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Themed Seasons Revisited

May 7, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

Back in 2012 Trevor O’Donnell posted 10 Deadly ~~Sins~~ Marketing Clichés., one of which was anniversaries. He pointed out that while milestones were once of some value as hooks for news stories, that isn’t the case any more.

That reminded me of a post I did about a meeting I attended where a freelancer who wrote for a number of publications told all those assembled that themed seasons weren’t really of interest to media outlets anymore either.

But I wondered if themed seasons shared across different arts organization didn’t have some attraction for audiences. I had noted that one place I worked participated in an Oscar Wilde themed season which included a “Go Wilde!” card people could use for discounts at each venue.

Granted, that was over a decade ago, but I am still curious about whether readers have had any experience mounting a similar program in their communities.

People might be interested in a program where they were guaranteed some sort of prize for visiting 4 out of 10 events in the course of a year and getting a passport stamped. Anyone who completed that much could be entered into a drawing for a greater prize.

If you encouraged people to post pictures of their passports on Facebook every time they attended, that could generate some buzz for the program. Not to mention, people could point to their social media post to prove their attendance if they lost the passport half way through the year and had to get a new one.

Audience Relations, Marketing/PR

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In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

May 6, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

I had a “where are they now” moment looking back at an entry from 2006 where I mentioned the MacArthur Foundation had given a $250,000 grant to Edward Castronova to develop Arden: The World of Shakespeare.

The idea was to create the environments out of Shakespeare’s plays and allow people to play in as realistic as possible an environment. At the time I commented,

“I wonder if playing the game might not provide good research for actors. Find out how a peasant might have really felt after spending hours of drudgery online. Want to discover real motivation for delivering Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day speech? Get ye to the Battle of Agincourt. (Of course, you might be felled by dysentery on the way if the game keeps things realistic.)”

So I wondered what ever happened to the game because I hadn’t heard of its release. Turns out, it never got released. The ambitions and motivations didn’t align with player values.

For example, one of the lessons Castronova says he derived from the experience was,

Think About Your Audience
“We put Arden in front of Shakespeare experts and they loved it. We put it in front of play testers and they yawned. We’d get feedback like, ‘I talked to that Falstaff guy for a while and got a quest to go repair something. I logged out and never came back.’ Too much reading, not enough fighting. Arden II will be more of a hack-and-slash Dungeons and Dragons type of game.”

There are probably a ton of audience relations lessons here for arts organizations, but I also saw some common incorrect assumptions shared by amateurs and other inexperienced parties about what it takes to do things full time.

I often have people who rent our theatre complain that the amount of hours we estimate their event will take is inflated, protesting that theirs is a simple show. People don’t realize that even with all the technology available to us, it is not easy to maintain the illusion that things are proceeding seamlessly without a number of people running around backstage communicating with various parties and executing a dozen tasks a minute.

Among Castronova’s other tips are not to be overly ambitious and to have appropriate staffing for the job. The thing is, even experienced groups are just as apt to underestimate requirements.

Performing arts organizations are well aware of the time and resources they need to invest in projects having done them many times over the years, yet they will often create new programs and assign them to already overburdened departments with the assumption that it won’t require too much more effort to take it on.

And that is often true, unless, you know, you want it to look half way decent.

(Title of this entry comes from an epigram to W.B. Yeats’ book, Responsibilities.)

Leadership, New Initiatives, Working In The Arts

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Training Handbook That People Always Have On Hand

May 1, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

Ten years ago, Inc.com anointed the employee handbook for Ann Arbor, MI’s Zingerman’s Deli as the World’s Best Employee Manual.

In all likelihood they have anointed other handbooks as the “best” since then, but from the sample pages from the handbook they have on the website, you can see that the fun handbook is something an employee would pay attention to. According to the article, Zingerman employees often carry the handbook around with them.

Since then, Zingerman’s has grown to a whole “community of businesses” run by managing partners whose vision the deli’s founders have supported. One of the businesses is actually a training arm that trains employees and conducts seminars for other businesses looking to learn about their methods.

Even if you aren’t interested in the training, the sample pages provide some good examples to emulate for your own staff and volunteer manuals to help keep the training in their minds and hands.

Volunteers, Working In The Arts

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Expanding The Company To Make It Smaller

April 30, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

About seven years ago, I wrote about a friend who incorporated the company he founded in order to gain the assistance of a board to help him expand operations, only to find that they were moving to contract the operations to a place where the organization was doing less than when he was running it alone.

Now he is mainly employed by another company altogether (happily, exercising his artistic talents) and the company he founded is largely inactive. I have a somewhat better sense now than I did when I wrote the entry what the causes of this situation were.

I wondered though if anyone else had come across a similar situation where an organization ended up worse off soon after the addition of a board. Did you have a sense of what the causes were? How can that be avoided in the future?

Boards, Working In The Arts

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