The business section of the Seattle Post-Inteligencer carries this corporate intervention story with a twist — the twist being that the corporation in question is a nonprofit museum. Since it opened, the Experience Music Project in Seattle has been in search of a focused mission, and scrambling for a more stable mix of revenue against […]
Storytelling for Arts Administrators
A successful manager of an arts and cultural organization has to be a good storyteller. Not fiction, mind you (leave that to the Enron executives), but compelling stories of mission, action, money, and goals. They tell these stories to donors, to board members, to staff, to artists, to audiences. And they tell them in several […]
Really, really, really knowing your audience
A great segment on NPR last night explored the phenomenon of Mormon cinema, an extremely targeted film genre that seeks to serve an extremely targeted audience. Says Dave Hunter, co-founder of Hailstorm Entertainment: We know where every single Mormon on the face of the planet lives. We have picked our audience and we are catering […]
Back to the amateurs
Apple Computer leader Steve Jobs had an odd statistic in his Macworld conference (see my weblog entry here) that I finally got around to tracking down. He quoted a study that said more than half of all households in the United States contained someone who currently played an instrument. From my Google wanderings, I’m guessing […]
What’s in a name? Lots of problems, that’s what
The Arts Presenters conference in New York, like so many other professional events in the arts over the past years, had a special focus on presenting ‘world music’. Lots of sessions explored the state of world music, the particular challenges of programming it to American audiences, the visa issues, the lack of professional infrastructure in […]
A refreshing dose of reality
Large professional conferences can usually drain the life out of you — with the flourescent lighting and recirculated air serving as metaphors for the vague insights and recirculated ideas that comprise their official functions. But around the edges of these events lives the true inspiration (and the true energy) for cynics like me. Such is […]
On the road again…
I’m traveling today to attend the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York (here’s a good overview of the conference in today’s NY Times). Hoping to get more grist for the weblog mill, and eager to mix and mingle with alumni of the Arts Administration degree program I direct, and other old friends […]
A cash-laden update to the Nutcracker story
A story in yesterday’s Boston Globe continued the saga of Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker production. As faithful readers will recall, the Wang Center announced last November that they’d be bumping the Ballet’s blockbuster to replace it with the touring Radio City Christmas Spectacular (here’s my original entry on the subject, and a follow-up). It seems the […]
Apple Computer enables a new generation of amateur
There is huge potential in Apple Computer’s new product announcements at yesterday’s Macworld Expo. Arts organizations should pay particular attention to the upgraded iLife software suite, which Steve Jobs called “the Microsoft Office for the rest of your life.” Why should you care about a software suite from a computer company with such a tiny […]
Do what you say, say what you mean
Friend and colleague (and PhD candidate in Marketing) Jennifer Wiggins adds some details to my rant yesterday about misunderstanding survey results. The article I cited and the sponsoring organization were excited to find that 90 percent of survey participants planned on attending more cultural events in 2004. What they missed was the real finding: that […]
