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You Wanna Be Where Everybody Knows Your Name

June 10, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

As I have stated before, I grew up in a rural setting in upstate NY and just before I started blogging, I worked at a rural arts and music center. But now that I am paying much closer attention to the lives of arts organizations and the communities they try to serve, moving to work in a rural environment has given much greater insight into the impetus behind Scott Walters’ efforts on behalf of rural arts organizations that lead to the creation of the Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education (CRADLE).

There may not be the financial support or audience attendance in numbers that larger cities and communities enjoy, but the impact of arts programs and opportunities can be much more immediate and apparent. This is not to say there isn’t just as profound an impact in other places, just that the feedback loop is that much smaller. Because everyone knows everyone, even if a person doesn’t make a comment about their experience to you, you are likely to hear about it from someone else.

Case in point, I met an administrator at the university early one Friday, later that day he got his haircut. That night his hairdresser, whom I had never met before, said he made positive remarks about me.

What has been interesting to me is to have confirmation of many of the benefits we in the arts claim we bring to the community.

People from the local hospital told me my arts center is important to the health of their organization because they generally don’t have problems attracting doctors to the area, but after a year or two pressure from their families often sees them moving away due to lack of activities. The better a job I do, the better it is for them.

The community board which helps us fund the bulk of our presenting was invited to have a fund raiser at a local wine store. The board had a band playing and the store owner had wine and beer tasting. The community board made quite a respectable amount of money that night so they were happy.

The owner of the shop said the arts people attracted the type of clientele he was looking for. They came, they chatted, they browsed, they bought. He was happy. I think everyone hopes there will be another opportunity to do that again.

Yeah, you can say this only reinforces the stereotype of arts people as effete wine drinkers, but you can grab a six pack of Bud in the supermarket. This business owner is focused on attracting people who drink wine and craft brewed beer and smoke cigars and the arts board helped to deliver them.

On the other hand, there were many people to just stopped in to grab a six pack and bottles who picked up performance season information and bought raffle tickets so the store potentially delivered new audiences to the theatre.

The last incident falls into the “big impact/change of life” category. This past weekend the local arts council had its first ever community arts awards event in my theatre. It was actually pretty well put together for a first attempt. Each award was interspersed with performances by youth performers.

I was surprised to learn that not only does this small town have an organization that teaches kids to do aerial acrobatics, but that the school is under the umbrella of the local museum. I am going to have to check it out. It may give Nina Simon and her Museum 2.0 a run for her money.

Probably the most conspicuous example of the arts impacting lives was the honoree who had been teaching piano for 60 years and so had a legion of people, from music teachers to kids attending top music conservatories, speaking her praises.

Among the other honorees were the Irish owners of the local pub who declared “what good is a pub without stories and music to fill it?” and the owners of a plumbing supply house who between them have sat on the boards of just about every arts organization in town.

There was a visual artist who had moved from Seattle and was instrumental in the founding of the local visual arts center. Known to be something of a recluse, the awards organizers went to his studio and made a really nice video of him talking about his art and his process. I wondered if the reception the film received from the audience emboldened him a little because he spoke a fair bit when he went on stage to accept the award.

Granted, there is a big fish in a small pond element to all of this. In terms of reaching numbers, a performer doing a show in Tampa impacts the lives of more people in one night than one of those honorees might in a year. Many times that is what foundations and granting organization are looking for.

But as I sat there Saturday night, I couldn’t help but think that what was happening in this town was what many arts organizations dreamed of. The results of an interaction with the arts, both positive and negative, and the bonds it creates between people are so easy to observe.

Person A and Person B may leave an event and separately speak about their experience with Persons C and D, respectively. No only is there a high chance that C and D will meet and speak about the experience related to them second hand, there is a good chance C will meet B, another person who actually attended, and get their view on the experience. All four then share a common bond around the experience.

Unless all four travel in the same circles, what is the chance that this interaction will happen often in a city of 300,000? Here it happens many times every day.

Obviously, there is a downside to this lack of anonymity. I was both amused and a little uneasy about having the an opinion of me by someone I just met come back to me via their hair stylist at a wine tasting that same afternoon. I am certainly going to have to step carefully at times.

But it also strikes me that for those willing to listen, it can be very easy to collect a fairly accurate view of the community without the need to resort to a lot of guess work.

Speaking of drinking wine and beer, this entry title brought to you by Cheers, of course

Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Amuse Bouche Fund Drives

June 5, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

So even though I am in a fairly rural area of Ohio, I have discovered that I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to being able to access public radio broadcast streams. There are two from Ohio universities, one from West Virginia and one from Northern Kentucky. Despite the mountains I can hear each of them fairly clearly since there are repeaters located within a few miles of my workplace.

I tell you this provide some context when I say I heard a fund raising approach I liked but can’t for the life of me figure out which station I heard it on. I have visited each station’s website and Facebook page and still don’t know whom to credit.

In any case, one of these intrepid stations announced that now that the summer had started, they would begin “One Shot Wednesday” fund drives. Instead of having a week long fund drive, they were just going to make appeals on Wednesdays throughout the summer.

I thought this was a great idea because many people will tune away for the week of a fund drive and come back when it is over. Having it once a week repeatedly introduces itself into a person’s habitual listening. Since the disruption is contained to a small period of time, people may tune away for a day, come back again and then be reminded the next Wednesday around.

The station can better retain their listeners and expose them more frequently to the message that the station needs their support before a person chooses to tune away. And who knows, people may stay with the station throughout the Wednesday since the appeal breaks are short relative to other fund drives.

I have been trying to think of what the performing arts organization version of this might look like. Attending performances is not part of most people’s daily routine so there is no week long fund drive people might seek to avoid.

Curtailing the curtain speech appeal might make many audience members happy, but what more palatable alternative do you replace it with?

I know the board of my organization enjoyed calling people up to ask them about how much they liked the past season. The effort was well received all around. It would be possible to insert an appeal at that time, but if done poorly it would probably be a negative experience for all involved.

You might try having board members or volunteers chat casually with people in the lobby before the show and introduce the idea of supporting the organization. There is more of an opportunity to monitor that the process is done well and give notes on improving in the future. The only problem might be if the lobby is too small or if most of the audience rushes in at the last moment leaving little opportunity to speak with them.

I think the real question at the base of all this is- what are we doing now that makes people uncomfortable and what can we do to make it less so. That is what the one radio station did. They took the week long fund drive that everyone groans about and parceled it up across the summer.

I have no idea how successful it is, but from the way they spoke, they have done this before. Once I find the station again, I will try to do some further investigation.

But what ideas do you have to break up the often awkward process of fundraising into something more digestible?

Audience Relations, Boards, Fundraising, General Musings

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They Call Me…The Stabilizer

June 4, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

A couple weeks ago a job listing from Springboard for the Arts’ job board came across my Twitter feed simply listed as “Stabilizer.”

Intrigued, I followed the link and discovered that it was for the job as Climb Theatre’s accountant.

As you might imagine, many of the staff at Climb Theatre have non-traditional titles. While I wonder if “Leader of the Pack…Vroom, Vroom” might be a little too whimsical for the executive director and question how confident people might be at giving money to an organization with a “Gambling Manager” on the executive staff (Managing Director? CFO? Artistic Director?), I immediately liked most of the connotations associated with “Stabilizer.”

The only negative association I had was that the organization wasn’t fiscally stable and they were looking for someone to save them. But in the job description they say, “Happily, CLIMB’s financial position is quite solid and cash flow is not an issue.”

What I liked about the title was that it implied if you took the job, you would be an important part of the organization’s life rather than a functionary in the back office. The job description says that too, but that was the first impression I got directly from the job title.

The job title also hints that there is an attempt to make the job environment an interesting and enjoyable place to work.

Changing job title terminology may seem like an empty gesture in place of real change, and granted it often is intended to manipulate. However, there can be a difference in the way you feel about yourself as a result.

Would you rather be a sales clerk or sales associate even though the job is exactly the same? As a customer, do you think you would treat one a little differently than the other? The difference may be small, but they can accumulate over time to result in better esteem.

I am not advising a mass change of titles to make people feel better about their jobs. In performing arts organizations especially the performers and technicians get recognition and praise for executing a performance well. Directors, both administrative and artistic, get interviewed and asked to speak before crowds.

The back office people may know they are doing work that is important to the organization, but can easily feel they are interchangeable with any other accountant, human resource officer or receptionist in an organization where so many are recognized for specific and often unique contributions.

In small non-profits where rewards of any sort are especially hard to come by, it can be especially important to make everyone feel like they are an integral part of the staff who would be difficult to replace.

Crazy titles will certainly come across as disingenuous if it isn’t part of the existing organizational culture. Besides, something unique to your own business culture will go further in making someone feel they are unique.

And by the way, if the job sounds appealing to you, you have until June 10 to apply

Leadership, Management Philosophy, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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Info You Can Use: Let’s Play Find The Exploitative Clause

June 3, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

About a month ago, I wrote about webcomic Penny Arcade’s online reality competition Strip Search which is aimed at finding the next great webcomic artist. (By the way, both the comic and the show are often NSFW)

I had mentioned that it seemed like the aim of the show was to use the Penny Arcade fame to help advance the careers of these artists.

I think their most recent episode of Strip Search provides a model for teaching arts students of all stripes about contracts.

Penny Arcade has famously signed away the rights to their intellectual property at least twice and only regained it by dumb luck. This is a topic near and dear to their hearts. I have seen the creators, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, and their business manager, Robert Khoo, talk about it in interviews and convention panels a number of times.

Khoo is probably the only business manager in the gaming world to achieve hero status for saving Krahulik and Holkins from themselves and helping to grow their company.

In this episode they have the contestants read through an exploitative contract and then go in and talk to Khoo about what they want struck or changed. Khoo basically plays a bumbling idiot in the negotiations because the whole point was to get the artists to evaluate the contract rather than necessarily deal with a combative negotiation environment.

Also, because it was a contest they only had a set amount of time to evaluate the contract and conduct negotiations. In real life situations everybody acknowledges the importance of investing all due care reading contracts and consulting with an attorney.

After the contestants spoke with him, Khoo mentioned that there were two basic approaches to the contract they could have taken. Either decided what their core values were and question whether the contract achieved or impeded those values or go through line by line analyzing each condition (or obviously a hybrid of both).

Because a classroom setting is similar to the contest environment with only a limited time to evaluate a contract (even if a student gets to take it home over the weekend), having a similar opportunity to look at a contract with many elements not in the artist or organization’s best interest and then roleplay a negotiation could certainly be helpful to arts students.

One of the things I never thought I got enough of in grad school was contracts. We got to look at a few contracts to see the sort of things that went into them and I got to read all the Actors Equity handbooks I wanted.

There really wasn’t a discussion about the type of things you would want to change because it wasn’t in your best interest.

Many people may be under the impression that a contract is something that you need to comply with as best you can if you want to do business with them at all. I think there is a basic assumption that the other party is acting in completely good faith and little acknowledgment of the possibility that the other guy may be trying to fleece you to the fullest extent possible.

Most people acting good faith with a reasonable bias toward themselves, but you had still better read the contract every single time it gets set before you.

Art(ist) Education, Business Models, Info You Can Use, Legal Topics

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