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Other Considerations For No Phone Policies At A Performance

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The Conversation recently had an article by Will Shüler examining the strict enforcement of a no cameras policy at a theater production he attended. When he arrived, ushers put a sticker over the camera on his phone. The presence of the sticker was checked multiple times before he was seated and ushers patrolled the aisles to make sure no one removed the sticker and used their cameras during the performance.

This may sound particularly extreme until you learn the measures were taken due to the nudity of actor Kit Harrington in the London production of Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play.

Shuler suggests that if these measures were deemed necessary, perhaps the nudity should have been cut.

If policing the audience is necessary, perhaps the casting or the nudity needs reconsidering, otherwise both read as gimmicks. Additionally, the efforts made to protect the penis in the performance arguably point to an increasingly prudish attitude of nudity and sensuality in theatre.

It is understandable that a celebrity would want control over any images of their naked body, and in an age of social media sharing, theatre companies may feel compelled to overprotect actors appearing nude on stage. These leaked images are in contrast to the production of Ink at Sadler’s Wells, which printed images of (non-celebrity) performer Šuka Horn’s male nudity in the programme.

Shuler makes some points worth considering in arguing about nudity’s place in performances.

What occurred to me was that in the context of the increased use of intimacy coordinators in theater, film, and television, there is a need/desire for trust between the performers and audiences.  Nude performances have been around for decades now, but information about the experience was generally shared verbally and mentioning the context in which the nudity occurred. Whether you thought it was appropriate or not was discussed in relation to the performance. Actors may be willing to perform nude as long as that understanding of where and why the nudity exists is shared between themselves and the audience.

However, the use of phones to record that aspect of a performance allows video and still images to be distributed without any sort of reference to the context in which it appeared. It becomes a picture of someone naked for sake of displaying a naked image of them. There is already an issue of AI generated images of celebrities, colleagues, and classmates creating distress for the subjects of those images.

While there are probably some who will be bold and self-confident enough to say, “Might as well give them some accurate content to work off of,” I wonder how many who might otherwise be willing to appear in some state of undress are reluctant to do so due to the opportunity cell phones provide.

Providing Assurances Can Do 80% Of The Heavy Lift In Marketing

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Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn where Ruth Hartt was reinforcing the idea that people purchase the outcomes they desire rather than things.

In response, commenter Jay Gerhart wrote:

Reminds me of our first JTBD work with Bob Moesta when we simply showed a digital ad for virtual care with a person enjoying an event with their friends. We didn’t have to show them obtaining health care – we showed the result of it. 40% increase!

It happens that the night before, I started re-reading Peter Drucker’s Managing The Non-Profit Organization

On the second page of the first chapter, Drucker essentially says that nonprofit mission statements need to be focused on outcomes. He relates the story of helping an emergency room of a hospital create a mission statement for itself. He says it took them a long time to arrive at a mission statement and when they did, people felt it was ridiculously obvious – “to give assurance to the afflicted.”

And, much to the surprise of the physicians and nurses, it turned out that in a good emergency room, the function is to tell eight out of ten people there is nothing wrong that a good night’s sleep won’t take care of. You’ve been shaken up. Or the baby has the flu. All right, it’s got convulsions, but there is nothing seriously wrong with the child.’ The doctors and nurses give assurances.

…Yet translating that mission statement into action meant that everybody who comes in is now seen…in less than a minute….Some people are immediately rushed to intensive care, others get a lot of tests, and yet others are told ‘Go back home, go to sleep, take an aspirin, and don’t worry…But the first objective is to see everybody almost immediately–because that is the only way to give assurance.”

Framing an audience’s desired goals for an experience in terms of medical outcomes helped further develop my understanding of the concept Hartt has been espousing.  Given the choice, very few people would prefer to undergo a medical procedure vs. just going about daily life. While knowing you will enjoy competent care is important, what people really want to know as Jay Gerhart suggests, is that they will come out the other side with as minimal an impact on their daily enjoyment as possible.

Obviously the stakes aren’t as high when attending an arts and cultural experience (one hopes), but there can still be a related anxiety regarding whether the experience will be an enjoyable one. Focusing on how the experience will solve a problem like providing an escape from stress of the work week or providing an opportunity to spend time with family and friends.

I often cite this Lexus commercial as a good example. The parents continue to drive until the kids say they no longer have a cell signal and then the parents stop driving. The voice over says “…and feel what it is like to truly connect.” You aren’t buying a luxury vehicle, you are buying a method to reconnect with your family.

But it isn’t just enough to communicate that message. As Drucker says, it has to be operationalized in some way. But translating it into action isn’t necessarily complicated just as providing assurance in Drucker’s example meant a commitment to making an assessment in a short period of time.

 

Audiences Generally Cut Back On Drinks Before Admission Tickets

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As always, Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS provided some attention worthy data in July regarding perceptions of the value of paying for museum and performing arts tickets. Basically, are the tickets worth it?

One of the things they found is that people expect to pay less for exhibit based and performing arts experiences in 2024 than they did in 2019, There is a lot nuance to this result according the Dilenschneider on her colleagues. First of all, this response is based on what people remember paying for their experience in pre-pandemic 2019. As you might imagine, they note that memory is imprecise and so comparing what they expect to pay this year compared to what they remember paying five years ago isn’t going to provide the most accurate results. In fact, data about what was spent in the first two quarters of 2024 tends to be higher than what they said they planned to spend.

The other thing to know is that people aren’t planning to cut back on admission tickets, but rather the other activities surrounding the central event. What IMPACTS terms off-site spending:

As of Q2 2024, the top area where folks recall spending money in relation to their visit is admission. Still, we do not see that admission costs are a top barrier to attendance to cultural organizations. So, to continue our work as data detectives, we’ll want to observe where other changes have taken place.

[…]

Folks are spending more on parking, admission, and onsite retail, and they are spending less on the other aspects surrounding the cultural experience.

Nowadays, despite rising food costs and restaurant prices, cultural participants plan to spend less (and actually do) on food and beverage. In 2019, performing arts patrons were more likely to grab a dinner before the show and perhaps drinks afterwards. Now, however, the data suggest that patrons may be more likely to only do pre-theater drinks, or perhaps skip the fancy bottle of wine for a single glass or choose a more affordable fast casual option than a Michelin-starred meal. These choices reflect consumers’ decisions to “trade off” or “trade down” when it comes to making their cultural-related spending choices. Fortunately for many cultural organizations, these “trades” thus far seem to primarily affect offsite spending (and indicate less sensitivity to onsite consumer behaviors).

Of course, these results are associated with people who actually made the choice to participate in an experience. A fair part of the article is devoted to a conversation about the general pessimism people in the US especially feel about the economy. Ticket prices are fairly low on the list of cost related barriers to visitation compared to concerns about the economy, prices, inflation, investment, personal finances, etc.

Libraries Serve The Huddled Masses Yearning For Wifi Access

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In another refutation of the argument that we should stop funding libraries because no one reads books, on Friday there was a public radio piece from Marketplace illustrating the increased role libraries play in communities.

In this particular story, they featured a library in Taylorsville, KY where not a lot of people have internet access due to the sparse population and difficult terrain. The director of the library noted that the use of the library computers has decreased over time, but the use of their wifi has increased significantly due to people using their own devices.

Director Debra Lawson said that while those computers are used less frequently lately —patrons typically bring in their own devices — the Wi-Fi usage is “through the roof.”

“We leave our Wi-Fi up 24/7,” Lawson said. “So sometimes … I come in the next morning, check on the camera, and there’ll be people outside in 35 degrees in sleeping bags using the internet.”

The main focus of the story is that federal infrastructure bills are providing better internet to places like Tayorsville as well as helping underwrite 70% of the $9000/year bill the library will have when they get fiber optic internet in the near future.

But the value of the internet service to the community can be measured in those people sitting outside the building in 35 degree weather using the service. During Covid, many libraries re-positioned their wifi equipment to provide a signal into their parking lots so that students who didn’t have internet at home could do their homework while building access was denied them. Even as the buildings re-opened, libraries have continued to offer that service for students and the unhoused population. When I go to my local library, there are signs on the exterior of the building with the wifi information so that people can log in.

Libraries provide a good example of a non-profit/government service that is constantly revising the way they offer their services to help meet the needs of the community. In many ways, they are much more responsive and nimble than many other cultural non-profits or government services.

Cultural Institution And Daycare Pension Partnership

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A miscellaneous bit of interesting information – I recently saw a job posting for the executive director of the Cultural Institutions Retirement System (CIRS). I was totally unaware of the existence of an organization specifically dedicated to providing pension and other retirement benefits for cultural organizations. I assumed most cultural organizations arranged for retirement services independently of each other or that employees received these benefits through their union membership.

In fact, that may be largely the case outside of NYC where about 50 cultural institutions in the five boroughs of NYC, plus one in Newark, NJ participate in the retirement system. Most members are museums and gardens, but there are a few unions and organizations like American Parkinson Disease Assoc., Inc. and Animal Care & Control of NYC, Inc. who also participate.

More surprising however is that an additional 100 child care centers also offer their retirement benefits through CIRS.  The retirement system was started in 1962 by five museums, the child care centers started joining in 1964.

All in all, it seems like an interesting, though unexpected, alliance of organizational interests pooling their funds to provide retirement benefits to their members.

Prioritizing Hospitality And Accessibility In The Face Of Fear

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You may have heard that museums in Vienna, Austria offered free admission to Taylor Swift fans who were faced with the cancellation of the concerts due to terroristic threats.

My one quibble with this is their claim that admission is so expensive for young people —who paid the equivalent of $750 plus travel to see the concert (though apparently ticket prices dropped to about $250 in the weeks before the concerts).  There is an element to this situation where people saying things are too expensive really mean they prioritize spending much more on some experiences versus others. (There is also the fact that it says something about concert ticket prices in the US that even at $750 a ticket it was cheaper for US residents to fly to Vienna than to see a show in their own country where ticket prices are in the thousands. But that is another post.)

Otherwise, I appreciated that many of the museums took steps that reflected the interests of their audience like adding more English language tours and switching out the classical music tracks played in the galleries.

The museum also switched the soundtracks playing its in 20 historical staterooms from classical music to Taylor Swift albums, prompting several large singalongs that went viral on TikTok.

“I love classical music, I love Mozart, I love Beethoven, I love all these classical artists, but it was really nice to have a Taylor Swift singalong more or less in the state rooms that normally stand for something else,” Eisterer said, noting she had worked for The Albertina for eight years.

While I would personally prefer a different music choice, I have noted for years that not everything an arts organization does is meant for everyone. One museum went from having 2000 visitors on weekend days to an average of 5000 people a day from Thursday-Sunday. Another saw a 100% increase over regular attendance.

While theses institutions gave up admission revenue, they did see a surge in sales in their stores and cafes which helped to make up for the loss.

Revenue considerations aside, the museums saw the cancelled concerts as an opportunity to advance the perception of accessibility, relevance, and welcoming among a younger demographic. Not only for themselves, but the city as well.  This is the sort of approach that helps engender trust and engagement in arts and cultural organizations that I have discussed in some recent posts.  (I am still holding to my general philosophy about free admission though)

While the initiative may have been a temporary hit to museum revenues from entry fees, museum staff told ARTnews there were far more benefits, including merchandise sales, publicity, and greater accessibility to younger visitors.

“We didn’t think about the money or the losing the money at all,” Eisterer said, noting that its entry fees can be very expensive for young people. “It was, for us, important to set like a sign for this concert that had been canceled because of this horrible reason, and to give somehow a bit of hope and say to people, ‘Hey, we know it’s devastating. You can’t go to the concert, but hey, you can enjoy a bit of of art in Vienna, that’s what we can offer you’.”

“It’s helpful for our reputation,” Posch said. “it pays into the reputation of the city of Vienna, being friendly, being generous, being hospitable. And that is worth more, in the end, than not generating these few euros in ticket sales.”

Defined Plan For Change –Including The Accusations

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Interesting story via Artsjournal.com that might provide a rough roadmap for arts organizations looking to change the programming mix they offer the community.  The public broadcaster of Norway( NRK) received survey results indicating that climate change was not getting enough coverage.  There was a reluctance to cover these sort of stories for fear of being accused of having too strong a political bent. (Recall Norway is one of the top five exporters of oil and natural gas in the world so climate change touches on a cornerstone of the national economy.)  An interesting aspect of this story is that the staff of the broadcaster pretty much managed upward in order to get executive leadership invested in making these changes.

The parallel to arts and cultural organizations I saw is that staff and board members are often concerned that instigating a shift in programming and experiences will alienate long time supporters and perhaps also garner accusations of making political statements with the choices.

After agreeing that NRK needed to produce better climate journalism, senior leadership, along with a group of journalists who weren’t climate specialists, decided to figure out what better climate coverage would look like.

Initial conversations covered everything from where the broadcaster drew the line between activism and journalism, to which editorial tone would balance fear and hope, to which audiences to focus on and where to put resources.

[…]

That has helped the broadcaster deal with claims that coverage of climate is politically motivated, and prevented such blowback from shaping the broadcaster’s climate strategy.

Part of the challenge has been to produce stories that don’t prioritize “running after whatever people get angry about, or that triggers some deep-rooted emotion,” says Cosson-Eide, “but instead looking for stories that are relatable, but also say something meaningful about what’s at stake and what we have to do as a society.”

I appreciated that they didn’t just say we are committed to more climate coverage but also created parameters about what that coverage would look like that was shared with everyone. In terms of the arts and culture realm, the decision might be made to commit to a course of action, but the artistic staff might decide what that looks like among themselves which leaves everyone else to speculate and opine that things are going too far or not far enough toward meeting the organizational commitment. Or perhaps the rest of the staff is in the dark about how decisions are connecting with the overall goals.

Based on the article, the creation of a clearly defined policy has allowed NRK to provide a consistent quality of coverage that other news outlets have struggled to maintain in the face of multiple crises like Covid, Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc.

I especially appreciated NRK’s decision to resist catering to the passions and controversies of the moment and stick with the core tenets of their climate coverage plan. It is a challenging thing to do for both news organizations and arts/cultural entities which seek to provide content and experiences which reflect the interests of the communities they serve. It sounds like NRK addressed the general topic in a relatable way, but tried to avoid placing it in the framework of whatever might have people riled up.

This approach seems like a good lesson for arts organizations looking to formulate a shift in type of programs and experiences.

The Loud Part Of DEI May Be Passing, But The Goals Remain

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An article on Hyperallergic by Lise Ragbir observed that DEI hiring initiatives have started to wane in both the commercial and non-profit sector. There were a number of high profile, highly touted hires, a fair number of which were short lived due to lack of supportive infrastructure and culture.

I suspect and hope that while the overt and public efforts at DEI have faded from the news, there are organizations quietly working to advance these goals. Ragbir provides three suggestions for arts organization to employ which will generally contribute to the development of infrastructure and culture for all employees.

The first is to empower staff. The long term goal being the reduction of turn over by providing people with opportunities to take on responsibilities which feel meaningful. Though this may also mean increasing salaries as well, Ragbir notes that it often costs the organization twice as much to replace a good worker as paying them enough to retain them. Not replacing them at all can lead to increased employee dissatisfaction and departure.

The MMF data also suggests that one of the major sources of career dissatisfaction is a lack of opportunities for growth or career advancement. The report highlights the fact that “the path to promotion and seniority is long and uncertain, with an average tenure of 12 years in an institution before a promotion.” Now consider this: Entry-level workers, who make up the most diverse part of the museum workforce, are also on the longest track to promotion.

A second suggestion advocates for using interim leaders during times of transition to provide the breathing space to create more constructive policies and work culture before hiring a new permanent leader.

Jenni Kim has served in lead operating and administrative roles at major museums and cultural organizations, including MoMA PS1. In a recent email exchange, she and I discussed the value of interim leadership. Her take? “An interim leader can play the pivotal dual roles of 1) giving an organization time to find and transition to its next leader, and 2) handling immediate and short-term needs that clear the deck for the next leader.”

[…]

“A leadership transition will likely change an organization in a number of ways, planned or not,” Kim said . “So, it is a critical moment for the board to reflect and assess their readiness to support and invest in setting-up new and diverse leaders for success.” Because diverse perspectives will lead us closer to fulfilling those loud calls for change.

The third suggestion might be a little controversial – empowering and training board members to help with the process. There are a lot of executive level leaders in non-profits who would prefer to keep board members at something of a remove from the organizational operations out of concern they may engage in micro-management. However, as Ragbir notes, there are greater expectations for accountability for cultural non-profits so this level of involvement may not be something arts leaders can avoid.

She notes that there is a lot of education and training of board members to prepare them for this level of involvement, but doesn’t link to any resources. I suspect this type of effort is so new there aren’t a lot of examples and case studies from which to draw. There is going to be some degree of finding ones way.

Trust In Non-Profits Is Up, But Unsurprisingly Politics Color That Trust

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Last month I pointed to research by Colleen Dilenschenider that indicated trust in cultural non-profits has grown since around 2019. Non-profit Quarterly (NPQ) had a short article about similar findings by the Independent Sector showing that trust in non-profits in general was higher than government, business, media, philanthropies, and foundations.

From the NPQ article:

The latest Independent Sector report breaks down five key findings:

After four years of decline, trust in nonprofits has rebounded by 5 points to 57%.
Trust in philanthropy remains steady at 33%, lower than trust in nonprofits.
Americans trust nonprofits to reduce national divisions more than they trust corporations, government, or media.
Americans have less trust in nonprofits to advocate for public policies and conduct nonpartisan voter engagement.
There are clear pathways for nonprofits to increase public trust in the sector

I was curious to know more about what the pathways to public trust might be so I took a closer look at the report issued by the Independent Sector. The measures survey respondents indicated would increase their level of trust was largely related to a commitment to ethical behavior and transparency.

62% of respondents would trust an organization more if it passed a course or certification for ethics in its operations

61% of respondents would increase their trust if the organization committed to a set of guidelines and ethical principles for its operations

79% of respondents said their previous volunteering experience made their views of nonprofit organizations more favorable

I was pleased to see that volunteering helped people feel more favorable about non-profit organizations.

After I read some of the comments individual respondents provided, I was a little skeptical about the statements that third party ethics certification would help raise confidence in non-profits. Regardless of political identity, people’s perceptions were that many non-profits were intentionally enflaming divisions or perpetuating the problems in order to justify their existence. Certification that what had been perceived to be corrupt practices by a non-profit was actually well within ethnical practice may result in people deciding the third party certification is untrustworthy.

Arts Can Still Be Part Of Your Identity Even After Practice Wanes

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About 10 years ago I wrote about a TED talk Jamie Bennett made where he noted it was easier for people to identify themselves with athletes based on sports they may have actively played years ago than it was to call themselves artists even if they were currently relatively active in creative pursuits.

In the context of that talk, I was encouraged to see an article from Salon where a woman confirmed she still considered herself a dancer even though she didn’t actively practice as much as she once did.

Janine Kovac writes:

Can I be in a traditional marriage and still have a husband who does all the grocery shopping and all the dishes? Because I do.

When I had kids, I knew I’d never go back to dancing. Am I still a ballet dancer? I think so. In our marriage, my husband and I make all our decisions together, and yet, I have no financial independence. Are we still equals? You bet.

She goes on to cite the example of Ingrid Silva and Celia Fushille who paused their careers to have families and then returned to dancing, choreography, and artistic direction of a dance company.

She also mentions she is on her way to Berlin with her daughter and her friend to attend a dance intensive program which is actually cheaper than attending a similar program near her home in the US. Like her, her friend:

My friend is also a former dancer and mother of three. In her world, she is the stable paycheck, and it is her partner who does the household logistics. Her job flies her to Barcelona and Munich, and in her spare time, she started a ballet photography company. Her life looks very different from mine but she too, has it all. Wife. Mother. Artist.

Whether they passed on their interest to their kids or their kids helped to keep it alive in their parents, it doesn’t matter. I am encouraged that people with any story about people who continue to feel connected with earlier artistic practice.

Obviously, a few examples is not indicative of a trend of a shift in sentiment. But I do think the opportunity and availability of seeing people outside your immediate social circle on social media, videos, etc who are not necessarily full-blown celebrated professions continuing to engage in creative and artistic practice in some way will help people feel that it is valid to maintain their own practice as part of their identity.

Mistake Of Viewing Culture As An Industry

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Via Artsjournal.com, a thought provoking interview with Professor Justin O’Connor, author of the book, Culture Is Not An Industry.

His basic premise is that if culture was an industry, decisions about it would play a bigger role in international policy and relations.

If we treat culture as a real industry, in the classical sense of the word, a very different picture would emerge. It would involve competing with big players on a global level, making decisions about investing large amounts of money into key areas. You would need to focus on geographical concentrations, drive innovation, maximise profits and exports, and talk about industrial policy in the same way you would about electric vehicles, wine, or dairy industries. However, this is not the same as talking about culture and art.

He uses the example of South Korea’s focus since the 1990s to make music and television dramas into global products.

He says that the misclassification of cultural as an industry has created multiple problems and generally seen funding directed toward a few universities and think-tank groups which reinforce this state.

…the last forty years have shown that the reducing culture to an industry has led to the marginalisation of culture on policy agendas and scrapping it away from transformative policies. The ‘culture-as-an-industry’ discourse has worsened working conditions in the cultural sector pushed to spend increasingly more effort and time on quantifying its impact.

[…]

The beneficiaries of the creative industry narrative include various clusters and consortia centred around universities, research agencies, consultancies, and similar entities. These groups often have more influence on governments than artists and cultural workers.

O’Connor tends to be against speaking about culture in economic terms, but instead as an important element in achieving a livable society. The problem is, that narrative can be in conflict with the goals of governments and business.

Cultural life is an integral part of social and political life, essential in defining citizenship. Culture, therefore, deserves to be considered one of the foundational services that contribute to creating a livable society.

[…]

However, if the conversation shifts to viewing culture as part of the public service sector, as a right, or as a sustainable development goal, large corporations may not find it as appealing to be grouped with culture and the arts. It’s no surprise that the United States has resisted including culture as a sustainable development goal on the UN agenda.

Perhaps most interesting to me is his assertion at the end of the article that the cultural sector not speak in terms of intrinsic value of culture:

Then the distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and social and economic is itself a product of neoliberal economics. Separating out the ‘intrinsic’ is actually a form of neoclassical economic modelling where individual good is purely a matter of the individual and her credit card. It also acts as an oubliette into which art is dropped as policy makers hurry on to the economic value…Art and cultural value are actually established and shared socially, and the individual judgement of a particular piece of art (song, video game, film) is part of our ongoing conversation about what we value as a society.

The world of culture is about the production and distribution of what we call art and culture: highly symbolic things, such as songs, plays, films, books, games, and paintings. The responsibility of the cultural sector is to take care of this world of symbolic things that has historically proven to be highly valuable to societies, and to support the people who create these symbolic things.

This gives me a lot to think about. My instinct is that what O’Connor is proposing is the next phase of my understanding about why we shouldn’t use economic value as a measure of the value of arts and culture. This deepens my understanding of why this argument is problematic. I regret that my old friend Carter Gilles is no longer alive to help me sort through these implications.

Did Curiosity About Bugs As A Kid Inform Our Creative Talents As Adults

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Seth Godin made a post recently that speaks to the perception you either have innate talent or you can never be successful at something. This outlook seems to operate very strongly when it comes to creative activity.

The first error we often make is believing that someone (even us) will never be good at riding a bike, because riding a bike is so difficult. When we’re not good at it, it’s obvious to everyone.

The second error is coming to the conclusion that people who are good at it are talented, born with the ability to do it. They’re not, they have simply earned a skill that translates into momentum.

There’s a difference between, “This person is a terrible public speaker,” and “this person will never be good at public speaking.”

The older I get, the more I can appreciate Godin’s point about earning a skill that translates into momentum. I suspect that abilities whose development can’t necessarily be observed as a result of physical practice like athleticism and musical performance may be the result of perspective and philosophy about the world people have developed over time, perhaps even since childhood.

Abilities related to creativity, problem-solving, interpersonal relationships, etc., may be the result of 10,000 little instances like observations of clouds and bugs, paying attention to conversations and retaining information as important, attempts at reasoning things about the world that you come across. School, socialization, family, wealth, opportunity, reading books, etc., will certainly play a part, supported by some good genes and brain chemistry perhaps. There are likely millions of musings and conclusions that we have never reflected upon as being productive toward the development of a skillset, much less that anyone around us was aware were occurring. But in the end, as Godin says, we earned the results.

Abilities that manifest as a result of our physical capacity are certainly dependent on genetics. But again as I have gotten older and experience more aches and pains, I have begun to suspect that there are some physical skills that are a result of perceptions and decisions we made as children regarding things as simple as how to walk, run, and stop. One of the things I suspect is that we are all making different decisions about how much to shift our body weight and which muscles need to be tensed when going to the cupboard to get a can of soup. I have lived in apartments where I was surprised to realize the heavy footed one stomping around was the wife who was a foot shorter and probably more than 100 lbs. lighter than her husband.

Even having developed the confidence to act as a result of some combination of decisions, perspectives, musings, etc., over the course of decades, there are often years of deliberate practice required to sit on top of that to truly excel in an area.

While genetics and other opportunities and privilege certainly contribute to the ease in which someone may obtain mastery, the more I read on the subject of innate talent vs. practice, the more I suspect that there is a lot of conscious effect and decision which is invisible to others as well as ourselves that ends up as a foundation for the skills we exhibit later in life.

Economics Of Broadway Show Breaking Broadway Formula

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Freakanomics did a two part show about how the Broadway play Stereophonic came together. The first part is broadly about the 11 year creative process playwright David Adjmi went through to make the show. The second part focuses a bit more on the economics behind a Broadway show.

If you have been involved with the performing arts for any length of time, you can probably predict the process Adjmi underwent – cobbled together funds from two commissions and a grant, plus had two architects let him live in their house rent free for years while he wrote. He had to put some pressure on Playwrights Horizons to consider the show and the cost of over $1 million was a lot for an off-Broadway production.

But it became a hit based on essentially breaking the formula of Broadway shows – a straight play about music, but not a musical, no stars in the cast, and runs long at 3.25 hours. Apparently it has a strong appeal to men based on the observation the men’s restroom line is longer than the women’s.

There is a lot more to the story than that. The first episode is 70 minutes alone and the second about 55 minutes.

Being the arts management nerd I am, I was even more interested in the second episode which talked about the economics and decisions that were made. Everything from the cost of putting on a show in NY vs. London, who can and how to invest in shows in both cities, what the actors got paid off-Broadway vs. after the move to Broadway, decisions about pricing tickets, and the marketing mix they used.

In terms of the pricing tickets, the producers say they can now get up to $349 for a ticket though they re-evaluate their pricing three times a week, but they started out much lower during previews:

We had preview pricing that was $40, $80, $120 to start, for the month of April. But you have to catch up to it, because now we can get $229 for them. You kind of play a game of chicken with yourself and with your audience. For something like Stereophonic, because it’s an unknown title — obviously it’s getting more well-known — but two, it does not have a major mega-star in it. It has a group of incredible rising stars, but they’re not household names. The way that we get there is by getting people in the door, and really building to that moment.

Thanks to improved audience analytics tools, the producers have changed their marketing mix from what it once was as well:

Oh, it’s almost entirely all digital now. It’s all mobile. It’s all through Meta — it’s all through Instagram, Facebook. We do still take the traditional behavioral banner ads that follow you around the internet. We still do some prints, but not a ton. We have dabbled into television, but we’re taking specific ads. We’re not taking giant flights with multiple spots on Good Morning America or the Today Show, which was always your bread and butter.

[…]

The R.O.I. is much easier to figure out because you can actually track people. Our zip code reporting is way more sophisticated now than it was before, whereas you had to blanket the market with something and then you didn’t see a direct correlation. Now it’s less things, but you can still see how your wraps jump due to specific things of press, like a C.B.S. Sunday Morning piece, or if your stars are on Morning Joe. There are fewer things that give you that pop, but at least you know, “If I’m on Morning Joe, then we’re going to have a good day at the box office.”

If this sort of information interests you and you have the time, I recommend giving the pieces a listen. Host Stephen Dubner says they are working on a longer, more involved series on the economics of making theater so I am going to keep an eye out for that as well.

Smoke And Heat Becoming A Bigger Threat To Summer Theater Than Rain Storms

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American Theatre posted a really comprehensive article about the challenges summer theaters are facing.

In the wake of social unrest resulting from things like Covid, George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter, many theaters have worked to provide better working conditions for staff. Some of the changes have included shorter work hours, better pay, and childcare.

However, as expenses have gone up and philanthropic support has declined, these changes are raising increasingly difficult questions for summer theaters. Not that theaters haven’t always had a multitude of challenges to address. Staying committed to fair pay and fair hours has meant doing fewer shows, scaling back on customer service, or in one case, back office staff stepping in to sell popcorn when concessions staff exceed their hours in a week. There are concerns about whether having shorter rehearsal hours will result in lower quality performances and disappoint audiences who may be paying more for tickets than in the past.

In response to this some theaters are re-packaging their offerings for audiences. For some destination theater festivals, this may result in better experiences for audiences who felt there was more going on than they were able to experience.

Covid has continued to create consequences for these theaters. Not only have many experienced professionals left the industry, but the pandemic interrupted the continuity of training for younger professionals.

Bahr agreed, adding that “the supply chain of welders or people doing lighting is gone,” and that in Utah, the issue is deepened by the festival’s reliance on local college students, who missed several years of in-person learning. As carpenters and other skilled workers explained to him, seniors used to teach the juniors and they’d teach the sophomores, and so on, but “it’s like they’ve got four years of freshmen now.”

Climate change has also increasingly posed a challenge for summer theaters. In addition to dodging snakes and bears passing through the natural environment in which the theaters operate, forest fires and heat are becoming a central concern.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Tim Bond noted that forest fires caused numerous cancellations in 2023:

“We had 10 cancellations last season,” he said, which is a serious financial hit. “We now have a ‘smoke team’ that monitors the smoke and the direction of the wind. They’ll know when the smoke will arrive, so sometimes we cancel even when audiences are seeing blue skies because we’ve gotten good at knowing when it will roll in.”

Utah Shakespearean Festival leadership said that smoke caused the cancellation of nine shows in 2022 resulting in a loss of $500,000.

American Theater Players in Spring Green, WI has had to cancel for heat and poor air quality and is having to budget to accommodate for increased number of refunds:

Young said that 2021 marked the first time American Players Theatre had to cancel outdoor productions in their 1,075-seat Hill Theatre for extreme heat. (Last year they lost performances due to poor air quality.) She said that while many audiences prefer matinees because they don’t want to drive at night, they increasingly have trouble sitting through them in extreme heat—weather that is also unsafe for actors. To compensate, APT is shifting outdoor matinees to late August, when it’s cooler in Wisconsin.

“We plan into our budget that we’re going to refund a certain number of tickets for weather,” she said, “but that number is getting higher, and we have to look at what it will be like in 10 years. Are we going to need a large indoor space to accommodate that shift?”

When Federal Funding Of Theater Equaled The Cost Of A Battleship

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Artsjournal.com posted an article from The Yale Review reviewing a book about the benefits the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) brought to Depression Era United States.  In addition to discussing these benefits the book’s author, James Shapiro, relates efforts to dismantle FTP by conservatives as an early manifestation of the culture war we experience today.

After reading about all the activity the FTP engaged in across the country, the reviewer Charlie Tyson notes that the budget was “less than 1% of the total funds allocated for federal work relief, or about the cost to build a battleship. Tyson notes that the cost to build an air craft carrier today is around $13 billion and challenges readers to think about what arts organizations and artists could do with that sort of money today.

What was most interesting was reading about the wide scope of activities the Federal Theater Project and the related Federal Dance Theater Project engaged in. If there was ever a time in the history of the US when artistic activity was viewed as populist rather than elitist, it was during the period of 1935 and 1939 when these projects were actively creating works. The works created weren’t just lighthearted fare. There were challenging pieces on topics like poverty, housing, racism, labor relations, and inequality.

The Living Newspaper program of the FTP addressed these topics and focused some criticism upon lawmakers by quoting statements made in the Congressional Record.  It is probably no surprise that legislators who were already opposed to FDR’s New Deal programs targeted works drawing a great amounts of attention to the uncomfortable issues of the day.

The funds distributed to artists through FTP provided for a significant amount of community engagement. To a certain extent there are probably lessons to be drawn today from the activities of artists 90 years ago.  One of the things cited by Tyson was how closely tailored to a target community some of the shows were:

“Unlike Hollywood, which delivered the same products to everyone, the Project was nimble, sensitive to local variation. For example, shows were staged in Spanish in Miami and Tampa and in Yiddish in New York. The Project gave directors license to adjust performances to satisfy local tastes; audiences in different cities might see differing versions of the same play.

A string of early successes established the Federal Theatre’s rep­utation. Its first hit was a production of Macbeth in Harlem, staged by one of the program’s so-called Negro Units. (The Federal Theatre was, at the time, Harlem’s largest employer.) To direct the production, the organization tapped Orson Welles, at that time a virtually unknown twenty-year-old actor with no professional directorial experience. The Harlem Macbeth—commonly known as the Voodoo Macbeth—traded Scottish gloom for Caribbean exot­icism. Set in nineteenth-century Haiti with a large all-Black cast and filled, in Shapiro’s words, with “drumming and spectacle,” the production was a sensation. It moved from Harlem to Broadway and then embarked on a national tour with stops in the Jim Crow South. The play reached roughly 120,000 people.

Many of the shows were performed for free. There are apparently pictures of thousands of people filling parks to watch performances. (Though I imagine many performances also occurred indoors). In total, it was estimated “…thirty million Americans—roughly a quarter of the population—attended Federal Theatre productions.”

Toward the end of the piece Tyson notes that there have been recent calls for more federal funding of non-profit theaters and cites a criticism that theaters have only themselves to blame for producing works with themes criticizing the social and political environment. But Tyson notes that theatrical performances have a long history of containing social messages from Victorian melodramas pointing out the plight of the poor to the social commentary of Federal Theater Project works through to today.

Accountability Leadership

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Back in June there was an article on the Harvard Business Review site about 3 Ways to Compassionately Hold Your Team accountable.  The authors of the piece approach the topic from the cognitive processes associated with accountability. What appealed to me about the piece was the contrasting of punitive approaches with those that views an assignment as an opportunity for growth and acknowledges that mistakes are a part of that process.

Since the creative process involves generating, refining, and building upon multiple iterations, this seems an appropriate approach to apply to management and leadership practices in arts and cultural organizations.

The authors categorize these perceptions of accountability as “threatening” vs. “worthy challenge.”

Leaders should strive for the second type of accountability, as there is now significant research suggesting that encouraging a growth mindset accelerates individual performance, learning and adaptability, and overall well-being. And because growth-oriented accountability rewards employees for taking risks and encourages a growth mindset, it has knock-on benefits for team culture. In particular, it compels people to find solutions to the mistakes others have made rather than blaming or shaming them.

The three accountability methods they identify are: Think Ahead, Own Your Commitments, and Anchor on Solutions.

Think Ahead involves envisioning and communicating what success looks like to staff, including any difficulties staff may encounter. The example given in the article is a client that often interrupts to ask questions, but similar situations occur in arts and cultural environments in terms of details known about attendees, groups, board members, etc. The challenge to Thinking Ahead is being able to empathize with the person(s) being assigned the task. Not only in terms of what questions they may have on details you take for granted, but anticipating that they may be intimidated by a situation that wouldn’t ruffle you.

Own Your Commitments is essentially holding yourself to the same standard as employees and modeling the behavior for them rather than taking a “do as I say, not as I do approach.” The authors point out that if employees are held accountable for meeting certain benchmarks but their leaders are allowed slack, the dichotomy can cause all sorts of issues.

An arts organization related example that immediately comes to mind are policies like ticket changes, rental refunds, etc. Often it does fall to a leader to bend policies to accommodate certain people and situations. In those situations it is important to confirm that staff made the right decision with their initial refusal rather than blaming them for not knowing they were dealing with an important person and should have made an exception. The other approach is to explain why the decision to bend policy was made and either empower employees to make that decision themselves within that context or give them permission to pass the decision up the chain without repercussions.

Finally, Anchor on Solutions is essentially the practice of acknowledging errors and problems are part of becoming more skilled and productive. It is about reflecting, discussing, and seeking solutions rather than focusing on assigning blame.

Anchoring on solutions means letting go of blame and working to make things better. It means debriefing deeply on both wins and failures, and constantly seeking creative ways of solving problems instead of reasons for failure. Like owning your commitments, anchoring on solutions is a learnable skill that is heavily influenced by the actions of others around us. Therefore, leaders need to be intentional about focusing on the way forward, not on finding out whose fault it is.

Rome Was Built In A Day. But What Day Was That?

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Seth Godin recently made a post that sort of wrapped the concepts of life long learning, creation being a process, and failure being part of any endeavor.

He starts by saying Rome WAS built in a day.

Rome was built in a day.

It wasn’t finished in a day. In fact, it’s still not finished.

But the day someone said, “this is Rome,” and announced the project, it was there.

Sometimes we get hung up on the beginning, unwilling to start Rome unless we’re sure we can finish it without incident.

I appreciate his suggestion that things come into being when they are acknowledged as existing and being named. Yet something can have an acknowledged existence and not be complete. In the process things are discarded and destroyed and other things remain just as there are parts of Rome which have endured as well as have gone from existence. Or like the Colosseum it both exists as a construction people visit, albeit in a partially destroyed state, but also has some of its constituent parts which were carted away contributing to other structures in the city.

Essentially a version of the Ship of Theseus where some discarded parts are recycled and others destroyed even as others have been added.

In that context as Godin says, we can’t go into the start of some endeavor with too much expectation about the form success will take lest we become paralyzed conceptualizing all of what will be required. That is as true about initiating a creative project as it is building a city or creating ourselves.

There was a day when you came into being. Was it the day of your birth or sometime later when your personality and personal philosophy developed? Are you still being built and who is doing the building?

 

Handling All Your Festival, Concert, And Theatrical Touring Needs

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Earlier this month a piece on The Conversation site called attention to the often unseen contributions roadies make to the success of festivals, concerts, and theatrical tours.  There is often a lot written about the artists performing, but scant content about the people who literally do the heavy listing. The article’s author, Gabrielle Kielich, has recently released a book road crew on tours.

One of the things she emphasizes is that the catch all term roadie tends to obfuscate the diversity of jobs touring crews perform and creates the impression they only contribute physical strength rather than a high degree of technical skill.

The size of a crew is determined by the scale of a tour and the needs of musicians, but they typically include the following: tour manager, production manager, instrument technicians, monitor engineer, front of house engineer, lighting technician and merchandise staff (known as “merch”).

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The term “roadie” falsely suggests that crew members’ roles are interchangeable and undifferentiated. For this reason, although “roadie” was once the accepted term, it has generally fallen out of favour. Now, many crew members prefer a more specific occupational title.

The rejection of the term “roadie” also represents a wider shift in the culture and professionalism of live music and distances these workers from the stereotypes and cliches associated with the mythologising of rock music culture.

Free Admission Isn’t An Audience Building Strategy

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Thinking that free or discounted tickets will increase accessibility and loyalty is something of a pet peeve of mine. Yesterday I commented on a post Sean Kelly of Vatic made on LinkedIn where he noted that people who didn’t want to use dynamic pricing for their events that were selling well would willingly discount or comp tickets to a show that was selling poorly. The connection I saw in that statement is that any pricing change you implement in response to perceived level of demand was essentially dynamic pricing.

In that context, I wanted to point to a recent post Colleen Dilenschneider and colleagues made about the connection between price and perception of value for different types of arts and cultural organizations.  The post has 35 charts and goes into a lot of detail which I am not going to even try to reflect.

There were a couple of statements made in their data analysis about pricing, satisfaction, access, and free admission to which I wanted to call attention. First of all, in general, they found that just because someone perceives something to be expensive, it doesn’t mean they feel the experience wasn’t worth the cost. People understand that a quality experience costs money.

In fact, lower cost experiences often receive lower satisfaction scores for various reasons, including the obvious fact that not charging a lot means you have less capacity to offer a quality experience:

Free and low-cost cultural entities generally have lower guest satisfaction rates, intentions to revisit, and willingness to return. Again, this is because people generally “pay for what they value and value what they pay for,” and it is consistent with ongoing research we continue to collect regarding perceptions of free vs. paid-admission organizations.

Also, it’s likely that at least some free and low-cost museums really do have lesser guest experiences! After all, they are likely reliant on another source of revenue than the gate and they may be more cash-strapped than other cultural entities that have alternative funding sources.

What really caught my attention was their admonition against equating diverse audiences and affordable access audiences:

However, diverse audiences and affordable access audiences are not the same. Indeed, it can be very problematic to assume that diverse audiences and affordable access audiences comprise the same groups of people. (More directly: It is dangerous and incorrect to associate the idea of diversity with the idea of affordable access.)

I suspect part of what they consider problematic is equating being low-income with being a person of color. One of the data points presented from the research was that the belief that an organization is “for people like me” was lowest among those perceived to be least expensive which already starts to cast some doubts on using free admission to diversify attendance. In part this may be related to low revenue meaning you may lack the funds to support efforts to make a broader segment of the community feel welcome.

But from the analysis provided by Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS it may also be that many of these entities aren’t really making any efforts beyond just offering free admission:

Being free is not the same as being welcoming. Some free and low-admission organizations treat their admission strategy as the near-entirety of their audience expansion efforts. However, free admission organizations do not have notably different audiences than paid-admission organizations. Just because something is free doesn’t mean people who don’t have interest (perhaps because they feel unwelcome) will do it. We see time and time again that free admission is not a foolproof audience expansion strategy with reliably positive impacts on welcoming perceptions. Being perceived as welcoming requires strategy, effort, thoughtful programing, prioritization and – often – investment. It’s not as simple as putting a “free” sign on the door.

Trust In Cultural Organizations Continues To Grow

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A recent post from Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS analyzes survey data that shows trust in cultural organizations has grown since the pandemic.  Trust in cultural entities exceeds that of media sources, state and federal agencies and non-governmental organizations. Among the more interesting insights from the data is that from 2010 to 2019, the level of trust for cultural organizations held relatively steady with values indicating mild agreement with the concept of trust associated with these organizations. Since 2020 however, the values increased to the level of agree and strongly agree with being able to trust those types of organizations.

I usually make relatively lengthy posts when writing about research results from Dilenschneider and her colleagues, but today I am going to offer a single excerpt that stood out to me regarding the cause of this shift in sentiment: (my emphasis)

At the same time, many cultural organizations experienced business disruptions. Some were closed for weeks or months at a time and unable to deliver the usual “visit us today” messaging. Instead, many cultural institutions began offering online experiences like virtual curator talks and trips behind the scenes. They put on educational programs and developed materials for families and schools grappling with virtual learning. In short, they proved relevance beyond their walls. They weren’t only talking about being places anymore. They also proved they were community resources.

Last May I posted about research showing that communicating on organization mission resulted in return visitation for cultural organizations.

Readers will probably also note that by shifting from visit us messaging to delivering content to communities, the organizations were focusing externally rather than internally.  The organizations were trying to offer content they felt would entertain, educated, and engage people rather than primarily focus the artistic excellence of the organization and artists.

I saw a lot of organizations develop fun, clever, engaging voices for themselves through digital offerings during the pandemic. Much of the content was new information for me and I didn’t find it dumbed down. If anything, it often made me do some additional research.  I am thinking maybe I need to go back and see if they are  maintaining or expanded  on that voice after restrictions lifted or did they shift back to more internally focused visit us today approach.

WESTAF Celebrates 50 Years Developing Technology For Arts

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The Western Arts Federation (WESTAF), the regional arts organization serving the western portion of the US turns 50 this year. They put out a series of videos on the history of the organization. I started watching them out of idle curiosity.

Some of the history is as you might expect with the different social and political influences which lead to their formation. The first headquarters being in Santa Fe, NM but the operational considerations of sending touring artists out resulting in the decision to move to Denver which was a bigger airport hub. Though Salt Lake City was apparently also under consideration based on a newspaper clipping appearing in a video.

What was really interesting was the story about how they decided to focus on technology for the arts. I knew each of the regional arts organizations has a different focus, but I hadn’t known that WESTAF’s focus on technology was based in a desire to diversify the organization’s income stream so that they weren’t entirely dependent on grants and donations. Episodes two and three talk about all the different products they have developed over the last fifty years.

I have been aware of many of their current products like Go Smart, their grant making and administration software, ZAPP which helps art festivals and fairs manage applications, CaFE (Call for Entry) which is built for applying to other types of visual arts projects (i.e. public art, exhibitions, artist-in-residence), and Public Art Archive, which is a place to document all the public art installations around the country.

However, there were a number of services they offered which didn’t quite succeed or were very useful but were phased out as needs of the industry changed. One of their first endeavors as the World Wide Web emerged on the scene was Circuit Riders, the goal of which was to connect arts organizations with consultants who could help them integrate emerging technologies into their operations. There was also a phone line, 900Arts which you could call for advice. In the first year Circuit Riders was in operation, they completed 144 contracts, but after three years it was closed down due to budget and staffing constraints.

In 1998, the Arts Computer program, was created to provide computers and sophisticated software to arts organizations at a low cost. Apparently the approach was to lease the computers and software to arts organizations. That only lasted a year. One interviewee suggested that the program was difficult to administer and the narration suggests that the exploding availability and use of personal computers decreased the need for the service.

WESTAF saw more success with their online job board, Artjob.org which started as a monthly newsletter in 1991, was distributed by email in 1993, and became a website that ran from 1998 to 2015. The video also talks about Artist Register launched in 2001, which pre-Google searches was a place for visual artists to market themselves. Based on the success of that service, WESTAF created WritersRegister and PerformingArts Register to serve artists in those areas.

Current and former staff interviewed for the video series credit former WESTAF Anthony Radich with the vision to offer these services, accompanied by a supportive board who allowed space for some of the initiatives to fail.

There are currently three videos in the series with a short intro video and the promise of more to come. They videos are each only about 10-15 minutes long and are fun to watch. Not every product WESTAF created was an exercise in trying to anticipate an unmet need in the arts industry. ZAPP apparently was a response to Kodak discontinuing the carousel slide projectors that so many arts festivals depended on to jury artist submissions. (I am sure artists are immensely grateful they don’t have to mail off piles of slides any more.)

If You Are Apt To Overlook It, How Do You Know Enough To Track It?

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Seth Godin made a post a week or so ago about the need to track things that are really important, but invisible to us or transpire gradually. I sense there is something valuable for arts and cultural organizations in what he has to say, but I am having a difficult time trying to figure out how to accurately track these things. I am hoping readers may have some idea.

In his post he writes:

Gas-powered leaf blowers would disappear if the smoke they belched out was black instead of invisible.

And few people would start smoking if the deposits on their lungs ended up on their face instead.

We’re not very good at paying attention to invisible or gradual outputs.

The trick is simple: If it’s important, make it visible. If it happens over time, create a signal that brings the future into the present.

One of the first things that occurred to me as important, but may transpire gradually is employee or audience dissatisfaction. But how do you accurately track and signal this situation? How do you know whether a dozen individual complaints are related to each other or independent rumblings? In hindsight it is easier to see that comments made in a series of staff meetings over the course of a months culminated in the departure of multiple people, but at the time those comments may not have seemed to be related.

Obviously, it is good to have supervisors who are responsive and emotionally intelligent enough to head off these issues, but if the supervisors are only seeing what is happening in their area, they may not feel there is enough of an issue to report it to those with a more global view of the organization.

Conversely, you may notice a gradual increase in audience satisfaction with their experience, but may not be able to pinpoint why. Is it the new ticketing software? The receptions for audiences under 40? The advance emails telling people where to find parking? These are all great ideas and making people happy so let’s keep them and continue to make everyone happy!

Except what you didn’t know was that it was a front of house manager whose infectious enthusiasm and good training transferred through the staff to the audience. When their parents got sick, they moved back to their hometown. Gradually, that lack of leadership and energy seeps out of the experience and audiences aren’t as satisfied. Having no idea this is the cause, you try new innovative programs to which people may respond, but it isn’t quite like it was. Even if you recognize that the departed staff member was a valuable asset that had been lost, you may not realize their work sent imperceptible ripples through the organization.

Godin uses examples where the link between cause and effect is pretty well known. So there are ways to measure leaf blower exhaust that don’t depend on sight and you can monitor lung health in different ways. But there are other situations where there are multiple factors which may contribute to outputs so it is difficult to know which to make visible. What might be relevant in one community may not be in another. The social dynamic of one region of the country may enjoy the enthusiasm of the front of house manager, but it may come across as insincere and cloying in another part of the country.

But I may be overthinking this and/or coming at this from the belief that just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean it is meaningful. Some readers may immediately identify the type invisible or gradual issues Godin may be referencing that are associated with the arts and some relatively objective measures that can be used to track them.

Return To In Person Date Searches Presents An Opportunity

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Bloomberg had an article on a trend that presents an opportunity for arts and cultural organizations. In some respects it could be considered rather mundane news – Gen Z Is abandoning dating apps in favor of in person singles events. Arts and cultural organizations have the opportunity to create specific experiences for this group either internally or in partnership with nearby businesses (bars, restaurants, etc.)

Though if there is a group in the community already organizing singles events it would probably be best to work with them to discover what sort of experience is most appealing to their participants.

It’s not formally conventional places, like bars or coffee shops, where Gen Zers are looking for potential matches. Think interest-based functions, such as the popular running group Venice Run Club, where new members have to state if they’re single as part of their introduction, or even a late-night chess club.

LA Chess Club, which runs every Thursday night from 8 p.m. to midnight, has become a recent hotspot for singles in Los Angeles in their early to mid-30s….But after the success of a speed dating event Kong hosted on Valentine’s Day in an attempt to get more girls to come, the club morphed into a space singles gravitated toward.

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Pitch-A-Friend Philly, a monthly event series in Philadelphia inspired by Pitch-A-Friend Seattle, encourages participants to share a roughly 5-minute PowerPoint presentation about their single friends to help them find a potential partner.

According to some of those interviewed for the article, the appeal of singles events organized around board games, movie screenings, dinners, brunches and other activities, is the opportunity to interact with people with shared interests in an environment that differs from the bar/coffee house/nightclub nightclub scene where you might be bothered by overly insistent people when you might want to be left alone.

Those are among the considerations that arts and cultural organizations might need to factor into any attempt to design singles experiences.

Still Seeking A Quality Experience, But Want Increased Comfort

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Here is something of a metaphoric lesson for arts and cultural organizations about changing the nature of the experience you offer to align with the needs and expectations of your customers. Bloomberg CityLab recently had a piece about how the work from home trend and loosening office dress codes are impacting  shoe shine services. Basically, fewer people are going to the office and an increasing number of those who are heading in to work are wearing sneakers.

As a result, many shoe shine businesses are shifting to sneaker cleaning services. People may be going to work in sneakers, but they still want to look neat and put together. It appears that people may be less confident in their ability to clean their sneakers themselves than shining their shoes.

“The industry isn’t the same anymore” said Charlie Colletti, owner of Cobbler Express, a third-generation shoeshine and repair shop in Lower Manhattan. “We’ll do some sneaker work, we clean sneakers, you know, try to keep up with the times.”

Sneaker-cleaning services helped Anthony’s Shoe Repair, near Grand Central Terminal, survive the pandemic. Like shining dress shoes, it’s a specialized service. “Many people do not know how to clean them,” owner Teodoro Morocho said. “You need the right equipment and material to be able to do it well.”

At the end of the article, Charlie Colletti quoted above says in the 1990s he was super busy, had a contract with Merrill Lynch, and about 16 employees. Again this has parallels with arts organizations who remember having packed houses of subscribers. Except in this case, instead of those core audiences getting older and younger audiences not replacing them, the cobblers and shoe shine companies are facing a change in work environment and style choices.

Whether it is arts and culture or shoes, people are seeking a heightened experience, but want to be more comfortable doing it.

After Nearly Six Decades It Is Time To Stop Striving And Start Doing

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American Theatre recently published a “Confidential Plan” written by Zelda Fichandler, founding artistic director of Arena Stage in 1968. Initially a memo written to the Arena Stage board about integrating both the acting company and audience. A revision of the memo was published more publicly. The notes on the article say that Fichhandler was initially unsuccessful and had to rework her plan. The fact she labeled it confidential is likely a reflection of that fact she knew her proposal would not be well-received if made public.

As you read her thoughts, it is somewhat depressing to think that observations she made about audiences in 1968 are still true today. After noting that the population of D.C. was 63% Black and yet there are no Black actors in the Arena Stage company she states (my emphasis):

The Negro’s struggle for power—economic power, business power, political, intellectual, psychological, human power—foundationally affects his relationships with other Negroes, with whites, and with himself. This struggle reverberates through contemporary American life. Each of us feels its vibrations every day. And yet we come into our theatre at night as if into an unreal world: A white audience sits around a stage upon which a white company tells “sad tales of the death of kings.” Surely we are in the wrong place!

Then later, in discussing the composition of audiences and her vision for increasing representation both on stage and in the seats:

Homogeneous audiences, who connect with a play in a predictably uniform way, with one pervading attitude, are anathema to the pulse of a living art. It isn’t coincidental that, in all its years of history, Arena seemed most alive while we were playing The Great White Hope and Blood Knot this year, both with interracial casts, both drawing an audience more diverse than usual with regard to race, income level, age, education, occupation, human experience, preoccupations and interests, patterns of entertainment, and expectations about theatre and life in general.

She makes other thought provoking statements and observations in the sections excerpted in American Theatre. However, some of the more general ones like those above remain as ideals arts organizations strive to achieve 56 years later.  She says the theater was never so alive as when the programming and performers were most inclusive, yet that is still a goal everyone says they want to chase.

Many non-profit arts organizations have made statements committing to a better job diversifying representation in programming, performers and audiences.  Hopefully those commitments are sustained and endure. There were many commercial enterprises that made similar promises in response to social pressure in 2020 after the deaths of people like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery but have eliminated much of  the staffing and funding that supported those initiatives.

Making The Experience About More Than Just The Art

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I caught an interview on a National Endowment for the Arts’ podcast  with Tyler Blackwell Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Blackwell talks about how he is working to increase representation for race and gender identity through his work at the museum.

What caught my ear was the museum’s plan to open a sculpture park that seems more focused on providing a green space to the community 24 hours a day than on encouraging residents to enter the museum. Blackwell says that they accept that people may linger outside by never enter.

…a sculpture park that sort of encircles the museum, is going to be a very significant green space in a part of Louisville that does not have a lot of public space for being outside, and so that is sort of one way. That’s a very basic and foundational way that folks might just be outside without ever coming into the museum, and they’re surrounded by art and they can gather and they can sit with their families or they can come with their friends and just sit on the grass.

Additionally, Blackwell mentions how the museum will be working to change the dynamics in their buildings to facilitate gatherings and conversations:

Then another way that the Speed is thinking about its openness, and again, trying to make itself a gathering place, is simply by incorporating more seating in the galleries, and that sounds so basic, but it is not so much about adding a more single benches here and there, but rather creating little pockets of comfortable seating that is so you can come into the museum. Perhaps you’re students at the adjacent University of Louisville and you are coming to study, you’re coming to read, and you know that there’s this one space in the museum that is usually pretty quiet and you are surrounded by amazing, amazing artworks from all over the world and you have the most comfortable chair you’ve ever sat in, and so simply by, again, creating more space and more invitations for sitting, gathering, talking perhaps. Museums do not have to be this quiet place that we also consider as being, you know, I often see people shushing other folks in the galleries.

This resonates with some of the posts I made last week. In one about the Wallace Foundation audience building initiative I included quotes from groups who found audiences wanted a more wholistic social experience. About a week before, I made a post on perceptions of crime in urban areas deterring attendance at urban based arts organizations and that one possible way to shift that perception was to frame the experience in the context of the surrounding environment which might include restaurants, riverside walks, exploring historic districts, etc.

Small City Or Small Arts Org, Getting Grants Is Tough

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According to a recent piece on CityLab, smaller cities and towns have much in common with smaller non-profits when it comes to applying for grants.  They both have great need but lack the staff and resources to effectively compete for grants.

Citing the case of Jackson, MS which has been in a state of distress since 2022 when their water infrastructure failed due to flooding, the article quotes the former chief administrative officer, Robert Blaine about their lack of capacity to secure grants:

Robert Blaine, now at the National League of Cities, said one of many issues that impeded the city’s efforts to fix its water crisis was its inability to compete for and win grants due to a lack of staff to complete applications. “We really, really needed the funds, but we didn’t have the competency, we didn’t have the capacity to be able to apply for it,” he told Streetsblog in 2023.

The article mentions there is a lot of funding available from the federal government that isn’t getting spent due to this lack of capacity. Many non-profits are stepping up to help by offering training to cities about how to go about securing grants, most of which require a lot more data than most non-profit arts and cultural organizations are required to gather. Some non-profits have assembled former employees of different federal agencies or former municipal grant writers to provide advice and read drafts of grant proposals.

Additionally, the Inflation Reduction Act provided funds for technical assistance to help states and municipalities complete grants including funds to gather the required data in addition to writing the grant proposal. Since it benefits states to have their cities secure funding for projects, some states also provide technical assistance.

Though it sort of sounds like the “you need experience to get a job, but you can’t get experience without a job,” paradox to be required to write a grant to get the funding to hire people who are good at writing grants. I did appreciate the flow chart on the Colorado grant writing assistance program that shows that if your application is denied, you can modify and resubmit. Also, they appear to commit to reviewing applications within 14 days so cities will be able to maintain some momentum. I think a lot of non-profit cultural entities wish that sort of do-over opportunity was available to them with their own grants.

According to a staff member of one of the non-profits helping cities write grants, there is a similar situation to arts and culture non-profits where those with the most direct interaction with communities in need of assistance are often those without the capacity to secure the grant funding they need:

“I always look at the grant world like a spectrum,” said Relf. “At one extreme, you have organizations that know how to write grants, and they win grants, but they’re not really in the community doing the work. And then you have these organizations that have a heart for the community. They’re there every day. They just don’t have the capacity to write the grants.”

The Best Laid Audience Development Plans Oft Go Astray

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Continuing from yesterday’s post about the Wallace Foundation’s evaluation of their five year audience building and sustainability initiative, In Search of the Magic Bullet, the best summary of the findings was report author Francie Ostrower’s statement:

…our analyses highlight that expanding audiences may happen, but not necessarily on the organization’s original terms. An overarching message to emerge from our findings: If organizations want to change audience engagement with them, then organizations need to be open to changing themselves.

One of the biggest assumptions the organizations participating in the initiative had was that audiences for the special audience development programs they created would eventually migrate to their central program offerings and that simply wasn’t the case.

“A symphony orchestra developed a new genre-crossing series where orchestra musicians played with indie artists, in the hopes that millennials would attend and then go on to attend main season programs. As one interviewee said, “We really thought this was going to be a gateway drug for millennials to come to . . . some more core product. . . . That really didn’t happen.”

Nor did the efforts seem to result in new audience members increasing their attendance frequency and eventually become donors.

“By the end of the initiative, however, at least a few participants were questioning what one called “this old myth of the long slow escalator.”

To the credit of most of the organizations, it doesn’t appear any expected their audience development efforts to result in the sort of increased attendance that would guarantee financial stability. They were pretty realistic about the fact that audience building was going to require long term effort beyond the five years of the initiative.

In fact,

“Another organization wants “to experiment with unshackling audience growth from earned revenue growth.”

Among some of the interesting results that came from reviewing the efforts of the initiative participants came from those who recognized that their expectations that target audiences would shift from the special programming series to the core series were erroneous. Some decided continuing the special programs was at odds with their core mission and discontinued their efforts.

Other organizations embraced the outcome: (my emphasis)

“Instead of deeming the program a failure because it did not yield crossover, the organization changed its idea of success—and did so because through surveys and other feedback they heard from people, “We love this stuff.” When organizational staff would encourage series attendees to buy a main season subscription they said, “Why would we do that? We like this stuff.” The organization decided it was important to continue the series but doing so requires them to raise money to subsidize it because, in their view, it will never pay for itself…

Others found that the new programming wasn’t gaining traction with their target audiences, but their core audiences loved the expanded offerings:

Another interviewee said: “If you go to our [latenight contemporary music series] . . . it’s not all young people. It’s plenty of older people. But edgier older people.” And, as it turns out, the age profile of most of the target group was not as young as initially anticipated.

[…]

The arts presenter found that the adventurous programming proved unexpectedly attractive to the organization’s core audience of regular attendees. As one put it, “The biggest ah-ha was actually seeing . . . ‘reverse crossover.’” Our analyses are consistent with that conclusion: While season subscribers comprised 16.1 percent of main season bookers, they accounted for fully 25.2 percent of special series bookers. This dovetails with our earlier finding that more frequent attendees are more likely to venture to new and less familiar work.

Another response I appreciated came from organizations that decided to target geographic locations experiencing vibrancy rather than a specific age or racial demographic. I liked the fact they were taking a different perspective from some of the other participants and were making an effort to study the audience there. I don’t know that many arts organizations are particularly adept at studying audiences so honing that skillset on a readily available group made sense.

Explaining their reasoning, one interviewee said: Why wouldn’t we want to study the audience, which is on our doorstep? And we know that the people who live downtown . . . that they’re skewed a little bit higher in terms of income, that they’re skewed towards financial, towards cultural entertainment and participation. That’s why people move downtown. So why wouldn’t we want to engage with those people?

The organization anticipated that the downtown area would include a younger audience but chose not to define their target in age-based terms.

One interviewee said, “Most organizations want to focus on the young audiences because. . . that’s the solution to filling in the gap left by the aging outpart of the audience. But I think that wasn’t as interesting to us as the idea of . . . dynamic new growth that was happening [here].”

Finally, I really appreciated this statement about arts and cultural organization needing to move beyond assumptions and internal focus to genuinely listen to audiences and reflect on what they are saying:

Further, as one dance company interviewee said, “It’s very easy to make incorrect assumptions that are consistent with your building, your time, the staff available time.”

An overarching implication of the BAS organizations’ experience is that these assumptions exist, and they need to be examined and addressed. Otherwise, arts organizations risk talking past, rather than speaking with, those they want to reach. That said, this may be a stance that does not come easily to large, established nonprofit arts organizations that have in the past, perhaps, been more able to take their prestige for granted or rely on a steady stream of subscribers willing to commit to a season program curated by the organization.

One interviewee said with some exasperation:

There’s a mentality in the arts that if we build it, they will come. There’s a mentality that we know better than the audiences what they should like. . . . “You need to sit in the seats and love what we do.” There are people who give great speeches about how, just trust that the audiences that like what you like will find you. I mean it’s like, I just want to throttle those people.

Magic Bullet May Have Missed, But The Ricochets Hit Valuable Things

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Last Monday, Ruth Hartt sent out an email newsletter noting that the Wallace Foundation’s five year, $52 million Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative basically failed to identify any definitive way to achieve that goal. I have been following Wallace Foundation efforts for years so I was surprised I had missed this news. But sure enough, back in February they released In Search of the Magic Bullet which said just that.

There was a lot of interesting insight in ..Magic Bullet so I will probably take at least two days covering what they discuss. Today, I thought I would address Ruth Hartt’s suggestion that the effort failed because the focus was on the “assumption that demographic characteristics drive consumer behavior” rather than on the problems audiences seek to have solved/outcomes they seek.

There is a difference between saying you want to attract younger, more diverse demographics and learning that people in these demographics seek an experience at which they can relax and share with friends among people like themselves. Providing that experience may involve decisions about programming, timing, framing of the experience, staffing, messaging, etc that differ from what the organization is currently doing. Then there may be other problems to be solved like parking, traffic, and babysitters which the organization over which may not have control, but may be able to facilitate.

A few weeks back, I made a post about research indicating what helps people feel welcome at arts and cultural experiences. It wasn’t just seeing themselves reflected in the programming, stories, and people depicted, but also seeing themselves reflected in the audience and staff circulating through the lobbies, galleries, and walkways.

Despite indicating the initiative failed to identify definitive answers, the reflections by staff of organizations participating in the Wallace Foundation effort show they had started to understand where there had been disconnects with target audiences. And there were absolutely changes groups made that saw significant results, including:

“…hiring paid concierges, to diversify its front of-house staff in terms of age as well as racial and ethnic diversity. The organization viewed this as an important part of conveying a welcoming environment to diverse audience members. According to one interviewee it “has actually been remarkably potent as one simple change.”

One realization shared by multiple organizations in the Wallace initiative was that internally/insider focused promotional messaging had no traction with new audiences:

Repeatedly, and often through market research, organizations learned they were communicating in ways that reflected their values and using language that may have been meaningful to those in the arts—but that did not resonate with audiences they wished to reach. The consequences were communications that undermined, rather than facilitated, the goal of attracting new audiences.

[…]
For example, one performing arts presenter learned:

Images that we thought, from years of being in the arts, were the most appealing . . . really meant nothing to many of the audience members. . . .They were replications of our own beliefs. . . . We always put forth the notion of the art and the aesthetic. And for many of the audiences we were trying to reach, price was much more important. Now we just say upfront, “This is what it costs.” . . . That was one of the most important lessons that we learned….

One dance company hoped to attract new audiences through informational and educational programming. The problem? They realized their communications about these programs  “were really geared towards…people that were very familiar with both the art form and what [we] offer.” But one thing they learned from focus groups: “Nobody wants to be talked down to about what they know or don’t know about the art form.” They altered communications about the programs to “make sense to people who maybe hadn’t been around a ton of [dance].”

Similarly, some of the arts organizations realized that not knowing what the experience would be like was a barrier to participation and made changes to their website to better explain or created videos that illustrated what attendees could expect.

Asked one interviewee rhetorically:

Who would go to a new restaurant without checking online to see what the experience was going to be? And we realized that from the consumers’ perspective, they’re thinking about the theater in the same way. So they really wanted to know; okay if I go to see this play, what kind of experience will I have?

In some cases, those videos backfired and the organization shifted gear. In focus groups, one organization was told the videos made the experience look “bougie”, unwelcoming, and off-putting. They decided to record attendees talking about the experience in their own words.

“Rather than someone telling you why you should like coming, we sort of flipped it to; here are people in their own words saying why this is something exciting to them and fun for them.”

Some organizations realized they needed to change the framing of their experiences in order to appeal to the younger audiences they were targeting. Among the barriers identified in focus groups was limited leisure time and competition not only from other arts groups, but other social activities.

Gen X members’ desire to spend their limited free time on social experiences. That desire reportedly included a wish for a full experience, with a “transition” from daytime activities into the theater experience rather than just coming for a play and leaving.

Speaking to the target audience’s perceived desire for a full and social experience, the organization held the series in a smaller theater space adjacent to a café\bar (both of which were additions to the theater’s existing venue). For one interviewee, the main thing learned about their target audience was that “providing [Gen X] with the whole night out, the whole experience, the place to eat, drink, art, and converse, is what they like.”

I just want to say, as a member I am glad someone was actually targeting Gen X and labeled them as a younger audience.

The same theater realized it was futile to try to “mold audiences for different genres” and instead changed the framework of their programming to suit the audiences. In this case, instead of expecting audiences to arrive at a specific time and sit in the theater until a show was over, they provided experiences where it was acceptable to get up and move around occasionally.

So even though the Wallace Foundation initiative was judged to have failed to find their “magic bullet” it appears the foundation’s support did provide organizations with the capacity to try new approaches and lead to some introspection about the results.

There is much more I haven’t covered which I intend to touch upon in coming days.

Perception of Crime Is Impacting Urban Based Arts Orgs, Change Of Framing Is Required

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Yesterday there was a report that the rate of violent crimes and some property crimes fell in the first quarter of 2024.  However, that may come as weak comfort to urban based arts organizations because there is still a perception that crime rates are high in urban areas. A recent post on Know Your Own Bone by Colleen Dilenschneider’s team says this is impacting people’s intent to visit arts organizations in urban settings (subscription required).

When compared to 2019, respondents in the first quarter of 2024 indicated less willingness to visit urban based arts and cultural entities. What surprised Dilenschneider’s team was that nearly 50% of people living in urban areas indicated they were less likely to visit an urban based organization.  The further people lived from a city, the less likely they felt they would visit an urban arts organization. Of course travel distance likely was a factor in diminished intent to visit. However, the overall results align with data about  decreased attendance at Broadway shows by people living in NYC suburbs.

Some of the contributing factors Dilenschneider’s folks cite is the lack of activity in urban settings–fewer office workers leads to less bustle and activity on the streets, in restaurants, cafes, storefronts. The lack of activity can help feed a perception of a place being unsafe even if there is no data to back it up.

You may have noticed something: We’re talking about crime perceptions increasing, not necessarily actual crime statistics.

Research suggests that violent crime is declining, but Americans still feel less safe. Though there may be a delta in actual crime vs. perceived crime, it may not matter. Whether it’s real or perceptual, potential audiences are increasingly citing crime as a reason to stay home.

In terms of the crime people cite as creating a disincentive to attendance, it varies according to where people live. In some cases, it is a sense of vague unease about urban environments rather than anything specific.

The top four crime barriers are all the same but in a different order for urban, suburban, and exurban audiences (homeless/unhoused populations, panhandling, news stories, drugs). Audiences who live further away from an urban area rely more heavily on “news stories” in shaping their crime perceptions. “Do not know” also makes the top ten for suburban and exurban potential visitors who cite safety perceptions as a primary reason why they do not visit despite their stated interest in doing so. However, they cannot put their finger on exactly the source of their crime-related concerns or the kind of crime that is most worrisome to them when it comes to visiting their nearest downtown region.

In terms of how to combat this perception, Dilenschneider’s team suggests focusing on the macroenvironment in which your organization operates. Instead of promoting a visit to your organization as an isolated experience, place it in the context of the amenities of the whole neighborhood:

“Is going to the museum worth venturing into the city?” may not be enough on its own to overcome negative perceptions.

“Is going to the museum, walking along the waterfront, exploring the historic district, sipping a cocktail at a café, and then enjoying a terrific dinner worth venturing into the city?” likely represents a very different calculus for visitors.

Mobile Phone Pied Pipers Lead Audiences To A Concert

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I saw an novel approach discussed for a concert by the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, England where the concert is performed by the audience walking to the venue.

Composer Huang Ruo’s  City of Floating Sounds starts when audience members select one of four starting points in Manchester and then start playing one of eleven pre-recorded tracks aloud on their phones as they start their walk toward the performance venue.  The street environment and weather are contributors to the first phase of the performance, along with the decisions the audience members make.

Huang explains that the City of Floating Sounds app detects other users: “It’s like a traffic map. You will see where people are and you can decide whether to join them or not. What you are playing on your phone – say, the horn section – might blend in unexpected ways with another section played by someone else. There are so many ways that people’s participation drastically affects the outcome. No two performances can be the same.

“It’s planned as an outdoor piece. And if there’s noise, or rain, or traffic – it’s all part of the symphony.”

He hopes that passersby will be intrigued enough to join the procession. The whole thing has a Pied Piper vibe, with the twist that nobody is really in control of what happens. “Even the people walking around, who don’t know there’s a symphony going on but hear something flying around with the sounds, they’re already part of it. They will add to it unconsciously through their movements.”

Once people get to the performance venue, they will find the BBC Philharmonic arrayed around the perimeter of a space which attendees can sit, stand, and wander while the piece is performed.

Huang hopes the lighting engineers will realise his vision. “I gave them the idea of those big caves in Vietnam where light comes in through sinkholes. You walk in darkness, suddenly, you see a beam of bright light.”

…He also encourages the audience to walk around during the performance – “this will add to the antiphonal, call-and-response effects going around the auditorium”.

But won’t it be challenging for the musicians if the audience are roaming about and filming? “We’re all really excited to see what it will be like,” says conductor Gemma New. “It’s our first experience of this kind of concert format.”

Part of Ruo’s vision for the experience harkens back to the outdoor opera performances his family attended on Hainan Island in southern China. He wants his concert to provide a more open experience in contrast to “opera and classical music as they so often figure in the west – as expensive cultural products for conspicuous consumption.”

Just tangentially related – I discovered that residents of Manchester, England are known as Mancunians which references the Latin name for the city, Mamucium, when Rome conquered Britain.

Are Cultural Resources In The Community A Recruitment Tool For Companies? You Bet

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There is frequently talk about how the availability of arts and cultural organizations and activities are frequently a quality of life element that attract employers to communities. I got a germ of an idea to find evidence of that. This is obviously not scientific, but I did a search on Indeed.com using the criteria of jobs paying more than $100,000 listed in the previous 24 hours and using the search terms “arts culture.” Using that narrow frame, I got about 50 results. Many of the positions were in the medical field and there were a number of listings for the same business.

Here is what I found. Many of these positions also listed food, microbreweries, outdoor activities, schools, etc as benefits for living and working in the community. For brevity sake, I am going to limit citations to arts and culture, though I also retained the context of the sentence in which the reference appeared.

This is low hanging fruit research. It took about 20 minutes to cut and paste out off the website and into a word processor document to prepare for this post. So it is pretty easy to make the case that companies trying to recruit skilled labor are using the presence of arts and cultural resources to attract workers.

Connected Health Care, LLC Boise, ID 83726 – Cultural Attractions: Explore Boise’s vibrant arts and culture scene, including museums, theaters, and music festivals.

ilocatum Nixa, MO – The city has a vibrant arts and culture scene, as well as numerous parks and outdoor recreational opportunities….Branson is famous for its live entertainment shows, amusement parks, and picturesque lakes

Connected Health Care, LLC Houston, TX 77082 (appears they are recruiting for their Dallas location) – Explore Dallas, Texas: Discover the vibrant culture and attractions that make Dallas a fantastic destination for your next assignment…Immerse yourself in the arts at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center….Experience the iconic Dallas Zoo and the Dallas World Aquarium.

Wake Forest Baptist Health Winston-Salem, NC 27157 …Wake Forest Innovation Quarter, boasts multiple restaurants, breweries, theaters, shops and a minor-league baseball stadium – something for everyone

Prestige Care – Creswell Health & Rehab Creswell, OR 97426-Eugene has a dynamic mix of arts and culture, shopping and dining, entertainment and sports.

Mission Hospital Asheville, NC 28801 – Whether you enjoy outdoor adventures, arts and culture, live music, shopping or fine cuisine, Asheville offers something for everyone!

Alaska Regional Hospital, Anchorage, AK 99508 – Located within Denaʼina Ełnena, on the traditional homelands of the Dena’ina Athabascan people and the Native Village of Eklutnathe city combines wild Alaska beauty, convenient urban comforts, mesmerizing outdoor spaces, and captivating arts and culture.

Frankfort Regional Medical Center Frankfort, KY 40601 – The vast array of architectural styles, famous landmarks, museums, and unique shopping make Frankfort a special place for residents….You will also have access to arts and culture and outdoor activities with a comfortable climate and the best of all four seasons.

The Medical Center of Aurora Denver, CO 80012 – Denver is home to rising stars in culinary and craft brewing culture and arts patrons enjoy the largest collection of performing arts stages under one roof in the world.

HCA Florida West Hospital Pensacola, FL 32514 – Pensacola offers 450 years of history, innovative coastal cuisine, art and culture, unique shopping and many festivals throughout the year, celebrating everything from music and food to art and Mardi Gras. Boasting a thriving arts community, the Pensacola Bay Area is home to the “big five,” including ballet, opera, symphony, theatre and an accredited museum of visual arts.

Mercy St. Louis, MO 63128 – The city is brimming with free, world-class attractions and boasts an arts-and-culture scene that’s second to none

Connected Health Care, LLC Indianapolis, IN 46262 Arts & Culture: Immerse yourself in the city’s rich arts scene, from world-class museums to live performances at the Indiana Repertory Theatre.

Indiana University Health Indianapolis, IN Vibrant downtown offering arts, theaters, world-class museums, zoo, concerts and memorials

Concentra Chicago, IL 60607 Chicago is home to a myriad of museums, sporting venues, festivals, and performing arts….. If you’re looking for world-class universities, endless entertainment, unique and plentiful shopping, and easy access to transportation, look no further – Chicago is calling your name!

Anne Arundel Gastroenterology Associates Annapolis, MD – Cultural Abundance: Immerse yourself in museums, theaters, music venues, and festivals that celebrate the arts and diverse cultures.

Transylvania Regional Hospital Brevard, NC 28712 Outdoor adventures, arts and culture, live music, shopping or fine cuisine, western North Carolina offers something for everyone.

Regional Hospital of Scranton Scranton, PA 18510  Scranton is a city steeped in rich history, a vibrant arts scene, outdoor adventures, and a wide variety of delicious cuisine

What Is Behind Philly’s University of the Arts Abrupt Closure?

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You may have heard the disconcerting news that the 150 year old University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia abruptly announced their closure last week, less than a year after Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announced they were discontinuing their bachelor and master of fine arts degrees.  What is particularly galling about the closure is that faculty and students weren’t informed that the school would be closing a few days later and heard about it via media sources.

In addition, the manner in which they made the announcement resulted in the school immediately losing its accreditation.  Apparently, the accrediting agency told them on May 28 that their accreditation was renewed for another few years. The next day UArts told the agency they were going to close in a few days and the agency pulled accreditation pretty much immediately in response to the fact the school was giving such short notice and had not arranged for teach out agreements to help students transfer to other schools.

This reminded me of the closure of Sweet Briar College that I wrote about in 2015.  There were all sorts of questions about how that decision came about, especially since the school had accepted a million dollar gift two weeks before the board decided to close the school. In that case, the alumnae rallied to call for the resignation of the president and board for not properly exploring options to keep the school open.  The school continues to operate today.

I am not suggesting UArts is in a position to be saved. A number of universities have been closing in recent years. Last week Marymount Manhattan merged with Northeastern University due to declining enrollments.  The merger was a result of discussions over the course of a number of years.

Clearly the difficulties UArts faced didn’t just emerge over the course of a week. The faculty just ratified its first contract in February after three years of negotiation, but according to a recent article on the closure, there was no indication of financial problems at that time.

“Part of what makes this so shocking and outrageous is that at no point was there any indication from the senior leaders at the university … that the university’s finances were this precarious,” faculty member and union representative Bradley Philbert told Hyperallergic, adding that within the last three months, the university has hired between four and six staffers.

“This is not just something that happened overnight,” Philbert said.

Others have mentioned the abrupt closure is likely a violation of the WARN Act which requires large employers to provide 60 days notice of layoffs and closures.

Instances like these make me wonder what sort of legal advice and guidance these boards have been receiving. Likewise, who was making decisions about internal and external communications that none of this information was shared with any of the school’s constituencies.  In the end, I wonder if there are parallels with Sweet Briar in that the UArts board may have decided to shut everything down without due consideration about the process.

Models For Staving Of Artist Displacement By Gentrification

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Interesting story in Bloomberg about what some arts organizations are doing to resist being displaced by gentrification.  The article focuses on Alma Weiser who formed Equity Arts as a Perpetual Purpose Trust (PPT) to buy and operate a building in Chicago. The PPT format allows Equity Arts to have for-profit projects which benefit the non-profit/charitable activities of the operation.

Once Weiser closes on the building, Future Firm founder and architect Ann Lui says they will begin work to bring the building up to code and rehab the basement, first and second floors. Half of the 12,000-square foot first floor, which has been a furniture store since the 1960s, will become an anchor market-rate retail tenant; rent from the tenant, Weiser said, will pay the building’s mortgage and allow grants and philanthropic donations to go further.

With an LLC and 501c3 working in tandem, Equity Arts opens up to other opportunities for funding beyond philanthropy and grants alone.

Among Weiser’s motivations for creating the trust wasn’t just to retain occupancy in a building in which she and others had been operating for many years, but also to avoid perpetuating the cycle where artists move to a new neighborhood and create a dynamic where gentrification begins to displace the long time working class residents.

The article also mentions San Francisco’s Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST) which helps artists secure space using knowledge and a combination of resources most arts organizations aren’t aware exist. They describe it as a long and complicated process:

CAST negotiates property acquisition, and invests their dollars into the purchase. After their client reaches stabilization through fundraising and programming, CAST maintains a small ownership percentage over the building to address asset maintenance and management. “It is an incredibly complex and unpredictable journey of time. These things can take five to 10 years on the larger scale projects,” CAST executive director Ken Ikeda says.

The Ujima Project in Boston is described as a very democratic and participatory funding organization focused on empowering artists as investors:

A Black and artist-led organization advancing collective economics, Ujima operates the nation’s first democratically controlled investment fund, according to executive director Nia Evans. Anyone, with any income, can invest in their fund; residents help craft and vote for a list of businesses that receive investment. Artists are business owners and entrepreneurs, Evans says, and should be part of institutional and financial mechanisms that can protect them from rising real estate costs; some of the new businesses Ujima is ratifying right now include artists seeking space.

Flagship Ballet Changes Course And Five Years Later Audiences Are Responding

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An Associated Press story (via Artsjournal.com) reports on the success the NYC Ballet has had in attracting younger audiences.  Not only has the average age dropped in the last five years, but the largest cohort of attendees as shifted from those in their 60s to those in their 30s.

In 2023, 53% of ticket buyers were under age 50, and people in their 30s made up the largest age segment by decade. Five years earlier, in 2018, 41% of ticket buyers were under 50, and people in their 60s made up the largest age segment.

The article says they have achieved this through a number of changes, some of which you might assume: Engagement via social media, both the organization’s accounts and those of individual dancers. Pricing – their 30 for 30 program which allowed those under 30 an opportunity to purchase any seat in the theater for $30 grew from 1,800 members pre-pandemic to 14,000 members now.

Perhaps less expected is the credit for the shift in audiences they give to the decision to shift from a single artistic leader to two. Five years ago the Ballet appointed Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan as an artistic team. This has apparently resulted in a significant change in the organizational culture:

Company insiders describe a mood different from the days when one outsized, all-powerful personality ruled from above. For one thing, the pair says they’ve instituted annual taking-stock conversations with each dancer.

[…]

She and Stafford say they’re also paying more attention to wellness, be it physical training to avoid injury, healthy diets, or a more frank discussion of mental health.

They have also changed the programming mix both in terms of commissioning collaborations between young choreographers and visual and musical artists with youthful followings and diversifying the ethnic and racial representation of dancers and choreographers.

And there have been collaborations with visual or musical artists with youthful followings — like the musician Solange, who in 2022 was commissioned to score a ballet by 23-year old choreographer Gianna Reisen.

[…]

Recently, the company heralded its first two Black dancers to dance Dewdrop, the second most important female “Nutcracker” role: India Bradley and guest artist Alexandra Hutchinson of the Dance Theater of Harlem. Yet to come is a Black Sugarplum Fairy. The company says 26% of of its dancers identify as people of color, whereas 10 years ago that figure was 13%. Stafford and Whelan have commissioned 12 ballets by choreographers of color in the last six years, it says.

Why Actors Are So Brillig At Memorizing Lines

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One of the most common questions performers are asked after a show is, how do you remember all those lines? In a short piece on the MIT Press Reader site, John Seamon writes that the process is rarely one that involves rote memorization.

Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character.

Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. ..Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text.

This approach isn’t too far from techniques people are taught for memorizing lists of things. Given the movie title, A Lion In Winter, someone might picture Simba from Disney’s The Lion King in the snow. Memorizing lines requires a more sophisticated process of associations and context creation, but the basic principles are the same.

My own process of memorizing Lewis Carroll’s decades ago is connected with the Muppet Show’s particular interpretation of the piece. Images from the show still bubble up in my mind when I recite it now.

*Yes, I know that my use of brillig in the title is incorrect according to Humpty Dumpty.

Audiences Should Accept No Substitutes

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Seth Godin had a post this week that serves as a good reminder to arts organizations to make your brand and experience distinctive so that audiences can’t substitute another’s experience for yours without knowing the difference.

If a jacket is made by Patagonia or a piece of hardware is made by Teenage Engineering, you can probably tell who made it the first time you see it, even without a logo. A painting by Sonia Delaunay doesn’t need to be signed to know who it’s by.

On the other hand, AppleTV streams shows that could have come from any streaming service.

When your brand has fingerprints, don’t do things that require you to wear gloves.

What People Say Helps Them Feel Welcome

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Yesterday, I mentioned some of the factors about membership/subscription benefits that Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS identified as most motivating for different generations and cultural backgrounds.

Earlier this month, they also identified “What Factors Create a Welcoming Guest Experience?” This is basically the sense of a place or experience being for someone like yourself. (subscription required)

Their graph of perceptions of exhibit based entities which were most and least welcoming provides the easiest to understand illustration of this. At the top end are zoos, at the bottom are children’s museums. In between is every other museum type and botanical gardens, eight categories in all. If it isn’t immediately apparent, (and it took me a second of pondering before reading onward to have my instinct verified), not everyone has children and thus don’t perceive children’s museums to be for people like themselves.

Interestingly though, when Dilenschneider’s team broke out the difference in perceptions between those who self-identified as non-Hispanic whites and those who self-identified as a BIPOC racial category, the gap between to two groups was smallest for children’s museums when compared to perceptions for the other exhibit based and performing arts categories. It was a difference of ~2% vs. anywhere between 6-10% difference.

As I noted yesterday, the IMPACTS folks mentioned that there are significant problems with the way people are asked to self-identify their race on surveys so it is difficult to determine any nuance in a category comprised of so many different groups.

Among the most encouraging findings of recent research is that people have noticed and appreciated efforts over the last two years by arts and cultural organizations to be more welcoming to a broader range of their communities. Over 70% of those identifying as BIPOC say they have felt more welcome. Over 50% of those identifying as non-Hispanic whites say they also have felt more welcome.

Perhaps the most important information in the post is what conditions are contributing to making people feel more welcome.

“Seeing people like me (other visitors)” was a significant factor. The indexed weight on the charts Dilenschneider & company provide placed it well ahead of the next two factors which were basically even. (Data like this is why I often encourage people to subscribe to their website and notifications)

Those next two are “Seeing people like me in ads and marketing materials” and “Seeing staff/volunteers like me”

“Fair representation in stories and exhibits” and “Interactions with staff” come next with similar weight, but slightly less than representation in marketing and staff/volunteers. Interactions with staff seems to be more about how people are treated.

“Multi-lingual signs” had far less weight than I expected. That might be a reflection of people who are multi-lingual still having a lower representation among participants.

While each of these categories had a much higher level of detailed explanation than I am providing here, there wasn’t any related to “Seeing programming relevant to me and my family.” My assumption is that given the complexity of interests people have, this differs from the “fair representation” category in that not everything that is relevant to you is necessarily tied to representation of your racial identity. You may feel anime is relevant to you and others of your social group. Similarly, programming related to drought and water conservation may be relevant to the region of the world in which you live.

“Fair and equal access to all experiences” and “Seeing performers relevant/like me and my family” were weighted least important.

Seeing performers like myself/family being at the bottom of the list surprised me since I had seen surveys around 2018 that placed that at the top of survey lists. Though that list was specifically people who did not participate in arts and cultural activities whereas the data set Dilenschneider and team used may be blended and have a larger representation of people who do participate in these activities.

The fact is, if you are going to pay attention to any of the other highly weighted results and work to increase the diversity of visitors, images in marketing, representation among volunteers and staff, and representation in stories and exhibits, there will be an inevitable impact upon who appears as a performer.

It’s The Mission, Not The Money That Keeps Them Coming Back

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Earlier this month, Colleen Dilenschneider’s team at IMPACTS released some interesting insights about what features of memberships and subscriptions most appeal to different groups. (subscription required)

For instance, people born before 1980 prioritize: free admission, priority access, members only functions, advance notice of upcoming activities, and member subscriber discounts, in that order.

Those born after 1980 prioritize: free admission, belonging to the organization, supporting the organization, supporting the mission/program, and making a positive impact toward the mission.

I immediately jumped to a conclusion that Colleen and team cautioned against. They note that while it appears that younger groups might be focused on mission related benefits, that just may be a result of the fact they haven’t been marketed to for as long as the older generation.

However, consider that a person born before 1980 has a bit more experience being marketed to by cultural organizations. These folks have simply been around longer! Maybe they’ve been a member or subscriber to more cultural organizations!

Either way, when we ask a person who’s been in market longer about their top membership benefits, they may be more likely to think before responding, “What have I been told are the top benefits of membership?” These folks may have more opportunities for recall, while a younger Millennial or adult member of Generation Z may have fewer marketing data points to draw on. They may be better able to answer the question based on their own experiences and what they value rather than what they’ve been told to value as a top membership benefit.

This said, since a younger segment of the population seems drawn to mission related benefits, that is what marketing for them should be oriented toward. Later in the article they show why people motivated by mission related reasons tend to have stronger relationships with organizations than those motivated by transactional benefits.

They list a similar distinction between those identifying as BIPOC and those that don’t. However, they include a caveat that there are a lot of flaws inherent to the limitations of racial self-identification questions on surveys that blur nuance.

From the data they do have, membership benefit priorities for non-Hispanic whites are free admission, priority access, members only functions, supporting the organization, supporting the mission/program.

Priorities for BIPOC identifying are: free admission, belonging to the organization, support of organization, support of mission/program and priority access.

Similar to the generational comparison, they suggest there is a possibility that since many arts organizations have only recently begun to focus on marketing to BIPOC communities, the group has been predominantly getting messaging focused on belonging and other mission driven goals and not transactional benefits.

Colleen and team transition into talking about why mission driven members are better than members driven by transactional benefits. Among the charts they feature which breaks out responses for exhibit (museums, zoos, gardens) and performing arts based organizations, people who are mission driven tend on average to spend more on their membership/subscription than transactionally motivated members. (i.e. purchase a higher tier subscription/membership).

Those motivated by mission related benefits tend to perceive their membership as more valuable than those tranactionally motivated, even though they spent more money than the latter group. And the mission driven folks tend to renew memberships/subscriptions more reliably.

Excitingly, research shows that younger and more diverse members are generally more mission-motivated than members who fit the more traditional profile. The takeaway may be simple: Highlight supporting the organization and its mission as a primary benefit of membership. Not necessarily instead of transaction-based benefits, but alongside them.

At the very least, it may be helpful to stop underestimating the importance of your mission in securing attendance and cultivating supporters. Your mission need not be the kale hidden within the sugary fruit smoothie of discounts.

Who Remembers When There Were Shared Comedy Bits?

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There is a lot of concern these days about intellectual property rights. Artists don’t want their work copied, sampled, superficially reproduced, etc., and have someone else profit off it.

But that wasn’t always the case, even within the last 100 years or so. A memory of old reruns I watched as a kid bubbled up this weekend where I recalled seeing an old vaudeville bit performed by a number of comedians. It is called by different names, but the line common to all the bits is “Slowly I turned,” as someone is set off into a homicidal rage upon hearing a key word.

I most clearly remember it from I Love Lucy, but I saw other comedians do it as well:

Abbott and Costello did it

The Three Stooges did it

According to Wikipedia, a lot of other folks did it or referenced it as well.

I started to wonder when the dynamic changed. I would guess it was when increasing mass media made entertainment more lucrative. When you go from having everyone making a passable living using a shared bit on the vaudeville circuit in front of a relatively limited audience to a limited number of people making a lot more money doing a bit that far larger audiences can view and go on to associate more exclusively with a single artist or comedy team, people may start to get a little protective.

I am not sure if that is actually the case of what happened. It is just a theory I had. I would be interested in learn more if anyone knows.

In the context of today where everyone is replicating the same dance or challenge for their Tiktok video, I wonder if there might be a shift back toward shared entertainment content. Though that is much more simple in theory than reality given that there have been controversies of white influencers getting credit and monetary rewards from copying the dance moves of black creators.

Champagne In The Ladies Church/Restroom

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I was somewhat amused by the story of a museum in Tasmania that had a lawsuit brought against it because one of its exhibits was intentionally designed to exclude those who did not identify as women. The experience of being excluded or welcomed was part of the exhibition.

It was designed to take the concept of an old Australian pub – a space which largely excluded women until 1965 – and turn it on its head, offering champagne and five-star service to female attendees, while refusing men at the door.

[…]

The museum had responded by claiming the rejection Mr Lau had felt was part of the artwork, and that the law in Tasmania allowed for discrimination if it was “designed to promote equal opportunity” for a group of people who had been historically disadvantaged.

The person who brought the suit claiming it was a violation of Tasmania’s anti-discrimination law, won the case on that basis.

The exhibit had been closed since that ruling, but last week I saw a follow-up article stating the lounge is being turned into a restroom and a church in order to take advantage of a legal exemption to maintain the original exclusive intent. Envisioning the space operating as a restroom and church is the part that amused me most. And then I read the additional irreverent plans the artist has for the use of the room and I had a little cackle.

“There is a fabulous toilet coming to the Ladies Lounge, and so in that sense the Ladies Lounge will operate as a ladies’ room.

“It’s a toilet that is celebrated the world round. It is the greatest toilet, and men won’t be allowed to see it,” Ms Kaechele said in Australian media reports.

Some of the key artworks, like the ones by Picasso, will be moved into the museum’s existing ladies toilet to ensure “uninterrupted viewing” while she applies for other exemptions.

And only on Sundays, men would be allowed into the space – to learn ironing and laundry folding.

“Women can bring in all their clean laundry and the men can go through a series of graceful movements (designed by a Rinpoche and refined by tai chi masters) to fold them,” she said, in an interview published by the museum on Tuesday.

[…]

“Thanks to the ruling, we have no choice but to open ourselves to a whole range of enriching experiences – spiritual, educational… to discover fascinating new possibilities, and to become better,” she said.

Yeah It’s Hot, But Very Little Sustenance Consuming The Roiling Steam Of Culture

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Seth Godin made a post today that advocates for the value of the journey over the destination:

TL;DR is defensive. Not simply because it defends our time, but because it defends us from change and from lived experience. A joke isn’t funny because it has a punchline. It’s funny because something happens to us as the joke unfolds, and the punch line is simply a punctuation of that experience.

“Orange you glad I didn’t say banana,” isn’t funny by itself.

Godin cites an article by Ted Gioia that I saw about a couple months ago in which Gioia uses the term “Dopamine Culture” to argue that people want to experience the hit rather than the journey.

In a chart from Gioia’s piece Godin includes in his post, Gioia charts the trend away from participating in an activity to spectating to essentially just consuming the short tail end of an experience.

Among Gioia’s examples which go from Slow Traditional Culture> Fast Modern Culture> Dopamine Culture:

Play A Sport> Watch A Sport> Gamble on A Sport
View in A Gallery > View On A Phone > Scroll on A Phone
Newspapers> Multimedia > Clickbait

Godin points out that what seems to be in demand is the metaphoric boiling water of all these short bits of experience we can consume, but that sort of diet doesn’t provide long term sustenance. Long time readers will know I approve of his sentiment that about not everything that can be measured matters:

Cavitation happens here. We’re at a rolling boil, and there’s a lot of pressure to turn our work and the work we consume to steam.

The steam analogy is worthwhile: a thirsty person can’t subsist on steam. And while there’s a lot of it, you’re unlikely to collect enough as a creator to produce much value.

[…]

And now we live in a time where the previously informal is easy to measure.

But just because it’s measured doesn’t mean it matters.

The creators and consumers that have the guts to ignore the steam still have a chance to make an impact.

Creativity Isn’t Locked Away In This Shed

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Rochester Institute of Technology (RTI) has a new building that puts creative spaces right next to each other. The Student Hall for Exploration and Development (SHED) has acting and and dance studios with transparent walls as featured spaces in the building next to maker spaces with equally transparent walls and garage style doors which open to a common space embracing the philosophy that arts and STEM practices can inform each other.

“Placing performing arts facilities so close to tech-project spaces encourages a unique kind of cross-fertilization. For a play presented in the Glass Box Theater called Ada and the Engine, fourth-year mechanical engineering major Catherine Hampp used the SHED’s 3D printing technology to build a stage version of Charles Babbage’s 1832 calculating device, a precursor of today’s computers. The textile lab can aid costumers of theatrical productions, then turn to the task of crafting headgear that can comfortably support devices that allow facial and eye movements to control a wheelchair. These are refined by student researchers in the co-located electronics lab.”

These spaces open on to an atrium with tables and chairs where students can socialize. The building connects the library and student union which results in about 15,000 students passing by all this creative activity and displays on a daily basis.

Right from the start of the article, I immediately thought of the way Steve Jobs designed Pixar Studios building with the restroom and mail room at a central hub so that people from different parts of the company would bump into each other and talk about what they are working on. His goal was to spur innovation with cross-pollination of ideas. The story I linked to in my 2014 post on the topic isn’t available any longer, but my recollection was that employees at the outskirts rebelled at having to walk so far to use the restroom and Jobs eventually relented and installed some in other parts of the complex.

Interestingly in that same 2014 post, I wrote about the segregation of the creative class from the rest of the community in many cities, especially in college towns. This sort of dynamic manifests in a cultural divide because there isn’t intermixing between the general community and the creatives who gather near the campuses. One of the places where the divide is least present are places in the Midwest and Sunbelt. In 2014, Rochester, NY was the second least segregated community behind Minneapolis-St. Paul.  RTI’s approach with the SHED isn’t new to the institution so I wouldn’t be surprised if they contributed to the overall culture of of the city in this respect.

 

 

Marketing Storytelling Is All About The Timing

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I recently saw this TED talk by Kelly D. Parker, a marketing professional who calls herself a storytelling strategist.  Her talk was on the power of storytelling and there were a number of points in her presentation which sounded very familiar.

For instance:

You know, I believe the worst story of all is the one that is told too soon. And truly, this is a very common mistake that aspiring storytellers make. We launch into a story and don’t know the first thing about who we’re talking to. Before you’re qualified to tell anything, you must deeply understand your audience’s problem and pursuit

This is very much in line with Ruth Hartt’s Jobs to Be Done practice which Ruth talks about in terms of identifying a target audience’s problem and offering a solution to it. She worked up a quick draft customer-centric video with stock images/video to illustrate classical music programming as a solution to hectic life.

Kelly Packer cites a similar example in a Nike ad where she discusses how the ad is very specific while being focused on customer need rather than product features:

Now specific doesn’t mean long and drawn out, it just means you want to include some distinguishable characteristics that your audience can relate to. It’s the reason why Nike’s ads with LeBron James don’t include a bunch of close up shots of shoes they’re selling. They don’t need to. They found the perfect person in LeBron James to represent a specific, relatable challenge, namely overcoming obstacles to beat an opponent. Then they utilize specific imagery to represent a specific progression of feelings, like defeat and discouragement, to hope and victory and resilience. And once you’ve been gripped by a story like that, doesn’t it almost go without saying that you want to wear the same sports gear LeBron James does?

Packer goes on to discuss the stage where marketing storytelling proposes the next step to audiences. Although she doesn’t mention it specifically identifies a practice which is often called out as being problematic in the arts – expecting commitment too soon which often takes the form of asking people to subscribe or donate after they attend one show.

But too often, we expect our audiences to commit too soon. Well-placed stories slow down the process just enough for you to build credibility and trust…. Good stories position us to be givers before we expect to receive. Not only that, stories make proposals irresistible because they allow us to build connection. Stories masterfully infuse a human element into our businesses, our brands and our programs that draws people in. So much so that by the time you do go in for the ask, like any good proposal, it simply feels like the next logical step.

It is interesting to think that despite being told that people’s attention spans are so short that an ever decreasing window of opportunity exists to make a connection, telling your story well can slow things down and create the space needed to develop a connection to a point where commitment is a foregone conclusion. I am fairly sure she isn’t expecting one ad to do all this work. It likely means different types of stories presented in different formats experienced in different contexts.

When The Marketing Department Is Expected To Do A Lot Of Heavy Lifting

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I know I have been citing Seth Godin a lot lately, but he has had a lot of posts that seemed relevant lately. One of his recent ones addresses how marketing is expected to do a lot of the lifting for a company.  In his post, he suggests that it is because no one has clearly defined the boundaries of what marketing is supposed to be doing.

This is just an excerpt of the full list of roles he identifies:

That’s the first part of the confusion. It’s a group of people who can’t decide what the thing they do is supposed to be.

Is it:

Advertising
Publicity
[…]
Making the logo pretty
[…]
Maintaining the status quo and not screwing up
Keeping the website running
[…]
Community engagement
[…]
Customer service
Customer delight
[…]
Branding (whatever that is)

And seven other things we could name and argue about…

If people are confused about what they do, perhaps that’s why it’s hard to move forward. What’s this meeting for? How do we know we’re working on the right things? What’s important?…

I have been preaching that marketing is everyone’s responsibility on my blog since the early 2000s. Apparently, I have been preaching it a lot in real life too because one of the marketing staff at my job named the folder in which all staff members can place images, videos, stories, etc they collect during events “Marketing Is Everybody’s Job.”

While there should be clear boundaries about what the marketing staff is expected to accomplish, the concept of who contributes to the accomplishment of those goals shouldn’t be siloed. If the message being broadcast via different media channels is that You are the audience we want, the all members of staff need to know they have to reinforce that message when they encounter the potential audience.

More Untruth In Advertising

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Over the course of the years, I have written on the practice of chopping up reviewer quotes and fitting things back together to make it sound like the critic enjoyed the show. It is called contextomy, by the way.

Thanks to Rainer Glaap who sent me another great example written by reviewer and columnist David Benedict for The Stage.

Benedict cites one example where Ben Brantley, former critic for the New York Times and Jesse Green, the person who replaced Brantley, were both recently had reviews of a show quoted even though Brantley left the paper over three years ago.

Beneath the words “True art sparks debate”, the ad quoted opposing one-liners from two Times reviews: “A stirring blockbuster” – Ben Brantley and: “An overeager blur” – Jesse Green.

….But Schulman smelt a rat, not least because Green succeeded Brantley as the Times’ theatre critic more than three years ago. Brantley’s review was for an earlier incarnation of the show way back in 2018.

It gets worse. None of the words quoted from either critic appeared in print consecutively. Those phrases were assembled from words that weren’t originally even in the same paragraph, let alone sentence.

Benedict recounts an instance when he was having lunch at a friend’s house and told the other guests about how he was misquoted in an advertisement for a show in which he wrote:

“The Sweeney Todd sequence is built around the rhyme: ‘He’s got a chopper/ Oh, it’s a whopper.’ If schoolboy innuendo is your bag, book now.” Passing the Duchess Theatre a little later, I was less than pleased to see my name outside accompanied just two words from my review: “Book now.” After my complaint and much-feigned innocence and wringing of hands, the producers finally took it down.”

The twist to this story is that apparently that specific anecdote was used in the development of truth in advertising law for the European Union–only now that the UK has left the EU, it isn’t applicable.

To my astonishment, one of the lunch guests piped up: “It’s you! I know that story because I drafted the EU directive on false advertising. You’re cited in European case law.” The trouble is that post-Brexit, EU directives no longer apply.

Choose Yourself Over The Long Haul

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Seth Godin had posted on the 150th anniversary of Impressionism which is benchmarked from the April 15, 1874 art exhibition organized by a number of artists whose work had been refused by the prestigious Salon de Paris.  The original show by the “Refused,” as Godin terms them, included 31 artists, among them were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Paul Cézanne.

Godin notes that first exhibition was a failure, not even attracting 1% of the Salon show and garnering largely negative reviews.

One of the most positive things to come from the exhibit was a scathing satirical piece, the one that gave the impressionists their name. The insecure critics came to regret their inability to see what was possible.

And yet, the artists persisted. Year after year, eight times, gaining momentum each time, they returned, working their way from outsiders to become the dominant form of artistic expression of their time.

But most of all, so much easier today than in Paris 150 years ago, these individual painters did two things: They picked themselves and they did it together.

I am amused to learn that the Impressionist name actually came from a satiric piece.

I am not sure the moral of this story is to stick with it and one day you will succeed. There were 31 people who participated in the first event, but most of their names are unknown.

While I agree with Godin that it is important to pick yourself and that it is easier to do today than it was 150 years ago, eight years is an eternity in terms of trend and tastes and people’s expectations of results. Success might be possible sooner, but how many people have the endurance to wait that long to gain recognition.

That said, I still remember seeing Sen. John Fetterman speak at an APAP conference when he was still mayor of Braddock, PA and spoke about an observation Sen. Arlen Spector made about it taking seven years for any sort of policy to garner enough momentum and support to become implemented.

Getting All Eyes And Minds On Accessibility

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Yesterday, the Western Arts Federation (WESTAF) sponsored a webinar on accessibility lead by Betty Siegel, Director Office of Accessibility and VSA at The Kennedy Center.

Siegel was absolutely fantastic. Her presentation was dynamic, full of relatable examples, and humor. One example she gave as the best sources of information about the history of accessibility was Comedy Central’s Drunk History episode on Judy Heumann’s early advocacy for disability rights. She frequently claimed the Drunk History series was a primary source of information for her.

While she did talk about legal and human dignity issues associated with accessibility, the overall goal of her presentation was about getting staff and volunteers to the point of internalizing the philosophy of making spaces and events accessible. You can renovate the physical space and compose policies, but if everyone isn’t invested in the practice, situational barriers may arise that people overlook as problems.

The example she used was of a historic building that has stairs at the front door and a ramp to a side door. The janitor opens both doors every day, but one day he is absent an a staff/volunteer comes in and not being aware of the full practice, only unlocks the front door.

Interestingly, that aligned with an experience I had just a week earlier when I realized that cleaning or facility staff might be deactivating the powered doors in our buildings at night and no one was turning them back on in the morning.  If someone hit the door plates, they wouldn’t open. So I had taken to tapping the door plates on my way in every day to make sure the doors swing open. But I also need to make sure everyone else is checking the doors as well.

Video of the webinar below. List of resources WESTAF provided below that.

 

 

Accessibility Resources

  • U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ): 
    • 800-514-0301 (voice); 800-514-0383 (TTY)
  • U.S. Access Board:
  • ADA Centers National Network:
    • 1-800-949-4232
  • W3C (wcag 2.1 aa)
  • National Endowment for the Arts:  
  • Access Smithsonian:  
  • Kennedy Center Office of VSA and Accessibility:  

Donors May Be Adding Inefficiencies To Fundraising

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Seth Godin recently made an interesting post about non-profit fundraising, in particular the inefficiencies that exist in the process that can’t be fixed by technology, because it can, but rather the expectations of the donors.

Along the way, it’s not unusual for a nonprofit to spend 50% of the money they raise on the expense of raising more money. That’s not because they’re inefficient, it’s because we are.

We demand a gala, or an emergency, or artfully written fundraising letters. Donors want personal attention from the folks who are ostensibly doing the front line or strategic work of the nonprofit, and treat regular donations as an exception, not the standard.

When the internet arrived, it dramatically lowered the transactional costs in a wide variety of industries. You can buy an airline ticket yourself faster and with less intervention than through a travel agent. You can buy stocks for transaction fees that are a tiny fraction of what a broker used to charge. But creative and effective nonprofit fundraising has been stuck in a cycle of risk, galas and uncertainty.

This reminded me of a letter that appeared this summer in the Chronicle of Philanthropy where a donor said he was going to stop giving because he wasn’t getting the communication and attention he expected. He made a follow up post this February which contains a link to the original letter. The original letter garnered a lot of pushback from the non-profit community, including some satiric criticism written by Vu Le While the donor says in his follow up he has learned more about the challenges non-profits face in regard to fundraising, he still seems to expect a lot of what Godin says keeps fundraising costs high for non-profits.

There Is A Group Naming Names And Advocating For Better Funding Practices

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Around the start of the year, the group Crappy Funding Practices was created on LinkedIn. Vu Le who writes the Nonprofit AF blog had started calling out the problematic practices of funders on Twitter a few years ago, but with the help of some volunteers, they decided to expand the scope of their activities and started to solicit submissions of bad practices non-profit staff have run up against.

A lot of what they call out are things like onerous reporting requirements or twenty page applications requiring world changing results in return for $5000 grant or prohibitions on fundraising for a quarter of the year. And even an instance where you had to pay $100 to attend a luncheon to learn if you received a grant.

One of the very worst examples were the requirements from a foundation supporting classical music.

The team also praises some positive funding practices like the Minnesota Council on Foundations which offered tools for other funders to use in order to reduce barriers for grant seekers. The Fairfield County Community Foundation got a shout out for acknowledging that they listened to feedback from grant seekers and had revised their processes.

Even though the page has only been operating for about four months, a writer from Inside Philanthropy took notice and reported on the page, the problems it was addressing, and the change that is slowly taking place as a result.

I expect that the profile of the group will continue to rise over coming months and years. Hopefully that will result in some industry wide changes that will make the process easier and more equitable for grant seekers.

As the article mentions, none of these problems are new. They have been acknowledged as hurdles in the granting process for years and years, but most funding organizations haven’t really worked at making changes to remove barriers for applicants. Vu Le started calling people out by name out of frustration. The group of volunteers behind Crappy Funding Practices has helped expand on this effort out to act as an advocate for non-profit grant seekers rather than out of spite. Though I imagine there is some angry frustration at the base.

I post about this not so much to encourage people to submit funders you dislike as to let people know that there is an organized effort to advocate for better conditions on your behalf. That said, if there are organizations whose practices and requirements are burdensome, you may want to consider completing their submission form.

Examples of Great Funders can be submitted here.

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