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Leaders Call For Disarmament Of Weapons Grade Elitism

March 4, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

I think there is probably enough overlap between my readers and Drew McManus on Adaptistration that I am not bringing anything new to the table when I point to his most recent post.

But man! It is so much in my wheelhouse that I wish I had written it. And with a title employing the phrase, “Weapons Grade Elitism,” it is hard leave it alone. It pushes all the right buttons.

Drew had an encounter with program notes for a concert that were so dense, even as an orchestra insider with decades of experience wasn’t quite sure what the author of the notes was referencing. I think some of the content was worse than anything Trevor O’Donnell has criticized.

Long time readers know that I often cite findings of the 2017 CultureTrack survey and frequently discuss how the language in promotional and informational materials can be alienating to people who are just starting to be curious about different creative disciplines. I was pleased to see Drew invoking both ideas in his final paragraph summarizing his experience with the program notes:

In the end, these program notes do far more harm than we probably realize. When the CultureTrack ’17 report showed the number one barrier to engagement is people feeling like “it isn’t for someone like me,” we should actively revolt against practices that result in program notes like this. If someone with a music degree feels alienated upon reading them, imagine how the rest of our patrons will react.

Weapon’s Grade Elitism In 800 Words Or Less

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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Discount Unto Others As You Would Have Others Discount Unto You

March 3, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Collen Dilenschneider is increasingly becoming my go-to source for general data about audience behavior in relation to pricing. Last month, she posted about the perception and attitudes free, discounted and full price engenders among attendees.

She had previously written, and summarizes in this recent post, that discounts tend to bring people who are already engaged with the organization back through the doors rather than achieving the goal providing additional access to people who can’t easily afford entry. She suggests that part of the reason is that the discounts are communicated through the same channels that made existing audiences aware of the organization rather than through channels and techniques that reach the desired additional audiences:

Thus, it’s often the people who already know that the experience is worthy of their time who take up a general discount. Also, general discounts – even if they are intended to pique the interest of income-qualified audiences – are often promoted using the same channels as every other outbound message, resulting in more awareness of access programs amongst people with household incomes greater than $250,000/year than individuals with household incomes of less than $25,000/year. (Here’s more on this topic.)

The new data she presents surprisingly indicates that the lower the price, the lower the value people place on the organization and experience.

In terms of satisfaction which influences whether people will return, tell their friends and have a higher value-for-cost perceptions,

This may surprise some. (“How can people who get discounts be more satisfied than people who paid no money at all to attend!? They got in for free, for goodness sake!”) What may surprise folks even more is that average satisfaction is notably highest of all among people who paid full admission prices for their experience.

In terms of likeliness to endorse the organization to others, it is much the same.

General admission visitors were significantly more likely to endorse an organization than those who got a discount or attended for free.

As it turns out, when organizations provide a general discount, visitors generally discount them right back.

Perhaps most importantly, what people paid for admission influences the perception of how dedicated the organization is to its mission.

When an organization discounts its onsite experience through free or reduced admission, it impacts how visitors perceive the organization’s mission, too. What happens onsite doesn’t just stay onsite

That’s why this finding may be the most important of all in this article.

People who paid full admission price believed much more strongly that these entities were effective in executing their missions. The difference is dramatic.When an entity discounts its admission price, it changes how the public perceives its mission and what it stands for.

She doesn’t say all discounts and free admissions are bad. As implied earlier, a disciplined, focused strategy of communicating discounts to a specific target audience rather than to the broader constituency can achieve the desired aims. However, it takes time and energy to cultivate relationships with the right people and direct money and resources to the correct communication channels.

Audience Relations, Pricing

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Don’t Ignore “Can’t Use My Tickets” Posts On Your Social Media Page

March 2, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

I wrote a post that appeared on Artshacker today about ticket scams occurring in the comments section of performing arts organization social media accounts.

Essentially, what happens is that a short time out from an event, posts start appearing in the comments section of your organization’s Facebook page apparently from people who need to get rid of their tickets because they have a conflict with the date.

The biggest, most immediate tell-tale sign that this is a scam is realizing there are more tickets offered for re-sale than have been purchased. In the screenshots I posted as examples, the $5 movie we were offering only had 16 advance tickets sold but there were at least 54 tickets being offered for sale. This doesn’t count all the offers we deleted.

You also need to wonder about the promised heavy discounts people were offering on a $5 ticket that made it worth texting or sending a direct message to a stranger.

Another thing I see if I don’t catch the fake post in time is tickets being offered for free that suddenly have a price attached if someone responds with interest.

The answer, of course, is that most of these accounts were bots. If you follow the link back to the poster’s account, you might find pictures of the person with family and friends which make it look legitimate (and I suspect some were real accounts that were hijacked) but others you notice some big inconsistencies like the fact their residence is in Sweden and they work for a company in Spain.

As I note in my Arts Hacker post, the simplest solution of shutting down commenting or requiring every comment to be approved can impede spontaneous reactions and conversations that create a sense of trust and community. Not to mention, it is difficult to conduct engagement campaigns if people are limited in their interactions.

Additionally, if people do get caught in a scam, it is likely to result in a negative association with, and perhaps distrust of, the organization on whose social media page the scam appeared.

If you knew you got a virus on a website or had your credit card number stolen on a gas pump skimming device, you would probably avoid returning, right?

One thing I didn’t mention in my original post but won’t probably come as a big surprise to many is that it is nigh-impossible to get the social media site to shut the scams down. We had a recent case where a person/bot posted their ticket offerings on their own page and tagged our page. I have to think this was a mistake and couldn’t have been effective because when we visited the page, there were more than 50 identical posts from a “woman” whose husband was deathly ill and couldn’t make dozens of monster truck rallies, concerts at bars, events at performing arts centers, many of them occurring at the same time across Canada and the United States.

We reported the page to Facebook. Even if it wasn’t a scam, a personal page was being used to conduct commerce. The response we got was that it didn’t violate any rules.

Anyway, check out the post on Arthacker, if nothing more than to see the screenshot examples of the type of posts you might encounter. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same names popped up on your social media pages.

Scammers In Your Social Media Community

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR

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Problems So Obvious A College Student Can Analyze Them In A Week

February 26, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Earlier this month, Vu Le at Non-Profit AF made one of those posts you didn’t know you needed until it was written. In it he addressed the stress higher education school projects have on already overburdened non-profits.

It is pretty much a rite of passage so if you haven’t been approached by a university student who needs to complete an assessment of your organization providing you with recommendations for improvement by next week, you need to question your organization’s existence in the universe and whether it has any meaning at all.

And full disclosure, I was one of those university students as I am sure many of my readers were as well. If you weren’t, you need to question the quality of your education and whether it had any meaning at all.

Since I am referring to class assignments I received about 25-30 years ago, this practice is probably well over due for revision and Vu Le is just the person to help start the conversation.

Vu Le lists a number of issues with these assignments. If you have generously participated in these exercises, you can probably identify with a number of them.

They are time-consuming

They are poorly coordinated

They stress nonprofit resources

They are usually not helpful

They are sometimes insulting

He expound on each of these with some detail. Read his post for a fuller explanation.

I have two colleagues who are providing feedback for a class which is conducting this sort of evaluation as a semester long project and they have each expressed frustrations similar to those listed above.

One of the issues Le raised that I hadn’t really encountered before, but obviously bears consideration,

They are usually not grounded in equity: Many students want projects at organizations led by Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, people with disabilities, immigrants and refugees, or other marginalized communities. But often they do not yet have the grounding in doing work in these communities without causing harm. Which means additional time and resources must be provided to coach the students and mitigate damage.

Of course, it must be acknowledge that university programs and especially the students often approach these projects with the best intentions. Le quotes Theresa Meyers, Chief of Staff at DC Central Kitchen,

The irony of it all is that society recognizes that nonprofits are understaffed and under-resourced which is part of the reason students are sent our way to ‘help’. [But] In our effort to support nonprofits, we are actually exacerbating the staffing inequities by forcing nonprofit leaders to also be unpaid professors.”

Le has a number of suggestions for improving the experience, which again, I briefly list here and he discusses in greater detail in his post.

Coordinate with nonprofits to figure out the best timing and types of projects:

Give plenty of advance notice

Build it into your budget to pay nonprofits

Make sure students do their research in advance

Have students do preemptive work on race, privilege, equity, diversity, inclusion, implicit bias, etc

Higher ed staff, build relationship with nonprofits

These are all good ideas, especially the one about reimbursing non-profit’s for their time, but I really like this one as a practical matter:

Collaborate on case studies: Often the projects are one-off, benefiting one student or one group of students. Think about more creative partnerships, such as working with nonprofits to create some case studies that multiple students can learn from and that can be used across many semesters.

I think Le envisioned case studies being used across multiple semesters as a way to avoid having to constantly impose upon non-profits. However, I think creating an evolving case study across multiple years in partnership with a single organization would answer many of the issues he mentioned: there would be advanced notice; a basis for advance research and awareness of race, inclusion, etc,; a well-developed relationship; and the capacity to budget funds for the non-profit. A multi-year project could employ a modular approach that made a deeper analysis of a specific area each semester rather than a superficial summary of the whole organization.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts

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