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Reaching The Unknown Non-Participant

January 18, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

I almost threw money away, literally.

I received piece a mail last week bearing the logo of a state university indicating a survey was enclosed. I was just about to throw it away when I became curious to see if they were doing a market survey to gauge the educational needs of the community.

When I opened it, I saw it was a public health survey. Just as I was about to throw that away, a $2 bill fluttered out on to my coffee table. I understand why they may have chosen to include the money as an inducement to complete the survey, but I wonder how much money has literally been thrown away in unopened envelopes around the state this week.

I feel some empathy for those administering the survey because this illustrates the effort and expense you have to go in order to reach people with whom you don’t have a relationship.

One of the challenges the arts have is to have a conversation with those who aren’t participating in order to learn why they aren’t. There will always be people who will never participate in an activity, regardless of what you do, but there are many who will be willing but do not participate for various reasons.

These reasons might be lack awareness; currently lacking the time due to child rearing obligations which will abate in a few years; perceive they lack the time, knowledge, etc, for whom opportunities exist and can be communicated or created.

Reaching these unknown people to survey them or even communicate with them is even more difficult now than a decade or so ago. So many people lack landlines that there is no destination for even an annoying robocall to reach.

Thanks to the option to receive financial statements, bills and other communications online, it is much easier to identify the few pieces of postal mail that is relevant to you without even opening them. (Those emails about winning $5 million in the Irish-Nigerian lottery that was liberated after a palace coup dispossessed the prince of an oil rich nation still almost fool me.)

As we can see, even trying to bribe people to participate is fraught with its own challenges.

My feeling is that an effective campaign to reach the unreached is going to require much more personal interactions either with organizations reaching out to individuals in an involved, relationship building effort or calling upon people with whom they already have a relationship to reach out to people and encourage them to at least respond to a request for information.

Certainly, technology can facilitate this by allowing people to spread the word quickly over social media. A degree of trust in all involved parties needs to be there. I am thinking, in part, about the post I made last week about a greater lack of willingness to trade privacy for benefits than we have been lead to believe.

It would be great if someone could figure out how to create survey that engaged as many people as asking about what color lightsaber you would wield while yielding, effective, meaningful, actionable results. (Which of Yo Yo Ma’s cellos are you?)

Until then, it may take a lot of asking.

Advocacy, Audience Relations

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Arts Need A Standardized Curriculum To Combat Patron Anxiety

January 13, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

Last summer Vox had a post, Everyone can be an opera buff. Here are 7 steps to get started.

It got me thinking that creating page like this on an arts organization’s website could be a much more constructive approach to engaging audiences than the “How To Act When You Visit” lists found on many arts organizations’ webpages.

While a number of arts orgs have very entertaining and humorous approaches to such lists, a page like Vox’s can serve multiple purposes. For example, while answering the question about seats, Vox includes a picture of the audience with most people wearing tuxes and dresses, but also features a young woman in a football jersey and someone taking pictures with their camera.

This image provides a clearer sense of what people might expect when attending a performance. The website may say it is okay to wear jeans, but the reality may be, if the venue doesn’t manipulate the photo shoot to reflect their aspirations, most people in the orchestra section aren’t wearing jeans.

What I appreciated about the Vox article was the way the advice about approaching opera was given. One of my initial thoughts was that a venue could appeal to younger audiences by creating a page that replicated the feel a Buzzfeed listicle with its animated GIFs.

What the Buzzfeed format lacks, however, is the additional depth of an informational article.

The first suggestion takes an entirely practical approach, for example:

1) Pick your first opera for maximum fun, not for what the curriculum says

Picking your first opera can be paralyzing, but don’t just choose one from the canon. When you take a kid to her first movie, you’d opt for a kids’ movie rather than jumping into Citizen Kane. Same here. You don’t need to earn a PhD, you need to get your money’s worth — and that means picking a show you might like.

Since your opera options depend on where you live, look at what’s offered and get some advice. “Call the company,” Plotkin suggests. He says the box office will be happy to simply tell you which opera in a season is best for a neophyte…

Also, see if there’s something you have a natural affinity for. To take one example, this season the Washington Opera is premiering a revised version of Philip Glass’s Appomattox. You won’t find that on any Wikipedia lists of classic operas — but if you’re obsessed with the progression of civil rights or the sound of Philip Glass, it’s probably a better first opera than a classic like Carmen.

and from the Third suggestion (my emphasis):

3) Listen to the music and Wikipedia the plot

Avoiding spoilers is the wrong approach for opera. Often, operas are in another language, so you want the plot in your mind already. That will help you appreciate the performances, setting, and spectacle instead of trying to parse who’s actually talking. Your program book will have a summary, too, but it’s best to just glance online the night before you go.

We’re trained to expect prestige entertainment to have emotional nuance, challenging intellectual themes, and difficult narratives. Opera doesn’t have that. It’s like the best episode of Scandal you’ve ever seen, so just don’t sweat the plot and enjoy everything else. People who like opera can make their enthusiasm seem pretentious, but opera isn’t pretentious at all. It’s literally screaming for you to love it.

I have been debating for awhile whether to tackle this subject as a post here or on ArtsHacker as an idea people might try. I decided to post here because it occurred to me that the idea could do with a little more development before it is used.

Specifically, it might be good if each arts discipline develop some standard concepts they wanted reinforced so that no matter what website people visited, they would receive the same underlying message. So there might be five standard concepts an arts organization would intersperse with 3-4 localized tips that draw attention to some feature of the physical setting or program enhancement.

I guess what I am suggesting is almost akin to standardized education curriculum, without the baggage that subject seems to have acquired. Everyone wouldn’t use the same content since every locale and organization has its own character. They would make an effort to include messaging on the chosen topics.

It would really just be a matter of addressing discipline wide anxieties people may have. Many arts organizations do a pretty good job of addressing the concern about what to wear, but aren’t as effective with questions about enjoyment and comprehension. Uniform guidelines and sharing suggestions may help change that.

The Vox article about opera deals with those questions indirectly when it advocates reading and listening ahead of time; urges not worrying about spoilers; saying opera is “like the best episode of Scandal you’ve ever seen”; and “Appreciate the things that make opera like a Broadway show on steroids.”

It is smart to handle these ideas indirectly. It is one thing to be direct when answering a question about what to wear, but it can be incredibly easy to come off as condescending and offensive when directly answering “What if I don’t understand it or enjoy it?”

Of course providing a webpage isn’t the only option available. There are some great video resources as well like the one on visiting a museum I noted last month.

So let it percolate in your mind. What are the basic issues your discipline needs to address? What are effective direct/indirect ways of getting that message across?

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

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No, Everyone Is NOT Giving It Up For Free Stuff

January 12, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

Last Wednesday I made a post about non-profit arts organizations deserving to expect a little more of their customer relationship management (CRM) software. I briefly referenced the fact that collecting a lot of data on people could potentially become creepy and intrusive.

This drew the attention of Drew McManus who expounded upon the idea in a post of his own, saying:

I can’t remember the last time ethics were part of a discussion about CRM capabilities but it is never a bad idea to ask “just because we can use technology to do a thing, does it mean we should?” Consequently, it’s good to see these questions work their way into larger discussions about features and functionality.

This idea dovetailed well with a recent study that suggested marketers are misrepresenting the American’s public willingness to trade privacy for discounts.

“..a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data—and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs…Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.

By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable.

Among their findings are that:

• 91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that “If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing.”

• 71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that “It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge.”

• 55% disagree (38% of them strongly) that “It’s okay if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the services they provide for me.”

The authors of the study note there is an inconsistency between these responses and actual behavior. Contrary to the third finding, when it comes to supermarket discount cards, 40% of those who don’t agree with the third statement participate in grocery store discount programs. The authors say this inconsistency arises from both the sense of resignation and a lack of understanding about what merchants and websites are legally allowed to do.

Among the examples they give are that 49% of people think a supermarket and 69% think a pharmacy needs your permission to sell your data. 65% think that if a website has a privacy policy, it means they won’t sell your data. All these are untrue.

“55% do not know it is legal for an online store to charge different people different prices at the same time of day.” (The same erroneous belief is held by 62% of people regarding off-line/physical stores.)

The study is interesting to read because it discusses how the research conducted by marketing and consulting firms finds people express a strong discomfort with the way personal data is handled. Observing the inconsistency between the expression of discomfort and action, the firms have chosen to interpret this as consciously choosing to trade privacy for benefits. While the study authors suggest that the irrational choices are due to resignation and ignorance, it is difficult to clearly discern the truth.

If nothing else, like teen promiscuity statistics, this trade off study helps to provide a sense that no, everyone else isn’t necessarily doing it.

I almost wish I had held off writing my post on CRM last week because a day later, I had a real life illustration of what the study was suggesting. I was presenting our board of directors some examples of the CRM capabilities available through the ticketing software services we had been considering. The examples contained a list of tickets and donations made by a hypothetical customer along with standard address information and notes about relationships with some people and employers.

Because the example was meant to illustrate the history of an avid attendee over the course of a number of years as they purchased tickets, merchandise and made donations, the bulk of the information was rather repetitive and mundane. For example, there were a lot of $2 donations for what was either a tacked on restoration fee or the guy rounding up his bill by donating to that fund.

The issue was, this made record of activity rather long and cover a few pages. People were concerned about amount of data that appeared was being collected on a person (all be much of it in $2 increments). It didn’t take long for someone to point out that far more data was being collected by Amazon, other retailers and websites than actually appeared on the sample profile I had provided. By then other people had already begun expressing resignation that this sort of thing was inescapable.

This reaction left me a little anxious that my hopes of making fundraising and marketing efforts more effective with better data collection and evaluation might get impeded right from the start. Later, thinking about it in the context of the trade-off study, I could see some benefit in providing some transparency and actually encouraging some oversight of the data usage by the board. That way they could better understand the process and provide assurances to the greater community that we were handling the information responsibly. Hopefully such assurances would result in increased confidence and support of the organization.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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Info You Can Use: Getting Meaningful Feedback From Your Community

January 11, 2016

by:

Joe Patti

Last month, I wrote about attending a session at creative industry conference where Marc Folk, Executive Director of The Arts Commission in Toledo, spoke about learning that one needs to go out to the community as a guest, asking to be hosted at meetings, gatherings, etc.

At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly how that idea translated into practice. Initially I envisioned something akin to the electoral process in NH where people host intimate meetings with political candidates in their homes or perhaps being invited to speak at a community or church meeting.

I also thought that he might have meant participating as a true guest at first where you weren’t necessarily the focus of attention as a speaker, etc, but just invited to sit quietly and observe the first time out.

Marc had mentioned sometimes there was a tendency to view yourself as “riding in on a white horse” to save a community so I thought being the guest of honor at a meeting might reinforce that conceit.

Just last week, Margy Waller addressed the same issue in an Americans for the Arts blog post, “We Are From the Arts and We’re Here to Help.”

“In one of the sessions, a group of participants had a passionate discussion on using the word “help.” They noted that it really isn’t possible to have a conversation about an equitable community if one party is offering to help the other. The word help itself implies that one group has more than the other—more to offer, more knowledge, more resources, more capacity, and so on. Using the word help shifts the perceived balance of power—in a way likely to shut down true collaboration and partnership efforts.

The solution? If you find yourself using the word help when talking about the role of arts in community, stop. Listen carefully and ask whether this is really the way toward an equitable community.”

Curious about the process he and his staff used, I reached out to Marc just prior to the holidays to learn more, summarizing my impressions and assumptions noted above. With his permission, I am reprinting a portion of his response:

Our approach utilized a combination of techniques, including what you listed above.

As far as process we first identified a local community partner. If possible, it was a community center or arts center in the neighborhood. We then reached out to the leadership of the center or another community group if the center did not have leadership, or there was no center and asked for a meeting. We then met with them and/or their board leadership to ask for their help in organizing a community meeting.

Once a meeting was called, we went back into the community centers/host venues and held “a listening tour” if you will. An important technique was that we hired a facilitator/consultant that facilitated these sessions. This created a degree of separation between the Arts Commission staff and the community issue and allowed for a more open and candid dialog from the community.

Out of this, we became more connected with “culture” or activities in these neighborhoods which has led to the building of genuine relationships.

A copy of the plan can be found here.

The reports from the neighborhood conversations can be found at the back of the plan.

I think the most important lesson is about language syntax/communication and authentic relationship development. My point at the conference about the white horse or “going into these neighborhoods” revealed much about our perspectives and gave great clue to where we needed to start our work.

For those that are interested, the neighborhood reports start around page 50 of the strategic plan.

I greatly appreciate Marc taking the time to outline the process for me. The importance of involving a facilitator was something I suspected in the back of my mind that he confirmed.

Based on his response, I have already started a conversation with my board president about how we might adapt this in our own community. I have mentioned to colleagues at other arts organizations I had some ideas I wanted to run past them in the hopes of establishing a cooperative listening tour.

Advocacy, Audience Relations, Info You Can Use, New Initiatives, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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