Getting in on the Act: New Report on Participatory Arts Engagement

Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act, about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. Authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard pack a lot into 40 pages--an argument for the rise of active arts engagement, a framework for thinking about ways to actively involve audiences, and lots of case studies. It is framed as a kind of study guide; pop-outs provide questions that tease out opportunities and tensions in the narrative. This report is not an end-all; it is the opening for a conversation.

Here's what I think is really strong about the report:

• Coordinated, succinct research findings supporting the rise of active arts engagement. Pages 9 and 10 pull together data from the NEA, the Irvine Foundation, Dance/USA, RAND, and the Knight Foundation to tell a tight, compelling story about the demographic shift from consumptive to active participation and the extent to which traditional arts audiences are also participating in art-making outside of traditional arenas.
• Excellent case studies, especially from the performing arts sector. I've often been asked about examples of participatory practice in theater, dance, and classical music, and this report is a great starting point. I was particularly inspired by the case studies related to art and civic action (like Paint the Street) and intrigued by the "implications" pop-outs asking questions about how the case studies might impact your own organization's practice.
• Useful differentiation in their Audience Involvement Spectrum (see image at top) between programs that provide "enhanced engagement" and those that invite audience members to make contributions that impact and alter the end result. It can be easy to conflate engaging activities with participatory opportunities, and I'm glad they were explicit about the difference.
• Useful definitions of participatory activities as "curatorial, interpretative, and inventive"--this is a reframing of the Forrester research framework for online participation which is probably more appropriate to the arts context.
• Useful designations of four broad goals for active participation (page 14):

1. Participation in Service of a Community Need or Societal Goal
2. Participation in Support of, or as a Complement to, Artistic Vision
3. Participation in Service of an Artistic Process or Product
4. Participation as the Fundamental Goal

What's challenging about the report is how many different frameworks it presents. I counted at least five different schemes in the six-page section on "Participatory Arts in Practice," and none of these were explicitly referenced in the subsequent case studies. I found many of the frameworks useful, but the lack of context and detail was frustrating. How did the authors come up with the intriguing blend of curatorial, interpretative, and inventive opportunities shown in the Audience Involvement Spectrum's Venn diagrams? Why is a photography contest an example of "crowd sourcing" wheres a community drawing contest is an example of "audience-as-artist"? What's the relationship between the goals of participation and the techniques employed?

I admire and wholly appreciate the brevity of this report, but I fear it's too short to be genuinely useful for organizations that want to act on it. The authors present complex ideas about active arts participation, and it's clear that a lot of research and thought went into their work. I'd love an extended version with more explanation about how these frameworks might work in practice, how they map to the case studies provided, and how organizations with particular participatory goals might best achieve them. If the goal is for organizations to adopt these frameworks as their own, I think we need a lot more supporting material--and maybe fewer different taxonomies.

What do you get out of the report? What next steps do you think we need to make it as useful as possible--and how can we, as active participants--take the lead?

Spring Internship Opportunities - and Thoughts about Internships

It's November, and that means we start looking around nervously at our fabulous fall semester interns and worrying about all the light that will go out of the world when they head back to school, home countries, etc. If you're interested in interning with me and my crew at the MAH in the coming months, please check out our offerings. We're seeking great folks for public programs, participatory exhibit design, online marketing, 3D design, and whatever else you might have to offer.

And while we're advertising positions, we've also learned to advertise something else: the experience of what it's like to be an intern at the MAH. And that's what this post is about--how we advertise the culture at our organizations (or not) when we offer new positions.

I had a bit of a wakeup call about internships last month at an "emerging leaders" lunch event at the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference. The topic of the lunch was internships, and the tables paired students with established professionals to talk about opportunities, issues, and possibilities. I was dismayed to discover that by the standards of many of these grad students, I'm a lousy intern manager. At our museum, we don't provide a lot of structured mentorship for interns. We don't have job-like feedback systems or crystal clear criteria for success. What we have is a lot of opportunities to contribute substantively, and a community of energetic colleagues (mostly other interns) to support the work.

Talking with the students at MAAM, I realized I tend to run internships in accordance with my personal values and a recollection of what I wanted as a newbie in the field. I wanted freedom and responsibility. I wanted the ability to do projects that would end up on the floor. I wanted to be able to work out my own ideas with smart mentors and then produce them--despite my inexperience--for visitors.

I often feel like I spend every day relearning that people think differently from each other. Not everyone wants a super-unstructured internship. What looks like opportunity to me looks like chaos to others. And if I think honestly about the interns we've had over the past six months, their success or failure had a lot more to do with personality and expectation fit than their projects or work areas.

At this time, we're not ready to offer people highly structured internships. We might never get there. But we are ready to be much more upfront about what the internship experience is like at our museum. Our Jobs and Internships page now explicitly says that our internships are good for self-directed, energetic folks who revel in ambiguity. We need interns who work onsite so they can get into the swing of things. And we're best for people who crave unfettered opportunity to make and do.

When you advertise jobs or internships, do you focus on the activities to be performed or the culture of the institution? My lunch experience at MAAM is leading me to focus a heck of a lot more on the second and less on the first. I'm curious to learn more about how other institutions are handling this. I think it's especially necessary in a time when we're focusing more and more on 21st century skills in the workplace--skills like collaboration and innovation--that suggest work formats and approaches that are increasingly different from formal education settings.

Do You Have a Good Argument for Your Institution?

At my grocery store, if you bring your own shopping bag, they give you tokens that you can use to donate money to local nonprofits. As I drop 5 cent tokens into my slots of choice, I often wonder: could my museum be on this list? Would it be appropriate to ask for donations here alongside the food bank and the women's shelter? Would anyone put their token in our slot?

This boils down to a fairly basic question: what's the value of our institutions? We all have arguments we make to prove our worth--economic, educational, social--but many of those arguments are insider-focused. They are successful with audiences who already believe in the intrinsic power of art or the role art plays in civic engagement, but it's unclear how helpful they are to the people who aren't attending, participating, or supporting. I don't think many of them pass the the grocery store token test.

Last year, the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati (now called ArtsWave) released a terrific report that examined this question in detail. The Fund wanted to find the most effective ways to promote public action for the arts in their city--not among established arts supporters, but among diverse members of the public who may have only a glancing relationship with arts institutions.

Here's how the project worked: researchers worked with small focus groups to understand their associations with arts and culture organizations and developed several framing arguments for public support of the arts. Then, they interviewed 400 people by phone and online, presenting them with a short framing argument (80-120 words), followed by a series of open-ended questions intended to determine how memorable the argument was, how it influenced their perception of the public value of the arts, and how likely it was to inspire action. The goal was not to find out what people like about the arts but what might impel them to actively support arts organizations and projects.

The results are fascinating--not just for the arguments that did work, but even more so for the ones that didn't (jump to page 15 of the report). A few gems:

• To many people, "culture" is about ethnicity. If you talk about a "cultural institution" or an "arts and culture" project, people might think you are talking about something specific to a set of individuals who share common heritage, not something universally shared.
• People often think of art institutions as providers of individual entertainment opportunities. If you want to go to the museum and I want to go to the baseball game, we're each making our own choices with our recreational time and money. This perception makes it hard for people to get behind the idea of public support for the arts--why should I subsidize your personal interest?
• Arguments about broadening your horizons through art and the spiritual and health benefits of art work for established arts enthusiasts, but for others, these arguments may fall flat. A lot of things can broaden your horizons, reduce your stress, and connect you to transcendence. While these statements were interesting to some people in the study, they were perceived as highly specific to individual experiences and did not impel any sense of public responsibility.
• If you talk about arts and kids, people may quickly assume that you are talking strictly about the education system and the role of art in schools.
• While arguments about the role of art in engendering civic pride and local distinction were effective, arguments about the role of arts in city planning or civic improvements were not. Participants quickly got distracted in talking about the problems of their city and were not sufficiently convinced that art has a role in addressing those issues.
• Arguments appealing to the long history of arts support in the city made some people feel defensive about contemporary public issues and interests. "We should do it because we've always done it" is not compelling to people dealing with difficult tradeoffs and stresses.

What did work? The framing argument that was most successful in Cincinatti was:

A thriving arts sector creates “ripple effects” of benefits throughout our community... The arts ripple effect creates at least two kinds of benefits:

1. A vibrant, thriving economy: Neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists and residents are attracted to the area, etc.
2. A more connected population: Diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better, etc.

The authors noted that this "ripple effects" framing was effective because:

• it focuses on public benefit, not individual enrichment.
• it positions the arts as having a geographically diffuse effect, not tied to specific events, institutions, or districts with which individuals may or may not associate.
• it pairs a practical idea of community health (economic vitality) with something more emotional and aspirational (bringing together diverse voices).
• it doesn't focus strictly on the dollars and cents of economic impact (which invites potentially unhelpful comparisons), but more broadly on the idea of vibrancy and vitality.

Some of these findings may be specific to Cincinnati, but I find the overall report extremely helpful as I think about how to talk about arts in Santa Cruz--both as the director of an institution and as a member of the city arts commission. It can be hard to step outside our own rhetoric and circles of support to realistically judge what people do and don't understand about what we do and why our institutions exist. We don't have an unalienable right to public support. We have a responsibility to frame what we do in a way that inspires people to act. And maybe, hopefully, to drop a token in our proverbial slot.

What inspires you to support the arts? What arguments do you find effective or unsuccessful in your region or organization? When a friend asks you why he/she should support the arts, what do you say?

Balancing Engagement: Adventures in Participatory Exhibit Labels

We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees in Santa Cruz. In our quest to make the public areas of the museum more reflective of Santa Cruz culture, we moved these boards from a comprehensive display in the history gallery into a main stairwell, prominently visible from the lobby and throughout the building.

The surfboards are beautifully hung in their new location, but they present a new challenge: we have to write very short labels. They’re no longer “an exhibit” per se—more of an evocative design element that hints at an important story told elsewhere in the museum.

We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way. We blatantly borrowed the brilliant technique the San Diego Museum of Natural History used to write labels based on visitors’ questions. We put up the following label along with a pedestal with post-its and pencils:

We're writing a description* for these surfboards and we need your help.

• What do the surfboards make you think about?
• What do you want to know?

Understanding what you think helps us think about how we display our collections.

*note: originally, this said "we're writing a label" but with that phrasing, lots of people wrote creative titles for the surfboards (like the title for a work of art) instead of talking about content of interest.

Visitors have gone to town, writing both basic questions (“who made them?” “who were the surfers who used them?” “how did they ride the plank?” "how old are they?") and sharing opinions (“better in their natural form," “my joyful youth circa 1963”). We’ve learned some things that should definitely be on the final label, such as the clarification that the plank on display is not an early surfboard but the raw material used to make one.

We can certainly write a decent label based on this activity. But one post-it threw me for a loop. It said:

“you should do something to spruce these up a bit. I wouldn’t have noticed the boards except for the post-its.”

Maybe this person was writing about his or her preference for neon paper products, but I doubt it. It was the activity that drew this person (and probably others) to the surfboards—not the objects themselves.

And that leads me to a basic question: Is it better to replace the post-its with a label that answers visitors’ questions, or to continue to support this participation? Instead of clearing the post-its and putting up a nice, discreet label (my original plan), we could keep the post-its and just write answers to the questions directly under them. Or, we could write a starter label based on the questions asked thus far, but then invite (and respond to) additional ones.

The fundamental question here is how we balance different modes of audience engagement. You could argue that visitors are more “engaged” by an activity that invites inquiry-based participation than one that invites them to read a label, even if they never get answers to their questions. Or, you could argue that this kind of active engagement should be secondary to sharing information, which can be more efficiently communicated by a label.

If museums are truly about inquiry-based models for learning, we need more tools—especially in history and art museums—to promote inquiry-based engagement. Science centers and children’s museums promote inquiry-based learning with multi-sensory experiences that are focused more on igniting curiosity than providing answers. Seeing how people responded to these simple post-its made me consider the relative paucity of tools we have to “ignite curiosity” in art and history institutions. If museums of all kinds are going to make serious claims about being places for 21st century, multi-modal, inquiry-based learning, we’ve got to have robust, diverse onsite experiences to back them up.

In this case, given the location on the stairs, we’re likely to replace the post-its with a label as planned. But the bigger question remains: How can we promote true inquiry in our institutions, and how can we give visitors the tools not just to ask but to debate, discuss, and address their questions with each other?

Equity in Arts Funding: We're Not There Yet. We're Not Even Close.

This week, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy released a new paper by Holly Sidford called Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. The title may sound innocuous. The paper is anything but. Sidford makes a clear, well-researched, and persuasive argument that "current arts grantmaking disregards large segments of cultural practice, and by doing so, it disregards large segments of our society." You should read this report. This is one of those important problems we were talking about last week.

We may say that we want to support programming and cultural opportunities for low-income and non-white people, but that's not where the money is going. Only 10% of arts foundation funding goes to minority-led organizations, and worse, the higher a foundation's funding in the arts, the less likely their money goes to support organizations serving low-income or underrepresented audiences. The majority of foundation funding for the arts goes to large, established organizations that present work that is based in the European canon for a primarily white, upper-income audience. Even as demographics change and public participation in the arts shifts away from these Euro-traditional formats, the money still flows down the old pathways.

This has obvious negative implications when it comes to issues of social justice and representation in the arts. But it has a whole slew of other negative implications as well:

• it hinders innovation by narrowly focusing money on a small group of organizations
• it makes funders less relevant to the shifting trends in cultural practice and participation
• it makes philanthropy less philanthropic and more self-serving (wealthy people getting tax exemptions for donating to the symphonies, theaters, and museums that are most likely to serve them as audiences)
• it creates inequity not just in initial funding but sustainability of programs for underserved audiences
• it diminishes the potential for art and arts programming to have transformative civic impact on individuals and communities

It can be easy to throw up our hands and say, "we don't make the rules here--the funders do." But a lot of the questions and issues described in Sidford's paper are as applicable on the level of individual programs or institutional priorities as they are for funders and foundations.

Page 20 of the report describes six barriers to equity in arts funding, all of which apply on the institutional level. There's the barrier of artistic quality--funders, trustees, or staff members who argue that work by non-canonical artists is not up to the standards of the institution. There's the barrier of the concern that this work is "social work" and not art--and therefore doesn't belong in a museum or a theater. And then there's the concern that you might have to cut "core" programs to introduce something new for a specialized audience. These barriers are present on every level of our organizations, from who we choose to collaborate with to what programs we offer to what our board looks like to where we seek funding.

All of these questions and barriers are worth grappling with and debating among cultural practitioners. What are we doing to create new pathways for more diverse and equitable work, and what are we doing to shut those pathways down?

Reading the report, I kept thinking of Rick Lowe, the artist and community activist behind Project Row Houses in Houston. When I met him at AAM, Rick told the story of the beginnings of Project Row Houses in the following way. He had been hired on contract in the 1990s as a curator for an exhibition at the MFA Houston on African-American artists. He got to see the museum process from the inside. The exhibition project was grant-funded, and it was specifically targeted to support African-American artists and audiences. But Rick noticed that only a tiny portion of the grant was actually going to those folks--the majority fueled the MFA machine. And so he realized that he could start his own non-profit that would do a better job supporting underrepresented artists and audiences. Almost 20 years later, Project Row Houses is a powerhouse organization combining art, civic action, public housing, and social change.

Project Row Houses does receive foundation funding--but there are a lot of projects with comparably powerful community impact that do not. Rick's story makes me wonder: what could arts institutions be doing to incubate and foster innovative work by and for underrepresented audiences? Instead of Rick's experience with the MFA turning him off of traditional institutions, is there a way that experience could have been a positive launchpoint for his future work?

One of the institutions that really impresses me in supporting this kind of social change through the arts is, strangely enough, a children's museum. The Pittsburgh Children's Museum leads the Charm Bracelet effort to provide micro-granting throughout Pittsburgh's Northside neighborhood to enhance community vibrancy, health, and learning. The Children's Museum is functionally serving as a fiscal sponsor for small programs--peer mentoring for teen girls, public art, a farmer's market--that promote social justice and cultural engagement for low-income people. I find it incredible that in the midst of an economic recession, the Children's Museum (and other institutions in Pittsburgh) have stayed committed to regranting for social change in this way.

What can you do in your own organization to ensure that your programs, budgets, and priorities match your goals for demographic participation, civic engagement, and social justice? What do you think funders should be doing--and are you willing to hold yourself to the same standard?

What Are the Most Important Problems in Our Field?

I'm working on a keynote address for next week's Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference in Baltimore. The speech is in memory of Stephen Weil, one of the giants of contemporary American museum thinking--a radical in a bowtie who strove to "make museums matter."

As I think about what can and might make museums matter today, I keep rereading a speech by Richard Hamming, a mathematician who made major research contributions to the fields of computer science and information technology. In 1986, Hamming made an incredible speech, "You and Your Research," about the question of what makes some scientists achieve great things and others, not so much. The crux of his argument is this: make sure you are working on the most important problems in your field. He explains:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.

This last sentence, I fear, describes the average worker, not just the average scientist. Most of us spend most of our time working on problems that are not important. That's somewhat reasonable--we all have to make payroll and run our programs and keep things going. My bigger concern is that when we DO make time for the bigger picture, the problems we choose to tackle are not the most important ones.

What are the most important problems in the cultural sector? The two hot problems seem to be:

1. finding new business models to sustain funding and support operations
2. making offerings relevant and appealing to shifting audiences

These topics may flood the blogosphere and conference circuit, but I don't think they're ultimately the most important. These problems are fundamentally self-serving; they come from the root question "how can we survive?" These questions could just as easily apply to any struggling industry (postal service, cigarettes) as to cultural institutions.

I suspect there are other problems we can work on that are more about culture and learning and less about institutional survival. When we think about "making museums matter," the important parts are the "making" and the "mattering"--not the museums. The goal is not to justify museums' existence but to make them as useful as possible.

So what are the important problems we need to tackle to become more meaningful institutions? I'm trying to mull a few for this talk next week, and I'd love your thoughts on what you see as the most important problems in our field. Here's what I've come up with:

1. How can we make cultural knowledge--content, context, and experience--as widely, freely, and equitably accessible as possible?
2. How can our institutions and programs improve quality of life for individuals and communities?
3. How should we structure our institutions and funding programs to do 1 and 2?

What would you add to this list?

On Saying Yes

It's a Saturday night when I get the email. "Sharon D. Payne," member of the incredibly popular Santa Cruz roller derby team, wants to pitch a partnership with our museum. She doesn't have a specific idea for a partner event or exhibit, but she feels like we have a lot to offer each other in terms of publicity and a shared focus on enhancing cultural experiences in the community. And she wants to do it now--in the next two weeks.

I want to say yes. In fact, I do say yes. But then, it turns out we've already said yes to three other groups for the event in question. I end up having to call and say we're going to wait until the spring to make something happen. And then I feel like a jerk.

I love saying yes. Yes to the heirloom seed library that now graces our lobby. Yes to partnerships with the Second Harvest Food Bank and the Homeless Service Center. Yes to tie-ins with the Symphony and the Boys and Girls Club. Yes to the Big Read with the library, yes to the Burningman artists who want to show their giant kinetic sculpture in the lobby, yes to projections on the side of the building.

Saying yes is one of the few things I can offer sympatico community organizations and individuals. We have a "no money, no bullshit" motto here right now; there's no money for partner projects, but we can say yes with a minimum of bureaucracy and red tape. We've actually gotten some of our best partnerships (like the seed library) because another organization said no. Being nimble and open to a bit of chaos is a luxury that comes with being a small institution on a mission to be a community hub. It's exciting to have someone approach us on a Tuesday with a great idea for Saturday, and as much as possible, we try to say yes.

But it's getting harder to do so as time goes on. Each time we say yes, the schedule gets a bit more full, the space is a bit more complete, the insanity a little higher. I'm learning to say "yes, but not now" or "yes, but let's figure it out a little more," and sometimes, painfully, "no."

I can see how it gets easy for an organization to get in the habit of starting from "no" instead of "yes." Chaos can be stressful. When we have more money and programs, maybe we won't want to deal with the headaches of installing a giant multi-person hammock in the lobby--even if it is free.

I don't want to get there. I believe that we're doing our best work when we are able to say yes to people who walk in the door with good ideas and real community needs to be met. And I feel like we're most fresh and dynamic when we can keep being responsive to the next idea.

The challenge, then, is to figure out how to say yes consistently, smartly, over the long term. Just as any project has its messy, open-ended phase before it hardens into completion, we're in a messy phase as an institution. What will we harden into? Is it better to try to stay in the messy phase as long as possible, or to create a structure that supports the messiness within a more formal setting?

This brings me back to Paul Light's recommendation in Sustaining Innovation that organizations need to learn "how to say no and why to say yes." My presumption is that as time goes on, our answer to the question of "why to say yes" will change. Right now, we're saying yes because it's a way to build trust in the community, to build on the enthusiasm of others, and to enliven our space with the passion and diversity of our partners. It would probably be a worthwhile exercise in the future to make sure we sit down as a staff and ask ourselves: "why should we say yes to this or that?" and track the change. But I don't want to codify anything to death. I'm still not sure whether informality and flexibility can be a permanent state of being... but I'd like to try. And in the meantime, I'm dreaming of what will make the most sense in the spring with the Derby girls.

Do you feel like you work in a place where "yes" is the default? What do you see making that possible (or impossible)?

Does Your Institution Really Need to Be Hip? Audience Development Reconsidered

Last Friday night, my museum hosted a fabulous (in my biased opinion) event called Race Through Time. It was a local history urban scavenger hunt that sent teams of 2-5 people out into the city to track down as many historic checkpoints as they could over the course of an evening. The event was oversold, and participants raved about the experience.

We created Race Through Time in partnership with a local networking group called Santa Cruz Next, whose primary aim is to support and celebrate ways that young professionals can and are changing our community for the better. Race Through Time was designed specifically for this audience of 30 and 40-somethings looking for fun social events with a Santa Cruz bent. We saw Race Through Time as an opportunity to share our mission around engaging with history with a new and highly desirable audience of young professionals. Everything about the event--from the time slot to the tone of the content to the music played--was designed for that audience.

When Friday night rolled around, we did see a crowd that skewed decidedly younger and hipper than our standard museum audience. But we also saw something else: parents and teenagers, grandparents and grandkids, elderly couples, out for a fun scavenger hunt evening. Yes, there was the 40-ish lawyer who effused that she'd never seen so many young people in the museum before. But there was also the couple in their 70s who told me this was the most fun they'd ever had on a Friday night in Santa Cruz. And from my perspective, it was this diversity that made the event unique--and made me rethink the way that cultural professionals typically approach audience development.

I've written before about the "parallel vs. pipeline" approach to new audience development. The concept goes like this: if you want to invite in people who don't traditionally engage with your offerings, you offer them an experience that is so tailored to their unique interests and preferred modes of engagement that it really is only for them. Performances just for teens. Late night mixers at museums for young adults. The experience is dramatically different from the norm and the audience is very targeted. It's a parallel experience, one that may or may not be eventually integrated into the core "pipeline" of traditional experiences and audiences.

We thought that Race Through Time would fall in this category--that it would be 90% people from the Santa Cruz Next young professional crowd. But it was more like 60%--enough for all those young people to feel like they were in the right place, but not enough to feel like it was "their" event alone. There were twenty-year old hippies. There were grizzled cyclists. There were families. It turned out that there were many different kinds of people who were excited about an active, adventurous approach to history.

This gets me thinking about whether the most productive programs for cultural organizations from an audience development perspective are not wholly parallel to the norm but somewhere just slightly outside, somewhere that links the typical to the possible. Maybe being incredibly hip one night a year or month or week is not enough to help the audiences who come to those events connect to the institution writ large. Those events bring in specific crowds for singular experiences, but to what end? If you have a wild event that feels like a spaceship landed on your institution, what happens when the ship leaves the next day?

Museums are not for specific crowds alone. As Elaine Heumann Gurian has often noted, the magic comes when cultural institutions bring together people who don't typically mix. As someone who can feel a bit alienated at events with homogenous audiences--even people who look like me--I appreciate the opportunity to be in a crowd that includes me without being prescriptive or limiting.

We lose something if we focus too narrowly on specific audiences. I've started realizing that at First Fridays, when our museum swells with people out on the town for an art experience. We are by no means the hippest First Friday destination in Santa Cruz, and sometimes, after a long evening at the museum, I'll head out to a gallery and look longingly at the young, cool artist crowd gathered within. I love hanging out with those people in those hip venues. But I also love that the museum invites those young adults in along with elderly folks in wheelchairs, families with toddlers--the happily un-hip.

And so I'm letting go of the idea that we have to be exclusionary to attract young people and looking for more diverse alternatives. The marketing argument has always been that we have to segment, that we have to tailor. But what if we segment to "people who like to meet people who are not like them?" I think that's a stronger community value proposition than becoming as cool--and limited--as an institution with a tightly-limited audience.

Do our institutions really need to be hip to be successful? Or do they just need to be welcoming, open, comfortable places that offer a diversity of experience? I realize I may be totally biased on this since I'm watching it happen in my own institution and my own community, and I'm also personally not a very hip person. What do you think?

Fundraising as Participatory Practice: Myths, Realities, Possibilities

"Fundraising is about relationships."

"The key to fundraising is listening."

"Development works when you are responsive to the donor's needs, not just presenting your own."

Anyone who has worked in fundraising has likely heard these missives again and again. But as a creative type who has recently taken on an executive role, I've been fascinated, shocked even, to learn that the folks in the development department have been singing the relationship chorus for so long.

On the one hand, this is awesome. I'm finding myself really enjoying fundraising because it is fundamentally about inspiring people to participate--and to do so in a way that is significant both for the organization and for themselves. As a designer, I'm always trying to ensure that participatory activities, however casual, impact both the participant and the organization. When someone gives money, that's almost always a given.

On the other hand, there's something deeply weird about the fact that I didn't know that fundraising was about relationships before I started doing it. If fundraisers are so keen on relationships, why weren't they the first into social media and participatory projects on behalf of their organizations? Even stranger, why are they so often the most opposed to such relationship-oriented efforts when extended to everyday members or visitors? I've led many meetings and workshops on building relationships with audience members in which development officers are the least comfortable with fostering open, two-way engagement with participants.

What's going on here? I suspect there are two contradictory issues behind this confusion:

1. While relationships are about giving and receiving, fundraising strategies frequently rely on a scarcity model in which gifts and thank you's are finite and defined. In a world in which donors are traunched, relationship "benefits" are meted out to individuals based on their level of giving. You can't have a personal relationship with someone who hasn't earned it through appropriate gifts--you'd be "wasting" your attentiveness.
2. While relationships are about trust and open communication, donor communication is perceived as very high stakes. Fundraisers therefore want to sculpt the message as much as possible. Too much openness could lead to someone being unhappy and withdrawing their participation.

Interestingly, in the participatory design model I'm more familiar with on the Web and in collaborative project design, the fundamental issues are different. It tends to be easy to communicate openly and express appreciation abundantly when you are co-creating an exhibition or a community art project. There's no such thing as too much community cheerleading or engagement. What's hard is to ensure that people make meaningful contributions and to help participants advance from one-time actions into ongoing involvement--two things that fundraisers are pretty darn good at.

I'd love to see a book, blog, or conference that focuses broadly on building relationships in cultural organizations--with donors, staff, visitors, audiences, members. I think there's a lot we have to learn from each other to get to a place where those relationships are as genuine and meaningful as possible. Authentic relationship-building is something I've long debated with friends in the education, exhibition, and online worlds. And now I feel silly that I haven't more actively engaged with fundraisers about it.

Guest Post: What YBCA is Learning from a Personalized Museum Membership Program

This guest post was written by Laurel Butler, Education and Education Specialist at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, CA. Laurel is the "Art Coach" who runs an unusual personalized YBCA:YOU membership program that started last year. YBCA:YOU is an intriguing take on experiments in membership and raises interesting questions about what scaffolding people need to have social and repeat experiences in museums. Joël Tan, YBCA's Director of Community Engagement & creator of YBCA:YOU, will monitor and respond to your questions and ideas in the comments section.

Two strangers stand next to each other in a gallery, staring at the same piece. Secretly, each wishes the other would turn and ask: “What do you think?” They want to connect with each other about the art. But they don’t.

If an arts experience is not shared, is the experience still transformative? Or are we missing a crucial part of the process?

I’ve always been the type of person who likes to ask strangers what they think. So, when I was hired to manage the YBCA: YOU pilot program at YBCA, the challenge was clear: How could I turn these fleeting, missed connections into meaningful moments of interpersonal engagement? Or, more simply: How can I make 100 art lovers become friends with each other?

The YBCA: YOU program is an integrated, personalized approach to the YBCA arts experience, designed to revolutionize the way the community engages with contemporary art and ideas. Participants in the program get an all-access pass to our space, and are able to use it any way that resonates with their interests. They also work with me, their personal “arts coach” to meet their aesthetic goals and maintain a consistent practice.

It’s a little like a gym membership with a dash of case management and counseling. This isn’t a coincidence ─ YBCA:YOU grew out of years of audience development research and was highly informed by our Director of Community Engagement Joël Tan's prior work in AIDS case management and public health. How many institutions really take the time to sit down with individual audience member and talk about what art they like, or what art they hate, or how they wish their arts experiences were different, or better? Apparently, the idea was exciting to other folks as well: A single press release generated twice as much interest as we had anticipated. At first, we were concerned about capacity ─ would we really be able to “get personal” with 150 people? But we were convinced that no survey, questionnaire, or aggregated data could provide the nuances and subtleties that come with a face-to-face meeting.

So, we sat down with every person who signed up for the program, and listened to their story, taking notes on the kinds of arts programming that might best support their interests and goals. There was Henri, who wanted to explore his budding interest in performance. We told him about Lemi Ponifasio/MAU at YBCA, and the Second Sundays series at Counterpulse. There was Jane, who was interested in the East Bay arts landscape. We recommended that she check out Art Murmur on the first Friday of the month.

The “Aesthetic Development Planning” (ADP) meetings were as diverse as you might expect from 100 plus Bay Area arts enthusiasts. However, there was one salient piece of feedback that kept coming up over and over: People wanted to connect with other people around the art. Traci felt put-off by the “scene” that surrounded the art world. She felt that she lacked formal training and knowledge, and was afraid of “saying the wrong thing”. Anton felt that his reading of art was so consumed by scholarly critique that it was hard to articulate a purely intuitive response. Many felt that there never seemed to be an appropriate context or venue for that kind of thing. You can’t simply turn to the stranger next to you and ask “What do you think”?
We’d been thinking about YBCA: YOU as a way to develop a deeper, more personal relationship between YBCA and its visitors, but what about creating community within our constituency? What does it take for an institution to connect people on an individual level?

We began by integrating our Art Savvy program into YBCA:YOU. Art Savvy is a facilitated gallery tour that uses the principles of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) to engage in deep observation and conversation around a piece of visual art. It’s a great way to get those two strangers in the gallery to talk to each other. We held YBCA:YOU Savvy sessions around our exhibitions, films, performances… even gallery walks and field trips around town. The folks who attended these events raved about how much fun they had, how much they had enriched and deepened their connection to the art. And yet, out of over 100 potential participants, we never got more than a dozen-or-so YOUers to show.

So, last month we decided to make phone calls to each of the YOUers to discuss the progress of their aesthetic development and talk about their experience of the program thus far. Again, the conversations were complex and diverse as the cohort itself, but one trope kept coming up over and over:
“It’s not you, it’s me.”

These folks made it clear that the program was, indeed, motivating them to make art more of a habit, but they needed more time to incorporate the idea of aesthetic development into their own lives, on their own terms. I realized that I was being impatient – the program, after all, hadn’t even been in place for six months! I couldn’t expect to see a radical social transformation right away, because the personal transformation needed to take place first.

The benefits of regular sessions at the gym, or visits to the dentist, or a therapist, or time spent with friends, are all pretty self-evident after six months. But, as Abigail Housen’s Aesthetic Development Stage Theory (PDF) tells us, it takes just as long to develop aesthetic muscles as physical muscles, and the results are not always so immediately clear. YOUers by and large were making art more of a habit in their lives, but not in drastic terms. They were branching out of their comfort zone one performance at a time, looking at the world around them with a new set of eyes to find the potential of art embedded within their daily lives.

It seems to me now that the capacity to make space in one’s life for art may precede the type of community participation that we were looking for as an indicator of programmatic success. I still believe that, with enough time and consistent personalized contact, a program like YBCA:YOU can revolutionize the way the world engages with contemporary art and ideas. However, like any revolution, it has to begin with the personal.