The Mission Paradox Blog

Fire Away

I don't know how things are going where you are, but in my neck of the woods I'm seeing a lot of arts people getting fired, resigning in lieu of being fired, etc.

Consider the following:

Firing people is a marketing function.

I know, you thought it was an human resources function.  But it isn't. 

How you fire people (and how you hire them) says far more about your company then an online ad for your next event ever will.

In fact, firing people creates the most powerful type of marketing:  viral marketing.

What do people do once they have been fired?

They talk about it. 

They may not talk about why they were fired, but they absolutely talk about HOW they were fired.  That message quickly spreads and it creates an impression about what type of company you are.

That's why letting people in a go in a way that keeps their dignity intact is so important.

I'm not saying that it's easy.  But it is necessary. 

If you have to let somebody go, try to do it in a way that let's both parties hold their heads high when it's over.

It could be the best marketing your company does all month.

 

Burning Capital

We hear a lot about Pres. Obama using his "capital" on the health care debate.

This idea of capital is an interesting one.

It serves as a reminder that there is only so much change an individual can make happen at one time.

So you have to pick your battles wisely.

That's something I think about when I see a person in an arts organization (either on the artistic or the business side) who feels like every battle must be fought to the bitter end.

Every battle over artistic choice must be won.

Every battle over the allotment of finances must be won.

You get the idea.

What those people forget is that every battle uses up capital.

Everytime that person declares that something "must happen now", they reduce their ability to make something (probably more important) happen in the future.

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We talk a lot in the nonprofit sector about Founder's Syndrome, the idea that an organization is being held back by its founding leadership.

When I see those sorts of situations I see founders that have burned up all their capital.

They asked for too much and gave too little in return.

Now they don't have the power to make things happen . . . only the power to STOP things from happening.

It's a sad thing, but avoidable.

Protect your capital.

Lose an argument every once in a while, even if you think you can win it.

Because there is nothing worse then a short term win that leads to a long term loss.

 

 

 

The Magic Number

6,000

That's the number of people who are primarily responsible for making my day job a multi million dollar arts organization.

That would be the number of subscribers, major donors, board members, etc. that create the artistic and financial engine of the company.

6,000

That's it.

In a city of over 3 million people, that's a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the pie.

Now to be fair, if you added in the number of single ticket buyers we have, plus the people who donate small amounts of money infrequently, that number would be more then 6,000 (it would be closer to 30,000)

But it is that relatively small group of people that makes the thing really go.

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For decades, running an organization was about the pursuit of more.

More members, more donors, more customers.

What we are seeing now is that being a strong company isn't about having a surface relationship with a lot of people, but about having a strong relationship with a few.

The arts doesn't just need more audience.

We need the people who do attend the arts to love us more.

That love and the engagement that comes with it, is a by product of connecting with a company, knowing what it stands for and feeling like you are a vital part of making things happen within the group.

The challenge is that the arts are very good at keeping people at a distance.

We do it through creating overly complex work and not giving people a frame in which to understand it.

Sometimes we do it by giving them simple, predictable stuff and expecting them to be satisfied with the same experience they had years ago.

Sometimes we do it by turning artists into demi-gods and making their creative process so dark and mysterious that it pushes people away instead of drawing them in.

Remember, it's hard to love something from a distance.

So if you want someobody to love your art, they are going to need some connection.  The fewer walls between them and the full artistic experience, the better.

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Think of it this way.

I know people who saw the Brodway musical Wicked 15 times.

I've seen fan created websites to shows like Jersey Boys and Avenue Q.

Yes, they are commerical products and most of us are on the nonprofit side of the ledger, but it doesn't change my point.

Those shows thrived because of the relatively small group of people that love them.

It's isn't the tourist that made Wicked a hit.

It's that girl who has seen the shows more times then you can count because she thinks the damn thing was written for her.

Wicked found it's Magic Number.

And I promise you, it was smaller then you think.

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So, what do you think your number is?

How many people need to love what you do enough for you to make a living at it.

Think about it.

You may discover that success is closer then you ever thought.

 

Stepping into the others shoes

If you ever want to know what it is like to be your customer do two things:

1.  Go to your website and try to purchase a ticket to your next show.

2.  Call your box office, pretend to be a customer, and try to purchase a ticket to your next show.

I've done both and the process, particularly buying a ticket online, showed me that we had some pretty big problems with the online ticket buying process.

I haven't gotten all the problems solved yet, but I know they are there.

If I hadn't put myself into my patrons shoes and saw the buying process from their perspective, I would have never saw the problems.

I would have been losing sales left and right with no idea as to why.

Don't let that happen to you.  Take the perspective of a ticket buyer and see how you can make the process a little bit better. 

Bad Idea

I'm sure that a lot of people thought Cirque Du Soliel was a bad idea.

A circus with no animals?

Performers that don't speak English?

Bad idea.

Of course nobody says that after millions of tickets sold and hundreds of millions of dollars made.

I'm sure a lot of people thought Zappos wouldn't last.

They sold shoes.   Everybody sells shoes.

And yeah, they said they would be committed to customer service and have a different organizational culture.

But everybody says that too.

Of course nobody said that when Amazon bought them for 900 million dollars.

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Don't be afraid of your bad ideas.

Don't be afraid of doing things a little, or a lot, differently.

That may be the only way to get to where you want to be.

Donations Are Better

I love selling tickets, memberships and subscriptions.

Earned income in the arts is a very useful thing.

But contributed income, particularly in the form of individual donations, is a much more powerful thing.

If you look at arts organization that are able to do the innovative work that moves an art form forward, you'll see that they have a strong base of individual donors.

It's simple, the more ticket sales you need, the more commercially based your organization has to be.

That's just how it goes.

If what your organization really wants is to break the rules, do risky work, etc. then you are going to have to do the hard work that leads to individual gifts.

Learn the basic of fundraising.  Learn how to ask for money.

Your organization can't be strong without it.

 

 

The Shifting Sands

Like I said a few days ago, I would have been a very average lawyer.

But that doesn't mean the law school experience wasn't valuable.  It was. 

In fact, on my very first day of law school my Property Law professor taught me something incredibly useful.

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Imagine two huge boulders standing maybe 100 feet apart.

Now imagine a river of sand running between the rocks.

My professor called the boulders the "hard rocks".  Those represented the legal questions that can be answered relatively easily.

Most of the questions in the profession were hard rocks.  They had answers.  Spend enough time searching databases and making phone calls and you could figure them out.

The river of sand in between the rocks was a much different place.

There the answers were much harder to come by.

In the sand, it's a challenge just to figure out a good question, much less an answer.

In the sand the landscape keeps changing.  A good answer 2 years ago may be invalid now. 

Or a technique that failed 5 years back may be viable now

The professor told us that our careers would be defined NOT by how we handled the hard rocks, the easy questions . . . but how we handle those questions that toss us into the shifting sand.

The lesson to us was clear:

Our job is to deal with the complex questions.

That's how careers are made.

That's how your career will be made, whether it is as an artist or an arts administrator.

Don't be afraid of the hard stuff.

Resist those that desire easy answers.

And remember that being confused and trying to figure all out is a perfectly acceptable place to be.

 

 

 

Community FAIL!

Something I don't do often enough is link to Douglas McLennan's blog, Diacritical.

This article:  Five Ideas For Building Community in the Arts is a great read.

But I've got to be honest, whenever I read or hear the words "community building", I cringe.

Let me explain.

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If you believe what you read, everyone wants to build community now.

People that sell copiers want to build a community of people who are passionate about copying.

People that sell insurance want to build a community of people who rave about their brand.

But here's the truth:

Most efforts to build community fail. 

They fail because we think community building is as easy as establishing Twitter and Facebook accounts.

It isn't.

Community Building is a skill.

A skill.

A skill separate and distinct from things like marketing, fundraising and artistic leadership.

If you want to build community you must have people involved with your organization that have the required skill set.

Isn't that why Obama's community building campaign worked so well?  He was an organizer at heart.  He had the skills.  He hired other people with the skills and sent them out into the world.

So I'm going to draw a hard line here.  If you want to build community, hire people (or get volunteers) that can do it.  And remember . . . NOT EVERYONE CAN DO IT.

That's my first point.

Here's the second:

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To effectively build community you must have the following:

1.  Central principles for the community to organize around

This is why politics naturally lends itself to community building.  It's easy to build community around "hot button" issues like health care or the environment.

When a company manages to do this outside the political environment, it's because they have some clear principles to organize behind.

So the community around Zappos Shoes is built around a desire for strong customer service (and a love of shoes).

The community around Daily Kos is built around "electing more and better Democrats".

The community is not built around the product, it is built around the purpose.

The reason that most groups fail to build a significant and active community is because the purpose isn't big enough, or meaningful enough . . . or there is no purpose at all beyond the merely superficial.

2.  A willingness to give the community the power it craves

Any true community will have some tension with the group that created it.

The Obama campaign is a great example of this, but there are others.

Starbucks has a passionate community that is always pushing the company to go places that (sometimes) they would rather not go.

If the arts wants to build true community, then we have to be willing to let the group touch some of our sacred spaces . . . and thus make them less sacred.

We have to not only be willing to talk about our artistic process (which is hard enough for most) but let the group influence it in some meaningful way.

I don't care if you have 1,000 facebook friends.  If those friends can't impact your work, then you don't have a community.

And speaking of Facebook, here's my final point:

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Most community building happens OFFLINE.

Not to hammer the Obama example too much, but we have to remember that he used all those online tools as a vehicle for the sort of face to face conversations that actually make things happen.

In the arts, community building happens in your venue, at your office space, at the home of the 10 patrons who love you the most . . .

It doesn't happen at your computer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Move Fast

Taking a few weeks to pick the perfect actress for a role . . . Good.

Taking a few days to figure out the perfect wording for an eblast . . . Bad.

Taking a few hours to get the light cues right . . . Good.

Spending hours debating whether your show postcard should be blue or red . . . Bad.

The artistic process is about spending a lot of time in the quest for the perfect decision.

The marketing process is about making a lot of pretty good decisions, quickly, and then adjusting along the way.

Taking three times as long to prepare your marketing materials isn't going to make the end product three times as better.

Just get the marketing materials done and out to the public.

You will do yourself a world of good.

 

 

Tracking You Down

I'm pretty sure that a few days from now, someone will email me inquiring about my marketing coaching services.

How do I know?

Because Google searches for both "Adam Thurman" and "Mission Paradox" are up.

And clicks on my Services and Testimonials page are up.

So I know what's happening.

I'm being checked out.

I don't mind it.

In fact, I expect it.

Think about it, when's the last time you made any significant purchase without researching it on the internet first?

You should assume that no one is going to purchase your art/artistic event without at least a visit to your website and a Google search.

So this means that:

1.  Your web presence should be well maintained.  I'm not even going to touch on the basic design elements your web site should have, I'm saying that AT A MINIMUM your site should have up to date information, be easy to read, be pretty much typo free and have ZERO broken links.

If you have typos, broken links, etc. then you are screaming to the world that you don't really know what you are doing.

Keep the errors low . . . and when you find them fix them ASAP.

2.  You should have Google Alerts on your name and the name of any organizations you are a part of.  It will help you stay aware of what people are saying about you.

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Update:  Hours after posting this, it was pointed out to me that I had some typos I need to address myself.  Which led to two hours of proof reading old posts.  Thanks for keeping me on my toes.