The second tip: for a nonprofit organization to work, pandering is off-limits. Take it from a notorious panderer from a family of panderers.
When your nonprofit arts organization’s tax exemption comes to mind, do you believe that it is a right earned by paying money to a lawyer to file the paperwork, a privilege that requires promise fulfillment to the people of your state, or merely a legal description of the operations of your company?
There is a correct answer to this, despite what you may be thinking. It’s obvious.
When you decide correctly that it is a privilege (not an earned right or a dull legal description), you have a chance to succeed in garnering indispensability. We’ve already established that in previous columns, books, and various diatribes.
Now, in this new/old world order of anti-arts, anti-education, and anti-truth political muckraking euphemistically calling itself “populism,” there is a saber dance tied to the delivery of good having to do with the dumbing down of America. Germany went through it in the 1930s, and we can look back at those times to determine our own outcome, at least in the arts-mosphere we inhabit.
Carl Sagan, noted and mostly beloved astronomer and planetary scientist, put it this way about 30 years ago (sadly and predictably, his foreboding happened):
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline; unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true — we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
Given that, you might make the gravely incorrect decision to pander to that same lowest common denominator in your artmaking, your charity, and your revenue appeals. You might decide to give in to the “celebration of ignorance,” a conceit that will not serve you well. It’s a mistake.
Not surprisingly, people chafe at the idea of you talking down to them. The mistake is made when you tell yourself that you have to “make it simpler,” or “lower the expectations you have” of your audience. Even the idea of “dumbing down” connotes the kind of cynical elitist posturing that puts the nonprofit arts industry in the soup in the first place. It places you in the position of “I know more than you, little public, so let me talk to you as though you’re a moron.”
In other words, you can’t dumb down unless you believe you are so intellectually superior that you have to make a deliberate effort to speak to the hoi polloi. I know, because it’s something I’ve done numerous times, causing even my closest friends to roll their eyes my way.
It comes from growing up in a family with two valedictorian brothers older than I am, both of whom engage in a sort of pompous dual to see who can be the most supercilious, as though it were a trophy to be coveted. While I won’t share their names or photos here, I hope you can glean from the following photo what kind of kids they were and the kind men they are.
While they are much better at this pomposity thing than I am, I am no saint on these matters. And even my Jewish family should canonize my sister for dealing with this kind of better-than-thou mishigas. Thanks, Kathy. So, I understand the pickle, and it’s a sour one.
A lot of the problem stems from “artistic vision,” a celebrated non-thing that guides too many arts organizations. If your “artistic vision” comes from a place of community aid — rather than personal choice, acclaim, excellence, ticket sales, external economic impact, or the general idea that the arts make people more educated (without testing that hypothesis because you don’t want to know if it’s not actually true for your nonprofit arts organization) — then you might have a chance for success. But then, artistic vision really has nothing to do with community aid, so it might be difficult to make that argument with this particular populace.
Artistic vision leads down a slippery slope to the notion of “leading the audience,” irrespective of what your audience is. If you only believe, for example, that only your paying audience and donors represent your community, you’ve already blown the assignment as a charitable organization. Change, go commercial, or just close up shop — you’re hoovering precious dollars from worthy nonprofits of all kinds.
Leading the audience, by itself, is not a terrible thing. In the literal sense, it has to do with the leader finding methods, symbols, and manners that the particular audience can recognize immediately and act in their best interest. It is what the political powers currently in office have done (cynically, but hey, it worked).
Back to you. In the case of too many failing nonprofit arts organizations, executives are leading an audience without being members of it. By “audience,” we don’t mean the people who plunked down money to sit in seats and view art. (They are irrelevant to charitable activities.) We mean the members of the community directly affected by the charitable work your organization does.
Can you relate to the people in your community without knowing their needs? Without listening? Without bias? Without a need to characterize an artistic vision as some sort of dominating principle of a whole charitable organization? Do you feel the need to “dumb down” your message and talk to them like they’re four? Worse, do you talk to them, as I do in too many of these articles, like they have Ph.Ds.?
Sorry about that. I’ll dumb it down for you if you want.
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