Goodwill Benefits Of The Arts

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In the course of this blog I have posted about great customer service experiences I have encountered. I have also mentioned some superlative performances to which I have been witness. Never before have I had occasion to discuss how a great performance has earned me extended good customer service.

Last winter we had a flamenco group perform in our theatre. We had a great audience and some really good outreach events, one of which earned us the commendation of a program officer at the state arts foundation. For this alone, I would be happy.

By some confluence of events, the group and the guest services manager at the hotel we use really hit it off. I am not sure what exactly happened. The group asked us to set aside tickets for about six of the hotel staff. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it isn’t completely rare. In fact, some times I have given comps to shows front desk people have wanted to see.

This time was different from the past. In the course of the group’s stay, the front desk and they really bonded. When the group returned to Spain, they sent the guest services manager a gift. When I met with the guest services manager last week to talk about our room needs for the coming season, she mentioned that she was planning to visit the flamenco group during a vacation to Europe.

As I write this, I almost feel ashamed to admit that I have benefited from this burgeoning relationship. I haven’t pressed any advantage, but the good will the guest services manager has felt has facilitated my operations since then.

Because of flight schedules, just about every group we had perform since last winter has arrived before noon and the check in time was 3:00. In the past we were told that the hotel would try to fit them in, but it was likely they would have to wander around for awhile until the rooms were ready. This past Winter and Spring we were told the first rooms available would be theirs. No one ended up having to wander around and kill time until the rooms were ready.

As a result, the artists were more settled and rested than in the past. They were able to arrive at the theatre at the appointed time and didn’t feel rushed to set up. I can’t say they performed any better than they would have had they been obliged to wait a few hours before they checked in. I do think they left having a more positive view of our organization than they might have.

They had no idea they were the beneficiary of the good will generated by those who preceded them. From the tenor of my meeting with the guest services manager, it is likely the benefits will be extended to artists in our next season as well. Hopefully none of them will cause things to sour.

To me this is one of the intangible benefits the arts bring to the community. If I was just another company bringing a lot of business to the hotel, they would certainly make an effort to ensure all our needs were met. I don’t know that they would be as personally invested in my organization if our entire relationship was based on commerce. How we might benefit from this is a lot harder to measure than economic or even intrinsic benefits. (Though accountants will try to figure it out for you.)

Late To The Confession

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I have only just gotten around to following up on my bookmark of John Killacky’s Regrets of A Former Arts Funder. If you hadn’t read it when it came out in late June, Killacky reflects on some of the practices he engaged in when he was a program officer at the San Francisco Foundation.

Most of his regrets focus on how he and other funders provided support to culturally specific organizations. Among the problems he identifies was the creation of a two tiered funding model that had different criteria and funding levels. It ultimately was not constructive for those organizations relegated to the second tier and tended to perpetuate and reward mediocrity on the first tier (or at least provide no incentive for taking chances). In fact, he also acknowledged, much as Scott Walters recently noted, that grant panels frequently employ evaluative criteria that punishes projects where success is not clearly assured.

I was intrigued by his suggestion that foundations adopt an approach more akin to that of venture capitalists (though not surprising given he worked near Silicon Valley, the VC capital of the nation)

“Maybe philanthropy should have taken a page from venture capitalists’ playbooks, investing more deeply at a significant level over a five- to eight-year time frame, as well as offering a range of non-cash, value-added assistance by sitting on boards, mentoring, and coaching of senior managers, in addition to artistic support. This is not hands-off, outsourced grantmaking. Focus on the triple bottom line and then get out!”

and later

When setting up these programs, I reminded the trustees that not all projects would come to fruition. For many venture capitalists, there is a rule of thumb regarding start-up investing. It suggests that on 1/3 of your investments you will lose all of your investment. On another 1/3 you may make or lose a little. The other 1/3 is where you make your money, and one or two is probably where the bulk of the return is. Unfortunately, this kind of risk-taking would seem foolhardy to funders.

I thought the second paragraph apropos to my posts of the last two days about admitting the arts experience can be disappointing.

One of the commenters to Killacky’s piece expressed concerns about the first paragraph I cited. The idea that foundation officers might come in to an organization that did not serve a traditional arts audience and tell them how they should be doing things seemed to strike the commenter as being even more detrimental than poorly funding the group.

This isn’t an unfounded concern. Venture capitalists often impose their own hand picked management teams on businesses in which they choose to invest and make demands about the way the company should be run. Depending on how it is handled, it either be a constructive or traumatic experience for the start-up that wooed VC support.

Foundations would presumably be entering a relationship with a fledgling arts organizations without the same sort of profit-driven motivation, but could still end up stifling the creative spark with too heavy handed an approach. The feeling that any attention is better than no attention being the stuff on which abusive relationships are made, arts organizations may bow to the demands of foundation officers, grateful that at least they can depend on their support over a number of years.

But obviously it can be a constructive situation for both entities if approached in a careful and deliberate manner. Being that intimately involved with an organization can give a foundation a much clearer picture about the needs and challenges faced by the sector they support than the sugar coated final reports they are getting and allow them to respond accordingly.

If foundations provide technical support and mentors over many years in the form of other working professionals rather than out of their own staff, the foundation can help arts organizations form support networks which will persist after their direct involvement ceases. As they share the fruits of their experience and own best practices, the mentors in turn can gain a deeper view of how different arts organizations operate than interactions at conferences and meetings can afford them.

Info You Can Use: Acknowledging The Arts Experience

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Welcome readers of You’ve Cott Mail and myriad other places. I appreciate your interest in the blog and yesterday’s entry about speaking more honestly about how an arts experience can occasionally be disappointing.

It is with some chagrin that I have discovered NEA chair Rocco Landesman talked about this very subject at the Chautauqua Institution about two weeks ago. One always likes to fancy they have stimulated lively discussion through the introduction of a timely subject. But of course, even I have made posts on the subject before so I can hardly expect to be the only one thinking about the subject.

If nothing else, the fact that Landesman has been speaking about it gives some indication that it is indeed timely and worth discussing. I have tagged this entry as part of my “Info You Can Use” series because Landesman mentions a number of ideas for better audience relations as well as noting some approaches that arts organizations have already put into practice.

“We might see an organization with an artistic director and a co-equal audience director. Rather than a manager of visitor services who reports to the director of external affairs who reports to a deputy director.

We might see fellowships for audience members…What if we complemented artist residencies with audience residencies, where we paid some audience members to attend exhibitions and performances? Or, better yet, what if arts organizations gave stipends to “audience fellows,” so that the fellows could go see whatever they wanted to see at other arts organizations?”

This last bit about encouraging audiences to see performances at other arts organizations isn’t as far fetched as it may initially sound. Back in 2006 the Marketing Director of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts made a comment on the blog about the organization’s plan to let patrons know about performances at other venues. Looking at their website, I can’t quite tell if they are still providing this information, but it looks like the marketing director is still there and hasn’t lost his job over the program.

More from Landesman: (my emphasis)

I visited the Seattle Art Museum, and they now offer “highly opinionated tours,” in which people paid by the museum walk through the galleries talking about the things they like, but also the things they don’t like. One of these docents led a tour in which he explained why Seattle’s Pollock isn’t really a very good Pollock at all.

We need to stop pretending that every single audience member needs to like every single thing we do.

Nick Hytner at the National in London, actually has his box office staff track subscribers’ likes, dislikes, and preferences, and has them e-mail the members and suggest some of the plays they way want to skip. I think acknowledging the viewers’ own tastes—in addition to curators’ and directors’ tastes—is absolutely key.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago put it extremely well. She said that arts professionals need to learn how to maintain their expertise, while relinquishing control. Madeleine will always have more expertise in contemporary art than I do, but I am still entitled to my own relationship with it, my own experience of it….”

Admittedly, some of these steps are a little bolder than we might be comfortable taking. This is info you canuse, but I make no claims about whether you will wantto use it. Certainly, one probably doesn’t have to adopt something as extreme as advising people not to attend a show. Just acknowledging that the arts experience can occasionally be disappointing in the course of normal conversation may earn good will through its simple earnestness.

Landesman covers other topics in his talk which might be worth a listen to many–especially for the flash mob performance which interrupts it midway. Much of the rest of his talk revolves around the same general theme of the need to support artists and artists needing to eschew the role of being separate and special to become more involved and present in their local communities.

Yeah, Sometimes It IS Boring

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I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to post about today, but Adam Thurman at Mission Paradox decided me with his post today about reducing the opportunities for audiences to be anxious about their attendance experience.

He starts his post:

When I picture someone entering a live performance venue I imagine a thought bubble above their head. Here’s the thought inside that bubble:

“Man, I hope this doesn’t suck.”

Interestingly enough, that is what I was thinking when I was driving to see a dance show this Saturday. I didn’t have too much basis for real concern since I knew the curators who put the show together and had worked with close to half the groups who would be performing. On the other hand, the event was billed as cross cultural and you never really know how successfully performers will execute their vision of what that means.

I think most of you with any experience in the arts know what I mean. Like me, I am sure you have seen some pretty awful stuff performed right after some pretty good stuff and are uncertain how the night will turn out.

Question is, do most people in our audience members know we have the same concerns abut enjoying the as they do? Do they know we can be worried about not liking the performance or being bored?

I suspect they don’t. I suspect they feel our disappointment with a performance will be expressed in terms of the failure of its attempt to illuminate the futility of the post-modern vision against the fin-de-siecle fatalism of the last decade.

Andrew Taylor once wrote he felt it was counter productive for arts organizations to never admit any program supported by a grant did not perform as planned or better.

“It’s an insight as old as theater — conflict, flaw, and tension are what make narratives compelling. And yet, read through most arts marketing materials or grant applications and what will you find? Perfection, triumph, success, and positive spin. Their performances are always exceptional. Their audiences are always ecstatic. Their reviews are always resounding (or mysteriously missing from the packet). Their communities are always connected and enthralled. In short, they are superhuman, disconnected, and insincere.”

I would say the same is true with audiences. We advertise everything we do as the most exciting and seminal work they will ever see but never concede audiences may not be in ecstasy every moment they are in the theatre. As a result, audiences expect to be in ecstasy and may either decide there is something wrong with them for not feeling amazed or decide they have been had by a bunch of B.S.

One of my favorite episodes in Drew McManus’ “Take A Friend To The Orchestra” program came about 6 years ago when Drew took the brother of WNYC Sound Check host, John Schaefer, to a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Jerry Schaefer had never been to an orchestral concert before. One of the parts that impressed me the most was that Drew admitted that he often gets bored at times during a concert and that it was okay to be bored at times.

I am not suggesting a full confessional after every performance outlining everything that went wrong. One common theme on this blog has been the idea that we need to speak about the arts experience in everyday life –when we are waiting online in the supermarket, at parties and picnics, in elevators and on buses. I am not talking about announcing your boosterism aloud in public places, but rather getting people to talk about their experiences, fears, anxieties, passions, etc., in relation to the arts. Part of that conversation needs to be acknowledging that, yeah sometimes it is boring; sometimes is it bad; sometimes it is confusing, even for those of us with a lot of experience.

The benefit people in the performing arts have as audience members when it comes to artists who are not household names is that we may often know more about the artist’s reputation than most. We can enter a performance space or gallery with a higher degree of confidence about the experience than others might.

This isn’t a peculiar characteristic of the arts, it just comes with exposure and experience. Sports fans will know what match ups are likely to be most exciting than will a new attendee to a game. Sports fans will recognize when a high stakes situation is developing while a novice allows their attention to wander.

While there are entire cable channels and sections of newspapers dedicated to educating people about why certain sports match ups will be exciting, the Arts and Entertainment channel shifted its focus in other directions and newspapers are dropping their culture reporting. The arts have to mostly rely on word of mouth and those with the most knowledge aren’t really speaking often or in a compelling manner that acknowledges the beauty and the flaws that make the beauty all the more remarkable.

And believe me, I include myself among those not communicating in a basic, honest manner devoid of marketing spin.