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Worrying Prohibition Or License To Get Out Of Boring Meetings?

January 22, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

A couple years ago I wrote a piece for ArtsHacker debunking the notion that anyone who was an ex officio member of a non-profit board did not have the power to vote. The fact is, they have the right to vote unless the organizational bylaws specifically indicate they don’t.

More recently though I discovered that some states like California actually prohibit a non-profit board of directors to have non-voting members which lead me to write a new ArtsHacker post.

The thought is that the role of director comes with certain responsibilities and obligations and so only those fully invested with the decision making authority to fulfill those obligations should be a director. This applies to any committees that exercise board powers as well, which is pretty much all of them (i.e. Executive, Finance, Governance, Nominating, Compensation, etc).

Since some boards have non-voting emeritus director positions or bestow major donors with honorary director titles, the law requires either the title be changed or the bylaws altered to provide these people with votes. (Though if the person has all the rights, responsibilities and authority of a director, they are considered a director regardless of their title as Trustee, Governor, Visitor, etc.)

Other people can attend these board and committee meetings to provide feedback and advice, but they are considered guests or advisors.

Now you may be thinking that the presence of executive leadership at board and committee meetings is crucial to the operations of a non-profit organization and it undermines their credibility if they are only considered to be a guest at the official proceedings.

The authors of the document providing advice about the law, (though they point out that they are not providing official legal advice, nor am I), suggest the following approach:

For example, a corporation may include in its bylaws a provision that the chief executive is required and has the right to attend every board meeting, unless specifically excused by the board. Such a person would be able to express opinions about matters up for discussion, present reports and be involved in the logistics of organizing board meetings, such as notification and setting the agenda.

(I suppose there are some executive leaders who were momentarily excited by the prospect of feigning their dismay at not being allowed to attend an interminable board meeting, but unfortunately, it is the law.)

Check out my full post on ArtsHacker. It may bear doing a little research to learn if your state has similar laws regarding board membership.

Does Your State Prohibit Non-Voting Board Directors?

Leadership, Legal Topics, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Don’t Call It An Arts Desert

January 21, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Last week Springboard for the Arts’ Executive Director Laura Zabel addressed the concept of solving “arts deserts” in a series of tweets.

But, please, let’s not let this “arts desert” idea take hold — it perpetuates the idea that underinvested communities (esp urban neighborhoods and rural places) need culture imported to them rather than support for what is there already.

— laura zabel (@laurazabel) January 16, 2020

The above sentiment particularly resonated with me because I worked for an arts organization in a rural part of a state where the statutory requirement that a percentage of arts funding to our part of the state was interpreted as giving more money to arts organizations in the urban areas if they sent touring shows to our part of the state. With the help of the speaker of the legislature, who was from our part of the state, that requirement was clarified as direct funding.

If you think a place is an “arts desert” then you are not looking hard enough or understanding the context of that place. Every place has culture and creative practice. It might not look like your culture but it is there.

— laura zabel (@laurazabel) January 16, 2020

This tweet, in addition to the others in the chain, reminded me of Ronia Holmes’ piece that I have cited before, Your organization sucks at “community” and let me tell you why, where she writes:

Disinvested communities are not devoid of arts and culture. In America particularly, communities who historically have been excluded from the table have responded by building their own tables, using whatever resources could be scraped together. Marginalized communities have established organizations that don’t treat them or their cultural output as deviations from the norm to be celebrated for diversity, but as fundamental components of society. The organizations they created, and continue to create, are replete with artists, leaders, decision-makers, and workers who look like and are part of the community they serve, who share similar lived experiences, and have a deep understanding of what programming will truly resonate.

These organizations are often in a constant struggle to survive in a system that is not only structured against them in terms of funding and other resource allocation, but that delivers a consistent message that what these community-based and -built organizations do is better handled by some organization several zip codes away. An organization that looks nothing like the community they’re supposedly courting, either in terms of staff composition or artistic output, …

I keep coming back to Holmes’ essay because I and others continue to observe examples where these problematic practices exist. The reality is, this dynamic doesn’t just exist between urban and rural locales or different towns, you can see it in operation between different neighborhoods and blocks in places we live. There are cultural districts and neighborhoods with parks and sidewalks that create similar impressions that places which lack certain amenities also lack a strong sense of culture, social bonds, and traditions because they are less visibly on display. But if you know where and how to look, you find they are consistently practiced and quite visible.

Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, creativity, State of the Arts

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Daydreaming The Way To Better Performance

January 20, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

Tyler Cowen shared a link on his Marginal Revolution blog about Hillary Hahn discussing daydreaming as a form of practice. The link went to blog post by Bill Benzon featuring a video of an interview with Hahn. Benzon transcribes the relevant portion of the interview, but I listened/watched the whole thing.

Hahn talks the challenges of touring, including difficulties practicing for the next tour; reading between the lines on Yelp reviews to find decent coffee in a new city; and her “Ice Princess” nickname which seems to be more about scrutiny of her facial expression and range of motion when performing.

But as Benzon says, the real prize comes around 55:54 when she discusses daydreaming and playfulness when she practices. As someone who has come out of the theatre acting tradition, I was intrigued when she talked about being honest to the moment rather than executing a rigid conception of the music. While this is considered important in acting, my perception has been this isn’t valued in classical music.

In theater, if an actor says “I’m sorry” more defiantly today than they did yesterday, as the person performing opposite them, the way you move and deliver your next line has to be an authentic response to that . Hahn says when she is doing master classes and she sees a student is clearly censoring their playing because they think it would be improper to do otherwise, she says she talks to them about it. She says when she has low energy during a performance, she doesn’t try to pump herself up, but uses that and plays a little more mellow so that when she reaches a point in a piece where the energy starts to increase, the audience is even more aware of the palpable change.

What classical musicians might think of all this I don’t know, but as someone from the outside it runs contrary to my conception of the philosophy and practice of classical music and begins to align more with what I know of the process of theatre, dance and visual artists.

Around 1:22.00 in the video she does a demonstration of what she means by daydreaming during practice. It isn’t so much daydreaming in the woolgathering sense as it is paying close attention to what one is doing and playing with different options to imagine what might happen during a performance. (The following comes much closer to the 1 hour mark, but expresses her approach)

I reverse the assumptions that I have. I just neutralize everything and then I’m…Kind of letting my mind wander. I’m thinking about what is going on with the orchestra. Waiting for something to occur to me. I think people don’t ever think that happens in practice.

For a lot of people, I think practice is about being more accurate, improving your playing, being more expressive, being more this or that. But for me, yes, there’s that, but… Those are the tools to get to the point where you can let your mind wander and get ideas.

During her demonstration of her practice process, she verbalizes what she is thinking:

“…so right there I heard the violin kicked into a certain resonance and I was really listening for that and that felt like it had a certain tone quality that I like.

And that feels good so it gave me a little bit of inspiration…

[…]

Perhaps I can take that further…how far can I go?…how long can I hold it?…can I get away with that?…I imagine the conductor is looking at me like…” (makes ‘get on with it’ hand motions)

She talks about how having this bit of fun helps her feel creative, cleanse her system of instincts she has and find answers to questions she has about the music. Earlier in the interview, in a bit that Benzon transcribed, she seems to indicate this approach also helps keep her nimble enough to practice with unfamiliar musicians on short notice:

I’m always trying to trigger in mind into new phrasing ideas, so I don’t get stuck and so that when I’m working with other people, I don’t have a lot of rehearsal time and I need to present a unified concert. So, when I’m working with other people, how can I play it in a way that’s authentic to me, but really coincides with what they’re doing and brings out a better version of the music than we could arrive at ourselves separately.

As I said, for musicians this may all be familiar equipment in a potential toolbox, but as an outsider I found it helped make unfamiliar material more relatable.

creativity, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Donate For The Tote Bag

January 15, 2020

by:

Joe Patti

I don’t know how I missed it on Vox.com, but Non-Profit Quarterly recently pointed out an article the site about the effectiveness of swag in non-profit fundraising.

The TL:DR version is, other than instances when it reinforces your identity (i.e. NPR or New Yorker tote bags), it isn’t really effective in terms of raising more than the cost of the gift and processing. This is especially true in regard to the unsolicited gifts like mailing labels and Christmas cards some charities send you around the holidays in the hopes you will feel guilty enough to donate.

For the more detailed version: There are definitely times when those gifts can actually increase donations because they are tied to people’s identity:

Simran Sethi, a journalist who hops between North Carolina, Mexico, and Italy, told me she nudged up her donation from $50 to $75 once just to get the WNYC tote bag. “I just wanted to show my NPR pride!” she says. Lindsay Diamond, who works for the University of Colorado Boulder, admitted to ponying up more so she could snag a Tiny Desk Concerts hoodie.

…. Like Sethi, people may want them to show off their contribution or affiliation, or perhaps connect with other like-minded folks. Donation levels that feature increasingly valuable gifts do indeed promote “bump-up spending,” Yarrow says. “Even when we’re donating, we consider value pricing.”

I feel like I just read a conversation on Twitter this week where people were questioning whether an organization was saying they were committed to spending $8 million a year to raise $20 million (or something similar). If any readers saw that exchange, point me to it. (My recollection was that it was in regard to Boston Symphony, but I can’t find any such article so don’t quote me on that.) But practices like that are pertinent to this conversation.

But a bad design of the donor reward scheme can be problematic:

A man from Chicago — name redacted to protect the guilty — for instance, confessed to donating a dollar to NPR just for the socks. “It was a gift-of-any-size campaign, and I knew I was probably costing them money,” he says. (He redeemed himself by shelling out later on.)

For some donors, there may be a perception that the non-profit is wasting money on swag they could be spending on their cause:

If donors do end up contributing, they may chip in less than they can afford because the premium casts a pall over the organization’s financial efficacy. Or they might knock the charity off their lists entirely. Younger donors, especially, are becoming more strategic with their largesse.

Research bears this out. A 2012 study by Yale psychologists found that the offer of a gift reduced feelings of altruism regardless of whether the gift was “desirable or undesirable, the charity was familiar or unfamiliar, or the gift was more or less valuable.” The authors attributed this to a “crowding-out effect,” one that may create ambiguity about the donor’s perhaps-less-than-unselfish motivations for giving.

There was a mention in both the Vox and NPQ pieces that often the calculus being used is the long term value of a donor versus what you spend today on a gift for them. In other words, you may lose $5 sending them a donor premium today, but if they give $1000 over the next five years, it is worthwhile.

A 2018 study posted on The Conversation looked into that assumption:

Fans of using premiums to raise money for causes believe that they are worth it even if they simply get donors in the door but do not raise more money than giving them away costs charities. That’s because, at least theoretically, they can form a habit of giving. But some researchers have found that donors who are lured into giving by donor premiums are unlikely to give again when asked without an incentive.

What should nonprofits and donors take away from our study? We conducted this experiment with just one organization, but the preponderance of the evidence from our work and the findings of others suggests that unconditional premiums are not worth it.

Most interesting to me was a personal observation made by Niduk D’Souza at the end of her NPQ that donor rewards are used regardless of their efficacy due to the way development offices are evaluated:

However, it is this fundraiser’s experience that the metric most often measured, and presumably without coincidence, is one that is most easily aligned with nonprofit budgets and often a fundraiser’s own job performance metrics: how many donors were brought in this quarter, this year, by your portfolio, and how much did your portfolio raise, or is it worth, overall?

So, is it any wonder why nonprofits continue to give away crap?

Fundraising, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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