Henslowe's Diary

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 theatre's 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 ended 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, whole 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 encourages 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 o.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.

Expertiness

2009-03-22T11:46:00.005-04:00

Nassim Taleb defines two kinds of experts in "The Black Swan." Taleb's distinctions are based on research by James Shanteau.

1. Experts who tend to be experts: these include surgeons, car mechanics, and livestock judges.

2. Experts who tend to be not experts: these include clinical psychologists, economists, and intelligence analysts.

The members of group one have demonstrable technical skill and knowledge which can easily be assessed by how well they accomplish their jobs. Group one members are bona fide experts. The members of group two are generally involved in interpreting a lot of soft data and making judgments about things which they may or may not be held directly accountable, and for which there is no particularly accurate or agreed upon yardstick by which to measure the utility of their conclusions. They are not experts, but rather exhibit the quality of being "expert-y."

Expertiness. It's like Colbert's truthiness.

A couple of days ago, I got a call from the indefatigable folks at the Theatre Communications Group. It seems that in a fit of web-based form filling and coffee-driven hubris, I had proposed a breakout session on social media for the TCG National Conference coming up in June, and they were calling my bluff.

I got pretty excited. I also tried (gently) to talk them out of having me present on the subject, explaining that I'm certain there are people out there who know more about the subject than I do - in fact, considerably more. But the nice woman from TCG on the phone persisted and I acquiesced, and now I'm about 95% sure that I'm going to be standing in front of a bunch of my peers and betters trying to deliver some kind of valuable knowledge that I might have by then about Twitter, and Facebook, and Ping and Tweetdeck and whatever else might be the iHotcake factory of the minute when June rolls around.

I'm afraid that in regard to the TCG Conference, I fall into Group 2 - I'm not an expert, I'm "expert-y" - like most members of the philanthropic-consultant industrial complex. I'll try to provide accurate and useful facts and conclusions that are less misleading than not, but in the end, no one is going to hold me to much account if what I say doesn't produce immediate and quantifiable results.

What I'll be delivering is a shipment of expertiness.

I like to stay abreast of the up-and-coming leadership of the nonprofit arts universe, and the younger members of the nonprofit sector in general. I've seen some budding leaders emerge, and I've hired some consultants that are younger than me (for those of you who are counting, those are people born after late 1974.) These are smart, dedicated people, many of whom will become the real next generation of leaders in the field.

I reckon this crowd (which includes me) needs some guidance and good ideas and that kind of jocular-yet-incisive shot in the arm we get from hiring consultants and attending breakout sessions. And I suppose we're asking people to believe that we might also be able to provide some in turn. But in our age of easy-access-to-soap-box and imploding taxonomy, let's keep one foot on the ground and listen to someone who really does have useful answers: your HVAC guy.

Oh No, Performers Coming Into Audience

2009-03-21T10:15:00.002-04:00

from our friends at theonion.com - ever vigilant critics of the earnestly ridiculous.

PITTSBURGH—Audience members at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts are reporting that, oh God, no, approximately 20 extremely enthusiastic actors are approaching the edge of the stage and appear determined to continue their current musical number in the main seating area.

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Attendees were oh, for the love of—they're going to make everyone sing along.

"Oh, man, are they? Shit," one audience member was overheard saying as the energetic ensemble began filing down previously unseen stairs and past the front row. "Shit, shit, shit."

Increasingly uncomfortable audience sources have also confirmed that the performers are proceeding down the aisle with crisp, larger-than-normal steps timed perfectly to the music. Even more shocking, some appear intent on interacting with non–cast members.

"Their smiles are so big," a female theatergoer said while pretending to look for something in her purse. "Why does that one have a cordless microphone? Is he going to try to talk to us?"

"I have to go to the restroom," she added.

While it remains unclear how long this horrifying breach of the fourth wall will last, or why the actors worked so hard to create a fictional distance between themselves and the audience if they had no intention of maintaining it, past productions suggest there is still five minutes left in the current number. Some predict the cast will return to the stage before the song's conclusion, but others fear they may stay in the aisles, making unnerving eye contact and blocking all available exits.

Thus far, the actors have ignored audience members' squirms and anxious expressions, opting instead to clap in an effort to get everyone to clap along with them.

Oh, no, more singing and dancing performers have just entered the balcony.

"Their makeup looks way scarier under normal lighting," one theater patron whispered. "Especially that one kid playing the old man."

Audience members have given no indication that the actors' increased proximity has enhanced their experience, or given them a sense of involvement in the production. Some have questioned, however, whether or not it is out-of-character for the play's antagonist to be doing the twist with the show's protagonist, especially before the conflict between the two has been resolved.

While most theatergoers have avoided meeting the actors' gaze by smiling awkwardly and staring straight ahead, the roughly 76 people seated on the aisles have been less fortunate. Performers are currently removing them from their seats and are apparently forcing them to participate in some kind of humiliating choreographed dance.

Jesus Christ, one actor just did a jumping toe-touch from the stage into the audience, pumped his fist, and high-fived a fellow performer, prompting those in the first several rows to jerk back in their seats and shield their heads.

"Why can't we just watch the play?" a female audience member asked a man who is possibly her husband. "When I saw this with Diane in New York, I swear, David, I swear they didn't do this."

Although the exodus into the seating area was not announced, there have been several indications that the actors could be capable of ruining the invisible boundary between them and the paying public. During the previous song, the ensemble sang the words, "For all of us," and gestured not only to themselves, but also to the audience. A second, more ominous sign was the sudden raising of the houselights during the song's chorus—a slight change in mood that caused some worried attendees to look around and ask, "What's going on?"

And, just before the upbeat percussive section that unleashed the thespians, a male lead turned his head sharply to the audience and said, "Here we go."

By then, however, it was too late.

Witnesses say one actor has now perched himself on the back of a seat and started singing directly to a small child. The boy has responded by clinging to his mother and burying his face into her chest.

"They're bringing that fat guy back onstage with them," an audience member said. "Oh, Christ, what are they going to make him do? Why—why don't they just leave us alone?"

You gotta break some eggs

2009-03-09T16:20:00.003-04:00

Theatres in the U.S. are failing at a high rate these days. A group in San Francisco met lately and discussed the recent near-closures of The Magic Theatre and Shakespeare Santa Cruz.

Chloe Veltman is a member of the Salon chewing these questions over and asks on her blog

Do these close-to-the-point-of-no-return theatre companies and newspapers matter? What if some of them vanish? Is there a difference between a vital organization and the vitality of the general scene? Or are we in need of some loss, the cultural equivalent of a controlled burn?

Thorny issue. Some theatres make what are considered by their peers and communities to be questionable artistic decisions. If they make a regular habit of it, they start to falter. A good recession comes along, and down they go.

At issue is the question of failure. All theatres need to be able to produce material that stinks. Avant garde houses and houses producing new work are going to produce more flops than everyone else. Harold Clurman was big fan of flops, and criticized Broadway years ago for not allowing the room for productions to fail. Clurman was also suspicious of audiences (including audiences of peers) coming to the theatre to judge, rather than to experience.

However these struggling theatres might perform within their local ecology, we sometimes must protect the basic right of theatres to fail, and yet keep their doors open. If every egg in a carton were as precious and expensive as producing a new play, no one would ever risk an omelet. The solution isn't to be miserly with your eggs, or let the chicken starve - the solution is to get as many chickens as you can and drop eggs all over the place in the hopes that you might enjoy the occasional souffle.

Not necessarily dancing

2009-03-06T16:47:00.004-05:00

I'm the first to agree that we in the arts need to step up the articulation of our advocacy. I've mentioned a few times lately that we're open to a sound trouncing if the best arguments we can make are economic.

I've been reading the RAND study Gifts of the Muse - which should be a primer for anyone seeking to expand the advocacy toolkit.

It's very dry.

The RAND folks are working very hard to give us enough traction to budge a sociopolitical structure that demands measurable metrics to prove our worth to society. Ironies begin to develop early on. The RAND study is a meta-study - it evaluates and exegesizes studies done by others. It cites another meta-study which threw out 1,103 of 1,135 studies on the cognitive benefits of arts for lack of sound methodology.

Those 1,103 crappy "studies" were like as not generated by over-worked, underqulailified arts teachers or administrators trying to meet some terrible reporting metric imposed on them by a project grant. Least-aways, that's my guess. I'm personally responsible for at least three.

As you trundle along (looking for reasons to update your Facebook status instead of digesting RAND's excellent-but-chewy report) you see this amazing tension develop between scientific methodology and the intrinsic benefits of the arts - very Aristotle. Very un-Zenlike.

My personal favorite WTF:

"in dance therapy, for example, there is typically movement in response to music, but this is not necessarily dancing."

Hrm.

I have only sympathy, affection, and respect for the folks at RAND and their funders; they're among the few out there trying to get some legs under real arguments for the arts. Sometimes, though, the harder we try to make rational arguments in favor of our species-old pasttime, the farther away we get.

Every now and then, look a skeptic straight in the eye and say "arts are important because they are, dammit - you know it, and I know it - quit screwing around." Then hit him with the RAND study.

Twitter

2009-03-03T15:08:00.002-05:00

For those of you who twitter, follow me @chriscasquilho - for advanced users, I often tweet the hashtag #artspro

Generally, I don't comment on what I had for lunch - but I do send out tweets relevant to the field that I don't have the time or wherewithal to blog about.

Happy tweeting!

Theatre criticism is as wanting for depth as artists are for disclosure

2009-03-03T13:49:00.004-05:00

A guest blog by Chris Torma

Is it possible that this week’s courageous production of Edward Albee’s play, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, could be the most important piece of theatre presented for Missoula audiences during this ’08-‘09 season? Certainly Yes.

Among other things, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? questions our culture’s morality in a spirit similar to that which Albee described in response to criticism of another of his works, The American Dream (1960). “This play is an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation, and vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.”

Can this week’s production of the work of a three-time Drama Desk Award Winner, three-time Tony Award Winner, and three-time Pulitzer Prize Winner, artfully staged and performed as a contemporary adaptation of the style of emotionally elevated Greek tragedy to which Albee’s storytelling pays homage, hope to achieve its rightful plane of significance if the culture of critics in our community limits its scope of this acclaimed dramatic work to its gossamer veil of “taboo themes” and most easily noticeable plot devices? Certainly No.

As Neil LaBute asserts in his play, The Shape of Things, there has got to be a line between creating art and just needing attention. Missoula audiences are wont to agree with him. So, news articles that do not actually educate audiences, other than to leave them with the impression that they might be uncomfortable after an evening of theatre, can lead many to be understandably resistant to take part in the event.

I believe that the level of thoughtful commitment that I witness being given to this production and many others of late, by its professional and/or scholarly participants, warrants an equal deepening of critical perspective regarding these works from our journalistic society.

Granted, it is extremely difficult for many a theatre artist to articulate his or her process and its magnitude until involvement in the production of a work such as The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? has ended, because the vicissitude inherent to realism lends itself to the sense of uncertainty that is central to the experience of participating in live theatre. This self-defeating habit of guarded secrecy is something that I have lately been challenging my friends and colleagues in the theatre, as well as myself, to break. For it is unreasonable to insist on a greater and more vital degree of thoughtful criticism from our community unless we are willing and intrepid to put forward to its journalists news of our creative ideas and speak with candor about the authenticity of the work that we are doing from moment to moment.

I am encouraged to have noticed a boon of insightful analysis published in the Independent and the Missoulian in the past few years. Joe Nickell is spot-on when he mentions at nickellbag.com that he “gets thanks from [theatre artists] for marking the legitimacy of their efforts with [his] thoughts,” and the emergence of Erika Fredrickson’s deeply reflective interest in the timely relevance of theatre is an emboldening inspiration to the dynamism that exists at the core of every creative artist.

This local advancement in criticism must be sustained. It is a vital facet and steward of the continual professional development and social consequence of Missoula’s theatre artists.

by Chris Torma

Imagine that

2009-02-28T15:43:00.002-05:00

The state of New York is reeling from a $16-billion-or-so deficit. Governor Paterson's solution? More or less across-the-board budget cuts. Seems fair-ish. But it's a strategy that has created a lot of anger and senselessly wiped out a lot of good programs that might actually generate more tax revenues than they cost.

Facebook changed its Terms of Service and granted itself "an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license" to pictures of your last family reunion. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded to cries of "foul," explaining

"people want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them-like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on-to other services and grant those services access to those people's information...these two positions are at odds with each other."

Hence the need for the irrevocable etc etc license to your baby pictures and pithy status updates.

What have these got to do 1. with each other; and 2. with theatre?

These situations highlight classic examples of dilemma - two equally less-than-appealing choices - one of which must be taken and rationalized. There's a limited amount of money in New York, and nobody wants their project cut; in order to protect itself from liability, Facebook has to egregiously violate the trust and rights of its users.

The other thing they have in common is an utter lack of imagination on the part of the deciders. Here's where theatre comes in: watch a theatre production team at work with a limited budget (is there any other kind) - and you'll see some amazingly imaginative solutions to all kinds of tricky business. How about the audience? I'm fond of saying "we're not fooling anybody" when someone comes to a play - but what creates narrative continuity for the skeletal sets, blackouts between scenes, people bursting into song on the streets where they live?

Imagination.

If the complex solutions to the administrative and creative problems that face theatre pratictioners daily were solved in so ham-fisted a fashion as the Facebook ToS and the New York State budget, we'd have been out of business a long time ago. It's not my job (or my area of expertise) to solve those problems - but I can provide a place where imagination holds the highest value - where people like Paterson and Zuckerberg can learn how to find graceful, flexible, and surpirising solutions to these seeming dilemmas without cutting of their noses.

As the melee for scarce resources forces the arts to make instrumental economic arguments - albeit very sophisticated ones - we become vulnerable to arguments against funding the arts on the grounds of opportunity costs. Let's offer our fellows imagination in the context of complex problem solving as a unique intrinsic benefit of our art.

A massive highway overpass may create more economic activity than 10 regional theatres in 10 years - but the engineers and financeers have to learn to use their imaginations somewhere...

Never Look a Gift Barrel in the Bung

2009-02-25T07:37:00.002-05:00

A thought on the commodification of art from Lewis Hyde:

"The Nielsen ratings will not lead us toward a civilization in which the realized gifts of the gifted stand surety for the life of the citizenry. Sprinkles of gold flake will not free the genius of our race."

Arts Gone Wilde

2009-02-23T17:25:00.002-05:00

This from Shami McCormick, Artistic Director of the Depot Theatre and 30-year veteran of New York State arts:

I suppose I look forward to the day when art doesn't need to justify its importance only in terms of its economic benefits; similarly when the artist does not need to explain that his/her work is "real" and that he/she too has a mortgage, kids and health needs. Oscar Wilde said "I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being."

I think there is also something terribly spiritual about the collective experience of theatre--in being part of an audience and bearing witness to stories unfolding. History recounts that the human experience has always involved "a gathering of a collective" to tell the tale of who we are and what we have done. For what other purpose than to help decide how we act in the future? Art and culture are not frills or whimsy and our ability to create or be engaged in an artistic experience is part of what helps define our "human-ness".

A lot of people have weighed in on this discussion about the importance of the Arts or lack thereof. We all have made the case for the economic benefits of the Arts; However, perhaps we have been less eloquent about their inherent worth, allowing people like Rep. Kingston to tag the Arts as "the favorite of the left" and Sen. Coburn throwing arts and culture into the same spittoon as casinos and golf courses. At any rate, I look forward to the outcome of all this talk and wonder if and by what means the "Arts" will redefine itself for a confused and anxious nation.

In the meantime - and to bastardize Shakespeare and Shylock: "If you prick and artist, doth not an artist bleed?" Like the construction foreman, the office manager, the auto worker, the cop and the teacher, I have a mortgage, kids and health needs. I am an American who happens to be an artist. I may have been misguided in my choice of careers, but I remain unapologetic and full of goodwill and hope for my fellow workers regardless of their professional callings. I hope we all survive these times and become more resourceful and more productive.

'Tis it nobler?

2009-02-18T07:49:00.007-05:00

I was witness to a blog exchange the other day regarding the debate between "starving artist" and "corporate sellout." Ironically, the defender of the starving commented that there's nothing noble about being a theatre artist, while the corporate fella maintained that maybe there was - just nothing particularly ennobling about starving.

I didn't think much of the general exchange, but the question of nobility got lodged in my head. Are theatre artists noble? Are any artists?

Theatre in America (and Europe) is generally subsidized. That means we fall into the same sociopolitical and legal categories as groups that feed the hungry and defend civil rights. Let's take it as a given that feeding the hungry and defending civil rights are noble callings.

Is art a noble calling? In The Gift, Lewis Hyde talks about the difference between "work" and "labor." Work is intentional, commodified, and performed in exchange for remuneration. Labor, says Hyde, "can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that will clearly prevent the labor." He speaks of labor in terms of creating art, but also in terms of social work, nursing and teaching - tasks in which emotional availability and patience are as much a part of the task as anything.

To the extent that our society has consented that it's useful to set aside some of our common proceeds to allow for the creation of art - including theatre - we have agreed that the products of that labor are, as Hyde puts it, "not things we easily price or willingly alienate." Artists can't be evaluated "on a pure cost-benefit basis because their products are not commodities."

Nobility is an elevation of character, or refers to some exemplary behavior. I don't know if that's the right term to describe artists, but neither do I think of art or theatre as simply a commodity that can't support itself in the market - nor of artists as wayward widgeteers who are especially bad at math and marketing.

Noble, maybe not. Giving, visionary, expressive, shamanistic - maybe. Perhaps those qualities taken together consitute some kind of nobility. Dulce et decorum est pro humanae laborare.

Arts administrators are always going to be in a difficult position of bringing a non-commodity to market. That's the job. Let's concern ourselves with whether giving is noble, and whether the gift is of quality, rather than ferreting out the character and motives of the giver (however well nourished).

What instrument do you play?

2009-02-13T14:47:00.004-05:00

One of the arguments (getting a lot of airtime lately) that we've come to rely on is an argument that the arts produce instrumental economic benefit. We tend to use this as concrete, metric driven evidence of the value of the arts to society.

Left out of the picture are the opportunity cost arguments: could the money (or foregone tax revenue) spent on the arts generate as much or more ROI if spent on something else? The answer is possibly "yes."

In light of that, it's critical that we begin to sharpen our rhetorical ability to discuss instrumental benefits unique to the arts, and [gasp] perhaps even intrinsic benefits of the arts.

The 30 Second Waltz

2009-02-08T21:14:00.003-05:00

I've been becoming a sort of proselytizer for Baumol's Cost Disease. I'm surprised how many folks in the business don't know about it. Here's an earlier post on it. To sum up: the specific rate of inflation for the arts rises about twice as fast as the general rate of inflation.

I'm reading Lewis Hyde's excellent book, The Gift, and he gives a great example in the foot notes - what he's describing is Baumol's Cost Disease - though he doesn't identify it as such. Here's the note:

As those who worry about the livelihood of artists are fond of saying, "you cannot play the 'Minute Waltz' in less than a minute." Worse (or perhaps better) you cannot write "The Minute Waltz" in less than...what? A day, a week, a year? -- however long it takes. There is no technology, no time saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.

What's particularly intriguing about the last sentence is that from Baumol's perspective (that of an economist) the arts suffer from a "disease." From the arts' perspective, maybe it's the market that's infected.

Jeff Tocci in Support of the Arts

2009-02-06T14:33:00.003-05:00

February 3, 2009 was Arts Day in Albany. A few hundred representatives of various arts organizations came from around New York state to plead their case for arts funding. This year is especially piquant because there's a lot at stake - and not even enough money to fund programs already approved in the current year's budget.

State Sen. Jose Serrano and Assemblyman Steven Englebright held a joint hearing for arts, culture, and tourism to discuss the cuts and the upcoming budget. Sen. Serrano encouraged testimony submitted via YouTube - a first as far as I can tell. Below is a video submitted by Jeff Tocci - a piece that speaks for itself, and that exemplifies both the position of artists, and our ability to use our creativity to make our case eloquently, yet to the point.

New York State Proposes 4% Tax on Theatre Tickets

2009-01-30T15:18:00.004-05:00

Gov. Patterson's current budget proposal includes authorization for a 4% tax on all theatre tickets - including those of nonprofit theatre companies statewide. This is total rubbish.

I'm excerpting a speech before the State Assembly by Philip Morris, CEO of Proctor's in Schenectady, NY.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak and participate in our State's budget and policy process. Clearly what gets decided in difficult times about our finances will reflect for years to come our priorities and hopes.

My name is Philip Morris. For the past 32 years I have run and advised cultural businesses. I have restored or built 4 theaters, 2 museums and thousands of square feet of cultural and arts spaces. All of these projects have worked to meet many community based agendas from educating school aged children to deeply participating in community development agendas, while, simultaneously caring for and nurturing the creative community. Currently, I am the CEO of Proctors, the capital region's performing arts center and the engine for the revitalization of downtown Schenectady.

Proctors, like most theaters, survives financially not only from the sale of tickets and concessions, but also on the good will of individuals, businesses and government each supporting in their own ways part of our many agendas. We get support to work with the region's schools, to keep ticket prices affordable, to be a conferencing center and to be the community's "people magnet."

While we are prepared to participate in the solutions needed to keep our State healthy, there are, in particular, two items somewhat hidden in the proposed budget that go far beyond "sharing in the pain" of our current economic realities.

First is a proposed revision in sales tax rules that would make all theater tickets taxable. In essence, if passed, when someone buys a ten dollar movie ticket or a 40 dollar show ticket at Proctors, they would have an automatic added charge of 4% for the State of New York plus whatever local shares of sales tax that may apply (potentially bringing the total up to about 8%).

Now on the one hand, this does not seem so wildly out of line: if you buy shoes or a hot dog from a restaurant, you will have such a sales tax charge. From a purely technical point of view, it seems to be a question of whether entertainment is a good or a service. We don’t pay sales tax on doctor’s appointments or haircuts. This budget is proposing moving tickets from a service into the goods category.

I think, though, there is way more to this issue. With the possible exception of mall based movie operators, theaters across this state and across most the country are like Proctors: supporting community agendas with the help of public and private altruism. This is true in Buffalo, in Elmira, in Jamestown, in Poughkeepsie, in Glens Falls, in Long Island, in Brooklyn and even in Manhattan.

Suddenly a sales tax? For many communities the theaters and culturals that sell tickets are engines of tourism, downtown redevelopment and artist employment. A new tax on the activities of those providers will, unquestionably reduce participation. Entertainment is extremely price and economy sensitive. Just ask any of us how we have been faring since this recession started over a year ago!

Think about it: we raise money privately to keep prices affordable!

All of us.

Which leads to the real conundrum. While it LOOKS like such a tax is paid for by the consumer, as monthly or quarterly tax payments get made to the state, the dollars will come from the theater’s bank account.

One could argue that, as ticket sales decline based on the cost increase added with a sales tax, in essence local philanthropy that would have been raised to support a community facility will be going to subsidize the state’s general fund.

Does it seem sensible to charge sales tax on a college tuition? Of course not as public funds are used in all sorts of ways to make that tuition affordable. What’s different about most theaters?

There are better ways. We have economic problems, but we have not died. Slash and burn attitudes in tough times make times tougher by accentuating the notion of disaster rather than accentuating shared responsibility and shared burden.

Please do not create crisis. Fairness and an understanding of those very businesses that help our communities thrive is to stay focused on policies that work. Our budget needs to show that too.

Again, thank you for the opportunity to participate.

Play to your strengths

2009-01-27T10:30:00.004-05:00

Jeff Jarvis' book, "What Would Google Do?" is out. Here's a brief description by the author.

I've been getting my feet wet with some of the social technology out there, and the launch of a new business book made me think of some old business books. It also made me think of book-length treatises on simple ideas. "The E Myth" is a good example. Its basic advice - "play to your strengths."

I read "What to Eat" by Marion Nestle awhile back - and I love her candor. In the preface, she says she can sum up the book in a sentence (which she does): eat less, move more, avoid junk food. I read the rest of the book because I wanted the details, and it was worth it.

Jim Collins comes to mind. A Wharton School review of Jim Collins' "Good to Great" sums up the book as follows:

Collins asks an interesting question. Unhappily, the methodology he used to formulate an answer is questionable and the answer is almost disappointing in its simplicity: Great companies become great by staying focused: focused on their products, their customers and their businesses. They aspire to higher levels of excellence, are never content to become complacent and are passionate about their products. They have leadership that is not ego-driven, and have organizational cultures that embrace constant change. That's the book.

In "The Black Swan," Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes an operating model that's almost the opposite of Collins'. Collins uses a very Aristotelian logic to do a regression on model businesses ("great") and then prescribes it to your business. By assembling the pieces and following the plan, your business too can achieve greatness.

Taleb counters, since we can barely read the pattern, why pretend? He advocates "bottom up tinkering and undirected trial and error." At least he takes into account our strengths as a species.

Maybe that's what Google does.

Reprint

2009-01-25T10:33:00.003-05:00

This is the provocative opening speech by Brian Eno at the Turner Prize in 1995. - Eno throws the gauntlet to the arts world and dares them to explain the value of our projects in as broad and accessible way as the sciences have theirs. Thanks to my wife for pointing it out to me, and thanks to Phaidon and Alan Fletcher for publishing it in The Art of Looking Sideways.

The Turner Prize is justly celebrated for raising all sorts of questions in the public mind about art and its place in our lives. Unfortunately, however, the intellectual climate surrounding the fine arts is so vaporous and self-satisfied that few of these questions are ever actually asked, let alone answered.

Why is it that all of us here - presumably members of the arts community - probably know more about the currents of thought in contemporary science than those in contemporary art? Why have the sciences yielded great explainers like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould, while the arts routinely produce some of the loosest thinking and worst writing in history? Why has the art world been unable to articulate any kind of useful paradigm for what it's doing now? I'm not saying that artists should have to 'explain' their work, or that writers expain it for them, but that there could and should be a comprehensive public discussion about what art does for us, what is being learned from it, what it might enable us to do or think or feel that we couldn't before. Most of the public criticism of the arts is really an attempt to ask exactly such questions, and, instead of just priding ourselves on creating controversy by raising them, trying to answer a few might not be such a bad idea. The sciences rose to this challange, and the book sales those authors enjoy indicate a surprising public appetite for complex issues, the result of which has been a broadening social dialogue about the power and beauty and limits of science. There's been almost no equivalent in the arts. The making of new culture is, given our performance in the fine and popular arts, just about our only growth industry aside from heritage cream teas and land-mines, but the lack of a clear connection between all that creative activity and the intellectual life of the society leaves the whole project poorly understood, poorly supported, and poorly exploited.

If we're going to expect people to help fund the arts, whether through taxation or lotteries, then surely we owe them an attempt at an explanation of what value we think the arts might be to them.

The folks at RAND have been making a stab at it in a very methodical way, and backed by their research, we may be able to take on the responsibility of becoming our own spokespeople.

Twitter-pated

2009-01-21T16:19:00.006-05:00

An intelligent associate of mine posed a few questions about the usefulness of Twitter, especially vis-a-vis its potential ROI. I've discussed my frustration with the vaporous nature of the ROI of various social media before.

He was responding to this post from a marketing website about why people Twitter.

His comments are (roughly) as follows:

It still seems like just another channel for more unchecked bull shiitake, which is already overabundant...

...Mass texting on a subscription basis...

..."What's the ROI of social media? Well, what's the I, exactly?" Your frickin time, that's what, only one of the most important resources you possess...

...digital gossip. You feel like you're connected, but you're really not in any meaningful way...

He bounced the gripes to a colleague of ours in journalism. Since the comments are articulate and useful - I'll credit our friend in the fifth estate: Kavan Peterson.

Kavan's response goes like this:

...it's insane how rapidly Twitter has been integrated by mainstream media and I definitely think it will be central in defining how mass media operates in a Web 2.0 (or whatever's next) world. But there are a couple of major points...that illustrate the power of Twitter:

1) Obama's campaign: At every mega-rally, the campaign asked everyone there to take out their cell phones and send a text to the campaign, and in return the campaign would send exclusive updates to its followers. That was all done on Twitter. What did the campaign get? About 10 million cell phone numbers from devout followers -- essentially FOR FREE. It was a massive fundraising, organizing asset. I'll let you ruminate what the ROI was on that.

2) Twitter's rapid growth: as someone who currently practices PR almost exclusively through social and new media, I find explaining the value of Twitter to be frustratingly difficult and tedious. But the point I always make is Twitter's explosive growth -- it went from zero to millions in one year, which completely eclipses the growth of Facebook, MySpace, Napster or any other new media phenomenon, and it's unbelievable how rapidly the mainstream media is adapting to it. It took years and years for blogs to make a dent in the flow of mainstream news but less than a year for Twitter to become the breaking-news platform.

The question isn't how long will the trend last, but how ubiquitous will social communication tools like Twitter become? I have no idea, but to deny that our culture is moving en masse towards a more public, participatory, social way of communicating is like denying global warming....the most remarkable aspect of social media has been the phenomenon of people marshaling massive amounts of human capital around activities in which making money is not the goal. In economic terms, the cost of forming groups of like-minded individuals around common interests or goals has dropped at an almost unimaginable rate -- I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, just think about how you would go about doing the things that Facebook does without Facebook. Twitter is doing the same thing for mobilizing and organizing people in real time.

Thanks to Kavan's insightful remarks, Henslowe's Diary will now Twitter you whenever I create a new post. Assuming you're hooked up to Twitter...and following me...I think...the internet has a lot of buttons...

Panaesthetic Mambo

2009-01-15T16:44:00.007-05:00

This bugbear of co-creation and consumerism in the arts, and especially the performing arts, has been pestering me for more than a year now. I had a little "aha" moment this morning when this showed up in my You've Cott Mail: League of Rock.

The League of Rock offers would-be rockers with regular-joe day jobs the opportunity to, well, rock. And rock hard. This is real stuff - they record and perform live with technical assistance and coaching from real rockers.

What has this got to do with theatre? Glad you asked...

There is a big scary pile of stats pointing to an oversupply of theatre (and art in general) in America. The suggestions on the table so far are:

1. Increase demand by switching resources from the supply chain into things like k-12 education in arts. Presumably, this will create, ipso facto, the next generation of arts appreciators.

2. Increase demand by finding ways to use technology to better market your art and to allow arts consumers the ability to interact and co-create.

The problem with both of these is that they assume a traditional demand model, which is certainly no longer applicable. Our culture is rapidly becoming "panaesthetic" (think Michael Graves' toilet bowl brush - beauty with your pooty). People are getting used to having a say in how aesthetics interrelate to their lives in a very democratic fashion. For a professional theatre practitioner, this is hard for me to say, but community theatres are the interactive model that performing arts constituents are demanding. They're just not often satisfying to watch.

But the would-be actors in your community theatre don't slave night after night on top of their 40-hour work week to generate embarrassing crud - that just the model we're using. What if we employed a model that placed a premium on transmitting knowledge from the professional to the dilettante with the idea of increasing skill through exposure to the art - rather than a model that runs like a mediocrity mill?

People want to have an effect on the outcome of a participatory experience. Instead of letting the performing and visual arts languish in the elitist margins, they can follow the example of League of Rock. Professional artists will need to assume the role of curator of their own work and form.

I haven't read this book, but the obvious irony is that while the avant garde of marketing is adopting theatrical methodolgy to create rich, compelling staged experiences for their consumers to explore as part of their brand, theatre isn't.

Dangling Digital Carrot

2009-01-14T11:25:00.005-05:00

A media savvy associate of mine sent me this illuminating article from NPR on the use of interactive games at museums to increase interest and participation.

So I’m having this profound existential problem with the marketing of art, and the dangling of digital carrots in front of would-be arts consumers. I absolutely feel like I am not mentally up to the task of unraveling the issue. I have this vague sense of disassociation that has a twinge of the irrational about it, which causes me to second guess what other people might call intuition. My intuition pushed me toward Baudrillard who I have supposed had some kind of a grasp on this.

The trouble with turning to the philosophical set is that they are always disagreeing with each other in arcane but not insubstantial ways. I don’t have the time to read Baudrillard, just the Wikipedia article and the Stanford article on him – a fact no doubt that he would use to indicate the validity of his point.

“For …Baudrillard, reification — the process whereby human beings become dominated by things and become more thinglike themselves — comes to govern social life. Conditions of labor imposed submission and standardization on human life, as well as exploiting workers and alienating them from a life of freedom and self-determination. In a media and consumer society, culture and consumption also became homogenized, depriving individuals of the possibility of cultivating individuality and self-determination."

That rings a bell. It’s more or less the beginning of the articulation of my concerns about what it means to use interactive technology to create an homogenized interface (a "sign" to Mr. B) between one human and the symbolic communication of another human (such as a painting).

The motives behind the creation and dissemination of these interfaces is primarily economic: if the curator says “we need more people to come” what they’re really saying is “we won’t be economically viable if more people don’t come and I'll lose my job and see the demise of a form and institution which is valuable to me.”

The reason you can be sure that’s the case is because the other option is considered nauseatingly elitist (which won’t due in century 21): “If the unwashed, plugged-in masses can’t appreciate our art at face value – screw them, the Philistines."

A final thought: I read in some hard-line business journal that mergers are what the corporate set does when they want to avoid real work. What do we artsy types do when we want to avoid real work (in addition to blogging)?

How to Save Broadway

2009-01-12T13:41:00.002-05:00

This is bound to be everywhere. If you see it here first, just tell your friends "I saw it first at Henslowe's Diary."

Great skit from Saturday Night Live about how to save Broadway. It's nice that people care.

For the record, Henslowe's Diary does not endorse any products or networks advertised in the above content.

Why Theatre

2009-01-07T12:52:00.007-05:00

There are not a few regional theatres circling the drain right now. I got a letter from an attorney with a list of inventory he is liquidating on behalf of a Florida theatre.

But lo! An impassioned stand by Shakespeare Santa Cruz, which leaped from the fire back into the pan with a week-long rally to raise over $400,000 from 2000 donors. Artistic Director Marco Barricelli makes a salient statement about why we bother, and what it's all worth. And it couldn't be timelier: he makes a direct reference to the matter in the comments of my last post - how theatre can create a singular transformation in a collective context.

I also came across this nugget in a RAND report this morning - a mission statement (more or less) from a state arts agency: to provide “valuable and transformative arts experiences that impact individuals and communities—and to help participants recognize the value and power of their experiences.”

When we think about what it is we do, and why we do it, let's consider those things: that our mission is to create transformative theatre for individuals and communites - and to create ways in which the communities we serve can recognize the value of what we offer.

The Narrow-casting Theatre of Tomorrow

2008-12-31T16:25:00.004-05:00

The NEA released a study about declining attendance in American theatres.

I've caught wind of some reaction from within the theatre community suggesting that perhaps the producers and artists have drifted away from the audiences - not the other way around. In conjunction with these trends and ideas has been the rise of the idea of the "consumer" of arts, rather than a patron or audience member.

I dunno - maybe we should just quit doing theatre. I'm sure most of the decline in our audiences is due to the irrelevant matter we've been stuffing down our audiences' maw with nary a soda to wash down the dry, indigestible stuff.

But I'm an optimist - always with a keen eye for the way forward. How about this: we could take after the niche-marketing crowd and narrow-cast - have a play created for every individual that comes to our theatre.

Let's call our patron Mr. Art C. Onsumer. The play can be about the more interesting and palatable parts of Mr. Onsumer's life and fantasies, feature products and lifestyles that he endorses (information about which we will solicit via an e-mail survey before he sees the performance), and end the way that is that best affirms for Mr. Onsumer's weltanschauung.

In the narrow-casting theatre of Tomorrow, the most in-demand theatre companies will come to your home and do the performance in your living room; the most loved directors will allow the viewer to pause the action when the phone rings or nature calls. Like reality TV, we can probably do away with writers altogether, and have Mr. Onsumer and his family yell imperatives at the performers, who will comply with grace and wit. Of course, we'll have to make sure that Mr. Onsumer and his children can co-create the experience by joining the performers when the spirit moves them.

Maybe the NEA can just give out free boxes of Cranium or Pictionary to every family. Because a great nation deserves great board games.

In the future, there will be flying cars

2008-12-12T09:58:00.001-05:00

Perhaps the reason humankind is so bad at predicting the future is because it's not there.

Happy Holidays!!

Two go out, only one comes back...

2008-12-09T12:59:00.002-05:00

I mentioned at some point early in this blog that I would take up the discussion of the split executive in theatre and other performing arts companies (i.e. artistic director/managing director).

This conversation has popped up on the Mission Paradox Blog. I think more can be said about why this dual-role exists, and it might be fun to play devil's advocate and think up some reasons it might be good; it may also be that there are a few criticisms of it that were left out of the Mission Paradox post.

I'll take up some of them anon.

Back on the Soap box

2008-12-07T11:24:00.006-05:00

I'm off the diary for the moment and back on the soap box.

This diatribe began as a comment on Andrew Taylor's Artful Manager Blog and spiraled out of control. Man, I love that guy's blog.

You'll have to read the original post - it's better than me describing it. It might help to listen to Taylor's comments about metaphor and structure. Also, his blog is an excellent source for more on this topic, but you can catch it up with threads of it all over the place - try any marketing blog, for instance, and you're bound to come across these ideas: namely, giving away content, and what I call "theatre 2.0" which is a broad concept that involves inter alia the notions of self-curation, self-directed creation or ur-collaboration (everyone throwing things in the soup), and any manner of internet-based interface with your organization.

I feel like such a Luddite when I read these ideas, because I always get this sinking feeling along with the question "how do you pay for professional art without a boundary and little or no state funding?" Given the philanthrocapitalist sentiments sweeping away our financing models and cyberspace sweeping away our production models, what are we to do?

I'm sure I'm simply wont of imagination, but are there resources that take these ideas to the next level and address the nitty gritty of how to create content and support a class of professional artists with no capital resources and giving the art away for free to all and sundry? Aside from augmentation and marketing of the real substance of art, what does the internet have to offer to the hands-on, personal experience of the intrinsic art as a creator and appreciator?

There are two worlds operating in separate vacuums right now - the folks developing the concepts and exploring the rapidly changing cultural landscape and market place; and the world of the day-to-day arts managers who have to plan and implement the next season or the next concert and work with boards who are usually struggling to grasp the basics of marketing and nonprofit financial structures.

The resource I'm looking for is the technical and financial capacity to implement any of these new ideas without imperiling my payroll. Creating Facebook and Youtube experiments uses valuable and scarce time to create projects that simply have no short-to-mid- term ROI, and possibly no significant ROI in the long term. Yes, they help my stakeholders create the experience and build the brand with our company, but there is a fundamental disconnect between something like live theatre and an electronic form of communication that lacks even the person-to-person interaction of a long-distance phone call.

Now is the Winter of our Pipes...

2008-11-24T15:13:00.004-05:00

Today I plugged in the heat tape that wraps the pipes under the building. The pipes supply water to the lobby, but travel under an unheated crawl space. If we don't plug them in, they'll freeze and burst. A few weeks ago, I winterized a bathroom in an exposed outdoor addition. Some nice fellows from a local farm came and blew the water out of the pipes with compressed air, and I put RV antifreeze in the toilet tank, bowl, and the p-trap for the sink.

It hasn't gotten terribly cold yet, so there's still water on in the back room that we use for costuming and dressing rooms. Pretty soon, I'll drain and blow out those pipes and add the RV antifreeze to the p-traps.

As usual this time of year, I entered donations into Giftworks and answered a bunch of email. Over the last few days, I also sent out a lot of thank you notes for donations received. On Sunday, we had a play reading of The Dixie Swim Club in our lobby. The soup du jour was potato corn chowder made by our very own Artistic Director.

I sent out a press release for events coming up in December.

This evening is the Chamber of Commerce annual dinner, and I've been asked to make a few remarks about the Chamber's website (I participated in the refit of the site this spring - I think I'm the chair of the web committee). These are the remarks (in brief) that I'll make:

1. Lake Champlain is very large. There are two states and two countries along its shores with many, many communities and businesses.

2. When you Google "Lake Champlain Events" the Chamber of Commerce site is #4 on the list.

3. If you're not listing your events on the Chamber site, you're missing out on any customers looking for things to do in the two states, two countries, and hundreds of towns, villages, and burgs that populate the shores of the lake.

Also, I solved the chair height problem by putting 2x4 blocks under the legs of my desk.

I changed the back-up tape in the server...

Diaretics

2008-11-20T14:51:00.002-05:00

Trying a new format. I've noticed that there is a lot of hot air about what this or that person thinks cluttering up the internet. I have a lot of things to say, but somebody else probably already said most of them, and proselytizing is a dull business.

I thought I might try writing a few notes about the things I do each day in the pursuit of theatre management. Maybe it will be interesting, maybe it will hang over my head like the ceiling fan of Damocles when my performance reviews come up.

Today I opened the mail, entered donations into Giftworks, made a bank deposit, and prepared for a guest lecture in a couple of classes on arts management at SUNY Potsdam. I also worked on our website and replied to a lot of email. I read the first few pages of Danny Newman's "Subsribe Now!"

I changed the backup tape in the server. I changed office chairs from a modern broken one to an antique not broken one - though it may prove to be too tall and I don't know if I can make it any lower. It seems to be making me sit up straighter, but when I do slouch, I have to slouch even farther.

More later...

Increase your piece

2008-09-30T13:00:00.000-04:00

This is good. I like his thinking!

Shag-a-shingle Buy-a-brick

2008-09-18T14:31:00.001-04:00

If your theatre is plagued by crumbling capital infrastructure, here's a great fundraising idea:

If a patron gets hit by falling pieces of your building - say a slate roof tile - present them with the following offer: if the patron covers the cost of the deductible on your theatre's general liability policy, then the replacement shingle will bear that patron's name.

Similarly, but more tragically, if your patron gets bonked by a tumbling brick and doesn't live to tell the tale, offer to name an entire course of bricks after the deceased if the family agrees to cover the costs of the funeral themselves, as well as forgoing any criminal charges, or civil damages.

Just some thoughts to help you make the best of your capital fundraising efforts.

Marginal at Best

2008-05-05T07:49:00.003-04:00

My friends in the biz tell me that a typical "textbook" marketing budget for a business will be 10-15% of the total budget, and that an aggressive marketing campaign may go as high as 25%. Certainly there are instances where it goes even higher.

The last two theatres I've managed have had marketing budgets between 5-8% of the annual budget - about half of what is considered normal. And it's never been easy to argue for more, because you either divert it from staff and program expenditures, or you have to convince the board that spending more on marketing will increase revenues and provide at least a nominal ROI.

As much as I'd like to say a marginal increase in marketing dollars will have a corresponding increase in ROI, I haven't actually witnessed it firsthand. In fact, I've seen a marketing budget increase fourfold with no real gain in attendance or donations.

Herein lies the rub, methinks: the percentage increases in budgets - even fourfold multipliers are irrelevant unless compared to actual cost of advertising. Even 10% of a $300,000 budget isn't a lot of money for an annual marketing campaign. So if you increase your 7% to 8% - you're really talking about going from $21,000 to $24,000 - which isn't going to get you much traction in the marketplace.

Now, if you double your $21,000 to $42,000, you're talking some real strategic changes in the way you market and the ability to effectively open up new markets. So the question is: is there really a point to increasing your budget from $21,000 to $24,000; furthermore, what happens if you decrease it to $18,000? Will you actually see a significant drop in attendance if you eliminate marketing in media in which you can't maintain enough presence to have a significant effect? For example - is it effective to have five 30-second radio spots play run-of-schedule for three days? Or to have one 8 column-inch ad per week in a 5 section daily paper? Both of these can be costly relative to your small budget, and the ROI of each is dubious.

The best way to set your marketing budget is to be realistic about what media you can afford to be effective in, maximize the potential of those media at an appropriate cost, and cut away anything else. There are margins at which no ROI exists, and there are break-away points where significant increases in spending will create a tremendous effect.

A couple of side notes: there are good ways to maximize the smaller marketing budgets we usually have. Try some co-op advertising with local businesses who value your organization as an asset. Partnering with the local daily paper to exchange 2-for-1 column inches for a sponsorship is another - a colleague of mine did this and catapulted his 8% cash marketing budget into a 12% when the in-kind contribution from the paper was calculated.

The Board of Tomorrow

2008-04-24T07:07:00.003-04:00

Aside from the title, this idea is not mine. After awhile, I might start telling people it is, and awhile after that, I may believe so.

In the meantime, read this post from Adam at Mission Paradox for a great look at how your organization might prospect for board members.

Lifesavers for Fundraisers

2008-04-23T07:43:00.004-04:00

I've got a couple of good links today. The first is to the Very Short List - a digestible trove of great stuff. The next two links came through the Very Short List (which doesn't always have anything to do with theatre or fundraising).

Christopher Davenport has made five five-minute films about fundraising. The first one aired April 21, and you can still watch it. You can also sign up to receive subsequent movies by email.

For you literary theatre aficionados, here's Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett. It's a gas - if you like Beckett jokes...also, it has nothing to do with fundraising, which may qualify it for meta-Beckett-joke status with high scores in non sequitir.

And finally, if you haven't been to Andrew Taylor's blog, you've never seen his awesome clock. You can buy one.

Emerge!

2008-04-15T12:58:00.005-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, some visionary folks at the Saratoga County Arts Council at the Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY began a small but fortuitous project they're calling Emerging Upstate Arts Professionals. Using the time-tested attractants beer and pizza, they convened a group of like-minded emerging arts professionals from Albany to Westport to network and discuss the field.

This particular group is facing the challenges of taking over the mantel of leadership in organizations where organization founders are retiring in an industry known neither for its succession planning, or its internal management development capacity. If you're in the area, and new to the field of arts management at any level, keep up-to-date by subscribing to the blog.

Kudos to Tanya, Leigh, Joel, and everyone at SAC for making this happen.

Manager Wanted

2008-04-13T06:20:00.002-04:00

The Pendragon Theatre in Saranac Lake, New York has announced it will begin a search for a new Managing Director to replace founder, Bob Pettee. Bob and his wife Susan Neal founded what would become Pendragon in 1980. In that time, it has grown very organically, and is an integral part of the town - having achieved the status of institution.

Pendragon uses a mix of community amateurs and professional theatre artists, as well as interns from nearby colleges to produce some quality theatre - and some pretty edgy stuff as well. Many of the board members, volunteers, and employees have been there a long time. The space(s) the theatre inhabits are as quirky and organic as its history.

From the outside looking in, the theatre has been flexible and responsive, opportunistic and visionary, and under careful and competent leadership.

Which all leads to the question: what kind of person can fill Bob Pettee's shoes?

In many ways, this is the same difficulty any business faces when it replaces a visionary founder with new blood - often a person younger than everyone she will manage. Challenges will always include resistance to change, people your parents' age subordinate to you who insist on calling you "kiddo," and so forth. In this situation, however, as in many arts organizations, there are some unique challanges:

1. Bizarre skill set. Arts managers are often expected to fundraise, advertise, design, motivate, hire, manage, and do light maintenance on outdated infrastructure - both technical and physical. In Bob's case, it would also be handy if his replacement could build and paint sets, act, direct, and teach. It leads to very overwhelming-looking job descriptions on ArtJob or ArtSearch. Don't be afraid to apply, even if the company seems to want a super-hero.

2. Inherited volunteers. These can also be board members. You can't fire them. You can't discourage them. However ridiculous and inefficient they may be, you're stuck with them and you have to learn how to live with them. Especially if you are in an isolated area with a small pool of willing volunteers and a very active grapevine - any perceived slight may send your bothersome volunteer packing - which may discourage other, more helpful folks.

3. Maintaining donor relations. Many of your organization's most ardent supporters might be friends of Bob at this point. Keeping them as involved as they have always been requires extra acrobatics, because they're not your friends, but you really need their $2000 or the board will think you're incompetent.

Still interested in Bob's job? I thought you were. Remember, Bob didn't have any idea what he was in for when he started either.

Thanks to Bob Pettee for being my unwitting example.

The General and his Privates

2008-04-05T11:42:00.003-04:00

I'm growing concerned that blogs are promoting a non-existent set of generalities about audiences and programming. What is "new and daring" exactly? What is "younger"? What is "older"? There are certain markets that don't offer senior discounts because they're populated by affluent retirees who don't need the extra two bucks. Other markets may represent a wide spread between the haves and have-nots that make pricing acrobatic. Not every theatre caters to every market. If you are subsidized and want to to do new and daring work, find underwriters that subsidize your new and daring work.

Comparing your theatre prices and audiences to Broadway's is like shooting fish in a barrel. Broadway has the highest prices anywhere. It also has the most expensive theatre real-estate, ergo, the highest rent anywhere. Broadway houses have union employees - the highest paid theatre workers anywhere. For a lengthy discussion on ticket pricing and value perceptions, check out this study.

Stay local. Compare your theatre to others in your area. Price accordingly. Understand your audience, your goals, your competitive differential before you decide that the blue-hair crowd who walk out when you drop the f-bomb on stage don't understand your work and the world of hungry twenty-something and thirty-nothing would-be-theatre-going liberal arts grads all hate Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Most importantly, remember that as a self-sacrificing, introspective, theatre-drunk arts professional - not many people think like you. Don't mistake the map for the terrain.

Here Comes Everybody

2008-03-21T08:01:00.006-04:00

I've been out and about lately talking to a number of people in my community about joining the theatre's board. It's a pretty small community and many potential candidates have already served on the board at some point in the last 25 years. Most of the folks I'm talking to know each other, and all are supportive of the theatre in one way or another.

I'm asking certain people because they would make great board members - they have great ideas, they're opinion leaders in the community, they have access to a variety of networks and resources, etc. My success rate in getting near-term commitments has been about 0%.

Then I got to thinking - these are pretty accessible people - I see them often and I like to talk to them. They're smart people, and they share their ideas with me about the theatre, the community, the economy, etc. So what's the difference between them and my actual board members? Well, they don't vote on the board - but then again, neither do I. And if I can influence the policies, directions and resources of the theatre as a non-voting particpant, why can't these community members-at-large?

Every one of the folks I am talking to has a stake in the theatre, and also have the ability to influence the discussion - even at the board level. They are peers with my board members - they contribute time and resources - they just don't sit at the table and vote. Granted, that can be a big deal from time to time, however, these folks are just as capable at effecting the direction of the theatre. So whether they join the board, I'll keep talking to them, keep them informed, keep soliciting their ideas and input as if they were board members.

Even if they don't appear on your letterhead, you can consider every community leader, opinion maker, or oracle of knowledge in your community who has a stake in your game a non-voting board member, so long as they care about what happens to your theatre.

More on Less

2008-03-16T08:42:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I posted a blog on Theatre with Less. I've tried to do some more looking around to see what else is being said about it.

I found this post on Theatre Ideas about sustainable theatre design.

This site is worth looking at.

Lot of heat out there. Not much light.

Theatre with Less

2008-03-15T10:13:00.004-04:00

Bill Raoul, one of my college professors and author of the Stock Scenery Construction Handbook, advocates the use of stock scenery as a resource saving method of constructing scenery. The clearest benefit to theatres of using these methods is modular design, and time and money savings in production. Raoul also casually mentions the amount of sheer waste created by set construction and disposal. Many elaborate sets, even on modest college and regional theatre stages consume thousands of dollars of materials, most of which are thrown away when the show ends - often in as few as five or ten performances - rarely longer than a few months.

When I worked at the Public Theatre as a carpenter, one of my first jobs was to demolish the set of a play that had run for six weeks. In addition to decimating and tossing out enormous faux-brick columns, we also pried up several hundred square feet of stone tile. While we did try to save as much tile as possible for re-use, we could only salvage about a third of it because it broke so easily when pulled up.

As the cost of theatre continues to rise at a rate higher than inflation, playwrights are finding that plays with large numbers of characters are not being produced by professional companies who cannot afford the payroll. Each year, theatres struggle to meet expectations of audiences by offering them some kind of simulation of spectacle, even if just a modest simulacrum of some fictitious drafty bedroom.

Even more ethically challenging to theatres is the amount of waste they produce each time they fill a dumpster with painted lumber, flame-proofed fabrics, and program print over-runs.

What if we challenged ourselves, and our audiences to shift this paradigm? What if we did plays with less? What does theatre-of-less look like? For instance, theatre outside in the daytime doesn't require lights - and is hardly an original idea (it also doesn't require a building, heating, cooling, or fire exits - ergo, minimal flame retardant).

Working in the bowels of production for many years, I've seen firsthand just how resourceful theatre artisans can be - but I've also seen the limits as they've struggled to meet the expectations of the current paradigm. What if we challenged all these creative, resourceful people to a $100 set design contest for "I Hate Hamlet?" Or to costume "Camelot" for $100? Every designer I know personally would sock me for proposing it - but think of it like any other form - haiku, say, or the scenic equivalent of a dirty limerick.

Theatre Co-op

2008-03-12T08:03:00.005-04:00

This may not be an original idea, but it might be new to my four loyal readers, and it's new to me as of this morning: the Everyman's Endowment Fund. Sort of.

I had a conversation with a board member last fall who was telling me that when she worked in municipal finance, her municipality had a AAA bond rating. And I thought, "what if our theatre could issue bonds?"

Then I thought, nah. But - what if we could raise an endowment the way co-op markets raise their buying pool? In a co-op, each person buys "shares" that vary in price depending on the location. I currently own two shares in a co-op (one for each member of my household). The shares were $35 each. The co-op has about 14,000 current members. At $35 each, that's $490,000. Invested modestly, that amount would generate $25,000 a year in interest.

What if, rather than hawking season tickets, a theatre sold shares like a co-op? Shareholders would receive the "member price" on tickets, could sell their shares back at any time, and would take advantage of other perks and incentives offered to members. Non-members would pay a premium price for tickets more reflective of the cost of producing the theatre. By purchasing a membership, shareholders are making a commitment to the health and longevity of the theatre and their community.

For example, let's say you have 1000 season subscribers, purchasing packages with an average price of $200 each year. That's $200,000. Offer those subscribers one share each at a price of $300, payable at $150 a year for two years. They'll be buying tickets of course - maybe even a "member-priced" season ticket, so there's a bit of an upfront push - but that's how co-ops work. Or cast a wider net - try to sell shares to anyone who comes to, say, two plays a season, but price the shares at $50. If you're in a big market, that might be 10,000 people. That's $500,000.

I'm sure there are some bugs to be worked out, but the bright side is that food co-ops all over the country do this every day, and it's a model that works. The folks who run the co-ops would probably be more than happy to help out. Incidentally, I know of at least one food co-op that raised money from its members to finance the construction of a building. They tapped existing members for short-term no-interest loans to the co-op, which were repaid to the members in the years after the co-op opened.

This is a bit sprawling, but to me, it's a big exciting idea that needs room to sprawl. The beauty of it all is that you're getting exactly what you wanted from your audiences - ownership. And with 5,000 to 15,000 members, the ebb and flow of a few hundred has little effect - compared to the day you biggest donor finds a new pet project and pulls the plug on 5% of your budget or more in one swell foop.

For my next amazing feat, I shall convince my board that this is not crazy! Stay tuned...

We look good on paper

2008-03-08T21:05:00.006-05:00

We're preparing our season brochure, and last week, I ordered our spring appeal bulk mailing. By using #80 paper on each instead of #100, we're saving several hundred dollars on each run (the brochure is a 14,000 run, the appeal is 5200). We also recently canceled weekly direct deposit for our three full-time employees.

Why bother with these little things? The direct deposit only cost $2.60 a week. Well, it means a few things - maybe $500-$700 more to invest in designers. It might mean a bonus where it counts - a stage manager who goes the extra mile; a TD who can walk and chew gum; a master carpenter whose knuckles don't quite hit the ground; extra valium for the costumer.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the cost of live theatre. The major cost is in the people who do the work, and the effect of good people is obvious on stage. The cost of direct deposit, #100 paper, and glossy programs is not obvious on stage. What do you want people to remember about your theatre - the stirring performances, or the sturdy paper?

And I thought squirrels were a problem

2008-03-03T08:10:00.006-05:00

Now, our good friend Phillip Henslowe might say something like this:

Too cvre Baumol's coste dissease: boyle iij heds of spinacke or cabbages for ij houres til skuishee then meddle withe heted treakle & presse yt to the forhed xiij timmes on a sheafe of tosted brown bredde.

Unfortunately, like many of Henslowe's other cures, this one may be found wanting when confronted by Baumol's Cost Disease. In their groundbreaking study on the economic structure of the performing arts, Performing Arts, The Economic Dilemma, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen describe how the primary input of performing arts - labor - is not scalable. An example of cost disease:

Compare the change in the cost to perform the Molière play "Tartuffe" in 1664 and in 2007 with the change in cost of calculating a large number of sums from an accounting ledger. In 1664, you needed two hours and twelve actors to perform Moliere's play, and it would take, say, twelve accountants working for two hours to add up all the sums in an accounting ledger. In 2007, a single accountant with a $10 calculator can add the sums in 20 minutes, but you still need two hours and twelve actors for the Moliere play.

What Bowen and Baumol reveal in Performing Arts, The Economic Dilemma, is that while the general inflation rate tends to hang around 3%, the cost of producing theatre inflates at a rate of about 6%. The same problem effects other industries with large professional labor inputs: health care, education, and government services. There is no way to drive these costs down without compensating professionals at a rate lower than general inflation.

Managing the finances of a theatre requires us to at least mitigate this disease. The book (sadly hard to find and apparently out of print) was published in 1966. Since then, certain parts of the performing arts operation have gained a degree of scalability. Some are cost-reducing - PCs, email, desktop publishing of programs, newsletters, bulk email; some are revenue enhancing - merchandising, sale of recorded proprietary material, larger houses (if you can keep them filled). Free labor is essentially immune to inflationary pressure, so maximize your volunteer capacity when appropriate.

Ultimately, this is a fundamental structural challenge - and a heady one - but one that we must be able to describe to our boards, donors, and legislators.

When letting of blood will not serve

2008-02-28T07:42:00.005-05:00

From tyme to timme, I like too shayre the legendary wisdome of the mastr Hymmselve.

I'm holding a contest to see if anyone can tell me how many times one should "vsse yt."

All the partye peepyl in the houss - hoote as you maye sufer yt!

Word.

Things we can't stop thinking about

2008-02-25T08:03:00.009-05:00

I went searching for Jim Collins-related blogs to find further discussion of his ideas in practice. Sadly, when one goes looking for things, one tends to find them.

This is an exceprt from a Wharton School review of "Good to Great" I found posted in a larger review of the book at businesspundit.com:

Collins asks an interesting question. Unhappily, the methodology he used to formulate an answer is questionable and the answer is almost disappointing in its simplicity: Great companies become great by staying focused: focused on their products, their customers and their businesses. They aspire to higher levels of excellence, are never content to become complacent and are passionate about their products. They have leadership that is not ego-driven, and have organizational cultures that embrace constant change. That's the book.

It's actually a very nice summary of the book. And to Collins' credit, his book motivated me to rethink basic ideas about motivating employees, what defines the "right" people for my outfit, and the executive decision-making processes of our company.

While searching for this information, I also found some credulous converts like myself who never read business books, had "Good to Great" recommended to them so many times that they read it, and then couldn't stop thinking about the ideas. Collins and his team stated some compelling ideas and constructed their research carefully.

But here I am, reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan." Taleb is an uberskeptic and makes even more compelling arguments about the nature of unpredictable events and their impact on the world as we know it. And I got to thinking about how and why businesses succeed. It may be that Collins' ideas have some traction, and if they inspire you to work harder and make better decisions, more power to you.

There is a compelling phrase (and variants of it) that Taleb deploys in "Black Swan" - bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. That's a broad concept - harder to grasp, and demanding of courage and flexibility - including the willingness to fail utterly that most of us are unwilling to accept, let alone embrace as a working paradigm.

I've often said of the theatres where I've worked - we're either going to make the right decisions at the right time and flourish, or we're going to do our best and fail. If the concept of theatre is in demand where we fail, someone else will pick it up and try again, and we'll all go look for a new job.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

2008-02-23T10:13:00.007-05:00

The firm of Wolf and Brown released a study in January called "Assessing the intrinsic impacts of a live performance." Two findings that smacked me right in the face:

1. Impact is a proxy for customer satisfaction. For those of us jousting the windmill of "cultural consumerism" this is fresh breeze in a dank cellar. According to the study, the notion of "customer satisfaction" - did the customer feel like his time and money was well spent - is more likely an artifact of the customer's desire to justify the expenditure than a realistic look at the impact of the performance. (See Dan Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" for a book-length discussion of this phenomenon.) Further, impact (as defined by the study) and satisfaction were so highly correlated that the authors recommend further studies eliminate the "satisfaction" measures as both redundant and uninformative.

If we can curate impact, maybe we need not concern ourselves with consumer-grade satisfaction.

2. "Constituency definition is the highest level policy decision that an arts organization can make." This idea is at the heart of many programming vs. audience development dilemmas. Many organizations suffer a chronic low-grade identity crisis that results from trying to pretend that the audience we built is not the audience we are programming for. We often program for the audience we would like to have, and striking a balance where you can lead your audience gently into new realms while reinforcing their cultural identity and making them feel comfortable in their seats is perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face.

Ripped from the Headlines

2008-02-22T16:19:00.004-05:00

This is where I get most of my news about the arts.

Congress Accidentally Approves Arts Funding

John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Goes On Wild Endowment Binge

Role Of Tree Ineptly Played By Second-Grader

The Poster Post

2008-02-20T09:53:00.007-05:00

The Wallace Foundation has been funding a number of studies around the country for the last ten or so years aiming at "building arts participation" - especially in rural communities through the broad swath of what the cosmopolitan arts crowd might call the "fly-over zone." But rural communities exist all over the country - even within hours of the largest metropolitan areas. Indio and Sonora California, the Catskills, Southern Vermont, Eastern Pennsylvania and Northwest Washington State are all excellent examples.

Among the many pragmatic pieces of information generated by these studies was where people in these communities receive (and look for) information about arts events. The number one source: newspapers (56%). Second to that, radio, TV, then word-of-mouth.

Posters bring up the rear at a paltry 0.37%. I have railed against posters for years as a drain on limited marketing resources, only to have board-members-about-town button-hole me and demand to know why the posters weren't up or blame the lack of evident postering for a saggy box office report. Posters take heavy graphic design, color printing, expensive paper, and more importantly, a tremendous amount of time to distribute. Of all the outlets for information, they are also the least controlled: your poster can be stapled over, removed, or soaked by rain no later than the minute after you turn your back to walk to the next poster site.

Posters end up in coffee shops near the toilet, in bookstores near the toilet, in grocery stores near the employee break room, in the back seat of your volunteer's car, and in doorways where smokers hang out.

Sure, if you've already developed a nice graphic and you have some extra dough or a great relationship with a printer - go ahead, hang a few posters. They draw nice attention to the windows and doors of your theatre - especially if you're in a high traffic area. The degree of control you have over your own real estate eliminates most of the problems - but it does cut down on exposure.

I'm trying to dig up the original report on this, which got me so excited to write about in the first place, but I can't lay my hands on it at the moment. Check back in a few days, and I'll have the sources added to this post.

Overhead over head

2008-02-14T13:26:00.006-05:00

Ellison Research has released a study about the public perception of overhead spending by charities. The results: too high. The double-whammy is that not only do people think that charities spend too much on overhead, they also overestimate the amount spent, considerably.

The upside to this is that, while there is a misunderstanding of the status quo, on average people think that charities should have an overhead rate of 22.4% - far higher than the highest number (usually 15%) imposed by various donors and foundations.

Although we're strange ones, theatres are nonprofits, and it's our responsibility as managers and fundraisers to educate our supporters about these facts as much as it is our job to promote the performing arts. There is extensive discussion, driven largely by reports coming out of the Nonprofit Finance Fund about the problems created in the nonprofit sector by facile overhead ratio criteria imposed by funders. The best thing we can do is let our funders know about work done by folks like the NFF, and also let them know that the general public has a much different concept of what's acceptable than the arbitrary standard stifling the sector now.

Never Underestimate the Boss

2008-02-13T08:50:00.008-05:00

I was cruising Wikiquote this morning looking for something Peter Drucker said about business management. If I can find that one, I'll post it later. I found this instead:

Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him. -- Peter Drucker Managing for the Future: The 1990's and Beyond (1992)

The first thought I had was "hey - that's me! I look illiterate and stupid to my subordinates, and I impute them at every turn!" Then I tried to gain some perspective and thought - "who's my boss?" Why, the Board, of course!

And then I thought about the number of times working with different boards over the years I have imputed to them broad deficiencies in ability, perception, and basic humanity. And then I thought how about much traction I got in the toughest times by giving them the benefit of the doubt, despite my frustration.

Artistic Paradox

2008-02-09T08:20:00.002-05:00

This is a thread from Mission Paradox - here's the gist: as we struggle to create and sustain our audiences, what purpose does the art play in the event? Is the art a means to end, or an end in itself? The conversation is certainly larger than it gets here and ranges pretty widely in the philosophical-anthropological realm.

We keep talking about finding ways for people to connect with our particular art form.

But people don't want to connect to art . . . they want to connect to other people.

So instead of a theatre company seeing their performance on stage that night as the point of the evening, perhaps they should just see themselves as the hub . . . as the thing that connects all the people in the audience to each other.

Now I know many artists would hate to see it that way. I mean the arts are about the artists right? People pay good money to see directors and musicians and dancers!

Right?

I'm not so sure any more.

I think what people are willing to pay for is to be connected to other people.

Mission Paradox also has an excellent blog on mission statement basics. The following comment from the post quoted above gave me some real pause in terms of what it is we're trying to do in the performing arts these days:

...connecting people in a renewing environment is our mission, actually. Indeed, the specific play that we're doing at any given time is secondary to the culture that we're creating in the world of the play.

I'm sorry - but what?!

If the mission of arts organizations is not to create art, then it begs the question: isn't there some better way to "connect people in a renewing environment?" Couldn't you easily succeed at that mission by offering classes on boat building, or starting a folf league? When push comes to shove, with no artists, there is no art. If your arts organization puts the needs of the community above the needs of the artist, you will turn your product into lukewarm porridge, lightly salted to taste.

This is an oldie-but-a-goodie that I cherry picked off Mission Paradox in yet another post:

Courtesy of Michael Kaiser from the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.
1. Create Great Art
2. Market Like Hell
3. Build the Board
4. Ask for Money

I will assert that it is an absolute truth that the art comes first, and anyone who thinks otherwise does so at the peril of their organization and their community. I will concede that the spiritual-anthropological desire to create and share art comes from a desire to connect and transform your fellow beings - and that this arises from the same urge that herds us together in the first place as a gregarious species.

I just can't get around how much history and culture gets tossed out the window when you switch your focus from creating a great play with great artists to having a flock of cultural "consumers" write about what they thought afterward in the lobby while the artists shuffle out the side door.

Merchandising on the Cheap

2008-02-06T11:21:00.002-05:00

If your theatre is the size of mine, you probably have the capacity to raise funds, answer the phone, and sell tickets. Oh, and produce plays. But we all love those great hats that everyone else's theatre has. And T-shirts. And mugs. And t-shirts for their dogs.

Our problem at this size is that it is very difficult to manage and sell merchandise. Inventory control is difficult, exposure to the products is only available when people are in your space, and most of us can't afford to sit on the inventory while we wait for people to realize that our logo merchandise is the only thing standing between them and being the coolest people in town.

CafePress.com is the perfect solution. I learned about it from a friend of mine who used to manage the Civic Theatre of Allentown, and I've set up merchandise for two companies I've worked for. I also found the Vigilante Theatre company uses CafePress. I'm sure there are more - I think I talked the Chenango River Theatre in Greene, New York into it as well.

You're never going to get rich on your merchandise, but if people will pay good money to promote the GAP and Nike on their clothes, they might just do it for you. You'll need someone who can do a little graphic work for you if you can't do it yourself, but getting basic logo merchandise is pretty easy. I recommend setting the price points low to encourage people to buy - I've never made more than $50-$100 a year on it - just get people wearing your stuff. You can order shirts for staff, or mementos for casts. You can operate multiple storefronts for different projects or productions, too.

Could be a good idea to promote if you're rolling out a new logo - and since it's web-based shopping, it works great in email blasts.

The Parson Wax Hole

2008-02-01T16:59:00.001-05:00

The weather is especially bad today, and I'm stuck inside, considering my namesake and beating away the wintery-mix blues. Here are some good remedies from Himself. If you try any of these, please let me know how it comes off (or up).

That pretty much speaks for itself.

Tally ho!

Ushers Needed

2008-01-30T14:38:00.001-05:00

Today, I removed this from the theatre:

It's a squirrel nest. It was made of fibers of something, insulation, and tissue paper. Embedded in it were pieces of stale bread and fruit rinds.

It was built in an architectural artifact created by a couple of beams and a couple of rafters. It's the vermin-nesting equivalent of the perfect storm. There was a matching space on the opposite side of the roof peak that also had a nest. After removing the crud, I packed the spaces with chicken wire.

This is the offender. Note the evil red eyes.

Kids: stay in school - or you could end up managing a theatre. Respect your ushers, and encourage them to keep the vermin out.

The Right People

2008-01-26T09:37:00.001-05:00

Waxing on Jim Collins today. (Not like that...)

Jim Collins in "Good to Great" says "get the right people on the bus" and you don't have to motivate them. He continues in "Social Sectors" that the arts and nonprofit universe has the added benefit of offering easily-gotten emotional remuneration that the widget-peddling crowd sometimes can't offer.

We're in a hiring phase at the theatre, preparing for the summer season. We're looking for three major technical positions and working out the calculus for stage manager scheduling - AEA SM, AEA ASM, and Non-AEA ASM.

Our budget, like many budgets this year, has contracted, and our programming is ambitious as ever, so we're in the position of trying to create the usual magic with the usual low pay and even fewer employees than last year. Many people might reflect that low weekly salaries aren't going to attract the right folks, and that you'll have to settle for enthusiasm, but no skill, or maybe some skill but no personality - the fish everyone else threw back.

When I started in tech theatre, I worked for $200 a week, and without bragging - I worked my butt off. I worked six 12 hour days each week for 15 or more weeks summer after summer. Each summer for the subsequent two years at one outfit, I got an additional $10 per week for my growing seniority.

I worked hard, I did creative work with no budget, no time, little skilled help, and 40-year-old stock set parts that were sliding slowly into ruin. Somehow, I built convincing fireplaces, a fire-breathing dragon with real deer-bone claws and flashing green eyes, and a leaking carboy of creosote. When I had down time, I repaired tools, trucks, drops, and lighting equipment. And I loved it. At the end of each of two summers, I got a cash bonus - and as a parting gift a set of beautiful, razor-sharp wood chisels.

I know there are people like that out there, and if you feel like your pay is low, think of what other currency you have to offer potential employees - TDs might like a design opportunity, for instance. One recent interviewee was excited that we weren't going to bunk her with three other people - that she'd have her own room.

Keep your expectations high, and let the people you hire know that you have high expectations, no time, no resources, low pay, and that you expect the best work. You might be surprised to find that there are folks out there who will work for you for the sole reason that you're not a flake. There are bad theatres out there who underpay people, overwork them, and treat them with disrespect (and here's one way to avoid them). Set yourself apart by building the best team you can and supporting by whatever means you've got, and I think we can achieve the results we want, and we don't have to lower our expectations because our weekly salary is less than the big theatre the next county over.

Can't tell your crew without a program

2008-01-18T13:39:00.001-05:00

This is a thought my office manager had last summer while we wrestled the many headed hydra of self-published, self-printed programs: once the audience is in the building, ticket in hand, what is the marketing value of a program?

We were trying to balance cost-effectiveness, waste-reduction, and in-house control with finish, quality, and aesthetics. For the big outfits who can order large runs of full color glossy programs, even if the show under sells and they throw out boxes of the things (something we've all done) - maybe it's not worth the effort.

Our solution was to get a slick black and white digital copier with a saddle-stitching unit - a Konica Minolta BizHub 350. In addition to being able to make 32 page program booklets, it also saved a lot of money on deskjet ink by becoming our network printer. It also three-hole punches - which makes it very popular with the stage managers.

Our marketing solution - to explain why we used flimsy black and white programs - was pretty straightforward - print the programs on recycled paper. We wrote on the front of the program that they were printed on minimum 30% post consumer waste. In addition, we were always able to print exactly how many we needed. After seating 7000 or so people last summer, we ended up with about 200 extra programs (usually the ones from the last night of each production, because they couldn't be reused.) And because they were not on glossy paper, they were easier to recycle again.

What is the marketing value of your program? Depends on your audience, your geography, your budget, etc. Our major donors are almost all major donors of various environmental causes as well, so this makes sense for us - saved a lot of money, too.

Crazy Larry's Discount Theatre!

2008-01-12T08:19:00.002-05:00

I recently went through a great load of math and spreadsheet jockeying to develop a three-year pricing strategy for the tickets at my theatre. The prices had been based on an old discount system with seniors, etc. getting $2 off the top bracket, and the musicals offered at a $2 premium to the plays. Every three or four years, the income would constrict around the expenses, and the prices would go up across the board by $2.

$2? Where did this magical number come from? Were the folks setting the prices devotees of the brilliant John Cusack film Better Off Dead (which would be an acceptable explanation...)?

Simply put, the discount to seniors, etc. was losing value over time, as was the premium on musicals. The discount rate between price bands and types of show were not only shrinking, their proportions were changing relative to each other. The same thing happened to the season ticket prices, except that the magic number there was $5 - which created all kinds of peculiar incentives and disincentives that had very little correlation to the anecdotal marketing goals at the time.

The pricing strategy we developed is simple, in that it takes into account that between inflation and certain types of steadily increasing costs (such as AEA salary and health benefits) the ticket prices are going to need to go up periodically. This is not a bad thing, and you need to decide for your audience how best to manage it and market it. But to know in advance what your revenue streams will be is critical to creating a proactive management strategy.

Key points of ticket pricing:

Don't give any one a discount who would pay full price.
Keep discount values consistent over the years by adjusting them proportionately to current prices.
Make sure your season ticket prices are creating the same incentives your marketing plan is.
Offer discounts to potential new patrons on season tickets, not single tickets. Single ticket buyers are often looking for a night out, not a commitment. These folks will often make up the margin on a blockbuster - season tickets are your bread and butter, singles are your gravy. (This can be tough - you're bucking a broad industry trend away from season subs over the last few years.)

If anyone is interested, I can furnish you with some of the spreadsheets I developed in the process. The might not solve your math, but they could inspire you to develop a really neat spreadsheet of your own!

Not so Great in the Social Sectors

2008-01-06T11:30:00.004-05:00

UPDATE 2/25/2008: Skeptics read this. Then read this.

I read Jim Collins' Good to Great a few months ago. It really helped me articulate and connect some intuitive ideas that were rolling around in my head. Collins' unassailable methodology gives me great confidence and enthusiasm when I put his ideas to use.

I was very excited to learn about the recently released companion monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, in the hopes that it would throw some light into a few dark corners that we in the social sectors seem to have all to ourselves. The corner left least illuminated by the first book was one of the three components of "The Hedgehog Concept". The Hedgehog Concept is the critical fulcrum at which your business or nonprofit may turn from good to great if you have methodically and diligently applied the principles of leadership, discipline, and careful recruitment of the right people.

The Hedgehog Concept has three key components: what you can be the best in the world at; what you are deeply passionate about; what drives your economic engine. Like a Venn diagram, the point where these three components overlap is your Hedgehog Concept, and you channel all your resources toward that, and shear away anything that does not support it. By doing so, your business can generate flywheel momentum - through discipline and time - that will carry your outfit to greatness.

Good to Great does an excellent job of laying out the scheme for this - not in a hokey, self-help business-section-at-Barnes-and-Noble way, but in a substantive, thoughtful, and convincing way. Collins received a huge response from people in the social sectors asking how to apply the theories to the arcane-seeming machinations of the nonprofit world. The monograph is worth reading and has some great things to say about leadership styles, discipline, and the vagaries of finding the right people when you're not paying much, or not paying at all.

To my great disappointment, however, Collins really drops the ball on a crucial bit of information (which I hope he can rectify in promised future studies of the social sector): the economic engine circle of the Hedgehog Concept. The beauty of the Hedgehog Concept rests in its directness and simplicity. The profit/x formula for meausuring the power of your economic engine is the core of evaluating the viability of your Hedgehog Concept. In Good to Great Collins makes a relatively innocuous comment about applying the profit/x concept in the social sector by saying you can substitute "cashflow/x" instead. In Social Sector Collins replaces the "cashflow/x" concept with a "resource engine" comprising three more parts: time, brand, and money.

Money is easy, time is workable, but "brand" he describes as a sort of emotional capital and makes several references to how difficult this and other social sector outcomes may be to evaluate. What made me cross, was that, aside from complicating a beautifully simple idea, it also created an unquantifiable variable right smack in the middle of what used to be a simple mathematical equation designed to focus energies of your organization and drive your flywheel to greatness. Brand-building seems to be a gooey sort of concept that you work really hard at and hope like hell it catches, but that has always been slippery and difficult to quantify. Unless Collins comes up with a better way to quantify the "brand" part of that circle, I'm going to stick with "cashflow/x" for the time being.

It's tricky, but you can apply it in theatre if you really work at it. Some "x" I've come up with are "board member," "artist," "audience member." Each one reflects a different focus - "board member" on fundraising, "artist" on production quality, "audience" on the experience of the production.

If Collins (or anyone) can get a better grip on the "brand"problem as it relates to the Hedgehog Concept, I think it will still be a great tool for social sector organizations. To his credit, he says that "the inherent complexity [of social sector economic structures] requires deeper, more penetrating insight and rigorous clarity than in your average business entity." Unfortunately, he provides only a relatively simplistic matrix as the only tool to assess that complexity.

The other parts of the modified "resource engine" circle can be quantified - I've got an idea I'm going to try out soon that involves creating a volunteer incentive and rewards program that operates in a way similar to a food co-op with working members. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, absolutely read Good to Great, read Good to Great and the Social Sectors - especially the part about leadership, and keep on ranchin' 'till the money runs out.

Eleemosynary

2008-01-02T13:34:00.002-05:00

Among the curiouser things about nonprofit theatres is that they are organized under what is essentially a charitable principle. Section 501 of the USC allows organizations "organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition" - with a few restrictions - to conduct business toward those ends without paying income taxes. There are a number of finer points, and potential taxes on unrelated business income - but the basic fact is that nonprofit theatres operate under one of those headings. In addition, unlike many other 501 organizations, 501c3 organizations can receive tax-deductible contributions.

I know we like to think that our audiences have religious experiences in our spaces, but I don't think the IRS would buy that. You could have a company devoted solely to the production of plays about science and math, or create of sort of Cirque du Soleil in which performers dressed in slinky gorilla suits put consumer electronics and Samsonite through their paces, but generally, theatre would probably fall into either the "educational" or "literary" categories. And that seems to make sense, except that there are foolhardy capitalist entrepreneurs out there who keep insisting on producing the same repertory, with the same talented group of people, sometimes in the same spaces as nonprofit theatre companies. A monograph on UK arts pricing notes that top-price tickets in commercial and non-commercial venues are typically the same.

The major legal difference is that nonprofit theatres don't distribute profit to shareholders or individuals. For those of us in the trenches raising money for what many consider merely a particle of entertainment, that's not really clear enough. We need to define why we are worthy of alms at the same time we define why we have to compete with rock concerts, movies, and other forms of entertainment to generate our earned revenue stream.

High Net Worth in da House

2007-12-27T10:51:00.001-05:00

The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University completed a study in October 2006 of high net worth giving in the United States, sponsored by Bank of America. According to the study "High Net-Worth households, those with incomes of greater than $200,000 or assets in excess of $1,000,000, represent 3.1 percent of the total households in the United States." Despite their small numbers, the members of these households make two-thirds of all charitable contributions in the country.

More importantly for nonprofit theatres, 10.8% of all HNW households (including households that did not give) made donations to arts organizations. By comparison, only 2% of all households (including non-givers, and HNW households) gave to arts organizations.

But wait! There's more! Of the households that did contribute to charity (givers only) 70.1% of HNW households gave to the arts, and only 8% of total households (givers only) contributed to the arts. What does it all mean? Read the report...

If you're pressed for time, I'll give you my take: we already know that our major donors carry the weight of our theatres on their backs. What's more important to note, is those people are also more likely to support the arts altogether, ergo, soliciting even non-major donations from high net worth households will be more fruitful than trying to increase the number donations from every household on your mailing list. Statistically you're five times more likely to receive a gift from a HNW household on your list than from the list as a whole. It certainly changes my thinking about the structure of annual campaigns and how I might spend my postage line.

Building the Better Mousetrap

2007-12-26T09:47:00.003-05:00

UPDATE 2/25/2008: Skeptics read this. Then read this.

Many of you may have heard of Jim Collins - author of "Good to Great" and "Built to Last," books he wrote on the structural underpinnings of successful companies. He has since released a monograph called "Good to Great and the Social Sectors" in order to relate some of the key ideas in "Good to Great" to the nonprofit universe.

"We must reject the idea—well-intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become 'more like a business.' Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?

I shared this perspective with a gathering of business CEOs, and offended nearly everyone in the room. A hand shot up from David Weekley, one of the more thoughtful CEOs—a man who built a very successful company and who now spends nearly half his time working with the social sectors. 'Do you have evidence to support your point?' he demanded. 'In my work with nonprofits, I find that they’re in desperate need of greater discipline—disciplined planning, disciplined people, disciplined governance, disciplined allocation of resources.'

'What makes you think that’s a business concept?' I replied. 'Most businesses also have a desperate need for greater discipline. Mediocre companies rarely display the relentless culture of discipline—disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action—that we find in truly great companies. A culture of discipline is not a principle of business; it is a principle of greatness.'” -Jim Collins

I'm enamored of the process Collins used to write "Good to Great" - he began by sorting mounds and mounds of data and then, through focused debate with his research team, developed theories which described the data. The results, to me, seemed much more solid and useful then much of the usual claptrap that you find in business self-help books. And, it's a surprisingly good read (if you're a management-type geek like me).

What I'd like to do is make a post a week or so talking about some of these concepts - that way, we'll spread out the fun, you won't get bored, and I don't have to let on that my copy of the "Social Sectors" monograph is lost in the holiday mail and I haven't read it yet. By the time it gets here, it should be pretty relevant. I'll also keep you updated on my attempt to put his theories to use within my own theatre.

The Sum of Us

2007-12-19T13:52:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, my Artistic Director and I met with Mark Fleischer, the new Producing Artistic Director of the Adirondack Theatre Festival. We introduced ourselves, had some coffee and exchanged some ideas. Mark is road testing some new web-based box office software next season; I'm eagerly awaiting his report. We also compared preliminary notes on how we could share resources and encourage greater circulation in the regional theatre community.

We're working out the details of a theatre passport that would give anyone with the card discounts at the participating theatres. Mark pointed out that the best argument for theatre begetting theatre was Broadway, with dozens of theatres jammed shoulder to shoulder in a few blocks of Manhattan generating the greatest concentration of commercially viable theatre in the United States.

The moral of this story: meet the people who run the theatres around you. Help each other. Share some ideas. Call someone this week and introduce yourself. If they live close enough - have a coffee. I called Tom Pechar at Alliance Theatre one day and exchanged only a couple of sentences, and took something away from that. I was interested in revamping my website, so I got in touch with the webmaster at the Guthrie and asked them about Drupal - a modular opensource web development tool - and they wrote me back. Take advantage of all the knowledge out there, and the fact that we work in an industry that has some of the coolest people around in management - and they're usually willing to share...

Beef up your Board

2007-12-19T13:43:00.001-05:00

Theatre vs. Nonprofit
As a business, the theatre produces and sells seats to plays. In that way, our business model and capital structure are similar to such disparate industries as universities and airlines – we create a product and our customers have to fill a chair which we maintain in order for them to enjoy our service.

Most theatres are also nonprofits – one of an increasing number which dot the landscape each year. Although these nonprofits may or may not provide a similar service or product, we are often competing for slim pieces of the same small pie in terms of government and foundation funding, and especially for individual donors and business support from our community. The more nonprofits proliferate, the more competition for resources.

Accountability
The reporting and accountability burdens of nonprofits have increased drastically in the last decade, and will continue to increase. As the nation relies more and more on nonprofits to provide services once provided by the for-profit and government sector, the burdens will continue increase. In the last few years, congress has added numerous layers and requirements to the application for 501c3 status, and is in the process of restructuring the tax return forms that nonprofits fill out.

These changes have placed a level of responsibility on boards and individual board members that did not exist a generation ago. Today’s and tomorrow’s board must be savvy, proactive, and forward-thinking. The people with the dedication and capacity to meet the demands of a modern nonprofit board member are few and far between.

Competition
The success or failure of a nonprofit starts and ends with its board, and the nonprofits that will succeed in competing for the resources necessary to fulfill their missions are not the ones that write the most successful grants or raise the most money; the most successful nonprofits will be those that compete for, attract, and retain the most skilled and dedicated board members.

If a theatre is to remain a competitive nonprofit, it is imperative that we discuss and develop board governance policies that will bring the theatre to the forefront of the new nonprofit world. Your theatre should strive to join the ranks of those companies cited as how-to success stories, such as the Arena Stage, the Alliance Theatre, and the Steppenwolf. Every ounce of your program and mission success will depend on your theatre's ability to achieve this vision.

Take a trip to the library

2007-12-17T11:33:00.001-05:00

The New York Public Library sits on the site of the historic Croton Reservoir, which supplied drinking water to the city from 1842 to 1899. In its place now sits a vast reservoir of knowledge in the form of books, journals, and a trove of online data.

The New York Public Library subscribes to dozens of journals and databases, including The New York Times and the Harvard Business Review - to name a notable pair. You really have to see it to believe it. Best of all - every piece of this data is available to any of us online with a New York Public Library Card. Useful for everything from AP photos, to articles on the philanthropic sector, to prospect and grant research, the NYPL card is available to residents of the City at no charge, and non-residents for a $100 annual fee. Compared to the fees you would have to pay to get the same information from these sources individually, it's a screaming bargain.

If you live in NYC now, get a card - you can keep it even after you move. I also have a card from the Chicago Public Library.

The Best Direct Mail Appeal Ever

2007-12-16T15:05:00.001-05:00

This from a story by Robert Walser, originally published in the Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung, in 1915, translated from German by Damion Searls, and published in the January 2008 Harper's:

"As you well know, I am a great talent and as such in need of continual support. Where, my dear sir, do you have the nerve to leave me in the lurch, and hence to perish? I think I have every right to more fat advances. Woe is you, unhappy wretch, if you don't send me ASAP enough for me to keep dawdling. But I am quite sure that you would never be foolhardy enough, and hence never dare, to remain insensitive to the prospect of nefarious, predatory demands."

Our dauntless artist, however unfortunately denied, "learn[s] to forget that anyone was duty-bound to offer him assistance," and becomes "responsible for his own behavior once more."

I will donate $100 to the first arts nonprofit that uses the above as a mass appeal. Try me.

Many thanks to Walser, Searls, and the assiduous folks at Harper's.