State of the Arts – Page 21 – Butts In the Seats

What If I Had Only….

March 12, 2012 by Joe Patti

One of the perennial challenges arts organizations face is attracting a younger audience and the tendency of audiences to commit so late that you wonder if there will be one for your event at all. According to a recent blog post by Priya Parker (which includes her talk at TEDxCambridge on the same subject), this is a result of a paralysis millennials feel when faced with so many choices. There is a fear of missing out on a better option.

Parker has conducted many interviews during her research in which respondents discuss the paralysis they feel at the prospect of making the wrong choice.

“Am I setting up my adult life to be the way that it could optimally be?” one of my subjects asked aloud, speaking of her general approach to life decisions. This subject explained how FOMO could even invade the pursuit of a spouse: “On the personal side, there’s this fear of ‘Am I committing to the right person?’”

More and more, particularly among those who have yet to make those big life decisions (whom to marry, what kind of job to commit to, where to live), FOMO and FOBO – the “fear of better options” – are causing these young leaders to stand still rather than act. “The way I think about it metaphorically is choosing one door to walk through means all the other doors close, and there’s no ability to return back to that path,” one subject told me. “And so rather than actually go through any doorway, it’s better to stand in the atrium and gaze.”

Those with the most options in this generation have a tendency to choose the option that keeps the most options open. Wrap your head around that for a second.

[…]

Many of us watch the choices of our peers and predecessors with a blend of admiration and anxiety. What seems to afflict this cohort – more than the political strivings or existential angst that defined earlier generations of elites – is a persistent anxiety about their might-have-been lives, about the ones that got away.”

I don’t think it is much consolation for art organizations to know this is something of a personal problem because ultimately, your audience’s problem is your problem. But once you have created an appealing work, communicated the information through appropriate channels and made it easy for those last minute decision makers to gain admission to your event, there may not be a heck of a lot left to do but watch and wait.

Obviously, this also has some implications about the development of creativity, a quality that seems to be receiving greater amounts of attention. It was apparently the a cover story of this weekend’s Wall Street Journal Weekend Review. Cultivating creative ability requires a lot of trial and error, especially the error part. You get better by learning from your mistakes. If Millennial are risk-averse, they may be too reluctant to commit themselves fully enough to make great creative strides.

In fact, in her TEDxCambridge talk, Parker mentions a number of related practices that inhibit creativity. One in particular was valuing success over mastery where when given the choice of spending two hours networking over coffee or two hours working on honing their artistic abilities, “they will always choose the coffee.”

Granted, every generation has been accused of being less accomplished than the generation before. Though that is usually by the preceding generation, Parker is speaking about her own generation. In the context of so many sources saying creativity is important, it will be worth paying attention to whether this approach to life will ultimately be a problem for the Millennial generation.

Transcending Expectations

March 6, 2012 by Joe Patti

Back in December I wrote about the production of First Person: Seeing America we were hosting. I had described it as something of a live documentary with the narration, images and music all being performed in front of you rather than having the narration and music underscore the images as it might in a documentary on the History Channel.

The performance occurred this past weekend and it was just as terrific as I anticipated. They did an outreach service for the school today where they explained the process they went through in picking the text, music and images from the thousands of available choices. I was pleased that even with the limited exposure the audience had to the content of the show today, they experienced enough to realize how moving some of the pieces were even for the artists. One of the questions asked was whether the artists gave each other the time they needed to work through their emotions when they became affected by them.

But now that the show is over and the group has moved on, I can confess my embarrassment at mistaken assumptions. The production features NPR talk show host Neal Conan, actor Lily Knight and chamber music group Ensemble Galilei. I loved the concept of the multi-media production from the moment I first heard about it. I was disappointed that one of my consortium partners had managed to grab the show before me. Our geographic proximity precluded my being able to present them. I was pleased when he approached us to partner with him on the production. Yes, I wasn’t his first choice of venue, but who cares.

The mistake I made however was thinking that the production was brainchild of Neal Conan. I just figured the guy with the current affairs radio talk show would be the one who pulled people together to create a history based multi-media production. I mean, a group focused on performing something as staid as early music wouldn’t be creative enough to put a production like this together, right?

Actually, yes.

I spoke to group member Carolyn Anderson Surrick and she said that the initial idea came when she saw a phone card with pictures taken from the Hubble Telescope in a shop. She realized that the images were in the public domain and thought she could do a better job using the images than put them on a phone card. Their first project, A Universe of Dreams, brought poetry, music and images from the telescope together.

Their next project, First Person: Stories from the Edge of the World, used images from National Geographic in a piece about exploration. The current piece, First Person: Seeing America, deals with American history. While Conan has been involved with each of these projects, it was Ensemble Galilei which initially conceived of the idea.

I mention the show because this is probably a good example of how arts groups need to transcend expectations in order to make progress these days. Ensemble Galilei didn’t reinvent themselves or really compromise their identities to accomplish this.

Surrick said they played to the strengths of the ensemble which is early music and Celtic. She said people suggested they do a piece about the Works Progress Administration (WPA) but they felt it would be necessary to have more jazz oriented music to do it correctly. While they might be able to fake it, whatever they played wouldn’t elicit the same frisson experienced when the appropriate music and text came together.

I will acknowledge that one of the biggest drawback with transcending expectations is that you also transcend an audience’s familiar frame of reference. As I mentioned before about shows that shared this quality, you have to work all the harder to explain your new approach in the small window of attention people allow you.

In this instance, some creativity with the show description, the name recognition of Neal Conan and Ensemble Galilei with their respective fan bases brought in respectable ticket sales. But we doubled our sales in the 48 hours after a two page spread appeared in the weekend section of the newspaper. Once people invested enough time to read about the show and understood the concept, they really became interested.

What Values Matter In Arts Grad Training Programs?

February 21, 2012 by Joe Patti

This weekend Scott Walters quoted an extensive comment made on another blog about the value of MFA acting programs. The gist is, students are ill served by the programs which need to focus on training students for 21st century opportunities.

This struck a chord with me because I had recently read a Fast Company article about how UC Berkeley’s Business School started to screen applicants based on whether they embodied the school’s core values. The school had decided to embrace these values in the interests of creating a “reduction of overconfidence and self-focus, which are perceived to be excessively present among the business graduates and leaders of the top business schools.”

At the time I read it, I was idly wondering if arts training programs at the master level might do something similar to address any perceived (and real) problems with those they graduate. It had been a long time since I was in grad school so I didn’t feel I knew enough about the state of things write a post about it. Having read Walter’s recent post, I am no more certain than before since it is the view of a single unidentified commenter. I do feel fairly confident in assuming that, as with most things, there is room for improvement.

I will readily admit that given my ignorance of the state of things, I don’t have any concrete suggestions about they might be done differently. I will say that one thing that stood out in the Fast Company piece was that Berkeley-Haas instituted significant changes in their program based on their stated values and then required their applicants to adhere to them.

Most remarkably, they are not simply communication tools but drive operations from the curriculum, research priorities to staff programs, and faculty hiring. The curriculum, for example, has been extensively revamped in order to introduce elements of creativity, innovation, collaboration, ethics, and social responsibility.

They made sure they embodied the values before they required the students to do the same. It would have been much easier for them to decide to implement the change by altering their admission criteria and assuming that choosing the right students would result in producing the right graduates. But that is less likely if the infrastructure surrounding the students doesn’t emulate and reinforce the values the school wishes to cultivate in its graduates.

Successful realization of any goal is easier for any entity if all members are aligned toward attaining it. Probably the most powerful thing an arts training program can do to convince applicants that it can prepare them to ply their craft in the current environment is to point to a major realignment of priorities to that end.

As the commenter that Walters quotes, SayItLoud, notes, theatre training programs often cite successful graduates and places their students have worked or can intern at. As impressive as that is, the reality is the path those graduates took to success may no longer be viable.

What training programs may really need to do is say to applicants, “We’ve changed ourselves from top to bottom and what success requires now is to push you off the conventional path. This is not the place to pursue training in becoming a triple-threat, actor/singer/dancer. You may have become a video editor/painter/acrobat or a ecologist/architect/percussionist or all six plus four things we aren’t mentioning. Do your interests, values and practices align with ours?”

At the very least, it will get everyone thinking about the whole training process. Given that the current conversation is that arts organizations need to change the way they operate and interact with audiences, you aren’t leading students astray by telling them they need to obtain a wider spectrum of skills. Like as not, they will be the ones helping to drive the change with the types of works they develop.

What Must They Think Of Us

February 15, 2012 by Joe Patti

In diplomacy terms, soft power is a nation’s culture and values as opposed to their economic and military power. Some institutions like McDonalds and Apple cross some of the boundaries between these three areas. For better or for worse, they represent aspects of both U.S. culture and economic power. This week I came across a blog post on the Voice of America (another channel of U.S. soft power) by a student from China who is studying in North Dakota.

I was a little chagrined to learn that everything Dandan knew about the U.S. before coming here, she learned from soap operas.

“When I was still in China, the only American art or entertainment I knew about was the American soap operas. In fact, I got my initial impression of America from “Criminal Minds,” “Sex and the City,” “Gossip Girl” and so on. Although these soap operas were quite ridiculous, even to my eyes, I still believed that most often they presented what was really going on in America.

These soap operas told me that the crimes in America almost existed everywhere and could be extremely disgusting, that everyone has sex and is open about talking about it, and that people in the Upper East Side were presumptuous and arrogant.

Yet when I came to America, the first lesson I learned from my classmates was that soap operas are not as popular as I expected, at least not amongst college students. Lots of people I know haven’t even watched one episode of those “famous” soap operas.

She goes on to talk about how impressed she was by a college theatre production. She also quite taken with her participation in a slavery simulation where she was sold in slave auction and escaped into the night hiding with others in basements until they reached freedom in Minnesota.

I think the arts community may need to add “tools of positive diplomacy” to the rationale for funding and look into getting on the State Department’s cultural ambassador program expanded. There is a lot of counteracting of our national image that apparently needs to be done abroad and we don’t always have to send the big symphonies, Broadway tours and ballets overseas in order to accomplish it. Not everyone is going to be able to see the big American company in the big performance hall in the major city. Smaller groups can bring interesting experiences to other places within countries.

Sure, it is in the best interests of some countries if the citizens have a poor impression of the United States. I figure if we can negotiate to have our military based placed on foreign soil, we must have the skills to create more opportunities for expressions of U.S. culture abroad. China, France and Germany have their Confucius Institutes, Alliance Francaise, and Goethe-Institut, respectively. The U.S. has the Peace Corps as one of its exemplar soft power organizations. Maybe we need an Arts and Culture Corps, too.

Honestly, I think the need and benefit of cultural exposure is probably mutual. U.S. citizens need the experience of traveling and performing abroad as much as people of other cultures need to be exposed to something other than our television programs.

Stuff To Ponder: What About Engaging Arts Organizations?

February 14, 2012 by Joe Patti

Taking up where I left off yesterday, one of the last things I mentioned was that arts people might have an easier time shifting their perceptions to be more inclusive of what constitutes artistic practice and works of art than the general public might.

The thing is, while arts people may be more able to make the shift in thinking, they may not think it is necessary unless the necessity of doing so is pointed out to them. There is a lot of effort being made on a national, regional and local level to communicate the benefits of the arts to the general public but there isn’t a complementary effort to let the arts community know what their role is.

You can help in that effort by passing on or retweeting this post! 😉

But really, I recently realized the effort to get the general public to invest in the arts is a little one sided. Americans for the Arts will run ads telling people there are things they can do give their kids more arts experiences but most of the burden is on the parents to go online to the Americans for the Arts site and seek out arts organizations in their community. There may be an assumption that whatever arts organizations are doing to generate public awareness of themselves will be enough.

While Americans for the Arts had some requirements if you wanted to partner in their last kids and the arts campaign, what perhaps they should have also done is gone to the arts organizations and said, listen, we are going to run a slew of ads in your area encouraging people to take their kids to performances and museums and sign them up for classes. We are going to tell them to look for this little smiley guy logo. You can benefit by putting this logo on your website, in your ads and on the side of your building like the Safe Place logo they have on fire stations so people can easily identify organizations that offer these services.

The NEA starting a long term campaign communicating a “its all art and you should be reaching out” message to arts organizations through various channels would help to get arts organizations on the same page with them. That way the arts groups can start providing a public message complementary to the NEA’s and begin to shift themselves and the community to a more inclusive mindset.

Heck, what might actually be effective is a national campaign like the one Dominos recently ran that acknowledges people’s complaints about arts experiences. It could simultaneously address public sentiment and let arts organizations know they have a responsibility in the relationship as well.

Of course, lacking the unified will of a corporation, the campaign can’t make concrete promises of improvement across the arts sector. And honestly, unless it was incredibly well-designed and coordinated, it could alienate the general public, arts organizations or both.

But it would also be the first time that these issues were acknowledged and addressed nationally. Those of us who regularly read blogs and attend conferences are likely well aware of the need for change. But many arts people, including board members, aren’t participating in these conversations and may not be as aware of the shifting realities. This would put the topic front and center.

There isn’t just a need to do a better job of communicating our message to our local community, we need to apply the same techniques to communicating among ourselves. Which may in turn increase the number of organizations effectively communicating with their local communities.

There are already a few communication channels being used to rally arts organizations and their supporters to contact their legislators prior to crucial votes. Those are a good starting point to mobilize arts organizations but the message needs to come from different sources: blogs, television, radio, YouTube video, tweets, Facebook. In other words, the same channels we are urged to use to engage our communities can be used to engage arts organizations.

Whatever the message is needs to be light and encouraging rather than declarative and directive. Just like our audiences, arts organizations should be hearing more from their national, state and local leadership than OHMYGOD! THEYAREALLAGAINSTUS YOUMUSTMOBILIZENOW!

There should be Van Goghurt commercials made to encourage arts organizations to do better and point out resources organizational leaders can consult.

The nonprofit arts world in the U.S. is so decentralized it is hard to effectively communicate with most of the organizations. If the government provided higher levels of funding, more organizations might have closer relationships with central funders and it would be easier to provide training and information in best practices. For many it is not worth the effort required to apply, so they remain unidentified and out of touch with service organizations.

Instead of providing a few arts organizations with the funds to improve community participation, maybe foundations/funders should focus on establishing stronger channels of communication and relationships between service organizations/arts councils and arts groups, as well as between the arts groups themselves. Once that is achieved, instead of many individual organizations trying to re-invent the wheel alone, they may become better aware of the practices of those around them which will hopefully translate over time into a community engaged with the arts rather than with specific arts organizations.

As it is now, the best engagement practices developed by the exemplar organizations being funded will only be disseminated to a few hundred people attending a conference or reading a report. Better engagement and communication between arts groups and the arts councils/organizations that serve them could multiply the impact.

What Is Art? What Is Craft? Whadda I Care?

February 13, 2012 by Joe Patti

Philosophy professor Mike LaBossiere has an entry on Creativity Post in which he discusses the issue of defining art. He cites one of the creators of the Penny Arcade web comic, Jerry Holkin, recent statement resisting conventional definitions of art.

“I don’t think I’ve ever read a definition for art that wasn’t stupid. Generally speaking, when a person constructs a thought-machine of this kind, what they’re actually trying to do is determine what isn’t art. I have always been white trash, and will never cease to be so; what that means is that I was raised with an inherent distrust in the Hoity and a base and brutal urge to dismantle the Toity. This is sometimes termed anti-intellectualism, usually by intellectuals, when what it is in truth is an opposition to intellect for intellect’s sake. The reality is that what “is” and “isn’t art” is something we can determine with a slider in our prefrontal cortex..”

For reference, Holkin’s comment is associated with this particular strip. (I am actually an avid Penny Arcade reader, too.)

When I was in grad school one of the first classes I was in took up the discussion of the differences between art and craft. We spent a few classes on the topic and read a number of articles debating the differences. In the end we arrived at no set definition. While I think the exercise of trying to arrive at a definition was valuable, I didn’t saw a reason to worry about the distinction. I have never been plagued with doubts that the projects with which I am involved might be craft rather than art.

There have been a few times when I have been concerned that the quality of the performance might not be equal to the price of admission, but outside reading articles like LaBossiere’s I generally forget a distinction is often made.

Which is not to say that I do not make a distinction between what is and isn’t art. Like LaBossiere, there have been instances when I am certain a hoax is being perpetuated. Most things I have no trouble giving the benefit of the doubt, but occasionally I am incredulous at what is enshrined as art. When I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art this summer, there were one or two galleries that left me incensed to think the contents were considered art. One of my visual artist friends explained how ground breaking the concepts were, but I still left pretty angry.

But I recognize that is personal and when I have these experiences, I don’t fume off to post denunciations.

As I read LaBossiere’s post it occurred to me that the NEA’s recent effort to classify a wider range of activities as participation in artistic pursuits will be in vain unless those considering themselves artists and arts professionals relax their own definitions. This may seem implicit in the NEA’s effort to widen the classification, but it is one thing to recognize that manipulating digital images is arts participation and another to have the product acknowledged as art.

Now I have already acknowledged there are some things I don’t consider to be art and that I am discerning about the quality of work I will present in my venue. Am I saying people in positions like mine need to give stuff we think is crap more exposure?

Well, not me of course, I am talking about all those other artists and administrators with their elitist attitudes. They need to relax and get off their high horses.

No, of course I am talking about me, too.

I don’t think I need to necessarily compromise on my standards of quality, but I can always do a better job of entertaining a wider range of types of artistic expression. Part of that will require educating myself about these different types. I am grateful that my daily life brings me in contact with many opportunities to do so. I need to take advantage of more of them.

Ultimately, I think if the NEA, Americans for the Arts, foundations, etc want to shift the public view of what constitutes arts, culture and the participation and creation thereof, they will need to devote a little time to communicating with those of us already involved in what has traditionally been recognized as arts practice.

It can’t entirely be about bringing the public around to the arts community way of thinking and considering themselves one of us. Efforts need to be made to encourage the current arts community to meet the general public part way and acknowledge their practice is valid and that they are in fact, one of us.

For all the elitism in the arts, I think arts people will have the easier job of shifting their perceptions. One of the benefits being touted about the arts is an ability to accept situations with no distinct right or wrong results. While one of the key practices of classification is to define what something is and is not, the vast majority of arts people don’t really cleave strongly to concrete definitions. While there are plenty of people who will happily go on at length, about what characteristics disqualify a piece from being considered post-modern, by and large most people won’t lie awake at night worrying about it.

I have some additional thoughts on the idea of arts organizations working to complement the efforts of national organizations like the NEA and Americans for the Arts which I will relate tomorrow.

Helping The Rising Tide Lift All Boats

February 6, 2012 by Joe Patti

I have been following The Producer’s Perspective, the blog of Broadway producer Ken Davenport, for a number of years now. While I don’t have solid evidence, I suspect he is not like other Broadway producers. He is often curious to learn about the audiences for Broadway shows, where they are coming from, what motivates their purchasing decisions, etc. While this may seem like basic marketing surveying, the information doesn’t really exist so he is often sending people to query folks standing in line at the TKTS booth in Times Square.

Taking some inspiration from Zappos, he decided to create a toll free number to have his office staff answer questions about Broadway to help dispel the notions his surveyors and focus groups discovered people have.

Well, that’s exactly what I thought . . . so then I wondered . . . why doesn’t Broadway have a hotline? Why doesn’t it have a toll free number that people can just call to find out stuff? Ivory Soap has one. Coke has one.

[…]

Yep, we created 1-855-SEE-BWAY (733-2929) to help answer your questions about Broadway.

It’s staffed by a bunch of the nicest Broadway theater lovers you could ever imagine (they also happen to be my staff, in a very Zappos-inspired “we all answer the phone including the boss” structure), and we guarantee we’ll get you the answer to whatever question you have about Broadway theatergoing.

Need to know what’s playing? Need to know at what times? Price of tickets? Suitability for kids? Location? Parking? Restaurants nearby? Sure, we got that. And if we don’t, we’ll get it for you. Promise on our autographed original cast recording of Company.

Oh, and before you ask . . . no, we’re not selling anything. This isn’t about us trying to make any money. This is about a service that should exist. And needs to exist if we’re going to grow our audience (just like Zappos increased theirs).

I bring this up not so much to promote his service (though I think it is great thing to offer) but to wonder if this signifies that arts organizations are moving toward a more collaborative “tide raises all ships” approach and a way from a competitive “ne’er the twain shall meet” stance.

About six years ago I wrote about an effort by the Broward Center for the Performing Arts to provide people with information about all the performing arts in town rather than solely about themselves. I am not sure if they sustained the effort, especially when the economy got worse, but I took the fact that they were even considering it as part of their business model as an encouraging sign.

This year I am partnering with three different groups to present as many shows. In the past, we have partnered with maybe one other organization and the sharing of responsibilities (and revenue/expenses) was not as extensive. I am not sure about next year, but I hope to continue similar relationships even with the additional work it entails.

There have also been times I have assumed other organization’s obligations so that the show can go on. Perhaps as involved as I am in this type of activity, I am seeing a trend…or wishing for one, where it doesn’t exist yet.

I am all for making the effort to turn it into a trend though.

A Heartbeat Left In The Old Girl Yet

February 1, 2012 by Joe Patti

Though they haven’t played since October 2009 and the symphony filed for Chapter 7 liquidation in December 2010, the Honolulu Symphony musicians saw a new opportunity to perform together emerge today as tickets went on sale for the first performances of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra.

The new organization has embraced an ambitious plan with their first masterworks concert occurring barely a month from now on March 4. A Pops season will be announced soon.

I spoke to Jonathan Parrish who headed the previous symphony’s musicians’ union orchestra committee at a meeting on Monday and he told me there was some scurrying going on to offer all the tenured musicians their places back. Many had moved away and might not return. Fewer had than I thought and some of those who did, have returned to town to play for the opera.

JoAnn Falletta, Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Virginia Symphony had been assisting the revival efforts as artistic adviser and programmed this first abbreviated season.

Steven Monder, former president of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, had also been active in trying to see the orchestra revived. Though it doesn’t say on the website or explicitly in the press release, an article printed this last November reported he “had already signed on as president.”

Obviously, there will be a “Wait and See” period since there had been a number of years where the former organization was constantly teetering on the brink.

It may have been purely by necessity, but I thought it shrewd to announce the revival during the opera season and have the opera ticket office handle their sales. Even if there isn’t a large overlap in the audiences, the opera patrons are watching the symphony musicians play and the opportunity to purchase tickets to the symphony is close at hand.

Stuff To Ponder: Active Interpretation of Culture

January 24, 2012 by Joe Patti

Participating in the Lead or Follow discussion over at Artsjournal.com, Lynne Conner writes the following about audience participation/engagement in performances (my emphasis).

Inviting audiences to interpret the art works we present (make, produce, critique) is not pandering. I wish we would stop this disingenuous habit of conflating an audience member’s inherent desire and cultural right to interpret the meaning or value of a work of art with choosing the agenda for artists or arts organizations. Sports fans engage in some of the most active interpretation in our culture (and as a result experience real satisfaction and pleasure), but that doesn’t mean they choose the plays or create the roster. I mean, come on.

This got me to thinking in a slightly different direction. There are numerous television stations, radio shows and newspaper columns featuring people with high levels of expertise talking about sports, yet thousands of people feel no reservation about expressing a contrary opinion loudly in public places and in blog posts. They can hold opposite opinions about games and players from those of their close friends and still remain close. They are not intimidated by those with greater expertise or by the prospect of hurting their personal relationships.

But have you ever been afraid to express your opinion about an artist or arts experience you have had for fear of either appearing elitist to the people around you, even close friends? Or on the other side of the coin, been afraid of appearing insufficiently knowledgeable? Why is that? Feeling unable to discuss these topics, of course, creates a vicious cycle where people continue to feel they can’t discuss these things.

But can the image problem the arts have be fixed by having more people talking a lot more? Maybe, but it will require a lot of people doing a lot of talking.

It is interesting to me that when a person goes shopping, a large number of choices can paralyze someone and result in no choice being made. However, in the face of hundreds of different opinions to select from, sports fans don’t seem to have a problem sifting through them and generating their own view of things. They don’t worry if they don’t agree with the guys at ESPN despite all the computers, statisticians and analysts the network has in their employ.

When it comes to the arts, people get concerned if they don’t agree with the single person writing the review/preview. Either something is wrong with the reviewer or with them. Sports fans can dismiss a single writer as a bum and find another source of information that more closely agrees with them. It doesn’t matter if it is a wholly unsubstantiated view. The fact it confirms their view can make them more comfortable and confident with their ability to evaluate their favorite sport.

That isn’t so easy to achieve in relation to the arts and is becoming less so as media outlets cut back their coverage.

Its funny because it is so much easier to dismiss the opinion of a single poorly funded person over a corporate television station with the resources to analyze something to death based on a thousand different criteria. Yet in the absence of any other easily accessible information about the performance, people don’t feel they know enough to say the reviewer is wrong, even though they may be absolutely right. On the other hand, ESPN’s analysis may be as close to 100% correct as can be, but it doesn’t bother the sports fan in the least that they are completely wrong in disagreeing with the analysis.

Heck, there are sports fans who have been rooting for teams that haven’t been contenders for a championship in decades. They find some pleasure in being wrong year after year rooting for the wrong team.

How many arts organizations get that much slack after rendering a poor performance?

A lot of the devotion a sports fan feels has to do with a feeling of ownership and investment they have in the team, a sense of kinship they feel with other fans and myriad other factors. Many arts patrons feel the exact same things.

Of course, some elements of the sports experience won’t translate over to the arts. Dancers aren’t going to reminisce about how they were berated by audiences at the beginning of the season but won them over with their technique and heart the way a rookie athlete might. Though audiences for those few performing arts companies who retain the same ensemble from year to year can speak about watching artists develop over time.

There isn’t anything insurmountable standing in the way of people engaging in active interpretation of their arts or cultural experience in the same manner as they do with sports–except that they aren’t doing it. There isn’t an arts and culture police running around enforcing standards on conversations. The only impediments are those largely tacit ones we enforce upon ourselves and each other.

I am going to stop short of suggesting what we must do because I don’t think it is as simple as more arts coverage in the media, more arts in schools, more arts bloggers, more outreaches, more free performances. These may all help, but there are a lot chicken and egg factors to the arts environment in the United States. These things are useless of themselves if no one is receptive to them. How do you create that receptive environment?

At the Arts Presenters conference earlier this month, Braddock, PA Mayor John Fetterman quoted a lesson from Sen. Alan Simpson that any significant change takes seven years. I wonder how long it might take to change the culture of a community to the point where people felt free to engage in active interpretation of arts and culture.

Teachers Don’t Know From Creative

January 17, 2012 by Joe Patti

We all know that arts classes and opportunities have been disappearing from schools at varying rates for decades. It may or may not surprise you to learn that creativity is not encouraged in schools either. While you may have suspected it all along, Alex Tabarrok links to a number of studies from the Marginal Revolution blog.

He cites in one study,

“What the paper shows is that the characteristics that teachers use to describe their favorite student correlate negatively with the characteristics associated with creativity. In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like.”

As Tabarrok notes, the classroom process is not conducive to impulsive creative expression. Self control is valued in students in order to create an environment for a group to learn in. I would note though that this is not to equate self-control with smothering creativity. Even in self-directed learning environments where students are more in control of the pace and manner of their learning, a degree of self-control is still expected.

It occurs to me that part of the fight to restore arts education to schools needs to include advocating for a learning environment that encourages creativity. Arts people may hold certain assumptions about that arts in education involves cultivating creative expression, but it might not necessarily be so. Everyone probably has a story about a teacher who nearly killed their interest in an artistic discipline.

It may seem like incrementalism in the face of the size of the struggle to get arts education restored, but in the process, it will be important to try to preserve opportunities for creative expression still have left lest they slip away.

Think about it– outside the classroom the only place where a child is still permitted to indulge their screaming anarchist tendencies is on the playground and a lot of schools are doing away with recess. Without recess, there is another moment of a child’s life where they are expected to behave.

Now granted, for all I know kids today may stand around at recess playing on their Nintendo DSes and ignore their screaming anarchist tendencies without any help from their schools and such advocacy is for naught anyway.

My point is that while fighting for the restoration of arts, it is probably important to make teachers aware of what creative students are actually like and provide tools/guidance for dealing with them rather than requiring them to conform to expectations all the time.

Essentially the approach of “Arts offer X, Y, Z to your students. But since you may not provide opportunities in the coming academic year, we will happily help you to recognize the creativity of your students and engage it in your classroom to some degree since these kids are likely the ones you have pegged as disconnected.”

Desperately Seeking Arts Managers

January 11, 2012 by Joe Patti

Artsjournal.com had a link to a story on ArtSeek about the difficulty arts organizations in the greater Dallas-Ft. Worth area were having finding arts managers. A good many positions are going unfilled. The article also cites the example of the NY Philharmonic being turned down by six candidates before finally hiring an Australian.

Now I know some of this is due to the level at which a manager must operate for some organizations. From recent conversations with colleagues, I know that some places have had close to 200 applicants for their director positions. I suspect there may be some applicants for the jobs linked to in the ArtSeek piece but they didn’t approach the minimum criteria for consideration.

But I am reminded of the Building Movement report and Ready to Lead reports I wrote on in 2008, and the Daring to Lead follow up report that came out this past summer.

All three addressed the problems perceived with the lack of mentoring and succession planning in non-profit organizations as well as the reluctance young emerging leaders felt toward assuming executive director positions.

Daring to Lead noted that while executive turnover was a concern, the rate was less than had been expected. Based on that, I assumed the recognition of the problem would be delayed a little while. Perhaps leadership turn over at arts organization has occurred at a greater rate than non-profits as a whole or Texas just has an atypical cluster of vacancies.

Regardless, the ArtSeek story points to the necessity to start to really examine whether the arts industry is sufficiently cultivating the next generation of leaders it needs to sustain its organizations.

Comes The Curator

January 10, 2012 by Joe Patti

While at the Arts Presenters conference, I learned that Wesleyan University has a certificate program in Curatorial Practice in Performance. My first thought was to wonder if there was really that much of a demand for such a program. Then I recalled that many arts organizations have long been consolidating their executive and artistic director positions into one person and that there were likely quite a few people who sought the training originating from this situation alone. People hired for their ability to run the arts organization like a business might find themselves a little anxious about making the correct artistic decisions.

According to the program website, the purpose is:

“…designed so that students can learn to modify and adapt curatorial practices from one discipline to another. ICPP welcomes emerging curators as well as other arts professionals who are interested in time-based art practices in visual art, traditional arts and the performing arts. The emphasis of the program is on the how of curating and focused on developing tools to contextualize performance.”

I was in a session where either Program Director Kristy Edmunds or Managing Director Pamela Tatge, (whomever was sitting behind me) noted that the visual arts have long had curatorial training, but it was lacking in performance disciplines.

In a separate session moderated by Alan Brown on what drives and inhibits our success, Brown noted that presenting arts organizations are becoming increasingly interested in having a curatorial relationship with artists rather than just taking what is offered. Given that most contracts coming across my desk stipulate that the artist has sole control over the artistic content of the show, I wondered if there is going to be a lot of pressure to on that very common contract clause in the future.

Conceivably, if arts organizations take their responsibility to more effectively serve and engage their community to heart, they will have a better sense of what their community will respond to than the artist. I am not talking about pressing artists to tone down edgy elements in the performance to conform to local tastes. Rather I envision a presenter may ask that a particular piece be performed knowing how it will resonate with the history of the location or address an on going concern of the region.

Brown noted that a few performing arts organizations are soliciting requests for proposals (RFQ) from performing artists so that projects more closely conform with what they want to achieve. RFQs from visual artists aren’t uncommon, and Brown says there aren’t a lot of performing arts organizations soliciting, but the fact there are may represent a shift in the approach to residencies. Pam Tatge who was on the panel for this session commented that artist residencies were becoming an intersection of the artist’s goals and presenter’s goals.

It seemed to me that this is something of a compromise between commissioning a piece and hosting an artist for a performance. There is a desire to provide the community a deeper experience than might be derived from attending a performance but not enough resources to direct the creation of a new work. So presenters are seeking artists who can provide additional experiences with specific relevance to the local community. These additional experiences seem to tend toward interaction and working with members of the community and de-emphasize the lecture/demonstration model.

It just occurred to me that another one of the underlying themes of the conference seemed to be the blurring of distinct roles. In addition to a session specifically about cross-discipline performance curation, there were two different sessions on the dissolving boundaries between agent, manager and producer with people taking on the functions of all three in various situations.

Those were just the sessions specifically dedicated to this idea. Just as the topic of cross-discipline curation came up in a separate session I attended, I am sure the topic permeated other conversations.

Arts Presenters 2012 Edition

January 9, 2012 by Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market Forces and Education

January 4, 2012 by Joe Patti

Looking back at some old posts, I really started to think about the conflict of market forces and education. I was reading an old post that cited Tony Kushner’s proposal to eliminate the BFA in favor of a liberal arts education because the BFA gives students too narrow an education. In the same post I cited a professor at Julliard who wrote, “The longer students stay in a conservatory the narrower their definition of life in the arts becomes.”

My thought was to write a post warning that if we are going to claim that an education in the arts bestows a wide ranging creative world view being sought by business today, we had better make sure that was what students were getting.

But then I got to the end of the entry where I wrote,

“Students are looking for the minimum training they will need to get a job… If you tell a student that if they want to be an actor, they need to spend four years pondering philosophy, history, literature and all the rest and then they can go on to get a masters in acting and then go get a job, the student is going to take their tuition money to your competitors, independent acting classes, or use it to move to NYC to try their luck.”

Which reminded me that this is the exact problem the acting program at my college is facing. There is some resistance to hiring a full time replacement for a professor who recently retired because while the classes are always pretty well enrolled, few of them go on to earn a degree. Some of this is certainly a result of students who are having a hard time with classes, but it is also because a lot of them are taking what they know and are going out and working.

We recently sat down to make a “Grads Made Good” list. It wasn’t difficult to think of people who were out there actively performing or doing production work. Some of them were even making a decent living at it. The problem was, few of them actually graduated. These people don’t count even though they are regularly engaged with the school either as part of the college’s productions or as members of groups who rent the facilities.

While this problem can be chalked up to counting and valuing the wrong things, the bigger question is what we should be expecting of students. Should we accept and accommodate the fact that they will only remain enrolled long enough to pick up the skills they see as marketable to them? Do we insist that this short term solution will prove insufficient to support their careers over the long term? (If that is indeed the case.)

Diversity vs. the Brand

December 28, 2011December 28, 2011 by Joe Patti

Apropos to the recent aggregation of articles on You’ve Cott Mail about diversity in the arts, I wanted to point back to a post I did a few years ago about the pressures of protecting the brand image which may make it difficult to achieve diversity.

In the post I point to how everyone from Ivy League universities to car companies will willingly eschew the opportunity for immediate gain in order to protect their brand image. Arts organizations may have the best intentions for diversifying audiences, but the fact that funders/donors/sponsors may desire to have their name before the eyes of certain demographics will drive many choices that are made.

Side Effects of Cultural Policy

December 26, 2011December 26, 2011 by Joe Patti

I hope everyone had a wonderful and restful Christmas yesterday. As I understand it, today is the seventh day of Hanukkah. And of course, we are just in the beginning of the 12 days of Christmas (which gives those who have procrastinated in their gift shopping to save face by the Feast of Epiphany.)

It is frequently mentioned that Hanukkah was never really a significant Jewish holiday but that its proximity to Christmas celebrations helped to make it so. That idea of how cultures influence each other is related to today’s blog post retrospective.

Back in 2005 I made a post about indirect outcomes of cultural policy. The fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a cultural policy is a policy of itself, but unfortunately limits the conversation we can have about the value of the arts. Yet the U.S. government actively used it arts and cultural assets as soft power influence around the world.

I also talk about how artist lead gentrification can improve neighborhoods and how the same high rents which displace the artists which made it happen can also result in the destruction of ethnic enclaves.

History Repeats Itself…Wait, Didn’t I Just Use This Post Title?

December 13, 2011 by Joe Patti

You may have read Kurt Andersen recent piece in Vanity Fair noting that fashion, art, design and culture in general hasn’t really changed much in the last twenty years. Or maybe like me, you started to get the sense of this some time ago when you realized the rebellious college/high school kids today were wearing the same clothes and essentially listening to the same music as when you were a rebellious college/high school kid 20+ years ago.

Reading Andersen’s article, I recall a piece in Rolling Stone back around 2000 where they said the 70s didn’t deserve the reputation for being an awful decade for music given that it saw the rise of so many different genres of popular musicians from Led Zeppelin’s rock to Ramones’ punk to Donna Summer’s disco. As Anderson points out, (as well as Weird Al) there hasn’t been much difference between Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Andersen attributes the lack of innovation to a desire for stability in an unstable world.

“People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.”

I just wonder why the Depression, two World Wars, Vietnam and the Cold War didn’t cause a longing for stability that froze popular culture (though I will concede the latter two may have planted the seeds.) Rather, I think that in making the world smaller and enabling us to all experience the same things at the same time, technology has started to introduce a uniformity. It is tougher for regional quirks to gain enough influence to bring about changes. Instead everyone consults the same sources.

As Andersen points out, the ubiquity of so many retailers across the country means that it is possible for us to access the same resources as everyone else as well. There used to be a minor plot element in stories where residents of smaller communities would ask a newcomer what the fashions were in Paris or NY. Now there is no need to do so. Not only does everyone know what the styles are, they are readily available.

What does this have to do with arts organizations these days? Well, for one, there has long been a conversation about how everyone in theatre is taking their cues from what is being done on Broadway. There has also long been a conversation about how everything being done on Broadway is a revival, revue or dramatization of material which has proven itself in some other format.

It seems that what we have here is an opportunity not only to break from our own past practices but to become agents of change for general culture as well. I am not so idealistic that I can’t admit that is a lot of inertia to overcome for non-profits. But since it appears increasingly likely a change of business model is in order, we might as well include artistic and cultural innovation while we are in the process of re-invention, right?

History Repeats Itself And Is Redundant, Too

December 6, 2011 by Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Info You Can Use: Crowdfunding Legislation Update

December 5, 2011 by Joe Patti

Thanks to Ken Davenport’s post on the subject, I discovered the bill to facilitate crowdfunding I wrote about at the end of October is nearing approval. The House (H.R. 2930) approved the measure early in November and the Senate’s proposed bill (S. 179) is in committee.

As discussed in my earlier post on the subject, the existing rules for inhibit small investments made by many people because S.E.C. rules kick in after threshold of 500 people. These bills provide a little more leeway.

William Carleton has a good comparison of the passed version of H.R. 2930 and the proposed S. 179. Of most immediate concern to most people will probably be that where the House bill places the per investor, per year limit at the lesser of $10,000 or 10% of annual income, the Senate bill caps investment at $1,000. The North American Securities Administrators Association apparently agrees with the Senate on this point.

At that level, and given the level of required reporting and investor notice, I wonder if it will be worth it to too many people to attempt crowd funding in this manner. But again, I am thinking in terms of the investing prospectus one receives. Presumably, there will be less information to provide to investors in the case of crowdfunding efforts.

Trent Dykes at The Venture Alley provides the details of the House bill. I was particularly interested to see what sort of protections an investor had against fraud.

Not that it isn’t enough motivation to defraud, but you can only raise $1 million annually using the exemption provided by the bill ($2 million if you provide audited financial statements.) In addition to providing warnings of risks to potential investors and sending a collection of information and reporting to the S.E.C., one protection people will have is that the money will be held in escrow by a third party until 60% of the target amount has been raised. Presumably, if the amount has not be raised by the target deadline, additional arrangements must be made to retain it. There are also provisions that ensure the people handling the offering and cash management are qualified to some degree. People with a history as a “bad actor” as determined by the S.E.C. will be prohibited from offering investment opportunities.

As I am not an expert in investing law, I don’t know how vulnerable these arrangements are to fraud. Presumably, moreso then your typical investment opportunity. Individuals will just have less of their personal fortunes exposed to the fraud.

For some people in the arts, this might offer a viable alternative to the non-profit model. I imagine the return on investment might manifest as a hybrid of traditional donor benefits and cash. Providing preferential treatment to encourage people to remain emotionally invested in the organization in addition to paying out cash dividends will probably help keep them financially invested in the company.

Hopefully the limitation on the investing level will insulate arts companies from demands to operate themselves to maximize investor return. Even if the cap is set at $10,000, people aren’t going to be getting immense returns enriching their bank accounts (at least not for a few years). Who knows, perhaps a company will realize so much success thanks to this, they will grow to the point the will be subject to regular S.E.C. investment rules.

Now that this form of investment looks to pass the hurdle of legislation, how long before the arts community will pass the mental hurdle of considering anyone who uses it to finance their operations as selling out their purity and ideals?

Pools And Pre-Schools And Theatres, Oh My!

November 30, 2011 by Joe Patti

Those who have been reading for a number of years may recall that I have been on an advisory committee for the performing arts portion of a community center the Salvation Army is building with the bequest of Joan Kroc. I thought it was only a year ago, but it has actually been over two years since I attended the ground breaking ceremony for the center. Today I had the opportunity to tour the facility before its official opening just after the new year. I had been looking at a lot of plans so it was gratifying to walk through the actual spaces and see elements that I suggested they add.

With the official opening nearly two months away, there is still some work being done. Enough of it was complete that we had to take a circuitous route around the complex and peer through windows into rooms that had been completed and were awaiting final inspection.

Just by way of comparison, here is the front of Kroc Center Hawaii now versus the empty fields in the pictures I took at the ground breaking.

You can take a look at their website for all the programs they will offer which includes a pre-school, after school programs and memberships to their athletic facilities. What I am sure families will really love is the POOLS!

Of course, the part I was most interested in was the theatre space. If you can believe it, I was actually pushing for a venue that was more like my own to provide an alternative rental facility for all those people I have to turn away. There is nothing else really on my side of the county and this is where all the population growth is. As much as I am interested in the theatre portion, I feel the entire project will be a real benefit to the community.

However, the Salvation Army wanted a more multi-purpose space to serve their worship services and provide the opportunity for weddings, banquet assemblies, conference trainings, etc as a supplement to their ballrooms. So there are some nice permanent seating areas.

And then a wide area for temporary seating, tables, etc, leading up to a low stage. They had some pretty nifty state of the art technology and a beautiful sound system which made me a little jealous.

Being the arts administration geek that I am, I was already mentally writing procedures and policies to suggest to whomever they hire to run the place. I suspect that even though the venue lacks many of the features my theatre possesses, they will see a level of demand that will force them to decide between rentals and their own programs.

Info You Can Use: Age Related Discounts May Be Illegal

November 22, 2011 by Joe Patti

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

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

Now there is some cause for rethinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience Engagement-Careful What You Wish For

November 14, 2011 by Joe Patti

One of the biggest topics of discussion these days is about engaging audiences. Often during these discussions, people talk about the way things used to be when audiences weren’t expected to sit passively in a dark theatre with the suggestion that maybe things need to move back in that direction.

I came across a link to a very interesting book on the subject, The Making of American Audiences by Richard Butsch. Last week, someone linked to the chapter on the decline of audience sovereignty (I apologize for not noting who.) What parts are online made for a very interesting read.

I backed up to the earlier chapters about the rowdy working class “b’hoys” who were very engaged, moreso than we might like. They would get up on stage with the actors at times and chase each other around. They would make actors repeat sections of the performance that they liked, often dozens of times, before they allowed the show to continue. If they didn’t like something the actor or manager did, they would call them out on stage for an explanation and apology. Edmund Kean refused to perform in Boston when audiences were small. When he returned four years later, people remembered the slight and audiences in New York rioted both inside and outside the theatre. He was met with the same reception in Boston a month later.

Imagine audiences that were so invested in theatre that people in one city were offended on behalf of another four years later.

The relationship between audience and performers wasn’t always so destructive. Some greenhorns, “green’uns”, believed so strongly in the reality of the performance they might climb on stage and offer money to characters suffering destitution. The b’hoys would attend performances regularly and were knowledgeable about the different works and familiar with the actors of the companies. While they might challenge an actor’s interpretation of Shakespeare when it differed from their own, they would also provide prompting when a line was forgotten out of a desire to see that the show went off well for the newer attendees. There could be a strong sense of ownership and rapport with the actors who appreciated the interactions.

However, in time, the actors became adept at managing the interactions with the audience, taking some of their control away. The b’hoys in turn became so invested in their favorite actors, they began to demand respectful treatment from the audience on their behalf, thereby ceding some of their ability to make demands on the performance.

Despite whatever control the working classes were exerting over their fellows, it was still too vulgar for the wealthier gentry classes. They began to move to theaters frequented by better classes of people and then abandoned theatre entirely in favor of opera. Respectable people did not go to the theatre.

According to Butsch, the focus was about opera as a place where respectable people gathered moving away from attending a performance because of a star. The orthodoxy of class was enforced by the dress code. Working class folks could go to some of the better theatres, but the requirement of kid gloves, good clothes and a clean shave helped to exclude them. “The introduction of reserved seating also made the exclusion of undesirables more manageable.”

Later chapters chart the shift of arts attendance away from being a male pursuit to one associated with the female gender.

It was very interesting to read about how our current attendance environment gradually developed. There was certainly a separation of the wealthy elites and the working class. However, even the working class had its own insider groups who were in the know and enforced certain expectations of behavior and knowledge upon those who were new to their community.

Really, this is a function of human nature and not specific to the arts. Not long ago IT departments were the source of frequent jokes because of their stereotypical disdain for those who hadn’t used computers enough to know how to troubleshoot simple problems. Now that people have more technology experience and there isn’t a need to enter arcane commands at a DOS prompt, that stereotype isn’t as prevalent. I think that is the state people in the arts are aspiring to when they talk about engaging audiences–getting them involved and familiar enough with an arts experience to dispel some of the negative stereotypes.

My “careful what you wish for” title to this entry doesn’t really anticipate a return to those wild and wooly times when performers had to dodge projectiles. It may only just feel like you are inviting that sort of chaos as you approach the process of audience engagement. It may result in the 21st century equivalent of calling the manager or actor on stage to explain themselves. This currently happens with celebrities’ personal lives where they are expected to respond to allegations about what they were doing at certain times and places. It doesn’t happen as much with their professional choices because the general public doesn’t feel empowered enough to be invested in caring.

But what if they were taught that it was an area in which their involvement was valued…

Engagement Matters In All Aspects Of Your Life

November 1, 2011 by Joe Patti

I came across a number of articles/blog posts about employment this week and have seen a little bit of common thread through them related to arts and creativity.

The first was the results of a Gallup poll declaring Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in Their Job Those who are middle aged and highly educated are more likely to be disengaged than younger and older workers. Gallup sees this as a problem because:

“Because jobs are more complex and require employees to have higher levels of skills and knowledge, business should be concerned that the more highly educated workers are less engaged. The less engaged employees are with their work and their organization, the more likely they are to leave to an organization.”

The arts may be faced with the challenge of engaging their community, but employers are faced with the same issue in regard to their work force. While it is of small consolation to those trying to generate income for their organizations, this may mean it isn’t that the arts are not engaging of itself but that people are looking for more connected and meaningful experiences for their lives in general and no one is doing a real good job of fulfilling that need at the moment.

This week also saw the results of another survey, this one by the NEA. Their Artists and Arts Workers in the United States looked at the economic activity of artists and creatives in each of the states. This group includes a wide swath of people: architects, writers, designers, photographers, circus performers, show girls, animators, to name a few.

There wasn’t any information on job satisfaction and engagement. I was hoping there would be. There were some interesting observations about clusters of different types of artists. For example, architects and designers are more likely to be foreign born and tend to be the best paid. I was surprised to see that the most common college major for dancers was visual and performing arts. Likewise, I surprised to learn that “In Hawaii, art retailer employment concentrates at 6 times the rate as the national average.”

I offer this as something of an introduction to the third article. On the Economist website, I saw a possible sign of hope for those studying the arts and humanities – The return of artisanal employment.

“Harvard economist Larry Katz had an answer. He reckons that future “good” middle-class jobs will come from the re-emergence of artisans, or highly skilled people in each field. Two examples he mentioned: a contractor who installs beautiful kitchens and a thoughtful, engaging caregiver to the elderly. He reckons the critical thinking skills derived from a liberal arts education give people who do these jobs an edge. The labour market will reward this; the contractor who studied art history or the delightful caregiver with a background in theatre will thrive.”

As much as I am pleased by any suggestion of the value of arts education, I have to confess some initial skepticism at the suggestion that caregivers with theatre degrees will be much in demand. However, considering the size of the aging baby boomer population, it isn’t inconceivable that they will create a demand for much more actively engaged care that will require caregivers with creative skills.

The piece goes on to point out that as employees are no longer able to count on their companies to support them throughout a career, people need to become more self sufficient and dependent on the skills they cultivate for themselves.

“Actually the new way may offer more certainty because people look out for themselves, rather than being vulnerable to changes that impact their employer. The nature of work constantly evolves. The company man was a post-war construct. The self-sufficient artisan is actually more consistent with historical labour markets.”

Circling back to the Gallup poll I first mentioned, the artisanal worker would likely be more highly engaged in what they were doing compared to the current circumstances. I should also note that while I implied otherwise the Economist piece doesn’t connect this trend exclusively to those with creative backgrounds, but those with a high degree of pride in what they do in any field.

This morning on NPR, I heard a story about a doctor who, at 101 is still making the rounds on the labor and delivery floor in Augusta, GA. He has delivered three generations of some families. It made me think of my family doctor who was still making house calls to the elderly in the 1980s.

The possibility that those sort of values may begin to manifest themselves again fills me with some optimism. As much as people might like to return to those days, it isn’t going to happen, but as I said the values can still manifest themselves in contemporary terms. If you have been listening to some of the discussion about Steve Jobs in the wake of his death, apparently one of the values his father instilled in him was building all parts of something well, including the things people will never see. The implication was that he made the same demands of the design of Apple products.

Arts Instruction Is Critical…As Long As You Volunteer To Do It

October 31, 2011 by Joe Patti

Last week I came across a link to a story about Columbia University students who created a program to provide after school arts experiences in NYC. I absolutely applaud the efforts of these students for seeing the need and providing arts experiences to public school kids for the last seven years.

However, the title of the piece sheds some light on the underlying problem – “Students sub for arts teachers at underfunded MoHi school.”

Artists Reaching Out (ARO), the program created by the Columbia students is now teaching arts during the school day. While this is a positive step for the group since their reach has increased beyond those they can serve after school, it a poor reflection on the NYC Public School system that has replaced arts teachers with unpaid volunteers. This great learning experience for the Columbia students is marred a bit by the fact they won’t be able to use the experience as volunteers teaching the arts to find employment teaching the arts in NYC public schools.

I give credit to Reginald Higgins, the principal of P.S. 125 where the ARO program is teaching during school hours. He seems to be trying to lead his teachers toward integrating the arts into the subject instruction.

“It’s really hard for teachers to include dance, music, and theater in their lessons,” Higgins said. “It’s a lot easier when you have it built into your schedule and when you have individuals come in to help you learn ways to work with your students.”

The Columbia students make an effort to learn what topics will be taught in the coming weeks and customize their activities to complement the instruction.

Given the dichotomy of instruction which is especially marked in this school, the efforts of the Columbia students seems particularly valuable in the lives of the PS 125 students.

“PS 125 shares a building with two charter schools, which receive public funding but are privately managed.

“They’re surrounded by children in uniforms who have arts programs, have more resources, and that affects me,” said Emily Handsman, BC ’12, ARO co-coordinator, and head copy editor of The Eye.”

As I read this piece, I thought about an interview Sir Ken Robinson recently gave where he spoke about creativity not being an add on. As I went back to watch the video of the interview, Robinson’s made a comment about a literacy program in the UK where teachers had to provide a prescribed unit of instruction for an hour and how he felt there were those in the “government who hoped they would recommend a creativity hour…on a Friday…after lunch.”

That comment barely registered on my conscious mind at the time, but popped to the surface when I looked at the ARO website and noticed their program required “Volunteer commitment of 4 hours/week, Friday afternoons, off-campus.”

That is certainly nothing more than coincidence, of course, but as the article describes the experience of the ARO participants in the schools, there is much the same sense of the arts instruction being relegated the status of an add on and being viewed by some as an inconvenience.

“The ARO students are building the capacities of my teachers,” some of whom are “art-phobic,” he [Reginald Higgins] said, adding that teachers of older students were worried ARO lessons would take away from time to prepare for standardized tests.

Fox said that increased attention to standardized tests has nearly wiped out exposure to the arts in public schools, but that teachers’ concern was “definitely legitimate.” “We’re really, really aware we’re taking time out of the school day for this, so we want to be sure we’re helping the teachers and not placing an additional burden on them,” Handsman said.

It is a bit dispiriting that the ARO students view their activities as taking time away from more important efforts. Ken Robinson made a comment that made me realize just how un-student centered standardized testing is. He points out that instead of serving education as a guide for making changes, instruction serves the standardized test. He notes that no student gets up in the morning inspired to help increase the standardized test score rating of their school.

Students don’t become unemployable adults because someone looks at their 5th grade standardized test scores, they are unemployable because there was a lack of engagement in their learning. The tests have meaning to teachers, principals, superintendents, legislatures, governors, Congress and the President of the United State and fulfill their needs, but have no direct significance to the students whose educational lives they will purportedly help.

The 5 minute video of Ken Robinson’s interview is worth watching. He points out the “there is not enough time to do it right first time around, but time to do it over” status of the U.S. education system observing that most remedial programs are geared personally to the student after discovering what inspires them. It would be cheaper to have a more individualized focus on instruction than to pay multiple people to teach the same thing to a student more than once.

Organizational Culture–It’s People!!!!

October 18, 2011 by Joe Patti

Rosetta Thurman recently relinked back to an entry she did last year about organizational culture and the importance of not feeling like you are helpless in the face of it. Her basic premise is that organizational culture emerges from the practice of people and not from immutable laws written into the founding documents and the actions. (Though certainly, the initial culture establishes the precedent from which the organization develops.)

Her assertion that individuals in the organization are responsible for whether the culture changes or not struck a chord with me. I have been frustrated with organizational inertia both as a supervisor and subordinate in many places I have worked. While you can feel constrained by the (in)actions of your supervisor, the situation flows both ways. The entrenched reluctance of those you are trying to lead can cause just as much apathy as when the same characteristic is exhibited by one’s leaders.

I generally experience an optimism about a new hire starting work similar to what I feel when I start a new job myself. I am eager to see what opportunities may be available by virtue of the skills and knowledge the new person brings. Given that most people in the non-profit field are overqualified for the job they are doing, each new person represents a great deal of potential.

People look at taking a new job as an opportunity for a new start. Employers should approach the arrival of a new hire in a like manner. Admittedly, most of the time in the non-profit world a new hire represents the opportunity to clear the backlog of work piling up on your desk. But if you view a new person as a replacement cog, chances are that is how you are viewed as well, perhaps even by yourself. The arrival of a new person is a good time to work on changing that aspect of the corporate culture for everyone’s benefit.

I just hired a new assistant theatre manager in September so these dynamics are at the forefront of my mind. Those who previously held the position provided different benefits to the theatre. The current person is in the position to either maintain or improve upon the gains of her predecessors. Having been in the job for about 45 days, she has enough understanding of the organization to start making suggested improvements.

I will confess that I reflexively feel a twinge of resistance when she starts a sentence with something like “I think that we should think about changing…” How could a new person dare to judge what we do! It is with some relief and then joy that I find that significant elements of her suggestions align with goals I am hoping to accomplish.

Granted, if you have done a good job during the interview process, this should be the result. However, I work for a state institution and the process seems oriented more toward CYA than hiring the best candidate. It is pleasing to realize you did hire the right person in spite of the process.

In any case, the most important factor in creating an environment where new endeavors are either encouraged or inhibited is the participation, or lack thereof, people.

But, of course, people have always been the most valuable ingredient.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/8Sp-VFBbjpE[/youtube]

Are We Being Nudged Toward Partnerships

October 17, 2011 by Joe Patti

I have started to wonder if there is going to be an increased emphasis on partnerships and perhaps even mergers in the non-profit arts. I often read about mergers by non-profits outside of the arts. Although the presenters consortium upon whose board I sit is in the middle of conducting a merger with a sister organization, I don’t hear about arts organizations doing it that often.

However, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation has recently announced a new granting program, Southern Exposure, which will support the presentation of artists from Central and South America. (By the way, you don’t have to be located in the Mid-Atlantic States to apply.)

Most of the program isn’t outside of what you might expect of such a program except that it will “support projects that are developed collaboratively by presenter consortia based in the United States and its territories and ensure that engagements take place in at least three different cities or towns.”

The Western State Arts Federation (WESTAF) used to have a similar program termed “hub grants” as part of its TourWest grant program up until a few years ago. From what I have heard (which may not be accurate) they discontinued it because of lack of wide spread participation. (We actually participated in a couple years.) But now that times are financially a little tighter, will arts organizations on a national level be more amenable to partnering?

But really, back to my original question of whether a trend might be developing in which organizations are encouraged to partner. One cause of my speculation is that this summer I saw a grant program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities for community colleges that required recipients to involve up to 12 other campuses.

Looking at the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation website, there are signs that they might be going in the direction of encouraging arts organizations to partner more often.

“Over the last five years, MAAF has built a core of program initiatives designed to address specific issues of regional arts support. The work of the Foundation has been focused on:
[…]
-Developing an infrastructure for touring and presenting
-Making connections beyond the region
-Developing partnerships
-Strengthening existing networks
[…]
-Exploring sub-regional initiatives and collaborations with subsets of MAAF state members
[…]
“

Now granted, the Southern Exposure initiative might have just fit their pre-existing efforts. Given that it does fit into their plans, if Southern Exposure proves successful, they may start to encourage similar collaborations more often.

Hawaii has an active presenting consortia (as do our brethren in the 49th, Alaska) so we are thrilled because this program plays to our strength. Plus, there is a project involving a group from South America we have been kicking around for a couple years. I will be the first to admit, this sort of cooperation isn’t easy to arrange and manage. It helps to have a little incentive. It would be great to see other groups adopt this practice. (Especially if you want to bring me out to consult with you! 😉 )

Arts For What They Are, As Opposed To What They Are Opposed To

October 5, 2011 by Joe Patti

Back in April, Peter Linett posted about the development of arts organizations during the 50s and 60s, commenting:

This was a negative identity, premised on oppositions rather than intrinsic attributes. The arts were non-commercial, non-profit, “high” culture as distinct from “low.” It’s almost as if the purpose of the arts, as that category came to be defined, was to be an antidote to the rest of culture: civilized because everything else was increasingly uncivil; elegant and “serious” because everything else was coarse and frivolous; formal because everything else seemed to be coming loose.

This oppositional approach has actually brought about some pretty vibrant works as artists rebel against what their contemporaries and those who preceded them do. This is what a lot of marketing and advertising efforts base their appeal to us on- that what one company offers is better than the other options. It may be related to your self-identity or making your life better/easier for an economic price.

Somewhere along the line, arts and culture got out flanked as the appealing alternative. For a long time it was holding its own against radio and television. Other alternatives developed or perhaps there was a shift in what people were looking for an alternative to. The question of “what exciting thing can I do tonight,” may be been replaced with “my life is so busy, what can I do tonight that doesn’t require me to get back in my car.”

Since it is likely that people’s criteria about what constitutes an interesting alternative is likely to shift, and shift rather often, Linett’s suggestion about presenting the intrinsic value of the arts for its own sake makes sense.

Right now the big push is to engage with audiences. If successful, these efforts should result in a much more positive and constructive relationship with audiences. But lets face it, everyone is pretty much scrambling to engage with audiences for the purpose of shifting choices toward them over someone/thing else. The race is to offer better engagement than the next guy and engage the socks off audiences until they don’t know what to do with all the engagement they are getting thrown at them. And god knows, thanks to the support of your board, you have the resources to pull it off and make everyone else’s efforts look puny by comparison.

C’mon, admit it, that is the internal conversation you are having. You have to meet payroll after all, so while part of you is sincere in your efforts, part of you is calculating the value of engagement efforts as a tool for attracting people to you in some manner.

I suspect in spite of any self interested element, individuals will come to value the arts for themselves thanks to the changes organizations make. I also suspect that arts and cultural organizations will come to enjoy providing engagement activities for their own sake and not as a means to secure grant funding or event attendance. In the best of all worlds, there will be a greater alignment between audiences and artists as the former comes to better understand the value of the arts as the artist does and artists no longer see one of their primary roles as interpreter/explainer.

Please don’t take this to mean that I think audience members don’t possess a deep appreciation for the value of the arts. Since engagement programs of necessity need to provide audiences with a different perspective on the arts experience and greater permission to be involved and understand, I anticipate that audiences will gain insights they did not possess before and artists will come to realize they can trust audiences to be smart enough to understand on their own.

Essentially, I am extending the idea of brains rather than butts in the seats toward an optimistic conclusion. Love and understanding can be ours if arts people can get past the idea that they are the arbiters of understanding. Of course, if arts people are going to cede this control, audiences have to embrace the opportunity and make an effort to understand. Good news is, a lot of them already are.

Better ROI Than Thou

September 28, 2011 by Joe Patti

The Los Angeles Times has a video of the change over process between the LA Opera productions of Cosi fan Tutte and Eugene Onegin.

My first reaction was how cool the magic of theatre is that such transformations can take place in a short time to generate the illusion of two different places.

Then I started to think about the cost and whether it was all sustainable. They only repeat the same production once so this change over requiring 45 stage hands happens about 4 times a week- Onegin on Saturday, Cosi on Sunday, Cosi on Wednesday, Onegin on Thursday, Cosi on Saturday, Onegin on Sunday. Then I look at the design elements and wonder if they really need to have 800 gallons of water on stage for one act only to drain it and expose the Plexiglas for the second act.

Next I looked at the prices, $270 for orchestra down to $40 for an unobstructed view in the back of the balcony ($20 for an obstructed view). If they cut back on some of the design elements and changed the production schedule, they could charge less and be more accessible, right?

But you know, while I was thinking all this, I was also feeling a little torn. I felt like my grandmother who, having grown up during the Depression, would scowl at us for not washing aluminum foil and Ziploc bags so they could be used again. Was the only reason I was having critical thoughts like this because that is how those of we in the non-profit arts are brought up to think?

Opera is all about spectacle and that is what people expect from the experience. People complain about the high cost of rock concerts and Broadway shows, but there are few people arguing they have to lower the prices to make the shows more accessible. Usually the accessibility argument for rock concerts is about keeping companies from buying up huge blocks of tickets, not that the original price was too much. People complained that the Broadway previews of Spiderman were so expensive, but people kept buying and buying.

So if the demand is there, what business is it of mine whether the LA Opera is operating in a way that requires them to charge so much? The rotating schedule might actually make better financial sense for them after all. I worked at a theatre in a community with a high tourist rate where the rotating repertory schedule actually helped increase their audiences.

Yet, while it does have significant private support, Broadway shows and rock concerts don’t depend on public support the way non-profits like the LA Opera does. So the question is, do we in the arts mount bold productions that employ technology cleverly to bring our audiences delight. Or do we worry that people wanting to reduce the funding the arts receive will use groups like the LA Opera as an example of why the arts don’t need funding since they can afford to operate at such high standards.

Some of this fear comes from the hostile reception the idea of public funding for the arts receives. It is also reinforced by the practice of private funding sources. The big measure of not for profit effectiveness right now is low overhead. I can’t recall where, but I recently read a quote from an influential politician/business person who said if anything could be funded, it should be the arts because they generate such a great return on the investment.

While I am glad to hear this message repeated by people not working in the arts, the pressure to have low overhead and great results for the investment tends to create a mindset where an organization views themselves as more virtuous than a better funded one because they bring the arts to under served populations and children on a shoe string budget. Who needs hostile politicians when we are all too willing to cast a “better-ROI-than-thou” disapproving eye on each other?

That’s all well and good, but this attitude is what also contributes to few people taking an arts career seriously because no one gets well paid.

Is In-n-Out Burger more virtuous than Wendy’s because they have a smaller, leaner operation? Sure, for profits and non profits have different reasons for operating, but few people praise a commercial enterprise as being virtuous because their cost controls have kept them small.

So does it matter how much the LA Opera is spending?

I Liked Your Ideas Better When We Were Being Repressed

September 20, 2011 by Joe Patti

A recent book review gave a fascinating look at how the value of ideas has declined in post-communist Czechoslovakia. In the wake of the Velvet Revolution, playwright Václav Havel became President of Czechoslovakia. He, along with other intellectuals and artists in Eastern Europe found themselves in governing roles as their countries transitioned away from communism.

And then they found themselves unwanted.

“The artistic and literary scene that flourished paradoxically under censorship and repression has died off. The public intellectual is, for the most part, no longer invited to the most important parties. Anna Porter writes, “Now that everyone can publish what they want, what is the role of the intellectuals?” and she can’t find an answer. It’s no longer the police state that’s attacking the intelligentsia — it’s disinterest and boredom. It’s distraction. It’s a trade off. And it’s one that we should be able to acknowledge and be allowed to mourn. When the historian Timothy Garton Ash visited Poland in the 1980s, he admitted to an envy for the environment there. “Here is a place where people care, passionately, about ideas.” The people of Central Europe traded in ideas for groceries and for not being beaten to death by the police. No one could possibly blame them, but at the same time, Havel and the other leaders had no sense of the true cost of democracy.”

There have been many books written about the decline of the public intellectual in the United States so it is pretty futile for me to attempt to address the causes here. It bears noting that the decline in the U.S. didn’t proceed from a point of censorship and repression. Back in the 1950s, artists like Salvador Dali and Random House publisher Bennett Cerf appeared on television game shows like “What’s My Line?” Now you would be hard pressed to name a visual artist or publisher with the same wide spread name recognition.

It clearly isn’t a matter of ideas are only important and valued when you are told you can’t have them. I do think there may be some truth in the question of the value of the value of intellectuals and artists in a time when anyone can publish or create. At one time people had many demands on their attention with farming and family but big ideas were still valued. Now while people have many draws on their attention, less of it is as compelling as seeing to your daily survival (or avoiding censorship/dealing with repression). With the leisure to decide what to focus on, you have the option to ignore big ideas that may take 30 minutes to process in favor of 30 different ideas that you can process in a minute each.

While the arts can have a role in emphasizing that big ideas matter and that we should invest the time to consider them, this isn’t a problem the arts community is going to be able to solve itself because the decline is a result of greater societal practice. The arts can deliver the message, but every strata of society has to value it– which may require valuing the arts as a valid messenger.

I don’t have any ready answers. I just offer this as something to think about– if you can allow it the time for proper consideration.

Info You Can Use: Dynamic Pricing That Doesn’t Alienate

September 13, 2011 by Joe Patti

Last week I was reading about some interesting ticketing structures being used by theatre groups in Chicago. Theatre Wit offers what is described as a Netflix subscription model where they provide unlimited admission to their shows for a monthly fee of $36. They also employ dynamic pricing with their single ticket sales and increase the cost based on demand.

What really intrigued me was the model being used by Filament Theatre Ensemble. Instead of selling tickets, they ask people to sponsor an element of the production as the price of their admission.

“In lieu of tickets, customers can sponsor costumes, props, and set pieces, finance two hours of rehearsal space, or pay for the production’s licensing fees. Big-ticket items such as the rent for the performance venue are broken into small portions and spread over the entire run of the show, so that all of items on the website are priced between 10 and 35 dollars. “

What I really loved about this system is that there is dynamic pricing by default but it is presented in a very positive and constructive way. It also provides a degree of transparency about the costs of mounting a production to audiences and gets them invested.

“Seeing as there is a limited number of items available in each pricing category, dynamic pricing is built into the system: once all of the 10–15-dollar items have been sold, patrons have to purchase something in the 15–20-dollar range if they want to see the show. However, contrary to Filament’s expectations, the lowest priced items aren’t the ones that sell first. Patrons are willing to spend a few extra dollars to sponsor something they can identify with—a cool prop, or a distinctive costume—rather than paying a smaller amount that will go towards office supplies…

However, from the company’s perspective it is more important that sponsoring a particular item, instead of purchasing a ticket, increases the audience’s emotional connection with the performance and with the company. Ritchey recounts, “A lot of times people would come up to us after the show and say I got you guys an hour of rehearsal space or I got that costume.” People get excited about what they have contributed to the evening’s performance. In addition to that, viewing all of the elements that go into a production online gives the audience a sneak preview of the show. Having seen all of the costumes and props in advance, the audience immediately feels connected to the production when they recognize those items on stage.”

According to the article, there are still a few issues to work out. Specifically, arranging for admission of people who come to the door to “purchase tickets.” I am guessing given this unorthodox approach, it may be difficult to explain the remaining sponsorship opportunities to those who show up at 5 minutes to curtain and just want to get in rather than choose between a ream of paper and audition space.

I find stories about alternative approaches like these and the one Andrew McIntyre related about Toronto’s Passe Muraille’s Buzz Festival very encouraging. Slowly arts organizations are beginning to discover valid approaches to audience engagement and keeping themselves viable through experimentation.

Will Buffet Family Foundation Influence Other Funders?

September 12, 2011 by Joe Patti

Non-Profit Quarterly linked to an interview in Fast Company in which Warren Buffet’s grandson talks about his approach to philanthropy as he takes up the reins of the family foundation.

As I read the interview, I vacillated between mild dread where I hoped no one else decided to adopt the approach and feeling that his approach was sensible and might provide leadership that would strengthen the general non-profit infrastructure in the United States.

What made me most uneasy was his focus on quantity over quality.

“The first question, for instance, is “Assuming we are successful, how many people would we reach directly with the funding of this gift?” Proposals gets 3 points for affecting +1 million people, 2 for greater than 100,000, and 1 for less than 100,000. Those proposals with a less ambitious scope can secure a coveted spot on the portfolio team by being particularly unique or cost-efficient.”

While he does allow for funding of smaller efficient and effective organizations, I just wonder if that will get lost in the desire to report numbers served and therefore reinforce the idea that you have fudge numbers and always report success or lose funding.

Where this is coming from for him is wanting to get away from non-profits making emotional appeals and move toward discussing the complex factors which contribute to the problems the non-profit is trying to address.

“In the philanthropic world, the problem is the product, in the business world, the product is the solution.” says Buffett, who argues that NGOs are forced to “sell suffering.” The needless focus on sappy narratives often overlooks sophisticated solutions that can’t be easily marketed with a T-shirt-clad celebrity holding a small child.”

This is where I feel he is most sensible because he is determined to fund every step in the chain to addressing a problem, including the unsexy areas. But to do that, he wants the redundant organizations to either get out of the business, partner with other groups or refocus themselves.

“…rather than dolling out cash to independent, uncoordinated actors with the most heart-string-tugging story, they could take on an entire social problems (like food security or breast cancer) by systematically lining up nonprofits to tackle each part of the causal chain, from federal policy to victim resources.

“If you are an NGO, doing the exact same thing as another NGO, and that other NGO is doing better than you’re doing it, then you are in business for the wrong reason,” Buffett says in an exasperated rant against the individualist nature of charities. Overlapping operations, he says, not only waste money through redundant overhead, but keep brilliant minds occupied with logistical distractions that sap their potential impact.

“We will give you money to execute your mission,” Buffett says, “if you work together and identify the most cost-effective and successful ways to achieve that.”

Meanwhile, looking at the entire causal chain of a crisis is key to revealing missing links in the solution, such as political or logistical hurdles that are essential to success, but not appealing enough to raise dollars.”

Granted, the focus of the foundation he is leading is on agriculture, water and feeding school children rather than arts and culture. However, the practices of a Buffet family foundation is bound to have widespread influence with funders in other areas. It is possible that other foundations may use the same criteria.

Given that the question about whether there are too many arts organizations in existence has been a hot topic of late, it is conceivable that funders are already thinking along these lines.

So let me ask-

-how many arts organizations would seriously discuss merging or refocusing if a major funder told them they were redunant and less effective than another organization?

-how many might consider abandoning major activities that were redundant if the funder offered major support to expand in their areas of strength?

-would the arts in your community be more vibrant if there were groups that focused specifically on different niches within the chain? Such as:

-organization that handed advocacy for the arts with local government
-organization that focused on advocacy for the arts in education in conjunction with other advocacy groups
-organizations that purely perform
-organization that coordinates outreaches to schools by designing programs that emphasize the strengths of the performance and presenting groups

There are more functions that different groups might handle, of course, but this serves as a good example. You might look at this and think about how difficult it would be with all these tasks so decentralized, but think about how more schools would benefit if there was an organization that was making an effort to provide uniform coverage of your entire city/county. How much easier would it be for artists to make a living in the community if there was an organization that was hiring them to do outreaches in schools or connecting artists with students seeking instruction.

All this in an environment made conducive for these activities by groups who solely focused on influencing law and policy in government and school boards. Their advocacy is made credible by the existence of organizations who attract and employ strong performers and other organizations who develop exemplary education/outreach programs and train the artists to execute them effectively.

This approach may decentralize efforts and require a lot of cooperation between different groups, but does improve on the current situation where everyone does a little of everything with different degrees of success provided they have the funding and personnel. As Howard Buffet acknowledges, there is a lot of unsexy infrastructure that no one really wants to fund that is crucial to the success of non-profit efforts. What a boon it would be if someone would fund all those places at a level smart people would be willing to engage in the work.

Brains, Rather Than Butts, In The Seats

March 13, 2013September 6, 2011 by Joe Patti

Ever since it was announced back in July, I have been waiting for Arts MidWest to post their video from the talk given by Andrew McIntyre provocatively titled, Arts Marketing is Dead: Long Live The Audience. The video was posted last week (or at least they tweeted that it was posted then) so I got right to watching.

McIntyre is a founder of Morris Hargreaves McIntyre which has developed a system of audience segmentation being used in Europe and a number of the British Commonwealth nations. The talk, while an hour long, is broken up into segments itself so you can view parts of it and then easily return to it and continue if you can’t view it all in one sitting.

What McIntyre says is dead, or rather needs to be dead, is the underlying idea espoused by Danny Newman in Subscribe Now that vilified the single ticket buyer for not allowing the arts organization to illuminate their life. McIntyre says that while ticketing philosophy has changed, the underlying philosophy underpinning that idea remains. Most arts organizations view those who are not attending as having a deficiency in their cultural diet that their product can fulfill.

McIntyre says that the focus of most marketing is on people who are immediately loyal, not on those who haven’t been to a show in a number of years. The practice of cleaning a database doesn’t recognize that the cycle of attendance for most people is actually one that skips a couple years. He speaks of conducting focus groups with audience members who speak enthusiastically about the arts organization but whose previous attendance was four years prior. These people have a long history of being associated with the organization, it is just at 2-3 year intervals. According to McIntyre, these people are apparently just as likely to support an organization over the course of decades as someone who attends annually.

McIntyre doesn’t mention what an ideal period for retaining contact information with what appears to be former supporters might be. I suspect that it may be specific to each community based on various factors including the transient nature of the population. As he was talking about this, my first thought was that you should be clearing your mailing list of people who didn’t seem to want a relationship with you so you weren’t sending them unwanted mail.

That said, I basically use attendees from the previous 5 seasons as the basis of my annual mailing list. I occasionally get a call from people who are concerned that they didn’t know about a show because they know they are on our mailing list and have always gotten our brochure. But if we haven’t captured their name in the last five years either because they haven’t attended or made a purchase at the door when it wasn’t practical to collect their contact information, they eventually get excluded from our list.

McIntyre cautions against relying too much on technology noting that Facebook didn’t invent community and Twitter didn’t invent word of mouth. The arts are about connecting people with people so more direct and personal contact is needed to maintain your relationship. The typical practice has been push marketing where you push empty seats on the community rather than pull marketing where you try to engage people to become involved with you.

He makes some rather humorous observations about why audience development as a concept is on the way out. He says audience development has never been clearly defined as an organizational activity. For marketing it is a euphemism for marketing staff, for education people it is euphemism for outreach, for finance it is a euphemism for box office development and for artistic directors, it is a less objectionable term than marketing.

It has been about how many people you can get involved rather than how deeply you can get them involved. McIntyre says in the UK until recently audience development has been out going out to get people who don’t want to come. The task, however, is not to rescue stranded audiences. They are quite happy with the cultural experiences they have, thank you very much. It is the arts organizations who are stranded and so audience development is really about making the organizations relevant to audiences.

He is clear to point out that audience focus doesn’t mean audience led. Everything is still artistically lead. He gives the example of a theatre in Toronto, Pass Muraille, that has a program called the Buzz Festival where they have audiences view 10 minute segments of shows in development and then pass out surveys asking people to answer specific questions about whether the choices were working – “Did you believe the motivation/relationships of X characters in this moment?” By the time the full show reaches the stage, there is such a buzz and audiences have such an investment in the show, that they sell very well.

The playwrights and directors are still making the decisions, but they are getting the feedback they need to inform these decisions. McIntyre says that in the past this sort of engagement with the audience was viewed as dumbing down the product and so maintaining a high degree of isolation was sought. Audiences are more intelligent and creative than they are given credit for and don’t deserve this level of disdain.

McIntyre says we need to treat people as brains in seats, not butts in seats. (Erk, maybe I need to change the name of this blog. I can see how it is complicit in this mindset.)

It is a little too long to cover here, but in the 6th segment of the video, McIntyre covers the Seven Pillars of Audience Focus that they feel are embodied by those most successful at engaging with their audiences.

Among the changes McIntyre says that need to be made: An organization must be vision lead. It can’t exist only to make enough money to continue to exist. Organizations need to stop fearing audiences and feel the need for peer approval because it holds them back. Stop trying to build brand loyalty in favor of building brand equity where people feel they have a stake in the organization. Need to know more about our audiences than the average income people in their zip code. Everyone in the organization must be involved in the marketing. What each person does needs to grow the organization and its brand.

McIntyre talks about a self evaluation tool they developed so you can arrive at a score for your organization and then use it again multiple times to chart your progress. He says he is less interested in the score than in the discussion the score and test generate. I thought maybe it was online, but I couldn’t seem to find it on their website.

Fund Making Long Term Investment In Performing Arts Orgs

August 30, 2011 by Joe Patti

For a few years now people have been calling for foundations and other funders to provide more long term capital investment in non-profit organizations. The Social Velocity blog has an interview with Rebecca Thomas, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at the Nonprofit Finance Fund. (NFF) (h/t National Endowment for the Arts) The NonProfit Finance Fund is in the fourth year of a decade long effort to provide $1 million of what they term change capital in each of 10 performing arts organizations they selected.

One thing Thomas talks about is how many non-profits are mis-captialized in that they have sufficient capital, but that most of it is in the form of restricted funds. She touches upon this in a separate publication, Case for Change Capital in the Arts and Financial Reporting Done Right, which I have briefly looked at and hope to blog on in the near future.

The thing that caught my eye was her discussion of how capital and revenue are reported on non-profit financial reports.

One of the things we learned early on in this work is that changing the financial reporting—to separate capital flows from recurring revenue—would not be an easy sell, for understandable reasons. Executive directors are reluctant to take a chance presenting new formats to donors who don’t understand the technique, and many board members aren’t inclined to re-learn nonprofit accounting principles. Moreover, NFF’s suggested methodology is not required by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and auditors don’t always feel comfortable suggesting novel formats, even when they provide heightened clarity.

[…] suffice it to say that when capital and revenue are conflated, an organization’s reports do not present a realistic view of operating performance. Unintentionally misleading information can lead to poor planning and decision making by nonprofit leaders, boards and funders.

Longer term, it will take aggressive education and advocacy efforts to convince nonprofit executives, board members and funders of the value of producing transparent financial reports and audits that reveal business model economics separate from capital infusions. Nonprofits will need to be convinced that they won’t be penalized for producing statements that may, at times, show temporary weakness in operating results during a change or growth period.

Since NFF is in it for the long haul to help the 10 organizations in their pilot program institute substantial change, my guess is that they are trying to develop a way to effectively educate and communicate the validity of this different approach in financial reporting to boards and funders.

The first thing that came to mind when Thomas talks about mis-capitalization is how the Philadelphia Orchestra declared bankruptcy while possessing a substantial, but apparently restricted endowment. I couldn’t help but wonder if implementing the type of reporting discussed here would have made the real financial situation clearer earlier on.

I also wonder if they may not be the perfect candidate for using this reporting going forward. Even with the bankruptcy, they probably have the wherewithal to alter their accounting method where most arts organizations wouldn’t. Given their prominence, they could serve as an exemplar to non-profits, their boards and funders as to why these reporting methods should be adopted and properly understood.

One thing to note if you are hoping NFF’s pilot program becomes a trend, according to Thomas not all organizations are good candidates for change capital. They have to already possess strong management and self-evaluative processes which include data informed decision making.

Art=Lemons

August 16, 2011 by Joe Patti

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion wherein a group sails from the Philippines to California around the start of the 18th century. Not quite knowing how to get there, the crew is stricken by scurvy on the long voyage. I got to thinking about how these days you never really worry about how you are going to obtain vitamin C, but the lack of it could eventually result in your death.

It struck me that this was actually a good metaphor for the place artistic and cultural expression plays in society. We often talk about the power of the arts in a prescriptive sense. While it won’t really cure all ills, it does play an important part in our health as humans. Yet because we don’t experience a distinct sense of the benefits at every encounter, it is easy to discount its value in our lives.

I had some orange juice this weekend and while the cool tangy flavor was a nice counterpoint to the savory flavor of the sausage I was eating, I didn’t necessarily recognize any redemptive qualities. If not for the orange juice and health care lobbies which tout the healthy benefits of drinking orange juice, the idea that it might be bolstering my health wouldn’t enter my mind. Right now I am investing no thought about seeking more sources of vitamin C.

The same is likely true for most of people. Their opportunities for artistic and cultural expression and experiences are probably frequent enough that they don’t take much note of it. As the NEA has recently noted, these experiences are varied and often informal. Even if they enjoyed their last experience, they may not be actively seeking their next one. Because the arts lobby has weaker market penetration than the citrus growers, people may be unaware of the benefits the arts bring to their lives.

While a month without vitamin C begins to result in severe deterioration in health, the symptoms related to insufficient artistic and cultural experiences aren’t as clear as malaise and lethargy, formation of spots on the skin, spongy gums and loss of teeth. (Well I mean, those are my symptoms of arts withdrawal, but I am assuming not everyone has that experience.)

A year ago, Newsweek printed an article about how creativity was in decline. While the researchers who conducted the study discussed in the piece say the arts have no special claim to instilling creativity, they note there will be repercussions if the decline continues.

University of Chicago Professor Martha Nussbaum recently warned that neglecting the arts and humanities in favor of technical skills may threaten democracy. Whether you subscribe to that view or not, we often hear about how businesses value creativity as well as technical skill in their employees and are concerned with any potential declines.

The arts are important on an even more basic level than that. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake when people were surrounded by devastation, they came together and sang songs. The songs didn’t clear the rubble and rebuild what had fallen. The songs didn’t set bones and stop bleeding. But it did dull the physical, mental and emotional pain people felt until aid could arrive. The arts are not a cure all, but their expression brings people together and binds them in a common story that helps them relate and provide comfort as a group in a way they can’t as individuals.

Society may discount the value of the arts in their lives, but they weren’t asking the accountants to rally the public to raise funds to provide relief to Haiti or even Japan in the wake of their recent earthquake. It was the artists they looked to. Artists of various disciplines helped provide a focus for soliciting and delivering aid to people in need.

The accountants were no less important to the task of directing aid to disaster areas. Most of the artists who helped raise the money probably personally lack the skills to effectively process the proceeds. Neither the accountant or the artists are likely to be as adept as the Red Cross at delivering the services that are needed. Different groups contribute to the eventual success of the whole endeavor.

It is pretty much unthinkable that artists would refuse to perform. (In fact, recent article on the BBC reveals some musicians feel emotionally blackmailed into participating.) No one is ever faced with the full consequences of no artists supporting a cause. While I could speculate, I don’t think anyone can really fully predict the results of devaluing and diminishing the presence of artistic and cultural expressions.

In fact, for as much as we talk about them, I am not sure those of us in the arts completely understand the benefits people derive.

Examining Your Non Profit Career

August 10, 2011 by Joe Patti

Rosetta Thurman posted her 15 Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Nonprofit Career Many of her questions dealt with personal ambitions and what image you had of ideal situations.

The questions that engaged me the most though were numbers 11-14 which challenge you to look at the factors which are causing you to operate less than effectively.

“11. In which areas am I holding back in sharing my true gifts with my organization and community?
12. Am I making a real difference in my current role or position?
13. What’s really keeping me from deepening my level of commitment to my organization or cause?
14. What is the biggest opportunity I have in my nonprofit career right now that I’m not taking advantage of?”

Number 12 reflects a common sentiment that probably enters the minds of all people who work in non-profits. Probably especially those who work in the arts who may tend to wonder if their devotion to their art may be better applied focused on the ills which plague the world. Often when you are seeking funding, you are competing for money with the ills of the world so it is difficult to not wonder about such things.

But the other questions– holding back your gifts, not being fully committed, not availing oneself of opportunities– these are some real interesting questions. One of the first things I thought of whether these questions are different when pursuing a career in the non-profit sector versus the for profit sector.

If you have low self confidence then there may not be any difference. In either case you may not feel you are qualified enough or appreciated enough to have your abilities valued. You may think that others are more deserving of training or opportunities to work on career enhancing projects than you. Perhaps you don’t feel you get paid enough and so the business doesn’t deserve your full commitment of energy and talent.

But if you are more assured and confident and have a sincere commitment to your job and the work of your company, there are areas where there can be a real difference between non-profit and for profits. You may not invest yourself and your talents more because you are afraid you may be asked to do more without any additional compensation or even increase in scope of your authority.

This can easily be true in both the for profit and non-profit spheres, but I am specifically thinking about the reports of how many non-profit leaders were reticent about ever taking on the position of executive director perceiving it as a thankless job with little support and poor prospects for a work-life balance.

In terms of taking advantage of opportunities, even the most self-confident person may be reluctant to take advantage of professional development opportunities for fear that they are diverting resources away from the core purpose of the organization. The result is that some extraordinarily talented people may lack the training and guidance to become truly effective and never develop a network of contacts who can act as a support network and knowledge base. Even if concerns over the cost of attending conferences and seminars is never stated, an organizational culture of always economizing may make people feel guilty that time and money is being invested in them.

Meanwhile, an employee at a for profit is probably more likely to view the professional development opportunity as an investment by the company in their career and perhaps even something they deserve in return for their dedication to the business.

I would really be interested in seeing a survey done to learn if there is a large difference in the way non-profit and for profit employees approach employer sponsored professional development opportunities.

I am sure there are other reasons and motivations that factor into all these questions–and Rosetta Thurman is too. She is asking people to share their answers to at least one of these 15 questions on her blog. If you have something to say, by all means stop by.

Funding The In Between Places

July 27, 2011 by Joe Patti

Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas has been looking at how the National Endowment for the Arts distributed funds for its “Our Town” grant program. In the last three posts on the topic, he has been critical of the way the granting process is structured and executed, perceiving a surprising bias against rural communities given that it takes its name from Thornton Wilder’s play set in a rural location.

Scott’s initial criticism sort of deflated my sails when, by his criteria, the award to the Wallkill River School, Inc. in Orange County, NY where I grew up was not being made to a rural arts organization given the population of the county. I was excited to see that their project whose purpose is “To support the development of economic strategies for long-term, sustainable partnerships between the arts and agriculture in Orange County,” was funded.

I have to concede that the population has increased quite a bit since I was growing up and its psychological distance from New York City has diminished since then. (Though it still qualifies as “way upstate” in minds of NYC residents.)

I was also happy to see that the Trey McIntyre Project (TMP), headquartered in Boise, ID had gotten a grant. (Full disclosure, we will be presenting the dance company in Spring 2012.) Though it isn’t rural per se, Boise qualifies as fly over country in many people’s minds. I have found Trey McIntyre’s decision to locate there rather than NY, Chicago or L.A. to be commendable—and so has the population of Boise who treat them like celebrities. The group has made great efforts to expand the concept of a dance company’s place in the community by appearing anywhere and everywhere from flash mob like performances to dancing at the local NBA farm team games to creating their own art installation in a hotel room (forward to 3:30 to hear McIntyre talk about the installation)

I was also very happy to see a local burgeoning effort in support of Hawaiian culture was funded as well. I can probably devote an entry explaining how valuable this award is going to be in planting seeds for greater things.

All this being said, I felt Walters did a credible job in his entry today arguing that many elements of the application and review process placed rural arts organizations at a disadvantage.

As Walters acknowledge in his analysis on Monday, the NEA did make an attempt to enlist the participation of arts centers in rural areas and didn’t receive a very strong response. However, in reviewing the comments on his failed grant application, Walter notes that the criteria being used to evaluate his application wasn’t appropriate for the project he was proposing.

“When I consulted the NEA as to why my own “Our Town” grant was not funded, the notes from the review committee focused on excellence: WHO is going to be providing the art, and what are their credentials? Notice that my proposal was for a participatory arts program, and so the artists would be members of the community, not imported “professionals” from outside the community. Participatory arts, as the NEA knows from having recently published it own studies on the subject, is about enhancing the creativity of the citizenry. Credentials and press coverage are irrelevant.”

He also notes that since rural arts organizations don’t have large staffs, the three weeks notice they were given between being invited to apply and the deadline was barely enough time to compose a proposal. When they made it past the first stage, they were given only a month to assemble a complete proposal, an immense task given the length of the application and the limited staff with which to do it. These small staffs may also lack the experience and advisers to guide them in infusing the grants with the polish that granters like the NEA have come to expect.

I actually faced a similar situation here. A grant program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities specifically focused on community colleges was announced in June with a deadline in August. One of the things they are looking for is involving up to 12 other colleges in a partnership. So not only do you need to try to assemble a work group of professors and administrators on your own campus during the summer after everyone has scattered to the winds, you have to get buy in from the same nearly non-existent groups on other campuses as well!

Via the citation of a comment by Ian David Moss, Walters wonders if the NEA is suited and equipt to directly pursue its mandate of geographically diverse funding. He discards Moss’ idea of directing more funding to trusted partners in rural states and letting them make decisions in favor of asking the NEA to become more accountable by cultivating stronger relationships with organization that work closely with rural arts groups and making a better effort to recruit people with an understanding of rural arts operations to serve on grant review panels.

While I disagree with Walters’ criteria about what constitutes rural, I am generally with him about the need to make the grant process more accessible to arts organizations in small communities. A decade ago, heck, even 5 years ago, I would have said the NEA faced an immense task trying to identify and reach out to rural organizations. But with email and social media, it is fairly easy to create focused email lists and Twitter feeds with which to deliver information to these groups.

It is just a matter of enlisting the rural arts service organizations that provide support to these groups to assist them in making them aware of the channels the NEA will be using to communicate with them. As Walters suggests, a time table and structure that recognizes both the limitations and different array of opportunities specific to rural arts organizations. Given how few organizations applied, even an increase of participation by a handful of groups will allow the NEA to claim a many fold percent growth in rural program support.

Info You Can Use: Variety of Thoughts On Dynamic Pricing

July 24, 2011July 20, 2011 by Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Cut Or To Keep Arts Classes

July 6, 2011 by Joe Patti

I am starting to wonder if the same forces that are seeing the arts disappear from K-12 schools are starting to encroach upon university level education to the same effect. There have been recent articles about eliminating the liberal arts degree. Given the amount of debt you get into going to a 4 year university, there is a concern about having a degree in practical fields like business or science one can translate directly into a job.

But I am seeing first hand that there are pressures to even retain arts classes. We just had an acting faculty member retire and I was talking to the chair of his division about when the ad to replace him might go out. Unfortunately, replacing him is not going to be automatic because there are a number of factors the upper level of administration considers before giving approval for a search.

The first is whether the class can pay for itself. It isn’t a surprise to anyone that instruction in the arts is more expensive than in other disciplines because the student – teacher ratio has to be smaller in order to be effective. One professor to 16-20 students instead of 30+. When it comes to arts classes then, general arts classes like survey world music are preferred over specialized classes like piano, voice, violin, etc because the ratio can be higher.

I should also mention for those who aren’t aware, my facility is located on community college campus so the price per credit is $95 versus $350 a credit at the system’s 4 year campus. It’s much more affordable for students to take classes here, but the college has to serve a lot of students to generate appropriate levels of revenue.

The decision to replace the acting teacher won’t entirely be made based on money. The fact is, many students who take performing arts classes are apparently not graduating. No one is suggesting there is causation in that. It looks like the type of student that are taking the courses aren’t persisting.

The courses aren’t filling up until nearly the end of the registration period which means that many in the classes may not have the organizational skills and motivation to be there that other students in the college have. Whether they have procrastinated their decision to enroll or just recently moved to the area, they may be in the class because their first preferences were full. They may not be fully invested or even able to commit to pursuing a course of study through graduation due to personal motivation or external forces.

Whatever the reason, if you are an administrator making a decision about what courses to offer and you notice that even if people have done well in a course, they aren’t likely to persist in their studies, it may not be entirely unreasonable to ponder if resources were better directed.

Some of the solutions mentioned in my conversation with the chair were not unlike those suggested for the arts in general. One was having the value of the class to students redefined in the course listings–what skills are you going to come away with, what requirements does this course fulfill, etc. Just as we talk about the value of the arts to communities.

Another was basically just increasing word of mouth advertising. Essentially talking to the counselors about steering students toward the classes earlier in the enrollment process. One potentially promising development is that the college had made orientation mandatory for all students recently and the process starts with an hour long presentation in the theatre. Since many attendees have appointments with counselors soon after their orientation, hopefully the presentation with its goofy skit will result in students being more inclined to want to register for arts classes.

At the very least, I hope the orientation sessions will end my experience where alumni tell me they graduated from the college and didn’t know there was a theatre.

This situation has been the cause of a lot of thought for me. It is easy to damn people who make decisions to cut the arts purely on the basis of return on investment. Saying a course in the arts can’t help a person get a good job will raise a chorus of howls as people reach for studies that may show otherwise. For a lot of college arts programs across the country, this may be the prime criteria for cutting or keeping.

I have a harder time finding an argument against a fairly loose definition of success like is the person likely to graduate. Talking about the value of the arts to bolster creativity and learning capacity will fall flat against that.

These students aren’t the ones getting caught up in the arts lifestyle devoting all their time to their art rather than attending to their other classes. Those guys are familiar to me because they are always hanging around the theatre. I know which ones have started getting Ds and Fs. Which ones are doing well. Which ones had to remove themselves from that life so they could turn their lives around. Which succeeded and graduated and which failed.

There are a whole bunch of others that I never really see until they get up on stage for the final performances at the end of the semester and perform before an audience for the first time in their lives. No matter what their motivation for registering for the class in the first place, they are up there now demonstrating what they have learned. If they aren’t graduating, I hope they are at least taking something constructive away from the experience.

Can You Buy At The Price You Are Selling?

June 28, 2011 by Joe Patti

I often have arts professionals in their late 30s-early 40s ask me for comp tickets or ask me to request comps on their behalf at another performance space. Their whole decision to attend is based on whether they can get the comps. Since the ticket prices have been in the $10-$30 range and some of these people have stable incomes, on a couple occasions I have opined that this sort of request is to be expected when you are a poor college student, but didn’t they think that at this stage in their career and level of success it wasn’t time to start paying for tickets and free up those comps for starving college students.

This post isn’t about deadbeat mid-career artists who should have long ago started attending shows to support the arts and not because they get comps. As fun as ranting on the subject might be, I am pretty much done now.

I started with that little gripe to catch attention and segue into my real topic of wondering how many artists actually can’t afford to attend/buy the sort of art for which they are being paid. The thought occurred to me as I was wandering through the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art and I saw a couple notations about some of the artists owning pieces by other notable artists. I wondered if that were still the case. More to the point, are artists, who sell one of their pieces for a certain price, buying the works of other artists at comparable prices. If not, is it because of an unwillingness to do so or because they can not afford to do so.

Following the latter train of thought, it isn’t news that people in the arts don’t get paid very well–especially those producing the art. (Drew McManus’ recent Compensation Reports illustrate this for orchestras.) I am sure some people are eager to liken artists to third world sweatshop workers who could never afford to buy the clothing they make, but I am pretty sure things aren’t that bad. Many performing artists can probably afford to see a couple shows at the level people are paying to see them perform, but perhaps not as many as they might like or would be helpful toward advancing their craft.

I have no idea where visual artists stand in this regard. My guess is that for the time it takes to create a piece, many probably make below minimum wage and have many mundane bills to pay before they can think about acquiring works of their own. But honestly, I have no idea about the art acquisition statistics for visual artists. Does anyone have any insight or links to research on this matter?

Actually, while I am thinking about it… I have seen a lot of surveys being done about engaging audiences, marketing to audiences, measuring how involved the general public is in the arts (and the need to redefine what activities count as engagement), and even the SNAAP survey which tracks the “lives and careers of arts graduates.” But as far as I know, no one has really surveyed artists to see how involved they are in attending/purchasing the work of others.

I think it would be especially interesting to see the results in terms of cross-disciplines– how often do theatre people attendance dance, how often to dancers go to museums, how often do sculptors go to the symphony? I would also be interested to find out if that changes as a person gets older and advanced in their careers. Do arts people only go to see stuff from other disciplines when they are young and poor and their friends are doing a thing in an abandoned warehouse or do they continue throughout their lives and consume a wider variety?

There would probably be elements of the results that were satisfying as well as some that were depressing. In any case, they could be used to mobilize action. At the last National Performing Arts Convention, people had so many ideas about what to do but were paralyzed about how to do it. Maybe the first, best and simplest step would be to look at the results of a cross-discipline survey mobilize a grassroots support effort by either saying, “Hey, you guys don’t support each other enough in your communities, get out there and see stuff,” or “You guys are really supportive of each other. Now we are are going to train you to advocate to your neighbors for your disciplines and those of your colleagues of the other disciplines. We succeed when we all stand together.”

It’s Yesterday Once More

June 27, 2011 by Joe Patti

Tip of the hat to Don Hall (aka Angry White Guy in Chicago) for linking to the Everything Is A Remix web series, some thing of a labor of love by NY film maker Kirby Ferguson. Parts One and Two came out a while back. Part Three just came out a week ago. The last part is due out this fall.

As I have been thinking about intellectual property rights recently, the series struck a chord with me. As you might imagine, the premise of the series is that there are no original ideas. The first video makes that abundantly clear by examining music, especially that of Led Zeppelin, who didn’t make a lot of effort to change any elements of the songs they were appropriating and very little to credit the original artists either. The second video talks about movies like the Star Wars series and the Kill Bill movies and the influences they tapped.

In the third part, Ferguson starts to talk about how creativity and inspiration are based on the work of others, standing on the shoulders of giants, as Isaac Newton famously said in the 17th century. (Though Bernard of Chartres apparently referenced the metaphor in the 12th century.) His example that most startled me was noting that Xerox created a graphical interface computer with a mouse, desktop, pop up menus and other familiar features, Alto, in the 1970s. It was mostly used by Xerox and some universities and was never released for commercial use. Apple made improvements to the design and interface as well affordability and released the Lisa and Macintosh in the early 80s and that eventually morphed into the iPads people are running around with today.

There is actually a transcript and links to all the music and video Ferguson used for each video chapter, should one wish to purchase any of it.

One thing I appreciate about a lot of blogs and other online venues is that people often make an attempt to at least make a passing reference to the source of their information and the jumping off point for their posts. I feel a little bad for Xerox. Sure, they failed to really exploit the technology they developed for nearly a decade before Apple took off with the idea. Because of this their name gets lost in history if not for people like Ferguson. I am sure Apple probably would have faced a law suit if they had made a public nod in their direction.

Still, it is nice for people to acknowledge that they got their good ideas from you. The tracking data for this blog often shows people from universities reading for a long time. I often wonder if my ideas are making it into a paper–and if I am being credited. Or maybe someone just left their browser window minimized behind their chat window for a long time.

The discussion about intellectual property rights, etc is a pretty lengthy debate and even though I recently talked about the issue, I actually wanted to take another tack with this post and ask:

Are we in the arts standing on the shoulders of those who came before and moving ourselves to innovation?

Again, a subject of lengthy and long debate where the current thinking is probably leaning toward an answer in the negative.

But it strikes me that maybe things aren’t so bad as they seem. Or at least perhaps some of the steps that need to be taken may not be as intimidatingly far away as they seem. If, as Kirby Ferguson says, innovation doesn’t come mostly with a flash of divine insight but rather after an onerous road littered with failures and mistakes, then maybe it is just a matter of recognizing how the past is manifesting itself today. (Albeit probably requiring hard work and likely failures.)

I think I have mentioned before that when I was in grad school getting my MFA in Theatre Management, my class read Danny Newman’s Subscribe Now! was unworkable in current times when so much competed for people’s time and attention. He suggested having subscription parties where key people in the community would invite their friends over for tea and would help convince them to subscribe to your season.

Seems pretty difficult to replicate these days if you think about it in literal terms. But this is exactly what happens on different social media platforms and sites like Kickstarter. Key people in the community present your cause/organization to their friends and convince them to become involved. It is tougher to identify specific influential people than in the past when planning subscription parties. But for the same effort you invested in cultivating relationships with those people, you can disseminate information about your organization in a manner that convinces people to become interested and involved with your organization. They may not become as deeply invested as people did in the past, but you can potentially reach far more people than you did in the past.

I will grant that some innovation that moves past recasting the old in familiar terms will be required for the arts to successfully innovate for the future, but it doesn’t all have to be created nearly whole cloth from scratch.

(In the interests of correctly referencing things. The title of this blog is from a Carpenters song)

Looked Better On My Blog Anyway

June 15, 2011 by Joe Patti

I will be back from vacation soon, I promise you!

In the meantime, have a gander back in time once more. In 2005, the Wallace Foundation commissioned a study which came out, “Gifts of the Muse – Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts” Artsjournal had a week long discussion about the study.

I made a comment on the discussion which I ended up reposting on my blog because HTML links were forbidden at the time. I have to say, I still like the idea I expressed at the end of the post about community arts groups cooperating on a shared showcase space.

Pro-Am Divine Part Deux

June 7, 2011 by Joe Patti

Back in 2004 I followed up the entry I referenced yesterday with another one tracking how an organization of amateurs can find themselves pressured into professionalizing their operations to the point where good intentions suddenly accumulate some burdens that draw attention away from those core good intentions.

Pro-Am Divide

June 6, 2011 by Joe Patti

Today I harken back to a time when the discussion of Pro-Ams as a term had yet to really take off, but people had started to get a sense something was going on in this respect that was worth talking about. In this entry, I make a tongue in cheek assertion that mismanaging arts organizations is best left to the professionals.

Ford’s Fresh Angle On The Arts

May 11, 2011 by Joe Patti

One of the activities the Ford Foundation is engaging in as part of their celebration of 75 years is a series of forums focused on issues of social justice. The first of these, held on May 4 had an arts focus. I have been watching the videos of the sessions on the site and still have a few more to go but I wanted to reflect on what I have seen. The event utilized Cover It Live to aggregate the observations of the social media people who were present so you can review their record of the proceedings as well.

In the lunch time discussion between NEA chair Rocco Landesman and former NY Times journalist, Frank Rich, called “Roccing Out: A Lunch Conversation” (sorry, no direct link you will have to scroll down the page), they went over a number of issues, including Landesman’s now famous comments about supply of arts exceeding demand. What I found most interesting was Landesman’s discussion of his efforts to create a private-public partnership between the NEA and private foundations to better serve the arts constituencies.

I found myself wondering if the association would constrict private foundations’ vision toward that of the U.S. government since they are obviously an influential player or if the NEA’s vision would broaden to more encompass the myriad aims of the private funders. I could see the NEA funding possibly expanding as its chair goes before Congress to mention that influential foundation X was bringing Y amount to their partnership. Or it could backfire and Congress could decide it only proved there was plenty of private money out there. Though if GE and oil companies can make billions, not pay taxes and still receive subsidies, there has to be a way to successfully frame the argument.

Landesmann also discussed how he is trying to work with other departments of the federal government to get them to emphasize and use the arts in their programs. He described his efforts as being the coo-coo bird who lays his eggs in other bird’s nests for them to raise since they have more resources than he does. Two examples he used were aligning the arts with transportation projects and housing and urban development.

The other session I watched was “Sharing the Stage: Globalization and Cultural Might.” The thing that grabbed me was the discussion of how construction of arts and cultural centers were seen by countries as a symbol of having made it. Having such buildings were seen as conferring credibility as an accomplished, modern culture and society upon the country. The problem is that some countries haven’t thought about actually inhabiting the buildings with art.

Michael Kaiser of the Kennedy Center talks about traveling to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and walking around a magnificent art center located far from the population that has never really had any performances in its 15 years of existence. He mentioned another large facility being constructed in the same country where they have projected no operating costs because it will be run entirely by volunteers. Vishakha N. Desai, President of the Asia Society, mentioned that China has plans for building hundreds of museums, but when she asked the mayor of Shanghai what would be put in them, she was told they would figure that out.

The point they were making was that there was something of a misunderstanding in governments in whether the value in art resided in the buildings or the artists. There was some discussion, especially when they opened up the floor for questions and comments, about the importance of having places to exhibit and perform work as well as to train managers to properly empower and enable the work of artists.

My first reaction to this talk about the building bringing prestige was the thought that this is what comes of promoting the economic value of the arts. This came mostly as a result of thinking about all the money and resources that went into the construction. I soon realized though that what the governments really sought was not the tangible value, but to trumpet the intangible value of their country’s culture. They have world class facilities in which to feature world class artists, heavily represented by artists of their own country.

In the US we have been arguing that arts and culture are one of the things about our country that make it great and strengthen the national character. It is difficult to criticize a government who agrees with that and wants to invest huge amounts of money to draw world wide attention to that fact.

Except, of course, that the Field of Dream expectation that if you build it, the artists will come to inhabit the facility and bring life to it is somewhat erroneous. It takes some significant effort and planning to cultivate an artistic life for a facility. My strong suspicion is that the construction of these facilities didn’t involve a lot of input from artists who represented the type envisioned to perform/use the building and the facilities may not be suitable to their needs at all necessitating some immediate renovations.

Degree or Equivalent

May 9, 2011 by Joe Patti

The Americans for the Arts ArtsBlog had a contribution from Zack Hayhurst, a candidate for a Masters in Arts Administration at American University. His entry talks about the benefits an arts management degree confers as well as what it doesn’t.

One of the things he says it won’t do is be beneficial to those who already have an established arts management career.

“My own experience has been that those who come to the degree program with a few years of arts management experience under their belt, are likely left feeling under-challenged. The reason for this is not because what the programs teach is not valuable or correct, but because the perspective from which subjects are taught are often taught from an introductory perspective. This is fine for people like me; however, for someone who has worked in the field – who has dealt with boards, who has managed a strategic marketing plan – the academic instruction of these subjects might seem a little too, for lack of a better word, “academic.”’

His experience at American University may be quite different than what one might find at arts management programs in other places. I know at one time the Bolz Center at the University of Madison required people to have some professional experience before entering their program. From the bios of their current students, I assume that is still the case. They probably gear their instruction accordingly.

But something I have noticed fairly often these days is that arts management jobs are saying some sort of masters in arts or cultural management is a desirable qualification these days. In such a case, what is a person without such a degree to do? Often the position will mention equivalent experience as being acceptable, but I know many organizations, including my own, will put a lot more stock in the degree over the experience.

As a person with a masters in arts management I can say that a year of experience is probably more valuable than a year of instruction, though the instruction certainly shortened the learning curve in acquiring that experience. I suspect most people who have earned an arts management degree would say that more or less. So why is the degree valued so much more?

Well, it is much easier to quantify. With a degree, I know exactly what a job candidate was required to learn. I can’t know exactly what skills a person picked up in acquiring their experience. One person in a relatively unknown theatre in a Colorado might have taken a lot of initiative and performed the functions of many positions in the understaffed theatre and has an incredible depth of knowledge. Another person working in the same position title at Lincoln Center may have acquired fewer skills because they were never challenged to expand their role. How am I to know unless the person from Colorado does a super job of outlining this experience in a cover letter and resume? The applicant has to do a great job communicating and I have to commit to listening and reading between the lines carefully to get past the prestige of Lincoln Center.

But really, even if neither of these people worked at a Lincoln Center and I wasn’t familiar enough with any of the places on their resumes to know what was demanded of them, how do I choose between them? Maybe I don’t have to if someone else has a degree in arts administration and a little bit of practical experience. I have hired people on the basis of experience over degree and had to write a long justification pulling apart every applicable line on their resume to explain why it was just as good or better than a degree. Being relieved of this necessity can be a powerful incentive to favor a person with a degree. It may be fear of this situation that will drive people with respectable amount of experience to enter masters programs as they see more and more jobs listing a degree as a desired qualification.

The question is, will it be a boring, financially wasteful experience for these people, or will arts administration programs provide a sort of alternative track that Hayhurst alludes to? Perhaps more valuable to people with significant experience might be shorter certificate programs, that are not necessarily based in higher education, geared toward those of their status that can supplement their knowledge in areas where they are weaker. It would just be a matter of getting employers to recognize these as qualified certification of substantial ability.

Stuff To Ponder: Transparent Community Driven Grant Processes

May 2, 2011 by Joe Patti

The Hawaii Community Foundation just recently completed the first round of granting for their Island Innovation Fund. I was really very impressed by the way they went about their very transparent granting process. Instead of having a grant disappear into the bowels of the foundation offices, they got the community involved in the process of providing feedback and guidance at every step.

The blog for the local technology radio show, Bytemarks Cafe, did a good job last October of summarizing the approach they took.

On my preview, the proposal review was a 4 step process. The first step in the process is the Concept, where you submit your idea and any associated material, be it photos, video, documents or presentations. There is an open period for submittals and a deadline to meet.

Next the process enters into the Collaboration phase where proposal material is made public (public as in registered users of the site). The public has about 30 days to comment or ask questions. Applicants are able to respond to comments and make improvements to their Concept.

During the third phase, HCF personnel will review the revised Concept. Projects that best demonstrate the principles and goals of the Island Innovation Fund will be ask to submit a Proposal.

Finally in phase 4 the Omidyar Network and Hawaii Community Foundation staff will review and evaluate Proposals. The most compelling proposals get invited to present a 15 minute presentation to an independent panel of judges for final selection. This judging is open to the public. Winning proposals will be announced one week after the final presentations.

I listen to the radio show pretty regularly, but I must have missed the show where they originally discussed this because I would have definitely participated in the feedback portion of the concept phase. I think that is the best part of the entire program. Not only does it allow applicants to understand what the community needs are and adjust their application accordingly, but it also provides the Hawaii Community Foundation (HCF) with a better understanding of what the community needs from them.

It is something of a win-win for everyone. Even if the applicants aren’t proposing something that fits into the HCF or fund goals, they get valuable feedback about their concept should they wish to pursue it with another granting organization. Those who are invited to proceed, but don’t get funded also receive important feedback and I believe some will be allowed to reapply for the next round. Being able to walk away knowing how to make your proposal better and speak about it effectively is valuable in itself because you often don’t get any feedback in that vein from granting organizations.

In understanding what the community needs, HCF can begin to think about their own approaches and priorities, including assumptions about community needs they may have made. Perhaps some of the proposals didn’t adequately address how the specific submitter would effectively approach a need in the community. The need still remains and now HCF may be able to bring resources to bear having read the feedback on the community forums suggesting what considerations need to be made in effecting a solution.

I should also note that even the final presentations to the independent panel was conducted very publicly and was streamed live over the internet. The video may still be viewed on the Island Innovation Fund website.

Now in a bit of serendipity, Diane Ragsdale addressed the pursuit and funding of innovation in the arts on her blog today. She mentions that receiving funding for innovative work can actually destabilize an organization as they try to meet the heightened expectations that such recognition brings.

But she also notes that often the most innovative work is passed over in favor of more tame versions because real innovation risks failure by necessity:

“Finally, it’s perplexing and annoying to others in the arts sector when funders give ‘innovation grants’ to projects and organziations that are not, actually, innovative–particularly when one knows the projects that did NOT get funding. I’m not sure how this happens but I suspect it is in large part because ideas that are truly surprising, that may even defy written rules and conventions, are unlikely to make it all the way through the grantmaking process at most risk-averse foundations (in no small part because they make lawyers nervous).”

I am not going to claim that those awarding money from the Island Innovation Fund, even given their intriguing granting process, are any less risk averse than any other foundation out there. However, I would think that efforts toward innovation in the arts would benefit from a granting process like the one they conducted. The one benefit I hadn’t mentioned yet about this program is that even if one isn’t an applicant for the grant, just participating in the question and commenting phase can help a person refine their own nascent ideas and understand how better to execute them.

Mutant Business Models Are Coming! (Embrace Them Before They Embrace You)

April 27, 2011 by Joe Patti

Apropos to yesterday’s post about non-profit business models is a piece by Saul Kaplan on the Harvard Business Review discussing how every organization that offers some sort of service needs a business model regardless of whether you are a non-profit, NGO, government entity or for profit business.

If you have never thought about your organization’s business model but figure it is about time you did, you may found Kaplan’s comments about the mutability of business models a little disheartening.

“If you ask any ten people in your organization how it creates, delivers, and captures, will the answers even be close?

If not, it’s probably because, in the industrial era when business models seldom changed and everyone played the game by the same set of well-understood industry and sector rules, it wasn’t as important to be explicit about business models. Business models were safely assumed and taken for granted.

That won’t work in the 21st century when all bets are off. Business models don’t last as long as they used to. New players are rapidly emerging, enabled by disruptive technology, refusing to play by industrial era rules. Business model innovators aren’t constrained by existing business models. Business model innovation is becoming the new strategic imperative for all organization leaders.”

He goes on to talk about the need for new, hybrid business models that blur the existing lines. I take some comfort in the fact that business models are currently a hot topic of discussion among various arts administration blogs. It means we are staying current with trends rather than following far behind.

One thing in particular I took away from Kaplan’s post was the importance of keeping involved in the conversation about business models given that existing lines of separation between profit and non profit are likely to become less distinct.

“Perhaps the most important reason for developing common business model language across public, private, non-profit, and for-profit sectors is that transforming our important social systems (including education, health care, energy, and entrepreneurship) will require networked business models that cut across sectors. We need new hybrid models that don’t fit cleanly into today’s convenient sector buckets. We already see for-profit social enterprises, non-profits with for-profit divisions, and for-profit companies with social missions. Traditional sector lines are blurring. We’re going to see every imaginable permutation and will have to get comfortable with more experimentation and ambiguity.”

Wait, What Is This Guy Actually Talking About?

April 26, 2011 by Joe Patti

In the morning when I look at all the Twitter streams I follow, I often click interesting looking links and then come back to the web pages when I am done with all the new tweets. The result is often a long series of tabs on the Firefox browser and often I don’t quite know who suggested what story when I get around to reading it.

Since most of those I follow have an association with arts and culture, you might understand why I initially thought the blog post I was reading was on that subject. It wasn’t until I got to the sixth point that I had any inkling it was on another industry altogether and the eleventh before I was sure.

RULES FOR BUSINESS MODELS

* Tradition is not a business model. The past is no longer a reliable guide to future success.

* “Should” is not a business model. You can say that people “should” pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.

* “I want to” is not a business model. My entrepreneurial students often start with what they want to do. I tell them, no one — except possibly their mothers — gives a damn what they *want* to do.

* Virtue is not a business model. Just because you do good does not mean you deserve to be paid for it.

* Business models are not made of entitlements and emotions. They are made of hard economics. Money has no heart.

* Begging is not a business model. It’s lazy to think that foundations and contributions can solve news’ problems. There isn’t enough money there. (Foundation friend to provide figures here.)

* There is no free lunch. Government money comes with strings.

* No one cares what you spent. Arguing that news costs a lot is irrelevant to the market.

* The only thing that matters to the market is value. What is your service worth to the public?

* Value is determined by need. What problem do you solve?

These sentiments are actually about news delivery and found on Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog. For awhile there I thought an arts blogger was replicating Adam Thurman’s posting style on Mission Paradox. I had to go back to my Twitter account to try to figure out where the heck I got this link, finally discovering it was the Artful Manager, Andrew Taylor.

Honestly now, if I hadn’t alluded to the fact it wasn’t about non-profit arts and cultural organizations, would you have known it wasn’t? Every point made is a topic of conversation that has come up regarding the arts. Hopefully, they are conversations you have had at least with yourself, if not the staff and board of your organization.

The fact that news organizations are facing these same questions is of some comfort–at least we know the arts are not alone in the challenges being faced.

At the same time, the fact these questions can be asked of the news industry only serves to confirm their wider relevance. These are questions any business must ask. The arts are not special in this regard.

As much as I feel my practical side provides a good balance to my idealism, it is tough to think about the arts not being the exception. Every time I scroll up to re-read these points and see “Virtue is not a business model,” and “Business models are not made of entitlements and emotions,” there is a part of me that says, “Yes, but the arts are different.” In many respects this is true, but the arts in the U.S. operate in an environment where what is written above is also true to a great degree and must be acknowledged.

Rather than try to talk all of us out of our belief in the sublime experience the arts can bring to every day existence, I will merely stress the need to be mindful of the aforementioned truths and not allow our aforementioned belief in the power of the arts to dismiss the stark reality they represent.

Info You Can Use: CultureTrack Survey Results

March 28, 2012April 19, 2011 by Joe Patti

Welcome SoundNotion fans. Come in, take a look around while you are here.

I just got around to reviewing the results of the recent Culture Track Survey. As always with surveys, there were a couple interest tidbits to be gleaned. I looked at the Cultural Track report and then the longer research report. Both are pretty easy to read since the bulk of the pages consist of a graph and a few sentences reflecting on the findings.

One result that caught my eye was in regard to corporate sponsorship. I don’t often see audience perceptions surveyed on this subject.

: Perceptions of Corporate Sponsorship

If you are making an economic argument for the value of the arts, you should probably be pitching it to businesses as well as governments as a way to enlist corporate support both in your lobbying and fund raising efforts. Just be careful not to make the case so strongly that you start to encourage people to use your organization to charity-wash their reputation lest you become a little tainted by association.

The report talks about barriers to attendance, what motivates people to be subscribers, how influential social media is on the attendance decision (not as much as you might think, though growing). The finding that didn’t jibe with my experience at all was that people plan their attendance well in advance.

“Both visual and performing arts audiences have become significantly less spontaneous and are planning their attendance much farther in advance.

· Only 5% of 2011 respondents visit a museum or exhibition on the same day they make the decision to attend, compared to 17% in 2007.
· Just 3% of respondents attend a performing arts event on the same day of their decision, down from 9% in 2007.”

The only way I can reconcile these numbers is if these reflect planning only and not acting to purchase tickets. Even broken down by subgroups, both infrequent attendees and young seasoned omnivores are planning well ahead in the 50% range and a few days in advance in the 37% and 44% range, respectively. I suspect people may plan in advance, but purchase later.

If there is truth in this, then I am feeling a little more secure in how early I start to promote events. I have often wondered if I am wasting time and money by not just concentrating most of the efforts to the last 5 days before a performance. The results say being able to access information well in advance of an event is highly valued.

The research report had more detailed results about the survey. If you are particularly interested in specific data about the ways different groups are using social media and technology to learn about events, you may want to take the time to study the results (PDF pages 20-33, 37-41).

Some results not related to social media/technology that you may know about, but bear repeating-

-Watching and listening to the visual and performing arts often occurs outside the exhibition / performance hall

-Enjoyment, spending time with or supporting loved ones, and interest in programming play roles in decisions

-Cost, lack of interest, and inconvenience are all barriers to entry

-No one factor contributes to the subscription buying process more than others, but exclusive events are less important than other benefits (last bit is interesting to know-Joe)

-For those that visit cultural organizations less, the reduction is focused on cutting expenses rather than a loss of relevance

-Frequency of attendance is a better indicator than income in terms of determining likelihood of contributions

-On site information helps enrich visits to cultural organizations

One response that interested me was: “Respondents from cities were significantly more likely to indicate that their home city should be considered a cultural center.” I am intrigued by the idea that city dwellers more than suburban and rural residents place a high level of importance on being perceived as living in a cultural center. If you live in a rural area, you probably have priorities that don’t emphasize a cultural life. I guess the same is true of the suburban experience. Perhaps suburbanites value having their homes within easy commuting distance of work and great culture and don’t have a high expectation of a great cultural life in their town.

The Farmer and the Cowman (and Restaurateur) Can Be Friends

April 18, 2011 by Joe Patti

Last week we hosted a food sustainability conference sponsored by our culinary program. Sustainability and local food sources is a big deal in Hawaii because between 85%-90% of all our food is imported. If there was a cataclysmic event which prevented food from reaching the ports, there is only about 10 days of food available to feed the population.

I have seen a number of arts bloggers draw a connection between the slow food movement and the arts so I listened closely to what was said hoping to gain a little insight from the practices of other industries.

Since the conference was organized by a culinary program, they approached the subject from the view of how restaurants can source more of their food locally and sustainably. The panels consisted of farmers, ranchers and restaurant owners talking about some of their practices.

Culinary Convening — Farmers, Ranchers and Restaurateurs Convene

There were some inspiring examples of some farmers operating almost completely off the grid with a high degree of recycling. They farm tilapia, circulate the water through lettuce and other plants which help filter the water and send it back through to the fish. Because of a rain catchment system, they haven’t had to draw from the public water supply in many months. Some of the effluvia gets diverted to a nursery which includes fruit trees to provide fertilization. One of the chefs at the gathering said he managed to put a dinner together for a party thrown by the governor where all the ingredients were grown within 100 feet of each other by sourcing them at the farm.

What struck me as applicable to arts and cultural organizations is the stories of some of the mutually beneficial relationships restaurants have created with farmers and ranchers. Chef Roy Yamaguchi of the Roy’s restaurant group convinced a farmer who was just weeks away from closing down his farm to grow a mesclun mix and required all his restaurants to use it. This allowed the farmer to stay in business.

Another chef, Peter Merriman, said that early on he made the conscious choice not to try to guard his food sources. While it undermines his ability to lay exclusive claim to offering high quality ingredients, he recognizes he is helping to keep his suppliers in business by telling people where he gets his ingredients.

Chef Alan Wong, who was in attendance at the convening, has been a long time proponent of using local ingredients. He spoke about how he held a beef tasting at one of his restaurants as part of an effort to convince restaurateurs to support ranchers by buying local beef.

The tasting ended up solving a big problem the ranchers had. The high end restaurants would buy the prime cuts of beef and leave the ranchers with the rest on their hands. A person from a local restaurant chain at the tasting had the presence of mind to ask what was happening with the rest of the cow. Now that chain consumes 250,000 lbs of local beef a year. Because the ranchers can sell the whole cow, the price is lower for everyone and there is incentive to the ranchers expand their operations.

Every arts organization has a different operating environment so I hope people can find something analogous to their own situation in these examples. The most obvious one to me is the oft mentioned fact that the regional theatre movement was intended to employ artists locally and still can if people commit to creating an climate in which this can happen.

One of the ways might be to duplicate Alan Wong’s tasting and actively invite colleagues to see different artists, not with the intent of “selling” them as so many showcase performances do, but with the approach of highlighting and celebrating local resources in an attempt to keep and cultivate them. There is an entirely different ambiance present in the latter scenario versus the former and I suspect one would be far more receptive to the idea of employing someone because of it.

I have to imagine given current trends that there is some mileage to be gotten out of boasting that the casting of a show produced a smaller carbon footprint because no one flew/drove a long distance to New York or Chicago to hire a person and the person didn’t have to travel far to appear locally. Arts organizations can celebrate their fiscal prudence by noting that they don’t have to pay for housing and per diem as they do with “imported” artists because the person already lives nearby. Therefore, much of the ticket revenue is going back into the community as artists buy goods and pay their mortgage and taxes. Perhaps the artists can make a statement about how they appreciate how the deliberate cooperation between a handful of organizations has created an environment that provides enough opportunities to live locally and raise a family rather than hustle for jobs in the big city.

Another idea would be to grow a network in which to share productions. Some theatres already invest in productions together, sharing the development costs and planning to have the show appear in both places. However, some of the members of my consortium produce shows for their own audiences while suggesting the other members might be interested as well. In most cases, each producing organization is partnering with a local performance group to develop the show already and a cost sharing agreement is already in place. Acquiring additional bookings in other parts of the state is just an added benefit for both. Having other venues willing to present the show can also assist with grant writing to support the development of the production and support touring. I have had two shows I produced go on tour and I have hosted three that originated with consortium partners.

This sort of arrangement is easier when there is a longstanding relationship between organizations in place and they know they can trust that a quality product will be created when they commit themselves in the conceptual stage. I think that is the sort of relationship that has been developed between the restaurants and the farmers and ranchers. The restaurants know what they are going to get from the suppliers and the suppliers know they have dependable buyers for their products.

One of the other challenges restaurants said they faced with local beef is that grass fed beef tastes different than corn fed beef. A representative from Roy’s Restaurants talked about how she has had to deal with indignant customers who demand to know what the restaurant is trying to pull when they first eat the meat. She spoke about how Roy Yamaguchi decided to not only note that the beef was grass fed in the dish description, but also put a section in the menu that explained about the beef and what it was the restaurant was trying to accomplish.

This immediately sounded like the challenge arts organizations face when trying to introduce audiences to anything outside their experience. The advantage the beef has over the arts is that while both steak and certain segments of the arts have an elitist aura about them, there is a perception that being adventurous with food is a mark of distinction while sampling a new arts experience is either intimidating or the mark of a snob. Do the arts need their own version of Anthony Bourdain to incite exploration?

(By the way, the title of this entry is a nod to the musical Oklahoma!)