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Chatbot As Assistant Grant Writer

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When I first saw this piece on Arts Professional about data driven decision making, I thought maybe the author, Patrick Towell, was cribbing Drew McManus and Ceci Dadisman’s recent conference session on the same topic.

He even referenced the gut trusting HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion/in Office).

I might have only had myself to blame having brought attention to it with my inspiring post on the subject.

But Towell quickly moves away from that subject to address a pretty significant barrier to using data to drive decisions–people’s comfort levels accessing, interpreting and using the data.

Towell cites respondents to a survey of people working in cultural organizations in the UK:

Some of those respondents work in an organisational culture that doesn’t embrace the use of data: “Data gets bad PR. The greatest barrier to usage is lack of fluency and comfort with data as a medium to tell stories.” For others it was systems being difficult to access and join up: “We can’t effectively understand or engage with our audience without tools to collate, analyse and use our audience data.”

Despite this discomfort, many respondents were eager to use data to support their activities:

Interestingly, many did consider its use in artistic and cultural programming: “Data could be used to inform our programming schedule, driving more revenue.” Audience development was an area where people saw a clear benefit: “Our visitor and sales forecasting is based in fairyland – better datasets and data analysis could be more realistic.” People also thought they could better justify the use of public money through more defensible evidence.

What Towell says his company has done is started to prototype a chatbot that will “sit over your data” as a “kind of Alexa for cultural managers” and help a wider range of people in an organization feel comfortable accessing it. The example they use in the screenshot of the prototype queries the chatbot about how many new members visited shows in December.

If they can get this to work, it would be awesome. If you were able to feed budget numbers into it so just about anyone could ask about revenue and expenses for different combinations of projects, it would make completing grant reports so much easier. Especially if it potentially spread to onus of completing reports around the organization.

The biggest hurdle I see is that funding organizations have such diverse definitions and conditions associated with their reporting, programming a bot AI to keep it all straight might be cost prohibitive.

Still, it is a pretty intriguing idea. Some time in the last couple weeks I saw someone mention they were visiting the websites of arts and culture organizations to see how many used chatbots to facilitate the sale of tickets. (Things like, “when are Thursday performances of Hamlet in June and July?”). The value of chatbots for public facing interactions is rather obvious, but I suspect few people have considered their utility for internal information sharing.

Your Phone Tells Me You Were In An Art Museum, Now You Are In Starbucks….

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Last month NPR had a story discussing how lawyers were sending ads for their services to people in hospital emergency rooms thanks to technique known as geofencing which allows one to identify cellphones entering to certain geographic area.

Geofencing is something retailers use to offer you coupons when you approach the area of their shops. The use around hospitals raises some privacy concerns. Everyone in the hospital is bound by law not to reveal information about your visit, but those gathering information from your phone signal are not.

Once someone crosses the digital fence, Kakis says, the ads can show up for more than a month — and on multiple devices.

To Kakis, this is just modern-day target marketing. In his pitch to potential clients, in an email reviewed by WHYY, he calls the technology “totally legit.”

But Massachusetts’ attorney general, Maura Healey, offers a different response.

“Private medical information should not be exploited in this way,” Healey says. “Especially when it’s gathered secretly without a consumer’s knowledge, without knowledge or consent.”

This type of service is widely available and can be used for all sorts of useful purposes. If you can see that people attending your events are also frequenting various restaurants and other businesses in your area you are able to take any number of actions like coordinating promotions with the businesses or providing evidence of economic activity in your community.

You can also geofence other arts organizations in your region as a way to identify people who are inclined to participate in arts and cultural activities and provide them with information about your own activities.

Of course, the technology can assist in some questionable practices as well. You might send general ads about “high quality performances at half the price and free parking” to people who have visited an arts organization in your area that charges higher pricing. Or you could directly disparage other organizations with people who enter or pass near their buildings.

As I understand it, you currently need to provide ad content to a service provider who sets up your ads in the same way a broadcaster might. By which I mean, it has to pass through human hands and they could potentially nix something as blatant as “Why are you walking into that crappy theater when you could be in a modern facility that allows you to eat at your seat and has a fun all around atmosphere. There is still time to come to Acme Theater.”

However, I imagine within a handful of years, you will be able to delineate your own geofencing using an online map and upload an ad from your office as you would to a social media site. It may be difficult to track who is attacking your reputation while people are buying food from your snack bar.

Now personally, I don’t see a lot of arts and cultural organizations getting this cutthroat. They may send out something along the lines of “If You Liked The Dali Retrospective, You Might Like….”

However, it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility that an electronics business, video streaming service or cable company might geofence your organization and send something like “After a hard day of work do you really want to get back in the car, try to find parking, get home at 11 pm and pay the babysitter when you could stay at home and enjoy being in control of your experience with your gorgeous entertainment system?”

I anticipate that there will be debates about the ethical use of techniques that allow marketers and others to track people’s movements as these practices become more common and wide spread.

Culture Is There For Those Hostile To It, Too

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Just came across Oskar Eustis’ TED Talk, “Why Theatre Is Essential To Democracy.” He talks about the how so much of the work Joe Papp did with the Public Theater was about expanding access and telling important stories that were being muted.

Eustis goes on to talk about how he has been trying to extend that mission as the current director of the Public Theater, taking shows out to the five boroughs of NYC and to NJ rather than expecting people to come to them in Manhattan.

I wrote a little about this when I covered Eustis’ keynote at the 2016 Arts Midwest conference where I wrote,

He also mentioned despite doing so many free productions in Central Park, they discovered only their prison program and the shows they trucked out to the five boroughs of NYC were the only programs that were serving a mix of people that reflected the demographics of NYC.

In his TED Talk, Eustis mentions how the curtain call statement by the cast of Hamilton  to then Vice President-elect Pence had spurred calls for boycotts of the show.

I looked at that boycott and I said, we’re getting something wrong here. All of these people who have signed this boycott petition, they were never going to see “Hamilton” anyway. It was never going to come to a city near them. If it could come, they couldn’t afford a ticket, and if they could afford a ticket, they didn’t have the connections to get that ticket.

They weren’t boycotting us; we had boycotted them. And if you look at the red and blue electoral map of the United States, and if I were to tell you, “Oh, the blue is what designates all of the major nonprofit cultural institutions,” I’d be telling you the truth. You’d believe me. We in the culture have done exactly what the economy, what the educational system, what technology has done, which is turn our back on a large part of the country.

With this in mind, he says next Fall the Public Theater is going to take Lynn Nottage’s play, Sweat, on tour to rural counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin:

Sweat is based on interviews Nottage conducted during visits to Reading, PA where she also helped create the multi-media, site specific production of This Is Reading that I have written about before.  (Be sure to read Margy Waller’s account of the production which I link to in both articles.)

Eustis describes Sweat as,

…about the deindustrialization of Pennsylvania: what happened when steel left, the rage that was unleashed, the tensions that were unleashed, the racism that was unleashed by the loss of jobs.

Eustis give us a lot to think about when it comes to bridging the gap between the ideals expressed in mission statements and grant proposals and translating them into action.  He could have easily concluded boycott efforts wouldn’t hurt Hamilton ticket sales one whit, ignored the disapproval and continued on. Instead, he concluded there was an unmet need and a problem that needed to be addressed and started to put a production together to respond to them.

The approach isn’t going to be one of, “we are Broadway and we are here to illuminate your poor benighted souls,”

We’re partnering with community organizations there to try and make sure not only that we reach the people that we’re trying to reach, but that we find ways to listen to them back and say, “The culture is here for you, too.”

When HiPPOs Attack

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Being the voracious consumer of arts administration theory and philosophy, I jumped on the slide deck Drew McManus and Ceci Dadisman put together for their session at the Association of Arts Administration Educators conference.

The topic they covered was “Effective Data Driven Decision Making,” which may sound uninteresting until you realize that the main thrust of their session was providing guidance for dealing with a major barrier to progress in an organization, the HiPPOs.

In his post on Adaptistration reflecting on his conference experience, Drew expresses some surprise that conference attendees hadn’t heard of HiPPO decision making before. I suspect people are familiar with the practice, but just don’t know that particular term.

HiPPO stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

I am pretty sure everyone has had the experience where they put a lot of effort into developing a plan/proposal, supporting it with research, surveys, etc., perhaps going through multiple layers of people to get their buy-in and approval only to have the final decision maker summarily nix it.

Usually the rejection is based on a personal opinion or gut feeling about what should be done, despite the fact that the people they pay to do research, analyze data, and be subject matter experts say otherwise.

This slide from Drew and Ceci’s presentation summarize it pretty well.

Accompanying this and other slides in the presentation are scads of notes Drew and Ceci graciously supply. Including the following tips about HiPPO behavior:

How to tell if you’re a HiPPO (or work for one). HiPPOs ask:

  • How much traffic is coming to our website?
  • What are our conversion rates?
  • What are the top exit pages on our website?
  • How many average monthly leads do we generate?
  • What is the average site visitor time on site?
  • What are our click-through rates on the homepage slider?

In short, if your data requests sound like grant applications, you have yet to establish a positive data culture.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking about effective data driven decision making in terms of having to collect even more information for reports no one is going to read. Think about this in terms of creating a work environment in which data analysis and expertise is honored across the whole organization (Drew & Ceci also address siloed decision making) and acted upon rather than disregarded on one person’s word.

Basically, the goal is to reduce how frequently you utter the phrase, “So what did I do all that work for…” at work

Go check out the slide presentation and accompanying notes.

Could You Benefit From Sharing Your Ticket Revenue With Four Other Theaters?

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Kaya Stanley-Money shares a really intriguing story on Arts Professional about how five London theatres presented the same performance and then pooled the ticket revenue.

…the five London venues to present Yvette for two or three nights at each venue over a two and half week period, sharing the box office income equally after the artist guarantee had been paid. This meant that venues at the start of the tour would benefit as much as those at the end, removing all competition and encouraging a genuine collaboration.

The performances were marketed as a London run, which enabled us to establish a comprehensive press strategy and offered the opportunity to build audiences for Urielle’s work in five different London boroughs. This was particularly important to reach a much younger audience who are typically less likely to travel far and have deeper geographical roots than your average London theatregoer.

Above all, this model offered Urielle the invaluable opportunity to build a relationship with all five venues, capitalising on their support for emerging artists.

I was especially drawn by the mention that this arrangement provided an opportunity to reach a younger audience in five London boroughs. This might not normally be possible because the venues typically insist a performance not happen within a certain radius of their venue. Since each venue stood to benefit if a partner was more successful than they were it made some sense to waive that clause.

I was interested to read that some of the venues were already exploring share box office arrangements. I know that theatres partnering on a production will often agree to share production costs, but this was the first I became aware of theatres engaging in box office sharing.

As part of the shared marketing effort, each venue contributed equally to the advertising spend and each provided links to the performances of all five venues on their respective websites.

Apparently the partnering venues were optimistic about the revenue potential because they agreed to a 60/40 artist-venue split rather than the typical 50/50 split.

In the end, this may have benefited the artist most. She established relationships with five venues. She was able to have a denser saturation of exposure across London than she would have had radius exclusion clauses been in place.  Potentially, she may have received more money than she would have with longer runs in fewer venues.

As Stanley-Money notes, this revenue sharing model can be beneficial when presenting new works or emerging artists because it mitigates the risk a single venue might undertake by pooling promotional expense as well as the revenue.

I am hoping that Stanley-Money follows up with a report on how successful they assessed the plan was.

For example, if a performance is in one or two places across 15 days, it may take awhile for the audience to build up as word of mouth builds and then the audiences may trail off. I would be curious to discover if that may have happened as the show appeared at five different venues. If the audience peaked at the second, third, and fourth venue, it isn’t a big problem revenue wise since all the venues are sharing.

However, if people don’t generally travel out of their borough to see a performance, there may be some exposure concerns at the venues with lower attendance. On the other hand, if they find that people who missed a local performance traveled out of their neighborhoods based on good word of mouth, it makes the cooperative partnership model look even better.

I would also be interested to learn just how easy it was to get all the venues to agree on promotional and operational arrangements. I have had experiences with groups with long histories partnering on many arrangements but could never manage to agree on promotional efforts. The fact this production was more of a second space event rather than a main stage event may have minimized the resistance.

Cross Cultural Appreciation Is A Start

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Pacific Standard recently pointed to a study conducted in Portugal that indicated some positive outcomes using the music and culture of immigrant groups to help reduce prejudicial attitudes.

It reports schoolchildren around age 11 who learned about the music and culture of a faraway land expressed warmer feelings toward immigrants from that country than those who did not. What’s more, those positive emotions were still evident three months after this exposure to the foreign culture.

“Music can inspire people to travel to other emotional worlds,” writes a research team led by psychologist Felix Neto of the University of Porto. Their work suggests songs can serve as an emotional bridge between cultures, revealing feelings that are common to both.

Their study, published in the journal Psychology of Music, featured 229 Portuguese sixth graders, all living in greater Lisbon. Two-thirds came from blue-collar families.

The students in the experimental group participated in twenty 90 minute sessions across six months. At the end of that period, their prejudices were reduced compared to the control group and that attitude persisted when the experiment group was surveyed three months later.

Learning of this study lead me to recall something mentioned in a keynote address delivered by Jamie Bennett where he cited an anthropologist working with drumming circles at the Field Museum

As I wrote in that post,

He goes on to say that this was based on observations of immigrants and first generation Americans living in Chicago who participated in drumming circles. As each performed drumming particular to their own cultural background, the group bonded. Bennett says this observation is important because it potentially illustrates that arts and culture is a pathway for integrating society that doesn’t involve assimilation–“I don’t have to become more like you to become more closely bonded.”

Thinking about both of these situations started me wondering if this effect is underappreciated and ineffectively employed to constructive ends. While I am obviously against positioning music and other cultural expressions as prescriptions to cure racism, the impact of cross-cultural exposure is well recognized.

Of course, what has been somewhat controversial in the U.S., at least, is that this impact has often manifested as borrowing/”discovery”/appropriation by people outside of the cultural group who go on to popularize it. Or people have borrowed the appealing elements of cultural expression while avoiding the daily challenges faced by members of the source culture.

The challenge therefore is 1) Opening people to experiencing expressions of cultures that are not their own. 2) Ensuring that the peoples of other cultures are able to retain ownership and identification with their expressions as people come to appreciate it.

Even after that, there is still much work that needs to be done. A reduction in prejudicial attitudes doesn’t equal the elimination of prejudice. A person is more than just the external expressions of their culture. There can be a gap to bridge between appreciating someone for their skillful exhibition of their culture and appreciating them as a whole person.

Classical Music As A Prescription To Cure Social Ills…And To Sell Perscriptions

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A couple weeks back there was a piece by Theodore Gioia in the Los Angeles Review of Books that started out talking about the history of weaponizing classical music.  You may be familiar with this practice where classical music is loudly played in public places like train stations, shopping malls, parking lots, street corners, etc with the goal of chasing away undesirable elements like teenagers and the homeless.

If ever there was a practice that reinforced the idea that classical music is for people other that yourself, it is people pointing it at you in the hopes you will go away.

As I read on, I realized that Gioia was tackling a frequent theme of my blog posts – placing value on the utility of art rather than valuing art for its own sake. After noting the use of classic music as a social disinfectant, he goes on to note how often classical music is separated from the context of an entire work and used to sell things.

Uproot “O Fortuna” from a Latin cantata, so it can be grafted onto a Domino’s Super Bowl spot. These transplants produce jarring mashups that trigger another insidious side effect: by always quoting works out of the context the public forgets that they have a context. The spectator forgets that “O Fortuna” could be glorious in its original context because it’s absurd hyping Domino’s Pizza.

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A prime example of classical music’s conflicted position in our capitalist culture is Bach’s Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. Dubbed the “Things Just Got Classy Song” by one columnist, the two-minute composition has been deployed for an astounding array of causes. IMDB lists 73 credits, with a résumé featuring primetime mainstays Smallville and ER, ad campaigns for Healthy Choice frozen broccoli and Pedigree dog food, and big-screen flicks ranging from Elysium and The Hangover Part II to a brief cameo in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

[…]

Where does this leave the prelude — and, by extension, classical music? From awakening Megasharks to selling Cadillacs, Bach’s Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 has been drafted to support many causes. But one cause it seldom supports is itself. After being pressed into the service of so many outside agendas — advertising, film, and police work — the prelude loses its identity as an independent work of art, demanding to be taken on its own terms. It is difficult for the prelude to provide any modern audience with a genuinely “pure” listening experience.

There are no easy solutions to the quandaries this raises.  Gioia doesn’t make any suggestions for a path forward and I don’t really have any ideas myself.

You want people to be exposed to art so it becomes familiar. However, if you start dictating which modes of expression are appropriate and which are not, you end up placing it on the pedestal that reinforces its elite status.

People often cite the use of classical music in Bugs Bunny cartoons like “What’s Opera, Doc” and “Rabbit of Seville” as constructive ways in which the general public was exposed to the music. I am sure there were enough people who were opposed to the concept that the cartoons would have never been had it been left to them.

Any suggestion of not presenting a piece out of the context of the whole can be a non-starter when you factor length of many compositions vs. the public’s attention span.

Of course, there are plenty of organizations who transmit art for its own sake through diverse modes of expression and media. But that brings in the long debated issue of relevance and effectively forging connections with the community.

The only admittedly vague route I can see toward appreciation of art in its own context is connecting with the instinct to want to know more. Since people have had so much exposure to some works via overt and background placement, people might not be driven by a new, novel encounter to seek more information.

For those that are curious enough to do research, a campaign to have ad agencies or advertisers credit the original composition online might help a little.

For example, the ad below uses “O Fortuna” to sell beer and there are credits for all the personnel who helped create the ad included in the YouTube notes. No mention that they were spoofing Carl Orff though.

Apparently the Carlton Draught has a tradition of using classical music in their ads. This one does credit “Nessun Dorma” as the source of their parody.

“Love You, But I Would Love You More If Only…” In Public-Private Partnerships

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This past week I have been dipping my toe in and out of the livestream for the ArtPlace America Summit. One of the plenary sessions I went back to listen to more fully was a discussion ArtPlace CEO Jamie Bennett held with Kresge Foundation CEO Rip Rapson and Detroit Future City Executive Director Anika Goss-Foster about public/private partnerships.

The title of the session was “You’re not the Boss of Me: What Happened to the Public in Public-Private Partnerships?” and the most fascinating parts dealt exactly the issue of who the boss is in public-private partnerships.

Around the 12:15 point, Rapson talks about how one of the previous mayors of Detroit had approached him at the Kresge Foundation asking if they would fund a long range master planning process to revitalize Detroit. The team Kresge put together was so successful in generating participation and investment from the community that the city administration started to feel that their prerogatives were being challenged and their competency was being questioned. The city government began resisting the efforts of the Detroit Future City team Kresge put together to work with them.

Kresge decided to shutdown the process for a year and pull it out of the mayor’s office. However, they had built up so much momentum getting the community involved over two years, the community wouldn’t allow them to dial things back. Kresge restructured things toward a community ownership model and finished the master plan.

Around the same time, a new administration took charge of Detroit city government and they embraced the externally generated plan. But then the same dynamic developed where the city government came to resent the involvement of outsiders. According to Rapson, they did recognize the talent of the Detroit Future City team, but they wanted to absorb the organization into the city planning department and have them work under the city’s terms.

Rapson says that in the current national environment, the lines between public and private are much more porous than in the past. At one time a philanthropic entity wouldn’t get involved with this type of work. At one time the view was that private sector work was tainted and the public sector was far too messy and political.

Today he says, when faced with a problem there is more of a negotiation of who does what the best. Who is best equipped with the expertise, capacity and resources to address an issue. For instance, only the city government is empowered to set zoning laws, levy taxes, etc.

What intrigued me was Rapson’s implication that Detroit Future City’s work was influencing how the Detroit city government viewed and executed community outreach, shifting it from an authoritarian approach to a more collaborative one. Though there is still work to be done.

I wondered if this might presage a new trend in the way cities might operate. Jamie Bennett asked if the ideal wasn’t supposed to be that citizens already had the opportunity to participate in planning through their vote and approaching their government representatives.

Rapson responded acknowledging that in this particular case, the Detroit Future City team had helped to create a constructive process and environment. But he also makes note that it had been an anti-democratic (his term) philanthropic institution which had been responsible for making sure the community voice was at the table.

My read between the lines on this was marginally cautionary. It is working in Detroit thanks to a number of conditions that have come into alignment, but it perhaps shouldn’t be seen as a broad panacea applicable to every city.

It sounds like Detroit Future City is doing a great job involving community input in their advocacy. Goss-Foster said people will come up to her in the streets and supermarkets to point out that the group with which they identify isn’t included in the plan. She said she often concedes they are right and invites them down to her office to talk about getting them included.

#ArtPlaceSummit Plenary: YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PUBLIC IN PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS?

From its bankruptcy workout to its approach to transit to the security cameras in its downtown, Detroit, MI has been shaped with the philanthropic and priate sectors in roles more traditionally played by government. And it is not alone: American communities are increasingly relying on public-private partnerships. Many of them are created in response to opportunities that arise out of market forces with very few communities first having an explicit conversation about how residents and their interests are democratically represented in those conversations.Presenters: Rip Rapson, Anika Goss-Foster, and Jamie Bennett

Posted by ArtPlaceAmerica on Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Are You Really The Storyteller You Think You Are?

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FastCompany had an article about Five Ways Non Profits Struggle last month.

Most of the things mentioned aren’t really news to you if you work in non profits: Restrictions on how grants and donations can be used, employee burn out, ineffective use of data collection and lack of access to capital.

The assertion that,

…most organizations don’t engage in fundraising experimentation because they’re worried about the perception that it might create. There’s a tendency adhere to a set formula–the portion of operations supported by grants, individual contributions, or mission-related revenues–without thinking about how impact can change if you get creative.

was somewhat intriguing. Perhaps I will investigate that idea a little more in the future.

It was the fifth point, however, that I hadn’t expected to see on the list.

53% of nonprofit leaders spend less than two hours preparing for a speech

That’s especially scary considering only 10% of people in the sector consider themselves to be well-trained storytellers, according to Janus’s research. At the same time, there’s a huge payoff for those who learn how to talk engagingly about their mission.

Now arguably, this might not make the top 5 problems facing non-profit leaders, but it could certainly constitute a barrier to success.

While I have encountered a number of people who did a poor job making their case or were deadly boring, I never considered that it might be lack of preparation that contributed to that problem. I think we have all encountered teachers/professors who have a reputation for being boring that spans years. Their problem was more attributable to delivery rather than lack of repetition.

On the other hand, if you do consider yourself a good storyteller and feel that process is an important part of garnering investment and interest in your mission, then it does behoove you to invest time in development and preparation.

This article made me recall how I was recently asked to deliver two talks within a couple days of each other. I was keenly aware that I was much more comfortable discussing content I had spoken on before and felt I did a more effective job delivering it. Even still, I probably practiced and tweaked it for 5-7 hours.

Even though I wasn’t as comfortable delivering the second speech, I invested close to 20 hours developing and rehearsing it.  I suspect when I get some more distance from it, I will be able to go back and cut a lot of extraneous content so I can do a better job on the topic the next time out.

It is admittedly not easy to find the time to do justice to a speech with so many immediate demands on your time. The two talks I recently delivered were definitely a nights and weekends endeavor. It is very much like the situation where the you could do something ten times in the time it takes you to teach a new employee to do the job to a half way acceptable level. In the long term, however, that initial investment can become a long term benefit to the organizational mission.

Pop Up Box Office Are As Much About Listening As Selling

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Hat tip to Artsjournal.com linking to an Arts Professional article all performing arts professionals should read.

Hull Truck Theatre in Hull, England started regular pop-up box office hours in local retail chain locations to help address barriers to participation people had.

(By the way, the barriers were exactly those identified in the US studies like Culture Track – “time, cost, lack of awareness of what’s on, childcare and a sense of it being ‘not for me’”)

Magda Moses, who is the Community Projects Coordinator at Hull Truck Theatre Company started out with a trial visit to one of the stores and had conversations about their past, present and future experiences with theatre, following the theme of an upcoming production of A Christmas Carol.

Members of our box office team then joined us, enabling customers to buy tickets from an ipad.

We now run these pop-up box office and community engagement sessions in four Heron Foods stores once a month, and having other staff in attendance has helped the project become more embedded across the theatre.

One of the things we’ve learnt is to visit on regular days and times so that we can promote our visits in advance and people expect us and get to know our staff.

Since some of the responses they have received have dealt with being intimidated by the theatre building, an opportunity to interact with box office staff provides a point of contact that likely would have never occurred had they not gone out in the community.

In addition to the oft mentioned concerns about how to dress and act at a performance, a number of people identified being concerned that the experience would not live up to the expense of tickets. When the theatre produced a show about local woman advocating for fishing industry reform in the 1960s, Hull Truck Theatre offered “pay what you can” tickets exclusively through pop up box offices at Heron Foods.

Moses writes, “…we received positive feedback that people were thrilled to be able to afford to see a play that was directly relevant to their community.”

It sounds like the feedback they got from these efforts might be better than any paper survey and they have gained some insight into their audience segments. Yes, it is probably more expensive and labor intensive than more conventional approaches, but I am sure there are some intangible benefits that can’t be easily quantified in an ROI analysis.

Every time we visit Heron Food stores we ask about what sorts of events they like to come to, which informs out future programming.

We’ve identified differences in audiences across the city. Shoppers on Orchard Park are likely to bring the whole family, so they want affordable shows that everyone will enjoy. Hessle Road shoppers are likely to be older and are interested in local history and Hull stories. This information helps us make sure our marketing is relevant to each area.

Our pop-up box office sessions are about much more than selling tickets. They’re also about building relationships, trust and familiarity in order to spark the idea that someone can go to the theatre.

The sessions are an important part of the Community Dialogues project and the theatre’s wider commitment to welcome new audiences. So once we get to know someone, we can direct them towards tours, coffee mornings, family events, access performances or workshops, depending on their interests.

Data Vs. Your Gut

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When I was thinking about what to write today, I figured a good intersection between yesterday’s post about productive employees not necessarily being good manager material and Drew McManus’ recent post about the “Shit Arts Administrators Say” Twitter account is Colleen Dilenschneider’s post, “Three Phrases That Effective Leaders Do Not Say”

Written last summer, Dilenschneider’s primary goal is to advocate for a proper approach to using all the data arts leaders have available to them. She argues that it can often feel easier, and therefore preferable, to rely on gut instinct rather than think critically about what is best for the organization.

Dilenschneider goes to great effort to explain these ideas so visit her page rather than being satisfied with my synopsis.

That said, in brief, the three phrases and suggested alternatives are:

1) “That doesn’t apply to me”
[…]
Say instead: “Let’s uncover the extent to which this finding applies to our organization, and explore what can be learned from this information.”

2) “I agree/disagree with the data”
[…]
Say instead: “Given these findings, I think our biggest challenge is…

3) “We need more information before we can do anything (on this topic where we already have meaningful information)”
[…]
Say instead, “Let’s consider what needs to change and what items need to be tackled to make the most of this information.”

It is in connection with phrase 2, that she addresses the problem of insiders using their gut feelings by warning against things like weighing the opinion of one person (board chair/executive director) more heavily than the hundreds/thousand whose responses comprise the data. Likewise, she points out that not only aren’t industry insiders the target market for the services and products arts organizations provide, insiders tend to have all sorts of blind spots and skewed perspectives due to their position.

One thing she doesn’t mention here, though I am sure she would acknowledge, is that it takes work to understand and evaluate whether data is valid and relevant to you.   It is often also easier to utter these phrases than to invest the time to look at the methodology behind the data to determine whether the results are dependable.

For example, radio and television stations trying to sell you ad space will cite all sorts of numbers about how much exposure you will get. With a little thought, you will quickly come to realize you won’t be reaching anywhere near those numbers as a result of any number of factors.  Your experience as a consumer helps inform a healthy skepticism.

When faced with data for an area in which you have no frame of reference or expertise, it can definitely require some effort to understand and evaluate. It is much more expedient and comfortable to go with one’s gut.

Dilenschneider does say there are times in which these phrases are useful. Note that final caveat though:

  • For instance, it’s a good idea to say, “That doesn’t apply to me” after you’ve collected the data and understand the true extent to which it applies to your organization, and you’ve found that it doesn’t.
  • It’s okay to say, “I disagree with this data” to discount findings when it is data about you and only you.
  • And it’s wise to say, “We need more information before we can do anything,” when it’s a big or expensive change and the takeaway is unclear. In such a case, you should absolutely gather more information!

This said, these phrases are all too often uttered defensively. If these words are about to escape your lips, think twice.

Star Employees Don’t Automatically Become Star Managers

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Last month in Harvard Business Review, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman wrote about how the most productive employees don’t make the best managers.

Of the seven qualities they had listed in a previous article as being important for a top producer, only one, collaboration, overlapped with the qualities found in good managers.  They note that most of the seven qualities of a top producer are focused on individual effectiveness whereas a manager needs to be outwardly focused.

The top qualities they list for good managers (the article expounds on each in more detail) are,

  • Being open to feedback and personal change. ..
  • Supporting others’ development. ..
  • Being open to innovation. …
  • Communicating well. …
  • Having good interpersonal skills…
  • Supporting organizational changes…

When we further analyzed our data, we found that many of the most productive individuals were significantly less effective on these skills. Let’s be clear, these were not negatively correlated with productivity; they just didn’t go hand in hand with being highly productive. Some highly productive individuals possessed these traits and behaviors, and having these traits didn’t diminish their productivity.

But this helps explain why some highly productive people go on to be very successful managers and why others don’t. While the best leaders are highly productive people, the most highly productive people don’t always gravitate toward leading others.

All this is important to know because often people who are most productive are promoted to managerial positions on the belief the person can bring out the same productivity in others. But they don’t always do well in that role because it requires a different skillset to achieve success.

Instead of promoting an effective producer and hoping they will learn managerial skills, Zenger and Folkman suggest cultivating those skills while people are still an individual contributor. They say like anything, developing good managerial qualities takes time and businesses often expect good results pretty quickly after a promotion. They note that organizations which are good at identifying and promoting successful managers have often been providing training and opportunities over time.

New managers tend to be overwhelmed with their new responsibilities and often rely on the skills that made them successful individual contributors, rather than the skills needed to manage others. The time to help high-potential individuals develop these skills is before you promote them, not after.

All of this is obviously good advice for non-profit arts organizations. Except that it can be easy to fall into thinking that with so much turnover due to low wages and long working hours, the work you do developing an employee’s skills is just going to benefit another business.

While this may be true in the short term, I submit it is worth considering that the lack of internal training and cultivation may be partially contributing to the perceived dearth of quality candidates to succeed executive leadership. If employees don’t feel there the organization is interested in them assuming a greater role, that is one more incentive to leave.

It may be the result of the small sample size available to me or a trending bias of boards of directors doing the hiring, but over the last few years it has seemed that executive positions of many arts non-profits are being assumed by people with backgrounds in health care or corporate world. This seems to especially be the case with arts organizations of significance like arts councils in mid to large cities or serving well-populated regions.

It has left me wondering if this is the result of a lack of qualified candidates from arts disciplines, or as I suggest, a bias of those doing the hiring.

Cultural Revival Starts At Home

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I just rediscovered a CityLab story I bookmarked last September discussing how a woman’s effort to revitalize culture and creativity in York, PA started in her apartment.

Bored with the city’s limited cultural offerings, Dwyer and her roommates decided to create their own homegrown events—a series of monthly arts shows in her living room…

The shows were modest affairs. “We would put art on the walls, move the furniture out of our living room. We made sure everyone’s bedroom was clean,” she says. “It was like a meltdown every month preparing for it.”

Soon, the shows started to draw hundreds of people through an evening. That attracted the attention of Dwyer’s landlord, Josh Hankey.

While some landlords might see large impromptu gatherings as something to stop, Hankey saw a business opportunity. “I knew that art could create an attraction,” he says. “I knew it could change the perception of a neighborhood, and I was going to help them whatever way I could.”

This was somewhat timely for me. I had attended a session hosted by my buddies, the Creative Cult where they asked everyone to write down what assets they might bring to revitalizing the creative environment in town. I wrote “my front lawn.”

I was partially inspired by the PorchRockr festival and Porchfests going on around the country. In many places people host music concerts on their front porches and attendees wander through the neighborhood taking it all in.

I am not sure my neighborhood is the best for a concert series, but I was intrigued by the idea of hosting a conversation or speakers series in the shade of my lawn.

The directors of my local art museum are already doing something along these lines. They live in a building across the street from the museum and invite everyone who attends an opening at the museum to walk across the street for an “after party.” This usually happens around 3 pm on a weekend so it is pretty accessible to all. Between passing through their studio spaces on the first floor and the ever growing and changing collection of art in the living space on the second floor, there is a lot for people to see and talk about.

Over the last few years that I have attended the “after party” events, the demographics of those at the party have really diversified in terms of an increase in first-timers and those who wouldn’t be considered museum insiders.

If you are finding people balk when you throw open the doors to your organization and invite them in, maybe the answer can be found in throwing open the doors to your home.

Politicians know the power of retail politics where they meet people one on one at small gatherings. Living room meetings are the hallmark of politicking in New Hampshire.

A similar approach may be useful to breaking down barriers for some people in a community.

The Only Bank Where The Assets Appreciate In Value Upon Withdrawl

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Barry Hessenius proved that we often don’t think of the most obvious things in a post he made last weekend encouraging people to create Story Banks to support your advocacy work.

Rather than having to identify an appropriate story every time we might have use for one, a Story Bank is a readily available, ongoing catalog of those stories, which can be used for a myriad of purposes.

[…]

Those can chronicle personal impact and value, can preserve the organization’s history and legacy, and can categorize beat practices and past mistakes.  While data and evidence based decision making is essential, stories can give data and evidence meaning, and enhance how we use data and evidence to make smart decisions.  It is our stories, particularly of impact and value, that support the argument of the preference for the intrinsic value of the arts.

I collect social media posts, positive comments, anecdotes, letters, etc into a file on an on going basis to support final grant reports. I don’t want to reach the end of a grant period and be scrambling to gather the materials. However, it never occurred to me to make those files available board and staff members in support of formal and informal advocacy and solicitation efforts.

But rather than waiting on someone to say or write something nice, Hessenius suggests a more active approach. He encourage organizations to survey their staff and board for stories about how the organization or the arts in general have impacted lives (including their own–not just what they might have heard from others). Then turn to donors, supporters and volunteers for their stories and then finally audiences.

Hessenius admonishes readers not to forget to include kids since their stories can be most poignant.

He points to a toolkit FamiliesUSA has assembled about creating and maintain a Story Bank as a resource.

Google Adword Grants – Use ‘Em Well Or Lose ‘Em

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Yesterday, Non Profit Quarterly had an article mentioning that a goodly number of non-profit organizations had their $10,000 Adwords Grants shutdown by Google for not meeting standards that were rolled out in January.  Drew McManus warned this was a possibility back in January in an ArtsHacker post.

If you have an Adwords grant from Google, you may want to check on your status. NPQ warns that if your account gets suspended, Google has additional criteria for getting it restored.

A lot of the criteria seem aimed at making sure the non-profit organization is actively trying to make effective use of the grant. The click through rate on your ads has to be above 5%. You can’t just use one keyword and the keywords need to be associated with your mission. Your geographic target needs to reflect the communities you serve.

Not mentioned in the ArtsHacker post and associated articles, but appearing in the NPQ piece is that Google is apparently verifying that the links in Adwords are going to websites owned by the grantee. So if you use a third party site to provide ticketing or process donations, you need to be very careful. It does appear that you can get the use of those sites cleared by Google.

Additionally, your website should be entirely dedicated to your non-profit purpose.

Owned and operated website

Your organization must own the domain that users land on when they click your ad.

High-quality website

Your website must function well and not contain broken links.
Your site must have a robust and clear description of your organization and mission. Each web page must have sufficient information for visitors to understand your organization’s purpose.
Your ads, keywords, and website may not make claims that promise results after a consultation, service, or purchase. Claims on your website must cite verifiable references to provide transparency to users.

Commercial activity

Commercial activity must not be the main purpose of your website. This includes sales of products and services, consultations, lead generation, and providing referrals.

[…]

Another noteworthy change is that grantees can only direct paid search users to approved domains, so be careful when using donation sites or landing pages that are located on related subdomains before receiving approval.

If any of this makes you concerned, take a look at the NPQ article and revisit the terms and conditions of your Adwords account.

Museum Hackers Target The “Not For Someone Like Me”

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In the last week I have seen mention of Museum Hack, in both Bloomberg (h/t Artsjournal.com) and Washington Post (h/t Nina Simon). The company does customized tours of museums from a particular frame of reference.

For example, their Badass Bitches Tour,

…shares stories of female artists, muses and subjects. (Versions of the tour are also offered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, National Gallery of Art in the District and the Getty Center in Los Angeles.) Over the course of two hours, we hear about witches and their love of psychedelics; we view works dedicated to the African goddess Oshun, who has inspired the art of Beyoncé; we peer into the dollhouse-like miniature rooms conceived by artist Narcissa Niblack Thorne; and we chew on the fact that works by women, historically, are largely underrepresented in art museums.

Whereas,

…a tour tailored to “finance bros,” for example, will immediately take them to the most expensive object in the museum, with a blunt discussion of its worth—an entry point to engage the newbie audience.

For Harry Potter fans, there is “The Completely Unofficial and Definitely Unlicensed Boy Wizard Tour”

Their core mission is to “go after people who think museums aren’t for them.”

This was a top response in the recent Culture Track survey among people who don’t participate/attend/visit arts and culture organizations. It is also a goal of Arts Midwest’s Creating Connection initiative. Not to mention Nina Simon’s whole raison d’etre.

According to the news stories, Museum Hack is increasingly being hired by cultural organizations to train their docents to present the content in a more accessible manner in terms of language, context and delivery.

My first thought was that there might be a lot of push back from cultural institutions who felt like this was dumbing down the experience what they have to offer.  (Though the fact Museum Hack brought $200,000 in revenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year is something to be dismissed.)

The thing is, people who regularly visit museums already have different motivations for doing so that may not align with the assumptions or goals of the institution. I have written about John Falk’s Identity and the Museum Experience before. What is described as the motivations of the a Experience Seeker pretty much aligns with the tour designed for “finance bros.”

While the experience provided at a cultural institution can often delight, you can’t control what type of experience people expect to have.  Falk’s identity scheme acknowledges that the same person might not return to the same museum with the same agenda. They may be acting as a facilitator for others during one trip and simple seek to recharge the next time around.

From what I have read their focus seems to really be more about storytelling and forming an engaging narrative about what is found in the museum rather than trying to exploit pop culture trends.

I have often seen titles for university courses that invoke pop culture associations that don’t always follow through and deliver on the promise of an engaging course.  There is probably less to complain about in terms of misrepresentation in a two hour museum tour than a 14 week university course.

One thing I was curious about that I didn’t see mentioned in either of the two articles was how many people who have never entered a museum have used their service versus how many regular museum attendees are signing up for the change of perspective.

I can believe that someone who never entered a museum might pay $59 for a tour that resonated with their interests. It would be good to know how often that happens because it could further refute the argument for free admission days.

Research already shows that free admission days are largely attended by those already in the habit of going to museums. Indications that people are willing to pay for an appealing experience might go some distance to bolstering museum finances.

If Anything, Measure of Arts & Culture Should Be Civil Societal, Not Economic Impact

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Lest you think Carter Gillies and I are lone voices arguing against the use of economic impact of  arts and culture as a measure of their value to society, in March the Global Education and Skills Forum had a panel address the question “Will We Still Need The Arts & Humanities in 2030?”

A member of the panel, British philosopher, Dr. Julian Baggini addressed the issue of using economic impact as a metric of the value of arts and culture in very familiar terms:

“…they don’t need defending in terms of anything else. And I think what happens is, we get sucked into a kind of debate in which we are always having to justify the Arts and Humanities in terms set by a more utilitarian agenda.”

He goes on to talk about how he was involved with a project which was studying the benefits of active participation in arts and culture for physical and psychological well-being.

Then he cautions that even framing the arts in terms of their health benefits or ability to stimulate important neurological centers in the brain represents a trap because it doesn’t allow for the arts to have value in and of itself. This framework uses health benefits to justify the existence of arts and culture.

He says the ultimate goal should be the creation of a more civilized society. In that context, economic growth and technology are instruments toward the goal rather than being the goals.

That is to say, economic growth should be evaluated for its contribution toward civilized society alongside arts, culture, science and technology rather than positioning those things as subservient to economic growth.

 

(around the 38:00 mark if it doesn’t start there)

 

When “Go Play In The Street!” Is Meant To Encourage

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Via CityLab is a NY Times story about how the Boyle Heights community in Los Angeles has recently hosted a “play street.” The program, which apparently started in London, shuts down a street to provide kids with a place to play.

A quick glance on the web shows that both NYC and Seattle have similar programs. I am sure there are more cities participating. They both have some good best practices guidelines.

NYC has put together a listing of organizations that will go to play street events in different parts of the city to provide a whole range of services from dance class, bike lessons, double-dutch workshops, healthy cooking demonstrations, music lessons, etc, etc.  Programs like this are a great opportunity for an arts and culture organizations to make themselves more accessible to the community–including talking with people to learn about how to become more accessible to them.

You may have read in the news that residents of Boyle Heights have been actively opposing galleries which opened in the neighborhood, seeing galleries as harbingers of gentrification which will eventually displace them. A few galleries have decided to close as a result.

The tension between both wanting and fearing improvements to the neighborhood is evident in the NY Times article.

“There’s a difference between making something beautiful to sell it and making it useful,” said Leonardo Vilchis, co-director of Union de Vecinos. “So the question is, can we make this place more livable for people living here now?”

With tensions about gentrification running high, the community’s decision to embrace the play street concept was not a casual one.

[…]

The residents chose Fickett Street with the intention of providing a safe space not just for children but for the community, said Chelina Odbert, KDI’s co-founder and executive director.

“What a play street is not is a replacement for permanent parks,” she said. “But it bridges the gap in a way that’s really needed.”

Even before I read the line about play streets not being a replacement for a park, I was hoping the city didn’t see closing off a street for play an acceptable substitute for a park. There is a lot of conversation about neighborhood which are food deserts, but there are probably a lot of social benefit deserts for things like play out there as well.

In the last couple years a small herd of boys has started ranging across the lawns of the neighborhood acting out various scenarios. I made it clear to their parents that I had no objection to picking up nerf darts when I mowed and having their “dead” bodies strewn across my lawn because it meant that they weren’t inside watching TV or playing video games. (In fact, as I write this, there are kids hiding behind my house.)

Provided there are sufficient traffic controls to make it safe, it would be a good sign if neighborhoods exercised their communal will to create an environment where kids can safely play in the streets without overt barriers.

The Books Are Due Back In Four Weeks. The Painting, Next Year

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Back in February I wrote about how the Akron Art Museum and Akron-Summit County Public Library were teaming up to lend art to local residents. At the time, the only other similar program I was aware of was at Oberlin College. At the time, someone wrote and said their local libraries had been doing that for a long time as well.

Sure enough, a piece appeared on Hyperallergic about 10 days ago listing or linking to visual art lending programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver,  Braddock Carnegie Library,  Minneapolis Art Lending Library , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Williams College, Kenyon College, University of Minnesota, Harvard, University of Chicago, University of California, Berkley.

I am sure there are quite a few more.

Many of those listed have been lending art for decades. The University of Minnesota appears to be the oldest having started in 1934.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver initiated their program, which started with commissioning 25 pieces by 20 artists, with the intent of showing Denver residents the importance of artists by allowing them to take the works home.

Some of the older programs have started to investigate the impact and motivation for borrowing the art.

MIT’s Student Loan Art Collection has existed since 1969, and in a recent lending session, 975 people entered a lottery for 600 artworks. Demand also exceeded supply when the University of Chicago revived its lending library after a 30-year hiatus.

[…]

This year, both MIT and the University of Chicago created surveys that aimed to determine whether students who borrowed art also became patrons of cultural events and spaces. (The results aren’t in yet.) Of the MCA in Denver, Lerner said that some borrowers may have a previous interest in particular artists, but he expects others to start “following” the artists whose work they borrow. At the MCA’s library launch event, 21 out of 28 borrowers told me that they didn’t know any of the participating artists. Several lottery entrants said they were participating because they wanted to hang original art in their home for free.

When the University of Chicago set about reviving their program, they assembled “a student-staffed Collections and Acquisition committee” to help make the collection more inclusive and diverse.

I am going to try to keep my eyes open for any news about the results of MIT and University of Chicago’s study. The fact that demand exceeds supply at nearly every one of these programs and the institutions need to run lotteries indicates there is definitely an interest.

Whether this interest overcomes a perceptual/time/physical barriers to visiting a museum/gallery will be of interest to me. People may fully embrace the opportunity to enjoy an art work in their home, but still consider museums a place other people go.

Do You Fear Innovation Will Threaten Your Effectiveness Metrics?

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Over the last few years, I have frequently written about the problem with using metrics as a measure of value and performance.  As long as we continue to be told that use of quantitative measures are important, I am gonna keep pushing back and reminding you it ain’t the be all and end all of evaluation.

Carter Gillies is actually more adamant and eloquent on this topic than I am so when I saw a piece on Aeon that started out sounding almost verbatim like Carter, I did a double take to check who the author was.

The author, Jerry Z. Muller, points out that performance metrics often incentive a gaming of the system in a manner which often runs counter to the purpose of the organization.

Or take the case of surgeons. When the metrics of success and failure are made public – affecting their reputation and income – some surgeons will improve their metric scores by refusing to operate on patients with more complex problems, whose surgical outcomes are more likely to be negative. Who suffers? The patients who don’t get operated upon.

One of the other issues is all too familiar to non-profit organizations come grant report time:

To the debit side of the ledger must also be added the transactional costs of metrics: the expenditure of employee time by those tasked with compiling and processing the metrics in the first place – not to mention the time required to actually read them. As the heterodox management consultants Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman note in Six Simple Rules (2014), employees end up working longer and harder at activities that add little to the real productiveness of their organisation, while sapping their enthusiasm.

Non-profit organizations are well acquainted with implications of metrics. Organizations are often restricted to what government entities, foundations and donors are willing to fund. It can be difficult to innovate or address needs if your funding source has different priorities or restricts how funding can be used.  I have discussed before that there can be a tendency to report that everything you did met or exceeded the plans laid out in your grant proposal.  The fear of losing funding for not being successful enough disincentivizes being honest about challenges the organization faced.

While there have been plenty of embezzlement scandals at non-profits to leave funders concerned about whether their money is being used responsibly, metrics provide faulty assurances because they are so easily falsified.

So what should be used instead of performance metrics? Well, Muller really doesn’t say.  Doing a good job and having good outcomes might be a start. You’ll want to examine numbers to assist in the process of reducing needless waste. But trying to squeeze an extra percentage out so you can improve your efficiency score over last year when you squeezed an extra percentage over the previous year is not constructive.

Ultimately, the truth is that evaluation is hard. Even if we were to urge funders to invest more time in investigating outcomes directly rather than relying on numbers, the tendency to have positive associations for feel good stories will benefit some organizations over those that do unsexy, but impactful work. Then we will be back to rallying removing the emotional element by employing cold, hard numbers for evaluation.

The Road To Creative Enlightenment Is Paved With Cardboard

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I have written before about the visual arts fair I started about two years ago to provide an opportunity for students and artists in the community to sell their work and get experiencing talking about it with people who don’t share their vocabulary.

Two weeks ago we had the fifth iteration of the event and we think it was easily the best one we have had thus far. We have experimented with the time and date a little bit. It appears that Spring is more popular than Fall in terms of artists having the time and material to participate.

We had so many applicants, that we decided to expand into a new area of the building. Previously, we had been concerns that if one or two people were placed into the overflow area that was slightly apart from the main area, they would feel slighted. Having reached a certain critical mass, we had the numbers to better populate that area. Additionally, a recent re-lamping project provided much better illumination.

A year ago we started placing art works in area businesses prior to the art fair event. We posting pictures daily on social media so people could find the artworks and at the very least generate good will for the business.  This year we saw an increase in participation by both artists and businesses. In one case, I ended up placing a work in a business on the other side of the county 45 minutes away.

Based on this alone, I would feel like we were making progress toward a goal of helping people recognize their capacity to be creative in line with the effort to build public will for arts and culture with which I am involved.

However…once again I partnered with my frequent collaborators, The Creative Cult who designed a “creative journey” visitors to the arts fair could embark upon. The journey took people along the fringes of the art fair and across three floors of the building in an attempt to find the guru who would provide the answer to creativity.

Here is a map of the odyssey

Participants were placed in the role of subjects of a tyrant who suppressed creativity. In order to escape, each party had to construct an item from a pile of supplies that would help them escape the walls of their prison. People made everything from drills to ray guns to bombs.

The next station was a field of strange flowers. When people touched the flower, they were overcome with the image of a monster. They had to draw the monster which was preventing them from being creative that day (which could be anything from lack of confidence to obligations) and a weapon with which they would slay the monster.

Next they ascended to a chasm guarded by a troll who asked riddles. The bridge was made of broken planks–but the only safe path was to step in the empty spaces rather than on the actual planks.

On the other side, they met “Steve” a guy playing video games and surrounded by half finished drawings. He never completes anything due to lack of confidence and commitment. There is always a last touch that needs to be added. There is a puzzle that needs to be solved to open the door at the top of the next level where they meet the guru face to face.

As to what the guru tells our intrepid questors, well that is for them to know.

Among the benefits I saw in this whole endeavor was that attendees were offered an alternative hands on creative activity in which they could participate at the visual art fair. If you were feeling uncertain about how to react to what you saw on display on the artists’ tables or how to interact with the creators, you could always run over and check out the crazy guys leading people around the building.

Days later when I had a little follow up conversation with one of the Creative Cult members, he remarked on how freeing the act of roleplaying was. A particularly shy member of their collaborative had fearless jumped in with both feet because he equated the whole activity as playing a Dungeons and Dragons character rather than himself leading a group of strangers.

As someone in the performing arts, this benefit of roleplay has long been apparent to me, but for people who identify themselves primary as visual artists, this was something of a revelation for them.

As they got excited about the prospect of adding roleplay to their toolbox, I started to consider how the resurgent popularity of games like Dungeons and Dragons might be employed to the benefit of arts and culture organizations.

The Creative Cult guys made a recap video of the experience that can be viewed on Facebook. I am having some problems getting it to embed successfully.

VICTORIOUS RECAPPP (VRAD 5

Discover the secret of creativity.Vern Riffe After Dark 5….VICTORIOUS FULL RECAP!!!!

Posted by Creative Cult Lives – cmar on Friday, April 20, 2018

 

There is a conspiracy to keep your creativity in a box Photo credit: Carla Bentley

Art Museum, The Game

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Intriguing video came across the old social media feed today in the form of a review calling the visual art oriented MMO Occupy White Walls as “The Weirdest MMO I Have Every Played.” The game is in alpha testing, but according to the reviewer, Fevir, that doesn’t detract from the experience.

Part of the motivation behind the game, according to Yarden Yaroshevski Founder and CEO of StikiPixels which is creating the game, is to provide a place to display the large segment of museums’ collections that are kept in storage and rarely seen.

The game allows you to create your own art gallery or museum and display different works in it. Other players can come by and browse. The game will also send non-player characters (NPCs) to visit and potentially pay admission fees. The in game currency can be used to expand and further customize your space–including “purchasing” art to display.

The game’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) learns what type of art you like as you browse, like or buy. My first thought, given the social media climate, is that this information could be sold to businesses who would then start soliciting you to buy art in real life. Not something I would be too keen on.

However, since people can upload their own images, the AI will serve the valuable function of keeping you from being inundated with pornographic images and memes. The company doesn’t want to be in the position of declaring what is and is not art. Ultimately, they may end up needing to limit or ban some content. If you are concerned about being subjected to dick-pix it would probably be prudent to wait until later stages of game development when the AI algorithm has learned to effectively filter them out.

Currency generated from player and NPC traffic appears to be the only competitive element to the game right now. For the most part, the game is largely focused on providing a platform to present, learn and discuss a wider range of visual art works.

I think it would be great if there was a way to pilot promotional efforts and test responses virtually. If the Artificial Intelligence (AI) was sophisticated enough to cross reference human player responses to different programmatic and promotional efforts and then direct appropriate NPC efforts to create a feedback loop to attract the notice of more players, that might be helpful.

In the context of problems with social media AI algorithms being effective at filtering undesirable activity, I would be concerned that the AI could be easily gamed to garner the most response for the least amount of effort. On the other hand, a my suspicion is lot of social media algorithms are purposefully permissive so as to retain the largest number of users. This game wouldn’t necessarily need to make things so flexible.

Fevir describes himself as “art indifferent” based on his experience with physical museums, but said after a few hours with the game AI, he started to see stuff that appealed to him. Once that happened, he began to delve into the notes about the artist, media and historic period in which the work was made.

He seems to feel that the ability for people to curate exhibits focused on particular artists, mount temporary exhibits and have conversations about brush technique took this beyond the experience of websites like Art Station, Deviant Art and the Museum of Modern Art’s online collection.

While it admittedly may have niche appeal, the basic concept and direction combined with opportunities for virtual reality viewing have some potential. There might be opportunities to mount exhibitions virtual exhibits that parallel real life exhibits. Being able to view and learn about something privately may provide people with the confidence to visit in real life. If people understand that the virtual experience doesn’t compare with really standing before a work, it may drive more visits to museums.

The downside, of course, is that if people feel like a virtual facsimile is acceptable, there may be fewer objections to works being deaccessioned and sold to private entities.

But as with so many pieces of technology, there is always potential for explosive usage in a manner the creators didn’t anticipate. It may be worth keeping an eye on this game or similar software that may emerge.

Respect The Authority of The Resource

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Hat tip to Nina Simon for calling attention to a post about how the Barnes Foundation is working toward changing their user experience. Even though the Barnes Foundation art collection was moved from a residential area to Philadelphia, efforts were made to replicate the close quarters environment of the original house. This complicates matters because it is easier for more people to access a place whose interior space hasn’t increased.

(There have been decades long conflicts related to Albert Barnes’  detailed instructions about the way the collection is displayed which informed the design of the new space.)

Shelley Bernstein, Deputy Director of Audience Engagement and Chief Experience Officer for the Barnes Foundation wrote about the poor impression people received before they even entered the door.

We had a no photo, no sketching, no bags, no coats, and “stay behind the line” policies. All of these things were well intentioned and all were in place in the name of collection safety — a very important thing — but, still, it was a lot of “no” to those we were trying to welcome. And we were trying to tell visitors about all these “nos” before they would enter the collection.

[…]

You can see this surface in online reviews, “… had to be told the exact etiquette before entering which makes it feel like they treat their visitors as if none of them has ever set foot in any other major museums/collections before(???)”

Bernstein set about trying to change how all these rules were communicated as well as exploring which policies could be changed. While she originally intended to scrap the no-photography policy, she realized with half the rooms only having 100 square feet that people could occupy, allowing free rein on photograph wasn’t going to work. So they piloted different policies over the course of a year to see which worked best in their environment.

Perhaps most importantly, they created staff training materials for interacting with visitors based on a process known as Authority of the Resource (ART), that the National Park Service uses in their training. This approach makes citing the rules the last step rather than the first. Even better, Bernstein has shared those materials, which includes signage and the National Park Service discussion of the approach, for others to reference.

Authority of the Resource (ART) shifts the focus away from the concept of enforcement power and toward the requirements to preserve the resource. There are obviously going to be people who don’t give a damn and want to do what they desire, but it does shift the initial interaction away from “because I said so and I am the authority figure.”

From the Park Service’s article.

“…the visitor ends up thinking about laws, regulations, badges and the ranger’s presence rather than focusing on the natural authority inherent in the requirements of a healthy ecosystem.

[…]

“…the AR technique goes one step further and asks the ranger/manager to subtly de-emphasize the regulation and transfer part of the expectation back to the visitor by interpreting nature’s requirement.”

Here the the Barnes Foundation training pamphlet. Clicking on either image will take you Bernstein’s Dropbox copy of the document.

Have You Hugged Your Grant Panelist?

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Short post today because I just returned home after serving on a grant review panel for the state arts council.

The deputy director of the council was reminiscing about the days in the not so distant past when the review process for the main grant program took three days. Even though the panelists reviewed the applications in advance, they would spend time reviewing VHS tapes, etc as a group and discussing final thoughts on the grants across those three days.

Now it is possible to review and pre-score the grants online and likewise review videos, recordings, webpages, etc online and in advance as well. The stacks of applications for each grant program are distributed between different groups so that no group of reviewers has to spend more than a day at the arts council offices deciding on final scoring.

However….

It is still a big job to serve on the panels and potential reviewers are busy.

A month ago a colleague told me she had been asked to serve on a panel for another program, but felt some trepidation about having enough time amidst all her other commitments to review the 45 proposals that had been assigned to her group.

There was a member of my panel today whose background and expertise I felt was much needed because it aligned with the non-arts field components found in five of the grant proposals. She also expressed reservations about serving again due to the time commitment required to preview the 45 proposals.

I should note the actual time we spent reviewing the grants today was about 6 hours. That is about an appropriate number of proposals to assign a group to review for a day. But it was also only possible thanks to 25-30 hours of preparation.

The moral of my little story here is to encourage everyone to volunteer to serve on your state arts council (or NEA) grant panels when asked.

Failing that, give your panel participants a hug in thanks.

Heck, definitely give your arts council staff a hug. They vet many multiples of proposals for basic qualifications and prepare them for the grant panels. Not to mention organizing and providing orientations to the panelists in the first place.

Are They Taking A Picture Of Your Powerpoint Because They Like It Or Because They Can’t Read It?

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In his reflections on attending the 2018 Nonprofit Technology Conference, Drew McManus noted how many presenters at the conference packed too much text on to Powerpoint slides. He observes the text was so dense and the font size so small on some slides he had to take a picture with his phone so he could magnify it to legibility.

I immediately knew I needed to pull out a post Seth Godin made earlier this month on that very subject. In discussing how to most effectively use a Powerpoint presentation, rule one was not to read the slide content aloud and rule four was to see rule one.

Additionally, he wrote:

2. But even better, remember that slides are free. You can have as many as you like. That means that instead of three bullet points (with two sentences each) on a slide, you can make 6 slides. Or more. The energy you create by advancing from slide to slide will seduce most of the people in your audience to read along to keep up. Slides that people read are worth five times more than slides that you read to them.

3. Better still, don’t use words. Or, at the most, one or two keywords, in huge type. The rest of the slide is a picture, which I’m told is worth 1,000 words. That way, the image burns itself into one part of the brain while your narrative is received by the other part. The keyword gives you an anchor, and now you’re hitting in three places, not just one.

5. Many organizations use decks as a fancy sort of memo, a leave-behind that provides proof that you actually said what you said. “Can you send me the deck?” A smart presenter will have two decks. One deck has plenty of text, but then those pages are hidden when the presentation is performed live.

I think people in the arts can really appreciate these points because they understand the value of pacing and using images to convey your message. There may be some reticence to do so for fear of breaking some rules of business decorum. Godin is basically giving people permission to flex those skills.

Just remember that too much flash and spectacle can detract and distract from your core message.

I love rule five. I had never considered having an enhanced version of a slide deck that you could send to those who requested it until I read this post. If you read my post last Wednesday, you know this is exactly what Drew did when he made the version of the presentation Ceci and he delivered available with all the background notes.

I was a little tickled to see that Godin’s post in early April about paring down the content of Powerpoint presentations was itself a pared down version of a post he made 11 years ago. That post in turn, was pulled from an ebook he wrote four years earlier. A little practicing what one preaches!

That is also the secret to delivering good presentations–practice and revisions. Practice and revise multiple times before the first presentation and then continue to do so every time you revisit the content.

As with so many things, there is a tendency to believe an effective speaker possesses an inborn talent and genius for a turn of phrase. One of the benefits of having so much video and audio content available online is that when you watch or listen to a favorite speaker, you have many opportunities to note how they continue to weave familiar content in and out of their addresses and evaluate how they are improving over time (or getting a little stale).

Yes! Long Awaited Good, Bad and Ugly of Tech RFPs (Far More Interesting Than It Sounds)

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For over a year now I have been excited about the session on writing Requests for Proposals (RFP) Drew McManus and Ceci Dadisman are presenting today at the NonProfit Technology conference so I figure I am pretty much obligated to write a post about it.

(Also I begged Drew to put up a mini-site with the presentation)

I should note, I am not attending the conference. I am just responding to the mini-site Drew has put up with the session content.

Wait! Before you ask yourself why you have read five sentences into a post about something as boring as a request for proposal and haven’t clicked away yet, let me assure you this is valuable info.

The more non-profit organizations depend on websites, social media, email, CRM software, ticketing systems, etc to cultivate relationships with their constituencies, the more it is necessary to make effective choices about the way technology facilitates these interactions.

I have been involved with a number of requests for proposals before and while it is an onerous process, there are some upsides to using it. As well as some downsides, both of which Drew and Ceci cover in the slide deck on the mini-site.

The mini-site covers all the steps, from gathering staff input to define your needs to communicating with different vendors to deciding what process to use. Project Evaluations are an alternative to RPFs, but have their own pros and cons.

The mini-site has a self-diagnosis questionnaire to help you decide which approach might be appropriate to you. (Note the emphatic disclaimer that they aren’t collecting any info on you, including placing you on a cold call list because “that would be a serious d**k move”)

Drew and Ceci solve one of the most frustrating parts of viewing a slide deck outside the context of the live presentation– trying to figure out what the bullet points on a slide really mean– by making their presentation notes available alongside each slide.

Since part of the title of the presentation promises to tell you about the stuff tech providers don’t want you to know, you will probably want to pay attention to those notes for this slide.

Here is a sample of some of the notes for this slide:

  • Tech conflict resolution (troubleshooting borders).
    • Some providers are all too happy to let someone else do the dirty work of quality assurance and troubleshooting or blindside you with unexpected fees to carry those tasks out.
  • Lack of flexibility and/or extensibility.
    • They may deliver on your project requirements but they may not play nice with other providers or make it easy to maintain.
  • Free, unsupported third party scripts/plugins.
    • Free scripts aren’t bad, but is the provider willing to support them or conflict resolve down the road. Ideally, a provider should provide a line item list of plugins, extensions, scripts, etc. that come from free and paid resources.
  • Non optimized performance (A.K.A.brute force programming).
    • This is all kinds of important in a post net neutrality world.
    • Talk about programming bloat where things work great on launch but performance grinds down over time.
  • They outsource coding but present themselves as a full service developer.
    • It’s increasingly common for design and branding agencies to project themselves as full web developers when the reality is they outsource coding.
    • Examine the difference between coders: frontend UX developer is not the same as a platform programmer.

If any of this starts to concern you, you may want to explore the whole presentation. Not just to raise your awareness about the problems that may arise, but to also become familiar with constructive approaches to the process both for your staff and the people with whom you may end up working.

You Have To Know How They Define Community Before You Can Tell Their Story

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I don’t know what inspired me to do so, but last week I visited ProPublica’s website and learned that Free Street Theater and ProPublica Illinois were teaming up to offer theater-journalism workshops across the Illinois.

What caught my eye was that they put out a call for invitations to communities in manner reminiscent of the process Marc Folk said The Arts Commission of Toledo employed when soliciting feedback from different n eighborhoods of that city.

In addition to going to Toulon, IL, Free Street and ProPublica Illinois will be visiting Urbana, Carbondale/Jackson County, Rock Island/Quad Cities, and Rockford during May. So if you live in or near any of those places, check it out.

They did a trial run at the end of March in Chicago and have posted some of their reflections already. One of the things they recognized immediately was a need to do a better job of making people aware that they were having these workshops.

In the course of playing various games, they discovered that the terms people use to define their community, including how they defined community, had some bearing on how they composed the narrative about themselves.

We played a game in which we were asked to line up according to how strongly we agreed with various statements, from “We are living in a war zone” to “I love ice cream.” You’d be surprised at how many interpretations there are of what a war zone is, and how many people have strong feelings about ice cream.

In small groups, we talked about a time we each felt misrepresented in a news story, and how that directly affected us and our communities. It led to revealing conversations about how we each defined “community.”

[…]

At the end of the night, we returned to the sticky notes to ask: What do we want the story of our community to be? This is an important question — for us and for this project — that journalists rarely ask. But they should. If journalists don’t know how a community views itself, journalists don’t know what that community has at stake when it is represented or misrepresented.

If we never bother to ask — in real, concrete ways — it can seem like we don’t care. Journalists know how to fact-check names and statistics. But how often do journalists fact-check the underlying narrative of a community?

Since there is an ongoing conversation in the arts about how people want to see themselves and their stories depicted in performances and other forms of creative expression, these reflections by ProPublica reporter Natalie Escobar should pretty much be shared by those identifying with the arts and culture community.

Creating Connections To “Why Didn’t I Think Of That”

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Last week Arts Midwest held a webinar to provide some examples of the way in which different arts organizations were putting the Creating Connection messaging and research into practice. They had representatives of the Eugene Symphony and two arts organizations from Klamath Falls, OR present talk about some of the successes they have seen.

Each of the organization links above will take you to pages with examples of brochures, videos, social media campaigns, letters and other pieces each of the organizations used.

There were a couple programs that stuck out for me as I was watching last week. One of the biggest “duh” moments for me was the Eugene Symphony’s use of a white board in the lobby to collect feedback from audiences. All those times we have tried to figure out how to get better response rate on surveys, something like this never occurred to us. So many grant applications ask for summaries of the feedback you have collected from the audience. It can’t hurt to have pictures of people enthusiastically participating in writing on white boards.

The people from the Eugene Symphony also spoke about how they shifted the focus of their fundraising efforts. At their gala auction, they placed fewer items up for auction and spent more time on storytelling about creating connections. In their donor appeal letter, they changed the message away from “support our excellence.” Instead, when deciding what to include in the solicitation letter, they ask themselves, “Is this going to be the story of their growth, their voice, their well-being or their happiness?” The repeated “their” being the letter recipient.

The images in their publications are focused on the experience the audience will have rather than on the organization. The “Meet The Conductor” video only shows Music Director & Conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong in the concert hall or in the process of conducting for a few seconds. Most of the video is him hugging people at picnics and while walking down the street, chatting at ballparks and sidewalk cafes.

Social marketing consultant Crystal Muno talked about work she did with the Ross Ragland Theater and Linkville Players in Klamath Falls, OR.  She said the Ross Ragland had been faced with the perception of being elitist. To combat that, they worked on messaging that presented the theater as a “kooky, enthusiastic, maybe a little eccentric aunt.”

One of the things I liked was that they used the image of a stick figure hugging the silhouette of the theater for all of their giving programs – donations, volunteer solicitations or asking people to join their guild. Depicting volunteers as loving the organization in the same way as large donors do has a certain appeal.

Crystal also spoke about how the Linkville Playhouse’s Little Linkville program, a group of adults who do shows for kids, started having kids usher the shows and design posters as a way of improving the connection with their core constituency.  She also talked about how their costume and prop philosophy was that they could only use and wear things that could be found around the house so that if the kids wanted to go home and replicate what they saw on stage, there would be few barriers to doing just that.

 

Repetition & Establishing Good Habits

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I was recently involved with a strategic planning session for a non-arts group where  staff and representatives of community constituencies  were intermingled at different tables.

When we were asked to brain storm solutions to serve a greater segment of the community, I mentioned the need to go out and learn about the unfulfilled needs of the community rather than focusing on the quality and range of services the organization wanted to offer. I suggested possibly conducting community listening sessions.

People at the table thought it was a great idea and wrote it down on the paper on the easel. When it came time to report out, that idea wasn’t mentioned but we only had a couple minutes so it was no big deal.

But as the other tables repeatedly mentioned going out to new areas to talk about all the great programs the organization had to offer without ever mentioning making an effort to learn if any of the programs were relevant to community needs, something inside me started to rebel and protest.

That is when I realized I had really started to internalize the ideas that research, different advocacy and policy groups, and individuals like Trevor O’Donnell have been communicating for awhile now.  I have mentioned this before – The focus can’t entirely be on your organization and how great you and the stuff you do are. It has to be about how what you do fulfills expectations your potential patron/participants have about a product or experience.

In the case of this blog’s readers, that experience is related to arts and culture.

While I have written about this idea a fair number of times now, I will freely admit my practice in implementing this concept is far from ideal.  Still, I see the fact that I bridled internally upon hearing proposals that ran counter to this concept as a positive step.

The experience has also reinforced for me that making progress is probably going to be a long term process of repetition –both to myself and aloud to others as I had in the strategic planning meeting.

Intellectually, we know repetition helps to establish good habits, but it is easy to forget this when faced with tepid progress. Lack of immediate investment by others isn’t necessarily an indication that the idea isn’t good. Merely that the presentation wasn’t effective and needs to be refined or that the people listening haven’t heard or considered the idea enough times for it to make sense as a valuable course of action.

Probably The Only Time Comic Sans Is Appropriate In A Planning Document

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Back in February CityLab covered an effort by residents of the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, MN to get people invested in contributing to the Small Area Plan for their neighborhood.  This was in part driven by the experience the Frogtown Neighborhood Association voted to refurbish an historic theater in town but the mayor choose to direct the money to a police shooting range because the theater wasn’t in the neighborhood’s small area plan.

Because Small Area Plans, like strategic plans tend to be dry documents that get put on a shelf never to be consulted, the Frogtown Neighborhood Association were determined to make their plan a living document with which people interacted. They did this by placing the plan and the feedback they received from hundreds of residents into the framework of a comic book.

What I admire about the document is that they create 8 characters who are experts on major areas of concern like land use, housing, transportation, education, arts, health and wellness, economic vitality and resource allocation.  They make each of these people representative of different demographic segments like long time residents, house owners, apartment renters, kids, married couples, single college grads, etc.

By doing so they put a face and connect expertise to different people in the neighborhood so it is more difficult to dismiss people as gentrifiers or cranky malcontents standing in the way of progress.

They reiterate their goal quite a few times across the book to employ design thinking to “Sculpt our community into a mixed income, arts, entrepreneurship and education centered urban village.”

Because it is a planning document it is still pretty text heavy, but this is an example of what is contained within the book.  As I sort of implied before, you could probably do worse than applying this approach to your strategic plan.

 

Focus On Art, Extend Your Attention Span?

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A common complaint in live performing arts is that no one has an attention span anymore. The sense is that cell phones, videos, bright flashing lights, etc have ruined our brains.

But according to Eric Barker on Barking Up The Wrong Tree, our brains have always been that way.

First off, stop blaming technology. It’s not your phone’s fault; it’s your brain’s fault. Tech just makes it worse. Our brains are designed to always be seeking new information.

In fact, the same system in your grey matter that keeps you on the lookout for food and water actually rewards you for discovering novel information.

From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:

The role of the dopamine system has actually been shown to relate directly to information-seeking behavior in primates. Macaque monkeys, for example, respond to receiving information similarly to the way they respond to primitive rewards such as food or water. Moreover, “single dopamine neurons process both primitive and cognitive rewards, and suggest that current theories of reward-seeking must be revised to include information-seeking.”

And this dopamine reward system is also what convinces people that they are good a multi-tasking. In reality, those who feel they are good at multi-tasking exhibit the worst ability in performing tasks requiring cognitive skills like simultaneously holding something in memory while trying to focus their attention on a task.

Says Barker,

Yes, you probably feel good when you multitask. But feeling good and efficiency are not the same thing. Multitasking meets your emotional need to do something new and exciting… while also slowing your brain down and increasing errors.

So if our brains have always been like this, why do we feel this is a new problem? We cite sitting quietly in a dark room watching a problem as a relic of past arts practice, but why were people content to participate in that way for so long? While there were fewer options in years past, there was still more to do than a human had capacity to engage in at one time.

In fact, with fewer options to record something, there was a much greater chance of missing out on an experience in the past than there is now. You can do a 48 hour binge watch of your favorite show and then catch up with everything you were ignoring during that period at a later time. We have much more control over how we consume an experience.

Yet people feel powerless in the face of all possible options. Why didn’t they start feeling anxious about this lack of power 30-40 years ago?

I am kinda tossing this out there for debate and consideration because I don’t know the answer.

Barker’s article is focused on providing people ways to extend their attention span which include: Stop Multitasking; Exercise; Meditate; Call Your Mother Nature (experiencing nature or even looking at pictures of a natural setting); and Reduce Interference (deal with email/cell phone/texts/other distractions at specific intervals only).

Of those things, I think people exercised more, had more exposure to nature and had their lives filled with less interference in the past. I think people have often needed to engage in multi-tasking and few have engaged in meditation so I don’t see much difference from the past in those areas.

If these general areas are useful in extending attention spans, perhaps the sensory isolation of passively watching a performance in a dark room with an enforced moratorium on electronic devices isn’t something arts and cultural organizations should abandon.

Which is not to say that active, engaging experiences shouldn’t be provided. Many potential arts activities hit on a handful of Barker’s suggestions. How much art has been created by applying a singular focus after finding the perfect natural setting at the end of an invigorating walk which has taken you far from cell phone service?

Even in the middle of an urban setting, acting, dancing, painting, shaping clay, etc, etc, can involve these elements, including being a meditative experience.

Indeed, the concept of an experience transporting or transforming pops up on nearly every survey about arts and culture you can find.

Makes me wonder if there is something to be gained by positioning performances/classes/experiences as distraction free and spiritually renewing. Basically, leave both your cell phone and ego at the door.

Kickin’–Erm, Springboarding Infographics Up A Notch

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Hat tip to Andrew Taylor for calling attention to ever awesome Springboard for the Arts’ “Year In Review” report which consists of a short letter from Executive Director Laura Zabel but more prominently features the following infographic which you can print and color.

I feel like this is a great example of the underlying message and goal of the Creating Connection I keep advocating for.

It basically tells people, “Springboard for the Arts is an organization that promotes arts, culture and creative expression, all things in which you can participate…so pick up crayons, markers or colored pencils and get started.”

If you are like me and are inspired by this sort of thing, share it! (Or maybe color it first and then share it)

 

Enough Sins To Go Around

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A couple weeks ago Ali Webb wrote the provocatively titled Philanthropy’s Seven Deadly Sins on Non-Profit Quarterly.

According to Webb they are,

Blindness to privilege
Dismissing community knowledge
Misplaced accountability
Poor partners
Failure to learn
Risk aversion
Lack of transparency

Some of the sins were more specific to philanthropic foundations than non-profit organizations in general, but I saw some parallels with topics I have discussed in the past.

I am relatively sure most people recognize that “Blindness to Privilege” is a significant issue right now.

Carlisle observes that, “There are increasingly few places in the country where there’s not going to be significant racial and cultural differences…where people who have been very sheltered or in dominant culture settings are beginning to say, ‘Wow, we are fish in water. We didn’t know we were fish. We didn’t know we were swimming in water.’”

Don Chen, Director of the Equitable Development Team at the Ford Foundation, remarks that he wishes he “had a dollar for every organization that comes to me and says our board came up with a new strategic plan, and we are going to focus on equity. These same people aren’t talking about equity as a core value or a core component of their mission; they are often talking about equity as a topic. That’s a warning sign for me because it could be dropped like any other topic.”

In the sin of “Dismissing Community Knowledge,” I saw some familiar phrasing.

Keller observes that too often, “we ride into communities, stand before them, and tell them what they need to do to solve their problems. Then we ride out, expecting programs to be scaled and sustained.”

“Foundation people tend to over-intellectualize but under-experience the challenges of those they seek to serve with no authentic proximity to the issues,” says Carlisle. She continued, “The validity that comes with seeing and understanding different world views, which are not dominant culture, can have extraordinary outcomes.”

[…]

Chen calls it “drive-by grantmaking,” where foundations make a grant and then go away for a year or two. “Local folks have a BS meter and they know if you don’t trust their knowledge,” says Harris.

For me, this echoed what Marc Folk of the Toledo Arts Commission said about riding into a community on a white horse and Margy Waller’s “We’re From The Arts and We Are Here To Help,” post I wrote about two years ago. Likewise, Ronia Holmes piece about arts organizations being bad at community outreach which I also wrote about also has resonance with this “sin.”

From a recipient point of view, the “Failure To Learn” sin encapsulated a lot of the issues non-profits face today with the expectations of funders. If you read Vu Le’s Nonprofit AF blog, you will be familiar with these gripes.

“In philanthropy, we don’t always clean up our messes when we change priorities and make transitions.” Hegarty offers that the unwillingness to learn may stem from “a tendency to think we are the smartest persons in the room and the assumption that we have all answers and understand all the angles.”

[…]

Another possibility that Chen offers is that the field is “delusional” about what was or could be accomplished with the amount of money offered. Sometimes, Chen said, the sector believes it is “smarter than everyone who ever came before. Especially when working in in under-resourced, low-capacity places, philanthropy tends to think it has super powers.”

[…]

“We ask a lot of our grantees and then what they share with us goes into a black hole. We never do anything with the information to further the work,” said the officer. “Without processing the information and developing a vehicle to get it back to the grantees, much learning is lost.”

All of this is something to think about. It is difficult to effect the change we like as fast as we think we should, but being reminded of these concerns on a semi-regular basis feeds progress.

You Are Not Alone In Thinking It Can Be Good To Be Alone

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Last month the BBC had a story on their site about the creative benefits of being a loner.

One reason for this is that such people are likely to spend sustained time alone working on their craft. Plus, Feist says, many artists “are trying to make sense of their internal world and a lot of internal personal experiences that they’re trying to give expression to and meaning to through their art.” Solitude allows for the reflection and observation necessary for that creative process.

There is such a high value placed on extroverted behavior in society that introverts can retain a degree of confidence in the value of their approach to life. However, the BBC piece does take the time to distinguish between constructive and destructive introversion behavior. (my emphasis)

Social withdrawal usually is categorised into three types: shyness caused by fear or anxiety; avoidance, from a dislike of socialising; and unsociability, from a preference for solitude.

A paper by Bowker and her colleagues…found that creativity was linked specifically to unsociability. They also found that unsociability had no correlation with aggression (shyness and avoidance did).

…Unsociable people are likely to be “having just enough interaction,” Bowker says. “They have a preference for being alone, but they also don’t mind being with others.”

I partially emphasized that section to distinguish between unsociability and other types of social withdraw. This may be an important distinction given that the URL of the article says “there are benefits to being antisocial” leading me to think the current article title wasn’t the original one. Being unsocial may not necessarily be antisocial.

Another thing from the article to note is the observation that being alone removes distractions resulting in a mode of daydreaming that “helps with focus in the long term but strengthens your sense of both yourself and others. Paradoxically, therefore, periods of solitude actually help when it comes time to socialise once more.”

This suggests the distraction of mobile devices in an otherwise solitary situation may prevent this mode from engaging.

You’re Not Art’s Type

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National Geographic had a photo essay featuring pictures of ballet dancers in Nairobi’s largest slum.  As I looked at it, I was reminded of El Sistema, the effort that provided free music education to impoverished children which started in Venezuela. This is a similar effort to teach dance to girls in Nairobi. Some of them have been accepted into more formal training programs and have appeared in performance venues.

The pictures show these young women practicing in dim rooms with dirt floors that are only lit by windows. Some of the rooms are so small, only one person at a time can practice advanced techniques.

When I see the effort these dancers make in order to participate in ballet, it strikes me that a real disservice is being done when we decide that the ideal dancer possesses a certain body type.

Dance obviously isn’t the only arts discipline where appearance is tied to success. Classical music’s use of blind auditions has helped to mitigate some of the issues associated with judging people on appearance, but doesn’t necessarily solve everything. Music in general and other performing arts disciplines are having to do a fair bit of introspection about their practices of late.

As much as I have read about the debates, there was something in this particular set of pictures that underscored for me the sense that a disservice was being done.

 

Photograph by Fredrik Lerneryd

Is Innovation A Scientific Or Artistic Endeavor?

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Really interesting research piece on Plos One asking if the arts are the “secret sauce” that helps drive innovation or if it is the nice to have “cherry on top.” They focused on data dealing with the arts in rural settings because it removed a host of elements present in urban environments that one might attribute as having an impact on innovation instead of the arts.

The more I read the piece, the more I thought they were going to come down on the side of the arts as “cherry on top.” They noted relationships between things like artistic activity and opportunities for leisure  or being near natural attractions that might draw and activate a certain demographic that is already interested in the arts.

However, they concluded,

From this perspective, the “cherry-on-top” explanation for the observed arts-innovation nexus is not supported by the data used in this analysis. However, the data are consistent either with the explanation of the arts as an attractive amenity, or as an enabler of innovative thinking. The economic geography literature has primarily considered the former explanation, although recent experimental research and emerging ways of thinking about innovation lend credence to the latter.

The likelihood that the “arts as enabler of innovative thinking” explanation will ever get a toehold in the economics-of-innovation literature is slim, given its theoretical foundation in non-rational thought, which is anathema to conventional economics.

[…]

The one advantage that the “arts-as-enabler-of-innovative-thinking” explanation has over the “arts-as-attractive-creative-class-amenity” explanation is the availability of experimental data supporting the former premise.

This pretty much encapsulates the environment we operate in. Even though there are some interesting indicators that arts can be an enabler of innovative thinking, because that data is based in some slightly squishy thought, it won’t be given credit for contributing to the economic value of innovation. (Perhaps more reason not to use the economic value of the arts argument.) Still, it is good to know people are studying questions about the link between creativity and innovation.

There was a previous section in the article that was more interesting to me than the conclusion.  Earlier in the article they talk about design being the bridge between art and innovation.

I hadn’t really thought about that before. I have pretty much considered design and innovation as a creative artistic endeavor. The article places innovation pretty squarely in an empirical, scientific realm. The first sentence in the following quote essentially says our biases shape our conception of how new ideas are generated.

…differences between the arts and innovation are stark with respect to where we think the new ideas come from, what purposes the new ideas serve, and which practices or innovation activities (techniques) allow those ideas to be realized.

[…]

Design provides a plausible bridge between the two parallel tracks of art and innovation. A useful concise definition of design is a mediation between people and technology that emphasizes aesthetics [19]. The mediation is both an applied art and a development activity critical to innovation.

The article notes that when an object is patented, the patent describes how the object works but what it describes is rarely what is released to the market. Something that looks great but doesn’t work is just as undesirable as something that works, but doesn’t have aesthetic appeal. Design bridges that gap.

If you have ever listened to the 99% Invisible podcast, you will have a sense of what I mean. The podcast focuses pretty heavily on the value of design as both a utilitarian, (often safety), and experiential element.

Not Just For The Kids

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Though it was only a week ago, I can’t quite recall where I came across a link to Ozan Varol’s post, “Stop asking children these seven questions (and ask these instead)”

I was barely past the first one when I started thinking these ideas were applicable to adults as well. And sure enough, the last line of the piece was,

“It may have occurred to some of you that this post is a Trojan Horse. These questions are as much for you as they are for children.”

Most of the seven questions are pretty much cornerstones of arts and creativity dealing with failure, curiosity, experimentation and imagination. While he expounds upon what he means for each, I figured I would just list the questions themselves without comments.

Withholding the easy answer in favor of letting people engage in the process of exploring and synthesizing their own answers is a core element of his post. Sure you can easily click the link, but hopefully your brain will already be churning as you seek the answer.

I assure you, even the question about choosing a kindergarten has broader applications.

1. “What did you learn today?” vs. “What did you disagree with today?”

2. “What did you accomplish this week?” vs. “What did you fail at this week?”

3. “Here’s how you do that.” vs. “How would you solve this problem?”

4. “Here’s your new kindergarten” vs. “What kindergarten do you want to attend?”

5. “That’s just the way it is.” vs. “Great question. Why don’t you figure out the answer?”

6. “You can’t do that.” vs. “What would it take to do that?”

7. “Did you make a new friend today?” vs. “How did you help someone today?”

Being On The Right Side of Copyrights

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I recently had a piece on ArtsHacker addressing questions about copyright which I see as a complement to an earlier piece I wrote for ArtsHacker that directed readers to tools that can help determine if a work is still under copyright.

This more recent piece includes a guide created by Harvard Law School’s Technology and Intellectual Property Legal Clinic.

Part of the stated aim of that guide was to help those creating protest art understand what uses of a public figure’s likeness is permitted.

But as I write on ArtsHacker, what I like about the guide is that it talks about how to identify those who hold the copyright of a work and what information you should provide when contacting them for permission to use their work.

Perhaps just as important for creative folks looking to expand their reach, the guide discusses how to license and merchandise your own work.

Check out both posts.

Even More Useful Info On Copyright And Intellectual Property

Copyright, Public Domain, and Fair Use Guidance Provided Here

Oh The Places You’ll See When You Can Ride The Rail For Free

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Last week CityLab wrote about the European Union’s plan to offer 18 year old residents a free 30 day Interrail pass this summer.  What this means is that potentially 20,000-30,000 teenagers will have the opportunity to travel across 30 countries this summer.

Why fund a bunch of free trips? The intent is to broaden young participants’ horizons and hopefully instill some sense of Europe’s connections. “Education is not only about what we learn in the classroom, but what we discover about the cultures and traditions of our fellow Europeans,” Tibor Navracsics, E.U. Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, said in a press release.

This reminded me of a program I wrote about a couple years back where the Italian government provided a culture voucher worth €500 to 18 year olds.

As I quoted from an article on The Stage (UK):

It can be used to buy books, pay for entry fees to parks, museums and archaeological sites, and instead of cash for theatre, cinema and concert tickets. The euros in the app are spent by the young people and the arts organisations then reclaim this money off the state.

I will have to see if I can find an article about how well Italy felt the program went. It bears reading The Stage article because it explores the idea of funding culture on the demand side versus the supply side.

Where To Perform Based On Where They Have Performed

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One of the toughest tasks when it comes to programming for a performing arts venue is trying to bring new experiences to the community that audiences will attend in large enough numbers to make the effort worthwhile. Sometimes you think something will be a hit and it doesn’t do well. Other times you discover you the artist you thought would only have niche appeal appeals to a pretty significant sized niche.

The artificial intelligence work of a company called Topos may help take some of the guesswork out of this process in the future.

According to a piece they wrote, they plugged in data about musical artist touring from 2008 to present, looked at the characteristics of the communities where the artists sold well and then created a list of places the artists hadn’t performed, but should consider.

For example, these suggestions for Florida Georgia Line.

They are careful to note that this is a work in progress and their algorithm is pretty narrowly focused, but they are optimistic about the potential.

In this article, we’ve constructed a narrow, highly specific view of place, ignoring myriad factors that shape neighborhoods.

[…]

Yet even this narrow view reveals much about neighborhoods, from their form (the connected downtown neighborhoods surrounding large arenas) to their milieu (the hipster neighborhoods connected to Bushwick).

We believe this approach starts to demonstrate the potential of understanding location as a set of relationships rather than solely as a set of isolated points or regions to which metrics are ascribed. Many applications of Location Intelligence — from opening a new store to planning a trip, launching a political campaign to arranging a tour — are ultimately about relationships: Brand and customer, traveller and a foreign culture, politician and constituent, touring musician and fan. Understanding the manifold ways one place is similar to another provides rich context for expanding these relationships into new territories.

Once the calculations have been further refined and test for larger tours, it may be awhile before the use of tools like these become viable for use by many arts organizations.

While I think most of us would be reluctant to leave all our decisions to a calculation, this work provides the opportunity to understand our communities better.

What I would be most eager to see is if these tools could help bring about the diversity in programming we all say we aspire to. A list of suggested artists backed by some proven data provides the opportunity to transcend what we and our boards think we know will sell in our community.

Of course, using a list in this manner would likely need to be accompanied by a sincere commitment to communication and trust building with a broader range of the community. It would be far too easy to discredit the list of suggestions by changing the programming but promoting and communicating about it in the same old way.

Often We Pay More For The Illusion Of Control

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If you want a lesson in the power of custom and pricing psychology winning over objectively better options, check out this New Yorker piece on failed attempts by restaurants to eliminate tipping.

Research conducted by Michael Lynn, at Cornell University, who is the foremost academic authority on tipping, has shown that people of color receive lower tips than their white colleagues, which arguably qualifies tipping as a discriminatory pay practice. The system perpetuates sexual misconduct, because service workers feel compelled to tolerate inappropriate behavior from customers who hold financial power over them. As restaurant prices have risen, gratuities—which are tied to sales, as a percentage—have too, so that there is now a substantial and hard-to-defend disparity between the pay of the kitchen workers who prepare food and the servers who deliver it.

A statistical model created by Ofer Azar…found only a small correlation between tip size and service quality, leading him to conclude that servers were motivated mainly by other factors …Another study by Lynn showed that perceived service quality affected tip size by less than two percentage points. A female server, by contrast, can expect to hike her tips by an average of seventeen per cent if she wears a flower in her hair.

A number of restaurant groups and owners have tried to eliminate tipping to help resolve this issues. Some have decided to eliminate tipping and set their prices higher in order to provide health and leave benefits in addition to a living wage.

While there have been some difficulties finding people who are willing to work in a no-tipping environment, the bigger problem is resistance from customers.

New research by Lynn shows that when restaurants move to a no-tipping policy, their online customer ratings fall. One factor that explains that dissatisfaction is how we, as consumers, respond to “partitioned” prices versus “bundled” prices. A partitioned price divides the total cost of an item into smaller components—say, a television listed for a hundred and ninety dollars that has a ten-dollar shipping fee. A bundled price would list the television, shipping included, for two hundred dollars. Consumers tend to perceive partitioned prices as cheaper than bundled ones.

Later the article notes people have an aversion to service charges. Even though people will typically tip 20%, if a 15% surcharge is automatically added in the place of tipping, people perceive it as a “gotcha” even though it means they will pay less. People also believe that service will suffer in the absence of tips.

There is a lot in this article that speaks to the value of using psychology in pricing strategy and providing the perception of the consumer being in control.

If you have ever shopped on sites like Amazon where there are multiple sellers of an item, if you pay attention you will often see items that are offered a few dollars cheaper than the rest of the group—until you get half way through the transaction and you realize that with the shipping and handling it is much more expensive than the sellers who offered free or included shipping. I often wonder if they are counting on people not noticing or deciding it is more trouble to back out of the transaction and starting anew with another vendor.

Surcharges on ticket sales would likely disappear immediately if the sales weren’t restricted to a single service. (Ticket prices rarely fall below face value on re-seller sites.)

Speaking about the ethics and motivations behind your pricing does gain traction with certain demographics and may make them more willing to pay a higher price if they know people are being taken care of. But this New Yorker story seems to suggest tricks like ending a price with a 9 rather than a 0 will still be a significant motivator of purchasing behavior.

Move Over Laughter, Singing May Be The Best Medicine

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When Daniel Pink tweets that choral singing might be the new exercise, you know I have to investigate even if it is just clickbait.

There seems to be some scientific basis to the claim, however.

Choral singing calms the heart and boosts endorphin levels. It improves lung function. It increases pain thresholds and reduces the need for pain medication,” Pink claims, citing research published in Evolution and Human Behavior. It also seems to improve your outlook, boosting mood and self-esteem while alleviating feelings of stress and depression.

These aren’t simply effects of singing. “People who sing in a group report far higher well-being than those who sing solo,” he notes. It’s about synchronizing with others. Rowers and dancers have similarly shown a greater capacity to endure pain when performing in time with others.

While there are some benefits accrued from the physical flexing of lungs and diaphragm, most of the benefits seem to result from the collaborative and communal aspects of choral music.

So even for those who don’t want to participate because they don’t enjoy singing, this seems to point to there being some benefits in active participation in arts and cultural activities. The close coordination found in choral, dance, theater productions seem to bring the best benefits, probably because they require a employing social skills connected with concession and negotiation.

But I have to imagine people would gain some benefits, albeit to a lesser degree, participating in a social, hands on creative activity with others versus passive observation.

The study in Evolution and Human Behavior looked at the bonds formed between people who met frequently (~once a week) in small choral groups and then came together with other choral groups to form a mega choir once or twice a year.

Importantly, we show that even after only a single session of singing, a large group of unfamiliar individuals can become bonded to the same level as those who are familiar to each other within that group.

[…]

Our results suggest that communal singing can cause a significant increase in social closeness of large groups of unfamiliar individuals (c.f. Pearce, Launay, & Dunbar, 2015). In other words, communal singing may bypass the need for personal knowledge about other individuals that more intimate relationships require.

I suspect the shared experience and interest in singing helps form these strong bonds quickly. The study says music specifically has a pivotal role forming bonds across human evolutionary history. The study also seems to say there is an aspect of social bonding that allow these connections to coalesce quickly even during less formal and infrequent contacts.

Something to think about and explore.

Could It Be That Pretty Much Anything Is More Engaging Than Test Focused Learning?

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Via Artsjournal.com is a piece from the Brookings Institution titled, “An unexpectedly positive result from arts-focused field trips.”

After crunching some numbers as part of research being conducted for the National Endowment for the Arts, the article author Jay P. Greene writes,

The surprising result is that students who received multiple field trips experienced significantly greater gains on their standardized test scores after the first year than did the control students.

Before you get too excited about that, the cause and effect relationship probably isn’t what you assume.

Greene notes that this was surprising because previous research has found there is no skill transfer between arts and other subjects.

…there is little to no rigorous evidence that art improves performance in math or reading, just as there is little evidence that math or reading improve performance in art.

Createquity presented similar information in 2016 when they examined the strength of existing research on the benefits of the arts.

Greene writes that based on the strength of previous research showing there was no positive transference of skills from the arts to other subject areas, they didn’t include that as part of their research design for the NEA study. However, since it wouldn’t cost more to process the data to answer the question about whether skills were transferable, they added that to part of their analysis assuming it would confirm past research that there are not statistically significant effects.

Even though they did find a statistically significant effect, Greene says that given the strength of previous research, their findings are not sufficient to invalidate what has been found.

We still do not believe that arts instruction and experiences have a direct effect on math or ELA ability. We think this because the bulk of prior research tells us so, and because it is simply implausible that two extra field trips to an arts organization conveyed a significant amount of math and ELA knowledge.

Our best guess is that test scores may have risen because the extra arts activities increased student interest and engagement in school. Looking at two different measures of student conscientiousness,…we find that treatment students experienced a significant increase on these outcomes, which may be indicators of school engagement…Maybe arts-focused field trips do not teach math or reading, but they do make students more interested in their school that does teach math and reading.

Greene says that this is just a guess or that their results might just be a fluke.

For my money, the arts improving student interest and engagement is a much better claim than improving test scores. As I have discussed before, the arts are not well served when they are seen as having a utilitarian purpose. While improving student engagement in subject matter is still a utilitarian view, it is a much more general measure than test scores. You start to move away from how many concertos and paintings are needed to raise test scores by five points.

However, just like with the economic value argument, I strongly suspect that you can substitute other activities in the arts’ place and find student engagement improves. Increasing opportunities for free play, recess, field trips, experiential learning, etc and focusing less on tests will probably improve engagement quite a bit.

Fundraising Is Now Everyone’s Job Too

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Yesterday I noted that I was interested to learn that $5 million in revenue was something of a dividing line between theaters which supported themselves primarily by ticket revenue (above $5 million) and those that received the majority of their support via donations (below $5 million).

That doesn’t mean that the larger revenue theaters don’t need to do much fundraising. Back in January there was an article in American Theatre that talked about how artistic directors are increasingly expected to join the executive directors and development staff in soliciting donations.

For some years now I have written about how marketing is the responsibility of everyone in the organization. It appears this is becoming the case with fundraising as well.

Michael Ritchie, artistic director of Center Theatre Group … puts the situation more urgently.

“Everyone in our building is ostensibly a fundraiser,” he said. “That’s the new reality for nonprofit theatres. We are all more dependent than ever on the success of our fundraising efforts. Fundraising is no longer optional for an artistic director; it’s an imperative.”

In an August 2017 American Theatre online article reporting on artistic leadership succession, Disney Theatrical Group president Thomas Schumacher suggested a reason for the new urgency: the global economic crisis of a decade ago. “Any artistic director who gets hired today will also be expected to go out and raise an awful lot of money,” said Schumacher, who spent five years on staff at the Mark Taper Forum. “That’s just different.”

The artistic directors they interviewed for the story varied in how comfortable they felt being part of the solicitation efforts. Some were comfortable with it from the start, others mentioned the fear and anxiety they felt. At the same time, many spoke about financial difficulties which had forced them to become more adroit in these types of interactions. Many estimated they spent between 25-30% of their time on fundraising, though one estimated it much higher:

Abe Rybeck, the founder and executive artistic director of…The Theater Offensive in Boston, said, “Sometimes it feels like I spend 120 percent of my time doing fundraising, and it also feels like that’s way less than I’m supposed to be doing.”

One thing I was really curious about after reading the article was whether the added responsibility of fundraising had changed the perception of the artistic director’s role in an organization. For a long time there was something of a stereotype that the managing or executive director of a theater was there to keep the artistic director’s ambitions in check. While there have definitely been some contentious power struggles in this arena, I think the stereotype may have served to perpetuate the roles by giving license for the artistic director to say yes until being told no.

This may have been another facet of the larger general stereotype that artists didn’t need to know about business and such considerations would only serve to limit their vision. Likewise, getting artistic directors involved in fundraising might be a manifestation of the recent general push for artists to cultivate business skills.

Since artistic directors are being asked to get involved with the one area of a non-profit organization everyone would be happier to avoid, I am hoping it has gone a long way toward dispelling the perception that the artistic directors are the irresponsible dreamers of the organization. Reading what the artistic directors had to say about participating in donor solicitations, it is pretty clear they have an appreciation of the costs of executing their vision.

The Broadway Box Used To Be Such A Nice Neighborhood Til Those Non-Profits Moved In

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Rob Meiksins had a piece on Non-Profit Quarterly that discussed what the non-profit Second Stage Theater’s recent ownership of the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway might portend in terms of economic and production models since Broadway theaters have long been commercial enterprises.

Second Stage Theater becomes the fourth non-profit currently producing in a Broadway stage. Meiksins wonders if this represents a growing trend that will break over 100 years of history for Broadway.

In addition to this being an interesting topic to ponder upon, I wanted to point the article out because Meiksins takes the time to explain the difference between Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, Regional Theater and Community Theater.  If you aren’t really familiar with the theater world, this can help you understand a little bit about these terms. Though there are further gradations, especially in regional theater, that even theater people can be confused about.

Meiksins goes into a bit of the history of how each of these classifications emerged from a desire to offer alternatives to the preceding structure. In some cases it was a matter of geography—development of significant institutions outside of NYC. In other cases it was a matter of pushing creative boundaries.

Often the differences between each category are economic. I was interested to read that non-profit theaters with revenues in excess of $5 million gain more than 50% of funds through earned ticket revenue while those with budgets below $5 million depend more heavily on donations.

The challenge for non-profit Second Stage Theater operating in a space classified as a Broadway house with the attendant higher union pay rates and staffing is,

….nonprofit theater companies like Second Stage have to rely much more heavily on ticket sales to offset the higher expenses they are incurring in these large, formerly commercial venues. Although they are far more accessible price-wise to the average theater-goer than a Broadway show, they are still far more expensive than the average Off-Broadway house. This is also reflected in the TCG report which indicates that larger theaters had a lower than average subscriber renewal rate: subscribers were not returning for another year at the same rate as they do for less expensive houses.

There is an implication that the additional presence of a non-profit entity producing within the “Broadway Box” may represent a shift away from the commercial content on Broadway toward quality fare with a more focused agenda. Another article mentioned that Second Stage summer 2018 production of Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee at the Helen Hayes Theater will mark the first time a play by an Asian-American woman has appeared on Broadway.

It may be difficult to imagine interest in the big splashy productions like The Lion King, Wicked and the upcoming Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ever waning to the point that additional Broadway venues are sold to non-profit companies. However, it bears remembering that the biggest hit in recent Broadway history, Hamilton, transferred to Broadway after being wholly funded and developed at the very non-profit Public Theater.

There are a number of other differences between typical Broadway productions and non-profit theater that aren’t covered in the article that can serve to illustrate how significant a trend toward non-profits might be.

For example, Broadway productions are typically funded by investors who theoretically have an opportunity to recoup their money if the show does well versus non-profit productions which are supported by donors and ticket revenue (as I am sure most readers are probably aware.)

There is also a continuity that exists from year to year and production to production in non-profits whereas, other than the person with the keys to the door, commercial Broadway theaters start from a blank slate when a new show moves in to the space.

Somewhat unspoken in all this, except in the title of the Non-Profit Quarterly article,  (Nonprofits On and Off Broadway: The Search for Enterprise Models), and some oblique references, is that there is a potential for a new hybrid business model to emerge from all this activity.

It wasn’t so long ago that the hot topic on arts blogs was basically “What’s so great about non-profit status?” There was quite a bit of discussion about alternative organizational structures and business models. While the conversation has largely settled down, the need for options hasn’t disappeared.

Love/Hate Relationship With Focus Groups

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The Guardian had a long read piece on focus groups earlier this month. As I was reading, about how the companies commissioning the focus groups had difficulty accepting the results, I was struck by how similar it sounded to the accusations of elitism and arrogance often leveled at arts and cultural organizations.

I began to realize that this type of arrogance isn’t really distinctive to arts and cultural organizations, it is pretty much characteristic of any entity offering services and goods to the public, be it corporations or politicians.  If anything, the fact that the arts and culture sector worries about being out of touch may be to their credit.

The article says focus groups get a bad rap across the board,

The public resents the mediocre outcomes of a focus-grouped world, feeling that the culture of consultation dumbs down our politics, entertainment and just about everything else. The clients who commission focus groups to give feedback on a new product or political initiative resent the obligation to listen to ordinary, non-expert people, and often feel humiliated by their judgments. Everyone imagines the participants to be idiots.

The companies who commission focus groups tend to hate the group participants, which the authors and those interview for the article attribute to various reasons. Some from the political or corporate class resent having to listen to “the people.” A number of focus group facilitators commented that clients are overly focused on the fact that participants are being paid and as a result think there is no need to feel respect or gratitude for the participants.

I thought this passage was particularly applicable to the arts:

Another complaint made by clients is that the people in the focus groups are not the target consumer…people from the agency would sit behind the screen during a focus group, and when it was over they would say: “Boy, did you bring in a bunch of stupid consumers. Our consumer isn’t like that. Our consumer is young, sophisticated, and bright. You brought in a bunch of dummies … They don’t know anything about this product.”

Many clients resent the arrogance of focus group participants, who (in their view) have way too much confidence in their own opinions, and too little humility about their own lack of expertise. Most of the time, clients hate the participants because these ordinary people provide an unbearable reality check: “[Clients] can’t believe that their customers don’t care about them or their product,” said Andy Tuck.

Sound familiar? Having preconceived assumptions about the demographics of the audience/community base you serve? Or perhaps you have created an idealized image about the community you serve? Whether they are rich or poor, they are intelligent enough to recognize what a gem they have in your organization and gratefully receive what you provide.

Yes, there is always that one person who said they have lived in the community all their lives and never stepped foot in your building before and are amazed by what they see. They are the exception to the general rule though.

Except that you are hearing this while standing in your organization. The reality you will probably experience standing on a random street is that a life lived without stepping in your building is the rule.

But as I said, I think there is some consolation to be taken in realizing that this type of arrogance is pretty much the natural result of wanting everyone to appreciate what you have built whether it is a company, political organization or arts and cultural entity. While we need to fret and worry a little that our egos are getting in the way of connecting with as wide a segment of the community as we should, we don’t need to necessarily fret that corporations and political campaigns are better at it than we are. Their research and execution are just better funded –and often times even that falls flat.

Can Your Organization Afford Empathy?

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For about a month now I have been pondering a post Seth Godin made about the limits of empathy and how it might apply to customer relations in an performing arts setting.

In the context of a customer who wants a refund on a car purchase after a broken limb prevents them from driving, Godin writes,

But empathy doesn’t require you to reach into your pocket because the customer has rewritten the terms of the deal and is undermining the business you’ve built to serve others.

Instead, it means that you can see his pain and that you’re completely okay with this person not buying from you again. That through the mist of pain and percocet, it’s entirely possible that he doesn’t have the reserves to be empathic to you, that he can’t see it through your eyes. And you probably can’t force him to.

So empathy leads to, “I hear you, I see you, and if you need to walk away, we’ll understand. We hope you’ll see it the way we do one day, but right now, I can’t solve your problem.”

We have occasionally had situations where people feel we should give them a refund for a performance that has occurred due to situations where they chose not to attend. Some times it was because they decided it was too cold, it rained too hard or because their road hadn’t been cleared two days after it stopped snowing. None of this providing an impediment to hundreds of other people. Other times there are some strong indications that they want a refund because they decided they wanted to do something else.

I am not sure how often Godin’s scenario of people wanting a refund on a car because they broke an arm actually happens. The reality is, people do have the option of doing something other than participate in an arts and cultural activity and often exercise that option. We can’t necessarily be philosophical in the way we respond to requests for refunds in the face of this reality.

One alternative is to have so much business that you are okay if a person chooses not to buy from you again.

We are all experienced with this type of scenario. Drew McManus just experienced that this past week.

In the context of Godin’s post, Drew was trying to rewrite the terms of the deal –pay a penalty if you want to change or cancel. It’s right there in the reams of small print you acknowledge when you buy the ticket. In American Airlines’ mind, it would be undermining the business they have built to serve others if they just let anyone cancel or reschedule.

On the other hand, not to excuse these policies, this summer American Airlines wanted to give pilots and flight attendants a pay raise outside of contract negotiations in recognition for a difficult time employees faced during the merger with US Airways and Wall Street sent their stock plummeting.

““We are troubled by [American’s] wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion to its labor groups. In addition to raising fixed costs, American’s agreement with its labor stakeholders establishes a worrying precedent, in our view, both for American and the industry,” J.P. Morgan analyst Jamie Baker wrote

So the fact that empathy is apt to be punished might be contributing to a cascade effect in corporate/organizational culture.

Perhaps one positive result of many arts organizations being small enough that they worry about losing customers even over ridiculous refund requests is that there is a tendency to treat constituents with a higher degree of empathy than they would receive elsewhere. Perhaps working on providing that can become something of a competitive advantage for some organizations.

There are no clear prescriptive answers to the type of refund requests I mentioned earlier. Each has to be addressed as they present themselves with the understanding that we may or may not damage our relationship with someone in the process.

Knight Fdn Looks To Fund Technology Connecting People With Art

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A heads up to people who have, (or know people with), innovative ideas using technology to connect people with arts and culture, the Knight Foundation is looking for project ideas via the Knight Prototype Fund.

Unlike some of the other projects the Knight Foundation funds, these projects don’t need to be set in the communities it traditionally supports which is why I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention. As the prototype term suggests, they expect some of the concepts to be in the early stages of development.

Applicants don’t necessarily have to work for an organization. We’re looking for ideas from arts organizations, artists, technologists, designers, educators, researchers and others inside or outside of institutions who are eager to experiment. We’re open to diverse approaches and perspectives on the use of technology to connect people to the arts, and seek to identify projects that have the potential to be replicated by others in the field.

What can we build to help arts organizations expand their use of technology? How can we use the qualities of new mediums to create unparalleled experiences? How can we replicate solutions, so that more in the field benefit? How can we learn more about the people we are trying to reach and design solutions that understand their needs? How can arts institutions provide magic outside of their four walls? How can cultural organizations breathe warmth into technology?

[…]

We hope to invest in projects that have provocative questions at their core that can only be answered through the act of making them a reality. Grantees will join together over a nine- month sprint to learn innovation techniques and test ideas.

They anticipate the average grant will be around $50,000. Deadline is March 6. They are hosting an online Q&A from 1 to 2 pm ET on February 21 (connection instructions at bottom of the page)

As an example of the type of thing the Knight Foundation has been doing lately, they partnered with the creators of Pokemon Go to see if similar games or tools could help build community.

It sounds like they would be open to projects that pushed the envelop even further as well as repurposing existing tools in a manner few people have considered.

One of the things I most appreciate about what the Knight Foundation proposes is that they are going to provide applicants with training in innovative methods as well as bringing them together to learn from each other. This acknowledges that innovation isn’t generated in a vacuum or emerge from a lone genius working in a garage, but rather builds on past work in new ways, often in collaboration with others.

Taking Arts & Culture’s Measure

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I have been cautioning the non-profit arts community about citing the economic value of the arts for over a decade now. The first time was in 2007. I wrote about it a few times in the interim, but I didn’t really start to devote time and space to the idea until the last 2-3 years.

However, if you don’t put stock in my arguments, perhaps you will find statements by celebrities with English accents to be compelling. Check out the following videos from an Arts Emergency Service convening at the Oxford Literary Festival where author Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials series) makes the same point cited in just about every piece I discussed in previous posts:

“Keep clear of economic justifications for the arts. If you do that, if you try that, you hand a weapon to the other side because they can always find ways of proving that you are wrong about it, you’ve got the figures wrong. You invite them to measure everything in terms of economic gain. My advice would be to ignore economic arguments altogether.”

Noted graphic novelist Alan Moore chimed in about “…the ridiculousness of, sort of, having to have impact. To appoint words like that to the arts, its criminal, its ridiculous.”

Pullman makes another statement that aligns with the assertions by Carter Gillies I often cite that just because something can be measured, doesn’t mean the measurement is relevant. (Diane Ragsdale also wrote a piece along these lines.)

“The government, you see, asks us to do something and then gives us the wrong tools to do it. [unintelligible] says, ‘Look I want you to measure this piece of wood. And here’s a tool for you.’ And gives you a grindstone. And one thing you can say is, ‘Why do you want to measure this wood anyway? This is firewood, I’ll burn it to keep myself warm.’ Questions arise from that. What is the right tool for measuring the arts and do we need to measure them anyway? What are we measuring them for?”

There is another video on the Arts Emergency page where the panel, which includes Arts Emergency co-founder, Josie Long, discuss the false dichotomy between art and science that is worth checking out.

As I was looking back at all the posts I made on this subject, I found the following tweet I had linked to many years ago.  It struck me that if you can’t entirely control the language your advocates use, request they make this one small change in terminology can help start to shift the “economic benefit” mindset. (Though perhaps not something to use in the context of immigration discussions.)

You Can Have All The Charity Golf Tournaments You Want When You Own The Courses

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Generous donations to a non-profit can often become more of a burden than a blessing which is why it is important to have a good donation policy and properly evaluate the impact of the donation upon the organization.

According to a story in Non Profit Quarterly, this is exactly the challenge being faced by the Great American Songbook Foundation in Carmel, IN.  The organization with a budget of less than $1 million was approached with a non-strings attached donation of an estate valued at $30 million.

….includes a couple of golf courses, a pool, a fully furnished 50,000-square-foot main house, and a clubhouse—all set on 107 acres. There are no conditions on the contribution.

The upkeep alone could easily eat up the entire current budget of the organization, what with the nine staff required to maintain the property, and it should be pretty darn clear to any manager or board who have taken a trip or two around the block that such a gift could potentially ruin the organization.

[…]

This isn’t the first time the Simons have tried to move the property, which has covenants that disallow certain kinds of development. In fact, the property has been on the market since 2014 at $25 million with no takers. Additionally, a previous attempt to contribute the property to the Indiana University Foundation in 2008 fell through.

The Songbook Foundation Board is going to take three years to study the use of the estate which is probably a wise course of action. The NPQ article notes that since they accepted the donation of the estate, they will bear the costs associated with maintaining the estate during that time.

There are a number of options available to the Songbook Foundation according to another article.

The foundation could decide to use the main house as a museum and center of operations, subject to a rezone. The golf course land could be sold in a plan similar to Estridge’s but with lot sizes that meet the covenants. That money could be used to support operation of the museum.

The entire property, including the main house, could be sold to a developer. That money could be used to support the foundation or build the Great American Songbook Museum closer to The Palladium, possibly next to the soon-to-be-built luxury hotel, The Carmichael.

[…]

“It’s a very generous gift,” Brainard said. “It’s an asset that could be used by the Foundation to leverage for future donations. It’s very important to include neighbors in any conversation about any use and then proceed in such a way that enhance’s property values in the area.”

…He [McDermott] said charity events could be held on the golf course and added that a donation this size is a signal to other potential donors who were thinking of writing a check.

I have to admit, given the number of fundraisers that occur on golf courses, I was amused by the thought that these guys may be the only non-profit to own part of their “supply chain.”

If they decide to keep the properties, they will almost definitely need to set up a separate administrative body to keep themselves from getting bogged down in the business of overseeing the estates. Not to mention there might be issues that conflict with their non-profit status. The unrelated business incomes from the estates could potentially be 25+ times greater than that of the non-profit. It will be really interesting to see what they decide to do.

I made a post on the ArtsHacker site about two years ago that included lists and links to various resources one can use to create a gift acceptance policy and to evaluate the suitability of accepting gifts when donors approach the organization.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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