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Some Reasons Acquiring New Customers Can Be Expensive

May 6, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

As so often is the case, Seth Godin recently made a post many elements of which are often cited as mistakes arts organizations make.

It should be noted that the things Godin lists are not meant to apply specifically to arts organizations. As often as we talk about how it is not appropriate for non-profits to be run like businesses, it is important to remember that since we are both trying to appeal to human beings to use a product or service, there are still a whole lot of problems we have in common. The over arching philosophy and motivation which guide the responses to these challenges is what often differentiates non-profits from for-profit entities.

The fact the post is titled, “When your project isn’t making money,” doesn’t mean it is aligned to businesses with a profit motive. Non-profits need to make money to pay their expenses, after all.

Of the 16 or so issues he identifies under the “It might be that your costs of acquiring a new customer are more than that customer is worth” subheading, only about 4-5 aren’t directly applicable to non-profit operations, and it only takes the slightest bit of imagination to see parallels.

Here are some of the more significant issues he lists. You have probably seen many of them mentioned before.

Because there’s a mismatch between your story and the worldview of those you seek to serve.

Because the people you seek to serve don’t think they need you.

Because it costs too much to tell these people you exist.

Because the people you seek to serve don’t trust you.

[…]

Because you’re focusing on the wrong channels to tell your story.
(just because social media is fun to talk about doesn’t mean it works)

[…]

Because the people you seek to serve don’t talk about you, thus, you’re not remarkable.

Or the people you seek to serve don’t like to talk about anyone, and your efforts to be remarkable are wasted.

Because your product doesn’t earn traction with your customers, they wouldn’t miss you if you were gone–the substitutes are easy.

Because even though you’re trying hard, you’re being selfish, focusing on your needs instead of having empathy for those you seek to serve.

Issues of lack of awareness, lack of trust, selfishness, competing substitutes are all topics of discussion in the non-profit arts community.

In fact, you may not associate some of Godin’s points with for-profit businesses. Do you immediately associate empathy with those whom you seek to serve as a characteristic of a for-profit business?

If you think about it, when call a customer or tech support number with a sense of dread and get your problems solved within five minutes, you may have been dealing with a company employing empathy for those they seek to serve. (Or at least one making an effort to retain your loyalty)

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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When You Try To Break Out Of Siloed Thinking, You Suddenly See Them Everywhere

May 1, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

When I was looking at Arts Professional UK for yesterday’s post, I saw an article by Lucy Jamieson about rewiring your thinking.

One of the things she talks about is eliminating silos both within an organization (i.e. development is responsible for fund development, and marketing does marketing work, and programming does programming), and between organizations. The latter being not only the elimination of duplication of effort by multiple entities but also exploring things like where the interests of arts, social justice and climate change advocacy might intersect.

One section of Jamieson’s piece caught my eye:

We talk a lot at the moment about resilience, about being agile and adaptable, about scalability… Yet sometimes it feels as though the more we say the words (resilience, agile, adaptable), the more we’re convincing ourselves that we’re actually doing and being those things.

Back to the Naomi Klein talk. She spoke at one point about the fairly recent shift from the idea of the individual as part of a collective movement, to the individual as a brand (think social media influencers)…

The parallel I’m drawing here is that if we really do want to be ready for change, and therefore resilient, we should also be prepared to instigate that change. And we’re far more likely to be able to do that by partnering up with someone else, no matter how small the change may seem.

I have been helping review grant applications over the last few weeks. Something that struck me recently was that both here in Georgia and in Ohio where I also served on grant panels, there are some amazing, well-designed after school writing programs targeted at helping kids living in difficult circumstances express themselves.

I get excited when I read about the contexts some of these programs connect with writing. Often these are the type of situations where you’d be grabbing a pen and paper in order to participate, never thinking it was a writing exercise and never raising the common student objection about when you would you ever use this skill in real life. Then there are other assignments that definitely asked you to write with intention and introspection.

Reflecting on this last week, I couldn’t help wondering why these techniques weren’t being used in school or why these groups weren’t being brought in to teach a class and give the teachers a break. Some programs I have come across have been sited at schools, but even those were conducted after hours.

The kids participating in these programs are, almost by definition, not handpicked cream of the crop who have a better chance of exhibiting positive outcomes. So schools can’t cite the programs as being inappropriate for their student demographics.

The only reasons I can think for these programs not being in schools is that either:

1- No one made the logical jump that these techniques or groups might be an effective tool for instruction. Perhaps it is a result of siloed thinking that teachers teach in schools during school hours and non-profit groups conduct their activities at other times or are a special, occasional presence in schools. It may also be that while funders are willing to support the time and labor intensive process of writing programs for non-profits, many don’t consider doing the same for schools (or letting them know they are interested in doing so.)

2- The other reason might be that they have different measures of effectiveness. While some of the non-profit grant applicants reference improvements in grades or behavior, by and large they are focused on helping participants feel personally empowered to express themselves. Schools measure effectiveness in terms of test scores which is a secondary or lower ranked concern for the non-profits.

State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Do They Know They Are Hard To Reach?

April 30, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

On the Arts Professional UK website, Imrana Mahmood, discusses her experiences becoming a creative producer in a manner that reminded me of two other speakers/authors I often cite. Mahmood’s experience seemed to be at the crossroads of Jamie Bennett’s TEDx Talk about people not recognizing their capacity to be creative even though they already engage in creative activity and Ronia Holmes’ piece on how disinvested communities aren’t bereft of creative and artistic practice.

Mahmood’s article immediately recalled Holmes to me thanks to the title, “A Seat at The Table.” Holmes had talked about how people in disinvested communities are often offered a small seat at the big table by other organizations when they actually own the entire table in their own communities. Mahmood’s article starts along much the same lines (my emphasis):

As a British Muslim woman of Pakistani heritage, I grew up with an intrinsic love of the arts, including qawwali, henna, calligraphy and poetry. It was therefore a surprise to be labelled as being part of a hard-to-reach community with low arts engagement, as I struggled to reconcile the reality of my lived experience with an inaccurate perception of my identity.

She was encouraged to apply for funding as an “emerging creative producer,” but says she was initially reluctant “to view myself as an arts professional.” I attribute this to her mention earlier in the piece that

“…a career in arts was not considered to be a proper job. This was despite spending much of my spare time running community arts projects as well as having a keen interest in visual arts and live performance.”

Throughout the rest of the article she mentions experiences which involved perceived tokenism and gatekeeping as well as instances when she felt she and others had license to express themselves on their own terms. If you take one thing away from this article, it should be her call for organizations to reflect on their own inaccessibility.

Paying lip service to diversity and only conversing with creatives of colour as though we exist as a monolith is hugely problematic. It is time that organisations committed to engaging hard-to-reach communities reflect on the reality of their own inaccessibility.

Along those lines, I have some reluctance in citing Ronia Holmes’ original piece as if it were a monolithic representation of the needs and sentiments of all communities, but I often return to it because it for its perception of all the dynamics motivating arts and cultural organizations.

Advocacy, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, creativity, Leadership, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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The Gallery At The End of The Rainbow

April 29, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

There was a piece on Hyperallergic last month that seemed to be continuing an ongoing conversation about the fact that most university based arts programs seem to be oriented toward training students to enter a narrowly defined career path. Where theater programs seem focused on Broadway and music programs on orchestras, Sharon Louden suggests visual arts programs identify gallery shows as the goal.

I hadn’t really thought about visual arts programs promoting unrealistic expectations about an ideal career path given the myriad media suggest so many options to pursue, but it makes sense that one might exist.

Louden says that for most visual artists, gallery sales are not a stable source of income. Many artists have become adept at diversifying their income streams and gallery sales isn’t at the top of the list of revenue sources most pursue. She argues that by subscribing to an emerging centralized MFA Fair, artist training programs are sending a message that gallery sales should be the central ambition of graduates.

Louden’s second objection really caught my eye because she says art schools are doubly profiting from their students by advancing participation in the MFA Fair.

We are all likely aware of the incredibly high cost of enrolling in MFA programs around the country. If universities end up paying for booths and/or taking a percentage of money from recent MFA artists, shouldn’t that be considered a form of double-dipping? Students who often have to take out huge student loans to pay for their education are now going to provide work to their alma mater so it can take a commission from sales of that work?

If a training program is profiting off the labor of students, Louden asks, doesn’t have a greater incentive to cultivate students’ whose work is more marketable and suppress those who push boundaries and take chances? As she says, time in a training program is the period when artists should have the most permission, (if not insistent prodding), from their mentors to diverge from the commercial motive.

How does the institution-turned-gallery decide who gets to show? Will they only accept artists who make conservative work that’s most likely to sell? What happens to the artist who makes work that is not easily accepted in the gallery paradigm? And most darkly, what happens when a former student sues a university for not including them in this fair?

Finally, she asks, if the metric of number of students selling work at an MFA Art Fair becomes a recruiting tool in the same manner as US World Report university rankings, does this not create pressure for non-participant training programs to join or suffer from the inability to guarantee “employment” upon graduation granted by the imprimatur of having a small percentage of students sell works?

Don’t forget there is a growing general societal pressure that university students pursue majors with proven career paths. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that training programs will look to accentuate the successes of graduates by arranging high profile opportunities.

Art(ist) Education, Business Models, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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