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Audience Relations

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.

Info You Can Use: CultureTrack Survey Results

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Welcome SoundNotion fans. Come in, take a look around while you are here.

I just got around to reviewing the results of the recent Culture Track Survey. As always with surveys, there were a couple interest tidbits to be gleaned. I looked at the Cultural Track report and then the longer research report. Both are pretty easy to read since the bulk of the pages consist of a graph and a few sentences reflecting on the findings.

One result that caught my eye was in regard to corporate sponsorship. I don’t often see audience perceptions surveyed on this subject.

 

Perceptions of Corporate Sponsorship

If you are making an economic argument for the value of the arts, you should probably be pitching it to businesses as well as governments as a way to enlist corporate support both in your lobbying and fund raising efforts. Just be careful not to make the case so strongly that you start to encourage people to use your organization to charity-wash their reputation lest you become a little tainted by association.

The report talks about barriers to attendance, what motivates people to be subscribers, how influential social media is on the attendance decision (not as much as you might think, though growing). The finding that didn’t jibe with my experience at all was that people plan their attendance well in advance.

“Both visual and performing arts audiences have become significantly less spontaneous and are planning their attendance much farther in advance.

· Only 5% of 2011 respondents visit a museum or exhibition on the same day they make the decision to attend, compared to 17% in 2007.
· Just 3% of respondents attend a performing arts event on the same day of their decision, down from 9% in 2007.”

The only way I can reconcile these numbers is if these reflect planning only and not acting to purchase tickets. Even broken down by subgroups, both infrequent attendees and young seasoned omnivores are planning well ahead in the 50% range and a few days in advance in the 37% and 44% range, respectively. I suspect people may plan in advance, but purchase later.

If there is truth in this, then I am feeling a little more secure in how early I start to promote events. I have often wondered if I am wasting time and money by not just concentrating most of the efforts to the last 5 days before a performance. The results say being able to access information well in advance of an event is highly valued.

The research report had more detailed results about the survey. If you are particularly interested in specific data about the ways different groups are using social media and technology to learn about events, you may want to take the time to study the results (PDF pages 20-33, 37-41).

Some results not related to social media/technology that you may know about, but bear repeating-

-Watching and listening to the visual and performing arts often occurs outside the exhibition / performance hall

-Enjoyment, spending time with or supporting loved ones, and interest in programming play roles in decisions

-Cost, lack of interest, and inconvenience are all barriers to entry

-No one factor contributes to the subscription buying process more than others, but exclusive events are less important than other benefits (last bit is interesting to know-Joe)

-For those that visit cultural organizations less, the reduction is focused on cutting expenses rather than a loss of relevance

-Frequency of attendance is a better indicator than income in terms of determining likelihood of contributions

-On site information helps enrich visits to cultural organizations

One response that interested me was: “Respondents from cities were significantly more likely to indicate that their home city should be considered a cultural center.”  I am intrigued by the idea that city dwellers more than suburban and rural residents place a high level of importance on being perceived as living in a cultural center. If you live in a rural area, you probably have priorities that don’t emphasize a cultural life. I guess the same is true of the suburban experience. Perhaps suburbanites value having their homes within easy commuting distance of work and great culture and don’t have a high expectation of a great cultural life in their town.

 

The Farmer and the Cowman (and Restaurateur) Can Be Friends

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Last week we hosted a food sustainability conference sponsored by our culinary program. Sustainability and local food sources is a big deal in Hawaii because between 85%-90% of all our food is imported. If there was a cataclysmic event which prevented food from reaching the ports, there is only about 10 days of food available to feed the population.

I have seen a number of arts bloggers draw a connection between the slow food movement and the arts so I listened closely to what was said hoping to gain a little insight from the practices of other industries.

Since the conference was organized by a culinary program, they approached the subject from the view of how restaurants can source more of their food locally and sustainably. The panels consisted of farmers, ranchers and restaurant owners talking about some of their practices.

Culinary Convening
Farmers, Ranchers and Restaurateurs Convene

There were some inspiring examples of some farmers operating almost completely off the grid with a high degree of recycling. They farm tilapia, circulate the water through lettuce and other plants which help filter the water and send it back through to the fish. Because of a rain catchment system, they haven’t had to draw from the public water supply in many months. Some of the effluvia gets diverted to a nursery which includes fruit trees to provide fertilization. One of the chefs at the gathering said he managed to put a dinner together for a party thrown by the governor where all the ingredients were grown within 100 feet of each other by sourcing them at the farm.

What struck me as applicable to arts and cultural organizations is the stories of some of the mutually beneficial relationships restaurants have created with farmers and ranchers. Chef Roy Yamaguchi of the Roy’s restaurant group convinced a farmer who was just weeks away from closing down his farm to grow a mesclun mix and required all his restaurants to use it. This allowed the farmer to stay in business.

Another chef, Peter Merriman, said that early on he made the conscious choice not to try to guard his food sources. While it undermines his ability to lay exclusive claim to offering high quality ingredients, he recognizes he is helping to keep his suppliers in business by telling people where he gets his ingredients.

Chef Alan Wong, who was in attendance at the convening, has been a long time proponent of using local ingredients. He spoke about how he held a beef tasting at one of his restaurants as part of an effort to convince restaurateurs to support ranchers by buying local beef.

The tasting ended up solving a big problem the ranchers had. The high end restaurants would buy the prime cuts of beef and leave the ranchers with the rest on their hands. A person from a local restaurant chain at the tasting had the presence of mind to ask what was happening with the rest of the cow. Now that chain consumes 250,000 lbs of local beef a year. Because the ranchers can sell the whole cow, the price is lower for everyone and there is incentive to the ranchers expand their operations.

Every arts organization has a different operating environment so I hope people can find something analogous to their own situation in these examples. The most obvious one to me is the oft mentioned fact that the regional theatre movement was intended to employ artists locally and still can if people commit to creating an climate in which this can happen.

One of the ways might be to duplicate Alan Wong’s tasting and actively invite colleagues to see different artists, not with the intent of “selling” them as so many showcase performances do, but with the approach of highlighting and celebrating local resources in an attempt to keep and cultivate them. There is an entirely different ambiance present in the latter scenario versus the former and I suspect one would be far more receptive to the idea of employing someone because of it.

I have to imagine given current trends that there is some mileage to be gotten out of boasting that the casting of a show produced a smaller carbon footprint because no one flew/drove a long distance to New York or Chicago to hire a person and the person didn’t have to travel far to appear locally. Arts organizations can celebrate their fiscal prudence by noting that they don’t have to pay for housing and per diem as they do with “imported” artists because the person already lives nearby. Therefore, much of the ticket revenue is going back into the community as artists buy goods and pay their mortgage and taxes. Perhaps the artists can make a statement about how they appreciate how the deliberate cooperation between a handful of organizations has created an environment that provides enough opportunities to live locally and raise a family rather than hustle for jobs in the big city.

Another idea would be to grow a network in which to share productions. Some theatres already invest in productions together, sharing the development costs and planning to have the show appear in both places. However, some of the members of my consortium produce shows for their own audiences while suggesting the other members might be interested as well. In most cases, each producing organization is partnering with a local performance group to develop the show already and a cost sharing agreement is already in place. Acquiring additional bookings in other parts of the state is just an added benefit for both. Having other venues willing to present the show can also assist with grant writing to support the development of  the production and support touring. I have had two shows I produced go on tour and I have hosted three that originated with consortium partners.

This sort of arrangement is easier when there is a longstanding relationship between organizations in place and they know they can trust that a quality product will be created when they commit themselves  in the conceptual stage. I think that is the sort of relationship that has been developed between the restaurants and the farmers and ranchers. The restaurants know what they are going to get from the suppliers and the suppliers know they have dependable buyers for their products.

One of the other challenges restaurants said they faced with local beef is that grass fed beef tastes different than corn fed beef. A representative from Roy’s Restaurants talked about how she has had to deal with indignant customers who demand to know what the restaurant is trying to pull when they first eat the meat. She spoke about how Roy Yamaguchi decided to not only note that the beef was grass fed in the dish description, but also put a section in the menu that explained about the beef and what it was the restaurant was trying to accomplish.

This immediately sounded like the challenge arts organizations face when trying to introduce audiences to anything outside their experience. The advantage the beef has over the arts is that while both steak and certain segments of the arts have an elitist aura about them, there is a perception that being adventurous with food is a mark of distinction while sampling a new arts experience is either intimidating or the mark of a snob. Do the arts need their own version of Anthony Bourdain to incite exploration?

(By the way, the title of this entry is a nod to the musical Oklahoma!)

What Makes Sense In Refund Policies?

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Adam Natale writes about Fractured Atlas’ development process for the ticketing module of their ATHENA software. They are talking to different sized performing arts organizations at Community Design Sessions (CDS) to get feedback about the design and assemble a wish-list of features. His discussion of the software’s use for ticket exchanges caught my attention.

“So, in each CDS, I brought up the fact that the software should allow for patrons to easily exchange their tickets. Most people in the room freaked out — enabling patrons to do this would result in complete pandemonium! And then my dear friend at Theatre Bay Area, Jamye Divila, a box office administrator and guru, sided with me. She said something along the lines of, “We do over-the-phone exchanges for subscribers constantly and it takes a lot of staff time to do this. What if we could automate the process and simply build permissions and restrictions into the software so that it doesn’t allow the patrons to do things they shouldn’t be allowed to do?” Suddenly, the air cleared. There was a collective “Oh, software can do that?” sigh that filled the room. Yes, software can do that.”

This made me wonder what sort of criteria people were using to grant refunds that they felt they could provide good customer service via a set of programmed rules. Often the criteria I use is based on judgments that are very human. The death in the family/grave illness, you don’t really question much and given that people know this, it can easily used as an excuse. How can a computer program know that a rock slide was just reported and traffic can’t get through from one direction? Granted, if the program is designed well, the ticket office could reprogram the conditions to make it easy for anyone to request refunds in this case. There are many occasions when nuanced decisions need to be made and I suppose it will always have to be a human that makes them.

Refunding does take a lot of staff time so I can definitely see the benefit of having the computer handle refunds in the cases when snow storms or sick performers force a cancellation. In cases when you have multiple performances and can have the computer offer an exchange to another performance or show of equal value to avoid processing a refund, there also a benefit. It would certainly also be a boon in extending subscriber/donor exchange benefits to people on a 24 hour basis. Those organizations like my own that have single engagement events, might opt to create criteria where anyone who has purchased an average of X single tickets a year since 2005 will be allowed to exchange because they are clearly loyal.

That raises the question about the whys of exchange and refund policies. Why do we not allow refunds? I imagine commitment is probably one issue. We want people to follow through on their decision to attend, especially in these days when there are so many competing choices. For the record, I don’t think people are waiting until the last minute to buy tickets because of the no refund policy. They are generally uncertain about what to do in the face of so many choices.

It is certainly logical to resist granting refunds given that it is a time consuming process. Selling the tickets can be too, but paying employees to give money back has a certain sting to it. If a computer could process the refund for you, would you be more willing to grant a refund?

I also don’t utilize as monolithic a response to refund requests as I once did. I sense this is a better stance in the face of all the options people have. But is it diminishing the perceived value of what we offer to do so?

Is it time to reassess the practice of refusing refunds given that people seem to be waiting until they are absolutely sure they want to attend? Is there an opportunity to appear more customer friendly by having a more liberal policy given that 90% of your audience isn’t buying until the last three days? My suspicion is that most people won’t have any awareness of your policy until they want to use it so a change won’t generate general good will. If you really go out of your way to loudly publicize a very liberal policy, you may really undermine the perception of your product unless you do it very cleverly.

Limitations on refunds and exchanges are a part of everyday life so I am not suggesting that it should be scrapped for performances in order to meet changing expectations. I am just using the occasion of this post to suggest looking at policies to assess if they are still valid in the context of changing purchasing and attendance behaviors and how they play into your goals for community relations.

Stuff To Ponder: Surveying The Whole Person

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Two thought provoking articles about surveying popped up on my computer today. While you may not think surveying is terribly exciting, I encourage you to read on. I promise there is no talk of statistical analysis.

The first I found on the Createquity blog where Crystal Wallis recounts how the North Carolina Arts Council turned to folklorists from the North Carolina Folklife Institute to help establish an arts council in one of the counties. Once Wallis explained the reason the state arts council tapped the folklorists, it made perfect sense to include them. Then I started wondering why more surveys don’t involve folklorists.

Folklorists, as it happens, are some of the best trained interviewers out there. They also have a particular advantage when it comes to arts research: folklorists are trained to seek out and recognize creativity in all forms, especially that which comes from people who don’t consider themselves “artists.”

From all accounts, it looks like the folklorists achieved excellent penetration into all corners of the community, including many niche populations that revealed the diverse historic and present influences in daily life. They didn’t just identify these elements in the community, but spoke with them as well.

Wayne Martin, Senior Program Director for Community Arts Development at the North Carolina Arts Council, explains the benefits that came from using folklorists in this project.

* Authenticity

“By having folklorists trained in interviewing, we got some really eloquent statements that we were able to quote exactly. The results of the research were in the words of residents, which was a different tone than when other consultants would come in and write about a place. We were confident that the assets they reported on were valued by those in the community, lending an air of authenticity and connection we hadn’t had from other reports.”

Martin’s words came back to me when I read the next article on Asking Audiences blog. Peter Linett talks about a New York Times piece criticizing a Brooklyn Museum exhibit on Plains Indian tipis for being bland, blaming the use of focus groups and visitor surveys in the planning process.

Linett addresses the problem most arts organizations face when asking audiences about future programming. Programming per popular acclamation of committee results in something that is uninspiring to everyone. Foregoing feedback entirely risks appearing highbrow and elitist. Because people are often at a loss to offer suggestions and questions on topics they know nothing about, the best intentions to avoid confusing complexity and condescending simplicity result in a middle of the road product in which “you can sense the oversimplifications even if you don’t know enough to say exactly what they are, and you can feel the flat, pedantic tone.” While Linett makes this observation in term of museum exhibitions, I am sure you can think of similar examples in other disciplines.

Linett identifies a likely source of the problem. (emphasis his)

But that’s because we’re starting with a narrowly cognitive, educative purpose in mind. We’re interested in what visitors know about tipis rather than (for example) what they feel, what they wish, what they fear, what they find beautiful, what they find sad. We’re looking at a single, isolated aspect of human connection to the material. It’s not necessarily the most interesting aspect, but it’s the one that museums, as Enlightenment institutions, have traditionally cared about most.

What kinds of questions would we ask if we cared just as much about emotional, spiritual, social, ethical, imaginative, and physical connections to that material? How would we start a conversation with our audiences about those kinds of engagement…

Upon reading this last bit, I was struck that this was what the North Carolina folklorists were asking of those they surveyed — or at least these elements were present within the answers they were recording. The greater degree of authenticity Wayne Martin observed in the survey results was likely due in part to answers that reflected these aspects of the interviewees’ connections with arts and the idea of a county arts council.

Surveying on an emotional rather than an intellectual level makes a lot of sense. People react to art and even the idea of the arts on a visceral level that they can have difficulty verbalizing. Surveying factual information isn’t going to help elicit a truly valuable response because people often don’t know why they do or don’t like art.

At least once a day when I am reading about arts topics in a newspaper article or a blog, there will be a comment that says “as long as no tax money is used for it…” and/or “art(ists) should support themselves.” I suspect these phrases are just convenient ways for people to get past the fact they don’t really know how to discuss how they feel about the arts. Certainly this inability is shared by those who want to offer praise as well. Asking Linett’s questions about what people felt, feared, admired and pitied might bring more sophisticated answers and avoid that question all performing artists fear–“How did they memorize all those words/steps/notes.”

Art and Fabric Softener, Perfect Together

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Earlier this month, Huffington Post featured an article about a group that is definitely out in the streets serving the community. The Laundromat Project arranges for artists to do residencies at different laundromat’s around NYC. They allow people to make art while they are waiting for their clothes to get done. When I first saw the video below, I mentally smacked myself in the head for never recognizing laundromats’ obvious position as a social gathering place to reach out to people.

You just have to make sure no one has paint on their hands when they go in to take their clothes out! Watch the video because their ambitions for their constituencies are to get them involved with projects much bigger than using finger paints and sparkles. I have a cousin who owns a laundromat in the greater NY area. I sent her information on the group to see if she might want to host them.

The Laundromat Project from The Quotidian on Vimeo.

While we are on the subject of finger painting…

There was an amusing piece in Psychology Today addressing the perennial claim that your kid could replicate the work of abstract artists. A study was conducted in which:

“30 paintings by abstract expressionists. Each painting was paired with a painting by a child, a monkey, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an elephant. The images were matched on superficial attributes such as color, line quality, and brushstroke, and subjects were asked which piece they personally liked more, and which they thought was a better work of art.”

They did some tricky things like obscuring or mislabeling the signatures on the pieces to test if judgments changed. The labels did influence the psychology students but not the art students. Though, “In all conditions, both art students and psychology students chose the professional works as more preferred and of better quality most of the time. (See the attached chart.) And preferences were pretty immune to labels.”

In the images they provide with the article. I could tell the difference between the profession piece and the one done by a child. However, I preferred the one done by the child. I was not alone.

“Even the art students preferred the child’s or animal’s painting over the professional’s-and judged it to be objectively better-30 to 40 percent of the time. And that’s even when they were labeled correctly.”

So there you go, for what it is worth.

Broader Definition Doesn’t Mean Lowered Expectations

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As I was thinking about writing yesterday’s entry on my drive home, there was a part of me that was experiencing some internal conflict. I do wholeheartedly believe in what I wrote at the end of my entry about the arts being a two way street-people in general would benefit from recognizing that many of their activities involve the arts and those in the arts need to acknowledge their arts training allows them to express themselves in non-arts activities and vocations.

This all derives from the idea put forth by the recent NEA report suggesting that more activities need to be recognized as involvement in the arts. What this means for most arts people is that they need to try to avoid the reflex to deem anything that does not approach some Platonic ideal of capital “A” art as not being art. Sorry everyone, time to get a little humble and admit that awful performance or painting you just saw is actual an artistic effort. Real art is a messy process as well you know, though granted some people never make any progress from their failures.

So that brings me to the question that was causing me some mental grumblings – Should we as arts people expect recognition of elite performance?

Now notice, I got what I feel is the source of elitism in the arts, dismissal of perceived substandard work as not art, out of the way before I asked this. What I am asking is if there should be an expectation of discernment between different quality performances. I ask this because there seems to be an anti-intellectualism trend emerging in the U.S. and perhaps other parts of the world and I don’t particularly think this is an area in which the arts should concede ground.

Yes, classical music, ballet and Shakespeare are hard to understand from the outset. But you know, so are the rules of football, baseball, cricket, poker and a thousand other activities. Before I attended my first football game, my father took me down in the basement and drew a lot of Xs and Os on our blackboard to try to explain the game to me. I really wasn’t that clear about the rules when I attended, though I did enjoy the tailgating and hanging out with the other fathers and sons who attended with us. In time, I got a better sense of when to cheer.

It wasn’t much different the first couple Shakespearean plays I viewed. I only caught half of what was going on, but what I did struck me as pretty damn clever and I stuck with it. The first time I took up Drew McManus’ challenge for Take A Friend To The Orchestra month and went myself, I didn’t quite understand or like everything, but there were some sublime moments.

My point is, while it takes a lot of hard work acquiring enough experience and education to attend an arts event, the effort isn’t any more involved in learning the rules for sports. Honestly, I think most aspects of arts attendance are a lot more straightforward than sports rules. Much of the impenetrable obscurity surrounding an attendance experience is due to regular attendees reinforcing the perception to bolster self worth and intimidate others. Read the script, libretto or watch a snippet of the dance on YouTube and you are half way to understanding the actual performance despite the vibes you might be getting from the rest of the audience. You can feel just as out of place at a sporting event. My first exposure to sumo wrestling was when I went to a match by myself a few years ago and people there were shouting things in a language I don’t speak. It took me a little while to figure out the rules, but I loved every minute of it.

But back to the question of recognizing elite performances. As much as people’s activities might qualify as arts participation. There is indeed a difference in quality, between a talented amateur and a person who has dedicated their life to mastering their craft. This is standard that should not loosened as the arts make an effort to do a better job of acknowledging all the ways in which people participate in the arts. My concern is that there will be a move to blur lines and equate artists in a way that diminishes recognition of true ability and talent.

There are athletes that operate at an elite level that few can approach and you don’t hear many people claiming that their high school or college teams are as good as professional boxers or basketball/baseball/football players. You will hear people claim a performance is as good as anything on Broadway. This may cause you to cringe that Broadway should be the gold standard when so many other exemplars exist, but the real problem is that the comment may be charitable at best. There is a perception that hard work over a short term and heart is enough to earn A’s in school or an acting/dancing/singing position. Shows like American Idol may perpetuate this idea, but it is definitely a misapprehension shared by people pursuing arts training and degrees. Regardless of the profession, there are only a few who can operate at an elite level and fewer still who have invested the effort to do so.

I am no more interested in starting a conversation about whether a classical musician is a superior artist to a jazz musician/a rock musician/country musician than I am about debating whether the marathoners and decathletes on the U.S. Olympic teams are better athletes than the sprinters and high jumpers. I do think it is clearer to people that this particular group of track athletes operate at the highest levels than it is that Itzak Perlman does as well. Even if these athletes lose their events, people whose only exposure to track and field is watching it once every four years can explain why they are superior performers. When he is playing a solo at Carnegie Hall, context just as prestigious as being the US representative at the Olympics, can people with a casual relationship to classical music explain what about Perlman’s performance makes him superior?

That is where some of the onus to educate falls. As we know, it takes more than just a single exposure to make someone appreciate the arts. Educating them about quality requires even greater work. Yes, we want people to know the arts are for everyone and everyone is participating in the arts to a greater degree than they imagine. But we have to maintain heroes for them to idolize and they have to clearly know why the person is worthy of being admired. This doesn’t detract from the recognition the star of the local community theatre production receives any more than Major League baseball stars diminish the glory accorded the powerhouses on the local softball team. No one confuses one for the other though.

If Everyone Is Gathered In The Middle of The Road, You’re A Freak On The Sidewalk

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I was catching up on some of the TED Talks I had marked on the old Google reader today when I came across a fun, short talk dissecting what makes a TED talk work vs. what elements people don’t respond as positively. The speaker, Sebastian Wernicke, even created a web site with a TED talk generator utilizing the best (and worst) words according to his statistical analysis.

It’s all tongue-in-cheek, but it also sort of falls into the category of “its funny, because its true” which in some respects isn’t so funny. A similar analysis is used to determine television and radio programming. The algorithms Pandora.com uses to suggest songs you may like based on songs you already like isn’t much different from the analysis many corporate owned radio stations use to determine whether to add a song to their play list. Even in a niche area like Hawaiian music, corporate has to evaluate and approve what gets played locally. I know because I tried.

I know it is not news that people gravitate toward the middle of the road stuff that challenges and excites just enough to keep people engaged but goes no further. Anyone who finds a new format to present this in gets copied. It strikes me that this may be part of the problem the arts face. The definition of the middle of the road has become concentrated around such a narrow point by analysis and replication that areas of the arts which used to be considered more mainstream suddenly find themselves of fringe interest.

I’ll grant that the arts suffer from a certain lack of nimbleness and we are seeing the result of that. I wonder though if the view of the arts as an interest of a fringe population is what has helped to lead to calls for defunding time and time again or for Rocco Landesman’s claim that there are too many arts organizations. There aren’t calls to evaluate organizational effectiveness and allocation of resources. The assumption seems to be that the nation is ill-served by the arts as a whole. Borders bookstores announced they were closing down stores last week. Starbucks did a similar thing a year or so ago and closed many of its stores. People may have said there were too many Starbucks around, but no has said we needed to have fewer coffee shops or book stores. The respective companies evaluated which areas were under performing and made a decision.

I will concede that governments aren’t currently in the business of evaluating arts organizations and so don’t have the data the head office a private sector company would have so they can create the criteria for cutting funding. I am certain most of us would be a little nervous about what sort of criteria might be set. Our return on investment in some areas is likely stronger in some areas than in others and it would be easy for someone who wanted to defund us to focus on our deficiencies. Or worse yet, compare us to the big impressive organization over yonder.

What I have noticed though is that no one who wants to reduce or remove funding has really made it an issue of quality. No one has even decided to call the arts on all the things arts leaders claim their disciplines provide at budget hearings. Which makes me think it isn’t a matter of the arts doing valuable work, it is matter of the arts no longer really being a mainstream concern. There are certainly other factors and it isn’t really a revelation that the arts aren’t as mainstream as they once were. It is a little depressing to recognize that no one is out there saying if we want their money, we need to do a better job at providing a benefit. Andrew Taylor noted this in an entry last week.

In terms of what the answer might be. It could lay in the direction of the random acts of culture program I wrote about the Knight Foundation sponsoring. I followed a trackback to that entry from The Waltzing Porcupine blog and discovered a link to an entry on the Asking Audiences blog that reinforced the idea that flash performances may be part of a strategy for arts organizations to become more nimble and find increased relevancy in audience’s lives. (emphasis from the original)

“What struck me most forcefully, watching videos of Random Acts of dance, poetry, classical music, and opera from around the country, was that the bystanders (well, they start as bystanders but soon become an audience) are obviously experiencing a range of real, pleasurable human emotions. That’s something you can’t usually see on the faces of arts audiences sitting in concert halls and auditoriums.

Why is that? Not just because they’re not expecting an arts attack and are thrown off balance, although clearly that’s part of the fun. I think it has to do with the fact that, in these Random Acts, the performers and the audience are in every sense on the same level. The performers are dressed like you and me. They’re in our midst, not on a stage. We’re together in this crazy business (opera, life).

[…]

But the Random Acts program is more ambitious and, from the looks of it, more dramatically subversive. It almost makes you think the arts have been in hiding all these years, playing it safe in their own cultural caves instead of venturing out to where life is really going on. Hence the feeling of celebration surrounding these performances: the arts are coming out of the closet, redefining themselves as things regular people do, in regular places — no longer “hallowed” experiences set apart from daily life.

[…]

But there is a subtle chipping-away effect. You can see the bystanders’ identities being challenged by their own reactions to the performance: “I’m not a dance (or classical music, or poetry, or opera) person. But wait a second. This is fun!”…

Star of Your Yearbook

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I was reading on Fast Company about a company, TreeRing that makes custom yearbooks for people. Ninety percent of the yearbook is the same as the one everyone else in your school gets, but the other 10% you can customize with your own material. As the story notes, most of the time only seniors get more than just a head shot in the year book and this allows underclassmen the opportunity to add their own pictures to remember their school experience for that particular year.

It got me to thinking that this sort of service might be of value for recognizing donors in program books. There would be a common recognition in all the program books, but an organization could have some custom printed for a donor or a company that had provided support with a specific letter of thanks to them plus a listing of all the benefits they will receive in return for their support. It would likely be too costly to do for every show, but for a season opening event or a fund raiser, an organization might get them printed up.

Something similar might be done in the program books of the average attendee. Again, the cost would probably be prohibitive for most arts organizations and people would probably prefer to receive enhanced material through their mobile devices rather than in print. But, if one was planning to see an opera at a high end venue like the Metropolitan Opera and they were going to keep the program as a remembrance of the occasion, they might order up a program book customized with information they may need to understand the show and their first encounter with opera. It would definitely be a boutique service and the printing and delivery would have to be accomplished on a just-in-time basis, but it could have an appeal.

Hey, Weren’t You In That Play With The Naked People?

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“Does Your Body Turn Heads Like Those On This Poster?” the poster on our bulletin board read. Upon looking closer, I learned that one of the directors participating in our 10 minute play festival was looking for people to appear nude in the appropriately named, “The Naked People Play.” Even though the 10 minute play festival is curated by the director of the drama department in the blackbox classroom/performance space and it is understood that mature themes and content are involved both implicitly and through explicit statements, I was the one people were going to call to complain. Yes, this is why I get paid the big bucks.

I had some discussions with those involved and read the script before I was convinced this show had something interesting to say. I was also sitting in the front row on the first performance where I could watch people’s reactions. The naked actors were positioned in a way that covered their genitalia with other body parts, but were otherwise naked. Other than a brief gasp and uneasy laughter at being confronted by two people sitting naked on stage when the lights came up, the audience of mostly college students and parents didn’t really have any strong discernible reactions, to my relief.

My take on the play was that it was about the nature of pop celebrity. The two naked people sit unmoving and without reaction while a woman discusses her failing relationship with the soon to be ex-boyfriend who has come to try to salvage it. There is a lot of 4th wall breaking while the guy, who can’t keep from reorienting his attention on the naked people, protests that the audience isn’t paying attention to his erstwhile girlfriend either. While she says the naked people, whose presence she really can’t explain, are a metaphor for their vulnerability in the relationship, I took something she said just before leaving to be the real message of the play. She notes that she and the other actor have done all the work and have the most at stake in play, but it is the naked people who are making no effort at all who are garnering all the attention and will be all that people remember when they talk about to show to other people. In fact, she says, not only will people not remember their names, they won’t remember the name of the play and only refer to it as “The Naked People Play.” (Which fortunately is the name of the play.)

I took that as a commentary on the current situation where people who put in the effort to develop solid skills, create well reasoned arguments or conduct stringent research are often disregarded in favor of someone who presents themselves and their views in a form that is the easiest to digest. In the end, I was just pleased that the show was generally well acted, well directed, the nudity well executed and not wholly gratuitous since it was used to illustrate a valid point. (Though they could have faded the spotlights out on the naked people a bit earlier at the end of the show.)

Bidding to Be Bumped

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You may or may not have heard that Delta Airlines has a new process by which the airline allows passengers to bid how much they would be willing to accept to be bumped off an over sold airplane. While I suppose this is an improvement over the old process by which they factored in when a person bought their ticket and how much they paid for their ticket when the airline decided who to bump in the absence of volutneers, the move seems to announce they are giving up any pretense at offering customer service. It seems like they are announcing their intent to overbook and that if you fly with them, you take your chances. Granted, every other airline may hold to the same philosophy and Delta is just being honest and open. I am just saying that it is bad customer service and public relations.

I can’t find who said it, I believe it might be Malcolm Gladwell or Daniel Pink, but I have seen someone cited a number of times in recent months that any policy decision which is made to benefit employees/your company is not a customer service decision. This seems especially the case here as it appears Delta is counting on a little game theory to reduce the amount in travel vouchers they give out by having people bid secretly against each other.

The basic thing I think they need to ask is- does anyone really come to the airport and go through full body scan/pat down at security with the intention of not flying? The fact that there have to be compulsory bumps can attest to the fact people generally don’t. I am sure someone will do an analysis of the most overbooked flights and the best bidding strategies and then go on the Today Show to talk about how someone can fly around the country virtually free if their travel plans are flexible enough. Most of us will be arriving at the airport with the specific intent to fly that day. Offering money doesn’t build a relationship with a customer, even when it is done openly and voluntarily at the gate.

Heck, do people show up to a performance willing to be turned away or have a disappointing experience even though they don’t have to arrive an hour early to get through security? Does getting your money back improve your relationship with a performing arts organization even if the parking was free and easy to find and the cost of dinner and a babysitter weren’t factors in the evening?

Perhaps other performing arts venues have changed their approaches, but even though I know not everyone will show up to a sold out show, I don’t oversell the house. Regardless of whether it is a reserved seating or general admission event, I always have a few seats held back to use at my discretion to resolve problems. I suspect there aren’t many places that would regularly oversell their houses. This is not just because of fire regulations, but because unlike the airlines, many places view performance tickets as a contract to provide a service. You can refuse people entry, but selling tickets you have no intention of honoring can be considered fraud. It is also pretty bad public relations so most of us avoid it even if we have no idea if the state would consider overbooking to be fraud.

My point isn’t so much to pillory the airlines. You could read enough of that over the last 10 years to have gotten your fill of it. I just wanted to provide a reminder about customer service being about relationships. Something that can’t be improved by providing an easier way to inconvenience people. Voicemail putting people on hold did not improve the experience over having a live person doing the same. This is something to remember when you consider emulating the airlines and their fluctuating pricing schemes. Yes, it may provide an improved yield per seat, but if your organization has been working to improve its relationship with the community, a more opaque pricing system is not going to accomplish that.

Talk About Your Org Before Someone Else Does

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Last week Americans for the Arts held a Private Sector salon on ARTSblog where they discussed where the interests of the arts and business intersected. Much of the discussion was very interesting, but one entry by Margy Waller stuck with me for a few days. Part of it was the timeliness of her subject. She cited the recent controversy at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) about a video that included ants crawling on a crucifix. She quoted a commenter on the NPR story about the controversy calling art the leisure pursuit of the elite.

It immediately made me wonder if the commenter was aware that admission at the NPG, like most of the Smithsonian museums, is free and that the gallery contains very accessible works of historical significance from portraits of Presidents, First Ladies, Founding Fathers and Cornwallis’ surrender to Washington at the end of the Revolutionary War to Stephen Colbert. I am not sure what more someone needs to feel that museum has something to offer them rather than deciding it is only in the purview of others. Even with the exposure provided by people like Stephen Colbert and millions of people wandering through the NPG for free every year, people are unaware of the experience the museum offers. The museums really only get national attention when there is controversy and at that point, no one is interviewing the person talking about the benefits of the arts or the thousands of other works hanging in the galleries.

This weekend when the Honolulu Symphony decided to ask a judge to allow them to dissolve rather than undergo Chapter 11 reorganization, (a request which as of this writing, the judge has granted), the 140+ comments people made on the initial newspaper article revealed just how uninformed and unaware about the symphony’s operations people were. I am not referring to people making spiteful comments about how elitist classical music is who weren’t making any effort to learn. There were plenty of them. But there were others conducting conversations in which people were learning about the business aspects of the symphony for the first time.

A commenter with the handle 1SWBP wrote:

“Shamonu–mahalo for the explanation. That makes more sense now. I appreciate your taking the time. My empathy now runs much more deeper and the union stuff makes perfect sense. I guess I never realized how ‘large’ our symphony was. I do regret not being able to get out more and enjoy them more often.”

What made Margy Waller’s post most inspiring however was a video of Cincinnati mayor Mark Mallory talking about the economic benefits the arts have brought to his city in his State of the City address last year. It reinforces the idea that you have to talk about what you bring to the table, and talk about it, talk about it some more and then get others to talk about it when people get sick of hearing you. A little depressing though that there are only 113 views so pass it on if you like it.

Spend More To Make Your Donation Really Worth It

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For the last couple weeks I have been attending films at the Hawaii International Film Festival. I actually don’t go to the movies all that often so seeing a series of movies over 11 days got to be a strain at times, but the opportunity to see a number of quality films is too good to pass up. Of course, I paid attention to the way the festival interacted with their audience.

I became a member at the $100 level this year and received an allotment of free tickets in exchange. Membership also allowed me to enter the theatres first before those who had purchased their tickets singly. This is an option for providing a perk in a general admission setting. Though it required that I queue up about a half hour in advance. They did a good job assigning their movies to appropriate sized theatres in the complex. My friends were in the non-member line and handed me their coats to put on the seats next to me. The theaters never got so full before they were able to gain admission that I had to contend with the no saving seats policy.

There was one house manager that was excellent. I encountered her in a number of films. She had control of the audience of 200-300 people all by herself. She filled the space with her voice and promised ludicrous things to anyone who identified an open seat. It got people laughing and on her side.

Getting back to the membership structure again. Intentional or not, the way the festival structured the membership benefits, it had my friends talking themselves into buying more tickets. In addition to free tickets and getting in first, membership also allowed you to purchase the $12 tickets for $8. The way my friends figured it, if I paid $100 for my membership and got 6 tickets free ($72 value) the membership would be worth it if I purchased an additional 7 tickets (four dollars savings on each one equaling $28, thus saving me my $100 membership.) Of course, by that point I would have spent $156 which I am sure the film festival would have appreciated. That convoluted attempt at reasoning made me reflect on the psychology of pricing and the way people make decisions. I have been reading bits and pieces about the field of behavioral economics as discussed by people like Dan Ariely. Episodes like this make me think I should be paying better attention.

The one other lesson I took from the festival is that even though technology seems to be a threat to the performing arts, it can’t be a substitute for a story. Though it often seems that way.

Julie Taymor’s The Tempest had some great acting, an interesting location (filmed on the lava fields of the Big Island of Hawaii and island of Lana‘i), and an intriguing dynamic created by casting Helen Mirren as Prospero, a role Shakespeare wrote as a male. But the movie had a such a large amount of CGI, some of which seemed to be left over from the psychedelic parts of Taymor’s Across the Universe, it made the movie disappointing for me.

Zhang Yimou’s Under the Hawthorn Tree depended entirely on the story of two people falling in love during China’s Cultural Revolution to make its impact. The movie is based on a true story and was so heart breaking, I was hoping some of the chaste lovers’ interactions had been exaggerated for dramatic effect because it the reality of it would have been too hard to bear. (I am sure the reality was indeed much worse.) I was so anxious that they were going to be found out and their lives ruined for mundane things like the guy buying the girl boots so her feet would be protected against lime burns, I was a little relieved by the sorrowful ending that left the audience in tears because it didn’t involve prison or re-education camps.

There is great importance to a good story told well. This isn’t a matter of comparing an American director to a Chinese director. People are hailing Zhang Yimou for returning to this type of storytelling after big garish extravaganzas like Curse of the Golden Flower which relied so heavily on spectacle.

Twitter Thursdays

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So we have a production coming up that will have six performances. Because one performance is generally poorly attended, we generally offer some sort of last minute rush promotion requiring people to say a silly phrase to get their discount. Since the audience for this show tends to be younger, I thought I might also experiment and make that night a “social media performance.” Essentially, we would have a night where people would openly be invited to do text friends and update Twitter and Facebook status. The only thing we couldn’t let people do due to intellectual property concerns is record or take pictures.

If it was successful, I might consider expanding it to other performances as appropriate. We don’t get a more than 5-10 people commenting about our shows on social media sites so I wanted to see what would happen if we openly encouraged it. Because most classes were required to see the production the previous week, we wouldn’t see too many grouses about being forced to see the stupid show by a professor.

Knowing that a lot of people don’t like to have those around them leaning over a glowing cell phone, I thought having a specific performance dedicated to the practice might help draw those who liked the practice and allow those who disliked it to attend at other times. It wouldn’t guarantee a texting free environment at all shows, but might lead both groups to feel we recognized their needs.

When I brought the idea up at the weekly production meeting, I thought there might be some resistance. My biggest concern was for the actors who might not get the same audience reactions on that particular evening as they did in other performances due to divided attention. In fact, there might be more conversation at that performance as individuals whisper inquiries about what has transpired after everyone else laughs or gasps. I figured there would have to be some discussion of appropriateness and shifting expectations.

What I hadn’t expected was a vociferous and absolute refusal to perform that night from one of the creative team. The individual was wholly opposed to the practice which he felt was an awful trend and inappropriate at a live performance. He was under no illusion that it wouldn’t happen anyway regardless of what we did, and perhaps become more common and widespread, he just didn’t want to be party to an effort to encourage people to do it.

I think this is just part of a set of concerns that has existed for awhile and may become more prevalent soon enough. Do we diminish the performance by validating something outside of the usual practice? For orchestras, it has been projection of video images in support of the music in some way. In theatre it has been stunt casting of television/movie/pop music figures in stage performances. This isn’t just about Broadway casting choice. All across the country weather forecasters and football heroes get cast in the hope that their popularity will bring more butts to the seats. I am not sure what the characteristic corresponding situation would be in fine arts and dance.

In many ways this is different. Those elements, for better or for worse, are part of the artistic product. It may be cheapening the product to dilute it in this manner in the name of getting more attendance. It is another thing to encourage people to ignore the performance entirely to tell their friends to come to the show.

In one of my favorite Take A Friend To The Orchestra outings, Drew McManus takes a guy to a concert in Carnegie Hall. Drew tells him it is okay to be bored during some portions of the performance and I think brings binoculars so he can look more closely at the musicians during these times. Even though Drew says it is okay to be bored and not entirely engaged by the performance, his suggested alternatives encourage his companion to try to remain involved even if the music isn’t finding purchase in his ear.

Encouraging people to text sends the message that is okay to be bored, but encourages them to disengage themselves from the performance entirely without making the attempt to involve themselves in some other aspect of the experience and give the performance a chance to connect and draw them back.

I know I sound like I am siding with the objector against something I proposed doing. But this is really a matter of the two sides of my identity as an arts professional in conflict. From the marketing standpoint, allowing people to tell their friends about their experience can improve attendance. Not just as a matter of simple recommendation, but as a way for experimenters to lead their more wary friends to new experiences.

But it changes the way people are interacting with the arts in some undesirable ways. If people are viewing a performance in terms of what they can report on every few minutes, there isn’t any time given to digest the experience. There are many inveterate arts professionals who aren’t really sure what they thought about a show until the next morning. If you view a performance as a loaf of bread to comment on a slice at a time, you may never see the golden beauty of the loaf as a whole. You decide that Helen Mirren as Prospero is dumb when she first appears in The Tempest and then look for the next moment to comment on, and then the next and the next, you may miss what Julie Taymor was trying to do with the story.

Is this the way we want to encourage people to approach their experience with art? Mediated through the lens of whether what just happened was interesting enough to report to their friends at the expense of missing/incompletely comprehending what happens next? I remember reading about how certain actors in Shakespeare’s time were judged masterful when the girls wandering the aisles stopped hawking oranges. Will the power of a show be judged not by a standing ovation, the value of which seems to have degraded of late, but by the fact people were so entranced that they stopped texting?

Tip You Might Be Able To Use

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With all the discussion of using GroupOn to sell subscriptions and tickets that has been occurring of late, (neatly summarized by Drew McManus last week), my brain was receptive to the mention of a similar service which may be better for both the consumer and the business.

I was listening to the radio when I heard an interview with a representative of a company called Tippr that provides a similar service to GroupOn’s. The benefit for businesses is that they have representatives in every city in which they have a presence who can sit down and structure an offer specific to your company and needs rather than the same arrangement everyone else gets. This includes making sure responses don’t exceed your company’s resources and ability to service them. One of the biggest problems businesses have had with Groupon is being overwhelmed by the number of people seeking to redeem deals. Tippr seems to view themselves as a service that provides growth to businesses rather than a discount deal site.

Which is not to say the consumer doesn’t benefit. Tippr offers three deals a day rather than just one. But the real value comes in what Tippr calls an Accelerated Deal. The more people sign on to deal, the bigger the discount. It starts at 50% but can go up to 90%. Presumably, the business can set a cap on how large the discount grows to.

You won’t see the Accelerated Deal anywhere else. The process was patented by a company named Mercata in the 1990s which went belly up according to Gigaom because, “Online social networking didn’t exist back then, customers were much less likely to spend money online…” Tippr bought the patents on the process.

When I first heard the Accelerated Deal described, I thought it was a system that rewarded early adopters. In my post on GroupOn, I had suggested that with the correct timing, one could use that service to reward people who committed early.

When they first started talking about how Tippr worked, it almost sounded like you could pay $10 for $25 worth of merchandise and then as people joined in the next level of discount would have you pay $15 for the discount which might now be at $30. Except that since the discount was the same for everyone, the person who paid $10 now was getting $30 worth of merchandise. So as the discount increased, the late comers were getting a really great deal, but the early adopters who were driving the whole effort really made out well.

For the business, this could really work out well if you structured the curve of the discount well. Sure, you may end up giving $100 of merchandise for $10, but if the cost of the discount went up to $20 after the first 10 people bought, you limit that exposure. The same if you limit the number of $20 deals knowing the discount will top out at $100 merchandise for $60. If you have a couple hundred people buying at the $60 range when the average sale in your store is $15, it might be good planning. Especially if you know from more modest offers that a fair percentage will return to your store to buy at full price and since they have already paid $60 in your store once, they are inclined to spend more than the normal $15 average.

While that isn’t how Tippr actually works, if more companies enter this market niche, you may see companies using this type of model of obscene discounts for the first responders to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hmm, maybe I should download the patent paperwork….

I am not sure how well Tippr might work for arts organizations. It may make sense for subscriptions over single ticket sales. If earned income is 40% of your budget and you have the potential of discounting your tickets anywhere from 50%-75%, it could be a perilous situation. But it can be absolutely worth it if you decide rather than spend a couple thousand dollars on print and radio advertising, you will forgo a couple thousand dollars in ticket revenue knowing every few dollars lost is a guaranteed audience member. Since Tippr has a representative to sit down with you and listen to your concerns so you can develop a sane plan for how much to discount and limit the number offered, you can also be guaranteed not to incur any more expense than you intended.

Ticketmaster’s New Invisible Pricing Policy

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So I see on Fast Company that a class action suit brought against Ticketmaster has moved forward with everyone who purchased tickets between October 21, 1999 and before May 31, 2010 named as parties to the suit. The suit focuses on the order process and UPS delivery fees notes the Fast Company article:

Plaintiffs assert that Ticketmaster’s Order Processing Fee is deceptive and leads consumers to believe that it represents Ticketmaster’s costs to process their orders, and that the Order Processing Fee is just a profit component for Ticketmaster, unrelated to the costs of processing the orders. Ticketmaster disputes these allegations.

Plaintiffs allege that Ticketmaster’s UPS Delivery option is deceptive because it leads consumers to believe the price they are paying Ticketmaster is a pass-through of the fees that UPS charges to Ticketmaster and that Ticketmaster substantially marks-up the amount it actually pays to UPS. Ticketmaster disputes these allegations.

I had read a piece on the MSNBC website back in September saying that Ticketmaster had created a blog site and were acknowledging that people hated their fees and would offer more transparency about the charges. But that hasn’t been the experience of Herb Weisbaum who wrote the MSNBC piece. He didn’t find out the exact amount of the processing fee until he reached the point of reviewing his order.

And this was after CEO Nathan Hubbard admitted on the Ticketmaster blog, Ticketology (my emphasis),

The problem is that historically we haven’t told you how much you have to pay for a given seat until very late in the buying process. And our data tells us this angers many of you to the point that you abandon your purchase once you see the total cost, and that you don’t come back. The data also says (and this is the important piece) that if we had told you up front what the total cost was, you would have bought the ticket! So by perpetuating this antiquated fee presentation, fans are getting upset, while we and our clients are losing ticket sales.

This practice changes today.

Now with all the changes to programming that probably needed to occur to make good on his promise, perhaps it was too optimistic to expect that would be changed in the first couple days. Or three weeks later when Herb Weisbaum bought his tickets. Or you know, right now 6 weeks later when I tried to buy ticket, clicked on the price details and was told about a $9 convenience fee, but didn’t find out about the processing fee until I was ready to hit submit. True, when it said “The price displayed includes the ticket/item price plus, when applicable, convenience charges, facility charges and additional taxes. Click Price Details for more information.” And that doesn’t mention that there might be charges they may not be telling me about. Silly me for assuming there weren’t unstated charges after reading that there would be more transparency early in the purchasing process. Their new pricing policy is transparent all right, it still remains to be seen.

The other thing that makes me skeptical that Ticketmaster is sincere about changing their ways is that there have only been two entries on the Ticketology blog. The first was in August where the CEO made this promise along with stating Ticketmaster would be offering refunds at select venues. (Which admittedly is a step forward.) The second entry was in September where the CEO talks about how much everyone loves their refund policy.

That’s it.

With all the events for which they sell tickets, all the myriad venues they operate out of and serve, they can’t muster more than 2 entries in 6 weeks? They could have pictures of their employees in and around some of the most famous and attractive venues in the world making you dream of seeing whatever you could just to walk through the doors and sit in those seats.

But all they got is a post about policy changes and another that is sort of self congratulatory about one of those changes. It pretty much screams, “this is a corporate propaganda blog.” Nothing is going to be posted that isn’t vetted by marketing and maybe legal. Ticketmaster protests that they aren’t responsible for the high prices and varied add on charges, but they aren’t doing a very good job of making that case.

Prices So Low, It Might Be Insane!

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There was a fair bit of discussion on Adaptistration two weeks ago about the Joffrey Ballet’s success in gaining over 2000 subscribers in a single day using the GroupOn discounting site. As a theatre manager, I get caught in the debate between making 25% of my ticket price vs. having an empty seat against possibly training people to wait for the deep discount in the future.

One of the best points that I think is made in the comments on the Adaptistration entry is that while you may be making 25% of the ticket revenue, you don’t have the marketing costs usually associated with promoting the show when you work with GroupOn. My assumption is that most arts organizations marketing costs aren’t 75% of the ticket price so there is still a danger of not meeting the other overhead costs you have by using GroupOn, but if the discount is structured correctly, you could end up doing marginally better than you might have and have a fuller house. Looking like you are successful is half the battle in convincing donors and granting organizations to support you.

Still, I was pleased to see Chad Bauman, the Director of Communications at Arena Stage take the subject on. In addition to suggesting that you are rewarding the wrong kind of behavior with these discounts and risk alienating the person who paid full price months ago, he notes that paying less than full price seems to translate into less than full commitment in both renewing and attendance.

“We must always remember that discount buyers behave differently and you must budget for that. Full season subscribers at most organizations renew at a rate between 85% to 90%. However, I have found that full season subscribers that purchase their subscriptions at a drastic discount renew at a much lower rate (around 60%). Additionally, because they spent significantly less amount of money per ticket, the no show rates are also substantially higher, sometimes leaving large empty holes in your house.”

As an alternative, Bauman suggests a slightly more work intensive process of acquiring mailing lists, sorting out your current subscribers and ticket buyers and-

5. Using the exact same deep discount offer you were going to give to Groupon, develop a cheap, but effective mailer and send to your list. Make sure it is an offer that is impossible to pass up, and that the offer leads in design and has a deadline. (note: if you don’t have a large box office staff, then make sure the offer is online only, or you will be swamped). The key is to keep production and mailing costs low–send using non-profit postage and use a discount printer/mail house.

By doing this, you get to keep the entire purchase price of the discounted subscription, and you minimize the possibility that your dedicated and loyal patrons will see that you are heavily discounting late into your campaign after thousands have already purchased.

Taken together, the Adaptistration entry and comments and Chad Bauman’s take, give a pretty good picture of the factors to consider and some alternative approaches to take.

I haven’t used GroupOn yet for personal consumption. In fact, it appears it might not have a lot of traction locally because there is no listing of past deals for my city. Though that could just be a technical matter. I wonder if you can effect the timing of the offer. That way, you can use it in a manner closer to that used by airlines. Not everyone in the plane is paying the same for their seats, but generally it is recognized that those who purchased earlier got a better deal. If you can arrange things so that people need to commit to the performance a couple months out, then at least you emphasize the need to plan ahead. Only problem is that if people don’t show up because their investment is as low as the price they paid for the ticket, you may judge it something of a mixed blessing.

Arts, Feel The Burn. Love the Burn!

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Andrew Taylor has the video of Diane Ragsdale’s address on Arts Alliance Illinois 2010 Members’ Meeting on his blog today. Her speech was titled, “Surviving the Culture Change” and she tackled the general idea that expectations are changing and the arts need to change too. My favorite moment was when she likened the experience of attending the arts for someone who has never really done so to going to the gym. “You have to go on a regular basis before going feels better than not going.”

During her talk she references the fact that large churches often make sure newcomers are greeted and are integrated into a small group that becomes something of a social network for them so they don’t feel like a small fish in a really big pond. I made a similar observation in just the last month.

She also talked about attending performances and then wanting the arts organization to have posted some sort of downloadable material the next day that she could share with her friends. Perhaps she acknowledged the problem and I missed it, but the biggest difficulty with that is arranging for all the intellectual property clearances to pull that off. Doing what she suggests will either take a major shift in how protective IP holders are with their material..or the rise to prominence of people who don’t care to have it tightly guarded. Something that may just happen if people flock to them because they enable audiences to share clips the next day.

Ragsdale speaks on a number of topics over 45 minutes and there is a lot that is likely to interest you, so watch it below. The last thing that grabbed my attention was when she talked about saying you don’t have time to be involved with the arts is just an easy default answer. She points out that people devoted to the slow food movement/sustainable agriculture invest a great deal of time and money hunting down organic ingredients, learning to prepare meals and then engaging in the time consuming cooking process. There is a sense of satisfaction they get from this activity. Part of the trick then is to provide an opportunity to acquire a similar sense of satisfaction in the arts.

N.B. – For a shorter version of Diane’s comments and the text of the prepared remarks, see the links in Scarlett Swerdlow’s comments below. Thanks for the tip, Scarlett!

Diane Ragsdale on Surviving the Culture Change (Full Remarks) from Arts Alliance Illinois on Vimeo.

Gumbo With Your Show

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I have only written about performances we have presented that transcended my expectations artistically (or things that we self-produced). The performance we presented this past weekend was just as excellent as I expected so it doesn’t necessarily fall into that category. However, the ancillary activities we conducted garnered us a lot of audience goodwill.

We were having a Louisiana group, Red Stick Ramblers, perform for us and noticed they did cooking demonstrations. Since their performance would be the first event of the season, it seemed like a good opening event to have the group cook for a small number of people. Theatres often offer the opportunity to have dinner with performers, but having the performers cook the dinner is a little more novel. They would be performing the same night so we didn’t want them to keel over in exhaustion. The chef/fiddler confirmed that cooking for nearly 200 people and doing a show nearly wiped him out once so I was pleased we limited the tickets to 50 people. We still have nice weather so we held it outside and billed it as a picnic. In addition to cooking, the band jammed a little off to the side while the meal was being prepared.

The people who attended were quite verbal with their appreciation for hosting the dinner and concert. They kept telling my boss how wonderful I was and what a great job I was doing at the theatre. (I should add, we weren’t serving any alcohol.) People got to listen and chat with the musicians. Others crowded around the pot and helped stir. If you have ever made a brown roux, for gumbo you know there is a lot of stirring to be done. A good number who attended the picnic knew each other from attending various music festivals in Louisiana so I was pleased there was some word of mouth in operation. I know the event added a couple people to our mailing list.

Of course, we had to expend quite a bit of effort to make a picnic happen in addition to a concert. There was a lot of food to be purchased and prepped prior to their arrival. Potatoes don’t peel themselves, nor do shrimp de-vein and lose their tails on command. Tables and chairs to be set up and broken down. Dishes had to be washed. By the end of the night, you begin to see the wisdom of having things catered.

But as people poured out of the theatre at intermission and the end of the show, still heaping praise on the experience, I realized we had earned a lot of good will with a number of people that evening. Caterers may have done all the clean up, but sometimes that can’t compare to a good home cooked meal. (Letting them in to the seating area earlier than everyone else probably didn’t hurt either.) By the time I got to the pot, everyone had fished all the big pieces of shrimp and other seafood out, but the liquid itself was pretty great tasting.

I am not particularly pushing these guys, though they are pretty easy going and fun. I think there are a few Louisiana/Southern US groups that do this sort of thing. A guy calling himself the Sauce Boss makes gumbo on stage while he performs and then gives a little to the audience. This can be a fun activity for a performing arts center. One of our partner venues in the state is having their cooking demo on a separate day from the concert so they can serve a larger group than we did. I think their dinner event was more fund raising focused.

Yes, We Get Snow Here

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In about five weeks we will be producing a show about the Hawaiian snow goddess, Poli‘ahu. Yes, Hawaii has snow every winter on Haleakala and Mauna Kea. It is upon Mauna Kea that Poli‘ahu and her sisters are said to reside. There are actually a lot of very interesting tales about the goddess and her sister, including a sled race against a disguised Pele, the volcano goddess.

We are working with the same company who created a Hawaiian opera based on the myth of the Naupaka flower back in 2006. One of the things that excited me about doing the 2006 show was that the artistic director was taking an approach to storytelling that was ambitious of itself, but fairly new in relation to Hawaiian culture. I thought the show might provide a good model and inspiration for other groups since Hawaii is undergoing something of a cultural renaissance. Since then we have presented a show produced by a partner organization about Kahekili who essentially played Uther to Kamehameha’s Arthur in the unification of the islands.

I had been pleased to learn that the artistic staff creating Kahekili had looked at the Naupaka performance when they were planning to remount their work created a decade earlier. In our early discussions about the Poli‘ahu, the artistic director talked about the lessons and ideas he took from the staging of Kahekili. The idea that there was an artistic conversation of sorts driving the evolution and development of works happening before my eyes really excites me.

This may not seem like big deal in most places where everyone seems to give homage/steal the best of what they see other people doing. There are strict lines of tradition and orthodoxy in hula so even if you explicitly say you aren’t doing hula, but only hula inspired work, your product must still be respectful. Likewise, anything dealing with royalty or divine entities must exhibit suitable reverence. The production of Poli‘ahu is also integrating Siberian and Yupik Eskimo chant and dance so even more attention must be paid to avoid offending someone.

Of course, we also face the challenge of trying to convince people who are familiar with the traditional performance to take a chance on the unorthodox. We have sold out these performances before so we are leaving the door open to add additional shows. But four years ago, the people who seemed to understand what we were trying to do were those least steeped in the traditional arts. In fact, one of the arts reporters who is familiar with the company’s work asked how this production would be any different from their previous work. I almost blessed the opportunity to speak to someone who was a little jaded about it all because I didn’t have to work overcome the inertia of unfamiliarity before even explaining the concept.

I can tell by the way the ticket sales are going that this show is going to be sold by word of mouth and trusted sources rather than print and broadcast media. There are shows six months down the road that are selling about as well on the strength of the brochure alone. They will probably be 1/3 sold before I even revisit my plan to promote them.

Fortunately, we have been working together this summer to line up the interest and involvement of many of these trusted entities and that effort should bear fruit very soon. Once some of that becomes public and visible, we will start reaching out to individuals in the hopes of getting the phrases “I saw…, I heard…” entering conversations, tweets and Facebook postings.

Ritual And The Arts

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So this weekend I am acting as a master of ceremonies for a wedding reception. The request was made based, I kid you not, my curtain speeches before performances. I guess that teaches me not to give discounted tickets to my friends. They also chose me for my sense of humor. I am supposed to make some humorous remarks about the bride because her sister doesn’t speak English fluently enough to tell everyone how the bride tortured her when they were younger and how devoted they are to one another.

Mostly I agreed because there wouldn’t be a DJ at the reception so I will be spared the two wedding reception songs I hate the most. Celebrate by Kool and the Gang and The Chicken Dance. Also, if I am up at the mic, I won’t have to participate in the catching of the garter!

As simple as this wedding is, there is still a fair bit of ceremony and protocol involved during the reception –more so than the actual wedding ceremony. It made me realize that people have a real need, despite protestations that they want to keep it simple, to have some propriety and procedure involved in order to validate the whole proceedings.

I got me wondering about all the complaints about the intimidating formality of attending arts events. Do people really want things to be as informal as they say they do? When you spend as much money as you do on a ticket, do people have a natural inclination to validate the experience with some sort of ritual to mark the occasion? The problem may not be that there is formality surrounding the arts event, it may simply be that the rules are unfamiliar.

You can easily spend more on tickets to a football game. If you have ever attended one of these events casually either not being a die hard fan or regular attendee, it is easy to feel intimidated by the fact that people have tail gate set ups that rival some restaurants with fiercely held opinions about barbeque.

Or just attend a comic book convention and try to follow the minutiae referenced by die hard fans.

I would mention attending a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time, but regrettably few theatres show the movie any more. I blame the VHS release of the movie for letting people watch it at home and therefore become disconnected from that particularly exhilarating audience participation ritual.

As a newcomer, any of these experiences can be intimidating to those who don’t know the rules. But aside from making fun of nerdy males for having poor social graces, no one says that the die hard fans need to make their area of interest more accessible as is done with the arts. If you want to join in, you have to learn the rules of football and how to hitch your grill to the back of your truck. If you want to hang out at the comics convention, you’ll need to know obscure facts like the first non-clone stormtroopers were recruited in the year 9 BBY. And you know you will need to bring props, learn when to use them and learn some of the common call backs for the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Being a show virgin at Rocky Horror can have more public consequences than going to the theatre or symphony for the first time. So why are people so put off by the thought of going to the theatre? Best I can think of is that it may seem more possible to master the arcane details of these other pursuits, even though it is much easier to study up in advance of attending a performing arts event and fake your way along by keeping quiet and watching everyone else.

Also, knowledge of the arts can often be tied to a measure of your worth as a person. Are you educated and cultured enough? While the same can be true of some sports in many parts of the country, there are friends and family members around to teach you the rituals surrounding the sport in your daily life. This is often not the case with the arts.

So I guess we get back to the old nature and nurture situation. Desire for ritual may be a natural part of being human, but our comfort level in approaching and learning new rituals is a function of what areas of knowledge we receive nurturing in.

Buildings That Say We Want You To Stay

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A hat tip to the Stuff Christian Culture Likes blog for the link to the photostream of Jody Forehand, a regional director for Visioneering Studios which does a lot of church design. I don’t want to get into a discussion about the influence of mega-churchs or the morality of such conspicuous consumption in church buildings.

I just wanted to point out just how theatrical the settings are. Even excepting the toon town design of the children’s worship area of Central Christian Church, I am sure most of us would be envious of the design and technology of each of these gorgeous buildings. Then there is the staffing. There is a lot of work that goes into organizing and mobilizing the largely volunteer staffing for some of these buildings every week.

I know there is a sense of obligation which brings people to these churches and their satellite campuses that people don’t feel toward the arts. The notes on Elevation Church say it is the broadcast hub for three locations serving 7000 people at 10 services a weekend. But as I have often said on this blog, perhaps there is something to be learned from churches. This is a situation where people aren’t charged an admission fee, there is music, but much of the time is spent listening to a person reinterpret a classic text for today’s audience or talk about their experiences. While one of the speakers may have a lot of experience traveling around speaking on the same subject, much of what is said by the speakers has not been extensively workshopped or rehearsed over many weeks. And yet, there is enough investment in the church to construct multi-million dollar buildings.

Even if people aren’t there out of a sense of obligation, there are spiritual needs that are met at worship services, even if they are heavily theatricized, that a main stream play or musical can’t provide. For many it is preferable to hear a single person talk about the life of crime they lead than it is to watch a well rehearsed performance about a criminal that mended his ways. Honestly, I don’t think communities are well served by theatres that only do morally unambigious shows with happy endings. Though there is a price to be paid for that decision.

But one thing that is clear from looking at this buildings is that they were designed to serve the communities. Even though the main use of the facilities is in a large room with theater style seating for hundreds, there are large areas devoted to children and large lounge areas and lobbies to mingle and hang out in. Even though there are multiple services each day, the place isn’t designed to move one group out and bring another group in. They don’t care if people stick around, in fact they want people to stay because that provides an opportunity to get a person more invested in the organization.

That is something of an alien thought for most performing arts groups because their model is based on selling a seat to a different person each performance. If a person wants to buy a seat for the next show, that is great! But if they just want to stick around and take in the whole vibe and experience again, that can cut into the bottom line.

But maybe it is time to rethink this approach, especially with organizations that are focused on serving a specific community. Internet communities create value by having people stick around and interact–the longer the better. Granted, even with the largest internet companies, the question always arises as to how they end up making money providing these services for free. And it is relatively easier for an internet company to add more capacity by buying more server space vs. a performing arts organization trying to expand their physical space as more people decide to hang out and interact.

Finding a model that works for theatres will take some imagination and perhaps even some tact. I have been reading quite a few articles lately that talk about how coffee houses which had been offering free WiFi have started turning it off because people have been camping out at tables all day long while nursing a single cup of coffee. So it isn’t as if theatres would be out of touch idiots for recognizing the need to empty and refill seats in order to stay in business.

Really, when people are hanging around the churches, they probably aren’t returning to the seats in the worship center anyway. There are other areas for them interact with people and many of those people will ask if they are interested in increasing their involvement and commitment to the church. This might involve anything from volunteering in some capacity to joining an affinity group (young parents, young singles, female professionals, etc).

Implementing these sort of programs are within the abilities of many arts organizations. Much of it can be accomplished with the help of well directed volunteers. Though granted many are willing to invest more volunteer hours into their spiritual lives than into the local arts organization. Certainly many find spiritual fulfillment in the arts.

Why Don’t You Want To Talk To Me?

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I often write, as do so many others, about the importance of establishing a relationship with your audience/donors/community. However, according to a blog post on the Harvard Business Review, our customers may not want a relationship with us. Well, not with arts organizations specifically, but rather with businesses in general.

The post, “Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You” begins by asking,

“Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk? Better yet, have you ever waited in line for an ATM machine even though there is nobody in line for the teller inside the bank?

If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, you’re not alone. Most customers these days demonstrate a huge — and increasing — appetite for self-service, yet most companies run their operations as if customers prefer to interact with them live.”

The authors cite data showing that businesses assume their customers prefer live service twice as much as self service, but that customers are “statistically indifferent about this … By and large, this indifference holds regardless of their age, demographic, issue type, or urgency.” The authors aren’t sure why this is, but offer a hypothesis

“…maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don’t want a relationship with companies. While this secular trend could be explained away as just a change in consumers’ channel preferences, skeptics might argue that customers never wanted the kind of relationship that companies have always hoped for, and that self service now allows customers the “out” they’ve been looking for all along. “

But what was really helpful about the article were the comments about customer expectations and when people may prefer one type of interaction over the other. And if you don’t believe me, scroll down and read the comment left by Matt Dixon, one of the article’s authors who says as much as he enjoyed writing the post, he is enjoying the comments more.

The reasons why people prefer not to deal with a live person run the gamut- not wanting to be upsold, incompetence/poor customer service from staff, wanting to take time with decision making, not feeling pressured to justify choices to a machine and having already done research on line.

The plus side for humans is avoiding the maze of choices on voice mail systems or having a problem that doesn’t seem to fit the options provided. The human better not sound like they are proceeding through a menu of choices! And of course people aren’t entirely convinced technology is dependable. Two of the calls I fielded today were questions about whether orders had gone through.

One comment by a poster named Will Kenny caught my attention.

“Much of the problem is how companies have defined “relationship,” and many of them simply meant “some way to stay in contact with the customer, to sell more stuff.” In other words, a “relationship” is formed, in these companies, when the company has found a way to continue talking to the customer.”

I felt a little guilty because often that is pretty darn close to the subtext of what we mean when we talk about developing a relationship with our community. It is tough to get past that because we are running businesses and have bills to pay after all. We probably have much more sincere relationships with our next door neighbors than we do with our customers because we babysit each other’s kids and make chicken soup when someone is sick. But those same gestures create a positive impression about the organizations we work for in people’s minds too. And those type of sincere gestures on the corporate level –including just plain listening well–can help strengthen organizational relationships, too.

Arts organizations are in a medial position in all this. So much of what we produce can be researched using other sources. You can read scripts, watch videos, listen to recordings and read reviews. People can avoid contact with us if they like. However, because of the intimidation factor involved with the arts, we are also called upon to be experts, and compassionate experts at that, who can explain without alienating. We save money by having technology handle information requests well and replace a real person. But we also save by having knowledgeable and skilled people who answer the questions. I think there is something to be said for small organizations where some times everyone ends up grabbing the phone because it forces everyone to be able to speak confidently about matters outside their immediate area.

Remembering It’s Not About You

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I finally got around to reading the report WolfBrown generated following a study of what motivates donors in the San Francisco Bay area, “It’s Not About You … It’s About Them: A Research Report on What Motivates Bay Area Donors to Give to the Arts and Artists.” As you might imagine, it encourages people to focus on the interests and needs of the potential donors rather than the needs of the organization.

Much of it is very interesting. The study revealed five different motivation groups in which donors fell- Values-Driven Intrinsics, Community Altruists, Progressive Artist Champions, High-Touch Social Givers, Supportive Audience; and discussed what characteristics each group possessed as well as the percentage of the audiences these segments comprised. The report included a number of case studies on Bay area arts groups and identified the way the groups’ approaches successfully met their donors’ needs and interests.

Rather than doing a lengthy summary, I just wanted to cite the things that popped out for me. The first was regarding elements that influenced relationships:

Live conversation: Talking directly with potential donors can increase their interest in an artist and his or her project. Direct conversations can also energize the person seeking the contribution….

• Online giving: Two-thirds of FFAMC donors have made donations online, and more than 60% of those who have not given online would consider doing so. …

• Giving time as well as money: FFAMC donors are almost twice as likely to be volunteers with organizations to which they give than are donors to large institutions….

• Contact pre-gift is more important than post-gift: Two-thirds of all donors surveyed indicated that they prefer to have attended an organization’s performances before they make a contribution. 42% of FFAMC donors indicated they prefer to get engaged with an organization personally before they make a gift; only 21% of FFAMC donors suggested they need a lot of postgift attention.

• Write your thank you notes: Most FFAMC donors and donors to other cultural organizations desire timely acknowledgment of their gifts, information about the impact of their contribution and regular notice of upcoming programs or invitations to special previews or openings. There are outliers at both ends of this spectrum – people who want a lot of information and some who prefer very limited post-gift contact. Asking a donor which kind of contact they
prefer is an important part of getting to know them.

I was actually surprised about the pre-gift contact being more important than post gift. I can understand that developing a relationship with an organization is a strong motivator for that initial gift, but it is interesting to know people don’t value post gift contact as much. Which is not to say they don’t want acknowledgment. I wonder if this might be regional or even generational based since so many of the donors in this study were younger than the usual arts attendee/donor. But perhaps our assumptions about what all donors want has been flawed from the start.

The other thing that caught my eye was the way The Shotgun Players survey their audiences. When we have conducted surveys, we try to keep it short but also try to capture as much pertinent demographic information as possible. The response rate is mixed, but generally very light. From the way I read this report, The Shotgun Players asks two questions on a raffle questionnaire, a serious one about motivation or demographics and a silly one related to the show, “During our Rosie the Riveter show, it was “If you were a power tool, what kind of tool would you be?” They get a 85%-90% response rate. It was a sort of “duh” moment for me when I recognized getting the answer to one important question a show from a meaningful number of people is more helpful than getting a handful of people to answer 6-8 questions.

Later in the report were some comments that belied the idea that artists don’t want to get involved in the business end of things. (And even if the idea is true, the sentiments expressed by an artist may provide a challenge to think differently where administrators may sound like nags.) Philip Huang said of his grant seeking experience:

“I liked the matching requirement very much. I would have never done this project on my own, without the match. I never would have changed artistic direction, or changed medium on my own without the endorsement of the FFAMC grant. I believe that artists should chase things slightly outside of their personal comfort zone. For me, fundraising from individuals was definitely that. Having an externally imposed timeline and an externally imposed mandate was good. I think the match was also a motivator for my donors. Once I got clarity about what I needed and I asked for it, people responded to my sense of propose and vision.”

Finally, what I thought was really excellent were instructions in the appendix prepared by Alan Brown on how to conduct the interview portion of the study. I have read a lot of studies over the years and I have never seen something like this included. There was just a very accessible and comfortable element to the instructions. Had I been conducting the interviews, the instructions would have calmed any anxiety I felt. And from various parts of the instruction, it appears Brown was training people who were not professional researchers and may have in fact been members of the commissioning organization.

“Sitting down with ticket buyers and donors and asking them about their experiences sounds simple enough. In reality, few cultural institutions or funders conduct qualitative research on a methodical basis, and many have slipped out of touch with their constituents.”
[…]
During most interviews, a great deal of data is communicated non-verbally, through body language, hesitation, gestures, and intonation. No matter how good the researcher, it’s just not the same as experiencing the interview in person. This is why the exercise is participatory – you’ll be doing the interviewing….With the researcher out of the way, the “filter” between you and your interviewees is gone.”

Some of the instructions are just good reminders for talking to donors and supporters in informal settings.

Good interviewing also requires a good set of questions. Asking the wrong questions (or avoiding the hard questions) is a waste of time. You may feel good by the end of the interview, but nothing is gained. Asking the right questions the right way, however, can unleash passionate, emotional, or even angry responses – which can be extremely informative.
[…]

Which brings us to the hardest part of interviewing – listening. A good interviewer is a good listener. Listening requires a great deal of concentration. A good listener understands what the respondent is saying, and also thinks about what the respondent is not saying, or trying to say…. A good listener hears when the respondent is having difficulty answering a question, and re-phrases the question or illustrates a response drawing from her own experience. “Maybe I can help you with this question by telling you how I would answer it for myself…” Perhaps the most difficult aspect of interviewing is simultaneously concentrating on what the interviewee is saying and also having a sense of where the interview is going – whether to probe deeper or move on to the next question.

Some questions are direct, while other questions involve asking people to tell personal stories. For example, “Can you remember when you felt especially proud of a gift you made?” Storytelling can be extremely useful in getting people to explain important events in their lives and to open up about difficult issues….”

As The Brochure Folds

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I am in the process of having our season brochure designed for the upcoming year and it seems like the way the brochure is folded is taking great precedence over the actual content of the piece. Because of postal regulations about the way items may be mailed the printing houses are suggesting we change the way we fold the brochure. It will be the same size and shape as we had planned, but will require fewer seals to hold it closed when we mail it. Fewer seals means a savings in the printing and mailing.

Except that the way the brochure opens is very important. More to the point, what people see when they first open the brochure is very important. A few years back, the first thing you saw when you opened the brochure were the compelling eyes of an Indian dancer. People opened the brochure and had a real “wow” experience. Last year we used a different designer and she took another approach to the arrangement of the information. Instead of an image, the first thing you saw was text. It wasn’t as ideal a situation in my mind, but the design positioned information in a better place for those who attached the brochure to refrigerators and bulletin boards as reminders. (We get a lot of ticket orders throughout the year from people who keep our brochure.)

The text people first saw last year when they opened the brochure dealt with our flex subscriptions and volunteering. Both areas saw an increase in participation last year proving that I really need to pay attention to what is on that first panel. I will be getting a full size sample to proof from the designer tomorrow. You can be assured one of the first things I will do is figure out how it folds and open and close it many times to determine what our patrons’ experience is going to be like.

I mention all these factors, of course, by way of pointing out the practical application of the various considerations you might employ when designing brochures.

Lies, Damn Lies and Are We Ever Going To Use These Survey Results?

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My Google Alerts informed me that the phrase butts in the seats was used recently in what turned out to be a reprint of a 2008 article on MinnesotaPlaylist. The topic of the December 2008 issue was “Know Your Audience.” In addition to the original piece that brought me there, a couple others caught my attention as well.

The first article, Joseph Scrimshaw’s “Humans With Pulses,” addresses the idea that everyone will enjoy a quality artistic product if only they are aware of it.

“I’m beginning to think that failing to be specific about who you want in the audience presents a risk to both the profit and enjoyment of theater. There is a tendency for artists to believe that any cross section of people will enjoy their work. After all, theater is good. Theater reaches out to people. It’s easy to reason, “This piece of theater I have created is good, so why shouldn’t any human with a pulse enjoy it?” Music is good, too. When I was fifteen years old my two favorite musical acts were Frank Sinatra and Guns N’ Roses. I chatted with my Grandma about one and with my friends about the other. Unfortunately, there was no chance in hell of any crossover.”

Scrimshaw talks about being aware of the specific segments of the community who might be interested in a performance and why. Granted, the venues he seems to work in sound like they are at the smaller end of the spectrum and thus can serve very narrow segments of the population–like knitters. His description of the audience at his knitting-based, murder mystery comedy sounds like the diverse group everyone yearns for-

“We had knitters from 18 to 82, multiple ethnicities, sexual orientations, and genders. The knitting demographic trumped all because they had an investment in the show: They wanted to see if this Scrimshaw guy (who’s supposed to be funny) had anything interesting to say about this craft that is their hobby and their passion.”

Using the topic of demographics as a segue, John Middleton provides an amusing look at the whole idea of scrutinizing demographics in “They, the People”

She and her husband—let’s call him David—went to Mexico last year and have been thinking about a trip to Europe. However, they’ve both lost a lot of money from their 401(k) accounts and what with Nancy’s allergies and recent weight gain and David’s high cholesterol and occasional erectile dysfunction, that romantic trip to the moors of England might have to wait.

“Whoa!” you’re saying. “This is creepy. Does he really know this stuff or is he just making it up?”

I know this stuff. Visit the raw data (PDF) and draw your own conclusions. Remember, demographers don’t lie.

I actually checked out the raw data, and believe it or not the survey actually asked about all these aspects of the participants’ lives. Here is the real stuff to remember:

It’s true demographers don’t lie. But remember, these numbers are simply a tool. They are descriptive. They do not tell us what plays to do or how to do them. They simply allow us to think about Nancy and her life. They remind us that we’re not just asking Nancy to plunk down twenty bucks to see a show; we’re asking for an investment of her time. She has to find out about our production, decide to go, come up with a night she and David are both free, leave work in time to dress, figure out where our theater is, find parking, and so on. Are we making this process as easy for Nancy as possible?

You see, demographers are not soulless, art-killing philistines. We’re here to help.

However, if you still have doubts about the usefulness of demography, let me tell you something: You are not alone. There is a tiny checkbox labeled “terror” in the heart of every demographer. The system of gathering respondent data is filled with imperfections from start to finish. One flawed remembrance here, one inflated self-aggrandizement there—each insignificant on its own, but they start to add up. Then as we extrapolate the data, every imperfection becomes multiplied many times over until we have nothing left but a spider’s web of half-truths and sweat-soaked guesses. We crush this seething mess into solid-seeming charts, tables and graphs in order to give it the look of Truth, but we know: Demographers lie! And if you think this is only true of demographics, you’re kidding yourself.

Filling out the theme of surveying and data is Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw piece, “Doing Data.” What was immediately interesting to me was her story about studying in London and wanting to do her Master’s thesis on whether theatre and dance organizations used the data they collected. Her advisor couldn’t understand why.

“His response was of course all organizations use data, that wasn’t interesting, I should focus on what they were doing with the data or whether they were satisfied instead. He had worked for years with Theatrical Management Association, a service organization for theaters in the UK, and he had started an audience data collection and dissemination program in 1990—fifteen years before I was coming to him with this topic. So he thought my concerns were old news.”

But Sara knew this wasn’t how it was in the US where data was collected, but rarely acted upon. Part of the reason she felt was because people don’t know how to effectively use the information that passes through their hands. This is what she found in the course of her research:

“I was also surprised that less than 50 percent of organizations collected demographic information, as that is frequently needed for grant reporting. The results also showed that over 50 percent of organizations did not consistently have access to their own box office data—meaning that they had to rely on other methods to collect data about their audiences.

Do I have any recommendations? I think using data is simple and complex at once. The most important things are fairly easy: looking at the data, analyzing it for trends, inspecting to see if there are any obvious gaps. However, the key is really using the data to understand your audience—asking who they are, where they are, why they come to you, then using that data to help inform your future decisions. Do you want to compare yourself to other organizations? Do you want to reach people you currently aren’t reaching? Is your audience who you thought they were? Audience data can help to answer all of these questions more honestly.

[…]

…I don’t believe that there is a magic formula or a correct answer. Instead, I think it’s a process of using little pieces of information to help create an overall picture.”

I have to agree that it is both simple and complex to use data. For me it is as much about the suspected dearth of information from certain segments of our audience as trying to accurately process the information I do have. I know our audience surveys aren’t being filled out by a representative portion of our audience because we barely get any completed by people in the 20s and 30s, but we see a lot of them passing through the doors.

Likewise, so many people purchase tickets at the door where we don’t have the time to collect information not directly related to the ticket purchase that the only data I have is from the lesser percentage that plan ahead. I could send reminder postcards to people who make their decisions last minute and perhaps improve my relationship with them. My software tells me exactly what time they made their purchase–if only I knew where they live or who they are!

I don’t want to be making decisions about how to serve all of my audience based on what I know about 20% of them. I figure that is a formula for retaining slightly more than that 20% but that is all I have to work with at the moment. Though that isn’t to say we can’t ask audience members to help us serve them by making note of their account numbers so we can better track simple things like attendance preferences. We may still miss a large segment of the audience, but we will narrow the gap a little and let people know their presence is important to us.

What Do You Do With A Stolen Actor?

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I attended a talk by minor theater deity Richard Schechner last week at an open event for the International Brecht Society Conference. He was speaking about environmental theatre (aka site specific). We just finished a site specific work last month so I was interested to hear what a person who had been doing it for decades had to say on the subject.

There were things he spoke of which matched my original desire for the work but which got scaled back by the artistic team due to various limitations and considerations. The good thing was that one of the people on the artistic team was there listening as well so we will have a common frame of reference for our next event. The talk was scheduled for longer than I thought it would be so I couldn’t stay until the end to ask questions or speak to those friends also in attendance.

I wish I had been able to speak with him because I would have liked to know how he might balance making a performance a more interactive experience with the alienation/intimidation factor of what he was doing. Some of the things he spoke about struck me as “only in a big city like NYC.” He made groups split up on entering so that they would be forced to explore the space more trying to find each other. And if they didn’t like it, they didn’t have to see his show because he had a full house every night. (That option came up a lot as he spoke about the performances he had done.) He also spoke about leaning folding chairs against the wall and letting people set them up wherever they liked without consideration of whether it would be in the way of the performance or technical operations.

My first thought was that while people may crave a more interactive experience, many are already intimidated by the thought of attending as a passive observer. How much worse might their anxiety be if they set themselves up right in the middle of some intense action? I mean I think there is too much contact when I go to a Cirque de Soleil show and one of the performers somersaults right into my lap. Okay, well that is probably too much contact for anyone, but even watching the performers move around the room playing with audience members raises some anxiety that I may be next. Though if you don’t introduce people to the concept, people can’t become more accepting of that type of interactivity. I would imagine setting has a lot to do with it. A performance in a nightclub where you expect to be bumped into and jostled might not cause the discomfort that the same activities in another place would.

The thing that really intrigued me were the rules he set up for his performances. In his production of Dionysus in 69 which is based on The Bacchae, Pentheus has an opportunity to avoid being killed. The actor goes into the audience and picks someone and starts to caress them. If the person doesn’t resist and the actor obtains satisfaction, by his own definition, from their physical contact, Dionysus loses, Penethus lives and the play ends. Schechner said there were only two times that death was avoided. Once, Pentheus ended up in a fairly torrid embrace with an audience member and left with her when they came up for air. The second time, a group of people who had seen the show and decided Pentheus was getting a raw deal abducted Pentheus when he went into the audience. The audience was dissatisfied that the show wouldn’t be concluded and Schechner called for a volunteer who would be fed the lines and actions as he/she was stripped down, anointed with blood and underwent a simulated dismemberment. Schechner said a 16 year old boy stepped forward and you could see him trembling with both fear and excitement. That is one of those powerfully visceral moments that theatre people constantly seek. Everyone is engaged in the moment because even though it is scripted, no one knows what is going to happen.

He told of another instance, I believe with Mother Courage, where they chose 15 people to come up on stage. If you were chosen you could either go up, pass being chosen on to the person next to you or leave the theatre with no recourse to return. But the show wouldn’t continue until they had 15 people. Schechner said one evening the audience apparently decided to test their resolve and the show was delayed at that point for four hours. I would say this is another one of those authentic moments in theatre, though less sought after.

I am sure people have played with the idea of propagating rules for a performance that can end it all in a potentially dissatisfying manner, but it is one of those “new to me” situations which fires the imagination. There may not be anything new under the sun, but parts of this production from 40 years ago might point the way to creating a more interesting environment for people who haven’t considered themselves as theatre attendees.

Please Patronize Our Fine Competitors

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Every week Drew McManus sends out an email to all the Inside the Arts bloggers with tips about enhancing our blogs. A few months back he suggested we not take it for granted that all our readers knew as much about basic elements of the arts as we did. This is a pretty tough thing to do. I know my concern would be that I would end up covering such elementary topics, people would either feel I was condescending or not writing anything of real relevance to them.

With all this in mind, I submit to you the request my landlord emailed me last week. She wanted to take her grandsons on a date to a performance next month at the big concert hall in town and wanted my help finding the best and most inexpensive seats. My first reaction was that I wasn’t sure what I could tell her. I have only been in the theatre about five times before and it was for events entirely unlike the one she wanted to attend. I really couldn’t give her good advice on acoustics or sight lines.

I took a quick trip to the Ticketmaster website and realized her needs were much simpler. The available tickets for the lowest priced tickets were listed as being in the orchestra pit, orchestra seating and upper balcony. The seating arrangement was continental with seat #1 dead center, odds on one side and evens on the other. (Frankly, I think that seating arrangement creates more problems for audiences than it solves.) None of this meant anything to her.

I was able to do a couple quick searches on different performance times and dates before the system shutdown for maintenance and discovered the only orchestra seats were three rows from the back and the balcony seats weren’t much closer. Based on my experience, I figured all the pit seating would be off to the sides which actually wouldn’t be too bad.

I wrote back to my landlord advising her to call or go down to the venue because she would have more control over her seat choice than the internet would allow. I advised her that the evening shows might be less crowded than the matinees and where she might expect the open seats would be found in each of the available sections. I also tried to explain how the seat numbering worked.

There was a lot of what I wrote that I assumed was pretty common knowledge about ticket buying. Some of it seemed pretty obvious and I only included it to provide a context for some of the more obscure bits of wisdom I was sharing. A day later she wrote back and thanked me for my advice saying she needed every bit of it. She expressed her appreciation for sharing some of the details I assumed she already knew. Apparently not that common knowledge. She managed to snag some respectable seats for the price level she wanted.

My efforts are not likely to yield Miracle on 34th Street style results where providing helpful information on my competitor’s products improves my own bottom line. I have been living in this apartment for six years and my landlord has never come to see a show. The best I may be able to hope for is that 10-15 years down the road one of the grandsons will show up at my door having been excited by what he sees next month.

Most of us wouldn’t necessarily welcome getting calls asking for help buying tickets to another place. Even if we weren’t offended by the request, we would lack the time to address such requests. That actually brings to mind a job opening I saw about 5-6 years ago where a performing arts center decided it would become the central information source for everything going on around town, including that of their competitors. Now given that they were a multi-space venue, chances were that something appealing to most audiences would appear on one of their stages so getting the community to think of them first was probably smart. It might not be as wise for a company producing shows with a niche appeal to attempt the same thing.

But if an arts group has a close and trusting enough relationship with their community, they may be able to strengthen it by having a Q&A about topics within their discipline that they don’t specifically represent. For example, a folk art museum might entertain questions about modern art, a symphony might open the floor to jazz inquiries, a theatre company specializing in contemporary plays can address Shakespeare. Of course, they could also give tips on etiquette, dress and seating arrangements for situations with entirely different dynamics than theirs. I’d bet audiences don’t realize their friendly neighborhood staffs have a wealth of general knowledge about their disciplines.

A rising tide may raise all ships, but in such an instance you would be remiss not to note or at least imply how much more lovely and unintimidating things are at the friendly neighborhood arts place by comparison.

Friday As The New Wednesday? Only On Broadway!

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Ken Davenport at Producer’s Perspective recently reprinted a preference survey conducted by the Telecharge ticketing service. Telecharge set out to discover at what times Broadway audiences would prefer to attend shows. The results were pretty interesting. It wasn’t really surprising to me to learn that people would rather have weekend shows start at 7 pm and that people who go to matinees like to eat after the show and those who go to evening shows want to eat before. But I found it interesting that people would rather have the weekday matinee be on Friday rather than Wednesday.

This raises the question about how well do we really know our audience’s preferences. I know that some people in my audience would prefer an earlier start time on week nights. But others need the extra time to wait for the traffic to clear enough to make it over to the theatre. Still, I am sure there is a lot I don’t know about my audience preferences.

Of course, there are other matters to consider. In the case of the Broadway study, one of the biggest impediments to changing the matinee day to Friday is that bus operators and schools don’t want to have their groups in NYC on a Friday night. Davenport notes that shows that aren’t dependent on these groups for their audience base might try some experimentation. Even if you aren’t on the 8 shows a week schedule Broadway is, there are other practical concerns like not overburdening your cast and crew with back to back performances and other time related stresses to consider.

Anyway, there are some observations made toward the end of the report that may just be interesting for their own sake, but could also drive some conversations in your offices.

Reflections On Many Recent Arts Experiences

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I know that my season is starting to wind down when I actually have time to get out and see other people’s performances. We who work in the arts are frequently told that if we want to stay at the peak of our powers, we should always being seeing things. When you are in the middle of your season, you tend to think that you see lots of performances because you are watching a lot of different things.

The problem is, the frame of mind you are in when you watch your own show isn’t the same as when you watch someone else’s. You are thinking about arrangements that still need to be made. You are noticing things the ushers should be doing better and trying to commit that list to memory so you can attend to it during a break. You are generally less free and open to the experience. Some times you just need to go somewhere else and have the experience free of this baggage so you can progress in your own skills and abilities.

Two Fridays ago I went to see a show that contained two pieces from a work being developed to premiere on our stage this coming October. It was a nice time and I chatted with some potential donors. Granted, it wasn’t entirely free of associations with work, but not paying for any part of the production or reception certainly frees the mind of some concerns. A sentiment that one of my colleagues from another arts organization also expressed to me.

This past Friday I went to the First Friday art walk to watch excerpts for the Celebrity Project show that is opening this coming weekend. We were trying to drum up interest in the show but also gauge what did and didn’t work. I sidling up to eavesdrop on people talking about the pieces. Pretty much all our spies overheard comments on the same issues and a revamp is in the works on a couple sections.

Saturday I went to see a Fijian group that had been brought in by the East-West Center arts program as part of the celebration of their 50th Anniversary. Before the show we were told that what we were about to see was the real deal and not something that had been altered to be more palatable for tourists.

This became apparent when the group finished their first song and then went up stage and sat down in a semi-circular huddle and continued to sing–backs turned to the audience–for another five minutes. The audience seemed mostly bemused to be ignored by the performers for that period.

During this, I had a quick cascade of thoughts:

-Hmm, maybe something like this would constitute a new approach to performances.

-No, wait, this is the opposite of the current thinking. Not only is it framed in the proscenium, it moves away from interactivity and getting the audience more invested in the performance. In fact, it is actually more alienating.

-Hey, isn’t that sort of synchronous? They are performing on platforms being built for a show by the father of alienation, Berthold Brecht. Hmm, now that I think about it, someone has probably already staged a show that makes no concessions to the needs of the audience at all, ignoring and alienating them.

-Actually, this sort of activity is probably very interactive and communal in Fiji which is why they are gathered together in a circle.  Since it isn’t designed to appease tourists, we are probably just in the wrong setting to experience it in the correct manner.

Anyway, after about five minutes the men got up and started dancing and the show went on from there. Different groups would get up to dance while those that finished moved back to the circle.

The singing never stopped continuing through the transitions between dancing groups. There would be a momentary pause as they shifted between songs. But the pauses were so brief that when combined with the split second tableaux the dancers would freeze into, the audience was generally uncertain when to clap.

I began to understand why attendees of classical music get so irked by applause at the wrong times. Breaks between movements are about 20 times longer than the minuscule pauses the Fijians took to pose and continue the same dance. Yet someone had to leap in and start clapping. By the third time I was muttering under my breath for people to wait a couple more beats by which time it would be clear if it was the end of the piece or just a designated pose point.

I have to give the Fijians a lot of props for their stamina and breath control. They sang continuously for 90 minutes without amplification. The only time a person didn’t sing was when they were dancing energetically around the stage. But then they sat back down and started singing again never appearing winded by their recent exertion.

The final interesting artistic encounter came today. The lobby of my building has a gorgeous 104′ x 23′ fresco mural by Jean Charlot. It is one of the last pieces he did before he died. Today his son came by to show the piece a muralist from Barcelona. I am very proud of the mural and I want to know everything I can about it so I brought my lunch to the lobby to see if I could learn anything new from Charlot’s son. There were some new revelations. Included were some fairly obvious motifs staring me right in the face I hadn’t recognized.

What I really appreciated was how passionately and eloquently the muralist from Barcelona spoke (either that or the translator was good at embellishing). He spoke of murals being the most primitive form of art dating back to cave walls. He talked about murals being the precursor of movies. He spoke of how in days when literacy was less widespread, murals told stories with sequences of images. However, unlike movies in which the sequence of event is set down by someone else, with a mural you can create your own story by choosing which image you will view next.

It occurred to me later that this activity is already in practice with people creating mash ups of other people’s work. As processing speeds increase in our various electronic devices, perhaps it will become even more prevalent. The problem today is that the person who created the original can become angry if people re-mix their work and share it with others. With a mural, the experience is much more personal within your own head or limited to whatever group you can gather around you to listen as you point out how you have re-imagined the sequence of events.

The Space Is The Thing

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So if you have been following my infrequent postings about the site specific work we are developing, The Celebrity Project, you know that I have reveled in the role of telling people to think big rather than to limit their vision and mused on the wisdom of having a set performance space rather than moving audiences around.

Now we are 10 day out from the performance and plans really need to bow to practicality over idealism. One of the biggest changes since last I posted on the subject in January is that we have really consolidated our performance spaces. Because we are getting rain more frequently now than we did even a month ago, we have moved performances to a more sheltered central area. Most of the show is still outside, but out of necessity, the audiences won’t move between performances spaces because there is less room to maneuver around.

We are still going to split the audience between different stages, but instead of the audience moving to a new stage, the actors will flip between them. There will be some activities they will witness in common in the area between them and a final piece in the theatre. It will certainly be great fun, but the change had us scrambling a little in the administration office.

Our original concept was to have the program book be a large fold out “map to the stars” that people would use to get from stage to stage (though mostly cued by ushers and performance guides). Now that people aren’t moving from stage to stage, the design has to be changed a little.

The other problem is that our press release played up on the star map concept promising people that they would get one but warning that there would be guards present to make sure they didn’t wander off in search of a star’s possessions to sell on Ebay. It was all sort of fun and tongue in cheek. Unfortunately, the release went out before anyone told me that part of the show had been scrapped. I made a slight retraction when I sent out a little update note letting people know they could attend the show without concern about the rain.

Because the action is now in a more confined space, albeit still outdoors, I had to ponder some of the same concerns about traffic flow and crowd control. In our tech meeting today, I asked that alterations be made in the staging of one piece to draw people away from a potential choke point rather than congregating there. I also asked that the cast members guiding people in pivoting to another performance area not wear masks. They can be a little disconcerting and we want to avoid people pausing as they approached the cast member while those behind moved forward to see what was happening.

Now that things are becoming finalized the assistant theatre manager and I will start attending some dress rehearsals to figure out our front of house procedures and evaluate any other problem areas. I will have to remember to get some pictures to post here before it is over.

The Developing Audience Member

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Over the last year, I have written about masterful performances that really affected me: the taiko performance a week ago, the kathak/tap dancing of Chitresh Das and Jason Samuels Smith last year and Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer’s performance last September. There have been a couple times I have brought up the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master your craft.

It occurred to me recently that if it takes that long to become a master, it likely takes a fairly significant fraction of that to develop appreciation and discernment of arts and culture. This isn’t something that really gets discussed enough I think. In fact, with all the studies that have done been, I don’t think anyone has ever studied how long it takes for a person to develop an understanding and appreciation for art. I am sure the subject has been studied tangentially in relation to learning and meta-cognition. But has anyone sat down and approached it head on how much time people need to process and internalize experiences?

What I am really getting at is the oft espoused idea that once someone is exposed to some form of art, they will fall in love with it forever after. The fact is, once may not be enough and it is pretty unfair and unrealistic that we expect it to be. We give performers hundreds and thousands of hours to gain proficiency and yet we expect our audiences to absorb just how sublime our work is after just two hours.

Yes, we have a need to have them fall in love quickly because the opportunities for exposure are so few and audience members becoming fewer. We are doing a disservice to our audiences to expect so much from them. We want them to realize what a great experience we are offering, but don’t really know how to guide them to that place and how long it might take.

If you are involved in the arts, then your discernment and appreciation were probably developing roughly in parallel with your mastery of whatever you were pursuing. Even if you stopped, your critical skills may have continued to improve as you processed new experiences through the filter of your knowledge. You likely did not notice it happening and so assume you always had pretty good aesthetic sense. But I bet you can look back and grimace at all the crap you used to like and produce–some of it was probably pretentious crap too. (Of course, it was still better by half than the stuff kids are listening to today!)

So the more I think about it, the more I believe that becoming the audience member we all want is as gradual a process as becoming the master we want them to applaud. As I referenced producing awful stuff when we were younger in the preceding paragraph, I was envisioning my dismal acting skills in college vs. what, in my foolishness, I perceived my acting skills to be. One of the things I clearly remember from that time was a friend telling me he was really getting into Indian raga. I immediately laughed because it seemed absurd to me that anyone who wasn’t of that culture would listen to raga, (I think that was my classic rock phase), and I suspected he was saying that to get women. But he said he was serious.

But today I have cited the excellence of three events, two of which were heavily infused with Indian music and instruments and the last that included taiko drumming. At the time I was making fun of my friend about ragas, I had no concept taiko existed. Now I am encouraging people to see these performances and it is difficult to imagine people not enjoying them.

So while we don’t know how long it make take to bring someone into a receptive outlook about the arts, what we do know is that Generation X is not experiencing the upward bump in classical music attendance as they move into their 40s as previous generations did. Alex Ross doesn’t think it is too late to reverse that trend by increasing exposure through a lot of hard work.

I will openly admit that at this juncture, my thoughts on this matter are completely at a preliminary stage. This idea is only a day and a half old in my mind. But as I think about it, it seems to me that people don’t necessarily need direct experience in a situation to gradually develop the ability to confidently approach it. You may not necessarily need constant exposure to classical music and sculpture to acquire critical evaluation skills in these areas.

This winter I went to a number of contemporary art museums and I think that I gained the confidence to do so from having built and lit sets for the theatre. Even though I haven’t done so for awhile, all the times I have watched a show and evaluated these elements since then has improved my ability to recognize how certain effects have been accomplished. That in turn gave me the confidence to walk into an art museum and understand a great deal about what I was looking at. Granted, it might not be what the artist and the critics intend me to understand and perhaps that will come later. For now I am deriving enjoyment when I visit.

I had a similar experience with sumo wrestling. I really don’t watch a lot of sports at all. I have seen a little baseball, football, hockey, soccer, wrestling and martial arts in my time. I went to a sumo event a few years ago knowing nothing and was soon enjoying myself. I think the little bits of experience from these other sports provided a context for the sumo bouts. Though admittedly, sumo is pretty easy to understand. None of my past sports experience is likely to be much help with cricket.

I will concede there is a great theatricality in the sumo ritual and my experience in that area probably helped as well. I have tried to watch bouts online since and find those videos which edit out a lot of the ritual unsatisfying.

Anyway, my point is– the skills/tools/abilities needed to appreciate an arts experience isn’t necessarily cultivated solely by exposure to the arts. While one exposure may not be enough, devising a way to nail people’s feet to the floor en masse so they can’t leave won’t be necessary either. There are myriad situations which are improving people’s capacity to understand and enjoy occurring all the time. The trick is to identify these situations and make people aware of the connections. I felt confident walking into a museum because I knew my comprehension of the use of light and shadow in a performance could translate to visual art because I was aware of their use in that discipline.

Engaging Production Blog

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Over the last few months, I have been following Don Hall’s An Angry White Guy In Chicago blog as he discusses the process behind the show he is directing, The (edward) Hopper Project..

Hall directed a play based on Edward Hopper‘s iconic Nighthawks painting. He was inspired by a retrospective of the artist at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper via Wikipedia.org

What has kept me coming back on a consistent basis is the fact that he does such a great job talking about his process and holding my interest when so many production blogs fail to do so.

So I thought I would direct a little attention his way (though he certainly doesn’t need my help) and point out some of the entries that caught my attention most:

-His discussion of how to make a play written by a group work. He acknowledges writing by committee generally isn’t going to yield anything of quality and talks about working through the conflicts he had with people who didn’t agree with his cuts. (And here is a reposting of Time Out Chicago preview piece he inserts into his blog later in which his process is described less charitably. To his glee, it seems.)

-Post about the start of rehearsal

One of the interesting things he does is reposts all the reviews of the work, starting on January 19 (if you followed the link to all the Hopper entries, just scroll up and start reading upward from the review by Joe Stead.) He then reflects, pretty fair and honestly for the guy who directed it, about the review, further discussing what his aims had been.

He acknowledges why some people may find the show difficult or dislike the style in which the show was presented. He says as much in response to one of the first reviews

“I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a sigh of relief that someone appreciated the fractured narrative structure and found it “consistent with the mystique evoked by Hopper.”

His review of reviews illuminates in one place the truth that you shouldn’t attempt to gear your show toward pleasing critics. What each seemed to think he lacked contradicted at least one other reviewer.

-One of the entries I loved the most since I have never heard of anyone else even trying to experience their show in this manner is the entry where he listens to his show being described for the blind. He laughs so hard that he approaches the point of sabotaging his own show.

However, Don does suffer some repercussions for his practice of reprinting reviews whole cloth and receives a cease and desist letter in response. The Chicago Tribune Theatre Editor pre-emptively reminds him of the limits of fair use when he provides Don with the link to the review which appeared in that paper. (I assume he does that with all the blogs and not in reaction to the desist letter.)

While I don’t wish legal action on anyone, I appreciate the reminder about the intellectual property issues and concerns one must be cognizant of when creating art. From what I understand, the cease letter was sent in reaction to reprinting a review from a web only publication. Since he fully credits and links to the original review, the only motivation I can think of for hiring a lawyer is that the advertising revenue lost by not having people visit the site. I am not sure Don was even asked to take the post down prior to receiving the letter. As more newspapers move to web only presences, I wonder if this sort of thing will become more prevalent.

Chatting In The Gauntlet

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For the discomforting performance I referenced in yesterday’s entry, we had set up a seating area on stage so that audience members could sit there and watch the performance looking out at the audience in the permanent seats. The cast referred to it as a gauntlet arrangement and from the tension it evoked, it was probably an apt description.

Can’t Talk Now, I Am Acting
Part of the performance involved the participation of “volunteers” from the audience. These people were chosen from those seated on stage and at one point, they help secure a performer in a bungee rig. An interesting thing happened. One of the volunteers started chatting with the artistic director while the bungees were being flown in about how much he had wanted to take her master class and maybe even take a dance class at the college. Striking up a conversation during the performance was a pretty strange thing to do, but the show was a little strange itself. After the show he spoke with all the cast members and even emailed the group complimenting the performance.

Those that spoke to him didn’t get the sense that he normally had problems acknowledging social boundaries. He was just really excited by his experience and wanted to talk about it.

Encourage People To Text During Your Monologue?
I started to wonder if this might be a sign of things to come as people begin to expect that the ease and immediacy of social media conversations be translated into their face to face encounters. We have already seen the negative side of this with people talking on cell phones and texting during performances. But this incident Saturday night gave me some insight into the constructive possibilities if a performance was well-designed to take advantage of these impulses.

There seems to be a growing practice at conferences that people Twitter about the speaker/panels, often with the hope that someone is monitoring the tweets and will adjust the content accordingly to either address areas of interest/questions or move past the boring parts. This sort of interactivity could be harnessed for a performance to change its direction every night.

But I wonder if there is a way to create an entirely new dynamic between performers and audiences in which a more extensive interaction than the way having people call out suggestions at improv shows transpires. I don’t know exactly how it would manifest, but I can imagine the performers would act to guide things in a general direction and integrate audience members either individually or as a collective resource.

How Sharper Than A Serpents Tooth Is A Marginalized Audience
What I am fairly certain of is that it won’t be a matter of trying to adapt what is already done to include patrons. People may find some successes, but shoehorning your audience into King Lear isn’t going to cut it in the long run. The format may evolve from current practice in stages, but I think it will depart from it eventually.

The success of this idea hinges on the guy from this weekend being a sign of things to come where people are less self-conscious about stepping forward to become involved in social interactions in general rather than an outlier. Given that those who watch YouTube videos far outstrip those who contribute, I don’t expect self-consciousness to ever erode so far that everyone will want to be up on stage.

Fits With Other Trends
It occurs to me that a situation where those with training/greater experience in the arts act to guide those with less dovetails well with other trends we have been hearing about. It would allow Pro-Ams to become more involved and pursue their interests if greater opportunities existed. If arts people became more adept at directing people without arts training in various activities, then perhaps they will gain the requisite skills to drive the creative economy we are told is emerging.

Getting What I Wanted…And Then Some

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From the “watch what you wish for” file. Last Friday I was driving home pondering the fact that far fewer people purchased tickets over the phone or in person than they did even five years ago. As a result we have lost an opportunity to speak with people and gain clues about what their impetus was for coming to the show and what sort of experience they expect. Certainly, we can speak with people in the lobby before the show and at intermission, but both our ability and time frame in which to act on things we learn is impaired. We also aren’t getting information like “my wife asked me to call for tickets for our friends and ourselves…” to learn who it is that initiates the attendance process.

Technology allows us to provide information and an opportunity to purchase 24 hours a day. However, I being to feel that the communication stream between our patron base and ourselves is increasingly one way. We provide the information telling them about the show on our websites, emails and stories but we get relatively little back from our community. If they didn’t buy tickets, we might not get any sign of response at all. Lack of purchase may not necessarily indicate lack of interest, just use of the wrong communication channel to reach people.

So as I was driving home Friday, I started pondering making today’s entry an open letter to our communities telling them they needed to be partners in the communication process to let us know if we were meeting their expectations.

Then came our show on Saturday.

We had advertised the performance everywhere noting that it was for mature audiences only. You couldn’t buy tickets online without seeing an image of the brash performance group making crude gestures (crotch grabbing, etc). We didn’t hide that the show might offend people. We warned people we suspected might be upset by it, including mentioning that it might not be suitable for their kids. We made a similar announcement before we opened the door that night.

Within 10 minutes people walked out and asked for a refund. I gave it without question because there was worse than that to come and I didn’t want to be accused of manipulating them into sticking around. More people walked out at a particularly intense scene. One woman threw her program book down in the row in front of me and criticized the choice of the performance while the show was continuing on stage before storming away from me. (This was the person who had come in to buy tickets and we cautioned against bringing her kids.)

Let me just say at this juncture that the show, while quite unsettling, wasn’t providing an extreme experience. There is far more coarse language concentrated in the first 10 minutes of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. The subjects being covered frankly and with some profanity, were not pleasant ones as you might imagine. I started to realize that people may be confusing being made very uncomfortable with actual obscene acts. Far more violence and sexual situations can be seen on television and in film but there is nothing to mediate the experience when it is live.

I admit that the show made me uncomfortable as I knew it would and I approached the lobby at intermission and the end of the show with some trepidation. But I guess everyone who hated the show had already left because no one approached me with complaints.

-One woman praised me for being brave enough to present the piece. She said of the four people in her group, she liked the show the best. She also said we gave her group something to talk about on the ride home. They were one of the last people to quit the lobby that night.

-Another woman told us that she was amazed at how far the performers went with the subjects. She noted that most of the time, groups were afraid to really commit themselves to fully exploring tough subjects so she was amazed when she realized they had reached the point people usually retreated from were going to just continue on. She said something to the effect of “I have had these conversations in private before and was flabbergasted that someone was saying them aloud for all the world to hear.” She said she was going to blog on the experience. We told her we hoped she would and asked her to send us the link.

-One of our students said his perspectives had changed.

-This weekend the performers forwarded comments attendees had left on their website. The commenters repeated the sentiment about the show giving them a lot to talk about.

I was surprised that we didn’t receive any negative emails or calls about the show over the weekend. The woman who complained to me in the theatre during the performance did call today to continue her criticism. I mostly just listened and let her talk. She told me how the show was inappropriate for the type of organization she perceived we were. Even though I didn’t agree with her about the type of places these shows should be performed; the responses of other audience members clearly showed there was some value in broaching the subject, I didn’t mention any of that.

This was the conversation I was yearning to have with my audiences on Friday. I didn’t necessarily want to have a criticism infused discussion, but I was getting what I had wanted–an audience member telling me how she perceived our organization and what she valued about it.

I really don’t have any desire or ambition to upset my audiences to elicit these sort of conversations from them. I would love for them to say these things to me all the time. But even if I was having rich, meaningful conversations with my audiences all the time, I would still present challenging work that made sense for us when I had the opportunity. Conversations on those subjects are desirable as well.

If I Were David Byrne…

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I just couldn’t help it.

When I started reading the reactions (Theatre Ideas has a good discussion in comments section) to David Byrne’s blog post about how spending on the arts is prioritized (including what sort of arts were getting priority), the first thing that came to mind was a line from Crash Test Dummies 1993 song, “When I Go Out With Artists.”

The song starts out with the singer feeling overwhelmed and somewhat alienated by all the specialized language surrounding art and feeling a little anxious about being asked what he thought of the art. He imagines David Byrne wouldn’t have that problem.

If I were David Byrne
I’d go to galleries and not be too concerned
Well I would have a cup of coffee
And I’d find my surroundings quite amusing and
People would ask me which were my favorite paintings

All I could think upon reading Byrne’s entry was that he actually is concerned about the measure of art, acknowledging that he doesn’t really get Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, though he doesn’t feel he is any less accomplished as a musician for it. I very much get the sense that if Byrne was in the Crash Test Dummies’ hypothetical gallery, he wouldn’t find his surroundings very amusing if one was required to subscribe to tightly defined standards of evaluating art.

Of course, not everything is negative in Crash Test Dummies’ universe. While everyone is pretty snooty, single malt whiskeys get their proper due and greater exposure.

Ah, Proscenium!

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I am beginning to understand why performance spaces were constructed in the first place. I have done some talking in the past about how performances may need to be uncoupled from the traditional performance spaces to have significance to audiences whose entertainment experiences continue to evolve. But now that I am actually trying to do that…. Well, I begin to see the wisdom of having a controllable environment.

I think the problem is that we are trying to offer people a traditional experience in a non-traditional space. I have moved performance operations to remote locations and run outdoor music festivals so I am familiar with the logistics of having performances in places that were not designed to accommodate them. Some of that will help me make arrangements for our site specific production, the Celebrity Project. In the long run though I think committing to taking art out of the traditional spaces is going to require a concomitant effort to change expectations about where and how arts can be experienced. (And yes, it certainly can be argued we are trailing so far behind in that respect, we may not be in the position to shape and define these expectations.)

But in some ways, I think we are hobbling ourselves by cleaving to old practices. Our concerns revolve around getting enough lighting equipment to different outdoor locations. People will move between different locations, but will stay there for a long enough time that they may want to sit so we will have chairs set up. But the chairs need to be set up in a way that has good sight lines but doesn’t congest the movement of people between different areas.

I am starting to think that next time maybe the site specific show needs to make more use of the site specific features like natural light. The Greeks might have been big on outdoor theatre, but they knew the natural features were of great importance. But with a show dealing with celebrity, moments in the limelight certainly can’t be neglected. Modern technology helps us cheat a little and put shows where we want them rather than needing to places with natural sound reinforcement.

Part of this is because are somewhat slaves to audience expectations. If we have a show as an event rather than just a happening on the street, people have a certain expectation of length to motivate them to make the drive. Comfort and accessibility for aging audiences during that time period need to be addressed. They will also want to see and hear everything that is going on from whatever vantage point they are at. All these considerations shape the staging and seating arrangements for our performance.

Most nights we only need to direct audiences to locations that meet these expectations once a night (we assume they can find their way back pretty well after intermission.) For this project, we will need a good plan for doing it multiple times over the course of an evening. So even as rehearsals start today, we are starting to plan. Though not too carefully too soon as I am sure the layout will change a number of times before the show opens.

Remember, The P Stands For Personal

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I had a situation emerge related to personal URLs (PURLs) that sort of put me off. I have written about these personalized web addresses which allow you to provide a customized experience for the recipients before. I hadn’t really thought that someone might invest the time and expense of creating PURLs and not provide a customized experience. When I had such an experience, I began to question the motivation and wasn’t entirely pleased with the direction my thoughts turned.

One of my alma maters sent me a brochure saying “Joe, a lot has change since X” and provided a URL that incorporated my name. (To protect my vanity and the specific school, I am not going to mention the date of my graduation.) This created an expectation that when I visited there would something like then and now photos of the campus. Perhaps there would be one of those lists noting that kids born the year I graduated have never known a world where different situations didn’t exist. Maybe there would be a really detailed list of all the weddings, births, promotions and general accomplishments of my graduating class.

But other than my name, it was a really, really, really generic web page. The alumni page on the school website is actually more engaging. One of the links to a virtual tour lead to a YouTube video which had been removed by the poster.

One of the prominent features was a donation appeal letter by the student featured in the mailer. So at this point I start thinking maybe the whole PURL set up was to measure which alumni were engaged enough with the school to use the PURL so the school could follow up with additional appeals. This made the whole set up seem calculated and not at all personal.

I actually emailed the alumni office last week saying all of the above. I told them that the PURL created an expectation of a personalized experience and when it did not emerge, I began to suspect the worst. I have yet to hear back from them.

Quite honestly, I think I could have made the same mistake. Even if I hadn’t wanted to necessarily follow up with a donation appeal, I could imagine using PURLs to see what percentage of lapsed donors and ticket buyers were still engaged with my theatre. I probably wouldn’t create a PURL with their name but rather embed a unique code in a link they clicked through on or have a situation where people would self-identify. When we are convinced we have a way to more accurately reach and measure our intended constituency, I think it is easy to overlook the recipient’s perspective and expectations upon receiving a communication.

So my advice here is that if you create an expectation of a personalized experience, whether it is in person at your performances or via an online presence, you should be perceived as making an effort to provide it at the very least.

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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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