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You Are Now Free To Exploit Your Interns

July 13, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

For the last year or so, non-profit arts organizations have been somewhat nervously wondering whether the criteria being used to define what constituted an internship might be applied to the non-profit industry as well.

The concern arose over a ruling against Fox Searchlight pictures in a case where interns on the film Black Swan where the court found the interns should have been classified as employees instead under the six points of criteria set down by the U.S. Labor Department.

Earlier this month, an appeals panel vacated the decision of the lower court saying the Labor Department criteria was out of date and providing a different criteria.

He argued that the proper way to determine workers’ status was to apply a “primary beneficiary test” — a concept proposed by Fox in which the worker can be considered an employee only if the employer benefits more from the relationship than the intern.

Judge Walker wrote that he and his fellow judges on the panel “agree with defendants that the proper question is whether the intern or the employer is the primary beneficiary of the relationship.”

He further argued that the test should hinge largely on the internship’s educational benefits: for example, whether the internship was tied to the intern’s formal schooling and whether it occurred in an educational setting.

Summer is the high season for internship and apprenticeships in the arts since so many students are out of school. It is fortunate that this ruling came out when it did. Now arts organizations can squeeze more labor out of their interns in the remaining weeks of the summer without any concerns.

Everyone knows that the arts are good for you and that you must suffer for your art. Ergo, any task an intern performs must be more beneficial to them than it is to the employer. Misery and lack of pay constitute authentic experiences for arts practitioners after all.

Yeah well, be that as it may, this is more a case of just because you CAN do it, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Just because the environment is potentially more relaxed than it was last month doesn’t mean proper standards don’t need to be developed for internships to make the experiences more valuable.

Schools like the Ringling College of Art and Design have clear standards (no more than 20% clerical work) and a series of evaluation forms.

There are a good number of people who don’t enter internships under the auspices of a formal training program. In either case, the success of the internship heavily depends on the type of experience the work site provides/creates.

If anything, an internship should be viewed as an additional responsibility the organization is taking on, not a solution to a lack of labor. Even beyond the consideration that staff members will need to take additional time to train an unskilled individual, time and effort to regularly evaluate and provide feedback to the intern needs to be factored in.

Having informal discussions over lunch or at the bar after hours still constitutes work for staff, especially if the need to address problems arises. Of necessity, intern assessment and evaluation needs to be a much more rigorous process than periodic evaluation of employees. (Not that many arts organizations do that very well, but that is a different post.)

Legal Topics, Working In The Arts

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Don’t Worry About The Backstage Door, Guard The Electrical Outlets!

July 8, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

You may have seen this story that has been circulating about the guy who brazenly climbed up on stage just before a Broadway performance in order to plug his phone into the (unbeknownst to him) fake outlet on stage.

Lest you think this an isolated incident, only a few months ago I was in an airport and saw someone plug their phone into at the ticketing kiosk by the gate. Emboldened, other people did the same until there was no more room on the power strip and people started unplugging the computer and ticket printer.

This is another issue arts organizations need to make note of. It used to be you only need to have security standing in front of the stage when the performer was famous enough to warrant it. Now you need to do so when anything appearing to be an outlet is in line of sight! (Just imagine a fan rushing the stage and the lead singer darting away before realizing the guy is making a bee line for an extension cord.)

But in reality, having sufficient outlets and charging stations available may be another amenity, along with things like good parking and opportunities socialize with friends over drinks before/after a performance, that serve as criteria when deciding whether to attend or no.

Arts organizations are frequently frustrated trying to keep up with the changing expectations of audiences and all the options there are for interacting with them. Just when you feel you have your presence correctly aligned on a social media channel, everybody you want to reach shifts elsewhere.

In this case, it’s just as you feel like you your lobby is particularly welcoming and your staff isn’t pressuring people to leave the lobby after the show, you start to worry about whether you have enough accessible outlets and Wifi service.

But of course, people who work in the arts aren’t without sin either. They share the same expectations as their audiences. If you are sitting outside the changing room in a clothing store waiting for your kid to come out, there is a fair chance you are going to be looking for an open outlet, too.

Sometimes there are opportunities to manage scare resources and still keep many people feeling satisfied.

The restrooms in our facility inevitably develop lines at intermission and other periods of high traffic. However, there are some people who know about some seldom used restrooms in an out of the way location. Even though these restrooms are physically less convenient to the theater than the lobby is, knowing the secret about our restrooms and not having to wait on line is regarded as a satisfying outcome.

So by posting a pro-tip about where to find secret restrooms, outlets or whatever on a site like Yelp, you can keep those who value being in the know happy even as they are crawling under a staircase to plug their phone in.

Arts Facilities, Arts in an Age of Technology

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So You Want To Interview For Executive Director

July 7, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

Now and again the issue is raised about people moving from the corporate to non-profit world without really understanding the philosophical and cultural differences between the two sectors.

It wasn’t until a posting by Joan Garry, who made the corporate to non-profit move when she became the executive director of GLAAD, that I realized I had never really seen an attempt to provide an understanding of those differences.

Noting that given the demographics of her readership, she is probably preaching to the choir, she encourages people to forward her post to anyone considering making the transition.

She provides her advice in the form of probable interview questions a candidate for a non-profit executive director position will receive.

This also serves a good guide for the type of questions a non-profit board should be asking candidates. She addresses the obvious question right out of the gate:

1. Tell us about your previous nonprofit experience. How do you perceive the differences in the sectors?

This is really important. You need to have played in the nonprofit sandbox in some way. I’m hoping you have volunteered, been involved in a PTA, or in your house of worship. Consider the differences between that and your corporate job.

If you haven’t done any of those things, as a member of the search committee, I am going to be very skeptical indeed.

Later questions address the fact that employees of non-profits are motivated by entirely different factors than those in a corporate setting; the larger number of constituents with conflicting interests that need to be managed; the relationship between board and executive director and of course, the ever present issue of fund raising.

Since these questions are based largely on the questions that were posed to her when she was interviewing, I appreciated that she reflected on the success of some of her answers. She said she admitted she had no fund raising experience, but that she figured if she could get boxing promoter Don King to pay Showtime what he owed them, she could ask anyone for money.

I also appreciated that she recognized that she was weak in some respects, despite being highly qualified in a wide range of areas, and that it was her answer to the question, “Why are you passionate about THIS organization and THIS mission?” that got her the job.

An acknowledgement that there are always skill sets that will need to be developed is pretty much expected for any new job. As a commenter on her post notes, sometimes that isn’t the case and there is a sense that non-profit work is something one deigns to do after they have had a real career.

Info You Can Use, Leadership, Working In The Arts

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Substantial Change Comes From Within

July 6, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

Diane Ragsdale has an extremely interesting post today related to an earlier set of posts she made two years ago about coercive philanthropy in response to change of direction the Irvine Foundation was taking in their funding philosophy.

She notes today that many of the arts groups the Irvine Foundation had traditionally supported did not shift themselves toward the new direction the foundation was encouraging arts organizations to go. She says:

My view, in a nutshell, was (and still is) this: While the Irvine Foundation may have been justified in pursuing a brave new strategy, its grantees were also justified in rebuffing it. I wrote:

Irvine appears to be interested in bringing about a kind of diversity (i.e., change) in the arts sector we don’t often talk about: aesthetic diversity. … However well-researched and justified, Irvine must recognize (and I think it does) that its strategy is out of line with the missions of a majority of professional arts organizations, which were formed to present work by professionals for audiences that come to appreciate that work, not make it. … Irvine needs to recognize that it is endeavoring to coax organizations into uncharted territory. It wants to coerce a change that many cannot make, or do not want to make.

We often speak of arts organizations bending over backwards and stretching their missions and activities in order to make themselves eligible to receive funding so it was of great interest to me to read about arts organizations who were not doing so even though it might be significantly detrimental to their finances.

In one of the posts Diane made two years ago, she talks about the long time period required to make the substantial change of the type the Irvine Foundation is signalling versus the impatience of most foundations.

She uses the example of Centerstage Theater in Baltimore which made a focused commitment to do a better job of serving the city’s 67% African American population. They initially lost subscribers and supporters before eventually replacing them in the 10 years it took to fully realize this vision.

Ragsdale suggests that substantive change only comes when the leadership is behind it, not when the funding philosophy shifts.

I seriously question whether funding organizations to make them change works. Has any organization that was reluctant to change made substantive long-term change because of a grant? I suspect any change that happens probably has more to do with leadership, other sources of income, and an intent to change that was already solid before the grant arrived.

And when change fails to be manifested? Well, I would wager that a majority of foundations perceive that organizations are at fault in that case (not the grantmaking strategy). And why wouldn’t they? Organizations write proposals in which they promise to change themselves in dramatic ways for ridiculously small amounts of money and over unreasonable periods of time. They lie about what they can do. They choose to do this to get the money. Foundations choose to believe these lies because it’s convenient to believe that it’s possible to change the world in 3-5 year cycles..

In her post today, she provides a insightful illustration of how this manifests. (To understand the reference to moving diagonally across the box, you need to scroll to the Ansoff Matrix graphic in her post.)

If a business is doing well, then (from its perspective) the best strategy is to continue to create the product it knows for the market it knows (market penetration). However, when that market is in decline (and one could argue that this is the case for many professional arts groups at the moment), its least risky move is either (a) to develop new products for existing markets (product development), or (b) to develop new markets for existing products (market development).

Asking arts organizations to develop new products for new markets sends them diagonally into the box marked diversification and is a high-risk move; there can be a significant chance of failure. And while Irvine might be willing to underwrite some of the financial risks associated with experiments in this realm, it can’t underwrite the strategic, operational, compliance, social, and psychological risks associated with such changes—organizations need to be ready, willing, and able to bear these on their own.

This section of her post really helped clarify some fundamental concepts of business strategy for me. It made me realize that when there is a discussion about the need for live performance organizations with middle to older aged audiences to develop things like video based entertainment in order to engage younger groups, what is being advocated for is a risky proposition requiring a commitment to endure challenges on all the fronts she lists.

The efforts of Centerstage Theater illustrate that even implementing the changes required to develop new markets for the existing product may entail some of the same risks she mentions.

There are many other related issues Ragsdale addresses so the whole post is worth a read.

I realize I should mention her current post is in reaction to a report on a recent study the Irvine Foundation engaged in. Even though Ragsdale is critical of some aspects of it, my general impression is that the Irvine Foundation may be in it for the long haul with their new focus given they have committed to gathering data and studying the issues. Though I guess we will see where things stand in 8 or more years.

Leadership, Management Philosophy, New Initiatives, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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