Great ideas can be found and cultivated everywhere. That is the basic message of a blog post on the Center for Small Towns’ website. They note that reporting on rural towns often seeks to reinforce an existing narrative rather than illuminating the facts. (On The Media did a great series about coverage of rural news this last Fall.)
Center for Small Towns calls attention to some pretty awesome ideas communities are doing that you may wish you had thought of first.
For instance, Lanesboro, MN created Poetry Parking Lots where they had people compose haiku about “the beauty of southeastern Minnesota, and of the strong community of Lanesboro.” They posted the haiku on light posts in parking lots.
They also made cast iron medallions which they placed around town “inviting residents and visitors to hunt for the various medallions as they walk about town.” This reminded me a lot of the manhole covers in Japan I wrote about a few years back. The art on the manhole covers serves the same purpose of emphasizing points of pride about the cities in which they are found.
In Fergus Falls, MN, an artist created a “Citizen Kit” to encourage civic engagement. The kits included,
“…a small red box complete with City Council meeting “punch cards,” citizen pledge cards to put in your wallet, and buttons. The citizen kits came complete with a spray painted gold hole punch, for local community leaders to use when they saw people attending city council meetings.”
Websites like Art of the Rural are also focused on stories like these where groups are employing innovative ideas in smaller places. As the title of the post suggests, good ideas pop up in all sorts of places, regardless of population. But I feel ideas like these can be especially effective at connecting with communities because they resonate so closely with the core identity of a place.
I have a fairly regular standing appointment on a radio station to talk about upcoming events at our performing arts center. Often the host will ask me to talk about the process we go through to book shows. Since I talked about it the time before, I am surprised he wants to hear about it again. But I also realize that what seems pretty repetitive and boring to me as someone on the inside might be fascinating to other people.
It got me to thinking, should we be revealing more details about our process than we are? Will the public be more engaged by an open discussion of the challenges we face?
Mostly I am thinking about the programming area. We generally don’t talk about our upcoming season until the last show of the current season. Partially, this is a matter of making a dramatic reveal. I don’t know that there is as much anticipation and fanfare about that sort of thing to make it as valuable a tactic as it was 20-30+ years ago.
The bigger rationale for not giving details about what we are considering is to avoid creating expectations in the community that we ultimately are unable to deliver on. Often it will look good for a top name for 6 months straight only to have the plans fall through at the last minute. As disappointing as that is for programming staff, at least they don’t have to deliver the news to 15,000 people waiting for the on-sale announcement, potentially damaging organizational credibility.
In a way, it is like the stereotypical horse race where one horse is in front the entire time and then ends up losing completely in the final yards. With that image in mind and with so many past comparisons about how the arts are like sports or should be promoted/covered like sports, I wondered if discussion about upcoming programming should be handled like speculation about a team draft.
Even if plans to have Wicked appear next season fall through at the last minute, does it create excitement and drama for people to know that is what you are trying to do for three months? Or does it make the replacement show look worse by comparison and potentially sour people on attending a show they would have been excited to see if they hadn’t been yearning for Wicked?
Maybe Wicked has too much notoriety to be a proper example. It might be better to evoke a musical group that is replaced by an equally notable group after the first group had been mentioned regularly for a number of months.
While contracts often state you are committing to the conditions if you announce before contracts are finalized, I am not suggesting a firm announcement, just an open discussion about what the organization is thinking about for the coming year. Because even if things fall through, you can provide assurances of your sincere intent to pursue the opportunity again in the future.
That’s one benefit to this approach. You don’t have to guess whether something will connect with the community because people will mention their approval to staff at religious services, at the coffee house, supermarket, etc throughout the planning process.
Of course, they may also express their displeasure just as sports fans do over draft choices and other decisions sports teams make. So staff will need to be prepared to discuss the philosophy behind pursuing a type of programming, including the concept that not everything the organization does is meant for everyone in the community. An ongoing conversation about plans may require developing a greater tolerance for criticism.
But even in the face of criticism, you can recognize people have some degree of investment in what happens in your organization.
I think some of the anticipated negative aspects like Wicked vs. “any other option you would normally think was great” assumes that the program decision making and new season communication process wouldn’t change. I think change would occur either organically or of recognized necessity. There would be few, if any, cases of stark disappointment because the community and arts organization understood each other a little better.
I also think it also underestimates the tolerance and understanding of disappointing outcomes from people who are used to release dates of anticipated movies, books, albums and tech devices being delayed for another year.
Post title inspired by REM. But I was also thinking of evoking an appropriately similar line from “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” “Have I said too much?/There’s nothing more I can think of to say to you/But all you have to do is look at me to know/That every word is true.”
Via Marginal Revolution blog, comes a story about a tourist spot in China that supposedly put in speed bumps to force people to slow down and appreciate the scenery.
It made me think, is this worth doing in places like museums where people rush past exhibits in order to get to the famous stuff so they can say they were there? Do you set things up so people have to take a circuitous route through choke points either on arrival or departure so people are forced to slow down and take a look around them for a couple minutes?
Or acknowledging the different doors for different people concept I wrote about yesterday, do you clearly mark an express lane for experience seekers who want to validate their visit with a selfie and direct everyone else in another direction so they can proceed at their own pace undisturbed?
Is the purpose as a museum to force these people to stand still long enough that they realize there are other delights to be experienced, or do you allow them to reinforce their narrow definition of what is valuable to experience?
Yes, I intentionally made both options sound negative and restricted the options to something of a false choice. There are other ways to look at an experience often the same person may seek a different type of experience in different places or different visits to the same place.
I don’t think there are any clear or easy answers to the questions I initially pose. Being aware of these different motivations is helpful and important when evaluating the experience you offer visitors.
It isn’t easy to offer an experience that is 100% fulfilling on all five categories 100% of the time.
Using the example Nina Simon gave in the TEDx talk I cited yesterday, if you have an event about the history of surfing on the beach away from your traditional facility, you are likely to attract an entirely new segment of people.
Consider: What does a person exploring the topic of surf history want out of the experience? What opportunities does a person seeking the experience of being at an interesting event want? What do people seeking to facilitate the experience for others need? What do people with relatively high degree of expertise on surf history want? What about people seeking to recharge or reflect?
A crowded event on a beach may not suit the needs of a person seeking to recharge or provide the rigorous detail an expert is seeking. However, a different event on the subject in a different place might, so you make an effort to ensure those elements are present at this other event and these people are aware of the opportunity. Just be cognizant that while a topic like surf history may open them to the idea of visiting your organization for the first time, the traditional experience visitors have at your organization may still alienate them.
But don’t get overwhelmed by the idea of an expanding multiplicity of permutations. Remember, every person who walks in the door, regardless of whether they are new or returning, will fall into one or more of those categories. Returning people will have the benefit of familiarity, but otherwise every visit can be viewed as an entirely new experience. There is always going to be some element of “each person, each day at a time,” to every interaction.
If you haven’t been following Nina Simon on her Museum 2.0 blog or haven’t read her book, The Art of Relevance, her recent TEDx Palo Alto talk could be a good 12 minute intro to her thoughts on making arts organizations relevant in their communities. (And if you like this, check out her longer talk at the Minnesota History Center that I covered last October.)
In her TEDx talk, she discusses how easy it is for an insider to decide to participate in an organizations and how many decisions an outsider has to navigate before deciding there is meaning for them on the other side of the literal and metaphoric front door.
She uses the door metaphor a lot throughout her talk. She says that often organizations think that being more inclusive means opening existing doors wider, but what is necessary is to create entirely new doors to access organizational programs. In the case of her Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, this has meant things like having part of their surfing exhibition on the beach.
Perhaps the most extreme and literal example of opening new doors she mentioned was that of the State Library of Queensland which built a gorgeous new white building and then invited aboriginal elders in to help them design an indigenous knowledge center. The elders noted that for them, knowledge wasn’t shared through books, but rather through music, dance and storytelling in a setting that wasn’t so sterile looking, most importantly around a fire. The librarians, true to their intent renovated a space for music, dance and storytelling and infused it with color. And they built a firepit (away from the flammable archives, of course).
In her Minnesota History Center talk she suggested that not everything an organization does is for everyone. In her TEDx talk, she returns to that theme by noting that not everything you do in the process of opening new doors is going to please everyone. Your organization is no longer going to conform to the idea of what people think a theater, museum, opera company, orchestra, etc should look like.
Suddenly a metaphoric neon pink door appears on the side of the building as part of an attempt to provide an experience in a context relevant to a certain segment of the population. Anyone is free to enter that door, but it isn’t meant to provide the same experience as the original doors of the building. It may be difficult for insiders to accept that every door or program isn’t meant for them. She says a door that says welcome to one person may say keep out to another. (The door in this case being myriad perceptual elements.)
There is an important subtext here that distinguishes this line of thinking from historical conversations the arts have about connecting with audiences. She never suggests that the people entering these additional doors will one day enter the traditional doors. Typically, conversations about engaging new audiences are focused on getting people in the door with an eye to getting them hooked on the core programming of the organization. It may happen, but Nina never suggests that will happen.
If it is the case that not every door/program is meant for everyone, some people may never/infrequently choose to enter the original doors/engage with the core programs. The end goal is to grow the relevance of the organization to a place where traffic through the new doors causes an identity to evolve which blends with or even subsumes what is currently considered the core program.
"Though while the author wishes they could buy it in Walmart..." Who is "they"? The kids? The author? Something else?…