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Audience Relations

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.
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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.

Free Admission For True Believers

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I don’t usually promote products here on the blog, but my assistant theatre manager found this in a Pier One and bought it for the theatre. We are thinking of putting it out by the lobby for all our free events. I pretty much captures who we are and what we are trying to accomplish with many of our shows.

To Those Who Believe Sign
To Those Who Believe

If you go into Pier One to get one of your own. Tell ’em you represent a theatre, museum, dance company, school, etc., Let them know the arts organizations in the community support them.

More thankful to have staff that is on the same wavelength as me (and I will credit her for shifting my thinking, too) and taking the initiative to grab the sign for the theatre.

Can You Pursue The Intrinsic Value of Arts Alone?

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There was a post by KCET columnist Corbett Barklie last fall that has had me thinking and wondering if there hasn’t been enough conversation about this topic.

In short, Barklie feels that arts organizations are sacrificing a focus on the intrinsic value of art in the pursuit of “social service” related activities. (my emphasis)

Arts groups exist to interpret the past, elucidate the present, and imagine the future. To borrow from Dewitt H. Parker’s The Principles of Aesthetics, “The intrinsic value of art must be unique, for it is the value of a unique activity — the free expression of experience in a form delightful and permanent, mediating communication.”

Nonprofit arts groups and the artists that run them are not reactionary entities. They are visionary entities.

You may be thinking, “But what about art groups who work in schools? Artists who work in hospitals?” In my opinion, those are arts service organizations — a rarely made but critical distinction. Arts service organizations exist to create and provide ancillary programs that help fulfill the missions of social service nonprofits such as schools, community centers, hospitals, etc…

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Because no distinction has been made between arts groups and arts service organizations, the general arts and arts policy conversation (set by funders and designated leaders) is getting more and more muddled. And artists who exist in organizations that are only concerned with artistic excellence are beginning to feel marginalized.

[…]

Unless and until arts groups find their voice of disagreement and set aside fear of funding or political ramifications long enough to speak up for themselves, the conversation will continue to focus less and less on challenges facing arts groups that are committed solely to artistic excellence. Eventually these arts groups will fade from view completely.

My first thought was, but isn’t an educational component the way it is supposed to be? Most non-profit organizations are organized under the aegis of the education part of 501 (c) 3. In a time when there is less arts education in schools, isn’t it in our best long term interest to be providing educational services? But then again, by Barklie’s definition, I have been working for arts service organizations for the last 20 odd years so this is the normal for me.

So my question to my larger audience; is it as Barklie suggests (and most recently echoed by Diane Ragsdale), have funders and others lead the arts in this direction?

After all, at one time, art was presented for arts sake and there wasn’t any efforts to supplement the efforts of education and health care.

Is this an improvement or a dilution of our effort? It can be argued that pursuing education programs helps put arts organizations in touch with their and constituencies, helping to remove ivory tower mentality and acculturate the community.

But there is also the issue of diverting resources from the core competency and mission of the company. For profit businesses aren’t expected to do this. Many get immense tax breaks with no expectation that they serve the public good.

Is it the new normal that arts organizations must split their focus in order to maintain their existence? Is there an egotism inherent to believing you should be able to pursue the intrinsic value of art alone?

Shaping oneself as an arts service organization seems about the only option for garnering foundation funding and mollifying governmental entities who want something more than pursuit of artistic excellence as a justification for being.

Thoughts?

Info You Can Use: Leveraging Transitions Well

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So I really hadn’t intended to write too much more about my job change until I left my current job or took my next one. However, the assistant theatre manager who is chairing the search committee is using some activities which I think are really beneficial to my organization and the community.

Today she held a meeting with various stakeholders to discuss what they wanted from the person who would replace me. I wasn’t included, but I eavesdropped on the conversation rising to my office off and on for about 15 minutes.

The group was comprised of about 15 people, some of which who are members of the search committee. Among them were faculty from music, theatre, visual arts; chair of Arts and Humanities; Dean of our division; our theatre staff; community artists; representatives of three renting organizations; volunteers; and our development officer.

They started out writing down what things they valued about the theatre, focusing especially on what will be missing if the theatre didn’t continue operations. Then they took turns talking about what they had written and sticking the post-it notes up on the wall in themed groups so that they could see what values people gravitated toward.

Later they moved on to some group activities to generate suggestions.

I spoke to some people after the meeting and they seemed pleased with the process. They were especially happy that the assistant theatre manager kept things moving along.

What I thought was really great about this exercise was that it brought so many different constituencies together who never meet each other. Each one became aware of what the other did in the facility and why certain elements of the facility and the services offered were relevant to them.

More importantly, this was all done in front of college administrators and the development officer which helped them understand the wide range of activities that occurs in the facility and why its existence was important.

It sounds strange to say, but I think this process was successful because I am leaving.

If we had tried to gather a group of people to talk about why they loved the theatre, I am not sure as many people would have shown up or been as eager to participate.

I think the sense of immediacy and the opportunity to influence the type of person chosen as the new theatre manager garnered far more investment in the process.

While part of me craves melodramatic gnashing of teeth and wailing, “Oh what shall we do without you, Joe? You are our source of inspiration and have that musky, Victor Mature-like scent,” I am really happy to see the transition turning into such a constructive process.

Just offering it here as an example something other organizations might try.

Oh, and I forgot, they fed the group Valentine’s Day cupcakes. That probably helped, too.

Info You Can Use: Are You Prepared to Weaponize Your Storytelling?

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Hat tip to P. Martin for the link to Chris Brogan’s guest post on Copyblogger about Content Marketing. I will confess that I think the term content marketing is a phrase devoid of much meaning. In the comments section of the post, Brogan agrees but says he just uses the terms that everyone is Googling.

It was hard to pass by this post though due to Brogan’s very quotable declaration that “Content marketing is weaponized storytelling.”

Brogan says that he used that phrase at a conference, but he isn’t sure that he really believes it and amended it to the admittedly less evocative, “Content marketing is sales-minded storytelling.”

His premise is that content marketing isn’t branding. He feels that only really big companies with large budgets can afford to build brand awareness. The little guy has to depend on content marketing which is aimed at “helping your market make a decision of some kind.” This doesn’t mean constantly making a hard sell.

Your site/email newsletter/podcast/whatever should consist of something like this:

Some posts that are just friendly and storytelling.
Some posts that are gentle pushes towards a next action or an ask.
Some posts that are pure selly-sell, as I like to call it. Apparently over here they call that an offer.
Some (but very few) totally off-topic posts.

This would be true of a blog, an email list, or whatever. I believe that the real goal of content marketing is to advance your business.

[…]

This is where it’s tricky. Because the business goal just might be entertainment. The business goal of my writing a guest post on Copyblogger is to get you to consider signing up for my awesome free newsletter.

Based on this great post (okay, decent post), you’re supposed to now think, “Wow, I really like what Chris had to say. I think I’ll give his newsletter a try.”

Did I charge you any money? No. Did I tell you about my product or service in the body of this post? No. What I did was start what I hope to be a relationship with you and I’ve invited you to get my awesome newsletter. That’s me content marketing.

Do you feel dirty? No. (You might already be dirty, but that’s awesome, and yet, not my fault.)

One of the commenters on this post felt Chris was wrong and made too many generalizations. His company has focused on positioning themselves as experts in the industry and gets great response from that. He said the only time responses have flagged was when they tried to inject content. Chris agrees that different industries and markets require different approaches.

Acknowledging that, I have to think that Chris’ approach is more aligned with the needs of arts organizations which largely employ storytelling to engage their customers/audiences.

At my theatre, we don’t do it with our newsletters as much as I would like. They have been mostly focused on communicating information about shows with interesting visuals and language and keeping text to a minimum. We are still evolving that approach.

However, our Facebook page has been a place where we share all sorts of information about the arts in general along with information about the shows. We have done this somewhat out of a desire to keep people engaged with the organization during the gaps between shows.

We want to give people a reason to continually visit our Facebook page, but also communicate information about arts careers and opportunities to the students and artists whom our facility serves. We have a television monitor with information about our shows in the lobby and it just occurred to me that would also be a great place to share some of the interesting tidbits we post on our Facebook page alongside our show information.

Many of these ideas can be offered free to the public without making a hard sell or talking about your company. So think about it. What resources are available to you? What can you do?

Age And Artistic Taste–Discuss

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Writing about the concept of music discovery, Tyler Hayes suggests that after a certain age, most people are pretty set in their music tastes and in terms of paying for recordings of music, are better served by buying and owning rather than “renting” the music from a service like Spotify.

He argues that technology currently does a poor job of creating an environment for music discovery.

The problem with Pandora is that it may replace the radio for some, or a lot of people, but there is no spark the same way when a friend says “Hey, you should check out this band, they’re great.” A computer can’t replace that, yet. There will be an app or site or service that does fix and solve discovery… But that isn’t now or even this year.

Music discovery should be a verb or an accident, through active looking or serendipitous stumbling, but it shouldn’t be paraded around only as a marketing term.

A number of thoughts that occurred to me as I read this. First was that idea that new music discovery tapers off after a certain age. There are studies that show that people often mature into an appreciation for classical music. But I wonder if the ground work for that appreciation isn’t laid when people are younger and attend live performances in general with their family and classmates.

Yeah, I know the arts for the kids discussion has been beaten to death. I am just suggesting that even though you turned out okay and appreciate art even though you had minimal exposure when you were younger, the general environment has greatly changed since then.

If you are in your 40s as I am, or older you and your parents watched many of the same television shows because that was all that was available. Even though I didn’t go to many Broadway shows in my youth, my mother would often play Fiddler on the Roof, Camelot and Godspell records. I would dance around singing the chorus of “If I Were A Rich Man” when I resented having to do chores.

Your parents had a fairly strong influence on your taste and you shared many of the same experiences. While it may have been to a lesser degree, you probably gravitated toward some of the same general arts genres your parents did as you got older. Even if you rebelled against sharing their aesthetic taste, you were still engaged by art to some degree.

I am not sure we can necessarily count on the same effect with the current generation. Lacking any exposure from any quarter, their tastes may solidify as they are and never include traditional/classical art forms as they mature.

I am open to hearing counter arguments, but if you are older than 30ish, be honest, are you as voracious a consumer of music/art as you were when you were younger or are your choices pretty much explorations along general lines you established in the past with some interesting, but not radical deviations?

Second thing I began to ponder was whether terms like audience/community engagement and discovery are largely marketing terms that are being used to add a little luster to the same general programs as before or if arts organizations have started making a more directed effort in these directions. This isn’t something I can opine upon even generally because I don’t have any really solid data. It is a good question to ask ourselves, though.

I do think that the thing arts organizations offer over any other entertainment form is the opportunity to experience the frisson of personal discovery. I love Tyler Hayes’ definition of musical discovery as “a verb or an accident, through active looking or serendipitous stumbling.”

You absolutely miss something when you try to experience it via a small screen or ear buds vs. going into a performance hall or gallery. Even if you don’t understand Dali, you have an experience standing in front of one of his wall sized works that you don’t by seeing a picture of it.

The challenge has always been trying to communicate that through media insufficient to the task without under or overselling it. The other part of the challenge is whether people will continue to value the seeking process.

Info You Can Use: Discovering Your Ideal Customer

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Last June I came across a useful article by Sarah Arrow about identifying your ideal customer. According to her, there is are a very narrow profiles which constitute a business’ ideal customer then the people who are secondary customers who influence your ideal customer. Her article is mostly aimed at writing different blog posts for the ideal and secondary customers, but it is just as easy to substitute “ads” or “social media updates” for blog post.

In the non-profit world there are many constituencies we serve: audiences, boards, government officials, students, parents, performers, ethnic groups, etc. In performance based arts, we talk a lot about diversifying our audiences to attract a wide range of people. There are also very limited resources available with which to communicate ourselves to these groups.

In light of all this, it can be difficult to decide who to target and so opt for trying to appeal to everyone in general. This may be largely ineffective because it engages no one specific very well.

Arrow runs through a process which can help identify an ideal customer. The example she uses are baby strollers. (my emphasis)

Imagine you sell buggies (strollers for my US readers), your marketplace is people with babies and toddlers – new mums, dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles. And the chances are you don’t just sell one type of buggy, but multiple types and styles so you can meet the needs of your customers.

That’s a big marketplace,…

When you have the ideal customer you get a better picture of how to market your buggies to that person. If your mum is a health nut, she’d love the buggy that you can jog with, Dads are often taller and buggies with adjustable handles will speak to him… but here’s the thing, a new mum tends to spend more than a second time mum, she’s the ideal customer in that big marketplace. You have to market to her first and get a relationship started with her swiftly before someone else does.

Arrow continues noting that first time grandmothers are also a lucrative market, but their concerns are much different than that of first time mothers so you need to provide a separate and different approach.

Secondary customers (in this case, the mother’s female friends) keep an eye open for the interests of the primary buyers and influence them. While they may not buy things themselves, Arrow says refer a friend offers are helpful because they still allow people to take action, even if it isn’t making a purchase.

So think about your audience. Can you whittle it down to three important categories like this? That becomes a little more manageable when it comes to producing materials, right?

And remember, they may not all require the same format. Older people read the physical newspapers more than other demographics so only one message may be needed for that medium. Other audiences may follow closely on social media so two or three different messages targeted at them may be required. Social media isn’t as cheap as people imagine, but also tend not to be as expensive as print and broadcast media.

The trouble might be identifying who the ideal customer is. First question that popped into my mind was that it is often women who provide the impetuous for ticket buying. Are they the ideal customer or the influencer? I suspect a little of both.

I think a far bigger problem for arts organizations will be an unwillingness to trim the list down. There is such a strong impulse to identify everyone as the primary customer and avoid being perceived as exclusionary. It doesn’t help that granters and foundations reward with funding those who can claim an impact on the widest possible field.

The truth is, the profile of the best people to pursue is probably much narrower. This doesn’t necessarily exclude the diversity funders seek. For some organizations, the ideal customer may be K-5th grade school teachers who in turn will bring diverse groups of students.

For other organizations, that same diversity might be more difficult to achieve. However if they have done the right job identifying and crafting a message to their ideal customers, the positive response rate should be higher than before.

Who Really Values Diversity In The Arts?

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Last month Springboard for the Arts tweeted that the attendance at the Guthrie Theatre’s attendance last year exceeded the Minnesota Vikings’ home game attendance, 425,932 to 421,668.

Springboard Executive Director Laura Zabel blogged about these numbers suggesting the 400k Guthrie audience members should manifest their love for the theater in the same way Vikings’ fans do–jerseys and facepaint.

One of my first thoughts, based on some of Zabel’s observations, was about whether tax dollars were better spent building a stadium which is only used 8 times a year by 400,000 people or a theatre which is used hundreds of nights a year by the same number.

But I quickly remembered the big to do about the lack of diversity in Guthrie’s current season. I wondered if the attendance numbers reflected any push back against that.

Based on a calendar year comparison, it hasn’t. At the end of 2011 their attendance was 421,982. That, however, was down from 2010 when their attendance was 435,877.

I don’t have any numbers comparing their seasons which run September – August. There could have been a precipitous drop off September – December 2012 that isn’t readily apparent. My suspicion, however, is that audiences by and large don’t care about diversity, or the lack thereof, as much as people in the arts sector do.

Diversity is an internal concern driven by economic and philosophic motivations rather than by external audience demands. Audiences do want works that speak to them so arts organizations pursue diversity in order to bolster attendance by expanding the appeal of their works.

Non-profit arts organizations are also widely motivated by their educational mission to expose their audiences to new ideas which is often manifested by who is chosen to perform and whose ideas are chosen to be presented.

While arts organizations have to be responsive to the tastes and interests of their audiences, the audiences take a pretty passive role when it comes to programming. They aren’t widely clamoring for their local arts organizations to bring in new faces and new ideas.

If they were, it would actually be easier to program a season because you would have an idea of what people wanted instead of having an empty theatre teach you what they didn’t.

The Guthrie’s artistic director, Joe Dowling noted that many of the shows in their current season were brought to him by the directors. That is how the programming decisions of most arts organizations are driven, artists and agents, rather than audiences approach decision makers with ideas.

In fact, one of the things artistic directors probably cringe most at is being approached by an audience member who says “I know this group…” I would have sworn it would never come to pass, but this season we are actually doing a show based on a usher coming up and essentially saying, “I am in this band…” It does happen, but often audience suggestions don’t reflect an understanding of the organization’s artistic and business models.

Just the same, that feedback can provide insight into the type of experience the audience member is looking for. Presenting Lady Gaga may be totally wrong for the Guthrie Theater, but a show where the audience can vicariously identify with the protagonist’s rise to celebrity might work great.

As you are all well aware, arts organizations are in the unenviable position of having to figure it all out. It is difficult to pursue any one agenda as wholeheartedly as you might wish. Program too conservatively and audiences will say the arts are arrogant and out of touch for telling them they ought to value antiquated works by Mozart and Shakespeare. Program too progressively and audiences will say the arts are arrogant for telling them they ought to value works challenging notions of gender, race and politics.

I don’t mean to champion a middle of the road approach. I could easily argue, as many people did regarding the Guthrie’s season, that I have far more diversity on my stage and in my audiences just by cultivating locally available artistic resources. I also know that may be harder to achieve in the next job I hold. A balance between leading and following has to be struck and recalibrated all the time.

Our Stories

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My mother has been doing some hardcore genealogy research for years now. There was a trip to Ireland a few years back, last Christmas we were in FDR’s Presidential Library, this Christmas I got a calendar with pictures and stories from my maternal grandfather’s side of family all over it.

But she isn’t alone, with shows like Who Do You Think You Are tracing celebrity genealogy, the increased use of DNA testing for various ends and Ancestry.com’s growing subscription rolls, show that people are increasingly interested in their heritage.

From what I have read, interest in genealogy usually increases as people enter retirement which is what a lot of baby boomers (including my mother) have started doing.

It occurs to me then that it might be meaningful to many communities if arts organizations made an effort to help them tell their stories through performance, exhibitions and participatory activities.

The one type of show that has pretty consistently done well for my theatre are those that resonate with groups that maintain a fairly strong cultural identity. Some of it has been related to ethnicity, but others have crossed ethnic lines and been more about the shared experience of place.

Even if you don’t have the capacity to produce/commission/organize a performance, I think there are plenty of opportunities for involving the community in interactive experiences.

By default, I think of those Nina Simon does at her museum, but something could easily be organized around a big 4th of July picnic where everyone sits around and tells family stories about the immigrant/frontier experience. Those stories can be collected/recorded/interpreted in some way and displayed.

My intuition tells me these activities that might even abet community building during a time where electronic devices are making people a little more insular.

Context And Environment Matter

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NPR recently teamed up with the TED people to present the TED Radio Hour which takes three TED talks on a similar theme to revisits them with the speakers. The one I heard run this weekend was about how our brains trick us and confuse us about what we value. It was the second segment with psychologist Paul Bloom which caught my attention because it deal with how so much of what we value about art depends on the context.

It started with the story about Joshua Bell playing in the subway station and no one paying him much mind or money, for that matter. When I talked about this experiment before, I mentioned that context and the environment played large roles in people’s enjoyment.

Bloom talked about the Dutch art dealer who was convicted of treason for selling Hermann Goring a Vermeer–until he confessed and proved the painting was a forgery–after which he was deemed a hero.

Bloom also spoke about Marla Olmstead who was painting works at 3 years old that people were paying tens of thousands of dollars for until 60 Minutes came to visit and it was discovered her father was prompting (and perhaps even helping) with the painting.

A common question was raised about each of these. If Joshua Bell is such a great performer which people pay great amounts of money to hear perform, why wasn’t his quality recognized as an anonymous performer in a D.C. subway? Why is it treasonous to sell a Nazi a real Vermeer but heroic to sell him a fake if you can’t tell the difference between the paintings? If you like the painting, why does it matter if a 3 year old or a 30 year old paints it?

The answer has to do with authenticity, the story which accompanies the experience and a willingness to receive. Classical music doesn’t have to be experienced in a formal performance hall or art in a museum gallery. There are successful programs that bring classical music and opera to bars.

But people go to those events expecting to listen to music. There are entirely different expectations and agendas as you move through a subway station which inhibits a person’s readiness to receive the experience.

Art like wine and food is more enjoyable and valuable when the authenticity of provenance is beyond question. You are buying the story as well as the physical object and that makes all the difference. According to Bloom, there are parts of the brain that light up when you believe you are drinking expensive wine that don’t light up when you believe you are drinking cheap wine even if it is the same wine. So it isn’t that you think it is better, you are actually having an entirely different experience.

The lesson for arts organizations and performers is to help your audience to that mindset. Whether you are in a formal performance space or not, there are things you must do in respect to the environment and interactions to help transition people toward the experience.

You could argue that flashmob performances don’t do that with their audiences and they are often well received. But I would say it isn’t the quality of the performance that people are necessarily responding to but the quality of the planning and execution that brought them the experience.

It is akin to crossing a stream and finding a diamond ring in the water. It is the enjoyment of finding an unexpected treasure that pleases. I think you would find people react just as delighted if an accomplished high school orchestra popped out of the woodwork as they would for the Philadelphia Orchestra revealing themselves in the same manner.

What I really appreciated was Bloom’s late addendum to his TED Talk. In the radio program he said the thing he didn’t emphasize enough in his TED Talk, and was pleased to be able to now, was that most people see it as a glitch or flaw that our perceptions and values can be manipulated by such factors. If we were perfect, these things wouldn’t sway us so easily.

Bloom’s view is that this “flexibility” actually allows us to experience more pleasure in life. He feels that taste can be developed through study and learning. The more you know, the more pleasure you can derive. So if you want to get more pleasure from wine or art, you need to do more than just expose yourself by drinking lots of wine and seeing lots of art, you need intentionally educate yourself.

That seems to align with the findings of the Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music report from six years ago which said exposure in the form of lecture/demos didn’t seem to have as long lasting impact on participation and attendance as participatory programs including instruction.

This, of course, reinforces the importance and sense of desperation to get art back into schools.

Stuff To Ponder: The Fairness and Transparency of Ticket Lines

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Seeing and hearing about people queuing up this year for Black Friday sales on the Monday prior reminded me about an article Tim Roberts wrote on Fullhouses.org this September. In it, Roberts asked if making people line up for theatre tickets was really the fairest way to distribute them.

I am sure the British Commonwealth nations who sponsor Fullhouses.org don’t experience the homicidal shopping frenzy that is Black Friday, but it occurred to me that it is something of a double standard to expect arts organizations to be fairer than retail stores.

It isn’t fair to have to take time off of work to stand in line for theatre tickets, but people camp out for a week to get $50 off a flat screen TV and no one blinks, eh?

Arts organizations are expected to operate more like businesses, aren’t we? Why not make people line up and wait? We may be worried about hurting our relationships with our patrons, but it doesn’t seem to hurt retail stores even when customers know they are being manipulated with sale prices.

Shakespeare in the Park in NYC has a long history of making people line up to get free tickets to their shows. And from their website, apparently people are queuing up before 6 am to be online for the 1 pm distribution. My suspicion is that their policy of randomly distributing seats rather than giving the closest seats to those at the head of the line is probably meant to dissuade people from lining up even earlier. It probably also keeps things from getting as emotionally charged as the Black Friday conflicts.

I did a couple posts on the subject a few years back. Now that I look at their site again, it appears they now offer an online lottery of sorts for tickets. While there are some alternative options, I am guessing your best bet is probably still going to be on the line in the park.

I know there have been some grumblings about the Shakespeare in the Park ticketing process, but I think their long history of requiring people to line up proves it is a viable model.

Back to the original question, is it really important to be fair? People generally have no awareness of whether the organization they are buying from is for-profit or non-profit. They are mostly motivated by the content of the show and tolerate quite a bit of unfairness.

People will go online to buy tickets and are poised to make a purchase at the exact moment they go on sale only to find they are all snatched up in a blink by automated processes. The fact people will still crave those tickets at a higher price on the re-sale sites empowers the very practice people say they despise.

A physical line is actually solid proof of your relative standing. If the line snakes down 5 blocks and you don’t get tickets, you may be disappointed but you could see that there really were 500 individuals ahead of you who had invested more time and effort than you did into making the purchase. While more inconvenient, it would seem a much more transparent and fairer option than online and over the phone ticket sales.

What I think the defining factor is is what your audience values as the basis of your relationship with them. In terms of retailers, the whole relationship is based on price. JC Penny found out people don’t care if they are being manipulated, just so long as the price is right.

So even if most people don’t discern between for and non-profit performing arts events, as a non-profit you can’t pursue a relationship based on price for the simple reason that price conscious people don’t make $1000 donations on top of their ticket purchases.

Patrons of non-profit organizations also don’t generally encounter having all the available tickets disappear in a matter of moments so aren’t likely to crave the transparency of physical lines.

Ultimately, how you handle the process of ticket sales is going to depend on your community and what they value. As a non-profit you are working on showing value in areas retailers often ignore.

There is part of me that thinks that if people are willing to queue up to buy something, either physically or virtually, it is hard to buy the sort of buzz and publicity that generates. It may be ill-advised to try to replace that in deference to some sense of fairness if people are not resentful about it.

Even if they are, it could be the sense of excitement inspiring that resentment. People are more likely to be angry that they have to go to work rather than standing on line to buy tickets if they drive by and there is a line of people threatening to buy up all the tickets before lunch break. Without that line, there is less urgency to see the show.

Before Thanksgiving I was listening to NPR as they interviewed people who had already planned to skip Thanksgiving dinner with their families in order to camp out in line–or they made arrangements to essentially tailgate their Thanksgiving dinner. As much as I thought they were crazy, it was clear even over the radio that people viewed the whole thing as a rite of passage type bonding experience.

I don’t think it was that long ago that people regularly did this sort of thing to get tickets for concerts too. I am betting there is an element of the concert tasting all the sweeter for the effort invested too.

The more I think about it, if you are going to have a physical line up, I think Shakespeare in the Park’s solution of providing a chance to be selected to receive tickets provides the best balance. You get the uncertain convenience of online acquisition balanced by the inconvenient certainty of gaining a ticket of your own merit by lining up early. I am not exactly sure how Shakespeare in the Park handles it, but if they keep the percent of the house they are releasing online a secret, they can vary it according to demand and maintain their attendance numbers.

Release The Theatre Ninja!

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The Boston Globe recently had an article on theatre etiquette listing strategies for audience members to use when attending performances to avoid causing any problems and to deal with those that arise. It ends noting that a cinema in the UK has started to employ lycra clad “ninja” to sneak up on ask patrons to be quiet.

What I found most interesting was a comment on the Globe article made by “jwinboston” who related an experience attending Handel’s Messiah. A family with 4 kids were making quite a fuss in the front rows. When she spoke to the father at intermission, he reacted indignantly feeling that his kids were being attacked. She spoke to an usher and found the family wasn’t there at the end of intermission. Others in the audience thanked her for speaking up.

However, she says,

“Over the years I’ve thought about that incident and I’ve come to the conclusion that I was actually in the wrong. I went to that concert with the same expectations that I have when I attend any classical concert, however, a Christmas season performance of Messiah is not any classical concert. Different people with different expectations attend these concerts and they are the target audience, not serious classical patrons. So at this time of year if you are going to attend one of these performances you need to do it in a relaxed and tolerant frame of mind. You’re there for the event, not the performance.”

I think most people would say she originally handled the situation quite reasonably as it was and wouldn’t have found any fault with her. To have this level of self-reflection is quite commendable. (And in fact another commenter does commend her.)

This is one of those times where theatre and religion have a lot in common in that the performances/services during the respective holidays are often well attended by people who normally don’t participate at other times of the year and aren’t quite familiar with the rituals.

Performing arts groups are probably more aware of the events that will attract these more diverse audiences than their regular patrons are. Since I saw this article, I have been trying to think of a way to beg the tolerance of regular patrons in a way that doesn’t sound condescending to one of the segments. If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them.

(Don’t make your ideas too good though. I really want to fit my ushers with ninja costumes.)

Info You Can Use: Negative Feedback As GPS Data

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In my last entry, I cited the pitfalls of providing too great a forum for feedback and expectations about how that input will be addressed. I think we all recognize though that as arts organizations, we need to solicit feedback in order to better serve our communities.

How you receive the feedback is just as important as how you ask for it. It is easy to dismiss feedback we don’t like or be paralyzed/depressed by taking it too much to heart. FastCompany recently had an article addressing how to take negative feedback on an individual level, but the advice can scale up to the organizational level.

The article talks about using negative feedback to make yourself more successful. I was interested to learn that openness to feedback is actually a significant factor in an employee’s success.

“A recent study found that 46% of newly hired employees will fail within 18 months. Of those that fail, 26% do so because they can’t accept feedback,…

[…]

“People who are at the bottom 10% in terms of their willingness to ask for feedback–their leadership effectiveness scores were at the 17th percentile,” says Joseph Folkman, president of Zenger Folkman… “But the people who were at the top 10%, who were absolutely willing to ask for feedback, their leadership effectiveness scores were at the 83rd percentile.”

One of the problems a lot of people face with negative feedback is that they see it as an indictment of them as a person rather than, say an indication of their poor typing skills. I don’t know for sure if it is any worse in the arts sector than any other sector, but I imagine given that those involved in the arts tend to derive so much emotional satisfaction from their work, negative criticism may be more apt to be taken personally.

Article author Denis Wilson suggests just treating the feedback as a single piece of data among many to guide your personal development rather than orienting specifically on it. He cites an apt analogy made by Joseph Folkman that a GPS device needs 3-4 sources of information to accurately track your progress. For the same reason, Folkman also cautions against relying entirely on your own perceptions.

The article goes on to suggest a number of ways to handle the feedback, again by mostly focusing on the facts of the situation rather than emotions involved. A patron may complain angrily and indicate that they have lost faith in you due to problems with their experience. Your focus should be on solutions to those problems rather than fixating on and reacting to the anger.

Of course, it it often no small feat to remain centered on the facts of a situation when on the receiving end of emotionally delivered criticism. Remember that being able to do so contributes to your personal growth.

There is nothing to say the person delivering the criticism will be satisfied with your composed reaction and apology. Just reading the comments to the article, it is clear some people have an expectation that those on the receiving end of the criticism will be contrite and cowed.

All Your Dance Are Belong To Us

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Thomas Cott recently included a link to a story about dance and visual arts that I found extremely intriguing. The article starts with a quote from Ralph Lemon, “I wait,” he said, “for the day when a museum acquires a dance.”

My first reaction was that this could be valuable for cross audience pollination. I thought back to an entry I did last February where the coordinator of a visual and performance art festival observed that there was little cross over between her audiences and that of a theatre oriented festival even though they had many of the same artists in common.

Then I started wondering about the logistics and arrangements involved for a museum to acquire and present dance. Fortunately, the article addresses all these things.

Apparently dance and museums are not strangers. A choreographer received top honors at the Whitney Biennial this year. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is featuring a 3 week dance series organized by Ralph Lemon. I was surprised to learn that both MoMA and the Guggenheim own several dance pieces and have paved the way for museums to collect “ephemeral works.”

Apparently working in a gallery space challenges choreographers to think in new ways about the visuals and use of space. Museums find they need to think differently about performance arts. (my emphasis)

“But dance isn’t performance art, as Jens Hoffmann, director of San Francisco’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, well knows; he encouraged Mr. Sehgal to transition out of dance, and pursue an audience in the art world.

…Naked on a stage, Mr. Sehgal “re-danced” moves from famous choreographers. “I thought it was interesting that he was turning himself into a museum of dance.” Mr. Hoffmann invited him to participate in several shows in Berlin and Dusseldorf.

Mr. Sehgal, who also has a background in economics, is adamant that his work be treated like any other work of visual art—bought, sold and exhibited. To exhibit one of his pieces, an institution must follow certain contractual obligations—the piece must be shown for a minimum of six weeks, during which time it is presented all day, every day, like any other art exhibition.

[…]

According to Ms. Breitwieser, the rise in interest in dance does parallel a similar rise in interest in live art, or art like Mr. Sehgal’s. Since visual art has become so conceptual and predicated on a kind of “de-skilling,” live art, including performance, dance and theatrical works, she said, present an element of “re-skilling” that audiences crave. Awwnd dance presented in the white-cube context of a museum presents a new challenge to both choreographers and viewers that dance in conventional theater doesn’t offer. “The museum’s position is to write history,” Ms. Breitwieser said. “This makes one look at a piece of live art differently.”

How the dance is treated and viewed is of some concern to those in the dance community. If the relationship is to continue, the situation will likely have to move beyond one-offs and short run exhibitions. Tino Sehgal’s insistence that his work be experienced by visitors with the same degree of persistence as any other art work in the museum may become something of a precedent.

According to Judy Hussie-Taylor, the director of Danspace Project, there is chatter in the dance community over whether museums are co-opting dance without fully understanding what it takes to support dancers. There’s also concern that financial resources that now go directly to choreographers and dance organizations may be diverted to museums and visual arts institutions.

“Selling a dance performance as a work of art is an interesting proposition,” she said, “primarily because it’d be great for choreographers to have the same kind of economic control of their work and its distribution [that visual artists have].”

As I said, for me this whole discussion is intriguing to me. I haven’t even been able to imagine all the implications. What does it do for museums which have heretofore always been the site of static art work if they are regularly offering art that is transitory in nature?

One of the big selling points for the performing arts has always been that it happens only for a moment in time. What is the impact of being able to see it 9-5, Monday – Friday in a MoMA gallery? Even though there is still a higher degree of randomness inherent to 50 live performances than 50 viewings of the same YouTube video, do all those repetitions diminish the value of the performance?

On the other hand, does the fact that MoMA has exclusive rights to an exciting, highly acclaimed dance piece and no amount of begging and money can get it performed in Minneapolis enhance the value of both the museum and the company?

How Audiences Are Like The Electorate

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Now that the election is drawing to a close, I think all non-profit arts organizations, especially those in battleground states, should go out tomorrow and ask media companies for donations. There has been so much money spent on advertising during the campaigns, those companies are going to have a big tax burden this year if they don’t find some worthy cause to donate to!

Alas, Hawaii is not one of those states. Neither presidential candidate visited this year even though rumor has it one of them was born here. While we did have a 2 term Republican governor, the state is pretty solidly Democratic. The State Senate has 24 Democratic members and 1 Republican.

Voting participation is so bad, CNN did a long study about why the state is dead last.

This where “all politics are local” comes in. There are some situations characteristic only of Hawaii. There isn’t another state where a sizable part of the population views statehood as the result of an illegal overthrow of the monarchy and won’t vote because they feel it legitimizes the occupation government.

Due to the distance from the rest of the continental US, a person living in Hawaii can actually hear the winner of a national election called by 5 pm local time, providing less incentive to vote. (Though Alaska is in the same situation and has 8th highest voter turnout.)

Two things I took away from the CNN article that applies to the arts.

First, the importance of giving people an opportunity to talk about their experiences. I mention engaging people in conversation about their experiences with the arts pretty consistently in the blog, but the CNN article shows it in action.

A group canvassing neighborhoods trying to get people engaged and signed to vote didn’t get much traction with conventional survey questions, but when they asked what was personally important…

“…At least she’d have to look at us before saying no.

Do you vote?

No.

Would you like to register?

No.

Last-ditch effort: Is there an issue important to you?

The volunteers explained that Kanu is asking candidates questions based on the issues identified by the people they meet while canvassing. If the candidates addressed her concern, they told her, they’d report back.

“Oh!” the woman said. I could almost hear her tongue loosening.

She launched into her life story….

…The volunteers asked again. Wouldn’t you like to vote? Your voice could be heard.

After some discussion, the woman, Marlene Joshua, 58, said yes.

The other lesson I came away with is that simply inviting people to attend a show could possibly be surprisingly effective.

“He never cast a ballot himself until age 34. No one had ever asked him to, he said, and politics just wasn’t something he thought much about…. But then, in 2010, he saw a link to Kanu’s website shared via Twitter. He clicked it and found a page that asked him to make a pledge to vote for the first time.

For whatever reason, he said yes. That decision was the start of an incredible transformation. It led to his current hobby: spending weekends convincing other people that their votes matter.”

and in another part of the article:

Michelson, from Menlo College in California, told me that some groups — racial minorities, recent immigrants and residents of low-income neighborhoods — don’t feel like people who are supposed to vote in U.S. elections. But if you ask them to participate, she said, that can all change.

“It doesn’t really matter what you say. It doesn’t really matter who asks you,” she said. “The important thing is the personal invitation to participate.”

We know that like people in these groups, there are those who also don’t feel like they are the type of people who go to see live performances. Changing that mindset may start with something as simple as a personal invitation. That gesture at least starts to confirm that they are perceived as the type of person who attends a live performance.

Perform In One Place, Teach In 100 Places

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Digital media seems to creep ever more closely to threaten the practice of physically attending live performance. Last month I got an email soliciting submissions for the WiredArts Festival, what they describe as a month long Fringe Festival which will be live streamed.

“there the audience is global, seating is unlimited and viewers can participate in live chat discussions, interact through twitter and facebook, while the performance is happening….We believe that THE SMALL THEATER AUDIENCE ISN’T IN DECLINE, IT’S ONLINE.”

The reasons they give for participating and the services they offer include:

-Instantly provides a platform to take your company and your art to a global audience.

-Opens the doors to online conversations that expand the work for everyone involved.

-Multiple cameras provide professional, high definition quality and creative, dynamic story telling.

-Increases opportunities for support and funding.

-Engages your company more deeply in social media community and the possibilities of social media networking and marketing

-Is fun, exciting and the wave of the future of the performing arts.

-Drives online audiences to the live theater.

YOUR PROGRAMMING SLOT FEE INCLUDES:
1 high-definition, multi-camera edit of your live performance
Social Media Marketing training sessions
3,000 square foot performance space at The Secret Theater
Opportunity to invite your own audience to the Secret Theater
4 camera setup and professional camera operators
Live-Streamed Director
1 Production Manager
1 Sound (for streaming) Technician
1 Board Operator

I am a little skeptical of their claim that this will drive online audiences to live theater given that the trend seems toward individuals increasingly isolating themselves. If positioned and presented correctly I imagine it could entice people to live performances, but it would have to be an active effort rather than passively depending on people liking something so much they decide to check it out live. People in general are too used to experiencing their entertainment via some form of mediation to feel there are some experiences that must be savored live.

Appropriately enough, three days after receiving this email the topic of You’ve Cott Mail was “The Future of Arts in a Digital Age.”

Included in Cott’s email was a piece by Andrew Sullivan basically saying only suckers eschew digital readers like the iPad and Kindle for print, a sentiment somewhat belied by the widespread power outages on the East Coast. A little difficult to read your Kindle by candle light, a feat I managed with an old fashioned print book in Mongolian yurt this summer.

Thomas Jefferson read by candlelight, by gum. It should be good enough for everyone!

Such smug assertions have a pretty short shelf life, though. The benefits of digital format will surely continue to increase.

The question is, what place does a performing arts venue have as this future unfolds? Will the role be like that of The Secret Theater where theatres facilitate the live streaming performance of arts groups by providing space, personnel and technology? And what differentiates this performance from a television show or a YouTube video for the viewer?

The organizers of the WiredArts Festival seem to acknowledge a live audience to provide genuine feedback is important and I suspect it always will be, but this may mean the end of large performing arts venues in favor of smaller 100-200 seat venues. (As point of context, The Daily Show studio seats about 300 people and Colbert Report about 100 people.)

Will those who are skilled at curating and producing these sort of events become recognized as the hottest performance venues potentially shifting the artistic center of gravity away from places like NYC and LA? There is a lot of interesting stuff happening in Cincinnati thanks to the efforts of groups like ArtsWave. As physical location becomes less important to gaining recognition, more creatives may start to gather in cities that provide high quality technology resources/support and low cost of living.

Given that artists will be reaching a global audience, live interaction in the form of workshops/residencies/master classes may become more valued if artists promote that as a service they can offer. Going on an extended tour with a dance company may be less common but the opportunity to work in a small group with a compelling artist may increase in desirability. (So I guess a base of operations in a city with a low cost of living but good airport will be essential.)

This may seem a remote possibility but the Andrew Sullivan article I referenced earlier pointed out people are buying the work of talented individuals rather than trusted institutions these days.

It may just be a matter of making people more aware that personal contact and instruction is possible causing the whole model to become inverted. Instead of touring a performance to 100 places and teaching in a few, you live stream one or two big performances a year from your base and the notoriety it generates supports sending skilled members of the company all over the world to spend a few weeks teaching people how to perform like they saw in the broadcast. If you have the talent and vision to parlay the longer term exposure and interactions with all these different people and cultures into a new creative expression that wows the world, you can keep the cycle going.

This version of the future would dovetail very well with the Pro-Am movement because it would help people nourish their avocation and still acknowledge the value of pursuing the arts as a vocation (though certainly a Pro-Am could just as easily travel about providing educational experiences at cut rate prices).

Patrons With Old Wounds

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A month ago while discussing audience participation and Great Lakes Theater Company Artistic Director’s feeling that babyboomers rather than young people craved interactive experiences at performances, I wondered aloud:

“It occurred to me that as people with training in the arts, we know about the history. But do our audiences in general know? Do they yearn to shout praise or insults and stay away because they can’t? Is the ability to do so something people would value so much they would start attending if they could?”

I was reminded today that while those who may value interactive experiences may not explicitly state their desires, those who would prefer more passive interaction definitely voice their opinions on the matter.

I had sent out an email newsletter yesterday mention an upcoming performance of Alice in Wonderland. In response I received an email from a patron stating the last time she attended she had an unpleasant experience due to people being allowed to be loudly interactive with the performers. Because she did not want to chance another bad experience, she wouldn’t be attending our performances any time soon.

I looked up her purchase records to try to discern what show might have offended her and found that our last attendance record is 4 years old. All that means is that she hasn’t purchased advance tickets in four years. She could have easily purchased tickets at the door or come with a friend and we didn’t capture her name.

My suspicion is that she probably attended one of our free end of semester student performances which tend to be pretty raucous or a Mexican music concert a couple years ago where the band encouraged the audience to sing along. Those are the only performances I can recall where we have received complaints similar to hers. We have also received praise from attendees who enjoyed the high energy atmosphere of these shows.

However…she was obviously so upset by the experience that she continues to be bothered months, if not years, later and she wanted to let us know that she still holds it against us.

I don’t want to advocate for maintaining the status quo, but I do think it is important to remember people like this woman when you start to consider moving toward more interactive experiences. Ask yourself who is more loyal, the people who will hate the changes or the people who will embrace them? Is there a way you can gradually phase in a change of dynamics or do you feel the shift is desperately needed to retain or attract an audience?

If you have read my blog for any length of time, you have probably gotten the sense that I don’t think there is anything to gain by completely catering to those that value the status quo. Pacing of a change over a long period of time can signal a commitment to the new course to your existing supporters without alarming them and assure your target audience that the changes aren’t a superficial attempt to pander to them.

We know people are staying away because their perception of the attendance experience isn’t appealing, but we don’t know how many would regularly attend if changes were made and how apt they would be to return on a regular basis. We know much more about those who do attend on a regular basis, but as the oft spoken mantra goes, they are dying off or retiring to Florida.

The bigger challenge to most arts organizations is discerning the a constructive course of action based on feedback. Those who support your course of action are rarely as vocal about it as those who despise it and it is hard not to react to the stronger emotional response. Supporters who feel you are on the correct course will say nice things in the lobby. Six months later, they may respond to a mailing with “looking forward to the show” which fade in the face of “I am never coming to see a show again based on my six month old experience!”

Stuff To Ponder: MyStage Accounts

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Hartford Courant columnist Frank Rizzo recently suggested an interesting subscription alternative, MyStage Accounts, that is something akin to the flex subscription or monthly membership pass.

Rizzo’s idea is basically like a savings account or gift card that the patron can use as a basis for purchasing tickets. (my emphasis)

Tell theatergoers that for the new season coming up they can simply open an account and from that account they can buy any ticket at any time. Simple as that. Write a check for $100, they’ll get get $115 worth of tickets; $200 and they get $240; $300 they can get $400 worth of tickets; $500 they get $700; $1,000 they get $2,000. Or whatever discounted percent those spreadsheets tell you is viable.

No muss, no fuss. (Is there an app for that?) The more they give, the better the deal (up to a point.) And there could be promotions where the theater can add to some accounts for whatever clever reason their marketing staffs come up with.

Rizzo’s thought is to provide a win-win situation. The theatre gets the money up front just as they do with any subscription and the audience member gets the flexibility of choice. I don’t know that this is any better or worse than the flex subscription or monthly membership model, it just provides another option that might appeal to your community.

What I like about this idea is that: First, it gets people invested in your organization when they think about the amount they have in their “bank account.” If you had a way to easily do an email merge out of your ticketing database you could send people their balance on a monthly basis during your season to keep them engaged.

The other thing I like is Rizzo’s suggestion that you might add to people’s accounts for various reasons. I think this ties in very well with the practices of social media and online gaming sites which give you bonus points and achievements for reaching certain milestones (very often based on use which encourages people to keep using!) or awards bonus points for playing during a certain time of the year.

Obviously a theatre might award bonus points for attending a show that they think would have low attendance but people would soon recognized bonus points signaled a lack of confidence. A successful program would also award people bonus points for seeing shows they want to see anyway like the annual production of A Christmas Carol.

That can actually provide an incentive to single ticket buyers to to open an account. They won’t derive any benefit from the Christmas bonus if they don’t have a MyStage account to deposit it into, after all.

In A World of Sameness, This Movie Stands Out (Just Like The 1000 Before)

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For the next week and a half or so I am enjoying films at the Hawaii International Film Festival. I write a little bit about my experiences every year, but what has struck me this year is a realization about just how hard it is to make a film/performance/whatever sound distinctive in a short space.

It doesn’t matter whether you are writing for the limits of a brochure or have the relative freedom of a web page, peoples’ attention spans dictate that you make your point quickly, succinctly and compellingly.

Now that I have been attending for a few years, I have started to recognize that movie about the quirky characters in the fashionable district of Taipei sounds a lot like the movie last year about the quirky characters gathered in the night market of Taipei.

I wonder if there is enough difference between the documentary about the 60 year old guy trying to find a Chinese wife and the fictional account of the 38 year old Danish bodybuilder who goes to Thailand to find a wife, that I will want to see both of them.

Part of the problem is, regardless of how good a writer you are, people bring certain assumptions to new experiences which they used to place the new thing into a context they can process. Just like the person describing food that someone else has never eaten, the description writer also has to provide some touchstones that will help people decide whether they will enjoy the experience.

Being able to post video on YouTube helps to provide some of the additional information people need to make a decision, but still it is difficult. The aforementioned movies about finding Asian brides for example, there is clearly a lot of authenticity and sincerity present in both the documentary, Seeking Asian Female and the Danish movie, Teddy Bear, but we all know that movie trailers don’t always give the best indication.

How many times have you realized all the best moments of a film were in the trailer? How many times have you recognized the restrictions of a movie trailer didn’t adequately prepare you for just how good the movie would be. I haven’t seen Seeking Asian Female yet, but let me tell you, the Teddy Bear trailer doesn’t do the movie justice. Bodybuilder/actor Kim Kold did a great job portraying the subtleties of the Dennis character.

I am not sure there is any clear cut instructions to give about how to make every experience seem distinct, both due to the way the information is received and because there are really only so many basic plots in the world.

Creating a history of trust with your audiences is one solution. One of the most gratifying comments I get from audiences is that they weren’t sure about the show but they came because they knew we always do great stuff.

It takes a lot of honesty to earn that trust. You can’t barrage people with quotes and language that basically promises a sublime, life changing experience every single time. Not all experiences are equally sublime and people will quickly realize their lives haven’t really changed all that much.

And ultimately most audiences, including mine, are comprised of people who attend too infrequently for us to have developed that degree of trust.

So my conclusion at this juncture is that we must labor on making everything sound interesting in the short space of time we have been allowed and hope we can improve our ability make a compelling case.

By the way, this post title is a reference to the sentiments expressed by these guys:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRtuxdfQHw&w=420&h=315]

This Ritual Will Be Tweeted

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If people can tweet at religious services for Jewish high holy days, can tweet seats at all your performances be far behind?

Well, obviously the reality is much more complicated than that. Synagogues aren’t at the forefront of using social media to engage their religious communities. Not yet at least.

But a recent article in the New York Times recounting a Rosh Hashanah service at the Jewish Museum of Florida contained some sentiments familiar to those in the performing and visual arts; including high cost of accessing the event, the need to “re-engage and energize young professionals” and a desire to make the experience accessible to that demographic.

“We can no longer assume that young people will join the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Gary A. Glickstein, Temple Beth Sholom’s spiritual leader. “They need to be helped on that journey.”

Substitute “participate/attend arts and culture events” for “join the Jewish community” and you have an oft repeated phrase of the arts community. (Albeit incorrectly attributed to Rabbi Glickstein.)

As part of the experiment, the organizers changed the formatting slightly and used technology to achieve the same intent as the conventional religious practice. They termed it an experience rather than a service.

The article seems to attribute willing participation in rituals people often avoid contributing to at regular services to the anonymity provided by the technology. What people texted about their own fears and failings appeared anonymously on a screen. The technology allowed people to share and bond as a community without necessarily making any individual feel vulnerable. Thus the organizers were able to serve the spiritual needs of the attendees.

The fact that the organizers felt it was necessary to change the formatting of a traditional religious practice signaled to me that it may take more than just allowing people to tweet at a performance to engage younger audiences. In many ways, tweet seats feels like an overlaid concession to younger audience members telling them they will be allowed to watch and text about the experience as long as they don’t disturb anyone else or have any expectations that the content will change.

Yes, I know there are plenty of people doing interesting and innovative programming that will inspire people to tweet without any prompting. My main thrust is to suggest both that it may be necessary to change the format of the experience to be more complementary to tweeting activity at an arts event and that it may be possible to do so without sacrificing the intent and significance of the experience.

I was encouraged to see that this was organized at a museum. I took it as a sign that the museum was responsive to the community it served and recognized as a viable resource to meet its needs.

Though those attending the Rosh Hashana services in Miami described their experience as “refreshing and fun,” the changes to the service didn’t seem to have a frivolous result. People described the sense of community and engagement they had and their feeling that the experience was honest and thought provoking, all of which I assume are typically the goals of most Rosh Hashana services regardless of where they occur.

Of course, there will always be occasions where live tweeting is not really appropriate…like a bris.

Baby Boomers Secretly Yearn To Play With Us

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ArtsFwd has an audio interview related to the audience engagement posts I made yesterday and about two weeks ago.

Richard Evans of EMCArts interviews Charles Fee of Great Lakes Theater Company and David Shimotakahara, Artistic Director of GroundWorks DanceTheater about their thoughts and practices related to audience engagement.

I was particularly interested in listening to the interview because after writing about Great Lakes’ practice of opening the theatre early, staying open late and having a bar in the seating area, I wanted to learn a little more.

I didn’t find out if anyone complains about noise coming from the bar area during the show, but I did learn that they conduct their fight and dance calls in full view of the audience during that 90 minute period before the show. (which often confuses audiences who feel they are intruding upon something) After the show, they don’t have a formal talk back but rather have the actors go out for a glass of wine and chat with whomever might be interested.

At one point in the interview, Fee mentions they don’t have a post-show talk back because he feels it is unfair to turn to the audience immediately after the show and ask them what they think. I can personally empathize with this sentiment because it often takes me quite some time to process what my feelings about a performance are.

GroundWorks DanceTheater offers a similar pre-show experience of necessity because they are often in non-traditional spaces where there isn’t a curtain to mask their activity or a separate studio to warm up in. Preparations are often done in full view of the arriving audience.

I was particularly interested in the comments made about audience participation in events. Fee mentions he has no problem with including those experiences in the show, but that the nature of the show changes to that of a circus. “It is no longer an aesthetic experience because the aesthetic distance has been shattered.”

There is discussion about conflicting feelings about audience participation. Fee mentions that when performers are audience members, they cringe when there is audience participation because they feel threatened by it, but acknowledges one of the things every performer talks about striving for is breaking down the 4th wall.

Fee mentions that in the continuum of participation, the fact a laugh landed and everyone held their breath as one, are valid measures of audience participation and engagement.

When he said that, I wondered if that is enough. There is frequent discussion about how passively sitting in a theatre is no longer viewed as interesting and that in the old days, audiences used to be far more vocal in their reactions until they were stifled by societal expectations.

I occurred to me that as people with training in the arts, we know about the history. But do our audiences in general know? Do they yearn to shout praise or insults and stay away because they can’t? Is the ability to do so something people would value so much they would start attending if they could?

As I was thinking perhaps we were projecting our assumptions on our audiences, Fee mentioned that he actually didn’t think young people really craved audience participation but rather it is the baby boomers. He said in his experience working regularly with young people, “the environment [of group participation] for them is fraught with danger, social danger…”

I wanted to hear more about what he was basing this theory that it was the baby boomers that were interested in participation, but the interview moved on. I was left wondering if it might be a case of older people projecting their desires on younger audiences, perhaps wishfully thinking about how they would love to get up there if only they were a little younger.

Indeed, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. When the flesh was a little stronger years ago, the confidence was lacking.

Shimotakahara opines that young audience are eager to create and want access to ways to create themselves, they may just not be interested in creating with you. Still, they may crave training and guidance to help them express their personal visions in a way that is participatory for them.

So some interesting views on the subject I hadn’t considered before. It’s only about 24 minutes so it is easy to give a listen as you wash the dishes or clean your rooms. (Which is exactly what I was doing when I decided to write about the podcast.)

They Are Just Not That Into Us

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I recently read an article that criticized the current thinking about an arts organization’s relationship with its audiences.

Except, that it wasn’t directed at arts organizations at all, but rather at general marketing concepts.

Yet it seemed to reflect upon the current conservations in the arts so closely, I was 2/3 of the way through before I realized it wasn’t really focused on arts organizations at all.

The article, 3 Ways You’re Wrong About What Your Customers Want, appeared on the website of Australian business magazine, BRW.

The first two myths they address is:

MYTH #1: MOST CONSUMERS WANT TO HAVE RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR BRAND.

Actually, they don’t. Only 23 per cent of the consumers in our study said they have a relationship with a brand. In the typical consumer’s view of the world, relationships are reserved for friends, family and colleagues…

How should you market differently?

First, understand which of your consumers are in the 23 per cent and which are in the 77 per cent. Who wants a relationship and who doesn’t? Then, apply different expectations to those two groups and market differently to them…

MYTH #2: INTERACTIONS BUILD RELATIONSHIPS.

No, they don’t. Shared values build relationships. A shared value is a belief that both the brand and consumer have about a brand’s higher purpose or broad philosophy…

Of the consumers in our study who said they have a brand relationship, 64 per cent cited shared values as the primary reason. That’s far and away the largest driver…

How should you market differently?

Many brands have a demonstrable higher purpose baked into their missions, whether it’s Patagonia’s commitment to the environment or Harley Davidson’s goal “to fulfill dreams through the experience of motorcycling.” These feel authentic to consumers, and so provide a credible basis for shared values and relationship-building. To build relationships, start by clearly communicating your brand’s philosophy or higher purpose.

The third myth is – THE MORE INTERACTION THE BETTER. and their suggestion is to stop bombarding your customers with emails.

Because so much of the conversation in the arts these days is oriented on engagement and relationship building, you can probably see why I initially thought it was about the arts. Actually, after reading the article and understanding its target audience, I started to wonder if maybe the ideas of engagement and relationship building might have migrated over from the for-profit business world and was embraced in an effort to “run things more like a business.”

I am not suggesting that arts organizations shouldn’t work on relationships with their community, only that in this context it might be wise to evaluate if every practice and assumption is appropriate for arts and cultural organizations.

I think most arts and cultural institutions realize not everyone is going to want to have a relationship with them. It is helpful to have an idea of what the percentages might actually be so we can better direct resources toward cultivating closer relationships with those who seek them.

One advantage arts and cultural organizations might have over businesses at large is that they are more likely to embody values with which people can identify and share. So there is a greater possibility for an arts organization to build a relationship with a customer.

The Return Of The Gentleman Caller

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A few months ago I saw an article by Peter Ling on History Today about how automobiles enabled a greater degree of sexual and social freedom in the 1920s.

I, of course, read it for the details of the social freedom cars afforded.

Ling talks about how there wasn’t really such a thing as dating before the 1900s. Arrangements would be made for a gentleman to call upon a young lady at her home where he would be entertained in the family parlor, speaking with the girl and her mother and perhaps witnessing the young lady’s skill at the piano.

With an increase in automobile ownership, the gentleman might show up to find the young lady waiting at the door, eager to go out somewhere. People were able to have new experience and interact across social classes.

“Money gave access to theatres, restaurants, galleries and clubs. By 1900, the traditional events of the season, such as the opera, began to be deemed passe by a growing number of privileged youths. These ‘bohemians’ began to perceive the possibility of a new freedom arising from the anonymity of crowded city streets…Thus, affluent youth figuratively ‘crossed the tracks’ to enjoy a surer privacy amidst working-class crowds than they experienced in their parents’ homes…

Women who regularly read the Ladies Home Journal, who could recall being warned in 1907 that it was scandalous to be seen dining alone with a man, even a relative, learnt from a debutante of 1914 that it was ‘now considered smart to go to the low order of dance halls, and not only be a looker-on, but also to dance among all sorts and conditions of men and women…’ Thus leisure-class and working-class youth began to date and sometimes to frequent the same venues

I have recently been wondering if we are seeing a reversal of this trend. With the poor economy, children are moving back in with their parents. People are staying at home to experience their entertainment from the internet and Netflix videos. And, young people today apparently aren’t interested in driving cars.

I don’t think we will see a return to courting and a rush to buy pianos for the parlor. Which is too bad because it would be nice for people to value musical skills more and most of Tennessee Williams’ plays, which often referenced courting practices, would gain renewed relevance.

If people are eschewing cars and staying closer to home, there are some possible benefits for the arts and culture. Back in June I wrote about how young people returning home from the big cities were bringing expectations and vitality back with them.

There may be a shift in importance for neighborhood arts and cultural spaces as people seek things to do closer to home. And if they don’t own cars, lack of convenient parking may vastly diminish as a consideration for attending or participating in a cultural experience which in turn provides more flexibility for establishing spaces.

These spaces may be smaller with versatile use so that they serve the varied interests of the more immediate community. Though I wouldn’t discount the possibility of larger facilities gaining renewed investment from the neighborhood and gladly renovating to accommodate more bikes and pedestrians.

Perhaps they can serve as latter day parlor for young people to call upon each other. Apparently Gen Y isn’t very good at dating and in fact can be very anxious about the whole process. There may be a very real need for a safe, chaperoned environment designed to facilitate interactions.

I make no claims at being a proficient trend spotter so who knows if any of this will really manifest. Still in some places around the country, there is probably some worth in looking around to see if former empty nesters in a short radius are seeing their chicks return and figuring out if there is something of value you can offer them.

Go To The Theatre, Smell Like A Man!

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A little fun speculative post today.

It has been widely recognized that women generally initiate the decision to attend an arts and cultural event. Now given that the vast majority of playwrights, composers, visual artists, choreographers, etc have been Caucasian males and most audiences are comprised of Caucasians, I wonder what it is in their work that seems to speak to Caucasian women more than any other group.

As much as you can point out that it is no longer true that Caucasian male creative artists are  responsible for as large a percentage of creative output as they once were, I can link to tons of blog posts and articles that note that the ratio is still too large. I am sure there will be many who will suggest that an even larger number of women would attend if the creative content was actually geared to them.

So I ask, albeit with a little tongue in cheek, how have Caucasian male artists failed Caucasian male audiences and how can we get those men back?

This is where I want to play my speculative little game. I am not going to advocate for more White male centric art. I think its good that what is out there appeals to a wider spectrum of the community. Given that people have shown the capacity to identify with art created by those who are unlike them and that doesn’t speak directly to their experiences, I think there is room for more to be created by artists of diverse backgrounds.

But in fact, I am not going to really argue directly for artistic content at all but rather suggest maybe we need to think about how the experience is positioned.

Earlier this month, Smithsonian.com had a piece about how the United States was sold on using deodorant. It an interesting story about how deodorants and antiperspirants were formulated and ultimately advertised to the American people by playing on their insecurities about smelling bad.

However, the earliest efforts were aimed at women which resulted in deodorant use being regarded as feminine. A man was supposed to possess a manly odor!

But with half the population not buying the toiletries, manufacturers felt they were missing out on untapped potential. Early attempts were made to get women to buy deodorant for their husbands but it was still largely seen as a female product.

Comments in a 1928 survey read:

““I consider a body deodorant for masculine use to be sissified,” notes one responder. “I like to rub my body in pure grain alcohol after a bath but do not do so regularly,” asserts another.”

Now if rubbing your whole body with pure grain alcohol isn’t manly, I don’t know what is. I feel less of a man for only splashing it on my face after shaving.

Later attempts were aimed at male insecurity as well.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s men were worried about losing their job. Advertisements focused on the embarrassment of being stinky in the office, and how unprofessional grooming could foil your career, she says.

“The Depression shifted the roles of men,” Casteel says. “Men who had been farmers or laborers had lost their masculinity by losing their jobs. Top Flite offered a way to become masculine instantly—or so the advertisement said.” To do so, the products had to distance themselves from their origins as a female toiletry.

For example, Sea-Forth, a deodorant sold in ceramic whiskey jugs starting in the 1940s, “because the company owner Alfred McKelvy said he ‘couldn’t think of anything more manly than whiskey,’” Casteel says.

At this juncture, I think it is pretty much a moral imperative that I insert the following:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE&w=560&h=315]

 

I think if the arts and culture industry is going to take its cues from deodorant advertisers, (and why wouldn’t you?), it is going to need to move beyond depending on women buying tickets for husbands and boyfriends and reframe the experience in some way.

While I am not necessarily above using someone’s insecurities to motivate them into action, I think I would rather take a more constructive approach to making men believe initiating a trip to an arts and cultural event is socially acceptable and perhaps even expected.

Obviously, the arts and culture industry needs to replace the word “men” in the previous sentence with other segments of their community in an effort to serve a greater portion of their potential audience.

And while we no longer get our deodorant packaged in whiskey jugs, (pity), reformulating and packaging the product for wider audience segments is still going to be required. Can’t get away selling the same old stuff.

While it is a lot of fun equating theatre and deodorant, I have to confess I don’t really have a lot of ideas in regard to what an effective approach might be. Anyone have any thoughts?

Do The Arts And Millennials Share The Same Core Values?

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Last month there was an article on Fast Company, Why Millennials Don’t Want To Buy Stuff, that claims the focus is moving away from acquisition of things toward access to ideas and relationships.

Though the article also admits it might be because they can’t afford stuff either.

They also point out many “goods” we consume are actually rented or licensed from services like Netflix, iTunes or Amazon’s Kindle. Exchanging money for a transient product is the norm for Millennials in a way it isn’t for previous generations.

According to the article, when Millennials do buy things it is motivated by one of three things. Either the item provides access to other experiences in the manner of most Apple products; the item can be used to develop a relationship or sense of community; or the item makes a statement about themselves to others.

Of course, there tends to be a lot of overlap between these motivators since sharing experiences enabled by a product can make a statement about yourself which can be shared with like-minded people.

If the article is correct, arts and cultural experiences are pretty well suited to Millenials. The experience is transient and can’t be possessed as a concrete object. It can provide a sense of community and opportunity for relationship building and can make a statement about the person to others.

Of course, as has oft been discussed, what Millennial wants the statement they are making to be that they like hanging out at a performance hall cultivating a relationship with old people.

The fact that this article just provides a slightly different perspective that brings us back to the conclusion that if you want to attract Millennials, you have to provide an experience they find attractive should be comforting. It means that the answer is so simple and evident that we keep reaching the same conclusion.

Or I suppose that we are so fixated on the idea of attracting Millenials, we lack the imagination to interpret it in any other manner.

There is something to be said for the research that shows people tend to orient toward arts and cultural experiences at a certain age range when they have reached a level of personal and economic maturity. In that respect, there is perhaps too much expectation placed on the Y generation to start attending now.

At the same time, I think that: 1- It never hurts in the cause of creating general awareness to let Millennials know now that the opportunities are available when they are of a mind to attend.

2-The product and approach you used to attract their grandparents and parents isn’t going to work on them so you might as well make your mistakes now while they aren’t really paying attention than trying to refine your approach later when they are.

I am encouraged by the thought that the Fast Company article might reflect the values being embraced by Millennials because I think it plays to the real core strengths of arts and culture. The message that the arts are what you get involved with to exhibit you are mature, cultured and refined is an ill-fitting suit in comparison. We have just been wearing it so long we have mistaken it for our identity rather than garb donned when an opportunity presented itself.

Would You Know If Your Candy Machine Was Broken?

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As you might imagine, there are a few vending machines scattered around our campus. The one behind our building get cleaned out regularly when we have rental groups with large numbers of kids or our own shows are in tech week.

A number of months ago, whenever I would try to get a granola bar from one end of a row, I got a message to make another selection. A little experimenting showed this was the case for a few of its neighbors. Across campus near the administration building there is a machine in which a whole row returns the make another selection message.

I usually don’t see the guy refilling the machines or when I do, I am generally in a rush. But I finally said something to the guy about a month ago. He thanked me for the report and said he would tell the technician to take a look at it. Then he commented that he had noticed on his computer inventory that those items weren’t selling.

It is people like him that make me really nervous.

Part of the reason I finally said something to him was because I started to realize he had no real investment in his job. The situation had existed for about 6-9 months.

Even if he wasn’t the same person who was tending to the machines when the problem started, there were many signs one existed. Not only was the fact that part of the machine broken conspicuous when they were the only things ever left when students and kids literally emptied the rest of the machine, but the items that weren’t selling were actually noticeably sun-bleached. And of course, he admitted his inventory was telling him that items in both machines never sold.

Wouldn’t you suspect a problem if an entire row of candy bars in a machine never sold, yet the Snickers were moving well in the sites around the campus?

The reason people like him make me nervous is that I start to wonder what problems I am not being told about. The vending machine guy may not be paid well and doesn’t feel like he has any incentive to make sure the machine is producing revenue efficiently. I begin to wonder if people working for me might feel something similar. My concern isn’t so much about revenue maximization as ensuring patrons, renters and others who use the facility don’t have a negative experience.

One of the most difficult tasks businesses offering services seem to have these days is training people to be aware of problems and be proactive about either attending to them or reporting it for further action.

I generally feel like I have a good staff that pays attention to these things. This afternoon my technical director noted that the dust from nearby construction had infiltrated our ticket office and the room needed to be cleaned. But there have been times when I have noticed a glaring problem and wondered why none of those who pass that way regularly, including cleaning staff, students and faculty, attended to it in some manner.

Of course, a lot of the responsibility resides with those who train and supervise. It is incumbent upon them to discuss the values of the organization, mention the types of behavior that is expected and outline the available courses of action.

It is also important that those courses of action be viable and legitimate. If a problem is reported and results are not forthcoming, there is less incentive to report problems in the future. The same if the resources to effect the solution are rarely available or there is a perception that making the extra effort on behalf of the organization is not valued.

If a solution can’t be effected immediately, the timeline for the response should be communicated clearly–e.g., “The leaky toilet will be replaced when the building is closed for the summer, in the mean time, this is the temporary stopgap solution we suggest.”

In the non-profit arts, frequent communication about what sort of environment and experience the organization wishes to provide is important given the large number of volunteers that assist with so many tasks. Even long time volunteers may forget the overall vision because they are not exposed to it as consistently as regular staff and they may volunteer at a number of other places, each with its own vision of things.

Most of all, supervisors and other leadership need to emulate the values they espouse with their own actions. If they aren’t excusing themselves to assist someone who looks lost or bending over to grab a candy wrapper blowing by, it is more difficult to get others to do the same.

Still Asking Why The Show Was Not Advertised

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Back in 2006 I was pondering the situation where people came up to me at a performance and asked, “Why Didn’t You Advertise This?”

Now given I get this comment most from people who have attended the event for which they are bemoaning the lack of advertising, obviously something worked to get them in the door.

Often they did see/hear an ad or a story or heard about the show from a friend. The problem they have is that they learned about the show close to performance time and had such a great experience, they are concerned that having almost missed it, they will lose out on something equally great in the future.

I made this post 6 years ago so my marketing mix has changed a bit from the one I describe, but many aspects still remain the same, including the fact I get the same question.

What is interesting to me as I think about this phenomenon is that while something we did was clearly effective at getting them into the theatre, some people have an expectation that they will hear about performances from a very specific source, often print media.

I would be curious to know what others do when faced with this situation.

Info You Can Use: Be Careful of Social Couponing

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If you have been considering using social coupons to increase attendance at your events and attract new customers, you may want to read a study covered last month in MIT Sloan Management Review (h/t Drucker Exchange) that noted the repercussions of a badly designed deal could last for months.

The authors, V. Kumar and Bharath Rajan tracked three businesses for a year after they started their social coupon campaigns. The three businesses did attract large numbers of new customers with the campaigns, but experienced significant losses during the month they offered their deal, in some cases two or three times their normal net monthly profits.

“Such losses would not have been so serious if the businesses were able to achieve higher revenues and increased profits in future months. However, this was not the case. Despite their best marketing efforts, the three businesses had difficulty retaining most of the new customers who were attracted to the coupon offers. Based on our analysis, it will take the car wash service and ethnic restaurant 15 and 18 months, respectively, to recover from the profit shortfall following the coupon launch; for the beauty salon and spa, the recovery period for the coupon campaign at current business levels was projected at more than 98 months, or eight years.”

Now granted, given that most non-profit arts organizations lose money on many of their events, these facts may hardly be a deterrent to using social coupons. However, arts organizations do seek new audiences. The authors state that basic design of social coupons aren’t really conducive to new customer acquisition, but steps can be take to mitigate the losses of a campaign.

One approach may be to upselling or cross-selling products and services. Many theatres have tiered pricing on their seating so being able to upgrade to center orchestra may seem like a good deal to some attendees. If theatres are trying to attract a younger audience, they may want to cross sell tickets to their edgier space whose ticket prices are comparable to the discount the person is paying.

In other words, a person comes in with a 50% coupon for a $30 ticket and the theatre asks if they would like a ticket for a later date at the other space where the top price is $20 for the same $15 price. This approach helps to retain the person for another performance for what is probably the average ticket revenue at the other space.

Another approach the article suggests is limiting the size of the discount and the conditions under which it may be redeemed. They mention that the restaurant in their study later offered 30% discount on two days a week and reduced their losses to close to zero.

They also suggest only offering the coupon to new customers, but I am personally ambivalent about that. I think that sours your relationship with existing customers. If you have ever seen those cable commercials that offer tons of great channels at a low price –but only to new customers–like me you may have been a little annoyed wondering what benefit you will ever derive for having paid your bill on time for 5 years. To my mind, even if it isn’t the same benefit, existing customers should feel like they are rewarded for loyalty if the new kids are getting some sort of incentive to participate.

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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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