You need to find a way to justify your worth to your community — and at the same time, prepare for bad news, too.
The buzz inside your nonprofit arts organization is louder than outside the walls. Much louder.
As in, if someone is not completely tuned in to what’s going on at your particular arts organization — either your performances or your impact — they’re just won’t care. You may gush about that symphony, that guest artist, that soloist, that play, that star, that choreographer, that dancer, that opera, or that conductor until the bovines return to your humble abode, but it’s likelier the outside world doesn’t know what’s happening at your joint than does. Even with reviews. Even with advertising. And even at the Rotary meeting immediately after you’ve spent 20 minutes at the daïs talking about it.
If you don’t believe that, do the research yourself. Stand one block away from your nearest visible sign and ask people on the street whether they’ve heard of your company, heard of any events happening at your company, and heard of the amazing and stupefying thingamajig that’s going on right now. You may be surprised at the results, which is a shame, because your marketing people have been telling you this for years now.
Now, add to that the relative disinclination out there for going out, especially going out to see an arts event, especially going out to see an intellectually stimulating (read: elitist polemic) arts event, and you’ll see why audience expansion is not the answer to your issues.
Finally, and I know this is hard for you, add to that the distinct possibility that your play/concert/exhibit/opera/ballet/etc. might be, to put it bluntly, awful. Atrocious. Dreadful. Loathsome. Rotten.
Really, really bad.
Art is rotten all the time. Or rather, some people will always hate your art (if that makes you feel better). Hope for the best, but expect the worst when it comes to your community’s reaction to your hard, unstable choice of work.
“If people don’t want to go to the picture, nobody can stop them.”
— Samuel Goldwyn
Then there is the matter of relevance. Relevance can be measured. The more you feel compelled to describe something as relevant to today’s times, the less relevant it is in the first place. Further, if your community is not directly benefiting by the charity work you perform (which is your task, after all, as a 501(C)(3) corporation), the superficially arbitrary nature of the choice of your work is all the more dispensable (in the literal sense of that word). If the community around you doesn’t really change much after you close down, you weren’t all that relevant to begin with, were you?
Here’s what to do: test your work against the needs of the community. Do the same kind of research you did above to gauge the sizzle around your organization, but do it in the most efficacious way for research. In the early aughts, I was the managing director for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF). If you’ve read my work, you know that it was an eventful experience, he wrote euphemistically.
When Winton “Red” Blount paid for the entirety of the building and placed it in (ostensibly) his backyard on the less-populated west side of town, there had been no community outcry for its existence. Red’s wife, Carolyn, sat on the board of ASF in the 1980s when they were located in Anniston, Alabama, in an non-airconditioned school gym in the summer months. She loved Shakespeare. The company came to her for money, she told her husband, and he wrote off all of ASF’s accumulated debt and built a new home for the company. At the time, it was the largest gift from an individual to any theater organization in America, well over $20 million in 1985.
But again, there was no populist movement to build a new, quite large theater company in Montgomery of any kind, let alone a Shakespeare Festival. Over the years, especially just after Red died in 2002, money became scarcer and local audiences shunned Shakespeare in favor of musicals about Patsy Cline, Elvis, and the girl groups of the 1960s. Cultural tourists, however, wanted to see Shakespeare — but they came from over 250 miles away.
Almost the day after Red died, the Alabama state house cancelled line-item funding for ASF, the whole of which was earmarked toward bringing in schoolchildren from every county in the state to see the work of Shakespeare. There is another story about how that funding was “found,” but it’s irrelevant to this particular story.
The only thing that’s important, at this point, is that Alabamians were pretty much done with Shakespeare’s works. They meant nothing to locals (except the ultra-elite and über-wealthy). But the artistic leadership didn’t want to acknowledge that. Neither did the 88-member board, ironically; many never even came to Shakespeare productions.
It was time to act, but you never know what can happen when you rock boats, do you?
I felt the time had come to do the research, even if we didn’t want to accept the answer. I put together a plan called “saving william shakespeare,” in which we removed any or all obstacles to attendance. The plan called for lowering the price for each of the five (out of nine) productions that were written by Shakespeare in the coming season by more than half. In addition, the price of season tickets — purchased almost exclusively by those within 20 minutes of the facility — would drop considerably. Price sensitivity was (and probably still is) a major issue in a relatively small (population 120,000 at the time), depressed, Deep South city, so in order to see whether they weren’t coming because of price or programming, the plan removed price from the equation.
The point of the experiment (using the scientific method) was to discover whether the company was being community-minded by presenting the works of Shakespeare. If so, build on it. If not, the best way to increase productivity is to eliminate that which is unproductive.
It wasn’t a perfect plan. It may not have even been a good plan. It needed input, feedback, and changes from all the relevant parties. It was too simplistic as written (a PowerPoint presentation). Unfortunately, right after presenting the plan, I was presented my walking papers, after which I nearly sprinted back to Seattle. “saving william shakespeare” never happened.
I had some great days in Alabama. The final ones were not among them. And the consequences tied to other stakeholders’ wholesale terror of discovering the company’s truth stuck with me.
Inside the brick-laden walls of the building, out of sight of the grandiloquent lobby and ostentatious donor’s lounge, lay a utilitarian, dingy office warren with not enough space, separated cubicles, deteriorating portable classrooms, spartan and crumbling shops, and too much deference to the managing director (me) and the artistic director, whose office spaces were gigantic in comparison. Regal on the outside, ragged on the inside. It bespoke a culture in which the academic, precious nature of Shakespeare’s work (regardless of the manner in which it was presented — Elizabethan, modern, or otherwise) never jibed with the community’s needs, only its elite’s wants. ASF is a wild experiment that continues to this day and its work is different from what it was in the early aughts, which is as it should be. I hear things are good there. Otherwise, what was that line in Macbeth again? Oh, right…
So, how are you justifying the work you do at your nonprofit arts organization?
Or do you stop at “Hope for the best?”
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