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Audience Relations

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 😉 )

Trading Time For Tickets

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So here is a question which may seem obsolete in an age of internet and mobile apps: Who is more important, the customer at the window or the customer on the phone?

Even though you may not face this particular problem, the question is one about expectations.

The situation I recently faced arose because our local audiences tend to buy their tickets over the phone or in person from our ticket office rather than online, at outlets or the Ticketmaster 800 number.

A musical act has been doing their Christmas show here for a decade and generally packs the house. This year I had the bright idea to send out postcards to everyone who had ordered tickets in the past. The postcard told them to ignore all the public announcements of tickets going on sale Monday, they could order their tickets the Friday prior in recognition of their loyalty to the group.

That Friday we had a line out the door and the phone ringing off the hook. I had two people at the window and one in the backroom on the phones. So that people didn’t get frustrated by the lack of an answer, I was in another room answering the phone and taking number to call back since we only had so many terminals to sell tickets out of.

After a half hour, we cleared enough of the line at the window to move another person to phone orders and returned calls to everyone on the list within an hour.

The issue is that people on the phone generally had an expectation of parity with the people at the window. If someone left their number with me at 10:15, they expected to get their ticket order in before the person who got online at the window at 10:30 and certainly before the person who happened to get through to the person handling the phones.

The truth is, it is pretty difficult to treat everyone in a completely egalitarian manner. It is difficult to ask the next person in line at the window to wait while you call someone back who called 5 minutes before they got there.

At the same time, you don’t want to give precedence to everyone at the window just because they made the effort to drive in. Many people only have one car or can only make a call during their 15 minute break at work.

Back in the day when the Internet was new and landlines walked the earth, you could put people on hold, attend to the person at the window and then go to the phone and back to the window. I am not sure the people on the phone especially would have the patience for that these days.

I would like to hear about policies and practices people have implemented that made this process seem fairer to both staff and patrons.

But I also wanted to note that Seth Godin actually recently addressed this issue on his blog. (my emphasis)

It seems egalitarian, but it’s actually regressive, because it doesn’t take into account the fact that different people value their time differently. People with time to spare are far more likely to be rewarded.

Another example: Call the company that sells your favorite tech brand and ask for customer service. You’ll be on hold for one to sixty minutes. Why do they do this? They can obviously afford to answer the phone right away, can’t they?

Like the mom who waits for the sixth whine before responding to her kid, these companies are making sure that only people who really and truly need/want to talk to them actually get talked to. Everyone else hangs up long before that.

You can hear the CFO, “well, if we answered on the first ring, more people would call!”

Again, at first glance, this seems like a smart way to triage with limited resources. But once again, it misses the opportunity to treat different people differently. Shouldn’t the really great customer, or the person about to buy a ton of items get their call answered right away? The time tax is a bludgeon, a blunt instrument that can’t discriminate.

Godin straight out acknowledges that people with more free time will get advantages. I quoted some additional text from him to raise the point that most arts organizations aren’t in a position of having the resources to answer calls immediately, but can genuinely be struggling to cover the phones.

I wonder if his suggestion about treating different people differently might be even more valid for those who have fewer resources. It could allow them to prioritize and focus on who is served.

Instead of the preferential donor/subscriber hotline which reinforces the social stratification the arts are trying so hard to distance themselves from, the preference could be predicated, as Godin suggests, on providing service to society.

Putting literacy volunteers and Habitat for Humanity volunteers at the front of the line could certainly show an organizations commitment to serving and improving the community.

Info You Can Use: Flex Subscriptions And Your Subscriber Base

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I have been pondering whether we should start offering a “Choose Your Own” subscription series in future years. In my past jobs, we never programmed with an eye to filling slots in a series so we offered “Choose Your Own” discounts without any problem. Now I am working in a place which has historically had a number of series and I am looking to offer an additional flexible one.

Since this blog is about discussing practical aspects of arts administration, I thought I would share some of the issues I have been taking into consideration both to solicit some feedback, but also give a sense of the thought process you need to engage in when making these decisions.

The numbers I am using in my example aren’t the actual ticket amounts and they are equal for all events in a series for sake of simplicity. The discount for buying the full season relative to the sub-season pricing is the same though.

Currently we offer a full season of nine shows ($290) and three sub-seasons of three shows each: Broadway ($150); Variety ($105) and Classical ($75).

My idea for a flex subscription is to offer the sub-season pricing if to any three shows or more shows of your choice.

That might break out as follows:

Book1

 

Instead of buying a series, people would pick and choose from among all the series. Because they are picking and choosing willy nilly, we can’t guarantee them the same seats will be available at every performance, but they still get their seats before single tickets go on sale and at a discount.

Usually the idea behind flex subscriptions is to give people who can’t make it to all the shows in a series the ability to benefit from an advance purchase discount.  It is seen as a plus if you can get someone who has historically been a single ticket buyer to commit to attending multiple shows in advance.

But the important issue is the need to factor in the likely behavior of your audience. If there are a lot of single ticket purchases for three or four shows across multiple series in the days right after single tickets go on sale for full price, you need to ask if you think more people will pick up this practice or if you will only end up giving a significant discount to the same group who typically buys tickets at full price months in advance of the show. You could end up losing money in the process.

The same for those who buy the classic series and then one or two tickets to the Broadway series at full price of $65. If there are lot of those, you may end up giving up quite a lot at a $15 difference per ticket.

In our case, our biggest series base is in Broadway with far fewer in Variety and Classic. It wouldn’t represent a significant loss if the Variety and Classic people who buy Broadway  tickets at full price received a discount.

My biggest concern is that we may lose full season subscribers to a piecemeal flex series.  Every year there is a Broadway show people aren’t crazy about so if Full season subscribers didn’t like one show and picked the other 8 individually, that would represent a $10 loss per subscriber. Not a big deal individually, but if many people made that choice it could be problematic.

The same with the Broadway series subscribers. If they dropped one Broadway show and picked up one Variety or Classic show as their third, that is a loss of $15-$25 per subscriber.

Now the easiest solution to keeping Full Season subscribers from becoming  “slightly less than Full Season” subscribers is to place the “Choose Your Own” on the same footing as the other sub-series and limit it to any three events. That way you don’t have to worry about people defecting to a 7 or 8 event subscription.

But if you are in a situation like I was in my last job where you don’t have a large subscriber base, you can go all out and offer discounts on as many shows above the minimum as people care to buy.  You have a fair chance of picking up new subscribers.

I will confess I was pretty gung ho about flex subscriptions and the philosophy of giving people the most freedom to choose in return for making that choice in advance. Organizations that kept their audiences tied into a designated series were adhering to a dated concept of audience relations! But as I say, that was when I didn’t have a fairly reliable subscriber base.

Now that I am in a situation where I am doing an analysis of the pros and cons in preparation for pitching the idea to an organization with an established subscriber base, I find myself being a little more pragmatic. (Though note I am still trying to introduce a flexible scheme.)

So what about you? Thoughts about this? Are there packages you have put together to entice people to subscribe that worked? Some that back fired on you and made you lose income or subscribers?

 

Info You Can Use: When It Is Okay To Punish Your Customers

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A couple weeks ago I wrote a post in which I decried the practice of many companies who offer better rates to new customers but provide no reward to long time customers.

Right on cue the next day, MIT’s Sloan Review published a piece that analyzes the transactional relationships people have with different types of business and discusses which can get away with treating long term customers poorly.

They acknowledge the fact that it can often be more costly to find new customers than to retain the ones you have, but note this is not true for all types of business. They use examples of cable and cell phone companies who provide services that are difficult to change versus a highly variable situation where someone may prefer to shop at Lowe’s, but will often purchase from Home Depot because it is move convenient to the drive home.

Lowe’s and Home Depot have to constantly work to retain customers and attract new ones while cable and cell phone companies can get away with raising rates mid-contract. The article authors say even if you are getting an offer to buy a new phone at a discount from your current service provider, it isn’t as sweet a deal as a new buyer is being offered.

Despite using the common terminology of “subscriber,” performing arts organizations don’t have the same luxury to treat current customers poorly that cable and cell phone companies do. I am sure it is no revelation that performing arts organizations operate in a far more competitive environment.

While depressing to contemplate, it was interesting to read the rationale that punishing customers makes good business sense.

Some customers are worth more than others and some customers are a greater drag on resources than others. Even if you don’t act on it, cultivating the ability to identify what policies are causing you to lose money can be valuable.

There might be some good lessons for arts organizations here. For example, some banks have started charging people to use lobby services and for receiving statements in the mail and made using ATM and receiving statements electronically less expensive because it costs more to maintain a physical presence and pay people.

Perhaps performing arts groups should make it more expensive to buy tickets in person versus online, rather than vice versa, as is the case in many places these days.

On the balance sheet, the answer is clear. However, since cultivating relationships are often viewed as the most important function arts organizations can fulfill for their community, perhaps it is better not to provide disincentives to personal contact.

But is that relationship something your customers value or is it something you have decided they value?

You should know the answer to this because if they do value good relationships and service, that is more expensive than just having someone at a desk. The training and retention of staff who provide good service and the database to support them requires a greater investment than just having someone available. If people don’t really value personal service, then maybe it is wiser to push them toward online ticketing and reduce ticket office staffing.

So here is the conclusion the authors came to:

“Specifically, we discovered that, most of the time, rewarding and acquiring new customers creates the most value. Under select circumstances, however, attention should shift to the retention of existing high-value customers….In markets that have a high degree of both flexibility and value concentration, companies should focus on rewarding their own customers — in particular, their best customers.”

The examples they use of high flexibility and value concentration is retail shopping, rental cars and airlines where people have many options to choose from and return customers will often spend greater amounts than just casual shoppers. They suggest reward programs for high frequency customers.

I translate that over to the arts as trying retain and reward subscribers and donors. The arts already acknowledge that these groups are high value individuals and need to be provided preferential treatment. So we have been doing something right all along!

Except that the authors don’t really address the question of what to do when your customer base is aging out. The article really just deals with optimizing your income from customers based on where your product/service falls on the continuum of flexibility and value.

There is an assumption that you have a product for which there is a demand. They address the question of how to treat your customers when you get them, not necessarily how to get them.

It is encouraging that the article validates the basic model many arts organizations use with their customers. The challenge that is still before us is offering a product people want and an rewards program that they value.

What Do You Sell Online?

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Okay, this entry is more a question for readers than any sort of discussion of issues. Basically, I would like to know how many price levels of tickets do you put on sale online?

When I was working in Hawaii, my colleagues at the other campuses and I put most of our base ticket prices for sale online- Adult, Student/Senior/Military, Under 12 and University Student.

When I arrived at my current job, I noticed only the top level ticket price for each area was listed online even though we offer just about the same discount categories as we did in Hawaii. Thinking it a mistake, I asked my box office manager why that was and she told me the software vendor suggested we only offer the highest level because people would take advantage.

[N.B. From a question I received, I wanted to clarify that this listing was on the purchase screen. When it came time to buy the ticket, they were advised to only let people buy full price tickets and not make the other price levels available. The other ticket prices were advertised both on and off line]

This was not my experience at all in Hawaii or other places I worked which also offered lower ticket prices online. Most of the time people wanted to pay the difference when someone couldn’t make it and they brought a person who didn’t qualify for discounts.

I admit I was a little riled when I heard that the ticket office was given this advice because I think that making people call or walk in to buy discounted tickets places a barrier to entry to many. I felt like this went against everything I have been working toward with my own practices and adovocating this blog.

Not to mention that someone can call and misrepresent their eligibility for discounts over the phone as easily as they can place the order online so you really aren’t preventing people who want to from taking advantage.

It’s not that my ticket office can’t ask that the internet site be set to offer more price levels, I just felt this advice reflected big corporate indifference. And that there was no effort on the company’s part to help venues facilitate the process for their customers.

But as I started to look around, I realized that many performing arts venues only seem to offer the highest level ticket online, even if they don’t use the same vendor we do.

So now my question is, what are people’s experiences and practices putting multiple levels of prices online?

Value Is Not Price

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The Drucker Exchange recently noted that the Cincinnati Reds and Michigan Wolverines teams have started using dynamic pricing, scaling prices based on popularity.

The Reds don’t provide much information about their structure, though they promise the price will never fall below whatever the season ticket holder pays. They set their base pricing at the start of the season per anticipated demand and start implementing the dynamic pricing two weeks out so it probably pays to buy early.

The Wolverines basically set their anticipated pricing from the start ranging from $65 for the Akron game, $10 less than last year, to $195 for the Notre Dame game, $100 more than last year. (And by the way, that is the lowest price tickets. Their top tier tickets for Notre Dame are $500.)

The piece on The Drucker Exchange says the mistake companies often make is to ask what customers value. This is aptly illustrated by the secondary market for those Wolverines games. You can get those $65 Akron tickets for $35 on the secondary market, but those $195 Notre Dame tickets seem to be going for about $319 already. (Single tickets go on sale tomorrow, 8/1)

Peter Drucker lamented how few companies recognize the importance of simply asking themselves what their customers value. “It may be the most important question,” Drucker noted in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. “Yet is the one least often asked.”

One reason for this is that companies think they already know. “Value is what they, in their business, define as quality,” Drucker wrote. “But this is almost always the wrong definition.” For example, for a teenage girl, “value in a shoe is high fashion,” while durability and price matter little.

“Another reason why the question ‘What is value to the customer?’ is rarely asked is that the economists think they know the answer: Value is price,” Drucker added. “This is misleading, if not actually the wrong answer.”

For instance, electrical contractors, while famously price-conscious, may prefer one of the most expensive fuse boxes on the market. “To the contractor this line is actually low-priced because it is engineered to be installed fast and by relatively unskilled labor,” he explained.

The ultimate lesson is simple but not easy: “The customer never buys a product,” Drucker wrote. “The customer buys value.”

(My emphasis on that last sentence on the Drucker citation)

There are many intangibles that factor into what people value. Will the Notre Dame game be three times better than Akron? Possibly. By game day in September, there is a fair chance the primary market tickets to the Notre Dame game will be four or five times more expensive than Akron, if not more.

There will be a point where the quality of the actual Notre Dame gameplay can’t be better than that of Akron in proportion to the difference in ticket price.

What people are willing to pay so much more for is the experience of tailgating and attending a potentially great game steeping in the palpable excitement surrounding the long rivalry between the two teams with thousands of others.

I have resistance to dynamic pricing for a number of reasons, many of which have to do with the relationship I feel we are trying to cultivate with our audiences.

The question is, do people really recognize and value that we are making the effort? Is it all pretty much one-sided? Many people don’t really discern between profit and non-profits organizations when making their entertainment decisions.

Are non-profits basically putting themselves at a disadvantage by not using dynamic pricing for shows that clearly will sell out months before the performance date based on a devotion to an audience that has no idea the organization has decided to suffer for their benefit?

There is a need to keep prices low to provide affordable access. If 900 people clearly value attending a performance that they will commit at $25 a ticket between one and three months before the show, do you really owe it to the last 100 people to maintain the $25 rate until they get around to buying tickets?

Or do you owe it to your long suffering staff to try to increase the revenue stream so you can pay them $12/hour instead of $8 by using dynamic pricing?

We aren’t sure about the investment of the community in your organization, but we can be more certain about the investment of your staff.

I am still a little uncertain about dynamic pricing. The issues aren’t as clear as I present them here. However, one issue I don’t generally see people mention in the dynamic pricing conversation is that by not using it you are potentially punishing your staff in the service of an ideal the community may not be aware of much less value.

If customers show they willing to place a higher value on a product, should non-profits acknowledge that by placing a commensurately higher price on it?

Serving The Community, It’s Like Dating

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Continuing with my answers to questions asked by readers, last week Karen asked:

“I’m very interested in how small arts organizations effectively serve their community, particularly in long term collaborations. While I focus on the symphonic and choral space, I’m sure a lot of the wisdom on the topic can be applied broadly.”

Short answer- If I knew that, I would force Drew McManus to make me a partner in his consultancy and we be raking in the money.

The truth is, no one knows because there is no one right answer. Every arts organization is different and the dynamics of each one’s relationship with the community is different. One of choral groups you work with Karen, is associated with a religious entity on a university campus so their goals and target community are quite different from those of symphonies’ with which you work.

Each is going to have a different definition of what effective service means. For some it may mean getting people to attend. For others it might be people paying to attend. Even if the amount of the payment is $5, that small difference will have some significant implications about how the company interacts with the community.

Your question calls attention to the fact there are a lot of arts blogs and articles out there that sing the praises of the idealism of serving the community, but no one really admits that when it comes to the practical aspects they can’t tell you how.

Because we are basically talking about relationships with other people, it is really akin to trying to get advice on how to get someone to love you. There are tons of articles written on the subject every year, but no one has the answer.

The best anyone can ever come up with is “be yourself” and “don’t be a jerk.” The rest is all generalities: be funny, but not overbearing with jokes; get the other person to talk about themselves, but don’t be distant; find common ground, but have different interests that the other person will find intriguing, etc.

In many respects much depends on chemistry, in this case the one you have with your community, not the person you really like.

Everyone knows you don’t want to have your concerts in the slums because the impoverished don’t get invested in classical music— except there is El Sistema.

Why did it work in Venezuela? Can it work here?

Who knows, but there is an example of a long term collaboration. Somehow it endured nearly 40 years with the backing of the Venezuelan government. I suspect it was a few years before it reached the point where the national government became interested in becoming involved.

My advice is to think about who you really want to serve, regardless of whether there is any money in it or grant funding to support it. If you can make it work under those conditions, great. Otherwise, you probably need to compromise and shift your focus a little to those things there is money in.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking, well if we spend resources on this thing that makes money, we will have the ability to help the people we really want to help. Then you are in a situation where you are cultivating relationships trying to serve community B so that you can serve community A which requires cultivating a different set of relationships.

If you have the time and resources to do that, you can probably swing working to serve community A for no money.

I am not saying that you can’t have varied programming and a wide appeal or that your other activities can’t generate revenue to support your long term collaboration. It is just that a small organization really needs to have a singular focus, otherwise they end up unable to achieve any of their goals effectively. (And I would hazard to guess this might be generally true for many organizations of larger size.)

If you are ready to be in it for the long term, then your collaboration with the community starts with developing relationships. If you decide that you want to really focus on bringing music to kids in a specific school district, you want to have relationships with the teachers, principal, superintendent that you are constantly reinforcing and renewing.

Most importantly, if at all possible, find a way to connect with the families in the district. Not only those with kids in the schools, but those with kids who have graduated and who will potentially be giving birth to those enrolling.

Show up at PTA meetings, participate in conversations on the Common Core standards for arts. Be in a position to be a partner and advocate for the community you have chosen to serve.

Go to Chamber of Commerce and Rotary meetings, talk about the group with which you are partnering, but also just meet people and talk about the weather. Get to know people and get known so that when you are in the paper for something your group has done, people already have a relationship with you from the time you brought that great pie to the potluck last New Year’s Eve.

Not only do you make a great pie, but you are doing good things for the school too. That’s great because I (as the person in your community) have to pay property taxes to support the school even though I don’t have kids. I am still resentful about the taxes, but also a little proud that my community has good schools so at least my taxes aren’t being wasted.

That is sort of my ideal vision of what a long term community partnership might look like. It is easier to do in a small city versus a large one because those relationships and connections with people not directly involved with your organization and the community are easier to create and maintain.

Having a relationship that provides a connection to people not directly involved with your organization or the community you serve is an important element in my mind. The goodwill you generate reinforces the sense of identity and worth for your organization and the community you serve.

Think about communities with strong athletic teams, whether it is college or professional. Whether you go to games or not, you walk into stores, you see branded merchandise for sale, bars have the games on television. If you are a student at the college, you get the sense that the whole community supports you even though you aren’t on a team, just by the benefit of your membership in the group.

Even if you don’t go to the games or have ever set foot on the campus, if you go visiting elsewhere and the people there are cheering for the grudge rivals of your hometown’s school, there is a good chance you will feel a tinge of responsibility to be loyal to your hometown team even if you don’t openly say anything.

I think that is the sign of an organization that has made a connection with the community when a person who has made no conscious effort at investment feels a sense of loyalty and duty to the organization.

Of course, unconscious investment ain’t paying the bills so you are always in the process of trying to convert people to being actively involved. You just don’t know if it will be a concert or a really good pie that tips the balance.

Stuff To Ponder: Subscriber Rush Tickets

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Since I have started a new job I am in the process of evaluating every document, process and interaction my organization undertakes. One of those areas is customer service, of course.

For that reason, an article I came across via The Drucker Exchange is really resonating with me. In a blog post titled, The Dark Side of Customer Experience, Monique Reece opens with a joke we can probably all relate to.

The longer version is in the post, but basically a guy dies and is shown heaven and hell and given a choice between the two. On his visit to heaven, everything is sedate and lovely. Hell is a veritable Mardi Gras party. After the doors close on Hell, the guy tells St. Peter he chooses Hell. The doors open and it the scene is the stereotypical hellish landscape.

Upon wondering what happened to the party scene, the man receives the response “Well,” said St. Peter as the doors closed. “The first time you came to visit you were a prospect. Now you’re a customer.”

Reece cites some of my biggest pet peeves– the introductory rate that rewards new customers and makes the person who has been loyal for 10 years, enduring price increases, feel like an idiot for sticking around so long for no recognition or reward. As Reece notes, there is actually more of an incentive to separate your relationship and then renew it.

The performing arts version of this is giving cut rate discount tickets to last minute purchasers, suggesting a certain amount of foolishness on the part of those who planned and purchased ahead of time. Some arts organizations sell large amounts of rush tickets at rates lower than those of subscribers who have committed to many shows in advance.

It just occurred to me moments ago, why don’t performing arts organization offer Rush tickets exclusively to those who have already purchased two or more tickets?

This would have multiple benefits 1- It rewards people who committed in advance; 2- It turns those people into recruiters for your show when they invite their friends along; 3- It gets people you already have a relationship with paying closer attention to your emails or social media account that you are using to communicate this discount, providing an opportunity to get them excited and mention other shows.

My suspicion is that attending a show on a half price ticket thanks to two people who purchased weeks in advance is a better model of behavior than attending alongside two other people who also decided to attend because tickets were half price.

It probably also reinforces many elements of the advance purchasers’ self-image if they know their friends were only able to attend because they were stalwart supporters of the arts organization.

The only real problem I can see with this idea is reserved seating. Offering rush tickets in this way appeals heavily to a social element which is compromised if everyone can’t sit together.

Granted, it illustrates the appropriate outcome associated with paying half price on the day of a performance versus full price in advance. Still the emotional disappointment of not being able to sit next to ones guests could supplant the acknowledgement of this logical consequence.

General admission events are good to go though.

This is not the direction I intended to go in when I started this entry. I like this result better.

Artisanal ≠ Careless

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One of the questions on “Wait, Wait..Don’t Tell Me” this weekend referenced the fact that fast food giants were instructing their employees and robotic processors (which may be one in the same) to essentially dial back the quality control a bit to make food less perfect and more rustic looking in order to hitch their wagon to the artisanal trend.

Kinda makes you wonder when companies understand artisanal to be investment of less care and effort rather than more.

I metaphorically rolled my eyes (because I was driving at the time), thinking to myself that there are hundreds of performing arts organizations handcrafting works all over the country, but lacking an audience because people will really only pay so much for authenticity. Packaging that provides the rustic illusion at a cheap price will trump quality at the real price a whole lot of the time.

The reality is, there is a very real trend sustained by people who are willing to pay more for authenticity. And they aren’t all hipsters from the trendy side of town. What they value isn’t just the product, but a sense of connection with the creators/cultivators.

Most arts organizations haven’t found a way to do this in an engaging way while getting the marketing department out of the way. I am sure the primary reasons why the Trey McIntyre Project’s dancers are treated like rock stars is because the company has cultivated a public enough profile that people recognize them when they are out running daily errands.

In some cases, with a little imagination and patience, providing that sense of connection may be fairly easy to accomplish.

I went into the local art museum last Saturday. The main exhibit area was empty and the next installation won’t be in until mid-July. However, the new directors of the museum were in painting the walls getting the area ready.

When I finished looking at the permanent collection, I chatted with the directors since they were there and so readily accessible. Since I was senior to them, having started my new job a whole three weeks before they started theirs, I asked them if they had considered changing their Saturday hours, at least for the summer.

They open on Saturday afternoons an hour after the farmers market, which is held 50 feet west of their front door, closes. There are enough people visiting the market that they have to park a couple blocks east of the museum and walk right by the front door. One of the directors assured me that they had already started considering that change.

Then we chatted a little about Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog and some of the ideas for interactive exhibits she has written about. I mentioned the possibility of using some of their spaces for lectures and demonstrations connected with our shows in some of the museum spaces since they are only a block and a half from the performing arts center.

I left feeling good about prospect of future collaboration, but also for the future of the museum given that they were very visible in their space and eager to engage despite how busy they were.

I think this openness will result in an a sense of an “artisanal” experience/connection to those in the community who value it.

When You Invite An Artist To Dinner

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Last week I was invited to dinner to meet with a muralist who is in town painting the floodwall murals. I don’t mean to constantly harp on the small town charm I am experiencing here at my new job, but you write what you know, eh?

I have been thinking recently back to my childhood when my parents would regularly invite our teachers home for dinner. It wasn’t just my family. Every kid’s family seemed to take turns. We were all horrified because not only were our teachers invading our personal sanctums, but given we were Catholic school kids, our homes were being visited by nuns who kept us at the edge of terror!

I am not sure anyone does this any more, but this was the type of grassroots effort that let both the kids and the teachers know the community valued education.

I wonder if it might be effective to do the same thing with the arts where you invited your neighbors over to meet an artist.

I know a few groups that have house concerts by guest musicians as fund raising events. While that sort of intimacy offers a great experience, the type of people invited and the expectations placed upon them by the fund raising format aren’t really conducive to what I have in mind.

Having the party at the biggest mansion in the most exclusive neighborhood probably won’t make the arts appear accessible to new segments of the community either.

But a back yard cook out or dinner you would invite your friends to anyway, but in this instance you say, I would like you to come to dinner to meet this local/visiting artist, provides a low pressure environment that communicates that you value the arts.

The artist doesn’t need to perform or have their work on display. Just the fact they are the guest of honor to whom everyone is introduced at a gathering with good food and good company can be sufficient to influence attitudes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLfb9hgmufI

Stuff To Ponder: New Standard Discount Category

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I had some additional thoughts regarding the article by Alex Tabbarok I cited yesterday that I didn’t include for fear it would get lost in the entry.

Noting out how oriented toward higher education our society is, Tabbarok observes,

“College students even get discounts at the movie theater; when was the last time you saw a discount for an electrical apprentice?”

It occurred to me that extending a discount to trade apprentices might provide a continuous but subtle message that the arts are for everyone, not just the educated elite.

Obviously, this needs to be supported by programming and an attendance experience that isn’t intimidating. But I wondered if the passive act of providing a discount to laborers might succeed where active claims of the arts being for everyone have come up short.

You may not get many actual apprentices attending, but the act of publicizing the discount may contribute to a shifting perception of your organization.

Amuse Bouche Fund Drives

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So even though I am in a fairly rural area of Ohio, I have discovered that I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to being able to access public radio broadcast streams. There are two from Ohio universities, one from West Virginia and one from Northern Kentucky. Despite the mountains I can hear each of them fairly clearly since there are repeaters located within a few miles of my workplace.

I tell you this provide some context when I say I heard a fund raising approach I liked but can’t for the life of me figure out which station I heard it on. I have visited each station’s website and Facebook page and still don’t know whom to credit.

In any case, one of these intrepid stations announced that now that the summer had started, they would begin “One Shot Wednesday” fund drives. Instead of having a week long fund drive, they were just going to make appeals on Wednesdays throughout the summer.

I thought this was a great idea because many people will tune away for the week of a fund drive and come back when it is over. Having it once a week repeatedly introduces itself into a person’s habitual listening. Since the disruption is contained to a small period of time, people may tune away for a day, come back again and then be reminded the next Wednesday around.

The station can better retain their listeners and expose them more frequently to the message that the station needs their support before a person chooses to tune away. And who knows, people may stay with the station throughout the Wednesday since the appeal breaks are short relative to other fund drives.

I have been trying to think of what the performing arts organization version of this might look like. Attending performances is not part of most people’s daily routine so there is no week long fund drive people might seek to avoid.

Curtailing the curtain speech appeal might make many audience members happy, but what more palatable alternative do you replace it with?

I know the board of my organization enjoyed calling people up to ask them about how much they liked the past season. The effort was well received all around. It would be possible to insert an appeal at that time, but if done poorly it would probably be a negative experience for all involved.

You might try having board members or volunteers chat casually with people in the lobby before the show and introduce the idea of supporting the organization. There is more of an opportunity to monitor that the process is done well and give notes on improving in the future. The only problem might be if the lobby is too small or if most of the audience rushes in at the last moment leaving little opportunity to speak with them.

I think the real question at the base of all this is- what are we doing now that makes people uncomfortable and what can we do to make it less so. That is what the one radio station did. They took the week long fund drive that everyone groans about and parceled it up across the summer.

I have no idea how successful it is, but from the way they spoke, they have done this before. Once I find the station again, I will try to do some further investigation.

But what ideas do you have to break up the often awkward process of fundraising into something more digestible?

Themed Seasons Revisited

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Back in 2012 Trevor O’Donnell posted 10 Deadly Sins Marketing Clichés., one of which was anniversaries. He pointed out that while milestones were once of some value as hooks for news stories, that isn’t the case any more.

That reminded me of a post I did about a meeting I attended where a freelancer who wrote for a number of publications told all those assembled that themed seasons weren’t really of interest to media outlets anymore either.

But I wondered if themed seasons shared across different arts organization didn’t have some attraction for audiences. I had noted that one place I worked participated in an Oscar Wilde themed season which included a “Go Wilde!” card people could use for discounts at each venue.

Granted, that was over a decade ago, but I am still curious about whether readers have had any experience mounting a similar program in their communities.

People might be interested in a program where they were guaranteed some sort of prize for visiting 4 out of 10 events in the course of a year and getting a passport stamped. Anyone who completed that much could be entered into a drawing for a greater prize.

If you encouraged people to post pictures of their passports on Facebook every time they attended, that could generate some buzz for the program. Not to mention, people could point to their social media post to prove their attendance if they lost the passport half way through the year and had to get a new one.

If You Love Your Brand, Set It Free

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Last week I reflected on Adam Thurman’s recent post about wrestling corporation WWE reinventing itself three times to adapt to changing audiences.

He followed up with a post about how the visible manifestation of rebranding has to reflect an internalized change that has already started within the company, or else the rebranding fails.

He suggests organizations commit to rebranding themselves every 7 years or so.

His post reminded me that Japanese anime series change their opening sequence and music every time the season changes, which can happen multiple times a year. As an example, here is the opening of D.Grayman season 1 versus season 3.

There is continuity of characters and basic artistic look to let fans identify their favorite anime series when a new season comes out. However, other than the Drew Carey Show whose changes in opening sequences didn’t necessarily synch up with changes in seasons, I can’t think of too many American shows that make a regular change. (Granted, apples to oranges comparison.)

In any case, while most arts organizations may put out a different brochure every season, they may not change the look of their website as regularly. That might be something to consider, especially if you can feature the work of a local visual artist to draw attention to them as a resource.

It could be especially effective to change the header of a monthly newsletter since that can take less effort than revamping an entire website. Doing A/B testing with different art can help identify an effective look and identity for the organization.

You can probably get a high open rate on your emails if you tell people you want their feedback. This month half are getting one piece of art and the other half another, next month the art with switch for both groups. That way people not only are engaged by the request for feedback, but there is a sense of competition with another group about who got to see the better artwork first.

Info You Can Use: Kickstarting Your Taxes

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Salon has an important article to read if you are an artist trying to use Kickstarter to fund a project. Apparently people don’t realize the money they receive via Kickstarter is considered taxable income by the IRS.

In short, money raised from Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms is considered to be taxable income. Amazon Payments, which handles the credit card transactions for Kickstarter, disburses the funds to the project creator and sends them a 1099-K, a tax form that reports “Merchant Card and Third Party Network Payments” to the IRS. In this particular case, a pledge made by a fan to a project would be considered a third-party network payment.

[..]

“Although musicians may not necessarily be selling something via Kickstarter, they are still entering into a transaction with their backers,” he noted. “If they reach their goal of ‘X’ amount of dollars, they have certain conditions they’ve agreed to make. They should consider the money as income because the IRS defines gross income from ‘whatever source derived,’ unless specially excluded.”

The article also notes that artists often underestimate the cost and logistics of making good on their promises. One woman promised her supporters tickets to a show so when she exceeded her allocation of comp tickets, she had to buy the rest herself. Another ended up spending $10,000 in postage mailing out the items she promised.

Kickstarter also brings an issue artists have faced with their patrons since time immemorial–their desire to be involved in all the decisions.

The issue for Dawn was intensified by her raising five times the amount of her set goal. Suddenly, fans were complaining that she didn’t really need the whole $104,000 to record the album. Dawn countered by noting that not only did she use all of her Kickstarter funds, but she also opened four separate credit cards and dipped into her life savings to cover the difference.

One of those interviewed for the article suggested that anyone thinking of launching a campaign consult with an accountant or business manager first to plan for the tax liabilities and expenses the campaign will entail.

Wrestling With Your Audience Composition

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I am rather busy wrapping things up here at work and preparing to move, but I wanted to make a nod in The Mission Paradox blog’s direction for a post he made about reinventing one’s organization.

Adam Thurman had been tweeting in advance of his post about how many times he attended Wrestlemania and how wrestling held lessons for arts and cultural organizations so I was curious to see what he had to say.

I had watched wrestling once upon a time, but drifted away for various reasons, including the fact the basic plot was pretty repetitive.

Yes, you could say that about arts organizations which revive the classics. Romeo and Juliet aren’t ever gonna get any less dead (though you never know…) But these days, there are probably more people for whom the classics are brand new than repeats.

But you have to admit, while the basic formula does repeat itself, there is a heck of a lot of drama that goes on before anyone ever enters the ring. Much of it harkens back to some basic archetypes with which people can identify: heroic journeys, villains, anti-heroes, talismans of power, ethical quandaries.

Thurman addresses some interesting facts I wasn’t aware of about how wrestling giant WWE reinvented itself twice in order to appeal to changing demographics and tastes.

Kids Say The Same Old Things

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I heard a kid tell a joke the other day that was probably pretty old when I told it to my parents 30 odd years ago. I frequently amaze my nephews by beating them to the punchline on knock knock jokes and riddles that I remember from my childhood.

But recently, I got to wondering who is preserving the valuable fart humor and bad puns of our youth? I am guessing parents aren’t largely responsible for teaching jokes like “How do you make a tissue dance? Put some boogie in it.”

My guess is that older kids/siblings pass these things on to the younger ones insuring the continuity of the best and worst kids jokes around. Even if each successive generation is learning these jokes from adults, the kids are enthusiastically passing them around their schools and playgrounds.

This makes me think it is all the more important to get kids involved with seeing and participating in arts and cultural activities when they are young. Not only does it introduce the idea that this is something people do, it can help to acculturate their friends as well.

Granted, kids chatting about their experience all over the school yard isn’t going to immediately transform into increased admissions at performing arts centers and museums. An adult tells another adult that his kids had fun at a Colonial times reenactment village, they might go next weekend. A kid tells another kid about the musket and cannon demonstration and imaginations are fired for hours, maybe days to come.

Arts and culture doesn’t have a lock on firing kids’ imaginations. There are a lot of things that will, and in the grand scheme of things, a few incidents as a kid aren’t going to make a specific impression that carries over to adulthood. After all, one hopes people’s sense of humor will evolve past the bad jokes of their youth.

But I have this itching suspicion that word of mouth among kids is greatly underestimated in its power to influence the adult that kid will become. The oral history preservation of these bad jokes hints at this.

Seeing a play may not be as compelling to a kid as talking about farts, but whatever a kid feels about their experience, they will share if they see it makes a connection with another kid. If the other kid has had a comparable experience and can talk about it, then both kids learn at an early age that these experiences can be used as a the basis of a relationship with someone else.

Consuming Art By The Pound

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For awhile there one of the biggest areas of discussion was about whether arts organizations should be like airlines an adopt dynamic pricing that responded to the demand for the show. I haven’t read much about it lately, but suspect some people are toying with the idea.

But another option has presented itself, again via airlines. Samoan Air announced that they were going to start charging people to fly based on their weight. This is because one of the biggest costs for airlines is fuel and weight determines how much fuel is necessary for a flight.

There is a certain logic behind this decision. When you ship cargo, you pay based on weight and size. It is only humans which pay a flat “piece” rate for themselves and their luggage.

So can the arts do the same? Can we charge by how much art a person consumes by their presence?

Don’t we do this to a degree already?

Tiered pricing for seating is based what we project the value of that seat is in terms of sight lines, acoustics and perhaps prestige. But when we charge one price for adults, another for students, another for senior citizens and another for kids under 12, that is due to the fact that adults are at the prime of their facilities and so are able to gain the most enjoyment and enlightenment from the experience, correct?

Yes, my facetious tone is meant to be obvious. Since people come to art with different experiences and backgrounds, it is impossible to measure who is “consuming” more from their interactions with it.

The fact of the matter is, the different level of pricing is based on the recognition that students and seniors don’t often have the income to attend. Kids pricing is to encourage/facilitate parents to bringing their kids. Military rate is good PR to recognize their services.

The reality is, the whole set up is something of a social contract with our audience where the people who don’t qualify for any discounts are pretty much in the position of subsidizing the experience for those who do qualify.

Thinking about it in this context, I wonder if we don’t really do enough to thank all those full price buyers for essentially voluntarily participating in this artificial construct. Maybe slip them a Hershey’s Kiss or a thank you note when we rip their tickets at the door.

One of the arguments against dynamic pricing is the same you might make against charging people in the same manner as cargo. For many organizations, price is part of the relationship they have with their community. On its own, pricing won’t build loyalty or relationships, but it can be an ingredient because it acknowledges something about the other person.

I make my suggestion about rewarding full price buyers with candy with some degree of seriousness because I think audiences can take their discounts for granted and it might be beneficial for all those involved to acknowledge that the discount only works with the tacit participation of many others.

Good Reason To Create Art Isn’t Always To Create Good Art

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We are often warned that art, and solutions in general, created by committee isn’t any good and doesn’t please anyone. But I wonder, if everyone involved feels ownership in what is produced and it strengthens the community, does it necessarily have to be of high quality aesthetically?

The wide gazing eyes of Thomas Cott fell upon a project sponsored in Mexico by the Scribe paper company. The company attached a small apartment to a billboard to house the artist who would be painting an advertisement for the company.

Over the course of 10 days the artist took suggestions about what to paint submitted over Twitter. The result may never be hailed as a work of genius, but the project garnered a lot of attention for Scribe. (You can see section details here) I am guessing it also strengthened the company’s relationship with a good segment of their customer base.

I am not sure what sort of guidance the artist was given by Scribe about integrating suggestions into her work, but apparently about 50 were used on the billboard.

Let’s pursue art for art sake and strive for excellence always. But for as much as we talk about connecting with our communities, it can often have the subtext of “but only on our own terms.” As Howard Sherman pointed out, there is a lot of disdain for anything tinged as low populism community theatre.

The primary goal of a community theatre production may have less to do with creating good art than spending time accomplishing something in cooperation with your neighbors. Heck, most guys who go fishing don’t want to actually catch something, they want to drink beer with their buddies.

So we may talk about how the arts need to connect with their community, but are we really ready to produce art for community sake, rather than art for art sake, and run the risk of creating really bad art that results in people feeling more connected with each other?

It likely takes starting from a place where you put community connections first and the pride and ego of the organization second. Scribe could have ended up in a situation where they had their name attached to a really ugly billboard in a prominent spot and they had to figure out what was the minimum amount of time they had to leave it up before they could paint it over.

It takes courage to cede control in a very public way. Just as not every masterful artist has the ability to teach what they know to others, not every artist and arts organization has the ability to lead a project like this to a good outcome.

Can’t It Wait?

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This weekend I was listening to Sherry Turkle’s 2012 TED Talk where she essentially reversed a position she held in 1996 about all the benefits technology would bring to our lives.

It isn’t really news to anyone that people are using technology to essentially mediate their interaction with their environment. However, the more I watched her talk, the more concerned I got about the implications about society at large and the more wary I got about the value of tweet seats in live performances. (my emphasis)

People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you’re texting. People explain to me that it’s hard, but that it can be done.
[…]

I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right. But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

When I ask people “What’s wrong with having a conversation?” People say, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.” So that’s the bottom line. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body — not too little, not too much, just right.

Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.

There is a lot more I initially quoted from her talk, but I felt like I had to trim it down a bit for brevity sake. Which is actually related to her point, I suppose.

At one point she talks about people viewing boredom and solitude as a problem that needs to be a solved with some sort of contact and so every red light and check out line is a potential cause of anxiety.

I am concerned about giving people tacit approval to shift focus to their cell phones instead of making an effort to engage with whatever is in front of them. Many shows have content that challenges audiences and makes them uncomfortable. It would be good if people didn’t have an excuse to avoid the conversation. I am not talking about in your face statements about social inequality and the inhumanity we visit upon each other, though they are worthy of discussion. I am thinking also of the disillusion faced by Willy Loman.

I guess the response is that 1- Not everyone will choose to tweet about something other than the event and may move the conversation to a larger audience and 2- You won’t have any problem if you give them something compelling to tweet about.

But the fact is, often your immediate and gut reaction to something isn’t all there is. Your response can at least wait until the end. Often you won’t know how you really feel about it until you have had a day or two to digest your experience. You may come to ruefully realize you were masterfully manipulated or that your disappointment wasn’t due to what you initially attributed it to.

I know a complete resistance by outlawing social media devices is not going to be practical. And there are likely many very constructive ways an art organization can cultivate and guide the conversation to create a larger discussion that results in people valuing their presence, even if they never attend an event.

But again, I come back to the question, can’t it wait?

Respect To The Loyal User

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So it appears that Google is phasing out its Reader service. This is rather annoying because it is the way I follow the vast majority of blogs. Given that it appears they are also phasing out Feedburner, it looks like the writing is on the wall that Google is no longer interested in helping people follow blogs.

So if you are subscribing to this blog via Feedburner, I encourage you to subscribe to my blog directly by using the subscribe by email field to the right——>

I have seen a fair bit of annoyance and anger over the impending disappearance of Google Reader. The strongest came from Maria Popova:

(The language is a little strong so I am placing it after the fold)

Read more

Don’t Blame Arcane Terminology and Practice

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Andrew Taylor touches upon a little of what I was thinking about this weekend in his post today. He quotes a recent piece by Marian Godfrey where she talks about how the language used by arts managers and grant makers is alienating and soul sucking.

…like any professional jargon, it puts up barriers and makes people who are unfamiliar with our dialect feel like outsiders, including the very people we are trying to support — artists and engaged people in our communities. I believe we need more humane language to describe ourselves and our visions: words and meanings that are shared by artists, administrators, and the public.

I had been thinking about the specialized language and terminologies used in the arts this weekend. I believe Godfrey was referring to the institutional and general language used to discuss the benefits of the arts as a whole, (I read the whole piece as Andrew Taylor enjoined his readers to do), whereas I was thinking about the terms specific to each arts discipline. As such, I don’t know that I can say I directly disagree with what Godfrey says.

The conclusion I came to this weekend is that while there is quite a bit of vocabulary one must learn in order to comfortably participate in a conversation about a discipline, I don’t think the need to learn a complex set of terms really comprises a significant impediment to becoming an participant or spectator. I think it is just a convenient excuse.

There are plenty of instances where people willingly engage in the time consuming process of learning special terminology. Take MMORPGs like W.O.W. where people will be exposed to terms like: tank, buff/debuff, AoE, aggro, autoloot, cooldown, PvE, PvP, grinding, griefing, among thousands of others. Players are expected to master the terminology, understand the role their character fills and how to use their abilities alongside others to achieve a goal.

Thousands of people happily undertake this challenge every day.

You might argue that people playing online games gain a sense of personal accomplishment that motivates them. But watching sports is often just as passive an activity as watching a performance, (okay, granted you can’t jump up and yell at a ballerina the moment the spirit moves you like you can with an athlete), and requires learning all sorts of arcane rules specific to each game. Often the rules are a little different for each level of play.

People learn these rules and terms because they want to. If they don’t know them, they can seek help from friends or go online to look up the information.

To illustrate this, I intentionally didn’t link to any resource with the gaming terms. Did you look them up or think about looking them up if you didn’t know what they were?

Sometimes this information is collated by the company/team/organization providing the activity. Often these days, people sharing a common interest join together to contribute information to a wiki which exists independently of the organization or activity it covers.

So when people express trepidation about learning the vocabulary and rituals of the performing and visual arts, I think the question really should be why this is so? My impulse is to respond that it is because there are not enough people they are acquainted with either personally or virtually providing a message that it is worth the trouble to learn about it.

I also don’t think there are enough informational resources out there to make it easy for people to learn if they so desire. I just did a Google search for the term “first position” because I can never remember the feet placement for the different positions. I couldn’t find it until I searched for the term “second position.” (Though I did discover A LOT of dance schools are named First Position.)

This is not to say that there aren’t many wikis and specialized dictionaries online which cover arts terminology. American Ballet Theatre has a pretty good dictionary of dance terms. It is just a coincidence that first position doesn’t appear there.

You would have to know to look there though because everyone’s go to source, Wikipedia, only has about 24 terms on it and there isn’t a good dance wiki that I could find. Information sources on theatre terminology are only slightly better.

As much as people say television shows like Glee, Smash and Bunheads don’t reflect reality, they do serve to disseminate the message that singing, theatre and dance are things people should be interested in learning more about.

Like I said, the idea that there isn’t enough of a visible trend and readily available information was something of a primary impression I had. I’d be happy to hear other theories.

While I think some of the terminology and practices might need a change, I do feel fairly strongly that people’s reticence to learn more about arts disciplines can’t be laid primarily at the feet of specialized vocabulary and unfamiliar practices.

People take the necessity of doing this in stride if they are motivated to learn something. Simplifying the language and altering the practices isn’t going to result in a sudden deluge of attendees because the initial motivating impulse will be absent.

What Is Your First Hint?

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I was reading today how the new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, has insisted that all employees be working at their corporate campuses by June rather than telecommuting. Yahoo has not been doing well in recent years and she took it as a bad sign that the parking lot was slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty out at night, something that is atypical for Silicon Valley tech companies, including Google where Mayer was recently an executive.

This got me to thinking about what the signs for arts organizations/companies would be that your staff wasn’t fully invested in the company? Since working conditions at many places are rarely optimal to start with, it may be difficult to know when morale and organizational culture is waning.

While we shouldn’t depend on people’s passion to keep them motivated in lieu of actually paying them, the passion is often the primary motivator ahead of pay, if the staff as a whole seems to have lost that feeling, you have to ask why.

There is a point where it is patently obvious to everyone that morale is low and the spark is gone. What I have started thinking about in reaction to the stories about Yahoo is what the warning signs might be that things are heading in the wrong direction but could be turned around before the negativity became omnipresent.

I would say the parking lot test is one indication. If people are leaving as soon as the job is done and seem reticent to come in any earlier than necessary, then the situation may be deteriorating. In my experience, unless it is 2 am after a load out of one show and a new show is loading in at 9 am the next morning, a fair number of theatre staff will hang out together for another half hour or so chatting and decompressing after the event.

I would also say that the lack of discussion about the event around the office the next morning is a bad sign. There is always need for a debrief and examination of what could be done better the next time. But even beyond the practical considerations, if people around the office aren’t spontaneously reflecting on the quality of the event and exhibiting some sort of intellectual or emotional connection with the experience (even if it is to reflect on audience reaction), then the environment may need to be examined.

What other signs are there? I have worked in performance most of my career so I would be especially interested to learn what is considered a bad sign in the visual arts. Though everyone should feel free to comment, regardless of what discipline you identify with.

I am not really looking to open a gripe fest where people complain about how the cheap bastards cut off the free coffee. But maybe you started noticing people stopped participating in the weekly “Bring Your Own Meat” barbeques in the summer and knew things were going awry weeks before anyone said anything.

Info You Can Use: NP Orgs Exist In Shadow Universe (Great Resource Guides Too)

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My Twitter feed delivered me two great resources for arts professionals on the same day this week.

The first came courtesy of Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group. I guess I should have known that when they talked about a guide developed for “WA Artists” they meant Western Australia and not Washington State. In my defense, they link to a lot of prominent U.S. arts sources (like me!).

The guide they shared, Amplifier: The Arts Business Guide for Creative People, from Propel Youth Arts, is really one of the best guides for creatives just starting out that I have come across. If you cut out the resource guide at the end of the booklet, 98% of it is applicable to a creative anywhere.

The guide is really accessible with fun illustrations and interviews that will probably make you want to move to Western Australia. It also walks you through all sorts of planning processes with questions and checklists: project management, business plans, identifying markets, goal setting, evaluation, finances & funding, legal, product, pricing, place and promotion.

It doesn’t just deal with performance, but also tackles film, visual art and publishing, delves into copyright law (which appears almost identical to U.S. law) and licenses.

The guide also spends a few pages on risk assessment and insurance for events which is something I have never really seen in similar guides even though it is very important.

The second resource comes from the Wallace Foundation. This one is more geared toward arts groups rather than individuals starting out and is focused on administrative issues like finances, board oversight and administration.

You may have seen some tweets about it but not followed the link. It is really worth stopping by to take a look.

Some of the guides and case studies are what you might expect “Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management” and How to Talk About Finances So Non-Financial Folks Will Listen.

But there are some with more intriguing titles like: “Efficiency” and “Not-for-Profit” Can Go Hand in Hand,  and The Looking-Glass World of Nonprofit Money: Managing in For-Profits’ Shadow Universe.  

The latter is described as” Especially useful overview for board members with little exposure to the unique nature of finance in a nonprofit context.” I  never really thought of NP orgs as operating in a shadow universe. Sounds so cool! Does that mean Rocco Landesman was the dark emperor or something while he headed the National Endowment for the Arts?

There are also proposals like “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle” which advocate for changes in the way foundations support non-profits.

The part of this resource I have seldom seen in other places was a whole section of five articles, including a podcast, on figuring out the True Cost of programs. They specifically have a calculator for figuring out the cost of after school programs, but following the steps outlined in some of the other articles can help reveal truths like social media isn’t actually free.

I haven’t read through everything in the guide, but I am definitely going to bookmark it for future reference.

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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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