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Always Wear Clean Underwear Theory of Management

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Collen Dilenschneider most a recent post about the factors that influence a cultural organization’s reputation. In order they are: Favorability, Mission Execution, Onsite Experience, Stability, Social Impact, Leadership, Testimonials, Business Results and Contributions to Education.

Dilenschneider starts out saying it isn’t about the Yelp/Trip Advisory reviews so I knew testimonials wouldn’t be listed near the top. I was really surprised to see that Mission Execution came in second and before Onsite Experience. My first thought was that we would need to rethinks the types of questions we were using on surveys because so few are oriented toward mission execution.

Now to be clear, Dilenschneider says this isn’t about your ability to recite your mission statement on command, but how well you have internalized and manifest your mission.

“But this measurement and its rank suggest that knowing what you stand for matters – and knowing that you take action surrounding what you stand for matters, too.”

As you might anticipate, she says many of these categories are inter-related. The perception of organizational stability is shaped by leadership and business results, the latter of which is basically financial stability.

Two of the significant observations Dilenschneider made speak to the need to always be working on cultivating a good reputation as a hedge against times of crisis. Or to metaphorically employ my grandmother’s advice – “Always wear clean underwear because you never know if you will be in an accident.”

The entities with better reputational equities prior to the pandemic seem to be faring better during it. … it seems those that had better reputation-related metrics prior to the pandemic are doing a better job keeping them for now. This may be because those institutions had already made investments in social media, for instance, and had established a reputation for engaging audiences digitally before they had to… Entities with better reputations may have similarly already been promulgating educational resources, also resulting in their coming to mind compared to entities that may be only really starting this effort now.

The web may now play an even bigger role in maintaining a positive reputation that inspires attendance. …The web – and social media, in particular – played a critical role in motivating attendance and shaping reputation prior to that pandemic. With more time spent online and fewer folks out and about, digital engagement and seeing stories from others may influence the perceptions of all of these factors influencing reputation to an even greater extent.

Choose Wisely

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I have had a little bit of survey fatigue so I haven’t been keeping up with Colleen Dilenschneider’s ongoing updates on audiences willingness to return to cultural organizations. As a result, I didn’t catch her post last week on the growing importance people are placing on mandatory face masks until recently.

What I felt was a more important reading of her post is that the conditions under which people will feel confident about returning to cultural organizations is increasingly more within the control of the organizations themselves.  In particular I base this on the fact that availability of a vaccine has dropped from the most important factor in April to the fifth most important factor. Face masks didn’t appear as a response on their surveys until about six weeks later in May. It started in the top three and as of last week, was the top factor. (my emphasis)

Or perhaps people are simply accepting that returning to normal activities might mean learning how to safely live alongside the virus for a time. The creation, approval, and distribution of a vaccine resulting in herd immunity may be many more months, or a year or longer away. This reality may be why masks now top the chart compared to the availability of a vaccine.

There has also been a dramatic decline in the percentage of people reporting that the government lifting restrictions means that conditions are safe to return to pre-pandemic behaviors…Now it’s seventh… and may still be decreasing.

As of this month, your organization’s own decision to be open is a bigger factor contributing to feeling safe than the government lifting restrictions. This is a big deal, but it’s not surprising. Cultural organizations are trusted entities at the same time that trust in the federal government is low. Many organizations closed before they were mandated to do so in an effort to flatten the curve. A notable 34% of likely visitors trust that you’ve duly considered safety and accordingly revised operations when making your decision to reopen.

If nothing else, these results emphasize the importance of regularly communicating with your community and generating a well-considered plan for an audience experience.

A Professional Knows Their Value

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Seth Godin offers a pretty good definition of amateur, professional and hack in a recent post. While I haven’t fully considered all the implications of his definition, I feel like it makes the best distinction between professional and amateur I have come across because it avoids explicit or implicit comparisons of quality, dedication, training/education that are often present in discussing these terms.

The amateur contributes with unfiltered joy. There’s really no other upside–create your work because you can, because it helps someone else, because it makes you feel good.

The professional shows up even when she doesn’t feel like it. The professional understands the market, the customer and the price to be paid for work that’s worth paying for. But the professional isn’t a hack.

A hack is a professional who doesn’t care.

If I have one quibble, it is that his definition of professional is tied to economic value of a product. Granted, the classic definition is that amateurs do things for the love of it and professionals get paid, but we all know that often professionals are asked to do things for exposure or told they shouldn’t expect payment for something they enjoy, and that doesn’t make them any less of a professional.

At the same time, I appreciate the way the definition of a professional includes a sense of dedication that goes beyond the love of the creative process and implies the professional has done the work to educate themselves about external factors surrounding their work. There is the idea that one’s work has market value and all the complicated discussions we have about the quality of work having no relation to market price, but also the sense that the professional knows when their work is being devalued.

Godin’s distinction between hacks and both amateurs and professionals is that the latter two groups have a longer view about the role and value of their work in the greater ecosystem:

Serviceable is for hacks. Memorable and remarkable belong to professionals and hard-working amateurs.

Thoughts?

Love-Hate Relationship With Curtain Speeches

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Troublemaker that Drew McManus is, he suggested that as people return to live performances post-Covid, arts organizations should re-think the hallowed curtain speech. He argues that patrons won’t have the patience to endure the lengthy speeches after months of ad free Netflix and Disney Plus watching bliss.

He mirrored his post on Facebook where a lot of people had something to say about curtain speeches.  (So if you have a lot to say on the subject, head over.)

I definitely agree that a lot of people do very long, poorly considered curtain speeches at their events. I try to keep my short and entertaining, but occasionally the stars misalign and it stinks and I resolve to get better.

Let me tell you, I have been to a number of organizations in my time where I wonder if they are investing any effort into trying to get better.  If our expectations are that the performers should be working to be at the top of their game, the staff delivering the curtain speeches should be aiming for the same goal.

I know that some places want to have artists, donors and board members speak so that there is better representation and variety in the appeals and some people will be better than others. In those cases, if you can’t guarantee that the speech is well-rehearsed, the time limit should be strictly enforced.

All this being said, what I feel is going to be most important post-Covid is a sense of reassurance and trust. While many in the Facebook discussion advocated for getting rid of curtain speeches, I wrote about the value of getting up and standing in front of people to assure them that the staff of your venue is taking steps to ensure their health and safety, even if you don’t explicitly say that.  (I quoted someone in a post a few weeks ago that cautioned about leaning in too heavily on safety messaging.)

Depending on the dynamics of your community and audience, delivering the curtain speech while wearing a facemask might be necessary to reinforce and model the expectations you have of audience members.

And as much as anyone is reluctant to have patrons getting in their face, literally or figuratively, with complaints, it may prove cathartic for audience members to vocalize their fears. If you have done a credible job keeping things safe and are able to identify what you can do better, then you just need to have a thick skin.

I am sure it won’t be necessary for some time to remind you that whomever showed up for the performance made a number of conscious decisions to do so, (or at least impulse factored into it much less than before). So perhaps the most valuable part of doing curtain speeches will be thanking people for coming out. I suspect it will take very little effort to make the sentiment sound much more heartfelt than it had in the past.

Even if you are convinced by my argument, if you want to vent about bad curtain speech experiences, head over to Drew McManus’ Facebook post and join the conversation.

Psychology of Re-Opening

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Artsjournal.com linked to a Washington Post story about all the psychological considerations some movie theater operators are factoring into re-opening their spaces for screenings. To paraphrase one of those interviewed, there may be a whole series of conditions that have to be met to admit audiences, but you don’t want people to feel like they are undergoing an airport screening just to see a movie.

An owner of a movie chain in Omaha has decided to rely on a mix of subtle imagery and social proof:

One conclusion: Leaning in to safety messaging is a surefire way to turn off customers.

“If you’re leading off the pitch with ‘It’s so clean you’re not going to get sick’ then you’ve already lost the argument,” said Barstow, whose company is about to open a new Omaha location. Instead of talking about disinfectant and distancing, he says, he believes it more effective to roll out traditional marketing that slips in the requisite information — an image of a shiny lobby with an employee in the background who just happens to be wearing a mask, for instance.

“You let people know you’re taking care of them, but very subtly,” he said.

Barstow said he and his daughter, who runs the company’s marketing operation, have discovered that the best weapon for luring customers might be not what the theater is doing at all — it’s the sight of other customers.

[…]

“Seeing someone like a mom bring her three kids to a matinee is I think going to be the best tool to make people feel comfortable about coming themselves.” Of course, he acknowledges, such events need to happen organically, captured instead of contrived on social media.

At my venue, we had already been planning to start showing movies in late July before our governor added live performance venues alongside movie theaters as places that are allowed to hold events. One of the major points of concern for employees was whether customers would wear masks. We weren’t sure how forceful we could be, but the recent decision by the AMC movie theater chain to make masks mandatory gives us a little more support, regardless of how insistent we decide to be.

One interesting observation from the Washington Post article I hadn’t really considered was the importance of having mask wearing staff communicate reassurance with their eyes and posture since the rest of the face won’t be visible. In this, perhaps the performing arts have a competitive advantage.

“You have to train staff how to reassure customers with their eyes, because no one will be able to see their mouths,” said Barstow, who is mandating employees wear masks.

“Maybe,” he mused, “we should hire local drama students.”

Customer Desires: Always Complicated

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The news JC Penney is closing a number of their stores and liquidating the inventory reminded me of a post I made eight years ago about the company’s efforts to deal more fairly with customers. Instead of having all sorts of sales and discounts that lead consumers to suspect something had been marked up last week in order to put it on sale this week, among other bits of trickery, JC Penny’s new CEO at the time pledged to offer completely transparent, low everyday pricing.

The move backfired on them leading a number of business reporters to observe that perhaps people liked to be cheated. That CEO was out, a new one was ushered in who restored the sales and coupons.

It was all a bit revelatory about consumer psychology and how you can’t always take what people say they want at face value.

As I pointed out in my post at the time, it also illustrates that money does not build relationships and loyalty.  I would suggest that most non-profit arts organizations are in the relationship building/facilitation business. If we weren’t, would people be donating the value of their tickets on cancelled events and increasing the amount they typically donate in a year? I say facilitation because participation in an activity with friends and family contributes to the development of relationships.

As much as your organization is struggling, those donations and other expressions of concern are what distinguish your identity and role in the community from larger corporations, even if you suspect you may be soon accompanying JC Penny on the road to dissolution. In that 2012 post, I also linked to a post I made about the expiration date of arts organizations. At the time I was speaking theoretically. Sorry to say it may be emerging into reality.

Back in 2012 when I first wrote my post, I quoted Collen Dilenschneider. She has since come out with much better research and advice for arts organizations use of discounts, but the basics still remain the same.

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

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

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

Putting Some O’ That Theory Into Practice

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I arrived in my office last Friday to find a heck of a lot more emails in my Inbox than I am used to. It turned out the evening before the governor had announced a change of guidelines that would allow performing arts organizations to open after July 1 and people immediately started scrambling trying to ascertain what it all meant.  Ultimately, nothing the new order contained deviated from our expectations by much at all in terms of how it would impact seating capacity or operational practices. We were on a Zoom call with the county attorney today and he had nothing surprising to say in his reading of the order, but it was good to have our understanding confirmed.

Like me, you may have heard that Texas’ governor had issued guidance on performing arts centers last week.  However, I was surprised to learn that Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, FL was having concerts last week. I hadn’t heard that things had opened that far in any other state.

The performances in Clearwater were in their lobby in a cabaret type setting  with attendance capped at 80 people. It looks like the three shows on June 11 sold out quickly and the added shows on June 14,  19 & 25 sold out as well. I was wondering if there are any readers in Florida who may have attended who could talk about the show and what their experience was. I see from an article on the show there were some screening procedures and people were seated at a social distance.

Fans were offered face masks at the gate, temperature-checked upon entry, and delivered drinks and snacks by servers in gloves and black masks. They sat in groups of four or fewer, and for the most part, only got up to hit the head.

The venue is also communicating their safety policies in the events scheduled this month which include the following.

– Venue staff will be wearing face masks; we encourage patrons to do the same. Face masks are available at the door upon request.
– Hand sanitizer stations are readily available. If you are in need of an attendant with cleaning supplies, please ask the wait staff.
– Table selection is on a first-come/first-served basis. We ask that you not change tables once you are seated.
– We encourage remaining at your table during the show. If you wish to stand, you will be asked to move behind the seated area and maintain social distancing.
– All food and beverage service will be table-side. There will be no walk-up service available.
– If you suspect you are ill or reside with someone who is ill with flu-like symptoms, we ask you to exchange for a future show.
– While we are committed to providing a clean and safe environment, it is impossible to eliminate all health risk in any location so please use discretion.

This seems a good example upon which to base your own venue communications as you start to open so that you don’t have to invent it all from scratch.

Many Stages Of Covid Coping

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I don’t know about everyone else, but not having a slate of performances on my schedule has kept me just as occupied as actually having events. While I am definitely grateful to still have a job, albeit warily eyeing its status, I have never not had enough to keep me occupied on an Monday-Friday, 8 am-5 pm+ basis.

It almost seems like we are going through the many stages of coronavirus coping analogous to the stages of grief. I am not sure how many stages we will go through for coronavirus, but this how I have partitioned my experience thus far:

First came the frenetic activity of crisis management, review of force majeure clauses, cancellations, communications and processing of refunds.

Then came the scrutinizing of governor’s orders and generation of seat maps, processes and shopping lists of sanitizing product in order to comply with what we anticipate the rules will be once we are permitted to re-open, whenever that may be.

Now things seem to be in the phase when organizations facing the prospect of cancelling their signature events try to formulate alternative plans. Their primary intent is to have something in place so that when they say they are cancelling their big event, they can simultaneously announce what smaller endeavors they will engaged in instead. The underlying goal being to create a situation where they retain relevance in the minds of community members in the absence of their big event.

I stayed late at work today to participate in my third Zoom meeting of the day to brainstorm contingency plans with a community organization. When I asked one of my staff if she would be on the meeting, she said she couldn’t because she was participating in the same conversation with another organization.

At the same time, it surprises me that some organizations are adamantly sticking to their traditional practices and ticketing policies–or at the very least, are doing a poor job communicating with their audiences. This week we had a spate of angry phone calls mistaking us for an organization in another part of the country that has a similar name. My guess is either something happened recently or some information was released that made 3-4 people so angry they didn’t realize the phone number they googled was at a place 800 miles away.

Though my understanding is that some ticketing services’ policies have exacerbated the refunding process so the blame may not lay entirely with venues.

In any case, I think it is clear to most everyone that you can’t take it for granted that you will retain the goodwill and reputation you may have built up. Those with poor reputations may find that a shift in personal priorities means there is no longer a begrudging tolerance of poor practices accorded them due to their stature and influence.

 

 

Keep Up Your Long Distance Relationship With Audiences

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Thanks to funding from a mysterious third party, today my state presenter consortium was able to participate in a webinar lead by Collen Dilenschneider and her colleagues at IMPACTS where they discussed the data Colleen has been writing about on her blog.

If you have been following her posts, or my posts on her posts, you know that she is currently releasing weekly updates about people’s willingness to participate in cultural events. By and large, that is what she shared today, including data from  her most recent post on factors that will drive participation.

If anything her research reinforces a concept that has been discussed for years now — the programming doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the experience and relationships associated with your organization. While people will be willing to participate in an environment where they can exert greater control over their experience earlier than one where they feel they have to cede control (i.e. gardens/museums/historical sites before crowded theaters), every other factor she listed in the webinar and her post today are about relationships.

There will be data they will release next week showing that observing what others in ones community are doing now replaces government declarations about reopening by a slight margin as the #2 contributor to confidence about attending.  If the general tenor of the community is open to re-engaging in communal life, people are more likely to start attending sooner.

Another big factor she mentioned in the webinar and her post today was the importance of keeping awareness of your organization at the forefront of people’s minds. If you have been quiet as a way to save marketing funds, it may prove detrimental to your ability to re-engage people’s participation in the future. Just providing content on social media or sending out regular emails with status updates is better than totally hunkering down and going silent.

Dilenschneider also mentioned that the trust you engendered when making the decision to shutdown to help flatten the curve can contribute to people feeling secure about returning. If the last impressions people had before you shutdown were that you were taking steps to sanitize surfaces and keep them safe, they will feel more assured that your decision to reopen reflects a confidence that your plans and procedures will provide a safe environment.

Obviously, not everyone will feel safe about returning at the same time and the appeal of what is being offered will definitely always be a factor, even in times when risk and reward are more in balance. The overall quality of one’s relationship with the organization will always loom large.

Dance Got Them Through Tough Times Before

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There was a piece on Vox today that I jumped on with interest because the title seemed to imply it was about a family run dance school applying for the Paycheck Protection Program.  I should have just read the subtitle more closely. There are only a couple of sentences about their interaction with the PPP near the end of the article and the subtitle summarizes it pretty well:  The bank rejected them for not having a pre-existing business relationship and now they are waiting on an application submitted through an online broker.

The rest of the piece is worth reading because it emphasizes the importance of developing relationships with your constituency. The mother and daughter running the Connecticut dance school have adults and children paying to take dance class via Zoom. (The other daughter also teaches in the school, but is on maternity leave and wasn’t interviewed.) I have talked to dance schools in my local area and they bemoan the difficulty of teaching over video. One woman says her non-touch screen video display has fingerprints all over it because she keeps trying to correct her students’ postures as she would for an in-person class.

For the CT dance school in the Vox article, they had an outstanding obligation to offer the children’s class because parents had pre-paid through June. The adult classes are run on a drop-in basis, but there is enough of a demand for both live and taped classes for that age group. According to the owners of the school, there is a lengthy social period built in before and after the formal class session where students catch up with each other.

From how they talk about the evolution of their school, it appears this sense of community developed over years of their in-person classes.

Founder Linda Freyer says,

So we started teaching adults in the morning and children in the afternoon — and the adults wanted this art form, they wanted to learn classical ballet, and they became passionate. I have adults that started, who never had dance training as children, and with a lot of work and discipline I got them en pointe. In toe shoes. They never believed that could happen! I have women who are still dancing with me 25 years later. We have gone through deaths of parents, we have gone through breast cancer, we have gone through brain tumors, we have gone through divorces, we have gone through so many life-changing crises, and they find solace coming to this ballet class.

[…]

We are such a community — I was teaching a class on the morning of 9/11, and it was adults, and people were drifting in saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear?” We were shell-shocked. And I remember one dancer saying, “Do you want to just cancel class?” We were speechless. And one of our students looked at the group and said, “Please teach us, Linda. I have a funny feeling this class will be the highlight of the next period of time.” So I turned off the news and I taught that class, and I will tell you — the gals who were in that class still talk about it.

Petra, the daughter who was also interviewed for the article mentioned she had danced all the way through college, but started a career in finance before deciding it wasn’t for her and pursued training in dance education. Petra’s story along with her mother’s discussion of adult students developing their skills to a place they could dance en pointe reminded me of a post I wrote on Lisa Mara who started a dance company for people who loved dance enough maintain their dance practice, but were pursuing other avenues as a career. The interview in Vox made it sound like the dance school had similarly cultivated an environment for adults who wished to rigorously pursue an avocation in dance.

Marquee Messaging For Morale

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A number of theaters around the country have started posting messages on their marquees to bolster the morale of their community. Here at my venue, we were trying to think of a message to post on our marquee so my marketing director did some research and gathered these images. I identified the ones I know or could figure out. I apologize for not knowing every place. I offer this as a bit of inspiration for other places that might want to do something similar.

I wanted to figure out messaging that was more tailored to our community. We discovered that Little Richard, who had been born here in Macon, had said “I love Macon. I love it better than anywhere I’ve ever been in my life,” so we came up with the following images. We had the images up on Friday, May 1 and then Little Richard died a week later which made the whole thing a little bittersweet for us.

The third screen about picking up the beat was something we developed in consultation with the local convention and visitors bureau.

I Figured This Was Highly Unlikely. What A Difference A Month Makes

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Early last month I bookmarked an article by Jeremy Reynolds in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette intending to come back to address it in a blog post in some manner. In the article, Reynolds was arguing for shorter classical music concerts.  At the time, I figured it would never happen broadly due to the inertia of tradition.

Now with public events shutdown and artists and organizations streaming their performances, I strongly suspect a lot more people are going to be open to exploring the basic concepts Reynolds espouses.

If concerts were shorter, the quality of musicianship could increase significantly. I often chastise classical groups for bloated, unnecessarily long recitals. An hour of tight, balanced, in-tune playing is vastly preferable to a two- or three-hour slog of mediocrity.

While some organizations say a program should fill an evening, offering quantity over quality is a poor strategy even if funders tend to favor inventive and diverse programming.

He also accuses ever lengthening intermissions of impeding the momentum of the experience. Since his article opens with him advising friends to go home at intermission, I imagine he would be all for a short, intermissionless performance which would solve two problems at once.

He addresses the idea that you have to give people their money’s worth:

I realize that the cost of ticket prices (which I recently argued are too expensive given how little revenue tickets generate) causes some groups to feel they need to hit a minimum threshold of time, but this is arbitrary. Maybe it’s not about the length of the program, but what an organization does with it that matters most.

[…]

The New World Symphony, a forward-thinking training ensemble in Miami, rolled out a series of concerts years ago that ran for 30 minutes and 60-75 minutes.

“The trick is not to think you have to fill an evening,” orchestra President Howard Herring said. “The question isn’t just: What music do I want to bring forth? but What is the uncompromised artistic experience that only we can provide?”

Now that groups and individuals are streaming their performances, they are almost certainly getting a lot of exercise evaluating and providing a highly focused uncompromised artistic experience. If things ever move back to the former semblance of normal, I think it would be a safe bet that those who continued to employ the “muscles” they developed while focusing on delivering an uncompromised experience will be on a firmer path to success.

Not Only Is Marketing Everybody’s Job, It Has To Be Done All The Time–Even Now

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I highly recommend watching Collen Dilenschneider’s Know Your Own Bone site over the course of the Covid-19 epidemic. Every Monday she is posting data about intention to visit cultural entities in as the epidemic unfolds. She says her company is receiving data in real time. I am surprised to learn people are taking the time to respond to surveys.

In any case, it appears people anticipate going to cultural entities in the next 3-6 months. That didn’t significantly change between March 16 and March 23, but she warns we may see a shift in the next week as the reality of the situation begins to sink in.

With this in mind, she is cautioning people against letting their marketing efforts flag during this period of time and offers suggestions about how to shift the focus of those efforts from “visit now” to keeping yourselves on people’s radar.

Because there can be pretty large time gap between when people decide to visit an entity and when they take action to visit, marketing you do now is informing people who will arrive months down the road. She also points out that it often costs more to re-engage audiences than it is to retain them.

At the end of her post, she offers 4 suggestions for re-focusing marketing efforts:

A) Strategic deferral in paid media to local audiences

In response to the observed decline in immediate-term intentions to visit among local market members, it makes sense to selectively defer campaign spending for paid media that targets audiences with relatively short lead times….

To be clear, this does not at all mean ceasing all marketing and not communicating with local audiences. It means strategically deferring select paid media efforts for this market, and holding these funds in abeyance for deployment at a more opportune moment.

B) Replace investments aimed at immediate activation (“visit now!”) and focus instead on maintaining top-of-mind status and broad awareness

…However, the current environment suggests more of a “maintenance” approach that intends to preserve awareness of what your organization does and stands for in order to keep your cultural institution at the forefront of people’s minds.

Unaided awareness and top-of-mind metrics are measurable –… Organizations want to be ready to immediately reactivate audiences when they reopen, and that means maintaining high levels of awareness and being top of mind in the meantime.

[…]

C) Meet people where they are right now: Online

{…]

There is a terrific opportunity for creative connection right now that proves relevance far beyond your walls – from providing resources for parents aiming to home school or keep children busy, to conducting events with staff experts on social media, to sharing penguins exploring their empty aquarium to give a sense of what’s still happening behind the scenes. The opportunities for creative and engaging ways to execute our missions and connect with our communities are seemingly endless. They are a good idea right now.

Finding ways to execute missions, support communities, and stay top of mind are strategic initiatives that position organizations to better succeed when their doors reopen.

D) Be responsive – not reactive

…This is not the time for knee-jerk reactions and short-sighted “gut instinct.” This is the time to think through opportunities and the current condition so that cultural entities are in a position to succeed when their doors reopen. This may be especially difficult as executives field calls from fear-driven board members demanding speedy, unfounded, and feelings-based actions.

[…]

In regard to marketing investments during this time, an immediate instinct may be to achieve significant short-term savings. Some may even consider going dark. Be careful. Data suggest that doing this without considering how these cuts are likely to increase costs and reduce attendance revenue upon reopening may be a financial problem rather than a solution.

Your organization has likely worked hard to show how you elevate the community. You’ve cultivated a level of awareness. You’ve worked hard to achieve top-of-mind status for certain audiences.

Now is not the time to let people forget that your organization exists.

Now is the time to show people how effectively you stand for your mission and your community – both when your physical doors are open and when they are closed.

 

Leaders Call For Disarmament Of Weapons Grade Elitism

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I think there is probably enough overlap between my readers and Drew McManus on Adaptistration that I am not bringing anything new to the table when I point to his most recent post.

But man! It is so much in my wheelhouse that I wish I had written it. And with a title employing the phrase, “Weapons Grade Elitism,” it is hard leave it alone.  It pushes all the right buttons.

Drew had an encounter with program notes for a concert that were so dense, even as an orchestra insider with decades of experience wasn’t quite sure what the author of the notes was referencing. I think some of the content was worse than anything Trevor O’Donnell has criticized.

Long time readers know that I often cite findings of the 2017 CultureTrack survey and frequently discuss how the language in promotional and informational materials can be alienating to people who are just starting to be curious about different creative disciplines. I was pleased to see Drew invoking both ideas in his final paragraph summarizing his experience with the program notes:

In the end, these program notes do far more harm than we probably realize. When the CultureTrack ’17 report showed the number one barrier to engagement is people feeling like “it isn’t for someone like me,” we should actively revolt against practices that result in program notes like this. If someone with a music degree feels alienated upon reading them, imagine how the rest of our patrons will react.

Weapon’s Grade Elitism In 800 Words Or Less

Don’t Ignore “Can’t Use My Tickets” Posts On Your Social Media Page

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I wrote a post that appeared on Artshacker today about ticket scams occurring in the comments section of performing arts organization social media accounts.

Essentially, what happens is that a short time out from an event, posts start appearing in the comments section of your organization’s Facebook page apparently from people who need to get rid of their tickets because they have a conflict with the date.

The biggest, most immediate tell-tale sign that this is a scam is realizing there are more tickets offered for re-sale than have been purchased. In the screenshots I posted as examples, the $5 movie we were offering only had 16 advance tickets sold but there were at least 54 tickets being offered for sale. This doesn’t count all the offers we deleted.

You also need to wonder about the promised heavy discounts people were offering on a $5 ticket that made it worth texting or sending a direct message to a stranger.

Another thing I see if I don’t catch the fake post in time is tickets being offered for free that suddenly have a price attached if someone responds with interest.

The answer, of course, is that most of these accounts were bots.  If you follow the link back to the poster’s account, you might find pictures of the person with family and friends which make it look legitimate (and I suspect some were real accounts that were hijacked) but others you notice some big inconsistencies like the fact their residence is in Sweden and they work for a company in Spain.

As I note in my Arts Hacker post, the simplest solution of shutting down commenting or requiring every comment to be approved can impede spontaneous reactions and conversations that create a sense of trust and community. Not to mention, it is difficult to conduct engagement campaigns if people are limited in their interactions.

Additionally, if people do get caught in a scam, it is likely to result in a negative association with, and perhaps distrust of, the organization on whose social media page the scam appeared.

If you knew you got a virus on a website or had your credit card number stolen on a gas pump skimming device, you would probably avoid returning, right?

One thing I didn’t mention in my original post but won’t probably come as a big surprise to many is that it is nigh-impossible to get the social media site to shut the scams down. We had a recent case where a person/bot posted their ticket offerings on their own page and tagged our page. I have to think this was a mistake and couldn’t have been effective because when we visited the page, there were more than 50 identical posts from a “woman” whose husband was deathly ill and couldn’t make dozens of monster truck rallies, concerts at bars, events at performing arts centers, many of them occurring at the same time across Canada and the United States.

We reported the page to Facebook. Even if it wasn’t a scam, a personal page was being used to conduct commerce. The response we got was that it didn’t violate any rules.

Anyway, check out the post on Arthacker, if nothing more than to see the screenshot examples of the type of posts you might encounter. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same names popped up on your social media pages.

Scammers In Your Social Media Community

Pop Music, Now With Less Pep

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Via Arts and Letters Daily is a link to an Aeon piece that claims pop songs have gotten increasingly sadder and negative over the last 50 years.  They lay out their method of analyzing lyrics and data which seems to reinforce this idea. Sadly, all the death metal, goth, emo, etc music my friends and I listened to in my youth didn’t seem to factor in as much as I hoped. It is hard to believe anyone today is titling and singing songs more blatantly depressing than Girlfriend in A Coma.

But I wanted to know why this trend might be manifesting. They posited three factors which might influence this: success bias, prestige bias or content bias. These terms are defined along these lines:

We checked for success bias by testing whether songs had more negative lyrics if the top-10 songs of the previous few years had negative lyrics…

…prestige bias was tested for by checking if the songs of prestigious artists of the previous few years also had more negative lyrics.

…Content bias was checked for by looking at whether songs with more negative lyrics also happened to do better in the charts.

Acknowledging that there is still more work to be done on studying this, they came to the following conclusions at this point in their research:

Although we found small evidence for success and prestige bias operating in the datasets, content bias was the most reliable effect of the three in explaining the rise of negative lyrics. This is consistent with other findings in cultural evolution, in which negative information appears to be remembered and transmitted more than neutral or positive information. However, we also found that including unbiased transmission in our analytical models greatly reduced the appearance of success and prestige effects, and seemed to hold the most weight in explaining the patterns. ‘Unbiased transmission’ here can be thought of in a similar way to genetic drift, in which traits appear to drift to fixation through random fluctuations, and in the apparent absence of any selection pressure

What really interested me was the idea that the decentralization of the recording industry removed a bias for distributing happier language in songs:

Given this preference, what we need to explain is why pop-song lyrics before the 1980s were more positive than today. It could be that a more centralised record industry had more control on the songs that were produced and sold. A similar effect could have been brought about by the diffusion of more personalised distribution channels (from blank cassette tapes to Spotify’s ‘Made For You’ algorithmic tailoring). And other, broader, societal changes could have contributed to make it more acceptable, or even rewarded, to explicitly express negative feelings.

This concept got me thinking about claims that no one wants to see theater dealing with serious themes any more and only want to see big flashy musicals that provide escapist entertainment rather than challenge people to think about their lives.

It could be that the fact people experience music privately through earphones allows them to gravitate toward a personal preference for negative themes that they don’t feel as comfortable engaging with through their public attendance of theatrical performances.

Or it could be that since theatrical production is so centrally controlled, the content that is distributed and marketed has convinced people about the type of shows they want to see. This may be particularly true if people don’t feel as confident in their ability to choose theatrical performances they want to see as they do music they want to listen to. It is easier to defer to the expertise of others.

 

The First Rule Of Modern Composer Club, Don’t Talk About Modern Composer Club

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Conductor Robert Trevino had a novel idea of getting people to attend concerts by modern composers…don’t tell people what the program was going to be. Counter-intuitively, the concerts had full audiences.

He got his inspiration from a restaurant in Malmö, Sweden. When you go to have a meal, they ask if you have allergies and then bring you your courses without telling you what you are eating. In this way, you don’t prejudge your experience.

The experience of that meal made me realise that in some way or another we all are pseudo-connoisseurs – by which I mean, many of our experiences in aesthetic, subjective art forms are evaluated – even pre-evaluated – through highly formed expectations and preconceptions. We come to things with well-defined preferences, we don’t usually engage openly and directly with what has been presented.

He said he had proposed a program of modern composers and seldom heard works, but was told no one could attend. He said he believes that this estimation was correct. People would decide the concert was going to contain unpleasant, discordant music and would stay away.

So with a lot of cooperation from the musicians of the Basque National Orchestra, media and ultimately, audiences, all of whom conspired to avoid spoiling the experience for future concert dates, they kept the program a secret. All the concerts in the four states of Basque Country sold out despite all the mystery.

What occurred, remarkably, was a great trust-building exercise between us, our musicians, our audience and the media (who had to be complicit in all of this … The national news channels came and filmed rehearsal but broadcast in such a way that you didn’t actually hear anything identifiable, and I myself presented a promotional trailer for the orchestra where I jokingly promised to finally reveal all, but every time I was about to say a composer’s name we made it look like the signal had failed!

If you watch the video that accompanies the story, (I also include it below), you will notice the concert was a logistical challenge. The musicians come on to the stage at different times, moving into position while playing their instruments. Other times, they move around the stage. Trevino leaves the stage and goes to sit in the audience during the performance of a work.

If audiences are usually uncertain about when it is appropriate to clap, they were pretty much completely lost during these concerts.

But as I approached and saw all the people lining up for their tickets, I saw a look on their faces that you don’t often see in concert halls. It was excitement, blended with total uncertainty about what this experience was going to be like. The energy and curiosity in the hall was palpable. And once I stepped out on stage for that kinetic first sequence of works, the audience didn’t know quite how to behave – in the video you see me encouraging them to clap and celebrate the musicians at various points. When I went to sit with them during one of the pieces, people were shocked at the complete breakdown of the standard concert procedure and yet at the same time they were fixated and engaged and present for what was happening.

If you find yourself muttering, “we could never pull that off here,” because you don’t think your audience is adventurous enough, consider that you might be underestimating them.

Obviously, there was a lot of advance work that went into teasing audiences into being curious about the experience and then into providing an event that was both visually and aurally engaging. It is likely that few would have shown up if a conventional marketing approach was employed and they wouldn’t have been as engaged by a conventionally staged performance.  Everyone involved with the Basque National Orchestra, media and audiences made the effort to deliver on the promise that something interesting was going to happen.

 

 

Making Singing “Ah” For Six Minutes Sound Interesting

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Last week Vox had a backstage video on the Metropolitan Opera production of Philip Glass’ Akhnaten. What I loved about it and wanted to call attention to was the way in which they made elements of the production that would be barriers for both new and existing audiences intriguing, potentially piquing curiosity.

I mean, if I told you the opera was sung in four different languages; featured a six minute period where everyone sang “ah!”; had a minimalist set; a costume festooned with baby heads; a cadre of professional jugglers; and period of full nudity, you might be a little wary about going.

Though that might sound more appealing than the description on the Met site:

Director Phelim McDermott tackles another one of Philip Glass’s masterpieces, following the now-legendary Met staging of Satyagraha. Star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is the title pharaoh, the revolutionary ruler who transformed ancient Egypt, with the striking mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges in her Met debut as his wife, Nefertiti. To match the opera’s hypnotic, ritualistic music, McDermott has created an arresting vision that includes a virtuosic company of acrobats and jugglers. Karen Kamensek conducts in her Met debut.

Please be aware that this production contains some full-frontal nudity, which may not be suitable for young audiences.

The video starts out addressing the 6 minutes of “ah” pointing out that it is harder than it sounds, and showing the stars tackling it with grinning gusto and periods of frustration.  Charismatic star Anthony Roth Costanzo references the pharaoh, Akhnaten, the first to embrace monotheism, as a “totally fascinating, weird, complex guy.”

The video makes the whole idea of the trained voice accessible by having light hearted conversations about vocal warm ups disturbing the neighbors, working with Castanzo’s vocal coach in a living room–and then seguing to the importance of the first tone when the singer opens their mouth to deliver.

Then they talk about what sets composer Philip Glass’ minimalist approach apart from other operas.

They aren’t afraid to use unfamiliar terms like “sitzprobe” because after defining it, they talk about why it is important — the singers and musicians come together for the first time after weeks of working apart–and it is an exciting time. They also illustrate how much work it is to bring all these pieces together – how easy it is to fall out of time and how the conductor and the prompter keep the musicians and singers synchronized with each other.

The reason for having 12 jugglers is explained. The viewer gets a sense of how the swiftly moving balls are a counterpoint to the music and slow movement of the rest of the performers and how the balls and massive sun are tied symbolically.

Even the nudity is addressed with Costanzo discussing the experience of descending 12 steps over the course of three minutes staring directly at 4000 people while completely naked.

Actually, at the end of the video Costanzo discusses the whole challenge of the opera:

“If I told you you’re going to come see a minimalist 3.5 hour opera about ancient Egypt, where there is no real story and it is sung in ancient Egyptian, you’d think ‘Man, there is no way I am going to that.’ And yet, I bet you are going to love it.”

I will be the first to tell you, whoever put this 10 minute video together spent a lot of time and money on it.

However, it succeeded in making the show seem interesting and accessible due to the way it framed the information it was presenting, not because of the high production values. You are interested in learning more because you like the people and they talk about what they are doing in a relatable way. There is nothing in the video to refute a claim that the nudity is gratuitous, but there is probably going to be a part of you that is cheering Costanzo on because he is literally manifesting the nightmare about walking into work naked.

I offer this as an example of how to talk about your work and diminish the intimidation/ perception of strangeness newer audiences may experience.

 

Reflections On Experiencing And Expressing Insight

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This weekend we hosted a performance by the dance company Diavolo.  You may be familiar with them as a finalist on America’s Got Talent, but they have been around since 1993 and have been on my radar since the early 2000s. They have been on my wishlist of groups to present for nearly two decades so I was happy to have the opportunity to do so this weekend.

They bill themselves as “Diavolo: Architecture in Motion” because they utilize some pretty significantly sized objects as part of their performance. I have included their sizzle reel below so you can get a sense of what that means.

I wouldn’t consider myself a dance person really at all. When I was watching the performance, I started thinking that they, moreso than any other dance or cirque type company I had seen, really honored the size, mass and shape of the objects with which they were working.

Instead of deciding what they wanted to do and then building an apparatus to make it happen, I felt like they started with the object as a partner and then created their work, acknowledged the fact the item blocked our sight at different times to hide and reveal things. I had the sense they were following the existing weight and motion of the objects rather than making the objects serve their purpose.

Almost immediately, I questioned whether it was really true they were among a few focused on synchronizing with the objects and honoring their physical properties to create dance vs. bending objects to their needs. I suspected they weren’t the only dance company that started from the physicality of the object and created from there. I figured it was likely I had seen it happen a dozen times before and had finally accumulated enough experience that I recognized what was happening.

I want to resist a simplistic explanation of experience and exposure. Research is showing that people are not “aging into” an appreciation of classical music. I don’t want to credit what I was recognizing this weekend as simply aging into an appreciation of dance.

I am okay with a complicated explanation of experience and exposure. I just resist an explanation that implies a sense of inevitability.

A month ago as I was traveling to a conference, I realized I was making little stutter steps getting on and off of escalators and moving sidewalks even though I have a lifetime of experience with these mechanisms. I was thinking about that Saturday night when one of the dancers sat lightly down on the huge rocking semi-circle and traveled upward without disturbing its motion or evincing any difficulty or hesitation dealing with the change of inertia.

The fact drawing a connection between mounting airport escalators and hopping on oversized playground equipment was a necessary element in my enlightenment this weekend indicates that the factors involved in growing an appreciation of a creative discipline are numerous and complex.

I also quickly recognized that “honoring the size, mass and shape of the objects,” was exactly the dense terminology that turns people new an experience off of it. (I swear, I was paying close attention to the performance. I am capable of simultaneously processing epiphanies and sitting in rapt attention.)

The “honoring…” phrase was legitimately the way I encapsulated what I was experience for myself in the moment but it definitely sounds like something someone would say to make themselves sound authoritative and perhaps stifle contrary views.

Basically what I am trying to say is there is nothing wrong with finding that dense, sophisticated terminology is necessary to distill the fullness of your experience for yourself.  Just realize the weight of those words may feel like a bludgeon to those who hear them. Diluting your impressions with broader, simpler context is probably necessary for people to understand your experience.

I think the issue is that many of us in the arts aren’t very practiced in employing the broader, simpler context familiar to our wider community.

 

Tonight We Have Paired The Seared Scallops With Wine And An Aria

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Back in May, American Theatre had an article about audience building efforts Opera Theatre St. Louis (OTSL) undertook with funding from the Wallace Foundation.  In my experience, there is always something to learn from these projects funded by the Wallace Foundation, especially since the case study reports tend to be honest about what things didn’t go well. So it is worth the time to read this short article.

One of OTSL’s efforts that drew my attention was their Opera Tastings project where they would pair tastings of food and wine with short opera performances. What I really appreciated about their effort here was that they took the program a fair distance from their home rather than concentrating on the St. Louis city limits. (my emphasis)

Hosted in a local restaurant or venue, the evening pairs 11 samples of food or drink with 11 operatic excerpts. The evenings have taken place all over St. Louis: in predominantly Black neighborhoods, in Chinatown, in Southern Illinois, or as far away as Columbia and Fayetteville, Mo. (120 miles and 145 miles, respectively).

“If the intent is to draw people in who surround you, then most of our organizations are finding that they have to be more present in the community,” says Ramos. “It’s how you build relevance. It’s how you show the work.”

[…]

Newcomers, in other words, discover what type of opera they enjoy, instead of being told why they should enjoy opera. More than three-quarters of Opera Tasting attendees are new-to-file (i.e., first time patrons), and every attendee gets $10 in “opera bucks” to redeem for a ticket to an upcoming show.

As I mentioned before, an aspect of these programs I have valued is the fact they were open about what went wrong. This type of reflection is a core part of Wallace Foundation’s ethic of “continuous learning” according to the article.

There was enough of an upside, despite the cost, to make the Opera Tastings worth retaining and refining. (my emphasis)

A lot of those opera bucks get redeemed: Right now an average of 42 percent of Opera Tastings attendees go on to buy tickets. What’s more, audience members who come to OTSL through Opera Tastings tend to buy more expensive tickets and become donors at a faster rate than expected.

One caveat: The tastings are costly to produce, costing $7,100 per tasting in 2018. And the true cost of audience recruitment may be obscured by the subsidies covered by opera bucks as well as discounted ticket prices

“It’s an expensive way to acquire new audience members,” admits Timothy O’Leary, general director of Opera Theatre from 2008 to 2018. And the majority of people who attend, 58 percent, never buy a ticket. The challenge now is to see how the tastings might be sustainable without Wallace support.

The article also talks about other programs like their Young Friends program which they estimate has a $16,000-$17,000 impact and their Opera Kids Camp for children to attend while their parents are at the opera. Take a look to learn more.

Data You Need To Believe Over Your Gut

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I so frequently tell my readers that Collen Dilenschneider has made an awesome post on her blog that it makes it difficult to convey the increased urgency to read one of her pieces when she has made an even awesomer post.

Despite this impediment, believe me when I say she recently made a post that is even more awesome than her usually awesome posts. Last week she wrote about how research results often contradict our gut feelings about a situation, despite being true. She confesses that as much as she deals with data every day, there are some instances where she asks the experts to revisit it just to be sure.

She goes on to list five data points that even she and her co-workers really wanted to believe were untrue.

Let me just say, I have seen some of this data before but part of what makes her post so great is this “contradicts our gut” framework she employs. As much as I read and write about arts administration, there are a fair number of instances where I raise mental walls against information I come across. It is useful to be constantly reminded that we need to take a deep breath and open our minds.

1) Local audiences have negatively skewed perceptions of the organizations in their area 

IMPACTS tracked 118 visitor-serving organizations and found that on average, people living within 25 miles of the organization indicate value-for-cost perceptions that are 14% less than those of regional visitors living between 25 and 101-150 miles away. In other words, locals believe their experience is less worthy of the admission cost they paid compared to the perceptions of those living further away. Interestingly, locals paid 20% less for admission, on average, than non-local visitors thanks to local discounts and promotions! They are also much less satisfied with their experiences than non-local visitors.

Even if this is influenced by a sense of sunk cost where long distance visitors arrive with a firmer conviction than local residents they will enjoy an experience given that they have already invested so much more time and money in planning and execution, it is important to recognize this dynamic is operating for different visitor segments.

2) An average visitor attends a cultural organization type only once every 27 months – and the average member returns to take advantage of free admission only once per year.

The average person who visits an art museum will not visit another for 28 months, on average. The average person who visits a history museum will not visit another for 32 months, on average. In total, the average visitation cycle for organization types that we monitor is 27 months. Here’s more on that data and what it means.

[…]

Subscription-based organizations such as theaters and symphonies: You’ve got it a bit better. Your members visit twice each year, on average.

I had actually written about this idea around 8 years ago. In the research presented at that time, it wasn’t that people felt they had enough of the organization and were going to wait a few years to go again, it was that people were so emotionally connected with the organization, they would swear they had just been there within the last year when it had been about two or more years.

Don’t immediately delete people from your mailing list if they don’t buy tickets to return, give it 3-5 years before you decide they are disengaged. (This assumes annual/semi-annual mailings vs. more frequent ones.)

3) Millennials are not “aging into” caring about arts and culture

Oooh, pay attention to this one!

This isn’t surprising to me and we have so much on this we’re getting into a “ridiculous” data volume category here, but this shocks other folks, so it’s making this list!

Millennials are not “aging into” caring about arts and culture as a natural function of getting older. Millennials also are not “aging into” other things some entities are banking on, like the belief that dolphins should be kept in captivity.

[…]

Millennials are a very important group for cultural organizations to engage. The take-away of these findings is critical: “Let’s just wait for people to think we’re important” is a failing engagement strategy.

Here is another point to be particularly mindful of–

4) On average, attendance goes back to baseline 5 years after a major expansion (but operation costs tend to be increased forever).

In a nutshell, attendance decreases in the years prior to a major building project as folks defer their visits until after the expansion opens. When an expansion opens, attendance certainly increases – 19.6% compared to the ten years prior! But that increase gradually decreases until attendance levels retreat to the baseline of the ten years prior after only 5 years. And the increased building space also means more staff members, more programming, more electricity, and more ongoing maintenance.

[…]

If you’re fundraising for or undertaking a major building expansion, make sure that you are clear on your goals and objectives – and that your expectations for long-term attendance and ongoing maintenance are grounded in reality.

And finally… (note the distinction she makes between mobile web and mobile apps)

5) Mobile applications do not significantly increase visitor satisfaction

Interestingly, people who use social media onsite in a way that relates to their visit report 7% greater visitor satisfaction scores than people who do not use social media in relation to their visit. Mobile web users experience a 6% bump in satisfaction. Even though all three of these methods (mobile applications, social media, and mobile web) take place on a mobile phone during a cultural organization visit, social media and the web significantly contribute to the visitor experience. Mobile applications do not reliably do this. One explanation for this may be that social media and mobile web “meet audiences where they are” and are examples of onsite technology facilitating the experience. Mobile applications, on the other hand, can be examples of technological intervention in which a visitor must interrupt the experience to figure out how to engage with the technology, or download it in the first place.

As much as I have quoted here, it is only about 1/3 of the data and rationale she presents in her post so check it out in order to get a more complete picture of things.

I Don’t Know, The DMV Line Is Usually At Least Novella

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I saw a really cool story via Americans for the Arts in May about a partnership between the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. They worked together to place kiosks that delivered short stories in a motor vehicles branch. People standing on line to conduct business can select, print out and read one of the short stories.  The library sees this as an opportunity to serve their community outside of their branches.

The stories are printed on demand and scroll out of the kiosk somewhat like a register receipt.

The story kiosk has a library of more than 8,500 short stories, varying in length. Stories are free, and readers can choose between selections for kids or content for all ages. Short Edition has also made the machine earth-friendly with eco-friendly paper that is FSC- and BPA-free.

I took a look at the website of the French company that makes the kiosks. Even though they talk about the printers being useful for business where people have to wait for service, I noticed some of the accompany pictures depict the stories being read at leisure in uncrowded cafes.

This made me wonder if there might be a use for the technology to deliver supplementary material at performances or perhaps only the parts of the playbill you are interested in. If you don’t care about the bios but want the program notes, you might choose to only print those and save on paper. Granted, this may not please those who paid to have their logos placed in the program, but perhaps they can be included on the print out on an ongoing basis.

Being able to see what types of material people are printing on demand might provide the organization with a better sense of what information to provide people in promotional materials to help them make the decision to attend. Likewise, it could be used to shape the programming and attendance experience to reflect these interests/needs.

It’s Still Not Ann Margaret

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I am going on vacation for a couple weeks so the blog will be featuring some interesting posts from the archives.

Back in 2009 I wrote a lengthy article about a Mad Men episode where the ad agency reproduced the opening of Ann Margaret singing Bye, Bye Birdie, in order to sell Pepsi’s new Patio diet soda. Even though it was exactly what they asked for, the client felt there was something wrong. When they leave, one of the ad men points out what was wrong was that it wasn’t Ann Margaret singing the song.

One of the points I made at the time was that people often try to copy or adopt something that has emerged as wildly successful in the assumption that they will be able to cash in on that popularity. The problem is that they don’t comprehend the nuanced elements that made the original so successful.

What made this old post more timely is that last week, there was a similar illustration of the “its not Ann Margaret” effect. The recent release of a video game based on the Avengers: Endgame movie was widely panned because few of the characters in the video resembled the actors who had portrayed the heroes in movies over the last decade or so.

A somewhat different perspective on anticipating and managing expectations.

Many have pointed out that the console versions of their favourite characters do not resemble the Marvel Cinematic Universe superheroes. Custom playable identities have instead been created, meaning Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark, Chris Evans’ Captain America and more are nowhere to be seen.

“Wow, the new Avengers game looks… really bad,” wrote one fan on Twitter. Another said: “They can’t even use the Avenger’s theme song? Like WTF.”

I Probably Don’t Really Know What My Audience Values Even Though I Am In The Lobby Before, After, And At Intermission

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I bookmarked a guest post on Museum 2.0 a month ago. Now I feel guilty for not circling back to it sooner. Nina Simon invited Martin Brandt Djupdræt, a manager at Danish museum,  to write about how his organization has all the decision makers interact with visitors as part of their audience research effort.

Their approach is super simple, though a little time consuming. A member of management approaches a random visitor and asks if they can follow the visitor around to observe where they go in the museum and what they interact with. Three weeks later they give the visitor a call and ask:

• why they chose this museum,
• what they noticed especially during the visit,
• whether they interacted with anyone, and
• whether they had talked to anyone about the museum after the visit, and what about

Every decision maker in the organization seems to be required to participate, from management to curators. Djupdræt says the goal is to get managers up and away from their desks interacting with people with whom they wouldn’t normally come in contact.

As you might imagine, what the managers and curators were sure people valued about the museum wasn’t quite accurate. Even those with more direct contact with visitors were surprised by what they learned.

The curators were surprised by how important other parts of the museum besides the historical content were for the visitor. The F&B manager and the head of HR were surprised by how many objects and stories the visitors were absorbed in. This has also given us insights into the work of our colleagues and made us appreciate their work to a larger extent. Now we all have useful and inspiring stories about visitors’ choices and the impact the museum had on them.

Another observation was the importance of food and drink. In our trackings we could see how much time the visitors spent on the museum’s eating places and the great social importance these breaks had. Something we learned about food through the interviews was that the guests consider the food at the museum as part of the museum’s storytelling. This insight has encouraged us to focus on food and food history as a priority topic at the museum, and a colleague is going to work particularly with that subject.

[…]

Visitors have always been a focus for the management, but the research have personalized our audience and they are discussed differently now. As the head of finance described it: “I normally look at whether a task is well done, financially possible and efficient, but now I also consider more seriously how a visitor would feel and react to the changes we plan.”

I especially wanted to include that last section as a reminder that measuring success by efficiency and expense doesn’t necessarily equate to providing a fulfilling experience.

One thing Djupdræt didn’t cover that I was curious about was why they waited three weeks to follow up. I didn’t know if that was a social practice in Denmark where it was rude to immediately survey people about their experience or if it was calculated to see how much of the visitor experience still made an impression three week later.

The whole article is a reminder not to depend entirely on surveys as an evaluation tool. Yes, it is an important practice to have people in the back office interacting directly in a focused manner with the people the organization serves, but there is also the shift of perspective this practice brings. You would assume a food and beverage manager would have fairly extensive interactions with visitors and would be paying close attention to trends.  That person at the Djupdræt’s museum still found themselves surprised by some of the insights they gained.

Take It From The Folks Who Have Done It 7000 Times –Short And To The Point

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A piece from Artsy regarding what they had learned writing 7000 bios for visual artists came across my radar a few weeks ago and I quickly tagged it as something I to which wanted to circle back. Now that I have done so, I realize it was written about 3 years ago.

The basic observations they make about artists’ bios are worth the attention of anyone in any arts discipline to when it comes to writing promotional copy for websites, brochures, etc.

They found that the sweet spot is between 80 and 140 words with the ideal being 120.  Any more than 150 and people’s attention starts to waver. While they have observed this in relation to gallery labels, it is probably all the more true for websites. They go further to say that a tightly written 80 word bio is better than a 120 word one with repetitive or filler content.

Some of the points to consider when writing an artist’s bio are specific to visual arts but are relatively simple to transfer to any arts discipline. As I mentioned earlier, these rules are just as applicable to describing a performance involving 40 people as it is for one person.

As with most things, the most important element is a strong opening:

The bio should open with a first line that encapsulates, as far as possible, what is most significant about the artist and his or her work, rather than opening with biographical tidbits, such as where the artist went to school, grew up, etc. For example: John Chamberlain is best known for his twisting sculptures made from scrap metal and banged up, discarded automobile parts and other industrial detritus.

Though in the case of promoting a performance or other event, I would start with a sense of why people will enjoy themselves rather than any sort of biographical information. Even if they know the show, no one is going to get excited about seeing Phantom of the Opera if it opens with “Written by the man who revolutionized the musical theatre form with shows like Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Evita, Starlight Express….”

Among the mistakes they say are the biggest people make when writing bios are some familiar faces: hyperbole, laundry list of accomplishments and “artspeak”:

It can be tempting to sing your artists’ praises. We’ve noticed, however, that readers do not respond positively to unsubstantiated claims about an artist’s import (e.g. “Artist X is considered one of the most important artists of the post-war period,” or, “Artist Y is widely regarded for her beautiful work”). Most readers will see right through trumped-up language …The best way to maximize the power of a good bio is to try to educate, not “hard-sell,” your reader. Numerous studies have shown that the hard sell doesn’t work, especially for younger audiences (read: tech-savvy collectors), who respond most positively to simple and authentic messages.

[…]

Impressive as these may be, these laundry lists are tedious to read in prose format. They also take up precious real estate, which you could otherwise devote to a real discussion of your artist’s practice.

There are certainly instances where it makes sense to include one particularly outstanding prize or exhibition, for example, an artist’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale. In this case, try to find a way to naturally include mention of the distinction in the normal flow of the text.

[…]

Instead of trying to impress other curators, academics, and galleries, focus on your audience of new collectors who may be completely unfamiliar with your artists. Readers want to glean information from your writing, and the best way to do that is to use simple language. A good rule of thumb is to impart one idea per sentence.

Obviously that last point should be applied to new attendees rather than new collectors. I would doubly apply the caution about artspeak to the injunction about laundry lists. As insiders, there are a lot of prizes, associations, and accomplishments we might deem particularly outstanding that means nothing to a newer attendee.

Trevor O’Donnell often invokes the “person in Starbucks test” where you recite your promotional copy conversationally to someone in a Starbucks. (or any other random casual encounter.) If they look back at your uncomfortably, he says your text needs a rewrite. Before you even get to that point, you might want to ask a person in Starbucks if a particular accolade means anything to them and leave it out of the description if they look at you cross-eyed or clearly as pretending it sounds familiar.

A Good Community Is An Asset To An Arts Organization

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I frequently urge people not to focus on the value of the arts in terms of economic impact on the community. Not only do the arts bring other forms of value to the community, but what is frequently un(der)mentioned is that the community provides reciprocal value to the arts organization.

We had the tour of a Broadway show come through a couple weeks ago. I was speaking with a local store owner who I know is a big fan of Broadway musicals and had attended the show. He mentioned that a number of cast members had come into his store and he had been thrilled to engage in some pretty lengthy conversations with them.

In fact, on the return visit of one person, the shop owner almost inadvertently revealed the purchase of a Valentine’s Day gift in front of the customer’s wife who was accompanying him at the time. The shop owner reveled in the experience of quickly changing what he was saying mid-sentence and sharing a knowing look with the husband.

The shop owner had mentioned local attractions, including a national monument, which the visitors were excited to learn about.

Based on this anecdote, I figured there must have been numerous other interactions with individuals and businesses throughout town and posted a general thank you on social media to everyone in the community who had shown the cast and crew kindness and hospitality during their visit. I mentioned the shop owner had directed some people to the national monument and tagged both the shop and the monument. At the very least, I thought it was good PR to employ outwardly focused messaging.

I didn’t necessarily think that the cast members had visited the monument.  They apparently did and identified themselves (or were recognized) because the folks at the national monument replied about how nice the cast and crew members were and their interest in information about the monument. The shop owner also posted his delight upon learning they had taken him up on his suggestion.

I have had similar experiences in other places I have worked. Local residents have been thrilled to have conversations in passing on the streets and coffee shops. I have had visiting artists express how friendly and helpful local residents were to them without knowing who they were.

One of my most favorite stories is from when a flamenco group and the guest services manager of a hotel struck up such a strong friendship, the guest services manager went to visit them in Spain a few months later. I never had any problems with getting performers early check in for years after that so it was a big win for everyone.

Bottom line though. As much as great events can bolster the reputation and appeal of your organization in the community, a good community can bolster the reputation and appeal of your organization among performers. A pleasant neighborhood with a wide choice of shops and restaurants isn’t just an asset to promote to attendees who want to grab something to eat before the show, visiting performers value those amenities as much, if not more.

Don’t think word and personnel don’t circulated among artists. I was trying to describe our wardrobe facilities and green room to a company we had never worked with before in an email and one of the guys responded that he had been here before and sent pictures he had on file of our wardrobe facilities and green room.

Every little thing counts.

Your Site Has 4 3 Seconds To Load Or I Am Leaving

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Big hat tip to Thomas Cott for linking to an article about how quickly people will abandon a webpage if it is loading slowly.  The title tells pretty much everything you need to know about the problem – Slow pages hurt conversions, but marketers aren’t in a hurry to fix them.  (my emphasis below)

[Unbounce] then conducted two parallel surveys of consumers and marketers to understand their respective attitudes toward page speed. Nearly 75 percent of consumers surveyed said they’d wait four or more seconds for a mobile site to load. However, Google data show that most people abandon sites after three seconds if content hasn’t loaded.

The majority of survey respondents indicated that slow-loading sites would negatively affect their willingness to buy and even return to the particular site. Surprisingly, women were more impatient than men in this regard.

Interestingly a majority of consumers said they wanted faster-loading sites even it meant giving up animations, video and images. The good news for brands and publishers is that most consumers were more inclined to blame their ISP (50.5 percent) than the site itself (34.2 percent).

Even though people were willing to blame their ISP over the site, that is no reason to think you can get by. Over 1/3 of respondents blamed the site itself. People are experienced enough to have a good sense where the blame lay.

Among the top suggestions for solving this issue are optimizing image and video size; improving caching and hosting and running speed tests.

If you are at a loss for where to even start to learn how to do these things–ArtsHacker has a whole series devoted to this. The impetus for this was anticipated slow downs due to net neutrality rulings by the FCC so there are a number of strategies in that series that you can use. You will definitely find pieces on image compression, speed tests, database optimization and minimizing the impact of page requests.

Granted, some of these procedures should not be undertaken if you are inexperienced working under the hood of your website. By the same token, if you don’t know much about how website traffic works, the articles can give you new information and a better sense of what things contribute to slow downs on your website.

 

Something I am curious about that is tangentially related is how quickly people will abandon a video if an ad they can’t quickly skip starts playing. This doesn’t usually impact videos embedded as performance samples in website that I have seen, but there have been a number of times I decided I wasn’t interested enough in a news piece to wait for an ad to finish.  I suspect I am more patient with those ads than most so it makes me wonder about the long term viability of those ads. Especially as YouTube seems to be getting increasingly insistent in their offers to sign up for their paid service.

California Symphony–They Speak Your Language

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I was excited to see Aubrey Bergauer posted a follow up to her original 2016 Orchestra X post regarding how the California Symphony was acting on the feedback it has received about the concert planning and attending experience. I have written about some of Aubrey’s work since then, but I was eager to see a cumulative reflection.

Unfortunately, her post came in the middle of the holiday production crunch so I only got around to reading it this week.

A couple of really interesting things that caught my attention in this latest post. First was the counter-intuitive value in leaving past events posted on the website. I always want to get the clutter of old information off my website so it is easy for potential attendees to find the information they want. While this is probably an important practice generally, for the California Symphony, leaving that information available helped bolster their credibility. She writes,

1) As the season progressed, this list got awkwardly short, especially for an orchestra like the California Symphony that doesn’t perform as frequently as our bigger-budget peers. Participants told us they couldn’t believe we didn’t perform more often, and it looked even worse when only a few concerts were on that list. 2) As they were trying to “get a sense of what we’re about,” as they said, they couldn’t really tell based on only a handful of upcoming shows

Another thing is that they started running digital ads in both English and Spanish. The Spanish ads have a link to a Spanish language landing page.

That pilot test did lead to a measurable increase in Latinx households, and so we decided to put some money behind developing the new site in both languages. Now, when we run ads in Spanish, we can link to landing pages in the same language, another step in making this important segment in our community feel invited and welcome here, as well as give them the information they need to join us.

This was not new information to me because Aubrey has been reporting her success attracting a broader audience segment on Twitter for a few weeks now.

While she didn’t report on the outcomes of the changes, her discussion of how they adjusted some of the website sections to be outwardly focused rather than inwardly focused gave me something to think about. For example, instead of “Education” as a navigation header they are using “Off Stage” with subheaders focused on kids, adults and artists. They also changed “Support Us” to the more outwardly oriented “Your Support.”

A lot of the work they did was in the area of providing background information both in their program book and website. Their program notes are more about the background of the artists and music than the technical details of the music. They have song clips and information drawn from Wikipedia available online for those who want to know more. They changed their writing style to short bullet points rather than paragraphs.

Aubrey provides the rationale behind these changes based both in research and user feedback so it is definitely worth while to read this recent post.

You Couldn’t Tie People To Railroad Tracks Because It Was Copyrighted

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Copyright may seem like a pretty dry subject, but the court cases that lead to the development of the law and theory surrounding copyright law can be pretty interesting. HowlRound posted the transcript of  Michael Lueger’s podcast discussion with Dr. Derek Miller about some of the early copyright cases that applied to theater and music performance.

One of the interesting cases they discuss is competing expressions of the iconic melodrama train track scene where someone escapes just as the train arrives. Apparently playwright Augustin Daly was the first to write such a scene and playwright Dion Boucicault copied the idea. The courts ruled in favor of Daly saying that even though every other element of Boucicault’s play was different, the common action was key to the drama and thus was protected.

(By the way, according to Atlas Obscura, contrary to the trope, Daly’s play, and even many silent films, had a man on the tracks and the leading lady rescuing him.)

Interestingly, when the guy producing Boucicault’s play tried to reach an early settlement by licensing the train effect from Daly’s show, “The court actually says, no, no, no. The effect is not something you can copyright, … You can’t own the effect, but you can own the action.”

This general concept holds to today where you can copyright the expression of the idea, but not the name or the idea itself. You can, of course, trademark names and patent effects, but those are different types of protections than copyright.

Another fascinating situation happened when Thomas Hamblin’s Bowery Theatre was doing poorly but Charles Thorne’s Chatham Theatre around the corner was doing great. Thorne was getting ready to do a play by Joseph S. Jones so Hamblin goes to Jones and makes a deal to open Jones’ play on the same night in an attempt to put Thorne out of business. They were planning to have Jones sue Thorne “for violating your [Jones’] rights to produce the play.”

However, the courts say since Jones was working for a Mr. Pelby when he wrote the play, Pelby had the right to sell the performance rights to Thorne.

But what came next is really interesting:

I’ve got a lot of evidence here from the New York Herald, which goes all in for Thorne, and they argue that by trying to shut down Thorne’s production, Jones and Hamblin of the Bowery Theatre are limiting the audience’s ability to compare the artistic products at the Chatham and the Bowery. It’s sort of a free trade argument that they’re making.

In other words, according to Thorne and to the Herald … Thorne actually writes an editorial that appears in the Herald … if the productions are allowed to compete with each other, both theatres are going to do even better artistic work than they would otherwise. They say Hamblin is trying to shut down artistic competition and to give you a bad product, but we’re in favor of a good product and letting Thorne do the play. Legally, actually, the case is sort of a weird, unimportant footnote, in terms of the legal precedent it establishes, but it helped in studying this case to teach me how theatrical copyright battles get both parties thinking about the relationship between a work’s artistic value and its monetary value.

It is interesting to me that they get into this argument that having competing versions of the same production going on around the corner from each other is providing people with a choice and opportunity to decide which is the better production.

Nowadays, when you try to license performance rights you can run into all sorts of restrictions because a 2000 seat venue 200 miles from you planning to do the same production 12 months after you mount your production in a 200 seat theater.

While that is kind of extreme, I think the basic idea that people are willing to pay a lower price for a discount version of the same product and cannibalize your potential audience is a real concern.

Even in 1841 when Thorne and Hamblin were butting heads, if people wanted to see a show a significant number would probably accept lower production quality for 25 cents at the Bowery versus paying $1 at the Chatham.

The Fine Line Between High Quality Data Collection And Stalking

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The marketing director at my new job was discussing the potential of using geofencing with me today and then lo and behold, the first article on my social media feed when I got home contained a link to an article on that very subject.

Geofencing can be used to track someone’s movement by where they carry their cellphone and send messages to them based on their behavior. As the article on Tao of Sports explains,

Geofencing also follows customers around for up to thirty days, which means beyond the initial purchasing period, it can also showcase whether the fan receiving the message then went to the stadium or not. With addressable geofencing, conversion zones can be setup as well. So if a fan crosses into a conversion zone, say a specific venue which advertised to them within the last thirty days, it will show on the report.

[…]

For secondary brokers, geofencing technology also adds an additional way to catch fans as they are entering the stadium parking lot, by hitting their phone with a last minute advertisement for concert or sports tickets. Image getting them right before they hit the window with a credible advertisement that beats the venue price.

Like any technology tool, geofencing is something of a double edged sword. It can provide you with much more accurate data about the way people are behaving than asking them about their habits or trying to observe it in other ways. But there is also that creepy Big Brother is Watching element.

The tweet by Roger Tomlinson that brought the article to my attention notes that geofencing is not legal in Europe without permission.

Last month when I was suggesting conference session topics for the Non Profit Technology Conference, I alluded to the issues surrounding geofencing in one of my topic ideas:

Ethics of Using Geofencing For Marketing  – i.e. I can geofence a local theater and target people based on the idea that they enjoy attending performances or with the intent of stealing the audience.

I don’t doubt that the use of geofencing or something like it will become increasingly prevalent. I suspect that a number of bad actors will cause people to become very protective of how their movements are tracked to the point that even if a law isn’t passed requiring you to ask for permission, in practice that is what you will have to do in order to gain the data you want.

I Don’t Know What You Need To Know Because I Know So Much

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This summer I have been seeing a lot of California Symphony Executive Director Aubrey Bergauer popping up in places like videos of conference talks she has been giving. It has been over a year and a half since I wrote about her Orchestra X project so I figured it was time to revisit and reacquaint people with the work she has been doing.

Recently she had a blog post following up on the conversations her organization has been having with the communities they serve. She mentions a theme I keep seeing in formal survey results and collected anecdotes — audiences aren’t clamoring for a change in programming as much as they are intimidated and confused by the decision and experience of attending a cultural event.

The bigger issue, she says, is that those of us on the inside forget what it was like being entirely unfamiliar with information or an experience. Even when we are faced with a new-ish experience, our past experiences allow us to make logical leaps that total novices can’t.

What we learned was that a “basic” level of understanding about the symphony or classical music does not exist among newcomers. Some people didn’t even know the names of the instruments in the orchestra, which to me, the person who had played an instrument all growing up and who wanted to manage a symphony since age 16, was pretty much unfathomable (remember hindsight bias?). The good news, we discovered, was that this group of smart people desperately wanted to learn about everything related to classical music though. And through the discussion we learned that the way we layout and present information on our website made it very difficult for them to do that.

[…]

Virtually every person in the room expressed the sentiment of “awe” when describing the art they saw and heard. No one said, “I need a shorter concert,” or “I need to hear more movie music.” They very much wanted to learn about all facets of the repertoire and were emphatic that the art is incomparable.

Bergauer says that now that California Symphony stopped stressing about programming mix and started focusing on retention versus new audience acquisition. Last season, their new attendee retention rate was over 30%.

Take a closer look at the post. She talks a little more about how rich experiences make us unable to anticipate what new attendees really need to know in order to enjoy themselves.

Our Market Is Everybody (Just Some More Than Others)

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Broadway Producer Ken Davenport is singing my song. I know you know this tune, but based on my experience, it bears reiterating.

He talks about how he often gets pitched ideas for new Broadway shows.

One of my stock questions to anyone pitching me anything is, “Who do you think the audience is for your piece?”

This question not only helps me determine whether the Pitcher and I are on the same page, but it also gives me some insight into the business acumen of the person who wants me to get involved in their project.

The red flag answer to this filtering question of mine?

“This show is for everyone!”

While I appreciate the bullish answer, the fact is . . . no show is for everyone. And the more you try to make it for everyone, the more you water it down and make sure that it’s for no one.

[…]

…Your first marketing exercise when you embark on producing a show or building a career is as follows.

  1. Identify exactly who your audience is.
  2. Find that audience and exploit them and only them.

If your audience spreads to “everyone” from there then great, but it’s much easier to market to a niche than it is to the world.

I am sure pretty much everyone has run into a similar pitch or had staff/board members make a statement about a show being for everyone. What is often frustrating is that many people who say this own or work for businesses which are pretty clear on who their customer base is and isn’t.

Even funeral homes which about 98% of us will likely end up patronizing on behalf of deceased loved ones likely each have a demographics to which they appeal more than others.

Davenport’s advice to have a focus that moves from the specific to the general is a pretty good guideline when it comes to marketing decisions.

I suspect people feel that they are conceding a flaw in the product if they admit it isn’t for everyone. Saying a certain group will REALLY like it and everyone else will probably like it to might provide the psychological out needed to identify those it is realistically for.

Where They Use Pom-Poms Rather Than Pens To Fill Out The Audience Survey

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Another month, another helpful webinar from our friends at Arts Midwest where different venues around the country talk about how they are integrating the Creating Connection practice into their operations.  This time around people from San Jose’s Teatro Vision and Red Wing, MN’s Sheldon Theatre.

Teatro Vision talked about an interesting project they conducted in conjunction with Day of the Dead activities. They had audiences respond to a number of prompts and then took the responses and used them to create poems which they posted in the lobby. Then they surveyed audiences about whether the poems helped to enhance the experience of the performance.

I had been looking forward to the Sheldon Theatre’s portion of the program for nearly a year. Anne Romens, the Creating Connection program coordinator, had been referencing their work in webinars and the professional development conference session we worked on last year so I really wanted a deeper dive into what they were doing.

If you have been reading up or hearing about Creating Connection over the last year or so, you know one of the basic, but crucial concepts is a focus on the audience and experience. The Sheldon has gone whole hog on that. Check out their website and you can see that plainly. Tell me you don’t want to be there.

Starting at about the 28 minute mark in the webinar, they talk about how there were no humans in any of the archival pictures of their building. Everything had been focused on the architectural beauty of the building. The 16-17 brochure was the first time an audience member attending a show was depicted in any of their promotional materials. If you watch their before and after pictures, you can see what a difference “populating” the building makes.

Executive Director Bonnie Schock talks about the concern her board and community members had that this shift in focus would undermine the value of the organization. But when they talked to their audience, themes of togetherness and shared experiences emerged as primary measures of value over the quality of performances and artistry.

They started to develop experiences surrounding performances- everything from meet and greets with artists to tea parties for performances of Alice in Wonderland. During a celebratory event at the start of a season, they handed out “emergency confetti” packets as people left for use when they were feeling down.

One technique I have seen nearly every group presenting a Creative Connection use is a white board/post-it note board for audience feedback. Not only did the Sheldon use this, they also “surveyed” audiences by having them drop little pom-poms in jars labeled with different sentiments (~40:45 mark).

A lot of great ideas presented by both groups, don’t let my prior interest in learning about one of them keep you from watching the whole thing.

 

#19NTC Topics-Oh Yeah Do I Got Ideas For You

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Last week Drew McManus did a call out to the non-profit arts community to submit proposals for the Nonprofit Technology Conference in March 2019. (Proposal deadline is August 17)

Last year, I was excited by the topic Drew was presenting – “Everything Tech Providers Wished You Knew About Writing A RFP (plus the stuff they want to keep secret)

So in the spirit of getting more stuff I am interested in learning about proposed, I am gonna give you a list of some of the things I think would make good topics in the hope some of you will submit something.

  • Data Privacy and Security From Perspective of Communities of Color – I have already reached out to one of the people who made a presentation for the Hispanic National Bar Assn in NYC, but anyone with an interest should submit on this topic. Given that non-profits serving communities of color often need to establish a relationship of trust, this seems like an important subject to address.
  • Analyzing The True Cost of Programs – favorite topic of mine. Related idea:
  • Using Evidence/Data to Rebutt the Concept of Overhead Ratio As A Measure Of Effectiveness
  • Shared /Online Procurement Goods/Services
  • Effective RFP Generation – both internal & external processes
  • Using Geofencing To Better Understand Target Communities – can geofencing help you better understand a community based on where they travel around the community?
  • Ethics of Using Geofencing For Marketing  – i.e. I can geofence a local theater and target people based on the idea that they enjoy attending performances or with the intent of stealing the audience.
  • In-Person/Conference Based Professional Development vs. Online/Technology Delivery. Are there some subject areas better suited to one format over the other?
  • Shared services/technology arrangements – in terms of both back office and program delivery
  • Delete the Facebook Account? – Communication strategies when faced with a concerted social media assault
  • Conforming with Google’s new criteria for Adwords Grants – i.e. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/05/07/nonprofits-can-keep-adwords-grants-following-major-changes-restore-lost-accounts/
  • Energy Saving Performance Contracts
  • Use of technology to provide regular cues to keep strategic plan alive and relevant – i.e. using software/apps to periodically to nag/remind you of milestones in time line, provide encouragement, remind you of ideas you had during the planning session
  • Effective Hiring – from job description to orientation/training  this topic is large enough to be multiple sessions can hit on everything from online job boards/job app apps to new state laws requiring salary range and forbidding asking about salary history

There are plenty more ideas where these came from, but I feel like this is a good broad range of subjects. I have already reached out to a few people encouraging to propose based on topics they are well-qualified to address.

If any of this inspires you in any sort of direction, submit a proposal.  If you got questions, let me know. Like Drew, I am on the conference session committee. Honestly, the conference organizers are really good about providing opportunities for people to ask questions at scheduled office hours and open Q&A sessions, and an online proposal prep group in which you can solicit feedback on proposals you are developing. All these resources are listed on the proposal pages.

Boy, You Are Really Enthusiastic About The World’s Largest Ball Of Lint All Of A Sudden

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A couple weeks ago, Holly Mulcahy wrote about eschewing the use of comp tickets in order to create the illusion that a performance was well attended.

As an alternative, she suggests seeking out and recruiting influencers to share their sincere reflections on their experience with the people who follow them on social media or with whom they might associate socially.

One thing I realized was missing from the articles she linked to about leveraging influencers for your brand was clear disclaimers about a quid pro quo relationship with the product or service provider. A lot of those seriously engaged as social media influencers are pretty savvy and disclose that they have received products, etc for free, but still you often hear of some people losing credibility because they failed to disclose this relationship.

I was reminded of a story some years back where a movie studio paid a girl $1,800 to insert a reference to their upcoming movie in her valedictorian speech at graduation. Marketers have gotten a little more sophisticated since then (the movie bombed, by the way.) but the public has likewise started to evince a growing skepticism about the motivations behind why people are promoting things.

If you are trying to recruit people from your community whom you have identified as knowledgeable, enthusiastic and influential, they may not consider the need to event make a passing reference thanking your organization for providing them with free, premium seating, valet parking and drink vouchers to an event. Because you want to make a good impression and facilitate their experience, it is likely that you might offer all this and more.

Not only might there be backlash if people feel the influencer is being plied with benefits in return for a good review, it might damage the influencer’s credibility if their followers aren’t able to access the same experience they assume comes with the published ticket prices.

One of the things you may want to clearly establish with an influencer is the scope and nature of your relationship and what level of disclosure is appropriate.

Can You Sincerely Build Relationships With A Marketing Motivation?

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Our friends at Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection project hosted another webinar recently showcasing the work being done by City Lights Theater Company in San Jose and Portland Playhouse.

Some of the ideas for engaging the audience that caught my attention were City Lights Theater’s practice of providing small presents to attendees. The theme of the presents aligns with each show in some way. They also hold parties on stage after the show allowing people to meet and mingle with the actors.

They have been doing these things for a number of years, but have recently tweaked both offerings to get people more actively involved. For one show, the present was origami paper and instructions to fold it into a heart. For another it was magnetic words you could form into poetry on your refrigerator.

For some post-show parties they have had drawing activities for audience members. For the play at which they handed out the poetry magnets, they set up a white board during the after party so the audience could write poetry.

You may recall from a previous webinar I covered, Eugene Symphony used a white board in their lobby to collect feedback from the audience. City Lights does that as well,  using the prompts “How Do You Create?” and “City Lights Makes Me Feel…”

The artistic director, Lisa Mallette, talks about other events and presents they have used to deepen their relationship with audiences and reinforce their organizational values. So it is worth watching the video to borrow/steal their good ideas.

Some of the choices they make seem a little counter intuitive because they value relationship building over overt marketing.

It caught my attention when Mallette pointed out their presents aren’t branded with the organizational logo.

“They know where they got it. They are going to remember where they got it. It doesn’t need to say, you know, ‘$5 off your next ticket.’ So we are shifting our thoughts about why we are doing this and making it not about transactional. That has been important for our growth as well.”

She said they avoid surveying people about their willingness to return/tell a friend during the after parties because they see it as compromising the authenticity of the connection they are trying to forge. The party is about sincere relationships so they want to avoid the appearance of plying people with cookies and wine in exchange for goodwill.

While they might ask willingness to recommend in a survey, she said often their surveys ask how the audience is doing rather than how pleased they are with the theater. For example, they will ask audiences if they are feeling creative or working on projects.

It is probably something of a testament to the connection they are forging that since 2011 one of the audience members has been going home after every performance and has been creating sketches based on how he experienced each show. City Lights is currently displaying his work on the back wall of the theater. Some of his sketches appear in the webinar.

Once she introduced the idea, I have really started thinking about whether transaction driven interactions like measuring marketing effectiveness or collecting data in support of grants might be interfering with or run counter to sincere attempts at community  relationship building.

Which, of course, raises questions about the degree of sincerity being invested in relationship building. If you immediately pivot to the need to measure and report effectiveness if you want to survive, you have your answer.

Sure the two goals may not be mutually exclusive. But I figure if a person asked you what you thought of them and how great, hospitable and well dressed they are as frequently as an arts and cultural organization asks those questions about themselves, you would think they were pretty self centered.  So there is probably a lot of room for improvement in asking people about themselves in a way that doesn’t have an underlying transactional motivation. (What they like to read, watch and listen to so that you can focus your marketing efforts there.)

When It Is Absolutely, Positively Best To Disavow Credit For Doing A Responsible Thing

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Years ago I had read an article on Non Profit Quarterly, Six Things Nonprofits Can Teach Small Business. According to the story, non-profit leaders often exhibited stronger leadership qualities than their for-profit business colleagues.

The six qualities generally address treating employees and constituencies with dignity, integrity, attentiveness and honesty.

One of the qualities dealt with being sensitive to the timing of certain decisions.

Timing is important. Leaders must be proactive, but anticipate the need to react. It is necessary to make sure all of the pieces are in place and understand how many situations should be handled before putting out a product or service. Reacting too early can damage relationships with clients, investors, and the public. A nonprofit CFO describes the importance of timing:

“The Red Cross upgraded its emergency help phone system after 9/11 with funds raised for the disaster; this rubbed donors the wrong way when it was reported in the media. So timing isn’t just about doing the right thing at the right time; executives need to be aware of the perceptions of that timing.”

I was reminded of this while listening to a recent episode of This American Life where the reporting team was provided access to the Starbucks racial bias training day when all the company owned stores were closed.

During the interview with him, then Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was emphatic about disassociating the bias training day from previous corporate initiatives which encouraged people to vote or be good stewards of the environment. Those efforts had resulted in positive associations for the company and have been recognized as good marketing.

If you read the transcript of the interview, Schultz basically asks the interviewer to stop citing the halo effects that resulted from previous initiatives. He kept insisting the bias training was an effort to start fixing their corporate culture and not an attempt to generate goodwill among the public.

Kelefa Sanneh: Yeah. When I suggested this to Howard, that this racial bias training thing had something to do with marketing Starbucks, he didn’t go for it.

[…]
Kelefa Sanneh: I want to make sure I understand this. You say this is not a marketing event. And obviously, to some people, anything that a company does kind of looks like marketing. How is this different from a marketing event?

Howard Schultz: This is the antithesis of a marketing event. It’s not something that is– it has nothing to do with trying to sell anything. Marketing is about creating awareness and selling your product. This is not– we’re not trying to sell anything.

Then the reporter, Kelefa Sanneh and host Ira Glass have a conversation about Schultz’ reaction which actually included the Starbucks PR person calling them and saying they might not want This American Life’s presence at the training if it was going to be a gotcha story about how Starbucks was trying to generate positive PR for themselves.

Ira Glass OK. All right, here’s the theory. Is it possible that he is so insistent that there’s no marketing in it because, yeah, he knows that anything his company does publicly affects how the public sees his brand. Like, of course doing anything like this is a kind of marketing.

But he doesn’t want to admit it because actually, underneath it, he actually is trying to do a good thing. He’s trying to actually address racism. He thinks America is too racist. He wants to do something about it. And he just feels like, oh, if we start admitting that there’s some marketing, or we get some brand halo from this, that’s just going to muddy the message.

Kelefa Sanneh Yeah, although what’s weird is, this isn’t the first time Starbucks has tried to do a good thing, right? They’ve had environmental initiatives. They had this voting thing, which he was happy to say the voting thing was good marketing. So in a sense, this isn’t new for Starbucks.

But what is new is that this is a racism initiative. And I think he has a sense that racism is so incendiary, so sensitive, that it can’t have anything to do with marketing. Like, if there’s any sense that this has anything to do with marketing Starbucks, people are going to tune it out or maybe worse, right?

Ira Glass Right, because it would be offensive.

Kelefa Sanneh Yeah, this idea, like, you’re taking America’s national sin of racism and using that to sell coffee. People might consider that offensive.

This exchange in the episode reminded me of the Non Profit Quarterly piece. It made me wonder, was this recognition by Starbucks a sign that the qualities mentioned are starting to permeate society a little more?

Emotional Intelligence is certainly not the sole province of non-profits. (And I am sure no small number of employees of non profits may be wondering where their share of emotional intelligence in the workplace is being stored.)

It is good to see the CEO of a corporation the size of Starbucks exhibiting the level of awareness about the situation that he was. There is obviously a profit motive in not screwing up the way the company responds to the recent instances of racial bias in their stores, but they probably could have glossed it over with less expenditure of effort, concern and money.

I have never really been a Starbucks fan and as much as I am complimenting them here, I am pretty unlikely to increase my visits. But I probably won’t more actively avoid their stores either.

Taken together, both the NPQ article and the This American Life transcript can serve as a reminder to be deliberate and thoughtful in decision making. Perhaps more importantly, that there is value in doing so even if the efforts of non-profits so often get overlooked.

Opt In To Learn How The Show Ends

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In somewhat the same theme as the post I made last week about Tu Me Manques  which uses social media to tell the story of a relationship, I had also come across an article in May about Pirates & Mermaids, a one person show about a long distance romance that “unfolds through texts between the two main characters, shared photographs, and good old-fashioned storytelling by the fire.”

What drew me to the story wasn’t the use of social media in the show. The show doesn’t appear to rely on the availability of live Wifi like Tu Me Manques does. It was the way the production company, Poorboy, was using social media to keep connected with their audiences. In the case of Pirates & Mermaids, it was ending the show with a cliffhanger that created some incentive for providing your email to Poorboy.

After the show finishes, audience members are offered a postcard where they can share a message about the performance and share their email address with the production team. Those who opt in receive two follow-up emails from Cameron that lets them know what happens next.

It is a creative and fun way of engaging audiences beyond the performance by building the story into the marketing. Plus, it’s a smart way to build a mailing list because it encourages people to opt in to email communications by giving them something more than a marketing message that they can really to look forward to. The messages that come back from audiences give an insight into audiences’ emotional investment in the story.

One thing I should note is that they tend to do the show for small groups of people so they already generate a degree of intimacy with audiences. The postcards and emails they get in response are more often addressed to the character, Cameron, encouraging him onward rather than commenting on how well the production team did their job. They have had about 150 performances over the last six year and have an email list of 800 people which they say represents 75% of their audiences opting in to the email list.

Some quick math indicates they are performing for audiences of 7-8 people (the article says they limit site specific shows to a max of 15) so this is hardly a cynical attempt to trick people into helping them fatten their marketing database. They say their email open rates for the show are 75%-80%, which is better than the open rates for their other productions which use different social media techniques to connect with audiences.

According to the article, they do transition people from the show email list to their newsletter. The piece doesn’t really mention whether they specifically ask if people want to be included in the newsletter list or not. My guess is that since the production company is based in the UK, it will need to be very deliberate in how they handle those email addresses now that new regulations went into effect across the European Union at the end of May.

In any case, their process represents an option for engaging audiences that people might like to explore a little more deeply.

Your Phone Tells Me You Were In An Art Museum, Now You Are In Starbucks….

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Last month NPR had a story discussing how lawyers were sending ads for their services to people in hospital emergency rooms thanks to technique known as geofencing which allows one to identify cellphones entering to certain geographic area.

Geofencing is something retailers use to offer you coupons when you approach the area of their shops. The use around hospitals raises some privacy concerns. Everyone in the hospital is bound by law not to reveal information about your visit, but those gathering information from your phone signal are not.

Once someone crosses the digital fence, Kakis says, the ads can show up for more than a month — and on multiple devices.

To Kakis, this is just modern-day target marketing. In his pitch to potential clients, in an email reviewed by WHYY, he calls the technology “totally legit.”

But Massachusetts’ attorney general, Maura Healey, offers a different response.

“Private medical information should not be exploited in this way,” Healey says. “Especially when it’s gathered secretly without a consumer’s knowledge, without knowledge or consent.”

This type of service is widely available and can be used for all sorts of useful purposes. If you can see that people attending your events are also frequenting various restaurants and other businesses in your area you are able to take any number of actions like coordinating promotions with the businesses or providing evidence of economic activity in your community.

You can also geofence other arts organizations in your region as a way to identify people who are inclined to participate in arts and cultural activities and provide them with information about your own activities.

Of course, the technology can assist in some questionable practices as well. You might send general ads about “high quality performances at half the price and free parking” to people who have visited an arts organization in your area that charges higher pricing. Or you could directly disparage other organizations with people who enter or pass near their buildings.

As I understand it, you currently need to provide ad content to a service provider who sets up your ads in the same way a broadcaster might. By which I mean, it has to pass through human hands and they could potentially nix something as blatant as “Why are you walking into that crappy theater when you could be in a modern facility that allows you to eat at your seat and has a fun all around atmosphere. There is still time to come to Acme Theater.”

However, I imagine within a handful of years, you will be able to delineate your own geofencing using an online map and upload an ad from your office as you would to a social media site. It may be difficult to track who is attacking your reputation while people are buying food from your snack bar.

Now personally, I don’t see a lot of arts and cultural organizations getting this cutthroat. They may send out something along the lines of “If You Liked The Dali Retrospective, You Might Like….”

However, it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility that an electronics business, video streaming service or cable company might geofence your organization and send something like “After a hard day of work do you really want to get back in the car, try to find parking, get home at 11 pm and pay the babysitter when you could stay at home and enjoy being in control of your experience with your gorgeous entertainment system?”

I anticipate that there will be debates about the ethical use of techniques that allow marketers and others to track people’s movements as these practices become more common and wide spread.

Could You Benefit From Sharing Your Ticket Revenue With Four Other Theaters?

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Kaya Stanley-Money shares a really intriguing story on Arts Professional about how five London theatres presented the same performance and then pooled the ticket revenue.

…the five London venues to present Yvette for two or three nights at each venue over a two and half week period, sharing the box office income equally after the artist guarantee had been paid. This meant that venues at the start of the tour would benefit as much as those at the end, removing all competition and encouraging a genuine collaboration.

The performances were marketed as a London run, which enabled us to establish a comprehensive press strategy and offered the opportunity to build audiences for Urielle’s work in five different London boroughs. This was particularly important to reach a much younger audience who are typically less likely to travel far and have deeper geographical roots than your average London theatregoer.

Above all, this model offered Urielle the invaluable opportunity to build a relationship with all five venues, capitalising on their support for emerging artists.

I was especially drawn by the mention that this arrangement provided an opportunity to reach a younger audience in five London boroughs. This might not normally be possible because the venues typically insist a performance not happen within a certain radius of their venue. Since each venue stood to benefit if a partner was more successful than they were it made some sense to waive that clause.

I was interested to read that some of the venues were already exploring share box office arrangements. I know that theatres partnering on a production will often agree to share production costs, but this was the first I became aware of theatres engaging in box office sharing.

As part of the shared marketing effort, each venue contributed equally to the advertising spend and each provided links to the performances of all five venues on their respective websites.

Apparently the partnering venues were optimistic about the revenue potential because they agreed to a 60/40 artist-venue split rather than the typical 50/50 split.

In the end, this may have benefited the artist most. She established relationships with five venues. She was able to have a denser saturation of exposure across London than she would have had radius exclusion clauses been in place.  Potentially, she may have received more money than she would have with longer runs in fewer venues.

As Stanley-Money notes, this revenue sharing model can be beneficial when presenting new works or emerging artists because it mitigates the risk a single venue might undertake by pooling promotional expense as well as the revenue.

I am hoping that Stanley-Money follows up with a report on how successful they assessed the plan was.

For example, if a performance is in one or two places across 15 days, it may take awhile for the audience to build up as word of mouth builds and then the audiences may trail off. I would be curious to discover if that may have happened as the show appeared at five different venues. If the audience peaked at the second, third, and fourth venue, it isn’t a big problem revenue wise since all the venues are sharing.

However, if people don’t generally travel out of their borough to see a performance, there may be some exposure concerns at the venues with lower attendance. On the other hand, if they find that people who missed a local performance traveled out of their neighborhoods based on good word of mouth, it makes the cooperative partnership model look even better.

I would also be interested to learn just how easy it was to get all the venues to agree on promotional and operational arrangements. I have had experiences with groups with long histories partnering on many arrangements but could never manage to agree on promotional efforts. The fact this production was more of a second space event rather than a main stage event may have minimized the resistance.

Classical Music As A Prescription To Cure Social Ills…And To Sell Perscriptions

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A couple weeks back there was a piece by Theodore Gioia in the Los Angeles Review of Books that started out talking about the history of weaponizing classical music.  You may be familiar with this practice where classical music is loudly played in public places like train stations, shopping malls, parking lots, street corners, etc with the goal of chasing away undesirable elements like teenagers and the homeless.

If ever there was a practice that reinforced the idea that classical music is for people other that yourself, it is people pointing it at you in the hopes you will go away.

As I read on, I realized that Gioia was tackling a frequent theme of my blog posts – placing value on the utility of art rather than valuing art for its own sake. After noting the use of classic music as a social disinfectant, he goes on to note how often classical music is separated from the context of an entire work and used to sell things.

Uproot “O Fortuna” from a Latin cantata, so it can be grafted onto a Domino’s Super Bowl spot. These transplants produce jarring mashups that trigger another insidious side effect: by always quoting works out of the context the public forgets that they have a context. The spectator forgets that “O Fortuna” could be glorious in its original context because it’s absurd hyping Domino’s Pizza.

[…]

A prime example of classical music’s conflicted position in our capitalist culture is Bach’s Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. Dubbed the “Things Just Got Classy Song” by one columnist, the two-minute composition has been deployed for an astounding array of causes. IMDB lists 73 credits, with a résumé featuring primetime mainstays Smallville and ER, ad campaigns for Healthy Choice frozen broccoli and Pedigree dog food, and big-screen flicks ranging from Elysium and The Hangover Part II to a brief cameo in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

[…]

Where does this leave the prelude — and, by extension, classical music? From awakening Megasharks to selling Cadillacs, Bach’s Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 has been drafted to support many causes. But one cause it seldom supports is itself. After being pressed into the service of so many outside agendas — advertising, film, and police work — the prelude loses its identity as an independent work of art, demanding to be taken on its own terms. It is difficult for the prelude to provide any modern audience with a genuinely “pure” listening experience.

There are no easy solutions to the quandaries this raises.  Gioia doesn’t make any suggestions for a path forward and I don’t really have any ideas myself.

You want people to be exposed to art so it becomes familiar. However, if you start dictating which modes of expression are appropriate and which are not, you end up placing it on the pedestal that reinforces its elite status.

People often cite the use of classical music in Bugs Bunny cartoons like “What’s Opera, Doc” and “Rabbit of Seville” as constructive ways in which the general public was exposed to the music. I am sure there were enough people who were opposed to the concept that the cartoons would have never been had it been left to them.

Any suggestion of not presenting a piece out of the context of the whole can be a non-starter when you factor length of many compositions vs. the public’s attention span.

Of course, there are plenty of organizations who transmit art for its own sake through diverse modes of expression and media. But that brings in the long debated issue of relevance and effectively forging connections with the community.

The only admittedly vague route I can see toward appreciation of art in its own context is connecting with the instinct to want to know more. Since people have had so much exposure to some works via overt and background placement, people might not be driven by a new, novel encounter to seek more information.

For those that are curious enough to do research, a campaign to have ad agencies or advertisers credit the original composition online might help a little.

For example, the ad below uses “O Fortuna” to sell beer and there are credits for all the personnel who helped create the ad included in the YouTube notes. No mention that they were spoofing Carl Orff though.

Apparently the Carlton Draught has a tradition of using classical music in their ads. This one does credit “Nessun Dorma” as the source of their parody.

Are You Really The Storyteller You Think You Are?

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FastCompany had an article about Five Ways Non Profits Struggle last month.

Most of the things mentioned aren’t really news to you if you work in non profits: Restrictions on how grants and donations can be used, employee burn out, ineffective use of data collection and lack of access to capital.

The assertion that,

…most organizations don’t engage in fundraising experimentation because they’re worried about the perception that it might create. There’s a tendency adhere to a set formula–the portion of operations supported by grants, individual contributions, or mission-related revenues–without thinking about how impact can change if you get creative.

was somewhat intriguing. Perhaps I will investigate that idea a little more in the future.

It was the fifth point, however, that I hadn’t expected to see on the list.

53% of nonprofit leaders spend less than two hours preparing for a speech

That’s especially scary considering only 10% of people in the sector consider themselves to be well-trained storytellers, according to Janus’s research. At the same time, there’s a huge payoff for those who learn how to talk engagingly about their mission.

Now arguably, this might not make the top 5 problems facing non-profit leaders, but it could certainly constitute a barrier to success.

While I have encountered a number of people who did a poor job making their case or were deadly boring, I never considered that it might be lack of preparation that contributed to that problem. I think we have all encountered teachers/professors who have a reputation for being boring that spans years. Their problem was more attributable to delivery rather than lack of repetition.

On the other hand, if you do consider yourself a good storyteller and feel that process is an important part of garnering investment and interest in your mission, then it does behoove you to invest time in development and preparation.

This article made me recall how I was recently asked to deliver two talks within a couple days of each other. I was keenly aware that I was much more comfortable discussing content I had spoken on before and felt I did a more effective job delivering it. Even still, I probably practiced and tweaked it for 5-7 hours.

Even though I wasn’t as comfortable delivering the second speech, I invested close to 20 hours developing and rehearsing it.  I suspect when I get some more distance from it, I will be able to go back and cut a lot of extraneous content so I can do a better job on the topic the next time out.

It is admittedly not easy to find the time to do justice to a speech with so many immediate demands on your time. The two talks I recently delivered were definitely a nights and weekends endeavor. It is very much like the situation where the you could do something ten times in the time it takes you to teach a new employee to do the job to a half way acceptable level. In the long term, however, that initial investment can become a long term benefit to the organizational mission.

Data Vs. Your Gut

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When I was thinking about what to write today, I figured a good intersection between yesterday’s post about productive employees not necessarily being good manager material and Drew McManus’ recent post about the “Shit Arts Administrators Say” Twitter account is Colleen Dilenschneider’s post, “Three Phrases That Effective Leaders Do Not Say”

Written last summer, Dilenschneider’s primary goal is to advocate for a proper approach to using all the data arts leaders have available to them. She argues that it can often feel easier, and therefore preferable, to rely on gut instinct rather than think critically about what is best for the organization.

Dilenschneider goes to great effort to explain these ideas so visit her page rather than being satisfied with my synopsis.

That said, in brief, the three phrases and suggested alternatives are:

1) “That doesn’t apply to me”
[…]
Say instead: “Let’s uncover the extent to which this finding applies to our organization, and explore what can be learned from this information.”

2) “I agree/disagree with the data”
[…]
Say instead: “Given these findings, I think our biggest challenge is…

3) “We need more information before we can do anything (on this topic where we already have meaningful information)”
[…]
Say instead, “Let’s consider what needs to change and what items need to be tackled to make the most of this information.”

It is in connection with phrase 2, that she addresses the problem of insiders using their gut feelings by warning against things like weighing the opinion of one person (board chair/executive director) more heavily than the hundreds/thousand whose responses comprise the data. Likewise, she points out that not only aren’t industry insiders the target market for the services and products arts organizations provide, insiders tend to have all sorts of blind spots and skewed perspectives due to their position.

One thing she doesn’t mention here, though I am sure she would acknowledge, is that it takes work to understand and evaluate whether data is valid and relevant to you.   It is often also easier to utter these phrases than to invest the time to look at the methodology behind the data to determine whether the results are dependable.

For example, radio and television stations trying to sell you ad space will cite all sorts of numbers about how much exposure you will get. With a little thought, you will quickly come to realize you won’t be reaching anywhere near those numbers as a result of any number of factors.  Your experience as a consumer helps inform a healthy skepticism.

When faced with data for an area in which you have no frame of reference or expertise, it can definitely require some effort to understand and evaluate. It is much more expedient and comfortable to go with one’s gut.

Dilenschneider does say there are times in which these phrases are useful. Note that final caveat though:

  • For instance, it’s a good idea to say, “That doesn’t apply to me” after you’ve collected the data and understand the true extent to which it applies to your organization, and you’ve found that it doesn’t.
  • It’s okay to say, “I disagree with this data” to discount findings when it is data about you and only you.
  • And it’s wise to say, “We need more information before we can do anything,” when it’s a big or expensive change and the takeaway is unclear. In such a case, you should absolutely gather more information!

This said, these phrases are all too often uttered defensively. If these words are about to escape your lips, think twice.

Your Resolution To Create Connections With Arts And Culture Starts Today! (or maybe tomorrow depending on when you read this)

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For over two years now I have been talking about Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection initiative to build public will for arts and culture.

While readers have had an opportunity to review the materials on the website, few have been able to attend the Arts Midwest presentations and ask questions in person.

Well you are in luck! Tomorrow, Tuesday, December 19 @ noon CST Creating Connection program manager Anne Romens will be hosting a webinar to discuss the project and findings. You can register by following that link.

Anne also hosted a webinar on the subject last week. The video of that webinar is available if you don’t have the opportunity to participate on Tuesday. You’ll want to pay attention around the 33 minute mark for the shout out to some work I have been doing.

Even if you don’t think you will become the full throated advocate for the project that I am, at the very least you can come away from the webinar with some tips on how to change your messaging and promotional materials to be more audience and experience focused.

The webinar comes at the right time to allow you to resolve to do a better job in the New Year so check it out.

When You Realize Your Hip “Wear Jeans” Series Audience Is Actually More Conservative Than The Masterworks Audience

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Earlier this year, I wrote about studies funded by the Wallace Foundation that helped Ballet Austin gain some insight about their audiences. Recently I discovered the Wallace Foundation had supported a similar study by the Seattle Symphony.

The piece is a short read, but if you don’t even have time for that, watch the accompanying video. There are some interesting contrasts between what the symphony assumed and the reality.

The study focused on three programs the symphony felt would connect with younger and newer audiences: Untuxed, an informal series where the musicians perform sans-tux (and black dress). Start time is earlier and program duration is no longer than 75 minutes.

Sonic Evolution – a series that draws on the influences and music of Seattle area pop music bands and incorporates video.

The third series is Untitled, a late night (10 pm start) chamber series set in the lobby with alternative seating and special mood lighting featuring “challenging 20th and 21st century compositions.”

What they found was that only the Untuxed series had a significant draw for new audiences. They were also interested to learn that the audience for the edgy Untitled series skewed older than they had anticipated.

Somewhat to the administration’s initial disappointment, the Untuxed audience seemed to prefer the “greatest hits” of classical music, making the tastes of the Masterworks audience look progressive by comparison.

They appreciated works like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Copland’s Symphony No. 3 and Bernstein’s Candide Overture—nothing more adventurous. “Untuxed is actually the most conservative audience that we have,” said Wade; they wanted music that they “know and love.”

…said one audience member. “I love the fact that it is ‘the best of’.” Another, who found the music “relaxing,” agreed and voiced appreciation for Untuxed’s other key draw—its early start and short span. “I am going to be able to make it home for my kids’ bedtime, and that means a lot to me,” she said.

They had also hoped that Untuxed would be an on-ramp to transition audiences to their core Masterworks series. Unfortunately, few have made that transition. In fact, most people who attended Untuxed had attended a Masterworks concert first. The good news, however, was that the cheaper Untuxed series didn’t cannibalize the Masterworks audience as was first feared.

…Untuxed, like Sonic Evolution and Untitled, is a separate program—or brand extension—neither more nor less. But all three are valuable, even without affecting attendance at the core Masterworks concerts, because they draw new audiences to Benaroya Hall. They are providing, as Wade says, “another lens on the orchestra,” taking SSO deeper into the community.

Among the other steps Seattle Symphony Orchestra is taking to grow their audiences is directly approaching businesses, hotels, condominiums and apartment complexes in the downtown area with ticket offers for employees and residents. That effort brought in $177,000 in sales to new or lapsed audiences.

They are really focusing on customer service training at every level and making a special effort to welcome new attendees.

SSO has also created a “Surprise and Delight” program for new subscribers. In it, staff members greet them by name when they arrive at Benaroya Hall and tell them SSO is glad they’ve come. “What we found,” said Wade, “is that, in fact, the people that we greet renew at a significantly higher rate than people that we don’t greet.” In the 2016-17 season, that tally was 41 percent versus 29 percent.

At each concert, about 35 new members also hear a buzz when their ticket is scanned, and are told to go to the information desk. “They are looking curious,” Kunkel said—and about five to seven of the 35 never go to the desk, he added. Those who do, however, are thanked and given free drink tickets. “Their concern falls away,” said Kunkel, who works the desk, “and they get a big smile on their faces.”

Hoping To Not Just Change The Name, But The Smell Of The Rose As Well

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In the last couple weeks two arts service organizations have taken the arguably long overdue step toward establishing greater parity among their members.

Last week at the Arts Midwest Conference, Ohio Arts Presenters Network (OAPN) president Robert Baird announced that the organization would be changing its name to Ohio Arts Professionals Network. While the acronym remains the same, the change was effected to acknowledge that agents, artists and other professionals were members of the organization.

Today, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) made a similar announcement that going forward they would be the Association of Performing Arts Professionals.

This isn’t the first time APAP has changed its name to reflect the composition of its membership. It started in 1957 as Association of College and University Concert Managers (ACUCM). In 1973 it changed to Association of College, University and Community Arts Administrators (ACUCAA) and became Association of Performing Arts Presenters in 1988 to acknowledge the membership wasn’t primarily based in higher education any longer. (Though I think ACUCAA, pronounced ah-koo-kah, was a lot more fun to say than APAP)

More than just superficially changing the name, APAP committed to a new program to help artists become members,

In addition to the updated name, this year the organization has introduced a pilot initiative called Artist Access, a one-year introductory membership program allowing qualified individual professional artists who have never been an organizational member of APAP, and who have never attended APAP as a full registrant, to become an APAP member and attend its annual members conference at reduced rates. More information is found at artistaccess.apap365.org.

Certainly, there is more work to be done to help everyone feel like an equal member of the respective organizations. (As with my cable company’s special pricing, I wonder where are the discount and benefits for long term loyal artists who have felt marginalized.) The format of the artist/agent/presenter interactions at the conferences often leave all involved feeling uncomfortable.

There have been efforts to change this situation. Over a decade ago, the Western Arts Alliance started experimenting with the physical layout of their conference, seeking to change the power dynamic.  Along with the name change, last week OAPN expressed their commitment to making attendance at their conference feel less confrontational by shifting the focus to a block booking format where artists, agents and presenting organizations sit down and try to set up beneficial routing arrangements that save the presenters money and get the artists working.

It will be interesting to see how these efforts develop and what new initiatives emerge to address concerns about the state of this corner of the creative and culture industry.

If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say, We Don’t Want To Hear It

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A long time complaint about arts coverage in newspapers has been that the writers seldom get it right. They don’t present the full story or employ fair criteria.

Of course, more recently the complaint has been that newspapers have completely eliminated their staff providing arts coverage.

Back in 2009, I wrote about an exchange between the communications director for the Guthrie Theatre and a writer for the Minnesota Star Tribute.

The former accused the newspaper of not engaging in substantive journalism about real stories and the latter accused the Guthrie of only participating in stories they liked and shutting down in the face of potential criticism. The incident was so noteworthy that even though the link to the communication director’s original letter no longer works, Minnesota Playlist reprinted it as part of a retrospective in 2014.

Even though arts organizations may not get arts coverage from local media the way they once did, I think the real value of my original post is in the discussion of transparency that arts organizations exhibit when sharing information about themselves in any forum.

Looking Back At Some Of My Favs

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Back in the day, Drew McManus ran an annual series on Adaptistration during the month of April which he christened,  Take A Friend To The Orchestra month. I found an old post which recounted some of my favorite entries which provide some great insight into the way different people experience attending the orchestra.

One post I linked to but didn’t quote was composer Alex Shapiro’s. As I re-read some of the entries I cited, I wanted to call attention to some of what she said.

If this orchestral thing is so enjoyable, why the heck do we need to fortify, inform, pre-warn, pre-inform and generally pre-experience it for someone? Is it actually that scary? That risky? Will body armor be necessary? Are we supposed to treat a new listener like a piece of food and soak her in a rich marinade of background information in order to ready her for the searing flame of the auditorium seats? Ouch!

As with all live concerts in any genre- chamber, jazz, rock, reggae- symphonic music washes over us as a sensual experience. If we insist on viewing it as difficult and challenging (perhaps because that automatically makes those of us who like it look awfully darn smart), we’re missing the point. And equally sadly, we’re sending a message that it’s an awful lot of work to listen to music. With an implication like that, people just might stay home, or opt to do something with their money that they perceive as a more obviously enjoyable experience. Hmmm. Sound familiar?

Later she talks about the way the L.A. Phil was advertising concerts. While this was in 2006 and the L.A. Phil has probably made changes to their promotional style, I am pretty sure there are still groups that employ the methods about which she complains:

One day last year as I was driving, a radio ad for the L.A. Phil came on. A haughty-sounding middle-aged white woman was cooing an oily, British-inflected voiceover into a high-end microphone, telling listeners just how marvelous the upcoming season was and that we won’t want to miss the “divine splendor and magnificence” (or some such combo of adjectives) of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

I was livid. This was “my” wonderful orchestra that was trying to get backsides into the seats, but this truly obnoxious ad “reached out” to only a very small and specialized segment of our population. How was this elitist presentation supposed to build audiences for the future? I love hearing the Phil at Disney Hall, but that radio spot even made me want to stay away, thinking, “gee, I guess this isn’t for regular folks.” These are the kinds of approaches that must be reconsidered, if the great tradition of the symphony orchestra is to continue. It has to do with the attitude we wear- not the clothes.

I know you have heard these sentiments about promotional efforts made before, but it is always good to be reminded. Especially because we don’t often hear “insiders” empathizing with the negative impression audiences might have of the way arts organizations talk about themselves.

Any way, I hope you will check out some of my suggested posts. They are a good mix of humor and insight about the experience of concert attendance.

Revisiting Fuzzy Definitions

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I am off on vacation to the Canadian Rockies for a week or so. If you don’t hear from me again, it may be that the Banff Centre for the Arts is as awesome as I hear and I am hiding out there.

As always when I am traveling, I have looked back at my archives to see what past thoughts may still have relevance today.

I came across a post I did in 2008 where I spoke about Alan Brown’s observation that in the 1997 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts conducted by the NEA.

Brown lists an admittedly small excerpt of the verbatim responses to the question: “What was the last “classical music” concert that you attended?” Among the answers listed are Tito Puentes, The Stompers, Showboat with Tom Bosley, Music Man, King and I and Oliver.

For the question, “What was the last “opera” that you attended,” Phantom of the Opera appears five times along with Les Miz, Brigadoon and “It was on Broadway” (remember, these are recorded verbatim).

Not having access to all the raw data, I have no idea what percentage of the answers these represent. As I suggested, it does make you wonder when people answer surveys that they enjoy and want to see more classical music or opera, if your concept of classical music/opera is the same as theirs. These results are from 10 years ago so I wonder how much less significant these categories are to people these days.

Now it is 20 years since that survey was conducted so I think what people consider as falling into those categories may be less defined. In that 2008 post, I wondered if it might be better to de-emphasize labels to a great degree.

Acknowledging that people don’t care how performances are categorized as long as they have an enjoyable experience changes the way you market performances. If the definition of classical music is rather nebulous, the fact that the violinist received a Pomme Rouge when they were 17 is nearly bereft of meaning. (As it should be, my mother was giving me pommes rouge before I was 5 years old.) Marketing has to focus on why someone will enjoy the performance and not overly concern itself with convincing someone they like the organization’s definition of classical music or whether the recipient likes classical music at all.

[…]

Of course, the water flows both ways in regard to this sentiment. When asked if they liked opera, someone might say they liked Phantom but didn’t really care for The Magic Flute. A good experience with what they think is opera, classical music, Shakespeare (but really Oscar Wilde), won’t guarantee liking the “real” thing. Nor may it inspire experimentation even if they equate Phantom with opera due to simple lack of name recognition.

At the core the idea is that defining labels allow people to decide whether they like something before they try it. We have done it since we were kids and asked what was in food so we could decide we didn’t like it if it had an ingredient we don’t like. We have probably all run into people who said something along the lines of “you said that was jazz, but that isn’t REAL jazz because…” They can’t enjoy it because it doesn’t fit a slot neatly.

At the same time, I am not suggesting the approach should be, “trust us sight unseen, you will like it.” Provide people with information, video links, etc so they can make a decision. I am just suggesting not to place that information behind a label that allows them to decide without exploring.

No Tall Tales To Tell

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You wouldn’t think fishermen needed help telling a story, but according to Non-Profit Quarterly, the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is looking for just that.

They are getting help from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod in securing the services of a digital storyteller to serve as part time artist-in-residence for a year. (Deadline to submit is June 30)

According to the Non-Profit Quarterly,

This is a unique opportunity for an enterprising photojournalist/videographer seeking to tell the story of a normally hard-to-reach profession. The Fishermen’s Alliance goal for the artist-in-residence is to give the general public a better understanding of organization’s value to Cape Cod.

Presently, the Fishermen’s Alliance YouTube channel has 25 subscribers. The 20 or so videos have a modest number of views. Their tagline is, “Small Boats. Big Ideas.” That message is not apparent in their existing videos. However, their plan to engage an artist-in-residence is certainly a big idea. One would not expect this kind of initiative to be launched by a relatively small-membership organization of commercial fishermen. Any nonprofit would do well to watch what the Fishermen’s Alliance artist-in-residence begins to produce online and take careful notes.

[…]

…Perhaps the biggest challenge for any nonprofit is strategic: How to create content that people want to consume, and how to create engaging videos that get shared. The Fishermen’s Alliance artist-in-residence will need a solid understanding of metrics and how they point the way for continual improvement. Yes, there is the still photography part of the job, but the cornerstone of any nonprofit’s content marketing efforts today needs to be video. From 360-degree videos (for the ambitious) to Facebook Live, all nonprofits need to respond to their audience’s shorter attention span by making content interactive and visual.

This can be valuable advice for non-profit organizations as something they need to strive for. But for arts organizations, the story may illuminate new opportunities. Can your organization or artists with whom you work offer similar services to non-profits and businesses in your community to help them attain similar goals.

 

Post title a riff on Love and Rockets’ “No New Tale To Tell”

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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