I am up here in Lake Placid for 6 weeks of concerts in the glorious Adirondacks with the Lake Placid Sinfonietta. Something is really bothering me, even though I am here in paradise. The words not-for-profit have such a negative connotation. I know it’s a widely used categorical description but it’s not accurate in the figurative sense and unfortunately on so many occasions when an orchestra’s financial situation is akin to a house on fire often the solution offered is to not to douse the flames, but to destroy the house!….
Fixing the business model by changing your mission…huh? There are many situations going on right now and it’s not my purpose to single any of them out. The similarities though with the approach to fixing the problems are troubling:
The story is way too familiar in these times of orchestras that are struggling with making ends meet, or worse. What puzzles me, is that instead of looking at it in a way that addresses the whole problem, it seems that the conclusion reached in many cases is that the only problem is with the product and that it isn’t sustainable, so everything about the product should change to make it more affordable to produce. The problem with that, is that it’s a very self serving close minded approach. We are not-for-profit organizations in terms of our financial structure, but we are most definitely supposed to be for profit organizations in terms of what we offer to and for our audiences and communities. It has to always be about them, it is for them we are doing this (a common theme here), and it seems we almost always lose sight of that. I wonder sometimes if we had board meetings in public places or in front of our audiences where anyone could drop in would change the way decisions are made…just a thought.
What frustrates me is that there are many organizations that offer high quality experiences with fine music making, tremendous accessibility, and superb guest artists, but when some of those organizations struggle to sell tickets and procure donations, an assumption is made that the product has to change, which erroneously is coined as a changing of the “business model” and what occurs is this:
- The altering and compromising of the mission, artistic quality, integrity and accessibility of the organization to maintain and secure the financial structure for the future
When it should be the exact opposite:
- An altering and fixing of the financial structure of the organization to maintain and secure the integrity and the quality of the organization so as to remain true to its original mission and to be accessible to the community….for the future!
So here’s the question: If a high quality organization is struggling to sell tickets and obtain support, will compromising the mission, the artistic product and the integrity sell more tickets and get more people to donate? Um NO!!!! I can hear the pitch now:
Please consider a donation to the Sadsack Symphonia, we are smaller than last year, our guest artists aren’t as good, we have fewer concerts, all of our best musicians left, we can’t afford to print tickets so you can sit wherever you like (and as usual there are plenty of seats), and we don’t have programs or a brochure but we will shout your name from the stage (since we can’t afford microphones). It’s all part of our effort to replace our artistic mission with a business plan….
The old adage applies: you can’t cut your way to prosperity! Now we can’t ignore reality by doing nothing and concessions are inevitable in many cases, but any change to a mission has to have input from all stakeholders regardless of the situation, it can’t just be a unilateral change in desperation by a few people. I mean if a church is struggling, does anyone ever say: I will save the church with a big donation as long as we become a synagogue? An orchestra is not a church, but there is still a faith and a belief in what we are doing at our core, so to treat that as expendable is akin to asking us to change religions!
I don’t understand why we hide things from our communities and don’t give them the opportunity to step up. Instead of appealing for their help while there is still time, many times we don’t even let them know out of fear of further abandonment and instead offer them something very compromised, hoping that they don’t notice or that we can fool them into believing that nothing has changed! A save the orchestra campaign is nothing to be ashamed of, it can even be a reaffirmation of what we want to do for our community, and more than that, it can work!!!! We need to trust all of the stakeholders especially our audiences. Offering a compromised product and mission may in fact disenfranchise them. We need to be honest with them at the very least.
One approach, and I have made this argument previously: those communities that preserve their quality of life pieces will bounce back the fastest after this recession, because it will be easier to recruit business and people to an artistically intact and vibrant community. That argument should be pressed so that we are not seen expendable entertainment but as a significant piece for any city’s recovery plan.
No one wants to stay in a house that’s on fire, because as painful as it might be, it might be better to leave the burning building and start construction on a new one if no realistic solution is offered. It may take a while but without compromising integrity and belief, along with the knowledge of what not to do, and no situations to untangle that were created out of a desperation to put an out of control blaze out (one that eventually took it down anyway), will make for a much better foundation for a rebirth and a sustainable future.
Hear, hear! I have yet to decide if I am going to sing with our local opera company (who are a month late with contracts), because their HUGE cuts in order to balance the budget have resulted in cutting jobs, not rehiring amazing singers, and in general showing a complete lack of care or commitment to the art form. The cuts (trying to make the chorus volunteer instead of AGMA, for one) are a signal of NOT wanting to continue the company, to me. The lack of artistic integrity is very sad and I don’t really want to work for a company that does not want to commit to us, the artists.
Having been in and out of this business for 30 years, as a Marketing Director, Dramaturg, Executive Director, repertoire consultant and Board Member for various organizations–you are exactly right. And the converse is also true: groups with mediocre artistic quality, and thus poor ticket sales, refuse to believe the reason they are floundering is boring-to-lousy concerts…they always think it’s marketing, or “branding” or competition or…you get the picture. So they spend precious resources on a clueless local marketing consultant, who after much inane turmoil produces a fat book and powerpoint presentation (mostly cribbed from League publications) that tells them what they want to hear. Except it isn’t true.
Hey Ron,
Great to read something by you, I hope all is well!
I just wanted to comment really quickly and tell you that I appreciated your article, and in particular that you don’t just beg the question of “if the organization is struggling to sell tickets, how do you survive?” after talking about how sacrificing the quality of the product won’t save it. As I was reading the article, I was afraid that it would basically end there but you went on to give some ideas for how to engage the community and try to actually improve things for the orchestras.
/ Cody
Hey Ron!
Thanks for your thoughts on this subject. It’s particularly appropriate to read about this type of behavior in light of what’s going on with the Richardson Symphony right now. You probably know by now that they’ve decided to go non-union, which means pretty much the entire orchestra is out of a job. These are people who have been in the RSO for decades and deserve better. The audiences deserve better than student orchestras as well. Anyway, thanks for the blog.
All the best,
Tonda
Amen! Great insights and a clear picture of where truly sustainable priorities should line up.
Any decent orchestra should have no problem marketing their “product,” some of the greatest expressions of the human mind spirit and condition. Though of course compelling performances are needed, producing and maintaining great art also has to be the goal of the board and administrations, or they’ll drive their organizations into the ground and leave their communities a cultural wasteland as with the Honolulu Symphony debacle.
Ron’s point that the community has to become stakeholders and trusted participants and supporters is the way to go. The quality of life that results is good business. This was recognized by major corporations like 3M, Medtronic, and Target in MN — they are much more interested in making their home turf attractive to future employees by philanthropic investments in the arts and culture than they are in seeking a place to set up shop that has the lowest corporate taxes de jour.
Thanks for another excellent piece, Ron. I especially appreciated your comments re letting the community know that their orchestra needs help. I have so often seen what you describe, the attempt to fool the public into thinking everything’s ok, in spite of even the least experienced of the audience recognizing, on some level, that the product they’re being given is less, in all kinds of ways, than it used to be. I think there’s a sort of shame built into the American ethos that prevents not only individuals, but also many organizations, from saying they’re in trouble and reaching out for help from their communities.
Ron,
That is a solid thinking.
The idea of not-for-profit has become a noose around the neck of the arts in Canada too.
Not for profit implies “not sustainable, not attainable, unwanted but for some reason requisite, not about hard work, it implies counter profitability in the sense that what we do must! not be profitable.
For those of us in the arts that are possess entrepreneurial thinking the very idea that our art AND our business would be administered by committee in order to be worthwhile to society is actually kind of offensive to our being. When I was younger and all ideals I would routinely blab on about the cultural sector evolving and that one day I would build a sustainable project on a for profit model. Trouble is that doesn’t really work either so I’ve evolved to a mixed fuels kind of thinking.
I feel that the “not-for-profit” model has created detrimental self-perceptions too. Like the idea among artists that receiving a grant is one of the highest forms of recognition. The genesis of a project starts with seeking a grant to do it. Where would we be if Steve Jobs had sat around waiting for a grant to do anything?
Sorting out a way for the arts to exist outside of charity is key to its continuance.
An incredible, 21st century challenge.
Cheers,
Neal Bennett
President
http://www.beethovenathome.com
Founding member
http://www.itromboni.com
I like the tone of your essay Ron and agree that the aggressive, innovative energies that the notion of “for-profit” enterprise entails would be beneficial for today’s cultural institutions. Those of us who make a living in the music industry should work hard to keep what we’ve built strong.
Of course, there were for-profit orchestras in the 19th-century, quite a few in fact. The early musicians union’s operated gig-dependent ensembles and so-called “enterprise orchestras,” such as that operated by Theodore Thomas out of New York, succeeded using this model — mainly by touring incessantly in a cultural environment in which local competitors were non existent. It’d be hard to replicate this model today, although Cleveland’s touring to Florida and the Berlin Phil’s digital concert hall are steps in that direction.
Of course, much would change in a for-profit ensemble world. Most for-profit companies go out of business. The Krafts and Fords that we think about today are the winners in a battle that has many more losers. Also, for profits don’t have concepts such as tenure. Imagine a scenario in which a musician was not generating enough revenue through say service exchange private lessons to make his or her quarterly goals and was thus fired to make way for a more entrepreneurial and thus profitable employee. Many musicians (maybe most) are already entrepreneurs, but they are used to keeping those profits for themselves (by say teaching lessons or selling imported instruments on their own time), not sharing them with the company/orchestra.
I totally agree with your aesthetic points, many of which echo Michael Kaiser’s book The Art of the Turnaround. Great art indeed finds its purpose by being great art and warmed over, second rate “cultoor” will not improve the situation.
However, I’m not sure that the tax benefits of non-profit status should be discarded. It amounts to a government subsidy of arts organizations through reduced costs (no sales tax on purchases) as well as a boost to donations by reducing a donor’s cost of giving (if I’m in a 30% bracket, a $100 donation only costs me $70). The very real economic benefit for communities that you mention is easy to research, but hard to monetize — do you send every resident a bill for $20 for economic stimulus services, does the government increase taxes to pay for culture as a social service? In the end, we’re still stuck in the donation game, asking those who can afford it to donate to benefit a greater good. For profits don’t get donations. My fear is that if all orchestras became for-profits overnight, we’d have many fewer ensembles in a year.
That said, if I were looking to add for-profit, revenue positive components to my orchestra, I’d start a new horizons ensemble immediately and have my musicians work as coaches, teachers, and conductors as part of their contracts.