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Intrinsic Value As A General Value

March 28, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

Recently there has been a sentiment that the arts community shouldn’t use economic benefits as an argument for supporting the arts. I agree with this because there are a lot of problems with the argument which can weaken your position. The difficulty is that in trying to reframe the argument in other terms, you are fighting a sort of cultural inertia.

Arts Alliance Illinois Executive Director, Ra Joy retweeted lobbyist Dan Johnson who wrote “Instead of using the phrase “I’m a taxpayer” to legitimize a comment about government, we should use the universal phrase “I’m a citizen'”

We have a consumerist mentality which leads us to feel we get a say in how all our money is used and should expect a certain level of satisfaction. Businesses we make purchases from extend money back guarantees to assure our satisfaction so there is a tendency to apply a similar outlook to other areas of our lives. In addition to those addressing concerns to the government, students often use the my taxes/tuition pays your salary argument with their teachers.

The problem is, people often over estimate how much of the cost their share actually covers. Hamilton College recently launched a campaign at their students showing that after February 23, someone else was paying for their education. As most of us in the arts world know, a taxpayer’s share of the National Endowment for the Arts funding is below fifty cents.

And, of course, in many cases the price of a ticket to a performance at a non-profit organization only covers about 1/3 of the cost of the production.

Johnson’s suggestion to use “I’m a citizen” is essentially the argument for the intrinsic value of the arts. It harkens back to the social compact theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau that influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States. (My first major was Political Science.) It is an argument that the government owes us based on the intrinsic nature of our relationship rather than our dutiful payment of taxes.

The influence of money which drives the concerns over the Citizens United decision and those of the Occupy Movement illustrate the problem of equating economic influence with general worth and merit. It is probably time to emphasize intrinsic value in general and not solely in the arts.

Advocacy, Government Relations, Leadership

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With 10,000 Friends Like These, You Don’t Need Enemies

March 27, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

One of the things that makes me cringe uneasily is seeing non-profits running social media “follow me” campaigns where they make the push for the next multiple of 5000 milestone looming a few hundred followers away. Maybe they simply want the appearance of being as cool as all the other kids on the block and show off how popular they are. But to my mind, and perhaps I am erroneously attributing motivations, it appears to be the social media version of “if only they get exposed to our work once, they will fall in love with us forever.”

I should be clear that while I often talk about the “get them in the door and they will won over” reasoning in relation to the arts, I am seeing this practice across the non-profit sector. If the motivation is reaching more people via raw numbers, I think it suffers the same flaw as buying huge mailing lists or extending special offers/programs to get more people through the door. Unless you are making an effort to provide an experience/materials that is relevant to the new people, the effort isn’t productive.

Non-profit organizations are advised to move away from the shotgun approach in their physical advertising and most agree because of cost and recipient resentment over being spammed by snail and email. But social media is both inexpensive and people are choosing to follow you rather than you pushing your material on them. In my view, regardless of how inexpensive a channel of communication is, the goal should always be to have a your information be of interest to a high percentage of those being reached rather than reaching the highest number of people.

Yes it is cheap to greatly augment those numbers of virtual followers, but why are you even making the effort if you have no follow up plans? That’s worse than creating a social media presence just because everyone else is. At least you aren’t actively trying to convince people to buy in to an experience you have no intention of enhancing.

Many of the organizations I follow provide information that is interesting to me as an arts professional, but unless they have 10,000 arts professionals/admirers following them, I doubt most of their followers are as engaged as I. The quality and quantity of one organization’s feed actually dropped significantly after their big push. (Though I suspect the feed was initially created by an intern who left or a staff person who got pulled off the detail because the tone also became decidedly less strident and partisan.)

The other problem is that these “follow us” campaigns encourage existing sincere followers to leverage their relationships with others to bolster your followers. This is akin to asking board members to open their address books to solicit donations from their friends, albeit less intrusive and garnering even less personal investment.

Ask people to evangelize for your organization, by all means. But if you are flogging them everyday to help you reach a specific goal, the number 10,000 has as much relevance to the well-being of your organization as January 1, 2000 had to the end of the world.

If you know most of your followers aren’t going to pay attention and decide not to write to their interests, why the heck did you make so much ado updating the countdown every couple hours for two weeks? If your social media site wasn’t envisioned as a tool to provide information to interested parties and strengthen your relationship with them why does it exist?

I will be the first to admit that I am not using my organization social media sites as often and effectively as I would like. But when I do issue updates, it is to celebrate the success of partner organizations/artists, make followers aware of grant opportunities, national issues with the arts and artists with whom they may be unfamiliar. Yes, when we have a show coming up, I am linking to videos and online stories about the artist, but we aren’t having a show every week of the year.

I know that a large segment of those following are positively inclined toward the arts as both consumers and practitioners. Many are not make the decision to attend a show, but their knowledge and general attitude toward the arts can be positively influenced by all the information we post.

Advocacy, Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations

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Foundation Data Wants To Be Set Free!

March 26, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

Last week Lucy Bernholz posted a collection of links on Philanthropy 2173. One of these was a video of a talk she gave last June on how the information foundations collect is as important to non-profits as the money they give.

She notes that foundations end up being huge repositories of information about successful activities in our communities and across the nation. In the best scenario, these projects get funded once and then filed away in the archives. In the worst scenario, they just get filed away.

As a result of their granting activities, Bernholz notes, the foundations know a whole lot about whatever their areas of interest are. But because the data hasn’t been aggregated into a usable form, even the foundation may not be aware of just how much they know. She advocates for making that data readily available so that groups can collate the information and make everyone aware of just what exactly is going on, what is needed and what the costs of delivering services are.

Bernholz uses the example of looking at all the requests made to Donors Choose, combined with what foundations are funding and the Race To The Top programs to learn exactly what is happening and needed in classrooms.

According to Bernholz’s post last week, there has been some progress since she gave her talk in using non profit data to help organizations.

To my mind, such transparency would probably also promote much more accurate reporting by non profits. It has been noted that grant reports have a tendency to be idealized. All the goals are met or exceeded and there are no challenges or unforeseen problems causing a deviation from the proposal. A system which files such information away and forgets it perpetuates this practice.

However, if the information is out there and circulating and people are repeatedly contacting you to find out how you designed your programs to achieve such wonderful success, there is greater pressure to have your results more closely reflect reality.

Advocacy, Arts in an Age of Technology, Fundraising

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If Only It Were This Easy To Add Sugar and Spice To My Acting Ability

March 21, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

There was a story in FastCompany last December about a company called uFlavor which will allow you to custom mix soft drinks both online and through their vending machines. You design everything from the exact percentage of each ingredient to the label on the bottle.

Since relatively small changes in ingredients can determine how you experience food flavors–what immediately pops, what lingers in the mouth–the granular control uFlavor offers with its ingredients can yield myriad results.

I was trying to figure out if there was some way technology could do the same for the arts, but I couldn’t quite imagine a way to do it. You really can’t try out different line readings for a play on a computer to determine which one is best because the subtleties each actor can bring to the performance are quite different. The same with dancers and singers.

Even though there are similarities in that subtle differences in food flavors and performances can vastly impact the perceived quality of the product, good performances are not so easily manipulated for manufacturing. It appears Baumol’s cost disease may maintain its hold on the performing arts a little bit longer short of performers being digitally manufactured a la the movie S1m0ne.

However, apparently programs like Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator have provided an opportunity for visual artists to evaluate choices. Even if they don’t use the software to produce an end product, I have been told by visual artists that they use them to vet their choices before they start painting/drawing/etc.

When I first heard this I became concerned that artists using this technique would lose their mastery of materials. I am sure a number of insights have come from things unintentionally mixing. Or when artists, frustrated that their materials won’t behave the way they want, have added a little bit of this and that with some occasionally rewarding results. There are also obviously differences between a computer screen and real life, but an experienced artist will allow for that.

But on further thought I realized that by providing artists a quick sense of the results, these programs gave artists much more time to experiment.

I mean, I am old enough that I started out writing on typewriters. Even though it may not seem that way all the time, the opportunity that word processors provided to edit, re-edit, re-order and incessantly revamp my words has made me a much better writer than I would have been had I had to continue to use a typewriter.

So as video and audio processing continues to improve, it may not be long before we start to see tools for playwrights/choreographers/actors/directors/designers to use to evaluate dialogue, choreography, blocking, line readings and how performers might interact with lighting and set design. It will certainly not be a perfect depiction of the real life results, but it may provide these people much more time to experiment extensively with ideas.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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