4.2 | Why Is it Imperative that We Define Our Promise - Where Do We Stand? Making Choices

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In the first week of this course, we talked about value and

how it's determined.

You remember that we showed that value is determined by people

outside of our organizations, the customers, audiences, visitors and donors.

It's the value to them that matters, if we're to build sustainable organizations.

And defining that value in a way that's clear and

compelling is the first task of any cultural organization.

This task comes before the creation of the artistic product.

Now that maybe radical fact for some people.

Our institutions preserve, present, and create art, and

saying that we have to consider a value to others before we do those things,

isn't always how it go in business.

Don't we know what's best for the world?

Isn't our mission preservation for these works?

Aren't we trying to make people's life better through art that we choose and

polish and present?

And wouldn't asking the value question first, asking how we're going to our

story to those we want to serve, make our institutions vulnerable to trends,

to lowest common denominator programming.

Shouldn't we be telling people that we have what they need,

even if it doesn't at first seem to be exactly what they want.

Well I don't think so.

I think that finding out what people care about, what inspires and

pre-occupies them.

And then relating what we have to offer to those interests

is the best way to fulfill our mission.

And is the best way to be sustainable.

And I don't believe it puts us at risk at all.

It may put some of our received wisdom at risk,

as well as change the way we operate at all levels.

But that might be the best thing we can do.

Understanding and

delivering what people find meaningful, the intersection of what they want and

what they need, is what mission-driven cultural organizations exist to do.

Our business models, indeed our reason for being,

rely on successfully asking people for three things: time, money, and loyalty.

The more people we get these three precious commodities from,

the stronger and more sustainable we are.

So how do you get these three things?

And how do you determine what you're promise to each individual that you want

to attract should be?

The arts are, in large part, an experiential good.

That is to say,

that the greatest benefit can only be delivered when people actually take part.

What would motivate them to take part?

To chose what we have to offer over the endless choices that they have for

how they spend their time and their money.

What would make them loyal to us and

provide enough meaning that they come back for more?

There is no one answer, but rather a lot of different answers,

that the segments of our potential market will have, and that we need to discover.

Peter will be talking in much more detail about the specifics of market

segmentation, and how to devise marketing plans and actions, but

I want to address the bigger promise that we make to our audiences, and

how we determine what that promise should be.

Before we tell our story to those segments of our market,

I think we need to take an anthropologist's approach to finding

out what promises would be most attractive.

Rather than studying our own work and trying to figure out how to repackage it,

rebrand it, rebadge it to make it catch people's attention,

we should look at what people already care about in our community and nationally.

For some, it will be that they care about learning,

lifelong learning or learning something new about a specific subject.

For some, it will be that they want to be entertained.

For others, it will be the sense of community that attending live performances

gives them, a sense of belonging to something bigger.

And for yet others, it will be to revisit those works that have meaning for

them, because they themselves have musical training or artistic experience.

Or perhaps, there are specific issues central to a community,

where a richer conversation needs to be sparked.

Where people want to come together and learn from one another.

For each of these motivations,

the story we have to tell, our marketing message, may need to be different.

Anthropologists work by studying what is, not what they want to be true.

This empathy map is one tool that we can use to do the same.

It isn't simple to observe what each segment of our audiences is motivated by,

but it's essential work.

The world's most gifted artistic directors often understand by observing the world

around them which issues can form the basis of an enduring work of art.

By considering what our potential audiences feel,

what they hear that matters to them, what they see when they look at the world, what

their particular needs are, and what might be most useful to them about what we do,

we can craft a promise to them that we can keep and that builds loyalty.

In his outstanding lecture at a conference in Baltimore in 2009,

Jerome Kagan of Harvard talked about why arts education matters to all of us.

Dr. Kagan described how important active participation in cultural activities

is for helping young people develop both procedural knowledge, which is linking

what our hands do with what our brains do, and schemata, which is having

the ability to create in our own minds, representations of the world around us.

Involvement in art and

music require and develop the skilled use of both of these types of knowledge.

Having this ability increases performance in other areas of academic work.

And it also increases our enjoyment of life.

In addition, Kagan reminds us that the combined use of hands and imagination

makes an important to contribution to what it means to actually know something.

He notes, you can't learn to play tennis by reading a book.

Being able to offer participatory experiences

might be part of the promise we want to make.

And if we make it, we have to make sure that our organizations are designed

to deliver on that promise.

So let's think about what if our real value to

others had little to do with how much money we generated.

But much more about how we created opportunities for

people to rehearse the skills of civic discourse.

This is Martha Nussbaum's compelling argument.

Or perhaps for people to have the right to an expressive life,

as Bill Ivey has coined the phrase.

What if the very fact that we're not concerned with money as our most important

institutional metric, is in fact the greatest value of the work that we do.

And that this frees us up to consider what our audiences truly need most,

on their own terms.

What if bringing people together to form, however briefly,

a community of experience, is what we set as our highest aspiration?

Now of course, we need money to operate our organizations.

But what if every measure of our success, by our own reckoning, was how successful

we were in creating those communities for the greatest number of people?

No matter how our organizations needed to be restructured and reframed to do this.

It may be that the empathy map becomes the business plan.

That knowing how your audiences, and as importantly those who

don't attend right now, feel about their lives becomes the guide for

how you tell the story of what you have to offer them, becomes the guide for

how you define the promise you want to make.

This picture of a bee comes from the floor of the Battersea Art Centre in London,

built with small subscription gifts from many hundreds of Victorians who wanted

a community based arts building.

The motto inscribed near the bees, which are a symbol of industry and

collective effort, translates as, not for me, not for you, but for us.

It may be that our biggest value, is that we care about us as an idea, and

as a necessity if we're to advance as a society.

The basis of our invitation, the promise we should make,

needs to be both broad in scope, and specific to the needs and

desires of our audiences, if we want to ask people to give us time,

money, and loyalty, if we want to ask people to become part of us.

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4.2 | Why Is it Imperative that We Define Our Promise

Artes e Estratégia Cultural

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Ministrado por

Peter Frumkin

Mrs. Russell Willis Taylor

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