Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
Argue all you want; email marketing still provides one of the best returns on investment for your marketing dollars. I get thousands per year and I have no idea why most of them are painfully dull. Most of the arts marketers I know and work with are all kinds of creative, but I have yet to figure out the disconnect. Granted, time is almost certainly a culprit, but I also wonder …
There’s an excellent article in the 6/12/2019 edition of fastcampny.com by Ben Paynter that examines two recent studies on nonprofit staff compensation. Spoiler alert: both studies uncovered ample evidence that compensation is a strong pain point among most employees. Compensation is a regular topic here at Adaptistration and back in 2016, we conducted a survey of orchestra and opera staffers and managers to help determine the how and why behind orchestra …
When the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) initiated a lockout of musician employees in June 2019, they also announced health care benefits would be cancelled at the end of the month. Not even two weeks later, the BSO’s executive leadership announced that while they intend to maintain the lockout throughout the course of the summer, they are rescinding their decision to cancel health insurance. In an article from 6/25/2019, we examined the …
There’s a fascinating article in the 6/25/2019 edition of The Baltimore Sun by Mary Carole McCauley that begins to draw lines supporters use to align themselves with one stakeholder or another in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s (BSO) ongoing lockout. Specifically, the article examines the recent spike of annual debt over the last 19 months and the impact it has on day-to-day cash flow. The [BSO] owed its vendors $2.1 million as …
One of the biggest challenges for small to mid size budget organizations is properly testing new website designs before going live. It’s no wonder why this is such a challenge; implemented properly, the process should include live and remote user testing utilizing one of several tools made expressly for those purposes. But the reality is that process requires time and adds costs that many arts organizations simply can’t accommodate in their …