June 28, 2009

INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL KAISER

Hello everyone.

"And the beat goes on........................"

INTERVIEW with MICHAEL KAISER

I heard Michael Kaiser - head of the Kennedy Center for the Arts since 2001 - speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last month, and asked him if we would sit for a brief interview. Michael's ideas and positions on a number of issues facing the arts community are thought provoking, and I think you will enjoy his responses to my questions.

Here is a quick bio: Michael M. Kaiser is President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Dubbed “the Turnaround King” for his work at The Kansas City Ballet, the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, the American Ballet Theater and the Royal Opera House, Michael has earned international renown for his expertise in arts management. A Cultural Ambassador for the U.S. Department of State, he advises performing arts organizations around the world, working with arts leaders in over 60 countries. He has created an online education forum for arts administrators at artsmanager.org, where professionals and students in the field can share experiences, seek employment, and post opportunities. He founded “Arts In Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative” in early February, which is currently providing free arts management consultation to almost 350 arts organizations across the United States.

And here is the interview:

BARRY: You have gotten a lot of media attention lately about your advice to struggling arts organizations that they should not make cuts to their artistic programming or to their marketing budgets. You’ve said that you think “that the problem is almost always not spending too much, but no development of adequate revenue, and that cost cutting is not a good long term strategy”. At the core of your philosophy is the mantra for arts organizations “to produce great art, well marketed”. For those readers not familiar with your argument, can you please expand on what you mean?

MICHAEL: I believe that the fiscal health of arts organizations depends on a robust inflow of revenue. What creates cash flow? Good programming (artistic and educational) supported by aggressive marketing. And yet, troubled arts organizations invariably cut these two areas first, since they represent discretionary spending. What evolves is a vicious cycle of less programming and marketing yielding less revenue yielding more cuts, etc. etc.

This is especially true in the current environment. When arts organizations are competing for a smaller pool of contributed dollars and ticket sales, they must compete harder, not less hard. This means more interesting programming and more aggressive marketing. When arts organizations are forced to cut budgets, I prefer them to cut these two vital areas last. I prefer to save on everything that does not relate to programming and marketing. Sometimes cutting these two areas is required but it should be a last resort.

BARRY: Following-up - You are quoted in a February of this year piece in the Washington Post as saying that you are: “not as concerned about smaller organizations -- which are used to dealing with difficult situations -- as (you) are about groups that are misdirecting efforts at downsizing.” But for those small to medium organizations that have undergone huge budget cuts due to declining revenues from virtually all of their sources, and thus may have no choice left but to cut either marketing or programming, what would you tell them to do? Many are in danger of closing their doors. Is part of the problem that the arts & culture sector is overbuilt with too much duplication for the marketplace to support? Left alone the marketplace will arguably weed out poorly managed organizations and those that don’t attract sufficient public support – and most of those will likely be smaller or newer organizations. Are we more likely then to see only the larger cultural institutions survive in the new arts landscape?

MICHAEL: What I said was that I am most concerned for the mid-sized organizations because they do not have the flexibility of the smaller organizations and do not have the resources of the larger ones. Mid-sized organizations typically have developed a larger infrastructure that is at risk in this environment. I am very concerned that the organizations that are ‘weeded out’ will be the ones with underpowered managements, not necessarily those with poor artistic product.

BARRY: In your remarks to the San Francisco arts community at a Commonwealth Club address last month you observed that arts organizations, in their attempts to fundraise, too often fail to market “caring about our organizations”. You opined that we should better market the organization’s image and value, and that institutional marketing (selling and branding the organization itself) need not be prohibitively costly. What did you mean by that? Do you have any practical advice to offer organizations to more effectively do that?

MICHAEL: I believe that there are two types of marketing: programmatic marketing and institutional marketing. Programmatic marketing is the marketing we all do – advertising, brochures, web sites, etc – to sell tickets. I am more concerned about institutional marketing – the things we do to get our communities excited about us as an organization. In my experience, it is these activities that drive fund-raising. Example of institutional marketing include major artistic and educational programs, special events, exhibitions, high profile appearances, etc. There is a classic example of the institutional marketing we did at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in my book, The Art of the Turnaround.

BARRY: You also said that you believe ‘individual donations’ are the key to fundraising stability for the arts. I assume you have concluded that the other sources of arts income -- corporate, foundation, and government support, combined with earned income are all inadequate or unreliable – or both. Is that right? Please explain why?

MICHAEL: I believe that grants from governments, foundations and corporations are bounded. Arts organizations that rely only on these sources will not grow with inflation or beyond. There is no limit to the amount of individual donations that can be raised.

BARRY: Another point you made in your talk, was that arts organizations often need a different Board of Director composition at different stages of the organization’s growth, and that the culture of the Board must change as the organization grows. How do you recognize when that culture needs to be changed and how do you get Board members to move on when that time comes?

MICHAEL: I believe it is clear to every arts executive when a board is not functioning properly. Frequently the board is ‘poaching’ – making the decisions that the staff should be making. Or the board members may not be as involved with the fund-raising of the organization as is needed at that point in its history.
Someone, ideally the Board Chair or the Head of the Nominating (or Governance) Committee will work with the Executive Director to determine a course for re-shaping a board. I have frequently asked a board member to resign a seat to make room for someone who can better serve the organization at that time.

BARRY: One of your suggestions that caught my interest was that arts organization leaders ought to make a list of the 100 people in the community who could change the life of their organization. Can you elaborate on that concept and how it could be used? You also said that a valuable exercise for the leadership of arts organizations is to carve out time each week to consider how to make next year easier. What did you mean?

MICHAEL: I believe that in every community there are 100-300 people who could truly help the organization if they were engaged. I suggest every arts organization make such a list and work aggressively to bring those people to events, meet with them periodically, make sure they see important news stories about the organization etc. A disciplined campaign to reach these people is required.

I believe that what makes next year easier is to do the institutional marketing today that brings new audience members, donors and Board members to the organization and enlivens those that already exist. So making time to do institutional marketing every week is essential.

BARRY: What do you think the role of the NEA ought to be in the current arts & culture economic climate? Do you think the endowment should shift any of its priorities? Do you think it ought to re-think where its’ funding goes? Do you think it ought to launch new initiatives that address specific weaknesses in the arts management ecosystem? Is the Arts In Crisis initiative you have launched at the Kennedy Center to help troubled arts organizations something the Endowment should have done? Why or why not?

MICHAEL: I am not qualified to say how the NEA should function. I do believe that the majority of funding should go to small and mid-sized organizations (and organizations that serve under-served populations). I also believe that all grants should be challenge grants. I am not certain whether the NEA has the people resources to mount programs like Arts in Crisis.

BARRY: You observed that most arts organizations need a new perspective every decade. Do you think senior leadership at arts organizations should have term limits; that key employees should have a sunset date (like the Hewlett Foundation imposes) when they should be required to leave the organization?

MICHAEL: I do believe that there needs to be turnover amongst personnel, particularly artistic personnel in presenting organizations. I do not think that is required in producing organizations, and certainly not in founder-driven organizations. I cannot prescribe exactly how long a term should be.

BARRY: Apart from the economic problems facing arts & cultural organizations, what do you think are the major challenges facing the arts & culture “field” as a whole, and what thoughts can you share about how some of those priorities might be addressed.

MICHAEL: I think our biggest challenge is our inability to increase productivity. This means that we suffer from inflation so much more than other industries. This means that we have to find ways to cover our costs. Historically this was accomplished by raising ticket prices but we have priced ourselves out of the market – many people can no longer to be habitual arts consumers. I believe we have to work to increase our fund-raising capabilities so we can reduce our reliance on ticket prices. This requires far more sophisticated marketing and fund-raising knowledge that many arts professionals have; we need to spend more on arts management training if we are going to have robust arts sector in the future.

BARRY: You said that you think major donors give larger amounts of money to organizations when those organizations become part of their social lives. I can see that in the largest cultural institutions like the major symphonies, ballets, operas and museums in the major cities. Do you think that works across the board irrespective of the size or the organization, and how do organizations (particularly smaller ones) increase their role so that they are a larger part of their major donor’s social lives?

MICHAEL: Absolutely. I see many smaller organizations, and community organizations, playing a central role in the lives of their constituents. This is something that any arts organization can work to achieve.

BARRY: What has been your experience thus far with your online Arts Manager.com “Arts In Crisis” support program for arts organizations? What insights into the management of our organizations has offering this service taught you? Do you think there ought to be some kind of institutional / systemic training opportunities made (widely) available to arts leaders so that they might improve their managerial skills levels? Looking at that issue from another perspective, how can we mentor younger arts administrators and provide them with quality professional development training and nonprofit business skills enhancement if much of our current senior arts leadership never got that kind of support in the first place?

MICHAEL: I have been trying for two decades to get the funding community to appreciate the need for better arts management training. We spend so much on training artists but so little on training the people who must find the resources for their work. It makes no sense to me. The biggest thing I have learned from all of our arts management training programs is that there is a tremendous thirst for training, and that board members need training as well.

BARRY: I ask this question of every interviewee. If you had one million dollars that you could spend any way you wanted to improve the arts & culture sector, how would you spend it (different from the Arts In Crisis program, as that program is already up and running)?

MICHAEL: I would select ten amazing young, small arts organizations and give them each $100,000 to plan and produce a life-changing set of programs.

Thank you very much Michael.

Have a good week.

Don’t Quit

Barry

Posted by msaunders at 09:09 AM | Comments (1)

June 23, 2009

REPORT FROM AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS SEATTLE

Hello.

"And the beat goes on...................."

REPORT ON THE AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS SEATTLE CONFERENCE:

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS:
1. Great turnout: 1200 people attended. Down from the record 1400 in Philly last year, but more than anticipated. General feeling of delegates that the current economic tough times (like the post 911 period) increase the need to gather and network and be around each other. Good cross section representation. More from the west coast than otherwise the norm because of the location. Most attendees continue to struggle to deal with budgets and cuts.

2. Seattle is a beautiful city. Hadn’t been here in five years, but the city continues to shine – beautiful, young, vibrant, easy to navigate. Most memorable view was from the windows of the 35th floor lounge of the Renaissance Hotel where they held the Friday night late night equivalent of prior years’ Hospitality Suite – Bob Lynch on the piano, impromptu vocals by Moy Eng, Marion Godfrey and others (why is it foundation program officers have such good voices?).

3. This year the conference was centered exclusively at the Convention Center (and that worked well ) but with delegates housed at five separate hotels in the area, there was no real sense of the conference in the hotel lobbies and lounges, and I missed that feeling and the ongoing opportunities for casual conversations.

OPENING SESSION:
The great value of this conference over the years has been the networking opportunities. The Opening Session – with a ballroom full of people – many of whom you haven’t seen for awhile produces two feelings: First you are heartened to be back among friends; to see many respected and admired colleagues again; and Second, it is enormously gratifying that there are so many of us in our sector. You get a real sense of the depth and scope of our reach, and of our potential power. It is empowering and puts the isolation of daily work back home into perspective. In fact none of us are alone. We are part of a huge, dynamic, living sector. It is reassuring to be reminded of this every once in awhile.

BILL IVEY Remarks:
Bill Ivey, Former NEA Chair and Obama Team Arts & Culture Transition Team Captain, shared anecdotal stories of how the Obama team approached the integration of our sector into the launch of the new Administration – including consideration of a future cabinet level position and the $50 million of Stimulus money for the NEA. For the latter, there were apparently plenty of back stage debates and lobbying - and the fear that inclusion of that money for the Endowment would set off opposition arguments against arts funding (which arguments did indeed come to pass) was countered by Bill and his allies to beat back the Coburn Amendment which would have banned any stimulus money going to the arts field (like our jobs aren’t real jobs?). Bill noted that two events helped position the arts well in the new administration: First, Hollywood Producer George Stevens was an out of the gate Obama supporter, and he teamed up with Broadway Producer Margo Lion to launch an Arts Policy Committee to support Obama’s candidacy (and, according to a number of well placed sources I spoke with in Seattle, Margo Lion was the likely force behind the nomination of Rocco Landesman as Chair of the NEA (click here for a link to the story and encouraging news that President Obama wants a “game changer” in the post – www.laurencejarvikonline.blogspot.com ; and second the Americans for the Arts initiative to get the arts on the priority agenda of all the presidential candidates in the New Hampshire primary combined to set the stage for increased awareness of and commitment to our sector by the President (who, Bill described as having an “instinctive cultural presence”). Those two moves are a departure for the arts sector in that they were proactive moves designed as a foundation on which we could build movement. Too much of our advocacy legacy has been reactive to crisis. These two moves are proof that to the extent we can create foundations on which to build, we will reap greater success in our lobbying of government for our needs and the intrinsic value of what we do.

Together with Americans for the Arts and a host of other players, Bill spearheaded the fight to get and keep that $50 million in the Stimulus package and all of those players should be congratulated for their deft and skilled handling of lobbying for arts & culture’s role for America for the future. One observation I found particularly telling, was Bill’s recounting of White House Chief of Staff Rahn Emmanuel’s observation on the economic meltdown: “Let’s not waste this crisis.” There is much food for thought in that observation that we can, and should continue to use. Our economic crisis, while likely to cause sea changes to the way we do business, is also likely to have profound impact (much of it negative) to those communities where we live and work. We need to make sure our communities know exactly what is at stake if we are not included as essential services to be protected during this time. We can’t afford to waste this crisis and let the negative consequences to our sector go unknown to our local publics. Bill observed that he thinks we would have lost the $50 million NEA Stimulus money were it not for the (Americans for the Arts Action Fund led) grassroots efforts of the field that rallied in support of the money when challenged by the (ultimately defeated) Coburn Amendment. Doug McLenann taped a brief interview with Ivey that can be accessed here: www.artsjournal.com/diacritical/2009/06/bill-ivey-talks-about-obama-an.html

Bill also noted in his remarks, his thesis set forth in his book Arts Inc. published last year, that market forces and sloppy public policy have pulled arts & culture away from the public’s best interest. His continuing goal remains to get the West Wing to take on at least a modest portfolio of arts policy objectives and to abandon the practice of thinking of the arts as an “amenity”. He shared his belief that arts & culture will likely, for the first time, be represented on the Domestic Policy Council under Obama, but that there remains a challenge to our community (arts administrators, arts educators and artists) to continue to press Obama and Congress for an expanded role in policy formation. And he noted too that while arts organizations are expert at managing scarcity, we need to stop playing victim.

Finally, Ivey argued that we must continue to make convincing arguments for the contribution of arts & culture to the sustainability, livability and ennobling of our communities and noted the value of tools such as Westaf’s Creative Vitality Index.

AFTA Annual Report:
As time was short for the opening lunch, Bob Lynch’s AFTA Annual Report was brief. He noted the drop in the percentage of philanthropic donations going to the arts, the 3% dip in attendance figures for arts events and the continuing budget cuts to local arts organizations both public and private. He also noted the number of successful attempts to secure more funding, and the rise to 100,000 enrolled members in the Arts Action Fund and the enormous value those people helped to play in protecting that Stimulus money when it was attacked. (More on the Arts Action Fund below). Click here for AFTA’s 2009 Strategic Plan: www.americansforthearts.org/about_us/environmental_analysis/default.asp

AWARD WINNERS:
Two Californians and long time friends were Award Recipients at the Opening Luncheon: Victoria Hamilton (San Diego Commission for Arts & Culture) won the Selina Roberts Ottum Award for exemplary leadership qualities, and Bruce Davis (Arts Council Silicon Valley) won the Michael Newton Award for innovative fundraising. Other awards went to: Randy Engstrom (Youngstown Cultural Arts Center) 2009 Emerging Arts Leader; Sheila Smith (Minnesota Citizen for the Arts) 2009 Arlene Valkanas State Arts Advocacy Award (Sheila led an outstanding drive to secure dedicated state revenue for the arts); and artist Buster Simpson won the 2009 Public Art Award. The Dallas based company Big Thought won the 2009 Arts Education Award for best arts education program design. Congratulations to all. I think we should have more awards – local and national – for exemplary work. It costs nothing, it raises visibility, and there are more than enough deserving individuals. Recognizing our own is something we should do more of.

GRANTMAKERS IN THE ARTS Sessions:
There were two Grantmakers in the Arts sessions and both were highlights of the conference from my perspective – highly informative with lots of practical information, expertly presented by very sharp panelists.

The first GIA Session was a recap on current research on arts funding – here are some of the highlights: (Go to www.giarts.org/for a complete report on all the listed studies in this first session. Download the Summer 2009 issue of the GIA Reader from the home page)

The GIA STUDY: Based on polling information (and not strict scientific balanced data):
 Foundation assets (dedicated to the arts) were down 22% in 2008 – from $608 million to $520 +/-.
 As Foundation money is calculated on a three year average of interest earnings, the figures for 2010, 2011 and 2012 are likely to be worse across the board.
 2009 total giving will decline between 9 and 12%.
 40% of foundations intend to keep their funding level with 2008
10% plan to increase funding
50% are likely to decrease funding, but aren’t yet sure how to apply any cutback.

• Foundations are trying to adjust their grants to help economically challenged grantees by:
o Allowing endowment grants to be used on an accelerated basis.
o Allowing multi year grants to be spent over a shorter basis (e.g. a three year grant can be spent in two years).
o Releasing restrictions on grants and allowing program funds to be spent (in part) on operations.
o Some foundations are dipping into their own endowments and awarding funds beyond the interest earned on those endowments.
o Foundations are cutting back their own operational costs in line with the reductions of their grant pools.

 The arts sector hasn’t historically suffered more than other nonprofit sectors.

 Marion Godfrey of the Pew Foundation noted Pew is husbanding its resources in anticipation that there will be less available funds for grants in 2010 and 2011.

 The most pessimism as to available arts funds is in the Community Foundation community and in the corporate sector.

THE ARTIST TRUST STUDY: Based on an unscientific and somewhat anecdotal survey of 1500 artists in Washington state – Puget Sound centric (i.e., more Seattle responses than rural) with a 67% response rate – 690 individual artists – with more visual than performing artists responding.

The negative economic impact from the artist’s point of view:

 Sales are down
 Demand is down
 Income is down
 Morale has taken a heavy hit

Artists want (in order):
 Small micro “bridge” grants to get by
 Business training (particularly in marketing and on-line skills)
 Access to low cost materials & supplies
 Convened opportunities to network with peers
 Affordable workspace

ARTS AND THE RECESSION – Helicon Study #1 of arts organization responses to the recession:

 25% are proactive – employing a range of creative approaches to fund raising, program creation, and audience development
 60% are informed but cautious in their responses and many in this category aren’t sure how to proceed
 15% are in denial that the sky is falling for them and aren’t doing much of anything different

Other findings:
 Funding is down across the board:
o Endowments: down 20 to 25%
o Corporations: down 20 to 50%
o Foundations: down 10 to 25%
o Individual giving: down 10 to 25%
 Many performance based organizations are adjusting their program offerings for more popular appeal.
 Audiences are down, on average, 5 to 10%, but some are as high as 30% in decline

 Arts organizations have responded to shrinking income by:
o Freezes on hiring new people
o Cuts in pay and benefits of existing staff
o Furloughs
o Layoffs

 Surprisingly, investments in technology and online capacity are increasing as marketing shifts to the internet
 Most arts administrators think the recession is only exacerbating fundamental problems that have existed for years.

STUDY #2: What are funders doing in response?:
 Concentrating cuts in grants to one or two years instead of letting it flow longer
 Spreading the cuts over several years to lessen the individual impact now
 Rethinking their programs and approaches
 Prioritizing existing commitments to make sure those that expected X dollars can rely on that reliance (which may be bad news for new applicants)
 Cutting their own operations budgets (though few are laying off staff)

FORECASTS:
1. The negative impact of the economic crisis will last well into 2013
2. Many arts organizations will NOT survive
3. The arts sector world will be a different place when the shakeout is complete
4. Rethinking funding sources, what we do and how we do it will be essentially across the board.
5. New behaviors for growth and survival will need to emerge.
6. Funders are likely to invest in fewer organizations and be forced to pick a select number to try to help stay alive and grow.

Quote: “It is not the strongest of the species, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change that will survive.”
Charles Darwin

The Second GIA Session focus was on Federal Stimulus Funding Money available to the arts and on strategies to get some of those funds. There was simply too much detailed information to recount, but the following web sites should be helpful in understanding what is available, and how the processes work:

www.americansforthearts.org/pdf/events/2008/convention/handouts/Recovery/Wisdom-1.pdf

Monitor the funds at www.recovery.gov

Review the items listed in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance at www.cfda.gov and / or www.grants.gov

Funds are available from several federal agencies (and the arts have successfully tapped into these agency funding pools in the past):

Department of Justice
Department of Labor
Department of Health & Human Services
Department of Education
Department of Transportation
Department of Housing & Urban Development
Department of Agriculture

Session leader Bill Cleveland did offer the following general observations to bear in mind when dealing with Federal Government agencies:

1. Most of the money is local in that it comes from the Federal Government to local agencies to disburse at the local level.
2. Securing funds from any of these agencies is “relationship intensive” – meaning that the more of an ongoing and close working relationship you have, or can develop, with the local agency administering the funds, the more likely your chance of getting a piece of the pie. After you identify the source of funds that might be available to you that you think you qualify for, make friends with the local agency people as quickly as you can.
3. The local agencies want to allocate all the money allocated to them. What they don’t disburse locally will only end up going back to the Federal Government. And they are on the clock – there will be a timeline for them to spend the money. The quicker you can make friends with them and make a convincing case that your program will advance their agendas and that you already have substantial local presence and value, the better your chances of getting money.
4. The amount of money can be significant.
5. Details of how to apply and how to get money are likely to vary greatly from place to place.

Arts Innovator Series: The Arts Education Innovator with Wallace Foundation head, Daniel Windham and Americans for the Arts chief, Bob Lynch was one of the best sessions at the conference. Both men are, of course, extremely knowledgeable and experienced, but what made the session so memorable and enjoyable is that both have a quiet charm and the format of the presentation was to integrate their own musicianship into the offering. Bob shined on the piano, but alas Daniel’s saxophone was apparently damaged in transit. Still, both offered keen insights into how to personalize the arts education messages and how to more effectively advocate on arts education’s behalf.

Bob recounted how when very young, he was at a local public swimming pool and what he remembered was seeing a bunch of guys horsing around at one end of the pool, and a bevy of attractive young girls listening to one guy playing a guitar at the other – and that pretty much made up his mind where things were at for him. Daniel told the story of moving from the Boston Symphony in the early evening to acting as a backup for Gladdys Knight and the Pips at the Sugar Shack club.

Bob’s rules for Advocacy are as follows:
1. Determine what you are advocating about. WE want – fill in the blank. But we must be sure to be clear. So we want arts education does us no good. We want passage of AB 101 – a bill that would facilitate arts education does us good.

2. To whom are we talking. We need to know who we are targeting with our advocacy. Far better to identify the members of a legislature that will actually play the decision making role in passing or not passing a piece of legislation, than just trying to lobby any member of the legislature.

3. Why? Why does what we want matter to whomever we are trying to lobby. Not why it matters to us, but why it should matter to the intended decision maker target.

ARTS ACTION FUND PAC RECEPTION:
The good news is that there are now 100,000+ people who have signed up as Arts Action Fund members – not contributors to the Political Action Committee – but activists who were willing to send emails, letters etc. Bob Lynch related the events surrounding the introduction of the Colburn Amendment – which would have prohibited Stimulus fund money from going to the NEA – and told the story of how arts supporting New York Senator Chuck Schumer had voted “for” the Coburn amendment. Deluged with Arts Action Fund emails and calls of complaint to his office, he not only backed off but admitted he had made a mistake, then went on the weekend news talk shows to advocate against the amendment. It is, Bob noted, that kind of massive grassroots response that is essential for political clout. As the number continues to grow, so will the power and clout of the arts.
The bad news is that there were less than 100 conference delegates who were willing to pony up $35 to attend the PAC reception. While the PAC has been successful in raising funds for its political war chest – and while it really doesn’t take as much money to be a political “player” as people might think, the arts still lag far behind other special interest groups in raising PAC funds. I still find it a mystery why out of 1200 attendees, less than 100 are willing to stand up with their pocketbooks. Perhaps more contributed than attended, but I still hope the day comes when the PAC reception has to be held in the Grand Ballroom.

Other people blogged on the Convention:

Check out Janet Brown’s (head of GIA)new blog: www.giarts.org/
And Ian David Moss – a new next generation arts leader I first met last year when he was a fellow at the Hewlett Foundation – is writing a really excellent blog which I strongly urge you to consider subscribing to. Ian is sharp, insightful, and his blog has both style and substance. Check him out at: www.createquity.com

All in all another very well organized and successful conference. Next year AFTA will celebrate its’ 50th Anniversary in Baltimore. And that is quite an accomplishment.

Have a great week.

NEXT WEEK: A BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH KENNEDY CENTER HEAD – MICHAEL KAISER

Don’t Quit.

Barry

Posted by msaunders at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2009

CASTING THE WIDER NET PART II

Hello everyone.

"And the beat goes on............................."

Yes, this blog is long. But I think the subject is important. Speed read or scan if you wish.

Data Mining / Pattern Analysis / Relational Software

Earlier this year I raised the subject of marketing in terms of Casting A Wider Net (which is just another way of saying that we need new potential donors and supporters, new volunteers, new people in our audiences. The question of course, is how to we get those people?

There are, it seems to me, some basic precepts if you want to Cast A Wider Net.

First, you need to identify whom to target. It is inefficient and largely ineffective not to narrow down the “universe” of people to whom you are sending your message. That universe has to be those people who are most likely to respond positively to your message. Trying to sell Hip Hop jewelry to AARP members is probably a waste of time and money.

Second, once you identify your target you have to determine how to most effectively deliver that message.

Third, only then can you craft the specific message for the specific audience you are going after (and just as there may be multiple target audiences, there may also be multiple variations of your message).

The question then is what tools can we employ that will help us to accomplish the first two specific goals – both as a field and as individual organizations? This is the second blog on that subject, and specifically about Data Mining and the value that marketing device might be to the arts & culture marketing efforts. Data mining is (according to Wikipedia) simply the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. In practical terms it is the automating (via computers) of the process of searching for patterns in data.

I have two barstools that sit in front of my kitchen center island. I was thinking of getting one more, so I went online on Google to see if I could, first, match the stools I have, and then find out if I could get a really good price. I found what I was looking for pretty easily, but decided I didn’t really need another stool after all. But for the next week, whenever I opened the browser connection, there on my home page (which is Yahoo, not Google), there was an Advertisement for Bar Stools.

At the Supermarket (like most people I generally shop at the same market, a Safeway for me, close to my house) last month I bought some South Beach Breakfast Bars. Last week I bought some sugar free Maple Syrup. I am obviously trying to reduce my intake of bad sugars etc. Yesterday, I bought some items that had nothing to do with such a lofty goal, but when I paid for my purchases I got a coupon printed out for a dollar off Nabisco reduced calories cookies.

I’m being watched and monitored. We all are – to a depth we fail to appreciate. Big Brother has begun folks. Seemingly innocent now, but who knows in the future. But this blog is not about the loss of privacy and all that scary stuff; it’s about the arts sector being as sophisticated as it can be in its competition for ever scarcer resources and support. It’s about successfully Casting That Wider Net.

We now live in the age of instant computer generated data mining. At the base level, Data Mining is about purchasing and inquiry pattern analysis. In both of the above situations, the computer identified a ‘behavior’ on my part and its (rather primitive) algorithmic programmed response was to suggest to me something that my inquiry or purchase suggested I might favorably respond to. This is kindergarten stuff.

Data mining software is one of a number of analytical tools for analyzing data. It allows users to analyze data from many different dimensions or angles, categorize it, and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases. Data warehousing is defined as a process of centralized data management and retrieval. None of this is new – it has been around for decades. What is new however, is the amount of data being collected and warehoused, and the development of ever more sophisticated software to process the data, analyze it and use it for predictive behavior applications.

Every time you shop at Safeway (or your market) and use your Safeway card, or your CVC Pharmacy card, or Costco card or any one of dozens more you might have; every time you use a credit card, or debit card, every time you make an inquiry or respond in some way on the internet, information about you and your habits and preferences is being gathered and stored. Virtually every consumer decision you make is recorded somewhere and a profile of you is expanded and filed away. From the retail seller’s point of view, they are primarily interested in targeting their budgets to maximize future sales and thus they are interested in what you buy and what you might buy if they can present that option to you in the right way, at the right time. And how they do that differs depending on your age, gender, socio-economic class, education, geographic location and, most importantly, on your buying patterns, and an analysis of trends in your past and recent behavior. What seems clear is that it works.

The amount of data on each of us is staggering and growing exponentially, and the more data available the more accurate the predictive software can be because it has a more accurate profile of the individuals being analyzed (and, frighteningly, data is now being collected on children as young as pre-school and so the data banks will someday go from cradle to grave). Beyond basic demographic information (age, gender, geographic location, etc.), add to your file political and philanthropic contributions, hobbies / interests, clubs and affiliations, political party affiliations, religious preference, financial profile (based on job, property owned, credit reports, DMV info, etc.), education background, personal information from Facebook, LinkedIn, My Space and countless other sites, magazines subscribed to, and criminal history – and that’s just to name some of the information readily available on most of us. But gathering and storing all the data is only half of the equation. What has made this a growth industry and of so much interest in so many quarters is the software that analyzes all this seemingly isolated data and uses it to predict future behavior; software that finds obscure relationships between millions of bits of data to determine connections virtually impossible for human beings to make (even if they could wade through the data). In the retail application, the predictive behavior software also analyzes what kinds of advertisements and marketing approaches actually work once they have narrowed down their targets.

Of course the data being kept on all of us is far more sophisticated than the relatively pedestrian retail / marketing application of this phenomenon. Homeland Security doubtless collects all kinds of additional information on us all – gleamed from public records and – to the horror of many – from private sources including emails, website surfing choices, telephone records, travel, and much, much more. But that is a whole other subject. And there may be serious privacy concerns that raise fundamental policy issues about our sector participating in this kind of approach at all – but I leave that to be discussed and debated. My purpose here is to consider what the nonprofit arts field can do to avail itself of all the marketing tools it might use to improve its bottom line in an ever increasingly competitive world.

Where is all this headed? Far, far beyond the most basic uses of this kind of marketing tool - i.e., Netflix notes you like Pixar Animation movies, so it sends you an email on the release of Kung Fu Panda; or Safeway prints out a coupon for me for some diet product. That’s fairly unsophisticated application of what has developed since then. Data Mining now includes in each folio on each person (and yes, just like you have a credit file, there is a much larger file of information on you that retailers can tap into), relational data on what is sometimes called “tethered individuals” (i.e., family members, neighbors, business colleagues, close friends etc.) By analyzing the data of those people and their profiles and their “relation” to you, Data Miners can get an even better and deeper level of insight into your behavior. Moreover, artificial neural networks (resembling actual biological neural networks in structure) actually learn human behavior patterns through a primitive form of artificial intelligence, and allow increasingly more sophisticated (and accurate) prediction of human behavioral response to specific stimulus (e.g., one advertising approach over another).

I’ve spent months now wading through tutorials on a host of subjects in the data mining area, and I don’t want to confuse you here with a lot of technical jargon because it simply isn’t necessary for us to even understand all the tools that computer scientists have developed to make data mining useful and relevant to a host of applications, including marketing ones the arts & culture sector might productively and beneficially employ. Suffice it to say that there are a host of tools and devices to determine which subsets of data could be the most helpful in trying to analyze variables that might have bearing on predicting future behavior (called Decision Trees). And new tools are being developed constantly. We are at the tip of the proverbial iceberg here.

Retailers from Walmart to Sony Pictures are already using Data Mining on an almost unimaginable scale. From what kinds of stimulus – promotions, shelf placement, advertising, discounts, release dates etc. - have on purchases, to creating new products in response to unmet demands. But Data Mining applications go far beyond retail. Sports teams are accessing data on their opponents play and game plans, identifying trends, and developing strategies to counter performance by opposition teams that may result in defeat. And this kind of game analysis has been going on for years. Only now computers make it easier and faster to accomplish. Thus if the Jets rush the Quarterback on third and long 52% of the time, the opposing team, knowing this, can hold back a tight end for blocking purposes, and thus run a wider variety of plays more successfully. It gets a lot more complicated than that. Anti-terrorism efforts are based largely on data mining and predictive behavior software. It is the analysis of trends and behavior patterns and the interface between that analysis and predictive behavior that is of the most interest.

For our purposes, we want to know which individuals are likely prospects to attend our performing arts events, and which variables influence their decision to attend or not. We want to know which specific consumers are most likely to purchase art. We want to know which people are likely to respond to our pleas for donations (and which donors might give more), and we want to know which elected officials might carry our banner and fight for our needs. And Data Mining can help us get more sophisticated and targeted.

Here’s an example: Let’s say we identify someone who has been to a jazz concert in the past six months, recently bought a jazz CD, and last year bought a biography of a jazz musician from Amazon. Not terribly complicated today for data miners. We could use that information to try to sell him / her a ticket to an upcoming jazz concert. But a more sophisticated approach would be to identify that individual’s “tethered” people, sort out and identify the two that share that interest in jazz, and then develop a mini campaign that packages an entire evening out -- sending email invitations (and the invitation could include a sample concert clip of a song, some background bio info, photos, reviews etc. - and could even include a pre-concert “meet & greet” bonus perk) to the cell phones of those three people to attend the jazz concert (at a 20% discount), followed by dinner at a nearby local restaurant (featuring the kind of food that group likes – with another discount) It could include maps to the locations (including a nearby parking garage – with yet another discount coupon). After the concert it could twitter the those people to push a CD of the concert, tickets to another concert next month, and a coupon good for a subsequent visit to that restaurant or another in the same neighborhood.

That would be neat. Our problem is we can’t identify that (unknown to us) person who went to the jazz concert in the past six months in the first place. We lack the data and the software to analyze the data. But it already exists out there, and is available to us for a price. Our next problem is we don’t have the money, nor do we have the on-staff expertise to know exactly how to deal with this kind of tool. No problem with that second challenge – those who are in the business of selling this data and the software to make it useful are only too happy to help us apply it to our needs, to help us to figure out how to best use it for our purposes and train us in its application. We do have to make some effort to get involved (and alas, we haven’t). The money to afford it? In small applications it isn’t necessarily prohibitively expensive, but we’re financially challenged right now. We need to figure out ways to work together, to act more like a sector or industry and share information, data and most importantly budgets – because the only way we can intelligently and efficiently avail ourselves of data knowledge and application is for us to work together. We’re too small to do it alone as individual organizations.

What should grab our attention as the arts sector is how can we avail ourselves of some of these increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques to sell our products more successfully. If we want to “cast a wider net” and compete for the same dollars and support that scores of other sectors are competing for, then don’t we have to figure out a way to employ the most impactful tools available, and ways to acquire those tools that we don’t yet have? Whether or not we should pursue such strategies is yet another larger policy question that I am not considering here. That we are neither organized enough to be able to employ these marketing techniques, nor able to afford access to them is likely a given. But there are private companies compiling all this data, and firms like Oracle and others writing increasingly sophisticated adaptable software to analyze this data to provide knowledge and information on which marketing decisions can be predicated and with very successful results. This is another area that national service organizations, foundations, state and regional agencies and the NEA ought to be playing a role (at least in investigating the potential in the tools and sharing their findings with all of us.

Arguably any process or procedure that allows any enterprise to more successfully market its goods and services will help its’ bottom line. We could never amass the necessary data on our own. Few sectors or industries could. We’re talking terabytes of data here, which is like trying to imagine the planets in all the galaxies in the universe. The collection of data is already a new industry itself. Data already exists, and software is available, that could help performing arts organizations to more successfully target potential audiences than their current efforts at casting that wider net. We don’t use that which is available in part because our level of sophistication is remarkably low in the marketing area, and, of course, our budgets (even of our most well heeled cultural giants) hardly provide adequate funding to tap into the latest tools. And, of course, we tend to want to market our products in ways that address the experiential level of our consumers, even if such a subjective approach is difficult, if not actually impossible, to quantify.

In fact, our marketing expertise is rooted (and many would argue, stuck) in a much earlier time. We collect precious little data of our own, and that which individual organizations do collect, is relatively simplistic, and even that limited data we are loathe to share with each other. Most performing arts organizations know very little about their audiences. Oh, they might have some basic demographic information but it is spotty, not collected on any on-going basis or updated regularly, and it is virtually never analyzed using anything anywhere near the level of sophistication as algorithmic predictive software. (Hell, we don't even systematically collect the email addresses of all those people who intersect with us at one point or another - and how insane is that?) The same can be said on the data we collect on our donors and other sources of fundraising. For an industry so heavily dependent on specific sources of cash flow and income, we are remarkably primitive in the way we collect, store and analyze the data that may be right out there waiting (begging in today’s world) to be analyzed. Alas we can’t, for the most part, even tell you the basic generational composition of our core audiences – at least not on an individual organizational basis – let alone which of our small donors are likely candidates to give more -- and it is at that level that we need to empower ourselves towards greater success.

Data Mining’s applications to our sector are limitless. Thus, for example (and I am not suggesting this would be a priority application – but it IS something that would have long ago been done in the private sector) it would be relatively easy today to identify what grants the top 100 arts funding foundations have made over the past five years, the backgrounds of those foundation’s current senior arts program officers, and the foundation’s Boards of Directors (and what both of those groups in each foundation favored in terms of allocation of funds), and with very great accuracy, analyze that data using off-the-shelf software that could be adapted to the purpose easily enough, and predict the odds of any given arts organization getting a grant from any specific foundation for a specific purpose. How much grant writing time could be saved? Ah, but that raises all kinds of other questions and problems Barry. Yes it does. But my point is simply that we ought to discuss these things. Aren’t you tired on being a 21st Century person living in a Jurassic world?

More to the point, here’s a better example. We could easily enough (in partnership with AE) analyze what percentage of American Express cardholders (and which ones specifically) in a defined subset of an identifiable category (based on age, income and educational levels – and ones within a set zip code) would be likely purchasers of season tickets to a growing theater company – and, what would be the best way to target those people with the theater company’s message (i.e., direct mail, email, phone call, AE Card bill insert etc.) Or we could run a state by state analysis of how local government (from city councils to boards of supervisors to state legislatures to members of Congressional delegations) not only voted on support to the arts, but where they appropriated money from (a variety of funding pools -- e.g., Education, Transportation, Parks & Recreation and General Fund budgets etc.). Add variables such as political party policy positions and platforms, and a host of other relevant data that the software can identify – and all of that data might suggest which elected officials we should target with our support and messages, and that info might be valuable to us in crafting a real strategy to reinstate government support for the arts. We don’t do that. At best we know how the national Congress and some State Houses vote. That’s pretty much it. And, but for the AFTA Action Fund, for the most part, at best, we send them letters and invite them to our gigs – usually when there is a crisis and we are trying to save something. That’s not a very sophisticated 21st Century political lobby / advocacy strategy. You can bet that other special interests groups are more sophisticated than that. And we are in direct competition with them. The point is there is data out there that can help us, really help us in developing specific strategies, and we are not using it.

We talk a lot about strategic planning, but much of our planning isn’t strategic at all. It is mere guesswork - long on speculation and short on verifiable data. In some ways it’s almost as though we continue to try to sell snake oil out of the back of a wagon. In successful advertising and marketing, mere repetition of a message is still necessary, but what the most effective message is, when and where to apply it and a host of other questions make that whole strategy much more complicated.

So if we are to cast the wider net and succeed in growing our audiences, expanding our donor bases, increasing our number of volunteers, we must consider using the most sophisticated tools that exist, and to be able to do that we are going to have to first figure out a way to cooperate and collaborate and share data, budgets and leadership in gaining new expertise and understanding. Our marketing savvy is just too primitive as compared to those who compete against us. We can’t go it alone anymore. In terms of marketing, the whole arts sector needs to be much more collaborative.

Casting the Wider Net by using Data Mining techniques is just one aspect I think in a much, much larger picture of what Arts Marketing is, or should be about, now and in the short term future. It will take time for us to get up to speed, but this is another one of those areas that we need to start now if we are ever to move down that new highway. We can’t continue to market the arts like they were marketed in the last century. Some of the fundamentals may remain the same, but too many of the variables have changed, and unless, and until, we are using the latest tools we will not be competitive.

I am trying to develop some basic outlines as to how arts organizations might employ Data Mining so as to share information with you on this tool. More on Data Mining and Casting the Wider Net – including how to craft the right message -- to follow in a later blog.

I would love to talk to people more about this subject and so if any of you marketing people are going to Americans for the Arts in Seattle in a couple of weeks, please come up if you see me and let’s talk.

Have a great week.

Don’t Quit

Barry

Posted by msaunders at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2009

A SMALL SILVER LINING IN THE ECONOMIC CLOUD

Hello everyone.

"And the beat goes on......................."

HELP JUST FOR THE ASKING?

With budget downsizing, layoffs and less money coming in from all sources, what can the average arts organization do to get staff help in fundraising, event planning, marketing, media relations, volunteer coordination and all the other things that simply have to get done?

The bad economic situation may actually be providing at least a temporary answer -- qualified interns. More and more recent college graduates are actively seeking nonprofit internships because in the current job market there are no jobs to be had. Internships give them practical experience and something to put on their resumes that will help them distinguish their experience (and commitment to a chosen field (e.g. marketing, finance, etc.). Any number of experts are advising college graduates (and even displaced workers)to consider an intership as a smart (temporary) move.

An increasing number of nonprofits are finding that they are getting huge responses to ads on craigslist and other places for interns - including non-paid positions -- even ones demanding six month minimum commitments. The key to attracting superior talent to these positions is to offer real training and oversight as well as meaningful decision making authority. If all you are looking for is someone to file papers and stuff envelopes, you aren't likely to get anyone who can really help you. But if you can allocate senior management time to oversee such a program and offer mentorship and skills training so that the experience is seen as serious professional development, there has never been a better opportunity to attract truly talented and often time surprisingly well qualified people in fields as diverse as website design and management, to marketing and public relations, to finance and accounting.

Need help in your understaffed (or nonexistent) marketing department? Is your finance department (or finance person) overwhelmed? Do you just not have the time right now to begin to create next year's budget? Want to boost the percentage of twenty somethings in your audience? Want to get some media coverage with that same segment? Want to increase awareness of your organization and raise money from the young professionals crowd?

Why not recruit two or three recent communications department (or other departments - e.g. business / finance etc.) new college grads as unpaid (or minimally paid) interns, for a defined time period (say, four to six months), and then after a quick orientation and tutorial in your organization and the nonprofit arts sector, turn that mini team loose to work on a series of predetermined objectives you and the team mutually arrive at (e.g., raise $20,000 from the under 35 crowd. Or get ten articles in local papers, magazines or on local television about the organization. Or draft a detailed budget for next year including cost cutting options. There are doubtless a score of things you would like to have done, but can't do yourself)? No budget? No problem, that is part of their challenge. You meet with them regularly to review what they are doing, offer suggestions and direction and monitor their progress. You stand to get unbridled energy and enthusism, out-of-the-box thinking and entrepreneurialship, and just maybe achieve some results that have been eluding you. You also get one or more people who will care about your organization and go out into the community and spread goodwill. You might even get a future permanent employee. They get the opportunity for some practical, real world experience, real decision making authority, and, depending on the degree of their success, an excellent addition to their resume and a terrific recommendation from you to prospective employers. They also get the chance to do some meaningful work and help with a good cause. Win / Win. No?

But this opportunity may not last forever. The economy will improve, more jobs will become available, and more workers will then be in demand, and less of them will be interested in working as an intern.

Something you might want to think about anyway.

Links you may want to check out:

Doug McLennan's blog on TEN WAYS TO THINK ABOUT SOCIAL NETWORKING AND THE ARTS
www.artsjournal.com/diacritical/2009/05/power-in-numbers-there-ought.html

SEATTLE AFTA CONFERENCE LINK: www.americansforthearts.org/Events/2009/convention/default.asp

Have a good week.

Don't Quit.

Barry

Posted by msaunders at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2009

BARRY'S BLOG - SOME COOL RANDOM LINKS

Hello everybody.

"And the beat goes on.................."

NINE COOL RANDOM LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB:

Here's some links I thought you might find interesting:

John Kilacky (Arts Program Officer - San Francisco Foundation) emailed me with this link to his Ten suggestions of things you can do to cope with the hard economic times. Check them out here – www.blueavocado.org/content/survival-strategies-arts

Here's an idea (from the Dalouge Smith blog - Dog Days - May 14, 2009)I have long thought should become reality. An Artist-in-residence in every corporation – click here: www.artsjournal.com/dogdays/

Some people thought Michelle Obama's remarks at the Metropolitan Museum in New York last week came up short, but to me what is important is the fact that the First Lady made the remarks in the first place. (I don't remember Laura Bush or Hillary Clinton out on the stump for the arts - though perhaps they did - though not often that's for sure.) One can only hope, however, that the arts are not just on the First Lady's radar screen, but will be a policy priority of the West Wing and the President too. Here is the text of Michelle Obama's speech – www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2009/05/text_of_michelle_obamas_speech.html

The Hewlett Foundation released the SRI follow-up report to their California arts education report - you can find it at their onsite library (scroll down) once you click here: www.hewlett.org/library

The Poodwaddle World Clock is a very cool site that gives you (in real time) the world population as it is growing plus scores of other world stats and info. It breaks down growth by continent, in terms of gender and some other fascinating statistics - there is a moving toolbar at the top - click on any of the icons. This is a dynamic site - play with it. I think you will find it fascinating. Click here: www.poodwaddle.com/clocks3.htm

Got an email this week from a Gen X self-described "emerging leader" who suggested to me that the real reason a lot of people are going to this year's Americans for the Arts Conference in Seattle is to network and look for possible new employment given that there are so many layoffs and closures going on in our sector. And I suppose if you are looking to put your name and face into people's minds so as to increase your chances of finding a new position, this conference is a very good one at which to do that. Click here for a link to their conference site: www.americansforthearts.org/Events/2009/convention/default.asp

Target Women if you want a donation. I have long suspected this is true. My own experience suggests most corporate giving decisions are made by high level exeutives wives. Here the Chronicle of Philanthropy suggests women in each family increasingly make the philanthropic decisions. www.philanthropy.com/news/updates/index.php?id=8307

Create a "social network" of your own. Ning.com is -(according to Ask.com) - "a social network designed around creating social networks. Ning invites users to create their own social network by going through a series of steps that name the social network, select a color scheme, and allow for unique profile questions.

In some ways, Ning is a portal to mini-social networks since you can choose to join any of the thousands of user-created networks, and in other ways, it is a social network development platform."
This has many potential uses for your arts organization. Click here: www.ning.com

Place group calls and send messages to multiple people for free (from your mobile or any other phone). www.foonz.com

If you have a link to a cool site you think people would like to know about, please add it as a comment below, or email me a reply. Thanks.

Hope you are rejuvinated following the Memorial Day holiday.

Have a good week.

Don't Quit.

Barry>

Posted by msaunders at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2009

NEXT YEAR COULD BE A WHOLE LOT WORSE

Hello everybody.

“And the beat goes on............”

THE CALM BEFORE THE REAL STORM?:

In conversations with foundation program officers, local and state arts agency directors, and elected officials, I am hearing the same draconian predictions – that arts organizations (in many, if not all, places) haven’t yet really begun to feel the economic crisis that is looming in the near future. We’ve been hit hard already, but we’re really still living on last year’s budgets and spending patterns – last year’s city and municipal budgets, last year’s foundation budgets, last year’s philanthropic giving, and last year’s audience attendance. And it is going to get a lot worse.

I am hearing that some major foundations may be cutting their funding pool budgets for next year by 20% or more, and that some smaller arts funding foundations are contemplating even deeper cuts. Local cities and counties, hard hit by the economic downturn and desperate for revenue, are likewise contemplating huge reductions for arts funding. And the competition for those scarcer dollars is heating up as many government funded areas seek to appropriate arts money for their needs, and are making the argument that what they do is more critical and necessary than arts funding and that arts funding must, during these hard times, take a back seat to other, more pressing needs. There are many cities and counties where the local arts agency funding pool is threatened with elimination or drastic cuts. Similarly, hotel tax funds – used to fund the arts in many jurisdictions, are down because tourism is down, and thus their pool of arts money is shrinking.

The response by many arts organizations to these possible reduced funding pools is to (perhaps erroneously) assume that if there is a 20% cut in some funding pool (hypothetically a foundation let’s say), that their grant will be cut by 20% next year. But what I am hearing is that (at least some) funders are trying to reassess what they fund and to what extent as they struggle to make hard choices in these desperate times, and that may mean that any number of organizations that have for a long time gotten an annual grant, may this year not get a cut in that grant, but rather may not get any grant at all. If the average arts organization’s funding includes a number of grants from a variety of sources, all of these cuts, in the aggregate, may add up to be a quite substantial portion of their total budget. For any number of organizations that could be an overall cut to their budget much larger than what they are anticipating.

Add to our problems that the number of those donating to the arts may not be falling, but the amount of their individual gifts apparently is. Corporate giving is way down across the entire nonprofit sector. And we have all seen the impact of audiences staying home resulting in cancelled or shortened performance schedules and the like. The NEA economic stimulus money (though not very much) nonetheless has helped some organizations cope with the (so far) relatively modest downturn (compared to what might lie ahead this coming year), and that has, itself, created somewhat of a false sense of security. That extra money won’t be available next year.

The long and short of all this is that a lot of inside people are talking about the next year as one that will really hit the arts hard. Some organizations are in denial over what may be coming, others may just not see it coming and are going to be in for a shock. Still others see the writing on the wall and are trying to plan for survival, but aren’t sure to what extent all of this will hit them. It will be prudent for arts organizations of all types and sizes to do some very serious worst case scenario planning this year in anticipation for next year.

One can only hope the above scenario doesn't happen.

NEA CHAIR NOMINEE:

The New York Times broke the story last week that Rocco Landesman, a broadway producer, is President Obama’s choice to head the NEA (www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/theater/13nea.html?_r=&scp=1&sq=endowment%20for%20the%20arts&st=cse ) For many in the arts this was a very surprising nomination, and some will be disappointed that Obama didn’t pick someone of color, a woman and / or someone with nonprofit arts experience. I don’t know Mr. Landesman, but like him I was an outsider and came from the "for profit" entertainment sector when I first started in the non profit arts 13 years ago, so I would hope everyone would give him a chance. I think it incumbent on the whole of the arts field to open an immediate dialogue as to what the NEA should be, what its’ priorities ought to be, how it’s money should be allocated and what role it should play in supporting arts & culture in America. I think every national arts service provider group – from every discipline, along with the foundations and funders, and & every state and city agency, should all begin to ask their colleagues to chime in on what kind of NEA we all want to see and then begin to organize those thoughts and reflections and share them with Mr. Landesman. Along that line, I intend to gather a half dozen or so leaders for discussion on this blog of exactly those questions -- with the hope that such an exercise might motivate others to do the same. The NEA ostensibly belongs to all of us. We need to discuss what the agency should be.

AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS IN SEATTLE:

With budget cuts, shrinking funding pools, and looming challenges, it is hard to argue that people should spend money and time travelling to attend a conference, but I would argue that this is precisely the time when arts leaders should get together --- to talk about those challenges, share ideas as to how to survive and cope and to network with their peers. For me, the Americans for the Arts conference has always been one of my personal preferred meetings. I can think of three really good reasons why arts leaders here in California in particular should attend the meeting in Seattle June 18-20th.

1. The networking possibilities. The conference provides one the better opportunities to intersect and interact with some very well positioned and powerful leaders in the field -- including those from three key groups: a) a large segment of the foundation / funding community -- (and I like to intersect with the people who have the money because sharing information with them tells you a lot about the health of our sector and let’s you know what kinds of projects may and may not fly in the future), b) a very large segment of the national service provider organizations(half of which it seems are now part of Americans for the Arts under the expansion umbrella of the past few years), and interaction with those people gives me a good idea as to what the various sectors of our field are facing and what they are doing to cope, and let's me get a handle on how others are successfully dealing with major challenges (it also let's me brainstorm with people from different corners of our field about possible collaboration, and (c) an excellent cross section of the sector's best and brightest independent consultants - and as a consultant now I like to touch base with others to see where there might be some possibilities for collaboration or for work.

I have found that I invariably come home from these gatherings with a new project in the development stage, and a very high percentage of those embryonic projects conceived at this conference end up being realized. Something seems to happen here and there are always surprising outcomes.

2. AFTA always allows attendees the opportunity to really see and experience the arts & culture of a city up close and in detail. I have been to probably a dozen AFTA conferences, and but for those conferences I would never have had the chance to really experience those cities and their arts communties in anywhere near the depth I do because of AFTA's sponsorship. Seattle is a fantastic and cool city, and it's so close to California that it's possible to come to this meeting Thursday and go home Friday night if you want to. Airline flights have never been more reasonable and there are multiple hotel options. As the conference rotates to different locations around the country, (and was in Vegas two years ago), it isn't likely to be back on the west coast for some time.

3. The chance for renewal. I have come away from each of these conferences both renewed and re-energized, and it is important for arts leaders during these times to get reconnected again to the pool of positive energy that will allow them to survive and weather these tough times.

Click here for AFTA convention information & registration www.americansforthearts.org/Events/2009/convention/default.asp

Have a great week.

Don't Quit.

Barry

Posted by msaunders at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2009

BURN OUT - RECOGNIZING IT, DEALING WITH IT

Hello everybody.

"And the beat goes on........................"

BURNOUT - RECOGNIZING IT; DEALING WITH IT:

During these stressful times, more and more of us are likely to feel the pressures mount and begin to burn-out. Those kinds of feelings can strike all arts administrators, whether new hires or seasoned vetern leaders. We need to first recognize the signs, then take pro-active steps to cope with the syndrome. Leaders need to know that burn-out is common, and how they can help their staffs to successfully combat its negative repercussions.

Here is a simple test to help determine if you are near or experiencing some kind of burn-out.

1. Are you feeling over tired and drained of energy?
2. Are you getting easily annoyed and irritated with small problems?
3. Are you less sympathetic or empathetic to others around you?
4. Is what you say increasingly misunderstood or misinterpreted by those your work with?
5. Are you increasingly feeling frustrated in trying to reach reasonable goals at work?
6. Do you think you are achieving less than you are expected to on the job?
7. Do you feel organizational politics in your organization has gotten out of hand and is making it harder for you to do a good job?
8. Do you sometimes dread coming into the office in the morning? Are you watching the clock in the afternoon?
9. Do you feel increasingly disorganized?
10. Do you daydream more during work hours than you use to?

Score yourself on a 1 to 5 scale for each question, with 1 being that you rarely, if ever, feel this way, and 5 being that you now feel this way most, if not all, of the time. The nearer your total is to 50, the more in danger you are of serious burnout.

What can you do to avoid and / or recover from burnout?

1. Identify what you think are the likely causes of your feeling stressed or unhappy on the job. Write them down over the course of a week if you have to. Just knowing what specific kinds of things are increasing your stress levels can help you cope with them. The more you understand what is making you feel like you are ‘burning-out’ the easier it will be to eliminate some of the negatives. Understand that you aren’t likely alone in feeling burnout on the horizon. Talk about what you are experiencing, not as a way to whine or complain, but as a rational approach to dealing with what are the root causes.

2. Recapture your time. Learn how to say ‘no’ to demands put on you that interfere with your productivity and stress-free environment. Prioritize what you need to get done and cut the rest back. Time is a precious resource – don’t spend too much of it on low-yield work that nets little results. Get more sleep, more exercise and take more time for yourself – even if just a few minutes here and there. Discover what you consider to be a reasonable work / home balance point, then rigorously defend that point. If you need to take a day off, do it. If you think you are in serious burn out, move your vacation up. Talk to your supervisor(s) and explain that you need to cut back in order to stay an effective team member. Take a deep breath and step back during the course of the day and when negatives arise, ask yourself: “Is this really a big deal? “ Don’t be hesitant to point out where the organization is losing it focus on what is important. It’s easy during difficult times for organizations to sometimes get involved in projects and tasks that are impossibly burdensome and unlikely to succeed. Sanity may ultimately depend on recognition of where energy is misplaced.

3. Conscientiously think more about how to manage your workplace environment and your relationship to co-workers and colleagues so as to avoid some of the negative pitfalls of office politics. Increase the time you spend with your positive support network. Don’t let people depend too heavily on you for too much. Manage those kinds of relationships. Distance from co-workers is both a cause of burnout and a defense against it. Spend at least part of each day thinking about how things are going for your co-workers? Are they burning out? Do they need some support? Empathy with others is essential to feeling more in control yourself.

4. Think about what parts of your job give it special meaning to you, then spend at least part of your time involved in those activities so you can maintain your level of passion and commitment. Spending all of your time dealing with the negatives on your plate breeds frustration, hostility and hopelessness. You need to spend some time doing tasks that you know are effective and which you enjoy. If your job description has become part of the problem, see if it is possible to have someone else within the organization help with some of the more stressful components - at least temporarily. Help can make the job easier and less stressful. If all of your job description is confronting challenges that leave you empty, you need to change that job description in some way.

5. Remind yourself about the good things that attracted you to your job in the first place. Try to gain a little perspective by standing back a little from time to time to appreciate that all the unreasonably burdensome challenges you currently face are likely cyclical – and that, in time, things are likely to get better.

NOTE TO SENIOR STAFF AND HEADS OF ORGANIZATIONS: The single most important thing to do in the face of actual, or potential, burnout is to address the issue head on and not ignore it. It isn’t likely to just go away by itself, but with a little conscious effort, you can effectively deal with it. If you are a senior manager, or Executive Director of your organization, try to remember that any number of the people on your staff may be dealing with some degree of job dissatisfaction and burn-out, and try to acknowledge that this reality is normal. You need to support your staff in identifying burn-out, its root causes, and some of the ways that your people can effectively cope with it. Bring the topic up at staff meetings, or with department heads or individual employees – and empower everyone to frankly and forthrightly accept that in these very difficult and challenging times (when programs and services are being cut, and staff laid off) burn-out is common and it is ok to acknowledge it. The more open you are in dealing with it, the less of a problem it will be for your organization. Please don’t assume it isn’t an issue for your people, just because no one is complaining about it openly.

Good luck.

Have a great week. Hope it was a Happy Mother’s Day for all.

And remember: Don’t Quit.

Barry

Posted by msaunders at 12:35 PM | Comments (1)

May 03, 2009

SWINE FLU AND THE BIGGER ISSUE OF THE CAPACITY OF THE ARTS TO THINK AND ACT COLLECTIVELY

Hello everybody.

“And the beat goes on.......”

DODGING A BULLET WITH THE SWINE FLU, BUT WHAT ABOUT NEXT TIME?:

From the news accounts it would seem that the current flu pandemic isn’t likely to pose the level of threat originally feared. While it remains to be seen how it will fully play itself out, it seems this flu isn’t the “doomsday” everyone fears may one day confront the world. I think the response by governments across the globe was pretty much the right response. Better to be cautious. Mexico, of course, took the biggest economic hit as a result of their attempts to contain the virus by discouraging (and preventing) people from assembling. Seeing what happened in Mexico makes it relatively easy to speculate as to what would happen to our little arts sector if some potential pandemic had had its genesis here in our country, in one of our metropolitan areas. Imagine the epicenter of the beginning of this pandemic scare having been New York or Los Angeles. And imagine it a more dangerous flu and so the fear lasted not one month, but three or four or more. If Mexico’s actions were the reasonable first response, then the closing of museums and galleries, the shutting down of virtually all performing arts venues (and movies, then restaurants and more) would happen here. Even if there weren’t a current economic recession and wider crisis, such action would be economically devastating to our sector. And perhaps the next potential pandemic will start here. It probably isn’t a question of IF, but WHEN. What would we do? What could we do? Clearly, the arts sector is highly vulnerable.

WORST CASE SCENARIO PLANNING – or CONTINUED LACK THEREOF:

Back in 2005, when the SARS (Bird Flu) pandemic scare was playing itself out in Asia, I blogged about the arts & culture sector doing some kind of scenario planning for the eventuality of some kind of natural (or man made) disaster. At the Madison Wisconsin Americans for the Arts conference that year, we did a “Hessenius Group” live session that touched on the issue of our sector’s contingency planning for unlikely scenarios (or more accurately, the lack of any such planning). I argued then that we ought to at least consider the implications of the impacts of everything from pandemics to economic collapse to earthquakes and hurricanes, and, at least, convene some of our best thinkers to discuss what those impacts might be and what might we do to minimize the negative fallout in the unlikely eventuality that any one of those scenarios became reality.

I echo that clarion call again. Now maybe there isn’t anything that can be done in the face of such disasters. I don’t know. But I still think we ought to try to get some kind of handle on what might happen, and consider whether anything could be done or not. If nothing else, we might increase awareness of the problems and challenges we might face, and at least begin to catalogue where our most pressing needs would be in such circumstances, craft some kind of unifying action that might address those needs (or at least get individual organizations to think in those terms), and expand awareness of our plight with the public. In all probability, scenario planning for us would have as its goal, not saving every organization, but saving the sector itself. The exercise itself would be, I think, of value.

If we had done that kind of planning, would it have made any difference given the current economic crisis and its impact on our sector? Could we have come up with any plan that might have helped those countless arts organizations that are now struggling? Or would it have just been a waste of time (a resource that seems in perpetual short supply for us)? I have no idea. I don’t think we can know until we do it. I suppose the easiest suggestion in the face of future catastrophes, would be to start some emergency fund to deal with those future needs, but how on earth would we possibly fund such a contingency pool? In all probability the small amount of money we could raise would be ineffective in the face of whatever need it was designed to address. Ok, I know that. But I still believe that it is prudent to at least discuss what kinds of events (that now seem ever more likely to happen and far less the isolated, unlikely random occurrences) might have significant negative impacts on our field, what those impacts are likely to be, whether or not there is anything we can do up front to prepare for those scenarios, and, even if not, then what the aftermath would likely look like as our sector is changed. I still think, for example, that we ought to be collecting data now during the current economic crisis which can be used to analyze what the sector was and what it will look like in two years when the economy rebounds, because I think there are lessons to be learned from what we are going through now, and those lessons can empower us to seize opportunities that may arise in the future – a future changed because of what is going on. But there is a much bigger issue at stake in talking about scenario planning – and that is that we have no mechanism in place to even have such a discussion. The real issue is how can we function as a “sector” when such action might be called for as necessary or advisable.

THE BIGGER ISSUE – CAN THE ARTS SECTOR EVER BEHAVE LIKE A “SECTOR”?:

The arts & culture sector’s capacity to behave like a sector is something we rarely face head on. We have no ongoing entity or structure or apparatus that allows us to discuss any of the myriad of issues we might want to discuss as a sector. We haven’t even really yet advanced to the point where we think of ourselves as a cohesive sector, capable of concerted, organized action on specific common challenges. We still lack the will, the skills and the means to think and act as a unified field, despite our constant references to ourselves as some monolithic arts & culture sector. We have too few of the tools in place yet that allow us to work and position ourselves as a field. Even though we pretend we are a “sector”, for the most part we are scores of separate interest areas and tens of thousands of individual organizations only loosely linked because of geography, discipline, budget size, lofty mission statement or other variable. We very infrequently work as anything even resembling a cohesive, organized, unified whole with common purposes and goals. We squander the potential clout and power we might have based on our numbers and our community value because we don’t act in concert. And when we do, it is usually reactive to some imminent crisis. There is no long range strategic planning for sector wide action on any level. We don’t even have the tools yet to move ourselves in that direction. We are still at the “talking about” it stage. That lack of identity and ability to mobilize ourselves has had profound costs to all of us over the decades, and is likely to be even more costly to us in the future. Yet here we remain.

I, and many others, have been beating the drum for a long time for increased cooperation and collaboration for the arts -- as a field -- to act in unity on broad issues that impact us all – from advocacy to research and data collection, from internal to external collaboration itself, from marketing to audience development. I don’t mean to suggest there is no cooperation and collaboration, no effort going on -- only that most of those efforts have little to do with arts & culture as a “sector”; most collaborative efforts are by and between individual arts organizations and sometimes with other sectors. The few sector wide efforts (Americans for the Arts Action PAC comes to mind as an example), are still somewhat embryonic and are not yet based on any widespread local foundation. Indeed, that’s how we think – basically narrowly within small spheres, and not “globally” as an actual sector (or industry). We are forever divided by discipline, territory, size, and several other markers. Theater groups rarely talk to symphony people, dance companies don’t interface or intersect with museums. Suburban groups have little interaction with their urban counterparts. Large budget organizations don’t interact with smaller arts groups. We remain separated by diversity, and age and other categories. We all champion arts education as common ground, but even there our agendas are different and the specter of “territoriality” raises its ugly head. Occasionally we rally to advocate on behalf of the NEA or something, but usually such efforts are “reactive” not “proactive”. We talk a lot about “the arts” and our value to society. But we rarely act like “the arts” – a cohesive, unified force that thinks in terms of what is best for the whole of arts & culture. Even when we look like we are acting in concert – say for pushing government for more money - in reality we aren’t doing so because we have some consensus on what would be good for the whole field, but rather are hoping we will directly benefit as individual organizations. I am not saying there is anything wrong or even unusual in our acting from the selfish motive of what is good for us as separate organizations, but rather that there are ways and times that if we thought and acted more on what would really be good for the whole arts & culture sector, we would, in fact, be pushing our own agendas, and would likely be directly moving towards addressing our own needs more than we are by continuing to be governed by a vivisectionist legacy.

But how on earth do we get there? How do we overcome all the obstacles to working in concert, to thinking in terms of the whole of the arts, to defining what an arts & culture sector is, and isn’t – and to developing the tools and the means to act collectively in smart, meaningful ways?

THE DENVER NATIONAL PERFORMING ARTS CONVENTION REPORT:

I call your attention to the just released Report authored by Elisabeth Long Lingo, Andrew Taylor, and Caroline Lee on the outcomes of the 2008 National Performing Arts Convention – Assessing the Field’s Capacity for Collective Action. You can access the full report via Andrew Taylor’s blog – click here: http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/main/our-capacity-for-collective-ac.php

This was a quite remarkable conference and is, I think, a landmark and very important report. It deals specifically with the capacity of the performing arts sector to think and operate “collectively” by examining what performing arts organizations already share, and the elements of building community and capacity to act in concert. Finally, it considers the “opportunity structure” for acting like a unified field. I can’t possibly do justice here to all that is contained in this report (and I urge you all to read the section in which the caucus participants at the Denver NPAC make specific recommendations. Great food for thought, and enough topics for a whole summit meeting of our best and brightest).

The report deals with “building community” by breaking that challenge down into four sub-parts:

• Defining the community by exploring what constitutes its boundaries and membership.

• Examining how cooperation and collaboration is valued

• Defining what are the shared interests, values and mission

• Articulating the common problems and opportunities for acting together.

The Denver Convention didn’t really focus on how the whole of the arts field (not just the performing arts section) might work to push a common agenda on a national basis. As the report concluded: “While building community is essential for defining common interests and connections, building institutional resources and capacity enables a community to take positive action together. The Denver convention was designed primarily to build community and define the common set of opportunities and issues for first action."

To move from building a sense of community to full "sector" awareness and identity, we would need to develop "institutional" (or systemic) resources which we do not currently have.

The report considers that process:

"The process of building institutional resource capacity involves four factors:

• Accessing and mobilizing community members and allies (the report noted that “a majority (77%) of respondents thought challenges facing the arts could best be addressed at the local level”) which may ultimately help the effort for the arts to develop a “sector” mentality, image and approach by providing a foundation on which to build.

• Acquiring, deploying and sharing resources (the report noted that “indicators suggest a systematic issue around knowledge dissemination in the field. Arts leaders either lack time or incentive to discover and use existing knowledge resources, or effective knowledge dissemination mechanisms do not exist to get this information out”). Clearly, if a significant percentage of us aren’t familiar with the (limited) tools that are available to us to act collectively, we have a long way to go.

• Creating effective decision-making and implementation processes for action plans (the report noted the oft cited reasons for our failure to act together to achieve mutually beneficial results by noting: “when describing the greatest challenges to taking action together, respondents cite follow-through and maintaining momentum, coordination of efforts (who would do what), preoccupation with day-to-day organizational demands, and the different needs/interests of the many disciplines. The old familiar problem of not enough time to do what needs to be done continues to vex virtually everything we try to do. When will we learn how to stop doing things we only think are crucial, so we can actually have the time to do some of the things that are, in fact, crucial? And while these practical considerations logically explain our failure to move closer to a unified field, it doesn’t explain our failure to “think” of ourselves as part of the same, larger “tribe”.

• Ensuring sustainable leadership (here the report noted that “it was striking how little conversation focused on the discovery and development of future leaders, and the skills and abilities they might require.”) And this might be at the heart of our problem to engage each other in a common mission to use our collective strength and act in a concerted manner, at least to some limited extent – to wit: nobody has the time, inclination or resources to craft, let alone implement, strategies to move us in that direction. It will take leadership – skilled, experienced, trained, respected leaders from within our field whose sole job is to move us to optimizing our position as a unified, collective field. Not only haven’t we identified (let alone recruited) any of those leaders, but we have no platform from which they might act even if we did identify them. Ultimately, fashioning the myriad segments of the wider arts & culture community into more of a cohesive, collective, is going to have to be some people’s full time job. We will never get there if it continues to be a volunteer effort. We need visionary leadership, and we need to provide that leadership with the support and tools (budget) to move us in the right direction. At some point the work must move from the discussion stage to the action stage. And to do that, we need to fund people to help us organize the effort.

The report suggests that given the overarching reality that people in our sector (as in most others) tend to think and act locally, one approach to building more of a sense of community as a precondition to building more of a capacity for us to act as a unified sector (at least in some ways, some of the time) is to build on that local (or even regional) core base and train and empower more people to act together as a field on that local level. I think this is largely the right approach. We need to build a foundational base on which we can develop an ever widening awareness of collective thought and action. Yet, I think we have to acknowledge that there may not just be one road to success. In some instances, a national campaign or agenda can be the catalyst from which the local effort can eventually be spawned. Thus, I think it may have taken years, if not forever, to build local Political Action Committees on behalf of the arts to develop our collective political and lobbying clout. Americans for the Arts has had great success in a relatively short period of time in establishing a national PAC. Of course, it predominantly deals with national issues, but one hopes that it can be the basis (soon) to now develop state PACs under its umbrella, and that eventually can lead to local city PACs. It’s not impossible to build from the top down, but it probably makes more sense in trying to develop consciousness as a sector to build from the bottom up.

SOMEDAY A TRUE ARTS & CULTURE SECTOR?:

The task of moving any sector towards thinking as a sector, and then manifesting that collective sense of community and unity into specific actions that benefit it – both as a whole and for its individual component members – is a daunting one, and arts & culture has a long, long way to go. We have made progress and conventions like NPAC and this report are terribly valuable. Alas, the problem is that our efforts so far remain random, ad hoc and infrequent. We as yet fail to have any sustained, comprehensive approach to addressing the challenge of thinking and acting like a sector (at least when it is in all of our interests to do so). We really do ourselves a disservice if we simply allow dealing with this issue to remain on our “to do” list for an indeterminate amount of time without ever moving specifically and methodically to deal with it. And I think the only way to give these isolated efforts some structure and legs as it were is for those few in power who can pull some of this together to take leadership initiative. Thus it is the NEA, or Americans for the Arts in concert with some of the other national service organizations, or one or more major arts funding foundations (or even the GIA on their behalf) – or all of these groups together who ought to make the forging of a true arts & culture sector a priority. These groups ought to figure out a way to convene representatives of us all to consider the ways we might think of ourselves as a sector and then act on that thinking – whether it is worst case scenario planning or the identification of leaders that might devote 100% of their time to dealing with this challenge, (and then figuring out how to support those leaders in dealing with the challenge), or some other area of mutual concern. We are much more likely to develop into a formidable “sector” that can deal with common problems and challenges and do things for our common good if we actually push for this kind of development rather than simply leave it to chance to happen on its own. Yes, it will take a long time to reach any level where we really have a national consciousness to who we are as a sector, and the built up foundation on which we can achieve common goals based on the power of that consciousness – but we have to start somewhere, at some point – and I hope the NPAC momentum doesn’t die on the vine and four years from now we talk about it again having done nothing in the interim.

Follow up link on last week’s blog about Young Professional Arts Administrators and their efforts to deal with the challenges facing them to having a career in the field. Click here (thanks Andrew Taylor): http://philanthropy.com/news/updates/8006/conference-notebook-young-people-urged-not-to-give-up-on-nonprofit-careers

Have a great week.

Don’t Quit.

Barry

Posted by msaunders at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)