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Seeing Ideas Implemented

February 15, 2006

by:

Joe Patti

I was looking at Ben Cameron’s Field Letter over on the Theatre Communication Group’s website today. (It may be replaced by a new letter soon so you may have to click on the Archives link, search for field letter and find the one dated Jan 15, 2006). As I read I began to recognize some ideas that have been bandied about blogs recently appearing in practice.

A couple of examples he cited reminded me of Drew McManus’ docent idea.

“Geva Theatre Center’s (Rochester, NY) pre-talk sessions with actors. An actor is paid a stipend to do this before every performance, as I recall, inviting the audience into the creative ideas of production before they see the play, even giving them ‘teaser’ moments to look for in the play.”

I know that I often come back to Drew’s docent program in my posts, but it really seems like good audience relations to offer guidestones to patrons who may might be experimenting with attendance for the first time.

Another good related example Cameron cites had a couple points that really caught my attention. (My emphasis)

Associate artistic director Sean Daniels of California Shakespeare Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area writes, “I had at one point thought that marketing Shakespeare to 22-year-olds was nearly impossible, but we went from 1,000 to 3,000 ‘under 30’ tickets in our first season.” This was made possible through a multi-tiered strategy:

–the creation of a group of ambassadors, empowering them to speak for the theatre;
-organizing events marketed towards and created for younger people (‘shindigs’), featuring drinks before and dancing afterwards, but with the play always being the centerpiece of the evening, “not a great evening with a play smushed in the middle”;
-using marketing muscle, through blogs for all artists, so people could have personal conversations with them;
-creating a comprehensive intern program to train 18- to 35-year-old administrators;
-recruitment of under-35-year-olds to the board; and finally, and most importantly,
–making sure “that bringing in young people was not a marketing initiative, but an artistic one'”a shift of the conversation from what young people want to ‘how do we create more points of access to the work we’re doing'”a viewpoint that informs the strategic plan, the board work and more

I included the whole quote because many organizations are desperate to attract younger audiences. There are a couple good strategies here for doing so. I wasn’t sure many people were going to click through to Cameron’s letter so I wanted to present them here.

My first emphasis of course links back to Drew’s docent program.

The second emphasis locked right into Andrew Taylor’s entry yesterday where he cites Neill Archer Roan whose study of audience trends shows that nearly half of an organization’s audience is lost every year replaced by new people drawn to performances by good marketing.

Andrew quotes Neill

“the course of our work, our client organizations have discovered that their marketing departments have effectively acquired new accounts (some in the range of 60% to 70% of audiences as new or re-acquired) while the rest of the organization — most of which has held itself harmless in this dynamic — has failed to retain the audience that marketing has acquired.”

It is great that California Shakespeare Theatre gets the concept that everyone has to work to retain the audience because the turnover numbers were a surprise for me. Though as a point of focus for organizational committment, it does make sense to adopt this approach.

One last note from Ben Cameron
“But these articles raised for me an additional question-are we connecting artists and potential audiences outside of the performance event itself? I’d love to know more about what people are doing in this way. If your theatre is undertaking new strategies, please let me know I’ll report back about what folks are doing.”

If you got something to share, let him know-his email is bcameron@tcg.org.

If you aren’t sure you want to bother a man as busy was Ben Cameron must be with your strategies, email me and I will share here. You are actually likely to see your good ideas posted online more quickly with me after all 😉

Audience Relations

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How Shall I Educate Thee

February 14, 2006

by:

Joe Patti

I’ve touched lightly upon the problems with the training of theatre professionals a couple times in entries. I never really got into it in the depth that Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas did in a recent entry.

It is an interesting read just for the simple fact that how artists are trained should be a periennial topic of discussion. I agree with Walters that offering BAs and BFAs in the arts is a disservice to students because the programs have too narrow a focus at a point in a student’s career when they need to have a wide variety of experiences with which to inform their art later.

Walters quotes at some length Tony Kushner’s keynote address to the 1997 Association of Theatre in Higher Education conference (reprinted in Jan 1998 American Theatre) which borrowed Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” title.

Among the sentiments Kushner stated were

“we should abolish all undergraduate art majors…any college or university worth its salt tell its undergraduate students that henceforth they cannot major in theatre, the visual arts, writing, filmmaking, photography or musical composition….[and instead] must prepare to spend the next four years of their lives in the Purgatory of the Liberal Arts.”

There are a few bits of knowledge Kushner feels students should know with which I don’t quite agree. I don’t know that people come across alexandrines enough in their careers that they would remember what it was much less need to memorize the definition in the first place. And I don’t know that my hormone laden brain could have really absorbed the Poetics when I was in college. I came to a greater understanding when I looked back upon it later in life.

I do think that if you are going to get into the arts as a career you are probably better served by someone telling you to get familiar with history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, political science and literature and then come back and you’ll talk.

Even BA programs that theoretically don’t have the conservatory focus and are supposed to provide a well-rounded education tends to have an organizational culture, if not an overt policy, that the Art and all related activites are to receive first priority. Certainly the discipline to rehearse, be prepare for performances, sculpt, paint, photograph, etc are important habits for artists to cultivate. But if the degree calls for a well rounded education, the program focus should be equally distributed.

Just as a disclaimer, I will say I think this is more possible to realize for visual arts, dance and theatre. I don’t know as much about music but I get the sense that you pretty much have to be focussed on your instrument all day, every day or you are doomed. I am not saying this is the way it should be. It just seems to be the way it is. Even dance where a woman’s career is over by the time she is 30 seems to allow a little more leeway when it comes to exploring the forces that might influence the formation and expression of dance.

In fact, Walters quotes an article by a Juillard faculty member saying something quite similar.

The longer students stay in a conservatory the narrower their definition of life in the arts becomes. Julliard’s president, Joseph William Polisi, noticed, as he traveled around, that many graduates were not leading full, juicy lives. He began to feel responsible for too many graduates who were thinking that a life in the arts is only about technique and gigs. Faculty members weren’t be encouraged to send graduates out there to explore other art forms or ask big questions. We weren’t modeling the very life we wanted them to lead.”

“…Ninety percent will be piecing it together in some different way: working in other fields, originating work, collaborating with artists of other fields, starting theatre companies and launching business endeavors. We need to model the way for students and young artists to think and be joyful and make meaning of this hodgepodge that is a contemporary career. [emphasis mine.-Joe]We’re good at rehearsing Shakespeare scenes and improvising the hell out of awkward situations. But we’re not so sensitive to training inner skills that will make a sustainable creative life in the theatre.”

The obstacles to creating a program where a student is prepared to be an artist in all these ways isn’t just in the difficulties related to changing the teaching methods and prevailing culture of a training program. There is also the expectations of the students that need to be surmounted.

There seems to be a real focus on only learning what is necessary these days. In part it is a function of the internet society where you can learn all you want to know about something whenever the need may arise. Students are looking for the minimum training they will need to get a job. With the cost of college these days, it is hard to blame them. My theory about the disparity between male and female enrollment in college these days is not that fewer men are able to get into college, it is that the requisite training/experience for the careers the men want can be found in other places.

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

Terms and Ideas

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Mailing Your Stamp of Approval

February 13, 2006

by:

Joe Patti

I had a “what a great idea” moment this evening which turned to “good idea with reservations” a few minutes later. I will share the idea with you in hopes that someone out there will have the influence with the right people to make this happen (or start up a company to do so).

I got a Valentine’s Day card from my nephew today mailed with a stamp with his picture on it. Apparently, Stamps.com has a service that allows you to place photos on a stamp template and produce legal to use first class mail stamps. The drawbacks are that you pay about $10 for the privilege ($17.99 for 20 vs. 7.80 of the regular kind) and you have to wait for them to be mailed to you.

What popped into my mind was that it would be great if arts organizations could create stamps with images/logos connected with the organization. Not only could the organization use the stamps, but they could make the images available to supporters to use for their own stamps. Given that a lot of greeting cards get mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, the stamps could help support end of the year donation drive with a slew of stamps saying “We Support X Theatre” or some such.

One of the pesky additional problems I mentioned before is that unlike Kodak’s Ofoto.com, Stamps.com doesn’t allow you to store your images online and then allow your friends to access them. You could get around this by emailing images to interested supporters, but then they would have to place the image and format the stamps. It isn’t hard to do, but if you aren’t comfortable with technology, it could be a disincentive.

I wonder if Kodak could get in on this less expensively than Stamps.com. They offer a dozen stickers for $3.00 so 24 would be $6.00, toss on $7.80 for postage and $13.80 is cheaper than Stamps.com with four more stamps. It would just be a matter of arranging for the Post Office’s sanction. Still because you have to wait for the stamps in the mail, it might not be cheap or immediate enough to garner widespread patron support.

It would be really great if people could print out the stamps from their home computers. You can already print out postage without images from your home computer and printer. Probably the only thing holding this back is the fact most people don’t have high enough quality printers at home to produce a decent looking image. Once they do, you will probably see homemade postage become more widespread. It would actually be a little more secure than the current black and white print at home postage which has to be monitored for photocopying.

Of course, will we still be mailing things then?

Arts in an Age of Technology

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Keeping the Name You Got

February 9, 2006

by:

Joe Patti

Back in September Drew McManus wrote about the importance of buying all important variations of your internet domain name address.

I just want to mention the importance of keeping the domain name you got. Within the last month, I visited the site of an agent and a performance group and both had let their name registration lapse.

As a result, no one could make an offer on any of the agent’s performers (especially given that he was on the road) or check out any of the other acts he represents. Nor could he receive any email because his address was his domain name which was now defunct.

For the artist, neither I nor anyone else interested in getting background information on the group could do so. All the information that would support press releases, all the video and music clips and all the pictures that will get audiences excited that the performance is coming to their town–it is all inaccessible. They too were on the road with their manager so getting support materials sent was difficult. Like it or not, the internet is the way prospective clients and patrons research performers and venues.

I contacted both entities pointing out that their internet presence was gone. I discovered in one case, the answer to why it lapsed was fairly simple but it is a cautionary tale for others.

The main reason why domain renewal gets overlooked is because no one is getting the reminders. The people who handle the registry of names are pretty organized and are eager to remind you to renew as far as 90 days before it is due. Because renewal is fairly cheap a lot of people pay for multiple years up front. The problem is, if the person handling those arrangements for your organization leaves and you delete his/her email address, you might never receive the reminders.

The lesson here is insist that the contact person email address be set to something generic like webmaster@yourdomain.org that passes to each new person in that position.

The registry companies will also try to reach you by regular mail too. However, if that address is incorrect or you moved or got a new PO Box and your forwarding has expired, you miss out again. Even if you do get the piece of mail okay, the companies have lot of services they want to offer you so the mail tends to look like junk mail. Especially if it is addressed to a person who worked there a year ago or is addressed generically to Webmaster.

Heck, if you aren’t a tech saavy person, even registering online is confusing. Check out GoDaddy.com . How quickly can you figure out how to register a domain name for the first time? How about renewing it?

Also, another reason to have email go to a generic address that can be passed around. It is two years after the old tech guy left, you don’t know the password for the account associated with your domain name. You can have your password sent of course–but it is going to the old tech guy’s email address which was deleted. (Of course, you could just recreate his email address with your own password, but the example wouldn’t be as scary.)

The worst case scenario is that the domain name is allowed to lapse for so long it goes up for auction and is purchased by someone else who then offers to sell it back to you for $10,000 or more. Though if you go that long before someone points out your website isn’t working, it probably wasn’t helping your organization’s public image and relations to begin with. Or people don’t think enough of your company to point it out.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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