Who Is In Charge of Engagement?

Someone comes up to you and says they really enjoyed the program they attended and want to spread the word to their friends and get them involved, to whom do you refer them? Is there someone who will offer to collect the contact info of the person and their friends and perhaps follow up with them later to see if they need more information?

In short, who is your community engagement person?

If you are at a loss to answer that, it may be because for all the discussion about the importance of community engagement, the task of handling community engagement is often assigned either to the marketing department or education and outreach department.

The marketing people may interpret engagement as trying to persuade people to participate, employing imagery and concepts with which the community may more closely identify and find more appealing.

Education and Outreach may interpret engagement as providing activities ancillary to the central one which allows the community to either better understand and enjoy the central event or perhaps just better appreciate the role the organization has in the community.

But once someone from the community expresses a sense of engagement, who handles the relationship from there? Community engagement is both separate and entwined with marketing and outreach. It can require its own dedicated staff, though it certainly depends on and thrives due to the efforts of these two departments.

Community Engagement In A Different Context

It may be easier to talk about the role of community engagement staff in terms disassociated from familiar assumptions about departments of an arts organization by examining the digital media positions of  community manager and social media manager.

Hootsuite ran a post on their blog about the difference between a community manager and a social media manager discussing them in a way that parallels the difference between marketing and community engagement.

A community manager is, at heart, a builder of relationships. This person will be engaging and nurturing customers and key members of your community. They make the brand personal and they advocate for the customer.

The social media manager, on the other hand, is more of a strategist. Your social media manager should be creating and aligning social media strategies in different departments within your company. They’ll be tracking your social media successes and failures, and using data to ensure you’re always improving. And they’ll be constantly creating and curating content for social networks.

In this example, the community manager is the community engagement person and the social media manager is analogous to the marketing manager. The latter is creating strategy and collecting data about how successful the strategy was along mostly quantitative measures. The engagement person is focused more on the qualitative feedback and spending time trying to develop relationships.

Oh, You Loved The Show? Can I Give You A Voucher for A Free Dinner?

You may have noticed I blatantly stole the example at the start of the Hootsuite post for the start of this post. That is because I wanted to emphasize that instead of fixing a situation by giving tickets to another performance to people who complained about a show, the engagement person’s approach is capitalize on a positive experience by giving tickets to those who praise the show. (If only metaphorically.) Their task to to ensure positive interactions are noted and reinforced.

Community Engagement doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Out of necessity there is a great deal of overlap and thus a need for integration between engagement, outreach/education and marketing (not to mention artistic and sales/ticket office) in terms of both ideas and execution.

Even though many businesses define customer engagement separately from customer experience, the person in charge of community engagement at an art organization might also conceivably work closely with venue physical plant staff or government entities on issues related to the building, parking and public safety to avoid a unpleasant experience.

One of my favorite nonprofit blogs, NonProfit with Balls by Vu Le, published a post on 1/20/2015 about the theory of trickle down community engagement.  The Chattanooga Symphony & Opera is in the midst of an education and community engagment planning process, so I was pumped to read this article.

Le defines the trickle down theory as:

Trickle-Down Community Engagement (TDCE). This is when we bypass the people who are most affected by issues, engage and fund larger organizations to tackle these issues, and hope that miraculously the people most affected will help out in the effort, usually for free.

Sound familiar to you? “Let’s work with everyone in the county to get instruments into the hands of the music teachers for their kids, but we’re not going to ask the music teachers once what they want or need.”

At the end of the post, Le gives funders, donors, mainstream orgs, and orgs led by marginalized groups some action items to reverse TCDE.  What he says to mainstream orgs, gives some items to think about as you look at your community engagement and education programs.

I went to a luncheon a few weeks ago on an “Innovation District” that Chattanooga is creating. In that luncheon, the words “Start-Up Entrepreneur” were said no less than 15 times; seriously, I stopped tallying after the 15th.  When the buzzword about town is not “art” or “symphony”, it’s easy to dismiss the other and get peeved that seemingly no one is paying attention to the work you’re doing.

But, in an April, 2015 post from American’s for the Arts ARTSblog, Floyd Hall, the Interactive Media Manager for Atlanta’s WonderRoot, Floyd steals creatively borrows a great strategy from the world of start-up entrepreneurship.  Entrepreneurs, by the nature of their business, need to be very forward thinking and able to see all aspects of an idea or company in order to pitch to investors.  Arts groups, too, need to be forward thinking and see all aspects, but sometimes get bogged down in the day-to-day operations of getting the program to print or sending in the grant request.

Entrepreneurs use a roadmap to develop their idea; Ash Maurya is credited with developing the Lean Startup Canvas, a revision to the Business Model Canvas developed by Alexander Osterwalder applied to lean startup methodology and with some tweaks, Floyd applies it to Arts Organizations.

Floyd swaps out the Entrepreneur’s Problem and Solution for Mission and Outcomes and creates a very handy logic model for creating and assessing community engagement and education programs and concerts and other events.  In planning for the next season at the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera, I’ve been using Floyd’s modified Lean Arts canvas to assess new programs and it’s given me opportunities to be forward thinking and see all of the logistics and aspects of the program before I start to implement it.

In Tennessee, our state arts council has spent the past year working with arts organizations in the state to be more inclusive with regards to audience members with disabilities or developmental differences.  I would venture a guess that most arts groups are like us; a little unsure of how to enter this area.  Over the past season, we’ve worked with members and families of the Autistic and Down Syndrome communities to present several sensory friendly concerts.

Talking about and to audience members with disabilities

One thing that organizations may struggle with is how to reference a patron with a disability.  The tip is to remember the person comes first.  Refer to patrons as patrons in wheelchairs, not wheelchair-bound patrons; your education programs are suitable for children of all abilities, not they’re suitable for normal and not normal children.

When talking to someone with a disability, presume they are competent and able to move and talk.  Talk directly to the person, even if a translator is present, and help them through any barriers that might be present at your venue.

If at any point you have a question about appropriate terms, appropriate accommodations, etc. while working on your organization’s accessibility or sensory concerts, ask someone in that community.  In the past year, working with the Autistic and Down-Syndrome communities, I can assure you that they are more than happy to answer your questions and give you input on what’s best for them.  My experience is that they are open communities full of energy and information; the communities you are hoping to serve are excellent partners.

Creating a sensory friendly environment

Audience members with disabilities should be included in our concerts and events and there are a few modifications that can ensure everyone enjoys the concert.
A sensory friendly concert environment is one that

• Does not have a PA system
• Provides room for movement
• Provides props like scarves, ribbons, or other manipulation items for movement
• Has a quiet space or room for sensory overloaded guests

Check which characteristics you can reasonably achieve: Can guests be seated near an aisle so if they need to move they can get up and do so; can one of your lobby rooms/dressing rooms serve as a quiet room?

If you can’t achieve them, let guests know ahead of time that there may be a PA system or that there will be flickering lights or they may bring their own small manipulatives, so they can prepare for the concert.

Some venues are equipped with adaptive technology like assistive listening devices like hearing aids or headsets or your organization may decide to create accessible program materials like Braille printed programs, picture schedules, or environment maps.  Be sure to include Accessibility Symbols on your marketing if you make these part of the experience.

Prepare audience members

Since audience members with disabilities may be unfamiliar with your venue or your art form, helping them to prepare for the event beforehand can make them feel more comfortable on concert night.

• Host a “Meet Your Seat” event so patrons and their families can come to the actual venue, find their seat, and determine any accommodations they may need to make ahead of time.  You could also host a short “What to Expect” Class that describes some of the sights and sounds they may expect on concert night.
• Create a Concert Night Tip Sheet with what to expect when they come from the parking area; where restrooms, elevators, water fountains, and exits are located; where a ‘quiet space’ is located; and information about the performance and any intermissions.
• Create a Pre-Visit Story.  Pre-visit stories are usually narrated in first person and describe the experience in short, descriptive sentences with pictures.  There is a great FREE app for Apple devices that will help you to create and share your story.  To see some examples, check out some of the ‘Supports’ materials from the Theatre Development Fund’s Autism Theatre Initiative.

It’s our job as arts administrators to train our staff and our audience members on how to be welcoming and inclusive.  Put a page in your program that includes tips for interacting with audience members with disabilities.

Add a program page or insert that gives your audience some tips for your sensory friendly concert.

Other resources

If you’re just venturing into this area, it can be a little scary; but fortunately there are many resources out there.

• Kennedy Center Accessibility Resources for Arts Administrators – a huge wealth of information
• Sensory Friendly Programming for People with Social/Cognitive Disabilities  – one of my favorite resources
• KC Staff Training Tip Sheet
• NEA Office of Accessibility
• NEA Design for Accessibility Guide
• League of American Orchestras Diversity & Inclusion Center
• Tennesseeans for the Arts Guide for Expanding Access to the Arts
• Musical Autist
• Guardian (UK) article about tackling disability prejudice through the arts

One of my college professors told my class that he started each morning by watching one Ted talk.  Since here in Chattanooga, our summer is a little more relaxed then during the season, I’m taking up his advice and starting each day with a TED talk*.

One of my favorites that I’ve watched this summer was given by New York based Ben Wellington, author of the blog I Quant NY self-proclaimed data storyteller at 2015 TedxBroadway.  His blog is truly a data-geek’s paradise and showcases a variety of stories told using open data shared by the New York City local government, through an Open Data Law signed in 2011.  Open Data from city governments has become a HUGE topic over the past few years.  Google “open data” and 7.59 million results come back.  Yeah, it’s a thing.

Wellington comes at data from an urban planning perspective; think parking tickets, bike accidents.  But, his point is that by showing and sharing your data, you can tell a story and, most important, can have an impact.

Arts organizations have lots of data. LOTS of data; numbers of tickets bought on a phone; educational expenses over 10 years; amount of ticket stock bought in the last three seasons.  Each datum point tells a story and lots of data tell the story of a particular production or of an entire season.  Individually, they may not be interesting, but together, they tell the story of your organization.

His ideas on how to be use your data to tell a better story:

• Connect with people’s experience.  Wellington uses an example of how close each building in NYC is to a pharmacy or drugstore.  As people walk to work or home, they see a drugstore; it’s a common experience.  What’s common about your audience’s experience? What data is there to tell a story?
• Focus on a single idea. 
• Keep it Simple. In both idea and sharing method.
• Explore the things you know best.
• Make an impact.  Wellington share some of his successes at 9:21 and the final one is pretty cool.  Since your data does tell a story, if it’s a story worth sharing, it will have an impact somewhere.  Showing the number of educational program locations might show you a hole to fill; there’s the impact.

If only they came and saw our art, they would be hooked for life.

This is one of those commonly voiced assumptions that is untrue. Some people need more than one interaction, often with diverse artistic expressions, before they become interested and invested in the arts. For some it doesn’t ever happen.

Obviously, there are some that are hooked at first sight.

While the problem arts organizations face is often stated in terms of “how do we get them to come to our event,” there are a couple programs that focus on taking the art literally to where people live.

The Dali Over My Bed

Perhaps one of the most insane sounding (at least to arts professionals) is Oberlin College’s Art Rental program which, for the last 75 years, has allowed Oberlin students to take original works by Picasso, Lichtenstein, Warhol and other notable artists home with them for $5 per work, per semester.

Apparently, the program hasn’t lost a single work or had any take major damage in all that time. According to the students, the works are stowed away safely whenever a party is being held.

An Oberlin Student’s selections

Art Straight From The Farm

The “straight from the farm” term is a little misleading, but taking a page from the community-supported agriculture (CSA) collective movement, arts collectives around the country are sending boxes of curated visual art home with people.

These arts collectives work much like the agricultural ones. People buy a subscription and receive a box or sack of works produced by local artists. In most places, one receives visual and craft works, but apparently there have been some works of literature included in some locales.

While the tuition and admission standards at Oberlin may make the students more apt to appreciate the works they are receiving than the general population, and while subscribers to the community-supported arts collectives are self-selected as enjoying art, neither group are comprised of the highly initiated. Both programs are producing entirely new educational (and delightful) experiences for participants.  There is a good deal of appreciation for art and the effort of artists being engendered.

Yeah But I Am A Performing Arts Organization, This Doesn’t Work For Me

Sure it can. Allow people to take home a dress form with a costume from that period play/opera you did last year. Yes, there is a little risk involved so you set some conditions up from the outset and be a little selective. But don’t limit it to your biggest donor whose mansion has a housekeeping staff.

Rewire old lighting instruments with an Edison plug, package it with some patterns, gels and cautions about how hot it can get and let people take that home a little while to play with.

Let people borrow set models and color renderings.

Let them take set pieces and props home.

If the performers are willing, lend them out for an evening too. Feed the performer and you get a monologue by the pool, a violin solo on the patio, dance lessons in your basement.

Encourage people to take pictures and videos with whatever (or whomever) you lent them and post it on the internet.

Note that both the Oberlin and CSA programs had nominal fees involved so I am not suggesting these programs be completely free. Administering them will not be easy. Performing artists often desire more than just a meal when they provide an in-home performance.

On the other hand, a wide degree of access is also key feature so these opportunities shouldn’t be restricted to those who donated $1000+ either.

My organization, the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera, has spent the last season and a good part of the summer talking about different opportunities to be more inclusive.  Our state arts council has placed a high importance on this and is being a driver of some innovative thinking in Tennessee arts groups.

Last season, we worked with a local organization serving children and family with autism to present several sensory friendly concerts.  They were very well received and we’re planning them again this season.

In thinking about ways to serve other underserved populations, I’m often stymied by how to include the deaf population in Chattanooga.  There are some beautiful visuals that come from a concert experience, but the whole point of a musical concert is the music.  How can that aspect of a concert be shared?

I don’t have an answer to that question (but would love to hear yours), but I did see a July 2015 BuzzFeed article come across my newsfeed by Colin Weathersby that gives a behind the scenes look at Deaf West’s Theatre‘s new production of the musical Spring Awakening.

There’s a five minute video with interviews with actors and artistic staff that talks about the complexities of producing and presenting an artistic work that is so aural. Hours of rehearsals, translation into sign language, creative cue giving went into the rehearsals.  DJ Kurs, the artistic director said, “One thing that we work really hard to do is bring the emotion that’s in the fabric of the musical and the story into the language that we use to perform the music.”

It’s a really interesting video that I think will challenge many of us to reconsider ways of delivering our art and making it more inclusive.

Like many people in arts organizations, I get to wear many hats in my job.  One of my favorites is that of volunteer coordinator.  Each season, we rely on over 100 volunteers to help our small staff do big work.

As I was gearing up for volunteer sign-ups and making some changes to the program, Vu Le’s July, 2015 blog post “Volunteers and the Bahn Mi of Social Justice” came through my inbox.

In his post, Vu talks about how nonprofits, many of whom couldn’t do their work without volunteers, are often really bad at treating their volunteers well. We go to great lengths to thank and recruit donors, but volunteers (who are time-donors) often get overlooked.

He gives four recommendations to changing how we work with volunteers:

1. Support volunteer management staff: “We could get more stuff done if every nonprofit had a full-time volunteer engagement professional. The few that I know are great, but always teetering on the edge of their positions being cut. Nonprofits, build this position and associated volunteer engagement costs into your budget…”
   A staff position that only deals with volunteers might be the ultimate luxury. But, chances are, someone is coordinating your volunteer program. Make sure that person has the support and the information they need to coordinate your volunteers well.
2. Recognize the role volunteers play in marginalized communities: “Many organizations led by communities that are of color, LGBTQ, disabled, rural, etc. often do not have enough funding for robust staffing. Volunteers, then, are critical for these organizations’ work. Funders and donors can greatly help these communities by recognizing and supporting these organizations to build strong volunteer management infrastructure.”
   I would take this in a different route for arts organizations.  We work everyday to bring art to underserved populations, but often it’s hard to get in the door of that community.  Recognize that volunteers bring unique backgrounds and relationships to your organization and could serve as door-openers or as champions in the community.
3. Change the philosophy around how you value volunteer contributions: “At the risk of oversimplifying, we should make it a habit to treat volunteers like donors. Just as we should be appreciative for every financial gift big or small, we should be just as appreciate for every single gift of time and talent.”
   Joe Patti has an awesome post on Artshacker that talks about how to appropriately count volunteer hours and it then links to an Independent Sector report on the value of volunteer time in different states.
4. Make volunteer appreciation a regular part of the work: “I don’t think it needs to be elaborate, just consistent and genuine. At every staff meeting, for example, spend a few minutes brainstorming the awesome volunteers for the week/month/quarter, and write or call to thank them personally, like you would a donor. The thing I’ve noticed about volunteers is that they often don’t expect to be thanked, which is a reason why they should be, and hearing from your team goes a long way.”
   Two years ago, we realized we weren’t really doing anything to thank our volunteers other than verbally acknowledging them after an event.  Now, we have an end of season volunteer luncheon and list them in our annual reports.  It’s not much, but it does help to create an environment where they know that we are appreciative of their time and thankful for their support.

Volunteers at our 2015/16 Backstage Bash lunch. Because most of our volunteers spend all their time in the front of the house, we thought they’d like to see the backstage!

There’s a sub-class of nerds out there called “Map Nerds”. I’m a proud member; I love maps. A standard class in many public administration or urban planning classes involves learning the mapping software “Geographic Information Software” (shortened to G.I.S.) and it is a fun day when I can break out my map skills to map out some kind of data for the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera.

Why should you map your data?

In one word: story-telling. Showing your data on a map is one way to (quickly) tell the story of your data. It’s a visual communication that shows a scope of information that is difficult to visualize if you were to tell that same scope of information through words. Check out this post on ArtsHacker for more information about why you should use your data to tell stories and how to get that data ready to go.

Using GIS

1. Go to the ArcGIS home page. There are a variety of GIS programs out there that you can purchase and install on your desktop. Usually, they’re very expensive, take way too much space on your computer, and have more functions than arts administrators really need. ArcGIS is a browser based FREE program that gives you basic mapping functions; I have found that for what I need to show and do, this program works perfectly.

Homepage for ArcGIS online

2. Click Sign-In. You’ll be redirected to a page where you can log-in if you already have an account (hey fellow map nerds!), can try a 60 day trial of the paid version, or can create a public account. The latter is likely what you’ll want to do, so click that and enter your personal information.

3. You’ll be taken back to the home screen, so click “Map” at the top of the page. This takes you to a base map of the United States with details on the left column.

Click Map to start creating your map

4. Choose your basemap. The basemap is the foundation of your map; it’s what the data will be placed over. There are several different maps to choose from, but my favorites are the topographic one (this is also the default map that appears when you create a new map) and the one I chose for this example, the light gray canvas map. You can go back and change this later if you decide your data points look better on another basemap.

Look at all the cool basemaps you can choose from!

5. Click “Add” at the top of the left hand column, then click “add layer from file”. It is possible to pull in a “layer” (or a set of data points that is all grouped together) from the web or from other users, but most often, I’m working with organization specific data. Clicking add layer from file opens a box allowing you to choose a ZIP, TXT GPX, or CSV file. The catch here is that your CSV file can only have 250 lines in it, so you’ll need to clean your data before uploading it and choose what’s important or compact the information into 250 lines.

After clicking “import layer”, you’ll see a box that let’s you match fields. Unless you’re really fancy and record the latitude and longitudes of your audience members or education locations, you’ll be working with a standard address. Make sure the fields line up and click “Add Layer”.

Follow instructions to add a layer – or a set of data points that will be displayed

6. The locations will appear on your map with a legend. Now, you can change them.

You’ll see in the left hand column a drop down box where you can “change the attribute to share”. Switch back and forth between your headers, likely between city, state, and zip, until you have what you want displayed. In this example, I wanted the cities to be displayed.

Choose how you want the data displayed. You’ll want to think about what the end point of your map is and what exactly you’re trying to display and which story you’re telling.

• Types (unique symbols): best used if your data is discrete and each place is different. Here, we’re showing different cities that we work in which end up being different colors.
• Heat map
• Location (single symbols): best used when your data points are all the same types of things like zip codes of recent attendees. A few years ago, I did a map showing where our musicians taught around the region and country. It was all the same type of data and I was mostly interested in showing the broad scope of where they taught, not the individual locations.

Click these two areas to change how your data is displayed.

To change the default icons, click “Select”. This then displays the categories by their symbols, names, and counts. You can type in different labels or counts in the columns if you like. To change the color, size, or shape of the icon, click on the icon itself which then opens up a box where you can choose from a variety of different symbols, change the size, and change the color. I like to match our colors to our organization’s color palette. #nerdalert

*You can change all the symbols at once by clicking on the tricolor icon at the top of that column.

Click the symbol in the list to bring up this box where you can change your symbols.

7. Add other layers. You can add additional layers by following steps 5 and 6. However, be careful of adding too much data. The point is to tell a story; does your additional layer help tell the story or make it more clear? I often find that one layer is very sufficient for my visual display.

8. Finishing up. Click “Save As” at the top of the map and name it. You’ll also need to add at least one tag (I almost always use “symphony”) and click save. From there, you can share it online, embed it in a website, or print it. The one hitch to the system is that there’s not an easy way to save it as an image file. I end up taking a screen shot, cropping, and saving as an image that way. Your computer settings may let you save it when you go to print it. It’s an issue, but since it’s a free program and there are several work-arounds, it’s not too big of an issue for me.

9. Share the brilliance. Use it in annual reports, on your website, in funding requests, and any other way you think will be helpful. I’ve found that sharing it on social media returns huge bumps in engagement.

Congratulations, you are now a Map Nerd. We’ll get buttons.

Watching the tweets from the National Arts Marketing Project Conference—#NAMPC—this past weekend, I was struck with an overwhelming sense of deja vu. Talk of storytellers lulling audiences into a comfortable dream state, of the surprisingly intimate relationship between podcasters and listeners…it was all in the keynote by Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. It’s also part of a session I gave at #TCG14 with Jason Snell of the Incomparable Radio Network.

(Full disclosure: I’m also part of several shows on the Incomparable Radio Network.)

If you’re curious, we recorded that session and put it online as a podcast episode.

One of the things I’ve come to love about podcasting is precisely that: the relationship between makers and listeners. I’ve found a similar connection with theatre audiences in my own community, but that’s entirely local–we’ll meet one another in the grocery store, at restaurants, what have you, so that isn’t surprising. But with podcasting, it’s not simply people choosing to come see your event at a venue, it’s people downloading your work to listen when and wherever, most likely as a one-on-one interaction in the car, on their phones, in their ears. Your event isn’t tied to a single location, and neither is your audience. Our show has fans around the world, which is still a little amazing to me even now.

I know what you’re thinking. How large of an audience is this? Well, the main series I’ve been working on this year has been the Incomparable Radio Theater. It’s a series of fake 1940s era radio shows, complete with ads both fake and real–the real ones are done in-house, in-period. In the first week of release, the download totals for each episode have been comparable to a sold out, month-long run of a show in the largest space at Actors Theatre of Louisville. (That’s my local major regional theatre, so that’s been my benchmark.) That’s just in the first week–the download totals continue to grow because the shows never expire. It also doesn’t count streaming listeners going through our website or other links, or people subscribed to the network’s master feed–a podcast feed that includes every episode of every show we produce.

(One caveat: this series spun off from a pair of episodes on the flagship show of the network, which already had a large listenership. And it spun off by popular demand–it was originally planned as a single episode, nothing more. Between that and being part of a podcast network, it had a good foundation when it launched as a series. These are not typical for a brand new podcast series.)

Look around, podcasts are everywhere. Think about how many of them are about telling stories, whether fiction or non-fiction.

There are several podcast networks, from Radiotopia (99% Invisible, the Memory Palace, the Truth, Song Exploder, the Allusionist) to Earwolf (How Did This Get Made?), from Maximum Fun (Bullseye, the Flop House, Judge John Hodgman) to Relay.fm (Upgrade, Clockwise, Isometric). Even Slate has built a network called Panoply, which includes a new series, The Message, a science fiction serial written by playwright Mac Rogers under the GE Mystery Theatre brand for sponsorship. There’s Our Fair City rising from the theatre community in Chicago. Just this week, Howlround featured a post on Playwrights on Podcasts as well. And, of course, there’s Welcome to Night Vale, which has spawned a mini-industry and a New York Times bestseller.

Should your theatre company or arts organization start a podcast? Maybe. If you have the time and resources, come on in, the water’s fine. Be prepared to play the long game–at first, your current audience will be the ones who’ll know about it; it may take some time to build an online audience beyond that. But look at it as a marketing tool as well, even if you’re doing original scripts and radio drama–because these episodes won’t expire the way a newspaper ad will. Take some of your print ad budget and put it toward something creative, then aim for sponsorship as you continue. Maybe do like Radiotopia and crowdfund a series–their fundraising campaigns have been wildly successful. 

Of course, I’ve got a few ideas for how theatre companies and arts organizations can use podcasts, but that’s for another post.

Stay tuned…

One of my favorite parts of my job is the part that I get to pretend I’m a Washington, D.C. lobbyist.  As the Community Engagement Manager, I get assigned the large task of doing small advocacy work.

Building relationships with legislators is important and should be on someone’s plate.  It doesn’t need to be a lot; but a little bit of effort can go a long way. (See my previous ArtsHacker post on 10 Ways to Build A Strong Relationship With Your Legislator).  A great way to do that is to send write your legislators each year.

What To Write About

Write about your organization and the things you’ve done in the past year.  Highlight stories and successes, but also don’t be afraid to put in your challenges.

Think about including:

• Number of artists/staff you employed
• Free community events you hosted, particularly if they are patriotic in nature
• Number of students engaged throughout the year
• Money spent with local vendors
• How many audience members you attracted from various zip codes
• Contributed and earned revenue

Towards the end of the letter, highlight your upcoming season briefly.  Include an invitation to them to attend a concert, exhibit, school performance, or other event.

Bonus points: Look up each legislator’s district and add a section that highlights the work you did in their district.

In the 2014/15 season, in your district, District 1, we:

• Performed in 4 schools and community location
• Drew over 951 ticket buyer
• Had 187 students attend our Young People’s Concert
• Provided salaries for 10 musicians and staff residing there

It takes some work to find districts and correlate locations with them (blessings upon your interns!), so my best tip is to go roughly by zip codes.

How To and Who To Send It To

• Pull together a list of your City Council members, County Commissioners, Mayors, State delegation (both House and Senate), and Congressional representatives.  Consider any other officials to include like your state’s Art Commission, school board members, Chamber of Commerce leaders, or community funders.  Does your organization do work in other counties? Consider including those legislators as well.
  • Visit your city’s or county’s official website, and locate the Council or Commission members.  If addresses aren’t listed, send it to them at the office location.  If you can’t find this website, visit your county’s election commission website which should have results of the latest election listed.
  • Visit your state’s website and look for a header like “Government” or “Legislature”.  You’ll be able to find your particular representatives by searching by your organization’s address.
  • Visit the Congressional House’s or Senate’s website and search by your address or state. You may want to send a letter to both their Washington office and their local office.
• Use a combination of paragraph and bullet points.  Bullet point facts and figures so they are easy to understand and easily scannable.
•  Proof your letter.  Proof it again. Nothing is worse than printing off 100 letters and finding a that you misspelled Veterans.
• Hand sign the letters.
  Bonus points: Sign in a colored, like blue, ink.  Your actual signature in a different color will stand out and they’ll be more likely to pay attention to your letter.
• If you choose, include a season guide or another marketing material.
• Send it off!  Make this a regular part of your advocacy work by doing it at the beginning or end of your fiscal year.

If you’re an artist or organization that doesn’t have a regular venue, you know the difficulties of finding places to rehearse or perform.  My organization, the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera is fortunate to have a semi-regular concert hall that we perform in frequently throughout the season. But, as we work to get into the community and meet people where they are, we’re running into the same challenge of finding appropriate performance venues.

Many artists may be aware of Fractured Atlas and use some of it’s services; they have a particularly awesome blog that is varied in article topic.  Their SpaceFinder site which allows artists in 14 large cities search through more than 5,000 spaces for rehearsal, studio art, and other creative rental spaces.

This whole thing is cool to me.  But one of the coolest features is the ability to search for venues that are accessible.  As artists and arts organizations begin to (finally) work with these populations and become more inclusive, it’s critical that are venues are inclusive and accessible.

It is limited in scope to those 14 cities, but there is a way to suggest and vote up different cities. Denver, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and others are among the suggestions up now.

The end of the fiscal year is looming for many arts organizations and Spring “We do good work, Give us your money!” letters are being written now. I’m sure many of those letters highlight sell-out shows and performances or exhibits with renowned guest artists. I bet most of them also highlight your organization’s education and community engagement programs.

Our elevator speeches that make it into these development letters include facts and figures of the programs: “25,000 kids in 12 counties heard one of two ensembles over a nine month period.  67% were from a Title I school, 34% were minorities and 8% were atypically developing kids.” We can ramble those numbers off in our sleep and they look impressive in the required boxes on grant applications.

The problem with numbers, though, is they don’t tell the whole story. They are, by their nature, quantitative, not qualitative data. Important, but not likely to tug at the heart of a donor or open the purse strings.  Real life stories of how someone has been affected by your program are much more likely to do that.

A great example of this comes from a phone solicitation of a donor in Seattle.  The donor, Erica Gomez, an admitted fan and donor of the symphony, challenged the Seattle Symphony caller about their engagement programs: “So does this outreach affect communities of color at all? Who gets access to this work?” Instead of rattling off the numbers, the caller relayed her family’s personal experience with the symphony’s education programs, which in turn led them to, what I assume from Gomez’ post, was a very frank and honest discussion about the arts and the need for communities of color to have equal access.

I wonder what the results that including real life stories of the effects of our community engagement programs would yield.  The CSO is including the story of a kid who came to our Young People’s Concerts in our spring mailing, so one case study results to come.

As an organization, we don’t do enough to make our organization accessible. Don’t get me wrong, I think we do a lot. But, many challenges and realities affect our ability to do a better job.  Diversity, particularly in areas of the country still facing the hangovers of segregation and those facing new realities of race equality, is not an area that we are going to solve overnight or in one season.  There is not one solution or strategy that will work across the board.  So, what if we told that to donors? If we said “dear donor, we know it’s an issue that our audience doesn’t look like the community it serves.  We’re working hard at it, but it is not a quick fix.  We could use your mental, physical, and yes, financial support to help us.” I wonder if that frankness and honesty, challenging your supporters to help you in more than one way, would yield even bigger results.

If you have been inspired by all the great community projects you see different arts groups doing and dream of doing something similar, but don’t know where to start, Minnesota based Springboard for the Arts has you covered with their Creative Exchange site.

In particular, the Toolkit section of the site has guides written by the creators of various projects from across the country to help you do what they did.  All of the toolkits are free, though some have fees for additional materials and services like DVD videos and consultations.

The toolkits cover a whole range of projects and useful information for individuals and groups.

Henry O. Studley tool chest.

Work of Art: Business Skills for Artists has a 12 part workbook and accompanying set of videos to help artists develop their careers.

There is a guide for creating a Healthcare Voucher Program to help artists access healthcare.

How could you not love Block Party in A Box which bills itself as

“a resource kit is helping people to plan & execute block parties without breaking a sweat…resources that take care of the mundane and time-consuming work required to plan street parties, leaving citizens with more time to enjoy the company of their neighbors.”

There is a guide to creating pop-up museums from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.

I was happy to see the guide for 500 Plates project from Akron, OH, which almost simultaneously occurred with a similar project in Tallahassee, FL (where it was called the Longest Table). In both cases, the project organizers took over the middle of a street to start conversations between people from across the community over a meal.

One of the more impressive efforts at placemaking I have come across, Irrigate, is also included. In partnership with the City of St. Paul and the Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Springboard for the Arts mobilized 600 local artists in 150 projects to mitigate the impact of a light rail construction project. If ever you have driven by an infrastructure construction site and felt pity for the people whose businesses and residences are suffering from the lack of convenient access, this toolkit will help you help them.

This is just a small sampling of the growing list of innovative ideas which include Dance Parties and CSA programs that provide boxes of locally produced art rather than locally produced produce.

We frequently read discussions about the need to communicate the differences between the business models of for-profit and non-profits. What there is less conversation about is the differences in business models among non-profits.

If you are looking at another non-profit organization and trying to replicate what they do in terms of fundraisers and earned revenue sources without success, it could be because you don’t understand what the best funding model may be for your type of organization.

A piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review identifies 10 general funding models for non-profits and illustrates how organizations with similar purposes can have wholly different funding models.

For example, based on the way the categories are organized, Susan G. Komen Foundation and Stanley Medical Research Institute both support medical research, but operate under different models. The East Boston Neighborhood Health Center has more in common with the Iowa Student Loan Liquidity Corporation than with the Cleveland Clinic even though they both provide health care.

Even two Human Service organizations whose primary funding source is the government can have different funding models.

After each of the 10 funding models, the article provides questions to ask about one’s organization in order to determine what the best model might be.

By the way, your doctor doesn’t know what funding model is right for you. This is a decision that takes a lot of thought and consideration within the organization.

Unclear about his organization’s business model except that it requires sharks with frikin’ laser beams attached to their heads

The model the authors term “Beneficiary Builder” may sound like an appropriate one. It includes the description: “Donors are often motivated to give money because they believe that the benefit they received changed their life,” along with the following questions to ask:

■ Does our mission create an individual benefit that is also perceived as an important social good?
■ Do individuals develop a deep loyalty to the organization in the course of receiving their individual benefit?
■ Do we have the infrastructure to reach out to beneficiaries in a scalable fashion?

However, the most appropriate model for most arts organizations is probably “Member Motivator” described as,

These individuals (who are members of the nonprofit) donate money because the issue is integral to their everyday life and is something from which they draw a collective benefit. Non-profits using the Member Motivator funding model do not create the rationale for group activity, but instead connect with members (and donors) by offering or supporting the activities that they already seek.

the accompany questions are,

■ Will our members feel that the actions of the organization are directly benefiting them, even if the benefit is shared collectively?
■ Do we have the ability to involve and manage our members in fundraising activities?
■ Can we commit to staying in tune with, and faithful to, our core membership, even if it means turning down funding opportunities and not pursuing activities that fail to resonate with our members?

None of this is to say there isn’t overlap with other funding models, especially in situations particular to your geographic or political environment. Nor does it mean you can’t establish an organization whose model is atypical among similar non-profit arts organizations.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review piece does give one a better idea of the structure and expectations associated with each model.

It also provides one with a much clearer understanding of why a particular organization receives more government funding or bigger donations from businesses and individuals. In many cases it is because the business model they have adopted facilitates attracting that support either by their capacity to solicit, relationships they have forged with key entities or the perceived importance of their work that has been generated.

It’s always interesting to see the various advertising campaigns directed towards the LGBTQ market during the month of June and during pride festivals around the world over the summer. I recently came across a fascinating article from June 22 by Alex Mayyasi in The Atlantic called “How Subarus Came to Be Seen as Cars for Lesbians”, which talked about how the brand began cultivating its gay-friendly image way back in the mid-1990s. And while arts organizations have generally been supportive of the LGBTQ community for longer than their corporate counterparts, it’s still far too easy to fall into the trap of slapping a rainbow on an ad and considering the job done. While it’s lovely that acceptance has come far enough that Skittles can lend out their colours for a month, it takes a little more than (even admittedly clever) “rainbow-washing” to really engage with a group whose defining characteristic is diversity.

Rather than just running a colourful campaign for a month, here are a few ways you can engage with the LGBTQ community in a much more meaningful way:

1. Start in your own workplace

One of the worst things an organization can do is actively market to LGBTQ people while treating its own employees unequally. If your organization doesn’t have non-discrimination policies or equal benefits for same-sex partners (for example), don’t even think about trying to sell yourself to LGBTQ people as welcoming, friendly, safe and fun. This can extend to things like removing gender-based assumptions from your employee dress code. It makes me wonder how many orchestras out there have modified their concert dress code for musicians to be more inclusive. Does anyone know of an example?

I understand that this can all be a bit bewildering if these considerations are outside of your personal experience, so be sure to seek out resources and support from organizations such as PFLAG or Human Rights Campaign if you’re unsure where to begin. A sincere desire to be more inclusive is a great place to start when dealing with the myriad of workplace issues faced by members of the LGBTQ community.

2. Create a safe and inclusive space

The last thing you want is someone feeling uncomfortable in your venue. Putting that rainbow sticker on the box office window is a powerful signal to LGBTQ patrons that they will be treated with respect, but there are considerations beyond your staff’s attitude.

For instance, you may not be able to easily reconfigure your washroom layout, but at the very least have a policy in place to allow access to the restroom of an individual’s gender identity. Another thing you can do, if possible, is to provide single occupancy all-gender washrooms, as an additional option to male/female washrooms for patrons. This has been implemented by some organizations by simply updating signage for accessible washrooms.

Creating a safe space includes how you interact with patrons when they’re not physically at your venue. I recently received a telemarketing call from a hotel chain that ought to know better, inquiring if I usually travel with my wife. While that wasn’t exactly a hate crime, how difficult would it have been to create a script that didn’t assume I’m straight? As another very common example, do your surveys force people to identify as male or female, or do you let them self-identify with an open-ended question? Are you attaching “Mr” or “Ms” pronouns to patron accounts even when they haven’t specifically told you how they’d like to be addressed?

3. Include diversity in more of your marketing materials

Let’s face it, as an industry we still do a pretty poor job of showing images of our audience in marketing materials at all (see Trevor O’Donnell’s blog Marketing the Arts to Death) but when we do, we usually go for that attractive, 30-something man and woman having a drink in the lobby who are seemingly enjoying a hilarious private joke, right? Let’s expand our vision a little bit so that a greater variety of people can see themselves in our marketing collateral. It doesn’t have to be be over-the-top obvious either, as The Atlantic article goes on to explain:

One campaign showed Subaru cars that had license plates that said “Xena LVR” (a reference to Xena: Warrior Princess, a TV show whose female protagonists seemed to be lovers) or “P-TOWN” (a moniker for Provincetown, Massachusetts, a popular LGBT vacation spot). Many ads had taglines with double meanings. “Get Out. And Stay Out” could refer to exploring the outdoors in a Subaru—or coming out as gay. “It’s Not a Choice. It’s the Way We’re Built” could refer to all Subarus coming with all-wheel-drive—or LGBT identity.

Maybe we should stop that whole ‘declining audience’ lament and start expanding who we envision as our audience.

4. Support LGBTQ causes

There are a myriad of ways you can support LGBTQ causes, from donating tickets to silent auction fundraisers, to participating in pride parades, to offering a venue to organizers of a queer prom. You can reach out to local Gay-Straight Alliances or the aforementioned PFLAG for some ideas on how you can be a strong, supportive partner of groups all year round.

Embracing diversity and becoming more inclusive can at times be challenging and take real effort, but besides being the right thing to do, the benefits are enormous. So while the next pride month may seem like the distant future, there’s no better time than today to start engaging with the LGBTQ community.

The new season is upon and I’m sure many community engagement managers out there spent the summer making plans for a variety of initiatives.  Probably high on that list were “diversity initiatives”.

If you google “diversity”, the definition is “variety; a range of things.” Nowhere in there does it say “putting people of different skin tones into theater/concert hall/museum seats,” but in so many organizations, both in the arts world and non-arts world, that is what the definition means. And if we’re in fine and performing arts aka high-art organizations (and especially in many places in the South), “How can we diversify our audience” is code for “How can we get more non-White people to buy tickets”?

As I was immersed in my own program planning for the year, complete with “diversity initiatives” at the top of the list, Malesha Taylor‘s article published in February on HowlRound. In the article, Taylor outlines several takeaways from a contract position to promote and increase audience development.  The article is short, but does a great job at bringing out several issues that arise when we discuss diversity initiatives.

Talk with any development, any community engagement specialist and they’ll likely tell you that their job is heavily dependent on relationships. The development director looking to pull in the five figure gift has likely been building a relationship and cultivating those donors for more than a few days.  The community engagement director has been developing a relationship with the social service organization over several months to best determine how each other’s stakeholders would benefit from an upcoming exhibition.  True engagement only comes from a relationship based in trust and equal rewards.

Taylor mentions that those relationships take time to develop.  Producing a play during February with themes close to the African American community is fine; beginning to talk with that community in January is not. You may see a short term increase your demographics, but it’s likely not sustainable.

Inclusivity and Diversity should be topics that we discuss year round, not just before Black History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month. If your organization is not quite at that level, take some small steps to get there.

• Recognize as a staff that diversity initiatives do not fall to one person. There is no one in your office who is “Manager of getting a wider variety of people to experience our art”. It’s everyone’s job and everyone has unique opportunities to move your organization closer to the goal.
• Realize that diversity is not just about skin color.  This is one of the most obvious categories, but read back through that definition above. Diversity is a variety. So, diversity includes age, socio-economic status, gender, education levels, geographic boundaries, ability, and a whole host of other categories.  Maybe your organization’s biggest obstacle is not skin-color, but that you only pull patrons from one county or only pull patrons mostly from a high level of education.
• Start talking with your board about diversity and inclusivity. Boards want our audiences to be diverse, but often our boards aren’t diverse.  Encourage your board chair or governing committee to include a variety of people on the board. Adding people to the board who don’t look like or come from the same background as other members can help staff to cultivate relationships with different communities. Similar to point number 1, diversity is not just the staff’s responsibility. The board plays an important role too.
• Don’t be discouraged. Diversifying audiences and true audience engagement is a difficult area to tackle and one that will not be resolved in a single season. There are many combinations of factors that go into why a particular community is not participating in your programs and you won’t figure out and solve those over night.  Be patient. Listen. Keep taking small steps. Even in June and November.

Looking for more resources? Americans for the Arts is a good place to start. HowlRound and Clyde Fitch Report are two of my favorites for consistently publishing thought-provoking articles.

Beginning in 1926, organizations across the country celebrated Negro History Week, first established in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson to “raise awareness of African American’s contributions to civilization.” In 1976, the celebration was expanded to a month and President Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Organizations across the country participate during February, with many arts organizations highlighting artists of color important to their medium or using art to call to attention the contributions, struggles, and history of African Americans.

The Kennedy Center’s online teaching center ArtsEdge, which has some really great offerings in all artistic disciplines, has an index of more than 60 posts focused on African American history and artists with several lessons geared towards elementary school grades.

The National Education Association also has a devoted page with lesson plans about artists or using the arts and background resources that would be helpful in preparing education or engagement initiatives.

As organizations begin to program 2016/17 and beyond and as you look to future community engagement and educational programs and celebrations of culture, look at how to include a diverse, year long celebration of all peoples and cultures.

Arts organizations are asked to create dozens of reports every year evaluating their programs to justify the funding they receive so you probably aren’t inclined to embark on an additional self-evaluation of their own.

However, the group, IETM – International network for contemporary performing arts, recently issued a self-evaluation tool kit specifically designed for arts organizations with the goal of empowering groups to take control of the evaluation narrative. IETM say that many funders employ criteria that suits their own agenda, or perhaps to justify their existence, and may either misrepresent or “hinder artistic processes and quality.”

If you decide to be proactive and to construct and conduct your own evaluation, you will step into a stronger position to define what is of value and what can be considered an impact in connection with your work.

You will be able to choose the paradigm, the approach, the logic which fits your needs best. You will be empowered to assert your own agenda.

The toolkit they provide is the most comprehensive evaluation guide I have ever seen. (I mean, I had never heard of autoethnography before.) The guide discusses the pros and cons of performing an evaluation in-house versus engaging an outside consultant versus participating in part of the data collection effort of a larger entity (i.e. national or regional arts council survey).

The toolkit is incredibly detailed with guidelines for the entire process: deciding to do the evaluation; deciding on the goals; the strengths and weakness of quantitative and qualitative measures; designing the process and measurement tools; tips how to ask questions; how to ensure you are surveying a valid sample; motivating people to participate; different equipment checklists for data collection methods; and suggestions about presenting the findings.

The toolkit clarifies the difference between seeming synonymous terms like outputs, outcomes, and impacts. They also offer suggestions about clarifying the meanings of terms you use. When you say artistic vibrancy, what does that mean? Okay, now ask your friends what they think that means.

Where I feel the guide is most helpful is evaluating different data collection methods so you aren’t left wondering if you should do a survey, roundtable, focus group, etc. They address each method describing what it is, discussing the suitable application of information collected by that method, how to prepare to use that method, how to administer the survey/act during the discussion, how to process the information gathered and then how to use it.

By the way, the references to terms like autoethnography notwithstanding, the toolkit is very easy and enjoyable to read. There are comics from the site xkcd throughout. Their advice on getting feedback on terms like “artistic vibrancy” was provided thusly:

Ask friends and acquaintances how they understand ‘artistic vibrancy’ for example. They probably think you are weird already, so your questions will not surprise them. Test your definitions with them. These other views and versions will be useful when you start to formulate questions for the assessment respondents.

In the same vein, they provide suggestions about presenting your findings in a manner characteristic of an arts organization. Good graphic design, infographics, storytelling, sure,

But why stop here?

You could organise a conference, an exhibition, a workshop, a production, a parade, a flash mob. You could make it into art.

Over the course of the year, I will be creating a series of posts on the topic of audience diversity. This incredibly important topic has become more and more important to me over the past few years.

With the US population becoming more and more diverse and our “traditional” audiences dwindling, arts organizations simply must make a concerted effort to engage with multicultural populations in the communities they serve.

We know from multiple national data sets as well as our own internal data (anecdotal and scientific) that the patrons of most arts organizations, especially benchmark organizations like opera, ballet, and symphony, do not accurately reflect the communities they serve.  Here is just one example of this from Americans for the Arts:

Just recently, Colleen Dilenschneider published some additional data about how well organizations welcome diverse populations. Here is a sample:

In a nutshell, we have a long way to go.

We need to change this. This type of change begins with a simple shift in the mindset we have as arts organizations as to what our sustainable audiences should look like in the future.

In addition to my posts here, I will be collecting relevant articles from around the web and compiling them in a Flipboard Magazine. Please feel free to follow!