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Unfulfilled Calls To Action

June 8, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

You Got My Hopes Up!
I received an email through my blog Friday about an audience study that has recently been completed. I was elated because generally these emails, which are essentially press releases, are on topics I have no real interest in writing about. Many are on show openings and I don’t really cover those sort of things. Unless there is some experimental marketing initiative involved, I am not terribly interested. But finally, here was something I was eager to write on. I followed the link provided and….Nothing. I followed the other link to the research organization that did the study….nothing again. I decided to wait until today and try again thinking the press people may have gotten ahead of things a little. It is now a couple hours after quitting time in both organizations’ time zones and the promised reports are still not up.

Answering A Call To Action
This goes to illustrate one of the basic tenets of advertising and promotion–Don’t issue a call to action without providing your target group an ability to act. If you have an ad for a performance saying tickets on sale now, you better have a way for people to buy tickets available or you risk losing your credibility. This can be difficult if you are doing broadcast advertising and the radio or television station is giving you free air time on an “as available” basis. If you are going to have an ad running at 6 am, you may catch a good number of people during their morning commute–including your ticket office staff who haven’t gotten in to the office yet. If you can’t provide a web address to purchase tickets at, you can at least make sure to append your ticket office number with the office hours. Technology has increased the number of hours people expect to engage in transactions so the least you can do is be specific about the hours they can actually expect to contact your organization.

In any case, I am disappointed the announcement of this report preceded its actual release by so much time. I am motivated to read it so I am likely to return to the page on a couple more occasions. Others for whom the information might be useful, like arts leaders, may move on to other things and never revisit the link. Thus a valuable opportunity is lost in a sector where a large percentage of leaders do not keep abreast of the latest literature.

Cart’s Before The Horse And Speeding Away
I thought about this issue over the weekend. While I realized that as a tool, the press release was poorly used, I also recognized that technology induced expectations are outstripping our ability to provide our constituencies with the ability to act. I have recently decided to use Twitter to support event promotion efforts at our theatre. In keeping with my philosophy of not adopting the newest technological trends as they emerge, I only decided to use Twitter when I felt it was a good tool to accomplish a goal I had and knew the story I wanted it to create for our organization. But that is a subject of another entry.

Because we really don’t have a subscriber base to speak of, a formal season announcement really isn’t important. I started posting on Twitter every time we signed a contract with an artist figuring the little informal announcements of our season had the value of putting our followers in the know early on. The tweets also serve as the first of many reminders about our season that I want entering people’s subconscious. The problem is, due to myriad factors ranging from end of fiscal year wrap up, summer vacations and general logistics, we aren’t able to make the tickets available at the moment.

Only The Freshest Tweets, Please
We don’t have a lot of people following our Twitter feed right now because it is new and I haven’t made its existence widely known while I experiment and evaluate it’s use. I don’t think I am losing a lot of sales, especially given people’s propensity of waiting until the last moment to buy tickets. But what about this time next year? Every ticket sold is important these days. If I can’t figure out an alternative and get people on board, by this time next year I could be announcing performances I am not prepared to sell tickets for. Sure, I could wait and post about them when I am ready to sell tickets, but Twitter is all about immediacy–“What are you doing right now?” Months old news is stale and moldy.

Even if I could make delayed updates work without losing any credibility, the way things are moving, that option may not be viable with the next generation of technology.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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“Don’t Let Them Use Your Passion Against You”

June 3, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

I always enjoy reading Adam Thurman’s work on Mission Paradox. Recently he posted “An Open Letter to Arts Administrators.” As an arts administrator, I felt obligated to disseminate it a bit. It contains advice that, even if you have heard it before, bears hearing again to remind you of a few things. (It’s also mirrored on Arts Blog. You may find the comments there worth reading.)

The section that particularly resonated with me was:

3. Don’t let them use your passion against you. Consider this:

Imagine you were a lawyer. What if I told you that there were some law firms (not all, but absolutely some) that didn’t get a damn about their employees? What if I told you that some firms were designed to bring in people and get as much out of them as possible before they burned out?

Would you believe me?

Of course you would. Hell, because it’s the legal profession you would expect such behavior.

Here’s da rub:

Some arts organizations are the exact same way.

Just because the end product is art and not a legal brief doesn’t mean the place automatically values their employees. Just because the place is a non-profit doesn’t automatically make it a nice place to work.

But here’s the really messed up part. At some of those arts orgs, if you complain that the hours are unreasonable, or the pay is low, or your input isn’t valued . . . they imply that your commitment to the “cause” is low. They convince you that if you really were passionate about your work, you would put up with the sub par conditions.

Don’t fall for it. It’s a trap. Remember point 1, it doesn’t have to be like that . . . you deserve better.

Been there and done that. I am ashamed to say that I am pretty sure I tacitly supported the “your commitment to the ’cause’ is low” message against other people in at least one place I worked even as I resented working under those conditions. I imagine I enjoyed the approval of my willingness to suffer for the cause and in the absence of any real remuneration, sought more praise by pressuring other people to toe the line. Though I have also declined contract renewals in places with poor work environments, too.

I was encouraged by the memory of two studies I read and blogged on last year, one by Building Movement and another commissioned by the Myer Foundation which showed that the new generation of leaders seek a greater balance between work and personal life and aren’t buying the idea that suffering is proportional to commitment.

What may be the downside for many non-profit organizations is that the leadership, recalling that they sacrificed and brought the company into being by force of will, are reluctant to groom these new leaders because of a perceived lack of commitment on the would-be protege’s part. One desirable benefit can be that the replacement won’t perpetuate a stressful environment. A board expecting the miracles of the last executive director might not make that easy.

Leadership, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts

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Waxing Philosophical With Donald Duck

June 2, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

Apparently Donald Duck is to German philosophy and culture what Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes was to classical music. According to a Wall Street Journal piece, Donald Duck comic sell close to 250,000 copies a week in Germany. A monthly Donald Duck special sells 40,000 copies primarily to adults. Where Carl Stalling injected classical music into Bugs Bunny cartoons, Erika Fuchs spent over 50 years injecting German literature and philosophy into her German translations of the Disney icon. (my emphasis)

Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.”

One of my first blog entries was about using comic books to promote the value of the arts. I am thinking that may still be a good idea given the influence Fuchs and Stallings works have had in making great works familiar and accessible to audiences. Americans for the Arts seems to have already picked up on that. Their last round of “Arts, Ask for More” television commercials featured characters from Disney’s Little Eisensteins.

Some of my earliest introductions to classics of literature were Classics Illustrated. I also remember reading religious comic books about Bible stories and Johnny Cash’s fall and return from grace. While waiting for the bus in a library during the winter, I read up on the life of Crispus Attucks and Harriet Tubman. I am sure interest and understanding could be generated in Shakespeare, Moliere, Bach, Mozart, Ansel Adams and Dada if someone did a good job of it.

Anyone with a visual arts background want to apply for an NEA grant? (Of course, nice cartoon videos to post on YouTube might be cool so actors and musicians are needed, too!)

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Art and Crime Bonus Entry

June 1, 2009

by:

Joe Patti

Speaking of the intersection of crime and the arts, Pacific Business News reports that the already cash strapped Honolulu Symphony suffered a break in this weekend. Fortunately, there wasn’t a lot of damage and very little was stolen.

Jackson said Honolulu Police Department officers described the break-in as a typical “cash grab.”

“There was a ransacking of papers and that kind of thing, but only an undisclosed small amount of money was taken — no equipment or computers,” she said.

Okay guys, do you read the newspapers? You go in to business that hasn’t paid it’s employees in nearly 12 weeks trying to find money?

State of the Arts

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