Trouble at the Toronto Zoo - did they lose our report?

There have been a number of articles published recently on the situation of the Toronto Zoo. But situation, I mean new fundraising campaign, and surrounding controversies.
Battle royale at the zoo smells of power grab
Toronto Zoo aims to go green . The Star reported this back in February
Wild Times for Zoo Fundraising
Showdown at Toronto Zoo
It’s all happening at zoo
And a sad article about Knut, the German polar bear: Global Warming and Psycho Bears

Here we shall reiterate the ORIGINAL CONCLUSIONS OF NETGAIN'S REPORT FOR THE TORONTO ZOO circa 2000 (cause it seems like they don’t remember)

1. The status quo is simply unsustainable given current environmental concerns, financial uncertainty, and the Zoo’s desire to maintain a reputation for innovation and leadership.
   
2. The zoo should exist as a model of and showcase for best conservation practices.
   
3. The new vision will become a reality through cooperation and consensus among management, marketing and development personnel.


4. Once repositioned, the Zoo will attract additional capital support that can be used for site and program renewal.


5. The refined focus will concentrate resources, rationalize both site and program spending and redefine the Zoo’s relationship with the City.

I’m fascinated by the torture the Toronto Zoo is putting itself through over how to attract private sector funds and why. Eight years ago we addressed the why, and ten years ago we addressed the how.
My colleague and I were asked to perform a review of the Zoo’s operation as part of a stalled capital campaign in the late ‘90’s by Ketchum Canada’s then President, Ross McGregor. What we found was the largely amateur Zoological Society trying to keep up with the needs of the City-managed operation, relying primarily on proceeds from the gift shop and the sale of memberships. Beyond that, there was little meaningful interaction between the City’s operation and the nonprofit organization that was raising funds for it.
The Society office was so far from the City’s administrative building that people drove from one to the other. Mail accumulated in a bent wire basket that was shuttled daily back and forth. One kept donor records and the other kept gate sales records. They had incompatible procedures, software, and network systems. Too much of the Society’s resources were being consumed by administration and the cost of the retail operation. Although it was a relatively lean operation, its ratio of expense to revenue didn’t look very efficient when compared to other fund raising departments.
A major bone of contention between them was the sale of annual memberships. Every year, the Society sold annual memberships as a fund raising activity. A family membership would pay for itself in two or three visits a year, and when surveyed, families reported that they were buying them primarily to save money, not to save animals, and certainly not to save the Toronto Zoo (there were exceptions of course). While the Society thought it was raising charitable funds for the Zoo, the Zoo managers saw their prices being undercut, leaving them to service all the visitors that the Society was bringing in at a discount.
We found internal competition, curators in the employ of the City carrying on discrete fund raising campaigns for their pet projects while the Society labored to win support for its mandated campaigns. There was little understanding or appreciation of the Society by the City’s management and governance team, and over the years the performance of the fund raisers lived down to expectations.
Our prescription from that time is still valid today:
Strengthen the nonprofit fund raising arm because it can do what tax-funded government bodies cannot. No one wants to give money to a City owned, operated, and subsidized agency.
If a staff member or Councilor came to your door and asked for millions of dollars to help support the road department, giving more money would probably be the last thing to cross your mind. If it is a necessary or desirable tax funded activity, and the City isn’t completely incompetent at budget time, taxes should have been collected to cover it. Conversely, if a volunteer of the Zoological Society comes to your door seeking money to transform the Zoo in a way that the City can’t or won’t fund through taxes, you might at least listen to what he or she has to say.
To strengthen the Society, we recommended a change in structure to the relationship between the two organizations. The Society’s administrative needs would be met at no cost by the City, including shared database systems and coordinated membership sales and servicing. In return, the Society handed over the retail operation, which was then doing well in excess of $2 million in gross annual sales. By meeting the Society’s needs in a way that didn’t cost the City anything, and by making a place for the fund raising officer of the Society in the management structure of the City’s management team, understanding, cooperation, and professionalism should have been enhanced on both sides.
Did we succeed? Initially, I think we did. I don’t know what has happened since to sour this relationship, to handicap the Society, or to make the City managers believe that they could do a better job of raising funds, but the answer is not to dissolve the community fund raising board at precisely the time you want to launch a massive capital campaign.
Evidence of this folly can be found in the Zoo Board’s proud claims to have dozens of waiting donors willing to put up a few tens of millions of dollars toward a quarter billion dollar goal. Who thinks that this is an adequate platform from which to launch a campaign of this scale? Ask for a show of hands at the gorilla compound because you won’t find agreement among professional fund raisers.
If they follow their imperial instincts, the tax funded representative the Zoo sends to your door will essentially ask you to pay more tax, admitting that the community isn’t sufficiently supportive to provide adequate lead gifts, and if pressed, admitting also that the City fired the community group that raised funds to build the Zoo in the first place. Do you reach for your cheque book or your broom when you hear this sales pitch?
That was the “how” question as it pertains to recent news from the Zoo. The “why” question was addressed in our December 2000 report, “Vision, Strategy, and Business Planning for the Toronto Zoo 2000 – 2010. In it, we argue that there is no reason for a zoo to exist in the new millennium other than to protect species, contribute to habitat conservation, and to mobilize the public to take action on either or both of these causes. Plain and simple, the zoo needed to identify itself with a cause other than the imprisonment of animals for the amusement of curious and uninformed spectators. This is not to say that the Zoo wasn’t trying to act in an enlightened way, but without a full, public commitment to the cause, it simply couldn’t expect a strong public commitment in return. Indeed, one benefit of taking this radical step cited in our report would have been an upsurge in public support for the capital projects associated with such a change.





This new vision and mission was wholeheartedly adopted by both boards and at least grudgingly by staff. But instead of following recommendations like a reduction in the animal collection to endangered or protected species (to about 3,500 of 4,500 animals, including everyone’s favorites), the first major investment was the creation of a water park, funded in part by money from the Molson Indy car races. Although they completed funding of a new gorilla compound around the same time, they also installed a simulated jeep safari ride just inside the gates. After 10 years of serving McDonald’s burgers, in front of exotic species displaced by ranching, they took our advice against renewing the contract, instead opening a Harvey’s franchise. The environmental message was mixed at best if indeed any commitment to the new vision and mission was evident to the public at all.
How odd that the Zoo should commission another consulting firm to reach the same conclusion eight years later about why a capital campaign is needed and why it would be supported. Stranger still is the idea that the Zoological Society’s fund raising potential should be eliminated rather than strengthened just when it is needed most.
Zoos are always in the news. They either confer prestige or shame on the City’s that own them. In war torn countries, we get footage of the animals starving or being eaten. From Germany we get news of a psychopathic polar bear that entertains visitors with violent expressions of rage at its social isolation. The Vancouver aquarium eventually caved in to public opinion and whale mortality by eliminating its orca exhibits and concentrating on humane and educational demonstrations of sea mammal behavior. The San Diego Zoo has had problems containing its big cats. And the Toronto Zoo, once one of the top ten in the world, struggles to hide the fact that it offers largely same visitor experience today as it did a quarter century ago.






The world isn’t waiting for the Toronto Zoo to find its way into the 21st century. Our relationship with the wild world is understood differently by children of the generation that built the Zoo, and by their children too. What hasn’t changed is the leadership of the Toronto Zoo. Its managerial mindset has no patience for voluntary sector organizations that don’t deliver bags of cash on cue, nor is there evidence of a genuine commitment to the cause of species preservation, habitat conservation, and education. Waterslides, jeep simulators, and overpackaged fast food franchises, in what is still a transit-hostile location, have failed to win broadly based philanthropic support for the Zoo as an environmental organization. Surely the Zoological Society is not to blame for this fund raising handicap.


I think I could update our recommendations very simply, and at much less cost than the high priced consultants the Zoo engaged to tell it what it already knows.





1. Invest in your fund raising capacity, don’t kill it.


2. Make a real commitment to the cause your fund raisers will have to sell.


3. Act more like a voluntary organization and less like a politicized, unionized, government operation, and you might reconnect with the community whose support you need.

More on the visible/invisible discussion

From my quote of the day (food for thought):

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (an Austrian writer)

Why best practices for business are useless for the arts

In the area of non-profit cultural enterprise, we are accustomed to having government and commercial institutions talking down to us. Through our boards of directors and funding relationships we are fed a continuous stream of "best practices," usually about five years after they've lost favour in the sector that spawned them. From industries that failed to anticipate rising fuel prices and from governments that can't run a gun registry, we get scandalously bad practices from scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells who oblige us to adopt them uncritically just to get along.

Examples? The Harvard planning model and the SWOT analysis are techniques that only work for organizations that have sufficient resources to do really solid research, analysis, and who can employ the relevant conclusions with enough process integrity to produce a result that offers better than average prospects of success. Those preconditions disqualify about 90% of the non-profits arts organizations that have been employing those methods to satisfy the business people on their boards, as well as the public and private sector funders on whom they depend.

Another great example is a study done by a well-meaning management consulting firm that tried to draw lessons from the airline industry for the performing arts. Their results were published and widely quoted for a brief time in the late '80's or early '90's. They noted, as Julia did in reference to Godin's article, that both industries offer time-bound products, so they both faced the same supply-demand, pricing, and inventory management dilemmas.

There, in my mind, the similarity ended and I recall little of interest in the study's findings. But how could the world's most credentialed multinational consulting firm fail to observe the fundamental differences between these enterprises? Even a lay analyst would conclude that these differences spoil all but the narrowest and least valuable analogies between them.

One industry is well capitalized, with a highly trained, unionized workforce and a high degree of price elasticity in most market segments. The other was never capitalized, always operates out of cash flow, has a transient workforce in all but the largest companies, and can charge only enough for its tickets to recapture a fraction of its operating and production costs. Can you guess which the airline industry is and which is the theatre industry in Canada?

One is faced with intense competition with others in its industry group, however customers have no real alternative to purchasing from one or another of that group. The other industry competes not only with others in the same category; it competes with all other leisure activities for the spare time and disposable income of its customers. Again, can you tell which one is which?

For anyone who wishes to maintain that there is a profound resemblance between the airline industry and the commercial theatre industry (as opposed to nonprofits), I have two responses, either one of which should decide the matter. First, most of the performing arts activities in Canada is nonprofit, not commercial, and even the commercial activity depends on the broad base of subsidized nonprofit activity beneath it for its audience and talent development. Second, airlines and theatres are not even time-bound in the same way, which was the primary point of comparison, after all. Anyone who has arrived a few minutes after the curtain has gone up at the theatre, or a few minutes after boarding has ended at the airport, can tell you that it is infinitely easier to be shown to your seat at the theatre than it is to sprint with your baggage down the runway, grasping for the landing gear. They are fundamentally different enterprises that operate in completely different circumstances, all of which affect the ways in which they market their products and manage their inventories.

People in business and government are always trying to share their wisdom with the arts, even though their own performance often puts that wisdom in doubt, and even though the techniques they offer may be unsuited to the practical realities of the arts enterprise.

Photo credit: Corex

Why Seth Godin's approach to marketing is wrong for the arts

Godin's right about something. A departure from the marketing mantras of the past half century is overdue. Knowledge workers in creative industries never really had their hearts in a formulaic approach to selling commodified products. There simply wasn't a better marketing vocabulary available to them, despite the fact that many were improvising and customizing approaches of their own.

Not that the four P's weren't adaptable, nor that Godin's five elements don't require a lot of work to actuate in real life, but there was nevertheless a need to think about marketing in a way that connected people in relationships that produced experience-based transactions. And of course the business of the arts is the sale of experiences more than of products or services in the conventional sense.

All well and good, except that Godin indulges himself in some of the same priestly platitudes that allowed the four P's to dominate marketing thought in inappropriate places. This really annoys me, because Godin had an opportunity to usher readers into a new relationship between the business clergy and the cultural laity. But in some ways, his approach is utterly conventional.

Let me get the numbers game out of the way first. Numbers have become part of prescriptive pronouncements for as long as there have been priests, or politicians, self-help gurus, and consultants. There was some validity to the notion that it helped the laity remember all the key points of the scheme being offered to them. Cicero argued that three was the quantity of talking points most easily assimilated in classical rhetoric, hence the lulling rhythms of phrases such as, "blood, sweat, and tears," pepper political speeches still today.

The outright numbering of points raises that limit by putting everyone on notice about how many there are, whether or not there is any thematic or logical coherence to them. It puts the onus on the student to find a way to remember it all, as if there will be a quiz later.

In fact, the numbering of points has become essential to the marketing of these schemes, and often becomes more important than the actual points being numbered. For example we rarely hear mention of AA's recovery program without the "12-step," label. Nor do the 'P's of marketing get mentioned without first stating that there are four of them. And Godin, while sounding as if he's departed from this pattern, gives us five elements. Not four, because that would be too few, and not six, because that would be too many. The Godin prescription is for precisely five because five is the right number of elements for right thinking people when it comes to marketing.

It's not the numbers I object to, it's the way his message is transmitted and received to those who are most in need of hearing it. I agree that his five element scheme is an improvement on the old four element scheme. What I object to is the hackneyed reliance on numbers to create the impression of a coherent whole, to make some disparate ideas and an idiosyncratic perspective seem more systematic and therefore credible.

Godin's five elements accommodate the arts in a way that the four P's and other commercially oriented marketing schemes could not. In fact, one of its virtues is that it delivers a little less than it promises as a prescription for change. Its value cannot be realized until a company is deep into the process of figuring out how each of the elements pertains to them and what they might do to exploit the opportunities it reveals to them. The four P's was more of a checklist that offered structure to the process of creating marketing plans and executing them. The five elements is less confining in terms of structure and process, and therefore more demanding of its users.

I just wish Godin had gone beyond saying that the last borrowed marketing model was inadequate or obsolete, not just because of what it recommended, but also because it borrowed from one economic sector, industry, or enterprise, and tried to transpose it's "wisdom" onto another. Rightly or wrongly, his bold language suggests that he is offering his prescription in the same way.

Godin's approach doesn't work because it's right for all times and all forms of enterprise; it works precisely because it demands adaptation to the specifics of the enterprise to have any value at all. It just seems obvious that, in the same way that product, price, place, and promotion fail to capture all that needs to be considered when marketing certain categories of products at this point in our history, his five elements will meet the same fate in certain categories in the future.

Rather than suffer the same dismissal as the four P's, how much better it would be for him to soften the language of his prescription, acknowledge the category limits of his scheme, and encourage adaptations that are enterprise-specific. Had he done so, his work would be a true departure from the customary treatment of this subject in the realm of cultural enterprise, and I could take fuller satisfaction from the intelligence of his prescription.

But who am I to complain. He is Seth Godin and he has five elements in his conception of marketing. He has laid waste to the four element scheme, so I can only succeed him by promoting six. Like nuclear proliferation or the latest advances in disposable razors, the highest number substantiates the value of the proposition. Even as I accept his recommendation, I recognize that it is limited in its applicability and durability. I suppose you would say that it, like all business theory and practice, is time-bound. But until someone says it, we in the arts will always be susceptible to the misapplication of inappropropriate or obsolete models that we will try to employ long after the end of their useful lives.

Real innovators in this field will invite their readers to modify or reject their recommendations according to the exigencies of their enterprise, rather than rejecting one scheme in favour of another as if a paradigm had shifted, when in fact there was never really a unified paradigm at work in the sectors from which these schemes are imported.


Photo credit: from The Independent Aunties of Ms. Evalyn Parry
Post by Doug.

Another take on making the invisible visible

There is a really interesting article in the NY Times today about mirrors. Scientists are using mirrors to study how the brain decides what is self and what is other. The mirror can render the invisible visible-- but sometimes without accuracy. So actually I'm not as goodlooking as I apparently thought. On the other hand, we should get a couple of mirrors in the office to increase productivity!

The article can be found here.

I find the most interesting discovery however the idea of using mirrors for therapy especially for phantom limbs. The article doesn't delve deeply into it, but I imagine a different awareness of the loss of the limb is triggered in the brain when we look at ourselves without it. Don't we have a similar psychological reaction when we see our own blood? (It's sometimes the blood that makes us recognize the seriousness of the injury.)

It would be interesting to know your thoughts.

Photo credit: Andrew Crowley

Marketing the arts

Seth Godin's blog about throwing out the old 4 Ps has been picked up in a variety of placed.

Doug and I discussed his points in relation to the strategy we are preparing for our non-profit dance organization client. Artists dislike when you refer to their "product" but it does need to be "sold" to an audience. And the audience for contemporary dance is very small.

So I thought I would review the 4 Ps here (via wikipedia's entry on Marketing Mix) and see how it is or isn't related to the cultural "products" being peddled by non-profit art organizations, in particular dance, and also see how Mr. Godin's take might be more relevant.

Product - An object or a service that is mass produced or manufactured on a large scale with a specific volume of units. A typical example of a mass produced service is the hotel industry. A less obvious but ubiquitous mass produced service is a computer operating system. Typical examples of a mass produced objects are the motor car and the disposable razor.

Is a cultural product a commodity? A dance product is a time-bound event-- as soon as it is performed it has ended. You retain no image and no tangible object of the dance event; unlike live music (whose nature is to exist then not exist), few people reproduce for sale/distribution studio versions of the live dance event that could then be watched (and sold) over and over again. It is true however that recordings are often distributed for free to presenters in order to sell the work or company.

Price – The price is the amount a customer pays for the product. It is determined by a number of factors including market share, competition, material costs, product identity and the customer's perceived value of the product. The business may increase or decrease the price of product if other stores have the same product.

No dancer has the same product so uniqueness is not an issue. On the other hand, very few people appear to want the product at all. Ultimately the 'fee' paid by the presenter is a sad amalgam of grants to both the presenter and the dance company, with neither side breaking even, and little contribution from the general public.

Place – Place represents the location where a product can be purchased. It is often referred to as the distribution channel. It can include any physical store as well as virtual stores on the Internet.

This, I suppose, would be the venues where you can see live dance. There is a "distribution channel" so to speak. It would include most theatres and performance spaces augmented by the occasional corporate conference or official ceremony.

Promotion – Promotion has four distinct elements - advertising, public relations, word of mouth and point of sale. Advertising covers any communication that is paid for, from television and cinema commercials, radio and Internet adverts through print media and billboards. Public relations are where the communication is not directly paid for and includes press releases, sponsorship deals, exhibitions, conferences, seminars or trade fairs and events. Word of mouth is any apparently informal communication about the product by ordinary individuals, satisfied customers or people specifically engaged to create word of mouth momentum.

Promotion appears to be the most important in this scheme of things and yet the most consistently neglected due to lack of funds.

Seth Godin boldly claims:

Never mind the "P"s. Marketing has five elements:

Data
Stories
Products (services)
Interactions
Connection

DATA is observational. What do people actually do?

Cultural organizations should be asking: do people consume our product? If so, for what reason? When? Who are they? Surveys are constantly going out but the quality of the data in this sector is dismal.

STORIES define everything you say and do. The product has a myth, the service has a legend...

Is the 'myth' the brand? (At least one component of it)...We are actively incorporating this point into strategic directions. Small organizations can make themselves seem bigger and more powerful with good automated systems and a good website, IMHO. And then...

PRODUCTS (and services) are physical manifestations of the story. If your story is that you are cutting edge and faster/newer/better, then your products better be.

So if you SAY you are doing the best work out there, then do it.
But that of course is subjective when it comes to culture.
The work with the biggest buzz is rarely of the highest quality.
On the other hand, most of this high quality work is invisible to 99% of the population. So...

INTERACTIONS are the hero of marketing, because there are so many and most of them are cheap.

This needs more explanation in my opinion.

CONNECTION is the highest level of enlightenment, the end goal. Connection between you and the customer, surely, but mostly connection between customers. Great marketers create bands of brothers, tribes of people who wish each other well and want to belong. Get the first four steps right and you may get a shot at this one.

Some questions marketers must ask: Does this interaction lead to connections? Do our products support our story? Is the story pulling in numbers that demonstrate that it's working?

What is the quality of the connection? In so many cases it is poor, frazzled, disorganized. And the onus upon this aspect of marketing is even greater because the dance event is LIVE; it must occur between human beings; in time; in space. In that way it's the only aspect of the company that matters: what does it produce live?

Any thoughts?

Photo credit: Laurent Zeigler

Making the Invisible Visible (Juice Lecture)

Photo Credit: Nate Archer
Edited by Julia
Post by Doug

Last year, my friend Robin Uchida told me about a conference topic he was considering for the annual Juice Dialogues at OCAD. He asked me what I thought of it. As often happens when I’m talking to Robin, I could think of nothing else afterwards. When I got home that night, I sat down to give him a response to the topic and unintentionally set myself off on a long, tangential approach to the questions, “how can you make the invisible visible?”

There are people working away at hardware and software design to compensate for absent human faculties. They aren't well known usually because their research isn't regarded as commercially valuable on a large scale, but the distance between the "challenged" world and the "unchallenged" world is shrinking. In some cases, this might be literally about making the invisible visible, or the inaudible audible, and on a design/industry plane, it's about making invisible value visible, etc.

A couple of examples, if you've got the time...

I was doing a community relations audit of IBM Canada in the '90's when I heard this tale. In the '80's, their lab in Boca Raton was fooling around with something called "voice command". It was an attempt to make text audible and to convert auditory commands into characters (GUI not yet being a part of IBM's world). They figured it was going to be a narrow interest product for blind people, so they weren't treating its development very urgently. In much the same way at about the same time, Xerox was working on OCR (Optical Character Resolution), which converted scans of printed material into revisable text on screen. Both applications found a mass market, one in the handsfree operation of handheld devices and the other in the digitization of archived documents, among other things.

As long as a product is perceived to have a social purpose, companies are stingy at the R&D stage. Almost by virtue of having a virtue, commercially valuable initiatives are overlooked for investment in favour of less innovative and less valuable prospects that have only a commercial intent. Incidentally, at the time, IBM didn't think of their investment in software for the blind as having community relations value either. Corporations are so single minded, they blindly tunnel after profit, like moles, ignoring the easy good piling up behind them.

The same thing goes on today. I walked out in the sunlight with a cheap pair of sunglasses on and as I passed a photo-development delivery van, was stunned by how vivid the reflective decals looked on it. I took the glasses off and lost not only the intensity of colour, but actually lost the ability to distinguish some of the colours at all. Colour blindness affects a huge proportion of men (about half I think), but we all sense the damage differently due to variances in the ways the rods and cones in our eyes are blunted. Different light conditions and different light intensities affect our colour vision in ways that make it difficult for colour blind people to succeed in various occupations. We colour code traffic lights, electrical wires, maps, we sort fruit, diagnose internal injuries, and grade beef according to colour. Would you have a colour-blind man defuse the bomb in your basement?

Back to the Juice Dialogues, there are two levels of invisibility to be made visible by designers.

First, they could help to find and dramatize value where it is hard for corporate eyes to see it - often in the detritus of other product development efforts.

Second, they can have a mediating influence over the form and function that a new generation of "hard wired" (even the mechanistic language needs updating as technology become more intimate with biology) so that we don't find ourselves in a corporatized Tim Burton nightmare of mistuned perceptual instruments housed in hideous prosthetic structures (omigod! My new feet look like a pair of trout and the penis implant between my eyes keeps lifting my hat off my head!)

Are there any others?

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places Part II

This is the 2nd part of our discussion of membership and audience development, adapted from a talk originally given by Doug Simpson at ANDPVA, the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts.

In Part 1 of this 2 part series, Doug made the case that the key to attracting and retaining new members is emotion. We continue the discussion below with frequently seen errors that prevent organizations from developing their audiences.

Mistake #1: Thinking that the audience you've got is the audience you want.

Virtually every client we've had begins every marketing and fund raising discussion by telling us about their audience or donor base. This makes sense to the extent that it informs them about who has responded to what has been offered in the past in terms of programming and promotions. However most of them are desperate for higher attendance and membership support, so it is illogical to allow the existing audience profile to determine who to target next. We have to at least think about how to broaden the support base or we're condemned to forever beating the same bushes to flush out a few more prospects or to suck a few more dollars out of the ones already in hand. The arts need constant growth and renewal of our audiences and members in order to flourish.

EXAMPLE: Years ago, the Toronto Zoo wanted to expand its visitor and membership base. Geographically, the Zoo is situated on the far eastern border of amalgamated Toronto, the biggest market in Canada. Logically, they would be targeting the city's huge population with all of their membership promotions. However their marketing and development people showed us data "proving" that the bedroom communities northeast of the city were much better hunting grounds than the city itself. Ajax, Pickering, Whitby, and north Scarborough were where they found most of their members, whereas the big city residents to the southwest simply weren't responsive to what the Zoo was offering.

Our analysis was different. The Zoo had done well in the bedroom communities - so well, in fact, that there was very little potential to achieve more. Membership was suffering from the law of diminishing returns. The harder the Zoo worked to attract new members from nearby communities, the less net support they received. In fact, we found that most of those valued members were young families who were using membership to benefit from discounted admissions. It took only a few visits for a family of four to wipe out the value (for the Zoo) of their annual membership. In effect, the people of Toronto were subsidizing the Zoo for people from other municipalities, both through an $8 million operating grant, and through this discounting of members. So we began looking at the barriers to Zoo membership for city residents. The answer seemed obvious. In our opinion, it was transit. City residents couldn't get to the Zoo often enough to get value out of their memberships. At the time of the study, the average household in Ajax, Pickering, or Whitby had between two and three cars in the driveway. The average resident of the old City of Toronto had slightly less than one car. Without a frequent, direct transit link, young families couldn't realistically make it to the Zoo. Imagine taking toddlers somewhere that requires a round trip of three hours with awkward transfers along the way.
Like all of us, the Zoo needed more visitors and more members to balance off its dependency on direct City funding. It also had good reason to find ways of serving the taxpayer better. But the targeting of its promotions was skewed by false assumptions about the motivation of its existing audience. The people of Ajax, Pickering, and Whitby don't go to the Zoo more often because they love animals more than the people of Toronto; they go because it's easier and cheaper. But it's obviously wiser to promote aggressively amongst the millions who actually "own" the Zoo, than to rely on an audience development strategy that targets the audience already being served, or perhaps over served. Let's rethink who we want as our supporters, and then we can think more clearly about how well we're connecting with them.

EXAMPLE (another one): In World War II, the British carefully recorded the damage to returning planes so that they could be modified where they were most likely to be hit. However the reinforced planes didn't have a much better survival rate than the unmodified planes. It wasn't until they realized that the really significant damage was suffered, not by the planes that returned, but the planes that didn't. By reinforcing where the returning planes hadn't been hit, they were able to reduce the number of downed planes.
It's easy to gather data about what's already in our grasp, but this data tells us very little about what's beyond our grasp. In audience development terms, this means that we must not assume that our future audience will be the same as our current audience, especially when the current audience and membership is insufficient to our needs.

Mistake #2: Scaling up in order to overcome meagre results.

Some organizations chickens before they hatch. Many organizations buy big mailing lists or engage big mailing houses to get more prospects into the hopper. The thinking is that the percentage of interested responses might be low, but that's all right if the number of solicitations is high. You've heard this kind of rationale before, "If only one out of two hundred thousand people send in $20, we just need to mail 18 million letters to make budget." But it's not really a numbers game. The really important thing is what you do with the prospects you discover. Most broad based direct mail campaigns don't make any money in their first year. It is only the incremental gains made in addition to annual renewals of memberships and subscriptions that make this kind of campaigning worth continuing, and some organizations, especially specialized or narrow interest groups never make any significant money at it. Once they get beyond their immediate circle of supporters, they never find that second ring of interested prospects, despite doing everything right. Keeping in mind that it's quite expensive to do the big mail campaign, and expensive to follow up on any prospects that emerge, the real gains are often made through fine grained follow up.

EXAMPLE: Let me tell you a happy story that illustrates the point that broad based initiatives can be more valuable as prospecting techniques than as methods of bringing in money fast. We were working on some member research for Amnesty International, which had just received a $1,000 cheque in response to one of its regular member renewal mailing. A lady in Calgary had responded to a small request with a big gift. The staff at Amnesty remarked on this to their development consultant, saying that they would pull this person from their next mailing so she wouldn't be irritated by further requests for a while.

The consultant took the opposite view. If she gave $1,000 when $100 would do, then she's signalling strong support for what Amnesty is doing. He wanted to meet her and learn more about her interest in the organization, so he called, flew to Calgary, and had coffee with her. He returned with a $30,000 cheque.

There's no point in paying a high price for more prospects than you can give your attention to. Don't cast your net so widely that you can't haul it into the boat. You really can't buy your way into enough new relationships to fix a declining or stagnant support base. Strong relationships will lead to higher levels of support from your current membership and better renewal or retention rates. Unless you have lots of money and mass appeal, you might want to have a hard look at existing relationships and build a narrower, better qualified group of prospects.

Mistake #3: Ignoring the practical details that inhibit your prospects.

It's already hard enough to bring new people into your audience and membership, so why ignore the practical realities that make it an even harder sell. In the case of the Toronto Zoo, we talked about how transit was an impediment for many city residents, but there are non-physical impediments as well. Sometimes the people you think you're attracting simply aren't getting the message. Either it's not reaching them or they aren't understanding it.

EXAMPLE: The Canadian Aboriginal Festival at the Rogers Centre (formerly the SkyDome), held annually in Toronto. When the Festival approached us in 1998, they were baffled by the Toronto market. They had been pretty successful with Aboriginals in the Golden Horseshoe and northern states, but their non-Aboriginal audience in Toronto simply never developed. They felt that they had enough media support to make a breakthrough, but the breakthrough never came. They needed to figure out why or they needed to stop trying to mount the Festival in a costly 50,000 seat venue.

We identified young, urban, non-Aboriginal families as a good test segment and conducted focus groups in a daycare, while at the same time running a telephone survey on a similar household profile. The answer was clear: the Festival's message wasn't making it through Toronto's pre-Christmas media and marketing clutter, and those that got the message weren't clear that it was intended for them. The style of the Festival's advertising gave them the impression that the Festival was only for Aboriginal people and that they might not be welcome, and as a result, they were discouraged from taking their children to it.

Although marketing and fund raising might be a science, there are often simple things that can be fixed to produce better results overall. Note that in this case, as with the Zoo, the only way to get this answer was to collect some information - surveys, focus groups and research if you've got the time and expertise to do it. If not, just talking to people can help an organization to understand what they're thinking.

Mistake #4: Misunderstanding what membership means.

Membership means different things to different people even within a single organization. Some want to feel like they're making a difference, whereas others want recognition and privileges or benefits, and still others enjoy the sense of belonging that comes from their affinity to the organization and its other members. The same is true of audiences, some of whom are supporting the organization by buying whole subscriptions and others who are simply trying to secure good seats or save money. Naturally we would like to have philanthropically motivated members and an audience that supports the artistic direction, but we can't afford to ignore the rest.
One marketing or fundraising approach won't work for all. So you have to understand what needs to be done to create the kinds of relationships you want.

EXAMPLE: The Canadian Opera Company was suffering an erosion of its subscription base during the late 90s, which was scary when they were dreaming of building a multi-million dollar opera house. Instead of people buying the six show season as a package, they were buying little three-packs, or cherry-picking through the season, packing the familiar shows and leaving the hall empty whenever the Artistic Director pushed the boundaries a bit. Theories emerged about education, immigration, alternate opera delivery media, performing arts industry cycles… But when we gathered carefully segmented focus groups of members and subscribers and put a series of straightforward questions to them, here is the picture that emerged: the COC had created a sophisticated audience for opera where it hadn't existed before in Toronto. Over decades, that audience had developed a variety of relationships to the COC, some not really very supportive. Some related most strongly to opera as an art form, and would go to see it anywhere, any time. Some related primarily to the COC as a company and felt that they were supporting its artistic growth and the culture of the city. Some related only to the repertoire. They had six favourite operas that they wanted to see again and again, and if they bought mini-subscriptions at all any more, it was only to keep their favourite seat locations. Perhaps the most surprising of all, the opera discovered that members thought that they were keeping the company alive and paying for the new opera house with their $75 annual membership fees.

The opera needed to fix its membership program in a hurry. It's extremely complicated in their case, but in a nutshell, we made sure that they linked their subscriptions to the artistic direction and to their capital campaign. The company started leaning harder on (now departed) Artistic Director Richard Bradshaw as a marketing brand, they started using the guarantee of seat locations and privileges to encourage larger donations, and they began rationalizing the benefits of membership relative to the cost, especially for affluent seniors who got discounted tickets and great membership privileges. The result was a return to full subscriptions and stronger financial contributions from members.

Get real about what your members think about membership or subscription. Why do they bother? You need to know, not only to make more sales, but also to reshape your membership offerings to improve member satisfaction and higher contributions. Don't assume that they see the same value in the transaction that you do. Ask them.


Mistake #5: Competing for share instead of growing the market...

You know who has an audience or a membership that overlap your own. You can work in isolation to develop membership and marketing plans that protect your share and possibly increase it, but you can't achieve a breakthrough with a strategy like this, and you probably don't want to vanquish your rivals in any case.

EXAMPLE: We were approached by the World Heritage Project to help raise $18.1 million USD to create a digital archive of artistic photographs and documentaries about all the world heritage sites. What we discovered was that this initiative closely paralleled a number of others, and that its unique features weren't really differentiating enough to power a competitive fund raising effort.

Another interesting case is the partnership of the Opera and the Ballet in the new Four Seasons Centre. In the past, they were working different parts of the same field, overlapping to some extent, but avoiding each other for the most part. This changed when they committed to living together in a facility. I spoke to the opera's corporate fund raising director after he was directed to have dinner with his counterpart from the Ballet. But instead of sharing strategies or prospects, he said it was the quietest dinner he'd ever been to. Suddenly they had been thrust together, the distance they'd maintained was gone, and they were faced with a choice between competing or cooperating in the effort to find support. Like many of our clients, they found themselves working hard to make space in a crowded market.

It is common for non-profit organizations, in the arts or other fields, to find themselves being overtaken by new entrants. Over time other organizations start to offer related services or programs, and gradually a constellation of rival organizations find themselves soliciting the same pool of membership and audience prospects. The choices are tough but simple. Either work harder to distance yourself from the field, or work closely with others in the field to look for new support beyond the existing pool of prospects and supporters. That means recognizing that your member is not only your member, but is legitimately attached in some ways to your rivals or allies. You have no option but to change what you offer and how you offer it to complement what else is available to them, or to withdraw and distance yourself as much as possible in the way you promote your organization to your current and prospective members.

You and your members and patrons are not alone. When you design what you offer and how you offer it, you need to recognize that there is a triangle of relationships at work between the member/patron, your organization, and your rivals or allies.