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Expanding The Company To Make It Smaller

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About seven years ago, I wrote about a friend who incorporated the company he founded in order to gain the assistance of a board to help him expand operations, only to find that they were moving to contract the operations to a place where the organization was doing less than when he was running it alone.

Now he is mainly employed by another company altogether (happily, exercising his artistic talents) and the company he founded is largely inactive. I have a somewhat better sense now than I did when I wrote the entry what the causes of this situation were.

I wondered though if anyone else had come across a similar situation where an organization ended up worse off soon after the addition of a board. Did you have a sense of what the causes were? How can that be avoided in the future?

Before There Was Rocco..

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…there was Anthony Radich.

Looking back at some of my old entries, I was surprised to find I had forgotten that five years before Rocco Landesman uttered his infamous blasphemy/straight talk about there being too much art, Western Arts Federation Executive Director, Anthony Radich had suggested killing off arts organizations.

So let’s euthanize some arts organizations. Let’s pull some of the nonprofit arts programming off the arts-production line and free up funding and talent for reallocation to stronger efforts–especially to new efforts tilted toward engaging the public. Let’s return to the concept of offering seed money for organizations that, over a period of years, need to attract enough of an audience and develop enough of a stable financial base to survive and not structure them to live eternally on the dole. Let’s find a way to extinguish those very large groups that are out of audience-building momentum and running on inertia. Instead of locking arts funders into a cycle of limited choices, let’s free up some venture capital for new arts efforts that share the arts in new ways with the public.

I guess everybody takes note of the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, but forgets about what the head of an equally important regional arts service organization says.

As with Rocco, the issue is much more nuanced than at first glance. I wrote about it and there was some good discussion on Andrew Taylor’s blog at the time.

Putting Your Best (And Only Face) Forward

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Between a post Trevor O’Donnell recently wrote on bad press release practices and someone emailing me a press release where they spent two sentences explaining in the email that the price on the attached press release was wrong–instead of just changing the press release, I figured I had the moral duty to revisit a great post I wrote on a number of years ago.

Matthew Stibbe offered tips on writing “Press releases for human beings” He provides some very simple guidelines for writing press releases. Check the related links at the bottom of the post for some other good posts on the subject.

However, as I did when I first wrote the post, I wanted to point out Stibbe’s very valuable advice for clearing the previous version histories from your documents before sending it–or just creating a PDF.

Often what has been deleted from a press release is far more informative to journalists than what was actually sent. By viewing the deleted content, journalists can glean insight into a far more interesting story than the one you are willing to tell.

If They Can’t Come To The Museum, Should The Museum Go To Them?

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Back in 2006 I wrote on an NPR story that is probably even more relevant now than then.

The story centered around the Museum of Online Museums, a curated list of museums of all sorts around the world that had online presences. As I noted, the philosophy behind it is

The guys who run MoOM absolutely believe that seeing art in a physical museum is often a necessity and can be a transforming experience. But they also believe there are a lot of interesting collections of material out there that people should see, but that they wouldn’t necessarily ever want to drive to. They also point out that one would never have the time to visit all the bricks and mortar museums out there either so having the art online provides welcome and needed access.

Since the site has a mix of well known museums alongside ones that were curated by amateurs, the story raised the question about who is qualified to call themselves a museum and what actually constitutes qualifications.

My blog and others have countless examples of how being well trained doesn’t necessarily ensure the production of a quality product. I think the same could reasonably be said of a curator at a prestigious bricks and mortar institution. The inclusion in the story of a professor of Native American Indian studies saying that mainstream museums haven’t done a good job representing Native American cultural groups futher clouds the concept of who is qualified to assemble a collection. (Additionally, the professor is quoted as saying most tribal groups resist the term museum in favor of cultural center because it connotes something that is old and dull.)

[…]

Is the collection of magazine covers featuring the US Flag from one month 1942 more valid than the site featuring steel and coal magazine ads from all of 1966 simply because the former is on the Smithsonian site?

The same questions have been applied to who gets to call themselves artists/musicians/actors as well as what constitutes a legitimate theatre/opera/orchestra/dance company and who are just dabblers.

The answers have become more difficult to arrive at with the proliferation of so many channels of dissemination. You don’t necessarily need to have performed in an established location or be represented by a music label to be a successful and recognized music artist, for example.

Can Renting Culture Suffice?

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I am beginning the process of moving to assume a new job in Ohio. If you are reading this, either my computer is packed and on its way to a new home or I am.

Fear not devoted readers, I have prepared a number of entries to hold you over until my computer, internet access and myself shall join up again.

Back in 2006 I cited an article Bill Ivey and Steven Tepper wrote on the growing cultural divide. (No subscription needed for the link in this post).

They discussed the emergence and impact of Pro-Ams, Professional Amateurs, a term that was fairly new back then. There is a lot to consider about what they have to say seven years later. At the time, they felt there will be a cultural divide between those who had the time and resources to navigate their choices and involve themselves in pro-am pursuits and those who didn’t.

I have to ponder more if the signs indicate things are moving in the direction they warn against or not.

What did catch my eye upon review this time around is their suggestion that we are moving toward renting culture rather than owning it.

“A few decades ago, cultural consumption required a small number of pieces of equipment – a television set and antenna, an AM/FM radio, and a record turntable. Now cable television, high-speed Internet connections, DVD-rental services, satellite radio, and streaming-audio services all require hefty monthly fees. Even consumption that feels like a purchase, like an iTune download, is often really a rental…”

This lack of ownership has been reinforced even since then by incidents where Amazon removed and changed content that people had purchased.

I wonder does this work to the benefit of live performance if music, books and videos become viewed as more ephemeral? Does the value of engaging in ephemeral experiences rise?

Or does it give rise to a notion that it is all disposable, not worth valuing and preserving since you can’t own it but can conveniently request access on demand?

It could conceivably lead to both.

Ben Franklin, Father of Matching Grants

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April 17 is the anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s death. I thought it appropriate then to link back to a post I did titled St. Benjamin, about a man who was in many respects ahead of his time, including in relation to non-profits.

Franklin had the idea for matching grants 200 years before the Ford Foundation did. Back in 1751, he convinced the Pennsylvania Assembly to give $2,000 toward a hospital if $2,000 could be raised privately.

At the time, the idea was consider controversial, even Franklin was a little uneasy about his idea. As I wrote:

Well for one, political opponents felt the move was too conniving. I suppose it was because they didn’t believe he could raise the money and had tricked the Assembly. Franklin noted that knowing that their money would essentially doubled, they gave more.

Franklin himself referred to his innovative idea as a political maneuver so he might have felt a little uneasy about it himself. The success of his plan eased any troubled thoughts he might have had. “…after thinking about it I more easily excused myself for having made use of cunning.”

If You Love Your Brand, Set It Free

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Last week I reflected on Adam Thurman’s recent post about wrestling corporation WWE reinventing itself three times to adapt to changing audiences.

He followed up with a post about how the visible manifestation of rebranding has to reflect an internalized change that has already started within the company, or else the rebranding fails.

He suggests organizations commit to rebranding themselves every 7 years or so.

His post reminded me that Japanese anime series change their opening sequence and music every time the season changes, which can happen multiple times a year. As an example, here is the opening of D.Grayman season 1 versus season 3.

There is continuity of characters and basic artistic look to let fans identify their favorite anime series when a new season comes out. However, other than the Drew Carey Show whose changes in opening sequences didn’t necessarily synch up with changes in seasons, I can’t think of too many American shows that make a regular change. (Granted, apples to oranges comparison.)

In any case, while most arts organizations may put out a different brochure every season, they may not change the look of their website as regularly. That might be something to consider, especially if you can feature the work of a local visual artist to draw attention to them as a resource.

It could be especially effective to change the header of a monthly newsletter since that can take less effort than revamping an entire website. Doing A/B testing with different art can help identify an effective look and identity for the organization.

You can probably get a high open rate on your emails if you tell people you want their feedback. This month half are getting one piece of art and the other half another, next month the art with switch for both groups. That way people not only are engaged by the request for feedback, but there is a sense of competition with another group about who got to see the better artwork first.

What Happens When We Lock 12 Artists In A House And Make Them…Draw!

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I am a long time reader of the web comic, Penny Arcade (sometimes NSFW) which is focused on gaming culture (online, console, tabletop) The creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, have been among the few people to actually make a living at it, though they have said it was a near thing a few times in their careers.

They have used their success to found charity that mobilizes the gaming industry to benefit kids and a successful series of conventions started in response to what they felt were inequities in gaming conventions.

They recently started an online reality competition, Strip Search, to find the next great web comic artist. The competition basically seems to be an attempt to give web comic artists exposure while making fun of the whole reality competition format.

They have them do goofy challenges like remembering trivia from a tour of Seattle and a drawing version of the telephone game in return for prizes. The elimination challenges are more focused toward an artist’s professional life- designing t-shirts and skateboard art to a client’s specs, interviews by the media and cultivating your brand by responding to social media praise and criticism.

The winner of the elimination challenge has to go before Holkins and Krahulik to draw a comic strip based on randomly drawn topics. The one drawing the worst strip has to leave the show.

This is where things really veer from the traditional format. While the artists draw, Holkins and Krahulik ask them all sorts of questions looking to unnerve them a little. Krahulik especially likes to say stuff like “CONTESTANTS 10 MINUTES! is what you will have in 30 minutes.” Then they make the contestants sit in the “shame hole” which is an SUV parked outside, while they judge the strips.

This may sound a bit torturous, but my view is that it is an attempt to satirize many elements of format. At the end of each episode, Holkins and Krahulik jump into the SUV with the loser and really encourage them to keep working and talk about their own experiences trying to get their careers off the ground. In a recent episode, Holkins gave one of the guys his contact information and encouraged him to contact him at any time for advice.

I think their aim is to both encourage the artist to continue and encourage their fans to support the artist. When I visited some of the artists’ sites, it appears they all got invited to the Penny Arcade Exchange conventions to speak on panels and gain more exposure.

Compared to most reality competitions, you might find this one a bit amateurish and unpolished. The production values aren’t high and Holkins and Krahulik aren’t the poised panel of judges you find on most shows. The result is some honest moments like a recent episode with audio of Krahulik cursing off camera at the prospect of having to choose between two well-executed pieces.

Ultimately, they do send someone home, but Krahulik refuses to enact the ritual destruction of the losing piece and instead gives it back to the artist to keep.

While manipulation of events and environment are the hallmarks of reality competitions, it seems like there are places Penny Arcade doesn’t want to go. For instance, while I have been watching, I found myself thinking that the contestants were being too nice to each other and complimenting their competitors’ skills.

It got me to thinking about why I thought it was necessary for them to less supportive of each other –or at least be edited to appear that way. Isn’t it tough enough to be in a competition that is broadcast all over the internet for everyone to comment on?

Heck, isn’t it tough enough just trying to make a living from being a visual artist?

It may not bring the prestige of a cable show like Top Chef, but in terms of artists using their success and following to help other artists, I think there is something there worth emulating.

Info You Can Use: Kickstarting Your Taxes

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Salon has an important article to read if you are an artist trying to use Kickstarter to fund a project. Apparently people don’t realize the money they receive via Kickstarter is considered taxable income by the IRS.

In short, money raised from Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms is considered to be taxable income. Amazon Payments, which handles the credit card transactions for Kickstarter, disburses the funds to the project creator and sends them a 1099-K, a tax form that reports “Merchant Card and Third Party Network Payments” to the IRS. In this particular case, a pledge made by a fan to a project would be considered a third-party network payment.

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“Although musicians may not necessarily be selling something via Kickstarter, they are still entering into a transaction with their backers,” he noted. “If they reach their goal of ‘X’ amount of dollars, they have certain conditions they’ve agreed to make. They should consider the money as income because the IRS defines gross income from ‘whatever source derived,’ unless specially excluded.”

The article also notes that artists often underestimate the cost and logistics of making good on their promises. One woman promised her supporters tickets to a show so when she exceeded her allocation of comp tickets, she had to buy the rest herself. Another ended up spending $10,000 in postage mailing out the items she promised.

Kickstarter also brings an issue artists have faced with their patrons since time immemorial–their desire to be involved in all the decisions.

The issue for Dawn was intensified by her raising five times the amount of her set goal. Suddenly, fans were complaining that she didn’t really need the whole $104,000 to record the album. Dawn countered by noting that not only did she use all of her Kickstarter funds, but she also opened four separate credit cards and dipped into her life savings to cover the difference.

One of those interviewed for the article suggested that anyone thinking of launching a campaign consult with an accountant or business manager first to plan for the tax liabilities and expenses the campaign will entail.

Wrestling With Your Audience Composition

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I am rather busy wrapping things up here at work and preparing to move, but I wanted to make a nod in The Mission Paradox blog’s direction for a post he made about reinventing one’s organization.

Adam Thurman had been tweeting in advance of his post about how many times he attended Wrestlemania and how wrestling held lessons for arts and cultural organizations so I was curious to see what he had to say.

I had watched wrestling once upon a time, but drifted away for various reasons, including the fact the basic plot was pretty repetitive.

Yes, you could say that about arts organizations which revive the classics. Romeo and Juliet aren’t ever gonna get any less dead (though you never know…) But these days, there are probably more people for whom the classics are brand new than repeats.

But you have to admit, while the basic formula does repeat itself, there is a heck of a lot of drama that goes on before anyone ever enters the ring. Much of it harkens back to some basic archetypes with which people can identify: heroic journeys, villains, anti-heroes, talismans of power, ethical quandaries.

Thurman addresses some interesting facts I wasn’t aware of about how wrestling giant WWE reinvented itself twice in order to appeal to changing demographics and tastes.

Kids Say The Same Old Things

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I heard a kid tell a joke the other day that was probably pretty old when I told it to my parents 30 odd years ago. I frequently amaze my nephews by beating them to the punchline on knock knock jokes and riddles that I remember from my childhood.

But recently, I got to wondering who is preserving the valuable fart humor and bad puns of our youth? I am guessing parents aren’t largely responsible for teaching jokes like “How do you make a tissue dance? Put some boogie in it.”

My guess is that older kids/siblings pass these things on to the younger ones insuring the continuity of the best and worst kids jokes around. Even if each successive generation is learning these jokes from adults, the kids are enthusiastically passing them around their schools and playgrounds.

This makes me think it is all the more important to get kids involved with seeing and participating in arts and cultural activities when they are young. Not only does it introduce the idea that this is something people do, it can help to acculturate their friends as well.

Granted, kids chatting about their experience all over the school yard isn’t going to immediately transform into increased admissions at performing arts centers and museums. An adult tells another adult that his kids had fun at a Colonial times reenactment village, they might go next weekend. A kid tells another kid about the musket and cannon demonstration and imaginations are fired for hours, maybe days to come.

Arts and culture doesn’t have a lock on firing kids’ imaginations. There are a lot of things that will, and in the grand scheme of things, a few incidents as a kid aren’t going to make a specific impression that carries over to adulthood. After all, one hopes people’s sense of humor will evolve past the bad jokes of their youth.

But I have this itching suspicion that word of mouth among kids is greatly underestimated in its power to influence the adult that kid will become. The oral history preservation of these bad jokes hints at this.

Seeing a play may not be as compelling to a kid as talking about farts, but whatever a kid feels about their experience, they will share if they see it makes a connection with another kid. If the other kid has had a comparable experience and can talk about it, then both kids learn at an early age that these experiences can be used as a the basis of a relationship with someone else.

Consuming Art By The Pound

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For awhile there one of the biggest areas of discussion was about whether arts organizations should be like airlines an adopt dynamic pricing that responded to the demand for the show. I haven’t read much about it lately, but suspect some people are toying with the idea.

But another option has presented itself, again via airlines. Samoan Air announced that they were going to start charging people to fly based on their weight. This is because one of the biggest costs for airlines is fuel and weight determines how much fuel is necessary for a flight.

There is a certain logic behind this decision. When you ship cargo, you pay based on weight and size. It is only humans which pay a flat “piece” rate for themselves and their luggage.

So can the arts do the same? Can we charge by how much art a person consumes by their presence?

Don’t we do this to a degree already?

Tiered pricing for seating is based what we project the value of that seat is in terms of sight lines, acoustics and perhaps prestige. But when we charge one price for adults, another for students, another for senior citizens and another for kids under 12, that is due to the fact that adults are at the prime of their facilities and so are able to gain the most enjoyment and enlightenment from the experience, correct?

Yes, my facetious tone is meant to be obvious. Since people come to art with different experiences and backgrounds, it is impossible to measure who is “consuming” more from their interactions with it.

The fact of the matter is, the different level of pricing is based on the recognition that students and seniors don’t often have the income to attend. Kids pricing is to encourage/facilitate parents to bringing their kids. Military rate is good PR to recognize their services.

The reality is, the whole set up is something of a social contract with our audience where the people who don’t qualify for any discounts are pretty much in the position of subsidizing the experience for those who do qualify.

Thinking about it in this context, I wonder if we don’t really do enough to thank all those full price buyers for essentially voluntarily participating in this artificial construct. Maybe slip them a Hershey’s Kiss or a thank you note when we rip their tickets at the door.

One of the arguments against dynamic pricing is the same you might make against charging people in the same manner as cargo. For many organizations, price is part of the relationship they have with their community. On its own, pricing won’t build loyalty or relationships, but it can be an ingredient because it acknowledges something about the other person.

I make my suggestion about rewarding full price buyers with candy with some degree of seriousness because I think audiences can take their discounts for granted and it might be beneficial for all those involved to acknowledge that the discount only works with the tacit participation of many others.

Info You Can Use: Pixar Pitch

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Yesterday I linked to a recent post by Barry Hessenius about gatekeepers and he mentioned that Hollywood had developed a pitch system where people without the connections to get a real meeting were afforded a short time to pitch an idea.

Apropos to this, Daniel Pink made a short video about six new pitches for selling yourself, ideas, etc.

He talks a little bit about how email subject lines are really pitches and makes some suggestions about rhyming pitches (which I can see will be effective you if you don’t go full Seuss). He also notes that questions are much more active and engaging than making statements.

He uses the example of Ronald Reagan who famously asked if his listeners were better off now than they were four years prior. Pink notes that this can get listeners filling in the blanks to convince themselves in ways your statements can’t connect with them.

He takes pains to make the point that the word pitch may imply something is traveling in a single direction, but in reality pitches today are interactive. You invite someone else to have a conversation about something with you.

The pitch I liked the best was the first one he introduces, The Pixar Pitch. This one is most suited for the arts because it is all about storytelling. Pink says this is the formula Pixar uses while planning and plotting their movies.

It runs something like this:

ONCE UPON A TIME____________, EVERY DAY___________, ONE DAY____________, BECAUSE OF THIS_____________, BECAUSE OF THIS_________________,
UNTIL FINALLY_____________________.

He notes that we don’t see life as a series of logical propositions, but rather a series of episodes and so making your case in this manner can create a powerful connection with your listeners.

This formula can be the basis for press releases and marketing materials. I took a look at the trailer for Pixar’s Finding Nemo and it follows this formula pretty closely. You don’t even need to know the formula to have your inner narrator describe the scene to you “Once upon a time there was a fish named Nemo and his dad, everyday they happily swam together under the sea until one day…..”

Obviously, newspapers would get a little tired of you if your press releases explicitly used this formula for every show, and if you can clearly see a more compelling approach to use, go with that, but the formula can under gird what you are trying to communicate about events.

If you are having difficulty getting your ideas to connect with people, don’t you think it is a good idea to check out Pink’s short video and see what might resonate with you?

I’m My Own Idea Czar

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La Piana Consulting blog had a post a few weeks ago about how the dynamics of non-profits can crush new ideas and creative approaches to problems.

Their last suggested solution to avoid this is to appoint an “Idea Czar”:

“Appoint an “Idea Czar” from outside the senior management ranks. This person becomes a human suggestion box, an ombudsman for creativity. Anyone with a novel idea that might answer a current challenge is invited to share it with the Idea Czar, who periodically reports on what he or she has learned at management team or board meetings. Then use those reports to dive deeply into a specific question that piques the particular group’s interest or that the CEO would really like the board’s or management team’s best thinking on.”

I walked around most of today pondering whether this could actually work. I mean, it would require someone with enough seniority and experience to be taken seriously by management, but who also hasn’t been around so long that they are cynical about the viability of ideas. Even if the didn’t discount them immediately, they would need to be idealistic and energetic enough to effectively advocate for the idea in the face of a resistant board and senior management.

I recognized fairly early on that in my venue the idea czar would be our assistant theatre manager. (I am fairly idealistic, but she tops me.) This made me realize that it isn’t enough to appoint someone on staff into the position, if you really want to break out of a status quo, the hiring process has to involve actively recruiting people who possess idealism and strength of character to advocate in the face of a tendency to say No.

Apropos of this, Barry Hessenius posted this week about how one can be their own best/worst gatekeepers in terms of openness to “good ideas, new thinking and ways to actually be better managers, administrators and leaders; opportunities for new projects, collaborations and ways of seeing our world.”

Just as this problem of gatekeeping can manifest on both a personal and organizational level, the solution can probably be implemented on a personal and organizational level.

It probably isn’t enough to appoint a person to be the company idea czar if the board and administration are going to perpetuate an environment that is hostile to new ideas. Management and leadership should practice self-advocacy by setting aside time each week to entertain new ideas in the same way 3M, Google and Hewlett-Packard give employees time each week to develop new ideas and products.

Management and leadership might use this time to read websites they bookmarked, jot down what interesting ideas they have and then go back to ideas they jotted down in previous sessions. I think this last step is important because realizing you had forgotten some of the great ideas you had had weeks before serves to reinforce that fact you have the capacity to have good ideas.

Even if none of those ideas ever travel from the idea journal into practice within the company, the very act of engaging with new ideas, looking at them, turning them over a little, before putting them away, helps the mind practice accepting and handling new ideas rather than simply rejecting them.

Good Reason To Create Art Isn’t Always To Create Good Art

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We are often warned that art, and solutions in general, created by committee isn’t any good and doesn’t please anyone. But I wonder, if everyone involved feels ownership in what is produced and it strengthens the community, does it necessarily have to be of high quality aesthetically?

The wide gazing eyes of Thomas Cott fell upon a project sponsored in Mexico by the Scribe paper company. The company attached a small apartment to a billboard to house the artist who would be painting an advertisement for the company.

Over the course of 10 days the artist took suggestions about what to paint submitted over Twitter. The result may never be hailed as a work of genius, but the project garnered a lot of attention for Scribe. (You can see section details here) I am guessing it also strengthened the company’s relationship with a good segment of their customer base.

I am not sure what sort of guidance the artist was given by Scribe about integrating suggestions into her work, but apparently about 50 were used on the billboard.

Let’s pursue art for art sake and strive for excellence always. But for as much as we talk about connecting with our communities, it can often have the subtext of “but only on our own terms.” As Howard Sherman pointed out, there is a lot of disdain for anything tinged as low populism community theatre.

The primary goal of a community theatre production may have less to do with creating good art than spending time accomplishing something in cooperation with your neighbors. Heck, most guys who go fishing don’t want to actually catch something, they want to drink beer with their buddies.

So we may talk about how the arts need to connect with their community, but are we really ready to produce art for community sake, rather than art for art sake, and run the risk of creating really bad art that results in people feeling more connected with each other?

It likely takes starting from a place where you put community connections first and the pride and ego of the organization second. Scribe could have ended up in a situation where they had their name attached to a really ugly billboard in a prominent spot and they had to figure out what was the minimum amount of time they had to leave it up before they could paint it over.

It takes courage to cede control in a very public way. Just as not every masterful artist has the ability to teach what they know to others, not every artist and arts organization has the ability to lead a project like this to a good outcome.

Is It Against The Law To Pay Me More?

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You may have heard about Dan Palotta’s recent TED Talk about how judging charities on concepts like administrative overhead ratios is hobbling their ability to solve huge problems.

He makes some persuasive points, though some of the concerns I had with his proposals when they appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog three years ago still remain.

Gene Takagi picked up on the talk and addressed legal considerations which would prevent non-profits from operating in the manner Palotta suggests. (Just to be clear, Palotta never suggests charities cleave to non-profit status.)

Takagi notes that charity pay scales are limited by laws governing 501 c 3s and so can’t compete well on salary if supporters show tolerance for doing so to attract the best talent. Expenditures are limited in much the same manner,

“If a for-profit spends 90 cents to make $1, it may be a perfectly acceptable profit margin, but if a charity spends 90 cents to make $1, it would be widely viewed as a terrible waste. As a result, many charities fail to properly report their fundraising expenses, and the IRS has raised the possibility of utilizing the controversial commensurate test, which addresses whether a charity is using its resource in line with its charitable mission…But this can’t be judged strictly on percentages, and charities should be allowed to experiment so if an honest fundraising and mission awareness-raising campaign fails, the charity isn’t slaughtered for it. The problem, however, is not the law, but the misguided public ideology of which Dan spoke.”

Charities are also often limited and discouraged from pursuing new revenue ideas by federal and state laws as well as popular sentiment.

I think the biggest question that this whole discussion raises for me is whether social attitudes are such that a for-profit company raising money for social issues will be tolerated. Given that people will give money to projects via things like Kickstarter without much consideration about whether it is non-profit or not, is the idea that non-profits do things that companies won’t due to lack of profitability and governments can’t/won’t due to lack of political will and expertise, over?

Currently I think there is a capricious element to Kickstarter campaigns that make it an unsuitable model for garnering long term support. However the very existence of such mechanisms may be shifting mindsets to a place where worthiness and overhead ratios are not mutually exclusive.

What About Artists On Corporate Boards?

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A posting by Alex Tabarrok today on Marginal Revolution inspired some “what’s good for the goose…” thinking for me today. He links to a study showing that academics on corporate boards tend to keep the company healthy.

I am not going to suggest putting arts and culture people on corporate boards will automatically help a corporation any more than encouraging them to settle in a city will make the area more economically prosperous. However, many of the impacts the study finds academics (both professors and administrators) have on companies appear to be ones that arts professionals might bring as well.

First, academic directors are outside directors with relatively strong reputations and a tradition of independent thinking. They are trained to be critical thinkers with their own opinions and judgments, and they are less influenced by others and can be tough when necessary (Jiang and Murphy, 2007)…Fama (1980) and Fama and Jensen (1983) argue that outside directors have incentives to monitor management because they want to protect their reputation as effective, independent decision makers. Thus, the monitoring theory indicates that academic directors would be important monitors of management.

Obviously, not all professors would make good directors, nor would all arts people. However, arts people have that tradition of independent thinking and an almost inborn fear of being labeled a sell-out which can motivate them to speak their concerns.

Third, academic directors’ primary areas of expertise are academic in nature. They tend to think through problems differently than nonacademics and can provide different perspectives in the boardroom, which adds to the board’s diversity. Prior studies find that board diversity (such as occupational diversity, social diversity, gender diversity, and ethnic diversity) is an important factor that influences board efficacy and firm performance

If arts people don’t bring a different perspective to things, I don’t know who will.

The area the study found that academics contributed most to a company was in relation to oversight. As I read the following, it seemed that non-profit board meetings and the attendant committee meetings, something that is at the center of both a professor and an arts administrator’s life, might actually be an asset.

“We find that academic directors are more likely to attend board meetings than other outside directors. In addition, academic directors hold more outstanding committee memberships than other outside directors. Specifically, academic directors are more likely to sit on monitoring-related committees, such as auditing committees and corporate governance committees, than nonacademic outside directors. The results on the director attendance behavior and committee assignments indicate that academic directors are better at board governance than other outside directors.”

Other benefits to oversight the study found was that CEO turnover was more closely tied with company performance and the financial operations were run in such a way there were fewer Securities and Exchange Commission investigations of the top executives when academics sat on the board. Companies with academics on the board also tended to be more innovative.

Now, of course, the disclaimers. Not all types of companies had academics on the boards and the study finds that different types of companies benefited from different board compositions.

Business professors were the most effective board members. Other types of academic fields mentioned were technology and law. This is not to say that arts people wouldn’t be effective because it doesn’t appear that too many liberal arts professors were asked to serve. It is something of an unknown quality.

If corporations are valuing creativity and critical thinking from employees, especially recent college graduates, they could presumably benefit from tapping those who teach them.

Likewise, they could benefit from arts people who are not only creative, critical thinkers, but are constantly cobbling together coalitions to pursue projects.

But the potentially biggest impediment to effective service on a for-profit board for both academics and arts people is whether they are dependent on the corporation upon whose board they serve for support.

“Furthermore, some academic directors hold administrative positions and thus may have connections to companies through university endowments or other fundraising relationships, which may make them less independent than inside managers.”

Still, it is interesting to think about the potential benefits to a corporation to have an arts person serve on the board.

In wondering why it doesn’t happen more often, I came to the not inconsiderable or illogical conclusion that corporations may not view those who ask them for money as equal to the task of helping them make money.

Rememberances of Lost Opportunities

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Via You’ve Cott Mail comes a NewMusicBox article on how the Mondavi Center is using Google Hangouts as a way to connect with audiences and perhaps as an update of the traditional concert talk.

Author Dustin Soiseth starts out talking about the ill-fated Concert Companion and the resistance to its use which helped to keep it from spreading.

In the context of my post yesterday decrying how social media was allowing people to escape from boredom and uncomfortable situations yesterday, when I read the article I thought, “now this is social media I can support.”

I know it can seem hypocritical to be against using social media devices unless people are reading what I want them to read, but having them semi-engaged is preferable to being entirely disengaged.

I mean, if you are on a first date with a person, if they are going to be surreptitiously using their devices instead of giving you their full attention, better they be looking up information on Neutral Milk Hotel so they can pretend to be a fan and try to make a connection with you than have them looking up cat videos on YouTube. (Not that I am speaking from experience.)

As I acknowledged at the end of my post yesterday, there is an inevitability to social media’s appearance/participation in arts events so it is important to find a way to make the experience constructive.

Soiseth points out much the same thing.

The use of supertitles in opera, while commonplace now, was quite controversial when it began in America in the 1980s. When Beverly Sills introduced them at the New York City Opera in 1983, she was called a “philistine” in The New York Times. In 1985, James Levine famously replied “Over my dead body” when asked about the possibility of supertitles at the Metropolitan Opera, and yet ten years later there they were, Met Titles in the back of every seat, and in standing room, too.

Concert Companion was rebuffed and now the technology is manifesting itself in performance halls in forms the arts organization doesn’t control. Though that opportunity was lost, other opportunities are presenting themselves.

Even though the Google Hangouts Soiseth attended/researched weren’t well attended, there appears to be some potential in the model the Mondavi Center is using. Some of the difficulties they seemed to face appeared to be related to awareness and lack of familiarity with the experience.

Organizations might even be able to replicate the Concert Companion experience by putting QR codes in their program books that people can scan at the change of each scene or movement in order to access notes on the performance at each juncture. After the performance, people can scan other codes for supplemental videos, discussion fora and the like.

We all know that even without an iPhone in hand, people are going to get bored and turn their attention elsewhere, look at their neighbors, read the program book, clean their fingernails, etc. It is okay to be bored.

Given that people are likely to become disengaged at some point and given that the presence of social media devices are only likely to increase, the prudent thing to do might be to provide an outlet for people’s impulse to grab their phones in the middle of the show.

Take the approach of: we would prefer you don’t pull out your phone, but if you feel you must, here is some interesting material to look at rather than to text your friends about going to the beach tomorrow. That said, this material isn’t going anywhere and you can look at it during intermission or tomorrow morning.

I can foresee that people may use hashtags or chat environments generated by the arts organization to discuss the performance during the show. My sentiment about that is the same as yesterday–encouraging audiences it some time to percolate in their brains and discuss it later.

Not to mention, the audience at large may potentially be upset by people spread throughout the theatre giggling as they try to outdo each other insulting the actors’ costumes.

On the other hand, that interaction may provide the arts organization more feedback about their show than they have ever gotten on a survey.

If you are feeling like I am flip flopping on this topic, I have to answer by saying it is a really difficult thing to address in an objective way. I don’t think the sentiments I expressed yesterday are at all unreasonable. I am concerned about what it means for society at large when people are afraid to be alone with their own thoughts.

But I also know that using a social media device during a performance and honestly facing the truths of one’s life are not mutually exclusive and room must be made for both.

Can’t It Wait?

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This weekend I was listening to Sherry Turkle’s 2012 TED Talk where she essentially reversed a position she held in 1996 about all the benefits technology would bring to our lives.

It isn’t really news to anyone that people are using technology to essentially mediate their interaction with their environment. However, the more I watched her talk, the more concerned I got about the implications about society at large and the more wary I got about the value of tweet seats in live performances. (my emphasis)

People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you’re texting. People explain to me that it’s hard, but that it can be done.
[…]

I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right. But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

When I ask people “What’s wrong with having a conversation?” People say, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.” So that’s the bottom line. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body — not too little, not too much, just right.

Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.

There is a lot more I initially quoted from her talk, but I felt like I had to trim it down a bit for brevity sake. Which is actually related to her point, I suppose.

At one point she talks about people viewing boredom and solitude as a problem that needs to be a solved with some sort of contact and so every red light and check out line is a potential cause of anxiety.

I am concerned about giving people tacit approval to shift focus to their cell phones instead of making an effort to engage with whatever is in front of them. Many shows have content that challenges audiences and makes them uncomfortable. It would be good if people didn’t have an excuse to avoid the conversation. I am not talking about in your face statements about social inequality and the inhumanity we visit upon each other, though they are worthy of discussion. I am thinking also of the disillusion faced by Willy Loman.

I guess the response is that 1- Not everyone will choose to tweet about something other than the event and may move the conversation to a larger audience and 2- You won’t have any problem if you give them something compelling to tweet about.

But the fact is, often your immediate and gut reaction to something isn’t all there is. Your response can at least wait until the end. Often you won’t know how you really feel about it until you have had a day or two to digest your experience. You may come to ruefully realize you were masterfully manipulated or that your disappointment wasn’t due to what you initially attributed it to.

I know a complete resistance by outlawing social media devices is not going to be practical. And there are likely many very constructive ways an art organization can cultivate and guide the conversation to create a larger discussion that results in people valuing their presence, even if they never attend an event.

But again, I come back to the question, can’t it wait?

Trying New Things With No Apparent Benefit

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Something a former employer has started doing has reminded me to always keep your options and mind open even if the potential value is unclear.

I used to coordinate the operations for the Appel Farm Arts and Music Festival. A few years ago, one of the board members, (now executive director), had the idea to offer a 25 mile bike ride on the festival day. I believe this year will be the third year they are doing it.

Because the festival is outdoors in a rural area, having a bike ride does fit the vibe of the event and the lifestyle of many of those who attend. But I gotta tell you, it would have never occurred to me that people would be up for a 25 mile ride followed by a full day attending an arts and music festival.

Just thinking about it is exhausting to me. Also, most of the audience does not live in the immediate area. Will people really want to haul their bikes to south Jersey to do this ride and attend the festival?

Just based on my experience living where I do now, I know there are enough bike enthusiasts who won’t hesitate to answer yes to all of the above. 10 years ago, I would have discounted the idea. And in fact, maybe all the elements weren’t in place to make it an attractive option back then.

As the guy responsible for all the logistics for the event, there are details related to adding the ride that would have concerned me and made me resist it. But there was a good volunteer corps that supported the festival so none of the details would have been too troubling in the end.

I applaud them for making the initial investment of time and energy to try it out. It is easy to advocate for experimenting and trying new things, but there are always practical considerations. The festival is a big event and to add something new diverts attention away from the core activity.

It may sound simple to gather a bunch of people on bikes, send them on a ride and make sure to have water and snacks available at the planned rest stops. There is still a lot of planning and tracking involved with the ride and I imagine the festival staff and volunteers make it look a lot easier than it is.

I think that it can sometimes be easier to diverge from the core mission of the organization in order to chase funding and grant money, but more difficult to add activities which complement existing programs but do not have a clear potential for financial gain.

I am not saying this was the case with the bike ride. They may have seen the opportunity to add 50 new attendees for all I know. I am just observing what is a potential paradox of just about any business. It is easy to get sidetracked by the prospect of new opportunities to the detriment of enhancing the value of existing conditions.

People may think that doing something with no apparent benefit is the cornerstone of a non-profit organization’s existence, but living and working under that philosophy doesn’t make the decisions any easier–especially when you are frequently enjoined to act more like a business.

Respect To The Loyal User

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So it appears that Google is phasing out its Reader service. This is rather annoying because it is the way I follow the vast majority of blogs. Given that it appears they are also phasing out Feedburner, it looks like the writing is on the wall that Google is no longer interested in helping people follow blogs.

So if you are subscribing to this blog via Feedburner, I encourage you to subscribe to my blog directly by using the subscribe by email field to the right——>

I have seen a fair bit of annoyance and anger over the impending disappearance of Google Reader. The strongest came from Maria Popova:

(The language is a little strong so I am placing it after the fold)

Read more

Toward Better Organizational Self-Evaluation

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I have been thinking a bit more on my post about when you get your first hint that things aren’t going well for your organization. I haven’t thought up any more interesting warning signs, but I have been thinking about the “after action” conversations between staff members I mentioned.

It isn’t necessarily a sign that things are going downhill, but I do think at least a semi-formal post mortem discussion that leads to action is necessary for the health of the organization. If people gather around the water cooler, talk about how great the show was, sigh “if only more people were in the audience” and then go back to their desks leaving it to the marketing department to fix or hoping things are better next time around, that isn’t really constructive.

I have worked for companies where a post mortem discussion focused on the technical issues that needed to be fixed/learned from the next time around, but I have come to realize that development, marketing and audience services need to be given equal time. And they need to be at the same meeting with the technicians.

I will be the first to admit I don’t do this to the extent I am envisioning it should be done as I write this.

There may be smaller meetings prior to the post mortem where each department collects their thoughts so they can summarize their victories and challenges and keep the meeting short. But if you are going to embrace the idea that responsibility for marketing and development are shared across the organization, then every department probably needs to be largely present.

It is too easy otherwise for those who are not present to feel disconnected and uninvested in the central goals of the organization, inhibiting long term progress.

It can be easy to address concrete technical problems like broken equipment and missed cues. It is more difficult to figure out intangible things like how to attract audiences and motivate volunteers. When the decision is made to have a cabaret in the lobby prior shows in order to engage audiences as they arrive, it is better that the tech people were in on that entire discussion and know the motivation rather than being told they now needs to support a cabaret before every show.

Probably annually there should be a discussion about whether what the organization is doing is working. The ultimate decision will be up to the board, but the staff are all experts in their respective fields. They may be best positioned to say whether what the organization is doing is working. If the season is programmed out of a sense of obligation (seven shows, Shakespeare in the Fall, Musical in the Spring) rather than as an acknowledgement of the current operating environment and community, then the impetus for change and the supporting evidence may need to come from the organization’s staff.

Admittedly, it is difficult to move against the inertia of an organization’s history and business model for both staff and board. I don’t know that a staff would initiate a radical change. On the other hand, if they were regularly involved with providing feedback and saw it was often acted up, who know what people might feel empowered to suggest.

The impetus for this post came not only from thinking about the warning signs post from last month, but also thinking about a post I did from a year about about founding arts organizations with planned expiration dates. Though I thought expiration dates are a great idea, I wondered if anyone would have the fortitude to do it.

From there my thoughts turned to the concept that any business should always strive to do things a little better the next time around. I figure there is a better chance of arts organizations putting a self-evaluation process in place than planning for their own demise. Given that, I started thinking about what practices need to be in place to allow an arts organization to be responsive to changing times?

What I would really be interested in is knowing if anyone works for any sort of organization or business that has institutionalized a really effective self-reflective process like this. What about the corporate/organizational culture has made it so effective?

People will avoid the mechanical imposition of this sort of structure so there needs to be some whole hearted investment by the employees. I would bet that any organization that does a good job examining themselves also has a highly effective personnel review process.

Be The Propaganda You Wish To See

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Last Monday was March 4, according to my grandmother, the most commanding day of the year. (March Forth!). I am guessing other people’s grandmothers must have used the same line because last Monday there were a lot of hits on the post I did nine years earlier called The Most Commanding Day of the Year.

My grandmother had a lot of funny turns of phrase that she used to entertain and trick her grandkids. She was also very proud of being Irish (though she was second or third generation in the U.S.).

Now I have more German than Irish in my background from grandparents on both sides, but I didn’t realize that until I was much older thanks to my grandmother’s constant propaganda about how wonderful the Irish are and how wonderful it was that we were Irish.

I never recognized how much influence that had over my life. I have never been rabidly Irish, even on St. Patrick’s Day. However, two weeks ago I was listening to a Deutsche Welle report on how successful Ireland has been at achieving their goals while holding the European Union presidency. I felt a this sense of pride in Ireland’s accomplishment even though I only have a vague idea of how the EU presidency works.

I have generally been cynical about the effectiveness of constantly telling kids that they are smartest and most talented because reality tends to rear its ugly head a vast majority of the time and they realize they don’t measure up to the billing.

My recognition of my reaction to the Ireland story gave me some insight into the power of reinforcing ideas for kids as the grow up. It has started me thinking about the long term benefits of encouragement absent of specific value, consistently telling kids they can be artistic and creative without necessarily saying they are the most creative in class or specifying what being a successful artist looks like.

I know this sounds very vague and touchie-feelie and I will be the first to admit that I have no data to back this up.

I do know that many experts encourage parents to praise the process rather than the result– praise the hard work that went into preparing for a test rather than telling a kid they are smart for scoring so high. That way there is a sense of cause and effect behind a failure and how it might be resolved rather than a total sense of loss and bewilderment when the natural ability you have been told you possess seems to have abandoned you.

The idea that exposing and involving kids in the arts at a young age is important is barely news to any of us. My purpose in writing this post is to point to just how subtle and pervasive cultivating part a person’s identity as a child can be.

In terms of my Irishness, my grandmother’s influence was reinforced by the fact I lived an hour outside of NYC, one of the great bastions of Irish identity in the U.S.

But though my grandmother has been dead over a decade now, my immediate family, uncles and cousins inevitably bond over obscure “holidays” like March 4. My mother and I talked about it on March 3 and though neither of us spoke to my sister, she emailed out about the most commanding day of the year to my siblings and cousins on March 4.

If you think about it, there is probably some equally peculiar element from your own upbringing that influences you to this day. Considering all this, it may be helpful over the long term to include phrases like “what do you like to do?,” “what have you created lately?” in every day conversation with kids of all ages.

(By the way, I haven’t appropriated the saying commonly attributed to Gandhi for my title. There is no evidence he said it. But as with all evidence debunking misattributions, the research is pretty interesting.)

Brush Up Your Suetonius

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The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace recently commissioned a study about the value placed on higher education by employers.

I initially only scanned the article, but listening to the Marketplace report on the radio on the way home brought me back to read it again when I heard the president of a technology company talk about how they make their new hires read Cato the Elder and Suetonius. He mentioned they were looking for people who could talk about the process of putting an idea forward, supporting it and problem solving.

“We do that because we ask them to look at the process – the abstract process – of organizing ideas,” Boyes says.

Sounds a lot like an argument for liberal arts education, at a time when more students are being told to study science and technology as a path to a career. Maguire Associates, the firm that conducted the survey, says the findings suggest colleges should break down the “false dichotomy of liberal arts and career development,” saying they’re “intrinsically linked.”

Or, as Boyes puts it: “We don’t need mono-focused people. We need well-rounded people.” And that’s from a tech employer.”

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about how college students need to focus on practical majors like business and STEM fields rather than wasting their time on Liberal Arts. But businesses keep saying they need well rounded problem solvers, not just people with technical knowledge.

Yet that technical knowledge and specific experience is becoming ever more important, predominantly in the form of internships. The Chronicle of Higher Education addresses that specifically in a separate section of their report. What I really liked about it is that it starts by relating a story about a student failing in her internship and learning from it. I think that is a hallmark of a good internship experience.

What I was a little taken aback by was the fact this woman had six internships. My concern is based on the fact that it takes considerable resources to support oneself while they are participating in an internship. Cost of college and the necessity of attending is certainly revealing the gap between the wealthy and those with fewer means. Now to learn that incurring the cost of internships is increasingly important for employment and to see that one woman has worked six of them presumably to make herself more marketable, is somewhat disheartening to someone like myself whose family didn’t have a lot.

I have written about internships a fair bit over the course of this blog discussing the laws that apply to them as well as some interesting ideas for giving arts majors more practical skills through the design of their training programs.

As I read and listened to the sections of this report, it occurred to me that arts training programs need to insure their education and internship opportunities are providing is relevant and valuable. But it also occurred to me that arts organizations offering the internship opportunities would benefit by marketing them to students outside the arts.

The interns from other disciplines can gain the practical experience and educational “leavening” they need to become more well-rounded. The arts organization can benefit in turn by having someone with a non-arts perspective working for their company.

True, this may reduce the number of internships available for people pursuing arts careers, but those students can also benefit from working for a non-arts company to become well rounded in other areas and pick up skills they can bring back to the arts.

Let me tell you, I wouldn’t have thought doing semi-farm work as a teenager would have translated into anything useful for the arts until it came time to drive a farm tractor around while setting up the grounds for an outdoor arts and music festival.

The Chronicle article mentions much the same thing:

Such exercises don’t always ensure connections, at least at first. Jacquelyn M. Lomp, who graduated from UConn last May with a B.A. in English, initially wasn’t sure how her internship, in which she wrote newsletters for the university’s pharmacy department, related to her studies. “I’d go from dissecting different pharmaceutical research,” she says, “to studying Norse mythology.”

Only after college did she come to recognize that both her academic work and her internship required intense focus and the ability to analyze language for deeper meaning.

The title of this post, inspired of course, by the song from Kiss Me Kate:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIpp2Jj8AQ&w=420&h=315]

Don’t Blame Arcane Terminology and Practice

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Andrew Taylor touches upon a little of what I was thinking about this weekend in his post today. He quotes a recent piece by Marian Godfrey where she talks about how the language used by arts managers and grant makers is alienating and soul sucking.

…like any professional jargon, it puts up barriers and makes people who are unfamiliar with our dialect feel like outsiders, including the very people we are trying to support — artists and engaged people in our communities. I believe we need more humane language to describe ourselves and our visions: words and meanings that are shared by artists, administrators, and the public.

I had been thinking about the specialized language and terminologies used in the arts this weekend. I believe Godfrey was referring to the institutional and general language used to discuss the benefits of the arts as a whole, (I read the whole piece as Andrew Taylor enjoined his readers to do), whereas I was thinking about the terms specific to each arts discipline. As such, I don’t know that I can say I directly disagree with what Godfrey says.

The conclusion I came to this weekend is that while there is quite a bit of vocabulary one must learn in order to comfortably participate in a conversation about a discipline, I don’t think the need to learn a complex set of terms really comprises a significant impediment to becoming an participant or spectator. I think it is just a convenient excuse.

There are plenty of instances where people willingly engage in the time consuming process of learning special terminology. Take MMORPGs like W.O.W. where people will be exposed to terms like: tank, buff/debuff, AoE, aggro, autoloot, cooldown, PvE, PvP, grinding, griefing, among thousands of others. Players are expected to master the terminology, understand the role their character fills and how to use their abilities alongside others to achieve a goal.

Thousands of people happily undertake this challenge every day.

You might argue that people playing online games gain a sense of personal accomplishment that motivates them. But watching sports is often just as passive an activity as watching a performance, (okay, granted you can’t jump up and yell at a ballerina the moment the spirit moves you like you can with an athlete), and requires learning all sorts of arcane rules specific to each game. Often the rules are a little different for each level of play.

People learn these rules and terms because they want to. If they don’t know them, they can seek help from friends or go online to look up the information.

To illustrate this, I intentionally didn’t link to any resource with the gaming terms. Did you look them up or think about looking them up if you didn’t know what they were?

Sometimes this information is collated by the company/team/organization providing the activity. Often these days, people sharing a common interest join together to contribute information to a wiki which exists independently of the organization or activity it covers.

So when people express trepidation about learning the vocabulary and rituals of the performing and visual arts, I think the question really should be why this is so? My impulse is to respond that it is because there are not enough people they are acquainted with either personally or virtually providing a message that it is worth the trouble to learn about it.

I also don’t think there are enough informational resources out there to make it easy for people to learn if they so desire. I just did a Google search for the term “first position” because I can never remember the feet placement for the different positions. I couldn’t find it until I searched for the term “second position.” (Though I did discover A LOT of dance schools are named First Position.)

This is not to say that there aren’t many wikis and specialized dictionaries online which cover arts terminology. American Ballet Theatre has a pretty good dictionary of dance terms. It is just a coincidence that first position doesn’t appear there.

You would have to know to look there though because everyone’s go to source, Wikipedia, only has about 24 terms on it and there isn’t a good dance wiki that I could find. Information sources on theatre terminology are only slightly better.

As much as people say television shows like Glee, Smash and Bunheads don’t reflect reality, they do serve to disseminate the message that singing, theatre and dance are things people should be interested in learning more about.

Like I said, the idea that there isn’t enough of a visible trend and readily available information was something of a primary impression I had. I’d be happy to hear other theories.

While I think some of the terminology and practices might need a change, I do feel fairly strongly that people’s reticence to learn more about arts disciplines can’t be laid primarily at the feet of specialized vocabulary and unfamiliar practices.

People take the necessity of doing this in stride if they are motivated to learn something. Simplifying the language and altering the practices isn’t going to result in a sudden deluge of attendees because the initial motivating impulse will be absent.

Caring, Rather Than Money, Makes The World Go Round

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There was a Slate article today covering research on motivating employees that seemed well-aligned with the non-profit work environment. The research essentially verifies the importance of providing recognition and a sense of meaning to employees.

Researchers found that small gifts, rather than money, motivated people to work harder. They told one group of workers they would receive 7 euros more in pay than they had been promised when they were recruited. Another group was given a gift wrapped water bottle worth 7 euros and the control group was given no bonus. The cash bonus didn’t inspire any improvement, but those receiving the bottle were 25% more productive than those in the other two groups. The article notes that this increase in productivity more than paid for the 7 euro expenditure.

(my emphasis)

It’s not that the workers particularly loved their bottles—in fact, in a separate experiment in which catalogers were offered the choice between a bottle versus 7 euros, 80 percent took the cash (and still worked a lot harder). Rather, it was the thought that counted, and simply handing out a few more euros hardly takes much thought. Even offering the option of a gift showed that the employer cared.

An intriguing final version of the experiment underscored the importance, in the eyes of the employees, of the thought and effort bosses put into their gifts. This time, the cash was delivered as a 5-euro note folded into an origami shirt and a 2-euro coin with a smiley face painted on it. The origami money-gift generated the highest increase in productivity of all…

The study isn’t without its limitations. It’s hard to imagine that the average Wall Street trader would work harder for a pink Cadillac than a six-figure bonus. The motivational effects of cash surely become more important when the stakes get higher, and gifts probably work best when tailored to the particular set of employees. That’s how you really show you care.

And that, more than gifts versus cash, is really the study’s takeaway. Many employees toiling away in stores, factories, and cubicles are desperate for a sense of meaning in their work lives. Even the smallest gesture of kindness that shows they’re part of an organization that actually cares can give them purpose—and that leads to motivation.

It is widely recognized that people who work in non-profits do so because they valued the purpose and meaning they find in their work. Invoking the obvious disclaimer that it shouldn’t be a substitute for paying people a living wage, a boss providing some validation that what motivates that employee is valued and recognized can keep that person energized.

It probably isn’t a coincidence that the gifts that exhibited the most effort on the bosses’ part elicited the strongest effort on the employees’ part. For all the technology that may separate us, the work environment is still a communal experience and each person wants to know that the others are expending effort and thought on their behalf.

In many respects, this goes back to the post I made last week about the early warning signs that things are amiss with your company. When the board, upper management and lower echelons are each convinced the others are invested and working hard to keep the organization viable, that knowledge permeates that whole organization without anyone giving voice to that fact.

And the absence of that unity will begin to manifest itself in some intangible way as well.

Secret Isn’t Thinking Out Of The Box, It IS The Box

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You have all heard, or even told, a story where you get a great toy for a child only to have them play with the box. The moral of the story is often to get simple stuff for kids to play with because they will be far more satisfied with that than anything else you can get them.

I recently started to suspect the same thing probably applies to arts experiences with kids. Adults have all these expectations for a high quality, well designed product that they impose on the experience. While the kids are thrilled with the whole experience, including the simple ancillary wrappings that adults will ignore or discard.

My nephews were going to the Museum of Natural History when they had off on Presidents’ Day. When they told me this, I commented “Oh, to see the dinosaurs?” They asked how I knew and without thinking, I replied, “Because that is what I remember from my visit.”

Actually, that isn’t entirely true as I will explain later, but the dinos make a big impression on kids my nephews’ age. I was the same age when I first went to Museum of Natural History.

When I asked them about how they liked the museum, my one nephew asked when he would get to see real dinosaurs (because, you know the skeletons alone are a disappointment to anyone with a vivid imagination). They also talked about riding the A train. Because the train is express at certain points, it rides the middle track which means at times you have one train zipping by in the opposite direction on one side of the train. But on the other side of the car, you have another train traveling in the same direction just “floating” alongside as it keeps pace. Honestly, even at my age I think it is a pretty cool phenomenon.

They actually loved running around Central Park more than the museum. Or at least, they talked about that about as much as the museum, if not a little more.

Talking to them reminded me that while many aspects of the experience are frustrating for adults, (including keeping on eye on the kids), almost every part of the experience can be magical and memorable for the kids.

Talking to them altered my thinking slightly. It isn’t important to expose kids to the arts, it is important to expose them to the whole experience and make it memorable. It doesn’t take much to make it memorable.

The attendance and participation experience as a kid, the whole experience, is what helps grow adults who love the arts. That my nephews and I were able to connect easily and immediately over the memory of the dinos hints at that.

The thing that is really most memorable about my first trip to the Museum of Natural History is both simpler and more complex. We made the visit around Christmas time and there was a huge tree in the lobby. At a table near the tree were a number of Japanese women teaching people to do origami. There were origami ornaments on the tree.

I know I must have spent at least an hour watching them. I had never seen anything like it before. I had no conception you could do that with paper. That was over 30 years ago and I still have the ornaments, both those I made and those the women gave me. I still remember being amazed they gave me the ornaments they folded. Given how hard it was to fold (for a 10 year old, at least) they seemed like precious objects to me.

What Is Your First Hint?

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I was reading today how the new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, has insisted that all employees be working at their corporate campuses by June rather than telecommuting. Yahoo has not been doing well in recent years and she took it as a bad sign that the parking lot was slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty out at night, something that is atypical for Silicon Valley tech companies, including Google where Mayer was recently an executive.

This got me to thinking about what the signs for arts organizations/companies would be that your staff wasn’t fully invested in the company? Since working conditions at many places are rarely optimal to start with, it may be difficult to know when morale and organizational culture is waning.

While we shouldn’t depend on people’s passion to keep them motivated in lieu of actually paying them, the passion is often the primary motivator ahead of pay, if the staff as a whole seems to have lost that feeling, you have to ask why.

There is a point where it is patently obvious to everyone that morale is low and the spark is gone. What I have started thinking about in reaction to the stories about Yahoo is what the warning signs might be that things are heading in the wrong direction but could be turned around before the negativity became omnipresent.

I would say the parking lot test is one indication. If people are leaving as soon as the job is done and seem reticent to come in any earlier than necessary, then the situation may be deteriorating. In my experience, unless it is 2 am after a load out of one show and a new show is loading in at 9 am the next morning, a fair number of theatre staff will hang out together for another half hour or so chatting and decompressing after the event.

I would also say that the lack of discussion about the event around the office the next morning is a bad sign. There is always need for a debrief and examination of what could be done better the next time. But even beyond the practical considerations, if people around the office aren’t spontaneously reflecting on the quality of the event and exhibiting some sort of intellectual or emotional connection with the experience (even if it is to reflect on audience reaction), then the environment may need to be examined.

What other signs are there? I have worked in performance most of my career so I would be especially interested to learn what is considered a bad sign in the visual arts. Though everyone should feel free to comment, regardless of what discipline you identify with.

I am not really looking to open a gripe fest where people complain about how the cheap bastards cut off the free coffee. But maybe you started noticing people stopped participating in the weekly “Bring Your Own Meat” barbeques in the summer and knew things were going awry weeks before anyone said anything.

Info You Can Use: Arts Hack-A-Thons

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This past weekend, the University of Miami had an art themed student hack-a-thon from noon Saturday through noon Sunday. Their definition of the art theme was:

“And by art, we mean all types of art and its interpretations. Want to make the instagram of music, or the Spotify of Images, or have you been thinking of something really cool with videos? Go ahead. This is your time to work on that side project you’ve been putting off.”

The organizers provided food and a space to work and let the teams go at it.

The results were varied and interesting. The winning team made an app that would allow you to find music local to any city by genre. Second place prize was for an app that help curate music recommendations. The third place team created “a music instrument combining piano and guitar sounds with motion sensors.”

Fourth place I have to copy and paste rather than describe. “Nullinator – Joke apps. 1 creates a plaid shirt design based on the sound waves of a song. Another replaces your face in a video with that of Nicholas Cage. A crowd pleaser.”

The entry receiving honorable mention created an app that uses motion sensors to control music “Speed up the song by moving closer to the sensor or distort the bass by waving your hand from side to side. Become a dj by having fun.”

While the UHack event chose art as a theme this year, the group Art Hack Day holds arts related hack days across the country. They describe themselves as:

“…dedicated to hackers whose medium is art and artists whose medium is tech. We bridge the gap between art, technology and entrepreneurship with grassroots hackathons that demonstrate the expressive potential of new technology and the power of radical collaboration in art. We believe in non-utilitarian beauty through technology and its ability to affect social change for public good.”

Looking through the list of sponsors at the different cities on both sites, I don’t see a lot of arts organizations involved. I wondered if any arts organizations knew these were going on and if involving arts organizations was even on the event organizers’ radar.

These events are probably organized so that none of the sponsors are directing what is being developed, but there may be some room at one to say “these are problems we face, maybe you can think of a solution.”

There does seem to be some scope for involving specific interests in the competitions. The Miami event had small prizes worth a few hundred dollars for best use of different companies’ APIs and Microsoft technology. That would be something easily within the capacity of an arts related organization.

One of the easiest and most visible ways an arts organization might be involved is to provide the space and food for the hack-a-thon to occur. I have to imagine it would be more inspiring to wander through galleries of a museum or the back stage of a theatre during breaks than to be in a student center lounge.

Info You Can Use: NP Orgs Exist In Shadow Universe (Great Resource Guides Too)

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My Twitter feed delivered me two great resources for arts professionals on the same day this week.

The first came courtesy of Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group. I guess I should have known that when they talked about a guide developed for “WA Artists” they meant Western Australia and not Washington State. In my defense, they link to a lot of prominent U.S. arts sources (like me!).

The guide they shared, Amplifier: The Arts Business Guide for Creative People, from Propel Youth Arts, is really one of the best guides for creatives just starting out that I have come across. If you cut out the resource guide at the end of the booklet, 98% of it is applicable to a creative anywhere.

The guide is really accessible with fun illustrations and interviews that will probably make you want to move to Western Australia. It also walks you through all sorts of planning processes with questions and checklists: project management, business plans, identifying markets, goal setting, evaluation, finances & funding, legal, product, pricing, place and promotion.

It doesn’t just deal with performance, but also tackles film, visual art and publishing, delves into copyright law (which appears almost identical to U.S. law) and licenses.

The guide also spends a few pages on risk assessment and insurance for events which is something I have never really seen in similar guides even though it is very important.

The second resource comes from the Wallace Foundation. This one is more geared toward arts groups rather than individuals starting out and is focused on administrative issues like finances, board oversight and administration.

You may have seen some tweets about it but not followed the link. It is really worth stopping by to take a look.

Some of the guides and case studies are what you might expect “Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management” and How to Talk About Finances So Non-Financial Folks Will Listen.

But there are some with more intriguing titles like: “Efficiency” and “Not-for-Profit” Can Go Hand in Hand,  and The Looking-Glass World of Nonprofit Money: Managing in For-Profits’ Shadow Universe.  

The latter is described as” Especially useful overview for board members with little exposure to the unique nature of finance in a nonprofit context.” I  never really thought of NP orgs as operating in a shadow universe. Sounds so cool! Does that mean Rocco Landesman was the dark emperor or something while he headed the National Endowment for the Arts?

There are also proposals like “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle” which advocate for changes in the way foundations support non-profits.

The part of this resource I have seldom seen in other places was a whole section of five articles, including a podcast, on figuring out the True Cost of programs. They specifically have a calculator for figuring out the cost of after school programs, but following the steps outlined in some of the other articles can help reveal truths like social media isn’t actually free.

I haven’t read through everything in the guide, but I am definitely going to bookmark it for future reference.

Free Admission For True Believers

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I don’t usually promote products here on the blog, but my assistant theatre manager found this in a Pier One and bought it for the theatre. We are thinking of putting it out by the lobby for all our free events. I pretty much captures who we are and what we are trying to accomplish with many of our shows.

To Those Who Believe Sign
To Those Who Believe

If you go into Pier One to get one of your own. Tell ’em you represent a theatre, museum, dance company, school, etc., Let them know the arts organizations in the community support them.

More thankful to have staff that is on the same wavelength as me (and I will credit her for shifting my thinking, too) and taking the initiative to grab the sign for the theatre.

Rent Out Space, Mingle Your Ideas

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Had an intersection of ideas moment this morning. Yesterday, I was listening to the TED Radio Hour about where ideas come from. They excerpted Steven Johnson’s talk on the subject where he starts out talking about how coffee houses in the 1600s become a hot bed for innovation because they provided an environment where people of disparate backgrounds could come together and share ideas.

This morning I see a short piece on FastCompany about an Airbnb type service that will let you rent out your empty office space to people looking for short term work spaces.

It occurred to me that this might be a boon to arts organizations by helping them supplement their income by renting out unused space. But also it could act in the same way as the coffee houses by getting different people working together in close proximity whether it is non-profit arts people in a for profit business space or vice versa.

This is generally the intent behind the development of incubators and innovation hubs, (Steve Jobs’ vision for Pixar Studios) but this shared space service has the flexibility and immediacy of being able to go down to the coffee shop without baristas wondering if you are going to nurse the same cup of coffee all day.

Want To Pursue A Creative Career?..Uhm, The Brits Will Help You Decide

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Finder of interesting things, Thomas Cott, tweeted a link to an article about creative apprenticeships in the UK. While unpaid non profit internships are not against the law in the U.S., they have been something of a hot topic in England.

According to the article Cott linked to, the creation of the National Skills Academy is not a reaction to the internship scandal, but given that many businesses in creative industries heavily depend on unpaid labor, it does provide a response to that problem. Essentially, it allows young people to gain the skills they lack in professional settings and provide organizations with some labor without running afoul the law.

I am not quite sure how this is arranged. Apprentices are entitled to a special apprenticeship minimum wage. Whether the company using their labor pays it directly or indirectly, or the training program does isn’t clear to me.

What interested me was some of the things the National Skills Academy was doing to provide training. Whereas getting a degree in the arts is increasingly seen as not marketable in the U.S. given rising tuition, the National Skills Academy has done their research and are working with creative industries to answer the demand. They have even built a training and rehearsal facility.

We’ve encouraged a shift in education away from courses of over-supply towards training that fulfils a clear demand from the industry. In the theatre and live music sectors, our members told us they needed new backstage staff more than anything else (and they weren’t at all worried about performers). But lots of colleges were offering over-subscribed performing arts courses first and foremost. We had a look at this, and our education members now deliver quality backstage courses approved by industry and popular with students.

Our members also felt the live events, music and theatre industries needed somewhere to train and rehearse. Together we made the case for a £13m investment to build an industry-spec new building for industry and students, The Backstage Centre.

The situation in the UK isn’t that much different than in the U.S. in terms of what is needed to do the job. One section of the site observes that even though 58% of those working in creativity industries have degrees, they ironically valued experience over education because there are gaps in the education people are receiving.

They also observe, as in the U.S., unpaid internships are not a viable option for people who don’t have the money to support themselves while they work. They strive to shift that dynamic.

But that’s not what we’re being told – a quarter of employers we asked said they were experiencing skills gaps and shortages in key areas. As a result, we’ve seen a rapid growth in unpaid internships – now much longer than the traditional three-month placement.

We’re concerned that there’s a disconnect here between employers and the education sector supplying them with staff. We’ve also seen that unpaid work is unsustainable for anyone without private support.

The overall picture shows under-employment, unemployment and unfair access.

Changing recruitment culture

Our membership network led the campaign to encourage a change in recruitment culture. In 2009, we created the first specialist apprenticeship frameworks, to supply employers with staff who have the specialist skills they want.

There are whole sections on associated websites devoted to helping young people make decisions about what creative careers they might want to pursue and what opportunities are out there. There are two sites devoted specifically to theatre work and another to music.

It is not just online resources, they have a series of in person sessions around the UK young people can attend. Some are targeted at students as young as 13. Many of them are fully booked.

So if you are like me, your first reaction is probably something along the lines of “Why don’t we have something like this in the U.S.?” I think even with all the talk about how the arts councils are continuing to be defunded in the U.K. and how cultural organizations may have to look to the U.S. model of garnering private support for their work, there exists an immense fundamental gap between how arts and culture are valued in the respective countries.

This program was only created five years ago and it already has 1,800 apprentices and the Backstage Centre built. Now admittedly, it remains to be seen whether there are jobs for all these people. My suspicion is that they expect/hope some of these people to end up creating their own companies and to help drive a shift to a creative economy.

Can You Pursue The Intrinsic Value of Arts Alone?

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There was a post by KCET columnist Corbett Barklie last fall that has had me thinking and wondering if there hasn’t been enough conversation about this topic.

In short, Barklie feels that arts organizations are sacrificing a focus on the intrinsic value of art in the pursuit of “social service” related activities. (my emphasis)

Arts groups exist to interpret the past, elucidate the present, and imagine the future. To borrow from Dewitt H. Parker’s The Principles of Aesthetics, “The intrinsic value of art must be unique, for it is the value of a unique activity — the free expression of experience in a form delightful and permanent, mediating communication.”

Nonprofit arts groups and the artists that run them are not reactionary entities. They are visionary entities.

You may be thinking, “But what about art groups who work in schools? Artists who work in hospitals?” In my opinion, those are arts service organizations — a rarely made but critical distinction. Arts service organizations exist to create and provide ancillary programs that help fulfill the missions of social service nonprofits such as schools, community centers, hospitals, etc…

[…]

Because no distinction has been made between arts groups and arts service organizations, the general arts and arts policy conversation (set by funders and designated leaders) is getting more and more muddled. And artists who exist in organizations that are only concerned with artistic excellence are beginning to feel marginalized.

[…]

Unless and until arts groups find their voice of disagreement and set aside fear of funding or political ramifications long enough to speak up for themselves, the conversation will continue to focus less and less on challenges facing arts groups that are committed solely to artistic excellence. Eventually these arts groups will fade from view completely.

My first thought was, but isn’t an educational component the way it is supposed to be? Most non-profit organizations are organized under the aegis of the education part of 501 (c) 3. In a time when there is less arts education in schools, isn’t it in our best long term interest to be providing educational services? But then again, by Barklie’s definition, I have been working for arts service organizations for the last 20 odd years so this is the normal for me.

So my question to my larger audience; is it as Barklie suggests (and most recently echoed by Diane Ragsdale), have funders and others lead the arts in this direction?

After all, at one time, art was presented for arts sake and there wasn’t any efforts to supplement the efforts of education and health care.

Is this an improvement or a dilution of our effort? It can be argued that pursuing education programs helps put arts organizations in touch with their and constituencies, helping to remove ivory tower mentality and acculturate the community.

But there is also the issue of diverting resources from the core competency and mission of the company. For profit businesses aren’t expected to do this. Many get immense tax breaks with no expectation that they serve the public good.

Is it the new normal that arts organizations must split their focus in order to maintain their existence? Is there an egotism inherent to believing you should be able to pursue the intrinsic value of art alone?

Shaping oneself as an arts service organization seems about the only option for garnering foundation funding and mollifying governmental entities who want something more than pursuit of artistic excellence as a justification for being.

Thoughts?

Info You Can Use: Development Directors Need Love Too

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You may be aware of the recent report commissioned by the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and conducted by CompassPoint about the careers of development directors. I already had a pretty good idea that development was a thankless task and there was a lot of turnover, but Under Developed: A National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising, brings the reality to the fore.

I was astonished to learn that a quarter of development directors were novices or had no experience in the field at all. My guess would have been closer to 5%.

One in four executive directors (24%) say their development directors have no experience or are novice at “current and prospective donor research.” Among the smallest nonprofits, the number rises to 32%. When it comes to securing gifts, executives report that 26% of development directors overall—and 38% among the smallest nonprofits— have no experience or are novice.

Half of all development directors vs. 34% of executive directors contemplate leaving development in two years. 22% of development directors had either given notice or were actively looking at the time they were surveyed. 40% of those surveyed said they weren’t sure they would stay in development as a career.

A quarter of executive directors reported firing their previous development director for performance or incompatibility with organizational culture.

As might be expected, organizations with bigger budgets reported greater retention rates. Being able to offer better salaries enabled them to attract talented people from other organizations. Some of these organizations reported something of an arms race with the best development professionals being able to name their own price in the face of an ever shrinking talent pool driving costs up across the board.

I have given some attention to the difficulties with attracting and retaining executive directors over the years so I thought it important to turn some attention to the development arm.

In fact, the report makes many of the same recommendations you will find in respect to the executive director positions: recognizing and celebrating emerging leaders, having better training/mentoring and having transition plans.

One of the central things they suggest is nurturing a culture of philanthropy. If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know a common refrain I have is that marketing and development aren’t the sole province of those departments followed by an inevitable link here.

The report talks about the need not to silo responsibilities. They define culture of philanthropy as:

Most people in the organization (across positions) act as ambassadors and engage in relationship-building. Everyone promotes philanthropy and can articulate a case for giving. Fund development is viewed and valued as a mission-aligned program of the organization. Organizational systems are established to support donors. The executive director is committed and personally involved in fundraising.

While they specifically mention executive director in the definition, the board is mentioned frequently enough in their discussion of the concept they probably should appear as well. They acknowledge at length that asking for money is a difficult endeavor for all those involved. They felt the fund development process would be much easier if the goal permeated all areas of the organization because it would naturally bring more support and resources to bear and make the director feel more empowered.

“I think the fundraisers don’t always manage up because they think, ‘It’s all on my shoulders.’ They forget that you’ve got 20 some board members and another group of volunteers, an executive director, and other direct staff — that this is a partnership.
—Executive Director

This is the one area in which smaller organizations can be compete with larger ones. While they may not have the money to pay high salaries and support the newest development software, (and the software gap is getting increasingly smaller and affordable), the more close-knit working environment can have the staff more easily integrate with development than in larger organizations where the function is more departmentalized.

There are some depressing findings in the report, but I think it is worth reading because I suspect it will also reveal that the problems one faces in ones organization aren’t as uncommon as you might think. That realization will hopefully allow people to feel a little freer to discuss these issues rather than assuming they face them alone and everyone else is operating effectively.

Info You Can Use: Leveraging Transitions Well

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So I really hadn’t intended to write too much more about my job change until I left my current job or took my next one. However, the assistant theatre manager who is chairing the search committee is using some activities which I think are really beneficial to my organization and the community.

Today she held a meeting with various stakeholders to discuss what they wanted from the person who would replace me. I wasn’t included, but I eavesdropped on the conversation rising to my office off and on for about 15 minutes.

The group was comprised of about 15 people, some of which who are members of the search committee. Among them were faculty from music, theatre, visual arts; chair of Arts and Humanities; Dean of our division; our theatre staff; community artists; representatives of three renting organizations; volunteers; and our development officer.

They started out writing down what things they valued about the theatre, focusing especially on what will be missing if the theatre didn’t continue operations. Then they took turns talking about what they had written and sticking the post-it notes up on the wall in themed groups so that they could see what values people gravitated toward.

Later they moved on to some group activities to generate suggestions.

I spoke to some people after the meeting and they seemed pleased with the process. They were especially happy that the assistant theatre manager kept things moving along.

What I thought was really great about this exercise was that it brought so many different constituencies together who never meet each other. Each one became aware of what the other did in the facility and why certain elements of the facility and the services offered were relevant to them.

More importantly, this was all done in front of college administrators and the development officer which helped them understand the wide range of activities that occurs in the facility and why its existence was important.

It sounds strange to say, but I think this process was successful because I am leaving.

If we had tried to gather a group of people to talk about why they loved the theatre, I am not sure as many people would have shown up or been as eager to participate.

I think the sense of immediacy and the opportunity to influence the type of person chosen as the new theatre manager garnered far more investment in the process.

While part of me craves melodramatic gnashing of teeth and wailing, “Oh what shall we do without you, Joe? You are our source of inspiration and have that musky, Victor Mature-like scent,” I am really happy to see the transition turning into such a constructive process.

Just offering it here as an example something other organizations might try.

Oh, and I forgot, they fed the group Valentine’s Day cupcakes. That probably helped, too.

Info You Can Use: Are You Prepared to Weaponize Your Storytelling?

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Hat tip to P. Martin for the link to Chris Brogan’s guest post on Copyblogger about Content Marketing. I will confess that I think the term content marketing is a phrase devoid of much meaning. In the comments section of the post, Brogan agrees but says he just uses the terms that everyone is Googling.

It was hard to pass by this post though due to Brogan’s very quotable declaration that “Content marketing is weaponized storytelling.”

Brogan says that he used that phrase at a conference, but he isn’t sure that he really believes it and amended it to the admittedly less evocative, “Content marketing is sales-minded storytelling.”

His premise is that content marketing isn’t branding. He feels that only really big companies with large budgets can afford to build brand awareness. The little guy has to depend on content marketing which is aimed at “helping your market make a decision of some kind.” This doesn’t mean constantly making a hard sell.

Your site/email newsletter/podcast/whatever should consist of something like this:

Some posts that are just friendly and storytelling.
Some posts that are gentle pushes towards a next action or an ask.
Some posts that are pure selly-sell, as I like to call it. Apparently over here they call that an offer.
Some (but very few) totally off-topic posts.

This would be true of a blog, an email list, or whatever. I believe that the real goal of content marketing is to advance your business.

[…]

This is where it’s tricky. Because the business goal just might be entertainment. The business goal of my writing a guest post on Copyblogger is to get you to consider signing up for my awesome free newsletter.

Based on this great post (okay, decent post), you’re supposed to now think, “Wow, I really like what Chris had to say. I think I’ll give his newsletter a try.”

Did I charge you any money? No. Did I tell you about my product or service in the body of this post? No. What I did was start what I hope to be a relationship with you and I’ve invited you to get my awesome newsletter. That’s me content marketing.

Do you feel dirty? No. (You might already be dirty, but that’s awesome, and yet, not my fault.)

One of the commenters on this post felt Chris was wrong and made too many generalizations. His company has focused on positioning themselves as experts in the industry and gets great response from that. He said the only time responses have flagged was when they tried to inject content. Chris agrees that different industries and markets require different approaches.

Acknowledging that, I have to think that Chris’ approach is more aligned with the needs of arts organizations which largely employ storytelling to engage their customers/audiences.

At my theatre, we don’t do it with our newsletters as much as I would like. They have been mostly focused on communicating information about shows with interesting visuals and language and keeping text to a minimum. We are still evolving that approach.

However, our Facebook page has been a place where we share all sorts of information about the arts in general along with information about the shows. We have done this somewhat out of a desire to keep people engaged with the organization during the gaps between shows.

We want to give people a reason to continually visit our Facebook page, but also communicate information about arts careers and opportunities to the students and artists whom our facility serves. We have a television monitor with information about our shows in the lobby and it just occurred to me that would also be a great place to share some of the interesting tidbits we post on our Facebook page alongside our show information.

Many of these ideas can be offered free to the public without making a hard sell or talking about your company. So think about it. What resources are available to you? What can you do?

Then What Are We Fighting For Anyway?

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The quote that this entry’s title comes from, Churchill’s response to the suggestion that funding for the arts be cut to save money during the Second World War, is unfortunately apocryphal.

He did however, refuse to send the art from the National Gallery to Canada on the belief that the Axis powers would be beaten.

The closest to the quote that he got was in 1938:

“The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life. The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them….Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.”

Granted this is before the war started so he may not have felt as strongly about cutting funding once hostilities got underway.

However, funding art during troubled times has been seen as a way to reassure the populace. I found the following on the National Performing Arts Convention website:

“In the third year of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln ordered work to go ahead on the completion of the dome of the Capitol. When critics protested the diversion of labor and money from the prosecution of the war, Lincoln said, ‘If people see the capitol going on, it is a sign that we intend this Union shall go on.’ Franklin Roosevelt recalled this story in 1941 when, with the world in the blaze of war, he dedicated the National Gallery in Washington. And John Kennedy recalled both these stories when he asked for public support for the arts in 1962. Lincoln and Roosevelt, Kennedy said, ‘understood that the life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose- and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”

–Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

While Churchill may not have advocated for arts funding during the war, the predecessor of the Arts Council of England was formed and funded in those early years with John Maynard Keynes leading the organization.

…In December 1939, in a world darkened by war, winter and blackout, a small group of civil servants and educators met to discuss the crisis in the arts. Great museums and galleries were empty, their contents packed off to safety from bombing. The theatres were shut, orchestras about to disband. The committee agreed that it was essential “to show publicly and unmistakably that the Government cares about the cultural life of the country. This country is supposed to be fighting for civilisation.”

In 1940, with an initial budget of £50,000 (about £2 million in today’s values) the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, mother to today’s Arts Council, was born. The Daily Express thundered: “What madness is this? There is no such thing as culture in wartime.”

When the earthquake struck Haiti a couple years ago, one thing I noticed during the news stories was that people were coming together and singing. It didn’t stop the bleeding or miraculously heal broken bones, but it brought people together and gave them strength to hold on until help arrived.

And when people were rally help for Haiti and those impacted by Hurricane Sandy, musicians and other artists and professionals were the public voice and face of the appeal in so many instances. These people didn’t just emerge from a vacuum fully formed, they are a result of environments which cultivated and valued their talent across decades of careers.

Ian McKellen was recently quoted as saying there will no longer be great actors of the calibre like himself, Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench because the repertory theatre movement which cultivated these people has died out.

Sure, it may be a case of a septuagenarian complaining “kids today…” but he reminds us that he and his colleagues weren’t born fantastic and imbued with gravitas but worked toward it over time.

Granted, it is difficult to plan and invest resources long term at the expense of the present. By the same token, laying a little bit away now for the future sends a message you have a vision of a future worth investing in. There is value in that on many fronts.

Take My Job, Please

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Come May I will be leaving Hawaii to assume the position of Director of the Vern Riffe Center for the Arts in Portsmouth, OH. The University of Hawaii has posted my current position today and I thought I would draw attention to it since the classification of “Public Information, Public Events Planning and Publications” doesn’t quickly catch the eye of arts administrators.

My dean is rewriting the job description a little so the title is presented more naturally in the job ads. It will be posted on arts job sites shortly, but I thought I would give my faithful readers some advance notice so you can apply or pass the posting along to colleagues.

As you may have surmised from the illuminating job title, bureaucracy with all its arcane rules is the biggest impediment to the expedient execution of duties in this job. However, if you are well organized, good at planning ahead and adept at navigating bureaucracies, you can do well in this position.

The positive points about this job are numerous and are centered on the people.

The chancellor of the college is extremely supportive of the arts here. In fact, I was trying to keep a low profile about my job change but he found an article online announcing my new job and sent it around to all the deans and vice chancellors at the college. The dean of our division is also a very amiable and supportive guy who wants to help the theatre thrive.

As you may have read in some of my blog posts, there is a lot of cross-discipline activity that occurs almost spontaneously in the building. The tables in our backstage are a very social area where students and faculty from theatre, music and visual arts are often found chatting and offering advice about different projects.

Being able to engage in that conversation is key to the success of the theatre manager position. I may depart my office at a certain time, but often don’t leave the building until an hour later. Many of the problems and concerns for the facility get addressed during that period.

There will be a $7-8 million renovation of the facility potentially starting in the next year. I have overseen a large part of the planning and design. The goal was to be shovel ready once the funding became available.

Even if the renovation doesn’t happen in the next year, the theatre will be celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2014. I have started some very preliminary planning and grant writing to support some great events.

The assistant theatre manager is really well organized and has a good instinct for design. Our website was much more “blah” when I was making the design decisions. She will actually be chairing the search committee.

The theatre collaborates with the Performing Arts Presenters of Hawaii, a statewide consortium of presenters which leverages their collective power to negotiate contracts and write grants together. I have served as an officers on the board for the last 8 years. While you can contract artists alone, you definitely get more bang for your buck cooperating with the group.

It takes some patience and tenacity when advocating for artists. Sometimes dates and artistic mix don’t synch up for everyone at the same time. In some cases, you may have to reintroduce the artist over the course of multiple years to get the buy-in you need to make the tour happen.

On the other hand, you have people who are familiar with the intricacies of your organization bringing you well-qualified suggestions, many of them great performers you weren’t really acquainted with before. In many respects, they are helping you shoulder the responsibilities that are associated with booking a season.

The theatre also has a very active rental business with over 350 public events a year (not counting classes that schedule time on the stage). There are a lot of perennial renters who can almost run the show themselves. There are also many first time renters whose vision outstrips their budgets whom you need to teach about organizing their production. Fortunately, the technical directors have a deep commitment and long experience in doing that sort of thing.

Representatives from all these constituencies will be on the search committee–theatre staff, drama instructors, visual arts instructors, a representative of the booking consortium, perennial renters, a community artist. I believe the committee numbers about 8-9 right now.

Then, of course, there is the obvious benefit of living in Hawaii and interacting with the confluence of cultures which live and visit here.

So why am I leaving? Well many of the things I value about my current job are present in the one to which I am moving. The university president and many of the staff are really wonderful people. A community board has an amazing relationship with the university and shares in a great deal of the presenting responsibilities. I am absolutely looking forward to joining the organization.

So in short for those interested, the theatre manager position is suited for a mid-career arts professional with a solid background in performing arts who is prepared to act assertively to advance the interests of the theatre.

Please don’t apply if your qualifications don’t meet this level and are not entirely sincere. The school declared two failed searches before the search that resulted in my hire so they are not about to settle.

So write a great cover letter that inspires and expresses your vision. You will be writing to a group of arts people who want to be excited by the next theatre manager.

…Just realize those arts people are constrained by a pedantic bureaucracy that makes them go down a check list of the minimum qualifications. If they can’t find evidence you meet the qualifications in your cover letter or resume, it doesn’t matter how inspiring you are.

Also pay VERY close attention to the transcript requirements. If you submit online transcripts, the committee has to evaluate whether your experience is equivalent to a degree.

I am happy to answer any questions people may have. Just submit them through the contact link atop the page.

Age And Artistic Taste–Discuss

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Writing about the concept of music discovery, Tyler Hayes suggests that after a certain age, most people are pretty set in their music tastes and in terms of paying for recordings of music, are better served by buying and owning rather than “renting” the music from a service like Spotify.

He argues that technology currently does a poor job of creating an environment for music discovery.

The problem with Pandora is that it may replace the radio for some, or a lot of people, but there is no spark the same way when a friend says “Hey, you should check out this band, they’re great.” A computer can’t replace that, yet. There will be an app or site or service that does fix and solve discovery… But that isn’t now or even this year.

Music discovery should be a verb or an accident, through active looking or serendipitous stumbling, but it shouldn’t be paraded around only as a marketing term.

A number of thoughts that occurred to me as I read this. First was that idea that new music discovery tapers off after a certain age. There are studies that show that people often mature into an appreciation for classical music. But I wonder if the ground work for that appreciation isn’t laid when people are younger and attend live performances in general with their family and classmates.

Yeah, I know the arts for the kids discussion has been beaten to death. I am just suggesting that even though you turned out okay and appreciate art even though you had minimal exposure when you were younger, the general environment has greatly changed since then.

If you are in your 40s as I am, or older you and your parents watched many of the same television shows because that was all that was available. Even though I didn’t go to many Broadway shows in my youth, my mother would often play Fiddler on the Roof, Camelot and Godspell records. I would dance around singing the chorus of “If I Were A Rich Man” when I resented having to do chores.

Your parents had a fairly strong influence on your taste and you shared many of the same experiences. While it may have been to a lesser degree, you probably gravitated toward some of the same general arts genres your parents did as you got older. Even if you rebelled against sharing their aesthetic taste, you were still engaged by art to some degree.

I am not sure we can necessarily count on the same effect with the current generation. Lacking any exposure from any quarter, their tastes may solidify as they are and never include traditional/classical art forms as they mature.

I am open to hearing counter arguments, but if you are older than 30ish, be honest, are you as voracious a consumer of music/art as you were when you were younger or are your choices pretty much explorations along general lines you established in the past with some interesting, but not radical deviations?

Second thing I began to ponder was whether terms like audience/community engagement and discovery are largely marketing terms that are being used to add a little luster to the same general programs as before or if arts organizations have started making a more directed effort in these directions. This isn’t something I can opine upon even generally because I don’t have any really solid data. It is a good question to ask ourselves, though.

I do think that the thing arts organizations offer over any other entertainment form is the opportunity to experience the frisson of personal discovery. I love Tyler Hayes’ definition of musical discovery as “a verb or an accident, through active looking or serendipitous stumbling.”

You absolutely miss something when you try to experience it via a small screen or ear buds vs. going into a performance hall or gallery. Even if you don’t understand Dali, you have an experience standing in front of one of his wall sized works that you don’t by seeing a picture of it.

The challenge has always been trying to communicate that through media insufficient to the task without under or overselling it. The other part of the challenge is whether people will continue to value the seeking process.

Americans Need A Cultural Stipend?

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Via Marginal Revolution, we learn Brazil’s Congress has approved a monthly Cultural Stipend for poorer workers.

“Now we are creating food for the soul; Why would the poor not be able to access culture?” the minister said.

Suplicy said the new incentive, approved by Congress and endorsed by Rousseff late last month, is expected to be introduced some time this year. “The money will be put in the hands of the worker who will decide how to spend it, by going to the movies, to the theater, to an exhibition or the museum,” she explained.

Other possible uses include purchases of books, music or DVDs.
[…]

Employers will cover 90 percent of the cost of the stipend but can then deduct the amount from their income tax. Workers will pay the remaining 10 percent, but can opt out if they choose to do so.

The first time I read about it, I thought it was a government funded program and might be hard to implement on a national level in the U.S.

However, since it is largely employer funded, the plan could actually work quite well in the U.S. since it allows the businesses to write it off their taxes much like companies and individuals can write off charitable donations in the U.S. I am not sure the government would have to create any new laws to make it possible. Though their encouragement would certainly help. The arts community could just make a big push for companies to declare their participation.

I imagine it would be great publicity for companies since they could collect testimonials from employees about the enjoyment they derived from books, music, performances and museum attendance thanks to their employers’ involvement.

Since employees have to contribute a little bit toward putting money on their culture cards, it gets potential audiences in the habit of paying to participate but doesn’t place the entire burden on them.

Granted, audiences may not end up using the money to purchase experiences at non-profit arts organizations. This won’t absolve arts organizations from the responsibility of making their offerings relevant and interesting. But along the lines of my letter to the president post, it starts to institutionalize the idea that all citizens should participate in cultural experiences.

When I did think this was a government program and was trying to devise a way to adapt it to the U.S., I thought about the dividend Alaska pays to its citizens from the oil proceeds. With that in mind, I was going to propose NY State use some of the tax money it collects from its great native resources- Broadway and Wall Street- to offer these cards to all citizens of NY. The population of the state has been dwindling so I thought it would be a great way to reward those who stayed and hopefully stimulate arts organizations in other parts of the state.

I suspect much of it would find its way back to Broadway. Though parts of Rochester NY are one of America’s Top 44 ArtPlaces so I wouldn’t count other parts of the state out.

Letter To The President On The Occasion of His Second Term

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The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

Four years ago, I wrote you on the occasion of your inauguration to ask you to consider implementing tax laws that would provide more flexible framework within which arts organizations could operate. Looking back, I think many of these ideas I outlined and cited are interesting and still relevant.

However, things have changed in the national arts and culture environment in the last four years. The movement for creative placemaking, for example, has the potential of improving the national arts and cultural landscape by fostering greater connections with communities.

However, there are some distressing trends as well. Many arts organizations, especially orchestras, have effectively ceased operations. In the case of the orchestras, this has come after some contentious contract negotiations between boards of directors and musicians.

I am not advocating for the government to prop these organizations up. As much as the closing of arts organizations is regrettable, not all companies can operate in perpetuity and must close.

My concern is that while every organization is different, these orchestras seem to be following very similar paths toward dissolution. It appears that, knowing no other way to proceed, people are looking to the example of other companies and organizations in similar situations for their cues on how to approach their difficulties. Overall there haven’t been many productive results.

What I am advocating you do during your second term is provide some direction and support for leadership training to the non-profit arts sector. I believe some of these difficulties arise from the fact that non-profit boards of directors and executive leadership often don’t receive the best education about their roles and options. With the best intentions in mind, what little funding an organization receives is directed toward delivery of programming and services rather than toward education and professional development.

The Small Business Administration provides all sorts of programs and mentoring for small business owners. Given their focus, I am not sure they are best equipped for training non-profits. Nor do I think something like this a core competency of the National Endowment for the Arts, but I am sure they know organizations who can properly administer and design the studies and training necessary.

But the services the Small Business Administration offer provides a rough model for creating something similar for non-profit organizations. Non-profit organization as a whole, not just arts and culture, are important to the national health. They provide services in many niches throughout the country.

The visibility element is extremely important. Whomever is tasked with providing the training and support should receive funding and direction to publicize their available resources on a national level: Non-profits are important to the health and vibrancy of the country and educated leadership is important to the non-profits.

As you may be aware, many states are actively trying to eliminate and defund their state arts councils. While state arts councils can certainly be conduits for the information, they may not be in a position to be the primary channel of dissemination to the arts sector. There needs to be an overall national campaign.

Whatever entity is administering this program can turn around and provide feedback and guidance to the government about the challenges non-profit organizations face and what might be done to help them help the country. Presumably the directors of the National Endowments already do this for their respective areas. A report from someone concerned only with the business/legal operating environment of non-profits will provide a valuable supplement to them and hopefully prove to be less politically controversial.

Many boards of directors are generally aware of their responsibilities for their organizations, but are uncertain how to properly pursue them. The spectre of the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations being applied to non-profits looms at the periphery of their awareness, but most are at a loss of how to proactively implement good governance to be in compliance. The fact it may be applied can discourage people from considering serving on boards.

Rather than wait for some incident that prompts lawmakers to enact greater regulatory measures, it would be preferable to help non-profits become educated about how to effectively lead and administer their charges.

I hope, Mr. President that you will consider this. By stepping forward to provide leadership in this area, you will raise the profile and awareness of the value non-profits provide to our country and the importance of strong and informed leadership to their continuance.

Sincerely,

Joseph Patti

Info You Can Use: Discovering Your Ideal Customer

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Last June I came across a useful article by Sarah Arrow about identifying your ideal customer. According to her, there is are a very narrow profiles which constitute a business’ ideal customer then the people who are secondary customers who influence your ideal customer. Her article is mostly aimed at writing different blog posts for the ideal and secondary customers, but it is just as easy to substitute “ads” or “social media updates” for blog post.

In the non-profit world there are many constituencies we serve: audiences, boards, government officials, students, parents, performers, ethnic groups, etc. In performance based arts, we talk a lot about diversifying our audiences to attract a wide range of people. There are also very limited resources available with which to communicate ourselves to these groups.

In light of all this, it can be difficult to decide who to target and so opt for trying to appeal to everyone in general. This may be largely ineffective because it engages no one specific very well.

Arrow runs through a process which can help identify an ideal customer. The example she uses are baby strollers. (my emphasis)

Imagine you sell buggies (strollers for my US readers), your marketplace is people with babies and toddlers – new mums, dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles. And the chances are you don’t just sell one type of buggy, but multiple types and styles so you can meet the needs of your customers.

That’s a big marketplace,…

When you have the ideal customer you get a better picture of how to market your buggies to that person. If your mum is a health nut, she’d love the buggy that you can jog with, Dads are often taller and buggies with adjustable handles will speak to him… but here’s the thing, a new mum tends to spend more than a second time mum, she’s the ideal customer in that big marketplace. You have to market to her first and get a relationship started with her swiftly before someone else does.

Arrow continues noting that first time grandmothers are also a lucrative market, but their concerns are much different than that of first time mothers so you need to provide a separate and different approach.

Secondary customers (in this case, the mother’s female friends) keep an eye open for the interests of the primary buyers and influence them. While they may not buy things themselves, Arrow says refer a friend offers are helpful because they still allow people to take action, even if it isn’t making a purchase.

So think about your audience. Can you whittle it down to three important categories like this? That becomes a little more manageable when it comes to producing materials, right?

And remember, they may not all require the same format. Older people read the physical newspapers more than other demographics so only one message may be needed for that medium. Other audiences may follow closely on social media so two or three different messages targeted at them may be required. Social media isn’t as cheap as people imagine, but also tend not to be as expensive as print and broadcast media.

The trouble might be identifying who the ideal customer is. First question that popped into my mind was that it is often women who provide the impetuous for ticket buying. Are they the ideal customer or the influencer? I suspect a little of both.

I think a far bigger problem for arts organizations will be an unwillingness to trim the list down. There is such a strong impulse to identify everyone as the primary customer and avoid being perceived as exclusionary. It doesn’t help that granters and foundations reward with funding those who can claim an impact on the widest possible field.

The truth is, the profile of the best people to pursue is probably much narrower. This doesn’t necessarily exclude the diversity funders seek. For some organizations, the ideal customer may be K-5th grade school teachers who in turn will bring diverse groups of students.

For other organizations, that same diversity might be more difficult to achieve. However if they have done the right job identifying and crafting a message to their ideal customers, the positive response rate should be higher than before.

Who Really Values Diversity In The Arts?

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Last month Springboard for the Arts tweeted that the attendance at the Guthrie Theatre’s attendance last year exceeded the Minnesota Vikings’ home game attendance, 425,932 to 421,668.

Springboard Executive Director Laura Zabel blogged about these numbers suggesting the 400k Guthrie audience members should manifest their love for the theater in the same way Vikings’ fans do–jerseys and facepaint.

One of my first thoughts, based on some of Zabel’s observations, was about whether tax dollars were better spent building a stadium which is only used 8 times a year by 400,000 people or a theatre which is used hundreds of nights a year by the same number.

But I quickly remembered the big to do about the lack of diversity in Guthrie’s current season. I wondered if the attendance numbers reflected any push back against that.

Based on a calendar year comparison, it hasn’t. At the end of 2011 their attendance was 421,982. That, however, was down from 2010 when their attendance was 435,877.

I don’t have any numbers comparing their seasons which run September – August. There could have been a precipitous drop off September – December 2012 that isn’t readily apparent. My suspicion, however, is that audiences by and large don’t care about diversity, or the lack thereof, as much as people in the arts sector do.

Diversity is an internal concern driven by economic and philosophic motivations rather than by external audience demands. Audiences do want works that speak to them so arts organizations pursue diversity in order to bolster attendance by expanding the appeal of their works.

Non-profit arts organizations are also widely motivated by their educational mission to expose their audiences to new ideas which is often manifested by who is chosen to perform and whose ideas are chosen to be presented.

While arts organizations have to be responsive to the tastes and interests of their audiences, the audiences take a pretty passive role when it comes to programming. They aren’t widely clamoring for their local arts organizations to bring in new faces and new ideas.

If they were, it would actually be easier to program a season because you would have an idea of what people wanted instead of having an empty theatre teach you what they didn’t.

The Guthrie’s artistic director, Joe Dowling noted that many of the shows in their current season were brought to him by the directors. That is how the programming decisions of most arts organizations are driven, artists and agents, rather than audiences approach decision makers with ideas.

In fact, one of the things artistic directors probably cringe most at is being approached by an audience member who says “I know this group…” I would have sworn it would never come to pass, but this season we are actually doing a show based on a usher coming up and essentially saying, “I am in this band…” It does happen, but often audience suggestions don’t reflect an understanding of the organization’s artistic and business models.

Just the same, that feedback can provide insight into the type of experience the audience member is looking for. Presenting Lady Gaga may be totally wrong for the Guthrie Theater, but a show where the audience can vicariously identify with the protagonist’s rise to celebrity might work great.

As you are all well aware, arts organizations are in the unenviable position of having to figure it all out. It is difficult to pursue any one agenda as wholeheartedly as you might wish. Program too conservatively and audiences will say the arts are arrogant and out of touch for telling them they ought to value antiquated works by Mozart and Shakespeare. Program too progressively and audiences will say the arts are arrogant for telling them they ought to value works challenging notions of gender, race and politics.

I don’t mean to champion a middle of the road approach. I could easily argue, as many people did regarding the Guthrie’s season, that I have far more diversity on my stage and in my audiences just by cultivating locally available artistic resources. I also know that may be harder to achieve in the next job I hold. A balance between leading and following has to be struck and recalibrated all the time.

Info You Can Use: In House Professional Development

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I came across a piece by the Bridgespan Group about creating professional development opportunities for non-profit organization staff members when you don’t have the money to send them to conferences.

Some of their suggestions included cross-training, job shadowing and stretch assignments which give people responsibilities outside their usual scope so that they can begin to develop in areas they are lacking.

One thing that caught my attention was the suggestion that employees be given the responsibility for organizing internal gatherings. In addition to having employees take turns organizing and running staff meetings, the article discusses companies where the staff arranges for speakers and other activities for in house professional development, training and team building exercises.

As I was thinking about this idea and who might the staff invite to speak or provide training, it occurred to me that this practice might be helpful in promoting greater understanding between non-profits, their boards and the community.

One of the first thoughts I had was that board members might either attend or be speakers at these events. The experience might either be very informative and help the organization move forward or reveal the gaps in understanding.

This is where things might get tricky. In the best possible situation, board members might come to an understanding of how the organization is run and the challenges it faces. Staff might learn new practices for the way forward.

On the other side, people may realize there is a huge lack of understanding. Staff may realize that a board member presenting a talk has no concept of the business model non-profits follow as they encourage the organization to embrace practices to move them toward greater profitability. How to approach them diplomatically and clarify matters may not initially be clear. However, it may provide a realization that a better board education program is needed.

The same thing can happen involving the public sphere. Staff may become aware of new trends applicable to their organization. Using these talks as an example, the non-profit staff could turn around and create/join a speakers bureau to raise awareness about their organization.

Finally, having read many excellent arts social media postings and blog entries by arts leaders, it is clear there are many very intelligent, well informed people out there in the non-profit world. If they are able to get up in front of their own company and speak objectively (rather than with a subtext about where the staff is failing to live up to expectations) about general philosophy and practice in their industry, I would bet those they work with would see them in an entirely different light.

It is so easy to get bogged down with the day to day details of running the organization, few in the organization may be aware of breadth of knowledge and passion their colleagues have. People may suddenly realize they have a unexpected source of expertise and inspiration readily available.

Of course, no matter what you do, you run the risk of he internal development/training sessions being entirely inappropriate and boring. But you can get that at a conference you pay to attend, too.

Price Higher Than You Are Prepared To Pay?

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Angry White Guy in Chicago, Don Hall, recently re-printed a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to an aspiring writer. It made me think a bit about the definition of the professional vs. amateur both in 1938 and today.

Quoth Fitzgerald: (my emphasis)

“I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner….

[…]

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming — the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

[…]

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

One of my first thoughts was to wonder how Fitzgerald might react if he were alive today when it seems that the public will accept and reward the work of artists who haven’t paid the price and have really only committed to half measures. While people won’t become invested in the soldier who is only a little brave, flash can be substituted for substance.

I am sure Fitzgerald would have said the same about some people during his time and maybe we would like to think that back in his day, even the worst would possess better qualities of some of the most highly acclaimed today. We don’t know if that is true or not.

I do think that regardless of the time, we can all agree like Fitzgerald that a professional has honed his skill that she makes everything look easy because they have internalized their skill. Amateurs are left trying to replicate the outer appearance of what professionals do.

But if the audience can’t discern between the two or aren’t bothered by the difference enough not to reward the lesser quality? Does the difference matter?

I am not just referring to what is produced by experienced and inexperienced individuals. Music played over an iPod loses a lot of the qualities that can be experienced with a bigger sound system but people are willing to sacrifice quality for portability. Now we have music being intentionally recorded so it sounds good on iPod that is bereft of the subtleties that made past compositions intriguing and exciting.

Fitzgerald’s post script gave me a little chuckle. Being a little talented and charming like being in good physical condition is rare enough to be recognized. But not so rare that like those admitted to West Point, there aren’t 1000 or so others possessing the exact same qualifications.

But as we know, diligence and talent isn’t enough to set you apart, nor does the lack guarantee obscurity.

Still, Fitzgerald’s letter reminds us there is a difference even if it isn’t recognized and so a reason to remain a little humble and continue to hone our skills.

Religion vs Arts, Who Wins The Battle Of Orthodoxies!

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Since the very beginning of the blog, I have been keeping an eye on the intersection of performing arts and religious communities. A recent NY Times article seems to include quite a number of places where this occurs.

It starts by describing a warehouse space that has the

“trappings of a revitalization project, including an art gallery, a yoga studio and a business incubator, sharing the building with a coffee shop and a performance space.

But it is, in fact, a church. ”

If you look at the website of this art gallery-cum-yoga studio-cum-etc-cum church, it might take a couple glances to realize it is a church.

You can say a lot about the importance of adhering to propriety and doctrine that should be part of sacred institutional practices and how the approach of many organizations isn’t invested with appropriate due seriousness.

But you can say the same thing about churches, too.

Oh wait, I mean arts organizations. Wait, which one was I talking about? This is so confusing.

You may be surprised to learn that not only has church attendance been falling lately, but there is a churn rate of about 40% annually.

Sounds a lot like the plight of arts organizations, eh?

Not only that, there is a real bias toward entrepreneurship

“For new leaders coming out of seminary, “the cool thing is church planting,” Mr. Bird said. “The uncool thing is to go into the established church. Why that has taken over may speak to the entrepreneurialism and innovation that today’s generation represents.”

Sounds a lot like the sentiments of performing arts kids coming right out of school that want to start their own company.

Like arts organizations, there is a push to connect with the communities in different ways, some going so far as to remove references to “church” and “services” in favor of “gatherings” and “communities.” One group has seen some success with centering their spiritual communities in coffee shops and is preparing to franchise their coffee concept.

As strange as a chain of spiritual coffee houses sounds, the trend seems to be away from the huge mega-churches, many of which have been foreclosed on, toward smaller multipurpose spaces that can be turned toward earning revenue rather than being empty six days a week.

In some respects having a church be the center of community center is a return to old practices. Chartres Cathedral was a bustle of commercial activity both inside and out.

One of the prime questions that emerges for me as I read this article is how religious/spiritual groups, which I believe stand to suffer much more from embracing the trappings of popular culture and entertainment than arts organizations do, seem to be a bit more nimble than the arts community at experimenting with new approaches?

I realize that many trends reported on by the NY Times are often not as widespread as the paper makes it appear, but as a person who rents a facility to religious services, I can attest that the article isn’t many degrees different from my experience.

It amuses me to think that the arts community self imposed idealism about selling out and becoming too commercial might actually represent a more inflexible orthodoxy than those embraced by religious communities possessing texts containing rules of behavior.

Though it isn’t as if the arts community isn’t having this same conversation. This is what Creative Placemaking is really all about. What these churches are doing may provide some interesting models and even potential collaborators in the pursuit of placemaking.

Our Stories

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My mother has been doing some hardcore genealogy research for years now. There was a trip to Ireland a few years back, last Christmas we were in FDR’s Presidential Library, this Christmas I got a calendar with pictures and stories from my maternal grandfather’s side of family all over it.

But she isn’t alone, with shows like Who Do You Think You Are tracing celebrity genealogy, the increased use of DNA testing for various ends and Ancestry.com’s growing subscription rolls, show that people are increasingly interested in their heritage.

From what I have read, interest in genealogy usually increases as people enter retirement which is what a lot of baby boomers (including my mother) have started doing.

It occurs to me then that it might be meaningful to many communities if arts organizations made an effort to help them tell their stories through performance, exhibitions and participatory activities.

The one type of show that has pretty consistently done well for my theatre are those that resonate with groups that maintain a fairly strong cultural identity. Some of it has been related to ethnicity, but others have crossed ethnic lines and been more about the shared experience of place.

Even if you don’t have the capacity to produce/commission/organize a performance, I think there are plenty of opportunities for involving the community in interactive experiences.

By default, I think of those Nina Simon does at her museum, but something could easily be organized around a big 4th of July picnic where everyone sits around and tells family stories about the immigrant/frontier experience. Those stories can be collected/recorded/interpreted in some way and displayed.

My intuition tells me these activities that might even abet community building during a time where electronic devices are making people a little more insular.

There Go The Brains of The Operation

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I had been pondering on whether to post on this topic but Thomas Cott’s link to a Bloomberg News story about how leaders of arts organizations in the U.S. remain in that position far longer than colleagues in the UK.

The story weighs the benefits of leaders having long term relationships with donors vs. concerns about leadership becoming staid and slow to be responsive to changing times.

My concern comes from a slightly different, though related, direction. Over Christmas I received an email from a long time friend saying she was leaving the performing arts sector to take another job. We had been students together and I had initially modeled my career path after her’s until I realized I really didn’t want her career path. She was essentially the founding executive director for her organization and had held the job for over a decade before deciding to make the job change.

I have heard similar stories from other colleagues, including those in my cohort at Arts Presenters’ Emerging Leadership Institute. People ended up leaving performing arts, some only a few years after having earned a master’s in arts administration.

While I am pleased to see that a master’s in arts administration can get you jobs in other sectors, I am a little concerned about what this bodes for the future. I am not calling for long term arts leaders to vacate their positions and let others get their chance, though that is something that is frequently mentioned.

My concern is that there is going to be a huge leadership gap when the long time arts leaders do retire. My long time friend had about 20 years experience before she made her decision to leave the arts sector. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her assume a state or regional arts policy leadership position. Granted, she could easily return to assume such a role in the future. I wouldn’t discount it happening.

My knowledge of people leaving the arts is anecdotal and not backed by hard statistics, but I have to imagine there are quite a few others out there of whom I am not aware who are likewise leaving the arts. If so, there is a going to be a huge gap to fill if people with 10-20 years experience leave the sector with only those with less than 10 years experience to replace them.

And lets not forget, there is research showing that many people don’t want to become executive directors. There may be few of any level of experience who are willing to step up. This is where the research and the reasons given by my colleagues intersect–lack of opportunity and work-life balance are dissuading people.

I have written about this topic a number of times before throughout the years, but it was largely theoretical. Now I begin to see signs of the problem impacting my own experience and the repercussions become less abstract and more worrisome.

In terms of a solution, I look back to my post last month on the executive leadership as my best suggestion at this juncture. There I suggested there might be benefits in adopting emerging business models and changing job descriptions so that responsibility and involvement in marketing and development permeate the entire organization rather than being siloed.

Context And Environment Matter

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NPR recently teamed up with the TED people to present the TED Radio Hour which takes three TED talks on a similar theme to revisits them with the speakers. The one I heard run this weekend was about how our brains trick us and confuse us about what we value. It was the second segment with psychologist Paul Bloom which caught my attention because it deal with how so much of what we value about art depends on the context.

It started with the story about Joshua Bell playing in the subway station and no one paying him much mind or money, for that matter. When I talked about this experiment before, I mentioned that context and the environment played large roles in people’s enjoyment.

Bloom talked about the Dutch art dealer who was convicted of treason for selling Hermann Goring a Vermeer–until he confessed and proved the painting was a forgery–after which he was deemed a hero.

Bloom also spoke about Marla Olmstead who was painting works at 3 years old that people were paying tens of thousands of dollars for until 60 Minutes came to visit and it was discovered her father was prompting (and perhaps even helping) with the painting.

A common question was raised about each of these. If Joshua Bell is such a great performer which people pay great amounts of money to hear perform, why wasn’t his quality recognized as an anonymous performer in a D.C. subway? Why is it treasonous to sell a Nazi a real Vermeer but heroic to sell him a fake if you can’t tell the difference between the paintings? If you like the painting, why does it matter if a 3 year old or a 30 year old paints it?

The answer has to do with authenticity, the story which accompanies the experience and a willingness to receive. Classical music doesn’t have to be experienced in a formal performance hall or art in a museum gallery. There are successful programs that bring classical music and opera to bars.

But people go to those events expecting to listen to music. There are entirely different expectations and agendas as you move through a subway station which inhibits a person’s readiness to receive the experience.

Art like wine and food is more enjoyable and valuable when the authenticity of provenance is beyond question. You are buying the story as well as the physical object and that makes all the difference. According to Bloom, there are parts of the brain that light up when you believe you are drinking expensive wine that don’t light up when you believe you are drinking cheap wine even if it is the same wine. So it isn’t that you think it is better, you are actually having an entirely different experience.

The lesson for arts organizations and performers is to help your audience to that mindset. Whether you are in a formal performance space or not, there are things you must do in respect to the environment and interactions to help transition people toward the experience.

You could argue that flashmob performances don’t do that with their audiences and they are often well received. But I would say it isn’t the quality of the performance that people are necessarily responding to but the quality of the planning and execution that brought them the experience.

It is akin to crossing a stream and finding a diamond ring in the water. It is the enjoyment of finding an unexpected treasure that pleases. I think you would find people react just as delighted if an accomplished high school orchestra popped out of the woodwork as they would for the Philadelphia Orchestra revealing themselves in the same manner.

What I really appreciated was Bloom’s late addendum to his TED Talk. In the radio program he said the thing he didn’t emphasize enough in his TED Talk, and was pleased to be able to now, was that most people see it as a glitch or flaw that our perceptions and values can be manipulated by such factors. If we were perfect, these things wouldn’t sway us so easily.

Bloom’s view is that this “flexibility” actually allows us to experience more pleasure in life. He feels that taste can be developed through study and learning. The more you know, the more pleasure you can derive. So if you want to get more pleasure from wine or art, you need to do more than just expose yourself by drinking lots of wine and seeing lots of art, you need intentionally educate yourself.

That seems to align with the findings of the Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music report from six years ago which said exposure in the form of lecture/demos didn’t seem to have as long lasting impact on participation and attendance as participatory programs including instruction.

This, of course, reinforces the importance and sense of desperation to get art back into schools.

Joe Patti's Musings on practical solutions for Arts Management

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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