitation letter to see what names you came up with as eagerly as they flip through the season brochure to see what shows are being offered.

While there is no guarantee they will give, they will at least be a little more engaged with the process.

It’s All In How They Play The Game

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I have been keeping a Createquity post about gamification and arts events bookmarked on my web brower for while now. I liked some of the ideas suggested there and hoped to refer back to the entry for inspiration in the future. I was surprised to realize the post was actually created nearly two years ago. It seems so much more recent.

I came across another article recently that underscored the necessity of paying close attention to the design of any experience you may gamify. As with any game, some times people get a little more competitive than we might like.

In a post recounting the different experiences she and her friends experienced attending Sleep No More, Megan Reilly talks about how some of the repeat attendees have been using their knowledge to try to force certain outcomes. This tends to negatively impact the experience of other attendees, especially first timers.

My other friend, Amanda, got to have the same Hecate experience that I described above – having the ring put on her finger, and going through “Is That All There Is?” When Hecate turned to choose someone else for her 1:1, however, that selected person apparently tried to take the ring off my friend’s finger! I really want to know what was going on in that person’s head, to make him think that this behavior was ok. And this is not the worst behavior I’ve heard of on the part of the audience – just the worst that has happened to someone I know

and later

Many people by now have had so much experience visiting and revisiting “Sleep No More” that they are becoming like gamers, saving and restoring and attempting something new to experience something they KNOW is there but has so far been hidden from them. They try to find the secret combination of moves that unlocks the 1:1 with Hecate, and get visibly frustrated when they are not the chosen ones. They don’t care that someone else next to them might be experiencing the show for the first time – they want their experience/interaction/hidden secret scene, dammit. After all, they paid roughly $90 to play this game (or more, if like me you are not in NYC) and they want to win.

I love the parallels between “Sleep No More” and games, I really do. I love being responsible for my own journey through a story, and having to do some work in order to discover a narrative. I love that there are little errands and quests within the show that are given to different lucky audience members. I don’t want the 1:1 experiences to be removed. But how do you let the audience of 400 something people a night know that the experience of the show doesn’t have to include any one of these things? That their ticket price does not entitle them to a specific experience? And that the other audience members and the performers are not non-playable characters?

I would encourage people to read the whole thing, even if you have no intention of ever gamifying your experience. Megan Reilly’s discussion of what elements work and why it is so exciting might change your mind.

In some respects, what she talks about are the hazards of attending a public performance writ large. The person who pulls out their cellphone in the middle of a conventional performance and starts talking may be the same person who pushes you aside at Sleep No More. The percentage of the general population who will impinge upon the enjoyment of others is probably going to remain constant.

Another issue one of Reilly’s friends faced seemed to simply be a function of letting the audience interact with each other. There was a lot of non-verbal signalling that something was going to happen when experienced audience members watched the rest of the audience for their reaction or all started rushing in a certain direction.

When people are all seated quietly in a theater facing in one direction, the anticipation of those who have seen the show before is less apparent. But that experience is certainly also less interesting and probably doesn’t encourage as much return business as the Sleep No More experience, even at $90 a pop.

When Customer Relationship Management is Pull Rather Than Push

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Monday night I went to the library to return a couple books. I had finished the second book in a series and wanted to read the third, but I had checked and knew the library didn’t have the third book. I went to the reference desk to see if I could request the book from another one in the state.

I was told the system to check if another library in the state had the book was down, but if I wanted, I could request that the library buy it. That way, I could have the book for a month rather than 2 weeks via interlibrary loan. Since I read quickly and didn’t want the library to buy a new book on my account, I said I would request the book via interlibrary loan during another visit.

This is where things got interesting.

The librarian decided to check if they had already ordered the book given that they had the first two volumes. She discovered that not only had they ordered the book in the last week, but my name had been flagged as a person to inform when the book came in based on my borrowing habits.

I left the library muttering under my breath that I really needed to start looking seriously at customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Here was a library serving a rural county of 78,000 whose services I use for free that had bought a book for me based on tracking my use of their services. (Yes, I suppose other people may have read the series too, but they ordered it right after I took out the second book so as far as I am concerned, they bought it for me.)

The way I see it, if they invest so much effort into serving a person who uses their services for free, how much disservice am I doing to my patrons who are paying me $30-$50 to see shows if I am not closely tracking their preferences and trying to figure out how to serve them better?

The way I see it, that last sentence there is a crucial one. There is a difference between the way Amazon uses software to track my activities in the interest of trying to sell me a book and the way the library tracks my activities in interest of buying a book for me.

While I would certainly use the software to suggest shows a person might be interested in seeing based on past history, I would also want to think about ways I could use data we collect to shape our programming to serve their interests.

[N.B. Well, I wrote this post on Monday evening knowing I wouldn’t have time to do so on Tuesday because we had a show. I just happened to see one of the librarians after the show and asked her what CRM system they used. She tapped her head.

Turns out, she had noticed what books I was taking out and order the third book in the series. I had specifically asked on Monday night if it were she that had ordered the book and was given an answer that made me think it was all tracked by software. This just goes to show that the best customer relationship software is caring employees paying attention and making notes.]

Price and Value

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Seth Godin recently made a post that provides a good summary of how value influences the way consumers view price.

“It’s too expensive,” almost never means, “there isn’t enough money if I think it’s worth it.”

Social entrepreneurs are often chagrined to discover that low-income communities around the world that said their innovation was, “too expensive” figured out how to find the money to buy a cell phone instead. Even at the bottom of the pyramid, many people find a way to pay for the things they value.

[…]

Often, it actually means, “it’s not worth it.” This is a totally different analysis, of course. Lots of things aren’t worth it, at least to you, right now. I think it’s safe to assume that when you hear a potential customer say, “it’s too expensive,” what you’re really hearing is something quite specific.

There is a sentiment commonly expressed around arts organizations, especially ones that are trying to attract college age attendees, that college students who say a ticket is too expensive will generally spend twice as much on beer on the same Saturday night. While a performance and a beer are transitory experiences, everyone knows beer is more transitory of the two. (The old saying, you don’t buy it, you rent it.) But, of course, it is the social environment that accompanies the beer that people value.

More from Godin:

Culturally, we create boundaries for what something is worth. A pomegranate juice on the streets of Istanbul costs a dollar, and it’s delicious. The same juice in New York would be seen as a bargain for five times as much money. Clearly, we’re not discussing the ability to pay nor are we considering the absolute value of a glass of juice. No, it’s about our expectation of what people like us pay for something like that.

Start with a tribe or community that in fact does value what you do. And then do an ever better job of explaining and storytelling, increasing the perceived value instead of lowering the price. (Even better, actually increase the value delivered). When you don’t need everyone to buy what you sell, “it’s too expensive” from some is actually a useful reminder that you’ve priced this appropriately for the rest of your audience.

Over time, as influencers within a tribe embrace the higher value (and higher price) then the culture starts to change. When people like us start to pay more for something like that, it becomes natural (and even urgent) for us to pay for it too.

That bit I bolded caught my eye. In theory the arts already deal with a tribe or community that does value what it does. That tribe tends to be affluent and influential, but we all know the common refrain is that these people are dying off. Whatever influence they have, it isn’t continuing to motivate too many others.

I am not sure the answer is just better storytelling and waiting for influencers to help shift the culture. I think there has to be a corresponding shift in product features to something consumers value as well.

This isn’t just about the arts. In the cell phone example Godin uses, the phone’s value in the developing world goes beyond just being able to talk to other people. It allows people to gather information about crop prices and choose which market to travel to and acts as a medium for currency exchange.

Without these benefits, I don’t imagine as many people in the developing world would own phones as do today. They are buying Nokia phones with long battery life rather than iPhones because electricity sources are so scarce.

In terms of the arts, I have no doubt that it is entirely possible to avoid compromising on price. I likewise believe that there are many groups out there offering what people want, but who suffer from lack of good storytelling.

Yet just as phone companies know they will sell more Nokia phones in Kenya than Apple and Samsung phones, even though those two companies are duking it out for domination in the rest of the world, very few arts organizations are going to be exempt from aligning their “product features” to suit local conditions.

Aid and Expectations

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There was a TED Radio segment that aired back in October that hit so many of the conversation points in the arts today: recognizing failure, serving communities and funder priorities.

The topic was aid work in Africa. Italian aid worker Ernesto Sirolli reveals that pretty much every aid effort in Africa has failed. Some failures are attributable to arrogance of thinking you know what the solution is, but are equally attributable to the fact that no one will admit their failures, leaving others to replicate them.

SIROLLI: Every single project that we set up in Africa failed, and I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed.

RAZ: How did every single project fail?

SIROLLI: And they still do. See, the first reaction was, let’s not tell anybody we made a mistake. Let’s not tell anybody about this project. I really thought that it was one bad project that will never be repeated, which, I think, is what the Americans in the Peace Corps are thinking right now. That they are in a bad project, but it’s unique. So what they do, they don’t tell anybody what they’ve done because there must be lots and lots of lot good projects out there.

But if they had the chance to go and find out what their colleagues are doing around Africa, they will discover that, in fact, the norm is failure.

What caught my eye was the assumption by each group that their failure was unique based on the assumption everyone else was succeeding. Not surprising since everyone was reporting successes.

Sirolli says that everyone sent back reports to the home office talking about how great things were going when everything was actually going to hell. While the rosy reports were submitted to one office, another letter was sent to him begging him to come help the distressed aid workers.

I think the arts world faces a similar problem, it is just that our budgets are a bit smaller. The failures get a lot more publicity though, if you take a look at all the orchestra negotiations that have broken down and the failure of companies like City Opera in NYC.

Actually, that is not really accurate. We only know the very end results in each of these cases. We don’t know enough about the failures that lead to these situations to learn from them. There isn’t much to be learned from “Don’t Run Out of Money.” A little more transparency and frank discussion may be helpful.

When Sirolli talks about the Enterprise Facilitation system he invented, I felt like his approach was both a lesson to arts organizations and funders.

SIROLLI: … And I invented the system called Enterprise Facilitation where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion. The servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. So what you do, you shut up, you never arrive in a community with any ideas and you sit with the local people. We don’t work from offices. We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. We have zero infrastructure. And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do…

…The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. And then we help them to go and find the knowledge because nobody in the world can succeed alone. The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. So years and years ago, I had this idea – why don’t we, for once, instead of arriving in a community to tell people what to do, why don’t, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn’t exist.

Art organizations can probably take a cue from him about learning about the community by hanging out in cafes and talking to people rather than holding community meetings. Both funders of arts organizations and the arts organizations themselves might find value in simply helping people to connect their passions with the knowledge they need to realize their passion.

Any entity with resources to offer will probably find it difficult to just step back and not try to motivate people or impose their ideas on the people they hope to help. I am sure Sirolli and his people had that problem when they started. It is extremely difficult to surrender your ego and expectations, especially when you are bringing money to the table.

But the thing is, that is exactly what the best actors are able to do. They set aside their expectations about the way a scene should go and open themselves to the infinite possibilities that might occur. That way if a line is flubbed or delivered differently than it has been in the past, they can respond appropriately to the situation.

Bad actors chug on heedless of unexpected change or are caught short by it. In either case, they call attention to the problem.

This isn’t the best analogy because Sirolli’s people don’t react in order to serve their motivations the way actors do. Still, his people need to strive toward the same goal of suspending judgment in the same manner as actors do.

Why Educate Your Palate If All They Serve You Is Hamburgers

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Playwright Mike Lew criticizes the logic behind blaming a lack of arts education for a decreasing attendance at arts events.

Take the basic argument of “We need more theater in schools so more people will go see theater later in life” and substitute comparable forms of entertainment where young people are already dropping boatloads of money. The very logic of the construction collapses.

Consider the following assertions:
-No one likes cooking anymore because we stopped teaching Home Ec in the schools.
-We need more video game training in classrooms to ensure the next generation of Xbox users.
-If we don’t teach kids how to listen to standup comedy, Louis CK will go bankrupt.
-Kids who never played live music in school just plain won’t pay for a Jay-Z concert.

Now consider the converse, swapping out theater for things that we do teach in schools:
-Good thing we taught kids biology, because zoo attendance is up 50%.
-Colonial Williamsburg is popping thanks to US History classes.
-Now that we have English in schools, bookstores are saved!
-My classroom had a PC, therefore this ipad is nonsense.

Some of his examples are a little flawed. Whether it is due to the lack of home ec classes or not, people actually aren’t cooking.

Much like cooking, arts attendance and participation is influenced by the example provided by parents and educational environment. I would argue with both the arts and cooking, the more you know, the more you will be willing to experiment with unfamiliar fare.

But as Lew points out, interest doesn’t depend on you being introduced to the arts in school. People will make the decision to attend if the opportunity appears interesting enough.

While his contentions that the problem is based in inflexible timing of performances, dearth of social opportunities, programming choices that don’t resonate with the lives of young people and general lack of hospitality are not new arguments, it doesn’t mean he is wrong.

As I was reading some of his examples, I thought that it wasn’t logical to draw a direct line from biology to zoo attendance and English classes and bookstores because there are plenty of other positive outcomes that can result from these classes. The same can be true of the arts. English, sociology and anthropology can as easily lead to the arts as directly arts education when you think about the stories people tell and the way they express themselves.

Give his post a read, he makes many interesting points in his contribution to this ongoing discussion.

Whisper Sweet Nothings In My Ear

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Last summer there were a number of stories about how the Seoul city government installed a giant ear sculpture into which citizens could make comments. The ear was served something of a dual purpose as a comment box and art installation. The comments were recorded and then played inside city hall. Sensors measured how long people stopped to listen, archiving those that gave pause for potential further action and composting (term the article uses) those that aren’t popular into music.

It has taken about 6 months of that percolating in the back of my consciousness for the obvious to occur to me. Duplicating this effort would be a visually and procedurally interesting way to collect feedback from the community about what you should be doing. If your organization is in a high traffic area, you could put it out on the sidewalk or move it around your community setting it up at the mall, fair grounds, park and other public places so that people could tell you what they thought about your organization, the programming, outreach efforts, etc.

Basically, it might provide a good opportunity to hear from the people who never set foot near your organization. Some big sculpture is probably much more interesting and engaging than having a survey firm cold call every phone number in town in order to reach those in your community you aren’t already serving. Granted, the feedback from a phone survey can provide more scientific results, but it probably wouldn’t be as effective at building relationships and goodwill.

The other obvious use is to plop it down in your lobby to try to capture some responses from attendees who won’t provide responses to your written or online surveys. Just the novelty of interacting with whatever figure you choose to use might elicit a number of responses.

Of course, if you go the talking Paul Bunyan statue route and have a staff member get your sculpture to respond, you might actually be able to (gently) guide the discussion to topics to which you are interested in getting answers.

We Are Audience, You Will Be Assimilated

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Often we use some really general terms when referencing the people who support our organizations which tends to make us think of them as monolithic entity. Having written this blog for 10 years now, I bear more than my share of guilt despite my continuing effort to conceive of them as brains, rather than butts in the seats.

Blogger Nick Sherrard offered a little kick in the pants back in December with a post titled: Hey Arts Organisations, I am not Audience: Why arts organisations should stop talking about people behind their backs

He sums it up best in this passage (my emphasis):

The fact of the matter remains that ‘audience’ does actually mean people who take part in turning up, tuning in, or downloading what you do.

If you don’t believe me go ask them.

Turn to the nearest person who doesn’t work in the arts and ask them what an audience is.

I think that describing people in terms they wouldn’t understand themselves is generally not a good idea —its talking about people behind their backs.

He goes on to point out that what we term as our audience is actually a group that is comprised of different segments, each of which have different expectations of their relationship with our organizations.

He uses the terms customers, fans, superfans and collaborators, but there are obviously many gradations as you care to define. The first step toward that though is recognizing there are differences and discerning what the expectations of each are.

Everyone Doesn’t Have To Like You

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Today I saw a post on The Creativity Post that had me thinking back to my piece yesterday on Seth Godin’s vision of what constituted an elite.  In The Gorgeous Reality of Not Being Liked by Everyone, Jordan Bates addresses the individual who tries to please everyone, but much of what he says can apply to groups and organizations.

We all know we can’t please everyone, but still we either try to do so, or pretend we are doing so. The simple fact is, regardless of what you are writing on your grant applications, everyone in your community can’t be your market. You simply can’t be all things to all people.  Just as Godin says trying to convert someone who doesn’t want to be is a near fruitless effort, trying to appeal to everyone can result in diluting your effectiveness across a broad swath, serving no one well.

Certainly, for arts organizations the motivation to serve all that you survey is driven by the funding system we have. No one source provides you with enough support so you have to position yourself broadly enough to garner support from 20 different sources.

As I read Bates’ advice to the individual, I see a lot of similarities for arts organizations.

2. Take Minor Social Risks – Start doing a few things that you normally wouldn’t do because of your fear of what others would think or say…

3. Live by Your Deeper Values – ... The more you seek to align your actions with what you feel in the heart of your being, the less you will invest in the opinions of the mud-flingers.

4. Focus on Actual Outcomes – ..

5. Love Your Good and Bad – Give yourself permission to not be the things you wish you could be. Embrace the fact that all of your qualities — both your boons and shortcomings — are essential to the equation that is you…

There is a fair bit of discussion these days about arts organizations needing to take more risks, focus on outcomes, embracing and acknowledging failure as well as success.

I wonder if it is possible to sit down with your funders and say, “Look, you have been funding us for a long time now so you know we are effective, but we want to narrow our focus on serving X. We anticipate much better outcomes than we are seeing currently and they will be deeper and more meaningful than the results we are currently reporting. Can we count on your continued, and perhaps increased support?”

I feel like there is a  bit of a precedent for this sort of thing given the current focus on placemaking  by the NEA and other influential funders. You can point to them and note that focused investment in one’s community is being highly valued by funders.

My initial impulse was to say, you have to avoid the perception of catering only to the wealthy. But as I thought about it, I wondered if part of the problem for some organizations has been a divided focus in trying to appeal to both the wealthy and the not so wealthy. Both groups end up feeling that the organization has neither of their interests at heart.

Arts organizations end up being Archie trying to alternately please both Betty and Veronica, except the results are not as hilarious  in real life.

Now other than the Metropolitan Opera which has a waiting list miles long and people willing their seats to descendants, I don’t think any arts organization really has an interest in providing a premium product to a wealthy audience. It is the perception that you have to cater to one group based on their money and the other based on your mission that causes the uncomfortable division.

I know in my community the elitist active seekers that Godin describes cut across all social strata and income levels so there is some sense in his suggestion that the focus should be on serving them.

Of course, the question comes up about whether it is sustainable. There is a real possibility that people will have to be let go in order to serve this narrower focus. An organization I once worked for closed down their performing arts program of 20 years to focus on their core competency of over 50 years. This was motivated  more by economic need rather than philosophic outlook, but in either case the organization has to examine its priorities. Better to make this decision of your own will than to have it forced upon you.

Even among the curious, everyone is not going to have the same interests and like everything you do. The current environment where most people are buying single tickets rather than subscriptions has changed the relationship and expectations the community has of arts organizations. It can be easier to concede and have them accept that they won’t like everything you present in your efforts to engage whomever you identify you want to serve.

It is likely they will accept that premise if there appears to be a corresponding attempt to discover what does interest and excite them and shift things in that direction. (Remembering the distinction between wants and needs)

 

Re-Defining Elite

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Seth Godin is talking about us. Well, actually I think that is a little narcissistic to think he is merely talking about people in the creative fields. I am pretty sure his comment encompass American culture as well as that as that of a number of other countries.

His post titled, “I’m an elitist” addresses a lot of topics we in the creative fields get conflicted about:

Lowering the price at the expense of sustainability is a fool’s game.

Only producing tools that don’t need an instruction manual takes power away from those prepared to learn how to use powerful tools. And it’s okay to write a book that some people won’t finish, or a video that some don’t understand.

Giving people what they want isn’t always what they want.

Curators create value. We need more curators, and not from the usual places.

Creating and reinforcing cultural standards and institutions that elevate us is more urgent than ever.

We write history about people who were brave enough to lead, not those that figured out how to pander to the crowd.

Elites aren’t defined by birth or wealth, they are people with a project,…

These are all issues that are constantly being bandied about in the arts today. Pricing seems to always be a topic of conversation.

Diane Ragsdale and Nina Simon recently challenged us to think about wants versus needs.

While Godin never promises you that someone will pay for it, he encourages the creation of challenging work because to do otherwise is a disservice those who are ready to be challenged.

He actually developed that idea in a post he wrote about 4 years ago and links to in his current post.

While Godin does acknowledge that affluence does play a role in ones ability to become an elite by providing free time to pursue knowledge and the tools to communicate and process that knowledge, he states that birth, class and affluence do not make one an elite.

The number of self-selected elites is skyrocketing. Part of this is a function of our ability to make a living without working 14 hours a day in a sweatshop, but part of it is the ease with which it’s possible to find and connect with other elites.

The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from.

Once you identify this as your mission, you save a lot of time and frustration in your outreach. If someone doesn’t choose to be part of the elites, it’s unclear to me that you can persuade them to change their mind.

Two things that come to mind. If we define elites as he does, people who are willing to be challenged, rather than worrying they are the people we are focusing too much upon because they possess interest and ability to support our endeavors, what will need to change in order to engage and coordinate this new constituency? And is it sustainable?

Not the first or last time this basic question has been asked, probably even in the last week given all the conversations about how the non-profit arts sector needs to change themselves. Following Godin’s suggestion to look in new places to find curators may be a start down the right road.

Second question is about that last paragraph of Godin’s that I quote. How do you determine if someone is unwilling to embrace the challenges that are a hallmark of an elite and shift your attention elsewhere? This seems to a difficult proposition because we are not always the most objective.

As I noted at the start of this entry, there is a degree of narcissism in the arts, really just about every industry, where we see people who don’t experience the world in a similar way as we do as an outsider. Lawyers view the world differently from engineers who view the world differently from computer programmers and visual artists. Those who do not value what we value are not valued.

Yet there are groups in each who are furrowing their brows and generating a lot of sweat, tackling problems with the gusto of Godin’s elites. We know they are fellow travelers in pursuit of progress, but we want them to pay attention to us right now. It may be 15 years* before their pursuits orient them in our direction and into our orbit looking for solutions.

I am sure Godin’s definition of outreach is much wider than what arts organization define as outreach, but even if your efforts embody his definition, 15 years is a long time and it is easy to give up on someone (or a group) that is clearly engaged and actively pursuing productive projects simply because they aren’t engaged and active with you.

As a whole, arts organizations currently don’t have that sort of patience. Even if they don’t expect people to fall in love with the arts after one exposure, they still want it to happen fairly quickly and investment to manifest in frequent interactions. Otherwise, organizations wouldn’t purge their mail lists after a year or two of apparent inactivity.

On the other hand, if you take up Godin’s challenge, take the approach that you value seekers and restructure to serve them in all the ways they want to interact with you, both on- and off-line, maybe it doesn’t take 15 years.

 

*I use 15 years because it was about 15 years ago that friends from grad school took me to an art museum when I was visiting them in NC, as did another pair of friends when I was visiting them in OK. However, it was only about 4 years ago that I started going to art museums of my own accord and on a regular basis. I figure if it takes a person with a career in the arts around 15 years to start to do that, it may take someone who is not in the arts around that long as well to go from infrequent to occasional and we need to wait for them.

No Venue Is Too Small To Be Sale Spoofed

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I never really thought of my venue and the shows it presents as a target for ticket resellers and secondary market brokers, but a recent incident provides a cautionary tale.

I had a woman make an appointment to see me to complain about the excessive services charges assessed by our ticket office. Now, our charges are rolled into the price so I thought she had ordered her tickets via Ticketmaster even though she swore she called our number.

When she brought her paperwork in, it was apparent the answer was much more complicated. The receipt showed that the order was placed during the week our ticket office was closed for Christmas holidays. Not only that, the charges for the tickets were twice the face value of the show (a renter presenting an Elvis impersonator).

We don’t know what number she called to order the tickets, but what we ended up piecing together was that a guy in Washington state basically took her request, went online to Ticketmaster and ordered the tickets, chose print at home and then FEDEXed the tickets to her, tacking all sorts of service charges on to the already over priced tickets. When we went in to the system to check if the tickets were actually valid, his name and address were associated with the seats and matched the address on the sales receipt.

In the end, the woman ended up paying over $120 for two tickets that would have cost her about $43 had she reached our ticket office.

In retrospect, I realized I had seen similar offers for our tickets on Facebook and Twitter. One posting was offering tickets to one of our shows, but had linked to a similarly named venue about two hours away. At the time, I thought they put our date on a concert being performed by the same group at another time and the prices were for those seats.

It was only later that I realized the concert in that city was being held at an entirely different venue. Our date was right, whoever was selling just linked to the seating map at the wrong venue.

Since then, I have paid closer attention and have seen people offering tickets on Twitter and Facebook to some of our events at jacked up prices. This isn’t secondary market selling, the seats they offer are in rows where no tickets have been sold and at a time when the event isn’t really in any danger of selling out.

This isn’t technically web or email spoofing since no one has tried to directly impersonate us. This just takes advantage of someone’s lack of knowledge or attention when they are ordering.

This sort of scam is difficult to warn people about. Those who are subscribers or have a close enough relationship with your organization that they read any correspondence they receive from you warning about this situation probably know enough to discern when they are not talking to an authentic representative.

The woman who complained to me actually had her call forwarded a couple times and then was instructed to go online to another site in order to buy the tickets. The inconvenience of this process alone probably would have tipped our regular customers off.

So in addition to watching social media for any positive or negative comments about your organization, you should keep an eye out for people pretending to be one of your ticket outlets as well.

Meandering In Minnesota

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A reader from Oklahoma recently wrote me thanking me for providing information arts organizations in rural settings can use. With that in mind, I wanted to highlight a “if Minnesota can do it…” post on Dakotafire, a site that hopes to emulate and replicate that MN’s successes in the Dakotas

I loved the idea promoted by John Davis, Executive Director of the Lanesboro Arts Center, had for making the entirety of Lanesboro, MN an arts campus (video) rather than just focus on building an arts center. (I also love Lanesboro’s claim to be the B&B capital of Minnesota)

The fact that the town of New York Mills, MN, population 1200, decided to sponsor a Great American Think Off is inspiring to me. It suggests that there are still plenty of interesting ideas that aren’t being explored and risks that aren’t being taken.

I was amused by the concept that rural communities don’t have arts/gallery walks like cities do, they have Arts Meanders that include artist studios spanning counties.

Note that none of these links appear in the Dakotafire post. The ideas were so intriguing, I was inspired to seek out the websites for each.

True, these are all existing ideas writ small, or perhaps it is writ large since they take the idea of an arts district and apply it to whole towns and counties.

For me it belies the thinking that there aren’t enough of some type of resource in a place to accomplish anything successfully. The effort invested in some of these projects has been spent over 20 years or so, but the devotion to pursuing the idea has been there.

APAP Reflections

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I just got back in the office today after attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference in NYC and I wanted to share some quick impressions and highlights from the experience. I am sure I will have much more to say in coming days.

The biggest, best experience came during the awards luncheon when Lehua Simon made her speech. I hired Lehua as assistant theatre manager when I was working at Leeward Community College Theatre in Hawaii. At APAP she presented during the “Five Minutes to Shine” session. The attendees of that session voted for the best presentation to be given during the awards luncheon.

I should note that a year ago, I sent her to an entirely different conference and the exact same thing happened. She gave a short presentation and was elected to do a longer presentation in front of the whole conference.

It looks like the conference intends to post video later so I will comment a little more thoroughly at that time. However, despite the fact that there were far more storied people getting awards, the applause was most thunderous for her five minutes and she ended up coming back out to take another bow. Three speakers after her, including Patricia Cruz, Executive Director of Harlem Stage and Robert Lynch, President of Americans for the Arts, referenced Lehua’s speech.

I think it would be incredibly hard to manufacture a moment that had such impact. As far as I was concerned, it just proves some people like Lehua just have innate talent for getting people invested when they speak.

Other moments that jumped out at me:

Johann Zietsman, an arts administrator who grew up in South Africa commented that when Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, people wanted him to defund all the orchestras and museums and devote the money to bringing drinking water to the country. Zietsman said Mandela commented that a country without arts is a country that only has water and taps. Zietsman noted that as crucial as drinking water was to the country, Mandela felt a great deal would be lost if the government didn’t also express value for the arts.

There was a plenary featuring Taylor Mac, Baratunde Thurston, and Abigail Washburn. There was a lot of laughter elicited by the three of them. One comment Taylor Mac made really grabbed me.

He mentioned how he hates audience interaction, (except when he does it, of course), because so often it is about the artist trying to get you to participate in their fun. Mac said his aim is to let the audience have an authentic experience interacting with his performance. If you feel uncomfortable as a result of something in his show, that is a valid experience. He said once he explains it to people in that context, they may still be a bit apprehensive, but they also seem to settle in and become a little more receptive to the experience.

That may sound like an easy rationalization, but I have to confess I felt more at ease with the concept as he explained the audience had permission to be uncomfortable.

As an example of what his performances can involve. He had one show focused on the 1820s. Since Braille was invented in the 1820s, he had everyone in the audience blindfolded and started them playing games like musical chairs. People ended up sitting in the lap of strangers and kissing them.

The session my colleagues and I did on presenting contemporary work by indigenous artists went pretty well. As with many of these sessions, 50 minutes wasn’t nearly enough time and we ended up continuing the conversations in the hallway. The audience was small which wasn’t surprising given the early morning timing, but there were people from the Canadian Arts Council and New England Foundation for the Arts in the audience who asked questions. So between them and those who were motivated to seek us out at 9 am, I feel like we were effective at reaching a good cross-section of people.

The most disappointing part of the conference was actually the opening keynote which featured Diane Paulus from American Repertory Theater, actor Zachary Quinto and composer Stephen Schwartz. I thought each of them was going to speak but instead the format was more like an episode of Inside the Actors Studio with most of the questions going to Schwartz asking him about when his musical Pippin was produced 40 years ago and Paulus about what it was like working with Schwartz on the recent revival of Pippin. Quinto was largely left out.

I felt like a keynote should be about setting the tone for the rest of the conference. Combined with a conference theme of “Shine” the tone seemed more about burnishing 40 year old works rather than encouraging attendees to strive toward anything new. The interviewer should have taken a cue from his laryngitis and left the three to talk about what was on their minds. Once they opened the floor for questions, things started to move in a better direction. (I wrote all of this on the conference survey by the way.)

I will admit that after the keynote was over, it did occur to me that I was potentially expressing a preference for optimistic platitudes over a discussion of the careers of noted artists.

Near the end of the session, Diane Paulus spoke about there not being a conflict between being an artist and being business minded. She described herself and others as identifying themselves as artists with an interest in marketing and artists with an interest in finances.

The observation that really grabbed my attention was that loyalty is not equal to a subscription. She had people talk about how much they loved American Repertory Theater, but when she asked what shows they had seen, they had only seen one in the last year.

That reminded me of Andrew McIntyre’s talk from three years ago where he described patrons who expressed a strong connection with an arts organization claiming to have attended the previous year when it had been two or three years.

There was a lot more that happened that can’t be summarized in a few paragraphs. I hope to write about them more in the coming weeks.

Wait! I Didn’t Mean YOU

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I was taken off guard by the news today that the Trey McIntyre Project is disbanding. I always half wondered if the company wasn’t meant to be permanent based on the fact they kept labeling their work in sequential years, Year 1, Year 2, etc.,

My first thought when I read the announcement was that they were following the Epoch model proposed by David McGraw I wrote about a couple years ago. While they are closing the company, there is a transition toward projects they (predominantly Trey) was already dabbling/becoming involved in. The Epoch model calls for a “quit while you are on top” exit strategy so I experienced a “be careful what you wish for” sense of dismay a few moments later.

As I have talked about before, The Trey McIntyre Project achieved in Boise, ID what every arts organization fantasizes about doing– on the street recognition and esteem on par with the local university football team.

In this respect they are something of a singular success story so I want them to continue on as an exemplar to the rest of us. The idealism of quitting while you are ahead sounds great in abstract, but reality of executing it pretty much guarantees and requires there to be high levels of disappointment.

Well we can hope the next generation of inspiring arts organizations is waiting in the wings to fill the void. Or step up and do it ourselves.

Presenting Works By Indigenous Artists

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A week from today, I will be presenting a panel at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference on “Presenting Works By Indigenous Artists.”

Our session is currently scheduled on Monday, January 13 at 9 am in the Madison Suite at the Hilton Midtown. (Check for signs and updates, they have already moved us once.)

Based on my experience in Hawaii, I know there are a lot of high quality indigenous arts performance groups out there who have a product that would appeal to the interests of curious audiences across the country.

However, I also know that there is a degree of uncertainty about how to identify artists, verify their authenticity and promote the show to audiences. So I put together a panel speak about the issue.

From our session proposal:

Session Focus:
Presenting indigenous artists, identifying groups, seeking support for tours, discussing the potential cultural requirements of those artists, promoting the artists in a respectful manner , marketing these performers to audiences who may be curious but unfamiliar with the culture; connecting indigenous artists with their local counterparts in your communities; Developing an understanding in your communities of the living and evolving nature of indigenous arts.

Session Description
There has been a marked increase recently in fine works being created by indigenous artists who combine western staging and presentation techniques with expressions of their own cultures. Recognizing that there may be a degree of uncertainty about artistic content, interactions with performers, expectations, use of terminology and promoting these productions to audiences, this session explores the issues around presenting indigenous artists.

The panel will discuss questions regarding booking decisions – identifying groups, understanding quality, your role as presenter in empowering artists to shape their own cultural expression while dispelling cultural misconceptions or stereotypes

Marketing – what is appropriate? what do I say to my community that doesn’t include these cultures? Interaction with the artists – what are the protocols? How can we create meaningful engagement?

The panel will consist of:

Colleen Furukawa, VP of Programming at Maui Arts and Cultural Center who has been instrumental in the creation and production of a number of cultural dance and visual arts works.

Karen Fischer, President of Pasifika Arts Network which represents indigenous artists and has been working to expand the programming of indigenous work in all disciplines.

Moss Patterson, Artistic Director of Atamira, the leading Maori Contemporary Dance Company based in New Zealand.

Rosy Simas, Choreographer of Rosy Simas Danse. Rosy is a Native American (Seneca) contemporary choreographer. Over the past 20 years, she has created more than 40 original works.

And, of course, myself. I have produced an opera entirely in Hawaiian, a hula drama about the Hawaiian snow goddess and a production showcasing elements of Balinese temple ceremonies. And I presented other significant works by artists from across Oceania and Asia.

You may be thinking it is easy for me to talk about how easy it is to sell indigenous performances based on my experience presenting to communities with a fair representation from similar indigenous communities. While I have lived in Hawaii, I currently live and work in the rural Midwest now and have worked in communities in NJ, FL, NY and UT as well so I am well aware of the varied types of communities many arts organizations are serving.

If you are going to be attending the APAP conference, swing by and see us.

I believe they plan to record us so between that and my own notes I will try to write about the topics we cover and the questions that are asked in a future post.

Forgive Your Mistakes

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As the year ended, it was announced that Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, was closing this January. Given the interminable previews, technical problems and public discussion of Julie Taymor’s dismissal as they moved to revamp the production, wry comments were never far from people’s lips when the show was mentioned.

The show served as a reminder that having successful big names attached to a show like The Edge, Bono and Julie Taymor, doesn’t guarantee success.

I was going to write a post on another topic today, but I got to reading about the difficulties faced by the original production of West Side Story in 1957. Despite also having big names like Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein attached to it, the show was a hard sell and faced a number of problems.

Stephen Sondheim, who hadn’t really become a household name at the time, didn’t want to work in the project for fear of being pigeonholed as a lyricist instead of a composer. His mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, had to convince him that working in such talented company would be invaluable for his career.

No one wanted to produce the show because its gritty story of street gangs ran counter to the happy, bright vision of musicals of the 1950s. (Remember, this is based on the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet, two of the main character are dead on stage by intermission and the two leads by the end of the story.) Even when two producers did sign on, one was unable to raise money and backed out soon after. Some theater owners refused to let their buildings be used for the show.

Finally, Hal Prince, who had previously turned the show down, was convinced to come on as a producer by Stephen Sondheim.

There were high tensions between the four collaborators over many of the artistic decisions, especially between the domineering Jerome Robbins and everyone else. Reportedly by opening night, none of the other three were on speaking terms with Robbins.

But the result was a show that was absolutely groundbreaking at the time, moving contrary to so many conventions. Now, more than 50 years later, West Side Story is one of the most enduring musicals on Broadway. It doesn’t seem quite so innovative today because so many others followed its lead.

In retrospect, it is easy to compare West Side Story to Spiderman and identify why one succeeded and the other failed, but had you been involved in the process of mounting the first production of either one, it would have been difficult to predict the eventual outcome correctly.

By some measures, Spiderman with the built in name recognition of the property, director and producers, along with all the funding behind it should have succeeded where West Side Story with its edgy story that no one wanted fund should have failed.

Today Drew McManus made a wish list for arts and culture in 2014 and asked what his readers wished for.

It wasn’t until I read about West Side Story and thought about Spiderman that I realized my wish is for artists and arts and cultural organizations to be able to forgive themselves for their failures and to realize that success is not always easy or immediately apparent.

Excepting Spiderman for a moment, there are huge, well funded corporations who perform extensive research and data analysis who still fail miserably in their endeavors. (See JCPenny’s assumption that consumers wanted honest pricing.)

While differences in economic realities may allow them to weather the consequences of their mistakes better than you can, at least recognize that having one hundred times your funding doesn’t make them even 10 times a better decision maker than you.

Conversely, your lack of funding does not indicate you lack brains and ability.

Info You Can Use: Speed Dating For Volunteers

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Last month Non-Profit Quarterly (NPQ) had a small piece on a “Speed Dating” event that 15 Sacramento non-profits organized to recruit volunteers. In addition to it being a great idea for volunteer recruitment, it also seemed like a (relatively) low-stakes way to practice and evaluate the most effective methods of speaking about your organization for fundraising and promotion purposes.

On the merits of recruiting volunteers, I thought it was a better option than just listing opportunities on websites and newspapers because it is more active and takes advantage of the cachet of other organizations to engage with people who might not immediately be attracted to your organization.

By this I mean, had you advertised a volunteer recruitment open house for your theater, it may pass the notice of people who don’t already have an affinity for your discipline or organization.

If you are part of an event that also includes the local Red Cross, schools, hospitals and other non-profits, you have an almost guaranteed opportunity pitch your organization to everyone there. Since everyone is expected to interact with everyone else, it removes the awkwardness of volunteer fairs where you attempt to engage with people who pass your booth. Ultimately you have the opportunity to gain the participation of a person who was only vaguely familiar with your organization, was unaware you went into elementary schools, but is absolutely invested in helping with those activities.

This approach may be well suited to recruiting young volunteers because it is so direct and interactive rather than depending on them to find and research you at some point in their busy day. (Which is not at all to say that older retirees wouldn’t find it great fun as well.)

In the NPQ comments section, Abigail Denecke echoed my thoughts wondering what questions/statements/approach might have been most effective at cultivating additional action. And I liked commenter Laura Halley’s idea about using a speed dating structure as a general orientation tool.

Hard To Pronounce Show? There Is An App For That!

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We all know that an online ticket platform can make it more convenient for people to purchase tickets at their leisure, but a recent article on Slate suggests that it may also help sell tickets by avoiding opportunities for anxiety.

…1980s change in Swedish liquor retailing that led to stores being moved from an “ask a clerk to retrieve a bottle” model to a “self-service” format. It turned out that, not only did removing a layer of human interaction spike sales (by 20 percent) but it also led to a shift in those sales toward a large number of difficult-to-pronounce drinks. According to Swedes independently surveyed by the researchers, it is apparently harder to say Stolichnaya than Absolut in Swedish, and there were real challenges with French wine pronunciation as well.* So take away having to say anything out loud and the sales of the tongue-tied bottles increased by 7 percent.

Another example they gave was that online ordering for pizza increased the spending on each order. People didn’t order more pizzas, but they did order more toppings on each pizza. The theory was that people were more comfortable doubling up on meats or making a complicated order (like for a Starbucks coffee) when they could do so online rather than having to express it to a person.

Of course, that may not always be in the best interest of the consumer…

..the website induced more “double bacon” than “double veggies” orders. The picture painted is one of people avoiding the awkwardness of complex—and fattening—orders online and making simpler—and healthier—ones when they had to deal with a real, live person.

I oriented more on the concept that ordering online helped people avoid potential mispronunciations on shows like Antigone and Coriolanus or artists with foreign pronunciations like Stephen Colbert.

I wondered given non-profit arts organizations are in the business of educating, is it better to gently correct or even correctly pronounce the name when reviewing the order, or to just ignore the mistake and avoid embarrassing the customer at all.

I don’t have any research to show that this sort of anxiety factors into the method people choose when they order tickets, but the research showed that people deferred their real desires even when the opportunity for embarrassment seemed low.

Though anxiety over the ticketing ordering process probably ranks lower than most barriers to participation for arts audiences, it does seem like another reason for having the alternative available and easy navigate.

I am not trying to contradict my blogging confrere Drew McManus with the title of this post and encourage people to develop new apps, but many of the commenters on the Slate article mentioned how much they loved being able to place their order when they entered Starbucks or a deli and have it waiting by the time they got to the register.

It may be beneficial to use a ticketing service that offers those sort of apps so people can order in advance or while they wait on line.

Perhaps I am overly sensitive to constantly being up-sold during my Christmas shopping excursions, but the last paragraph of the article especially resonated with me. The author, Joshua Gans, notes that this potential for embarrassment also inhibits employees who are forced to ask for customer names, email addresses, store credit cards and extended warranties, from giving the best and most sincere service to customers. It can undermine confidence and goodwill if customers pick up on this unease or are annoyed at a time when they are spending money.

So in addition to examining whether your processes are making things difficult for your customers, you may need to evaluate their impact on your employees as well.

Don’t Be Nervous, It’s Not About You

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I do a lot of public speaking and am generally pretty comfortable doing it. The place I get most nervous is up on stage. In a classroom or hall full of 50-100 people, no problem. On stage, in a theatre, and my nervous energy starts to rev up.

It doesn’t approach anywhere near paralysis, but it is there.

At the last theatre I worked at, I got pretty accustomed to the space and the general energy of the people. But now that I am standing up in a new space, I gotta start all over again.

I took a little guidance from a post Seth Godin made about public speaking on Monday to prepare for my appearance before the performance we had Tuesday night.

In his post, “Speaking in public: two errors that lead to fear,” he says:

1. You believe that you are being actively judged

2. You believe that the subject of the talk is you

When you stand up to give a speech, there’s a temptation to believe that the audience is actually interested in you.

This just isn’t true. (Or if it is, it doesn’t benefit you to think that it is).

You are not being judged, the value of what you are bringing to the audience is being judged. The topic of the talk isn’t you, the topic of the talk is the audience, and specifically, how they can use your experience and knowledge to achieve their objectives.

[…]

If you dive into your (irrelevant to the listener) personal hurdles, if you try to justify what you’ve done, if you find yourself aswirl in a whirlpool of the resistance, all you’re providing is a little schadenfreude as a form of entertainment.

On the other hand, if you realize that you have a chance to be generous in this moment, to teach and to lead, you can leave the self-doubt behind and speak a truth that the audience needs to hear. When you bring that to people who need it, your fear pales in comparison.

Not the simple advice found in, “imagine everybody in their underwear,” but probably more useful to you in the process of preparing for your moment in the spotlight so you don’t start getting worked up in advance.

Incidentally, this is the same advice usually given about marketing and advertising–It isn’t about you, it is about your audience and what is valuable to them. So you shouldn’t be spending a lot time listing accomplishments trying to justify your organization, but rather make the focus about your audience and how they benefit.

Thanks For The Virtual Relationship

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I started my current job in May, however I came to interview for the position right before Thanksgiving last year. As you might imagine, I count that date as an important milestone. Given the proximity of this “anniversary” to Thanksgiving, there were a number of cards and loaves of pumpkin bread being distributed to those who welcomed and assisted me in the transition to my new job.

I probably missed a number of people in the process. One person I whose participation in my job search I did want to recognize is Drew McManus. I use the term “participation” because while Drew did directly contribute to my getting this job, he also more indirectly helped with a little experiment I was running.

So this entry is actually less about saying how wonderful Drew is (though he is), as reflecting on what it is we actually value about employees and coworkers.

I actually started my job search a few years back and I asked Drew if I could use him as a reference. At the time, we had never met in person. And as of right now, our only in person meeting was a couple hours for dinner during a lay over I had in Chicago when I was returning from a job interview.

I wanted to see if it was actually possible to get a job based on the recommendation of someone whom you had never met or worked with directly. I listed Drew about third or fourth on my reference list behind people who had actually supervised my work directly on a daily basis.

While it is true to say that we never really met, we have communicated quite often over the years via email and a number of times on the phone, soliciting each other’s advice and discussing the arts environment. We would coordinate on cross-blog projects. I would frequently alert Drew to problems with the website hosting the blog and there were a few times I expressed criticism of some of the changes he was proposing.

So in many respects, our relationship was similar to that of many workplaces where coworkers assist and comment on each other’s work and labor to advance the interests of the company, in this case the Inside the Arts page.

The Adaptistration blog has passed its decade mark and Butts in the Seats will reach that point in February. In some respects, Drew is more familiar with the quality of my work and thoughts on arts administration than my previous four work supervisors. Since I am faithful about scheduling blog posts to cover my absences during vacations, he knows a bit about my work ethic.

Yet we work in a field that emphasizes in-person interactions with our customer base. We want people experiencing the arts in close physical proximity with the performer or actual piece of visual art.

There is a 10 year section of my life’s work that does not exist physically. There are people who have published fewer pages of incoherent ramblings than I have who are recognized poets and authors (or gotten tenure). I can’t quite say for sure if those 10 years of effort even helped me get this job or not.

Do you really want to hire someone who values interactions and creative content that are generated virtually for a job that is so much about the physical experience?

I think most everyone would agree this is pretty much indicative of the new normal and has been for awhile. Even the novelty of this story has waned from what it might have been four or five years back. I have interacted with Drew and others so frequently and so regularly it is difficult to remember or even believe that we have only met physically for two hours.

To some degree, the situation was almost akin to the blind auditions orchestras hold. My value was being discussed based largely on the quality of my work for the benefit of the project and not colored by office politics, personal affiliations or the size of the tip I leave when we go to lunch.

The common joke is that you never really know if the person on the other end of the computer is who they represent themselves to be, but this is also the stuff upon which relationships and trust are, and will be developed.

Even though Drew was last on my list, he received a surprising number of calls and apparently carried on fairly decent length conversations. And I actually got called out for some in-person interviews afterward. I don’t know whether his conversations helped my case, but they clearly didn’t hurt.

One thing I take from this is that while the opportunity to view performances online can undermine the value of live attendance in people’s minds, this experience has shown me that it is possible to develop a seemingly deep relationship with them as well. All the information you put out there on your website and all the interactions you have on social media can make people feel as if they have visited your performance space and experienced an event there, even if they haven’t.

I won’t argue that it isn’t a shallow, illusory relationship which may crumble quickly upon contact with the real life situation. But I think half the barriers to participation audiences encounter are mental and anything that removes or diminishes those perceptions and makes people feel as if they have the ease of a longstanding relationship with you is helpful.

Though again, the image that you put out there has to match the reality fairly closely. You can’t promote yourself as Disney if the reality is the Jersey Boardwalk after a hurricane.

Process Knows Its Limits

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A post on Drucker Exchange, When Process Is a Prison, got me thinking about ticket office operations. I am sure the content of the entry could be applied to a hundred things that happen every day in arts organizations, but that is what bubbled to the top in my mind.

“Procedures can only work where judgment is no longer required, that is, in the repetitive situation for whose handling the judgment has already been supplied and tested,” Drucker wrote in The Practice of Management. “In fact, it is the test of a good procedure that it quickly identifies the situations that, even in the most routine of processes, do not fit the pattern but require special handling and decision based on judgment.”

I pretty much started the trajectory of my arts management career in the box office a couple decades ago. Since then the rules governing exchanges, returns and other transactions have seemed to move from matters of policy and procedure to matters of judgement. These days having a ticket office manager you can trust to make good judgments on behalf of the organization is as, if not more, important than their technical ability to troubleshoot the computer system you are using to sell your tickets.

Granted, box office operations are probably technically more a matter of policy than procedure, but Drucker’s general sentiment applies.

The ticket office has always been viewed as the first place of contact with customers where good manners and efficient processing of orders is prized. But now customer service interactions are almost more important than the product being sold, given customer expectations and their ability to almost instantly report their disappointment to 1000 of their closest friends.

Consistently providing good service doesn’t necessarily mean treating everyone equally because everyone views their situation as special and may expect you to have some degree of awareness of those circumstances. This is why customer relationship management (CRM) software is viewed as so important by businesses at large (though you wouldn’t know it when you call your cable or cell phone provider). Many arts organizations don’t have the resources to support sophisticated CRM software so human judgment and good note keeping becomes all the more important for them.

Perhaps my perception of the change is based on the fact that I have gradually moved into a position of generating the policy rather than enforcing it and I am a big softy. But I suspect there are many others who will confirm that things have changed from the 70s and 80s when it was “No Refunds, No Exchanges, No Exceptions” for non-subscribers. Now it is more akin to “No Refunds, No Exchanges, Except for the Exceptions.”

As Drucker is quoted, the best procedure recognizes those times that are exceptions to the procedure. I think that some times changing environment requires you to recognize that it is no longer useful to maintain set policies and procedures in favor of general guidelines and good judgment.

How Long Before You Lose Patience?

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Ah, truer words were never spoken!

Maybe I am reading the wrong blogs, but I am surprised none of my usual sources haven’t already quoted this recent post by Seth Godin, “Who is this marketing for?”

-Who, precisely, are you trying to reach?
-What change are you trying to make?
-How will you know if it’s working?
-How long before you will lose patience?
-How long before someone on your team gets to change the mission?
-How much time and money are you prepared to spend?
-Who gets to approve this work?
-Who are you trying to please or impress?

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about how true these are. He suggests asking these before you embark on a marketing campaign in order to save time and money.

All are valid questions, but some are created more valid than others. The first three and how much time and money, are smart to ask. The rest need to be asked, but usually aren’t.

“-How long before you will lose patience?” was the one that jumped out at me because even when there isn’t any ego involved, that ends up being the biggest failing of any marketing campaign. In fact, most people will say if you aren’t taking the long, holistic view, you are probably engaged in advertising rather than marketing.

Marketing is a long term game usually involving multiple parts, aimed at shifting perception as much as selling product. If you are ending it because your patience has run out due to lack of sales rather than lack of shift in perception over the course of months, then you are probably doing it wrong.

But even when you are doing advertising just to sell product, a degree of patience to allow sufficient exposure is definitely required and I will certainly cop to not investing enough time and resources into let advertising permeate the public consciousness.

Person Who….

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Margy Waller tweeted a link to an article which theorized that using the term “People on Bikes” rather than “cyclists” would help improve road safety by humanizing the bike riders.

I immediately wondered if there was any benefit, internally and externally, to changing the terminology applied to arts patrons. (Instead of, for example, “arts patron.”) The article starts out saying that even for those who ride bikes, the term cyclist evokes the image of a hardcore enthusiast who has uses specialized equipment and clothing like a high end bike and spandex bike shorts.

The arts have the same image problem with people perceiving arts patrons as being hardcore afficinados with a set dress code and specialized knowledge.

Replace the word “biking” with “arts attendance” and “cyclist” with “arts patron” in the next paragraph and you have a sentiment drawn straight from an arts blog or conference. (I don’t know that arts patron is the wrong term to use, I just employ it for want of a clearly alienating term.)

“From an advocacy standpoint, getting rid of the word “cyclist” removes perceptual barriers that prevent people from trying biking in the first place, says Dave Snyder, executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition. “It makes biking accessible to anyone, and diminishes the sense of biking as an activity for a subculture or one that requires an ‘identity’ to engage in. Someone who has a bike in their house somewhere and only occasionally rides it and never would consider themselves a ‘cyclist’ is someone we should definitely reach out to.”

The poster by Bike Pittsburgh featured in the article looks exactly like posters and banners I have seen arts organizations use to show that their employees performed every day functions in the community.

This may seem like silly semantics, but the article argues that the active “people who X” humanizes the entity more than the passive label.

“Try saying “people who drive” instead of “drivers,” or “people who walk” instead of “pedestrians.” Suddenly this passive, faceless term that usually connotes a victim or someone at fault turns into a more active, visual description of an actual human who is choosing to do something. I can identify more with a “person who drives” or a “person who walks” or a “person who uses a wheelchair” or a “person who rides the bus” or a “person on a Segway,” even if I don’t do any of those things, because I understand, even beyond their mode of transit, they’re still people.”

So my first question is, are there terms like patron, community, attendee that tends to make us apply a generic identity on people instead of individualizing them?

Second question is, what term should be used? “Person who attends dance” denies someone’s identity as a person who attends theater, concerts, museums, etc.

“Person who participates in the arts” seemed the best bet to me. It avoids the hardcore stigma of “person who is enthusiastic about the arts” and is more active than “one who enjoys the arts.”

In addition to being unwieldy terminology, I know this sounds like saccharine soaked political correctness. But these things can make a difference. The idea of viewing people as brains rather than butts in the seats I wrote about a couple years ago, for example.

I am actually somewhat more interested in the internal benefits of a language change than shifting attitudes externally, though I would welcome any campaign that could achieve that.

Long ago I worked at a place where the box office kept a list of all the stupid things they were asked on the back of the door. I didn’t think having staff constantly reminded that their customers were dopes was very conducive to good service. Even if they were consciously being as pleasant as they could, that list was eroding their respect unconsciously.

So I wonder what might change if an organization’s staff started referring to customers as “people who love the arts.” Marketing department meetings would talk about adverting goals in terms of attracting 500 lovers of the arts for a show. Curtain speeches could celebrate that a performance is sold out with 1100 people who love the arts.

What are your thoughts? Is there any creative person (person who exercises creativity?) who can think of an elegant, but active descriptor?

Sometimes They Just Want To Go Home

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I was perusing the tweets of those at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference (NAMPC) while thinking about a comment made by the director of the local arts museum wondering why people were leaving a fundraiser so early.

This was the exact opposite situation from one apparently expressed by Alan Brown at the NAMP Conference who wondered why arts organizations were so quick to chase people out after the event was over.

The live and silent auction were over and no one was going to be asked to donate more money. There was plenty of food and alcohol to consume, a cigar and brandy station had been set up in the newly renovated alley for those who wanted to parttake. There was plenty of art to look at, including an amazing new installation and the artist was on hand to chat with.

They had only expected about 75 people to attend and more than 130 showed up so there were plenty of people with whom to mix and mingle. (And one of the other attendees remarked to me that there were a lot of new faces at the event so it wasn’t as if the conversation topics dried up.)

And it was only 8:30 pm on the Saturday night of a three day weekend.

By 8:45 except for the staff and volunteers, the place had pretty much cleared out.

So when I saw Sara Leonard tweet quoting a speaker at the conference saying, “Create the value your audience craves,” I wondered what might have been lacking that might have kept everyone hanging around a little longer.

The auctioneer had to ask for quiet a couple times during the auction because people were too boisterous so they were clearly having a good time.

Perhaps what the audience valued was an organization that ran an efficient fundraiser that showed them a good time and got them out before 9:00.

Maybe as Alan Brown suggests, everyone was used to being chased out and left of their own accord. Or maybe, as one off the museum staff suggested, the community likes to get to bed early.

I feel that I must make a bemused observation that clearly one needs to appeal to a younger audience not only to sustain support for the arts long term, but to find some people willing to stick around and keep the party going for you in the short term. (which I mean both literally and figuratively.)

Whether it be fund raisers or performances, it isn’t enough just to have a fun after-event party in order to attract younger audiences, the content of the main event has to be of some interest because there are plenty of bars and dance clubs where they can go instead and circumvent the boring part.

But the truth is, sometimes it isn’t anything you did. Audiences just want to go home and that is an enjoyable evening.

Is This An iPad I See Before Me?

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Last week we hosted an Immersive Game + Simulations Technologies conference in my facility. This is an area in which I am only generally familiar so some of the speakers had some very interesting things to so. The keynote speech given by Simon Solotko provided me with an immediate vision of a likely intersection between live performance and technology.

Fair warning: Don’t read any further if you can’t tolerate the idea of cell phones and iPads being used in your arts facility.

Solotko addressed the idea of augmented reality where technology overlays some sort of information upon the “real world.” For example, if you pointed the camera on your cell phone down the street, an arrow might appear on the screen over the image of the street showing you which way to turn to get to a bakery.

Solotko’s thought was that you could use this technology to provide whatever information you wanted people to know about you, and only that information. If you were at a writers’ conference you might put information out on the Cloud that you were doing research on a book about the Civil War. When someone pointed their phone/iPad in your direction they would see that information, but know nothing more about you than that. So if they shared your interest or had some resources you were seeking, they might come over and speak with you.

Solotko noted that you wouldn’t want to use facial recognition to connect yourself to the information you put out there because it is far too permanent and identifiable to be able to retract. Not to mention that there would be problems in low light environments. (This has a lot of social utility and you might want to put some information out there while you are in a dance club, after all.)

According to Solotko, this is really what the Samsung Galaxy Gear is all about. Its utility is about more than just moving the functions of a phone to your wrist, but providing an platform to deliver the augmented reality experience Solotko envisions.

As he describes it, you would put some information out there on the Cloud then program your wristband with some distinctive pattern of color. When someone pointed their camera at you, it would pick up the pattern and provide whatever information you chose to share.

I immediately recognized live performances could use this to provide supplemental information about the artist performing; the character they are playing; provide stream a real time translation of Shakespearean speeches or Italian aria being delivered; and perhaps even offer another layer of characterization by revealing a character’s internal thoughts that belie their spoken sentiments. (Though if an actor is any good, they shouldn’t need a virtual thought bubble to communicate, but it could definitely have its uses.)

Of course, orchestras had this idea a long time ago with the ill-fated Concert Companion project.

As I noted earlier, this means actively encouraging people to hold up their phones or wear their Google Glasses and ceasing to worry that they are recording every moment on stage. Whether audiences and venues are ready to embrace this shift in the viewing environment is likely to depend on a number of factors.

Stuff To Ponder: Bring Back The Claques

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A few months back, Gizmodo posted a video by VSauce on the subject of clapping as a form of expression.

At about the five minute point in the VSauce video, they talk about how in the early 19th century people hired themselves out as professional “claques.” They would learn operas and then applaud and laugh at the correct places as a way to prompt the rest of the audience. Today, television shows have signs that prompt people when to respond.

I was interested to learn that while babies will naturally learn to clap, parents are encouraged to teach their children to connect clapping to an enjoyable event. Even though we might unconsciously start clapping when we see something we like, we have been socialized to do it rather than it being a natural reaction.

The big question that came to mind was, why are people so intimidated by not knowing when to clap during a symphony? Since it is a socialized practice, they can just wait until everyone else starts, right?

The place that really trips people up is the pause between movements. For a few moments, I wondered if society had betrayed classical music by creating an expectation that you start clapping immediately at the end of a piece.

Perhaps earlier audiences had more patience and let things simmer a moment before clapping and that had evolved to an ever shorter period of time?

But there was a New Yorker piece pictured in the VSauce video by Joseph Wechsberg who was a member of a claque during the mid-1920s in Vienna. He talks about how hard it was to be part of the claque for operas like Carmen because the audience was likely to break into “wild applause” at the incorrect moments and it was the job of the claque to influence the audience “into orderly channels.”

Clearly, people were no less apt to clap at the wrong times nearly 100 years ago. According to Wechsberg, even young boys followed opera and thought wild clapping was heresy so I am sure there were a lot more venomous stares being delivered in concert halls then versus now.

Individual singers would pay to have people clap for them, but it basically was just enough to cover tickets to the show so the claques were essentially just doing it for free tickets.

With that in mind, I wondered if there was any value in reviving the practice of giving people comp tickets in return for their leadership in applause? Or perhaps more constructively, to act as mentors for new attendees?

With email and social media, people with the knowledge claques possessed could be used to much greater effect than a dependable source of applause.

Since Joseph Wechsberg’s description of his claque was basically that of poor artists and students, having them act as guides in return for tickets might be an interesting and productive arrangement.

The Kids Are All Right

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I am currently attending the Ohio Arts Presenters Network conference so I don’t have the time to write a lengthy post tonight.

However, one thing that impressed me (other than the fact they do the best job of feeding the attendees than any other conference I have attended). I have been to a number of conferences where the artists’ showcases were either only attended by conference attendees and showcases that admitted a public audience as well as the conference attendees.

This morning however, the conference scheduled all the youth/school performers back to back in a single block and then invited about 100 or so school kids to attend. The theatre director explained to the kids that they were going to see a new performer every 12 minutes and that their reaction would help people decide what performers were really good.

One of the agents commented how smart a move this was because these artists needed an audience of kids. Many of their high energy frantic performances would likely fall flat on an entirely all adult audience.

I will admit, the kids’ presence was helpful and from the comments we overheard while left, their evaluation about which performer was the best matched that of most of the agents and presenters I spoke with throughout the day.

With a lot of family shows, you have to ultimately convince the parents or teachers that the show is worth seeing because they control the money and transportation. However, the kids have both the power to influence the parents, and in this case, performing arts presenters, that something is worth seeing.

The Philanthropic Second Date

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Simone Joyaux recently posted her The Donor-Centric Pledge on Non-Profit Quarterly. There are about 23 statements against which you can measure your organization’s practices.

A good many are likely to lead to extended conversations. There were a couple that caught my eye about first time giving that I wanted to address.

10. Many first-time gifts are no more than “impulse purchases” or “first dates.”
11. We’ll have to work harder for the second gift than we did for the first.
18. Asking a donor why she or he gave a first gift to us will likely lead to an amazingly revealing conversation.

Number 10 about first time gifts being an impulse purchase struck me as likely to comprise a much greater percentage of giving than in the past. If giving via cell phone and Kickstarter-like campaigns continues to grow, it is likely that donating will become more of an impulse rather than habitual practice.

Even people who have been reliable annual givers may find themselves possessed of a much greater awareness of interesting opportunities than in the past and start to shift their giving elsewhere.

So statement 11 about having to work harder to get the second gift may actually start to apply to the 12th gift in some cases.

Number 18 provides a portion of the roadmap to avoiding losing donors by focusing on what has motivated them to give. It is pretty much another version of the suggestion I made in my post yesterday about finding out what motivates people to participate in an arts activity.

Even though we probably don’t want to actively acknowledge it, perhaps what should be added to Joyaux’s list is the understanding that a donor’s interests and motivations shift over time. After a decade of giving, they have changed as people. If you have cultivated a close relationship over that long a period, it a separation can be painful.

But their shift in priorities may not be a reflection on the value of your organization, especially if you have been engaged in donor and audience -centric practices.

Audience Development As Disagreement

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In a post Seth Godin made today, he says:

The easiest way to disagree with someone

…is to assume that they are uninformed, and that once they know what you know, they will change their mind. (A marketing problem!)

For a long time that was the mode in which arts organizations operated, believing that once people were exposed to the arts, they would fall in love with them forever and ever.

I really never thought of that view as “disagreeing” with a potential audience member, but I guess in a way that is what it is.

It wasn’t until I read Godin’s post that I realized that the view people would fall in love with the arts once they were exposed is probably based on a longstanding sales philosophy that being told “No” simply meant that people didn’t have enough information.

I don’t know how many jobs I had where I was told that. I always thought it was a pile of baloney because there are plenty of reasons for not wanting to buy something other than lack of information. I suspect it was just a semi-manipulative way of making the sales person blame themselves for not making the sale.

Godin has a couple more levels of difficulty for disagreeing with someone. However, he says (my emphasis)

The hardest way to disagree with someone is to come to understand that they see the world differently than we do, to acknowledge that they have a different worldview, something baked in long before they ever encountered this situation. (Another marketing problem, the biggest one).

There actually are countless uninformed people. There are certainly craven zealots. And yes, in fact, we usually hear what we want to hear, or hear what the TV tells us, or hear what we expect, instead of hearing what was said, and the intent behind it. Odds are, though, that we will make the change we seek by embracing the hard work of telling stories that resonate, as opposed to dismissing the other who appears not to get it.

So while Godin’s answer does sort of embrace the idea that the problem is a lack of information, that deficit isn’t solved by delivering a spiel*. Rather the most effective approach will likely be a long term communication process based on an understanding of the other person–the audience and community in the case of most arts organizations.

(*Mahagonny-Songspiel might work, but I doubt it.)

Info You Can Use: The Writing On The Walk

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So tonight is the first event in the season at my new job, a concert by a group called Cordis which bills their music as chamber-rock.

Now if you are asking, “what the heck is chamber-rock?” thank you very much. I actually used that question as the basis of my advertising campaign for the show because I figured nearly 100% of our audience, including our subscriber base, would be wondering the same thing.

That question was posed at the start of our press releases. I bought time on an electronic sign at the intersection of two major roads that flashed the “What the Heck” question on one screen and then provided contact and web information on the next screen.

A couple weeks before the show we distributed posters around campus and town. Then a week prior to the show, I went out early in the morning with sidewalk chalk to write the “What The Heck..” question, and a web address that contained information and videos, around campus and around town near the businesses that accepted our posters.

I didn’t write it directly in front of the businesses’ doors out of concern that they might find it annoying. (I was more direct on campus.) But I did put it on a general area close enough to the business that anyone entering the business had an opportunity make a connection between the sidewalk chalk and the poster.

Near the museum and the library, I took a slightly different tack and included a suggestion that people go in to find out more. My intent being to send people in to explore those organizations when the might not normally do so.

Here is a sample:

What The Heck Is Chamber Rock

I know this is hardly a groundbreaking idea and it isn’t suited to all performances. But the content of this performance lent itself well to having a little fun.

I will admit that it didn’t seem to spur much increase in advance single ticket sales. I suspect there are a number of other issues at play like price and timing that factor into that.

Walking around campus, I did see students looking down at lot, but it was mostly at their phones rather than the sidewalk writing. Though I did catch a couple stopping to read, there is a decrease in situational awareness to contend with these days.

So I am happy to (pun intended) chalk this up to generating awareness and good will in the community than anything else.

Info You Can Use: Resources For Developing Community Engagement

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I have been reading a fair bit lately accusing arts organizations of paying lip service to the concepts of connecting and building relationships with the community. The suggestion is this is something of a euphemism for “what is the least I have to do to convince people to see my show?”

While there may be some truth to this, there are a number of arts organizations who sincerely wish to forge stronger bonds with their communities.

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters recently released a resource for those wishing to develop community engagement activities.

The 14 members of the Leadership Development Institute, comprised of presenters from across the country developed the content for “A Cooperative Inquiry: How Can Performing Arts Organizations Build and Sustain Meaningful Relationships with Their Communities?”

They organize the content into the following areas:

Making the Case – Why is it important to know and connect with community?

Building an Organizational Culture – Why is it important to integrate community engagement into a presenter’s mission/strategic plan?

Connecting with Your Community – How should geographic, socioeconomic and political realities of the community inform an organization’s approach?

Involving Artists – How should artists – who are key stakeholders in the arts ecology – be involved in connecting their work with communities?

Evaluating Impact – How can evaluation serve internal learning and enhanced community engagement?

The material gets the old Butts in the Seats seal of approval because it offers practical solutions. Being part of the Leadership Development Institute requires that you discuss the theories, go back and try to implement what you discussed within the context of your organization and then come back and report to the whole group.

As a result, most of the five areas listed above ends with a “How It Works In Practice” section discussing what did and didn’t work for some of the participants. Each area also has a worksheet associated with it to help guide discussions and planning.

The areas that I read with the greatest interest were the first two, making the case and building organizational culture. It seems to me that if you don’t have a clear understanding of your goals and investment by the staff, all your efforts are likely to come to naught.

I liked the five sample generic case statements they provided because they ran the gamut from invoking Aristotelian ideals to the short and practical,

“Unless our arts organizations continually evaluate our missions and evolve our programming to reflect the communities in which we serve, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant and impotent as a force for social and cultural change in our cities.”

I also appreciated that there was one specifically geared to university campus based art organizations.

When it came to making statements about who the community you served was and who you would like to connect to, I liked their suggestion that an arts organization work a little backwards and start by examining a performance or event that you deemed culturally successful and determine what made it important and relevant.

This appealed to me because so often statements about mission and who you serve are very aspirational. That is how it should be.

But often looking at these statements in the context of an event you feel was successful might contradict some of that self-image if the community you think you are serving well isn’t participating in your greatest successes.

On the other hand, you may discover that you have made greater strides in serving a community than you imagined when you recognize that what you identify as the culturally successful event, while not the best attended or financially rewarding, has had the deepest impact in the community. This may manifest in a hundred small ways that aren’t directly recorded on a balance sheet.

When it comes time to try to build organizational culture around the idea of community engagement, that culturally successful event can provide a great starting point.

Staff can be dubious when new initiatives are introduced so having an example of an event that everyone is proud of provides a set of shared values from which to start a conversation about other efforts in which everyone can feel some degree of investment.

Truly A Transformational Arts Experience

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I just wanted to share this cool video that truly embodies the term “creative placemaking” courtesy of WFPL.

Artist Matthew Mazzotta used materials from a blighted house in York, Alabama that was being torn down to construct a house that can be “unrolled” to make a 100 seat public performance space on the same lot the old house sat.

You can read about the project and some of the travails it faced, view pictures and watch other videos of the process.

Stuff To Ponder: Focus Exercises For Audiences

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Given that I am working on a university campus, there is always a conversation about how do you get more students to attend performances at the performing arts center. One of the easiest answers is to offer extra credit or have students attend and then write some sort of paper on the experience.

I have reservations about this course of action given many years of experience with such programs. If students are not majoring in the arts, but are taking an “introduction to” course figuring the class will be an easy “A,” the results are often less than desirable.

It isn’t so bad if only a few students are taking intro courses during the semester, but if there are multiple sections of large lecture hall size classes, the students all tend to attend on the night that will least impact their weekend plans and that audience is markedly different from any other audience.

In some respects, it is almost better to play in front of a half empty room than a full room where only a few people respond to the performance.

I should note for the record that this isn’t a great concern of mine on my current campus since the intro classes are smaller and fewer students are being directly induced to attend. However, as I mentioned yesterday I dislike the idea of people viewing attendance at the arts as a trial to be endured.

In the course of a recent discussion, I had an idea for a general assignment related to attending an arts event that took the focus of the requirement off the performance itself and might get them in a receptive frame of mind for the performance

Basically, I was inspired by John Cage’s 4’33”. My thought was to assign students to arrive 15-30 minutes early for a performance. Turn off their cell phones and just sit and observe without speaking or interacting for 4’33”. After that, they could make notes about what they observed and then sit back and take the performance as they found it.

The benefit of this assignment is that it is flexible enough to be used by many liberal arts disciplines. Music students could focus on sounds; actors, sociology and psychology students on how people interact; fine arts students on the light in the room; literature students could use the observations as the basis of a short story or poem.

Students majoring in an arts discipline would need to be paying close attention throughout the evening and prepare to generate more involved papers and presentations.

But for students who may be attending a performance for the first time, their assignment is done before the curtain rises. Hopefully the engaging in the process of focusing on observing what was going on around them ends up puts them in frame of mind where they are ready to receive the performance.

If students are told the assignment only requires them to observe the pre-show activity, but they are free to include observations from the entire performance, maybe that assists in helping people maintain their focus throughout, diminishes resentment about their grade depending on attendance and the desire to check the cellphone too frequently.

I would love to see someone conduct a study to see if there is any noticeable increase in attention or enjoyment for first time or infrequent attendees after performing a simple exercise to focus their thoughts and attention just prior to the experience.

I am sure there are plenty of studies on the benefits of visualization for athletes, but that is based on past experience and a knowledge of ideal performance. It would be interesting to know if there is any benefit for those venturing into unknown territory.

Take Me To The River

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As the summer comes to a close, I wanted to share something that caught my eye back in May. I bookmarked it and looked back at it periodically throughout the summer because I liked the idea so much.

Back in May, as a celebration of the Minnesota River,

“performers staged a “paddling theater production” …The event offered stories, songs and characters from local river lore, presented both as live theater and live-action radio drama in an original production called “With the Future on the Line: Paddling Theater from Granite Falls to Yellow Medicine.”

… Eighteen voyageur canoes, each holding nine audience members and a guide, paddled the 13-mile theater route. Audience members could choose to take part in the theatrical voyage by signing up for a spot on a guided voyageur canoe or by bringing their own canoe or kayak.”

Take a look at the pictures that accompany the article. (Actually it is more photo essay than written text.) It looks to me like the company may have stopped at different points along the river to perform for people gathered there.

I am not sure if they did one scene or the whole story at each stop. From the images, it appears that those of the audience that didn’t take the canoes may have been bussed to the second stop.

I just like the whole concept of using the river as a mode of transport and medium for performance. Even before I read about this project, I had been pondering the possibilities for doing something similar on the nearby Ohio River.

A few years back someone told me a dance concert had been performed on a barge anchored in the Genesee River (or maybe Erie Canal) where those waterways pass through Rochester, NY. The image of people arrayed along the shoreline watching the performance has fired my imagination since.

Even if you don’t live on a navigable waterway, something like this could be possible between towns connected by a railroad or a hiking trail like the Appalachian Trail. It could serve the double purpose of bringing performances to different communities in a novel way and getting those avid about outdoors activities involved.

Imagine your company arriving in town with an entourage of 30-40 hiker-campers. Along the way there could be commentary on the flora, fauna, geologic features and historical sites found along the route.

This is the sort of audience participation and interaction that everyone talks about, only it isn’t dependent on having a physical performance space.

(Not that passively listening to Talking Heads is bad 😉 )

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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