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How Will My Advice Help?

July 30, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Arts Midwest sent out their monthly newsletter this week which included stories they had published on their website during July. One of the pieces was a quick set of case studies of small arts organizations making efforts to prevent burn out among their staff and volunteers.

Another piece included three examples of arts organizations’ efforts to create community advisory committees. The experience of one organization in particular, 825 Arts, caught my attention because it emphasizes the importance of being specific when recruiting for committees. It is something that seems obvious, but is seldom recognized and put into practice.

Essentially, they tried to recruit a group to advise them about how best to serve the Frogtown and Rondo neighborhoods in St. Paul, Minnesota. They had a hard time recruiting and retaining people to the committee because people didn’t quite understand the purpose of the group.

Once they shifted their messaging and communication about the group, they saw more involvement.

…they changed the name of the group from “Community Engagement Committee” to “Neighborhood Dream Team.” The new name captured the spirit of the group’s new goals: dreaming and visioning on programs and their potential for their neighborhood.

They also decided to shift formats, engaging members through an ongoing text thread in addition to in-person meetings. The text thread allowed members to respond and contribute on their own time, while the bi-monthly meetings focused on larger proposals and the bigger picture.

825 Arts found success with their community advisory group by honoring members’ time, adapting to their preferred communication styles, and establishing a clear, shared goal.

Source

Among the advice 825 had for others was to make sure people not only understand how they are contributing to the organization, but how those contributions have shaped the final result of things that have been implemented.

Audience Relations, Boards, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership

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Even The Wealthy Met Museum Has Decades Of Serious Deferred Maintenance

July 29, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

I am not sure how I came across it, but Yale University’s School of Management published a series of stories about The Business Behind The Arts. One of the stories briefly profiled Daniel H. Weiss who was president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2015 to 2023.

He addresses a number of topics, including balancing the mission and purposes of museums against their need to be sustainable. He gives a number of examples, including how the Met had spent seven years preparing a Michelangelo exhibit that was on display for three months. He says it advanced the mission of the museum, but was not a good financial decision.

It was interesting to get his perspective on this balance. Especially since during his tenure The Met made the controversial decision to eliminate the pay-what-you-wish admission fee for anyone who didn’t live in New York. Weiss talks about how he had enjoyed free admission at the National Gallery when he was an undergraduate in Washington, D.C., and how when he attended Yale, the director of Yale University Art Gallery argued the Met should be free given how wealthy it was.

However, he said once he took the helm of the Met, he discovered the budgets were more constrained than most people imagined. Apparently admission revenue had declined by 67% over the previous decade.

He was also faced with a significant amount of deferred maintenance. Apparently, the skylights over the European Painting Gallery were supposed to have been replaced during President Lydon Johnson’s administration. As you might imagine, deferring repairs was undermining the infrastructure of the building and not just threatening the collection with leaks. It ultimately cost $150 million to replace the six acres of skylights and associated HVAC, roofing, etc. He says there was not much philanthropic support for the project so I infer that the admission revenue is helping to pay down that cost.

The Yale article includes a video they made to accompany a case study on the Met which includes a backstage tour of some areas, including the skylight area.

Arts Facilities, Fundraising, Leadership, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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What’s Member/Non-Member Age Gap?

July 28, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Last month Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience provided an analysis of exhibit and performing arts audiences from the perspective of age. (sub required)

It will come as no surprise that older generations (GenX, Boomer, Silent) participate more relative to their representation in the general population than Millennials and Gen Z. Similarly, Boomers and Silent Generation are more likely to be members of an arts and cultural organization relative to their representation in the general population.

What I found interesting was their analysis of the average age of attendees with memberships vs. non-members. For exhibit based entities, botanical gardens had the largest delta with 13 years between the average of 57 for members and 44 for non-members. Members of other exhibit based entities ranged in average age of 38-45. Average age for non-member attendees to art, natural history, science museums was 8-9 years. For history, zoos, aquariums it was 4-6 years.

Children’s museums were the only outlier in that non-members were on average 1 year older than members. That’s understandable given younger people tend to have kids who visit children’s museums.

For live events, symphony members were 57 on average while non-members were 48. Live theater had the biggest delta with members at 48 and non-members at 37. All other live performance had members at 46 and non-members at 36.

While I am really summarizing the data since they don’t permit reprinting their charts, this can begin to give a bit of a baseline against which to compare your organization’s internal data about members and non-members.

As colleagues like Ruth Hartt have pointed out, you can’t build a marketing plan around targeting demographics because you have no idea WHY people are deciding to participate.

The IMPACTS data notes that a sense of belonging and supporting the mission are among the top two responses people given when asked what the primary benefit of being a member/subscriber is. The younger a person is, the more importance they place on these two elements.

Both tend to be more important to members of exhibit based organizations rather than performance based organizations. The IMPACTS folks suggest this may indicate there is benefit for performing arts organizations to remind people they are supporting a unique mission in the community.

It’s not binary – members want to feel like “insiders” at the organization … but they also want to know that their memberships are making a difference. Today’s members may be primarily transaction-motivated or mission-motivated, but members are increasingly identifying as both. Smart cultural organizations provide members with the opportunity to know that they are bettering their communities by helping to support an organization’s mission.

Source

Audience Relations, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR

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No Refunds, Did You Buy The Insurance?

July 22, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Last week Seth Godin made a post about how companies use technicalities in their terms of service (TOS) to generate more revenue after quoting a low initial price.

There was one statement he made that started me pondering its applicability to refund policies many arts organizations have.

The metric is simple: every time you have to tell people they should have read the TOS, then either your marketers or your legal team has made a mistake. You’ll need a TOS, sure, but you don’t want to rely on it to communicate.

Source

In the last decade or two I have tried to be relatively forgiving about refunding for death, injury, and illness–which was especially important during the Covid pandemic.

Recently, the requests for refunds are tending to be a result of inattentiveness during the online purchase process. It makes me wonder how often people are paying far too much for things they didn’t intend to buy.

Recently we had someone purchase tickets for an event she thought was the same week rather than three months hence. The most frequent issue we run into is people who purchase tickets together in the orchestra of the venue and then an errant single seat in the balcony. My theory is that they are buying tickets on their phones and are brushing the screen and selecting another seat. But apparently they are not checking the shopping cart before completing the transaction and not noticing they are purchasing more ticketing than they intended.

We have a new ticketing system which offers insurance against any unforeseen circumstances that may arise. I am not sure if being inattentive during the purchase is covered. The fact the insurance is available to purchase does provide ticket office staff with an out and an ability to say “we have a no refund policy, did you purchase the insurance?”

But like Godin’s comment about the TOS, that feels more like a way to generate revenue rather than a way to create relationships and trust.

Audience Relations, Marketing/PR

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