momorantings

On Thursday of last week, Thomas Cott featured several articles on "right-sizing" in the arts in his daily " You've Cott Mail ." As many of his emails tend to do, it has stuck with me for days. See his email came at an opportune time for me. I had just given the plenary speech at American University's Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium which partially focused on NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman's " supply and demand" speech , and soon thereafter, Rebecca Novick authored a blog entitled " Please, Don't Start a Theater Company." A central theme from these various sources began to emerge, which was packaged quite nicely by Rebecca when she said: "In the past fifteen years, the number of nonprofit theater companies in the United States has doubled while audiences and funding have shrunk. Neither the field nor the next generation of artists is served by this unexamined multiplication of companies based on the same old model. The NEA'...

Several years ago, I wrote a post entitled " You want to get into trouble? Concentrate on new audiences. " At the time, I was confused and frustrated with the relentless focus on developing new audiences. The field's obsession with the new to the detriment of the loyal seemed illogical. My good friend Laura Willumsen , senior consultant at TRGArts , summed it up quite nicely by saying "we should find a way to love the one we're with, before we start courting others." Pretty safe advice that came at the perfect time for me. Three years later, I have come to realize that healthy arts organizations have equally robust campaigns focused on new acquisition and retention, and increasingly we are focusing on improving the overall lifetime value of our customers. For those with retention problems, I would still advise spending a majority of your resources reducing attrition before launching costly acquisition campaigns. There is nothing worse than spending a signifi...