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What The Hell…Oh Wait That Is A Pre-Covid Picture

December 2, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

I have a post on ArtsHacker today encouraging people to really think about what message their promotional photos are sending as we hopefully will start to move out of Covid restrictions.

ArtsHacker-in-chief Drew McManus praised me for thinking of such a timely topic to write on and I responded that it was largely inspired by a true story.

At my day job we have been able to mount some smaller scale events like movie screenings, storytelling sessions and outdoor concerts using our fire escape as a stage. Even with all the measures we have taken to ensure social distancing, people have a hard time conceiving of themselves seeing indoor events. We had the manager and mascot of our local baseball team introduce a screening of A League of Their Own this summer. When they told a co-worker where they were going, she was interested in attending until she found out the screening was indoors. At the same time, she was willing to go to a restaurant where she would be sitting a lot closer to other people and have worse air circulation.

As a result, my staff and I have been putting time and effort into taking pictures of people attending performances spaced apart at an appropriate distance. We have pictures of parents helping their kids pump hand sanitizer and everyone wearing masks. These pictures pepper our web page and appear at seemingly random intervals on our social media pages. All calculated to present an accurate, reassuring image of an experience at our venue.

It wasn’t long ago that we noticed social media posts by another arts organization promoting an upcoming concert. The image they used depicted a packed indoor concert which I am 90% certain was a stock photo rather than from one of their shows. Later they emblazoned “Sold Out!” across the same image which reinforced the idea that there were shows going on locally where people were crushed together.

The truth is, the show they were doing was at an outdoor amphitheater which employs solid social distancing guidelines. While it was sold out because of social distancing guidelines, attendance didn’t reach the fire code capacity of the space. The post-event pictures reflected this with masked people seated in a grassy area a respectable distance from one another.

While pictures of people spread out across the frame isn’t as sexy as a mass of people with open mouthed expressions of delight, it is a lot more reassuring for audiences during these cautious times. Right now a lot of people are seeking that measure of confidence over a mass communal experience.

Just think about how many times in the last 9 months you have reflexively felt uncomfortable with how blase people in a video or picture were being about masks and social distancing only to realize the performance or gathering depicted was from 18 months ago.

A year ago how I promoted my event didn’t really impact the way people perceived your event. Now the question is much less about which of many activities you want to choose and more about IF you feel comfortable making a choice to participate in a public activity at all. As a result, how other organizations present an experience has a much greater influence on the lens through which people perceive your event.

Work On Those Re-Opening Venue Images

Audience Relations, Marketing/PR

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Who Is Prioritized In Programming Decisions

December 1, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

The Atlantic ran an article about how museums are having to deal with questions about equity and representation in their programming that are posed by both external and internal constituencies.

The content of the article is pretty much applicable to every arts and cultural organization, regardless of discipline because the root of the problem seems to be the process by which programming decisions are made.

The collection departments at museums don’t tend to engage with the educational staff—who help interpret exhibitions by organizing lectures and seminars that can enhance public understanding of a display’s importance—until too late. “When I was first in the art-museum world as an educator, we were presented exhibitions after they had been curated and decided upon,” she said. “And then it was our job to figure out how to teach from those exhibitions. How the content mattered, how relevant it was to our community, all those decisions were made outside my office.”

In that sense, context enters the conversation at the end of the decision-making process. And even when educators are involved, they can sometimes focus too much on scholarship—as with the “White Gold” exhibit—trapping museums in a cycle of overemphasizing academics and underemphasizing analysis in a racial and historical context, leading to misguided exhibitions. “What curatorial processes could benefit from are open-ended questions rather than setting out theses to prove,” Bradley said.

This basic scenario has long existed across arts and cultural disciplines. This is part of what people are referencing when they discuss silos in organizations. A programming decision is made by one group and then another group is tasked with marketing it to some segment of the community. What this does is put those who weren’t involved in the decision making in the position of reverse engineering a rationale for the value of the programming and trying to make it stick. A better alternative would be starting from the question of what will be valued by the community and letting the programming decisions emerge from that.

How one goes about discussing the question of what will be valued differs from place to place and organization to organization. Some of the museums mentioned in The Atlantic article received feedback from community partner organizations, others made an intentional decision to involve people without formal arts training so that the process didn’t get bogged down in academic lingo and context.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Marketing/PR, Working In The Arts

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I Want Your Advice, But Not Your Feedback

November 30, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Via Daniel Pink is a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that suggests asking for advice rather than feedback. On the surface this may sound like a distinction without a difference, but research has found that asking for advice garners more actionable suggestions than asking for feedback.

Those who were asked to give feedback tended to give vague comments along with general praise, such as, “the applicant seems to meet most of the requirements.” In contrast, those who were asked to provide advice were more critical and actionable in their comments…Specifically, advice-givers suggested 34% more ways to improve the application and 56% more ways to improve in general.

According to Amantha Imber who wrote the HBR piece, an important element of soliciting advice is specificity about what you want to learn.

Ask yourself, “What will really help me get better at [problem]?” For example, instead of asking, “What do you think of my revenue numbers from last quarter?” you could say, “So far, I’ve tried [a] and [b] but I haven’t been able to meet my goal. How would you have gone about doing this?”

[…]

If you ask people to think about what could help you in the future, the advice you will receive will be more specific and actionable. For example, you could make the ask specific, such as, “What could I change about my presentation skills to deliver a more powerful presentation next time?” or “Could you give me a few tips to make my slides more appealing?”

I feel I should mention that this approach for getting actionable suggestions is not a completely new idea in the arts world. Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process which has been employed for about 20-30 years now involves creators asking for reactions about specific elements pretty much as outlined in the HBR article. Except in Lerman’s process there are more specific guidelines about the way respondents phrase their statements in order to keep the process focused.

Art(ist) Education, creativity, Working In The Arts

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Desperately Seeking The Wishbone This Thanksgiving

November 25, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

I saw a social media post this week that said something to the effect of: “Let’s admit that back in 2015 we all failed to correctly answer the question, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years.'”

If nothing else, I think we should agree that people should stop using that question in interviews.

Since there is only a month left until Christmas, it is probably time to start thinking about those New Year’s resolutions. If you haven’t been keeping up with the recent data updates from Colleen Dilenschneider at Know Your Own Bone, (no blame, it is difficult trying to be a data sponge in Covid times), she made a summary post yesterday that reviews stuff you should be thinking about.

The bad, but not unexpected news, is that it may take a year or more for cultural activity to rebound to the point things were at in 2019.

Like many of her posts, this one reviews what factors cultural organizations have going for them and what things orgs should be working on if they haven’t been.

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving holiday. Keep safe and healthy.

State of the Arts

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