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Thus Rises The Individual Curator and Commissioner

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There was an intriguing piece on Wired last week (h/t Thomas Cott) about an alternative approach to funding events via Kickstarter. Andy Baio talks about funding record projects, conferences and festivals by essentially lining up the speakers/performers/resources and then seeing if anyone is interested in buying tickets to the proposed events/project. If there isn’t enough interest, it doesn’t happen.

What was most interesting to me is how this type of approach really empowers an individual to curate a project. You may not be an artist yourself, but you have an idea of what combination of artists and concepts might be compelling and then can set out to bring it together.

While this is sort of my job already, there is something of an expectation that there will be balance in those I invite. I have a certain responsibility to make sure my facility and events are being run in a fiscally responsible manner. An individual isn’t necessarily saddled by those expectations. They can do a project as a one off and no one is concerned about whether their activities are serving the needs of the community.

Makes me wonder if this might be a potential mode of operation for the future. One of many that might replace the non-profit arts organization.

If taken at its face, this approach seems shift some burden to the artists/speakers being invited. If the event doesn’t happen, will they get paid? While Baio doesn’t explicitly mention it, I am guessing you would have to provide some sort of guarantee of payment to the artist/speaker regardless of whether the performance happened or not. Baio alluded to this in a couple places, including his requirements for these projects.

Projects like these have three big requirements.

Strong, achievable concept. Commissioned works should be scoped down to something realistic, because you’re paying for their time, but high-concept enough to capture the excitement of other fans.

Organizer. The funding may come from the crowd, but there needs to be a single person managing the project and handling all the logistics and small details.

Due diligence. The organizer will need a firm agreement from the artist, committing to a timeline, payment, and any other demands. Also, if the project results in a tangible work, determine who owns the rights to it before you start raising money.

While most artists and speakers like being paid, they like to be seen and heard even more so there is also some incentive for them to help promote the cause. It may not occur too frequently at present, but it could certainly become commonplace if the practice of running a project up the flag pole becomes more wide spread.

The other thing, of course, is that it turns your audience into much more active advocates for the work because there is a possibility it won’t happen. We know that many audiences today, especially among the younger generation, tend to wait to see if something more interesting might come along before buying a ticket. Since the performance will occur regardless of their commitment, there is no incentive to commit. The threat that the event might not happen can garner an increased investment in its success even if it is only that people continually check the progress of the funding to see if the event will happen.

A commenter to the piece pointed out a service in Brazil which rewards the early adopters. It sells refundable tickets to a show until the minimum is met. Once the event has secured its funding, it starts selling non-refundable tickets and apparently starts reimbursing the purchasers of the refundable tickets up to the their full purchase price.

Manholes As Destination Tourism (Seriously)

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In answer to the perennial question about how the arts can show their value to the community, I came across an answer/inspiration in the form of the Flickr group, Japanese Manhole Covers. There are nearly 3000 pictures of some amazingly artistic manhole covers.

With NYC looking to ban big sugary drinks and Disney announcing that they will restrict junk food ads, it occurs to me that a constructive approach to fighting obesity would be to commission these artists to make manhole covers.

People would get out and start walking around in an attempt to see them all. Heck, people may even include a manhole tour as part of their tourism. I am sure someone will develop a social media app that maps out the locations and people would compete to check in at each of them on sites like Foursquare. (Actually, looks like there is an iphone app for Japan.) Just to keep things interesting, the public works department can switch them around every so often so that people would have to contribute to a remapping effort.

Check out the Japanese covers, some of them are pretty amazing and show a lot of investment and pride in culture and community.

(Clicking on image will take you to the specific photographer’s page rather than the larger pool of manhole photos)

Osaka Castle Artwork on Manhole cover - Osaka, Japan
Osaka Castle Artwork on Manhole cover photo credit: Neerav Blatt

Stuff To Ponder: Is Too Much Money Being Left On The Table?

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Though I have written about dynamic pricing, I have generally been a little resistant to the idea of implementing that sort of pricing because I feel having a clear and simple pricing is part of an arts organization’s relationship with a community. Or rather, having a complicated one can be a barrier to attendance and also generate a negative association with the organization.

But I have been reading some things recently that make me wonder about that.

JCPenny’s attempt to sell everything at an everyday low price that reflects the value of the product has apparently backfired on them.

According to a piece on MSNBC’s website:

Consumers complain about this constantly. That’s the basis of the Red Tape Chronicles in fact. At its best, the maddening mixture of coupons, rebates, sales and fine print fees can feel like a game. At worst, it’s being cheated. You’d think shoppers would love a chance to buy from a store that doesn’t play these games, the way car buyers (allegedly) like shopping at no-haggle auto dealerships.

[…]

To oversimplify for a moment, here’s Penney’s problem. They told the world that retailers only offer their best prices during crazy sales, and Penney stores would no longer host them. Sensible consumers apparently took that information to heart and decided to simply wait for such sales at other stores. As an added benefit, Penney lowered consumers’ search costs, because they now knew they didn’t need to bother driving to a Penney’s store anymore.

[…]

Shrouding isn’t the only reason Penney’s pricing plan is flawed. The firm is also leaving a lot of money on the table by rejecting a phenomenon known as “price discrimination.” Some people have more money than time, and some have more time than money. Some shoppers don’t mind spending hours to save $20; others would gladly give a store $20 to escape quickly. Smart retailers get money from both. By killing couponing, Penney has eliminated its ability to satisfy price discriminators.

And as others have pointed out, markdowns serve the age-old retailing trick of “anchoring.” For some reason, even very smart consumers feel better paying $60 for something if you initially tell them it costs $100, and then reduce the price.

Right around the same time this article came out, Colleen Dilenschneider on the Know Your Own Bone blog wrote about why offering discounts through services like Groupon is a bad idea for non-profits. The two reasons she gave?

“1) Your community expects more discounts, 2) Perhaps more importantly, your community waits for discounts”

Since MSNBC pretty much confirms what Colleen claims, I started to wonder if maybe arts organizations are fools not to double the prices and then offer 50% off coupons through social media.

Yeah, I know it is cynical and believe me, I still don’t want to get into doing anything resembling this. But I do everyone a disservice if I don’t explore the option.

Are arts organizations being responsible if they leave money on the table by not recognizing some people will pay more for the privilege of getting the transaction over quickly? If you effectively charge what you perceive to be the true value of your product by doubling the price in order to take advantage of consumer inability to pass up a 50% off coupon, are you really cheating your audience? (In other words, intend to sell tickets at $25 by pricing them at $50 and then flooding the market with half off coupons.)

One thing of course, I need to point out is that price does not develop loyalty. You can not develop a relationship with your community if interactions with your organization are based on price. I stated that in the early days of this blog and as Dilenschneider notes this is true even in these days of social media:

“It is far better for your brand and bottom line to have 100 fans who share and interact with your content to create a meaningful relationship, than to have 1,000 fans who never share your message and liked you just for the discount.”

Dilenschneider also points to some data that there are diminishing returns from social media discounts. This may illustrate be where arts organizations and retailers differ. Retailers can offer myriad discounts annually and not suffer, but arts and cultural organizations offer a product valued entirely differently from that of retailers

But lets assume that the current discounting model doesn’t work well for non-profits because it is really designed for the needs of retailers and that a discount offered in an alternative manner might prove more effective. Should we be researching alternative discount structures in order to more effectively generate revenue given that the future of donations and grants looks precarious?

Questions like this get into the core philosophy about the organization’s existence. Is the purpose to preserve and perpetuate the organization so it can continue to do good work? Or was the focus on providing the art in an affordable manner and the inability to do so is a sign that the organization should transition toward closure?

What Signals Are You Reading?

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There is an old rule of thumb about judging the cleanliness of a restaurant’s kitchen by the cleanliness of the restrooms. I actually used this example this past weekend when discussing an experience in what I took for a high end restaurant in another country…until I visited the restrooms.

Adam Davidson, heard often on NPR’s Planet Money had a piece in the NY Times on how people use “signaling” to make decisions.

He gives a couple examples of how people use signaling. He spends more money on a brand of baby formula even knowing there probably isn’t too much a difference between it and a cheaper competitor based on the labeling. A friend bought a more expensive chandelier from Amazon because he felt uneasily that the $100 difference in price meant the cheaper merchant cut corners.

He also cites Pepsi’s decision to pay Nicki Minaj to be a spokesperson:

“Even for consumers who don’t listen to her music or trust her expertise in the carbonated-beverage sector, the mere act of paying for a pop-star endorser sends a subconscious signal that their product is so successful that, well, they can afford Nicki Minaj. It also signals that the company is too heavily invested to turn out a shoddy product. For many, that’s a reason to choose the soda over the generic stuff.”

The example that really got me thinking was about bus owners in Haiti who paint their buses with all sorts of images at great expense.

“Yet bus owners feel the need to get a fresh paint job once or twice each year because few people will pay to ride an unpainted bus. The extravagant decorations suggest that an owner cares about his business — that he spends money maintaining his engines, tires and brakes (no small matter in a country with steep mountains and lousy roads). My hunch, however, is that many owners, short of cash, are likely to invest in a visible new paint job over invisible brake maintenance. With no external authority — government inspectors or consumer-watchdogs or online consumer forums — there’s no way to know if the signal is accurate.”

The reason this caught my eye is that, like the bus owners in Haiti, many arts organizations don’t have the money to fully maintain their buildings and have to make decisions about what to invest in to attract and retain audiences. I wondered if many arts organizations are fully cognizant of what cues audiences were deriving from their experience. Perhaps too much focus is being paid to the wrong things.

There are some aspects whose signals we can be fairly certain about. The surroundings and what others are wearing can often determine whether people feel intimidated or perfectly comfortable. We can draw some direct lines between the experience people have purchasing tickets, getting information, finding parking, being greeted by employees, etc., and what people’s perception of us might be.

But it is more difficult to know whether our ticket prices, quality and content of our brochures and websites are telling people our work is too high or low quality for their tastes. Do they think the performance will be incomprehensibly high culture or too amateurish for them?

Do we need to fix up the entryway because its condition signals that we don’t invest a lot of attention in the quality of our work? Or does it add to a funky-cool ambiance that we didn’t really knew appealed to our audiences and we should invest the renovation money in our work?

Did our sincere attempt at moving a water fountain to be more convenient to the restrooms get interpreted as a blatant ploy to increase traffic at the snack bar?

Many factors which contribute to signalling are unconsciously received so surveying people about all the elements contributing to their impression of you is a fruitless pursuit.

Not to mention, the same element can signal one person’s trash and another’s treasure. Pepsi may gain prestige by engaging Nicki Minaj, but her fans may see it as a harbinger of disappointment since she will have to modulate her behavior to remain a spokesperson.

Be Here, With Me

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Like many of you, my dear readers, I am of a split mind about the inclusion of social media in live performances. Overall, I think this is a good place to be. I have often written here that one should not jump on the hottest trend, but obviously one should not entirely dismiss it. A healthy mix of skepticism and self-education on the matter is valuable.

There was recently a post on the Drucker Exchange that pushed me toward the “against” column. I have talked about the benefits of tweet seats and such in other entries so I am not going to try to balance the “con” argument here.

In reference to employees using headphones and having social media chat window open at work, the Drucker Exchange piece cites former entertainment executive Anne Kreamer,

“The majority of these young workers said that they felt far more connected moment to moment with people outside their workplaces than with any co-workers,” she writes. The problem, according to Kreamer, is that they miss out on crucial exchanges, become less loyal to the company and one another, and innovate less. As studies on innovation show, physical proximity matters.

… For one thing, it’s the reason many people go to work at all. “Work is for most people the one bond outside of their own family—and often more important than the family,” Drucker observed in People and Performance. “The work place becomes their community, their social club, their escape from loneliness.”

[…]

More important, such contact influences productivity, and creating satisfying informal work arrangements among co-workers is especially important for good output. Research conducted by General Motors during the 1940s, for example found that “‘good fellowship’ or ‘good relations with fellow workers’ showed as the leading causes of job satisfaction,” Drucker recalled.

The Drucker Exchange piece echos a rhetorical corollary many arts people ask of those who feel the need to engage in social media exchanges during a live performance experience, “What is the reason you come to the performance at all?”

For many it may be that a friend or significant other encouraged them–but then they aren’t really dancing with the one that brought them, either. (Though granted, that person may also be connecting with outsiders as well.) Or maybe they are getting extra credit for a class or looking to advance their career.

The mention that employees who isolate themselves in this manner at work are less loyal to the company makes me think audience members who do the same probably aren’t developing a lot of loyalty to the arts organization. True, the act of actually writing about what they are seeing may actually forge a connection that passively watching the show wouldn’t, but there is no guarantee the person is relating their feelings about the show.

While arts organizations probably can’t have the same expectations about audiences they could during the days of high subscription rates, audience churn is a big problem. It costs a lot more to attract a new attendee than to maintain a relationship with frequent attendees. It seems ill-advised to encourage activities that don’t cultivate a connection and may even erode it.

Simply forbidding people to use mobile devices isn’t going to magically result in the scales falling from people’s eyes and have them realize how disconnected they were. The arts organization has to provide a reason to get engaged in the immediate experience as an alternative to connecting to friends who are elsewhere.

As much as we may want to believe it, the experience of the performance may be insufficient to get a person invested. For some people, texting, tweeting, etc may simply be filling the void of uncertainty about the experience with a safe activity.

The solution may not be any more complicated than encouraging front of house staff to actively ask people what brings them to the performance and find out what their expectations are. Or perhaps changing the layout of the lobby to facilitate people gathering and chatting in certain areas. Essentially replace the friends who are elsewhere with friendly faces right where they are.

This song went through my mind as I wrote this entry-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkiU4ruREgI

Recognizing Your Customers

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There has been a post on The Drucker Exchange that has been nagging at the edge of my unconscious for a couple weeks now. Actually, it was one line from a news piece about how the Massachusetts Department of Transportation has been able to replace bridges in days rather than years.

“The highway department didn’t use to see the drivers as customers,” Frank DePaola, administrator of the highway division for the department, told the Times. “For a while there, the highway department was so focused on construction and road projects, it’s almost as if the contractors became their customers.”

There is obviously a lesson here for all businesses, including arts organizations about taking a step back and re-evaluating who your customer is. Often times it is multiple people.

Adam Thurman illustrated this in a post he made yesterday about buying a suit.

“He told me that he understood that no one really needs a suit…
[…]
He understood that people aren’t really paying for a suit, they are paying to work with a person that truly gives a damn about how they look. They are paying for the feeling they get when they look good.

It takes a certain humility to embrace that thought. It takes a humble artist to understand that it isn’t all about her or her art, it’s about the audience and the feeling they get from the experience.”

I actually took the time to follow a link in the Drucker Exchange post to one of Peter Drucker’s books, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices where he talks about the fact that there are often many customers that have to be pleased. For example, in some cases, it might be both the consumer and a government regulator, each of which have vastly different definitions of what they value.

Another example Drucker gives addresses how people’s priorities change over time–a teenage girl wants the most stylish shoes with price being a lesser concern and durability being of no concern. Her older sister (or the same girl in a few years) will have these same priorities in different proportions.

Arts organizations have seen this effect. When people reach a certain age, they tend to gravitate toward the arts more frequently than when they were younger because their priorities change. The challenge being faced now is that overall social priorities have gradually shifted over time as well so while people’s priorities still mature over time, the way they choose to express those priorities are manifesting in a different manner.

So in the context of all this, one of the challenges I constantly face in serving my customers is the perception that our theatre is hard to find and get to. Even though I recognize this is a need to be served, it really confounds me and is therefore somewhat akin to my not recognizing who my customers are.

There are standard department of transportation road signs directing people to us from 2-3 miles out. To get to the theatre from the highway, you make a right, go three lights, make left, go to the bottom of the hill, make a right, make a left and you are pretty much delivered to the campus. It is generally straight drives and right angles. There are no confusing one way streets to navigate. Everything is well lit and on major thoroughfares with regular signs. Parking is free and plentiful.

I understand that people might overlook the signs, obvious though they are. We offer directions and maps for download off our website that include reverse directions so that you can get back home. We have copies of those directions available in the lobby as well as people depart.

We have a dedicated directions line you can direct dial to, which from the feedback we have gotten, I suspect people are listening to on their cellphones as they drive.

My suspicion is that “hard to find” really means they are unfamiliar with the location because they don’t drive by the neighborhood on a regular basis. We are separated from the local retail area by an interstate and there is no reason to drive across unless you attend school or live in the neighborhood.

The other problem is that most people probably use GPS or Google Maps instead of checking our website for directions. Unfortunately, the shortest distance route actually makes you get off the highway three miles early and takes you through a zillion stop lights. At certain times of the day, that route can easily add an hour travel time due to traffic.

These aren’t things I can solve, though I am always looking for options. One thing I will try to do is communicate the sources of reliable information more frequently via various channels before people embark on a trip to the theatre.

If anyone has suggestions or stories of how you solved this sort of problem, I would love to hear about them.

Info You Can Use: There Are No Dumb Questions, Just People Who Attract Them

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Audience Engagement being something of a buzz word du jour, (yeah, I have used it a bunch of time here and am aware I am complicit), one of the easiest ways to make your audience and community feel involved with an event is to allow them to ask questions.

In the last two years, we have had some really good audience discussion sessions with our touring artists. Some of the questions and observations that have been made have blown my socks off. However, the greater part of my career experience has left me a little cynical about the experience. Most of the time the conversation and questions have bordered on the inane (and quite often jumped over the border.)

I often attributed it to people’s lack of familiarity and comfort with the material and attendance experience. Maybe they weren’t as savvy as I assumed.

However, according to a recent piece on HowlRound, the audience is plenty smart, the wrong people may have been involved in the discussion sessions. Brant Russell who leads the post-show discussions at Steppenwolf Theatre offers 11 (or so) rules for post-show discussions, writing:

“If you’re an actor in the production being discussed, and you want to come out for the discussion, please be aware that your presence affects the tone of the room far more than you know. You inadvertently change the kind of discussion that is possible. The audience wants to talk to you, and they want you to talk to them, and as a result they will ask questions that they don’t really care about (How did you memorize all those lines?). What’s more, the audience will hold back some of what they would otherwise express because they don’t want to hurt your feelings….The best case scenario when an actor was onstage for a discussion was that the conversation turns into a moderated interview, and we would end up discussing what it was like to work with XYZ director, rather than the big questions the play asks…I try to partner with the actor to lead the discussion, rather than direct questions toward him or her. That way, everyone is participating in the same project…”

He has a similar rule about leading the discussion if you directed or produced the work because criticism will color the way you conduct the conversation.

My assumption has always been that people will want to have someone who has been involved with the artistic elements of the performance present at the discussion. While that certainly is the case, Russell’s observation that their presence will limit the scope of the conversation makes perfect sense. The audience is perfectly able to conduct a discussion in the absence of artistic personnel.

Most of his rules are to basically get out of the way of the conversation – Rule 3 – You are not an expert, Rule 4: You’re not a teacher, Rule 5: Keep it short, Rule 7: Get out of the way. Basically, you moderate an exploration of the production and keep it from being hijacked or waning, but otherwise let the discussion continue.

The one rule that intrigued me most was number 9 –

“If you really hate the production you’re discussing, just wait. I’ve found that if I lead enough conversations on a play, something will emerge that I will fall in love with. I have never liked a production less as a result of continued discussion.”

I like the idea that the audience can help those involved with the creation of the production to appreciate it more. We often think of an arts event as something we offer to audiences for their entertainment and education. Typically our end of the transaction involves receiving money and applause.

The idea that audiences can teach us something about our own work makes the exchange seem somehow more complete. Perhaps the next iteration of the intrinsic value of the arts survey should ask the arts organizations what things they learned from their audiences.

It is probably a good piece for leading discussions pretty much anywhere, including conference panel discussions and the like. If you are like me and feel you haven’t been thinking enough about how you could do the post-show discussion thing better, the article is definitely a good place to start.

Stuff To Ponder: Oh The Hats You Will Wear

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The Non-Profit Quarterly had an article this week, “Why Every Nonprofit Has a New Job Title: Publisher.” It really resonated with the way I had been feeling lately. Back when I started in my arts career, I didn’t do so much writing as I do now. Sure, as the new guy I had to write press releases and brochure text, but that was on occasion and scheduled by the marketing calendar.

Now I am writing everyday. It isn’t just this blog. I am creating social media updates, composing emails  , no make that designing emails given their highly graphic nature these days, writing press releases, brochure content, web site content, uploading images to other social media sites. Some of it is produced on a schedule, but more frequently it is produced spontaneously as events unfold so that the information is timely and fresh.

There are a lot of tools which make it much easier for people to connect with what we do from wherever on earth they may be. Servicing them is a lot harder than it used to be.

There seems to be something of a confluence of discussion around this topic lately. Thomas Cott circulated a series of posts about the media arts organizations use to communicate with this week. I was particularly interested to learn email is still more valuable than social media as a marketing tool.  I reminisced a little reading Trevor O’Donnell’s recollection of the 80s as a simpler time for creating marketing materials.

Don’t believe John McWhorter’s claim in the New York Times that “in the proper sense, e-mail and texting are not writing at all.” Maybe he ain’t doing it right, because it certainly feels like I am investing as much time as required when I do it on behalf of my venue.

Even in an increasingly visual media environment, you have to be a skilled writer and do much more of it than in the past. The talent required now is bringing writing, video, images, music together to tell a compelling story. People who made movies may claim this is old hat for them, but this sort of production is no longer their sole province. Now people like you an I can participate in production in places where highly paid professionals once walked.

It is probably good for all of us to remember that last bit as we look askance at Pro-Ams encroaching on our performing and visual arts territory thinking they can produce and participate in our sphere as well as we can.

Truth is, we are probably doing the same thing in respect to graphic design, music and video making among other areas. We now have the confidence to experiment ourselves. We aren’t necessarily as good as the professionals we used to/might have had to pay for the same service, but we are satisfied we are making a good show of it.

(Apologies to Dr. Suess)

The Customer Is Sometimes Very Wrong

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Earlier this month, Thomas Cott’s You’ve Cott Mail had some stories about dealing with divas. While there are a few divas I have had to deal with, I actually feel like I have encountered fewer abrasive personalities in the arts over the last few years than when I was younger. It may just be that I am more confident now than I was in the early part of my career and I have enough experience dealing with such people that I either 1) identify them immediately and avoid becoming involved in the first place or 2) identify them immediately and take preemptive action to diminish opportunities for conflict.

I have actually had the occasion to pull customers aside and tell them I won’t tolerate them treating my staff in a certain manner more recently than saying the same to an artist. Of course, as I mentioned, looking over a touring artist’s contract you can often prepare for potential problems months prior to their arrival. You really don’t know if an audience member/renter will cause a problem until the moment it occurs.

Which is not to say you can’t channel your inner boy scout and be prepared.

Cott cites a blog entry by Seth Godin who mentions that it is tougher for people to get away with being a jerk because technology allows us to both learn about problematic people more effectively and identify alternatives.

While this is true for the providers of services, this is also true for the consumers. Performers can find out about bad experiences others have had at different venues and either avoid them or take steps to ensure their needs are met.

But it is also true for our customers. We often don’t talk about using this side of technology. We celebrate the fact that technology allows us to offer better customer service by recording customer preferences, noting how we disappointed them in the past so we can do better in the future and rewarding them for their record of loyalty. This is as it should be. Our focus should absolutely be on providing better service.

However, we should also value the contributions of our staff, collaborators, partners, etc, to our success and make an effort to provide a positive work environment and experience. Corporations apparently need to spend billions paying bonuses to retain the top talent, it behooves us to spend a little time making notes and taking steps to retain valued employees.

The same technology that allows you to remember your customer’s preferences so that they don’t have to reiterate them at every interaction also allows you to note that they give your staff a hard time, press them with heavy demands when renting your facility due to their lack of preparation or frequently challenge their credit card charges.

Making notes allows you to address these issues in advance of the next encounter in an effort to improve your relationship and experience–and take appropriate action if the changes don’t emerge.

Obviously, most companies aren’t going to get into discussing negative experiences with their customers over the internet the way customers will about them. (Though you may be sorely tempted!!!) However, when I wrote a few of these examples, I had particular instances in mind. The situation with people challenging their credit card statement in a serial manner has actually happened. Being on a ticketing system which shares a database of names and addresses allows us to serve our customers without repeatedly asking them to wait while we enter their personal information and it also allows us to provide warnings to colleagues about who is habitually trying to get out of paying for their tickets at venues around town.

The problem with flagging people for negative interactions is that it can be abused to take revenge for petty slights. Which is one of the reasons few companies encourage these sort of notes in customer records. Not to mention the records might be subpenaed or hacked so you don’t want to write anything you wouldn’t say in public.

But for those egregious cases where people make your staff miserable, you owe it to everyone to keep proper records. Time makes memories fade and problems don’t seem as serious later on…until the person does something to remind you why you didn’t want them back. In non-profits there is a lot of staff turnover so good notes can help smooth transitions by maintaining a portion of the organizational memory.

Good notes can help you strengthen your relationships with the majority of your customers by identifying their needs and preferences, but also prevent you from letting the minority of your customers divert time and resources more constructively spent on the bulk of your customer base.

Distinguishing Yourself With Your Own Best Practices

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One of the big focuses on college campuses today is tracking student success. It is important that students both earn their degree in a timely manner and have developed appropriate mastery. Classes are scrutinized and numbers crunched to insure quality is being maintained but that instruction is not delivered in a manner that inhibits student success.

The students need to master the material, but the way the material is delivered may need to be changed to facilitate the learning process. As you might imagine, there are a lot of conversations about whether standards are being compromised along the way.

I hadn’t really seen many connections with the arts until I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week one of the early sections struck a chord.

1) Institutions should improve student success by focusing on practices within their control instead of blaming external factors.

When asked about the challenges they face in helping more students graduate, higher-education leaders tend to list external forces, such as budget cuts and poor academic preparation. Yet regardless of whether states or the federal government restore needed support, or our K-12 system produces better-prepared graduates, institutions can do more with mechanisms directly within their control to help the students they enroll.

Research has shown that institutional practices make a big difference in student success. Similar institutions (of comparable size, selectivity, and student composition) vary more significantly in their completion rates and success with underrepresented populations within segments than they do between segments—with high performers outpacing low performers by as much as 40 percentage points.

The same complaints are made by arts organizations- funding cuts, lack of arts exposure/involvement and other external pressures. The article goes on to mention that the profile of students diverges from traditional in some way and that they “swirl,” attending more than one institution, sometimes simultaneously.

Certainly the arts face the same thing with audience composition changing and splitting their arts and entertainment activities between many choices. Arts organizations struggle with the expectations their audiences bring to the experience in much the same way as colleges struggle to meet student expectations that their credits will transfer from other institutions.

Yes, even if you are adept at handling them, external forces impact your organization immensely and can not be ignored. But there are still many things within in the scope of your control which can positively impact audience experiences.

Unfortunately, unlike college, the arts are not seen as critical to life long success. Where colleges can answer the problem of poor K-12 preparation by offering more remediation and earning money by the effort, there isn’t as much money to be made from filling in the gaps in people’s cultural education.

Which is not to say educational programs can’t be successful for an individual organization, the necessity of bolstering one’s creativity and arts knowledge just isn’t as widespread a cultural value driving people to our doors. I suspect that this is where the second paragraph I quoted applies. Internal institutional practices can probably likewise make a difference in successful audience/community engagement and set one organization apart from similar organizations.

If you read as many articles and blogs as I do in the pursuit of improving your practices (and creating content for your blog) you may be intimidated by the long list of things you are supposed to be doing to improve your organization. I think one of the things that doesn’t get emphasized enough is to make sure your internal practices are playing to your particular organizations strengths rather than trying to replicate/adopt what you read other people are doing.

Using social media may help raise your organizational profile immensely, but the tone and frequency of your interactions should be your own and not mirror that of the big organization you wish you were. The same with your website, the people answering your phone, your ushering staff, curtain speech, lobby decorations, press releases. It should all play to your strengths rather than reflect industry best practices.

You would think all this would be a given, but think a moment and if your like me you can think of a few encounters you have had that ran contrary to the general environment and screamed “industry best practice.” (And if you think a little harder and honestly, you can probably identify some you have perpetuated.)

Granted, some times it is difficult to separate what you value about yourself from the actual organizational strength. For example, a farmer may view his expertise at growing a certain crop as a strength, overlooking the assets of the quality of the soil that can allow him to grow other crops now in demand.

This is a rather simplistic example, but in a similar way arts organizations can define themselves by their performances only, overlooking the asset of their production studios which can meet a burgeoning demand.

Should Arts Organizations Sanction Electronic Devices

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Let me just preface this entry by saying I am pretty much old school when it comes to attending performances. I don’t have any problem sitting passively in a dark room watching a performance. I don’t have any problem standing in a dark room and moving around as required for site specific performances. Sure, I get a little uncomfortable when performers in elephant masks sit on my lap and put their arms around me, but I am pretty much open to whatever experience the performers are offering me.

But as a person who programs and administers a performing arts facility, my job requires me to acknowledge that not everyone seeks the same experiences I do and I have to pay attention and be open to making changes.

When you go to the movies, you can’t bring in your own food. Not because the theatres don’t allow food, but because they want to control the environment their spaces–namely the food is purchased from them.

I wonder if the same situation exists in relation to the performing arts. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this weekend about why you shouldn’t text while in the theatre. I actually agree with the points about wasting money, annoying other people, maybe you are the one that is boring, you aren’t in the moment, you wouldn’t text while your lawyer is advising you and you are interacting with machine instead of humans.

But what is the difference between using a cell phone and Concert Companion? Many of those same points can apply, except Concert Companion is developed and supported by arts organizations and foundations. While I am not sure Concert Companion is still active, the most recent article I can find on it is seven years old, it shows that nearly a decade ago orchestras were already thinking of introducing hand held electronic devices people could reference throughout a concert into the performance hall.

Perhaps they didn’t recognize the problems this might cause, including giving license to others in the audience to pull out their own devices for other purposes. My question is, would these devices be welcomed if they were serving the arts organization? If audiences, especially new audiences, showed an interest in using their iPhones to access information about a performance and told the performing arts organization that it really enhanced the experience, would there be more tolerance for the glowing screens?

There was recently a story about Quebecois artist, Olivier Choinière, who as part of his performance piece arranged for people to attend a performance of Moliere’s School for Wives at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. The 80 people in his “audience” were instructed to hide their headphones until the lights went down and then start listening to a podcast.

“What the audience within a larger audience was then treated to was Choinière’s indignant but humorous real-time commentary, in which he questioned whether the metatheatrical production lived up to the claims, in the promotional material, that the director had found “terrible resonances with our society” (for instance, regarding pornography and pedophilia) in Molière’s 1662 play about a misogynist named Arnolphe who raises a young girl to be the perfect wife.”

I don’t really agree with Choinière’s event and would agree that it was somewhat closer to being parasitical than a performance. Yet, I think it is an interesting concept and I am sure many of you do as well. I can easily imagine arts organizations doing something similar to help guide audience members through a performance. Provided people keep the volume down so their neighbors can’t hear, ear buds are a far less obtrusive alternative to the glowing screens of Concert Companion type guides.

Though I suspect once people starting using the guides, I suspect they wouldn’t be satisfied with just listening and might crave the accompaniment of visual information as well.

So is it okay for people to listen to podcast commentary or look at supporting materials as long as it supports the show, but a invasive practice if someone is criticizing and lampooning the performance? Will ushers back away quietly when they see an approved image of John Cage on a hand held screen, but swoop down if they see someone texting about their physics homework?

Again, to my mind all these devices are extraneous and intrusive. However, I realize many people didn’t have parents and schools that exposed them to the arts (ah, memories of my sister shouting “Mommy, they are naked,” in reaction to dancers in body stockings.) Right now we see the presence of these devices as detrimental to the experience, but there is a fair possibility that if people start developing performance related content, they will viewed as useful tools for educating and enhancing the experience in the near future.

It would be great if audiences eventually got to the point where they could wean themselves off using devices, but once people start, they may expect/seek material to supplement a performance. No guarantee that the material will always be complimentary or under the arts organization’s control.

While it is easy to criticize, to do a good job providing a running criticism, you would have to know the material about as well as you would to provide a running educational commentary. If there are people like Choinière who have enough motivation to create a criticism, there are probably those just as motivated to create a helpful guide. Tough part might be identifying them so you can partner with them (or point audiences toward their material). It might make sense to seek these people out now (or task your education department to generate the material) before you find yourself scrambling to do so in reaction to a Choinière.

As I sit here writing this, I am thinking, “God, do I really want to create an environment in my theatre that encourages people to use mobile devices?” Yes, people are already doing so against our wishes, but do we really want to sanction that activity by providing content for it? If you think there is a good chance someone else might eventually create negative content, it would probably be good to at least start having hypothetical conversations about how you might implement your own program or otherwise constructively react.

——-
Reader Challenge- In addition to sanction and cleave, are there other words in the English language that have opposite meanings? I seem to remember at least one more.

Charm Offensive (Minus The Offensive)

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I was reading the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) Spring Newsletter today and there was a letter from Alliance President John Haynes (page 2) giving his view of what audience engagement is really about.

He tells a story of his time as a programming executive at CBS TV when he pretty much had an unlimited expense account and could do just about anything that struck his fancy. He would regularly order pizza delivered to his apartment and he could hear its approach long before it got to the door thanks to the singing of the Neapolitan deliveryman. At one point the delivery man confessed he was having a hard time saving his money because he was attending the opera a few times a week. Haynes confessed in turn that he had never attended the opera, a fact that flabbergasted the delivery man.

“He was shocked. Here I was, living the good life in a doorman high‐rise on West End Avenue, three blocks from Lincoln Center, but bereft of the most glorious creations of mankind. He sang longer and with more feeling that night than ever before. Neighbors I’d never met came out of their apartments. He sang his way to the elevator and was still singing when the door closed.”

The next time Haynes ordered pizza, the delivery guy showed up at the door with two tickets to the opera. Haynes attended his first opera, Carmen, with the pizza deliveryman. He says that he has seen his role as an arts administrator to do for others what the pizza deliveryman did for him; expanding the scope of his experience. “And that’s how I came to conceive of my role as an “arts leader. I’m just the pizza delivery man. ‘Wanna see something cool?'”

The pizza deliveryman was an apt model for the arts community. He was clearly passionate about a segment of the arts. Even though he couldn’t believe Haynes did not go to the opera, much less love it, he managed to express it in a humble rather than condescending way. (And like the arts, he was poor and funded his passion through donations/Haynes’ large tips.)

Of course the challenge we face today is that unlike Haynes, audiences aren’t necessarily won over after one exposure. And many of us are expending great effort in the direction of audiences who are not CBS executives with unlimited expense accounts. Regardless, we do have the same opportunity the pizza man had. We can unabashedly share our passion where ever we go and maybe after repeated exposure, people will start to open up to the possibility of sharing whatever it is that makes us (metaphorically) sing. (Keeping in mind that constantly singing songs from Wicked, either literally or figuratively, is going to make people want to throttle you.)

I realize that since this is filtered through Haynes’ recollection, the pizza deliveryman sounds very charming. Someone else might have perceived him as pushy and elitist. Though I have to think he was indeed as earnest as Haynes portrays him.

The pizza man has had his victory. For the rest of us, another challenge is to be charming as we talk about our passions and avoid making people’s eyes glaze over as we yammer on–or worse, harden as they feel alienated by the tone and direction of the conversation.

Most everyone in the arts seems to be invested in this shared goal, but there are few clear tips circulating about how to accomplish it. Perhaps it is as easy as the “be yourself” advice dispensed about dating. But if that were effective, there wouldn’t be 1,000 new dating articles on newsstands and the internet every week.

I’d suggest more practical and specific advice about diminishing the appearance of elitism might be what the arts needs. But like I said, advice on any sort of relationship doesn’t seem to provide much clarity or instill confidence.

Dear Thespis-

There is a woman at the supermarket I would really like to get to know better as an audience member. However, she seems to think I am elitist snob even though the resale value on her five year old SUV is still more than I made last year. How do I get her to even consider looking my way?

With 10,000 Friends Like These, You Don’t Need Enemies

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One of the things that makes me cringe uneasily is seeing non-profits running social media “follow me” campaigns where they make the push for the next multiple of 5000 milestone looming a few hundred followers away. Maybe they simply want the appearance of being as cool as all the other kids on the block and show off how popular they are. But to my mind, and perhaps I am erroneously attributing motivations, it appears to be the social media version of “if only they get exposed to our work once, they will fall in love with us forever.”

I should be clear that while I often talk about the “get them in the door and they will won over” reasoning in relation to the arts, I am seeing this practice across the non-profit sector. If the motivation is reaching more people via raw numbers, I think it suffers the same flaw as buying huge mailing lists or extending special offers/programs to get more people through the door. Unless you are making an effort to provide an experience/materials that is relevant to the new people, the effort isn’t productive.

Non-profit organizations are advised to move away from the shotgun approach in their physical advertising and most agree because of cost and recipient resentment over being spammed by snail and email. But social media is both inexpensive and people are choosing to follow you rather than you pushing your material on them. In my view, regardless of how inexpensive a channel of communication is, the goal should always be to have a your information be of interest to a high percentage of those being reached rather than reaching the highest number of people.

Yes it is cheap to greatly augment those numbers of virtual followers, but why are you even making the effort if you have no follow up plans? That’s worse than creating a social media presence just because everyone else is. At least you aren’t actively trying to convince people to buy in to an experience you have no intention of enhancing.

Many of the organizations I follow provide information that is interesting to me as an arts professional, but unless they have 10,000 arts professionals/admirers following them, I doubt most of their followers are as engaged as I. The quality and quantity of one organization’s feed actually dropped significantly after their big push. (Though I suspect the feed was initially created by an intern who left or a staff person who got pulled off the detail because the tone also became decidedly less strident and partisan.)

The other problem is that these “follow us” campaigns encourage existing sincere followers to leverage their relationships with others to bolster your followers. This is akin to asking board members to open their address books to solicit donations from their friends, albeit less intrusive and garnering even less personal investment.

Ask people to evangelize for your organization, by all means. But if you are flogging them everyday to help you reach a specific goal, the number 10,000 has as much relevance to the well-being of your organization as January 1, 2000 had to the end of the world.

If you know most of your followers aren’t going to pay attention and decide not to write to their interests, why the heck did you make so much ado updating the countdown every couple hours for two weeks? If your social media site wasn’t envisioned as a tool to provide information to interested parties and strengthen your relationship with them why does it exist?

I will be the first to admit that I am not using my organization social media sites as often and effectively as I would like. But when I do issue updates, it is to celebrate the success of partner organizations/artists, make followers aware of grant opportunities, national issues with the arts and artists with whom they may be unfamiliar. Yes, when we have a show coming up, I am linking to videos and online stories about the artist, but we aren’t having a show every week of the year.

I know that a large segment of those following are positively inclined toward the arts as both consumers and practitioners. Many are not make the decision to attend a show, but their knowledge and general attitude toward the arts can be positively influenced by all the information we post.

iPad Will Make Your Performance…Forgettable

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One option for preserving the performing arts is often mentioned is a greater use of multi-media either in a performance or as a medium to transmit the performance. However, reading an article on Time magazine’s website (h/t Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution) about how it is more difficult to remember things you read in electronic format versus paper format, I wondered if moving to electronic media might be a disservice to the arts.

Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. Garland explains that when you recall something, you either “know” it and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing” is better because you can recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.

“What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the material more quickly over the passage of time,” says Garland. “It took longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.”

The thought is that spatial context is very valuable in helping us to remember things. We recall where places are physically located based on landmarks. Though it may seem hard to believe it can be that significant a factor, we are better able remember information because we have a sense of where it appeared on a page. E-books don’t have that sort of physical context.

In addition, apparently size matters as well.

“He says that studies show that smaller screens also make material less memorable. “The bigger the screen, the more people can remember and the smaller, the less they can remember,” he says. “The most dramatic example is reading from mobile phones. [You] lose almost all context.”

Based on these findings I wondered if the arts might actually seem less relevant if digital media was the only way to access it. While a performance obviously loses its impact when it is not seen live, it may quite literally be less memorable when viewed on a smaller screen as well.

I would be interested to learn if there are studies comparing the experiences of people who watched a movie in a theatre vs. on a television vs. a small screen. (I am sure movies watched on airplane seatback screens will be memorable or forgettable due to myriad factors other than screen size 😉 )

Will movies seen on a very small screen be less memorable because the distances between people and things are so compacted? Desperate lunges to save someone may make less of an impression when reduced to fractions of an inch. Panoramic shots of gorgeous landscapes may pass by unnoticed in small scale.

Digital media may increase your reach by giving you access to a larger distribution channel, but if the scale makes it difficult to distinguish your product from thousands of others, you may have to question its worth.

You may basically be in the position you are now with YouTube where everyone posts something in the hopes it goes viral. I am sure YouTube won’t always be the standard, but if you can use it to test things now. Watch a video on the largest computer screen you can find and then watch the same one on a cell phone screen and judge the effectiveness. Better yet, watch the smaller version first and then watch the larger and see how much you may have missed just in terms of emotional expression.

Info You Can Use: Short Term Space Naming

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I apologize for not making an entry as usual last Wednesday. I was deeply involved with a fund raiser that evening. So far we have seen some positive results which I would attribute to a combination of our approach and the environment we created that evening. I thought I would relate some of what we did and maybe some of you might find elements you can use.

As I believe I have mentioned before, we are planning a renovation of our theatre facility. Our development officer was thinking about naming rights for some of the spaces and had an interesting idea.

It is often very difficult for someone to get enough money together to name a space in perpetuity. However, they might be interested in naming a space for five years at a fraction of the cost of a life time naming. Once they had committed to that, they might be more open to the idea of a permanent naming via an estate gift or other method. The arrangement is that the 5 year will go into our donation account for us to use in the short term and the permanent naming will go into an endowment.

After discussing this idea with our leadership, she had lunch with a long time supporter of the theatre to run the idea by him. He was very receptive of the idea.

Our next step was to invite people to a lunch brain storming session about the renovation and how we might support it. Our concept was to float this naming idea but also see if anyone had suggestions to refine it or even replace it with a better idea. Although only a fraction of those invited attended the meeting, those that responded with regrets expressed some excitement for the possible renovation and gratitude at being invited. Those who did attend expressed a fair amount of enthusiasm about our plan.

Next we sent out a letter to the same mailing list telling everyone we had held the meeting, came up with some new ideas and would be holding a campaign kick off event so watch for the invite. We sent off the invite a few weeks later.

We designed the kick off party to play to our strengths. We held the event on the stage which most of our audience and supporter had never been on. We had artist renderings of the renovation and a sample theatre seat for people to sit in. (The people at the brainstorming session actually got to provide feedback on a number of seat samples before the architect had to send them back.)

The musicians were located on the orchestra pit which had been raised to the stage level. To watch the musicians, the audience had to look out toward the empty seating area. In effect, the roles were reversed with the artists in the physical position the audience usually occupied and the audience was on stage which the artists usually occupied.

About a half hour in, at the end of a particular song, a flash mob which had slowly been infiltrating the party started to perform, stomping, singing, banging objects, etc. They moved downstage to perform a song and physically advanced on the audience so that they would move clear from an area of the stage where we intended to perform. (We also instructed the caterers not to circulate with food below that line so that people wouldn’t linger there.)

Some child performers were introduced and got the whole audience (supplemented by some of our flash mob) involved in a call and response. Then they launched into a wild performance singing a rap while fabric was dropped from the ceiling and three aerialists came running out, climbed up and performed. Near the end of the piece, confetti was dropped so it swirled around the aerialists and down on the audience. Staring up at the aerialists, the audience got to witness the use of some theatrical mechanics and techniques they had never seen before.

Then while the energy was up, we talked about the theatre, the renovation and the short term naming plan. We already had a person lined up to sponsor our Green Room for 5 years so we had him speak and presented him with the plaque that will be mounted outside the Green Room.

After that, we distributed information about the naming opportunities and I gave tours of the facility to those who hadn’t really ever seen it. Unfortunately, like a groom at his wedding, I didn’t get to eat any of the food I paid to have served.

However, our efforts have already seen some additional successes. One woman called back to our development officer that evening after she left the party to express interest in sponsoring our lighting booth. Another contacted the development officer this week about the women’s dressing room. I have to credit these events to the donor who sponsored our Green Room as much as anything we did. I don’t doubt that his generosity provided a catalyst for the others.

These short term naming opportunities aren’t really going to be enough to help us with the renovation efforts. Though they can cover buying lobby and green room furniture and various appliances we might need. Not to mention it adds a little to our operating funds. While there is a lot of good energy and interest surrounding the program, my guess is that we will probably need to see a renovation start within the next five years to sustain people’s enthusiasm.

What If I Had Only….

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One of the perennial challenges arts organizations face is attracting a younger audience and the tendency of audiences to commit so late that you wonder if there will be one for your event at all. According to a recent blog post by Priya Parker (which includes her talk at TEDxCambridge on the same subject), this is a result of a paralysis millennials feel when faced with so many choices. There is a fear of missing out on a better option.

Parker has conducted many interviews during her research in which respondents discuss the paralysis they feel at the prospect of making the wrong choice.

“Am I setting up my adult life to be the way that it could optimally be?” one of my subjects asked aloud, speaking of her general approach to life decisions. This subject explained how FOMO could even invade the pursuit of a spouse: “On the personal side, there’s this fear of ‘Am I committing to the right person?’”

More and more, particularly among those who have yet to make those big life decisions (whom to marry, what kind of job to commit to, where to live), FOMO and FOBO – the “fear of better options” – are causing these young leaders to stand still rather than act. “The way I think about it metaphorically is choosing one door to walk through means all the other doors close, and there’s no ability to return back to that path,” one subject told me. “And so rather than actually go through any doorway, it’s better to stand in the atrium and gaze.”

Those with the most options in this generation have a tendency to choose the option that keeps the most options open. Wrap your head around that for a second.

[…]

Many of us watch the choices of our peers and predecessors with a blend of admiration and anxiety. What seems to afflict this cohort – more than the political strivings or existential angst that defined earlier generations of elites – is a persistent anxiety about their might-have-been lives, about the ones that got away.”

I don’t think it is much consolation for art organizations to know this is something of a personal problem because ultimately, your audience’s problem is your problem. But once you have created an appealing work, communicated the information through appropriate channels and made it easy for those last minute decision makers to gain admission to your event, there may not be a heck of a lot left to do but watch and wait.

Obviously, this also has some implications about the development of creativity, a quality that seems to be receiving greater amounts of attention. It was apparently the a cover story of this weekend’s Wall Street Journal Weekend Review. Cultivating creative ability requires a lot of trial and error, especially the error part. You get better by learning from your mistakes. If Millennial are risk-averse, they may be too reluctant to commit themselves fully enough to make great creative strides.

In fact, in her TEDxCambridge talk, Parker mentions a number of related practices that inhibit creativity. One in particular was valuing success over mastery where when given the choice of spending two hours networking over coffee or two hours working on honing their artistic abilities, “they will always choose the coffee.”

Granted, every generation has been accused of being less accomplished than the generation before. Though that is usually by the preceding generation, Parker is speaking about her own generation. In the context of so many sources saying creativity is important, it will be worth paying attention to whether this approach to life will ultimately be a problem for the Millennial generation.

Big Data May Be En Vogue, Little Data Still Has Plenty To Offer

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Apropos of my post yesterday about using big data to customize information to the interests of individuals in your community, I happened to come across an interview with Jamie Bennett who is chief of staff at the National Endowment for the Arts. (Or maybe it wasn’t coincidence and Big Data Big Brother conspired to bring it to my attention based on yesterday’s post!!!)

The interview is on a website without permalinks to its content so you may have to scroll down to February 27, 2012 or search for Jamie Bennett to find it.

One thing I realized upon reading Bennett’s interview is that I may not have been clear it is already possible to offer sophisticated interactions with patrons without access to Big Data. I had forgotten that Nicholas Hynter has the membership staff at the National Theatre in London email patrons and suggest that based on what the theatre has observed about them, the patron may want to skip the next show. Obviously, you need to have the staffing and resources to do this sort of thing, but it is certainly within reach.

Another emerging option is sites like Culture Craver, the site upon which Bennett’s interview appears. Only available in NYC at the moment and still in beta stages, Culture Craver, aims to do for arts and culture what Pandora does for music and suggest events that you might like based on comparing your history and stated preferences with those of others with similar tastes.

While the interview would naturally be oriented toward the types of situations in which services like Culture Craver might be useful, I have to admit to being surprised by an anecdote Bennett related about how self-segregating audiences can be. He mentioned that RoseLee Goldberg who runs the visual and performance art oriented Performa festival often features the same artists who appear at the theatre oriented Under the Radar festival.

(text broken into two blocks for reading ease)

She was asked to speak at the Public Theater about some of the artists that she had presented who were also Public Theater folks, and she did a poll of the audience, and said, “Who here is a visual arts person?” And there was nobody. And if you asked that same question about those artists at a Performa audience, it would be all visual arts people and there wouldn’t be any theater people. They’re consuming the same thing, and yet the audiences don’t cross-pollinate….

I’ve begun asking myself, “Why have we drawn that circle? Does it have meaning? Is there something that the arts all have in common with each other? Is painting part of the same cohort as theater? Is dance the same cohort as music?” I believe it is. I’m still working it out in my mind — to have a well-spoken philosophical rationale for this, but I believe it is something. I think creating a real community within that, and not saying, I’m a contemporary dance company and I have nothing to do with classical dance, let alone a museum, I think harms us, and if we saw ourselves as a larger community and worked together that way, I think we’d all benefit tremendously from it. So, figuring out a way to conceive of ourselves as a sector and operate as a sector and realize that more is more. If somebody comes to see something at another theater, that’s ultimately good for my theater, because it’s creating a new audience, it’s building an audience, it’s building an informed community.

Bennett doesn’t lay all the blame on audiences for not being more adventurous. Arts organizations are responsible for propagating these distinctions and communicating them to patrons in various ways. With all the surveys I have read about arts attendance, I don’t recall any findings that definitively observed a significant degree of inter-and intra-disciplinary self-segregation among arts organizations, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening or at least that audiences aren’t moving in this direction.

If it is the case, then services like Culture Craver, perhaps in the form of smart phone apps, might become increasingly valuable for arts organizations. Something that says, “hey you trusted us for 25 theatre performances, trust us when we say you’re likely to enjoy this dance piece” can help diversify audiences if they aren’t.

I am just thinking back to the post I did early last month about how members of Gen Y trust the online opinions of total strangers over that of family and friends when I wonder if this isn’t an area to which we should pay close attention.

You’re Sharing Too Much Information About Me With Me

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We are planning a reception next month so a few weeks ago we were checking the website of a printer we often use for postcards to get pricing for invitations. The next day I got a call from an account representative saying he saw we had accessed the website and wondered if there was anything he could help us with.

Now it happened that I had been frustrated by the fact they only printed in batches of 500. We needed about 650 and I didn’t want to be in the position of having to throw out 350 invitations. He was able to arrange for a print run of 650. By paying attention to the activity on their website, his company was able to meet my needs and get my business.

But I tell you, I was a little creeped out. In the future I will probably be mindful of how I visit that website because I know they are watching. Maybe in 5-10 years this sort of response will be so prevalent I won’t think anything of it, but right now it makes me uneasy to know that my visits are being so carefully monitored.

Forbes just had a piece about a similar situation with Target. The store monitors its customer’s purchases and is able to customize the coupons it mails to their homes. As a result, they were able to figure out a teen age girl was pregnant before her parents knew. The store got an indignant call from the girl’s father who later apologized when he discovered the truth.

Target is now more circumspect about how they print their coupon books. Forbes quotes an interview given to the NY Times,

“Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

I am sure Target isn’t the only ones doing this leaving me to be paranoid about whether a promotion that resonates with my interests is a coincidence or a calculated insertion by a company.

Thomas Cott recently linked to a McKinsey Quarterly article (registration required) about how in the era of Big Data, arts organizations are lagging behind. I am sure the main reason is lack of funds to collect and process the huge amount of information required to create a profile of the local community/audience. I am also sure that it won’t be long before it becomes affordable to purchase the services/information from a company.

The thing I wonder is, now that arts organizations have started to realize how important it is to engage with their community, will they settle for a tool that allows them to create the illusion of engagement? I want to be high minded and idealistic, but my guess, given the style of marketing most of us currently or recently have engaged in, is yes.

We all know that it is a lot easier to send out materials we hope will appeal to people than to take the time to interact with them individually. If the opportunity to deliver content which data analysis says is highly likely to appeal to people is more affordable and less labor intensive than direct engagement, aren’t you going to take it?

Of course, to retain people as patron/volunteer/participant, you will have to engage them as a distinct individual. Otherwise people are going to realize that while it seemed as if you understood what they liked from the information they received, it is clear from the experience provided that is not the case.

While the budget administrator side of me hopes that day comes really quickly, the idealist side of me hopes it takes a long time for the price of Big Data services to become affordable so that we are forced to engage with our communities.

The practical side of me wonders what the hell the idealist is thinking. Why should the non-profit arts sector hold itself to such a high standard and intentionally take the road less traveled when all the companies competing for our communities’ time and attention aren’t the least concerned about such things.

Arts Funding and Diversity in Oregon

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The Oregonian reported this weekend that the city of Portland would start to tie arts funding to the diversity of the art organization’s board, staff and ultimately audiences.

Specifically, arts groups will be asked to increase the ethnic makeup of their staff, boards and contractors. Their audiences, too, may become more diverse through marketing and outreach. Organizations will also be expected to spend more of their budget — 30 percent being the ideal — on communities of color.

It appears the hope is that by shifting the composition of the board and employees, the type of programming will shift to be more inclusive. Though I think there is some potential for problems, I appreciate the intention behind the plan. Change the culture of your city through its arts and cultural institutions. The arts and culture community is probably a good place to start with such efforts because they are likely to regard the goal as a worthy one.

There are some practical problems as mentioned in the article. First, federal law prohibits making hiring decisions based on race.

Another problem noted is the lack of resources arts organizations have to perform the assessments and programs to which the money is tied. That said, the article notes there are plans for a new levy to fund arts organizations and arts education in the schools. This is encouraging because it acknowledges that the arts require a more supportive environment in which to operate and pursue these programs.

One thing I am most concerned about is that the programs offered to communities of color be appropriate to those communities and not simply extensions of activities which appeal primarily to Caucasian audiences. While some programs may be equally well received by all audiences and it is just a matter of making them more widely accessible, we already know that the demographics who have traditionally comprised arts audiences don’t view traditional arts programs has having relevance to them. There is a good chance that people outside of those demographics will perceive the programs as even less relevant to them.

Designing a program that is meaningful to different communities is possible. It just takes additional time and resources, two things arts organizations have in short supply. It is much easier to use a similar approach in all instances. Is there enough funding being offered by the city of Portland to make it worthwhile to customize programming?

However, since many arts organizations currently have no choice but to change their approach to their audiences and communities if they wish to continue operating, perhaps this is the most suitable time to implement this policy. If you are struggling to discover how best to engage your community, you might be open to considering expanding the definition of your community.

Do you think Portland’s plan can succeed? Not all the guidelines have been set, but do you think this is the correct approach.

One last thing to ponder. In the article Mayor Sam Adams is quote talking about the criteria they will use.

“Adams says organizations shouldn’t be intimidated by the measures. Increasing racial diversity on staff and boards and spending more money on communities of color will be just two of several factors that determine public funding. And when they are used, they’ll be interpreted flexibly. Different groups face different challenges, he says. “

I felt a little relief knowing there wouldn’t be a hard benchmark for funding. I think there has to be flexibility. On the other hand, I am a little concerned about how flexibly the criteria will be interpreted. It is one thing for private foundations to favor the same organizations with large amounts of funding. But there needs to be a higher degree of equity and transparency in the process of disbursing public funding.

Better to have clear guidelines from the outset about the type of outcomes are valued by the funding program than to sanction loose interpretations which allow the rationalization why an organization should be funded.

My perception is that this is the toughest part of funding. How do you allow for both a small organization that works with the same 20 people once a week for 9 months and a large organization that reaches 20,000 people once in the same time frame? Which is valued?

Now throw issues of race/ethnicity in as a factor and it becomes more complicated. (Yes, I am aware that diversity encompasses more than just race, but race is generally the most volatile aspect and is one of the stated criteria.) The stakes become a lot higher when you say racial composition matters and people can see where the money is going. If a medium size organization increases diversity by three on their board of ten and a large organization only increases their diversity by one on a board of 25 and the latter gets more funding in proportion to their budget, what will people think?

Does it matter that the one person on the larger board is more influential than the three on the smaller board and will potentially increase the reach and effectiveness of the organization? Well, I guess it depends on the way the funding criteria is written.

And as I said, with race as a measure, the criteria needs to be very clearly written as do the awards panel’s justifications. Leave too much ambiguity in the rules or the funding justifications and you open the whole process to accusations of racism, raising tensions rather than alleviating them. Funding for the arts is enough of a political issue as it is.

You Don’t Tell Me What To Give, Don’t Tell Me What To Say

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An interesting question was posed to Kelly Kleiman, the Nonprofiteer, about the practice of suggesting donors increase their giving from the previous year. The writer was offended at being told what to give the next year. Kleiman attributes the origins of the practice to universities who, anticipating the increased fortunes of their graduates as the moved along in their careers, asked for slightly greater amounts as the years progressed.

This seems like a great thing and, in fact, is the reason individual giving is such an important source of funds to organizations: while foundations often won’t continue their support unless you do something new and different for every grant, most individuals will just keep on giving unless you affirmatively offend them.

But what you’re saying is that the request for elevated support is just such an affirmative offense.

The problem is that the cost of everything continues to go up, and unless the monetary inflow goes up at the same time the agencies you support will find themselves seriously behind the 8-ball. Perhaps the agencies requesting your increased support would do better if they reminded you of that—”We haven’t been able to give our actors a raise for five years while their rents and grocery bills just keep on rising”—rather than beginning with a flat-out demand that you do more.

I thought the question and answer gave some interesting insight into the whole practice of “upselling” donors from year to year as well providing some guidance about how make the request a little more graciously.

What made me cringe was the second part of the writer’s question/complaint.

“And this year, when, as a board member, I was given the fundraising “ask” letters that were going out under my name to my personal contacts, I felt especially irritated to see the request for a specific additional amount. I would certainly never have written my friends directly with this request.”

Kleiman responds that the writer is within their rights to feel upset that such a request was going out under their name. It put me in mind of a piece from the Non-Profit Quarterly I wrote on this summer. The author, Simone Joyaux, referred to the practice of having board members solicit donations from family and friends ,as trespassing. She claims it leverages personal relationships rather than an interest in a cause and ends up alienating both the board member and their friends.

Joyaux noted that giving based on trespassing is generally shallow and not likely to persist after the board member has transitioned away from the organization. Unless, of course, the person solicited is genuinely interested in the organization’s cause. In which case it is better to have conversations and identify that interest initially rather than blindly solicit everyone in a board member’s address book.

This post title inspired by Lesley Gore

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaw1ibwVbPI&w=640&h=360]

Who Is More Important? The Event Or Organization?

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I had a small disagreement about marketing with one of the people partnering on a show with us that raised the question about what is more important, the artist or the organization.

The disagreement was pretty simple. We had designed an ad to promote a show. Between the sponsor and creator logos/credits and the general design of the ad, there wasn’t a lot of room left. To maintain a clean, attractive look for the show, I suggested that we omit the three names of the presenters. We would have the name of the theatre, but not “presented by X, Y, Z groups, each of which were fairly long.

My feeling was that the show was what would attract the audience. If we credited the three of us, it would look cluttered and the pertinent information would be lost. If we reduced the font size to the point the ad didn’t look cluttered, it would be too small to be of value and not worth including.

Since we had already advertised the show via brochures, posters, postcards and email blasts, most of those who associated our names with quality already knew we were involved with the show. Those whom we would be reaching with the ad would be making decisions based on the show, not who was presenting it. Therefore, our names were not as important in this particular communication channel.

My partners disagreed with my point of view (though they praised the ad image as much better than the brochure and poster images which was gratifying) and we included our names in pretty small type.

It got me to thinking, is there ever a time when the event is more important than the organization taking credit? Choosing to cede space in favor of a funder might be done out of a concrete sense of obligation (or lack thereof, I am aware of some organizations that choose to omit funder recognition.) Valuing the event/artist above the organization is a bit more theoretical and nebulous a decision.

I don’t know that it should be a default organizational policy where you decide the artist always comes first and people will have to work to find out whose efforts were responsible for their experience. There are some cases where people won’t be familiar with a work where the organizational reputation for quality will provide the confidence an audience needs.

In some cases, you may want to take credit for an experience but get very little recognition because the artist’s reputation will eclipse your own. We recently presented Ben Vereen and it was clear from the phone conversations we were having with patrons that our involvement played no part in the decision to attend.

Both Elton John and Neil Diamond are performing in town in January and February and I couldn’t tell you who the promoters are. I could make an educated guess of 3-4 different people. That is probably the best rationale for making sure your name is associated with your productions. Get a reputation for quality and people will attribute great experiences with which you had no involvement to you.

Surveys show that audiences don’t have much awareness of the tax status of the organization providing their nights’ entertainment. If people aren’t discerning between profit and non profit organizations, how aware are they of whether a show is being presented by me or someone who is renting our facility? There are times of the year that bring especially high numbers of calls from people expecting us to resolve problems with tickets they didn’t purchase from us, so I know some people aren’t aware of the distinction.

Knowing that people may not be making as great a distinction between you and everyone else as you might hope, are there situations where the event is more important than your organization? I am not talking about simply leaving your name off marketing material for the sake of aesthetics. I am asking if there is some program you have or dream of having where it doesn’t matter if anyone knows you did it?

Is it possible for a non-profit to get to that place? Do the producers of a Broadway show care if they have high personal/business name recognition if the show is profitable? Can a non-profit be that blasé as dependent as they are on attracting funders who want assurances their support is making a difference?

I don’t know the full answer to these questions because I have just started considering them and it is a complicated matter.

I don’t think the inability to subsume the organization name to that of an artist necessarily has a direct correlation to the situation Diane Ragsdale discussed in November about low pay for artists. As I note, there are many important reasons to keep name awareness high. However, the organization’s perception of artists certainly is going to factor into the question.

With all the instances recounted by Inside the Arts blogfather, Drew McManus, of orchestra boards answering the question pretty decisively in their own favor, it may be a question that needs to be asked more frequently.

Stuff To Ponder: Active Interpretation of Culture

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Participating in the Lead or Follow discussion over at Artsjournal.com, Lynne Conner writes the following about audience participation/engagement in performances (my emphasis).

Inviting audiences to interpret the art works we present (make, produce, critique) is not pandering. I wish we would stop this disingenuous habit of conflating an audience member’s inherent desire and cultural right to interpret the meaning or value of a work of art with choosing the agenda for artists or arts organizations. Sports fans engage in some of the most active interpretation in our culture (and as a result experience real satisfaction and pleasure), but that doesn’t mean they choose the plays or create the roster. I mean, come on.

This got me to thinking in a slightly different direction. There are numerous television stations, radio shows and newspaper columns featuring people with high levels of expertise talking about sports, yet thousands of people feel no reservation about expressing a contrary opinion loudly in public places and in blog posts. They can hold opposite opinions about games and players from those of their close friends and still remain close. They are not intimidated by those with greater expertise or by the prospect of hurting their personal relationships.

But have you ever been afraid to express your opinion about an artist or arts experience you have had for fear of either appearing elitist to the people around you, even close friends? Or on the other side of the coin, been afraid of appearing insufficiently knowledgeable? Why is that? Feeling unable to discuss these topics, of course, creates a vicious cycle where people continue to feel they can’t discuss these things.

But can the image problem the arts have be fixed by having more people talking a lot more? Maybe, but it will require a lot of people doing a lot of talking.

It is interesting to me that when a person goes shopping, a large number of choices can paralyze someone and result in no choice being made. However, in the face of hundreds of different opinions to select from, sports fans don’t seem to have a problem sifting through them and generating their own view of things. They don’t worry if they don’t agree with the guys at ESPN despite all the computers, statisticians and analysts the network has in their employ.

When it comes to the arts, people get concerned if they don’t agree with the single person writing the review/preview. Either something is wrong with the reviewer or with them. Sports fans can dismiss a single writer as a bum and find another source of information that more closely agrees with them. It doesn’t matter if it is a wholly unsubstantiated view. The fact it confirms their view can make them more comfortable and confident with their ability to evaluate their favorite sport.

That isn’t so easy to achieve in relation to the arts and is becoming less so as media outlets cut back their coverage.

Its funny because it is so much easier to dismiss the opinion of a single poorly funded person over a corporate television station with the resources to analyze something to death based on a thousand different criteria. Yet in the absence of any other easily accessible information about the performance, people don’t feel they know enough to say the reviewer is wrong, even though they may be absolutely right. On the other hand, ESPN’s analysis may be as close to 100% correct as can be, but it doesn’t bother the sports fan in the least that they are completely wrong in disagreeing with the analysis.

Heck, there are sports fans who have been rooting for teams that haven’t been contenders for a championship in decades. They find some pleasure in being wrong year after year rooting for the wrong team.

How many arts organizations get that much slack after rendering a poor performance?

A lot of the devotion a sports fan feels has to do with a feeling of ownership and investment they have in the team, a sense of kinship they feel with other fans and myriad other factors. Many arts patrons feel the exact same things.

Of course, some elements of the sports experience won’t translate over to the arts. Dancers aren’t going to reminisce about how they were berated by audiences at the beginning of the season but won them over with their technique and heart the way a rookie athlete might. Though audiences for those few performing arts companies who retain the same ensemble from year to year can speak about watching artists develop over time.

There isn’t anything insurmountable standing in the way of people engaging in active interpretation of their arts or cultural experience in the same manner as they do with sports–except that they aren’t doing it. There isn’t an arts and culture police running around enforcing standards on conversations. The only impediments are those largely tacit ones we enforce upon ourselves and each other.

I am going to stop short of suggesting what we must do because I don’t think it is as simple as more arts coverage in the media, more arts in schools, more arts bloggers, more outreaches, more free performances. These may all help, but there are a lot chicken and egg factors to the arts environment in the United States. These things are useless of themselves if no one is receptive to them. How do you create that receptive environment?

At the Arts Presenters conference earlier this month, Braddock, PA Mayor John Fetterman quoted a lesson from Sen. Alan Simpson that any significant change takes seven years. I wonder how long it might take to change the culture of a community to the point where people felt free to engage in active interpretation of arts and culture.

Stuff To Ponder: Curtain Speeches

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I was reading an entry on the Creativity Post by Thomas Mark about how important audience attentiveness is in live performance. It was interesting, but I wasn’t intending to post on it…until I read the last paragraph.

A crucial moment for establishing the relationship of audience and performer is immediately before the performance begins. Let me explain. People arrive, find their seats, and begin to turn their thoughts from daily affairs to the performance ahead. At last, the house lights go down. Everyone falls silent. That is the magic moment, the short period of greatest attention and receptivity and anticipation,… At any rate, that’s what should happen. Unfortunately, what actually does happen far too often,… Instead of allowing the performance to begin, the chairman of the board or the executive director or someone appears with a microphone and makes a fatuous speech. “Welcome ladies and gentlemen . . . blah blah blah . . . [insert a lame joke here] . . .blah blah blah . . . CDs available in the lobby . . . blah blah blah . . . The annual patron’s reception . . . blah blah blah . . . Our gratitude to our sponsors . . . blah blah blah . . . Turn off your cell phones . . . blah blah blah . . . Thank you, and enjoy the performance.” Not so easy, any more. Anticipation, attention, and receptivity have given way to irritation and impatience. The magic moment has been irretrievably shattered, leaving performers and audience to pick up the pieces as best they can. This kind of disregard for the conditions of artistic performance by the very people who organize the event is unpardonable. When it happens audiences and performers are entitled to complain vigorously.

Now, as someone who does deliver a curtain speech, I felt the need to take up the subject. I will concede that the curtain speech, poorly done can add a sour note to an evening. In light of all the interruptions that occur during a performance, the incessant ringing at Avery Fischer Hall being the most publicized recent example, such announcements are certainly appropriate, if not always effective.

Many locales require fire and emergency announcements be made and doing these in person rather than by recording is usually most effective. I saw a performance in NYC earlier this month and the fire/cell phone/recording prohibition announcement was made via a recording. While the volume and clarity was excellent, people were still standing and chatting while it was going on.

Having someone make the announcement does help to transition the audience from the arrival phase of the experience to the performance experience. I would agree that delivering the announcement after lowering the lights does interrupt the audiences experience since the lights also signal a transition. I generally go out while the house lighting is still at full. Though some times we bring them down to 3/4 or 1/2 to signal my arrival.

Obviously, there are other ways to provide the same information. The artistic design of some shows precludes my appearance and the salient points are delivered by an audio or video recording or even a performer.

Overall, I think a personal welcome to the audience is helpful to the organization, especially if well-considered. I generally talk very briefly about the show and why we chose to present it as a way to prepare people for the experience.

A lot of work is invested in performances and performance venues have many guidelines for the behavior of the front of house staff in order to provide a good attendance experience for audiences. But often very little effort has gone into the preparation and delivery of the curtain speech. Given that the attention of everyone is on the speaker at the same moment, it is most assuredly contributes to the experience.

Content matters. I actually start thinking about what I am going to say the day before the show, make notes and pare it down to 2-3 minutes max. I am not always successful in making silky smooth transitions into the show, but I do keep it brief and get off the stage.

Very rarely do I mention the next show and only solicit donations obliquely by thanking the audience and expressing my hope that they will continue to support our programs. Maybe I would get more donations if I was more direct and I think I can still find some good phrases to use that will indicate our need for donations without being overtly pushy. Honestly though, I don’t really know that making a general appeal before a performance is terribly effective as a fundraising technique.

In the moments before a performance, I think the focus should be on the immediate experience and not on future concerns. I have posters and a television screen and ushers with brochures in my lobby to push my future shows. In the 2 minutes before the show starts, the audience should be guided toward why the experience will be enjoyable. I am sure I am not the only one who has found themselves slightly disappointed by the movie they are watching after seeing preview trailers for the exciting movies coming the next summer.

People certainly don’t want to be thinking about your financial woes just as they are about to see a performance (though the curtain speech may be a good time to address them if the situation is widely known by the public.)

Many audience members can’t discern between for-profit and non-profit organizations and their respective performances. It’s great that people don’t feel the quality of non-profits are lacking, but it also means they may not particularly feel their lives would be worse should the non-profit disappear. We certainly don’t want to have people identifying long boring, speeches and appeals for money as a distinguishing characteristic of non-profit events.

I would be interested to know what other people think. Is there a better way to do curtain speeches? What things should be left out or are better accomplished in some other manner? What things not typically found in curtain speeches should be included?

Info You Can Use: Forget Dynamic Pricing, Use Placebo Pricing

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I got my sister a gift certificate at Restoration Hardware for Christmas. They sent along a catalog that weighed about as much as my 3 year old nephew so I chose not to carry it on the plane with me lest I be charged an overweight bag fee. I was thumbing idly through the catalog this weekend and I was struck by its design. You can view the catalog online to see what I am talking about. Some of it resembles a magazine with stories about the artisans who apparently produce some of the goods they sell.

Each page has notes with arrows with tidbits about each of the items like the fact that a $2500 dining room table is a “reproduction of a perfectly proportioned stone column in ancient Greece, built of solid reclaimed pine timbers from 100 year old buildings in Great Britain.” Obviously, they are selling to people who value and find satisfaction in their home furnishings having certain features and provenance.

One of my immediate thoughts was that arts audiences often want the type of experience illustrated in this catalog when they come to the theatre. Except that we would have to charge the type of prices Restoration Hardware does just to produce a season brochure that communicated in the fashion of the catalog, not to mention the cost of actually providing the experience. Of course, the whole image being conveyed would prove intimidating to large swaths of the population to whom we are trying to appear my accessible. As we are very much aware, there aren’t a lot of people willing to pay the type of price necessary to have that experience.

After awhile, I thought about the fact that a lot of retail stores are designed to appeal to the idea people have about themselves rather than to who they really are. For example, I read an article that pointed out that while some national clothing stores seem to be designed for 17 year olds and have pictures of people that age, the stores tend to be filled with 14 year olds because its fits the 14 year old’s desire to appear more mature. Whether that was the initial intent of the store or not, they knew who comprises their customer base and are sure to provide the appropriate range of sizes and styles.

So I have been thinking about how arts organizations, (and mine in particular), can identify what image audiences have of themselves when they attend performances and adjust the physical, social and customer service experience in that direction without incurring large expenses.

I was amused to find a possible answer linked to on the Marginal Revolution blog. His “about me” info is pretty sparse, but Peter Seebach suggests a Placebo restaurant where you list everything at twice the normal price but give everyone a 50% discount on the bill. (my emphasis)

There was some research a while back which found a possibly-surprising result. …if you serve the same wine to a lot of people, and tell some of them it’s $12 for a box and others it’s $400 for a bottle, the latter like it better. Better yet, they’re right — they really do enjoy it more. Thank you, MRI scans and the like.

…So say you have a steak roughly of the same quality as the $13 steaks at the Outback Steakhouse. The menu says $26, your bill when it arrives has a 50% discount. But everything you order feels expensive.

For extra credit, you could do interviews and arrange waiters to adopt personalities which suit the customers. Someone comes in who likes Good Wholesome Cooking? We can set you up with a waiter who thinks fancy food is ridiculous. Or, we can set you up with a waiter who is a total food snob, and you can have a wonderful meal knowing that the waiter is missing out on Good Wholesome Cooking. Your call.

The basic idea here is… people aren’t going out to eat for the food, they’re going out for the experience. Why not sell the experience as-such as the product? And thanks to some lovely research done on placebos in the 60s or so, we know that in some cases they work even if you know it’s a placebo — they’ve been shown to treat depression effectively even when explained.

Can it really be as easy as having a perpetual 50% off sale?

We are all aware on some level that when a store has a sale with deep discounts, the original price they are quoting was probably inflated. We may grouse and think it is a little dishonest, we are still out there buying from that store on a regular basis.

And this feeling of being in a dishonest situation can be ameliorated by providing sincerely good service (leavened, perhaps with a little bit of the personality that appeals to the specific customer). The other thing is, no one actually ever pays full price, even accidentally, and everyone knows it. That isn’t something you can know for certain when it comes to airplane tickets, a pricing model it is often suggested performing arts organizations adopt.

So the big question is, do you take advantage of customer psychology to provide audiences with a satisfying experience?

Oh, actually, you already do in a thousand different ways with your marketing, pricing and other practices. Question is, do you do something so blatant?

Given that in some cases the placebo effect works even in the face of full disclosure, it is tempting to try out such simple way to create an experience. Many ticketing systems, including my own, make it very easy to print one price on the ticket and set the actual price much lower.

Stuff to Ponder: Quality Vs. Emotional Satisfaction

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Back in 2005, I wrote about a study by the Urban Institute dealing with attendance at cultural activities. Looking back at the study, The Diversity of Cultural Participation, I am still a little puzzled by one of the results. I’d love to know if there has been any additional insights developed since that time.

What they had found was that the majority of attendees went expecting an emotionally satisfying experience but far fewer felt they had one. Yet few people entered performance halls expecting a high quality experience but more left feeling they had one.

I make a number of assumptions and guesses about the reasons for various findings in my post, but as I say, I have no idea if I am anywhere near correct. The only thing I could think to add is that people see a lot of movies they feel are poor quality but are emotionally manipulative and bring those expectations to performance halls and museums. I would love to hear what other people think or have discovered.

Diversity vs. the Brand

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Apropos to the recent aggregation of articles on You’ve Cott Mail about diversity in the arts, I wanted to point back to a post I did a few years ago about the pressures of protecting the brand image which may make it difficult to achieve diversity.

In the post I point to how everyone from Ivy League universities to car companies will willingly eschew the opportunity for immediate gain in order to protect their brand image. Arts organizations may have the best intentions for diversifying audiences, but the fact that funders/donors/sponsors may desire to have their name before the eyes of certain demographics will drive many choices that are made.

The Arts Org and The Pro-Am Can Be Friends

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Arts Orange County Executive Director, Richard Stein, recently linked to a study his organization commissioned about how art organizations were acknowledging the rise of Professional-Amateurs (Pro-Ams). The study, Professional-Amateur Engagement: A Balancing Act in Arts Organizations, studies the literature and practices addressing people’s desire to become more involved with the arts, but not necessarily as a career path.

If you aren’t really familiar with Pro-Am concept, this is a good place to get up to speed on the topic. Especially the prickly topic of how to define “amateurs” without marginalizing or offending someone. The paper also provides some case studies of organizations who have created programs to involve their community.

Pacific Symphony placed 20 pianos around town and organized a number of on and off-line activities surrounding them. They also had a program called ““OC Can You Play With Us” which partnered community musicians with symphony musicians to rehearse and perform a concert performance with the Pacific Symphony. What I liked about this program was that Pacific Symphony used it to also call attention to the existence of other community orchestras as resources rather than keeping all the attention on their own organization.

The paper also mentions the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and STREB, both of which offer workshops and classes to help people hone the skills and knowledge for their own activities, be it a performance company or their own personal practice. RSC has also opened up their stage to 10 amateur regional companies to mount their own productions on the RSC stage.

The one program that really tickled me was Armand Hammer Museum of Art‘s Visitors Dream-In.

“the Hammer invited “dreamers” to make a $25 campsite reservation to “camp out in the Hammer courtyard and collect any dreams that occur during their stay.”67 The campers were treated to experimental dreaming workshops, bedtime stories and a morning waking concert; on the next day dreams were reenacted by Gawdafful Theater.”

I just thought this sounded like a cool idea and according to their blog, they had about 170 register to participate.

Customer, Know Thyself

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I will admit that one problem of which I have often been aware is that it is difficult to make everyone at my theatre aware of the myriad forms of relationships different people have with us. Since there are some people who have been working for the theatre for 35 years, I am actually often less aware of a person’s history with the organization than some of the employees.

Chad Bauman tackles this very situation in an entry on his Arts Marketing blog. He relates a situation we have all probably been in: A person approaches our organization with a transaction they want to make. However, because their relationship with the organization doesn’t fit into the straightforward rules we have set down, they are not extended the courtesy accorded those less closely involved with the organization. Fortunately, someone who knows the value of the customer’s relationship with the organization is on hand and provides direction.

Bauman goes on to talk about the improvements they have made with their practices so that the communications and development departments are contributing to maintaining long term relationships with their constituency and community.

But in the course of his entry, I think he also ends up answering the question posed by the title of his entry – “Who are your best customers (and why many don’t know)?” He talks about how they replaced their old ticketing software for something with more integration and then hired someone else to write an algorithm that would alert their staff when they were speaking to someone with a high value relationship with the organization.

The best software certainly doesn’t mean anything if the practices of the organization don’t support the goal of cultivating and maintaining relationships with customers. However, I think the impediment to most organizations will be the need to pay to have someone write a custom program for them.

On the scale at which the Arena Stage operates, it makes good financial sense to have this done. The return on investment they have seen already with an increase in subscriptions and a decrease in churn probably justifies it. But will that be the case with most organizations?

That being said, I feel like I am woefully behind the curve trying to employ the customer relationship management (CRM) features with the ticketing and donor software we do use. In the sense that arts organizations aren’t using whatever resources are available, including integrating their daily practices toward a common goal, I would say Bauman is correct.

The thing is…it may be too late to pursue CRM. The trend is apparently heading in the opposite direction.

According to a articles Thomas Cott distributed the link to this past week, the government of the United Kingdom is strongly encouraging businesses to give control of customer data back to customers moving from customer relationship management to customer managed relationships.

Writes Tim Roberts:

In April this year, the UK Government launched a new consumer empowerment strategy “designed to encourage businesses to release their customer data back to them so that consumers can use this data for their own purposes.”

The Government has boasted that the ‘midata’ project will “turn the existing approach towards consumers on its head (with) a shift away from a world in which certain businesses tightly control the information they hold about consumers, towards one in which individuals along or in groups, can use their data or feedback for their own or mutual benefit“.

In the context of everyone’s worries about what Google will do with all the information it is collecting on you, this opens the possibility that we may actually find out what it is they know about us.

But it also occurred to me that while it may initially be frightening for people to learn what sort of profile has been synthesized about them, it may also prove illuminating if people came to realize their actual practices differed from their assumptions about themselves. For instance, they may attend shows every so many months not really considering themselves a fan of music as much as live theatre only to see that over the course of 5 years there is a record of them attending 12 concerts vs 5 plays. It might encourage people to be a little more open minded and adventuresome with their entertainment choices when they realize their tastes are more diverse than they realized.

In the other article quoting Alan Mitchell whose company has been advising the UK government says:

“And the second thing is that it is not only about a message going through to the customer, it is also that the organisation needs to be creating some sort of value in the information sharing – why should I share information with you? It is not just about receiving messages, it is about getting some sort of value from the process.”

When I shared my thoughts about the data contradicting people’s image of themselves with Drew McManus, he commented

“…think about all the box office and CRM solutions that require patrons to create accounts but provide next to zero outlet for patrons to do much with their user account besides update info. What sort of message does that send?”

Sharing that information would actually keep people more engaged and interested in your organization. It would probably also solve the problem of people creating multiple ticket accounts I groused about a couple months ago if they had a reason to use the same account for every interaction with your organization. Which means the organization has a much better sense of their relationship with the person since the history isn’t dispersed across multiple accounts.

CRM has been invaluable to companies because customers have had an expectation for decades now that if they patronize a place regularly, it will be acknowledged in some way whether it is the amount of starch in their shirts or the way they take their coffee. Even though CRM may be on its way out, many of the customer service practices it allowed companies to extend aren’t going away. Even if you have been behind the curve on using CRM software effectively (or at all) you still have an opportunity to participate in the next phase of relationship building.

Info You Can Use: Reward Disloyalty

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H/t Daniel Pink who linked to a story about a “Disloyalty Card” being used by independent coffee shops in Singapore. If you go to one of 8 coffee shops and pick up a card, go to any of the other 7 to get stamps and then come back to the original, you get a free cup of coffee.

I know some arts organizations who have tried these sort of programs to encourage patronizing other organizations with mixed results. What appealed to me about this approach was the rebellious, counter culture feel of it. I had this image of a program that encouraged people to be disloyal to movie theatres and Netflix.

What probably works for the coffee houses is that they can create a bit of an edgy or cool vibe with their stores. If arts organizations are going to try this, they either need to have the same vibe or link it to a series of shows that have that sort of feel. No one is going to feel like they are walking the path less traveled if they find themselves in a staid, completely conventional experience.

My impulse would be to avoid using it during something like a First Friday event where it might look more like a bingo game where people breezed through to get their cards stamped. That doesn’t seem particularly productive. An opportunity to do it across the course of a few months to a year could encourage people to make a more deliberate progress- see a show one weekend, walk through a gallery the next month, go to a dance concert and take visiting friends to the contemporary art museum.

It doesn’t appear that the Singapore disloyalty program requires you to visit all 8 of the coffee shops, just frequent more than one. Even disloyalty programs need to be convenient so it doesn’t make sense to force people to wander all over the place just to get a free cup of coffee. The same would likely apply to a similar program with the arts. Even if all the participating venues were in close proximity, it wouldn’t really be effective to force people to frequent places that didn’t appeal to them.

Structuring the program to encourage people to try a few new things is good. There should be a variety of disciplines represented, but they should get credit for going back to the places they liked rather than only rewarding them for hitting every place once.

Heck, it probably shouldn’t be confined solely to places that were built with the intention of housing art. Get the coffee shop or bar that hangs work by local artists involved. Even better–approach the bars and coffee shops with some opera or classical music performances like the Yellow Lounge program in Germany I wrote about a few years ago or Opera on Tap. Getting these sort of performances into the mix would make for an interesting disloyalty program.

History Repeats Itself…Wait, Didn’t I Just Use This Post Title?

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You may have read Kurt Andersen recent piece in Vanity Fair noting that fashion, art, design and culture in general hasn’t really changed much in the last twenty years. Or maybe like me, you started to get the sense of this some time ago when you realized the rebellious college/high school kids today were wearing the same clothes and essentially listening to the same music as when you were a rebellious college/high school kid 20+ years ago.

Reading Andersen’s article, I recall a piece in Rolling Stone back around 2000 where they said the 70s didn’t deserve the reputation for being an awful decade for music given that it saw the rise of so many different genres of popular musicians from Led Zeppelin’s rock to Ramones’ punk to Donna Summer’s disco. As Anderson points out, (as well as Weird Al) there hasn’t been much difference between Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Andersen attributes the lack of innovation to a desire for stability in an unstable world.

“People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.”

I just wonder why the Depression, two World Wars, Vietnam and the Cold War didn’t cause a longing for stability that froze popular culture (though I will concede the latter two may have planted the seeds.) Rather, I think that in making the world smaller and enabling us to all experience the same things at the same time, technology has started to introduce a uniformity. It is tougher for regional quirks to gain enough influence to bring about changes. Instead everyone consults the same sources.

As Andersen points out, the ubiquity of so many retailers across the country means that it is possible for us to access the same resources as everyone else as well. There used to be a minor plot element in stories where residents of smaller communities would ask a newcomer what the fashions were in Paris or NY. Now there is no need to do so. Not only does everyone know what the styles are, they are readily available.

What does this have to do with arts organizations these days? Well, for one, there has long been a conversation about how everyone in theatre is taking their cues from what is being done on Broadway. There has also long been a conversation about how everything being done on Broadway is a revival, revue or dramatization of material which has proven itself in some other format.

It seems that what we have here is an opportunity not only to break from our own past practices but to become agents of change for general culture as well. I am not so idealistic that I can’t admit that is a lot of inertia to overcome for non-profits. But since it appears increasingly likely a change of business model is in order, we might as well include artistic and cultural innovation while we are in the process of re-invention, right?

Will Perform For Snacks

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On the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen has a short post about a psychology professor who requires his students take turns bringing a homemade snack in to each class. If they don’t bring in a snack, he doesn’t teach. I was initially pretty cynical about this approach as a valid teaching technique and was surprised to learn he had actually been doing it for over 30 years before it became an issue.

While I was still a little cynical after reading about his rationale for the requirement, I could understand how it fits into a psychology class that runs 3 hours at a stretch.

Parrott said that he’s teaching students to work together to set a schedule, to work in teams to get something done, and to check up on one another, since everyone depends on whoever has the duty of bringing snacks on a given week. Typically, no individual should be involved in preparing the snack more than twice a semester, he said.

Parrott said that considerable research shows that students learn more if they develop the skills to work in teams, to assume responsibility for projects, and get to know their fellow students. Team members need to count on one another, he said, and his students learned Thursday that if someone fails at a task for the team, there are consequences. “They need to learn to check on one another and clearly they didn’t get that done,” he said. “This was an important lesson.”

It struck me that this might be a good approach for building/engaging community around an arts organization (with the punitive elements de-emphasized, of course.) An arts organization might have a performance/gallery series where attendees were required to bring food as payment. Some times it might be the orange ticket holders, other times the blue ticket holders, so that an attendee isn’t bringing food for the whole audience every time they attend.

Allowing for a snack period like this will change the dynamics of the relationship with the audience. It isn’t going to pay the light bill, but it can get people involved and invested enough in the organization in other programs that do earn revenue and donations. I suspect the staff will do a much more effective job of convincing people their organization is worthy of support while chatting over chocolate chip cookies than pitching them during a curtain speech.

I can envision scenarios where groups bond over their shared responsibility to provide snacks to try to outdo the other groups. If that turns into its own type of headache and introduces stress to an event intended to be informal, that impulse could be channeled to support a more formal series of events to increase the investment in its success.

Info You Can Use: Age Related Discounts May Be Illegal

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Hat tip to Thomas Cott at You’ve Cott Mail for making us aware that attempts to attract younger audiences through special pricing may be a form of age discrimination. The D.C. Office of Human Rights has determined the special pricing offered to young people at 30-35 years old are a form of age discrimination.

What this specifically applies to are practices by theatres like Arena Stage and Kennedy Center. I wrote about the Arena Stage’s plan (toward bottom) back in May and felt Chad Bauman’s blog post on how he was implementing it gave theatre people a lot to think about.

Now there is some cause for rethinking.

The D.C. Office of Human Rights asked for a justification for the pricing and determined it was not sufficient to warrant the exemption senior citizens enjoy.

“The report says that the theaters had not demonstrated that the discounts are justified by business necessity, because patrons older than 35 do not have the same opportunity to buy tickets at a reduced rate.

It does offer the thought, though, that there may be an emerging need for discounts to young professionals, particularly given many young adults do not begin their careers until they are at least 25 to 30 years old, and face other financial challenges.

The report recommends that pricing be broadened so that the same type of discounts are available for those 30-64. It does not appear that the office plans to enforce the recommendations by following up further with theaters to see if changes are made.”

While the article says the D.C. office may not monitor compliance, this is a practice that may come under scrutiny elsewhere. Like Ladies’ Nights discounts at bars, there is theoretically the potential that all age based discounts in every situation including restaurants and retail sales might come under review. (Finally, I can order off the kids’ menu!) The article doesn’t say what the basis for senior citizen exemption is. An earlier article quotes the head of the D.C. Office of Human Right as saying:

“Students and seniors may not have the means for a full ticket, so it is reasonable you offer discounts to those segments,” Velasquez said. “With this situation, if you’re a professional who is 34 years old? I am not sure. That’s the reason behind the inquiry.”

I can’t believe that is the entirety of the rationale for allowing it especially since they apparently rejected the idea early careerists would need it based on income or the lack of arts education schools. If income is a prime factor in exempting senior citizens, there is a chance that someone could use the median wealth of retiring baby boomers compared to that of their parents as the basis of arguing that it is as erroneous to assume they need a discount as it is a 34 year old professional.

Pricing isn’t and shouldn’t be the only method by which to attract younger audiences, but it is a pretty powerful motivator. There may be other ways to structure attractive pricing to the same segment of the population based on or complemented by some other criteria. The Office of Human Rights only rejected the reasoning the theatres submitted. That doesn’t mean a compelling line of reasoning doesn’t exist.

Try Ask

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I try a fair number of the strategies/techniques that I cover here. Some work better than others. For example, for the last seven performances we have tried just asking two questions in our surveys, one fun question and one that we really want to know about from our audience. Even with the ability to answer on a hard copy or text your answer, we haven’t gotten a lot of participation.

Except the night this past weekend when we were participating in an Americans for the Arts survey. Strangely, participation in our 2 question survey went up a little when people were faced with filling out a multi-question survey.

We also didn’t get the response I expected for a recent tweet seats program even though it was circulated a fair bit via social media. Though since this was a trial program, the small number of participants suited me fine and the experience will allow us to refine our approach.

In any case, I am sometimes skeptical about how much input and participation we might get from our community with other endeavors. So I was a little surprised and very pleased by the response we received for space naming meeting were recently had. As part of a renovation we hope to undergo, we have been trying to find a new approach to facility and space naming campaigns so we hosted a brainstorming meeting.

Recalling Andrew McIntyre’s assertion that people who are emotionally invested in your organization might only be visiting you in 2-3 year intervals, we invited people who had either donated or purchased tickets to multiple shows over a 3-4 year period. That yielded about 450 names after purging duplicates. We followed up a letter with a reminder email.

While only about 15 people attended the informal lunch meeting, there were about five times as many people expressing pretty heartfelt regrets saying they were honored to be invited and wishing they could be there. We even received some donations though we didn’t ask for any money.

I was really rather surprised at how many people seemed interested in investing more time and effort to provide feedback than would be required for a paper survey. I am sure the fact the purpose of our communication was to give them something (lunch) in return for their participation rather than asking them to pay to participate (season brochure, email newsletter) probably had a positive impact. Perhaps knowing they could participate in a dialogue rather than in the unidirectional conversation of a survey was a factor in their willingness to come to the meeting.

In any case, it was a very constructive experience for us, especially since I had never spoken face to face with 90% of those who attended. We were hearing from a number of new voices. The meeting also ran about an hour longer than we had planned due to the length of the conversations.

I am significantly less skeptical about the prospect of people’s willingness to participate and become invested with us. None of these people may participate in our space naming campaign, but my encounter with them has left me energized and excited. My advice to others who may not believe there is a lot of interest and investment in their programs based on survey response rates is to give a brainstorming type meeting a try. Like us, your attendance to invitees ratio may be fairly low, but you may gain unsought benefits.

(The title of this entry is a Hawaiian pidgin/creole phrase)

Audience Engagement-Careful What You Wish For

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One of the biggest topics of discussion these days is about engaging audiences. Often during these discussions, people talk about the way things used to be when audiences weren’t expected to sit passively in a dark theatre with the suggestion that maybe things need to move back in that direction.

I came across a link to a very interesting book on the subject, The Making of American Audiences by Richard Butsch. Last week, someone linked to the chapter on the decline of audience sovereignty (I apologize for not noting who.) What parts are online made for a very interesting read.

I backed up to the earlier chapters about the rowdy working class “b’hoys” who were very engaged, moreso than we might like. They would get up on stage with the actors at times and chase each other around. They would make actors repeat sections of the performance that they liked, often dozens of times, before they allowed the show to continue. If they didn’t like something the actor or manager did, they would call them out on stage for an explanation and apology. Edmund Kean refused to perform in Boston when audiences were small. When he returned four years later, people remembered the slight and audiences in New York rioted both inside and outside the theatre. He was met with the same reception in Boston a month later.

Imagine audiences that were so invested in theatre that people in one city were offended on behalf of another four years later.

The relationship between audience and performers wasn’t always so destructive. Some greenhorns, “green’uns”, believed so strongly in the reality of the performance they might climb on stage and offer money to characters suffering destitution. The b’hoys would attend performances regularly and were knowledgeable about the different works and familiar with the actors of the companies. While they might challenge an actor’s interpretation of Shakespeare when it differed from their own, they would also provide prompting when a line was forgotten out of a desire to see that the show went off well for the newer attendees. There could be a strong sense of ownership and rapport with the actors who appreciated the interactions.

However, in time, the actors became adept at managing the interactions with the audience, taking some of their control away. The b’hoys in turn became so invested in their favorite actors, they began to demand respectful treatment from the audience on their behalf, thereby ceding some of their ability to make demands on the performance.

Despite whatever control the working classes were exerting over their fellows, it was still too vulgar for the wealthier gentry classes. They began to move to theaters frequented by better classes of people and then abandoned theatre entirely in favor of opera. Respectable people did not go to the theatre.

According to Butsch, the focus was about opera as a place where respectable people gathered moving away from attending a performance because of a star. The orthodoxy of class was enforced by the dress code. Working class folks could go to some of the better theatres, but the requirement of kid gloves, good clothes and a clean shave helped to exclude them. “The introduction of reserved seating also made the exclusion of undesirables more manageable.”

Later chapters chart the shift of arts attendance away from being a male pursuit to one associated with the female gender.

It was very interesting to read about how our current attendance environment gradually developed. There was certainly a separation of the wealthy elites and the working class. However, even the working class had its own insider groups who were in the know and enforced certain expectations of behavior and knowledge upon those who were new to their community.

Really, this is a function of human nature and not specific to the arts. Not long ago IT departments were the source of frequent jokes because of their stereotypical disdain for those who hadn’t used computers enough to know how to troubleshoot simple problems. Now that people have more technology experience and there isn’t a need to enter arcane commands at a DOS prompt, that stereotype isn’t as prevalent. I think that is the state people in the arts are aspiring to when they talk about engaging audiences–getting them involved and familiar enough with an arts experience to dispel some of the negative stereotypes.

My “careful what you wish for” title to this entry doesn’t really anticipate a return to those wild and wooly times when performers had to dodge projectiles. It may only just feel like you are inviting that sort of chaos as you approach the process of audience engagement. It may result in the 21st century equivalent of calling the manager or actor on stage to explain themselves. This currently happens with celebrities’ personal lives where they are expected to respond to allegations about what they were doing at certain times and places. It doesn’t happen as much with their professional choices because the general public doesn’t feel empowered enough to be invested in caring.

But what if they were taught that it was an area in which their involvement was valued…

Remember, You Have A Date With Us

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Okay, a topic seemed to beg me to write on it today– Keeping connected with those who purchase tickets in advance. There were a couple of incidents today that demanded I give some thought to the topic. We always bemoan the fact that so few people purchase tickets more than a few days, if not a few hours/minutes, in advance of a performance. Question is- are you doing anything to show your appreciation and concern for those who actually do purchase in advance.

Recently, I have been thinking about doing a better job of serving those who purchase tickets in advance. This was instigated by an unusually large number of will call tickets going unclaimed last year. Most years, we might have one or two groups of tickets that went unclaimed every other performance or so. Last year, there were at least one group of tickets unclaimed every show and near the end of the season, there were 4-5 groups.

Upon review, we generally discovered that the tickets had been order months in advance and surmised that the people may have forgotten they ordered the tickets and hadn’t set up a reminder. Most of these were also tickets that had been ordered over the internet and the person didn’t request mailing. Not having physical tickets laying around the house, it could easily be a case of out of sight and out of mind. I strongly suspect even those who do have their tickets mailed may end up burying them in a drawer or dressers over the course of months and also forget to attend.

I have been considering changing our approach when asking for people’s email addresses so that we can take a more active role in reminding them about the upcoming show. Currently, we ask if people want to be on our email list for our monthly news letter. A fair number of people decline to provide it. I think we can honestly move to saying we want it so we can send people reminders as we see so many people forgetting to attend. Those who purchase over the internet are already getting a reminder in the form of our newsletter a week or so before a performance, but they may not be opening the email and need a subject line indicating it is a reminder that they purchased tickets.

What has made this topic beg me to cover it today is that the director of another arts organization we are partnering with on two performances this Spring contacted me about emailing reminders for those events. So I know I am not the only one thinking this way.

And… today I swung by to pick up my will call tickets for the Hawaii International Film Festival. While I was there, I purchased an additional ticket for a movie two Saturdays hence. Even though I have the ticket in hand, I received an email when I got home thanking me for purchasing the ticket and noting that it had been added to my online itinerary.

I thought this was a good customer service touch. But it also struck me as a possible solution for a problem we face at the theatre. Our customers can actually go online through our system and review their ticket orders as well. The problem we face is that people often create new accounts every time they make a purchase. When people call to ask about their tickets, we often have to look under 3-4 different account numbers to find their orders. Most of the time the account with the highest number has the most recent activity, but that isn’t always the case if they have remembered old usernames and passwords.

What I am thinking is that regardless of whether a person makes a purchase on or offline, we should arrange to have a follow up message sent that emphasizes using their account to review their itinerary. If people think about their account in the context of assisting them with arranging their lives and are getting more frequent reminders about what their account number is, they may use the same account more consistently.

Now to talk to the powers that be about whether we can activate something like that…

The Little Things Are More Engaging Than You Think

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If you are like me, the changes in the economy and people’s expectations about their interactions with the arts probably has you avidly watching for the new theories, techniques and technologies that may be relevant to your operations. Faced with uncertainty and rapid change, it is easy to forget that there are simple little gestures which we repeat over and over whose performance our audiences value. The explicit, big gestures using the newest techniques may pique interest and get them in the door, but it is going to be the small, mundane things that help keep them.

Some of these are passive things that are part of the organizational culture which we barely recognize we do. They don’t require a lot of time and energy but result in constructive activity. It can be something as easy as just leaving the door open as an invitation for something to happen.

I met today with one of the architects working on our facility renovation. I am anticipate we will be having a lot of these sort of meetings which cover small changes that will have a significant impact on the way audiences experience our facility.

One thing I talked to him about was putting more outlets in our scene shop. This isn’t to accommodate more power tools, but rather to accommodate the gathering of students and others. At the moment, the table area we typically use for meetings, lunch and effecting repairs has started to turn into a learning commons. Students are plugging in so many computers and other devices that they have extension cords crossing in front of the staircase to my office which I subsequently trip over.

I realized this afternoon that this gathering is actually the result of a decision I made three years ago to make the area more welcoming. Prior to that, on days we didn’t have classes or activities in the shop, I would leave the shop door locked and the lights off. All the better to show how ecologically responsible we were by keeping our energy usage to a minimum. Students were theoretically supposed to enter through another door to attend classes but often passed through the shop if the door was open.

As enrollment grew over the last few years and I saw exterior gathering areas becoming more crowded, I started to leave the lights on and the door open on a regular basis. Over that time, the number of people seeking a place to study or chat grew (granted, a little strange given that scene shops are noisy places, but there you are.)

Now we have faculty from visual arts and music who don’t normally teach in our building coming in to eat their lunch. The area has become something of a learning commons and collaborative space for students and faculty. I have students designing a poster and postcard for the show next month running up to my office with their thumb drives to get feedback on their work. Before the hammering started this afternoon, one of the music teachers was pounding on the meeting tables to teach a percussion sequence to a student.

I don’t know how long this may last. I can definitely attribute some of this activity to the dynamics between specific students and that may disappear when they graduate.

I can’t directly link any increase in attendance to this gathering of students so leaving the door open hasn’t helped my revenue situation much in a time when that is increasingly becoming a concern. However, since no one on staff has to design a poster or postcard for the next show, we are able to spend that time in other pursuits. When it comes time to distribute the materials, I bet the students will be interested in helping given their ownership of the piece. This afternoon, the students helped populate areas of the theatre during a photo shoot we were doing in support of a space naming campaign we hope to launch fairly soon. Potentially, their presence might yield income if those images are used in the campaign.

I know this sounds a little vague and hard to quantify. What I am advocating for is basically not forgetting about the assets you have to offer to your community and making them available for use by your constituencies. Some activities may take a little more effort than just leaving doors unlocked and lights on. For example, even though you want to go home, you leave the concession stand open, the lobby lights on and the restrooms open while people stand around chatting and chatting and chatting because the welcoming environment creates an intangible, but valuable positive impression of the organization even though it isn’t as effortless as it may appear.

In some cases you may be able turn a weakness and inaction into a strength. Don’t have money for landscaping? Plant wild flowers that attract butterflies. The front area won’t seem as much a rambling mess with butterflies flitting around.

What you do may not even be connected with your physical plant. Maybe the diner everyone on staff eats at all the time can turn into the site of an impromptu consultation session on how to create haunted houses and wire up holiday displays. That sort of thing reminds everyone that 1) Your organization contributes to the economy by patronizing area business; 2) Enhances the value of the diner in the community; 3) Makes people aware of the knowledge and expertise represented by your organization. I am sure there are fourth, fifth and beyond reasons, but note none of these have anything to do with specifically trying to attract people to your shows. Yet they engage your community at the cost of making a little extra effort at a place you were going to anyway.

It is key that you treat these sort of activities like giving someone a gift– you can’t have an expectation of something in return. If there are positive results, it may take years for it to manifest in a manner you can attribute to your efforts but it may not do so in the way you anticipated. Just as in personal relationships, what you value and want from your friendship with someone may not be the same as what your friend perceives as the valuable aspects of their relationship with you.

Criticizing The Performance, Not The Audience That Enjoyed It

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This weekend I went to see a show with some friends. I enjoyed most of it, except for the lead actor. It was clear to me that while the rest of the actors were invested in the reality of the play, his character knew he was the hero. Where everyone else had to react to the unexpected changes in the universe, he anticipated what was coming and manipulated the universe. Some of it may have been the director’s choice, but given the other actors were invested and he wasn’t, I believed most of it was the actor’s choices.

As the show ended, it was clear my friends enjoyed every moment of the show and didn’t perceive the things I did. I knew they were going to ask me what I thought. My immediate worry was, how am I going to talk about this show which they clearly enjoyed without implying they shouldn’t have. And how can I explain what I thought was wrong without suggesting that they lacked the intelligence or perception to notice it.

Basically, how can I talk about my experience without sounding like the stereotypical intellectual snob associated with the arts. My friends won’t take much offense, but whatever approach I used would essentially be practice for dealing with the general public. If I was talking about a show in my theatre, I am really never going to have this sort of conversation because few people would ask what I thought about my own show. (I also realized how many arts experiences I have by myself or with other arts people where conversations can be a little more frank.)

One of those who accompanied me is a landscape architect so I decided to use his profession to provide context for my comments. I would explain my problems with the lead actor as I did in the first paragraph expounding on what I mean by investment in reality and why that is important. Since the show was a comedy, I used the example of the candy wrapping episode in I Love Lucy, where regardless of how bizarre a situation got, we were rooting for Lucy and Ethel because they believed in the reality of the run away assembly line and their need to succeed.

I explained that because I had experience in the performing arts, the problems were apparent to me where it might not be to them. If they enjoyed the show, that is great. Being able to recognize these thing is a mixed blessing- It is helpful if you are in a position to fix the problem, but a hinders one’s enjoyment of many performances where one isn’t in control.

I mentioned how it was possible for me to walk through a garden and admire the flowers while my landscape architect friend noticed all the problems with drainage and general appropriateness with the design. None of this means the flowers are any less attractive just as nothing I perceived invalidates the experience they had at the show.

Now yes, among ourselves as arts people we can, and do, have long discussions about how audiences attribute more value to their experience than is warranted and give standing ovations to barely mediocre work. But that isn’t a conversation we can have with the general public without causing a lot of resentment.

Given that I was dealing with my friends who had the capacity to forgive any offense I might offer, I can’t say the general approach I used in this situation will work in most cases. I have to imagine though that it can be effective to offer an honest, snark free, appraisal of your own experience which acknowledges that one’s insight and perception, while highly informed, isn’t necessary for others to share.

I felt my explanation was successful because I was able to be honest and provide some education about acting and directing choices without coming across as if I were lecturing the ignorant. It was helpful to be able to be able to draw a parallel between the abilities we both developed as a result of our professions to illustrate how artistic criticism is no more intellectually inaccessible than any other form of discernment that is cultivated over time.

The same parallels can be drawn for pretty much any profession or avocation that a person has been involved for many years to create a common frame of reference. No one gets overly concerned that their accountant feels superior to them because they can’t spot mistakes on a balance sheet with a glance. They can be worried about how it might look if they don’t understand a performance or painting, though.

As I write this, I recall my post from Friday in which I quote Stephen Tepper and George Kuh talking about the training creatives receive. I occurs to me that while anyone may develop a discernment related to their profession and avocation, the resulting abilities are not necessarily equal. Those in the arts are specifically trained to look at things with a critical and deliver and receive critiques. Those seeking accounting degrees aren’t regularly asked to look at their classmates’ work and discuss whether it adheres to the generally accepted accounting practices. In that respect, it is understandable that people may experience a little anxiety at the ease with which creatives (which includes landscape architects) can and will discuss perceived problems.

Brains, Rather Than Butts, In The Seats

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Ever since it was announced back in July, I have been waiting for Arts MidWest to post their video from the talk given by Andrew McIntyre provocatively titled, Arts Marketing is Dead: Long Live The Audience. The video was posted last week (or at least they tweeted that it was posted then) so I got right to watching.

McIntyre is a founder of Morris Hargreaves McIntyre which has developed a system of audience segmentation being used in Europe and a number of the British Commonwealth nations. The talk, while an hour long, is broken up into segments itself so you can view parts of it and then easily return to it and continue if you can’t view it all in one sitting.

What McIntyre says is dead, or rather needs to be dead, is the underlying idea espoused by Danny Newman in Subscribe Now that vilified the single ticket buyer for not allowing the arts organization to illuminate their life. McIntyre says that while ticketing philosophy has changed, the underlying philosophy underpinning that idea remains. Most arts organizations view those who are not attending as having a deficiency in their cultural diet that their product can fulfill.

McIntyre says that the focus of most marketing is on people who are immediately loyal, not on those who haven’t been to a show in a number of years. The practice of cleaning a database doesn’t recognize that the cycle of attendance for most people is actually one that skips a couple years. He speaks of conducting focus groups with audience members who speak enthusiastically about the arts organization but whose previous attendance was four years prior. These people have a long history of being associated with the organization, it is just at 2-3 year intervals. According to McIntyre, these people are apparently just as likely to support an organization over the course of decades as someone who attends annually.

McIntyre doesn’t mention what an ideal period for retaining contact information with what appears to be former supporters might be. I suspect that it may be specific to each community based on various factors including the transient nature of the population. As he was talking about this, my first thought was that you should be clearing your mailing list of people who didn’t seem to want a relationship with you so you weren’t sending them unwanted mail.

That said, I basically use attendees from the previous 5 seasons as the basis of my annual mailing list. I occasionally get a call from people who are concerned that they didn’t know about a show because they know they are on our mailing list and have always gotten our brochure. But if we haven’t captured their name in the last five years either because they haven’t attended or made a purchase at the door when it wasn’t practical to collect their contact information, they eventually get excluded from our list.

McIntyre cautions against relying too much on technology noting that Facebook didn’t invent community and Twitter didn’t invent word of mouth. The arts are about connecting people with people so more direct and personal contact is needed to maintain your relationship. The typical practice has been push marketing where you push empty seats on the community rather than pull marketing where you try to engage people to become involved with you.

He makes some rather humorous observations about why audience development as a concept is on the way out. He says audience development has never been clearly defined as an organizational activity. For marketing it is a euphemism for marketing staff, for education people it is euphemism for outreach, for finance it is a euphemism for box office development and for artistic directors, it is a less objectionable term than marketing.

It has been about how many people you can get involved rather than how deeply you can get them involved. McIntyre says in the UK until recently audience development has been out going out to get people who don’t want to come. The task, however, is not to rescue stranded audiences. They are quite happy with the cultural experiences they have, thank you very much. It is the arts organizations who are stranded and so audience development is really about making the organizations relevant to audiences.

He is clear to point out that audience focus doesn’t mean audience led. Everything is still artistically lead. He gives the example of a theatre in Toronto, Pass Muraille, that has a program called the Buzz Festival where they have audiences view 10 minute segments of shows in development and then pass out surveys asking people to answer specific questions about whether the choices were working – “Did you believe the motivation/relationships of X characters in this moment?” By the time the full show reaches the stage, there is such a buzz and audiences have such an investment in the show, that they sell very well.

The playwrights and directors are still making the decisions, but they are getting the feedback they need to inform these decisions. McIntyre says that in the past this sort of engagement with the audience was viewed as dumbing down the product and so maintaining a high degree of isolation was sought. Audiences are more intelligent and creative than they are given credit for and don’t deserve this level of disdain.

McIntyre says we need to treat people as brains in seats, not butts in seats. (Erk, maybe I need to change the name of this blog. I can see how it is complicit in this mindset.)

It is a little too long to cover here, but in the 6th segment of the video, McIntyre covers the Seven Pillars of Audience Focus that they feel are embodied by those most successful at engaging with their audiences.

Among the changes McIntyre says that need to be made: An organization must be vision lead. It can’t exist only to make enough money to continue to exist. Organizations need to stop fearing audiences and feel the need for peer approval because it holds them back. Stop trying to build brand loyalty in favor of building brand equity where people feel they have a stake in the organization. Need to know more about our audiences than the average income people in their zip code. Everyone in the organization must be involved in the marketing. What each person does needs to grow the organization and its brand.

McIntyre talks about a self evaluation tool they developed so you can arrive at a score for your organization and then use it again multiple times to chart your progress. He says he is less interested in the score than in the discussion the score and test generate. I thought maybe it was online, but I couldn’t seem to find it on their website.

Intersection of Artist And Audience Engagement

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Via Andrew Taylor’s Twitter feed last week, I became aware of an entry on Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog about use of space to engage arts attendees in different ways. What was really interesting about the entry was the conflict of views held by Nina, the Executive Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz and one of the artists being exhibited in the museum’s Creativity Lounge about whether the lounge activities were contributing or detracting from the exhibit.

I appreciate that the artist came to realize that the lounge was actually contributing to people’s enjoyment of her work, but what I really loved was that the theoretical conversation about the purpose and role of a museum and the experience visitors should be having was actually being played out in practice. It is easy to talk about audience engagement activities in the abstract and project the wonderful benefits that will ideally be realized. Reality challenges that when an artist feels that the grand experiment is leading to their work not being taken seriously.

Granted, artists’ vision being compromised is nothing new. Historically other artists, administrators, producers, donors and patrons have all contributed to undermining artistic expression. That’s no excuse not to think about the impact of our decisions as we take up the task of trying to engage our patrons.

One of the big debates now is over the place of social media in live performances. Do you allow people to update their Twitter and Facebook posts during a show or do you try to suppress it. If people are engaged and are telling their friends about how much they enjoy the experience, that is a plus. If the glow and activity is distracting performers and audience members that is a bad thing. If people are splitting their attention between the performance and texting, that can be a negative as well.

The fact that back in the day people spoke and moved about during Shakespeare’s plays and Mozart’s concerts is often cited as an argument against the current restrictive nature inherent to live performances.

What isn’t often mentioned is that Shakespeare’s actors didn’t spend 8 hours or more a day for 4-6 weeks rehearsing for the show. I suspect Mozart’s musicians didn’t all invest hours a day from the time they were 8 years old practicing for the chance to compete against others of the same experience for a single seat on an orchestra with whom they would spend additional hours.

High demands are placed on artists these days and they want to be taken seriously for what they are bringing. When they see something happening that seems to undermine that, it is understandable that they be a little skeptical and wary.

One thing I take away from Simon’s post is the need to execute some engagement programs in as careful and deliberate a manner as the design of a performance or piece of art. When the program experience intersects with the art experience, you can’t just say, lets try this and see how people like it in the same way you might try out different ad campaigns to see which approach might be most effective.

Simon’s Creativity Lounge could have fallen flat and been just awful had the environment not been carefully considered. It is clear from her posts and responses in the comments section that it was.

For me this post was very timely because I am immersed in discussions about renovations to our facility. Part of the plans include razing and moving the ticket office and adding a concessions area. We have the opportunity to change the environment in the front of the theatre to one that has a more welcoming vibe through changes in lighting, landscaping and seating design. The factors we need to consider are just starting to percolate to the front of my brain.

Stuff To Ponder: Ticket Office Openness Vs. Security

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Currently I am involved in talking with architects to plan a renovation for our theatre. Part of this will involve razing and moving our ticket office. In the course of other theatre design projects with which I have been involved, as well as those related to me by colleagues, there seems to be a desire to have a more open and friendly ticket acquisition experience for audiences.

Since people are purchasing online and using credit cards to purchase tickets, the thought is that the reinforced bank teller window (an image recently invoked by Rocco Landesman) can give way to a more open concierge desk set up with an aperture to a secure backroom available for deposit of cash receipts.

Thinking this might be an option we should consider, I emailed the theatrical architect with whom the lead architect is working. The fact our ticket office is located outside rather than in our lobby adds a little twist to the concept. My concern was mostly with how to secure the desk area and keep it clean when we aren’t using it without resorting to bulky contraptions or unattractive steel roll up doors. Though sheltered from the rain, we would have to figure a way to avoid having money fly away in a breeze. I thought with some good design and procedures, we could overcome these hurdles and provide a more welcoming atmosphere for our patrons.

The problem is that while the move toward cash-less transactions enables us to move toward a more open and friendly experience, thieves are making corresponding changes in the tactics they use to exploit the new transaction formats. We may end up right back behind the reinforced teller windows again before too long.

With his permission, I am sharing part of the response I received from architect Paul Luntsford of PLA Designs.

“Due to the increasing problem with skimmers and RFID scanners, debit and credit card transactions are moving to the secure and controlled window. By the way, this skimmer/RFID scanner thing is really getting bad. We went to see Les Mis tour show last Friday at our huge, union run, city-owned 3000 seat theater. I used the ATM in the lobby to get some dough to buy junk during intermission. That night, or technically the next morning at 3AM, my debit card was used online at the Apple store to attempt a $1 test purchase by some unsavory character who had managed to compromise my RFID data from my card when I used the ATM in the lobby! So, you need to consider that all electronic transactions happen behind a window, and that window has an embedded wire mesh that is bonded to ground and acts like a Faraday shield to prevent capture of RFID data when the card is processed by one of YOUR people.”

While the credit card company may be at fault for not properly encrypting information, that fact will be of little comfort if people start to associate your brightly lit lobby with a dimly lit alleyway in a bad neighborhood where they may be preyed upon. As security of the cards improves, (and hopefully theft techniques lag), we can hopefully look to maintaining a more open transaction environment. If not, along with good cash handling procedures, you may end up having to train employees on safe credit card handling procedures like not passing the card back out side the Faraday cage without replacing it in a protective sleeve.

Info You Can Use: Acknowledging The Arts Experience

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Welcome readers of You’ve Cott Mail and myriad other places. I appreciate your interest in the blog and yesterday’s entry about speaking more honestly about how an arts experience can occasionally be disappointing.

It is with some chagrin that I have discovered NEA chair Rocco Landesman talked about this very subject at the Chautauqua Institution about two weeks ago. One always likes to fancy they have stimulated lively discussion through the introduction of a timely subject. But of course, even I have made posts on the subject before so I can hardly expect to be the only one thinking about the subject.

If nothing else, the fact that Landesman has been speaking about it gives some indication that it is indeed timely and worth discussing. I have tagged this entry as part of my “Info You Can Use” series because Landesman mentions a number of ideas for better audience relations as well as noting some approaches that arts organizations have already put into practice.

“We might see an organization with an artistic director and a co-equal audience director. Rather than a manager of visitor services who reports to the director of external affairs who reports to a deputy director.

We might see fellowships for audience members…What if we complemented artist residencies with audience residencies, where we paid some audience members to attend exhibitions and performances? Or, better yet, what if arts organizations gave stipends to “audience fellows,” so that the fellows could go see whatever they wanted to see at other arts organizations?”

This last bit about encouraging audiences to see performances at other arts organizations isn’t as far fetched as it may initially sound. Back in 2006 the Marketing Director of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts made a comment on the blog about the organization’s plan to let patrons know about performances at other venues. Looking at their website, I can’t quite tell if they are still providing this information, but it looks like the marketing director is still there and hasn’t lost his job over the program.

More from Landesman: (my emphasis)

I visited the Seattle Art Museum, and they now offer “highly opinionated tours,” in which people paid by the museum walk through the galleries talking about the things they like, but also the things they don’t like. One of these docents led a tour in which he explained why Seattle’s Pollock isn’t really a very good Pollock at all.

We need to stop pretending that every single audience member needs to like every single thing we do.

Nick Hytner at the National in London, actually has his box office staff track subscribers’ likes, dislikes, and preferences, and has them e-mail the members and suggest some of the plays they way want to skip. I think acknowledging the viewers’ own tastes—in addition to curators’ and directors’ tastes—is absolutely key.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago put it extremely well. She said that arts professionals need to learn how to maintain their expertise, while relinquishing control. Madeleine will always have more expertise in contemporary art than I do, but I am still entitled to my own relationship with it, my own experience of it….”

Admittedly, some of these steps are a little bolder than we might be comfortable taking. This is info you canuse, but I make no claims about whether you will wantto use it. Certainly, one probably doesn’t have to adopt something as extreme as advising people not to attend a show. Just acknowledging that the arts experience can occasionally be disappointing in the course of normal conversation may earn good will through its simple earnestness.

Landesman covers other topics in his talk which might be worth a listen to many–especially for the flash mob performance which interrupts it midway. Much of the rest of his talk revolves around the same general theme of the need to support artists and artists needing to eschew the role of being separate and special to become more involved and present in their local communities.

Yeah, Sometimes It IS Boring

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I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to post about today, but Adam Thurman at Mission Paradox decided me with his post today about reducing the opportunities for audiences to be anxious about their attendance experience.

He starts his post:

When I picture someone entering a live performance venue I imagine a thought bubble above their head. Here’s the thought inside that bubble:

“Man, I hope this doesn’t suck.”

Interestingly enough, that is what I was thinking when I was driving to see a dance show this Saturday. I didn’t have too much basis for real concern since I knew the curators who put the show together and had worked with close to half the groups who would be performing. On the other hand, the event was billed as cross cultural and you never really know how successfully performers will execute their vision of what that means.

I think most of you with any experience in the arts know what I mean. Like me, I am sure you have seen some pretty awful stuff performed right after some pretty good stuff and are uncertain how the night will turn out.

Question is, do most people in our audience members know we have the same concerns abut enjoying the as they do? Do they know we can be worried about not liking the performance or being bored?

I suspect they don’t. I suspect they feel our disappointment with a performance will be expressed in terms of the failure of its attempt to illuminate the futility of the post-modern vision against the fin-de-siecle fatalism of the last decade.

Andrew Taylor once wrote he felt it was counter productive for arts organizations to never admit any program supported by a grant did not perform as planned or better.

“It’s an insight as old as theater — conflict, flaw, and tension are what make narratives compelling. And yet, read through most arts marketing materials or grant applications and what will you find? Perfection, triumph, success, and positive spin. Their performances are always exceptional. Their audiences are always ecstatic. Their reviews are always resounding (or mysteriously missing from the packet). Their communities are always connected and enthralled. In short, they are superhuman, disconnected, and insincere.”

I would say the same is true with audiences. We advertise everything we do as the most exciting and seminal work they will ever see but never concede audiences may not be in ecstasy every moment they are in the theatre. As a result, audiences expect to be in ecstasy and may either decide there is something wrong with them for not feeling amazed or decide they have been had by a bunch of B.S.

One of my favorite episodes in Drew McManus’ “Take A Friend To The Orchestra” program came about 6 years ago when Drew took the brother of WNYC Sound Check host, John Schaefer, to a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Jerry Schaefer had never been to an orchestral concert before. One of the parts that impressed me the most was that Drew admitted that he often gets bored at times during a concert and that it was okay to be bored at times.

I am not suggesting a full confessional after every performance outlining everything that went wrong. One common theme on this blog has been the idea that we need to speak about the arts experience in everyday life –when we are waiting online in the supermarket, at parties and picnics, in elevators and on buses. I am not talking about announcing your boosterism aloud in public places, but rather getting people to talk about their experiences, fears, anxieties, passions, etc., in relation to the arts. Part of that conversation needs to be acknowledging that, yeah sometimes it is boring; sometimes is it bad; sometimes it is confusing, even for those of us with a lot of experience.

The benefit people in the performing arts have as audience members when it comes to artists who are not household names is that we may often know more about the artist’s reputation than most. We can enter a performance space or gallery with a higher degree of confidence about the experience than others might.

This isn’t a peculiar characteristic of the arts, it just comes with exposure and experience. Sports fans will know what match ups are likely to be most exciting than will a new attendee to a game. Sports fans will recognize when a high stakes situation is developing while a novice allows their attention to wander.

While there are entire cable channels and sections of newspapers dedicated to educating people about why certain sports match ups will be exciting, the Arts and Entertainment channel shifted its focus in other directions and newspapers are dropping their culture reporting. The arts have to mostly rely on word of mouth and those with the most knowledge aren’t really speaking often or in a compelling manner that acknowledges the beauty and the flaws that make the beauty all the more remarkable.

And believe me, I include myself among those not communicating in a basic, honest manner devoid of marketing spin.

What’s Good For The Grágás Is Good For The Arts Organization

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I was reading that Iceland is in the process of updating it constitution and is soliciting feedback from its citizens. The constitutional council is posting drafts of each section online and are integrating some of the responses into the constitution. Actually, because so much of the activity is occurring online, they have suggestions from an international audience via their Facebook page. I am not sure if they have implemented international suggestions, but the people running their Facebook account seem to be doing a pretty good job of responding to those who post about the process.

I was thinking that this might be an approach that an arts group looking to serve a community might use as they began to generate an organizational structure. There seems to be some wisdom in getting everyone involved at the point of constructing the framework and having them continue to feel invested in the organization years into its operation because it has taken the community’s needs into account. A barn raising of the Internet age, if you will.

Of course, the tricky question is the degree to which you involve everyone. Trying to please everyone on a committee doesn’t end up pleasing anyone as we well know. There has to be a small group of people deciding what the focus of the discussions will be about. That is the function the 25 member constitutional council in Iceland serves.

On the other hand, going into the process with a lot of pre-conceived notions around which you will plug in community suggestions might also yield a product that no one really gets excited to be involved with. Deciding from the outset the organization will do Shakespeare when the community indicates a live music and visual art center is needed, for example.

Crowd sourcing feedback is probably never going to be a substitute for the good judgment based on hard work and research that starting any business requires. A serious look at demographics may show that the population can’t support a music and visual arts center for more than five years versus the prospects of a destination Shakespeare festival. However, using social media tools to disseminate information about why a music and visual arts isn’t going to viable may garner a good deal of faith and respect in the burgeoning organization when the community clearly sees they have done their homework.

Obviously, the same process can be used by existing organizations to strengthen their place in their community or even realign themselves with the existing needs. Iceland isn’t starting from scratch, after all. But there has to be real conviction in the organization to effect change. There can be a lot of organizational inertia trying to keep things from truly changing. If the change is coming due the realization that the faith and investment of the community has been lost, there could be a lot of resistance to overcome before truly constructive conversations about changes can transpire.

By the way, Grágás refers to the Grey Goose laws of Iceland that were in use until the 13th century. Therefore, I took some poetic license in the title of the entry to make it fit the goose-gander saying. The constitutional council using social media is known as Stjornlagarad.

It’s Yesterday Once More

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Tip of the hat to Don Hall (aka Angry White Guy in Chicago) for linking to the Everything Is A Remix web series, some thing of a labor of love by NY film maker Kirby Ferguson. Parts One and Two came out a while back. Part Three just came out a week ago. The last part is due out this fall.

As I have been thinking about intellectual property rights recently, the series struck a chord with me. As you might imagine, the premise of the series is that there are no original ideas. The first video makes that abundantly clear by examining music, especially that of Led Zeppelin, who didn’t make a lot of effort to change any elements of the songs they were appropriating and very little to credit the original artists either. The second video talks about movies like the Star Wars series and the Kill Bill movies and the influences they tapped.

In the third part, Ferguson starts to talk about how creativity and inspiration are based on the work of others, standing on the shoulders of giants, as Isaac Newton famously said in the 17th century. (Though Bernard of Chartres apparently referenced the metaphor in the 12th century.) His example that most startled me was noting that Xerox created a graphical interface computer with a mouse, desktop, pop up menus and other familiar features, Alto, in the 1970s. It was mostly used by Xerox and some universities and was never released for commercial use. Apple made improvements to the design and interface as well affordability and released the Lisa and Macintosh in the early 80s and that eventually morphed into the iPads people are running around with today.

There is actually a transcript and links to all the music and video Ferguson used for each video chapter, should one wish to purchase any of it.

One thing I appreciate about a lot of blogs and other online venues is that people often make an attempt to at least make a passing reference to the source of their information and the jumping off point for their posts. I feel a little bad for Xerox. Sure, they failed to really exploit the technology they developed for nearly a decade before Apple took off with the idea. Because of this their name gets lost in history if not for people like Ferguson. I am sure Apple probably would have faced a law suit if they had made a public nod in their direction.

Still, it is nice for people to acknowledge that they got their good ideas from you. The tracking data for this blog often shows people from universities reading for a long time. I often wonder if my ideas are making it into a paper–and if I am being credited. Or maybe someone just left their browser window minimized behind their chat window for a long time.

The discussion about intellectual property rights, etc is a pretty lengthy debate and even though I recently talked about the issue, I actually wanted to take another tack with this post and ask:

Are we in the arts standing on the shoulders of those who came before and moving ourselves to innovation?

Again, a subject of lengthy and long debate where the current thinking is probably leaning toward an answer in the negative.

But it strikes me that maybe things aren’t so bad as they seem. Or at least perhaps some of the steps that need to be taken may not be as intimidatingly far away as they seem. If, as Kirby Ferguson says, innovation doesn’t come mostly with a flash of divine insight but rather after an onerous road littered with failures and mistakes, then maybe it is just a matter of recognizing how the past is manifesting itself today. (Albeit probably requiring hard work and likely failures.)

I think I have mentioned before that when I was in grad school getting my MFA in Theatre Management, my class read Danny Newman’s Subscribe Now! was unworkable in current times when so much competed for people’s time and attention. He suggested having subscription parties where key people in the community would invite their friends over for tea and would help convince them to subscribe to your season.

Seems pretty difficult to replicate these days if you think about it in literal terms. But this is exactly what happens on different social media platforms and sites like Kickstarter. Key people in the community present your cause/organization to their friends and convince them to become involved. It is tougher to identify specific influential people than in the past when planning subscription parties. But for the same effort you invested in cultivating relationships with those people, you can disseminate information about your organization in a manner that convinces people to become interested and involved with your organization. They may not become as deeply invested as people did in the past, but you can potentially reach far more people than you did in the past.

I will grant that some innovation that moves past recasting the old in familiar terms will be required for the arts to successfully innovate for the future, but it doesn’t all have to be created nearly whole cloth from scratch.

(In the interests of correctly referencing things. The title of this blog is from a Carpenters song)

Conversation During Controversy

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I think I have re-linked to this story a number of times over the course of my blog, but Neill Archer Roan’s recounting of how the Oregon Bach Festival engaged their community in a conversation about the controversies surrounding a performance of Bach’s St. John’s Passion has always seemed to be a great example of what arts organizations can do at their best. Granted, it requires a whole lot of courage, especially in these days where social media can generate furor in a matter of moments. I fear the conversations wouldn’t have been so constructive had this happened this year.

Roan’s original post is regrettably no longer available, but I believe my post does a good job of relaying enough basic information to generate discussion within one’s organization.

Cost of Making Things Free

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So I am off on vacation for a couple weeks. Regular readers fear not! I have set up a series of entries to appear according to my usual posting schedule.

Since summer officially started, I thought it appropriate to take a look back at my post about how the Public Theatre manages to offer Shakespeare in the Park for free. Please be sure to read to the comments section in the entry where my misunderstandings were corrected by a reader two years after the post. In my defense, the Shakespeare in the Park website still doesn’t do much to clarify that.

Info You Can Use: Tix, Pix, Kits and Internships

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I am a busy, busy boy this week which is why I ended up not posting yesterday. Hopefully things will calm down a little by next week. So by way of recompense for not posting yesterday, I offer you four links to practical information for use in your arts organization. I am sure at least one of these links will prove useful to you.

First up, Richard Kessler recently posted a toolkit for getting parents involved in arts education, Involving Parents and Schools in Arts Education: Are We There Yet? What is special about this guide is that it is written by parents for parents. Presumably, parents will know what best motivates them to get involved. As Kessler says, “You have to admit, there’s something to be said about a guide that emerges directly from the work of parents, educators, and partners, rather than from staff.”

I haven’t gotten a chance to look at the whole thing, but I am encouraged that the second chapter is “Understanding Parents” and the fifth chapter is “Motivating Parents” with the “Educating Parents” in between. In the arts I think we often want to skip past the understanding and educating parts and move straight to motivating audiences into the action of attendance. The handbook reminds us of the proper order of things. The guide is 45 pages long. Fifteen pages are devoted to interacting with parents, the other 30 odd are sample forms, checklists and templates to use in organizing parents toward a school arts event.

Next, a link from our friends at the Non-Profit Law blog to the Department of Labor’s fact sheet about what is allowed during an internship under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It should be noted that these rules only apply to for-profit businesses at the moment, but a footnote they state (my emphasis) “Unpaid internships in the public sector and for non-profit charitable organizations, where the intern volunteers without expectation of compensation, are generally permissible. WHD is reviewing the need for additional guidance on internships in the public and non-profit sectors.” So it might be prudent to design your current internship program with the for-profit guidelines in mind.

Chad Bauman talks about a plan that the Arena Stage formulated to wean people off student discounts. They used to offer $15 tickets to people under 30 during the week prior to the performance. The problem was, once they turned 31, their ticket price went up to $60. It appeared this steep price jump was discouraging people from continuing to attend.

Now their plan is to offer a “pay your age” pricing for 3% of the seats starting two months before the first performance. The hope is to not only create the idea of paying an increasing amount as you age, but also emphasize the importance of buying tickets early rather than the week of the performance.

This program is still only available to people under 30. You don’t pay $85 if you are long lived. In the comment section of the entry, Bauman addresses the potential sticker shock a person might get upon turning 31 and finding they now have to pay $60 instead of $30. I really appreciate his view of cultivating a person over 10-15 years.

“Once a patron turns 31, and we have already gotten them into a pattern of buying early for a discount, we would then offer them a 3-play preview subscription acquisition promo probably in the range of $99 for three plays (or $33 per ticket). After they “age-out,” my next major priority is getting them to subscribe. Then once they subsribe, I will work to get them to upgrade their subscription packages. This is a long term strategy that really looks at the customer over a span of 10-15 years. From first time PYA buyer to full season subscriber and donor will probably take 15 years.”

Finally, if you use images from the internet and are confused about the difference between royalty free and copyright free images or aren’t really even sure about acquiring images to use, Tentblogger has a good comprehensive guide (with supporting images, of course) dealing with all these questions and more.

Change Content For Specific Audience? Good Question

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Last month, Ken Davenport over at Producer’s Prospective issued a “you make the call” challenge to his readers and it ended up the most read and commented on post of April. People were still adding their opinions as of last Friday. Here is his scenario and challenge.

I have a division at my office that sells group tickets to Broadway shows. A few weeks ago we got an inquiry from a group of 500 people that was looking for a show. Yep, 500! That’s 1/3 of a big Broadway house, which means quite an impact on a weekly gross….

The group came back and said there was one show that they specifically interested in. “Great,” we said and started to place the order.

There was just one problem.

The group explained that there were a few moments in the show that they thought were objectionable, and unfortunately, because of the mission statement of the organization, they would not be able to book their group (of 500!) if those moments were in the show.

Insert dramatic chords here.

The “moments” weren’t specifically plot-related, nor would they involve a great deal of work to alter them.

But would the show make the alterations to satisfy this group?

Insert more dramatic chords here.

Obviously there are a lot factors that would be involved in this decision, like when the group is looking to come (what time of year and what performance during the week), how well the show is doing, how much the group is paying, etc.

But if you’re a commercial theater producer, the question is whether you would be willing to ask your creative team to make the changes to their work to accomodate this bonus to the bottom line?”

The responses to this challenge fell into some general camps- Sure if it isn’t that complicated; What about the fact that 1000 other people paid to see the original show? (sub-set response to this was, Sure if they want to buy the whole house); The artistic choices made were deliberate and that vision should not be compromised, stick to your guns; If you do it once, you create a precedent to do it again.

A couple of interesting points made by a commenter going by Julia was that shows often compromise their content on the basis of an audience’s physical situation: modulating strobes for epileptics, adding illumination for signed performances, captioned performances, audio described performances. Each of these changes the appearance of the performance from the original or alters the experience of other audience members who are not targets of the services.

I haven’t really addressed the issue of changing an artistic choice based on audience feedback since discussing Neal Archer Roan’s tough decisions about Bach’s St. John’s Passion and anti-Semitism. Since the discussion was still ongoing over on Davenport’s blog, I thought it might be appropriate to draw attention to the issues and get people thinking about how they might handle it.

Of course, if we are all to be honest, how we say we would handle it often diverges from how we actually handle the situation when faced with its impact on our own reputation and budgets.

One question I would add to the mix. Are you more likely to make the change if your show is on Broadway or presented by a non-profit organization? Broadway has much more profit motive to their show. The saga of Spiderman with the never ending previews, the rewrites and reissues have shown that Broadway is open to revamping content in response to criticism. (I am surprised no commenter on Producer’s Perspective mentioned that.) While they do it for more than one show, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility a permanent change might not be implemented if appeal to a wider market was perceived.

On the other hand the income from 1/3 a house means a lot more to a non-profit organization than a Broadway show. Though most Broadway shows have less flexibility in doing so, that Spiderman could afford to shutdown for a few months for rewrites is fair evidence that Broadway probably has a little more ability financially to refuse the change on principle alone.

I’m Not Standing Here Acting For My Health, It’s For Your’s

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I always keep an eye open for stories about people using arts in health care in some fashion. Mentions of organized programs seem to be pretty rare though…or perhaps I am not looking hard enough.

I almost skimmed by it, but thanks to a job listing for a managing director I became aware of the NiteStar program at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. The program has been around for nearly 25 years with a mission of using “the performing arts and peer education to help young people make informed decisions, providing options for changing attitudes and prejudices, and creating opportunities for promoting healthy behaviors.”

Their programs address issues of “sex and sexuality, domestic and teen violence, substance abuse, and multiple health threats, including teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases.” A 1996 PBS documentary, Sex and Other Matters of Life and Death, chronicled their efforts over the course of a year.

While it might not be the subject matter everyone would want to tackle, I wanted to note their efforts because their basic experience developing and delivering programs in diverse venues in conjunction with health services could help those with similar ambitions avoid reinventing the wheel.

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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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