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Not Everything Is For You

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There is a video of Nina Simon speaking at the Minnesota History as part of her Art of Relevance book tour early this month. Many things she said jumped out at me and I am going to pass the video along to a couple other people in the hope of starting some conversations.

Around the 47 minute mark she talked about responding to organizational insiders who are dissatisfied by programming that seeks to attract new audiences.  She uses the metaphor about going to a restaurant and how you don’t suddenly decide to boycott the restaurant if they start adding vegetarian and heart healthy options to their regular menu.  In her particular experience long time insiders complained about interactive programming and community festivals, she pointed out that the new people coming to those events weren’t complaining that the museum was offering programming and opportunities that insiders valued.

When she talked about that, it occurred to me that often resistance to new programming is  rooted in the belief that everything should be for oneself. The truth is, everything isn’t for you.

Granted, some times new programs are part of a zero sum equation, especially in a performing arts situation where there are finite resources and dates. A new initiative may displace one of regular events. Instead of 10 things designed for you, you only get nine. For a lot of people even 1/10 of a change can result in them feeling the organization is no longer relevant to them. This may especially be true in the case of subscription holders.  That one bad grape in ten ruins the value of the whole package.

In this situation it can be a little tricky to say, that’s okay you don’t need to come to that show, we have other discount configurations that may suit your needs. Not only might your delivery of that message be flawed and sound offensive, but even with perfect delivery, the patron may only hear “that’s okay you don’t need to come.”

Even if the new initiatives are additions and don’t displace any of the current offerings, patrons, donors, board members can still feel the organization is no longer the one they value, despite having lost nothing.

Or at least lost nothing but the desire to keep the delight they feel to themselves. Nina addresses that a couple minutes earlier with the response, wouldn’t you want to share the joy you feel with everyone else? She says even though in their hearts they want to say, “No way!” it is difficult to admit it aloud.

Even though Nina makes it sound easy. Even though she cites examples of people who are excited to see new vibrancy come to the organization they value, it isn’t easy to go against the inertia of thinking that everything that is being done is being done for you.

Regularly reinforcing, gently and diplomatically, of course, the sense that “What We Do, We Do For YOU (collectively)” rather than “for you” (singularly) is important….even though we do want everyone to feel individually invested.

I think Nina’s restaurant metaphor is a useful one. Most of the time restaurants make menu changes and it barely registers notice from people. You can assure people that while it may feel like the organization is metaphorically changing from a steakhouse to a vegetarian restaurant, that isn’t what is happening. Besides, you may find you some of the vegetarian offerings appeal to you.

(As any vegetarian will tell you, if there is a delicious vegetarian option available on a buffet, it will be cleaned out immediately by all the meat-eaters.)

 

Too Much Art To Learn, No Time For Managing You?

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One last post about the arts entrepreneurship conference I attended a couple weeks ago. Tomorrow it will be on to other things.

There are increasingly productive efforts being made toward teaching/mentoring/instilling, (whatever term you want to use), artists to manage their own careers.  I purposely didn’t use the term entrepreneurial practices because there are those that rankle at the idea artists need to measure their success in terms of economics and commerce. I have written enough about the idea that arts organizations should be run like a business to agree with that point.

On the other hand, everyone can use some sort of guidance about how to manage their lives and careers, even if it doesn’t have a commercial focus.

You Interview For A Job, Not A Career

An issue that came up at the conference was that career development offices, especially those at universities and colleges, tend to operate with a 20th century orientation on preparing to interview for a job rather than creating a career for one self. This is least helpful for students in arts disciplines where interviewing often doesn’t occupy a central role in career advancement.

The thing is, when parents come on a college visit with high school students, they ask the admissions office how many graduates get a job, not how many graduates started their own businesses or independent careers. Most parents would likely be terrified at the thought of what might happen if their defiant 16/17 year old tried to start their own company. The focus of career offices are partially driven by the expectations of tuition paying parents.

You Don’t Know You Want To Know It Until You Do

The other difficulty with trying to teach students to be more entrepreneurs mentioned at the conference is that they often aren’t in a place where they are receptive to forced instruction in that topic. One of the panelists spoke about how a visiting artist held a Q&A after conducting a master class and said she wished she had learn more about the business side in school. But she also admitted that she probably wouldn’t have paid attention at the time.

Once students have a project they become personally invested in, then they become interested in learning what is involved in making it a reality. That may be the advantage Millikin University has in having experiential learning as an institutional value. They put students in a position where they become invested in the success of something while they are in school.

Many people don’t have that experience until after they graduate and lack the easy access to advice and resources an academic setting affords. That was one of the central topics of discussion on a panel lead by Millikin professor Dr. Mark Tonelli. He presented a series of quotations from research he conducted with students and graduates.

Lives Are Ruined, Others Are Not

One graduate’s response reflected their perception of what their education lacked:

“We have a jazz degree, but no idea how to go about teaching private lessons ourselves, we have no idea how to adapt our jazz skills to the popular music scene (i.e. gigs that pay), having our heads buried in self-indulgent art music leaves us completely out of touch with current trends in music, we don’t know how to negotiate contracts, when to hire an agent, how much to pay people, where to find legal advice, we don’t even know how to do our !@#$%&* taxes…this is pathetic for a university-level bachelor degree.”

While my first impulse upon seeing this was to become indignant about how schools are failing to prepare students, there were others who presented a more moderated view.

“I feel I was fully prepared musically and artistically…it was my understanding that my degree would not encompass any business elements [so] I cannot hold it against the degree. I do feel that more business would be helpful to most students. At the same time, I am somewhat comfortable with the notion that it is an arts only degree and those who wish to make a living can sink or swim by learning business in the real world…I remember some professors saying that while the business was very important, there is just so much art to be learned that it is better to do a great job of that than diluting the degree with a mixture of art and business.”

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, of the respondents Dr. Tonelli quoted simply said they wished they could just play jazz and not have to worry about the business side at all.

Beauty Now, Sharks Later Is Not The Only Option

As a person who works on the business side of the arts, I was a little annoyed by the student being told there is so much art to be learned it is better to put off learning about business until later. If you are learning to be an artist, is learning about the business side a dilution or is it a holistic approach to the subject?

Is there so much art to be learned that some can’t be learned later? I am pretty sure there is an assumption you will need to continue honing and gaining skills after graduation. Performers take voice and acting lessons throughout their careers. Visual artists pick up new techniques and skills. Musicians study additional technique.

The way the student characterized those wanting to make a living as having to sink or swim illustrates quite a bit about how business skills are viewed.  Do instructors and mentors really want their charges to think they will be fully informed about the thing they are most passionate about in life, but if they want to do anything with it, they are on their own with the sharks?

A university/conservatory education provides the basis upon which you continue to develop over the course of your career. So why aren’t some general career management skills part of that, again with the assumption that one will need to continue to learn? If that were the case, the first graduate cited might be less discontented with their degree: aware of the basics but knowing there was more to know and having a sense of what they potentially needed to know more about.

The idea that career management skills are something separate you pick up later if you need it seemed divorced from how artists have historically managed their careers. Worse, it places the artist in a passive role, waiting to be discovered by someone else who will promote and manage them or give them a job. Certainly at a certain point one needs managers, accountants and agents to handle one’s business—but until you get to that point one really needs to be aware of how to perform many of those tasks for oneself. To be active and in control rather than simply waiting.

Very few artists have achieved success as hermits passing their work through a partially opened door to an agent. There plenty of instances when an artist has found themselves in a difficult place because they didn’t have the skills to monitor how their agents were handling their business.

Can’t Brag About Them And Not Invite Them To The Table

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I attended a presentation by Mosaic Education Network about their efforts working in conjunction with the Barnett Center at Ohio State University to provide some entrepreneurship workshops for artists in the Columbus, OH.

One of the things that impressed me was that they seemed to have made an effort to attract a more inclusive range of artists than might usually be served by such gatherings. When they spoke about how the different artists came to realize that the challenges they faced weren’t exclusive to their discipline, they mentioned that some attendees thought it was just a problem DJs were facing and visual artists likewise thought it was specific to them.

It got me thinking, how many individuals or organizations seeking to convene artists to talk about entrepreneurship would include DJs on their invite list? If I had been a little quicker with this realization, I might have thought to follow up and ask about the range of disciplines and practices that were invited.

The National Endowment for the Arts expanded their definition of what constituted arts participation when they conducted a study a few years ago. If arts organizations are going to tout those statistics to prove what a wide range of Americans are engaged with arts and cultural activities, it is probably only logical and fair to put practitioners of those disciplines on the literal and figurative invite list.

What they planned to do was hold a Create-a-thon modeled on the hack-a-thon events common in software coding, emphasizing the brain storming practices. This creative event was meant to lead off an 8 week series of workshops people would attend.

What actually ended up happening is a combination of a cautionary lesson and a testament to their nimbleness and willingness to revise their plans.

Associating the Create-a-thon with the software hack-a-thon model resulted in unanticipated expectations among some attendees. People came assuming there would be venture capitalists present and that those who gathered would help them develop their business model. That wasn’t what the organizers envisioned.

I have seen a lot of people advocate for adopted the hack-a-thon for arts and culture. I think I wrote about it myself some years ago. This problem never emerged on my radar which probably means I don’t know nearly enough about hack-a-thons to be stealing the idea.

Clearly if you are considering something along these lines it is very important to communicate exactly what will be occurring or evoke an entirely different model so that people don’t make the wrong assumptions.

They had 40 people attend the first day, but only 20 people came the second day. The presenters clarified the drop in attendance wasn’t due to the absence of venture capital at the event. Some people already knew they wouldn’t be able to make both days.

I wouldn’t normally even bring up the drop in attendance on the second day except that it helps to underscore how successfully they ended up. By the completion of the eight week series of classes/workshops, they ended up serving 76 people. While the interest initially seemed to flag, they attracted additional people through word of mouth and continued attempts to increase awareness.

But it wasn’t just good advertising. They attributed their ultimate success to their willingness to recognize the mistakes in their initial assumptions and take action to alter their plans.

They had assumed that those who were interested in taking their workshops would attend all eight weeks. They learned it was better to think about the classes in a modular fashion and allow people to attend the sessions by which they felt they would be best served.

For example, Week One focused on the Mission Statement; Week Two on Vision; Week Three on Value Proposition the artist brought; Week Four on Marketing, etc.  People only attended the workshops they felt they needed.

While they had planned to offer the classes during the day, they quickly realized that most everyone who had an interest in the workshops had day jobs and shifted to offering them in the evenings.

The presentation by the partners from Mosaic and the Barnett Center was successful by the measure of leaving me wanting to know more.

They seemed to be both working with people and embodying an ethic which are appropriate to the times and environment.

For example, you may have groaned inwardly at the mention of the Mission Statement workshop. Everyone writes these big impressive sounding statements that they can’t remember and never refer back to.  They took one artist’s wordy, paragraph long statement and boiled it down to “I manipulate fabric for curious people.”

That may sound too informal, but it is easy to remember and probably fits more organically with the artist’s vision and value proposition than most arts organization mission statements. Just try memorizing your mission statement and the fabric artist’s. Tomorrow morning I bet you can recite her’s more easily than your own. I bet her’s even fires your imagination better than your own.

In a marketing project they spoke about, an artist had been updating his Instagram followers about the progress he was making on a visual art piece. When it was done, he told them it would be hidden somewhere at a festival and provided clues about where to find it. This helped the artist promote his work and helped build a relationship with the festival when he was able to show how he had driven attendance to their event. Of course, it also contributed to the relationship the artist had with his supporters.

Finally, one of the things the Mosaic Education Network and Barnett Center presenters emphasized for those planning to do Art Entrepreneurship training for their communities went right to the heart of the big debate about paying artists.

Don’t talk to artists about how their art should be profitable and how you are teaching them to be successful, while simultaneously asking those who are helping you provide the workshops to do so for free/the exposure.  No one doubts it is difficult to find funding to support training programs like this, but the people who are helping you should profit from working with you.

Why Is This So Tiring If The Students Are Doing All The Work?

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Yesterday I wrote about the exciting things happening at the student-run ventures at Millikin University. Something I should mention, all these ventures are being run at the undergraduate level. You might naturally assume that students in the school’s MBA program were the impetus behind some of these efforts, but they are all undergraduate run.

While these programs are certainly worthy of emulating, one thing to be aware of is that when you are in the role of the supervising faculty member, it can take as much effort to restrain yourself from interfering or “fixing” things for a student venture as it does to teach the subject in a classroom setting.

Julie Shields, Director of the Center of Entrepreneurship, oversees the Blue Connection gallery located in the Decatur Arts Council building in downtown. I asked her if the software the information systems class developed to help Blue Connection I mentioned in yesterday’s post was used after that initial semester. Among the things the software did was cross reference sales records with weather and social media campaigns to help the gallery staff make decisions about marketing and inventory.

She said that every semester she has the students write a page of advice and wisdom for the next class. At the start of the next semester, she puts the paper in the middle of the room and tells the students it is available for their use so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel or repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. In all the years she has been teaching the class, no one has picked up the paper.

She said that it is difficult for her not to step in and fix things. When she has fixed things, she has regretted it because it was difficult to get the students to assume the degree of responsibility they should. She said students have often thought she was mad at them because she opted to bite her tongue and walk out of the room rather than submit to her impulse.

Coming from a performance background, my first inclination is to attribute the decision to eschew the advice of the earlier classes to the fact that visual artists often work alone versus the more cooperative theater environment. I am pleased as heck that the students in the Pipe Dreams Theatre company I spoke about yesterday engage in long term planning.

A visual artist vs. theater artist comparison isn’t really fair because the gallery is run by both business and visual arts students, creating an entirely different dynamic than that of the theatre company.  Not to mention, no two businesses ever operate identically.

Both the visual arts students and business students start out expressing stereotypical sentiments. The visual arts students wonder why they need to know the business stuff and the business students want to know why they have to be involved with art.

In addition, each has different working habits. The business students are ready to leave at 5 pm while the visual arts students may get inspired and come in at midnight to rearrange the displays. However, they have to work together to establish plans and procedures, including operating hours during which they will staff the gallery. I didn’t ask, but my guess is that there is a minimum number of hours a week they are required to be open. The one mandatory period of operation is during the First Friday gallery walk.

Julie Shields has some anecdotes about semesters where things gelled well. One business student admitted he didn’t know much about artistic quality, but he was able to provide a great analysis of sales trends that lead to one of the more financially successful periods.

Again, I think Millikin University is doing a lot of great work in enabling these student run ventures. The emphasis is definitely on Work.  I am not going to even try to tackle how they establish criteria for grading except to say there isn’t a direct relationship between financial success and a passing grade.

One additional case I wanted to mention which is not a student venture but taken along side them might be an indication of a burgeoning arts industry in Decatur, IL. During the conference, we visited the Heroic Age Art Center which is planned as something of an arts incubator. The original intention was to develop a video production center in the bottom floor and then create artist space upstairs. There was so much interest and demand, they ended up renovating the artist spaces first and all that space has been rented. Millikin plans to have a presence in the center at some point, but they will have to wait for the rest of the renovations to be completed first.

Why I Was So Excited To Spend The Weekend In Decatur, IL

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As I had mentioned yesterday, I had been looking forward to participating in the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference at Millikin University for a year due to their student run venture program which include in music publishing, a visual arts gallery, a theater space, a printing press, a publishing house, a printmaking studio and a radio station.

These are part of the Arts Entrepreneurship program, however the university has long had a philosophy of experiential learning.  The essence of what many university faculty and staff members expressed over the weekend was that students were told not to wait for someone to give them permission, but to jump in and try an idea out.

The work the students are doing and the results being accomplished are very impressive. As you have probably guessed, I was very excited to see it all first hand.

While ideally the decisions and responsibilities for each of these ventures would be borne by the students, the extent to which this happens seems to range between ~80%-98%, dependent on the program.

For example, one of instructors in the music publishing area spoke of how much time running the music label took and his efforts to get the students to bear more of the responsibility. On the other hand, he noted students worked very autonomously in other parts of the music production program.

There was a session in which an information systems professor spoke of a project his students had done with the student run gallery as a client. His classes worked on many similar projects for other departments and some external clients. Noticing that these clients were left without software support at the end of every semester, students created a venture independent of any class to service the software.

The conference was held during the university’s Fall Break so unfortunately we really only got to speak with students involved with the Pipe Dreams Theatre venture and the Blue Connection visual arts gallery.

I brought my camera with me so I could take pictures of what I experienced, but looking at the images I realized that these places look like any other theater or gallery space you might find anywhere. There is nothing to distinguish them from any other such place. That is probably to the students’ credit that you can’t easily discern that they are in charge.

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I did want to share this one image from a presentation the Pipe Dreams students gave. They made this sign so I don’t know if the course objective is officially “To run the company in the general direction of not into the ground.”

The work load is the same whether you are taking the class for one credit or three. Everyone does get paid. According to the instructor Sara Theis, the most people have been paid is about $120. Other times she has cut checks for around $2.50. This is all determined by the students.

Pipe Dreams seems to be the venture in which students are more involved and invested.  They hire staff, they buy the equipment, do the marketing, write the grants, choose and cast the shows.

The space they occupy is slightly off campus. Other than the university covering the heat and the salary for the instructor, the students are responsible for everything in the building.  When one season loses money, the next cohort needs to deal with the deficit.

What probably impressed me most was that the students involved with Pipe Dreams are mindful of what the next group will inherit and make long term plans for the viability of the organization. For example, I thought the requirement that a student be involved for three consecutive semesters before they could be part of the managing board was dictated by the instructor, Sara Theis. She assured me that was entire the students’ decision because they saw the need to ensure continuity.

These long term plans include replacing aging equipment. One of the things they mentioned was that it took about three cycles of students before they were able to get ETC to grant them new dimmer system for their lighting.

There was a disagreement about whether the theatre seating was acceptable or not. After learning from an audience survey that people were uncomfortable, they created a plan to purchase new seating.

When they do midnight shows for students, they conduct a risk assessment in advance and institute bag checks.

In a separate panel of current students and alumni of Pipe Dreams, the students were well aware of the value of the experience. They appreciated the opportunity learn to fail and fail a lot in the relative safety of a university setting. They were also pleased that they could walk into a job interview with some realistic experience on their resumes.

Another young woman said that the experience over the years completely disillusioned her about a career in the arts. She said she was grateful because she might have spent 7-10 more years pursuing a career and ending up miserable. I think it is to the program’s credit that they put students in a position where they can really come to that realization as a consequence of choices they freely made for themselves rather than through the direction/requirement of faculty.

They were proud of what they accomplished. One spoke of the way the cohorts he belonged to gradually changed the dynamics of the Pipe Dreams company from safe, pandering programming to the more challenging content they produce now.

Some of their marketing campaigns caused the university to institute new rules about how student events can be promoted. One of students said they make no apologies for trying out new ideas.

They also have gotten some flack from the Millikin Theatre program for snatching up valued members of the campus acting pool which I think is awesome.

While turnover of students impacted continuity, they said it also brought new perspectives and skillsets to address problems the company faced.  They hold retreats every semester to help orient new students and one of their recent projects has been to create procedure manuals in each of the areas of responsibility to hand down to future generations.

Since this post is getting a little long, tomorrow I will offer some insights about some of the other student run ventures. The Blue Connection gallery provides a good contrasting examples to the Pipe Dreams venture.

Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Accounts Ledger?

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This weekend I got to do something I waited an entire year to do…go to Decatur, IL. Your first response may be to wonder why the heck I was looking forward to that for an entire year. The reason is because the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education conference was being held at Millikin University.

At last year’s conference, I had learned about Millikin’s student run arts businesses and was eager to see it in person. I will just say the experience did not disappoint. Though I am still slogging through my notes from various sessions at different student run ventures so my readers will need to be patient for at least another day before learning more about that portion of the experience.

What I wanted to discuss today is a session I attended on one of the bugbears central to arts entrepreneurship — financial literacy. When people talk about artists needing to be more business minded, that is probably one of the top three issues they envision needing attention.

Of the seven people on the panel, two were accountants that work closely with artists, Jessica Jones and Elaine Grogan Luttrull. It was something that Jessica said that really gelled the whole subject for me. She mentioned that there is an emotional and cultural barrier everyone experiences when it comes to money and finances. It isn’t just people in the arts and it isn’t about numbers being inherently intimidating. She said that she has helped engineers and scientists who work with numbers all day and they have the same issues as everyone else when it comes to finances.

I don’t remember if it was Elaine or Jessica who mentioned it, but they were somewhat opposed to the concept that people should learn “basic skills” because the term means different things to different people. A CPA can look at materials and identify revenues sources in seconds whereas other people need to make an effort and consider the skills far from basic. Jessica commented that you can’t just carve out a top 10 or 20 list of things people need to know, rather people need to become comfortable with the language, concepts and terminology so they know what to ask and how to understand a conversation about their financial situation.

Ken Weiss from University of North Carolina reinforced this idea saying that it isn’t just important for people to know terminology, but the relevance. His school does a session on intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, etc. with a guest speaker who gets the students engaged by helping them understand how these issues help their career.

This idea emerged multiple times in different sessions at the conference. People discussed how their students had the “a-ha!” moment when they came to the realization that they needed to know something for themselves and not just because the professor said they need to know it.

One of the two CPAs spoke about how helpful it was for people to learn what resources were available in terms of things like software to handle accounting, sales records, etc., and then create operational plans and procedures based on whatever resources were most suited to their needs.

That way you aren’t constantly faced with the prospect of processing your numbers and you can spend the majority of your time doing the work you love. Sometimes the biggest impediment is being unaware that these resources exist and being intimidated by the thought of keeping track of it all. Ultimately it comes back to haunt you when it comes time to report your income for taxes.

Others on the panel commented that some arts disciplines were worse than others in recognizing the need to teach students skills to help manage their careers. However with the general concern about university students taking on so much debt, many schools are moving toward making financial literacy a skill that all students must possess.

What Arts and Cultural Concepts Should Every American Know?

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The Aspen Institute has a project in which the arts and culture community might want to participate. They are asking “What Every American Should Know.” They acknowledge right off that the project name might be controversial because it evokes E.D. Hirsh’s book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know which sparked a lot of debate.

I have a clear memory of picking up the book while house sitting for a professor and subsequently having a conversation with him about his objections to some of the topics on Hirsh’s list.

The Aspen Institute asks,

In our sweeping and turbulent nation, how can we cultivate a sense of shared culture and identity? The more fragmented we become, the more necessary it is for us to have a common vocabulary – a shared set of cultural and historical references – that we can all collect and understand.

I think the way the current election campaign is being conducted probably underscores the necessity of the type of thing they are doing.

The Aspen Institute list is an extension of an essay Eric Liu, executive director of the Aspen Institute American Citizenship and Identity Program wrote. In it, he defends the utility of Hirsh’s effort, in part because even protest movements need to employ the shared vocabulary of the culture they are opposing in order to be effective. He also acknowledges that a new list of 5000 topics needs to be constructed for today’s American citizens.

They have set up a website where you can contribute your top 10 topics. They have a selected lists from various distinguished persons such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, David Henry Hwang, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as examples. I hope they eventually make more lists public. I know 90% of the topics on the selected lists, but the other 5% are new to me so I am curious to know more about what I don’t know.

It probably says something about the validity of Top 10 lists on the Internet that I only started to consider this to be a serious effort when I saw they are scheduling in-person sessions at libraries to discuss the idea of “What Every American Needs To Know.” (scroll to the bottom to see if they are coming to a library near you.)

Obviously I think a lot of arts and culture topics should appear on some lists so the more people that contribute, the better. My only question is what will be done with the lists and will it contribute to effecting the change they seek.

Maybe it is enough just to have conversations in libraries. That may plant the seeds for change that are needed by getting people to talk and relate to one another. Whether it can counteract the bile one finds online remains to be seen.

Only $25 For A Ticket?….We Must Be INSANE!!!!

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In a recent post Seth Godin proposed two ways of approaching your business, “Either you dazzle with as much hype as you can get away with, or you invest in delighting people, regardless of how difficult it is.”

It was the example that he used to support the idea of hyping the hell out of something that left me incredulous.

Years ago, I asked fabled direct marketer Joe Sugarman about the money-back guarantee he offered on the stuff he sold through magazine ads. He said 10% of the people who bought asked for their money back… and if any product dipped below 10%, he’d make the claims more outrageous until it got back up. He told me that this was a sweet spot, somewhere between amazing people with promises and disappointing them with reality.

The idea that someone decided they aren’t being outrageous enough if a certain percentage of people aren’t asking for their money back sort of blew my mind. It goes against the whole concept of customer service. As Shakespeare writes in the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing, “…the fashion of the world is to avoid cost [trouble], and you encounter it.”

But this got me to wondering if a super-hype approach might work for the arts. Trevor O’Donnell is constantly saying that arts marketing doesn’t focus on the audience member and instead references concepts and accolades that are only relevant to insiders. Hyping an event like a cheesy used car commercial would break people of that habit.

I am sure there would be a lot of outcry that this approach was demeaning the work, but if it is successful at attracting a larger following, it might be worth considering.

Note–I am not suggesting anything be changed about the event. People often express concern about dumbing down an experience. I am only suggesting the advertising be dumbed down.

Yeah, I know even that would be a hard sell. I can imagine what my board might think if the advertising strayed from portraying a certain image of the organization.

Recent conversation has focused on the need for the arts community to move away from the conceit that all people need is one exposure and they will be hooked on the arts. I think that is the right mindset.

However, if people arrive with the expectation they are going to leave amazed and so ecstatic they will barely be able to walk straight for an hour afterward, they may convince themselves that they are having a better time than they would have without being primed by the hype.

Of course, there are going to be people who are disappointed, but that is part of the calculation. In fact, adopting this philosophy, you are paying close attention to make sure that ratio doesn’t fall below a certain point.

Probably the biggest difference between circa 1979 when Sugarman’s company was operating at its peak and now is that people can more easily share their dissatisfaction with each other.

Also, most arts events are communal experiences vs. the individual experience of purchasing something from direct marketing. If 10% of 1000 people are upset, everyone is going to know it immediately and it will sour the experience of the other 900.

There is nothing to say you need to make utterly ridiculous claims and aim for a 10% dissatisfaction rate. If you stage pictures and write copy giving the impression audiences are enjoying themselves five times more than they actually are, you probably still won’t be flirting with fraud – but you will be focusing more on audiences. (If your audiences already look like they are having an awesome time, just hype it by a factor of 3 😉 )

If you do resort to a used car type ad, talking about how you must be insane to sell tickets to such a great show for so low a price or for letting people into your museum to see art for FREE! ….well if you balance charm and humor it might help you make progress convincing people that you are a true, worthwhile asset in the community.

Yes, I suppose arts organizations might double down on talking about how great they are instead of how great a time the audience will have. I have to believe there is a limit they will reach where the only option to escalate the hype is to start focusing on audience interests.

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If You Can’t Poach ‘Em, Praise ‘Em

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A few months back when Ceci Dadisman and Drew McManus first floated the idea of recognizing Creative Arts Administrators to the rest of us ArtHacker authors, my first thought was that the project shouldn’t just be about who is doing a great job, but rather who you would love to poach from another company.

I have mentioned this idea in something of an off-handed way in my posts from time to time. We frequently hear about people being lured or headhunted away in relation to for-profit companies. A recent discussion my board had about recruiting new members cited the fact that one woman was pursued and lured to a new job by another company in town as part of her qualifications and value to our board.

You rarely hear this sort of thing in the non-profit realm. I don’t know if people are concerned about being perceived as cutthroat. Perhaps more likely, they don’t feel they can offer pay, benefits or work environment competitive enough to entice people to leave their current job. Intangible factors like idealism about the work being done might also come into play.

All this being said, having a more competitive job market can be beneficial. First of all, it can raise employee morale if they are being courted or see colleagues being courted. It gives a sense that someone external to the organization is paying attention and recognizes their contribution. Not to mention contributing to the sense that a path to advancement exists within the industry.

This type of competition can also help justify the organization’s overhead ratio and funding requests if they can do more than cite the hypothetical need to offer good salaries to retain people. If you are losing talented people to poaching by other non-profits, that says something. (Granted, if you are losing people to poor salaries, that says something as well.)

I should note that I am not just daydreaming about how great it would be if non-profit arts organizations had to compete for the best talent. Drew McManus and I recently had a conversation where we both observed that search firms were increasingly being listed in job postings.

We were a little wary about whether this was a good thing since some of the firms don’t appear to have any experience conducting searches in the arts and culture field. This could be another indication of boards of directors looking to run the arts “more like business” and may result in organizations being lead by people with little practical background in the arts.

But it could also be an indication that arts organizations are seeing the need to have the recruitment and hiring process handled with greater care and alacrity than they possess.

So in time news that people are being actively headhunted away from an organization may come with greater regularity. Depending on what generalizations about Millennials you subscribe to, this may have the effect of attracting a greater number of very talent people to non-profit work as they pursue a desire to do meaningful work. But with that may come a lot more job switching than arts organizations are used to.

So granted, there is a fair degree of speculation in all this. Bottom line though. If you know someone in the arts you would really love to have working with you, but don’t feel like you could snatch them away —Nominate them on ArtsHacker.

And if you are working with an amazing person right now and having them snatched away would break your heart, nominate them on ArtsHacker and let them know their work is valued.

And if you are afraid calling attention to a person’s awesomeness is going to see them headhunted and it is better to keep the person hidden from sight, well you may already be creating an uncomfortable work environment that will cause them to leave anyhow.

When Serving Bad Food To Patrons Can Solidify Their Loyalty

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Over the years I have made many posts riffing on the idea that marketing it is the responsibility of the entire organization, not just a single department. For that reason, I was happy to see a recent case study report TRG Arts posted on that topic.

Working with Performing Arts Fort Worth (PAFW), they emphasized the need for everyone to be involved in the effort by simply including everyone in the conversation.  PAFW started having patron loyalty meetings where they discussed the issues at hand, including the cost of retaining long time supporters versus attracting new individuals.

That’s when it clicked, and the floodgate of ideas opened up! House management said they were going to make patron loyalty a regular topic at their usher meetings. Someone suggested they send patrons a voucher for a free drink in their birthday month. Someone else suggested they turn the process for testing new concession products into a tasting event for loyal patrons. There were many more ideas that came up, and there were a number of people who said they would take responsibility for implementing ideas. “I never was a part of that process” quickly became “I understand our shared goal and I want to help.”

I particularly liked the idea of involving loyal patrons in a tasting of new concession products. Even if the new options weren’t tasty, the idea that your input was valued could go a long way to cementing a patron’s relationship with the organization. I am curious to know if PAFW has implemented that idea.

There was one thing the TRG piece mentioned that caught my attention:

And yet, there were legitimate operational questions that needed to be answered. If a VIP Presenter would like their complimentary drink in a souvenir cup, whose budget gets charged for the cup? How far can I go (and should I go) to make a patron happy?

The sentence evoked a memory of an episode of the West Wing when newly appointed chief of staff CJ Cregg is running into a lot of opposition from the Secretary of Defense over some new initiative (I think it was accepting the nuclear bombs form the Republic of Georgia). She has a realization that his resistance is based in the fear that the funds to implement this will come out of his budget.

As idealistic as you may be, there is always a cost of some sort associated with every good idea. So if you insist that marketing is everyone’s responsibility, you are insisting that everyone bear some degree of additional cost to implement this directive. The cost may be in time, resources or money.

It will be important to communicate that marketing/patron retention/whatever you call it, is a priority for the organization and allowances (and perhaps allocations) will be made to enable the achievement of this goal. Otherwise internal resistance may thwart your efforts from the start.

Wherein Resides The Identity of A Group?

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When I was taking a college philosophy class we got into the classic debate about where identity resides in a person or thing. If you have a boat and gradually replace every board over the course of five years, is it still the same boat? When did it become a different boat?

The same with humans, if you replace every limb with prosthesis, when does the person cease to be themselves and become a cyborg? When are they essentially a machine?

Sci-Fi really lends itself to the debate: if Capt. Kirk is completely disassembled into atoms and beamed to a planet in a matter transporter and his atoms reassmbled, is he still the same Capt. Kirk that left the Enterprise?

I got to thinking about this topic when I saw the new version of The Magnificent Seven this weekend. There were some significant plot points shared by both the original version and The Seven Samurai, which inspired the original, that weren’t really featured in the newest version. The boastful young gunslinger was missing, for example, but there was a similar plotline in the Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, which also has a lot of common plot points with both versions of The Magnificent Seven. Westerns in general probably share a lot of the same plot lines with each other if we get right down to it.

I am really only stopping off at The Magnificent Seven to pose a question about the ethics of presenting a group with a famous name which is comprised of few, if any, of the original members.  Just because a group has the legal right to use a name, and the controversies over who gets to do so can fill a few blog posts, when does it become an issue of misrepresentation when it comes to audience expectations?

Yes, everyone probably knows that Glenn Miller and all of the members of the original orchestra are no longer playing together when they go to a concert. (There are, in fact, four different groups around the world licensed to use that name.) On the other hand, the keyboardist for the band War is the only original member still performing with the group.

There are some very public debates that rage about whether a band went downhill after a key member left or if the group was better off without the bum, but for the most part people aren’t terribly aware of the shifting line ups of most groups over the years.

If you are thinking of presenting such a group, you may have the unenviable task of determining if the soul and identity of the group has departed and deciding whether to pursue the engagement.

Then there is the related question of, what are people buying? Are they buying an opportunity to relive memories of what they were doing when they heard this song and the line up doesn’t matter so much?  Or are they buying a return to their past fandom when they originally saw the group in concert and details do matter?

This isn’t just a question that nags at popular music. What if the conductor who is closely identified with an orchestra and creating their distinctive sound moves on?  Or even going back to the original idea, if there are 80 odd musicians who were part of the ensemble that created the signature sound of the orchestra, as each departs over the years, what is the tipping point where a new orchestra exists?

How much do any of these things matter? Well, in terms of popular music, there is potential for issues as members of groups die and the prospect of a reunion of the originals wanes. Not everyone can afford whatever preservation techniques The Rolling Stones are using.

Is it just the case that people need to move on and accept progress?  Is this true in all scenarios? How do you know which scenario is a bridge too far in terms of faithfully and ethically providing what you are advertising?

Info You Can Use: Revise Your View Of Contracts

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I don’t regularly crosspost about things I have written on Arts Hacker. I sort of feel like I am cheating readers by trying to make one post do double duty on two websites.

However, I have a post today about a session on contracts conducted by the partners at GG Arts Law at the recent Arts Midwest conference.  As I mention in that post, contracts and legal issues always seem to be a concern for arts managers. I have attended multiple conferences in different regions and contracts and law sessions are always well attended, even if they deal with the exact same subject matter as the year before.

What grabbed me about this session was that Brian and Robyn from GG Arts Law started by telling attendees to shift their thinking about why contracts exist and what they are used for.  On television and in the movies, we often see someone suffering under the constraints of a contract they signed and perhaps they get saved by some obscure provision on the bottom of page 731.

While that might be closer to reality for big corporations, it isn’t really applicable on the scale most arts organizations operate on.

Which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen or people don’t try. I believe it was Brian from GG Arts Law that related a story about a contract that was being translated from Spanish where the person was only going to translate part of the contract because they intended to spring a “gotcha!” on the other party using the contents of the untranslated portion.

What Brian and Robin tried to convey was that contracts should be used to memorialize the details of an agreement at the end of a conversation rather than be used at the start of a conversation.  If someone follows up an inquiry by immediately sending their contract, don’t be afraid to start taking notes or marking it up with the changes you want. There are no iron-clad, non-negotiable industry standards no matter how much people may swear there are.

Even though people are often intimidated by contracts or see it as a bludgeon with which to enforce behavior, that isn’t really what it is for.

Take a look at my post and give the concepts there some serious thought. It may change your whole relationship with the contracting process.

There will be two other posts about contracts coming up on Arts Hacker. The second should appear on Wednesday and is a continuation of my goal to provide general information about contracts. The third is more focused on collaboration and commission contracts and will appear at some point in the future.

Non-Profit Arts Version Of “The Talk”

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From what I have been reading, the new Fair Labor Standards Act regulations regarding overtime pay is going be pretty tough for non-profit arts organizations to handle. If you aren’t up on the news, the salary threshold part of the overtime exemption criteria will rise from $23,660 to $47,476. Anyone making less than that or who doesn’t meet the other criteria for exemption will need to be paid overtime.

Generally, most of the criteria hasn’t changed so the big issue for non-profits is the salary threshold. Last month, American Theatre did a pretty good job of covering how the new rules will impact theaters specifically. There have been articles about non-profits in general, but few that discussed how arts organizations were planning to address the change.

The reason I say this new requirement is going to be tough is because some of the comments of the interviewees made me cringe. One person mentioned the benefit of staffing their organization with young 20-somethings to take advantage of the fact they would still be living at home and under their parents healthcare. Another respondent estimated the cost of living in their anonymous mid-size Midwest city was $20,000/year which I suspect is misinformed. The lowest costs of living, even for small Midwest cities, I found hovered around $25,000.

While I cringed at some of the tactics people were generating to deal with the projected expense they were going to incur, I didn’t view them as particularly extraordinary. The alternative approaches being considered are absolutely typical of the problem solving process arts organizations engage in. This is the sort of unorthodox creativity you have to employ to pull things off in the non-profit arts.

The problem is that depending on stop-gap measures and pressure of organizational culture will no longer be viable in the face of this new salary threshold and expectations of a work-life balance that new employees are bringing to the workplace. The gulf will literally and figuratively be too wide to straddle.

This is going to be one of those situations that is going to result in a lot of negative news before it gets better. Doubtless there will be cases we will be amazed have lingered only to explode somewhat scandalously a decade down the road (or sooner since the salary threshold for non-exempt moves to $51,000 in 2020).

The situation is likely to force long delayed conversations between arts organizations, their funders, boards, audiences and employees about what is really required to operative effectively.

The only consolation is that this conversation will still be way easier than talking to your kids about sex.

I don’t think I am being especially prescient when I say now would be a good time to develop a cogent response to the statement “Arts need to be self-supporting or close,” and start distributing the talking points to everyone. It is guaranteed that sentiment will be expressed constantly.

At the same time, a serious discussion about business plans and legal structures employed by arts organizations may become unavoidable. We may see groups recreate and reinvent themselves. Especially if non-profits are permitted to retain their assets as they transition into a corporate entity with a different tax structure.

All this being said, the American Theatre piece discusses how organizations are already making efforts to implement constructive measures to prepare for these changes.

Maybe around this time next year when people have been operating under the new rules for 9-10 months, I will suggest to Drew McManus that ArtsHacker do a series on some practices and restructuring efforts that initially seem to be working. The salary changes are going to have too significant an impact on the arts industry not to share advice about what has been successful for the organization and beneficial to employees.

In the meantime, I will work on learning more about the implications of FLSA rules in order to provide tips about how to prepare for the changes.

For example, many organizations may not know that use of comp time to offset “binge-and-purge” schedules around production time is already illegal  and is about to become more so for a wider range of employees.

But this kind of comp-hours time-shifting isn’t kosher under FLSA provisions. If a non-overtime-exempt employee works 60 hours one week, say, they can’t offset that by clocking just 20 the next week; they’ll be earning their regular salary for the 20-hour week and time-and-a-half for the hours over 40 in the 60-hour week. This was always the case under the FLSA, but with the new $47, 746 threshold, it will apply to many more employees than before.

Middle School Is Too Young To Start Suffering For Your Art

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There is a lot of conversation about the importance of advocating for the funding and inclusion of arts in K-12 education but according to a recent study, some attention needs to be paid to the social aspects experienced by students interested in the arts.

According to a recent piece in Pacific Standard (h/t Createquity), students taking music and theatre classes are more likely to be bullied than other students. The study the article cites (subscription required) did not include visual arts students.

The study involving 26,420 middle and high school students found that bullying peaks in middle school.

…female music and theater students faced a 41 percent greater risk of being bullied, and male music and theater students faced a 69 percent greater risk of being bullied than their peers.”

Looking specifically at middle school — a period when bullying typically peaks — the researchers found theater and music students had a 39 percent chance of being bullied, compared to a 30 percent chance for their peers who did not participate in such activities.

Not surprisingly, the bullying was more likely to involve physical aggression for boys, and relational aggression for girls — hurtful behavior such as spreading rumors or exclusion from desirable social activities. Female music and theater students had nearly a one-in-three chance of experiencing this sort of victimization, compared to a one-in-four chance for female athletes.

The researchers suggest that perhaps arts educators should receive additional training making them aware of these potential factors in their students’ lives to help prepare the teachers to be better mentors and resources for the students. In addition, they encourage zero tolerance for bullying of any sort and opening arts related rooms as safe spaces where students can gather for some respite.

In something of a “physician heal thy self” approach, the authors of the research paper propose use of arts to combat bullying in general.

Teachers can use discussions of the social-emotional import of art to reduce bullying by drawing parallels from what may seem to students as distant abstractions of composer’s or playwright’s artistic intent into the students’ own lived experiences. Drawing connections from art to daily lives in a framework intended to support students social-emotional competencies can actually reduce bullying and victimization, which seems like a worthwhile investment of time given the results of the present study.

[…]

…a drama-based bullying unit was developed by teachers in a middle school and used in social studies classes to supplement a larger, schoolwide anti-bullying initiative. In the program Burton (2010) described, students assumed the roles of bully, victim, and bystander in theatrical improvisations. The improvisations among girls especially brought the covert nature of relational aggression into the open and allowed victims of bullies a chance at “role reversal, choosing to portray bullies carrying out bullying they had actually experienced” (p. 264). The improvisations were then used to develop devised theatre pieces that were presented to younger students as part of a successful bullying reduction and prevention program.

I don’t know about you, but when I read about improv among girls bringing the “the covert nature of relational aggression into the open and allowed victims of bullies a chance at “role reversal…” I immediately thought of this scene from the movie Mean Girls.

I had worked for an organization that ran a residential arts summer camp and it was always clear that the kids reveled in an environment that didn’t pressure them to conform as they did in school the rest of the year. It didn’t necessarily strike me at the time that they were subject to more bullying than their peers. This was over a decade ago, before social media really took off, so the bullying may not have been as magnified. The data runs from 2005-2011, but the researchers don’t indicate if it has gotten worse across that time period.

Regardless, this is a factor in arts education to which to pay attention. Declaring success in preserving funding for the arts in your school district is worthless if kids are being intimidated for participating in the classes and activities.

All Your Trend Are Belong To Us

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Over the years I have frequently cautioned against becoming invested in the current hot thing that everyone is doing because the fad could pass quickly and you will have spent a lot of time and resources on something that is no longer viable.

One important thing I have never really been able to define is how to determine the difference between a long term trend and a passing fad.

Fortunately, Colleen Dilenschneider provides some intelligent guidance on the subject on her Know Your Own Bone blog. (my emphasis in green, rest is her’s)

So how can your organization figure out if something is a fad or a trend? A helpful trick may be to consider that trends inevitably affect some form of the organization’s engagement strategy, but fads usually influence tactics. This isn’t a fool-proof trick, but it can help your organization think strategically about the differences between both fads and trends.

For instance, social media use is a trend and that affects your engagement strategy, but selfies affect how you can carry out that strategy. Screaming “YOLO” and going gluten-free are things that folks may be doing these days – and, in order to remain relevant, your organization may benefit by embracing them for now. But these fads affect your organization’s tactics (and messages and programs), not its strategy. Data-informed management affects your strategy. Embracing transparency affects your strategy. The trend toward personalized interactions and programs thanks to our increasingly individually-tailored world is a trend and also deeply affects our strategies.

So by this definition, fads don’t really become trends in the same way ponies don’t grow up to be horses. (In fact, wanting a pony for your birthday is just a fad for most of us.)   But to confuse things, what social media tells you are trending topics are really just fads. (Whereas “all your base are belong to us” riffs are memes)

My advice in the past has generally been to wait, watch and evaluate whether something is going to endure and whether it is suited to your organizational goals and identity.  Dilenschneider takes a slightly different approach essentially saying it is okay to jump on the latest bandwagon, just don’t mistake it for an interstate shuttle.

Dilenschneider makes a valid point that it can be just as detrimental to be averse to adopting innovation as it is to waste time and energy chasing the latest fad.

If you have the time and resources, jumping into something knowing that it will be a short term project you will eventually discard can be useful in identifying new potential audiences and partners, and gauging your capacity to execute different sorts of activities. Essentially, something akin to rapid prototyping in software.

For example, you may never have considered the possibility of mounting performances or a festival in dance clubs. Yet over the course of playing with a lot of fads, you connected with demographics different from your core audience and had done some minor promotions with local bars. All this gave you the inspiration and confidence to do shows in bars.

Just remember though, this is an ideal outcome. It is very easy to become involved with a fad that becomes a long term detriment to your organization. Remember when Groupon was hot? Everyone was excited by it, but it became a nightmare for a lot of companies who lost money through discounting and never gained return business or loyalty. I know someone who still uses it regularly to find things to do, but never returns to a company unless there is another discount offer.

Info You Can Use: Success May Result In Reduced Donations (Big MAY)

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I was surprised by a recent piece on Non-Profit Quarterly reporting the results of a recent study finding that the more successful an arts organization was in attracting an audience, the more donations will decline.  The theory the researchers had was that success made an arts organization look less needy.

I was skeptical of this based on what I have observed, so I did a little digging to find the full article which appeared behind a paywall in Public Performance and Management Review. The details of their finding are a little more nuanced.

Even though the researchers make the statement in their conclusion that,

“The evidence suggests that better performance outcomes in terms of increased awareness and attendance have a negative rather than a positive influence on charitable giving.”

The discussion of their findings seems to suggest this is only true in regard to foundations.

For a 10% geometric mean increase in an organization’s attendance, the amount of all contributions received in the following year decreases by 0.72%

If we separate private giving into its three components (individual, corporate, and foundation giving), this negative relationship is statistically significant for foundation grants only. The amount of all charitable giving decreases by 0.08%

They don’t really make any statements about how individuals and corporations handle their giving in response to increased attendance and awareness.

Other Items of Interest:

Some other interesting things they found was that:

“It is worth noting that the amount of donations appears to be unresponsive to both government funding and program revenue.”

Basically, donation amounts don’t seems to be impacted by the amount of government funding or program revenue an organization receives in a year.

•Giving away free tickets may slightly help donations

“The result for increased free access lends some support to the first hypothesis: a 10% increase in the number of free tickets provided by arts and cultural nonprofits results in a 0.34% increase in contributions. This positive relationship is, however, only marginally significant.”

•Younger organizations tend to receive greater support than older organizations.

Donors, however, appear to prefer relatively young organizations, at least in the case of arts and cultural nonprofits. When we divide private giving into its three components, organization age has a negative relationship with institutional giving but is not a significant factor for individual donors.

Big Surprise

Despite what we read about donors really scrutinizing administrative overhead, for arts and cultural non-profit organizations at least, high overhead is not penalized.

…donors to arts and cultural nonprofits do not care about fundraising efficiency, which is measured by the average cost to raise one dollar. As the cost to raise a dollar increases, donations increase rather than decrease. On average, a 10% decrease in fundraising efficiency (i.e., an increase in the fundraising cost to raise a dollar of donation) leads to a 0.72% increase in the total amount of contributions. In other words, an organization would solicit slightly more donations, as compared to other organizations of similar type and size that spend less per dollar raised.

[…]

This finding is counterintuitive and provides no support for the prevailing assumption that donors view high costs of raising funds negatively. The results show that donors to arts and cultural nonprofits, especially foundation funders, reward rather than punish nonprofits that spend more to raise a dollar of donation.

The idea that the appearance of success is what helps you raise money is what provided the impetus for my deeper investigation. I think we all have a feeling that a few big organizations seem to attract big donations. Because the researchers are only looking at data collected via the Cultural Data Project, the social cachet of being seen to donate to a popular organization isn’t factored into the results. The authors do acknowledge that popularity and visibility do seem to be factors.

They suggest that big organizations are attracting larger donations because they are pouring more money into their fundraising budgets and aren’t being penalized for incurring the overhead expense.

I was interested by their observation that organizational size didn’t seem to impact corporate giving. I would assume visibility in the community, and therefore the ability to make a business more visible, is a factor in corporate giving more than organizational size.

Caveats

The researchers admit that since very little research has been done on these specific questions before, more study is required to gain an accurate picture. They say the statistical significance of the relationship between increased success and reduction in donations is marginal.

They also note that they use attendance as their measure of success which may be a poor criteria since it has no bearing on the effectiveness or quality of the experience for an audience member.

Likewise they note that using website visits as a measure of awareness might not be valid for many organizations whose communities may depend on print media, mailings and word of mouth to raise their awareness.

What Oskar Said

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The keynote speaker for the recent Arts Midwest conference was Oskar Eustis who is current artistic director at the Public Theater.  Tweets in reaction to his speech have been Storified if you want some insight.

A lot of what he spoke about centered on the value of government support of the arts and the value of non-profit arts organizations, especially in his career.  One of his first jobs in the arts was supported by a CETA grant. National Endowment for the Arts money supported the development of Angels in America which he commissioned and directed.  Lin Manuel Miranda’s invitation to perform at the White House saw him perform a song that eventually became the opening number for Hamilton which Eustis developed at the Public Theater.

He also mentioned how he was sitting with Julie Taymor at a session of Aspen Ideas Festival when Michael Eisner stood up and said he thought too much importance was placed on the value of non-profit theater, citing how he had bolstered Taymor’s career when he choose her to direct The Lion King. Eustis said before he had a chance to throw down with Eisner, Taymor pointed out she only developed the skills to direct a show of the caliber The Lion King thanks to the experience she had in non-profit theater.

Like me, a lot of these topics are close to Eustis’ heart. He spoke of how worried he was that as a country we have equated having a market economy with having a market society. That is, that we judge the value of what we do based on how financially successful it is.

If you have been reading my recent posts about economic value of the art and culture vs. intrinsic value, you know this permeates societal thinking beyond just the idea that arts organizations need to be run like businesses and support themselves.

Eustis said that he had been pushing for the Public Theater to present more of its work for free as they do with Shakespeare in Central Park, but his board was reticent because they didn’t feel that people would value something they got for free. Eustis acknowledged that might be the case with some things, but given that people were camping out overnight just to get a spot on line to see Shakespeare, he was pretty sure the Public Theater’s work would be sufficiently valued. In the upcoming year, the Public Theater will mount their first free production at one of their regular spaces.

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.

During the Q&A after his address, Mario Garcia Durham, President and CEO of Association of Performing Arts Presenters rose and expressed his dismay that the Kennedy Center was essentially telling people that they would need to buy subscriptions to two seasons if they wanted to get tickets to see Hamilton when it came to Washington D.C.

Durham was concerned that this would place the show out of reach of the demographics with which Miranda most wanted the show to resonate and plead with Eustis to ask Miranda to arrange auxiliary programming to accompany the show that the general population would be able to access.

Eustis replied that while he really didn’t have any control over the decisions made by organizations that presented the show, he did have a right to sit at the table and provide guidance when policies were being shaped. He said if he had his way, when it came time to make the show available for amateur performance, it would only be licensed to only high schools in perpetuity and would never be available for production by theatrical organizations.

I am embarrassed to admit there were some other noteworthy things Eustis said that I can’t recall. They were so noteworthy I tracked down  Arts Midwest President David Freher to discuss them. I figured I needn’t make note about them since they were so vivid in my mind.

If anyone else was at the keynote and was impressed by anything else they heard, please share because it may jog my memory.

Let None Of Them Be Missed

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I have returned from the Arts Midwest Conference in Milwaukee which apparently broke attendance records. I can believe it did because I have never had so much difficulty finding a free moment to speak to agents with whom I didn’t have an appointment.

I will have quite a bit to report over the course of the next few weeks after I have had time to reflect.

One thing I wanted to follow up on from last year’s conference is something of a “credit where credit is due” topic.

About a week after last year’s Arts Midwest conference there was a huge outcry over the NY Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP) planned production of The Mikado which was employing yellow face and other Asian stereotypes in the production design.

I thought I had written about this in my blog, but it turns out I only made a comment on HowlRound regarding the issue. As I note in my comment there, they were pretty quick about cancelling the production but social media response made the two-three days in real time seem like the issue had lingered for a month.

Before going to the conference this year, I had gotten a brochure which made it appear that they had revamped the production and were offering it again for touring this year. I made a point to seek out NYGASP Executive Director David Wannen at the Arts Midwest conference to ask what had transpired.

Wannen told me they had indeed made changes to the production. Part of that included bringing a large number of advisors on board to help guide them in the production design planning as well as the casting decisions.

He noted that one of their loudest blogging critics was encouraging her followers to audition and support the productions. (Auditions are for the company performing in the entire season so persons of color are being considered for all their shows.)

From the way Wannen described the show, there will be Japanese inspired/influenced elements combined with 19th century England, but nothing overtly stereotypical. I saw one picture of the Mikado wearing a dragon like helm that could have as easily come from Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones as a fantasy movie set in China or Japan. (It evoked Smaug from The Hobbit more than a Chinese/Japanese dragon for me)

Wannen said the decision to cancel the production last year was made quickly because there was already a conversation among board and staff that the traditional approach to the show wasn’t going to fly for much longer given the social environment. However, there were many on the NYGASP board who insisted on adhering to the traditional production.

The controversy that emerged last year confirmed for the organization that a change was needed. According to Wannen there was something of a shake up in the board. From what I understood in our discussion, there were some resignations.

By some fortuitous happenstance, I was able to gain some additional insight about the sort of continuous effort required for crisis management.  NYGASP appears to have made a lot of constructive decisions, obtained the investment and buy-in of important and influential constituencies and generated some excellent goodwill for themselves.  We may hear/read a news story about redemption like this and assume all is well and the problems have been fixed.

I was seated next to Wannen on the first leg of my flight home. While we sat at the gate waiting to depart, he was on the phone relating the same things to someone that he had talked with me about — mentioning all the steps that were taken and the goodwill they had garnered in the process.

The lesson I took away from this is that no matter how good the situation may appear externally,  there is always more work to be done after a crisis to regain trust and address negative perceptions.

After I had spoken to Wannen, I walked away feeling optimistic about NYGASP and impressed by the difficult choices they had embraced, including admitting there had been a problem. After sitting next to Wannen on the plane, I realized he recognized despite all the positive response they had received thus far, it was too early to declare any sort of victory right yet.

Even though it may be tempting to put bad experienced behind us as soon as possible, it important for organizational leadership to discern when it is too early to do so.

 

The title of this entry is a paraphrase from The Mikado‘s famous “list” song, “As Someday It May Happen.” Traditionally updated with current events, it is evidence that the show survives all sorts of adaptation.

 

Mario Cavaradossi Could Have Been A Great Rugby Player

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One of the first blog posts I made included speculation about what the arts experience might be like if the arts were covered in the newspaper like sports.

A little over eight years ago I made a post about an experiment The Guardian newspaper conducted along those lines.  They sent their sports writers to arts events and their arts writers to sporting events and asked them to write about the experience.

The links to both articles still work so check them out.

I initially sighed at what seemed to be universal sentiments expressed by people who don’t see themselves as arts attendees: “I go by here every day and never realized how amazing it was inside” and “I had no idea arts lovers were so passionate in expressing their appreciation.”

However, all the writers seemed to sincerely enjoy their experience working in the realm of their opposite numbers. Even if they never chose to return, it seemed like they would speak positively about it if the opportunity ever presented itself.

The title of this post comes from a comment made by a sports writer who saw parallels between being a tenor performing in Tosca and being a top notch rugby player.

You Can’t Tell A Lot About The Value Of Art Based On The Audience With Which It Is Associated

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If you have been following my posts closely for the last couple months, you know the topic of the prescriptive value of the arts to fix various problems has been on my mind lately. Often we see people argue about how the arts stimulate the economy, help students do better in school or contribute to a reduction in crime.

It wasn’t until I was looking back at some old entries that I was reminded of a less frequently discussed measure of success — are the right people being served.

Back in 2008 I wrote about a speech given by Frank Furedi where he criticized the apparent perception that a performance wasn’t successful unless it was attended by the right demographics.

[Britian Cultural Minister Margaret] Hodge had nothing to say about the musical experience of listening to performances at The Proms. Instead she focused entirely on the audience. She observed that ‘the audiences for many of our greatest cultural events – I’m thinking in particular of The Proms – is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this’. In essence, she was arguing that one should judge the merits of a concert on the basis of who’s in the audience.

…For Hodge, and other supporters of the politicisation of culture, the value of classical music is called into question by the fact that apparently the ‘wrong’ people listen to it. ‘The main problem with classical music is its audience’, wrote Sean O’Hagan in the Observer. That’s another way of saying that because its audience is predominantly middle class, classical music is an unreliable instrument for promoting social cohesion and community regeneration.

I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be more opportunities for a wider demographic range of performers and artists. Nor am I suggesting potential audiences should learn to appreciate the standard cultural expressions of the country in which they live.

I feel a lot of progress has been made, especially in the last year, in terms of calling attention the narrow choices that are being made in casting and programming. That shouldn’t be impeded or reversed. There is still a lot of stubborn inertia to overcome.

However, in the process of expanding opportunities, it will be easy to judge something as less valuable because it doesn’t resonate with the correct audiences.

It is just as bad to say Western classical music is less valuable than a Taiko drumming performance because it won’t attract as many Japanese audience members that your funders desire as it is to decide to cast Scarlett Johansson as The Major in The Ghost in the Shell movie because she is more marketable than a Japanese actor.

As Furedi suggests, the view that a work by a Western artist won’t resonate with someone who doesn’t come from a Western background does a disservice to them and underestimates their capacities. (As is the assumption that Westerners won’t enjoy something that isn’t from the Western canon.) Just because someone is thrilled by an experience that tells them more about themselves doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate an experience that has more relevance to another than them.

Yes, steps need to be taken to make audiences more demographically diverse. Judging the worth of a work based on whether it helps you achieve that diversity is misdirected.

Value Of The Arts At Most Intrinsic-It Fixes You For You, Not For Other People

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I am traveling to the Art Midwest Conference today where I will first take a seminar about using Google Analytics which Drew McManus promises will be akin to a heroic journey. Since I have intentionally opted not to fly through Chicago O’Hare this time around, hopefully his seminar will be the only heroic saga I undertake.

As always when I travel, I have dug back into the archives a little for some posts. Back in 2008 I wrote about a column on the value of the arts that Robert Fulford wrote.

Last month I wrote about how it was inadvisable in the long term to talk about the instrumental value of the arts in terms of education and economy. Fulford notes that the “makes you a better human being” argument is equally fraught with peril.

The arts won’t make you virtuous and they won’t make you smart, but they are nevertheless my faith, firmly installed in the part of me where some people put religion.

Great art, alas, has sometimes been loved by monsters, famously the Nazis. George Steiner, the eminent critic, delivers the bad news: “We know that a man can play Bach and Schubert and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”

[…]

On a more trivial level, we also can’t claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. I knew a man who had Shakespeare, Verdi, Beethoven and the rest of the gang played at him by the greatest performers of his time, night after night for a lifetime. Did no good. He remained gloomy, narrow and hopelessly addicted to conventional wisdom. He was like the oaf in Love’s Labour’s Lost who has “never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book, so his intellect is not replenished….”

Fulford says the value of the arts is what you, as the individual gets out of it. Presumably while the arts didn’t improve his gloomy friend for others around him, his friend found some value to himself in it. Right there is probably the value of the arts at it’s most intrinsic.

What, then, does it guarantee? Those who give it their time and love are offered the chance to live more expansive, more enjoyable and deeper lives.

[…]

The arts also let us live, imaginatively, within the world where they are produced. They give us an alternative human narrative — and perhaps that’s their most generous gift to us. History as seen through the arts doesn’t portray demagogues and soldiers as the greatest figures. It’s a history where delicate, fascinating traditions are handed down the generations, developed, subverted, forgotten and rediscovered, all within a drama that makes reality created by politicians seem pale and predictable.

No Creativity Please, We’re Southern

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You may have read about the surprising results of a National Endowment for the Arts survey on creativity that found a stark demarcation in creative activity that mirrored the traditional free and slave states.

As much as I might like to be smug about how these results confirm a belief in the superiority of the Northern denizens over the uninspired South, I really wonder how accurate this data is. Assuming the method of data collection isn’t flawed, I have a nagging suspicion that the findings may reflect a reluctance to self-identify as a creative person.

I have mentioned before how Jamie Bennett of ArtPlace America has suggested people have an easier time viewing themselves as an athlete on the continuum with Tiger Woods and Serena Williams than as an artist.

The reason why I suspected this might be a factor for this survey is because the responses from Hawaii in the personally performing or creating category was so low (34.8%) relative to the rest of the country. While I may have had difficulty selling tickets to some events while I worked there, the ratio of people I saw participating in some form of creative expression was the highest of any place I have lived.

If you were in a room with 10 people and asked who played ‘ukulele, danced hula or created lei, you wouldn’t have difficulty getting half to raise their hands. If you added participating in other cultural practices like Chinese, Japanese, Filipino music and dance, you would probably add two or three more people.  In many cases, you would probably see hands raised multiple times.

Every weekend from Memorial Day to Labor Day there is at least one Obon Festival celebration on O’ahu, an event involving singing, music, dancing and crafts. There are multiple hula festivals, including the highly competitive Merrie Monarch. Choral music has a strong following. The Kamehameha Schools Song Contest, like Merrie Monarch, is highly competitive, heavily attended and televised across the state.

I suspect that because many respondents may not have had formal training and only fool around for friends and family, especially with ‘ukulele, they didn’t consider themselves as practitioners. Or perhaps they danced or played for decades as kids, but didn’t do it as much now so they don’t consider that as a valid part of their identity. Or because participation of the types I have described is so common it isn’t considered noteworthy.

If you were in my hypothetical room with 10 people, you would probably have to probe a bit and qualify what activities met your definition to get all 7 or 8 people to raise their hands.

While I don’t think every state south of latitude 36°30’ has the range of participation equivalent to that of Hawaii, I think there is likely a disconnect between how the NEA defined creative expression and how the respondents defined it. Participation rates may still be less than those north of that latitude, but they would probably be higher than these results indicate.

The truth may be that social and cultural factors are dissuading people south of that point from self-identifying as being creative and similar factors may be causing some people north of that line to apply a more flexible standard than the NEA intended. A map reflecting the true composition might be much more mottled.

Can You Deliver On The Promise of Clean Restrooms?

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Yesterday evening I was hanging out at the local coffee house participating in a send off of an artist who has been creating murals for a public art project in the city for over 20 years now.

I got to talking to the owner of the coffee house about his management philosophy. Which, when it comes to employees, can be pretty much summarized as, cultivate the good workers and cut loose the deadwood.

He pays his employees a decent wage and involves them in as many aspects of the business as they are comfortable or interested. For example, when considering any potential new menu items, everyone participates in the preparation and pricing to make sure it makes sense in terms of the time and resources it requires.

Sometimes I don’t agree with his choices, but he always good at explaining his rationale to customers. I was on hand when a woman suggested they have loyalty punch cards like other coffee houses and he laid out the alternative approach he had chosen that provides value to the customer.

As closing time approached, the gathering adjourned to the patio so the employees could go home. I made a trip to the restroom and was confronted by this sign.

deserve restroom

When I mentioned the sign to the owner, he said it was there more for the employees than the customers. It communicated the standard of cleanliness they were expected to maintain because god help them if he got a call.

I thought it was pretty damn audacious. It doesn’t just say contact the manager if the restroom isn’t clean. It tells the customer they DESERVE a clean restroom and promises they will get it.

Question to ask yourself: Does your organization operate at a level that you can promises this standard of service?

This isn’t a literal promise about clean restrooms, it has figurative implications about the service you should expect to receive during every interaction while you are on the premises. It plays into the adage about being able to judge the cleanliness of the kitchen from the state of the restrooms, but goes beyond that.

Even with only a handful of customer contact points, it takes a lot of effort and attention to achieve this standard. If you really sit down and make a list, there are more contact points with customers than you think.

Can you tell your customers, figurative clean restrooms are hard to find, but they deserve them, and then deliver on that promise? It is pretty daunting.

Does Your City Need An Arts Bureaucrat?

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Given the Labor Day holiday and the fact that Wells Fargo seems to think kids need to set aside their childish artistic dreams for real career choices, it seems appropriate to do a post on interesting, constructive arts careers.

Jennifer Lasik, Arts Coordinator for the City of Evanston, IL makes a “Case for an ‘Arts Bureaucrat’ in City Government.”

While her boss hates the use of that term, (the real job title is Cultural Arts Coordinator), she sees the arts bureaucrat role as one of the most important parts of her job. (my emphasis)

In public performance or art installation, there is often perceived conflict between what the artists want to accomplish and the objectives of the City regarding liability, maintenance, budgets, and code regulation.

[…]

While intended primarily as a resource for the arts community, City staff has appreciates having someone who “speaks artist,” can plan and evaluate artistic projects, and listen to and fine-tune artists’ proposals to address various departmental questions and concerns. Both groups trust me to negotiate a balance between the artistic and practical aspects of the project, helping artists through the application and permit process, and cutting through some of the bureaucratic red tape that can cause frustration and bottleneck. The time and energy this position saves for both the City staff and the artists is a compelling argument for an arts bureaucrat position.

She lays out the scope of her position which makes it sound like this position, created in 2013, was the next step in a process in which Evanston was amenable. She notes, for example that:

“Public Works uses a “Complete Streets” model, which means that when maintenance or repair work is done, other goals such as public art, accessibility and sustainability are factored into the rebuild.

At the end of her post, she provides some suggestions for municipalities that don’t have the capacity for a full time arts bureaucrat, including appointing a staff person to act as an “arts whisperer” to help facilitate communications.

Big Boards In Big D, But Probably Not For Thee

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There was a piece on the Dallas Morning News website about how the boards of various Dallas arts organizations were beginning to focus on greater diversity in their membership and accountability of their staffs.

The article opens by noting that Dallas Summer Musicals parted ways with their managing director months before his contract expired and the Dallas Museum of Art appeared to have a tense parting with their director.

“In the old Dallas,” says Veletta Forsythe Lill, a former City Council member and past executive director of the Dallas Arts District, “a board would have let a guy finish his term,” as in, why not let Jenkins stay eight more months, until his contract expired?

“But we’re living in a new Dallas,” Lill says, “and the new Dallas naturally carries with it a new breed of board member. The new boards want more control and more accountability.”

[…]

Today’s artistic boards veer younger and more corporate, and although older white men continue to dominate, their once-fierce hold — some would say stranglehold — is beginning to wane. Today’s artistic boards are increasingly more diverse, with women commanding a more powerful presence than ever before.

I was happy to see that boards are starting to take their governance responsibilities seriously and are attempting to make board and staff composition more diverse and reflective of the communities they are serving.

As I was reading through the article, I wondered if the boards would possess the will to evaluate how effective they are at executing their responsibilities.

When I see that Dallas Summer Musicals has 146 board members and 40 members on their executive committee, I can’t help but be skeptical about how effective such an unwieldy arrangement can be.

Reading the following, I suspected the membership numbers are largely courtesy appointments for the purpose of fundraising:

Board giving and participation guidelines: $1,000 down payment to be a general board member, coupled with raising at least $2,000 from outside donors. Must be a season-ticket holder. Executive committee members: Must make a $2,500 down payment, raise at least $5,000 from outside sources and be season-ticket holders.

Similarly large numbers appear on the boards of AT&T Performing Arts Center whose bylaws allow up to 70 members, but currently has 55; Dallas Museum of Art which has 73 board members; and Dallas Symphony Orchestra which has 68 members, 20 of which are on the executive committee.

In January I wrote about San Diego Opera which was revived after a stakeholder revolt fought the board’s decision to cease operations. The board membership went from 53 to 24. One of the key issues they identified as having contributed to their inability to adapt to the changing economic and social environment in San Diego was the “Get, Give or Get Off” board membership policy.

The San Diego Opera was one of those organizations where having a large number of people on the board was a function of fundraising. You pay x amount of money and you’re on the board, and no one wants to alienate any of those folk with contentious conversations that cause discomfort. But that is certainly not a good modus operandi for an organization facing the whitewater of the twenty-first-century cultural organization. And, it was not only the business model that had to change but the governance model, too.

Yes, yes, I know everything is bigger in Texas. With a funding model that includes 40 executive board members bringing in $7,500 each and the other 146 board members bringing in $3000 each, Dallas Summer Musicals may not experience issues that require them to be more nimble and responsive.

For everyone else, everywhere else, it is worth considering if a move toward a leaner, more nimble board might be the best course to meet the organizations long term challenges.

For  your listening pleasure, “Big D” from The Most Happy Fella.

Pretension Is Just A Hoity-Toity Word For Pretendin’

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A book with an intriguingly different view on pretentiousness was recently the subject in the LA Review of Books. According to reviewer Barrett Swanson, Dan Fox, author of Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, thinks pretentiousness gets a bad rap.

Early in his disquisition, Fox wonders why children who investigate the world through “pretend” and “make believe” are seldom accused of pretentiousness, whereas adults who experiment with the liberties of masquerade are inevitably charged with duplicity.

[…]

“So you thought the film you just saw was pretentious, and so was the date you took with you. You thought the food and service at the restaurant where you had a bite to eat after was also pretentious. But pretending to be … what, precisely?” Fox asks. Because there is no Platonic ideal,… “When a person decides that a restaurant is pretentious,” he concludes, “the ‘authentic’ restaurant to which it’s being compared and the values that provide The One True Restaurant with its bona fides are seldom revealed.”

There are some interesting things in there to ponder.  Though before I get into the main part of my post, I wanted to note (without having read Fox’s book), that often pretension is based on an authenticity comparison that is anything but idealized — San Diego being the only place to get authentic Mexican food, for example. (Whereas NY is indisputably the only place that makes pizza and bagels worth eating.)

My initial thoughts about why kids can pretend without being dismissed as pretentious and adults can’t get away with it as easily, is due to the fact we don’t feel empowered to call people out as quickly when we get older.

Between being bound by a sense of polite behavior and a growing understanding that there are subjects in which other people are more expert at than ourselves, we don’t feel we have the ability to force people to acknowledge they are pretending something is what it isn’t. Still, because we feel ashamed of our lack of knowledge or ability to deny the reality being asserted, we label it pretentious.

For example, we had no problem as kids recognizing that someone is pretending to be Superman or a dinosaur. We had no compunction about saying pretend bombs, swords and Kamehameha waves missed us or got deflected by our energy shields.

It is more difficult to know if someone is wrong when they make a statement about a performance or visual art work if we don’t have experience in that field. If something tastes awful to us, we don’t know if it is really poorly made or if our palate just isn’t refined. Because we acknowledge the possibility of not having enough knowledge or experience, we don’t have the confidence to yell “Na-uh!” that we did when we were children.

Even if we did and we were right, there may be sufficient number of other people who have agreed to pretend otherwise causing us to feel uncomfortable. We may laugh about wine experts who think the same wine tastes better when it is in a more expensive bottle, but we still feel anxiety about picking out a bottle to bring to a dinner party.

It may actually relieve one’s anxiety to a degree to look at a situation that appears intimidating and decide everyone who thinks a certain way is pretending. It can be liberating to walk among people whom you have decided have subscribed to a certain fiction whereas you have subscribed to a slightly different fiction. Or perhaps, you have decided it would be fun to see how far you can get pretending the same thing everyone else does.

While I think this might be a helpful intermediary step to assuage anxieties, deciding everything is equally meaningless and lacking of value does an injustice to objects and achievements that have actual value.

This isn’t an argument for determining what is objectively more valuable and important than something else. Rather, eventually one needs to acknowledge that there are some things one recognizes as more important and valuable than other things. Others may not agree and that doesn’t bother you. The you five years in the future may not agree with the you of today and you need to be okay with that possibility as well.

Friends Don’t Let Friend’s Orgs Get Clickbaited

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Non-Profit Quarterly had a piece last week about an effort to “help” non-profits that is flawed on so many levels.

An advertising company has created a site, Clickbait For Good which is creating clickbait campaigns for charities, apparently without being asked. Setting aside the fact that clickbait has pretty much peaked and worn out its welcome, the images they are using with their campaigns are pretty inappropriate for the associated charities.

It is unclear if the charities consented to the clickbait headlines being created for them on the Clickbait For Good website. One hopes not.

  • For Love 146 (human trafficking): “She fell for Mr. Perfect. You won’t believe what happened next” (with an accompanying image of a seated young girl in a frilly red dress).
  • For Girls Not Brides (child marriage in places like Bangladesh): “OMG! She is just 16 and she has done things the Kardashians haven’t even thought about” (with an accompanying image of an elite wealthy woman wearing a white dress hiked as high as it will go before being pornographic, exiting the backseat of a luxury car carrying a bag containing her latest expensive purchase).
  • For #Milk4Syria: “The ONE thing you need to know about drinking milk.”
  • For American Foundation for Suicide Prevention: “Exclusive: See what happened only a week after Robin Williams’ suicide.”

I checked the webpage out and indeed the images are as cringe worthy as described-

child bride

Non-Profit Quarterly lays it out pretty clearly why these sort of campaigns do more harm than good when it comes to generating investment and trust.

The problem is that this ill-conceived initiative is likely to aggravate more than inspire. The website should offer charities the option to sign up to decline the offer.

Clickbait is sometimes clever, often misleading, always distracting, and by definition overpromises and under-delivers. Clickbait patronizes the donor and at best trivializes the charity’s mission. Nonprofits seek engagement and relationships, not mere clicks. View “counts” may pay the bills in the marketing world, but tricking people into clicking on charity content kills trust, which is the coin of the realm in the voluntary sector.

[…]

Charities cannot game trust. Lying kills donor retention. The headlines above are morally indefensible. Clickbait is like learning to smile from a manual. Philanthropy is not grown in a petri dish. Charity is the result of honest human interaction and concern. Charity needs to be honored, not disgraced.

There is definitely fun to be had with click-baity ads, especially if you are spoofing the format to get people to attend a fun event. But to draw attention and support to serious crises, if there are appropriate, effective uses of the format, I have to imagine they can be counted on one hand.

There may not be a high likelihood that your arts organization will be targeted by one of these ads and the potential impact may not be as bad as for some of these humanitarian organizations. If these campaigns are indeed being created unsolicited, a neighboring organization might be grateful if you alert them to an ad that casts them in a questionable context.

Failing To Your Back Up Plan

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Harvard Business Review had a short piece about a study that found that having a back-up plan often undermines one’s motivation to succeed.  The interviewer specifically uses an example of having a back-up plan to an arts career in one her questions. (not to mention the first image you see is a dancer en pointe in one sneaker)

So, to use another cliché, we need to always act as if failure is not an option?
The punch line of this research could certainly be this: If you prepare for failure, you may be more likely to fail. But the practical advice we would give is more nuanced than that. We’re not suggesting that you always avoid making backup plans. But maybe you could hold off on doing so until you’ve put as much effort as possible into your primary goal. If you’re a manager of a team working toward a certain objective, consider asking a second group, consisting of different people, to come up with the backup plan rather than your A team. If you’re an entrepreneur, think about committing to one start-up idea for a period of time, instead of planning for and being ready to jump to another project as soon as things go south.

My aunt always told my cousin, an aspiring dancer, that she should get a teaching degree to fall back on. Was she wrong?
Success and performance depend on many factors. For some people, not making a backup plan might indeed be beneficial in helping them put their best effort forward. Some parents assume that having a backup plan is always a good thing, yielding nothing but positive outcomes. Given our findings, we’d suggest that they at least consider the possible negative effects.

Before I go any further, lets remind ourselves that achieving a high level of performance in any endeavor is not necessarily rewarded with remuneration or acclaim. Often there is no direct relationship between financial success and ability.  Jihae Shin who authored the study states that plainly – success and performance depend on many factors.  When it comes to arts careers, it often seems like those factor are stacked against you.

Since we are at the start of a new school year, this is probably a good time to resurrect (if it has ever been buried) subject of whether those pursuing an arts careers should be advised to think about a back up plan.

If you tell a person who is highly skilled and possessed of the potential to be a world class actor/dancer/ musician/visual artist to have a back up plan, are you undermining their potential?

If they achieve their potential and can’t find a means of support for themselves through their practice and have no other skills, have you contributed to their misery?

This conversation intersects with the one about artists needing to be more entrepreneurial vs. diluting a conservatory experience to provide instruction in that direction.  Where is the cut off line of talent and skill between those who should be counseled to pursue a discipline relentlessly and those who should start making back up plans?

Who is the best judge of this? Many would say the budding artist can’t be trusted to know themselves. Either they overestimate their talent and ability or are squandering it.

Carter Gillies outright says there was evidence that he should not be an artist…then he stuck his fingers in clay, got an MFA and is supporting himself as a potter.

To a large degree, success in an artistic career is more attributable to an intersection of luck and good connections than the accurate prognostications of mentors, professors, friends and family.

My personal bias is toward picking up as many skills as you can and being open to opportunities that come along. My own career path is not what I envisioned it would be and some of it was a result of getting out of my own way. (Though I suspect I could be a bit more open.)

I am going to go out on a limb and say that when Drew McManus was working his butt off to attend Interlochen Arts Camp, he may have had an inkling that he would be an orchestra consultant one day.  But probably didn’t think he would be running a blogging exchange, arts job board, designing websites for arts organizations and rolling out a scheduling management service.

There are more opportunities to apply our skills than we are lead to believe. When I say this, I don’t just mean artists, I mean that we have been largely socialized to believe that success is found at the end of a college degree in a STEM or Business field and all else results in a job in a fastfood restaurant.

Does keeping your eyes and options open constitute a back up plan that will keep you from reaching your potential? Assuming you are motivated to find something that works for you and apply yourself to pursuing it, I would say it isn’t. Given that many people tend to have multiple careers over the course of their lives, it may be unwise to be too much of a specialist.

Jihae Shin suggests there are different ranges of time in which refusal to entertain other options is useful.  Eschewing any alternative for a lifetime can be destructive.

Aside from your job search, have these findings changed how you operate at work?

Yes, I now sometimes try to delay making a backup plan until after I’ve really done everything I can to accomplish my first goal. For example, when Katy and I were working on this research project, I didn’t think about other projects we could do if this one failed.

Just because you opt for your back up plan doesn’t mean you can never dance again.

But lets face it, the whole subject and conversation is complex and full of nuance. Not the least of which is that as an artist, even the suggestion that you may “never dance again” if you choose a back up plan is emotionally and spiritually painful.

Why Would We Not Want More?

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I frequently write about why arguing the benefits of the arts based on their instrumental value (e.g. improves economy or test scores) is a bad approach because it depends on an absence of a substitute which is effective at accomplishing the same ends.

The alternative is to talk about the intrinsic value of art, or art for arts sake. The problem with this approach is that it lacks that concrete data that everyone says they base their decisions on.

Or rather, it lacks the concrete data that everyone insists they are faithfully basing their decisions upon. If you have paid any attention to the way decisions are made in the political or educational arenas, you know that isn’t true. Still, if you want to make your case, you have to do it in a convincing manner in terms which people can relate.

Teacher Peter Greene had an entry on Huffington Post about a year ago which performs this task pretty effectively in regard to defending music education. It probably isn’t the exact approach to take if you are called to provide testimony at your state legislature, but he provides a general ground plan.  (my emphasis)

Music is universal. It’s a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch— music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?

[…]

Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?

Music is freakin’ magical. In 40-some years I have never gotten over it — you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin’ magical.

Even though the “Why would we not…” questions are not completely based on logic, it shares many of the same motivations that drive scientific inquiry.

We are surrounded by sun, air, earth and water, why would we not want to study them to better understand how they impact things like agriculture and help us prepare for drought, fires, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes?

As I said, while Greene’s reasoning doesn’t provide quantitative measurements to support it, it does provide what Carter Gillies says is often lacking in such rationale – it begins to teach people why we value the arts – and it does it with language that captures attention and starts to fire the imagination.

Concentrating On What Is There Not On What You Wish Was There

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Maria Popova made a BrainPickings post about Elliott Schwartz’s book, Music: Ways of Listening, about four years ago. The link to it just came to my attention recently.

Popova notes, “you can substitute “reading” for “listening” and “writing” for “music,” and the list would be just as valuable and insightful, and just as needed an antidote to the dulling of our modern modes of information consumption.”

Reading Schwartz’s thoughts, I think you could probably make a similar substitution for most arts disciplines.

As I mentioned last week, I have been trying to be more active about answering Arts related questions on Quora. Yesterday, I received a request to answer a question about what things should one think about if they wanted to become a better dancer. I started thinking what my answer might be if no one else stepped forward to answer. To my slight surprise, many of the general approaches I was thinking of suggesting are included in Schwartz’s list from 1982.

I wouldn’t necessarily include all these in a Quora answer, but among the things Schwartz wrote that jumped out at me were the following:

Develop your sensitivity to music. Try to respond esthetically to all sounds, from the hum of the refrigerator motor or the paddling of oars on a lake, to the tones of a cello or muted trumpet. When we really hear sounds, we may find them all quite expressive, magical and even ‘beautiful.’ On a more complex level, try to relate sounds to each other in patterns: the successive notes in a melody, or the interrelationships between an ice cream truck jingle and nearby children’s games.

I liked this one especially because it isn’t necessary to do a substitution at all to make it applicable to other arts disciplines. It can be just as valuable to an actor, dancer, writer, visual artist, etc to pay attention to mundane sounds around them and be sensitive to how that might manifest in the work they produce.

The same is true regardless of whatever discipline you might insert. Actors frequently people watch to gain deeper insight into the way they can depict characters and relationships. Dancers, musicians, writers and visual artists can all use people watching to inform their work. And then so on with each discipline.

Try to develop musical concentration, …It may be easy to concentrate on a selection lasting a few minutes, but virtually impossible to maintain attention when confronted with a half-hour Beethoven symphony or a three-hour Verdi opera.

Composers are well aware of this problem. They provide so many musical landmarks and guidelines during the course of a long piece that, even if listening ‘focus’ wanders, you can tell where you are.

The idea that is it okay and normal to lose focus and become bored when participating in an arts experience goes back to the early days of this blog. (obligatory nod to Drew McManus) It is important for people who are relatively inexperienced to be aware that such guideposts exist for them.

Try to listen objectively and dispassionately. Concentrate upon ‘what’s there,’ and not what you hope or wish would be there. At the early stages of directed listening, when a working vocabulary for music is being introduced, it is important that you respond using that vocabulary as often as possible. In this way you can relate and compare pieces that present different styles, cultures and centuries. Try to focus upon ‘what’s there,’ in an objective sense, and don’t be dismayed if a limited vocabulary restricts your earliest responses.

I thought the idea of concentrating on “what’s there” and not what you wish would be there is especially relevant these days when you can get the exact form of gratification you desire upon demand by pulling your smartphone from your pocket. (Though I suppose there were similar issues people were bemoaning in 1982. Can’t think of what since cable and VCRs weren’t ubiquitous presences.)

Popova excerpts seven tips from the book and I have pared down the ideas expressed even further. At the very least it is worthwhile to view the Brainpickings post and ponder what Elliott Schwartz had to say.

Dances With Seedlings

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Via Non-Profit Quarterly is a brief story about the Farm to Ballet Project which is taking agricultural themed ballet to about nine farms throughout Vermont this summer. (Their second season, I should mention.)

When I first started reading about this project, The Wormfarm Institute and their various programs like the Fermentation Fest and Roadside Culture Stands immediately came to mind. There has been a concentrated effort over the last decade or so to call more attention to arts programs in rural settings.

The Farm to Ballet Project partners closely with the farms and reinvest profits either into the farm or other agricultural non-profits.

But he also has a passion for local farming, and the Farm to Ballet Project has allowed him to connect the not-so-obvious dots between dance and agriculture. The project supports the farming community because 75 percent of ticket sales from each performance go to the host farm or to agriculture-related nonprofits. Local farm products are highlighted in other ways, too. For example, at a recent performance, “many in the 300-plus audience of adults and children also enjoyed dinner beforehand made from locally grown ingredients.”

They perform a story ballet that follows farm plants, animals and soil over the course of a year. The dancers in the first video below talk about being lettuce, cucumbers, goats, bees and various other creatures in the performance which occurs outside in the farm fields.

In the second video below, two of the dancers talk about how much they have come to appreciate impact of different grass types (and cow patties) on what sort of movements they can safely execute.

In addition to bringing ballet to communities in a context the audiences have never seen before, they are also providing an opportunity for people to renew an artistic practice that had been interrupted by other life events.

In the interview below, a woman talks about how she never expected to be able to perform classical ballet again after having started a family. This season their youngest company member is 17 and the oldest is 73.

This comment reminded me of a post I made last year about a woman who started two dance companies in different cities for people who had trained in dance to a high level, hadn’t pursued dance as a career, but wanted to continue dancing and choreographing.

This interview is additional evidence that there is an unmet need for an outlet of creative expression in dance and probably other disciplines.

They mention a benefit of performing in a farm field they hadn’t initially anticipated is that kids can follow their impulse to get up and start dancing off to the side without really interrupting the performance.

Telling The Story Of Your Overhead

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Our friends at the Non-Profit Happy Hour Facebook group shared the Furniture Bank’s Charity Overhead Manifesto. In the post, the Furniture Bank talks about how much damage resistance to covering overhead can do to their programs.

We have heard many of these arguments before, but Furniture Bank takes the next necessary step of humanizing and discussing the impact of the work “overhead employees” perform.

The reason this is important is because it takes an abstract concept of overhead and specifically shows how overhead costs are manifested in the organization’s operations. Absent this specificity, it is easy to envision overhead going to senior administrator salaries or unsexy equipment and supplies like filing cabinets and copy paper. While this is inevitably the case to some degree, it isn’t the whole story.

This reminds us how important a compelling story can be. Furniture Bank lists what their overhead helps them accomplish:

  • Maintain, insure and run a fleet of 11 trucks, and a team of movers, picking up furniture from donors and delivering them to clients every day;
  • Employ 25-30 individuals each year who would otherwise face barriers to employment;
  • Pay market rent on a 30,000 Sq Ft client showroom;
  • Sustain an organization with 40 hardworking and big hearted employees who:
    • take orders,
    • track inventory,
    • book client appointments,
    • schedule and complete pickups & deliveries,
    • answer donor inquiries,
    • process donations,
    • ensure we have the right technology to run our operations, and
    • undertake the numerous other tasks that must occur every day to ensure that the community’s unwanted furniture goes directly to a family transitioning out of homelessness or displacement.

That format can be a little boring though. They also participate in the Charity Defense Council’s “I’m Overhead” campaign that has created images with Furniture Bank employees discussing what they do which end with a line about the impact they make, (you can see examples of the full ads on the Furniture Bank site.)

“My name is Miro Janes-Richardson. I make sure families have a place they can finally call home, and I’m overhead.”

My name is Yuri Hernandez. I make sure clients have the dignity of choice and don’t have to sleep on the floor, and I’m overhead.”

Miro is a truck crew leader and Yuri is a client services coordinator.

It may be difficult for arts organizations that don’t have a strong human services aspect to their operations to tell as compelling a story as these, but there are still opportunities to illustrate that staff help the organization be good stewards of donations.

For example:

“Do you recognize this flat? It has been in some of your favorite performances over the last five years including Dangerous Liaisons, Amadeus, A Raisin in the Sun and Christmas Carol. Here at the theater, we are great recyclers, repainting and repairing set piece dozens of times, extending their useful lives for years. This reduces our need to purchase lumber, which is good for the environment. But to make it happen, we need to store flats like this one and be clever about changing its appearance so you don’t recognize it when it appears again.

I am Steve and I work magic to make fake trees look real so that real trees can live, and I am overhead.

That five minutes of typing may not have resulted in the most compelling argument for theater operations, but you get the idea.

It isn’t just enough to tell people that they shouldn’t use overhead ratio as a measure of effectiveness, it is also necessary to communicate specific examples that illustrate that what they may envision the raw numbers represent isn’t necessarily the reality.

I don’t doubt that there will still be people who want 95-100% of their donation to be devoted exclusively to program beneficiaries, but linking overhead activities with impact outcomes can help combat decision making strictly by the numbers.

The Classic Or Contemporary?

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When it comes to Shakespeare, I feel like it is worth taking the time to sit and allow yourself to adjust to the language and rhythms rather than dismissing it outright as too impenetrable. There is a lot in there that can’t be accurately replicated by updating the language.

I would say the same thing about classical music and visual art. Allowing yourself time to transition your perspective from 21 century life to whatever period a piece of music was written in is worth the time.

If you are wandering a museum, you definitely need to be prepared shift between digital graphics of daily existence to Vermeer to Mark Rothko.

So I was interested to read back in April that Shakespeare enjoys a greater degree of appreciation in non-English speaking countries.

A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries reveals, for example, that 88% of surveyed Mexicans like Shakespeare, compared with only 59% of British people; 84% of Brazilians said they found him relevant to today’s world, compared with 57% in the UK; and 83% of Indians said they understood him, far more than the 58% of Britons.

Overall, Shakespeare’s popularity abroad stands at 65%, compared with 59% in the UK.

[…]

The research suggests it is experience of Shakespeare at school which plays the biggest part – studying the original text can put people off for life.

Hilhorst said most Britons were taught Shakespeare in his original English while abroad there were often translations which used a more contemporary, accessible language.

That conclusion would explain why the “do you like Shakespeare” figures are roughly the same among English-speaking countries – USA (63%), Australia (60%) and the UK (59%). In the top five are India (89%), Mexico (88%), Brazil (87%), Turkey (79%) and South Africa (73%)

Only French and Germans like Shakespeare less than English speakers.

There is an implication in the article that Shakespeare is better enjoyed in general when the language is updated to be accessible to contemporary audiences.

I am of two minds about this. First, it is irking no one is really advocating for classical music to be updated to make it more accessible. Certainly, you can put it in different contexts to make it more familiar and accessible like Bugs Bunny cartoons or playing it in bars, but will it increase appreciation and understanding of Bach to hear is played on electric bass, guitar, keyboard and a drum kit?

What about electric violins and turn table?

Does it help people understand The Last Supper if it is digitized or parodied?

star-wars-last-supper-mosaic-72dpi

If I am being honest, maybe Black Violin’s version of Bach’s Brandenburg Concert will help people become more comfortable with the original. But I imagine it is also easy to claim that while it may make you more comfortable, it doesn’t really help you understand Bach’s original composition.

I would also argue this is more akin to a shift in context than an actual adaptation into a contemporary “language.” I would place the common practice of  setting Shakespeare in different time periods while retaining the language in this category.

Which brings me to my second mind. The one advantage Shakespeare has is that the works can be adapted to contemporary times and the adaptations can help you understand the original works. I would say West Side Story may do this better for Romeo and Juliet and Throne of Blood for MacBeth than Forbidden Planet does it for The Tempest (granted, Forbidden Planet wasn’t intended as an adaptation of Tempest).

Whether adaptations like these help inspire people to explore the originals, I don’t know. My sense is that the theatrical format by its very nature lends itself to adaptation in ways that allow people to connect with the original works in ways other arts disciplines don’t.

To a certain degree, there is an argument for making Shakespeare’s language more contemporary because you can do effectively.

But it is still absolutely worth experiencing Shakespeare in the original language.

What Is Required To Create Works That Matter?

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Can a creative person afford not to attend to the business details and promotion/branding of their practice these days?

Cal Newport, perhaps unwittingly, wades into the longstanding debate about pure practice of ones craft vs. being more business savvy and oriented with his post “Want to Create Things That Matter? Be Lazy.”

In this instance, the “laziness” is not doing anything that distracts you from deeply investing in your core pursuit. So no engaging with fans on social media or email; accepting speaking engagements; show casing work, etc.

While Newport doesn’t explicitly say this includes ignoring personal finances and legal arrangements, his definition that:

“…shallow work is an activity that can impede more important deep efforts and therefore cause more net harm than good. It might slightly help your writing career in the moment to be retweeted, but the long term impact of a distracting Twitter habit could be the difference between a struggling novelist and an award-winning star like Stephenson.”

could easily be used to support a rationalization for avoiding the less pleasant aspects of a creative career.

Paying attention to the contracts you enter in and analyzing if you are effectively pricing your work provide a net benefit to one’s career, but this is also time consuming if you don’t have the resources to pay someone else to do it for you.

While you would be on solid ground to claim these are definitely worthy pursuits, according to Newport activities like public speaking engagements are on shakier ground. Still, public appearances, especially ones you are paid for, aren’t really on the same level as busyness that you engage in to avoid doing substantive work.

Emails and social media can be a time suck and you can rationalize that you are getting things done and advancing your career, but Newport has a point that the trade off of spending an hour on tweets vs. an hour of productive creation in unequal. At a certain level of notoriety, public appearances can become a huge time and energy suck of themselves.

At the same time, we can point to examples of people who have had their careers start based on the effort they have put into a social media presence. Whether you think that success is deserved or not or whether you believe the career will endure or not is another issue.

Even though I am pretty much firmly on the side of balancing your checkbook and reading your contracts, I think the conversation about how best to pursue a career as a creative isn’t one that can be definitively settled.

That said, it doesn’t serve creative artist well to lecture them on being mindful of all aspects of their lives without some good practice guidelines (if not best practice guidelines).

Most creative oriented folks would say it is important to them to create work that matters. But if no one is aware of the work’s existence, if no effort has been made to make people aware of it, does it matter? Or rather, does it matter to the extent that others feel it has impact in their lives.

There can also be the question about whether it matters enough to support the creator financially, but that touches upon an immense conversation so I will just leave the question as one of impact.

So how do you know when you are neglecting the practical requirements of a creative career? How do you know when you are favoring shallow pursuit of your creative goals over deeper pursuit of them?

These statues were in a side alley people park their bikes in. Does this work matter?
These statues were in a side alley people park their bikes in. Does this work matter?

Can You Answer This Question About The Arts?

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I am a little embarrassed that it hasn’t occurred to me to post about this sooner.

Here on the old blogosphere, general Internet, at conferences, in coffee houses and on the street where you live, we often talk about educating people, reaching out to them, removing the sense of mystery about the arts. Yet it seems so difficult to figure out an effective way to do this.

While I am not going to claim it would have a high ROI, it just occurred to me, (despite participating for years), that getting more arts people answering questions on Quora would help promote and educate people about the subject. In addition, it would give those involved with the arts a sense of what people were asking and give them practice answering the questions.

I have been reading and participating on Quora for a few years and only just recently realized that the arts have pretty light representation in terms of questions and responses. I get a digest of recent responses everyday which often address questions about history (real and speculative), politics, and guns, lots of guns. I have no idea why I get so many topics on guns since that isn’t one of my stated interests.

It just occurred to me this weekend that I don’t really see much about the arts. When I do seek out questions on the topic, the most recent answers can be between 3-5 years old.

Today I got a request to answer – “Why do they tiptoe in ballet?” I have a general idea of how to respond, but many of you with a dance focus can do a better job answering than me.

Here is a brief example of the types of questions in the subject area – What makes acting believable?; How can I improve my live performance as a musician?; Theatre: Why aren’t plays recorded for commercial sale?; What are some interesting tricks that are used in theatrical set design? (this one only has two answers); Is it socially acceptable to go to the theater by myself?

Of course, there are also questions about studying an arts discipline (barely any answers on multiple theatre related ones) and dating someone who is involved in the arts.

Quora can be a great source of information on areas of interest you may have. You may often discover answers to questions you weren’t aware you had. The range of people answering questions can be surprising. Celebrities, prominent business people, Nobel Prize winners and prominent experts often offer their insight. Over time you will also start to recognize and even seek out answers by less noted people who have earned your trust by exhibiting a high level of expertise and thoughtfulness in their responses.

While you will find articles providing advice on how to use Quora for marketing and promotion, the environment of the forum doesn’t really tolerate blatant promotion.

Enquiring Stakeholders Want To Know

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Last week I made a post about “rebranding” overhead costs in other terms in order to get away from the associated stigma. Included in the post, I mentioned that a non-profit was being sued by donors for dipping into its restricted funds to invest in the organization’s exploding growth.

On the Non-Profit Quarterly website today was an interview with Cindy M. Lott about the changing non-profit regulatory and enforcement environment that suggested similar scrutiny of non-profits may only increase.

The interview with Lott discusses a lot about the history of non-profit regulation on the state and federal level. One of the things they note is that the IRS’s decision to digitize 990 filings is going to bring the opportunity for a lot more transparency for non-profit charities. Access to financial documents and other information will hopefully provide a greater capacity to detect misappropriation and embezzlement of funds.

What caused me a bit of concern wasn’t the prospect that governments might use this information to apply undue scrutiny to non-profits, but that donors and funders might.

According to Lott, state attorneys general have always had legal standing to bring a suit against a non-profit entity or board of directors. In recent years, she says, other groups have argued that they have standing to bring suit as well.

Occasionally, we see beneficiaries who say, “Wait a minute—I represent an interest that is not being brought by AGs for whatever reason.” And we see marginalized members of the board and donors who say this as well.

While this is contrary to laws regarding who has standing, the fact that there are shareholder actions and class actions in the private sector may be cited to pressure for the same rights in the non-profit sector. Lott notes that secretary of state offices which oversee non-profits in each state are heavily involved with enforcing consumer protection and might easily equate donor dollars with consumer dollars.

I am merely noting what may be a natural outcome of the current trajectory of an underresourced enforcement community intersecting with a wealth of publicly available data. We may very well find in the near future that donors and beneficiaries who have access to information about where these billions of dollars are going may, in fact, decide that they would like a say when they believe something goes off the rails.

The interview cites the action taken by a wide segment of stakeholders in the case of Sweet Briar College’s planned closing. The footnotes for the interview provide a number of other examples of stakeholder actions, including a class action by donors who discovered 100% of their donation didn’t go toward programs as they intended and a suit by two sons who want to review the cause of losses suffered by a foundation their father established.

At this point I don’t see anything to be immediately alarmed about. It will definitely be worthwhile to keep an eye out for how things develop in the areas of governmental oversight and legal standing of donors and other possible stakeholders.

“…The Art That Is In You Has Only Faintly Touched The Lives Of Your People.”

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Last month, Americans for the Arts blog was printing excerpts from the writing of Robert E. Gard who primary focused on manifesting the Wisconsin Idea through theater and creative writing starting around 1945.

I first became enamored of the concept of the Wisconsin Idea about 10 years ago. The idea that a state government and university system would be focused on a holistic improvement of the lives of the state’s citizenry is pretty inspiring.  Even though political opposition began work to undermine and unravel elements of it almost immediately, people have hewn to the Wisconsin Idea for over a century.

There was an excerpt on Americans for the Arts’ blog of a piece Gard wrote in 1952 that illustrates just how long some themes and debates about the arts in the U.S. have endured.

Your struggle, America, has matured so rapidly that the quaint folkishness of your village has been swept into an almost common molding, and the economic fruit of your struggle has been so plentiful that we, your people, have tended to shun the responsibility of art, sometimes to scorn it, and to look at it askance as a manifestation unworthy of our virile American manhood. You have put down deep taproots, America, that have given us the stuff of wondrous plenty, but these same roots have starved off the expressiveness of yourself. For those of us who have loved you best have not completely understood your struggle, and the art that is in you has only faintly touched the lives of your people.

[…]

It became suddenly and completely apparent to me that we could no longer pretend that theater, to have its true vital meaning, could be fabricated and foisted upon the people as entertainment alone, or as sociology, or as an art form practiced by the few for the satisfaction of individual egos. But that theater must grow spontaneously from the lives and the necessities of the people, so that the great dream of a few men and women who saw true visions might come true: the dream of an America accepting the idea of great popular art expression without question, as a thing inherently American.

So there you go, in 1952 Gard expressed concern that: 1 – America has a slightly hostile streak when it comes to the arts or creative self-expression; 2 – Arts needed to be viewed as more than just simple entertainment; 3- Yet not viewed as the province of an elite few, but as place where people saw their own lives reflected.

In 60+ years since Gard wrote that, little has changed. These topics still dominate conversation and are cause for hand wringing.

I am optimistic that things are headed in a constructive direction. Given all the attention focused on programming, casting and employment choices being made in theater and movies, there is a greater opportunity to see oneself and one’s stories.

The same with the effort to build public will for arts and culture I have been writing about recently which has creative self-expression at its core.

I am sure Gard was pretty optimistic back then too, and with good reason if you look at all that was created and still endures in the name of the Wisconsin Idea. It is also pretty clear that the effort has to constantly be sustained against both external forces that seek to oppose and erode it, as well as simple internal neglect and entropy.

To some degree, I see the effort to build public will for arts and culture as a spiritual successor of the Wisconsin Idea. The Idea was always meant to become a national influence. While its spread hasn’t been as prevalent as initially hoped, the folks in Wisconsin have been really good about actively keeping the torch lit and the light has indirectly had a positive influence on others.

If you are looking for a guiding principle to help you speak about arts and culture to those who have negative associations with the concepts, you could do worse than to meditate upon and internalize the empathy and ambition of the last line in the first paragraph I quoted:

For those of us who have loved you best have not completely understood your struggle, and the art that is in you has only faintly touched the lives of your people.

Is There Rising Market For Silence?

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The journal Nautilus had an interesting piece about the value of silence.

The article starts out talking about how 100 Finnish marketing experts met to discuss how to promote the country for tourism. Someone half jokingly suggested promoting the silence of the country. The group decided it actually wasn’t a bad idea.

One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” An international “country branding” consultant, Simon Anholt, proposed the playful tagline “No talking, but action.” And a Finnish watch company, Rönkkö, launched its own new slogan: “Handmade in Finnish silence.”

The “Silence, Please” campaign has apparently become one of the most popular aspects of the branding effort.

Despite the current theory that an arts experience shouldn’t require participants to be passive receivers in a dark, quiet room, silence is healthy for our mental and physical well-being and may be an asset worth promoting for some arts and cultural entities.

The Nautilus piece mentions research that shows how exposure to noise while we sleep can have emotional and mental impacts that may also manifest into physical problems.   Silence, on the other hand, can have positive impact on our development.

Yet to her great surprise, Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses. This was deeply puzzling: The total absence of input was having a more pronounced effect than any sort of input tested.

It should be noted that these observations were made with mice, but they are researching the implications for dementia and depression in humans.

There is also mention of a 1997 Washington University study (with humans) that noticed there were interesting increases in some brain activity when subjects were quietly doing nothing that get suppressed when people are engaged in an activity.

Artists of all disciplines have known about the power of empty space and silence in their work. Still, I was surprised to learn of following result that occurred when monitoring the vitals of humans listening to music:

In fact, two-minute silent pauses proved far more relaxing than either “relaxing” music or a longer silence played before the experiment started.

So perhaps concert goers do have cause to be upset at those who clap between movements. It isn’t ruining the composition, the noise from clapping is robbing them of a positive physiological effect!

Many creatives, including one cited in the Nautilus article, are very much aware that silence is often the best method for generating creativity and inspiration.

If the arts community is going to encourage people to become more actively engaged in their own creative expressions, it is probably important that the value of silence not be overlooked. It is easy to forget that when there is so much to say about technique, history, artistic value, monetary worth, personal practice etc., etc.

For those who are seeking to unplug themselves from their regular lives, the opportunity and implied requirement of silence may be the most valuable aspect.

Heck With Garage Bands, Rock The Porch!

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Ever since I first heard them mentioned during our state arts council’s grant panel discussion, I have been keeping an eye on the PorchRokr Festival up near Akron.

The hook of the festival is that the artists apply perform on people’s front porches. The audience can wander throughout the neighborhood and decide which lawn to recline on.

Truly an event with deep roots and involvement in the community (unless you want those damn kids to stay off your front lawn.)

What is great is that there an investment and willingness to share what has been learned with others.

I came across a mention of a community panel discussion in a couple weeks where the festival organizers will teach others about their process in advance of the upcoming festival.

Since the Eventbrite link will expire in a couple weeks, here is a description:

Have you ever wondered what it takes to plan and execute a community arts and cultural festival? Join us on Tuesday, August 9th to hear from Katie Carver Reed, Jon Morschl, and Anita Marron of PorchRokr Festival. We’ll learn what it takes to create PorchRokr and the influence the festival has on the local community.

This year’s PorchRokr festival takes place on August 20, 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. in Highland Square. Over 100 bands and performers, rocking 30 porches, on 12 streets, all in one day.

PorchRokr is planned by the Highland Square Neighborhood Association, a Knight Arts Challenge recipient.

In the process of looking for that event listing, I discovered a group is partnering with PorchRokr to offer workshops for the performers over the course of a month.

Again an excerpt since the Facebook event will expire:

A collaborative partnership between The Highland Square Neighborhood Association PorchRokr Festival and Wandering Aesthetics, it is a way for performers – of all genres and all experience levels – to enhance their onstage presence, work through stage fright, brush up on invaluable performance skills and practice in front of an audience.

Each session is designed as a “one-off” workshop geared to nurture onstage success.

1) Making Contact: Overcoming Stage Fright & Forming a Genuine Connection (JULY 23)
2) Do Not Be Dismissed: Presence and Energy in Performance (JULY 30)
3) Seen, but Not Heard: Voice for the Performer (AUGUST 6)
4) From Vamping to Banter: Improv for the Unexpected (AUGUST 13)

*Participants are encouraged, but not required, to attend all four (4) sessions

I am encouraged and inspired by programs like these that recognize the value of helping artists help the festival help the audience to have a more enjoyable and memorable experience.

Even if you didn’t run a festival, the topics they cover would make for a good workshop series for any arts organization that was looking to make or strengthen connections with the community.

Overhead By Any Other Name

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FastCoExist recently continued its discussion about how a poor view of non-profit overhead cost is limiting the good such organizations can do by offering some “rebranding” suggestions in order to help change perceptions.

As an illustration of how the concept that non-profits must restrict their overhead cost is a severe impediment toward doing good, they cite a lawsuit against Architecture for Humanity.  The group was experiencing huge program growth, but was limited by donors to only devoting 10% to overhead costs. Because they dipped into program money to fund their growth, they have been taken to court accused of looting the funds.

Many company donations, the suit alleges, were earmarked for project costs. As overhead rose and things got more desperate, those got tapped to cover broader expenses. The plaintiff is calling that looting. The suit shows pretty clearly how groups—even if their rapid growth is woefully mismanaged—can be trapped by antiquated views on things like “overhead” and “indirect costs.”

[Update: Issues like this are why it is good to have Directors and Officers Insurance]

FastCoExist spoke to two brand naming experts who mulled over various concepts for changing how overhead costs are viewed by changing the terminology. The article go through various ideas they discarded to come up with the following suggestions.

From Margaret Wolfson of River + Wolf:

1: Circle funds
2: Encompass funds
3: Vessel funds
4: Core funds

Anthony Shore of Operative Words suggested:

1: Operations costs
2: Operational costs
3: Direct operations costs
4: General operational costs

The author of a Bridgespan report on paying overhead costs noted that this latter set of terms may not be appropriate because “not all operational costs are indirect, and not all indirect costs are operational.”

The naming experts made some additional suggestions that sounded a bit like arts organization donor categories so maybe we are already heading in the right direction and just need to find more sexy language:

Wolfson’s other idea is to award branded titles for budget line items, so folks who cover electrical costs could consider themselves “Illuminators” while those picking up the hardware and software tab would be “Digital Drivers.”

The point is, words definitely do matter. The final expression might end up being a bit unsexy, but only metaphorically. As Shore puts it: “What could be more sexy than dramatically influencing how much money pours into the critical, staying-afloat initiatives within an organization?”

Every Musician Is Important To A Symphony

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In a move that I like to see as reinforcing the importance of orchestra musicians in a time where their value is being diminished during contract negotiations, a long time supporter of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), Marjorie Fisher, recently left $5,000 to every one of the 78 current full-time musicians.

If supporters of other orchestras being to follow her example, we may see musicians fighting a lot harder to maintain the number of permanent positions during contract negotiations.

When I first scanned the story on the Non Profit Quarterly, I initially wondered if this bequest might be in response to the poor treatment symphony musicians have received during contract negotiations. However, given that the Fisher family has made donations to support the DSO in every way possible, (and just illuminated a new possibility), it would be difficult to make that assumption.

That said, between the prevalence of crowd funding campaigns and indications of a shift toward direct support of those in need, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people were investing greater effort into ensuring support was going specifically where they intend.

What Many Of Us Have Learned

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Awhile back Barry Hessenius asked me to write a “What I Have Learned” essay for his blog. He noted that in the past he often featured similar pieces written by people who were approaching the end of their career. This time around he wanted to feature the voices of people who were on the upward arc of their careers.

This past Sunday he posted the collection of essays. I should warn you, the post is L-O-O-O-N-N-G. I wasn’t given a word limit and I would guess none of the other 17 people whose contributions appear were either.

True to Barry’s purpose of providing a forum to some lesser known people, there were names a recognized but many I didn’t and ended up Googling. I had originally intended to provide a list of the contributors with links to bios or websites as a reference, but after opening 10 tabs in my web browers, I realized my entire post was going to end up being a list of names.

So read the post and if you see someone you like, Google them to learn more.

There is a lot to read but there is a lot worth reading. Over a couple days I made note of the next person on the list and performed a Find on the page when I came back to continue reading.

To give a small sample of what people submitted, I was really struck by this advice from EMC Arts’ Karina Mangu-Ward:

Accept offers of support, even if it makes you feel vulnerable:  Early in my work at EmcArts, a more experienced colleague of mine approached me and said that if I was ever interested in developing my practice as a facilitator he’d be willing to mentor me.  I brushed it off at the time, unsure of how to accept the support.  But I kept in the back of my mind.  Four years I later, when I was in a difficult moment of growth, I called him up and asked him if he’d be willing to to set aside two hours a month to talk with me about the big questions I was wrestling with.  Now, he’s one of the most important people in my professional life.

A few contributors mentioned issues of Power, but Ian David Moss from Factured Atlas & Createquity made it his central topic. After a lengthy admonition about abuse of power which included the first sentence below, he suggests people are often unaware of the power they possess and the effective, if seemingly mundane ways, in which it can be exercised.

Power is like a precious, poisonous metal: it requires care and professionalism in handling or people are going to get hurt.

[…]

Know that speaking up is always, always an exercise of power – no matter who you are. Know that asking uncomfortable questions is a way to change the course of a meeting, a policy discussion, a decision. Know that sharing your experience in a forum where it will be heard is an exercise of power. Know that doing so again and again is more powerful than doing so once, as tedious as that may seem to you.

Know that doing your job well, maybe even better than anyone else, is an exercise of power. Know that understanding what you’re good at is an exercise of power. Know that vacuums of leadership mean more power for you. You never need to let your title and salary have the final say on what you’re capable of.

[…]

Know that charging yourself to gain more knowledge, particularly knowledge that most people around you don’t have, is one of the most valuable and impressive forms of power you can exercise. And absolutely no one is stopping you from exercising that particular power starting right now.

Taken out of context, any one paragraph might come off as advice for ruthless ambition, but he figuratively starts and literally ends his contribution with the reminder that “…with power comes responsibility.”

Each of the contributors comes from a different place with their “lessons learned” essay, but generally offer insight of a similarly high quality. Bookmark it and allow yourself to read through it over time.

Finding Things Out Only Adds

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Since I seem to have started on a philosophical kick this week, how about we consider Richard Feynman’s “Ode To A Flower” commentary in the video below? You can also see it illustrated in an awesome Zen Pencil’s comic.

Like Feynman’s friend, I remember being in my high school science class and thinking that it was robbing life of all its wonder. I would rather be entranced by the fictitious stories that made things seem magical than to learn the dull truth that it was all a result of chemical reactions.

Later, I came to appreciate, as Feynman points out, that science actually gives you the tools to extend your wonder and experience the delight of discovery.

For example, one of the things I have wondered about for 20+ years is whether squirrels in Florida hide nuts for the winter since there is no danger of food scarcity. If they don’t, if you transported a Florida squirrel to Boston, would instincts kick in and lead it to hide nuts or would it be in danger of starving?

It may sound like a silly question, but I keep it tucked away in the back of my mind in case I meet a scientist who can provide the answer. I find it exciting to know that I can discover that answer and receive additional interesting revelations with follow up questions.

Feynman’s short comments illustrate just how valuable the skill of communicating what you do to the uninitiated is. Feynman was great at explaining scientific concepts to people. A lot of scientists aren’t.

By the same measure, a lot of artists and arts organizations aren’t really good at explaining art and the value of the arts either. I wonder how much of that is due to simple lack of practice and how much is due to fear of being accused of selling out or dumbing things down.

I had a recent email exchange with Carter Gillies about this subject. I wondered if the scientific community felt Neil DeGrasse Tyson wasn’t a real scientist because he used his public profile to explain science to the general public. Is he accused of dumbing things down for a general audience? Do people suggest he can’t have time to engage in real scientific work due to all his media appearances?

I assume I don’t need to cite any parallel sentiments in the arts and cultural sphere.

Unfortunately, in these days when people have a high degree of control over the information they receive and are able to more easily ignore and filter out what they don’t want to hear, explaining the value of a subject becomes more difficult even for highly skilled communicators.

Frequently the initial encounter with the revelations and new questions that emerge isn’t easy or comfortable to bear.

Even with the tools to communicate your message to a wide range of people, getting someone like the high school me to accept a less magical view of the world in exchange for one that still had a lot of potential for wonder requires a retail, one-on-one, effort.

While Feynman gave physics lectures to packed lectures halls, the “Ode To A Flower” comment came from a series of one on one discussions he and artist Jirayr Zorthian had about art and physics over the course of eight years.

As an added aside: There is frequently discussion about people needing to see people like themselves on stage. I can’t express the thrill I got when I first heard a New York accent coming out of the mouth of a person acknowledged to be a brilliant scientist. I think it can be easy to underestimate the impact of those types of experiences.

Spiritual Fulfillment And Cultural Experiences

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High Expectations of Cultural Experiences

Last week I wrote about Ken Davenport’s admonition that an arts experience not exceed a person’s expectations by too large a margin.

As a counterpoint to that, I wanted to call attention to a piece from BrainPickings on Geoff Dyer’s writing about expectations and disappointment. Among the disappointments he lists from his own life include going to Boston’s Museum of Fine Art to see a painting by Paul Gauguin only to find it was out on loan. Upon learning this, he dejectedly trudges out of the museum.

The experience of the missing masterpiece, of the thwarted pilgrimage (which is not at all the same as a wasted journey), made me see that the vast questions posed by Gauguin’s painting had to be supplemented with other, more specific ones. Why do we arrive at a museum on the one day of the week — the only day we have free in a given city — when it is shut? On the day after a blockbuster exhibition has finally — after multiple extensions of its initial four-month run — closed?…

[…]

Impossible — not even conceivable — that a Muslim, on making the mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, could be disappointed. That is the essential difference between religious and secular pilgrimage: the latter always has the potential to disappoint.

Part of this reminded me about John Falk’s list of five basic identities types that visit museums I have written about in the past (and probably will write about again.)

Specifically, I was reminded about the Experience Seeker type which Antoinette Duplessis describes as “…‘collecting’ experiences. They want to feel like they’ve ‘been there’ and they’ve ‘done that’ – they want to see the destination, building or what’s iconic on display.”

In this particular instance, Dyer sounds as if he is acting within this type. He goes into the MFA to find a particular painting and leaves when it is not available rather than exploring what other experiences he might have.

Cultural Pilgrimages

What really caught my attention was his comparison of a religious pilgrimage to a secular pilgrimage and how the former could never be disappointing.

I have frequently read, listened and contributed to conversations regarding how people often expect some sort of transcendent experience when they attend an arts event. I had always assumed that this was because people who didn’t have much experience with the arts intellectually idealized what the unfamiliar experience would be like and are subsequently concerned if they didn’t understand what was going on or found themselves becoming bored.

This may actually be the process most people go through in regard to the arts. However, Dyer’s comparison of the two pilgrimages made me wonder if people might not be equating an arts experience with a religious experience when they formed expectations in their minds.

Spiritual Aspects of Cultural Pilgrimages

This idea isn’t that far fetched. Communities across the country often organize special trips to America’s theatre Mecca of NYC to see shows. With all the hype about Hamilton, and Wicked and The Lion King being among the more familiar household names, it is not unreasonable that excitement would build to the point of simulating a religious experience and lead to an expectation of a type of spiritual fulfillment.

These expectations aren’t necessarily created by marketing hype. Just seeing videos on YouTube of devotees lining up to buy tickets for Hamilton and lingering outside to sing together even after they can’t get in can shape expectations. If your experience is disappointing and your spirit isn’t buoyed by the show like thousands, if not millions of others, the failure is with you, correct?

Perhaps the least harmless reaction to this is when people feel the need to leap to their feet to give a standing ovation at the end of a performance even if they are kinda confused by what happened. (Or take a selfie in a museum by a piece they don’t quite understand.)

Spiritual Fulfillment Comes From Within

How the heck do you deal with disappointment when expectations are for spiritual fulfillment? This a type of transcendence is impossible to intentionally deliver. It is an entirely internal matter that people experience for themselves. If people can leave Mecca feeling a sense of transcendence despite the constant danger of being crushed to death by the crowds, others can easily overlook a bad cab ride in NYC if they feel they are completing a once in a lifetime activity.

When the expectations are based in intellect and emotion, as with my initial assumption about the process people went through in regard to the arts, it is relatively easy to provide education which shifts expectations and lets people know it is okay to be bored or confused. If you can assure them that with time and exposure, the experience will become accessible, there is potential to move people away from anxiety toward self-empowerment.

Challenge of Providing Spiritual Fulfillment

But what happens if people view the mystery and inscrutability of an arts experience in a manner similar to the way they view the mysteries of their faith? It is not implausible to make this association given how fervently arts people speak about their (a)vocation. In all likelihood they wouldn’t place as great an importance on an artistic/cultural experience as they would the experiences of their religious practice. But they may seek a person or information source that was able to explain/guide them through the experience with clarity and certainty.

Lacking someone to do so, or being told there was no single interpretation and it was up to the viewer to decide, it can be comforting to verify your perceptions against those of others. In this respect, there really isn’t any difference between those who view the lack of clarity as an intellectual, emotional or spiritual mystery. The difference is in the degree of certitude required to make you comfortable.

If people are convinced that a pinnacle experience they had was akin to a religious one, all others will pale in comparison. No other can be considered since the ideal has already been encountered.

The other alternative is worse. When an experience that is anticipated to have the same payoff as a religious pilgrimage is ruined by a bad cab ride from the New York airport, it can equally sour someone on any subsequent suggestions.

Again, I am not saying people really ever equate a cultural experience with a religious experience. I am just intrigued with Dyer’s suggestion that a secular pilgrimage has a hazard for disappointment that a sacred pilgrimage can not possess and what the implications of that concept may have for arts and culture.

Safe Deposit Insuring Arts Center Future

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Well here is a novel idea for funding an arts organization–using the proceeds from leasing space in storage vaults.

The inspiration for building the largest underground storage vault in China was finding a way to fund an art museum.

The idea for the vault came to the company’s founder, Liu Feiguo, while he was lobbying to open an art museum in the Shanghai Tower. He realized that the high revenues from the Baoku Treasury could fund the museum’s daily operations.

Baoku Treasury clients are given a 15-year membership pass to the Shanghai Guanfu Museum and the Baoku Art Center, allowing free access to exhibits and events. Most of the proceeds from deposit box sales are reinvested in the museum.

Baoku China has already announced plans to expand and build community vaults. According to Zhou, “Community vaults are actually cheaper to build than high-end swimming pools.”

It isn’t cheap to rent a deposit box and the security measures sound like they are from a Mission Impossible movie. The least expensive option is $10,300 for 15 years. I assume since clients get a 15 year membership pass to the museum and art center that must be the standard lease length.

This exact idea probably isn’t viable for everyone and everywhere, but shows a little creative thinking may be worthwhile.

Slightly Exceeding Expectations As An Ideal Outcome

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A recent post on Ken Davenport’s The Producer’s Perspective caused me to engage in a bit of internal debate.

Ken says a one of the worst things you can do is greatly exceed audience expectations:

“..But it also means that before they step into the theater, they have no clue what they’re about to see . . . and they aren’t expecting it to be anything to write home to Mama about.

Exceeding an audience’s expectations isn’t a creative problem. It’s a marketing problem. It means that however you are promoting your show, from the title to the blurb to the website, it’s not generating enough excitement with your potential buyer. And, unfortunately, when audience’s expectations are low, that means that most of them won’t make a purchase. People buy tickets to things that they expect to be good great. They are buying entertainment, remember? They want to be entertained. And in 2016, with the cost of tickets as high as they are . . . entertaining an audience isn’t enough. They want to be wowed.”

This is all contrary to the outcome I want.

One of the greatest pleasures I get from my job is when people enjoy a performance they didn’t expect to. There isn’t a lot of financial remuneration in non-profit arts, but hearing people say “Wow” when they leave the performance hall…and having them continue to talk about their experience weeks, months and even years later, is pretty gratifying.

The mission of most non-profit arts organizations is to provide an opportunity for exploration and learning versus the profit making goals of Broadway shows, so you might argue that you aren’t going to want to emphasize the entertainment value of the event.  If you aren’t charging Broadway prices to enter the door, then the burden of expectations is relatively lighter as well.

The problem is, most people, even those who attend your events, don’t know you are a non-profit organization. They aren’t discerning between the entertainment or education value your organization is offering versus those of a profit seeking entity. Chances are, it is all the same to them.

Regardless of whether you think people want to come for the entertainment value or to learn new things, Davenport has a point that if people are arriving not knowing what to expect, then you are probably under- or mis- communicating the event to the wider community.

Note, he is just talking about generating enthusiasm for being there. People may have an entirely wrong concept about the event and have their minds blown and that is okay. If they are tentative about being there in the first place and hoping they have a good time, that is another thing altogether.

The reasons why non-profits aren’t doing a better job at this are myriad. In some cases, it is a matter of bad decision making when it comes to allocating money and personnel to marketing efforts.

There is often a desire, and perhaps a sense of obligation, to invest money in the artistic product rather than advertising and personnel, both of which can be regarded as overhead expense.

As has been noted many times before, donors and funders want to know money is going toward results and impact, delighting people and changing their lives.  Even though marketing isn’t explicitly listed as something most foundations doesn’t fund, there is less support and tolerance for the costs to reach those people and generate interest and excitement in them.

It definitely requires a careful balancing act. Some organizations are good at it, some aren’t and some probably aren’t really making an effort.

It really feels strange to read Davenport brag that his team did such a good job marketing Altar Boyz, seeing the show only slightly exceed audience expectations. But if the audiences truly expressed a high level of satisfaction with the experience and seeing the show only slightly added to that, then it a measure of success if their satisfaction extended hours, if not days prior to, and after the performance.

Is that a feeling your arts organization can lay claim to generating?

Even though the discussion inevitably circles back to issues of time, personnel and money, these questions and ideas are worth regularly revisiting, regardless of your situation. Sometimes just thinking about them provides a little inspiration about a resource or opportunity specific to your community that can be tapped into.

Arts Center, I Choose You!

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I was walking in to work on Saturday and met a woman who has offices in the arts center who told me that there was a Pokemon in the fountain in front of the building.

Sure enough, as part of the new augmented reality game Pokemon Go, when she pointed her phone at the fountain, the virtual map overlay showed a Pokemon in the fountain. She then lamented that someone else was battling to capture it. I assume it was the kid standing on the sidewalk just south of the fountain.

Then she explained that she and her kids had seen some Pokemon in a tree at the Farmers’ Market that morning, but the virtual critters got away.

As we walked into the arts center, her phone informed her my building was a Pokemon center and she told me if I downloaded the app, I could capture them every morning when I came into work.

I asked her how the building and fountain had been designated as spawning points and she said someone must have come along before her, taken a picture of the building and added it to a list of possible points.

At that point, I realized it could be a great boon for getting younger people in the door if they could get their venues included in the game.

Jason Evangelho at Forbes Magazine had the same idea and suggested businesses use the game to lure in customers. Unfortunately, if you read down to the Update postscript at the end, the game creators are the ones who designated these locations using Google Maps, not the general public.

However, Evangelho figures given the opportunities the game represents, they may come up with a way for different places to get themselves added or offer some sort of premium features for game players.

One of the things he mentions places that already are designated as “Pokestops” can do is buy a lure module that attract Pokemons to the location for 30 minutes. (for 100 Pokecoins currently selling for 99 cents.)

It may be worth checking if your location is already designated as a central location in the game so you can think about how to adapt that into your activities.

It should be noted, you may not have any choice in whether you want to accommodate game players. Some police stations designated as Pokemon centers have had a steady stream of people coming in to capture them. It may be necessary to brief staff very soon on whatever customer service policies and procedures you create in response to these visitors. Especially since there have been an increase in accidents due to people paying even more attention to their phones as they swing them about trying to locate their virtual prey.

On the other side, players have posted on social media about the Pokemon company’s sneaky attempts to get them to go back to church.

The game is getting people to wander around in places they haven’t been before so it may increase foot traffic near your organization even if you aren’t a designated game location. Though in an incident echoing the movie Stand By Me, a girl found a dead body when she jumped a fence to find a Pokemon.

All in all, something to be aware of and keep an eye out for associated opportunities. Once it becomes clearer what sort of promotional opportunities exist, I will probably get a post up on ArtsHacker.

Same Idealism, Potential For Same Mistakes

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Some time back I read a piece on the Bridgespan Group’s website that made me realize that non-profits and funders/donors may adopt similarly flawed approaches to addressing social issues. When you think about it, it only makes sense that two groups that are passionate and idealistic about bringing change to communities might make the same errors in policy and execution.

Because donor/funder is perceived as having more power in the funder-non-profit relationship, it can be easy to assume their decisions are based on criteria that differs from the non-profits seeking their support.

In fact, funders can make inefficient and inconsistent decisions for the exact same reasons non-profits do.

In the article, What Are the Five Most Common Traps I Should Avoid in My Philanthropy?, trap number one is:

Trap #1: Fuzzy headedness

As a philanthropist, your passions, values, and beliefs will fundamentally drive your giving. But unfortunately, “fuzzy headedness” occurs when donors allow their emotions and wishful thinking to completely override logic and thoughtful analysis. One common symptom: When asked “what are you trying to accomplish?” do you respond with broad, hopeful statements (like “curing cancer,” “ending poverty,” or “stopping global warming”)? If so, you’ll need to get more specific because at that level, your goals are still too undefined (and therefore unattainable)…

I realized this is almost the exact same mistake some non-profits make. They embrace vague mission statements and goals and define everyone in a geographic radius as the people they intend to serve instead of having a clearly defined focus.

I wondered if there might be a feedback loop between funders and non-profits with one saying their goal is to completely fix X and the second getting excited and inspired by the goal (or the money now available for that goal). Each party seeing the other is excited and invested in the goal decides it is worthy to pursue and goes on to mutually reinforce this too broad goal upon each other and others around them.

The second trap, Flying Solo, also has a similar overlap. Both funders and non-profits can fall into the trap of believing they know the solution to a problem either through lack of research about previous efforts or ego. The result is they spend a lot of time and effort repeating the mistakes others have made. Or they fall short having overestimated their ability to marshal the required resources alone.

The remaining traps are more funder oriented and have a little less in common with non-profits. Number three deals with under-estimating what it will take to achieve a goal and therefore underfunding the project. The fourth deals with using overhead cost as a measure of effectiveness.

Non-profits could contribute to reinforcing these traps by keeping their numbers low in order to keep their overhead ratio low, resulting in underperformance due to lack of sufficient funding. Which may, in turn, result from less funding from a donor or foundation that expected better results.

Some of the ideas in the article are new to me, some I have heard before, particularly regarding suggested changes in philosophy by funding organizations. The piece could be worth further reading if you are trying to find an effective line of reasoning to convince a funder to adjust their expectations and criteria.

Signals Of Quality In Arts Disciplines

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For the last month or so I have been trying to figure out why, depending on the discipline, different elements of an artist’s background signal quality.

I realized that when people on my board or in my audience talk about a classically trained musician, they orient on what conservatory they attended first and then what ensembles they may have played in.

However, when it comes to actors whether the person appeared on Broadway or TV/movie is the most important. Lacking that, if they are based in NY or LA adds to their cachet. However, no one ever seems to care if they went to NYU or Yale Drama or University of Wisconsin for their training.

With dance it is usually which dance company they have performed with and where. Very seldom does the source of their training get mentioned.

Visual artists it is all about whether you can understand what you are looking at, whether you think it is any good and what the price tag is. Many people can discern whether an artist has had formal training or not, but I don’t think I have ever heard someone express confidence that an artist will be good based on the place they studied.

Scott Walters has long talked about the problem of actors needing move to NY/LA/Chicago so they can get work in their own hometown. I am not going to rehash those lengthy arguments.

But along those lines I wanted to toss the question out there about how and why this range of criteria about what constitutes quality developed.

I have come up with a lot of theories that don’t quite make sense. One idea I had was that while there are people who enjoy the arts in general, just as their are cat people and dog people, people who like the arts have one discipline they focus on. Otherwise, wouldn’t there be a single prime criteria that dominated, especially for the performing arts? Instead it seems people accede to the dominant criteria of each discipline, perhaps feeling they aren’t as qualified to judge as they are in their primary focus.

As I said, that doesn’t quite make sense. I can poke a lot of holes in that idea. I am left wondering where these concepts of quality originated from. Is there something that the music education and performance community did to signal a conservatory education is desired in a musician in a way that isn’t as compelling in the acting and dance community? Or is it that the audiences and communities that participate in each of these disciplines gradually oriented on certain signs they felt insured a quality experience.

Another thought I had is there an unconscious desire to be associated with the strongest name recognition. People on the street may recognize the Julliard name, but if given ten options to choose the Big Five orchestras, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas might appear on the list more often than Cleveland based on general impressions people have of each city.

I am not saying people shouldn’t be getting credit for doing well in a conservatory program, especially if they spend a lot of money in the process. I have a suspicion if the underlying factors informing these concepts of quality were better understood, it might be easier to communicate that artists who don’t possess those specific associations and pedigrees can provide a high quality experience. Inversely, one could suggest an artist does not necessarily need those associations and pedigrees in order to be successful.

Granted, there is a continuum there. This claim is more true of having a NYC address than having formal training. It may be easier to break these conceptions now than it was in the past since the internet allows people to verify that quality and these signifiers don’t go hand in hand. (Though we can also attest that the same forum allows a lot of crap to get recognition while hard work and talent are overlooked.)

Anyone have other insights or theories?

Resources From Unexpected Places-Federal Reserve Banks

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Okay, I know this week I posted a piece that continued my long standing assertion that talking about the economic impact of the arts is not an effective way to garner long term support and investment around arts and cultural activities.

However, while it shouldn’t be the central argument for support, I don’t discount the value of using economic impact as corroborating data.

In that vein, I have recently been wondering if it might not be useful for the arts community to forge closer ties with the various regional Federal Reserve Banks. I have seen some publications coming from them that are valuable to non-profits and make a case for the place cultural organizations have in community development.

Last December, I used a well-written guide on managing Non-Profit Executive succession and transitions produced by the Kansas City Federal Reserve in a post I wrote for ArtsHacker.

Since then I have seen two pieces in a four part series written by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on the importance of cultural organizations in Eastern Kentucky’s transition away coal mining. The first focuses on creative placemaking and the second specifically spotlights the work of Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY.

I am not sure how many may read the articles, but the people and businesses who closely watch the activity of the Federal Reserves are not without influence. Section headers like “The economic impact of creative placemaking;” “A Case for investment: two examples;” “Making Dollars and Sense” can resonate with the interests and concerns of these groups.

It might be worth having state and regional arts councils reach out to make contacts with the respective Reserve Banks in the different regions to explore whether the councils can provide data and stories that might be of interest to the readers of the Federal Reserve publications.

Having the Federal Reserve’s research as an additional source to corroborate statements and statistics about economic impact can help bolster non-profit organization goals.

In return, the Federal Reserve banks may be able to produce publications like the non-profit leadership succession guide that are useful to non-profits. Having issues of finance, taxation, labor law, business relations, etc tailored to the national needs of non-profits could be helpful.

If the Federal Reserve produced case studies about beneficial collaborations between businesses and non-profit organizations, the gravitas they bring could cause groups to consider exploring similar efforts.

Maybe they already produce documents like this and we are just not widely aware of it. It actually took me some time to find the third installment in the series on Eastern KY on the Cleveland Fed website. Had I not had the URL of Part 2 as a guide, I may not have found it.

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