This story can’t be allowed to pass uncommented upon. Or at least, I feel the need to comment more extensively than did Thomas Cott when he tweeted this link.
In a case of damned if you have too much overhead and damned if you don’t have enough, ALS Association is in a panic about their rating as an effective charity due to the windfall they received thanks to the ice bucket challenges.
Since they didn’t expect such a surge in donations, they don’t have a plan formulated to use it. As a result, they are in danger of having their rating fall from a B+ to an F.
“You can get in trouble for having too much money in the bank,” said Daniel Borochoff, founder and president of Chicago-based CharityWatch, part of the American Institute of Philanthropy. “We want to see that there is a plan for spending down this money.”
[…]
Borochoff said having so much cash and no plan for what to do with that money could lead to an automatic F. Newhouse said those plans are in the works, which I ‘ve written about here in a separate post.
Concern over a potential downgrade lead ALS Association CEO Barbara Newhouse to take a peremptory step of writing to three rating agencies asking them not to penalize the association.
So let me get this straight. A commercial business makes five times their normal annual income and they are celebrated for it. Even if someone takes a close look at how this amazing feat was accomplished and sees something fishy, it is often difficult to get regulators, who wield legal authority, to take effective action. (Not to mention the business can sit on the cash as long as they want.)
However, a charity experiencing unprecedented largess starts to react with panic that the judgment of unofficial entities may result in bad will for them. This despite the fact that the process by which this funding is acquired is transparent, public and clearly unexpected.
The one glimmer of hope is that two of the three rating agencies she sent letters to, Guide Star and Charity Navigator, were signatories to the letter sent out last year urging donors not to use overhead ratio as a prime criteria for giving.
Hopefully there won’t be any problems for ALS Association as they consider their next move.
Otherwise, we may see spiteful people leveling the curse of prosperity in this post title.
I was really surprised to find my name tucked at the bottom of Barry Hessenius’ 2014’s Top 50 Most Powerful and Influential People in the Nonprofit Arts (USA) In fact, since I read his blog via Feedly and had caught up with my subscriptions on Saturday, I might not have read the post for another week if it weren’t for someone tweeting that Robert Bush from Charlotte’s Arts and Science Council made the list.
It’s not that I don’t think what I produce is worthwhile, it is just that I don’t perceive the old blog here as having that high a profile.
Now, of course, there is pressure to meet the standard set by the company I am listed in.
But Barry’s list dovetails nicely with the subject I intended to address today: cooperation and competition in the arts. Last month, Seth Godin observed that authors don’t compete with each other.
Yet, not only do authors get along, they spend time and energy blurbing each other’s books. Authors don’t try to eliminate others from the shelf, in fact, they seek out the most crowded shelves they can find to place their books. They eagerly pay to read what everyone else is writing…
Can you imagine Tim Cook at Apple giving a generous, positive blurb to an Android phone?
And yet authors do it all the time.
It’s one of the things I’ve always liked best about being a professional writer. The universal recognition that there’s plenty of room for more authors, and that more reading is better than less reading, even if what’s getting read isn’t ours.
It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an infinite game, one where we each seek to help ideas spread and lives change.
Even though the limits of funding, revenue generation opportunities and audience free time make existence as an arts organization or artist seem like a zero sum game, my experience starting about 15 years or so has been that arts people are generally pretty supportive of the work of colleagues in both word and action. They will tell their friends about interesting events and invite them along when they attend.
That hasn’t always been my experience. About 20 years ago, I feel like there was a lot more “us vs. them, we do the real art in this town” attitude. It has seemed over time the people I have worked with have espoused this view less and less.
Which isn’t to say that people aren’t envious of other organizations’ funding base; think other organization’s programming needs to be more diverse; think the annual awards ceremony for their community is all political; and aren’t befuddled by the more abstract and conceptual extremes of artistic expression.
Godin cites the intense rivalry of Pepsi and Coke as the antithesis of the relationship authors share. I mean, be honest. Haven’t you held your breath a moment when pouring Coke into a cup printed with a Pepsi logo, imagining the cup will melt? Have you ever mixed Pepsi and Coke together, standing at arm’s length expecting a reaction similar to dropping Mentos into a bottle of diet Coke, if not an explosion? That is how apparent the rivalry of the two companies is to the general public.
It would be hard to imagine Pepsi or Coke tweeting about members of other companies showing up on a list of the most influential and powerful people in the beverage industry.
But watch who calls attention to Barry Hessenius’ list over the next couple days. I bet you will find that the majority of those who do, don’t work for the same companies and organizations as those named. There may even be former employers and co-workers celebrating the attention someone has received. As Godin noted, there is a recognition that the success of one enhances the prestige and fortunes of the many.
Hey did you hear that Nina Simon, Laura Zabel and Donna Collins made the list?
You may have seen this recent piece in The New Yorker on creativity. My state arts council linked to it and now I see multiple others have as well.
Author Joshua Rothman asks, “How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing?”
That question gave me pause because in most of the posts I have done on the subject of creativity, it has almost always been about the product of creativity rather than the actual value of the process itself. I frequently invoke (as does Rothman) the IBM survey in which thousands of corporate CEOs said that creativity is one of the things they most highly value. I often talk about how the arts community can show their value to businesses, and by extension, the rest of the world via training and discussion of the creative process.
As Rothman points out, there was a time, (The Romantic period of Coleridge and Woodsworth), when there wasn’t an expectation that what was going on in your head would assume some demonstrable manifestation. (my emphasis)
It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age. We live in a consumer society premised on the idea of self-expression through novelty. We believe that we can find ourselves through the acquisition of new things…Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach. Even as this way of speaking aims to recast work as art, it suggests how much art has been recast as work: it’s now difficult to speak about creativity without also invoking a profession of some kind.
Even before I got to this paragraph near the end of the article, I started to think that we really aren’t allowed to make art for arts sake any more. There is both overt and subtle messaging that if your efforts aren’t advancing your career or marketable skills in some way, then it is frivolous.
It can absolutely be a lot of fun to try something new with the idea that you might be able to integrate it into your work. But how often do we allow ourselves to walk through mountain meadows and imagine making airplanes out of the flowers we see around us? If we allow ourselves to do that, how often is it being used to serve work in the sense of unleashing our creativity Rothman mentions: to surmount a creative block or as a vacation to refresh ourselves to go back to work bright eyed and clear headed?
Given the dynamics of our lives these days, I don’t know that we can ever return to the ideal state of the Romantics Rothman cites. In some sense, as a society we may be better off than the Romantics because more people have the leisure time to indulge their creativity than did in Coleridge’s day.
At the very least, we have the opportunity to open ourselves to fits of fancy and imagination. The exemplar that immediately popped to mind for me was when I was working in Hawaii and had the pleasure of driving Laurie Anderson around. She kept expressing her amazement at how blue the sky was. She may have noticed a dozen other things, but that is what sticks out in my memory. I was so struck by her enthusiasm, that I took her on a detour so I could share the panoramic vista of a scenic overlook with her.
I will cut right to the chase and say that I honed right in on their discussion of making a “cut list” of things to stop doing that are diverting resources and energy away from revenue generation.
If you’re a president, CEO, or executive director, you must align with your colleagues and focus your team on the sustainability of your business model and getting the revenue results that will support your mission. Insist on a “stop doing” list. Your non-profit status does not mean that you must exhaust staff time and resources with every initiative, regardless of return on investment.
They give examples of three theaters that have started focusing on audience retention in some fashion. Obviously, the area of focus could be anything.
I think the statements with the most impact were made in the comment section by Paul Botts.
During my years as a program director at an arts funder I adopted a habit that was driven by that “stop doing everything” idea. When presented with an organization’s new strategic plan my first question was always, “Tell me something which expresses your mission, which you could do and should do and really want to be doing, but which you aren’t going to do right now.”
If the response was a blank or shocked look then my feedback was that they didn’t have an actual plan they simply had a laundry list. If you haven’t made any actual choices then you haven’t done any real planning, etc.
Botts goes on to say that he follows up relating his own experience as managing director of an arts organization that tried to do everything their mission called for only to end up in bankruptcy. Even having gone through this uncomfortable experience, he still has to remind himself of lessons learned, indicating it is not an easy thing to keep yourself and your organization focused.
In the past I have often posted about diluting your efforts by adding programs as a way to chase foundation funding. But the situations TRG talks about are less clear cut and potentially more difficult to identify. The examples they give aren’t a matter of adding children matinees in order to get arts education funds. They talk about the Guthrie Theater deciding not to flyer the Mall of America in favor of focusing on getting first time attendees to come back for another visit.
Passing out flyers in a busy place is the sort of thing it is difficult to identify as a cut because it is a visible effort that looks like progress. It is the sort of thing audiences and board members will fault you for not doing in the face of declining attendance.
For some arts organizations, it might be the right strategy to increase attendance because the conversations accompanying the activity serve to increase a connection. In other communities, the connection may exist for as long as it takes to find a trashcan for the flyer.
The other thing that makes the cutting decision difficult is that there may be things that don’t appear to be effective because they are less public, more difficult to measure and might be among your organization’s least favorite activities. Just because you are really motivated to cut them may not mean it is constructive to do so.
Like a paper cut, what appears to be the least significant cut may tend to hurt the most.
Two weeks ago my neighbors were gathered around their pool talking excitedly about doing the ice bucket challenge. One of the kids asked five or six times what ALS was throughout the conversation before someone answered, “Lou Gehrig’s disease or something like that.”
This was a good illustration for me about the hazards of having a cause explode in popularity. Often the symbols associated with the cause become valued more than the cause itself.
The Non-Profit Quarterly has been covering some of the skepticism that has been expressed about the long term usefulness of the social media trend.
Writing for Time, Jacob Davidson, whose father died of ALS, found the ice bucket campaign initially attractive, but then had misgivings. “When I looked closer, I became uneasy,” Davidson wrote. “No wonder it took me weeks to learn the Ice Bucket Challenge was linked to ALS. Most of its participants, including Kennedy and Today’s Matt Lauer, didn’t mention the disease at all. The chance to jump on the latest trend was an end in itself.”
Davidson also mentioned the somewhat negative structure of the campaign, that if you choose not to donate, you dump a bucket of ice water on your head. “The challenge even seems to be suggesting that being cold, wet, and uncomfortable is preferable to fighting ALS,” he noted. If the strategy of dumping cold water was meant to increase awareness of the disease, the strategy has a built-in contradiction: “ALS needs all the awareness it can get, but somehow I doubt many learned a whole lot from contextless tweets of wet celebs smiling and laughing,” he added.
Despite Stephen Hawking and having seen Pride of the Yankees, ALS might not be strongly on my radar if my father hadn’t died from it about 20 years ago. Even if that hadn’t been the case, I still would be a little concerned about how centered the campaign is on the self rather than the disease.
Seth Godin noted that about 90% of those mentioning the challenge or posting video/images of themselves taking the challenge haven’t donated. That is certainly their right.
He goes on to point out the double edge to the situation. Specifically that a positive impact has been to spread the word about a little known disease. (I guess Stephen Hawking isn’t famous enough himself.) The other point Godin makes is that it is normalizing charitable giving.
This has been great for ALS related charities which have seen more giving in a few months than they see in many years. Even if 90% aren’t giving, the 10% who are are having a significant impact for these organizations.
On the other hand, Godin points out that there are some things to watch out for:
1. Good causes in need of support are going to focus on adding the sizzle and ego and zing that gets an idea to spread, instead of focusing on the work. One thing we know about online virality is that what worked yesterday rarely works tomorrow. A new arms race begins, and in this case, it’s not one that benefits many. We end up developing, “an unprecedented website with a video walkthrough and internationally recognized infographics…” (actual email pitch I got while writing this post).
2. We might, instead of normalizing the actual effective giving of grants and donations, normalize slacktivism. It could easily turn out that we start to emotionally associate a click or a like or a mention as an actual form of causing change, not merely a way of amplifying a message that might lead to that action happening.
Along the lines of Godin’s mention of a fundraising arms race, Non Profit Quarterly quoted Emmanuel College research fellow William MacAskill who expressed concerns that flash could easily obscure the need to do due diligence on the recipients of a donation.
His second point more directly addresses the issue of the seriousness of the charitable decision, that such “donor-focused philanthropy…regards all causes as equal…We should reward the charities that we believe do the most good, not those that have the best marketing strategy, otherwise the most successful charities will be those that are best at soliciting funds, not those that are best at making the world a better place.”
Of course, the truth is people give to people, not organizations. To be a successful charity, you have to be good at both soliciting funds and making the world a better place.
I don’t think anyone would really mind if there was a groundswell of support that rallied attention to their cause, even if the attention didn’t translate into material support. Attention is extremely valuable. I can say with a high level of confidence that there are people in my community right now that speak well of my organization that don’t attend our events. If they inspire others to become involved, that is great for us.
The thing to watch out for is when the cause escapes your control and is co-opted for other purposes. Probably the biggest example of this is pinkwashing where companies use the goodwill of breast cancer awareness to sell products and burnish their image with little or no benefit going to breast cancer research.
As immersive arts experiences become increasingly prevalent, there have been some interesting introspective reflections of the experiences recently in The Guardian and Irish Times.
Both pieces mention the competitiveness of returning audience members souring the experience. I wrote about this issue to a greater degree in March so I won’t get into it much here.
One the one hand, she seems to feel that an immersive experience can help shift the awareness and focus of a participant in a manner the participant wouldn’t on their own. Citing Marina Abramovic’s installation 512 Hours where participants count rice grains one by one, Myf observes,
“Sure, I could have a stab at this while home alone by switching my phone off and counting the grains from my half-used pack of SunRice. But would I really do it without Abramović’s prompting? I enjoy being part of something creative, conceived by an inquisitive mind, because I know I can’t create such work myself. I like being included in the art-making.”
But she also seems to feel that people may conflate participation under someone else’s guidance and vision with being a creator. (my emphasis)
And I’m starting to think that us regular folk might not be up to the job. Are we really clever or interesting enough to be driving the narrative? I’m not sure I am. I like how art makes me feel like an outsider in someone else’s conversation, how it pushes me to think beyond myself and my own ideas. Is it healthy to be made to feel like we’re now special enough to be included in everything?
[…]
What is it about humans, at this particular time in history, that makes us think we’re special enough to be part of art without having done any of the work to develop the emotional, intellectual or craft level that artists have strived to achieve? Perhaps inviting the audience in isn’t always for the best. Even though I like being included, I’m just not sure I’ve done the hard yards to deserve it.
Granted, the vast majority of the theater going public in both the UK and US probably haven’t really encountered an immersive performance experience. Crawley’s reflections urge a consideration that the way these events are executed may promote a self-centric view of what should be a communal experience.
It is not just that audience members have started fighting each other in order to be in a position to be involved in the story.
What you, the audience, have always known is that to sit, watch, engage and reflect is not passive. In an insightful takedown last week of the radio personality Ira Glass, who dismissed Shakespeare’s King Lear as “not relatable”, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead argued that while art is a mirror in which we see ourselves, the demand for “relatability” is lazy and vain: art as a selfie.
That sounds like the toxin of our age and, perhaps, a reason to switch off the immersion. “You, the audience”, sounds like a command. “I, the protagonist”, feels lonely. Isn’t it supposed to be about us?
Crawley didn’t link to Rebecca Mead’s article, but I have included it for reference since I was interested to read what she said.
What seems to be relevant to Crawley’s statement was this (my emphasis):
But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.
To appreciate “King Lear”—or even “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Fault in Our Stars”—only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare.
What might be an obvious solution is to design the experience as a metaphorical Ropes course where people can only advance/gain access cooperating as a group. Perhaps some, having sacrificed themselves for the good of the group, might get the satisfaction of watching the result of their actions from a hidden room on the sidelines.
But I am sure there are plenty of people like me who are content to watch and ponder and who don’t like to get dragged into participating in the first place. Having to participate and do so as part of a team in order to witness interesting content might be even more off putting. (Though I would much rather participate in a group than to be singled out as an individual.)
(Yes, I intentionally wrote a provocative post title intentionally using another definition of immersion in the spirit of Drew McManus’ little experiment)
It often seems one of the hardest things to do in the performing arts is to correctly anticipate audience interest in a show. Related to that is gauging the best way to market and position an individual show to a specific audience segment.
I recently faced a situation where anticipating audience interest wasn’t difficult, but an opportunity to fumble the marketing and interaction with the target audience segment presented itself. This seemed like a good illustration of what is meant when we talk about understanding and treating audience segments differently.
Every year my department and a community arts organization partner on a nine show presenting season. This year there are a few shows that I wanted to do outside the season. Since our season brochure is one of our best tools for promoting the shows, I decided to list those two events as extras that could be purchased in addition to a season subscription.
There is a whole separate potential issue we may face with people thinking those shows were part of their season subscription. We used an entirely different color scheme and separated the events on the order form with explanatory text. We won’t know if that is sufficient until those events come up in the Spring.
The community organization’s board of directors asked if I was including those two shows, why wasn’t also including our annual concert by the Oak Ridge Boys as well. I explained that the audience for our subscription season was different from our Oak Ridge Boys audience. The board member noted that she attended the Oak Ridge Boys and the subscription series. I replied that the concert audience had different expectations and needs, trying to avoid saying that the Oak Ridge Boys audience was a lot more enthusiastic than our subscription audience.
I wrote her an email later explaining that it was better to keep the Oak Ridge Boys concert listed separately for a number of reasons. The first is the enthusiasm of the Oak Ridge Boys audience. The day we open sales, they flood the phone lines and line up out the door. They are used to hitting redial over and over until they get through. A subscriber would likely become angry if they were trying to resubscribe on the same day as Oak Ridge Boys tickets go on sale and the phone rang busy for an hour.
On the other hand, because we mail the brochure out at non-profit bulk rate which has a variable delivery rate, the Oak Ridge Boys fans would become angry if they received the brochure after the on sale date. Since we hold a subscriber’s seats from the previous year for 6-8 weeks after the re-subscription campaign begins, the brochure arrival date is not problematic.
What we do for the Oak Ridge Boys fans is mail a postcard to everyone who purchased the year before announcing a special pre-sale date that falls before the date announced on our website and in the newspapers.
Today was that special presale date and we were swamped. We sold more tickets in one day than we have sold in 4 weeks to the most popular Broadway show in our series, a show I expect will sell out.
Even though the subscription campaign started a month ago and the box office staff had been calling the last 25 people reminding them to resubscribe for two weeks, someone showed up this morning to renew their subscription and got caught in the horde. She was fine with having to wait awhile and a little incredulous at the crowd and the ever present din of the telephones.
As I stood watching over the activity in the box office today, I was reminded about that meeting where it was suggested I put Oak Ridge Boys in the brochure. In truth, it had occurred to me before anyone even suggested it. But I realized it would have been a mistake to treat the Oak Ridge fans like our season subscribers. While subscribers are generally content to keep the same seats year after year, the Oak Ridge Boys fans largely strive to get better seats than those they had last year.
I suspect there are expectations characteristic to people who only subscribe or buy single tickets to our classics, broadway or variety series that I could be doing a better job of fulfilling. Those might be difficult to identify because they have been wrapped up so closely with other subscribers for so long that they may not really think about needing to be treated differently.
However, one of the two additional shows I am doing this year is targeted at high school and college students with the intent of developing an additional series tailored to them. They definitely have different expectations of their experience that I will need to learn to meet.
And even people who fall into one segment may exhibit entirely different behaviors as members of a another audience segment. That board member who mentioned they were both subscribers and Oak Ridge Boys attendees– her husband was 4th out of around 75 waiting when we opened the ticket office this morning.
Yesterday, I was speaking with a friend who was learning English as a second language. I don’t remember which word it was exactly, but we got on the subject of corporate speak, the nigh-meaningless terminology that businesses use to recast their activities as something impressive sounding.
I let her listen to Weird Al sing about synergies, operationalizing strategies, monetizing assets and other esoteric phrases set to “Suite Judy Blue Eyes,” preparing to be asked what the heck those words meant.
As I waited, it suddenly occurred to me that my hopes for simplified grant reports where non-profits honestly reported the results of the project rather than claiming everything went as well or better than planned, were probably impossible.
As long as for-profit companies are using this self-aggrandizing language to talk about themselves, non-profits are going to be expected to mimic them to some degree to provide the appearance of competence and effectiveness. Most granting entities are either the non-profit arm of companies employing this blather or are foundations with boards comprised of people who work for these companies. For them, use of the latest corporate speak buzzwords are indications of organizational health.
It also occurred to me that the difficulty in attracting audiences from all strata of society might be rooted, in part, in the need to employ an esoteric vocabulary. The need to sound impressive for funders probably influences marketing text. .
But it doesn’t mean much to the audiences you wish would show up.
Certainly there are plenty of other factors which might inhibit a decision to attend an event. Programmings choices that don’t resonate with the interests of local audiences being one.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that new employees who understand how to communicate in a way that interests desired community demographics find themselves pressured either overtly or subliminally over time to use more “polished” language.
I’m afraid that just as like death and taxes, the influence of corporate speak is going to persist until we can actualize a paradigm shift by distilling our core identities into a bleeding edge proactive client centric modality.
By and large, these voluntary arrangements sounded reasonable. Artists would occupy empty storefronts making them look less dismal, helping to lower crime rates and providing a little bit of revenue for landlords in spaces that would otherwise generate none. As long as no one was under the illusion that this arrangement would last long, everyone can be generally satisfied.
When a commercial project is subjected to artwashing, the work and presence of artists and creative workers is used to add a cursory sheen to a place’s transformation. Just as greenwashing tries to humanize new buildings with superficial nods to green concerns (such as wind turbines that never turn), artwashing provides similar distraction. By highlighting the new creative uses for inner-city areas, it presents regeneration not through its long-term effects—the transfer of residency from poor to rich—but as a much shorter journey from neglect to creativity.
The author, Feargus O’Sullivan, discusses a number of cases in which artists were welcomed in wholeheartedly and then either forced out or subjected to unfriendly lease terms when their leases were up. He expresses some resentment for struggling artists being displaced by trust fund kids who like the lifestyle but don’t really need the space. Though he notes that even these people are, in turn, being nudged out in favor of the next higher grade of tenants.
He acknowledges that the situation is a little murky at times leaving some artists semi-complicit in the whole process due to the way they receive support. He cites a group that is producing a work with a critical tone that “art institutions sit comfy in the pockets of big corporations” in a space provided to them by a big developer who is eager to be associated with an artsy group.
O’Sullivan also asks us to consider that while artists may be subject to displacement as a result of their success, in some situations they may be displacers themselves. Although in most of the cases he cities, they were economic peers of those they lived among. (My emphasis.)
In celebrating their role, we are allowing the process of displacement to be mystified, and thus masked. An attitude has arisen which says, “Before, there was crime and emptiness; now we’ve got galleries and coffee. You’re telling me you actually preferred crack dens?” This shuts down debate by asserting that art and cafés for incomers were the only viable antidotes to lawlessness and poverty, when in fact they merely shunt them elsewhere. It erroneously suggests that creative uses of urban spaces are an end point, and reveals the ugly undertone beneath much talk of neighborhood change: That these inner city areas are just too good to be squandered on the low-income people being displaced from them.
So while artist inspired gentrification has long been recognized to be a mixed blessing for artists at best, it needs to be recognized that this gentrification isn’t actually solving the basic problem that existed. It is bringing much welcomed renewal to the physical elements of the area, but those in residence when the renewal begins don’t really experience much benefit at all.
When you do a S.W.O.T. analysis for your organization (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats), Opportunities and Threats were where you listed external situations that could help or hinder you.
When I worked at an arts center in southern New Jersey, one of the biggest threats was Atlantic City. While it might take you hours to get there in summer time traffic, Atlantic City was 45 miles away and therefore fell into the customary 50 mile exclusion zone that prevented performers from appearing within a certain time period before or after their event date. It frustrated the artistic director to no end because we would frequently be outbid and excluded by casinos in Atlantic City.
This is one of those situations where it is too simplistic to claim that arts organizations that can’t support themselves or serve their community ought to close. No one in the local community was going to Atlantic City to see these performers. There was sufficient community interest in seeing them, it was just that the organization was prevented from offering the shows which makes it difficult to generate revenue.
That is why I have been watching an effort by performing arts presenters in upstate NY to prevent the same thing from happening to them. Last October, a coalition of a dozen venues received “assurances from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration that potential private casinos in New York will be required to partner with local arts organizations rather than compete with them.”
“While we were not able to reach agreement with a number (of casino applicants), the agreements we have reached are significant because they declare clearly the size and scope of casino entertainment plans, they have joint booking agreements that will guarantee access for the casinos and for Fair Game groups to touring performers, they support the Fair Game Fund for those same facilities and establish arts granting programs for smaller organizations in every region,” said Philip Morris, the CEO of Proctor’s in Schenectady and the chairman of Fair Game. “Finally, should the plans the casinos propose be significantly changed, each applicant has agreed to mitigate those impacts with additional support.”
According to another article, the state mandated that some sort of agreement be made. The agreements provide some funding for members of the performing arts coalition, keeping a fair bit of the money in the community.
Under the agreements, casinos will share gambling revenue with the coalition. Amounts will vary by casino and region. Of the distributed gambling revenue, 85 percent will remain in the region where the casino is located, with 15 percent going to the Fair Game coalition. Of the 85 percent that remains in our region, 70 percent will be split by the Bardavon and coalition member Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, on the Woodstock site in Sullivan County. Bethel Woods and the Bardavon will distribute the remaining 15 percent to local arts organizations.
As some members of the coalition say, the situation is still evolving. This situation will be a good case study for what to do if faced with casinos or some similar competitive threat in your area.
In both cases above the challenge comes because of who the organizations serve – in the YMCA case the membership is very similar to those folks who join commercial gyms, so why does one get tax privileges over the other. The argument raised in the case against free software is that such a resource might be used by commercial enterprises – so where’s the public benefit?
The nature of these challenges focuses on who might be benefitting from the services, not whether the services themselves are a public benefit. This is ironic from a nonprofit standpoint. For decades nonprofit managers and funders have been trying to build sustainable revenue sources for nonprofit organizations so they can survive. So much so, the Red Cross recently argued that its spending practices are trade secrets! BUT, at least in the logic of the two headlines above, if the organizations might serve those who can pay (one source of sustaining revenue) then they may not be nonprofit.
While it doesn’t apply to all non-profits, one of the basic reasons often given for why we need non-profit organizations is that they often provide necessary and useful services that other entities won’t, in part because the opportunities for profit were low to non-existent.
In my experience growing up in the 1970s, the YMCA was offering services like swimming, exercise classes, weight rooms and summer camps long before health clubs and specialized exercise clothing were even on anyone’s radar.
The idea that the YMCA is a competitor with an unfair advantage in a niche they pioneered now that businesses can make money running yoga and kettlebell classes, is a little appalling to me. Rather the fact that these challenges have gained traction in different places around the country is what appalls me.
Does that mean that a gallery can open near a museum and challenge the museum’s tax exempt status because they are a competitor in art sales?
Or that if a movie chain notices that a demographic shift in their city has created a substantial demand for foreign films, they can demand that the a venerable art house movie theater be required to pay taxes?
I can understand the skepticism about the non-profit status of organizations like Roundabout Theater, but the vast majority of non-profits haven’t been competition to other companies–until apparently societal views shifted to make what they do worth pursuing.
I wondered if anyone was hearing similar rumblings in other lines of business.
I am back from my trip to Germany. Part of my trip was devoted to helping my mother do some genealogy research. In the process, I came to a realization I think we have all have suspected- The relationship Europeans have with the arts can never be replicated in the United States. There are just too many fundamental differences in the lives we lead and the the way we interact with the arts as we develop from children to adults.
I have traveled fairly extensively in China, Japan, Mongolia, Ireland and Germany and in my view, the arts seem most present in the lives of Japanese and Germans. Though in Japan it manifests more as a pursuit of general excellence while in Germany it seems to manifest as the intentional creation of artistic work.
No matter where I went in Germany from large cities like Frankfurt and Munich, to smaller towns like Obernburg and Volkach and the university town of Heidelberg, there were dozens of notices of concerts, recitals and plays everywhere we went.
Now granted, Germany has the benefit of churches and castles as well as theaters in which these performances can take place.
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Stage in Heidelberg Castle Courtyard
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stage outside Heidelberg Castle
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stage in courtyard of Aschaffenburg Castle
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Germany also has a “percent for art” program where a percentage of the construction project cost is set aside for a work of public art. The wife and daughter of our host in Obernburg had both had works selected for public buildings. (I apologize, I neglected to make note of the names of Marianne’s works.)
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by Marianne Knebel
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by Marianne Knebel
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Die Tore Sind Geoffnet (The Gates Are Open)by Petia Knebel
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I did some research to see whether the German percent for art program pre-dated the United States. It does by a decade, though it is a policy rather than a matter of law. According to my research, this has produced some inconsistent results in terms of quality. I have to admit that my first impression was that Petia had obviously copied ideas from her mother.
Questions of quality aside, what impressed me was that an effort was made to use the work of local artists. Marianne’s work is a half hour drive from her house. Petia’s is about 2-3 miles from the house as the crow flies.
And from what I understood, there is something of a infrastructure to support artists with foundries and factories setting aside space for the artists to work on these pieces. It sounded similar to what the Kohler Company does in the U.S. Even if the quality of work and the selection process is uneven, this seems to be an environment which encourages and enables artistic expression.
It isn’t just concert notices and public art by local artists that a German sees as they go about their day. There are other reminders that aesthetics are valued. The old part of every town we visited had stone streets. In both Obernburg and Volkach, the streets had been dug up for construction and then the stones were cut and laid back down. This wasn’t just a narrow strip for a sewer pipe, it was the whole width of the street.
The street only looks narrow until you have to put all the stones back
Germans also apparently devote a fair bit of time bringing beauty to death. We went to three cemeteries in the course of our genealogy research and they all looked like this:
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I don’t think it is a matter of Germans being better artistic human beings as it is a reflection of the fundamental differences in the activities of our daily lives. I had a bit of insight during my travels that lead to this hypothesis.
My mother’s side of the family came from Obernburg Germany and founded the town of Obernburg, NY. While in the German town, I learned that until around the 1800, it wasn’t permitted to build outside the walls. From the way other towns we visited were structured, I am guessing this was the case in many places. Even now that people are building outside old parts of town, most of the infrastructure for daily life from grocery stores, banks, churches, government buildings, restaurants, are all located in the old town centers.
These areas still have very narrow streets where the speed limit hovers around 15 mph and is better suited to walking and biking than driving. Whereas in the U.S. old buildings might be demolished to make way for a modern building, if any building has been replaced in these German towns, the new construction has conformed to the general dimensions and style of the surrounding buildings.
As a result, people’s lives are centered in these very communal places where they walk past notices about performances and speak to their neighbors about events around town. (Not to mention walking by the venues multiples times a day.)
Remember, I don’t speak German so I didn’t read any newspapers, watch television or go online to learn about local events. Every performance I became aware of was due to walking past a poster, banner or marquee. In this particular environment it was an effective method of communication.
One thing that we know about my ancestors in Obernburg, NY from letters and diary entries was that they didn’t have the opportunity to replicate these community towns that they had left. This was a little disorienting for them. Because land was parceled off in patents that had to be occupied in order to hold it, people were forced to live on their land miles from each other rather than next door.
In a moment of insight, I wondered if this basic difference between being forced to live together in Germany versus being forced to live apart in the U.S. may have been a major factor in the differences that developed in the way each country experiences and views their relationship with the arts. Can land use policy be as, if not more, important than education and direct funding when it comes to participation in the arts?
If nothing else, as far as I was concerned, walking around these picturesque towns were a great argument for the benefits of mixed used neighborhoods.
If things are quiet for you over the summer, it might be a good time to evaluate your interactions with donors and customers. A few years back, I brought attention to a number of interesting findings about customer interactions.
One was that
“perceived indifference by a company causes far more people to sever their relationship with a company than cost and quality issues.” and “It’s important to note here that indifference only be perceived. People cannot know other people’s motives; they can only deduce them from the actions they see. So you can care passionately and still be perceived as indifferent.”
The third dealt with using industry standard language in materials for customer/donors that not only have no relevance to these groups, but can ultimately be alienating.
Seven years ago, I made a blog post that included Scott Walters’ ideas about actor training, Seth Godin’s idea about “conceptual dip” and my observations that history shows us that the manifestation of the performing arts go through transitions.
As I re-read the post, I thought about Braddock, PA mayor John Fetterman quoting former Senator Alan Simpson who said it takes around seven years to effect significant change.
To my perception, in the last seven years there hasn’t really been significant change in the way arts students are educated. Nor does it appear the arts community has made much progress powering through the conceptual dip or started to transition to a new manifestation.
I think most everyone agrees the time for these things to occur is nigh. I read a whole lot, but still these changes may have escaped my notice. If the change hasn’t started, is it the case of there not being enough unity of will to make it happen?
As I read the article, the findings sounded increasingly familiar. Indeed, the authors are the same people who wrote the Set In Stone study that came out two years ago. I posted about it here and here if you are interested in a summary.
While both were interesting, I found the result of the latter investigation more intriguing because arts organizations really are never clear about who their competitors are, how much of a impact they have on each other and whether the net effect is positive or negative. Since so many of the results reported in Set In Stone were based on perception, I would really be interested to read the book to learn if the authors had been able to verify them with hard data.
The CityLab article reports that there are a number of reasons why cultural facility construction can often be detrimental to municipalities. Among them,
“The types of leaders who provide the passion and drive to build structures of this sort [major performing arts centers] are successful men and women who are accustomed to relying on their own experience and judgment,” the book reads. “They depend on what they might describe as ‘inside knowledge’—knowledge gleaned from their own experiences, and those of their collaborators’ experiences.
“What tends to be absent in their thinking, however … is ‘outside knowledge,’ such as what statisticians refer to as ‘the base rate’ regarding the distribution of projects that did not go as planned,” the book continues.
Other traps that civic leaders fall into include hindsight bias and consistency bias: People’s memories about decision-making for projects tends to change over time, and people tend to revise their memory of the past to fit present circumstances.
“While the Philadelphia Orchestra originally embarked upon a building project for the purpose of constructing a new single-purpose concert hall, the opportunity to make it an economic development anchor in downtown Philadelphia partly persuaded its leaders to morph the idea into something entirely different—a PAC [performing arts center],” the chapter explains. “Today, the reason for building the Kimmel Center is frequently remembered by its community as being to revive a distressed former industrial city’s downtown.”
The example of the motivational drift for the Kimmel Center seems to parallel the ever shifting rationale for the value of the arts- It makes kids better at math; makes an economic contribution; is a force for gentrification; attracts creatives – when the initial purpose was simply for the sake of the art.
I am sure this drift isn’t just limited to cultural facilities construction. I bet sports arena construction is sold in a similar manner. It is just a particularly good illustration that whether you want to fund a performance or the construction of a space to perform it in, the best, most true justification isn’t going to be persuasive enough for all those whose support you need.
It used to be that there were constantly stories about copyright owners going after kids who had downloaded music and video or sampled/excerpted parts of works and represented it as their own. We would hear about companies tracking stuff on computers and going after the owners.
You don’t hear these sort of stories as much any more. Since many of the copyright owners were big corporations, perhaps they figured there was a lot of bad P.R. associated with their efforts.
Or maybe they felt like there was too much of the activity going on that it was fruitless to try to catch everyone and try to stop it.
I know that a lot of performing arts companies have taken liberties with the shows they produce, assuming that the country is so big and their organization so small that no one will bother to check up on them.
Well thanks to technology, it is apparently getting easier for performance rights holders to monitor production activity. Or at least technology is making us more aware that the rights holders are checking on and catching people.
As first reported by Howard Sherman, Hands on a Hardbody show creators actually attended a performance in Texas and noticed the show wasn’t the one they created. A number of actions were subsequently taken by the Dramatists Guild and Samuel French, Inc, which appear in updates on Sherman’s post.
These aren’t isolated incidents. Howard Sherman has been keeping an eye on these issues and addressing them on his blog. Back in January, he discussed the Asolo Repertory Theater having to postpone their opening when they got caught rewriting Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come! [Disclosure: I worked for the Florida State University side of the Asolo about 20 years ago.]
There are a lot of issues connected with artistic freedom, color blind casting, community standards and the comparative attitudes of material creators toward their works that factor into these stories. Most are addressed in the dozens of comments on Sherman’s posts. They are a good place to start if you aren’t familiar with the basic, but common, issues related to the stage.
While the performance licenses are pretty explicit about what you can and can’t do, the conversation about intellectual property is always evolving so it is definitely something to keep an eye on.
Not to mention that if you have been flaunting the conditions of your license assuming that you won’t get caught, it may be time to reassess that belief.
*I mistakenly misidentified the school involved with Rent as being in CT. Thanks to Howard Sherman for bringing the mistake to my attention
As I noted yesterday, I am breaking up my reflections on Robert Stein’s thoughts on the value of museums and the arts in to two posts.
One observation he made that particularly resonated with me was in relation to the “economic value” argument arts organizations often use. (my emphasis)
“Perhaps the most common knee-jerk reaction when Museums are pushed to make the case for their own existence is to turn to studies of economic impact. The hope is that our local constituents will embrace us with open arms if they only understand how good museums are at “pulling their weight” financially. I think we ought to be very careful not to put too much stock in this economic raison d’être.
[…]
Museums are ideally suited to generate social impact — uniquely so. Whereas every business can compete with the museum in respect to its economic muscle in the community, very few could hope to compete with the potential social impact museums are capable of making. Besides, why would we care to win a game that isn’t central to our reason for being? What happens when our city booms around us and the fiscal imprint of our museum is no longer significant to the same degree it once was? When our city is in financial trouble, does it see museums as primarily economic assets or cultural assets? When the next recession strikes and our revenues dip, does our commensurate value to the city dip as well? I hope not.
Stein talks about how the solutions to global problems require input from all areas of society — with an emphasis on the fact that diverse input is an absolute necessity.
Harvard economic historian David Landes addressed this apparent dichotomy … in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are Rich and Some So Poor (Landes, 1998). In it he emphasizes the intangible factors surrounding the economic challenges present in developing nations and surmises the following, “if we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.” In this simple observation, Landes has keyed in on one of the very tangible impacts that the arts can bring.
Indeed, I was intrigued by Stein’s citation of writer Neal Stephenson’s premise that writers were shirking their duty to inspire.
In one of my favorite examples, noted science fiction author Neal Stephenson famously chided his fellow scifi authors in an essay for the World Policy Journal. He noted that generations of scientists had been inspired by the work of Arthur C. Clark, William Gibson, and others, but that the current generation of science fiction authors had given up on imagining a positive future world in favor of more dystopian tales.
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Later in the essay Stephenson quotes Michael Crow, the President of Arizona State University, who prodded, “scientists and engineers are ready and looking for things to do. Time for science fiction writers to start pulling their weight and providing big visions that make sense.”
There are frequent conversations about how theater and movies are revivals and adaptations of material that has proven success and have a built in audience. There are gripes that music getting broad play is tested and analyzed for general appeal which yields a generic product that pleases, but doesn’t excite.
Usually the complaints are based on the idea that artists should be producing original works that push the boundaries of creativity and perhaps challenge assumptions.
Rarely is it suggested that artists are failing a responsibility to provide big vision that inspire people to expect and achieve better for themselves. Do artists in fact have this responsibility? I believe it can be illustrated that artists have served this role at various times throughout history, so are they or are they not doing so now?
The degree of introspection required to answer this will consume more than a few days of consideration.
One of initial thoughts was that it is difficult for art organizations faced with management vs labor conflicts or the liquidation of art collections to focus on whether they are providing society with a big vision. But in some sense, these conflicts reflect upon a need for a society to expect better for themselves and not easy cede to the idea that they play an unimportant role.
Seth Godin had a post today reflecting on a woman he noticed in front row seats at a concert being given by jazz bassist Christian McBride. The woman was fidgeting, checking her watch and fiddling with stuff, entirely disengaged with the concert.
Says Godin:
McBride seemed to be too professional and too experienced to get brought down by her disrespect and disengagement. Here’s what he knew: It wasn’t about him, it wasn’t about the music, it wasn’t a response to what he was creating.
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Do your work, your best work, the work that matters to you. For some people, you can say, “hey, it’s not for you.” That’s okay. If you try to delight the undelightable, you’ve made yourself miserable for no reason.
It’s sort of silly to make yourself miserable, but at least you ought to reserve it for times when you have a good reason.
We all know that ideally, this is the best philosophy to embrace. We know that the arts aren’t for everyone and that you have to allow people the time and space they need in order to eventually find that your work resonates with them. If it is going to resonate at all, that is.
But we don’t live in an ideal world and we receive a lot of messages that our audiences need to get it, and get it quick. This obviously manifests in ticket sales reports and the requirements of just plain old pride in wanting to have seats full of people enjoying themselves.
There is a lot of subtext that our funding depends on it as well. We are asked about the diversity of our audience. What are the numbers and percentages of racial groups, students and seniors?
Some times there is no subtext at all. I am currently working on a final grant report that asks what we did to engage the community to participate; what did or will we do to remove perceptual, practical and experiential barriers; what motivates patron, board members and volunteers; and to provide a first hand account of how the programming has made an impact on an individual or a group.
Faced with questions like that, you have a lot of motivation to start thinking your audience, board and volunteers need to experience something that moves them, and they need to have that moving experience during the current grant period.
Its no wonder we have ushers patrolling the aisles and glaring at people pulling out their iPhones. Not only can’t we afford to have the individual become disengaged from the performance, we need to make sure the glow of the phone isn’t constituting a perceptual or experiential barrier to a dozen other people around them. These are all black marks against us that our funders expect us to address.
Now as a practical matter, foundations aren’t infiltrating mystery shoppers into our audiences to make sure we are properly identifying these problems and proposing solutions in our final reports. Their questions are meant to inspire some self-examination in grant recipients about procedures and operations.
Questions like these on a grant report indicate the type of activity and outcomes that are valued in grant recipients. These expectations are somewhat in conflict with the long view non-profit arts organizations are enjoined to embrace in respect to cultivating their audiences.
When Christian McBride plays The Blue Note, the venue worries about whether they sold enough tickets, food and alcohol to cover costs. The Blue Note certainly wants all the patrons to have a good time and come back again, but they don’t concern themselves too much with whether people have attained a new level of personal growth.
When McBride plays at a non-profit arts center’s jazz series, the organization worries about all those things The Blue Note worries about, but also has to concern themselves about recognizing potential barriers to entry, the diversity of the audience and whether they have been inspired.
It can be something of a psychic burden to try to balance all the requirements of a non-profit existence. You have to be cool, put your best work out there and not worry about delighting the undelightable.
But at the same time, you wonder how you have failed that person. What barriers have you been complicit in maintaining? Is she really undelightable, or is that a convenient way for writing her off when you should be patient and try harder? How can you change your programming and outreach efforts so she feels engaged and included?
I actually don’t know if I have ever written on the subject before. There was an article for arts and culture professionals I found useful on The Guardian website back in March.
I think one of most important steps to take when seeking a mentor is discarding the “those who can’t, teach/if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich” mentality. As the article points out, just because someone is successful, it doesn’t mean they can be an effective mentor. Inversely, just because someone hasn’t achieved commercial recognition for their work, doesn’t mean they can’t be an effective mentor.
You see the truth of this most clearly in sports. There are plenty of coaches who weren’t elite athletes, but who have studied coaching and their specific field of endeavor closely enough that they produce effective teams and individuals.
And like a good coach, a good mentor will challenge you to push yourself in new, possibly uncomfortable directions.
It occurred to me as I was reading the article that I am unaware of any program that trains arts professionals to be good mentors for people outside the workplace. If you are in the position of mentoring someone in your workplace, some of your time is going to be devoted to teaching them to navigate the organization and contribute to the organization’s success.
Mentoring someone with whom you don’t already work is a different situation altogether. In some respects, it is a purer form of mentorship because you don’t have to concern yourself with workplace politics or being evaluated on how effective your mentee becomes.
When I read the article’s suggestion to:
“Also ensure the meeting ends with clear and positive actions. Importantly, as a mentee, make sure you do your homework, otherwise when you meet again you’ll end up going over the same ground.
I wasn’t sure I would have thought to formally establish a course of action to take prior to the next meeting with someone I was mentoring. Granted, every mentor relationship is different and some mentees may require concrete goal setting where others do not.
In the context of a shared work environment, goal setting is obvious. As I thought about it, I was not sure I would have immediately considered it as one of an assortment of tools a mentor could use to guide someone with whom they did not work.
Mentoring in the arts and culture field seems like a worthwhile topic for conference sessions, magazine articles or blog posts. Does anyone know of anyone who has effectively tackled the subject?
It got me wondering what sort of terminology do people use when they have a positive or negative experience after an arts or cultural experience. Looking back over some surveys we have, I couldn’t see any patterns. I imagine it is because we have such a small sample size and often people aren’t very verbose with their responses, providing short commentary like “It was great!”
It would be interesting to see what the results might be from a literature review of past arts and culture surveys.
Even without such a study, there are some observations from the restaurant language study that might provide clues for arts and cultural organizations. For instance, people who wrote negative reviews really didn’t talk about the food as often as they commented about the experience. Reviewers used terms like “worst, rude, terrible, horrible, bad, awful, disgusting, attitude and mistake.”
According to the study authors,
“one–star reviews were overwhelmingly focused on narrating experiences of trauma rather than discussing food, both portraying the author as a victim and using first person plural to express solace in community.”
As mentioned earlier, the positive reviews were split in the types of terms they used. Addiction terminology was used for cheaper food that fell into a general category of sweet or starchy comfort type food purchased from a cafe, diner or food truck.
“…addiction, crave/craving, chocoholic, jonesing, binge/binging. It also includes phrases in which drugs are described as a metaphor (drug of choice, like a drug, new drug, favorite drug, etc.) and phrases describing food as the drug crack (including made of crack, food crack, edible crack, etc.).
Reviews would use the first person singular, “I”, showing a personal investment in the opinion.
Most terms used in more expensive sit down restaurants revolved more around sensual aspects of the food:
Reviews for more expensive restaurants tended to be longer and use more complex words.
In terms of negative reviews for arts and cultural events, we do know that the experience surrounding the event often plays a large factor in whether a person enjoys a performance. So if you are seeing language like that, positive or negative, it is something to pay close attention to. Even if they praise the ease of parking today, you know that might be an area of complaint if road construction impedes it next time around.
I am not sure sexual or addiction terminology in reviews is a dependable criteria for judging a review to be a positive one. However, the type and complexity of words used in a positive may give a hint as to whether your audience views your events as a guilty pleasure or a high value experience.
Or lack of complexity in a response could mean that people simply lack the knowledge and confidence to provide sophisticated commentary.
The language of decadence is used in relation to food 100 times a day for everything from a diet snack to a master chef’s entree on a cooking show. No one will really judge a person for making an inaccurate or uninformed evaluation of a cheap piece of chocolate.
But even if someone has watched every season of American Idol, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, etc, etc, they may not feel qualified to critically evaluate a performance the same way the judges on those shows do. Both the language and the practice of talking about these experiences is infrequent and uncommon for most people.
In fact, it is expected that you immediately express your delight upon eating something you approve of, but that you delay your response until an appropriate time at many performances.
The effusive vocabulary applied to a meal will probably never develop for a performance. Still, a closer reading of the terminology used in surveys, comments and lobby chatter might provide some insight.
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.
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
Last week I participated in a Twitter conversation about curtain calls and curtain speeches sponsored by HowlRound. They had the whole thing storified almost before I thought about doing it myself.
The hour went by so quickly and there were so many opinions on the matter, I figured it was a great topic to bring up on the old blog here.
I will start by stating my position on curtain speeches and am happy to have people argue for or against.
If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have a curtain speech. At worst, they are long, disorganized rambles that are often more about people giving money to support the organization than conducive to experience the audience is about to have.
That said, I see them as a necessary evil. I don’t see that as a contradiction, but rather as something of a corollary to the idea that the best king is the person who doesn’t want the job because they will be least intrusive in the people’s lives.
Many localities require fire exits, etc pointed out to audiences. Given that I have worked in locations that are tornado and earthquake prone, I feel it is important that such an announcement be made. People tend to pay more attention to a human than a recording so I will often do the curtain speech.
There is also the issue of reminding people to turn off cell phones, etc. I have seen great video announcements at movie theaters that get that point across, but those videos don’t often fit with the atmosphere of the evening and again since people will pay closer attention to a live person, I see it as another reason to do the speech.
But at least once a year I end up leaving it to the audio announcement because my presence prior to the show doesn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the event.
In the Twitter chat some people said they like curtain speeches that are made in the theme of the play. One of the most recent I saw had the actor playing the stern housekeeper in the show severely warning audience members about cell phones, etc.
I agree that this can be a clever device and hold attention, but sometimes it too clever by half and ends up detracting from the play itself when people associate the character with the person who made the curtain speech rather than with the role they play in the performance.
The other necessity I see associated with curtain speeches is supporting grants. Not only do you need to acknowledge sponsors and funders from the stage as well as in print, but granting organizations want hard number research. Again, it is more effective to have someone on stage enjoining people to fill out a survey than having it written somewhere or announced by a disembodied voice.
Some times it is just a matter of making people aware there is a meet and greet with the performers after the show. People miss the notice in the program and tend to be grateful for the opportunity. The more people attend, the better outreach attendance data for your grant report.
In some of my past posts I have written that I often use curtain speeches to forge connections with the community. They see me on stage and then I am in the lobby at intermission and the end of the show for them to deliver praise or complaints to.
As I have mentioned, I also try to impart some information about the show that people are unaware of that may enhance their enjoyment. This past year, I feel like my most successful attempts were talking about the impact of A Christmas Carol in shaping holiday traditions we take for granted and reminding people that The Miracle Worker only deals with the first of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan’s accomplishments.
Other curtain speeches aren’t as successful. It takes a little while to understand what information might resonate most with audiences.
I try to keep all this to 3-4 minutes and start right at the performance time so that the curtain speech is covering the stragglers in the audience who are trying to find their seats. That way my delay and the interruption of late comers cancel one another out.
If I didn’t do my speech, the audience would still be disturbed by those latecomers, so better they have my entertaining presence to focus on. The important element of this strategy is to get house management to give the go ahead for the speech when they estimate there are only about 2-3 minutes worth of people left in the lobby.
To make the curtain speech quick, effective, informative and not negatively impact audience enjoyment takes some work. I think the reason why people hate curtain speeches is due to the lack of preparation by those who do them. The reality is, the curtain speech is as much a tone setting first impression as the interaction a customer has with your ticket office staff or office receptionist. Equal attention must be paid.
I am often jotting notes about a performance in a Word document months before the event. Some will be part of a social media post, some will be part of a press release and some will be part of the curtain speech for that show. I usually have a good idea about what I am going to say a few days before the performance. I am waiting in the wings 5-10 minutes before the show starts staring at the floor going over what I intend to say.
Sometimes it is great and sometimes I screw up a little because I try to speak extemporaneously with only a few jotted notes. The goal is always to get a little better, a little more engaging and a little more adept each time.
Things you will notice I have not included: fundraising pleas and promoting other shows. Certain times of the year I might mention one of these topics- i.e. Telling people when to expect the new subscription brochure at the closing show of the current season. I don’t make it a habit to regularly talk about future shows because it can undermine the current show if I am praising the next show on the schedule. (Hamlet will be amazing! Oh, and enjoy tonight’s show…)
There are a lot of great thoughts in the chat. I didn’t see half of them when the discussion was in progress.
What do you think? Can any of this be handled more effectively some other way?
I apologize for the lack of posts last week. I learned about a death in the family the Friday before last and I didn’t have an opportunity to schedule posts to cover my absence.
On my flight back I missed a connection and spent the night sleeping on the floor in O’Hare airport. The initial cause was a weather delay, but it was exacerbated by some other incidents. When we were queued up to take off, we pulled out of line because of weather over Chicago. Shortly thereafter, a guy in front of me started mouthing off to the flight attendants. As a result, we rolled back to the gate and he was put off the plane. The captain announced anyone else who wanted to get off could.
Then we rolled back to the holding area and after 10-15 minutes, the captain comes on and says someone else wants to get off the plane. We roll back to the gate and this time a number of people choose to get off. Finding the luggage for everyone who had left took a long time. As soon as we were done (and watched the safety video for the 3rd time) we basically rolled right from the gate to the runway and took off.
Even though my connecting flight had been delayed in taking off, I still arrived a half hour after it left and ended up sleeping in the airport due to a lack of available hotel rooms and rental cars.
The question I pondered as I eyed my name inching up on the standby queue was what this willingness to go back to the gate twice portends for customer expectations and demands in the future. I understand the security concerns associated a hostile passenger that had us return to the gate the first time, the second return seemed to be motivated more by a simple request.
I wonder at the calculus that made returning to the gate a second time and potentially adding to the mass of people stranded at an airport and the ill will that would generate seem preferable to getting in the air at the first possibility.
Worse, I wondered about what sort of precedent this would set for future flights I might take if people felt they had license to request a return to the gate when they got tired of waiting for the plane to take off.
What is the possible impact of airlines making these decisions upon the changing expectations of our audiences?
One statement I heard at a seminar on customer service that always made sense to me was that no customer really wants their money back. That is just the easiest and most assumed option thanks to repeated claims of “satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back.”
But who spends time and money driving/flying somewhere, renting a hotel, getting a babysitter, paying for meals and making whatever other arrangements are required to reach a destination or purchase a product, assured by the knowledge that they can always get their money back if they are dissatisfied?
They go to all this trouble because they expect to have a problem free experience. Giving them their money back doesn’t really compensate for all the other expenses and effort that was required. So if you are the source of disappointment, you should work to make the situation better and hold the refund for later when other options have been exhausted.
In some respects, the returning to the gate is a better solution than giving money back. But my feeling is that if they made being on the plane a more comfortable, positive situation to start with, people would be less interested in getting off. It is a sorry state of affairs when getting off and going nowhere is viewed as the preferred option.
The same is likely true of attendance at performing and visual arts events.
But this is where buying things online and receiving your entertainment in your house is so attractive. You don’t have to make the time and financial investment required for a destination based product or experience. If you are not satisfied, you can ask for your money back. You may not be entirely happy, but at least you don’t feel the bad experience has cost you in other areas.
My concern about the impact of this “go back to the gate” practice is less about people thinking they can get up and leave whenever they want to if they are dissatisfied. That practice is decades old. My worry is that this advances the idea of individual desires over the good of the collective group and will manifest in ways worse than people talking and texting on phones during a performance.
Because there is such a focus on the quantitative these days with people encouraged to enter STEM fields and schools’ value being judged on the basis of test results, the arts community has been pushing back by touting the value of the arts. Though often it is in the context of these same quantitative measures: test scores, economic impact and earnings.
The Drucker Exchange post, as well as the Wall Street Journal column by Thomas Davenport that inspired it, note that like the peanut butter and chocolate of a Reese’s cup (my metaphor), quantitative and qualitative are most effective together.
Despite years of work at providing both knowledge and quantitative analysis to decision-makers, there is scant evidence that we have really improved decisions—so we have our work cut out for us.
At heart I think the historical separation of knowledge and numbers people is a “Two Culture” problem, made famous by C.P. Snow. Knowledge management people are humanities/liberal arts types, and analytics people are math/science types. We need to get them together, however. Almost all key domains of business–including customer insights, understanding the broader business and economic climate, and various approaches to performance improvement—involve both qualitative and quantitative content. The best decisions and the best organizations will make effective use of both.
In my post last week, I suggested that the scientists quoted in the Salon article felt their scientific investigations were enhance by their artistic pursuits. Peter Drucker apparently said much the same thing, but observed the same is true for someone in the humanities in relation to science.
“We will have to demand of the scientifically trained man that he again become a humanist; otherwise he will lack the knowledge and perception needed to make his science effective, indeed to make it truly scientific,” Drucker warned. “We will have to demand of the humanist that he acquire an understanding of science, or else his humanities will be irrelevant and ineffectual.”
From time to time, I also write about what value arts organizations might bring to businesses. Thomas Davenport talks about how people with the qualitative mindset can help the analytically minded tell a clearer story about their data.
Knowledge people are good at dealing with text, and some would probably be able to extend their skills into text mining and analytics. Knowledge management practitioners are also good at capturing insights, and there are many analytical assumptions and results that are never recorded. It’s also likely that some good knowledge analysts could help quants “tell a story with data,” which is something almost every organization is looking for these days.
The companies Davenport is talking about would employ such people full time so it wouldn’t be an opportunity an arts organization could do on the side. Though it certainly points to possible career opportunities for those with a liberal or fine arts background.
Something along these lines could provide a coaching/advisory opportunity on a smaller scale for arts organizations. Ultimately, thinking about how you can help a business tell the story of their data will probably help a non-profit organization do a better job telling the story of their own data on grant applications and marketing materials.
Arts organizations are probably all too close to their own data and tend to see grant reports as a chore. Helping a company in an unrelated field tell their story for an entirely different purpose could cause a shift in perspective that increases their effectiveness in talking about themselves.
Seth Godin had a post today about origin stories, noting that each of the successes he cites has a different origin story. They didn’t follow the same path as someone else to achieve wide spread recognition.
“‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’
“No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”
One of the toughest things about running a business of any sort is being able to balance between embracing best practices and slavishly replicating case studies in success.
Following best practices prevents you from wasting valuable time and energy developing processes and repeating the mistakes someone else has already encountered and overcome.
On the other hand, attempting to replicate someone else’s wild success by imposing their apparent development framework/pathway upon your own company will probably have the same uncomfortable, non-productive results as trying to wedge your feet into their custom built shoes.
Part of the problem is that even when the founders of the wildly successful company talk about their path to prosperity, they aren’t telling you the full story of all the dynamics at play. They may not be entirely aware of all the factors that fed into their success, or they are ignoring and omitting some details that don’t make for a good founding mythology.
In the opening segment of a This American Life episode titled, Origin Story, they discuss the “started in a garage” mythology for companies like Hewlett-Packard (whose origin Godin cites) and Apple.
Ira Glass
This is from a promotional video that Hewlett-Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started what is now the largest technology firm in the world.
Dan Heath
In 1938, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company. They had a few hand-operated punches, a used Sears Roebuck drill press that had just made the trip west in the back of one of their cars, and they had a rented flat with a garage.
[…]
Ira Glass
Even Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard weren’t exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and at Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Litton Engineering. He let them use equipment that they didn’t own themselves yet. Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett-Packard when they started Apple in Job’s garage.
Pino Audia
And, for example, in the case of Steve Jobs, he benefited greatly from the support that he got from the Atari people, because they introduced him to investors.
If you listen to those first few minutes of the episode or read the transcript, you’ll see that a bit of romance gets injected into the founding stories of a lot of companies.
This is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of sweat and creativity invested in getting these companies off the ground. Just like the hot new artist that explodes on the scene, no one really talks about the years of testing, revision, hustle and lucky breaks that went into the impressive debut (a.k.a Draft #250).
There is a lot of valuable advice you can take by paying attention to someone else’s process- performing due diligence, avoiding undesireable contract stipulations, generating appropriate plans and budgets and being bold with marketing plans.
Just don’t expect to achieve the same results by following exactly the same steps as someone else. You have no idea who or what conditions may have been helping mount those steps. Ultimately, you might be better off carving your own steps or even rappelling down an entirely different mountain instead of trying to climb behind someone else. (Or simply ignore vague metaphors about achieving things altogether.)
In short, he had the restrooms and other important building features placed in a central hub so that people from different parts of the company would run into each other. About a year ago I wrote a little about other arrangements that replicate this basic idea.
Today he made his final post on the places where creative class workers are segregated from everyone else. Even if you are skeptical about Florida’s theories about creative class bolstering the economies of different communities, the research results are interesting to consider. I had never even thought about segregation of creatives as a problematic condition.
You may have heard of the term “town and gown” referring to the distinct cultural line that often develops between people who live in a community with a college and those who attend and work there. The depth of this cultural divide is one of the factors that feeds into the creative class segregation, but there are many others as well.
The metros where the creative class is most segregated include the nation’s largest metros and many of its leading knowledge-based economic centers. Los Angeles tops the list, followed by Houston, San Jose, San Francisco, New York, Austin, San Antonio, San Diego, and Chicago.
When we expand the list to include all metros, a number of smaller ones also show substantial levels of segregation. The creative class remains the most segregated in Los Angeles, but Trenton-Ewing, New Jersey (which includes Princeton University) takes second place, and Salinas, California is the third most highly segregated metro in the country on this score…The creative class is also highly segregated in college towns like Ann Arbor, Durham-Chapel Hill, Tucson, Gainesville, and College Station. As I wrote a few weeks ago, many of these smaller college towns also experience high levels of segregation of educated residents.
There were some results from the research that I saw encouraging to my hope that vibrant cultural experiences could be built in smaller communities.
Conversely, the metros where the creative class is least segregated are mainly in the Midwest and Sunbelt. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul is the least segregated large metro on this score, followed by Rochester, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Providence, Milwaukee, and Hartford. Jacksonville, Tampa, and Virginia Beach in the Sunbelt round out the top ten large metros where the creative class is least segregated.
The metros where the creative class is least segregated are all smaller ones. In fact, there are more than 150 smaller and medium-sized metros where the creative class is less segregated than their counterparts in the least segregated large metro. Many of these places, especially in the Northeast and the Midwest, are cities where levels of the creative class are fairly low. Mankato, Minnesota, has the lowest level of creative class segregation in the country, followed by Lewiston-Auburn, Maine; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Joplin, Missouri; and Rome, Georgia.
There are a number of reasons why segregation is higher in large metropolis, often having to do with gentrification raising rents and longer commuting times, both which inhibit different groups from interacting with each other.
So getting back to the question I posed yesterday about what scenario might be better, this research got me wondering if a situation might arise where a lot of people are doing creative work in a large city, but they may be doing it in enclaves distinct from the general population. That dynamic may actually be better for your personal creative growth, but the work being created might also be more disconnected from the community than that being created in a smaller metro area.
It may be more difficult therefore to attain the goal of “serving the community” in a larger metro than a smaller one. Even though greater numbers of people are experiencing your work, you may be serving a far smaller segment of the population than an artist in a metro area of 50,000. Two arts organizations in the smaller metro may serve a far more economic, educational and racially diverse segment of their general community than 20 arts organizations in a larger city.
As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t really thought about segregation of creatives as being a problem. I wonder if it is perceived as such. Is this manifesting in a negative manner for cities with high segregation like New York, Austin and Chicago, which are all recognized as having relatively vibrant cultural scenes? Do they see untapped potential in more integrated living conditions?
The protests in San Francisco against tech companies like Google would seem to be a reaction against creatives living amongst the population. (The issues are more complicated than that, really.)
On the other hand, the low segregation communities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Rochester, Buffalo and Cincinnati all generally recognize and appreciate the benefits their arts scenes bring to the livability of their respective cities. And lest you think that smaller communities necessarily means less available financial support for the arts, ArtsWave of Cincinnati just raised “$12 million in contributions– the highest amount ever raised by any community campaign for the arts in the country.”
The Spring Issue of Arts Presenters’ Inside the Arts is out. When I first got the hard copy version, I quickly scanned through to see if there was any mention of my former colleague, Lehua Simon’s talk. At first, I only saw the picture on the back cover.
I started to get a little miffed when it didn’t appear like any mention was going to be made in the recap of the conference. How could they ignore an event that made such an impact!? Finally, I saw the coverage in a few paragraphs on the last page of the recap article.
I excitedly reported this to Lehua and other former colleagues who later informed me I missed probably the most prominent mention of all, APAP President Mario Garcia Durham’s lengthy discussion of Lehua’s impact upon the conference in his letter.
I have mentioned before that walking into a conference and quickly achieving recognition seems to becoming Lehua’s forte. The fact that people are able to come from relative obscurity and in 5 minutes energize others by presenting themselves is what excites me about the arts. There was no invocation of politics or attempts to elevate one group to the detriment of another. Lehua just talked about experiences that made her passionate about the arts and it resonated with a large group of people.
While those five minutes are longer, (though less bloody minded), than Conan the Barbarian’s famous statement about what is best in life, it can be helpful to remember that it doesn’t take long to inspire passion in others, be it other arts people or audiences.
What I appreciated most from Mario Garcia Durham’s letter was when he wrote:
“When Simon walked on to stage, she represented leadership activated in the moment. She embraced the risk, took up the challenge and succeeded.
Simon is a fine example of individual leadership that makes an impact through personal creativity, determination and empowerment. She didn’t get to APAP on her own, but she took all the steps to get there and was ready in real time to participate in ways she hadn’t imagined.”
This encapsulates a lot of what we say about being leaders in the arts- embracing risk and being agile and open enough to participate in whatever possibilities present themselves.
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.”
I have been keeping a Createquity post about gamification and arts events bookmarked on my web brower for while now. I liked some of the ideas suggested there and hoped to refer back to the entry for inspiration in the future. I was surprised to realize the post was actually created nearly two years ago. It seems so much more recent.
I came across another article recently that underscored the necessity of paying close attention to the design of any experience you may gamify. As with any game, some times people get a little more competitive than we might like.
In a post recounting the different experiences she and her friends experienced attending Sleep No More, Megan Reilly talks about how some of the repeat attendees have been using their knowledge to try to force certain outcomes. This tends to negatively impact the experience of other attendees, especially first timers.
My other friend, Amanda, got to have the same Hecate experience that I described above – having the ring put on her finger, and going through “Is That All There Is?” When Hecate turned to choose someone else for her 1:1, however, that selected person apparently tried to take the ring off my friend’s finger! I really want to know what was going on in that person’s head, to make him think that this behavior was ok. And this is not the worst behavior I’ve heard of on the part of the audience – just the worst that has happened to someone I know
and later
Many people by now have had so much experience visiting and revisiting “Sleep No More” that they are becoming like gamers, saving and restoring and attempting something new to experience something they KNOW is there but has so far been hidden from them. They try to find the secret combination of moves that unlocks the 1:1 with Hecate, and get visibly frustrated when they are not the chosen ones. They don’t care that someone else next to them might be experiencing the show for the first time – they want their experience/interaction/hidden secret scene, dammit. After all, they paid roughly $90 to play this game (or more, if like me you are not in NYC) and they want to win.
I love the parallels between “Sleep No More” and games, I really do. I love being responsible for my own journey through a story, and having to do some work in order to discover a narrative. I love that there are little errands and quests within the show that are given to different lucky audience members. I don’t want the 1:1 experiences to be removed. But how do you let the audience of 400 something people a night know that the experience of the show doesn’t have to include any one of these things? That their ticket price does not entitle them to a specific experience? And that the other audience members and the performers are not non-playable characters?
I would encourage people to read the whole thing, even if you have no intention of ever gamifying your experience. Megan Reilly’s discussion of what elements work and why it is so exciting might change your mind.
In some respects, what she talks about are the hazards of attending a public performance writ large. The person who pulls out their cellphone in the middle of a conventional performance and starts talking may be the same person who pushes you aside at Sleep No More. The percentage of the general population who will impinge upon the enjoyment of others is probably going to remain constant.
Another issue one of Reilly’s friends faced seemed to simply be a function of letting the audience interact with each other. There was a lot of non-verbal signalling that something was going to happen when experienced audience members watched the rest of the audience for their reaction or all started rushing in a certain direction.
When people are all seated quietly in a theater facing in one direction, the anticipation of those who have seen the show before is less apparent. But that experience is certainly also less interesting and probably doesn’t encourage as much return business as the Sleep No More experience, even at $90 a pop.
Long time readers will know that I frequently counsel not jumping on the newest technological gizmo bandwagon too quickly lest you dilute your efforts fruitlessly across too many efforts.
The research was conducted on news sites so the validity may vary depending on how much more engaging you feel your website is versus the top 26 news sites like CNN, Fox News, BBC, NPR and BuzzFeed.
Pew Research found that people visiting a site directly stayed longer (4:36), looked around more (24.8 pages) and returned more often (10.9 visits) than those arriving via Facebook (1:41, 4.2 pages and 2.9 visits)
Even sites such as digital native buzzfeed.com and National Public Radio’s npr.org, which have an unusually high level of Facebook traffic, saw much greater engagement from those who came in directly.
The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do
Reading the report, you may notice that the results are all based on desktop and laptop user data because the mobile data collected by the major analytics firms are not as detailed and thus are unable to support as granular an analysis.
However,
While the main analysis does not include mobile traffic to these sites due to comScore’s smaller mobile panel size, the overall findings translate to the mobile realm as well. As Patrick Cooper, NPR’s Director of Web and Engagement told Pew Research, “The big thing publishers should take
away from the desktop data, even if desktop is going away, is that: 1) method of entry matters to the experience and 2) they can’t control method of entry.”
Remember, these numbers reflect the behavior of people who are visiting a webpage based on something they see elsewhere on the web. This research doesn’t address whether Facebook is a good tool for developing relationships with people.
The act of typing in the direct address of a website (or clicking on a bookmark) implies a certain level of engagement with the website already. The fact is, The New York Times may have tens of thousands of people who choose visit the NYT Facebook page faithfully everyday by typing in their Facebook address, but who don’t linger long or look around much when they choose to click through to the website to read a story.
There may be thousands of people who feel loyal and engaged with the New York Times via their Facebook page that the research is viewing as lightly engaged due to their habits upon visiting the webpage.
Arts organizations can just as quickly describe a show and provide supporting video on a Facebook page as their webpage and don’t need to depend on the same attention span as a news site would to read an article. (Which may mean some visitors may have too short an attention span to watch a performance, regardless of where they see it listed.)
So, lacking evidence to the contrary, Facebook may still be a good tool for providing information to people who are already following your organization. My take away from the research though is that buying ads, having people like your posts or reposting your information may bring you a surge in traffic, but not necessarily increase the number of people engaged in your work.
“It’s too expensive,” almost never means, “there isn’t enough money if I think it’s worth it.”
Social entrepreneurs are often chagrined to discover that low-income communities around the world that said their innovation was, “too expensive” figured out how to find the money to buy a cell phone instead. Even at the bottom of the pyramid, many people find a way to pay for the things they value.
[…]
Often, it actually means, “it’s not worth it.” This is a totally different analysis, of course. Lots of things aren’t worth it, at least to you, right now. I think it’s safe to assume that when you hear a potential customer say, “it’s too expensive,” what you’re really hearing is something quite specific.
There is a sentiment commonly expressed around arts organizations, especially ones that are trying to attract college age attendees, that college students who say a ticket is too expensive will generally spend twice as much on beer on the same Saturday night. While a performance and a beer are transitory experiences, everyone knows beer is more transitory of the two. (The old saying, you don’t buy it, you rent it.) But, of course, it is the social environment that accompanies the beer that people value.
More from Godin:
Culturally, we create boundaries for what something is worth. A pomegranate juice on the streets of Istanbul costs a dollar, and it’s delicious. The same juice in New York would be seen as a bargain for five times as much money. Clearly, we’re not discussing the ability to pay nor are we considering the absolute value of a glass of juice. No, it’s about our expectation of what people like us pay for something like that.
Start with a tribe or community that in fact does value what you do. And then do an ever better job of explaining and storytelling, increasing the perceived value instead of lowering the price. (Even better, actually increase the value delivered). When you don’t need everyone to buy what you sell, “it’s too expensive” from some is actually a useful reminder that you’ve priced this appropriately for the rest of your audience.
Over time, as influencers within a tribe embrace the higher value (and higher price) then the culture starts to change. When people like us start to pay more for something like that, it becomes natural (and even urgent) for us to pay for it too.
That bit I bolded caught my eye. In theory the arts already deal with a tribe or community that does value what it does. That tribe tends to be affluent and influential, but we all know the common refrain is that these people are dying off. Whatever influence they have, it isn’t continuing to motivate too many others.
I am not sure the answer is just better storytelling and waiting for influencers to help shift the culture. I think there has to be a corresponding shift in product features to something consumers value as well.
This isn’t just about the arts. In the cell phone example Godin uses, the phone’s value in the developing world goes beyond just being able to talk to other people. It allows people to gather information about crop prices and choose which market to travel to and acts as a medium forcurrency exchange.
Without these benefits, I don’t imagine as many people in the developing world would own phones as do today. They are buying Nokia phones with long battery life rather than iPhones because electricity sources are so scarce.
In terms of the arts, I have no doubt that it is entirely possible to avoid compromising on price. I likewise believe that there are many groups out there offering what people want, but who suffer from lack of good storytelling.
Yet just as phone companies know they will sell more Nokia phones in Kenya than Apple and Samsung phones, even though those two companies are duking it out for domination in the rest of the world, very few arts organizations are going to be exempt from aligning their “product features” to suit local conditions.
Really interesting story out of Australia via Non Profit Quarterly. The Arts Minister has asked the Australia Council to develop a policy penalizing arts organizations who refuse private funding based on idealistic or political motivations.
Refusing funding from tobacco companies is mentioned in a couple instances, but this was brought on by artists in the Sydney Biennale objecting to its association with a company involved in a controversial detention center used to house asylum seekers.
Senator Brandis responded to that by saying, “What I have in fact asked the Australia Council to do is to develop a policy so that it would be a condition of the receipt of Australia Council funding that the arts organisation concerned not unreasonably refuse or unreasonably terminate private sponsorship.” When pressed on who would be responsible for deciding what is to be considered “unreasonable,” Brandis replied, “I don’t frankly have a fixed or dogmatic view about whether it should be the Australia Council or whether it should be the Minister or whether it should be some third party arbiter.”
We can only hope that the option adopted is not the current Minister. Brandis has since said that while it was reasonable for arts companies or festivals to reject corporate funding if they had concerns about a sponsor’s financial credentials, it was unreasonable for them to refuse sponsorship on political grounds.
While the funding model in the United States is different than that of Australia and the amount of support U.S. arts orgs receive from government sources is comparatively small compared to private and corporate support, I can easily see a similar rhetoric being used politically in the U.S.
“X Theater has been on the public dole (equal to 2% of its budget) for years and they are perennially saying they are in financial straits. But just last year they refused a donation from Y Company (seeking to charity wash its reputation after that last scandal), even after they offered to double their usual donation. Where do they get the nerve to ask the people of this great state for more of their hard earned money after refusing Y Company’s generosity?”
To a certain extent, refusing money from tobacco companies might be easy because there has been a decades long nation wide campaign about the problems brought on by smoking. With other companies, issues like environmental damage and sweatshop like conditions with low pay may be mitigated by widespread employment and improvement in the general standard of living, causing more ambiguous views about refusing support on ethical grounds.
I think it would be difficult to pass a law or rule to this effect in the U.S. because it is easy to see how that there will be no end of trouble. (How can such a poor school afford to refuse Playstation’s sponsorship in return for painting their gym and cafeteria with the logo?!)
Just merely employing the rhetoric to equate arts organizations refusing private funding with the unemployed refusing a crappy job can be damaging enough.
There was a TED Radio segment that aired back in October that hit so many of the conversation points in the arts today: recognizing failure, serving communities and funder priorities.
The topic was aid work in Africa. Italian aid worker Ernesto Sirolli reveals that pretty much every aid effort in Africa has failed. Some failures are attributable to arrogance of thinking you know what the solution is, but are equally attributable to the fact that no one will admit their failures, leaving others to replicate them.
SIROLLI: Every single project that we set up in Africa failed, and I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed.
RAZ: How did every single project fail?
SIROLLI: And they still do. See, the first reaction was, let’s not tell anybody we made a mistake. Let’s not tell anybody about this project. I really thought that it was one bad project that will never be repeated, which, I think, is what the Americans in the Peace Corps are thinking right now. That they are in a bad project, but it’s unique. So what they do, they don’t tell anybody what they’ve done because there must be lots and lots of lot good projects out there.
But if they had the chance to go and find out what their colleagues are doing around Africa, they will discover that, in fact, the norm is failure.
What caught my eye was the assumption by each group that their failure was unique based on the assumption everyone else was succeeding. Not surprising since everyone was reporting successes.
Sirolli says that everyone sent back reports to the home office talking about how great things were going when everything was actually going to hell. While the rosy reports were submitted to one office, another letter was sent to him begging him to come help the distressed aid workers.
I think the arts world faces a similar problem, it is just that our budgets are a bit smaller. The failures get a lot more publicity though, if you take a look at all the orchestra negotiations that have broken down and the failure of companies like City Opera in NYC.
Actually, that is not really accurate. We only know the very end results in each of these cases. We don’t know enough about the failures that lead to these situations to learn from them. There isn’t much to be learned from “Don’t Run Out of Money.” A little more transparency and frank discussion may be helpful.
When Sirolli talks about the Enterprise Facilitation system he invented, I felt like his approach was both a lesson to arts organizations and funders.
SIROLLI: … And I invented the system called Enterprise Facilitation where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion. The servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. So what you do, you shut up, you never arrive in a community with any ideas and you sit with the local people. We don’t work from offices. We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. We have zero infrastructure. And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do…
…The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. And then we help them to go and find the knowledge because nobody in the world can succeed alone. The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. So years and years ago, I had this idea – why don’t we, for once, instead of arriving in a community to tell people what to do, why don’t, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn’t exist.
Art organizations can probably take a cue from him about learning about the community by hanging out in cafes and talking to people rather than holding community meetings. Both funders of arts organizations and the arts organizations themselves might find value in simply helping people to connect their passions with the knowledge they need to realize their passion.
Any entity with resources to offer will probably find it difficult to just step back and not try to motivate people or impose their ideas on the people they hope to help. I am sure Sirolli and his people had that problem when they started. It is extremely difficult to surrender your ego and expectations, especially when you are bringing money to the table.
But the thing is, that is exactly what the best actors are able to do. They set aside their expectations about the way a scene should go and open themselves to the infinite possibilities that might occur. That way if a line is flubbed or delivered differently than it has been in the past, they can respond appropriately to the situation.
Bad actors chug on heedless of unexpected change or are caught short by it. In either case, they call attention to the problem.
This isn’t the best analogy because Sirolli’s people don’t react in order to serve their motivations the way actors do. Still, his people need to strive toward the same goal of suspending judgment in the same manner as actors do.
Playwright Mike Lew criticizes the logic behind blaming a lack of arts education for a decreasing attendance at arts events.
Take the basic argument of “We need more theater in schools so more people will go see theater later in life” and substitute comparable forms of entertainment where young people are already dropping boatloads of money. The very logic of the construction collapses.
Consider the following assertions:
-No one likes cooking anymore because we stopped teaching Home Ec in the schools.
-We need more video game training in classrooms to ensure the next generation of Xbox users.
-If we don’t teach kids how to listen to standup comedy, Louis CK will go bankrupt.
-Kids who never played live music in school just plain won’t pay for a Jay-Z concert.
Now consider the converse, swapping out theater for things that we do teach in schools:
-Good thing we taught kids biology, because zoo attendance is up 50%.
-Colonial Williamsburg is popping thanks to US History classes.
-Now that we have English in schools, bookstores are saved!
-My classroom had a PC, therefore this ipad is nonsense.
Some of his examples are a little flawed. Whether it is due to the lack of home ec classes or not, people actually aren’t cooking.
Much like cooking, arts attendance and participation is influenced by the example provided by parents and educational environment. I would argue with both the arts and cooking, the more you know, the more you will be willing to experiment with unfamiliar fare.
But as Lew points out, interest doesn’t depend on you being introduced to the arts in school. People will make the decision to attend if the opportunity appears interesting enough.
While his contentions that the problem is based in inflexible timing of performances, dearth of social opportunities, programming choices that don’t resonate with the lives of young people and general lack of hospitality are not new arguments, it doesn’t mean he is wrong.
As I was reading some of his examples, I thought that it wasn’t logical to draw a direct line from biology to zoo attendance and English classes and bookstores because there are plenty of other positive outcomes that can result from these classes. The same can be true of the arts. English, sociology and anthropology can as easily lead to the arts as directly arts education when you think about the stories people tell and the way they express themselves.
Give his post a read, he makes many interesting points in his contribution to this ongoing discussion.
One of the more intriguing ideas I have come across in my 10 years of blogging is the Artist Pension Trust which has artists deposit their work into across the course of 20 years with the proceeds of the sales going to fund their pensions.
When I first wrote about this back in 2006, I didn’t have too many of the details, but a recent story examining the success of the trust as it reaches its 10 anniversary provides many more details.
I was interested to learn that only 20% of the 2000 participating artists were from the United States. Though given that the number one rule of investment is diversification, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Basically, it works this way:
Participating artists donate 20 of their works over a planned 20-year period (two per year during the first five years, one per year for the ensuing five years and one piece every other year for the remaining 10 years) to the trust. There are regional directors and selection committees, consisting of independent curators, artists and collectors but not dealers (“they bring a conflict of interest,” Moti Shniberg, a former high-tech entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Mutual Art, the parent company of the Artist Pension Trust, said).
The trust “cultivates” the investment by lending them to museums and art festivals. Keeping them locked in storage for 20 years wouldn’t help enhance their value, after all. While the plan is to keep the works for 20 years, some have already been sold when their value increased significantly.
Other artists have withdrawn and asked for their art to be sold when they were short on money.
While the ideal of pooling art for the long term benefit of all is admirable in theory, in practice human nature caused the trust to slightly alter their original plan.
“David Ross noted that his original idea was for all the proceeds of sales of artwork be placed in the general pool, but a number of the artists he had approached, “who all believed that they were going to be successful in their careers,” were unenthusiastic about supporting less accomplished colleagues. “Dividing the profits—40 percent for the artist, 32 percent for the general pool—made the idea easier for them to swallow.”
As noted earlier, there are no dealers on the committees because they have a vested interest in selling an artist’s work rather than letting it be deposited in a trust for 20 years.
I look forward to checking in again on this in 10 years when the trust starts to sell the works of the first depositors in preparation for paying out pensions. How well will those artists who have been had the patience and discipline to participate in this program fare?
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.
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
Apparently they haven’t had any lost or damaged in all that time. There is a lot of competition for the paintings with the students camping out all night to be near the head of the line and consulting maps of where the pieces will be located in the room to strategize what they will grab first. (They are limited to 2 pieces though)
Given that Frank Almond recently had his violin stolen coming out of a concert hall, it is amazing to me no one has targeted the student dorms to grab the painting.
And it should be noted, contrary to what is initially claimed in a blog on the Oberlin website, these pieces are not works that would otherwise remain out of circulation. These works are particularly set aside for this rental program and distributed and returned every semester without much incident.
Between the two situations comes the question about the best way to instill a respect for art. Do you keep kids out of the museum until they are mature enough or try to engender respect throughout their lives? Frankly, I recall wandering the Museum of Natural History on my own when I was in 10 or 11 years old so my feeling is that most kids can handle themselves if properly trained.
Presumably college students are mature enough to appreciate art in a museum, but do you dare let them take it and hang it in their dorm room?
Well, clearly you can at Oberlin at least. But the practice of lending out priceless art works like library books hasn’t caught on with museums in any widespread way, despite Oberlin’s 70+ years of success with it. I simultaneously cringe at the idea of a museum doing so and feel slightly ashamed at being so distrustful with so little evidence that people who would borrow can’t be trusted.
Today I saw a post on The Creativity Post that had me thinking back to my piece yesterday on Seth Godin’s vision of what constituted an elite. In The Gorgeous Reality of Not Being Liked by Everyone, Jordan Bates addresses the individual who tries to please everyone, but much of what he says can apply to groups and organizations.
We all know we can’t please everyone, but still we either try to do so, or pretend we are doing so. The simple fact is, regardless of what you are writing on your grant applications, everyone in your community can’t be your market. You simply can’t be all things to all people. Just as Godin says trying to convert someone who doesn’t want to be is a near fruitless effort, trying to appeal to everyone can result in diluting your effectiveness across a broad swath, serving no one well.
Certainly, for arts organizations the motivation to serve all that you survey is driven by the funding system we have. No one source provides you with enough support so you have to position yourself broadly enough to garner support from 20 different sources.
As I read Bates’ advice to the individual, I see a lot of similarities for arts organizations.
2. Take Minor Social Risks – Start doing a few things that you normally wouldn’t do because of your fear of what others would think or say…
3. Live by Your Deeper Values – ... The more you seek to align your actions with what you feel in the heart of your being, the less you will invest in the opinions of the mud-flingers.
4. Focus on Actual Outcomes – ..
5. Love Your Good and Bad – Give yourself permission to not be the things you wish you could be. Embrace the fact that all of your qualities — both your boons and shortcomings — are essential to the equation that is you…
There is a fair bit of discussion these days about arts organizations needing to take more risks, focus on outcomes, embracing and acknowledging failure as well as success.
I wonder if it is possible to sit down with your funders and say, “Look, you have been funding us for a long time now so you know we are effective, but we want to narrow our focus on serving X. We anticipate much better outcomes than we are seeing currently and they will be deeper and more meaningful than the results we are currently reporting. Can we count on your continued, and perhaps increased support?”
I feel like there is a bit of a precedent for this sort of thing given the current focus on placemaking by the NEA and other influential funders. You can point to them and note that focused investment in one’s community is being highly valued by funders.
My initial impulse was to say, you have to avoid the perception of catering only to the wealthy. But as I thought about it, I wondered if part of the problem for some organizations has been a divided focus in trying to appeal to both the wealthy and the not so wealthy. Both groups end up feeling that the organization has neither of their interests at heart.
Arts organizations end up being Archie trying to alternately please both Betty and Veronica, except the results are not as hilarious in real life.
Now other than the Metropolitan Opera which has a waiting list miles long and people willing their seats to descendants, I don’t think any arts organization really has an interest in providing a premium product to a wealthy audience. It is the perception that you have to cater to one group based on their money and the other based on your mission that causes the uncomfortable division.
I know in my community the elitist active seekers that Godin describes cut across all social strata and income levels so there is some sense in his suggestion that the focus should be on serving them.
Of course, the question comes up about whether it is sustainable. There is a real possibility that people will have to be let go in order to serve this narrower focus. An organization I once worked for closed down their performing arts program of 20 years to focus on their core competency of over 50 years. This was motivated more by economic need rather than philosophic outlook, but in either case the organization has to examine its priorities. Better to make this decision of your own will than to have it forced upon you.
Even among the curious, everyone is not going to have the same interests and like everything you do. The current environment where most people are buying single tickets rather than subscriptions has changed the relationship and expectations the community has of arts organizations. It can be easier to concede and have them accept that they won’t like everything you present in your efforts to engage whomever you identify you want to serve.
It is likely they will accept that premise if there appears to be a corresponding attempt to discover what does interest and excite them and shift things in that direction. (Remembering the distinction between wants and needs)
Seth Godin is talking about us. Well, actually I think that is a little narcissistic to think he is merely talking about people in the creative fields. I am pretty sure his comment encompass American culture as well as that as that of a number of other countries.
His post titled, “I’m an elitist” addresses a lot of topics we in the creative fields get conflicted about:
Lowering the price at the expense of sustainability is a fool’s game.
Only producing tools that don’t need an instruction manual takes power away from those prepared to learn how to use powerful tools. And it’s okay to write a book that some people won’t finish, or a video that some don’t understand.
Giving people what they want isn’t always what they want.
Curators create value. We need more curators, and not from the usual places.
Creating and reinforcing cultural standards and institutions that elevate us is more urgent than ever.
We write history about people who were brave enough to lead, not those that figured out how to pander to the crowd.
Elites aren’t defined by birth or wealth, they are people with a project,…
These are all issues that are constantly being bandied about in the arts today. Pricing seems to always be a topic of conversation.
While Godin never promises you that someone will pay for it, he encourages the creation of challenging work because to do otherwise is a disservice those who are ready to be challenged.
He actually developed that idea in a post he wrote about 4 years ago and links to in his current post.
While Godin does acknowledge that affluence does play a role in ones ability to become an elite by providing free time to pursue knowledge and the tools to communicate and process that knowledge, he states that birth, class and affluence do not make one an elite.
The number of self-selected elites is skyrocketing. Part of this is a function of our ability to make a living without working 14 hours a day in a sweatshop, but part of it is the ease with which it’s possible to find and connect with other elites.
The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from.
Once you identify this as your mission, you save a lot of time and frustration in your outreach. If someone doesn’t choose to be part of the elites, it’s unclear to me that you can persuade them to change their mind.
Two things that come to mind. If we define elites as he does, people who are willing to be challenged, rather than worrying they are the people we are focusing too much upon because they possess interest and ability to support our endeavors, what will need to change in order to engage and coordinate this new constituency? And is it sustainable?
Not the first or last time this basic question has been asked, probably even in the last week given all the conversations about how the non-profit arts sector needs to change themselves. Following Godin’s suggestion to look in new places to find curators may be a start down the right road.
Second question is about that last paragraph of Godin’s that I quote. How do you determine if someone is unwilling to embrace the challenges that are a hallmark of an elite and shift your attention elsewhere? This seems to a difficult proposition because we are not always the most objective.
As I noted at the start of this entry, there is a degree of narcissism in the arts, really just about every industry, where we see people who don’t experience the world in a similar way as we do as an outsider. Lawyers view the world differently from engineers who view the world differently from computer programmers and visual artists. Those who do not value what we value are not valued.
Yet there are groups in each who are furrowing their brows and generating a lot of sweat, tackling problems with the gusto of Godin’s elites. We know they are fellow travelers in pursuit of progress, but we want them to pay attention to us right now. It may be 15 years* before their pursuits orient them in our direction and into our orbit looking for solutions.
I am sure Godin’s definition of outreach is much wider than what arts organization define as outreach, but even if your efforts embody his definition, 15 years is a long time and it is easy to give up on someone (or a group) that is clearly engaged and actively pursuing productive projects simply because they aren’t engaged and active with you.
As a whole, arts organizations currently don’t have that sort of patience. Even if they don’t expect people to fall in love with the arts after one exposure, they still want it to happen fairly quickly and investment to manifest in frequent interactions. Otherwise, organizations wouldn’t purge their mail lists after a year or two of apparent inactivity.
On the other hand, if you take up Godin’s challenge, take the approach that you value seekers and restructure to serve them in all the ways they want to interact with you, both on- and off-line, maybe it doesn’t take 15 years.
*I use 15 years because it was about 15 years ago that friends from grad school took me to an art museum when I was visiting them in NC, as did another pair of friends when I was visiting them in OK. However, it was only about 4 years ago that I started going to art museums of my own accord and on a regular basis. I figure if it takes a person with a career in the arts around 15 years to start to do that, it may take someone who is not in the arts around that long as well to go from infrequent to occasional and we need to wait for them.
Yesterday I was at our local hospital attending some presentations on different aspects of the hospital’s operations. One of the people spoke about the processes the hospital follows to ensure good customer service. Because there are so many steps and people involved in scheduling a patient’s test, handling their arrival at the front desk, directing them to the proper part of the hospital and then administering the test, there are many opportunities for patients to be upset or frustrated.
The hospital has a whole process set up for each face to face interaction which include a greeting, mention of employee’s name, confirmation of details of visit, pointing out the restrooms and a number of other things I don’t recall. They have an acronym 7-8 characters long that they use to remember all the steps.
The woman who is in charge monitoring customer service followed patients through the process for about a week and conducted some phone surveys as well.
It was interesting to learn that a frequent complaint across the different areas was that people were laughing. One person was upset by people laughing in a backroom and talking about breakfast as she was checking in. Another didn’t like the fact people were laughing in the halls. This is understandable as people going into the hospital would be anxious about any sign that staff wasn’t serious and focused on their jobs.
Arts organizations can probably get away with a lot more cheerfulness in front of clients in the course of their duties, but like any business, would also need to reflect an attentive and efficient demeanor.
One practice the customer service director noticed impacted each patient’s visible level of comfort was when staff did what she termed “managing up” as they passed a patient on to another person. The way she used the term seemed to deviate from the standard definition. It might be more accurate to say they were managing patient expectations.
Essentially, as a patient was handed over to someone else, the escort would introduce the new person and say something complimentary – “she is really friendly,” “he is the best radiologist in the state,” “her nursing team is very attentive.” The hospital encouraged the staff to do this in order to assuage the concerns of patients who were probably anxious about just being in the building even if they felt fine.
I mention all this because one thing she noticed was that the doctors were horrendous employing any of the gestures which are pretty much mandated for the rest of the staff, including simply introducing themselves by name. Obviously, some were extremely personable, but on the whole the general staff was better at remembering to “manage up” than the doctors were when they handed a patient on to technicians or nursing staff.
I started wondering if the same might be true of an arts organization. I would wager that the lower echelons of staff in arts organizations are better at saying complimentary things about their supervisors than executive administration are when they pass clients/customers back to staff for assistance.
There is a lot of focus on the importance of the box office and house staff as a first line of contact for customers and training them to comport themselves well. But rarely do we talk about the importance of other parts of the organization bolstering the image of these areas.
Advertising will talk about how great the performers are, but does anyone else in the organization publicly comment on the quality of the front of house staff? A lot of service oriented companies like airlines and hotels will have advertising which feature friendly, energetic faces eager to make your experience comfortable. But rarely do you see an arts organization emphasize their service as a selling point.
I wonder how much greater the satisfaction of audiences will be if you were to comment, “This is Michael our box office manager, he is a crackerjack at troubleshooting these complicated problems.” or “This is my favorite usher, Mabel, she’ll make sure you find the rest of your party.” (It probably wouldn’t hurt employee and volunteer relations either)
One last thing I learned during my visit to the hospital: A hospital may be really generous making a donation to your organization, but you are only doing half your job if you are just talking to the people who can write you a check. You can enter into a mutually beneficial relationship if you cultivate a relationship with the physician recruitment staff.
Doctors may be primarily concerned with the state of the hospital facilities, but their families are going to be the ones living in your community. They don’t care about how many stents the cardiac unit implanted last year and the mortality rate, but they do care about what activities are available in the community.
The families have a strong influence on whether the doctors stay in the community so the hospital has a vested interest in making sure the families are happy. Our local hospital actually sponsors date nights where they will babysit the kids while the parents go off and do whatever they want until 11 pm. The more amenities the physician recruitment staff knows about, the better for everyone.
While we were on break, one of the hospital staff commented she just learned that the local museum had summer arts classes. Another commented she never knew that and the first observed that a lot of times different organizations have their summer arts camps the same week and she wished they would spread them out.
It just so happened someone called me that afternoon to say they were thinking of starting up a summer arts camp and I saw the directors of the museum at lunch today. I advised both to make sure the recruitment staff knew about their summer plans and try to arrangement them so they didn’t overlap the same weeks.
A reader from Oklahoma recently wrote me thanking me for providing information arts organizations in rural settings can use. With that in mind, I wanted to highlight a “if Minnesota can do it…” post on Dakotafire, a site that hopes to emulate and replicate that MN’s successes in the Dakotas
I loved the idea promoted by John Davis, Executive Director of the Lanesboro Arts Center, had for making the entirety of Lanesboro, MN an arts campus (video) rather than just focus on building an arts center. (I also love Lanesboro’s claim to be the B&B capital of Minnesota)
The fact that the town of New York Mills, MN, population 1200, decided to sponsor a Great American Think Off is inspiring to me. It suggests that there are still plenty of interesting ideas that aren’t being explored and risks that aren’t being taken.
I was amused by the concept that rural communities don’t have arts/gallery walks like cities do, they have Arts Meanders that include artist studios spanning counties.
Note that none of these links appear in the Dakotafire post. The ideas were so intriguing, I was inspired to seek out the websites for each.
True, these are all existing ideas writ small, or perhaps it is writ large since they take the idea of an arts district and apply it to whole towns and counties.
For me it belies the thinking that there aren’t enough of some type of resource in a place to accomplish anything successfully. The effort invested in some of these projects has been spent over 20 years or so, but the devotion to pursuing the idea has been there.
Last month, the Cultural Data Project released a study they commissioned to investigate the use of data by arts organizations and what impediments to effectiveness exist.
If you aren’t familiar with the Cultural Data Project, it is an attempt to collect data from arts organizations across the country in order to assemble as comprehensive a set of data as possible. While this is useful for research, it is also meant to provide arts organizations with analysis each can use to better understand the environment in which they operate.
The problem is, few arts organizations are taking advantage of this opportunity.
“Many of the organizations that provide information to the CDP are not taking advantage of the reporting tools, contributing to the sense that CDP is something that they contribute to rather than something they derive value from. “Because of the barriers present in accessing data (e.g., lack of time and data-use training, clunky and difficult to use databases), many nonprofits simply do not attempt to make better use of data at their disposal that could help improve organizational performance.”
This is attributed in part to what respondents characterize as a “collect data first, ask the questions later” approach. The report suggests there is a “more is better” approach that leads to more data being collected than is needed, as well as a lack of ability at framing effective questions that will help move the field forward.
This approach is reinforced by funders: (my emphasis)
“Funder requests often determine what kind of data organizations choose to collect and may crowd out organizations’ interest in asking questions that could inform their own decision-making. This may contribute to a sort of vicious cycle in which organizations’ primary experiences with data are framed as a duty to a funder, and since the data requested by the funder may not be what the organization itself needs to know for its own reflection and improvement, data collection comes to be perceived as a ‘cost of doing business’ rather than an investment that brings strategic value to the organization”
An observation I had really never considered is that while administrative staff works with research data all the time, there is little effort made to get artistic staff using it for their decision making.
“As the previous participant noted, “arts administrators have acquired a taste for data used in financial management, fundraising, audience development and advocacy decision-making. But there is little data on artistic choice, much less data that allows us to explore the relationships between artistic programming and audience or organizational sustainability.”
[…] (many paragraphs later, my emphasis)
But these experts emphasized that until data-informed decision-making takes hold in programming departments, we won’t truly be able to say that the cultural sector is effectively using the available cultural data or using it to full effect. “Until we can engage artists and curators in examining audience, market and trend data, we can never really make progress as a field,” said one. “I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve been allowed to present research to actors, dancers and musicians. They are the ones who can move the world.”
Because data collection is seen as such a chore, according to the report the job is often assigned to “low-salary, junior-level staffers who are given little in the way of training and professional development.” As a result, the collection is executed poorly and there is low value placed on the data.
The Cultural Data Project would like arts organizations to see data as a “tool not an end.” The study respondents felt that one of the areas of highest value for arts organizations is using the data to establish a benchmark against which they can measure themselves, as well as a source of information about practices by groups similar to themselves.
The biggest gap in the arts knowledge economy is in the area of practice,” noted one contributor. “What new or different artistic programs are leading to successful artistic outcomes? What new or different business practices are leading to successful operational outcomes? … Another added that most organizations are eager for this kind of information about their peers, which would take the concept of benchmarking into new and valuable areas: “I think cultural organizations would welcome as much information as possible about the types of programming that are being offered by other similar organizations, along with summary-level data about audience participation or attendance…. Is it new and different? Was it successful? Data that address these questions would be lapped up.”
As you might imagine, among the recommendations for the future, (and there are many more issues addressed than I have covered here), are shifting the way organizations view, collect and handle data as well as involving artistic staff in the evaluation of data.
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.
It is something of a trope that when you are a teenager without a lot of work experience looking to get a better job, you get creative about how you describe your past experience, claiming to have “coordinated the comfort and appreciation of over 1000 customers daily” when your job was to keep the restrooms clean.
At the time, some of the comparisons seemed a little facile and the same sort of stretch teenagers make to sound more skilled.
For example, the improvisation classes we take develop a sensitivity to imagination and impulses. We learn how to say, “Yes” and to follow impulses without fear, judgment or resources. We find ourselves acting with others in highly bizarre and complex scenarios that we have to “act” our ways through. Entrepreneurs, similarly, often find themselves in such situations and must rely on quick thinking, problem solving and the following of impulses.
Further, the storytelling skills we learn as performers, play well into branding ourselves as an artist, entrepreneur or arts business. The research skills we use to research a play and character can simply be repurposed to research one’s market and competition. Our understanding and experience in collaboration aids us in building a culture around creative businesses that represents values: personal, professional, political, artistic, etc. Just like we cast plays, entrepreneurs hire employees.
After reading over the report assembled by the Brooklyn Commune, I realized that the only reason I felt like it was a stretch is that I haven’t really come across many arts people who are interested in applying the skills they acquired in other areas. I have to include myself in that statement. While I look for new opportunities on behalf of my organization, I generally have no inclination to start a business or apply those skills on behalf of a company in another industry.
I think this gets back to the sentiment many of us hear when we begin to embark on a career in the arts, “if you can imagine yourself doing anything else for the rest of your life, pursue that instead.”
What might be inhibiting some of the progress in the arts is that we have so little desire to do anything else that we don’t give a lot of consideration to how our skills might be of practical use outside our field.
One of the reasons the arts community is having difficulty communicating their value to the public at large may be due to never thinking, much less talking, about how the skills we have cultivated are of use anywhere else, because we have no inclination to employ them anywhere else.
When I went back and re-read the TCG posting from the perspective that people would be intentionally trying to apply the skills they have gained to be entrepreneurs, I became more convinced by the idea of the skills being eminently transferable.
I have written a few posts before about how classes and training in the performing arts confer these skills to students, but in my mind I always pictured these students as people who always intended to pursue careers in other areas and are picking up useful skills to transfer to those jobs.
I never really considered someone who had had a successful career in the arts over 10-15 years deciding they would parlay that experience into starting a company that provided logistical support to construction sites.
Again, because we aren’t supposed to imagine doing anything else, why would someone who was successful want to do anything else? But with a partner with construction industry knowledge, an arts person would already have the skills to sell the services, assemble and direct project teams and find creative solutions to problems.
The simple truth is, while we learn a lot of important skills during our arts careers, we don’t acquire all the requisite skills after we start pursuing an arts career. We bring a lot of skills from other jobs and interests in with us.
After I ran my first music festival, I remember the marketing director asking me where I learned to be so highly organized, anticipate problems and develop plans. She wondered if any of my previous jobs had included organizing large outdoor events before.
The truth was while I brought many useful skills from other jobs, none of them directly prepared me for that experience as well as my mother had. Since we lived so far from the supermarket, she used to have us kids make monthly meal menus and shopping lists.
We would go tent camping a few hours away back when you were lucky to have a running water tap nearby much less power. You learned quickly that if you didn’t pack books or games to keep you occupied or forgot to pack the right clothes, it could be a long, boring miserable week.
If you do intend to make a career in the arts, you really still do need possess the drive that comes from a mindset where you can’t imagine doing anything else because it ain’t getting any easier.
Or maybe that is the wrong approach and will just maintain an long too myopic vision.
Since the definition of what it means to participate in artistic pursuits is expanding, the concept of what constitutes a successful artistic career probably also needs to expand—as will the concept of what a person trained in the arts is capable of accomplishing in other industries.
While not all people who work hard pursuing their art becomes highly accomplished or successful, I do believe that it takes a great deal of effort and dedication to become an accomplished exponent.
If nothing else, you need to surmount all the missteps and failures that are part of the process. This has often meant devoting so much time and energy in the pursuit and practice that it doesn’t leave much time for other jobs. But maybe we need to think more about how working in other areas can provide skills to benefit our artistic practice.
A pianist isn’t going to hone her skills by typing hours a day the way a visual artist can learn about composing images in a space while working as a graphic designer. However working in the trust and estate planning department of a bank might provide the pianist with the ability to speak to potential donors about their giving plans and help her better understand how to market her career.
One of the more interesting discussion sessions at the Arts Presenters conference I attended was related to a study/discussion conducted by the Brooklyn Commune Project that was released last month. Andy Horowitz of Culturebot and Risa Shoup of Invisible Dog Art Center reviewed the results.
The report discusses a lot of the factors impacting the arts from Baumol and Bowen’s Cost Disease (which I guess I have been writing about for so long, I couldn’t believe was news to anyone), the idea of public good and a review of how arts funding in America got to the place it is.
In addressing funding by foundations, they noted that it is generally recognized that the best return on investments is realized when you balance investment in “safe” entities as well as entities that are prone to take more risk. However, 90%+ arts funding goes to the safer bets resulting in an environment which hampers innovation.
This is the part of the reports summary which I thought said it best:
We uncovered a treasure trove of lost documents, publications and reports, discovering that chief among the problems of the performing arts is a lack of meaningful documentation and knowledge management, as well as a disastrous lack of intergenerational dialogue and mentorship, not to mention peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
Most significantly, we learned that we, as artists, are not the problem. We have heretofore accepted the received assumptions about artists—that we are bad with money, that we are unprofessional and insufficiently entrepreneurial. We have heretofore accepted the notion that our labor is not “work”, and as such we should be grateful to labor without compensation, to provide our services for free to institutions who are funded expressly to produce and present our art to the public, for the public good. We have heretofore accepted the notion that the system desires to be equitable and just, that it is self-critical and working to improve itself. Now we know differently.
The issue of artists undervaluing their work and heavily self-subsidizing it came up in the conference presentation. According to the 526 respondents to their survey,
75.00% claimed to make between 0-10% of their income from their art practice.
50% of those polled spend at least $2000-5000/year out of pocket on their art practice.
81% of those polled spend $2000 or more per year out of pocket.
$75,000 was the median annual income to be considered “successful”
$45,000 was the median annual income to be considered adequate for “stability.”
20% is the amount of total current income artists claim to receive from their art practice
95% is the amount of total current income artists hope to receive from their art practice in five years.
The speaker oriented in on the income levels deemed to be a sign of success and stability and the fact that artists hoped that 95% of their income would be derived by their practice within five years.
Since all those surveyed lived in the boroughs of New York City, the speakers cited:
“a February 2013 report released by the office of former NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and titled The Middle Class Squeeze, “middle class” in NYC means a household income between $66,400 and $199,200. Lower Middle Class would be $53,120 to $66,400 and Low Income would be anything below $53,120.
What people deemed stable was actually classified as low income and successful fell on the lower end of the middle class income bracket for NYC.
The report goes on to ask, “Why do artists think there even is an “enough”? Maybe it is because we do not work in a sector where extreme wealth is likely.”
Both the report and the speakers at the conference conceded that artists aren’t in it for the money and often view the “psychic income” derived from creating art to be more rewarding than earning cash.
The end of the report contains separate recommendation sections for presenters/producers, funders and artists. Among the suggestions for artists are to redefine the vocabulary and sense of an artist’s value, skills and products both for themselves and others. Part of that requires learning basic business skills like budgeting and finance so you get a better sense of your value.
“At the same time develop practical skills for the knowledge and creative industries (such as graphic and web design, video and audio editing, programming, copywriting) that will support the financial demands and flexible time requirements of your artistic practice.”
My overall impression was that the report was attempting to strike a tenuous balance. While the writers claimed that the problem isn’t the artists’ fault in the introduction, the recommendations say they have to contribute to rectifying the diminished view of their value by being better communicators and actively seeking productive partnerships.
While artists may be misperceived as not being business minded enough, they are enjoined to gain 21st century skills. That might be one of the toughest recommendations to make. They outright say to get a real job to support your artistic pursuits as a practical matter because it is difficult to support yourself otherwise. They note Philip Glass (who received an award at the APAP conference) drove a taxi for three years after Eisenstein on the Beach premiered at the Met.
Perhaps the biggest irony about the report is that even as they end with recommendations against undervaluing your work and discussions about how artists overly subsidize their own products, the report started by talking about the fact they applied for a grant, didn’t get it and went ahead with the effort of putting the report together anyway. (Though admitted they didn’t do a good job on the application.)
This document suggesting that artists motivated by the psychic income will often become involved in a project uncompensated wouldn’t exist if the artists hadn’t done just that.
I am sure they realized there was a conflict between what they said and did because they worked up a budget (see page 6) for what it “would have” cost, estimating the project at $131,000 of which $8,400 was actually contributed (probably by the participants), the rest was contributed in-kind. Their total contributed hours tallied up to 3165.
I just got back in the office today after attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference in NYC and I wanted to share some quick impressions and highlights from the experience. I am sure I will have much more to say in coming days.
The biggest, best experience came during the awards luncheon when Lehua Simon made her speech. I hired Lehua as assistant theatre manager when I was working at Leeward Community College Theatre in Hawaii. At APAP she presented during the “Five Minutes to Shine” session. The attendees of that session voted for the best presentation to be given during the awards luncheon.
I should note that a year ago, I sent her to an entirely different conference and the exact same thing happened. She gave a short presentation and was elected to do a longer presentation in front of the whole conference.
It looks like the conference intends to post video later so I will comment a little more thoroughly at that time. However, despite the fact that there were far more storied people getting awards, the applause was most thunderous for her five minutes and she ended up coming back out to take another bow. Three speakers after her, including Patricia Cruz, Executive Director of Harlem Stage and Robert Lynch, President of Americans for the Arts, referenced Lehua’s speech.
I think it would be incredibly hard to manufacture a moment that had such impact. As far as I was concerned, it just proves some people like Lehua just have innate talent for getting people invested when they speak.
Other moments that jumped out at me:
Johann Zietsman, an arts administrator who grew up in South Africa commented that when Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, people wanted him to defund all the orchestras and museums and devote the money to bringing drinking water to the country. Zietsman said Mandela commented that a country without arts is a country that only has water and taps. Zietsman noted that as crucial as drinking water was to the country, Mandela felt a great deal would be lost if the government didn’t also express value for the arts.
There was a plenary featuring Taylor Mac, Baratunde Thurston, and Abigail Washburn. There was a lot of laughter elicited by the three of them. One comment Taylor Mac made really grabbed me.
He mentioned how he hates audience interaction, (except when he does it, of course), because so often it is about the artist trying to get you to participate in their fun. Mac said his aim is to let the audience have an authentic experience interacting with his performance. If you feel uncomfortable as a result of something in his show, that is a valid experience. He said once he explains it to people in that context, they may still be a bit apprehensive, but they also seem to settle in and become a little more receptive to the experience.
That may sound like an easy rationalization, but I have to confess I felt more at ease with the concept as he explained the audience had permission to be uncomfortable.
As an example of what his performances can involve. He had one show focused on the 1820s. Since Braille was invented in the 1820s, he had everyone in the audience blindfolded and started them playing games like musical chairs. People ended up sitting in the lap of strangers and kissing them.
The session my colleagues and I did on presenting contemporary work by indigenous artists went pretty well. As with many of these sessions, 50 minutes wasn’t nearly enough time and we ended up continuing the conversations in the hallway. The audience was small which wasn’t surprising given the early morning timing, but there were people from the Canadian Arts Council and New England Foundation for the Arts in the audience who asked questions. So between them and those who were motivated to seek us out at 9 am, I feel like we were effective at reaching a good cross-section of people.
The most disappointing part of the conference was actually the opening keynote which featured Diane Paulus from American Repertory Theater, actor Zachary Quinto and composer Stephen Schwartz. I thought each of them was going to speak but instead the format was more like an episode of Inside the Actors Studio with most of the questions going to Schwartz asking him about when his musical Pippin was produced 40 years ago and Paulus about what it was like working with Schwartz on the recent revival of Pippin. Quinto was largely left out.
I felt like a keynote should be about setting the tone for the rest of the conference. Combined with a conference theme of “Shine” the tone seemed more about burnishing 40 year old works rather than encouraging attendees to strive toward anything new. The interviewer should have taken a cue from his laryngitis and left the three to talk about what was on their minds. Once they opened the floor for questions, things started to move in a better direction. (I wrote all of this on the conference survey by the way.)
I will admit that after the keynote was over, it did occur to me that I was potentially expressing a preference for optimistic platitudes over a discussion of the careers of noted artists.
Near the end of the session, Diane Paulus spoke about there not being a conflict between being an artist and being business minded. She described herself and others as identifying themselves as artists with an interest in marketing and artists with an interest in finances.
The observation that really grabbed my attention was that loyalty is not equal to a subscription. She had people talk about how much they loved American Repertory Theater, but when she asked what shows they had seen, they had only seen one in the last year.
That reminded me of Andrew McIntyre’s talk from three years ago where he described patrons who expressed a strong connection with an arts organization claiming to have attended the previous year when it had been two or three years.
There was a lot more that happened that can’t be summarized in a few paragraphs. I hope to write about them more in the coming weeks.
This last week I have gotten some real lessons in the importance of disaster planning.
During the quiet of the holidays I started a conversation with some colleagues about how we would handle inclement weather on performance days. Everyone keeps telling me how they try to shy away from scheduling shows in January because the weather is so bad. With that in mind, I wanted to have a plan for how we would proceed before the need arose.
Since we present a number of touring shows, we would be in a position of needing to pay artists per our contract unless the weather is so bad a state of emergency is declared. In that case, we would issue refunds to the ticket buyers.
However, if the weather is poor, but not so bad that we cancel the show, there may still be a number of people contacting us asking for refunds because they chose not to attend. My recent conversation has been about what we should do to respond to these people. Since we need to pay the performers, we probably won’t be in a position to offer refunds.
I have been discussing possible options with staff, board members and others. Our eventual solution may not make our customers happy but surveys have shown that even when the solution doesn’t please them, customers have a better impression of your company when you make the attempt to resolve their complaints rather than just refusing them outright.
In the process of the conversation, we decided we should post our policy on our website noting that we only offer refunds when the university closes and/or the sheriff declares a level 3 emergency.
And then came this week with the extreme cold.
Pretty much every school in county closed and many of the universities in the state did as well. We were open though.
Given that it was sunny and there was barely a dusting of snow on the ground, I started to launch into the stereotypical grandparent tirade and talked about how I stood out waiting for the bus in colder weather than this when I was younger. (Unfortunately, I not as tough as my grandfather. I only had to trudge uphill through the snow to the bus stop one way rather than both ways.)
Had we had a show and a different provost who decided to cancel classes, I might have been in a situation whereby our own policy dictated we issue refunds. At the same time the performing artists would stand there looking at me like I was crazy for saying the show was cancelled due to the cold and then glare at me when I said we weren’t paying them.
Not that the cold didn’t cause any difficulties. Yesterday we narrowly avert a large disaster when someone noticed a ball of ice forming on the sprinkler heads of the lobby fire suppression system. They just got the water turned off as the ice melted. There was some flooding, but nothing like what it could have been.
Every company knows that they should have a good disaster plan, how they will respond, where people should turn to for communications, etc,. Performing arts organizations need to know about the evacuation plans of the venue they perform in and think about issues like refunds.
But the events of the last week have made me realize I also need to know about the criteria being used by the decision makers I am depending on. I may assume the criteria is one thing and it won’t be. It may also change as personnel change.
As we heard about school closings Monday morning, a person I know who had attended and taught in some of those schools was amazed, noting they had never closed in the past. He opined that they might be quicker to close now due to people being more litigious.
In any case, being aware of shifting criteria can make for better planning. Had we or one of our renters had a school show this week with all the schools cancelling, that would have been quite problematic. Thinking about that, it just occurred to me that I should know what my policy about payment will be if a renter is impacted by school closings.
The person who made the decision to keep campus open this week when other campuses closed will be stepping down in June. I already started to advocate that very clear guidelines be developed for what conditions will result in the campus being closed and for the successor to be aware of the repercussions on our activities should the decision be made.
Now I also realize I need to know what constitutes a level 3 emergency in the sheriff’s eyes.
I was taken off guard by the news today that the Trey McIntyre Project is disbanding. I always half wondered if the company wasn’t meant to be permanent based on the fact they kept labeling their work in sequential years, Year 1, Year 2, etc.,
My first thought when I read the announcement was that they were following the Epoch model proposed by David McGraw I wrote about a couple years ago. While they are closing the company, there is a transition toward projects they (predominantly Trey) was already dabbling/becoming involved in. The Epoch model calls for a “quit while you are on top” exit strategy so I experienced a “be careful what you wish for” sense of dismay a few moments later.
As I have talked about before, The Trey McIntyre Project achieved in Boise, ID what every arts organization fantasizes about doing– on the street recognition and esteem on par with the local university football team.
In this respect they are something of a singular success story so I want them to continue on as an exemplar to the rest of us. The idealism of quitting while you are ahead sounds great in abstract, but reality of executing it pretty much guarantees and requires there to be high levels of disappointment.
Well we can hope the next generation of inspiring arts organizations is waiting in the wings to fill the void. Or step up and do it ourselves.
Based on my experience in Hawaii, I know there are a lot of high quality indigenous arts performance groups out there who have a product that would appeal to the interests of curious audiences across the country.
However, I also know that there is a degree of uncertainty about how to identify artists, verify their authenticity and promote the show to audiences. So I put together a panel speak about the issue.
From our session proposal:
Session Focus:
Presenting indigenous artists, identifying groups, seeking support for tours, discussing the potential cultural requirements of those artists, promoting the artists in a respectful manner , marketing these performers to audiences who may be curious but unfamiliar with the culture; connecting indigenous artists with their local counterparts in your communities; Developing an understanding in your communities of the living and evolving nature of indigenous arts.
Session Description
There has been a marked increase recently in fine works being created by indigenous artists who combine western staging and presentation techniques with expressions of their own cultures. Recognizing that there may be a degree of uncertainty about artistic content, interactions with performers, expectations, use of terminology and promoting these productions to audiences, this session explores the issues around presenting indigenous artists.
The panel will discuss questions regarding booking decisions – identifying groups, understanding quality, your role as presenter in empowering artists to shape their own cultural expression while dispelling cultural misconceptions or stereotypes
Marketing – what is appropriate? what do I say to my community that doesn’t include these cultures? Interaction with the artists – what are the protocols? How can we create meaningful engagement?
The panel will consist of:
Colleen Furukawa, VP of Programming at Maui Arts and Cultural Center who has been instrumental in the creation and production of a number of cultural dance and visual arts works.
Karen Fischer, President of Pasifika Arts Network which represents indigenous artists and has been working to expand the programming of indigenous work in all disciplines.
Moss Patterson, Artistic Director of Atamira, the leading Maori Contemporary Dance Company based in New Zealand.
Rosy Simas, Choreographer of Rosy Simas Danse. Rosy is a Native American (Seneca) contemporary choreographer. Over the past 20 years, she has created more than 40 original works.
And, of course, myself. I have produced an opera entirely in Hawaiian, a hula drama about the Hawaiian snow goddess and a production showcasing elements of Balinese temple ceremonies. And I presented other significant works by artists from across Oceania and Asia.
You may be thinking it is easy for me to talk about how easy it is to sell indigenous performances based on my experience presenting to communities with a fair representation from similar indigenous communities. While I have lived in Hawaii, I currently live and work in the rural Midwest now and have worked in communities in NJ, FL, NY and UT as well so I am well aware of the varied types of communities many arts organizations are serving.
If you are going to be attending the APAP conference, swing by and see us.
I believe they plan to record us so between that and my own notes I will try to write about the topics we cover and the questions that are asked in a future post.
As the year ended, it was announced that Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, was closing this January. Given the interminable previews, technical problems and public discussion of Julie Taymor’s dismissal as they moved to revamp the production, wry comments were never far from people’s lips when the show was mentioned.
The show served as a reminder that having successful big names attached to a show like The Edge, Bono and Julie Taymor, doesn’t guarantee success.
I was going to write a post on another topic today, but I got to reading about the difficulties faced by the original production of West Side Story in 1957. Despite also having big names like Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein attached to it, the show was a hard sell and faced a number of problems.
Stephen Sondheim, who hadn’t really become a household name at the time, didn’t want to work in the project for fear of being pigeonholed as a lyricist instead of a composer. His mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, had to convince him that working in such talented company would be invaluable for his career.
No one wanted to produce the show because its gritty story of street gangs ran counter to the happy, bright vision of musicals of the 1950s. (Remember, this is based on the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet, two of the main character are dead on stage by intermission and the two leads by the end of the story.) Even when two producers did sign on, one was unable to raise money and backed out soon after. Some theater owners refused to let their buildings be used for the show.
Finally, Hal Prince, who had previously turned the show down, was convinced to come on as a producer by Stephen Sondheim.
There were high tensions between the four collaborators over many of the artistic decisions, especially between the domineering Jerome Robbins and everyone else. Reportedly by opening night, none of the other three were on speaking terms with Robbins.
But the result was a show that was absolutely groundbreaking at the time, moving contrary to so many conventions. Now, more than 50 years later, West Side Story is one of the most enduring musicals on Broadway. It doesn’t seem quite so innovative today because so many others followed its lead.
In retrospect, it is easy to compare West Side Story to Spiderman and identify why one succeeded and the other failed, but had you been involved in the process of mounting the first production of either one, it would have been difficult to predict the eventual outcome correctly.
By some measures, Spiderman with the built in name recognition of the property, director and producers, along with all the funding behind it should have succeeded where West Side Story with its edgy story that no one wanted fund should have failed.
It wasn’t until I read about West Side Story and thought about Spiderman that I realized my wish is for artists and arts and cultural organizations to be able to forgive themselves for their failures and to realize that success is not always easy or immediately apparent.
Excepting Spiderman for a moment, there are huge, well funded corporations who perform extensive research and data analysis who still fail miserably in their endeavors. (See JCPenny’s assumption that consumers wanted honest pricing.)
While differences in economic realities may allow them to weather the consequences of their mistakes better than you can, at least recognize that having one hundred times your funding doesn’t make them even 10 times a better decision maker than you.
Conversely, your lack of funding does not indicate you lack brains and ability.
"Though while the author wishes they could buy it in Walmart..." Who is "they"? The kids? The author? Something else?…