Karen McConarty: Close your eyes and picture yourself in a red velvet seat. As the lights dim, you feel energy buzzing through the theater as a spotlight illuminates the stage. No, it’s not your organization’s opening night. It’s your night, at Boot Camp 2024. Join us at the Time Center in New York City October 24th and 25th to grow your skills alongside a tight-knit community of arts leaders who just get you. Where else can your passion for marketing strategy, devotion to sales trends, and love of Balanchine show up in a single conversation? But wait, here’s the best part. This is the earliest we’ve ever announced Boot Camp and we’re celebrating with a special New Year’s deal just for you. Register by February 9th and save $100 on your in-person ticket. Plus, get free on-demand access so you can rewatch all your favorite moments after the conference ends. This deal is too good to pass up, so hurry! Go register at capacityinteractivebootcamp.com. That’s capacityinteractivebootcamp.com. See you there!
Dan Titmuss: Hi everyone, and happy New Year! We have a special episode for you today—a healthy dose of inspiration to help you recenter before diving into the new year of challenges, opportunities, and fantastic art-making. Throughout 2023, we spoke with remarkable thought leaders ranging from executive directors and art researchers to experts in DEIBA, both within and beyond the realm of the arts. We are incredibly lucky to have such interesting guests, and we nearly always end each session with the same question. If you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leadership teams, staff, and boards of thousands of arts organizations, what would it be? We call this their CI to Eye moment, and it’s one of my favorite parts about interviewing guests. Over the last year, we’ve had some really eye-opening answers to this hypothetical. So for today’s episode, we are revisiting these key insights to offer encouragement and perspective for the year ahead. Let’s dive in, shall we? This time last year, Cookie Ruiz, the executive director of Ballet Austin, talked with our managing director Christopher Williams about zeroing in on what matters and letting art lead the way.
Cookie Ruiz: It’s so important that when we understand sales data and we understand all of the analytical data that we can look at, that we’re running arts organizations and they’re driven by art and they’re driven by artists that have something to say. And I think that we get in trouble when the business gets in front of the art. And so it is a different choice to be an arts-first organization, and it is very easy to program by way of sales figures. I feel like if we can be unafraid to let art lead us and keep up with the sales, sure, but let’s not program by way of sales figures. That would be my hope.
Dan Titmuss: Thinking back to your mission helps you shed distractions and stay focused on what really matters. So much so that this was one of the main focuses of Boot Camp 2023. Cookie’s CI to Eye moment perfectly lays the groundwork for another year of highly intentional and impactful arts marketing. Keeping art and our missions at the forefront is an excellent guide when faced with competing priorities. But there can be sneaky barriers that might not be on your radar. No, not opinions from your board. Data privacy. Folks discover so much about your organization online, but if you aren’t careful with visitor data, you’ll limit who you reach by tarnishing incredibly valuable audience trust or even get in legal trouble. 2023 saw new privacy regulations, the phase-out of third party cookies among major browsers, and the changeover from Universal Analytics to GA4. Suddenly data collection and privacy was top of mind for arts and culture organizations, and rightly so. Jodi Daniels, founder and CEO of Red Clover Advisors, talked with me about the moral and legal imperatives surrounding data privacy.
Jodi Daniels: Each individual who is engaging with your organization is trusting you, and their data is equally deserving as their dollar.
Dan Titmuss: Jodi later joined us at Boot Camp to talk more about data privacy. If you’re interested, I highly recommend registering for Boot Camp On Demand and checking out her talk. It’s easy to get lost in acronym-heavy conversations about things like GDPR and CCPA, so much so that we often forget to think about the connection between data privacy and the trust people have in your organization. Trust is something that Rob Macpherson, managing director at Creating Impakt, talked about in his CI to Eye moment.
Rob Macpherson: I think I’d say with regard to this whole issue of data security that you have to believe that one slip in this area, I don’t want to panic anyone, but one slip can really demolish a hard-won reputation. It can ruin confidence, and it can be a tough one to build back from. And when this has happened, you need to plan for that. So this is a long piece of advice, but take it seriously and just avoid those slips.
Dan Titmuss: Okay, that clip sounded a little “doom and gloom,” but Rob’s interview was a lot of fun—and not just because he’s a fellow Brit. He shared a lot of fascinating lessons from his time at the Birmingham Hippodrome where he updated the organization’s data and privacy strategy to be in accordance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. I never thought a conversation about data privacy would have this many laughs, but my biggest takeaway was that data privacy is far more widespread than people realize. It touches every part of your organization and goes way beyond email opt-ins. There are even sneaky things you might not think of as quote unquote data, like dietary preferences from event attendees. Bottom line, if you want to protect your brand’s reputation and build trust with audiences, smart data privacy policies are a must. Rob went on to say:
Rob Macpherson: Make sure that you strengthen the brand of your organization at every possible step. Understanding customer motivations first and foremost, and orientating everything you do around the customer’s need, the audience’s need, over and above your own ambitions. If you orientate it around what customers really want and understand their motivations and what drives them and you test that and you act strategically, I think you have the best possible chance of success.
Dan Titmuss: So look, Rob technically offered two thoughts, which is against the rules, but I don’t think anyone complained. It’s worth remembering that amongst all this data worry, there’s also the huge potential for improving engagement and increasing sales—something which has been a challenge over the last four years as the arts industry continues to recover from the effects of COVID, inflation, and other disruptions. Charles Buchanan, senior director of marketing and audience development at Detroit Symphony Orchestra, shared his thoughts on setting new sales benchmarks and adjusting marketing strategies for a post-pandemic world.
Charles Buchanan: I think the most important message right now is that we have to let go of what things looked like before the pandemic. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to say pre-pandemic in every single presentation and every single meeting… And if you think about it, for most organizations, our last completed season was 2018–2019, which is now four years ago. And so we know for certain that it’s a very different market today and that things have been changed permanently. How people consume entertainment, how they spend their time, whether they leave the house or don’t leave the house… And we need to basically accept that this current year is the new benchmark, and if our attendance numbers don’t work for what we need, we need to be thinking about how we grow from there and how we attract new audiences to replace what we’ve lost.
Dan Titmuss: It’s been a few years now, and there’s no question that aspects of our industry have changed permanently. If your organization is still stuck in a comparison trap with pre-pandemic seasons, make 2024 your year of looking forward and establishing new benchmarks. While we’re emerging from a particularly challenging time, let’s remember that the past few years have also brought loads of inspirational art and equally inspirational marketing to go along with it. Our industry’s resourcefulness, creativity, and resilience are some of our greatest strengths heading into the new year, and one of our guests reminded us just that. Here’s Van Ackerman, VP of marketing and communications at Cincinnati Arts Association.
Van Ackerman: Through any dark times like this, just have patience and stay creative. Arts organizations are resilient. So are the people who run them and work for them. And we’ve weathered many storms like this, and we will come out the other side, and we will come out better. And trust—I mean, trust that. Trust your team, trust your staff, and treat each other with love and respect.
Dan Titmuss: Trust your team, trust your staff, and treat each other with love and respect. Incredible message and words to live by. I remember being so reassured by Van’s words during this conversation. The emphasis on taking care of your people was a common thread in a lot of these episodes. Back in July, CI’s president Priya Iyer Doshi, sat down with Snehi Bhatt, a leadership development executive at Admired Leadership, to talk about healthy work cultures. Snehi introduced us to the concept of fan-ness, which completely changed my perspective on leadership.
Snehi Bhatt: There’s this incredible video I would love for everyone to check out around an idea we call fan-ness. It all comes back to being a fan. What does being a great fan mean? That you’re not only a fan when things are good, but rather you’re a fan when things are absolutely terrible. And you can see the power of how that fan-ness can impact someone and motivate and inspire them. So be a fan of your child, be a fan of your colleague, be a fan of your leader even, because everyone needs to feel special every single day. And I’m going to give a quick example, which I think is pretty profound, is that Phil Jackson, if you know the coach of the Chicago Bulls, would do quirky little things, write little notes, and he would have sometimes some cheesy pick-me-up and put it on a post-it note and he’d put it on the lockers or in the locker rooms and things like that. And there’s an interview, and I don’t know quite when that happened, but Michael Jordan said, “Phil’s always writing these tidbits, but guess what? Every time he did it made me feel special.” Michael Jordan needed to feel special at the height of his career. He was undoubtedly one of the best players, taking the Chicago Bulls to the championships. And if Michael Jordan needs to feel special, I promise you, there’s someone in your life that needs to feel special too.
Dan Titmuss: For those who are super deep into the arts, the Chicago Bulls are apparently a basketball team. You are the coach of your team, and even the best players need encouragement every so often. As a leader, are you truly a fan of your employees? Do you make them feel valued and respected every single day? Of course, taking care of your people extends way beyond day-to-day leadership. It also means establishing and sustaining strategies for DEIBA, which is short for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and accessibility. In one of our more impactful episodes, I sat down with Dr. Evelyn Carter, president of Paradigm, to talk about DEIBA in the arts and beyond. Three years after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed, it’s imperative to hold ourselves accountable and do everything we can to move the needle in what Evelyn calls “the next frontier of DEIBA.”
Evelyn Carter: We are seeing evidence that it is not enough now to simply proactively state your organization’s values for inclusion, for example. You have to be willing and prepared to fight for those values. We are seeing an unprecedented attack against LGBTQ+ individuals and particularly against trans folks in our society. And so if you are an organization that says “We welcome trans people” or “We are going to showcase trans folks in our plays, in our productions, what have you,” and you don’t have a plan for how you are going to protect those same individuals from fascists who are protesting outside your doors, if you don’t have a plan for how you are going to protect them when they are walking to their car at the end of your production, if you don’t have a plan for how you are going to address the bigoted comments that might come in the reviews following whatever the event is, then you are not doing the work that is required of upholding that value in today’s society. And so it is imperative that you think not just about what it means to live that value, but if you have to fight because you know that it is right, what will it look like for you to do that? And having a plan for that, that everyone is aligned with and ready to take action on, is what’s going to be required in this next frontier of DEIBA.
Dan Titmuss: You need to be proactive. If you don’t have a plan to protect the individuals that you have said that you support, then you aren’t doing the work. If you want to know more about Dr. Carter’s research, I highly recommend checking out her blog series, “Let’s Break It Down,” which merges her love of research, pop culture, and corporate DEI initiatives. And definitely give the whole episode a listen. I mean, give all of our episodes a listen. Of course I would say that, but this one in particular hits as hard now as it did then, and it’s always useful to remind ourselves of how we can support DEIBA in our organizations. When I’m looking back on all of these CI to Eye moments, it’s a lot to take in, but if you walk away from today’s episode with one thought, let it be this. What gets us through challenging times and moves our industry forward is our unending passion for the work we do. This year, find time to nurture that passion and take care of yourself so you can bring art to even more people. In that vein, let’s end on a CI to Eye moment from the bestselling author and leadership expert Tara Mohr, who sat down with Priya to talk about the importance of playing big while preventing burnout.
Tara Mohr: You are the instrument of your work, so take good care of the instrument.
Dan Titmuss: Take care listeners, and do what you need to do to look after yourself. Take that mental health day, treat yourself to a coffee, indulge in exercise, whatever it is, do what’s best so you can play your metaphorical music. And let us know! If you had the power to broadcast one message to the executive directors, leadership teams, staff, and boards of thousands of arts organizations, what would it be? Tag us on social @ CapacityInteractive. We would love to hear from you.
Thank you for listening to CI to Eye. This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss. Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are CI to Eye’s designers and video editors, and all work together to create CI’s digital content. Our music is by whoisuzo. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover CI to Eye and hear from experts in the arts and beyond. If you didn’t enjoy today’s episode, pass it on to all of your enemies. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for our newsletter at capacityinteractive.com so you never miss an update. And if you haven’t already, please click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, stay nerdy.
