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Yes, We Get Snow Here

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In about five weeks we will be producing a show about the Hawaiian snow goddess, Poli‘ahu. Yes, Hawaii has snow every winter on Haleakala and Mauna Kea. It is upon Mauna Kea that Poli‘ahu and her sisters are said to reside. There are actually a lot of very interesting tales about the goddess and her sister, including a sled race against a disguised Pele, the volcano goddess.

We are working with the same company who created a Hawaiian opera based on the myth of the Naupaka flower back in 2006. One of the things that excited me about doing the 2006 show was that the artistic director was taking an approach to storytelling that was ambitious of itself, but fairly new in relation to Hawaiian culture. I thought the show might provide a good model and inspiration for other groups since Hawaii is undergoing something of a cultural renaissance. Since then we have presented a show produced by a partner organization about Kahekili who essentially played Uther to Kamehameha’s Arthur in the unification of the islands.

I had been pleased to learn that the artistic staff creating Kahekili had looked at the Naupaka performance when they were planning to remount their work created a decade earlier. In our early discussions about the Poli‘ahu, the artistic director talked about the lessons and ideas he took from the staging of Kahekili. The idea that there was an artistic conversation of sorts driving the evolution and development of works happening before my eyes really excites me.

This may not seem like big deal in most places where everyone seems to give homage/steal the best of what they see other people doing. There are strict lines of tradition and orthodoxy in hula so even if you explicitly say you aren’t doing hula, but only hula inspired work, your product must still be respectful. Likewise, anything dealing with royalty or divine entities must exhibit suitable reverence. The production of Poli‘ahu is also integrating Siberian and Yupik Eskimo chant and dance so even more attention must be paid to avoid offending someone.

Of course, we also face the challenge of trying to convince people who are familiar with the traditional performance to take a chance on the unorthodox. We have sold out these performances before so we are leaving the door open to add additional shows. But four years ago, the people who seemed to understand what we were trying to do were those least steeped in the traditional arts. In fact, one of the arts reporters who is familiar with the company’s work asked how this production would be any different from their previous work. I almost blessed the opportunity to speak to someone who was a little jaded about it all because I didn’t have to work overcome the inertia of unfamiliarity before even explaining the concept.

I can tell by the way the ticket sales are going that this show is going to be sold by word of mouth and trusted sources rather than print and broadcast media. There are shows six months down the road that are selling about as well on the strength of the brochure alone. They will probably be 1/3 sold before I even revisit my plan to promote them.

Fortunately, we have been working together this summer to line up the interest and involvement of many of these trusted entities and that effort should bear fruit very soon. Once some of that becomes public and visible, we will start reaching out to individuals in the hopes of getting the phrases “I saw…, I heard…” entering conversations, tweets and Facebook postings.

Standin’ In A Line To See Bob Dylan

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Interesting piece in the San Francisco Chronicle via Artsjournal.com about Bob Dylan’s ticketless concert experiment that had a lackluster result. Basically, in attempt to avoid the high ticket fees tacked on by ticketing services and scalpers, Dylan decided to charge much less for tickets than at other venues. The catch was that you had to line up no earlier than noon, with cash only. Admission started at 5:30 pm for the 8:00 show, but you couldn’t leave because you had no ticket to gain readmittance with. According to the article, the 2250 seat event didn’t sell very well.

The folks at the Chronicle, and indeed many of the commenters on the piece, attributed the low turn out to the lack of a convenient way of securing tickets before going. Many people said the assumed they wouldn’t be able to get in by the time they traveled down to the venue so they didn’t bother. People wanted to be certain they could get in before making the attempt. It is likely also partially a statement about Dylan’s popularity with people that they frequently mentioned being able to get down there after work rather than saying they would have snuck out of work to attend. Other bands may have seen better attendance with the same plan if their fans were willing to go to extremes to attend.

But it also provides some insight into how people are approaching their entertainment experiences these days. There was a time after all that people would wait on line for hours and pay cash to get into a show. Granted, it was a few decades ago. Today people complain about all the additional fees ticketing services charge, but the way they prioritize their lives allows the ticket sellers to increasingly charge them for the convenience. It is somewhat interesting to me that the interactions with big ticketing services like Ticketmaster really shapes my relationship with my patrons and their expectations.

I get people who easily spend more in gas and time trekking in to avoid the $2 service fee, all of which goes to keeping the system running, vs. $10+ charged by Ticketmaster. We have no problem selling to people who walk in, but it often seems their righteous indignation is costing them more than it is saving. It may be the principle of the thing, but that principle is much more significant when the price is higher.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have people who often assume there is a restricted window of time in which they can purchase tickets and who are flabbergasted to learn the tickets went on sale months prior with all of our other events.

There is certainly great benefit to be derived from restricting access to increase the perceived value of the event. Scarcity can create demand. The question is whether this is a suitable procedure for an organization whose mission is to serve the community and cultivate understanding and appreciation. Sure everyone at the theatre needs to eat and anything that helps you keep ticket prices at a level that enables you to meet payroll is valuable. But do you really want to be engendering a sense of anxiety and distrust in your audiences to achieve that? Though since many people can’t discern profit from non-profit, the anxiety and distrust may be yours regardless.

There are probably a number of elements that contributed to Bob Dylan’s experiment having less than pleasing results, including having just played in nearby Oakland. (Though certainly no one in San Francisco goes to Oakland for their entertainment.) I suspect that one of the biggest factors was creating too many conditions to be met with too little certainty.

Info You Can Use: Sponsorship and Fundraising Webinars

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Fractured Atlas is tackling sponsorship and fund raising in September with a series of webinars on Tuesdays and Wednesdays throughout the month. It looks like the sessions address Fractured Atlas’ criteria for the programs they run in these areas but also give tips for approaching companies for these things in general. Though if you are interested, you might check. The September 15 session seems to be geared for those who have been accepted into their sponsorship program.

If you have not heard of Fractured Atlas before, ” We help artists and arts organizations function more effectively as businesses by providing access to funding, healthcare, education, and more, all in a context that honors their individuality and independent spirit.” They are always working to expand their reach nationally and I think the timing of the webinars is an example of that. At first I thought they were running them 8:30 -9:30 AM which would put it in the wee hours of the morning for me and not be of much help. On second look, I realized it was in the evening which would serve me and everyone in the time zones between here and the U.S. East Coast much better.

Ritual And The Arts

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So this weekend I am acting as a master of ceremonies for a wedding reception. The request was made based, I kid you not, my curtain speeches before performances. I guess that teaches me not to give discounted tickets to my friends. They also chose me for my sense of humor. I am supposed to make some humorous remarks about the bride because her sister doesn’t speak English fluently enough to tell everyone how the bride tortured her when they were younger and how devoted they are to one another.

Mostly I agreed because there wouldn’t be a DJ at the reception so I will be spared the two wedding reception songs I hate the most. Celebrate by Kool and the Gang and The Chicken Dance. Also, if I am up at the mic, I won’t have to participate in the catching of the garter!

As simple as this wedding is, there is still a fair bit of ceremony and protocol involved during the reception –more so than the actual wedding ceremony. It made me realize that people have a real need, despite protestations that they want to keep it simple, to have some propriety and procedure involved in order to validate the whole proceedings.

I got me wondering about all the complaints about the intimidating formality of attending arts events. Do people really want things to be as informal as they say they do? When you spend as much money as you do on a ticket, do people have a natural inclination to validate the experience with some sort of ritual to mark the occasion? The problem may not be that there is formality surrounding the arts event, it may simply be that the rules are unfamiliar.

You can easily spend more on tickets to a football game. If you have ever attended one of these events casually either not being a die hard fan or regular attendee, it is easy to feel intimidated by the fact that people have tail gate set ups that rival some restaurants with fiercely held opinions about barbeque.

Or just attend a comic book convention and try to follow the minutiae referenced by die hard fans.

I would mention attending a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time, but regrettably few theatres show the movie any more. I blame the VHS release of the movie for letting people watch it at home and therefore become disconnected from that particularly exhilarating audience participation ritual.

As a newcomer, any of these experiences can be intimidating to those who don’t know the rules. But aside from making fun of nerdy males for having poor social graces, no one says that the die hard fans need to make their area of interest more accessible as is done with the arts. If you want to join in, you have to learn the rules of football and how to hitch your grill to the back of your truck. If you want to hang out at the comics convention, you’ll need to know obscure facts like the first non-clone stormtroopers were recruited in the year 9 BBY. And you know you will need to bring props, learn when to use them and learn some of the common call backs for the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Being a show virgin at Rocky Horror can have more public consequences than going to the theatre or symphony for the first time. So why are people so put off by the thought of going to the theatre? Best I can think of is that it may seem more possible to master the arcane details of these other pursuits, even though it is much easier to study up in advance of attending a performing arts event and fake your way along by keeping quiet and watching everyone else.

Also, knowledge of the arts can often be tied to a measure of your worth as a person. Are you educated and cultured enough? While the same can be true of some sports in many parts of the country, there are friends and family members around to teach you the rituals surrounding the sport in your daily life. This is often not the case with the arts.

So I guess we get back to the old nature and nurture situation. Desire for ritual may be a natural part of being human, but our comfort level in approaching and learning new rituals is a function of what areas of knowledge we receive nurturing in.

Concert And Brew

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So something of a tangential post to my entry yesterday featuring churches whose design and technology rival performing arts venues. Today’s topic– performance spaces you want to work at based on superficial qualities like the name or appearance alone. This is an audience participation post so feel free to add your dreams and stories in the comments box.

I will start mine out with a little confession. I used to hear promotions on the radio for Live at the Concertgebouw. The Concertgebouw is one of the premiere music venues in the world located in Amsterdam.

Not knowing this, however, I thought they were saying Concertebrau which I imagined was a concert hall in which Germans enjoyed their two great passions, classical music and excellent beer. I pictured Germans reclining, great steins in hand and reveling in the music. Since it was pretty much accepted gospel that Europeans had a much greater appreciation of classical music than Americans, I figured attendance was a commonplace past time at which beer was present.

My second theory was that there wasn’t a lot of beer involved, but that the Germans envisioned the creation of great music much like the crafting of a great brew–involving a lot of investment of time and balanced elements but ultimately intoxicating. That was a little more wishful thinking.

Not that the crossing of a concert and beer hall was very realistic. I was almost disappointed to learn that the real place was in Amsterdam. Can’t tell from the website if they serve beer.

The other places that have caught my imagination just on the basis of outward appearances are the Chocolate Church in Bath, Maine; Albuquerque’s KiMo Theatre with its cool interior featuring skulls with glowing eyes and swastika. Though I have never been there, I have mentioned my infatuation with the whole idea of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center a couple times in this blog. Same with Wolf Trap. I don’t know what they are like now, but long ago I got my hands on an American Players Theatre brochure and thought it had some pretty clever and enticing writing. Enough that I still think I need to get to Wisconsin one summer soon.

I am sure there are other deserving arts organizations who have been the beneficiaries of my lust at a distance, but I can’t think of them at the moment. There are a couple that have not requited my lust and thus must suffer not being mentioned.

Any places that have fired your imaginations, gentle readers, if only based on a cool name or well designed brochure?

Buildings That Say We Want You To Stay

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A hat tip to the Stuff Christian Culture Likes blog for the link to the photostream of Jody Forehand, a regional director for Visioneering Studios which does a lot of church design. I don’t want to get into a discussion about the influence of mega-churchs or the morality of such conspicuous consumption in church buildings.

I just wanted to point out just how theatrical the settings are. Even excepting the toon town design of the children’s worship area of Central Christian Church, I am sure most of us would be envious of the design and technology of each of these gorgeous buildings. Then there is the staffing. There is a lot of work that goes into organizing and mobilizing the largely volunteer staffing for some of these buildings every week.

I know there is a sense of obligation which brings people to these churches and their satellite campuses that people don’t feel toward the arts. The notes on Elevation Church say it is the broadcast hub for three locations serving 7000 people at 10 services a weekend. But as I have often said on this blog, perhaps there is something to be learned from churches. This is a situation where people aren’t charged an admission fee, there is music, but much of the time is spent listening to a person reinterpret a classic text for today’s audience or talk about their experiences. While one of the speakers may have a lot of experience traveling around speaking on the same subject, much of what is said by the speakers has not been extensively workshopped or rehearsed over many weeks. And yet, there is enough investment in the church to construct multi-million dollar buildings.

Even if people aren’t there out of a sense of obligation, there are spiritual needs that are met at worship services, even if they are heavily theatricized, that a main stream play or musical can’t provide. For many it is preferable to hear a single person talk about the life of crime they lead than it is to watch a well rehearsed performance about a criminal that mended his ways. Honestly, I don’t think communities are well served by theatres that only do morally unambigious shows with happy endings. Though there is a price to be paid for that decision.

But one thing that is clear from looking at this buildings is that they were designed to serve the communities. Even though the main use of the facilities is in a large room with theater style seating for hundreds, there are large areas devoted to children and large lounge areas and lobbies to mingle and hang out in. Even though there are multiple services each day, the place isn’t designed to move one group out and bring another group in. They don’t care if people stick around, in fact they want people to stay because that provides an opportunity to get a person more invested in the organization.

That is something of an alien thought for most performing arts groups because their model is based on selling a seat to a different person each performance. If a person wants to buy a seat for the next show, that is great! But if they just want to stick around and take in the whole vibe and experience again, that can cut into the bottom line.

But maybe it is time to rethink this approach, especially with organizations that are focused on serving a specific community. Internet communities create value by having people stick around and interact–the longer the better. Granted, even with the largest internet companies, the question always arises as to how they end up making money providing these services for free. And it is relatively easier for an internet company to add more capacity by buying more server space vs. a performing arts organization trying to expand their physical space as more people decide to hang out and interact.

Finding a model that works for theatres will take some imagination and perhaps even some tact. I have been reading quite a few articles lately that talk about how coffee houses which had been offering free WiFi have started turning it off because people have been camping out at tables all day long while nursing a single cup of coffee. So it isn’t as if theatres would be out of touch idiots for recognizing the need to empty and refill seats in order to stay in business.

Really, when people are hanging around the churches, they probably aren’t returning to the seats in the worship center anyway. There are other areas for them interact with people and many of those people will ask if they are interested in increasing their involvement and commitment to the church. This might involve anything from volunteering in some capacity to joining an affinity group (young parents, young singles, female professionals, etc).

Implementing these sort of programs are within the abilities of many arts organizations. Much of it can be accomplished with the help of well directed volunteers. Though granted many are willing to invest more volunteer hours into their spiritual lives than into the local arts organization. Certainly many find spiritual fulfillment in the arts.

100% Fundraising Expenses

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Some what apropos of my post on mandatory salary caps for executives of non-profits is a post by Dan Pallotta on the Harvard Business Review blog in which he makes suggestions that would likely see government entities really start screaming.

Palotta advocates for salaries of non-profit staffs on par with those of for profit businesses. But the bulk of the post is spent on the premise that low fund raising expenditures are actually inhibiting charities from doing the most good. His argument is that instead of touting 10%-15% expenditures on fund raising and remaining too small to make a big impact on a problem, charities should be spending 50%-100% on fund raising.

“The less an organization invests in fundraising the less it can grow. The less it can grow the more human suffering persists. We have institutionalized a mechanism for insuring the persistence of human suffering and called it “charity.”

[…]

“If we are serious about the value of human life, then we have to start thinking about 50 to 100% fundraising rates for the organizations chartered to save human lives. Those organizations should take no pride in telling donors or anyone else how low their fundraising costs are. Quite the opposite. I want to support the organization that’s going for scale, not the one that’s stuck where it is. Why would I support a cancer organization promoting its low fundraising investment while cancer remains uncured? We have the whole reward system backwards.

(Qualification: I’m not sanctioning inefficiency. That’s a completely different conversation. Everything I’m advocating assumes maximum efficiency.)

What we are doing is not working. A world in which 10 to 15% fundraising ratios are the norm is a world in which our charities are woefully too small to confront social problems on any meaningful scale. It’s a world where growth occurs – if it occurs at all – at the pace of molasses — the pace of death — and where human suffering continues on an unimaginable scale with no end in sight.”

If you are like me and you are thinking if an organization is spending 100% of the money it raises on raising more money then no one is getting cured, then you are absolutely correct. That is exactly what he is proposing. Presumably, you would use all that money to find a new way to convince people to donate since you wouldn’t have any examples of those whom you have helped.

If you read down into the comments section where Pallotta responds to some of the questions, you get a little more detail. Addressing the idea that the fund raiser never gets around to doing anything, Pallota says,

“Think of it this way. Humanitarian organizations regularly engage in certain activities – a direct-mail campaign – designed to acquire new donors. Sometimes those campaigns can go for several years running 100% costs. But then comes the pay-off – huge fundraising databases with no new expense associated with them You turn that engine on and then you start producing revenues for programs and for the cause at volumes many, many times larger than you could have if you never made the investment and never tolerated the 100% cost ratios for a certain period of time. Understand? “

In response to the question posed by a commenter named Shaun, who asks “who wants to be the person who gives money just to solicit more money?” Pollota answers, “Think of it this way: if I told you your dollar could go directly to the needy, or that it could go to an ad campaign that would generate ten dollars for the needy, which would you choose?” To which another commenter, RachelAC, replies, “I might prefer that my $1 go to the needy now, rather than $10 going to the needy in five years.”

I think RachelAC’s response expresses the crux of the matter for me. In an ideal situation, Pallota’s approach works. But my concern is that the fund raising entity gets so enthralled by their success in raising money, that they never stop and fund the solution. As RachelAC implies, in many situations the dollar today can make a difference where the $10 comes too late. Though granted, whenever a solution to a massive problem comes, it arrives just moments too late for some.

My even bigger concern is that the officers will embezzle the money and run off as they have with so many charities in the past. The fact they are apparently not making as much as they could be according to Pallota only means the incentive to do so increases. I would prefer to know the thieves only absconded with the little I gave rather than what they parlayed it in to.

Big problems can require audacious approaches to solve them. I can see where the piecemeal approach isn’t getting people closer to a solution any faster. But will people continue to give if a theft on the same grand scale were to occur? I think the faith you lose in a charity when it betrays your trust cuts a lot deeper than when a company or person you have invested with misappropriates your money. You enter a relationship with the latter knowing there is a chance you will lose your money. With investments, we are told to diversify. Does it make sense to do the same with our philanthropy or are we just short changing an already under capitalized effort?

“The Monster Outside The Door”

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No, the title of this entry is not another riff on my new lizard mascot in the blog header. Last month I made a post quoting Robert Hewison in an article from The Art Newspaper saying citing the economic value of the arts is bad because “But the Treasury doesn’t buy it. They can see through the “multiplier” calculations of the cultural boosters.”

Today I came across a link on Artsjournal.com to economist John Kay’s website wherein he expounds upon that subject and advises valuing art for its cultural and commercial value.

“Thousands of people build hospitals and surgeries, and many small and medium-size enterprises manufacture hospital supplies. Illness contributes about 10 per cent of the UK’s economy: the government does not do enough to promote disease.

Such reasoning is identical to that of studies sitting on my desk that purport to measure the economic contribution of sport, tourism and the arts. These studies point to the number of jobs created, and the ancillary activities needed to make the activities possible. They add up the incomes that result. Reporting the total with pride, the sponsors hope to persuade us not just that sport, tourism and the arts make life better, but that they contribute to something called “the economy”.

The analogy illustrates the obvious fallacy. What the exercises measure is not the benefits of the activities they applaud, but their cost; and the value of an activity is not what it costs, but the amount by which its benefit exceeds its costs. The economic contribution of sport is in the pleasure participants and spectators derive, and the resulting gains in health and longevity. That value is diminished, not increased, by the resources that need to be diverted from other purposes.

Similarly, the economic value of the arts is in the commercial and cultural value of the performance, not the costs of cleaning the theatre….

…The relevant economic questions are whether the cultural and commercial value of the performance offsets these costs and whether these benefits can be translated into a combination of box office receipts, sponsorship and public subsidy. The appropriate economic criterion, everywhere and always, is the value of the output.”

I have often felt that economic benefit surveys often seem to grasp at straws in an attempt to find any activity tangentially related to arts events. Though I will grant you that if a downtown area empties out at night, it doesn’t matter how scarce parking is, the spaces in a garage are worthless. Activities that put cars in that lot help keep people employed. But then, the parking company can claim they provide economic benefits to the arts by providing a safe place to park within walking distance of the venue in an area with scarce parking. Your audience may even value the close parking enough to factor it in to their attendance decision. But as the arts organization in question, do you see the parking lot as keeping you employed? You might. But if everyone starts adding up the reciprocal value they offer to each other, the result may end up being ten times the actual amount of money changing hands in that particular business district.

When you think about it in that context, then Kay’s insistence that the only appropriate economic measure is the value of the specific output becomes more apparent. And it is logical to think that value only exists when the benefit exceeds the costs. The problem the arts have is that the measure of the benefit is so nebulous that we are driven to find some concrete method with which to prove that benefit does exceed the amount granted and donated.

Plenty of people are willing to say that the arts aren’t worth very much in today’s environment. Many are just as willing to listen and believe them and that makes all of us in the arts really nervous and sends us scrambling for evidence. Kay doesn’t offer much help in making that argument and in fact, he raises the stakes a little by adding commercial success as a measure of the value. That doesn’t leave much hope for the group that only had 80 patrons, but touched them incredibly and deeply, only it is tough to demonstrate the degree.

Which is not to say he doesn’t wholly believe there is an intrinsic value to the arts.

“We need to put out of our minds this widely held notion that there is such a thing as “the economy”, a monster outside the door that needs to be fed and propitiated and whose values conflict with things – such as sports, tourism and the arts – that make our lives agreeable and worthwhile. Activities that are good in themselves are good for the economy, and activities that are bad in themselves are bad for the economy. The only intelligible meaning of “benefit to the economy” is the contribution – direct or indirect – the activity makes to the welfare of ordinary citizens.”

I am not quite sure if he is differentiating between economic value benefit to the the economy since presumably having a job cleaning a building would directly contribute to the welfare of an ordinary citizen. Assuming he is separating the two, I would use those concepts to make the following point—

Ultimately, economic benefits are replaceable and interchangeable. Back in 2007, I covered an article that noted that a group seeking funding for the arts in England cited priorities that would be served by the grant that were among the exact same benefits then Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised the 2012 Olympics would provide.

Studio 54 contributed to the economy by employing cleaning people when it was a Broadway Theatre, radio and television studios for CBS, a disco, and then back to being a theatre again when it was purchased by Roundabout Theatre. Let say all these entities existed at the same time and are arguing which gets to use the building based on economic benefit they bring. Who gets to use the building?

Now lets say the criteria used is the cultural value each organization brings. Now who gets to use the building? Maybe it is CBS both times. In the first example, they might win because they would be spending the most on payroll and other expenses. In the second, they might win because their programming reaches more households and thus touches more lives. But when it comes to determining the value offered by a night club notorious for its hedonism and excess versus theatres, the decision may be tougher to make.

My point is, while it is hard to define in concrete terms, cultural value is a much more specific property of an organization than economic benefit and is worth citing as a reason for others’ support.

What Does The Lizard Represent?

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So a few changes around the blog today. I sent a few pictures of the objects on my desk to Inside The Arts fearless leader, Drew McManus to be used to spiff up the blog header and give it a new look. I sent a picture of my copy of Peter Drucker’s Managing the Non-Profit Organization among other things. Drew said the other pictures didn’t come out right, but I suspect he just felt I was getting full of myself and trying to make myself look deep and important so used the old lizard instead. (I also sent him pictures of the yo-yos and Wheel-O that also sit on my desk, but perhaps he felt that gave the wrong impression.)

But since we tend to be a little misanthropic about the state of the arts from time to time here on Inside the Arts, I also suspect that maybe the lizard and the “Culture Dinosaurs” album cover may be a sign of things to come.

With that in mind, I am about to introduce a topic reversing past statements about how the arts should be positioned.

In the past, I have argued that the value of the arts should not be spoken about in terms of prescriptive benefits – listening to Mozart will make your kids smarter being one of the more famous claims. But we can’t entirely deny that the arts are deeply steeped with pretty much every element that make us human – history, storytelling, movement, music and memory. As such the arts are a vehicle for just about every theory and idea Carl Jung espoused from archetypes to collective unconscious and can constitute an important therapeutic tool.

Psychology Today has had a series called The Healing Arts running on their blog over the past year. Every couple weeks since February, art therapist Cathy Malchiodi has been doing a countdown of her top 10, “Cool Art Therapy Interventions.” She is down to number three so presumably the top two will be coming in the next month or so. Among those therapies she has listed are mask work, mandala making, family sculpture making, photo collages and visual journaling. You can see pretty quickly how some of these activities could help a person express themselves better or introduce calm and focus. Asked to guess what activities might be helpful, I would likely mention these at some point.

Something I would not have listed because it seems so basic is Creating Together. Except for those artists who crave a solitary existence, I don’t think many in the arts would deny that part of what draws them to the arts is the collaborative experience. Even if you don’t achieve some sublime synchronicity while working with others or interacting with audiences in your daily experience, the communal act, even when simply fooling around, can bring something to each participant. About a year ago, I talked about the possible influence of high emotional satisfaction being a possible motivator for involvement in the arts. That, or something closely related, may also contribute to the therapeutic usefulness of the arts.

Why Don’t You Want To Talk To Me?

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I often write, as do so many others, about the importance of establishing a relationship with your audience/donors/community. However, according to a blog post on the Harvard Business Review, our customers may not want a relationship with us. Well, not with arts organizations specifically, but rather with businesses in general.

The post, “Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You” begins by asking,

“Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk? Better yet, have you ever waited in line for an ATM machine even though there is nobody in line for the teller inside the bank?

If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, you’re not alone. Most customers these days demonstrate a huge — and increasing — appetite for self-service, yet most companies run their operations as if customers prefer to interact with them live.”

The authors cite data showing that businesses assume their customers prefer live service twice as much as self service, but that customers are “statistically indifferent about this … By and large, this indifference holds regardless of their age, demographic, issue type, or urgency.” The authors aren’t sure why this is, but offer a hypothesis

“…maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don’t want a relationship with companies. While this secular trend could be explained away as just a change in consumers’ channel preferences, skeptics might argue that customers never wanted the kind of relationship that companies have always hoped for, and that self service now allows customers the “out” they’ve been looking for all along. “

But what was really helpful about the article were the comments about customer expectations and when people may prefer one type of interaction over the other. And if you don’t believe me, scroll down and read the comment left by Matt Dixon, one of the article’s authors who says as much as he enjoyed writing the post, he is enjoying the comments more.

The reasons why people prefer not to deal with a live person run the gamut- not wanting to be upsold, incompetence/poor customer service from staff, wanting to take time with decision making, not feeling pressured to justify choices to a machine and having already done research on line.

The plus side for humans is avoiding the maze of choices on voice mail systems or having a problem that doesn’t seem to fit the options provided. The human better not sound like they are proceeding through a menu of choices! And of course people aren’t entirely convinced technology is dependable. Two of the calls I fielded today were questions about whether orders had gone through.

One comment by a poster named Will Kenny caught my attention.

“Much of the problem is how companies have defined “relationship,” and many of them simply meant “some way to stay in contact with the customer, to sell more stuff.” In other words, a “relationship” is formed, in these companies, when the company has found a way to continue talking to the customer.”

I felt a little guilty because often that is pretty darn close to the subtext of what we mean when we talk about developing a relationship with our community. It is tough to get past that because we are running businesses and have bills to pay after all. We probably have much more sincere relationships with our next door neighbors than we do with our customers because we babysit each other’s kids and make chicken soup when someone is sick. But those same gestures create a positive impression about the organizations we work for in people’s minds too. And those type of sincere gestures on the corporate level –including just plain listening well–can help strengthen organizational relationships, too.

Arts organizations are in a medial position in all this. So much of what we produce can be researched using other sources. You can read scripts, watch videos, listen to recordings and read reviews. People can avoid contact with us if they like. However, because of the intimidation factor involved with the arts, we are also called upon to be experts, and compassionate experts at that, who can explain without alienating. We save money by having technology handle information requests well and replace a real person. But we also save by having knowledgeable and skilled people who answer the questions. I think there is something to be said for small organizations where some times everyone ends up grabbing the phone because it forces everyone to be able to speak confidently about matters outside their immediate area.

As The Brochure Folds, The Saga Continues!

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For those of you who were following the trials and tribulations of my attempts to design a season brochure per the requirements of the post office, I must confess….the post office won. *sigh*

By which, of course, I mean that I could have designed it anyway I wanted if I were willing to pay the price. The changes the print house suggested did add a slightly disjointed element to the design, but since I decided most people who kept it would be looking at the other side of the brochure most of the time, it wasn’t worth the extra cost.

I have been trying to find a clear illustration of what we ended up with, but really haven’t been able to. The instructions the print house gave us in the course of trying to convince us to change the design just confused us so I didn’t want to use that. But if you are curious, grab a piece of paper and make your own mock up! We used a larger sheet than your standard 8.5 x 11 paper, but you will get the idea.

Hold piece of paper in landscape orientation. Fold the right side to the left so that the crease is on the right side. Fold the paper in thirds starting from the top. Top third folds down, bottom third folds up so it lays on top. Draw a little indicia on the right hand corner. That is the mailing side facing you. The post office likes the piece to go in with the full crease on the bottom and the creased ends on the right side. The open ends are on the top and left side.

If you rotate the page on the vertical axis and write the name of your arts organization, you see where we had our theatre name. The problem is, if you open the brochure up now, you will see the top panel is the mailing label upside down. We had a real striking image we wanted to use across the middle panel where the name of the theatre was, down to the bottom panel. I decided I could live with the mailing panel being upside down since the rest of that side looked good. With most of the important content about the shows on the other side, I figured most people would tack it up with that side facing out and rarely see the inverted panel on the back.

Any way, that was my solution for this situation. The printer is going to be having a seminar on the postal service regulations and our graphic designer plans to go. Based on what she learns and knowing how the post office likes things, next year we may start out our design concept differently with an alternative orientation and folding pattern. The one interesting thing I haven’t gotten a chance to follow up on is that both the post office and the printers said we would likely need three tabs to hold the mailing closed. All the brochures my staff and I received at our homes only had one. I am just wondering why. (I also wonder what it says that I am writing reminders to check up on adhesive tab rules.)

Remembering It’s Not About You

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I finally got around to reading the report WolfBrown generated following a study of what motivates donors in the San Francisco Bay area, “It’s Not About You … It’s About Them: A Research Report on What Motivates Bay Area Donors to Give to the Arts and Artists.” As you might imagine, it encourages people to focus on the interests and needs of the potential donors rather than the needs of the organization.

Much of it is very interesting. The study revealed five different motivation groups in which donors fell- Values-Driven Intrinsics, Community Altruists, Progressive Artist Champions, High-Touch Social Givers, Supportive Audience; and discussed what characteristics each group possessed as well as the percentage of the audiences these segments comprised. The report included a number of case studies on Bay area arts groups and identified the way the groups’ approaches successfully met their donors’ needs and interests.

Rather than doing a lengthy summary, I just wanted to cite the things that popped out for me. The first was regarding elements that influenced relationships:

Live conversation: Talking directly with potential donors can increase their interest in an artist and his or her project. Direct conversations can also energize the person seeking the contribution….

• Online giving: Two-thirds of FFAMC donors have made donations online, and more than 60% of those who have not given online would consider doing so. …

• Giving time as well as money: FFAMC donors are almost twice as likely to be volunteers with organizations to which they give than are donors to large institutions….

• Contact pre-gift is more important than post-gift: Two-thirds of all donors surveyed indicated that they prefer to have attended an organization’s performances before they make a contribution. 42% of FFAMC donors indicated they prefer to get engaged with an organization personally before they make a gift; only 21% of FFAMC donors suggested they need a lot of postgift attention.

• Write your thank you notes: Most FFAMC donors and donors to other cultural organizations desire timely acknowledgment of their gifts, information about the impact of their contribution and regular notice of upcoming programs or invitations to special previews or openings. There are outliers at both ends of this spectrum – people who want a lot of information and some who prefer very limited post-gift contact. Asking a donor which kind of contact they
prefer is an important part of getting to know them.

I was actually surprised about the pre-gift contact being more important than post gift. I can understand that developing a relationship with an organization is a strong motivator for that initial gift, but it is interesting to know people don’t value post gift contact as much. Which is not to say they don’t want acknowledgment. I wonder if this might be regional or even generational based since so many of the donors in this study were younger than the usual arts attendee/donor. But perhaps our assumptions about what all donors want has been flawed from the start.

The other thing that caught my eye was the way The Shotgun Players survey their audiences. When we have conducted surveys, we try to keep it short but also try to capture as much pertinent demographic information as possible. The response rate is mixed, but generally very light. From the way I read this report, The Shotgun Players asks two questions on a raffle questionnaire, a serious one about motivation or demographics and a silly one related to the show, “During our Rosie the Riveter show, it was “If you were a power tool, what kind of tool would you be?” They get a 85%-90% response rate. It was a sort of “duh” moment for me when I recognized getting the answer to one important question a show from a meaningful number of people is more helpful than getting a handful of people to answer 6-8 questions.

Later in the report were some comments that belied the idea that artists don’t want to get involved in the business end of things. (And even if the idea is true, the sentiments expressed by an artist may provide a challenge to think differently where administrators may sound like nags.) Philip Huang said of his grant seeking experience:

“I liked the matching requirement very much. I would have never done this project on my own, without the match. I never would have changed artistic direction, or changed medium on my own without the endorsement of the FFAMC grant. I believe that artists should chase things slightly outside of their personal comfort zone. For me, fundraising from individuals was definitely that. Having an externally imposed timeline and an externally imposed mandate was good. I think the match was also a motivator for my donors. Once I got clarity about what I needed and I asked for it, people responded to my sense of propose and vision.”

Finally, what I thought was really excellent were instructions in the appendix prepared by Alan Brown on how to conduct the interview portion of the study. I have read a lot of studies over the years and I have never seen something like this included. There was just a very accessible and comfortable element to the instructions. Had I been conducting the interviews, the instructions would have calmed any anxiety I felt. And from various parts of the instruction, it appears Brown was training people who were not professional researchers and may have in fact been members of the commissioning organization.

“Sitting down with ticket buyers and donors and asking them about their experiences sounds simple enough. In reality, few cultural institutions or funders conduct qualitative research on a methodical basis, and many have slipped out of touch with their constituents.”
[…]
During most interviews, a great deal of data is communicated non-verbally, through body language, hesitation, gestures, and intonation. No matter how good the researcher, it’s just not the same as experiencing the interview in person. This is why the exercise is participatory – you’ll be doing the interviewing….With the researcher out of the way, the “filter” between you and your interviewees is gone.”

Some of the instructions are just good reminders for talking to donors and supporters in informal settings.

Good interviewing also requires a good set of questions. Asking the wrong questions (or avoiding the hard questions) is a waste of time. You may feel good by the end of the interview, but nothing is gained. Asking the right questions the right way, however, can unleash passionate, emotional, or even angry responses – which can be extremely informative.
[…]

Which brings us to the hardest part of interviewing – listening. A good interviewer is a good listener. Listening requires a great deal of concentration. A good listener understands what the respondent is saying, and also thinks about what the respondent is not saying, or trying to say…. A good listener hears when the respondent is having difficulty answering a question, and re-phrases the question or illustrates a response drawing from her own experience. “Maybe I can help you with this question by telling you how I would answer it for myself…” Perhaps the most difficult aspect of interviewing is simultaneously concentrating on what the interviewee is saying and also having a sense of where the interview is going – whether to probe deeper or move on to the next question.

Some questions are direct, while other questions involve asking people to tell personal stories. For example, “Can you remember when you felt especially proud of a gift you made?” Storytelling can be extremely useful in getting people to explain important events in their lives and to open up about difficult issues….”

Ceding Control Of Your Message (Just A Little)

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I am experiencing the slight panic that goes with having other people promote your events over social media more frequently these days. It is difficult to cede control of my information dispersal to other people, largely because it is increasingly involuntary.

Because services like Google and Twitter allow you to see what people are saying about my organization, I often find that people are forwarding incomplete information or mangled information. Some of it is a result of copy and paste which left some information behind or the necessity to truncate text for Twitter. What people are choosing to include in information to their friends often isn’t what I think sells the show. In some cases I can imagine that maybe a detail has significance to a person and their friends. Other times what they send is so nondescript, I can’t help but chalk it up to laziness and I hope that the mere idea that a friend has brought it to their attention inspires people to attend.

The temptation to correct or emphasize a point can really be strong at times. All I need to do is create a separate account of my own to set things aright. Just have to hope they don’t get too suspicious about the lack of posts or friends my brand new account has connected with it. But the consequences of injecting myself into someone else’s conversation for the purpose of correcting their information about our organization or being caught in an inauthentic masquerade are probably more damaging to us than a few incorrect dates and prices.

I have a similar situation with a local group with which we are partnering to produce a show. One of the board members is sending out press releases about the show on behalf of their organization. Personally, I think my writing is much better and paints a more complete picture. I send our partner some emails asking that certain bit of information be clarified, added or corrected.

But as many of you well know, personal relationships matter. That board member had people clamoring to write advance stories and conduct television and radio interviews in the course of a couple days. I didn’t know that a couple of the magazines even existed. In fact, one of them is just starting up and our event will have significant space in the first issue.

Personal relationships, be they virtual or other wise, seems to trump accuracy of information when it comes to getting people involved. Or perhaps it glosses over the consequences of poor information delivery. Though ultimately the annoyance of those who show up at the wrong time or expecting to pay a different price may be borne by the arts organization rather than the friend.

Mandatory Non-Profit Salary Caps

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Last week, the NY Times had a story about how lawmakers are really scrutinizing the salaries of non-profit leaders. The paper notes that New Jersey recently passed a provision that “includes a limit on what nonprofit groups can pay their chief executives if they are providing social services under state contracts. The cap, based on a formula that also applies to for-profits providing such services on behalf of the state, is part of a broader effort by Gov. Chris Christie to rein in salaries on state workers.”

It seems to me that it may not be a very long jump to apply the same scrutiny to arts organizations who receive government funding. It may not be in the next few years, but it could be coming. It wouldn’t surprise me if NJ was the first to do it too given their “cut off your nose to spite your face” attempts to reduce arts funding a year and a half ago.

My initial impulse was to write something about how the government was coming after the non-profits because they couldn’t rein in the salaries at big corporations which made big campaign contributions. I also wanted to moan about how money equals access and the need for more visible and active advocacy if the arts didn’t want to be victimized by such unwarranted scrutiny. Charity Navigator is cited as saying only 2/10th of 1% of non-profits in the U.S. actually pay their leaders six figure salaries. But you get one story about Joe Dowling making $680,000 at the Guthrie Theatre and suddenly everyone else is eyed suspiciously despite their 10 year old car that has clearly needed a new muffler for the last 6 months.

And you know, I may still follow that impulse and further rant. But I want to ask. If the NJ state government is so concerned about efficiency and effectiveness in their contracts with social service agencies, are they also going to look at whether people are being paid too little? There is likely much more waste in employee turn over due to retraining costs and time spent than there is with paying the executive too much. Charity Navigator President Ken Berger is said to disagree “with the argument, popular among many nonprofits, that to attract top talent to manage complex organizations, they must compete with for-profit businesses.” A six figure salary is often cited as outrageous in the article so lets grant that you can find and retain talent for about $90,000. But is the government concerned that non-profits may be losing a series of talented to the for-profit world because those organizational leaders are only being paid $25,000?

There is an argument often made that the government should be turning over a lot of its functions to non-profits because they can do the work more efficiently. If that is the case, the government is likely to be increasingly concerned about the salaries of the top executives. But if they are going to depend on non-governmental social service agencies, they should also be sure that there is a certain standard of care being provided to people. That requires good training, but also appropriate pay to help maintain the continuity of delivering that standard. If they are going to care what is being paid at the top, they should also be concerned what is being paid at the bottom. But it is likely the government will focus more on the results than the process the company follows to obtain them. It is much simpler and more popular to target executive pay as the reason for substandard service delivery than other harder to quantify measures. Cost cutting is equated with money well spent but what works for sneakers has a different result in social services.

But in the arts, other than educational outreach, governments have a different agenda than they do with social services. Unfortunately, it is often appropriateness of content that often raises concerns rather than quality of services.

In any case, even though most of us have no fear of being accused of having too high a salary, the examination of non-profit salaries appears to be a continuing concern. It bears watching how it all unfolds.

Competitive Bidding For All!

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With all the other services offered online, I have often wondered why no one is offering a procurement bidding system. Perhaps there are such an assortment of laws from state to state it is too expensive. But if Google can navigate China’s laws and politics to give away its service for free, there has to be some money to be made.

Since I am ultimately talking about a benefit for the arts community, I would be happy to a service specifically tailored to help the industry developed. Baumol’s cost disease may say technological advances can’t reduce the number of people needed to play Beethoven, but that doesn’t mean we can’t save on our purchases of gaffers tape!

The service I am referring to is something similar to what I use at work. As a state employee, I have to get competitive bids for any goods or services above a certain dollar threshold. We use an online solicitation system which runs the bidding process for us. Even if we know something is going to fall far below the mandatory use threshold, we will use the service if we think we can get a better price somewhere.

Vendors sign up to be alerted when bid requests in certain broad subject areas are posted and then if they are awarded the bid, they pay a percentage of the price and that is what keeps the system running. The percentage on our system is 1/2% which is very competitive with other states. There are some basic bells and whistles for vendors too in terms of tracking and historical reporting. What I like best is that it exports all the salient details of the winning bid to a purchase order.

The two big complicating factors for my department as part of a state entity is 1) Necessity to accept the lowest bid or fill out copious paperwork explaining why you hadn’t and 2) Being VERY specific with your bid details lest the lowest bidder not have a feature you assumed would be included.

Making the requesters stick to these conditions in an open market setting would be difficult. But it would also not be any different than how things work right now. Private citizens and companies throw business to their favorite vendors all the time even if they aren’t the cheapest option. There are also plenty of sales personnel who invest a lot of time and energy meeting someone’s specifications only to have customers go elsewhere or be lured away by a competitor who convinces them they really want a feature they offer.

One of the reasons I suggest this is because there are often times that the difference in bids is significant. Some times so significant that we wonder if the lowest bidder got the stuff off the back of a truck somewhere. Other times, the margin is much closer, but frequency of purchasing makes the savings add up. The benefit to us is that the reach of our bid requests are much further than had we called around locally for competing bids. Even though we have to wait about a week to allow everyone time to bid, we save all the time we would have spent searching catalogs or the internet or calling around to find the best price.

There is a chicken and egg element to this which is why if someone set this up to service the arts and culture industry, it would probably have to be on a national scale. Arts organizations won’t sign up and use it unless there are a lot of vendors on it and vendors won’t bother with it unless there is a big customer base. Its existence would have to be widely advertised outside the theatrical supply and services sector. There are probably a number of companies who don’t think of themselves as serving the arts and won’t sign up. But of our best deals have come from companies who don’t cater to theatres.

If anyone knows of a service like this that the general public can use, I would be interested in learning more about it. If there isn’t anything like this but there are a lot of people interested in some sort of service, maybe Drew McManus will take the project on after his Venture Project software is launched.

Info You Can Use: Taking Your Marketing Mobile

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A member of the Performing Arts Administrators group on LinkedIn suggested a link to two marketing guides by Kodak. One was on using social media and the other is about using mobile marketing. Both are free downloads.

I looked at the mobile media guide most closely because I have the least idea of how to use that as a technology much less as an effective marketing tool. My initial impression that parts of it wouldn’t be easy to set up were correct. Getting a short code –the four to five digit number to which people text a word or phrase is complicated to arrange.

“Use a short code on a service provider or get a service provider to work with the aggregators on obtaining carrier certification and provisioning according to your planned campaigns and needs. Since every new service requires a new certification, make sure you cover as many services as possible before submitting the campaign for approval, to avoid having to go through the certification process again.”

Both documents provide good background and glossary of terms for those who aren’t familiar with the technologies. They provide examples of campaigns they have conducted, many of which are on a scale and involve resources most arts organizations only dream of. That being said, Twitter allows people to follow your feed on their service by texting to a number. If you created a dedicated Twitter account for promotional efforts, you can have information and links to all sorts of specials sent to people’s mobile devices without dealing with the carrier certifications. It appears you just need to text “follow (feedname)” to 40404 in the US. The code is different in other countries.

Kodak encourages people to evaluate if the technology is the correct fit for their organization. They also offer Do’s and Don’ts for campaigns. The one they provide for mobile marketing seems obvious as a step for keeping spam off mobile devices.

“The rule for viral messages is that they can only be sent by non-commercial entities who manually select a recipient to receive it. Messages forwarded by automatic means, originating from a commercial source, or offering inducements to forward messages are definite “don’ts”.”

At first I just thought it was an ethical rule, but since the next section advises you to consult a lawyer about what is and is not permissible, I wondered if it might be a Federal law created to squelch spam before it started. As always, the best rule of thumb with most communication media remains true — be careful you aren’t annoying people.

Do Androids Make Good Critics

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Science fiction often has a motif of technology seeking to become human. Its a story as old as Pinocchio or even Pygmalion and Galatea. Star Trek: The Next Generation series had an android named Data who painted and played music as part of his quest to achieve humanity. His work was often praised for its technical proficiency but lacking that intangible quality of self that artists imbue in their work. There is often a sense of pity that for all the sophistication possessed by the entity, the gap can’t be bridged. Perhaps it is out of ego that we create these stories which suggest there are some things in which technology can’t surpass us.

But what happens when we abdicate our aesthetic judgment to technology? Via Tyler Cohen’s Marginal Revolution blog, is a link to a prototype camera that rates the aesthetics of the picture you are about to take. Move the camera around to different angles to improve the percentage to achieve a better picture. According to the Today and Tomorrow web page, right now the camera, Nadia, communicates via Bluetooth with a Mac that does all the evaluating. The camera was created as something of a statement about the artistic experience, but you know it won’t be long before someone develops this as a feature for digital cameras. I’ll bet they get it linked up with Google Maps to automatically create notes about the best place for tourists to stand in relation to monuments.

Also on the Today and Tomorrow page is a camera that actually inserts smiles on people’s faces regardless of their expression. So if you are standing in the ideal spot to take pictures in front of the Grand Canyon, but your moody teenage offspring are scowling, the picture and memories need not be ruined. Say the camera creators:

“To achieve this camera takes a picture but overlays it with a smiling mouth drawn from a pre-existing pool of pictures with smiling faces. To generate to maximum level of exaggeration the replaced smiling mouth impression is matched as realistically as possible to that of the initial portrait taken.”

Again, the camera was created by German art students and is not a commercial development for cameras. But as the creators point out, digital cameras can already automatically retouch pictures in real time.

I know a couple photographers who figure they are the only ones keeping the makers of camera film in business since everyone else is going to digital. I am not going to debate characteristics of film photographs which are lost in digital. I am sure they have been beaten to death in books, blogs and magazines ad infinitum.

The question I want to ask is the I asked earlier–what are the repercussions of abdicating judgments to a piece of technology? In our science fiction, we always assume we retain the characteristics we value into the future and some are envied by those who do not possess them. But what if we, as a whole, don’t really care about some thing enough to work at developing and retaining them?

For those of us in the arts and our long time patrons, we know that developing discernment takes time and experience. One of the primary instructions to formal students and interested others has always been–go see stuff and then see some more. But it is conceivable that an artificial intelligence fed the judgments of thousands could synthesize an authoritative one of its own. It may not be perfect, but it would be enough to get by, right? Oh wait, Pandora already does this for music and Amazon does it with…everything.

But you know you can’t trust those Amazon reviews. People can manipulate them! A computer algorithm is an objective source! For those who are intimidated by the arts it may provide a sense of confidence that gets them to attend events more often. There are no critics to agree or disagree with. You take your device (and I am imagining more widely than just photographs) to a performance or gallery, let it absorb what you are seeing and hearing and rate it.

Except what if you point it at the stuff you already know you like and it says it sucks? What does the device know? It was programmed by elitist arts lovers. It has no credibility with you! What if it is like Pandora and has a feature that suggests you might like x because you like y based on a computer program? That might be bad for the arts people because it just reinforces people’s consumption of experiences they pretty much already like. It can’t sneak in suggestions to encourage people to take chances too much because it will lose credibility.

Also in my experience with Pandora, technology can’t yet measure that intangible quality based on beats per minute. Some people are great because of so many other factors. I stopped using it very quickly when I hated nearly everything it suggested alongside my favorite groups.

Do people care about learning about quality or about what already appeals to them? Is there too much work and risk involved in experiencing the unknown even at a highly accurate computer’s recommendation?

The use of such technology doesn’t have to necessarily have such a stark dichotomy, of course. Devices that evaluate aesthetics can help Pro-Ams sharpen their skills at creating things. They may only enable people to advance to a certain level, but can bring great enjoyment in the process.

It is a complicated subject all around. About as complicated as the idea that being able to create high quality original works is exclusively a trait of humanity.

Do You Fight For Your Rights?

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Artsjournal is doing another one of their special week long conversations on a topic. This week it is the issue of artists and intellectual property rights. There are too many topics being bandied about to summarize them all, but as you might imagine one of the central themes is in regard to the whole tension between wanting to protect your creative rights and the ability and desire of the public at large to integrate or reimagine your great ideas into their own.

Bill Ivey does a good job of summing up the need for changing how rights are controlled.

“The notion that artists and companies share the same values when it comes to the character of our arts system is a crock. Companies worry about the theft of assets; artists worry about obscurity. These two concerns overlap at times, but often they don’t. What’s the real benefit to an artist of copyright protection that reaches beyond three-quarters of a century? What’s the real benefit to an artist if your publishing company or record company uses licensing fees to prevent your composition from being sampled. or prevents your film clip from being part of a documentary. We need to begin the organizational conversation Marty envisions by figuring out what an artist-oriented regime of laws and regulations would look like.”

There is also a discussion about whether artists are investing appropriate time and attention into protecting their rights. There was actually some pretty extensive discussion, tied together by Tim Quirk, refuting the idea that artists are/should be primarily focused on their art and can’t be bothered with mundane details of business and rights management. Quirk says:

“I had always assumed this ridiculous idea that artists are delicate otherworldly creatures who can’t and shouldn’t concern themselves with prosaic business or policy matters was being fed to them (along with other helpful notions, such as being a drunk or an addict is all part of being creative) by malicious middlemen and mendacious media.

But now I’ve read Vickie’s insightful analysis of how this dynamic is perpetuated by art schools and universities, and Bill’s observation that “things like intellectual property, media policy, unions, performance rights, and so on not show up in art schools or music conservatories, they have precious little traction in arts management programs.”

He goes on to acknowledge that intellectual property laws and the convoluted system of entities that administer them are really tough to comprehend and can be frustrating, but it is something that is worth mastering. It was interesting to me to read Bill Ivey’s thoughts on how this was an area that arts training programs fell short in. When I was pursuing my MFA, I had direct experience with different contracts, including negotiating music performance rights. Even still, the first thing I mentioned at my degree defense when asked what additional instruction would have been helpful during my studies was more contract and rights law. This was 15 years ago so I am surprised to learn that more isn’t taught given all the challenges technology presents in this area.

Though to be fair, as Brian Newman notes, there is a lot to be taught already. I was intrigued to learn in one of his posts that in film at least, the very people who are now clamoring for film makers to become involved in policy debates helped to dismantle the organizations which could have been instrumental in driving that discussion. I wonder if that is the case in other disciplines.

“In the world of film, we used to have a very strong network of media arts centers around the nation. As foundations shifted priorities (and the NEA’s support changed dramatically), however, many of these organizations have shut down or refocused energies to where the money is – social issue action, youth training or corporate support for large activities, like film festivals. When attending a Grantmakers in the Arts conference a couple of years ago, I was amazed that there was a group of funders upset that they couldn’t get filmmakers active in the policy debate – but they had helped disband the very network that could have served to rally filmmakers around these issues.”

Intellectual properties rights is likely to continue as an important topic for years to come so it is worth following the whole conversation. I have barely represented the breadth of it here. They are covering nuances between people who live or die by the strength of protections versus people who need loose protections to thrive and further develop their work. There is also the inevitable discussion of how money determines whose voices and interests are being heard and transformed into policy and law.

Buying From The Source

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I recently became a member of my local public radio station. I “came out” as a non-member while a guest on the Spring Fund drive and declared I was ready to sign up. My hope was that it would inspire others to do the same. What I didn’t mention was that while I really enjoyed the high quality news and information, what tipped me into the membership column was the show This American Life. I am crazy about the show and wish I had gone to see host Ira Glass speak at the Arts Presenters conference when I was there a few years back.

The thing is, I am not usually listening to the radio when the show is on so I generally consume the program over my computer while I am at home. Consume is an appropriate word because there have been times where I have listened to three shows from the archive in one sitting. (Well, often I am dusting, mopping the floor or folding laundry, but you get my point.) Not long ago, before you could listen to any episode, a short segment would play with Glass asking you to donate to support the rigorous story gathering process they engage in.

If you aren’t aware, generally your donation to the radio station goes to pay for the programming you hear. Your support of the station indirectly supports shows like This American Life. It made me think–I am not listening to the show on the radio. Even though my donation is going to support the show, should I perhaps not be supporting the show more directly? I am using their internet bandwidth to listen to the show. Coupled with some other recent occurrences, I realized this sort of thinking may end up impacting arts organizations in the near future.

In the last week or so, National Public Radio decided it was changing its name to NPR just like Federal Express changed to FEDEX some years ago. Their decision is based on the fact that the content is no longer only delivered and received over the radio and can be heard on the web and in podcasts, among other media. In fact, often you can scan the transcripts of a segment on their website rather than listening at all. They are beginning to increase their focus on online presence and delivery of content. But what if the individual shows do their own fund raising? It might be possible that they will undermine the local stations’ fund drives. This American Life does some really impassioned and well argued promos for the local radio fund drives. But as funding gets tighter, might shows like their shift focus to their own survival?

The national office of PBS is looking at making a nationwide fund raising appeal directly to donors and it is making local television stations nervous that it might undermine their own efforts. It might be a bad idea if it did since PBS needs the television stations as a distribution system. Unless they are seeing more people interested in viewing their content online rather than on television.

But nothing can compare to live performance right? Well, as you may be aware, the Metropolitan Opera has a fairly successful program where they broadcast their shows to movie theatres. And a writer for the London Telegraph says watching the National Theatre in a movie theatre is better than attending the event live. You already have the opportunity see the National Theatre productions at about 50 cinemas around the US this summer.

One thing NPR has going for it is the variety of programming it offers. If I donate $50 to This American Life, that is all I have supported. If I donate the same or more to my local NPR station, I am supporting a wider variety of programming I enjoy. That is the potential advantage the cinema owners have. There is a possibility of curating a wide experience from the very best in the field. This is what I and many others around the country do now, only the guys with the movie screens won’t have to pay for hotels and travel which immensely increases the pool from which to select. Their curated season might include opera from the Metropolitan Opera, classical music from the Philadelphia Symphony, theatre from the Guthrie Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. While I would argue you miss half the experience by not attending the latter two in person, such a program would bring excellent performance to people who don’t have the means to travel. (Though you will still have to shush those damn kids in the back rows.)

Of course, it also changes expectations of performances by everyone else. So the question is, will a rising tide raise all ships as people become more interested and less intimidated by the attendance experience or will the cinema events cannibalize local audiences who would rather see the Broadway production rather than the local production or the bus and truck tour. Likely it is a time will tell situation which hinges upon how wide the cinema project spreads and how invested those with the means become in creating and promoting these shows.

They May Be Big Brother, But At Least They Have Good Customer Service

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So last week I was deluged with phone calls for the college admissions and records and financial aid offices. For a long while I thought the phone system went haywire and the voice mail system was misdirecting my calls. I pleasantly redirected peoples’ calls, silently reminding myself that it wasn’t their fault and as I am fond of saying, marketing is everyone’s job. I may be king of my castle, but I am a member of a larger organization whose interests I serve.

I soon discovered though that people were actually directly dialing my number and were not being redirected by a voice mail system. I also discovered that people only have a really vague idea about where they get pieces of information. Eventually I deduced that people were being misdirected by search engines –specifically Google. I did a search for the college on Google and to my horror found that my office number was listed as the main switchboard number. This was only true for Google. Yahoo and Bing didn’t have erroneous information.

I am not sure how it happened, but my theory is that someone tagged the theatre on Google Maps and put our phone number. My building is one of the few on campus tagged on Google maps and somehow it may have become the default phone number. Once it became the top search result, everyone started calling.

Fortunately, Google has a link that allows you to submit corrections. In fact, if you have an account, you can fix it right away. So I submitted a couple corrections from different IP addresses and submitted one from my Google account. It took about 48 hours, but the listing disappeared…..

…And was replaced by a listing for the ATM machine in the library, the location of which was also tagged. Since the telephone number listed is that of the bank, I am willing to bet that the bank has been getting calls from people who haven’t been paying attention.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. Today I received a call from someone at Google Maps verifying where it was exactly that the erroneous listing was directing people. Google may be massive, but they apparently aren’t too unwieldy to fix and then follow up on problems in a timely manner. You often don’t get that sort of response from utilities and companies whose service you actually pay for.

Probably the big lesson here is that even when you are depending on other people’s labor to contribute and correct content, the endeavor can never entirely be without cost. It would be inconceivable for Google and Wikipedia to collect and present in a meaningful way the amount of information they do if they depended solely on paid staff, but they still need to create a structure and invest resources to monitor the veracity and suitability of the material they provide. In fact, I just read today that Google doesn’t outsource the review of content flagged as inappropriate and provides counseling to the staff that processes it.

I don’t mean to turn this into a plug for Google. The whole experience just reveals the importance of monitoring and addressing mistakes and that it is possible to do so no matter what your size should you make the conscious decision.

Bringing Hope In A Hopeless World

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Interesting piece in The Art Newspaper on why the arts should be funded in austere times. The article is basically an argument about the value of the arts. What immediately caught my eye was the story author Robert Hewison tells about the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the UK’s predecessor of today’s Arts Council. In 1940 when some felt it was illogical to be doing so, the British government committed £2 million in today’s money to the council ““to show publicly and unmistakably that the Government cares about the cultural life of the country. This country is supposed to be fighting for civilisation.” The end of the article notes that the creator and first chairman of the council was “the economist John Maynard Keynes. He believed that in a recession, governments should stimulate the economy.” It was Keynes approach that many were encouraging the Obama Administration to follow to deal with the current economic environment.

Hewison summarizes why the economic benefit of the arts doesn’t work-

“But the Treasury doesn’t buy it. They can see through the “multiplier” calculations of the cultural boosters. They understand the meaning of “opportunity cost”. The money spent on artistic steel and glass could have been spent on an arms factory—and created more employment.”

and notes why the prescriptive argument of how the arts help solve myriad ills isn’t desirable-

“The New Labour government liked this argument, and directed that the arts council should use the arts “to combat social exclusion and support community developments”. The ACE found itself having to meet targets for health, education, employment and the reduction of crime—not truth, beauty or a sense of the sublime….

…. It is difficult to demonstrate a value-chain between art and social enhancement, and difficult to measure the social enhancement itself. Ministers for culture became embarrassed by this…”

Granted the conditions in the US aren’t the same as in the UK. For one thing, I could only dream of a funding structure that had “47% box office, 31% from the arts council, 12% from local authority sources and other public funding, and 9% from trusts, foundations, donors and business sponsorship.” Yes, that is 53% government funding.

The same weaknesses in those arguments exist on both sides of the Atlantic. Right now people are pondering how to make a case for the intrinsic value of the arts backed up by some measurable results for policy makers. While I think there is potential for making the case, it isn’t as easy to do as with previous arguments. There aren’t talking point lists being circulated for the intrinsic value the way they have been for the economic and prescriptive value arguments. It takes a person skilled in persuasive speech or writing to make a compelling argument in this area.

Some of Hewison’s arguments seem tinged with a desperation to employ the arts to preserve society through war or some other cataclysm.

“The value in use of the arts is that they help a society make sense of itself. They generate the symbols and rituals that create a common identity—that is why art and religion are so closely linked. Like religion, the arts give access to the spiritual. Art is a link to previous generations, and anchors us to history. Culture is a social language that we would be dumb without. “

and

“The precautionary principle tells us we have a duty to future generations to ensure that our cultural assets are passed on to them. We also have a selfish interest in sustaining the richness and diversity of those assets.”

and

Culture creates social capital, expressed as trust generated by a shared understanding of the symbols that the arts generate, and a commitment to the values they represent. It sustains the legitimacy of social institutions by ensuring that they are accepted, not imposed. Societies with an equitable distribution of cultural assets will be more cohesive, and more creative. Wellbeing, which is the true end of economic activity, depends on the quality of life that culture sustains.

My only qualms with that come in the context of Ben Cameron’s speech that I covered yesterday. I have this sense is that the manifestation of art and culture that Hewison wants to preserve differs from the direction the arts are going. I think Hewison links culture and religion in a manner that evokes monasteries preserving knowledge through the Dark Ages. I think the reality is closer to the religious reformations Cameron referenced. Both can seem pretty cataclysmic as the unfold. Even though a great deal of what is being created seems ephemeral at best, there are things being created with longevity which can serve to anchor us in history.

The question is, will the government want to support these new manifestations. Perhaps even more importantly, will people whose whole success is due to operating outside of the traditional structures want that support? I am sure it would make many in the different levels of government happy if they could find enough people to say so. (Just for the record, I am not ready to give it up yet!) Right now I think everyone dreams of a either a new operating method that doesn’t require so much funding or a new funding method that will sustain their operations. Perhaps one or the other will emerge to relief the situation.

Even though it seemed to me that Hewison was looking for a hedge against the collapse of society in some post-apocalyptic world (and perhaps I was just imposing my own fantasies on his words), he isn’t wrong to say that expressions of arts and culture do provide stability and that governments have an interest in sustaining them.

Rationally, the government should be putting more funding into the arts because of the social capital they generate. There is a sound economic argument that when the market fails to provide certain kinds of goods thought useful, then it is necessary to intervene—health and education are the usual examples. The economics of the arts are particularly prone to market failure, for it is not easy to make the advances in productivity that technology facilitates in manufacturing

The Artisan Reformation Has Begun

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Nod to Andrew Taylor for providing a link via his Twitter feed to a speech Ben Cameron made at the Association of Arts Administration Educators conference. Cameron talks about many of the worrisome issues I have covered here in the past – finances, shrinking audiences who procrastinate on ticket buying, organizational succession by young arts leaders who want to reshape rather than maintain what they have inherited.

But as he moved past providing this context for his comments, he made one of the more interesting observations about the change that will be necessary in the arts by comparing it to the religious reformations of the 16th century. It seems there is ever a confluence of art and religion. He leaves some room for optimism while noting the necessity for nimbleness (my emphasis).

Both reformations have been spurred by technological breakthrough—the invention of the printing press and the subsequent widespread public access to scripture occasioned by the printing press certainly has parallel in the redistribution of knowledge with the invention of the Internet. Both reformations challenge old business structures—god forbid that the decimation of monastic orders is the metaphoric fate for today’s major institutions but only time will tell. And both reformations essentially challenged the necessity of intermediation in a spiritual relationship, challenging the notion of the gatekeeping priest or now artist.

Now the Religious Reformation did not obliterate the Catholic Church. Just as 500 years later, many people around the world still find deep meaning in high mass and formal religious institutions, I for one believe that the historic institutions that we have funded to date at their best will continue to be worthy of our investment…

…But the Reformation more notably reshaped and broadened the universe of how religion would operate, who would be empowered to act, giving rise to new denominations, new religious rituals, new opportunities for the common layperson to assume responsibility for her own spiritual experience. Similarly in the arts, we are witnessing an explosion of arts organizations operating in new ways and the emergence of the hybrid artist: amateurs doing work at a professional level—a group dubbed elsewhere as the Pro-Ams—….and professional artists who choose to work outside of the traditionally hermetic arts environment, not from financial necessity but because the work they feel called to do cannot be accomplished in the narrow confines of the gallery, the concert hall or the theatre.”

He suggests that the training of arts administrators should include many of the traditional subjects of audience development, fund raising, accounting and entertainment law. But he says that for the next generation of leaders internships and practical experiences “with the political campaign, the sports complex, the environmental justice center” may be just as valid as a similar experience at an arts organization. He cites the MIT five step model of cultivating new businesses, “idea generation, training, mentoring, legal counsel and finally delivery to market capital” and wonders if this along with a more interdisciplinary focus might not serve students and the evolving industry better.

Even though his basic message isn’t anything new, the models and ideas he invokes are intriguing. Both the text and audio of his speech are available so you can pick your poison. You can even download the source audio and listen to his speech on your commute to work or while hiking.

Crucial Policy Decision: Unwelcome Solicitations

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a series of articles about sexual harassment in fund raising today. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read them, but if you have a subscription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the same articles appear there.

I really had no idea that sexual advances on development officers by donors was such a prevalent problem. But upon reading the main article, it makes sense that the potential would exist.

In many cases, those women are appealing to older, powerful men for large donations. To succeed, fund raisers must build long-term relationships with donors. And they often visit donors in their homes or meet them in social settings where alcohol and personal information are plentiful.

To be sure, unwelcome sexual advances are not a daily occurrence for most fund raisers. But the problem happens often enough that they and the organizations that employ them should have better guidance on what they can do to prevent and deal with harassment, says Polly Aris Stamatopoulos, a Washington consultant to nonprofit groups.

Ms. Stamatopoulos says she has rejected inappropriate sexual requests from donors and observed several incidents in which other donors or trustees made sexual overtures toward fund raisers she supervised. People who raise money for a living, she says, should be required to take “a class in the sexual politics of fund raising.”

It occurs to me that this may be an even bigger problem in the arts where the development office is often comprised of one person with few people to turn to for support or to shift a donor to. Given that the executive director is often the primary fundraiser in many organizations, the situation can even be worse with no one but the board to turn to for support. One of those interviewed in the articles spoke of feeling an obligation to keep the donations coming. Her sense of obligation was entirely self imposed because when she spoke to her supervisors after tolerating the advances for two years, they readily assigned the donor to another staff member. The donor never gave to the organization again. It isn’t hard for me to imagine that in some situations staff supervisors or board members would discourage the affected person from rocking the boat too much lest they endanger fund raising efforts.

Most organizations have sexual harassment policies that cover employee behavior, but I suspect few have explicit statements that employees should expect reasonable treatment from patrons and donors as well. Dealing with advances from members of the public is much more complicated than similar situations with employees. That only means that clear policies should be generated so that people can confidently and knowledgeably handle the situation.

It makes sense for organizations to train fund raisers about how to carry themselves as a representative of the company in social situations far away from the work environment. Instruction on how to handle every manner of uncomfortable situations, including unwanted advances is a logical component of such training. But I am guessing it not the sort of training many arts organizations provide.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy is hosting an online discussion on Wednesday, July 14 about coping with unwanted advances if anyone is interested in exploring the topic.

More On Mergers And Alliances

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I have had non-profit mergers on the mind of late due to some personal experience so it is no wonder that two entries on the subject from different blogs caught my attention today.

The first was a book review by Gene Takagi at Non-Profit Law blog. He recommends Nonprofit Mergers & Alliances by Thomas A. McLaughlin. Takagi starts out referencing a quote from the book supporting the old truism that it is best to enter a negotiation in a position of strength.

“Indeed, the book had me at “hello” or, rather, its first sentence: ‘The best time to consider a merger or an alliance is before it is necessary, when coming together with another organization will mean combining strength with strength, and when the collective energies and the creativity of the two or more entities can be used proactively instead of being sapped by the demands of crisis management.’ “

This concept is actually central to the commentary made in the second blog post I saw today, Drew McManus talking about Philadelphia Orchestra and Philly Pops decision not to merge. The former would have absorbed the latter. Drew cites the troubles the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera had with their merger. The orchestra and pops adopted a gradual approach to the merger and that revealed some of the potential difficulties they might face as a single entity. Both organizations will work in close partnership, but retain separate governance structures.

As you might imagine from the title of the book he reviews, Takagi notes that there are different stages to both mergers and alliances and lists them out. According to Takagi, the book outlines the pros and cons to both approaches and provides some good advice about very complex undertakings.

The book may be a good resource for the next generation of non-profit leaders. Apparently McLaughlin feels that “nonprofit services are fragmented and how consolidation is part of a nonprofit’s life cycle.” Given all the talk about mergers of late, I believe there is more behind that statement than just an attempt to sell a book about how to accomplish such things.

As The Brochure Folds

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I am in the process of having our season brochure designed for the upcoming year and it seems like the way the brochure is folded is taking great precedence over the actual content of the piece. Because of postal regulations about the way items may be mailed the printing houses are suggesting we change the way we fold the brochure. It will be the same size and shape as we had planned, but will require fewer seals to hold it closed when we mail it. Fewer seals means a savings in the printing and mailing.

Except that the way the brochure opens is very important. More to the point, what people see when they first open the brochure is very important. A few years back, the first thing you saw when you opened the brochure were the compelling eyes of an Indian dancer. People opened the brochure and had a real “wow” experience. Last year we used a different designer and she took another approach to the arrangement of the information. Instead of an image, the first thing you saw was text. It wasn’t as ideal a situation in my mind, but the design positioned information in a better place for those who attached the brochure to refrigerators and bulletin boards as reminders. (We get a lot of ticket orders throughout the year from people who keep our brochure.)

The text people first saw last year when they opened the brochure dealt with our flex subscriptions and volunteering. Both areas saw an increase in participation last year proving that I really need to pay attention to what is on that first panel. I will be getting a full size sample to proof from the designer tomorrow. You can be assured one of the first things I will do is figure out how it folds and open and close it many times to determine what our patrons’ experience is going to be like.

I mention all these factors, of course, by way of pointing out the practical application of the various considerations you might employ when designing brochures.

Info You Can Use: Understanding Financial Statement Basics

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If you are new to a position as board member or administrator of an arts organization or if you have simply resolved to become better educated about your business’ financials, Inc magazine offers a series of articles comprising a quick primer on what they all mean. This month’s article is “How to Understand an Income Statement.” This is a good place to start if you don’t know the difference between an income statement and a cash flow statement.

It is especially a good place to start if you don’t know how a company can be extremely profitable, but unable to pay its bills each month. There are also articles on how to identify why you can’t pay your bills each month too.

If you have no idea where to begin and what is important to look at, they have articles on tracking the pertinent numbers and help you with a basic understanding of what they are and why they are important.

Of course, it is good to remember that there are some measures which a non-profit doesn’t adhere to — like profit ratios on ticket sales when it is already known that earned revenue isn’t going to cover experiences.

Silly Violinist, You Dance In Train Stations

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Toward the end of my work day, I received an email from a patron making a wide flung appeal:

“Opera has long been one of the arts that I don’t care about or support, but watching this video somewhat changed my mind.”

The video he refers to is the one below of the Opera Company of Philadelphia emerging from the crowds at Reading Terminal Market to perform a piece from La Traviata. The patron makes an appeal for someone on his email list to make this sort of thing happen locally and suggests a market as a site.

From my point of view, this is just part of a recent trend. Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera did the same song in a Whole Foods. Another opera group also did La Traviata, though a different piece, in Valencia, Spain.

Opera seems to be for markets and musical theatre for train stations. Groups in Wellington, NZ and Antwerp, Belgium chose to give flash mob performances of “Do Re Mi” from the Sound of Music in local train stations. Perhaps Joshua Bell and Tasmin Little were ignored when they played anonymously in train stations because they chose to perform classical music rather than musical theatre and played music rather than danced.

To me it seems like an imaginative promotional stunt that will probably wear itself out pretty quickly given that everyone seems to be doing La Traviata and Sound of Music, regardless of geographical distance. But right now the idea is new, fresh and exciting to my local audience. So the question is–Are flash performances viable and how do you keep it fresh so the audiences don’t get jaded? These sort of performances can break down barriers to attendance by showing how accessible the material is. It will be necessary to make formal performances just as accessible though otherwise people will feel betrayed by a bait and switch.

People might be emboldened to stage similar events themselves, (please not High School Musical, please not High School Musical), and this could mark the start of a new populist form of performance (or a revival/revamping of some of basic staging concepts of the old pageant wagon mystery plays.)

Army For The Arts

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Americans for the Arts recently linked to a blog post and testimony video that Brigadier General Nolen Bivens, U.S. Army, (Ret) delivered to Congress on the importance of the arts to national security. He discusses how the arts contribute to cultural understanding and method of diplomacy around the world in places of conflict that the Army operates as well as places the country wants to maintain good relations. He also mentioned the usefulness of the arts in the therapy of soldiers.

Interesting enough, just about the time Gen. Bivens was giving this testimony in April, Vinita Rae Smith was recording an interview discussing her retirement as theatre manager of the Army Community Theatre after a 40 year career as a civil service employee of the Army. She gives a sense of the state of the theatre arts in the Army these days. She has the distinction of opening the only theater the Army has ever constructed for the express purpose of being a theater -Ft. Knox, Kentucky. Every other theater has been re-purposed from some other use. One of theater she worked at was renovated from a laundromat. That theater is still used to show movies, but the stage is no longer structurally sound enough for live performances.

She didn’t mention what the Richardson Theatre which she recently ran used to be. The woman participating in the interview with her reminisced that before Vinita arrived, they used to have to wait until the movies were over at 11:00 pm before they could start rehearsing so they didn’t generally finish until 1-2 am. Vinita made changes that resulted in a more sane schedule.

But while Vinita improved the situation for live theatre on her post, the same can’t be said for all Army bases worldwide. She mentioned that Germany used to have 30 theatres, now there are about 14. Korea had 13 and now there is one. Some of it is likely a result of the decreasing number of troops stationed in these countries and the reduced need for services. But I also suspect Gen. Bivens might have been indirectly advocating for support of the arts in the military too. Even before she thought of retiring, it was generally acknowledged that Vinita was holding her program together by force of will. You get that sense as you listen to her talk about the expectations the Army has for programs like her’s. Her replacement is coming from Germany. I both wonder if he will possess the force of personality to maintain the program and if the program he leaves in Germany will survive his departure.

Walking The Oregon High School Arts Beat

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Oregon Public Broadcasting recently had an episode their show Arts Beat where they directly addressed the value of arts education in schools. There is also a “sidebar” video of three people talking about how they integrate creativity into their jobs and invite people to talk about what their lives would be like had they not had arts in school.

The science teacher in the main video, Michael Giesen, was the 2008 National Teacher of the Year and you can easily see why based on the way he gets his students acting, moving, drawing/model making and interacting in the process of learning about science. (In case you think music is left out, Giesen and his guitar figure prominently in the lessons.)

There seems to be a disconnect present though. Giesen is rewarded for his creativity up to the national level, but I suspect a teacher trying to initiate such a process from scratch might be told the activities they had the student engaged in were extraneous and consuming time best spent trying to master basic competencies for testing. (Though perhaps not in his school or district.) I am sure Giesen’s students do just fine on the testing because he creates so many powerful associations to the material through all the activities he employs. I just wonder how much latitude a teacher working toward that goal would be provided as they made missteps in the process of refining their approach.

It is the competency requirements that John Baker, the choir director in the second segment of the video feels erodes his program. At one time he had 90 people in his girls choir, now he has 14. He says his principal thinks it is because kids don’t want to sing, but he believes it is that there are so many requirements the students need to fulfill, they have little opportunity to take his class.

His students learn music theory, sight reading, sing in four languages and need to develop critical thinking skills. But all this aside, the video shows the students performing some very interesting looking and sounding pieces. I can’t think but that many students would be at least a little intrigued by the classes. The first reaction I had to the snippet at the beginning of the video was that I didn’t know they had choral pieces like that. There were a few more seconds like it later in the video.

Baker’s fear is that because his program is so strong and winning competitions, no one is paying close attention to how much it is diminishing. He fears that when he retires and people notice the inevitable differences between the new person and the institution of 3 decades, they will attribute the weakness of the program to the unsuitability of his replacement. In fact, Baker seems to believe his position will become part time before he retires.

The last part of the video deals with the lack of funding and time allocated to arts experience in schools. This is a common theme nationwide. What was most interesting about John Baker’s segment was that he didn’t attribute his problems to either of these things. He didn’t talk about his funding being cut or say that the administration was necessarily undermining him.

His problem seems mostly to be due to a shift in values. Either his principal is right and kids don’t want to sing or he is right and required focus of students’ education is moving them away from his program. It is rare to hear of a school arts program in distress due to a philosophical rather than financial shift in priorities. Perhaps it happens more frequently than I realize and it is just the budget cuts getting all the press.

Info You Can Use: Considerations Before Forming A Non-Profit

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Last month, as many non-profits were faced with losing their status due to a change in the tax filing laws, Board Source President/CEO Linda Crompton suggested the situation might be good for the non-profit world by removing duplicative and ineffective/inactive non-profits. Because non-profits really aren’t required to generate a business plan or survey the need and competition before filing for status, she feels there may be too many non-profits in existence.

No for-profit company would start up without doing a thorough analysis of the competitive landscape; that analysis would be baked into the business plan and would inform all other decisions — one of which might be “not here, not now.” It’s incumbent upon our sector to school itself on this point: just because we have an idea, and a mission, and a great, good heart, does not mean that we need to start our own, brand-spanking new organization to fulfill that mission. The same truth applies to organizations in all stages of their lifecycle. Boards should be asking themselves: are we still relevant? Are we fulfilling our mission effectively and sustainably? Is there another organization across town doing the same thing, only better? Should we be discussing merger, or even dissolution?

I have mentioned a number of times over the years that I have often many arts organizations have been started that could have easily been part of an existing group or that could have merged with other groups when it was clear that their service area couldn’t support both groups very well. I will admit that I have seen many more groups in merger talks over the last few years since the economy has gotten worse than I had during previous economic down turns. It was good to see people considering this route. But I have also seen new groups peel off because of personality differences or a desire to perform a slightly different genre. Admittedly there is a difference between classical and modern realism, but Shakespeare festivals manage to produce both without compromising their souls.

To be honest though, I don’t know if the IRS would be in a position to evaluate whether there was or wasn’t a need for any type of non-profit, be it an arts organization or social service agency. Imagine the work involved in developing criteria to measure if there was a sufficient support base for the organization in a community. Imagine the bad press the IRS would get for denying someone non-profit status for a social service organization serving a very emotionally charged cause.

Which doesn’t mean due diligence shouldn’t be done. In a comment to Linda Crompton’s entry, Don Griesmann links to an entry on his blog in which he enumerates all the considerations that should be made before creating a non-profit. He also footnotes his arguments with the largest number of stories on the difficulties faced by non-profit organizations I have ever seen.

His entry came at the end of 2009 and he proposed that no new non-profits should be allowed to be created in 2010 unless a whole multitude of conditions were met. A brief sampling:

•Unless you understand the nonprofit will not be “your nonprofit” and you have enlisted an incorporating board that is interested in the concept and capable of performing the necessary tasks of incorporating and operating the organization and

•Unless you understand there is no “free money” from the federal or state governments. The federal government distributes funds through scholarships, fellowships, contracts, grants and loans. Each requires an application, meeting eligibility requirements, demonstration of a task to be undertaken, proof that the task was performed and the money used appropriately and in many instances a report evaluating the use of their funds…

….•Unless you have a concept of what it costs to develop and operate a nonprofit in terms of shared leadership, time, thought, study, serious planning, hard work, evaluation and annual reporting as well as money and
•Unless you have no intention of attempting to raise more than $5,000 a year for the next 5 years…

…•Unless you have performed due diligence and created a board of mixed talents, diversity, shared passion and vision concerning a truly unserved issue or need supported by some empirical evidence. If the need is an underserved need, why not join with the current providers and increase the service or product? And
•Unless you understand that there simply are not grants available to pay for the incorporation process. If you and others cannot raise the first $1,000 or so to incorporate, then where do you think you will get the money to run the organization? When someone asks, as many do, does anyone know where I can get a grant to start my nonprofit, we should either not respond or tell the truth – you are not ready to start a nonprofit. Go volunteer at a local nonprofit….

One of his next “unless” includes having a business plan that answer 19 different questions. One of his other conditions might be that you shouldn’t form a non-profit if you don’t have the patience to read his whole entry. While it is very long, it asks many pertinent questions and raises many points that ought to be considered. It is good to see people starting to advocate for this level of consideration prior to forming a non-profit.

Of course, non-profit status covers a lot of situations, including block associations and other purposes that wouldn’t necessarily be competing for grants from a shrinking pool of resources. These will certainly benefit from being well planned, but aren’t likely to struggle to stay in existence or become a drain on their community if they don’t meet every criteria.

Things To Ponder: Who Is Your CEO?

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Gene Takagi at the always enlightening Nonprofit Law Blog links to a two part entry on why the title of the senior leader of a non-profit should transition from Executive Director to President/CEO. The argument made in the pieces is that the person in that position gains credibility within and without of the organization.

Takagi only touches upon this very briefly because his greater concern is who is legally the CEO of the organization, the executive director or board chair. I voraciously consumed the post because I have dealt with organizations where the dynamics were such that one was clearly in a dominant position. I often wondered to whom people would look for leadership in a crisis–versus who was ultimately responsible for the decisions that were made during that time.

Takagi’s advice is-

“However, if the organization has a paid executive director who is tasked with operational leadership and the board chair is a volunteer who is not active in management of the organization’s operations, the CEO designation should be given to the executive director. Nonprofit boards should (1) review their bylaws to understand how their management structures have been established, and (2) amend them, as necessary.”

Acknowledging that the board chair may not want to give up the CEO title in this case, especially if said person is the organization’s founder or the board is very active, Takagi suggests the board seriously think about what is in the best interests of the organization. There are legal repercussions the nominal CEO may face.

It must not be overlooked that whoever has the CEO title may face increased exposure to liability for failure to meet his or her duties. Any CEO should be very familiar with the organization’s current financial position, programs, legal compliance issues, and overall strengths and weaknesses. Imagine a judge’s or jury’s reaction to a CEO who claims not to have reviewed the financials for several months or failed to take any steps to help ensure that the operations of the organization were compliant. Such reaction may be very different if it were the volunteer board chair’s liability that was being considered and the organization had a separate executive director designated as the CEO.

I did a quick read of other sources to see if Directors and Officers Insurance and Errors and Omissions Insurance would cover this sort of negligence and my results were inconclusive. Different insurance companies offer different coverages which contain different exclusions. Some seemed to imply this was the sort of thing you buy the insurance to guard against. Others said the insurance companies will look for any blatant omissions to use as a pretext to deny a claim.

Lies, Damn Lies and Are We Ever Going To Use These Survey Results?

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My Google Alerts informed me that the phrase butts in the seats was used recently in what turned out to be a reprint of a 2008 article on MinnesotaPlaylist. The topic of the December 2008 issue was “Know Your Audience.” In addition to the original piece that brought me there, a couple others caught my attention as well.

The first article, Joseph Scrimshaw’s “Humans With Pulses,” addresses the idea that everyone will enjoy a quality artistic product if only they are aware of it.

“I’m beginning to think that failing to be specific about who you want in the audience presents a risk to both the profit and enjoyment of theater. There is a tendency for artists to believe that any cross section of people will enjoy their work. After all, theater is good. Theater reaches out to people. It’s easy to reason, “This piece of theater I have created is good, so why shouldn’t any human with a pulse enjoy it?” Music is good, too. When I was fifteen years old my two favorite musical acts were Frank Sinatra and Guns N’ Roses. I chatted with my Grandma about one and with my friends about the other. Unfortunately, there was no chance in hell of any crossover.”

Scrimshaw talks about being aware of the specific segments of the community who might be interested in a performance and why. Granted, the venues he seems to work in sound like they are at the smaller end of the spectrum and thus can serve very narrow segments of the population–like knitters. His description of the audience at his knitting-based, murder mystery comedy sounds like the diverse group everyone yearns for-

“We had knitters from 18 to 82, multiple ethnicities, sexual orientations, and genders. The knitting demographic trumped all because they had an investment in the show: They wanted to see if this Scrimshaw guy (who’s supposed to be funny) had anything interesting to say about this craft that is their hobby and their passion.”

Using the topic of demographics as a segue, John Middleton provides an amusing look at the whole idea of scrutinizing demographics in “They, the People”

She and her husband—let’s call him David—went to Mexico last year and have been thinking about a trip to Europe. However, they’ve both lost a lot of money from their 401(k) accounts and what with Nancy’s allergies and recent weight gain and David’s high cholesterol and occasional erectile dysfunction, that romantic trip to the moors of England might have to wait.

“Whoa!” you’re saying. “This is creepy. Does he really know this stuff or is he just making it up?”

I know this stuff. Visit the raw data (PDF) and draw your own conclusions. Remember, demographers don’t lie.

I actually checked out the raw data, and believe it or not the survey actually asked about all these aspects of the participants’ lives. Here is the real stuff to remember:

It’s true demographers don’t lie. But remember, these numbers are simply a tool. They are descriptive. They do not tell us what plays to do or how to do them. They simply allow us to think about Nancy and her life. They remind us that we’re not just asking Nancy to plunk down twenty bucks to see a show; we’re asking for an investment of her time. She has to find out about our production, decide to go, come up with a night she and David are both free, leave work in time to dress, figure out where our theater is, find parking, and so on. Are we making this process as easy for Nancy as possible?

You see, demographers are not soulless, art-killing philistines. We’re here to help.

However, if you still have doubts about the usefulness of demography, let me tell you something: You are not alone. There is a tiny checkbox labeled “terror” in the heart of every demographer. The system of gathering respondent data is filled with imperfections from start to finish. One flawed remembrance here, one inflated self-aggrandizement there—each insignificant on its own, but they start to add up. Then as we extrapolate the data, every imperfection becomes multiplied many times over until we have nothing left but a spider’s web of half-truths and sweat-soaked guesses. We crush this seething mess into solid-seeming charts, tables and graphs in order to give it the look of Truth, but we know: Demographers lie! And if you think this is only true of demographics, you’re kidding yourself.

Filling out the theme of surveying and data is Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw piece, “Doing Data.” What was immediately interesting to me was her story about studying in London and wanting to do her Master’s thesis on whether theatre and dance organizations used the data they collected. Her advisor couldn’t understand why.

“His response was of course all organizations use data, that wasn’t interesting, I should focus on what they were doing with the data or whether they were satisfied instead. He had worked for years with Theatrical Management Association, a service organization for theaters in the UK, and he had started an audience data collection and dissemination program in 1990—fifteen years before I was coming to him with this topic. So he thought my concerns were old news.”

But Sara knew this wasn’t how it was in the US where data was collected, but rarely acted upon. Part of the reason she felt was because people don’t know how to effectively use the information that passes through their hands. This is what she found in the course of her research:

“I was also surprised that less than 50 percent of organizations collected demographic information, as that is frequently needed for grant reporting. The results also showed that over 50 percent of organizations did not consistently have access to their own box office data—meaning that they had to rely on other methods to collect data about their audiences.

Do I have any recommendations? I think using data is simple and complex at once. The most important things are fairly easy: looking at the data, analyzing it for trends, inspecting to see if there are any obvious gaps. However, the key is really using the data to understand your audience—asking who they are, where they are, why they come to you, then using that data to help inform your future decisions. Do you want to compare yourself to other organizations? Do you want to reach people you currently aren’t reaching? Is your audience who you thought they were? Audience data can help to answer all of these questions more honestly.

[…]

…I don’t believe that there is a magic formula or a correct answer. Instead, I think it’s a process of using little pieces of information to help create an overall picture.”

I have to agree that it is both simple and complex to use data. For me it is as much about the suspected dearth of information from certain segments of our audience as trying to accurately process the information I do have. I know our audience surveys aren’t being filled out by a representative portion of our audience because we barely get any completed by people in the 20s and 30s, but we see a lot of them passing through the doors.

Likewise, so many people purchase tickets at the door where we don’t have the time to collect information not directly related to the ticket purchase that the only data I have is from the lesser percentage that plan ahead. I could send reminder postcards to people who make their decisions last minute and perhaps improve my relationship with them. My software tells me exactly what time they made their purchase–if only I knew where they live or who they are!

I don’t want to be making decisions about how to serve all of my audience based on what I know about 20% of them. I figure that is a formula for retaining slightly more than that 20% but that is all I have to work with at the moment. Though that isn’t to say we can’t ask audience members to help us serve them by making note of their account numbers so we can better track simple things like attendance preferences. We may still miss a large segment of the audience, but we will narrow the gap a little and let people know their presence is important to us.

Learn The Secret Powers of Time

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Kotte.org posted an fun video of an animated talk by Philip Zimbardo about time perception. Geography, weather, religion and technology all have a part to play in how even people of the same country and culture approach time. The brief talk is fun to watch and listen to because an artist quickly illustrates what Zimbardo is talking about with little cartoons. (Well, actually a sped up movie of illustrator’s efforts.) If you would rather watch a fun video than read about people’s changing views on how their time should be used, (perhaps you feel you don’t have the time to read about the subject, for example), this may be just what you are looking for.

I had long suspected geography and weather resulted in the approach to time Zimbardo says it does so I was happy to receive that confirmation. His talk might provide insights for you as to why people are late to make decisions (including attending your performances!) in comparison to other parts of the country you may have lived. Though technology seems to be a great leveler. Zimbardo says young people don’t wear wrist watches because it is a single use device. While reasonable sounding, I am not sure how much credence I give the causality in that claim. He also touches upon that hot topic of audience relations — the need for to provide an interactive rather than passive experience, especially among males.

Take a look-

Brief Encounters With Arts In China

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So I am back from my vacation in China. I hope some of the topics I scheduled to be revisited while I was away were of some interest and use. I was pleased to have gotten a couple comments on those old entries as a result. My thanks to Drew McManus for policing the comments to make sure they approved in a timely manner.

My trip took me to various places, but mainly Beijing, Yellow Mountain and Shanghai and the World Expo. Because I was touring with a group, I didn’t have the opportunity to check out as many theatres and arts centers as I did during my trip to Ireland. As a result, I ended up in front of the Beijing Children’s Art Theater without a camera because I didn’t expect to come upon it.

I did have quite a few artistic encounters though. There was this guy painting scenery with his hands on the Great Wall near Beijing.

He claimed to be one of the best finger painters. Given there were no other painters around to gainsay him, I will have to take him at his word. I have to admit, I do regret not buying a piece when I had the chance. It was early in the tour and I was promised better, but we didn’t really come across something as good of the same size and price.

We visited Longmen Grottos in which many images of the Buddha were carved over the course of 400 years. It provides some interesting insight into how the philosophy about depicting the Buddha evolved over time as well as the politics involved. Some of the works provided a nod to the patrons who supported the endeavors. Most bore the scars of those who opposed the work and Buddhism with faces and appendages hacked away.

We traveled to Yellow Mountain, historically the de rigueur destination of any artist who wishes to be taken seriously in China. With such breath taking vistas available, it there isn’t much mystery as to why. James Cameron apparently used the mountain range as his model for the world of Pandora in Avatar. The pine trees that grow there are reputed to be the ingredient that produces highly prized ink sticks for calligraphy and ink and wash paintings.

Nearby was Hongcun which was one of the villages Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was filmed. There were many art students there as well. (Who scolded me for not bartering my purchases in the village down enough.) Art students are allowed multiple admissions over the course of a week for free to work on their pieces.

Finally, we ended up in Shanghai during which time we attended the World Expo. This was really where I started evaluating things with the eye of someone who organized a lot of events. Security was clearly a consideration surrounding the World Expo. As we approached Shanghai by bus, we were pulled aside at a toll plaza and sent to a building to have our passports inspected. Bags were scanned every time you entered the subway system. You had to go through a metal detector to enter the Expo grounds and got scanned by a wand wielding security agent. And they didn’t hover over your body like in US airports. The wand was rubbed right against you. They also didn’t allow water in the Expo, but I imagine that was more about selling it than anything else.

Hospitality wise, the city seemed invested on many levels. In every subway station there was someone in Expo garb standing next to the machines that vended the fare cards ready to help you use the machine and figure out what route to take to your destination. All the taxis we took had stickers with a number to call if you couldn’t speak enough Mandarin to tell the driver where you wanted to go.

I am told they also asked people living near the Expo site not to hang their laundry out their windows. (The picture below is from near the hotel which was a few miles away.)

I think they also cracked down pretty heavily on the street vendors too. Two years ago when I walked the Bund, we were approached and followed by people trying to sell us all sorts of things. This time there was none to be seen. In fact, in the park/walkway along the river, a couple of the shop buildings that were there last time are entirely gone. (And I was really looking forward to another gelato!)

The Expo itself was immense. It seemed like you could walk forever and barely get anywhere. Even though there were hundreds of thousands of people there the night we went, it didn’t seem crowded—until you got on line for a pavilion. In the 5 hours we were there, I only got into 4 pavilions – Nepal, India, US, UK. Others in my group went to the less popular pavilions and got through 11. One guy visited North Korea and snagged a little pamphlet by Kim Jong Il critiquing folk dance.

The US pavilion was pretty dull. The entry is one big corporate advertisement. I know they had to fund it privately rather than with public funds, but all the logos feel very heavy handed. The movies they show are pretty lackluster compared to the expectations I had.

The UK pavilion was the real winner for me. The Seed Cathedral was amazing and it rightfully had a long line for entry. (Though there was announcement they were shutting down the Germany queue when the 4 hour wait exceeded the Expo closing time. Were they giving out beer samples?) The pavilion, which is describe, I think accurately as a sculpture, is comprised of 60,000 plastic rods with seeds embedded in each. Apparently many of them will still be viable for planting after the Expo concludes.

I will let my photos do the rest of the talking.

Oh and this YouTube video too. The light was pretty low and my camera just aint that good.

Info You Can Use: Cost of Volunteering

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Hopefully if I have planned well, the next post you see will be written by me upon my return from vacation. I have sort of saved the best for last. In this 2005 entry, I covered a study about the costs and benefits of volunteering. I think the topic is still very relevant because people probably don’t examine whether they are using volunteers to their best effect and if the time, energy and materials invested in training a volunteer is at least balanced by the volunteer’s productivity. There is also the shifting expectations of volunteers about their experience.

An excerpt from the entry-

One very interesting observation that the study makes is that half of the participants in the survey were unwilling or unable to accept more volunteers at the time. “This finding fundamentally challenges the assumption that the only requirement to engage more citizens in volunteer service is an effective call to serve.”

Musing on the Gifts of the Muse

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In this trip down memory lane, I harken back to an entry I did mirroring one of my responses to Arts Journal’s conversation on the Wallace Foundation’s Gifts of the Muse study. Mostly I addressed some minor proof of the idea that people have an intrinsic need to surround themselves with beauty and even big retailers recognize this.

You may find some value in reviewing the Arts Journal discussion. It was one of better ones they have hosted in my mind. Even re-reading my own entry reminded me of some ideas I had that I might work toward.

Powerless Before Over Our Creativity

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This bit was included in an entry containing links to a lot of locations. Feel free to read the entry. My real reason for directing you back there is Arts Anonymous’ 12 Step Program which starts with: “We admitted we were powerless over our creativity — that our lives had become unmanageable. ”

Check out the 12 Traits they list that drive you to this situation. Good chance all or most are true for you.

Reflecting on Civic Reflection

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Six years ago I wrote on the practice of Civic Reflection, a process which is supposed to help non-profits and civic groups.

“Imagine getting together with other civically engaged people and talking about your values and the choices you make in serving your community.”

It still sounds interesting though I haven’t come across another mention of it in the last six years. I wonder if it can be adapted to communities based on the internet. I renew my inquiry for more information from anyone who has engaged in this practice.

Effecting Change After The Meeting

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Two entries today and sort of long.

Many of us are dubious about attending meetings because we aren’t sure any action of value will result. In two entries entitled Useless Meetings and Useless Meetings 2, I explore the monograph, The Measure of Meetings: Forums, Deliberation, and Cultural Policy.

I talk about their thoughts on why it is so hard to create cultural policy and why conventions are a poor place to attempt it–currently. They make suggestions on how to alter that situation.

More Revisting Drucker

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Following up on my last trip to early entries, I had done a handful of entries on Peter Drucker’s Managing the Nonprofit Organization. I am not going to link back to all the entries, but I thought the topics covered in this one were particularly interesting because he addresses the unintended consequences of decisions and provides guidance on how to avoid them.

One of my favorite quotes:

“…Soon people in the organization no longer ask: Does it service our mission? They ask: Does it fit our rules? And that not only inhibits performance, it destroys vision and dedication.”

Oldies But Goodies

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I am off on vacation for a couple weeks, but I thought I would leave my readers with some things to ponder and review while I am away. The next handful of days will have links to some of my earlier entries that still seem very relevant.

The first is an entry I did on Peter Drucker’s book, Managing the Non-Profit Organization. I had taken it out of the library at the time but just bought the book this past winter. I can’t believe that was 6 years ago. Drucker wrote the book because he didn’t feel most management books addressed the particular challenges non-profits face.

Consolidating Back Office In Columbus

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I was listening to NPR this weekend and caught a story about Columbus Association for the Performing Arts CAPA, a Columbus, OH organization which area arts organizations have contracted to perform administrative functions.

About a year ago, I wrote about the excellent series the Non Profit Law blog did on the experiences non-profits have encountered merging their administrative functions.

Most of the examples used in that series were social service organizations so it was of some interest to hear a little about how arts organizations were entering the same arrangement. I wondered if it might become more prevalent in these tough economic times given that six Columbus area arts groups entered into arrangements with CAPA in the last year and a half. (This assumes there are businesses around the country who are able to offer these services. Not aware of too many in existence.)

I share a similar concern as Russell Willis Taylor quoted near the end of the piece. Relationships really matter when making the specific case for your organization in the community. Since CAPA seems to have varying scopes of responsibility with each client company, presumably an organization can reserve certain functions for itself and perhaps be involved with CAPA’s efforts on their behalf. But for a lot of artists and groups, the temptation to cede those functions to another so they can concentrate on creation of work alone may prove seductive. In the long run, their presence and public profile may wane as a group like CAPA’s waxes due to their adroit handling of so many responsibilities.

I don’t doubt that an arrangement with a group like CAPA can be extremely beneficial. Large for profit companies outsource their accounting, human resources, marketing, advertising and other functions all the time to great effect. But they also work very closely and stay very involved in every activity affecting the public image of their product because that is what is necessary.

As a little aside- I must confess that I had a moment of glee when I heard them describe the political cartoon implying CAPA is taking over. That anyone feels an arts organization is growing too powerful is so novel a concept, I can’t help but feel some joy. I mean, I don’t think I have heard anyone accused of that since the late 19th century with the Theatrical Syndicate. (Okay, I will grant you Clear Channel/Live Nation.)

What Do You Do With A Stolen Actor?

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I attended a talk by minor theater deity Richard Schechner last week at an open event for the International Brecht Society Conference. He was speaking about environmental theatre (aka site specific). We just finished a site specific work last month so I was interested to hear what a person who had been doing it for decades had to say on the subject.

There were things he spoke of which matched my original desire for the work but which got scaled back by the artistic team due to various limitations and considerations. The good thing was that one of the people on the artistic team was there listening as well so we will have a common frame of reference for our next event. The talk was scheduled for longer than I thought it would be so I couldn’t stay until the end to ask questions or speak to those friends also in attendance.

I wish I had been able to speak with him because I would have liked to know how he might balance making a performance a more interactive experience with the alienation/intimidation factor of what he was doing. Some of the things he spoke about struck me as “only in a big city like NYC.” He made groups split up on entering so that they would be forced to explore the space more trying to find each other. And if they didn’t like it, they didn’t have to see his show because he had a full house every night. (That option came up a lot as he spoke about the performances he had done.) He also spoke about leaning folding chairs against the wall and letting people set them up wherever they liked without consideration of whether it would be in the way of the performance or technical operations.

My first thought was that while people may crave a more interactive experience, many are already intimidated by the thought of attending as a passive observer. How much worse might their anxiety be if they set themselves up right in the middle of some intense action? I mean I think there is too much contact when I go to a Cirque de Soleil show and one of the performers somersaults right into my lap. Okay, well that is probably too much contact for anyone, but even watching the performers move around the room playing with audience members raises some anxiety that I may be next. Though if you don’t introduce people to the concept, people can’t become more accepting of that type of interactivity. I would imagine setting has a lot to do with it. A performance in a nightclub where you expect to be bumped into and jostled might not cause the discomfort that the same activities in another place would.

The thing that really intrigued me were the rules he set up for his performances. In his production of Dionysus in 69 which is based on The Bacchae, Pentheus has an opportunity to avoid being killed. The actor goes into the audience and picks someone and starts to caress them. If the person doesn’t resist and the actor obtains satisfaction, by his own definition, from their physical contact, Dionysus loses, Penethus lives and the play ends. Schechner said there were only two times that death was avoided. Once, Pentheus ended up in a fairly torrid embrace with an audience member and left with her when they came up for air. The second time, a group of people who had seen the show and decided Pentheus was getting a raw deal abducted Pentheus when he went into the audience. The audience was dissatisfied that the show wouldn’t be concluded and Schechner called for a volunteer who would be fed the lines and actions as he/she was stripped down, anointed with blood and underwent a simulated dismemberment. Schechner said a 16 year old boy stepped forward and you could see him trembling with both fear and excitement. That is one of those powerfully visceral moments that theatre people constantly seek. Everyone is engaged in the moment because even though it is scripted, no one knows what is going to happen.

He told of another instance, I believe with Mother Courage, where they chose 15 people to come up on stage. If you were chosen you could either go up, pass being chosen on to the person next to you or leave the theatre with no recourse to return. But the show wouldn’t continue until they had 15 people. Schechner said one evening the audience apparently decided to test their resolve and the show was delayed at that point for four hours. I would say this is another one of those authentic moments in theatre, though less sought after.

I am sure people have played with the idea of propagating rules for a performance that can end it all in a potentially dissatisfying manner, but it is one of those “new to me” situations which fires the imagination. There may not be anything new under the sun, but parts of this production from 40 years ago might point the way to creating a more interesting environment for people who haven’t considered themselves as theatre attendees.

Info You Can Use: Intern or Employee?

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A few weeks ago I did an entry on the social impacts and elements of internships in the arts and very briefly referred to the question of whether unpaid internships were legal.

It only occurred to me later that the whole legality question wasn’t really dealt with very well. I read a lot about it, but didn’t really pass the information along or give readers the sense of urgency to follow through.

Well, hat tip to the ever resource full Non-Profit Law Blog which linked to an entry on Blue Avocado which really tackles the question in much greater detail than the NY Times article I had linked to in my previous entry.

The federal criteria to which you must adhere according to Ellen Aldridge at Blue Avocado are:

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction.

2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees.

3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation.

4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded.

5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period; and

6. The employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.

You must meet all six or else pay minimum wage. Number 4 is probably the toughest to adhere to. The fact that non-profits can have volunteers adds another dimension to the whole question. You should really read the entry because I can’t get into all the nuances like laws dealing with stipends and the nature of functions being performed without reprinting the entire entry. There is, in fact, a significant difference between an intern and a volunteer, part of which determines the type of work each can perform.

At the end of the entry, Ellen Aldridge recommends two NY Times articles on the topic. The first is the one to which I linked in my previous entry. The second is the guidance the California Labor Department provided on the subject of unpaid internships.

The guidance really just supports the expectations an intern would have of their experience– something relevant to their career goals and not predominantly copying and filing.

In that situation, the agency suggested that payment was not required if an intern “performs culinary tasks directly pertinent to his or her education only, is closely supervised,” and “does not displace regular workers.” But, the agency said, if a restaurant required an intern to bus tables or wash dishes, that would probably be considered an employer-employee relationship and the intern would most likely have to be paid.

Mr. Balter cited another guidance letter that said film studios should pay college students who do routine work like delivering messages, filing tapes and clipping newspaper articles, partly because the work was so similar to that of regular employees and could displace such employees.

In the new guidance, the agency noted that it had previously concluded that interns should be paid if they did any work normally done by a regular worker.

But showing more leeway, Mr. Balter wrote that interns could do occasional work done by regular employees, as long as it “does not unreasonably replace or impede the education objective for the intern and effectively displace regular workers.”

This is only the interpretation in the state of California, and a recently altered one at that. Your state may differ so it will be prudent to see where things stand locally. It is promising that they take their lead from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals which is considered more moderate than the 9th Circuit in whose jurisdiction California falls.

Please Patronize Our Fine Competitors

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Every week Drew McManus sends out an email to all the Inside the Arts bloggers with tips about enhancing our blogs. A few months back he suggested we not take it for granted that all our readers knew as much about basic elements of the arts as we did. This is a pretty tough thing to do. I know my concern would be that I would end up covering such elementary topics, people would either feel I was condescending or not writing anything of real relevance to them.

With all this in mind, I submit to you the request my landlord emailed me last week. She wanted to take her grandsons on a date to a performance next month at the big concert hall in town and wanted my help finding the best and most inexpensive seats. My first reaction was that I wasn’t sure what I could tell her. I have only been in the theatre about five times before and it was for events entirely unlike the one she wanted to attend. I really couldn’t give her good advice on acoustics or sight lines.

I took a quick trip to the Ticketmaster website and realized her needs were much simpler. The available tickets for the lowest priced tickets were listed as being in the orchestra pit, orchestra seating and upper balcony. The seating arrangement was continental with seat #1 dead center, odds on one side and evens on the other. (Frankly, I think that seating arrangement creates more problems for audiences than it solves.) None of this meant anything to her.

I was able to do a couple quick searches on different performance times and dates before the system shutdown for maintenance and discovered the only orchestra seats were three rows from the back and the balcony seats weren’t much closer. Based on my experience, I figured all the pit seating would be off to the sides which actually wouldn’t be too bad.

I wrote back to my landlord advising her to call or go down to the venue because she would have more control over her seat choice than the internet would allow. I advised her that the evening shows might be less crowded than the matinees and where she might expect the open seats would be found in each of the available sections. I also tried to explain how the seat numbering worked.

There was a lot of what I wrote that I assumed was pretty common knowledge about ticket buying. Some of it seemed pretty obvious and I only included it to provide a context for some of the more obscure bits of wisdom I was sharing. A day later she wrote back and thanked me for my advice saying she needed every bit of it. She expressed her appreciation for sharing some of the details I assumed she already knew. Apparently not that common knowledge. She managed to snag some respectable seats for the price level she wanted.

My efforts are not likely to yield Miracle on 34th Street style results where providing helpful information on my competitor’s products improves my own bottom line. I have been living in this apartment for six years and my landlord has never come to see a show. The best I may be able to hope for is that 10-15 years down the road one of the grandsons will show up at my door having been excited by what he sees next month.

Most of us wouldn’t necessarily welcome getting calls asking for help buying tickets to another place. Even if we weren’t offended by the request, we would lack the time to address such requests. That actually brings to mind a job opening I saw about 5-6 years ago where a performing arts center decided it would become the central information source for everything going on around town, including that of their competitors. Now given that they were a multi-space venue, chances were that something appealing to most audiences would appear on one of their stages so getting the community to think of them first was probably smart. It might not be as wise for a company producing shows with a niche appeal to attempt the same thing.

But if an arts group has a close and trusting enough relationship with their community, they may be able to strengthen it by having a Q&A about topics within their discipline that they don’t specifically represent. For example, a folk art museum might entertain questions about modern art, a symphony might open the floor to jazz inquiries, a theatre company specializing in contemporary plays can address Shakespeare. Of course, they could also give tips on etiquette, dress and seating arrangements for situations with entirely different dynamics than theirs. I’d bet audiences don’t realize their friendly neighborhood staffs have a wealth of general knowledge about their disciplines.

A rising tide may raise all ships, but in such an instance you would be remiss not to note or at least imply how much more lovely and unintimidating things are at the friendly neighborhood arts place by comparison.

Measuring Sports With Arts’ Yardstick

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For a long time there has been a sort antagonistic undercurrent between the arts and sports, more on the part of the arts than sports. Personally, I think it can be traced back to high school where artistic and athletic pursuits both competed for after school program funding, but that is just my theory. (Borne out by those humiliating wedgies and locker stuffings the jocks carried out on the drama kids. Not me, mind you. Just something I have heard.)

But you see signs of it all the time. Arts organizations will pull out stats that show more people spent more money on their events than on sports. Folks in the arts bemoan the loss of reviewers in newspapers while the sport section expands.

Things seem to be shifting a little bit though. There was the Minnesota law that combines arts support with funding for outdoor sport hunting and fishing.

I came across a less beneficial pairing of art and sport today in an editorial about increasing student activities fees to support college sports.

“On the revenue side, even the most popular sports are perennial money losers, weighed down by staggering travel costs and erratic attendance. Just like the Honolulu Symphony, everybody loves the idea of a collegiate men’s basketball team, but not enough people turn out to support it.”

It is tough to know where to begin. The paper does the symphony no favors by reminding people of it’s woes. There is also the idea that only things that make money are worth having around. That is an argument the whole non-profit funding system exists to refute in some degree. In this case, the situation is not the same because the core purpose of the not for profit university is theoretically to educate, not necessarily to support ancillary athletic programs. I will leave it at that so as not to become embroiled in debates about the value of athletics to learning and the monies collegiate programs bring to schools.

There has always been a bit of an assumption that sports were getting all the funding to the detriment of the arts, especially in high schools where the arts are cut but sports often aren’t. But it is starting to look like colleges and universities are no longer willing to support sports teams any longer. In the last year, both Hofstra and Northeastern Universities shutdown their football teams (though 13 new football programs were announced as being in development) because the schools were no longer willing to make their funding a priority.

My first impulse was to follow this observation with a “there but for the grace of God…” statement noting that if the arts’ traditional opposite is threatened, wither stands the future of the arts? But that plays back into the whole concept that the arts are of lesser value than sports. Honestly, I can’t see that arts programs at schools are in any more danger of being cut than they usually are.

If anything, I would say the standards long applied to the arts are being applied in other areas. It isn’t just sports. In education as a whole, the intrinsic value of learning is being displaced by the what degree pursuits are of practical use and financial value upon graduation. This isn’t a matter of what majors student are choosing to pursue, it is also a discussion educational institutions and government officials are having over what degrees are worth offering.

Info You Can Use: Foreign Guest Visas

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Arts Presenters has recently alerted their membership to a proposed change in the way visas for foreign artists are evaluated. According to Artists From Abroad, O Visas are given to “only one alien of extraordinary ability in the arts entering the U.S. to work in his/her area of expertise. “Extraordinary ability” for purposes of the arts is not an especially high standard. It means “distinction” which, in turn, means a high level of achievement in the field, substantially above that ordinarily encountered.”

This differs from the P-1 and P-3 visas, the first of which applies to groups of note with a long term association and the latter which requires cultural uniqueness.

The nature of my work is such that I don’t use O visas. As I understand it, the problem with emerging with the O visa is that Customs and Immigration are proposing “45-day cap on the amount of time allowable between engagements.” Since an O visa can be valid for up to three years, it is feasible there would be gaps in activity of 45 days here and there during this time.

If you do use O visas or have the potential of doing so, you may want to review the page Customs and Immigration has set up soliciting feedback on the proposed changes.

If you need help framing your feedback, Arts Presenters is encouraging people to contact Leah Frelinghuysen, Director of Public Affairs.

Even if you don’t use O visas, Arts Presenters is advocating for changes in the whole visa process because it has been incredibly frustrating and problematic for people trying to bring tours together. Keep your eyes open for opportunities to provide feedback and comments as those policies (hopefully) come under review.

Effectively Merging Non-Profits

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I apologize for missing my postings on Monday and Tuesday, I was away at a retreat to examine and discuss how to effectively merge the booking consortium to which I belong with the consortium that it spun off from. The meetings occurred in another part of the state and I didn’t have ready access to a computer and the time to write entries.

I use the phrase “effectively merge,” the same words we used throughout most of our discussions, because the truth is that an actual merger of two non-profits is a lengthy, involved and expensive process. What will happen in reality is that the one organization will be dissolved and its assets and members will be transferred to the other as is allowed by its founding documents. But in effect, it is a merger.

A good portion of the first day seemed to be spent composing the correct syntax for the required motions that would be made the next day at the annual meetings of both organizations to start this process. Since we already intended to rewrite our bylaws per the suggestions of an attorney we consulted, we were resolved to dedicate the next year to working on the rewrite. We also were determined to examine the organization and what we wanted it to be. As a consequence, both groups will remain in existence as separate entities for another year laboring jointly to define the bylaws and purpose of the combined organization.

Even though it is likely to be the most dry and boring, I joined the Governance and Membership Committee just for the experience of redefining the nuts and bolts of the organization. I figured it would make good material for blog posts if nothing else.

I also joined the Artistic Selection Committee. The other committees are Marketing/Sponsorship/Grants and Education. Among the things the committees are going to explore are what does it mean to be a member? What are the benefits of participation? Should membership be tiered to both allow casual partnerships with non-member groups and provide greater benefits to those who are more extensively involved.

We are going to examine how we go about selecting artists to present in the context of many different factors. Since we would like to pursue gaining sponsorships as a group and offer companies the opportunity to have exposure across the state, we will have to decide how the program is designed and the sponsored show is chosen. There is also the big issue of whether such arrangements will endanger relationships individual members had with these companies previously. Why sponsor shows at a single venue when you can do so across the entire state? On the other hand, perhaps your brand is diminished by having your name associated with theatres that serve a less elite clientele and you don’t want your ads appearing in their programs.

There are similar questions for the education area. A recent partnership resulted in an experience between schools, audiences and artists that could have yielded a more extensive interaction had the time and resources been available to exploit the situation. If these are the opportunities we want to pursue, where do the staff hours and other resources come from?

That brings us back to the work of the other committees exploring what it means to be a member and what sort of investment in the organization is needed to benefit from its efforts, including any packages put together to offer potential sponsors.

One of the desires stated this week was to expand the membership to include other arts organizations around the state. By redesigning the purpose of the organization a little, we hope to increase our relevance to other groups. They may only do a show once or twice a year, but they can find the process greatly facilitated by our expertise. I think there could be a reciprocal benefit. Perhaps connections the new groups have open up more churches and schools to chamber concerts and outreaches. (Or local artists and churches/schools became more aware of each other.)

So my question here at the end of the entry is this—has anyone had any experiences similar to this? I have to help generate bylaws and policies to guide this organization and it would be nice not to reinvent the wheel. Are you a member of a consortium or partnership between different arts organizations which works together to achieve certain goals?

I am looking more for an arrangement where all decisions and initiatives are generated and executed by the members rather than a situation like an arts council where the council works to advance the interests of the members. We operate as a board organization rather than a membership organization. Though I would be interested in learning about any multi-organizational partnership arrangement that diverges from everyone else does.

Board Stories (Plus Board Development Scholarship Info)

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I don’t often see blog entries on someone’s practical experience solving board related problems so I was pleased to follow a link on a Non Profit Law blog Tweets of the Week Entry to BoardSource’s Board Life Matters blog. There Melissa Sines talks about her experience on a board experiencing Battered Board Syndrome in the wake of the Executive Director’s unexpected departure.

She relates some very common problems her board faced:

“The relationship between board and staff had always been a rocky one in our organization. It was hard to ignore the finger-pointing taking place on both sides of the table. It was a classic case of management saying, “The board doesn’t fundraise enough, what good are they?” and the board saying, “The staff doesn’t listen to anything we say, anyway, what use are we?”

She credits a grant that allowed her board to engage in a year long training process covering myriad issues with saving the organization.

I haven’t had the opportunity to read the rest of the blog to see how useful it might be, but I couldn’t help but notice the most recent entry offering 20 scholarships to allow “emerging nonprofit leaders to participate in the annual BoardSource Leadership Forum to deepen their governance knowledge.”

This is the first scholarship I have heard with the aim of improving board governance so it bears attention. The criteria are:

* Are either
o nonprofit board members with less than three years of experience serving on a nonprofit board
o nonprofit executives or staff members with less than three years of experience working with a nonprofit board
* Have demonstrated leadership ability and potential for their organization and the nonprofit community
* Are affiliated with a nonprofit organization that has an annual budget less than $5 million
* Will enrich the diversity of the sector. Diversity includes but is not limited to age, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability.
* Would not otherwise be able to attend the BoardSource Leadership Forum and have not attended a previous Forum

Info You Can Use: DON’T FORFEIT YOUR NON-PROFIT STATUS!

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I can’t believe I forgot to post this since the booking consortium I belong to had a brief heart attack until we realized we were in compliance.

According to the NY Times, about 1/4 of Non-profits will automatically lose their non-profit tax status as of May 15. Not for profit organizations that made less than $25,000 a year didn’t used to have to file. A law passed in 2006 said any non-profit that doesn’t file for three consecutive years will lose their status. Since that covers calendar years 2006-2009, that means the end is nigh for a lot of small organizations. Groups this small may not have kept their contact information up to date and didn’t receive the warning letters the IRS sent out in 2007.

This may not impact the large arts organization you work for, but the smaller charities, trade associations and membership groups (maybe your block association?) to which you belong might be at risk.

The good news is that all you need to do to comply is send back a postcard form informing the IRS that you are still exempt from having to file the full 990.

Even better news–you can file this postcard, the 990-N electronically online at the IRS website.

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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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