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Mounting A Performing Arts Conference When No One Wants To Travel

October 7, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Two regional arts conferences, Western Arts Alliance and Arts Midwest partnered on offering a single online conference to replace their respective in-person events.

I will say right from the outset, I really need an in-person conference which takes me away from my job. The online conference doesn’t offer enough content to justify my staying at home all week, but trying to participate virtually with the demands and distractions of my job is not working.

I am not saying I would have traveled to Omaha this year. I am just recognizing the benefits of intentionally carving time out to devote to your professional development.

Also, the technology they are using to deliver the conference is very frustrating to use. I suspect it looked really well designed when the conference organizers were reviewing it because it brings a lot of valuable features together in one place. I thought they made a good choice when I first poked around it prior to the conference start.

However, in practice when you have over 1000 people using it to view content and interact to conduct business, the shortcomings become clearer. There were some sessions where people have openly commented they are doing research on other platforms for conferences they organize.

This being said, the virtual conference format allows me to have my staff participate, something I wouldn’t have been able to afford with an in-person conference. Being able to divide and conquer when it comes to attending and offering observations on different conferences sessions and performance showcases is pretty valuable.

As I write this, the second day of the conference is drawing to a close. There are still two more days, but one observation my staff and I have made already is that there is a stark gulf between people who have acknowledged the future will not be the same as the past and those that view their current situation as akin to a delayed flight home–incredibly inconveniencing, but you’ll eventually get back to familiar surroundings.

In one session I attended yesterday, I wondered what people had been doing for the last seven months because people were asking questions that seemed to indicate they hadn’t really considered their options for re-opening. Sessions I attended today were much better and assuring. People were offering examples of creative approaches they were using, plans they had for the future and the responses they were seeing from the community.

My marketing director had been in a session on Failure yesterday where the host basically summed up the session by noting if organizations weren’t exploring different options now, in two-three years when new models of participation begin to solidify and gain significant traction, those organizations will be two years behind the curve. Currently, because no one knows what will happen, there is a greater tolerance for experimentation and associated mistakes. It is difficult to criticize a decision as bad if no one can say what the better decision would have been–implementing that better option next time has an almost equal chance of failing in the current operating environment.

What I think will be problematic for the performing artists showcasing at the conference is that they are packaging themselves to suit last year’s paradigm. While their showcases are pre-recorded in venues that show off their talent much, much better than an in-person experience in a conference hotel ballroom, they also don’t have the opportunity to discuss what they have to offer in light of what they may have gleaned from sessions earlier in the day.

To be clear, I definitely don’t think depending on being able to deliver a quality, problem free livestream performance would have been a better option. I am just saying had the performance been delivered live, whether in-person or live stream, artists and agents could have taken what they were hearing venues were saying about their plans and concerns over the course of the day and revised their script to present themselves as capable of providing a solution to those problems.

I was considering writing this post next week after the conference was over so I could provide a more complete assessment of the experience, but I know a few performing arts presenters who may be participating in the conference read my blog so I wanted to get them thinking about these factors which may be shaping how they are experiencing different parts of the conference.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Meanwhile, Next Door In Austria

October 6, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

The title of today’s post references the fact yesterday’s post was about cultural funding in Germany. I hadn’t planned it this way, but I wanted to draw attention to the lengths various venues in Austria went to this summer in order to perform in front of live audiences.

According to a piece on Vox, the Salzburg Festival in Vienna went ahead with their centiennial anniversary festival with audiences subject to the following conditions:

Among the rules: Audience members were asked to wear masks and social distance at one meter. Seating capacities were reduced, and every second seat in every concert hall was locked so people couldn’t get around the restrictions. There were no intermissions at performances, or refreshments available.

Simply buying a ticket meant agreeing to engage in contact tracing, if it came to that: Tickets were personalized with names, and audience members had to show an ID when they entered any venue. ..

In the end, the festival attracted more than 76,000 visitors — a little more than a quarter of last year’s — from 39 countries during August. According to the festival’s final report on the event, “not a single positive case has been reported to the authorities.” And of the 3,600 coronavirus tests carried out on the 1,400 people involved in festival preparation, just one came back positive in early July.

What was more interesting to me was the process the Vienna State Opera used to determine the testing schedule for their employees. Encouraged by the success of the Salzburg Festival, they planned to reopen last month and implemented a system of color-coded lanyards to indicate which employees were most at risk for exposure to the Covid virus.

Singers and people working directly with the singers are part of the red group and are tested every week (since they can’t always wear masks or keep distance onstage). Administrators are part of the orange group and are tested every four weeks. The yellow and white groups — people who don’t have close contact with artists, such as delivery people — are only tested if there’s a known exposure. And everyone wears colored lanyards to denote their risk, while groups are instructed to stay apart.

Read the whole article because there are interviews with individual artists about how they are impacted. The tl;dnr version is – artists are risking their health for even less pay than before

Art(ist) Education, Arts Facilities, Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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Budgeting More Money For Culture, Despite Covid. You Can Probably Guess Where

October 5, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Last week Artnet reported that Germany’s 2021 draft budget held an increase in funding for cultural organizations in the country.

You may recall that I made a post in May that clarified German cultural organizations didn’t receive $54 billion in aid as had widely been reported.

German arts administrator Rainer Glaap had brought the misunderstanding to my attention and provided links to stories that explained that the money was spread across a wide swath of industries and that since each German state had their own programs and interpretations of how funding was to be used benefits to cultural entities varied wildly with freelance artists often receiving short shrift.

The most recent story seems to be more specifically focused on funding for cultural entities since the budget numbers cited are $2.26 billion and it quotes the German culture minister

Culture minister Monika Grütters says that such a strong budget for the final year before the German elections underscores the country’s commitment to culture, especially on top of its existing billion-dollar coronavirus rescue program.

“Especially in times of crisis, culture is the foundation of our social cohesion,” Grütters says in a statement. “Art, culture, and the media make us aware time and again of our great privilege to live in a country of freedom of the press, culture, and opinion, where controversial debates are possible, desired, and endurable. The protection of these freedoms remains the highest principle of federal cultural policy.”

The German government’s cultural budget has grown by about 60 percent since Grütters took office in 2013, and 85 percent since the German chancellor Angela Merkel came to power in 2005.

The story doesn’t really get into whether the different states were taking steps to make sure freelancers and small business groups were better able to access funding or other supports than previously.

While the erroneous $54 billion amount had caused no shortage of envy among arts and cultural professions last Spring, I wanted to point out prioritizing culture is not an outlier. Not only has improving funding for cultural organizations been a priority this year, it has been a priority for over a decade. It should be noted, this budget has to be approved by the German Senate before it is put in effect.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Finance, Fundraising, Government Relations

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Be Sure Your Data Doesn’t Just Mean You Are Good At Posting Memes

September 30, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

If you have been reading my writing for the last few years, you know that in addition to employing the preceding phrase fairly often, I argue that not everything that can be measured about an arts organization’s activity is a valid measure of the value of the organization and the work it does.

What should also be acknowledged as a corollary to that is that not all data is created equal or equally valuable. Since there is a growing push for arts organizations to do a better job of embracing data-driven decision making .

Over at Arts Hacker, I recently summarized a post by Colleen Dilenschneider distinguishing between key performance indicators (KPIs), diagnostic metrics and vanity metrics.

Briefly, KPIs measure progress toward your mission/goals, diagnostic metrics inform KPIs and vanity metrics sound impressive, but aren’t an indication of any sort of progress. (i.e. Your social media engagement increased 1000% in a week because you posted a kitten meme.)

The problem, Dillenschneider says, is that valuing vanity metrics can result in allocating resources away from mission focused activities and evaluation. For example, the executive director may suddenly gain national prominence and invitations to speak at conferences, etc. which may raise the profile of the organization and make many stakeholders extremely proud of their association.

But if this isn’t contributing to a recognition of problems with the quality of the work being done and the poor community interactions that are occurring, then there is no value to having a year over year increase in the number of speaking invitations.

If you are trying to use data to inform your decisions, take a look at the post. The line between KPIs and diagnostic metrics can be confusing and it can be easy to categorize the latter as part of the former without a reminder of the dividing line.