The Mission Paradox Blog

The Magic Moment

Something powerful when art and audience connects.

Someone sees a spectacular stage show and it redefines their idea of what is possible.

A person in the crowd of a sold out concert hears a song that makes her cry.

These are magical moments.  They don't happen all the time.  They can't happen all the time.  But they happen just often enough to make the whole damn thing worth it.

It's important to remember and celebrate those moments.  All the business elements, all the artistic elements, they all revolve around putting some magic into an audience member's life.

It involves giving that audience member an alternative to the mindless, numbing entertainment that is available in so many places.

That's the point of it all.

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In a few days I'll be headed to Boston to participate in the Theatre Communication Group's conference. 

It will be a reminder of the power of the industry.  It will also be a chance to remember that the power isn't about us.

This isn't about the Artistic Directors, marketers, Board members and fundraisers.  We are important, but we are not the point.

The point is them.

The point is giving people a magic moment.

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Alright, time for a break from blogging.  Regular posting will resume on July 9.  But I'm not going away.  I encourage you to follow me on Twitter, @missionparadox.  I'll be sharing useful info and I'd love to chat with you.

This is also a reminder that to visit my blog archives.  I've been doing this for years.  Some of my best stuff is hidden in this archives.  Search around, you may like what you find.

When I'm back on the 9th, I'll resume my Future of the Nonprofit Arts series.

The Marketer as Dr. Watson

Sherlock Holmes is a smart guy.  That's part of the audience's attraction to him.

It's also a bit of a problem.

Left to his own devices, the knowledge that Holmes has could easily fly right over our heads.

Enter Dr. Watson.  His role in the story is to be the eyes and ears of the audience.  He was there to ask that question that you would ask.

As an arts marketer, I embrace the role of Dr. Watson.  I work for the audience.  I try to remember how intimidating the "arts world" can be to someone looking at it from the outside.

It's my job to welcome them in.

I think that's your job as well, even if you don't identify yourself as a marketer.

For me, playing the role of the audience means always keeping a bit of distance from the art that I'm marketing. I'm always walking a fine line between knowing just enough about a play and knowing too much. I want to see the play in the way an audience member may see it.

It also means creating compelling content that helps the audience become comfortable with the work.  

It also means being very clear with "obvious" information such as how to buy tickets, where to park, where to eat, etc.

Never assume your audience knows that sort of stuff.

Embrace your inner Watson and the audience will receive the benefits.

A humble start

There are photographers who want to make a living from the work.

There are craftspeople that want to make a living by selling goods on Etsy.

There are excellent graphic designers that want to open up their own shop and work with clients they love.

How do you get to that point?

It starts with understanding how to make a small living.  Before you can sell 100 paintings you have to be able to sell one.

Before you can make $100,000 a year from art, you have to be able to make $1,000.

People tend to jump to the end of the story.  They fantasize about being famous, going on vacations, selling their art to thousands.

Caught up in all that fantasy they never do the boring, hard, work of building a platform and trying to sell a few things to a few people.  That experience will teach you so much.  It may take a while to figure out what works and what doesn't work for your audience.

But if you never start, you never learn.

Start.

 

The Future of the Nonprofit Arts - Part 2: There are no accidents

Part One is here:

http://www.missionparadox.com/the_mission_paradox_blog/2012/06/the-future-of-the-nonprofit-arts-part-1-breaking-away-from-our-parents.html

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Allow me to quote myself, from Part 1

The first nonprofit arts shadow is a strong, institutional resistance to change.  This is by design.  Hierarchy, structure and change do not mix.  The world is filled with groups that either couldn't see the world evolving or couldn't summon the will to deal with the change.

We have to consider our structures and how we can remove the natural barriers to change.

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All Part of the Plan

Certain classes you always remember.  For me, it was a class on organizational design.  Our professor spent weeks hammering home this fact:

Nothing is an accident.

The way an organization is structured (designed) creates the outcomes.  The way a theatre, orchestra or dance company is designed can stimulate innovation, it can improve morale, it can increase productivity.  

The reverse of that is also true, poor design can shoot all those good things in the proverbial face.  This is true even if the place is filled with well meaning people.  People respond to their organizational environment.  It can bring the worst (or best) out of people.

He also hammered home this point:

Design can be changed

Organizational design is a set of decisions.  Some spoken.  Some unspoken.  They are a set of decisions about how information flows, how power is shared, how quickly change happens, or whether change happens at all.

If you change the decisions, you change the design.  

If you change the design, you change the outcomes.

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This is such an important point to consider because we make so many assumptions about how a nonprofit arts organization must function.

We assume that the Boards of Directors have to operate in a certain fashion.

We assume that vital functions such as marketing and fundraising have to be based toward a certain audience and have to be staffed by certain types of people.

We treat these assumptions as if they are sacred law delivered by a guy stepping down from a mountain.

By contrast, the thriving nonprofit of the future will understand that every element of their organization structure is a decision.  It isn't law.  It's a choice.

The thriving nonprofit of the future will spend as much time considering the design of their organization as they do sweating their revenue generating operations.

They will understand and embrace the idea that nothing is an accident.

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The Good Idea Test - For an example of how this may look in practice, consider the "good idea" test.  Instead of seeing your organization as a series of departments or functions, think of it as a place where good ideas thrive or die.

Now imagine that a really good idea has popped up in some area.  Maybe it comes from an intern, maybe the Executive Director.  Now consider the place in your organization where that idea dies.  Is there an unhelpful committee structure that kills the idea?  Is there a particular meeting where the idea would be swatted around but no action would be taken . . .  which is the same as killing it?

Consider that moment. 

The principles of organizational design tell us that you can increase the chance of that good idea surviving by making a new decision about that moment.

Maybe you change the committee structure.  Maybe you put in a new set of rules in that previously idea killing meeting.

New decision.  New outcome.

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When we the series kicks up again, we will take a look at the harm caused by short term thinking.  We will look at how organizations in other fields have beaten this problem and what we can learn from them.

 

 

 

 

 

Comfort or Progress

Here's the premise, having diverse groups leads to better decisions.

Here's the logic behind the premise, courtesy of Northwestern University:

"Diverse groups outperformed more homogeneous groups not because of an influx of new ideas, but because diversity triggered more careful information processing that is absent in homogeneous groups."  

The article continues

"In diverse settings, people tend to view conversations as a potential source of conflict that can breed negative emotions, and it is these emotions that can blind people to diversity’s upsides: new ideas can emerge, individuals can learn from one another, and they may discover the solution to a problem in the process."

Emphasis added.  Link to the article here.

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Sometimes the choice is simple.

Do you want to feel comfortable, or do you want to progress?

Let's be clear that the world has made it's choice already, it's progressing.  It's becoming more connected.  It's becoming more complex.

That decision has been made.  The real question is whether you in the specific, and the arts industry in general, wants to move with the world or against it.

Moving with the world means allowing people with different worldviews, different apperances, different ages, different backgrounds to become meaningful parts of the discussion.

That's the difference between being stuck and being unstuck.

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If you stop by my office on a Wednesday afternoon, you would notice what appears to be a marketing meeting.

I say appears, because what you may see is chaos.  Lots of people in the room.  Some of the them don't even work in the marketing "department".

You may not even be able to tell who is in "charge" of this meeting.  You would see interns offering suggestion that actually get acted upon.  At that moment, they are in charge.  

You would see different points of view and different perspectives.

And you would see moments of genuine discomfort.  Real stress.

It would be easier for the guy at the top of that particular piece of the organizational chart (me) to have a nice, comfortable meeting where I do the talking the team does the listening and that's it.

It would be easy to fill the room with people who thought exactly like me.  

But there would be no progress.

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No matter what your job description says, we all have the same task . . . to move this thing forward.  The alternative is to be caught in a doom loop in which the same people offer the same ideas.  That was unacceptable when the world was simple.  It's really unacceptable when the world is complex.

So here's what I want you to consider . . . 

What if the idea that could revolutionize your organization was in the heart and mind of a person you overlooked because she was at the bottom of the org. chart?

What if the energy and spirit you need to move the art forward could be provided by an audience that looks a little different then the one you have now?

What if you missed all of that because you valued comfort more then progress?

Prepping for the Plenary

I'm honored to be a part of the TCG Conference, especially the Plenary:  Ensuring the Sustainability of the Field

I've offered my thoughts on diversity, sustainability and the arts in the past.  A lot of those thoughts live here.

I'll continue my thoughts about the future of the nonprofit field on Monday.

The Future of the Nonprofit Arts - Part 1: Breaking Away From Our Parents

This is probably as close as I'll ever get to a "manifesto".  It's about the nonprofit arts system and how it can have an exciting, relevant future in a complicated, dynamic world.

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The Beginning

In the beginning there was Ford.  Or at least the Ford Foundation.  

It was the significant investment from the Ford Foundation (and a few other foundations) that created the modern nonprofit arts organization.  Like any child, the nonprofit arts industry was built in the image of our industrialist parents.

If you think about the structure of a typical arts org - Board, CEO, multiple (siloed) departments, a defined hierarchy - you can see the fingerprints of the Industrial Revolution all over the thing.  This was a necessary step.  The arts industry needed a sense of stability.  It needed organizations capable of creating art year after year.

It makes sense that people would assume that what created stability in so many other industries (hierarchy, systems, etc.) would do the same in our world.

They were right, for a very long time.  People embraced the structure because it worked.  It created an industry that has employed hundreds of thousands of people and (more importantly) has helped deliver great works of art to millions of people.

I want to emphasis those last points.  It's easy to rip the nonprofit world.  It's easy to judge the choices arts organizations make.  But these organizations (big and small) and the people that have funded them have enabled some fantastic artistic moments.

Sunshine and Shadows

Every bit of sunshine has a shadow.  In this case, we have two major ones.  The first shadow is a strong, institutional resistance to change.  This is by design.  Hierarchy, structure and change do not mix.  The world is filled with groups that either couldn't see the world evolving or couldn't summon the will to deal with the change.

The second shadow is an emphasis on short term thinking.  In an industrial world, the emphasis is on hitting the quarterly and yearly numbers.  The leaders of our world are judged on short term statistics:

The annual fund

The attendance for a particular event

Yearly growth in subscribers numbers

Hell, I'm as guilty of this as anyone.  I work as a Marketing Director of a large nonprofit theatre.  Right at the top of my bio is the fact that I have exceeded my revenue number for multiple seasons.  I'm not immune to short term/number based thinking.

But while we all had our heads down going through the grind of artistic planning, executing fundraising campaigns, etc. we didn't really have the time/energy/willingness to deal with the wave that is coming straight at us.

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The wave

If the issue was just getting people of color into our institutions we could handle it.

If the issue was just building the next generation of audience and arts leaders we could deal with it.

If the issue was just communicating with an increasingly fragmented audience we could find smart people to manage the problem.

If the issue was just staying competitive in a digital world filled with cheap entertainment we could cope.

Our industrial structure could handle any one of those problems.  Maybe two.

It's when all those problems hit us at once that our shadows begin to overwhelm us. 

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The nonprofit arts system as you and I know it is only about 50 years old.  That's not as old as you think.  The world wide web is only 30 years old.

Like any young(ish) industry, we are now hitting a crucial point.  The gifts of our parents - the industrial revolution - have taken us as far as they can.  Those gifts were not designed for this world.

So now we have to tackle the shadows.  We have to consider our structures and how we can remove the natural barriers to change.  We have to question whether our emphasis on yearly budgets, goals and benchmarks fits with our current environment.

If we can grapple with those shadows then a bright future awaits.

When I continue the series, I will take a look at our structures and how we can make them fit the new world.

NOTE:  Part 2 is here

Building a Platform - Part 2

Part 1 is here

So what are the characteristics of a good platform?

Let's start with the idea that a platform can come in many forms.  It can be digital or print.  It can be based in social media or web based.  The key is to choose a style that fits your personality.  I can't emphasis that enough because you are going to get a ton of people saying that "blogging/facebook/twitter/etc is dead and you should really get with Pinterest/Tumblr/whatever."

Ignore that.  Do what fits your style.  Experiment a bit if you need to find out what works, but when you find that thing stick to it.

Let's talk about some other keys to building a your own platform:

-  A platform is a means of spreading an idea, it's not a forum for selling stuff or self promotion.

"But Adam, don't you sell coaching packages and workshop packages on your blog?"

Sure, but that's not the point of this blog.  The point is to put my ideas on the arts, marketing, diversity, leadership, etc. into the world.  If the idea spreads, good.  If the idea spreads AND people buy something, great, but I don't wake up in the morning trying to sell things.

So what ideas are you trying to spread?  

I know you're an actresses, that's cool but that is also common.  What do you think about the industry?  What are your thoughts about proper acting technique?  What do you think the proper role of live entertainment in the 21st century?

Those ideas, those thoughts, are what can spread.  Find a way to express them.

-  You need consistent content.  Notice that I said consistent not constant.  When I started blogging I wrote a post every day (including weekends).  Now I post about three days a week.  

Ideally, you should deliver a steady stream of content.  Writing something every day helped me to find my voice and develop a style.  That may not be realistic for you. The point is that you should make a promise about content and stick to it.  

If you promise a new video every 2 weeks, do it.  If you promise a new set of artistic sketches every month then do it.

-  A good platform has an intended/target audience.  My audience is individual artists and people who either run or work within small to midsized arts organizations.  I write with those people in mind.  

Who is your platform for?  This is something you may know right away or it may be something you figure out over time.  Either way, remember that you aren't creating content just for the helluva it.  You are making it for an intended audience.  Keep them in mind.

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To sum up:

People believe what they see.  A platform is your opportunity to demonstrate your skills and spread your ideas.  If those ideas spread, you win.  That win may equal being hired by a great company.  That win may be a great artistic comission.  

Your platform should have consistent and relevant content that is intended for a defined audience.  You will not start at that place.  When you start you'll thrash around for a while and figure out.  I wrote 200 blog posts before I got even close to figuring some of this stuff out.

It's an effort but it's a worthwhile effort.