Moving to a new level of awareness

Moving to a new level of awareness

I am pleased that Huffington Post has provided a platform to champion the cause of arts education.  See my first blog, of many more to come.  If you have thoughts, ideas, stories,developments in this field that need attention, please let me know.

It begins with the customer

We belong to the Luxury Marketing Council, a consortium of luxury brands organized by the peripatetic Greg Furman, and Tuesday evening I found myself in the Wedgewood Room at The Pierre, a locale close to my heart (our big gala at the end of this month will be there).  The topic was customer service, and the kick off came from Kristen Hamerling at The Harrison Group with some shocking statistics: their research of the top 10% economic demographic shows that high end consumers trust the internet more than sales persons, and that they trust user feedback on the internet more than expert feedback.  For those of us trying to educate and motivate our audiences the bar is getting higher and higher.  These trends apply to retail, financial services, and all other spending areas.

The Harrison Group’s profiles of high-end consumers are an invaluable source of insight, as we learned last fall during our Innovators Forum.  Check out especially Harrison Group Jim Taylor’s amazing profile of the upper income theatre goer here

https://vimeo.com/user8875928/review/31864071/ee461f9405

Coming back to the Pierre, these bombshells from Harrison were followed by several leaders in customer service from banking, retail, business to business and the nonprofit sector, who outlined strategies to circumvent these trends:

1)  Focus on saving time and building trust.

2)  Build customer confidence  by educating them about your offering

3)  Never “profile” a customer by their dress, accent, or behavior.  Most high end individuals were born in the working and middle class (only 3% inherited their wealth), and they know when they are being scorned or patronized.

4)  Treat your front line employees as your best source of information about your customers.  The days of the “mushroom” approach–keep them low, keep them in the dark–are over.  Train, staff, and communicate as well as possible. This is a highly risky area to try to cut costs.  Conversely, senior management must make every effort to stay in touch with the “sales floor”, wherever it is: phone room, front of house, parking lot.

The internet as an information and filtering tool is still in its infancy, but look what it has done to publishing, electronics, travel, and entertainment.  Adapting to all this is a battle, but it’s only a battle.  The war is the overall customer experience, and we must not lose sight of the old-fashioned standards, too.

What have been your wins and losses in customer service?  Are you audiences viewing you more favorably than before?  If so, do you know why?

Help a deserving theatre win $10,000: Vote for your favorite Arts Ed PSA!

Margo Lion, the Co-Chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities, recently mentioned that in many disadvantaged communities, only 3% of students are getting exposed to theatre arts education.  Help us redress this catastrophic imbalance in our society.  Give these kids a chance.  Here’s how.

We asked our theatres to create 60-second PSA’s explaining how theatre arts education promotes workforce creativity and helps disadvantaged youth. And we will award the winning theatre $10,000.  We have nearly 7,000 vote so far, but we need your help. More votes means more impact as we move further into the field of advocacy and support for these programs.  Join us and view these wonderful videos, pick your favorite, and help us make the case.

All you have to do is go to our Facebook page:   http://www.facebook.com/NationalCorporateTheatreFund.  Your voice will be heard!

Voting closes April 2, then our distinguished panel of judges: Philanthropist and producer Cheryl Henson, playwright David Henry Hwang, and Julie Woffington, Executive Director of the Educational Theatre Association, will determine the winning video, which will be presented at our Gala April 30 in New York.  That evening honors Harry Connick, Jr., Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Play House and our Chairman, James S. Turley of Ernst & Young.

Join us for an exciting month coming up. But first, logon to Facebook and choose your favorite video.  And let’s all take these kids to heart.

Arts Education and a national crisis

We are preparing something pretty big here at NCTF.  So hang on and stay tuned.  Today, I want to frame the arts education issue as one of national crisis.  Yes, our education system in general has declined to the point that the Council on Foreign Relations just issued a report saying it has become a national security issue.  This report, prepared by a committee chaired by Condoleezza Rice and Joe Klein, outlines the failure of so many youth to qualify for military, diplomatic or intelligence service posts.  This time, they do not decry the usual science and math crisis so much as the problem of our schools and the “whole person” our society needs.

This is when the conversation turned to arts education.  Catch this:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/03/condoleeza-rice-makes-the-case-for-arts-as-vital-part-of-education.html

We want to do something about this, and we’re laying the groundwork now.  Stay tuned, and let me know what you think should be done.  Rebuilding the services and systems that created this prosperous, successful nation will take a long time, and all our efforts.  Please join us!

Every Challenge is an Opportunity

I have had discussions with senior executives at two financial services firms recently and a common thread emerged: they have sustained and in some cases grown their support for arts & culture over the past three very difficult years; they are facing unprecedented public pushback over entrenched problems and past mistakes; they can’t figure out how to tell the story of their philanthropy to the angry public and government officials.

This is a very sticky wicket for all of us. Carrie Perloff’s eloquent Huffington Post story, below, raises so many relevant points.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-perloff/arts-bank-funding_b_1194141.html

But we should connect the dots. No, we do not want to impair our own integrity and public service role by seeming to be shills for major contributors. But are we looking for appropriate, targeted opportunities to sustain our relationship with these long term, committed supporters by letting the story of our relationship be told?

I remember a public utility once relating how a local community center had generously offered them use of their facilities during a black out so that the utility had a place to help its customers deal with the outage. That was one grantee the utility remembers well every time renewals come around.  Not only did the nonprofit help a key supporter, but like our theatres, together these two organizations helped their community.

No one at the financial services firms I spoke to tacitly asked for us to help. Rather, like a good friend, they were sharing a frustration they were trying to solve themselves.

This is our opportunity: to be grown ups, to retain our integrity, and also to build these critical relationships even further so that together we can serve our communities better. No one is served if we are clumsy or unskillful in doing this, but the right time, the right story, and our staunchest, most committed supporters will be helped to survive, and their teams will understand why we are partners worthy of their loyalty.

Isn’t that the best thing we can do for our community?

A Year to Move On From

I am a naturally positive person, I suppose. I live with a half-cupper, so by reaction I tend to always see a few additional drops around any given corner. Which is exactly how this year-end feels to me. A year that began with such hope for continued recovery—back in the spring we were statistically well along in a recovery, remember?—has staggered to its end surrounded by man-made uncertainty and haunted by natural disasters.

The economic divide in American culture continues to inform so much of what we see: outstanding generosity by corporations and individuals who struggle to do good, yet new, gaping needs emerge almost every day. How can we recover a robust economy when half our citizens are sliding into poverty? How will we ever get our education system back on track when there are so many conflicting strategies to do so? And didn’t those conflicting strategies bring us to this point in the first place?

Then we ask, where are the arts, and where is theatre in this picture? We need community more than ever. ArtsWave in Cincinnati has done brilliant work exploring the community-building effect, the “ripple” effect, of the arts in dire economic times. Not only do the arts offer direct economic impact—real estate, peripheral spending like parking and restaurants; but there is also strong impact in giving people a place to come together and experience something together, build community together. And that is where the solutions truly emerge. In a polarized and toxic political culture, our story-tellers are the ones who bring us all together.

Check out this groundbreaking report on what the arts mean to a community at: http://www.theartswave.org/about/research-reports

Gabriel Byrne, the Cultural Ambassador of Ireland, tells a very moving story about a community in rural Ireland that created a community theatre and saved a building in which to house it. “If we can build a theatre, why can’t we build a bank?” they came to ask. That story to me recalls the essence of why what we do matters.

Yes, I am a half cupper. And even at the shank end of a year like this, as we enter 2012 and all the change we hope it will bring, I find renewed trust in the ripple effect. Those ripples are pointing to the future. In 2012, let’s all make waves, together.

Who Are We Selling?

In this economic climate, reaching out to high net worth individuals, or the companies that seek to engage them, can be a touchy subject for the arts.  The fact is, income inequality and the incredible wealth accumulated by a small percentage of our population have created great opportunities in terms of prospects and their passions.  But we must temper our pursuit of these individuals with an appreciation of our broader public purpose.  It can be challenging to face these facts and see an opportunity in them without losing our focus.

First, the facts: arts audiences are substantially wealthier, more influential and better educated than the population as a whole. At the recent Innovators Forum, organized by NCTF and The Nederlander Organization for theatre marketers and corporate relations staffs, we heard from two experts in the luxury marketing field, the incredible Jim Taylor of The Harrison Group, and Greg Furman, Founder and President of the Luxury Marketing Council.

We sought their views on the perspective of the affluent on theatre, and their observations were quite insightful.  One central point is that these audiences, with disposable net income of $150,000 or higher per household, are past the time of acquisition and object-related status.  Instead, they are engaged self-actualizers who look to theatre to exemplify a well-lived life.  Greg cited a major marketing firm that identifies the aspirations of this economic segment as wanting to achieve the “meditative state”, i.e., seeking satisfaction beyond mere material status symbols.

But as Jim Taylor observed, not all affluent are alike.  Only a portion are true theatre-goers, for example, and no effort will ever convince the remaining members of that cohort to buy a theatre ticket with any frequency.  Furthermore, most affluent individuals came from middle class backgrounds, and it can take up to ten years to become acclimated to their wealth, and reach that “meditative” level.

This goes beyond the bromide that high-end audiences seek experiences that cannot be bought.   It’s more than celebrity touch, champagne in the foyer, or a handshake with the artistic director, although those are important keynotes. Rather, it’s agreeing together that we are joint partners, we who make art and they who support it, in heightening the quality of life for them, and beyond that, for our community.

What does this lead to in practical terms?

It means embrace what we do as artists and engage with them in an authentic and shared vision of making life better.  What we do best is exactly what excites them, not the “donor benefits.”

It means discounting tickets unwisely undermines that value proposition completely; it trashes the perception of our production.  The affluent love a good buy like anyone else, but clumsy discounting and marketing makes them doubt our commitment.

A corollary to this is not to chase the non-attending affluent and waste resources on individuals who will never support the theatre.   By the time they have become wealthy, their life patterns are pretty much set and they will not change.  Many of us in individual fundraising have had that experience: a juicy database of wealthy individuals. which is practically useless unless it contains parameters identifying theatre-lovers.

Now what does this have to do with private sector partnerships?  Two things: first, as we discussed at a recent NCTF board meeting, we are now in a time when one or two individuals might be financially capable of making life-changing contributions to our efforts.  Wealth is that concentrated.

But even more importantly for us who bring corporations and theatres together, it means what we do speaks to the better natures of the employees, customers and clients of our leading companies.  Sponsorship is about selling the audience.  Do we really understand what we have to offer?

We will soon be posting the presentations made in our Innovators Forum and you can hear these wise words directly.   Please email me at bwhitacre@nctf.org for notification of this opportunity. (Or comment on this blog!)

I’m still contemplating the insights we heard that day.

Corporate Story Telling

“Our projects have to have a beginning, a middle and an end.”

“Don’t bring me your menu of options, A-level for $10,000, B-level for $15,000.  Let’s just talk about what you’re doing and let me figure out how we can be part of it.”

“We’ve been tasked to put the A for Arts into STEM for the next Clinton Global Initiative meeting.”

These are not foundation executives or non profit executive directors talking.  These are community relations executives at three Fortune 500 companies.  I also saw this phenomenon at the IEG sponsorship conference last spring, when GE and Xerox explained how they are using sponsorship to enter a new country or demonstrate logistics prowess through a sports franchise.  Or a company that uses its pro bono work on behalf of a nonprofit to develop in-house expertise that will be resold to the commercial market.

What does all this mean to me?  Partnering with the nonprofit sector, or to speak globally, the NGO sector, is not just business being good, it’s very good for business.  In fact, the opportunities for engagement with corporations by the nonprofit sector as a whole may never have been higher.

If we connect to them at their level.  And don’t lose ourselves in the process.

Companies with public relations problems—and who in any facet of public life does not have one of those, today?—need stories to tell all their stakeholders about the specific, identifiable difference their corporate social responsibility is making.  They need to own those stories, and even better, profit from them in other manifestations.

But are we in this game, we in the arts?  Are we engaged enough, probing deeply enough, or thinking strategically enough, thinking big enough, to sit at that table?

During our recent strategic planning process, we at NCTF came to call event-philanthropy our “crack cocaine”.  It was integral, it was easy, it was transactional, and we got very good at it.  But it isn’t scalable, it’s low margin, and while it makes everyone feel good, it serves about 40 people at a time.  And to protect our partners’ competitive positions, we can’t even talk much about it.

No story, no impact, no difference.

So we did two things. First, we are organizing our 20 constituent theatres into a sponsorship/purchasing collective offering our consolidated business spending and problems to partner corporations seeking a large-scale platform.  Our theatres spend $350 million a year directly in goods and services.  We are already getting attention from national and international firms.

Second, we are exploring the feasibility of a cause that will transcend event marketing.  We are still hooked on our events.  They keep our relationships alive and vibrant.  But our vision has expanded and we are using these events as a platform for broader, deeper engagement with our major corporate partners, current and potential, instead of an end in themselves.  And we are entering new levels of partnership conversation as a result of this bigger view.

It’s going to be more and more about balancing our true mission with meeting companies where they need to be.

About making them aware of the new kinds of opportunities we are creating.

About sharing our business and logistical needs, whatever matches their competencies.

Companies are hungry for the new like I have never seen them before.  The social dynamism of this age we are in—when every assumption about the public and private sectors is up for grabs—means we have this opportunity to tell that story, together.

What are you bringing to the table?  What is the table?

Mass or Class?

Despite our complaints about ticket prices, we have a hard time thinking of theatre as a luxury product. Especially in the nonprofit world, where our communities pay us to be accessible. But look around the auditorium some evening at your theatre and ask yourself, are the affluent in the house? Look at our proudly documented demographics: High education? check. High income? check. And are we reaching enough of those folks to survive the many challenges we face?
I’d love to say “check”, but we all know that’s an open question. And of course the artist in us, the community activist, the progressive soul at the heart of theatre, has very mixed feelings about our function as an income distribution mechanism: take from the wealthy and give to the starving artist, the under-served student, the eager young worker who could never pay the $250 per person our shows would cost without contributed income.

We’ll be exploring this and more at next week’s Innovators Forum in New York. It’s our second installment of this great collaboration between NCTF and The Nederlander Organization. Stay tuned for more insights!

Nourish and Inspire

The body is a device to calculate

The astronomy of the spirit.

Look through that astrolabe

And become oceanic.

Maybe it was because I was sitting in the doctor’s office when I read this fragment from Rumi.  It really struck me.  Summer has been a time of indulgence: vacation, catch up lunches, visioning the future, dodging earthquakes, hurricanes and other splendid distractions.  The physical body is something we so often forget in the madness of arts marketing and corporate programming.  And yet it’s what connects us to everything else.

I recently attended a show at Manhattan Theatre Club–the incredible MASTER CLASS by Terrence McNally featuring Tyne Daly in a masterly performance.  She was part of our Broadway Roundtable this past spring, where we gather corporate friends and share the delights of theatre in a private lunch hosted by UBS.  And I worked at MTC during the early 90’s, when the incredible McNally plays were an almost annual tentpole of our seasons.  It was thrilling to see him back at MTC, especially in their new Broadway house, The Samuel J. Freidman Theatre.  But what really made my night was the unexpected surprise of a pass to the Patron’s Lounge and two free drinks.

It’s silly that something so comparatively simple gave the whole evening a fresh new edge.  We always talk about recognizing and thanking our donors and supporters, but experiencing the other side of the table reminded me how magical this actually is.  I remember attending a local orchestra with one of their supporters, and how she quietly beamed every time a staff member crossed the lobby to greet her.   She was the least pretentious, most humble person, yet this handshake gave her confidence that her gifts were not only recognized, but placed in the hands of people who could carry on a conversation, a relationship, and of course even an artistic program.   Competent execution of this small gesture is more than quenching a thirst or finding a chair.  It inspires confidence in the entire enterprise and in one’s role in it.

The tricky part is that this is not about robotically “showing up, showing face”.  This has to come from a genuine place, personally and organizationally.

When you look through your astrolabe, what do you see?  Are you oceanic, generous, thorough and trustworthy?  Or are you feeling the pressure of daily problems and having a hard time looking up from your piles?  Is art inspiring your life with a spirit of generosity, or grinding you down under these challenging circumstances? If the latter, what can you do about it?

We’re looking into this at the upcoming Innovators Forum, a lovely event we do every year that’s part of Advertising Week.  It takes place this year October 4.  Stand by for more.

I hope your summer was a good one for your body, and may your fall be astronomical.