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Secret Art In Minnesota

June 4, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

The always cool people at Springboard for the Arts (and that isn’t a commentary on Minnesota weather) recently got to do a “TV Takeover” where they explained how they serve the artistic community in Minnesota. They chose the theme of “Your Secret Art” to emphasize the idea that a lot of people have artistic talent which may not immediately be apparent.

There were two parts of the show I liked, both dealing with “artists taking care of business.” At the 51 minute mark, artists talk about pricing their work and their initial reluctance to ask to be paid or to charge what they were really worth.

The artists that were interviewed note that it is natural to make the mistake of undervaluing your work, but that you need to quickly move past that. Pricing is not only based on your time and materials, but a result of doing market research and understanding how similar work is valued.

This was an important topic for artists and one that is rarely broached in interviews with artists about their careers.

The other part of the show I liked was at the 24 minute mark where artists talk about their work as a business. What really grabbed my attention was the statement made by Uri Sands of TU Dance in answer to the noisome assertion that art is not a profession because you love doing it. Sands says if you have a talent, you have a responsibility to your gift. It requires enormous work whether you are a mathematician, athlete or dancer.

Art requires more of him because he does love it. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have to think about it and could clock in/clock out. But because he loves it, thinking about dance inhabits all his free time as well.

I thought that was a fantastic answer because it is so absolutely true that artists often aren’t easily able to stop investing themselves in one part of their lives come 5:00 pm.

Visual artist Anna Metcalf talked about how valuable it was to refer to creating ceramics as her job. She spoke about having a business plan which helped her establish priorities and also legitimized her art practice as a business. It sounded to me as if this might provide her with a little self-discipline, but there also seemed to be a subtext that the frame work might help keep others from viewing her work as a hobby.

I couldn’t quite catch the name of the third artist interviewed in this segment. Even though she was surrounded by puppets, it sounded as if her practice encompassed many disciplines. Since I just wrote about mentors yesterday, her comment that when was was younger she assumed mentors would find her grabbed my attention.

She said that she now recognizes the need to seek out and cultivate people to be mentors. This made me realize that yesterday’s post really didn’t touch on the idea that you could have multiple mentors at anyone time and that it can be smart to cultivate relationships now with people who could potentially be a mentor in the future.

A corollary to the idea that not everyone is suited to be mentor is that not everyone is suited by knowledge or temperament to be a mentor at every stage of your career. You will outgrow some mentors and grow into others.

Springboard for the Arts and the people they serve are doing some pretty interesting things. I can be worth the time to watch the whole thing.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Business Models, Working In The Arts

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Either A Mentor or Mentee Be

June 3, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

Since I am in the mood for suggesting what people should be re-evaluating professionally over the summer, I figured I might talk about finding a mentor today.

I actually don’t know if I have ever written on the subject before. There was an article for arts and culture professionals I found useful on The Guardian website back in March.

I think one of most important steps to take when seeking a mentor is discarding the “those who can’t, teach/if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich” mentality. As the article points out, just because someone is successful, it doesn’t mean they can be an effective mentor. Inversely, just because someone hasn’t achieved commercial recognition for their work, doesn’t mean they can’t be an effective mentor.

You see the truth of this most clearly in sports. There are plenty of coaches who weren’t elite athletes, but who have studied coaching and their specific field of endeavor closely enough that they produce effective teams and individuals.

And like a good coach, a good mentor will challenge you to push yourself in new, possibly uncomfortable directions.

It occurred to me as I was reading the article that I am unaware of any program that trains arts professionals to be good mentors for people outside the workplace. If you are in the position of mentoring someone in your workplace, some of your time is going to be devoted to teaching them to navigate the organization and contribute to the organization’s success.

Mentoring someone with whom you don’t already work is a different situation altogether. In some respects, it is a purer form of mentorship because you don’t have to concern yourself with workplace politics or being evaluated on how effective your mentee becomes.

When I read the article’s suggestion to:

“Also ensure the meeting ends with clear and positive actions. Importantly, as a mentee, make sure you do your homework, otherwise when you meet again you’ll end up going over the same ground.

I wasn’t sure I would have thought to formally establish a course of action to take prior to the next meeting with someone I was mentoring. Granted, every mentor relationship is different and some mentees may require concrete goal setting where others do not.

In the context of a shared work environment, goal setting is obvious. As I thought about it, I was not sure I would have immediately considered it as one of an assortment of tools a mentor could use to guide someone with whom they did not work.

Mentoring in the arts and culture field seems like a worthwhile topic for conference sessions, magazine articles or blog posts. Does anyone know of anyone who has effectively tackled the subject?

Leadership, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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What Do You Know About Your Emails?

June 2, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

If you are like me, you may be taking time this summer to re-evaluate some of your practices like email marketing. Last year, I came across an interesting set of email marketing myths.

Now I know, these sort of articles are pretty common so I did a search for similar stories and actually found this list popped up fairly frequently. That must mean this list of myths is true…or that they have a really good email mailing list. In either case, they must know what they are talking about, right?

Two of the “truths” that caught my eye were for myths 2 & 3 – 85% of opens happen within two days of receiving an email, but only 21% of purchases happen during that period. 32% happen two weeks after. And “20% of your annual openers do so after being inactive for 6 months.”

First, let me say for the record I can’t believe any company is actually ceasing to send me emails after I fail to respond or take action for 6 months. It is hard for me to believe any company thinks they should give up after 6 months and actually does it.

That said, the basic idea that people are engaged by your communication and your organization long after you might assume they are hearkens back to the research presented by Andrew McIntyre a few years back that indicated people often felt a close association with a company/arts organization even after 2-3 years of inactivity.

This is just another bit of evidence from a different quarter that reinforces the concept of not giving up hope that a person will continue their participation in your activities.

The facts for myths 4, 5 and 6 were interesting to me. The fact that fewer than 1 subscriber in 2000 will tag an email as spam was interesting me. I don’t think I ever tagged a non-Viagra related email as spam myself, but I always worry that recipients might be liberal with the spam button. I am less concerned now.

I was also surprised to learn “sending four emails a month instead of one doubles the number of consumers opening one or more emails..” Post author Mark Brownlow explains,

“Don’t get misled by changes to rates. All things being equal, if you double your frequency and average click rates drop 20% that’s a win.

1000 mails/month at 10% CTR = 100 clicks

2000 mails/month at 8% CTR = 160 clicks

The converse is also true. If you remove 60% of your list and see click rates double, you’re actually losing.

1000 mails at 10% CTR = 100 clicks

400 mails at 20% CTR = 80 clicks”

In responding to myth 6 about shorter subject lines being better, Brownlow encourages people focus on being efficient with subject lines, but give yourself permission to use whatever words are necessary to make your impact. The infographic presents some interesting data about subject lines – less than 60 characters increase opens, but those over 70 characters increase clicks.

Of course, as they say, your mileage may differ and you really need to pay attention to the characteristics of those you are reaching. Brownlow cautions in the comments section, “…Many recommendations are based on scenarios or averages that may not fit your particular situation. As you say, testing is important…”

If you are apt to dismiss the data in the infographic as not matching your experience, then you can’t cleave to the myths as being true in turn because they aren’t likely to be true for your situation either.

Even after decades of using email, it is extremely difficult to calibrate its use as a marketing tool because the way people use the technology is constantly evolving.

I am keeping one eye turned toward Adam Thurman over at Mission Paradox blog. Last month, he was looking for guinea pigs to test and provide feedback on his email marketing class. I am interested to see what he may have developed.

Business Models, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR

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Was Your Show Like Sex, Drugs or a Punch In The Nose?

May 28, 2014

by:

Joe Patti

I recently read about a study that analyzed the language used in restaurant reviews. They found that negative reviews often used the language of trauma. Positive reviews either used drug addiction terms for cheaper restaurants or sexual/sensual terms for more expensive restaurants.

It got me wondering what sort of terminology do people use when they have a positive or negative experience after an arts or cultural experience. Looking back over some surveys we have, I couldn’t see any patterns. I imagine it is because we have such a small sample size and often people aren’t very verbose with their responses, providing short commentary like “It was great!”

It would be interesting to see what the results might be from a literature review of past arts and culture surveys.

Even without such a study, there are some observations from the restaurant language study that might provide clues for arts and cultural organizations. For instance, people who wrote negative reviews really didn’t talk about the food as often as they commented about the experience. Reviewers used terms like “worst, rude, terrible, horrible, bad, awful, disgusting, attitude and mistake.”

According to the study authors,

“one–star reviews were overwhelmingly focused on narrating experiences of trauma rather than discussing food, both portraying the author as a victim and using first person plural to express solace in community.”

As mentioned earlier, the positive reviews were split in the types of terms they used. Addiction terminology was used for cheaper food that fell into a general category of sweet or starchy comfort type food purchased from a cafe, diner or food truck.

“…addiction, crave/craving, chocoholic, jonesing, binge/binging. It also includes phrases in which drugs are described as a metaphor (drug of choice, like a drug, new drug, favorite drug, etc.) and phrases describing food as the drug crack (including made of crack, food crack, edible crack, etc.).

Reviews would use the first person singular, “I”, showing a personal investment in the opinion.

Most terms used in more expensive sit down restaurants revolved more around sensual aspects of the food:

“erotic, food porn, lust, lusted, lusting, naughty, orgasm*, pornographic, seductive*, sensual*, sex*, sinful, sultry, tempt, temptation, tempting, voluptuous, wine porn.”

Reviews for more expensive restaurants tended to be longer and use more complex words.

In terms of negative reviews for arts and cultural events, we do know that the experience surrounding the event often plays a large factor in whether a person enjoys a performance. So if you are seeing language like that, positive or negative, it is something to pay close attention to. Even if they praise the ease of parking today, you know that might be an area of complaint if road construction impedes it next time around.

I am not sure sexual or addiction terminology in reviews is a dependable criteria for judging a review to be a positive one. However, the type and complexity of words used in a positive may give a hint as to whether your audience views your events as a guilty pleasure or a high value experience.

Or lack of complexity in a response could mean that people simply lack the knowledge and confidence to provide sophisticated commentary.

The language of decadence is used in relation to food 100 times a day for everything from a diet snack to a master chef’s entree on a cooking show. No one will really judge a person for making an inaccurate or uninformed evaluation of a cheap piece of chocolate.

But even if someone has watched every season of American Idol, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, etc, etc, they may not feel qualified to critically evaluate a performance the same way the judges on those shows do. Both the language and the practice of talking about these experiences is infrequent and uncommon for most people.

In fact, it is expected that you immediately express your delight upon eating something you approve of, but that you delay your response until an appropriate time at many performances.

The effusive vocabulary applied to a meal will probably never develop for a performance. Still, a closer reading of the terminology used in surveys, comments and lobby chatter might provide some insight.

Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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