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Portland, OR Art Tax Update

March 9, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Back in 2012, Portland, OR approved a $35 tax to supports arts education and arts organizations around the city. In 2017 I wrote a post about how overhead was starting to cut into the amount of money available to distribute to programs. Part of that overhead was attributable to the fact people weren’t paying the tax and so funds had to be diverted toward enforcement. Last week, via Artsjournal, is another article mentioning that the tax hasn’t proven to be the boon supporters hoped it would be. For one, people still are resistant to paying it.

The art museum, like the rest of the big five, never received the targeted 5 percent support.

That’s in part because the tax has never brought in the $12 million a year voters were told to expect. (Revenues were $9.8 million the first year and peaked at $11.46 million in 2016.)

Portlanders have been reluctant to pay it. Although the city’s population has risen nearly 12 percent since November 2012 and tax receipts should have increased proportionally, figures show revenues still never reached levels proponents forecasted.

A point I want to clarify. The article makes it sound like arts funding for schools has diverted money that was intended for non-profit arts organizations. However, from my earlier posts, it appears the law that was passed intended to fund the schools first and then the non-profits would receive funding. In fact, this recent article says when the measure was passed in 2012, funding the schools was politically more attractive to voters than funding non-profits. While the arts organizations had been pushing the art tax idea for a long time prior to the vote, when the time came, the resolution being voted upon was written to fund the school first.

The other thing the article notes is that between the collection effects and the art tax name, there are public relations and perception issues which have proven problematic.

While arts leaders all favor more Portlanders paying the tax, some worry the city’s zeal to collect is counterproductive. “You get pinged with a letter, you get pinged with a postcard, you get an email saying time to pay the arts tax,” says Portland Center Stage’s Fuhrman. “That’s where I think the bad PR comes in.”

Andrew Proctor, executive director of Literary Arts, which produces the Portland Book Festival, says the public’s ill feeling has a cost. “Even the name ‘arts tax’ sounds punitive,” he says, “and it misleads citizens that in paying the tax they have supported arts institutions. They haven’t. It can damage our fundraising efforts and can polarize the conversation.”

[…]

Hawthorne, the former RACC official, says he fears the public may believe the tax works. “Ten to 12 million is a lot of money,” Hawthorne says. “People may perceive the arts have had their influx and now it’s time to focus on more pressing needs.”

The whole article provides a lesson for those considering advocating for an arts tax of some sort. The basic idea isn’t bad, but the way it is structured and executed needs to be thought out. The example of Portland points to things people want to avoid. The name; the way in which it is collected, structured and discussed; all call negative attention to it.

It is worth reading the whole article because it also mentions the Regional Arts and Cultural Council’s (RACC) initiative to provide more equitable funding for smaller arts organizations. Back in 2012, RACC was starting to require more diversity on the boards, staff and eventually audiences of Portland’s arts organizations. In January, I had written about how the Arts Council of England was instituting similar requirements, forgetting that Portland had been working toward that goal for nearly a decade now.

Last year, RACC shifted their funding model to better align with this philosophy which includes size and economic diversity among its criteria. As a result, the larger organizations in town receive less of the art tax money than they once did.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Business Models, Finance, Fundraising, Government Relations, Legal Topics, State of the Arts

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Leaders Call For Disarmament Of Weapons Grade Elitism

March 4, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

I think there is probably enough overlap between my readers and Drew McManus on Adaptistration that I am not bringing anything new to the table when I point to his most recent post.

But man! It is so much in my wheelhouse that I wish I had written it. And with a title employing the phrase, “Weapons Grade Elitism,” it is hard leave it alone. It pushes all the right buttons.

Drew had an encounter with program notes for a concert that were so dense, even as an orchestra insider with decades of experience wasn’t quite sure what the author of the notes was referencing. I think some of the content was worse than anything Trevor O’Donnell has criticized.

Long time readers know that I often cite findings of the 2017 CultureTrack survey and frequently discuss how the language in promotional and informational materials can be alienating to people who are just starting to be curious about different creative disciplines. I was pleased to see Drew invoking both ideas in his final paragraph summarizing his experience with the program notes:

In the end, these program notes do far more harm than we probably realize. When the CultureTrack ’17 report showed the number one barrier to engagement is people feeling like “it isn’t for someone like me,” we should actively revolt against practices that result in program notes like this. If someone with a music degree feels alienated upon reading them, imagine how the rest of our patrons will react.

Weapon’s Grade Elitism In 800 Words Or Less

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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Discount Unto Others As You Would Have Others Discount Unto You

March 3, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Collen Dilenschneider is increasingly becoming my go-to source for general data about audience behavior in relation to pricing. Last month, she posted about the perception and attitudes free, discounted and full price engenders among attendees.

She had previously written, and summarizes in this recent post, that discounts tend to bring people who are already engaged with the organization back through the doors rather than achieving the goal providing additional access to people who can’t easily afford entry. She suggests that part of the reason is that the discounts are communicated through the same channels that made existing audiences aware of the organization rather than through channels and techniques that reach the desired additional audiences:

Thus, it’s often the people who already know that the experience is worthy of their time who take up a general discount. Also, general discounts – even if they are intended to pique the interest of income-qualified audiences – are often promoted using the same channels as every other outbound message, resulting in more awareness of access programs amongst people with household incomes greater than $250,000/year than individuals with household incomes of less than $25,000/year. (Here’s more on this topic.)

The new data she presents surprisingly indicates that the lower the price, the lower the value people place on the organization and experience.

In terms of satisfaction which influences whether people will return, tell their friends and have a higher value-for-cost perceptions,

This may surprise some. (“How can people who get discounts be more satisfied than people who paid no money at all to attend!? They got in for free, for goodness sake!”) What may surprise folks even more is that average satisfaction is notably highest of all among people who paid full admission prices for their experience.

In terms of likeliness to endorse the organization to others, it is much the same.

General admission visitors were significantly more likely to endorse an organization than those who got a discount or attended for free.

As it turns out, when organizations provide a general discount, visitors generally discount them right back.

Perhaps most importantly, what people paid for admission influences the perception of how dedicated the organization is to its mission.

When an organization discounts its onsite experience through free or reduced admission, it impacts how visitors perceive the organization’s mission, too. What happens onsite doesn’t just stay onsite

That’s why this finding may be the most important of all in this article.

People who paid full admission price believed much more strongly that these entities were effective in executing their missions. The difference is dramatic.When an entity discounts its admission price, it changes how the public perceives its mission and what it stands for.

She doesn’t say all discounts and free admissions are bad. As implied earlier, a disciplined, focused strategy of communicating discounts to a specific target audience rather than to the broader constituency can achieve the desired aims. However, it takes time and energy to cultivate relationships with the right people and direct money and resources to the correct communication channels.

Audience Relations, Pricing

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Don’t Ignore “Can’t Use My Tickets” Posts On Your Social Media Page

March 2, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

I wrote a post that appeared on Artshacker today about ticket scams occurring in the comments section of performing arts organization social media accounts.

Essentially, what happens is that a short time out from an event, posts start appearing in the comments section of your organization’s Facebook page apparently from people who need to get rid of their tickets because they have a conflict with the date.

The biggest, most immediate tell-tale sign that this is a scam is realizing there are more tickets offered for re-sale than have been purchased. In the screenshots I posted as examples, the $5 movie we were offering only had 16 advance tickets sold but there were at least 54 tickets being offered for sale. This doesn’t count all the offers we deleted.

You also need to wonder about the promised heavy discounts people were offering on a $5 ticket that made it worth texting or sending a direct message to a stranger.

Another thing I see if I don’t catch the fake post in time is tickets being offered for free that suddenly have a price attached if someone responds with interest.

The answer, of course, is that most of these accounts were bots. If you follow the link back to the poster’s account, you might find pictures of the person with family and friends which make it look legitimate (and I suspect some were real accounts that were hijacked) but others you notice some big inconsistencies like the fact their residence is in Sweden and they work for a company in Spain.

As I note in my Arts Hacker post, the simplest solution of shutting down commenting or requiring every comment to be approved can impede spontaneous reactions and conversations that create a sense of trust and community. Not to mention, it is difficult to conduct engagement campaigns if people are limited in their interactions.

Additionally, if people do get caught in a scam, it is likely to result in a negative association with, and perhaps distrust of, the organization on whose social media page the scam appeared.

If you knew you got a virus on a website or had your credit card number stolen on a gas pump skimming device, you would probably avoid returning, right?

One thing I didn’t mention in my original post but won’t probably come as a big surprise to many is that it is nigh-impossible to get the social media site to shut the scams down. We had a recent case where a person/bot posted their ticket offerings on their own page and tagged our page. I have to think this was a mistake and couldn’t have been effective because when we visited the page, there were more than 50 identical posts from a “woman” whose husband was deathly ill and couldn’t make dozens of monster truck rallies, concerts at bars, events at performing arts centers, many of them occurring at the same time across Canada and the United States.

We reported the page to Facebook. Even if it wasn’t a scam, a personal page was being used to conduct commerce. The response we got was that it didn’t violate any rules.

Anyway, check out the post on Arthacker, if nothing more than to see the screenshot examples of the type of posts you might encounter. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same names popped up on your social media pages.