off-stage right

Pick up any business publication and you will find an article about re-building trust with customers during all of this economic turmoil especially with the backdrop of bail-out packages, outrageous bonuses for AIG, and Bernie Madoff.

But as arts leaders or nonprofit leaders, we have be careful to really assess the situation and not just assume our audiences and stake-holders don’t have trust issues.  We have to talk to the people we work with and work for. 

Unfortunately I think the artistic community often forgets this advice and in some extremes assumes its audiences aren’t intelligent enough to really know what they want or enjoy.  What better way is there to burn any possible trust your audience might have than to assume you are better and smarter than they are?  And if you are foolish enough to assume you know what they want because of you own anecdotal interaction or the advice of a handful of board members you are in trouble. 

Whether you are in the commercial or non-profit sector of the arts, you have a mission to create art of some sort and bring it to audiences.  If you don’t do some work to find out what those audience members are thinking you will not have a substantial impact in your community and as a result you will not earn or raise money.  Certainly good leadership has some intuitive knowledge about their stake-holders, but without regular and vigorous evaluation and study an individual or small group’s intuition is not enough. 

I hear arts leaders say all the time – I know my community, I live there, I am part of my community.  And, I do believe they feel this way and in many cases they are partially right.  There are some leaders who are tuned-in to their constituency in an astounding manner.   However, nationwide (and worldwide) communities are shifting at a tremendous pace.  Without a concrete system for listening to your community, almost no leader can fully keep up.  It is a constant learning process.  And often the people we turn to in our inner circle don’t really represent the full community – our boards and donor circles are simply not diverse enough.  Too often people make assumptions and when the assumptions are proven wrong, they blame the audience for not being smart enough or it was the marketing anything but the fact that perhaps it was simply the wrong choice in programming.

So what happens if you don’t agree and think that a small cluster of people can fully evaluate what a audience wants and what a community needs to see and hear (let’s say for the theater the artistic director, managing director and a few board members or in the commercial theater world a handful of producers)?   Well what happens is that you will slowly disengage (or never engage) your community and you will lose their trust. 

And without trust you will not sell tickets or receive contributions.  Without trust you will be irrelevant.

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