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Teaching Arts Students Entrepreneurial Skills, It Has Begun

October 19, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

This weekend I attended the annual conference of the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) at Ohio State University. Even though my university doesn’t have arts entrepreneurship or management classes, I wanted to attend because there has been a lot of conversation recently on the topic of training artists to have a more entrepreneurial mindset.

I took many notes on the sessions I attended. I expect there will be at least two posts this week covering what I learned.

What made one of the greatest impressions on me was learning about the Arts Entrepreneurship program at Millikin University. The heart of their program is a series of student run ventures in music publishing, a visual arts gallery, a theater space, a printing press, a publishing house, a printmaking studio and a radio station.

There is actually another venture not listed on their website that just started to get going in the last couple weeks.

You might expect this many student run ventures at large universities with established programs like Ohio State and Southern Methodist University. The fact that Millikin has so many with an enrollment of about 2100 says something about what can be accomplished with the buy-in of faculty and administration.

Given there is a greater expectation that universities better prepare students with practical career skills in their fields of study, Millikin may end up being a good model for smaller schools seeking to meet those expectations. Which is not to say there aren’t other great programs out there. OSU seems to be on a very promising track–but they have a lot of resources which isn’t the case everywhere.

If this sounds intriguing, you may want to attend the SAEE conference next October because it will be hosted by Millikin University.

The faculty which advise the courses/ventures that run the theater space, retail art gallery and poetry printing press were at the conference. One of the common threads that ran through discussions of their respective endeavors was that they allow the students to fail quickly and often–and the students are held accountable for the results and to each other.

Currently, the theater venture, Pipe Dreams Studio Theatre is running into some revenue problems due to decisions they made about how they were going to handle ticket sales. Even though the first production appears as if it may lose money, the instructor Sarah Theis, says the venture usually ends up comfortably in the black.

Which is good because they apparently don’t get bailed out by the school. The course is repeatable and the requirement to be on the management team is to take the course for three semesters. This tends to engender some accountability since the decisions made earlier impact what resources a student has to work with when they end up on the management team.

Julienne Shields, who supervises the downtown retail art space, Blue Connection, spoke of the panic and conflict that inevitably occurs during the initial stages. She turns these occurrences into learning opportunities.

I am not sure what the mix of majors in the other student run ventures are, but the art retail space is a mix of arts students and business students, both of whom express misgivings about why they need to take the class at all. Both groups basically embody their respective stereotypes. Just having them learn to understand and work with each other almost justifies the reason for the class by itself.

Shields said the arts students will get inspired and want to start working at midnight while the business students are more aligned with the 9 to 5 schedule. The business students will happily grab the numbers the arts students are struggling with and help make sense of them, but they won’t understand the story behind the numbers.

While the arts students are initially happy to have the numbers taken out of their hands, because the class structure forces the students to ultimately be accountable to one another, they can’t avoid dealing with the numbers forever. In the end, the business students have a better understanding of the story behind the numbers and the arts students can see how the financial elements align with the story of the art.

Since all these endeavors are essentially group projects, the biggest challenge for the instructors is to create a grading rubric that accurately evaluates whether everyone is pulling their own weight. There was some brief discussion of this and from what I derived, the focus really is on the success of the group rather than parsing precise degrees of credit and blame. After all, in real life if the company fails, it doesn’t matter who only gave 60% effort, everyone is out of a job.

Tomorrow I intend to cover the challenges faced by art entrepreneurship programs that conference attendees identified. One of the biggest being that the effort is really just in the infancy stage.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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Making Ticket Refundability The Customer’s Choice

October 14, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

When conversations about demand based pricing for the performing arts comes up, there is often a comparison made to the airlines and the way they factor in dozens of variables when they price their seats. One airline practice that doesn’t get mentioned is the refundable fare where you pay more in return for the right to cancel the ticket.

The right to exchange, and sometimes even get a refund for tickets, has long been a benefit extended to performance subscribers. Now that subscription sales are fading, perhaps it is time to think about applying it to single tickets?

The thought came to me when I was reading an story on a Microsoft blog about Jet.com The company is heavy into dynamic pricing to the point where the price of an item changes while it is in your shopping cart as variables are factored.

One of the ways people can lower the price of an item is to agree not to return it.

At checkout, customers can waive the right to return certain items, driving the cost down further; choosing one credit card over another — or paying directly from a checking account — takes dollars off, too. The system also suggests purchasing combinations that can save customers money.

With greater control over these variables, shoppers can strike their own personal balance between cost and convenience, something Lore’s team saw as missing in the industry. “The whole concept of Jet is to make transparent all of the costs that go into an e-commerce transaction, and then empower consumers to pull out costs as they see fit.

So what if you offer the opportunity to return tickets for an extra $5-$10 per ticket charge?

Generally the motivation for not allowing returns is fear of not being able to resell a ticket. There are also the labor costs and credit card transaction fees associated with processing a refund. Having different pricing makes the economics of all this more transparent and shifts some control to the purchaser.

If you do decide to allow a refund on a ticket sold as non-refundable, the rationale for a fee is clear. I know some performing arts organization charge an exchange fee which can seem punitive. In the context of this type of discount program, it can seem less so since the customer was offered the choice and the price difference has already been discussed.

I am not advocating this as a new source of income. There are social and emotional transactions that occur during the refund process, the results of which may not be directly correlated to whether a full refund was granted or not. It is better when the subject never comes up, regardless of whether you are generating any income from the exchange.

Still, it is something to think about. Especially if the choice of a discount in exchange for waiving the ability to make a return becomes more widespread and familiar.

If such an approach is implemented, it would definitely need to be handled at the time of sale from the positive perspective of “All our tickets are refundable, but you can get an additional discount if you don’t think you will want to exchange/refund,” rather than a more negative, “it will be an additional $10 if you want to be allowed to get a refund.”

Airlines handle it in the latter manner. Just think how much happier you would be if the $500 ticket were only $300 if you waived the right to a refund.

Airlines can’t really it that way because people initially hunt for the lowest price. They gain advantage from advertising the lowest price and adding costs as you choose options.

Price hunting doesn’t factor as much into the decision about which production to see so arts organizations have a little more flexibility in that respect.

I would be curious to see if a higher level of satisfaction might result from implementing this type of pricing. Would people feel more satisfaction secure in the knowledge they can either get a refund at any time or having gotten a great discount to something they fully intended to see anyway?

I imagine it would depend on the demographics of the community. Younger people and families might appreciate the low risk flexibility. More established audiences might view the unorthodox approach and additional level of pricing as confusing.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR, Pricing, State of the Arts

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Just Pray Your Grandma Doesn’t Run Against You For Homecoming Queen

October 13, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

Recently I have been seeing more stories about shared use of public buildings. In Bremen, Germany, the city philharmonic is sharing space with students in a local school building. In Cleveland, music students from the Cleveland Institute of Music live in a retirement community.

Now I see a Massachusetts school near Boston was shares space with the local senior citizen center.

But during the early phases of planning, as his team met with officials, they realized that the needs of the town’s elderly overlapped quite neatly with those of its teenagers. At the time, the senior center was using a small Victorian house that fell far short of accessibility standards.

The senior center had a strong dance program, Poinelli recalls learning. “We said, ‘Well, we have a dance room in the high school.’ In the winter, they took seniors in a bus to a local shopping center to walk—I said, ‘Well, we have this huge field house, you could use that.’ There was so much overlap, and it just seemed to make sense.”

[…]

Members of a knitting circle taught several students to knit, for example, and high-school sports teams give presentations to the senior men’s group, sharing their strategy for the upcoming season. Kids in need of community-service hours help serve lunch at the senior center, and veterans have been asked to talk to students about their service. The senior center gets 25 free tickets to every high-school performing arts event, and last year, the seniors’ dance team performed at the high-school talent show.

I was immediately struck by how this arrangement helps keep arts in the schools. It increases the demand for, and use of, arts facilities which helps justify their expense.

Even more importantly, it connects the interests and political clout of the largest generation as they retire to those of public education.

There is likely to be less grumbling about property taxes and not having any kids in school if people have an emotional connection to the students. They may also be more likely to advocate on behalf of the students. If retirees are using the same facilities as students, I suspect they will be better maintained.

If there is frequent contact between students and retirees, there may be subtle positive impacts on behavior and attendance thanks to the socialization.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Arts Facilities, Info You Can Use, New Initiatives, State of the Arts

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Ah! The Problem Is Your Show Is Like A Chicken Sandwich With Mashed Potatoes and Gravy

October 12, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

The first segment of this week’s This American Life episode offers proof that marketing departments everywhere run up against the same challenges, regardless of whether they are in the for or not-for profit world, whether they are selling art and culture experiences or hamburgers.

How many times have you said, this is a really great product/experience, but I don’t think there is a market for it?

That is what the marketing team for Hardee’s says about a mashed potato, gravy and chicken sandwich they are sampling from the company’s test kitchen. The taste and texture are really great, they think anyone who bought it would really like it, but they don’t think there are enough people who will make that initial decision to buy a sandwich with mash potatoes on it.

This is exact conversation that occurs when many arts events and performances are first conceived or proposed. It’s great. Anyone who experienced it would like it. Is there enough to it to impel people to that choice?

Really folks confess, how many of you have made a sandwich that included mashed potatoes at some point during the holidays? It was good wasn’t it? You might not want to order it in public though.

Here is a picture by the way.

My guess is the arts run into the same issue to some degree. People are curious or have experimented creating something similar themselves, but are reluctant to be seen publicly participating.

What correspondent Zoe Chace says the Hardee’s team has to do is figure out the story they are going to tell that makes all the weirdness make sense.

They offer some interesting insight into customer psyche, at least in terms of food. The Hardee’s marketing team says that a macaroni and cheese burger is an easier sell than the chicken sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy because it only adds one unfamiliar element-macaroni. People are used to cheese on their burgers. Their gut tells them that Mashed Potatoes AND Gravy on a chicken sandwich may be too far a leap. (That said, from what I can find it appears they market tested the mashed potato sandwich but not the macaroni and cheese burger.)

I am not sure if that offers anything that can be applied to the arts, but it might bear paying attention to how many variations from an expected norm an event that sells well has versus one that that doesn’t sell well.

Another thing the Hardee’s team talks about is the importance of naming to the image you are trying to project. They discuss how they tried selling a burger with pulled pork on it three times. It wasn’t until they included the term “Memphis Barbeque” that it started selling well, they assume it’s thanks to the cachet Memphis has as a source of good barbeque.

I can completely relate to that. Once I presented a performance that was extremely high quality. The challenge was that it was a collaboration of artists from different disciplines, in a format that was unfamiliar to audiences. This made the show difficult to quickly explain and the title of the event didn’t help matters.

About a year later, I saw the show advertised elsewhere with a title that was much more representative of the content. I contacted the manager and asked if it was the same show with the same principal artists. I assumed one of them had left and so the show couldn’t be advertised in the same way.

It turned out it was the same exact show and they hadn’t been particularly invested in the title they had been using. They were happy to call it whatever helped sell it best.

Ninety-five percent of productions, the title is an immutable part of the brand identity. At least once a year since learning a performer was flexible about the event name, I have been able to negotiate some minor alterations on the name or description of a show to make it sound more appealing and accessible specifically to my local audience. It never hurts to ask.

In the third segment of the podcast, This American Life asks advertising agencies how Volkswagen can extract themselves from their current difficulties. While many say VW is in trouble because it broke faith with its customers, everyone they asked had sentimental feelings for VW based on the company’s past ad campaigns.

There is something to be said for generating good will.

One company suggested a documentary style self-examination. Another suggested VW appeal directly to the consumer, saying their focus was on what they thought over any governmental or industry investigation–essentially throwing themselves at the mercy of the Internet.

A third suggested building a plant in Detroit to bolster jobs there and have Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton do a TV ad in the style of their Broadway show (mixing hip hop and Constitutional themes). It is a little strange to listen to the audio of their sample ad as they transition from lyrics drawn from the Constitution to mentioning the importance of environmental stewardship.

The thought that annoyed me though, and this has nothing directly to do with the podcast, is that the arts are dismissed as a viable career path—until it comes time to rally goodwill around a billion dollar international company or some other tragedy.

This isn’t a direct criticism of VW or ad agencies, both of which know the value of creative artists. I just feel like I need to call attention to these situations as a bit of counter messaging.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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