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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.

[…]

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.

Benefits Of Incorporating Your Arts Career

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h/t Artsjournal.com for linking to a really valuable article on Observer about considering creating a limited liability corporation (LLC) if you are an artist.  I recently created a post on ArtsHacker summarizing some of the ways in which an LLC protects artist’s personal assets in the case of lawsuits and in some cases, divorce proceedings.

This excerpt from Observer article summarizes how an artist would operate after forming an LLC:

….but most artists operating as one-man shops set up limited liability companies, according to Powers, where the LLC is the employer and the artist is technically the employee. When a sale or commission is made, the money is paid directly to the corporate entity, which then pays the artist, either in a lump sum or in increments (as a salary), and the artist pays taxes on that money as ordinary income. But not all the money transfers directly through to the artist. The corporate entity retains some cash to purchase art supplies, health insurance, workmen’s compensation to protect employees who may get injured during transit or installation, commercial premises and liability insurance—and, assuming the artist is successful enough, to hire employees or consultants.

The article discusses a number of legal scenarios an artist might find themselves in which the buffer of an LLC would be beneficial. More than just providing legal protection, they also note that forming an LLC would allow the artist to solicit investment to support their work.  Take a look at the ArtsHacker post or go straight to the article to learn more.

 

Should Your Work Be Protected By An LLC?

Toward A More Shared Curation Experience

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I’m not really a big fan of improv, but I was intrigued by the concept of a show called The Worst Cafe in the World, which has transferred from Belfast to Off-Broadway this month.

The show is described as:

The show actually gives audience members a menu of theatrical moments to choose from, and based on their selections, the cast will piece together the show. Menu items include an inspiring monologue, an improvisation calling for audience involvement and a digital experience focusing on the power of technology.

According to a press release, ticket holders should also expect different nightly specials to define their experience: think pop-up guests, delectable food and more. Even better, every guest will receive a complimentary beverage and snack upon entry—treats that sound even more exciting given that tickets only cost $25.

And I agree. All this for $25 in NYC? Amazing.

Granted, the concept isn’t really new or novel. I presented a concert nearly a decade ago where the singers provided a menu of songs the audience could choose from. It was around Christmas time so there was a good mix of operatic pieces along with sacred and secular carols. The menus were numbered so the production used a random number generator to determine what audience member got to choose the next song. I have seen groups use the choose your own aria format for fundraising events.

Despite this, I feel like this type of interactive option is under used for many performing arts events outside of improv. I am not sure why given that you can easily control the list from which people select in order to ensure a high quality experience. It is an opportunity to provide the experience of a shared curation and increase audience investment and involvement.

Filling Freed Up Space With Generosity

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Seth Godin often posts on the theme of generosity.  Looking back at my past posts, I quickly came up with a handful I made about his discussion of the links between generosity, creativity, and leadership.

He recently made another post on the theme of fear being self-centered and generosity allowing you to overcome fear.

Jumping in the water to save a struggling swimmer stops us from worrying about how we look in our suit or whether the water is cold. And if you’re worried about the customer instead of your quota, making a sales call is easier too.

The key scene at the climax of the Wizard of Oz happens when Dorothy intercedes on the scarecrow’s behalf. Once again, she finds the courage to overcome her fear when she’s generously supporting a friend.

It’s more than a shift in narrative. It’s a shift in intent.

His reference to a sales call actually reminded me of the early days of my career when I worked in a ticket office or supervised people in a ticket office. Because there was always a deluge of calls and people standing at the window, there were often instructions about who to prioritize (e.g. phone before in-person, in-person before phone, alternate between the two). Likewise there was often discussion about techniques to move conversations along to attend to the next customer so that people weren’t waiting in a queue either physically or over the phone.

Overall it was a matter of providing a good customer experience over wanting to sell as quickly as possible. However, I would really get anxious as I saw a queue growing. There was a certain degree of fear in being perceived as not effective and efficient at processing the orders. In most cases, it was the immediate customer that had questions or was indecisive that was holding things up. But the anger and frustration was likely to fall upon staff rather than the departing customer.  And the mentality that you had to move a person along quickly probably wasn’t conducive to creating a positive interaction.

Since the increase in the use of online ticketing, that sort of situation has greatly abated allowing staff to take a little more time to answer people’s questions and allow them to mull their choices. In some respects, it may not be a really effective use of time to allow people to monopolize your time, but there is more opportunity to allow customers to feel attention is being paid to them.

Technology like online ticketing allows people to select the level of attention they need. Obviously, there are two sides to this situation. Technology makes it easier for businesses to ignore customers and force them to navigate confusing processes. Likewise, in the absence of past demand, live staffing of box offices is often scheduled for shorter periods of time.

But even at times immediately prior to a performance, the fact that people can pull up their tickets on their phones or flash a piece of paper they printed at home, the demands on ticket office staff are less than they once were. There may be problems with online orders that need to be resolved and people who requested the ability to pick up tickets at the door, but the ability to take more time to address these requests is comparatively greater than it once was.

While this doesn’t illustrate Godin’s point of making a decision in the moment to be generous to help others allows you to overcome fear, it is helpful to consider that we have more tools at our disposal that free us up to be generous.  There is more opportunity to fill that vacuum with generosity and attentiveness rather than reserve it for our own use.

Dancing And Singing Scientific Study Data

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I recently caught this story about an anthropologist at the University of South Florida (USF) who studied the impact of algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico and was concerned no one would read her reports which indicated consequences for the tourism industry.  She was concerned no one would read the study and wondered if there was a way to raise awareness. (I am going to say a more accessible title than “Non-linear impacts of harmful algae blooms on the coastal tourism economy” might have helped.

However, the story aligns with the recent trend of my posts about the intersection of art and science because the professor ended up collaborating with the USF school of music to compose a work based on the data.

Indeed there was. Composition professor Paul Reller worked with students to map pitch, rhythm and duration to the data. It came alive, O’Leary says, in ways it simply does not on a spreadsheet.

“My students were really excited to start thinking about how the other students, the music students, heard patterns that we did not see in some of the repetitions,” she says. With music, she added, “you can start to sense with different parts of your mind and your body that there are patterns happening and that they’re important.”

You can watch a video of the composition via the link to the story or right here. Other departments are getting involved, including an effort to create an augmented reality experience based on the data and composition.

This story reminded me of the Dance Your Ph.D. contest that was started years ago with the same intent of translating a summary of doctoral theses in the sciences into a visual format. It was originally intended as a one off event to lighten things up for students who were defending their theses, but people started asking when the next competition deadline would be.

This year was the 16th iteration. I found an article announcing the 2024 winners and it seems like things have evolved since the last time I watched. The one on the “Epigenetics of Early Life Adversity“, depicting how stressors in childhood can impact adult health really caught my attention.

However, the winner, “Personality, Social Environment, and Maternal-level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population”, aka “Kangaroo Time” is far, far, far, more fun than it’s title would suggest. I am glad the NPR story reminded of the contest and lead me to check it out.

 

Art Is Everywhere When You Look At The World Through A Creative Lens

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Sort of dovetailing with my post yesterday about art and science nourishing each other, you may have seen that scientists have named a new species of gecko after Vincent Van Gogh.

Yes, everyone reporting on this is calling it Vincent Van Gecko.

The scientists were inspired by the markings on the lizard which reminded them of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

This is one of those instances when having a smidge of artistic exposure allows you to create an engaging story around a scientific advancement which may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

In the conversation between the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and Director of the Census Bureau I posted about yesterday, they talk about the importance of good data collection methodology to decision making and reporting about the impact of arts and creativity on society. But they also discussed how creativity and artistic expression facilitates effective storytelling and communication about the relevance of  scientific discoveries and achievement in our lives.

How Important Is Creativity? Let The Census Director Count The Ways

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The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) posted a slightly longer than usual podcast episode a few weeks back with a conversation between NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson and US Census Bureau Director Robert Santos.

If you missed the introductions at the art, you might be forgiven for thinking Santos was the NEA Chair the way he went on about the importance and value of creative practice in one’s life. He talked at some length about being a live music photographer at the SXSW festivals in Austin, TX for eight years and the different perspectives he received while watching all the creatives present their work. He talked about how innovation doesn’t just emerge from scientific hypothesis and data, but by creativity fueled by an artful life.

Later, he discusses the use of art and creativity in healing, relating it to his time as President of American Statistical Association during the pandemic and using his monthly newsletter to depart from the usual messages about checking out webinars about statistic practice, but rather

“…send personal messages and reflections that would help folks understand that we’re all in this together and that we need to help each other out and we can do so virtually. So I would tell stories about of resilience and how we need to tap into them and I told stories of creativity and mentoring and it was specifically focused on thinking as creatively as I could to help the folks that were suffering so much because they were stuck in their homes.”

At another point, he mentioned the way the Census Bureau had used familiar cultural touchstones to engage with people to navigate the challenges Covid presented during the 2020 Census:

…we had artistic reincarnations of things like the Loteria, — there are cards that have little icons, very colorful, of different types of characters, and birds, and skeletons, and scorpions, and things of that sort. And because of the pandemic, we could not use our usual face-to-face methods, or community organizations couldn’t do that. So rather than having a table in a grocery store saying, “Come fill out a census,” they were going out and distributing in community centers that were giving out water, and talking about best practices for vaccines and things. They were handing out these Loteria cards that, instead of the usual icons, they had different census characters on them, like an enumerator, or a little graph, or things of that sort. So it was reinforcing the necessity and the importance of civic participation, but doing it in an artistic way that was very pleasing to the eye, and got you to think, “Oh, this is really interesting.”

The example of Albert Einstein playing violin is often used as an example of a scientist who embraced his creative side, but I am thinking it is time to find new examples to amplify this concept, starting with Santos and anyone else he might identify. Not to relieve the NEA and other creative entities from doing the same, but Santos seems really adept at identifying the bridges between creative and science based approaches and is a vocal advocate.  I mean, there was a point where he was saying, credit where credit is due, the NEA inspired me to think all federal departments should have artist-in-residence programs.

Alignment of Storytelling

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Back in February I caught a broadcast of NPR’s podcast show Code Switch where the episode was about the music that came out of or was inspired by Japanese internment. Artists like Kishi Bashi and Mike Shinoda of the band Linkin Park are among descendants of internees and wrote music how that impacted their family, especially in terms of the silence that was maintained about the experience.

The story particularly resonated with me because our local art museum had just closed a show of Ansel Adams photos taken at the Manzanar War Relocation Center during the internment as well as a show in another gallery depicting life at Granada Relocation Center, here in CO, better known as Amache. The museum apparently didn’t know at the time the show opened that President Biden would sign an act creating the Amache National Historic Site a couple weeks before that show ended.

In 1944, while the war was still going on, Adams displayed the photos he took in a controversial show titled “Born Free and Equal,” referring to the fact that most of those interned had been born in the US, perhaps generations prior.

The show here in town had a significant impact in the greater community. Attendance was at some of the highest rates the museum has experienced. I happened by the front doors one day and a family exited in silence until one of the parents said, “Well that was something. What did you think of that?” A man who had been interned at one of the camps as a child traveled some distance with his family and brought a book he made of his drawings and remembrances he created while there. He presented a copy to the museum director and one to the curator.

While I was listening to the Code Switch episode, I wished they had run it a few weeks earlier to align with the shows at the museum so they could have expanded the story they told about the relevance of the shows.

I also wondered why there seemed to be such an alignment of information about the Japanese internment recently. The hosts of the radio story mentioned that the US government had issued an apology some years ago and paid out reparations to internees and their families. Those people in turn have donated money to organizations who promote Japanese culture and history in the US, including increasing awareness about the internment.

 

Intended Customers Aren’t The Only Targets Of Customer-Centric Efforts

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I wanted to brag a bit on my staff today. For about a year now I have been talking about making our promotional materials and operational habits focused more toward attendees rather than inwardly focused. As a result, staff has helped collect images of audiences enjoying themselves and gather stories about what engages and interests them both about our venue and programming, but also the greater community.

One of my staff members took this to heart and expanded on the concept to include our volunteers. For me this reinforced the concept that the target of customer-centric efforts aren’t just the people we hope will show up. More about that later.

One of the things our staff member does is conduct “Let’s Make A Deal” style quizzes about safety procedures before every performance. If a volunteer answers correctly, they get to choose a box with prizes under them. Some are fun white elephant type prizes.

For a recent training sessions we held for all volunteers, she sent out a Raiders of the Lost Ark themed invitation that invited volunteers to submit stories and pictures about current and past adventures, share something they are proud of, funny stories and their favorite thing about volunteering. They were also asked if they wanted to bring in an artifact to share.

About half of the 40 people who attended submitted stories, images and artifacts which we put on display across three walls of a lobby alcove.

She carried the same Raiders of the Lost Ark theme through the training Powerpoint with images from the movies which were spot on with the topic.

You can probably see the obvious link between volunteers feeling engaged with an organization and the willingness and energy they can bring to helping audiences feel welcomed. Who is in the lobby greeting people as they arrive is just as important as the faces and stories that appear on stage or on the walls/display in the space.

The customers in a customer centered approach aren’t just the primary targets of your efforts, whether it as a paid or unpaid attendance environment, volunteers and other constituencies, including infrequent or non-attendees are part of the mix. The impression everyone in the greater community has about your organization and the experience you offer gets communicated to a greater or lesser extent. Volunteers are definitely a primary point of contact for audiences, but non-attendees who feel their quality of life is improved by having an entity like yours available have just as big a role to play so having them feel engaged, if only in a tangential manner, is valuable.

Looking Like The Hero, But Feeling Like The Imposter Of Our Story

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Seth Godin recently made a post reminding us that even those who seem like they are well-established in their career as artists may not feel that secure. He cites an article on a recent documentary about the recording of “We Are The World” 40 years ago.

The article recounts how Huey Lewis’ knees were shaking when he sang a solo that had been intended for Prince who was a no-show.  Stevie Wonder was the MVP of the effort, intentionally flubbing his part to make other artists feel at ease and coaching Bob Dylan through his part–doing his Dylan impression–to help Dylan through his anxiety to hit his solo. Waylon Jennings ducked out when Wonder suggested inserting a Swahili phrase.  Shelia E. felt a little disaffected when she began to suspect she was invited to entice Prince to participate.

Godin notes that we assume all we need to feel confident is the recognition and validation of hundreds or thousands of people:

We’d like to believe that if we only had the adulation, market success, and fan support of superstars like these, then we’d finally be comfortable and able to do our best.

In fact, it seems the opposite is true. Imposter syndrome shows up because we are imposters, imposters acting ‘as if’ in search of making something better.

Helping People Persuade Themselves

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Seth Godin made a post recently suggesting that the most effective persuasion occurs when we persuade ourselves.

The purpose of the memo or the table or the graph or the presentation is to create the conditions for someone to make up their own minds. Because it’s almost impossible to make up their mind for them.

This post seems to dovetail pretty well with the “Jobs to Be Done” theory Ruth Hartt espouses for arts marketing. This is the idea that people purchase things that they feel will solve problems they face. These needs are more complicated than just food, shelter, clothes, etc. The statement the food, shelter, clothes, etc., make about you and make you feel about yourself may factor in. So in that regard it may not be a product or service people purchase, but time spent with others, spent recharging, spent improving knowledge and expertise, etc.

As Godin says, the approach and tools you use to communicate with people has to facilitate them convincing themselves that what you offer will meet a need, solve a problem, complete a job to be done.

Ruth made a mock up video along those lines a couple years ago.  Some of the things Godin identifies as being barriers to self-persuasion are similar to issues Ruth has identified in arts marketing. They all have to do with mistakes people make when telling their story.

Godin writes:

Sometimes, we are entranced by our own insight, or impressed with our communication tools. We let facts, formatting and filigree get in the way of a good story.

And sometimes, we’re afraid of our power, so we bury the lede too far, letting ourselves off the hook by not influencing someone else.

Once in a while, we do the opposite. We say what we mean so clearly and so directly that the story disappears and the facts bounce off the inertia and self esteem of the person encountering them.

 

Mind Blowing How Much Close Family And Friends Add To Attendance Experience

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Some pretty compelling evidence that we should be encouraging people to participate in arts and cultural activities with family and friends. Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACT released some data about whether school group visits to exhibit and performance based experiences translate into visitation as adults. (subscription required)

The answer is pretty shocking (my emphasis):

People who visited as children with their families generally do find cultural organizations to be welcoming, while folks who visited with groups are somewhat on the fence when considered as a collective.

Perhaps the most jarring finding is the lack of significant difference in welcoming perceptions among those who visited with school groups (or other groups) and those who did not visit as children at all. Visiting a cultural organization with a group generally did not impact attitude affinities as an adult.

They break out this data across a number of graphs in terms of household income and exhibit vs. performance based experiences and the results are consistent. Similarly, responses to intent to visit and the extremely important willingness to recommend to others followed similar trends. People who attended with family and friends had more positive responses than those who attended with groups or never attended.

It is important to note this data doesn’t separate out those who participate in longer term experiences like camps, residencies, classes, outreach programs.

The folks at IMPACTS have some theories about why there is so little difference between those that only have experiences with groups and those that have never visited as children. I encourage people to take a look at the article to learn more about this. They probably wrote 2000+ words on the topic and include a number of charts. I am just reaching 250 words here–including what I have quoted.

Thinking back about my own experiences as a child, I suspect that the modeling behavior of adults has a big impact on children. There are things I assumed about my life arc based on my perceptions of my parents and those of my peers when I was a child that I was surprised to learn were erroneous when I grew up due to the expectations they stated and modeled.

In the context of this data, it seems even more important to reflect on how we can make it easier for families to make the decision to attend. Really, I suspect that if you did the same research on 30-50 year olds who said the friends they made in college helped get them in the attendance habit, you would probably find a similar level of willingness to attend in the future or recommend to others. You might not find the same raw numbers as those whose parents/grandparents/neighbors took them, but socialization will probably still be a factor.

Facilitating the ease of decision making requires examining every aspect of the experience from programming, promotion, ticketing experience, parking, the welcome, concessions, and the departure.

Need To Create Promotional Content Competes With Need To Create Creative Content

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A few years ago I wrote a post about how actors were discovering that how many followers you had on social media was being taken into account during casting decisions. Vox recently had an article talking about how the same dynamic exists for authors and musicians.  Your book or music might be great, but the publisher may not be willing to take you on if your social media engagement is low.

It used to be that record labels wanted to control all aspects of promotion and prohibited the artist from taking their own initiative. Now it is the other way around where the publishers and record labels put the entire burden of marketing on the artist. The Vox article contains a couple Tiktok videos of musicians talking about this issue. They feel their artistic practice is suffering because they constantly have to be worried about whether they are posting too late in the day to get good reaction. Another said she had to use a spreadsheet to keep track of when and what she should be posting.

One of the big challenges about social media is that you have to balance looking interesting and polished, without looking too polished lest you appear to be engaged in inauthentic self-promotion. The musician Ricky Montgomery alludes to his video where he mentions that you can’t go into the woods to record for three months because you need to be posting “candid” video and photos from your sessions–his air quotes around candid.

To compound the issue as the article points out, consolidation of media and publishing has eliminated competition so writers are being paid less. Similarly, the prevalence of platforms like Spotify for listening to music means musicians are paid less as well. So the rewards for all this effort are less than before even as more people are able to participate as creators.

It wasn’t long ago that many people, myself included, were talking about the need for artists to become more business minded. This is still true in terms of things like better understanding the market in which you wish to sell your work, knowing how to speak to those without insider knowledge about your work, not getting cheated in contracts and payments, etc. But in some respects, the pendulum has perhaps swung in the other direction to far and too quickly where the burden of knowing all these things and more is required on day one without the space to transition into the knowledge and expertise gradually as your career grows.

 

Getting Into Art Can Require Seeking Something Of Yourself In Art

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Last month Vox had a piece by Courtney Tenz about how to interpret art. It isn’t the sort of article you can simply link a social media post to for your audiences to read. One of Tenz’s core points is that art often isn’t immediately digestible at a glance. But there are takeaways organizations can use when having conversations like “If art’s such a central tenet of our culture, though, why do so many of us feel like we just don’t get it?”

Tenz says one of the barriers she likely faces is being told by a teacher she would never truly understand the beauty of Monet. But she still desired a relationship with visual art:

I realized, I had to build a relationship with art. I not only had to take it in regularly — akin to something the writer Julia Cameron calls “artists’ dates” in her book on creativity, The Artist’s Way — but I would also need to sit with it when I did.

The first step she lists for learning to interpret art is to view it as an interactive adventure where you as the viewer have license to decide what is interesting and meaningful about the piece. In that vein, take the time to evaluate what you think about the work rather than just give it a passing glance.

Correspondingly, the second step is to be open to feeling discomfort with the experience:

…And truthful art can make people wildly uncomfortable. “But that discomfort is such an important part of the work,” Deal says.

In this case, part of not getting the art could stem from a reluctance to confront that discomfort. As Langer writes, teaching art is an education in feeling; when art gives rise to emotions that we do not always have access to, it can feel too tough to manage. Yet it is in grappling with those emotions that the connection to art — and, ultimately, understanding it — is forged.

“How do you teach a willingness to be uncomfortable?” asks Ovenden. Even as an avid lover of art, she finds the emotional response doesn’t always come easy. “It can be really overwhelming.”

The third step Tenz lists is related to the first – “Keep an eye out for glimmers of your own experience.” Finding what is relatable to your life and seeing yourself reflected in something contributes to an increased comfort and perhaps increased understanding.

“Or, as Karen K. Ho told me, if you start to think about the arts as a way of transforming time or transforming your experience — if you move beyond the surface response of “this is a nice picture” or “this is a picture that sucks” — then looking at art can be a really interesting endeavor”

Some Ticketing Reform Bills Being Manipulated To Benefit Secondary/Speculative Market

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A nod to Erick Deshaun Dorris for the link to a Guardian article about how ticket resellers are leveraging the hatred being directed at Ticketmaster to manipulate legislation to their benefit.  The article mentions that a lot of legislatures only have a superficial understanding of the ticketing industry, mostly informed by complaints generated by big name artists like Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift.

The article quotes Kevin Erickson, Director of the Future of Music Coalition who discusses how the language of many proposed bills will actually benefit some of the larger secondary market players rather than consumers:

“Companies like StubHub, Vivid Seat, SeatGeek have been rather successful in appropriating legitimate public frustration with Ticketmaster to advance an unrelated policy agenda that’s mostly about maximising their access to inventory, to continue to be able to get as many tickets as possible and sell them at inflated prices,” he says. Erickson explains that BOSS SWIFT would eliminate legitimately helpful fan-to-fan resale sites and require “transparency of hold”, meaning that artists and venues have to disclose how many tickets will ultimately be available ahead of sale. “That sounds reasonable until you understand that that’s incredibly helpful to the brokers making their purchasing decisions,” he says. “It doesn’t benefit the individual family who just wants to buy a ticket to be able to attend the event.”

Erickson says BOSS SWIFT is unlikely to pass and fortunately a more artist and fan friendly bill, Fans First Act which mandates the full cost with fees be advertised and prevents speculative purchases, has more support and potential for passage. The article also cites efforts by individual states to provide protections through consumer protection laws. It mentions legislation in Maryland which is scheduled for a vote in the next week or so which requires price transparency, outlaws speculative ticketing, and limits price mark ups on the secondary market.

The article quotes MD State Senator Dawn Gile who says they spoke with a wide variety of venues and performing groups during the process of drafting this law. She cites experiences that many venues have faced, including my own and those of my colleagues, with regard to speculative ticketing and resale on smaller events:

“…even a local production of The Nutcracker was affected by secondary markups, while another venue found speculative tickets being sold for mezzanine and balcony seats “when the theatre doesn’t even have a mezzanine, nor a balcony”, says Gile. “The issue is pervasive. It’s been eclipsed by the topic of these really popular shows, but it’s not just Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé that are affected, it’s our smaller venues here.”

[…]

Additionally, says Gile, these companies are “suggesting that somehow if we move forward with this legislation, we’re not going to have any shows come to Maryland ever – that we’re effectively killing the live entertainment industry here.” The argument is disproved, she says, by the fact that several states already cap the secondary market – including the razzle-dazzle centre of Las Vegas – “but obviously the live entertainment industry continues to exist”. Her bill, she says, “just removes the incentive from brokers from being able to try to profit off the consumer”.

What I appreciated most was a final quote from Kevin Erickson about shifting how arts and cultural activities are framed:

“There is an opportunity here to accomplish a shift in how we think of music and the arts and live events as not just about something that has economic value, but to talk about the intrinsic value of live music as a vehicle by which communities form, a vehicle for historically marginalised voices to be heard, a way that communities define themselves. Policymakers at all levels have a responsibility to centre the voices of music communities who are imperilled by the rise of extractive business models.”

You only have to look at the photos coming out of each date on the Eras tour, in which thousands of teenage girls are having their first live music experiences, to see the vast potential for community activation: here are the roots of future lives spent in music…

The Work Doesn’t Get Any Easier At The Top

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The Chronicle of Philanthropy had an article written by the co-executive directors of the Building Movement Project (BMP) which focuses on non-profit leadership issues. I have been writing about their various studies since 2008.

I haven’t yet read the full results of their recent study which asked the same questions of leaders in 2016, 2019, and 2022, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy article shares some seemingly contradictory findings.

BMP found that the number of people interested in assuming leadership roles in non-profit organizations has been dropping in each study since 2016. What really surprised them was that previously non-profit staff of color had increasingly expressed an interest in leadership positions, but that reversed and dropped significantly in the 2022 survey.

Upon further investigation, BMP found that the context in which aspiring leaders had assumed their roles wasn’t the most constructive (my emphasis):

… we found that aspiring leaders, especially those of color, weren’t being pulled into leadership through support and positive role models but were more often pushed into top positions to escape difficult work circumstances and improve the situation for themselves and others.

…We assumed that removing barriers would translate into a positive desire to move into leadership.

But the data showed the opposite. The more challenges respondents faced in nonprofit workplaces, including inadequate salaries and a lack of mentors, the more likely they were to express an interest in the top role, particularly people of color.

Basically, the assumption that things are better at the top didn’t hold true. This was especially the case for persons of color who worked for predominantly white boards. They felt less supported by leadership and boards than white leaders or staffs of color who worked for boards and leaders of color.  While that does seem to indicate that persons of color can create an environment which will be more supportive of aspiring leaders, they actually need to feel like they can stay in the role long enough to cultivate younger staff.

Along these lines, BMP found:

“…leaders of color receive far less support from both their predecessors and leaders in other organizations than white executive directors do. Specifically, 22 percent of leaders of color and 30 percent of white leaders got support from their predecessors; and 33 percent of leaders of color and 41 percent of white leaders got support from leaders in other organizations.”

Among the suggestions BMP has for reversing the diminishing interest in executive leadership of non-profits are some obvious ones like making sure the work load is reasonable and borne by sufficient staff, cultivating younger staff, providing mentoring and networking opportunities from peers and retired executives.  Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems with this list is that fewer funders are willing to provide the financial support to increase staffing, education, mentoring, and networking required to empower leaders.

Customer Centric Marketing Tips All In One Place

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I have been writing about the importance of providing audience focused marketing and experiences for a number of years now. These three links are just representative of  the hundreds of posts I have made on the subject. Even having written all that, it is often difficult for me to remember all the tips and ideas when it comes time to put them into practice.

Therefore, I was happy to see that Ruth Hart posted her “Three foolproof tests for customer-centric arts marketing” on LinkedIn. Additionally, she provided a link to a customer-centric arts marketing check list on her webpage. I eagerly downloaded it last week and it is great.

Now if you go to download the check list, you will note that she asks for your contact info in exchange for the list. That may make you a little wary of providing it. You don’t know how your contact info is going to be used. Is Ruth going to start spamming you will emails trying to sell you a service?

I mean, I am pretty sure someone scraped my contact information from LinkedIn or married my email address from one source to my LinkedIn profile because I get repeated emails about franchise opportunities referencing an former job title and location from people every week with subject lines saying “Re:Re:Re:Re: Executive Director opportunities.”

Stuff like that is pretty annoying.

But I have a pretty high level of trust in Ruth to conduct her communications in a constructive manner. I have been following and interacting with her for awhile and she seems to practice what she preaches in terms of not doing stuff like spamming ticket buyers, etc with sales pitches or donor requests.  She writes about how that will erode relationships with audiences and community, and from what I have experienced she seems to follow her own advice. I haven’t gotten spammed by her yet.

And no, the link I provide to her check list isn’t some sort of affiliate program where I get something if you sign up.

While I would usually like to excerpt multiple suggestions from that list, I want to honor the work she did to put it together.

Except, I will note that this post does reflect one of the points on her list and include that one:

Provide info to eliminate “threshold fear” such as concert running time, what to wear, and other FAQs

By trying to assure you, quite sincerely, that my experience thus far has shown me that Ruth won’t spam you if you provide your contact info in exchange for her list, I am attempting to eliminate a type of threshold fear you might have.

ASL As Part Of The Performance Rather Than Reporting The Performance

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There was a really interesting article in Dance Magazine about artists using American Sign Language (ASL) as part of dance performances or to underscore movement in shows. One choreographer, Bailey Ann Vincent, says that she knows most of the audience is hearing, but if there is someone that communicates using ASL, they will have a richer experience:

For Vincent, using ASL in her choreography—which might mean incorporating a sign to emphasize an emotion a character is feeling, or to communicate what a lyric is saying—is both an artistic choice and an accessibility-related one. Though her audience is mostly hearing, “I still try to approach all our shows assuming there might be someone who is Deaf in the audience,” she says.

Another dancer said when he was asked to move beyond the role of an interpreter for a performance, it changed his perception about the role of ASL as a medium of communication.

…“She asked me to represent all sounds in sign language, and also use my body as a dancer,” says Kazen-Maddox. “It was the most mind-shifting thing for me, because I was seen as an artist and a dancer and a performer, and was also representing in sign language everything that was happening.”

The experience was the beginning of a shift in Kazen-Maddox’s career, away from simply facilitating communication between­ Deaf and hearing individuals as an interpreter­ and towards an emerging genre Kazen-Maddox calls “American Sign Language dance theater.” But it was also indicative of a wider shift in the performing arts, one that is more artistically fulfilling for Deaf and ASL-fluent artists and that also repositions accessibility: Rather than something tacked on to and separate from the performance, it is something deeply ingrained and integrated.

But as you might imagine, as the use of ASL as an artistic element increases, there are concerns about it being co-opted. It is important to remain conscious and thoughtful about the intent behind the use of ASL as an artistic element and avoid employing it in a superficial manner or in the service of ill-considered goals.

…And when hearing artists and audiences value how signs look over what they mean, the fusion of dance and ASL can become offensive rather than enriching. Antoine Hunter..gives the example of a hearing choreographer asking him to “reverse” a sign because it would look cool, which then made it meaningless or changed it into a distasteful word.

“When people who are not native signers see ASL incorporated with movement, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful,’ ” says Alexandria Wailes, a Deaf dancer and actor, through an interpreter. “Which is valid in its own right, but ASL is a language that is tied to culture, communities, and history. It’s not just something that you look at or do because it feels cool and it’s beautiful.”

No Knitting Backstage In Germany Please

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Rainer Glaap, an arts administrator working in Germany reached out with an update about the publication of his second book whose title translates as Knitting Forbidden! The book covers laws which applied to theater in Bremen from 1820 and for Leipzig from 1841. The bulk of the laws applied to the practice of theater in those places with a handful applying to the audience.

I’m not sure if it is the actors and technicians or audience members who weren’t permitted to knit. Maybe both. You gotta keep your eyes on those knitters!

Rainer notes that while some of the laws are somewhat humorous in the context of the present day, many remain very topical. He mentions that while there weren’t intimacy coordinators working in theater 200 years ago, there were laws to protect female actors that read like intimacy guidelines today:

“Apart from the author’s instructions, kissing is not allowed. – It must never happen that you lift a woman up and kiss her. – Under no circumstances must a man kiss a woman on the mouth; If the author has linked the kiss to the action, then kiss the cheek or forehead. – There are also special touches that you have to avoid, e.g. B. if a man comes too close to the breast while holding a woman. Anyone who trades against one of these points pays 8 gr. Punishment.”
(§105 of the Leipzig Theater Laws of 1841).

If you read German and want to buy the book, it can be found here – https://www.epubli.com/shop/stricken-verboten-9783758478505

According to the descriptions of the book there, it was the actors who weren’t permitted to knit during rehearsal. I still think there is probably some wisdom in watching audience members who bring pointy sticks into the theater though.

20th Anniversary Of Butts In The Seats

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This past Friday, February 23 marked the 20th anniversary of this blog. While Drew McManus often remembers the anniversary better than I do, I did recall the anniversary was coming up prior to the actual date.

When I first started back in 2004, I used a platform provided by my internet service provider for a total of two entries. It was quickly clear that their set up was not suitable for blogging. I ended up switching to Movable Type which I stayed on for awhile until Drew McManus invited me to join the Inside The Arts platform.  I am glad he did because the technical requirements for maintaining the blog were quickly outstripping my ability and interest.

Happily, Drew was far more skilled in such things. And while his focus on expanding his business to provide websites and ticketing CRM for arts organizations led to the sunsetting his blog, Adaptistration, his company embodies the same approach as his blog–providing useful tools and advice for arts and cultural organizations. At one time you might have read his posts or attended conference sessions on how to effectively use Google Analytics or analyze 990 filings for orchestra compensation. Now he focuses on making it easier for customers to learn about organizations, events, and feel comfortable rather than overwhelmed purchasing tickets.

While I didn’t initially mean to make this post an ad for his company, I have known Drew a long time, and our conversations have informed many of my posts. (He recently commented in a Zoom conference that I was the attendee he had known the longest and met in person the least.)

However, my initial inspiration to start blogging was another Andrew — Andrew Taylor, who writes the Artful Manager blog. I actually wrote to him with a comment on one of his posts shortly before starting my blog and he included my response in a later post. (Mine is the one about Chick tracts) I was so thrilled, I made it the subject of my second blog post.

There have been a lot of people who have influenced my thinking over the years. At the risk of overlooking some important ones, I will cite Carter Gilles and Nina Simon as being among those who have helped to shift my thinking and improve the way I operate professionally. The point being, this blog hasn’t emerged from a vacuum but stands on the shoulders of giants who have come before.

When I look back at some of my earlier posts, I have to cringe at some as I compare where I am now philosophically and professionally. Certainly others have stood the test of time. This blog does reflect much of the general thought about how arts and cultural organizations should operate so it is also a testament to how the general thought has evolved over the last two decades.

My view is that things have been moving in a more constructive direction in terms of being more audience and community-centric. This has manifested in orientations toward welcoming and inclusivity for community members, but also staff and volunteers. There have been increased implementation of policies to create better work environments for employees at all levels, including interns and apprentices.

Yes, there are still a ton of hostile work environments out there. You don’t have to look far or hard to find stories about organizational leaders who seem to be intentionally doing the worst they can to make people miserable. I have written about a lot of them. But you can absolutely see examples of organizations who are breaking away from the long seated mentality of the show must go on even if it destroys you/you have to pay your dues like I did/suffer for your art.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading all the while

Take Care That Mural Isn’t Destroying Instead Of Revitalizing

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I was walking through a building lobby when I noticed a table with a pamphlet discouraging people from painting murals on their brick buildings. My first thought was that this city department was undermining community beautification efforts. But as I read more closely, I realized the brochure was warning people about some very real issues associated with damaging the structural integrity of buildings.

If you are a member of the arts community trying to cultivate a more creative environment in your city, you don’t want to have your beautification efforts responsible for hastening the decline of the very neighborhoods you are trying to revitalize.

I recently wrote an ArtsHacker post citing some of the issues raised by the brochure I came across.

I mentioned the following among the things to consider, but there are more details in the full post:

Many of the issues painting brick structures creates are related to trapping moisture in what is normally a relatively porous, breathable material. Temperature changes causing expansion of that moisture can undermine the structural integrity of the brick and mortar.  The paint can obscure the development of these issues until the damage becomes severe and repairs more costly and extensive.

[…]

Keep in mind that geographic location should also be factored in to the materials and process chosen. The guide linked to here is calibrated to the conditions of cold, snowy winters and glaring summer sun at elevations exceeding one mile. Murals will weather differently in the relatively warmer, more humid climes of the southeast and drier, hotter deserts of the southwest, as well as the mix of annual weather conditions across the rest of the US.

 

 

Don’t Be Too Quick To Paint That Mural

Growing Trust And Confidence In Times Of Decline

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Seth Godin recently made a post citing a Brookings Institution survey series that showed a decline in confidence in multiple institutions and companies since 2018.   Godin notes that some of the decline may be due to news and propaganda eroding the general perception of institutions with which people don’t regularly directly interact. But he suggests that by and large, the diminished confidence is due to companies trading trust for short term profit.

Amazon and many other companies went from investing heavily in being reliable, trustworthy and fair to taking persistent steps to trade these valuable assets for quarterly results. It’s worth being clear about this–they did this intentionally. They decided that the confidence consumers had placed in them wasn’t worth as much as the shortcuts they could take to increase profits instead.

Near the end of his entry, he writes:

This is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for–to become the one that earns the benefit of the doubt.

As I was reading his post, I was thinking along the same lines. Surveys have shown that arts organizations, and particularly exhibit based experiences like museums, parks and zoos have been enjoying an increased level of trust since Covid restrictions have ended. The ability to control spacing between oneself and others in exhibit based experiences gave them a slight advantage over performance based entities, but both types of spaces have earned a greater measure of trust over the last couple years.

There is an opportunity to retain and grow that trust by examining interactions with experience participants to ensure you aren’t undermining that trust with anything that appears to be trading it for easy gain. There will always likely be some negative interactions people will have with your organization, but those interactions won’t necessarily significantly diminish the level of trust people have if it is handled well.

After all, we have probably all had interactions where we got what we wanted, but still had a sense that we were held in low regard by the company and organization. Air travel immediately comes to mind. Many people can probably remember two-three instances where they were on equally crowded travel conditions, but you felt more attentiveness and care being paid in one instance versus the others.

Think about how you can continue to exhibit trustworthiness and care, and potentially grow that in contrast to people’s experiences elsewhere.

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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