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Follow Us Here…And Here…Here Too…And Oh Yeah, Here

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Thomas Cott shared Colleen Dilenschneider’s recent post about the futility of using social media for the sake of using social media.

“…spending copious time on the newest social media features (that none of your audiences are using), measuring success by vanity metrics, and building out features that nobody is asking for…why do organizations do these things? They don’t help support bottom lines like getting folks in the door, building affinity, increasing donor support, or sharing knowledge if they aren’t relevant to your market or strategically integrated into an engagement plan…. and yet organizations brag about these useless endeavors to their boards and at industry conferences.

Many organizations seem to be feeling so “peer pressured” to be utilizing social media that they are using it to do stupid, time-consuming things for audiences that don’t matter”

I am right there with her. I have often suggested organizations shouldn’t be jumping on to the latest social media bandwagon. Especially since news of these apps/tools is often self-perpetuating out of proportion to the percentage of the population actually using them. Once a critical mass is reached, they get reported on because everyone else seems to be reporting on it making it seem like far more people are using it than actually are.

However, I can understand why arts organizations are doing it. Yesterday the Here and Now program on NPR interviewed Amanda Palmer and the conversation got around to referencing Taylor Swift’s story about two actresses being up for a part and the one with the larger Twitter following getting it.

While Palmer goes on to talk about a large following not equaling depth of engagement just as Dilenschneider mentions, the idea that breadth of exposure is better than depth with a few people is still the dominant criteria.

Print, broadcast and online media still talk about the number of eyes and ears they can deliver when trying to sell you advertising.

Grant reports will often ask about the number of hits your website received during the grant period. I called one funder to clarify criteria to use for indirect exposure because it almost felt like an invitation to wildly estimate using a contagion theory. My guess is that some of the sources of their funding have proved to be impressed by these numbers so we are being encouraged to provide them.

And actually, when I looked up contagion theory to make sure I was using the term correctly, I found out complex contagion theory is a term associated with social media. So it isn’t entirely unreasonable that funders are interested in reporting about a shotgun approach.

The same thinking that motivates a movie or stage production to cast the actor whose commentary on their involvement in the project will reach the most people, influences the values of arts organizations and their funders. If an organization is trying to expand its reach with using the hottest new toys, don’t they appear more ambitious and progressive than the organization that has a solid 500 people savoring their every post on a single social media site?

Visit the Facebook pages of two arts organizations in a city you have never visited. When you decide which is better are you basing it on how cool their header image is and the number of likes? Or did you actually take the time to evaluate the quality of their posts?

Colleen Dilenschneider is fairly accurate in her assessment about how these efforts will not provide any meaningful results, wastes time and potentially sets your efforts back. The answer to her question about why organizations engage in futile social media efforts is that the illusion of progress is valued.

To some extent, you might ask the same question about why people use alcohol as a social lubricant instead of working on changing themselves to become more adept at handling these situations. Except that the illusion generated by this activity is widely expected and accepted. (Insert your own joke equating the idea of wasted resources and the need to use the restroom after a beer.)

Keep Board Members Heart And Soul (You May Need Them In The Future)

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This being Veteran’s Day, I thought I would point to Simone Joyaux’s recent piece on Non-Profit Quarterly dealing with veterans of smaller scale conflicts- ex-board members.

Simone enjoins people to remember that most former board members still believe in your cause even after they have served and shouldn’t be treated like a generic donor. She lists many ways to keep former board members involved and in the loop, including enlisting them to help with board recruitment and fund raising efforts.

This article caught my attention because last week I had attended a board meeting of the community organization with which we partner. During the meeting, they dealt with the departure of one board member, the conferring of emeritus status on another (she is 103 years old, she earned it), and the approval of 4 new board members.

The board member who was leaving said he envisioned remaining involved with the organization whether he liked it or not given that he has never left job where he didn’t end up continuing to provide advice.

You often don’t get someone explicitly saying they want to stay involved like that, but you should make the effort to keep them in the loop and provide the opportunity.

Of the 4 people who will be joining the board, 2 have served before.

Which illustrates something that Simone didn’t mention–you want to treat a former board member well because it is likely that the set of people in your community willing to serve on non-profit boards isn’t so large that you won’t end up asking former members to serve again.

The Artists, They Live Among Us

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I didn’t really know much about Jamie Bennett when he was chief of staff at the National Endowment for the Arts or when he was appointed as executive director for ArtPlace America, but after watching a video of his talk at TEDxHudson, I figure he was the right person for the job.

There were a number of moments during his talk where I nodded my head and thought “this guy gets it.” (And not just because as kids we apparently both had our first Broadway experience seeing the same production of Peter Pan with Sandy Duncan)

He talks about growing up in Honesdale, PA and encountering the idea that art was something done by people who lived far away. He speaks of a colleague performing a study for the Urban Institute who went out and asked people who the artists in their community were, only to be told there weren’t any despite all the participation in singing and dancing going on.

He relates another experience in Aspen, CO where people in the audience readily self identified as golfers and tennis players, but not as artists. He comments that he doesn’t know:

“why we can so easily see ourselves on a continuum with Serena Williams and Tiger Woods, but we don’t think anything we do has anything in common with Sandy Duncan.”

He goes on to list all the encounters he had with artists growing up in Honesdale. He admits it even took him 30 years to realize there were practicing artists in his hometown.

He continues saying what we have probably all realized by now, that this perception of artists as an “other” is deeply rooted in society. He cites a study which found that “Although 96% of Americans value art in their communities and lives, only 27% value artists.”

When he says that the study lead to the formation of United States Artists which took the tagline “Art comes from artists,” people laugh. But I couldn’t help thinking that such an obvious statement might be required.

Since people have a concept of creativity and inspiration as something that flows from the ether into blessed individuals rather than something that everyone can participate in and get better at with some effort, just like your tennis backhand, a blatant statement of the basic definition of an artist could be necessary.

I suspect this sense of special insight has been propagated by artists. If you are going to be poor and starving, it helps a little to be able to wrap yourself in an aura of uncommonality, in touch with the muses the way monks are infused with spirituality.

Bennett likens the situation to the food world which has made people more cognizant of the source of their meals leading to the concepts of eating local and farm to table, among others. He extends that idea to making people aware of the local sources of art, including themselves.

The second thing Bennett said that made me sit up and take notice was that the typical conversation about the arts in this country is about the lack of money and resources. “We open with our lack and spend every conversation with our hand out.”

He talks about the purpose of ArtsPlace America being to turn that around to draw attention to the asset common to every community-artists.

“Not every community has a waterfront. Not every community has strong public transportation. Not every community is lucky enough to be anchored by a hospital or university. But every community has people who sing and dance and tell stories.”

I don’t know that the dearth of resources is what entirely dominates my conversations, but I am going to keep a more attentive ear on what I say in the future.

Bennett goes on to talk about other benefits of the arts in communities. He touches on some concepts that were familiar to me, but provides slightly different insights about the positive ripple effects of arts participation, especially among groups of people who may not be perceived as artists.

Curatin’ Ain’t Easy

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It is ten years this month that Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller first started talking about Pro-Ams, the Professional-Amateur whose dedicated pursuit of an avocation brought them on par with professional practitioners. I have written a fair bit upon the subject over the years.

When the topic comes up for discussion in the arts, one central question often arises (or lurks shallowly in the subtext) about whether amateurs really can perform to the standard professionals possessed of a keen eye honed by experience and education can.

Essentially, if we let the amateurs get involved, will quality and artistic merit be supplanted by work that panders to popular tastes and doesn’t require any effort to understand?

This is a question that Nina Simon, Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of History and Art has had to struggle with as a practical matter. While she has increased the fortunes of her museum since assuming the director role, her means have not been without criticism.

Recently her programming decisions were discussed in in a Wall Street Journal article, Everybody’s an Art Curator. The article uses Simon’s museum as the basis of discussing a national trend of involving the community in curatorial decisions. The article mentions the departure of one of Simon’s curatorial staff and disagreements with an artist over the context in which her show was hung. The article discusses friction at other museums around the country as they attempt to enact similar programs.

Nina Simon posted about the WSJ article on her Museum 2.0 blog this week, linking to two more in depth considerations of the idea of outsourcing curation broached in “Everybody’s an Art Curator” by Ed Rodley.

As I read all these posts and articles, it occurred to me that there is a high likelihood that a lot of the blame for the weaknesses of involving amateurs probably lies with the arts organization itself.

As Rodley observes:

“I think if you were to look at a large sample of museum projects with participatory elements, you’d find plenty that had poorly thought out and articulated goals and dubious educational value. Which is something that the field as a whole could stand to look at closely.”

Arts organizations have a history of not investing enough patience and resources in a new initiative. Common discussions in the field involve the misguided expectation that new audiences segments will respond positively and feel they are being served on the basis of one event aimed at them a year. What is required are accompanying outreach efforts, conversations, and shifts in making the attendance environment more appealing to your target groups.

Chances are, Rodley is right on the money when he suggests that insufficient attention has been paid to program design.

On the other hand, arts organizations frequently run into a lack of understanding about how difficult their work is to accomplish. I have frequently encountered renters who start a conversation which “Oh it is just a simple…,” having not considered how everything is going to fall into place.

Nina Simon makes a similar observation about the perception that amateur curators are a strategy aimed at reducing and replacing staff.

“Community is not a commodity. We don’t involve people in content development to “boost ticket sales.” It’s neither “quick” nor “inexpensive” to mount exhibitions that include diverse community stories. Yes, community involvement is at the heart of our shifted, successful business model. But that business model requires experienced staff who know how to empower people, facilitate meaningful participation, respond to community issues and interests, and ignite learning. It’s not cheap. It’s not easy. It’s the work we feel driven to do to build a museum that is of and for our community.”

I feel like Simon’s efforts at community involvement actually help educate people about the work that goes into putting a show together. For example,

“Hack the Museum,” a show that invited a mix of outside professionals to live at the museum for 48 hours and build a new exhibit from the permanent collection.”

Yes, the results of their efforts may be mixed. But how exciting is it for people to camp out in a museum for two days and learn the process? I can’t imagine that giving 75 people a tour of the curatorial department would be as effective in helping them understand the process. Nor would it likely engender the investment that the participants felt. Nina made some posts about it here and here and the participants looked like they had a blast.

I am fairly certain she isn’t passing off the work of community participants as professional choices since that would be counter to her goal of convincing all visitors that their involvement with the museum is meaningful.

Those of us who work in the performing arts will often grouse that so much gets a standing ovation or accolades of “as good as professionals” when it doesn’t deserve it. However, the performing arts may have an advantage over visual arts in that there is a rough sense of a continuum between elementary school recital and full blown concert by a professional symphony orchestra.

The criteria by which to judge and classify visual art in terms of quality is less distinct, and not only because so many people think their kids could produce what they are looking at.

How many people outside of the gallery and museum world know what standards are applied in curating a show? Where exactly does your Pinterest page fall between the refrigerator and the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Where do you go to find out?

You could do worse than a sleepover at a museum.

Don’t Wait Up, I’m Going Cruisin’ With The Actors

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If you are in the entertainment business, it appears Netflix is shaping up to be the major nemesis. HBO is going to let you stream their series without cable as a way to respond to people dropping their cable subscriptions and shifting toward Netflix.  Movie theaters are vowing to refuse to screen the new Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon movie because it will be released on Netflix at the same time.

So what are live performance companies to do? It is pretty difficult to be ready to perform on demand. Sure recording your performance and posting it on YouTube is always an option, but you’re trying to perpetuate the benefits of attending events in person.

Well, I don’t know if it is THE answer, but one possible model for study might be found in a post on the HowlRound website this past July. Jean Ann Douglass and Eric John Meyer do theater in a truck. People buy tickets online and at 4:00 pm on the day of the show, they receive an email about where to find the truck.  Such an arrangement allows for the possibility of having a show centrally located to the bulk of your audience.

Now granted, with a capacity of only 15 people, the scale is a little small. However, as they point out, it allows a great deal of flexibility in positioning a performance.

Another appealing aspect of this work is the freedom it affords us as producers and presenters. We can rent our venue anytime, anywhere across the country

One of the key elements of their performances are bars with bathrooms. While the performance could theoretically be performed in any parking lot, the audience needs restroom facilities. At intermission, the audience is sent off to a nearby bar and when they return, they view a second, entirely different play. Then after the performance, you can have a drink with the performers.

There is a lot of potential for symbiotic relationship between bars, restaurants and other businesses in this performance model. There are probably a good number of places that would be happy to have a guarantee of 15 customers coming in at a known time.

Obviously, weather is a consideration since it can get too hot or cold in the back of a truck. However, I imagine anyone who was really serious about bringing performances into different neighborhoods in on a consistent basis would make the necessary alterations.

As I sit here, I have visions of the invention of entirely new ways to staging shows to accommodate the form of tractor trailers and shipping containers. Not to mention the rise of companies specializing in taming the acoustic qualities of these spaces.

After working wonderful performance halls, it is probably depressing to even contemplate having to resort to such rough conditions to provide the experience of live performance. But let us not forget that wagons were the primary delivery mode for performance once upon a time.

With the convention of performance hall audience behavior out the window, entirely new possibilities might open up with people using electronic devices and social media to interact with the performances. The novelty of going cruising with a performance troupe might be very appealing to people.

Guest Post: The Overhead Solution

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Back in June 2013, I wrote about the release of a letter by GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and BBB Wise Giving Alliance urging funders to discontinue the use of overhead ratios to measure the viability of non-profit organizations. They felt the number was an inaccurate assessment of  an organization’s effectiveness.

Since then, the subject of overhead ratio has appeared a number of times in my posts.

Recently, the GuideStar, Charity Navigator and BBB Wise Giving Alliance have released a second letter. This one is aimed at non-profits asking them to assist in the effort by educating their funders about the true costs of the programs and by providing alternative narratives about program effectiveness.

I was approached by GuideStar with a request to host a guest post on the subject. As this has been an area of interest for me, I was pleased to do so.

 

A Message From GuideStar President/CEO Jacob Harold

In 2013, I joined with partners at the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and Charity Navigator in writing an open letter to the donors of America explaining that “overhead ratios” are a poor way to understand nonprofit performance. We named this campaign “The Overhead Myth.”

I’m glad to report that the response to the campaign, including the original Overhead Myth letter to the donors of America, far exceeded our expectations. More than one hundred articles have been written about the campaign. It comes up every time I hold a meeting or give a talk. For many in the field, it’s been a deep affirmation of something they’ve known a long time. And, indeed, many leading organizations– the Donors Forum, Bridgespan, the National Council on Nonprofits, and others — have been working on the issue for a long time.

But we also know we have a long road ahead of us. The myth of overhead as inherently “wasteful” spending is deeply ingrained in the culture and systems of the nonprofit sector, and it will take years of concerted effort for us to move past such a narrow view of nonprofit performance to something that fully reflects the complexity of the world around us. That effort is essential, however, if we want to ensure that we have a nonprofit sector capable of tackling the great challenges of our time.

That’s why last week the CEOs of Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and I released a second Overhead Myth letter—this one addressed to the nonprofits of America. In that letter, we suggest a set of steps nonprofits themselves can take to help dispel the Overhead Myth. We all share responsibility for allowing things to have reached this pass.  And it will take all of us to fix it.

We direct this letter to nonprofits not because we feel they are the originators of the Overhead Myth but because they are in the best position to communicate with their donors and funders. We want to recruit nonprofits to help us retrain donors and funders to pay attention to what really matters: results.  In the end, that means nonprofits have to throw away the pie charts showing overhead versus program—and step up to the much more important challenge of communicating how they track progress against their mission.

In simple terms, we must—collectively—offer donors an alternative. In the letter, and on the accompanying website, we call on nonprofits to do three things as their part of this evolution:

  1. Demonstrate ethical practice and share data about their performance.
  2. Manage toward results and understand their true costs.
  3. Help educate funders (individuals, foundations, corporations, and government) on the real cost of results.

We have provided a list of tools and resources related to each of these goals. These tools give nonprofits tangible steps they can take to engage their stakeholders around this critical issue. As the sector develops new resources and tactics, we will add them to the website.

We believe it will take a shared effort to focus donors’ attention on what really matters: nonprofits’ efforts to make the world a better place. It doesn’t matter whether you work at a nonprofit or donate a few dollars to a favorite charity every year, please join us as we seek to move from the Overhead Myth to the Overhead Solution.

For more information, or if you have a resource related to this issue that can help advance the cause, please email overhead@guidestar.org.

 

— Jacob Harold is the president and CEO of GuideStar, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that connects people and organizations with information on the programs, finances, and impact of more than 1.8 million IRS-recognized nonprofits. GuideStar serves a wide audience inside and outside the nonprofit sector, including individual donors, nonprofit leaders, grantmakers, government officials, academic researchers, and the media.

This letter original appeared on PhilanTopic blog and is shared with their permission.[divider]

Art of Mathematics (Be Sure To Show Your Work)

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A recent building renovation on my campus by the math department offices saw the installation of blackboard walls. The goal was to provides students with a place to study and work on projects as a group.

Math hall

 

I am not sure if it was part of the original vision, but many of the boards have been used to illustrate the utility and beauty of math.

math answers 002

 

These are nowhere near the best examples of some of the content that has popped up. Since this hallway is in the administration building, I have had frequent occasion to pass by these boards.

As a person who has been confounded by math, I have been impressed by what an asset they seem to be for demystifying the subject. I have only understood about 1/3 of what has been posted, but the explanations that accompanied that 1/3 were often very entertaining as they facilitated my comprehension. The 2/3 I don’t understand at least gives the impression that it is interesting and enjoyable.

There has been one section that has stuck in my craw a bit…

if it is too hard...

 

I am not sure if this sentiment was created by any of the math students. Even though this particular hallway goes directly into “math territory” (the other hallway passes the offices of the Dean of Arts and Sciences and Office of University Communications), the general content is less mathematically focused.

This has been up for the last 8-10 weeks now and has remained unchanged while other sections have been erased and altered. One of the reasons it sticks in my craw is that it is immediately visible upon entering the administration building door so it is the first thing I have seen.

When this got posted on Facebook, someone pointed out the irony of this appearing on a wall full of art. And for that reason, it is a little difficult to justify going up and erasing it both as a matter of free speech and art censorship. There have been a number of works that either explicit or figuratively had a message that art sucks/is stupid.

I have nudged the chair of the fine arts department to deploy some students for a little counter-propaganda, but nothing has happened yet.

Perhaps the students are hard at work with their time consuming projects and rehearsals.

It comes as no surprise to anyone that arts disciplines face this bias. No one needed President Obama to make a comment about STEM majors being better for careers than art history, to come to this realization.

Ultimately though, the irritation I feel when I see this sentiment upon entering the administration building disappears when I make a left down the other hall and see the multi-colored attempts to use art to illuminate the mysteries of mathematics.

It really doesn’t matter if people are using these boards to insult the arts because the boards represent an effort to use a multi-disciplinary approach to education that has long been advocated for.

As we learned long ago on the internet, the intent of any effort that allows the for unmoderated contributions is bound to be co-opted at some point.

All In The Timing

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While I was at my state presenters’ conference last week, I was speaking to a colleague at a theater a couple hours away about possibly collaborating on advertising on public radio stations in whose coverage area both our theaters are in. My thinking was that people might be confused by separate ads. They might think, was that on Tuesday here in town and Wednesday 90 miles away or vice versa?

In the course of conversation, she mentioned they hadn’t announced that part of their season and would be waiting until January. (This was something of a relief for me because I hadn’t seen the show on their website and was afraid they backed out.)

She said they decided to break up their season and only announce half at one time in order to generate renewed excitement about the theater’s offerings. Unlike my venue, they don’t have any subscribers from whom they are seeking an ongoing investment. It sounded as if this is the first year they will be trying this as a bid to renew momentum for their programming so I don’t have any sense of how successful the approach is.

I was wondering if any one else had done this sort of thing and if they had any success with it. Are there any tips that you might have for catching attention and getting people excited, especially during the first year or two when people aren’t expecting to hear about a raft of new shows?

I just anticipate I may end up adopting similar tactics one day and there are probably a number of other readers who are ready to give it a try right now.

Many theaters are experimenting with different types of ticketing models from choose your own seasons, themed mini-seasons, punch cards allowing you to see any show in their season as many times as you like up to a limit or fewer times/shows with as many friends as you like.

I haven’t really heard about people playing with the timing of announcing groups of events in order to find an idea spacing. People would quickly become inured if you ANNOUNCED! EVERY! SINGLE! SHOW! WITH! GREAT! FANFARE!

But I am sure there are timing tricks that haven’t been widely explored. I imagine in snowier climes, if you announce a whole new group of offerings in January after the Christmas buzz has worn off and the winter doldrums have set in, your announcement might gain some traction.

Television networks abandoned announcing new seasons of series every Fall decades ago in favor of floating starts throughout the year. Is there a viable way to do something similar for live performances?

You Can Enter The Museum Without Entering the Museum

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I was quickly scanning a story about Harvard University president Drew Faust arguing for the value of university art museums when I was brought up short by a remark made by Director of the Harvard University Art Museums Thomas Lentz in anticipation of the reopening of the museums next month after a long renovation.

During the question and answer session, Lentz responded to a question about what Harvard’s reopened museums will offer by saying that the new museums are designed to be more accessible to students and community members.

“You can enter through one entrance and go out the other without actually entering the museum. The courtyard is going to be a new public gathering space,” he said. “We don’t want it to be a static treasure house.”

What caught me was the phrase about entering without entering the museum. After I went back to re-read the sentence, I realized that he meant you could enter the building complex without actually entering the museum.

I did try to find out more about these plans, but most of the other articles about the design didn’t really talk about how the building would be used by visitors. Harvard Magazine did have a pretty good story about the all around use of the facilities.

The courtyard Thomas Lentz seems to be referring to is this one. Nearly every article I read about this project features this space.

The Harvard Art Museums, during renovation and expansion, showing the Calderwood Courtyard.

I have been having conversations with my staff about making our lobby a more welcome gathering place just to provide a sense of belonging to those who may enter or pass through. One of the advantages we have is that there is a parking lot on one side of the lobby and the rest of campus on the other side.

So yes, you can enter through one entrance and go out the other without actually entering a theater space.

Over the last few months, I have been paying attention to what other arts organizations and businesses who provide public gathering spaces do to make these spaces welcoming. One thing that has become very clear is that no matter how nice the amenities you offer, if people don’t have a reason to enter, it is all for naught.

Its that whole issue about “Field of Dreams” being a movie. If you build it does not guarantee anyone will come.

From the pictures of the Harvard Museums, exterior surroundings I am not sure if there is a reason someone would pass through one door and move toward the other on the way to somewhere and be enticed to linger. Certainly curiosity about the renovations and word of mouth about how interesting the courtyard environment is may be enough to get things started. After activity reaches a critical mass, it can be self-sustaining.

A month ago I wrote about the Taipei Performing Arts Center and what a cool idea the public loop through the building with unprecedented views of backstage activities was. But even as I wrote about it, I wondered if people would really enter the building and avail themselves of the opportunity, even with the entrance extending over the street.

I haven’t been to Taiwan, but if their behavior is even half that of their mainland brethren, there is a pretty good chance the public loop will be packed with people.

For the rest of us though, people are only slightly more likely to flock to our lovely public lounging places than to our formal performances unless they have a reason to do so. Often the biggest factor in that decision is just the physical location and layout.

If it is difficult to park nearby and the location isn’t conducive to foot traffic, people may not wander in during the day or come early to relax prior to a performance. Nor may they linger long afterwards if their drive is long and traffic problematic.

On the other hand, creativity and an eye for opportunity in your particular environment might provide a solution. I had a colleague whose performance space was too small for any sort of pre- and post show gatherings. However, an empty storefront with convenient access to the theater turned out to be great as a coffee lounge situation, provided a sense of greater activity on the street and put a little money in the property owner’s pocket.

It probably goes without saying that while it is a marked improvement to increase the number of people passing through and lingering in your public spaces, you still need to give them a reason to engage with your programming. It doesn’t matter how good the courtyard of the Harvard Museums are, they can still end up being a “static treasure house” if people don’t have any reason to pass through the next threshold.

Keeping Audience’s Minds At The Event

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David Dombrosky was the plenary speaker at the Ohio Arts Presenters Network conference I attended this week.

At one point in his presentation, he used a chart that seemed very familiar and my first impulse was to wonder where he had grabbed it from. As I peered closer, I realized it was from a white paper his company, InstantEncore had put out this summer that I had downloaded but hadn’t made time to read yet.

Attending a conference is an expensive way to catch up on your reading….

Drombrosky talked about the growing prevalence of mobile devices, how they are the primary mode in which people are interacting with websites and how this is changing people’s expectations about their arts experience.

Dombrosky spent a fair amount of time underscoring the importance of responsive web design, a common topic of conversation lately. Drew McManus has been a long time proponent of it in the arts.

Drombrosky’s talk focused on the experiences being offered audiences, before, during and after an event. While he did mention tweet seats in passing, he didn’t really advocate for providing that type of experience.

He spoke about using technology to maintain a long held philosophy about what it should mean to attend an arts event, namely that the audience should be leaving the real world behind for a time. He related the words of one of his university instructors who talked about people disconnecting from the troubles of the world and being funneled into the world being created in the performance hall.

The problem is now that people can reconnect with the troubles of the world too easily at intermission. He suggested thinking about what sort of content that could be offered to keep audiences connected with the event. Among his suggestions were online program notes (which might replace the need to print programs), trivia about the artist, links to videos, places where albums can be purchased/downloaded. Perhaps create a forum or hashtag related to the event where people can discuss their experiences.

The availability of these resources can help keep people engaged while they are at the performance and allow them to continue to be connected to the performance and your organization after the event if they wish to do so.

He mentioned the Austin Symphony Orchestra has an “ask the conductor” program where you can submit a question during the show and the conductor will return a response. (Though in reality it is probably someone standing next to the conductor transcribing his response, of course)

Apparently the Detroit Symphony Orchestra encouraged people to take selfies around the concerts which not only kept people engaged with the event, but changed the symphony board’s perception of the audience demographics.

I haven’t read the white paper InstantEncore produced, but from what Dombrowsky said, more details about these case studies are included in it.

Info You Can Use: When Is Your Arts Career Not A Hobby?

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There was a very interesting article on the Forbes website which explored the point at which the IRS determines your arts career is actually a job and not a hobby.

Since you can deduct job related expenses to a greater degree than hobby related expenses, the distinction is rather important to an artist.

And while a taxpayer may deduct expenses of a trade or business in excess of the profit earned by the business, thus generating a net loss, a hobby may only deduct its expenses to the extent of the profits of the activity; in other words, the hobby cannot generate a net loss.

The article author Tony Nitti, lists the 9 point test that the IRS uses the make the distinction. In the article he discusses a specific case where the IRS was challenging the filing of an artist and provides examples of how each question of the test would be applied in this case.

Later, he talks about how this particular artist’s career met the criteria of each of the test questions.

Something I found notable was that usually in these cases, a person has a steady job and then engages in a side activity which they subsidize with the income from their regular job.

In this artist’s case, she was an artist for about 20 years before she was hired on to the faculty of a college. The IRS was suggesting that her artistic career which preceded the steady job was the hobby.

This is one of the reasons I feel the article is valuable. For a great many practicing artists, this will be the path their career takes. It is only when they have proven their worth after some period of activity that they may be offered work on a consistent basis.

Now I should note, as Nitti does, that the reason the IRS was looking at this artist was because of the types of things she was claiming are expenses. That issue still has to be resolved in a separate hearing. Most artists probably shouldn’t worry about being targeted by the IRS.

The hearing about whether her artistic career was a career or a hobby has been completed. Nitti’s discussion about why her activities met the criteria is an important read. Even though this case addresses the career of a visual artist, it doesn’t take much effort to see how it applies to other disciplines.

Basically, if you keep adequate records, educate yourself about the market, consult with market experts, price your work to make a profit and have an expectation that work you are currently doing (which I suspect would apply to rehearsing and practicing) will eventually make a profit, then you might have a career as an artist!

Obviously it isn’t as simple as that summary so read the article.

Info You Can Use: Take A Look At The Broadway Books

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Though I don’t cite him very often, I keep an eye on the blog of Broadway producer Ken Davenport because he tends to ask questions about how Broadway can do a better job of serving the public.

We often see Broadway as a monolithic behemoth to whose gravitational pull most theaters are subject to some degree. It is interesting to see someone talking about how the business process in NYC might not be living up to its potential and gain insight into some of the inner workings.

In the next two weeks Davenport is going to conduct webinars breaking down the budgets of a Broadway show. These will be held on October 22 and 29, both from 7-8 pm EDT with a recording posted afterward. (my emphasis)

Over those two nights, I’ll walk you through my philosophies of budgeting, a strategy to make sure you come in under budget on every single one of your shows, and most importantly I will walk you through each and every line and page of an actual Broadway budget.

In other words, if a budget is the engine of a Broadway show, I’m going to pop the hood, take apart the motor piece by piece, and then put it back together again . . . so you not only understand how it works, but so you can build your own.

[…]

It’s going to be fun, and if you’re a numbers guy/gal, you’ll really love it. If you’re not a numbers guy/gal, well, all the more reason for you to sign up, because budgeting is where so many shows go wrong. It is the business blueprint of your production.

I emphasize this second to last sentence because even if you never think you will ever mount a Broadway show, this is an opportunity to have someone talk about a budgeting process for a performance.

For everyone who talks about transitioning away from the non-profit arts business model, this is a good opportunity to gain insight into what factors you need to consider in the commercial realm, even if you are already pondering a third (or fifth) alternative.

Info You Can Use: Change That Contract!

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I thought I would talk a little about performance contracts today. It may not have been in relation to performance contracts, but I recently read that many people are under the impression that when they receive a contract they either meet the conditions or no deal is possible.

This may be true for the terms of service presented with every computer app and service out there, but isn’t necessarily so in a great many areas of life.

The reality is that contracts for performances are often a lot like dating. There are non-negotiable conditions and then there is a lot of aspirational conditions reflecting an ideal scenario. Knowing which is which is a matter of experience, but you won’t get that experience until you start to ask.

For example, when we do Broadway shows, there are certain stage dimensions that the tour requires. Most of the time, we are pretty close, but if we aren’t we can still do the show. It is just that the production makes a decision about what set pieces will remain on the truck.

Similarly, nearly every Broadway show technical rider we receive asks for a 36 foot tall Genie lift and 2 sets of washers and dryers. We have a lift that can reach 19 feet and only one washer and dryer set. No one has ever balked about doing the show based on that.

There are some stages which will be too small to accommodate a show or lack sufficient equipment, but productions know that every venue is different and will undertake all sorts of contortions to make the show happen.

On the other hand, if they say you have to have 50 people with various qualifications onsite at 8:00 am to help unload and set up the stage, they mean it. They will either fine you for not having enough stagehands or stop constructing the set until enough people are present–often both.

These guys left a venue at 2 am the night before and arrived on your doorstep at 8 am and tonight they will be leaving at 2 am to start it all over again. They have little tolerance for situations which will make their job harder or more hazardous.

In terms of the legal content of the contract where it talks about liability, force majeure obligations and indemnifications, you might feel a little intimidated by the formality of the language and feel you have little recourse but to accept.

In fact, this is the place where you should be looking very closely to make sure you are not placed at a severe disadvantage. Most force majeure clauses I have seen are reasonable and equitable in acknowledging the impact of severe weather and other unavoidable emergencies. Then there are some where you could have a meteor smash into your building and you would have to make payment in full plus an additional inconvenience fee.

Be careful about taking a claim of “industry standard clause” at face value.  Ask colleagues or post a question on a discussion forum if you are uncertain or confused about a section of a contract.

However, there are people working at standardizing performance contracts. The Broadway League has created a form booking contract that now seems to accompany every tour of a Broadway show we present.

Given that these contracts are among the longest I deal with, having nine pages which is the same from show to show is a great boon. You make your changes, save it and send it along with every new show. Then you are only left with combing through four-five show specific pages and 15-20 pages of the tech rider. That may seem like a lot of work still remaining, but the nine pages of the form booking agreement tend to have most of the complicated legal language.

Don’t get overly worried if your changes to a contract make it look like a rainbow spiderweb of insertions, deletions, reversals and counter signatures. It is not uncommon for a contract to look something like the below.

contract capture

This is just a visual example of what a marked up contract might look like only. Most of the change notation placements make little logical or legal sense. I applied them very loosely and even obscured other parts of the contract. These are just examples of the type of notations that commonly appear on a contract and how crowded it might appear with deletions, additions and alternative language proposals.

The STET by the way means to reverse the change. It is often used to indicate that a person doesn’t agree with the change in its entirety and wants it restored to its previous state. (Which, it should be noted, may not necessarily be its original state.)

Every change that is made should be initialed and dated by both parties before either signs off on the contract. It is also wise to keep a clean copy of the original document and save each version of the contract as a separate file. I strongly suggest springing for Adobe Acrobat so you can edit PDF documents electronically and easily reverse them. Otherwise you will go crazy trying to replicate all the changes for every iteration.

Of course, there is no guarantee that your changes will be accepted. You should just feel you have an ability to negotiate reasonable conditions.

While this entry is only meant to address a small segment of contracting and to do so from the presenter point of view, I was considering using this as a basis for an entry for Drew McManus’ ArtsHacker project.

With that in mind, I would be interested in knowing what other information would make this or a related entry useful to a reader. What questions might you have?

Same Old Library Building, Different Content

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CityLab had an article on the changing role of libraries in communities which was based on a longer piece about the Columbus (OH) Metropolitan Library (CML).

As I have mentioned before, I frequent my local library so often that the staff anticipates my needs (or they are stalking me) so I am a big fan of the institutions already.

What caught my attention was the informal survey the Columbus library did asking people on Facebook “to share five words describing their childhood libraries and five words describing how they imagine libraries two decades from now.”

The word clouds that resulted from this survey appear in both articles. While books, reading, information, research and learning figure heavily in the childhood word cloud, community, technology, information, entertainment, access and meeting emerge for the libraries of the future. While some of the childhood words lose their prominence in the vision of 20 years hence, their weight is still on par with strongest future concepts.

The Facebook survey CML used seems like an interesting exercise to engage in for trying to discern how your community sees their relationship with your organization changing. Paper or in person surveying might be required if you don’t have the 36,000 Facebook likes and 800,000 card carrying members that CML has.

The CityLab article uses CML’s results to complement a report released by the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries. Among the findings that CityLab emphasizes are:

People: The library must “shift away from building collections to building human capital.” This not only refers to the users of the public library but also its librarians, who will act as curators of the library’s content.

Place: The public library of the future is both a physical and virtual place. While the latter gets emphasized—perhaps overly so—in discussions about the future, the physical structure of the public library will remain vital to its community. But its purpose will change: “The physical library will become less about citizens checking out books and more about citizens engaging in the business of making their personal and civic identities.”

[…]

Platform: America’s public libraries should become community learning platforms. They should serve as a jumping-off point for users to create, learn, and innovate…

If this language about staff acting as curators; the role of space and how it is used; and providing a jumping-off point for creativity, innovation and learning sounds familiar, it is probably because the same concepts have been bubbling around conversations in relation to the arts.

So it may bear paying attention to what libraries are doing these days and consider whether it is worth partnering closely with them to reach common goals.

Everybody Gets To Learn From Their Mistakes

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An underlying theme of many of my posts has been about the importance of acknowledging that failure and mistakes are part of the artistic development process. A recent post by Justin Brady on The Creativity Cultivator reminds us that the same allowances need to be made across the whole of an organization.

Brady likens the situation to a type of corporate helicopter parenting:

He hired some brilliant people, but brilliant people are the result of many years of learning through failure. These brilliant employees weren’t aloud to perform the very human trait that made them brilliant to begin with: Judgement free failure and the freedom to fix and learn from that failure. Jim’s a great guy, and we all have blind spots, but his constant monitoring and willingness to “swoop in” and fix everything was making a culture where trust is more scarce than my dog’s obedience training when a guest comes over.

Employees pick up on patterns like this and begin to not even trust themselves. Upon the first sign of frustration they will just let Jim fix the problem. This creates a very “busy” culture, where Jim is constantly being pulled in every direction putting out fires. It also causes great employee to begin to resent their leader and each other.

Whether the back office is staffed by “true believers” of your discipline or not, the tolerant, patient culture has to permeate all levels of the organization and not stop at the studio/rehearsal hall door.

Encouraging those identified as artists/creatives to experiment and not be afraid of failure and holding everyone else to regimented procedures creates two classes of employees. Certainly different groups within the organization need to be treated differently according to their function, but if you view some jobs as disposable functions that anyone can do, then the result is likely to be disposable.

As I write this, I realize that one of the problems we are currently facing with two people who have rotated into our building is probably that they view their function as interchangeable with colleagues in other parts of the university. In fact, we keep telling them that the function they serve for us is important and noticed.

When you are hiring new staff, regardless of the position, you need to know that you are looking for the right person for your organization and you need to make the new hire aware of that fact as well. (Presumably those qualifications aren’t entirely a willingness to do the work of five for the pay of three-quarters of a person.) Then you have to do as Brady suggests and give them the room to fail and make things right for the organization.

All You Can Smile For Just $25!

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When the entertainment tax in Spain skyrocketed, attendance at shows fell precipitously. To lure people back, one comedy theater company instituted a program where people would only pay if they laughed. According to an article on Springwise, the seats were outfitted with cameras and facial recognition software.

Every time you laughed, the account associated with your seat is charged 30 euro cents. So that people wouldn’t intentionally restrain themselves as the show progressed, the charge was capped at 80 laughs or 24 Euros.

They also instituted a season ticket where you bought “laughs” rather than performances. Since other theaters around Spain are adopting this system, I wonder if the laughter season tickets are redeemable at any participating venue.

The video accompanying the article suggests a pay per cry for tragedy and a pay per WTF! when attending an avant garde piece.

While those last suggestions are a little tongue in cheek, the system helped the theater raise their income by $28,000 Euros over what was normally taken.

Now certainly this specific system isn’t suitable for all genres of performance. It wouldn’t work for symphony concerts unless you were charging for all the time people weren’t fidgeting, coughing or consulting their cellphones. (Though penalizing people for pulling out their cellphones does have a certain appeal!)

However, the general concept does answer what is often a significant barrier to participation in an unfamiliar experience–“What if I don’t like it?”

I also like the idea that you could purchase “experiences” that might be transferable from venue to venue. That way a state arts council or tourism board could sell experiences redeemable at all the arts organizations around the state.

Then if you lived near a museum, you could go in on one day and visit a couple galleries and only be charged per gallery you entered or by each work you viewed for more than a few minutes. You could come back a week later and visit another gallery. By the time you are finished, you feel you have gotten your money’s worth on your own schedule and didn’t have to pay multiple times for re-entry. (I am specifically thinking of the recent complaints about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s voluntary admission fee.)

All this being said, I am not sure how best to accomplish this operationally. If there is going to be pay for reaction, I think it has to be more streamlined and elegant than attaching iPads to the back of theater seats as seen in the video. Though I do see the value in allowing people to see themselves reacting and share it on social media, I would be concerned about damage or theft.

What might be viable are some sort of disposable medical sensor placed on the face to determine when muscles formed a smile or heart rate changed or when someone stood up and started dancing.

The more I think about this, the smarter I think it is. If you cap out the cost at the price you would have normally charged, if people reach or exceed that cap, there is quantitative data to back up the fact they enjoyed themselves…or that they got a bargain and should have paid more for enjoying themselves as much as they did.

Of Lab Mice and Men

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I was listening to the radio yesterday when they mentioned the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. I was amazed to learn the researchers had gained some insight in to how we navigate the world around us. The whole concept seems too ineffable to be grasped. But indeed the researchers gained at least a toehold on it.

What really got me was that this development was based on a discovery one of the researchers made in 1971 and then bolstered by a discovery the other two award recipients made in 2005.

Now I am sure each has experienced many other developments in their research and that these discoveries informed other areas of research. But it left me pondering at the patience and belief involved in scientific research to wait over 30 years for some other piece of research that complements and validates your own. Then wait nearly a decade more for people to vet both pieces of research and recognize the significance.

Again I am not saying this is the only thing the researchers have accomplished in their careers and that they only received validation when they were awarded the Noble Prize.

I just feel somewhat humbled by the idea that research is being done with the faith that it may contribute to a profound discovery.

Scientists and artists pursue their vocations differently so it isn’t fair to try to compare the two directly. Still, how many of us in the arts, practitioners and funders alike, are instilled with a vision of what we want to accomplish that spans decades and have the patience to see it through?

Certainly the arts operate much more reactively than science as times and tastes change.

When you are worried about next year’s funding, it can be difficult to cleave to a long term vision of where you want to be.

I am not sure if scientists have a grand master vision either rather than focusing on progressing from one project to the next. My perception is that there is a greater acknowledgment that progress takes time and there is a greater willingness to accord them that time.

On the other hand, artists can be sustained by a similar thought that a performance given today may plant seeds that manifest into something of international note decades down the road.

Why Here? Why Now?

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You may have seen that the St. Louis Symphony experienced a pop-up protest urging a change of attitude in light of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.

I have looked at reporting on this event on Huffington Post, NPR and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

None of them answered the biggest question that came to mind–Why did they choose to do this at a St. Louis Symphony concert? Are there people from Ferguson who attend the concert that they hoped to influence?

The Washington Post article quotes one of the organizers as saying they wanted to “speak to a segment of the population that has the luxury of being comfortable,..”

But I wondered if that was their only aim or if they are hoping for something more. It seems like a lot of effort to jar people out of the comfort zone.

My assumption, which may be incorrect, was that it was perceived that people of influence in general attend symphony concerts and the planners of this intermission event hoped to mobilize the attendees to act either directly or indirectly. Is this at least a partial acknowledgment that a symphony still wields some relevance?

Perhaps their aim was simply to reinforce their parting message that black lives matter.

I doubt the answers to any of these questions are clearcut because there are complicated issues of racial and social demographics and power dynamics entwined with Ferguson, the symphony attendees and the flash mob.

As to whether they were successful or not is a matter of gauging whether more people were applauding than were visibly displeased.

Two weeks ago I wrote about my participation in an NEA webinar that stressed the value of the arts in healing communities. As I watched the video of this flash mob today, I wondered if the St. Louis Symphony had been recruited to serve as a convener for a conversation without their knowledge.

Is this an opportunity for the St. Louis Symphony or some other arts organization to facilitate a conversation about the issues facing the greater community?

Wherein I Speak of Chocolate Chip Cookies and Zombies (But Mostly Cookies)

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My mother sent me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies today. This sort of thing has been going on for a few years. She has been finding these new cookie recipes which she swears are better than the old recipes and she sends them to me.

Frankly, I am not having it. Maybe it is due to the temperature differences en route to my house, but when I eat the cookies she mails me, I can’t believe she is claiming these are better than the ones I grew up on. It isn’t just the taste. The texture and general consistency of the cookies are all wrong.

I will eat other cookies, but when it comes time to make cookies to give to others, I am sticking to the old proven recipes in my book.

I am sure we all have something in our lives we are attached to in this manner. Something that we have an emotional attachment to for which we will accept no substitutes.

And maybe you can see where I am going with this. I bring this up to remind you that this is a powerful factor to contend with when we are trying to energize programming with new and challenging content.

Last week we opened the season with a guy who does a great job channeling Frank Sinatra who was joined by three guys who used to be in some of the Motown groups of the 60s. It was a great show and a lot of fun. I was dancing in the wings backstage. We had a great sized audience. As an opening show it really set the tone for the rest of the season.

As people left the performance they were telling me it was the best thing they had seen in a long time here. I have been hearing the same thing over the course of the last week. It hasn’t just been people who attended the show. Their friends and kids have been telling me they were told the same thing.

My perception is that it was a great show, but the best thing that has appeared here in a long time…I don’t know about that.

Though I admit I was backstage so I didn’t get the full impact of the show. Those guys all understood the power of showmanship and connecting with the audience so I don’t doubt everyone felt they had a quality experience.

We can talk about innovating our programs, educating and engaging audiences with new ideas. It is easy to forget that there is often a “homemade chocolate chip cookies” grade emotional attachment involved in some of the content we offer.

By no means do older audience members lack the interest and curiosity to participate in innovative approaches to art. They certainly have expectations of their experience that are rooted in the present.

But they also tend to have a much stronger emotional investment in their experience than younger audiences.

After the show last week, I received a call from a long time attendee who told me what he liked and disliked about the performance and then proceeded to complain about last season. One of his objections was to the profanity in West Side Story, a show that first hit Broadway over 50 years ago when this gentleman was in his 20s.

Yes, he may be a cranky old man that needs to recognize that honest portrayals of life include profanity. Maybe it isn’t healthy to be dwelling on gripes for 6+ months, but it is also a sign of an investment in what we do that isn’t exhibited by younger audiences.

It may be that we need to shift thinking and practices to engage younger audiences instead of being entrenched in practices of the past that appeal only to older audiences. But it also may be that societal dynamics have shifted to a place where it is unrealistic to expect that level of investment from people any longer.

Just think about how long bands like the Rolling Stones have endured. Then try to identify a group that has emerged in the last decade that has engendered a relationship with audiences that will sustain their zombie corpses.

Current efforts to sustain performing arts organizations may or may not correctly be compared to attempts to keep a corpse animated. I think we talk so much about the financial aspects of keeping an organization operational that it is easy to forget that it is more than just money keeping things going.

There is an emotional investment that accompanies the money and in some respects, it is much easier to find alternative sources of funding than it is to replace the value of that emotional investment.

The Arts Are For Swingers

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Do you ever sit in your office, thinking wistfully of the days when you were a kid and you would run around the playground, playing games and swinging on the swings?

Do you think your audience is thinking the same thing?

Well apparently some folks at Boston’s Convention Center were thinking along those lines because they built a temporary playground for adults on one of their lawns.

The playground is temporary because the convention center plans to expand on to that land in about 18 months. However, it is being used as something of a proof of concept testing ground.

The BCEC, Sasaki and Utile figured, why not test out some concepts for what should be the permanent park, further south on D Street towards residential South Boston?

The playground contains a “set of 20 lighted oval swings, bocce, ping pong, beanbag toss, Adirondack chairs, a sound stage, and open-air bar” and has become wildly popular.

Like the community ovens I wrote about a week or so ago, this is another idea for the type of thing that can be done to increase community engagement.

Now, according to one of the commenters on the article, the playground in Boston cost around $1.1 million which seems a little expensive for a project with an 18 month life span. Though maybe the equipment will migrate to the permanent park.

Many cities are seeing quick pop-up parks appearing on their streets.

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation in Philadelphia set up an amazing looking pop up park for the summer. It was slated to close September 1 but got extended an entire month due to popular demand.

Brooklyn’s Prospect Park has a pop-up Audubon program aimed at kids. Huntsville, AL will have activities popping up along their streets this month.

If you look at the pictures associated with each of the projects, you will see that they run the gamut from ambitiously expensive to simple and versatile.

Pop up events like this can be used to inspire community action as well as a tool for direct engagement. While reading about pop-ups, I learned that a community in Dallas dressed up a street with benches, trees and pop up shops for a day to provide evidence for its potential. (If you are looking to use this for community improvement, check out Better Block.)

One of the commenters on the Boston Convention Center park story shared this video of a fun installation on the streets of Montreal where people generated music as they played on the swings.

[vimeo 97090808 w=500 h=281]

Montreal’s 21 Swings (21 Balançoires) from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

Transform Into…SUPER THEATER!!!!!!!

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Andrew Taylor tweeted today that he would be speaking about theater spaces this week in Taipei and linked to a video of the Taipei Performing Arts Center.

At first I thought Andrew was going to be speaking there, but then realized the building hasn’t been completed yet.

Watching the video, I was interested to see that the design by Rem Koolhaas addresses many recent discussion points about how building design can either engage or alienate audiences. Starting at around 1:35 the video talks about how the street runs right into the building. Even more intriguing is the inclusion of a “Public Loop” which allows the general public to pass through and apparently peek in on the different performance and production work spaces around the building.

I imagine they would have to have some well trained staff present to prevent flash photography of a performance while allowing passersby to view what was transpiring. But more importantly than that, it seems to allow the public an opportunity to see what transpires backstage in the scene shop, costume shop and perhaps even in the fly system of a theater.

The public loop doesn’t seem to be comprised entirely of darkened hallways that visitors shuffle through. There appear to be open spaces where visitors can sit and relax for a time.

One element that came as a bit of a surprise was their “Super Theater” configuration mentioned around 4:30. It allows them to take down the walls between two of the spaces to create a massive warehouse like space. They cite the fact that B.A. Zimmerman’s Die Soldaten requires a 100 meter stage. (Yes, that is right, approximately the length of a football field.)

It may seem like a lot of construction expense to accommodate a niche use until you recall that productions like Sleep No More, The Donkey Show and their ilk use large open spaces like this.

The building exterior is rather strange looking and has its detractors. My immediate concern was if the difficulty and cost of transforming the building might make such a transformation more of an aspiration than a reality.

As I wrote this post, I recalled another transforming theater, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. It turns out that facility was also designed by Rem Koolhaas so his company has some experience with this process. As you can see in this video, it takes 11 stagehands six hours to transform that the Wyly Theatre. I imagine Taipei might require more people and closer to a day, but that probably isn’t an impediment.

I wrote about the design of the Wyly a few years back. As you can see in the video where Joshua Prince-Ramus explains the design, that building also highly flexible and has many engaging elements to it. It allows people to enter or exit through its very walls, or perhaps even sit outside and watch a performance (or rehearsal) inside.

In the context of all this, I am curious to learn what Andrew Taylor talks about in Taipei this week. Not to mention how successful the Taipei Performing Arts Center is at engaging their formal and informal audiences.

Artist conception of rival theater companies competing for market share
Artist conception of rival theater companies competing for market share

Community Now, Arts Education Later

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I listened in on an National Endowment for the Arts webinar today that was billed as addressing arts education. But the reality was, the speaker, Richard Harwood of the Harwood Institute seemed to feel arts education shouldn’t be a primary concern in most communities. From what I understood, he felt that the arts had much more immediate assets they could provide to communities and arts education was a focus for a later stage.

The NEA will post a more complete version of the webinar in a couple weeks. However, if you are interested in learning more immediately, there is a captioning transcript available of the session. I was monitoring it while I took notes of my own to help me keep up. Be warned that there are some omissions and mistakes. [NB the audio is now available online]

As a result, I will mostly be paraphrasing here unless I am confident that what I am quoting is reasonably accurate.

Harwood echoed part of the current conversation about making arts relevant in a community, namely that the focus has to be on the shared aspirations of the community and not on those of an individual organization or group of organizations.

He mentioned how he would often hear comments from people wondering why a program that worked for a community down the road didn’t work for their own. The reason is that you can’t borrow something from another community that is not aligned with the shared aspirations of your own.

“Communities that move forward the fastest are ones who align around shared aspirations, not simply coordination of programs…”

As he has traveled the country, Harwood said the number one issue he hears people mention isn’t foreclosure of homes, inability to pay college tuition or that they have lost their jobs. The top concern was that we need to restore our belief that we can come together to get things done.

Harwood strongly urged listeners

“…to think about what it is that enables us to create the belief we can come together to get things done. I think there are ways to change our efforts so we embody that belief. We need to pay attention to the narrative of our communities. I don’t need to tell you how important this is.”

Among the narratives that have to be worked against are the idea “we tried that 30 years ago, why would we try it again?” or “I am waiting for the next mayor to get elected.” He said that Americans have retreated from public life because “They didn’t see their reality reflected in public discourse. Belief starts with a notion something you care about that I care about matters.”

This was really the first time I heard someone talk about the challenge facing arts and arts education in the context of a societal malaise. Looking at it in this context, the cultural wars of that 80s that have seen a recent resurgence aren’t so much about people hating arts and culture. It is that arts and culture is being used as a whipping boy for something much larger.

In a sense, I think we all know that, but until Harwood spent close to 30 minutes talking about the problem without really mentioning the arts at all, I didn’t recognize that the tensions really aren’t about the arts at all. It is about a lack of trust and belief in one another. The way he talks about it, arts and culture have bigger contributions to make than providing music lessons and an enjoyable Friday date night. The arts can be instrumental in mending society.

He says every community has a multiplicity of competing narratives. The question isn’t how to resolve the competing narratives, but rather to illuminate them. Explore how we understand the narratives. What do the arts bring to them and what do arts bring to how people express these narratives.

He uses an example of Youngstown, OH where his company was brought in after the public schools were taken over by the state. As they engaged adults around education they heard that the adults were afraid of the kids. They crossed the street when they saw the young people. When they looked into the eyes of the children, they didn’t see the essential qualities needed to succeed. All they saw were troublemakers who would end up behind bars. They didn’t see them as the future of the community.

When they talked to the kids, they basically agreed that this was how the adults saw them. It is at this point that Harwood explicitly says that if we are really concerned about kids and arts education, the kids need to be engaged around who they want to be and how they see adults in their lives.

You might ask about arts education, but Harwood says he would never start with the arts. It is the job of the arts community to figure out how the arts can fit into what they want to become so they can reach their potential, become creative, innovative and express themselves.

Basically, you don’t try to figure out how to get them to fit into the arts.

When it comes to involving children and the arts, Harwood feel that what the arts offer that few others don’t is the power to convene. They have the power to bring people together in these conversations.

He says, (and I hope I am getting this correct because the transcript is a little spotty), he “thinks the arts, unlike a lot of other things, is not fundamentally about policy disputes. It is about creating something.” Due to this, he feels the whole focal point begins to shift because the fact art is about expression can help create norms for kids. Including the norm of what does it mean to create something.

He notes, arts deal with the whole child. So much else only deals with one piece so addressing the whole child can be a huge calling card for arts in education.

Obviously, a lot of interesting things to think about. As I suggest, putting arts education as part of a later step after other divisions have been healed shifted my perspective. I realized that culture wars conflict about the arts is really a symptom of something much bigger.

As narcissistic as many arts professionals may be, I think we can survive knowing it ain’t all about us in this case.

You Got Questions, We Got Answers

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Last Wednesday was Ask A Curator Day in which over 700 international museums participated, answering questions about their collections and museums in general.

The effort reminded me of an article I saw on The Guardian’s website last summer suggesting arts and cultural organizations use Reddit as a way to talk about their organization.

I will admit that other than viewing a few AMAs (Ask Me Anything) by notable folks over the course of a year, I don’t visit Reedit too much.

Which is not to say it wouldn’t be valuable for me to do so or be something more suitable to your circumstances than mine.

If you visit the Theatre reddit, you will see there are all sorts of messages from audition questions, advertisements, obituaries and a couple people mentioning Howard Sherman’s article about the high school teacher who got fired over Spamalot.

There are a number of related sub-reddits associated with theatre that provide discussions with a more specific focus.

One of the features the Guardian article really focuses on is the Ask Me Anything section where people make themselves available to have others ask questions of them. Right now at the top of the list is a Holocaust Survivor, a nun who help women victimized by the Lord’s Resistance Army and the actor Simon Pegg.

There are also EMTs from Pennsylvania, professional mountain bikers and an American kid playing football in England listed so the topics don’t have to be weighty or the participants famous in order to participate.

Reddit AMAs provide a better forum for Q&As than Twitter because there is more room and you don’t have responses scrolling up your screen as you and the participants type and the discussions can occur over time. You can provide a link to your AMA so that people know where to find you and they can view a record of the conversation when it is over if they are unable to participate during the scheduled period.

Let Them Bake Bread!

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At a loss about how to forge closer bonds between the community and your organization? Let them bake bread!

Not only do you have the example of Bread and Puppet Theater, to inspire you but there is a growing trend of communal ovens across the country.

I recently read an article about how such an oven was helping to revive a dilapidated park in Toronto.

This caused me to recall a seeing Braddock, PA Mayor John Braddock discuss a similar community oven his city set up. The oven was one of the cornerstones in the city’s plan to revitalize itself.

When I conducted a search to see where things stood now, I came across a story of a Torontonian studying nearby in Pittsburgh who was working on the Braddock oven as part of a fellowship.

If you read the article, you will see that like any project, a community oven isn’t quite as simple as it seems. The Braddock oven is being rebuilt/replaced because it isn’t as efficient as it could be. People have to be trained to use it correctly. The wood has to be seasoned and of the right type.

At the same time, the Canadian grad student, Shauna Kearns, has helped to forge community partnerships to get the rebuild accomplished.

With sustainability becoming an area of increased focus, (that was the basis of Shauna Kearns’ fellowship), participating/partnering in a community oven can be bolster organizational identity in the community.

Info You Can Use: You Can Hack Being An Arts Administrator

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Drew McManus is fulfilling one of my ambitions.

When I was first starting out this blog, I envisioned creating some sort of repository of information about arts and arts administration that people could consult.

It should be noted that I was unemployed when I started this blog nearly 11 years ago so I had a lot of time on my hands to be ambitious. That plan never panned out. Getting a job and getting really busy sort of diverted my focus from that.

However, despite being quite busy with his job as a consultant, Drew McManus has deluded concluded that trolling through 990 filings and evaluating the effectiveness of orchestra websites aren’t monopolizing enough of his time.

Drew has decided to create an Arts Administration version of Lifehacker. He is looking for people to be contributors to this effort. If you are interested, sign up on his website.

To my mind, everyone has something to contribute. If you are a student in college, you can contribute tips on engaging your friends and colleagues.

If you live outside the U.S. there are plenty of challenges we face in common and plenty of insights from your particular experiences that can be of value.

In that vein, I wanted to call attention to a course being offered free online by Stanford “How To Start A Start up” It is being hosted by Sam Altman of the venture firm Y Combinator. The course speakers are a who’s who of Silicon Valley.

It isn’t directly arts related, but there will obviously be some commonalities with arts business. Among the topics are building company culture, how to operate, how to manage and how to raise money. Everyone keeps talking about the need for a shift in thinking in the arts and this may spur some different approaches.

After learning about this class, I did a survey of all the Massive Open Online Courses being offered by different entities around the country -MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Coursera etc. No one offers anything related to arts administration that I could see. The only online arts administration program I am aware of is the Certified Performing Arts Executive program at University of New Orleans.

[N.B. Dang it! Nina Simon made a liar of me pointing out this course on arts innovation. It didn’t show up on my search because it started the day before.]

Given the lack of any centralized source of information, tips and tricks related to arts administration, a resource like the one Drew is proposing is sorely needed.

Please consider signing up to make a contribution. With your help, a lot of people will be able to hack being arts administrators

We Make Cancellations Look Easy

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It is fortunate that I am not often able to relate how I personally handled a crisis. However, we recently ran into a situation where we had a signed commitment for a show and the attraction backed out.

We were fortunate in that the event falls near the end of our season so we have plenty of time to communicate the change. In addition, we were able to replace it with another performance around the same date.

This sounds all very simple which is great for public relations because it appears that everything is being handled with grace and aplomb.

The reality is, you don’t realize the limitations of your ticketing software until you try to do a refund of one event on a subscription package. I am glad I had created a choose your own flex subscription package this year. Otherwise, our only option would have been to cancel all the seats for the subscriber and replace them with full price tickets–not something that maintains good relations with the audience.

Obviously, had it not existed already, we could have gone in an retroactively created a structure similar to what we had in place for the flex subscription.

The other issue is that now these people who got refunds are not recognized as subscribers by the ticketing system so their seats won’t automatically carry over to next season. We have had to keep track of those subscribers so that we can lock in their seats again next year.

I don’t list all this in order to vent my frustration at the ticketing system we use, but rather to illustrate some of the hurdles involved with problems like these. (I haven’t even mentioned the difficulties of trying to process cash refunds through a university system.)

The audience should never know about these problems. There was a moment where people in the box office were saying “Well, we will have to tell the subscribers that next year they will have to….” I emphasized the steps we would do instead so that the concept that asking for a refund might result in the loss of seats one held for 10 years was never introduced to the subscriber.

In order to inform our ticket buyers about the change, we sent out releases and went on the radio to make people aware of the substitution and ask them to watch their mail boxes for letters outlining their options. After the letters went out, we followed up a week later with an email mentioning the same options.

One positive element to this situation was that we could use the tickets we already issued for the replacement show. The ticket scanners will register them correctly. Since many people consult their tickets for the show dates, we included pre-printed stickers in the letters that could be placed over their tickets to remind them about the correct date.

Since most tickets to this event have been purchased by full season subscribers, we offered the option of either buying tickets to one of two non-season shows at a steep discount or receiving a refund.

Now my hope was that by putting the refund option last, we wouldn’t get a lot of people who wanted refunds. Out of the hundreds of tickets we have sold already, we have only had to refund around 10 which represents about 5-6 people, but that still is more than I would have liked personally.

My other goal in offering discount tickets was to generate good will and awareness. I figured there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy with the replacement show and wouldn’t want a refund. However, by apologizing for the inconvenience and offering a discount on other shows, we will hopefully rise in their estimation.

In addition, there have been some who were not aware that these shows weren’t part of their season subscription despite our efforts to differentiate them so the letter helped reinforce this.

We haven’t had too many people take advantage of the discounted tickets at this point. While I always want to be selling tickets, our immediate goal was to at least maintain goodwill.

One last thing we did was set a time limit on when you could request a refund or purchase discounted tickets. Since the show is more than 6 months away, we didn’t want to have a deluge of people calling for refunds a week before because they decided not to attend at the last minute. The date we set was 6 weeks after the letter was mailed out and I expect we will be flexible through a few weeks after.

Whether this stance ends up creating problems for us remains to be seen when the show arrives.

Not Ready For Some Football

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If you are wringing your hands over the difficulty you are having attracting students to your performances and events, you are not alone– university football programs are having difficulty, too.

An article on Inside Higher Education’s website reports some pretty significant drops in attendance by students at football games.

Student attendance at major college football games is declining across the country. By how much varies greatly at each institution, but a recent Wall Street Journal analysis of turnstile data at 50 public colleges with top football programs found that average student attendance is down more than 7 percent since 2009.

In 2013, the University of Georgia’s designated student section was nearly 40 percent empty. The University of California at Berkeley has sold about 1,000 fewer student season tickets this season than last year — a season that already saw a decline from the previous one. Since 2009, student attendance at the University of Florida has dropped 22 percent. Three-fourths of the University of Kansas’ student tickets went unused last season.

The article blames cold weather, lack of cellphone/wifi signals and alcohol in stadiums, along with the option to watch the game on a wide variety of media as reasons why attendance is dropping.

And by the way, none of these problems are new. A little over a year ago, Jon Silpayamanant wrote about the exact same attendance issues facing professional sports. Inside Higher Ed mentions that universities are using many of the same solutions the professional teams were adopting including more robust wi-fi, better access to food and beer, and more promotions and giveaways.

One of the concerns expressed about the lack of student attendance is the poor image it provides on television.

“Fundamentally, students are part of the show and that’s something that folks don’t always recognize,” Southall said. “If you watch a college sports telecast, where do the cameras go for in-crowd shots? The cameras are in the student section. If that section is not there, it’s like having a movie without enough extras to walk in the background of the shots. I always joke to my students, ‘You understand you’re paying to be extras. You’re just there for the show, so everyone else can keep consuming it.’ “

The long term concern is that disinterested students will become disinterested alumni who won’t support the athletic program and the university down the road.

As always when we talk about sports and the arts, there are a number of parallels here. One of the big one being the concern that the lack of interest/exposure as “kids” will translate into lack of investment as adults.

This article made me wonder about the real viability of Tweet Seats programs. If students aren’t motivated to attend a football game by the opportunity to be on television or, at the very least, being able to make “I am here participating” posts on social media sites, then are Tweet Seats programs really valuable as a way to attract and retain young audiences?

Given that many Tweet Seats program segregate social media users to their own section, the participants may feel even less engaged than students in a stadium surrounded by tens of thousands of others. (Though I suppose they could feel like they are part of an exclusive group if the environment is right.)

In the great battle of sports versus arts, among the advantages sports had were the ability to be a loud part of a large group at an event where the outcome was unknown. I found it somewhat worrisome that even with these advantages, sports were losing its audiences. What chance do the arts have then?

If you have been reading the results of audience research studies over the last decade or so, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the answer university athletic departments have arrived at is focusing on the audience’s experience, not on the “performance”.

“…according to a recent survey conducted by Ohio University’s Center for Sports Administration and stadium designer AECOM. The top three priorities for that spending — enhancing food and beverage options, premium seating, and connectivity — all focus on the experience of fans, rather than the players.”

May A Large Donation Destroy Your Rating!

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This story can’t be allowed to pass uncommented upon. Or at least, I feel the need to comment more extensively than did Thomas Cott when he tweeted this link.

In a case of damned if you have too much overhead and damned if you don’t have enough, ALS Association is in a panic about their rating as an effective charity due to the windfall they received thanks to the ice bucket challenges.

Since they didn’t expect such a surge in donations, they don’t have a plan formulated to use it. As a result, they are in danger of having their rating fall from a B+ to an F.

“You can get in trouble for having too much money in the bank,” said Daniel Borochoff, founder and president of Chicago-based CharityWatch, part of the American Institute of Philanthropy. “We want to see that there is a plan for spending down this money.”

[…]

Borochoff said having so much cash and no plan for what to do with that money could lead to an automatic F. Newhouse said those plans are in the works, which I ‘ve written about here in a separate post.

Concern over a potential downgrade lead ALS Association CEO Barbara Newhouse to take a peremptory step of writing to three rating agencies asking them not to penalize the association.

So let me get this straight. A commercial business makes five times their normal annual income and they are celebrated for it. Even if someone takes a close look at how this amazing feat was accomplished and sees something fishy, it is often difficult to get regulators, who wield legal authority, to take effective action. (Not to mention the business can sit on the cash as long as they want.)

However, a charity experiencing unprecedented largess starts to react with panic that the judgment of unofficial entities may result in bad will for them. This despite the fact that the process by which this funding is acquired is transparent, public and clearly unexpected.

The one glimmer of hope is that two of the three rating agencies she sent letters to, Guide Star and Charity Navigator, were signatories to the letter sent out last year urging donors not to use overhead ratio as a prime criteria for giving.

Hopefully there won’t be any problems for ALS Association as they consider their next move.

Otherwise, we may see spiteful people leveling the curse of prosperity in this post title.

How Green Is My Theater

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Last week we were having a conversation to create a repair and replacement plan based on life cycle expectations for our performing arts facility. Of course, there are already a number of issues that needed to be addressed with some immediacy. The head of facility operations mentioned that these days there is little funding to be had for capital improvements. The only way to get much needed repairs and upgrades accomplished is via energy savings performance contracts. (ESPC)

The wikipedia description I linked to about performance contracts being a program for federal government entities is a little narrow. Nearly every state has a similar program, (Oregon has a good description), for themselves and their municipalities and many companies with large physical plants can benefit from them as well.

The benefit of a performance contract is that there is no up front cost to your institution. The company doing the work takes out loans and guarantees that the project will save you money in energy costs. Over the course of 25 years, you pay off the contract with the money you save.

As to whether ESPCs might be an option for arts organizations, I have looked at the programs of about 4-5 states. Other than Oregon’s which suggests a minimum of $100,000 in annual energy bills, there isn’t any clear guidance about what level of energy expense is appropriate to undertake such a project. Presumably your current bills should be relatively high as should the potential for energy saving to make it worth the while of your organization and the company undertaking the work.

You don’t necessarily have to be a governmental entity to have the work done. A couple of the vendors who provide ESPCs list retail and libraries as potential customers. Granted, they may be thinking supermarkets and libraries in need of excellent climate control for their collections rather than clothing stores and my neighborhood library.

But I think about the power use of theaters in particular with all their stage lighting and the energy savings that can be realized. LED lighting still has some color temperature and control issues which make them unsuitable for some uses, but the improvements come very quickly. Many theaters can benefit from upgrading their general lighting and HVAC systems.

When I was working in Hawaii the lighting in our lobby, offices, scene shop and exterior were all replaced. The illumination levels went up and the power use dropped immensely. My only gripe was that even with diffusion filters, the LEDs in some of the exterior stairwells were so sharply defined that it felt like you were furtively moving between pools of light.

My state arts council just sent out a survey yesterday and one question was about how they could better serve my organization. It wasn’t until after I finished the survey that it occurred to me to wonder if state arts councils couldn’t act as coordinators and guarantors on energy savings performance contracts.

Since many foundations aren’t providing capital improvement funding any more, this might prove to be a viable alternative. If a single organization wouldn’t realize enough savings to make a contract worthwhile, perhaps serving the needs of two or more organizations in the same community would be. The organizations could then turn around and use their energy savings to pay off the arts council (if not the energy contractor).

I am not sure what would happen if the organization went out of business or moved before the contract was paid off, but I am sure those considerations are already included in contracts for hospitals and other businesses.

Obviously, I am not fully acquainted with all the details of ESPCs to know how viable this would be. However, given how energy efficiency is becoming an area of increasing concern, I would not be surprised at all if the incentives for upgrading systems improved so over the next 10 years that it became easy for many arts organizations to do.

[Title of the post comes from the novel and movie, How Green Was My Valley]

Hey Did You Hear About…

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I was really surprised to find my name tucked at the bottom of Barry Hessenius’ 2014’s Top 50 Most Powerful and Influential People in the Nonprofit Arts (USA) In fact, since I read his blog via Feedly and had caught up with my subscriptions on Saturday, I might not have read the post for another week if it weren’t for someone tweeting that Robert Bush from Charlotte’s Arts and Science Council made the list.

It’s not that I don’t think what I produce is worthwhile, it is just that I don’t perceive the old blog here as having that high a profile.

Now, of course, there is pressure to meet the standard set by the company I am listed in.

But Barry’s list dovetails nicely with the subject I intended to address today: cooperation and competition in the arts. Last month, Seth Godin observed that authors don’t compete with each other.

Yet, not only do authors get along, they spend time and energy blurbing each other’s books. Authors don’t try to eliminate others from the shelf, in fact, they seek out the most crowded shelves they can find to place their books. They eagerly pay to read what everyone else is writing…

Can you imagine Tim Cook at Apple giving a generous, positive blurb to an Android phone?

And yet authors do it all the time.

It’s one of the things I’ve always liked best about being a professional writer. The universal recognition that there’s plenty of room for more authors, and that more reading is better than less reading, even if what’s getting read isn’t ours.

It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an infinite game, one where we each seek to help ideas spread and lives change.

Even though the limits of funding, revenue generation opportunities and audience free time make existence as an arts organization or artist seem like a zero sum game, my experience starting about 15 years or so has been that arts people are generally pretty supportive of the work of colleagues in both word and action. They will tell their friends about interesting events and invite them along when they attend.

That hasn’t always been my experience. About 20 years ago, I feel like there was a lot more “us vs. them, we do the real art in this town” attitude. It has seemed over time the people I have worked with have espoused this view less and less.

Which isn’t to say that people aren’t envious of other organizations’ funding base; think other organization’s programming needs to be more diverse; think the annual awards ceremony for their community is all political; and aren’t befuddled by the more abstract and conceptual extremes of artistic expression.

Godin cites the intense rivalry of Pepsi and Coke as the antithesis of the relationship authors share. I mean, be honest. Haven’t you held your breath a moment when pouring Coke into a cup printed with a Pepsi logo, imagining the cup will melt? Have you ever mixed Pepsi and Coke together, standing at arm’s length expecting a reaction similar to dropping Mentos into a bottle of diet Coke, if not an explosion? That is how apparent the rivalry of the two companies is to the general public.

It would be hard to imagine Pepsi or Coke tweeting about members of other companies showing up on a list of the most influential and powerful people in the beverage industry.

But watch who calls attention to Barry Hessenius’ list over the next couple days. I bet you will find that the majority of those who do, don’t work for the same companies and organizations as those named. There may even be former employers and co-workers celebrating the attention someone has received. As Godin noted, there is a recognition that the success of one enhances the prestige and fortunes of the many.

Hey did you hear that Nina Simon, Laura Zabel and Donna Collins made the list?

Creativity for Creativity Sake

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You may have seen this recent piece in The New Yorker on creativity. My state arts council linked to it and now I see multiple others have as well.

Author Joshua Rothman asks, “How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing?”

That question gave me pause because in most of the posts I have done on the subject of creativity, it has almost always been about the product of creativity rather than the actual value of the process itself. I frequently invoke (as does Rothman) the IBM survey in which thousands of corporate CEOs said that creativity is one of the things they most highly value. I often talk about how the arts community can show their value to businesses, and by extension, the rest of the world via training and discussion of the creative process.

As Rothman points out, there was a time, (The Romantic period of Coleridge and Woodsworth), when there wasn’t an expectation that what was going on in your head would assume some demonstrable manifestation. (my emphasis)

It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age. We live in a consumer society premised on the idea of self-expression through novelty. We believe that we can find ourselves through the acquisition of new things…Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach. Even as this way of speaking aims to recast work as art, it suggests how much art has been recast as work: it’s now difficult to speak about creativity without also invoking a profession of some kind.

Even before I got to this paragraph near the end of the article, I started to think that we really aren’t allowed to make art for arts sake any more. There is both overt and subtle messaging that if your efforts aren’t advancing your career or marketable skills in some way, then it is frivolous.

It can absolutely be a lot of fun to try something new with the idea that you might be able to integrate it into your work. But how often do we allow ourselves to walk through mountain meadows and imagine making airplanes out of the flowers we see around us? If we allow ourselves to do that, how often is it being used to serve work in the sense of unleashing our creativity Rothman mentions: to surmount a creative block or as a vacation to refresh ourselves to go back to work bright eyed and clear headed?

Given the dynamics of our lives these days, I don’t know that we can ever return to the ideal state of the Romantics Rothman cites. In some sense, as a society we may be better off than the Romantics because more people have the leisure time to indulge their creativity than did in Coleridge’s day.

At the very least, we have the opportunity to open ourselves to fits of fancy and imagination. The exemplar that immediately popped to mind for me was when I was working in Hawaii and had the pleasure of driving Laurie Anderson around. She kept expressing her amazement at how blue the sky was. She may have noticed a dozen other things, but that is what sticks out in my memory. I was so struck by her enthusiasm, that I took her on a detour so I could share the panoramic vista of a scenic overlook with her.

First Cut Is The Deepest

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Nod to Thomas Cott for calling attention to a post on TRG blog about Mission versus business models.

I will cut right to the chase and say that I honed right in on their discussion of making a “cut list” of things to stop doing that are diverting resources and energy away from revenue generation.

If you’re a president, CEO, or executive director, you must align with your colleagues and focus your team on the sustainability of your business model and getting the revenue results that will support your mission. Insist on a “stop doing” list. Your non-profit status does not mean that you must exhaust staff time and resources with every initiative, regardless of return on investment.

They give examples of three theaters that have started focusing on audience retention in some fashion. Obviously, the area of focus could be anything.

I think the statements with the most impact were made in the comment section by Paul Botts.

During my years as a program director at an arts funder I adopted a habit that was driven by that “stop doing everything” idea. When presented with an organization’s new strategic plan my first question was always, “Tell me something which expresses your mission, which you could do and should do and really want to be doing, but which you aren’t going to do right now.”

If the response was a blank or shocked look then my feedback was that they didn’t have an actual plan they simply had a laundry list. If you haven’t made any actual choices then you haven’t done any real planning, etc.

Botts goes on to say that he follows up relating his own experience as managing director of an arts organization that tried to do everything their mission called for only to end up in bankruptcy. Even having gone through this uncomfortable experience, he still has to remind himself of lessons learned, indicating it is not an easy thing to keep yourself and your organization focused.

In the past I have often posted about diluting your efforts by adding programs as a way to chase foundation funding. But the situations TRG talks about are less clear cut and potentially more difficult to identify. The examples they give aren’t a matter of adding children matinees in order to get arts education funds. They talk about the Guthrie Theater deciding not to flyer the Mall of America in favor of focusing on getting first time attendees to come back for another visit.

Passing out flyers in a busy place is the sort of thing it is difficult to identify as a cut because it is a visible effort that looks like progress. It is the sort of thing audiences and board members will fault you for not doing in the face of declining attendance.

For some arts organizations, it might be the right strategy to increase attendance because the conversations accompanying the activity serve to increase a connection. In other communities, the connection may exist for as long as it takes to find a trashcan for the flyer.

The other thing that makes the cutting decision difficult is that there may be things that don’t appear to be effective because they are less public, more difficult to measure and might be among your organization’s least favorite activities. Just because you are really motivated to cut them may not mean it is constructive to do so.

Like a paper cut, what appears to be the least significant cut may tend to hurt the most.

Info You Can Use: Artists U

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Springboard for the Arts recently profiled Artists U, an artist lead, artist centered professional development and planning project.

The project started in Philadelphia and has spread to Baltimore and South Carolina. Since they train artist facilitators to lead workshops elsewhere, their sessions may be coming to a location near you.

Artists U grew out of founder Andrew Simonet’s observation that:

“I went to so many [professional development workshops for artists] when I started out and so much of it was useless,” Simonet says. Workshops were often run by arts professionals, not artists, who didn’t understand or address the real struggles that artists face.

After attending a Creative Capital Foundation development workshop, Simonet “says he was “blown away” by “how wrong artists are in their vision of the world.” So one of the focuses of the training sessions and part of the Artists U website is to change the thinking and practices which undermine artists’ efforts.

The website also has a free to download book, Making Your Life As An Artist which addresses these issues in greater depth.

I have only generally skimmed the book thus far, but a section that immediately caught my eye was suggestions on reframing the way you discuss your work so that it will be engaging rather than alienating to most human beings. This is an area in which every artist and arts organization needs to evaluate their practices.

Take a look..

modern dance
click to expand
figurative
click to expand

Eclipsed By Your Cause

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Two weeks ago my neighbors were gathered around their pool talking excitedly about doing the ice bucket challenge. One of the kids asked five or six times what ALS was throughout the conversation before someone answered, “Lou Gehrig’s disease or something like that.”

This was a good illustration for me about the hazards of having a cause explode in popularity. Often the symbols associated with the cause become valued more than the cause itself.

The Non-Profit Quarterly has been covering some of the skepticism that has been expressed about the long term usefulness of the social media trend.

Writing for Time, Jacob Davidson, whose father died of ALS, found the ice bucket campaign initially attractive, but then had misgivings. “When I looked closer, I became uneasy,” Davidson wrote. “No wonder it took me weeks to learn the Ice Bucket Challenge was linked to ALS. Most of its participants, including Kennedy and Today’s Matt Lauer, didn’t mention the disease at all. The chance to jump on the latest trend was an end in itself.”

Davidson also mentioned the somewhat negative structure of the campaign, that if you choose not to donate, you dump a bucket of ice water on your head. “The challenge even seems to be suggesting that being cold, wet, and uncomfortable is preferable to fighting ALS,” he noted. If the strategy of dumping cold water was meant to increase awareness of the disease, the strategy has a built-in contradiction: “ALS needs all the awareness it can get, but somehow I doubt many learned a whole lot from contextless tweets of wet celebs smiling and laughing,” he added.

Despite Stephen Hawking and having seen Pride of the Yankees, ALS might not be strongly on my radar if my father hadn’t died from it about 20 years ago. Even if that hadn’t been the case, I still would be a little concerned about how centered the campaign is on the self rather than the disease.

Seth Godin noted that about 90% of those mentioning the challenge or posting video/images of themselves taking the challenge haven’t donated. That is certainly their right.

He goes on to point out the double edge to the situation. Specifically that a positive impact has been to spread the word about a little known disease. (I guess Stephen Hawking isn’t famous enough himself.) The other point Godin makes is that it is normalizing charitable giving.

This has been great for ALS related charities which have seen more giving in a few months than they see in many years. Even if 90% aren’t giving, the 10% who are are having a significant impact for these organizations.

On the other hand, Godin points out that there are some things to watch out for:

1. Good causes in need of support are going to focus on adding the sizzle and ego and zing that gets an idea to spread, instead of focusing on the work. One thing we know about online virality is that what worked yesterday rarely works tomorrow. A new arms race begins, and in this case, it’s not one that benefits many. We end up developing, “an unprecedented website with a video walkthrough and internationally recognized infographics…” (actual email pitch I got while writing this post).

2. We might, instead of normalizing the actual effective giving of grants and donations, normalize slacktivism. It could easily turn out that we start to emotionally associate a click or a like or a mention as an actual form of causing change, not merely a way of amplifying a message that might lead to that action happening.

Along the lines of Godin’s mention of a fundraising arms race, Non Profit Quarterly quoted Emmanuel College research fellow William MacAskill who expressed concerns that flash could easily obscure the need to do due diligence on the recipients of a donation.

His second point more directly addresses the issue of the seriousness of the charitable decision, that such “donor-focused philanthropy…regards all causes as equal…We should reward the charities that we believe do the most good, not those that have the best marketing strategy, otherwise the most successful charities will be those that are best at soliciting funds, not those that are best at making the world a better place.”

Of course, the truth is people give to people, not organizations. To be a successful charity, you have to be good at both soliciting funds and making the world a better place.

I don’t think anyone would really mind if there was a groundswell of support that rallied attention to their cause, even if the attention didn’t translate into material support. Attention is extremely valuable. I can say with a high level of confidence that there are people in my community right now that speak well of my organization that don’t attend our events. If they inspire others to become involved, that is great for us.

The thing to watch out for is when the cause escapes your control and is co-opted for other purposes. Probably the biggest example of this is pinkwashing where companies use the goodwill of breast cancer awareness to sell products and burnish their image with little or no benefit going to breast cancer research.

Random Thoughts About Problems and Practices

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I got recruited at the last minute to teach a public speaking class this semester. After a week, I have already started to make my problem their problem.

I asked the students, in a time when technology adds so many distractions on top of everyday concerns, how did they see themselves rising above or breaking through the noise of these distractions to communicate what is important to them.

What would they do to connect with people and convince them to become invested in the same thing they are? Would they try to use the media that was providing to be so distracting or would they do something different to set them apart?

In many respects, people trying to advocate for early childhood education, political candidates and delivering a speech at a conference all face the same challenges as arts organizations do in terms of trying to find an effective method of communication. People are distracted by cell phones, watch content online, skip ads on a DVR, read fewer newspapers and magazines, all of which makes it difficult to target your message effectively.

My students didn’t have an answer. I have just gotten them started thinking about these issues. They may not be aware that it will be a recurring theme throughout the year.

Another little anecdote I wanted to share. Last week, the drama department held auditions for the first show. I asked one of the students to perform her monologue for my students today so they could get a sense of what it is all about. It seemed to be a good experience.

However, one thing I started to notice over the last year was that the cast list is no longer being posted on the call board. Everyone is contacted via email. I feel like this robs something from the process for the rest of the community. There is no opportunity for even those who didn’t audition to stop by the board to at least mentally celebrate with those who got cast and commiserate with those who didn’t.

I am sure email or text is much more efficient for the directors. They can inform people and get a response relatively quickly rather than having to continually check if someone swung by the call board to initial next to their name and then chase them down to find out if the lack of an initial meant the actor was too lazy to check or they were affronted to be offered a part they felt was beneath them.

But the situation makes it harder for a person like me who is interested and part of the arts community to get invested in the show. I can’t ask cast members how rehearsals are going in passing because I have no idea who is in the show. I am going to have to make an effort to find out.

When I do know someone has been cast, seeing them on the streets or at gatherings reinforces my association of them with the production and as an artist in general.

I wonder if not posting a cast list becomes one of those tiny changes that alters the dynamics for the performing arts. Without insiders closely invested in a production, does that weaken the bonds the general public feels with the arts since word of mouth from people with expertise becomes weaker?

Or am I just perceiving it that way because I haven’t been connected to anyone in the casts via social media like a normal person would be?

I’ll Make It Worth Your While To Quit…

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Back in January, I wrote about some of the intriguing aspects of Netflix’s human resource policies. One of these policies was that they provide generous severance packages to people they don’t feel are performing at a superior level. (Look for the reference to slide 22)

Back in April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent a letter to investors outlining his company’s policy to offer warehouse employees up to $5,000 if they decided to leave the company.

While the Amazon offer based on a voluntary decision, like Netflix the policy it is based on the idea that an employee who isn’t motivated or completely proficient at their job is a threat to the long term health of the company.

So the question for a lot of companies and organizations is, is there an employee whom you might wish would take advantage of this opportunity if it was presented to them? If the answer is yes, the question that follows is, then why do you keep them around?

For non-profits, the obvious answer probably is that there are a lot of things you can accomplish with that $5000. You can’t just tie up that much money for even a portion of your employees against the day they decide to quit.

The amount of the severance pay doesn’t matter. The whole premise behind Netflix and Amazon’s policy is that they stand to lose more than they will payout if an ineffective person remains with their company. Figure out what that number is for you over the course of 5 years or so, and you have your severance pay.

If your answer is that the person means well and is enthusiastic, then you have to consider if you are actually acting as a good steward of the trust and funding invested in you by your supporters by employing a person who is not operating at close to the potential of someone in that position.

If your answer is that they are willing to work at less than market rate so you save money, then the question might also be if you are subjecting your clientele to poorer treatment than they deserve in the name of saving money.

The hiring process is an expensive one in terms of time, money and other resources so no one wants to be engaging in a replacement search every few months. This all goes to underscore the importance of high quality human resources and hiring practices right from the outset so you are attracting and retaining the right people. If the local talent pool doesn’t appear strong enough, it might require identifying overlapping applicable skillsets possessed by people outside your immediate field.

Stuff To Ponder: When Not To Tell Your Story

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Createquity may be in reruns right now while they reorganize, but they have great timing. Today they featured a post from 2011 which was something of a complement to the post about pricing and story I made yesterday.

Where my post yesterday addressed using a resonant story to get people invested in paying a little more to participate in an arts event, Createquity featured a guest post by Margy Waller suggesting that when it comes to public funding for the arts, the lack of a publicized story might be the best bet.

Members of the public typically have positive feelings toward the arts, some quite strong. But how they think about the arts is shaped by a number of common default patterns that ultimately obscure a sense of shared responsibility in this area.

For example, it is natural and common for people who are not insiders to think of the arts in terms of entertainment. In fact, it’s how we want people to think when we are selling tickets or memberships. But, in this view, entertainment is a “luxury,” and the “market” will determine which arts offerings survive, based on people’s tastes as consumers of entertainment. Consequently, public support for the arts makes little sense, particularly when public funds are scarce.

Perceptions like these lead to conclusions that government funding, for instance, is frivolous or inappropriate. Even charitable giving can be undermined by these default perceptions.

The second paragraph aligns squarely with Seth Godin’s thoughts on pricing that “Some goods are difficult to understand before purchase and use, and most consumers undervalue them and treat them like commodities.” And later “In situations like this, our instinct is to assume that the thing is generic, a commodity, not worth extra.”

Waller suggests that given the perception that public support of the arts is frivolous, by making the fight to restore/increase funding public, arts organizations are choosing a battlefield where they are at a disadvantage.

Politicians can leverage public opinion that the arts are a luxury. When the conflict is covered by the media, it is in the context of a political fight rather than say, a matter of societal value, education and cultural identity.

Because the big fight in the default way of viewing the arts is very losable. And in our efforts, we’re forced to expand a precious resource: the time and energy of staff and key supporters who have to work so hard to convince public officials that they won’t suffer consequences in the next election.

Moreover, every time the fight is public, we’re likely to be reinforcing the dominant ways of thinking about the arts that are getting in our way now. When attacked, we rebut with facts, and the media covers the issue as a political fight with two equal sides – both seen through a lens that sets up the arts as a low priority on the public agenda. And as we know, this can have the effect of making people defensive and hardening existing positions. Of course, it should be no surprise that even officials who are friendly to arts funding are reluctant to be in the middle of that kind of coverage.

Waller suggests a strong, but quiet lobbying campaign, citing the success of just such an effort in Ohio. When you think about it, she has a valid point because quiet lobbying is exactly how plenty of entities who would prefer to avoid public resistance to their plans get things accomplished.

I am sure we can all envision some program that slipped by under our radar and we would prefer not to be associated with those sort of tactics. But the reality is, not every act of governance is preceded by a rancorous public debate. I am sure many arts supporters would be happy not to gird for battle every budget cycle if their goals could be accomplished quietly and efficiently.

Info You Can Use: Story and Pricing

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Seth Godin posted some thoughts about pricing that are worthy of consideration. The fact this post is about three times as long as his usual posts indicates the importance he places on the topic.

He tackled the concept of substitution which is basically what we talk about when we identify movies, television, Netflix, video games, etc as competitors for people’s entertainment dollars and time.

One of the key elements of pricing is realizing that people have choices, and that substitutes are available. This is more nuanced than it sounds, though, and I want to highlight key things to keep in mind when you think about how much to charge and how people might react.

Marketers make two mistakes over and over. They create average, commodity products and expect that people will pay extra for them. Or, in the other direction, they lose their nerve and don’t charge a fair price for the extraordinary work they’re doing, afraid that people will find a substitute.

This second paragraph that essentially summarizes the situation arts organizations face. Arts organizations are either accused of overvaluing their product and charging too much in the face of substitutes. Or they are accused of setting prices too low leading audiences to expect those prices should be the norm for something that cost five times as much to produce.

Godin addresses a number of factors which impact what price someone will pay. The one I felt was most applicable to the arts was:

Some goods are difficult to understand before purchase and use, and most consumers undervalue them and treat them like commodities

[…]

This leads to opportunity and challenge of marketers who choose to sell something that we don’t buy very often and that we can’t tell if it’s better (or if the story is true) until after we buy it. In situations like this, our instinct is to assume that the thing is generic, a commodity, not worth extra.

Having read this, it occurred to me that as arts attendance decreases there is an increasingly likelihood of arts experience meeting the definition of something that is difficult to understand before purchase and use. As a result, people see it as interchangeable with other entertainment options. To be fair, many elements of the experience are interchangeable, but others are not.

According to Godin, what enables you to sell a good or service at a higher price is if it has a story. The example he used are organic eggs. We are all probably aware of some aspect of the story associated with organic eggs: they are better for you; the chickens are handled more humanely; you support small, local farmers; lack of antibiotics and pesticides; locally sourced means a small carbon footprint in production.

Whether these things are completely true or not can be immaterial. If some part of the story resonates with the consumer, they become more willing to pay a higher price.

However, I think the story for the arts almost has to be more powerful than for organic eggs. When you are in the supermarket already, the story of organic eggs and your image as a responsible world citizen doesn’t have to resonate very strongly to divert your decision from one carton to another. If you are in a farmer’s market, the story and your self image are so self-reinforcing by the surrounding booths, it is actually easier to buy more than you intended.

When you are at work or at home making plans, the story offered by the local arts companies has to be pretty strong if it is going to influence your decision away from your usual activities.

Or at least this is the case for performing arts organizations. Visual arts organizations can benefit from impulse decisions. A couple weeks ago I was chatting with a friend at the front desk of the local museum and about five people came in saying they were in town for a funeral and decided to swing by the museum. Not necessarily the first thing that pops to mind when I go to funerals, but they enjoyed themselves.

In either case, if you do have a story, once people start to involve themselves with your organization, they integrate your story into their lives and it becomes easier for them to decide to do so again.

Best Practices In Audience Drowning

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As immersive arts experiences become increasingly prevalent, there have been some interesting introspective reflections of the experiences recently in The Guardian and Irish Times.

Both pieces mention the competitiveness of returning audience members souring the experience. I wrote about this issue to a greater degree in March so I won’t get into it much here.

In The Guardian article, Myf Warhurst wonders if audiences are really up to the job of being part of a performance.

One the one hand, she seems to feel that an immersive experience can help shift the awareness and focus of a participant in a manner the participant wouldn’t on their own. Citing Marina Abramovic’s installation 512 Hours where participants count rice grains one by one, Myf observes,

“Sure, I could have a stab at this while home alone by switching my phone off and counting the grains from my half-used pack of SunRice. But would I really do it without Abramović’s prompting? I enjoy being part of something creative, conceived by an inquisitive mind, because I know I can’t create such work myself. I like being included in the art-making.”

But she also seems to feel that people may conflate participation under someone else’s guidance and vision with being a creator. (my emphasis)

And I’m starting to think that us regular folk might not be up to the job. Are we really clever or interesting enough to be driving the narrative? I’m not sure I am. I like how art makes me feel like an outsider in someone else’s conversation, how it pushes me to think beyond myself and my own ideas. Is it healthy to be made to feel like we’re now special enough to be included in everything?

[…]

What is it about humans, at this particular time in history, that makes us think we’re special enough to be part of art without having done any of the work to develop the emotional, intellectual or craft level that artists have strived to achieve? Perhaps inviting the audience in isn’t always for the best. Even though I like being included, I’m just not sure I’ve done the hard yards to deserve it.

In the Irish Times article, Peter Crawley wonders “Are we, the audience, drowning in immersive theatre,” referring to how prevalent the format is.

Granted, the vast majority of the theater going public in both the UK and US probably haven’t really encountered an immersive performance experience. Crawley’s reflections urge a consideration that the way these events are executed may promote a self-centric view of what should be a communal experience.

It is not just that audience members have started fighting each other in order to be in a position to be involved in the story.

What you, the audience, have always known is that to sit, watch, engage and reflect is not passive. In an insightful takedown last week of the radio personality Ira Glass, who dismissed Shakespeare’s King Lear as “not relatable”, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead argued that while art is a mirror in which we see ourselves, the demand for “relatability” is lazy and vain: art as a selfie.

That sounds like the toxin of our age and, perhaps, a reason to switch off the immersion. “You, the audience”, sounds like a command. “I, the protagonist”, feels lonely. Isn’t it supposed to be about us?

Crawley didn’t link to Rebecca Mead’s article, but I have included it for reference since I was interested to read what she said.

What seems to be relevant to Crawley’s statement was this (my emphasis):

But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.

To appreciate “King Lear”—or even “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Fault in Our Stars”—only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.” In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare.

What might be an obvious solution is to design the experience as a metaphorical Ropes course where people can only advance/gain access cooperating as a group. Perhaps some, having sacrificed themselves for the good of the group, might get the satisfaction of watching the result of their actions from a hidden room on the sidelines.

But I am sure there are plenty of people like me who are content to watch and ponder and who don’t like to get dragged into participating in the first place. Having to participate and do so as part of a team in order to witness interesting content might be even more off putting. (Though I would much rather participate in a group than to be singled out as an individual.)

(Yes, I intentionally wrote a provocative post title intentionally using another definition of immersion in the spirit of Drew McManus’ little experiment)

Info You Can Use: Fiscal Sponsorship As Apprenticeship Program For Non-Profits

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Non-Profit Law blogger Gene Tagaki recently tweeted a link to an article he wrote for the American Bar Association about 5 years ago urging lawyers to consider alternatives to forming non-profits organizations for their clients.

I should note that this article was written before the first Benefit Corporations were legal in the U.S. so that also remains an option to forming a non-profit.

One of the biggest considerations for not forming a non-profit is the fact that there are so many, with more being formed every day, but an ever shrinking supply of funding to support their efforts.

“Ron Mattocks, author of Zone of Insolvency: How Nonprofits Avoid Hidden Liabilities and Build Financial Strength, asserts that as many as one-third of the nation’s 1.4 million registered nonprofits operate in the zone of insolvency.
[…]
If a nonprofit is insufficiently prepared to compete and operate in such an environment, the end product may be gross inefficiencies, frustrated founders, disillusioned donors, and fewer resources ultimately reaching its intended beneficiaries.”
 

There is also the issue of whether the founders have a realistic business plan that is viable amid the economic conditions present. Takagi also spends some time cautioning against founder’s assumptions of the amount of control they can legally exert over the organization.

Among the alternatives to forming a non-profit Tagaki suggests is actually working with an existing non-profit. I often wondered, if people are able to muster the resources to create an entirely new non-profit that overlaps or competes with an existing one, why not first approach the existing non-profit first proposing to enhance their efforts with an ancillary or complementary program.

That is pretty much what Tagaki suggests:

When appropriate, lawyers should make their clients aware of the following benefits of working with an existing nonprofit:

-Avoidance of start-up costs and administrative burdens of a new nonprofit.
-Increased efficiency in furthering the charitable mission by using an established infrastructure.
-Opportunity to gain experience and expertise in running a nonprofit.
-Development of connections in the nonprofit community.

Collaborating with an existing nonprofit is an alternative that may be considered even where the contemplated charitable idea is not currently being implemented by an existing nonprofit. A nonprofit with a compatible mission may be receptive to implementing and operating a new program, particularly if a volunteer is willing to bring resources to the table. Alternatively, the nonprofit may have institutional knowledge relating to the charitable idea and its implementation. Moreover, the nonprofit may open doors and leverage assets that might not be otherwise readily available, such as

-Existing resources, including staff, volunteers, infrastructure, and systems.
-In-house experience and expertise, which may allow the contemplated program to be launched and operated efficiently and in compliance with the law.
-Donor and business relationships, including with institutional funders, nonprofit leaders, allied organizations, and the media.
-Goodwill, which may provide the program with name recognition and built-in public trust.

The other alternative he suggests is a Fiscal Sponsorship where a project is housed within the auspices of an existing non-profit. It allows the project to take advantage of the non-profit’s status without needing to create a separate entity. If the sponsorship agreement is written correctly, the project has the freedom to move to another non-profit or perhaps spin off as a separate non-profit once they have experienced sufficient growth. Fiscal sponsorship arrangements have been used to host short term projects or as an incubator for fledgling non-profits.

The Sponsor usually retains a portion of the gifts as a fee (5-10 percent is common) and allocates the rest to the Project. The Project Initiators may serve as employees or volunteers of the Sponsor delegated with the responsibility of operating the Project. They also may retain the right to move the Project to another Sponsor or to a new exempt organization created to permanently house the Project. Any such rights should be precisely spelled out in the fiscal sponsorship agreement.

Fiscal sponsorship may provide a Project with immediate tax-exempt status, advantageous treatment as a public charity (i.e., nonprivate foundation) without independently passing a public support test, some degree of administrative support, and a governing body that has a duty to ensure that the Project is operating in compliance with applicable laws. The Project Initiators must weigh such benefits against a lack of autonomy; their limited control over the Project, which remains under the ultimate control of the Sponsor; and the sponsorship fees.

The trade-off aside, if a fiscal sponsorship agreement is written well it can be an extremely helpful process of essentially testing the viability of a concept and learning how to run a non-profit organization without incurring the start up costs.

I was not aware that this option really existed. It might almost be better if aspiring non-profits pursued this option more regularly. Even if it didn’t result in new organizations spinning off all that often, it could potentially create more robust non-profit organizations. (Perhaps even resulting in more nimble sponsored programs growing to subsume their nominal sponsoring parent.)

Since the fiscal sponsorship option is relatively unknown as an option, perhaps the biggest hurdle will be getting both parties prepared and willing to engage in such an arrangement.

It is well known that non-profits start new programs in order to garner funding to support their main goals. It would be easy for a sponsoring organization to starve the program it agreed to house of the resources it needs to succeed. From the other side, as Tagaki mentioned, once you bring your program under the auspices of a fiscal sponsor, their priorities need to become your priorities to a large degree.

Info You Can Use: Treating Different Audiences Differently

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It often seems one of the hardest things to do in the performing arts is to correctly anticipate audience interest in a show. Related to that is gauging the best way to market and position an individual show to a specific audience segment.

I recently faced a situation where anticipating audience interest wasn’t difficult, but an opportunity to fumble the marketing and interaction with the target audience segment presented itself.   This seemed like a good illustration of what is meant when we talk about understanding and treating audience segments differently.

Every year my department and a community arts organization partner on a nine show presenting season. This year there are a few shows that I wanted to do outside the season. Since our season brochure is one of our best tools for promoting the shows, I decided to list those two events as extras that could be purchased in addition to a season subscription.

There is a whole separate potential issue we may face with people thinking those shows were part of their season subscription. We used an entirely different color scheme and separated the events on the order form with explanatory text. We won’t know if that is sufficient until those events come up in the Spring.

The community organization’s board of directors asked if I was including those two shows, why wasn’t also including our annual concert by the Oak Ridge Boys as well. I explained that the audience for our subscription season was different from our Oak Ridge Boys audience. The board member noted that she attended  the Oak Ridge Boys and the subscription series. I replied that the concert audience had different expectations and needs, trying to avoid saying that the Oak Ridge Boys audience was a lot more enthusiastic than our subscription audience.

I wrote her an email later explaining that it was better to keep the Oak Ridge Boys concert listed separately for a number of reasons. The first is the enthusiasm of the Oak Ridge Boys audience. The day we open sales, they flood the phone lines and line up out the door.    They are used to hitting redial over and over until they get through. A subscriber would likely become angry if they were trying to resubscribe on the same day as Oak Ridge Boys tickets go on sale and the phone rang busy for an hour.

On the other hand, because we mail the brochure out at non-profit bulk rate which has a variable delivery rate, the Oak Ridge Boys fans would become angry if they received the brochure after the on sale date. Since we hold a subscriber’s seats from the previous year for 6-8 weeks after the re-subscription campaign begins, the brochure arrival date is not problematic.

What we do for the Oak Ridge Boys fans is mail a postcard to everyone who purchased the year before announcing a special pre-sale date that falls before the date announced on our website and in the newspapers.

Today was that special presale date and we were swamped. We sold more tickets in one day than we have sold in 4 weeks to the most popular Broadway show in our series, a show I expect will sell out.

Even though the subscription campaign started a month ago and the box office staff had been calling the last 25 people reminding them to resubscribe for two weeks, someone showed up this morning to renew their subscription and got caught in the horde. She was fine with having to wait awhile and a little incredulous at the crowd and the ever present din of the telephones.

As I stood watching over the activity in the box office today, I was reminded about that meeting where it was suggested I put Oak Ridge Boys in the brochure. In truth, it had occurred to me before anyone even suggested it. But I realized it would have been a mistake to treat the Oak Ridge fans like our season subscribers. While subscribers are generally content to keep the same seats year after year, the Oak Ridge Boys fans largely strive to get better seats than those they had last year.

I suspect there are expectations characteristic to people who only subscribe or buy single tickets to our classics, broadway or variety series that I could be doing a better job of fulfilling.  Those might be difficult to identify because they have been wrapped up so closely with other subscribers for so long that they may not really think about needing to be treated differently.

However, one of the two additional shows I am doing this year is targeted at high school and college students with the intent of developing an additional series tailored to them. They definitely have different expectations of their experience that I will need to learn to meet.

And even people who fall into one segment may exhibit entirely different behaviors as members of a another audience segment. That board member who mentioned they were both subscribers and Oak Ridge Boys attendees– her husband was 4th out of around 75 waiting when we opened the ticket office this morning.

Info You Can Use: Non-Profits and Loans

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If you didn’t catch it, in June Non-Profit Quarterly had a good 101 guide on when it is appropriate for non-profits to take out loans.  Most times you hear about non-profits and loans it is once the non-profit is in financial trouble and deep in debt.  The discussion of constructive use of loans by non-profit arts organizations is relatively rare.

In my own experience, conversations among arts administrators usually touches on earned revenue, fund raising/sponsorships and grants.  I have never heard anyone talk about using loans to fund an initiative. This might be, as the NPQ article suggests, there is a stigma of failure associated with taking out a loan. Or it might be simply that we are so used to worrying about falling attendance, lack luster fundraising and onerous grant writing that no one really thinks to mention loans.

In addition to discussing the times it is and is not appropriate to seek a loan, the article notes that there are no “one-size-fits-all” loans so organizations can negotiate terms that suit their needs.  They also provide a general sense of what answers and materials you might expect to be asked to provide as part of the loan process.

 

 

Stuff To Ponder: Professionalizing Non-Profit Boards

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Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution is a proposal put forth in the Stanford Law Review suggesting replacing board members with a professional board services company.

When I first saw the title “Why Not Put a Firm on Your Board” on Cowen’s blog, I thought maybe the Stanford article was going to be a satire of the whole “corporations are people” idea that is the basis so many recent Supreme Court decisions. However, they are completely serious and there is some sense to what they propose. (Though I suspect they may still have been inspired by the court.)

As I read the article, I started to wonder if something similar might be good for non-profits. The article is definitely aimed at large for-profit corporations, but the fundamental problems are the same:

-Both for and non-profit boards are comprised of people who have other day jobs and don’t have the time, either during or outside board meetings, to exercise proper oversight of the corporation.

-Board members either get too little information about the corporation to do their jobs, or are overwhelmed with too much.

-Board members often don’t possess specialized knowledge about the entity they are overseeing and therefore can not make good decisions.

-Finally, board members are in a position where they are more loyal to the management of the company than to the general community of stakeholders.

The articles authors propose a company, which they dub “Board-R-Us,” to provide professionalized oversight of management and assume legal liability for decisions made. I am not convinced that these companies wouldn’t succumb to pressure and influence from their clients like Arthur Andersen did or via their own corporate owners.

That aside, there were some compelling reasons for speculating on whether something like this might be viable for non-profits. In addition to the problems with effective oversight mentioned above, non-profit arts organizations often express frustrations trying to recruit a board that better represents the demographics of their community or target audience.

A board services provider (BSP) could recruit and train board members for a non-profit organization. A BSP would likely have extensive contacts at many companies, service organizations, universities, etc developed in the process of searching on behalf of many organizations which would make the search easier for them than for board nominating committees.

The BSP could advise both the organization and the board members about how to more effectively interact with each other so that neither dreaded attending regular meetings.

I am not sure if a BSP would essentially just be a recruitment firm or if the board members would work for them. The former situation would more easily permit board members to serve voluntarily. The latter might require a stipend of some sort.

I am not sure how a stipend might be resolved legally, but if a board member was paid by a separate company and if it wasn’t much more significant than gas money, it might pass muster.

One of the benefits of engaging a BSP for a non-profit is that you could actually have a healthy rotation of people through your board when the BSP assigned new people as terms expired.

A robust rotation system might also prove an incentive to companies to encourage employees to participate in non-profit boards via a BSP. The networking opportunities available as people rotated through the boards of different organizations can be valuable to companies. If the BSP is helping the non-profits provide pertinent information in an organized manner and the board meetings are being run efficiently, few may feel the experience is a waste of their time.

These scenarios assume a situation similar to the current arrangement of part-time board members helping to manage a non-profit with some guidance and oversight from a BSP rather than full-time oversight from a BSP simply because of the costs involved with the latter option.

In terms of how even part time services from a BSP might be paid for, I envision a dedicated good governance fund administered by a state arts council. If the arts council can’t find a source willing to specifically fund this, they might charge participating arts organizations a nominal fee and create a pool of money to pay a BSP.

The participating arts organizations could then choose from among a number of available board service providers.

We Need To Stop Optimizing Our Synergies

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Yesterday, I was speaking with a friend who was learning English as a second language. I don’t remember which word it was exactly, but we got on the subject of corporate speak, the nigh-meaningless terminology that businesses use to recast their activities as something impressive sounding.

I ended up sending her a link to Weird Al Yankovic’s recent video, “Mission Statement” which makes fun of corporate speak.

I let her listen to Weird Al sing about synergies, operationalizing strategies, monetizing assets and other esoteric phrases set to “Suite Judy Blue Eyes,” preparing to be asked what the heck those words meant.

As I waited, it suddenly occurred to me that my hopes for simplified grant reports where non-profits honestly reported the results of the project rather than claiming everything went as well or better than planned, were probably impossible.

As long as for-profit companies are using this self-aggrandizing language to talk about themselves, non-profits are going to be expected to mimic them to some degree to provide the appearance of competence and effectiveness. Most granting entities are either the non-profit arm of companies employing this blather or are foundations with boards comprised of people who work for these companies. For them, use of the latest corporate speak buzzwords are indications of organizational health.

It also occurred to me that the difficulty in attracting audiences from all strata of society might be rooted, in part, in the need to employ an esoteric vocabulary. The need to sound impressive for funders probably influences marketing text. .

But it doesn’t mean much to the audiences you wish would show up.

Certainly there are plenty of other factors which might inhibit a decision to attend an event. Programmings choices that don’t resonate with the interests of local audiences being one.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that new employees who understand how to communicate in a way that interests desired community demographics find themselves pressured either overtly or subliminally over time to use more “polished” language.

I’m afraid that just as like death and taxes, the influence of corporate speak is going to persist until we can actualize a paradigm shift by distilling our core identities into a bleeding edge proactive client centric modality.

ArtWashing Sounded Reasonable When I Suggested It

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Over the years I have written about the gentrification effect of artists in neighborhoods. While artists are often displaced as they make a neighborhood increasingly trendy, there have been cases where artists went into an area knowing their stay would likely be short term.

By and large, these voluntary arrangements sounded reasonable. Artists would occupy empty storefronts making them look less dismal, helping to lower crime rates and providing a little bit of revenue for landlords in spaces that would otherwise generate none. As long as no one was under the illusion that this arrangement would last long, everyone can be generally satisfied.

However, a recent story on The Atlantic’s CityLab labels the intentional use of artists by London developers to enhance property values as ArtWashing.

When a commercial project is subjected to artwashing, the work and presence of artists and creative workers is used to add a cursory sheen to a place’s transformation. Just as greenwashing tries to humanize new buildings with superficial nods to green concerns (such as wind turbines that never turn), artwashing provides similar distraction. By highlighting the new creative uses for inner-city areas, it presents regeneration not through its long-term effects—the transfer of residency from poor to rich—but as a much shorter journey from neglect to creativity.

The author, Feargus O’Sullivan, discusses a number of cases in which artists were welcomed in wholeheartedly and then either forced out or subjected to unfriendly lease terms when their leases were up. He expresses some resentment for struggling artists being displaced by trust fund kids who like the lifestyle but don’t really need the space. Though he notes that even these people are, in turn, being nudged out in favor of the next higher grade of tenants.

He acknowledges that the situation is a little murky at times leaving some artists semi-complicit in the whole process due to the way they receive support. He cites a group that is producing a work with a critical tone that “art institutions sit comfy in the pockets of big corporations” in a space provided to them by a big developer who is eager to be associated with an artsy group.

O’Sullivan also asks us to consider that while artists may be subject to displacement as a result of their success, in some situations they may be displacers themselves. Although in most of the cases he cities, they were economic peers of those they lived among. (My emphasis.)

In celebrating their role, we are allowing the process of displacement to be mystified, and thus masked. An attitude has arisen which says, “Before, there was crime and emptiness; now we’ve got galleries and coffee. You’re telling me you actually preferred crack dens?” This shuts down debate by asserting that art and cafés for incomers were the only viable antidotes to lawlessness and poverty, when in fact they merely shunt them elsewhere. It erroneously suggests that creative uses of urban spaces are an end point, and reveals the ugly undertone beneath much talk of neighborhood change: That these inner city areas are just too good to be squandered on the low-income people being displaced from them.

So while artist inspired gentrification has long been recognized to be a mixed blessing for artists at best, it needs to be recognized that this gentrification isn’t actually solving the basic problem that existed. It is bringing much welcomed renewal to the physical elements of the area, but those in residence when the renewal begins don’t really experience much benefit at all.

Best Leaders Are Internally Motivated

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There was a post on the Harvard Business Review blog site about a recent leadership study – Why You Lead Determines How Well You Lead.

According to the study, people with an internal motivation to lead are more effective than those with external motivations. More surprising, a person who has a mix of internal and external motivations, does very poorly.

“As one might predict, we found that those with internal, intrinsic motives performed better than those with external, instrumental rationales for their service — a common finding in studies of motivation. We were surprised to find, however, that those with both internal and external rationales proved to be worse investments as leaders than those with fewer, but predominantly internal, motivations. Adding external motives didn’t make leaders perform better — additional motivations reduced the selection to top leadership by more than 20%. Thus, external motivations, even atop strong internal motivations, were leadership poison.

Many believe that the best way to influence behavior is to incentivize it, and such external incentives certainly work with lab rats. In our study, however, adding external incentives clearly did not improve leader performance.”

and later

“If those we seek to develop as leaders adopt external justifications for leading well — such as an increase in shareholder value, better pay or perquisites, or increased profits — they are likely to be less successful as leaders in comparison to those who seek to lead for more internal, intrinsic reasons alone.”

If you have been reading my blog for awhile, you probably can see where my mind is going here. These results made me wonder if non-profit leaders might not make the most effective leaders since internal motivation for doing the job is all but given.

Now remember, effective leader doesn’t necessarily equate to successful. This is a “if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich” situation. Non-profit organizations are notoriously underfunded and lack the resources to achieve the success they aspire to. Not to mention many are pursuing work which others won’t because there is no profit to be made.

Likewise non-profit leaders may make really stupid choices because there was never any time to properly develop and cultivate them throughout their careers. (Not that this type of grooming has kept their for-profit colleagues from making stupendous mistakes either.)

Yes, I am flirting with suggesting that for-profit corporations pull something akin to the movie Trading Places consider looking for effective leaders in non-profit organizations (sans the whole bet thing).

Yes, this regrettably will take talent out of the field, but it would put them in a place with greater resources to provide their leadership skills with more impact. Without maximizing shareholder value as a central goal, the general business environment may shift for the better. Though that might be as big a fantasy as the movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjDbJQKDXCY

The Arts Are Enough of a Gamble Without Casinos

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When you do a S.W.O.T. analysis for your organization (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats), Opportunities and Threats were where you listed external situations that could help or hinder you.

When I worked at an arts center in southern New Jersey, one of the biggest threats was Atlantic City. While it might take you hours to get there in summer time traffic, Atlantic City was 45 miles away and therefore fell into the customary 50 mile exclusion zone that prevented performers from appearing within a certain time period before or after their event date. It frustrated the artistic director to no end because we would frequently be outbid and excluded by casinos in Atlantic City.

This is one of those situations where it is too simplistic to claim that arts organizations that can’t support themselves or serve their community ought to close. No one in the local community was going to Atlantic City to see these performers. There was sufficient community interest in seeing them, it was just that the organization was prevented from offering the shows which makes it difficult to generate revenue.

That is why I have been watching an effort by performing arts presenters in upstate NY to prevent the same thing from happening to them. Last October, a coalition of a dozen venues received “assurances from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration that potential private casinos in New York will be required to partner with local arts organizations rather than compete with them.”

Earlier this month, the coalition, Upstate Theaters for a Fair Game, came to an agreement with 10 of the 17 casino license applicants.

“While we were not able to reach agreement with a number (of casino applicants), the agreements we have reached are significant because they declare clearly the size and scope of casino entertainment plans, they have joint booking agreements that will guarantee access for the casinos and for Fair Game groups to touring performers, they support the Fair Game Fund for those same facilities and establish arts granting programs for smaller organizations in every region,” said Philip Morris, the CEO of Proctor’s in Schenectady and the chairman of Fair Game. “Finally, should the plans the casinos propose be significantly changed, each applicant has agreed to mitigate those impacts with additional support.”

According to another article, the state mandated that some sort of agreement be made. The agreements provide some funding for members of the performing arts coalition, keeping a fair bit of the money in the community.

Under the agreements, casinos will share gambling revenue with the coalition. Amounts will vary by casino and region. Of the distributed gambling revenue, 85 percent will remain in the region where the casino is located, with 15 percent going to the Fair Game coalition. Of the 85 percent that remains in our region, 70 percent will be split by the Bardavon and coalition member Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, on the Woodstock site in Sullivan County. Bethel Woods and the Bardavon will distribute the remaining 15 percent to local arts organizations.

But agreements haven’t been made with everyone, some like the Mohegan Sun have publicly stated they will refuse to do so.

As some members of the coalition say, the situation is still evolving. This situation will be a good case study for what to do if faced with casinos or some similar competitive threat in your area.

I Gave Away My Right To Vote

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A couple weeks ago, I encouraged others to take away my right to vote.

Why? Because I am an ex-officio director on a board by dint of my position and during a recent review of the board’s by laws, I discovered they did not specify that my position was non-voting.

In a recent repost of one of her blog entries, Ellis Carter clears up some common misunderstandings about ex-officio officers, one of which is that the term means they don’t have voting rights.

There is often a misconception that ex officio board members lack voting rights. The term “ex-officio” has nothing to do with voting rights. Ex-officio directors can be voting or non-voting; therefore, it’s important to clarify in the bylaws whether ex officio board members have voting rights.

No election or appointment is required. Also, it can be very confusing to make a position “ex-officio” and subject the ex-officio director position to term limits. Ex officio directors are not generally subject to term limits because the director position is tied to the office. What happens if the term ends before the director leaves the office the position is tied to? The better practice is to avoid term limits for ex-officio directors all together.

Other than the fact the original intent has always been that the person in my position not have a vote, one of the prime reasons I asked to have the by-laws changed was to remove any concerns about a conflict of interest that might exist. This particular board’s sole existence is as an independent partner in the presenting season of the performing arts center I run. Among the things they vote to approve are fairly significant transfers of funds in support of that partnership.

While I have never attempted to vote and my presence has never been used to establish a quorum, there is always the possibility my position technically having a vote might be used as a tie-breaker in a contentious situation.

On the other side of the coin, there may be decisions the board makes that neither I nor the university will want to be entangled in. Closing an admittedly small opening to claim I might have voted on the decision is a good step to take.

It occurs to me to wonder if ex-officio board members are covered by board insurance depending on whether they have voting privileges or not. Are there any lawyers reading who might know?

If Other People Can Make Money At What You Do…You Might Not Be A Non-Profit

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I almost passed by a recent post by Lucy Bernholz on Philanthropy 2173 blog titled What Are Non-Profits For?

I’m glad I didn’t because her news that health clubs were challenging the YMCA’s non-profit status based on the idea that they were competing for customers left me a little incredulous. (my emphasis)

In both cases above the challenge comes because of who the organizations serve – in the YMCA case the membership is very similar to those folks who join commercial gyms, so why does one get tax privileges over the other. The argument raised in the case against free software is that such a resource might be used by commercial enterprises – so where’s the public benefit?

The nature of these challenges focuses on who might be benefitting from the services, not whether the services themselves are a public benefit. This is ironic from a nonprofit standpoint. For decades nonprofit managers and funders have been trying to build sustainable revenue sources for nonprofit organizations so they can survive. So much so, the Red Cross recently argued that its spending practices are trade secrets! BUT, at least in the logic of the two headlines above, if the organizations might serve those who can pay (one source of sustaining revenue) then they may not be nonprofit.

The other case she refers to is a situation where the IRS denied non-profit status to an open source software company because for profit companies might use their product.

While it doesn’t apply to all non-profits, one of the basic reasons often given for why we need non-profit organizations is that they often provide necessary and useful services that other entities won’t, in part because the opportunities for profit were low to non-existent.

In my experience growing up in the 1970s, the YMCA was offering services like swimming, exercise classes, weight rooms and summer camps long before health clubs and specialized exercise clothing were even on anyone’s radar.

The idea that the YMCA is a competitor with an unfair advantage in a niche they pioneered now that businesses can make money running yoga and kettlebell classes, is a little appalling to me. Rather the fact that these challenges have gained traction in different places around the country is what appalls me.

Does that mean that a gallery can open near a museum and challenge the museum’s tax exempt status because they are a competitor in art sales?

Or that if a movie chain notices that a demographic shift in their city has created a substantial demand for foreign films, they can demand that the a venerable art house movie theater be required to pay taxes?

I can understand the skepticism about the non-profit status of organizations like Roundabout Theater, but the vast majority of non-profits haven’t been competition to other companies–until apparently societal views shifted to make what they do worth pursuing.

I wondered if anyone was hearing similar rumblings in other lines of business.

Info You Can Use: Who Owns An Artist’s Booking Data?

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A very interesting question regarding the relationship between an agent and artist was recently broached on the Musical America blog. An agent who has an artist leaving their representation for another company asks who owns the leads and contacts they have cultivated on behalf of the artist.

However, the question has come up as to whether we are obligated to give the artist all of the leads and contacts we have been pursuing on his behalf that have not been booked yet. That doesn’t seem fair. We have been working on some presenters for years, have invested a lot of time, and consider that to be our proprietary information. If we turn all of that over to his new manager, that’s just going to be a gift to the new manager who will follow up on all of our work and take the commissions.

Now you may think the agent is correct. It doesn’t seem fair that the new manager will benefit from the efforts of the company that the artist is leaving. However, lawyer Brian Taylor Goldstein answers that under the law of agency, representatives, a term which applies to people like attorneys, realtors, accountants, artist agents, etc, work for a principal party and all the work they do belongs to that principal. (my emphasis)

…there are four key concepts:

(1) An agent works for the principal and, while the agent can advise the principal, the agent must follow the instructions and directives of the principal.

(2) An agent can never put his or her own interests above that of the principal.

(3) All of the “results and proceeds” of the agent’s work on behalf of the principal belongs to the principal.

(4) Any contractual provision, written or oral, that contravenes rules (1) – (3) is null and void.

In short, when a manager represents an artist, the manager has no proprietary information. In other words, those aren’t your leads and contacts, they are the artist’s. While your leads and contacts may start out as your own, once you contact someone on behalf of an artist, the artist is legally entitled to know anyone you have spoken to on his or her behalf, including the details of such conversation. Moreover, unless there is an agreement to the contrary, the artist is also free to contact anyone directly on his own behalf.

This information was surprising to me. I knew that this relationship existed with one’s realtor, but didn’t realize it extended to artists and agents/managers as well.

Goldstein goes on to explain that the law is set up this way to protect the agent from liability for any breach by the principal. The agent isn’t liable if the artist fails to show up for a performance, for example.

(Of course, since the agent will be the first to receive an emotionally fraught phone call if the artist doesn’t show, they will bear a lot of non-legal responsibility.)

He also enumerates a number of aspects of the agent-artist relationship that people may assume are a matter of law, but are merely a result of traditional practice, and perhaps due for a change.

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