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What About Artists On Corporate Boards?

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A posting by Alex Tabarrok today on Marginal Revolution inspired some “what’s good for the goose…” thinking for me today. He links to a study showing that academics on corporate boards tend to keep the company healthy.

I am not going to suggest putting arts and culture people on corporate boards will automatically help a corporation any more than encouraging them to settle in a city will make the area more economically prosperous. However, many of the impacts the study finds academics (both professors and administrators) have on companies appear to be ones that arts professionals might bring as well.

First, academic directors are outside directors with relatively strong reputations and a tradition of independent thinking. They are trained to be critical thinkers with their own opinions and judgments, and they are less influenced by others and can be tough when necessary (Jiang and Murphy, 2007)…Fama (1980) and Fama and Jensen (1983) argue that outside directors have incentives to monitor management because they want to protect their reputation as effective, independent decision makers. Thus, the monitoring theory indicates that academic directors would be important monitors of management.

Obviously, not all professors would make good directors, nor would all arts people. However, arts people have that tradition of independent thinking and an almost inborn fear of being labeled a sell-out which can motivate them to speak their concerns.

Third, academic directors’ primary areas of expertise are academic in nature. They tend to think through problems differently than nonacademics and can provide different perspectives in the boardroom, which adds to the board’s diversity. Prior studies find that board diversity (such as occupational diversity, social diversity, gender diversity, and ethnic diversity) is an important factor that influences board efficacy and firm performance

If arts people don’t bring a different perspective to things, I don’t know who will.

The area the study found that academics contributed most to a company was in relation to oversight. As I read the following, it seemed that non-profit board meetings and the attendant committee meetings, something that is at the center of both a professor and an arts administrator’s life, might actually be an asset.

“We find that academic directors are more likely to attend board meetings than other outside directors. In addition, academic directors hold more outstanding committee memberships than other outside directors. Specifically, academic directors are more likely to sit on monitoring-related committees, such as auditing committees and corporate governance committees, than nonacademic outside directors. The results on the director attendance behavior and committee assignments indicate that academic directors are better at board governance than other outside directors.”

Other benefits to oversight the study found was that CEO turnover was more closely tied with company performance and the financial operations were run in such a way there were fewer Securities and Exchange Commission investigations of the top executives when academics sat on the board. Companies with academics on the board also tended to be more innovative.

Now, of course, the disclaimers. Not all types of companies had academics on the boards and the study finds that different types of companies benefited from different board compositions.

Business professors were the most effective board members. Other types of academic fields mentioned were technology and law. This is not to say that arts people wouldn’t be effective because it doesn’t appear that too many liberal arts professors were asked to serve. It is something of an unknown quality.

If corporations are valuing creativity and critical thinking from employees, especially recent college graduates, they could presumably benefit from tapping those who teach them.

Likewise, they could benefit from arts people who are not only creative, critical thinkers, but are constantly cobbling together coalitions to pursue projects.

But the potentially biggest impediment to effective service on a for-profit board for both academics and arts people is whether they are dependent on the corporation upon whose board they serve for support.

“Furthermore, some academic directors hold administrative positions and thus may have connections to companies through university endowments or other fundraising relationships, which may make them less independent than inside managers.”

Still, it is interesting to think about the potential benefits to a corporation to have an arts person serve on the board.

In wondering why it doesn’t happen more often, I came to the not inconsiderable or illogical conclusion that corporations may not view those who ask them for money as equal to the task of helping them make money.

Caring, Rather Than Money, Makes The World Go Round

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There was a Slate article today covering research on motivating employees that seemed well-aligned with the non-profit work environment. The research essentially verifies the importance of providing recognition and a sense of meaning to employees.

Researchers found that small gifts, rather than money, motivated people to work harder. They told one group of workers they would receive 7 euros more in pay than they had been promised when they were recruited. Another group was given a gift wrapped water bottle worth 7 euros and the control group was given no bonus. The cash bonus didn’t inspire any improvement, but those receiving the bottle were 25% more productive than those in the other two groups. The article notes that this increase in productivity more than paid for the 7 euro expenditure.

(my emphasis)

It’s not that the workers particularly loved their bottles—in fact, in a separate experiment in which catalogers were offered the choice between a bottle versus 7 euros, 80 percent took the cash (and still worked a lot harder). Rather, it was the thought that counted, and simply handing out a few more euros hardly takes much thought. Even offering the option of a gift showed that the employer cared.

An intriguing final version of the experiment underscored the importance, in the eyes of the employees, of the thought and effort bosses put into their gifts. This time, the cash was delivered as a 5-euro note folded into an origami shirt and a 2-euro coin with a smiley face painted on it. The origami money-gift generated the highest increase in productivity of all…

The study isn’t without its limitations. It’s hard to imagine that the average Wall Street trader would work harder for a pink Cadillac than a six-figure bonus. The motivational effects of cash surely become more important when the stakes get higher, and gifts probably work best when tailored to the particular set of employees. That’s how you really show you care.

And that, more than gifts versus cash, is really the study’s takeaway. Many employees toiling away in stores, factories, and cubicles are desperate for a sense of meaning in their work lives. Even the smallest gesture of kindness that shows they’re part of an organization that actually cares can give them purpose—and that leads to motivation.

It is widely recognized that people who work in non-profits do so because they valued the purpose and meaning they find in their work. Invoking the obvious disclaimer that it shouldn’t be a substitute for paying people a living wage, a boss providing some validation that what motivates that employee is valued and recognized can keep that person energized.

It probably isn’t a coincidence that the gifts that exhibited the most effort on the bosses’ part elicited the strongest effort on the employees’ part. For all the technology that may separate us, the work environment is still a communal experience and each person wants to know that the others are expending effort and thought on their behalf.

In many respects, this goes back to the post I made last week about the early warning signs that things are amiss with your company. When the board, upper management and lower echelons are each convinced the others are invested and working hard to keep the organization viable, that knowledge permeates that whole organization without anyone giving voice to that fact.

And the absence of that unity will begin to manifest itself in some intangible way as well.

Info You Can Use: NP Orgs Exist In Shadow Universe (Great Resource Guides Too)

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My Twitter feed delivered me two great resources for arts professionals on the same day this week.

The first came courtesy of Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group. I guess I should have known that when they talked about a guide developed for “WA Artists” they meant Western Australia and not Washington State. In my defense, they link to a lot of prominent U.S. arts sources (like me!).

The guide they shared, Amplifier: The Arts Business Guide for Creative People, from Propel Youth Arts, is really one of the best guides for creatives just starting out that I have come across. If you cut out the resource guide at the end of the booklet, 98% of it is applicable to a creative anywhere.

The guide is really accessible with fun illustrations and interviews that will probably make you want to move to Western Australia. It also walks you through all sorts of planning processes with questions and checklists: project management, business plans, identifying markets, goal setting, evaluation, finances & funding, legal, product, pricing, place and promotion.

It doesn’t just deal with performance, but also tackles film, visual art and publishing, delves into copyright law (which appears almost identical to U.S. law) and licenses.

The guide also spends a few pages on risk assessment and insurance for events which is something I have never really seen in similar guides even though it is very important.

The second resource comes from the Wallace Foundation. This one is more geared toward arts groups rather than individuals starting out and is focused on administrative issues like finances, board oversight and administration.

You may have seen some tweets about it but not followed the link. It is really worth stopping by to take a look.

Some of the guides and case studies are what you might expect “Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management” and How to Talk About Finances So Non-Financial Folks Will Listen.

But there are some with more intriguing titles like: “Efficiency” and “Not-for-Profit” Can Go Hand in Hand,  and The Looking-Glass World of Nonprofit Money: Managing in For-Profits’ Shadow Universe.  

The latter is described as” Especially useful overview for board members with little exposure to the unique nature of finance in a nonprofit context.” I  never really thought of NP orgs as operating in a shadow universe. Sounds so cool! Does that mean Rocco Landesman was the dark emperor or something while he headed the National Endowment for the Arts?

There are also proposals like “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle” which advocate for changes in the way foundations support non-profits.

The part of this resource I have seldom seen in other places was a whole section of five articles, including a podcast, on figuring out the True Cost of programs. They specifically have a calculator for figuring out the cost of after school programs, but following the steps outlined in some of the other articles can help reveal truths like social media isn’t actually free.

I haven’t read through everything in the guide, but I am definitely going to bookmark it for future reference.

Info You Can Use: In House Professional Development

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I came across a piece by the Bridgespan Group about creating professional development opportunities for non-profit organization staff members when you don’t have the money to send them to conferences.

Some of their suggestions included cross-training, job shadowing and stretch assignments which give people responsibilities outside their usual scope so that they can begin to develop in areas they are lacking.

One thing that caught my attention was the suggestion that employees be given the responsibility for organizing internal gatherings. In addition to having employees take turns organizing and running staff meetings, the article discusses companies where the staff arranges for speakers and other activities for in house professional development, training and team building exercises.

As I was thinking about this idea and who might the staff invite to speak or provide training, it occurred to me that this practice might be helpful in promoting greater understanding between non-profits, their boards and the community.

One of the first thoughts I had was that board members might either attend or be speakers at these events. The experience might either be very informative and help the organization move forward or reveal the gaps in understanding.

This is where things might get tricky. In the best possible situation, board members might come to an understanding of how the organization is run and the challenges it faces. Staff might learn new practices for the way forward.

On the other side, people may realize there is a huge lack of understanding. Staff may realize that a board member presenting a talk has no concept of the business model non-profits follow as they encourage the organization to embrace practices to move them toward greater profitability. How to approach them diplomatically and clarify matters may not initially be clear. However, it may provide a realization that a better board education program is needed.

The same thing can happen involving the public sphere. Staff may become aware of new trends applicable to their organization. Using these talks as an example, the non-profit staff could turn around and create/join a speakers bureau to raise awareness about their organization.

Finally, having read many excellent arts social media postings and blog entries by arts leaders, it is clear there are many very intelligent, well informed people out there in the non-profit world. If they are able to get up in front of their own company and speak objectively (rather than with a subtext about where the staff is failing to live up to expectations) about general philosophy and practice in their industry, I would bet those they work with would see them in an entirely different light.

It is so easy to get bogged down with the day to day details of running the organization, few in the organization may be aware of breadth of knowledge and passion their colleagues have. People may suddenly realize they have a unexpected source of expertise and inspiration readily available.

Of course, no matter what you do, you run the risk of he internal development/training sessions being entirely inappropriate and boring. But you can get that at a conference you pay to attend, too.

There Go The Brains of The Operation

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I had been pondering on whether to post on this topic but Thomas Cott’s link to a Bloomberg News story about how leaders of arts organizations in the U.S. remain in that position far longer than colleagues in the UK.

The story weighs the benefits of leaders having long term relationships with donors vs. concerns about leadership becoming staid and slow to be responsive to changing times.

My concern comes from a slightly different, though related, direction. Over Christmas I received an email from a long time friend saying she was leaving the performing arts sector to take another job. We had been students together and I had initially modeled my career path after her’s until I realized I really didn’t want her career path. She was essentially the founding executive director for her organization and had held the job for over a decade before deciding to make the job change.

I have heard similar stories from other colleagues, including those in my cohort at Arts Presenters’ Emerging Leadership Institute. People ended up leaving performing arts, some only a few years after having earned a master’s in arts administration.

While I am pleased to see that a master’s in arts administration can get you jobs in other sectors, I am a little concerned about what this bodes for the future. I am not calling for long term arts leaders to vacate their positions and let others get their chance, though that is something that is frequently mentioned.

My concern is that there is going to be a huge leadership gap when the long time arts leaders do retire. My long time friend had about 20 years experience before she made her decision to leave the arts sector. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her assume a state or regional arts policy leadership position. Granted, she could easily return to assume such a role in the future. I wouldn’t discount it happening.

My knowledge of people leaving the arts is anecdotal and not backed by hard statistics, but I have to imagine there are quite a few others out there of whom I am not aware who are likewise leaving the arts. If so, there is a going to be a huge gap to fill if people with 10-20 years experience leave the sector with only those with less than 10 years experience to replace them.

And lets not forget, there is research showing that many people don’t want to become executive directors. There may be few of any level of experience who are willing to step up. This is where the research and the reasons given by my colleagues intersect–lack of opportunity and work-life balance are dissuading people.

I have written about this topic a number of times before throughout the years, but it was largely theoretical. Now I begin to see signs of the problem impacting my own experience and the repercussions become less abstract and more worrisome.

In terms of a solution, I look back to my post last month on the executive leadership as my best suggestion at this juncture. There I suggested there might be benefits in adopting emerging business models and changing job descriptions so that responsibility and involvement in marketing and development permeate the entire organization rather than being siloed.

Stuff to Ponder: Get Thee To A Start Up Weekend!

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I was intrigued to see that the Scion car company is running a contest to help cultivate new entrepreneurs. Scion has always positioned themselves as a lifestyle brand, (disclaimer: I own one of the first 100 Scions sold in my state.), but I thought this was an interesting approach for them.

Basically, they will fly up to 50 semi-finalists to LA to participate in a three day event where they attend seminars, meet up with mentors and receive advice on writing press releases, forming LLCs, getting loans, soliciting investors and copywrighting ideas (I am guessing they mean trademarking since you can’t copywright ideas.) The semi-finalists then rewrite their proposals and finalists are chosen from the best revamped proposals.

I am sure there is a lot Scion will get out of it, but free advice directly applying to their own business isn’t one of them. One of the first restrictions on the contest is that it can’t be related to the car industry or Scion’s business activities.

This idea isn’t new. There are tons of entrepreneurship competitions out there as well as start up weekends where people from all sorts of background come together to meet and potentially launch a start up in the course of 54 hours.

The Scion contest got me thinking about two things- First, could an arts oriented project end up as a finalist in one of these type of competitions? Could someone go into one of the Start Up Weekends and emerge with a viable arts oriented company and business model after tapping into the brains of those present?

My second thought was from the other direction–should arts professionals participate as advisers in these sort of events in order to exhibit the value of the arts in the community beyond just entertainment? This might go a long way toward making the case not only for arts organizations, but perhaps more importantly toward the value of arts in education, if it was shown that it can contribute to the development of products and ideas that are indeed marketable.

The success of the design school teams over the business school teams in a University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management challenge already started to provide some indications of this.

I have written about articles on what private enterprise can learn from non-profits.

I also pointed that it is important to note that the value of many of the creative exercises arts organizations can offer business lies not so much in the superficial motions of the activity as the fact that performing them means you are carving time out of your day to devote to creativity.

We DO NOT Need Another Abraham Lincoln

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Last month, Drew McManus posted that we need another Abraham Lincoln. He didn’t go into many details, but I wonder what he could be thinking. Since he suggests replacing Henry Ford with Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar, perhaps he is implying musicians need to be freed from the slavery of assembly line performance where standardization makes one concert interchangeable with any other concert.

All Abraham Lincoln exemplifies is lead from behind disengagement. When Republicans met in Chicago to nominate someone for president, Lincoln was in Springfield content to let his surrogates drum up support. After he was nominated for president, he didn’t even hit the campaign trail, again content to let surrogates like Henry Seward, a former rival for the nomination, speak for him while he sat in Springfield never making a speech.

Heck, Lincoln was so disengaged, he wasn’t even going to go vote on election day until someone pointed out it was his civic responsibility to do so for state and local races also being run that day.

This is not the type of leadership the arts need, especially orchestras. They need leaders who are engaged and involved with all their constituencies.

You may say that this is unfair and the Lincoln was only following the custom of the time and you would be correct. In Team of Rivals , Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential race, Stephen Douglas,

“Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country…becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”

Even though Douglas was supportive of the spread of slavery, shouldn’t we look to him and the strength of character it took to break with tradition and face criticism when the country was at the brink of a national crisis as an example of leadership for the arts?

All right, so…. admittedly I am exploiting the fact Drew was a little vague about what characteristics of Lincoln are needed and quoting from a book whose premise is that Lincoln was a good organizer of people rather than a solitary leader to refute Drew’s thesis. Lincoln was faced by challenging circumstances which forced him to alter his position and practices throughout his career. That is what makes it so easy for those with opposing political view points to claim him as their own. It is easy to cherry pick from different periods of his life.

Not to mention that some people’s strength lies in mobilizing capable subordinates while others are really only effective when they step to the fore. There is probably more blame to be attached to bowing to pressure and adopting practices that run counter to your leadership strengths than to resisting popular expectations in order to operate effectively.

The fact that I was being intentionally inflammatory doesn’t diminish the fact that we are at a crossroads in history that will demand changes in behavior. Some aspects of how we operate may never change.

Lincoln stayed at home and didn’t make speeches because he didn’t want to commit to any course of action or give the newspapers anything to misconstrue. Today we expect presidential candidates to make an appearance everywhere, but they still try their hardest not to commit to anything specific and fear what the media may make of what they say.

For his time, Lincoln was actually rather politically savvy and aware of all the different constituencies he needed to please. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the reasons why Henry Seward didn’t get the nomination was because he spent the summer touring Europe while Lincoln was shoring up his support among key groups.

The changes the arts world need to effect are numerous or else there would be little for myself and hundreds of other arts bloggers and writers to talk about. So in effect we DO need someone like Lincoln as a leader, one who can recognize they stand at the crux of complicated times that requires one to change and respond in a nuanced manner.

There is a lot to admire in Henry Ford. He did much to improve the lives of his workers, but like the parts of his automobiles, they were viewed as parts that could be replaced without any impact to the viability of the company. Ford created a system where the means of production was low skilled labor. That is not necessarily the case with the arts.

Release The Theatre Ninja!

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

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

However, she says,

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

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

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

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

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

Fuel Your Growth Or Ignite Your Destruction?

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Thomas Cott’s recent round up of stories raising questions about whether arts organizations should accept funding from energy companies which are poisoning the environment through oil spills and hydraulic fracking reminded me of the semi-controversial sponsorship of dance by Altria.

I haven’t been able to find it online, but some years ago there was a feeling that the relationship of tobacco giant Altria, neé Philip Morris, to dance was a little unseemly bordering on co-dependence due to the fact that dancers often resorted to smoking to curb their appetites and maintain their desired weight and figure.

They supported a great number of arts organizations, including Lincoln Center, but had a particular affinity for dance. It might have emerged as an issue in the wake of the anti-corporate sentiment of the Occupy movement last year if Altria hadn’t withdrawn their support of the NYC dance scene a few years back when they moved their headquarters to Richmond, VA.

Altria still provides support for the arts, a theatre in Richmond will be named for them in 2013, but their profile of support isn’t as visible since they have left New York.

It does raise the question about what elements should factor into a decision to accept corporate sponsorship or not. Many times corporations provide the sponsorship to bolster their image in the community. At the same time, an arts organization will be concerned about how the image of the corporation reflects on them in the community.

A theatre in Virgina or North Carolina will probably worry less about how their community will react to them being sponsored by Altria than those in NYC since tobacco has a long history in those places. But then Altria may have less incentive to provide sponsorships in those communities in order to bolster their image.

There is also the funding source to consider. Is there less of a stigma associated when Altria’s employees are directing where the funding goes?

This isn’t about Altria. You can substitute the name of an oil company for Altria and oil rich states like Alaska and Texas for tobacco growing states and the situation will be about the same.

In fact, with the stories about how big banks are mishandling money and putting the screws to people over their mortgages, accepting money from banks in some places may not endear you to the community. And since your community is in poor financial straits, banks may be the only significant source of funding enabling you to provide free and low cost services to the self same community.

Given all these factors, it may be wise for arts boards to draft policies and procedures for assessing sponsorship and donation opportunities which may arise.

If you are thinking these issues don’t really matter or don’t feel you even know where to start in developing criteria to evaluate opportunities, you may want to take a look at the blog post by Chris Garrard that Cott links to. There, Garrard addresses what he sees as the weakness of statements like: “But the arts sector needs the money…”; “But historically, the arts have always taken money from big business or sponsors… Why should things be any different now?” and “If we engage more people in the arts to learn about life and philosophy, then that has to counteract issues with where the funding came from…”

I am not necessarily saying Garrard is completely correct. His responses are highly idealistic. But these are all issues that need to be considered.

Info You Can Use: Negative Feedback As GPS Data

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Careful What You Ask

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One of the primary rules of surveying people is to avoid asking questions about things that you have no intention or ability to follow through on. A corollary to that is; and don’t do it on the internet.

The White House is probably learning this lesson after promising to respond to any petition receiving more than 25,000 signatures on their We The People website. If you haven’t heard about this already, people from every state in the union have petitioned to be allowed to secede.

Puerto Rico on the other hand just had a non-binding resolution to become a state.

As of this writing, Texas has over 100,000 signatures on their petition and a number of other states like Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee have exceeded 25,000 signatures.

Austin, El Paso and Atlanta have counter petitions to secede from their respective states to remain part of the U.S.

There are various other counter secession petitions listed as well including everything from exiling people who signed the secession petitions, making seceding states reimburse the U.S. for taxes and forcing Papa Johns and Pizza Hut to give everyone who remains in the U.S. free pizza if Missouri secedes.

There are actually some petitions that probably approach the intention of the website: asking the US to use its influence to gain the freedom of political prisoners, creating unified standards for redistricting, and justice for populations displaced by the U.S. government.

These are a little harder to find amidst all the demands for dissolution, impeachment and vote recounts.

I have read some articles that suggest that while the White House promises a response, it may resemble the form letter you get from a company after complaining: “Your concerns are important to us and we appreciate the feedback of our citizens. However, at this time the administration has no plans to dissolve the country. Be assured, we will keep your suggestions on file against the time that we might make such a decision and will contact you for your input into the process.”

I usually keep away from general politics for the simple reason that as the last election showed, there isn’t all that far to fall down the slippery slope before reaching the mud.

However, I think this is a great example, writ large, of the dangers inherent to soliciting feedback over the internet. It doesn’t take much thought about the consequences to jump on a petition signing bandwagon. Often you will get suggestions from people who have no concept of your business model, audience and organizational history.

However, if something in the input solicitation process leads them to believe there is a good chance of some action being taken and it isn’t, a simple “what do you think?” can turn someone who was generally positively inclined toward your organization into someone who has a bad impression. Better not to have asked in the first place.

The people who signed those petitions are probably expecting the White House to at least acknowledge their requests and start the process of exploring whether their state should be allowed to leave the Union. If nothing of the kind happens, people who merely grumbled “we should show them and leave the US” over a beer before may perceive the whole website as an empty sham and become even more resentful.

And sure, lets face it, that is pretty much what we have come to expect from promises politicians make. This will just be another one of those cases and nothing significant will likely come of it.

However, we do expect more from the businesses with which we interact. This petition system is just a really clear example of how you should watch what you ask, how you ask it and what expectations you create about your response.

Fleeing The Tiger Is No Time To Get Creative

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There was a recent series of posts about creativity and children on the Creativity Post website that have made some concepts gel for me.

In September Dr. Peter Gray made a post about declining creativity scores in school aged children. In part he blames an education system which increasingly focuses on the concept that solutions are either right or wrong rather than providing free time to experiment and play. Given the research he cites, parents that over schedule their kids’ time also share some of the blame.

As much as we in the arts tout the benefits of creativity, you may be surprised to learn how important it is to success in life and how significant the decline is:

According to Kim’s analyses, the scores on these tests [Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)] at all grade levels began to decline somewhere between 1984 and 1990 and have continued to decline ever since. The drops in scores are highly significant statistically and in some cases very large….

…but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average Elaboration score on the TTCT, for every age group from kindergarten through 12th grade, fell by more than 1 standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. Yikes.

[…]

Indeed, the TTCT seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.

In a post this month, Gray continues on this theme discussing how important it is to allow a child to create in a non-judgmental environment. He cites some interesting research on the impact of judgement in home environments on the creative development of children.

My ah-ha! moment came after Gray discusses how people will generate a more creative product if they don’t know their work will be evaluated. People tend to edit themselves in order to please the evaluator and out of fear and anxiety about being judged. (my emphasis)

“If a tiger is chasing you, your best bet is to use well-learned or habitual ways of escaping from the tiger, not to dream up new creative ways of doing so. Creative ways always run the risk of failure, so we are biologically constructed to cut creativity off when failure has serious consequences.”

Many in the arts, myself included, have written about how important it is for arts organizations to embrace the risk of possible failure by experimenting with new approaches to the creation of art, audience/visitor experience, marketing, pricing, etc.

In the context of Gray’s observation, it isn’t that arts organizations are simply risk averse about new experience the way kids are worried about the first day of school or audiences are anxious about attending their first classical music concert.

Rather the fear engendered by financial consequences evokes a hard wired primal fight/flight reaction that actually shuts down our ability to think creativity.

The idea that this situation is biological was as illuminating to me as Neill Archer Roan’s observation a few years ago that emotional satisfaction engendered a diminished sense of responsibility for self-/professional development in arts professionals.

I think it is helpful for arts organizations to be aware the fear of experimentation in the face of perceived threats is not only probably irrational, but also a genuinely visceral reaction. Knowing this, they can endeavor to create a decision making environment where the influence and presence of these threats are diminished.

Likewise, it is important for arts organizations to know these things when providing and advocating for arts education. Creativity is cultivated by arts instruction that provides opportunity for wholly free expression alongside direction and evaluation.

Gatekeeper Processes

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The annual program review is a process we go through at the college both to provide evidence for our accreditation and to measure the general effectiveness of the programs in order meet organizational goals. This process helps the school identify “gatekeeper courses.”

Some colleges and universities use gatekeeper courses to weed students out of certain degree programs by making it very difficult to pass.

For our purposes, the designation is used to indicate courses possessing some characteristic which makes it very difficult for students to acquire basic skills. Make no mistake, the professors will bridle at any suggestion that the standards be lowered in any manner.

Often the solution lies in things like re-ordering the sequence in which concepts are introduced so that the class builds knowledge toward a complex concept in a different manner or perhaps providing hands on demonstration of the complex concept. There are many strategies one can use.

In the arts we talk about very much the same thing when we speak of removing barriers to entry for audiences. We look for alternative ways to communicate, allow people to purchase tickets, find parking, etc–anything that facilitates the decision to attend and makes the experience of doing so more pleasant.

There are many aspects of the process an arts organization can’t and won’t compromise, but there are alternatives the organization can pursue or implement. For example, people may have to pay for parking, but the performing arts center can arrange to paint a distinctive logo on the columns of the municipal parking garage as a signal to patrons the best side of the building to park reach the lobby.

During our preparations for the accreditation site visit, I realized there are many aspects of an organization’s operation that can constitute a “gatekeeper” preventing full participation of all the groups you hope to serve and even hamper the effectiveness of the organization itself.

The organization may pride itself on its accessibility to the public but there may be portions of the art class registration process which you see as helping you collect data for your grants which cause segments of the community you are eager to serve to opt out of participation.

You may view the procurement process you have instituted as central to your attempt to control spending but your staff may see it so onerous it constitutes a disincentive to suggest and develop new programs and as a result, your organization is viewed as staid and unresponsive to changing times.

I have talked many times about marketing being the responsibility of everyone in the organization and that everyone needs to feel like what they do is contributing to the success of the organization and its mission.

But I think it is very easy for departments not in direct contact with those identified as the prime constituency -performers, students, audience members, gift shop customers, etc to feel divorced from the mission.

Human resources may say “we hire the people that make our audiences happy” but sees their purpose as making sure no one exposes the organization to any sort of liability, causing employees to be perpetually anxious.

The business office may say “we help acquire the resources to create the stuff of which dreams are made…” but view their mandate as not allowing the idealistic artistic staff to spend too much money.

Just like with the gatekeeper courses, no one would advocate that staff not be fully trained about sexual harassment and limits of labor laws or that purchasing practices not be properly documented and monitored. However, it is worthwhile to evaluate what parts of your practice are impeding the pursuit of the mission.

Can the material in the employee training program be communicated and reinforced in a different manner than a video at orientation and dire lectures on sexual harassment scenarios? If people are having a hard time remembering purchasing subcodes, is there a better way to organize and list the codes? Or maybe the codes should be an intuitive alphanumeric sequence instead of an incomprehensible series of numbers?

Most importantly is how that department defines their relationship to the overall mission. A change in philosophy will lead to the type of changes I mention. I read an example of this, I think it was in Peter Drucker’s Managing the Nonprofit Organization, about two state social service offices. One got much higher satisfaction ratings than the other because it started from a place where it saw itself as helping people access services while the other saw its role as denying services people weren’t entitled to.

Even if the first office had a lower standard for awarding benefits to clients than the second, but I don’t think an organization has to necessarily compromise the rigor of its standards to engender a sense of satisfaction from others. My choice of the phrase “started from a place…” was intentional.

The context from which you start reframes the whole experience for both the employee and customer even if the final answer is “No.” It isn’t that everyone feels happier because the interaction started on a positive note. Rather, decisions were made long before that customer arrived that effected changes to the physical environment and procedures the office felt were necessary to meeting its perceived mission.

Visitors to both offices might have to fill out Form 46B, but the visitor to the former one might understand the necessity and feel generally optimistic about the outcome, while a visitor to the latter may perceive it as yet another test of their worthiness based on capricious standards.

I have strayed a little bit back toward customer service with this example. But I really want to advocate for looking inward at the company policies and procedures that might be acting as gatekeepers and making employees jobs difficult.

I think arts organizations are generally cognizant of the importance of providing good customer service, even if they aren’t doing it well. Internal evaluation doesn’t happen as frequently and admittedly the true source of problems can be difficult to identify. In the classroom, test scores give a pretty good indication that something is wrong.

It is harder to recognize that inefficient delays in the production department can be solved by providing staff with a company credit card with daily spending limits–a move that empowers the technical staff to acquire minor resources so they can continue working while assuaging the business office’s fears of uncontrollable cost overruns.

Expecting Donors To Inspect More

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So I recently read a rather thought-provoking guest post by Anna McKeon, on Daniela Papi’s Lessons I Learned blog. In the post, McKeon basically says non-profits are making it too easy to donate and volunteer.

Now she is mostly speaking in relation to programs that non-governmental organizations run internationally, but I read with interest thinking that what she said might be applicable across the board with non-profit organizations. McKeon talks about how easy it is to text or click a button on a website to donate without ensuring the money will be used responsibly.

She cites an interesting news report about the negative impacts of voluntourism where people are bussed in to small village where they help build an orphange, feel like they have bonded and made an impact with the local population only to be replaced by another bus load of people doing the same thing the next afternoon.

We shouldn’t make it easy. We’re doing a disservice to ourselves. We’re encouraging each other not to think, not to explore, not to discover. We’re not challenging ourselves, our commitment, our perceptions, or our opinions. We’re promoting a life of ease where a sense of goodwill can be bought and not earned.

So let’s leave some things to be difficult. Difficulty helps us learn. It helps us discover more about the very thing we are trying to achieve. It can also mean that it feels even sweeter when we do succeed in our aims. And you know what? Even though “difficult” might be a harder sell, I still know enough people out there who are up for the challenge.

She makes a semi-valid point that many organizations accept the help of volunteers whose skills are so poor they wouldn’t consider actually hiring them but involve them in the work because it is free labor. I am sure readers can think of a few volunteers they have encountered who fit that bill.

The stakes aren’t as high for ushers at a performance as they are when it comes to providing clean water to a village. But an arts organization could be utilizing volunteers to do far more advance their programs if there was a greater expectation of investment from the volunteer and a corresponding higher level of commitment to volunteer training by the organization.

The one big question that really popped into my mind was–is it really the place of a non-profit organization to demand that donors and volunteers do more due diligence before becoming involved with the non-profit? Being supported by a highly engaged and educated constituency is certainly something I would crave, but I am not sure it is realistic.

But do people care about engaging in research if they are emotionally moved by an experience? Is it our place and in our best interest to expect them to? I think it is pretty clear you can easily garner more money via $25-$100 donations if you make it easy for people to satisfy an impulse to give they feel after seeing a show.

Yes, it is superficial giving and you may never get another donation from them again–but if you hadn’t gotten that impulse donation, you may have absolutely no basis to explore their willingness to give again. If they bought a ticket at the door and left without donating because there was too much work involved, you have no donation and no contact information for them. It is a missed opportunity for further interactions of any kind.

I will concede that it is bad for all non-profits if a donor discovers they contributed to a corrupt organization and is disinclined ever to donate again. There has to be some proportionality to the effort, though. Larger donors certainly need to be cultivated and at certain levels and mutual due diligence is required, but is it worth it for either party to have high expectations associated with a small donation of time or money?

The blog owner, Daniela Papi, related an interesting anecdote in the comments section which actually made me worried about the possibility of what I will term the tyranny of expectations. She talks about an NGO which was concerned about documenting impact for the benefit of their donors to the detriment of their own programs.

“when I asked them why they were harming their programs by trapping themselves in their own donor promises their answer was “Well, Kiva does it. People know exactly who their money goes to on Kiva, and they make that easy. Kiva is our competition for funding, so we need to do it too.”

I am definitely for accountability, especially in the face of so many non-profit scandals where people abscond with funds. (Which can still happen accompanied by glorious impact reports.) But I suspect that the more prevalent impact documentation becomes, there is a danger donors will expect reporting out of proportion to their donation, seeking detailed information customized to their interests, the cost of assembling which exceeds their donation.

This may emerge alongside low administrative costs as another unrealistic expectation placed on non-profit organization. Low overhead ratio and documentation of impact are probably mutually exclusive. I would be highly skeptical of an organization which reports being highly successful at achieving both.

Fear of The Black Hat

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I was intrigued last month by a post on the ArtsFWD website made by Liz Dreyer about Edward DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats group discussion and thinking process.

My first gut reaction that made this approach appeal to me was that it forces everyone in a discussion to act as a devil’s advocate and point out the problems with an idea. In many conversations either no one wants to appear pessimistic or there is that one guy who seems to revel in the role. With the Six Thinking Hats, everyone has to engage in that this type of thinking so that it isn’t avoided, nor is any individual resented for adopting that position.

In addition to taking a judgmental approach, Six Thinking Hats also requires the group to explore in turn: the straight facts of the situation; speak optimistically seeking the positive benefits; discuss feelings and hunches and creatively explore alternatives and new ideas. The whole process is bracketed by a “meta-thinking” hat that sets the rules about how the thinking will be done and evaluates the process when it is over.

Dreyer does a pretty good job of outlining how the group at EMCArts explored the Six Thinking Hats process so I don’t want to reiterate all the details.

As I mentioned, I liked that the process made everyone move between the different perspectives together which helps prevent a strong personality from dominating a conversation and consistently redirecting it toward their personal bias. I also suspect that participation would help each individual member strengthen their personal decision making abilities through practice and the example of others. If a person didn’t feel really confident about thinking creatively or trusting their hunches, contributing to a discussion where this type of thinking wasn’t suppressed and observing others more skilled at this type of thinking could help that person develop themselves.

If you are considering using this approach in meetings, I would suggest doing additional research on how to use it. Each hat isn’t used in equal measure. Some of the additional research I have done specifies that the Red Hat which embodies intuition and hunches only be used for 30 seconds in order to ensure the response is spontaneous and free of internal censoring (“Oh that is a stupid idea…”) There is also a warning, echoed by Dreyer’s post, not to let the critical devil’s advocate Black Hat get overused.

On the other hand, DeBono’s critics say that his approach emphasizes creativity and qualitative thinking rather than testing if empirical data actually bears the ideas out.

That said, if you are doing any grant writing at all in support of your programs you are probably being asked to provide enough empirical data to keep you grounded.

[hr]

By the way, the title of this post was pulled from the hilarious 90s hip-hop mockumentary, Fear of A Black Hat.  Entirely unrelated to the subject of the post but worth checking out, especially if you grew up in 1980s and 90s because you will recognize a lot of the groups they are making fun of.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqp-aSPqQYc]

Arts & Job Crafting

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Apropos to yesterday’s Labor Day holiday there was a blog post on the Harvard Business Review site back in June about job crafting, basically changing aspects of your daily activity to make your job more enjoyable.

I thought many of the suggestions cited by the author, Amy Gallo, were particularly applicable to arts organizations. Arts employees are apt to feeling burned out and unfulfilled due to wearing many hats and having a large workload.

But compared to many other types of businesses, employees of arts organizations generally have a fair bit of freedom about how they accomplish tasks. Employing a little creativity in the process isn’t likely to be viewed as disruptive and might even be applauded.

One of the first suggestions Gallo mentions is examining oneself to assess whether the problem might be that you are simply prone to being dissatisfied all the time. Another is to think about ways to change your outlook about your job and perhaps form emotional connections with colleagues and co-workers.

Next is to look at restructuring the job itself:

“Spreitzer and Wrzesniewski suggest using a job crafting exercise to redesign your job to better fit your motives, strengths, and passions. “Some people make radical moves; others make small changes” in how they delegate or schedule their day,…For example, if your most enjoyable task is talking with clients, but you feel buried in paperwork, you might decide to always speak with clients in the morning, so you’re energized to get through the drudge work for the rest of the day. Or you might save talking with your clients until the end of the day as a reward.

If it’s not the work you dislike but the people you work with, you may be able to change that too. Wrzesniewski says she has seen people successfully alter who they interact with on a daily basis to increase job satisfaction. Focus on forging relationships that give you energy, rather than sapping it. Seek out people who can help you do your job better”

In some respects, the fact that just about everyone performs multiple functions in an arts organization can be an asset to job crafting efforts. Lacking concrete job boundaries, people can swap some of their duties a little bit. What is mind numbing to one might provide a refreshing respite to someone else. One thing I have appreciated about the arts jobs I have had has been the ability to get up and away from one task to do essentially all of the things Gallo mentions.

I have been able to attend artist outreaches to see the impact of our work on people in the community. I can talk with colleagues and patrons and develop connections with them. I have been able to get up from my desk to stick my nose in on rehearsals and classes to get some inspiration. Walking around to inspect facilities and equipment or setting my hand to some physical task often provides the distraction my mind needs to find a solution that wasn’t coming sitting in front of my computer.

Info You Can Use: Telling Your Boss What You Really Think

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One of the challenges non-profit organizations often face is in relation to personnel evaluation. Many organizations don’t have a formal human resources department and don’t often engage in a constructive evaluation process. Even if they did, so many companies are so small it may be a little difficult to speak candidly without fear for repercussions.

I became aware of a website, Tell Your Boss Anything, which provides a tool that can help with this process a little. The site allows employees to submit feedback anonymously. This can be used by employees who want to tell their bosses something, but also by bosses who want to solicit feedback from their employees/team about programs and situations.

The service can be set up so that upper management in the organization can monitor what people are saying about a manager, though the anonymity of the commenter is preserved and the lower/middle manager apparently doesn’t receive direct access to the feedback.

There is a cost involved with the service but it seems pretty reasonable. A manager can solicit unlimited feedback for $20/month. Larger companies can get plans to solicit feedback for multiple managers.

There doesn’t seem to be a cost involved for an individual providing feedback to their boss. I suspect there is probably some mechanism which monitors and limits how much feedback is going to a particular email address in a given period to thwart an attempt to avoid paying for an account.

There will still be challenges using this tool in smaller organizations since it can be difficult to avoid providing information that makes one identifiable. Unless everyone in the office is openly disgusted with the boss, it may be easy to deduce who is complaining about lack of opportunities, the sick leave policy, or that big project with which only three people were involved.

Whatever feedback is submitted goes through a moderation process. I initially assumed it was to prevent people from using anonymity to issue a stream of explicative laden invective, but perhaps they would also suggest changing elements that might make it easy to identify an individual.

If nothing else, the tool can be useful to solicit feedback from employees on many topics where perceived expectations and peer pressure might keep them from more publicly voicing their true thoughts: the board’s proposed capital campaign plan; health insurance and retirement plans; reflections on how a controversial decision might have been better handled.

It Is All In How You Play The Game

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Today faculty and staff on my campus met to discuss what to expect when the accreditation team visits our campus for a week in October. If you aren’t familiar with higher education accreditation, basically it is an evaluation of how everything an institution of higher education does contributes to student learning and success. It looks at everything from curriculum development, grading standards and financial aid practices to the budgeting process and grounds/building maintenance.

The accreditation visits happen every six years but basically you spend the intervening time improving your practices, collecting data to evaluate if you are improving and generating interim progress reports.

If that sound incredibly mind numbing to you, it really is. Just about everyone in the organization is involved in contributing to the report, but only a few people handle all the information. God bless them for it.

That was what the meeting today was pretty much all about–making the whole organization generally aware of the report’s content. After my post yesterday about communicating organizational values, I wanted to share a little bit about how they did it because I really appreciated how they took a 500+ page behemoth and made us all a little more knowledgeable about it.

A lot of what transpired today could be used for board meetings/retreats where vision and strategy is discussed. It could just as well be used for volunteer and employee training to make people aware of values, procedures or even the upcoming season of shows.

Basically we played games. You may groan and I don’t blame you. I have been to meetings where the game playing seemed forced and awkward. I think the problem is that those games were aimed at breaking the ice or team building while these games were focused more on increasing familiarity with issues and content. I thought they were well designed in that they moved quickly and weren’t interspersed with heavy fact laden lectures.

Before we played games, we were told what the purpose and value of accreditation was and what the possible outcomes might be (including sanctions) so we had a sense of why it was important to be familiar with this information.

First played a type of BINGO game where questions were asked and then you got to mark off the answer–if it was on your card. The questions were a mix of statistics, history and information about where resources could be found.

Next we played a MAD-LIBs type game where we had to fill in the blanks in the text of recommendations that had been made at the last accreditation visit and the strategic goals we had developed to answer them.

Now if you think that sounds really boring, you will know how effective the game playing was when I tell you we were up on our feet trying to beat the other teams and resorting to strategic research (cheating).

Later we did a speed dating style game where we had to ask each other likely questions the accreditation team might ask of us, then shift seats and ask the next person.

The goal of this wasn’t to achieve a perfect answer, but give people a greater awareness of the many factors being evaluated. The question I was assigned to ask was about the 95.1% of classes currently involved in an ongoing evaluation process and what could be done to improve the process and percentage. I ended up talking to the head of Human Resources, Campus Fiscal Officer and a member of the business faculty.

The first two really had no idea how to answer the question because the don’t directly deal with academic concerns, the faculty member did provide a more cogent answer. But now we are all a little more aware of the criteria upon which the campus is being judged and know that a self-evaluative procedure is in place for a large number of our courses.

What appealed to me most about my experience today was that this type of approach really plays to the strength of the performing and visual arts. We do similar things in rehearsals when we are developing performances and when we try to communicate information in education and outreach programs. Even if you aren’t doing these exact things, the potential is present in your associated artists and staff. With a little work, these techniques can be applied to administrative and governance purposes.

Now as I said from the outset, there was a lot of time consuming and mind numbing work that got us to this point. There is no avoiding that or making too much more enjoyable (though certainly, any fun is an improvement). In terms of getting investment from the group and communicating information and values, games are a good tool.

Info You Can Use: Outside Audits And You

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During the summer many non profit boards of directors suspend their meetings due to the difficulty of scheduling meetings around members’ vacations. When meetings start up again in the fall, it may be a good time to think about revisiting organizational policies.

Using the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which currently only applies to publicly traded companies, as a guide Independent Sector (IS) and BoardSource have drawn up a checklist of good governance practices to implement.

There is also a link to a more expansive discussion of the topics in the checklist you may wish to read.

While the act currently only applies to public companies, financial impropriety in the non-profit sector has lead many to explore how sections of the law might be applied to non-profits or to suggest the creations of similar rules for non-profits.

The bulk of the rules apply to auditing and financial disclosures though some deal with conflict of interest, record retention policies and whistler blower protections.

One of the biggest challenges in applying the recommendations from the law is that while publicly traded companies have to pass certain milestones in terms of size and assets before going public, non-profits come in all shapes and sizes. An outside audit is really only practical for some large non-profits (and required for those receiving more than $500,000 in federal funds.)

Most non-profits should at least have an independent audit committee, but as the article notes, many smaller non-profits will have difficulty finding a qualified people to be treasurer, finance committee and audit committee and good governance requires there not be significant overlap.

For those who do use an outside auditor, though the Act only requires the lead partner of the auditing company change every 5 years, IS suggests the company be changed every 5 years and that the company not provide any other services, except tax return preparation as pre-approved by the board, to minimize conflict of interest.

For those organizations using an audit committee, it is suggested none of the members of the committee have any financial/business interest with the non-profit.

The very bare bones, basic criteria for a board that IS suggests is that they all receive training to become literate enough to understand the organization’s financial documents. IS says it is important that when the organization signs off on their 990 that: 1- the 990 is actually completed comprehensively and accurately, something that is infrequently done; 2- that the signature actually reflects an understanding of the organization’s financial condition.

I have talked about conflicts of interest policies in the past and the IS document doesn’t really discuss this in as much detail as the financial disclosure.

One thing I was not aware of and wanted to share is the whistler blower protections. You may be aware that it is illegal to take any retributive actions against those who report misconduct: firing, demotion, harassment, passing them over for promotion. What you may not know is:

“Even if the claims are unfounded, the organization may not reprimand the employee. The law does not force the employee to demonstrate misconduct; a reasonable belief or suspicion that a fraud exists is enough to create a protected status for the employee.”

I wasn’t aware that the criteria to achieve whistle blower protection was based on a reasonable belief rather than requiring some sort of evidence. Perhaps I have been watching too many crime dramas–or perhaps not enough of the right types.

In any case, it is important to have good clear policies about employee conduct, financial and accounting practices, conflicts of interest, records retention (which includes email and voicemail) in place long before any of these things become issues.

When Guilt Is Good

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Research by the Stanford Graduate School of Business had some surprising results suggesting that even more than extroversion, a sense of guilt may be a strong indicator of leadership potential.

Although “guilt” and “shame” may seem quite similar to most people…psychologists recognize a crucial distinction between the two: Whereas someone who feels guilty feels bad about a specific mistake and wants to make amends, a person who’s ashamed of a mistake feels bad about himself or herself and shrinks away from the error. Everyone tends to respond to mistakes according to one or the other pattern…

The researchers administered a test to measure how guilt prone people were and then put these people into a variety of situations. When they asked the participants to rate each other’s leadership qualities, those who scored higher for guilt were ranked highest for leadership.

According to the research article, participants weren’t picking up on people’s guilt but rather the behaviors that manifested from those feelings “making more of an effort than others to ensure everyone’s voice was being heard, to lead the discussion, and generally to take charge.” Similar research was conducted outside the lab at businesses surveying employees, clients and coworkers and produced similar results.

The key thing to understand is that guilt prone people feel responsible for the group at their own expense in contrast with shame prone people who tend to feel responsible for protecting themselves.

It should be noted, however, that guilt prone people are also most likely to support layoffs. While they feel bad about firing people, their sense of responsibility for the company as a whole will lead them to seek ways to fix the problems the organization faces. And good leadership abilities doesn’t guarantee good decision making abilities.

These results made me wonder about the qualities of non-profit leaders. A streak of martyrdom always seemed to be a prerequisite to work long hours for little pay. I don’t think it takes any great leap in logic to think it is motivated by a sense of guilt and responsibility to insure the organization is successful in providing its services to the detriment of oneself.

If this is actually a good thing according to the Stanford research, do people drawn to non-profit service actually have the best leadership potential and simply lack the training and resources to more effectively fulfill this potential?

Info You Can Use: Doing Business With Board Members

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Since I am on the topic of board decisions this week, Non Profit Law blog recently listed a link about non profits doing business with their own board members.

While it is natural for non profits to seek out people from specific professions/skillsets to be on their boards in order to provide some expert guidance and advice, things get a little sticky when it becomes necessarily to contract professional services.

Since board members often have a personal investment in the organization, they may tend to charge extremely competitive fees for their services. As the article notes, it can also be a little awkward to be talking about paying someone else to do work that a board member in the room is perfectly capable of performing.

The article notes that not only is it difficult to avoid having some business dealings with your board members, it may be hard to actually get good people to serve on the board if they perceive there will be undue scrutiny of how their professional and volunteer activities overlap.

However, it is important to have a conflict of interest policy for board service. Failing to have one and follow it create potential problems for the organization, especially given the role non-profits serve in their communities.

Experts say one danger of so many veteran board members is that a nonprofit could lose touch with how a community perceives the awarding of contracts to members of its own board.

“Public legitimacy and support are very important, and a more isolated board may not be as aware of that,” said Francie Ostrower…

[…]

Board Source , an organization for nonprofit boards recommended by the National YMCA, suggests that board members who want to do work for the organization should donate their services. If they can’t, they should follow the board’s conflict policies.

Other critics of the practice such as Joshua Humphreys, a fellow at Tellus Institute, a Boston policy think tank, take a dimmer view.

“Best practice for nonprofits is to draw a bright line between board service and doing business with service providers,” said Humphreys. “It creates divided loyalties between the public purpose of the charity and the private gains someone is motivated by.”

Siegel (Jack Siegel, Charity Governance) said the practice chips away at the independent thinking of board members who are the recipients of contracts, as they tend to side with their supporters on the board in other matters.

“If you see conflict (of interest), you can almost bet there are other problems in the organization,” Siegel said.

The article goes on to quote Siegel pointing out that it is difficult to hold the work of board members to the standard you should because you have a relationship with them. This point struck a sympathetic chord with me as I remembered some occasions in my career where the quality of the work by a board member was never in question, but changes to elements no one really liked were never requested for fear of offending the board member by questioning their style/taste.

One of the suggestions for eliminating the conflict is that the person leave the board for the duration of their company’s contract under the assumption that if the person is really invested in the success of the organization, they will extend the same discounts as they would when they were serving.

What the article doesn’t mention is that if they don’t extend the same discount it may actually be better for your relationship with the person. If all those involved feel that a fair market price is being paid for the work, there is less potential for resentment on the part of the service provider over sacrificing time and income on a difficult project and less hesitation on the part of the non-profit to assert that their standards be met.

Still, this is all easy to say in theory. In practice, you run into the old question, “how do you fire a volunteer?” When people generously provide time, energy and expertise, they are investing a lot of themselves personally. It can be difficult to refuse their help without making it seem like you are refusing them as a person.

That is why it is good to have a well-constructed conflict of interest policy to which to point. When the situation arises where a board member will start to do business with the organization in a significant way, you can point to the policy and note that providing the service will, of necessity, change the board member’s relationship with the organization and as such the following actions must be taken per the conflict of interest policy.

Board Source has some general information on conflicts of interest on their website and some samples conflict of interest statements for purchase and download. (I have never read them so I can’t attest to their usefulness.)

Right People, Not Right Product Make A Great Company

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So as something of a follow up to my post earlier this week asking if foundation boards embrace non-profit values, I wanted to point to an article about what private enterprises can learn from non-profits.

The five points the article emphasizes are connecting with the community, understanding what motivates your employees, creating long term value, valuing people over the program or product and improvising.

Many of these points are representative of what the arts can bring to private businesses. While I don’t think the arts are exemplary in the diversity of employees and audiences it serves, improving that situation is a major topic of conversation and can help lead others to the questions they should be asking about themselves.

Likewise, while it may seem that non-profits don’t have a sterling record in respect to overworking employees, they do understand what motivates people to dedicate themselves to a cause in return for little material reward.

Lately one subject that seems to come up frequently is the idea that private companies have an unhealthy focus on short term gains at the expense of creating long term value. Many companies are starting to see that focusing on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is crucial for doing business.

It almost seems that if the non-profit sector can come up with an effective program to engender even a partial shift toward a longer view, a great service will be rendered.

The one point I especially liked in the article was that great people have more value to a company than great products and services. I think it can be easy to forget that when you are being evaluated based on the numbers you achieve (which is especially the case for non-profits’ administrative cost ratios)

4. The right people (not the right product or program) make for a great organization (Chris Pullenayagem, Director, Christian Reformed Church)

Many private (for profit) organizations rely on products or processes or programs to be successful in their business. For those that do, this seems to be an inverted way of pursuing excellence. People bring vision, passion and creativity to their work as evidenced in non-profit organizations. If the right people are hired, every organization will move towards excellence in achieving its vision and what it was mandated to do. Any organization can show results, but only this type of organization will thrive with excellence.

More Thoughts On Organizational Structures

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When I was applying to graduate programs in arts administration, the head of the program I eventually joined said something to the effect of I shouldn’t enter the program if I was a frustrated actor. I wasn’t.

Just in case, you know, you hadn’t already gotten the sense that I really like the arts administration field after blogging on the topic for eight years.

I have always been a little unsure where I should fall on the subject of how devoted to arts administration one should be. I agree with those who say that we lack well trained arts administrators and think that more people should devote themselves to its pursuit.

On the other hand, I have recently been writing about the arts and culture sector adopting new business and organizational models. I think of necessity some of that will include fewer distinctions between administration and performers.

Yes, people can fulfill both functions. I have occasionally talked about how I have been involved in providing the initial artistic vision and leadership on some projects. But once you reach the point of trying to deliver a certain level of excellence, something is going to suffer unless responsibilities are delegated.

At that point, even if you continue to perform many of the functions of your dual roles, some portion of the responsibility has to be delegated to at least one single person who is solely dedicated to one role or the other. Dispersing responsibility and decision making across many people will only work to a certain point before it becomes unwieldy.

I am not saying organizations which have these sorts of structures can’t be successful. At a certain point it becomes clear that specialization is required. That said, recently it has appeared that large arts organizations may not be the best structure for the future. Perhaps as we move forward, some of the most successful structures will be of a smaller size and be quite effective with all members contributing to both the creative and administrative life of the group.

One thing I haven’t really talked about is the situation of the frustrated artist my grad school adviser referenced. I have worked with people who were competent at the administrative side of things, but were clearly more interested in their art. They were essentially doing the administrative thing to support their artistic pursuits.

It certainly isn’t a new story. Inevitably the artistic desire won out and they moved on in the hopes of sating it. As much as I would like to live in an ideal world where everyone has an opportunity to support their dreams, I have to tell you, the organization was not as well served by these people as those who were fully invested in the job they were hired to do.

The difference in the quality of work between those with a split focus and those who preceded and followed them was marked. Arts organizations have enough challenges and deserve better than “what I really want to do is direct,” though that is often what they choose to settle for.

It occurs to me that one of the benefits of the current structure for arts organizations is that when you apply for a position, the expectations are pretty standard from job to job. Even if the duties differ, you generally know what roles you will be expected to fulfill based on the job description. If arts organizations develop new structures that include artists who also handle administrative duties, then the expectations would be particular to that group.

In light of this, it would almost be better to form the organization with the intent to dissolve after a certain period rather than with an indeterminate end. When the group forms, a certain dynamic will develop that everyone acknowledges and at least tacitly approves. If everyone knows that one person is more inclined to the administrative duties and another is more inclined to avoid them, when the first person leaves it might be difficult to find someone who shares the same exact view on how their duties should be split and doesn’t become resentful that the other person isn’t pulling their weight.

Better that the organization dissolves and reforms to tackle the next project in a manner that plays to the strengths of the existing members rather than to continually attempt to shoehorn new people into the group with the expectation that the founding dynamics remain preserved.

In contrast to the aforementioned current structure, in arts organizations with a more flexible approach to their structure and position descriptions, the frustrated artist may not feel that they need to leave to pursue their artistic expression. Less concrete expectations in a job description may allow greater latitude for how employees/members contribute to the company. With the understanding that there will be an opportunity to express themselves, there may not be a sense of a divided focus. But again, it is all going to hinge on the dynamics of the company.

The Customer Is Sometimes Very Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distinguishing Yourself With Your Own Best Practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Values Matter In Arts Grad Training Programs?

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This weekend Scott Walters quoted an extensive comment made on another blog about the value of MFA acting programs. The gist is, students are ill served by the programs which need to focus on training students for 21st century opportunities.

This struck a chord with me because I had recently read a Fast Company article about how UC Berkeley’s Business School started to screen applicants based on whether they embodied the school’s core values. The school had decided to embrace these values in the interests of creating a “reduction of overconfidence and self-focus, which are perceived to be excessively present among the business graduates and leaders of the top business schools.”

At the time I read it, I was idly wondering if arts training programs at the master level might do something similar to address any perceived (and real) problems with those they graduate. It had been a long time since I was in grad school so I didn’t feel I knew enough about the state of things write a post about it. Having read Walter’s recent post, I am no more certain than before since it is the view of a single unidentified commenter. I do feel fairly confident in assuming that, as with most things, there is room for improvement.

I will readily admit that given my ignorance of the state of things, I don’t have any concrete suggestions about they might be done differently. I will say that one thing that stood out in the Fast Company piece was that Berkeley-Haas instituted significant changes in their program based on their stated values and then required their applicants to adhere to them.

Most remarkably, they are not simply communication tools but drive operations from the curriculum, research priorities to staff programs, and faculty hiring. The curriculum, for example, has been extensively revamped in order to introduce elements of creativity, innovation, collaboration, ethics, and social responsibility.

They made sure they embodied the values before they required the students to do the same. It would have been much easier for them to decide to implement the change by altering their admission criteria and assuming that choosing the right students would result in producing the right graduates. But that is less likely if the infrastructure surrounding the students doesn’t emulate and reinforce the values the school wishes to cultivate in its graduates.

Successful realization of any goal is easier for any entity if all members are aligned toward attaining it. Probably the most powerful thing an arts training program can do to convince applicants that it can prepare them to ply their craft in the current environment is to point to a major realignment of priorities to that end.

As the commenter that Walters quotes, SayItLoud, notes, theatre training programs often cite successful graduates and places their students have worked or can intern at. As impressive as that is, the reality is the path those graduates took to success may no longer be viable.

What training programs may really need to do is say to applicants, “We’ve changed ourselves from top to bottom and what success requires now is to push you off the conventional path. This is not the place to pursue training in becoming a triple-threat, actor/singer/dancer. You may have become a video editor/painter/acrobat or a ecologist/architect/percussionist or all six plus four things we aren’t mentioning. Do your interests, values and practices align with ours?”

At the very least, it will get everyone thinking about the whole training process. Given that the current conversation is that arts organizations need to change the way they operate and interact with audiences, you aren’t leading students astray by telling them they need to obtain a wider spectrum of skills. Like as not, they will be the ones helping to drive the change with the types of works they develop.

Helping The Rising Tide Lift All Boats

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I have been following The Producer’s Perspective, the blog of Broadway producer Ken Davenport, for a number of years now. While I don’t have solid evidence, I suspect he is not like other Broadway producers. He is often curious to learn about the audiences for Broadway shows, where they are coming from, what motivates their purchasing decisions, etc. While this may seem like basic marketing surveying, the information doesn’t really exist so he is often sending people to query folks standing in line at the TKTS booth in Times Square.

Taking some inspiration from Zappos, he decided to create a toll free number to have his office staff answer questions about Broadway to help dispel the notions his surveyors and focus groups discovered people have.

Well, that’s exactly what I thought . . . so then I wondered . . . why doesn’t Broadway have a hotline? Why doesn’t it have a toll free number that people can just call to find out stuff? Ivory Soap has one. Coke has one.

[…]

Yep, we created 1-855-SEE-BWAY (733-2929) to help answer your questions about Broadway.

It’s staffed by a bunch of the nicest Broadway theater lovers you could ever imagine (they also happen to be my staff, in a very Zappos-inspired “we all answer the phone including the boss” structure), and we guarantee we’ll get you the answer to whatever question you have about Broadway theatergoing.

Need to know what’s playing? Need to know at what times? Price of tickets? Suitability for kids? Location? Parking? Restaurants nearby? Sure, we got that. And if we don’t, we’ll get it for you. Promise on our autographed original cast recording of Company.

Oh, and before you ask . . . no, we’re not selling anything. This isn’t about us trying to make any money. This is about a service that should exist. And needs to exist if we’re going to grow our audience (just like Zappos increased theirs).

I bring this up not so much to promote his service (though I think it is great thing to offer) but to wonder if this signifies that arts organizations are moving toward a more collaborative “tide raises all ships” approach and a way from a competitive “ne’er the twain shall meet” stance.

About six years ago I wrote about an effort by the Broward Center for the Performing Arts to provide people with information about all the performing arts in town rather than solely about themselves. I am not sure if they sustained the effort, especially when the economy got worse, but I took the fact that they were even considering it as part of their business model as an encouraging sign.

This year I am partnering with three different groups to present as many shows. In the past, we have partnered with maybe one other organization and the sharing of responsibilities (and revenue/expenses) was not as extensive. I am not sure about next year, but I hope to continue similar relationships even with the additional work it entails.

There have also been times I have assumed other organization’s obligations so that the show can go on. Perhaps as involved as I am in this type of activity, I am seeing a trend…or wishing for one, where it doesn’t exist yet.

I am all for making the effort to turn it into a trend though.

Who Is More Important? The Event Or Organization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arts And The Four Year Career

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An article recently posted on the Fast Company website talks about how transitory people’s jobs, and increasingly, career paths, are.

“According to recent statistics, the median number of years a U.S. worker has been in his or her current job is just 4.4, down sharply since the 1970s…Statistically, the shortening of the job cycle has been driven by two factors. The first is a marked decline in the “long job”–that is, the traditional 20-year capstone to a career. Simultaneously, there’s been an increase in “churning”– workers well into their thirties who have been at their current job for less than a year. “For some reason I don’t understand, employers seem to value having long-term employees less than they used to,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton”

Given the idea that arts organizations need to be more nimble in the current fast changing environment and that corporate CEOs value creativity in leadership, it made me wonder if arts organizations might not be able to take advantage of this trend by creating mutually beneficial employment situations.

Essentially, if there is going to be a lot of employment churn, the arts might be able to benefit in both the short and long term by making sure a jaunt in the arts is included in a person’s itinerant career path.

Arts organizations experience a fair bit of turn over in their employees. (In fact, I will bet that is what you thought the title of the entry referenced.) It may be worthwhile to hire people without backgrounds specifically in the arts into positions. Since you are probably just as likely to have to replace a person with arts background as someone who doesn’t, you aren’t overly wasting time and resources by hiring and training someone without industry experience.

The potential benefit to the arts organization is introducing some new ideas and practices to the organization. The employee gets a broader experience to add to their hodgepodge resume which may make them more marketable. (Needless to say, the work environment must be such that it accepts the former and confers the latter.)

Of course, as the article mentions, the trick is to separate those who are really driven in their pursuits from the dilettantes. Arts organizations in general aren’t particularly well skilled in those type of human resource practices. It would be worthwhile to have someone on the board with the ability to provide those services in some form, even if you have no intention of ever hiring a person without an arts background.

In the long term it could be helpful if businesses started to identify arts organizations as a good training ground for the skills they seek in employees to the point where it was as de rigueur on a resume as extra curricular activities are on a college application. It also wouldn’t hurt if the experience engendered an appreciation in the arts in the transitory employee that they will carry on to positions creating business or government policy.

Arts Presenters 2012 Edition

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I have been attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference this past weekend. I am sure I will have more to say on the subject in future entries, but I wanted to post a few reflections and impressions while they were fresh.

First, I wanted to give some congratulations and props to Mario Garcia Durham, the new President and CEO of APAP on this, his first conference with the organization. I had met Mario a handful of times before in his capacity as the Director of Artistic Communities and Presenting at the National Endowment for the Arts. I was always set at ease by his open and welcoming manner when I had consultation sessions with him.

I took it as a good sign that he invited the Emerging Leadership Institute participants and alumni (of which I am one) up to his suite to discuss what we felt was the future for the field. We didn’t have a lot of time with him, but it was a promising sign. I also thought it was a promising sign that he got a standing ovation at the start of the conference from the membership. (And even more promising that he decides to discard a long speech he had prepared at another gathering!)

For this conference, I decided to break out my laptop and do a little live tweeting from different sessions. I had a great time doing it and could really see the utility of the activity for the conference, and somewhat by extension, for Tweet Seat programs that have been emerging at various arts events. I will say though that I really felt that I ended up missing many aspects of the sessions I was attending. Not only in terms of not entirely absorbing points people were making, but also some of the nuances of what they were saying. Even though my brain and multi-tasking abilities may not be on par with those of the younger generation, I can’t help but think they would indeed suffer from the same situation.

I was also surprised given the size of the attendance that more people weren’t tweeting from the various discussions going on, at least not on the official hashtag, #APAPNYC. Didnt see much on the counter-conference hashtag #APAPSMEAR, either. Many people used the hashtags to promote their showcases, but didn’t really seem to overdo it.

I was a little disappointed that there weren’t more people tweeting from the sessions because there were often a number I wanted to attend running concurrently and with a few exceptions, no one was reporting what was transpiring in those rooms.

On the other hand, there were a fair number of people following along. I appreciate all those who signed up to follow my twitter feed. Between those who started following me and those who were tweeting themselves, I found a number of new interesting people to follow in turn.

One interesting thing I noticed was a change in the underlying theme of the discussions at the conference. In the past it has often been about declining attendance and funding. This year it seems to be more focused on social and cultural trends, perhaps thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movements. People were talking about loss of identity, disenfranchisement, fragmentation and polarization of society.

Questions were raised about what role arts organizations would have in addressing this and place in the community rather than how to get more people through the doors. One of the major speakers at a few of the sessions was John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, PA who has attracted a lot of national attention for his efforts to revitalize his town and reverse the decline by the use of art and community efforts. As part of one effort, they took the bricks from a demolished garage to make a communal bread oven.

I will try to post more on the conference in the weeks ahead as I am able to digest the experience.

Give The Gift Of Autonomy For Christmas

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So the big tragedy of non profit arts organizations is that while we are the champions of creativity, we don’t really provide all our employees the most conducive environments for being creative. Sometimes good things happen despite us. Because the workload to personnel ratio is usually slanted in favor of the work load, there often isn’t a lot of opportunity for people to stand back and do some creative problem solving that might result in the alleviation of some of the work load.

A recent post on the Drucker Exchange criticized the industrial age view that long hours and great effort equates to productivity when that simply is not so any more. Andrew Fuqua recently made a related post on the benefit of “slack” in the work place. His post was generally about the computer programming industry, but there were many lessons non-profit arts organizations can take away.

One of the things he says a programming company should do is, “managers must stop assigning tasks.” Instead, it is up to teams to decide how the work will be done. Of course, for non-profit arts organizations, this assumes there are enough people to comprise a team rather than 1 person (or half person departments). But essentially he says, managers shouldn’t be making assignments, handing out work or be an individual contributor.

“Well, gosh, then what should a manager do? Well, I’ll tell ya! You could manage more people. You can still step in when the team needs help (but not too quickly). You are still an agent of the company, handling legal stuff, signing off on expenditures, etc. You can still manage risks, especially if you are a skilled Project Manager.”

Even if that doesn’t sound like something that is viable given the size of your organization, there are other things he suggest that are definitely applicable.

“Keep an eye on the system, looking for improvements
Ensure cross-training is happening (not by making assignments, but making the team handle it)
Understand the dynamics of the organization
Understand how value is created
Protect the team from interference
Make the organization effective; learn to look at it as a system
Support the team
Clear roadblocks
Watch interpersonal interaction — watch when one team member pulls back, withdraws in a brainstorm (for example)
Help the team learn TDD by making room for them to learn (time – remove the schedule pressure while they learn)
Understand the capacity of the team (also a team and scrummaster job)
Think through policies, procedures and reward/review systems and improve them (what messages do they send?)
Understand what motivates knowledge workers (see the previous reference to Pink) and let creating that kind of environment be an imperative”

Arts organizations can definitely benefit from looking at the dynamics of the organization and looking at themselves as a system of interrelated and interdependent parts rather than different segments performing different functions. This approach will help the organization understand where the value they possess lies. It may not only be the stuff you are selling tickets to, but in the expertise that is possessed by the group.

You will see a lot of these factors mentioned as valuable in management texts. The one suggestion Fuqua makes that jumped out at me was in regard to watching when a team member pulls back and withdraws in a brain storm. That can say a lot about the interpersonal dynamics of the organization. It may be viewed as one less person providing opposition to your ideas, but it could be damaging to the organization long term to have someone feel disassociated from the rest of the organization or team.

You might note that Fuqua references Daniel Pink and his talk about what motivates knowledge workers. That motivation is autonomy which repeated studies have shown is more effective than cash rewards.

One of the things Pink talks about is a Australian software company, Atlassian, which periodically gives their employees 24 hours to work on whatever they want. The only proviso being that they share it with the entire company at a party they throw at the end of that period. Apparently the practice has contributed to the solving of a number of problems and the creation of new products.

Imagine what might be produced if you let a bunch of creative arts people loose of their everyday constraints for 24 hours with the promise of beer at the end!

One of the things I know is very important to a lot of people I work with in the arts is professional development opportunities. Again, this is something Fuqua references. Often the biggest thing inhibiting arts people from getting the professional development is the funding. One solution to this problem goes back to my comment a few paragraphs ago about understanding that the value possessed by the organization may not solely reside in the product you are selling to the public.

Your organization may possess expertise that is valuable to other arts organizations and for profit businesses. You might arrange for a cooperative professional development day where all the arts organizations get together and have their staffs provide learning opportunities for each other. You might be able to likewise trade your expertise to area businesses in exchange for training or advice.

Best of all scenarios–your organization (or cooperative of arts organizations) puts together training programs to sell to businesses based on your expertise. Perhaps seminars in team building, creative brain storming, or the selection and lighting of visual art in commercial office spaces.

Info You Can Use: Internship Guide For Arts Organisations

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The subject of paying interns has been in the news fairly frequently. This summer I noted that while non-profits are currently exempt from some of the rules of the Fair Labor Standards Act, this may not be true for long. Classifying employees as interns or independent contractors may not be valid, even for non-profits depending on their work situations.

In the England, arts organisations (yes, I am intentionally using British spelling) have a legal responsibility to pay interns according to minimum wage standards. The Arts Council of England just published a guide to these rules. While these wage laws don’t apply the entities in the U.S., the criteria for what constitutes an intern are very close to those applicable to for profits in the U.S.

The guide also provides suggestions for designing a meaningful internship experience and for writing appropriate ads for these positions. Therefore the guide can be a good resource for those looking to get ahead of possible changes in the labor laws and seeking to provide a positive working environment.

Info You Can Use: So You Think You Want To Merge

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It seems discussion of non-profit mergers is becoming more prevalent of late. I recently became aware of a research document created by Wilder Research and MAP for Non Profits looking at what factors contribute to or inhibit the successful merger of non profits in the pre-merger, merger and post-merger phases.

There were actually some parts of the document, What do we know about nonprofit mergers? Findings from a literature review, focus group, and key informant interviews, that were very familiar. So much so I thought perhaps I had already written a blog post on it already. It doesn’t seem that is the case. However, since their report includes a literature review in addition to surveying they conducted themselves, it is likely I read some of this before.

They raise some good questions and provide some interesting advice on many aspects of a merger on issues like the name of the new organization, getting a third party involved to shepherd the process, doing due diligence on each other, issues about conflicting organizational cultures, creating a clear time line for the process.

One suggestion they had was to involve your top five funders in the process in order to gain their investment. That may be very sound advice as at least one case they mentioned found that most funders treated the merged organization with its newly expanded capacity as if it were one of the constituent entities effectively cutting their support in half.

Many organizations chose to merge as a result of some sort of crisis, either the loss of leadership, financial problems, change in the operating environment, etc. According to the research, one of the worst times/reasons to merge is if one organization is at the brink of financial ruin. Other than the fact that the new organization will inherit the problems of the troubled organization and that it is not prudent to negotiate anything from a position of weakness, research shows that even mergers between relatively sound organizations don’t necessarily result in a financially stronger combined organization.

The following are areas that they identify as needing to be addressed during the merger phase. There is a similar list for the pre- and post- phases.

2A. Key stakeholder involvement
2A1. Executive staff champion
2A2. Board commitment to the merger process
2A3. Client, consumer, and funder involvement in planning

2B. Role of staff in merger process
2B1. Staff involvement in planning
2B2. Communications with staff throughout process
2B3. Staff’s perception of the effect of the merger

2C. Integrating formal and informal structures
2C1. Attention to cultural integration
2C2. Attention to board and mission integration

2D. Providing due diligence to the process
2D1. Clear decision making process
2D2. Clear and realistic time frame

They provided the following factors which contribute to a merger’s failure:

-Lack of capacity, sophistication, or skill in the board or executive leadership
-Leadership’s inability to communicate well or to effectively influence others
-A weak or declining balance sheet or imminent financial collapse of one organization
-Programs or services that are not particularly unique or of distinctive value to the community
-Organization’s fear of losing autonomy or change
-Differences in governance, culture, or mission
-Board and staff opposition to the idea of merger
Engagement purely for survival, not from strength
-People involved do not see the real work involved in a merger
-Loss of key leader during the process

Info You Can Use: Arts Marketing Standards

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Thanks to Tim Roberts at Arts Research and Ticketing Service Australia who recently linked to UK Arts Marketing Association’s new Arts Marketing Standards. The standards outline what abilities you should have at four different stages of your career:

Level 1 – Assistant – officer
Level 2 – Senior Officer – new manager
Level 3 – Manager
Level 4 – Head of department/director

These standards are rigorous and thorough. Level 1 standards run 130 pages and each subsequent level adds about 20 pages. Actually, since some of the standards don’t apply to Marketing Assistants, there are many pages that just read “It is not anticipated that Marketing Assistants will have responsibility for…” and it isn’t as intimidating as the 130 page count may seem. On the other hand, the head of department/director has 190 pages entirely full of standards they might be expected to meet.

They also have devised some toolkits to help different entities use the standards:

Employer’s Toolkit
Marketer’s Toolkit
Trainer’s Toolkit
Job Description Templates

The employers toolkit suggests the following use for the standards:

“This booklet outlines how the standards might be used by those working as employers of arts marketers within cultural organisations across the UK to:
•Plan the marketing role/s and job descriptions needed in your organisation.
•Carry out a performance review, building understanding of where the current strengths and skills are within your marketing team and gain a clearer insight into skills gaps within the team
•Input into appraisals and planning of staff training and development

There are eight modules that comprise the full standards. I will leave the reader to explore them all. To give a sample of what is contained,  the first module, “Provide marketing intelligence and audience, visitor and participant insight” has 3 subsections the first of which is, “Assess the marketing environment.”

That in turn has three subsections, the first of which is “Map organisations within their current and future marketing environment.”

The standards for that look something like this (click to enlarge):


So the obvious question is, would these sort of standards be helpful for U.S. arts organizations to adopt?

Actually, I don’t think there is any doubt that they would. The true question would be whether they could and would be effectively applied on a large enough scale to bring about meaningful and significant change.  If so, should similar standards be developed for other roles within arts organizations?

These standards in conjunction with the toolkits might be of the most help to some of the smallest arts organizations who might have the least experience with marketing. The toolkits provide grids noting the general expectations for different positions normally found in a marketing department including box office.   It can help them construct expectations that are suitable to the needs and resources possessed by their organization and make more appropriate hiring decisions.  In other words, people may think they need a director of marketing when they need someone to perform the tasks of a manager or senior officer.

 

Can Arts Orgs Play Moneyball With Their Staffs?

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Ever since the movie Moneyball came out, I have been thinking about whether similar system can be applied to the arts. I mean a system by which baseball teams with small budgets were able to compete on par with the most well-funded teams by assembling a team of under utilized misfits? Heck, I am describing the place you work, right? It seems ready made for the arts!

I was happy to see a recent post by Shawn Harris on the TCG website raising the same general question. I agree with most of what Shawn suggests, including taking an objective look at different aspect of our operations and audiences to determine whether we are truly serving the interests of the community or just perpetuating assumptions.

One assumption I feel pretty safe in making is that what motivates people to attend a baseball game is different from what motivates people to attend an arts event. While celebrity is certainly a factor, people attend baseball games looking for an engaging contest. If they don’t know a lot about each of the players, that is okay if the game was well played. Can the same be said about an arts event? If someone is unfamiliar with a performance, will the fact that statistically speaking, the actors, while unknown, are the most effective performers in a period play?

Probably not. But then again, you shouldn’t be selling the show based on statistics anyway. Even though stats are a huge part of sports, that isn’t what primarily sells tickets. While a well-known artist would make it easier to sell a show, in the long run it is going to be better to take the “brains in the seats” view and work on engaging audiences in the organization, one aspect of which is going to be based on the quality of your personnel choices.

That is what I first started thinking about when I was considering whether Moneyball could be applied to the arts–are we hiring the best people? More over, are we actively seeking the best people or just casting a net and taking whatever swims our way?

I recall going to an Arts Presenters conference where Andrew Taylor talked about how a lot of arts organizations didn’t know how to effectively evaluate the skills of job candidates. He said there was a tendency to hire to the specifics of a job description rather than to the general needs of the position. Though he did mention an associate who hired a person who managed a Sears call center to run their ticket office after some unsatisfying interviews with people from the arts field, it seemed the exception rather than the rule. Taylor said he teaches his students to take control of the interview in order to illuminate their skills and illustrate how it applies to the criteria laid out in the job description.

While I am reluctant to put arts people out of work by suggesting that you look to hire those without any industry experience, I think it can help to always be mindful of the basic abilities you seek in employees. I once had lunch with some representatives from Enterprise Car Rentals and they were so impressed by the affability and service provided by one of the wait staff, they tried to recruit her at the end of our meal.

When was the last time you even thought about adding a person you met outside the context of the arts to your team? In fact, other than pursuing people who would increase the prestige of your company, when is the last time you tried to recruit someone way from another arts organization based on abilities and effectiveness alone?

When I think about the Moneyball model of finding success putting together a seemingly mismatched set of players few other teams desired, I wonder about our collective ability in the arts to effectively identify and cultivate the talent of people who aren’t necessarily shining in their current position. I know this can be tough in the arts where everyone wants to be the star actor/dancer/artist/director. Even if you are perceptive enough to see their talent lay elsewhere, people may be resistant to taking a different role.

The thing is, non profits should be pros at identifying and leveraging undiscovered skills. With all the volunteers we use to assist us with our programs and to serve on our boards, we should be championing seemingly unorthodox hiring decisions. But if Andrew Taylor is correct, the hiring practices in the arts are actually more orthodox than in the for profit sector.

If that is the case, perhaps we aren’t using our volunteers’ skills as effectively as we could, as well. That question starts to bring me back to my post last week featuring Aaron Hurst’s suggestion that certain volunteer programs may be a waste of time.

The research he cited found little difference in effectiveness between well- and poorly- managed programs involving less than 50 people. I wonder though if well managed programs might have beneficial side-effects for organizations in the form of improved hiring skills. In other words, the capacity to identify and employ highly capable people may be developed in the process of effectively doing the same thing with volunteers.

The Little Things Are More Engaging Than You Think

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intersection of Artist And Audience Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stand By Your Non-Profit Until The Bitter End

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Interesting piece on the Chronicle of Philanthropy about the responsibilities of non-profit boards to attend to the dissolution of their organizations.

Janet Kleinfelter, a deputy attorney general in Tennessee, talks about a case where a non-profit abandoned their organization after they realized it could no longer continue. They passed a resolution essentially saying the bank could do whatever it wanted to dispose of the assets and then resigned.

Kleinfelter writes that boards are required to give proper notice to state and federal regulators about the impending closure of their organization and submit the documentation in support of that action.

It is actually better for board members to stay involved with the organization than disassociate themselves. (My emphasis)

“Legally the board is required to dissolve the nonprofit, but when it fails to do so, that responsibility falls to the regulators and the courts.

This process will probably involve subpoenas to members of the former board, which may require board members to retain personal legal counsel at their own expense. What’s more, by resigning, board members may no longer have the benefit of directors’ and officer’ liability insurance. Former board members may even be personally liable for actions done in the name of the nonprofit while it is unmanaged.“

Info You Can Use: The “No Social Media Policy” Social Media Policy

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Hat tip to Rosetta Thurman. To paraphrase Thoreau (or The United States Magazine and Democratic Review), apparently the social media policy which is best governs least.

According to a piece on the HR Examiner by Heather Bussing, applying a light hand when creating a social media policy will actually minimize your exposure to legal liability for something your employee writes.

“If you have a comprehensive social media policy that dictates what can and cannot be discussed, you will have to pay someone to monitor what is being said, demand that inappropriate posts come down and discipline when the edicts are violated. How much time, money and energy is this really worth?

Under agency law, if you are directing the conduct of employees in social media, the company will be liable for everything that is said. To the extent something said is defamatory, violates a nondisclosure agreement or just pisses someone off, a comprehensive social media policy is the best way to get the company named in the lawsuit.

If you are not controlling it, then the company generally will not be liable for things said and done in employees’ personal accounts. This is because the employees are not acting in the course of their employment and the employer is not controlling or implicitly approving the actions of its employees. And if there is no deep pocket to sue, the chance of a lawsuit getting filed at all is greatly diminished.”

Having employees make a disclaimer that what they say doesn’t reflect the opinion of the employer can cause someone to investigate whether the employer is closely monitoring what is being said and taking disciplinary action. If this is so then the case can be made that the employer was guiding the content or was aware of the content and made a decision whether to act upon it. The speed and degree to which the employer acted can be used as a basis of arguing approval of the content.

You can also run afoul free speech and right to organize if your policy is too restrictive as well as violate whistle-blower and non-retaliatory protections.

“The National Labor Relations Act protects employees from retaliation by an employer for discussing wages, hours or working conditions. These NLRA protections apply whether or not your company has a union, because they relate to “organizing” or pre-union actions.

The bottom line is that a social media policy cannot prohibit an employee from saying bad things about what it is like to work at your company. Protected expressions include being critical of the bosses, the customers or the stupid signs in the kitchen.”

If you are closely monitoring someone’s personal social media accounts you might be violating rights to privacy and open yourself to hacking charges if you gain access to and use passwords. Monitoring personal social media could lead to a wrongful termination action if it was discovered that you were aware of personal details that might place a burden on the company and moved to fire or harass them into leaving.

And of course, having a strict social media policy can be bad for your public image if it appears you are dictating what is being said rather than allowing for spontaneous interactions.

The article doesn’t really address how constrained you are in acting upon things employees may post on social media sites. People may have protected free speech but there is a difference between getting drunk and telling everyone in the bar that your boss has an unmentionable relationship with farm animals and getting drunk, pulling out your phone and posting the same thing to 5000 followers. That still may be protected, but at some point the scale of people receiving the message is going to be great enough that a business is justified in whatever action they may take.

Bussing does discuss in what situations it is acceptable to monitor social media accounts and to what degree it should be done. As in most things, the best social media policy is preparation and education. Employees should be taught what sort of activity is professional, how sharing certain tidbits of information can violate confidentiality and what opinions may be considered defamatory.

Info You Can Use: Correct Organization Of Personnel Files

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Hat tip to Emily Chan at Non Profit Law blog for sharing a link to a Blue Avocado piece on how personnel files should be maintained. More specifically, what information should not be stored in a personnel file, if retained at all, and what should be kept in separate files.

Some of the prohibitions made sense given the need to maintain privacy of medical records and the fact that some documents must be released to federal inspection and it is inappropriate to provide access to the details of an entire employment history. It makes sense that nothing should be placed in the file that employees aren’t aware of.

There are some other factors I don’t know I would have ever considered when setting up a system of personnel records.

Following are the most important items to exclude:

* Any writing regarding the employee’s performance that the employee has not seen should not be in the file. For example, while the performance evaluation that was presented to the employee should be in there, a complaint memo from a department manager about an error the employee made that was never shown to the employee should not.

* Working notes or logs that a supervisor has kept for her own benefit, usually to assist in the drafting of a performance evaluation. The notes should be destroyed after documenting anything of importance in the annual performance evaluation.

* Any medical information (including drug testing information) about the employee from any source should never be in the employee’s personnel file, but rather in a separate, more restricted confidential medical file. This separate medical file could also include any medical-related information such as documents related to Workers’ Compensation, FMLA and ADA.

* Complaints or investigation reports (harassment, discrimination, ethics, licensing etc.). Any complaint about an employee that is subject to an investigation should not be in the employee’s personnel file, but in a separate complaint file. For example, if an employee is accused of sexual harassment, the only thing that should be lodged in the personnel file is any disciplinary action taken against the employee or a substantiated report of wrongdoing — but not the original complaint or investigation notes.

* These items also should not be kept in a personnel file, but in separate, confidential files:
o Hiring Documents, such as letters of reference, background investigation reports, or I-9s
o EEO Statistical Information for the EEO-1 Report
o Payroll records

In short, to manage all of this personnel information we suggest four sets of files:

1. A personnel file for each employee
2. A separate medical file for each employee
3. One folder that has Forms I-9 for all employees
4. A file (or set of files) for all employee payroll records

Ellen Aldridge, who wrote the Blue Avocado piece, also provides a downloadable check list of items to include. She follows the material cited above with information about what things employees can add to their files, how long you need to keep information, how to store the files and suggested policies and protocol for accessing and reviewing files.

The one thing I questioned, (literally-I ask about it in the comments section of the article), is the suggestion that notes a supervisor has been keeping to base a performance evaluation on be destroyed. The supervisor might be documenting incidents of absence, mishandling of cash or even episodes when customers praised an employee to a supervisor or were witnessed using exceptional judgment and initiative. Wouldn’t you want to retain this evidence if the employee challenged a poor evaluation or to defend the employee against potential layoffs?

There hasn’t been a response to my comment as of publication time. Perhaps the the advice will be to formally include these records as part of the evaluation and the destruction advice refers to informal handwritten notes versus a spreadsheet the supervisor has been maintaining.

If anyone has insight or wants to share their own best practices, I would be interested to learn the answers. My guess is that a modified version of these practices should be applied to volunteer records as well.

Info You Can Use: Variety of Thoughts On Dynamic Pricing

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It seems like dynamic pricing may start to creep into the non-profit performing arts sector as a common practice. Stories about it are starting to crop up more and more frequently. When the topic of changing prices based on market demand comes up, people often use the phrase “like the airlines do.”

So should I be surprised when today I saw a story about how Opera Australia got advice about dynamic pricing from the airline Qantas?

In the beginning of July, there was a story about dynamic pricing in the Los Angeles Times. Chad Bauman at the blog Arts Marketing did a good job addressing the recent move toward dynamic pricing in a post earlier this month.

Of course, who knows. Maybe dynamic pricing is just a hot story because newspapers see others during stories on dynamic pricing. Still, it is a conversation non profit organizations need to be having, if only to decide it isn’t for them.

I actually started a discussion on the Performing Arts Administrators’ group on LinkedIn back in May. I had some concerns about the approach to pricing suggested by a guy I was partnering with on a show. It ended up that I misunderstood what he was proposing.

There were only a few responses and the conversation appeared to have run its course when I went away on vacation at the beginning of June, but when I returned I found a slew of new responses. I think it reflects some of the concerns and thoughts people have about the practice.

One of the first responders, Mark Wladika, said the practice of variable pricing left him feeling manipulated, though allowed if people were aware from the outset that “hot shows will see an increase,” it might represent a middle ground. Another commenter, Omar Miller, noted that if the maximum variation was only going to be $5-$10, the potential revenue gains may not be worth the loss of good will if audiences felt manipulated. A concern for the good will of the community was echoed by a number of commenters.

As the conversation went on, the need to communicate the policy clearly seemed crucial as well as limiting it to single ticket purchasers and exempting subscribers. It was noted that lowering ticket prices at the last minute has the potential to alienate those who bought earlier at a higher price and end up reinforcing a procrastinating behavior.

Joanne Bernstein, a Chicago based arts consultant, advised that the decision to change a price be based on a rise in demand rather than proximity to a performance date. She argues that people are busy and should not be penalized for not being certain about their plans just because it happens to be less than 24 hours before a performance.

Maggie Christ brought up the legal issues surrounding variable pricing citing NYC laws that require if a range of prices is implied, the maximum price as well as the minimum price is required. For example, you can’t say tickets starting at $15 without noting that the top price is $500. Which, of course, gives a pretty good indication about the cost of most of the tickets and the probable location of those $15 seats.

Toronto based arts consultant, Linda Rogers, pointed out that some arts organizations are limited by the capacity of their ticketing systems. Airlines and many Broadway houses using services like Ticketmaster and Telecharge have a greater ability to alter their ticket structure in response to demand than most arts organizations. I have to agree there because the process we have to follow to charge a higher price on the day of the show is pretty clunky.

One comment I particularly liked came from Kara Larson, an arts consultant from Portland, ME.

“Two important points: 1) People value what we do differently. Correctly differentiating initial prices and dynamically raising them in response to demand allows people to decide for themselves what seats, timing, and price is right for them. The ones who want to wait for a sure-fire hit will often happily pay for the privilege. 2) Being responsible stewards of the organizations people charitably support means making the most of opportunities to earn revenue given our programming. Passing up opportunities to make revenue means asking for more donated support. And vice versa.”

In a later comment she made a pretty thought provoking suggestion about a different way to approach dynamic pricing:

“The base interest is understanding demand in our markets well enough to price ALL our tickets optimally. Building a rational projection model and adjusting it when we discover errors should be our first and most important task regarding pricing. Only when we err (significantly, in my opinion) do we need to correct by pricing dynamically. Dynamic pricing is an admission that we got the prices wrong in the first place, so badly that it’s worth it to the bottom line to invest in a new system for correcting them.

At the last arts center where I implemented dynamic pricing, the revenue increase was significant in the first season and less in the second. To me this was good news, because we had taken what we learned in year one and applied it to the base ticket pricing, so had less correcting to do at the last minute. Remember, whenever you price upward dynamically, you’ve already sold some (and often most) of your tickets at the wrong price.

I suggest that instead of spending what seems, industry-wide, to be an increasing amount of time debating the merits of dynamic pricing we all spend some time collectively developing much better predictive models for pricing in the first place.”

Some members of the group are moving forward with using dynamic pricing. Steve Carignan, Executive Director of the Gallagher Bluedorn at the University of Northern Iowa says he is moving forward with dynamic pricing this season. He asks,

“Performing arts has for a long time been linked to a discount mentality (devaluing our product and trying to cut our way to a smaller loss). Is it our customers who are uncomfortable or us?”

Liz Olson of the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts made a comment that gave me cause for concern.

“…I don’t think that foundations or donors will look at variable ticket pricing fondly. They like when we are able to show self-sustainability but from what I have seen donors tend to punish non-profits they deem as operating “too much like a for profit.” (as seen in the endless debate about overhead costs and executive pay at nonprofits.)”

Does anyone have any insight into the validity of this? Have any foundations made comments of this general sort? Another commenter said she didn’t feel this was the view foundations and donors viewed attempts at dynamic pricing. However, neither offered much in the way of explicit evidence for either view. I hate to say that from what I have read, either could be the dominant perception at this time. Or perhaps the practice isn’t wide spread enough that foundations have developed a clear policy and approach.

Info You Can Use: Shall I Pay Thee?

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Our friends at the Non Profit Law Blog linked to a presentation intended to be a guide about compensated time for non-profits. The reason the presenter, Veneable LLP, this is so important is because issues related to compensable time are becoming increasingly prevalent.

– Employers are failing to identify, record, and compensate “off-the-clock” hours spent by employees performing compensable, job-related activities.

– One third of surveyed respondents indicated that their organization had been hit with a wage and hour claim in the past year.

– Today, wage and hour class actions outnumber all other discrimination class actions combined.

– According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than 80 percent of employers are out of compliance with federal and state wage and hour laws.

The presentation is in PDF format so you can proceed at your own speed and there is a helpful chart at the end that summarizes it all. The laws about compensable time are a little tricky, especially related to travel.

Among the topics the presentation addresses:

      -If an employee works unauthorized over time, do you have to pay them? (Yep)

-Waiting time vs. Off Duty – Do you have to pay an employee who is waiting for a task? (phone to ring, machine to be fixed, package to arrive)

-Difference between compensable and non-compensable “on-call” statuses

-Are employees paid when they attend lecture/training/conference/meeting?

-How comp time can be used in lieu of over time pay

-Are employees paid if they are encouraged to perform work/volunteering for a charity?

-Is your internship program legal?

-What types of travel require compensation? What types don’t? Are employees paid for work they complete on their laptops while traveling?

-If an employee is required to take their work-issued Blackberry or other work related equipment home with them, is any compensation needed?

-Do you have to pay employees if a snow storm makes the street impassable for two days?

As I mentioned, some of these issues are a little tricky and nuanced. Those dealing with employees who do a lot of traveling may find it useful to download the guide as a quick reference. I could quote you back the answers on a lot of these issues, but I would be hard pressed to explain all the travel rules.

Trespassing Won’t Make You Many Friends

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The Non Profit Quarterly had a piece by Simone Joyaux which I suspect reflects what will be the necessary practice in fund raising for the future.

She asks fund raisers to stop asking their board members to trespass on their family and friends.

Trespassing is when you ask your friends or colleagues to give gifts and buy tickets . . . just because they are your friends and colleagues. This is the personal and professional favor exchange. This is obligation to a person rather than a cause. It’s a lousy way to raise money. It’s offensive. It alienates the asker and the askee. And it’s not sustainable.

[…]

How often have you, as a fundraiser, asked your board members to name names? How often have you asked them to bring in a list? Did you ask your board members to write notes on the letters that you planned to send to their list?

I say again, trespassing is a bad idea. It alienates board members. It alienates the friends and colleagues of board members. It doesn’t produce loyal donors or sustainable gifts.

Joyaux advises asking board members to suggest those they believe might be interested in supporting one’s organization and then inviting them to learn more about the organization. In the process of interacting with these people, one can gauge whether they are interested in what the organization does and perhaps what specific manifestation of the mission they may be disposed to supporting. From there you can work on cultivating a relationship with them that may see them more involved with the organization.

This suggestion isn’t terribly earth shattering or new. I have heard Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser say this is essentially what he does to garner support for the organizations he leads. When I first heard him speak about how he evaluates what people may be interested in and only really approaches them in relation to their interests, it seemed a less daunting and more considerate approach than soliciting everyone for every cause, even though it is much more time consuming.

As Joyaux notes, existing supporters like board members are probably going to be more comfortable implementing an organizational relationship building approach. After all, they invested the time to develop their personal relationships with friends and colleagues. While they may be willing to donate the fruits of that investment to their favorite non-profit, those relationships were built on entirely different circumstances which may not be entirely compatible with a request for support of a non-profit.

Now that social media allows people to be approached for their support every time they turn on a computer or pick up the phone, it is likely that only those organizations that take the time to cultivate a relationship with people will earn sustained support.

Not that social media won’t be a good tool for keeping people engaged with the organization’s work. It may just not be the strongest method for the organization and individual to gain a good mutual understanding and appreciation of each other’s priorities.

N.B. My apologies. Some how I ended up omitting the link to Joyaux’s piece when I first posted this entry.

Building Cathedrals, One Budget At A Time

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In something of a complement to my post on Wednesday regarding the factors influencing decisions about providing arts classes in higher education, Friday I attended a retreat on budgeting with the rest of the college leadership.

Now if that sounds like something you would dread attending, I was right there with you. I had a copy of The Economist in my portfolio just in case things got too boring. However, it was really a very engaging and educational experience. I have a feeling that the facilitator that was hired to run the session probably anticipated the dread with which we were approaching the day because she started out by telling us we needed to change our perception of what we were doing.

She began with a story/parable about walking along a road and seeing two emaciated men banging away at blocks of stone. Asked what he was doing, the first man sighed that he was chipping stone. The second man seemed to be working with a greater spirit than the first and when asked what he was doing, the second answers with a beatific look on his face, “I am building a cathedral.”

I had heard that one before, but I had to admit that it did pretty much describe how most of us probably approach budgeting–as a burdensome chore. The fact is, we can approach it thinking about what doing a good job on the budget can enable us to accomplish. Its hard work, but no harder than constructing, painting and lighting a set for a play.

The problem for most of us is that no one admires what a good job we did on the budget like they will for the set. Few of us had the guidance of experienced people in crafting a budget. I have clear memories of the different areas of knowledge imparted to me by technical directors and master electricians and carpenters. My memories of practical instruction in budget and finance by mentors is a bit more hazy.

And, of course, it is easier to dream of building cathedrals when you actually have money to budget toward that goal, small as it may be.

In any case, inspiring parables aren’t going to keep morale high very long if things turn mind numblingly boring. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case. We soon broke up into groups. By luck of the draw, (actually, they had us count off by fives), I ended up in a group with the two people whose decision making most impacts my budget. The topic was–what aspects of the process most impact your budget and operations.

Since the theatre does a pretty good job of supporting ourselves with earned revenue compared to other areas, I don’t receive much of my budget from them. However, some years they will take money from our revenue, some years they won’t. But I never know. I said this sort of thing made it very difficult to plan and gave me no incentive to have money left over at the end of the year. Fact is, we could actually be more self supporting and engage in an equipment replacement program that would not require us to ask them for money if our surpluses were allowed to accumulate.

No sort of action or solution was suggested. Nor did I expect one. It was good to have a fairly safe forum in which to address this situation. It probably helped that I was relating a “building a cathedral” opportunity where I envisioned our small annual surplus being used toward a bigger goal.

The day was full of shuffling around to other groups to address other aspects of the budgeting process. One particularly interesting session had us looking at the strategic plan which is what is supposed to be guiding funding priorities. We were tasked to boil each section of the plan down to a sentence that provided a helicopter view of the section so that anyone in the organizational chart could read it and understand how their work contributed to the plan. One of the results was that the language we used to describe our section was similar to that of a couple other groups. This was encouraging because obviously, you want a degree of unity between parts of the strategic plan.

The problem was, that the facilitator was initially unclear about the significant differences between three of the sections. There was something of a suggestion that parts of one section really should be organized under the umbrella of a different section. I was rather impressed by the effectiveness of the exercise in revealing that some clearer delineation might be needed so that everyone in the organization understood their place.

The last phase of the day was creating a common set of criteria for funding that would be shared across the organization as budget requests were passed up the ladder.

These criteria were:

-Aligns with strategic goals
-Leverages resources, strengths and opportunities
-Possess motivation and capacity to implement
-Has data justifying the need and plan to assess the impact

One of the biggest problem faced in the current budgeting process is apparently the lack of supporting data. Requests were being passed up without sufficient rationale based on numbers, industry needs, etc

Then we looked back at the problems with the budgeting process we identified at the beginning of the day and tried to determine if the criteria we had created would help address them. In the end, the problems we felt they couldn’t address were the result of either external factors we didn’t have control over (i.e. the way the overall state system operated and things they required). The other general area was the mysterious process by which things that never even entered the budgeting review process got funded. A working group was formed to address how to make that process more transparent and perhaps more aligned with the common criteria. I am optimistic about the ultimate outcome of the efforts. I don’t think we will ever be rid of funding that circumvents the process, but I am fairly confident there will either be more transparency or less of it occurring.

Most of all I was quite pleased with the entire experience. It is certainly an exercise an art organization might use in order to get everyone invested in the budgeting process and discover the problematic areas related to the practice. It definitely needs a skilled facilitator to lead it. Money has great potential to be a contentious issue and it is easy to get side tracked by specific issues rather than working to identify the root causes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Info You Can Use: Speak Passionately, Persuasively…and Briefly

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I love it when, in the course of a few minutes, I come across different web pages that seem to go together like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese Peanut Butter cup.

In this instance one link was provided by Drew McManus who noted Harvard Business School’s “Elevator Pitch Generator.” Based on the old scenario that you might get lucky enough to gain access to a powerful decision maker in a place away from their gatekeeper staff like an elevator, enterprising people are encouraged to find a way to talk about their idea or business in a compelling way in under a minute. The pitch generator coaches you through the process of formulating that pitch.

After answering who you are, what you do to bring value, why you are unique in delivering value, what your immediate goals are and how the listener is involved in those goals, the generator analyzes the pitch. The generator tells you your word count, how long it might take to deliver it and notes how many times you repeated words. You have the opportunity to revise your pitch or email/print it off for use.

The second web page I came across (I apologize for not properly noting the source of the link) was on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog. Katya Andresen references Charles Green’s Trust-Based Selling where he talks about the six toughest questions customers ask sales people.

Katya uses this to create the 5 Toughest Questions Donors Will Ask:

1. Why should we choose to donate to your organization?
2. What makes your organization different?
3. What experience do you have?
4. We aren’t interested, why should we pay attention to you?
5. Why is your overhead so high?

She provides suggested answers to each and acknowledges there may be more toughest questions to add by asking readers what tough questions they have been asked.

The response I liked the best was to the last one, probably because it was expounded up at length in a separate blog post of its own.

“This is not about salaries. This isn’t about overhead. It’s about your heroic staff, creating amazing arts programs that transform the people you touch. The end results of your efforts is the story you tell in your fundraising pitch. That’s not self-serving! Your CEO talking about the lives you change is not self-promotion—it’s the beating heart of your mission. Say it loud and proud.

If I were at your arts organization, I’d tell an incredible story about one child touched by a single performance. And I’d say what made it possible was my small, dedicated team. With a donor’s support, more of that magic can happen.

You raise money by talking about the impact of your work—not about budget line items. If a donor demands to see the numbers and asks about pay, tell a great story about one of your staff to illustrate my point: that nothing wonderful happens without a creative, committed team. (I assume your staff isn’t being paid $1 million a piece—that’s something I can’t spin.)

The bottom line: Don’t be afraid of talking about your people. They aren’t overhead – they are change agents. If they do great work, put them front and center in your stories of transformation. To use a theater term, they deserve center stage.”

There is so much focus on minimization of overhead as a measure of a non-profits success, mostly brought on by a very small number of charities paying executives a great deal of money, that it is helpful to have a little guidance on the subject. Mostly, she is reminding us that it is the work that really matters and that is what should be talked about. Saying we need to pay a liveable wage to retain talented people may sound too similar to the arguments banks make that they need to pay big bonuses to retain the top talent for people to make a distinction. It is probably better to focus on the fact you are employing people who bring both talent and passion to effect change and follow Katya’s advice not to focus on the money.

It seems to me that you can use the elevator pitch generator to hone how you talk about your organization, especially to donors. Talking about how people have been affected may need to take longer than a minute to be properly persuasive. But while you don’t want to gloss over a compelling anecdote in order to tell the story of your organization in under a minute, what is said still needs to be lean and to the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ford’s Fresh Angle On The Arts

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One of the activities the Ford Foundation is engaging in as part of their celebration of 75 years is a series of forums focused on issues of social justice. The first of these, held on May 4 had an arts focus. I have been watching the videos of the sessions on the site and still have a few more to go but I wanted to reflect on what I have seen. The event utilized Cover It Live to aggregate the observations of the social media people who were present so you can review their record of the proceedings as well.

In the lunch time discussion between NEA chair Rocco Landesman and former NY Times journalist, Frank Rich, called “Roccing Out: A Lunch Conversation” (sorry, no direct link you will have to scroll down the page), they went over a number of issues, including Landesman’s now famous comments about supply of arts exceeding demand. What I found most interesting was Landesman’s discussion of his efforts to create a private-public partnership between the NEA and private foundations to better serve the arts constituencies.

I found myself wondering if the association would constrict private foundations’ vision toward that of the U.S. government since they are obviously an influential player or if the NEA’s vision would broaden to more encompass the myriad aims of the private funders. I could see the NEA funding possibly expanding as its chair goes before Congress to mention that influential foundation X was bringing Y amount to their partnership. Or it could backfire and Congress could decide it only proved there was plenty of private money out there. Though if GE and oil companies can make billions, not pay taxes and still receive subsidies, there has to be a way to successfully frame the argument.

Landesmann also discussed how he is trying to work with other departments of the federal government to get them to emphasize and use the arts in their programs. He described his efforts as being the coo-coo bird who lays his eggs in other bird’s nests for them to raise since they have more resources than he does. Two examples he used were aligning the arts with transportation projects and housing and urban development.

The other session I watched was “Sharing the Stage: Globalization and Cultural Might.” The thing that grabbed me was the discussion of how construction of arts and cultural centers were seen by countries as a symbol of having made it. Having such buildings were seen as conferring credibility as an accomplished, modern culture and society upon the country. The problem is that some countries haven’t thought about actually inhabiting the buildings with art.

Michael Kaiser of the Kennedy Center talks about traveling to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and walking around a magnificent art center located far from the population that has never really had any performances in its 15 years of existence. He mentioned another large facility being constructed in the same country where they have projected no operating costs because it will be run entirely by volunteers. Vishakha N. Desai, President of the Asia Society, mentioned that China has plans for building hundreds of museums, but when she asked the mayor of Shanghai what would be put in them, she was told they would figure that out.

The point they were making was that there was something of a misunderstanding in governments in whether the value in art resided in the buildings or the artists. There was some discussion, especially when they opened up the floor for questions and comments, about the importance of having places to exhibit and perform work as well as to train managers to properly empower and enable the work of artists.

My first reaction to this talk about the building bringing prestige was the thought that this is what comes of promoting the economic value of the arts. This came mostly as a result of thinking about all the money and resources that went into the construction. I soon realized though that what the governments really sought was not the tangible value, but to trumpet the intangible value of their country’s culture. They have world class facilities in which to feature world class artists, heavily represented by artists of their own country.

In the US we have been arguing that arts and culture are one of the things about our country that make it great and strengthen the national character. It is difficult to criticize a government who agrees with that and wants to invest huge amounts of money to draw world wide attention to that fact.

Except, of course, that the Field of Dream expectation that if you build it, the artists will come to inhabit the facility and bring life to it is somewhat erroneous. It takes some significant effort and planning to cultivate an artistic life for a facility. My strong suspicion is that the construction of these facilities didn’t involve a lot of input from artists who represented the type envisioned to perform/use the building and the facilities may not be suitable to their needs at all necessitating some immediate renovations.

Wait, What Is This Guy Actually Talking About?

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In the morning when I look at all the Twitter streams I follow, I often click interesting looking links and then come back to the web pages when I am done with all the new tweets. The result is often a long series of tabs on the Firefox browser and often I don’t quite know who suggested what story when I get around to reading it.

Since most of those I follow have an association with arts and culture, you might understand why I initially thought the blog post I was reading was on that subject. It wasn’t until I got to the sixth point that I had any inkling it was on another industry altogether and the eleventh before I was sure.

RULES FOR BUSINESS MODELS

* Tradition is not a business model. The past is no longer a reliable guide to future success.

* “Should” is not a business model. You can say that people “should” pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.

* “I want to” is not a business model. My entrepreneurial students often start with what they want to do. I tell them, no one — except possibly their mothers — gives a damn what they *want* to do.

* Virtue is not a business model. Just because you do good does not mean you deserve to be paid for it.

* Business models are not made of entitlements and emotions. They are made of hard economics. Money has no heart.

* Begging is not a business model. It’s lazy to think that foundations and contributions can solve news’ problems. There isn’t enough money there. (Foundation friend to provide figures here.)

* There is no free lunch. Government money comes with strings.

* No one cares what you spent. Arguing that news costs a lot is irrelevant to the market.

* The only thing that matters to the market is value. What is your service worth to the public?

* Value is determined by need. What problem do you solve?

These sentiments are actually about news delivery and found on Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog. For awhile there I thought an arts blogger was replicating Adam Thurman’s posting style on Mission Paradox. I had to go back to my Twitter account to try to figure out where the heck I got this link, finally discovering it was the Artful Manager, Andrew Taylor.

Honestly now, if I hadn’t alluded to the fact it wasn’t about non-profit arts and cultural organizations, would you have known it wasn’t? Every point made is a topic of conversation that has come up regarding the arts. Hopefully, they are conversations you have had at least with yourself, if not the staff and board of your organization.

The fact that news organizations are facing these same questions is of some comfort–at least we know the arts are not alone in the challenges being faced.

At the same time, the fact these questions can be asked of the news industry only serves to confirm their wider relevance. These are questions any business must ask. The arts are not special in this regard.

As much as I feel my practical side provides a good balance to my idealism, it is tough to think about the arts not being the exception. Every time I scroll up to re-read these points and see “Virtue is not a business model,” and “Business models are not made of entitlements and emotions,” there is a part of me that says, “Yes, but the arts are different.” In many respects this is true, but the arts in the U.S. operate in an environment where what is written above is also true to a great degree and must be acknowledged.

Rather than try to talk all of us out of our belief in the sublime experience the arts can bring to every day existence, I will merely stress the need to be mindful of the aforementioned truths and not allow our aforementioned belief in the power of the arts to dismiss the stark reality they represent.

Does Screaming and Demeaning Treatment Make the Show Better?

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The big discussion on the LinkedIn Performing Arts Manager forum right now is about the design of a Masters Program in Cultural Leadership. The conversation was slow in starting but sort of took off in the last couple weeks. I mention this just in passing in case anyone else wants to join the discussion and note the source of my post topic.

Anne Marie Quigg recently mentioned in the discussion that she was going to be delivering a conference presentation on her book about bullying in the arts. Bullying is a hot topic in general these days, mostly in schools. But we really don’t discuss it that much in the arts. Or rather, we grouse when we experience it, but we don’t really talk about needing to address it as a matter that undermines the health of the industry, organizations and individuals.

The description of the book notes that really awful people and situations are tolerated because they produce exceptional artistic products and that there is no really concerted effort to change that environment.

“Anne-Marie Quigg researched whether the behaviour represented isolated, rare occurrences in specific creative environments or if it was indicative of a more widespread problem in the arts and cultural sector. She discovered the highest level of bullying recorded in any single employment sector in the UK.

Bullying in the Arts reveals Dr Quigg’s findings, including the personal, organisational, legal and economic consequences of bullying behaviour. Looking at the experiences of countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, and the United States, this book challenges the notion that the arts are beyond the limitations of the ordinary milieu, exempt from the rules and regulations governing the treatment of employees. “

There have already been mentions in other articles that young leaders reject the premise that one must give their lives to the organization and pay their dues like their predecessors did and prefer a work-life balance. For this reason, many young leaders entering the field don’t aspire to the executive director role.

If this is indeed the trend, (heck, even if it isn’t) it indicates the necessity to address the negative pressures across all areas of the arts and not just administration. It is difficult to believe that only those with ambitions in administration are reticent to embrace the current lifestyle of arts managers and the performers and designers are just fine with the way things are.

Being an artist doesn’t convey a special grace that absolves one of behavior that would get people in most professions fired. Restaurant kitchens are notoriously rough places to work (and they have knives!) and there is a similar debate over the supremacy of the head chef (the way it has always been) vs. the idea that the food doesn’t taste any better for all the screaming.

Given that my experience is mostly in theatrical production and presenting, I am not entirely familiar with the world of dance, opera, classical music and visual art. Are there attempts to address this problem in other areas? What sort of behaviors and practices need to be changed?

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