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If You Give Me More Helping Hands, Give Me More Cash

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The idea of mandatory national service gets bandied about a lot, especially during presidential election years. This year it seemed to pop up more frequently due to the proposals for free college tuition being floated by some of the candidates. People were suggesting at the very least those who received free tuition needed to reciprocate in some fashion such as national service in the military, Peace Corps, Americorps, etc.

Last week a discussion held by a local public radio station on the pros and cons of mandatory service came across my social media feed. The host and his guests made a lot of good points about the cons, not the least of which is that people are supportive of the idea for younger people, but when you suggest a mandatory service of even one hour a month for all citizens, there is fierce resistance.

Most of the negative outcomes they mentioned were from the point of view of those who would be providing service. Something they overlooked was the fact that there is expense involved in administering a service program, regardless of whether the participants are being paid or not. This is true whether the service is military or civil. I am going to mostly address it from the civil side, but the basic factors are almost identical. This issue is overlooked pretty much everywhere I could find a national service discussion online.

Supervisory infrastructure, materials, equipment, space, facilities and dozens of other details are necessary if there are any expectations of a meaningful experience with meaningful outcomes from a mandatory service experience.

Mandatory service on a national or even state level can be a boon to the work that non-profits and other service organizations do, but it will require a significant increase in capacity building funding from some combination of governments and foundations. Otherwise having service workers becomes more of a hindrance than a help to an organization.

This issue needs to be raised a lot more emphatically when these ideas are discussed. Otherwise, people will be looking askance at the non-profit sector wondering how it could be screwing things up so badly when they were being provided with the service of 3 million high school graduates every year.

I think it is too easy to equate added labor with industrial productivity and revenue generation and see mandatory service as a boon to organizational sustainability. But very little work non-profit organizations do generates revenue. Being able to teach more children will require more space and instructional supplies. Being able to feed more homeless or elderly will require more food, vehicles and food preparation equipment. Being able to provide health services to people will require more space, medicine, diagnostic equipment.

More capacity to do these things means more money than ever will be spent. Unfortunately, the organizations’ capacity to generate the money to cover these costs probably won’t increase a whit.

The only area in which I could see any sort of return on investment would be in terms of the old WPA type infrastructure projects. If you have people planting trees that can be harvested decades down the road, clearing/creating parks that can be used to generate revenue or gentrify an area to increase the tax base, then you might tie a tangible result to the service. However, a lot of the needed services have intangible results.

So yes, ultimately the nation would be more unified and healthier for having a stronger ethic of service. But getting there ain’t free.

This Is What You Said, This Is How We Are Fixing It

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If you haven’t seen the first iteration of ArtsHacker’s Most Creative People In Arts Administration, hop over there now and check it out.

Or actually, wait until you read the rest of my post, then go over there…

If there was one thing I learned as a member of the review panel, it was that there are a lot of unrecognized arts administrators doing great work out there. This year Juan José Escalante, Executive Director of José Limón Dance Festival and Aubrey Bergauer, Executive Director of California Symphony both deservedly tied for top honors.

One thing that impressed me about Bergauer’s nomination were support documents that included the symphony’s blog. To be certain, there are only a few entries on the blog, but the one I appreciated the most discussed the results of discussion sessions they conducted with Millennials and Gen Xers.

The post reviews all the issues the discussion participants raised and then lists what the symphony has done to address these issues. This is important because one of the key rules of surveying is don’t ask for a feedback on an situation you don’t intend to take action on. Not only did they take action, but they used the blog to communicate what that action is within the confines of their operating environment. (i.e. They don’t control the ticketing system of the venues at which they perform.)

The blog post is a treasure trove of great feedback for any arts organization since there is very little that is specific to the California Symphony. The things discussion attendees wanted to know but weren’t finding easy to access included things like: why is this music a big deal?, how long will it run?, what will the experience be like?, what are each of the instruments called?

The music selected for the program mattered least.

There were a lot of quotable sections of the blog. Here are some of my most favorite favorites.

Read the Manual:

Then, they get to step 4): make a decision on why they want to attend a specific concert, and our response is essentially “WHY CAN’T YOU FIGURE OUT WHY RACHMANINOFF’S SECOND SYMPHONY IS A BIG DEAL? LOOK IT UP IF YOU WANT TO KNOW!” (marketing failboat — why do we set up our sites this way, and then wonder why the sales funnel is getting choked up at the add-to-cart step?).

Everyone Else Is In The Know:

One participant asked if there is “a separate webpage for younger people we could make?” What was so interesting about that comment is that this person assumed that they were in the minority as far as understanding answers to these types of questions. The assumption was that other, older people are much more familiar with the symphony when in reality, there is no magical age at which one suddenly becomes an aficionado.

Comment from a discussion participant:

“It was so impressive — I didn’t expect it to feel THAT different than Spotify.”

On Pricing:

Even the discussion group brought up (on their own, without any prompting) the idea that they’ll all shell out big bucks for Taylor Swift. So price alone is never an isolated issue; it’s all about the perceived value one is receiving in exchange for that price. What we did find interesting was the comment of, “I’m more likely to go to three $25 performances than I am one $75 or $100 performance.” Many others chimed in with agreement to that statement.

Okay, now you can go over to the Arts Hacker site. Thanks for reading.

Be True To Your Audience Just Like You Would Your Girl Or Guy

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Last week I was initially dismayed to read 85% of audiences in Washington D.C. patronized one theater. I try to promote the concept that all arts organizations in a community need to work together to illuminate all the opportunities for cultural participation, but news like that can cause people to scramble and jealously cling to whatever audiences they can get.

The people quoted in the article admit as much:

That means encouraging audiences to go to any theater, following the “rising tide lifts all boats” philosophy. It can be a bit counterintuitive for chronically embattled nonprofit arts organizations long in the habit of primarily looking out for themselves.

“It’s the fear that if I introduce you to my friends, you’ll like them better than you like me,” Woolly Mammoth managing director Meghan Pressman says.

However, there are a number of people quoted in the piece that feel the study underestimates how broadly people already attend other organizations, in part because the study that was conducted only included seven of the many theater groups in the Washington D.C. area. Some of the groups in the survey do have 20%-30% overlaps between their audiences. In surveys others have conducted for Signature Theatre and Round House Theatre, found even greater overlap:

In the two-year Round House survey, 43 percent of single-ticket buyers had been to four or more theaters within a year, 59 percent went to three or more, 76 percent to two or more, and 91 percent went to at least one theater other than Round House. That does not include attending the big touring houses (the Kennedy Center, the National Theatre, the Warner Theatre), which further raises the figures.

Perhaps more encouraging is that the theaters are already collaborating on projects and not defensively guarding their audiences.

Examples seem to be growing. Signature and Round House cross-promoted the musicals “Jelly’s Last Jam” (recently at Signature) and “Caroline, or Change” (with Signature talent working at the Bethesda stage). Round House just partnered with Olney Theatre Center on a co-production of the two-part, seven-hour “Angels in America,” presented at Round House and geared to moving patrons between the two troupes. Next year, the organizations will team up again — sharing infrastructure, artists and audiences — for a show at Olney.

So obviously by the end of the article I was breathing a little easier and had a more optimistic view of things.  Though admittedly the idea that there were audiences that felt such a high degree of loyalty to a single theater was encouraging. (Assuming it was loyalty and not lack of awareness or other barriers that kept them from attending other places.)

Something from the middle of the article worth of note was an observation made about how theaters cultivate audiences:

For Robinson, the issue is keeping audiences the first time they visit. She describes a “magic math” that happens when patrons can be lured to more than one performance, and to more than one theater, per year. Repeat attendance jumps and attrition dives, yet the art of keeping audiences is often lost, as organizations fret about attracting fresh faces.

“It’s a gong that we clang,” Robinson says, warning against too much “prospecting” for brand-new clientele. “If we date, and you don’t ask me out again in a few weeks, I’ll forget how cute you are.”

Even if your stance is to glare at others and try to retain what audiences you have, you do well to remember not to take those audiences for granted. To extend the dating example, good communication and attentiveness are a necessary part of retaining audiences.

Stuff To Ponder: Expanded Approaches To Pay What You Want Pricing

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A few weeks ago economist Alex Tabarrok wrote about a strange “pay what you want” promotion a shoe company was running. It struck him and many commenters of the Marginal Revolution blog as a psychological experiment with a goal of getting most people to select the set middle range price.

In that same post he linked back to 2012 post where he provided an analysis for why “pay what you want” can make sense for charities and performing arts organizations. The analysis may be difficult to understand, but the bottom line is:

Probably more importantly, pay-what-you-want pricing is going to be advantageous when the seller also sells a complementary good, such as concerts, which benefit from consumption spillovers from the pay-what-you-want good.

Basically, when you offer an option to pay what you want, there should be accompanying options like food, merchandise, other participatory activities that you can earn revenue from. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the movie theatre model where a bag of popcorn is $10. Offering pay what you want simply because you think it is a good idea without any sense of how you can offset the loss of revenue isn’t prudent. If end up with a higher per ticket price than you had before, that is great, but don’t plan on it.

One of the commenters on the 2012 post noted that the site HumbleBundle allows you to pay what you want, but also posts the average price paid in real time.

Currently, if you pay more than the average of $4.14, you can unlock additional content and if you pay more than $14 there is another level of content you can receive.

Having some sort of bonus content or access people will receive for exceeding the average is a smart idea. It rewards those who act early before the average increases as a result of people paying to receive that content (or just being generous). This content or access could be better seating, merchandise, concessions, meet and greet opportunities, invites to other organizational activities, etc.

I got to thinking about how my ticketing system can tell me what the average selling price of my tickets are on demand. I could theoretically manually update that information on the lobby screens simply as a point of information at various intervals just as a bit of psychological social pressure on people to pay close to that or a little more. While I might also choose to update that information on our website, I am not sure the sense of social pressure would be as significant for online sales.

However, if ticketing software providers created a way to export that information to update in real time like HumbleBundle does, it might be possible to create a sense of tension and excitement in lobbies just prior to performances. (Or if handled correctly, even online). Granted, it could be done manually but I know I have better things for my staff to do than constantly run reports and post data to a public screen.

Watching it tick steadily up with every purchase is much more interesting. Especially if you are experience the dual satisfaction of seeing how much money was being raised for the organization while knowing you got access cheaper than a lot of other people – “Whoo hoo!! We collectively moved the price to $15.63 (but I got mine for $4.85!)”

Thoughts? What experiences, if any, have you had? I know a number of places are doing pay what you want/can, but I am not clear if they are supplementing their income with related goods and services or if they have found a way to energize audiences around the practice in a productive manner.

Why I Was So Excited To Spend The Weekend In Decatur, IL

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As I had mentioned yesterday, I had been looking forward to participating in the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference at Millikin University for a year due to their student run venture program which include in music publishing, a visual arts gallery, a theater space, a printing press, a publishing house, a printmaking studio and a radio station.

These are part of the Arts Entrepreneurship program, however the university has long had a philosophy of experiential learning.  The essence of what many university faculty and staff members expressed over the weekend was that students were told not to wait for someone to give them permission, but to jump in and try an idea out.

The work the students are doing and the results being accomplished are very impressive. As you have probably guessed, I was very excited to see it all first hand.

While ideally the decisions and responsibilities for each of these ventures would be borne by the students, the extent to which this happens seems to range between ~80%-98%, dependent on the program.

For example, one of instructors in the music publishing area spoke of how much time running the music label took and his efforts to get the students to bear more of the responsibility. On the other hand, he noted students worked very autonomously in other parts of the music production program.

There was a session in which an information systems professor spoke of a project his students had done with the student run gallery as a client. His classes worked on many similar projects for other departments and some external clients. Noticing that these clients were left without software support at the end of every semester, students created a venture independent of any class to service the software.

The conference was held during the university’s Fall Break so unfortunately we really only got to speak with students involved with the Pipe Dreams Theatre venture and the Blue Connection visual arts gallery.

I brought my camera with me so I could take pictures of what I experienced, but looking at the images I realized that these places look like any other theater or gallery space you might find anywhere. There is nothing to distinguish them from any other such place. That is probably to the students’ credit that you can’t easily discern that they are in charge.

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I did want to share this one image from a presentation the Pipe Dreams students gave. They made this sign so I don’t know if the course objective is officially “To run the company in the general direction of not into the ground.”

The work load is the same whether you are taking the class for one credit or three. Everyone does get paid. According to the instructor Sara Theis, the most people have been paid is about $120. Other times she has cut checks for around $2.50. This is all determined by the students.

Pipe Dreams seems to be the venture in which students are more involved and invested.  They hire staff, they buy the equipment, do the marketing, write the grants, choose and cast the shows.

The space they occupy is slightly off campus. Other than the university covering the heat and the salary for the instructor, the students are responsible for everything in the building.  When one season loses money, the next cohort needs to deal with the deficit.

What probably impressed me most was that the students involved with Pipe Dreams are mindful of what the next group will inherit and make long term plans for the viability of the organization. For example, I thought the requirement that a student be involved for three consecutive semesters before they could be part of the managing board was dictated by the instructor, Sara Theis. She assured me that was entire the students’ decision because they saw the need to ensure continuity.

These long term plans include replacing aging equipment. One of the things they mentioned was that it took about three cycles of students before they were able to get ETC to grant them new dimmer system for their lighting.

There was a disagreement about whether the theatre seating was acceptable or not. After learning from an audience survey that people were uncomfortable, they created a plan to purchase new seating.

When they do midnight shows for students, they conduct a risk assessment in advance and institute bag checks.

In a separate panel of current students and alumni of Pipe Dreams, the students were well aware of the value of the experience. They appreciated the opportunity learn to fail and fail a lot in the relative safety of a university setting. They were also pleased that they could walk into a job interview with some realistic experience on their resumes.

Another young woman said that the experience over the years completely disillusioned her about a career in the arts. She said she was grateful because she might have spent 7-10 more years pursuing a career and ending up miserable. I think it is to the program’s credit that they put students in a position where they can really come to that realization as a consequence of choices they freely made for themselves rather than through the direction/requirement of faculty.

They were proud of what they accomplished. One spoke of the way the cohorts he belonged to gradually changed the dynamics of the Pipe Dreams company from safe, pandering programming to the more challenging content they produce now.

Some of their marketing campaigns caused the university to institute new rules about how student events can be promoted. One of students said they make no apologies for trying out new ideas.

They also have gotten some flack from the Millikin Theatre program for snatching up valued members of the campus acting pool which I think is awesome.

While turnover of students impacted continuity, they said it also brought new perspectives and skillsets to address problems the company faced.  They hold retreats every semester to help orient new students and one of their recent projects has been to create procedure manuals in each of the areas of responsibility to hand down to future generations.

Since this post is getting a little long, tomorrow I will offer some insights about some of the other student run ventures. The Blue Connection gallery provides a good contrasting examples to the Pipe Dreams venture.

Non-Profit Arts Version Of “The Talk”

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From what I have been reading, the new Fair Labor Standards Act regulations regarding overtime pay is going be pretty tough for non-profit arts organizations to handle. If you aren’t up on the news, the salary threshold part of the overtime exemption criteria will rise from $23,660 to $47,476. Anyone making less than that or who doesn’t meet the other criteria for exemption will need to be paid overtime.

Generally, most of the criteria hasn’t changed so the big issue for non-profits is the salary threshold. Last month, American Theatre did a pretty good job of covering how the new rules will impact theaters specifically. There have been articles about non-profits in general, but few that discussed how arts organizations were planning to address the change.

The reason I say this new requirement is going to be tough is because some of the comments of the interviewees made me cringe. One person mentioned the benefit of staffing their organization with young 20-somethings to take advantage of the fact they would still be living at home and under their parents healthcare. Another respondent estimated the cost of living in their anonymous mid-size Midwest city was $20,000/year which I suspect is misinformed. The lowest costs of living, even for small Midwest cities, I found hovered around $25,000.

While I cringed at some of the tactics people were generating to deal with the projected expense they were going to incur, I didn’t view them as particularly extraordinary. The alternative approaches being considered are absolutely typical of the problem solving process arts organizations engage in. This is the sort of unorthodox creativity you have to employ to pull things off in the non-profit arts.

The problem is that depending on stop-gap measures and pressure of organizational culture will no longer be viable in the face of this new salary threshold and expectations of a work-life balance that new employees are bringing to the workplace. The gulf will literally and figuratively be too wide to straddle.

This is going to be one of those situations that is going to result in a lot of negative news before it gets better. Doubtless there will be cases we will be amazed have lingered only to explode somewhat scandalously a decade down the road (or sooner since the salary threshold for non-exempt moves to $51,000 in 2020).

The situation is likely to force long delayed conversations between arts organizations, their funders, boards, audiences and employees about what is really required to operative effectively.

The only consolation is that this conversation will still be way easier than talking to your kids about sex.

I don’t think I am being especially prescient when I say now would be a good time to develop a cogent response to the statement “Arts need to be self-supporting or close,” and start distributing the talking points to everyone. It is guaranteed that sentiment will be expressed constantly.

At the same time, a serious discussion about business plans and legal structures employed by arts organizations may become unavoidable. We may see groups recreate and reinvent themselves. Especially if non-profits are permitted to retain their assets as they transition into a corporate entity with a different tax structure.

All this being said, the American Theatre piece discusses how organizations are already making efforts to implement constructive measures to prepare for these changes.

Maybe around this time next year when people have been operating under the new rules for 9-10 months, I will suggest to Drew McManus that ArtsHacker do a series on some practices and restructuring efforts that initially seem to be working. The salary changes are going to have too significant an impact on the arts industry not to share advice about what has been successful for the organization and beneficial to employees.

In the meantime, I will work on learning more about the implications of FLSA rules in order to provide tips about how to prepare for the changes.

For example, many organizations may not know that use of comp time to offset “binge-and-purge” schedules around production time is already illegal  and is about to become more so for a wider range of employees.

But this kind of comp-hours time-shifting isn’t kosher under FLSA provisions. If a non-overtime-exempt employee works 60 hours one week, say, they can’t offset that by clocking just 20 the next week; they’ll be earning their regular salary for the 20-hour week and time-and-a-half for the hours over 40 in the 60-hour week. This was always the case under the FLSA, but with the new $47, 746 threshold, it will apply to many more employees than before.

Telling The Story Of Your Overhead

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Our friends at the Non-Profit Happy Hour Facebook group shared the Furniture Bank’s Charity Overhead Manifesto. In the post, the Furniture Bank talks about how much damage resistance to covering overhead can do to their programs.

We have heard many of these arguments before, but Furniture Bank takes the next necessary step of humanizing and discussing the impact of the work “overhead employees” perform.

The reason this is important is because it takes an abstract concept of overhead and specifically shows how overhead costs are manifested in the organization’s operations. Absent this specificity, it is easy to envision overhead going to senior administrator salaries or unsexy equipment and supplies like filing cabinets and copy paper. While this is inevitably the case to some degree, it isn’t the whole story.

This reminds us how important a compelling story can be. Furniture Bank lists what their overhead helps them accomplish:

  • Maintain, insure and run a fleet of 11 trucks, and a team of movers, picking up furniture from donors and delivering them to clients every day;
  • Employ 25-30 individuals each year who would otherwise face barriers to employment;
  • Pay market rent on a 30,000 Sq Ft client showroom;
  • Sustain an organization with 40 hardworking and big hearted employees who:
    • take orders,
    • track inventory,
    • book client appointments,
    • schedule and complete pickups & deliveries,
    • answer donor inquiries,
    • process donations,
    • ensure we have the right technology to run our operations, and
    • undertake the numerous other tasks that must occur every day to ensure that the community’s unwanted furniture goes directly to a family transitioning out of homelessness or displacement.

That format can be a little boring though. They also participate in the Charity Defense Council’s “I’m Overhead” campaign that has created images with Furniture Bank employees discussing what they do which end with a line about the impact they make, (you can see examples of the full ads on the Furniture Bank site.)

“My name is Miro Janes-Richardson. I make sure families have a place they can finally call home, and I’m overhead.”

My name is Yuri Hernandez. I make sure clients have the dignity of choice and don’t have to sleep on the floor, and I’m overhead.”

Miro is a truck crew leader and Yuri is a client services coordinator.

It may be difficult for arts organizations that don’t have a strong human services aspect to their operations to tell as compelling a story as these, but there are still opportunities to illustrate that staff help the organization be good stewards of donations.

For example:

“Do you recognize this flat? It has been in some of your favorite performances over the last five years including Dangerous Liaisons, Amadeus, A Raisin in the Sun and Christmas Carol. Here at the theater, we are great recyclers, repainting and repairing set piece dozens of times, extending their useful lives for years. This reduces our need to purchase lumber, which is good for the environment. But to make it happen, we need to store flats like this one and be clever about changing its appearance so you don’t recognize it when it appears again.

I am Steve and I work magic to make fake trees look real so that real trees can live, and I am overhead.

That five minutes of typing may not have resulted in the most compelling argument for theater operations, but you get the idea.

It isn’t just enough to tell people that they shouldn’t use overhead ratio as a measure of effectiveness, it is also necessary to communicate specific examples that illustrate that what they may envision the raw numbers represent isn’t necessarily the reality.

I don’t doubt that there will still be people who want 95-100% of their donation to be devoted exclusively to program beneficiaries, but linking overhead activities with impact outcomes can help combat decision making strictly by the numbers.

“…The Art That Is In You Has Only Faintly Touched The Lives Of Your People.”

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Last month, Americans for the Arts blog was printing excerpts from the writing of Robert E. Gard who primary focused on manifesting the Wisconsin Idea through theater and creative writing starting around 1945.

I first became enamored of the concept of the Wisconsin Idea about 10 years ago. The idea that a state government and university system would be focused on a holistic improvement of the lives of the state’s citizenry is pretty inspiring.  Even though political opposition began work to undermine and unravel elements of it almost immediately, people have hewn to the Wisconsin Idea for over a century.

There was an excerpt on Americans for the Arts’ blog of a piece Gard wrote in 1952 that illustrates just how long some themes and debates about the arts in the U.S. have endured.

Your struggle, America, has matured so rapidly that the quaint folkishness of your village has been swept into an almost common molding, and the economic fruit of your struggle has been so plentiful that we, your people, have tended to shun the responsibility of art, sometimes to scorn it, and to look at it askance as a manifestation unworthy of our virile American manhood. You have put down deep taproots, America, that have given us the stuff of wondrous plenty, but these same roots have starved off the expressiveness of yourself. For those of us who have loved you best have not completely understood your struggle, and the art that is in you has only faintly touched the lives of your people.

[…]

It became suddenly and completely apparent to me that we could no longer pretend that theater, to have its true vital meaning, could be fabricated and foisted upon the people as entertainment alone, or as sociology, or as an art form practiced by the few for the satisfaction of individual egos. But that theater must grow spontaneously from the lives and the necessities of the people, so that the great dream of a few men and women who saw true visions might come true: the dream of an America accepting the idea of great popular art expression without question, as a thing inherently American.

So there you go, in 1952 Gard expressed concern that: 1 – America has a slightly hostile streak when it comes to the arts or creative self-expression; 2 – Arts needed to be viewed as more than just simple entertainment; 3- Yet not viewed as the province of an elite few, but as place where people saw their own lives reflected.

In 60+ years since Gard wrote that, little has changed. These topics still dominate conversation and are cause for hand wringing.

I am optimistic that things are headed in a constructive direction. Given all the attention focused on programming, casting and employment choices being made in theater and movies, there is a greater opportunity to see oneself and one’s stories.

The same with the effort to build public will for arts and culture I have been writing about recently which has creative self-expression at its core.

I am sure Gard was pretty optimistic back then too, and with good reason if you look at all that was created and still endures in the name of the Wisconsin Idea. It is also pretty clear that the effort has to constantly be sustained against both external forces that seek to oppose and erode it, as well as simple internal neglect and entropy.

To some degree, I see the effort to build public will for arts and culture as a spiritual successor of the Wisconsin Idea. The Idea was always meant to become a national influence. While its spread hasn’t been as prevalent as initially hoped, the folks in Wisconsin have been really good about actively keeping the torch lit and the light has indirectly had a positive influence on others.

If you are looking for a guiding principle to help you speak about arts and culture to those who have negative associations with the concepts, you could do worse than to meditate upon and internalize the empathy and ambition of the last line in the first paragraph I quoted:

For those of us who have loved you best have not completely understood your struggle, and the art that is in you has only faintly touched the lives of your people.

Every Musician Is Important To A Symphony

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In a move that I like to see as reinforcing the importance of orchestra musicians in a time where their value is being diminished during contract negotiations, a long time supporter of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), Marjorie Fisher, recently left $5,000 to every one of the 78 current full-time musicians.

If supporters of other orchestras being to follow her example, we may see musicians fighting a lot harder to maintain the number of permanent positions during contract negotiations.

When I first scanned the story on the Non Profit Quarterly, I initially wondered if this bequest might be in response to the poor treatment symphony musicians have received during contract negotiations. However, given that the Fisher family has made donations to support the DSO in every way possible, (and just illuminated a new possibility), it would be difficult to make that assumption.

That said, between the prevalence of crowd funding campaigns and indications of a shift toward direct support of those in need, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people were investing greater effort into ensuring support was going specifically where they intend.

Great Expectations For Middle of the Road Food

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It is probably no surprise to learn that food brings communities together. CityLab recently had a piece about a group in Tallahassee, FL that received a grant from the Knight Foundation to support a project called “The Longest Table,” intended to bring 400 strangers from all parts of the city,

“…to use the dinner table as a medium for generating meaningful conversation among people of diverse ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds.”

I was thinking this sounded a lot like a project I wrote about last fall that occurred in Akron, OH that also set up tables down the middle of the road in order to bring 500 people together for a meal and discussion about how a highway that was being closed down might be re-purposed.

It turns out on closer investigation, not only was that also sponsored by the Knight Foundation, there was an earlier iteration of the Tallahassee meal that occurred last October within a week of the one in Akron.

I think this is secretly a plot by the Knight Foundation to identify the best cooks around the country for some nefarious end!

Actually, an element of that was central to the Akron 500 Plates project. (the identifying good cooks part, not nefarious plotting)

The artists and collaborators collected recipes from each of the 22 neighborhoods in the city and printed them on each of the plates so that everyone went home with a recipe from someone in the community. Then they built tables and distributed them to each of the neighborhoods to provide a gathering point at which conversations and community meals could continue.

500 Plates has made the recipes and toolkit for replicating this in the neighborhoods and other cities available on their website.

The participants in both projects talk about how the format lends itself to discussing somewhat sensitive topics because the environment sets people a little more at ease. This type of event may help arts organizations come in contact and start a conversation with the elusive demographic of people we never meet in order to learn what their barriers to involvement are.

“If Only…” Only If You Are Committed

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One of the most interesting This American Life shows that I have come across and have listened to a couple times is about an auto manufacturing plant that Toyota and GM built in partnership.

When Japanese cars were outselling American cars by a wide margin, people wanted to know why. What was it about the way the Japanese made their cars that made buying one preferable to American cars.

Toyota told GM everything holding nothing back. (from the episode transcript)

Frank Langfitt Schaefer says when he realized how much of the Japanese system happened off the factory floor, it answered something that had never quite made sense to him. Why had Toyota been so open with GM in showing its operations?

Ernie Schaefer You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people. You know, I’ve often puzzled over that– why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking all the wrong questions.

We didn’t understand this bigger picture thing. All of our questions were focused on the floor, you know? The assembly plant. What’s happening on the line. That’s not the real issue. The issue is, how do you support that system with all the other functions that have to take place in the organization?

If you listen to the episode or read the transcript, you can learn about the exact details. The bottom line was that GM didn’t have the will to implement all the changes to their procedures and corporate culture that would allow them to replicate Toyota’s successes.

The same applies to any effort to effect change in any group, company or organization. The words “If only…” are often uttered implying if a simple change was made, everything else would fall into place. If only we hired/fired a person. If only we had a little more money or a different opportunity.

While a simple change often can change the entire dynamics, the will or natural inclination to reach a certain goal already has to be present. In organizations and groups where there is truly one bad apple souring things among others who are already making positive efforts, a single change may result in an immediate and significant improvement.

Otherwise, you can get rid of a person who is poisoning the work environment, but the environment isn’t going to get any better if there are still 10 other people making disparaging comments and undermining each other. Hiring a charismatic leader who has brought constructive change to other organizations isn’t going to be effective if the board or employees aren’t committed to following the leader’s plan for improvement.

Much like the This American Life episode, the solutions to many of our problems can be found in business journal articles, blog posts and conference sessions, no secrets withheld. Without the will to commit to the full range of changes necessary to implement them, those strategies, procedures and techniques aren’t your solutions.

I do a lot of preaching here on the blog about what people should be doing better, but I don’t necessarily do them myself. I don’t see anything criminally inconsistent or hypocritical in that because I am clearly aware that some of those techniques are not suited for my current situation or is there the will to make them manifest.

It is all worth talking about because it raises awareness for other people and cultivates and evolves the general perspective about the arts. There are things that we weren’t ready to undertake in the past that we started to grow into.

Artists Make Great Tour Guides

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A couple days ago, CityLab had an article about a fledgling sharing economy start up called Lokafy that pairs tourists with local residents willing to act as tour guides to the “real” areas of their city. Lokafy is so fledgling that it is only in Paris and Toronto with plans to shortly start the service in New York City.

What grabbed my attention about Lokafy was that they value people with artistic temperaments as guides.

Samra recruits “Lokafyers” through the “creative gigs” section on Craigslist. “I think it’s really great for travelers to meet the artists in a city because artists are the ones who kind of step back and interpret life and soak in what’s going on around them,” she says. She views the local guides as something between a tour leader and a friend.

Travelers can expect to see the hidden gems, says Samra. In Toronto, one Lokafyer took her guests to St. Lawrence Market by way of side streets so that they could see street art they may have overlooked.

This concept appealed to me on many levels. It provides a little flexible employment for people, especially artists. It exposes tourists to the work of local artists and helps them become invested in the city in ways they might not have on the usual tourist circuit.

It also gives creatives an opportunity to practice talking to regular people about art, allowing them to make mistakes and get feedback in a relatively low stakes environment.

As with other sharing economy services, I wondered in the back of my mind if this service would be able to scale up and still maintain its intimate connection with tourists. Just as real estate companies have come to dominate AirBnB listings in some cities, tour operators may end up taking advantage of the Lokafy’s image to the point where tourists frequently find that their local tour guide has ushered them on to a full tour bus.

It occurred to me that the value of this idea goes beyond tourism. Even if Lokafy doesn’t take off or spread to smaller cities around the U.S., a similar service sponsored out of the chamber of commerce, local arts council or convention and visitor’s bureau would be great for new residents.

Just moved to Columbus, OH; Birmingham, AL; Chattanooga, TN and want to get to know your city but don’t really know where to begin?

What if you could get a pre-screened personal guide to take you around to many interesting corners of the city, point out hidden treasures and provide historical insight into things you see everyday on the way to work, deepening your appreciation of your new home in ways the printed/web visitors’ guides can’t?

Only problem I see with this program becoming popular is that either: 1) You become good friends with the person who hired you as a tour guide. So should you be charging them to hang out tomorrow? or;

2) Your current friends think you are so awesome they want you to give tours to their friends and family for free, or;

3) Just like with your art practice, people think you shouldn’t need to be paid to have fun, ignoring the fact that you have spent time scrupulously assembling notes and plans for different neighborhoods.

If you have been reading my blog for the last year or so, I see this as an extension of the general “talking to strangers” concept I have been collecting and making attempts to implement.

Info You Can Use: Getting Meaningful Feedback From Your Community

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Last month, I wrote about attending a session at creative industry conference where Marc Folk, Executive Director of The Arts Commission in Toledo, spoke about learning that one needs to go out to the community as a guest, asking to be hosted at meetings, gatherings, etc.

At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly how that idea translated into practice. Initially I envisioned something akin to the  electoral process in NH where people host intimate meetings with political candidates in their homes or perhaps being invited to speak at a community or church meeting.

I also thought that he might have meant participating as a true guest at first where you weren’t necessarily the focus of attention as a speaker, etc, but just invited to sit quietly and observe the first time out.

Marc had mentioned sometimes there was a tendency to view yourself as “riding in on a white horse” to save a community so I thought being the guest of honor at a meeting might reinforce that conceit.

Just last week, Margy Waller addressed the same issue in an Americans for the Arts blog post, “We Are From the Arts and We’re Here to Help.”

“In one of the sessions, a group of participants had a passionate discussion on using the word “help.” They noted that it really isn’t possible to have a conversation about an equitable community if one party is offering to help the other. The word help itself implies that one group has more than the other—more to offer, more knowledge, more resources, more capacity, and so on. Using the word help shifts the perceived balance of power—in a way likely to shut down true collaboration and partnership efforts.

The solution? If you find yourself using the word help when talking about the role of arts in community, stop. Listen carefully and ask whether this is really the way toward an equitable community.”

Curious about the process he and his staff used, I reached out to Marc just prior to the holidays to learn more, summarizing my impressions and assumptions noted above. With his permission, I am reprinting a portion of his response:

Our approach utilized a combination of techniques, including what you listed above.

As far as process we first identified a local community partner.  If possible, it was a community center or arts center in the neighborhood.  We then reached out to the leadership of the center or another community group if the center did not have leadership, or there was no center and asked for a meeting.  We then met with them and/or their board leadership to ask for their help in organizing a community meeting.

Once a meeting was called, we went back into the community centers/host venues and held “a listening tour” if you will.  An important technique was that we hired a facilitator/consultant that facilitated these sessions.  This created a degree of separation between the Arts Commission staff and the community issue and allowed for a more open and candid dialog from the community.

Out of this, we became more connected with “culture” or activities in these neighborhoods which has led to the building of genuine relationships.

A copy of the plan can be found here.

The reports from the neighborhood conversations can be found at the back of the plan.

I think the most important lesson is about language syntax/communication and authentic relationship development.  My point at the conference about the white horse or “going into these neighborhoods” revealed much about our perspectives and gave great clue to where we needed to start our work.

For those that are interested, the neighborhood reports start around page 50 of the strategic plan.

I greatly appreciate Marc taking the time to outline the process for me. The importance of involving a facilitator was something I suspected in the back of my mind that he confirmed.

Based on his response, I have already started a conversation with my board president about how we might adapt this in our own community. I have mentioned to colleagues at other arts organizations I had some ideas I wanted to run past them in the hopes of establishing a cooperative listening tour.

Humility In Service

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I was attending a creative industry conference today which gave me a lot to think about. One of the topics that came up was creative placemaking. Right now that is a big push for improving communities around the country. ArtPlace is one of the bigger efforts to this end.

However, one of the things keynote speaker Tom Borrup noted was that often placemaking has an element of placetaking.

It is widely acknowledged that gentrification displaces artists which planted the seeds for vibrancy within neighborhoods. The process of placemaking seeks to improve conditions in neighborhoods which may end up displacing a wider spectrum of residents beyond artists. Even if it doesn’t immediately displace them, the placemaking vision may implicitly be imposing a different type of art and culture than already exists there.

Borrup suggested one of the most important questions to ask is whose art and culture is being employed in the placemaking effort. Should there be an effort at placekeeping? That is, an intentional effort to determine what should be left in place rather than replaced.

This reminded me of the woman I wrote about two weeks ago who was selling a condo in San Francisco’s Mission District at below market rate. She was requiring the condo buyer to commit to a cultural promissory note to contribute to the community. One of the conditions I hadn’t mentioned was that she required the buyer not to complain about the Day of the Dead celebrations.

Whether that is a reasonable expectation of a property buyer or not, this shows a concern that the existing culture of the neighborhood not be disparaged or displaced by new residents.

Along the same lines, in another session Marc Folk, Executive Director of The Arts Commission in Toledo noted that arts people often talk about the necessity of going out into the community since the community doesn’t come to them. He said that he often approached that as if he was metaphorically riding out on his white horse to save the community.

He said after a time he learned that really first you needed to go out as a guest and ask to be hosted at meetings, gatherings, etc. which is a much more humble approach. I had visions of the electoral process in NH where people host intimate meetings with political candidates in their homes. Though I also suspect he may have meant being a true guest and not being the focus of attention at all the first few times out.

Similarly, in another session a panelist noted that after experiencing a lot of resistance from educators, they finally asked what they were doing wrong. They were told that generally arts organizations come along and ask the schools to participate in their programs rather than asking what initiatives the schools were pursuing that they could participate in. (I guess in some cases, arts organizations put schools into grants as program participants without even consulting with the schools.)

This general sentiment reminded me about the diversity panel I attended at the Arts Midwest conference this past Fall.  When I wrote about the session, I noted:

..the focus of engaging diverse communities has been on how the arts/cultural organization can benefit from the inclusion. This can make the effort feel disingenuous and leave people feeling marginalized. Few organizations can say why engaging diverse audiences is meaningful beyond seeking to expand sources of revenue.

The first step then is to articulate why it is important and what the organization’s concept of diversity is given that the term can encompass cultural, ethnic, social, sexual and other affinity groupings.

The Arts Midwest panel talked about consulting representatives of the segment that aligns with your concept and letting them tell you what is relevant to the community rather than engaging an artist or program and expecting/telling that segment they should find your offerings relevant to them.

If you think about what is required to do any of this, you realize that you need to take the approach of truly serving the community rather than doing things you think the community will like.

What Do We Mean When We Say Entrepreneur?

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Final day of observations on last weekend’s Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE)  conference.

The Terms We Use Matter

Some of the best observations about teaching students entrepreneurship were made by Jeffrey Nytch from the University of Colorado-Boulder. There is a lot of conversation going on about how students need to be taught to be entrepreneurial with attendant ideas of what that means, but Nytch’s observations provide some grounding for that discussion.

He noted that what entrepreneurship is not, is pounding the pavement and marketing one self.  Entrepreneurship is creating value and implementing solutions to meet needs, which by definition is not primarily focused on getting yourself employed, but serving others. Among the other characteristics he listed were recognizing opportunity, customer focus, flexibility/adaptability, risk assessment (taking calculated risks), resourcefulness and an ability at storytelling.

He also emphasized that teaching entrepreneurship  has to focus on being strategic rather than providing prescriptive solutions like this is how to do marketing, this is how to apply for grants, this is how you get non-profit status etc.

When talking about teaching students to be entrepreneurs, it is probably important to be clear about what outcomes you are envisioning when you use that term. As a result of Nytch’s presentation, I have been careful to use phrases like “entrepreneurial mindset” and “teach students entrepreneurial skills” in previous posts in an attempt to delineate these activities from a engaging in a full entrepreneurial venture.

Mentoring Is Local and Global

There was another conversation about using mentoring to transition students to entrepreneurship.  A good deal of the focus was on helping people after they graduated.

Something that came up often during the conference was that university career service offices have a hard time working with arts students because their career path is so nebulous. It is easy to direct students with business, education, science, teaching, pre-law and pre-med degrees because career progression is fairly well understood.

In much the same way, it can be difficult for career services to provide support to entrepreneurs because by definition they seek to walk the road less traveled.

Among the suggestions that were made, most of them by a recent graduate, was using social media to create connections between entrepreneur programs across the country. One could easily find their ideal team members living elsewhere and you don’t necessarily all have to be located in the same geographic area to be productive.

Along the same lines was a suggestion for providing some basic support and access to graduates of partner programs. A person may graduate in one place but move elsewhere to start their venture so it would be good to be able to tap into the list of local mentors another program had identified. (Imagine how great it would be to be recognized for bolstering the local economy by “stealing” graduates of other programs from those communities thanks to your mentor and incubator network.)

It was also suggested that students be invited to the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) conferences so they can share their experiences with the assembled educators. Especially in terms of what aspects of their training did and did not prove valuable to avoid reinventing the wheel or replicating the same mistakes as someone else.

Miscellaneous Thoughts And Resources

Michael Bills who directs the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Ohio State University said they were only offering entrepreneurship as a minor at the undergraduate level because they felt that entrepreneurship is a graduate level pursuit. (I should note this is a university wide program out of their business school rather specific to an arts entrepreneurship program.)

This is based on the concept of the T shaped skills. Briefly, the vertical bar of the T represents the depth of your skills, the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines. Their thought is that you develop your depth as an undergrad and then really focus on your ability to collaborate as a graduate.

I have heard similar philosophies about fine arts disciplines and know there are some universities that won’t teach arts administration as an undergraduate major based on the same concept.

DePauw University recently created a site called 21CM.org (21st Century Musician) as a resource and place for conversations among musicians about developing an entrepreneurial mindset. It is intentionally devoid of any mention of DePauw other than the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. The About section makes no mention of the school and the conference presenters pointed out the site doesn’t bear DePauw’s colors.

The school took the same approach in establishing a public music space for “courageous music making” in their hometown of Greencastle, IN. The space isn’t branded with DePauw’s name or colors (it actually appears to use the 21CM.org colors) though the website uses DePauw’s domain.

In both cases, the goal is for the community of participants to take ownership of the respective resources.

That is generally the extent of my notes from the conference that fit into the general theme of these three posts. It will be interesting to see how SAEE grows as an organization and how the whole concept of artist as entrepreneur (and how best to teach those skills) evolves over time.

Even as there is a need to introduce this type of instruction in undergraduate/graduate/conservatory training, there is also the obvious unmet need to train people who have passed that stage, may have some career experience and wish to acquire additional skills or engage in a venture of their own.

Just Pray Your Grandma Doesn’t Run Against You For Homecoming Queen

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Recently I have been seeing more stories about shared use of public buildings. In Bremen, Germany, the city philharmonic is sharing space with students in a local school building. In Cleveland, music students from the Cleveland Institute of Music live in a retirement community.

Now I see a Massachusetts school near Boston was shares space with the local senior citizen center.

But during the early phases of planning, as his team met with officials, they realized that the needs of the town’s elderly overlapped quite neatly with those of its teenagers. At the time, the senior center was using a small Victorian house that fell far short of accessibility standards.

The senior center had a strong dance program, Poinelli recalls learning. “We said, ‘Well, we have a dance room in the high school.’ In the winter, they took seniors in a bus to a local shopping center to walk—I said, ‘Well, we have this huge field house, you could use that.’ There was so much overlap, and it just seemed to make sense.”

[…]

Members of a knitting circle taught several students to knit, for example, and high-school sports teams give presentations to the senior men’s group, sharing their strategy for the upcoming season. Kids in need of community-service hours help serve lunch at the senior center, and veterans have been asked to talk to students about their service. The senior center gets 25 free tickets to every high-school performing arts event, and last year, the seniors’ dance team performed at the high-school talent show.

I was immediately struck by how this arrangement helps keep arts in the schools. It increases the demand for, and use of, arts facilities which helps justify their expense.

Even more importantly, it connects the interests and political clout of the largest generation as they retire to those of public education.

There is likely to be less grumbling about property taxes and not having any kids in school if people have an emotional connection to the students. They may also be more likely to advocate on behalf of the students. If retirees are using the same facilities as students, I suspect they will be better maintained.

If there is frequent contact between students and retirees, there may be subtle positive impacts on behavior and attendance thanks to the socialization.

Arts Participation Tied To Education, Not Wealth

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Some encouraging news coming from Pacific Standard in support of the growing trend to focus on participatory arts experiences over simple attendance. According to the results of a new study conducted in England,

“…most forms of arts participation are strongly correlated not with class, but rather with education. To his surprise, he found that in a large sample of the English population, those with higher incomes were actually less likely to be active participants in the arts.”

Let’s get it out of the way right at the beginning and acknowledge that arts participation may be more integral to the English education experience than the U.S. so this finding may not be completely applicable to the U.S.

Still, it is a factor to pay attention to when looking at the demographics of the people you are engaging and trying to engage. The findings are pretty captivating.

In other words, a certain percentage of people go to the opera in order to be seen, to impress their bosses (or in-laws), or because it’s what their friends and neighbors expect them to do. But if you are actually a member of the opera chorus, it’s probably because it feeds your soul.

[…]

Reeves found that “arts participation, unlike arts consumption and cultural engagement generally, is not closely associated with either social class or social status.”

Indeed, “those with higher incomes are less likely to be arts participants,” he writes, adding that this finding is unexpected and difficult to interpret. Perhaps, he speculates, those at the top tend to work longer hours, and have less free time to devote to creative pursuits.

However, Reeves found education was “a strong predictor of the likelihood of being an arts participant.” After adjusting for the influence of family background, he found that, compared to people who did not participate in higher education, those who had earned a degree were four to five times more likely to play a musical instrument, or be involved in painting, photography, or dance.

It is intriguing to think, even if just speculation, that the practice of providing art to be consumed may have been heavily influenced by the fact that those with the most money only had time to attend. Those who are highly educated, but not as affluent may have an interest in consuming, yet they have a stronger interest and availability in participation, but may feel convenient opportunities are lacking.

If you are in a community where everyone sings in a choir, but few attend a concert by touring artists, you may be witnessing this dynamic in action.

There has long been a criticism of a one size fits all approach to marketing, programming, development, etc., especially in terms of trying to replicate what another organization is doing. Now one needs to consider if an art for consumption model may be incompatible with their community as well.

Then there is this statement to think about:

In any event, the findings can serve as a rejoinder to those who argue the arts are strictly of interest to the elite—an assertion that implies the rich can fund these organizations themselves rather than asking taxpayers to help do so.

Despite the exciting prospects represented by this statement, what is still going to be a million dollar mystery question for most arts organizations is if you shift to providing a more participatory mode of arts experience, is there enough interest to support the organization?

Even though there is potentially a much wider scope of people to which to appeal, the knowledge really affluent people are most interested in arts consumption may deter change.

Substantial Change Comes From Within

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Diane Ragsdale has an extremely interesting post today related to an earlier set of posts she made two years ago about coercive philanthropy in response to change of direction the Irvine Foundation was taking in their funding philosophy.

She notes today that many of the arts groups the Irvine Foundation had traditionally supported did not shift themselves toward the new direction the foundation was encouraging arts organizations to go. She says:

My view, in a nutshell, was (and still is) this: While the Irvine Foundation may have been justified in pursuing a brave new strategy, its grantees were also justified in rebuffing it. I wrote:

Irvine appears to be interested in bringing about a kind of diversity (i.e., change) in the arts sector we don’t often talk about: aesthetic diversity. … However well-researched and justified, Irvine must recognize (and I think it does) that its strategy is out of line with the missions of a majority of professional arts organizations, which were formed to present work by professionals for audiences that come to appreciate that work, not make it. … Irvine needs to recognize that it is endeavoring to coax organizations into uncharted territory. It wants to coerce a change that many cannot make, or do not want to make.

We often speak of arts organizations bending over backwards and stretching their missions and activities in order to make themselves eligible to receive funding so it was of great interest to me to read about arts organizations who were not doing so even though it might be significantly detrimental to their finances.

In one of the posts Diane made two years ago, she talks about the  long time period required to make the substantial change of the type the Irvine Foundation is signalling versus the impatience of most foundations.

She uses the example of Centerstage Theater in Baltimore which made a focused commitment to do a better job of serving the city’s 67% African American population. They initially lost subscribers and supporters before eventually replacing them in the 10 years it took to fully realize this vision.

Ragsdale suggests that substantive change only comes when the leadership is behind it, not when the funding philosophy shifts.

I seriously question whether funding organizations to make them change works. Has any organization that was reluctant to change made substantive long-term change because of a grant? I suspect any change that happens probably has more to do with leadership, other sources of income, and an intent to change that was already solid before the grant arrived.

And when change fails to be manifested? Well, I would wager that a majority of foundations perceive that organizations are at fault in that case (not the grantmaking strategy). And why wouldn’t they? Organizations write proposals in which they promise to change themselves in dramatic ways for ridiculously small amounts of money and over unreasonable periods of time. They lie about what they can do. They choose to do this to get the money. Foundations choose to believe these lies because it’s convenient to believe that it’s possible to change the world in 3-5 year cycles..

In her post today, she provides a insightful illustration of how this manifests. (To understand the reference to moving diagonally across the box, you need to scroll to the Ansoff Matrix graphic in her post.)

If a business is doing well, then (from its perspective) the best strategy is to continue to create the product it knows for the market it knows (market penetration). However, when that market is in decline (and one could argue that this is the case for many professional arts groups at the moment), its least risky move is either (a) to develop new products for existing markets (product development), or (b) to develop new markets for existing products (market development).

Asking arts organizations to develop new products for new markets sends them diagonally into the box marked diversification and is a high-risk move; there can be a significant chance of failure. And while Irvine might be willing to underwrite some of the financial risks associated with experiments in this realm, it can’t underwrite the strategic, operational, compliance, social, and psychological risks associated with such changes—organizations need to be ready, willing, and able to bear these on their own.

This section of her post really helped clarify some fundamental concepts of business strategy for me. It made me realize that when there is a discussion about the need for live performance organizations with middle to older aged audiences  to develop things like video based entertainment in order to engage younger groups, what is being advocated for is a risky proposition requiring a commitment to endure challenges on all the fronts she lists.

The efforts of Centerstage Theater illustrate that even implementing the changes required to develop new markets for the existing product may entail some of the same risks she mentions.

There are many other related issues Ragsdale addresses so the whole post is worth a read.

I realize I should mention her current post is in reaction to a report on a recent study the Irvine Foundation engaged in. Even though Ragsdale is critical of some aspects of it, my general impression is that the Irvine Foundation may be in it for the long haul with their new focus given they have committed to gathering data and studying the issues. Though I guess we will see where things stand in 8 or more years.

Share Your Locker With A Bassoonist

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If you remember your Grimm Brothers fairy tales, you will recall the story of the Bremen Town Musicians, animals who drove criminals out of a house.

Well according to the BBC, a group of musicians in Bremen is helping to prevent crime by also taking up residence– in this case, in a neighborhood known for crime and poverty. More specifically, taking up residence in a school.

Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen shares space in a public school. When the philharmonic was looking for a new space, the city made sure the rooms in the new school they were building had excellent acoustics and set up the dual residency in the single building.

Initially, the musicians were disappointed they weren’t getting an iconic building and the teachers didn’t want to have students diverted from learning core subjects to interact with musicians.

The school and the orchestra devised a series of projects to bring musicians and students together. Musicians would visit classes to talk to pupils and once a year the musicians would help pupils and residents of Tenever to write and perform an opera.

But what makes the partnership unique is the sheer volume of interactions between musicians and pupils. Whenever they are not playing, the musicians are based in the school.

They sit with pupils over lunch and talk to them about their lives. Pupils are allowed to watch the orchestra rehearse, sitting between the musicians rather than in front of them as an audience.

Ms Rueggeberg says: “Normally you only see an orchestra dressed up for a concert, but the kids mostly see them running around in jeans and find them very approachable. It has broken down the barriers.”

As you might expect, test scores have gone up and problem behavior has decreased. Having the orchestra based there has also apparently reduced the negative stigma associated with the neighborhood.

If you want to combat the idea that “the arts are not for someone like me” there is probably no better way than having students eat lunch with artists and sit next to them during rehearsals.

If you notice at the end of the BBC piece, the musicians feel they are benefiting both in a growing understanding of their audience and development of their own skills.

“When the children sit between us at rehearsals, our concentration is better. We can actually see their eyes grow wide with excitement when we play certain chords or play quickly.

Shirtless Men As Institutional Marketing

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Oklahoma City Ballet Executive Director Shane Jewell wrote a piece recently on the Clyde Fitch Report discussing the ways in which his organization has used performance and institutional marketing to promote itself.

In discussing the familiar practice of performance marketing, Jewell goes to some length to distinguish the video they did for their production of Cinderella as a trailer rather than a commercial. What might be confusing is that in the next sentence he states the commercial won Gold at the Oklahoma City ADDY Awards.

After re-reading the post, I assume he wants to emphasize that they didn’t view it as a commercial because it diverged from the expected pattern of

“…live-performance footage with voiceover and text. This is possibly a company’s biggest waste of time and money. The only people who would enjoy this type of commercial are those who are already fans of ballet, and more than likely they do not need a commercial to alert them of upcoming performances… The goal of performance marketing is to attract new audiences.”

My initial concern was whether the trailer might set up unrealistic expectation in people who were not familiar with ballet. (Though on the other hand, we pretty much expect trailers won’t be completely accurate representations of movies so it probably isn’t a big problem.)

What I really want to focus on though is the ballet’s handling of less frequently used institutional marketing–essentially the effort of demonstrating that your organization is a part of the community rather than apart from the community.

Noting that their community is very athletically oriented, the ballet created a print ad using their dancers to depict the fierce cross state rivalry between Oklahoma State University and University of Oklahoma. (You can see the ad in Jewell’s post.)

They also created a video emphasizing the athleticism of their dancers which they ran during the portion of the year they weren’t performing.

Oklahoma is a sports state so we played to the athleticism of our dancers and you don’t even realize you are watching a ballet commercial when it begins.

Here is the ad. Whether it was intended or not, I felt like the “Oklahoma City” graphic at the end with “Ballet” only popping in for the last second, communicated a sense of “we are you.”

After seeing these ads, it probably won’t surprise you that Jewell’s last bit of advice is- “know your audience. And have your men take their shirts off.”

You may be looking at this videos and thinking it must be nice to have the production budget to be able to make these videos. Jewell said the ballet trailer increased ticket sales enough that they covered the expense of making it.

While it is true that you often have to spend money to make money, I can personally attest it can be very easy to direct funds toward ineffective efforts. It can be extremely difficult to justify spending money on marketing that is not connected to a revenue generating activity. That is money you could use for that very purpose three months down the road.

There are opportunities for institutional marketing that don’t necessarily involve producing ads. I am reminded of the activities the Trey McIntyre Project engaged in around Boise, ID. In addition to their concerts, they generated flash mobs, danced at the local NBA farm team basketball games and participated in an art installation in a local hotel (starting around 3:30).

Certainly these type of things demand resources of their own. Time spent on them is not being spent on rehearing or creating, but the option is there.

And there is always having your men take their shirts off.

Info You Can Use: Talking To Strangers

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The recent NEA report on why people don’t attend arts and cultural event mentioned not having someone to attend with was a barrier to entry. Daniel Pink recently tweeted a story that gave me an idea for alleviating that issue.

Seats on buses in Brazil are being reserved for “making new friends.” You sit in the seat if you are open to having a conversation with strangers. There are Post-It notes attached to the Reserved Seating signs with conversation starters provided.

Even though the content of this video is in Portuguese, I am pretty sure no translation is necessary-

The application for arts organizations is probably pretty evident. Reserve some really great seats at an attractive price for people who are open to having conversations with strangers.

You would want to sell them individually so friends couldn’t grab them themselves or at least sell them in odd numbers if you think you can trust two people who are acquainted to include the individual sitting next to them in a conversation.

The museum version might be having stickers people can wear or a bench at which people can wait in order to pair/group with like minded strangers and wander the galleries together.

Like the bus program, you can provide conversational prompts that are both generic ice breakers as well as specific to the event people were attending.

But don’t hand the ice breakers out to participants at the box office. Having little signs and Post It prompts attached to the backs of the seats in front of the participants is a good way of promoting the program and it gives other passersby an opportunity to grab some questions for themselves.

If you can provide an after event socialization opportunity in the lobby, local restaurant or bar, so much the better.

And if you can provide discounted tickets for a year to anyone who participated in your “Make New Friends” program, even if they only come back alone, that would be really great!

Having to increase the number of seats available to your “Make New Friends” program because former participants kept returning in order to extend their year of discounts wouldn’t be the worst problem to have.

Having them return with their newly made friends is no problem at all.

If You Got The Data, She Wants To Study It

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Reader Heather Grob responded to my recent post asking about more information regarding propensity score matching to learn more about arts audiences.

Heather, an associate professor in the St. Martin’s University School of Business writes,

Hi Joe,

Yes, I have used propensity score matching in a different venue than the arts. It was in a study looking at workers’ compensation pension outcomes. When you have a subject where there are selection biases (for example, that the more educated are more likely to participate in the arts) then propensity scoring can help to control for the outcome to more precisely estimate the effect on outcomes.

I think you explained it pretty well to a lay audience. I imagine it would be useful to use when you have a lot of data on attendees and non-attendees (or season ticket holders and not is more likely).

If anyone has data they want to “play” with, let me know. I’m interested in doing more studies on socioeconomic phenomena in the arts. –Heather

I wasn’t sure anyone would respond to the post with more information much less be interested in getting their hands on data to study. If someone is interested in learning a bit more about their audience and potentially their community, if the data is available, you may want to follow up with Heather.

Is It Still Possible To Slow Down And Pay Attention?

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A couple years ago, Seth Godin notes what is has probably become abundantly clear to us all– people are looking for abridged versions of pretty much every activity so they can “acquire” an experience without having to spend the time having the experience.

There is a self-perpetuating cycle set up by the media and internet which has generated the demand by creating expectations which in turn forces them to ratchet things up a bit to fulfill the expectations they helped to create.

“A performance artist was on the local public radio station the other day. He didn’t want to talk about the specifics of his show, because giving away the tactics was clearly going to lessen the impact of his work. No matter. The host revealed one surprise after another, outlining the entire show, because, after all, that’s his job–to tell us what we’re going to see so we don’t have to see it ourselves.”

Godin had an interesting observation though about the exception to this.

My full-day live seminars have impact on people partly because I don’t announce the specific agenda or the talking points in advance. It’s live and it’s alive. I have no certainty what’s about to happen, and neither do the others in the room. A morphing, changing commitment by all involved, one that grows over time.

To some degree I think all seminars, not just his, result in people feeling like it has an impact on their lives because the format itself forces people to slow down to the speed of the proceedings. (Though they may be living at a slightly different speed via their tablet computers and phones throughout the seminar.)

Godin makes a similar claim about audiobooks changing people’s lives because they can’t skip ahead and still get the full story.

This dynamic may be why the Serial podcast became such a hit. People had to navigate the story at the speed it was being delivered and no one had any idea what the ending would be.

The performing arts have long touted the uncertainty of live performance as a selling point. You never know if someone is going to flub a line or the first chair violinist will kill off the second chair by bowing too vigorously. (Don’t pretend you haven’t imagined it.)

But it seems that this level of uncertainty just isn’t enough to interest people any more. The arts may need to kick it up a notch.

Ah, but what is the answer? Certainly the endings of many performance pieces are well known or can be discovered. Even if a performance company devoted themselves to offering entirely new works all the time, it wouldn’t be long before the show is summarized and reported.

In some communities it could be more detrimental to have a new work panned on social media by a couple people than to present a well known old warhorse.

More free formatted, choose your own adventure type shows like Sleep No More offer an alternative. Except there has been a problem when people discover the outcomes designed into those shows and try to impose themselves upon the different pathways.

On a smaller scale and performed over a limited time, I imagine that this model could still prove successful for many performance companies.

I obviously don’t know the answer, but I am intrigued by the basic idea Godin presents about how an experience that forces people to travel at the pace it unfolds and evolves can have a significant impact on the participants.

This describes the experience the performing arts have always aspired to and at one time, often achieved– people walking out of a performance feeling moved by the experience. People obviously have that reaction these days too, but at one time it was happening in greater numbers and in response to content rather than spectacle.

Many aspects of those days are certainly behind us and we shouldn’t seek to restore them because they were a product of a different social and cultural environment.

The Serial team may not be able to replicate the success of their first effort, but the fact that so many people became invested in the podcast suggests it is possible that people will slow down and pay attention if you create the right product.

Dabbling In The Revolution

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This week we made our first foray into the Classical Revolution movement with the help of CutTime Simfonica. Mr. Cuttime, or Rick Robinson, as his friends call him, helped us coordinate this in conjunction with the formal concert by CutTime Simfonica we presented last night.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Classical Revolution (CR), it is an effort to remove the intimidation factor from classical music by taking it out of the formal concert hall setting and bringing it to bars, clubs, houses, etc. The idea being if you find classical music doesn’t make you uncomfortable in your local watering hole, it might be something you will enjoy in a more formal setting.

Formerly a bassist with Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Rick helped to found a CR chapter in that city. (And got a Knight Foundation grant to expand it.) He encouraged us to invite local musicians to essentially “jam” with CutTime Simfonica so I started reaching out to the local wind symphony last summer and followed up with flyers and contacts throughout the last month (as did Rick).

Unfortunately, a major Christmas concert got scheduled for the same night as our Classical Revolution session so we didn’t get many outside musicians participating. (Though that concert rescheduled in order not to conflict with our formal concert Tuesday night, so we can’t complain.)

However, we did have a 15 year old flutist show up to join in so he got a lot attention that night.

Click to view full album

(The poor guy was so nervous he couldn’t eat his hamburger during the three hours of the Classical Revolution. Thankfully, the pub brought out a fresh one.)

Being Christmas time, there was a little bit of audience participation required in order to create a “stereo surround sound” jingle bells experience for the audience.

 

I am not sure that the CR event generated any additional ticket sales for the concert hall performance the next night, but it did seem to change some perceptions. The morning after the CR concert, we went on the radio to promote the show. The radio show host said her boyfriend was a little reluctant about attending, but 2.5 hours later she was ready to leave and he wasn’t.

She admitted, she never really understood classic music but her boyfriend’s insight was that it is like reading a novel, there are different plots and stories being interwoven.

What crystallized the experience for me was at the end of a Brahms piece, Rick Robinson commented “man, that is one sexy piece of music.” I could see there was something about it he was discovering as he played. When I mentioned this to him, he said he often didn’t get to play the cello part. So to a degree there was a discovery element for him. I loved both the verbal and non-verbal expression of delight experienced in that moment.

The formal concert the next night had the same sort of light hearted element to it that the Classical Revolution performance did the night before. As I watched, I realized there was a lot of potential for resentment in linking Classical Revolution events to more formal concert hall experiences.

People attending a CR event where they have a great time interacting with the musicians might feel like they experienced a bait and switch if they were actively encouraged to show up to a full symphony orchestra concert where the musicians barely acknowledged their presence.

While the CR and formal concert were both essentially chamber music experiences, Rick Robinson took it a step further by polling the audience about their past interactions with classical music. He had extra seats set up on stage and invited a rotating group of audience members to come up and sit close enough to “see the musicians sweat.”

As each group left the stage, he asked them what they felt. One woman said she felt like she needed to get back to playing the violin. One man commented it was interesting watching the facial expressions and interactions, especially the percussionist anticipating where he would need to come in.

The diversity of the programming also helped, running from familiar pieces by Mozart and Beethoven to the Martin Luther King movement of Duke Ellington’s “Three Black Kings.” Rick also included three of his own compositions and explained the stories behind them.

His association of music with food generated vivid imagery for the audience. He spoke of his “Pork N’ Beans,” as; taking a bite of spicy pulled pork, then a mouthful of hot beans, the heat rising in our hero’s mouth until a forkful of cole slaw cools it down. At both the concert and the Classical Revolution event, people said they could tell when each mouthful came, especially the cole slaw.

Today, as I reflected back, I realized that there is a lot of attention and conversation on doing programming that will attract younger audiences. There isn’t much discussion about transitioning existing audiences toward acceptance of that programming.

When the subject comes up, it is usually to discuss the dichotomy between what new and existing audiences like. The perception is that existing audiences are alienated by the content that appeals to new audiences.  Seldom is there discussion of a long term vision to gradually segue existing audiences toward the programmatic point that may appeal to new audiences.

I am thinking about this because I am wondering what the conversation will be at the next board meeting. What feedback have they received about an event in which the transitions between high quality music performances by Columbus and West Virginia Symphony musicians were filled with some unconventional audience interactions?

The responses I received last night and today from members of the audience have been very positive. But many of those were the people who went to sit on stage.

It started to occur to me that despite a few rough edges here and there, Rick Robinson might be developing a format that bridges that gap – palatable to existing audiences and intriguing to those looking to experiment with a classical music experience.

Curatin’ Ain’t Easy

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It is ten years this month that Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller first started talking about Pro-Ams, the Professional-Amateur whose dedicated pursuit of an avocation brought them on par with professional practitioners. I have written a fair bit upon the subject over the years.

When the topic comes up for discussion in the arts, one central question often arises (or lurks shallowly in the subtext) about whether amateurs really can perform to the standard professionals possessed of a keen eye honed by experience and education can.

Essentially, if we let the amateurs get involved, will quality and artistic merit be supplanted by work that panders to popular tastes and doesn’t require any effort to understand?

This is a question that Nina Simon, Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of History and Art has had to struggle with as a practical matter. While she has increased the fortunes of her museum since assuming the director role, her means have not been without criticism.

Recently her programming decisions were discussed in in a Wall Street Journal article, Everybody’s an Art Curator. The article uses Simon’s museum as the basis of discussing a national trend of involving the community in curatorial decisions. The article mentions the departure of one of Simon’s curatorial staff and disagreements with an artist over the context in which her show was hung. The article discusses friction at other museums around the country as they attempt to enact similar programs.

Nina Simon posted about the WSJ article on her Museum 2.0 blog this week, linking to two more in depth considerations of the idea of outsourcing curation broached in “Everybody’s an Art Curator” by Ed Rodley.

As I read all these posts and articles, it occurred to me that there is a high likelihood that a lot of the blame for the weaknesses of involving amateurs probably lies with the arts organization itself.

As Rodley observes:

“I think if you were to look at a large sample of museum projects with participatory elements, you’d find plenty that had poorly thought out and articulated goals and dubious educational value. Which is something that the field as a whole could stand to look at closely.”

Arts organizations have a history of not investing enough patience and resources in a new initiative. Common discussions in the field involve the misguided expectation that new audiences segments will respond positively and feel they are being served on the basis of one event aimed at them a year. What is required are accompanying outreach efforts, conversations, and shifts in making the attendance environment more appealing to your target groups.

Chances are, Rodley is right on the money when he suggests that insufficient attention has been paid to program design.

On the other hand, arts organizations frequently run into a lack of understanding about how difficult their work is to accomplish. I have frequently encountered renters who start a conversation which “Oh it is just a simple…,” having not considered how everything is going to fall into place.

Nina Simon makes a similar observation about the perception that amateur curators are a strategy aimed at reducing and replacing staff.

“Community is not a commodity. We don’t involve people in content development to “boost ticket sales.” It’s neither “quick” nor “inexpensive” to mount exhibitions that include diverse community stories. Yes, community involvement is at the heart of our shifted, successful business model. But that business model requires experienced staff who know how to empower people, facilitate meaningful participation, respond to community issues and interests, and ignite learning. It’s not cheap. It’s not easy. It’s the work we feel driven to do to build a museum that is of and for our community.”

I feel like Simon’s efforts at community involvement actually help educate people about the work that goes into putting a show together. For example,

“Hack the Museum,” a show that invited a mix of outside professionals to live at the museum for 48 hours and build a new exhibit from the permanent collection.”

Yes, the results of their efforts may be mixed. But how exciting is it for people to camp out in a museum for two days and learn the process? I can’t imagine that giving 75 people a tour of the curatorial department would be as effective in helping them understand the process. Nor would it likely engender the investment that the participants felt. Nina made some posts about it here and here and the participants looked like they had a blast.

I am fairly certain she isn’t passing off the work of community participants as professional choices since that would be counter to her goal of convincing all visitors that their involvement with the museum is meaningful.

Those of us who work in the performing arts will often grouse that so much gets a standing ovation or accolades of “as good as professionals” when it doesn’t deserve it. However, the performing arts may have an advantage over visual arts in that there is a rough sense of a continuum between elementary school recital and full blown concert by a professional symphony orchestra.

The criteria by which to judge and classify visual art in terms of quality is less distinct, and not only because so many people think their kids could produce what they are looking at.

How many people outside of the gallery and museum world know what standards are applied in curating a show? Where exactly does your Pinterest page fall between the refrigerator and the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Where do you go to find out?

You could do worse than a sleepover at a museum.

Raising The Roof On Art Class

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This past weekend I went to my 5 year old niece’s gymnastics class. The school she goes to is apparently one of the country’s national training centers. The way things were laid out in the building, I wondered if a similar format in an arts academy might be conducive to generating interest and excitement in families about being involved in performing and visual arts.

Basically, pretty much all the activity in the school was on display and happening at once. The building was essentially a large warehouse space with mats down everywhere. Nearest to the entry area on the left side was an open space where gymnasts were practicing flips. On the right side were trampolines and balance beams.

Dead center of the room were pommel horses and rings with uneven bars nearby. There was a sort of divider across the middle of the room and beyond that were other balance beams, vaulting pits and other equipment you would know from the Olympics. To one side along the dividing line there was a loft platform with a sign indicating it was “kiddie world” or something along those lines.

As I said, pretty much every area was being used at the same time. They had groups starting every 5 minutes with stretches and then moving on to some section of the room to start learning.

My niece’s class was only about 30 minutes and my assumption was many of the higher level students had started much earlier and would be sticking around much longer. My guess would be that there was probably a flurry of activity for about two hours a night with families bringing young kids in for 30-60 minute classes and then the serious students had the place to themselves again.

What impressed me about the whole arrangement was that parents waiting for their kids in the raised observation gallery would be sitting there watching all this bustle of activity and could visualize their kids advancing around the room until they were executing the precise motions of the students along the back wall.

Or perhaps like me, they might be impressed by the number of boys enrolled in the program, having had no conception there were that many 10-14 year old boys interested in gymnastics. Not to mention that they would have the upper body strength to work on the rings at that age.

Sitting there, it was easy for me to envision classes in dance, improv, acting, painting and other activities all occurring before me. Perhaps they would be partitioned off from each other a little, but everything would be visible from the parents’ raised view. (I confess, I am not sure how musical instruments or voice might be effectively integrated, but I am sure a music educator could find an easy solution.)

The biggest plus in my mind was the opportunity to take arts classes of many disciplines out of closed classrooms and studios and put them on display all at once, providing information about all the options that are out there.

No one is going to mistakenly believe a great ability in an artistic discipline could be cultivated in a half hour class. On the other hand, kids can be fearless and impress you with their progress as my niece did for her mother and I.

An arts school that brought together all that energy and excitement with a little bursting of preconceived notions could create positive impressions for both parents and kids about the arts while both are at the start of their relationship. Maybe it results in increased attendance at arts events or the kids and parents taking additional arts classes later in life.

As a parent, in this scenario your experience with your kid’s class isn’t that dreaded recital. It is watching your kid have fun doing something. If they don’t appear to be having fun in that painting class, seeing that other kid having fun over at the dance class suggests an alternative. Maybe seeing other kids and parents having fun painting together makes you want to join in. (If only you can get your kid to want to take that instead of dance!)

Grant Panels Talk About The Best Ideas

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A couple weeks ago the Ohio State Arts Council streamed the deliberations of one of their grant panels. We had submitted an application for a new project so I decided to listen in.

The review started around 8 am and our application didn’t get addressed until around 3 pm, but by 10 am I had a pretty good idea that our application was going to fall short of the mark.

Even though I had run the application past the institutional grants person, there was a lot of silly omissions I could see we had made. By which I mean, we had the data or had envisioned activities as part of our discussions about the project—but we didn’t include it in the grant application. It was one of those cases of being so close to a project you were filling in the blanks and making leaps with your mind.

The problem is, the grant panel didn’t have the benefit of that knowledge or being mind readers. When our turn came, I took notes and now we will do better in the future.

Part of the intent of this post is to encourage people to listen into these deliberations, if available, to help you avoid the mistakes I made and just help improve your grant applications in general.

My other motivation was to encourage people to listen to these deliberations just so you can find out what colleagues in other locales are doing. I heard some really great ideas from the comfort of my office chair.

To some extent this is even more valuable than reading arts related blogs because grant review proceedings bring the details of diverse arts projects to one forum. Then you have people critique the idea, raising questions about things applicants possibly failed to consider, including whether they have been realistic about anticipating the resources and time that will be required.

Of course, you hear comments about what makes an application and an idea exciting to the grant panelists as well.

The one project that really caught my attention was the Highland Square neighborhood of Akron, Ohio’s proposal for their 3rd annual Porch Rokr and Art in the Square Festival.

They have over 100 performers appearing on the porches and front lawns of people throughout the community. You can see pictures from last October’s Festival on their Facebook page.

It appears they have a central area where visual and craft artists can sell their work as well.

This is the sort of event that strengthens ties and cultivates pride in a community

Classical Music, Out standing In The Field

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I wanted to call attention to John Luther Adams today. It may have escaped your notice that he won a Pulitzer Prize for Music yesterday for his composition, “Become Ocean.” (sample here). It certainly escaped my notice.

I had a faculty member come to my door talking about how he spoke to Adams today and how he has known the composer for awhile and Adams had played his music on his radio station in Alaska. I think the faculty member assumed I knew about the Pulitzer, which I didn’t. I thought he was just going on about a buddy of his.

It was only after the faculty member left my office and I Googled Adams’ name on a lark, that I discovered he was a big deal. Adams’ work was much more accessible than the faculty member’s comments lead me to believe. (Especially in the context of some of the music samples he has given me in the past.)

As I looked around for some other samples of Adams’ work, I found this video of his “Inuksuit” at Park Avenue Armory which really excited me. As Alex Ross mentions in his article on the performance, Adams never intended for the work to be performed indoors, but saw a lot of possibility in the cavernous armory. He set up 76 musicians throughout the drill field, catwalks and adjoining rooms and encouraged the audience of 1300 to wander among and with them.

What excited me was that we so often talk about getting orchestral music out of the concert hall and here was a piece that was never envisioned to be indoors.

There was the recent question of whether American orchestras are ignoring American music. Between Adams’ Pulitzer win and his willingness to have his music played under the sky, there is incentive to pay some attention.

Concerts like this will generate a clear dividing line between those who yearn to listen in acoustically perfect halls and those who don’t. Symphonic  and chamber music wasn’t written for warehouse spaces so I don’t advocate trying to impose the “Inuksuit” format on them.

“Inuksuit” seemed to be much more about experiencing the music than listening to it. I would guess concerns about coughing, opening cellophane candy wrappers and cellphones ringing in the middle of the show never emerged. For all the people who were up and walking around, it seemed like at any one time the majority actually sat/laid quietly and let it all wash over them. And the audience definitely did experience and respond. If you look at the last 2 minutes of the video, as the sound produced decreases, so does the physical movement in the room and nearly everyone stands still.

I don’t think anything about this negates the value and need for quiet moments in music found in conventional orchestral pieces. Listening to “Become Ocean,”  Adams definitely has an appreciation of silence, as you might expect of a composer who takes nature as his inspiration.

In fact, there seems to be an impulse for “Become Ocean” to escape the room.

From his NPR interview it almost sounds like the walls are a hindrance (my emphasis):

“It’s scored for large symphony orchestra, a bunch of percussionists, a large string section, full woodwinds and brass and even four — count them, four — harps. The orchestra is deployed as three separate ensembles. It’s really a piece for three orchestras. The different instrumental choirs are separated as widely as possible in the performance space.”

Toward A System Of Organizational Critiques

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In a Guardian article last summer talking about the intersections between art and science, “scientist with one foot in the arts” Simon Kirby noted of culture of peer review in the sciences:

(“It’s all about surviving the gauntlet of people trying to tear your ideas apart – that doesn’t happen with an arts audience”)

That one line got me to bookmark the article and think about whether a structured peer review process might be beneficial in the arts.

Let me state from the outset that I am in no way proposing any sort of scenario where a panel snickers behind their hands that what was exciting in NYC Dance seven years ago is just becoming hot in Madison, WI. Nor would I desire a situation where an arts organization with a $20 million budget smiles condescendingly at the excitement expressed by an organization with a $20,000 who got 1000 people to attend their event.

At the same time, we could all use some advice about what we could be doing better outside of anonymous posts on the internet.

With many funding organizations inviting applicants to attend panel reviews of their funding requests or streaming the proceedings of the panels and their process online, it might be logical to offer reviews and critiques of other aspects of organizational operations.

The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival has a long running program of having adjudicators travel to productions in each of the 8 regions to provide critiques of performances. Some of the productions and actors are nominated to perform at each of the regional conferences.

Perhaps a similar system might be set up to review and critique different aspects of an arts organization’s operations from the customer experience to board relations. This wouldn’t involve any element of competition that would get you invited to a conference outside of presenting interesting case studies and discussing best practices.

However, it would give arts organizations an objective view of their practices and procedures without the stakes of accreditation hanging over the experience. Adjudicators would gain the ability to apply the same critical eye to their own organization as well as have an opportunity to observe and learn from peer organizations.

Ideally, an adjudication team would include at least one person from a discipline unrelated to the organizational activities so that theater people are learning a little from visual artists, visual artists from classical musicians, musicians from dancers and so forth.

Info You Can Use: Rural Arts

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Last week, Americans for the Arts held a blog salon on Rural Arts.  There were a lot of familiar names and faces with posts by Wormfarm Institute and Springboard for the Arts’ rural offices, but there were more people with whom I was unfamiliar.

There were three posts that jumped out at me, likely because they were aligned with my penchant for practical knowledge. Two were by Savannah Barrett with Art of the Rural which is coordinating 2014 as Year of the Rural Arts.

Her first post suggests working with Cooperative Extension Services in your community as a method of developing the arts. Cooperative Extensions in many states operate arts extensions as part of their services and apparently the national 4-H has recently started placing a greater emphasis on communication and expressive arts according to Barrett.

Her second post lists federal and philanthropic resources that are involved with rural arts.

The third post was made by Shannon Ford from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He lists 6 characteristics which he has identified as making arts rural programs successful. Most of the characteristics are common to pretty much any activity planned by an arts organization- clarity, sustainability, evaluation. However because resources are often particularly scarce in rural communities, the need to be focused on these areas is especially important given the small margin of error.

This is why he emphasizes visibility and partnerships as a way of leveraging good will and shared resources as a way to communicate your goals to many corners of the community and achieve investment.

His last characteristic, authenticity, seemed most important of all given that the values of a rural community are shared. By which I mean in the general sense and in the course of conversation. Even if two people aren’t of like mind about your efforts, whatever you do is going to be a topic of  their conversation. As Ford notes, “No good ever came of ignoring your community’s cultural context or norms, and rural perspectives have a long history of being ignored.”

If you are interested in learning more, Americans for the Arts is hosting a three webinars on the rural arts starting Wednesday, February 26, each at 3 pm EST.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014: Economic Development and Art in Rural Communities

Thursday, February 27, 2014: Resources For Rural Arts

Friday, February 28, 2014: Placemaking in Rural Communities

Stuff To Ponder: The Working Job Interview

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Earlier this month, I read an interview with WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg about his company, Automattic’s, hiring process. The title of the interview, Hire by Audition, Not Resumes, is what caught my eye.

What Automattic does is pay potential hires to do short term work for them so they can get a real sense of the person they might be potentially working with long term. Mullenweg says they hire about 40% of those who tryout and have very low employee turnover.

During the trials, we give the applicants actual work. If you’re applying to work in customer support, you’ll answer tickets. If you’re an engineer, you’ll work on engineering problems. If you’re a designer, you’ll design.

There’s nothing like being in the trenches with someone, working with them day by day. It tells you something you can’t learn from resumes, interviews, or reference checks. At the end of the trial, everyone involved has a great sense of whether they want to work together going forward. And, yes, that means everyone — it’s a mutual tryout. Some people decide we’re not the right fit for them.

Automattic employs people who work virtually so they don’t care when and how the work get done which allows people who already have jobs to “audition” for a new one on their own schedule.

It might be problematic for an arts organization to include those who are already employed in a short term work interview that requires them to be physically present. But this format does give both the employer and applicant an opportunity to evaluate the reality of each other.

If you are seeking to fill a position where the person is required to be self-directed, having them physically work onsite for the whole period probably isn’t a necessary. You can give a person marketing or financial materials and ask them to come back after a few days to discuss/present the approach they might take promoting events or improving the financial status of the organization.

Mullenweg admits this process requires a significant investment of time and energy, something most arts organizations don’t have an excess supply of. However, if your organization only has 20 people, each which must shoulder a large share of responsibility, it will be better to make the effort and avoid having someone leave and shift the burden to everyone else. Likewise, it is preferable that each person be competent enough to bear their entire share of the load.

Automattic’s process answers a common gripe from freelancers who are often asked to submit a proposal involving a great deal of work without any compensation only to later find that the company which solicited the materials is using all their ideas. Even under this process the applicant can have his work and ideas appropriated, but at least they will have received some sort of payment for their effort.

Stuff To Ponder: Bring Back The Claques

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A few months back, Gizmodo posted a video by VSauce on the subject of clapping as a form of expression.

At about the five minute point in the VSauce video, they talk about how in the early 19th century people hired themselves out as professional “claques.” They would learn operas and then applaud and laugh at the correct places as a way to prompt the rest of the audience. Today, television shows have signs that prompt people when to respond.

I was interested to learn that while babies will naturally learn to clap, parents are encouraged to teach their children to connect clapping to an enjoyable event. Even though we might unconsciously start clapping when we see something we like, we have been socialized to do it rather than it being a natural reaction.

The big question that came to mind was, why are people so intimidated by not knowing when to clap during a symphony? Since it is a socialized practice, they can just wait until everyone else starts, right?

The place that really trips people up is the pause between movements. For a few moments, I wondered if society had betrayed classical music by creating an expectation that you start clapping immediately at the end of a piece.

Perhaps earlier audiences had more patience and let things simmer a moment before clapping and that had evolved to an ever shorter period of time?

But there was a New Yorker piece pictured in the VSauce video by Joseph Wechsberg who was a member of a claque during the mid-1920s in Vienna. He talks about how hard it was to be part of the claque for operas like Carmen because the audience was likely to break into “wild applause” at the incorrect moments and it was the job of the claque to influence the audience “into orderly channels.”

Clearly, people were no less apt to clap at the wrong times nearly 100 years ago. According to Wechsberg, even young boys followed opera and thought wild clapping was heresy so I am sure there were a lot more venomous stares being delivered in concert halls then versus now.

Individual singers would pay to have people clap for them, but it basically was just enough to cover tickets to the show so the claques were essentially just doing it for free tickets.

With that in mind, I wondered if there was any value in reviving the practice of giving people comp tickets in return for their leadership in applause? Or perhaps more constructively, to act as mentors for new attendees?

With email and social media, people with the knowledge claques possessed could be used to much greater effect than a dependable source of applause.

Since Joseph Wechsberg’s description of his claque was basically that of poor artists and students, having them act as guides in return for tickets might be an interesting and productive arrangement.

Go To Conferences For The Coffee Breaks

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Last week Kacy O’Brien discussed an alternative model for conferences on HowlRound. She describes the Open Space Technology conference model as the coffee break segment of a conference, except that it occurs all day. The coffee break being the part of a conference where all the valuable connections and discussions occur.

O’Brien confesses her initial skepticism:

“Now, I’m a concrete, practical kind of person, so when I learned that an Open Space Technology conference means there are no speakers, there is no agenda, that breakout sessions are determined by participants the day of the conference, I laughed a derisive little laugh and said, “There is no way this will ever work.”

And talks about the guiding principles of Open Space Technology

There are a few guiding open space principles:

The people who are there that day are the right people to be there. Subtext: You’ve made the time to be here so you’re passionate about this.

​The rule of two feet: If you are no longer getting anything out of a breakout session or no longer contributing to the discussion, get up and walk away—move on to something else. Subtext: Only the most engaged people will be participating in a conversation at any given time.

Whenever something happens is the right time for it to happen. Subtext: An idea will succeed only when there is enough energy, time and passion behind it—don’t force it.

Ultimately, she seems impressed by the format and is happy to admit she was wrong about it being a viable method.

She mentions that she decided to lead a session and was prepared to heed “The rule of two feet” when it appeared no one was going to show up. But a few more people did join her break out and within a short time she had four action items she would have never devised on her own and the names of interested parties who could advise her, if not provide direct assistance with her project.

I was intrigued and excited by Kacy O’Brien’s description because she was describing the type of conference I would be interested in attending. But, to my chagrin, I am preparing my first session for a national conference and so it is sort of in my interest to have a more formalized structure.

Though to be honest, I wouldn’t be opposed to the model O’Brien describes. There really isn’t any difference in the end results of having an empty break out session regardless of what model the conference is using.

However, in the case of the session I proposed, there are two people participating as speakers who would not otherwise been attending the conference. I am not so proud that I can’t admit that their contribution could possibly be more valuable than my own. It is not likely I could have organized as high quality a session on the fly with those in attendance at the conference.

It also struck me that it would be problematic to use this model at a large national conference due to the difficulty of communicating the topic and location of all the break outs. While the information could be disseminated on social media, not everyone has the tools to receive that information equally. There is already a certain level of stratification among arts organizations and this could result in a further increase.

Though anyone who has participated in a successful Open Space conference involving thousands of attendees, please share your insights. I wouldn’t doubt that it could be done with proper preparation, I am just not able to imagine how to satisfactorily perform all the operational details.

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been Creative?

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There was an article on Salon this weekend which noted that while people in creative fields are facing increasingly difficult times, the amount of literature/media celebrating creativity continues to increase. The author basically concludes that the idea of creativity is valued, but society doesn’t really actively seeks out and support creatives.

He says the same basic examples are recycled over and over again to illustrate how beneficial creativity is to the economy, but there isn’t an expanding effort toward cultivating creatives.

It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well…the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.

This reinforces the uneasiness I felt when I learned the National Endowment for the Arts decided to expand their definition of participation in arts activity to include viewing/listening to recordings and broadcasts. Suddenly 74% of adults were participants.

I support the idea that the survey should acknowledge that technology was a valid way to interact with the arts, but I was still left asking, “So what?”

That 74% was twice the number who reported having attended an arts event. That means that 38%+ did not view themselves as having participated in an arts activity.

Even if you went and told them, “Hey, that thing you do? It is participating in an arts activity,” they basically didn’t have to make an effort to change their lifestyle in order to continue being counted as a participant.

Those who cared about being considered a participant gained a measure of satisfaction they didn’t have and those who didn’t care could just live on.

Since that initial study came out in 2008, there hasn’t really been any initiative to encourage people to up their game and be more of an active participant.

I am not talking about fulfilling the self-interest of arts organizations to get people through their doors. That portion of the study didn’t really change anything for arts organizations. They knew long before then that people were watching broadcasts and listening to recordings and doing other things rather than attending and it was going to be necessary for arts organizations to change their approach.

There hasn’t been strong effort to say, what you are doing is considered participation, now try picking up a guitar, writing poems and short stories, sketching the clouds.

I don’t discount the possibility that people are already quietly doing this. Perhaps the next NEA survey should ask if listening and watching broadcasts and recordings has lead to further exploration through taking a class, experimenting with Photoshop, keeping a journal, etc,.

The very act of asking that question might reinforce the idea that creative efforts should be valued better than a series of television and print ads encouraging people to get up and paint in the manner of exercise campaigns.

In the past I have advocated asking people what they liked about their last arts experience when you encounter them at supermarket check out line or at dinner parties. It occurs to me we should add asking if people do any acting, singing, dancing, painting, writing, etc., themselves to introduce the idea there is value in self-improvement and education.

While the Salon article takes a fairly cynical tone about feeling self-important after reading a book on creativity or watching a TED talk, it is true that creativity can’t be achieved through passivity. Quiet time is certainly helpful, but the creative process is active, full of mistakes, risk, disappointments and blisters as well as the sublime.

Info You Can Use: Resources For Developing Community Engagement

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I have been reading a fair bit lately accusing arts organizations of paying lip service to the concepts of connecting and building relationships with the community. The suggestion is this is something of a euphemism for “what is the least I have to do to convince people to see my show?”

While there may be some truth to this, there are a number of arts organizations who sincerely wish to forge stronger bonds with their communities.

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters recently released a resource for those wishing to develop community engagement activities.

The 14 members of the Leadership Development Institute, comprised of presenters from across the country developed the content for “A Cooperative Inquiry: How Can Performing Arts Organizations Build and Sustain Meaningful Relationships with Their Communities?”

They organize the content into the following areas:

Making the Case – Why is it important to know and connect with community?

Building an Organizational Culture – Why is it important to integrate community engagement into a presenter’s mission/strategic plan?

Connecting with Your Community – How should geographic, socioeconomic and political realities of the community inform an organization’s approach?

Involving Artists – How should artists – who are key stakeholders in the arts ecology – be involved in connecting their work with communities?

Evaluating Impact – How can evaluation serve internal learning and enhanced community engagement?

The material gets the old Butts in the Seats seal of approval because it offers practical solutions. Being part of the Leadership Development Institute requires that you discuss the theories, go back and try to implement what you discussed within the context of your organization and then come back and report to the whole group.

As a result, most of the five areas listed above ends with a “How It Works In Practice” section discussing what did and didn’t work for some of the participants. Each area also has a worksheet associated with it to help guide discussions and planning.

The areas that I read with the greatest interest were the first two, making the case and building organizational culture. It seems to me that if you don’t have a clear understanding of your goals and investment by the staff, all your efforts are likely to come to naught.

I liked the five sample generic case statements they provided because they ran the gamut from invoking Aristotelian ideals to the short and practical,

“Unless our arts organizations continually evaluate our missions and evolve our programming to reflect the communities in which we serve, we run the risk of becoming irrelevant and impotent as a force for social and cultural change in our cities.”

I also appreciated that there was one specifically geared to university campus based art organizations.

When it came to making statements about who the community you served was and who you would like to connect to, I liked their suggestion that an arts organization work a little backwards and start by examining a performance or event that you deemed culturally successful and determine what made it important and relevant.

This appealed to me because so often statements about mission and who you serve are very aspirational. That is how it should be.

But often looking at these statements in the context of an event you feel was successful might contradict some of that self-image if the community you think you are serving well isn’t participating in your greatest successes.

On the other hand, you may discover that you have made greater strides in serving a community than you imagined when you recognize that what you identify as the culturally successful event, while not the best attended or financially rewarding, has had the deepest impact in the community. This may manifest in a hundred small ways that aren’t directly recorded on a balance sheet.

When it comes time to try to build organizational culture around the idea of community engagement, that culturally successful event can provide a great starting point.

Staff can be dubious when new initiatives are introduced so having an example of an event that everyone is proud of provides a set of shared values from which to start a conversation about other efforts in which everyone can feel some degree of investment.

SoHo On Erie

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In the wake of Richard Florida’s advocacy for the creative class as harbingers of vitality in a city, a number of locales subscribed to the notation with mixed results.

Things aren’t as simple as providing fallow ground for artists, adding a little water and standing back to watch prosperity grow.

That said, I have been watching an effort in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood with some interest. Maybe the long term plan is to spur gentrification and economic vitality, but right now it looks like they are looking to create an artist colony and inject some vitality into a neighborhood.

They adopted the most aggressive approach I have seen in getting artists there.

What initially caught my eye was their offer of assistance with transportation, hotels and meals to artists across the country to help them attend a Welcome to Collinwood weekend earlier this month.

When artists arrived, there were all sorts of tours and activities for them, including an opportunity to check out houses they could buy for $6500 and fix up.

“Our $6,500 house program is a perfect opportunity for artists who want to create their own live/work space and don’t mind putting a little rehab and TLC into their property. We select houses that are in moderate to good condition, houses where rehab costs will be relatively low, and then give artists 6 months to make any necessary repairs to the property. After those repairs are complete, you own the house outright.”

If you aren’t in to rehabbing a house, they will do it for you at a cost that is less than market price–with a $1500 allowance for appliances.

And it appears they may even give you some work to do via grants for community art projects.

I am not sure how many people attended the weekend and it is far to early to know if anything positive will develop since it only occurred a few weeks ago. Anyone who is interested can contact them to get involved.

Obviously I would like to see this succeed. There are Weed and Seed programs where they offer housing to police officers at low prices and mortgages in order to help stabilize communities. I have no idea whether Collinwood is a high crime area or not, I just draw the parallel in order to express a hope that the introduction of artists to communities is shown to contribute to a similar state.

It isn’t enough to feel secure in your community, pride and excitement are important as well.

What Should I Talk About?

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Now that I am back living in the lower 48, I have begun thinking a little more seriously about possibly presenting at some of the national or regional conferences. I had actually thought about it a bit when I was in Hawaii, but distance limited my opportunity to attend many conferences and hampered collaboration opportunities.

That gave me the idea to ask my readers–what do you think I should do a session on? This is actually a double duty question because I am also essentially asking what topic would you want me to write blog entries on to.

I understand that many people can’t attend conferences so I would ultimately be planning on posting whatever I talked about on the blog. And readers might see bits and pieces of what I was working on emerge on the blog as my research brought me in contact with new information.

Rather than to ask what topics I should blog about, I wanted to frame in the context of what do you want to know about so badly that you would seriously consider undertaking the expense of travel, hotel, food, etc to attend a conference where someone was talking about it?

I also suspect I take for granted people’s familiarity with many topics I come across in my daily reading. The reality might be that people are desperate for information. So even if I didn’t do a conference session on it, your feedback will help determine topics I blog about in the future.

Just as examples of conferences sessions to get you started, Arts Presenters is looking for session proposals on Catalyzing Communities around the arts, Making the Case for the Arts and The Art of Transition. That last one seems like it could encompass everything from leadership transition to changing your organizational approach to programming and marketing.

I just found out that I probably will be attending APAP conference this year. Though I am not sure I would get a proposal together by the deadline next Thursday so I am not necessarily looking for a topic that would fit that conference.

I figure I can either lead or contribute to a conversation about:

-contract negotiations, submitting offers, reading contract riders
-closely partnering with multiple arts presenters to organize a tour as a consortium
-partnering with artists to create performance works reflecting stories/values of indigenous cultures

Of course, I can talk about many other topics like marketing, social media, presenting in higher education environments (and bureaucracies) but I feel like a lot of other conference presenters can and have done so before. Though I am certainly happy to produce blog posts on these topics

I feel what I have listed are areas in which I have more specialized knowledge than many others. It is also likely that I am forgetting some too. If there is a subject area which you have come to value my expertise, let me know.

Thanks.

When You Invite An Artist To Dinner

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Last week I was invited to dinner to meet with a muralist who is in town painting the floodwall murals. I don’t mean to constantly harp on the small town charm I am experiencing here at my new job, but you write what you know, eh?

I have been thinking recently back to my childhood when my parents would regularly invite our teachers home for dinner. It wasn’t just my family. Every kid’s family seemed to take turns. We were all horrified because not only were our teachers invading our personal sanctums, but given we were Catholic school kids, our homes were being visited by nuns who kept us at the edge of terror!

I am not sure anyone does this any more, but this was the type of grassroots effort that let both the kids and the teachers know the community valued education.

I wonder if it might be effective to do the same thing with the arts where you invited your neighbors over to meet an artist.

I know a few groups that have house concerts by guest musicians as fund raising events. While that sort of intimacy offers a great experience, the type of people invited and the expectations placed upon them by the fund raising format aren’t really conducive to what I have in mind.

Having the party at the biggest mansion in the most exclusive neighborhood probably won’t make the arts appear accessible to new segments of the community either.

But a back yard cook out or dinner you would invite your friends to anyway, but in this instance you say, I would like you to come to dinner to meet this local/visiting artist, provides a low pressure environment that communicates that you value the arts.

The artist doesn’t need to perform or have their work on display. Just the fact they are the guest of honor to whom everyone is introduced at a gathering with good food and good company can be sufficient to influence attitudes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLfb9hgmufI

Info You Can Use: We Are More Than Just Our Overhead Ratio

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Well, the timing could be a little better.

Part of the big news today is that GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and BBB Wise Giving Alliance joined together to sign an open letter to all donors asking them not to use overhead as a primary criteria for giving.

The letter does a pretty good job in a short space of discussing how inaccurate the ratio is and the consequences for non-profits when they feel they have to hobble themselves to maintain a low number.

The letter specific cites Stanford Social Innovation Review‘s article, The Non-Profit Starvation Cycle which does a good job explaining the problem in detail.

The reason why I said the timing could be better is because it comes on the heels of a weekend where CNN has been majorly featuring a story about charities that have been fleecing donors with the causes only getting 4% in some cases.

Now make no mistake, I am not defending a 96% overhead by any means. There are a lot of scams out there and it appears pretty clear that the organizations featured in the story set out to deceive right from the moment they generated names that sound very close to nationally recognized charities.

My concern is that to people unfamiliar with charities, the timing of the letter’s release makes it almost appear to be an apologist for the high overhead ratios these dishonest groups had. Especially since a picture of the website of the one of the groups CNN damns contains a claim that Charity Navigator gave them a 3 star rating.

The proximity of these two announcements aside, the public recognition that charities should not be judged on overhead alone is a real advance in the effort to get non-profits evaluated on less superficial criteria. It will likely still happen for some time to come, but it is an encouraging sign.

Stuff To Ponder: New Standard Discount Category

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I had some additional thoughts regarding the article by Alex Tabbarok I cited yesterday that I didn’t include for fear it would get lost in the entry.

Noting out how oriented toward higher education our society is, Tabbarok observes,

“College students even get discounts at the movie theater; when was the last time you saw a discount for an electrical apprentice?”

It occurred to me that extending a discount to trade apprentices might provide a continuous but subtle message that the arts are for everyone, not just the educated elite.

Obviously, this needs to be supported by programming and an attendance experience that isn’t intimidating. But I wondered if the passive act of providing a discount to laborers might succeed where active claims of the arts being for everyone have come up short.

You may not get many actual apprentices attending, but the act of publicizing the discount may contribute to a shifting perception of your organization.

Business Plans Enhanced By Creative Mediuum

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I was really happy to see that MIT required the projects submitted to their annual $100K Entrepreneurship Competition to have the arts at the core.

The impetus for making this a requirement:

“came to Magee when he was sitting in on business pitches and noticed that many of them could have used an artist’s touch. “This isn’t just about businesses that need a graphic designer or have a beautiful website,” he says. “It’s about businesses with arts at their core.”

The committee for the competition received 40 submissions, but only half met the requirement of having arts at their core.

This reminded me about a post I did on the competition that University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management held last year where the teams including design students offered a more compelling and engaging pitch than the MBA students.

It reinforces the value those with creative degrees bring to business and points to the necessity to train creatives how to bring that value to businesses.

The winner of the MIT contest was a site called Mediuum and described as “a sort of iTunes for art, providing access to digitized art works for the masses.”

According to the team’s project page,

The art market is a $40 billion annual market, but is riddled with problems that alienate its largest potential consumer base. Digital consumers are habituated to the instant access and gratification they enjoy with other cultural content, like music and movies. By comparison, finding art they like is expensive and time consuming, and there is no digital solution.

Enter Mediuum:

Mediuum lets people discover, display and enjoy the art they love most, on digital screens. We combine an online marketplace of exceptionally high quality work by the world’s most talented artists with a platform that allows people to display that art on any screen. Our solution is creating a new online market for art discovery and consumption.

I visited the site and was a little disappointed. The only way to get on is the request an invitation. My first thought was that this was a reflection of the elitism that everyone accused the arts of perpetuating and an aspect of the alienation the project page referenced. The only way to access the art is to meet the approval of a gatekeeper.

I submitted a request for invitation and received a message that they would get back to me. Over 24 hours later, I still haven’t received a reply.

Now that being said, there have been many new online services that have required you to receive an invitation during the early stages. This has been the case with many Google products, including Gmail. In time, Mediuum may be easily available to all.

Or it could just be taking the problems of bricks and mortar establishments to the Internet.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

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I had a “where are they now” moment looking back at an entry from 2006 where I mentioned the MacArthur Foundation had given a $250,000 grant to Edward Castronova to develop Arden: The World of Shakespeare.

The idea was to create the environments out of Shakespeare’s plays and allow people to play in as realistic as possible an environment. At the time I commented,

“I wonder if playing the game might not provide good research for actors. Find out how a peasant might have really felt after spending hours of drudgery online. Want to discover real motivation for delivering Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day speech? Get ye to the Battle of Agincourt. (Of course, you might be felled by dysentery on the way if the game keeps things realistic.)”

So I wondered what ever happened to the game because I hadn’t heard of its release. Turns out, it never got released. The ambitions and motivations didn’t align with player values.

For example, one of the lessons Castronova says he derived from the experience was,

Think About Your Audience
“We put Arden in front of Shakespeare experts and they loved it. We put it in front of play testers and they yawned. We’d get feedback like, ‘I talked to that Falstaff guy for a while and got a quest to go repair something. I logged out and never came back.’ Too much reading, not enough fighting. Arden II will be more of a hack-and-slash Dungeons and Dragons type of game.”

There are probably a ton of audience relations lessons here for arts organizations, but I also saw some common incorrect assumptions shared by amateurs and other inexperienced parties about what it takes to do things full time.

I often have people who rent our theatre complain that the amount of hours we estimate their event will take is inflated, protesting that theirs is a simple show. People don’t realize that even with all the technology available to us, it is not easy to maintain the illusion that things are proceeding seamlessly without a number of people running around backstage communicating with various parties and executing a dozen tasks a minute.

Among Castronova’s other tips are not to be overly ambitious and to have appropriate staffing for the job. The thing is, even experienced groups are just as apt to underestimate requirements.

Performing arts organizations are well aware of the time and resources they need to invest in projects having done them many times over the years, yet they will often create new programs and assign them to already overburdened departments with the assumption that it won’t require too much more effort to take it on.

And that is often true, unless, you know, you want it to look half way decent.

(Title of this entry comes from an epigram to W.B. Yeats’ book, Responsibilities.)

Consuming Art By The Pound

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For awhile there one of the biggest areas of discussion was about whether arts organizations should be like airlines an adopt dynamic pricing that responded to the demand for the show. I haven’t read much about it lately, but suspect some people are toying with the idea.

But another option has presented itself, again via airlines. Samoan Air announced that they were going to start charging people to fly based on their weight. This is because one of the biggest costs for airlines is fuel and weight determines how much fuel is necessary for a flight.

There is a certain logic behind this decision. When you ship cargo, you pay based on weight and size. It is only humans which pay a flat “piece” rate for themselves and their luggage.

So can the arts do the same? Can we charge by how much art a person consumes by their presence?

Don’t we do this to a degree already?

Tiered pricing for seating is based what we project the value of that seat is in terms of sight lines, acoustics and perhaps prestige. But when we charge one price for adults, another for students, another for senior citizens and another for kids under 12, that is due to the fact that adults are at the prime of their facilities and so are able to gain the most enjoyment and enlightenment from the experience, correct?

Yes, my facetious tone is meant to be obvious. Since people come to art with different experiences and backgrounds, it is impossible to measure who is “consuming” more from their interactions with it.

The fact of the matter is, the different level of pricing is based on the recognition that students and seniors don’t often have the income to attend. Kids pricing is to encourage/facilitate parents to bringing their kids. Military rate is good PR to recognize their services.

The reality is, the whole set up is something of a social contract with our audience where the people who don’t qualify for any discounts are pretty much in the position of subsidizing the experience for those who do qualify.

Thinking about it in this context, I wonder if we don’t really do enough to thank all those full price buyers for essentially voluntarily participating in this artificial construct. Maybe slip them a Hershey’s Kiss or a thank you note when we rip their tickets at the door.

One of the arguments against dynamic pricing is the same you might make against charging people in the same manner as cargo. For many organizations, price is part of the relationship they have with their community. On its own, pricing won’t build loyalty or relationships, but it can be an ingredient because it acknowledges something about the other person.

I make my suggestion about rewarding full price buyers with candy with some degree of seriousness because I think audiences can take their discounts for granted and it might be beneficial for all those involved to acknowledge that the discount only works with the tacit participation of many others.

Trying New Things With No Apparent Benefit

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Something a former employer has started doing has reminded me to always keep your options and mind open even if the potential value is unclear.

I used to coordinate the operations for the Appel Farm Arts and Music Festival. A few years ago, one of the board members, (now executive director), had the idea to offer a 25 mile bike ride on the festival day. I believe this year will be the third year they are doing it.

Because the festival is outdoors in a rural area, having a bike ride does fit the vibe of the event and the lifestyle of many of those who attend. But I gotta tell you, it would have never occurred to me that people would be up for a 25 mile ride followed by a full day attending an arts and music festival.

Just thinking about it is exhausting to me. Also, most of the audience does not live in the immediate area. Will people really want to haul their bikes to south Jersey to do this ride and attend the festival?

Just based on my experience living where I do now, I know there are enough bike enthusiasts who won’t hesitate to answer yes to all of the above. 10 years ago, I would have discounted the idea. And in fact, maybe all the elements weren’t in place to make it an attractive option back then.

As the guy responsible for all the logistics for the event, there are details related to adding the ride that would have concerned me and made me resist it. But there was a good volunteer corps that supported the festival so none of the details would have been too troubling in the end.

I applaud them for making the initial investment of time and energy to try it out. It is easy to advocate for experimenting and trying new things, but there are always practical considerations. The festival is a big event and to add something new diverts attention away from the core activity.

It may sound simple to gather a bunch of people on bikes, send them on a ride and make sure to have water and snacks available at the planned rest stops. There is still a lot of planning and tracking involved with the ride and I imagine the festival staff and volunteers make it look a lot easier than it is.

I think that it can sometimes be easier to diverge from the core mission of the organization in order to chase funding and grant money, but more difficult to add activities which complement existing programs but do not have a clear potential for financial gain.

I am not saying this was the case with the bike ride. They may have seen the opportunity to add 50 new attendees for all I know. I am just observing what is a potential paradox of just about any business. It is easy to get sidetracked by the prospect of new opportunities to the detriment of enhancing the value of existing conditions.

People may think that doing something with no apparent benefit is the cornerstone of a non-profit organization’s existence, but living and working under that philosophy doesn’t make the decisions any easier–especially when you are frequently enjoined to act more like a business.

Religion vs Arts, Who Wins The Battle Of Orthodoxies!

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Since the very beginning of the blog, I have been keeping an eye on the intersection of performing arts and religious communities. A recent NY Times article seems to include quite a number of places where this occurs.

It starts by describing a warehouse space that has the

“trappings of a revitalization project, including an art gallery, a yoga studio and a business incubator, sharing the building with a coffee shop and a performance space.

But it is, in fact, a church. ”

If you look at the website of this art gallery-cum-yoga studio-cum-etc-cum church, it might take a couple glances to realize it is a church.

You can say a lot about the importance of adhering to propriety and doctrine that should be part of sacred institutional practices and how the approach of many organizations isn’t invested with appropriate due seriousness.

But you can say the same thing about churches, too.

Oh wait, I mean arts organizations. Wait, which one was I talking about? This is so confusing.

You may be surprised to learn that not only has church attendance been falling lately, but there is a churn rate of about 40% annually.

Sounds a lot like the plight of arts organizations, eh?

Not only that, there is a real bias toward entrepreneurship

“For new leaders coming out of seminary, “the cool thing is church planting,” Mr. Bird said. “The uncool thing is to go into the established church. Why that has taken over may speak to the entrepreneurialism and innovation that today’s generation represents.”

Sounds a lot like the sentiments of performing arts kids coming right out of school that want to start their own company.

Like arts organizations, there is a push to connect with the communities in different ways, some going so far as to remove references to “church” and “services” in favor of “gatherings” and “communities.” One group has seen some success with centering their spiritual communities in coffee shops and is preparing to franchise their coffee concept.

As strange as a chain of spiritual coffee houses sounds, the trend seems to be away from the huge mega-churches, many of which have been foreclosed on, toward smaller multipurpose spaces that can be turned toward earning revenue rather than being empty six days a week.

In some respects having a church be the center of community center is a return to old practices. Chartres Cathedral was a bustle of commercial activity both inside and out.

One of the prime questions that emerges for me as I read this article is how religious/spiritual groups, which I believe stand to suffer much more from embracing the trappings of popular culture and entertainment than arts organizations do, seem to be a bit more nimble than the arts community at experimenting with new approaches?

I realize that many trends reported on by the NY Times are often not as widespread as the paper makes it appear, but as a person who rents a facility to religious services, I can attest that the article isn’t many degrees different from my experience.

It amuses me to think that the arts community self imposed idealism about selling out and becoming too commercial might actually represent a more inflexible orthodoxy than those embraced by religious communities possessing texts containing rules of behavior.

Though it isn’t as if the arts community isn’t having this same conversation. This is what Creative Placemaking is really all about. What these churches are doing may provide some interesting models and even potential collaborators in the pursuit of placemaking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dancing On The Street Where You Live

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Producer David Binder did a short TED Talk about arts festivals. He mentions a number of new festivals which are engaging directly with communities in site specific events.

However, it was the first one he mentioned, Minto: Live Sydney Festival 2011, that fired my imagination most. The people of Minto, accompanied by some cooperating artists, performed on their lawns, driveways and garages as the audience moved by. I am not sure if it was planned or spontaneous, but one story Binder relates almost sounds like some residents who weren’t part of the original tour got caught up in the spirit and began performing on their lawn.

I saw a lot of applicability to the current discussions about creative placemaking and community engagement.

But what I saw as the most compelling element of this practice is that it reinforces the value of the arts and play for kids right where they live. When asked about what got me started in the arts, I often refer back to a role in my 8th grade play.

But like a lot of people in the arts, the reality is, my siblings and I would perform for our family and friends at gatherings.

A festival like this would demand greater sophistication, but heck with arts in schools, performing at home would reinforce the value of the arts for the kids, the parents and the whole community literally right where they live. It would be interesting to see if residents of Minto felt the experience changed their perception and participation in arts activities.

Just as annual tours of historic homes emphasizes the value of their presence and engenders a sense of pride in the neighborhood, (though perhaps some resentment in the kids who have to help clean their home in preparation), a neighborhood arts festival could advance the cause of the arts, inspire pride and perhaps surprise people with the hidden talents of their neighbors.

I don’t really think this would or should be a substitute of arts in schools, though it might spur renewed community interest in offering instruction. Rather, I was thinking that at one time a home piano was once the center of family activity. Participation in a neighborhood arts festival might serve to fill that absence to a small degree.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rttG3xyHcw&w=560&h=315]

We Have To Destroy Our Arts Organization To Save Our Arts Organization

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The news of Hostess Bakeries making good on their threat to liquidate in the face of a baker strike reminded me of You’ve Cott Mail’s “Is bankruptcy the answer for arts money woes” round up from this past August.

Back then Thomas Cott linked to a story about how the Barnes Foundation let everyone believe they were going bankrupt in order to make the case for moving the art collection to Philadelphia easier. Another story recalled how the Philadelphia Orchestra also declared bankruptcy in order to help with their contract negotiations and relieve their pension obligations, suggesting that the stigma of doing so may be dissipating and other orchestras may be following suit.

Cott included an article by Terry Teachout acclaiming the success of the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) in getting the citizens of three counties to agree to an increase in their property taxes (called millage) in return for free admission to the museum.

There was some talk that millage might especially be the wave of the future for funding the arts.

Yeah, not so fast. According to Judith Dobrzynski, the DIA might want to give a thankful prayer for their blessings. Residents of Ann Arbor, MI voted down millage to support a comprehensive public art project.

With that in mind, I wouldn’t necessarily count millage out as an answer. I suspect the biggest difference between Ann Arbor and Detroit was that DIA is a specific, visible entity, the benefits of which are easy to experience by walking in the door. If they were forced to close, it was clear what would be lost. Ann Arbor was looking to support art yet to be created which can be more difficult to become mentally, emotionally and socially invested in.

What I would really like to see is an arts organization successfully sell a community on a wide-ranging public support option like millage in the absence of a scenario of imminent demise. I have seen so many appeals in the face of an apocalypse that I wonder if it is even possible to rally significant community support for a healthy, stable arts organization.

Have we trained people only to respond to dire predictions? Or perhaps they have trained us that they will only respond to appeals couched in those terms.

Bankruptcy and tales of woe really isn’t the most constructive way to develop a relationship and confidence from your community. It impacts credibility and people soon become inured to news of financial crises. In this Hostess liquidation, the only person who wins is Little Debbie. (Come to find out, Hostess owns Drake’s Cakes)

The best evidence that you will not mishandle donated funds is that you are never in the position of telling people about the void that will open in their lives if they don’t rally to support you. It is harder to suggest people should have confidence in your business plan and financial practices if you are in dire straits, but more people seem ready to increase their giving in these instances because it is easier to be passionate in short bursts.

Yes, I know Joni Mitchell told us we take the things we love for granted many years ago, but there is nothing to say we can’t rally to change that behavior.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIuP7zEVeM&w=420&h=315]

All Your Dance Are Belong To Us

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Thomas Cott recently included a link to a story about dance and visual arts that I found extremely intriguing. The article starts with a quote from Ralph Lemon, “I wait,” he said, “for the day when a museum acquires a dance.”

My first reaction was that this could be valuable for cross audience pollination. I thought back to an entry I did last February where the coordinator of a visual and performance art festival observed that there was little cross over between her audiences and that of a theatre oriented festival even though they had many of the same artists in common.

Then I started wondering about the logistics and arrangements involved for a museum to acquire and present dance. Fortunately, the article addresses all these things.

Apparently dance and museums are not strangers. A choreographer received top honors at the Whitney Biennial this year. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is featuring a 3 week dance series organized by Ralph Lemon. I was surprised to learn that both MoMA and the Guggenheim own several dance pieces and have paved the way for museums to collect “ephemeral works.”

Apparently working in a gallery space challenges choreographers to think in new ways about the visuals and use of space. Museums find they need to think differently about performance arts. (my emphasis)

“But dance isn’t performance art, as Jens Hoffmann, director of San Francisco’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, well knows; he encouraged Mr. Sehgal to transition out of dance, and pursue an audience in the art world.

…Naked on a stage, Mr. Sehgal “re-danced” moves from famous choreographers. “I thought it was interesting that he was turning himself into a museum of dance.” Mr. Hoffmann invited him to participate in several shows in Berlin and Dusseldorf.

Mr. Sehgal, who also has a background in economics, is adamant that his work be treated like any other work of visual art—bought, sold and exhibited. To exhibit one of his pieces, an institution must follow certain contractual obligations—the piece must be shown for a minimum of six weeks, during which time it is presented all day, every day, like any other art exhibition.

[…]

According to Ms. Breitwieser, the rise in interest in dance does parallel a similar rise in interest in live art, or art like Mr. Sehgal’s. Since visual art has become so conceptual and predicated on a kind of “de-skilling,” live art, including performance, dance and theatrical works, she said, present an element of “re-skilling” that audiences crave. Awwnd dance presented in the white-cube context of a museum presents a new challenge to both choreographers and viewers that dance in conventional theater doesn’t offer. “The museum’s position is to write history,” Ms. Breitwieser said. “This makes one look at a piece of live art differently.”

How the dance is treated and viewed is of some concern to those in the dance community. If the relationship is to continue, the situation will likely have to move beyond one-offs and short run exhibitions. Tino Sehgal’s insistence that his work be experienced by visitors with the same degree of persistence as any other art work in the museum may become something of a precedent.

According to Judy Hussie-Taylor, the director of Danspace Project, there is chatter in the dance community over whether museums are co-opting dance without fully understanding what it takes to support dancers. There’s also concern that financial resources that now go directly to choreographers and dance organizations may be diverted to museums and visual arts institutions.

“Selling a dance performance as a work of art is an interesting proposition,” she said, “primarily because it’d be great for choreographers to have the same kind of economic control of their work and its distribution [that visual artists have].”

As I said, for me this whole discussion is intriguing to me. I haven’t even been able to imagine all the implications. What does it do for museums which have heretofore always been the site of static art work if they are regularly offering art that is transitory in nature?

One of the big selling points for the performing arts has always been that it happens only for a moment in time. What is the impact of being able to see it 9-5, Monday – Friday in a MoMA gallery? Even though there is still a higher degree of randomness inherent to 50 live performances than 50 viewings of the same YouTube video, do all those repetitions diminish the value of the performance?

On the other hand, does the fact that MoMA has exclusive rights to an exciting, highly acclaimed dance piece and no amount of begging and money can get it performed in Minneapolis enhance the value of both the museum and the company?

How Audiences Are Like The Electorate

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Now that the election is drawing to a close, I think all non-profit arts organizations, especially those in battleground states, should go out tomorrow and ask media companies for donations. There has been so much money spent on advertising during the campaigns, those companies are going to have a big tax burden this year if they don’t find some worthy cause to donate to!

Alas, Hawaii is not one of those states. Neither presidential candidate visited this year even though rumor has it one of them was born here. While we did have a 2 term Republican governor, the state is pretty solidly Democratic. The State Senate has 24 Democratic members and 1 Republican.

Voting participation is so bad, CNN did a long study about why the state is dead last.

This where “all politics are local” comes in. There are some situations characteristic only of Hawaii. There isn’t another state where a sizable part of the population views statehood as the result of an illegal overthrow of the monarchy and won’t vote because they feel it legitimizes the occupation government.

Due to the distance from the rest of the continental US, a person living in Hawaii can actually hear the winner of a national election called by 5 pm local time, providing less incentive to vote. (Though Alaska is in the same situation and has 8th highest voter turnout.)

Two things I took away from the CNN article that applies to the arts.

First, the importance of giving people an opportunity to talk about their experiences. I mention engaging people in conversation about their experiences with the arts pretty consistently in the blog, but the CNN article shows it in action.

A group canvassing neighborhoods trying to get people engaged and signed to vote didn’t get much traction with conventional survey questions, but when they asked what was personally important…

“…At least she’d have to look at us before saying no.

Do you vote?

No.

Would you like to register?

No.

Last-ditch effort: Is there an issue important to you?

The volunteers explained that Kanu is asking candidates questions based on the issues identified by the people they meet while canvassing. If the candidates addressed her concern, they told her, they’d report back.

“Oh!” the woman said. I could almost hear her tongue loosening.

She launched into her life story….

…The volunteers asked again. Wouldn’t you like to vote? Your voice could be heard.

After some discussion, the woman, Marlene Joshua, 58, said yes.

The other lesson I came away with is that simply inviting people to attend a show could possibly be surprisingly effective.

“He never cast a ballot himself until age 34. No one had ever asked him to, he said, and politics just wasn’t something he thought much about…. But then, in 2010, he saw a link to Kanu’s website shared via Twitter. He clicked it and found a page that asked him to make a pledge to vote for the first time.

For whatever reason, he said yes. That decision was the start of an incredible transformation. It led to his current hobby: spending weekends convincing other people that their votes matter.”

and in another part of the article:

Michelson, from Menlo College in California, told me that some groups — racial minorities, recent immigrants and residents of low-income neighborhoods — don’t feel like people who are supposed to vote in U.S. elections. But if you ask them to participate, she said, that can all change.

“It doesn’t really matter what you say. It doesn’t really matter who asks you,” she said. “The important thing is the personal invitation to participate.”

We know that like people in these groups, there are those who also don’t feel like they are the type of people who go to see live performances. Changing that mindset may start with something as simple as a personal invitation. That gesture at least starts to confirm that they are perceived as the type of person who attends a live performance.

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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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