Home Page

No Venue Is Too Small To Be Sale Spoofed

February 11, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

I never really thought of my venue and the shows it presents as a target for ticket resellers and secondary market brokers, but a recent incident provides a cautionary tale.

I had a woman make an appointment to see me to complain about the excessive services charges assessed by our ticket office. Now, our charges are rolled into the price so I thought she had ordered her tickets via Ticketmaster even though she swore she called our number.

When she brought her paperwork in, it was apparent the answer was much more complicated. The receipt showed that the order was placed during the week our ticket office was closed for Christmas holidays. Not only that, the charges for the tickets were twice the face value of the show (a renter presenting an Elvis impersonator).

We don’t know what number she called to order the tickets, but what we ended up piecing together was that a guy in Washington state basically took her request, went online to Ticketmaster and ordered the tickets, chose print at home and then FEDEXed the tickets to her, tacking all sorts of service charges on to the already over priced tickets. When we went in to the system to check if the tickets were actually valid, his name and address were associated with the seats and matched the address on the sales receipt.

In the end, the woman ended up paying over $120 for two tickets that would have cost her about $43 had she reached our ticket office.

In retrospect, I realized I had seen similar offers for our tickets on Facebook and Twitter. One posting was offering tickets to one of our shows, but had linked to a similarly named venue about two hours away. At the time, I thought they put our date on a concert being performed by the same group at another time and the prices were for those seats.

It was only later that I realized the concert in that city was being held at an entirely different venue. Our date was right, whoever was selling just linked to the seating map at the wrong venue.

Since then, I have paid closer attention and have seen people offering tickets on Twitter and Facebook to some of our events at jacked up prices. This isn’t secondary market selling, the seats they offer are in rows where no tickets have been sold and at a time when the event isn’t really in any danger of selling out.

This isn’t technically web or email spoofing since no one has tried to directly impersonate us. This just takes advantage of someone’s lack of knowledge or attention when they are ordering.

This sort of scam is difficult to warn people about. Those who are subscribers or have a close enough relationship with your organization that they read any correspondence they receive from you warning about this situation probably know enough to discern when they are not talking to an authentic representative.

The woman who complained to me actually had her call forwarded a couple times and then was instructed to go online to another site in order to buy the tickets. The inconvenience of this process alone probably would have tipped our regular customers off.

So in addition to watching social media for any positive or negative comments about your organization, you should keep an eye out for people pretending to be one of your ticket outlets as well.

Audience Relations, Info You Can Use, Working In The Arts

1 Comment

Meandering In Minnesota

February 10, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

A reader from Oklahoma recently wrote me thanking me for providing information arts organizations in rural settings can use. With that in mind, I wanted to highlight a “if Minnesota can do it…” post on Dakotafire, a site that hopes to emulate and replicate that MN’s successes in the Dakotas

I loved the idea promoted by John Davis, Executive Director of the Lanesboro Arts Center, had for making the entirety of Lanesboro, MN an arts campus (video) rather than just focus on building an arts center. (I also love Lanesboro’s claim to be the B&B capital of Minnesota)

The fact that the town of New York Mills, MN, population 1200, decided to sponsor a Great American Think Off is inspiring to me. It suggests that there are still plenty of interesting ideas that aren’t being explored and risks that aren’t being taken.

I was amused by the concept that rural communities don’t have arts/gallery walks like cities do, they have Arts Meanders that include artist studios spanning counties.

Note that none of these links appear in the Dakotafire post. The ideas were so intriguing, I was inspired to seek out the websites for each.

True, these are all existing ideas writ small, or perhaps it is writ large since they take the idea of an arts district and apply it to whole towns and counties.

For me it belies the thinking that there aren’t enough of some type of resource in a place to accomplish anything successfully. The effort invested in some of these projects has been spent over 20 years or so, but the devotion to pursuing the idea has been there.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

No Comments

Learn To Stop Worrying And Love The Data

February 5, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

Last month, the Cultural Data Project released a study they commissioned to investigate the use of data by arts organizations and what impediments to effectiveness exist.

If you aren’t familiar with the Cultural Data Project, it is an attempt to collect data from arts organizations across the country in order to assemble as comprehensive a set of data as possible. While this is useful for research, it is also meant to provide arts organizations with analysis each can use to better understand the environment in which they operate.

The problem is, few arts organizations are taking advantage of this opportunity.

“Many of the organizations that provide information to the CDP are not taking advantage of the reporting tools, contributing to the sense that CDP is something that they contribute to rather than something they derive value from. “Because of the barriers present in accessing data (e.g., lack of time and data-use training, clunky and difficult to use databases), many nonprofits simply do not attempt to make better use of data at their disposal that could help improve organizational performance.”

This is attributed in part to what respondents characterize as a “collect data first, ask the questions later” approach. The report suggests there is a “more is better” approach that leads to more data being collected than is needed, as well as a lack of ability at framing effective questions that will help move the field forward.

This approach is reinforced by funders: (my emphasis)

“Funder requests often determine what kind of data organizations choose to collect and may crowd out organizations’ interest in asking questions that could inform their own decision-making. This may contribute to a sort of vicious cycle in which organizations’ primary experiences with data are framed as a duty to a funder, and since the data requested by the funder may not be what the organization itself needs to know for its own reflection and improvement, data collection comes to be perceived as a ‘cost of doing business’ rather than an investment that brings strategic value to the organization”

An observation I had really never considered is that while administrative staff works with research data all the time, there is little effort made to get artistic staff using it for their decision making.

“As the previous participant noted, “arts administrators have acquired a taste for data used in financial management, fundraising, audience development and advocacy decision-making. But there is little data on artistic choice, much less data that allows us to explore the relationships between artistic programming and audience or organizational sustainability.”

[…] (many paragraphs later, my emphasis)

But these experts emphasized that until data-informed decision-making takes hold in programming departments, we won’t truly be able to say that the cultural sector is effectively using the available cultural data or using it to full effect. “Until we can engage artists and curators in examining audience, market and trend data, we can never really make progress as a field,” said one. “I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve been allowed to present research to actors, dancers and musicians. They are the ones who can move the world.”

Because data collection is seen as such a chore, according to the report the job is often assigned to “low-salary, junior-level staffers who are given little in the way of training and professional development.” As a result, the collection is executed poorly and there is low value placed on the data.

The Cultural Data Project would like arts organizations to see data as a “tool not an end.” The study respondents felt that one of the areas of highest value for arts organizations is using the data to establish a benchmark against which they can measure themselves, as well as a source of information about practices by groups similar to themselves.

The biggest gap in the arts knowledge economy is in the area of practice,” noted one contributor. “What new or different artistic programs are leading to successful artistic outcomes? What new or different business practices are leading to successful operational outcomes? … Another added that most organizations are eager for this kind of information about their peers, which would take the concept of benchmarking into new and valuable areas: “I think cultural organizations would welcome as much information as possible about the types of programming that are being offered by other similar organizations, along with summary-level data about audience participation or attendance…. Is it new and different? Was it successful? Data that address these questions would be lapped up.”

As you might imagine, among the recommendations for the future, (and there are many more issues addressed than I have covered here), are shifting the way organizations view, collect and handle data as well as involving artistic staff in the evaluation of data.

Management Philosophy, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

No Comments

Joy Is Easy In The Arts–Just Get Out Of The Way

February 4, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

As promised, I am posting the video of the “Five Minutes To Shine” speech my former colleague and assistant theatre manager, Lehua Simon gave at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference luncheon. The video APAP posted on their site didn’t include the slides (it was difficult to get both the speaker and the video screen in the same shot) so Lehua kindly added her slide presentation to the video below.

As I mentioned in my early post, she got a great response and some of the speakers who followed after her made reference to parts of her presentation. (By the way, that is me at the end yelling “hana hou” which is means “do it again,” basically the Hawaiian call for an encore .)

As you probably noticed, she started to tear up a bit in front of the audience. Half the people at my table were colleagues from Hawaii and told the other half I was the theatre manager in the story who left. There were a lot of whispered questions about what I did that would drive her to start crying in front of 3,000 people. While I possibly did not prepare her well enough for my departure, I had given four months notice and there were many conversations about issues and potential problems during that time.

The questions she was sending me after I left mostly dealt with the new fiscal reporting system that the university had changed over to a few months before I departed. There were a number of things that did not transition from the old system as might be expected. But it is difficult to answer these questions from memory 5,000 miles away.

As frustrating as that was, probably the bigger source of frustration was the new policies and procedures being created as after the furor followed the university athletics program’ attempt to contract Stevie Wonder for a concert that saw $200,000 sent to a company that took the money and ran.

The university was formulating much more restrictive policies as I was leaving and when I was asked to comment on the drafts, I pointed out there was nothing wrong with the old policies, it was the fact they hadn’t been enforced that lead to the problems. When I spoke to the new theatre manager, he said the policies were still shifting to the point every contract they have signed has come back with new requirements.

My purpose in mentioning this is not to scorch bridges, I really valued the opportunities afforded by that job. Rather, I think this is a good illustration of the claim made in the Netflix Human Resource slide show that companies start curtailing freedoms and start instituting more processes the larger and more complex they become.

State universities don’t have the flexibility to hire in the manner that Netflix can, but many organization do if the will to do so exists. It may be worth thinking about whether your processes are helping or hindering your organization’s purpose as well as impacting your employees’ happiness with their jobs.

I am sure Lehua’s discussion of the spiritual fulfillment she receives from doing her job resonates with many of you, whether you work in the arts or not. That sort of joy comes easily when you work in the arts without very much intentional effort by the employer. Companies in other industries have to add amenities to make employees happy. Arts organizations just have focus on getting impediments like onerous processes out of the way. (Lack of funding, alas is a tougher nut.)

Netflix points out that there are some areas that absolutely require processes. So make the processes where necessary and enforce them strictly, but resist making new processes just to answer every problem that pops up. I am sure we have all come across a rule or some requirement in a contract that is so strange, you know there is some sort of story behind it. As Netflix noted, in creative environments it isn’t necessarily cheaper to prevent errors than to fix them when they occur.

General Musings, Leadership, Working In The Arts

No Comments