Exciting World of Boards

Artsjournal.com had a link to an interesting article on boards today because it deals with some misunderstanding and misconceptions about serving on a non-profit board.

The article from the Tacoma, WA News Tribune is pretty interesting just as a story about how boards of trustees have and have not been instrumental in the closing of area arts organizations.

But as I mentioned, the even bigger value is in first hand perceptions and actions of board members who came to realize the job was more involved than they expected or had been lead to believe. At the same time, the story is a testament to the dedication of board members. One board member took six month leave from her law office to work full time on reviving Seattle’s ACT Theatre.

There is also a fairly broad feeling about how much fundraising board members should do.

When TAG closed, board president Mike Jones said he’d seen fund raising as chiefly a staff job. He said it was a matter of principle – that requiring members to give or raise a fixed amount would amount to ‘buy(ing) their position on a board’ – unfairly limiting membership to the elite.

TAM’s board, like many, uses a sliding scale, said vice president Judith Nilan. Each donor is expected to raise or give a certain amount. The museum calculates these in advance, and can afford to admit only a certain number of members at lower levels so the board can meet its annual group donation of $100,000.

“Most boards have a give-or-get policy, and if they don’t, they should,” Donnelly said. “What are you there for, your good looks’ I’m serious. You bring your skills and talents to a board, but the organization needs resources.”

The old phrase is “give, get or get off,” and trustees’ best donations are connections, said Clare Dowdall, an award-winning fund-raiser who was development director at the Cleveland Playhouse, Alley Theatre in Houston and the American Lung Association in the Southwest.

Unfortunately, the most idealistic view is attributed to the person associated with a failed organization. There are plenty of fairly successful organizations with that same philosophy. Most organizations have to place practicality before idealism though.

I also like the article for the way it mentions the pitfalls of an unbalanced staff-board relationship- the uninvolved board vs. the micromanagers, the immovable fixtures vs. the constantly changing members with no institutional memory.

Probably the moral of the entire article is for boards not to be afraid to ask questions and really dig into the financial/managerial health of an organization.

I have discussed board resources in the past one of the best online resources is BoardSource.org. The value of their FAQ section isn’t so much in the questions it answers, but in the issues it gets you thinking (and asking more questions) about.

Interesting Origins

As I am looking over my web statistics, I have noticed amidst all the trash links, (ones that supposedly indicate that people are visiting me via links on poker, viagra and sex sites), I noticed that the blog is attracting visitors from interesting locations.

I have cited Worker Bees blog a couple times in the last few weeks of course. (Okay, this weekend, I gotta add some reciprocal links in my sidebar–especially after reading her most recent entry and links about how men never link to women’s blogs)

However, I have found that my blog is listed in a Diva Marketing entry citing my tag line of “Musings on Practical Solutions For Arts Management” as a good way to carve out my niche.

I also have my first evident reader from overseas (may be readers since people have been following the link on his blog) in Peter Jentzsch who lives in Copenhagen and included my blog in the sidebar of his dance diffusion blog. He doesn’t actually say anything about me in the blog, but he did comment on one of my blog entries.

However, I did discover by reading his blog that Artsmarketing.org has recently started a blog of their own. In fact, today’s Artsmarketing.org entry links to an NPR story that addresses the RAND “Gift of A Muse” study that has spurred the debate on Artsjournal.com

C’mon, did you really think you were gonna read an entry this week where I didn’t mention it?

Writing Elsewhere Tonight

I had a comment on the Artsjournal discussion I have been citing the last couple days. However, since the comment section didn’t register the links I painstakingly typed in HTML code in the entry, I am mirroring it here as it was meant to be seen.

The entry I was commenting on may be found here.

A week or so ago, Artsjournal linked to a Wired article that talked about people almost having an intrinsic need for art/beauty/meaning/purpose in their lives. I quoted the following bit in my blog:

For companies and entrepreneurs, it’s no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. Check out your bathroom. If you’re like a few million Americans, you’ve got a Michael Graves toilet brush or a Karim Rashid trash can that you bought at Target. Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the left side of your brain! Or consider illumination. Electric lighting was rare a century ago, but now it’s commonplace. Yet in the US, candles are a $2 billion a year business -for reasons that stretch beyond the logical need for luminosity to a prosperous country’s more inchoate desire for pleasure and transcendence.

Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people are searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such once-exotic practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and politics, the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of everyday life.

And just recently I saw a great illustration of this as Target Stores rolled out their “Design for All” campaign. They know they can’t compete with WalMart on price, but they are plugging in to this craving people have. You can probably buy most of the same stuff at WalMart, but their message is, you will feel better about yourself if you shop here.

Now how the arts can manage to position themselves in the same manner against the convienence of cable TV, DVDs mailed to your home and all the rest, I don’t quite know.

If you think back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need, you know that safety issues like infant mortality will never be superceded by self-actualization activities like the arts, and it is silly to try as has been pointed out. At the same time, those needs Maslow cites are sort of hard wired into the human brain.

While I agree with Phil Kennicott that the current political/social environment may be making people who might have previously been just unfamiliar with the arts into people who are predisposed to view the topic with hate, they too have these deep seated needs. The closest they may ever come to supporting the arts is by attempting to fulfill the need by buying products at Target which in turn supports the arts. (I believe that was one of Ben Cameron’s jobs prior to joining TCG.)

I hate to engage in idealistic speculation that implies the utopian theoretical can be translated into the practical so here is what I think might be a doable suggestion which extends Joli’s thoughts-

Perhaps the entree for answering this need for potential audiences is the garage band approach rather than the massive performing arts center. Maybe organizations should be putting their money into storefront theatres and stand alone black boxes where insecurities about dress code and etiquette aren’t as big an issue because everyone is wearing jeans. (We tell people they don’t necessarily have to dress up, but then they arrive at the venue and the veteran attendees are looking snazzy which gives a contradictory message.)

Once people feel comfortable and good about themselves, then you point out that if they enjoyed this, maybe they want to try the mainstage over on 6th Street–or just keep coming back.

The alternative venue doesn’t necessarily need to be run by one organization. All the arts organizations of a community might go in and share the costs and use it as sort of an outreach facility. Theatre companies the first two weekends of the month, snippets of opera on the third, chamber music on the fourth.

My Arms Are Too Short

Lots and lots of great conversation going on over at Artsjournal.com’s A Better Case For The Arts. It is somewhat heartening to see that so many people agree that the attitude arts professionals have about what they do has to change as does the approach to attracting and retaining audiences in this day and age. (The disheartening thing of course is that no one has the answer.)

It is tough to comment on the breadth of the discussion at this point, but since part of it had some significance to the experience of the last couple days I have had, I wanted to cite them. (They are also among the more interesting discussion and commentary) One of the post and accompanying commentary is titled The Public View. The other came under the heading The Enemy?.

The latter was very interesting because it pointed out in the changing political landscape that seems the harbinger of a culture war, people who have not been exposed to the arts may no longer be uninformed with the potential to be an attendee once introduced to it, but instead may be pre-disposed to be hostile to the arts.

A sobering thought, but still, education and exposure is the best solution for a great many of the world’s ills. (Though some will point out there are plenty of people out there ready to spin your education to reinforce what you already believe.) The Public View promotes this idea of education and exposure. Writes Jim Kelly:

I don’t believe the “case for the arts” can be made to the general public. Our duty to the public is not to explain to them why they should enjoy the arts, not to tell them the many ways it will improve them as individuals. Our duty is to involve them in the arts on some level in the belief that they too will experience the benefits of the arts first-hand and will become new advocates for the cause. In other words, we have stop talking about the arts and start doing art.

We have limited public dollars at our disposal, but we’re constantly asked to support another study, plan, reseach project, etc. Instead, my agency made a conscious decision to support art projects that increase audiences exposure to and participation in the arts. Most of us agree that you will never appreciate the intrinsic value of the arts if you’ve never experienced the arts. So let’s dedicate ourselves to increasing people’s exposure to the arts in all their permutations.

There were some great comments to this entry, but the one I liked best came from Jane Deschner:

Yes, you’re exactly right. I find people are often “afraid” of their own creativity and imagination. If they can become engaged in some way (whether by performance in a furniture store, embellished fiberglass animals on the street, musical performance in a hospital lobby) in a quality experience, they may develop an interest and gain the confidence to participate. But it has to have substance, be good. Who said art has to be on in a theater or museum or concert hall?

The bit about people being afraid of their own creativity really rings so true in my experience.

So how does this all connect with the events of my last few days?
Well, I have been trying to set up outreach programs for a performance group coming in during the next few weeks. Problem is, they arrive right in the middle of most of the local school’s Spring Break! Eek!

I did find a couple school who were in session and offered the opportunity to them. A few turned me down, but another couple never returned my multiple calls. The unreturned calls were surprising because these were schools that actually had well funded arts programs and would have been able to pay (and often had for similiar groups) for the program I was bringing in even though I was offering it for free.

Just today, I discovered all of my plans for outreach programs to the at risk schools with few or no arts classes are sort of falling apart. Because I schedule with the state booking consortium, the tight travel and performing itinerary leaves one group with no time to do a lecture/demo outreach and the another with only a Sunday afternoon. A third group wants as much for a one hour lecture/demo as for a performance (about $10,000) so that is pretty much out. Though, hey, if you can get that sorta money, more power to ya!

This is rather distressing since I actually wrote letters of intent at the request of some agents so that a funding group that supports outreach to my type of community would provide money to support their touring. Now granted, this is all a year away, things change and I am looking to do some out of the box thinking to put together a program to make this happen. (Perhaps go to churches that serve this sort of community?)

I am also starting a conversation with local arts groups who haven’t really thought about organizing enough to do joint performances about doing some and perhaps hooking up an outreach on there too.

Though I will probably be able to bring rewarding experience to local populations in the end, it is rather frustrating to be having such a hard time bringing free programs to my community. There is no real financial reward to it. The grant monies it will yield for me are pretty negilible and hardly cover the additional fees I am paying for the outreach (not to mention the extra day of lodging). I would get more work done in the day if I wasn’t trying to make all these arrangements.

But damned if I don’t believe it will actually have a beneficial impact on a fair number of the lives I am trying to serve. I am not quite sure if it will bring audiences in to theatre, gallery and museum doors. But I do think at some point in their lives, the people who see the programs will stop and contemplate truth and beauty in their lives, if only secretly, if only for a few minutes.