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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.

As The Brochure Folds

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I am in the process of having our season brochure designed for the upcoming year and it seems like the way the brochure is folded is taking great precedence over the actual content of the piece. Because of postal regulations about the way items may be mailed the printing houses are suggesting we change the way we fold the brochure. It will be the same size and shape as we had planned, but will require fewer seals to hold it closed when we mail it. Fewer seals means a savings in the printing and mailing.

Except that the way the brochure opens is very important. More to the point, what people see when they first open the brochure is very important. A few years back, the first thing you saw when you opened the brochure were the compelling eyes of an Indian dancer. People opened the brochure and had a real “wow” experience. Last year we used a different designer and she took another approach to the arrangement of the information. Instead of an image, the first thing you saw was text. It wasn’t as ideal a situation in my mind, but the design positioned information in a better place for those who attached the brochure to refrigerators and bulletin boards as reminders. (We get a lot of ticket orders throughout the year from people who keep our brochure.)

The text people first saw last year when they opened the brochure dealt with our flex subscriptions and volunteering. Both areas saw an increase in participation last year proving that I really need to pay attention to what is on that first panel. I will be getting a full size sample to proof from the designer tomorrow. You can be assured one of the first things I will do is figure out how it folds and open and close it many times to determine what our patrons’ experience is going to be like.

I mention all these factors, of course, by way of pointing out the practical application of the various considerations you might employ when designing brochures.

Lies, Damn Lies and Are We Ever Going To Use These Survey Results?

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My Google Alerts informed me that the phrase butts in the seats was used recently in what turned out to be a reprint of a 2008 article on MinnesotaPlaylist. The topic of the December 2008 issue was “Know Your Audience.” In addition to the original piece that brought me there, a couple others caught my attention as well.

The first article, Joseph Scrimshaw’s “Humans With Pulses,” addresses the idea that everyone will enjoy a quality artistic product if only they are aware of it.

“I’m beginning to think that failing to be specific about who you want in the audience presents a risk to both the profit and enjoyment of theater. There is a tendency for artists to believe that any cross section of people will enjoy their work. After all, theater is good. Theater reaches out to people. It’s easy to reason, “This piece of theater I have created is good, so why shouldn’t any human with a pulse enjoy it?” Music is good, too. When I was fifteen years old my two favorite musical acts were Frank Sinatra and Guns N’ Roses. I chatted with my Grandma about one and with my friends about the other. Unfortunately, there was no chance in hell of any crossover.”

Scrimshaw talks about being aware of the specific segments of the community who might be interested in a performance and why. Granted, the venues he seems to work in sound like they are at the smaller end of the spectrum and thus can serve very narrow segments of the population–like knitters. His description of the audience at his knitting-based, murder mystery comedy sounds like the diverse group everyone yearns for-

“We had knitters from 18 to 82, multiple ethnicities, sexual orientations, and genders. The knitting demographic trumped all because they had an investment in the show: They wanted to see if this Scrimshaw guy (who’s supposed to be funny) had anything interesting to say about this craft that is their hobby and their passion.”

Using the topic of demographics as a segue, John Middleton provides an amusing look at the whole idea of scrutinizing demographics in “They, the People”

She and her husband—let’s call him David—went to Mexico last year and have been thinking about a trip to Europe. However, they’ve both lost a lot of money from their 401(k) accounts and what with Nancy’s allergies and recent weight gain and David’s high cholesterol and occasional erectile dysfunction, that romantic trip to the moors of England might have to wait.

“Whoa!” you’re saying. “This is creepy. Does he really know this stuff or is he just making it up?”

I know this stuff. Visit the raw data (PDF) and draw your own conclusions. Remember, demographers don’t lie.

I actually checked out the raw data, and believe it or not the survey actually asked about all these aspects of the participants’ lives. Here is the real stuff to remember:

It’s true demographers don’t lie. But remember, these numbers are simply a tool. They are descriptive. They do not tell us what plays to do or how to do them. They simply allow us to think about Nancy and her life. They remind us that we’re not just asking Nancy to plunk down twenty bucks to see a show; we’re asking for an investment of her time. She has to find out about our production, decide to go, come up with a night she and David are both free, leave work in time to dress, figure out where our theater is, find parking, and so on. Are we making this process as easy for Nancy as possible?

You see, demographers are not soulless, art-killing philistines. We’re here to help.

However, if you still have doubts about the usefulness of demography, let me tell you something: You are not alone. There is a tiny checkbox labeled “terror” in the heart of every demographer. The system of gathering respondent data is filled with imperfections from start to finish. One flawed remembrance here, one inflated self-aggrandizement there—each insignificant on its own, but they start to add up. Then as we extrapolate the data, every imperfection becomes multiplied many times over until we have nothing left but a spider’s web of half-truths and sweat-soaked guesses. We crush this seething mess into solid-seeming charts, tables and graphs in order to give it the look of Truth, but we know: Demographers lie! And if you think this is only true of demographics, you’re kidding yourself.

Filling out the theme of surveying and data is Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw piece, “Doing Data.” What was immediately interesting to me was her story about studying in London and wanting to do her Master’s thesis on whether theatre and dance organizations used the data they collected. Her advisor couldn’t understand why.

“His response was of course all organizations use data, that wasn’t interesting, I should focus on what they were doing with the data or whether they were satisfied instead. He had worked for years with Theatrical Management Association, a service organization for theaters in the UK, and he had started an audience data collection and dissemination program in 1990—fifteen years before I was coming to him with this topic. So he thought my concerns were old news.”

But Sara knew this wasn’t how it was in the US where data was collected, but rarely acted upon. Part of the reason she felt was because people don’t know how to effectively use the information that passes through their hands. This is what she found in the course of her research:

“I was also surprised that less than 50 percent of organizations collected demographic information, as that is frequently needed for grant reporting. The results also showed that over 50 percent of organizations did not consistently have access to their own box office data—meaning that they had to rely on other methods to collect data about their audiences.

Do I have any recommendations? I think using data is simple and complex at once. The most important things are fairly easy: looking at the data, analyzing it for trends, inspecting to see if there are any obvious gaps. However, the key is really using the data to understand your audience—asking who they are, where they are, why they come to you, then using that data to help inform your future decisions. Do you want to compare yourself to other organizations? Do you want to reach people you currently aren’t reaching? Is your audience who you thought they were? Audience data can help to answer all of these questions more honestly.

[…]

…I don’t believe that there is a magic formula or a correct answer. Instead, I think it’s a process of using little pieces of information to help create an overall picture.”

I have to agree that it is both simple and complex to use data. For me it is as much about the suspected dearth of information from certain segments of our audience as trying to accurately process the information I do have. I know our audience surveys aren’t being filled out by a representative portion of our audience because we barely get any completed by people in the 20s and 30s, but we see a lot of them passing through the doors.

Likewise, so many people purchase tickets at the door where we don’t have the time to collect information not directly related to the ticket purchase that the only data I have is from the lesser percentage that plan ahead. I could send reminder postcards to people who make their decisions last minute and perhaps improve my relationship with them. My software tells me exactly what time they made their purchase–if only I knew where they live or who they are!

I don’t want to be making decisions about how to serve all of my audience based on what I know about 20% of them. I figure that is a formula for retaining slightly more than that 20% but that is all I have to work with at the moment. Though that isn’t to say we can’t ask audience members to help us serve them by making note of their account numbers so we can better track simple things like attendance preferences. We may still miss a large segment of the audience, but we will narrow the gap a little and let people know their presence is important to us.

Consolidating Back Office In Columbus

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I was listening to NPR this weekend and caught a story about Columbus Association for the Performing Arts CAPA, a Columbus, OH organization which area arts organizations have contracted to perform administrative functions.

About a year ago, I wrote about the excellent series the Non Profit Law blog did on the experiences non-profits have encountered merging their administrative functions.

Most of the examples used in that series were social service organizations so it was of some interest to hear a little about how arts organizations were entering the same arrangement. I wondered if it might become more prevalent in these tough economic times given that six Columbus area arts groups entered into arrangements with CAPA in the last year and a half. (This assumes there are businesses around the country who are able to offer these services. Not aware of too many in existence.)

I share a similar concern as Russell Willis Taylor quoted near the end of the piece. Relationships really matter when making the specific case for your organization in the community. Since CAPA seems to have varying scopes of responsibility with each client company, presumably an organization can reserve certain functions for itself and perhaps be involved with CAPA’s efforts on their behalf. But for a lot of artists and groups, the temptation to cede those functions to another so they can concentrate on creation of work alone may prove seductive. In the long run, their presence and public profile may wane as a group like CAPA’s waxes due to their adroit handling of so many responsibilities.

I don’t doubt that an arrangement with a group like CAPA can be extremely beneficial. Large for profit companies outsource their accounting, human resources, marketing, advertising and other functions all the time to great effect. But they also work very closely and stay very involved in every activity affecting the public image of their product because that is what is necessary.

As a little aside- I must confess that I had a moment of glee when I heard them describe the political cartoon implying CAPA is taking over. That anyone feels an arts organization is growing too powerful is so novel a concept, I can’t help but feel some joy. I mean, I don’t think I have heard anyone accused of that since the late 19th century with the Theatrical Syndicate. (Okay, I will grant you Clear Channel/Live Nation.)

Friday As The New Wednesday? Only On Broadway!

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Ken Davenport at Producer’s Perspective recently reprinted a preference survey conducted by the Telecharge ticketing service. Telecharge set out to discover at what times Broadway audiences would prefer to attend shows. The results were pretty interesting. It wasn’t really surprising to me to learn that people would rather have weekend shows start at 7 pm and that people who go to matinees like to eat after the show and those who go to evening shows want to eat before. But I found it interesting that people would rather have the weekday matinee be on Friday rather than Wednesday.

This raises the question about how well do we really know our audience’s preferences. I know that some people in my audience would prefer an earlier start time on week nights. But others need the extra time to wait for the traffic to clear enough to make it over to the theatre. Still, I am sure there is a lot I don’t know about my audience preferences.

Of course, there are other matters to consider. In the case of the Broadway study, one of the biggest impediments to changing the matinee day to Friday is that bus operators and schools don’t want to have their groups in NYC on a Friday night. Davenport notes that shows that aren’t dependent on these groups for their audience base might try some experimentation. Even if you aren’t on the 8 shows a week schedule Broadway is, there are other practical concerns like not overburdening your cast and crew with back to back performances and other time related stresses to consider.

Anyway, there are some observations made toward the end of the report that may just be interesting for their own sake, but could also drive some conversations in your offices.

Info You Can Use: Cell Phone Donations

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If you have been excited by the prospect of using cell phones as a mode of donation after hearing of the success in raising funds for Haiti, you may want to do some research and calculations. The cell phone and credit card companies have gone out of their way to make it easy to donate for Haiti relief and waived most of the ancillary costs.

You on the other hand, probably won’t be so lucky.

Hawaii Public Radio had a short piece covering a meeting sponsored by a local foundation on the subject of cell phone donations this week. (link downloads mp3 file. This link if first doesn’t work. Look for raising funds..social media) A representative from a cell phone company talked about the costs to set something like this up- $500 set up fee, $400 monthly fee and a a .35 per transaction fee.

With costs like that, it would likely only be worth your while if you had a large group of people already giving that you wanted to provide an alternative mode for donating.

Now that said, I can easily see the costs coming down as those for whom it makes sense use the service. Once all those involved with the transactions create more efficient processes, the service may become more affordable. Someone is likely to invent an app for the iPhone or Facebook which will facilitate the whole exchange and two years from now it will be a $2 billion business in $25 average increments.

Another observation that is made in the story related to social media was in regard to who one puts in charge of coordinating it. One speaker cautioned against putting the youngest person in the office in charge of social media just because they understand the software the best of anyone. “They know the tools, but they don’t understand the sophistication of your message and they don’t always understand the intangible qualities…of how you actually communicate with people out there.”

I have a suspicion this is something a lot of people have already thought to themselves but were afraid to say it for fear of showing just how out of touch with social media and its great power they are. It just takes a visit to sites like Failbooking.com to see some pretty poor choices when using Facebook. Though to be fair, I sort of question the wisdom of this water safety ad by Royal Life Saving Society Australia.

Honolulu Symphony No Longer Stands Apart

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There is an oft expressed sentiment in Hawaii that the state is about 10 years behind the current trends. The Honolulu Symphony administration, however, seems to be right in step with the current approach symphony management nationwide takes while in negotiations with their musicians.

In an interview that aired last Friday on Hawaii Public Radio, Honolulu Symphony Executive Director Majken Mechling echos the usual arguments about musicians only working part time, being overpaid for their services and being obstructionist. My heart sunk when I heard this during my morning drive to work last Friday. These arguments sound so similar to those espoused by other symphony organizations across the nation, I wondered if Mechling, who was recently executive director at the local chapter American Diabetes Association, had researched those symphony negotiations in preparation for the symphony job. Intentional or just coincidence, I believe it was a mistake to follow this approach in terms of public and musicians relations.

The symphony administration has gone from the exemplar of civil relations with musicians I cited about a year and a half ago and Ron Spigelman praised about a year ago, to just like most every other symphony.

The Honolulu Symphony musicians’ pay was about 12 weeks behind by the time a large donation late last year caught them up. They had been continuing to play for about a year even though the gap in how far behind their pay was continually increased.

Last April I had observed that the moral victory the musicians achieved by their dedication to their organization in spite of not having been paid didn’t put food on their table or pay their mortgages. I will likewise acknowledge that dedication, commendable as it might be, doesn’t pay off the symphony’s debts today.

But I can’t imagine that the decision to donate $2.13 million to the symphony last September wasn’t in part influenced by the dogged loyalty the musicians showed to the organization. I am sure the musicians’ gesture impressed a number of people enough to make less publicly recognized donations.

Now about three months after the symphony filed for bankruptcy protection, to hear the musicians disparaged as if they hadn’t provided such a significant sign of their investment disturbs me. Frankly, even if they are being obstructionist, it is hard to blame them after enduring such a long period of uncertainty and making concessions only to have things fall apart on them anyway. Even if the musicians aren’t as cordial in private as they were before, where is the benefit in employing antagonistic language?

I certainly don’t condone any threats Mechling may have received from musicians or their supporters. But after a long period where the relations between the administration and the orchestra were at least publicly polite, there doesn’t seem to be anything to gain by being critical of the musicians. The organization still retains a halo of goodwill. What is the cost of being complimentary of the musicians or saying nothing? The situation may unavoidably end with the number of musicians being severely cut. It would be better that the narrative continually be that the orchestra has always valued its musicians, always honored their loyalty and is heartsick to have reduced their numbers. That would be the sort of thing that convinces donors the orchestra is still worth supporting, even in it’s diminishes capacity.

The thing I disliked the most was Mechling’s comparison of the dealings with the musicians union to that of the state and its union employees. I believe she was trying to tap into the popular sentiment expressed on online comment forums that was recently running against the state employees while they were making obligatory noises resisting pay cuts and furloughs. (Disclosure: I am represented by one of the union bargaining units which did settle and take pay cuts and furloughs.) I believe her attempts were misplaced and unnecessary. For one thing, the state employees would have been striking and making all sorts of noise if their pay was just a couple weeks in arrears. The musicians barely made the slightest critical statement publicly against the symphony. Even now Steven Dinion’s comments in the interview that they have been frustrated by the process and don’t understand the administration’s agenda are about the strongest public statements that have been made by the musicians on the situation.

I understand and empathize with the frustration Mechling may be feeling having taken the helm of an organization that seemed to have cause for hope only to have bankruptcy declared a short time later. The time she was provided to feel any sort of elation was quickly curtailed and now she is faced with overseeing the (hopefully) partial dismantling of a long storied institution. This includes being faced with making decisions about the futures of 80 some individuals. That can’t be easy. Artists, administrators and technicians grousing about each other in turn is a national past time in the performing arts. Limiting the timing and the forum in which these are done, however, is critical.

Engaging Production Blog

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Over the last few months, I have been following Don Hall’s An Angry White Guy In Chicago blog as he discusses the process behind the show he is directing, The (edward) Hopper Project..

Hall directed a play based on Edward Hopper‘s iconic Nighthawks painting. He was inspired by a retrospective of the artist at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper via Wikipedia.org

What has kept me coming back on a consistent basis is the fact that he does such a great job talking about his process and holding my interest when so many production blogs fail to do so.

So I thought I would direct a little attention his way (though he certainly doesn’t need my help) and point out some of the entries that caught my attention most:

-His discussion of how to make a play written by a group work. He acknowledges writing by committee generally isn’t going to yield anything of quality and talks about working through the conflicts he had with people who didn’t agree with his cuts. (And here is a reposting of Time Out Chicago preview piece he inserts into his blog later in which his process is described less charitably. To his glee, it seems.)

-Post about the start of rehearsal

One of the interesting things he does is reposts all the reviews of the work, starting on January 19 (if you followed the link to all the Hopper entries, just scroll up and start reading upward from the review by Joe Stead.) He then reflects, pretty fair and honestly for the guy who directed it, about the review, further discussing what his aims had been.

He acknowledges why some people may find the show difficult or dislike the style in which the show was presented. He says as much in response to one of the first reviews

“I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a sigh of relief that someone appreciated the fractured narrative structure and found it “consistent with the mystique evoked by Hopper.”

His review of reviews illuminates in one place the truth that you shouldn’t attempt to gear your show toward pleasing critics. What each seemed to think he lacked contradicted at least one other reviewer.

-One of the entries I loved the most since I have never heard of anyone else even trying to experience their show in this manner is the entry where he listens to his show being described for the blind. He laughs so hard that he approaches the point of sabotaging his own show.

However, Don does suffer some repercussions for his practice of reprinting reviews whole cloth and receives a cease and desist letter in response. The Chicago Tribune Theatre Editor pre-emptively reminds him of the limits of fair use when he provides Don with the link to the review which appeared in that paper. (I assume he does that with all the blogs and not in reaction to the desist letter.)

While I don’t wish legal action on anyone, I appreciate the reminder about the intellectual property issues and concerns one must be cognizant of when creating art. From what I understand, the cease letter was sent in reaction to reprinting a review from a web only publication. Since he fully credits and links to the original review, the only motivation I can think of for hiring a lawyer is that the advertising revenue lost by not having people visit the site. I am not sure Don was even asked to take the post down prior to receiving the letter. As more newspapers move to web only presences, I wonder if this sort of thing will become more prevalent.

Remember, The P Stands For Personal

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I had a situation emerge related to personal URLs (PURLs) that sort of put me off. I have written about these personalized web addresses which allow you to provide a customized experience for the recipients before. I hadn’t really thought that someone might invest the time and expense of creating PURLs and not provide a customized experience. When I had such an experience, I began to question the motivation and wasn’t entirely pleased with the direction my thoughts turned.

One of my alma maters sent me a brochure saying “Joe, a lot has change since X” and provided a URL that incorporated my name. (To protect my vanity and the specific school, I am not going to mention the date of my graduation.) This created an expectation that when I visited there would something like then and now photos of the campus. Perhaps there would be one of those lists noting that kids born the year I graduated have never known a world where different situations didn’t exist. Maybe there would be a really detailed list of all the weddings, births, promotions and general accomplishments of my graduating class.

But other than my name, it was a really, really, really generic web page. The alumni page on the school website is actually more engaging. One of the links to a virtual tour lead to a YouTube video which had been removed by the poster.

One of the prominent features was a donation appeal letter by the student featured in the mailer. So at this point I start thinking maybe the whole PURL set up was to measure which alumni were engaged enough with the school to use the PURL so the school could follow up with additional appeals. This made the whole set up seem calculated and not at all personal.

I actually emailed the alumni office last week saying all of the above. I told them that the PURL created an expectation of a personalized experience and when it did not emerge, I began to suspect the worst. I have yet to hear back from them.

Quite honestly, I think I could have made the same mistake. Even if I hadn’t wanted to necessarily follow up with a donation appeal, I could imagine using PURLs to see what percentage of lapsed donors and ticket buyers were still engaged with my theatre. I probably wouldn’t create a PURL with their name but rather embed a unique code in a link they clicked through on or have a situation where people would self-identify. When we are convinced we have a way to more accurately reach and measure our intended constituency, I think it is easy to overlook the recipient’s perspective and expectations upon receiving a communication.

So my advice here is that if you create an expectation of a personalized experience, whether it is in person at your performances or via an online presence, you should be perceived as making an effort to provide it at the very least.

Mad Man Delayed

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I had marked this video intending to post it during Inside the Arts “Mad Men Week,” but totally forgot about it until coming across it today. The video is Rory Sutherland talking about how ad men create perceived value for objects. The has a great sense of humor so the video is just plain fun to watch.

My favorite bit comes toward the end when he talks about Post cereal’s roll out of Diamond Shreddies which literally turned the old Shreddies cereal on end. Inexplicably, the move was a little controversial and Post issued a “combo pack” of both cereals. (I gotta hope the controversy was manufactured by Post.)

The thing that might be most valuable for arts people is a quote at the end of his talk where he cites a quote “Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new.” Though in the case of the arts and current attendance trends, the familiar may be an entirely new experience.

He says it isn’t a bad definition of what advertising people’s job is: “To help people appreciate what is unfamiliar. But also to gain a greater appreciation and place a far higher value on those things that are already existing.”

Okay no surprise there. Apropos to my previous comment, arts people try to make their disciplines familiar to those who haven’t had much interaction with it every day.

Support of Great Numbers

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Today I got an appeal from a performing arts group asking me to vote for them on the Chase Community Giveaway Facebook page. The top 100 organizations get $25,000 and the top voted organization get $1,000,000. I am a little leery about this. First of all, I wonder if Chase is using this to gather names to offer their banking services to. I am also concerned about charitable giving becoming a matter of popularity and campaigning. I have never had any interaction with the group who emailed me. They likely got my address by buying a database from a professional organization of which I am a member. Now they are spamming me in an appeal for my support.

I do appreciate it when people outside corporate giving offices are provided an opportunity to direct donations. Many organizations I have worked for have benefited from employer matching donations. For Subaru’s 30th anniversary in the US, they asked their employees to nominate causes to which they would donate cars. A place I once worked received one of those cars. (And my next car is likely to be a Subaru as a result.)

Every September, a local grocery chain allows people to donate to charities at the cash register and they match it. We send out emails alerting people to this opportunity. The people we email already have a relationship with us in some form.

Just like with American Idol voting, giving based on voting results provides too much opportunity for stuffing the ballot box using scripts, duplicate Facebook accounts and other little tricks. Not only do charities not deserve to have their funding decided in this manner, but their staffs should be pursuing their core purpose, not frantically monitoring internet voting standings and trying to rally votes. The constituencies that many of these groups serve may be immensely grateful for the help they receive, but may not have the ability or time to get online to express that appreciation by voting. Those who deserve the support most may not even make it on the radar.

However, if giving decisions are going to be made via social media tools, then it behooves non-profits to raise their public profile so that people are aware of their work and accomplishments and can advocate for them.

On a related note, you may or may not be aware that when Dutch Bank DSB dropped out as sponsor of the U.S. Olympic Speedskating team, Stephen Colbert called upon his viewers to pool their money and donate to sponsor the team. The Colbert Nation logo will appear on the team’s uniforms starting at the World Games.

It started me thinking that maybe the arts should do something similar. Perhaps we could funnel our money through Americans for the Arts. But the question is, what team to sponsor? The gymnastics teams with their choreographed floor exercises might seem a good fit, but may be too obvious. Maybe the pole vaulting team. “Americans for the Arts, proud sponsor of the US Olympic pole vaulting team. Americans for the Arts, catapulting America to new heights.”

Okay, a little corny, but it could be fun. Think of it- whatever team we picked would have some of the best visual promotions out there. Visual arts could be creating all sorts of pieces in tribute to the athletes in action. We might even end up with an Olympic mascot that wasn’t immediately forgettable.

Gulp! Let Employees Set The Rules

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So getting back to my Human Sigma discussion in this entry. There is quite a bit I am skipping over generally because I have discussed many of the concepts before in other entries. For example, the idea that customers can develop an emotional investment with a company based on how different factors align with how a person identifies themselves. The surroundings and other customers conform to their idea of cool and upscale and so they develop an attachment with it.

One thing authors Fleming and Asplund mention that evoked an “ah-ha!” connection for me was the importance of having design empower customers. People want to feel competent in their relationship with your organization and design contributes to that. This is why many chain stores have standardized layouts. Nothing erodes the confidence of a do-it-yourselfer like not being able to find what they seek in a big box hardware store by yourself.

This made me think of the need to have easy to navigate websites and voice mail systems, but most importantly for the arts—an easy to navigate season brochure. How many season brochures have you picked up and couldn’t figure out how to buy single tickets much less fully subscribe to a season? The fact that people aren’t subscribing much any more may be a partial blessing for organizations’ relationships because negotiation of many a brochure has been the bane of arts patrons.

One study finding I alluded to in earlier entries is that Human Sigma isn’t just about getting customers highly invested in the company. According to their research, even within the same company, the branches that were most profitable had high emotional investment by both customers and employees. Having one group actualized but not the other is good, but having both improves success exponentially.

Now you may be thinking this is great and your organization is about halfway there because arts people almost by definition are highly emotionally invested in what they do. But they aren’t necessarily invested in promoting and interacting with patrons. If you recall the list of quotes in yesterday’s entry, at least one artist wondered why he/she needed extra training to be an arts educator given all they had received in their discipline.

Employee-Customer interactions contain the most terrifying suggestions in Human Sigma because Fleming and Asplund urge instructing employees about the end goal but leaving it to them to achieve it. Because a standard script of responses can’t cover all eventualities, the authors essentially propose using one as a FAQ document rather than as part of a set procedure. This is pretty scary because it requires giving up a lot of control. Though I should note, it doesn’t mean relaxing standards, just re-evaluating how those standards are measured.

Instead they suggest creating a series of strategies employees can use to improve their interactions with customers. Rather than rewarding people on the basis of how many people they can process in an hour, the focus is on engaging in conversations to assess their needs. “The uncomfortable truth here is left on their own, employees will develop their own strategies for interacting with their customers and their fellow employees, whether you play a constructive part in that process or not.” They posit that you are better off involving yourself at the start to keep it constructive.

The process is more than I can explain here so you will have to read the book if you are interested. In summary though, they say that the best environment to help people develop new strategies for customer interaction is one where they are held accountable for their mistakes and high quality feedback is provided. What they aren’t suggesting is that each person does their own thing, but rather that employees be allowed to develop new approaches by group consensus.

One of the things that popped out as I read the book was the concept of decision making silos. These silos emerge when decision making is compartmentalized rather than shared throughout the organization. The example they use was an airline whose advertising arm promised much better service than the front line service personnel had the resources to deliver. In fact, each had been provided with contradictory guidance. Advertising was tasked to improve market share, the front line was instructed to ruthlessly control costs. Neither consulted the other to discuss how to resolve an essentially mutually exclusive set of expectations.

I have talked about how marketing isn’t just the job of that department before. The authors go a step further by suggesting the position of a Chief Human Sigma Officer who will watch out for such conflicts and has the authority to move an organization toward more interactive decision making. They suggest consolidating all marketing and human resource responsibility into this executive position. (Though acknowledge other configurations are possible.) I don’t know how this might manifest in many art organizations. Though given that disciplines like theatre are merging artistic and management executives into one position, maybe merging marketing and human resources isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

I am nearly done with my discussion of the book. Next entry- Assessment and Reward

Art That Scans

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I have a few more thoughts based on the Human Sigma book I have been discussing over the last few entries. However, I wanted to present some fun stuff I have recently come across as something of a palate cleanser before I move on.

In something of a reverse of Al Hirschfeld’s work where people would try to find a bit of information, the name Nina, in the lines of his art, a Japanese company has created art out of informational lines. Via Dark Roasted Blend are these great images made out of functioning bar codes. The company in question, Design Barcode, won a top advertising award in 2006 for their work which appears all over products in Japan. A short promo video they made claims they have never had a misread. To watch the movie, click the arrow in the upper left corner.

The other tidbit I thought I would share is a link to Richard Kessler’s blog, Dewey21C. I have been biting my tongue for the better part of a month over the comments he quotes in his entry, “The Things I Hear About Arts Education.” The tongue biting is my attempt not to make snarky remarks in reaction to some of the sentiments he cites.

Regardless, they bear reading since he says they are all real quotes because they represent a spectrum of views about arts education. Some of my favs:

We like arts because there are no wrong answers.
School Principal

We do not like the arts because there are no wrong answers.
CEO

Parents are the key to arts education.
Foundation Staff Member

Parents are a waste of time.
The very same Foundation Staff Member

Parents in low income areas don’t care about the arts.
Arts Education Consultant

We must do something about ensuring that artists entering schools have basic training.
Director of Arts Education/Cultural Organization

After all the training artists have already received, why should we have to receive additional training? We’re not teachers; we’re artists.
Teaching Artist

That You Care Is What Matters

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Yesterday I alluded to the research findings presented by Fleming and Asplund in their book, Human Sigma, that how you handle customer problems is more important to your relationship with them than actually solving the problem. (I should mention, HumanSigma is a program of Gallup so they have a lot of experience in surveying.) They say that “customers who encounter a problem and are extremely happy with how the company handled the problem often have levels of emotional attachment equal to—and in some cases exceeding– those who have no problem at all.”

The Means, Not The End That Matters
They say that customers don’t expect a business will always resolve a problem to their liking, “but they do except the company to handle them in an exemplary way.” There is also the issue that not everyone has the same expectations of a solution to contend with. They use the example of receiving an undercooked meal at a restaurant. Some people may be content with having the meal cooked properly and the offer of complimentary dessert. Others may feel the whole meal should be free. You are likely to be more successful creating good procedures to address problems than you are at creating solutions that will please everyone.

They have found that people who have a high emotional investment are likely to give a company the benefit of the doubt when a problem arises viewing it as an honest mistake or even pondering how they may have contributed to the situation. Those with low engagement are more likely to place heavier blame on the company for the problem making it more difficult to please them.

Steps to Resolution
Fleming and Asplund suggest six steps that should be part of resolution procedures.

First is to acknowledge the problem exists. Second is to apologize. They are quick to add that apologizing is not accepting the blame. Lawyers warn clients not to apologize out of fear it can be used against them in lawsuits. But according to a NY Times story, policies of apologizing have cut malpractice suits and legal costs for the University of Michigan and University of Illinois hospitals. People who feel wronged view the refusal to apologize as a lack of empathy for the situation and so they escalate matters in an effort to gain acknowledgment.

Good resolution processes can actually strengthen a relationship with people who have experienced a problem. According to Fleming and Asplund, people who have encountered a problem and have been extremely satisfied with the way a bank handled it were 51% full invested in the bank versus 26% full investment by people who never experienced a problem. They say that apologizing validates a person’s trust in the company and reinforces their value as a customer.

The third step they suggest is “Take ownership of the problem and follow up, even if the problem is unresolved.” Promising to follow up by a certain time or date is better than a vague “as soon as possible” because the customer may feel they have to continue checking in on your progress. Even if you haven’t solved the problem by the appointed hour, it is better to contact the customer with that information than leave them wondering or in the position of having to track the contact person down again.

Suggestion four is to handle problems on the spot rather than bumping it to a supervisor. This means empowering front line service people to respond with a solution appropriate to their position. If the customer is not satisfied, then someone higher in the chain can be contacted. They use the example of a hotel chain that generally had managers resolve problems with free nights’ stays. Among the steps they took were to empower housekeeping to offer gift baskets, robes and bouquets of flowers and only refer a problem to the manager if a person was dissatisfied. Because they weren’t defaulting to free accommodations to resolve their problems, their costs dropped and satisfaction rose.

Their fifth suggestion is have a process which quickly brings the problem to the attention of a supervisor or manager. The mention a logging system which alerts managers if a problem remains unsolved after a certain period of time. Most arts organizations are small enough that a computerized system is not needed to communicate complaints to other staff. Just the same, there is plenty of opportunity for the complaint to lie dormant on someone’s desk and never be brought to a supervisor’s attention so the importance of communicating a complaint needs to be emphasized. The authors warn to be wary that your system not make people feel their responsibility in addressing complaints ends upon handing them off to someone else.

The last suggestion is to leave people better off than they were before the problem occurred. Even if the solution is not the one they desired, they should still be in a better position than they were before. Presumably this means gaining intangible benefits such as feeling more valued as a customer and perhaps having a specific contact person who can address future difficulties if the current problem hasn’t been completely resolved.

Business Solutions Unfair to Customers

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Emotional Advocacy
Yesterday, I started writing about the book, Human Sigma by John Fleming and Jim Asplund and as promised, I wanted to continue exploring the book today. One of the things I was happy to see addressed was the idea of the single question customer survey. I had pondered the validity using the question, “Would you recommend this company to others?” in a past entry.

Fleming and Asplund note that not only do you miss a lot of information by asking only one question, but also all advocates are not created equal. As discussed in my last entry, people can be satisfied and thus have no reservations about suggesting a company or service to others, yet they aren’t really invested in the company and may defect. Then there are those who are emotionally invested and can serve as enthusiastic promoters.

The authors don’t have any specific suggestions about what questions to pose on satisfaction surveys, likely because they urge you to “get under the hood” of customer relationships and ask about things that matter. What matters to one business may not have any significance to another.

The authors give an example of a survey they conducted at an amusement park where most of the feedback they received was negative. People complained on and on about the parking, lines, the prices, the food and the lack of shade. When they were asked if they would return, everyone said they would without hesitation. The deciding factor was their childrens’ enjoyment. Had they the same experience on a Saturday night (sans the lack of shade) at one of our performance venues, they would never come back again, but the vicarious joy they experience through their kids provides an emotional connection with the theme park.

Fairness In Interactions
Later in the book, the authors discuss perceptions of fairness and how that can feed people’s emotional investment. That section of the book is fairly long so it is difficult for me to cover all the ways interactions can be viewed as fair or not. Anyone who has worked in customer services knows that people’s preferred treatment can swing between wanting to be treated exactly like everyone else to wanting an exception made for them, all depending on their situation.

There were a few examples they gave that are recognizable as significant the arts world. For instance, subscribers and donors who have invested themselves in your organization expect preferential treatment in return for their loyalty. (The example the book gives is airline frequent flier program.) If you launch a campaign to attract new business that offers a better situation to new people than to long time customers, you run the risk of alienating them. An example that comes to mind is the low introductory rates offered on cable television packages that are only good for new accounts while you get no recognition for your long term relationship.

Another example in the performing arts world can be found in ticket exchange policies. Many organizations have a no return/no exchange policy with subscribers and donors being the only exception. As long as policies and procedures are enforced equitably, there is no problem. But once you perform an exchange for a flat tire but not my canceled babysitter excuse, then the inequity in the system is exposed. And then there are policies that are confusing to patrons from the start such as why internet and phone orders incur a service fee but walk up orders don’t.

Business Solutions Unfair
One example they give as an impediment to good customer relationships is the phone queue with the recorded message about your call being important leaving you to reconcile how this can be if the place is so poorly staffed the average wait time is twenty minutes. What the authors say about this really struck me, (my emphasis) “From the customer’s perspective, any process or system whose primary purpose is to solve a business problem rather than a customer concern is unfair.”

They also note that treating people equally can appear unfair. If your customer service staff follows the exact same scripted process with customers not recognizing that the script can’t cover all eventualities, the result may make you look incompetent and patronizing for asking questions or suggesting solutions which obviously do not apply to the situation.

Tomorrow I want to address what the book says about solving customer problems. It turns out how you attempt to resolve a problem is much more important than whether you actually solve it.

Emotional Satisfaction

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A two years ago I had been entranced by a comment Neill Roan made about arts administrators being so emotionally satisfied with their jobs, they didn’t feel the need to keep current on the latest literature and theories about arts administration. Earlier this year, I was in touch with Neill on another matter and asked him about the source he had cited. The book was Human Sigma by John Fleming and Jim Asplund.

Human Sigma and Emotional Satisfaction
I had assumed Human Sigma would be about psychology or the biological factors which emphasize or inhibit our actions. Instead, the book is a response to the Six Sigma process which the authors feel is detrimental to employee and customer interactions. Six Sigma seeks to reduce inefficiencies in the workplace. The authors note that human interactions, especially those with customers, are inherently inefficient and trying to make them otherwise can be alienating.

Biology does actually wield a lot of clout in our decision making processes. The authors cite NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux who,

“has argued that it is much easier for emotional responses to influence our thinking than for rational responses to temper our emotions. This is because the neural pathways that extend from the emotional system to the cognitive or thinking system of the brain are wider and faster than those that extend from the cognitive system back to the emotional processing areas.”

This is a contributing factor to the field of behavioral economics which examines why people don’t always behave rationally in their own best interests. The book mostly focuses on employee and customer interactions. My intention is to talk about some of the things that caught my interest in this and future entries.

Even though the book doesn’t explicitly address how high emotional satisfaction can cause people to–well, it is difficult to find the right word because most either connote willful or unconscious neglect or incompetence, let’s say overlook—the need to keep abreast of latest developments, there is a lot be learned about how people make their decisions. In fact, some of this might help explain why people choose to devote themselves to causes with low material rewards like the arts in the first place.

Satisfaction Ain’t Enough
About 10 years ago I went to a session on customer service where the speaker said that satisfaction and competitive price doesn’t contribute to a long term relationship with a customer. She noted that people who were satisfied with the service they received would still defect to a competitor. The book breaks this down on a finer level distinguishing between those who are emotionally satisfied and those who are rationally satisfied. Those who are emotionally satisfied with a company have a far greater investment in the company than those who are rationally satisfied.

What surprised me was that those who are rationally satisfied “behave not any differently than customers who are dissatisfied.” They use the example of a credit card company. Those who were emotionally satisfied spent an average of $251/month and used the card 3.1 times a month. Those who were rationally satisfied spent an average of $136/month and used the card 2.5 times each month. Those who were dissatisfied also spent $136/month and used the card 2.2 times.

The authors make the point that tending to a person’s emotional satisfaction can actually enhance their material value to your company. Investment in relationships is an investment in the financial health of your organization. We in the arts should understand this because of our constant efforts to woo and maintain relationships with donors. Even though we have a list of benefits we provide for different levels of support, we will go above and beyond to stay in a donor’s good graces.

The example of the credit card company was really apt in my case. I just canceled the card I had for 20 years because I felt the card company violated our relationship. I started the card with a $500 limit in 1989 and had gradually built it up to nearly $30,000 after the last two decades. After the fiscal crisis in 2008, they cut my limit by more than half despite my excellent credit. I never needed anywhere near the limit, but it was a point of pride for me that I had built it up to that level. Not an easy thing to build excellent credit while working in the arts.

There was also some deceit a couple years back when Bank of America bought the credit card company. They sent me a letter saying my card number had been compromised. When I called to find out who had been lax with my card information so that I could avoid the company, they gave me the run around before finally admitting everyone got the letter as an incentive to move to the Bank of America card.

That episode made me leery, but it was the credit limit cut that sent me into the arms of my credit union. I tolerated all sorts of rate hikes and the suspicious changes of payment due dates, but when they attacked the source of my pride it was over.

When I called to cancel the card, they didn’t even try to stop me. I have heard stories about companies being willing to reduce interest rates and do other things to keep customers, but they didn’t even ask me to reconsider after I told them my reason. I wonder if they have received so many calls they have learned that there is no use in talking people out of it.

We Shall Engage Them On The Park Benches!

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Something I thought I had posted but I can’t seem to find is my belief that getting other people to talk about whatever experience they have had in the arts is much more effective than you telling them what is so great about the arts. Perhaps I only spoke about it at a lecture or with a group of people, but my basic idea was that if you are somewhere like a wedding and you get on the topic of what you do and people mention that they have attended a performance or a museum/gallery show, you should inquire about the experience.

It doesn’t matter how long ago it was or if they didn’t particularly like it. Try asking them what they did like about the experience. What was valuable to them? What wasn’t? Don’t get too much into explaining why they should or shouldn’t have enjoyed something. This is also a conversation, not an interrogation or survey. If people talk about not knowing what to wear or when to clap, that is an opportunity to offer advice. Telling people why Mozart was the greatest may not be productive if people take it as a statement on their ignorance.

My goal is to connect people back to their positive memories about an experience and help them feel they have some ability to correctly evaluate their experience. Essentially, I want to help them convince themselves the arts hold something of value for them.

I often have these sorts of conversations around theatres with audiences, but that is essentially preaching to the choir. I don’t have as many opportunities to do so outside of a performing arts venue. Or at least perhaps I have been slow to recognize and exploit those opportunities.

My assistant theatre manager (ATM) managed to do so yesterday and I was happy to take a lesson from his example. As I mentioned, we attended a career day at a local high school yesterday. As we were leaving, a gentleman on a bench greeted us and asked what we had been up to. The ATM mentioned who we were and what we were speaking to students about. I don’t recall exactly how, but he managed to get the guy on the bench, a security guard at the school, talking about the poetry he wrote. He hadn’t written any in a long time and lost his notebooks years ago, but he did remember lines he wrote when he was in high school and started reciting them for us. He also recited some haiku he wrote.

Assuming we were professors, he “gave” us his poetry to recite to our classes feeling that college students could identify with the sentiments expressed by verses he wrote when he was their age. We agreed he was probably right about that. We encouraged him to try his hand at poetry again and maybe read it at an open mic night somewhere.

I knew within a minute of the conversation’s start that this was how we should be engaging people all the time. Certainly we don’t want to harangue people to come clean with the experiences they hold close to their heart. But if they are willing to start, we should keep them talking about it for a bit.

Bye, Bye Patio

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For me, one thing that would make Mad Men better is if their efforts to market products took a bigger role and the behind the scenes drama took a smaller one. I would think Don Draper was as big a cad if he slept with 1/3 less women. It is around the time of this show that marketing started to transition toward the needs of the consumer. Prior to this the focus was either on: Production- If I make a lot of a high demand product, people will buy it; Product- If I make a high quality product, people will buy it; Selling- If I take an existing product and use different techniques to sell it, I can sell high volumes of it.

It isn’t until around 70s that conducting market research to ascertain customer tastes and designing the product with that in mind came into practice. This is a great simplification of what the different approaches were. What I have wanted to see is the company evolving toward new approaches as competition for business pressed them. The show is still pretty enjoyable in any case.

There was one episode this season, episode 4, “The Arrangements,” whose subplots resonated with me. The main one revolved around the commercial for Pepsi diet soda, Patio. The Pepsi representative wants an ad that inserts their product in a reproduction of Ann-Margaret in the opening scene of Bye-Bye Birdie (seen below). The guys at Sterling Cooper recreate the opening flawlessly, so much so I imagine there would be intellectual property lawsuits had it run without the movie studio’s permission. In the end, though everyone agrees the commercial is exactly what was requested, the Pepsi representatives say there is something wrong with it. They just can’t put their finger on it. After the clients leave, one of the ad men points out what is wrong is that the woman in the commercial isn’t Ann Margaret.

For me it was illustrative of the problem you face when trying to jump on a popular trend. If the original does well, you can only fail in the comparison by trying to copy it exactly. The best you can do is put your own original spin in something and even that may fail. Most attempts at recreation and revival are made after the impact of the original has started to fade from people’s memories.

The whole idea of riding the coattails of popularity is still new to the characters in the show they are puzzled when their attempt fails. Even though it is disappointing to them, it sort of excites me to know there was a time when advertising wasn’t as slick and calculated as it is these days. In truth, there are still areas where advertisers are stumbling today. This Friday on the On The Media radio program, there was a piece responding to a New York Times article about how DVRs are actually helping to improve the television ratings used to determine advertising rates because people AREN’T skipping commercials as everyone, including the people selling the machines, assumed they would. Shows are actually getting better ratings three days after airing than they did on their air date thanks to DVRs.

Ann Margaret

Mad Men Ad

The other part of the episode that connected with me was where a young guy comes in wanting to promote the sport of jai alai. He has a lot of money to spend and some grand ideas about how to promote it. Personally, I didn’t think the efforts would be successful, but figured maybe they were appropriate for the time period. Turns out, the ad guys figured they had a fool from whom they would soon part his money.

The thing that struck me was that as he left the meeting, the potential client said “If jai alai fails, it will be your fault” to which one of the ad guys said something to the effect of “everyone believes that.” It brought me back to a couple places I worked where the attitude was when the show did well, it was a good show but when the show did poorly, it was because the marketing department did a poor job. The truth is, there are some things the public isn’t interested in seeing. The world record audience for jai alai was set in 1975 with 15,500 people. As of today, the Philadelphia 76ers have the worst average home attendance in basket ball with about 12,000 people. The Minnesota Timberwolves which falls at 15th of 30 teams in attendance averages 17,600 people. (Source: ESPN website)

And by way of comparison, in their 1975-76 season, the 76ers averaged 12,400 in home attendance. In 1964, the year Mad Men is currently, 76ers average attendance was 4,300 (NY Knicks were about 9,200). I am sure there was a lot of promotion and work done to make basketball more popular since 1964. The presence of players like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell probably helped excite the imagination of crowds in ways jai alai players didn’t. It is intangibles like the structure of a product and the personalities associated with it that create an interest in it that a lot of money can’t buy.

Well, okay, there is a lot of money being spent today to bring personalities and products together. But back then and in the trenches of arts organizations today, lots of money thrown into marketing can’t assure success. (Which assumes there is a lot of money to throw into marketing.) Actually, I can go full circle with this. The fictional ad the Sterling Cooper boys put together for Patio soda didn’t work because they didn’t bring the correct personality together with the product. The real Patio did capitalize on the personality of brand identity and became Diet Pepsi in 1964. The other Patio flavors were later phased out “because soda consumers were primarily interested in brand-name products.”

How I Used My New Lobby Toys

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Drew McManus asked if I had any photos of the mobile lobby screen I described in an earlier entry in action. I hadn’t thought anyone would be interested in pictures of people watching a Powerpoint slide show so I didn’t take any pictures.

As an alternative, I thought I would post some of the slides we used. The first is the Americans for the Arts ad I described in my earlier entry. You can click on each to enlarge.

Americans for Arts Slide
Americans for Arts Slide

For the group we had performing, I had three informational slides like the one below to give attendees some background information on who they were about to see.

Dervish Slide Photo: Dervish
Dervish Slide

I also included slides about upcoming shows to whet people’s appetites.

Black Grace Slide Photo: Duncan Cole
Black Grace Slide
Celebrity Slide Photo: Michael Harada
Celebrity Slide

Finally, following the philosophy that it is especially good during tough economic times to let patrons know you have productive plans for the future, I featured a slide on a show we will be doing a year from now.

Poliahu Slide Photo: Tau Dance Theater
Poliahu Slide

One thing you may notice is that the last slide has a much smaller image than any of the previous slides. Given the size of the screen, I needed images that looked good at 72 dpi at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 lines. That last image wasn’t really able to hold its quality at those settings. Just a tip for people planning to try something similar. I am sure if I was more adept at image manipulation (and had the time), I could have made it work.

Photos: Dervish- Courtesy Dervish; Black Grace- Duncan Cole; Celebrity- Michael Harada; Poliahu- Tau Dance Theater.

Film Burdens

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This past week I attended a number of screenings at the Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF). For as long as I have been here, I had never been to the festival and I didn’t know why. I started planning out the movies I wanted to see via their online schedule about a week before the festival started and was disappointed how many films on my list I would miss because of work and other obligations. Hopefully, some will show up in local art house theaters in the next few months. Still, I ended up seeing four films over the course of the last week and weekend. One of them I rushed which was fun even though they ended up adding another screening in response to the demand.

There was a huge crowd at every screening. I hope they did well. They lost their naming sponsor this year. When the president of the festival mentioned the loss of the sponsor I suddenly remembered that the reason I never attended the festival before was my impression has always been that the festival was comprised of insular elitist snobs who congratulated themselves on their taste. It think this was a result of the name- The Louis Vuitton Hawaiian International Film Festival. This year, there was no Louis Vuitton and I found my self anticipating the festival and wondering why I had never attended.

In my defense, I have a little baggage in this regard. When I was a student, I volunteered for a week at a film festival where the clientele was very much comprised of self-congratulatory elitist snobs. That was the demographic the festival literally catered to- one of the vendors sold brie, grapes and a baguette as a meal and the rest offered similar fare. Being a poor college student, I was going down the street to get pizza and burgers most of the time. That festival is no longer in existence. While its demise was a result of bigger problems than limiting their audience appeal, I am sure it didn’t help.

That said, I greatly appreciated that the audiences at HIFF were of a higher quality than I have experienced in most movies. Even though each screening was filled to near capacity, people generally watched in respectful silence (I’m looking at you, running commentary guy who was sitting two seats to the right of me yesterday.) No cell phones sounded despite the lack of the multiple appeals you generally see in movie theatres. The audiences seemed pretty representative of the usual movie audience demographics. If anything, it skewed younger than I anticipated so I might have expected more talking and cell phone use. I think the fact the shows were packed actually helped eliminate extraneous sound because people were so concerned about having their seat counted as available for rush seating, a small percentage seemed to buy concessions. (No brie, plenty of popcorn.) Or at least they kept the ice rattling to a minimum.

Also, as a friend remarked, attending the festival provided a greater guarantee that the movie would be of good quality. Presumably most people were there to watch something they can’t often see rather than be social.

Not everyone felt the movies were great, of course. One of the films I was interested in sold out so they added another screen to run concurrent with the first. I wasn’t aware of it at first, but the movie starred a local actor who has gone on to some success. I think that might have accounted for a large portion of the demand. When the actor introduced the film, she mentioned that it was definitely an art house film and that the director didn’t hand you the movie. There was an expectation that you might be angry or confused when the film ended.

That certainly seemed to be true at the end of the movie. As people filed out, some were already on their cell phones telling friends how much they hated the movie. I was a little disappointed that forewarned the movie might challenge them, they hadn’t given themselves the opportunity to even digest the experience or go next door to the Q&A and ask the actor what the heck was going on. I went on Twitter and there are a lot of negative tweets from that night too.

What I observed seems a testament to just how much pressure arts creators and presenters are under now to please people. People are not only rushing to judgment, they are rushing to tell their friends. That sort of word of mouth is sure to make it difficult for people who wish to be subtle or inspire thought with their work to do so and get the consideration and recognition they are due. If you want people to think, they aren’t likely to be dashing off tweets as they walk out of the theatre. Also, 140 characters may not be the best medium for praising your subtlety.

New Toys For The Lobby

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The college has these new flatscreen televisions on rolling mounts deployed around campus as an experiment in mobile information stations. Fortunately for me, the woman who coordinated the purchasing effort decided there would be a need for a roving screen. (The others, while mobile generally don’t move much because they are networked for ease of updating.) The benefit to me is that I can borrow the television for our events.

We had an event this past weekend so I used the opportunity to create a looping presentation with information about the band for a number of slides. Then I had information about upcoming performances, workshops and master classes. I am hoping between the television in the lobby, the brochures, notes in the program book and posters in the restrooms, we will increase people’s awareness about our events. The other screens around campus have information about our shows on them, but that is laid out by someone in a central office. The screen in my lobby has our information exclusively and if I learn of something interesting during a performance, I can update the information and have it running at intermission.

In addition to our information, I also made up a little promotional ad for Americans for the Arts, “Arts, Ask for More” campaign using the print ads you can download via the social media widget they created. (You can see the widget in the lower right hand corner of my home page. My entry on the widget is here. The text on the bottom of the ads were a little hard to read so I rewrote the text beneath the image and used their phrase “For 10 Simple Ways You Can Get More Arts Into Your Child’s Life,” followed by the Americans for the Arts web address.

I felt it was important to add this information both on the general principle of promoting arts education, but because this Friday is the first day of statewide furloughs which will take teachers, and therefore children, out of the classrooms. I wanted to provide people with a source of ideas for providing an educational experience for their kids.

So now I am contemplating how to most fully use the screen. I know there are many performance venues who use flat screens to promote their events. If anyone has some suggestions for what sort of information we can include or how to use the tool more advantageously than just a substitute for multiple posters, let me know. I have already started including trivia information about the groups to help audiences understand them a little better. I would love to include video except that YouTube videos look awful at such high resolution. I would need to rely on DVDs which artists are moving away from in favor of online video.

Substitution Blues

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Ken Davenport posted some interesting information about the impact of absenteeism in Broadway shows on Producer’s Perspective. He was curious to learn if the need to have an understudy stand in was having an impact on audiences so he commissioned someone to study the question.

The impetus for this was the increasing rate of absenteeism in Broadway shows, particularly West Side Story. I had read the NY Post article Ken links to back in August and I couldn’t believe there was such a high rate of absences given that there are no lack of performers who are just as talented waiting to step on to the Broadway stage. Cameron Mackintosh did clean house on Les Miserables when he felt the quality was flagging so it seemed pretty risky for actors to appear to be slacking off. In retrospect, I suppose there is always the teensy little chance that the Post sensationalized the problem beyond the reality.

While some respondents to the survey liked the idea of an understudy having a chance to surpass the star, absenteeism was generally seen in a negative light. The perception was that it is becoming more prevalent and that the quality is not the same. Some respondents felt that they had to apologize to the guests they asked along or advise their friends not to attend the show. On the whole, people said they are becoming more cautious about their ticket purchases.

Davenport suggests the Actors Union and Producers get together to explore the problem. It should be noted that his survey results said people thought there was more absenteeism, but there was no study done on the question of whether there actually is more absenteeism over all. Though as a practical matter, the truth has little bearing if audiences have decided the problem is widespread and are acting accordingly. As Davenport suggests, better training of understudies may begin to reverse the perception that understudies are offering a vastly inferior product.

One of the commenters on the entry suggests that the understudy notice in the program book may have a psychological effect prejudicing a person against the show before the curtain rises. (Though I have attended a show where there was a small flurry of the notices falling out when I opened the Playbill. That certainly didn’t help my confidence.) Of course, eliminating proper notice probably runs afoul New York’s fraud laws.

While reading the entry, I recalled Holly Mulcahy’s September column on The Partial Observer about substitutions in orchestra programs. I wondered if the practice of changing up a concert offering was undermining confidence in orchestras as much as changes in casts are in Broadway shows. And has anyone ever done a study on that?

More Tales From the Furniture Store

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So last Thursday I had a really excellent dinner at a furniture store.

Long time readers will remember when I blogged about the opening of this store about two years ago. I was a little skeptical about a situation where a high end furniture store had a wine bar, high end restaurant and theatre in it. I have actually been to a couple events at the wine bar and theatre before but this was the first time I had dinner at the restaurant. It was really quite excellent. The highlight for me was an intermezzo of wasabi and apple sorbert. Just when you thought the wasabi was going to be too much, the coolness and sweetness turned things around and left your mouth with a taste of honey.

I was there lending my support for a fundraiser a performance group partner was having in order to raise money for a production we are premiering next October. The meal was preceded by a piece from the show we are putting together. It was my favorite situation. I got to have people tell me how wonderful and inspiring the show appeared to be and congratulate me. Followed by a really good meal. I didn’t have to worry about organizing the experience. I’ll find out how successful the appeal packets were in a few weeks.

But aside from that there was something that caught my eye about the activities at the facility. One of the women at my table mentioned her daughter said the bars and restaurants were a hot place on the weekends and there were lines out the door. I knew they kept the theatre busy with fashion shows and other events. One thing I didn’t realize until that evening was that they have a game night one Tuesday each month. They bill it as a “netplaying” opportunity. As an alternative to normal networking events, you attend and play board games or Wii video games at one of 12 stations set up around the theatre. (I should mention it is something of a black box theatre space with no permanent seating.)

It is free though you need to purchase at least one drink or something to eat. I am guessing the program has been at least marginally successful because they are advertising a new time and new sponsors. I am not sure if the sponsors help provide the games or the prizes (or both).

I saw this netplaying program and started thinking about the networking/attract new audiences type events that arts organizations sponsor. The approach has had mixed results from what I have read and thus has been of dubious value. My suspicion is that those who have had poor results have been doing it solely to increase their audiences rather than provide something that is needed and valued by their community.

I have no doubt that the social side of the building is designed with the intent of having attendees patronize the furniture side. I am not going to attribute high ideals to the business. The bars and restaurants are designed to appeal to young professionals. At the moment, they may be spending all their money on the clothes to wear to the bar and the wine they consume there while their apartment is a dump. It won’t always be that way though and when the young hipsters are ready to furnish an apartment, they are likely to at least look through the store there. In the meantime, they are in the building having fun and bringing their friends.

The arts organization which isn’t quite sure if it will make its budget from year to year may not have the institutional patience to take such a long view. In their heart of hearts, they may be whispering “If you build it, they will come and they will donate money” and hope it will all happen in the course of a season.

If you look at my previous entry and then look at the events they have running each month now, you will see that there is a pretty significant difference in how they are using their space. No jazz or film nights, not really too many family oriented events, few seminars on topics like micro-enterprise.

They started out with an idea of what might be useful to the community and then made adjustments over time. They built their facility with the intent of providing services to a clientele that would purchase their furniture. How much more difficult must it be then for an arts organization to do the same in a facility that wasn’t built to enhance the lifestyle of a demographic that isn’t patronizing events held there?

And since the purpose of the organization probably never included providing ancillary services to woo new audiences, there isn’t likely to be a staff dedicated to that purpose who have been provided the support and resources to adjust programming to find the combination of services which is most appealing. The fact that some organizations experience success at all probably has as much to do with luck as sincerity, devotion, excellent planning and execution.

Probably the best approach would be to contract with external vendors. While it would require staff to monitor contracts and process payment/revenue splitting with the vendors, at least staff isn’t faced with fabricating services whole cloth. You also have the opportunity cancel those services which don’t seem to be valued and replace them with new ones. Staff will still be needed to coordinate experiences that are appropriate to the tenor of the organization preventing them from working on something more directly related to the core purpose. Leadership needs to recognize this when committing to what is likely to be a long term development process.

Fun on the Fund Drive

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I was a guest on my local public radio station’s fund drive today. It was my second year, but as always I had a blast. I am sure it isn’t the same experience for everyone, but the time just flew by. I was ready to go another hour but they already had someone else lined up.

As a leader of a non-profit organization, these fund drives seem like such a win-win for both organizations. I was there offering tickets as premiums for membership and in return, I received the opportunity to raise awareness about my organization. I actually tried to be cognizant of how much I talked about us but the hosts kept feeding me lines opening new avenues of conversation.

I saw the whole experience as a game to see how I could turn something into a plug to become a member. The host commented on how adventurous and daring our programming was. Thanked her and talked a little bit about our philosophy and came back around and mentioned something to the effect of how supporters of the station were likewise adventurous and bold in that they were eager to consume programming that dealt with situations outside their daily experience.

I had been worried I would run out of things to say so I had prepared some notes in advance of my arrival making a connection between the tickets we were offering and the station. (Lead singer of a group voted among the distinctive voices of her country-the station is a distinctive voice in the community with few such alternatives–you can be a distinctive voice by declaring your support of the station.)

It turned out I need not have been so concerned. The program I was guesting on had fewer opportunities for pledge solicitations than the one I was on last year. I left the remaining tickets for the station to in future segments and then fed the host my notes so she could use them in future segments. No need for my ideas to go to waste, after all. (I have had interactions with her before so it the situation wasn’t akin to a waiter pitching his ideas to a film director.)

So I know this entry has mostly been about how cool and clever I am. I am, however, too lazy to make these same suggestions in a third person voice. “One should endeavor to be a gracious guest by preparing remarks that emphasize the desirability of becoming a member.”

Besides, I know that if I say I had fun playing word games, most of you will figure you are cleverer than me, (you aren’t by the way), and can do a much better job promoting your organization and membership to your public radio station and will help your local station in the (futile) attempt to do just that.

But in all seriousness, while I was sitting there waiting to go on air again, I starting thinking how much I wished there were other forums where the general public would direct their attention to hear arts people talk enthusiastically. There was an entirely different energy to our conversation than I have experienced at Q&As and performance talks. It might have just been the setting. Talking to each other without the immediate awareness of an audience likely changes the dynamics. If I could be sure I could translate at least some degree of the experience to our stage, I might consider asking the woman who hosted our segment to act as an interviewer for a show discussion.

Something for me to ponder.

Oh and if the idealism of helping out another non-profit in your community or playing clever word games isn’t motivation to go on a fund drive, how about economics. We saw a surge in ticket sales while I was on the air. One guy apparently drove to the theatre and began banging on my office door because he was afraid we would be sold out.

Hate Hazelnuts, Love Filberts

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In an illustration of the power of language in branding and naming, while having coffee this weekend a friend and I started having a discussion where he stated how much he hated hazelnuts and really preferred filberts. I ran with the joke and solemnly agreed that hazelnuts were over exposed. Witness the hazelnut creamer and syrups available here in the coffee house. Another friend was still up at the counter when we started the conversation so when she sat down and heard us seriously discussing how filberts, which tasted amazing, were being marginalized by the hype about hazelnuts, she sort of got pulled in. We did clue her in to the fact we were talking about the same nut, but not until we had a discussion about how the hype about the benefits of acai was selling smoothies of dubious nutritional value at that coffeehouse.

Of course, we all know that language is used to make things sound less negative. Like how there are those who refer to the dangerous chemical, Dihydrogen Monoxide as Hydrogen Hydroxide because the latter sound less threatening. But a little research will show that it is widely used as an industrial solvent and coolant, in the production of Styrofoam and poisons. Even in small quantities, accidental inhalation can cause death.

Of course, there are always people who will be smart enough to see through attempts to mislead them. When it comes to promoting our events and our organizations, a careful balance must be struck. I am a big proponent of avoiding trite phrases like those excerpted from movie reviews for the purpose of advertising the film. Yet if your language is too lofty, you run to the risk of creating an appearance of elitism.

I had a situation this season when writing text for our brochure. I described a show where a man must confront an evil force which has subverted the souls of better men than he. I later mention him having to resist the fell forces. A professor suggested I change subvert and fell because the students wouldn’t understand what it meant. Setting aside most of the reasons I thought that statement was wrong, I ultimately decided to keep the language because 1) our students aren’t the target audience for the brochure anyway; it receives much more use by the post-college age general public. 2) I didn’t think that given our educational mission I should be dumbing down a word choice that wasn’t that challenging to start with and could be derived from the context of the sentence.

Just the same, my concern about having language that might alienate people and pose a barrier to attendance made me think about the situation for awhile.

#@$#^%$#@%$# SPAMMERS!

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Well spammers recently co-opted a feature on our website for their own nefarious purposes. The result is, we have had to shut down a useful tool on our website until we can find a solution.

The feature enabled people to easily tell friends about a performance. A simple click of a link autofilled a form with the description text and a link to our events. It also allowed people to personalize the message with their own thoughts and remove our material entirely if they felt they could do the job on their own.

So you can probably see the opportunity for spamming. We recognized that it was open for abuse, including people looking to represent themselves as us, so we had all uses of the form blind copy us.

I had more than 4500 emails this morning. I was lucky there weren’t more, I am sure. Upon further investigation, we discovered that the measures we had put in place to thwart this sort of thing had been doing so quite well for some weeks now preventing spam from ever entering our mail queue. But the spammers found a way around it and so here we are being blacklisted by service providers.

This is quite annoying because while the feature wasn’t overwhelmingly successful, people did use it regularly to pass the word along to their friends. Now we have to find another method. Anyone have a suggestion? I imagine something with a RECAPTCHA challenge exists out there.

In the mean time, if you have a similar feature on your website but haven’t been monitoring its use, you may want to examine its recent activity.

The Uninvited News Release

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I think I may have previously mentioned that one of the local daily papers has started allowing people to submit stories to be posted on its webpage. I recently encountered a situation which that emphasizes the need to monitor and control your message and image on the web.

Last week I noticed a strange headline on a reader submitted news story for a local university theatre. The headline was poorly written and the word choice wasn’t the sort of thing you would use to promote an event. Even a mundane “Theatre performs X In October” would have been more suitable. Upon reading the whole piece, I figured perhaps the department was having the students write press releases to get experience. Then I realized the show it was spending most of the space discussing had opened and closed already.

I contacted a colleague in the department to discover what had happened. If the story was submitted late, that was one thing. However, since this was the same newspaper that had inexplicably omitted our events from a recent review of Fall Arts Events, I was concerned that maybe their approval process for web stories had a backlog that was delaying their release. If that was the case, I wanted to take that into account when submitting releases. Regardless of what the answer was, the delayed story damaged the organization’s credibility a little.

It turned out that a journalism student decided to be helpful and submitted a story unbeknownst to anyone at the theatre. (Though the student waited until her journalism professor reviewed and graded it. I hope the professor wasn’t aware this outdated story was being posted.) This news caused me some concern. Because there was no verification procedure in effect, someone who had no connection with the theatre was able to represent themselves as if they did and had a story published under the imprimatur of a major newspaper.

Certainly it isn’t news that the internet allows people to misrepresent themselves. About three years ago, Drew McManus bought up a number of alternative web addresses for orchestras around the country. It takes a lot less effort to submit a fallacious story to a newspaper than it does to create a spoof site that looks like that of the Asian Art Museum. This event represents a new variation on the problem because newspapers are still generally seen as a dependable source of information (at least in the non-political arena). People may not yet be distinguishing between the links to reported stories and those to submitted stories.

Assorted Arts Candy

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Okay, some fun links from around the web today-

First off, you can have your big performing arts centers and arts organizations with multi-million dollar endowments and budgets, I would wake up happy every morning if I could say I worked here. (I wonder if they have 24 hour security to keep people from eating the building.)

Second, I wanted to point out an article on the always helpful Non-Profit Law Blog about common problems with organizational by laws. I passed the link on to an organization of which I am a member because we spotted some of the same issues with our bylaws and I figured there might be more still to examine.

The entry also includes potential problems when using another organization’s bylaws as a template for ones own.

Last, I wanted to direct people to an entry on Ken Davenport’s The Producer’s Perspective about a Hungarian immigrant who created a theatre ticket discounting organization in NYC that preceded the TKTS booth in Times Square by nearly a century.

Joseph Leblang received free tickets to shows in exchange for allowing posters to be put up in his shop. What he did was turn around and sold his tickets as well as those received by the neighboring shop owners for less than full price. The theatre owners weren’t happy but ended up turning their unsold stock over to Leblang because he did such a high volume business.

Davenport ends with an observation about keeping ones eye open for opportunity. There were many shopkeepers receiving tickets who could have started the same sort of endeavor but none did. Or at least none emerged to significantly challenge Leblang.

Arts. Widget For More

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Americans for the Arts have a widget available that can be easily placed on any website, blog or social media site. I put one at the bottom of my right side bar.

If you click on the share or embed link in the lower right, it provides you with the ability to either automatically insert the widget on your social media site (and many blogs) or copy the code so you can manually insert it into your blog, website, whatever.

If you click on campaign, you can see the television ads they have been running (my fav is Raisin Brahms), listen to radio ads or download some of their other logos like Elizabeth Barrett Brownies.

I think it is important to post this sort of thing just to make people aware of the lack of arts in schools by sheer numbers so please consider adding the widget to your webpages, blogs and social media accounts.

I have been critical of Americans for the Arts (or if I haven’t, I have thought it) for only allowing partners who had invested large sums of money have access to more than just a logo as a tool to promote the “Arts. Ask for More” campaign. Certainly, they had every right to place controls on how broadcast and print ads were used. It is just that the only way I could participate was by posting a logo. Now that there is something more, I am happy to use it everywhere I can and encourage others to do the same.

Wrong Words Can’t Describe This Film

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Since I am always looking for a situation that provides something of value for arts administration, I take my lessons where I find them. The latest was an illustration of how what you say about an experience matters. Intellectually, we know that if we want to convince people to attend an event, we need to employ compelling word choices. Execution often fails.

Around mid-July a friend told me he and his girlfriend had gone to see a movie called Departures. The way he talked about it, it sounded like Night Shift without the call girls. He describe it as a movie about a guy who loses his job and ends up working for an undertaker. He talked about it being funny at times and sad, but never used very strong terms. As a result, my image was of a guy who spent the night in the morgue reading, making some awkward mistakes in relation to dead bodies and perhaps learning something of the way these people lived to inspire him about his future. A nice story, but it didn’t make me want to see the movie.

About two times since then he mentioned it was a good movie, but didn’t really inject any particular enthusiasm above saying he and his girlfriend liked it. The thought that went through my mind was that he wasn’t certain enough about his own tastes to speak more confidently about the film. He thought it was a good movie, but he wasn’t sure if was actually a good movie.

I can’t necessarily blame him. The movie is only playing on one screen out of 115 in the county. Can’t be that good if it is only playing at one theatre, right? But the whole issue of feeling comfortable with your encounters with art is a topic for another entry.

Last week I ran into another guy who raved about the movie encouraging me to go see it. The image he painted for me was nowhere near what the first guy had. So I went to see the movie this past weekend.

Yes, it is only playing at one theatre in the county, but it has been playing there for about 80 days. I was near that one theatre Saturday morning so I went to the 10:45 am show. The word of mouth must be good because there were about 40 people ahead of me online and nearly all of them bought tickets to the film. I know this, because the people in front of me kept remarking when someone bought tickets to our showing. I think there were only about 75 people in the theatre, but that is pretty good for a morning show nearly 80 days after it opened.

I absolutely loved the movie. Arts people should especially take note given that the lead character loses his job when his orchestra goes under. There may be another career waiting out there for you! I am told you can watch the movie on line but it would be a shame to do that. It surprisingly hasn’t opened in some parts of the country so there is still an opportunity to see it. Hopefully it is experiencing a prolonged run in those places it has opened so others can go see it if they haven’t.

Watching it online, you would also miss the communal nature of film going. The audience for this sort of movie are not as likely to talk on their cell phones throughout the show as with many films so you can be reasonably assured of a good experience. This movie is about death so there are some heart wrenching moments. It is at these times that you are reminded you aren’t experiencing these emotions alone. I think you would also lose the impact of some absolutely beautifully composed shots, including the deft grace with which the lead character performs his new job.

The movie left me wondering if they still prepare the dead in Japan in this manner. I suspect it isn’t the standard practice, but perhaps it is still common enough. The lead actor learns how to prepare a dead body to be placed in a coffin. There is a ritual cleansing of the body which is executed before the family. The entire body is disrobed, cleaned and redressed in view of the family. It is all done under a cloth draped over the body so that the family does not see the unclothed form of their loved ones. The precision and artistry with which the ceremony is performed is beautiful and entrancing.

The movie makes the point that funerals are for the sake of the living when one of the characters points out the three coffin models they sell with widely varying prices and mentions they all burn the same in the incinerator. Still, I think you would have an entirely different view of death and funerals if you knew your loved one received such attentive care before they were placed in the coffin.

So anyway, that is my attempt to sell you on the movie by telling you why I liked it while avoiding press release language. It lacks the umph of vocal expression, (OMIGOD, THE MOVIE WAS AWESOME — which is close to how I have expressed myself in person), but hopefully people are at least intrigued. I have intentionally avoided linking to the trailer because I think it does a poor job of portraying the movie. Even after seeing the movie, my excitement is dulled by the trailer. If you need to watch something, visit this page and immediately click on the picture to the right of the actor playing the cello. The little bit that plays best represents what makes the movie so good.

Presumed Disappointing

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Adam Thurman at The Mission Paradox made a great blog post yesterday pointing out that, unfortunately, when it comes to the question of whether they will enjoy an opportunity to interact with the arts, the default assumption many audience members hold is “no” until convinced otherwise.

“Most people, when given the option to attend a performing arts event, are more scared that the performance is going to be disappointing then they are excited that the performance is going to be good.”

He goes on to say:

“This is the thing we have to remember:

We are in the trust business.

Not the theatre business.

Not the museum business.

The trust business.

When you are dealing with a risk averse public the only way to get them to do a risky thing is by earning their trust.

How do you earn their trust?

By building a relationship with them.

My observation is that most of us in the arts are very good at putting up programming, but we aren’t good at building relationships.”

It put me in mind of an entry I did about three years ago where I cited an entry on Neill Roan’s old blog (oh why, oh why did you shut down that blog!), titled “How Audiences Use Information to Reduce Risk.”

In the entry I talked about the efforts I was going to inform people about performances since they often commented they hadn’t seen anything about the show. Reviewing the entry, I realize now that the problem we likely face is that people’s primary expectation is to receive notice in the newspaper or radio because that is where they traditionally have gotten the information. The problem is, people aren’t using those media in the same way they used to. Their expectations don’t align with their practice any longer.

In that entry I spoke of using electronic notifications, word of mouth and opinion leaders to help disseminate information about performances. One thing I missed that Adam speaks about is relationship building. It is true that people need to view the information you provide as credible, but they also need to believe that you will provide an enjoyable experience even if they end up less than thrilled about the performance.

Just last week Drew McManus cited a situation where the non-artistic elements of an evening combined with a partially disappointing/partially sublime artistic experience with the net effect being negative. Some of the non-artistic elements were entirely out of the arts organization’s control, others could have been ameliorated to some degree.

Certainly people aren’t coming for the parking and an easy ticket office experience. You gotta deliver the goods artistically. The relationship building comes when people know your artistic quality is pretty dependable and can trust that you will make an effort meet their needs and expectations and reduce problems that arise.

A Folding Table, A Jug of Water and Thou Sweating In The Parking Lot

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I am reading a book about customer service right now. My intention is to report some observations on the text as a whole at some point. However, I saw an illustration of one of the points made in an early chapter today. The book had noted the veracity of “time flies when you are having fun” pointing out that a well designed wait that is 30 minutes long can actually seem shorter than a poorly designed wait that is only a third as long. Because human perception is involved, you can ruin a relationship with a customer in the latter situation even though you significantly reduced their wait time.

Our campus is in a situation with many strikes against it. Budgets have been cut so staffing is down but enrollment is up adding an additional 1500 student to our commuter campus. Alas, the heretofore un(der) used overflow parking is now inaccessible due to long delayed construction projects.

There wasn’t much to be done about the parking unfortunately, but someone got organized this year and had information tables distributed about the campus with all sorts of hand outs and big coolers of water. There were also large color campus maps that someone slapped up on the sides of buildings so people didn’t have to seek out kiosks to figure out where they were.

I looked around wondering why no one had thought to do this before. People had always volunteered to serve an hour or so on the welcome committee but it was never this organized or welcoming. People stood around smiling, answering questions and engaging people who looked lost. Now there is a table identifiable as a source of information from a distance that is stocked with information—and most importantly after trekking in from that parking space in the hinterlands you stalked for 30 minutes–water to drink.

While I walked around comparing what I was seeing to previous years, I realized that tweaking your customer service up a level or two doesn’t just help your relationship with those you serve. It also sends a message to other employees about the commitment of the organization. Memos about improving service are useful and identify areas for improvement. In this case, there were no memos that went out about how things were going to be done better—it was just done.

I am obviously someone whose business it is to think about improving customer interactions so I notice such things. But I have to believe that others noticed the improvement, how it fit in the context of other recent changes and what it all says about the direction of the organization.

I also had some insight into the issue of providing volunteers with opportunities to feel they are doing important work. I have never really had much desire to volunteer for welcoming slots before. Today when I witnessed the increased effort at hospitality, I had a desire to participate next time around. (Just have to remember not to schedule sending the brochure to the printer, interviewing a ticket office clerk and starting internet sales on this day next time.) In previous years, my impression of the job was that it provided a pleasant first impression of the institution and directions to buildings. With the addition of tables, maps and water jugs, suddenly it seems like an important contribution to relieving anxious new arrivals.

We are planning a volunteer luncheon/training in a few weeks so perhaps I am in a receptive mindset on the subject. We have been thinking about how to design the volunteering experience so people have a greater feeling of doing something of value. We have been discussing increasing volunteers’ scope of responsibility and authority. I believe we also have to consider if these duties will allow them to feel they are providing a service patrons find valuable. Though certainly, people volunteer for different reasons and more authority may be a bigger motivator than being useful.

Human Touch Is Always Important

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Back in March I had mentioned that we were in the process of re-evaluating our emergency procedures and noted we had recently had automated external defibrillators (AED) installed.

If you aren’t familiar with them, AEDs are designed to save lives by essentially talking untrained people through the process of shocking a person’s heart back into a normal rhythm. The machine can detect a normal heartbeat so that you can’t actually use it on someone who doesn’t need it. (Such as part of a fraternity prank.) In fact, it is apparently mandated that the machine rather than a human make the decision as to whether a shock should be administered. The devices were first deployed around O’Hare airport and were such a success at saving lives, you can see them placed all over these days.

I was refreshing my CPR/First Aid training today in a session that also dealt with AED use. Due to my impression that the machines empowered an untrained person to save a life, I was surprised to learn that CPR training was an essential component of AED use and training. The AED isn’t of any use on those whose hearts have stopped but can help if your efforts at CPR have managed to establish a rhythm. (Our model at least coaches you on whether your compressions are deep enough and provides metronome cues to keep you on pace.) Of course, CPR should be started while you are waiting for the AED to be retrieved.

There are apparently companies that eschew the CPR training and insist only on the AED training depending pretty much entirely on its abilities and those of anyone who may be passing at the time. I don’t care if the machine gets to decide whether to administer a shock. Given how much arts organizations depend on the goodwill of that community, I can’t imagine eliminating human contact in favor of a machine is wise when it comes to life saving. It was a good idea to have some CPR trained staff before the AED came on the scene and it still seems prudent even with the presence of equipment that greatly increases survival rates.

Another interesting tidbit I learned, though I can’t attest to its veracity, is that most of the first AEDs manufactured were red. Given the association of red with emergency services, this seems logical. According to our trainer, lay people were less likely to use the AEDs because they perceived them to be emergency personnel only equipment. Seems reasonable, but maybe he was just trying convince us to accept ugly neon green AEDs.

While that little fact has nothing to do with the importance of training our staffs, it does illustrate just how important even the most subtle design choices can influence people. (And lends credence to the consultants who get paid to obsess over what tie a political candidate is going to wear.)

How Deep Is Your Brand?

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Neil Roan makes a good argument about the weak relationship between logos and branding in a recent blog entry. He talks about an exercise he conducted during a consulting interview where he challenges those assembled to describe the logos of Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then the New York Philharmonic.

In one case, one person – a communications professional – remembered one slight design attribute of the Met (lines and circles that reveal how the M character was drawn. She remembered it as DaVinci-esque in character). In all other cases, there were nothing but blank looks. Nobody – not one person, including a bunch of visual arts professionals and designers – could remember the logos for these household-word arts-brands.

Neill points out what I imagine is the obvious truth to most of us– all these organizations have world class brand identities regardless of anyone’s ability to recall their logos. Frankly, if you visit any of these organizations’ web pages, you will see that none of their logos are particularly remarkable that they would stick in the memory. I can understand why only the Met’s stylized M was the only one to elicit vague recall. (Yet I have this nagging suspicion they probably spent quite a bit of money developing those logos.)

The main thrust of Neill’s post is that branding involves much more than just a face lift or a new feel. Magazines and newspapers can project being more hip and modern by changing type face and layout, but superficial changes like that don’t work for organizational entities. Developing a real brand take commitment and a long view about how the organization will develop an identity which is embedded in its very bones.

Neill states that “It requires honesty when it’s easier to opt to look good rather than be real.” It took me a little while to think of an organization that has developed a strong brand being real rather than always being good. Then it occurred to me that the University of Notre Dame football team has developed a powerful aura and mythology that has endured regardless of the quality of the team. (Of course, it probably helped that Catholic priests all over the country would make a brief statement on the team’s behalf from time to time.)

Give the entry a read, especially if you are one of those being pressured to enact quick fixes and feel like no one values substance any more.

The Bad Makes Me Look Oh So Good

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Dan Ariely did a talk for the 2008 TED conference about how irrational we are when making decisions. The whole talk is quite entertaining. What really caught my attention comes around 12:30 where he talks about how a useless option can make other options look more valuable.

He uses an example of a mistake on the Economist.com. They were offering an internet only subscription for $59, a print subscription for $125 and a print and internet subscription for $125. After talking to the Economist and learning it was apparently a mistake, he did an experiment and offered the subjects these options. The web and print subscription option was overwhelmingly favored and no one wanted the print only subscription.

Seeing that the print only subscription was not valued, he got rid of it and did the experiment with the internet only option and internet and print option. This time, the internet only option was the clear favorite. He said the print only option was useless “in the sense nobody wanted it. But it wasn’t useless in the sense that it helped people figure out what they wanted.”

He goes on to say that because we really don’t know our preferences that well, we are susceptible to all these influences.

He offers another amusing example where he has computer generated pictures of two men, Tom and Jerry and he asks people which one they would prefer to date. In half of the cases he adds a third picture with Tom’s face Photoshopped to look less attractive and the other half where is the third picture is Jerry’s face altered to look unattractive. In those cases with the ugly Tom, people preferred regular Tom over Jerry and those cases that offered ugly Jerry, people preferred Jerry. The less attractive option actually made the choice it most resembled appear more appealing than a dissimilar option.

These revelations made me wonder if these behaviors could be used in subscription and ticket sales. Offer people options that don’t have value to nudge them toward purchasing more a bigger subscription package than they might have. I don’t know that it would transform a lot of single ticket buyers into subscription buyers unless we are wrong about flexibility being more important than price. A mini-subscription that offered flexibility and appeared to be a great value might have some success in getting single ticket purchasers to commit.

I also wonder if offering non-premium options with your show helps make them look more attractive than your competitors’. Ariely talks about another experiment where they offered people the option of an all-inclusive trip to Rome or Paris. In this case it is really apples and oranges since the two cities are in different countries have have so many different attributes to value. Once they add the option of going to Rome but having to pay for coffee in the morning, suddenly people preferred Rome over Paris by a larger degree due to the lesser option being available.

It doesn’t seem logical to me to think that given the option between the symphony and a free cocktail at intermission and the opera and a free cocktail at intermission, that people would flock to the orchestra if a no cocktail option for the same price was offered. But as Ariely points, out the decision being made are not entirely rational.

One other element that gives me pause is that all these results seem to be theoretical. No one had to commit time or money to their decision. Still, it is an interesting thing to consider since being theoretically more attractive will help your organization remain in people’s minds if they don’t necessarily commit. Those who see your brochure this year may be struck by what a good deal your shows are. Even if they don’t commit to buying tickets this year, that positive impression may keep you near the fore when they are deciding to attend next year.

Imagine The Kids After Salvador Dali Watched Them

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I recently became aware of a company that is offering artists in NYC and Chicago a flexible alternative to the waiting tables option. Sitters Studio provides babysitting work to performing and visual artists. The parents get a babysitter who offers creative activities to their children. The artists get an opportunity to employ their training and perhaps hone their skills and approach if they have any plans for bringing arts and arts education to children and families.

Sitters Studio trains their people in CPR, does background checks and bonds them but then appears to act as a clearing house for jobs. The sitters get a minimum of 4 hours pay in cash at the end of a session and help with cab fare after 9 pm. Rates start at $18 in NYC and $15 in Chicago. The interesting thing about the NYC side is that they seem to offer their services on something of a subscription basis. For $200/year you get priority service and a better rate than single time callers. They also offer cancellation forgiveness and bulk purchase and referral incentives.

All in all, it sounds like a great idea for all involved, especially if it results in kids growing up to appreciate the arts. The company provides their babysitters with a “Tote of Toys” that according to this story, serves as an ice break and source of ideas for the babysitting experience.

“We’ve given the sitters something from every art medium,” says Wilson. “We give them something that’s from a visual art, a theatrical art, a dance discipline and also from the musical discipline and we really find that it’s a great starting off point for the kids to engage in play.”

There seems to be a fair bit of potential in this company both as a business and as a way for advancing the interests of the arts community. There is certainly always an opportunity for conflicts of interest with people taking advantage of their close relationship with a family to sell/promote their personal work. But there is also opportunity for unified action. Last December all the babysitters had their charges working on cards for the armed forces overseas. I imagine that periodically Sitters Studio could sponsor some other unified initiative that reinforced the value of the arts in people’s lives without being pedantic.

Manufacturing Spontaneity

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Via Marginal Revolution, the Wall Street Journal has a story about a girl who was paid $1,800 to reference an upcoming movie in her high school valedictory speech. The movie did rather poorly and the “amateur” video of the graduation the movie studio posted on YouTube failed to achieve viral status. I doubt that will stop anyone from trying something similar again.

One of the things I wonder is if this sort of thing might not be pursued as a funding source for cash strapped non-profits. Will it really be in the non-profit sector’s best interest to engage in something like this? We bill live performances a authentic experiences with an opportunity for the sublime (as well as screw ups and catastrophes) that television and video don’t provide. If people discover the evening has been peppered with scripted “candid” moments, will we risk losing credibility and what’s left of our regular audience.

The counterargument might be made that if we don’t cash in on the eyes and ears we have assembled, someone else might just hijack our events to do so. The school district in the story had no idea their graduation ceremony had been co-opted for this purpose. In truth, there is nothing to force marketers to deal with you at all. In fact, it probably will be less trouble to circumvent you since an arts organization will want to draw up contracts and have lawyers involved.

It would be so much easier to arrange for an elderly person to disrupt a sold out performance and have a concerned adult child wring his/her hand over the fact the parent had neglected to take their Aricept. The visceral concern your audience feels having witnessed how Alzheimer’s can cause social disruptions is a much better selling point than any television ad and pretty much guarantees dissemination by word of mouth which I suspect has a higher trust ranking than a YouTube video.

It would be much better if non-profits didn’t get involved in these efforts in the first place. Then at least if people have a negative reaction upon discover an occurrence had been planned, they won’t automatically suspect the collusion when there wasn’t based on past revelations of the organization participating in such efforts.

More Roused Passion

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Well I am pleased to learn that my “best of” revival of my April 2005 entry about Neill Roan’s handling of the antisemitism in Bach’s St. John’s Passion has moved Neill to repost the talk he had given on the subject. If you were intrigued by the coverage I gave the incident in my entry, you will likely find it worth your while to read the entire thing. It is really an excellent study in engaging your audience amid controversy.

Just Leave Those Barriers Intact, Eh?

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Well, I am actually happy to confess that upon review, there aren’t as many artists being promoted by trite phrases as I implied at the end of my post yesterday. I get 40-50 emails a week from agents and artists during the off-season and close to that a day during the conference season. Even if only 1% contain trite phrases, I am seeing them with enough frequency that it feels like an epidemic.

The general area of offense I had in mind when I mentioned it yesterday is of the “ground breaking, barrier shattering, break through” ilk. I found quite a few of this type in my review. It appeared in emails, two cold call resumes I received in the last month and at least one radio advertisement I have heard lately. The closest to the truth any of these people seemed to get was the label experimental. I see the claim made a lot in reference to dance, but theatre and music make their share.

If you do modern dance with ballet, hiphop or jazz influences, you really aren’t pushing the envelop. Employing Hopi Indian influences gets intriguing. Getting the women of al Qaida to do modern dance is breaking all sorts of barriers. As is a ballet company doing something other than Nutcracker for their Christmas show.

Performance art pieces doing strange things in strange costumes that may or may not be a reference to the alienation of the individual by some force may be entertaining and thought provoking, but the ground was broken and has been pounded back down by many who have come before.

Taking a classic rock tune that appears fairly often on soft and light rock stations, turning it into an easy listening tune and calling it a break through crossover hit is just plain evil.

I have harped on the annoying overuse of “what it means to human” before. I am happy to see that phrase has moved to the fringes. I did see it used two weeks ago, but there had been a very welcome gap in our encounters. (I do pray it isn’t experiencing a revival.) I am hoping that the barrier breakers either find some other ways to talk about themselves or become involved with some legitimately innovative activities.

Use of trite marketing language generally doesn’t have any relation to the value of the performance or audience enjoyment. It does form a first impression so it definitely impacts the likelihood of being considered as a performer.

I’ll be the first to admit that writing effective copy is tough and if I am not, I will be among the first to shout Amen! Staying away from the trite stuff makes it harder but you ain’t gonna get any better allowing yourself to default to those word choices.

Artist, Promote Thy Self!

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Ah summer! When a young theatre manager’s thoughts turn to…collecting promotional information for the upcoming season.

I have been trying to collect information to promote our upcoming season on the web, season brochure, press releases, etc, etc. Much of my motivation is to have most of this into my graphic designer and web person’s hands before I go on vacation so I can come back and review what they have done.

It really astounds me that so many artists are ill prepared to promote their works. I can understand not having images upon my request, especially for works in progress or when an ensemble has had some significant change over. It can be tough getting everyone together and turn around from a photoshoot in a short time.

But there are a couple groups that seem unable to verbalize what is attractive about their work. All I need is 4-5 short sentences at this juncture folks! How hard is it to formulate something to get me excited!

One group I wrote up a blurb of the general sense I would be going for and asked them to fill in some blanks. My blanks even had suggested answers along the lines of – Mitch is a well regarded musician for his virtuosity in (bluegrass, classical, rock). All that they needed to do is clarify what was unclear.

That was over a week ago. I still haven’t heard back from them.

Another group is reviving a masterwork. For two weeks I have asked them for some simple clarification about the program being revised. I saw the principal performer two weeks ago at a theatre and he assured me I would get something (along with the contract) soon. I did receive a blurb this week about the last time he worked together with a guest artist appearing in the revival–but nothing about the revival itself. I finally emailed the organization which secured the grant for the revival asking them for some general information. Their deadline for materials was a few weeks ago so presumably they have something more than I do.

Something I noticed. With one exception, the groups I do have materials for all have agents. I have started to wonder, if not for the agents sending out a standard packet of information, would most of these other groups been in a position to communicate about themselves so clearly? The one exception is a young group without an agent which sent me two fantastic pages dense with great information.

If it comes to pass that agents either sever or reduce their involvement with their less than marquee performers and artists are left to fend for themselves in some manner, it might be a bad situation for many groups.

I don’t have any illusions about my role in things becoming redundant if artists really focused on managing their own business. Yeah managing the business end saps your energy for making art.

Just like anyone associated with an arts organization should be able to passionately extemporize on the value of what they do, every artist should be able to dash off an email or a make a phone call to give a short spiel on why they are worth seeing.

Notice I say extemporize. It is a maneuver that not everyone can do but with enough practice, people can sound unpracticed doing it.

If I have the time to ponder over lunch tomorrow, perhaps my next entry will be on some of the trite phrases being bandied about in promotional messages these days. In this, neither agents nor artists hold the high ground.

Lord knows, some of them do a better job than the publicists for arts organizations. Just take a look at Greg Sandow’s rants from 2005 (read from May 25 through June 15)

Unfulfilled Calls To Action

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You Got My Hopes Up!
I received an email through my blog Friday about an audience study that has recently been completed. I was elated because generally these emails, which are essentially press releases, are on topics I have no real interest in writing about. Many are on show openings and I don’t really cover those sort of things. Unless there is some experimental marketing initiative involved, I am not terribly interested. But finally, here was something I was eager to write on. I followed the link provided and….Nothing. I followed the other link to the research organization that did the study….nothing again. I decided to wait until today and try again thinking the press people may have gotten ahead of things a little. It is now a couple hours after quitting time in both organizations’ time zones and the promised reports are still not up.

Answering A Call To Action
This goes to illustrate one of the basic tenets of advertising and promotion–Don’t issue a call to action without providing your target group an ability to act. If you have an ad for a performance saying tickets on sale now, you better have a way for people to buy tickets available or you risk losing your credibility. This can be difficult if you are doing broadcast advertising and the radio or television station is giving you free air time on an “as available” basis. If you are going to have an ad running at 6 am, you may catch a good number of people during their morning commute–including your ticket office staff who haven’t gotten in to the office yet. If you can’t provide a web address to purchase tickets at, you can at least make sure to append your ticket office number with the office hours. Technology has increased the number of hours people expect to engage in transactions so the least you can do is be specific about the hours they can actually expect to contact your organization.

In any case, I am disappointed the announcement of this report preceded its actual release by so much time. I am motivated to read it so I am likely to return to the page on a couple more occasions. Others for whom the information might be useful, like arts leaders, may move on to other things and never revisit the link. Thus a valuable opportunity is lost in a sector where a large percentage of leaders do not keep abreast of the latest literature.

Cart’s Before The Horse And Speeding Away
I thought about this issue over the weekend. While I realized that as a tool, the press release was poorly used, I also recognized that technology induced expectations are outstripping our ability to provide our constituencies with the ability to act. I have recently decided to use Twitter to support event promotion efforts at our theatre. In keeping with my philosophy of not adopting the newest technological trends as they emerge, I only decided to use Twitter when I felt it was a good tool to accomplish a goal I had and knew the story I wanted it to create for our organization. But that is a subject of another entry.

Because we really don’t have a subscriber base to speak of, a formal season announcement really isn’t important. I started posting on Twitter every time we signed a contract with an artist figuring the little informal announcements of our season had the value of putting our followers in the know early on. The tweets also serve as the first of many reminders about our season that I want entering people’s subconscious. The problem is, due to myriad factors ranging from end of fiscal year wrap up, summer vacations and general logistics, we aren’t able to make the tickets available at the moment.

Only The Freshest Tweets, Please
We don’t have a lot of people following our Twitter feed right now because it is new and I haven’t made its existence widely known while I experiment and evaluate it’s use. I don’t think I am losing a lot of sales, especially given people’s propensity of waiting until the last moment to buy tickets. But what about this time next year? Every ticket sold is important these days. If I can’t figure out an alternative and get people on board, by this time next year I could be announcing performances I am not prepared to sell tickets for. Sure, I could wait and post about them when I am ready to sell tickets, but Twitter is all about immediacy–“What are you doing right now?” Months old news is stale and moldy.

Even if I could make delayed updates work without losing any credibility, the way things are moving, that option may not be viable with the next generation of technology.

Organic Arts, Taste The Difference

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My cousin is a farmer. But he isn’t just any old farmer. About five years ago he started working his farms with two massive Belgian draft horses rather than using gas powered equipment. When fuel prices started climbing last year, I figured I might end up taking lessons from him some day. He hasn’t turned his back on technology by any means and calls upon neighbors to do some of the tasks that are either too much for his horses or can’t be done with his team. But he is really committed to sustainable farming with out chemicals and the like.

I have been trying to discern what lessons his way of life might have for my way of life. My cousin’s farm contributes goods to a community supported agriculture cooperative where people subscribe to receive a share of his produce throughout the year. He would probably farm like this anyway, but his timing is fairly good in that he is doing this at a time where value is being placed on organic and free range farming. His website outlines how his crops and livestock are employed to support each other which adds value to the sides of free range beef, sheep, poultry and eggs you can purchase from him online.

So I am trying to figure out what is the back to basics approach the arts can take? Other than the piano and sheet music in the parlor, I can’t really of an archetypal image in American arts life with which to appeal to people. What ideals would you invoke to remind people of value that has been lost in present times? How are they diminished by cell phones and the Internet?

And really, it is a lot of idealism that people are buying with their free range organic food these days. It can’t diminish what my cousin is doing to say so because he is obviously a true believer. I grew up surrounded by farms, (God help me, but the smell of manure still makes me nostalgic), but most consumers have no direct experience with process by which food is produced. The basics they are trying to get back to isn’t likely something they or even their parents once had and yearn for again.

So the success of a campaign on behalf of the arts wouldn’t necessarily depend on people having experienced the arts. It would just need to evoke some value people feel is missing from their lives. One of the images we want to avoid is that of the elite, white audience. Unfortunately that is a real historical image. Not only do most arts organizations want to avoid that as they strive to be more multicultural and inclusive, but likely would prefer people not imagine audiences comprised of rich bankers.

It may sound manipulative to say success depends on using the right turns of phrase. As we are all aware though, the reality is that we start from zero with vast number of people. If more people had interaction and experience upon which to appeal, it would certainly be more effective to connect with real experience rather than a nebulous ideal. The problem people like my cousins have is that there are a lot of companies out there playing fast and loose with what constitutes what organic and free range means. It is obvious that my cousin’s operation is sustainable but the other guys can undercut his price by employing less rigorous standards and calling it the same thing. If more consumers possessed the discernment which comes from direct experience with the food production process, fewer would be fooled.

In terms of producing a sustainable arts product that has resonance with a community, Scott Walters’ Theatre Tribe appears to be a viable option. (Albeit the only considered plan of which I am aware.)

Having a good product still doesn’t solve the question of messaging. Though certainly real quality lends itself to convincing arguments about value. The simple truth is, evoking the idea that arts attendance fills a gap created by modern life may not be the most effective option. You don’t need me to tell you quality doesn’t equal success. As big a trend organic is these days, there are still far fewer farmers than there were when I was a kid.

Perhaps the only lesson to take from my cousin’s example is one we already know as arts people. First, do what fulfills you and if people are interested in paying you for it great. As I said, his decision to farm with draft animals was not motivated by the credibility he would get with consumers of organic food and hopes of income as a result. He may not even make much selling to that segment of people. (In fact, he teaches agriculture at a local high school.) He just likes working his farm.

You Know, For The Kids (And Everyone Else, Too)

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February was a real busy month for me so I only had the time to bookmark The Nonprofiteer’s epiphany about the value of public funding for the arts.

“Of course you’re indifferent to public funding for the arts, you dodo; you live in Chicago, where major performers and exhibitions will show up anyway. Public funding for the arts isn’t for Chicago–it’s for Bloomington.

And she remembered growing up in Baltimore, which is not a small town but which waited for months between visits of major dance companies; and she remembered the thrill of seeing those dance companies for the first time. And she realized (0r remembered) that that’s the real point of public funding for the arts: to make available to everyone the thrill of exposure to first-rate art. Everyone: that means people who live in Bloomington, and International Falls, and Arroyo Hondo, even though the free market would not support a stop in any of those places by the latest tour from the Joffrey or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Met.

I thought she made quite a few good arguments on behalf of funding the arts. They seem of particular value given that she finds them compelling as a person who is not particularly supportive of public funding for the arts. It isn’t often that a non-politician who has not drank deeply of the Kool-Aid takes the time to provide considered commentary on behalf of public support of the arts so it behooves us to take note. As might be expected, I am not entirely in accord with her suggestion that support should only be in presentation rather than creation of new works. Though I certainly do see her point:

“…you have to accept another, equally painful truth, which is that no one can actually determine what’s “art” til at least 25 years after it’s been created. Probably the Nonprofiteer doesn’t need to remind you that people threw things at the stage the first time they saw and heard The Rite of Spring, now part of the musical canon. But what she probably does need to point out is that this doesn’t mean the public should accept and/or fund every objectionable thing it sees in hopes that it will ultimately turn out to be art. Rather, it means that support for creation is a mug’s game, a gamble at which most players lose, and that the public should instead put its money into presentation.”

I hadn’t initially assumed she was saying that public funding of the arts was needed to bring culture to the hinterlands. All the same, I was glad for Scott Walters’ comment to her about the importance of enabling local groups to develop works that emphasize and reinforce the value that can be found in their communities. For me that is the strongest argument for funding the creation of new work. I am not as vocal as Walters is on his blog about how the concept that artistic success originates from NY/LA/Chicago is robbing the rest of the country of talent. But I am certainly in agreement with him that there is no reason those places should be held as a standard of quality and be viewed as the only destinations for achieving artistic success.

Public monies and tax breaks are offered to attract and retain industry, perhaps the same should be done with the arts. The argument can be made that state and municipal support of the arts is doing just that. What the public support is not doing though is generally providing incentive to “buy locally.” In some cases, there has to be an equal investment in encouraging people to create locally as well. I have mentioned in a number of posts lately that while it would be much more economical for me to present local artists, there aren’t enough of quality to sustain the effort very long. There are a fair number of talented people in the community, but most (though certainly not all) are expressing themselves via Broadway plays and musicals or covers/derivatives of other people’s work.

Still, if the criteria for receiving public monies and tax breaks was 100% of the concept and execution by local artists, I could take advantage of the support at least once a year and guarantee my audiences the quality they have come to expect. That sort of confidence constitutes a good starting point in my mind.

One last bit of the NonProfiteer I would quote is her view that we need to get public support for the arts as acceptable a concept as public support for education.

Yes, yes, the Nonprofiteer knows: education isn’t well-funded either; but relatively few people argue that public funding for education is just a plot to spread disgusting lies, or to keep teachers from having to work. Let’s get the discussion about public funding for the arts to the level of conceptual agreement we have for public education, and then we can engage in any further battles that might need to be fought.

In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU. No one cares about you. What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.

I think there is a distinction between what she means by “how exposure to what you do will improve us” and the message the arts have been communicating along those lines. While improving test scores, reasoning skills and developing geniuses in the womb are probably part of what she is suggesting we talk about, it can’t be the entirety for the simple reason that it excludes anyone who is not a child. People care about their kids, yes, but everyone will only be persuaded when they perceive they are included in the benefits. I think it is pretty clear that the reasons we give can’t be about what we want people to experience but what they want to experience.

We want people to experience transcendent moments and there is a good chance the first time they sit down to hear a symphony play, they won’t have a transcendent experience. The measure of their satisfaction with the experience that night may simply be that no one caught on to their utter cluelessness. Transcendent experiences should certainly always be a goal and are absolutely attainable on ones first interaction. I just spoke to a woman today who had a group of students who did just that, though they probably couldn’t have identified it as such.

There is a difficulty in asking people what they want out of an experience with which they have had limited interaction. About 18 months ago I linked to a video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about how when people were asked what kind of spaghetti sauce they liked, described the sauces they were eating. However, when presented with samples of different options, expressed strong preferences for sauces that no company actually made. When asked, people may say they like car chases and gun battles not realizing what they really may value is dramatic tension and once they get past the arcane language, a lot of Shakespeare really suits them.

If trying to draw responses of value from your audiences sounds like an intimidating process, well sure it is. There are big companies sinking millions of dollars into marketing and research trying to figure it all out too with limited success. The advantage you have is that you only have to figure it out for the community you serve.

More Impact Of The Economy Conversation

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Yesterday, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters had a follow up to the conference call on the economy I listened in on in December. Given that there weren’t enough phone lines to accommodate all those who wanted to attend, this time they employed a webinar format so people could attend online. You either listen directly or download the web session.

The call is about 90 minutes long and many on the panel mention strategies and opportunities people can take. What caught my ear and interest were the approach to programming described by Marilyn Santarelli, Executive Director of the F. M. Kirby Center for the Performing Arts. She talks about how she is re-negotiating payments to artists per Numa Saisselin’s suggestions in “Arts Presenting Is Dead.”

As Saisselin suggests, she goes to the artists and talks about their sales to date, their marketing efforts and are honest about their break even point. They asked that the artist share in the risk and lower their price. They proposed that after reaching the break even point, they would start to restore to the artist “dollar for dollar from the first dollar whatever discount you gave to us.” She found the artists that bought in to this option worked harder to help promote the show with more interviews, b-roll, etc. The alternative, she told them, was canceling the show.

It sounded as if they had only done this starting last December. I am curious to know if this inhibits her planning for her upcoming season as artists and agents worry that what they initially negotiate may not be final. Likewise, would they be more open to booking with someone who has a workable alternative to cancellation if things go poorly.

She also talked about their ticket sales strategy. Her organization is discounting early in the season and offering discounts to a wider variety of people including subscribers and sponsors. I am not sure, but it sounded as if they were expanding the groups of people who are eligible for discounts. As the season goes on, the prices will go up. She hopes if they message this approach correctly, people will buy early realizing they are getting a bargain. No mention of whether they were loosening their exchange policy for people who committed early. The Kirby Center has only implemented this on a few show so far and did so because 60% of their sales were happening in the last few weeks. I suspect that this approach will vary in success from community to community and some will still rather wait and see than to buy now and that the higher price closer to the date may prove a disincentive to those with many options.

These are just some of the strategies and opportunities being employed that are mentioned in the webinar. If you are eager for a little guidance, give it a listen.

Under Pressure To Find Value In Live Performance

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Thanks to YouTube I have been thinking a lot about the experience of live performance. A couple months ago, for reasons I can’t remember, I watched this cover of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” done by David Bowie and Gail Ann Dorsey.

I thought their rendition was great and a couple weeks later, I wanted to hear it again and ended up with this version.

It was soon clear that it wasn’t the same performance. I liked the first version much better. One of my first thoughts was how interesting it was that the same song, same performers, same tour could have a vastly different quality. It seemed to me a good argument for seeing live performance. Often people say they don’t want to see a play or hear a piece of music again because they have already seen it. People in the arts generally counter that different groups render different interpretations. If that doesn’t work, we break out the old opportunity for disaster option noting that you never know what will happen at a live performance. Even better in this case with almost all things being equal, one performance is so much more exciting than the other which proves another degree of value for live performances. I started checking to see if Bowie was coming to town soon.

Well, come to find out it is not quite all things equal. The second video is from 1997 and the first from 2003. (In my defense, not all of the copies are well dated.) I imagine part of the reason I like the 2003 video is that the sound is much better. I also believe Dorsey got more kickass in that time.

Which brings me to the second revelation about the experience of live performance–the importance of reference points. My sense of where the videos fall on the quality continuum is based on my experience with the original version by Queen and Bowie vs. 2003 Bowie and Dorsey vs. 1997 Bowie and Dorsey. What I have no ability to judge is the relative value of a piece of classical music played by the NY Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, much less the same piece by a single ensemble now and six years ago.

From my perspective, no symphony would allow themselves to take the liberties in interpreting Beethoven Bowie and Dorsey took with Queen’s original music. But I could well be wrong. I have no experience upon which to base that assertion other than my belief that symphonies are too tradition bound to do so. This lack reinforces the importance of regular and repeated exposure to the arts. It also reveals why the belief that people will become enamored of the arts if only they will step through the door is erroneous. People can only judge something is good if they have a basis upon which to make the judgment.

The general implication of making a statement about exposure to the arts is that it has to be in schools. Students are a captive audience and unformed vessels ready to receive. The parents are lost to us. They are too old and too busy at work to pay attention to our lessons. Yes, that is mostly true. But when they take breaks from work they go to things like First Friday’s downtown where they will stop and satisfy their curiosity about Southeast Asian dance if the opportunity presents itself in a easily accessible place.

Cheap dates are important in this economy so First Friday type events may present an opportunity for increased exposure. Expose people often now and maybe they will be prepared to pay for the experience by the time the economy turns around and increases their disposable income.

April is Take A Friend To the Orchestra Month (TAFTO) and provides a good opportunity to position events and opportunities that encourage friends to experience an event together.

(You don’t actually have to be an orchestra to take advantage of April in this manner. Just don’t tell Drew McManus I gave you permission.)

Looking For Shows In All The Close Places

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Last Friday I went to First Friday downtown. My main motivation was that my assistant theatre manager and his wife were performing at an outdoor stage. The theme was Asian performance so there were performances of gamelan, kulintang music, Balinese, Cambodian and Thai dance and a couple of fusion pieces.

While I came to support a friend, I was soon evaluating performances for suitability in upcoming seasons. We have been told to expect that we are all but guaranteed to lose $20,000 from a regular source so I need to identify generally inexpensive quality performances. Ultimately, I didn’t think any I saw that night were quite right and a couple, pretty awful. Before I made this determination I started to ponder how I might structure future seasons.

I started to wonder if it might be possible to follow Numa Saisselin’s example and announce a shorter season in my brochure next Fall with the intent of adding two or three performances as the opportunity presents itself. There are always a few shows that do well and a few shows that attract a third of what the best shows do. My expenses are generally the same for all of them so if I can reduce my costs a little, I will be doing better. What contributes either directly or indirectly to my costs is distance people have to travel so I can realize some significant savings if I can control those expenses. Since people are making their attendance decisions extremely close to the performance dates, I don’t think I would lose anything by having some events absent from the season brochure.

I often have a general idea of which shows will have a lower appeal but pay the price knowing that the work is worth seeing and if I don’t bring them, then no one else will. The smaller audience appreciates the opportunity no less than the larger one. Unfortunately, that idealism may have to be indulged slightly less often in favor of discerning whether there are local/regional performers who have the quality but haven’t had the opportunity to be seen.

Outside of my uncertainty about such groups existing, one concern I have is that if I don’t set my schedule early, I will have to really control what dates I rent out. We have a fairly strong facility rental program and can have most of the year rented out almost immediately after releasing the dates we don’t intend to use.

I would most certainly make more money renting instead of presenting on those same dates but I don’t want to reduce our offerings even in these financially tenuous times. I believe we would lose momentum with our community. While precious few seem to have any loyalty to us, I suspect their numbers are greater than we imagine. There is also the issue of slipping out of the collective consciousness if there are fewer mentions of us in the media.

So for the next few months I am going to be doing a lot of pondering, talking and consulting with people on our direction. There is no option before me that I want to fully commit to –fully a rental house, fully produce local performers–but the fiscal realities before me are likely to mean exploring these options to some degree.

Living The Fantasy..Sort Of

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One of the reasons I enjoy my job is because I get to live my fantasies. One of my favorite involves standing in front of the ticket office having ticket holder praise my acumen in contracting high quality performers while those who did not purchase in advance wail in lament at seeing the sold out sign in the ticket office window.

Of course, being a fantasy, it doesn’t live up to reality. In my fantasy, the show has been sold out for weeks or showing clear signs of doing so for some time. The most recent reality is that ticket sales were steady, but few for months. At week out we we barely had 150 tickets sold. Then things started picking up 3 days before and exploded the last two days before the performance.

The people who showed up having not bought tickets had spent 6 months telling me how excited they were this performer was coming. They worked two buildings over, had a poster for the event right next to their office doors and received two emails exhorting them to purchase tickets.

It is hard to be savor being pleased with oneself when you are stifling the instinct to smack people upside their heads.

Granted, it is inevitable that a popular show will require dealing with a few disappointed souls who did not act quickly enough. My real reaction was more to roll my eyes in exasperation than to enact the V-8 forehead smack.

My real concern is that with people making decisions so close performance dates it is becoming harder to discern between a show destined to sell out and a flop before the actual performance date. In the context of the proposal of my last entry to allow presenters to cancel when ticket sales look dismal, I might have canceled had I been engaging in that practice. The article I wrote on came into my hands in a timely manner. It not only got me thinking, but it connected with a situation I was experiencing.

Numa Saisselin’s proposal to allow presenters to cancel includes proving diligence in promoting the show. In this case, I can pretty clearly trace the surge in sales to media coverage for which I did not pay. I probably need not have bought any advertising space at all. One story on the local NPR station I knew would probably happen because the interviewer asked for a contact name. The second, a feature story in the newspaper, was totally a surprise to me. The writer, who usually asks me for contact information didn’t in this case so I had no idea the story would run.

I feel confident in saying I wouldn’t have needed to advertise in this instance because I believe a lot of people knew and valued the performer. The stories were merely a kick in the butt to get them to start buying. For the rest of my performances, it can be difficult to make effective decisions. I am fairly certain advertising and electronic reminders during the week of the performance is effective for one portion of my demographic and that periodic exposure of the information over a longer period of time is effective for another segment even though both groups are buying their tickets at the last moment.

Other than the brochure and email, we aren’t quite sure what is most effective. When we ask people where they heard about the performance, many times people can’t decide through what form of media they heard it much less what station or newspaper. (It can be quite interesting to learn we are advertising on radio or television when we haven’t.)

In any case, I could have shown an investment in promoting the show through various media and promotional campaigns and asked for a cancellation based on awful ticket sales–and geez I would have been wrong. Yet there have been a few times when I would have been oh so right to cancel based on identical circumstances. Hopefully most people don’t operate in a market in which such nebulous conditions exist, but I suspect a great many do or will in the course of a few years.

And I begin to think the agents already know this and have been monitoring the situation for years. The last couple places I have worked, agents periodically call to get ticket sales counts even though the artist is guaranteed a set amount rather than a percentage of the gate. I can’t recall any agent or management company directing promotional resources to our market if tickets weren’t selling well. Yet at times the agents could be pretty relentless about getting the attendance numbers.

Saisselin’s mention of the unofficial procedure for cancellations made me think that perhaps agents may have assembled quite an in-house database of artists’ average sales X days out in cities with Y demographics. They may have a fairly accurate idea of when a cancellation request might be in the offing or perhaps when it might be prudent to either drop an artist from their roster or work with the artist to improve elements of their performance.

In spite of my sold out performance fantasies, the trend seems to be toward committing to attendance later and later in the process. If agents are in fact compiling information for decision making purposes, they may find the predictive power of their stats to be increasingly less dependable any distance out from a performance as reality confounds their expectations. (Or maybe they have really good statistical models.)

Programming Comfort Food

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I attended the season planning meeting of my block booking consortium today. As I suspected, many projects which would have been quickly picked up by the membership in recent years were deferred to other years because of financial concerns. One partner is going into a major retrenchment mode reducing their events from 10 to three or four. I left the meeting with fewer details solidified than in the past, in part because there were fewer tours available to collaborate on. There are a few dangling possibilities that I can pursue but I will have to work much hard to build a tour working on people individually than I would have in the meeting.

The situation was expressed best by one of the members. She spoke about her audiences orienting on “comfort food” rather than experimenting with new fare. While she isn’t moving toward more pop culture acts, many of the performers she is looking at have performed at her venue before or are similar enough to previous artists to provide audiences with a familiar reference point. Because of this approach, even though economics are driving so many decisions, she actually turned down the opportunity to present a less expensive, lesser known act that would be more intellectually challenging in favor of a much more expensive, better known one.

There were a couple positive outcomes to the meeting. A board member flew over with the director of his organization in an attempt to understand how the consortium worked. When a board member is motivated by financial uncertainty to involve themselves in some aspect of operations, it can be a iffy proposition. Negative judgments made after a short exposure to an unfamiliar process can be unhealthy for an organization. In this case, it was a positive experience all around because the board member asked a lot of questions and seemed to recognize that the problems they were facing were widespread and not particular to them or due to missteps by the director.

That was the second positive outcome of the meeting. For the first time since I have been a member of the consortium, people actually took the time to talk about a number of subjects. The people who attended the Arts Presenters conference last month spoke about the Marketing Segmentation Study Alan Brown from Wolf Brown spoke on. I was pleased, of course, since I am a believer in arts people taking the time to stay abreast of recent literature and generally stay informed.

There was also discussion of different strategies people are using in pricing, marketing and sponsorship. I took quite a few notes. The one idea I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of was providing show sponsors with the option of either having a full page ad in the program book or donating the space to a non-profit. That is a win all around since the sponsor gets points with both the theatre and another non-profit and gets to write off more of the sponsorship as a donation since they didn’t get the value of the ad space. The theatre gets the financial support and scores a few points with the non-profit and its supporters. The other non-profit gets increased exposure.

Interesting Thoughts From Other Places

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Read some good stuff today on two blogs that really can’t be improved upon by any commentary I can offer so read on—

The Nonprofiteer had some sage advice in a recent entry regarding recruiting people to fill volunteer roles be it a board member or ticket taker — recruit in pairs.

The two-by-two recommendation is most often made about Board members, and specifically about minority Board members: don’t ask someone to be the only African-American or the only woman in the room. But it’s equally true of any Board recruit, or in fact of any volunteer: bring in 1 person, and you’ve got a 50% shot at keeping him/her. Bring in 2, and you’ve got an 80% shot at keeping them both.

Why? Because misery loves company, and being a newcomer/outsider is always misery. And because unless your Board or volunteer program is truly astonishing, anyone observing it from the outside will think it could use a lot of improvement. The prospect of trying to improve something unaided is usually daunting to the point of not bothering.

Seems easier to do with board members who tend to be actively recruited as opposed to volunteers for other areas which are often self-selected. You don’t want to turn someone away simply because no one else offered their services this week. It is possible though to orient people in pairs or small groups to facilitate bonding among them. If the 80% retention stat is correct, it seems prudent to arrange the situation so people’s initial volunteer encounters are in multiples.

Over at Producer’s Perspective, Ken Davenport relates an answer Sandy Block of Sernio Coyne gave to the question about why producers attempt to mount Broadway productions given the enormous challenges. Block stops the class in which the question was asked and queries those attending how many remember the first movie they saw and then how many can name the first Broadway show they saw. Few people raised their hands at the first question but everyone raised their hands at the second.

Says Davenport:

There’s a highly emotional experience connected with Broadway; a passion that can be turned into profit . . . Now the real question is, how can we capitalize on that?

Davenport then asks his readers to take Sandy Block’s survey and record the first movie and first Broadway show they saw in the comments section of the entry. If you remember, go on over and write it in.

Segmenting Mass Appeal

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More and more often these days at work are segmenting our message to audiences and I have to say, it is a pretty labor intensive undertaking.

In the last week I have:

Contacted Newspapers
Sent out press releases and images for our upcoming shows and discovered the newspaper arts editor who was there in November took the buy out package and is no longer there. The features editor who oversees the weekend arts section has stated she is taking things in a new direction. Considering that the last direction was more pop culture oriented and away from the arts, I am reluctant to learn what this new focus might be. In any case, this means shifting the language of my releases yet again to make our performances seem to resonate with this new theme without misrepresenting the shows.

It would be great if the rival papers, seeing the shift in focus figured the main daily was on to something and copied them. The problem is that the alternative weekly defines themselves as an alternative to the main daily. We get a healthy portion of our audience from the alt-weekly. Where the main daily wants to write stories on shows with the widest appeal, the alt-weekly wants to tell people why a select niche go to these shows. Their readership is pretty savvy so a lot of explanation isn’t necessary. However, I did make a note to the editor observing why people might, on the face of things, underestimate a couple events.

The main daily paper has also started to emphasize user generated content which makes me think the days of the editors that remain may be numbered, too. We already lost the editors who did stories for the neighborhood inserts a couple months earlier. For the moment, it gives me another avenue of communication with the public. Although this means essentially writing a press release that appeals directly to the general public rather than one that tries to convince an editor the performance is worth tasking someone to write a story about.

Contacted Schools
Because it is the start of a new semester, we emailed information to many of the area colleges suggesting professors add us to their syllabus as supplementary material or extra credit assignment at the very least. I email the theatre, dance and music people, of course. However, thanks to online course listings, I am able to contact history, education, religion, anthropology, literature and philosophy professors when the subject matter of a performance aligns with course topics. Some shows are more suitable than others. Although it is fairly labor intensive to cross reference course titles with the descriptions on other web pages, we get enough professors giving positive responses to make it worthwhile. At the very least, many of the professors attend even if their students don’t. Since these academics are from other campuses, this helps spread the word about our venue to a desirable demographic.

Contacted Our Email List
Every month I send out emails about the performances for that month. Because this group is so large, we know the least about how to effectively pitch to this group. Our approach can be similar to the material we use on the newspaper’s user generated content. Except these people know us and have a relationship with us and we can’t talk to them as if they are entirely anonymous entities. We also have the benefit of controlling the timing and content of what we release. This is the group I am most anxious about contacting because I don’t want our communications to come across as spam.

Back in November, Adam Thurman at The Mission Paradox touched on this subject. I am indeed the Joe who made the comment on the entry. I am concerned about find a balance between telling a compelling story about our organization and saying so much people consider it spam and don’t read it. Every month we have a few people who unsubscribe from our list. I keep a list to make sure we honor their wishes and don’t resubscribe them at some point. I rarely know why people leave our list. Why did they chose this month to leave and not last month?

Today I actually received one answer to this silent question. A woman emailed us to tell us she was leaving the list because she lived on the other side of the county and no longer drove at night. She urged us to keep up our good work offering people great performances. It is encouraging to get emails like this. I don’t have the capacity to ask people and allow people to explain why they are unsubscribing when they do so. I am looking into a technology which I believe might actually facilitate this.

Adam Thurman’s answer to the questions I had about balancing selling with creating relationships was a suggestion to add a couple interesting tidbits into the email. He noted that if an item needed more than a tidbit in length to explain it, a link to a page expounding on the item should be provided for those interested in more information.

The performance schedule for the next six weeks really lent itself to this practice. One event, the performers encourage people to bring hand held percussion instruments for audience participation. . Another event we are able to offer an opportunity to attend a master class so suggested people mark the date. We will follow up with another reminder next month.

We Also Did Everything Else
We were also working on PSAs and print and radio ads making changes appropriate for each audience as we went. You pretty much have the idea of how we were working so I won’t belabor the point with each of these.

The thing that is intimidating is that as much as we have crafted our message for each of these audiences, we could be doing more. Technology allows us to collect and process information more readily than in the past. We only have a small portion of our total audience’s email addresses and attendance histories because so many people are buying tickets at the door where it is difficult to both capture contact information and serve everyone on line in a timely manner.

Still, I have quite a bit of information with which to work. I can target all people who attended dance performances with a custom message about an upcoming dance performance. I could subdivide them and target people who attended sub-genres of dance similar to that of an upcoming event and further customize my message to make note of that similarity. I can toss in other criteria like frequency over a set period of time if I wanted.

Just as there can be a Tyranny of Choice with consumer goods, so too can the plethora of options paralyze your marketing and promotional plans in an attempt to find the perfect permutation of elements to generate the most effective appeal.

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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