Missed opportunities in Detroit

Doing the unexpected is what gets your message across. There is nothing unexpected about the way things are unraveling in Detroit now that everyone has their dander up, but this time I'm going to pick on the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's management for a minute here for a supreme missed opportunity.

Drew McManus at Adaptistration details the current fluff-up over the musician's televised concert where the DSO management gets a powerful law firm to send a scary letter to the TV station to get them to back off. Naturally, it only leads to a press opportunity for the station and the musicians.

So here's the "What If"... What if the DSO management had instead encouraged their audiences to go to this concert? I mean, I can't find their mission statement anywhere on their website (you should fix that, DSO!), but I imagine it has to do with promoting the artform and so forth. And concerts out in the communities to expand the reach of the orchestra is one of the key items that the management is demanding.

So imagine how this plays out this way. The musicians rally to this concert. The TV station agrees to broadcast it. The management sends out a press release and marketing materials to its patrons and donors saying "Please watch the musicians perform this great concert that will showcase exactly the type of programming we are encouraging in our new contract with them. This is a fantastic opportunity to see them doing the work that artists everywhere need to do to help our important work survive and thrive into the next generations. We applaud them for their ability to work to broadcast the event free for all of the Detroit market to enjoy this work, and we hope that in doing this kind of outreach, they find a way back to the negotiating table with work rules that comprise events like these back on the table." And so forth.

But surely, you say, the union would respond with something nasty. Maybe so. I doubt it. And maybe it wouldn't bring them back to the negotiating table either, but it would turn more than a few heads and make an exceptional point about the need for what I again feel is the most important part of the new contract management laid out, the work rules. Without those, the orchestra and classical music in Detroit in general is doomed anyways.

As McManus says, there's a giant brand experiment going on here. For the DSO, for classical music, and for the arts. Brands can reinvent themselves, but only if there's an audience to reinvent themselves to.

More on political fundraising

First of all, VOTE.

But while we're on the subject, a couple of pieces that stand out for me. Lucy Bernholz of Philanthropy 2173 comes out strong against the kind of anonymous donations enabled by Citizens United, calling it money laundering.

When you think of money laundering, trust and integrity are not what comes to mind. Yet trust and integrity are the calling cards of nonprofits. This is just one reason everyone in the social sector needs to be thinking about what it means if 501c4s and 501c6s start gaining a reputation as fronts for company money. That’s not a reputation your local food bank or youth organization wants to have to live down, and talking tax code subtleties with the general public is not going to be an effective way to deal with this issue.

Lucy's fear that most Americans don't understand the difference between various not-for-profit companies is spot-on. The tax code is far too complex as it is to the point that use of accountants and specialized computer programs to prepare taxes is rising. Do we expect the average American to distinguish between a 501c3 and 501c4? I expect most people's eyes to glaze over. This needs to be addressed in the next Congress no matter who is in power, and not-for-profits as a whole need to lead the conversation on this so that we aren't disgraced and distanced from our donors.

It's all the more important to note then that Dylan Matthews, guest-blogging for Ezra Klein today, doesn't find clear evidence that all this money actually increases chances of winning.

The studies... seem to suggest that spending has pretty low bang-for-bunk, with studies putting the cost of a vote anywhere from $50 to $175. Combined with the fact that 95 percent of House races since 2004 have been won by the bigger spender, this seems to suggest that campaigns spend a lot because donors perceive them as winners and give more, not that spending more makes campaigns win.

So donors feel they will have influence by donating even if they aren't actually having a significant effect on the election. Naturally, in the arts, we don't want to let our donors influence the art, but if this is the culture that politics is engendering in donors, how soon before that pressure increases on arts organizations instead.

On that note, this increases the importance of really good donor programs that greatly reward donors with access and fantastic programming so that they don't feel a need to interfere in artistic decisions to gain that access they feel they deserve from giving to us. They deserve the access, but not to the point of changing the art which would simply end up being a devolving spiral that destroys the mission of the organization in favor of donor pandering.

Building processes

1000 page views!! The picture's a bit of a stretch, I know.

 

It was another action-packed day.

First, in ArtsAppeal history news, I broke 1,000 page views on the blog today (yesterday now, it would seem). Thank you all for your readership and participation. This is not just a place for me to get all my thoughts out, but for you to participate in the discussions and make those thoughts better for all of us to benefit.

Next, I had a fantastic sit-down with Sharon Kushiner, Major Gifts Officer at The Field Museum, one of the best museums in the world as far as I'm concerned. After all, they do Science! Yes, with the explanation point and everything. Next to the arts and gaming, Science! is what makes my geeky heart pitter-patter most in this world. Getting to talk shop with her was fantastic. A true kindred spirit.

Finally, I got to see the ensemble preview of Memory for BackStage Theatre Company. What an incredibly human show set to a fascinating political backdrop. I'm very excited to see where it's going.

But this is also the time that I'm working to set some of those experience processes in motion. One of the advantages a small company like BackStage has over a company like the Field is how easy it is for us to be entrepreneurial which is where I play best. So using that as an advantage, we're looking to make a really incredible experience for one of our groups that is looking to see the show and our patrons as well.

To go about this, I'm again trying to put myself in the shoes of the patrons. These are a group of outsiders to the company coming to see a show that they have likely not seen before, this being the Chicago premiere and all. We've already been discussing access opportunities, and one of the ideas we've struck upon is inviting a number of community experts and one or two artists from the show to come sit-down with our patrons to explore the ideas in the show. What a great way to be introduced to a theatre company than to have an event ready to go that will expand my understanding of the subject matter and make me familiar with the topics and some of the artists involved in the show.

Now, of course, my personal preference is to go to the group first and ask them what they would expect from an incredible night out at the theatre, but it doesn't hurt to have something like this in your back pocket as a possibility as you proceed either. You wouldn't want to push it on them, but being able to make a suggestion helps tremendously.

Obviously, these things can't just happen on the fly, so now we can break it all down and make a process chart of who is doing what steps to get this ready, calling the community experts, arranging space, notifying the patrons, etc. But as the process develops, each step can be documented, assigned to a person or team of persons, and evaluated later to see how to improve it, especially with the group and patrons but also internally. In this way, the emphasis is on what the group and the patrons see and experience instead of making this a "marketing effort" or just another product as it were. And in this way, we enhance their experiences and their loyalty to the organization.

It's going to be a fun few weeks coming up. Can't wait for Opening Night and everything that follows.

Hi there, ARTSblog folks!

ARTSbloggers? ARTSblogians? ARTSblogipodes? Hmm...

Just a quick welcome on a busy day to this space. I started off intending to talk about fundraising until I realized that my entrepreneurial mind tends to wander a bit and see big picture inputs into fundraising. So I hope you enjoy the Creative Conversations post, and I look forward to seeing you chime in on the discussions here as nascent as they may be.

It's the people, stupid.

This should be a no-brainer, folks. It amazes me that Elmer Sotto, head of growth for Facebook in Canada, needs to come out and say this.

This is not simply a tool for fundraising. If you think it is, you’ve missed the whole thing. It’s a means to build a relationship… Facebook allows you to build a relationship slowly over time with a lot of people.

This is why experience management is so important. The fact that fundraising is about relationships should never, ever have been in doubt. I think the second fundraising rule I learned after "People only give if you ask" was "People give to people." Was my training that unusual? I really hope not.

I think the most amazing complement I got to my initial post on experience management was from an author friend of mine, David Crampton. He came back from the explanation and said "I would call that being human to your customers." Trust a real writer like him to be so much more eloquently simple than I am. But as we discussed it, the clear truth was that the vast majority of companies have not treated their customers like humans. The greater the irony that our government gives them corporate personhood, isn't it? Most of them sure haven't earned it.

We need to start earning it. We need to take those people we call customers or patrons or donors, and we need to start thinking about the experiences we're giving them and how to talk with them, developing relationships with them, instead of at them, bombarding them with only the words we think they want to hear to get their attention, to know that we're doing everything we can to treat them with the respect they deserve as our fellow human beings.

Our patrons are not a commodity. They are human beings that are passionate about our work or have the potential to be passionate if we only give them an exceptional experience with the time and energy they give to us. Invite them in, take the steps to learn about them, and then transform their experiences into something that can't be duplicated by anyone else earning you their loyalty every step of the way.

Experience management

I've been bandying this term around here, and I do a passable job it seems of describing it well enough in person. Time to put words to paper... or blog as it were.

People don't buy products. People don't buy services. What they are buying is an expectation of positive experiences that involve those products and services. Just be able to have a bunch of wood and sails floating on the water does not make me want to buy a boat. Having my friends over and cruising Lake Michigan with the wind in my hair makes me want to buy a boat.

The same is true of the arts. Not to devalue art for art's sake on a philosophical level, but patrons and donors don't give us money simply for art to exist. They expect that we offer them an experience with that art that they will appreciate. Whether that's purely being entertained or if they hope to achieve an emotional or intellectual fulfillment from the experience, the key is still that it's about the experience.

And in the end, the better our experiences with something, the more loyal we are to that thing. I'll shop at Jewel-Osco or Dominick's or any other grocery store based on personal convenience and prices in the moment, but I'm not loyal to any of them. I'm loyal to my local friendly game store for my board game shopping though over buying cheaper online, because my local game store takes the time to introduce me to games, demo the games for me, talk to me about strategy, helps me meet other gamers to play with, etc.

But how many companies, in the arts or otherwise, do you know that have a person that's strictly devoted to looking at things from the patron's point of view and really managing that experience? If this is the absolute core of where loyalty comes from and enables higher margins and increases the lifetime value of the customer and all those other things that business types drool over, where are the Directors of Experience Management out there?

To be certain, some people and companies do this sort of thing naturally. I desperately want to go to Masaharu Morimoto's eponymous restaurant in Philly as I hear from friends that he has achieved that level of precision. I keep wanting to go to Alinea here in Chicago as well. Ah, for the days when I have some extra pocket change for such adventures in edible delights... Maybe I should have experienced breakfast this morning... But you could probably come up with other excellent, if less tasty examples from Nordstrom's to that vacation spot you go to year after year to your own favorite comic book shop or game store.

What is needed is take that natural, unconscious competence and turn it into a process-driven conscious competence. Someone, a champion in your organization to coordinate with marketing, the box office, front-of-house staff, artistic staff, development, and anyone else in your organization that is part of the patron experience and start really starting to manage that experience with the goal of forever increasing the loyalty that your patrons have to your organization.

And of course, the most important part is interfacing with the patrons themselves to understand what they are experiencing. You can't turn a person from an outsider to a patron to a donor to an advocate without directly engaging with them. You need to see through their eyes and walk in their shoes. Someone needs to take an active role in doing, moving from just talking to potential customers to engaging with patrons in a dialogue.

Who will this person in your organization be? Well, I have a goal that in five years, major arts organizations everywhere will have a Director of Experience Management. Until then, however, it can be anyone that is willing to step up and be a champion. Someone that is willing to knock down silos and get everyone working together to create a cohesive process throughout the organization. Maybe that someone is you.

Sideshow: My blog hero, Ezra Klein

Anyone that follows my Buzz or Google Reader feed knows how much I love Ezra Klein. Besides the fact that I'm a little bit of a political blog junkie, I enjoy his style, his depth, and his humor. I can't possibly keep the kind of pace he does, but then I'm not getting paid by WaPo to do so, so that's probably fair.

So when he talks about his craft, I'm pretty excited.

If there's explanation to be done, it's done in a link. (You'll notice, for instance, that I described Manjoo's argument in only the barest of terms. I'd have had to spend more time on it if I couldn't have sent you to the source). If there are multiple points to be made, they're usually (though not always) broken into different blog posts. If there are interviews associated with the post, I'm likelier to put them up as a full transcript rather than simply excerpt them in the text. The fact that my readers are mostly regulars, that I can use links and that I have no space limits drives both the writing and the organization of the content. A blog post is a part of a discussion, and that means you don't start from the beginning and you don't have to get everything out in your first comment.

He goes on to compare that to the news-article-as-lecture. I don't know about you, but I never was able to sit through a lecture. I was that geek at the front of the class always asking all these crazy questions and getting into debates with my profs. It explains why I love this medium so much I suppose. Engagement in the discussion is always my preference, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

Thanks for the peek behind the scenes, Ezra!!

The economics of musician pay

ArtsAppeal reader and Director of New Media at the Wayne State University Theatres, Alex Goodman, sent me this excellent link to an analysis of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra strike.

For a decline to be large and noticeable, even in the mid-term, the symphony world would have to be a perfect, rational free-market economy. In fact, openings at orchestras occur infrequently, musicians often have something other than money in mind when they make decisions about where they want to play, the decisions made in auditions are not infallible (meaning that the best musician is often not chosen for openings), the musical development of an orchestra and its members is unpredictable, no true "scale" of artistic ability exists in any case that would measure the relative position, musically, of the Detroit Symphony against larger symphonies (Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland) or smaller ones (Portland, Seattle).

Barry Johnson at Arts Dispatch makes an exceptional point. We have a strong tendency, both liberals and conservatives, to more or less idealize the free-market system here in America. The truth is that, especially in the arts, there are subjective qualities in hiring and in evaluation of different performance groups. So when there's talk about the DSO becoming a "second-tier" orchestra, what does that mean?

While art can exist without artistic organizations, no artistic organization can exist without sustaining and expanding audiences and donors to say nothing of staying within their budget. Every one of the musicians in the DSO is welcome to go elsewhere if they feel that that's the best choice for them as an artist, but there will be artists that feel comfortable (dare I say giddy even) existing within the storied halls of the DSO under the constraints they will need to endure and thrive together as artists and artistic organization. And who is truly to say that the audiences in Detroit will appreciate them less?

Sideshow: Language

As a writer, a speaker, and a hearty user and abuser of language, it was delightful to watch this Stephen Fry rant given life. It hasn't been a good week if I haven't scribed a word never before seen in the English dictionary, but that I think far better describes my intent than anything previously written. I am undoubtedly wrong, but it is fun nonetheless.



I love the term "sound-sex" and hope to find cause to use it very soon.

Creative Conversations

Every young arts manager should be a part of the Emerging Leaders Network. If your area doesn't already have a group set up, get on this. The future of our profession is happening in these groups. The thought leaders that will drive our ability to innovate and explore new ways to succeed come out of the discussions and the conversations and workshops and get-togethers and partnerships that happen in these groups. Each of us, isolated, may be successful. All of us together are unstoppable.

That's my evangelical speech of the day. But how about some actual thoughts from last night's Chicago group?

We were privileged to have Daniel Reid, Ian David Moss, and Marc Vogl with us for a vivid discussion. What started off as a panel discussion quickly became more interactive with the entire group and got to explore some very interesting areas.

Daniel and Ian discussed their work exploring crowdsourcing of funding projects for foundations. Imagine a Wikipedia of arts projects and companies with citizen curators in place of Wikipedia's experts and editors. A democratically elected higher strata of curators as determined by ratings of their reviews would have power to assign points to various funding projects and therefore determine if and how much funding those projects and companies get. Daniel and Ian were excited by this idea as it distributes the ability to survey all the incredible artistic inputs coming in unrelentingly through technology that no one person or even a small committee could truly comb for those that deserve funding.

Parallels to projects like Kickstarter were made, but they see this project being a little more than just "voting with dollars" as it were. They want to truly democratize the project and make it a funding method for foundations from large to small. I particularly like the idea of buddying this sort of structure up with a community foundation that is largely though not exclusively funded by the people associated with the reviews. You wouldn't need to give to review or to review to give, but the money and the reviews have a very strong tie and can really strengthen a particular community base that way.

Marc talked quite a bit about organizational issues in the arts, starting with his transition from going from a small, entrepreneurial, underfunded not-for-profit to the very large and bureaucratic but well-heeled Hewlett Foundation. His work and passion at the moment seems to be very much directed towards making sure that the Emerging Leaders of today are given every opportunity to grow and get compensated properly, not just financially but educationally, through the ability to innovate and explore ideas, and through being challenged positively in their work. He believes, and it was certainly reflected in the audience discussion as well, that intrinsic value in arts management positions must be brought to the fore, and he's hoping to find ways to fund that amongst the organizations he's working with. I know I'm wishing him every success in that regard.

There was also a fascinating discussion he led about entrepreneurship in the arts, a topic of considerable importance to many in the arts lately it seems based on my experiences. Entrepreneurship is at once revered and scary as hell. I maintain that until you put yourself out there as an entrepreneur, you can't understand what it's like. You have to assess for yourself just how risk-adverse you are, and even then, understand that you're in a world unto itself when you become an entrepreneur. Being entrepreneurial within an organization is less risky, and I know we all encouraged ideas on how to introduce that into arts organizations as a prevailing value. I suggested thinking about the Google 20% time projects as a model that could work well for arts organizations, but as always, the issue is time and energy and how much of it do any of us have left at the end of the day to give. A company that really values these things though will have to find a way lest their prized staff burnout and lose the will to give their all for the arts for which they once had so much passion.

What I take most out of the evening was the discussions at the bar later that harken back to my opening paragraph. We are legion. Together, we can confront the problems facing us and come up with new ideas and new solutions. It brings back why I started this blog to begin with, and that was to be a part of a wide-ranging dialogue in the blogosphere specific to arts management issues. We can start to take risks by putting our ideas out there. I, personally, am willing to be wrong here on my blog and elsewhere if it advances the discussion and leads us all to a better understanding. We need the crucible of ideas, for people to put themselves out there, and for these kinds of discussions to occur at great workshops like Creative Conversations as well as over the internet. I'm encouraged by the connections that were made last night, and I look forward to expanding on them.

Catch all you Emerging Leaders in the next great internet debate!

TED Talks are awesome

I still haven't fully processed this one yet to make a sound analysis, but I thought I'd toss this out to the crowd and see what you thought. Melinda Gates talks about learning from Coca-Cola's success in global marketing to bring innovation to the not-for-profit sector. The Gates Foundation is generally more interested in funding world health projects than arts projects, and bless their hearts for tackling such enormous world problems, but that doesn't mean we can't all tag along on their brainwaves and figure out what it all means for the arts too.



Thoughts?

Detroit theatre getting tools for growth

I've been pretty rough on Detroit and their musicians of late. I'd like to take a moment to laud the efforts of one person that's standing up for the theatre community in Detroit.

A good friend of mine, Michael Meike, decided to take a stand for Detroit's theatre community by making the Facebook page, Theatre in the D. He and I were talking last night about websites like the League of Chicago Theatre's Chicagoplays.com, and how by bringing the theatre community together into one place for the artists and the patrons, it has made the entire community stronger.

According to one of Mike's future professors at Wayne State University, there are over two hundred theaters and theatre companies in the Detroit area. I spent over half my life in Metro Detroit and another four years just a little ways away in Lansing. Despite that much time there, I couldn't name more than the smallest fraction of those companies.

Granted, many of them are likely tiny and come and go with the whims of their founders, but that's the point isn't it? Without building a full community to support these companies, without enriching the audiences with great information, without helping those that are seeking out all these fantastic opportunities to engage in theatre to find those opportunities, how will some of these tiny companies become bigger companies? How does the community prove it's on the way up and worthy of support? How will the community foster its common donors?

Getting donors starts with getting patrons. Getting patrons starts with making people familiar with the work. Getting people familiar with the work starts with awareness. Theatre in the D is a great start of it all for Detroit.

Sideshow: Human billboards

While this looks only moderately comfortable, I love the concept of having someone right there to talk about your show. It fills me with a certain glee. Unexpected, hires an actor, and is totally interactive. Brilliant.



Full disclosure: I'm an ING Direct client and love them.

Hockey and the arts

Ryan Miller, goalie, playing for Team USA Hockey

It's hockey season again, thank goodness. I'm a self-admitted hockey fan. I can't help it, having grown up in Hockeytown itself. And yes, the Detroit Red Wings are my favorite team, but not exclusively so. I appreciate the sport as a whole and all the incredible athletes that play it, so I have a tendency to root for all three of my current and former hometown teams, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh.


But Detroit always comes first for their commitment to something more than just entertaining their fans. For holding the game to a higher level. For a long history of doing anything and everything as a team to be the best, even sometimes at the willing (though occasionally begrudging) sacrifice of individual glory. The result has been them hoisting the Stanley Cup, the hardest professional sports trophy to win, four times since 1996, an unrivaled feat in today's hockey environment.

Start to dig a little deeper and you'll start to see all sorts of lessons for the arts. Here we have a sport that has been marginalized in large part because many people feel it is inaccessible and arcane. It has audience and player diversity issues. It struggles to remain relevant and gain the prominence it deserves as a sport that is equally graceful and brutal at times.

One of the key lessons I want to take from hockey at the moment is the amazing transformation of the Chicago Blackhawks, last season's Stanley Cup winners after 41 years without winning it. When I first arrived almost four years ago in Chicago, I was able to walk up to the window and get a ticket for $10 to see the Hawks play their division arch-rival Red Wings and sit down to find half the arena empty. Man, haven't we seen that in the arts a few too many times.

The transformation came largely in the form of accessibility and a commitment to the mission. The new team owner, Rocky Wirtz, aggressively went after the talent and coaching he needed to be one of the top teams in the league, using young guys right out of the draft alongside solid veterans that knew success in winning the Cup from other teams. That alone though hasn't always worked for other hockey teams. He needed to get the city behind him, and in a complete reversal from his father, committed to putting every single game on TV in the Chicago market.

What a difference it made. People saw their home team in action for the first time on their own home ice when previously they would be lucky to maybe catch the occasional away game that was being broadcast nationally. They knew the names of all this hot talent that the team had put together. They saw with their own eyes what was happening and that their Original Six team was on the way back to glory.

And they came to the games.

Look at the incredible success of The Met in broadcasting to movie theaters everywhere, adding not only audiences for its amazing operatic performances nationwide but seven thousand new donors to the donor rolls. I feel that this is the same story, and it needs to be told to arts managers far and wide. Accessibility is the key to coming out of obscurity and finding new audiences and with those new audiences, new donors. We need to work with our artists to open up the opportunities for us to broadcast and record our artforms so that people can see it, understand it, and appreciate it. The increase in audience and revenues will be palpable and ensure that we don't drift off into obscurity in an age where the rest of the world is already being delivered to its fingertips but we aren't.

Rewarding loyalty with access

I'm having a ball getting ready for BackStage Theatre Company's production of Memory and just getting integrated into the company as a whole. We're having some primo discussions about where we want to be going as well, including expanding experiences beyond just the shows.

I've identified three levels that we're going to be working on with events that I think are a good way for small companies in general to organize their events around.

- All Access: events coordinated with Marketing, these could be associated with the shows or other events as needed and advertised in the press to draw people in with a big net. (4 events per year to draw people in on a general basis)

- Patron Access: designed for current patrons, donors, and friends of the company that we want to specially invite to become part of our patron base, advertised through more intimate forms of communication, ie- blog entries, other opt-in services. (8 events a year to stay active with us and boost our mindshare)

- Donor Access: exclusively for those that give, these are all about donor special access, giving donors a reason to stay loyal and to bring new donors in as current donors talk about these special experiences. (12 events a year to secure loyalty and allow them to become an active part of the full company experience)

I like this nice, simple way of thinking about it, because it draws on the dynamics of the loyalty of our patrons and inviting them further into our world as we recognize their commitment to us and their desire to support what we're doing. This is not only rewarding those that are more loyal, but also giving them ever more reasons to stay that way or increase their loyalty.

The strike at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra rolls on

I spent a long weekend in Detroit for a friend's wedding and to visit family, so I got a good look at the local news coverage of the strike at the DSO. To put it mildly, I'm disgusted by what I'm seeing. As much as my life's purpose is to ensure that artists get fairly compensated for the wonderful experiences they provide, there was nothing that gave me any sympathy for the musicians on strike in Detroit.

Let's start with the horrific way that these artists treated one of their own. No one, under any circumstances, deserves to be physically threatened or to have their livelihood threatened over a concert. Especially a concert that was being generously organized in an effort to keep the arts patrons of Detroit engaged during the strike and to which the proceeds were to go towards the very musicians that are on strike's pensions. How much more clear can the musicians' make it that their only concern is for themselves and their pocketbooks and not the art or the audiences? How does this engender support from the very community you need most on your side, the patrons?

Then if you want to look truly disconnected from the reality of the economic situation and the community, make sure you march on the picket line in tails. Let's highlight again that the musicians' are fighting desperately over their pay that started at nearly four times the median income in Detroit and that the final offer implemented by the orchestra is three times that income. It's a hefty sacrifice for anyone to lose 30% of their income. I don't think anyone disputes this. But it's realistic for the situation on the ground.

These are not tactics that are going to endear the musicians to the public or encourage audiences to connect with the artists of Detroit. Again, I will strongly encourage the DSO to find the excellent but not world-class artists that will accept these pay parameters and especially the new work rules that will take them out into the communities to do the outreach necessary to build new audiences. The DSO may have world-class quality, but they are not in a city that needs a world-class orchestra. They need an orchestra, and musicians within it, that are about building the city as a cultural destination again and the artform within the city to levels that can once again support a world-class orchestra. Neither are true at this time, but they could be with musicians that are connected to the city, not just their wallets.

Stop burying the lead

Full confession here. I've done it. Every professional writer I know has done it. If you haven't done it, you're way better than me. But I see it time and again, where someone writes a beautiful, flowing letter... that very few people read or react to.

Most of the time, I find it's because people, when asking for money do what the newspaper guys call "burying the lead" or putting the point of the letter so far down in the narrative that it gets lost. Why do we do this? Maybe it's because we feel we need to make our case before we make the ask. Maybe we are afraid that if we just come right out and say we're asking for money, people will react poorly. Maybe it's not even a conscious choice, just how we were taught to write.

Whatever the reason, do yourself and your audience a favor and lead your appeal letters by making sure they know why you're writing. Simple and straightforward is ok. You might even shock your audience with them not having to read very far to get to the point. More importantly, you're respecting them by not wasting their time on energy on something they don't want to or don't have to read because they've already made a choice for the moment one way or another. To sift through all those aforementioned messages a day, we need to help our patrons scan well for the things they need to read or all of our messages will get lost on them.

I'm a huge fan of Made to Stick and the SUCCESs principle laid out therein. Making messages Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories or at least as many of those things as you can will help make your message stay with your potential donors and get them to act. They rave about The Girl Effect, and if you haven't seen it yet, you need to do so. There's no doubt that the video is about a cause and that they are going to make an ask of you right from the begining, and the more you watch, the more the message sticks and moves you to action. Inspirational to anyone doing fundraising and/or marketing for any cause.

Revenue management, part 2

So what can a small company especially do to improve on the simple revenue management schemes that are already widely in place? Getting giant systems like the airlines certainly isn't necessary and are still hard to find for the performing arts. But having a plan in place is the first step. If it works, you can worry about sophistication later.

First, it's important to take the perspective that every empty seat at curtain time is sold for $0. To say nothing of the fact that it's a lost opportunity to have someone else see that show. Having anyone in that seat is an improvement and having them pay even a penny for that seat is even better.

It's important though to recognize that the factor that's missing most from current revenue management in the arts is the factor of time. Take that tracking data that you have (or the data that you're going to start putting together) and look at when your patrons are taking action. If you can depend on strong walk up traffic but sales are slow three weeks out, it makes more sense for you to lower prices three weeks out to get people to change behavior and take action. If a show is already at 80% capacity with brisk sales two weeks out, it's likely time to raise prices for that show. Don't just automatically send tickets to the half-off sales outlets when you may be able to sell them internally for 70% off and still achieve full capacity.

This takes some experimenting. And as evidenced in recent articles, it'll take a little public relations savvy too. Especially for rising prices. But with some time and patience, you should be able to start to see how audiences react to your ticket prices over time and compared to other events like good/bad reviews, advertising in various media, blog posts, etc. The more you can anticipate those changes, the more you can react accordingly and your model will become more sophisticated over time.

Meanwhile, it's an opportunity as well to target your audiences better. Data like this can help tell you how different segments, areas of the city, and so forth react to your offerings. A price change doesn't have to be across the board as different market segments have different reactions to price changes as well. Readers of Time Out Chicago may be far more ready to take advantage of a price code than those of the Sun-Times.

And as those audiences are captured, new donor targets will emerge. Ticket buying patterns may yield good information on how much a particular patron values your shows, leading to new donor acquisitions. It all feeds one into the other as you continue to manage your patron experiences from first notice to full loyalty, pricing being one tool along the way.

Revenue management maximizes audiences and income

In order to fulfill our missions, we, as arts managers, need to do two key things. First, we need to reach out to as many people as possible with our art. Second, we need to fund that art.

Complicating these basic activities are that we work with more or less fixed capacity spaces in the short run with a performance that will happen whether or not that capacity is met. There are only so many folding chairs we can add to the space before we have audience members sitting in the actor's laps on one side, and we can't sell tickets to last Wednesday's show that wasn't full without a fraud detective wanting to ask us a few questions.

So what does an industry with an "expiring" product, variable demand, and fixed supply do to achieve its two-headed objective of butts in seats and maximized revenue?

Well, donations have long been one very necessary component in capturing the extra value that we've provided, but as Michael Kaiser pointed out, the not-for-profit arts will always need to rely on development dollars because we are an industry that can't realize much in the way of increased efficiency over time. I have always felt that we need to divorce donations from being exclusively about capturing the full value of the performances from those that can afford to give, and make it much more about value-added giving that opens more doors to loyalty and participation.

That leaves us with finding new ways of capturing more income from tickets themselves. While I have and will continue to argue that the price elasticity of arts patrons is not a tremendously steep one, price still matters to most of our patrons. Thus we can use it as a tool to achieve our objectives.

To a simple extent, we've been doing revenue management for a very long time. Pricing a Saturday show higher than a Sunday matinee is a very simple form of RM. The various outlets we use to offer deep discounts in the final days before a show recognize the dynamics here. However, these are crude measures, and other industries such as the airlines and the hotel industry have pioneered variable pricing systems that take full advantage of very similar situations.

Instituting these systems can start simple and grow over time, but they inevitably take the ability to track sales over time. Your marketing and development people are likely already advocating for better data tracking, so here's one more reason it's needed.

More on the theories behind this all soon...