Kibitzing is the Road to Hell for Charitable Organizations: “You know what you SHOULD do…”
Kibitzing. Webster’s definition: “watching other people and making unwanted comments about what they are doing.”
Good intentions (egad). Some people pay for the privilege via their donation or board service. My mother believes it’s her birthright.
For arts charities, kibitzing mainly involves comments, programs, and activities that are unsupported by research or any evidence of success.
Instead: come with solutions rather than problems. Shortfalls are as unintentional as bad art. No one intends red ink or a lousy play with bad acting. But rather than more bake sales, auctions, galas, or (egad) a “give-a-million-dollars-or-we’ll-go-bankrupt-on-Tuesday” campaign; rather than creating a program committee (because anyone can pick plays) or a marketing committee (because anyone can market the arts), work with your ED toward real, verified solutions.
The road to hell is paved with kibitzers. The road to bankruptcy, too.
Charity Culture: If Doing the Right Thing Makes You an Endangered Species, Do It Anyway
Sadly, few people know “Profiles in Courage.” Ask around.
Among performing arts charities, some leaders shrewdly keep their positions because they fear appearing impolitic. They seek sustainability for themselves first, and then, secondarily, their organizations.
To them I implore:
- Pay performers wages, on the books, legal standard or better, for every hour they spend: rehearsals, performances, fittings, etc.
- If your charity isn’t making a substantial difference, merge or close. If it is, share your secrets.
- It’s about social progress, not black ink. Both are preferable, but you’ve failed if your best work is 30 years of balanced budgets.
- Take a stand. Don’t buy trouble, of course, but don’t become invisible to save your own skin.
- Theatres: plays aren’t written, they’re wrought. It’s about the production and the viewpoint, not the script and sets.
- Do something. Don’t be something.
Playing Chicken – For Arts Charities, Not a Game for the Faint of Heart, Because, Well, It’s Impossible and Doesn’t Make a Compelling Case
I read an article recently called A Day Without Art. Stephanie Milling suggests scenarios in which the arts hypothetically disappear for a day. But hypothetical threats are terrible tools of advocacy.
We can’t not have art. Look at your coffee cup, even if it’s paper. It has form, function, and looky there, art on it.
Here’s the ant at this particular picnic:
If art is ubiquitous, does it have value? Why pay for it?
Rather than forecasting the impossible – a day without art – could we better spend our energies measuring our specific organization’s specific outcomes and advocate by trumpeting those to the world?
No one responds well to this particular game of chicken. It’s akin to the idea of eating your kids – it may solve the messy bathroom problem, but it’s neither realistic nor sustainable.
The Creation of Art: Diamonds and Great Art Come from Tension and Pressure
Artists don’t work alone. They require collaborators.
A script isn’t a play. A score isn’t a symphony. A scene isn’t a painting. Choreography isn’t a dance. A libretto and score isn’t an opera.
And a vision isn’t an arts charity.
For any piece of art to be considered finished (and viable), a team is required. Playwrights, composers, choreographers, visual artists, and arts charities may be the ones who create artistic launching pads, but art, like space exploration, requires a slew of equal partners. Among those: directors, performers, designers, interpreters, tools and toolmakers, and audiences. All partners create tension. And that’s good.
No single artist deserves immunity from collaborative pressure. A piece of true art isn’t done until it’s done. Not before. Not after. The immutable pressure of the finish line makes the race exciting, meaningful, and artistic.
Have You Heard? I’m a “Bomb-Throwing Provocateur!” Who’d Have Thought an Artist Could be One of Those?
A few posts ago, we talked about the enmity brewing between the arts charities and the rest of the charity sector. That many US arts charities concentrate on the quality of their art while the rest of the sector concentrates on outcomes. That arts charities are pretty much the only part of the charity sector in which the donor also uses the charity, exacerbating the arts’ reputation as being elitist.
Responses were 50-50. Those that agreed tended to come from arts marketers and fundraisers while the rest came from artistic directors and producers. Break it up…nothing to infer here.
Funniest comment was from a 36-year arts veteran decrying elitism; it’s part of the title here. She could have said, “You’re an asshole.” Or “jerk.” Or just plain “wrong.”
I might be all those things. After all, I’m an artist.
Successful Trusteeship, or “Isn’t Writing a Big Honking Check Enough?”
Good board members:
- aren’t ambassadors. Ambassadors wait for people to come to them. They’re zealots. They zealously get donations and zealously get new board members.
- don’t try to get. They work together and with staff and they get.
- personally donate among their three largest monetary donations that year. Not from their company…from them.
- are forensic analysts, (not governors). Remember, the bottom line is “Are we living our mission? Is the mission working?” They see to it that it does, regardless of the financials.
- insist that board meetings are too important to be reporting vehicles. Productive monthly board meetings can be like having twelve mini-retreats.
Think of it this way: if each board member’s consulting rate is $100/hour and your charity has 20 board members, do you want to spend $2,000/hour talking about the past or the future?
This Just In: Artists Value Money Just Like You Do
I just read an article in the Chicago Tribune about actors receiving no payment for some performances. I’m not sure why it was written, except as acknowledgment that, well, actors receive no payment for some performances. Even for hit shows.
But why? “We can either pay you guys and not do a show — or not pay you and do a show,” said one producer in the article.
Here’s the thing: there are lots of performers. The competition forces them to undervalue themselves.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s ethical not to pay them. At least minimum wage. For rehearsal and performance time.
If that producer decides not to make money on a project, that’s his prerogative. But no pay to performers is abusive, unless he’s offering 40 acres and a mule after the run of the show.
Nonprofit Strategy: Managing Change is Hard; Managing Stasis is Impossible
I had breakfast with a trustee for an educational organization in a wealthy community within the last five years.
He bemoaned the fact that an über-wealthy benefactor was annually bailing them out with huge sums of money, but the organization was still always crying for cash. And the company refused to upgrade its business practices.
“Why is she bailing them out?” I paraphrased.
“Because it’s her legacy to her kid,” he paraphrased. “And let’s face it, for vanity.”
“And if it folds?”
“She won’t let it.”
“Are they always in a cash crisis?”
“Yes – and not only that, it’s just not serving all that many children.”
“And they can’t change the way they do business?”
“She won’t let them.”
Can’t change. Can’t succeed. Can’t close.
Bad for the organization? Bad for the industry? Bad for the community?
For Arts Charities, Everything Powerful Stems from a Great Mission…Including a Great Mission Statement
Many arts organizations craft mission statements that promote activities, art, and excellence. Unfortunately, those things are irrelevant.
“[Theater] presents engaging dramatic work that celebrates the intimate relationship among artist, audience and language.”
That’s not a mission statement. No surprise: that theater died.
A mission is the unspeakable acme of a societal obligation. A mission statement expresses that mission, the product of an organizational manifesto, as best it can.
“[Company’s] mission is to create theatre so strikingly original in form, content or both, that it instills in young people an enduring awe, love and respect for the medium, thus preserving imagination and wonder, those hallmarks of childhood which are the keys to the future.”
See the difference? This mission statement discusses the mission’s impact – “preserving imagination and wonder” – as a crucial need. That’s a supportable argument.
Dream Job…and My Title Would Be Chief Dream Merchant
What I want:
An arts charity that makes my community better.
Value to the community:
Safety. Knowledge. Personal Power. Issue solutions.
Artistic Tools:
Provocation. Entertainment. Populism. Progressiveness. Mischief.
Other Tools:
Educational residencies in both art and topic.
Partners:
Every other charity, educational institution, or NGO with similar values.
Differentiation:
50-50 split on revenues with partners. Partners open their mailing lists to help themselves financially through ticket sales.
Quantifiable outcomes:
The measured outcomes of the partners. Quantity of classes, students, and schools participating.
Non-quantifiable outcomes:
Populist results defeat the arts’ elitist reputation. The needs of the charities are filled.
Initial budget:
Enough so that all artists receive at least $15/hour (in 2014 dollars) and no full-time hourly rate is more than 4x anyone else’s.
Impact:
Arts moves people to action. Thorny issues seen can never be unseen. Life is better.
Sustainability is Neither Reaching for Relevance nor Selling Out. It’s More Important than That.
The art of sustainability in arts charities is akin to performing a balance beam routine on a Ginsu knife. You can sacrifice mission for dollars or dollars for mission, but even if you maintain a perfect balance, there will still be substantial blood on both sides.
We talk way too much about relevance in the arts. The tag in the back of the shirt is relevant for a description of content and washing instructions, but the design of the shirt can reveal personal characteristics of the wearer. Let’s aim higher. How about “integral”?
Integral arts charities are those that are so entwined with other charities that they become essential to the health of the community. “Integral” obviates this useless discussion of relevance and moves us to the more useful question:
How do the arts make communities thrive?
A Version Aversion (or: Why It’s More Important That The Whole Thing Works And Not Just The Elements)
Saw a play recently. The story was appropriately troubling and deftly told. But great art is not about literary proficiency or good acting.
Often in any of the artistic ventures, we render our version of a piece, and are judged by some version of accolade. Our study becomes about acting excellence or mind-blowing special effect or the brilliant manipulation of color and light. And critics judge on those foundations. Even in a new work, we cling to “our version.”
Fans don’t care. Fans are, fittingly, binary. Either the art makes one transform or it doesn’t. When we seek outcomes that make it jarring to return to reality, we do well. If fans only enjoy the elements created to produce the art’s reality, then “our version of art” is to “great art” as “Matchbox Cars” are to “Lamborghinis.”
Stepping in Moral Quicksand: When a Horrible Person/Company Gives to Your Nonprofit
I was going to write about all the charities to which Donald Sterling donated.
I was going to ask if the standards of the organization should stand up against the horror of the donor.
After all, UCLA gave back $3 million of Sterling’s money.
Then I was going to ask about donations from companies that peddle “evil” – tobacco, liquor, oil, etc.
But then I thought about individual donors’ morals. Not just unethical oligarchs like Henry Ford, Rupert Murdoch, John D. MacArthur, or even Sterling. What about all the philanthropists whose fortunes were built on a million broken backs? Or a few? Or one? And I thought about my experiences with morally corrupt donors.
I’m sinking.
Help.
You Gotta Live in the House You Live in
Hypothetical: Strategically speaking, what would your charity do if money were not an issue at all?
The answer to this question is significant. Because if it begins with anything but “we’d do exactly what we’re doing now,” then it’s likely that either you or your mission have to go.
I live in a 1950s house. Typical low ceilings. Small, utilitarian rooms. If I had all the money in the world to renovate it, I’d enhance its 1950s nature, not build 4 additional stories to get a Puget Sound view and in doing so, ruin the house’s charm.
Same with charities, arts or otherwise. You created a mission for a reason…there was a need. A societal wrong to be righted. If you want to accomplish something other than your organization’s mission, go do it.
Just do it somewhere else.
Jack and Jill: Why Smart Nonprofits Search for Interim Leadership
Executive Director Jack resigns.
Jack leads the committee to replace himself. The committee selects Jill.
Jill is not Jack.
Jill discovers too late that she been enlisted to follow Jack’s path rather than set her own.
After a year, not only is Jill unhappy, but trustees and employees resign.
After a second year, Jill resigns. Or is fired.
The reeling company hires Fred – who is neither Jack nor Jill.
Uneasy lies the head that breaks a crown.
Succession planning needn’t require permanence. It might be best to hire an interim leader from outside the organization (not a board member) while the permanent search is carefully executed.
Every organizational leader’s legacy ends the day the leader leaves. Which means it is never a good idea to have the outgoing director have a say on a permanent successor.
40 years in the Desert – Advice for Leaders Taking the Helm and Those Whose Helm is being Taken
Happy Passover. Story goes: Jews escaped slavery and spent 40 years finding “the Promised Land.”
A popular idea on why it took so long: the generation that escaped were slaves. The generation after that was prepared to lead the new world. People found leadership abilities only after shedding the slave mentality.
When a change in staff or board leadership occurs, it is incumbent upon the incumbent organizational leaders to adapt, not the other way around. You didn’t hire (or elect) a “new” former leader. You hired an exemplary individual with different (but complementary) values, aspirations, and ideas. Shed the mentality of an organization run by the previous leader. That culture vanished when that person left.
If you’re the new leader, remember that you were hired to lead on your terms. Your feet won’t fit in someone else’s footprints.
Charity-Nonprofit. Tomato-Tomahto? Potato-Potahto? Not so much.
Charity as defined by the OED. Helping those in need.
Nonprofit as defined by the OED. Having to do with the financial aspects of a company and specifically designated in definition 2 as being separate from a charity.
Nonprofit organization as defined by the United States. Makes possible some companies to be tax-exempt if they participate in specified exempt purposes: charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.
Charity as defined by the United States. Key words: “the poor, distressed, or underprivileged,” “religion,” “education,” “science,” “public buildings, monuments, or works,” “the burdens of government,” “neighborhood tensions,” “prejudice and discrimination,” “human and civil rights,” and “community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.”
I’d rather run a charity than a nonprofit, wouldn’t you?
More importantly, do you?
Innovation: not just for production managers and marketing directors
I love production managers. The good ones tend to come from a background of experimentation. Using the improv-tested training mantra of “Yes And,” their work ethic promotes wildly thoughtful experimentation.
I love marketing directors, too. Good ones aim for reaction rather than beauty. No fan cares about “Addy” awards. They care about having a personally meaningful experience.
Innovation in arts charities need not be limited to the production manager or marketing director, the two lead staff members dedicated to translating the art to fans.
To innovate, all you need to do is innovate. Which requires…
Identifying the need…
Honor for the ideas of the team…
Synthesizing the data…
10% more time than is available…
500% more patience…
A vision of success…
And the acceptance that, as more than one production manager has famously said, “This could suck.”
Even Endowments Don’t Want You to Have an Endowment
Went to a foundation’s financial conference a few years back. Before the economy went south.
The COO of the foundation said (a direct quote), “If you’re not pulling 20% of your annual budget from your endowment roll-off, then you probably shouldn’t have an endowment.”
And now, the math:
Assuming the annual payment is 5%, your endowment would have to outnumber your annual budget by a ratio of 4-1.
Endowments are not reserve funds. They are not liquid. They have little to do with an organization’s stability. Often, the endowment campaign is successful, but the organization teeters on bankruptcy in vast oceans of red ink.
Endowments do not prove an organization’s worth, nor does it assure its future. Although, I suppose, it does offer a bankrupt organization the chance to pay off its bills before closing for good. So there’s that.
Like licking honey off a thorn – Art, why we do it, who it’s for, and why it has power
Painters sing.
Actors play.
Writers choreograph.
Singers paint.
Dancers conduct.
Choreographers sculpt.
Sculptors act.
Musicians paint.
Directors sing.
Conductors write.
And in doing so, no issue, thought, or attitude can be unseen, unfelt, or unheard. It is not for the singing, the painting, etc., that art is produced. The glory of art is in its scope of power. To inspire peace or revolution. To cause great comfort or great discomfort. To provide joy or desolation.
As a populist, I believe that visual and performing arts serve great groups of people. I fear that many in power judge art as dangerous. Their battle plan continues to manipulate those same great groups of people into despising it, to consider it as foreign. As the other.
And I fear that they’ve won that battle. But not the war. Not yet.
More words and phrases that ought to be outlawed from the lexicon
“If you build it, they will come.” – Originally written by WP Kinsella in his best-selling novel, Shoeless Joe, and popularized in FIELD OF DREAMS, these six words have rationalized arts capital campaigns across the US, many of the fruits of which have predictably become money pits.
(The original quote was “If you build it, he will come,” and referred to the protagonist’s father. They had a catch.)
“Art for art’s sake” – coined in the 19th century to justify Aestheticism, in which art was thought to exist for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no other purpose. Today used to justify programming for many arts organizations.
“Community” – here’s the OED definition. Used by nonprofits in a mercurial manner to keep from describing the very people they wish to positively affect.
“I Wanna!” The Fatal Game of Power About Nonprofit Arts. Ages infantile and up.
How to play:
Players select their tokens to start play. Each token designates their role in nonprofit art.
Marionette: Performing Artists/Designers
Blob of Clay: Writers/Composers/Visual Artists
Pawn: All technical/administrative/volunteer personnel (one token represents all)
Change Purse: Audience
Louis Vuitton Pocketbook: Donor/Funder
Fake Louis Vuitton Pocketbook: Development Director
Hammer: Trustee
Bent nail: Managing/Executive Director
Telescope looking up: Artistic Director/Curator
Microscope looking down: General Manager/CFO
Bloody leech: Critic/Journalist
Sorry: designated tokens for marketing/pr directors were deleted in the last budget cycle.
All players spin the Great Glass Wheel Of Art simultaneously in all directions and yell, “I Wanna!” The Wheel comes off its bearings; breaks into millions of pieces. Players move tokens anyplace in the room that feels most advantageous, regardless of the playing board or other players.
End of game:
Chaos. All players proclaim victory. None actually win.
Nag, nag, nag. So, Mr. Big Shot, how do you make a perfect nonprofit arts organization?
There is no perfect nonprofit organization of any kind. All nonprofits are experiments in righting some crucial societal wrong.
For the arts, that wrong is ignorance. It is complacence. It is the invisibility of the big picture. The visual and performing arts bring us beauty, power, and intellect. The opposite of all those words, of course, is nothingness.
Art is never for art’s sake because it is condescending to anthropomorphize it.
When great nonprofit arts organizations look at their core ambitions and value, they view their work as an innovative tool toward the betterment of society.
Commercial arts organizations’ goals begin and end with profits. Mediocre arts nonprofits goals are measured by their art. Great arts organizations’ goals involve righting the crucial societal wrong.
Final note: Great nonprofits don’t consider self-survival a worthy mission. Mediocre ones do.
Legacy-building is not derived from a legacy building
The intention of legacy is a killer.
Many nonprofits in the arts have chosen to engage in massive fundraising efforts to build buildings. But buildings in and of themselves are not your duty.
A capital campaign is like raising money for launch pads. NASA’s mission is to “pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.” Not “build the best launch pad.”
Your nonprofit’s mission may tangentially benefit from capital expenditures. But when EDs, ADs, or philanthropists intentionally attempt to leave a legacy by building venues, they put the organization at risk of irrelevance. Some call that the “Edifice Complex.”
The building may last, but the company may die from spent energy, mission drift, and rationalizing programming for the new space.
Your legacy with a nonprofit organization ends when you leave. As it should be.
Isn’t Great Art Enough?
Doesn’t the artwork of a Van Gogh or Diego Rivera exhibit at a nonprofit museum make one seek insight into the meaning of life?
Doesn’t the performance of a nonprofit dance company’s production of Copland/DeMille’s “Rodeo” or Ailey’s “Revelations” make one try to restore the American dream?
Doesn’t the experience of a nonprofit theater’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Romeo and Juliet,” or “Angels in America” make one try to become more tolerant?
Do nonprofit arts organizations need more than those responses to justify charitable funding?
While many nonprofit arts organizations choose “art for art’s sake,” populist sentiment seeks quantifiable results to validate contributions to any portion of the nonprofit sector (social service, education, etc.).
So: shouldn’t great art be enough? Absolutely. Art can be produced for its own sake when no donations are requested.
