Drew McManus

Volunteering Your Way to #1

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I was listening to Andrew Taylor’s interview with Artsjournal.com founder/editor Doug McLennan today. During the interview McLennan mentioned all the ways in which organizations were creating online communities to help them achieve things. One of the ways he mentioned people’s contributions were rewarded was via a ranking system to show who had been most productive.

I started thinking about whether this might be a useful way for arts organizations to motivate volunteers. At one time, I had heard that creating contests and achievement awards for volunteers could be counterproductive in terms of motivating and retaining volunteers. I wondered if the new online rewards environment may have changed this. After some reading and thinking on the matter, I decided a ranking system is probably still not useful in many of the traditional functions of an arts organization.

One of the things I read which confirmed my recollection advising against rankings is that many volunteers are motivated by other factors than rankings. Also, different people have different ranges of ability. If someone is providing assistance because they believe in the organization but is in a situation where recognition is accorded to those who are hustling for first place, they may become disheartened. One suggestion I read was to have people compete against their own old milestones. Online communities have a certain anonymity that can insulate one from emotional investments. This may not be the case when a volunteer is working to benefit people and causes with which they can personally interact and experience.

There is also the issue that online contributions can be made on ones own schedule. Involvement and duration are self selected. Whereas many arts organizations engage volunteers during certain hours and events. There is also often a person acting as a gatekeeper determining who gets to contribute and when. A person striving to be number one may find time constraints and scheduling favoritism shown others inhibits their ambitions.

Scoring people for activities that aren’t constrained too much by time deadlines may be still possible. You can open up archives and newspaper/props storage and just let people go at it cataloging and organizing things on their own schedule. Though physically getting in each other’s way in cramped storage areas is also a problem that online activities don’t face now that most people have fairly speedy bandwidth.

If anyone has any feedback in terms of reward systems that were meaningful and didn’t alienate volunteers, ideas for ways to motivate volunteers given the expectations of the internet age or even tasks you can turn to the internet group mind to accomplish (like designing Drew McManus’ Twitter page) I would love to hear them.

Presumed Disappointing

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Adam Thurman at The Mission Paradox made a great blog post yesterday pointing out that, unfortunately, when it comes to the question of whether they will enjoy an opportunity to interact with the arts, the default assumption many audience members hold is “no” until convinced otherwise.

“Most people, when given the option to attend a performing arts event, are more scared that the performance is going to be disappointing then they are excited that the performance is going to be good.”

He goes on to say:

“This is the thing we have to remember:

We are in the trust business.

Not the theatre business.

Not the museum business.

The trust business.

When you are dealing with a risk averse public the only way to get them to do a risky thing is by earning their trust.

How do you earn their trust?

By building a relationship with them.

My observation is that most of us in the arts are very good at putting up programming, but we aren’t good at building relationships.”

It put me in mind of an entry I did about three years ago where I cited an entry on Neill Roan’s old blog (oh why, oh why did you shut down that blog!), titled “How Audiences Use Information to Reduce Risk.”

In the entry I talked about the efforts I was going to inform people about performances since they often commented they hadn’t seen anything about the show. Reviewing the entry, I realize now that the problem we likely face is that people’s primary expectation is to receive notice in the newspaper or radio because that is where they traditionally have gotten the information. The problem is, people aren’t using those media in the same way they used to. Their expectations don’t align with their practice any longer.

In that entry I spoke of using electronic notifications, word of mouth and opinion leaders to help disseminate information about performances. One thing I missed that Adam speaks about is relationship building. It is true that people need to view the information you provide as credible, but they also need to believe that you will provide an enjoyable experience even if they end up less than thrilled about the performance.

Just last week Drew McManus cited a situation where the non-artistic elements of an evening combined with a partially disappointing/partially sublime artistic experience with the net effect being negative. Some of the non-artistic elements were entirely out of the arts organization’s control, others could have been ameliorated to some degree.

Certainly people aren’t coming for the parking and an easy ticket office experience. You gotta deliver the goods artistically. The relationship building comes when people know your artistic quality is pretty dependable and can trust that you will make an effort meet their needs and expectations and reduce problems that arise.

When Your Agent Truly Works For You

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This weekend, Drew McManus and I had a brief email exchange about the Chicago Tribune piece he discusses on Adaptistration today. My organization and most of my presenting partners don’t contract for orchestra related services. Chamber music groups are about it. However, we deal with many of the same agents. I mentioned in an email to Drew that we hadn’t really seen a reduction in fees this year. However, if the reduction in programming I have seen among my partners is echoed across the country, I thought perhaps we would see low fees in the following season. I also suggested that maybe the agents would boost the fees of the marquee artists to offset the loss of revenue from others and the A-list artists would only appear in the places that could bear the higher costs but suffer no significant loss of income.

I hoped that there might be a silver lining and the economic downturn might provide opportunities where the quality emerging artist finds success doing what they have always done–work their butts off providing a consistently great product for little money, make a reputation for said effort and gain employment at venues which may not have considered them a year or two ago.

Drew responded such a thing may not come to pass under the auspices of agents. He noted that a lot of the emerging and mid-level people had been increasingly marginalized by their agencies over the years in favor of names that sold themselves. (I am greatly paraphrasing.)

I wonder if agents really can hold all the cards anymore now that technology enables artists to to make direct appeals and handle inquiries online. I am not sure about the situation with classical music but from what I have heard, fewer presenters are attending the booking conferences in favor of researching prospective performances online. This from an agent whose artists seem pretty happy.

How long though before presenters move from following up with an agent after a visit to the agency website to corresponding with the artist directly? There have already been a couple events where I have worked so extensively with the artist, I wondered why I had spoken to the agent at all. It seemed all the agent did was assure the artist they weren’t being cheated.

That might be the type of model that emerges. If an artist is touring, it is difficult to field questions and make decisions about future dates. Some centralized source that manages information will likely be important. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a formal agency anymore. It could be a cooperative effort by artists where employees located across the country work from home to respond to inquires. Artists would still be represented by an agent(s), but in this case, the artists retain much more power in choosing which people will represent them.

If the promotional information all resides on the artists’ websites, all that is needed is a well designed central web presence to differentiate the members from others of their genre in a web search and help move it to the top of the search. Obviously, there shouldn’t be too many artists listed on the central site lest the visitor get overwhelmed by the choices.

Actually, heck with one site. If the cooperative is smart, they have a lot of specialty sites to appeal to different niches. The one for bars and clubs positions the members with one type of image. The one for colleges gives another. If there are 40-50 groups in a cooperative maybe an individual group appears with 15 others on one site that appeals to colleges, with a slightly different mix on one for small venues, on another for clubs and another for folk festivals.

Personal contact with presenters and other probable buyers is likely to always retain some importance. So perhaps the cooperative arranges for one or more of their telecommuters living near a city with a high frequency of tours to attend their performances as each group passes through so their agent can speak intelligently at conferences.

Depending on the design of the cooperatives, there could still be a lot of inequities in the representation. The groups which bring more money to the cooperative either directly or by the frequency of their performances might demand more prominent placement on websites or aggressive pushes at conferences. The larger groups may insist on agents in places their tours frequent more often leaving the others more weakly represented. They may run into a Catch-22–the small groups insist their agents book them in Raleigh so the agent can see them. Unfortunately, because the agent hasn’t seen them, she can’t speak with enough conviction to get the group a booking in Raleigh. (The solution being, if the closest the group gets to the agent is Atlanta, buy a plane ticket to Atlanta.) Over time, a group might move from one cooperative to another that better represents their philosophies.

Maybe these sort of arrangements won’t emerge but I feel pretty confident in saying that the continued development and use of technology is going to change the agent-artist dynamic over the next few years. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the next five years brought a significant shift with agents either playing a much diminished role or being valuable for entirely different reasons than they are now.

My TAFTO Favs

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Next week the entries for this year’s Take A Friend To The Orchestra Month (TAFTO) begin. I have always enjoyed reading this series, even before I had any association with Drew McManus or joined Inside the Arts. There have been a couple entries from the past that have really stuck in my mind. While you are waiting for this year’s installments, I thought I would post a couple links to some of my favorite entries.

Nothing should be read into the fact that I haven’t included entries from 2008. These are my favorites and I make no pretense at being egalitarian. Nor am I being modest by excluding my own contributions. This is a list of the entries that popped out at me and remained in my memory over the years. Last year’s entries were just fine and whet my appetite for the 2009 batch.

2005

I really enjoyed some of the earliest entries because they focused on some of the rules for attending the orchestra. Really many of them can easily be applied to attending any arts activity whether it be performance or visual arts experience.

For this reason, Kyle Gann and Sam Bergman’s entries back in 2005 are among my favorites. They approach some of the intimidating aspects of attendance with honesty and humor.

One of the entries that I immediately associate with the whole TAFTO initiative was the WNYC interview on Soundcheck when Drew took Soundcheck host John Schaefer’s brother, Jerry to a Bartok performance at Carnegie Hall. The interview, which may be downloaded here, requires RealPlayer to play. In my view, the interview constitutes the most effective entry in the TAFTO effort. Jerry speaks with complete candor about how he only liked 2/3 of the experience. If I only had one entry to choose to help me convince someone to attend an orchestra performance, this would be the one because the listener can be most guaranteed that they are receiving an honest appraisal, realize they probably possess the capacity to evaluate and enjoy the experience, and recognize they have permission to be bored and not enjoy every moment.

2006

In this batch of writing, I liked Jerry Bowles account of how he and his wife had cultivated an appreciation of culture in general in his nephew by treating him like an adult. His entry serves to remind all arts people that appreciation of our products is a gradual process rather than an instantaneous event. Also, getting to that point requires communication, patience and trust that people will find their way rather than needing a dumbed down approach.

Kevin Giglinto’s entry traveled along the same lines, except that he spoke about his personal interactions with music that took him from Led Zeppelin through Husker Du and Sonic Youth to working for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO). When he first encountered Led Zeppelin, Husker Du and Sonic Youth, he had no doubts about his relationship with the music. Even though each initial experience challenged what he knew, he believed in his capacity to comprehend it.

The prospect of working for CSO intimidated the hell out of him though.

“I probably felt the same perceived barriers that people have in their minds today that stop them from entering the doors for the first time. I asked myself the same questions I know they are asking:

“What if I don’t understand the music?”
“Will I appreciate it less without that understanding?”
“Is this music really for me, given what I usually listen to?”

Then came the first performance I attended. On the program was Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony…When the music ended, and the audience erupted with applause, I realized that all the questions I had in my head prior to the experience were irrelevant. It was the music. It took me over with the same incredible rush that I experienced with The Who, The Clash or whoever else occupied my musical drive. It was the music.”

I can’t leave 2006 without mentioning Alex Shapiro’s “screw the rules, let them wear party hats” post which I believe is still one of the most commented upon entries on the Adaptistration blog. The entry remains a must read. Alex’s point is essentially that one generally doesn’t prepare to go to a rock concert being overly concerned about hearing the lyrics much less grasping the whatever imagery and metaphor they invoke but we are pleased if we do. Going to a classical music performance should be approached in the same anxiety free manner.

And if you are thinking, yeah but at a rock concert, part of the excitement is hoping some hot guy/girl will bump into while screaming “Wahooooo!!!!”, Alex is right there with you wishing it would happen in our symphony halls.

I also enjoyed Pete Matthews recounting of his visits to three different classical music events with the same friend in the course of a month. It was just a nice, comparison of the types of music you can hear and the sort of places you could hear it. I was most encouraged by the quality experience they had in a high school auditorium given they also attended at Avery Fisher and Carnegie Halls.

2007

James Palermo, General Director of Grant Park Music Festival caught my attention with his vow not to apologize for loving classical music. I think a lot of us have found ourselves falling into the same mindset and needing to pull ourselves out.

Then I read a quote attributed to the great soprano Leontyne Price about the value of the arts. I’ll never forget it:

“We should not have a tin cup out for something as important as the arts in this country, the richest in the world. Creative artists are always begging, but always being used when it’s time to show us at our best.”

When a President dies, at the funeral we feature the hottest opera star singing Amazing Grace. When the media wants to associate something with class or value, it invariably uses baroque or classical era music. If a marketer wants to conjure up grandeur or power, it’s Verdi’s Anvil Chorus or Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries.

So, I vowed to stop apologizing for loving and understanding classical music. Whenever I hear negative comments from friends or colleagues, I remind them that the music is enjoyable, revelatory and full of great things for anyone who is open enough to experience it without prejudice, regardless of social class or race.

One of the most singular posts in the TAFTO was produced by Bill Harris who engaged in an extensive analysis about whether Take A Friend To The Orchestra Month was a worthwhile endeavor. His work is so insightful and unlike any other entry in the TAFTO series, it is impossible to ignore.

Hope you took a look at some of these past entries and will join the fun over at Adaptistration next week for the new installments!