Latest on the Rose Museum

Most of you have heard about Brandeis University's plan to close the Rose and sell the collection of works, which by some accounts are worth $375 million.  Early reports this week said that the sale would be used to cover the $10 million shortfall in the school's budget for this year.

I thought this sounded extreme when I heard it, and a bit unrealistic.  Why sell such a large asset to address a comparatively small deficit.  It's a little akin to killing flies with a elephant gun.  Plenty of individuals close to the story expressed the same reaction.  

Unsurprisingly, we are hearing now that the deficit Brandeis faces is much larger.  In an interview provided with The Daily Beast, the COO reports the shortfall is more like $79 million over the next six years.  In addition, their capital campaign is still underway and they face issues in this effort as well.   A primary funding source, Carl Shapiro and his foundation, are still reeling from the Madoff scandal.  The Shapiro Foundation has already announced to Boston area non-profits it will not be providing any more support in 2009 beyond the pledges it has already made.  So it's unlikely there are white knights ready to ride in with assistance.

There have been initial cries of outrage from students, alumni and The Association of College and University Museums and Galleries.  And I agree.  It sets a dangerous precedent.  One that could have long-term implications on donors' willingness to give gifts to any but a select few institutions perceived as "financially stable".

I don't think that will stop the sale.  

We are sure to see some protracted court battles over whether Brandeis can legally sell these works.  But if the budget shortfall extends out that many years, then school officials were never really considering this a solution for their problems in 2009.  They probably expected from the beginning to sell the collection off over a half decade or more. 

I can't speak to whether they are correct in their assessment of the school's financing, but it appears they saw this as the least painful way to keep the rest of the university operating in a relatively normal fashion.  If and when it does happen, I hope they'll be able to look back and say the results for Brandeis will be worth the damage done to other university art museums.

Coffee and Lunch

Folks at our agency know that I love to talk and I love to eat.   Tuesday I got two chances to do both.

I spent a good bit of time in the morning having coffee with Shane Hudson, the associate director of development at Playmakers Repertory Company here in Chapel Hill.  I first went to a performance at Playmakers in 1989 and it was great to talk about the theatre and hear about many of their new initiatives.   They've got an aggressive 10 show season underway and just opened a rotating set of Well and The Glass Menagerie.

Shane's an engaging guy and I really enjoyed the time.  He's got his own area arts blog called Theatre North Carolina.    And if he didn't have enough going on with his dayjob, he recently became the editor of the Raleigh edition of Broadwayworld.com.  Check out both if you get a moment.

Lunch time was fun as well.  Linda Charlton, the director of marketing at the Durham Performing Arts Center, and I had an excellent discussion and meal over at Rue Cler (highly recommend the L'escalope de Saumon).  

Jennings had the good fortune to work with DPAC on their launch campaign this past fall which I'll talk about in a future post.   My hat's off to Linda, Bob Klaus and their team.  They have had nothing but blockbuster success since they formally opened the doors in December.  

In a year when a lot of venues are struggling, DPAC has seen packed houses for most nights and just finished up a great run of RENT, which the local pubs loved.   Rent crackles with wit and wisdom 

Rent was the first show in their Suntrust Broadway Series.  They've got Oprah Winfrey's The Color Purple, Legally Blonde the Musical, and Fiddler still to come this spring. 

And soon DPAC will announce their 2009-2010 Broadway schedule.  It's headlined by Wicked and Linda says the rest of the shows are going to really blow the doors off.  So if you live within driving distance of the Triangle, look for that announcement coming in March.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have to get to the gym to work off my meals.

The cost of free labor

We run a successful internship program here at our agency.  Each semester college students from UNC - Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State and other local universities spend time learning the ad business with us.  We've been blessed with some amazingly qualified young people, that I know will soon have me saying, "They worked with us once."

Early on we learned that you've got to have a formal reporting structure and a set of goals in place, in order for both the agency and the intern to get the most out of their time here.

As I was reading some recent articles and postings this week, I was intrigued to see that the same sentiments ran through a report created by the Stanford Social Innovation Review called The New Volunteer Workforce.  

They outlined five primary reasons why volunteers don't return to organizations they've volunteered with:

- Not matching skills with assignments

- Failing to recognize volunteer's contributions

- Not measuring the value of volunteers

- Failing to train and invest in volunteers and staff

- Failing to provide strong leadership

In short, even though your volunteers are unpaid, you have to plan and manage them like other staff.  Otherwise they quickly get the impression that what they do isn't important and they'll volunteer their time with an organization where they feel appreciated.

There's lots more on attracting, training and retaining volunteers for non-profits in the report as well.  This may not be your department, but I suspect there's someone in your organization that might be very interested.

Just as I postscript, I was turned on to the report by a posting in Andrew Taylor's blog - The Artful Manager.  If you've never read some of his work, I'd highly recommend spending a little time there.

Some lessons from Inaugural 2.0

Tomorrow, like many, I'll watch Barack Obama be sworn in during the historic inaugural ceremony in Washington.

It's been well documented that the Obama campaign's use of social media gave them an edge in organizing and communicating both in the primaries and in the general campaign.  While I don't think that MySpace was the only factor in his November victory, this seems an appropriate time to talk about some lessons we could take from their use of web 2.0.

Lesson 1 - Give and get information.  Everywhere they went, the campaign gathered email addresses as people attended speeches and events.  They invited those same individuals to join them in the various social media forums.  When you have customers in the door, try to do the same.

Lesson 2 -  It doesn't have to cost a fortune.   Once the information from supporters was in, the campaign used email, Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other platforms to reach out.   This meant the campaign was able to touch followers, daily in many cases, for nearly zero cost.  The biggest expense was the staff it took to generate messages and content.  With marketing budgets tight, you may be able to reduce some costs by moving content from printed form (newsletters, invitations, etc.) to electronic format.

Lesson 3 - Connect your primary website with your social presence.  Even if you don't have the manpower resources to duplicate the content output of the Obama campaign, take a look a their website barackobama.com.  It's a study in organizing and connecting your primary home on the web with your presence on social media sites.  Scroll down the page to the section called Obama Everywhere in the right hand navigation to see what I mean.

Of course there's much more to study if you'd like to take the time.  There are many good articles out there recounting the campaign's social media outreach:

Rolling Stone  - The Machinery of Hope

Black Enterprise - Obama's Lesson in Social Media

The Industry Standard - Did Social Media Decide the U.S. Presidential Election in Obama's favor?

To go even further in depth, check out the blog devoted to covering the campaign's social media efforts: Barack 2.0

Your advertising budget can go further in 2009

If you have an ad campaign planned for an event in the first half of 2009, there's good news. Your ad budget should buy you a lot more exposure.

The recession is hitting media outlets hard.   And no medium seems to be immune.  The New York Times group reports that revenue was off 4.6% in August.  Their New England Media division (including the Boston Globe) is down almost twice that at 9% below year-over-year revenues.  

A leading survey of internet expenditures shows sales for display advertising off over 50% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Prime purchasers of advertising have dramatically cut their budgets, led by car manufacturers and car dealerships.  Nielsen's ad spending reports showed automotive advertising down 10% through third quarter.  And I expect the fourth quarter numbers to show a further decline when they come out in a few weeks..

If you were hearing about lower advertising demand but had a hard time negotiating in fourth quarter last year, keep in mind that many broadcasters and newspapers were still being buoyed by political campaign dollars and holiday retail advertising.  Now advertising sales managers are facing first quarter without those seasonal revenue bumps.  

We've negotiated discounts of 40-50% on some annual print contracts.  Savings on local TV and cable have been smaller but still represent substantial increases in reach and frequency over our normal ad buys.

While I don't advocate beating up your media sales reps just because they are down, you should expect that you will receive more for your ad dollars this year.  Remember to negotiate, ask for additional commercial avails or ad space.  Discuss value added promotions as well.  

One other note, if you typically place your ad buys direct, but aren't as comfortable haggling, you may want to try a limited arrangement with a media buyer or ad agency.  They'll likely have a better sense of what your local market rates should be.  Many times, the discounts they can secure go well beyond the extra fees involved.

Whether you do it yourself or work with an outside firm, take advantage of the opportunity to get more from your advertising dollars while it exists.

Checklists for Measuring Success in Art Museums

The media often uses a single criteria to gage the success of an art museum - attendance.  That's the reason I talk here so often about ideas for improving attendance figures.

In good markets the criteria list reporters are more savvy and that criteria list may look beyond a single exhibition to include the broader number of important exhibitions conducted and the size of membership.

But there's much more to a museum's mission than even these simple statistics.  Maxwell L. Anderson published an excellent essay for the Getty Leadership Institute back in 2004 called Metrics of Success in Art Museums in which he argues that there should be at least 11 primary measurements followed:

Quality of Leadership

Fulfillment of Education Mandate

Institutional Mandate

Management Priorities and Achievements

Caliber and Diversity of Staff

Standards of Governance

Scope and Quality of Collection

Contributions to Scholarship

Contributions to Art Conservation

Quality of Exhibitions

Facilities Contribution to Core Mission

Under each of these criteria he goes into greater depth to identify measurable elements of performance.  From number of catalogs published to the number of permissions granted for sketching in the galleries.  It's 20 pages and well worth the time if you haven't seen it before. Each of the measurable elements is clearly listed in an end-of-document appendix, so his proposed checklist is there for easy access.

It occurs to me that a list like this is not only a way for a museum to judge itself internally but could be used to redefine success in the public eye.  

If you'd prefer not to be judged solely by admissions you must help the media (and through them the public) see these other measures of success.  You'll have to define those other criteria if you want to be judged by them.

note: at the time of this posting I had intermittent trouble with the PDF link from the Getty Leadership Institute.  Here is an additional link that provides an all text version of the document.

Domestic over Import?

As during most recessions, beer sales are up in 2008.  Through the end of 2008 sales were up 1.4%.  Those increases have been primarily among the U.S. brewers.  More expensive imports like Guinness aren't pacing with domestic stalwarts such as Bud.

We may see the same sort of trend among art museums this year and into 2010.  Many museums are considering, or are already, canceling the appearance of traveling shows, our equivalent of an "import", in favor of exhibitions from their internal "domestic" collections.

The Denver Art Museum just announced they are canceling a small traveling show from the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin.  An article in the New York Times looks at how the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Newark Museum and the Brooklyn Museum are all looking internally for new shows as well.  Like the rest of us they are trying to generate visitors in a tight budget year  and the smaller expense of conducting these shows is being looked at very favorably.

Yes, the economy is forcing us into some hard choices.  But in this instance I think we are benefitting from these decisions.  In addition to the financial relief "domestic" exhibitions will provide short term, it should also mean that some amazing collections are seeing the light of day again after years of being tucked away from the public.  That's an idea I can raise a glass to.

Are fans twittering about you?

My friend Wendy Livingston is the Manager of Marketing and Communciations at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.  She's been a huge advocate for Web 2.0 efforts at the museum.   This has included a number of blogs hosted on their site, plus Nasher entries on MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and more.

Twitter is probably the least familiar of these to some of us.  For starters its short (140 character) entries and 24-hour feed make it harder to tackle as a marketing channel.  It's hard to feed that beast with new content constantly, especially when time for our non-web marketing duties is already at a premium.

If you're really new to Twitter you may want to check out a great introductory video called Twitter in Plain English.  It's just under 2 and a half minutes long and gives you a great overview of how twittering works.

In addition to posting messages promoting events and activities.  Twitter can give you an opportunity to see how people are viewing your brand.  There are a number of Twitter monitoring services that allow you to type in a word, for instance "Nasher", and watch what others are saying about you in their Twitter messages.  I like Monitter, it's amazingly intuitive and in seconds you can start to see what's being said about your organization.

Even if you never post a single Twitter message you can still make connections with individuals that are already acting as brand advocates for you on the web.  I'd recommend an observation period first, but after that you may decide to approach a select few with special promotions, discounts or insider info.  

Those rewards should help their tie to you grow even stronger.

NEA report on nonprofit theatres

The National Endowment for the Arts released a study of the nation's nonprofit theatres a few weeks ago.  All America's a Stage: Growth and Challenges in Nonprofit Theatre looks at the period between 1990 and 2005, when the number of these theatres doubled.

No doubt the study's look at performance during and following recessions will get the most interest.  The study reports that, after the 2001 downturn, revenues fell 12 percent for 2002.

For me, that made their findings on increasing ticket prices even more interesting.  The report included statistical models that predict increasing low end ticket prices by as much as 20% would have little impact on attendance.  The models resulted in an attendance downturn of less than 2% when ticket prices increase.

It seems counterintuitive to raise prices in a down economy.  But I'm sure more than a few general managers, executive directors and the like will give some thought to the numbers in this report.  I'll be asking for a little more info on the models they used.

You can read more about the report from the NEA or download it here

and make your own conclusions.