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

April 9, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advocacy, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, creativity, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Repetition & Establishing Good Habits

April 5, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advocacy, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, New Initiatives

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

April 3, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advocacy, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Business Models, creativity, Government Relations, Info You Can Use, Leadership, New Initiatives, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Focus On Art, Extend Your Attention Span?

April 2, 2018

by:

Joe Patti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Says Barker,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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