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Take The Opportunity For A Reboot

January 11, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Research has shown that offering free admission doesn’t lead to an increase in participation by new audiences. In most cases those that are attending are the people who normally attend, they are just showing up again a little sooner than they might have.

This past October/November I actually paid attention when I visited a museum that was offering free admission on a day that the featured artist was speaking. Sure enough, except for friends of the artists that came from out of town, there were only a handful of people who appeared to have never visited before. Most everyone else were greeted by staff as familiar faces or entered and made a beeline down the correct hallway to the exhibit.

Recently Seth Godin made a post titled “Why isn’t there a line at the library?” which addressed an aspect of what keeps people from showing up. He notes that if any other company was giving their core product away for free, people would cram through their doors.

A century ago, information was truly scarce and books were far more expensive than they are now. A decade ago, obtaining the instructions on how to do something was difficult indeed.

“It’s too expensive,” or “I can’t get access to it,” used to be really good excuses. But they obscured the truth: “It’s too much work.”

And that’s the answer to the question. It’s too much work to change our minds. It’s too much work to dance with the fear of failure. It’s too much work to imagine walking through the world differently.

Let’s be clear, this is true for all of us. There is always something we decide is too much work to engage with and yet will pour five times as much effort into something else. People will periodically ask me if I want to return to acting on stage, but the prospect of investing the proper time and energy to do a good job turns me off the idea. Yet there other things I have been working on regularly for decades. (This blog, for one, to think of it.)

There has also been an ongoing conversation in the arts community about the fact that an environment has been created around what we do that makes it a lot of work to comfortably participate.

Certainly, there are things that our potential audiences/participants already eagerly engage in that require more effort. But in many cases there is also a more widespread sense that you will be joining a bunch of fun, like minded people in this pursuit. Often that is not the vibe we give off.

This forced pause in operations the coronavirus has created provides an opportunity to shift the context and narrative for the future. It can start with social media posts and then transform into practice. Any return to activity is likely to begin on a small scale as people venture out which provides a low stakes environment in which to experiment with change and make your mistakes. Starting out small may not be great for the bottom line, but it offers a chance to reboot narratives and expectations regarding what we are all about.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts

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Lack of Perks Don’t Make Or Break Donor Relations

January 6, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Advisory Board for the Arts just sent out a summary of four takeaways about what motivates arts donors based on interviews conducted this past November and December.. While this post is going to be quote heavy, it isn’t going to include all their observations so I encourage you to take 2-3 minutes to read the whole thing.

The first takeaway was basically “first impressions set the tone for the whole relationship.” Once someone makes a donation, future donations will generally fall in the same area. The amount donated is fairly dependent on their perception of what a person like themselves has a duty to donate.

“…which is a combination of what they can afford to give and what they believe is their duty to give, based on factors like marital status, whether they have children, and how much they get out of the arts. When prompted to discuss whether he would consider increasing his giving to arts organizations, for example, one interviewee said that increasing “would probably be appropriate for a couple or a family. Just being single, $1,000 is already a high tier.”

The second takeaway probably holds no big surprises. Donors like to support different organizations, but they have a core group of entities (~2-5) with whom they concentrate their support and perhaps up to 20 others which they vary their support.

The third takeaway is very promising for organizations during and after Covid. While people may donate at a certain level to gain perks, taking away those perks won’t cause them to reduce their giving, by and large.

A handful of donors we spoke to pointed to benefits like free parking and access to donor lounges as reasons for their giving — but across the board, donors indicated that they would not change their giving habits if those perks were significantly reduced or removed entirely (as has been the case for many during the COVID-19 pandemic)… Many donors expressed a desire to help their communities, including by attracting business and building a vibrant local economy, through a demonstrated commitment to the arts. They stated their views clearly: the arts are not a luxury. They belong — they are needed — as part of the social fabric of every community…

The last takeaway is also probably not a surprise. Relationships and connections matter–both with the organization and other participants.

…the opportunity to meet and to know other people is what brings them back each year. Interviews revealed they have an acute awareness of what would be lost without those relationships.

Importantly, donors emphasized the difference between arts organizations’ (often costly) initiatives to foster community-building and the community itself. One interviewee summed this up succinctly when she told us that “perks like donor parties and receptions create community, and that is one of the satisfactions people get from donating. It is something people get besides the altruism of giving to the arts. But there are a lot of ways to create community without parties.”

We spoke to some donors who had met lifelong friends through the opera or symphony; we spoke to other donors who jumped at every opportunity to speak with artistic directors and performers and curators. They weren’t planning on discontinuing those relationships anytime soon. To do so would be to leave the community that had brought them those friends in the first place.

Audience Relations, Fundraising, State of the Arts

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Prioritizing Cultural Practitioners To Receive Covid Vaccine

January 5, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

NPR story came across my social media feed yesterday about how the Cherokee Nation has prioritized giving the Covid vaccine to those who are fluent in the Cherokee language. I sought out a little more information and learned that there are about 2500 fluent speakers and about 20 have died to Covid in the past year. The first allotment of the vaccine was about 900 does and there are other categories of people on the priority list so they aren’t going to be able to inoculate everyone.

The fact that the Cherokee Nation moved to protect cultural practitioners and had the need to do so provides a lot of complicated issues consider.

Not the least of which are the indications in both the NPR and Tulsa World stories I linked to that suggest some of these people might be normally disinclined to get vaccinated if it weren’t for the value being placed upon them. Based on what they had heard, nearly everyone interviewed expressed concerns about the safety of the shots.

“Language is an essential link to preserving the culture of the Cherokee Nation people,” Montgomery said of the decision to prioritize Cherokee language speakers in vaccine scheduling.

“When I walked through (the center) earlier today and I saw a couple of native (Cherokee) speakers that were getting their vaccine, I can’t describe the emotion I felt knowing they’re here overcoming any fear they might have of receiving the vaccine and doing so to protect themselves and their families.”

John Ross, a Cherokee language translator, …Asked about the tribe’s decision to prioritize him and other language speakers for vaccines, he said he was initially shocked to learn that he would be vaccinated this week but felt “elated.”

State of the Arts

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But Why Do People Want More Diverse, Locally Focused Stories Told?

January 4, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Last year (December 31, so technically) I had a post on Arts Hacker taking a look at the work LaPlaca Cohen and Slover Linett Audience Research had done interpreting the Covid edition of the CultureTrack survey through the lens of race and ethnicity.

My post focused on the findings which indicated an interest in having arts organizations offer more inclusive and community focused programming that reflect the stories and faces of everyone. There were some interesting findings about how some communities saw arts and cultural organizations as a trusted source of information whereas it was barely on the radar of other communities. Most everyone saw value beyond just fun and entertainment, though those characteristics are highly valued.

This greater emphasis placed by some BIPOC Americans on the social, civic, emotional, therapeutic, and creative-expression roles of cultural participation may help practitioners and funders think more broadly about service and relevance to communities of color during difficult times.

One thing I didn’t address in that post that stood out was a question the researchers raised about why people want a greater diversity of local stories told.

It reminded me that a lot of assumptions are made about the “why,” but no one has really sought out the answers in a deliberative way. The overall conclusion of the report was that the data raised a multitude of questions in need of study. (i.e. surprising Native American affinity for photography and strong digital consumption of classical music by Black/African-Americans.)

It’s worth reflecting on how a desire to celebrate one’s cultural heritage is connected to other desires; people who are interested in celebrating their cultural heritage are also more likely to want arts and culture organizations to feature “more diverse voices and faces,” focus more on local artists and the local community, and offer stories that reflect one’s life — all of which Americans of color are more likely to express than White Americans…Perhaps White Americans don’t think of arts and culture activities or sites as places to do that kind of celebrating — or perhaps they don’t recognize the extent to which some of those activities and sites do, in fact, celebrate and exemplify European cultural heritage. Might Multiracial Americans feel that their backgrounds and identities are too complex or nuanced to be celebrated in the arts? All of this begs for further research into why many people want more diversity, localness, and stories that reflect their experiences and whether they see those things as tied to their — or their community’s — cultural heritage