Audience Relations

Simple Gestures, Big Results

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Knowing that my customer service skills can be lacking, I try to keep my eyes open for practices that answer customer needs well. One of the cardinal rules for relations with anyone, be it your boss, relatives, friends or patrons is to try to anticipate the needs of the other person.

Last week I came across an instance of what to do and wanted to share it with the readers. It is a small act, but it can make a big difference.

I have been emailing back and forth among two other alumni members of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Emerging Leadership Institute about some activities we want new and alumni members to participate in as part of our attempt to enhance the value of attending the institute.

One person emailed the rest of us a draft letter addressed to the new and returning ELI members alerting them to conference sessions and social events where concerns members had would be addressed. The format was pretty simple with a listing of the event and the time. It looked fine and I replied to that effect mentioning that I would have to research one session a little more because the title made it look interesting.

The next email I received had a revision of the previous letter. This time each session listed had a full description of what the session was all about. What had impressed me was that she took a cue from my comment that I intended to research a session that sounded interesting to provide me the information herself. Obviously, she didn’t do it for me alone. If I was curious, others would be as well.

Actually, since I am praising her rather than criticizing, I don’t mind mentioning her by name- Laura Kendall, Assistant Director of Community Engagement and Learning at the Lied Center in Lincoln, NE. There, now maybe she will get a raise.

You would naturally expect someone with a title like hers to make that connection and act on it, but it is a rarer quality than you would think. It is easy to enter a mindset that the community you are engaging and educating is only your own and that you only need to do so within the context of programs planned in conjunction with performances.

And maybe she doesn’t pick up on the unspoken messages all the time either. However, I emailed her back last week praising her for recognizing that additional information would make a better letter. She said I made her day so I will bet she will be more conscious of these cues in the future regardless of how well she noticed them before.

Anticipating and answering needs people didn’t really know they had is what will help set an experience at an arts organization apart from other experiences. People are able to gain the information they want more and more easily these days. Global positioning directional units were one of the hottest selling items this Christmas season. But information sources like GPS units only provide what you ask for and not only is the information sometimes incorrect, it also lacks wisdom and discernment to advise well.

But this is only one example of good practices arts organizations should be embracing. Keeping alert for everyday occurrence that can adapted and applied to become your standard procedures is the real point of this entry. Often it isn’t that you come across a new practice as you encounter something that makes you question if you are doing it well enough.

TOILETS SWIRLING DOWN A HOLE TO CHINA

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I won’t get in to why I came across this website. Suffice to say, some people in the office got sick over the Thanksgiving holidays. The anti-diarrhea medicine maker, Imodium A-D had a fun little feature on their website I hadn’t expected to find– a way to locate public restrooms in the U.S.

They are careful to assure you that you won’t need the map while using their product, but it is always good to know where you find facilities while traveling. You don’t want to depend on the map because it isn’t comprehensive. Imodium grabs the information from a site called The Bathroom Diaries which allows people to rate restrooms across the world. People don’t tend to share those experiences as much as say, hotel stays.

It wouldn’t hurt if you were like the Portland (Oregon) Center for the Performing Arts and had people evaluate your restrooms and point out that there was a long bench that was handy as a changing room. Or perhaps you could write something yourself. In searching for a city that had an arts organization reviewed, I noticed that every Old Navy across the country was listed as “A great place to go” and every Starbucks included the observation that “The pleasant Starbucks barristas are cool. You should buy a drink but if you don’t, they won’t mind. Ask for a key if its locked.” Apparently these corporations thought mention of their restroom situation was important enough for their business to have someone place a duplicate entry for every one of their locations. (Or at least up to a point. None of the branches of either company in my city are listed.)

There are many websites out there at aggregate obscure data into interesting data that clever arts organizations can use to their benefit. For example, this site answers the question it asks “If you dig straight down, where will you end up?” Fortunately, I never completed that hole in my backyard. I just discovered I would have ended up in the ocean about 3000 miles southwest of Perth, AUS. instead of China. It turns out, the most direct route to Beijing is through Argentina.

This handy “hole through the world” map can be employed during shows like Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing where a character begs to be sent on an errand to the Antipodes in order to avoid someone. It can be fun (and educational) to use the site to illustrate for audiences that if he had traveled to the literal antipodes of Messina (where the play is set) or London (where it was originally performed), he would have ended up in the ocean east of New Zealand.

Unfortunately, with two exceptions, there is no place in North America that corresponds with land at its antipodal point. It would be fun to point out the location opposite the theatre where the show was being performed. The antipodes of North America is the Indian Ocean. Only the State of Hawaii which corresponds to Botswana and a corner of Namibia and a point in the Alberta plains just north of Montana which corresponds to the French and Southern Antarctic Lands match up with any landmass.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t fun to learn that you can’t reach China by digging in your backyard. It can just be interesting to have a connection with a people and land opposite you. Maybe you can research the best public restrooms in their city! (Though they don’t flush in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere.)

The real moral of this entry is that it can be useful to bookmark websites with goofy, but interesting information because you can never tell how it might be useful in creating a connection with your activities.

What Do You Expect?

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A dance professor at my school is trying to revive a dance festival which has, for various reasons, not been produced the last four years. It is an invitational event that has included pieces from college, high school, community dance schools and professional companies. Essentially, groups have ten minutes to show off their best stuff and wow the audience.

As the professor was following up on the invitations, one of the group leaders told the professor he didn’t want to expose his students to our audiences whom he likened to football crowds. The professor was shaken so I followed up with the group leader to ascertain whether he was referring to all our audiences or just the audiences at this event and to discover if his comments were misinterpreted.

It turns out that they weren’t. He felt the audience, which is generally comprised of family and friends of the dancers, needed to be educated about how to behave. He admitted he didn’t know how that might be accomplished as lecturing folks before a performance on decorum would probably make people resentful.

I don’t know the history of dance enough to know if formal performances (as opposed to dancing at festivals and balls where attendees participated) were once as boisterous affairs as theatre and classical music performances apparently were. If there is a trend away from passively sitting and watching, will enthusiastic reactions become the norm in the near to mid future?

Arguments for quiet can be compelling in situations where physical harm may result from distractions. I was speaking to a teacher of middle and high school students who said that it took her school five years of explaining why loud reactions might result in people getting hurt.

Others have pointed out the obvious solution. If you know the audience is going to be boisterous months in advance, you plan a program that won’t imperil the dancers. Since no group has much more than 10-15 minutes to perform, it isn’t as if they would run out of safe material.

The festival format is less structured than the typical dance performance so some degree of informality is to be expected. Not to mention that in an attempt to fill the house, the dancers are strongly encouraged to promote the show and sell tickets so the audience is going to be family and friends virtually by default.

More importantly, there is no guarantee that students of any performance discipline will always be plying their craft in front of refined audiences. Exposure to a “misbehaving” group can be a valuable one. The festival audience may be loud, but they are supportive. There is no guarantee that this will always be the case, either.

The comment about the festival audiences stirred up some emotions and discussion about audience expectations, both what performers should reasonably expect from them and what they may be expecting of their relationship with the performers. I have a feeling the conversations are going to continue for the next couple days as the discussion spreads among colleagues in an attempt to sort thoughts and feelings.

Bigger Source of Pain- Hamlet vs. Dentist

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They have probably been advertising it for a long time now and I have been ignoring the content of the commercials but I just realized that Oral-B has been promoting one of their tooth brushes as having an on board computer.

My first thought was that the thing was going to report my brushing habits to my dentist. (Avaunt thee, traitorous dental implement!)

The truth is, no matter how high tech his practice becomes in its information collection and interpretation, my dentist won’t be terribly effective if he doesn’t have a good bedside, or in this case, spit sink side, manner. Sure he may have lots of patients. But dental visits are the cause for a lot of anxiety as it is. If his manner is a contributing factor to people delaying a return visit, he is failing the purpose of his profession. (Unless we are to believe Little Shop of Horrors)

I am sure you see where I am going with this. I can easily foresee that the use of RFID chips or something similar in the future will allow arts organizations to capture more data about audiences, especially those who walk up to a performance, than ever before. But performing regression analysis on the demographics attending each performance is only going to go so far in cultivating relationships with people.

It certainly isn’t going to tell you a person is on crutches and should be diverted to another door before they arrive at the main entrance so they don’t have to hobble all the way back. A well trained house staff will tell you these things after they have attended to the patron’s needs.

Dentists have a much higher barrier of entry to overcome than arts organizations do. (Though some people have a better sense of what to expect at the dentist.) There is no reason not to aspire to providing the same level of reassurance and comfort that a dentist office needs to extend to make their customers comfortable.