Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
Imagine for a moment that you’re passionate about Haggis, so much so that you went to school to study everything you could learn about Haggis and earned a degree in Culinary Arts with the goal of launching your very own startup food truck that does nothing but produce Haggis dishes, let’s call it Pluck You*. Since you’re in startup mode, Pluck You does generate revenue but not enough to live on …
One of the most frustrating and expensive problems arts managers deal with is email subscriber inactivity and no matter how hard you work to avoid it, just as sure as the sun will rise in the morning, your email lists will have inactive users, commonly referred to as non-responders. They drive up your email marketing costs and generate an inflated sense of patron connectivity but that doesn’t mean the situation is …
Several weeks ago, we examined the value of improving workplace satisfaction within the orchestra field via grassroots efforts; specifically, increasing the quantity and frequency of reviews from arts administrators and staffers about their respective institutions at GlassDoor.com. Since then there has been a noticeable increase in reviews with 10 new entries at seven orchestras. Of those, four reviews were for groups that only had reviews from 2014 or older so the …
More often than not, whenever we talk about outreach and making connections with our community, those conversations unfold in a very top-down prescribed manner, not unlike a list of boxes to tick off on a grant application. Although there are plenty of good conversations to have within those parameters, they tend shortchange meaningful grassroots efforts and we end up missing out on making sincere long-term connections. Case in point, Holly Mulcahy …
There’s a fascinating article by Peter Dobrin in the 10/18/2015 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer that casts a frank eye toward the orchestra’s current state of strategic limbo. There are a number of thoughtful items but one in particular jumped out; specifically, the issue of what the orchestra does with musicians that no longer play at the level of necessary artistic excellence. I’d have a little more sympathy for the players’ …