IRAFF's data sharing system for regional arts councils goes live!

There's no mention of us, but we were originally hired by Economic Indicators Committee of IRAFF (see below, a committee formed of regional arts funding bodies) and proposed and designed this system after performing audits of their data, as per the original contract. It has taken about 5 years for this to become a reality and we did three phases of it-- beginning with the recommendation that they create this system. Yeah, Netgain! We'll pat ourselves on the back anyway. As GM for Kaha:wi, I also suspect this will make my life a little easier, while at the same time complicating it as one requirements is the submission of independent financial statements for our last season, which we currently do not have.

This is the official press release:



CADAC goes live

Ottawa, December 4, 2008 — After a very successful pilot and some fine tuning, CADAC (Canadian Arts Data/ Données sur les arts au Canada) the integrated financial and statistical online database for arts organizations is now ready to accept data for operating program deadlines beginning in 2009.

CADAC uses a web-based application that will lighten the administration burden on arts organizations applying for operating funding to one or multiple public funders by enabling them to submit one set of financial and statistical information.

Thirty-three arts organizations from all disciplines participated in the pilot testing of the application which took place between October 4 and November 16. The feedback received from those organizations noted that the registration process and the instructions were simple to follow.
Twenty-eight of the organizations indicated the test was a positive or very positive experience. Their input resulted in six enhancements to the application and adjustments to the financial form. It also helped to identify and solve seven problem areas.

To facilitate the process, each funder will be contacting organizations to let them know the first deadline for which they should submit their financial and statistical data into CADAC. This process will be phased in over the next two years as operating deadlines occur throughout the year.
Organizations applying for operating funding are encouraged to register with CADAC as soon as possible.

The CADAC team would like to thank all of those who participated and enabled us to finalize the application in time for the 2009 deadlines.

The following are member partners: the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Vancouver, the Manitoba Arts Council, the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport, the Ontario Arts Council, the Saskatchewan Arts Board and Toronto Arts Council. Discussions are ongoing with other provincial, territorial and municipal arts funders to encourage them to join the partnership.

In addition, the CADAC initiative has supporting partners: the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund, the Ontario Ministry of Culture, the Ontario Trillium Foundation and the City of Toronto.

CADAC was originally conceived by the Intergovernmental Roundtable of Arts Funders and Foundations (IRAFF) in Ontario and shepherded through the development phase by the Ontario Arts Council.

The Canada Council for the Arts is the secretariat and host for CADAC.

For more information: CADACInfo@thecadac.ca

Sudbury Performing Arts Centre on hold due to nickel prices

We don't like to say we told you so, but...
This year NetGain completed a review of another consultant's feasibility study for a new performing arts centre in the city of Sudbury. We saw many similarities between the anticipated problems and success of this PAC and the North York Performing Arts Centre, for which we have completed a series of studies over the past 7 years or so.
At the time, the Greater Sudbury city committee leading the process wanted to build a centre of about 1800 seats, which we felt was far too large for the city, its current arts/culture market and its stated goals of revitalizing business downtown and serving the local arts community. This size was already being debated within the arts community itself. In fact, one of the things we mentioned in our final report to the client was to be very cautious, because a downturn in nickel prices could severely affect the city's fortunes and their ability and desire to subsidize a new PAC in perpetuity. Lo and behold, the following article came out this week.

Report on Business:

Closed mines, broken dreams in the town that nickel built

ANDY HOFFMAN
From Friday's Globe and Mail
December 5, 2008 at 12:56 AM EST
SUDBURY, ONT. — When John Rodriguez became Mayor of Sudbury in November, 2006, things had never looked better for the city whose economic fortunes have always been inextricably linked to the price of nickel.
The price of the metal was rocketing to record levels and Mr. Rodriguez saw opportunity for Sudbury to spiff up its image and shed its reputation as a hardscrabble mining town beholden to the vagaries of the boom and bust commodity cycle.
He unveiled plans for a massive recreation complex and a $167-million performing arts centre. Mr. Rodriguez planned to tap the new foreign owners of the region's major nickel operations for cash. Brazil's Companhia Vale do Rio Doce and Swiss-based Xstrata PLC had just shelled out nearly $40-billion combined to buy in to the Sudbury Basin. “I was going to ask for big bucks,” Mr. Rodriguez said in an interview.
Yet the mayor's dreams of building a world-class performing arts centre are now on hold. Vale and Xstrata are cutting production in Sudbury and closing mines because of a sudden and severe crash in base metal prices brought on by the global financial crisis.
“This is not the time to do it because the economy is falling apart,” he said.

Read the rest of the article here.

Variety Thursday: What's on the internet

Something I know very little about: 'Trolls' and 'trolling': Here. Kind of sad.

"The Olympic Games will be played out on Facebook, YouTube and Flickr whether we like it or not. We need to engage, not disengage, with them," said Balfour.
Very wise. Check out the story here.

"Cirque du Soleil was formed in 1984 by Laliberte and fellow street performers in Quebec. Since then, it has grown into a sprawling global operation that plans to put on 18 separate shows on four continents this year." Now investors from Dubai own 20%. I know someone who dances for CdS (she is an amazing breakdancer!). Check out that story here. Another one of our clients, Centennial College, has a program in Dubai. Dubai seems to me like a strange desert kingdom being assembled from scratch, all hubris and glory.

Two of my favorite "affordable" art sites: 20 x 200 and Lumas. My favorite Lumas photographer is Juho Kuva. These sites are also possibly worth your consideration as successful digital models for connecting art to consumers/audience. Aren't these iterations on iTunes/ youtube/ etc. ? Don't they lead me to artists I never knew existed? Now I know Juho Kuva's name and one day may possibly own some of his work.

The problem with grants

I was having a conversation with my brother who works with Big Brothers Big Sisters, a mentoring program in Toronto. Oh, and by the way, if you are a visible minority male-- he is always looking for more mentors. Apparently they have no problems finding women mentors for girls. But I digress. He also works with a number of other not-for-profits and the conversation turned to grants. He told me about a report called "We Can't Afford to Do Business This Way" (Officially, "A Study of the Administrative Burden Resulting From Funder Accountability and Compliance Practices"). If you work with a non-profit at the organizational level and have been responsible for grant writing, this report won't tell you much that you haven't already experienced first hand, and the data collection was not in the area for the arts. It is still an eye-opener and I recommend it highly.



Download the report here.



Three findings that could be applied to arts/culture generating organizations:



The cumulative administrative burden on agencies is all consuming. The agencies respectivelycompleted 182, 48, and 94 major funder reports a year. Each funder and/or program had its ownreport requirements and formats. Securing and reporting on grants is the priority activity for thesurvival of organizations and their programs, pushing aside other organizational priorities suchas overall agency budgeting and strategic planning, community relations, staff development, and program management.

Funders are slow to approve/reject grants, and the slow response time causes “gap”problems for service delivery [here, substitute "arts programming or planning" for "service delivery"]. Agencies often found themselves with “nine months” to deliver“12 months” of service. If an agency guesses wrong and retains staff during the “gap” and thendoes not receive the grant, it incurs significant debt. If it lets staff go, program delivery and continuitysuffer. Response time for 73% of grants was four to five months or longer from the time the proposalwas submitted to the time the funder made a decision.

Grant applications and reporting, and addressing the challenges posed by funder practices andrestrictions, dominated the attention of senior management [...]. Senior managers are very aware and worried that they cannot replace themselves.Senior managers reported that frontline staff are reluctant to take on management jobs.Moreover, the agencies do not have the administrative capacity to train the next generation ofsenior managers. The reluctance of funders to compensate senior managers adequately iscompounding succession-planning. Grant management, of necessity, takes priority over other management responsibilities.

Scary, isn't it.

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.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

The following text is adapted from a lecture Managing Director and Senior Consultant Doug Simpson gave at ANDPVA (Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts) on how to (and not to) develop audiences and members in non-profit organizations. I am going to post it two parts.



LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES – PART 1

I'm old enough to remember when small arts organizations burned up volunteer resources running bingo instead of building membership support. When bingo ceased to be a big money-maker, a lot of organizations started running Nevada tickets. Raffles and lotteries seemed like failsafe money-makers for a while, until there were so many of them they fell out of favour.

I also remember when I was running a theatre company in Peterborough so long ago that our big annual raffle featured two new inventions: the VCR and the wind surfer. The Board failed to sell enough tickets, and the Board Chair walked off with both first and second prize. It took me a week of guilt tripping to get him to give them back. But it wasn't just a small market phenomenon. At about the same time, the Canadian Opera Company, with one of the wealthiest memberships in the country, was losing big money raffling off Mercedes sedans and fabulous trips. The whole herd of non-profit fund raisers had to move on and find a new technique for getting money out the community.

But I want to step back from techniques for raising money, and focus on the good old honest practice of audience and membership development. What could be more simple and straightforward than accepting admission money from people who want to experience what you offer, or then to invite them into a deeper relationship with the organization through membership, and in return, giving them a more profound understanding and appreciation of the thing they love?

There's no trickery or salesmanship at root here. It's not about techniques that you can swap with other organizations. It's about establishing and cultivating a unique relationship between your organization and those in the community who appreciate what it does. Underneath all the marketing jargon and sly, seductive direct mail techniques is the genuinely powerful connection between what you do for the community and those in the community who really care about it.

Relationships. That's what we're really talking about. Lasting supportive relationships. Not one night stands, but relationships that have a better than average chance of enduring and becoming stronger.

When I talk in this simplistic way, people get uncomfortable because it sounds too much like a TV ad for an online dating service, not the tricky and important business of membership and audience development. But let me ask you, honestly, what lasting relationship starts with borrowed techniques? How many movies or plays have you seen where some lovesick swain asks his womanizer friend to help seduce the woman of his dreams? Will Smith's, Hitch, is the latest example. Cyrano de Bergerac might be the most famous one. In fiction, as in real life, it works so badly, it's funny.

My contention is that we should let the unique essence of our relationship to members and audiences determine what fund raising and marketing techniques we use, rather than the reverse.

Too often, out of habit or desperation, we employ techniques that fail to present us in our best light, or that attract people who aren't right for us. When that happens, when we don't get the results we want, it's tempting to try harder.

For example, if we budgeted for a 3% response rate to a mass mailing and we only get 1.5%, it's easier to rationalize sending twice as many letters than it is to back up a step and consider whether or not we're sending the right message to the right people, or whether or not we're using the wrong medium altogether.

Seriously think about how many non-profit organizations try to expand their support base by buying mailing lists from other organizations! Yes, you may find a few more prospects, and convert a few of those into new supporters, but the cost is high relative to an approach that is focused on the unique relationship you're seeking and on the need to motivate your future member to become involved with you. It’s worth doing for the 800 pound gorillas in our field, but not for the vast majority of small cultural organizations.

Here's the most fundamental thing I can tell you, and I think it puts everything else into perspective. The currency of membership and audience development, as for all kinds of marketing, is not dollars, not number of impressions, nor privileges, benefits, or services; it is emotion.

Anytime you get someone to get out of their easy chair to start a transaction with you, you first have to convince them that they feel like doing something about what you've offered them. You then also have to convince them to choose your offering over everything else available to them at that moment. And finally, given that it is a non-profit offering in which they are donating to or buying something of uncertain dollar value, you have to leave them with a good feeling: a feeling of pride, of pleasure, and a desire to do it again - donate monthly by credit card instead of once by cheque, for example, or to buy a series subscription instead of a single ticket. By analogy to online dating, this is the true "love connection."

Underneath it all, the currency of the transaction is emotion. Everything else is a secondary consideration that comes into play only AFTER the right feelings are stimulated.

How do we know who to approach and how should we approach them to arouse the right feelings? Let me give you some examples that you might be able to relate to, and think about how your organization behaves when it's looking for love, when it's trying to build lasting support relationships.

Part II - Tomorrow - Concrete examples of successful membership developement and some common pitfalls.

Technology in the Arts Conference, the Canuck version

Doug and I first heard about the Technology in the Arts conference sometime last year when we were called to participate in an impromptu brainstorming session by Bill Poole. It appears that Carnegie Mellon's Centre for Arts Management and Technology had launched this conference as a sort of anniversary party get together thing and it ended up being so successful they decided to bring it North of the 49th. The whole thing was at that time orchestrated by a fascinating and charismatic woman named Cary McQueen Morrow. Since leaving Carnegie Mellon she has started her own arts consulting firm in San Francisco.


During the brainstorming session to choose possible conference topics, we discovered three things.
1) Nobody had much to say about technology. One man amused/bored us for hours with his tale circa 1985 of the discovery of word processors.
2) Our firm actually has a strange amount of experience with leading arts clients to technology, the way one might try to lead a horse to water (you can't make them drink). Our most recent experiences with that involved the Canadian Music Centre, whose plight I described in an earlier entry. Another project involved creating an evaluation template for an arts facility. More on that project another time, I think.
3) Although funding bodies felt strongly that they had the perogative to decide whether certain agencies deserved increased funding for technology projects/upgrades, one officer pretty much outright admitted her department lacked all knowledge in this area (and were therefore unable to evaluate the usefulness of any project).

Doug later sat on the advisory panel for the conference in Canada, which took place May 9 and 10th (we were unable to attend due to prior committments).

It is also worth noting that the Canadian Music Centre did end up submitting and presenting the story of their digital revolution and newfound awareness during the conference. We congratulate them.