The Donors We Forget About
For eight of the nine years I've spent in Minnesota, I had a part-time side job as a news editor at ArtsJournal.com, the arts news clearinghouse that, not coincidentally, provides our blog's news feed. Basically, my job involved getting up unreasonably early several days each week and surfing the web sites of several dozen newspapers and magazines looking for interesting stories about orchestras, theatre companies, and dance troupes, and then writing short blurbs about said stories to appear on our site's front page.
It was a fun job, partly because I wound up on a first-name basis with a number of important writers and critics across the English-speaking world, but mostly because it forced me to take in a lot of different viewpoints about the industry I work in on a daily basis, and to summarize those viewpoints without filtering them through my own biases. I came away from the experience with a deep respect for professional journalists, and, I hope, a better-than-average understanding of the way arts organizations interact with the people we serve and the media that cover us.
By far the best part of working for ArtsJournal, though, was the regular conversations I would have with my boss, AJ's managing editor, Doug McLennan. For much of the time I worked for the site, I was Doug's only employee, and we spent a lot of time bouncing ideas off each other, discussing what the rise of the Internet Age would mean for arts groups of all kinds, and exchanging e-mails that usually began, "Did you see that piece of **** that Newspaper X ran this morning? What is wrong with that guy?"
The thing that I liked most about Doug, a Juilliard-trained pianist who's spent most of his professional life in journalistic circles, was the way he seemed always able to take the long view of things when others were focused on minutiae. If orchestras were debating whether or not to consider amending a national agreement governing the way we record (and pay for) CDs, Doug would be the first to point out that, unless the debate included a serious discussion of downloadable media and online distribution, it wouldn't make a lick of difference what conclusion we arrived at. (That seems obvious now, of course, but Doug made this comment in 2002, long before the advent of YouTube, iTunes, or any of the other online services we now take for granted. And just for the record, most orchestras still haven't really begun to face up to these changed realities.)
Doug also has a talent for defining the terms of an argument in a way that most of us wouldn't have thought of, and lately, he's been putting that ability to great use on his newly launched and long-overdue blog, Diacritical. Just for instance, here's his opening salvo from today's entry on the way arts groups approach the two groups of individuals who support our existence...
"Give an arts organization $1000 and they'll put your name in the program. Buy $1000 worth of tickets and they'll tell you that the cost of your ticket only covered 55 percent (or 40 percent or 30 percent) of the cost of you being there. Then a few months later, long after the performance, they try to hit you up for more money. Gee thanks.
"Maybe this is backwards. Who's the more valuable member of your community? The person who gives you money but otherwise doesn't have much to do with you, or the person who buys tickets and shows up for every performance?"
Now there are, of course, donors to every arts group who also buy lots of tickets, but Doug's made a very important point here. All arts groups have Development departments staffed by large numbers of very skilled people who are expert at the care and feeding of donors. But when it comes to lowly ticket buyers, we entrust them mainly to the comparatively inexperienced box office staff, which tends to turn over frequently, and be far less specifically trained than the folks in development. (This is not in any way a shot at the dedicated people who work in ticket sales, just an acknowledgment that, on the whole, low-paying hourly wage jobs are going to attract a different level of professional expertise than salaried and specifically defined office positions.)
So what's the solution? As usual, Doug has an answer that wouldn't have occurred to me, but that makes instant sense:
"In online social networks, participation is rewarded for the frequency and quality of that participation, and even small recognitions encourage people to participate at higher levels.
"If you have an audience member who brings five friends, find a way to reward them. If they bring 10 friends, give them something more. Every arts organization has a page in their program listing the names of people who contributed money and at what level. How about a page that lists the names of people who brought in more people?"
Better yet, how about having a web site that functions not just as a static advertisement for your organization, but as a social network (or a conduit to an existing network like Facebook) that makes it easy for ticketbuyers to aspire to such perks? Or special pre- and post-performance events for those who do? Why not reward the donation of time and effort just as much as we reward the donation of cash?
I'll give Doug the last word, because as usual, he says it better than I could...
"Most organizations don't give people enough ways to support them... All it takes sometimes is empowering them to do it."
It was a fun job, partly because I wound up on a first-name basis with a number of important writers and critics across the English-speaking world, but mostly because it forced me to take in a lot of different viewpoints about the industry I work in on a daily basis, and to summarize those viewpoints without filtering them through my own biases. I came away from the experience with a deep respect for professional journalists, and, I hope, a better-than-average understanding of the way arts organizations interact with the people we serve and the media that cover us.
By far the best part of working for ArtsJournal, though, was the regular conversations I would have with my boss, AJ's managing editor, Doug McLennan. For much of the time I worked for the site, I was Doug's only employee, and we spent a lot of time bouncing ideas off each other, discussing what the rise of the Internet Age would mean for arts groups of all kinds, and exchanging e-mails that usually began, "Did you see that piece of **** that Newspaper X ran this morning? What is wrong with that guy?"
The thing that I liked most about Doug, a Juilliard-trained pianist who's spent most of his professional life in journalistic circles, was the way he seemed always able to take the long view of things when others were focused on minutiae. If orchestras were debating whether or not to consider amending a national agreement governing the way we record (and pay for) CDs, Doug would be the first to point out that, unless the debate included a serious discussion of downloadable media and online distribution, it wouldn't make a lick of difference what conclusion we arrived at. (That seems obvious now, of course, but Doug made this comment in 2002, long before the advent of YouTube, iTunes, or any of the other online services we now take for granted. And just for the record, most orchestras still haven't really begun to face up to these changed realities.)
Doug also has a talent for defining the terms of an argument in a way that most of us wouldn't have thought of, and lately, he's been putting that ability to great use on his newly launched and long-overdue blog, Diacritical. Just for instance, here's his opening salvo from today's entry on the way arts groups approach the two groups of individuals who support our existence...
"Give an arts organization $1000 and they'll put your name in the program. Buy $1000 worth of tickets and they'll tell you that the cost of your ticket only covered 55 percent (or 40 percent or 30 percent) of the cost of you being there. Then a few months later, long after the performance, they try to hit you up for more money. Gee thanks.
"Maybe this is backwards. Who's the more valuable member of your community? The person who gives you money but otherwise doesn't have much to do with you, or the person who buys tickets and shows up for every performance?"
Now there are, of course, donors to every arts group who also buy lots of tickets, but Doug's made a very important point here. All arts groups have Development departments staffed by large numbers of very skilled people who are expert at the care and feeding of donors. But when it comes to lowly ticket buyers, we entrust them mainly to the comparatively inexperienced box office staff, which tends to turn over frequently, and be far less specifically trained than the folks in development. (This is not in any way a shot at the dedicated people who work in ticket sales, just an acknowledgment that, on the whole, low-paying hourly wage jobs are going to attract a different level of professional expertise than salaried and specifically defined office positions.)
So what's the solution? As usual, Doug has an answer that wouldn't have occurred to me, but that makes instant sense:
"In online social networks, participation is rewarded for the frequency and quality of that participation, and even small recognitions encourage people to participate at higher levels.
"If you have an audience member who brings five friends, find a way to reward them. If they bring 10 friends, give them something more. Every arts organization has a page in their program listing the names of people who contributed money and at what level. How about a page that lists the names of people who brought in more people?"
Better yet, how about having a web site that functions not just as a static advertisement for your organization, but as a social network (or a conduit to an existing network like Facebook) that makes it easy for ticketbuyers to aspire to such perks? Or special pre- and post-performance events for those who do? Why not reward the donation of time and effort just as much as we reward the donation of cash?
I'll give Doug the last word, because as usual, he says it better than I could...
"Most organizations don't give people enough ways to support them... All it takes sometimes is empowering them to do it."
Labels: state of the art, the business of music, the media
posted by Sam at
9:16 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting post! People are complicated and it's hard to know what will motivate them. We were at Orch Hall last night, for McCoy Tyner (great show). We bought tickets to about one dozen shows over the past year, and the offer that got us to commit allowed us to pick from a variety of events (not just orchestral concerts, but MnOrch, jazz events, even musical theater). No matter how much research you do, you will miss some potential supporters if you just cater to those who have bought tickets or made donations in the past. Encourage diverse tastes and opportunities to support the orchestra, and you'll build a more diverse audience. Some of those who come to Pirates of Penzance or Chris Botti WILL also buy tickets for Elgar and Dvorak. And if they start to think of Orch Hall as "their" house, so much the better!
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