Henslowe's Diary

The Pitch: Why do businesses support the arts?

2013-06-20T15:15:00.000-04:00

Americans for the Arts recently released a report on how and why businesses support the arts.

Some telling data points:

Only 1/8 of businesses who supported the arts thought supporting the arts would help them achieve their business goals.
Barely more than one-quarter of the businesses thought that the arts were an economic generator.

We all have some dusty figure about how the arts create jobs and the increased dollar-velocity in our communities driven by arts activities. Maybe those numbers are true, but to the businesses who might support you, that information isn't salient.

The top three reasons businesses support the arts are:

Improved quality of life in the community (I can support this anecdotally).
The arts create a vibrant community and society (are these actually different profiles?)
Arts organizations offer educations initiatives that benefit the community.

Community benefit, community vibrancy, community education. If you're going to a business asking them to support you, don't try to explain how you align with their mission, create jobs, or help them move product. Chances are, you're wrong anyway.

The businesses who support the arts are actually making a better case for intrinsic value than we're making about our own work.

Instead, explain to the business how your organization or project makes the community vibrant, improves the lives of their customers and employees, and will, ergo, attract more commerce to the area simply because it is a vibrant, value-laden community in which to live, work, and do business. Demonstrate results to them that definitively identify what it is your group has done and will do to deliver the three things businesses find most valuable.

Finally, think local. 96% of the monetary support given to arts groups was given by local businesses.

Board Meeting Bingo

2013-04-07T15:00:00.000-04:00

This game was inspired by my wonderful friend, David. It's called "Board Meeting Bingo" and it offers a way to re-invigorate desultory board meetings in non-profit theatres.

You can re-order the items in each column (except the center square - which is the "free" square) to create 504 unique bingo cards. Feel free to create new terms to replace the ones in the sample card below. You can play the same cards across multiple meetings as long as someone remembers to bring the cards back each time. Prizes are encouraged: some ideas might be a massage or a free car wash by fellow board members.

When an item is in quotes, the person in that role actually has to say the word. Any un-quoted text in a square is a description of an action or idea undertaken or expressed by the person in the role.

Here are the roles:
AD = Artistic Director
MD = Managing Director
BP = Board President
CC = Committee Chair
BM = Board Member

This table is HTML. You have my permission to copy it. There is a PDF version below. You can copy that too.

AD	MD	BP	CC	BM
“vision”	“deficit”	Doesn’t get through agenda	“more information”	Comes late
“risk”	“budget”	Steps down as president	“didn’t meet”	Leaves early
“new work”	resigns	ADJOURNS MEETING FREE	Steps down as committee chair	“didn’t get the minutes”
“legacy”	“website”	Talks about successor	“after the meeting”	resigns
suggests extra-budgetary fundraising	“metrics”	Re-organizes committees	Recommends concrete action	Makes donation at meeting

If you would like a pdf version, click here. Enjoy!

Explaining to do

2013-02-05T15:53:00.002-05:00

A co-worker of mine was working on a Master's degree, and as part of a project on leadership, she asked me to answer some questions about how my values are reflected in my leadership.

I dutifully responded and then saved the document...which remained hidden away for almost over a year...UNTIL NOW!

Here are my responses. Try answering the questions for yourself. Formulating the answers was a good exercise, and as a famous blogger once said (paraphrase) - writing things down makes me more articulate; writing them in a public forum makes me more honest.

What are your three primary values as a leader?

• Transparency – no one has all the information or all the answers. Hoarding information breeds inflexible systems. Sharing ideas and being open to honest, useful criticism improves the organization and the relationships among the people who make it up.

• Outcomes – the group is working toward a goal. We want things to be a certain way, and we are working to deliver those outcomes. All else (ego, credit, ego, blame, ego) is a distraction. Don’t take anything personally.

• Individual respect – organizations exist to serve people. People work in them. If there is not a culture of respect for every individual that makes up an organization (employees, clients, etc.) the possibility of delivering a valuable outcome is diminished or destroyed.

Describe a way in which you have personally lived a value.

• I’ve developed a silly catch-phrase that sounds strange and meaningless to a lot of people who don’t think I mean it when I say it: “You’re great.” Sometimes I don’t mean it at the moment I say it, but I never utter it facetiously. I picked it up from my father-in-law. It is a constant meditation on respect and humility. If I say enough and you hear it enough, we might both come to believe it a little (or a lot) and do better things for ourselves and others. It acknowledges the potential of every person you meet; it acknowledges the daily struggles we have in simply being human; it acknowledges that each person’s value is intrinsic, rather than utilitarian.

Quick Hitters

• What do I stand for? Arete. Always room for improvement.

• What brings me suffering? Intolerance. Closed-mindedness. Resistance to change.

• What makes me jump for joy? Hyper-efficient systems that deliver high-quality outcomes.

• What keeps me awake at night? Red ink.

• What’s grabbed ahold and not let go? There’s always a better solution than the status quo (even if you just thought of it).

• What do I really care about? People – even if I don’t like them.

Tell a signature story that communicates an important value.

• As the manager of a professional theatre company, I was responsible for the finances. I worked with the production departments to put together the productions to deliver high-quality theatre in a timely manner within the limits of the budget. After struggling for several seasons to keep the production departments within their budgets, I began to schedule weekly budget meetings with all the production heads in a room together. Aside from providing each of us with timely, accurate information, it was also a forum for each of us to share concerns or thoughts. The meetings brought our values and outcomes into closer alignment: I understood the specific challenge of the moment that they had to solve with limited resources; they understood that in order for me to be successful, I needed them to provide me with accurate and timely information and to be mindful of budgets and receipts. There was no question that we were all working on the same project with the same aspiration of quality. The transparency and the affirmation of the common outcome allowed us to work harder to support each other – I got a closer view of the fine detail of their project, and they got a sense of the big picture that I was involved in. It solved the problem.

Describe a critical moment of leadership that challenged your values.

• I believe that openness, trust, and productive criticism are keys to improvement and success. As an executive manager, I’m still responsible to yet a higher authority (a board, a president, etc.) for mission success and fiscal health. I was once involved in a situation where sharing critical financial information was necessary for the success of the company, but the other key organization leader lacked technical savvy and placed a higher value on short-term mission success and programming imperatives than fiscal health. In order to effectively share the information, discuss it, and plan, I had to create conditions under which the information would be shared, which seems very disrespectful because gatekeeping indicated a lack of trust. There was no way around it, because the alternatives jeopardized the integrity of the information, which would then jeopardize the success and health of the company. It was not within my authority or ability to modify the behavior or skill set of the other executive, but as a counterbalance to the awkward situation, I tried to keep respect for my counter-part's individual humanity at the front of my mind. It was difficult, and I was not always successful, but the health of the company was vouchsafed. Choosing among competing core values induces a unique kind of anxiety – one enters into constant negotiation with one’s own value structure. In that case, placing a higher value on the positive outcome for the company won out. My hope was that more good would be done for more people over time than harm was done by placing the long-term fiscal integrity of the company above the implicit need to trust my co-exec. I had to base my judgment on the outcomes - weighing the outcome of placing one value above the other and vice versa. In the end, I chose the one that I was most comfortable with. I don't know if I could ever say for certain that it was the "best."

What behaviors and activities help you communicate your values?

• Here’s an old saw (and a mixed metaphor): you can pull a rope, but you can’t push it. I try to lead by example. My actions are always an attempt to live the values I espouse. There are a couple of other things that I find helpful: define and communicate the values of the organization clearly and frequently; create systems that support your values and account for any tendencies toward noncompliance. People are people and they tend to do what they will. Not everyone is going to agree with my values or with the values of the company. It is unrealistic in many situations to think you can just replace the people – especially since each of us will always interpret values differently no matter how well-defined. As a leader, I try to be sensitive to those areas, and create systems with an efficient natural flow that promote (or at least don’t diminish) the values of the organization. When people activate those systems, the values naturally arise and are affirmed. The best systems will support the values, deliver the outcome, and readily present themselves as the most attractive choice to anyone asked to use them.

Reading List for Arts Marketers

2012-11-19T13:42:00.002-05:00

I went to the NAMP Conference in Charlotte a week or so ago. I was very pleased that the folks from Baker Richards, Group of Minds, and University Musical Society had a panel to discuss pricing and marketing in light of the latest work being done on consumer psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics.

Luckily for me, I had read many of the books they cited, and I'm real rah-rah about the whole set of concepts.

Later, while running my mouth for some very patient folks I was fortunate to have dinner with, I got a couple of requests for my reading list - which more or less corresponds with what was said during the session.

Anyway, here it is. I roughly categorized it. I put the books in the order you should read them if you're low on time. Some flow from others. The categories are not ordered. That's up to you.

Behavioral Economics/Psychology

Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler
Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
Everything is obvious once you know the answer, Duncan Watts
Priceless - the myth of Fair Value by William Poundstone
The Honest Truth about Dishonesty; Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. His TED talks are great.
This is a little tangential, but Everyday Design by Donald Norman gives a lot of insight into user friendliness, and he expands it to incorporate advances in behavioral psych in "Emotional Design" (his second book)
How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker. It's long, and it's mostly neuroscience and neurobiology, but it reinforces and explains some deeper evolutionary concepts, and concepts of the mind that relate directly to the other works (plus a lot of other stuff about the brain)

Stats, analysis, flaws in thinking based thereon

The Drunkard's Walk, Leonard Mlodinov
The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver
Subliminal, Mlodinov
The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dorner
The Black Swan, Nicholas Taleb

Related in general

Traffic - Why we drive the way we do and what it says about us, Tom Vanderbilt
Critical Mass, Philip Ball
The shallows, Nicholas Carr - a little sobering, looks at how the information technologies we use literally change how our brains work
The Information, James Gleick - covers the theory of information

Totally random selection that has nothing to do with those, but pokes a hole in Classical Economics (my favorite whipping boy)

Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber

Short, fun, sort of related

Fooling Houdini, Alex Stone - it's got a lot of fun autobiography, and is mostly about magic tricks, but refers to the same kinds of mechanisms that the other books do in a different context. A good spacer for after you digest "Black Swan" or "How the Mind Works."

A lot of my reading list comes from listening to Radiolab and To the Best of Our Knowledge on public radio. The rest are from watching TED talks, and there's a lot of overlap. There are a couple I just stumbled upon. I liked hearing the authors talk about their work first, since it gave me a voice and a foothold on the work.

You might want to jump back and forth between the categories - back to back, you start reading stuff that sounds repetitive, but in the end, I think it helps me retain the information.

10 Guidelines for Musical Theatre Composers

2011-03-31T08:36:00.009-04:00

1. If you write a ballad, you may not use the word "yearning" or any conjugation thereof.

2. If you are writing a historical musical, you may not use the phrase "some folks say" or "some folks" in any exposition. Try to avoid using the word "folks" at all. It rhymes with "yolks."

3. No screaming. Let's stick to singing.

4. If your plot requires a metaphor for freedom, you may no longer use flying or flight. You may use concepts like open water, but avoid conceits that involve the sky. Other acceptable metaphors may involve bathing, especially if there is nudity (it helps sell tickets).

5. No musicals starring animals, superheros, or anything you can find in a Pottery Barn or Williams-Sonoma. (Sorry, Disney. Sorry, Julie.) For that matter, leave off of the cartoon genre. Cartoons defy physics in a way that human actors can't.

6. I know someone is thinking about it, so let me head you off at the pass: no Beatles musical, please. The Beatles are fine the way they are, and they don't need your help.

7. While we're at it, let's not do anything else I can find in a jukebox. (In ten years - maybe less - these will be called "iPod musicals." When was the last time you saw an actual jukebox?)

8. Write a musical with Tom Stoppard.

9. Read a book. There are a lot of really good musicals based on really good books.

10. Resist the urge to have a character sing to or about the following topics/items:

facebook
a cell phone
a laptop
twitter
the internet

Aside from the obvious inanity, imagine the footnotes in the playbill for the 2031 revival at Lincoln Center.

One lion, two lion heads, one great horse with his legs, one sackbutt.

2011-02-10T11:34:00.004-05:00

I stumbled across this awesome list at www.props.eric-hart.com. I did absolutely no work on this list except CTRL-C - so mad props to Propmaster Eric Hart.

I can't get over how awesome this is.

Henslowe’s Diary provides a list of the props in storage at Henslowe’s Rose Theatre. Though his diary does not mention Shakespeare, he was a contemporary and his theatre was similar in size and organization. I gave an excerpt of what was on that list, but since then, I’ve dug up the list in its entirety:
One rock, one cage, one tomb, one hell mouth.
One tomb of Guido, one tomb of Dido, one bedstead.
Eight lances, one pair of stairs for Phaeton.
Two steeples and one chime of bells and one beacon.
One globe and one golden scepter.
Two marchpanes, and the City of Rome.
One golden fleece, two rackets, and one bay tree.
One wooden hatchet, one leather hatchet.
One wooden canopy, old Mahomet’s head.
One lion skin, one bear’s skin and Phaeton’s limbs and Phaeton’s chariot and Argosse’ head.
Neptune fork and garland.
One crosier staff, Kent’s wooden leg.
Jerosses head and rainbow, one little altar.
Eight visors, Tamberlayne bridel, one wooden mattock.
Cupid’s bow and quiver, the Cloth of the Sun and Moon.
One boar’s head and Cerberus three heads.
One caduceus, two moss banks and one snake.
Two fanes of feathers, Belendon stables, one tree of golden apples, Tantelus tree, nine iron targets.
One copper target, seventeen foiles.
Four wooden targets, one greave armor.
One sign for Mother Redcap, one buckler.
Mercury’s wings, Tasso pictures, one helmet with a dragon, one shield with three lions, one elm bowl.
One chain of dragons, one gilt spear.
Two coffins, one bull’s head.
Three timbrels, one dragon in fostes.
One lion, two lion heads, one great horse with his legs, one sackbutt.
One wheel and frame in the siege of London.
One pair of wrought gloves.
One Pope’s miter.
Three Imperial crowns, one plain crown.
One frame for the heading in Black Jone.
One ghost’s crown and one crown with a sun.
One black dog.
One caldron for the Jew.

Oh, yeah. Thanks, Eric. That made my whole year.

Supply/Demand and our Friend, Rocco

2011-02-09T11:18:00.005-05:00

Hey, why not. Everyone else is...

This entry was spurred by an excellent dissection of the matter at Devon Smith's blog 24 Usable Hours.

Here's the short version, which you all know. Rocco Landesman, NEA Chair, went on the record stating the arts are oversupplied. This is not news. The Wallace Foundation published an excellent paper describing this at the end of 2008.

Smith's entry in the battle regards theatre. There is no way to approach the discussion without gross oversimplification. Unfortunately, the reductivism necessary to create the models will not yield real-world solutions to the problems. An incomplete list of flaws in the various models:

1. As Devon mentioned, the TCG numbers are aggregate for theatres with budgets of as small as $50k and as as large as tens of millions. It's like comparing a small-motor repair shop to GM.

2. There is no way of measuring general demand for theatre-at-large. Single ticket buyers are responding to a kernel of entertainment. Subscribers have brand-loyalty - and as many as 50% of theatre-goers consider it primarily a social outing (is the demand for art, or social interaction? How is the nature of social interaction related to the venue/offering?)

3. While theatres tend to make a long-term investment in admin staff, they tend to make short-term investments in a lot of artistic staff - especially actors and directors. While this is an industry problem all of its own, the declining artistic salary (particularly at an Equity company) doesn't reflect pay cuts to individual earners (more, but lower-paid), but rather smaller-cast shows (fewer, but higher-paid employees).

4. The performance of the expense-inflation ratio is predicted by Baumol's Cost Disease (critiqued here by Scott Walters) - as Devon mentioned - like the healthcare industry. You'll find similar math holds true for educational institutions.

5. The market is inefficient. There is no magic wand to balance the supply and demand. Some theatres are doing great and holding steady. I call this the "there are too many theatres, but mine isn't one of them" problem.

6. The capital structure of most theatres is inflexible. Theatre, like airlines, will always struggle with matching perishable demand with perishable supply. Every one who has sold tickets knows this: you turn people away on Friday night, only to play to an inexplicable half-house on Saturday night. The first week of a run sells at 50% capacity, and the last week is sold out with a waiting list. How much of the supply/demand problem can be described by market inefficiency? This is also a common problem in employment figures generally.

I do appreciate Devon's approach to the discussion, as it is the only rational starting point, but I think much more detailed and specific research is needed before anyone can make any conclusions about the state of supply and demand in theatre.

Consultiness

2011-01-10T12:29:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time, a business might have hired a consultant to bring in a modicum of outside expertise in some area that the business didn't have internally, and didn't need to maintain internally. Such a consultant might help you streamline the box office, set up your accounting system so that budget reports were more useful, or end-of-year tasks were simpler.

Typically, such a person might expect to have collected a variety of helpful management and industry tips that they sort of dribbled out as they worked, or maybe they left the client with a summary report at the end about what the next steps might be, or how the actual improvements the consultant just created might be used in concert with other systems, or perhaps suggestions about how the tweaks might be used to increase business overall.

Certainly some of the suggestions might have included statements of normative behaviors, and maybe a few creative and inspiring words of wisdom...maybe 80% technical know-how, and 20% pearls...

Unfortunately for me, this era seems to have ended long before I entered the workforce. My experience with consultants has been long on business-self-help, flip charts, and expertiness - and short on deliverables - concrete changes that actually saved me money or time, improved relations with my customers or staff, or increased my revenue streams. I'm always left with the feeling that if I could somehow congeal the airy, tatterdemalion ideas sprayed across 39 sticky flip-chart pages into some kind of fuel, I could burn it and make progress.

The emphasis of outside-consultant work has unfortunately shifted to the nuggets of inspiration, the over-inflated idea that some "outside opinions" are needed to kick your business out of a rut and take it to the next level. Every time I have faced an intractable management problem, I have never been short on opinions - but usually short on resources and workable, immediate (or even long-term - but concrete) solutions. The proportions have more than reversed: 100% pearls, many of which were actually offered by me, my employees, board members, etc., which the consultant mystically transmogrifies into their own suggestion with a colored marker (maybe that's the "magic" in the marker).

Before you spend any scant resources on some well-intended expertiness, decide first if using the money for, say, a high-speed ticket printer with auto-cutoff might not be more useful to your staff, patrons, and bottom line than a roll of giant paper with yet another SWOT analysis on it.

How to Become a Theatre Marketing Expert, (or "How to Shoot Fish in a Barrel")

2010-12-02T07:58:00.003-05:00

After years of careful observation, I offer the following 5-step sure-fire path to building a successful career in marketing theatre and performing arts (which of course includes the fat consulting gigs):

1. Go to the most expensive college you can afford and make lots of friends. You'll need these connections for step two. (If you can manage to start earlier in a prestigious prep-school, that is also helpful).
2. Get a marketing internship or an entry-level job at a well-known, popular, well-funded, and successful theatre company (this is where you use the college connections).
3. Get a promotion at the successful company, or move to a higher position in another really well-known, well-funded theatre company. (Repeat this step as often as needed).
4. Hope that the artistic director doesn't go sideways on you ("The Paper Mill Effect").
5. Don't screw anything up.

If you follow these five simple steps, I personally guarantee you will enjoy a successful career as a theatre marketing guru. You should not expect to make a great deal of money, but you should be able to live comfortably.

Most of your compensation will be the sense of fulfillment you get when the neophytes of our business stop to drink at the well of your hard-won knowledge of the intricacies of attracting an audience down a well-worn path to a popular venue to see familiar works.

Enjoy!

Cut the turkey - raise the revenue

2010-11-02T14:50:00.003-04:00

We had our annual board meeting lately, and we're wrestling with budget issues (surprise!)

The main point at issue is how not to institutionalize cost-saving survival measures that got us through the lean times of the down-turn - in other words, how do we stop burning the furniture to heat the house (before we run out of furniture).

We've got some creative strategies and some good thoughts going, but after the back-and-forth of the meeting, one of my board members shared this little nugget with me:

"Expenses are like the bad relatives you see every year at Thanksgiving: you know exactly who they are, and you know you can never get rid of them. Going over the minutiae of controlling these expenses was driving me crazy. The only reliable way to stay afloat is to increase your revenue at least a little bit every year."

I would identify the most critical aspect of my job as fiscal manager of this outfit as creative cost-control. The above thought offers a very different and possibly more productive line of thinking. And isn't it more uplifting to think of ways to generate revenue (especially once you've whittled your office supply budget down to the nub)?

Video Killed the Radio Star - theatre take note

2010-09-05T15:19:00.002-04:00

No, this is not another diatribe about how tv and movies are replacing theatre.

It's a diatribe about how arcane and outdated union rules and copyright law are costing all of us in theatre money.

I've been bobbing, weaving, and taking in stride the overlapping rules regarding the the shooting a pictures and video for promotion of our theatre and productions. Some of these no doubt sound familiar:

No full musical numbers
No shots longer than 3 minutes
No produced promotions can contain more than 30 seconds of show footage
No video
No audio
No video, except for rehearsal purposes
24 hours notice before shooting stills or footage
Video must be hosted on the theatre's website (my personal fav - what does that even mean?)

In these days where youtube can make or break a product or a news story in 24 hours, diminishing subscriptions, aging audiences, and last-minute ticket buying, Actors' Equity and the play publishers are keeping a foot on the neck of promotion and marketing - at their own peril.

I need these tools to sell tickets. I need them to be fast, flexible, and spur-of-the-moment. I need to use youtube to build audience anticipation by posting rehearsal videos. I need to put photos on facebook ASAP without trying to sort out how to make sure the lo-res digital photos are all properly credited.

It's time for everyone to get on board and demand some changes to these rules. Most of us are nonprofits - the rules seem to imply that we're going to take every opportunity to ambush our own employees and sell them down the river to line our pockets and stock up on top-shelf yacht wax. In reality, most of the royalties, salaries, and pension payments are pouring in from nonprofits who tend to place fiscal and artistic integrity on a high pedestal, and only use their proceeds to underwrite yet more salaries and royalties.*

Grow up and move on MTI, RH, Sam French, Dramatists, Equity, et. al. It's a hard enough business to sell people on - don't cripple those of us trying to keep your people in work.

*This statement is completely unsubstantiated at the time of this post - Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

Accumulation

2010-06-16T10:15:00.006-04:00

Every theatre I work in seems to suffer a super-abundance of accumulated stuff.

I worked in one where, after swamping the floor-ceiling 10' x 20' storage area full of costumes, I had to post a dichotomous key to help people decide whether to keep an item or get rid of it.

I worked in a university where, after a semester of disposing of 20 years' accumulated detritus, I finally met the manager of the physical plant, who congratulated me on filling three dump trucks full of crap. He had been wondering when all that stuff was going to reappear...

In theatre, as well as other businesses, ideas also accumulate. Some are good, some are not; some ideas have been around forever (like a bucketful of Wise lash-line cleats) but were never, or are no longer used.

Unfortunately for many theatres, the dual-executive of Managing Director/Artistic Director tends to encourage accumulation - almost inevitably.

This is the mechanism: if you have something (an item or idea) that you think is good - as an executive staff member, you have a prerogative to keep it. You may have to explain it, justify it, etc., but your co-executive is unlikely to veto it because his own ability to exercise the same prerogative hinges on his protection of yours.

Take, for example, a box of documents (and let's assume you have limited storage). You want to keep it. Your co-manager has no use for it, and would as soon throw it out - but will no doubt defer in most instances, because he has a box of his own that he would like to store in which you see little value.

The result? Throw both boxes away? Never! Keep both. Same goes for ideas.

Stuff and ideas are similar in that they both require resources to use and store. Anything requiring resources tends to accumulate inertia of its own. After years of this accumulation, most companies have more of both than they can effectively resource, and the stuff and idea becomes a drain - but there is still no effective mechanism within a co-executive for arbitrating the storage while retaining the necessary executive prerogative to sort and keep.

Peter Drucker advocates rethinking your business by sitting down and asking "if I started my business today, what am I doing now that I would not do?" If you apply the above mechanism, you will get somewhere north of one and somewhere south of two sets of answers from an MD/AD executive. One will cherish ideas the other wants to toss.

Most of us have experienced the hands-on deficiencies of supercilious accumulation: legacy programs draining the budget, overstuffed prop rooms, threadbare curtains in plastic bags crammed under the stage. Before we come to accept them as business-as-usual, consider a metaphor of "super-accumulation": accretion.

At a certain point, your organization will achieve this level of accumulation and simply collapse into nothing under its own weight - not necessarily dead, but rather than light, issuing only cryptic squirts of indecipherable energies while steadily sucking down resources.

$1 for the arts

2010-04-29T11:23:00.003-04:00

I know it's a tired old fundraising idea..."if everybody gave $5, or $10 or whatever - we'd have a million dollars!"

Of course, no one does give that way. But in New York, we're facing a budget crisis and Gov. Paterson is bashing away at the budget like a furious pre-teen with a whack-a-mole addiction. We've gone through this three times now: budget crisis - NYSCA cut. NYSCA restore. Each time, I've made the argument to our legislators that cutting the NYSCA budget a few million dollars hurts a lot of people a lot, and saves the state a few measly bucks - the proposed cuts to NYSCA are typically almost 1/3 of NYSCA's budget, but account for only .0015 (fifteen-one-thousandths or 0.15%) of the total budget gap.

One the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that arts spending NY state accounts for over 300,000 jobs and over $25 Billion in annual spending within the state.

So why the cuts?

Also absent from this stupid leaderless conversation is the idea that we could actually add a few fees or raise taxes a little to save some vital programs - like schools, arts, and parks - when we might be able to postpone costly projects like road building for a few years until the economy recovers (slow down when approaching potholes!). Minnesota has enacted such a tax to preserve the core of their heritage and legacy (however they happen to define it.)

The truth is that if school taxes go up or state income taxes go up a tiny amount we're not likely to notice. Lawmakers bandy about how many gagillion dollars get vacuumed out of your pocket everytime they pay for something with a tax increase.

Think about this - New York has 16 million people. If each one paid a $1 fee each year that's enough to restore the proposed NYSCA cuts. I don't think it should be rammed down people's throats, but what if the state organized a referedum with "legacy projects" on it - things submitted by tax payers to be critical to the future of the state, and let people choose from 10 or twenty things that they would then be compelled to pay a $5 fee toward for the next two fiscal years.

It's not much, but neither are the amounts of some of these critical cuts - nursing homes in your county, local schools, etc. It's an imperfect idea, sure, but that kind of thinking is missing from the whole debate and it needs to be put back in.

Have your voice heard - click here to support a $1 fee for the arts, or submit your own solution.

The State is on Twitter now - be heard! @NYTaxpayer #straighttalkny

A Horse of a Different Color

2010-02-23T11:38:00.004-05:00

No doubt the Bard wrote this after a meeting with Henslowe:

...an two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.
Much Ado about Nothing iii. v. 36

I came across that in Kenneth Turan's "Free for All" about Joe Papp and the Public Theatre. Papp quotes it in reference to his split from Bernie Gersten after Papp's (in)famous 57th birthday at the Delacorte.

1. "Free for All" is pretty good reading.
2.What Papp says is true. If you work in an MD/AD outfit, who's sitting in front?
3. Mr. Ed was a talking zebra.

The Big Opt-Out

2010-01-28T10:00:00.004-05:00

Reflecting on the challenges of balancing theatre and commerce, arts and funding, etc.

I think it's safe to say that those of us in the nonprofit corner of theatre have entertainment on our list of to-dos, but it's most likely parked in our mission statement (if it's in there at all) under verbs like "change," "provoke," or the always-serviceable-though-peripatetic "educate."

In our best work we're aiming to provoke our audience, cajole it, encourage it to scrutinize its cherished status quo ("educate" is sort of a pre-masticated version of those better verbs).

How and when did we get it into our head that government funders (and many individuals - whose deep pockets are often triple-stitched and deeply lined with business-as-usual) would be eager to jump into bed with agitators? Why do we want to be in bed with them?

It seems inevitable that there is an inverse relationship between the ability of the art to challenge, and the willingness of the establishment to fund it. If you want to hang around the periphery like a rebellious suburbanite teen taking gas money from his parents, you can only gyrate so far from the norm before the funds stop flowing.

If you want to shake things up a lot, you have to opt out.

On Canaries and Mineshafts

2009-12-30T21:09:00.002-05:00

I had a meeting with a prominent businessman a couple weeks ago seeking support for a project. We had a luxurious 45 minutes with the fellow, and we got to cover more topics more deeply than I supposed.

The businessman had been instrumental in organizing the arts to revitalize his community, and he was a great fan and supporter - though he claimed ignorance of the real ins and outs. He purchased bulk theatre tickets in discounts and gave them to employees as perks.

He also did this with hockey tickets.

This being a recession and all, we talked about the economic impact of the arts on the community. (Remember, this is a guy who spearheaded the location of a theatre in his central business district as a revitalization project).

He said we was pretty sure that the arts (and theatre) had dubious direct economic impact compared to other activities, but that he was just as sure that the existence of the arts in a community was an indicator of a robust economy and a healthy body politic.

In other words, arts are a staple of any good community, but they don't lay the groundwork for their own success. Think about it: if there are no industries capable of sustaining a middle class, there won't be any arts. But if you attract healthy commerce into a clean, well organized community, you should be able to easily generate artistic activity that the community will embrace.

Conversely, if you are in a community where the arts are failing to thrive, or ebbing from a historic high-water mark, it may be the first indication that the socio-economic infrastructure of the community is losing integrity.

Now, when you take to the streets and lobbies to advocate for the existence of the arts in your community, why not talk about them like the rosy flush on a child's cheek - an indicator of health - and work with leaders, business people, and legislators to create the environment in which arts can thrive?

A corollary tale: representatives of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce once visited me at the theatre and asked what they could do to help my business. I told them to create a sustainable middle-class economy in the region. That would be the best thing for ticket sales I can think of.

Baumol Explained (with thanks to Scott Walters)(and Diane Ragsdale)

2009-12-12T11:23:00.004-05:00

UPDATE: Maybe the relationship of Baumol and the Arena Stage is not so clear-cut as Scott Walter argues. This is a quote from Zelda Fichandler regarding the decision to make the Arena a nonprofit:

"[...] we made all of our expenses at the box office for roughly the first fifteen years of our existence. It was as late as the mid-sixties when we conceded that we couldn't continue to do this, but had to become a deficit-producing organization. I bring this up simply to point out that, while...indeed, without the nonprofit income tax code, our American theater would simply not exist, being nonprofit does not really define us -- our goals, our aims, our aesthetic, our achievements. What defines us, measures us, is our capacity to produce art."

For more on the discussion of the business model of the Arena and nonprofit theatre, read Diane Ragsdale's post.

ORIGINAL POST
This is a significant reprint from Scott Walters at <100k the full post is here). It explains the background and context of Baumol's Cost Disease, which I have mentioned on this blog a number of times. Scott's post is a real eye-opener. Read on!

I’d like to talk about “Baumol’s Cost Disease,” which had a major impact on the development of the regional theatre movement through William J. Baumol’s and William G. Bowen’s 1966 book Performing Arts, the Economic Dilemma: A Study of Problems Common to Theater, Opera, Music, and Dance. At the time that Baumol and Bowen were writing, a “cultural explosion” was being declared by writers like Alvin Toffler (The Culture Consumers, 1964) and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund panel report The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects (1965, headed by Nancy Hanks, who would become the frist NEA Chair), both of which helped lead to the passage of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965. Baumol and Bowen, and the Twentieth Century Fund who paid for their report however, deflated that bubble.
As Joseph Wesley Ziegler put it in his 1973 book Regional Theatre: The Revolutionary Stage, “the ‘cultural explosion’ had already proved to be largely a myth: the natural increase in population and per capita income had given the appearance in the early 1960s of increased interest in the arts, but the percentage nof people interested in the arts had not grown significantly.” (63) This inconvenient truth, however, was largely ignored in favor of a truth that was more useful to the growth of the regional arts — the “cost disease.”
What Baumol and Bowen said that had the most traction was that the income gap in the performing arts was inevitable because unlike industry, the performing arts did not benefit from increases in productivity — it took the same number of actors to perform Hamlet in 1965 as it did in 1601, and it took the same number of musicians to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony now as it did in the 1800s. So while productivity remained flat, wages continued to rise as did other costs, and the result was that either ticket prices would have to rise beyond levels that patrons would be willing to pay, or there will be an income gap. Based on this “cost disease” concept, Baumol and Bowen made a strong case for foundation and governmental support for the arts by pointing out the “inevitability” of this income gap. The effect of this can be most dramatically illustrated by the case of one of the eraly regional theatres, the Arena Stage in Washington DC as led by Zelda and Thomas Fichlander.
Again Ziegler, who in 1962 went to the Arena Stage as an “administrative intern” on a grant from the Ford Foundation to improve his management skills (and who later served as the head of the Theatre Communications Group), provides the perspective:

By the time I arrived, the Fichlanders [Zelda and Thomas] had mastered running their theatre to the point where they could do the job without a budget. They simply never spent more than the box office and grants brought into their coffers. Each year there was either a breakeven situation or a surplus….Since that time, however, the picture has changed. During recent years, Arena Stage has always incurred an “income gap” — commitments to creditors over and above funds brought in as earned income. It is characteristic, I think, that after moving into its new building Arena Stage did not have income gaps until they became acceptable. Income gaps in the performing arts became acceptable with the publication of the Twentieth Century Fund’s The Perfomring Arts: The Economic Dilemma, which proved their inevitability and opened up the possibility of deficit funding for theatres. The other justification for income gaps came from the establishment, at the same time, of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal government’s first step in accepting support of the arts as a proper function. Arena Stage, with its extraordinary administrative savvy, saw the income gaps could be funded; from then on Zelda instituted additional programs which could be judged suitable for foundation assistance and which assured the Arena Stage would need help. (34-35)
Thus, Baumol’s “cost disease” became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and like a crack dealer introducing the drug at the schoolyard, Baumol quickly had the performing arts addicted to a combination of government and foundation subsidy. The other pusher in this scenario was the Ford Foundation, which pumped millions into the regional theatre, pushing small-scale operations like the Mummers Theatre in Oklahoma to build a huge theatre far beyond their needs, and funding young regional theatres to import actors from NYC to fill its stages instead of building ensembles committed to a community.
The fact is that Baumol and Bowen were right on both counts: there WAS no “cultural explosion,” it still was and would continue to be a pastime aimed at the economic elites, and they were also right that given a business model that emphasized large theatres, large budgets, and a production aesthetic that mimicked NY, an income gap WAS inevitable. But the conclusion that was drawn from those two truths — that what was needed was private and public subsidy — was flawed.
First of all, in the case of theatre there was, in fact, an increase in productivity: it was called film and television. While we choose to see these as different art forms, the amount of crossover that occurs between the artists of all three belies their difference. While it still took the same number of artists to perform Hamlet, film and television multiplied exponentially the size of the audience. In other words, theatre was being mass produced through film and television. What should have happened at that point, and didn’t, was a reconsideration of the business model. Instead, Baumol and Bowen recommended that the government and rich people bail us out.
Theatre might have done the same in 1965, but didn’t. Instead, we learned to beg. According to the most recent Theatre Facts published by TCG, regional theatres now have a whopping 48% of their budget coming from contributions, and only 52% is earned income.

Like the two-income household, subsidized theatre has inflated to fill the space provided, but without embracing a change of paradigm, there really is no going back.

I think somewhere in here is a moral that's tied to the concept of "Buy Local." Maybe - "No theatres, no food!" Or "Plays, not Condos."

The Perpetual Assumption

2009-09-24T14:58:00.004-04:00

Most theatre mission statements go something like this:

"Theatre Y brings really kick-ass theatre and theatre outreach to population Z."

Or, you could do sort of a MadLib mission (with a nod to Shami McCormick for the idea):

"[Organization] strives to [verb] [noun] to an [adjective] [group of people] so that [noun] can experience the fullness of life."

Something like that. In the theatre we are often faced with difficult programming decisions that balance our artistry and mission directives against our need to generate earned income through ticket sales. Most of us have also realized that so go ticket sales, so often go donations. Let's call this the "Patsy Cline-Marat/Sade Effect".

What creates the need to balance earned income against mission is the not need to produce this season, but to produce the next season - and the season after, etc., ad nauseum. But nowhere in our missions does it state "Theatre Y strives to [verb] [adjective] [noun] for our [adverb] [noun] audience forever."

But that's exactly how we behave.

Obviously, there are innumerable salient arguments about why one should plan at least a little perpetuity - but when it comes to making the really hard choices year in and year out - how do you evaluate and mediate between mission and revenue? Does your organization have a vision statement, non-negotiable value, or criteria that ultimately decides which way the wind will blow if the choice were between the artistic vision and integrity of your theatre and its ultimate fiscal dissolution - the fabled "final season"?

Generally, it will never come down to that. Instead, you'll experience mission creep until you are unrecognizable to your former ideal - or you'll experience a slow crushing debt that is your patronage telling you "thanks for the memories, but we'll take our business elsewhere" until one day you owe more than your board can stomach and you go.

But if you had to create an over-arching framework to guide those decisions, what would it look like? Would you include the word "perpetual" in your mission? Would you include "...or until our five-year trailing average capacity drops below 60%" in your vision statement? Or would you just keep on ranchin' till the money runs out?

Peripherals

2009-05-04T08:51:00.002-04:00

I'm in the midst of my third fiscal year as manager of my present company. I'm also on my third health plan. Each year, the cost of the health plan has gone up by over twenty percent, so I downshift into a less expensive and crappier plan with more out-of-pocket expense.

I have about two downshifts left before I run out of plans. Unless something changes drastically, I will be out of a plan in FY2012. Our health insurance rep married a Canadian. She gets his benefits from Canada. She says she has no idea how small businesses will be able to afford insurance at all anymore.

I run an Equity company. In FY2006, the weekly health benefit (our expense) cost $125/week. This year (FY2009) it costs $142. Multiply that by 80 or 90 contract weeks, and you rack up enough to get rid of an entire contract for an actor.

In total, my company pays between $14,000-16,000 per year in health insurance costs. Mine is not a large company. That's the total cost of a small play with a two-week run for us.

Think about that. The cost of our health care per year is the cost of a play. If they don't work enough weeks this year, many of our AEA employees will be unable to take much - if any - advantage of all that money. I think twice before using my insurance because the out-of-pocket expenses are too high.

When I see the line in the sand between artists and administrators over living wages, buildings, infrastructure, etc. grow deep and wide, I do think it is important to consider the peripherals. Like theatre, health care also suffers from cost disease.

Knowledge of Baumol does not absolve anyone of responsibility to the greater form of theatre and questions and problems it poses for posterity. Ignorance of Baumol, however, is certain to foil any plans for change as certainly as ignorance of geometry or knowledge of basic wiring.

Consider this: how would your landscape and future as a theatre manager look with a national health plan? How would your work as an artist be affected? How would your decision to have, or not have a family be affected?

The NEA budget does very little for most people, artists and otherwise. Let's make the government do something worth a damn to us. I'll forgo the imaginary grants from the NEA in favor of the immediate $15,000 I'll get back in my budget from a national health plan.

Rule of 70

2009-04-29T13:28:00.005-04:00

In case you can't get enough teeth-gnashing onstage, backstage, at rehearsal or in the boardroom, here's something from the bloggy sphere you can sink your chops in like some tender ribs: a see-saw row between artists and administrators (so it is perceived) over the the failure (or lack thereof) of theatre in America.

Regular theatre blog readers may yawn as the story continues to trot out its dreary rounds, but here's a summary for the uninitiated. In one corner, Mike Daisey and his provocative show "How Theatre Failed America" and in the other corner (for the moment) Todd Olson, the artistic director of the Florida-based American Stage Theatre Company.

At the end of a good sum-up of the row, this curious observation appears in the comments:

the current debate about institutional theatre model, whether Olson's or Daisey's, is a debate about real estate and the social safety net.

More and more, I am beginning to realize that it is possible I am the only person working in theater who has ever heard of William J. Baumol. If you read this blog very much, you may have heard of him as well (and you deserve the highest praise for your taste in reading material). As much as the usual blowhards line up around the ring to watch the boxing match above, I'll be the blowhard that keeps talking about Cost Disease until maybe one other person catches on.

To wit: of course the social safety net (read: health care) along with real estate (read: fly space) are hamstringing theatre. Of course artists are pissed because they feel second-best to your capital campaign. Of course you feel needlessly maligned for trying to get the artists good lighting and indoor flush toilets. And the pressure will only continue to rise (at a rate of approximately twice the rate of general inflation) and so I suppose will the intensity of the debate.

Assuming the intensity accumulates annually at the difference between general inflation and industry-specific inflation, the debate should be twice as intense in 24 years - just in time for our kids to pick up the gloves.

First you, then us

2009-04-17T17:19:00.003-04:00

Mission Paradox has a good post about the basics of foundation funding:

Say I have $100,000 want to start a foundation with it.

Someone will take that $100,000 and invest it.

Assume those investments get me a 10% return on my money, or $10,000.

That $10,000 is the money I'm going to give back to nonprofits in the form of grants.

If you're like most foundations, though, chances are you're going to put $5000 of that $10k back into the pile because the Feds say you only have to use $5000 (5%) for program activities - including grants. But guess what? You can also call your admin costs "program expenses." So you're going to use about $1000 for that. Now you have $4000 to grant out.

Most foundations base their giving on a 2-3 year average of their investment returns.

This means that the horrible economy of the past year or so hasn't really been reflected in the amounts that foundations give to grantees . . . yet.

But it's coming, so be prepared it.

Assume that in the next 2-3 years foundations are going to do some combo of the following:

1. Reduce the amount they give to current grantees

2. Reduce the amount of new grantees they allow in

3. Change their giving guidelines so that they are more focused in their giving.

In a bad year, the percentage return on the foundation nest egg will go down - but guess what doesn't - that's right - the foundation's administrative payroll. Remember, when the hard times come foundation cost-cutting works like this - "first you, then us." They'll keep their staff and infrastructure by reducing grants to the field.

If you're in the arts, probably 85% or more of your contributed funds come from individuals and maybe some corporations. Spend at least 85% of your time developing those relationships instead of a lot of time tracking down elusive and erratic grant funding.

After all, we did it their way

2009-04-12T07:41:00.003-04:00

The New York Times ran a piece last week describing how many dance companies are being slowly crushed by the financial millstones that their newly minted homes have become. We're living through what is becoming more and more of a financial crucible. I run an Equity company, and regardless of the fact that layoffs are rampant and no one I know in management is getting a raise (and some are taking cuts and furloughs) - AEA members, like many union members across the country, are getting a contractual raise.

I'm the last to suggest that the members aren't worth it or don't deserve it. I bring it up only as an example - like the cost of operating a building - of relentlessly increasing overhead in an industry already plagued by seemingly insurmountable structural economic problems.

I was a bit of a slacker in my student years, so I don't recall or never learned at what point theatre moved entirely indoors. Since it was dark inside, theatre had to be lighted with some kind of incandescent form of combustion.The move indoors required fixed seating, lobbies, carpets, plumbing, pest control, roofing, fire suppression, etc etc etc - all of which had to be paid for and maintained and upgraded about every ten years.

Whenever we budget for a lighting designer (or a costumer, or a set builder) I always mention that "x will cost so much, and y will cost so much - that is if we do the show indoors in the dark." We're doing theatre a certain way, folks, and no one says that we have to. Costs are not set in stone - they're what we decide.

All we really need is some actors and a script. Adjust costs accordingly, reprice your tickets, and see what happens. Montana Shakespeare in the Parks - which certainly has overhead - and uses actors and sets (albeit modular - which save on expense) - touts itself as "free every summer."

"Free every summer."

Chew that over. No talk of ticket prices, the specifics of attendance, season subscriptions. It's performed outside - no need for lighting, roofing, carpeting, plumbing, HVAC. Can you imagine how much time is saved? How much money? Certainly they have some alternative expenses and logistical concerns, but nothing like what anyone maintaining a building has.

We're doing theatre whatever way we inherited. We're wringing our hands looking for money and trying to attract audiences at a magical and elusive price point (think Unicorn) that supports us and that they can afford. We're raising money for endowments - the interest from which we'll use to repaint the building in 10 years. We're spending more time trying to bring less audience to our empty chapels.

Do theatre any way it can be done. Do it your way. Deliver what needs to be delivered stories, memorable performances, life-changing epiphanies, laughs.

Raise money on YouTube

2009-04-04T11:29:00.008-04:00

Sometimes it seems like most of the internet is there to make getting rid of your money easier or learning about fascinating products like Squeeze Bacon.

To help keep the inanity in balance with the anity, YouTube has added a layer of functionality to its content on behalf of registered nonprofits - the ability to donate to a cause while watching a video sponsored by or on behalf of a charity. Here's a good video from an outfit that has been making a name for itself answering the question "why social networking?" Note the "advertisement that springs up at the bottom about 10 seconds in. Register your nonprofit to use this function here.

And for those of you who remain skeptical about twitter - the cast of the West Side Story revival will be tweeting live from the recording session. What's the ROI? I imagine increased sales of the album, nes pas?

ps. I found out about both of these on Twitter. @ajlovesya @apropst

Why the pearls? Why the blue hair? Why anything?

2009-04-02T17:16:00.005-04:00

"Why Twitter?"

Decent enough question.

Why talk?

Do you ever go to meetings just to put in face time? What for?

When you're at a social gathering, and you see people that you know from work - do you talk to them?

You're in line at a coffee place you go to all the time, and the guy in front of you (who you don't recognize) is asking his friend (who you don't know) what he should get - would you recommend something, or ask him if he likes a good cappuccino?

Maybe you do. Maybe the guy likes it a lot, and thanks you for recommending. Now it's like a choose your own adventure, except you don't choose:

1. The guy that owns the shop that you patronize says "thanks" and gives you a free bagel.
2. The guy who likes the cappuccino is in the next time and he buys you a bagel.
3. The guy who likes the cappuccino uses Twitter and so many people show up the next week you can't get a cup of coffee because the line is too long and you have to go somewhere else instead (damn guy, damn twitter).
4. #3 Happens and the coffee shop owner opens another store closer to your office.
5. Nothing happens. You go on about your day.

What's the most likely? #5 I suppose. Does the fact that any of those possibilities might happen discourage you from recommending the cappuccino? Depends on who you are.

Why Twitter? Why talk?

Lean, mean, value addin' machine

2009-03-23T15:24:00.005-04:00

If you have about 40 minutes, watch Ben Cameron's comments from the Illinois Arts Alliance 2009 Members Meeting.

If you don't have 40 minutes to spare, watch it anyway. The survival of your arts org might depend on it.

Midway in the address, Cameron asks the following four questions (he uses dance as an example - enter your org instead). He insists that you must be able to answer these questions.

1. What is the value of dance to your community?
2. What is the value dance alone brings (or brings better than anything else) to your community?
3. How would your community be damaged if deprived of dance tomorrow?
4. How can your organization be optimized to be the best conduit for dance in your community?

In regards to question #2, he specifies that anything that brings second rate value or duplicated value will not last long in the current cultural and economic climate.

These questions are a key to real advocacy - not just mentioning how your outfit supports jobs - any business can do that. Likewise, parasailing excursions are good for driving tourism, and potluck suppers build community. What is the real, unique value your organization brings to your community - and keep in mind that if you're a nonprofit, you also need to justify the additional expenditures on your behalf in the form of foregone tax revenue. Anyone who doubts that, take a look at this.

If you are in your community, your state house, or on the web making the case for your discipline and your organization, sharpen up your rhetoric and add the answers to these four questions to your tackle box.