Why change can be hard

Like my post on marketing, what follows comes from conversations with many people, and from one consulting job.

Let's say you run an orchestra, or work in a high position at one. You know you have to change, and one obvious change is to become more accessible, more transparent, more understandable to everybody in your city.

And so you start looking at the face you present to your public. You look at all the printed matter you produce -- your brochures, for instance, and your program book. Pretty quickly you find things that ought to change. In the program book, for instance, there might be a page that your executive director writes, with greetings to the audience, little bits of news, and thank-yous (well deserved) to people who've helped the orchestra.

But maybe this page isn't very interesting. The items in it don't amount to much. They're written boringly. Nobody applied any basic rules of magazine writing, even though your program book is, in effect, a magazine, in which your orchestra presents itself to everyone who comes to hear it. Nobody really tried to make the items interesting. If you figure that you'll always have an audience, that doesn't matter. They're buying tickets anyway. But if you think you need to reach out to new people, you need to do it every way you can. In everything you do, you need to make the orchestra seem lively, interesting, artistic, contemporary.

(And you can't blame the executive director for this problem. There's no reason he or she should be a writer. And, to be honest here, he or she almost certainly doesn't write this page in the program book. It's written by somebody who's paid to do it.)

What can you do? To anyone with magazine or newspaper experience, it's very simple to fix the problem, or at least to start to fix it. Begin by looking at the content. If it's arranged as separate items, which of them is the liveliest, the most important, the most interesting? Start with that one!

And if the items aren't interesting, how can they be improved? Often that's not hard, at least in principle. Suppose you're thanking everyone who gives money to the orchestra. Don't just write a boilerplate thank-you note. ("The Miskatonic Symphony wishes to thank the many people who so generously gave support to all of its activities during the past season.") Make it personal. Quote some people who made donations. Why did they support the orchestra? Find someone who gave money for the first time. What motivated them? Maybe quote your development director about the personal bonds that can develop between your fundraisers and your donors. Find a donor to talk about that.

I won't say that now your program book will read like Vanity Fair, but at least it'll be more interesting. It won't seem so much like an in-house newsletter, or, worse, like a community newspaper. It'll look and feel professional, which means that it'll help people to believe that the orchestra is a capable and lively institution.

But now the problems start. Who's going to make these changes? Very likely you don't have anyone on your staff who can do it. If you did, you might have done these things already. So now you'll have to hire somebody. It's going to cost you time and money.

And is it worth it? Maybe not! If you improve the executive director's page, will you sell more tickets? You probably won't. So it's probably more cost-effective to leave things as they are. And with budgets tight, being cost-effective matters.

This same reasoning applies to almost any small change you might make, at least in the areas we're talking about. (A small change in how you run your box office, if, let's say, it makes it easier for your subscribers to exchange tickets, might make a world of difference.) So it really doesn't pay to change anything!

Except that if you changed everything -- if in every way that you address the public, you were lively, thoughtful, and compelling -- that would make a difference. You'd be more persuasive to a larger audience. You'd start to pull yourself out of the classical music ghetto. You'd seem to be part of the wider world, the world where the audience you want to attract already lives.

So you need to change everything -- but, in practice, you can't change anything. The answer, of course, would be to start with things you really can do, without new staff or funding. It's not always easy to identify those things, but they exist. And then maybe they generate some momentum, making further changes possible.

But at the start, you really do face a dilemma. Changing classical music institutions isn't easy.