Amuse Bouche Fund Drives

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?

They Call Me…The Stabilizer

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

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

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.

Drop And Give Me A Sonnet

Recently, (though it could have been 6 months ago the way time flies for me) Howard Sherman pointed back to a Huffington Post entry he did a few years ago about how the theater community looks derisively upon community theater.

I don’t know that this will ever change. But I recently got to thinking in the context of the Pro-Am trend where people are making greater efforts to hone their skills and knowledge, should community theaters be pushed to do and expect more to serve the needs of Pro-Ams and improve their own proficiencies?

Even though this proposal may see funding diverted away from larger established organizations (which has actually been suggested often in any case), in the long term it may benefit the arts in general.

Now that I am back living in a rural setting, I drive past volunteer firehouses regularly. It got me to thinking, not only are these firemen volunteering to run into burning buildings, they have to undergo 50-100 hours of training, refresher training, maintain good physical condition and show up to a certain percentage of calls to qualify for the privilege of risking their lives.

Not to mention mundane maintenance, housekeeping and fund raising duties.

I started wondering if maybe there needed to be a bit of a cultural shift for community theater groups toward requiring people to take classes and training in order to participate. I know there are many organizations that are pretty substantial and offer classes, but most come together on a project by project basis and don’t engage in a larger education effort.

Those who work backstage have the best chance of gaining additional skills because they are often being taught by people with some sort of construction background. Still, often novices are integrated into the effort without much safety training in advance. And they can be limited to only learning the techniques the most experienced person knows if there isn’t any effort to bring in outside experts.

I think actors might suffer most if they are only involved on per project basis. They gain the experience of performing and can certainly advance. But since the director is responsible for guiding many people, there is really no opportunity to instruct actors about techniques and the process of experimenting and exploring one’s options.

Having classes can enhance the value of the organization overall. Teaching is an effective path to learning so even if the group handles the classes entirely internally, they end up a little better off than when they started.

Bringing in guest teachers for seminars, whether it is a person from the community theatre the next county over, a professor at the local college or a designer from the big city, is even more ideal. (And maybe the experience will cut down on the derision a little.)

Now you may think it an awful idea to require people to attend classes if they want to participate in a performance because it puts up a barrier to entry at a time when the arts are trying to be welcoming to all.

But I wonder if a lack of this sort of rigor has resulted in the attitude we are seeing today that artists shouldn’t want to be paid because they engaged in a fun activity. Taking a class won’t necessarily guarantee a person will become any more skillful, but they will be more aware of the dedication and investment involved.

I don’t think having a requirement that if you want to participate, you should want to get better, is that onerous.

The classes don’t even necessarily need to be separate from the rehearsal process, though only having them as part of the process is actually more elitist because the training is limited to those who are cast.

When you think about it, when sports teams practice they don’t arrive at the field and move to their assigned roles. There are a lot of drills that focus on the fundamental skills of the game, improving physical condition and endurance. Players are asked to perform outside of their accustomed roles. There are clinics occasionally given by skilled practitioners.

This happens at all levels of play because the expectation is that you will strive to be a better player at the end of the season than you were when you came to the first training session. People who aren’t willing to make that commitment get cut from the team.

So that is why I wonder what sort of results would we see if funding and influence were directed toward creating an environment where honing skills became the norm.

I have been thinking for 20 minutes of a way to say it without it sounding condescending without much luck, but this bringing influence to bear would of necessity include a culture shift which saw “professional groups” partnering with community groups to provide training and assistance. As I said, I don’t think there will ever be a time when community theater will be viewed with complete parity by professional groups, but the gap will never close without increased interaction.