Have you ever walked into a bar, or a restaurant, or a shop, or even into a friends house and experienced a feeling of being unwelcome? You know the one, when everybody at the bar looks at you kinda suspicious like and you know they’re all thinking “you’re not from around here, are you”. Nearly every single time that happens we close the door and head on down the street, or we make our excuses to our friend and get the hell out of their house as soon as possible and make arrangements to meet them somewhere “neutral” next time. Why is that? It’s simple, if I open a door and I don’t see me or my people staring back at me, then there’s no way I’m staying. Truth be told I didn’t come here to meet you, I came here to meet me. Think about this the next time you look at your website, or your print material. People don’t want to see you, they want to see themselves. Continue reading You’re not from around here, are you? You, your audience and your Online Presence.
The Blog
“You Want me to Give you WHAT??!” How to ask for money and stuff.
I’ve asked a lot of people and organisations for money and stuff over the years. Some people have said yes and some have said no. I’ve attended workshops and seminars, and researched the psychology of the ask and there’s a couple of principles you should always keep in mind. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for a grant, a donation or an investment.
The first principle is the most important: nobody ever gave money to somebody they didn’t know. Continue reading “You Want me to Give you WHAT??!” How to ask for money and stuff.
Say what now? The APAC15 Conference
This years APAC was great – in the literal sense of the word. The nature of the art of theatre, its value, its language, its potential for social change, its political nature were all up for discussion. As Gary Keegan summarised it on twitter ” Kindness, grassroots, intrinsic value, artists leading the way, fearlessness in challenging the status quo”. The speakers and panelists – some of whom I agreed with and some of who I vehemently disagreed with – were all committed, passionate and inspirational. But I think we would all agree that everything paled in the light of Sir John Tusa’s keynote: it was a Masterclass in Public Speaking, or as somebody put it, “a masterclass in just plain speaking“. The Conference was also, in my experience, unique in terms of who turned up – and who didn’t turn up. What struck me most, on reflection, was that for all the words that were used, we actually don’t know what we’re talking about. Continue reading Say what now? The APAC15 Conference
Culture as an Asset Class
The story going around, particularly in Ireland, is that Arts and Culture are not – and can never be – a business because it can never ever turn a profit. Arts and Culture – by their very nature – are not commercial assets and are not worthy of investment. I mean look at all the struggling artists and small arts organisations fighting for a small piece of the tiny pool of state support. While it may or may not have a certain intrinsic or social value it’s just not a realistic investment risk.
Yet, according to Niamh Bushnell, Dublin’s Start-up Commissioner, 95% of all start-ups fail. 95%. That’s a hell of an attrition rate. It means that the risk of investing in a start-up is at least equal to, if not greater than, investing in arts and culture. And we need to bear in mind that no industry has a 100% hit rate. The market failure that we associate with Arts and Culture (and that is used to justify state subsidy) is at least on a par with start-ups. The big difference is that the failure is corrected in the Arts through subsidy, while in start-ups failure is accepted as an essential part of the ecosystem. I accept that there are certain institutions and activities that should be funded, but not that the current model of funding is effective or that they should be denied access to private investment capital. But that’s a different discussion (watch this space)
I want to look at this story from the investors viewpoint for a moment. Because, to take the single example of theatre, an investor can realise a a very significant (30%+) return on an investment and turn the whole thing around in four months and I’ve never met a start-up that can offer that. Further, if you choose to invest in a portfolio of productions over a three-year period you can also avail of a number of interesting tax opportunities depending on how you choose to promote and deliver the shows.
Dogs, Stars, Cows, Question Marks and the Art of Arts Programming.
So, you’re running an Arts Centre or a gallery or a “cultural Institution”; or you’ve just started a new festival or theatre or dance company. How do you decide what to programme? What will you actually do, and what factors – internal and external – will inform that decision? What criteria will you use to justify the massive investment of time, talent, energy and public or private money. It’s a tricky one. Continue reading Dogs, Stars, Cows, Question Marks and the Art of Arts Programming.
Dreamwalkers, Boundary Scanning and Antoine O Flatharta
Antoine O Flatharta is – in my opinion – one of the greatest, and most under-acknowledged Irish playwrights. He is the only one whose plays I would go to see again and again (five times in the case of Silverlands). He wrote a beautiful play for TEAM many years ago called Dreamwalker. I won’t go into the details of the plot but at the end the protagonist gives this great speech about what he learned living with a tribe. The tribe believed that the borders of their land marked the end of the world. They would elect (or select, I can’t remember which) a person to walk beyond the borders into the non world. Their job was to travel the non world and dream the dreams of the tribe. On their return they would share the stories of their dream travels, describing what lay beyond the borders of the known. In doing this the dreams were made real, and the borders of the tribe, the borders of the known world expanded. These people were called Dream walkers. It fascinates me how much of the hard, rational language of business is built on mythic stories just like this.
Continue reading Dreamwalkers, Boundary Scanning and Antoine O Flatharta
So why aren’t they coming to see my work? Audience development and the Law of Diffusion
We hate to admit that some stuff is simply beyond our control. We also don’t like thinking that what we do is elitest, or of genuine interest to very few people. The unfortunate – mathematical – truth is that so long as what we do is deemed or perceived to be new, complex or innovative, (a word much misused in the arts in my opinion) then we will only ever attract a small number of people. Why is that?
Continue reading So why aren’t they coming to see my work? Audience development and the Law of Diffusion
The Problem with Arts Funding, Joss Whedon, and the Prison of the Imagination
In Joss Whedon’s film, Serenity, the character River Tam is a psychic. She’s also a trained killer and very probably psychotic. She’s plagued by a memory she can’t quite get to the surface. In one of her many breakdowns she cries out to her brother: “It’s not mine. Its not mine and I shouldn’t have to carry it” Psychologically speaking the relationship between artists and the arts funding model in this country – and I suspect elsewhere – is pretty similar. The funding model with its power structures, bureaucracies and instrumental priorities is not mine, and I shouldn’d have to to carry it. And its driving us insane. In short the funding model does not support imagination and creativity. It defines it and constrains it. From a business point of view, it should be the other way round. In other words the funding model contradicts itself.
Continue reading The Problem with Arts Funding, Joss Whedon, and the Prison of the Imagination
The Arts of Living and Dying
I had a very interesting conversation with one of our finest young theatre artists at the start of the week. We disagreed on dying. I would suggest that everything – including the organisations that we build (commercial and cultural) have a life cycle (as opposed to a trajectory with no end point) We struggle, we grow, we peak, we decline and we die. Culturally, we are not good at accepting this and certainly not good at talking about it. The real problem is that when an organisation or a talent becomes completely dependent on funding, and consequently the funding body becomes dependent on the continued existence of the organisation/talent in its current form to justify their own existence we end up with zombies: unstoppable, insatiable, and deathly. Continue reading The Arts of Living and Dying
Funders, Managers and Artists
What Do we Think we’re Doing?
Stories are back in fashion. Marketers and service managers talk about understanding the customer story, Leadership and entrepreneur manuals talk about effective story-telling but what I find interesting is work done on story-telling in organisations, and how we can apply the learning from that to our understanding of the cultural industries, of the relationship between Arts Funders, Arts Managers and Artists Continue reading Funders, Managers and Artists
Consultant - Arts, Culture and Creative Industries 