Sustainability is boring. It’s risk-averse. It asks you to improve your impact rather than win It’s a lousy way to run a ballclub. It’s the perfect way to run your arts organization.
Back in October, just after the regular season ended for Major League Baseball (MLB) in the US, who said the following?
“Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, ‘We’re going to win 54 percent of the time.’ Because sometimes 54 percent is — one year, you’re going to win 60 percent, another year you’re going to win 50 percent. It’s whatever it is. But over time, that type of mindset gets you there.”
You probably wouldn’t know him, even if I were to give his name. I’ll tell you that he is the president of baseball operations of an MLB franchise. Here’s something else he said:
“If what you’re doing is focusing year to year on, ‘What do we have to do to win the World Series this year?’ You might be one of the teams that’s laying in the mud and can’t get up for another decade. So we’re actually doing the fan base a favor in asking for their patience to win the World Series, while we continue to build a sustainably good roster.”
His name is Jerry Dipoto. He runs my city’s team, the Seattle Mariners. This year, the Mariners finished with a won-loss record of 88-74, which means it won 54% of its games. That record, while pretty good, was not good enough to make the playoffs, let alone the World Series.
It is not irrelevant to note here that the Seattle Mariners are the ONLY current team in MLB never to have even played in the World Series, let alone win one. So its tortured fan base, which began with the franchise’s inception in 1977 (after a lawsuit settlement with MLB borne from having a used car dealer buy and move its previous team to Milwaukee after one season in 1970), has the distinctive honor (?) of being the most pooped-upon group of caring individuals since the Washington Generals.
There’s even a fantastic documentary about it on YouTube, called The History of the Seattle Mariners. [Note: it’s as long as the new Scorsese flick, and just as full of heartbreak, so watch it in small chunks.]
If your business depends on winning and losing – in a literal sense, like a sports franchise – then it’s fair to judge its leaders by a won-loss record. And it’s probably not fair for management to continue to move the goal posts (a football metaphor). In still another football metaphor, asking for patience from your fan base, again and again, looks a lot like this:
Nonprofit arts organizations are in no such business. There is no football to pull away.
If you judge your nonprofit arts organization by how it manages its finances, you’re missing the point. The point of a nonprofit is to help people in one of the ways mentioned in the nonprofit definition, Section 501(C)(3) of the IRS. Forget the code for a moment. The point is to help people. To garner funding, you have to gather data on tangible findings of help. What did the community ask you to help? How did you manifest that help? How many were helped? What was the impact of that help?
There is no magic number that counts as a victory. Unlike Herm Edwards’s comments above, you don’t “play to win the game.” There will never be a moment where your company will be able to celebrate an ultimate victory. All you can do is sustain a better result than the previous attempt at help. Just get better than before.
And when failures happen, discuss why they happened. Don’t look at failures as things to sweep under the proverbial rug, regardless of how funders see it. Open, transparent discussions of things that didn’t work can help your community find that which does. As we’ve often said in these columns, “productivity can be defined as the elimination of that which is unproductive.” The same idea applies to your nonprofit arts organization.
Just get better than the last time. Think of it as that 54% rule – if your activities as a nonprofit arts organization improve the lives of 54% of the people that you wanted to help, that’s a great step. Now, find ways to improve that each day, each season, each decade.
It’s like taking the distance between zero and one and calculating the midpoint. Then calculate the midpoint between that and one. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And so on.
Think of “one” as the ultimate victory. Winning the game. Know that you’ll never reach “one.” But you’ll have a higher and higher result each time.
That’s what sustainability is: helping more and more people each time you perform an activity. Not drawing a bigger audience, getting fabulous reviews, or achieving something no one else has ever been able to do, like making an unknown or bad piece of art work somehow because only you have the secret sauce to make that happen. (“Only I can make Moose Murders work.”)
So, Jerry Dipoto, your task is to win, not to sustain. Field a team that wins the World Series and few fans will care about a subsequent 70-win season. What they won’t be able to stand is a team that intentionally tries to win just enough games not to win the World Series, but overall, is better than average. It’s the nature of sports teams.
By the way, Jerry Dipoto, the last 25 World Series winners (if you throw out the 2020 COVID-shortened season) won an average of 95.8 games, a winning percentage of 59.25%. Do that instead of 54% and you’ll have a likelier chance of getting to the promised land.
And so, nonprofit arts organizations, your task is to sustain, not to “win.” Provide greater impact to the neediest people in your community. The leaders and foundations will support that idea, even if you fall short one year, because they know you’ll learn from your failures and do better next time. Just keep getting better and measure your results not from acclaim or vision, but by an improved community.
By the way, nonprofit arts organizations, in case you’ve forgotten, sustainability has absolutely nothing to do with survival. Or profitability. Or, in many ways, your company. Sustain your community for as best you can and as long as you can. Be a net gain to your community by action, not by revenue-driven bottom lines, and you’ll succeed in this Pre-Post-Pandemic Era.
Alan’s new book, “Scene Change: Why Today’s Nonprofit Arts Organizations Have to Stop Producing Art and Start Producing Impact” will be published in a matter of days! CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER IN THE UNITED STATES. If you live in the UK, CLICK HERE. If you live in Australia, CLICK HERE. And, of course, it is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other large bookstores. If you can’t find it, just give the bookseller the ISBN: 978-1-80341-446-1. They’ll know what to do.
A few advance copies may be made available for those booking conferences, reading engagements, and speaking engagements. Recruit your local bookstore, conference panel, or boardroom to get a visit from Alan.
SPECIAL OFFER! For a limited time, Alan can offer a free copy for every board member of your nonprofit arts organization when you sign up for a consultation. Contact him at alan@501c3.guru for details.
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