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What Should I Talk About?

July 24, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

Now that I am back living in the lower 48, I have begun thinking a little more seriously about possibly presenting at some of the national or regional conferences. I had actually thought about it a bit when I was in Hawaii, but distance limited my opportunity to attend many conferences and hampered collaboration opportunities.

That gave me the idea to ask my readers–what do you think I should do a session on? This is actually a double duty question because I am also essentially asking what topic would you want me to write blog entries on to.

I understand that many people can’t attend conferences so I would ultimately be planning on posting whatever I talked about on the blog. And readers might see bits and pieces of what I was working on emerge on the blog as my research brought me in contact with new information.

Rather than to ask what topics I should blog about, I wanted to frame in the context of what do you want to know about so badly that you would seriously consider undertaking the expense of travel, hotel, food, etc to attend a conference where someone was talking about it?

I also suspect I take for granted people’s familiarity with many topics I come across in my daily reading. The reality might be that people are desperate for information. So even if I didn’t do a conference session on it, your feedback will help determine topics I blog about in the future.

Just as examples of conferences sessions to get you started, Arts Presenters is looking for session proposals on Catalyzing Communities around the arts, Making the Case for the Arts and The Art of Transition. That last one seems like it could encompass everything from leadership transition to changing your organizational approach to programming and marketing.

I just found out that I probably will be attending APAP conference this year. Though I am not sure I would get a proposal together by the deadline next Thursday so I am not necessarily looking for a topic that would fit that conference.

I figure I can either lead or contribute to a conversation about:

-contract negotiations, submitting offers, reading contract riders
-closely partnering with multiple arts presenters to organize a tour as a consortium
-partnering with artists to create performance works reflecting stories/values of indigenous cultures

Of course, I can talk about many other topics like marketing, social media, presenting in higher education environments (and bureaucracies) but I feel like a lot of other conference presenters can and have done so before. Though I am certainly happy to produce blog posts on these topics

I feel what I have listed are areas in which I have more specialized knowledge than many others. It is also likely that I am forgetting some too. If there is a subject area which you have come to value my expertise, let me know.

Thanks.

Art(ist) Education, Arts in an Age of Technology, Legal Topics, Management Philosophy, Marketing/PR, New Initiatives, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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We Have Ways Of Making Your Website Talk

July 23, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

I don’t know if I have every mentioned it here, but if you haven’t discovered the blog Google for Nonprofits, it is pretty handy for getting tips on using any of the many products Google has created.

Last week, they had an entry about using the Goals feature of Google Analytics. I have long been aware of the feature, but never used it because I always figured I can call up the data for a time period and cross reference the data a bunch of different ways as the questions about visitor segmentation occurs to me.

However, there might be times when you want to achieve a certain goal like raising awareness about a specific show in a certain area within a period of time or increasing traffic from social media sources and you want to avoid the trouble of setting the filters up every day. Setting a goal tracks all that for you, tells you how close you are to achieving the goal and tells you when the goal is met.

The example they use is for volunteering:

“Goals are completed activities that happen on your site, like someone filling out and submitting a volunteer sign-up form. We can easily translate the key performance indicators (KPIs) we designed in our measurement framework into Analytics Goals. For example if your KPI is volunteer sign-ups, you could track it by setting a goal of how many people reach the volunteer sign up confirmation page.”

And they also allow you to track segments of your website visitors.

For example, you could use a custom dimension to segment your website visitors into groups like volunteers and donors. When someone submits a donation your custom dimension will indicate the user is a donor. Or when someone volunteers via your website, they’ll be identified as a volunteer. With that segmentation, we can gather specific data on our donors and volunteers which allows us to measure our KPIs

In regard to the segmentation tracking, I suspect its success depends on people not clearing their web browser cookies cache between visits in order to note their return during subsequent visits.

But if you have been wishing you could learn more about your visitors from your website, this blog is a good place to learn some tricks to making it talk.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use

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Stuff To Ponder: Subscriber Rush Tickets

July 22, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

Since I have started a new job I am in the process of evaluating every document, process and interaction my organization undertakes. One of those areas is customer service, of course.

For that reason, an article I came across via The Drucker Exchange is really resonating with me. In a blog post titled, The Dark Side of Customer Experience, Monique Reece opens with a joke we can probably all relate to.

The longer version is in the post, but basically a guy dies and is shown heaven and hell and given a choice between the two. On his visit to heaven, everything is sedate and lovely. Hell is a veritable Mardi Gras party. After the doors close on Hell, the guy tells St. Peter he chooses Hell. The doors open and it the scene is the stereotypical hellish landscape.

Upon wondering what happened to the party scene, the man receives the response “Well,” said St. Peter as the doors closed. “The first time you came to visit you were a prospect. Now you’re a customer.”

Reece cites some of my biggest pet peeves– the introductory rate that rewards new customers and makes the person who has been loyal for 10 years, enduring price increases, feel like an idiot for sticking around so long for no recognition or reward. As Reece notes, there is actually more of an incentive to separate your relationship and then renew it.

The performing arts version of this is giving cut rate discount tickets to last minute purchasers, suggesting a certain amount of foolishness on the part of those who planned and purchased ahead of time. Some arts organizations sell large amounts of rush tickets at rates lower than those of subscribers who have committed to many shows in advance.

It just occurred to me moments ago, why don’t performing arts organization offer Rush tickets exclusively to those who have already purchased two or more tickets?

This would have multiple benefits 1- It rewards people who committed in advance; 2- It turns those people into recruiters for your show when they invite their friends along; 3- It gets people you already have a relationship with paying closer attention to your emails or social media account that you are using to communicate this discount, providing an opportunity to get them excited and mention other shows.

My suspicion is that attending a show on a half price ticket thanks to two people who purchased weeks in advance is a better model of behavior than attending alongside two other people who also decided to attend because tickets were half price.

It probably also reinforces many elements of the advance purchasers’ self-image if they know their friends were only able to attend because they were stalwart supporters of the arts organization.

The only real problem I can see with this idea is reserved seating. Offering rush tickets in this way appeals heavily to a social element which is compromised if everyone can’t sit together.

Granted, it illustrates the appropriate outcome associated with paying half price on the day of a performance versus full price in advance. Still the emotional disappointment of not being able to sit next to ones guests could supplant the acknowledgement of this logical consequence.

General admission events are good to go though.

This is not the direction I intended to go in when I started this entry. I like this result better.

Audience Relations, Business Models, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR

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We’ll Pay You Twice As Much As The Last CEO (snicker)

July 17, 2013

by:

Joe Patti

Apropos to my post dealing with doing more with less earlier this week, last week Janet Brown, CEO & President of Grantmakers in the Arts wrote about the problems with non-profit CEOs forgoing pay.

She cites an example where the retiring CEO of a performing arts center had only accepted a nominal salary. The savings that represented meant the different between running a deficit. Now with the CEO retiring, they either needed to find someone else who was willing to do the job for free or find the money to pay someone for the job.

The performing arts center should have been booking the CEO’s non-salary as an in-kind contribution all these years, keeping the reality of the expense in the budget. This, of course, would have shown a loss for some years, which (I’m only guessing here) is probably not what the CEO or the Board wanted. So the cycle of under-capitalization continues.

Brown asserts that every organization should strive to be completely transparent financially, not only for the sake of those who inherit leadership positions, but also to retain the confidence of supporters.

Sound business practices are possible in nonprofits but, as I’ve stated before, this demands transparency and leadership that wants to do more than keep the doors open….Our investors in the nonprofit arts world are community members, governments, foundations and corporations who give money because they believe in our organizations, their missions and the good they are doing for our communities. These investors also deserve (and should demand) returns, which include the best artistic product possible and the strongest balance sheet good management can provide.

I guess the lesson here is not to pay your executive director as well as your interns, erm I mean, pay them both!

Boards, Business Models, Fundraising, Leadership

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