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The “You Didn’t Pay Enough Last Time” Approach To Fundraising

May 18, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Nod to Artsjournal.com for posting David Rohde’s examination of how viewing new ticket buyers as donors immediately after their attendance experience is extremely detrimental to arts organizations. He specifically addresses how the Metropolitan Opera’s use of telemarketing in this manner is leading to its demise, but they are not the first or last arts organization to employ this approach.

There have been others who have written about what it says when I person who has just seen a production for the first time gets a call or email asking for a donation or to become a subscriber a day or two later. However, I don’t recall anyone invoking quite this perspective:

From the patron standpoint, the problem here is three-fold. First, name another product or service that announces after it’s won a new customer that they underbilled you and you’re not welcome back until you fork over more dough for the first time.

He goes on to say that Metropolitan Opera ought to be playing up the benefits it has over its Broadway neighbors:

The Met’s goal with any new patron should have been to get them to tell five friends about how exciting it was to attend the opera and bring them all the next time….

The seating in the theater is more comfortable than in the typical Broadway theater, where the audience rows are often jammed up against each other. There’s no chance of missing the story in an opera because of the English titles on the seatbacks in front of you, compared to Broadway’s blasting of amplification that often seems disconnected from whoever’s singing or speaking on stage.

And the opera intermissions are longer and can be more of a party, especially at the upper balcony/bar level that inevitably attracts a fun crowd on La Bohème nights, compared to the rushed crush of bodies in a Broadway intermission that always ends in a mad scramble back to the seats for Act 2.

Rodhe’s overarching point is that relationship building is what will enable organizations to endure through the next crisis that may emerge and telemarketers just aren’t equipped to create those relationships.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Business Models, Fundraising

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Out Or Just Not Interested In Getting In?

May 17, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin made a short post last week about the difference between Jargon vs. Lingo. Its brevity seems to make a clear case, but it leaves a ton of important considerations unsaid.

Jargon is intentionally off putting, and lingo reminds us how connected we are.

They might look similar, but the intent is what matters. Jargon is a place to hide, a chance to show off, a way to disconnect. Lingo, on the other hand, allows us to feel included.

You may see right off that even if you say it is intent that matters, whether something is alienating or inclusive is highly subjective. The line between feeling connected to a group because you have mastered the subject specific terminology and feeling like a privileged insider for having mastered that terminology can be really thin.

Likewise from the other side there is a difference between feeling excluded because you aren’t being provided the patience and access to participation by members of a group and failing to recognize that becoming fully initiated as an insider takes time and effort.

These dynamics obviously exist in the world of arts and culture, but rather than drawing an example from there, let me cite online gaming culture.

As an old fart, I started online gaming with text MUDs back before the modem screech was even a thing, much less broadband existed. It was only last Memorial Day weekend decided to make a foray into MMORPGs. And already you are seeing terms that can either come across as lingo or jargon based on your relationship with these things.

Knowing that some of the conversations on these games can get pretty heated and abusive, especially in Player vs. Player combat situation (PvP), I resolved to keep my head down, watch and listen as best I could from the fringes before getting more deeply involved.

Fortunately I picked a game and servers where the language doesn’t get that abusive despite there being a lot of competitive elements. At a certain point I realized I was far too comfortable hanging out at the fringes and needed to jump in and participate in these competitive and cooperative efforts.

Once I did, I came to realize as much as I had been lurking on the fringes keeping busy doing my own thing, it had actually been detrimental to the development of my characters and enjoyment of the game. The rewards for cooperative group play are much greater as achieved faster than solo play, including the sense of shared victory. But of course, it took and continues to take, effort to learn correct timing, techniques, and development processes to become more effective and extend my survivablity.

Online gaming is definitely a place where it is easy to find yourself intentionally excluded by insiders or excluded by your own lack of interest in working to understand the particular rules of the realm which you have chosen to enter. The dynamics of the jargon-lingo line are not very clear cut.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, General Musings

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Man, Can That Wiggly Opera Quartet Sing

May 12, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

Grateful hat tip to the Arts and Management Technology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University for calling attention to Blob Opera, a fun little experiment on Google Arts and Culture.

It introduces concepts about pitch, sung vowel sounds and the highest voice leading harmony in the quick tutorial where you drag blob figures that sing the bass, tenor, mezzo and soprano parts. From there you can play around, record, and share your own compositions.

There is a pre-recorded selection of Christmas carols you can play, but even those you can manipulate by taking control of the figures mid-concert, selectively muting different parts.

Even if your organization isn’t involved with opera, this can be something interesting to share in newsletters and on social media accounts to erode any sense of intimidation people may feel regarding creative arts.

Also, you may want to bookmark it and fool around with it yourself on occasion. Colorful blobs singing vowel sounds operatically has a soothing, therapeutic quality.

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

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Hassle-Free Refunds And Disney Pays Ticketing Fees? We Could Get Used To This

May 11, 2021

by:

Joe Patti

So it appears Howard Sherman gets first mention a second day in a row on my blog (not that he doesn’t deserve it). He called attention to the fact the production The Lion King on Broadway was not only offering free refunds and exchanges on ticket purchases, but Disney would be picking up the dreaded Ticketmaster service fees. Apparently Disney is doing the same for Aladdin through August 7, 2022

Positive steps from Disney, as seen on The Lion King website. pic.twitter.com/JZQLYYVtt0

— Howard Sherman (@HESherman) May 11, 2021

I actually went online to price tickets to see what they were charging and at the end of September I found third row orchestra seats for The Lion King at $125 which didn’t seem too bad. Though I don’t know what they were selling for in February 2020.

I was so amazed at this, I wondered to my co-workers if this might not turn into an industry trend that the public came to expect. I hadn’t thought to check if other shows were doing the same thing until I saw a tweet by journalist/critic Jonathan Mandell linking to the refund/exchange policy which applies to all Broadway theaters owned by the Nederlander Organization., including the Minskoff Theatre where Lion King is showing. I didn’t see any expiration date on this offer.

The Shubert Organization which owns the Telecharge ticketing service as well as some Broadway houses is offering free refunds and exchanges through January 17, 2022.

I didn’t see anything about refunds and exchanges on the Jujamcyn Theaters website, the company that owns a number of other Broadway Theaters. But it should be noted they also didn’t have tickets for any of their shows on sale either.

Getting back to the question of whether waiving ticket service fees might become a thing, this is something my staff and I have been discussing for a few years now. (Truth be told, the staffs of different theaters at which I have worked have been talking about it for about 10-15 years now.)

We have been trending toward including the fees in the advertised price of the tickets, however many of those who rent our venue have wanted it added on top at check out. Because it is different from the usual experience it occasionally elicits a “hey wait a minute…” response from some of our more frequent attendees.

You have to wonder if people come to see this as a normal experience based on their Broadway experience, will there be pressure to continue the practice indefinitely?

Of course, this doesn’t even mention the free, no questions asked exchange policy. There are restrictions as to number of times you can request an exchange and people who buy tickets from resale market or 3rd parties are probably going to have issues if their name and contact information aren’t associated with the tickets. But expectations may shift in toward hassle-free refunds, especially if the threat of Covid continues to loom in the background generally for some years to come.

Audience Relations, Pricing

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