Posts Tagged ‘theater’
November 17, 2011
There could be worse ways to handle succession planning than the one chosen by the Miami City Ballet, but it would be hard to think of one. The Board of Directors, concerned that the ballet company would collapse when its famous artistic director Edward Villella retired, decided to test its own theory by forcing him out before he was ready to leave. Some Board members blame the outcome on Mr. Villella, who apparently refused to greet several of them at the company’s gala; but it’s hard to blame him when one of them called a meeting with him for the purpose of handing him a book on succession planning.
The Times article reaches for the classic suits-versus-artists narrative, saying that Villella’s ouster reflected the Board’s determination to place business stability above artistic product; but that’s unfair. The Board is responsible for the continued health of the company, and a failure to consider new leadership when the current leader is 75 would be a dereliction of duty. But what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
As Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre Board learned back in 2000, you don’t call in the company’s artistic engine and hand him his walking papers–or even the sort of broad hint contained in the gift of a book about succession planning. You’re talking to someone about his life’s work and his passion, and you can’t talk to him as if he were a CEO who had been recompensed all these years in cash and expected to be recompensed the same way in retirement. An artistic director who is compelled to retire–and yes, indeed, some of them need to be–has to be offered a form of compensation congruent with what he’s been receiving up until now, something involving artistic control–even if it’s only the control inherent in leading the search for his own successor.
And even if the artistic director’s retirement creates the opportunity for the Board to step into its proper role of leadership–say, supervising the managing director instead of having the artistic director do so–that’s an opportunity to be pursued once the new artistic director begins. From the Board’s standpoint, having the managing and artistic directors report co-equally is a way to lighten the artistic director’s load while assuring that the Board itself receives comprehensive information. But from the standpoint of the incumbent artistic director, it’s a slap in the face, and suggests that the Board wants to interpose a business person (and a businessperson’s veto) between the artist and his vision.
Of course the Board IS the boss of the company, including the artistic director. But the most effective bosses wear their power lightly, in cooperation rather than conflict with the artists they mean to be serving. By this measure, the Board of the Miami City Ballet just fell on its face.
A word to wise arts Boards everywhere.
Tags:501c3, arts groups, Arts Organizations, ballet, Board of Directors, Boards of Directors, Edward Villella, Executive Director, Executive Directors, governance, human resources, Management Advice Day tip, nonprofit, Nonprofit management, not for profit, personnel, succession planning. Miami City Ballet, theater, Victory Gardens Theatre
Posted in Arts Organizations, Boards of Directors, Coverage of nonprofits, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General, Personnel Issues, Succession planning | Leave a Comment »
November 3, 2011
Thanks to Thomas Cott of You’ve Cott Mail for pointing the Nonprofiteer to this article in Crain’s New York Business about the value of collaboration among small arts organizations as typified by the Lower Manhattan Arts League.
The league — which includes small groups like Access Theater and larger organizations such as Dance New Amsterdam and the Children’s Museum of the Arts — has monthly meetings where constituents help each other with everything from fundraising to legal advice. The groups have created a downtown cultural festival, which they produce in the fall and spring. The members even apply for some grants as one entity and lobby the city government as a pack. Individually, some members with budgets as small as $100,000 are barely on funders’ radar, but as a group the members generate around $14 million in economic activity per year and employ roughly 1,200 people full- and part-time. After years when none of the groups were able to score a grant from American Express, for example, the consortium applied together in 2009 and was awarded $100,000. They divvied up the money according to the size of each budget.
While the cheery tone of the article elides some of the serious difficulties arts organizations face in aligning their missions and needs with one another, the point is nonetheless well-taken: organizations too small to get attention on their own may be big enough when combined with others to secure foundation funding and government cooperation.
Such collaborations also serve as living ripostes to the chronic funder complaint that the supply of arts organizations exceeds the demand for them: if these disparate groups can work together without cannibalizing their audiences or funding, they must not be duplicating each other’s work. Or, as it is written: the whole [collaborative network] is greater than the sum of its parts.
Tags:501c3, Advocacy, arts groups, Arts Organizations, charity, collaboration, donors, foundations, Fundraising, Management Advice Day tip, Mission, nonprofit, Nonprofit management, not for profit, philanthropy, public funding for the arts, Relations with funders, theater
Posted in Advocacy, Arts Organizations, Coverage of nonprofits, Government grants, Mergers, acquisitions and consolidations, Mission, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General, Relations with funders | 3 Comments »
December 8, 2010
H/t the indispensable Nonprofit Quarterly‘s Nonprofit Newswire: a congregation in Anchorage is running a “Mitzvah Mall,” at which what’s for sale is donations to nonprofits. A Festival of Light indeed!
And h/t the equally indispensable You’ve Cott Mail, a clipping service about arts and arts management: United States Artists has created a Website to allow patronage of individual artists by individual donors, without the embarrassment of face-to-face requests or the notion that you have to be a Medici to support artists.
What an elegant and lovely idea for the season—individual philanthropy, organized collectively.
Tags:501c3, arts groups, Arts Organizations, charity, charity promotion, donors, Fundraising, grantmaking, grants, nonprofit, Nonprofit management, nonprofits, not for profit, philanthropy, Private Philanthropy, Relations with funders, social capital, theater
Posted in Arts Organizations, Coverage of nonprofits, Fundraising, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General, Private Philanthropy, Relations with funders | Leave a Comment »
July 23, 2010
[An excerpt of this posting appears on the Huffington Post, in the Impact section.]
The Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones notwithstanding, the problem with the Chase Community Giving program isn’t that it lets “civilians”–non-expert non-critics–decide which theater companies deserve a $20,000 one-time no-strings grant. The problem is that it pretends to do that–Let the People Decide!–while actually turning theater companies into marketing satellites of Chase Bank. Institutions poor and weak enough to be moved by a $20,000 carrot–to which the competition was explicitly restricted–recite the bank’s name relentlessly to their audiences. That’s a lot of advertising for very little money. Of course, all corporate giving is advertising–but this is of a special, insidious kind.
The Nonprofiteer doesn’t believe in “crowd-source philanthropy,” because it’s not philanthropy at all: it’s “crowd-manipulation marketing.” Chase has gotten hundreds if not thousands of little charities to demand that their audiences provide contact information to the bank and subject themselves to commercial targeting for the good of the cause.
These crowd-manipulation marketing programs (pioneered by Pepsi and American Express, doubtless with many more corporate behemoths yet to come) also set up a system which rewards the nonprofits with the greatest Internet presence or savvy, which is not the same as giving the money to the neediest, or best, or most diverse, group of people doing important work in society. Again, the issue isn’t who gets to define “best;” it’s whether the agencies competing for that designation have a fair and equal opportunity to receive it. Upper-middle-class people may imagine that “everyone” has access to the Internet, but in fact if you reward clicks and responses to e-mail and Facebook postings, you reward organizations with wealthy white audiences and disadvantage those whose audiences are nonwhite and/or poor. Way to magnify the digital divide. Way to make sure that the rich get richer and the poor have babies.
This lazy and manipulative approach to corporate giving diverts nonprofit attention from real fundraising–which involves relationships over the long term–to point-and-click fundraising, which costs “donors” nothing and therefore gives them no stake in the institution.
The argument about who’s entitled to judge art is a side-show, doubtless one Chase would be happy to have theaters and critics debating from here to eternity. Meanwhile, the bank laughs all the way to–the bank.
[Unable to resist, the Nonprofiteer dons her critic's hat and argues that, though she believes her opinions about theater are better-informed and therefore more useful than those of the guy standing next to you on the train, she's also open to the possibility that her prejudices and blind spots make this false in a significant number of cases. In any case, if she didn't believe theater was the essential human art form--because it involves words, the very thing that separates us from all other species--and therefore belonged to everyone human, she wouldn't spend so much of her life seeing and reviewing plays. So she refuses to concede that others' engagement with theater--in whatever form, and without any credentials whatsoever--is unwelcome or inappropriate.]
“Crowd-source philanthropy” doesn’t mean the people get to decide; it means they get the illusion of deciding while actually being used to serve someone else’s commercial purposes. We know that’s a bad thing when the issue is what corporations give to, and get from, politicians. Let’s not fail to notice when the issue is what they give to, and exact from, us.
See also Barbara Talisman’s posting on the subject, which links to an entire discussion of the pros and cons.
Tags:advertising, arts groups, Arts Organizations, charity, charity promotion, corporate giving, donors, Fundraising, grants, Marketing, nonprofit, Nonprofit management, nonprofits, not for profit, philanthropy, Private Philanthropy, Relations with funders, theater
Posted in Arts Organizations, Campaign finance, corporate giving, Coverage of nonprofits, Fundraising, Marketing, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General, Private Philanthropy, Relations with funders, Technology | 6 Comments »
June 14, 2010
Dear Nonprofiteer,
I work for a storefront theater company (though this could apply to any arts organization), and we want to encourage people to donate while they are waiting for the show to start, or as they are walking out of the theater. However, we do not want to “ruin” the art by including a verbal appeal in the pre- or post-show announcements; though we have information on how to donate in our program and on our website, we feel that we can raise some income from our immediate audience after every show. I’m sure this goes for museums, galleries, and dance companies as well—how can we influence our audience to donate at the door without being too pushy or discounting the art?
Signed,
The Tactful Fundraiser
Dear Tactful,
The Nonprofiteer had a law professor whose motto was, “Passive lawyers don’t eat!” Well, the Nonprofiteer’s motto is, “Tactful fundraisers don’t eat!” It’s true that most people would rather talk about their sex lives than talk about money, but the only way to raise it is to make clear that you not only deserve it, but need it.
So the Nonprofiteer disputes your entire premise that a request for funds can “ruin” an art form. Obviously you wouldn’t insert it in mid-play (though product placement in the movies and on tv makes that less obvious than it once was); but a pre- or post-show pitch is completely appropriate. People who want to ignore it will, but no one will be able to say that s/he didn’t know you needed money.
Now, how to actually get that money? There’s the Southwest Airlines approach: make the expected pitch in an unexpected manner, e.g. “Please take all your personal problems with you when you deplane.” There’s the National Lampoon guilt-trip approach: its cover showing a terrified canine at gunpoint with the caption “If you don’t buy this magazine we’ll shoot this dog” was at the very least unforgettable. A Chicago theater company does its own equivalent of this by announcing at curtain that the actors don’t get paid so unless you stuff money in the cashbox you’re just exploiting them by attending (not the precise words); it seems to work quite well.
In other words, there’s nothing dainty or secretive about a nonprofit arts organization’s need for money, so the more directly and entertainingly and memorably you state it, the better your chance of actually receiving the money.
Or you can ignore everything I’ve said, offer a door-prize of a bottle of wine to whoever wins your nightly raffle, and have people enter the raffle by dropping their business cards in a bowl. Then send follow-up appeals (by e-mail, as it’s cheapest) to everyone whose card you got, thanking them for attending and asking them to donate. This is good list-development strategy; whether it’s good money-development strategy remains to be seen. It’s far too easy to ignore an appeal once you’ve had the entertainment and have gone home.
Finally, you can try a bit of reverse psychology. Admit everyone for free and then ask them to pay what they think it was worth on the way out the door. (Post a “suggested donation,” of course.) You’ll get some free riders, but you’ll also get some people who are so impressed with what they’ve just seen that they give you something more than the suggested donation. Those are people you can expect to see again–whereupon you offer them a door-prize if they win the business-card raffle, and you have their names so you can dun them long into the future.
Tags:arts groups, Arts Organizations, charity, charity promotion, donors, Fundraising, Management Advice Day tip, Marketing, nonprofit, Nonprofit management, nonprofits, not for profit, philanthropy, Private Philanthropy, public funding for the arts, Relations with funders, theater
Posted in Arts Organizations, Finances, Fundraising, Marketing, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General, Private Philanthropy | 1 Comment »
April 22, 2010
If the Kresge Foundation isn’t giving matching grants for brand-new arts buildings anymore–and it’s not–the arts-building bubble is over as surely as the housing and financial-industry bubbles. Granting funds instead for renovation and repair means the new Kresge posture will benefit the arts groups that got while the getting was good (or, perhaps, have some other basis for grantworthiness, e.g. re-purposing of an historic building). But arts groups which have been thinking about building from scratch are now stuck contemplating Max Bialystock’s mantra: “He who hesitates is poor!”
Tags:arts groups, Arts Organizations, charity, donors, foundations, Fundraising, grantmaking, grants, nonprofit, Nonprofit management, nonprofits, not for profit, philanthropy, Private Philanthropy, Real Estate, recession, Relations with funders, theater
Posted in Arts Organizations, Finances, Fundraising, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General, Private Philanthropy, Real Estate, Relations with funders | 1 Comment »
April 15, 2009
The Arts Work Fund surveyed 70-some small and mid-sized Chicago arts organizations about their adaptation to the current economic climate, and has consolidated their responses into a Report on the Impact of Current Economic Conditions, available on its home page.
Most poignant result: “Those who were least financially literate were struggling prior to the recession and now are fully feeling its brunt–this cuts across budget size and discipline.”
It’s always been true: the arts groups which survive are not necessarily the ones producing the absolute best artistic product but the ones combining reasonably good artistic product with the necessary resources, managed skillfully. Remember that the next time you hear an actor or dancer or musician speak dismissively of the Board and businesspeople whose efforts put his/her work on the stage.
And Happy Tax Day to all.
Tags:arts funding, arts groups, Arts Organizations, Boards of Directors, charity, dance, Fundraising, music, nonprofit, Nonprofit management, not for profits, recession, theater
Posted in Arts Organizations, Boards of Directors, Coverage of nonprofits, Finances, Fundraising, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General | Leave a Comment »
May 5, 2008
Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago announces that it will sell its “Greenhouse” building, home to five other nonprofit companies in three auditoria, to a development company which has agreed to operate it as a nonprofit theater space for at least 25 years. Victory Gardens itself last year moved out of the building and three blocks up the street into the renovated Biograph Theater, which history buffs may recall as the last place John Dillinger ever saw a movie (or anything else).
This is a good outcome for everyone: for Victory Gardens which is, after all, primarily a theater and not a landlord and like most of us is better off not sinking all its worldly wealth into housing; for the theater companies resident at the Greenhouse which won’t have to seek new homes, scarce even in a declining real estate market; for Chicago arts patrons who benefit from exposure to multiple companies in a single convenient location; and, it must be said, for the member of the Victory Gardens Board whose development company will purchase the space.
There’s nothing untoward about the deal–the purchase price is based on an independent appraisal, and will have to be approved by independent lenders, and in any case no one will make any money til at least 2033–and it’s almost certainly the case that the only place to find a purchaser of extremely valuable land in an upscale residential community who wouldn’t immediately knock down the old barn and build condos was on the theater’s own Board. But it’s also true that ultimately the purchaser will do very well with this property; and why shouldn’t she?
So let this be a lesson to all the Boards trembling in fear about contractual relationships between Board members and the agency (“The artists who show in our gallery can’t be on our Board because they might derive financial benefit from our operation!”)–such transactions are not only permissible but occasionally the most beneficial for all concerned.
Tags:arts groups, Arts Organizations, Boards of Directors, charity, nonprofit, Nonprofit management, not for profit, Real Estate, theater
Posted in Arts Organizations, Boards of Directors, Earned income, Nonprofit management, Real Estate, Uncategorized, Volunteers/Volunteerism | Leave a Comment »
