Check out this visual storytelling piece on CityLab about the history of libraries in the US. As arts and cultural organizations struggle with the question of inclusion of under-represented communities in our spaces and on our boards, the efforts people to which people went to gain access to books may provide some insight into the issue. Especially given that the meaning and value of libraries today is no longer directly tied to books. (In fact, 150+ years ago the role of libraries was already expanding beyond a source of books.)
It is generally acknowledged that Ben Franklin started one of the first libraries in the United States, but it was privately funded and by invitation which excluded white women, blacks and poor people. According to the graphics in the CityLab piece, this just lead those groups to form their own clubs like the Phoenix Society of NY established to, (I love this phrase), “Establish Mental Feasts” and “Establish Circulating Libraries for the Use of People of Color on Very Moderate Pay.”
Women’s Clubs were established along the same lines, and when they excluded Jewish, black and working class women, those groups created their own clubs.
I think I may have mentioned before that I currently work in a historic theater that has the dubious distinction of possessing one of the best preserved Jim Crow balconies in the country. A few blocks away from us is a theater established by a black business man to serve the black community due to the lack of access in my building. Reading about a parallel history in libraries is pretty relevant to me.
Before Andrew Carnegie started to endow libraries across the country, many of these library projects were already embracing social issues like literacy, anti-lynching, and suffrage. Bookmobiles were bringing books to rural communities. Even with Carnegie’s funding and the expansion to public access, according to the graphic, it was women’s clubs that helped drive the construction of libraries to the point where having one was a staple of every community.
Even still, there was a lot of exclusion by race:
As I was reading through the CityLab piece, I saw echos of many of the questions arts and cultural organizations need to face regarding their identity.
For example, at one point the stated purpose of many libraries was to promote “desirable middle class values.” While this isn’t as explicitly stated by many arts organizations these days, it is present quite implicitly.
They were pretty particular about excluding someone with (perceived) expertise from the group as including such a person either led to people deferring to the person’s expertise or feeling too intimidated to contribute to the conversation. The researchers drew comparisons with book clubs, but encouraged arts organizations to facilitate the formation of such groups since people rarely organize themselves. (emphasis from original)
Deborah (DX): “It’s really nice to talk about it afterwards. Rather than just sort of taking it all home with you”.
Bridget (IKG/BCMG): “[…] at the contemporary music thing, it was quite nice to sit down at the end and talk with other people about the experience [agreement] because otherwise you sort of wander away with a couple of inane comments, and sort of forget about it. But sitting down with people is an interesting way of reflecting –” [Doris: “It can add to the experience.”]
This deepening of experience through conversation was also evident in the group discussions themselves, as participants wrestled with their own responses to an event and sought insight and reassurance from others in the group. They emphasised that the particular kind of discussion they had enjoyed in the audience exchange was not the same as the conversations with performers sometimes offered by theatre or concert providers, where Doris (IKG) felt she “would feel a bit intimidated about saying something not terribly deep and meaningful – but this doesn’t intimidate”.
Some of the commentary the researchers recorded was very interesting to learn. I was trying to figure out how an arts organization could go about capturing this data without being there. An obvious answer is to record it if that doesn’t impact what people are willing to say. Otherwise, asking someone to take notes. Among the comments the researchers recorded were ones about the marketing materials organizations were putting out.
Even while the new audience members struggled to find a vocabulary to talk about their response to a concert, some felt that the language being used by the arts organisation also failed to capture their experience, with too much of an emphasis on analysis and not enough on the emotional impact of the music:
Bryony (E360A): “For me that description of tonight doesn’t make it sound very exciting – it makes it sound a bit rubbish!” [laughs].
Adam (E360A): “Especially the Martinů one, like that was my favourite one, and it says it ‘exhibits the flute to great effect’ [laughter] but to me it was the violin that was really interesting, and the variations in the music”.
These sort of discussions can be helpful for new attendees because they can validate the reactions they have. Some of the discussions revolved around feelings of guilt about being bored or having one’s mind wander. Someone else in the group piped in defending her “’right to daydream’, expressing the view that if the music encouraged her into personal thoughts and memories, this was in itself a response to the performance and not one for which she should feel apologetic.”
Okay, so I promise I am not seeking out articles that discuss the problems with depending on quantitative metrics to determine effectiveness and value. They just keep falling into my lap. This one is via Dan Pink and is kinda fun to read thanks to some animations.
The piece in The Hustle has us follow the “career” of Otis has he moves from being a cashier to sales to online advertising to programming to surgery in order to illustrate how the use of quotas and efficiency metrics permeates every industry and every profession to incentivize gaming the system in order to generate the best appearance.
But Otis came to learn that metrics weren’t inherently bad — his bosses had just failed to grasp two important economic principles:
Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” and
Campbell’s Law: The more a metric is used, the more likely it is to “corrupt the process it is intended to monitor.”
He realized that when his performance was measured with a specific metric, he optimized everything to hit it, regardless of the consequences that arose. As a visiting professor at the London School of Economics told him, improper targets could:
Encourage “gaming” the system (e.g., bagging free groceries)
Incentivize the wrong aspects of work (e.g., writing trivial code)
Erode morale (e.g., writing clickbait)
Harm customers (e.g., turning away critical surgery patients)
And so, Otis decided to start his own company — a company where metrics would serve their true purpose: To motivate and align. Efficiency, Otis finally realized, isn’t just output; it is the value of what is produced.
If you think about the measures being applied to non-profit arts and cultural organizations like overhead ratio, economic impact, test scores, etc and pay attention to what organizations are doing in order to meet those metrics, you will probably start to see behaviors that conform to those listed above.
It could manifest as massaging numbers in financials and research; chasing funding that doesn’t align with mission and strains capacity; superficial efforts that check desired boxes; pursuit of a narrow segment of community rather than a focus on broader inclusion. I am sure readers can think of many examples from their own experiences.
In the last six months it seems like I have been coming across a lot of stories about how museums tours are presenting alternative contexts for collections. Back in May I was writing about Museum Hack which is providing tours through a somewhat pop culture lens.
Since then I have come across a number of stories about efforts in Philadelphia Museums to provide tours from a number of different perspectives, including those who have lived and played around the ruins of ancient civilizations.
Last week I saw a story in the NY Times about a pilot program University of Cambridge has launched that to provide an LGBTQ+ perspective on their collections. The university recruited Dan Vo who had already established himself as a figure in alternative museum tours to help them develop their series.
His Polar Museum tour highlighted artfully carved whale teeth known as scrimshaw — a way of occupying male whalers so that they didn’t have sex with each other, Mr. Vo said — and items from indigenous communities that showed how fluid gender roles were in some Arctic populations.
Tours like these are important for the future of museums, Mr. Vo said in an interview later. “It makes them relevant,” he said, “and people want to see themselves reflected in collections.”
The article quotes Alistair Brown, policy officer at the Museums Association who says museums
“are looking at radical ways of reappraising their collections,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re either inviting critical and diverse voices into the museum, or at least welcoming their presence if uninvited.”
Some of the tours aren’t as welcome as others. The NY Times also highlighted Uncomfortable Art tours given by Alice Procter which highlight the imperialism and colonialism underlying museum acquisitions. She has received death threats because promotional images on her website label Queen Elizabeth I as a slaver and Queen Victoria as a thief. The British Museum created a tour series of their own in response to Procter’s which highlights the specific provenance of objects in their collection.
Examples like these (including the ones I cited in earlier posts) can provide a real sense of the potential inherent in museum collections and the type of things people are curious to know. It also highlights the type of details arts organizations should know about their offerings whether it is museum objects or works being performed.
It has only just started to occur to me that this is a result of the development of Professional-Amateurs predicted 15 years ago and has become something that can both challenge and threaten arts organizations and greatly enhance the work they do.
In my post yesterday I referenced the difficulty non-profit arts organizations have with conducting outreach activities that have relevance to communities. I and others have also frequently written about the problems with the way arts organizations approach relations with underserved communities, especially communities of color.
The honest truth is, a lot of non-profit organizations find the work they are doing has poor resonance with the communities they hope to serve. I was reading a piece on CityLab today about an organization that is trying to plant trees in Detroit. You would think this is a pretty non-controversial endeavor, but many neighborhoods in Detroit had a narrative of distrust in which trees figured prominently.
But as I read the article, I felt like so many phrases and terminology were exactly the same ones that crop up in discussions about how arts organizations need to frame their approach and relationships with underserved communities.
For example,
Elliot Payne, described experiences where green groups “presumed to know what’s best” for communities of color without including them in the decision-making and planning processes.
“I think a lot of the times it stems from the approach of oh we just go out and offer tree plantings or engaging in an outdoor activity, and if we just reach out to them they will come,” Payne told Taylor.
Cut out the references to tree planting and outdoor activity and it immediately sounds like a conversation at an arts conference without even needing to insert arts terminology.
Then there was this passage:
However, from reading excerpts of Carmichael’s interviews with TGD staff members, it’s clear some of the tree planters thought they were doing these communities an environmental-justice solid. After all, who would turn down a free tree on their property, given all of the health and economic benefits that service affords? Perhaps these people just don’t get it. As one staff member told Carmichael in the study:
You’re dealing with a generation that has not been used to having trees, the people who remember the elms are getting older and older. Now we’ve got generations of people that have grown up without trees on their street, they don’t even know what they’re missing.
How many times have you been part of a conversation where those advocating for the value of the arts talk exactly along these lines? – People don’t understand the value of the arts and the benefits they afford. The younger generation isn’t used to attending/participating in arts experiences. They have grown up without arts educational classes or opportunities to attend performances, they don’t even know what they’re missing.
What was really interesting to read was how residents of neighborhoods and the city were operating from two different narratives about trees. A researcher was surprised to learn that nearly a quarter of the 7500 residents the tree planting organization approached rejected the trees. When the researcher spoke to residents, they told her about how the city cut down the elm trees that used to line the streets after the 1967 race rebellion so that it was easier for police to conduct helicopter surveillance. The city, on the other hand, said they cut down the trees and sprayed them with DDT from helicopters in order to stem the spread of Dutch Elm disease which threatened during that time.
It was this conflicting narrative that motivated residents to reject the trees. They were already well aware of the benefits of trees in providing shade, improving home values, filtering air pollution, etc., it was just that they didn’t trust the motivations of the city.
This made me wonder if people were more aware of the benefits of the arts than we believe and there are narratives that inform a sense of distrust. Ideas about what the arts are and who they are for may comprise a large part of that narrative.
There was also a far more practical consideration fueling the rejection. People felt someone else was deciding what should be planted and where without having any conversations with the people who would have to live with the trees —and rake the leaves and branches that fell. The city doesn’t have the resources to trim the trees or remove dead ones that threaten the fall so the residents would bear the consequences.
What I could really empathize with was that The Greening of Detroit, the organization planting the trees, probably felt like they were doing a lot to have conversations and involve the community in a discussion about the tree planting. In retrospect, there were missteps in their approach and they didn’t dedicate enough staff resources to outreach. However, they held community meetings and placed door hangers, both of which discussed their plans and their commitment to maintain the trees for three years following the planting.
Unfortunately, none of these things made the right connection with the residents but I could see a lot of arts organizations in similar circumstances feeling that making the investment to take those steps was doing a good job by residents.
It seems like the really, really retail, one-on-one interactions that were part of the researcher’s follow up was what was needed to make residents satisfied they were being heard.
One Detroit resident whom Carmichael interviewed for her study told her: “You know what, I really appreciate you today because that shows that someone is listening and someone is trying to find out what’s really going on in our thoughts, the way we feel, and I just appreciate you guys. And maybe next time they can do a survey and ask us, if they would like to have us have the trees.”
Unfortunately, her post came in the middle of the holiday production crunch so I only got around to reading it this week.
A couple of really interesting things that caught my attention in this latest post. First was the counter-intuitive value in leaving past events posted on the website. I always want to get the clutter of old information off my website so it is easy for potential attendees to find the information they want. While this is probably an important practice generally, for the California Symphony, leaving that information available helped bolster their credibility. She writes,
1) As the season progressed, this list got awkwardly short, especially for an orchestra like the California Symphony that doesn’t perform as frequently as our bigger-budget peers. Participants told us they couldn’t believe we didn’t perform more often, and it looked even worse when only a few concerts were on that list. 2) As they were trying to “get a sense of what we’re about,” as they said, they couldn’t really tell based on only a handful of upcoming shows
Another thing is that they started running digital ads in both English and Spanish. The Spanish ads have a link to a Spanish language landing page.
That pilot test did lead to a measurable increase in Latinx households, and so we decided to put some money behind developing the new site in both languages. Now, when we run ads in Spanish, we can link to landing pages in the same language, another step in making this important segment in our community feel invited and welcome here, as well as give them the information they need to join us.
This was not new information to me because Aubrey has been reporting her success attracting a broader audience segment on Twitter for a few weeks now.
While she didn’t report on the outcomes of the changes, her discussion of how they adjusted some of the website sections to be outwardly focused rather than inwardly focused gave me something to think about. For example, instead of “Education” as a navigation header they are using “Off Stage” with subheaders focused on kids, adults and artists. They also changed “Support Us” to the more outwardly oriented “Your Support.”
A lot of the work they did was in the area of providing background information both in their program book and website. Their program notes are more about the background of the artists and music than the technical details of the music. They have song clips and information drawn from Wikipedia available online for those who want to know more. They changed their writing style to short bullet points rather than paragraphs.
Aubrey provides the rationale behind these changes based both in research and user feedback so it is definitely worth while to read this recent post.
I recently experienced a confluence of reminders that not all experiences with arts and culture result in positive responses people anticipated. I am not talking about works of poor quality or offensive works. Friend of the blog Carter Gillies sent me a link to a National Institute of Health case study on Stendhal syndrome where people have averse reactions to cultural overload.
In this particular case, a man visited Florence, Italy and
…he experienced a panic attack and was also observed to have become disorientated in time. This lasted several minutes and was followed by florid persecutory ideation, involving him being monitored by international airlines, the bugging of his hotel room and multiple ideas of reference. These symptoms resolved gradually over the following 3 weeks.
Four years later, he revisited southern France, this time with no intention of returning to Florence. However, visiting this area reminded him of his trip to Florence and triggered another panic attack followed by persecutory beliefs, again involving monitoring by the airlines and which settled within a few days.
Prior to this I had heard of Paris Syndrome which is a similar experience, but seems to be particularly associated with Japanese visitors to Paris. I was likewise aware of Jerusalem Syndrome in which people have religious oriented obsessions when visiting that city.
In the process of reading about Stendhal syndrome, I came across Lisztomania which was an actual thing 200 years ago and not a catchy song politicians video taped themselves dancing to while in college. (As I said, it was strange coincidence to be planning to write about it and then see the song title pop up in the news related to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)
Lisztomania is described an hysterical reaction people had to listening to Liszt perform. If you read the Wikipedia article on it, people have gone to lengths to differentiate it from Beatlemania by noting that Lisztomania was seen to be more of a medical condition and considered contagious. Take from that what you want, but it is interesting to read the entry and the various implications people of the time made about their respective constitutions enabling them to resist the “disease.”
Finally, I wanted to point out an NPR story I heard on New Year’s Eve about the horror people feel when they experience the impulse to crush and destroy cute things. People studying this situation basically say it is the brain’s attempt to keep us from being overwhelmed by our reaction to cuteness.
The study found that for the entire group of participants, cuter creatures were associated with greater activity in brain areas involved in emotion. But the more cute aggression a person felt, the more activity the scientists saw in the brain’s reward system.
That suggests people who think about squishing puppies appear to be driven by two powerful forces in the brain. “It’s not just reward and it’s not just emotion,” Stavropoulos says. “Both systems in the brain are involved in this experience of cute aggression.”
The combination can be overwhelming. And scientists suspect that’s why the brain starts producing aggressive thoughts. The idea is that the appearance of these negative emotions helps people get control of the positive ones running amok.
With all these stories coming to me in a short period of time and seeing the commonalities, it occurred to me that people in the arts and culture industry need to be mindful that experiences we provide can be overwhelming. People with a long history of interactions with culture aren’t immune and perhaps aren’t any better suited to dealing with the feelings they experience. Deciding it is logically impossible that you are unable to process a negative reaction given your experience and expertise may create no less anxiety than for someone who is having their first interaction and is at a loss to understand what they are feeling.
NB – Meant to include the following learning points from the NIH case study near the end of the post:
It is well known that adverse life events can detrimentally affect mental health, but it is less appreciated that intense experiences, that would otherwise be considered positive, can have similar effects.
[…]
It seems that “pilgrimages,” be they religious or artistic, are particularly likely to induce such psychological reactions.
There has been a fair bit of evidence that people are not generally aware whether the place they are having their entertainment experience is a non-profit or for-profit business. An experience appeals to them and they participate. All those efforts invested in curating a balanced season of offerings may receive less recognition and appreciation than you think.
Leaders of cultural arts organizations tend to perceive an entertaining experience to be one that is simplified and dumbed down compared with the educational experience they offer. Participants have a much broader definition of what constitutes entertainment.
Surveying perceptions of memorial sites like USS Arizona Memorial, Arlington Cemetery, Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the September 11 Memorial & Museum, Dilenschneider’s company, IMPACTS found that memorial sites,
Considered as a collective, they are generally viewed as entertaining! People find these sites relevant and meaningful – and thus find them entertaining. This is the opposite of what some internal industry leaders believe “entertaining” to mean!
In general, cultural organizations are seen as entertaining entities. That’s great news because entertainment value motivates visitation while education value tends to justify a visit. Moreover – as we’ve discussed – entertainment value is the single biggest contributor to overall visitor satisfaction.
If you recall my posts on the most recent CultureTrack study, one of the most consistent motivators to participation across all disciplines was to have fun. Dilenschneider has presented information before from other sources that reinforces this result as well.
Later in her post, she presents another chart showing
“Memorial sites are perceived as both educational and entertaining, again challenging the notion that “entertainment” is necessarily vapid, empty, or meaningless.”
and makes the following important observations:
1) “Entertainment” means engaging
A synonym of “entertainment” is “engaging.” The opposite of “entertainment” is disengagement. Why would cultural organizations be disappointed to learn that they are not disengaging? I posit it’s because we’ve created and promulgated the baseless cognitive bias within our industry that entertainment and education are opposing forces, and that one comes at the expense of the other. In reality, they must work together to lead a successful cultural organization.
[…]
2) “Entertainment” is not the opposite of “education”
As shown above, cultural organizations are generally seen as both educational and entertaining! An idea that one value necessarily comes at the expense of another is generally unfounded. If it were true, these numbers could not both be high at the same time – and yet they are!
[…]
Entertainment value and education value are not the same thing, but their relationship much more closely resembles that of partners than of enemies. They may benefit by being considered individually at times, but they do not necessarily function independently.
A great deal to think about in relation to how we frame our thinking about what we are doing.
One thing I misinterpreted was her assertion that “…entertainment value motivates visitation while education value tends to justify a visit.” I read that as something viewed as entertainment impels people to participate while something viewed as educational is seen as an obligation — you have to go to the opera because it is good for you.
But when I watched the accompanying video (below), I realized the perceived educational value aligns directly with the motivations found in the Creating Connection initiative. Desire to see and learn something new and different and wanting a child to learn/see something different are part of the perceived educational value.
After long correspondence (both in years and text length), I finally had an opportunity to meet with Carter Gillies over Thanksgiving weekend. On at least one occasion I dubbed Carter “potter-philosopher,” because he has studied and practiced both disciplines.
Carter has been a big proponent of measuring the value of the arts on their own terms rather than their instrumental value to stimulate economies, raise test scores, cure cancer and bring world peace.
We spoke and debated for many hours on these ideas. However, the really challenging conversation was the one I had with myself days later. It is a conversation that millions have had and never concluded satisfactorily.
Before I left Carter’s house, he took me back to his studio and told me to pick out whatever I wanted. I grabbed a bowl that caught my eye and Carter discussed why he liked the glaze he applied to it, pointing out the subtle golden flecks that dotted different places.
A few days later he wrote me thanking me for visiting and hoping I enjoyed eating out of the bowl.
I was mortified. How could I eat out of that bowl? It was a piece of art that represented the culmination of our relationship to this point. I had it prominently displayed on a table in front of my sofa.
But then when I thought about it, I have two mugs given to me by one of the directors of the art museum back where I previously lived in Ohio. I drink out of those all the time. In fact, I am drinking out of one of them right now, totally unplanned. To leave them in the cupboard and not use them would be a small betrayal of my relationship with her, implying they were not good enough to eat out of.
I have endowed both the bowl and mugs with value derived from my relationship with the makers. My conclusions about what the appropriate treatment of each are completely opposite and pretty illogical.
I am not even sure the question here is “what is art?”
Does mundane and common use diminish an object’s identity as art while preserving it in an untouched and stationary state except to dust it impart greater identity as an object d’art?
The makers are both in my mind and heart when I see and use these objects which is part of the value for me. Does sentimentality contribute or detract to the objective value of these items?
These are questions that can be addressed forever. But this also illustrates why it is so much easier to talk about the value of art in terms of instrumentality. Instrumental measures are things people can grasp on to much easier.
The big problem, however, as Carter points out is that we never really try to introduce the conversation with policy makers about why we value the arts. It can be really easy to talk in a passionate way about why you value the bowl on your coffee table and the mugs in your cupboard as well as the stuff hanging on your walls.
Yes, there is no facile way to empirically say the bowl is more valuable than the mug. There is a whole lot of complicated factors that contribute to record breaking auctions at Sotheby’s .
People value art and creativity in their lives for reasons that have nothing to do with what they can sell it for or enhancing their test scores.
The first step is opening your mouth to mention that the true value of a creative expression is divorced of these measures and potentially even divorced from another person’s perception of that creative expression.
While I was at the Arts Midwest conference in November, Joanna Taft, Executive Director of the Harrison Center for the Arts, spoke about the “porching” culture that had developed in Indianapolis and spread across Indiana.
Taft focuses on an active return to traditional uses of porches– just sitting outside and chatting with neighbors and passersby.
I will be honest when I first heard about this, I wondered if people were trying to turn hanging out on the porch into a thing by verbing a noun. According to Taft, the practice is outside the experience of so many people that she and her collaborators created step by step guides and videos to help people get organized.
What I did appreciate was that Taft and the Harrison Center recognized that porching on a weekly basis might end up excluding some neighbors for various reasons and made efforts to find solutions.
…it became evident as we monitored social media posts and attended neighborhood association meetings that many longtime residents were being left behind. The neighbors participating in #PorchPartyIndy were sorted by their financial ability and energy level to host a porch party. We wanted to make our porching initiative more inclusive.
…we realized the time had come to not only encourage residents to host their own parties, but for the Harrison Center to intervene and host porch parties for some of our neighbors.
[…]
Before the party, we organized a group of Harrison Center interns to visit the homes of residents we had met through neighborhood association meetings. At those meetings, we noticed that some of these neighbors expressed strong opinions and concern for their community and this convinced us that they had powerful stories to tell. We queried them about their favorite foods and colors to ensure we catered to their porching style.
For instance, we discovered that a neighbor named Miss Terri loves purple, so we arrived with a table for her front yard covered with a purple tablecloth, and served purple carrots, purple chips, and grapes. Miss Jimmie turned 101 and was tired of the same old cake, so we put candles in her favorite dessert, a pecan pie.
It is no news flash to even casual readers of the blog that I am involved with Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection program to build public will for arts and culture. Last week, they ran a webinar just to present the basic research and program. In recent months they have been featuring two case studies where people talk about how their organizations are putting the research and messaging into practice. This session was aimed at giving people more complete information about the program.
As much as I have been a fan boy cheer leading the program, what I really appreciated about the webinar last week was the number and type of questions people were asking of the presenters.
It was an indication of just how serious people were thinking about implementing the research that webinar attendees were questioning the research methodology. I think people in arts and culture field are wise to scrutinize whether a new approach to doing business is a popular fad soon to fade or has some rigorous thought behind it. They have little enough time and resources as it is and don’t want to waste it on initiatives lacking substance.
What I really appreciated was when one person, identified as Zi Li, asked about case studies on failed programs because they were interested to learn why those program failed. My friend Carter Gillies often mentions the problem of survivorship bias where you only study the successful cases rather than gaining insight from those that failed.
The music on the Awesome 80s radio station is always going to be better than the music today because you are comparing the cream that rose to the top and endured the last 30 years to all the music being performed today, both good and bad.
If you are new to the concept of Creating Connection or just want a refresher, take a look at the video from the webinar which includes all the questions and comments made that day.
A couple years ago I was serving on a grant panel which made me aware of an arts and culture organization that was running “breakfast raves,” for lack of a better word.
They were getting people together on Friday mornings around 5 am to have a dance party and breakfast before they ran off to work. I thought it was a great idea, especially for getting people who didn’t identify as night owls engaged and meeting new people in the community. Not only that, it was another way for performing arts organizations to use space that was usually only occupied at night. I thought it would make for a great study to see if people who attended morning raves were more productive and creative when they went to work that day.
In the past week I came across a story in CityLab about Daybreaker, a company that is doing much the same thing in cities around the world. The writer, Sarah Holder, attended a session in Washington DC that involved yoga and then a silent dance party (because they meet outdoors and can’t blare music in early morning hours.) Looking at the Daybreaker website, this is pretty typical – work out, followed by a dance party, followed by breakfast. Apparently they will also have performances.
They reach a pretty wide range of people:
….target cohort as “adventurous” people who “share the common interest of waking up at 6 a.m. to dance.” Most attendees are between 25 and 45 years old; a fact sheet provided by the Daybreaker team says the demographic breakdown is 68 percent women, 32 percent men, and “100 percent human.” Forty-seven percent are single.
The Daybreaker people also see themselves as an important conduit for building connection:
And they, like a surprising percentage of the crowd, were middle-aged: Kia was 42.
That’s significant, because, if loneliness is a nationwide epidemic, it’s particularly pronounced among older people, says Agrawal, based on observations she made on her book tour. Almost a third of Americans over 45 are socially isolated, according to AARP. “Many people in their 60s and 70s came to my book event to share their feeling of loneliness,” Agrawal said. “And how—to quote their words—invisible they feel.”
Of course, the sense of loneliness is shared across all generations so gatherings like these are great for everyone. Given that people in their 40s, 50s, 60s grew up on rock and other high energy music, there may be an unmet potential in programming morning dance parties aimed toward those demographics. I am thinking, in part, about the ubiquitous “dancing grannies” in China who are up at the crack of dawn participating in the activity for both exercise and socialization. (And often drawing the ire of younger people upset that their elders are blaring music at 5 am.)
When I first saw this story, I was interested in the concept as a way for arts and cultural organizations to diversify their offerings and help remove perceptual barriers about what it means to enter a creative space. However, one part of the article emphasized the fine line between sincere and insincere motivations for creating community when revenue is involved.
Note the bad association the word “community” has gotten.
But finding zen by paying to party with strangers on the roof of my office building (conveniently, I also work in the Watergate) seemed a little painful and inauthentic. Agrawal says she understands. “The word community has been kind of bastardized already,” she told me. “It’s just another word for ‘users’ by marketers.”
But with Daybreaker, she’s tried to cut through the bullshit. The “belonging” the brand creates isn’t a commodity, she says, nor is it a coincidence.
Seth Godin made a post earlier this week comparing Persistence with Consistent wherein he starts with the statement “Persistence is sort of annoying.”
He goes on to talk about the way in which consistent is the desirable opposite side of the coin,
Consistent with your statements, consistent in the content you create, consistent in the way you chip away at the problem you’re seeking to solve.
Persistence can be selfish, but consistency is generous.
And the best thing is that you only have to make the choice to be consistent once. After that, it’s simply a matter of keeping your promise.
In this context, persistence seems to be about performance of a specific action whereas consistent is policy. In this sense persistence is approaching a challenge in the same way until it is worn down to the point you can pass. Whereas consistent is more about dedication to finding a way past that obstruction.
While both approaches never falter in achieving a singular goal, the latter entertains options regarding the methods by which this can be accomplished. In fact, consistent may be better equipped to recognize that surmounting the barrier isn’t the goal but rather getting to the place beyond the barrier and therefore there may be no reason to engage with this particular barrier at all.
What actually drew my attention to Godin’s post was that last line about keeping a promise. Working in the non-profit arts sector is often such a struggle that we feel like we can only survive with dogged persistence. Perhaps what is really needed is a focus on consistency.
If our promise to the community we serve is to provide a certain experience, a persistent approach may keep you locked into executing an approach and methods which have decreasing relevance. A determination to offer a consistently valuable experience can lead you to place more importance on needs of those you intend to serve rather place importance on the methods by which you accomplish it.
Think about it this way. If you want to keep a promise to provide excellent customer service do you do the same thing today as you did five years ago? Do you use the same approach for small groups as large? Kids as for elderly? Film audiences as for Broadway musical audiences? 2500 seat theater as for 150 seat theater?
Sure you will still make bad choices, but a consistent approach to great customer service is likely better able to take the differences of time, place, environment and expectations into account than a persistent approach.
If you are like me, Emerson’s line, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” might have come to mind when you first saw the term. In that context consistency has a negative connotation. After reading and pondering Godin’s post I wondered if it might have been better said as “a foolish persistence.” Though I learn toward consistency is a better word choice.
It should also be noted, Emerson never mentions what the characteristics of wise or non-foolish consistency are. Consistency is not necessarily negative in and of itself. Persistence isn’t either, but it does have implications of a single-mindedness that can quickly become problematic.
You may have noticed I didn’t make definitive claims about persistent being one thing and consistent being another. Ultimately, of course it isn’t about what word you use as much as what practice you embody.
When I saw there was going to be a similar effort in Macon, I signed up to participate on my second day on the job here.
(Just a little disclaimer, the major funders of the local On The Table, the Knight Foundation and Community Foundation of Central Georgia, fund my organization.)
Instead of a discussion occurring in a single place at a set time, there were dozens of discussions occurring across the community with the first ones starting at 7:00 am and the last one beginning at 8:00 pm. The topics covered everything imaginable, including some which were specifically intended as forums with government officials. People agreed to act as hosts in parks, private homes, business offices, libraries, churches and community centers. In total, there were over 1500 seats available around the community.
While the general concept emerged from the idea that community bonds are forged over meals, the organizers were empathic that “It’s not about the food.” I imagine this was in part to prevent those who volunteered as hosts from feeling obligated to provide a gourmet experience for dozens of people. Also so that participants weren’t focused on attending the sessions with the best food choices versus the most engaging topics.
Other than wanting to be part of the basic experience, my motivation for participating was to get a sense of the community to which I had recently moved. The first session I attended was at the public library where the topic was “Preserving Ethnic History.”
Readers of this blog know that I often talk about people desiring to see their stories depicted by arts and cultural organizations. Since I helped Hawaiian artists tell their stories through performance, I wanted to learn if similar opportunities for partnerships might exist in this community.
As much as I was interested in the topic, I as concerned that the subject might have too much niche appeal to attract many participants. I need not have worried as the table quickly filled and needed to accommodate some chairs at the corners. The conversation that emerged was very interesting as the group had to tease out the differences between culture, ethnicity and identity before we could really define what it was exactly that was important to preserve.
A comment made by a woman who has taught manners and etiquette all her life cut across all subjects and seemed particularly applicable to arts and culture practice. She said her mother always emphasized that she and her siblings were to always consider themselves as sharing something rather than giving because both parties gained from sharing whereas one party always lost something in giving.
The second session I attended didn’t have an announced topic and instead employed some of the prompts provided by the On The Table organizers.
The third session was lead by a group that is trying to educate people about the state budget and how it is allocated. That conversation was focused largely on where the priorities of the society should be rather than talking specifically about the state budget. Those materials were available as hand outs to review at home.
Below is the prompt card from the session yesterday. If you were interested in doing something similar, you might check out the Chicago Community Trust On The Table website. I had read somewhere that they started the effort which has been replicated elsewhere. Certainly, you might want to search out the websites of the different communities that have hosted these events. Every community is different so some iterations may match your community better than Chicago’s.
I have been extremely busy preparing for the sponsor reception capping off a $3 million facility renovation at my day job. (It really well tonight, thankfully)
I wanted to briefly call attention to an article Michael Rushton cited about the literal prescriptive use of the arts. What caught my eye was the following sentence:
Doctors will each be able to assign up to 50 museum prescriptions over the course of the pilot project.
Rushton goes on to point out the problems inherent in making this comparison:
My problem with these sorts of stories, though, is not just the hyperbole. It’s about what it says about “art”. The story has not one single mention of any work of art these doctors’ patients might encounter at the MMFA (save for a photo indicating there is a Calder retrospective currently on exhibition). The actual works have no importance, it’s just “art”, or, as they say, whatever. The museum is a place with hallways and rooms that have framed pieces of canvas with paint on them hung from the walls.
And we can see why this is the approach, for what if we did pay attention to what art? What happens if researchers discover (as we know they ultimately will) that impressionist works increase the viewers’ levels of cortisol and serotonin more than do works of post-expressionism? That landscapes generate more hormone secretion than abstract works? Will doctors then start to advise the museum on its curatorial policies? Will the arts council?
[…]
…A part of the hidden, evil genius of “economic impact” studies was to embed the claim right from the start that the actual art itself doesn’t matter at all, so long as money is spent on it. But I don’t see how advocacy on health benefits, or empathy, or entrepreneurial creativity, would be able to get away with that.
I was recently listening to an episode of This American Life on church planting and found it a little strange to be listening to people use venture capitalist terminology to describe efforts to build new worship communities as “target the unchurched.”
Reporter Eric Mennel mentions attending a conference where the conversation is
“…about “kingdom return on investment.” Or “evangelistic networking” is one I’ve read, or “corporate renewal dynamics.”
“Launch” is a big word that they use in both worlds. They talk about “launch Sundays” and “launch budgets” in church planting. And the framing of what they’re doing is in business terms, right?
As I continued to listen, they started to mention that these efforts were heavily bankrolled by established churches,
So a lot of the startup capital comes from the biggest denominations. The Southern Baptists– they spend tens of millions of dollars a year on church planting. But a lot of church plants actually get their funding directly from megachurches– established churches that have thousands of members.
That got me thinking that you don’t see many large arts organizations doing something similar where they provide seed funding to enable more nimble arts organizations to go out to target the un-artsed.”
Perhaps I should have known there would be parallels with the arts because This American Life titled the episode, “If You Build It, Will They Come?” evoking the “Field of Dreams” mentality we have been urged to abandon.
However, what I really found fascinating was the parallels between the problems one church planter had with diversifying the demographics of church planting and those of arts organizations trying to do the same thing with their program participants.
This American Life (TAL) spoke to Watson Jones III who became really excited by the church planting model, but noticed that pretty much everyone at this church planting conferences was Caucasian. The TAL reporters confirmed that most church planting happens in gentrifying or affluent urban neighborhoods or suburbs.
Jones felt things were wide open for planting churches in urban neighborhoods for people of color. As I referenced before, there is some surprising infrastructure for church planters. Jones got training in budgeting, fundraising, creating a business plan and mission statement for his church, plus an 18 month residency at a church plant site. He ended up landing about $100,000/year funding for three years to support his planting efforts.
They ended up doing a lot of things arts organizations do when trying to attract new audiences– handing out flyers and candy on the streets trying to get people to attend gatherings at homes, coffee houses and other non-traditional venues.
While the non-traditional worship services at funky, cool locations are pretty much the core identity of the church planting process that helps attract new members, it had the opposite effect for communities of color.
Watson Jones
….And one lady told me– she said, you guys are a cult. You call me when you get a church. Especially, I think, among black people, the more out of the box or avant garde you are, the less likely you are to be trusted.
Theologically, we say all day long, the church is the people of God. The people in your city, in your neighborhood, does not understand church apart from a building, a preacher, a choir or a praise team, and something that looks like a church service, period.
[…]
AJ Smith
Yeah. I mean, we were going to be the people who were out there on the streets, pastors who were very much present with the people. And that’s how we’ll grow the church. That didn’t work.
As I am listening to all this, I can’t but help think about how this is literally out of Nina Simon’s TEDx Talk on the Art of Relevance.
I mean look at this still. If you can’t see the stenciled sign on the bottom of the slide she is showing, it says “House of Worship In A Den of Sin.”
Nina uses this picture to discuss how some people will see this as a welcoming place and others will see it as scary.
These guys trying to plant a church are running into a similar situation where the lack of a formal building and familiar experience was an impediment to people’s willingness to commit to this fledgling church. (Unfortunately, even when they did get a physical place in which to hold services, they had problems attracting a consistent group.)
This podcast provides many things to think about regarding the efforts of arts organizations to diversify the groups they serve. The foremost of which may be whether the design and execution of impromptu experiences in non-traditional spaces reflect affluent Caucasian ideals about what outreach efforts to those underserved by the arts looks like and subsequently serve to largely appeal to a similar demographic.
Carter Gillies shared the unabridgedversion of a piece he wrote for the Arts Professional UK on his website this weekend. As Carter is wont to do, he examined statements about quantifying and measuring the value of the arts made by Simon Mellor, the deputy chief executive for arts and culture at Arts Council England.
I was particularly drawn to Carter’s second entry where he addresses this statement by Mellor (my emphasis):
“At its heart, the Quality Metrics system is about enabling arts and cultural organisations to enter a structured conversation with audience members and peers about the quality of the work they are presenting. It allows them to capture valuable data that they can use to understand how their intentions for the work are aligning with the experiences of their audiences and peers and, hopefully, to use that information to plan future programmes and improve the quality of their work. It will also enable those organisations to provide more evidence to current and future funders about the quality of their work.
Let me first state that I don’t believe these metrics will really have any ability to measure the quality of the work done by the arts organisations. If you have read any of my previous posts on the matter you probably knew that already.
I was taken by the idea expressed in the bolded sentence above. One of the biggest challenges facing arts organizations in the last few years is the recognition that what they are doing might not align with the interests of the community. In surveys like Culture Track, people say they aren’t attending arts events because they don’t see themselves or their stories depicted on the stages, walls, and spaces. They don’t preceive what is happening in arts spaces to be relevant to them. Nina Simon wrote a whole book about making experiences relevant for people.
So if the Arts Council of England could actually deliver some real insight into how to make the experience more relevant for people, that would be a pretty valuable service.
However, as Carter points out later in that second entry, there are many examples of artists whose work was initially rejected before being lauded. Some died before others began to recognize the value in the work they missed before. We see this sort of thing happen all the time in our lives. Movies and shows that did poorly both critically and economically suddenly become cult classics.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show became immensely popular after it initially flopped. But it is also a good example of something whose value exploded after people were able to participate and take ownership of the experience.
Even if it is an accurate reflection of how people are receiving something, the research is only going to be valuable to a point.
The problem, however, with creating a metric is that often that metric becomes fetishized as the measure of value rather than one element among many that can help us understand how an art work and the experience surrounding it is received.
As Carter notes, quoting Oscar Wilde, even when we talk about a metric someone else is using, the meaning of that metric may not be shared by both parties. Thus the #NotMyMetric title of this post.
(my emphasis)
There is a reason bean counting number crunchers have so much authority in the arts, and mainly it is for the good. The arts are a business and need to function as such. But it is also important to not let that world view overreach itself. We need to be careful in not putting the cart before the horse. In many ways the arts are the exact opposite of what the counters are, and see, and value.
The ever impish and ironical Oscar Wilde understood this predicament:
“When Bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When Artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money.”
There is a mutual interest, in other words, but neither does it mean a banker thinks of art as an artist does, values it for the same things in the same way, and equally true of artists’ attitude towards money, but especially that this does not mean they should be left in charge of one another’s concerns. A ‘dinner table’ acquaintance is insufficient for the real work that needs to be done.
I went to the Arts Midwest conference last week and I am still sorting out all the notes and brochures, etc that I picked up.
There were a couple general bits of observations I wanted to share.
Blake Potthoff, Executive Director of the Fairmont Opera House in Fairmont, MN gave me permission to share something he said in one of the professional development sessions. He opened his comments by expressing a problem totally opposite of the one the rest of us face–he wanted advice attracting older generation audiences to his shows, specifically those from Generation X. Apparently he isn’t having problems attracting millennials.
Later, he mentioned that one of the ways they evaluate how their shows were being received was by convening an advisory group every other month and asking them whether they felt a show in the season had been programmed for impact or for dollars.
In other words, once people have seen the show, the organization asks their advisory group if they felt the inclusion of the show in the season had been purely motivated by money or if they felt the show had been meant to have some impact on their lives.
What didn’t come up in the professional development discussion was the fact that the arts org can often lose more money on what people perceive to be a cash cow than on a lightly attended event.
Potthoff said these discussions have really impacted how the organization plans their season and experiences.
The approach was pretty intriguing for me. This isn’t a question we generally ask our audiences.
Usually, the rule is not to ask a question if you don’t intend to act on the answer. In this case, I am not sure what my response would be to the answers I would get.
If my goal is to have an impact on people’s lives, does it matter if people think a show has a commercial motivation and turn out in sufficient numbers to support it? If people answer that a show was impactful, but too few people show up to make it financially viable –well this situation is what we generally assume. Things that aren’t popular are still worth doing for the impact.
If people feel a show was both motivated by commercial success and feel the show was highly impactful for them, that might provide some direction, especially if I felt the show was mostly feel good fluff without much value. I just have to put my snobbery aside a little and explore what contributed to people feeling this way.
Then there is the final option where none of our expectations are met – what we intend to be impactful is viewed as commercial and what is intended to be a money maker is viewed as impactful. Some answers may lead you to place where you resent your audience for being out of tune with your intent.
In some respects, this may be a question that you ask not knowing exactly what you will do with the answer–except that you resolve to be open minded and not reflexively decide the answers are irrelevant.
Because you probably also need to ask, does your community care whether something is meant to be a money maker or impactful? Do they have negative associations with their concept of what the intent to make money entails?
When they perceive something was intended to be impactful, do they feel that it has improved their lives or that they viewed it like vegetables–they know they are supposed to consume it for its cultural value, but they really prefer something else.
Even beyond the question of profit vs. impact, it may be enlightening to generally ask people what they perceive our organizational motivations to be.
Apparently ideas like this occur and are developed somewhat in parallel because for the last two weekends, the theater department here at Mercer University has been using the basic framework of Dungeons and Dragons to create a heroic saga with the participation of audience members.
Martin Noyes of Savannah College of Art and Design had experimented with the idea on a smaller scale in the classroom, but this was the first time he employed the concept as a full production that unfolded across seven nights.
The experience was very intriguing to me because it both required creating a sophisticated framework of rules and allowing the performers (and audience) a lot of freedom to introduce unpredictable elements into the performance.
The technicians supporting the performance had to be prepared to create the appropriate ambience on the fly. In many cases, they had to be just as inventive and resourceful as the actors. It was quite telling that Noyes would often be surprised that they found an appropriate image to project or sound effect to use as part of the action. He wasn’t completely aware of what they had available in their repertoire.
In addition, there was a musician on violin accompanying the performance creating a soundscape on the fly as well.
The performance, called Vengeance and Veritas, was presented in a blackbox space. The set looked something like this:
As you might imagine, flexibility and imagination were employed more frequently than realistic set pieces.
The cast consisted of four main characters, plus four others that took on various roles and helped with some of the mechanics of the performance. Noyes acted as the game master and portrayed many of the allies and antagonists, providing direction or challenges to the main characters. Audience members were pulled up to be ancillary characters and with a few whispered notes from Noyes, were called upon to make decisions to either thwart or assist the central characters in their goals.
By the finale, there were about 12 audience members up on stage alongside the actors either manipulating the rudimentary puppets of one of two dragons or depicting female warrior-monks.
If that wasn’t enough uncertainty added to the proceedings, the 20 sided dice so iconic to Dungeons and Dragons were used to determine the outcomes of many decisions. Oversized dice were distributed throughout the audience. When called upon, they threw the dice into the performing area. Often multiple dice were thrown simultaneously forcing Noyes to indicate which die would rule as it skittered across the floor.
There was a lot I loved about the design of this production.
First, I loved that it developed into something larger than expected. Noyes apparently didn’t think things would develop as far as they did, forcing him to create more narrative guidelines between performance nights. In the heat of the action, he would often forget where on stage he put his notebook down, providing an amusing delay while he retrieved it to consult his notes.
The actors were free to make decisions about their involvement within the confines of the narrative. Noyes had a couple of out of character exclamations of “oh shit” when the actor portraying a vampire turned up deciding to be the hero, thwarting the plans of the villainous character Noyes was portraying.
At the same time the nigh unkillable vampire kept becoming a liability to his allies as the dice roll incited his bloodlust to attack wounded allies.
There were also times where well-reasoned character development and choices by the actor was allowed to trump the dice roll.
While a performance built within the framework of a game like Dungeons and Dragons does require you to have some degree of insider knowledge, unlike many arts experiences, the audience was often more knowledgeable than the creators. Noyes had to admonish the audience to silence as it became clear the actor portraying the vampire was about to make a decision that would benefit a regular person but is deadly to vampires.
This particular approach to creating dramatic narrative answers many of the objections people make about performing arts – it is never the same performance each night, the outcome is unpredictable, the audience is actively engaged and doesn’t have to be cajoled into participating.
Another great thing was that the episodic nature of the performance induced people to return to see the show again. (Anyone who performed got a little gift at the end of the night too) Where they may not have participated on the first night, a lot of people were ready to jump up and take part on subsequent nights.
Because the cast didn’t know how the performance would unfold every night, no one knew when the show would end each night either. Noyes had to judge a good cliffhanger point to stop at.
One conversation we had (my staff provides the ticketing for the performance) is that if this type of show is ever done again, we need to offer special multiple performance pricing to make it easier for people to attend as many nights as they like.
The process also provides artists and technicians with the opportunity to explore new approaches to story creation; become nimble and resourceful in executing complex tasks on the fly and evaluate what does and doesn’t work. There may be a number of practices in common with comedy improv performances, but there are a lot more moving parts involved.
Because of the performance environment, the unintentional pauses, rough edges and problems in the shows I attended only served to provide a greater sense of intimacy and connection for the audience. (How often do you see a director exclaim his pleasure when something is unfolding well or preface a performance by telling an audience how his ultimate goal is to destroy a good portion of what he labored so hard to create?)
In a different physical spaces, the expectations might be for a more polished product. In that case, the performers might have to run through a scenario a couple times before an audience encounters it—but still introduce a mechanism of unpredictability to keep things feeling exciting and fresh.
Since I didn’t expect to see roleplay driven storytelling manifest so quickly and in such a way, I am obviously excited to see what else might emerge.
I am going to be attending the Arts Midwest conference this week so I started scouring my archives for content for Wednesday’s entry. Instead, I came across an old post that is a bit more appropriate for Labor Day.
Back in 2009 I wrote about a New Republic piece that suggested one of the reasons manufacturing has diminished in the US is that business schools started focusing more on finance and consulting back in 1965. So while countries like Germany and Japan have constantly made advances in manufacturing, the US hadn’t been able to keep up.
“Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background….But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”
I made the following observation about how this situation was finding its way into the arts.
…realized that this describes exactly what people are afraid will happen if arts organizations are “run more like a business.” The fear is that decisions will rest entirely on return on investment and will be divorced from the manufacturing process as it were.
There was a time I would not have imagined that any arts organization would have a disconnect between the administration and the artists…
Nearly five years ago, I cited observations that orchestra administrations were disassociated from the performances and performers. Given all the conflicts and closures since then, I don’t think the overall environment has gotten any better since.
With the increased focus on STEM subjects, I wonder what this portends for the future. Will an emphasis on research and experimentation lead to more innovation in general and have an influence on the arts in the form of data based decision making and technology driven innovation?
Or will the value of the arts continue to be evaluated in terms of quantitative measures?
The fact that the arts community was pretty quick to start insisting that STEM become STEAM to include the arts makes me optimistic for the former scenario, but we need to pay attention to what areas our schools focus on.
What’s particularly noteworthy about voters approving this property tax is that Genesee County’s seat is Flint, MI.
When the topic if government support of the arts is discussed, the question often arises how you can justify support for arts and culture when there are so many other problems to be addressed. Flint, MI has been known for the social and economic challenges it faces in addition to some significant problems with the municipal drinking water supply.
Yet, voters saw some value in supporting a millage proposal that would enhance the arts and cultural environment in their county. Why is that?
Van Voorhis, who grew up in Flint, expresses confidence that the residents of Genesee County will find their quality of life improves as the financial support of the arts and cultural organizations continues over the next decade. She cites a study showing a similar effect in Cleveland when they passed taxes in support for arts an culture.
One of the insights and suggestions she pulls out of the Cleveland study will be familiar to those of you who have been reading my posts on Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection initiative to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture.
Insight #1: Long lasting change involves shifting the way people think
[…]
Try this
Work backwards. Go talk to the people you’re trying to influence and ask them what they care about. What are their biggest challenges? What changes are they trying to effect? Ask them if there are particular ways arts and culture could be helpful to them (or if they’ve even considered arts and culture as part of the equation). All of this information better positions you to illustrate how arts and culture can be woven into and make a difference in those things they care about. Ultimately, you’ll be better positioned to articulate exactly how investment in arts and culture will yield concrete benefits from an angle they already understand.
Creating Connection emphasizes that lasting change requires changing the way people think and that the effort to shift the thinking requires effort over the long term.
Note that Van Voorhis’ suggested approach starts with focusing on the community first rather than the organization. Consider and address their challenges first.
Earlier when I asked why it was that people voted for the millage proposal, what I suspect is the answer is that arts and culture connects with a deep need people have. That need transcends specific arts organizations so it is incumbent upon arts organizations to pay attention to serving that need.
There are more things from the study that she cites and what she cites is only a small segment of the whole study so if you are interested in making a similar case in your community, it may be worth taking a look.
I am in the process of moving so I am shifting in to “throwback” mode for a week or so.
I thought I would look back at a post I made about one of Ian David Moss’ contributions of a blog salon.
In his contribution Moss wrote took the view that arts education put children on the track to careers that the socioeconomic environment couldn’t support. (my emphasis)
Much of the literature that advocates arts education as a strategy for cultivating demand for the arts assumes that students who have invested thousands of hours of their lives in perfecting a craft during their formative years will happily set all of that aside as soon as they turn 18 and 21, become productive members of society with skills that they somehow picked up while practicing piano for four hours a day, and donate all of their expendable income to their local arts organizations. Really? Don’t you think that some of them might be a little bitter about having to leave their dream behind? Don’t you think some of them might continue on and spend their parents’ life savings on three graduate degrees in a quixotic quest for fame and glory that never materializes? Is this the best use of our collective human capital?
In my post at the time, I disagreed with the view writing,
Or rather, I don’t think operating on the assumption that not everyone will become an arts practitioner completely nefarious. No one expects every kid who participates in Little League, Pop Warner Football and various soccer leagues will go on to become a professional athlete after all the time they have invested in practicing. Though certainly a situation where a college athlete isn’t expected to devote themselves to their studies is not something to be emulated.
Your analogy to Little League sports is a good one. Sure, some of the participants dream of being professional football players, but most simply enjoy playing and the experiences they have with friends. For some reason, artists don’t recognize that this is the case for the arts as well. There are other reasons to do it than going pro — reasons that are just as fulfilling (I’d venture to say, in the current arts climate, oftentimes MORE fulfilling)… what an arts education promotes is a rich life that includes the possibility of creative expression as an end in itself, not a means to an end. This was the message of the “Gifts of the Muse” report, for instance: the INTRINSIC value of the arts. Lets not get lost in arts education as existing solely for the creation of professional artists or the creation of paying audience members. There is a more active and vibrant alternative to those roads.
In the intervening years, as I have begun to really think about the intrinsic value of art vs. the instrumental value, I have grown to appreciate Scott’s comments all the more. Reading this old post, I feel like this might have been a formative moment when I started thinking about arts education and making people aware of their capacity for creativity.
However, there is a lot of validity in Moss’ argument that universities and conservatories are taking the money of a lot of people with mediocre ability and preparing them for a traditional career path in the arts. This problem has been recognized for quite awhile now.
But also note my intentional use of “traditional career path” because there are an ever broadening array of ways in which creative abilities can be applied. Training programs aren’t doing the best job of preparing students to pursue those options.
This summer I have been seeing a lot of California Symphony Executive Director Aubrey Bergauer popping up in places like videos of conference talks she has been giving. It has been over a year and a half since I wrote about her Orchestra X project so I figured it was time to revisit and reacquaint people with the work she has been doing.
Recently she had a blog post following up on the conversations her organization has been having with the communities they serve. She mentions a theme I keep seeing in formal survey results and collected anecdotes — audiences aren’t clamoring for a change in programming as much as they are intimidated and confused by the decision and experience of attending a cultural event.
The bigger issue, she says, is that those of us on the inside forget what it was like being entirely unfamiliar with information or an experience. Even when we are faced with a new-ish experience, our past experiences allow us to make logical leaps that total novices can’t.
What we learned was that a “basic” level of understanding about the symphony or classical music does not exist among newcomers. Some people didn’t even know the names of the instruments in the orchestra, which to me, the person who had played an instrument all growing up and who wanted to manage a symphony since age 16, was pretty much unfathomable (remember hindsight bias?). The good news, we discovered, was that this group of smart people desperately wanted to learn about everything related to classical music though. And through the discussion we learned that the way we layout and present information on our website made it very difficult for them to do that.
[…]
Virtually every person in the room expressed the sentiment of “awe” when describing the art they saw and heard. No one said, “I need a shorter concert,” or “I need to hear more movie music.” They very much wanted to learn about all facets of the repertoire and were emphatic that the art is incomparable.
Bergauer says that now that California Symphony stopped stressing about programming mix and started focusing on retention versus new audience acquisition. Last season, their new attendee retention rate was over 30%.
Take a closer look at the post. She talks a little more about how rich experiences make us unable to anticipate what new attendees really need to know in order to enjoy themselves.
I was reading a piece in CityLab about Repair Cafes which strike me as a good complement to MakerSpaces and creative activities that arts and cultural entities may host. The concept was started in Amsterdam by Martine Postma who was disturbed by how much repairable equipment was sitting at the curb on trash day. She sells start up kits that allow you to use the Repair Cafe logo and puts you in touch with the other Repair Cafe’s around the world.
But beyond reducing what is sent to the landfill, personal empowerment plays a large role in the Repair Cafe concept:
What she’s discovered was that it wasn’t that people liked throwing away old stuff. “Often when they don’t know how to repair something, they replace it, but they keep the old one in the cupboard—out of guilt,” she said. “Then at a certain moment, the cupboard is full and you decide this has been lying around [long enough].”
[…]
For the time being, communities are doing what they can to encourage people to fix things. Libraries like the one in Howard County, for example, have started renting out tools and creating “makerspaces” where members learn to both repair and create. Elsewhere, cities have hosted MakerLabs, FabLabs—short for fabrication lab—and Innovation Labs for both adults and children. Bike shops and nonprofits alike have fished scrapped vehicles from the landfill to repair and donate to the underserved community.
The social and personalized elements of the Repair Cafes, makerspaces, etc may be part of the value and appeal. After all, you can watch a YouTube how-to video to fix something that breaks. If you don’t have confidence in your ability to effect the repairs, having someone available to teach you the skills to do so in the process of fixing your stuff might motivate you to act. This despite the fact it is more trouble to haul your broken equipment somewhere versus tossing it in the trash.
It is also easier to toss stuff away rather than hauling it to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but people donate goods to non-profits all the time because they know it is better not to let things go to waste.
Just as recognizing your capacity to be creative is empowering, learning to fix items can instill a degree of pride and self-satisfaction which is why I feel it is such a close companion effort to creative activities.
About two weeks ago, I saw a story about their Barnes Jawn(t)s program where they hand over the tours to unconventional guides. People can choose to take a tour with seven different guides who will provide their own perspectives on the Barnes’ collection.
(It appears technically, there may be 9 guides. According to the article, the first tour was conducted by “Madhusmita Bora, a classical Indian dancer, and Ashley Vogel, a staff member with the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.”)
The jawn(t) program is described as:
Join us for evening tours full of make-believe as we play fast and loose with everything you thought you knew about the Barnes. In Philadelphia, jawn is a catch-all word for anything. A Barnes Jawn(t) is an anything-goes tour of the collection with a fascinating Philly personality as your guide. These off-the-cuff, sure-to-run-off-the-rails tours are led by a diverse array of community leaders, artists, and comic-book nerds—all experts in their fields. No two tours will be the same. After taking a Jawn(t), you’ll never look at the Barnes the same way again!
My read on the project is that they are, in part, trying to combat the idea that visiting the Barnes Foundation “isn’t for people like me” by having people with whom you might better identify lead the evening tours.
You may recall a few months back I wrote about Museum Hack which conducts themed tours in various museums around the country, also billing themselves as an unconventional approach. The Barnes approach seems to be in the same vein, but much more focused on the perspective of the individual guide.
I was wondering if the fact these tours start an hour after closing time was intentionally chosen so attendees’ potentially first visit to the institution would involve a more intimate group rather than interacting with the large number of daily visitors–or just a matter of convenience to accommodate people getting off of work.
Actually, I just noticed all the tours are on Tuesday when the Barnes is closed making me additionally wonder if some portion of experience is being customized and prepared for the tours earlier in the day. (Given the stipulations Albert Barnes made about how the art was to be displayed, I would suspect nothing about the galleries themselves is changed.)
Contributing to the impression that there might be some special customization going on is that they list a local group as the organizer:
Based in Philadelphia, Obvious Agency is an interactive design collaboration between Joseph Ahmed, Arianna Gass, and Daniel Park. The agency works with cultural institutions to explore new ways to engage audiences through custom games and interactive performances. The group also produces the artistic work of its members, including Go to Sleep, a real-life adventure game about insomnia. Commissions include the Diamond Eye Conspiracy through Drexel and Temple Universities.
I was interested to see this partnership/collaboration with an outside group as an indication of possibilities for other arts and cultural organizations.
Another month, another helpful webinar from our friends at Arts Midwest where different venues around the country talk about how they are integrating the Creating Connection practice into their operations. This time around people from San Jose’s Teatro Vision and Red Wing, MN’s Sheldon Theatre.
Teatro Vision talked about an interesting project they conducted in conjunction with Day of the Dead activities. They had audiences respond to a number of prompts and then took the responses and used them to create poems which they posted in the lobby. Then they surveyed audiences about whether the poems helped to enhance the experience of the performance.
I had been looking forward to the Sheldon Theatre’s portion of the program for nearly a year. Anne Romens, the Creating Connection program coordinator, had been referencing their work in webinars and the professional development conference session we worked on last year so I really wanted a deeper dive into what they were doing.
If you have been reading up or hearing about Creating Connection over the last year or so, you know one of the basic, but crucial concepts is a focus on the audience and experience. The Sheldon has gone whole hog on that. Check out their website and you can see that plainly. Tell me you don’t want to be there.
Starting at about the 28 minute mark in the webinar, they talk about how there were no humans in any of the archival pictures of their building. Everything had been focused on the architectural beauty of the building. The 16-17 brochure was the first time an audience member attending a show was depicted in any of their promotional materials. If you watch their before and after pictures, you can see what a difference “populating” the building makes.
Executive Director Bonnie Schock talks about the concern her board and community members had that this shift in focus would undermine the value of the organization. But when they talked to their audience, themes of togetherness and shared experiences emerged as primary measures of value over the quality of performances and artistry.
They started to develop experiences surrounding performances- everything from meet and greets with artists to tea parties for performances of Alice in Wonderland. During a celebratory event at the start of a season, they handed out “emergency confetti” packets as people left for use when they were feeling down.
One technique I have seen nearly every group presenting a Creative Connection use is a white board/post-it note board for audience feedback. Not only did the Sheldon use this, they also “surveyed” audiences by having them drop little pom-poms in jars labeled with different sentiments (~40:45 mark).
A lot of great ideas presented by both groups, don’t let my prior interest in learning about one of them keep you from watching the whole thing.
Peter Svarzbein’s thesis project had residents of El Paso, TX excited about the return of a trolley system that went defunct about 45 years ago.
….part performance art, part guerrilla marketing, part visual art installation, and part fake advertising campaign. The project began with a series of wheatpaste posters advertising the return of the El Paso-Juárez streetcar, and continued with the deployment of Alex the Trolley Conductor, a new mascot and spokesperson for the alleged new service. Alex appeared at Comic Cons, public parks, conferences, and other public spaces to promote the return of the streetcar, while additional advertisements appeared across El Paso, sparking curiosity and excitement for the assumed real project.
Eventually, Svarzbein admitted that the project was a graduate thesis masquerading as a streetcar launch,…
But when Svarzbein heard the city of El Paso was preparing to sell the art deco trolley cars, he rallied community support for the restoration of the trolley cars and passenger service. His initiative gained the support of both the city and state department of transportation, garnering a $97 million grant to help get the cars running again.
I love what happened next,
In one of the most surprising twists in this long tale, shortly after this funding was awarded, he rode the wave of public support for the once-fictional project to win a seat on El Paso’s City Council. He is now the City Representative for District 1, and an artist is now at the table.
In his remarks about the creativity he employed to rally support for the restoration, Svarzbein reflected on the role of an artist in the community,
“there is a sort of responsibility that artists have to imagine and speak about a future that may not be able to be voiced by a large amount of people in the present. I felt that sort of responsibility. If I couldn’t change the debate, at least I could sort of write a love letter to the place that raised me.”
The NEA’s Arts Works blog had a post, Five Questions We Have about Visiting Art Museums, which I thought had some pretty good tips for interacting with art. The post was specifically aimed at families attending museums together and offered this bit of insight.
Of course, kids might not see things exactly the same way adults do. What do you do if your little one looks at a portrait of George Washington, for example, and says our first president’s a ballerina? Evans says that’s just fine! “In terms of their experience with the portrait, that’s still very relevant and very accurate. You can ask them what they see that makes them think of a ballerina. Maybe it’s because he’s standing with his feet in a certain position or he has his hand out. That’s still their engagement with it to notice his pose,” she said.
In some cases, this is the type of question anyone might have upon first encountering an unfamiliar mode of expression. People tend to initially process a new experience in the context of something familiar.
But it also might be the case that the simpler interpretation might be more enjoyable. Hat tip to Ceci Dadisman who retweeted this:
I also enjoyed the following advice in answer to the question, “What’s the most important thing I should know about looking at art?
Borrowing an idea from social media, Moss suggested asking yourself (or your kids), “What is the picture, if you could post one thing, that you would want to show of your experience?” She added, “Maybe that will get you thinking, ‘Oh, I need to be thoughtful about what I’m seeing and really zoom in on the object that’s really speaking to me,’ and also really thinking about why.”
Moss also added that she wants museum visitors to, “own the experience. Don’t feel intimidated. Don’t feel like you’re not smart if you don’t like something. Bring your experiences to bear on what you see and have fun and walk away with something new in your mind.”
Again, the suggestion frames the way people can approach the museum experience in a familiar context.
Essentially, the suggestions are giving parents permission to view art through the eyes of their children but pretty much anyone should feel like they have permission to approach art in that manner regardless of whether they have children.
In some ways this reminds me of a piece I wrote a piece on being as patient with yourself as you are with a baby, inspired by Stephen McCraine’s webcomic Be Friend with Failure where he specifically draws a connection between appreciation of great art and the fact you wouldn’t criticize a baby learning to speak in the same way you criticize yourself for not quickly absorbing a new skill. Everyone needs permission both from themselves and others to acquire skills, perception, etc required for a new experience.
I frequently write about how people often don’t feel arts and cultural events are for them is because they aren’t seeing themselves and their stories portrayed. So it was with some interest that I read about Opera Philadelphia’s effort to provide a free high definition broadcast of their 2017 opera, We Shall Not Be Moved, which uses the 1985 bombing of the MOVE compound by the city of Philadelphia as a starting point.
Opera Philadelphia has a history of providing free opera broadcasts on Independence Mall. They are particularly interested in presenting this broadcast because so many people were unable to see the live performance. I was surprised to learn the public broadcast will cost as much as $160,000. Right now they are running a crowdfunding campaign for the last $25,000.
What I was most interested in learning was the details of the original production which involved music by Daniel Bernard Roumain, libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and the direction and choreography of Bill T. Jones, all luminaries in their respective fields. It is no surprise to me that they would be involved with the project because they each have a history of working with communities to help them tell their stories.
The students from Art Sanctuary had the opportunity to work with these artists as the piece was developed. We Shall Not Be Moved had its world premiere during O17 at the Wilma Theater, then moved on to Harlem’s Apollo Theater and the Opera Forward Festival in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, it was presented by Dutch National Opera; as noted on the crowdfunding page, the reception there “proved that this timely, Philadelphia-based work could also find relevance with the wider international community.”
Readers may be aware via the Adaptistration blog/Drew McManus that Rob Deemer has been leading an effort to create the Composer Diversity Database in order to make it easier to more broadly program concerts and create music for any sort of artistic projects, including films, video games and of course, operas.
The success We Shall Not Be Moved has had is just another small piece of evidence that there is an audience and interest in projects that don’t appear in or confirm closely to characteristics of the traditional canon. It bears noting that often these projects aren’t developed and promoted in a traditional manner and that may factor largely into the breadth of their appeal.
A couple weeks ago, Holly Mulcahy wrote about eschewing the use of comp tickets in order to create the illusion that a performance was well attended.
As an alternative, she suggests seeking out and recruiting influencers to share their sincere reflections on their experience with the people who follow them on social media or with whom they might associate socially.
One thing I realized was missing from the articles she linked to about leveraging influencers for your brand was clear disclaimers about a quid pro quo relationship with the product or service provider. A lot of those seriously engaged as social media influencers are pretty savvy and disclose that they have received products, etc for free, but still you often hear of some people losing credibility because they failed to disclose this relationship.
I was reminded of a story some years back where a movie studio paid a girl $1,800 to insert a reference to their upcoming movie in her valedictorian speech at graduation. Marketers have gotten a little more sophisticated since then (the movie bombed, by the way.) but the public has likewise started to evince a growing skepticism about the motivations behind why people are promoting things.
If you are trying to recruit people from your community whom you have identified as knowledgeable, enthusiastic and influential, they may not consider the need to event make a passing reference thanking your organization for providing them with free, premium seating, valet parking and drink vouchers to an event. Because you want to make a good impression and facilitate their experience, it is likely that you might offer all this and more.
Not only might there be backlash if people feel the influencer is being plied with benefits in return for a good review, it might damage the influencer’s credibility if their followers aren’t able to access the same experience they assume comes with the published ticket prices.
One of the things you may want to clearly establish with an influencer is the scope and nature of your relationship and what level of disclosure is appropriate.
Our friends at Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection project hosted another webinar recently showcasing the work being done by City Lights Theater Company in San Jose and Portland Playhouse.
Some of the ideas for engaging the audience that caught my attention were City Lights Theater’s practice of providing small presents to attendees. The theme of the presents aligns with each show in some way. They also hold parties on stage after the show allowing people to meet and mingle with the actors.
They have been doing these things for a number of years, but have recently tweaked both offerings to get people more actively involved. For one show, the present was origami paper and instructions to fold it into a heart. For another it was magnetic words you could form into poetry on your refrigerator.
For some post-show parties they have had drawing activities for audience members. For the play at which they handed out the poetry magnets, they set up a white board during the after party so the audience could write poetry.
You may recall from a previous webinar I covered, Eugene Symphony used a white board in their lobby to collect feedback from the audience. City Lights does that as well, using the prompts “How Do You Create?” and “City Lights Makes Me Feel…”
The artistic director, Lisa Mallette, talks about other events and presents they have used to deepen their relationship with audiences and reinforce their organizational values. So it is worth watching the video to borrow/steal their good ideas.
Some of the choices they make seem a little counter intuitive because they value relationship building over overt marketing.
It caught my attention when Mallette pointed out their presents aren’t branded with the organizational logo.
“They know where they got it. They are going to remember where they got it. It doesn’t need to say, you know, ‘$5 off your next ticket.’ So we are shifting our thoughts about why we are doing this and making it not about transactional. That has been important for our growth as well.”
She said they avoid surveying people about their willingness to return/tell a friend during the after parties because they see it as compromising the authenticity of the connection they are trying to forge. The party is about sincere relationships so they want to avoid the appearance of plying people with cookies and wine in exchange for goodwill.
While they might ask willingness to recommend in a survey, she said often their surveys ask how the audience is doing rather than how pleased they are with the theater. For example, they will ask audiences if they are feeling creative or working on projects.
It is probably something of a testament to the connection they are forging that since 2011 one of the audience members has been going home after every performance and has been creating sketches based on how he experienced each show. City Lights is currently displaying his work on the back wall of the theater. Some of his sketches appear in the webinar.
Once she introduced the idea, I have really started thinking about whether transaction driven interactions like measuring marketing effectiveness or collecting data in support of grants might be interfering with or run counter to sincere attempts at community relationship building.
Which, of course, raises questions about the degree of sincerity being invested in relationship building. If you immediately pivot to the need to measure and report effectiveness if you want to survive, you have your answer.
Sure the two goals may not be mutually exclusive. But I figure if a person asked you what you thought of them and how great, hospitable and well dressed they are as frequently as an arts and cultural organization asks those questions about themselves, you would think they were pretty self centered. So there is probably a lot of room for improvement in asking people about themselves in a way that doesn’t have an underlying transactional motivation. (What they like to read, watch and listen to so that you can focus your marketing efforts there.)
Regardless of whether the setting is urban, suburban or rural, there are a number of communities experiencing really difficult times. A number of panelists discussed the need to address the community trauma before you ever talk about economic stimulus. You can’t just walk in and position something as a solution to the problems in the community until those problems are aired and people have a sense that they can move forward from there. Otherwise the issues will likely continue to fester and undermine the foundation of what you are trying to accomplish.
When it comes to investment and grant making in rural communities, it probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that one of the factors contributing to the low level of investment is geographic remoteness. David Stocks of the Educational Foundation of America (which ironically is not involved in education) talked about how program officers will need to invest a lot more effort into bringing support to rural communities.
They might need to take a plane to a regional airport and then drive 2-3 hours before they reach a community. There is also the issue of trying to identify what organizations would make good anchor partners for the work they do. There is a need for both funders and community organizations to work at expanding their relationship networks to increase the chances that their orbits will intersect.
Marie Mascherin who works for New Jersey Community Capital, characterized her organization primarily as a lender. She talked about how lenders viewed placemaking activities which was a perspective you rarely get. All the same, she warned those in attendance that her organization was atypical in that they got a lot more involved with the community and projects they were working on than most similar lending organizations.
John Davis who was involved with bringing vitality to both New York Mills, MN and Lanesboro, MN passed on a piece of advice he had received from a college professor – don’t make excuses, even about money, for not finding a creative solution. Basically, don’t let lack of money (or other things) become default excuses about why things can’t be accomplished. In a rural setting where resources are scarce, you pretty much have to try harder to find creative solutions.
(Honestly, “work even harder and don’t make excuses,” wasn’t something I wanted to hear, but wasn’t exactly news.)
Davis also talked about an argument he made to a local government that was balking at renovating a building. He noted it would cost them $35,000 to demolish the building or they could invest $35,000 into renovating the building and have a more valuable property they could sell later if his project failed.
His project didn’t fail, but that concept dovetailed in an interesting way with a comment Ben Fink of Appalshop made about a prison project being proposed near Whitesburg, KY. He said that the $300,000,000 prison was being sold to the community as, at best, creating 300 new jobs. He noted that was $1,000,000 a job–compare that to how much benefit $1 investment in arts and culture has for a community.
It occurred to me that is something to look into and leverage proactively with governments and decision makers. Rather than waiting until it comes time to ask for funding to be renewed, when a discussion comes up about providing tax breaks or subsidies for companies, it might be useful to mention that $1 invested in creative placemaking/arts/culture/education in the community is more efficient.
While I am on the subject of economic activity, in one session I bluntly asked Jeremy Liu of PolicyLink about the veracity of economic impact claims being made by organizations and communities. He said if they are using analytic tools like those offered by Implan, the numbers are dependable.
In the past I have mentioned my concern with arts and culture organizations arguing for funding or policy changes citing the benefits of art and music on learning and test scores when such benefits are only weakly supported or have been debunked.
What has worried me is that decision and policy makers will learn about the lack of evidence for these claims and perhaps actively wield it against the arts community. By the same token, I have often wondered at the rigor behind claims of economic impact of creative activity in communities and feared what might result if they are debunked.¥
A few other tidbits people offered-
Don’t become hyperfocused on placemaking. Don’t value place or a project over the community. Even if you are in a group, no project is completed in isolation.
If you recall in the very beginning of my post yesterday I mentioned that I gained an appreciation and broader perspective on the different roles that contributed to a placemaking project from governments to funding/loan group to community members to the people executing the work, placemaking is a function of many entities working together.
I feel like I am citing him a lot in these last two posts, but I appreciated Ben Fink’s insights about establishing relationships with people in the community. He said the first real shared connection you will make with someone is rarely associated with the project you are trying to accomplish. As an example, your aim may be to solicit participation in a building renovation for a maker space but the initial basis of your relationship is a shared interest in 19th century steam engines.
He said that building community support and participation happened in the same way friendships develop. It is heavily dependent on the dynamics at the formation of the project. If participation is by invitation only, one person ends up being in charge. If you form a clique of interested parties, it becomes insular. But if the project begins with the intention of leaving the door open, interested people will start to gravitate toward the project as they see work happening.
¥- None of this compromises my assertion that while arts and cultural activity may generate economic activity, steady employment, positive social outcomes and quality of life, the none of this is a measure of the value of arts and culture.
If you are a person of a certain age, you may find that the love of Dungeons and Dragons you secretly harbored as a youth is finally gaining some respectability thanks to shows like Stranger Things and common interests with video gaming, anime/manga, cosplay, comic books, etc which has insured its presence at conventions across the nation.
Even if you aren’t particularly enamored of the game, as people interested in artistic and creative expressions, you might do well to pay attention to the storytelling elements of games like Dungeons and Dragons and think about how you might tap into this practice as a method of creating new work.
To be clear. I am not necessarily talking about creating new work based on fantasy settings. I am just thinking about the fact that there are a lot of people out there engaged in the process of world building and exploring what makes for an interesting story and character traits/backstory.
Right now there is an explosion of groups creating 3-4 hour videos of their gaming sessions on a weekly basis.
While I haven’t had an opportunity to evaluate them all, for me the current gold standard is Critical Role which features “a group of nerdy-ass voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons.” What I appreciate about them is the amount of effort they put into the game. They follow the rule about showing and not telling in the process of fleshing out their character. There is still a lot of out of character, off color commentary, but they definitely have invested themselves in their roles and upped the stakes for themselves in terms of embodying flawed rather than clearly heroic entities since they moved into a new campaign in January.
Another long lived, though intermittent group is Acquisitions, Inc which started podcasting games a decade ago. They have a “spin off” group called The C Team that videocasts session on a more regular basis.
Wizard of the Coast which owns the Dungeons and Dragons property has really been supporting this trend with their own groups like Dice, Camera, Action. In the last month, they drew attention to other groups like UK based High Rollers; all female gaming group, Girls, Guts, Glory, and new Chicago based group Rivals of Waterdeep.
Wizards is making a pretty clear attempt to show that everyone can enjoy participating in creating stories and building worlds regardless of race, gender or geography. In the process of checking out those participating in a recent roll out event at the start of June, I discovered some members of a relatively noteworthy group who podcast their adventures lives within 20 miles of me.
It has all got me thinking about different opportunities. These might consist of checking out local groups and inviting them to present one of their gaming sessions publicly in one of our spaces. Or as I suggested earlier, consider if there some project we could collaborate on which tapped into the world building and storytelling process. The result could be anything from a dramatization of a local story to periodic pop up of multi-media experiences projected on the side of buildings and other structures to public art installations.
I really see this as a tool/process to involve people in a project who might not normally feel they had the capacity or permission to create and contribute.
In somewhat the same theme as the post I made last week about Tu Me Manques which uses social media to tell the story of a relationship, I had also come across an article in May about Pirates & Mermaids, a one person show about a long distance romance that “unfolds through texts between the two main characters, shared photographs, and good old-fashioned storytelling by the fire.”
What drew me to the story wasn’t the use of social media in the show. The show doesn’t appear to rely on the availability of live Wifi like Tu Me Manques does. It was the way the production company, Poorboy, was using social media to keep connected with their audiences. In the case of Pirates & Mermaids, it was ending the show with a cliffhanger that created some incentive for providing your email to Poorboy.
After the show finishes, audience members are offered a postcard where they can share a message about the performance and share their email address with the production team. Those who opt in receive two follow-up emails from Cameron that lets them know what happens next.
It is a creative and fun way of engaging audiences beyond the performance by building the story into the marketing. Plus, it’s a smart way to build a mailing list because it encourages people to opt in to email communications by giving them something more than a marketing message that they can really to look forward to. The messages that come back from audiences give an insight into audiences’ emotional investment in the story.
One thing I should note is that they tend to do the show for small groups of people so they already generate a degree of intimacy with audiences. The postcards and emails they get in response are more often addressed to the character, Cameron, encouraging him onward rather than commenting on how well the production team did their job. They have had about 150 performances over the last six year and have an email list of 800 people which they say represents 75% of their audiences opting in to the email list.
Some quick math indicates they are performing for audiences of 7-8 people (the article says they limit site specific shows to a max of 15) so this is hardly a cynical attempt to trick people into helping them fatten their marketing database. They say their email open rates for the show are 75%-80%, which is better than the open rates for their other productions which use different social media techniques to connect with audiences.
According to the article, they do transition people from the show email list to their newsletter. The piece doesn’t really mention whether they specifically ask if people want to be included in the newsletter list or not. My guess is that since the production company is based in the UK, it will need to be very deliberate in how they handle those email addresses now that new regulations went into effect across the European Union at the end of May.
In any case, their process represents an option for engaging audiences that people might like to explore a little more deeply.
Just came across Oskar Eustis’ TED Talk, “Why Theatre Is Essential To Democracy.” He talks about the how so much of the work Joe Papp did with the Public Theater was about expanding access and telling important stories that were being muted.
Eustis goes on to talk about how he has been trying to extend that mission as the current director of the Public Theater, taking shows out to the five boroughs of NYC and to NJ rather than expecting people to come to them in Manhattan.
He also mentioned despite doing so many free productions in Central Park, they discovered only their prison program and the shows they trucked out to the five boroughs of NYC were the only programs that were serving a mix of people that reflected the demographics of NYC.
In his TED Talk, Eustis mentions how the curtain call statement by the cast of Hamilton to then Vice President-elect Pence had spurred calls for boycotts of the show.
I looked at that boycott and I said, we’re getting something wrong here. All of these people who have signed this boycott petition, they were never going to see “Hamilton” anyway. It was never going to come to a city near them. If it could come, they couldn’t afford a ticket, and if they could afford a ticket, they didn’t have the connections to get that ticket.
They weren’t boycotting us; we had boycotted them. And if you look at the red and blue electoral map of the United States, and if I were to tell you, “Oh, the blue is what designates all of the major nonprofit cultural institutions,” I’d be telling you the truth. You’d believe me. We in the culture have done exactly what the economy, what the educational system, what technology has done, which is turn our back on a large part of the country.
With this in mind, he says next Fall the Public Theater is going to take Lynn Nottage’s play, Sweat, on tour to rural counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin:
Sweat is based on interviews Nottage conducted during visits to Reading, PA where she also helped create the multi-media, site specific production of This Is Reading that I have written about before. (Be sure to read Margy Waller’s account of the production which I link to in both articles.)
Eustis describes Sweat as,
…about the deindustrialization of Pennsylvania: what happened when steel left, the rage that was unleashed, the tensions that were unleashed, the racism that was unleashed by the loss of jobs.
Eustis give us a lot to think about when it comes to bridging the gap between the ideals expressed in mission statements and grant proposals and translating them into action. He could have easily concluded boycott efforts wouldn’t hurt Hamilton ticket sales one whit, ignored the disapproval and continued on. Instead, he concluded there was an unmet need and a problem that needed to be addressed and started to put a production together to respond to them.
The approach isn’t going to be one of, “we are Broadway and we are here to illuminate your poor benighted souls,”
We’re partnering with community organizations there to try and make sure not only that we reach the people that we’re trying to reach, but that we find ways to listen to them back and say, “The culture is here for you, too.”
This past week I have been dipping my toe in and out of the livestream for the ArtPlace America Summit. One of the plenary sessions I went back to listen to more fully was a discussion ArtPlace CEO Jamie Bennett held with Kresge Foundation CEO Rip Rapson and Detroit Future City Executive Director Anika Goss-Foster about public/private partnerships.
The title of the session was “You’re not the Boss of Me: What Happened to the Public in Public-Private Partnerships?” and the most fascinating parts dealt exactly the issue of who the boss is in public-private partnerships.
Around the 12:15 point, Rapson talks about how one of the previous mayors of Detroit had approached him at the Kresge Foundation asking if they would fund a long range master planning process to revitalize Detroit. The team Kresge put together was so successful in generating participation and investment from the community that the city administration started to feel that their prerogatives were being challenged and their competency was being questioned. The city government began resisting the efforts of the Detroit Future City team Kresge put together to work with them.
Kresge decided to shutdown the process for a year and pull it out of the mayor’s office. However, they had built up so much momentum getting the community involved over two years, the community wouldn’t allow them to dial things back. Kresge restructured things toward a community ownership model and finished the master plan.
Around the same time, a new administration took charge of Detroit city government and they embraced the externally generated plan. But then the same dynamic developed where the city government came to resent the involvement of outsiders. According to Rapson, they did recognize the talent of the Detroit Future City team, but they wanted to absorb the organization into the city planning department and have them work under the city’s terms.
Rapson says that in the current national environment, the lines between public and private are much more porous than in the past. At one time a philanthropic entity wouldn’t get involved with this type of work. At one time the view was that private sector work was tainted and the public sector was far too messy and political.
Today he says, when faced with a problem there is more of a negotiation of who does what the best. Who is best equipped with the expertise, capacity and resources to address an issue. For instance, only the city government is empowered to set zoning laws, levy taxes, etc.
What intrigued me was Rapson’s implication that Detroit Future City’s work was influencing how the Detroit city government viewed and executed community outreach, shifting it from an authoritarian approach to a more collaborative one. Though there is still work to be done.
I wondered if this might presage a new trend in the way cities might operate. Jamie Bennett asked if the ideal wasn’t supposed to be that citizens already had the opportunity to participate in planning through their vote and approaching their government representatives.
Rapson responded acknowledging that in this particular case, the Detroit Future City team had helped to create a constructive process and environment. But he also makes note that it had been an anti-democratic (his term) philanthropic institution which had been responsible for making sure the community voice was at the table.
My read between the lines on this was marginally cautionary. It is working in Detroit thanks to a number of conditions that have come into alignment, but it perhaps shouldn’t be seen as a broad panacea applicable to every city.
It sounds like Detroit Future City is doing a great job involving community input in their advocacy. Goss-Foster said people will come up to her in the streets and supermarkets to point out that the group with which they identify isn’t included in the plan. She said she often concedes they are right and invites them down to her office to talk about getting them included.
From its bankruptcy workout to its approach to transit to the security cameras in its downtown, Detroit, MI has been shaped with the philanthropic and priate sectors in roles more traditionally played by government. And it is not alone: American communities are increasingly relying on public-private partnerships. Many of them are created in response to opportunities that arise out of market forces with very few communities first having an explicit conversation about how residents and their interests are democratically represented in those conversations.Presenters: Rip Rapson, Anika Goss-Foster, and Jamie Bennett
Hat tip to Artsjournal.com linking to an Arts Professional article all performing arts professionals should read.
Hull Truck Theatre in Hull, England started regular pop-up box office hours in local retail chain locations to help address barriers to participation people had.
(By the way, the barriers were exactly those identified in the US studies like Culture Track – “time, cost, lack of awareness of what’s on, childcare and a sense of it being ‘not for me’”)
Magda Moses, who is the Community Projects Coordinator at Hull Truck Theatre Company started out with a trial visit to one of the stores and had conversations about their past, present and future experiences with theatre, following the theme of an upcoming production of A Christmas Carol.
Members of our box office team then joined us, enabling customers to buy tickets from an ipad.
We now run these pop-up box office and community engagement sessions in four Heron Foods stores once a month, and having other staff in attendance has helped the project become more embedded across the theatre.
One of the things we’ve learnt is to visit on regular days and times so that we can promote our visits in advance and people expect us and get to know our staff.
Since some of the responses they have received have dealt with being intimidated by the theatre building, an opportunity to interact with box office staff provides a point of contact that likely would have never occurred had they not gone out in the community.
In addition to the oft mentioned concerns about how to dress and act at a performance, a number of people identified being concerned that the experience would not live up to the expense of tickets. When the theatre produced a show about local woman advocating for fishing industry reform in the 1960s, Hull Truck Theatre offered “pay what you can” tickets exclusively through pop up box offices at Heron Foods.
Moses writes, “…we received positive feedback that people were thrilled to be able to afford to see a play that was directly relevant to their community.”
It sounds like the feedback they got from these efforts might be better than any paper survey and they have gained some insight into their audience segments. Yes, it is probably more expensive and labor intensive than more conventional approaches, but I am sure there are some intangible benefits that can’t be easily quantified in an ROI analysis.
Every time we visit Heron Food stores we ask about what sorts of events they like to come to, which informs out future programming.
We’ve identified differences in audiences across the city. Shoppers on Orchard Park are likely to bring the whole family, so they want affordable shows that everyone will enjoy. Hessle Road shoppers are likely to be older and are interested in local history and Hull stories. This information helps us make sure our marketing is relevant to each area.
Our pop-up box office sessions are about much more than selling tickets. They’re also about building relationships, trust and familiarity in order to spark the idea that someone can go to the theatre.
The sessions are an important part of the Community Dialogues project and the theatre’s wider commitment to welcome new audiences. So once we get to know someone, we can direct them towards tours, coffee mornings, family events, access performances or workshops, depending on their interests.
I just rediscovered a CityLab story I bookmarked last September discussing how a woman’s effort to revitalize culture and creativity in York, PA started in her apartment.
Bored with the city’s limited cultural offerings, Dwyer and her roommates decided to create their own homegrown events—a series of monthly arts shows in her living room…
The shows were modest affairs. “We would put art on the walls, move the furniture out of our living room. We made sure everyone’s bedroom was clean,” she says. “It was like a meltdown every month preparing for it.”
Soon, the shows started to draw hundreds of people through an evening. That attracted the attention of Dwyer’s landlord, Josh Hankey.
While some landlords might see large impromptu gatherings as something to stop, Hankey saw a business opportunity. “I knew that art could create an attraction,” he says. “I knew it could change the perception of a neighborhood, and I was going to help them whatever way I could.”
This was somewhat timely for me. I had attended a session hosted by my buddies, the Creative Cult where they asked everyone to write down what assets they might bring to revitalizing the creative environment in town. I wrote “my front lawn.”
I was partially inspired by the PorchRockr festival and Porchfests going on around the country. In many places people host music concerts on their front porches and attendees wander through the neighborhood taking it all in.
I am not sure my neighborhood is the best for a concert series, but I was intrigued by the idea of hosting a conversation or speakers series in the shade of my lawn.
The directors of my local art museum are already doing something along these lines. They live in a building across the street from the museum and invite everyone who attends an opening at the museum to walk across the street for an “after party.” This usually happens around 3 pm on a weekend so it is pretty accessible to all. Between passing through their studio spaces on the first floor and the ever growing and changing collection of art in the living space on the second floor, there is a lot for people to see and talk about.
Over the last few years that I have attended the “after party” events, the demographics of those at the party have really diversified in terms of an increase in first-timers and those who wouldn’t be considered museum insiders.
If you are finding people balk when you throw open the doors to your organization and invite them in, maybe the answer can be found in throwing open the doors to your home.
Politicians know the power of retail politics where they meet people one on one at small gatherings. Living room meetings are the hallmark of politicking in New Hampshire.
A similar approach may be useful to breaking down barriers for some people in a community.
…shares stories of female artists, muses and subjects. (Versions of the tour are also offered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, National Gallery of Art in the District and the Getty Center in Los Angeles.) Over the course of two hours, we hear about witches and their love of psychedelics; we view works dedicated to the African goddess Oshun, who has inspired the art of Beyoncé; we peer into the dollhouse-like miniature rooms conceived by artist Narcissa Niblack Thorne; and we chew on the fact that works by women, historically, are largely underrepresented in art museums.
Whereas,
…a tour tailored to “finance bros,” for example, will immediately take them to the most expensive object in the museum, with a blunt discussion of its worth—an entry point to engage the newbie audience.
For Harry Potter fans, there is “The Completely Unofficial and Definitely Unlicensed Boy Wizard Tour”
Their core mission is to “go after people who think museums aren’t for them.”
According to the news stories, Museum Hack is increasingly being hired by cultural organizations to train their docents to present the content in a more accessible manner in terms of language, context and delivery.
My first thought was that there might be a lot of push back from cultural institutions who felt like this was dumbing down the experience what they have to offer. (Though the fact Museum Hack brought $200,000 in revenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year is something to be dismissed.)
The thing is, people who regularly visit museums already have different motivations for doing so that may not align with the assumptions or goals of the institution. I have written about John Falk’s Identity and the Museum Experience before. What is described as the motivations of the a Experience Seeker pretty much aligns with the tour designed for “finance bros.”
While the experience provided at a cultural institution can often delight, you can’t control what type of experience people expect to have. Falk’s identity scheme acknowledges that the same person might not return to the same museum with the same agenda. They may be acting as a facilitator for others during one trip and simple seek to recharge the next time around.
From what I have read their focus seems to really be more about storytelling and forming an engaging narrative about what is found in the museum rather than trying to exploit pop culture trends.
I have often seen titles for university courses that invoke pop culture associations that don’t always follow through and deliver on the promise of an engaging course. There is probably less to complain about in terms of misrepresentation in a two hour museum tour than a 14 week university course.
One thing I was curious about that I didn’t see mentioned in either of the two articles was how many people who have never entered a museum have used their service versus how many regular museum attendees are signing up for the change of perspective.
I can believe that someone who never entered a museum might pay $59 for a tour that resonated with their interests. It would be good to know how often that happens because it could further refute the argument for free admission days.
Research already shows that free admission days are largely attended by those already in the habit of going to museums. Indications that people are willing to pay for an appealing experience might go some distance to bolstering museum finances.
A member of the panel, British philosopher, Dr. Julian Baggini addressed the issue of using economic impact as a metric of the value of arts and culture in very familiar terms:
“…they don’t need defending in terms of anything else. And I think what happens is, we get sucked into a kind of debate in which we are always having to justify the Arts and Humanities in terms set by a more utilitarian agenda.”
He goes on to talk about how he was involved with a project which was studying the benefits of active participation in arts and culture for physical and psychological well-being.
Then he cautions that even framing the arts in terms of their health benefits or ability to stimulate important neurological centers in the brain represents a trap because it doesn’t allow for the arts to have value in and of itself. This framework uses health benefits to justify the existence of arts and culture.
He says the ultimate goal should be the creation of a more civilized society. In that context, economic growth and technology are instruments toward the goal rather than being the goals.
That is to say, economic growth should be evaluated for its contribution toward civilized society alongside arts, culture, science and technology rather than positioning those things as subservient to economic growth.
Via CityLab is a NY Times story about how the Boyle Heights community in Los Angeles has recently hosted a “play street.” The program, which apparently started in London, shuts down a street to provide kids with a place to play.
A quick glance on the web shows that both NYC and Seattle have similar programs. I am sure there are more cities participating. They both have some good best practices guidelines.
NYC has put together a listing of organizations that will go to play street events in different parts of the city to provide a whole range of services from dance class, bike lessons, double-dutch workshops, healthy cooking demonstrations, music lessons, etc, etc. Programs like this are a great opportunity for an arts and culture organizations to make themselves more accessible to the community–including talking with people to learn about how to become more accessible to them.
The tension between both wanting and fearing improvements to the neighborhood is evident in the NY Times article.
“There’s a difference between making something beautiful to sell it and making it useful,” said Leonardo Vilchis, co-director of Union de Vecinos. “So the question is, can we make this place more livable for people living here now?”
With tensions about gentrification running high, the community’s decision to embrace the play street concept was not a casual one.
[…]
The residents chose Fickett Street with the intention of providing a safe space not just for children but for the community, said Chelina Odbert, KDI’s co-founder and executive director.
“What a play street is not is a replacement for permanent parks,” she said. “But it bridges the gap in a way that’s really needed.”
Even before I read the line about play streets not being a replacement for a park, I was hoping the city didn’t see closing off a street for play an acceptable substitute for a park. There is a lot of conversation about neighborhood which are food deserts, but there are probably a lot of social benefit deserts for things like play out there as well.
In the last couple years a small herd of boys has started ranging across the lawns of the neighborhood acting out various scenarios. I made it clear to their parents that I had no objection to picking up nerf darts when I mowed and having their “dead” bodies strewn across my lawn because it meant that they weren’t inside watching TV or playing video games. (In fact, as I write this, there are kids hiding behind my house.)
Provided there are sufficient traffic controls to make it safe, it would be a good sign if neighborhoods exercised their communal will to create an environment where kids can safely play in the streets without overt barriers.
Back in February I wrote about how the Akron Art Museum and Akron-Summit County Public Library were teaming up to lend art to local residents. At the time, the only other similar program I was aware of was at Oberlin College. At the time, someone wrote and said their local libraries had been doing that for a long time as well.
Many of those listed have been lending art for decades. The University of Minnesota appears to be the oldest having started in 1934.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver initiated their program, which started with commissioning 25 pieces by 20 artists, with the intent of showing Denver residents the importance of artists by allowing them to take the works home.
Some of the older programs have started to investigate the impact and motivation for borrowing the art.
MIT’s Student Loan Art Collection has existed since 1969, and in a recent lending session, 975 people entered a lottery for 600 artworks. Demand also exceeded supply when the University of Chicago revived its lending library after a 30-year hiatus.
[…]
This year, both MIT and the University of Chicago created surveys that aimed to determine whether students who borrowed art also became patrons of cultural events and spaces. (The results aren’t in yet.) Of the MCA in Denver, Lerner said that some borrowers may have a previous interest in particular artists, but he expects others to start “following” the artists whose work they borrow. At the MCA’s library launch event, 21 out of 28 borrowers told me that they didn’t know any of the participating artists. Several lottery entrants said they were participating because they wanted to hang original art in their home for free.
When the University of Chicago set about reviving their program, they assembled “a student-staffed Collections and Acquisition committee” to help make the collection more inclusive and diverse.
I am going to try to keep my eyes open for any news about the results of MIT and University of Chicago’s study. The fact that demand exceeds supply at nearly every one of these programs and the institutions need to run lotteries indicates there is definitely an interest.
Whether this interest overcomes a perceptual/time/physical barriers to visiting a museum/gallery will be of interest to me. People may fully embrace the opportunity to enjoy an art work in their home, but still consider museums a place other people go.
I have written before about the visual arts fair I started about two years ago to provide an opportunity for students and artists in the community to sell their work and get experiencing talking about it with people who don’t share their vocabulary.
Two weeks ago we had the fifth iteration of the event and we think it was easily the best one we have had thus far. We have experimented with the time and date a little bit. It appears that Spring is more popular than Fall in terms of artists having the time and material to participate.
We had so many applicants, that we decided to expand into a new area of the building. Previously, we had been concerns that if one or two people were placed into the overflow area that was slightly apart from the main area, they would feel slighted. Having reached a certain critical mass, we had the numbers to better populate that area. Additionally, a recent re-lamping project provided much better illumination.
A year ago we started placing art works in area businesses prior to the art fair event. We posting pictures daily on social media so people could find the artworks and at the very least generate good will for the business. This year we saw an increase in participation by both artists and businesses. In one case, I ended up placing a work in a business on the other side of the county 45 minutes away.
Based on this alone, I would feel like we were making progress toward a goal of helping people recognize their capacity to be creative in line with the effort to build public will for arts and culture with which I am involved.
However…once again I partnered with my frequent collaborators, The Creative Cult who designed a “creative journey” visitors to the arts fair could embark upon. The journey took people along the fringes of the art fair and across three floors of the building in an attempt to find the guru who would provide the answer to creativity.
Here is a map of the odyssey
Participants were placed in the role of subjects of a tyrant who suppressed creativity. In order to escape, each party had to construct an item from a pile of supplies that would help them escape the walls of their prison. People made everything from drills to ray guns to bombs.
The next station was a field of strange flowers. When people touched the flower, they were overcome with the image of a monster. They had to draw the monster which was preventing them from being creative that day (which could be anything from lack of confidence to obligations) and a weapon with which they would slay the monster.
Next they ascended to a chasm guarded by a troll who asked riddles. The bridge was made of broken planks–but the only safe path was to step in the empty spaces rather than on the actual planks.
On the other side, they met “Steve” a guy playing video games and surrounded by half finished drawings. He never completes anything due to lack of confidence and commitment. There is always a last touch that needs to be added. There is a puzzle that needs to be solved to open the door at the top of the next level where they meet the guru face to face.
As to what the guru tells our intrepid questors, well that is for them to know.
Among the benefits I saw in this whole endeavor was that attendees were offered an alternative hands on creative activity in which they could participate at the visual art fair. If you were feeling uncertain about how to react to what you saw on display on the artists’ tables or how to interact with the creators, you could always run over and check out the crazy guys leading people around the building.
Days later when I had a little follow up conversation with one of the Creative Cult members, he remarked on how freeing the act of roleplaying was. A particularly shy member of their collaborative had fearless jumped in with both feet because he equated the whole activity as playing a Dungeons and Dragons character rather than himself leading a group of strangers.
As someone in the performing arts, this benefit of roleplay has long been apparent to me, but for people who identify themselves primary as visual artists, this was something of a revelation for them.
As they got excited about the prospect of adding roleplay to their toolbox, I started to consider how the resurgent popularity of games like Dungeons and Dragons might be employed to the benefit of arts and culture organizations.
The Creative Cult guys made a recap video of the experience that can be viewed on Facebook. I am having some problems getting it to embed successfully.
Hat tip to Nina Simon for calling attention to a post about how the Barnes Foundation is working toward changing their user experience. Even though the Barnes Foundation art collection was moved from a residential area to Philadelphia, efforts were made to replicate the close quarters environment of the original house. This complicates matters because it is easier for more people to access a place whose interior space hasn’t increased.
(There have been decades long conflicts related to Albert Barnes’ detailed instructions about the way the collection is displayed which informed the design of the new space.)
Shelley Bernstein, Deputy Director of Audience Engagement and Chief Experience Officer for the Barnes Foundation wrote about the poor impression people received before they even entered the door.
We had a no photo, no sketching, no bags, no coats, and “stay behind the line” policies. All of these things were well intentioned and all were in place in the name of collection safety — a very important thing — but, still, it was a lot of “no” to those we were trying to welcome. And we were trying to tell visitors about all these “nos” before they would enter the collection.
[…]
You can see this surface in online reviews, “… had to be told the exact etiquette before entering which makes it feel like they treat their visitors as if none of them has ever set foot in any other major museums/collections before(???)”
Bernstein set about trying to change how all these rules were communicated as well as exploring which policies could be changed. While she originally intended to scrap the no-photography policy, she realized with half the rooms only having 100 square feet that people could occupy, allowing free rein on photograph wasn’t going to work. So they piloted different policies over the course of a year to see which worked best in their environment.
Perhaps most importantly, they created staff training materials for interacting with visitors based on a process known as Authority of the Resource (ART), that the National Park Service uses in their training. This approach makes citing the rules the last step rather than the first. Even better, Bernstein has shared those materials, which includes signage and the National Park Service discussion of the approach, for others to reference.
Authority of the Resource (ART) shifts the focus away from the concept of enforcement power and toward the requirements to preserve the resource. There are obviously going to be people who don’t give a damn and want to do what they desire, but it does shift the initial interaction away from “because I said so and I am the authority figure.”
From the Park Service’s article.
“…the visitor ends up thinking about laws, regulations, badges and the ranger’s presence rather than focusing on the natural authority inherent in the requirements of a healthy ecosystem.
[…]
“…the AR technique goes one step further and asks the ranger/manager to subtly de-emphasize the regulation and transfer part of the expectation back to the visitor by interpreting nature’s requirement.”
Here the the Barnes Foundation training pamphlet. Clicking on either image will take you Bernstein’s Dropbox copy of the document.
In his reflections on attending the 2018 Nonprofit Technology Conference, Drew McManus noted how many presenters at the conference packed too much text on to Powerpoint slides. He observes the text was so dense and the font size so small on some slides he had to take a picture with his phone so he could magnify it to legibility.
2. But even better, remember that slides are free. You can have as many as you like. That means that instead of three bullet points (with two sentences each) on a slide, you can make 6 slides. Or more. The energy you create by advancing from slide to slide will seduce most of the people in your audience to read along to keep up. Slides that people read are worth five times more than slides that you read to them.
3. Better still, don’t use words. Or, at the most, one or two keywords, in huge type. The rest of the slide is a picture, which I’m told is worth 1,000 words. That way, the image burns itself into one part of the brain while your narrative is received by the other part. The keyword gives you an anchor, and now you’re hitting in three places, not just one.
5. Many organizations use decks as a fancy sort of memo, a leave-behind that provides proof that you actually said what you said. “Can you send me the deck?” A smart presenter will have two decks. One deck has plenty of text, but then those pages are hidden when the presentation is performed live.
I think people in the arts can really appreciate these points because they understand the value of pacing and using images to convey your message. There may be some reticence to do so for fear of breaking some rules of business decorum. Godin is basically giving people permission to flex those skills.
Just remember that too much flash and spectacle can detract and distract from your core message.
I love rule five. I had never considered having an enhanced version of a slide deck that you could send to those who requested it until I read this post. If you read my post last Wednesday, you know this is exactly what Drew did when he made the version of the presentation Ceci and he delivered available with all the background notes.
I was a little tickled to see that Godin’s post in early April about paring down the content of Powerpoint presentations was itself a pared down version of a post he made 11 years ago. That post in turn, was pulled from an ebook he wrote four years earlier. A little practicing what one preaches!
That is also the secret to delivering good presentations–practice and revisions. Practice and revise multiple times before the first presentation and then continue to do so every time you revisit the content.
As with so many things, there is a tendency to believe an effective speaker possesses an inborn talent and genius for a turn of phrase. One of the benefits of having so much video and audio content available online is that when you watch or listen to a favorite speaker, you have many opportunities to note how they continue to weave familiar content in and out of their addresses and evaluate how they are improving over time (or getting a little stale).
In addition to going to Toulon, IL, Free Street and ProPublica Illinois will be visiting Urbana, Carbondale/Jackson County, Rock Island/Quad Cities, and Rockford during May. So if you live in or near any of those places, check it out.
They did a trial run at the end of March in Chicago and have posted some of their reflections already. One of the things they recognized immediately was a need to do a better job of making people aware that they were having these workshops.
In the course of playing various games, they discovered that the terms people use to define their community, including how they defined community, had some bearing on how they composed the narrative about themselves.
We played a game in which we were asked to line up according to how strongly we agreed with various statements, from “We are living in a war zone” to “I love ice cream.” You’d be surprised at how many interpretations there are of what a war zone is, and how many people have strong feelings about ice cream.
In small groups, we talked about a time we each felt misrepresented in a news story, and how that directly affected us and our communities. It led to revealing conversations about how we each defined “community.”
[…]
At the end of the night, we returned to the sticky notes to ask: What do we want the story of our community to be? This is an important question — for us and for this project — that journalists rarely ask. But they should. If journalists don’t know how a community views itself, journalists don’t know what that community has at stake when it is represented or misrepresented.
If we never bother to ask — in real, concrete ways — it can seem like we don’t care. Journalists know how to fact-check names and statistics. But how often do journalists fact-check the underlying narrative of a community?
Since there is an ongoing conversation in the arts about how people want to see themselves and their stories depicted in performances and other forms of creative expression, these reflections by ProPublica reporter Natalie Escobar should pretty much be shared by those identifying with the arts and culture community.
Last week Arts Midwest held a webinar to provide some examples of the way in which different arts organizations were putting the Creating Connection messaging and research into practice. They had representatives of the Eugene Symphony and two arts organizations from Klamath Falls, OR present talk about some of the successes they have seen.
Each of the organization links above will take you to pages with examples of brochures, videos, social media campaigns, letters and other pieces each of the organizations used.
There were a couple programs that stuck out for me as I was watching last week. One of the biggest “duh” moments for me was the Eugene Symphony’s use of a white board in the lobby to collect feedback from audiences. All those times we have tried to figure out how to get better response rate on surveys, something like this never occurred to us. So many grant applications ask for summaries of the feedback you have collected from the audience. It can’t hurt to have pictures of people enthusiastically participating in writing on white boards.
The people from the Eugene Symphony also spoke about how they shifted the focus of their fundraising efforts. At their gala auction, they placed fewer items up for auction and spent more time on storytelling about creating connections. In their donor appeal letter, they changed the message away from “support our excellence.” Instead, when deciding what to include in the solicitation letter, they ask themselves, “Is this going to be the story of their growth, their voice, their well-being or their happiness?” The repeated “their” being the letter recipient.
The images in their publications are focused on the experience the audience will have rather than on the organization. The “Meet The Conductor” video only shows Music Director & Conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong in the concert hall or in the process of conducting for a few seconds. Most of the video is him hugging people at picnics and while walking down the street, chatting at ballparks and sidewalk cafes.
One of the things I liked was that they used the image of a stick figure hugging the silhouette of the theater for all of their giving programs – donations, volunteer solicitations or asking people to join their guild. Depicting volunteers as loving the organization in the same way as large donors do has a certain appeal.
Crystal also spoke about how the Linkville Playhouse’s Little Linkville program, a group of adults who do shows for kids, started having kids usher the shows and design posters as a way of improving the connection with their core constituency. She also talked about how their costume and prop philosophy was that they could only use and wear things that could be found around the house so that if the kids wanted to go home and replicate what they saw on stage, there would be few barriers to doing just that.
I was recently involved with a strategic planning session for a non-arts group where staff and representatives of community constituencies were intermingled at different tables.
When we were asked to brain storm solutions to serve a greater segment of the community, I mentioned the need to go out and learn about the unfulfilled needs of the community rather than focusing on the quality and range of services the organization wanted to offer. I suggested possibly conducting community listening sessions.
People at the table thought it was a great idea and wrote it down on the paper on the easel. When it came time to report out, that idea wasn’t mentioned but we only had a couple minutes so it was no big deal.
But as the other tables repeatedly mentioned going out to new areas to talk about all the great programs the organization had to offer without ever mentioning making an effort to learn if any of the programs were relevant to community needs, something inside me started to rebel and protest.
That is when I realized I had really started to internalize the ideas that research, different advocacy and policy groups, and individuals like Trevor O’Donnell have been communicating for awhile now. I have mentioned this before – The focus can’t entirely be on your organization and how great you and the stuff you do are. It has to be about how what you do fulfills expectations your potential patron/participants have about a product or experience.
In the case of this blog’s readers, that experience is related to arts and culture.
While I have written about this idea a fair number of times now, I will freely admit my practice in implementing this concept is far from ideal. Still, I see the fact that I bridled internally upon hearing proposals that ran counter to this concept as a positive step.
The experience has also reinforced for me that making progress is probably going to be a long term process of repetition –both to myself and aloud to others as I had in the strategic planning meeting.
Intellectually, we know repetition helps to establish good habits, but it is easy to forget this when faced with tepid progress. Lack of immediate investment by others isn’t necessarily an indication that the idea isn’t good. Merely that the presentation wasn’t effective and needs to be refined or that the people listening haven’t heard or considered the idea enough times for it to make sense as a valuable course of action.
Back in February CityLab covered an effort by residents of the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, MN to get people invested in contributing to the Small Area Plan for their neighborhood. This was in part driven by the experience the Frogtown Neighborhood Association voted to refurbish an historic theater in town but the mayor choose to direct the money to a police shooting range because the theater wasn’t in the neighborhood’s small area plan.
Because Small Area Plans, like strategic plans tend to be dry documents that get put on a shelf never to be consulted, the Frogtown Neighborhood Association were determined to make their plan a living document with which people interacted. They did this by placing the plan and the feedback they received from hundreds of residents into the framework of a comic book.
What I admire about the document is that they create 8 characters who are experts on major areas of concern like land use, housing, transportation, education, arts, health and wellness, economic vitality and resource allocation. They make each of these people representative of different demographic segments like long time residents, house owners, apartment renters, kids, married couples, single college grads, etc.
By doing so they put a face and connect expertise to different people in the neighborhood so it is more difficult to dismiss people as gentrifiers or cranky malcontents standing in the way of progress.
They reiterate their goal quite a few times across the book to employ design thinking to “Sculpt our community into a mixed income, arts, entrepreneurship and education centered urban village.”
Because it is a planning document it is still pretty text heavy, but this is an example of what is contained within the book. As I sort of implied before, you could probably do worse than applying this approach to your strategic plan.
Hat tip to Andrew Taylor for calling attention to ever awesome Springboard for the Arts’ “Year In Review” report which consists of a short letter from Executive Director Laura Zabel but more prominently features the following infographic which you can print and color.
I feel like this is a great example of the underlying message and goal of the Creating Connection I keep advocating for.
It basically tells people, “Springboard for the Arts is an organization that promotes arts, culture and creative expression, all things in which you can participate…so pick up crayons, markers or colored pencils and get started.”
If you are like me and are inspired by this sort of thing, share it! (Or maybe color it first and then share it)
There is another way. The Gewandhaus Leipzig in Germany (concert venue) offers flex- tickets for a small premium. Not an…