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Where Have All The Pledge Drive Guests Gone?

by:

Joe Patti

I have been listening to the pledge drive for the statewide public radio network the last couple weeks and been thinking nostalgically about my time living in Hawaii when I was a regular guest during the semi-annual drives. It was a minor point of pride feeling that I had worked my way up from being a guest an a 4:00 pm Saturday show to a midweek lunch time slot. I can’t say for sure if my clever patter as responsible for being asked to guest at seemingly more “visible” time slots, but there were times when I would finish up one slot and be asked to move to another room to appear on the second program stream.

But it doesn’t seem like public radio stations do this sort of thing any more. Having worked for organizations that depended heavily on volunteer labor, I can completely understand that it can take a lot of staff hours to schedule guests in dozens of slots across a two week period. That is in addition to the numbers you need to cover phones. With the increased move to online donating, I am not even sure if many stations need volunteers to cover phones any more. It used to be that you would hear acknowledgements of restaurants that donated food for the volunteers. I haven’t heard those in many year which means either there aren’t a lot of volunteers to feed or the stations are paying for the food directly now.

In any case, what I think has been lost by eliminating community guests from fundraising is the opportunity to provide social proof.

For the last few years, theaters like mine have worked to increase the number of audience photos on our websites and publications to show who is attending performances and the enjoyable experience they are having. I have frequently mentioned that people feel more comfortable participating in a cultural experience when they see themselves and their stories depicted.

There is a pretty distinct impression of who public radio is for. Even though the names of correspondents represent some pretty diverse backgrounds as do the stories being told, the voices telling the stories continue to cleave rather closely to the stereotypical “public radio voice.” Some of the podcasts associated with public radio diverge a little from the “voice,” but not many and few podcasts are part of the main programming stream.

In addition to adding some vocal variety in the programming, returning to having community guests on the pledge drives can provide the social proof about who values the stations and their programming. Obviously, choosing who the guests will be requires some strategy. My recollection from the past was that there were always a lot of lawyers on. That might not be the image of who the stations are for that they want to project. As much as I enjoyed the experience, maybe I am no longer the right person to be a guest any longer.

As much as I am citing the example of public radio here, I am basically using this particular situation to approach the importance of all cultural organizations providing visible social proof from a different angle.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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Somber Silence The New Standing Ovation?

by:

Joe Patti

I saw an article on the NBC News site questioning the value of standing ovations with a subtitle suggesting the seeming default occurrence of the act was a symptom of “‘everyone gets a trophy’ culture.” I almost passed it by because it didn’t sound like it was going to say anything new on the subject.

I am glad I didn’t because along with observations about standing ovations being meaningless if you do them all the time and suggesting that audiences can be manipulated into giving standing ovations, the writer Maggie Mulqueen, says they can also represent demands audiences expect to be met:

At a classical music concert I attended recently, the soloist left his violin backstage during his bows as a clear sign that there would be no encore despite the demands of the audience. As we headed out of the theater, I overheard grumblings of disappointment that he had not acquiesced to the call for more. We don’t expect every sporting event to go into overtime in return for giving the teams a standing ovation, so I am not sure where this sense of entitlement comes from for the performing arts.

Later, she provides an anecdote illustrating how lack of applause can be a greater testament of the power of a performance than a standing ovation—while admitting concerns that the performers might read it the wrong way.

The play ended suddenly, the stage went dark, and the audience, stunned by the power of the play, was silent for several seconds. Then, as the weight of the experience sank in, hands began to clap, tears were dried, and actors took their bows. The audience filed out quietly as we tried to regain our bearings.

Ironically, the absence of a standing ovation that night added to how memorable an event it was. Because the content of the play is sober and dark, such a gesture would have felt like a celebration and been in poor taste. As I made my way back to my hotel, I wanted to tell everyone I saw on the Tube to go see it. But mostly, I wanted to reassure the actors. “You were great,” I wanted to tell them. “Please understand it was your forceful performance that kept us in our seats.”

Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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Adding A Throwaway Option Can Solidify Decisions

by:

Joe Patti

Many arts organizations are seeing a drop in ticket sales and subscriptions this year which got me to thinking about a TED talk Dan Ariely did about how unwanted options helped helped people make a decisions, in some case spending more than the cheapest option.  I had done a post about it some years ago and thought about how it might be applicable to subscriptions.

Offer people options that don’t have value to nudge them toward purchasing more a bigger subscription package than they might have. I don’t know that it would transform a lot of single ticket buyers into subscription buyers unless we are wrong about flexibility being more important than price. A mini-subscription that offered flexibility and appeared to be a great value might have some success in getting single ticket purchasers to commit.

I also wonder if offering non-premium options with your show helps make them look more attractive than your competitors’. Ariely talks about another experiment where they offered people the option of an all-inclusive trip to Rome or Paris. In this case it is really apples and oranges since the two cities are in different countries have have so many different attributes to value. Once they add the option of going to Rome but having to pay for coffee in the morning, suddenly people preferred [all-inclusive] Rome over Paris by a larger degree due to the lesser option being available.

It doesn’t seem logical to me to think that given the option between the symphony and a free cocktail at intermission and the opera and a free cocktail at intermission, that people would flock to the orchestra if a no cocktail option for the same price was offered. But as Ariely points, out the decision being made are not entirely rational.

Audience Relations, Business Models, Marketing/PR, Pricing

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Do Factors Underlying Desire To Work From Home Herald An Increase In Creativity?

by:

Joe Patti

Back in 2009 I wrote about a TED talk Dan Pink did on motivation. In particular, he discussed how monetary rewards was successful at motivating people in mechanical tasks, but when it came to problem solving and creative solutions, in many cases the greater the reward, the longer it took people to solve a problem.

At the time I wrote:

This may explain why arts people are able to create in the absence of monetary reward.

I wouldn’t let this get around lest people insist that paying you more may rob you of your creativity.

[…]
Pink says the new operating model should be based on:

“Autonomy- Urge to Direct Our Own Lives
Mastery- Desire to get better and better at something that matters, and
Purpose- The Yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

It seems like these concepts are beginning to increasingly manifest themselves as people start to consider work from home as an option and seek to embrace greater degrees of autonomy, mastery and purpose in their lives.

Business Models, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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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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