Arcola leading eco-concept in London’s theatres

Arcola Theatre representives were at City Hall last week to launch their vision for a new eco-theatre in Dalston Junction.  Executive Director, Dr Ben Todd, said:

Our aim is to create a place Da Vinci might call home where creative people across multiple disciplines drive innovation for a sustainable and equitable future.

The theatre’s environmental sustainability and community engagement programmes are seen to be a crucial part of the site which will include a public garden and growing space as well as space for sustainable technologies research.

With London’s theatres needing to reduce carbon ommission by 60% over the next 15 years (read the Mayor’s Green Theatre Plan here), and other art-form venues starting to follow, the lessons Arcola are learning now are likely to come in handy for other organisations considering how best to meet their own target. Our eco-champion here is Bryony who I’m sure will be keeping an eye out…

Follow the project at Future Arcola

Musings on the LSO Digital Symposium

I’ve just got back from the LSO “All Change?” Digital Symposium. Both Anwen and I were in attendance and I think our feelings about the day are about the same – lovely to network and join in the debate as always but we really need to move on this conversation now and talk about the impacts, actions and responses of digital development. One thought from the day stood out for me in particular:

Government should have led the way in testing and researching digital content and social media, much as they tested new school learning frameworks in laboratory conditions in the 50s and 60s, we should expect them to finance and develop models for the public to engage with online media, test them, refine them and release this information to publicly funded organisations.
Although I think it might have been an interesting approach, my argument with this is that approaches to interactive social media (by which I mean not videos or podcasts, but a platform that genuinely allows the audience to participate) should be unique to each organisation due to online content’s very nature of transparency and openness.

Hmm, I could have phrased that better, but it’s been a long week!

You can view comments from the day at twitter.com/AllChange_LSO. Were you there? What did you make of the day? And can you refine my response above?!

Book review- The Art of the Turnaround

The Art of the Turnaround, Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organisations by Michael Kaiser

I’ve just finished this book by the man who’s been dubbed the ‘turnaround King’ – previously CEO at the Royal Opera House. It’s part arts management handbook, part career memoir, as Kaiser relives his experiences of working at once failing and now leading US dance organisations Kansas City Ballet, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, and American Ballet Theatre, before coming to the UK to sort out the reopening of the Royal Opera House and then on to his current post at The John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts back in Washington DC.

Kaiser’s philosophy for mantra for success is simply: ‘good art marketed well’. Indeed most of his advice is pretty straightforward, but it’s good to see a simple recipe for success being implemented in a number of organisations, and illustrated with practical examples throughout.

Kaiser’s 10 rules for turning round a failing arts organisation, and indeed making a good one better are:

 1. Someone must lead
2. The leader must have a plan
3. You cannot save your way to health
4. Focus on today and tomorrow, not yesterday
5. Extend your programming planning calendar
6. Marketing is more than brochures and advertisements
7. There must be only one spokesman and the message must be positive
8. Fundraising must focus on the larger donor, but don’t aim too high
9. The board must allow itself to be restructured
10. The organisation must have the discipline to follow each of these rules

AMA conference – open up and let them in!

This year was my first AMA conference and as a non arts-marketer I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.  Being someone who networks a lot in my job, I liked the encouragement to get sussed about who you wanted to meet in advance.   So I arranged some quick hellos and some longer meetings with other delegates in advance and enjoyed making good use of the meeting spaces provided, discussing cpd, community consultation and artist studios in housing associations amongst other topics.

From my perspective the conference messages were delivered incredibly well by some smart and professional speakers.  Diane Ragsdale opened really well, and I loved her assertion that cultural institutions only exist to matter to people right now, Dan Germain at Innocent kept it simple but memorable about creating a well loved brand – the worst thing we could do at Innocent is clam up and get too serious and stop talking to people.  Ed Sanders from Google/You Tube shared the quick way to digital upskilling 1) Find a geek 2) Buy him beer 3) Reap rewards and Dick Penny talked through how his organisation in Bristol, Watershed has made sense of the disruption of changing their organisation by understanding that their work so far has resulted in their role as custodians of a shared cultural space held in shared ownership.  A role that brings them both rights and responsibilities.

There was a massive emphasis on 2 way interaction during the conference and my AMA wordle overall would have to include…

Open  Honest  Trusted  Humble
Listening  Co-created

All principles central to community engagement.

The atmosphere amongst delegates still seemed to show a range of barriers to reaching this ‘open organisation’ nirvana.   When it comes to putting the vision into practice, some messages I took away were:

• There’s a culture change afoot (and not everyone will like it)
• Self-awareness includes listening to and not being offended by criticism
• Not listening will soon be a criminal offence (well as good as…)
• Willingness to see other viewpoints or wear different shoes will put you ahead of the game
• Our to do lists should be changing – taking the time to listen and plan your actions in response is the work… it’s not an extra bit.

Some places to look for inspiration

- S.L.A.M (referenced by Diane Ragsdale).  They say -

Our space is open to the public.  Come in and watch the process as it unfolds and if you have a great idea let us know.  Bring lunch and use our WiFi!

- Watershed’s D’shed (Dick Penney).  They say -

Welcome to dShed, Watershed’s online showcase of digital creativity, it’s a publishing platform for artists, media producers and communities and a space to view, explore, create, learn, discuss and debate.

AMA Conference – what’s changing in organisations?

I enjoyed this year’s AMA conference a lot. I thought the debates were timely, speakers excellent and I caught up with colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while as well as meeting really interesting new people. I just wished that there were more colleagues from beyond marketing and audience development to share the experience…

From my perspective the highlights were:

Diane Ragsdale from the Andrew J Mellon Foundation – her excellent keynote combined inspirational ideas, practical actions, real examples and references for further reading. My takeaway is let’s move from being powerful gatekeepers to enthusiastic brokers.

An organisation that is already doing this is Watershed in Bristol, Dick Penny from there spoke about how he considers them  to be custodians of a shared culutral space and sees Watershed’s  role as bringing people togather around ideas that matter to them.

The urgent need for cultural organisations to change to keep pace with the changing world around us was a constant theme. This was brough to life by Cornerhouse in Manchester, whose experiment in adopting an open source way of working is inspired by Charles Leadbeater’s We Think. Still very much a work in progress,  Dave Moutrey and Sarah Perks shared the organisational changes they have made, which include merging their programming and marketing teams.

It is always a pleasure (and an enjoyable intellectual challenge) to listen to or read John Holden’s work, and his AMA appearance talking about the value of culture was no different. He eloquently outlined how our conceptions of art and culture have shifted  from simply ‘high’ and ‘low’  to ‘publicly funded’ ‘commercial’ and ‘home made’  – and what impacts this has had on how we organise and communicate about culture. Like Diane, he referenced Bill Ivey’s Arts Inc, which I’ve not read, but am about to track down…  Questions included a lively discussion on the role of ACE funding policies in shaping how we  value culture. The John thought I’m taking away is that people’s value of culture is, of course, subjective, and we need to help them to create their value through a relationship of mutual respect between organisations, artists and audiences.

Finally, and I’m sure  a big hit with most delegates, Dan Germain from the legendary Innocent shared the  now apocryphal story of how the company was founded and the principles that guide the way it works. Very entertaining, with totally relevant and practical things we can use in our own organisations:

• Know what you stand for – live your values
• Have a regular AGM (A Grown Up Meeting) – meet your customers, to talk to them and listen to them

and my favourite….

• Limit updates to 1 minute at team meetings

If you were there, what did you think?

Research thinkings from the AMA conference

copyright Hal Mayforth

I attended the AMA conference for the first time this year.  I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but was looking forward to hearing some new ideas which I might be able to bring to AL’s research team, and getting a better understanding of how arts organisations market their wares (even if it meant missing Eastenders for two days).  So, here’s my take on the AMA conference with my Research Officer hat on (and it turns out not a lot happened in Albert Square in my absence anyway).

One of the many areas Diane Ragsdale spoke about was the audience’s potential role as co-producers rather than consumers;  but to what extent does your audience want to co-produce?  Understanding them should help ensure any projects based around audience co-production meet the expectations of that audience.  This relates to the idea that it’s core to have clarity about who you’re serving and why – then you can think about how to reach them.  And how do you understand your audience?  Research!  So that covered the importance of good research, leading on to…

Leo and Rachel from Audiences South gave a handy rundown of the tools available to help understand your audience.  Some were better known (such as ACE’s new(ish) segmentation, ACORN and Mosaic) than others (PSPP, a freeware SPSS-type data analysis program), but in all an interesting starting point for seeing what useful research you can do with limited time and £.  I’m going to be exploring PSPP, so if anyone has any tips let me know!

According to Andy Ryans (via Stelios of easyjet fame), excellence is created by exceeding expectations.  So, in order to be able to know how excellent our event/service/production/offer is we need to measure the audience’s expectations compared to their actual experience.  This is something we’ve been doing for some time at AL as one way of measuring the success of an event/service etc, but using it to measure excellence isn’t something I’d considered before, and am definitely going to investigate.

The theme of value kept coming up at the conference, which made me think about how to measure it, and how we at AL might build this into surveys we design.  John Holden and Tim Baker spoke about the difference between value and benefit – benefit being objective, value being subjective, which I think takes us to a similar place to measuring excellence – if the benefit earned from taking part in or attending the arts is perceived by an audience member as having greater impact on them than the time or money required to do it, value has been created.  So there’s a lot going on when you ask people about what they value, and why.

Finally, Dan Germain from Innocent smoothies (I prefer a nice Irn Bru myself, but there you go) encouraged organisations to “listen and keep listening” – good advice, especially if through listening you actually make changes, which is what research should be all about!

AMA – collaboration, collaboration, collaboration (aka digital)

As my colleagues have given you a marketing perspective, a research perspective and an organisational perspective, I’ve gone for the digital perspective. In the spirit of web 2.0 and Charles Leadbeater’s The Art of With (next event 25 November at Cornerhouse) for me this is all about the opportunities to collaborate and connect with each other, with audiences and with artists.

So, first of all on the ‘with each other’ – yes, I was one of those annoying twitterers (purely a personal experiment of course – my theory being if you’ve not experienced it how do you know what impact it might have). Armed with my trusty iphone I was multi-tasking – listening, tweeting and reading.  My findings – I was not so interested in where people are as what they thought.  My conclusions – I made some connections with interesting people at the conference who I would not have necessarily met in person and useful references were sourced by active tweeters, but I was hoping for a bit more comment. Anyway – have a look at one of the various tags #ama2009, #amaconf2009 or #amaconference09 or see what I had to say at #audienceslondon. I think there are big implications for the future of conferencing too, which we at AL will have to take note of – we live in a world of immediacy… look out for the new ‘digitally interactive dialogue space’. And is anyone using the AMA wiki set up by #MarcusRomer (follow his Twitter too)? One request by twitter was to share social media case-studies… so should we do this using social media?

Tackling digital from an organisational point of view seems to present a number of challenges, some of which is discussed in the Silos to Shrek Ears research report which inspired Dave Moutrey to take Cornerhouse on the journey he described in the keynote. We are charged as marketers and organisations to manage complexity, as discussed in Graham Leicester’s inspiring work at the International Futures Forum. So, how do we live comfortably with all the new opportunities – maybe it’s something about using evidence and information. Who has used the YouTube Metrics as Ed of YouTube suggested? Or entered into the discussions on the impacts of social media as suggested by Marcus Romer (everyone’s new guru… or is he a geek?). For Cornerhouse this is working out how to work an ‘Adhocracy’ style organisation.  However, the top tip is: if you can change the way you work internally effectively,  your audiences will probably go with you… wherever you want to take them.

Now to the audiences bit – as you may know, my continual quest is for some more concrete information about which audiences engage digitally and if they do, how (or does ) it enhances their artistic experience…  As Diane Ragsdale said it is not enough to facebook them, it’s all the other stuff and how relevant you are to someone that influences them to engage. Andy Ryans reiterated this, in terms of encouraging us to remember the other tools, such as just talking to people face to face. We perhaps need to be clearer for ourselves about how we use the wonderful Web 2.0, and remember according to the 90-9-1 principle of social networking maybe only a small proportion of audiences are up for full online dialogue. So, how can we best serve the 90%? Maybe we can take some lessons from the Slow Food Campaign – combine enjoyment and responsibility on all sides. Hans de Kretser’s guide to social media should be good reading (wait for the conference report) – number 1 is ‘have a strategy’. You can already find Marcus Romer’s session about using digital media here? In terms of generating content to engage audiences – do we take Dan from Innocent’s advice of ‘keeping it mildly interesting’ – perhaps we’re putting too much pressure on ourselves to come up with super-duper content, when people actually want to know how many costume changes are involved or by what route a painting arrived from New York…

There were obviously some bits about artistic content online, with the much lauded YouTube orchestra (in collaboration with LSO) and many examples from Watershed of what they’ve let artists do.  But the heart of the matter seems to be about giving up control and allowing amateur/user generated content to work alongside the professional artists’ work. Most people do know how to edit and filter to find the good stuff. And on the other hand our brands are usually strong enough as arts organisations to survive re-shaping by our users or audiences. Finally, we should not fear failure, allow ourselves to experiment and as Ed of YouTube said just ‘read up, team up and mix up’.

And as Martin Reynolds of Festivals Edinburgh said “collaboration breeds collaboration”.

A 10 Point Post AMA Conference Manifesto!

You know how you go off to conferences and feel inspired to change the world, but usually the feeling fades after a few days back in the office and no-one actually does anything differently as a result? Well, I wanted to capture that potential for change by summing up this year’s Arts Marketing Association conference in the form of a manifesto for all arts organisations – based around Diane Ragsdale’s Keynote, which made 7 points which she then developed in her ‘In conversation’ breakout session. Many of Diane’s points were also echoed and developed by the other keynote speakers and breakouts. For some, these recommendations will mean a big shift in organisational culture. For others, who are already doing these things, to greater or lesser extents, well, there’s always room for improvement…

So, without further ado, I present The AMA 2009 Conference Manifesto!

The conference recommends that arts organisations need to…

1. Be more open and porous and allow audiences better access to the development of the art, e.g. put webcams into rehearsal rooms, invite audiences (not just members) into rehearsals, allow audiences a say on programming.Try one thing and see how it goes…

2. Broker relationships between audiences and art – fostering better internal communication and collaboration between artistic and marketing departments (perhaps even merging the two into one team) can help towards this. Maybe start with a monthly brainstorm across departments around a new season or event.

3. Allow the art to be digitized and re-appropriated by audiences online, to allow better access and co-creation with audiences – (recognise that if it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist). Find a good partnership with an artist or other organisation and experiment.

4. Offer a platform/space for social interaction around the arts (recognise that seeing other people is as important as seeing the art). Is just having a bar enough? Should we be offering more concrete opportunities ie. the equivalent of book clubs?

5. Allow audiences to become co-creators. We need to embrace the shift to a pro-am culture, and recognise the value of all art no matter who made it.

6. Invest in audiences. Realising that taste is cumulative, we should educate our audiences to help them develop a deeper appreciation of the arts (e.g. Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Beyond the Score programmes: http://www.cso.org/beyondthescore/about.html)

7. Avoid growth for the sake of growth, and seek relevance and impact instead. Organisations should beware that they must constantly strive to retain the relevance that they have only precariously attained. Institutions cannot and should not be maintained for their own sake. Ironically, as institutions have grown, audiences have declined – we need to reverse this trend.

8. Foster adaptation and diversity. Creeping normalcy must be avoided, but this must also be balanced against avoiding ‘premiere-itis’ and over-valuing new work.

9. Collaborate to grow the shrinking pie. Like social service organisations collaborating to tackle social issues, arts organisations should join together to tackle the issue of declining arts attendance.

10. Manage audience expectations – by being honest, and building the idea that not everyone will like everything, we will gain more trust. We should also avoid over-intellectualising the arts, and ensure that audiences are made to feel that an emotional response to art is equally as valid a rational response.

An AmbITion Manifesto

 I’ve been mulling over the thoughts and questions I took away from the AmbITion roadshow and Art of Digital London Symposium… lots of issues that were discussed at Sadlers Wells also came up in Leicester at the AMA conference. Having just written up my post-AMA conference manifesto, I felt inspired to write a post-AmbITION manifesto too, about things we need to be doing differently or better…

ambITion recommends that arts organisations…

1. Create remarkable content (it’s not about creating quality so much as interest)

2. Crowdsource and co-create (collaborate with other artists and audiences)

3. Explore virtual spaces and be playful

4. Provide platforms for discussion and co-creation, don’t just provide content (e.g. host bloggers nights)

5. Open up the creative process

6. De-institutionalise and personalise instead

7. Share the power of the curatorial/creative process – empower your audience to participate

Digital bums on seats?

One of my favourite reads recently, a quote from Hannah Nicklin’s blog, a fellow delegate at Shift Happens this week:

A theatre company operating now, with no involvement in social media, is like a painter having no involvement with the colour blue. ‘But how does this translate to bums on seats’

In fact this is taken a little out of context with the rest of the post, so forgive me. The eloquent painter sentence is Hannah’s own view, where as the ‘bums on seats’ comment is the phrase she’s arguing should be abolished when it comes to discussing social media. An excellent blog post, do have a read.

Oh, and I posted a (rather long) comment in reply which you can read here, defending the people who want to know the ROI of social media at the moment. Although I’m one who doesn’t need the numbers, I’m sold, I understand why some do, and I think it’s ok to ask.