Arts Marketing for Dummies

I spent the ’90s working at non-profit arts groups, mostly Seattle Opera. It was an interesting vantage point because the Opera reputedly–if you believed the people I talked to at the Rep and Symphony–had it all: Not only were there the artistic benefits of gesamstkunstwerk-ing, but we were understood to shower with money from donors and the ticket-buying public. A live orchestra! Million-dollar sets! International opera stars!

Opera was a license to print money. Especially among performing arts organizations in Seattle, the Opera stood out for its annual budgets in excess of $10 million.

But the reality was that, like every other arts organization, the Opera spent a little bit more each year than it had made, and so there was a last-minute push each spring to “close the gap” and “help us balance the budget.” Even record-breaking subscription and single ticket sales, we’d inform the 100,000 people on the Opera’s mailing list, makes up only half the Opera’s income. The rest is thanks to your donations. Please give.

Years after, fellow SunBreaker RvO, also an Opera alum, and I used to half-jokingly talk about writing an Arts Marketing for Dummies book. There are plenty of arts marketing books out there, of course. But ours would be different. Ours would actually respond to the longer-term economic trends that were making the old, inefficient arts business model unsustainable.

But then, we thought, who would buy it? There was a reason neither of us worked in the arts anymore–we’d both gotten burnt out by the continual chore of persuading colleagues and leadership to embark on necessary change. (Near the end, my morale suffered a little: “Work harder, not smarter!” I used to tell people.)

In 2009, I went to an arts conference, and discovered that almost nothing had changed in the intervening decade. Rather, things had gotten much worse. But arts organizations had resorted to belt-tightening; they were going to starve themselves out of a funding famine, despite the research that showed the problem wasn’t purely recessionary:

While it may take five years to climb out of this current recession, this crisis is masking the effects of a five-to-ten year shift in philanthropy in response to the global economy. It’s not that the well has gone dry, necessarily, but it’s being decentralized and outsourced where possible.

Peter Senge gave a talk at the conference:

He qualified the problem-solving mindset that came up with sustainability with the creative orientation that asks, “What are we trying to create?” (Dinosaurs, in their way, were probably very interested in sustainability.) Any arts organization wants to matter, to be relevant, but our impression is that Senge isn’t betting on any whose relevance is primarily theoretical or abstract. For him, the arts matter if they arise from how we actually live, not from how we like to think we live.

Tragically, this was in June, and so most of the fundraisers had balancing the budget on their minds, rather than revisiting their organization’s mission and business model.

I don’t mean to go head to head with Senge, but he was arguing a strawman sustainability, using the word to mean “survival,” and questioning whether some arts groups deserved life-support. But the principles of sustainability, when it comes to arts organizations, help leadership ask the right questions about the structure of their arts-delivery systems.

For instance, how much of what arts groups could be said to stint on (or waste) is required by self-preservation?

Gad-playwright Paul Mullin makes the trenchant observation that theatres offer jobs to everyone associated with theatre but playwrights. Arts administrators at larger houses frequently make six figures with benefits; playwrights…do not. The point is not that anyone is being overpaid; the point is that someone very important seems to have been left out. Where is our local playwright non-profit (or cooperative) that seeks to leverage those resources? (Rule: Form a more perfect union.)

Because self-preservation is the defining aspect of arts institutional life–ironically, the non-profit model virtually guarantees it–the business model warps in that direction. People begin to have trouble distinguishing between best business practices and those that have worked in the past to pay everyone’s salaries. Over time, the institution’s existence–its habits and proclivities–mediates the art presented. It’s not just a question of the popularity of one work versus another–it’s a question of box office receipts. That’s what’s being discussed when the directors meet: saleability.

It should be discussed! Don’t get me wrong. But, as before, is anything important being left out?

Jeremy Barker, our At-Large Arts contributor, forwarded me some “new thinking,” that reminded me of the kinds of solutions that conflict with institutional values. Joanna Harmon in Minneapolis asks:

What if small companies and loose collectives of theatre artists were enabled by a single group of administrators, rather than each company reinventing its administrative wheel?

This will sound more or less interesting to you–I’m willing to bet–depending upon your role in arts administration. Anyone currently “making it” in the arts will be less enthusiastic about downsizing administration even if the result is that more art is being produced. That’s not odd at all. But consider that very difference: What if administrators’ fortunes weren’t tied to any one institution? What sort of choices might they make?

We have an example, actually, in ACT. ACT is both a theatre and, as owner of its venue, a producer. Not coincidentally, ACT has also invented the ACT Pass. It’s innovative to adopt a pure membership model, yes, but it could easily be the last thing a standard 5-play-per-season theatre tried before it went out of business. ACT is not acting like a theatre. (What is Pacific Northwest Ballet’s relationship to Seattle’s dance community? What about Seattle Symphony and chamber music? Too often, partnerships are outreach-oriented, which are more burdensome than synergistic.)

I would take Harmon’s question a step farther. The optimal use of resources is a tenet of sustainability, and as it happens, arts administrators are not the soulless quasi-corporate drones they are at times portrayed to be. So it’s already the case that most arts organizations collaborate and share a great deal, more than you might expect if you considered how competitive the marketplace is. The problem is, they collaborate inefficiently.

To some arts patrons’ chagrin, for instance, arts groups frequently broaden their marketing base by trading direct mailing lists. But it’s relatively unregulated, depending on who is doing the trading–on the arts-goer side, there is no master arts-attendee list you can opt into and set your preferences for. Instead, every single organization reinvents the database, usually in their own way, and the results are sometimes anarchic.

The situation is unlikely to change because, at an institutional level, there’s no apparent incentive and the loss of control disturbs leadership. Thus, database management and mining remains a core function of organizations theoretically devoted to art production. (Rule: We create art and outsource/outshare the rest.)

In the same way, theatres share lighting, costumes, props. Some share box offices. But these are usually contingent partnerships and collaborations–it’s not a true pooled ownership because no single institution has the right, after all, to donate its resources at what might be its own expense. They have a duty to their donors, not necessarily the health of the greater arts community.

So it’s necessary, I think, to look beyond the individual arts institution, and even the non-profit model, to consider the whole arts community ecology. (Can we move beyond opportunism in siting arts venues, so that disruptions don’t eliminate spaces? Cf. Odd Fellows Hall and 619 Western.)

As I said, this was all supposed to go into a book. There’s too much to discuss–I can only hint at the scope of reorganization around shared function–and of course, the arts being what they are, there are many over-educated people willing to argue about minutiae rather than broader principle. However, I’m happy if this is a book that writes its own history–Seattle happens to have strong entrepreneurial spirit, and arts start-ups are refreshingly eager to innovate (if only because, just starting out, they have so little institutional capital to coast on). Go ahead, kinder, macht Neues!