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Prepare For The Swarm

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Since I did a post on ideas that must go earlier this week, I thought it would be a good opportunity to draw attention to a document the Independent Sector put out on Nine Trends Affecting the Charitable Sector.

The document is only 6 pages long so it is a quick read, but the point that caught my attention was #4, “Swarms of individuals connecting with Institutions.”

Individuals will be more strongly aligned with causes and less to the organizations that advance them. As they become increasingly sophisticated at swarming, individuals will often sidestep organizations that are not equipped to partner with them. At home and abroad, swarms will direct their efforts at addressing market and government failures in new ways, with solutions that seek to either fill in the gaps where infrastructure is lacking or provide alternatives to existing services.

…Institutions will need to become agile in a variety of new ways: by listening deeply, responding in real time, providing platforms that enable and accelerate existing swarms, and by leading swarms themselves. In parallel, part of the sophistication that swarms may gain is a far greater ability to draw on institutional capabilities, which could be instrumental for sustaining their impact over time. Associations will face particularly strong pressure as technology makes it easier to connect with peers and access new information and resources with minimal overhead, both at a distance and in person.

As a result, the dominant culture of leadership across society will continue to gradually shift from central control towards broad episodic engagement; being adaptive, facilitative, transparent, and inspirational will be increasingly valued. Particularly in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, leaders will continue to use formal authority as an essential tool, but many will emerge whose power is drawn from informal influence.

While the Independent Sector document couches their predictions in terms that seem applicable to groups seeking change in social, legislative and public health areas, the same expectations may end up applied to the arts once people begin to realize success in these other arenas and begin to expand their ambitions.

The most obvious manifestation might be if professional-amateurs (Pro-Ams) wanting to share their work in a live interactive setting approach an existing arts institution looking for a venue at which to base their project and find that the organization is unable/unwilling to assist them. In that case, the Pro-Ams may develop an alternative method and bypass established entities.

Even though bloggers like myself often write about the arts field as if it is stuck in a rut and afraid of innovation, I actually feel that as a field we actually have a leg up on other types of organizations in the non-profit sector when it comes to being open to either helping someone realize their vision or partnering with them on a small scale to make it happen.

Maybe not on big stuff requiring major investment, but on things like experimental, site specific works in the local park (or parking garage).

The inflexible element will be one arts entities run into  perennially  – the spirit is willing, but the bank account is weak. The answer may be: “Yes, but next year when we can muster resources,” when the swarm members want to accomplish something with more immediacy.

There is no easy answer to that because you can’t just hold money aside on the off chance that someone is going to pop in with a proposal that matches what you can bring to the table. On the positive side, the swarm may be able to rally the necessary support for this one project.

The Independent Sector mentions the episodic nature of these efforts to mobilize so you wouldn’t be able to count on regular support, but the fact you were flexible enough to participate/partner may generate the informally based influence they talk about at the end there. That may be enough to allow you to solicit support from sources whose radar you had never been on before.

Who knows, maybe a local swarm will “direct their efforts at addressing market and government failures” in the arts.

Substantial Change Comes From Within

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Just Something I Was Trying

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A few weeks ago I posted about an orchestra in Bremen, Germany which is based out of an elementary school. The situation has been something both the students and musicians have found to be constructive and enjoyable. In addition, the partnership has helped improve the reputation of that part of town.

In reaction to this story, there were a few “we should do that here” type of comments made in a handful of places. Recently, I was pleased to learn that a somewhat similar program exists in Cleveland where some music students of the Cleveland Institute of Music live in a retirement home.

The arrangement was born out of a lack of housing at the Cleveland Institute but has grown into a more formalized program. Students from the institute perform for, and occasionally with, residents of the retirement home. The students take their meals and interact with the other residents. On the whole, the arrangement seems to have had a positive and somewhat therapeutic impact on the lives of the regular residents.

So this is great! Music students will gain a better understanding of potential audiences!

At least that was my initial reactions until I recognized, as we often joke/bemoan, residents of a retirement community are the main demographic attending symphony halls and chamber concerts.

While these students may potentially develop insights and skills for better interacting with potential audiences, the truth is arts students live, work and play with those on the lower end of the coveted “young people” age range in university dorms and apartment complexes for years at a time and don’t necessarily develop these skills.

To a greater or lesser extent, we all live among members of our target demographics, but it doesn’t guarantee we will learn to relate with these groups and talk about our work in a way that interests and engages them.

Perhaps part of what is required is to take a page from Bremen and Cleveland and just go out and practice in plain sight.

I say practice because a performance in the park, flash mob in a train station or shopping center can have enough formality associated with it to prevent people from approaching you lest they disturb you. While being a familiar figure frequently visible in the park or other common area, pausing and restarting your practicing, can incite some curiosity and conversation.

The years one is in school probably provide the best opportunities an artist has to understand how to present themselves and interact with their peers.

Operating within the context of an educational environment may give both the performer and the observer the most permission they will ever have to ask stupid questions and give awkward answers. In other words, both get to learn to talk about the arts.

There is a lot of conversation about the need to teach arts students to be entrepreneurs, but I am thinking an important part of that might be requiring students to spend X amount of time each month practicing their discipline outside of rehearsal studios and practice rooms in places like dorm quads, university center lounges, sidewalks, green spaces etc.

During this time, they should be departing from discipline and orthodoxy of the classroom to play along with music on a boombox, create an impromptu soundtrack for actors performing a scene, paint/sketch an interpretation of the music/dance/acting piece being performed.

You know, essentially embodying the cliched movie plot of the kid who has the skills to be great, but wastes their talent rebelling and involving themselves in some expression of pop culture.

Except this time, it is instructor approved effort in experimentation, collaboration and conversation.

After a few minutes of playing with an idea, they can turn to any spectators and ask “what do you think?”

That can be the start of a conversation that can gradually contribute to the development of both performer and spectator. If the spectator says, “I don’t know,” and the performers says “I don’t know either, it was just something I was trying,” that is perfectly fine because it gives everyone involved permission to be imperfect in execution and understanding.

If spectators jump in to participate in some way, that is great because it provides the basis of a conversation between people who have a connection to the performance/interaction.

There is always the possibility that a spectator will launch into a scathing critique in an attempt to humiliate the students practicing. That is something else all artists need to learn to deal with.

Chances are, the face to face encounter won’t be as harsh as a criticism on social media. Though instructors need to recognize the potential for their students to be recorded and belittled on social media.

Really, unless they are trying something extremely ambitious, kids wiping out on their skateboards or while attempting a parkour move are much more interesting fodder for a video of Epic Fails.

Even if no great, incisive conversations ever develop from an arts student’s efforts, just the fact that it made seeing an artist perform/create as normal as seeing a skateboarder can have a long term positive effect.

There may even be a greater impact if it is a high school/college age peer performing/creating masterfully. After all, a teenage skateboarder is a lot cooler and impressive than a 45 year old skateboarder (Tony Hawk notwithstanding.)

Investing In Social Outcomes

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Non-Profit Law blogger Gene Tagaki had a post on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago about Social Impact Bonds. These bonds are a fairly new approach to funding non-profit activities. While I think they could be a viable tool for funding the arts, I had some reservations about them as well.

The biggest difference between a social impact bond and the current practice of government entities providing grants to solve the same problem is that a private investor is involved in the process.

Here’s how that might work using social impact bonds:

  1. A government agency identifies a social problem and commits to making a payment, but only if the targeted social outcome goal is met.
  2. An investor interested in addressing the social problem makes an investment which will may result in repayment with an additional return on its investment, but only if the social outcome goal is met.
  3. A nonprofit organization is paid by the investor, delivers services to achieve the social outcome goal, and provides a report back to the other parties.

Typically, an intermediary develops the SIB, raises capital from the investor(s), selects the nonprofit service provider(s), and selects an independent assessor that will determine if the social outcome goal is met.

Among the benefits to this approach that Takagi lists are:

  • Government payments only for agreed upon social outcome results, generally shifting government funding from short-term relief to longer-term impact.
  • Greater development and use of metrics for impact assessment, which may contribute to a favorable change in the way government funding works in its selection of service providers, models of service, and evaluation criteria and protocols.
  • Investors screen nonprofit service providers for those most likely to deliver the targeted social outcome result.

The shift toward long term impact rather than short term goals would definitely be a boon for most arts organizations. But the potential for service providers to be chosen on the basis of independent analysis using different criteria can be very appealing.

Arts organizations which are well positioned in communities investors wish to impact and who specialize in providing the services desired have the potential for receiving all the funding they need to do the job rather than funding in proportion to their budget. If organizations are chosen based on effectiveness rather than prestige, smaller arts organizations may be more likely to benefit as well.

The potential downside of this approach is that because it is an investment, the desire for a return may dictate many elements of the program.

  • Diversion of more cost-efficient direct government and philanthropic funding of sure-bet programs to address social problems…
  • Investors may dictate strategies of service provision to maximize their opportunity for a high economic return on their investment instead of a high social return.
  • Funding will be restricted and likely prevent nonprofits from using such funds to build the necessary infrastructure to support new or expanded programs to achieve the social outcome result.
  • Funding for innovative and long-term strategies may be stifled by investors willing to fund only the strategies with the most proven track records of success and/or easily measured, short-term returns.

Even if your organization doesn’t participate in a Social Impact Bond program, I foresee some potential repercussions in government granting and funding taking their cues from investors. If a government entity sees that companies are investing in certain programs, they may either view it as a type of imprimatur of those programs without doing any research or developing any criteria of their own. Or the government entity may wish to curry favor or stimulate greater investment in the community by supporting investor agendas with grants and favorable rules.

Part of the process to be qualified to invest in a Broadway show is that your personal wealth be such that you can afford to lose money. That is essentially what Takagi suggests in the analysis at the end of his piece. Only true social investors who are prepared to lose money or only gain a small rate of return in order to effect a social good should be allowed to participate in the Social Impact Bond program.

I bring up the Broadway investment scheme because the same potential for damaging investor influence exists there but the agreements have been structured so that it is clear the majority of investors don’t have any say in the way the show is executed. A basic framework exists that could be applied to Social Impact Bond funding.

Doing It Alone: Reader Participation Edition

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Okay dear readers, I need your help.

Buoyed by the amount of traffic and social media sharing on my “Talking to Strangers” post back in February and encouraged by the recent research finding that people underestimate how much they will enjoy doing things alone, I plan to work over the summer to develop a program to encourage single attendees .

If you recall from my Talking To Strangers post, I, (and I assume a bunch of the rest of you), was inspired by an effort in Brazil which reserved seats on buses for strangers who were interested in meeting new people. To facilitate the process, they had Post-It notes with suggested topics of conversation for participants to use.

Given that an NEA study said a significant impediment to event attendance respondents identified was the lack of someone to go with, I suggested a program similar to the one in Brazil might be helpful for arts organizations.

I had talked to my staff a couple months ago to get them brain storming, but I thought I would enlist readers’ to provide input as well. I figure this can be helpful to everyone, after all.

So here are some questions to consider:

-What are the guidelines for participation?

If you are setting aside special seats for the program, obviously people can’t buy two at once unless they are interested in sitting in two separate locations.

-How best to promote the program to explain it clearly without sounding condescending?

You don’t want to imply people are losers and have no friends–unless you can do it in such an amusing manner it endears people to your organization.

-What are good general conversation topics to use?

Obviously, each event lends itself to specific questions, but what consistent elements might you direct people to discuss?

Not just plot and composition of a piece, but for example, physical features of the theater you might want to draw attention to. For this program, it may be better to get people speculating about how the fresco on the ceiling was painted than to tell them outright.

-What is a good way to mount the questions on the back of seats?

This is a bit of a puzzler at the moment. It has to be durable enough that it doesn’t fall off as people brush going to and from their seats. It has to be removable since you may change the seats for the program from event to event or rent the facility to groups that don’t have a talk to strangers program.

But it can’t have metal hooks that will gouge into the back of the person sitting in the seat it is attached to. Magnets might work, but not everyone has seats with metal backs.

-What are logical extension to this program?

While I saw this as a way to remove a psychological barrier from a single ticket buyer who might otherwise decide to stay way, single subscribers may want to be paired with other single subscribers. You might hold an after performance events to help people solidify their new friendship. People who already attend frequently and with friends may want access to the conversation starter questions to join in the fun with their group.

All this would be great because it provides an opportunity to engage people in other ways.

What Else?

There are other factors to consider, but I throw these out to start people thinking.

Arts and Survival

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This article on CNN about the role music is playing in the aftermath of the earthquake in Nepal caught my eye. There were similar stories and videos after the 2010 Haitian earthquake of people creating a bond of community through singing and music.

The singing isn’t getting anyone fed, clothed or sheltered, neglecting the very bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of need. But it does help with the next step up by providing a sense of love and belonging.

Though no one wants to see disasters like this happen, the fact that people’s basic instinct is to turn to music and dance to create community illustrates that the arts are not a frivolous luxury. They are an essential part of our identity.

Being able to participate with a group provides you membership in a culture. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be your birth culture. Insisting people speak English and be able to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” using the correct signifiers may seem overbearingly chauvinistic, but it also identifies what songs provide you entree to a community.

The other thing it illustrates is that not only does everyone have the ability to participate and practice an artistic discipline, it is important that they be able to do so. To a degree it is a basic survival tool mentally, spiritually and perhaps even physically if the sense of community it generates gains you food and shelter.

In a less dire circumstance, we had Garrison Keillor do his solo show about a month ago. He had the audience singing at the beginning and end of his performance. While I have read some criticism of his singing voice, it was sufficient to get everyone started. As the show was drawing to an end, I wondered if someone would be able to do the same thing in 20-30 years. With the ability to choose between disparate channels of information, there may be fewer common cultural touchstones in the next few decades.

Potentially it may be good for international relations if people thousands of miles apart can find 10 points of common ground. It may be less beneficial to local relations if neighbors can only find 10 points of common ground.

Talk About Somebody Beside Yourself

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One of the social media guidelines for organizations that is frequently mentioned is to avoid having every post you make promote your products/events. The idea is that you should present a variety of topics that might be of interest and educational to whatever demographic follows you. People quickly become disillusioned by posts that talk only about yourself or try to sell them something.

It’s a lot like dating, too.

I have started to believe that is a good practice to embrace when you are asked to make speeches and presentations about your arts organization as well. Even though you are asked to talk about yourself, the audience may enjoy themselves more if you expand the scope a little.

Over the last year I have been asked to speak to a number of groups and each time my general approach is to talk about how my organization fits into the greater “arts ecology” of the community.

The simple fact is, no one arts organization usually has the resources to meet the needs of everyone in the community. A vibrant arts environment requires a wide variety of groups representing various aspects of their disciplines. Performing arts organizations may not have a season that runs year round. A visual arts organization probably isn’t equipped to provide classes in performing arts. A children’s theater may not be able to provide adults with the experiences they crave.

When I have been talking to groups, I have been pointing out all the opportunities that exist in the community in contexts my organization can’t serve well. My goal is to raise awareness and pride in the resources the community has to offer.

One thing we know from research is that even if people never avail themselves of amenities like the opera, they value living in a community where an opera exists. That attitude helps communities attract new businesses and helps businesses attract quality employees. (Granted that is of little consolation to the opera performing to empty seats.)

It doesn’t take much effort to mention other arts organizations you frequent and why you like attending. (Especially if they are comping you in to events.) I often mention my lack of knowledge about visual arts and how I enjoy the informality of the local museum which allows me to ask questions without feeling like I will be judged for my ignorance.

Within this general theme, I also tell funny stories and have been known to recite some poetry as well. I get many compliments on my talks and invitations to speak at other places. Certainly, a good deal of this success can be attributed to my gradually improving skill at public speaking.

But consider, when people come thinking they are going to hear someone talk about the upcoming season of performances and leave having discovered there is more going on in their community than they knew, the experience has exceeded their expectations. My brochure can tell them what is coming up over the next year, but only I can make them leave excited and proud about living here.

I am sure many of you live in places where you view other organizations as rivals for audience and donors. You don’t necessarily have to mention them, but I suspect that if you get into the practice of talking about how exciting it is to live in a place that has an organization like Company A, you will start to get much better at identifying and communicating about the niche you fill in the community. (And perhaps in the process you will discover a niche you should be filling instead.)

Company A may not even be the organization you view as a rival. It may be an organization of a different discipline you feel complements the work you do, or vice versa.

Who knows, in the process of talking about your local arts ecology, someone (including yourself), may get so excited and proud about the environment that partnerships, alliances, sponsorships and better may result.

Info You Can Use: Can You Talk About Your Arts Org’s Secret Sauce In Less Than Two Slides?

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A little while ago Entrepreneur website had an infographic Guy Kawasaki created of the “The Only 10 Slides Needed When Pitching Your Business.”

I bookmarked the article because even though most non-profits don’t pitch investors the way a Silicon Valley company might, they still need to convince various constituencies to support them and doing so in a simple and effective manner can be important.

Or in other words–how to do a presentation without using a massive Powerpoint presentation. Kawasaki’s infographic maps out the order in which 10 slides (15 maximum) should be presented.

At first glance, you may not think every slide is applicable, but just think about the grant applications you make. How many of them ask about your business model, strategic planning, problem you are addressing, promotional plans, evaluation method, list of board and staff members and justify why you receive funding based on past successes? All of that is in the infographic by other names.

If you are talking to potential audience members or volunteers, you can eliminate some of these slides. The question still remains, can you go out into the community and talk about the programming and opportunities you offer in a simplified and interesting way, or are you going to have a slide for each of your events?

The slides can be metaphorical by the way. This is more about tight organization of thoughts than the availability and use of a projector and screen at a presentation. Trying to include too much content in your presentation is akin to trying to cram as many images from your upcoming season in one slide in order to limit it to 10 total. It reduces the effectiveness of the whole.

Right at the top of the infographic is says, the low number forces you to focus on the absolute essentials…the more slides you need, the less compelling your idea.

Kawasaki’s chart has one slide for the Value Proposition – “Explain the Value of the Pain You Alleviate or the Value of the Pleasure You Provide,” and one slide for the Underlying Magic – “Describe the technology, secret sauce or magic behind your product…”

These are the bread and butter areas of the arts. Arts organizations are all about the pleasurable experience and magic. But can you make that case in just a couple slides, even if you were allowed a total of four slides between these two areas?

Can you do it a way that is focused on the pleasure the audience/participant will receive? Nobody buys secret sauce that only the cook thinks tastes good. People have to know they will enjoy the secret sauce as well.

Obviously, this practice is transferable to other areas of the organization, especially marketing. Can you communicate the essence of what your event is in a poster, broadcast or print ad, social media post, email blast, etc? Can you make the case for donating in a brief curtain speech or solicitation letter? Can you give a gallery tour/play talk/concert lecture that makes people want to come back and learn more or do their own research?

Be Careful What You Bring To Your Data

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I heard about this crazy theory that there is a correlation between parking and a country’s productivity.

An international business professor did some research and apparently, Americans tend to back into public parking spaces more often, selfishly blocking the flow of traffic around businesses while they continually reposition their vehicles so that they can experience the gratification of immediately pulling out when they are ready to leave.

Chinese pull in forward more often so they reduce their impact on the flow of traffic and will patiently yield to approaching vehicles when it comes time to back out and leave.

This is why China is more productive than the United States. They are more attuned to how their actions contribute to the good of the whole of society.

Oh wait a minute, that isn’t what the research says at all.

Actually, it says Chinese back into spots more frequently than Americans, showing their propensity for delaying gratification and that is why they are more productive. They are more willing than Americans to forgo comfort now for prosperity later.

You can read a quick recap of the research on this NPR story about it.

When I first heard about this research, I thought it was a bunch of baloney and sounded like confirmation basis. Backing in to a spot as a manifestation of delayed gratification supports the narrative of Chinese as patient just like it supports the narrative of Americans being selfish in my fake survey results.

Did you find it easy to believe my fake example by the way?

I don’t necessarily care overly much about parking and productivity. I just thought this was a good illustration of how our biases can shape our perceptions of data. When we survey our community and look at the results, we often make conclusions about what has lead to those answers based on what we think we know. In addition, the choices we made while collecting the data might have pre-biased the results toward our existing assumptions.

It is only when you don’t believe the results that you take the time to scrutinize them closer and see if there are any problems. If you agree with the findings, you aren’t motivated to do so.

The author of the parking study presents some numbers that show a correlation between parking style and productivity so there may be some evidence in support of his hypothesis. But I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t been inclined to think that the way you park your car was the product of a wide variety of factors and not a manifestation of delayed gratification.

It can be difficult to do, but when you review data about your organization, be it surveys, ticket sales, attendance, etc., it can be good to occasionally step back and wonder, is this what the data really says or what I want it to say?

Memento Labore

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Last month I wrote about a 2012 study that found the biggest impediment to creativity identified by Americans is lack of time.

A recent piece on Medium tells the story of an author who contacted 275 creatives to be interviewed for a book he was writing and was told “No” by one third of them. Another third said nothing.

Of those who did say no, a great deal of them cited a lack of time as the reason. The article author, Kevin Ashton, suggests that the reason why so many of these creatives were successful is that they said no to requests which would divert them from their work.

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating.

Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time.

No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

From time to time I have written about how companies will bring a consultant or improv group in to teach their employees exercises that will help them become more nimble and creative. The mistake being made is thinking the exercises are the answer to the problem rather than recognizing it is the time spent with a shifted mindset that yields creative results.

The emphasis being on time spent.

Even creative artists can fail to recognize that their “break out” work was actually the result of a long period of failure and refinement and become discouraged when inspiration doesn’t immediately gift them with their next great idea.

I revisit this idea here periodically because it is useful to be reminded.

I frequently arrive at the solution I seek when I am mowing the lawn or in the shower. But generally the process hasn’t just encompassed the time it takes me to mow the lawn. I have already done a great deal of thinking and research leading up to that moment or have drawn my knowledge and experience to that point. The flash of insight I receive while mowing helps to coalesce all the ideas into a possible course of action.

[The title of this post is a riff on the Latin memento mori – remember you must die. My cobbled together meaning is remember you must work]

Info You Can Use: Talking To Strangers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even More Live, Live Performance

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A lot of people are going to be entering a dark room and putting on blindfolds. No, I am not talking about fans of 50 Shades of Grey.

ArtPride NJ tweeted an article today about a Sensory play being offered in Jersey City.

The Shapeshifter,” a sensory play by local writer Meg Merriet, is designed for sight-impaired audiences and uses fragrance, atmosphere, texture and sound to bring the story to life. Sighted audience members, on the other hand, are blindfolded.

[…]

“I realized that the theater world was very much in need of a catch-up when it came to ADA-compliance and accessibility,” said Levie. “The goal of No Peeking is to create a new experience by taking away the privilege of sight and adding other sensory elements to live arts, be it theater performance, poetry readings or live music.”

As I read this article, it occurred to me that this was an arena in which live performance could compete with recorded and digital media. Perhaps organizations offering live performance need to double down and offer more “food for the senses” by asking people to deprive themselves of sight.

Because most people are so dependent on sight, it wouldn’t take much effort to create interesting and tantalizing experiences. All that would be needed was a hint of something and let people’s imaginations fill in the blanks.

Then there would be the overwhelming desire to look at one’s cellphone on top of the already overwhelming desire some people have even when they can see.

Although, even that could play a part in a sensory play if someone created an app that connected the phone to the action (or provided attendees with some other device they could hold) that would synchronize programmed sensation with the action.

A sensory performance need not depend solely on removing people’s sense of sight. Providing earphones that pumped white noise to remove a sense of hearing or provided audio that synched with the action, but not in the way someone might expect is also an option (think Pink Floyd-Wizard of Oz synchronicity in Dark Side of the Rainbow, only intentional.)

Because of allergies, I would imagine choices for smell, taste and touch would be very limited. But as the process was refined, a wider range of options might open up. (Just imagine a theatrical supply companies opening up entire new lines of hypo-allergenic products.)

All this being said, the idea of providing sensory experiences isn’t new. Movie theaters tried smell-o-vision and seats with rumble packs to provide different sensations. The results were not very good. Technology has come some way in solving this, but accurate mass delivery of the same experience is going to be expensive.

But as I said, the advantage live performance has is that living element. There is no need for fancy sound equipment to simulate someone walking from right to left, because they are. The idea of a person being hit and falling is much more present for you when it is live rather than closing your eyes in a movie. The prospect that someone might even be moving closer to you, even if it is only 3 feet, is experienced in ways that even the best surround sound system can’t replicate.

What Do You Know About Propensity Score Matching?

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While it was relatively quiet in the office over the holidays, I made an attempt to catch up on reading reports that I had downloaded and bookmarked over the last few months.

In the process, I came across Measuring Cultural Engagement: A Quest for New Terms, Tools, and Techniques which is a summary of a symposium of “Cultural researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from the U.S., the UK, and other countries” held in June 2014.

Instead of telling you about what I read and evaluating it, I actually wanted to ask- Does anyone know anything about Propensity Score Matching?

Well, obviously I guess I probably should do a little explanation for people.

It is a statistical method that has been around for about 30 years, but this is the first I have heard of it. It’s application to the arts is discussed on page 18 and sounds pretty interesting, but I am not quite sure if it is something an individual arts organization could engage in themselves.

According to Measuring Cultural Engagement (MCE):

“The Norman Lear Center adapted PSM to evaluate the impact of media and arts programming. The idea is to isolate a piece of media or arts programming to assess whether audience members who were exposed to it were more likely to demonstrate a shift in knowledge, attitude, or behavior compared to very similar people who did not encounter the programming”

The reason this technique can be valuable to the arts is because it is often difficult and expensive to identify a representative sample group of people who have participated in a niche event. Yet arts groups often need to gather data from people in support of grants and it is often difficult to get the data you really need: (my emphasis)

“One key problem in measuring cultural engagement is confusing outputs with outcomes. It is easier to tell funders how many seats or tickets were sold or the number of “likes” on Facebook than whether a particular arts or cultural event had a substantial impact on an individual or a community. Since many cultural agencies and organizations, including the NEA, talk about the benefit or value of arts and culture to individuals and communities, it is essential that the research community develop pragmatic tools to help these groups demonstrate that their mission is being accomplished. Using PSM in this way, arts organizations can focus on outcomes instead of outputs, measuring the impact of their work on individuals and communities.”

The example used in MCE is evaluating whether people who saw the movie Food, Inc had a experienced a change in knowledge and attitude. The Normal Lear Center used surveys distributed through social media groups and email lists affiliated with the film and production company. They received about 20,000 responses.

MCE acknowledges that one of the weakness of Propensity Score Matching is that it requires a pretty large sample size, but that the Lear Center has been able to get good results from as few as 1,000 surveys. This is one of the reasons I was wondering if it is at all viable for an individual arts organization.

Being able to get results focused on outcomes rather than outputs sounds great–if it is something that can reasonably be done. Has anyone out there had any experience with Propensity Score Matching?

Something MCE mentioned that intrigued me but wasn’t expounded upon enough was (my emphasis):

“Seventeen statistically significant variables were identified that predicted the likelihood of seeing a film like Food, Inc. Of these, only three were demographic. This surprised the film’s marketing team as demographics usually form the basis of film marketing. The three variables focused on whether a survey participant was employed in certain industries or had children. Individuals were more likely to see the film if they did not have children. This was contrary to what the marketers expected.”

I really wanted to know what the nature of the other 14 significant variables were if they weren’t demographic. Arts marketing focuses pretty heavily on demographics as well so it would be really interesting to know what types of factors made up the majority of the significant variables if they weren’t demographic.

Basic Intro To Finance Options

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When I was at the Ohio Arts Council conference yesterday, I attended a session on finance for arts and culture. This is unknown territory for me because I am familiar with grants and fundraising, but don’t really have any significant experience with finance.

One of the things I learned were the differences between Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFI) and Community Development Corporations (CDC). (Which is to say, I know slightly more than the textbook definition, but enough to start paying attention and learning more.)

There were representatives of each of these type of organizations as well as banks and venture capital firms talking about somewhat familiar financing options like bonds. There were also tools that I had no idea a non-profit organization might consider like the EB5 program which provides foreign investors with a fast track visa process.

While I had a sense that a non-profit might get funding from a revolving loan fund, I had no idea that a non-profit might actually run one. One option mentioned during the panel was possibly partnering with people to run your fund and coming in as a second layer on a loan that a bank was underwriting.

The panel made us aware of New Market Tax Credits which CDFIs sell to banks to encourage them to fund/invest in projects in low-income, high-poverty, high-unemployment communities at a lower rate. They encouraged us to Google the terms “New Market Tax Credit Arts Culture” to see what sort of projects popped up in order to get a sense of what was possible.

There were some main points the panel wanted those seeking financing to walk away from the session knowing about:

• Investors want to know how your project fits into the overall vision of: your city, foundations providing support, other funders, the community and your own organization.

• Even if they don’t explicitly say it, economic developers are looking for how the project provides cohesion in terms of issues like market change, safety and stability in the community. Economic developers don’t concern themselves about the health of an arts and cultural organization except as an attractor of new business and enhancer of quality of life. They noted one of the reasons businesses are starting to orient back toward downtowns is because the density of activity provides for connectivity and innovation.

• They emphasized that no one source will provide 100% of the funding. It is going to have to come from a mix of economic development entities, banks, public and private grants and donations.

• As a result, you need to have all parties at the table, even ones that you won’t necessarily need immediately. You don’t want to be in position where you realize you will need extra funding and go to someone at the last minute saying you need money, trying to explain your project to them and get them connected to your story.

• The panel explicitly said, if you start talking to these entities when you have a project in mind, it is already too late. You need to be telling your story and have people aware of it years in advance of soliciting support for a project.

Ultimately, it seems like you have to be telling your story every day, all the time to your immediate community in order to gain short term support for your projects and to anyone else who may ever remotely be of any use to you for a hypothetical project.

To heck with “Always Be Closing,” you need to be “Always Be Charming” (Yeah, that stinks. Anyone has a catchy phrase, let me know.)

An interesting suggestion about bolstering confidence in your organizational story was to devote part of your annual budget to enriching your endowment in order to show potential investors that you are investing in yourself.

It was notable that the first question asked after the presentation was about the shame directed at non-profits for overhead and the fact they might try to pay people a living wage. One of the panelists said people shouldn’t be ashamed and that foundations should know better.

However, I felt like he was sort of hedging when he said to break down administrative cost by task rather than by roles and titles. For example- assessment,  program administration, engineering, capacity building.

I didn’t feel that overhead cost was of particular concern to the people on the panel. Their criteria for good governance and success seemed more aligned with the for-profit sector. So the fact this came up immediately may be a sign that the subject of judging an non-profit organization by overhead costs will become a more prevalent topic in the next couple years.

The Artists, They Live Among Us

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I didn’t really know much about Jamie Bennett when he was chief of staff at the National Endowment for the Arts or when he was appointed as executive director for ArtPlace America, but after watching a video of his talk at TEDxHudson, I figure he was the right person for the job.

There were a number of moments during his talk where I nodded my head and thought “this guy gets it.” (And not just because as kids we apparently both had our first Broadway experience seeing the same production of Peter Pan with Sandy Duncan)

He talks about growing up in Honesdale, PA and encountering the idea that art was something done by people who lived far away. He speaks of a colleague performing a study for the Urban Institute who went out and asked people who the artists in their community were, only to be told there weren’t any despite all the participation in singing and dancing going on.

He relates another experience in Aspen, CO where people in the audience readily self identified as golfers and tennis players, but not as artists. He comments that he doesn’t know:

“why we can so easily see ourselves on a continuum with Serena Williams and Tiger Woods, but we don’t think anything we do has anything in common with Sandy Duncan.”

He goes on to list all the encounters he had with artists growing up in Honesdale. He admits it even took him 30 years to realize there were practicing artists in his hometown.

He continues saying what we have probably all realized by now, that this perception of artists as an “other” is deeply rooted in society. He cites a study which found that “Although 96% of Americans value art in their communities and lives, only 27% value artists.”

When he says that the study lead to the formation of United States Artists which took the tagline “Art comes from artists,” people laugh. But I couldn’t help thinking that such an obvious statement might be required.

Since people have a concept of creativity and inspiration as something that flows from the ether into blessed individuals rather than something that everyone can participate in and get better at with some effort, just like your tennis backhand, a blatant statement of the basic definition of an artist could be necessary.

I suspect this sense of special insight has been propagated by artists. If you are going to be poor and starving, it helps a little to be able to wrap yourself in an aura of uncommonality, in touch with the muses the way monks are infused with spirituality.

Bennett likens the situation to the food world which has made people more cognizant of the source of their meals leading to the concepts of eating local and farm to table, among others. He extends that idea to making people aware of the local sources of art, including themselves.

The second thing Bennett said that made me sit up and take notice was that the typical conversation about the arts in this country is about the lack of money and resources. “We open with our lack and spend every conversation with our hand out.”

He talks about the purpose of ArtsPlace America being to turn that around to draw attention to the asset common to every community-artists.

“Not every community has a waterfront. Not every community has strong public transportation. Not every community is lucky enough to be anchored by a hospital or university. But every community has people who sing and dance and tell stories.”

I don’t know that the dearth of resources is what entirely dominates my conversations, but I am going to keep a more attentive ear on what I say in the future.

Bennett goes on to talk about other benefits of the arts in communities. He touches on some concepts that were familiar to me, but provides slightly different insights about the positive ripple effects of arts participation, especially among groups of people who may not be perceived as artists.

Info You Can Use: When Is Your Arts Career Not A Hobby?

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There was a very interesting article on the Forbes website which explored the point at which the IRS determines your arts career is actually a job and not a hobby.

Since you can deduct job related expenses to a greater degree than hobby related expenses, the distinction is rather important to an artist.

And while a taxpayer may deduct expenses of a trade or business in excess of the profit earned by the business, thus generating a net loss, a hobby may only deduct its expenses to the extent of the profits of the activity; in other words, the hobby cannot generate a net loss.

The article author Tony Nitti, lists the 9 point test that the IRS uses the make the distinction. In the article he discusses a specific case where the IRS was challenging the filing of an artist and provides examples of how each question of the test would be applied in this case.

Later, he talks about how this particular artist’s career met the criteria of each of the test questions.

Something I found notable was that usually in these cases, a person has a steady job and then engages in a side activity which they subsidize with the income from their regular job.

In this artist’s case, she was an artist for about 20 years before she was hired on to the faculty of a college. The IRS was suggesting that her artistic career which preceded the steady job was the hobby.

This is one of the reasons I feel the article is valuable. For a great many practicing artists, this will be the path their career takes. It is only when they have proven their worth after some period of activity that they may be offered work on a consistent basis.

Now I should note, as Nitti does, that the reason the IRS was looking at this artist was because of the types of things she was claiming are expenses. That issue still has to be resolved in a separate hearing. Most artists probably shouldn’t worry about being targeted by the IRS.

The hearing about whether her artistic career was a career or a hobby has been completed. Nitti’s discussion about why her activities met the criteria is an important read. Even though this case addresses the career of a visual artist, it doesn’t take much effort to see how it applies to other disciplines.

Basically, if you keep adequate records, educate yourself about the market, consult with market experts, price your work to make a profit and have an expectation that work you are currently doing (which I suspect would apply to rehearsing and practicing) will eventually make a profit, then you might have a career as an artist!

Obviously it isn’t as simple as that summary so read the article.

Info You Can Use: Change That Contract!

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I thought I would talk a little about performance contracts today. It may not have been in relation to performance contracts, but I recently read that many people are under the impression that when they receive a contract they either meet the conditions or no deal is possible.

This may be true for the terms of service presented with every computer app and service out there, but isn’t necessarily so in a great many areas of life.

The reality is that contracts for performances are often a lot like dating. There are non-negotiable conditions and then there is a lot of aspirational conditions reflecting an ideal scenario. Knowing which is which is a matter of experience, but you won’t get that experience until you start to ask.

For example, when we do Broadway shows, there are certain stage dimensions that the tour requires. Most of the time, we are pretty close, but if we aren’t we can still do the show. It is just that the production makes a decision about what set pieces will remain on the truck.

Similarly, nearly every Broadway show technical rider we receive asks for a 36 foot tall Genie lift and 2 sets of washers and dryers. We have a lift that can reach 19 feet and only one washer and dryer set. No one has ever balked about doing the show based on that.

There are some stages which will be too small to accommodate a show or lack sufficient equipment, but productions know that every venue is different and will undertake all sorts of contortions to make the show happen.

On the other hand, if they say you have to have 50 people with various qualifications onsite at 8:00 am to help unload and set up the stage, they mean it. They will either fine you for not having enough stagehands or stop constructing the set until enough people are present–often both.

These guys left a venue at 2 am the night before and arrived on your doorstep at 8 am and tonight they will be leaving at 2 am to start it all over again. They have little tolerance for situations which will make their job harder or more hazardous.

In terms of the legal content of the contract where it talks about liability, force majeure obligations and indemnifications, you might feel a little intimidated by the formality of the language and feel you have little recourse but to accept.

In fact, this is the place where you should be looking very closely to make sure you are not placed at a severe disadvantage. Most force majeure clauses I have seen are reasonable and equitable in acknowledging the impact of severe weather and other unavoidable emergencies. Then there are some where you could have a meteor smash into your building and you would have to make payment in full plus an additional inconvenience fee.

Be careful about taking a claim of “industry standard clause” at face value.  Ask colleagues or post a question on a discussion forum if you are uncertain or confused about a section of a contract.

However, there are people working at standardizing performance contracts. The Broadway League has created a form booking contract that now seems to accompany every tour of a Broadway show we present.

Given that these contracts are among the longest I deal with, having nine pages which is the same from show to show is a great boon. You make your changes, save it and send it along with every new show. Then you are only left with combing through four-five show specific pages and 15-20 pages of the tech rider. That may seem like a lot of work still remaining, but the nine pages of the form booking agreement tend to have most of the complicated legal language.

Don’t get overly worried if your changes to a contract make it look like a rainbow spiderweb of insertions, deletions, reversals and counter signatures. It is not uncommon for a contract to look something like the below.

contract capture

This is just a visual example of what a marked up contract might look like only. Most of the change notation placements make little logical or legal sense. I applied them very loosely and even obscured other parts of the contract. These are just examples of the type of notations that commonly appear on a contract and how crowded it might appear with deletions, additions and alternative language proposals.

The STET by the way means to reverse the change. It is often used to indicate that a person doesn’t agree with the change in its entirety and wants it restored to its previous state. (Which, it should be noted, may not necessarily be its original state.)

Every change that is made should be initialed and dated by both parties before either signs off on the contract. It is also wise to keep a clean copy of the original document and save each version of the contract as a separate file. I strongly suggest springing for Adobe Acrobat so you can edit PDF documents electronically and easily reverse them. Otherwise you will go crazy trying to replicate all the changes for every iteration.

Of course, there is no guarantee that your changes will be accepted. You should just feel you have an ability to negotiate reasonable conditions.

While this entry is only meant to address a small segment of contracting and to do so from the presenter point of view, I was considering using this as a basis for an entry for Drew McManus’ ArtsHacker project.

With that in mind, I would be interested in knowing what other information would make this or a related entry useful to a reader. What questions might you have?

Same Old Library Building, Different Content

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CityLab had an article on the changing role of libraries in communities which was based on a longer piece about the Columbus (OH) Metropolitan Library (CML).

As I have mentioned before, I frequent my local library so often that the staff anticipates my needs (or they are stalking me) so I am a big fan of the institutions already.

What caught my attention was the informal survey the Columbus library did asking people on Facebook “to share five words describing their childhood libraries and five words describing how they imagine libraries two decades from now.”

The word clouds that resulted from this survey appear in both articles. While books, reading, information, research and learning figure heavily in the childhood word cloud, community, technology, information, entertainment, access and meeting emerge for the libraries of the future. While some of the childhood words lose their prominence in the vision of 20 years hence, their weight is still on par with strongest future concepts.

The Facebook survey CML used seems like an interesting exercise to engage in for trying to discern how your community sees their relationship with your organization changing. Paper or in person surveying might be required if you don’t have the 36,000 Facebook likes and 800,000 card carrying members that CML has.

The CityLab article uses CML’s results to complement a report released by the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries. Among the findings that CityLab emphasizes are:

People: The library must “shift away from building collections to building human capital.” This not only refers to the users of the public library but also its librarians, who will act as curators of the library’s content.

Place: The public library of the future is both a physical and virtual place. While the latter gets emphasized—perhaps overly so—in discussions about the future, the physical structure of the public library will remain vital to its community. But its purpose will change: “The physical library will become less about citizens checking out books and more about citizens engaging in the business of making their personal and civic identities.”

[…]

Platform: America’s public libraries should become community learning platforms. They should serve as a jumping-off point for users to create, learn, and innovate…

If this language about staff acting as curators; the role of space and how it is used; and providing a jumping-off point for creativity, innovation and learning sounds familiar, it is probably because the same concepts have been bubbling around conversations in relation to the arts.

So it may bear paying attention to what libraries are doing these days and consider whether it is worth partnering closely with them to reach common goals.

The Arts Are For Swingers

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Do you ever sit in your office, thinking wistfully of the days when you were a kid and you would run around the playground, playing games and swinging on the swings?

Do you think your audience is thinking the same thing?

Well apparently some folks at Boston’s Convention Center were thinking along those lines because they built a temporary playground for adults on one of their lawns.

The playground is temporary because the convention center plans to expand on to that land in about 18 months. However, it is being used as something of a proof of concept testing ground.

The BCEC, Sasaki and Utile figured, why not test out some concepts for what should be the permanent park, further south on D Street towards residential South Boston?

The playground contains a “set of 20 lighted oval swings, bocce, ping pong, beanbag toss, Adirondack chairs, a sound stage, and open-air bar” and has become wildly popular.

Like the community ovens I wrote about a week or so ago, this is another idea for the type of thing that can be done to increase community engagement.

Now, according to one of the commenters on the article, the playground in Boston cost around $1.1 million which seems a little expensive for a project with an 18 month life span. Though maybe the equipment will migrate to the permanent park.

Many cities are seeing quick pop-up parks appearing on their streets.

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation in Philadelphia set up an amazing looking pop up park for the summer. It was slated to close September 1 but got extended an entire month due to popular demand.

Brooklyn’s Prospect Park has a pop-up Audubon program aimed at kids. Huntsville, AL will have activities popping up along their streets this month.

If you look at the pictures associated with each of the projects, you will see that they run the gamut from ambitiously expensive to simple and versatile.

Pop up events like this can be used to inspire community action as well as a tool for direct engagement. While reading about pop-ups, I learned that a community in Dallas dressed up a street with benches, trees and pop up shops for a day to provide evidence for its potential. (If you are looking to use this for community improvement, check out Better Block.)

One of the commenters on the Boston Convention Center park story shared this video of a fun installation on the streets of Montreal where people generated music as they played on the swings.

[vimeo 97090808 w=500 h=281]

Montreal’s 21 Swings (21 Balançoires) from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

Let Them Bake Bread!

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At a loss about how to forge closer bonds between the community and your organization? Let them bake bread!

Not only do you have the example of Bread and Puppet Theater, to inspire you but there is a growing trend of communal ovens across the country.

I recently read an article about how such an oven was helping to revive a dilapidated park in Toronto.

This caused me to recall a seeing Braddock, PA Mayor John Braddock discuss a similar community oven his city set up. The oven was one of the cornerstones in the city’s plan to revitalize itself.

When I conducted a search to see where things stood now, I came across a story of a Torontonian studying nearby in Pittsburgh who was working on the Braddock oven as part of a fellowship.

If you read the article, you will see that like any project, a community oven isn’t quite as simple as it seems. The Braddock oven is being rebuilt/replaced because it isn’t as efficient as it could be. People have to be trained to use it correctly. The wood has to be seasoned and of the right type.

At the same time, the Canadian grad student, Shauna Kearns, has helped to forge community partnerships to get the rebuild accomplished.

With sustainability becoming an area of increased focus, (that was the basis of Shauna Kearns’ fellowship), participating/partnering in a community oven can be bolster organizational identity in the community.

Best Practices In Audience Drowning

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As immersive arts experiences become increasingly prevalent, there have been some interesting introspective reflections of the experiences recently in The Guardian and Irish Times.

Both pieces mention the competitiveness of returning audience members souring the experience. I wrote about this issue to a greater degree in March so I won’t get into it much here.

In The Guardian article, Myf Warhurst wonders if audiences are really up to the job of being part of a performance.

One the one hand, she seems to feel that an immersive experience can help shift the awareness and focus of a participant in a manner the participant wouldn’t on their own. Citing Marina Abramovic’s installation 512 Hours where participants count rice grains one by one, Myf observes,

“Sure, I could have a stab at this while home alone by switching my phone off and counting the grains from my half-used pack of SunRice. But would I really do it without Abramović’s prompting? I enjoy being part of something creative, conceived by an inquisitive mind, because I know I can’t create such work myself. I like being included in the art-making.”

But she also seems to feel that people may conflate participation under someone else’s guidance and vision with being a creator. (my emphasis)

And I’m starting to think that us regular folk might not be up to the job. Are we really clever or interesting enough to be driving the narrative? I’m not sure I am. I like how art makes me feel like an outsider in someone else’s conversation, how it pushes me to think beyond myself and my own ideas. Is it healthy to be made to feel like we’re now special enough to be included in everything?

[…]

What is it about humans, at this particular time in history, that makes us think we’re special enough to be part of art without having done any of the work to develop the emotional, intellectual or craft level that artists have strived to achieve? Perhaps inviting the audience in isn’t always for the best. Even though I like being included, I’m just not sure I’ve done the hard yards to deserve it.

In the Irish Times article, Peter Crawley wonders “Are we, the audience, drowning in immersive theatre,” referring to how prevalent the format is.

Granted, the vast majority of the theater going public in both the UK and US probably haven’t really encountered an immersive performance experience. Crawley’s reflections urge a consideration that the way these events are executed may promote a self-centric view of what should be a communal experience.

It is not just that audience members have started fighting each other in order to be in a position to be involved in the story.

What you, the audience, have always known is that to sit, watch, engage and reflect is not passive. In an insightful takedown last week of the radio personality Ira Glass, who dismissed Shakespeare’s King Lear as “not relatable”, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead argued that while art is a mirror in which we see ourselves, the demand for “relatability” is lazy and vain: art as a selfie.

That sounds like the toxin of our age and, perhaps, a reason to switch off the immersion. “You, the audience”, sounds like a command. “I, the protagonist”, feels lonely. Isn’t it supposed to be about us?

Crawley didn’t link to Rebecca Mead’s article, but I have included it for reference since I was interested to read what she said.

What seems to be relevant to Crawley’s statement was this (my emphasis):

But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.

To appreciate “King Lear”—or even “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Fault in Our Stars”—only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare.

What might be an obvious solution is to design the experience as a metaphorical Ropes course where people can only advance/gain access cooperating as a group. Perhaps some, having sacrificed themselves for the good of the group, might get the satisfaction of watching the result of their actions from a hidden room on the sidelines.

But I am sure there are plenty of people like me who are content to watch and ponder and who don’t like to get dragged into participating in the first place. Having to participate and do so as part of a team in order to witness interesting content might be even more off putting. (Though I would much rather participate in a group than to be singled out as an individual.)

(Yes, I intentionally wrote a provocative post title intentionally using another definition of immersion in the spirit of Drew McManus’ little experiment)

Toward A System Of Organizational Critiques

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Customer Relationship Management is Pull Rather Than Push

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Monday night I went to the library to return a couple books. I had finished the second book in a series and wanted to read the third, but I had checked and knew the library didn’t have the third book. I went to the reference desk to see if I could request the book from another one in the state.

I was told the system to check if another library in the state had the book was down, but if I wanted, I could request that the library buy it. That way, I could have the book for a month rather than 2 weeks via interlibrary loan. Since I read quickly and didn’t want the library to buy a new book on my account, I said I would request the book via interlibrary loan during another visit.

This is where things got interesting.

The librarian decided to check if they had already ordered the book given that they had the first two volumes. She discovered that not only had they ordered the book in the last week, but my name had been flagged as a person to inform when the book came in based on my borrowing habits.

I left the library muttering under my breath that I really needed to start looking seriously at customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Here was a library serving a rural county of 78,000 whose services I use for free that had bought a book for me based on tracking my use of their services. (Yes, I suppose other people may have read the series too, but they ordered it right after I took out the second book so as far as I am concerned, they bought it for me.)

The way I see it, if they invest so much effort into serving a person who uses their services for free, how much disservice am I doing to my patrons who are paying me $30-$50 to see shows if I am not closely tracking their preferences and trying to figure out how to serve them better?

The way I see it, that last sentence there is a crucial one. There is a difference between the way Amazon uses software to track my activities in the interest of trying to sell me a book and the way the library tracks my activities in interest of buying a book for me.

While I would certainly use the software to suggest shows a person might be interested in seeing based on past history, I would also want to think about ways I could use data we collect to shape our programming to serve their interests.

[N.B. Well, I wrote this post on Monday evening knowing I wouldn’t have time to do so on Tuesday because we had a show. I just happened to see one of the librarians after the show and asked her what CRM system they used. She tapped her head.

Turns out, she had noticed what books I was taking out and order the third book in the series. I had specifically asked on Monday night if it were she that had ordered the book and was given an answer that made me think it was all tracked by software. This just goes to show that the best customer relationship software is caring employees paying attention and making notes.]

Price and Value

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Seth Godin recently made a post that provides a good summary of how value influences the way consumers view price.

“It’s too expensive,” almost never means, “there isn’t enough money if I think it’s worth it.”

Social entrepreneurs are often chagrined to discover that low-income communities around the world that said their innovation was, “too expensive” figured out how to find the money to buy a cell phone instead. Even at the bottom of the pyramid, many people find a way to pay for the things they value.

[…]

Often, it actually means, “it’s not worth it.” This is a totally different analysis, of course. Lots of things aren’t worth it, at least to you, right now. I think it’s safe to assume that when you hear a potential customer say, “it’s too expensive,” what you’re really hearing is something quite specific.

There is a sentiment commonly expressed around arts organizations, especially ones that are trying to attract college age attendees, that college students who say a ticket is too expensive will generally spend twice as much on beer on the same Saturday night. While a performance and a beer are transitory experiences, everyone knows beer is more transitory of the two. (The old saying, you don’t buy it, you rent it.) But, of course, it is the social environment that accompanies the beer that people value.

More from Godin:

Culturally, we create boundaries for what something is worth. A pomegranate juice on the streets of Istanbul costs a dollar, and it’s delicious. The same juice in New York would be seen as a bargain for five times as much money. Clearly, we’re not discussing the ability to pay nor are we considering the absolute value of a glass of juice. No, it’s about our expectation of what people like us pay for something like that.

Start with a tribe or community that in fact does value what you do. And then do an ever better job of explaining and storytelling, increasing the perceived value instead of lowering the price. (Even better, actually increase the value delivered). When you don’t need everyone to buy what you sell, “it’s too expensive” from some is actually a useful reminder that you’ve priced this appropriately for the rest of your audience.

Over time, as influencers within a tribe embrace the higher value (and higher price) then the culture starts to change. When people like us start to pay more for something like that, it becomes natural (and even urgent) for us to pay for it too.

That bit I bolded caught my eye. In theory the arts already deal with a tribe or community that does value what it does. That tribe tends to be affluent and influential, but we all know the common refrain is that these people are dying off. Whatever influence they have, it isn’t continuing to motivate too many others.

I am not sure the answer is just better storytelling and waiting for influencers to help shift the culture. I think there has to be a corresponding shift in product features to something consumers value as well.

This isn’t just about the arts. In the cell phone example Godin uses, the phone’s value in the developing world goes beyond just being able to talk to other people. It allows people to gather information about crop prices and choose which market to travel to and acts as a medium for currency exchange.

Without these benefits, I don’t imagine as many people in the developing world would own phones as do today. They are buying Nokia phones with long battery life rather than iPhones because electricity sources are so scarce.

In terms of the arts, I have no doubt that it is entirely possible to avoid compromising on price. I likewise believe that there are many groups out there offering what people want, but who suffer from lack of good storytelling.

Yet just as phone companies know they will sell more Nokia phones in Kenya than Apple and Samsung phones, even though those two companies are duking it out for domination in the rest of the world, very few arts organizations are going to be exempt from aligning their “product features” to suit local conditions.

What If Your Painting Doesn’t Fit In The Deposit Envelop?

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One of the more intriguing ideas I have come across in my 10 years of blogging is the Artist Pension Trust which has artists deposit their work into across the course of 20 years with the proceeds of the sales going to fund their pensions.

When I first wrote about this back in 2006, I didn’t have too many of the details, but a recent story examining the success of the trust as it reaches its 10 anniversary provides many more details.

I was interested to learn that only 20% of the 2000 participating artists were from the United States. Though given that the number one rule of investment is diversification, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Basically, it works this way:

Participating artists donate 20 of their works over a planned 20-year period (two per year during the first five years, one per year for the ensuing five years and one piece every other year for the remaining 10 years) to the trust. There are regional directors and selection committees, consisting of independent curators, artists and collectors but not dealers (“they bring a conflict of interest,” Moti Shniberg, a former high-tech entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Mutual Art, the parent company of the Artist Pension Trust, said).

The trust “cultivates” the investment by lending them to museums and art festivals. Keeping them locked in storage for 20 years wouldn’t help enhance their value, after all. While the plan is to keep the works for 20 years, some have already been sold when their value increased significantly.

Other artists have withdrawn and asked for their art to be sold when they were short on money.

While the ideal of pooling art for the long term benefit of all is admirable in theory, in practice human nature caused the trust to slightly alter their original plan.

“David Ross noted that his original idea was for all the proceeds of sales of artwork be placed in the general pool, but a number of the artists he had approached, “who all believed that they were going to be successful in their careers,” were unenthusiastic about supporting less accomplished colleagues. “Dividing the profits—40 percent for the artist, 32 percent for the general pool—made the idea easier for them to swallow.”

As noted earlier, there are no dealers on the committees because they have a vested interest in selling an artist’s work rather than letting it be deposited in a trust for 20 years.

I look forward to checking in again on this in 10 years when the trust starts to sell the works of the first depositors in preparation for paying out pensions. How well will those artists who have been had the patience and discipline to participate in this program fare?

Re-Defining Elite

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Seth Godin is talking about us. Well, actually I think that is a little narcissistic to think he is merely talking about people in the creative fields. I am pretty sure his comment encompass American culture as well as that as that of a number of other countries.

His post titled, “I’m an elitist” addresses a lot of topics we in the creative fields get conflicted about:

Lowering the price at the expense of sustainability is a fool’s game.

Only producing tools that don’t need an instruction manual takes power away from those prepared to learn how to use powerful tools. And it’s okay to write a book that some people won’t finish, or a video that some don’t understand.

Giving people what they want isn’t always what they want.

Curators create value. We need more curators, and not from the usual places.

Creating and reinforcing cultural standards and institutions that elevate us is more urgent than ever.

We write history about people who were brave enough to lead, not those that figured out how to pander to the crowd.

Elites aren’t defined by birth or wealth, they are people with a project,…

These are all issues that are constantly being bandied about in the arts today. Pricing seems to always be a topic of conversation.

Diane Ragsdale and Nina Simon recently challenged us to think about wants versus needs.

While Godin never promises you that someone will pay for it, he encourages the creation of challenging work because to do otherwise is a disservice those who are ready to be challenged.

He actually developed that idea in a post he wrote about 4 years ago and links to in his current post.

While Godin does acknowledge that affluence does play a role in ones ability to become an elite by providing free time to pursue knowledge and the tools to communicate and process that knowledge, he states that birth, class and affluence do not make one an elite.

The number of self-selected elites is skyrocketing. Part of this is a function of our ability to make a living without working 14 hours a day in a sweatshop, but part of it is the ease with which it’s possible to find and connect with other elites.

The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from.

Once you identify this as your mission, you save a lot of time and frustration in your outreach. If someone doesn’t choose to be part of the elites, it’s unclear to me that you can persuade them to change their mind.

Two things that come to mind. If we define elites as he does, people who are willing to be challenged, rather than worrying they are the people we are focusing too much upon because they possess interest and ability to support our endeavors, what will need to change in order to engage and coordinate this new constituency? And is it sustainable?

Not the first or last time this basic question has been asked, probably even in the last week given all the conversations about how the non-profit arts sector needs to change themselves. Following Godin’s suggestion to look in new places to find curators may be a start down the right road.

Second question is about that last paragraph of Godin’s that I quote. How do you determine if someone is unwilling to embrace the challenges that are a hallmark of an elite and shift your attention elsewhere? This seems to a difficult proposition because we are not always the most objective.

As I noted at the start of this entry, there is a degree of narcissism in the arts, really just about every industry, where we see people who don’t experience the world in a similar way as we do as an outsider. Lawyers view the world differently from engineers who view the world differently from computer programmers and visual artists. Those who do not value what we value are not valued.

Yet there are groups in each who are furrowing their brows and generating a lot of sweat, tackling problems with the gusto of Godin’s elites. We know they are fellow travelers in pursuit of progress, but we want them to pay attention to us right now. It may be 15 years* before their pursuits orient them in our direction and into our orbit looking for solutions.

I am sure Godin’s definition of outreach is much wider than what arts organization define as outreach, but even if your efforts embody his definition, 15 years is a long time and it is easy to give up on someone (or a group) that is clearly engaged and actively pursuing productive projects simply because they aren’t engaged and active with you.

As a whole, arts organizations currently don’t have that sort of patience. Even if they don’t expect people to fall in love with the arts after one exposure, they still want it to happen fairly quickly and investment to manifest in frequent interactions. Otherwise, organizations wouldn’t purge their mail lists after a year or two of apparent inactivity.

On the other hand, if you take up Godin’s challenge, take the approach that you value seekers and restructure to serve them in all the ways they want to interact with you, both on- and off-line, maybe it doesn’t take 15 years.

 

*I use 15 years because it was about 15 years ago that friends from grad school took me to an art museum when I was visiting them in NC, as did another pair of friends when I was visiting them in OK. However, it was only about 4 years ago that I started going to art museums of my own accord and on a regular basis. I figure if it takes a person with a career in the arts around 15 years to start to do that, it may take someone who is not in the arts around that long as well to go from infrequent to occasional and we need to wait for them.

Meandering In Minnesota

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A reader from Oklahoma recently wrote me thanking me for providing information arts organizations in rural settings can use. With that in mind, I wanted to highlight a “if Minnesota can do it…” post on Dakotafire, a site that hopes to emulate and replicate that MN’s successes in the Dakotas

I loved the idea promoted by John Davis, Executive Director of the Lanesboro Arts Center, had for making the entirety of Lanesboro, MN an arts campus (video) rather than just focus on building an arts center. (I also love Lanesboro’s claim to be the B&B capital of Minnesota)

The fact that the town of New York Mills, MN, population 1200, decided to sponsor a Great American Think Off is inspiring to me. It suggests that there are still plenty of interesting ideas that aren’t being explored and risks that aren’t being taken.

I was amused by the concept that rural communities don’t have arts/gallery walks like cities do, they have Arts Meanders that include artist studios spanning counties.

Note that none of these links appear in the Dakotafire post. The ideas were so intriguing, I was inspired to seek out the websites for each.

True, these are all existing ideas writ small, or perhaps it is writ large since they take the idea of an arts district and apply it to whole towns and counties.

For me it belies the thinking that there aren’t enough of some type of resource in a place to accomplish anything successfully. The effort invested in some of these projects has been spent over 20 years or so, but the devotion to pursuing the idea has been there.

Info You Can Use: Netflix HR Policies and the Arts

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Apparently Netflix Powerpoint presentation on human resources has been getting a lot of views this last month. I remember being able to read the accompanying article on Harvard Business Review at one time, but it seems to be protected by a registration requirement now.

The Powerpoint presentation can be viewed however and has some interesting lessons about employee relations for non-profit arts organizations. I will state outright that probably the biggest hurdle for arts organizations will be paying top dollar for top talent since the arts are often limited in their earning ability. However, given that arts people are often motivated by psychic income rather than monetary income, some of Netflix basic philosophy may apply.

Or perhaps having highly talented people working for you and following their ideas about jettisoning process and procedure can help you identify income streams needed to provide appropriate remuneration.

There are 126 slides so I can’t really summarize the whole presentation, but I wanted to talk about a few that stuck out.

Slides 4-18 talk about the values of Netflix making it clear that their view is that the true values of any company aren’t what they say they value on paper, but what employee activities are actually rewarded. A company says they value integrity, but punish a whistleblower, then that is not a true company value.

This is something to think about when writing your organizational values and mission statement. It almost seems best to be like the college campus that only puts in sidewalks when they see where the students walk to get between buildings. It might be best to enumerate the values you do exhibit rather than the ones you aspire to–and then revise as you evince more constructive behavior.

The thing about Netflix HR policy that most companies might have a hard time implementing is in slide 22. “Adequate performance gets a generous severance package.” They want people who are performing at their best and give those who aren’t the boot, but in the nicest way possible.

In the article which is now behind a registration system, they talk about a woman who was a great producer, but as technological advances left her behind, she couldn’t conform so they sat her down. They make it sound like she was relived to be let go (and maybe the severance package is just that good).

It seems a little cold hearted, but it does show they are in earnest when they claim a commitment to only working with the top talent they can find. In the slides that follow, they talk more about that, saying they use the metric of who would they fight to keep if the person was being hired away. You keep those you would fight for and give severance to everyone else.

To be fair, they say the approach should go the other way (slide 27) and that every employee should periodically ask what their manager would do to keep them on if they gave their two weeks. Later in the slides, they say that interviewing with other firms while working for Netflix is not a sign of disloyalty, but a good way to discover your market value, just make sure you don’t reveal any corporate secrets. (slide 108)

In slide 38, they admit working for them is not for everyone. They focus on results, so you don’t get an A for effort.

Where things get interesting is around slide 43. This is where they talk about why they are so focused on only keeping the most talented people. They note how companies often start curtailing freedom as they get bigger and more complex. Companies will add processes, but Netflix says that is only a short term solution because they lose their ability to be flexible (slide 51-61) in the face of change.

The solution is to increase the level of talent in your organization faster than complexity, that way you have self-disciplined, creative people working for you who don’t require tons of processes to keep them reined in.

This is the part I felt was most applicable to the arts. The conversation these days focuses on how inflexible arts organizations are at responding to the changing operating environment. Yet we have some of the most talented, creative people working for us. Small arts groups are nimble, but as they grow and become established, they generally seem to become less flexible. The size and desire for job stability by the employees has frequently been identified as prime culprits.

But according to Netflix you can have growth, organizational flexibility and job stability, so perhaps it is the processes that are to blame.

The next slide was the one that intrigued me most:

not so creative

 

That last line implying it is better to be flexible enough to recover from a problem rather than having rules to prevent them really caught me off guard. And in the slides that follow (63-71) they give examples of good and bad processes and discuss how their famous “take whatever vacation time you want” policy came into being. (Slide 67 is essentially the thesis)

But the idea that it is better for creative environments to take errors in stride and move past them echoes the oft expressed idea that artists and arts organizations shouldn’t fear making mistakes and taking risks because it is integral to self-development.

There are some interesting slides on employee relations, providing context rather than attempting to control (81-87). I don’t want to get into summarizing that because I wanted to tackle their compensation policy.

Their philosophy is that the compensation for each person is individual and they should be paying top market price for that person. And that they shouldn’t wait until an annual review to award an increase in compensation if they realize they are not paying top dollar, they should do so immediately.

Compensation is not dependent on Netflix success.  (96-104) They are against giving raises based on job title (what are all other marketing directors getting? Not all people with that title are of the same quality), or giving across the board percentage raises, or practicing internal parity (everyone in the department/seniority get paid the same).

For Netflix, monetary compensation is everything. I imagine that is because they are hiring people who are both very talented and motivated by the idea monetary compensation is everything.

For arts organizations, it is probably possible with some thought to find non-monetary rewards that motivate employees along the same philosophical lines utilized by Netflix. Perhaps flex time, access to facilities and supplies to exercise their creativity, use of organization owned housing for out of town guests at Christmas, etc.

Given the idea that compensation level is personal to each individual, the opportunities provided to each person may be different. An administrator and a receptionist may end up making the same salary because the administrator values being able to use the ceramic studio to create works they can sell over being paid more.

If you subscribe to their philosophy that A level results for B level effort gains you greater responsibility and compensation that will allow you to grow within the company, then a receptionist who has made great contributions could be promoted to the marketing department.

But then you potentially run into the area that takes the most courage–letting go of a mediocre producer in the marketing department. If there are a couple of stars in the marketing department who have the potential of heading up a new endeavor that will earn more revenue, that’s great, shuffle them off to better things. But you might as easily need to let someone go to get the best talent into marketing.

Netflix philosophy assumes everyone working for them is motivated to advance. I don’t recall if they covered this in the slides or the article, but I suspect if someone declined to be promoted, they might be viewed as too timid for the company’s ambitions and content to invest B effort to generate A work.

This may be just as true for an employee of an arts organization, but much more difficult to discern because the person could value the work/life balance afforded by their position so they can spend time with family or artistic pursuits. You might never find someone who can produce as well as they can working 25 hours a week and they may stick with you for the next 10 years. It can be tougher to discern in the arts and tougher to find the resolve to cut mediocre people loose.

But I suppose allowing for employee work-life balance is why Netflix has the very liberal “no-vacation policy” vacation policy. They probably understand that those needs are just as individual as compensation.

Wherein I Hallucinate About Internships

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I recently misread the title of a post on Museum 2.0. But in that second of misapprehension, my brain flooded with assumptions about the subject of the post. I misread “A Shared Ethics for Museum Internships” to be something like “Ethics for Shared Museum Internships.” In that moment, I thought shared internships was a great idea and had a vision for how it would work.

Some of these assumptions were made in the context of the growing discussion of problems with unpaid internships, most recently an quoting former Sleep No More interns as saying there wasn’t any educational benefit to the experience.

One thing articles about unpaid internships have focused on is the idea that the experience is supposed to be educational and of no direct benefit for whomever the intern is working. Now the best information I have right now is that these guidelines don’t apply to non-profit and public sectors. But there are rumblings that this may be changed. And there is also the issue of just because you can use an intern in the place of a staff person, doesn’t mean you should.

What I thought the Museum 2.0 post was going to suggest was trading interns between companies, particularly between for- and non-profits. I had this immediate vision of interns at a bank working in a museum and the museum intern working in a bank for a few weeks. The benefit being that the future banker would have an understanding of arts non-profits and the future museum director/curator would gain insight into what motivated banks to support arts organizations (or what motivates individuals to give as part of their bequest if the intern worked in the the trusts department.)

While it may not be entirely appropriate for a non-profit to “act like a business,” this type of experience can contribute to a better understanding of the points of view of board members who are business leaders by future non-profit leaders, and those of non-profits by future business leaders and board members. Miracles probably won’t result from a few weeks spent interning in a different company, but it shouldn’t impede things too badly either.

Moments later, I realized what the real title of the piece was, but my initial impression still seemed like an interesting idea. Even if you didn’t do an internship trade, placing an intern to work for a week at the company that did your brochure printing or the hotel that put your performers up, would give an intern a better understanding of the work done by the close partners of the organization.

A few years down the road, the intern might be in a position to propose an arrangement that is mutually beneficial to both the non-profit and the commercial partner that ends up bringing them closer together. A closer bond would also be the hopeful long term benefit of the intern swap I initially mentioned. Once the interns had reported on their experience and moved on, hopefully the cooperating businesses and non-profit would feel a continuing respect and understanding of each other.

Of course, it can be hard work to arrange all these details. It is hard enough to ensure that the experience at your organization is meaningful and doesn’t relegate the intern to copying and answering the phone, much less to provide the same experience at other work sites. But then, the intern isn’t really supposed to be making a lot of copies during this period anyway.

Any thoughts about this, its viability and how it might be accomplished? I mean, essentially what I am asking is, since I already hallucinated the post into existence, does anyone want to write about Ethics of Shared Internships?

Software Update As An Exercise of Artistic License

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Earlier this week I was reading an article about the practical consequences of receiving content and updates from “the Cloud.”

Previously, I had read a little bit about how we are really renting rather than buying content. This article reinforces that noting how “upgrades” actually removed features or content that people had specifically opted to purchase.

I started to think, “ah, soon the arts will be the only provider of authentic content..,” except that hasn’t been the case for decades, if ever.

I am not sure about the other disciplines, but in theatre there has long been a battle between the content creators and the interpreters over the faithful depiction of the creator’s work.

Performing groups will omit content for considerations like running time and language or cast people of the opposite gender in a role. The standard royalties contract requires you to perform the show as written, at least dialogue wise. Some playwrights/lyricists/composers will actually specify that you can not under any circumstances cut or change specific elements of their show.

Others will actually provide permission to make changes with suggestions on how it can be accomplished.

With situations like Amazon removing and changing content from people’s Kindles and Tesla using a software update to remove a feature people paid $2250 for, both done without telling people it was happening, it seems like a good time to revisit the idea of whether it is suitable to make changes to a performance and represent it as the original.

There has been a lot of discussion about sampling other people’s work and representing it as your own. While censorship is an eternal topic of conversation, there generally isn’t as much conversation about changing someone else’s work and still representing it as their’s.

Content creators often make specific choices in the expressions of their vision that they feel are crucial to what they are trying to communicate. Replacing all the cursing in David Mamet’s plays with “darn it” changes everything about the dynamics between the characters. He would probably be horrified to have his name associated with a production of American Buffalo that inserted fiddlesticks for every utterance of f–k.

Adaptation and artistic license has been a common feature of the arts. When a musician announces that they are going to play a song by someone else, you can be reasonably certain that there are going to be alterations from the original.

However, when dealing with content with which the average viewer is not familiar, is it honest to claim to be performing a work if you have made crucial changes?

For example, Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s longer plays, so maybe you decide to cut the scene where Hamlet speaks to the players of “the play within the play” about his intent to entrap his uncle with a thinly veiled depiction of Hamlet’s father’s murder. Rather, you choose to reference the scheme briefly when the uncle reacts strongly to seeing the scene.

This decision removes the famous “Speak the speech I pray you…” speech and arguably weakens the show by removing a demonstration of Hamlet’s character development. Though since you cut it, you would argue that it wasn’t so important.

However, the real question is, if you don’t tell people about all the cuts and changes you made, are you defrauding your audience by letting them think they are buying tickets to the authentic product? They wanted the experience of seeing Hamlet. You diluted it by removing some important parts.

This is a debate that can get tossed back and forth for a long time. It seems an interesting situation to consider in the context of a consumer’s ever decreasing status as an owner of content.

Is there any difference between softening perceived Anti-semitism in a performance of Merchant of Venice in the name of artistic vision and Amazon agreeing to remove the N-word from electronic copies of Huckleberry Finn sold to certain school districts because their vision is that Huck be less racist?

It has started to occur to me that as people begin to consume content via media that can be altered without notice or detection, artists may actually have less scope for claiming artistic licenses lest they end up providing justification for widespread revisionism.

Ironically, it may prove to have been easier to claim artistic freedom and expression when there was a definitive source both you and your detractors could agree you were diverging from. How can you claim your interpretation is a rejection of the rampant injustice embodied by the original if you can’t be sure if what you are reacting to is the original sentiment or some latter action?

And why are you so upset anyway when you can work to get the offensive content revised to your liking?

Info You Can Use: Resources For Developing Community Engagement

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

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

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

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

They organize the content into the following areas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Will You Do If You Win?

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Economist Alex Tabarrok has written about the fact that the primary activity of firefighters is no longer fighting fires. Fires are less frequent than in the past thanks to building codes and other preventative measures so municipalities are finding additional tasks for fire fighters to perform.

What caught my eye was his comments:

“…explains it in terms of what’s called the “March of Dimes problem.” When polio was defeated, the March of Dimes, started under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to combat the disease, suddenly had no reason to exist. “They were actually successful, and it was something they never planned for,” said Tabarrok. “But instead of disbanding the organization, they set it onto a whole bunch of other tasks…and so it’s kind of lost its focus. It’s no longer easy to evaluate whether it’s doing a good job or not.”

This immediately brought two things to mind. First, that this was a good illustration of the value of embracing the idea of building an expiration date into your organization at the time of formation.

The other thing it evoked was the oft expressed warning against chasing funding for projects outside the scope of your core purpose just because the funding exists. Not only does it cause an organization to lose focus, but as Tabarrok notes, it is difficult to evaluate if your work is really effective any more.

It occurred to me that one of the benefits of building a planned expiration into your organization is the ability to declare a win. That is something that non-profits don’t often get the opportunity to do given the way they are often structured.

If you read about the vision behind arts organizations with expiration dates, achieving the expiration condition doesn’t necessarily need to result in an absolute dissolution.

In many cases, it can just be an opportunity to reorganize a similar group of people to address a new project without feeling an obligation to perpetuate anything from the previous entity. In many respects, it contributes to organization evolution by discarding what didn’t work or is no longer relevant and allowing experimentation with some new ideas.

Take Me To The River

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As the summer comes to a close, I wanted to share something that caught my eye back in May. I bookmarked it and looked back at it periodically throughout the summer because I liked the idea so much.

Back in May, as a celebration of the Minnesota River,

“performers staged a “paddling theater production” …The event offered stories, songs and characters from local river lore, presented both as live theater and live-action radio drama in an original production called “With the Future on the Line: Paddling Theater from Granite Falls to Yellow Medicine.”

… Eighteen voyageur canoes, each holding nine audience members and a guide, paddled the 13-mile theater route. Audience members could choose to take part in the theatrical voyage by signing up for a spot on a guided voyageur canoe or by bringing their own canoe or kayak.”

Take a look at the pictures that accompany the article. (Actually it is more photo essay than written text.) It looks to me like the company may have stopped at different points along the river to perform for people gathered there.

I am not sure if they did one scene or the whole story at each stop. From the images, it appears that those of the audience that didn’t take the canoes may have been bussed to the second stop.

I just like the whole concept of using the river as a mode of transport and medium for performance. Even before I read about this project, I had been pondering the possibilities for doing something similar on the nearby Ohio River.

A few years back someone told me a dance concert had been performed on a barge anchored in the Genesee River (or maybe Erie Canal) where those waterways pass through Rochester, NY. The image of people arrayed along the shoreline watching the performance has fired my imagination since.

Even if you don’t live on a navigable waterway, something like this could be possible between towns connected by a railroad or a hiking trail like the Appalachian Trail. It could serve the double purpose of bringing performances to different communities in a novel way and getting those avid about outdoors activities involved.

Imagine your company arriving in town with an entourage of 30-40 hiker-campers. Along the way there could be commentary on the flora, fauna, geologic features and historical sites found along the route.

This is the sort of audience participation and interaction that everyone talks about, only it isn’t dependent on having a physical performance space.

(Not that passively listening to Talking Heads is bad 😉 )

Stuff To Ponder: New Standard Discount Category

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Call Me…The Stabilizer

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A couple weeks ago a job listing from Springboard for the Arts’ job board came across my Twitter feed simply listed as “Stabilizer.”

Intrigued, I followed the link and discovered that it was for the job as Climb Theatre’s accountant.

As you might imagine, many of the staff at Climb Theatre have non-traditional titles. While I wonder if “Leader of the Pack…Vroom, Vroom” might be a little too whimsical for the executive director and question how confident people might be at giving money to an organization with a “Gambling Manager” on the executive staff (Managing Director? CFO? Artistic Director?), I immediately liked most of the connotations associated with “Stabilizer.”

The only negative association I had was that the organization wasn’t fiscally stable and they were looking for someone to save them. But in the job description they say, “Happily, CLIMB’s financial position is quite solid and cash flow is not an issue.”

What I liked about the title was that it implied if you took the job, you would be an important part of the organization’s life rather than a functionary in the back office. The job description says that too, but that was the first impression I got directly from the job title.

The job title also hints that there is an attempt to make the job environment an interesting and enjoyable place to work.

Changing job title terminology may seem like an empty gesture in place of real change, and granted it often is intended to manipulate. However, there can be a difference in the way you feel about yourself as a result.

Would you rather be a sales clerk or sales associate even though the job is exactly the same? As a customer, do you think you would treat one a little differently than the other? The difference may be small, but they can accumulate over time to result in better esteem.

I am not advising a mass change of titles to make people feel better about their jobs. In performing arts organizations especially the performers and technicians get recognition and praise for executing a performance well. Directors, both administrative and artistic, get interviewed and asked to speak before crowds.

The back office people may know they are doing work that is important to the organization, but can easily feel they are interchangeable with any other accountant, human resource officer or receptionist in an organization where so many are recognized for specific and often unique contributions.

In small non-profits where rewards of any sort are especially hard to come by, it can be especially important to make everyone feel like they are an integral part of the staff who would be difficult to replace.

Crazy titles will certainly come across as disingenuous if it isn’t part of the existing organizational culture. Besides, something unique to your own business culture will go further in making someone feel they are unique.

And by the way, if the job sounds appealing to you, you have until June 10 to apply

Going Back To The Farm

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One of my favorite posts was one I did covering a grant report made to the University of Wisconsin-Extension, Putting Culture Back into Agriculture.

One of the great things about the report is that it talks about the impact of the Wisconsin Idea on the arts in that state with artists crisscrossing the state helping farmers and townspeople learn how to paint, write plays and learn how to sing together.

I put a number of great quotes in my entry, but one I omitted which seems just as relevant now as it was when UW-Madison President Glenn Frank said it in 1925:

There’s a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama…. The arts are vital, if in the years ahead we are to master instead of being mastered by the vast complex and swiftly moving technical civilization born of science and the machine….

Even if you don’t see your organization as serving a rural community, the reflections by the grantees about what they did wrong in their approach to serving their community, how they rectified it and how things turned out splendidly just the same.

It isn’t often you see this sort of humility in grant reports and it can serve as an example of what to emulate.

If You Love Your Brand, Set It Free

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Last week I reflected on Adam Thurman’s recent post about wrestling corporation WWE reinventing itself three times to adapt to changing audiences.

He followed up with a post about how the visible manifestation of rebranding has to reflect an internalized change that has already started within the company, or else the rebranding fails.

He suggests organizations commit to rebranding themselves every 7 years or so.

His post reminded me that Japanese anime series change their opening sequence and music every time the season changes, which can happen multiple times a year. As an example, here is the opening of D.Grayman season 1 versus season 3.

There is continuity of characters and basic artistic look to let fans identify their favorite anime series when a new season comes out. However, other than the Drew Carey Show whose changes in opening sequences didn’t necessarily synch up with changes in seasons, I can’t think of too many American shows that make a regular change. (Granted, apples to oranges comparison.)

In any case, while most arts organizations may put out a different brochure every season, they may not change the look of their website as regularly. That might be something to consider, especially if you can feature the work of a local visual artist to draw attention to them as a resource.

It could be especially effective to change the header of a monthly newsletter since that can take less effort than revamping an entire website. Doing A/B testing with different art can help identify an effective look and identity for the organization.

You can probably get a high open rate on your emails if you tell people you want their feedback. This month half are getting one piece of art and the other half another, next month the art with switch for both groups. That way people not only are engaged by the request for feedback, but there is a sense of competition with another group about who got to see the better artwork first.

Don’t Blame Arcane Terminology and Practice

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Andrew Taylor touches upon a little of what I was thinking about this weekend in his post today. He quotes a recent piece by Marian Godfrey where she talks about how the language used by arts managers and grant makers is alienating and soul sucking.

…like any professional jargon, it puts up barriers and makes people who are unfamiliar with our dialect feel like outsiders, including the very people we are trying to support — artists and engaged people in our communities. I believe we need more humane language to describe ourselves and our visions: words and meanings that are shared by artists, administrators, and the public.

I had been thinking about the specialized language and terminologies used in the arts this weekend. I believe Godfrey was referring to the institutional and general language used to discuss the benefits of the arts as a whole, (I read the whole piece as Andrew Taylor enjoined his readers to do), whereas I was thinking about the terms specific to each arts discipline. As such, I don’t know that I can say I directly disagree with what Godfrey says.

The conclusion I came to this weekend is that while there is quite a bit of vocabulary one must learn in order to comfortably participate in a conversation about a discipline, I don’t think the need to learn a complex set of terms really comprises a significant impediment to becoming an participant or spectator. I think it is just a convenient excuse.

There are plenty of instances where people willingly engage in the time consuming process of learning special terminology. Take MMORPGs like W.O.W. where people will be exposed to terms like: tank, buff/debuff, AoE, aggro, autoloot, cooldown, PvE, PvP, grinding, griefing, among thousands of others. Players are expected to master the terminology, understand the role their character fills and how to use their abilities alongside others to achieve a goal.

Thousands of people happily undertake this challenge every day.

You might argue that people playing online games gain a sense of personal accomplishment that motivates them. But watching sports is often just as passive an activity as watching a performance, (okay, granted you can’t jump up and yell at a ballerina the moment the spirit moves you like you can with an athlete), and requires learning all sorts of arcane rules specific to each game. Often the rules are a little different for each level of play.

People learn these rules and terms because they want to. If they don’t know them, they can seek help from friends or go online to look up the information.

To illustrate this, I intentionally didn’t link to any resource with the gaming terms. Did you look them up or think about looking them up if you didn’t know what they were?

Sometimes this information is collated by the company/team/organization providing the activity. Often these days, people sharing a common interest join together to contribute information to a wiki which exists independently of the organization or activity it covers.

So when people express trepidation about learning the vocabulary and rituals of the performing and visual arts, I think the question really should be why this is so? My impulse is to respond that it is because there are not enough people they are acquainted with either personally or virtually providing a message that it is worth the trouble to learn about it.

I also don’t think there are enough informational resources out there to make it easy for people to learn if they so desire. I just did a Google search for the term “first position” because I can never remember the feet placement for the different positions. I couldn’t find it until I searched for the term “second position.” (Though I did discover A LOT of dance schools are named First Position.)

This is not to say that there aren’t many wikis and specialized dictionaries online which cover arts terminology. American Ballet Theatre has a pretty good dictionary of dance terms. It is just a coincidence that first position doesn’t appear there.

You would have to know to look there though because everyone’s go to source, Wikipedia, only has about 24 terms on it and there isn’t a good dance wiki that I could find. Information sources on theatre terminology are only slightly better.

As much as people say television shows like Glee, Smash and Bunheads don’t reflect reality, they do serve to disseminate the message that singing, theatre and dance are things people should be interested in learning more about.

Like I said, the idea that there isn’t enough of a visible trend and readily available information was something of a primary impression I had. I’d be happy to hear other theories.

While I think some of the terminology and practices might need a change, I do feel fairly strongly that people’s reticence to learn more about arts disciplines can’t be laid primarily at the feet of specialized vocabulary and unfamiliar practices.

People take the necessity of doing this in stride if they are motivated to learn something. Simplifying the language and altering the practices isn’t going to result in a sudden deluge of attendees because the initial motivating impulse will be absent.

Info You Can Use: NP Orgs Exist In Shadow Universe (Great Resource Guides Too)

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My Twitter feed delivered me two great resources for arts professionals on the same day this week.

The first came courtesy of Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group. I guess I should have known that when they talked about a guide developed for “WA Artists” they meant Western Australia and not Washington State. In my defense, they link to a lot of prominent U.S. arts sources (like me!).

The guide they shared, Amplifier: The Arts Business Guide for Creative People, from Propel Youth Arts, is really one of the best guides for creatives just starting out that I have come across. If you cut out the resource guide at the end of the booklet, 98% of it is applicable to a creative anywhere.

The guide is really accessible with fun illustrations and interviews that will probably make you want to move to Western Australia. It also walks you through all sorts of planning processes with questions and checklists: project management, business plans, identifying markets, goal setting, evaluation, finances & funding, legal, product, pricing, place and promotion.

It doesn’t just deal with performance, but also tackles film, visual art and publishing, delves into copyright law (which appears almost identical to U.S. law) and licenses.

The guide also spends a few pages on risk assessment and insurance for events which is something I have never really seen in similar guides even though it is very important.

The second resource comes from the Wallace Foundation. This one is more geared toward arts groups rather than individuals starting out and is focused on administrative issues like finances, board oversight and administration.

You may have seen some tweets about it but not followed the link. It is really worth stopping by to take a look.

Some of the guides and case studies are what you might expect “Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management” and How to Talk About Finances So Non-Financial Folks Will Listen.

But there are some with more intriguing titles like: “Efficiency” and “Not-for-Profit” Can Go Hand in Hand,  and The Looking-Glass World of Nonprofit Money: Managing in For-Profits’ Shadow Universe.  

The latter is described as” Especially useful overview for board members with little exposure to the unique nature of finance in a nonprofit context.” I  never really thought of NP orgs as operating in a shadow universe. Sounds so cool! Does that mean Rocco Landesman was the dark emperor or something while he headed the National Endowment for the Arts?

There are also proposals like “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle” which advocate for changes in the way foundations support non-profits.

The part of this resource I have seldom seen in other places was a whole section of five articles, including a podcast, on figuring out the True Cost of programs. They specifically have a calculator for figuring out the cost of after school programs, but following the steps outlined in some of the other articles can help reveal truths like social media isn’t actually free.

I haven’t read through everything in the guide, but I am definitely going to bookmark it for future reference.

Info You Can Use: Are You Prepared to Weaponize Your Storytelling?

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Hat tip to P. Martin for the link to Chris Brogan’s guest post on Copyblogger about Content Marketing. I will confess that I think the term content marketing is a phrase devoid of much meaning. In the comments section of the post, Brogan agrees but says he just uses the terms that everyone is Googling.

It was hard to pass by this post though due to Brogan’s very quotable declaration that “Content marketing is weaponized storytelling.”

Brogan says that he used that phrase at a conference, but he isn’t sure that he really believes it and amended it to the admittedly less evocative, “Content marketing is sales-minded storytelling.”

His premise is that content marketing isn’t branding. He feels that only really big companies with large budgets can afford to build brand awareness. The little guy has to depend on content marketing which is aimed at “helping your market make a decision of some kind.” This doesn’t mean constantly making a hard sell.

Your site/email newsletter/podcast/whatever should consist of something like this:

Some posts that are just friendly and storytelling.
Some posts that are gentle pushes towards a next action or an ask.
Some posts that are pure selly-sell, as I like to call it. Apparently over here they call that an offer.
Some (but very few) totally off-topic posts.

This would be true of a blog, an email list, or whatever. I believe that the real goal of content marketing is to advance your business.

[…]

This is where it’s tricky. Because the business goal just might be entertainment. The business goal of my writing a guest post on Copyblogger is to get you to consider signing up for my awesome free newsletter.

Based on this great post (okay, decent post), you’re supposed to now think, “Wow, I really like what Chris had to say. I think I’ll give his newsletter a try.”

Did I charge you any money? No. Did I tell you about my product or service in the body of this post? No. What I did was start what I hope to be a relationship with you and I’ve invited you to get my awesome newsletter. That’s me content marketing.

Do you feel dirty? No. (You might already be dirty, but that’s awesome, and yet, not my fault.)

One of the commenters on this post felt Chris was wrong and made too many generalizations. His company has focused on positioning themselves as experts in the industry and gets great response from that. He said the only time responses have flagged was when they tried to inject content. Chris agrees that different industries and markets require different approaches.

Acknowledging that, I have to think that Chris’ approach is more aligned with the needs of arts organizations which largely employ storytelling to engage their customers/audiences.

At my theatre, we don’t do it with our newsletters as much as I would like. They have been mostly focused on communicating information about shows with interesting visuals and language and keeping text to a minimum. We are still evolving that approach.

However, our Facebook page has been a place where we share all sorts of information about the arts in general along with information about the shows. We have done this somewhat out of a desire to keep people engaged with the organization during the gaps between shows.

We want to give people a reason to continually visit our Facebook page, but also communicate information about arts careers and opportunities to the students and artists whom our facility serves. We have a television monitor with information about our shows in the lobby and it just occurred to me that would also be a great place to share some of the interesting tidbits we post on our Facebook page alongside our show information.

Many of these ideas can be offered free to the public without making a hard sell or talking about your company. So think about it. What resources are available to you? What can you do?

Religion vs Arts, Who Wins The Battle Of Orthodoxies!

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

It starts by describing a warehouse space that has the

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

But it is, in fact, a church. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not only that, there is a real bias toward entrepreneurship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Stories

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My mother has been doing some hardcore genealogy research for years now. There was a trip to Ireland a few years back, last Christmas we were in FDR’s Presidential Library, this Christmas I got a calendar with pictures and stories from my maternal grandfather’s side of family all over it.

But she isn’t alone, with shows like Who Do You Think You Are tracing celebrity genealogy, the increased use of DNA testing for various ends and Ancestry.com’s growing subscription rolls, show that people are increasingly interested in their heritage.

From what I have read, interest in genealogy usually increases as people enter retirement which is what a lot of baby boomers (including my mother) have started doing.

It occurs to me then that it might be meaningful to many communities if arts organizations made an effort to help them tell their stories through performance, exhibitions and participatory activities.

The one type of show that has pretty consistently done well for my theatre are those that resonate with groups that maintain a fairly strong cultural identity. Some of it has been related to ethnicity, but others have crossed ethnic lines and been more about the shared experience of place.

Even if you don’t have the capacity to produce/commission/organize a performance, I think there are plenty of opportunities for involving the community in interactive experiences.

By default, I think of those Nina Simon does at her museum, but something could easily be organized around a big 4th of July picnic where everyone sits around and tells family stories about the immigrant/frontier experience. Those stories can be collected/recorded/interpreted in some way and displayed.

My intuition tells me these activities that might even abet community building during a time where electronic devices are making people a little more insular.

Do Arts Really Need A Tax Status Of Their Own?

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Today is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. If you saw Spielberg’s movie, Lincoln, you will know that there were many concerns about the legality of trying to make the proclamation stick, especially upon reunification of the country, which necessitated the adoption of the 13th Amendment to ensure the abolition of slavery.

The movie actually reminded me a lot of an episode of The West Wing where legislative wrangling was set against the backdrop of a president’s daily national and personal concerns. Either the job hasn’t changed a lot in 150 years or Spielberg was presenting the story in a familiar context.

Let me state clearly from the outset I don’t want to equate slavery with non-profit art organizations. The anniversary and the relationship between the proclamation and 13th amendment is just a convenient excuse to revisit a topic.

The concept that a situation only had tenuous legal support has parallels in the non-profit status most arts organizations enjoy. There is no mention of arts organizations in the 501 c 3 tax code. I made note of this in an open letter post to President Obama on the occasion of his inauguration four years ago.

In that post I asked the president to help the non-profit arts sector by providing a specific, better designed tax structure in which arts organizations can operate. Thinking back I wondered if that was still necessary given the continued emergence of the L3C model, B corporations and the crowd funding/investing options allowed by the JOBS Act.

Don’t get me wrong, none of these options are well suited to arts organizations. I just started wondering if the arts are really best served if the government legislates a specific structure within which they must operate. Experimentation with planned organizational expiration may do more to cultivate viable, community/situation specific models than asking for one to be legislated.

Having arts organizations making common cause with for-profit corporations and other interests to advance laws and regulations they mutually favor may do more to raise the profile of arts organizations in general than had the arts groups worked among themselves to carve out something specific to the arts sector.

Just something to think about at the start of a new year and a new presidential term since many ideas and opportunities have emerged since the last one.

Your Personal Board of Directors

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The Drucker Exchange has an animated interpretation of a speech Jim Collins (Good to Great, Built to Last) delivered in 2009. The speech is titled “Ten To-Dos For Young People” but I am pretty sure it is good advice for people of any age.

The first thing Collins suggests is getting a personal board of directors where the members are chosen not for their accomplishments but for their character. These people don’t necessarily need to know they are on your board of directors.

This struck me as an oft overlooked aspect of personal development. We are often told to find mentors and network to advance our careers, seldom does the character of these mentors and the necessity of moral and value guidance get mentioned.

People in the arts often need this type of guidance because establishing a career is so difficult and subject to so many conflicting pressures. It is not only a matter of whether you appear nude in an “art film” to pay the rent but also the question of whether you are a sell out if you faced with an opportunity for commercial success. Are you a bad person for choosing either of these paths? Professional mentors may not provide the same advice as personal mentors.

He also proposed examining yourself as objectively and dispassionately as a scientist would a bug. Just as a scientist doesn’t make judgments about how the bug would be better bug if it only worked harder or learned more, you should just look at yourself as you are at this moment and simply catalog the features you and others observe.

I thought this was especially apt advice for people in the arts since so much self evaluation is derived from qualitative, often emotionally based criteria. Detachment can be difficult to achieve, but the results can be both valuable and comforting.

Although I have often heard the advice to perform objective self-evaluation and had it compared to a scientific approach, I found it helpful to be reminded that a scientist doesn’t generally wish the insects they are observing were as fast as cheetahs and intelligent as dolphins. They hunker down and try to discover what the bug can teach us about the world.

I also liked Collins advice to look at your statement to question ratio and see how you can double it. He says he was once told that he was spending a lot of time trying to be interesting and that perhaps he should shift his effort toward being interested.

Now I will say that while there is that stereotype of the self-impressed artistic type who makes statements about the “true meaning” of something, I think this is part of the learning process. Often these statements are just an attempt to test one’s view of the world.

I think everyone is allowed to be an unsufferable egoist for while to work themselves out. The problem arises if you don’t realize this is a method of learning and not the default mode of social interaction.

Collins advice is apt both personally and professionally as a method of teaching yourself how to learn from everyone you meet. I think this dovetails well with my post last week about the importance of asking audiences and the community about their experience with the arts rather than telling people what their experience will or should be.

Finally, (and if you have been counting, you know I have covered fewer than 10 points–watch the video it is only 4:30 minutes long and a cartoon for goodness sakes), Collins advice is to find something that you have so much passion for you are willing to endure the pain.

If you are involved with the arts, you have probably already made this decision. Even if Collins wasn’t thinking specifically about the arts when he said this, the animation team was and depicted this point with a ballerina dancing and then massaging her feet.

How Audiences Are Like The Electorate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you vote?

No.

Would you like to register?

No.

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

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

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

She launched into her life story….

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

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

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

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

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

and in another part of the article:

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

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

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

Now For Something Completely Different

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Last year my assistant theatre manager gave me a calendar of Japanese wood block prints from MFA Boston. Most of the works included are several hundred years old and have really enjoyed looking at these past months.

Many of you may be under the impression that art from this period was very stylized and refined, and you would generally be right.

However…the subject matter which artists dealt with is another subject altogether. A scroll created by an unknown artist of the Edo Period, quite aptly named “He Gassen” tells the story of the “Great Fart War,” pre-dating Monty Python by about 200 years.

The scroll was digitized by Waseda University and all the images can be viewed on their website. Note that the proper sequence requires you to start at the top right and proceed left across the page.

While the scroll’s key demographic may strike you as being an eight year old boy, you might find yourself bookmarking this page depicting Japanese men in various degrees of undress discharging their attacks from atop horses, attempting to erect protective barriers and “recharging” around great pots of food, as something of a guilty pleasure.

You may not have credited the Japanese of the Edo period with this sort of humor. To some degree you would be correct, this period was characterized by strict Japanese isolationism. The He-Gassen scrolls are said to have reflected the anti-Western sentiment of the time.

Again, not unlike the sentiments expressed by the Frenchman toward the Englishman in the Monty Python video.

Believe it or not the “fart battle” was a fairly common subject of the time. Christie’s auction house sold fart war scrolls by another artist for about $1,500.

Fleeing The Tiger Is No Time To Get Creative

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There was a recent series of posts about creativity and children on the Creativity Post website that have made some concepts gel for me.

In September Dr. Peter Gray made a post about declining creativity scores in school aged children. In part he blames an education system which increasingly focuses on the concept that solutions are either right or wrong rather than providing free time to experiment and play. Given the research he cites, parents that over schedule their kids’ time also share some of the blame.

As much as we in the arts tout the benefits of creativity, you may be surprised to learn how important it is to success in life and how significant the decline is:

According to Kim’s analyses, the scores on these tests [Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)] at all grade levels began to decline somewhere between 1984 and 1990 and have continued to decline ever since. The drops in scores are highly significant statistically and in some cases very large….

…but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average Elaboration score on the TTCT, for every age group from kindergarten through 12th grade, fell by more than 1 standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. Yikes.

[…]

Indeed, the TTCT seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.

In a post this month, Gray continues on this theme discussing how important it is to allow a child to create in a non-judgmental environment. He cites some interesting research on the impact of judgement in home environments on the creative development of children.

My ah-ha! moment came after Gray discusses how people will generate a more creative product if they don’t know their work will be evaluated. People tend to edit themselves in order to please the evaluator and out of fear and anxiety about being judged. (my emphasis)

“If a tiger is chasing you, your best bet is to use well-learned or habitual ways of escaping from the tiger, not to dream up new creative ways of doing so. Creative ways always run the risk of failure, so we are biologically constructed to cut creativity off when failure has serious consequences.”

Many in the arts, myself included, have written about how important it is for arts organizations to embrace the risk of possible failure by experimenting with new approaches to the creation of art, audience/visitor experience, marketing, pricing, etc.

In the context of Gray’s observation, it isn’t that arts organizations are simply risk averse about new experience the way kids are worried about the first day of school or audiences are anxious about attending their first classical music concert.

Rather the fear engendered by financial consequences evokes a hard wired primal fight/flight reaction that actually shuts down our ability to think creativity.

The idea that this situation is biological was as illuminating to me as Neill Archer Roan’s observation a few years ago that emotional satisfaction engendered a diminished sense of responsibility for self-/professional development in arts professionals.

I think it is helpful for arts organizations to be aware the fear of experimentation in the face of perceived threats is not only probably irrational, but also a genuinely visceral reaction. Knowing this, they can endeavor to create a decision making environment where the influence and presence of these threats are diminished.

Likewise, it is important for arts organizations to know these things when providing and advocating for arts education. Creativity is cultivated by arts instruction that provides opportunity for wholly free expression alongside direction and evaluation.

Can We Do Lunch?

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I frequently reference the positive interactions and contributions that have resulted from one of the visual arts teachers eating his lunch backstage. He says he eats here because his students can’t find him to bug him while he is eating. While he does often eat peacefully in our building, he gets himself involved in providing advice or direct assistance on some project or another on a pretty regular basis during his meal. It leads me to suspect he is exaggerating his desire to flee his students.

I get a warm feeling when I hear him chatting with people backstage, even if it is about something entirely unrelated to performing/visual arts like remembrances of past vacation trips. I know there are relationships being strengthened in those conversations and that will manifest to our mutual benefit somewhere down the road.

I got to thinking about how this dynamic which evolved through no effort of our own could be intentionally be replicated elsewhere.

One thing that occurred to me was that K12 schools might set up a program where students could have lunch with artists once or twice a week. They could just hang out together without any expectation of some sort of “artistic experience” occurring and talk about sports or the weather. Maybe the artist would give some sort of advice on a project a student was working on, maybe they would just complain about the cafeteria food.

Of course, this is predicated half on the assumption there is still a music/drama/art studio in the school to hang out in and half on the assumption the arts programs in the school are either non-existent or on the wane. Obviously, this could be a great complement to school arts programs which are already vibrant. But really, one of the benefits I saw to this idea was that if the school can’t support anything else arts related, maybe they could scrape some dollars together to pay for the artist’s gas and lunch over the course of a year.

My other thought was that this could provide the most regular, unintimidating interaction with the arts a student might get. They get to hang out with a knowledgeable artist who isn’t grading or placing expectations on them on a consistent basis. There is an opportunity to actively engage with an artist in a manner that assembly performances and lecture demos by visiting artists don’t provide.

The benefit to the artist is that they gain some insight in to what younger people in the community (and perhaps the community at large) is thinking and experiencing about the arts informally over a longer period of time rather than in the short span of a Q&A or reception which impose constraints and expectations on the interaction.

Unlike a one off outreach concert/lec-dem, there is no pressure on the artist to provide an experience replete with meaning to make the kids love the arts because it might be the only experience they get at all this year.

Students having a rich and varied experience with the arts is the ideal, but maybe this simple interactions over lunch across a student’s educational career is what is needed to normalize the idea that one would go to or be involved in performance, museum, gallery opening when one got older and had the time and resources to do so.

I talk about this idea in relation to K12 schools, but obviously there is nothing to keep an arts organization anywhere from having weekly lunches anyone could attend without any preconceived expectations about the experience. Obviously it would be ideal if it could happen in an arts center so people get used to the idea of just wandering in and so you can jump up and grab something to demonstrate with if someone asks a question.

But if an arts center is physically in a bad location or people just won’t consider it as part of their lunch plans, having a weekly gathering at the local coffee shop/diner to talk about whatever can be just as effective. (Not to mention, the coffee shop owner will love your arts organization all the more.)

Thoughts about this? Ways it can be improved? This entry was about 85% stream of consciousness so I am likely to have overlooked some problems or additional opportunities.

Yes Virgina, There Is A Cost Disease

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Over on the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen opines that the arts are not impacted by Baumol’s cost disease.

2. I do not see the arts as subject to the cost disease very much at all. As for the “live performing arts,” the disease seems to afflict the older and less innovative sectors, such as opera and the symphony. There is plenty of live music these days, it is offered in innovative ways, and much of it is free.

I was a little confused by this point since all it really proves is that people aren’t charging for live music and doesn’t really address that there are costs involved with the performance.

Admittedly, he does seem to imply that innovation in the way the artistic product is offered makes all the difference. Back in June, I noted that Jon Silpayamanant made the point that there are alternative ways to make money when offering an experience.

Cowen goes on to say, (my emphasis)

“4. In many sectors of the arts, especially music, consumers demand constant turnover of product. Old music becomes “obsolete” — for whatever sociological reasons — and in this sense the sector is creating lots of new value every year. From an “objectivist” point of view they are still strumming guitars with the same speed, but from a subjectivist point of view — the relevant one for the economist – they are remarkably innovative all the time in the battle against obsolescence. A lot of the cost disease argument is actually an aesthetic objection that the art forms which have already peaked — such as Mozart — sometimes have a hard time holding their ground in terms of cost and innovation.”

I will grant him that some of the cost disease problems can be attributed to an adherence to aesthetic ideals rooted in the past and a resistance to innovation.

But I am not sure if consumers are truly demanding a constant turnover in product. There is reluctance to sample anything new and unfamiliar among consumers. This isn’t necessarily confined to symphony and opera where you might argue the new material is being presented to the wrong audiences (i.e. older existing audiences whose tastes are already set).

There is as much a sense of risk aversion among audience as among content creators. Broadway shows are often revivals or derivative of works that have already proven their success. Playwrights bemoan the fact that regardless of their proximity to Broadway, few theatres are producing new works.

The same is true with movies. The most well attended movies this summer were based on comic books. Even the plots of those stories had been revamped numerous times in the comics format. The plan for the adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit went from two movies to three leaving fans to wonder, if the three books of the Lord of the Rings took three movies to tell, (albeit with much left out), how is the one book of The Hobbit going to be stretched to three?

A fair bit of emotion and nostalgia is responsible for perpetuating the conditions which contribute to Baumol’s cost disease. One of the points Cowen makes reinforces this:

“Live music” may seem like it doesn’t change much, but lifting the embargo on Cuba would boost the quantity and quality of my consumption of spectacular concert experiences, as would a non-stop flight to Haiti.

Opportunity rather than innovation is the only thing having any bearing on the quantity and quality of his consumption. It isn’t necessary for Cuban musicians to made any changes whatsoever since 1962 when the embargo began, they just need to be available.

There is an element of his aforementioned “aesthetic objection that the art forms…have already peaked” in this point as well. It is difficult to take an entirely objective view of a product or service possessing an artistic element.

If quality of product could be maintained by paring down performers and replacing them with technology, The White Stripes would have been a model everyone emulated. As interesting as the band’s work might have been, there wasn’t a rush to form duo performance groups.

It may be a difficult to define Platonic ideal, but there is a minimum one can offer before the perception of the experience suffers. Ultimately, because it is his area of expertise, I might find myself having to concede Cowen’s point in the face of a more detailed argument. But I think given that the resources necessary to provide the central experience remain generally constant, Baumol’s cost disease does indeed impact the arts significantly.

As for the solution, at this point I keep coming back to Jon Silpayamanant’s idea that ancillary elements surrounding the experience need to be developed in order to support it.

What Pricing Is Right?

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Back in June the MIT Sloan Management Review had an article in pricing strategies. The bulk of the article discusses research on practices of companies that have sales forces that goes out to solicit business and has some degree of control over the pricing.

However, the research found some basic elements of price setting that are common regardless of industry and geography. (my emphasis)

1. Cost-based pricing. Here, pricing decisions are influenced primarily by accounting data, with the objective of getting a certain return on investment or a certain markup on costs. Typical examples of cost-based pricing approaches are cost-plus pricing, target return pricing, markup pricing or break-even pricing. The main weakness of cost-based pricing is that aspects related to demand (willingness to pay, price elasticity) and competition (competitive price levels) are ignored. The main advantage of this approach is that the data you need to set prices are usually easy to find.

To a certain extent, this is the pricing strategy used by many non-profit organizations–and their critics. I say it is used by critics of non-profits because one of the common refrains one hears is that if non-profits can’t make enough to support themselves, they should be left to fail rather than supported by government funding.

Non profits use this approach to determine what level of revenue they need to cover their costs in the context whatever other funding sources (donations/sponsors) exist. But as the authors say, it can ignore the level of demand that may exist potentially increasing the revenue stream if the price were set higher (or perhaps ignoring the lack of demand and setting the price too high.)

2. Competition-based pricing. This approach uses data on competitive price levels or on anticipated or observed actions of actual or potential competitors as a primary source to determine appropriate price levels. The main advantage of this approach is that the competitive situation is taken into account, and the main disadvantage is that aspects related to the demand function are again ignored. In addition, a strong competitive focus in setting prices can exacerbate the risk of a price war.

I am not aware of too many price wars among arts organizations, but it can be a mistake to taking your pricing cues from competitors. For one thing, just because you perceive your product to be of equal value to your competitor’s doesn’t mean your customers necessarily do.

3. Customer value-based pricing. This approach, which is also often called “value-based pricing,” uses data on the perceived customer value of the product as the main factor for determining the final selling price. Instead of asking, “How can we realize higher prices despite intense competition?” customer value-based pricing asks, “How can we create additional customer value and increase customer willingness to pay, despite intense competition?” The subjective and quantified value of a purchase offering to actual and potential customers is the primary driver in setting prices. Customer value-based pricing approaches are driven by a deep understanding of customer needs, of customer perceptions of value, of price elasticity and of customers’ willingness to pay.

The advantage of customer value-driven pricing approaches is their direct link to the needs of the one constituency paying for the respective goods or services: the customer. The big disadvantage of such approaches is that data on customer preferences, willingness to pay, price elasticity and size of different market segments are usually hard to find and interpret. Furthermore, customer value-based pricing approaches may lead to relatively high prices, especially for unique products. Though that may seem optimal in the short run, these pricing approaches may spur market entry by new entrants or create a risk-free zone for competitors offering comparable products at slightly lower prices. Finally, it is important to note that it is an error to assume that customers will immediately recognize and pay for a truly innovative and superior product. Marketers must educate customers and communicate superior value to customers before linking price to value. Customers must first recognize value in order to be willing to pay for value rather than base their purchase decision solely on price.

Despite these shortcomings, many pricing scholars consider customer value-based pricing to often be the most preferable way to set new product prices or to adjust prices for existing products

Now I don’t have any real evidence that non-profit arts organizations use customer values as the basis of their pricing decisions, but damned if the language the authors use doesn’t match the language being used in discussions of arts management issues: increasing value and customer willingness to pay for it; the necessity of understanding needs of customers/community; high prices for unique products (unique at least from the NP org point of view); audiences not recognizing truly innovative and superior product; need to educate customers/community about the superior value of the artistic product.

Factor in movies/internet/video games as competitors offering what is perceived to be comparable product with lower monetary/social/time, etc. costs and it sounds like they are describing a the situation facing the non-profit arts and culture industries.

Except that these factors are rarely connected with discussions of pricing for non profit arts organizations. While creating the perception of value in audiences does often enter the discussion, I don’t know that it is necessarily accompanied with a “deep understanding of the customer needs, of customer perceptions of value, of price elasticity and of customers’ willingness to pay,” but rather with hopes and assumptions. How many pricing decisions arts and cultural organizations make every year are based on this understanding?

This may be due to lack of will as much as lack of funds to conduct the research necessary to achieve the deep understanding. Since customer value-based pricing seems to be recognized as the best approach, perhaps research into the intrinsic value of the arts should include a greater focus on pricing to see how value and pricing are connected.

Though I am not sure if the knowledge will be of practical use to a significant number of organizations. The authors point out the information is difficult to gather and interpret. I imagine the results will probably be specific to an organization or geographic region.

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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