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It’s Annual Appeal Time?! My Papercuts Still Haven’t Healed From Last Year’s Envelop Stuff-A-Thon

by:

Joe Patti

As Thanksgiving approaches, your anxiety level may be rising at the prospect of spending uncomfortable meals with relatives, engaging in an even shorter official Christmas shopping season than usual, and getting your annual appeal letter out.

I can’t help you much on the first two, but a couple years ago Fracture Atlas posted their helpful “Procrastinators’ Guide to Sending a Year-End Appeal”

Reading their guide might cause you a little bit more anxiety at first when they suggest the appeal consist of three different missives rather than one, but I promise there is a method in their apparent madness that aims to make the whole process productive for you. (my emphasis)

The centerpiece could be a 1-2 page letter mailed in a pretty envelope with a seasonal stamp. This will set the flavor for your whole campaign, aesthetically and thematically. Your “sides” could be a follow-up email about two weeks later, with a final email request within the last few days of the year. Make sure there’s a visual through-line in these materials and that they reference each other, otherwise the recipient may not recognize that the materials are related.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know I talk about the importance of marketing materials being focused on the experience of the participant rather than on the importance of the organization or performer. The appeal letter is no different. Juliana Steele who wrote the Fractured Atlas piece says the emphasis should be on the impact the donor can have and be positive in tone rather than focused on the organization and its frightening dire need.

While it may be true that your program, production, or exhibition will have to scale back if you don’t raise the appropriate funds, remind them of what you will be able to do with their support, not what you won’t be able to do. The holidays may have them stressed out — give them inspiration!

Other suggestions Steele makes deal with the logistics of the ask–including specifically asking for a donation rather than implying it. Projecting success is important, but not the appearance of wasteful spending. Steele says the letter should be printed on good paper, but nothing so fancy that people become concerned about organizational priorities.

It should be easy for people to return their check in a return envelop or make a donation online. The more steps people need to take to get funds to you, the greater a chance their process will stall along the way.

Of course, sometimes the hardest part of writing an appeal letter is just getting started. Take it from someone who learned to type on an actual typewriter–the best thing about word processing is that the time cost of writing more than will be ultimately necessary is near zero. Starting to write anything knowing you will edit it down moves you closer to the end goal faster than staring at a blank screen. (These blog posts don’t come easy a lot of times and often evolve a fair bit from the topic I started writing about.)

Steel provides the following advice along those lines:

Writing a letter that is inspiring can be challenging and anxiety producing. Honestly, all you can do is sit down and get words on paper. Turn off the television, navigate away from your inbox, read appeals from other organizations, and make a list of all the amazing stuff you do (and will do next year). After a while, you will have something to work with and build upon.

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

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Museum, The Video Game

by:

Joe Patti

Via a social post ArtsMidwest made, there is a museum management game coming out next year called Mondo Museum. Thinking back to all the posts Nina Simon had made on Museum 2.0 over the years, my first thoughts were that there was no way a game could really encompass all the ways in which a museum needs to work to become relevant to their community.

Then my misgivings started to move toward 10 on the dial when I read the following:

Success is quantified in two ways: money, which comes from ticket sales and gift shop revenue; and prestige, which is measured by visitor numbers and their experiences. These metrics feed each other: a prestigious museum will have high foot traffic, while a big-budget will give you more opportunities to please audiences.

Granted, the game designer wants Mondo Museum to have the widest appeal possible so these are terms which general players could best understand, but revenue and visitors are hardly the best measures of a museum’s real value.

My concerns began to dial back when I read there would be some nuance required in the curation of displays and that the designers were cognizant of some important conversations associated with museum collections.

Curating shows that draw meaningful connections between disparate collections—like a model of the solar system next to ancient Egyptian astronomical tools, the designer suggests—will earn you points.

[…]

Yet, by and large, the game is not about replicating the modern museum. Instead, it posits an alternative form of institution, one free from colonial histories, strict genre restraints, and underpaid labor.

In the world of Mondo, art is never purchased, and artifacts are never obtained through imperialism or theft; all historical objects live in institutions near to where they were created

In an interview in another article, the game creator commented:

…if anyone is brought in will likely be to review specific collections for cultural sensitivity issues we might have been oblivious to. For example, someone recently brought up the debates museums have around the subject of human remains when making exhibits about ancient burial practices and so on, which I hadn’t considered before. That kind of insight is really helpful (in our case, this helped me decide to only have mummified animals because a) they’re actually pretty cute while human mummies are pretty gross and b) a human mummy is kind of unnecessary since the real interesting artefact/art is the coffin and sarcophagus).

No video game is going to perfectly replicate all the considerations of running a museum. (I mean what museum can operate entirely on earned revenues, with a well-paid unionized staff,  avoiding grant writing, fund raising galas and thorny ethical questions about accepting large donations?)

As the creator discovered, there aren’t actually any museum management games out there. The fact that the game encourages people to draw thematic connections between seemingly disparate topics in curating displays and requires you to source objects through exchanges with legitimate sources means it introduces people to some good processes and practices.

Art(ist) Education, Arts Facilities, Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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One Of The Most Significant Music Venues In Washington DC Is Outside A Cellphone Store

by:

Joe Patti

Today CityLab had a post titled “How Go-Go Music Became Kryptonite for Gentrification in D.C.” This was actually a follow up to an article that had come out in the Spring that I bookmarked with a notation “A T-Mobile store is the cultural axis for Go-Go music?”

I had bookmarked the story with the intention of returning to it in order to draw attention to the way centers of cultural signficance often emerge organically rather than by plan. I don’t think anyone uses a cellphone store as a model when drawing up plans for a cultural facility.

Briefly, the story here is that a guy who owned a nightclub which featured go-go bands opened a cellphone store when the venue closed and started playing his go-go music collection over the speakers outside his store. The neighborhood has gradually gentrified since the mid-1990s and residents of the new condo across the street complained about the music being too loud.

You may not know that residents of Washington DC claim go-go as their own, feeling the music style is synonymous with the city. Hearings were held on October 30 in support of a bill to make it the official music of the city.

They rallied around the store in a big way:

Thousands of people flooded Shaw’s streets and thousands more signed a petition (80,329 to be exact) demanding that Campbell be allowed to keep playing go-go at his corner, all done under the banner #Don’tMuteDC, which was to say “don’t mute—or erase—black people in D.C.” … which was to say, “don’t let gentrification have the final say.” And it didn’t. Several forces converged—including the CEO of T-Mobile, which owns the Metro PCS cell phones and service Campbell sold at his store—to declare that “the music will go on,” which led to the condo tenant dropping the complaint and acquiescing to the will of the streets.

Often speakers/writers about non-profit organizations challenge people to think about their place in the community and ask the question, who would miss you if you were gone, as a way to gauge the degree of relevance your organization has in the community.

Something of a corollary to this question is whether there is an entity in the community so that is so closely tied into the identity of the community that people would become angry if it disappeared. It may not be your organization, but really asking the question and paying attention might be revelatory. On the surface, it may seem obvious. In some communities, everything may seem aligned toward high school or college football. But there may also be some powerful, but overlooked element your organization could do a better job embracing and/or magnifying. Or at the very least recognizing and acknowledging the importance of.

Advocacy, Arts Facilities, Arts in an Age of Technology, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts

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Life Beyond The Thunderdome

by:

Joe Patti

A few months back, Andrew Taylor at the Arts Management program over at American University linked to an interview with Ed Schein, professor emeritus of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.  Schein basically says that the environment in which corporations operate these days is so complex that CEO’s don’t have the capacity to provide direction by themselves. However, the expectation that they should be able to do it all as an individual keeps them from admitting a different leadership dynamic is required.

Or as Schein says, “Leadership is a group sport, not an individual heroic activity.”

Even though Schein was primary speaking about the corporate environment, you can pretty much see this dynamic will be present in every size company and organization. What initially caught my attention was when Schein said in his eyes, leadership is the pursuit of something new and better but many CEO don’t really know how to accomplish that and don’t do the research and testing to discover what is viable.

Again, the seems to be a factor in non-profit arts organizations. We want to find that new audience or implement something new, but work more on hunches than data.

But Schein says, in the US at least, there is a strong societal expectation that the CEO be all-knowing expert who will move the organization forward with a mix of genius, charisma and sheer force of will.

So many CEOs don’t know how to ask their people what to do. They think they have to own it all. They have to be the big-shot hero, and the world expects them to be.

[…]

Because we have these monstrous notions of what leaders are supposed to do, all based on this old model. We need a whole new concept of what a leader does, what leadership is, and get rid of all this command and control.

[…]

Well, people being afraid is also the society saying, “You’re supposed to be in charge. And therefore, if you don’t know the answer, you’re not doing your job.” So naturally, the leader is going to feel afraid—he feels, “They’re going to discover that I don’t really know, and then they’ll fire me.” But this notion that the leader ought to know is, I think, a particularly American, individualistic idea.

Schein gives a number of examples of people he felt were humble leaders because they recognized that they needed to depend on the expertise of a group of people if success was to be achieved. This is not to say, they were completely team players who sought consensus in decision making. One of those Schein mentions is Lee Kuan Yew, first Prime Minister of Singapore, who Schein acknowledges was an autocrat as much as he might have been humble enough to recognize he needed a team of experts in the transition from British rule.

If you have seen those lists defining leaders vs managers, you have probably sensed a negative connotation associated with management. However, that is what Schein says there needs to be more emphasis on:

…we may be overemphasizing leadership and underemphasizing managing. Is there no room for anything staying the same? We need a term for that, and the word “managing” is a pretty good one. We want the railroad to run on time, and that requires managers, not leaders. So we need to honor both what managers do to keep things moving and what leaders do who are really obsessed with improvement. What leadership does is make it new and better.

However, his concept of cultivating management is in terms of creating relationships that provide you with the data and experience informed advice and judgment necessary to make it new and better.

One of the problems of the managerial culture is that it is built on a transactional concept of how people should relate to each other. You have your role, I have my role. And we maintain a lot of distance because, if we get too close, I’ll be giving you favors and it’ll be too uncomfortable. Let’s stay in our boxes and in our roles.

[…]

To describe the process of getting from that role-based transaction to this more personal relationship we’re coining the word personize—not personalize, but personize. Get to know each other in the work context…My son-in-law doctor takes his nurse or his techs out to lunch. They build a new kind of relationship. So we call that a Level 2 relationship, or, to use another term, “professional intimacy”.

And if the potential leader doesn’t see that, that he or she needs that relationship to get anything done, then nothing will happen. They’ll complain, “Bureaucracy has stymied me once again.” But they reinforce the bureaucracy by maintaining distance.

That last line about distance reinforcing bureaucracy really gave me something to think about. I haven’t come to the conclusion he is right, but I definitely see an element of truth in there that I hadn’t recognized before.

In many respects, I think arts and cultural organizations tend to already have a work culture oriented toward the personized relationships advocated by Schein so perhaps the key is to pay closer attention to that and leverage it to our advantage in getting things accomplished.

I was going to title this post, “We don’t need another hero,” which made me think of the song Tina Turner did for Thunderdome. When I actually looked at the lyrics, I saw the lines:

And I wonder when we are ever gonna change?
Living under the fear, till nothing else remains
We don’t need another hero,
We don’t need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome

The idea of life beyond Thunderdome being one that has moved beyond fear seemed more apt.

Leadership, Working In The Arts

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