Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice. I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/) My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA. Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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Are We Being Nudged Toward Partnerships

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I have started to wonder if there is going to be an increased emphasis on partnerships and perhaps even mergers in the non-profit arts. I often read about mergers by non-profits outside of the arts. Although the presenters consortium upon whose board I sit is in the middle of conducting a merger with a sister organization, I don’t hear about arts organizations doing it that often.

However, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation has recently announced a new granting program, Southern Exposure, which will support the presentation of artists from Central and South America. (By the way, you don’t have to be located in the Mid-Atlantic States to apply.)

Most of the program isn’t outside of what you might expect of such a program except that it will “support projects that are developed collaboratively by presenter consortia based in the United States and its territories and ensure that engagements take place in at least three different cities or towns.”

The Western State Arts Federation (WESTAF) used to have a similar program termed “hub grants” as part of its TourWest grant program up until a few years ago. From what I have heard (which may not be accurate) they discontinued it because of lack of wide spread participation. (We actually participated in a couple years.) But now that times are financially a little tighter, will arts organizations on a national level be more amenable to partnering?

But really, back to my original question of whether a trend might be developing in which organizations are encouraged to partner. One cause of my speculation is that this summer I saw a grant program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities for community colleges that required recipients to involve up to 12 other campuses.

Looking at the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation website, there are signs that they might be going in the direction of encouraging arts organizations to partner more often.

“Over the last five years, MAAF has built a core of program initiatives designed to address specific issues of regional arts support. The work of the Foundation has been focused on:
[…]
-Developing an infrastructure for touring and presenting
-Making connections beyond the region
-Developing partnerships
-Strengthening existing networks
[…]
-Exploring sub-regional initiatives and collaborations with subsets of MAAF state members
[…]
“

Now granted, the Southern Exposure initiative might have just fit their pre-existing efforts. Given that it does fit into their plans, if Southern Exposure proves successful, they may start to encourage similar collaborations more often.

Hawaii has an active presenting consortia (as do our brethren in the 49th, Alaska) so we are thrilled because this program plays to our strength. Plus, there is a project involving a group from South America we have been kicking around for a couple years. I will be the first to admit, this sort of cooperation isn’t easy to arrange and manage. It helps to have a little incentive. It would be great to see other groups adopt this practice. (Especially if you want to bring me out to consult with you! 😉 )

Remember, You Have A Date With Us

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Okay, a topic seemed to beg me to write on it today– Keeping connected with those who purchase tickets in advance. There were a couple of incidents today that demanded I give some thought to the topic. We always bemoan the fact that so few people purchase tickets more than a few days, if not a few hours/minutes, in advance of a performance. Question is- are you doing anything to show your appreciation and concern for those who actually do purchase in advance.

Recently, I have been thinking about doing a better job of serving those who purchase tickets in advance. This was instigated by an unusually large number of will call tickets going unclaimed last year. Most years, we might have one or two groups of tickets that went unclaimed every other performance or so. Last year, there were at least one group of tickets unclaimed every show and near the end of the season, there were 4-5 groups.

Upon review, we generally discovered that the tickets had been order months in advance and surmised that the people may have forgotten they ordered the tickets and hadn’t set up a reminder. Most of these were also tickets that had been ordered over the internet and the person didn’t request mailing. Not having physical tickets laying around the house, it could easily be a case of out of sight and out of mind. I strongly suspect even those who do have their tickets mailed may end up burying them in a drawer or dressers over the course of months and also forget to attend.

I have been considering changing our approach when asking for people’s email addresses so that we can take a more active role in reminding them about the upcoming show. Currently, we ask if people want to be on our email list for our monthly news letter. A fair number of people decline to provide it. I think we can honestly move to saying we want it so we can send people reminders as we see so many people forgetting to attend. Those who purchase over the internet are already getting a reminder in the form of our newsletter a week or so before a performance, but they may not be opening the email and need a subject line indicating it is a reminder that they purchased tickets.

What has made this topic beg me to cover it today is that the director of another arts organization we are partnering with on two performances this Spring contacted me about emailing reminders for those events. So I know I am not the only one thinking this way.

And… today I swung by to pick up my will call tickets for the Hawaii International Film Festival. While I was there, I purchased an additional ticket for a movie two Saturdays hence. Even though I have the ticket in hand, I received an email when I got home thanking me for purchasing the ticket and noting that it had been added to my online itinerary.

I thought this was a good customer service touch. But it also struck me as a possible solution for a problem we face at the theatre. Our customers can actually go online through our system and review their ticket orders as well. The problem we face is that people often create new accounts every time they make a purchase. When people call to ask about their tickets, we often have to look under 3-4 different account numbers to find their orders. Most of the time the account with the highest number has the most recent activity, but that isn’t always the case if they have remembered old usernames and passwords.

What I am thinking is that regardless of whether a person makes a purchase on or offline, we should arrange to have a follow up message sent that emphasizes using their account to review their itinerary. If people think about their account in the context of assisting them with arranging their lives and are getting more frequent reminders about what their account number is, they may use the same account more consistently.

Now to talk to the powers that be about whether we can activate something like that…

Possible To Cultivate New Funders Motivated By New Mandates?

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You may have read about the report the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference noting the disparity in foundation support for arts organizations.

According to the report,

“the largest arts organizations with budgets exceeding $5 million represent only 2 percent of the nonprofit arts and culture sector. Yet those groups received 55 percent of foundation funding for the arts in 2009. Only 10 percent of arts funding was explicitly meant to benefit underserved populations.”

Most of this money is going to large organizations patronized by a shrinking wealthy white audience during a time when people are orienting toward community based arts groups.

As I read this, I recalled Scott Walters’ discussion of the difficulty his small arts organization had meeting the deadlines for the Our Town grant process and the questions he raised about the appropriateness of the criteria being employed. I suspect there is something of a feedback loop inherent to foundation grant programs in that they are structured to the needs of the organizations they serve and those they serve tend to be organizations with the resources to meet the criteria of the grant programs.

Foundations may have to expand the number and types of organizations they serve, as the report suggests. But I strongly suspect they will have to also institute changes in their process to better accommodate those with fewer resources than those with whom they currently deal. Otherwise, they probably won’t have very strong participation from a larger, more diverse group.

Of course, most foundations, whether they have an arts focus or not, were set up to serve the interests of their founders. It appears that this has been rather successful. The greatest success in securing support for under served populations may end up being best realized by cultivating/encouraging individuals and groups from those communities to develop their own funding structures whether it is foundations or cultural hui.

The article mentions that current funding practices originated in an 19th century need to prove America was on par with Europe culturally. That need has passed and a new set of practices based on different motivations are required. Existing foundations may end up doing a lot of good after shifting their priorities, but in attempting to overlay new priorities on their founding purpose they may never be as effective as organizations that structure their approach around a mandate to support the arts and culture of under serve communities from day one.

Cultivating a sustained culture of support in areas where it is not currently practiced won’t happen overnight, but aided by technology it may not require 100 years to take root either.

Are Gov’t Caps of Non-Profit Salaries On Horizon?

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The Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) notes that the governor of New Jersey has placed salary caps on non profit executives who do business with the state and the governor of New York has started a non profit salary review.

While governments have a right to be concerned over non profit scandals and society might properly have an expectation that a good portion of the funding going to a non-profit organization will be directed toward serving the appropriate segments of the community, there is a inequality in the expectations. In an article linked in the SSIR blog, Doug Sauer, CEO of the New York Council of Nonprofits notes,

““The State government contracts to buy services from nonprofits just as it contracts with the for-profit sector; except that the nonprofit is often expected to unfairly perform at below the actual cost of doing business. Perhaps it is also time to order an extensive review of the executive compensation of ‘taxpayer supported for-profit businesses’.”

Additionally, John Brothers notes in the SSIR blog post that most non-profit executives don’t even approach the $141,000 cap that NJ is imposing.

“According to the 2010 Guidestar Compensation Study, human service executives earned a median annual pay of just over $122K. What is more interesting is that of the over 3,000 nonprofits surveyed, just 0.004% earned more than a million dollars and only 4 percent earned more than $500K, with sizes of organizations peaking in the multi-billions. I would say that this is hardly a national epidemic of nonprofit jet-setting executives.”

You may look at these stories and think that they only apply to social/human service organizations. However, Gov. Cuomo of NY doesn’t make as clear a distinction regarding those organizations that NJ does. While the initial round of inquiry letters went to social service organizations, the fact the NY governor said all non-profits receiving state funding will be reviewed raised the question,

“Does this mean that the task force will examine compensation at hospitals and other health care providers – where CEO salaries of $1 million or more are not uncommon? What about major arts organizations and institutions of higher learning where that is also true?”

This move to evaluate non-profit salaries provides a potential avenue for those who oppose the funding of arts and culture. Lacking the ability to accuse artistic content of being obscene, they can seek to limit funding to organizations whose compensation is perceived to be excessive.

Fortunately, there are a number of objective measures and loads of data one can employ to prove compensation is fair. This situation underscores the need for non-profits to become better organized to advocate for themselves before it comes to that though.