Trend and Options Analysis in Feasibility Planning

Feasibility studies and plans for arts and cultural facilities, districts, or other development typically begin with what I call UMEF, for User, Market, Economic, and Financial analyses. Very often, however, the users have already vociferously stated their wants and needs, and the market is pretty well identified. So why hire an outsider to do a feasibility study?

Many studies are commissioned because there is need for outside objective quantification of those stated needs, and to test the viability of the market projections. But for an analysis to do anything more than copy down everything everyone states, the analyst needs an essential skill, knowledge base and context. Call it the ability to be a futurist, to look ahead 10-20 years and intuit audiences, user groups, and economic realities of the field.

I’ve never seen a cultural facility RFP that really gets at this. Imagine seeing the request for a study that says “we want to assess the impact of the huge population of boomers entering retirement, combined with the under 40 population that has dramatically different views of culture and entertainment on this proposed facility in 10-20 years. Will the boomers increase their arts participation when they retire? Will they participate in the same ways/frequency as the current retirees in our audience? Will they and the under 40 crowd – today’s real entertainment consumers – come together to form a shared interest in what we offer? We want to think about the kind of building or buildings that will be most useful and valuable to our community in 10 years. We want to assess the options for what will stimulate arts and cultural growth in our community. We want to go beyond enumerating what is, into seeing what might be, and then figure out options for getting there.”

A feasibility study should be the chance to look into the future and identify what will likely be different, to consider all the trends that will be shaping our cultural consumption, to think about the role of arts and culture in the community of tomorrow, to consider all sorts of options, to envision options that haven’t yet been considered. Then communities can take a very long view on the economic value and costs of each option, and really understand the risks, benefits and outcomes of building for culture.

Social Networking (Your Neighbors) at Work in Audience Development

Social networking isn’t just for the web. Take it down to its old fashioned roots of neighbors talking to neighbors, friends asking friends, and it is an essential but truly undervalued element of effective audience development for the arts, museums, entertainment – all types of cultural participation.

I’ve been studying this phenomenon for a while. I first came upon it when doing analytics concerning the annual audience growth for a major opera company client. I kept finding that in high rise appartment/condo buildings, our direct marketing strategy took us to Sue in unit 204 and maybe also to Ted in unit 916. And here we were at the results end of things, noticing that in addition to Sue in 204 and Ted in 916, we’d picked up Alice in 206 and Jo in 917. Hmm. Just to see if this was a random occurance, I tracked it through and found that over 30% of newcomers appeared linked to someone nearby. And it wasn’t just limited to high rises. How likely would it be that Yvonne at 516 S. Sidney Ave. just randomly turned up next to Terry at 519 S. Sidney Ave., especially since I saw – through mapping – that we hadn’t tapped anyone else in a multiblock area. Hmm again.

I’ve now been tracking this consistently throughout the last six months. In dense metro areas, the neighbor-to-neighbor network is unfailingly (and easily) evident in high rises. In suburban areas, you’ll find the likely newcomer lives a house or two away or maybe across the street. (Check it by mapping it.)

I just saw it again this morning, which has inspired this entry. I was analyzing an audience in the metro DC area. Three months ago, the “base” list included three units in the same Rockville, Maryland building – units 125, 225, and 409 had all been prior attenders and were as a result targeted this fall by direct mail. Lo and behold, not only did they buy, but they brought? marketed to? handed materials to? units 121, 704, and 1605, all of which also bought and came. So far in analyzing this particular campaign, I have seen dozens of the same scenario played out, and I am confident we’ll see that 30% of the newcomers are friend or neighbor-driven.

A few months ago I posted a question about this on Facebook and Twitter, and most everyone who responded said that they would rarely go to arts, culture (i.e. lectures, readings) and entertainment alone, and that if their spouse/family/friend didn’t want to go to something they really wanted to attend, they’d find a neighbor or call another friend to go. Only friends who travel extensively said they were comfortable going to paid/ticketed events on their own.

Its accepted wisdom in marketing that happy current customers become top sales force members in recruit of new customers. This foundational concept is under-used when it comes to building arts and cultural participation, but it is true. Its not “group sales:” for most of these folks, the very concept is a turn off. But it is deep and real, and has the ability to add 30% or more to your audience if you do it right.

Cautious Optimism about Audience Growth

Today brought a lot of economic news that leads to some cautious optimism about prospects for audience growth. Lux retailers like Saks are seeing profits, as are mainstreamers like Target. These are important indicators for arts and museum ticket sales.

Among our own clients, ArtsMarket is seeing some signs that lead to cautious optimism as well. Single ticket admissions to well priced events and exhibits are doing very well, and in some cases are soaring. But retail sales patterns predict arts buying patterns: people who bought high priced tickets last year are sitting a few rows back this year, and are buying at the last minute (and with cash). Even multi-millionaires are buying single tickets rather than subscriptions. Overall, counts are strong, but margins are slim and only work when costs are held to the minimum.

This all suggests to us that holiday promos are a must, in preparing for the months ahead. Gift cards are important as are pre-holiday promos for tickets to use in the new year. Get out ahead now to hold on in February. Build your own momentum.

There is a silver lining. Those increased counts that offer low margin now will gradually lead to better returns as the economy rebounds. Build your audience counts today to reap rewards by next summer.

Fixing Charitable Giving in the Arts

If you haven’t seen Monday’s Wall Street Journal special section Report on Philanthropy and Charitable Giving, go find it on line. Make sure your favorite funder gets a copy.

Pablo Eisenberg’s superb and provocative cover story, “What’s Wrong with Charitable Giving and How to Fix It” hits the nail on the head in calling for nine fundamental changes in the way that foundations of all sizes give out their money to all types of nonprofits. (See link in blogroll to the left.) His top three priorities are to increase the amount of payout from 5% to 6%; to increase general operating support; and to increase multi-year funding. The first priority takes an act of Congress. The other two are common sense. So are his other points, including simplifying application and reporting procedures and adopting rolling grant making.

Let’s get the first priority dealt with first. Eisenberg argues that “an increase in the payout rate to 6% in all grants would eventually add about $10 billion a year to the coffers of nonprofit organizations, to the approximately $40 million that it is estimated that foundations now give.” Yes, you read that right. $10 BILLION would be added to the $40 million. He goes on to say that “Foundations claim that such an increase would jeopardize the perpetuity of their assets, yet a number of studies argue that their assets could be maintained with a payout of 7% or 8%. The Obama administration and Congress should act quickly to increase the payout to 6% in grants, and the President should use his bully pulpit to pressure foundations to give much more than they are currently giving.” (Well, my sense is that most foundations are giving as much as they can to save nonprofit organizations in this dire time. But I fully agree: Congress has to let the payout go up to 6% or we will simply lose our vital nonprofit sector.)

As for Eisenberg’s other key recommendations – increased operating support, multi-year funding, and rolling grant making – they are essential changes that have to happen to keep the arts sector alive. Many foundations, to their vast credit, have already scrapped their various grant programs in favor of general operating support – at least through the predictable future. But the very notion is still politically charged among funders who have traditionally used grant making to address their own priorities. Equally charged is the idea of multi-year funding and overall larger annual allocations so that organizations have a chance to really do what they set out to do, rather than accomplish only a fraction of their goals.

In the arts, the past/current model has been proven, and proven, and proven to not work. In her report to Grantmakers in the Arts – the association of foundations and public agencies that fund the arts – Holly Sidford recently wrote that “the nonprofit arts business model is shaky, for many reasons. One important reason is that the practices of both nonprofits and funders have not recognized that there are different kinds of money (in the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s terms: build, buy, and burn capital), a financial diet too rich in project grants erodes the fundamental viability of any nonprofit organization. A commitment by more funders to better understand and respect capitalization principles in their grantmaking, coupled with more open-minded exploration of ways funders can support hybrid and alternative financial models, would increase responsible practices in the future. A corollary to this is the need to adequately capitalize collaborative ventures.”

For decades and through a number of recessionary cycles everyone involved in arts funding has known that the emperor has no clothes – the funding approaches adopted and used in both the public and private sector do not and have not and will not work to create a healthy nonprofit arts sector. It was 1966 when economists William J. Baumol and William Bowen first studied and wrote about the fundamental earnings gap within the performing arts and here we are today, still with the same earnings gap and the same undercapitalization and underfunding of the arts.

Write a letter to the President. We need that 6% payout rate.
Talk to your favorite foundations. It has been 44 years since the earnings gap was documented as undeniable. Isn’t it time to fix charitable giving so that the arts survive and (maybe) thrive?

Research we Need (in Marketing the Arts)

Its time to notch up the science behind marketing the arts. Are your brochures tuned to elicit real responsiveness? Is your web site similarly tuned? Your post cards? Your promotional flashes in any form? Have you used consumer research to maximize your promotions?

I’m constantly surprised by inadequate visuals and graphic elements that are used to sell the world’s most visual and emotional of all products – the arts. My guess is that a lot of the poor field-wide promotions are due to: 1) A reliance on in-kind design or a utilization of lay graphics teams; 2) A lack of belief in marketing as a science, and as such, a portfolio of proven approaches that WILL make a difference if correctly used.

I’m happily posting a link here (see below) to the expert writing of Jean-Pierre Lacroix, President and Founder of Shikatani Lacroix and author of (among other booiks) The Blink Factor (1990), a book that has been on the “favorites” portion of my book shelf since it was published.

In his recent white paper on promotional packaging, Lacroix shares some critical elements of consumer responsiveness that will benefit any arts promotion. For example, he writes that “while consumers typically read from left to right, top to bottom, the research indicates that words are recalled better if they are perceived from the righthand side of the individual, or in the case of packaging, the right side of the face panel. Pictorial or non-verbal cues are more successful if coming from the left-hand side. Brain laterality will only affect material on the outer sides of the pack. There is no evidence of laterality for centralizing elements of packaging.

“In addition, based on other packaging studies, 40% of all communication consumers absorb is visually
oriented, and 80% is driven by the use of color and shape. These insights support the need for
promotional packaging flashes that complement consumers’ absorbtion of information, leveraging how
information is viewed and retained.

“For some packs’ copy, such as brand name or flavor description, it is important to enhance recall and
research suggests that these elements should be placed centrally or on the right-hand side of the pack.
Pack flashes function as pictorial devices despite containing verbal elements, and therefore should be
positioned on the left hand side. Nearly twice as many respondents who saw a promotional flash on the left-hand side of the pack were able to correctly recall the promotion. In addition to its visual effects, packaging also communicates its shape, size, weight, and texture through its tactility.”

Go read the balance of his white paper. Sure, he is writing about cereal packages and how we as consumers make choices as we move through grocery stores. But our field needs this level of detailed examination concerning consumer responsiveness to all sales and promotional materials.

And, by the way, think of testing your promotional materials even when you adhere to the level of science Lacroix describes. When was the last time you used a focus group or consumer panel to evaluate prospective responsiveness to your marketing and promotional materials? Can you be sure you have created materials that enhance recall, that ensure positive response, and that keep yoru targets from wandering somewhere (some other art/entertainment) else?

How many thousands of dollars are you betting on your next season? Can you risk all that expense, and all that revenue to anything less than research-based marketing?

http://www.sldesignlounge.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/PromoPackaging.pdf

Invest in Arts Marketing: Its Your Future

Let’s say this clearly: it has never been harder to create, build, and maintain an arts audience. There has never been more attrition, lower retention, more ways needed to connect, more prospecting needed, to more numbers, to derive small incremental gains. Toss out yesterday’s level of investment. Take it up x 4. Or x 10.

There are more and more reasons not to attend, to walk through the doors, to sit and interact with the art on stage or with the art on the wall. The economy and lack of discretionary dollars, fragmentation in our lives and interests, inertia, lack of social connectedness with others in the audience or on stage, lack of time, lack of intellectual curiosity, lack of winningness to invest in the metal state of emotional and intellectual response and reflection that art demands of us. And, not to forget Shanon from Arizona’s comment in response to my last blog – the complete and utter self absorption that comes with endlessly customizing earphones/text/screen handheld/Twitter/Facebook to reinforce self rather than encounter with minds open to exploring the different and other that is art. She’s talking this problem v/v high schoolers, but it increasingly pervades all generations. It may be that new media’s foundational concept of 24/7 self-absoption is the greatest challenge that arts participation warriers have ever faced.

I think of the monster challenge, then, that is what arts marketing now faces every day, and the level of investment that HAS to be made to find, prospect, emotionally connect to and then retain audiences.

A couple of weeks ago, I concluded a year-long consultancy with a fine Canadian theatre company, during which we created marketing systems, tested them through fire, and evaluated what should last. They did significantly increase their audience count, but didn’t reach their revenue goals because it cost more than planned, and they needed more discounting tactics to get people in and back in the door than they planned. It left the board and staff collectively saying “it was so hard, so expensive, took so much time….was it worth it? Is this our future? Are you SURE there is no other way than a lifetime commitment to marketing at this level?”

Yes, yes, and yes. It will cost more, require more prospecting with lower returns, take more back office time, and be ever more strategic – requiring more and more organizational skill. It will be less fad, more investment. It will grow from detailed ROI projections, detailed Lifetime Value calculations. It will be more investment in the pipeline – constantly ensuring a stream of newcomers to enter the door, and then winning them back. It will be much more releationship marketing to build that return. It will take nothing for chance.

Today, we are marketing to the cultural market of one. It takes a lot of investment to find and connect to that “one,” to keep and nurture that “one,” so as to eventually realize the continued support of that “one.” Today there are hundreds of niche arts and cultural audiences and interests: no single “arts-interested potential audience.” Realizing this, and aligning your organization’s investment accordingly, will position you to gain the one-by-one audience growth that is the arts future.

Ignoring it is…denial.

Rewarding the Creators

There’s a must read column in today’s on-line Forbes by Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant Saramana Mitra. Anyone who thinks about the role of creativity, of invention – the absolute thinking processes we learn from and through the arts – should ponder it.

Writing about our economy, Mitra says,

“We’re not having any recovery. We need the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the creators, the scientists, the technologists–those who build value, those who create jobs–to lead us out of this nightmare. Not a bunch of speculators who make money regardless of whether value gets created or destroyed. In fact, many of them are incentivized to destroy value by spreading fake rumors about companies and stocks, and they do so often. Some get caught, most don’t.

And our talented youth gets seduced by this profession of speculation known for its easy and abundantly flowing financial rewards, avoiding those that require much greater intellectual capacity. Most importantly, very early in their lives, our talented youth come to realize that fields that may earn them a Nobel Prize–cancer research or multi-core computing–may not make them rich. But moving money from here to there will.

And thus, we lose Berkeley Ph.Ds in nuclear physics to hedge funds and MIT computer scientists capable of delivering computing to 6 billion people to derivative manipulation on Wall Street.”

Mitra’s focus on nuclear physics and computer scientists could well have included the documentary film maker, the author, the composer, the designer whose creativity and innovation should also lead the way.

Until we see that creativity is fundamental to economic as well as social progress, and make creativity a fundamental (and attractive) value throughout our culture, we’re stuck. Intellectual property is the currency of the future. What drives its creation?

Creativity and innovation.

Building the Future’s Arts Buildings

As an arts-facility planner whose teens are mobile-messaging, YouTubing, Ituning and 24/7 media engaged arts active kids, I can’t help but wonder about the vast divide in what we think arts facilities should be – most especially performing arts facilities – and what our kids will want them to be in the next ten years.

I’ve recently been facilitating some planning for a high school auditorium/performance center, and in the process have read hundreds of web posts from high schools all over the country planning new auditoria. In these searches, I keep looking for discussions of the ways kids learn and engage in the arts today – maybe not in class, but on their own – as a predicter of the arts facilities of the future. Its a whole different world out there, but the vast majority of high schools are still building performance halls for the band, orchestra, and high school musical.

Now, I love the band, orchestra, and musical side of arts learning as much as anyone could. But where are the sound-proof rehearsal spaces for the plugged in bands, the computer studios for the composers, or the film stages for the film programs? The editing studios? What about the black box theatres that also serve as the school television studio? For that matter, what about the small experimental theatre spaces, or the acoustically superb recital spaces? (There are more of these out there, to be sure, but still not that many…)

I’ve been reading Henry Jenkin’s report for the MacArthur Foundation, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, at the same time as thinking about arts facilities, and it is pretty provacative. Through the arts facility lens, Jenkins to me suggests we are living in two simultaneous zones. One zone is buildings (and teaching) that reinforce tradition. The other zone – which is where our kids are, right now – requires us to find new ways to enrich and transform arts learning facilities to match this amazing participatory culture that is no longer the future.