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How Do You Take Your Compliments?

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A woman who was our assistant theatre manager is now pursuing her doctorate in Thailand and recently sent us a questionnaire. She is surveying the difference between the way Americans and Thai respond to compliments based on the relative age and social standing of the person delivering the compliment. All my answers were pretty much the same but from what I know about Thai culture, your status relative to the person giving the compliment dictates how humbly you might respond.

I got to thinking a little about how we handle compliments in the arts. A few years ago, Holly Mulcahy had talked about how difficult it is for an artist to accept a compliment graciously rather than offer apologies for the performance. I remember doing something similar when I was acting, barely being able to mumble out a thanks.

It is easier now that I am in administration. I get to stand in the lobby during intermission and the end of the performance accepting compliments about the show without reservation because I am generally as unaware of the flaws the performers may perceive about their performance as the audience is. Though there have been a few rare times when I have been witness to some very tense moments backstage when artistic directors and stage managers voiced their disapproval of a performance.

As I think about the value and significance of those compliments, one thing I don’t feel I do enough of is solicit feedback beyond, “Thanks, that was a great show.” from a wider variety of people. I have advocated having conversations about the arts where ever you find the opportunity whether it is at a wedding reception or on the checkout at the grocery store in order to get people to voice what they do or don’t like about the arts experience. You can often get people who say they aren’t arts people to recognize they are actually more involved and invested than they realized. Having them reflect on that is good for the arts in the long run.

Starting and sustaining those conversations in the grocery store can be a challenge, but it is easy as falling down in a theatre lobby or gallery. I certainly do talk to a lot of people throughout an evening but it is often the same familiar faces who are knowledgeable about the arts and know they have access to me.

With them it is easier than falling down. What I need to remind myself to do is take “Thank you, that was a great show,” from “strangers” and extend my response to something beyond “Well thank you, thanks for coming out this evening.” Last year I had the presence of mind to do that with a couple and suddenly their high school aged daughter piped in with observations that were so insightful, I was about to beg her to come to college here when she graduated.

My intuition tells me making time to encourage other than the usual suspects to expound a little more on their experience is probably the doorway to better fund raising opportunities. Making the connection with new people may certainly inspire a personal donation from those who find themselves becoming more invested in the organization, but it may also indirectly lead to identifying and connecting with companies/organizations interested in providing support who were never even on your radar.

I am not suggesting that you should be in the process of always closing a fund raising pitch. Rather I am pointing out that relationships are the real basis of enduring support. It is easy to fall into the trap of always speaking with the same familiar people at every performance. It is another thing that solicit additional feedback from an unfamiliar person. Even if their first words are compliments, the next words might not be. But doing so can go a long way toward not only securing their loyalty, but alleviating the impression of elitism in the arts.

Do U2 Fans Like Ballet?

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Back in 2006 U2 was supposed to play here in town but had to postpone because of an illness in the Edge’s family. We had a dance performance schedule for that day and I got it into my head to target U2 fans to attend the show with a “Does Bono Like Ballet?” ad campaign.

You can read about my rationale for attempting this and what the results of my little experiment were.

It was difficult to actually identify how many U2 fans came, though we had a good number of people buy tickets using the discount phrase according to the sales records.

Just for the record, the band did reschedule to just before Christmas. I went to the concert and had a great time.

Still Asking Why The Show Was Not Advertised

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Back in 2006 I was pondering the situation where people came up to me at a performance and asked, “Why Didn’t You Advertise This?”

Now given I get this comment most from people who have attended the event for which they are bemoaning the lack of advertising, obviously something worked to get them in the door.

Often they did see/hear an ad or a story or heard about the show from a friend. The problem they have is that they learned about the show close to performance time and had such a great experience, they are concerned that having almost missed it, they will lose out on something equally great in the future.

I made this post 6 years ago so my marketing mix has changed a bit from the one I describe, but many aspects still remain the same, including the fact I get the same question.

What is interesting to me as I think about this phenomenon is that while something we did was clearly effective at getting them into the theatre, some people have an expectation that they will hear about performances from a very specific source, often print media.

I would be curious to know what others do when faced with this situation.

I Don’t Remember The Nest Being So Nice

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There is potential that cities across the country can ultimately benefit from this economic downturn if they play their cards right and tap into those returning home to help contribute to raising the quality of life. This at least, according to a piece by Will Doig on Salon.com.

According to Doig, young people who have moved to the big cities around the country like NYC, LA and Chicago, find the cost of living to be too high and returning to the places they left, often to start their own businesses.

“Or as urban analyst Aaron Renn puts it: “New York City is like a giant refinery for human capital … Taking in people, adding value, then exporting them is one of New York’s core competencies.”

And it exports them in droves. People associate brain drain with the agricultural and industrial Midwest. But most years, when foreign immigration is excluded, it’s places like New York and Chicago that lose the most residents. Chicago loses nearly 81 people a day to out-migration, more than any other metro area in America. Between mid-2010 and mid-2011, nearly 100,000 people left the New York area. Los Angeles lost almost 50,000.”

Of course, this doesn’t diminish the fact that a whole lot of people are returning home to live a fairly depressing unemployed existence. But according to Doig, in returning home, these people bring expectations of products and services they experienced in the big cities, paving the way for these same products and creating demand for business and government services. They also tell their friends about the great environment in the “nests” to which they have returned attracting more people there.

The reason why I mention cities need to play their cards right is because they have a role in perpetuating an image of their cities as vibrant, interesting places to live. According to Doig’s piece, the reputation perpetuated about cities belie the actual conditions in those cities. (My emphasis)

“The mesofacts say that Charlotte [North Carolina] is a boom town and Portland [Oregon] is cool.” In reality, the economies of both Charlotte and Portland have been struggling for a while now. Yet new residents still flock to these places because the mesofacts tell them they’re hot, when it’s actually Pittsburgh they should be looking to, where per capita income has risen faster than any other major Midwestern city’s, and the unemployment rate has been lower than the national average since 2006.

“I’ve been saying to people in Pittsburgh for years, ‘What Seattle was in the ’90s, you’re going to be that big.’ And they’d laugh. But the data show it,” says Russell. “The editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette keeps saying the biggest problem in Pittsburgh is brain drain. And I’m like, you’re 20 years too late. Why are you torpedoing your own in-migration? When you’re running around saying you have a brain drain problem, what you’re saying to the world is, ‘We’re a loser.’ But if you can convince people the data are true as opposed to the mesofacts, then you open the sluicegates.”

If Doig is correct about all this, it could be the time for arts organizations to step up and take advantage of their trend. As Scott Walters and many other have noted, artists flock to cities like NYC, Chicago and LA convinced they can make their careers there. This is due not only to the alluring glow of the lights of Broadway, but to the practices of many regional theatres that often do their casting in major cities forcing actors to move there if they want to work back home.

This isn’t just the case for theatre either, Trey McIntyre confounded everyone when he chose to base his dance company in Boise, ID rather than one of the major cities. Artists aren’t just seduced away from home by the mythology of these cities, there are very practical reasons to move there if you want an opportunity to practice.

But as I said, arts organizations have an opportunity to reverse this trend by focusing on hiring locally and then getting the local arts community to tell their friends in the big cities why they should move back. For many of those who left, artistic spaces that seemed provincial and under equipped when they left may suddenly seem luxurious after working and living in dingy, holes in the wall in the big city. Yet they have also probably seen and done some pretty artistically interesting things.

As people move back, the arts organizations can tap into the returnees’ experiences interacting with the current thought and aesthetics churning in the big cities and adapt them as their own. You are never going to overcome the allure of going off to the golden cities, but by providing a reason to return, many places across the country can embrace the situation and leverage it to their own advantage.

Info You Can Use: Be Careful of Social Couponing

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If you have been considering using social coupons to increase attendance at your events and attract new customers, you may want to read a study covered last month in MIT Sloan Management Review (h/t Drucker Exchange) that noted the repercussions of a badly designed deal could last for months.

The authors, V. Kumar and Bharath Rajan tracked three businesses for a year after they started their social coupon campaigns. The three businesses did attract large numbers of new customers with the campaigns, but experienced significant losses during the month they offered their deal, in some cases two or three times their normal net monthly profits.

“Such losses would not have been so serious if the businesses were able to achieve higher revenues and increased profits in future months. However, this was not the case. Despite their best marketing efforts, the three businesses had difficulty retaining most of the new customers who were attracted to the coupon offers. Based on our analysis, it will take the car wash service and ethnic restaurant 15 and 18 months, respectively, to recover from the profit shortfall following the coupon launch; for the beauty salon and spa, the recovery period for the coupon campaign at current business levels was projected at more than 98 months, or eight years.”

Now granted, given that most non-profit arts organizations lose money on many of their events, these facts may hardly be a deterrent to using social coupons. However, arts organizations do seek new audiences. The authors state that basic design of social coupons aren’t really conducive to new customer acquisition, but steps can be take to mitigate the losses of a campaign.

One approach may be to upselling or cross-selling products and services. Many theatres have tiered pricing on their seating so being able to upgrade to center orchestra may seem like a good deal to some attendees. If theatres are trying to attract a younger audience, they may want to cross sell tickets to their edgier space whose ticket prices are comparable to the discount the person is paying.

In other words, a person comes in with a 50% coupon for a $30 ticket and the theatre asks if they would like a ticket for a later date at the other space where the top price is $20 for the same $15 price. This approach helps to retain the person for another performance for what is probably the average ticket revenue at the other space.

Another approach the article suggests is limiting the size of the discount and the conditions under which it may be redeemed. They mention that the restaurant in their study later offered 30% discount on two days a week and reduced their losses to close to zero.

They also suggest only offering the coupon to new customers, but I am personally ambivalent about that. I think that sours your relationship with existing customers. If you have ever seen those cable commercials that offer tons of great channels at a low price –but only to new customers–like me you may have been a little annoyed wondering what benefit you will ever derive for having paid your bill on time for 5 years. To my mind, even if it isn’t the same benefit, existing customers should feel like they are rewarded for loyalty if the new kids are getting some sort of incentive to participate.

Thus Rises The Individual Curator and Commissioner

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There was an intriguing piece on Wired last week (h/t Thomas Cott) about an alternative approach to funding events via Kickstarter. Andy Baio talks about funding record projects, conferences and festivals by essentially lining up the speakers/performers/resources and then seeing if anyone is interested in buying tickets to the proposed events/project. If there isn’t enough interest, it doesn’t happen.

What was most interesting to me is how this type of approach really empowers an individual to curate a project. You may not be an artist yourself, but you have an idea of what combination of artists and concepts might be compelling and then can set out to bring it together.

While this is sort of my job already, there is something of an expectation that there will be balance in those I invite. I have a certain responsibility to make sure my facility and events are being run in a fiscally responsible manner. An individual isn’t necessarily saddled by those expectations. They can do a project as a one off and no one is concerned about whether their activities are serving the needs of the community.

Makes me wonder if this might be a potential mode of operation for the future. One of many that might replace the non-profit arts organization.

If taken at its face, this approach seems shift some burden to the artists/speakers being invited. If the event doesn’t happen, will they get paid? While Baio doesn’t explicitly mention it, I am guessing you would have to provide some sort of guarantee of payment to the artist/speaker regardless of whether the performance happened or not. Baio alluded to this in a couple places, including his requirements for these projects.

Projects like these have three big requirements.

Strong, achievable concept. Commissioned works should be scoped down to something realistic, because you’re paying for their time, but high-concept enough to capture the excitement of other fans.

Organizer. The funding may come from the crowd, but there needs to be a single person managing the project and handling all the logistics and small details.

Due diligence. The organizer will need a firm agreement from the artist, committing to a timeline, payment, and any other demands. Also, if the project results in a tangible work, determine who owns the rights to it before you start raising money.

While most artists and speakers like being paid, they like to be seen and heard even more so there is also some incentive for them to help promote the cause. It may not occur too frequently at present, but it could certainly become commonplace if the practice of running a project up the flag pole becomes more wide spread.

The other thing, of course, is that it turns your audience into much more active advocates for the work because there is a possibility it won’t happen. We know that many audiences today, especially among the younger generation, tend to wait to see if something more interesting might come along before buying a ticket. Since the performance will occur regardless of their commitment, there is no incentive to commit. The threat that the event might not happen can garner an increased investment in its success even if it is only that people continually check the progress of the funding to see if the event will happen.

A commenter to the piece pointed out a service in Brazil which rewards the early adopters. It sells refundable tickets to a show until the minimum is met. Once the event has secured its funding, it starts selling non-refundable tickets and apparently starts reimbursing the purchasers of the refundable tickets up to the their full purchase price.

Stuff To Ponder: Is Too Much Money Being Left On The Table?

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Though I have written about dynamic pricing, I have generally been a little resistant to the idea of implementing that sort of pricing because I feel having a clear and simple pricing is part of an arts organization’s relationship with a community. Or rather, having a complicated one can be a barrier to attendance and also generate a negative association with the organization.

But I have been reading some things recently that make me wonder about that.

JCPenny’s attempt to sell everything at an everyday low price that reflects the value of the product has apparently backfired on them.

According to a piece on MSNBC’s website:

Consumers complain about this constantly. That’s the basis of the Red Tape Chronicles in fact. At its best, the maddening mixture of coupons, rebates, sales and fine print fees can feel like a game. At worst, it’s being cheated. You’d think shoppers would love a chance to buy from a store that doesn’t play these games, the way car buyers (allegedly) like shopping at no-haggle auto dealerships.

[…]

To oversimplify for a moment, here’s Penney’s problem. They told the world that retailers only offer their best prices during crazy sales, and Penney stores would no longer host them. Sensible consumers apparently took that information to heart and decided to simply wait for such sales at other stores. As an added benefit, Penney lowered consumers’ search costs, because they now knew they didn’t need to bother driving to a Penney’s store anymore.

[…]

Shrouding isn’t the only reason Penney’s pricing plan is flawed. The firm is also leaving a lot of money on the table by rejecting a phenomenon known as “price discrimination.” Some people have more money than time, and some have more time than money. Some shoppers don’t mind spending hours to save $20; others would gladly give a store $20 to escape quickly. Smart retailers get money from both. By killing couponing, Penney has eliminated its ability to satisfy price discriminators.

And as others have pointed out, markdowns serve the age-old retailing trick of “anchoring.” For some reason, even very smart consumers feel better paying $60 for something if you initially tell them it costs $100, and then reduce the price.

Right around the same time this article came out, Colleen Dilenschneider on the Know Your Own Bone blog wrote about why offering discounts through services like Groupon is a bad idea for non-profits. The two reasons she gave?

“1) Your community expects more discounts, 2) Perhaps more importantly, your community waits for discounts”

Since MSNBC pretty much confirms what Colleen claims, I started to wonder if maybe arts organizations are fools not to double the prices and then offer 50% off coupons through social media.

Yeah, I know it is cynical and believe me, I still don’t want to get into doing anything resembling this. But I do everyone a disservice if I don’t explore the option.

Are arts organizations being responsible if they leave money on the table by not recognizing some people will pay more for the privilege of getting the transaction over quickly? If you effectively charge what you perceive to be the true value of your product by doubling the price in order to take advantage of consumer inability to pass up a 50% off coupon, are you really cheating your audience? (In other words, intend to sell tickets at $25 by pricing them at $50 and then flooding the market with half off coupons.)

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

But lets assume that the current discounting model doesn’t work well for non-profits because it is really designed for the needs of retailers and that a discount offered in an alternative manner might prove more effective. Should we be researching alternative discount structures in order to more effectively generate revenue given that the future of donations and grants looks precarious?

Questions like this get into the core philosophy about the organization’s existence. Is the purpose to preserve and perpetuate the organization so it can continue to do good work? Or was the focus on providing the art in an affordable manner and the inability to do so is a sign that the organization should transition toward closure?

What Signals Are You Reading?

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There is an old rule of thumb about judging the cleanliness of a restaurant’s kitchen by the cleanliness of the restrooms. I actually used this example this past weekend when discussing an experience in what I took for a high end restaurant in another country…until I visited the restrooms.

Adam Davidson, heard often on NPR’s Planet Money had a piece in the NY Times on how people use “signaling” to make decisions.

He gives a couple examples of how people use signaling. He spends more money on a brand of baby formula even knowing there probably isn’t too much a difference between it and a cheaper competitor based on the labeling. A friend bought a more expensive chandelier from Amazon because he felt uneasily that the $100 difference in price meant the cheaper merchant cut corners.

He also cites Pepsi’s decision to pay Nicki Minaj to be a spokesperson:

“Even for consumers who don’t listen to her music or trust her expertise in the carbonated-beverage sector, the mere act of paying for a pop-star endorser sends a subconscious signal that their product is so successful that, well, they can afford Nicki Minaj. It also signals that the company is too heavily invested to turn out a shoddy product. For many, that’s a reason to choose the soda over the generic stuff.”

The example that really got me thinking was about bus owners in Haiti who paint their buses with all sorts of images at great expense.

“Yet bus owners feel the need to get a fresh paint job once or twice each year because few people will pay to ride an unpainted bus. The extravagant decorations suggest that an owner cares about his business — that he spends money maintaining his engines, tires and brakes (no small matter in a country with steep mountains and lousy roads). My hunch, however, is that many owners, short of cash, are likely to invest in a visible new paint job over invisible brake maintenance. With no external authority — government inspectors or consumer-watchdogs or online consumer forums — there’s no way to know if the signal is accurate.”

The reason this caught my eye is that, like the bus owners in Haiti, many arts organizations don’t have the money to fully maintain their buildings and have to make decisions about what to invest in to attract and retain audiences. I wondered if many arts organizations are fully cognizant of what cues audiences were deriving from their experience. Perhaps too much focus is being paid to the wrong things.

There are some aspects whose signals we can be fairly certain about. The surroundings and what others are wearing can often determine whether people feel intimidated or perfectly comfortable. We can draw some direct lines between the experience people have purchasing tickets, getting information, finding parking, being greeted by employees, etc., and what people’s perception of us might be.

But it is more difficult to know whether our ticket prices, quality and content of our brochures and websites are telling people our work is too high or low quality for their tastes. Do they think the performance will be incomprehensibly high culture or too amateurish for them?

Do we need to fix up the entryway because its condition signals that we don’t invest a lot of attention in the quality of our work? Or does it add to a funky-cool ambiance that we didn’t really knew appealed to our audiences and we should invest the renovation money in our work?

Did our sincere attempt at moving a water fountain to be more convenient to the restrooms get interpreted as a blatant ploy to increase traffic at the snack bar?

Many factors which contribute to signalling are unconsciously received so surveying people about all the elements contributing to their impression of you is a fruitless pursuit.

Not to mention, the same element can signal one person’s trash and another’s treasure. Pepsi may gain prestige by engaging Nicki Minaj, but her fans may see it as a harbinger of disappointment since she will have to modulate her behavior to remain a spokesperson.

Stuff To Ponder: Oh The Hats You Will Wear

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The Non-Profit Quarterly had an article this week, “Why Every Nonprofit Has a New Job Title: Publisher.” It really resonated with the way I had been feeling lately. Back when I started in my arts career, I didn’t do so much writing as I do now. Sure, as the new guy I had to write press releases and brochure text, but that was on occasion and scheduled by the marketing calendar.

Now I am writing everyday. It isn’t just this blog. I am creating social media updates, composing emails  , no make that designing emails given their highly graphic nature these days, writing press releases, brochure content, web site content, uploading images to other social media sites. Some of it is produced on a schedule, but more frequently it is produced spontaneously as events unfold so that the information is timely and fresh.

There are a lot of tools which make it much easier for people to connect with what we do from wherever on earth they may be. Servicing them is a lot harder than it used to be.

There seems to be something of a confluence of discussion around this topic lately. Thomas Cott circulated a series of posts about the media arts organizations use to communicate with this week. I was particularly interested to learn email is still more valuable than social media as a marketing tool.  I reminisced a little reading Trevor O’Donnell’s recollection of the 80s as a simpler time for creating marketing materials.

Don’t believe John McWhorter’s claim in the New York Times that “in the proper sense, e-mail and texting are not writing at all.” Maybe he ain’t doing it right, because it certainly feels like I am investing as much time as required when I do it on behalf of my venue.

Even in an increasingly visual media environment, you have to be a skilled writer and do much more of it than in the past. The talent required now is bringing writing, video, images, music together to tell a compelling story. People who made movies may claim this is old hat for them, but this sort of production is no longer their sole province. Now people like you an I can participate in production in places where highly paid professionals once walked.

It is probably good for all of us to remember that last bit as we look askance at Pro-Ams encroaching on our performing and visual arts territory thinking they can produce and participate in our sphere as well as we can.

Truth is, we are probably doing the same thing in respect to graphic design, music and video making among other areas. We now have the confidence to experiment ourselves. We aren’t necessarily as good as the professionals we used to/might have had to pay for the same service, but we are satisfied we are making a good show of it.

(Apologies to Dr. Suess)

Charm Offensive (Minus The Offensive)

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I was reading the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) Spring Newsletter today and there was a letter from Alliance President John Haynes (page 2) giving his view of what audience engagement is really about.

He tells a story of his time as a programming executive at CBS TV when he pretty much had an unlimited expense account and could do just about anything that struck his fancy. He would regularly order pizza delivered to his apartment and he could hear its approach long before it got to the door thanks to the singing of the Neapolitan deliveryman. At one point the delivery man confessed he was having a hard time saving his money because he was attending the opera a few times a week. Haynes confessed in turn that he had never attended the opera, a fact that flabbergasted the delivery man.

“He was shocked. Here I was, living the good life in a doorman high‐rise on West End Avenue, three blocks from Lincoln Center, but bereft of the most glorious creations of mankind. He sang longer and with more feeling that night than ever before. Neighbors I’d never met came out of their apartments. He sang his way to the elevator and was still singing when the door closed.”

The next time Haynes ordered pizza, the delivery guy showed up at the door with two tickets to the opera. Haynes attended his first opera, Carmen, with the pizza deliveryman. He says that he has seen his role as an arts administrator to do for others what the pizza deliveryman did for him; expanding the scope of his experience. “And that’s how I came to conceive of my role as an “arts leader. I’m just the pizza delivery man. ‘Wanna see something cool?'”

The pizza deliveryman was an apt model for the arts community. He was clearly passionate about a segment of the arts. Even though he couldn’t believe Haynes did not go to the opera, much less love it, he managed to express it in a humble rather than condescending way. (And like the arts, he was poor and funded his passion through donations/Haynes’ large tips.)

Of course the challenge we face today is that unlike Haynes, audiences aren’t necessarily won over after one exposure. And many of us are expending great effort in the direction of audiences who are not CBS executives with unlimited expense accounts. Regardless, we do have the same opportunity the pizza man had. We can unabashedly share our passion where ever we go and maybe after repeated exposure, people will start to open up to the possibility of sharing whatever it is that makes us (metaphorically) sing. (Keeping in mind that constantly singing songs from Wicked, either literally or figuratively, is going to make people want to throttle you.)

I realize that since this is filtered through Haynes’ recollection, the pizza deliveryman sounds very charming. Someone else might have perceived him as pushy and elitist. Though I have to think he was indeed as earnest as Haynes portrays him.

The pizza man has had his victory. For the rest of us, another challenge is to be charming as we talk about our passions and avoid making people’s eyes glaze over as we yammer on–or worse, harden as they feel alienated by the tone and direction of the conversation.

Most everyone in the arts seems to be invested in this shared goal, but there are few clear tips circulating about how to accomplish it. Perhaps it is as easy as the “be yourself” advice dispensed about dating. But if that were effective, there wouldn’t be 1,000 new dating articles on newsstands and the internet every week.

I’d suggest more practical and specific advice about diminishing the appearance of elitism might be what the arts needs. But like I said, advice on any sort of relationship doesn’t seem to provide much clarity or instill confidence.

Dear Thespis-

There is a woman at the supermarket I would really like to get to know better as an audience member. However, she seems to think I am elitist snob even though the resale value on her five year old SUV is still more than I made last year. How do I get her to even consider looking my way?

Dramaturgy Is Everyone’s Responsibility

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When I was studying theatre as an undergrad and grad student, there was one role in the theatre most of my fellow students never got a clear definition of, that of dramaturg. Most of our professors would wryly answer, “nobody really knows” when asked what a dramaturg did.

There was also a sense of guilt and embarrassment. Dramaturg was one of those positions you added when your theatre had money and seemed fated to be first cut when money got tight. Except the dramaturg tended to work closely with the artistic administration who were naturally resistant to the idea of cutting them so it was usually someone in development or marketing that got cut first.

If you look up dramaturgy on Wikipedia or the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) website, you will learn that a dramaturg is a sort of historian/researcher who helps all those involved with a production, from the creative ensemble to the audience, understand the greater context in which a performance occurs.

The reason why no one knows what a dramaturg does is that the role is so generally defined, the duties can vary vastly from place to place.

I explain all this to provide context for the people I am about to quote. If you think that makes me something of a dramaturg, well Amrita Ramanan, the literary manager at Arena Stage would likely agree. She recently posted a manifesto outlining her vision of role of the literary office of the future on HowlRound.

“…David Dower…talked about dramaturgy as integral to a theater company’s thru line, such that every theater maker holds the mission and vision of the art as their ultimate goal even if they explore different tactics on how to achieve them. A marketing manager practices dramaturgy by communicating to an audience to mission and vision of the art through website blurbs, posters and brochures. A development associate practices dramaturgy when they approach a potential funder, carrying and articulating the mission and vision of the art and why it needs the funders support to thrive. A casting director practices dramaturgy when casting a show by supporting the mission and the vision of the playwright’s intent and director’s concept with every person they call in.

This is a variation on the theme I have often touched upon in my blog that marketing is everyone’s responsibility.

This is one of the reasons why dramaturgy is such a nebulous position at many organizations, if it exists at all. The argument can often be made that the dramaturg’s responsibilities are more suitably performed by a number of other departments in an organization. On the other hand, do the directors of marketing, development and the performance have the time to do all the appropriate research? Is having all these people researching the same subject independently the best way to assemble information? The answers depend on the ambitions of the organization.

Ultimately, whether an arts organization of any discipline has someone acting in the role of a dramaturg (whatever it may be called), everyone involved with the organization takes on some aspects of the dramaturg role in the execution of their duties. Each person needs to be skilled in acquiring the appropriate information and putting it into practice on behalf of the production.

Success in this regard will depend on talent and training, but also opportunity. Some of this opportunity will manifest as access to information sources, but as Howard Sherman recently pointed out on his blog, some of the opportunity can be provided and encouraged by organizational culture. (my emphasis)

“Most every theatre uses the first rehearsal/first reading as a day to introduce the company and the staff of a show, but in my experience, it’s incomplete. I recall being brought into rehearsal rooms, the staff circling the company, seated at tables, as one by one we did the Mouseketeer roll call of our names and titles. There might be a speech…maybe a quick demonstration of the set model – and then we were sent back to our desks to go about our regular business. We were not invited to stay for the first reading, often told that it would make the company too self conscious; I wish that we had been required to stay and listen, that even at the most unformed step, every staffer should be made to be there at the birth of a new production, not just drop by for a wave and a bagel before things got messy. The same should probably hold true for that final rehearsal in the rehearsal hall; it further engages the staff in the creative process, and refamiliarizes the company with a staff that they may not have interacted with for some three weeks. I have heard of some companies that even hold readings of plays long before first rehearsal, with the roles divvied up among the staff – what a marvelous way to connect the staff with what they’ll soon be working on, and to connect the staff with each other.”

I remember years ago reading an entry on Greg Sandow’s blog where he mentioned that those who worked for orchestras rarely attend the performances or come into the office the next morning and talk about the event. I was floored at the time. Given all the acrimony between the administration and musicians at many orchestras these past few years, it has become easier to believe.

Even if people at your organization come in and talk about productions with great enthusiasm, Howard Sherman’s observations show that there are always more opportunities to connect and learn about the projects that can be offered. Even if there isn’t a dramaturg at your organization, sharing the knowledge that individual staff members have collected in preparation for a project can help everyone do their jobs more effectively.

Big Data May Be En Vogue, Little Data Still Has Plenty To Offer

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Apropos of my post yesterday about using big data to customize information to the interests of individuals in your community, I happened to come across an interview with Jamie Bennett who is chief of staff at the National Endowment for the Arts. (Or maybe it wasn’t coincidence and Big Data Big Brother conspired to bring it to my attention based on yesterday’s post!!!)

The interview is on a website without permalinks to its content so you may have to scroll down to February 27, 2012 or search for Jamie Bennett to find it.

One thing I realized upon reading Bennett’s interview is that I may not have been clear it is already possible to offer sophisticated interactions with patrons without access to Big Data. I had forgotten that Nicholas Hynter has the membership staff at the National Theatre in London email patrons and suggest that based on what the theatre has observed about them, the patron may want to skip the next show. Obviously, you need to have the staffing and resources to do this sort of thing, but it is certainly within reach.

Another emerging option is sites like Culture Craver, the site upon which Bennett’s interview appears. Only available in NYC at the moment and still in beta stages, Culture Craver, aims to do for arts and culture what Pandora does for music and suggest events that you might like based on comparing your history and stated preferences with those of others with similar tastes.

While the interview would naturally be oriented toward the types of situations in which services like Culture Craver might be useful, I have to admit to being surprised by an anecdote Bennett related about how self-segregating audiences can be. He mentioned that RoseLee Goldberg who runs the visual and performance art oriented Performa festival often features the same artists who appear at the theatre oriented Under the Radar festival.

(text broken into two blocks for reading ease)

She was asked to speak at the Public Theater about some of the artists that she had presented who were also Public Theater folks, and she did a poll of the audience, and said, “Who here is a visual arts person?” And there was nobody. And if you asked that same question about those artists at a Performa audience, it would be all visual arts people and there wouldn’t be any theater people. They’re consuming the same thing, and yet the audiences don’t cross-pollinate….

I’ve begun asking myself, “Why have we drawn that circle? Does it have meaning? Is there something that the arts all have in common with each other? Is painting part of the same cohort as theater? Is dance the same cohort as music?” I believe it is. I’m still working it out in my mind — to have a well-spoken philosophical rationale for this, but I believe it is something. I think creating a real community within that, and not saying, I’m a contemporary dance company and I have nothing to do with classical dance, let alone a museum, I think harms us, and if we saw ourselves as a larger community and worked together that way, I think we’d all benefit tremendously from it. So, figuring out a way to conceive of ourselves as a sector and operate as a sector and realize that more is more. If somebody comes to see something at another theater, that’s ultimately good for my theater, because it’s creating a new audience, it’s building an audience, it’s building an informed community.

Bennett doesn’t lay all the blame on audiences for not being more adventurous. Arts organizations are responsible for propagating these distinctions and communicating them to patrons in various ways. With all the surveys I have read about arts attendance, I don’t recall any findings that definitively observed a significant degree of inter-and intra-disciplinary self-segregation among arts organizations, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening or at least that audiences aren’t moving in this direction.

If it is the case, then services like Culture Craver, perhaps in the form of smart phone apps, might become increasingly valuable for arts organizations. Something that says, “hey you trusted us for 25 theatre performances, trust us when we say you’re likely to enjoy this dance piece” can help diversify audiences if they aren’t.

I am just thinking back to the post I did early last month about how members of Gen Y trust the online opinions of total strangers over that of family and friends when I wonder if this isn’t an area to which we should pay close attention.

Info You Can Use: Gen Y and User Generated Input

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Last month, MarketingProfs presented the results of some research that showed Gen Y consumers won’t make purchasing decisions without consulting user generated content (UGC). Interestingly, they frequently trust the opinions of strangers over that of family and friends.

Millennials want to hear from friends and family, but when spending money is at issue, the opinions of strangers like them—particularly those with direct experience with the brand, product, or service—have more weight.

When considering purchases, 44% of Millennials are more likely to trust experienced consumers than people they know.

Moreover, 51% of Millennials state that UGC from strangers is more likely to influence their purchase decisions than recommendations from friends, family and colleagues, compared with 34% of Boomers who say the same:

At this point it probably doesn’t come as news that if arts organizations want to reach a younger audience, online sources are going to be a primary source of information for Gen Y.

The article mentions that user generated content is perceived by Gen Y to be fairly reliable and honest in the appraisal of goods and services. It also says that companies that support online feedback are seen as more credible.

Because “86% [of Gen Y] say UGC is generally a good indicator of the quality of a brand, service, or product,” what I would really want to know is how good they, (and really anyone), are at discerning company/competitor generated comments from authentic ones.

That degree of confidence in UGC could embolden a lot of companies to pad their reviews or sabotage their competitors. Since many review sites summarize the number of good and bad reviews a product received or the number of people awarding 5 through 1 stars, if people aren’t thoroughly investigating the ratings, it doesn’t matter if the text of the review is so stilted it is obviously generated by the marketing department. With so many available options, the easiest thing is to discard those with the poorest ratings and invest attention in the better ones.

Fortunately, while reviews on travel review sites, Yelp and Amazon often have their veracity questioned, I haven’t heard of any arts organizations becoming embroiled in attempts to bolster their own image or denigrate another’s. Granted, arts organizations haven’t been the best at leveraging online promotion so online reviews aren’t as relevant for them as other types of businesses. I just don’t see the Metropolitan Museum of Art having their staff making anonymous “Kandinsky, I say Kan-stink-sky” comments about the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibitions any time in the near future.

The fact remains that arts organizations need to be cognizant of the influence online information has and what is being said about their organization online. Sure the people with the most disposable income right now are Baby Boomers and they don’t put as much stock in online content as Gen Y. Everyone is checking product review these days, it is only a matter of time before the practice becomes more prevalent for the older generations.

While not profiled in the study, Gen Xers attitudes certainly fall somewhere between Baby Boomers and Gen Y and they increasingly have disposable income, too. It won’t be prudent to adopt a wait and see approach in respect to monitoring user generated content and providing feedback opportunities.

Stuff To Ponder: Curtain Speeches

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I was reading an entry on the Creativity Post by Thomas Mark about how important audience attentiveness is in live performance. It was interesting, but I wasn’t intending to post on it…until I read the last paragraph.

A crucial moment for establishing the relationship of audience and performer is immediately before the performance begins. Let me explain. People arrive, find their seats, and begin to turn their thoughts from daily affairs to the performance ahead. At last, the house lights go down. Everyone falls silent. That is the magic moment, the short period of greatest attention and receptivity and anticipation,… At any rate, that’s what should happen. Unfortunately, what actually does happen far too often,… Instead of allowing the performance to begin, the chairman of the board or the executive director or someone appears with a microphone and makes a fatuous speech. “Welcome ladies and gentlemen . . . blah blah blah . . . [insert a lame joke here] . . .blah blah blah . . . CDs available in the lobby . . . blah blah blah . . . The annual patron’s reception . . . blah blah blah . . . Our gratitude to our sponsors . . . blah blah blah . . . Turn off your cell phones . . . blah blah blah . . . Thank you, and enjoy the performance.” Not so easy, any more. Anticipation, attention, and receptivity have given way to irritation and impatience. The magic moment has been irretrievably shattered, leaving performers and audience to pick up the pieces as best they can. This kind of disregard for the conditions of artistic performance by the very people who organize the event is unpardonable. When it happens audiences and performers are entitled to complain vigorously.

Now, as someone who does deliver a curtain speech, I felt the need to take up the subject. I will concede that the curtain speech, poorly done can add a sour note to an evening. In light of all the interruptions that occur during a performance, the incessant ringing at Avery Fischer Hall being the most publicized recent example, such announcements are certainly appropriate, if not always effective.

Many locales require fire and emergency announcements be made and doing these in person rather than by recording is usually most effective. I saw a performance in NYC earlier this month and the fire/cell phone/recording prohibition announcement was made via a recording. While the volume and clarity was excellent, people were still standing and chatting while it was going on.

Having someone make the announcement does help to transition the audience from the arrival phase of the experience to the performance experience. I would agree that delivering the announcement after lowering the lights does interrupt the audiences experience since the lights also signal a transition. I generally go out while the house lighting is still at full. Though some times we bring them down to 3/4 or 1/2 to signal my arrival.

Obviously, there are other ways to provide the same information. The artistic design of some shows precludes my appearance and the salient points are delivered by an audio or video recording or even a performer.

Overall, I think a personal welcome to the audience is helpful to the organization, especially if well-considered. I generally talk very briefly about the show and why we chose to present it as a way to prepare people for the experience.

A lot of work is invested in performances and performance venues have many guidelines for the behavior of the front of house staff in order to provide a good attendance experience for audiences. But often very little effort has gone into the preparation and delivery of the curtain speech. Given that the attention of everyone is on the speaker at the same moment, it is most assuredly contributes to the experience.

Content matters. I actually start thinking about what I am going to say the day before the show, make notes and pare it down to 2-3 minutes max. I am not always successful in making silky smooth transitions into the show, but I do keep it brief and get off the stage.

Very rarely do I mention the next show and only solicit donations obliquely by thanking the audience and expressing my hope that they will continue to support our programs. Maybe I would get more donations if I was more direct and I think I can still find some good phrases to use that will indicate our need for donations without being overtly pushy. Honestly though, I don’t really know that making a general appeal before a performance is terribly effective as a fundraising technique.

In the moments before a performance, I think the focus should be on the immediate experience and not on future concerns. I have posters and a television screen and ushers with brochures in my lobby to push my future shows. In the 2 minutes before the show starts, the audience should be guided toward why the experience will be enjoyable. I am sure I am not the only one who has found themselves slightly disappointed by the movie they are watching after seeing preview trailers for the exciting movies coming the next summer.

People certainly don’t want to be thinking about your financial woes just as they are about to see a performance (though the curtain speech may be a good time to address them if the situation is widely known by the public.)

Many audience members can’t discern between for-profit and non-profit organizations and their respective performances. It’s great that people don’t feel the quality of non-profits are lacking, but it also means they may not particularly feel their lives would be worse should the non-profit disappear. We certainly don’t want to have people identifying long boring, speeches and appeals for money as a distinguishing characteristic of non-profit events.

I would be interested to know what other people think. Is there a better way to do curtain speeches? What things should be left out or are better accomplished in some other manner? What things not typically found in curtain speeches should be included?

Info You Can Use: Forget Dynamic Pricing, Use Placebo Pricing

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I got my sister a gift certificate at Restoration Hardware for Christmas. They sent along a catalog that weighed about as much as my 3 year old nephew so I chose not to carry it on the plane with me lest I be charged an overweight bag fee. I was thumbing idly through the catalog this weekend and I was struck by its design. You can view the catalog online to see what I am talking about. Some of it resembles a magazine with stories about the artisans who apparently produce some of the goods they sell.

Each page has notes with arrows with tidbits about each of the items like the fact that a $2500 dining room table is a “reproduction of a perfectly proportioned stone column in ancient Greece, built of solid reclaimed pine timbers from 100 year old buildings in Great Britain.” Obviously, they are selling to people who value and find satisfaction in their home furnishings having certain features and provenance.

One of my immediate thoughts was that arts audiences often want the type of experience illustrated in this catalog when they come to the theatre. Except that we would have to charge the type of prices Restoration Hardware does just to produce a season brochure that communicated in the fashion of the catalog, not to mention the cost of actually providing the experience. Of course, the whole image being conveyed would prove intimidating to large swaths of the population to whom we are trying to appear my accessible. As we are very much aware, there aren’t a lot of people willing to pay the type of price necessary to have that experience.

After awhile, I thought about the fact that a lot of retail stores are designed to appeal to the idea people have about themselves rather than to who they really are. For example, I read an article that pointed out that while some national clothing stores seem to be designed for 17 year olds and have pictures of people that age, the stores tend to be filled with 14 year olds because its fits the 14 year old’s desire to appear more mature. Whether that was the initial intent of the store or not, they knew who comprises their customer base and are sure to provide the appropriate range of sizes and styles.

So I have been thinking about how arts organizations, (and mine in particular), can identify what image audiences have of themselves when they attend performances and adjust the physical, social and customer service experience in that direction without incurring large expenses.

I was amused to find a possible answer linked to on the Marginal Revolution blog. His “about me” info is pretty sparse, but Peter Seebach suggests a Placebo restaurant where you list everything at twice the normal price but give everyone a 50% discount on the bill. (my emphasis)

There was some research a while back which found a possibly-surprising result. …if you serve the same wine to a lot of people, and tell some of them it’s $12 for a box and others it’s $400 for a bottle, the latter like it better. Better yet, they’re right — they really do enjoy it more. Thank you, MRI scans and the like.

…So say you have a steak roughly of the same quality as the $13 steaks at the Outback Steakhouse. The menu says $26, your bill when it arrives has a 50% discount. But everything you order feels expensive.

For extra credit, you could do interviews and arrange waiters to adopt personalities which suit the customers. Someone comes in who likes Good Wholesome Cooking? We can set you up with a waiter who thinks fancy food is ridiculous. Or, we can set you up with a waiter who is a total food snob, and you can have a wonderful meal knowing that the waiter is missing out on Good Wholesome Cooking. Your call.

The basic idea here is… people aren’t going out to eat for the food, they’re going out for the experience. Why not sell the experience as-such as the product? And thanks to some lovely research done on placebos in the 60s or so, we know that in some cases they work even if you know it’s a placebo — they’ve been shown to treat depression effectively even when explained.

Can it really be as easy as having a perpetual 50% off sale?

We are all aware on some level that when a store has a sale with deep discounts, the original price they are quoting was probably inflated. We may grouse and think it is a little dishonest, we are still out there buying from that store on a regular basis.

And this feeling of being in a dishonest situation can be ameliorated by providing sincerely good service (leavened, perhaps with a little bit of the personality that appeals to the specific customer). The other thing is, no one actually ever pays full price, even accidentally, and everyone knows it. That isn’t something you can know for certain when it comes to airplane tickets, a pricing model it is often suggested performing arts organizations adopt.

So the big question is, do you take advantage of customer psychology to provide audiences with a satisfying experience?

Oh, actually, you already do in a thousand different ways with your marketing, pricing and other practices. Question is, do you do something so blatant?

Given that in some cases the placebo effect works even in the face of full disclosure, it is tempting to try out such simple way to create an experience. Many ticketing systems, including my own, make it very easy to print one price on the ticket and set the actual price much lower.

Arts Presenters 2012 Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer, Know Thyself

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I will admit that one problem of which I have often been aware is that it is difficult to make everyone at my theatre aware of the myriad forms of relationships different people have with us. Since there are some people who have been working for the theatre for 35 years, I am actually often less aware of a person’s history with the organization than some of the employees.

Chad Bauman tackles this very situation in an entry on his Arts Marketing blog. He relates a situation we have all probably been in: A person approaches our organization with a transaction they want to make. However, because their relationship with the organization doesn’t fit into the straightforward rules we have set down, they are not extended the courtesy accorded those less closely involved with the organization. Fortunately, someone who knows the value of the customer’s relationship with the organization is on hand and provides direction.

Bauman goes on to talk about the improvements they have made with their practices so that the communications and development departments are contributing to maintaining long term relationships with their constituency and community.

But in the course of his entry, I think he also ends up answering the question posed by the title of his entry – “Who are your best customers (and why many don’t know)?” He talks about how they replaced their old ticketing software for something with more integration and then hired someone else to write an algorithm that would alert their staff when they were speaking to someone with a high value relationship with the organization.

The best software certainly doesn’t mean anything if the practices of the organization don’t support the goal of cultivating and maintaining relationships with customers. However, I think the impediment to most organizations will be the need to pay to have someone write a custom program for them.

On the scale at which the Arena Stage operates, it makes good financial sense to have this done. The return on investment they have seen already with an increase in subscriptions and a decrease in churn probably justifies it. But will that be the case with most organizations?

That being said, I feel like I am woefully behind the curve trying to employ the customer relationship management (CRM) features with the ticketing and donor software we do use. In the sense that arts organizations aren’t using whatever resources are available, including integrating their daily practices toward a common goal, I would say Bauman is correct.

The thing is…it may be too late to pursue CRM. The trend is apparently heading in the opposite direction.

According to a articles Thomas Cott distributed the link to this past week, the government of the United Kingdom is strongly encouraging businesses to give control of customer data back to customers moving from customer relationship management to customer managed relationships.

Writes Tim Roberts:

In April this year, the UK Government launched a new consumer empowerment strategy “designed to encourage businesses to release their customer data back to them so that consumers can use this data for their own purposes.”

The Government has boasted that the ‘midata’ project will “turn the existing approach towards consumers on its head (with) a shift away from a world in which certain businesses tightly control the information they hold about consumers, towards one in which individuals along or in groups, can use their data or feedback for their own or mutual benefit“.

In the context of everyone’s worries about what Google will do with all the information it is collecting on you, this opens the possibility that we may actually find out what it is they know about us.

But it also occurred to me that while it may initially be frightening for people to learn what sort of profile has been synthesized about them, it may also prove illuminating if people came to realize their actual practices differed from their assumptions about themselves. For instance, they may attend shows every so many months not really considering themselves a fan of music as much as live theatre only to see that over the course of 5 years there is a record of them attending 12 concerts vs 5 plays. It might encourage people to be a little more open minded and adventuresome with their entertainment choices when they realize their tastes are more diverse than they realized.

In the other article quoting Alan Mitchell whose company has been advising the UK government says:

“And the second thing is that it is not only about a message going through to the customer, it is also that the organisation needs to be creating some sort of value in the information sharing – why should I share information with you? It is not just about receiving messages, it is about getting some sort of value from the process.”

When I shared my thoughts about the data contradicting people’s image of themselves with Drew McManus, he commented

“…think about all the box office and CRM solutions that require patrons to create accounts but provide next to zero outlet for patrons to do much with their user account besides update info. What sort of message does that send?”

Sharing that information would actually keep people more engaged and interested in your organization. It would probably also solve the problem of people creating multiple ticket accounts I groused about a couple months ago if they had a reason to use the same account for every interaction with your organization. Which means the organization has a much better sense of their relationship with the person since the history isn’t dispersed across multiple accounts.

CRM has been invaluable to companies because customers have had an expectation for decades now that if they patronize a place regularly, it will be acknowledged in some way whether it is the amount of starch in their shirts or the way they take their coffee. Even though CRM may be on its way out, many of the customer service practices it allowed companies to extend aren’t going away. Even if you have been behind the curve on using CRM software effectively (or at all) you still have an opportunity to participate in the next phase of relationship building.

History Repeats Itself And Is Redundant, Too

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I was starting to write up a draft of a press release for a show we will be doing in the Spring, First Person: Seeing America. Probably the best way to describe it is as a live documentary. When you watch a documentary or a show on the History Channel, old photographs often appear on screen while music plays under a narration to create a mood. In First Person: Seeing America, all these elements are present live.

NPR’s Neal Conan (Talk of the Nation) and and actress Lily Knight read and dramatize the words of Abraham Lincoln, Langston Hughes, Damon Runyan, John Muir, Frederick Douglass, Calamity Jane and others, while accompanied by chamber music quintet Ensemble Galilei. Photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection including Matthew Brady, Walker Evans, WeeGee, Edward Stieglitz and Thomas Eakins are projected behind them.

It really looks like a terrific show. But since no one has really seen anything like it before, my challenge has been trying to briefly describe it in terms people will understand and be intrigued by. I actually struck on talking about it as a live documentary while a guest on an NPR fund drive in October and that has seemed to work pretty well.

While I was writing today, it suddenly struck me that history has sort of come around again and the basic premise of this show is pretty timely. What else is the popularity of social media but an interest in the first person accounting of others’ lives? Granted, most people will have more interest in the lives of those they know than historical figures. I am not sure how much traction I will get referring to Frederick Douglass as an original tweeter or blogger.

Still, at one time keeping a journal was something a person did. While the motivation for doing so now is less for personal reflection and more for public consumption, the practice has returned. Perhaps it is time for arts and literature people to harness that impulse and direct the general populace toward refining their approach. I know that there are people already doing a fine job using these tools to express themselves creativity through video, music and writing, but I have an intuitive sense that the practice has yet to reach its full maturity.

I am well aware that in all likelihood the proportion of quality writing to dreck has probably remained constant throughout history. For every Langston Hughes, there have been 99 people dashing off junk. You have to wonder though if in 100 years there will be people mining blog and tweet archives to put a similar show together bearing witness to our lives.

So much pressure to be a poignant and inspiring representative of my time!

Info You Can Use: Age Related Discounts May Be Illegal

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Hat tip to Thomas Cott at You’ve Cott Mail for making us aware that attempts to attract younger audiences through special pricing may be a form of age discrimination. The D.C. Office of Human Rights has determined the special pricing offered to young people at 30-35 years old are a form of age discrimination.

What this specifically applies to are practices by theatres like Arena Stage and Kennedy Center. I wrote about the Arena Stage’s plan (toward bottom) back in May and felt Chad Bauman’s blog post on how he was implementing it gave theatre people a lot to think about.

Now there is some cause for rethinking.

The D.C. Office of Human Rights asked for a justification for the pricing and determined it was not sufficient to warrant the exemption senior citizens enjoy.

“The report says that the theaters had not demonstrated that the discounts are justified by business necessity, because patrons older than 35 do not have the same opportunity to buy tickets at a reduced rate.

It does offer the thought, though, that there may be an emerging need for discounts to young professionals, particularly given many young adults do not begin their careers until they are at least 25 to 30 years old, and face other financial challenges.

The report recommends that pricing be broadened so that the same type of discounts are available for those 30-64. It does not appear that the office plans to enforce the recommendations by following up further with theaters to see if changes are made.”

While the article says the D.C. office may not monitor compliance, this is a practice that may come under scrutiny elsewhere. Like Ladies’ Nights discounts at bars, there is theoretically the potential that all age based discounts in every situation including restaurants and retail sales might come under review. (Finally, I can order off the kids’ menu!) The article doesn’t say what the basis for senior citizen exemption is. An earlier article quotes the head of the D.C. Office of Human Right as saying:

“Students and seniors may not have the means for a full ticket, so it is reasonable you offer discounts to those segments,” Velasquez said. “With this situation, if you’re a professional who is 34 years old? I am not sure. That’s the reason behind the inquiry.”

I can’t believe that is the entirety of the rationale for allowing it especially since they apparently rejected the idea early careerists would need it based on income or the lack of arts education schools. If income is a prime factor in exempting senior citizens, there is a chance that someone could use the median wealth of retiring baby boomers compared to that of their parents as the basis of arguing that it is as erroneous to assume they need a discount as it is a 34 year old professional.

Pricing isn’t and shouldn’t be the only method by which to attract younger audiences, but it is a pretty powerful motivator. There may be other ways to structure attractive pricing to the same segment of the population based on or complemented by some other criteria. The Office of Human Rights only rejected the reasoning the theatres submitted. That doesn’t mean a compelling line of reasoning doesn’t exist.

Info You Can Use: Standards For Your Website

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Apropos to my post yesterday about standards for arts marketing personnel is today’s a review of arts organizations’ online marketing efforts. Drew McManus unveiled his 2011 Orchestra Website reviews today.

Drew has been doing this for a number of years now. Bless him for it because it is a pretty time and labor intensive effort. From the number of social media reactions to the post, it is pretty evident that his efforts are appreciated by a large number of people. Drew will actually be on a panel at the National Arts Marketing Project this weekend called “Your Website Is Ugly.”

So don’t let yourself think that you can’t learn anything from the reviews, the standards he uses are applicable to pretty much anyone who is trying to communicate information and sell tickets using the internet as a medium. Basically everyone then.

The great thing to take away from the report is that you don’t need a big budget to be effective. Two of those who appear the top ten rankings are ensembles with smaller budgets.

Tomorrow (11/9) Drew will take a more detailed look at the scoring for the different organization. If you don’t have time to read the reviews, here are some of the things which kept some sites from getting better scores-

“A lack of direct buy tix links for events featured on the landing page.
-A convoluted donation shopping cart (some systems actually required users to remove ticket purchases before they could add a donation).
-A lack of search features and/or sitemaps.
-No social media share buttons on convert event pages.
-Concert calendars that displayed nothing more than an event’s name (no what/where/when details, no “buy tix” link, etc.).
-Inefficient optimization for tablet platforms.”

Now that I have a person with the time and ability to implement the solutions to some of these problems, I am forwarding Drew’s posts on to her.

Info You Can Use: Arts Marketing Standards

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

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

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

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

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

The employers toolkit suggests the following use for the standards:

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

 

The Little Things Are More Engaging Than You Think

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stuff To Ponder: Ticket Office Openness Vs. Security

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Currently I am involved in talking with architects to plan a renovation for our theatre. Part of this will involve razing and moving our ticket office. In the course of other theatre design projects with which I have been involved, as well as those related to me by colleagues, there seems to be a desire to have a more open and friendly ticket acquisition experience for audiences.

Since people are purchasing online and using credit cards to purchase tickets, the thought is that the reinforced bank teller window (an image recently invoked by Rocco Landesman) can give way to a more open concierge desk set up with an aperture to a secure backroom available for deposit of cash receipts.

Thinking this might be an option we should consider, I emailed the theatrical architect with whom the lead architect is working. The fact our ticket office is located outside rather than in our lobby adds a little twist to the concept. My concern was mostly with how to secure the desk area and keep it clean when we aren’t using it without resorting to bulky contraptions or unattractive steel roll up doors. Though sheltered from the rain, we would have to figure a way to avoid having money fly away in a breeze. I thought with some good design and procedures, we could overcome these hurdles and provide a more welcoming atmosphere for our patrons.

The problem is that while the move toward cash-less transactions enables us to move toward a more open and friendly experience, thieves are making corresponding changes in the tactics they use to exploit the new transaction formats. We may end up right back behind the reinforced teller windows again before too long.

With his permission, I am sharing part of the response I received from architect Paul Luntsford of PLA Designs.

“Due to the increasing problem with skimmers and RFID scanners, debit and credit card transactions are moving to the secure and controlled window. By the way, this skimmer/RFID scanner thing is really getting bad. We went to see Les Mis tour show last Friday at our huge, union run, city-owned 3000 seat theater. I used the ATM in the lobby to get some dough to buy junk during intermission. That night, or technically the next morning at 3AM, my debit card was used online at the Apple store to attempt a $1 test purchase by some unsavory character who had managed to compromise my RFID data from my card when I used the ATM in the lobby! So, you need to consider that all electronic transactions happen behind a window, and that window has an embedded wire mesh that is bonded to ground and acts like a Faraday shield to prevent capture of RFID data when the card is processed by one of YOUR people.”

While the credit card company may be at fault for not properly encrypting information, that fact will be of little comfort if people start to associate your brightly lit lobby with a dimly lit alleyway in a bad neighborhood where they may be preyed upon. As security of the cards improves, (and hopefully theft techniques lag), we can hopefully look to maintaining a more open transaction environment. If not, along with good cash handling procedures, you may end up having to train employees on safe credit card handling procedures like not passing the card back out side the Faraday cage without replacing it in a protective sleeve.

Info You Can Use: Acknowledging The Arts Experience

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Welcome readers of You’ve Cott Mail and myriad other places. I appreciate your interest in the blog and yesterday’s entry about speaking more honestly about how an arts experience can occasionally be disappointing.

It is with some chagrin that I have discovered NEA chair Rocco Landesman talked about this very subject at the Chautauqua Institution about two weeks ago. One always likes to fancy they have stimulated lively discussion through the introduction of a timely subject. But of course, even I have made posts on the subject before so I can hardly expect to be the only one thinking about the subject.

If nothing else, the fact that Landesman has been speaking about it gives some indication that it is indeed timely and worth discussing. I have tagged this entry as part of my “Info You Can Use” series because Landesman mentions a number of ideas for better audience relations as well as noting some approaches that arts organizations have already put into practice.

“We might see an organization with an artistic director and a co-equal audience director. Rather than a manager of visitor services who reports to the director of external affairs who reports to a deputy director.

We might see fellowships for audience members…What if we complemented artist residencies with audience residencies, where we paid some audience members to attend exhibitions and performances? Or, better yet, what if arts organizations gave stipends to “audience fellows,” so that the fellows could go see whatever they wanted to see at other arts organizations?”

This last bit about encouraging audiences to see performances at other arts organizations isn’t as far fetched as it may initially sound. Back in 2006 the Marketing Director of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts made a comment on the blog about the organization’s plan to let patrons know about performances at other venues. Looking at their website, I can’t quite tell if they are still providing this information, but it looks like the marketing director is still there and hasn’t lost his job over the program.

More from Landesman: (my emphasis)

I visited the Seattle Art Museum, and they now offer “highly opinionated tours,” in which people paid by the museum walk through the galleries talking about the things they like, but also the things they don’t like. One of these docents led a tour in which he explained why Seattle’s Pollock isn’t really a very good Pollock at all.

We need to stop pretending that every single audience member needs to like every single thing we do.

Nick Hytner at the National in London, actually has his box office staff track subscribers’ likes, dislikes, and preferences, and has them e-mail the members and suggest some of the plays they way want to skip. I think acknowledging the viewers’ own tastes—in addition to curators’ and directors’ tastes—is absolutely key.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago put it extremely well. She said that arts professionals need to learn how to maintain their expertise, while relinquishing control. Madeleine will always have more expertise in contemporary art than I do, but I am still entitled to my own relationship with it, my own experience of it….”

Admittedly, some of these steps are a little bolder than we might be comfortable taking. This is info you canuse, but I make no claims about whether you will wantto use it. Certainly, one probably doesn’t have to adopt something as extreme as advising people not to attend a show. Just acknowledging that the arts experience can occasionally be disappointing in the course of normal conversation may earn good will through its simple earnestness.

Landesman covers other topics in his talk which might be worth a listen to many–especially for the flash mob performance which interrupts it midway. Much of the rest of his talk revolves around the same general theme of the need to support artists and artists needing to eschew the role of being separate and special to become more involved and present in their local communities.

Info You Can Use: Variety of Thoughts On Dynamic Pricing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversation During Controversy

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I think I have re-linked to this story a number of times over the course of my blog, but Neill Archer Roan’s recounting of how the Oregon Bach Festival engaged their community in a conversation about the controversies surrounding a performance of Bach’s St. John’s Passion has always seemed to be a great example of what arts organizations can do at their best. Granted, it requires a whole lot of courage, especially in these days where social media can generate furor in a matter of moments. I fear the conversations wouldn’t have been so constructive had this happened this year.

Roan’s original post is regrettably no longer available, but I believe my post does a good job of relaying enough basic information to generate discussion within one’s organization.

Cost of Making Things Free

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So I am off on vacation for a couple weeks. Regular readers fear not! I have set up a series of entries to appear according to my usual posting schedule.

Since summer officially started, I thought it appropriate to take a look back at my post about how the Public Theatre manages to offer Shakespeare in the Park for free. Please be sure to read to the comments section in the entry where my misunderstandings were corrected by a reader two years after the post. In my defense, the Shakespeare in the Park website still doesn’t do much to clarify that.

News You Can Use: Musicians Are Delicious

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If you're ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you're ready for any emergency. emergency.cdc.gov

As you can see in the above, the Centers for Disease Control have finally acknowledged the threat of a zombie apocalypse. Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for bringing this important government service to my attention.

From the CDC website:

“If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control (including isolation and quarantine)…Not only would scientists be working to identify the cause and cure of the zombie outbreak, but CDC and other federal agencies would send medical teams and first responders to help those in affected areas.”

Actually, while this is really on the CDC site, they use the subject of a zombie attack to reinforce the need to have good emergency plans and supplies prepared for any disaster. Some examples:

“First Aid supplies (although you’re a goner if a zombie bites you, you can use these supplies to treat basic cuts and lacerations that you might get during a tornado or hurricane)”

“Pick a meeting place for your family to regroup in case zombies invade your home…or your town evacuates because of a hurricane.”

“Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.”

While the whole zombie attack craze may have peaked and is already on its way out. (Yeah right, zombies are not that easy to kill!) The tongue in cheek approach mixing “fiction” (the government will never really seriously admit the zombie problem we face) with the real message they are trying to communicate–and offering social media options to spread the word–could easily be used by arts organizations to communicate their core message.

On a related topic, a study was recently released providing information that will be of great importance to arts people when the zombie attack comes. According to the Freakanomics website,

“A new study argues that musicians have more highly developed brains than the rest of us….New research shows that musicians’ brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation.”

So when the zombies come, all you really need to do is be faster than the musicians or point out the location of their delicious, highly developed brains to the zombies. Of course, given that musicians have a heightened alertness and calmness, they will likely possess the composure needed to effectively flee themselves, so you will have to be especially canny.

(Thank god for the CDC. I was wondering how I was going to address the Freakanomics piece without feeding the egos of my Inside the Arts brethren who are mostly musicians.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lens Through Which You View This Will Be Provided

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Earlier this week I received an email inviting me to become the “Twitterer in Residence” for the Crossing Europe film festival in Linz, Austria.

Now, I am under no illusion that this was anything but a mass emailing to every blogger around with some connection to performing arts and cinema. Still the fact that the festival and its sponsor, Austrian eyeglass manufacturer, Silhouette, are offering to provide travel, lodging and pocket money for six days to have an English speaker write about the festival, is a testament to how important and influential social media is perceived.

They don’t try to hide the fact they expect you to write nice things in return, at least about their sponsor. Their eligibility requirements note that during the festival, “personal opinion and impressions are put in the foreground.”

However, in relation to the main sponsor, “I understand to be not only reporter at the festival, but within the project also a testimonial for the festival’s main sponsor Silhouette Eyewear (http://www.silhouette.com) and I’m looking forward to this.”

If you are a cinema blogger, this may not be too big a deal to you. You aren’t being asked to compromise your views about films and actors. No one looks to you as an authority about eyewear so you can gush until the cows come home. Of course, people may wonder if your perception of the festival may have been skewed by the complimentary rose colored glasses you were given.

Regardless of what you may feel about the attempt to conflate compensated bloggers with the role once held by professional critics, you have to admit that the sponsor hasn’t tried to hide that they will be influencing the opinion about themselves. The burden of defending impartiality falls squarely on those who take them up on their offer.

I can see this type of social media promotion appealing to businesses. They can offer benefits in return for a person saying whatever they truly think about the organizations the bank/law firm/store supports. In return, the person has to write testimonials about their company. The company provides more or less sincere exposure that causes it supports might not otherwise receive. It also “buys” advertising for themselves. I imagine accountants can tell them how much of the benefits the company is providing the social media creator is tax deductible as an in-kind donation.

Info You Can Use: Helping Your Publicist Help You

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Last week Ciara Pressler had an entry on Fractured Atlas with tips about increasing your chances of getting press coverage. Her number one tip struck a chord with me.

The #1 way to maximize your chances for coverage? Trust your press reps to do their job. The time to hash out goals, strategy, and timeline is at the beginning of the promotional period, not on Draft 7 of the press release or in the middle of the night on email a week before opening.

The collaborative nature of the arts can work for us, but at times, against us. A creative environment inspires us to have ideas about more than just our own role, and some of the best results come from the synergy of a group. But the bottom line is that we all have a specific job to do,…

I have been in a position where others, whether they were actually in a position to direct my activities or not, micromanaged promotional efforts. Glad to have put those days long behind me. Now I get to micromanage and make people miserable! Seriously though, regardless of my position, I like to have a general plan in place well before an event is upon me and not make any major alterations. I am sure that is true for most people. You don’t want to be in a situation where you have to invest a large number of resources, be it financial or your own brain power and physical energy, to accommodate a drastic change of direction.

Some brief excerpts of other tips that I particularly liked:

Respond quickly.
As in minutes, not hours, and never days. Landing a placement can literally be a matter of being first to respond. …

[…}
Be brief & buzzy.

When a reporter asks you a question, whether by email, phone, or in person, it is not a cue to launch into your 20-minute (or even 5-minute) philosophy of the state of the arts in America….

Know what you’re there to promote.

If you’re being interviewed, stay focused on the topic of the article or segment….

Let the photographer do her job too.

It’s the publicist’s job to know which photos will work for a particular publication…

[One of my particular pet peeves. I have waged constant battles with people who are fine directing a show, but awful at getting people to look natural in a photo shoot and won’t cede control. -Joe]

Understand that media is a business.

A reporter is subject to an editor is subject to an editorial calendar is subject to the publication as a whole is subject to advertisers. If there are four major shows opening in a given weekend, there may not be room for a review of a new company’s first production. If an outlet’s primary audience is musical theatre lovers, they will likely pass on covering a Shakespeare play. Especially in the age of search engines, priority will be given to topics that will draw the most – or most desirable – audience to a publication.

I didn’t edit down this last one because this sort of response is common to those outside an arts organization as well as within. I got a call last week from a person telling me it wasn’t very helpful that they learn about the show from a feature story in the weekend entertainment section of the paper on the same day as the event. We had the event on websites, including those focused toward local families, newspaper and radio spots and had been listed in calendar sections repeatedly for a couple weeks. (Not to mention the brochure and email blasts we had been sending.) Fortunately, people who had been purchasing tickets identified each of those places as a source of information or I might despair at having paid for all that advertising. I explained to him that I had no control over what the newspaper printed and when. I noted that papers usually waited to print a story with big headlines and eye catching images until a time when the information was immediate and relevant because that is what people valued. I added that we were very pleased that they had chosen to cover our event amid all the rest of the things going on.

You Have Just Walked In To A Random Act of Culture

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Well, Opera Company of Philadelphia is at it again. Back in June I did an entry on their flash mob performance of La Traviata at Reading Terminal Marketplace. In January, they were back in Reading Terminal Marketplace with a flash mob performance of “Toreador” However, this time it was under the auspices of the Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture program according to a New York Times piece. The program is centered mostly in those communities with a Knight Foundation presence, but they are looking to expand after using these communities as pilot programs. The website has video from other communities and includes opera, dance, brass and string performances in public gathering places.

“Everything we do revolves around the idea of weaving the arts into the fabric of the community,” said Dennis Scholl, the arts program’s director, who aims to produce 1,000 Random Acts by the end of 2013. “Our hypothesis is that people care about the arts, and if you analyze where they are and bring art to them, they will be passionate about it.”

One of the things I like about the Knight Foundation effort, other than the basic fact that they are supporting and promoting arts organizations, is that the program is pulling many groups together to work collaboratively. Opera Company of Philadelphia organized another event to perform Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus at a Macy’s that involved 650 people. According to the Times article this meant the inclusion of “…28 groups — ‘everything from the Presbyterian church choir to the Gay Men’s Chorus,…’ ” If they can work together on this project, perhaps whatever conditions separate their organizations can be diminished or removed for future partnerships. I am not equating the abilities of church choirs with opera singers, I am just suggesting there might be other situations where they can generate more excitement together.

As I was thinking about this program as a possible template for connecting the arts with audiences, some questions occurred to me. If malls are viewed as appropriate places for performances, what is the fate of our acoustically refined performance halls? Will people recognize their experience in the food court is far from the ideal? Will they care?

If people can see a high quality performance for free, not realizing it took $30,000 to put the Macy’s performance together, will people balk at paying $50+ for a ticket because it seems so far out of proportion? They got 650 people at Macy’s for free, after all.

The Times article mentions that when the Opera Company of Philadelphia did their flashmob La Traviata last year, there was a groundswell of support that followed and hopefully such benefits might follow those that participate in the Random Acts of Cultural Program. It might be good though to also take the opportunity to educate people about what was invested to make it all happen. A little hand out that says, “We are glad you enjoyed this so much. This was a fantastic experience for us too, involving 650 people from 28 groups, 500 rehearsal hours and $30,000 generously supported by the Knight Foundation that allowed us to provide this 10 minutes random act of culture for free. If you thought we were great here, please consider coming to see us at our best when we perform throughout the year at Lovely Venue.”

Next Season Is So Great, It Has A Codename!

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If you use the Firefox web browser as I do, you may have noticed links on the Google search page that take you to the community they have built around the “fire foxes” (red pandas) they adopted at the Knoxville Zoo. Or a link informing you that the next version of their web browser is code named Tumucumaque after the Brazilian national park that Mozilla is supporting in partnership with the World Wildlife Federation.

My initial, and admittedly, cynical reaction is that this smells a little bit like greenwashing. Though as an open source and non-profit project, Mozilla can weather the suspicions and pessimism a little easier than most.

Since people do respond to these efforts if they feel they are sincerely done, it occurred to me that connections like this on the local level might be a win-win for non-profit arts organizations and those with whom they partner. Such an effort could bring positive attention to both organizations. Partner with an observatory to dedicate your season to a newly discovered star or planetary body. Adopt students at schools/boys and girls club/future farmers of America chapter you already work with to present a “Student of the Month” where the student’s art work is on display on your website or in your lobby.

You could even duplicate the code name route and turn the T.B.A. listing in your season brochure into the focus of intrigue and speculation. Having it connected with a partner organization may help you avoid spending more time thinking up clever code names than you did in season selection.

If you start a partnership with a local science museum, just be sure to vet any suggestions they may make thoroughly. You don’t want to end up advertising Project Nematode just because one of the scientists thinks they are the coolest critters around. Theatres have enough parasitic worms associated with them already!

Bidding to Be Bumped

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Write For Creative People Only

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Last month Ciara Pressler had a great post on the Fractured Atlas blog about changing the way you talk about what your offering so the focus is on the potential audience and not the art organization.

Your marketing is not a mirror, it’s a window. Rather than reflecting on you, any pitching of your product or production must explain to the potential patron why their hard-earned money or precious time should be spent here when there are so many other options out there.

We have heard this sort of thing before, but Pressler offers some fun examples of how you shift the focus to audiences without constantly saying, “You will love this” or “audiences love this.” (I apologize in advance for the amount I include here, I just like so many of her examples.)

“We’re #1! (reference unavailable)

It’s about you: Amazing Jewelry is the most amazing jewelry.

(PASS: At that price, it better be amazing. Know what I think is amazing? That jewelry I saw at the mall the other day on sale. At least I’ve heard of that brand before.)

It’s about them: Amazing Jewelry is dedicated to creative design for creative people.

(MASS: Dedication, how admirable! I am pretty creative… I’ll click on this link and check out their designs, which I will find creative because a creative person like me recognizes creativity, and will value it accordingly.)

Non-Editorial Process Disclosure, aka, Oz Was Behind a Curtain for a Reason

It’s about you: After one year of development, we present: Our Show.

(PASS: Why did it take so long? How long is it supposed to take? Man, if I took a year to do something at my job, I wouldn’t have a job. Just sayin’.)

It’s about them: Be the first to see Our Show in its limited Our City engagement.

(MASS: Oh yeah, I’m an early adopter. Just check out my iPad! I can’t wait to tweet this to all my followers while I check in on Foursquare. I hope I can still get tickets.)

No One Puts Baby in a Corner

It’s about you: Unsigned Indie Band is completely original, no-genre music!

(PASS: Eh, this clip sounds like something else I heard once but I don’t have the available brain space to connect it to anything I already like. Next.)

It’s about them: The progressive orchestration of Arcade Fire meets the ethereal vocals of Florence and the Machine – with a beat you can dance to.

(MASS: Who are these guys, my perfect Pandora station? It’s about time someone mashed up two bands I’ve heard of with an activity I’d like the option to take part in.)

While Ciara is right in noting that people do need a reference point when evaluating something new, I am a little wary about making comparisons to other people/groups because so many people are promoted as the (different age/gender/generation) version of a person or as the next (insert popular entity here.) You can suffer when fans of the existing entity don’t feel the new version measures up. People who read fantasy novels roll their eyes at claims that a writer is the next J.R.R. Tolkien because it happen so often. I once read a book review where the writer proclaimed his joy that there was finally another writer in the genre good enough that comparing people to Tolkien was no longer necessary.

A number of years ago I linked to a series of posts by Greg Sandow who gave examples of poorly written press releases that cited musicians winning awards and competitions that might as well been made up for all the significance it had to most audience members. Ciara Pressler’s post reminded me of that because that sort of approach focuses so heavily on the artist and doesn’t provide as much time letting the audience know what they will receive from the experience that they wouldn’t with some other soloist. If there is no significant difference, then best not spend so much focus on that person when you could be focusing on the value to the potential audience.

The first reaction I had to Ciara’s “audience comment” that “Man, if I took a year to do something at my job, I wouldn’t have a job,” was that it took a lot longer than that to get Spiderman up on Broadway and people still want to see it despite all the weak reports. But then again, most of us ain’t putting up something with the cachet and hype to endure development delays and technical difficulties.

By the way, did this post title make you want to read it?

Info You Can Use: Google URL Builder

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Technology in the Arts recently had a tip about Google’s URL Builder. Designed to work with Google Analytics, the URL builder helps you track targeted campaigns by putting identifying words or phrases into your links. For example, you can post a link to an upcoming show and mention it on your Twitter feed and Facebook. Analytics will tell you that visits were referred by Facebook and Twitter, but if you inserted a link into posts across the course of a week from different accounts, you don’t know which post or account may have been effective or if the referrals actually come from your posts or someone entirely unrelated to your organization. Creating URLs with identifying information can help you determine how effective different efforts may be.

These links can also be used in emails and newsletters to accomplish the same thing. Tara George who wrote the Technology in the Arts entry notes, “For smaller organizations or independent artists who do not utilize broadcast email service providers (like Constant Contact), Google URL builder could prove to be a viable alternative for tracking traffic deriving from e-mail communication.” I am currently using a email service without these tracking abilities so I thought our “Give The Gift of Live Performance” holiday email campaign might be a good opportunity to use the URL Builder. I inserted a couple different tracking words into my emails to help differentiate between the lists and sat back to see what happened.

Well, there were fewer click throughs than I expected given the low number of opt-out requests we received. On the other hand, the number of ticket orders we received in the week after sending the email closely matched the number of referrals from the email. People who were interested enough to follow a link seemed to follow through with an order. One thing Analytics and URL builder can’t track is number of emails that were opened. There may have been a lot of people who opened the email but just weren’t ready to buy tickets for shows after the Christmas holidays or already knew enough about our performances from our brochure, website and previous emails that they didn’t need to click on any of the informational links in the email.

The tool can also only track when people follow links to URL addresses that you own/control enough to have placed the tracking script in webpages. So you can track visits to www.acmetheatre.org/ElvisShow.html, but not necessarily to the YouTube video the performer posted of Elvis Show. This didn’t immediately occur to me, though it should have, and I placed my tracking words in links to YouTube I included in my email because I wanted to track how many people were interested enough to watch the videos. Now the folks at YouTube will have my “ChristmasNews” pop up as a campaign word if they care to look at their Analytics report.

Tara George suggests asking others to create custom URLs for you or create these URLs for them so that all parties can track responses to interviews, stories, events and other collaborative endeavors that may drive traffic to each respective site.

Info You Can Use: Viral Media and Intellectual Property Guide

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The people over at the Technology in the Arts have been offering some nifty guides and podcasts for performing arts folks. Those I have looked at are fairly concise and easy to consume in a short period in your busy day. One of the more timely guides I have recently seen is about the legal considerations associated with posting video online that you hope will go viral.

As the guide author Amelia Northrup notes, technology has been moving faster than union agreements have been made so it can be difficult to know what is allowed and what is forbidden. Yet there is a fair bit of pressure to have a more extensive multi-media representation on the internet.

“Many of us have received well-intentioned comments from a friend or board member about posting performance footage online. However, there are not a lot of people giving practical advice on how to avoid an ugly legal run-in with your dancers over streaming video or negotiate with a union to ensure you are able to post the video of the third movement of a string quartet to your Facebook page. Building audiences with performance footage is wonderful, of course, but the benefit is nullified when your efforts cause a lawsuit from the composer!”

The guide has some case studies comparing the experiences of different arts organizations, both union and non-, who have worked to broadcast their works over the internet with varying results. Northrup also provides a brief guide to copyright law with a graphic that does a pretty good job at helping you get a general sense of which of the myriad copyright laws may apply to your production. (Though no guarantees you will be completely sure after looking at the graph.)

Northrup also discusses the fair use doctrine and address an assumption I never considered people might make. She points out that since using materials for educational purposes is permitted under fair use and non-profits are classified as educational entities, non-profits may assume there is nothing forbidding their use of protected materials. In short, it just ain’t so. On the other hand, some unions have rules that define use within certain parameters – “Actors’ Equity contracts have allowances for “b-roll,” which is approximately three minutes of footage that can be made publicly available, usually without royalties being paid to the performers.”

The guide also points out that more than just the work of the performers is covered by copyright and union protections and may involve payment of royalties and residuals.

“Artists contribute to the production by creating intellectual property, and therefore essentially become authors themselves. Any art used in the show, such as set, costumes, and lighting design are the intellectual property of these additional artist/authors (lighting designers, technical directors, etc.). This is also often a problem in the entertainment industry. In his book The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig describes the difficulties that movie producers have clearing rights for logos, artwork, even furniture.”

And don’t forget that a video you post online highlighting interesting sections of a performance will also involve the intellectual property work of the video editors and related production crew as well.

The guide includes a list of Dos and Don’ts which reiterates knowing what the rules are, negotiating for the widest latitude of use from the outset and sticking to the agreement. One of the case studies reinforces the “don’t” of assuming the two related unions you are making arrangements with talking to each other, even if they say they are. There was one “don’t” that wasn’t really discussed in the rest of the guide- “Don’t assume that designers, actors, or any other artist or author will automatically equate your organization’s promotions with publicity for them.”

I have never run into an instance where this became a problem between an organization and artists, but I have had encounters where people at arts organizations assumed that an artist or designer wouldn’t mind if they used the artist’s work because it would promote them. I think that could potentially be the biggest area of contention in the future since technology seems to be fostering this attitude. That was the basis for a big discussion debate on composer Jason Robert Brown’s blog this summer. Brown is a big defender of sheet music royalties and had that view challenged by a young woman who felt she was helping promote him by trading his sheet music over the internet. Brown found 4,000 instances of people offering his work for free and was a little concerned about the loss of royalties that might represent. One of the points the young woman used as a counter during their lengthy debate was that he might stand to make money if someone used the free sheet music in a talent show which lead someone else to download Brown’s music from iTunes.

This is a topic that has no quick or easy answers. There are hundreds of comments on Brown’s post debating this topic and from what I heard, visits to his site rocketed into the hundreds of thousands. I daresay the basic conversation about intellectual property and the best intentions of fans when they use it hasn’t exhausted itself yet. You can sue those with malicious intent with a clear conscience. Responding to exploitation by those who adore you is another matter entirely.

Must Read: For-Profit Arm No Panacea For Non-Profit Funding Woes

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If you have ever thought that starting a for-profit arm for your non-profit to help support the latter’s mission, you must read The Nonprofiteer’s post on the subject. I have been hearing it suggested that non-profits embrace these types of arrangements as grants and donations have become increasingly difficult to secure. A study linked to by The Nonprofiteer requires one to pause in such considerations.

Writes the Nonprofiteer of the study:

“nonprofit agencies which choose to support themselves with for-profit businesses end up serving their clients less and worse. Moreover, when the businesses thrive the profits go back into the business, while when the businesses falter the losses are taken out of the hide of the agencies. “

I took a look at the study, “Social Enterprise: Innovation or Mission Distraction,” in which author Rebecca Tekula analyzes the 990 filings of Human Service organizations in New York County from 2000 to 2005. The number of organizations this encompasses is not cited though Tekula writes that the data “represents 700 organizational years” which averages to 116.67 organizations for each of those six years.

What Tekula says she found is that enterprises that yield non-business related income undermine the value provided through the non-profit program-

“As hypothesized, the internal capital markets of nonprofit firms seem to follow that of for-profit firms in that diversification leads to value loss as proxied by programmatic expenditure. What can be inferred from my findings is that this particular type of external enterprising behavior is associated with less value in the programmatic output of human service nonprofits.”

And, no surprise, ineffective programs can be a drain on the resources that should be directed to the effective ones-

“My findings are in accordance with cross-subsidy theories of diversification in which internal budgeting allocates funds to divisions with few investment opportunities (ailing enterprises of nonprofits) while failing to channel funds to those with ample investment opportunities (effective, efficient programs). While this research is a first step toward identifying the factors associated with earned income behavior in nonprofit organizations, there is much work to be done in this area.”

Tekula is careful not to say this will be true for all sectors of the non-profit world and encourages similar study of the arts, healthcare and education. But does caution, (my emphasis)

“Clearly more thought and research must be invested in this area and caution must be given in popularizing and glorifying the unproven benefits of unrelated or external enterprising activities on the very organizations that have become important service providers for society’s neediest individuals.”

Gentrifying Both Space And Time

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So apparently arts activity can not only gentrify neighborhoods, it can gentrify time as well. I was attending some First Friday performances on the lawn of the state arts museum this past Friday and got to talking with the guy who organizes the activities. He is a prime mover in the arts scene involved with boards of a couple organizations, presenter of performances and a key figure in the arts district revitalization.

He told me that the downtown arts community was thinking about moving the gallery walk activities to another Friday. What had begun many years back as an attempt to bring activity to downtown at night by having galleries open succeeded a little too well. The First Friday activities made the district such a cool place to be that eventually the older mature crowd ended up supplanted by a younger, rowdy bar crawling crowd. Actually, this probably qualifies as a de-gentrification, doesn’t it?

Now no one is visiting the galleries and buying on First Fridays, but the bars are making their monthly payroll in one night. Things have gotten a little rowdy to the point where the police department is requiring that the downtown merchants association bring 14 more special duty officers on. The bars are being levied for the extra cost.

About a year ago, I started hearing about “slow art Fridays” on the 3rd Friday. From my discussion Friday night, I understand that this was laying the groundwork for the shift. Galleries and fashion houses are open on the 3rd Friday for this event and apparently the older, art buying demographic is showing up.

In the meantime, less effort is being put into the programming and promotion of arts events on First Fridays. There are still things going on and the doors are open, but the resources are being redirected. I was speaking with a ticket office clerk yesterday and he confirmed that things were dead in one of the cornerstone venues this past Friday.

So you are probably wondering, what keeps people from going down every Friday night and getting drunk in the streets? Nothing. There is nothing stopping people from doing the same thing on third Fridays, but they aren’t doing it yet. Since people aren’t really patronizing the galleries, that isn’t a motivating factor for coming downtown. Perhaps I am not listening to the right radio stations or reading the right newspapers or Twitter feeds, but I haven’t really seen bars pushing drink specials on First Fridays. They don’t have to. Probably the energy of being part of a big crowd is what is most attractive to people.

Perhaps it is the perception that they are engaging in a cultural activity that motivates people to attend even though they make a beeline for the bars. If the galleries and related businesses start closing up at 5 pm on the first Friday, then maybe the crowds will start to dissipate or end up migrating to the third Friday. If the galleries have the resources to open on First Fridays, it might be good in the long run training people to appreciate art through the continual exposure. Even if they aren’t buying now, they may be more open to doing so in the future. There is a proverb that one generation plants the tree and the next enjoys the shade. That is a tough thing to endure though if you have to pay your bills today.

The thing I think will keep third Fridays from being overrun is that it takes more effort to ascertain if the current Friday is the third one in the month than it does to recognize it is the first one. That may be the saving grace of the slow art theme of third Friday.

It is rather frustrating to keep hearing stories of artists becoming victims of their own success. You eke out an existence in squalid setting. Gradually things get better to the point where you are recognizing some success. But that means you have a handful of successful years before you are either priced out of your location or the aura of success attracts people who aren’t interested in your products driving away those who are. Is there any place that has been able to strike a balance and maintain the long term success and affordability environment for an arts community that was responsible for sparking a neighborhood revitalization?

Spend More To Make Your Donation Really Worth It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twitter Thursdays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tip You Might Be Able To Use

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prices So Low, It Might Be Insane!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Refunds and Exchanges

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So I made a big mistake this week with a reception invite. There was actually a letter missing from the title of the show on the cover of the invite. Now in my defense, about five other people missed it to. I had originally assumed that I messed it up by accidentally brushing the space bar when I was reviewing the work on my computer yesterday. Then I went back and looked at the versions I emailed out to the various parties involved, including the show creator, over the course of two weeks. It was missing all that time and no one caught it. I suspect part of the reason is that the cover of the invite was inverted so that it would fold into the correct orientation on the finished product. (Also, I think the show might be cursed. The show creator made a mistake on his first run of invitations a year ago when he was inviting his donors to a preview of part of the work.)

In any case, I sent the corrected version back to the printer and told them if they were having a sense of deja vu, it was because I had made a mistake on the first run. I got a call from the print shop and they said if I brought all the flawed pieces back, they would only charge me 50% of the original cost on the reprint. This was happy news to me since I resigned myself to putting the reprint on my credit card as it was my fault. I think it is a great policy on the part of the shop because they earn good will from the customer and they can be sure the paper is recycled rather than tossed in a dumpster.

As I usually do when I encounter an example of good customer service, I wondered how this policy might be applied to the arts. My first thought was in regard to exchange fees for tickets. Many organizations either do not exchange, have a $2-$5 fee for exchanges or only allow subscribers to exchange. I don’t have any data on how well any of these policies are received by audience members who want to change the performances. I suspect it is largely a function of the communities and the dynamics of the relationship each organization has with its audience base. While I think no exchanges or a fee provides an incentive to make a firm decision, it can be difficult to discern if the ticket office made a mistake or to demand people pay it when an accident/emergency is going to prevent their attendance. Deciding to do an exchange or refund is so often a subjective judgment call that having a fee can exacerbate the frustration of those who feel they were unjustly denied.

Part of the problem is an empty seat is not a ream of paper. Yes, an empty seat is lost revenue once the show has started but that is a more abstract concept for people than the ream of paper now spoiled by a mistake the consumer has made. The whole concept of a performance as a perishable commodity which you are exchanging money for can be tough to grasp if there are many opportunities. My dentist can fine me for breaking my appointment because he knows I will have to come back sooner or later when my teeth start to hurt. (Just for the record, I am faithful to my 6 month appointments.) Occupying his chair is something I feel I need to do. Not always the case with some performances.

In these days when people are making and changing their plans at the last minute, do no refund/exchange policies or fees make sense? Do they provide a disincentive to attendance in the first place? There are a number of organizations who experiment with flex passes, some of which allow you a set number of tickets to any performance you want to see. You can come once with 6 friends, come 6 times to the same show yourself or go to 6 different shows yourself. Seattle Rep has a package like this called Player Pass. They even have a Today’s Pass where you call the day of the show to get the best seats. Of course, if the show is sold out, you can’t get in.

If you only have one night performances and many of these shows don’t have similar ticket prices, then it can be difficult to institute a program like this. What I like about these flexible programs is that it puts a little more of the responsibility back on the ticket buyer. I am good at my job because I excel at advance planning. In the face of indecision and vacillation over weekend plans, I want to grumble, “geez, make a decision already!” With these flexible passes, if a person waits too long and the show they want to see is sold out and they don’t value the remaining shows in the season as much, then their subscriptions have lost a little of that intangible value I spoke of earlier.

Of course, the annoyance factor for me would be about the same whether they were wheedling and begging to get into a sold out show or vacillating about going to a show in advance. I may feel a little smug about having a sold out show, but I always hate having to turn people away from great shows for reasons that have nothing to do with ticket revenue. Flex passes don’t alleviate your worry on Wednesday about whether people will come to see the show on Friday because few have committed to any weekend plans yet. Well sure, with the flex passes you have already collected some money, and that is comforting. But performances were meant to be seen, the more the better.

Yes, We Get Snow Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

100% Fundraising Expenses

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Some what apropos of my post on mandatory salary caps for executives of non-profits is a post by Dan Pallotta on the Harvard Business Review blog in which he makes suggestions that would likely see government entities really start screaming.

Palotta advocates for salaries of non-profit staffs on par with those of for profit businesses. But the bulk of the post is spent on the premise that low fund raising expenditures are actually inhibiting charities from doing the most good. His argument is that instead of touting 10%-15% expenditures on fund raising and remaining too small to make a big impact on a problem, charities should be spending 50%-100% on fund raising.

“The less an organization invests in fundraising the less it can grow. The less it can grow the more human suffering persists. We have institutionalized a mechanism for insuring the persistence of human suffering and called it “charity.”

[…]

“If we are serious about the value of human life, then we have to start thinking about 50 to 100% fundraising rates for the organizations chartered to save human lives. Those organizations should take no pride in telling donors or anyone else how low their fundraising costs are. Quite the opposite. I want to support the organization that’s going for scale, not the one that’s stuck where it is. Why would I support a cancer organization promoting its low fundraising investment while cancer remains uncured? We have the whole reward system backwards.

(Qualification: I’m not sanctioning inefficiency. That’s a completely different conversation. Everything I’m advocating assumes maximum efficiency.)

What we are doing is not working. A world in which 10 to 15% fundraising ratios are the norm is a world in which our charities are woefully too small to confront social problems on any meaningful scale. It’s a world where growth occurs – if it occurs at all – at the pace of molasses — the pace of death — and where human suffering continues on an unimaginable scale with no end in sight.”

If you are like me and you are thinking if an organization is spending 100% of the money it raises on raising more money then no one is getting cured, then you are absolutely correct. That is exactly what he is proposing. Presumably, you would use all that money to find a new way to convince people to donate since you wouldn’t have any examples of those whom you have helped.

If you read down into the comments section where Pallotta responds to some of the questions, you get a little more detail. Addressing the idea that the fund raiser never gets around to doing anything, Pallota says,

“Think of it this way. Humanitarian organizations regularly engage in certain activities – a direct-mail campaign – designed to acquire new donors. Sometimes those campaigns can go for several years running 100% costs. But then comes the pay-off – huge fundraising databases with no new expense associated with them You turn that engine on and then you start producing revenues for programs and for the cause at volumes many, many times larger than you could have if you never made the investment and never tolerated the 100% cost ratios for a certain period of time. Understand? “

In response to the question posed by a commenter named Shaun, who asks “who wants to be the person who gives money just to solicit more money?” Pollota answers, “Think of it this way: if I told you your dollar could go directly to the needy, or that it could go to an ad campaign that would generate ten dollars for the needy, which would you choose?” To which another commenter, RachelAC, replies, “I might prefer that my $1 go to the needy now, rather than $10 going to the needy in five years.”

I think RachelAC’s response expresses the crux of the matter for me. In an ideal situation, Pallota’s approach works. But my concern is that the fund raising entity gets so enthralled by their success in raising money, that they never stop and fund the solution. As RachelAC implies, in many situations the dollar today can make a difference where the $10 comes too late. Though granted, whenever a solution to a massive problem comes, it arrives just moments too late for some.

My even bigger concern is that the officers will embezzle the money and run off as they have with so many charities in the past. The fact they are apparently not making as much as they could be according to Pallota only means the incentive to do so increases. I would prefer to know the thieves only absconded with the little I gave rather than what they parlayed it in to.

Big problems can require audacious approaches to solve them. I can see where the piecemeal approach isn’t getting people closer to a solution any faster. But will people continue to give if a theft on the same grand scale were to occur? I think the faith you lose in a charity when it betrays your trust cuts a lot deeper than when a company or person you have invested with misappropriates your money. You enter a relationship with the latter knowing there is a chance you will lose your money. With investments, we are told to diversify. Does it make sense to do the same with our philanthropy or are we just short changing an already under capitalized effort?

Why Don’t You Want To Talk To Me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As The Brochure Folds, The Saga Continues!

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For those of you who were following the trials and tribulations of my attempts to design a season brochure per the requirements of the post office, I must confess….the post office won. *sigh*

By which, of course, I mean that I could have designed it anyway I wanted if I were willing to pay the price. The changes the print house suggested did add a slightly disjointed element to the design, but since I decided most people who kept it would be looking at the other side of the brochure most of the time, it wasn’t worth the extra cost.

I have been trying to find a clear illustration of what we ended up with, but really haven’t been able to. The instructions the print house gave us in the course of trying to convince us to change the design just confused us so I didn’t want to use that. But if you are curious, grab a piece of paper and make your own mock up! We used a larger sheet than your standard 8.5 x 11 paper, but you will get the idea.

Hold piece of paper in landscape orientation. Fold the right side to the left so that the crease is on the right side. Fold the paper in thirds starting from the top. Top third folds down, bottom third folds up so it lays on top. Draw a little indicia on the right hand corner. That is the mailing side facing you. The post office likes the piece to go in with the full crease on the bottom and the creased ends on the right side. The open ends are on the top and left side.

If you rotate the page on the vertical axis and write the name of your arts organization, you see where we had our theatre name. The problem is, if you open the brochure up now, you will see the top panel is the mailing label upside down. We had a real striking image we wanted to use across the middle panel where the name of the theatre was, down to the bottom panel. I decided I could live with the mailing panel being upside down since the rest of that side looked good. With most of the important content about the shows on the other side, I figured most people would tack it up with that side facing out and rarely see the inverted panel on the back.

Any way, that was my solution for this situation. The printer is going to be having a seminar on the postal service regulations and our graphic designer plans to go. Based on what she learns and knowing how the post office likes things, next year we may start out our design concept differently with an alternative orientation and folding pattern. The one interesting thing I haven’t gotten a chance to follow up on is that both the post office and the printers said we would likely need three tabs to hold the mailing closed. All the brochures my staff and I received at our homes only had one. I am just wondering why. (I also wonder what it says that I am writing reminders to check up on adhesive tab rules.)

Info You Can Use: Taking Your Marketing Mobile

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A member of the Performing Arts Administrators group on LinkedIn suggested a link to two marketing guides by Kodak. One was on using social media and the other is about using mobile marketing. Both are free downloads.

I looked at the mobile media guide most closely because I have the least idea of how to use that as a technology much less as an effective marketing tool. My initial impression that parts of it wouldn’t be easy to set up were correct. Getting a short code –the four to five digit number to which people text a word or phrase is complicated to arrange.

“Use a short code on a service provider or get a service provider to work with the aggregators on obtaining carrier certification and provisioning according to your planned campaigns and needs. Since every new service requires a new certification, make sure you cover as many services as possible before submitting the campaign for approval, to avoid having to go through the certification process again.”

Both documents provide good background and glossary of terms for those who aren’t familiar with the technologies. They provide examples of campaigns they have conducted, many of which are on a scale and involve resources most arts organizations only dream of. That being said, Twitter allows people to follow your feed on their service by texting to a number. If you created a dedicated Twitter account for promotional efforts, you can have information and links to all sorts of specials sent to people’s mobile devices without dealing with the carrier certifications. It appears you just need to text “follow (feedname)” to 40404 in the US. The code is different in other countries.

Kodak encourages people to evaluate if the technology is the correct fit for their organization. They also offer Do’s and Don’ts for campaigns. The one they provide for mobile marketing seems obvious as a step for keeping spam off mobile devices.

“The rule for viral messages is that they can only be sent by non-commercial entities who manually select a recipient to receive it. Messages forwarded by automatic means, originating from a commercial source, or offering inducements to forward messages are definite “don’ts”.”

At first I just thought it was an ethical rule, but since the next section advises you to consult a lawyer about what is and is not permissible, I wondered if it might be a Federal law created to squelch spam before it started. As always, the best rule of thumb with most communication media remains true — be careful you aren’t annoying people.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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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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