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Can’t Comp And Discount Your Way To An Audience

May 11, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

You may have seen the video message by Guthrie Theatre artistic director Joseph Haj last week where he laid out why the Guthrie wouldn’t be offering their content virtually as other places had chosen to do. Instead, they will be producing three shows from March through August 2021.

In the video, he makes the case for the value of live performance based on the shared experience. Apparently there was a study in 2017 that showed audiences hearts beat in unison during live performances which generates a sense of trust and empathy you don’t experience when watching a video. (You also don’t get footnotes. I would really be interested in learning more about that study.)

I don’t know about you, but last week I started having a hard time remaining focused on Zoom sessions that were providing content that was of great importance and interest to me and my organization. Lord help me if I had pets or children around to distract me as well. Trying to deliver educational content is likewise experiencing problems with participation and retention of information.

Granted, the fact that people are trying to use a virtual platform in the same way they conduct face to face meetings is probably to blame for this disconnection. In the future we may see presentation techniques and technological features that will make the experience more valuable. Think about the fact that the first motorized vehicles literally were horseless carriages because that was the dominant mode of transportation at the time. There has been quite a bit of refinement since then in terms of design and use.

The biggest cause for concern should be that human contact and empathy is what will be refined away as the virtual delivery experience improves. While there is definitely a romance to horse based transportation and the internal combustion engine has created environment pollution problems, I don’t think there were concerns that traveling swiftly and smoothly in an environment of improved climate control was going to undermine societal bonds. (Though certainly, it may have eroded the human-equine relationship.)

If anything, the challenges of these times is probably going to really clarify where the true value of the arts resides. It is going to be the relationships that organizations build with their audiences that will bring them back. Once organizations answer the questions of health and safety, the opportunity to share an experience with others is going to be the compelling appeal, not discounts and comps. It is going to be important to listen and pay attention to what people expect of their experience. The expectations probably won’t be exactly the same as they were in January. The demographics of those most interested in inhabiting spaces and participating in activities may be quite different as well.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership, State of the Arts

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Lottery With Your Latte

May 7, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

There was an article on Arts Professional UK a couple weeks ago that presented an intriguing idea–the use of receipt lotteries to fund arts & education.

Receipt lotteries started in Taiwan in 1951 as a way to prevent under reporting of sale tax collections. Basically, every sales receipt you receive has a series of numbers printed on it. Every couple months, they have a drawing to determine a winner. A number of other countries have set up similar arrangements.

However, it doesn’t have to be done every couple months. Things could be set up so that there was a drawing for smaller prizes every Saturday and you just needed to go online to check if you won something.

There are many benefits of this. First, there isn’t a concern about gambling or that that lower income people are targeted for participation if everyone is entered when they buy groceries or go see a football game. So if your state arts and education funding comes from the lottery, you may feel less discomfort about benefiting from a problematic situation.

Second, it encourages loyalty to retailers that offer the lottery numbers on their receipts. This can be a boon for states who are concerned that online retailers are not remitting sales tax properly. If consumers prefer to buy their products from an online business that provide them a good chance to win $200 at the end of the week, retailers have an incentive to register, and therefore remit taxes, with each state.

Obviously it would be good to have a handful of lottery services that states used in common rather than requiring retailers to register individually with the 40 or so states that have sales taxes of some sort. Most places who use receipt lotteries have seen an increase in sales tax revenue.

I believe I read that in Taiwan, if you aren’t interested in participating in the lottery, there are collection boxes in to which you can drop your receipt and they will be given to charities.

Obviously, the biggest flaw in this sort of arrangement is that in times like these when no one is buying anything, then the funding available to arts and education drops to nearly nothing. But it is highly likely very little money is going to be allocated to the arts by state governments through the usual legislative process anyway.

The other problem, like with most lotteries, is that there is no guarantee the state government won’t divert the revenue being set aside for arts and education to some other cause on a regular basis either.

General Musings

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Alas, Germany Didn’t Allocate $54 Billion In Relief Funding To The Arts

May 5, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

You may remember reading that Germany had rolled out €50 billion ($54 billion) in funding for the arts a few weeks back. The news was touted as putting arts funding in the US to shame. While it may ultimately still be the case that aid to arts will put the US to shame, the claim that all that money is going to the arts is not accurate.

I had received an email about some arts research from long time friend of the blog, Rainer Glapp, who lives in Bremen, Germany. I asked him how things were going with all that funding. He responded that there was a big misunderstanding about all the money being focused on the arts and culture.

He explained the money is intended for small businesses and freelancers. While artists can apply, the money is intended for rent of venues and other expenses and not for personal expenses. He told me that primarily, direct funding for arts comes from the 16 states rather than the federal government.

As I went back to find articles about the €50 billion I had seen, I discovered that pretty much every website references the same ArtsNet article. There is a correction to that article dated March 27 which reads:

The government has clarified a point of confusion in its press release and previous reports in the media, stating that the aid package for small businesses and freelancers in culture, art, and media will come from a larger package for solo self-employed people and small businesses that totals €50 billion.

So artists and arts organizations won’t be benefiting as well as first impressions had indicated.

Rainer graciously dug up some articles on the situation which are written in English. One on the Deutsche Welle website illuminates the problems artists are facing:

But on April 7, the Alliance of Freelance Arts, representing 18 branches, replied that freelance and solo artists and their small business teams had “hardly any” access to such federal measures.

“This is due on the one hand to the lack of federal guidelines on the recognition of work-related living expenses as business or employment expenditures and on the other hand to the fact that the [16 German] states tend to interpret administrative leeway to the disadvantage of freelance artists,” said the alliance.

[..]

Already, the German Music Council (Deutscher Musikrat/DMR) had demanded a monthly basic income grant of €1,000 ($1,088) for “all freelance creative professionals” over the next six months.

Another website Rainer shared provides a chronology of how the coronavirus impacted cultural activities in Germany. It reinforces the fact there is no federal relief funding focused on helping cultural entities and illustrates just how varied the support for artists is in each of the states.

However, there is no specific federal support programme designed to meet the specific needs of the cultural sector. This is still being demanded by the German Cultural Council (April 22), the Cultural Council of North Rhine-Westphalia (April 16) and other associations, in the form of a cultural infrastructure fund.

[…]

The possibility of claiming support services — in addition to the instruments at the federal level — is also very much dependent on the state the applicant lives in…. Baden-Württemberg have an emergency aid programme for freelancers that allow them to apply for EUR 1180 grant money for up to three months, Bavaria offers EUR 1,000 a month in basic payments, but only for members of the artists’ social fund. In Hamburg, self-employed can apply for EUR 2,500 in addition to federal funds. In Bremen, artists can apply for up to EUR 2,000 in emergency aid (in addition to a purchase programme for visual artists); in Saxony-Anhalt EUR 400; and in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania there are bridging grants for artists available in the amount of EUR 2,000. The support fund for artists supported in NRW (EUR 2,000 per month) was only equipped with a total of EUR 5 million, so that only a small proportion of the applicants could take advantage of this fund. Other federal states (e.g. Berlin and Saarland) had to discontinue their support programmes due to over expenditure. In other federal states there are — in addition to the federal programme — no state programmes, for example Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia.

Fundraising, Government Relations, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Things To Consider As States Start To Re-Open (#1 Buy A Tape Measure)

May 4, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

There are a lot of stories out there about how some US states are allowing businesses to open. To my knowledge, none have reached the point of allowing live performance venues to open yet, but a lot of people are caught between feelings of anticipation and anxiety.

It would be great to get back to work even on a small scale and then gradually ramp up, but there are lot of things to consider, including public reaction to your decisions. While you are pulling out your tape measure so you can figure out what your seating/attendance capacity will be if you need to maintain six feet of distance, you may want to check out a post I did on Arts Hacker about resources created by the Downtown Professionals Network to help Arts & Cultural entities prepare their spaces.

There is also guidance for restaurants and retail if you happen to have food service and merchandising operations.

The special website also has resources to help people in community leadership roles. If you haven’t already taken up that mantle, this is the time to do so. Whatever emerges as the next normal, you want to be taking a proactive role contributing to policy and practice as well as reinforcing the value your organization contributes to the community.