Working In The Arts – Page 16 – Butts In the Seats

Substantial Change Comes From Within

July 6, 2015 by Joe Patti

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.

Diego Rivera and the Paintbrush of Destiny

July 1, 2015 by Joe Patti

As part of our website revamp, I am in the process of adding content about the various murals located around the building. One of the best pieces is a little removed from the lobby and spans a couple floors so I have made a video and map to help guide people to it.

So it was with great interest that I read a recent piece on NPR about the rights visual artists, especially muralists, can exert to determine the disposition of the buildings in/on which they are painted.

As I started reading, I began to worry that more people might refuse to allow murals to appear on the sides of their buildings if they were aware of these issues. However, the story notes that Philadelphia, which has a robust, formal mural program, has found ways to strike a balance and work with both the artist and building owner to find some sort of accommodation. They are likely a good source for advice on these matters.

Only works created after 1990 enjoy this protection under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). So Diego Rivera’s paintbrush technically hasn’t altered the destiny of any buildings as far as the Act is concerned.

This piece from the National Endowment for the Arts and this one from the Arts & Business Council of Greater Philadelphia do a pretty good job of explaining various aspects of the law.

One thing I think bears emphasizing since many of the commenters on the NPR story get it wrong is that while works for hire are not covered under the VARA, that does not mean that only works created for free are covered. If you are commissioned to create a work as an independent contractor and get paid for it, your work is covered. This is clearly stated in the Arts and Business Council flyer, but I wanted to reinforce that.

The reason I think it is particularly important to be aware of this law is because so many communities are utilizing murals to help spruce up the neighborhood. Often these murals are on abandoned buildings that are good candidates for destruction should those murals generate the the desired positive ambiance and attract new residents and businesses.

Since the rights are retained until the death of the last surviving creator, it might be good to form a general agreement that the work is being created with the expectation (and perhaps hope) that someone will eventually destroy it.

The other thing to note is that the VARA deals with the artist’s moral rights to the work which can never be given away. The artist can transfer ownership, but can’t give up their moral rights. Per the NEA Office of General Counsel article:

“VARA restricts the exercise of the rights of attribution and integrity to the author or joint authors of the artwork, regardless of whether he/they hold title either to the copyright or the artwork itself. Thus while both copyright and physical ownership are property rights which may be transferred, moral rights may not be transferred. Moral rights may, however, be waived. The waiver instrument must be very specific: the creator must consent in a written and signed instrument specifically identifying the artwork, the uses of that work, and with a clause limiting the waiver to both aspects.”

So even if a mural was presented as a birthday present to someone, the next owner of the building can’t immediately bulldoze it as the new owner of the mural. Notice of 90 days must provided to the artist(s) during which period of time they can take whatever action they decide is necessary from a final visit to take pictures before it is destroyed to seeking a court injunction against the demolition.

The one issue that isn’t really addressed is what protections exist for art that someone produces uninvited. People go out and paint over unwanted graffiti everyday….unless it is a Banksy in which case they may chisel out the section of the wall and sell it at auction.

If someone cares enough to chisel it out and keep it, aren’t they admitting it is valuable and not a nuance? So if Banksy (or Banksy’s lawyer) shows up and says the art is site specific (which many clearly are) and may not be moved/destroyed/defaced per VARA, who has the right to determine what happens with the work?

Corralling The Wild Volunteer

June 30, 2015 by Joe Patti

The Wall Street Journal had a story entitled Docents Gone Wild sharing some stories about museum docents going off script, treating visitors rudely or diverting people away from works of art they didn’t approve of.

The take away for me wasn’t so much that you have to keep an eye on those crotchety senior citizens as much as the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation provides an opportunity to mobilize a large cohort of people on behalf of the arts. Only it will require some effort to effectively engage and train them.

In some respects this idea is a complement to the series on arts and aging/healing that Barry Hessenius hosted last month. That series dealt with the idea that there is an unmet need that the arts can respond to that is only going to grow as the Baby Boomer generation ages. However, currently most arts organizations lack the capacity to do so.

In terms of enlisting retirees as volunteer or in a type of semi-retired/second career role, arts organizations’ ability is a little more developed, but can still be improved. These retirees are people who are transitioning out of careers as highly skilled professionals and will likely enjoy a longer, healthier post-retirement lifestyle than their parents had.

They may want to contribute more than just ushering, envelop stuffing and phone answering during their retirement. If they can’t find an activity to hold their interest, they may choose another activity that they feel is better suited to the energy and ambition they feel they have.

Arts organizations may be wary about involving additional older folks on their boards of directors when they are desperately seeking younger voices, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some organizations managed to create special task groups that mobilized to advocate and lobby for them with government entities.

For all the foibles their docents may exhibit, I am pretty impressed by the rigor of the training program these museums have instituted for their docents. Not that I would increase the training we give our volunteers for its own sake, but it makes me wonder if we are investing enough attention to our training as well as care and feeding of our current volunteers even before addressing the issue of being prepared for new arrivals.

As I was I writing this post, I had a vague recollection of some futurist like John Nasbitt (Megatrends 2000), Faith Popcorn (Popcorn Report) or Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) coming out with a book in the last 10-15 years that said retirees would gather into fairly insular communities termed something like Yogurt Communities because they would value “active cultures” or cultural activity. I wonder if anyone can remember it because I can’t find it. I was curious to do a check back to see if predictions were coming to pass.

Marketing Begins At Home

June 29, 2015 by Joe Patti

I do a lot of talking about how marketing is the business of everyone in the organization, not just the department bearing that name. Everybody needs to be invested in the organization and its goals. I often use the example of telling your organization’s story while you are in line at the supermarket.

A lot of what I and others write about in this vein stresses the importance of relating your story to external audiences. But I have slowly come to recognize the success of those efforts really depends on your success in relating that story to internal audiences first.

Even if the whole organization is supposed to be responsible for telling the story, its likely that the story may only remain fresh and alive for the people in the marketing department who deal with it everyday. They are the ones that have to take the full page press release and compress the information and concepts for consumption on webpages, social media, 30 second PSAs, posters and print ads. They are constantly having to distill information in order to maintain its essence.

Something I have noticed in my own experience is that staff and board members who helped with the programming and writing of brochure descriptions don’t seem to know as much about the performances as I do. Then I realized it was because I am interacting with marketing materials and having conversations about opportunities for interesting education services on a weekly basis.

Despite being deeply involved with the process for a fair amount of time, other board and staff members end up months removed from their efforts.

Arts organizations advertise and send out emails to remind the general public about events we previously announced in an effort to engage them as the time approaches. There probably needs to be a corresponding internal effort as well. You can send staff emails, briefing sheets and talk about events in board and staff meetings, but emails get deleted and people often just want to get out of those meetings.

However, people often have a tendency to avoid work, right? Water cooler type conversations about why upcoming events are going to be interesting can make a deeper, more lasting impression on people and help to make them better advocates. Especially because instead of receiving a general announcement, they are getting the message customized for them.

Even if other employees are insiders to a degree, they can often serve as the initial sounding board/guinea pigs for approaches you will use with the general public. Volunteers may especially be valuable in this regard since they are probably invested enough in the organization to provide feedback, but may be disconnected enough from the inner workings that they are only slightly more aware of the organization’s activities than the average attendee.

In many respects, marketing definitely begins at home. Even if everyone is working together to make every event a success and are clearly invested in seeing everything come off well, it is far too easy to assume everyone is equally as knowledgeable about the value of the event.

Marketing may be the business of everyone in the organization, but there are always going to be people who know more and are more passionate about events than others. Whether they are officially part of the marketing or artistic team or not, it is always going to be incumbent on them to pass on the knowledge and instill the passion in the other employees to enable them to be effective representatives.

Who Are The Must Reads In The Field…..

June 23, 2015 by Joe Patti

…and how do you know?

I frequently promote ideas Seth Godin posits on his blog and show how they connect with the arts.

I do it so frequently, you may be astonished to learn this ain’t one of those times.

And really, someone probably isn’t worth reading if your thought processes always align.

Last month he made a post essentially calling people out for not being aware of the leading voices in their area of endeavor.

He ends the post with:

The line between an amateur and professional keeps blurring, but for me, the posture of understanding both the pioneers and the state of the art is essential. An economist doesn’t have to agree with Keynes, but she better know who he is.

If you don’t know who the must-reads in your field are, find out before your customers and competitors do.

Too much doing, not enough knowing.

While I am secure in the knowledge that I am undoubtedly one of the must-reads in my field and need only listen to the voices in my head if I wish to be enlightened, even I have to ask who the heck has the time to identify and follow all the must-reads in their field.

Twenty years ago, it was possible but now there are so many insightful minds expressing themselves I have a hard enough time keeping abreast of everyone I follow. I often discover to my chagrin that the people I thought I had included in my Twitter and news feeds aren’t in there.

I would agree with the general concept that arts professionals could do a better job staying abreast of new ideas and trends that will help them work smarter over shorter hours. I will also concede that my ability to read a lot of material and distill it into blog posts is partially attributable to the fact I, (by way of metaphor), have a small lawn to mow and I don’t devote a lot of time weeding my flowerbeds.

I don’t know how the rest of you manage.

There are two main problems with institutionalizing the concept of must-reads.

One that is significant for the arts is the attitude of “how could you not know about X?” which has, fairly or unfairly, contributed to the image of the arts as elitist. (Do such people exist in great numbers? While I have often been intimidated by the idea of their disapproval, I have rarely encountered them outside of the “no clapping between movements” crowd.)

The second problem is that when you create a list of must-reads, you inevitably omit a worthy or include an unworthy, the focus turns to the validity of the list and it ceases to be useful as a guide.

For most people, the must-reads are going to be those who direct you to other interesting thought leaders. While I am eschewing list making, I think everyone can agree that ~~my blog~~ You’ve Cott Mail fits this description of a must-read and is a good place to start seeking people to follow.

How Many Agents Have You Broken Up With?

June 17, 2015 by Joe Patti

Everyday I get a flurry of emails from the agents of performing artists letting me know when the performers are available cross the course of the next year or two. Often I notice that artists with whom I am familiar have moved under the representation of a different agent.

After my post yesterday about the evolving career prospects for non-profit executive directors, I idly wondered if anyone studied the reasons why artists change representation.

I know there is the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) study which looks at the employment experiences of graduates of arts degree programs. However, I don’t think it really examines interactions with agents.

Of course, the larger issue is that not every practicing artist graduated from a degree program and wouldn’t be included in the survey.

The two major reasons artists and agents part company are either the artist doesn’t feel the agent is able to represent them well due to lack of initiative or contacts, or the agent doesn’t feel they can provide the artist with the support they need.

From conversations I have had with agents, I know that latter case can often include essentially firing the artist as a client due to feedback the agent receives about their personality or lack of organization. There are some agents who have painstakingly tried to instill good personal and business practices in their clients to no avail.

The idea that artists need to be cognizant of at least some aspects of the business side of their practice, if not take an entrepreneurial approach, has been bandied about to some degree for at least a couple decades now.

I think it would be helpful for all those involve if there was a clear picture of what leads to an artist and agent parting ways and that can be prevented or make the relationship more constructive.

A study may find that artists are choosing the wrong agent for them or vice versa and suggest steps that lead to a more enduring relationship. It may find that artists need better coaching and training at certain milestones in their career.

Agents can be a good resource for artists because they know a great deal about the employment environment and provide advice customized to the individual. (versus general advice on websites/books).

On the other hand, because agents are in competition with each other, there isn’t a lot of incentive for them to collaborate on a uniform process. (Though many certainly have worked together to establish strong standards of behavior for the industry.)

To a certain degree, this study would be about how to increase employment opportunities for artists. There have been many studies about why audiences aren’t attending performances and how to fix that. There aren’t really any studies I can think of that look at why artists aren’t being hired and how to fix that.

Its not entirely a direct result of lack of audiences because there are some performers who are getting more offers than they can accept and they aren’t all super marquee names.

My suspicion is that just as there are studies saying foundations need to change their funding philosophies to reflect the realities faced by non-profit organizations, such a study would reveal a need for presenters, casting agents, gallery directors etc., to change their approaches as well.

One of the things I would be curious to know is the comparative rates of turn over in artist-agent relationships for stage actors, screen actors, visual artists, instrumental soloists, dance companies, music ensembles, etc. I would bet there is a wide variety in the range with the standard for some being a matter of a couple years whereas others being measured in decades.

What I Learned Today About The Benefits of the Arts

June 10, 2015 by Joe Patti

I apologize for missing my posting schedule yesterday. I was involved with an activity that I need to keep confidential. It kept me busy all day and required a bit of driving to return from. However, I can say it was related to my job and I got paid with a big bucket of candy.

I am taking the time to tell you this by way of celebrating the type of opportunities those of us in the arts have in the course of our jobs. It is an amusingly enigmatic, but absolutely true, description of what transpired.

Another of those enjoyable opportunities presented itself again today when people from our state arts council came down to do a site visit for a project we are participating in October. In addition to showing them around my facility, I also took them around town to look at our floodwall murals, our children’s theater and the local museum.

Since we are at one of the most remote parts of the state (I look at the hills of KY across the Ohio River from my office) I wanted to provide a little advocacy for the arts in our community.

Some of what I learned in the process brought to light issues which I suspect are being seen nationwide.

Something the people at the museum noticed in the arts classes and summer camp activities they conduct is that they are having to spend more time working on basic eye-hand coordination exercises with kids than they used to. There is a circus/gymnastics school under the museum’s organizational umbrella and they are having the same issues with coordination and with kids feeling comfortable about throwing their bodies around.

They see this as a result of the reduction of arts classes and recess in schools and the simple fact that kids are more often in front of screens rather than just running around wildly.

So when we talk about the benefits of the arts, we can probably lay claim to improving very elementary abilities like eye-hand coordination and gross and fine motor skills. It probably sounds ridiculous to even consider saying such a thing since it is essentially slightly above walking as part of natural development, but it may not be long before we start hearing about the consequences of people lacking these abilities.

Everywhere I have worked, I frequently hear something along the lines of “X have lived here all their whole lives, but this was the first time they were in this/a arts building.”

In the experience of the museum folks, the things they are having the kids do like making mbira with cigar boxes and wire coat hangers are often among the first projects involving trial and error problem solving the kids have worked on with material objects. (As opposed to solving puzzles, etc on a screen.)

It makes me glad I am supplying my nephews with boxes of Legos. Again, this may eventually become an area in which the arts can claim the provide a notable benefit.

The last thing I learned that made an impression on me was that the circus program, which has a Cirque du Soleil type focus on acrobatics, has been really effective at cutting across social and economic strata. Because physical work is so dependent on body type and weight, students get paired up on this basis rather than with whom they are friends.

Some parents may be rolling coins to allow their kids to participate, but in the practice rooms the value of one person relative to another is all about physical strength and ability to safely counterbalance you. Economic means doesn’t really factor into whether you can trust someone act as your partner.

This is not a claim all arts disciplines can make. In some social background does enable you to progress further. In others, you aren’t necessarily required to depend so entirely on a partner.

That being said, there are ways most of the arts disciplines can structure their instruction to draw attention to the fact that social and economic background doesn’t have any bearing on one’s ability to demonstrate excellence. (Probably best accomplished by drawing as little attention to any differences as possible.)

Yes granted, ability to afford advanced training and internships is tied to economic background, but in the early stages of training especially, it is often clear that background is not a determinant of basic ability. (Though it may determine how inhibited someone is about exhibiting their ability.)

So even though the arts have been branded as elitist, they can be a powerful tool for socialization that de-emphasizes distinctions.

Psst! You Wanna Buy A Press Release?

June 8, 2015 by Joe Patti

Last week I was reading an article on Slate that talked about teachers who were making more money selling their lesson plans online than they were from their teaching jobs.

So before I go on, let me just suggest that if there are any educational activities your organization does that you feel are really effective or if you have any lesson plans that bring the arts to other academic subjects (or vice versa), you may want to make them available on the websites mentioned in that article. There may be a good market for such things.

My purpose in this post is somewhat along the same lines. I wondered if there might not be a need among arts professionals to share materials they developed so that others wouldn’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel.

In a way, it is something of a logical extension of the idea behind Drew McManus’ ArtsHacker website which gives advice and guidance to arts organizations. (If you didn’t know it already, I am a contributor to the site.)

I am not suggesting he monetize the site. There is plenty of need for the freely given and available advice it provides.

I suspect there might be a real need for other types of materials arts groups develop in the course of business.

Just off the top of my head, there is probably a need for good marketing content for different shows. Whenever I do research on artists or shows so that I can write press releases and web/brochure blurbs, I often find that people are using the generic descriptions provided by the artist or agent.

Often the blurb is about how great the artist or performance is, but not why an audience member might enjoy the show. I find this particularly true of Broadway shows which seem to have more content about the creators and producers than the show itself. My audience doesn’t know enough about various choreographers to care about that.

I am sure there are a lot of people out there who try to craft interesting descriptions designed to resonate with their local audiences, but they aren’t easy to find. Having this work collected in one place might be a boon.

Right now the best centralized sources are the table at conferences upon which arts orgs throw their brochures.

Granted, you wouldn’t be able to use someone’s release in its entirety. Every community has its own particular nuances that need to be addressed. I don’t imagine that the teachers mentioned in the Slate article are using lesson plans on the sites without making alterations to suit their students.

After a few years, this resource may actually raise the quality of promotional writing in the arts if press releases were available for download for a few dollars from a database indexed by show/artist and community demographics.

Once people start looking at the potential approaches one might use to promote something, they may be inspired to up their own game– especially if people are paying money for good material.

It may instill confidence in a number of people who start to see a high demand for their writing. Just because an event wasn’t well attended doesn’t mean you are a bad writer. The message may have just been poorly distributed.

(Though the negative potential is that instead of hiring marketing staff, a company might have an intern aggregate content from press release samples.)

Other things people might find valuable are ideas for events surrounding a performance: everything from dinner & show promos; coffee houses; young professional wine and cheese events and after performance talks, to an imaginative use of a speed dating format to meet the cast.

It may sound a little cynical, but I could also see a demand for providing grant report content from which people could crib information. Even though a lot grant reporting feels like it involves mindless reduplication of effort with minor tweaks, against this is an area where the example of effective writing can be valuable.

I would be reluctant to have people post their strategic plans for sale since they really do need to be invested with long, tedious hours of discussion and revision to be effective.

However, case studies on how an organization manifested their strategic plan could be useful. If you are having to write about it for some grant or foundation report, you might as well make a little additional money off the effort.

The one big issue I haven’t investigated or really thought about is the issue of copyright credit. I am not sure how the teacher lesson plan sites work it. I have seen copyright notices on educational handouts. Since classroom instruction isn’t as public a forum as press release distribution and web content, I don’t imagine there is any need to give credit to another teacher before a lesson on fractions.

Would you have to give byline credit on every press release noting all the people who contributed to it as some news outlets do?

A lot of potential in this idea, but much to think about.

You May Be Assimilated, But Never Replaced

June 2, 2015 by Joe Patti

NPR’s Planet Money program worked up a little interactive tool that purports to tell you whether your job will be automated in the next 20 years. On the whole, Arts and Entertainment fields fair pretty well compared to other areas.

Now obviously, this should be taken with a grain of salt since 20 years ago there essentially was no internet. The Netscape Navigator web browser was only a year old and America Online hadn’t reached the peak busy signal on their modems. There can be plenty of other factors that emerge which may affect your employability in the arts.

Still, it is interesting to see that it is anticipated accountants and auditors have a 93% chance of being replaced by automation. Whereas choreographers have a 0.4% of being replaced. Most performing and visual artists fall below 10% chance of being replaced, except for actors who apparently have a 37% chance of being automated. (There has already been a movie after all)

If nothing else, the little tool makes for some good entertainment. For example, it says Judges have a 40% chance of being replaced, but lawyers only have a 3% chance of being replaced. Does that mean that lawyers will be required to persuade robot judges?

A common thread in all the jobs not likely to be replaced by robots is the requirement for nuanced human interaction, vision and judgment. (Umpires and referees are virtually guaranteed to be replaced according to the chart.)

Granted, if Hollywood and Broadway continue to produce shows based on pre-existing works, an algorithm may successfully replace some writers in the future.

The idea that human created interactions will be of some value in the future is encouraging. Even if artists still continue to be paid poorly.

We just need to hope that the researchers’ basic assumption that human interaction will be valued in 20 years isn’t incorrect.

Flyover, USA, Broadway Needs You!

May 27, 2015 by Joe Patti

One of the reasons why I like reading Broadway producer Ken Davenport’s blog, The Producer’s Perspective, is that like a lot of non-profit arts managers, (though he isn’t one), he is constantly asking how the experience of attending a Broadway show can be made better.

It may interest you to learn that this examination extends to the national tours of Broadway shows. Back in March, he took a look at a study the Broadway League did on the demographics of people who attend Broadway touring performances.

It may come as no surprise that audiences for the tours are older, whiter and trend more slightly more female than audiences on Broadway. Among his insights that caught my eye were the following:

In the 2013-2014 season, Broadway shows touring across North America drew 13.8 million attendances. (NOTE FROM KEN: Broadway saw only 12.21 million attendees. The Road Audience is 13% larger than the Broadway Audience. Now do you see how important The Road is?)

[…]

The most commonly cited sources for show selection (other than being part of the subscription) were: the music, personal recommendation, Tony Awards and articles written about the show. (NOTE FROM KEN: This is all the same as in NYC, with a little less dependency on advertising, because shows aren’t in these towns long enough to have big advertising budgets. Want to be big on The Road? You better be big in NY first.)

The reported influence of Tony Awards in deciding to see a show continued to grow. Twenty-four percent of respondents said that Tony Awards or nominations were a reason they attended the show, compared in 8% in the 2005-2006 season.

[…]

Theatregoers said that the most effective type of advertising was an email from the show or presenter. (NOTE FROM KEN: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Everyone should look to double their email list every year.)

[…]

Advance sales to single-ticket buyers have been steadily increasing over the past 10 years.Thirty-eight percent of respondents said that different performance times would encourage more frequent attendance.

He makes many other observations, but these were most interesting to me in terms of providing some insight into how best to promote performances to audiences.

In his commentary on the study’s final finding, he suggests touring productions may be important to the health of shows on Broadway by getting people interested in visiting NYC.

Thirty percent of respondents said they made a visit to New York City in the past year. Of those, 81% attended a Broadway show while in town. (NOTE FROM KEN: And this is the stat I was looking for. 81%. That’s huge. Like 3.35 million huge.)

For me, the last stat is what says it all. See a lot of people think Broadway begets The Road. But I think we should focus on the reverse. See, it’s much easier for a person in Dallas to see a show in Dallas, rather than NYC, right? So perhaps Broadway would benefit from encouraging Dallas citizens to see shows in Dallas first, before trying to sell them Broadway. Get them to buy into what’s close to them, what’s easy for them, and they’ll work their way up to Broadway.

In a different post last week, Davenport noted the importance of touring to Broadway productions. The economics of touring is different from mounting a production on Broadway. While no one knows if a Broadway show will recoup its investment, a tour nearly always does. However, you have to have invested in the Broadway production to have the opportunity to invest in the tour.

Davenport questions why people loudly announce when a Broadway show recoups, but never announce when a tour does. He suggests the following reasons:

Is it because National Tours have an unbelievably high recoupment rate?… So since it’s more of a “given,” do we just not think it’s special enough to put out there?

Or are we afraid of putting it out there for the public for fear of getting the attention of unions and vendors who want a bigger piece? (If so, I think we have plenty of losses on Broadway to point to that balance the equation.)

Or are we afraid of putting it out there because the Presenters of the tours might be losing money, while the tours themselves are making money?

That final point resonates a bit with me. Due to the economics of our region and a mission to make attendance affordable, we lose much more on a sold out Broadway show than we do on a chamber music concert with 1/3 of the seats filled.

Setting that aside, it is very interesting to learn just how important venues in the fly over country between the coasts are to the continued economic well-being of productions in NYC. As it is, looking at the cast bios for these shows, they are certainly dependent on artists migrating from those parts of the country to NYC in order to mount the Broadway productions and tours.

Are Program Bios Adding Value To The Experience?

May 20, 2015 by Joe Patti

Earlier this week Samantha Teter had a piece on ArtsHacker about writing bios. She does a good job pointing out many important elements that should be part of a bio (including proofreading) and that one should use a different bio for different purposes.

However, recently I have been wondering if bios in a performance playbill are really effective anymore. Performers have been using the same basic format with the same basic content for decades now, but as we all know, audiences have changed during that time.

So among my questions are: Do audiences read bios any more? Is the content relevant to them? Has anyone thought to ask?

What are the purposes of bios? Do they serve the artists by providing recognition to individuals? Do they serve to strengthen a relationship with the audience? Are they effective at doing either?

Over the last decade I have often read suggestions regarding press releases and marketing content for the arts. One of the things most often criticized is the inclusion of long listings of accolades that the public has no way to judge the relevance of.

People know what the Tony Awards are, but nearly anything else is a mystery. While foreign sounding names like the Zhege Dongxi Prize and studying with Pierre Lapin at Le Jardin de M.A. Gregoire sound somewhat impressive, no one who is not an insider has any idea if this is a mark of excellence or something someone made up.

There is also the distinct possibility that even regular audience members may lack the connection to the arts field that past audiences did and do not recognize the prestige of names like Jacob’s Pillow, Tanglewood, and Stratford Festival.

If one actor lists a dozen shows they were in and another just lists a short handful, is the former more experienced than the latter? It could easily be the case that the former is just starting out and listing everything they have been in since high school and the latter is so experienced, it isn’t worth listing more than the last couple shows.

Does it help the audience feel more engaged in the event to know that the performer lives with their husband, kids and two dogs, Misty and Pepper?

I am not suggesting that bios be scrapped so that the organization can save on printing bills and relegate performers to a simple listing. Yes, I know some unions require the inclusion of bios.

Nor am I saying that all bios are useless. I spent part of today reading bios of the speakers slated for the Americans for the Arts conference in Chicago.

I am just asking, outside of tradition, do we know why we still do this? If we do, then could we do it better?

If we want audiences to be excited by our organizations and what we do, would it be better to have a big color picture in the program of the artists conducting a workshop or in rehearsals, instead of pages of text?

Perhaps QR codes with the names of the individual artists could be placed around the margins of the image so that people could scan them and learn much more than 50 words about the artist by visiting their social media page packed with images and videos.

If the purpose of listing bios is to provide artists with recognition that they wouldn’t otherwise receive and it has to be done in the traditional format, then are there any changes of content people might suggest?

Think about it this way. Everybody gets their name in the credits at the end of a movie, but even if people stay and try to pay attention to the list, it is nearly impossible to pick individual names out even if there is someone you are looking for. Someone working on the movie probably has a better chance of being recognized as people scroll down on the IMDB listing than they will in the movie theater.

Teaser trailers at the end of Marvel movies keep people in the theater, but they probably don’t help improve an artist’s exposure and recognition. By making considered changes to program books, arts organizations might actually have the ability to raise the profile of artists, if only by a smidgen and provide a more meaningful experience for audiences.

I am just not quite sure what those changes might be. Something to consider, though.

It’s Just Something I Was Trying

May 19, 2015 by Joe Patti

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.)

Share Your Locker With A Bassoonist

April 29, 2015 by Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Bad Customer Experience May Be A Feature, Not A Bug

April 28, 2015 by Joe Patti

About a month ago I bookmarked a post Seth Godin had made about customer service. Since it is a little longer than usual, I waited until I had the time to come back to read it.

Now I sort of wish I had read it earlier because it pretty much runs counter to every customer service best practices article I have ever read and provides a lot to think about.

Essentially he says there are different types of customer service and a company should own the type they practice rather than pretending they are striving for something they ain’t.

Customer service is difficult, expensive and unpredictable. But it’s a mistake to assume that any particular example is automatically either good or bad. A company might spend almost nothing on customer service but still succeed in reaching its goals.
[…]
Organizations don’t accidentally run ads, don’t mistakenly double (or halve) the amount of cereal they put in the box. They shouldn’t deliver customer service that doesn’t match their goals either.

and at the end of the post [my emphasis]

Every single person who makes budget decisions, staffing decisions and customer service decisions must to be clear about which strategy you picked, needs to be able to state, “we’re doing this because it’s congruent with what we say customer service is for.”

Obviously, you can mix and match among these options, and find new ones. What we must not do, though, is plan to do one thing but then try to save time or money and do something else, hoping for the results that come from the original plan without actually doing it.

Customer service, like everything an effective organization does, changes people. Announce the change you seek, then invest appropriately, in a system that is likely to actually produce the outcomes you just said you wanted.

Between those two passages I quote, he points out ten different uses of customer service. There are some most of us aspire to. There are some that we complain about.

We read a lot of articles about how businesses need to engage with customers. So when we have an unsatisfying interaction with a company, we may complain about how they did not take the opportunity earn our loyalty. But as Godin points out, they may be reaching their goals without interacting with us in the way we want them to.

As customers, we may be like the school kid who says, I am really nice, helpful and loyal to them, why won’t they like me? Liking you may not be important to their goals.

We all probably assume this is part of airlines’ calculation, but reading Godin’s post you realize there are a lot of other companies that have decided they are doing just fine without doing much more.

My suggestion as you read his post is to take a different approach than you might normally.

Instead of thinking about all the things you need to change about the way you do business in order to meet customer expectations, be honest and consider whether the way you handle customer service isn’t just the way you want it after all.

If it isn’t the way you want it, consider what approach would fulfill your vision of success rather than what approach the articles you read say you should be using.

Whatever philosophy you adopt needs to be inline with your philosophy on programming, education, pricing and operations. Any misalignment will be apparent.

You can’t change your pricing in an attempt to attract under served audiences but have programming, education and operations oriented to serving a different demographic.

Likewise, you can’t aspire to certain goals without directing training and funding to support it.

Once you have decided what your philosophy is and what resources you can afford to direct toward accomplishing it, then you need to own that reality rather than pretend to be doing something else.

Talk About Somebody Beside Yourself

April 27, 2015 by Joe Patti

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.

Why In God’s Name Does This Seem Like A Radical Notion!?

April 15, 2015 by Joe Patti

Seth Lepore wrote a piece on HowlRound about the need for Artists to Be Entrepreneurs. I thought it was pretty well written and on the mark.

However, I have been feeling extremely frustrated by the response to his column. The amount of retweets of the piece has had me cursing under my breath because it feels like people are just discovering this idea for the first time. I know it has been a continuous topic for the last decade at least. Add to that the common refrain that arts organizations should be run like a business and I have a hard time believing this is a revolutionary notion to anyone.

I was going to start this post with the phrase “Last week Seth Lepore wrote..” because I have been seeing people mention it so much it feels like it has been a week since the post first appeared. It has only been three days.

I don’t usually like to post on topics that are getting a lot of traffic and generating conversation elsewhere. Especially if I don’t have any new insight or counterargument. But I posted a comment on Lepore’s piece saying this topic apparently needs to be discussed more often if it is garnering so much notice.

So here I am, calling additional attention to the issue.

As I suggested, I don’t really have anything to add to what he wrote. Quite honestly, just thinking about this topic is agitating me more than you can imagine and it is difficult for me to calmly compose a post.

Partially this is due to the fact that the anecdotes Lepore relates about the lack of training in these areas are completely familiar to me. I referenced the idea that performing arts training programs aren’t doing enough to train students for careers in a post last month.

Some of the content of that post comes from direct experiences I have had with formal performing arts training programs that don’t train students to manage their own careers. Nor do they encourage students to create and experiment with their own independent projects and few students seem interested or motivated in doing so on their own.

I have worked at a community college without even a certificate program in performance where students had full time jobs, went to school and were taking the initiative to create their own projects and getting involved with other people’s. Some of it stunk, but it got better every year.

I don’t know what motivated one group to create work independently of their instruction and not the others except perhaps that other people around them were already modeling that behavior and inviting them to participate. And perhaps because some of their instructors enabled them by telling the students to bring in some materials and they would show them how to make masks, etc.

But there are plenty of training programs that operate amid those sort of dynamics. As Lepore suggests, a significant contributing factor is likely that faculty never emphasized the value of entrepreneurship, investigating collaborations, etc. They never insisted students learn.

Some will obviously learn by trial and error. Others may never get to a place where they feel like they know how to take control of their careers. Certainly, knowing how to manage and promote yourself well is no guarantee of a successful career. But acquiring these skills will better enable you to understand what is not working and why.

The best suggestion I have for rectifying this situation–for making posts like Lepore’s seem common rather than groundbreaking–is to ask the school you got your arts degree from what they are doing to train their students and enable them to handle their careers. If you didn’t graduate from such a program, (and even if you did), when you meet faculty from other arts training programs, ask them the same thing.

Turn it into one of those buzz/demand generating schemes where people go into a store to ask about a product, then have family and friends call about it, too in order to make it feel like there is an unmet demand for that product.

Which in this case is absolutely true.

What Does Your Recommendation Cost You?

April 8, 2015 by Joe Patti

Seth Godin had a great post about word of mouth last week that really bears reading and thinking about. We all know that word of mouth referrals are often more powerful than any piece of advertising you can create.

In fact, back in 2003 a Harvard Business Review piece suggested that if you only had an opportunity to ask customers one question, “would you recommend this to a friend,” was the most effective measure of satisfaction.

Given that people are abandoning traditional forms of media, arts organizations are increasingly dependent on word of mouth, especially in the form of social media.

Godin lists six reasons why people may be reluctant to give a business a referral, but the three that seem to most closely apply to art organizations deal with the basic concern of “what does this referral say about me?”

Do I want to be responsible if my friend has a bad experience? Will I get credit if it works, blame if it doesn’t?
[…]
How does it make me look? Do people like me recommend something like this? When I look in the mirror after recommending this, do I stand taller?

Is this difficult to explain, complex to understand, filled with pitfalls?..

These seem to be issues an arts organization needs to address most given that the arts are often viewed as an elitist pursuit that is not easy to understand.

Even if you are passionate and excited about what you saw, if your friends don’t seem to have the same level of interest and curiosity in the arts that you do, you may be reluctant to encourage the experience in case they don’t enjoy it as you have; think you are an elitist snob for enjoying the arts; or think you don’t share the same values because you enjoy and understand such dense, complicated material.

The one benefit I see to social media is that it allows you to commit to different levels of referral. If you are really anxious about what people will think about you, you can simply Like something. If a friend is incredulous about your apparent interest in modern dance, you can save face by saying a couple of the moments in the video were interesting or you thought one of the dancers was particularly attractive.

But really, since everyone will like anything with little prompting, a Like can help you test the waters and perhaps even introduce your friends to the concept of liking the arts without being too detrimental.

If you are feeling a little more confident that your friends will enjoy something as much as you do, you can share without much comment. Again, if your choices are challenged, you have some room for deniability.

If you are really confident, you can post or share with comment about how much you like something.

In this respect, social media provides insulation from the negative results of an in person recommendation.

Of course, we know that insulation goes both ways. If people are going to react negatively to something you are passionate about, they may say worse things about you online than they would in person and their scorn can linger for all to see.

Godin’s last line pretty much confirms what we already know about making arts more accessible to people. Having a high quality product isn’t enough, the whole experience has to be great as well.

“Being really good is merely the first step. In order to earn word of mouth, you need to make it safe, fun and worthwhile to overcome the social hurdles to spread the word.”

There is a lot that can contribute to “safe, fun and worthwhile.” It can the social experience and the crowd you attract. Ease of parking and finding your building can be a factor. Educational programs and materials can contribute. Every community and situation is different so you need to figure out what that means for you.

Info You Can Use: Board Members Can Be Personally Responsible For Gross Inaction

March 16, 2015 by Joe Patti

Responsible governance by non profit boards is becoming an increasingly important and discussed topic. Non-Profit Law blog recently pointed out a court decision that emphasizes the need for boards to take their oversight duties seriously.

The following should especially be of interest: (my emphasis)

…that governing boards of not-for-profits who have actual knowledge of mismanagement by the officers of the corporation and choose to ignore it and/or not take appropriate action, can be held financially liable for breach of their fiduciary duty of care. The decision carries special weight because it turns on its head the long-held assumption that nonprofit directors are insulated from financial exposure, barring personal involvement in corruption, venality or fraud. This should be a wake-up call to nonprofits about the very real perils of inattention or inaction.

This case is related to the board overseeing a not-for-profit retirement home where the board’s inattention was particularly egregious. Board meetings were poorly attended, there was no treasurer, no finance committee as required by bylaws and the board was aware that the chief financial officer wasn’t maintaining records properly.

It is the fact the board was aware of the mismanagement at the retirement home, (I haven’t listed even 1/4 of it), and allowed much of it to continue, exposed them to liability.

Many states have laws similar to that of Pennsylvania where this case occurred, which says a board member is:

“…entitled to rely in good faith on information, opinions, reports or statements, including financial statements and other financial data” prepared by employees or experts. However, “[a] Director shall not be considered to be acting in good faith if he[/she] has knowledge concerning the matter in question that would cause his[/her] reliance to be unwarranted.”

If a board member has based her decisions information and advice she has every reason to believe is accurate and dependable, then she is more greatly insulated from personal liability should mismanagement and impropriety be surreptitiously running rampant.

Most people need not fear joining a non-profit board of directors, even for an organization that appears to be struggling financially, if they are diligently monitoring the situation and taking steps to rectify it. (And making sure such actions are being properly recorded in the meeting minutes.)

As I have noted in the past, if you do find yourself on the board of a failing non-profit, even though it may occupy an inordinate amount of time and energy, it much better to stick it out until the bitter end than to potentially expose yourself to greater liability by quitting.

Shirtless Men As Institutional Marketing

March 11, 2015March 10, 2015 by Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would The 18 Year Old You Listen To Career Advice From 40 Year Old You?

March 3, 2015 by Joe Patti

Yesterday Thomas Cott tweeted two articles taking a Pro and Con view of the value of arts degrees. The first talked about how you don’t have to appear on Broadway to have derived value from your theater degree. The second wondered if BFA and MFA programs in dance aren’t part of a pyramid scheme.

My criticism of both articles is that they overlook just how important self-motivation and the influence of social dynamics are as factors in your success.

The piece about theater degrees rehashes lists I have seen in multiple places about how many key life and business skills you pick up by studying theater. These lists ignore the simple fact that you only acquire these skills by applying yourself diligently — something you can accomplish by working in construction, catering, and auto repair while pursuing any number of humanities degrees.

Theater doesn’t enjoy some special lock on the cultivation of creativity and marketable skills.

In the piece about dance degrees, I agree that too many training programs in the performing arts, including dance, don’t emphasize the need to develop career skills nearly as much as they should. I have done a lot of tongue biting over the years when I have wanted to scream in protest.

To some degree it is difficult to communicate the importance of acquiring these skills to young adults who just want to perform. In theater, it is hard enough to get actors to seriously apply themselves to learning technical theater skills even knowing the skills make them more employable.

The thing is, training in higher education is expensive across the board. If you think you can acquire the knowledge and skills on your own either through a series of employment opportunities or by independent or online study, that is great.

But for most people, going to school is the only way to raise your abilities to the standard required or the only way to keep yourself motivated and focused on acquiring those skills.

While I probably could have picked up the same abilities I acquired while pursuing my MFA in Arts Management through jobs and studying, I don’t know if I would have been motivated enough to do so at the time I enrolled. It probably would have been a number of years later before I was together enough to do so on my own.

In some respects, I use the audience for this blog as a substitute for the formal school environment to keep me motivated to constantly read, research and think about arts management.

That brings me to the other factor I mentioned earlier, social dynamics. This is something that exists in every arts training program, that no school can honestly represent the quality of.

How you interact with other students, faculty, members of the general public can have an enormous influence on you. This can determine how driven you are, how culturally omnivorous you are and what opportunities you avail yourself of.

I say that no training program can honestly make claims about how supportive the environment that their school is because these dynamics are constantly shifting and changing. Numbers of students, faculty and performance opportunities printed in a brochure have nothing to do with it.

I worked in places with a large number of undergraduate and graduate students who were involved with a good number of projects. Except, as mentioned in the article about dance programs, they were all associated with the academic program and few people worked on independent projects.

I have worked at a community college that didn’t even have a minor in a performing arts discipline and students were involved with creating their own performances on campus, forming performance groups with people from the community, involved with other established performance groups and picking up cross-disciplinary skills in the process.

Some of this was facilitated by efforts the academic departments made, but by and large it was the result of a cohort of students who kept each other motivated and managed to sustain their energy even after graduations. None of it was part of some long range plan. It just happened.

I can’t say who has the better chance of being employed as artists over the long term. Formal training programs have the imprimatur of a degree, the cachet of their name and the network contacts of alumni and faculty.

People who have been omnivorous in their pursuits may develop a following and recognition that their creativity, range of knowledge and skills and entrepreneurship are well suited to the current arts environment.

The truth is, it isn’t too long after you graduate that what you have done and what you can do right now becomes more important than where you studied. (Though certainly there are places whose name recognition is still impressive 20 years after you graduated.)

But as anyone who reads this blog can tell you, working in the arts is really hard.

Admittedly, when you are 18-20 years old, it is extremely difficult to know what education and career path you should be pursuing to bring the most success. The same is pretty much true at 40.

When you are looking at a career in the performing arts, the cost of attending a training program or forgoing it is not as real to you as it is four years or so later and you look back in regret at choices made or not made.

Let’s also be honest that training programs want to sell you on attending them. As an aspiring artist, you are going looking for them. It may actually be to the credit of BFA & MFA programs moreso than many other academic disciplines that they reject a lot of people. This may be the biggest favor they do for many.

Yes, they need to do a much better job in respect to preparing people for careers and should be working harder to discourage people who aren’t exhibiting the discipline and skill at that time that they need to succeed.

But it really is not in their best interest to dissuade people too strongly.

The benefit students today have over students from 10-15 years ago is that so much about the reality of an arts career is discussed online now. It is possible to make a much more informed decision today.

Think back though. Even if you sought out or were given links to articles like the one about dance programs being a pyramid scheme, would the 18 year old you have been dissuaded?

Can Fundraising Be Inspirational To All Involved?

March 2, 2015 by Joe Patti

Last Thursday I attended an art show opening at the shop of a wood furniture maker. The owner of the shop invited some college kids in to festoon his walls with their work which leans heavily toward graffiti.

A couple things struck me while I was there.

First, the owner of the shop sells his furniture starting at about $2500 and going up. Except for a handful of people, few attendees at the opening could likely afford to buy his work because they were mostly college students.

Likewise, the fact the artists worked in a graffiti style, the art work isn’t likely to attract the type of people who will spend $2500+ to his store while the art show is up.

Clearly, the store owner was motivated by a desire to support local artists and not by a desire to grow his customer base.

I was impressed by the work the students had put into the installation. There were a few hundred hours worth of effort invested.

What I valued more was the opportunity this offered the artists to talk about their work with people they had never met. This is an important skill for an artist to acquire and be comfortable with as they work to advance their career.

These guys were really well organized. They had prints, tshirts and stickers for sale. They also had a laptop with a slide show of their work so you could order tshirts.

On the whole, they were doing a really good job of promoting themselves with the help of this business owner.

You may take inspiration from this story or it may give you ideas for a program you can cultivate among businesses in your community.

Much about this story is exactly what occurs when a non-profit organization asks a person or business for support in some fashion.

People give, and even though the organization may offer different levels of recognition, unless the donor/sponsor is giving a major amount or your organization is a focus of social and business activity in the community, there may not really be any direct benefit to their company in the form of goodwill or increased business.

As I thought about it, I realized when it happened to someone else, it was inspiring and exciting. When you have to solicit support for yourself in order to secure fiscal stability, it is business and somewhat burdensome.

When I tell you, look at this case, the gesture this business owner made enabled these artists to hone their communication skills and promote their work, it sounds so exciting and inspirational.

Telling a donor or granting entity that their support will enable fledgling artists to improve their ability to discuss and promote their work, it doesn’t feel as exciting. Maybe because you know this is only a small part of what the money will be used for or perhaps because the solicitation doesn’t have an immediate and direct connection to the result.

I have been wonder since last Thursday if there were any way to instill more of a sense of excitement and inspiration into the solicitation process but I can’t really think of any.

The artists who showcased on Thursday got their opportunity because they met the business owner at a similar opening that occurred in December. The person who is rumored to be doing the next show met the owner in much the same way.

But by and large, no one will know you need support unless you tell them so you need to go through the solicitation process. There is a certain degree of scrutiny and follow up reporting that is involved with any significant transfer of monetary and material support.

As much time, inconvenience and effort the business owner has spent by allowing different artists to showcase in his store, the expense hasn’t been terribly large for him at this point.

The only time the process isn’t going to require bothersome and boring effort that I can see is if you happen upon a comedy movie ending where you inherit an enormous sum from an unknown admirer.

For all my doubts, I still wonder if it might be possible to make fund raising/solicitation an enjoyable experience for everyone involved. I would love it if the experience I had last Thursday was scalable so I am especially curious to learn if anyone out there has managed to design such an experience.

Recent Trends In Non Profit Governance

February 25, 2015 by Joe Patti

Last month Non-Profit Quarterly (NPQ) published a summary of BoardSource’s governance index, Leading With Intent.

The summary is encouraging in that it shows a vast majority of non-profit boards engage in good governance practices. (Although NPQ notes that the results may be slightly skewed given most people on BoardSource’s survey mailing list tend to be people who have contacted them due to interest in good governance.)

The disappointing, though not surprising, finding is that most board and executive leaders are Caucasian and over 40.

“But the lack of inclusion of younger people and people of color on boards and as executive directors seems to point to an unwillingness to join in and make best use of the current societal disruption.

Young people have a different experience base in the political and social uses of networks, which relates to the ability to approach big questions. Additionally, smaller boards can best work for the good of a larger community if those boards have an understanding of how to interact effectively with a larger, more diverse, and unbounded governance system of stakeholders. This cutting edge of governance requires cultural wisdom and the wisdom of younger leadership.”

I was interested to learn that board size has shrunk by 20% between 1994 and 2014 and there is a de-emphasis on people with connections to money. (my emphasis)

The thought that boards must be packed with influential connectors seems to be going the way of the dodo, at least for many organizations. This fits well with the idea that boards should know how to interact effectively with larger systems of governance and support. “Interacting effectively” in these times means that board members are connected enough to the organization and its stakeholder environment to ensure proper communication with stakeholders. Board members should be capable of listening with an educated ear for the tremors and trends in the organization’s environment. A lack of diversity on the board interferes with the capacity to accurately “listen.”

Although NPQ was generally optimistic about it, I had mixed feelings about the news that executive directors have remained in their jobs rather than making a mass exodus as was once feared. My feelings are the same as they were back in 2007/2008 when the concern about mass retirement of executive directors was first expressed.

At that time there weren’t many organizations with succession plans in place or an active efforts to cultivate people to assume those positions and according to the current NPQ article, there still aren’t. While NPQ acknowledges the lack of succession planning is a problem, my focus is more on the cultivation of new leaders.

My fear is that if potential leaders don’t feel like they are being challenged and provided with significant responsibility and decision making opportunities, they may choose to shift their careers elsewhere. The result may be a new generation of leaders with very shallow experience with non-profit work.

I often encourage people to read the full text of a report and that is especially true for this one since NPQ is soliciting articles that make use of the compiled data. If this is a topic which interests you, consider writing about it.

Info You Can Use: Do You Know The Value of A Volunteer’s Time?

February 18, 2015 by Joe Patti

Did you know I am a contributor to ArtsHacker, a website dedicated to offering all sorts of solutions to arts organizations?

Did you know that a volunteer’s time is worth an average of $22.55/hour and may be worth more in your locale?

Did you know you can actually claim each volunteer’s time on grant reports and financial reporting that you submit?

Did you know I wrote all about these things in a post that appeared on ArtsHacker last Wednesday?

Did you know that a meme about volunteering featuring the World’s Most Interesting Man makes your post more interesting?

Well, hey, now you do.

All kidding aside, volunteer hours are very valuable to an arts organization both as a result of the effort they expend on its behalf and for the value you can claim on various financial documents. And with even just a few volunteers working for you, it can add up to quite a lot.

There are accounting rules, of course, that limit what and how much of a volunteer’s time you can claim. But even if you use this information for nothing more than helping your organization recognize the true value of a volunteer’s effort, calculating this number can be worth it.

Do you know the value of your volunteers’ time?

Would You Trade Board Oversight For Investor Scrutiny?

February 16, 2015 by Joe Patti

The Clyde Fitch Report takes a close look at a bill being proposed in the U.S. Senate to give Broadway investors the same tax break as those who invest in movies.

The goal of the legislation according to a press release put out by the bill’s sponsor, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer is to provide more incentive for banks and investment funds to invest in Broadway shows and therefore spur job growth.

“..Due to the tremendous risk involved, it is very unlikely that any managed fund or banking institution in the United States will lend resources for live theatrical productions, so the majority of capitalization comes from small or independent investors.”

After some analysis The Clyde Fitch Reports’ asks if there really is a dearth of investors and they wonder if banks should really be investing clients’ money in an endeavor widely acknowledged as likely to lose money.

Do you believe banking and investment institutions should gamble their clients’ money to produce Broadway shows?

Do you believe 233 names, sets of names and/or entities listed over the title of a random list of 10 Broadway shows represents a problem generating a “pool of interested investors in Broadway”?

Do you believe investors in commercial Broadway deserve a tax break?

Are there any other individuals in the American theater for whom tax-code tweaks might be desirable?

When I first read the article, I thought it was a proposal to get investors paid earlier in the process. While it isn’t, I wondered with the weight of large investment institutions present, would the arrangement get altered so that investors recouped sooner and “Hollywood accounting” adopted resulting in the creatives getting little.

I also wondered with more money behind them, would Broadway productions become more adventuresome, or even more oriented toward stage adaptations of proven works and revivals.

On the other hand, since I am always keeping my eyes open for alternative funding models, I also wondered if this might provide more options nationally to arts organizations.

When I first read the following from the Schumer press release, I thought perhaps these investment tax breaks might be applicable to artistic projects created around the country.

“On average, Touring Broadway contributed an economic impact to the local economy that was 3.5 times the gross ticket sales. This income is also vital to sustaining our nation’s theatres, as more than 50% of Performing Arts Center’s ticket sales derive from patrons attending the Touring Broadway series. This revenue permits local venues to offer opera, ballet, unique exhibitions and to fund much needed arts education curricula. Without Touring Broadway, all of these vital programs would suffer.”

Then I realized, no, what the release is saying is that Broadway needs the tax breaks so everyone else can present Broadway tours.

I am a little skeptical about the economics cited here. I don’t know about the venues with week long runs, but while Broadway audiences are among our biggest, they are also the shows that tend to lose the most money for us. We ain’t funding anything else off the proceeds.

Now if they were obliged to lower their rates for non-profits in return for this tax break, that would be beneficial to us. But I don’t see that happening.

All the same, I do wonder if the law being proposed could benefit people in other parts of the country looking to run a performing arts center as a commercial enterprise by allowing them to solicit investors.

Or perhaps it could help turn other cities into development centers by attracting investment for works that weren’t necessarily contemplated to go to Broadway but rather stay put in Portland, Minneapolis, Miami, etc. as a significant attraction for the region.

The productions may not gain the same cachet it would from Broadway, but what it did develop might be enough to create regional or national interest in a tour of say a multi-media dance work that generated a respectable return on the investment.

If the legislation is not written in such a way to include non-Broadway productions, is it worth lobbying to have the scope widened?

As the title of this post suggests, it would change the complexion of the way performing arts entities operated.

By Faith Alone

February 10, 2015 by Joe Patti

Yesterday I wrote about the need for grace in the face of criticism. It must have struck a chord with some folks because the traffic to that post exploded (I am sure a great deal of credit goes to Thomas Cott, though.)

Today I wanted to touch upon the equally frustrating, but much more gratifying “that was amazing, too bad more people weren’t there,” event.

To be clear, this isn’t the show that your staff and arts insiders from your community thought was excellent for its artistic quality. This is the show at which 100 regular members of the community filtered into your 550 seat theater and absolutely loved it.

You know they loved it because right at intermission as you move to use a urinal a total stranger thanks you for taking the time to visit his group and tell them about the show.

(If you are a guy, understand just how much he must have loved the show that he couldn’t adhere to the unspoken rules about not holding a conversation with a stranger at the urinals.)

You know they loved it because strangers keep coming up to you at restaurants and supermarkets for weeks later to tell you how excited they were.

Not to mention the social media conversations that you may catch.

This is the type of reaction that makes a career in the arts worthwhile. Few other professions get this sort of heartfelt thanks.

Except, you know, you would probably be okay trading a “that was awesome” for “that wasn’t bad” if it meant having 300-400 more people in the audience.

That brings me to the real purpose of this post, which is to ask a question.

There is some received wisdom that once people learn they can trust your organization to provide a quality experience, they will be more willing to take a risk on unknown and unfamiliar shows.

So my question is, is that really true? Can anyone point to a case where their local community grew to trust their judgement and attended unfamiliar events in sustainable numbers based on faith?

I am not talking simply about growing an audience. I increased attendance at dance concerts when I was in Hawaii. But that was more about marketing and making dance programs and schools more aware of performances and talking to them about what we were planning for next year.

While this certainly generated trust in our work, it was more a matter of effectively tapping into an existing interest group than cultivation.

I have also definitely had people who have said they weren’t sure about a performance, but attended because they knew we did quality and interesting work.

The problem is that their numbers were relatively small and while they may have represented the unexpressed sentiment of a larger group, attendance often made it clear there weren’t numbers to be sustainable.

At the base of this is the necessity of taking a critical look at whether pursuing audience trust as a long term goal is realistic or is it a pleasant ideal to which non-profit arts organizations have subscribed.

Research has shown that audiences in general don’t discern between whether an event is being held by a for-profit or non-profit entity when choosing what to attend. With that in mine, are there that many in our communities that really appreciate that you are pursuing excellence when others seemingly are not?

It is likely that audiences aren’t thinking in terms of excellence as much as having an awesome or amazing experience, and that is fine. But we all know that it is relatively easy to provide an experience that will be evaluated in these terms by offering a commercially recognizable name.

So again I come back to the question, after having mastered marketing and awareness building, has anyone managed to grow a following/loyalty/what have you, in your community based on faith in your work? How did you do it? Where did you do it? What is the scale of the program?

I don’t doubt that success is possible in cities and communities where the underlying dynamics encourage curiosity and experimentation. But a lot of those places can have higher costs of living so question about being self-sustaining becomes relevant.

Since there is rarely anything in the arts that is truly self-sustaining, what I mean is a program central to the organization’s operations that has become increasingly less dependent on grant support or infusions from other parts of the program. An after hours program doing edgy programming in the black box theater seating 80 is being subsidized by all the other events that keep the organization in business.

A company that has gone from not paying anyone and depending on everyone to costume themselves to paying a stipend equivalent to $1.12/hr and costuming from Goodwill is an improvement, but probably isn’t a proven model yet.

It Is About Time, All The Time

February 2, 2015 by Joe Patti

You have probably been hearing or reading a lot about the recent National Endowment for the Arts survey results, particularly about why people they don’t participate in arts activities.

I was recently looking at some old articles I had bookmarked and the statistics from a study on creativity caught my eye. Curiosity sent me scurrying back to the NEA report to see if my suspicions were true.

In 2012, StrategyOne surveyed 1000 people each in the U.S. UK, Germany, France and Japan about their relationship with creativity. It is graphic heavy and very interesting to read.

A couple years ago, Jeffrey Davis summarized the StrategyOne results for the U.S. on Creativity Post.

When Americans were asked what their biggest challenge to being able to create were:

For the Americans surveyed, self-doubt (27%), other personal obligations (29%), other work obligations (22%), and one’s age (13%) ranked fairly low.

That leaves two self-perceived blocks: Time and Money.

54% of surveyed Americans claimed they didn’t have the financial resources to let them create. 52% perceived that lack of time kept them from being able to create.

But when you unpack this question, its potential answers, and the actual responses, much if not all of it comes back to time.

Our perception of time is tied to how we view our obligations. If we think we don’t have enough money to create, this means in part that we think we don’t have enough money to be freed up from other obligations to afford us the solitude and “off-time” necessary to be “on” creatively.

If you look at the NEA study results about barriers to attendance 47% said time, 38% said cost, 37% said access.

I suspect there is a stronger relationship between time and money being the top answers in both surveys than I can imagine. One of my initial thoughts was that creativity is seen as a frivolous pursuit.

With so many other activities that are perceived to be more important, creativity gets lowest priority and so of course there is no time left to pursue it as an attendee, participant or self-directed creator.

As much as I would like to damn society for giving people this message and encourage everyone to free their minds like me, if I am honest I have to confess to feeling the same pressure.

This past Christmas when things were quiet, I felt guilty about catching up on professional reading when I should be doing something constructive like writing press releases. What I was reading were materials provided by our state arts council and still I felt like I was avoiding my real responsibilities.

That is a pretty insidious mindset, eh?

Fortunately, I was able to make up for it and flex my artistic tendencies by blasting music and singing at the top of my lungs since there was no one else on my floor.

Something to think about though. The challenge may not be as simple as getting people to make time to see shows, it may be about getting them to make time for the more fundamental task of being creative.

I suspect if you succeed at the second battle, you will have already made great headway on the first. But that second one is a real doozy to try to accomplish.

Info You Can Use: Good Fellowship Opportunity

December 31, 2014 by Joe Patti

Tomorrow as the new year dawns and you make a resolution to be the best darn arts administrator you can be, you might want to consider starting an application to Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s new arts administration/leadership fellowship.

According to American Theatre, the Paul Nicholson Arts Management Fellowship is meant to increase diversity among arts leadership.

The seven-month fellowships are for professionals interested in a career in arts management and artistic leadership. Candidates need only be interested in leading an arts organization; a background in theatre is not required. The chosen fellow will work in close capacity with OSF managing director Cynthia Rider, and will lead projects across multiple administrative departments.

Johka emphasizes that while the Paul Nicholson Fellowship is designed to give potential leaders of color an opportunity to develop professionally, the application process is open to all, not just candidates of color.

“You can’t make a claim to have a commitment to diversity and inclusion while maintaining that in order to bring people in, they must have a long history in a field that has been traditionally all white,” Johka adds. “You have to open up your criteria to accept and value all kinds of transferable skills.”

Just in case you breezed over the sentence I bolded above, it is not necessary that you have a background in theatre.

Deadline is February 1 and the fellowship, which includes housing, transportation and a stipend, begins March 31, 2015. Application is accepted online.

Seems like a great opportunity. My only nitpick is that the application process requires three letters of recommendation to be attached at the time of submission. I realize this is likely to be a highly competitive process and there needs to be a weeding out process. However, if the goal is to attract people of diverse backgrounds, requiring three letters of recommendation may end up excluding people who have advanced along the less traditional path with “all kinds of transferable skills” they are seeking.

Getting quality letters of recommendation for your application file in a timely manner is often even a difficult task for university doctoral students who operate in a culture in which they are de rigueur.

Dabbling In The Revolution

December 17, 2014 by Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Info You Can Use: Minimalist Design and Slide Decks

December 17, 2014December 16, 2014 by Joe Patti

I just finished teaching a public speaking course this semester. One of the pieces of advice I tried to emphasize for my students was not to fill your Powerpoint slides with tons of text.

It was difficult to accomplish this goal. I must confess part of me was secretly pleased that members of the visually oriented Millennial generation were having the same struggles with simplifying their presentations as those who pioneered the use of Powerpoint.

This being said, the minimal look is definitely in.

Drew McManus has been advocating for flat and responsive web design for awhile. You can also see the increased use of a page spanning dominant image on sites like TED.com

and the Weather Channel

The SlideShare blog recently featured slide decks that Guy Kawasaki promotes for aspiring entrepreneurs that translates this minimalist approach to slide decks. The first has a lot of great examples of text heavy slides that were heavily trimmed down and had a single central concept set against a single dominant image. (requires Flash)

[slideshare id=295996&doc=sample-slides-by-garr-reynolds-1204852162670051-5]

Slide number 5 provides a good example of how to transition from what might be your current practice to a more minimalist approach, taking an image of President Kennedy from the corner and making the slide all about the image and his “Ask not…” quote. Many of the other slides are an example of an entirely revamped approach to a topic.

The other slide deck that caught my eye was the third. It provides a template to help a marketer create a presentation about different customer personas. It is created as something your organization or company can use immediately to present what you know about the different demographics that comprise your customer.

When I immediately, I mean it is pretty much designed so you can download it right now, delete the instructional and example slides, plug in the relevant data and images and use what remains as a basis for a presentation if you want. (requires Flash)

[slideshare id=30601327&doc=buyerpersonatemplate1-140129195502-phpapp01]

Honest Planning Isn’t A Game

December 1, 2014 by Joe Patti

One of the common elements between the non-profit arts world and the gaming industry are the long, dehumanizing hours for little to no pay. There is actually a web comic dedicated to satirizing the work conditions at gaming companies. It allows people to submit their horror stories. Incredible as it may seem, if the stories are true, working in the gaming industry might actually be more dehumanizing and exploitative.

There is one post that sounds hauntingly familiar as it recounts comments from friends and family along the lines of “you are doing what you love, how can it be work?”

Makes me think the arts need a web comic/war story board to gather around.

Last month we had a video gaming conference in our theater. One of the speakers was talking about the stages of putting a game together from pre-production through testing and release.

What he said was, if you did your planning right and maintained discipline so that you didn’t get sidetracked trying to integrate some new cool technology or idea someone had, you wouldn’t end up doing a lot of 60-80 hour weeks of crunch time.

He said it was important not to allow your or your team to put in too many 16+ hour days because when it came to planning out your next project, you would forget/ignore the true cost in time the project would require. Yes, you were able to complete that stage in four weeks last time, but it involved your team working 80 hours a week during those four weeks.

And guess what, the new project will require everyone to work 80 hour weeks for a month as well. By trying to adhere to a reasonable schedule, you will inevitably recognize that you really need 6 weeks to complete that stage (not 8 weeks because your team will likely be more effective well rested than exhausting themselves every day.)

I often hear theater staff talk about the fact that renters often underestimate the amount of work their event will require because everything appears to occur so effortlessly and simply. But the truth is, a lot of theater staff don’t really acknowledge the true effort either because they push themselves over long hours to get a project done or people are pulled in from other departments to lend a hand.

Often this results from the gradual push to do more with less as the organization tries to maintain the same level of service as their funding gets cut.

Just as often, if not more often, this practice has been part of the organizational culture from the beginning. Everyone happily worked the long hours or stepped in to lend a hand on that first show and no effort was ever made to evaluate the planning process to create a schedule that was more conducive to good physical and mental health.

Then either the number of projects increased or new people joined in who weren’t part of the original core group and they start feeling a little resentful about the work load.

Those who have been around longer start complaining about the work ethic of youngsters these days, never really noticing that the founding culture might have been fine at the time, but it really wasn’t a sustainable planning and working model.

There is a lot of talk about work-life balance these days. The solution you may came up with is to allow people more time off. What you might really need to do is pause for a second and think about whether the assumptions you are bringing to your timeline planning is flawed.

If giving one person more time off means you are shifting more responsibility to someone else, that can be great in the short term if it is helping someone develop new skills. However, if in their enthusiasm over being trusted with new responsibilities they start working longer hours, it just hides the problems with the planning process until they get burnt out or the person who replaces them complains.

A good, hard, honest look at the true cost of time and resources being expended in order to fulfill annual or project plans may be required if you are going to effectively provide a good work-life balance to everyone.

Door #1 or Door #2 And $400,000?

November 24, 2014 by Joe Patti

If you haven’t heard about it yet, it is worth checking out a recent story about two successful Broadway shows vying for the same theater.

Some time back, the producers of The Audience, starring Helen Mirren reserved the Schoenfeld Theater starting in February 2015 as part of the plan to bring the show over from London.

In the meantime, the theater was empty so the producers of It’s Only A Play booked the Schoenfeld with the plan of moving out on January 4.

The problem is, It’s Only A Play got wildly successful and the producers planning to extend the run, naturally wanted to stay in the Schoenfeld.

This part of the story isn’t so news worthy, this sort of thing happens frequently enough on Broadway. What came next isn’t.

Because the theater right next door, Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, has an opening in January, the producers of It’s Only A Play, suggested The Audience move in there and offered The Audience $400,000 to do it. The It’s Only A Play folks figured it would cost them $800,000 to move, so if they could stay put they would offer half the cost they saved.

The configuration and amenities of both theaters are very similar, except that the Schoenfeld was more recently renovated.

Despite the large production costs that Broadway shows incur, the producers of The Audience declined to even discuss the arrangement. All their plans call for using the Schoenfeld.

Adding an interesting dimension to this whole story is that Ken Davenport is a producer on It’s Only A Play so he writes about the issue on his blog, The Producer’s Perspective. His account of the exchange doesn’t diverge from that of the NY Times story, but he asks his readers what they would have done.

I thought most people would be incredulous that the producers of The Audience would leave that much money on the table. Who wouldn’t want Door #2 plus $400,000 when you already know what is behind door #2.

But the comments actually run about 2:1 in favor of The Audience taking up residency in the Schoenfeld. The fact that Helen Mirren is in the show and that it has broken records in London factored into many opinions that the production should be in the place that best showcased its attributes rather than compromising artistic vision.

A case might actually be made in the other direction. It is not unheard of for West End hits to bomb on Broadway and vice versa. Since The Audience is about the rise of Queen Elizabeth II from 1952 to present, the show may not have the same draw for American audiences as it did in London.

This is not to say that both Queen Elizabeth II and Helen Mirren don’t enjoy a great deal of good will and respect in the United States. Just that as a hedge against a lesser degree of interest, it might be best to position the show in the best environment possible. Physical surroundings are a big influence on audience enjoyment.

This whole situation provides some good PR for both productions. The Audience has the reputation of being so certain of their success that they could turn down $400,000. And now there is additional attention cast on the success of It’s Only A Play for extending their run and making a gutsy offer that might have allowed them to stay put.

Don’t Wait Up, I’m Going Cruisin’ With The Actors

November 4, 2014 by Joe Patti

If you are in the entertainment business, it appears Netflix is shaping up to be the major nemesis. HBO is going to let you stream their series without cable as a way to respond to people dropping their cable subscriptions and shifting toward Netflix. Movie theaters are vowing to refuse to screen the new Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon movie because it will be released on Netflix at the same time.

So what are live performance companies to do? It is pretty difficult to be ready to perform on demand. Sure recording your performance and posting it on YouTube is always an option, but you’re trying to perpetuate the benefits of attending events in person.

Well, I don’t know if it is THE answer, but one possible model for study might be found in a post on the HowlRound website this past July. Jean Ann Douglass and Eric John Meyer do theater in a truck. People buy tickets online and at 4:00 pm on the day of the show, they receive an email about where to find the truck. Such an arrangement allows for the possibility of having a show centrally located to the bulk of your audience.

Now granted, with a capacity of only 15 people, the scale is a little small. However, as they point out, it allows a great deal of flexibility in positioning a performance.

Another appealing aspect of this work is the freedom it affords us as producers and presenters. We can rent our venue anytime, anywhere across the country

One of the key elements of their performances are bars with bathrooms. While the performance could theoretically be performed in any parking lot, the audience needs restroom facilities. At intermission, the audience is sent off to a nearby bar and when they return, they view a second, entirely different play. Then after the performance, you can have a drink with the performers.

There is a lot of potential for symbiotic relationship between bars, restaurants and other businesses in this performance model. There are probably a good number of places that would be happy to have a guarantee of 15 customers coming in at a known time.

Obviously, weather is a consideration since it can get too hot or cold in the back of a truck. However, I imagine anyone who was really serious about bringing performances into different neighborhoods in on a consistent basis would make the necessary alterations.

As I sit here, I have visions of the invention of entirely new ways to staging shows to accommodate the form of tractor trailers and shipping containers. Not to mention the rise of companies specializing in taming the acoustic qualities of these spaces.

After working wonderful performance halls, it is probably depressing to even contemplate having to resort to such rough conditions to provide the experience of live performance. But let us not forget that wagons were the primary delivery mode for performance once upon a time.

With the convention of performance hall audience behavior out the window, entirely new possibilities might open up with people using electronic devices and social media to interact with the performances. The novelty of going cruising with a performance troupe might be very appealing to people.

Art of Mathematics (Be Sure To Show Your Work)

October 29, 2014 by Joe Patti

A recent building renovation on my campus by the math department offices saw the installation of blackboard walls. The goal was to provides students with a place to study and work on projects as a group.

I am not sure if it was part of the original vision, but many of the boards have been used to illustrate the utility and beauty of math.

These are nowhere near the best examples of some of the content that has popped up. Since this hallway is in the administration building, I have had frequent occasion to pass by these boards.

As a person who has been confounded by math, I have been impressed by what an asset they seem to be for demystifying the subject. I have only understood about 1/3 of what has been posted, but the explanations that accompanied that 1/3 were often very entertaining as they facilitated my comprehension. The 2/3 I don’t understand at least gives the impression that it is interesting and enjoyable.

There has been one section that has stuck in my craw a bit…

I am not sure if this sentiment was created by any of the math students. Even though this particular hallway goes directly into “math territory” (the other hallway passes the offices of the Dean of Arts and Sciences and Office of University Communications), the general content is less mathematically focused.

This has been up for the last 8-10 weeks now and has remained unchanged while other sections have been erased and altered. One of the reasons it sticks in my craw is that it is immediately visible upon entering the administration building door so it is the first thing I have seen.

When this got posted on Facebook, someone pointed out the irony of this appearing on a wall full of art. And for that reason, it is a little difficult to justify going up and erasing it both as a matter of free speech and art censorship. There have been a number of works that either explicit or figuratively had a message that art sucks/is stupid.

I have nudged the chair of the fine arts department to deploy some students for a little counter-propaganda, but nothing has happened yet.

Perhaps the students are hard at work with their time consuming projects and rehearsals.

It comes as no surprise to anyone that arts disciplines face this bias. No one needed President Obama to make a comment about STEM majors being better for careers than art history, to come to this realization.

Ultimately though, the irritation I feel when I see this sentiment upon entering the administration building disappears when I make a left down the other hall and see the multi-colored attempts to use art to illuminate the mysteries of mathematics.

It really doesn’t matter if people are using these boards to insult the arts because the boards represent an effort to use a multi-disciplinary approach to education that has long been advocated for.

As we learned long ago on the internet, the intent of any effort that allows the for unmoderated contributions is bound to be co-opted at some point.

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

October 21, 2014 by Joe Patti

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: Take A Look At The Broadway Books

October 20, 2014 by Joe Patti

Though I don’t cite him very often, I keep an eye on the blog of Broadway producer Ken Davenport because he tends to ask questions about how Broadway can do a better job of serving the public.

We often see Broadway as a monolithic behemoth to whose gravitational pull most theaters are subject to some degree. It is interesting to see someone talking about how the business process in NYC might not be living up to its potential and gain insight into some of the inner workings.

In the next two weeks Davenport is going to conduct webinars breaking down the budgets of a Broadway show. These will be held on October 22 and 29, both from 7-8 pm EDT with a recording posted afterward. (my emphasis)

Over those two nights, I’ll walk you through my philosophies of budgeting, a strategy to make sure you come in under budget on every single one of your shows, and most importantly I will walk you through each and every line and page of an actual Broadway budget.

In other words, if a budget is the engine of a Broadway show, I’m going to pop the hood, take apart the motor piece by piece, and then put it back together again . . . so you not only understand how it works, but so you can build your own.

[…]

It’s going to be fun, and if you’re a numbers guy/gal, you’ll really love it. If you’re not a numbers guy/gal, well, all the more reason for you to sign up, because budgeting is where so many shows go wrong. It is the business blueprint of your production.

I emphasize this second to last sentence because even if you never think you will ever mount a Broadway show, this is an opportunity to have someone talk about a budgeting process for a performance.

For everyone who talks about transitioning away from the non-profit arts business model, this is a good opportunity to gain insight into what factors you need to consider in the commercial realm, even if you are already pondering a third (or fifth) alternative.

Info You Can Use: Change That Contract!

November 22, 2014October 15, 2014 by Joe Patti

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.

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?

Wherein I Speak of Chocolate Chip Cookies and Zombies (But Mostly Cookies)

October 1, 2014 by Joe Patti

My mother sent me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies today. This sort of thing has been going on for a few years. She has been finding these new cookie recipes which she swears are better than the old recipes and she sends them to me.

Frankly, I am not having it. Maybe it is due to the temperature differences en route to my house, but when I eat the cookies she mails me, I can’t believe she is claiming these are better than the ones I grew up on. It isn’t just the taste. The texture and general consistency of the cookies are all wrong.

I will eat other cookies, but when it comes time to make cookies to give to others, I am sticking to the old proven recipes in my book.

I am sure we all have something in our lives we are attached to in this manner. Something that we have an emotional attachment to for which we will accept no substitutes.

And maybe you can see where I am going with this. I bring this up to remind you that this is a powerful factor to contend with when we are trying to energize programming with new and challenging content.

Last week we opened the season with a guy who does a great job channeling Frank Sinatra who was joined by three guys who used to be in some of the Motown groups of the 60s. It was a great show and a lot of fun. I was dancing in the wings backstage. We had a great sized audience. As an opening show it really set the tone for the rest of the season.

As people left the performance they were telling me it was the best thing they had seen in a long time here. I have been hearing the same thing over the course of the last week. It hasn’t just been people who attended the show. Their friends and kids have been telling me they were told the same thing.

My perception is that it was a great show, but the best thing that has appeared here in a long time…I don’t know about that.

Though I admit I was backstage so I didn’t get the full impact of the show. Those guys all understood the power of showmanship and connecting with the audience so I don’t doubt everyone felt they had a quality experience.

We can talk about innovating our programs, educating and engaging audiences with new ideas. It is easy to forget that there is often a “homemade chocolate chip cookies” grade emotional attachment involved in some of the content we offer.

By no means do older audience members lack the interest and curiosity to participate in innovative approaches to art. They certainly have expectations of their experience that are rooted in the present.

But they also tend to have a much stronger emotional investment in their experience than younger audiences.

After the show last week, I received a call from a long time attendee who told me what he liked and disliked about the performance and then proceeded to complain about last season. One of his objections was to the profanity in West Side Story, a show that first hit Broadway over 50 years ago when this gentleman was in his 20s.

Yes, he may be a cranky old man that needs to recognize that honest portrayals of life include profanity. Maybe it isn’t healthy to be dwelling on gripes for 6+ months, but it is also a sign of an investment in what we do that isn’t exhibited by younger audiences.

It may be that we need to shift thinking and practices to engage younger audiences instead of being entrenched in practices of the past that appeal only to older audiences. But it also may be that societal dynamics have shifted to a place where it is unrealistic to expect that level of investment from people any longer.

Just think about how long bands like the Rolling Stones have endured. Then try to identify a group that has emerged in the last decade that has engendered a relationship with audiences that will sustain their zombie corpses.

Current efforts to sustain performing arts organizations may or may not correctly be compared to attempts to keep a corpse animated. I think we talk so much about the financial aspects of keeping an organization operational that it is easy to forget that it is more than just money keeping things going.

There is an emotional investment that accompanies the money and in some respects, it is much easier to find alternative sources of funding than it is to replace the value of that emotional investment.

The Arts Are For Swingers

September 30, 2014 by Joe Patti

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.

Info You Can Use: You Can Hack Being An Arts Administrator

September 18, 2014September 17, 2014 by Joe Patti

Drew McManus is fulfilling one of my ambitions.

When I was first starting out this blog, I envisioned creating some sort of repository of information about arts and arts administration that people could consult.

It should be noted that I was unemployed when I started this blog nearly 11 years ago so I had a lot of time on my hands to be ambitious. That plan never panned out. Getting a job and getting really busy sort of diverted my focus from that.

However, despite being quite busy with his job as a consultant, Drew McManus has deluded concluded that trolling through 990 filings and evaluating the effectiveness of orchestra websites aren’t monopolizing enough of his time.

Drew has decided to create an Arts Administration version of Lifehacker. He is looking for people to be contributors to this effort. If you are interested, sign up on his website.

To my mind, everyone has something to contribute. If you are a student in college, you can contribute tips on engaging your friends and colleagues.

If you live outside the U.S. there are plenty of challenges we face in common and plenty of insights from your particular experiences that can be of value.

In that vein, I wanted to call attention to a course being offered free online by Stanford “How To Start A Start up” It is being hosted by Sam Altman of the venture firm Y Combinator. The course speakers are a who’s who of Silicon Valley.

It isn’t directly arts related, but there will obviously be some commonalities with arts business. Among the topics are building company culture, how to operate, how to manage and how to raise money. Everyone keeps talking about the need for a shift in thinking in the arts and this may spur some different approaches.

After learning about this class, I did a survey of all the Massive Open Online Courses being offered by different entities around the country -MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Coursera etc. No one offers anything related to arts administration that I could see. The only online arts administration program I am aware of is the Certified Performing Arts Executive program at University of New Orleans.

[N.B. Dang it! Nina Simon made a liar of me pointing out this course on arts innovation. It didn’t show up on my search because it started the day before.]

Given the lack of any centralized source of information, tips and tricks related to arts administration, a resource like the one Drew is proposing is sorely needed.

Please consider signing up to make a contribution. With your help, a lot of people will be able to hack being arts administrators

Hey Did You Hear About…

September 8, 2014 by Joe Patti

I was really surprised to find my name tucked at the bottom of Barry Hessenius’ 2014’s Top 50 Most Powerful and Influential People in the Nonprofit Arts (USA) In fact, since I read his blog via Feedly and had caught up with my subscriptions on Saturday, I might not have read the post for another week if it weren’t for someone tweeting that Robert Bush from Charlotte’s Arts and Science Council made the list.

It’s not that I don’t think what I produce is worthwhile, it is just that I don’t perceive the old blog here as having that high a profile.

Now, of course, there is pressure to meet the standard set by the company I am listed in.

But Barry’s list dovetails nicely with the subject I intended to address today: cooperation and competition in the arts. Last month, Seth Godin observed that authors don’t compete with each other.

Yet, not only do authors get along, they spend time and energy blurbing each other’s books. Authors don’t try to eliminate others from the shelf, in fact, they seek out the most crowded shelves they can find to place their books. They eagerly pay to read what everyone else is writing…

Can you imagine Tim Cook at Apple giving a generous, positive blurb to an Android phone?

And yet authors do it all the time.

It’s one of the things I’ve always liked best about being a professional writer. The universal recognition that there’s plenty of room for more authors, and that more reading is better than less reading, even if what’s getting read isn’t ours.

It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an infinite game, one where we each seek to help ideas spread and lives change.

Even though the limits of funding, revenue generation opportunities and audience free time make existence as an arts organization or artist seem like a zero sum game, my experience starting about 15 years or so has been that arts people are generally pretty supportive of the work of colleagues in both word and action. They will tell their friends about interesting events and invite them along when they attend.

That hasn’t always been my experience. About 20 years ago, I feel like there was a lot more “us vs. them, we do the real art in this town” attitude. It has seemed over time the people I have worked with have espoused this view less and less.

Which isn’t to say that people aren’t envious of other organizations’ funding base; think other organization’s programming needs to be more diverse; think the annual awards ceremony for their community is all political; and aren’t befuddled by the more abstract and conceptual extremes of artistic expression.

Godin cites the intense rivalry of Pepsi and Coke as the antithesis of the relationship authors share. I mean, be honest. Haven’t you held your breath a moment when pouring Coke into a cup printed with a Pepsi logo, imagining the cup will melt? Have you ever mixed Pepsi and Coke together, standing at arm’s length expecting a reaction similar to dropping Mentos into a bottle of diet Coke, if not an explosion? That is how apparent the rivalry of the two companies is to the general public.

It would be hard to imagine Pepsi or Coke tweeting about members of other companies showing up on a list of the most influential and powerful people in the beverage industry.

But watch who calls attention to Barry Hessenius’ list over the next couple days. I bet you will find that the majority of those who do, don’t work for the same companies and organizations as those named. There may even be former employers and co-workers celebrating the attention someone has received. As Godin noted, there is a recognition that the success of one enhances the prestige and fortunes of the many.

Hey did you hear that Nina Simon, Laura Zabel and Donna Collins made the list?

Creativity for Creativity Sake

September 3, 2014 by Joe Patti

You may have seen this recent piece in The New Yorker on creativity. My state arts council linked to it and now I see multiple others have as well.

Author Joshua Rothman asks, “How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing?”

That question gave me pause because in most of the posts I have done on the subject of creativity, it has almost always been about the product of creativity rather than the actual value of the process itself. I frequently invoke (as does Rothman) the IBM survey in which thousands of corporate CEOs said that creativity is one of the things they most highly value. I often talk about how the arts community can show their value to businesses, and by extension, the rest of the world via training and discussion of the creative process.

As Rothman points out, there was a time, (The Romantic period of Coleridge and Woodsworth), when there wasn’t an expectation that what was going on in your head would assume some demonstrable manifestation. (my emphasis)

It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age. We live in a consumer society premised on the idea of self-expression through novelty. We believe that we can find ourselves through the acquisition of new things…Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach. Even as this way of speaking aims to recast work as art, it suggests how much art has been recast as work: it’s now difficult to speak about creativity without also invoking a profession of some kind.

Even before I got to this paragraph near the end of the article, I started to think that we really aren’t allowed to make art for arts sake any more. There is both overt and subtle messaging that if your efforts aren’t advancing your career or marketable skills in some way, then it is frivolous.

It can absolutely be a lot of fun to try something new with the idea that you might be able to integrate it into your work. But how often do we allow ourselves to walk through mountain meadows and imagine making airplanes out of the flowers we see around us? If we allow ourselves to do that, how often is it being used to serve work in the sense of unleashing our creativity Rothman mentions: to surmount a creative block or as a vacation to refresh ourselves to go back to work bright eyed and clear headed?

Given the dynamics of our lives these days, I don’t know that we can ever return to the ideal state of the Romantics Rothman cites. In some sense, as a society we may be better off than the Romantics because more people have the leisure time to indulge their creativity than did in Coleridge’s day.

At the very least, we have the opportunity to open ourselves to fits of fancy and imagination. The exemplar that immediately popped to mind for me was when I was working in Hawaii and had the pleasure of driving Laurie Anderson around. She kept expressing her amazement at how blue the sky was. She may have noticed a dozen other things, but that is what sticks out in my memory. I was so struck by her enthusiasm, that I took her on a detour so I could share the panoramic vista of a scenic overlook with her.

First Cut Is The Deepest

September 2, 2014 by Joe Patti

Nod to Thomas Cott for calling attention to a post on TRG blog about Mission versus business models.

I will cut right to the chase and say that I honed right in on their discussion of making a “cut list” of things to stop doing that are diverting resources and energy away from revenue generation.

If you’re a president, CEO, or executive director, you must align with your colleagues and focus your team on the sustainability of your business model and getting the revenue results that will support your mission. Insist on a “stop doing” list. Your non-profit status does not mean that you must exhaust staff time and resources with every initiative, regardless of return on investment.

They give examples of three theaters that have started focusing on audience retention in some fashion. Obviously, the area of focus could be anything.

I think the statements with the most impact were made in the comment section by Paul Botts.

During my years as a program director at an arts funder I adopted a habit that was driven by that “stop doing everything” idea. When presented with an organization’s new strategic plan my first question was always, “Tell me something which expresses your mission, which you could do and should do and really want to be doing, but which you aren’t going to do right now.”

If the response was a blank or shocked look then my feedback was that they didn’t have an actual plan they simply had a laundry list. If you haven’t made any actual choices then you haven’t done any real planning, etc.

Botts goes on to say that he follows up relating his own experience as managing director of an arts organization that tried to do everything their mission called for only to end up in bankruptcy. Even having gone through this uncomfortable experience, he still has to remind himself of lessons learned, indicating it is not an easy thing to keep yourself and your organization focused.

In the past I have often posted about diluting your efforts by adding programs as a way to chase foundation funding. But the situations TRG talks about are less clear cut and potentially more difficult to identify. The examples they give aren’t a matter of adding children matinees in order to get arts education funds. They talk about the Guthrie Theater deciding not to flyer the Mall of America in favor of focusing on getting first time attendees to come back for another visit.

Passing out flyers in a busy place is the sort of thing it is difficult to identify as a cut because it is a visible effort that looks like progress. It is the sort of thing audiences and board members will fault you for not doing in the face of declining attendance.

For some arts organizations, it might be the right strategy to increase attendance because the conversations accompanying the activity serve to increase a connection. In other communities, the connection may exist for as long as it takes to find a trashcan for the flyer.

The other thing that makes the cutting decision difficult is that there may be things that don’t appear to be effective because they are less public, more difficult to measure and might be among your organization’s least favorite activities. Just because you are really motivated to cut them may not mean it is constructive to do so.

Like a paper cut, what appears to be the least significant cut may tend to hurt the most.

Info You Can Use: Artists U

August 27, 2014 by Joe Patti

Springboard for the Arts recently profiled Artists U, an artist lead, artist centered professional development and planning project.

The project started in Philadelphia and has spread to Baltimore and South Carolina. Since they train artist facilitators to lead workshops elsewhere, their sessions may be coming to a location near you.

Artists U grew out of founder Andrew Simonet’s observation that:

“I went to so many [professional development workshops for artists] when I started out and so much of it was useless,” Simonet says. Workshops were often run by arts professionals, not artists, who didn’t understand or address the real struggles that artists face.

After attending a Creative Capital Foundation development workshop, Simonet “says he was “blown away” by “how wrong artists are in their vision of the world.” So one of the focuses of the training sessions and part of the Artists U website is to change the thinking and practices which undermine artists’ efforts.

The website also has a free to download book, Making Your Life As An Artist which addresses these issues in greater depth.

I have only generally skimmed the book thus far, but a section that immediately caught my eye was suggestions on reframing the way you discuss your work so that it will be engaging rather than alienating to most human beings. This is an area in which every artist and arts organization needs to evaluate their practices.

Take a look..

I’ll Make It Worth Your While To Quit…

August 20, 2014 by Joe Patti

Back in January, I wrote about some of the intriguing aspects of Netflix’s human resource policies. One of these policies was that they provide generous severance packages to people they don’t feel are performing at a superior level. (Look for the reference to slide 22)

Back in April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent a letter to investors outlining his company’s policy to offer warehouse employees up to $5,000 if they decided to leave the company.

While the Amazon offer based on a voluntary decision, like Netflix the policy it is based on the idea that an employee who isn’t motivated or completely proficient at their job is a threat to the long term health of the company.

So the question for a lot of companies and organizations is, is there an employee whom you might wish would take advantage of this opportunity if it was presented to them? If the answer is yes, the question that follows is, then why do you keep them around?

For non-profits, the obvious answer probably is that there are a lot of things you can accomplish with that $5000. You can’t just tie up that much money for even a portion of your employees against the day they decide to quit.

The amount of the severance pay doesn’t matter. The whole premise behind Netflix and Amazon’s policy is that they stand to lose more than they will payout if an ineffective person remains with their company. Figure out what that number is for you over the course of 5 years or so, and you have your severance pay.

If your answer is that the person means well and is enthusiastic, then you have to consider if you are actually acting as a good steward of the trust and funding invested in you by your supporters by employing a person who is not operating at close to the potential of someone in that position.

If your answer is that they are willing to work at less than market rate so you save money, then the question might also be if you are subjecting your clientele to poorer treatment than they deserve in the name of saving money.

The hiring process is an expensive one in terms of time, money and other resources so no one wants to be engaging in a replacement search every few months. This all goes to underscore the importance of high quality human resources and hiring practices right from the outset so you are attracting and retaining the right people. If the local talent pool doesn’t appear strong enough, it might require identifying overlapping applicable skillsets possessed by people outside your immediate field.

Best Practices In Audience Drowning

August 13, 2014 by Joe Patti

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)

Info You Can Use: Fiscal Sponsorship As Apprenticeship Program For Non-Profits

August 12, 2014 by Joe Patti

Non-Profit Law blogger Gene Tagaki recently tweeted a link to an article he wrote for the American Bar Association about 5 years ago urging lawyers to consider alternatives to forming non-profits organizations for their clients.

I should note that this article was written before the first Benefit Corporations were legal in the U.S. so that also remains an option to forming a non-profit.

One of the biggest considerations for not forming a non-profit is the fact that there are so many, with more being formed every day, but an ever shrinking supply of funding to support their efforts.

“Ron Mattocks, author of Zone of Insolvency: How Nonprofits Avoid Hidden Liabilities and Build Financial Strength, asserts that as many as one-third of the nation’s 1.4 million registered nonprofits operate in the zone of insolvency.
[…]
If a nonprofit is insufficiently prepared to compete and operate in such an environment, the end product may be gross inefficiencies, frustrated founders, disillusioned donors, and fewer resources ultimately reaching its intended beneficiaries.”

There is also the issue of whether the founders have a realistic business plan that is viable amid the economic conditions present. Takagi also spends some time cautioning against founder’s assumptions of the amount of control they can legally exert over the organization.

Among the alternatives to forming a non-profit Tagaki suggests is actually working with an existing non-profit. I often wondered, if people are able to muster the resources to create an entirely new non-profit that overlaps or competes with an existing one, why not first approach the existing non-profit first proposing to enhance their efforts with an ancillary or complementary program.

That is pretty much what Tagaki suggests:

When appropriate, lawyers should make their clients aware of the following benefits of working with an existing nonprofit:

-Avoidance of start-up costs and administrative burdens of a new nonprofit.
-Increased efficiency in furthering the charitable mission by using an established infrastructure.
-Opportunity to gain experience and expertise in running a nonprofit.
-Development of connections in the nonprofit community.

Collaborating with an existing nonprofit is an alternative that may be considered even where the contemplated charitable idea is not currently being implemented by an existing nonprofit. A nonprofit with a compatible mission may be receptive to implementing and operating a new program, particularly if a volunteer is willing to bring resources to the table. Alternatively, the nonprofit may have institutional knowledge relating to the charitable idea and its implementation. Moreover, the nonprofit may open doors and leverage assets that might not be otherwise readily available, such as

-Existing resources, including staff, volunteers, infrastructure, and systems.
-In-house experience and expertise, which may allow the contemplated program to be launched and operated efficiently and in compliance with the law.
-Donor and business relationships, including with institutional funders, nonprofit leaders, allied organizations, and the media.
-Goodwill, which may provide the program with name recognition and built-in public trust.

The other alternative he suggests is a Fiscal Sponsorship where a project is housed within the auspices of an existing non-profit. It allows the project to take advantage of the non-profit’s status without needing to create a separate entity. If the sponsorship agreement is written correctly, the project has the freedom to move to another non-profit or perhaps spin off as a separate non-profit once they have experienced sufficient growth. Fiscal sponsorship arrangements have been used to host short term projects or as an incubator for fledgling non-profits.

The Sponsor usually retains a portion of the gifts as a fee (5-10 percent is common) and allocates the rest to the Project. The Project Initiators may serve as employees or volunteers of the Sponsor delegated with the responsibility of operating the Project. They also may retain the right to move the Project to another Sponsor or to a new exempt organization created to permanently house the Project. Any such rights should be precisely spelled out in the fiscal sponsorship agreement.

Fiscal sponsorship may provide a Project with immediate tax-exempt status, advantageous treatment as a public charity (i.e., nonprivate foundation) without independently passing a public support test, some degree of administrative support, and a governing body that has a duty to ensure that the Project is operating in compliance with applicable laws. The Project Initiators must weigh such benefits against a lack of autonomy; their limited control over the Project, which remains under the ultimate control of the Sponsor; and the sponsorship fees.

The trade-off aside, if a fiscal sponsorship agreement is written well it can be an extremely helpful process of essentially testing the viability of a concept and learning how to run a non-profit organization without incurring the start up costs.

I was not aware that this option really existed. It might almost be better if aspiring non-profits pursued this option more regularly. Even if it didn’t result in new organizations spinning off all that often, it could potentially create more robust non-profit organizations. (Perhaps even resulting in more nimble sponsored programs growing to subsume their nominal sponsoring parent.)

Since the fiscal sponsorship option is relatively unknown as an option, perhaps the biggest hurdle will be getting both parties prepared and willing to engage in such an arrangement.

It is well known that non-profits start new programs in order to garner funding to support their main goals. It would be easy for a sponsoring organization to starve the program it agreed to house of the resources it needs to succeed. From the other side, as Tagaki mentioned, once you bring your program under the auspices of a fiscal sponsor, their priorities need to become your priorities to a large degree.

Info You Can Use: Non-Profits and Loans

August 6, 2014 by Joe Patti

If you didn’t catch it, in June Non-Profit Quarterly had a good 101 guide on when it is appropriate for non-profits to take out loans. Most times you hear about non-profits and loans it is once the non-profit is in financial trouble and deep in debt. The discussion of constructive use of loans by non-profit arts organizations is relatively rare.

In my own experience, conversations among arts administrators usually touches on earned revenue, fund raising/sponsorships and grants. I have never heard anyone talk about using loans to fund an initiative. This might be, as the NPQ article suggests, there is a stigma of failure associated with taking out a loan. Or it might be simply that we are so used to worrying about falling attendance, lack luster fundraising and onerous grant writing that no one really thinks to mention loans.

In addition to discussing the times it is and is not appropriate to seek a loan, the article notes that there are no “one-size-fits-all” loans so organizations can negotiate terms that suit their needs. They also provide a general sense of what answers and materials you might expect to be asked to provide as part of the loan process.

Stuff To Ponder: Professionalizing Non-Profit Boards

August 5, 2014 by Joe Patti

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution is a proposal put forth in the Stanford Law Review suggesting replacing board members with a professional board services company.

When I first saw the title “Why Not Put a Firm on Your Board” on Cowen’s blog, I thought maybe the Stanford article was going to be a satire of the whole “corporations are people” idea that is the basis so many recent Supreme Court decisions. However, they are completely serious and there is some sense to what they propose. (Though I suspect they may still have been inspired by the court.)

As I read the article, I started to wonder if something similar might be good for non-profits. The article is definitely aimed at large for-profit corporations, but the fundamental problems are the same:

-Both for and non-profit boards are comprised of people who have other day jobs and don’t have the time, either during or outside board meetings, to exercise proper oversight of the corporation.

-Board members either get too little information about the corporation to do their jobs, or are overwhelmed with too much.

-Board members often don’t possess specialized knowledge about the entity they are overseeing and therefore can not make good decisions.

-Finally, board members are in a position where they are more loyal to the management of the company than to the general community of stakeholders.

The articles authors propose a company, which they dub “Board-R-Us,” to provide professionalized oversight of management and assume legal liability for decisions made. I am not convinced that these companies wouldn’t succumb to pressure and influence from their clients like Arthur Andersen did or via their own corporate owners.

That aside, there were some compelling reasons for speculating on whether something like this might be viable for non-profits. In addition to the problems with effective oversight mentioned above, non-profit arts organizations often express frustrations trying to recruit a board that better represents the demographics of their community or target audience.

A board services provider (BSP) could recruit and train board members for a non-profit organization. A BSP would likely have extensive contacts at many companies, service organizations, universities, etc developed in the process of searching on behalf of many organizations which would make the search easier for them than for board nominating committees.

The BSP could advise both the organization and the board members about how to more effectively interact with each other so that neither dreaded attending regular meetings.

I am not sure if a BSP would essentially just be a recruitment firm or if the board members would work for them. The former situation would more easily permit board members to serve voluntarily. The latter might require a stipend of some sort.

I am not sure how a stipend might be resolved legally, but if a board member was paid by a separate company and if it wasn’t much more significant than gas money, it might pass muster.

One of the benefits of engaging a BSP for a non-profit is that you could actually have a healthy rotation of people through your board when the BSP assigned new people as terms expired.

A robust rotation system might also prove an incentive to companies to encourage employees to participate in non-profit boards via a BSP. The networking opportunities available as people rotated through the boards of different organizations can be valuable to companies. If the BSP is helping the non-profits provide pertinent information in an organized manner and the board meetings are being run efficiently, few may feel the experience is a waste of their time.

These scenarios assume a situation similar to the current arrangement of part-time board members helping to manage a non-profit with some guidance and oversight from a BSP rather than full-time oversight from a BSP simply because of the costs involved with the latter option.

In terms of how even part time services from a BSP might be paid for, I envision a dedicated good governance fund administered by a state arts council. If the arts council can’t find a source willing to specifically fund this, they might charge participating arts organizations a nominal fee and create a pool of money to pay a BSP.

The participating arts organizations could then choose from among a number of available board service providers.

ArtWashing Sounded Reasonable When I Suggested It

July 30, 2014 by Joe Patti

Over the years I have written about the gentrification effect of artists in neighborhoods. While artists are often displaced as they make a neighborhood increasingly trendy, there have been cases where artists went into an area knowing their stay would likely be short term.

By and large, these voluntary arrangements sounded reasonable. Artists would occupy empty storefronts making them look less dismal, helping to lower crime rates and providing a little bit of revenue for landlords in spaces that would otherwise generate none. As long as no one was under the illusion that this arrangement would last long, everyone can be generally satisfied.

However, a recent story on The Atlantic’s CityLab labels the intentional use of artists by London developers to enhance property values as ArtWashing.

When a commercial project is subjected to artwashing, the work and presence of artists and creative workers is used to add a cursory sheen to a place’s transformation. Just as greenwashing tries to humanize new buildings with superficial nods to green concerns (such as wind turbines that never turn), artwashing provides similar distraction. By highlighting the new creative uses for inner-city areas, it presents regeneration not through its long-term effects—the transfer of residency from poor to rich—but as a much shorter journey from neglect to creativity.

The author, Feargus O’Sullivan, discusses a number of cases in which artists were welcomed in wholeheartedly and then either forced out or subjected to unfriendly lease terms when their leases were up. He expresses some resentment for struggling artists being displaced by trust fund kids who like the lifestyle but don’t really need the space. Though he notes that even these people are, in turn, being nudged out in favor of the next higher grade of tenants.

He acknowledges that the situation is a little murky at times leaving some artists semi-complicit in the whole process due to the way they receive support. He cites a group that is producing a work with a critical tone that “art institutions sit comfy in the pockets of big corporations” in a space provided to them by a big developer who is eager to be associated with an artsy group.

O’Sullivan also asks us to consider that while artists may be subject to displacement as a result of their success, in some situations they may be displacers themselves. Although in most of the cases he cities, they were economic peers of those they lived among. (My emphasis.)

In celebrating their role, we are allowing the process of displacement to be mystified, and thus masked. An attitude has arisen which says, “Before, there was crime and emptiness; now we’ve got galleries and coffee. You’re telling me you actually preferred crack dens?” This shuts down debate by asserting that art and cafés for incomers were the only viable antidotes to lawlessness and poverty, when in fact they merely shunt them elsewhere. It erroneously suggests that creative uses of urban spaces are an end point, and reveals the ugly undertone beneath much talk of neighborhood change: That these inner city areas are just too good to be squandered on the low-income people being displaced from them.

So while artist inspired gentrification has long been recognized to be a mixed blessing for artists at best, it needs to be recognized that this gentrification isn’t actually solving the basic problem that existed. It is bringing much welcomed renewal to the physical elements of the area, but those in residence when the renewal begins don’t really experience much benefit at all.

The Arts Are Enough of a Gamble Without Casinos

July 28, 2014 by Joe Patti

When you do a S.W.O.T. analysis for your organization (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats), Opportunities and Threats were where you listed external situations that could help or hinder you.

When I worked at an arts center in southern New Jersey, one of the biggest threats was Atlantic City. While it might take you hours to get there in summer time traffic, Atlantic City was 45 miles away and therefore fell into the customary 50 mile exclusion zone that prevented performers from appearing within a certain time period before or after their event date. It frustrated the artistic director to no end because we would frequently be outbid and excluded by casinos in Atlantic City.

This is one of those situations where it is too simplistic to claim that arts organizations that can’t support themselves or serve their community ought to close. No one in the local community was going to Atlantic City to see these performers. There was sufficient community interest in seeing them, it was just that the organization was prevented from offering the shows which makes it difficult to generate revenue.

That is why I have been watching an effort by performing arts presenters in upstate NY to prevent the same thing from happening to them. Last October, a coalition of a dozen venues received “assurances from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration that potential private casinos in New York will be required to partner with local arts organizations rather than compete with them.”

Earlier this month, the coalition, Upstate Theaters for a Fair Game, came to an agreement with 10 of the 17 casino license applicants.

“While we were not able to reach agreement with a number (of casino applicants), the agreements we have reached are significant because they declare clearly the size and scope of casino entertainment plans, they have joint booking agreements that will guarantee access for the casinos and for Fair Game groups to touring performers, they support the Fair Game Fund for those same facilities and establish arts granting programs for smaller organizations in every region,” said Philip Morris, the CEO of Proctor’s in Schenectady and the chairman of Fair Game. “Finally, should the plans the casinos propose be significantly changed, each applicant has agreed to mitigate those impacts with additional support.”

According to another article, the state mandated that some sort of agreement be made. The agreements provide some funding for members of the performing arts coalition, keeping a fair bit of the money in the community.

Under the agreements, casinos will share gambling revenue with the coalition. Amounts will vary by casino and region. Of the distributed gambling revenue, 85 percent will remain in the region where the casino is located, with 15 percent going to the Fair Game coalition. Of the 85 percent that remains in our region, 70 percent will be split by the Bardavon and coalition member Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, on the Woodstock site in Sullivan County. Bethel Woods and the Bardavon will distribute the remaining 15 percent to local arts organizations.

But agreements haven’t been made with everyone, some like the Mohegan Sun have publicly stated they will refuse to do so.

As some members of the coalition say, the situation is still evolving. This situation will be a good case study for what to do if faced with casinos or some similar competitive threat in your area.