One of the key elements of social media is “the community.” Without a community, there wouldn’t be a social in social media. But what exactly is this community?

In my post on a fictional online community manager position on the Orchestra Revolution blog, Jean Shirk, public relations manager at the San Francisco Symphony, posed some important questions:

Do people actually want to meet and interact with one another online or in person, or do they want to read, watch, and listen online? Do they want to meet new people in person, or are they content with going with friends they already know to the concert hall?

Regardless of these questions, we still tend to define classical music goers in Chicago or San Francisco as a community within the respective cities, and we still define classical music fans gathering on various social networks as communities.

Benedict Anderson, author of Imagined Communities, a seminal theory on nationalism, argues that a nation is just that: imagined. It is imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

Classical music communities and online communities in today’s social media environment are not so different. At any given concert, how many patrons know each other? In any online community, how many participants have met other participants face-to-face? Yet a patron feels a bond with his fellow concertgoers, and a Facebook fan of the London Symphony Orchestra feels a bond, however small, with other fans.

When I was in my late teens, I was a member on an R.E.M. fan Web site. This was before the term social media was ever even coined, yet the site was more social than most sites today. While members never really knew most of their fellow-members, let alone met their fellow-members, in the minds of each lived an image of a community, centered on a common interest in the music of a particular band.

Anderson argues that imagining the idea of a nation arose historically after social and scientific discoveries—most notably the emergence of the printing press under a system of capitalism—reduced privileged access to knowledge and paved the way to the vernacularizing of religious communication, which led to democratization, liberalization, and the increasing difficulty of justifying divine and dynastic power. In short, a history-altering change in information dissemination and communication fueled the Reformation and Enlightenment, which “made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to others, in profoundly new ways.”

The origins of online communities have a similar, although less profound, story. And that’s to be expected; we cannot start to compare the imagining of nations with online communities in terms of impact and stakes. And whereas imagining the nation forever changed worldly, political power, perhaps our current story of online communities is best showcased by the impact it has on business; the increasing difficulty of justifying modern day divine and dynastic power: corporations and institutions.

The discoveries of the computer age paved the way. The Internet greatly reduced privileged access to knowledge and social media vernacularized our communication. Where local languages replaced Latin in religious communication in Anderson’s outlook; authentic conversations, text speak and colloquialism replaces corporate and institutional language in the social media age. The Cluetrain Manifesto speaks of the current homogenized “voice” of business that will “seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.”

This change in communication liberalized the masses and democratized the playing field. In Anderson’s outlook, kings and emperors were replaced by republics and democracies; in today’s world we see, as the Cluetrain Manifesto once again puts it, networked markets that “are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them.”

This self-organization is described in Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s new book The Networked Nonprofit. The authors talk about the rise of Millennials, or digital natives, those who have grown up in today’s vernacularized, social media world. These Millennials no longer owe allegiance to any particular company or organization; they self-organize as “free agents.”

The R.E.M. fan Web site mentioned earlier was just such as thing. It wasn’t started by the band or the record label. It was started by a devoted, free agent fan. The site and particularly the community weren’t built overnight. It took many people in this imagined community.

And to answer Jean Shirk’s question: did people actually want to meet and interact? Yes! Despite the virtual nature and the scattered geography of its member base, among the very active participants there were meet ups at concerts, offline friendships, and if I remember correctly, even a marriage or two. Not so different from the non-virtual world that also sees varying degrees of involvement in the community.

And through social media, these online imagined communities have real power and they know it. “If [companies] don’t quite see the light,” warn the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, “some other outfit will come along that’s more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.” Kanter and Fine urge the modern, networked organization to engage these free agents and leverage their social networks.

R.E.M. saw the light and engaged with its free agents and fans online. It is perhaps not entirely coincidentally that the guy who started up the fan site now heads up the emerging technology department at the record label.

So perhaps this is a warning to the big dynastic powers in classical music: the big orchestras and the major opera houses. Extraordinary changes in communication brought down kings and emperors in the past. Another noted historian, Eric Hobsbawm, paraphrases Pierre Vilar in his book Nations and Nationalism since 1780: “what characterized the nation-people as seen from below was precisely that it represented the common interest against particular interests, the common good against privilege.”

You want to be a part of the common interest, the common good and not be defined as a particular interest or a privilege. Does anything indicate more clearly the need to engage with your people, rather than dictating to your people?

Ignore at your own peril. We all know what happened to Marie Antoinette after she uttered the words “Let them eat cake.” *

* Words she in fact never uttered. But she was executed nonetheless.

There was a minor storm in the classical music blogosphere in the last two weeks or so. What started it was Heather Mac Donald’s article Classical Music’s New Golden Age and Greg Sandow’s massive, blunt, multiple post response, which was then again countered by Mac Donald.

Mac Donald claims classical music has entered a new golden age and her central thesis is basically this:

It is indisputable that classical-music lovers have never enjoyed such an abundance of great music, performed at levels of consummate artistry.

Indeed, this is indisputable. There are some good arguments to back up her thesis too, and she lists some of them: more orchestras now than in 1937; more and higher quality recordings; more and higher quality musicians through conservatories.

By all means, it looks like Mac Donald is right. However, as Michael Bruce writes in one of the comments underneath one of Sandow’s posts: “Golden ages, by definition, do not last.”

And that’s perhaps Sandow’s central thesis: the classical music environment, such as it is, is unsustainable.

At the onset of writing this article, I thought I was going to stand somewhere in the middle. No golden age, but rather strike the golden mean between Mac Donald and Sandow. But then I realized they’re both arguing quite different things.

Mac Donald argues that sheer quality and quantity of performances must mean we’re in a golden age and Sandow argues that audience trends indicate that the current structure is not sustainable. So Mac Donald is arguing from the viewpoint of performances, whereas Sandow is arguing from the standpoint of audiences.

And that’s precisely why this matter is such a delicate issue. In business everything revolves around the customer (the audience); however, in the arts, things really revolve around the product (the performance). But of course, this doesn’t preclude the need for an audience in the arts (otherwise, what’s the point), and more specifically an audience that can sustain the art.

So where Mac Donald argues that the product is experiencing a golden age, Sandow argues that the audience for the product is declining. These two are mutually exclusive if you take a snapshot in time: one is an observation in a specific moment in time; the other is a trend over time and a prediction for the future. So it’s only when you start looking into the future, you see that the two will affect each other. This qualitative and quantitative golden age of classical music cannot be sustained if the audience keeps declining.

So, the fact that there are now more orchestras than in 1937 is a good thing in Mac Donald’s snapshot view, but it is not necessarily a good thing for long term sustainability considering the audience that can sustain this number of orchestras is trending downwards.

I’ve compared the classical music dilemma to print media many times. Despite the availability of an abundance of great journalism, written at levels of consummate literacy, one would hardly call this the golden age for print journalism. There really is an uncanny comparison in many aspects. The big difference, however, is that print media had considerably less time to react to the external environment that made it irrelevant (i.e. the Internet).

• Growth of news organizations: organizations became bigger, more complex, more expensive, and harder to manage and sustain. These organizations could not react to the changing external environment fast enough.
• Number of organizations: up until the recent quick crash-and-burn of print media, the number of magazines and newspapers was growing. This fragmentation looked good for the industry on the surface—more journalism, more niche journalism—but paired with a decline in audience, you are faced with less and less costumers for more and more news.
• Number of students: what about the number of journalism students enrolled in college? Surely, this says something about the level of training and preparation for the journalistic workforce. The number of students is steadily rising, despite the industry caving. This means quality goes up, but sustainability of this quality goes down.

So what’s happening next?

• Deprofessionalization: journalism, like classical music, will never die. But what are the trends we have seen in journalism? Citizen journalism and blogs. These are a thread to the quality of journalism (and the quantity of quality); when there is no money to support journalism, you cannot expect the same level of reporting.
• New business models: on the other hand, there will be a handful of journalists and publishers finding new ways to sustain professional journalism.

At the core, print media, or classical music, if you will, serves the community and will always serve the community. It just won’t go away. Their original missions and purposes are still relevant and true. Who am I to define art, or to define classical music? Who am I to dictate how orchestras should bring classical music to communities?

Curt Long, in a guest post for Adaptistration, wrote a fantastic article inspired by this year’s “Orchestra Revolution” discussion at the League’s conference: Changes In The Model…Do We Need Revolution Or Evolution? He ends with:

On balance, I would suggest that

1) in many ways the traditional model focuses on the right things, and that
2) there are still basic building blocks which an orchestra can implement which will help to address those things effectively, but that
3) the environment in which we operate has become sufficiently dynamic and complicated that we should abandon the idea that there is any “simple” model which captures what an orchestra needs to do to thrive, and that
4) every community is different, and every orchestra needs to make its case for community support within the context of the resources, aspirations, and priorities of its own community.

I think this perfectly echoes what I’ve been writing: that orchestras need a structure that facilitates a purpose defined by those who use it.

So although I won’t argue against calling this a golden age for the quality and quantity of classical music performances, we must realize that, golden age or not, classical music in its massiveness and complexity cannot be sustained into the future by a declining audience.

We have more time to react than those unfortunates in print media, but react we must. Not through revolution, but through building a good structure that will facilitate a purpose specific for each unique organization.

Classical music organizations of the future will be simple: they will be a catalyst for musicians to come together and make music for the community. Just as they’ve always been at their core. But on the way to this simplification, there will likely be casualties, big and small. On the other hand, new organizations, capitalizing on the changes in the external environment, will sprout and become successful. Such is the world.

The title of this blog post is of course a wildly inaccurate claim. How did I get to the number? In my small-scale “free agent” crowdfunding experiment for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, I ended up with $235 from 1,000 followers by the deadline. That translates to $0.24 per follower.

The goal was $1,000, or one dollar per follower. It was a fairly arbitrary goal and I had no expectations. However, I’m still slightly disappointed I didn’t make the goal. But consider the following:

Networking

• All communications were strictly limited to my blog, Twitter and Facebook. Since this was an experiment to test social networking, I did not send an appeal to friends and family in the way people do when they raise funds for a run or walk, or want you to vote for a particular contest.
  

  Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, the authors of The Networked Nonprofit that inspired this experiment, wrote an Assessment and Reflection Report on America’s Giving Challenge 2009. They found that: “Personal solicitations to pre-existing networks of donors and friends through multiple channels were rated as the most effective methods for fundraising. Thirty-five percent of contest participants rated messaging to friends through Facebook as most effective; 32 percent rated personal email to friends, family and colleagues as effective or most effective; and 25 percent rated email to an existing organizational donor base as effective or most effective.” I did not use any of these methods.

• In light of that, I personally met only 4 of the 12 donors (excluding myself). Two donors were former colleagues who also have Twitter accounts. However, most of the donors were definitely social media contacts with whom I have had more in-depth conversations. One donor was a friend of a friend.

Sharing

• Kicking off the effort was paired with an e-mail to a list of about 30 classical music bloggers. In addition, I created Web banners for those bloggers to use. Four bloggers wrote a post; one blogger used the banner. (Other bloggers, not on the initial list, also wrote a post. All are captured here).
  

  In the Assessment and Reflection Report, the authors bring other good lessons and note that “Some like Atlas Corps recruited 150 ‘Campaign Captains’ before the contest started. Other organizations broke their efforts down into bite-size pieces for their volunteers by creating templates to use to send messages to their friends, post and comment on blogs, and create their own videos.” Perhaps I should have recruited similar “captains” and created more multimedia in a shareable format.

• I counted most on Twitter followers to spread the word. There were 44 followers that used the #floodofsupport hash tag or linked to the Crowdrise page or blog post.
• Spreading the word was not a case of “build it and they will come.” The hash tag spread fairly well in the first couple of days, after which it dropped significantly. Even after I created an incentive to use the hash tag (a ¢5 donation for each mention), it did not pick back up.

Technology

• The donation process needs to be as simple as possible. I would have preferred to go straight to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s Web site, but after checking in, I decided it would cost them too much in administrative fees and human resources. Remember, I did know how the donations would start coming in; I anticipated more donations, but smaller amounts.
• Crowdrise was a good tool, but certainly not perfect: it didn’t allow for $1 donations, as I had wished. The payment process went through Amazon, which created an extra step. In addition, seeing that donations came from different countries, there were questions surrounding paying with credit cards and with foreign currency.

The positives

• Sure, I did not reach my goal. But I would be willing to bet that the particular donors would not have given a gift if it wasn’t for this effort. Nothing is lost and my “free agent” effort didn’t cannibalize the Nashville Symphony’s efforts.
• The Nashville Symphony Orchestra fulfills a, albeit large, regional function. But don’t let this geographic boundary limit your campaign. I started this campaign in Chicago, having never been to Nashville, and received donations from different countries and states (England, Germany, and several states within the U.S.).
• This also tells us something about telling stories and increasing awareness of your issue or organization in general.

The lessons for arts organizations

• Don’t think of social media as a quick fix to raise funds. This was already obvious before the experiment, perhaps, but even though I felt I had a great cause to support, in the end it was the personal connections and more in-depth relationships that resulted in donations.
• Beyond using and counting on your social network for donations and spreading the word, find ways to activate your network more concretely: create those “campaign captains.” Going about the effort alone is much tougher.
• Momentum is tremendously important. Even after a monetary incentive to simply retweet a hash tag, I could not retrieve the momentum. Kanter and Fine identified immersion in the effort and the ability to react on the fly as key aspects in fund raising success.
• Technology and ease of process is very important. That’s why the Red Cross was so successful with their text message donation campaign during the Haiti crisis. It was easy to explain and simple to execute. Make sure your organization’s Web site and your staff can handle a wave of many small donations, and make it a one-click process.
• Your key performance indicator is of course the money you raised. But it doesn’t stop there. You will likely have gained more relationships, deeper relationships, behavioral information, and increased the organization’s overall awareness and created opportunities to tell your story. Measure those elements as well.

In the end, this entire experiment was all about just that: experimenting. I wasn’t able to fully engage and immerse myself in the project; life on the outside took over. But remember that the experiment was about creating a low-effort, easy to set up campaign, and seeing where 1,000 Twitter followers would lead. Could I have raised more money? Definitely. But that wasn’t the point.

I am still proud of raising $235 for the Nashville Symphony’s flood recovery effort. It’s a $235 they wouldn’t have had without this little experiment.

We have a little less than a week to go for my little crowdfunding experiment #floodofsupport. I have been learning some good lessons already, which–beside doing a good deed–was the point.

Flood of Support

Right now, unfortunately, I’m still ways away from the $1,000 goal. The project started out well, but has been stagnant for the last few days. Perhaps because I’ve been out of town and haven’t paid it the attention it deserves.

You’ll have to wait for the write up of the learned lessons until after the project deadline. But I wanted to highlight the good people who have spread the word so far:

Who has donated?
You can see the list of donors on the project’s page on Crowdrise.

Who has spread the message?
You can see the list of people who tweeted about #floodofsupport here.

The following people have blogged about #floodofsupport

Nashville Symphony Orchestra
Maura Lafferty
Maryann Devine
Drew McManus
Amanda Ameer
Christian Spließ
Birgit Schmidt-Hurtienne (here and here)
Chris Foley (ran one of the banner ads on his Collaborative Piano Blog)

What’s next?
Right now, I’m trying out donating ¢5 for each of the first hundred tweets that mention #floodofsupport. I’ll also be trying to target some tweets to particular people.

Also, there’s still a $20 matching grant from a former Chicago Symphony colleague out there. You should DM him.

Do you have any brilliant ideas on how to advance #floodofsupport? Let me know!

I just returned from San Francisco, where I presented in a seminar on social media at the annual conference of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras. I was invited by seminar moderator Oliver Theil, public relations director at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. My co-presenter was–and I still get goose bumps saying this–the venerable Beth Kanter.

Beth’s new book The Networked Nonprofit provided a framework for the presentation. I tried to provide concrete examples from my Orchestras and Social Media Survey and case studies from the field. I also touched on the orchestra “churn” study in connection to the book Flip the Funnel, which I have written about during the TAFTO month.

Below the embedded presentation follow some of the topics in more detail:

Classical music organizations and free agents

• Beth’s book explains free agents as people who work outside the organization and are enthused by a cause rather than an institution. The job of the organization then becomes to make it “easy for outsiders to come in.” Marcia Adair’s #operaplot is the perfect example of an outsider, a free agent, coming up with a great idea and involving arts organizations in a way that is simple, effortless and risk-free. Read my interview with Marcia here.
• Naturally, I briefly mentioned my very own free agent experiment #floodofsupport. There’s still time to get involved.

Integrated campaign around a viral video

• Perhaps you’ve seen the video: a flashmob (or is it guerilla marketing) opera performance at a market in Valencia, Spain. The video received more than 4 million views. But that wasn’t it. The creative agency behind the video produced several complementing elements: a micro-site; Twitter, Facebook and other social networking profiles; and a print brochure. All for their client Palau de les Arts. The reason why people might not have known about that side of the effort, though, became painfully obvious when I contacted someone at the creative agency. He told me the powers that be at the Palau didn’t believe in the campaign and nixed it, including editing out any branding in the viral video. What a missed opportunity!

Saint Louis Symphony: cross-platform integration

• The Saint Louis Symphony is an example of well-designed cross-platform integration of social media tools. Highlighting their connectedness on the front page with prominent links to Facebook and the orchestra’s blog. A page on the Web site lists all their social media efforts. Facebook or Twitter are not silos of interaction; social media tools work best across platforms and they work best when an organization’s Web site complements the tools, as well as offline complementing online.

Landing pages

• Another page from Saint Louis Symphony’s book. They do a good job with a custom page on student efforts on their Facebook page. That led me to talk about landing pages and welcome tabs, items specifically designed to welcome new fans and call for a specific action. I saw a recent study where having a landing page/welcome tab on your Facebook page increases the “like” conversion from 23% to 47%. I have not yet seen an orchestra with a custom welcome tab.
• Not to mention Twitter landing pages. Why not welcome people from Twitter to your site with a specific message to them? Moreover, if you set up a Twitter landing page on your site with a specific call to action that takes them through a specific path on your web site, you can measure conversion rates through Google Analytics with funnels. You can see where people dropped off, how many and where they went. Keep this in mind, not for just ticket sales, but for newsletter sign ups or other actionable items.

Measuring results

• Due to time shortage, the only point I really wanted to make was that you should look at a social media effort as part of an integrated marketing communications effort, where communications result in behavior change and marketing is the financial value of this behavior. So if you’re measuring, you first have to know what this behavior change is. What are you looking to achieve in the next 5 to 10 years? Those sometimes 150-year-old mission statements can still be a guiding light. The principles don’t change much, the environment does, and that’s what is reflected in the last sentence of the New York Philharmonic’s mission statement, to bring classical music to the community “in any other manner now known or hereafter to be…” Read my series on Evaluating Social Media for Classical Music Organizations.

We all know that Nashville got hit with a terrible flood a few months ago. This terrible flood didn’t spare the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO). The orchestra’s damages were approximately $42 million and after insurance and support from FEMA, the remaining financial gap could be as much as $10 million.

A flood is no fun. I know. In 2008, my neighborhood was hit with flooding from the Chicago River. I saw the whole community suffering, and many still are.

I’m sure, scratch that, I’m hopeful, some wonderful major donors will step up the plate and help rescue the NSO from this disaster. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, for example, graciously donated $25,000 toward the symphony’s recovery.

But why shouldn’t we all try to contribute our own little bit as a classical music community online? Here’s my idea: leverage this network with #floodofsupport

I recently passed the 1,000-follower mark on Twitter. I was curious what that exactly meant, so I asked if people could respond with a simple “hi.” I got 16 responses. I pondered what that means for organizations trying to get more out of people than simply saying hello. I was pointed to the term “slacktivism” by Maura Lafferty.

Now, to properly commemorate these 1,000 followers, I wanted to see if we can get past this slacktivism and get some real activism.

I just finished Beth Kanter and Alison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit. In this wonderful book, the authors talk about “free agents.” People who care about a cause, but do not work for, or perhaps more importantly, with an organization.

In that spirit, as a free agent, I want to raise a modest $1,000 for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s flood recovery effort. That translates to just one dollar for each of my Twitter followers.

Here’s all the important stuff:

How to support

* #floodofsupport runs until August 1, 2010
* Donate here: http://www.crowdrise.com/floodofsupport/

About Crowdrise
* Crowdrise charges 5% + $1 for donations below $25; and 5% + $2.50 for donations $25 and up.
* If someone donates $1, $0 will go to the NSO
* I checked with the NSO, and for them there are costs (credit card fees, administrative) and valuable human resources associated with many small donations as well. The point is to help them, not to make their lives harder. Crowdrise seemed the best option. If you have questions about your donation, check here: http://www.crowdrise.com/about/faq.

Marc’s mini-matching grant
* The first five donors who leave a comment underneath this post, will see their donation matched up to $5.

How to support even more
* Spread the message to your friends and ask them to donate and spread the message as well
* Start your own mini-matching grant on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, my blog…

Sharing and networking
* I’m relying on my network to donate, but as importantly, to share the message. When you share on Twitter, please use the hash tag #floodofsupport so we can track the spread!
* I have e-mailed many classical music bloggers to ask their support. Please let your favorite bloggers know about this campaign!
* If you have a Web site or a blog, please use the banners I have created below with a link to this blog post (so that they get all the instructions).

Free Agent
* I have no connection to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. In fact, I’ve never even been in Nashville. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care! It’s all about the classical music community on the Internet helping out an organization in need.
* The only contact I have had with the NSO is to ask about any costs associated to donating online. There were, hence the Crowdrise option. Let’s surprise them with a nice big check!

Banners

Link these banners either to http://mcmvanbree.com/dutchperspective/floodofsupport or http://www.crowdrise.com/floodofsupport/

Flood of Support (120 x 240)

Flood of Support (125X125)

Flood of Support (300 x 250)

Flood of Support (468 x 60)

I’ve been an avid fan of Beth Kanter’s blog for the past few years. It might come as no surprise that I pre-ordered her, and co-author Allison Fine’s, book The Networked Nonprofit. And if you’re a reader of their blogs, it might also come as no surprise that the book fully lived up to its great expectations.

My first reaction, on Twitter no less, was telling Beth that I liked the tone of the book. It doesn’t have the common “social media hippie” talk. You know, the long-haired, world-peace-wishing, tree-hugging, social-media-is-going-to-solve-all-your-problems-and-here-are-the-tools-to-do-it talk.

Good social media books talk less about the tools and more about the concepts and frameworks. That’s what I loved about Flip the Funnel, and that’s what I loved about The Networked Nonprofit. Both define and lay out a framework in which you can apply your own strategy. We all know I’m a big fan of such frameworks.

Sometimes it looks as if the authors are treading the hippie-talk territory. I think this is unavoidable. It’s because nonprofits have been used to doing things in a particular way and a different approach might seem like a fairy tale at times. But the authors never end up actually sounding like our long-haired friends. Many positive, world-peace-wishing, elements are backed up with organizational structure research outside, and predating, the social media realm, and they are often balanced with real-world pitfalls to look out for.

Although the authors provide a core framework, the book is chock full of examples and practical, how-to information. Reading the book will help you answer all those “I’m scared of social media” questions. The reflection questions at the end of each chapter are particularly helpful for a nonprofit manager building a social media strategy.

As the authors write, the book is built on a simple equation: “Social Media Powers Social Networks for Social Change.” The book sets the stage with the rise of Millennials who no longer owe allegiance to any particular organizations, but rather pick out particular causes. Thus, the Networked Nonprofit will engage these “free agents” and leverage their social networks.

As we move through microplanning, crowdsourcing cautions, creating social culture, and making nonprofits simpler, we end up in the final chapter, one of the strongest chapters of the book: Governing Through Networks. It takes a critical look at governance at nonprofits. Again, the directive here is not “they should use social media and all will change for the better,” the concept is working as a Networked Nonprofit in a broad, on as well as offline, sense.

The book is a fast read, but you’ll keep it as source to reference. In that sense, it’s a perfect (hand)book for nonprofit managers that are looking to increase the impact of their organization’s mission statement in a connected world. I am going to be rereading it, and using it, in the months ahead.

Just published: an interesting study from the National Endowment for the Arts called “Audience 2.0: how Technology Influences Arts Participation.” I wanted to give a quick, initial overview with some quick, initial comments.

One would think that with the opening up of the Internet, with the increased accessibility, arts participation through electronic media has risen significantly. But unfortunately, we can’t find that out through this report. It does note that arts participation through electronic media declined by almost 20 percent from 1992 to 2002.

But first, let’s see what the NEA defines as electronic media: radio, audio recordings, television, video recordings, Internet, and portable media. Only the first three media were polled in 1982, video recordings were added in 1992, the Internet in 2002, and portable media in 2008.

So when we see this decline in participation rate in electronic media arts participation, we probably have to take into account that this was before the Internet truly provided more access and this was while radio and television stations were cutting arts performances and CD sales were going down.

Unfortunately, as the authors write in a note “the format of the questions in the 2008 SPPA having to do with arts participation through media differed substantially from those in the 1982, 1992, and 2002 SPPAs, making it difficult to compare arts participation rates between the 2008 SPPA and prior years.”

In the current report, however, the findings “suggest that adults who have access to the Internet are substantially more likely than those without Internet access to participate in the arts through any form of electronic media.”

I would love to see a report focused primarily on the Internet and portable media, without the effects of CDs and DVDs, radio broadcasts and television programs.

But there are some things we can learn from the new report, especially when compared to the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts:

The Internet audience and age

• Around 75% of those who saw an arts performance online, or those who created art online, were ages 18-44; however, people who look up art information tend to be a little older, only 63% were 18-44. In the arts participation survey of 2008, 50% of those attending the arts were ages 18-44.

The Internet audience and education

• Nearly 38% of those who saw an arts performance online, and nearly 44% of those who create art online, were at least a college graduate. In the arts participation survey of 2008, 48% of those attending the arts were at least a college graduate.

The Internet audience and income

• 33% of those who saw an arts performance online, or those who create art online, made less than $50K. In the arts participation survey of 2008, 30% of those attending the arts made less than $50K.

So we can clearly see that the age of those who experience art online is much younger than those who attend live art. A higher education, perhaps connected to younger age, is not as important for Internet participation as for attending live performances. And income seems not to be a major factor in difference, perhaps due to a higher distribution of Internet access among more wealthy families.

Another interesting finding from the Audience 2.0 report is that nearly twice as many respondents reported having participated in classical music through electronic media than through live attendance (18% versus 9%). The smaller sample of opera sees the same story with 5% versus 2%. This is perhaps not entirely surprising, as listening to a recording of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony is easier, in many aspects, than attending it in performance.

Causation and correlation

But the question on everyone’s mind, of course, is if participation in the arts through electronic media leads to participation through other means, or in other words, live performances?

Interestingly, the report used some statistical models that predicted frequency and breadth of live arts attendance from arts participation through electronic media. Participation through electronic media was related to an increase in both frequency and breadth, second only to higher education levels.

But just like a recent study by a marketing agency, “Facebook Fans Spend More Money,” which found that a fan of a brand on Facebook spends more money on that brand than non-fans, was seen by many as causation, rather than correlation, we have to be careful with electronic media leading to other participation, vice versa, or the two even reinforcing each other. The NEA study states that “determining the causal nature of those relationships requires more research.”

The good news is that the study suggests that “using electronic media to view or listen to the arts does not ‘replace’ live arts attendance” and seeing the clear relationship between participating in the arts through electronic media and participating in the arts through attendance, performance, and creation, “encouraging arts participation through electronic media may lead to greater interest in the arts overall.”

What to do with this information?

Sure, more research is needed to determine the causal nature, but there is much useful information in just the fact that people who participate in arts online, are much more likely to go to a performance or create art themselves. The study found that the likelihood for media arts participants to attend a live performance was nearly 30% greater than non-participants and the likelihood to create art was 27% greater.

As an arts organization, you can find the places where people participate in arts online. Better yet, you can create such a place. You can gather and collect their demographic information, of course, and base your marketing and your outreach on education and income statistics, but what is perhaps more important is their behavior and the subsequent financial value of that behavior.

In the general population, half of the people do not attend live performances nor participate in art through media. About 13% of the people only attend live performances and a slightly larger number, 15%, only participates through media. But 22% both attend live performances and participate.

One question undeniably is why do those who only participate through media not attend live performances? It seems that education and income are related factors. It’s perhaps quite logical: media consumption has fewer barriers than live consumption.

Another point, seeing that participation through electronic media was related to an increase in both frequency and breadth of live attendance, is how can we persuade those who only attend live performances to participate through media?

So arts organizations should provide the opportunities for their attendees to keep being engaged with the art through media consumption: 1) it provides fewer barriers, increasing the diversity of the audience (age, economical, education, ethnicity) and fulfilling part of your mission statement of bringing art to the community (because who says it can only happen through live performances?); and 2) it echoes my Take A Friend To the Orchestra contribution on flipping the traditional marketing funnel: keep them more engaged and they will attend more.

And how do we keep attendees more engaged through media? Well, social media anyone?

An interesting question from the League of American Orchestra, which had its annual conference just last week. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go, but that doesn’t preclude me from chiming in (I did here, here and here). In addition, the opening session was broadcasted and recorded. Find it here.

The question was “what is the most important question to discuss?” and the audience, both on- and offline was to pick from the following options:

Purpose: What makes an orchestra matter in the 21st century?

Change: If we “let go of the past” and “embrace the future,” what should we retain, release, and go for?

Structure: How should an orchestra be structured, organized, and behave to be successful?

Relevance: What does the artistically vibrant orchestra need to look like to be essential for its community?

Relevance won by a mile, followed by purpose, change and lastly structure. Those first three questions, to me, indicate that orchestras, or at least their managers, don’t quite know what they are. Ian David Moss at Createquity writes: “My sense is that the orchestra field is facing something of an existential crisis right now. Why else would it so openly welcome questions of its relevance to audiences and communities in the 21st century?”

Are we really in some kind of existential crisis? I’m not so sure. Each arts organization, each orchestra is of course unique, but they all have a broad purpose in common: art. In whatever shape or form and to be determined by more creative types. And artistic vibrancy creates relevancy. Sure, change is needed to let go of the past and embrace the future, but we’ve been talking about this for years and we’ve seen some answers: engagement. Ben Cameron, in his key note address, talked about a market less defined by consumption, but more and more by participation.

To me, it all boils down to the question: How are you going to change, how are you going to be relevant, how are you going to fulfill your purpose without the necessary structure?

Jesse Rosen, president of the League, in an online conversation with Doug McLennan, seemed to agree: “I couldn’t help but notice the lowest scoring question […] was the question about structure. […] It may be one of the elephants in the room, because it is one of the harder problems to solve.”

Although it’s perhaps something that can’t be discussed in snippets of 140 characters, on Twitter, I received some push back. Ian David Moss wrote in response to my tweet that the purpose is art: “Whenever anyone pushed the ‘what is the purpose of the orchestra’ or ‘what excites you,’ nobody took bait.” Conductor Stephen Brown wrote: “how do we know what structure is necessary?” and “an orchestra with a great structure will still die if it supports an irrelevant ‘experience/product.’”

My problem with discussions about purpose, relevance is that they are too abstract to facilitate real change. And purpose and relevance do not come in a one-size-fits-all package. What the field needs is a real, hands-on discussion about how to facilitate change and how to practically prepare for the future. The field needs a new structure in a new environment.

In this changing environment the structure would need to follow a couple of rules:

* Creativity nowadays means setting up a framework in which creativity can happen
Ben Cameron suggested in his key note that an orchestra’s role is maybe “an orchestration of social interaction.” Jesse Rosen even questioned “are we more about reenactment than creation?” Creativity not just stems from the organization anymore. The structure needs to provide a framework of resources for creativity and allow and set the stage for people, inside or outside, to become creators.

* The structure needs an organizational culture that supports it
As Joseph Jaffe writes in Flip the Funnel: “…without cultural buy-in, organizational resource allocation, system integration, and best practices are like a transplanted organ rejected by its host body.” In an older book, Strategy: Core Concepts, the authors explain how a mismatch in culture and strategy occurs. I wrote about that in an earlier blog post on organizational culture and change. I have also used the very same book to look at a decentralized organization versus a centralized organization. And for the Orchestra R/Evolution blog, I wrote about Google’s 20%-time rule, which is one idea to allow creativity to come back into the organizational culture.

In short, the new structure needs to reflect the new environment. The often heard words transparency, authenticity and sincerity are not just buzz words. Eric Booth mentioned that “anytime you engage workers in conversation about their work, productivity goes up.”

The purpose is art; vibrant art breeds relevancy; the change that’s needed is engagement; now let’s build the structure to support it.

* Update: there has been more discussion on the topic. Find it here:
Drew McManus | Adaptistration | Look Before You Leap
Stephen P Brown’s Blog | An Orchestra’s Relevance Isn’t Relevant?
Andrew Adler | Louisville Courier-Journal | Orchestra Leaders Only Talk of Change

Last Wednesday, I had my whirlwind trip to Los Angeles to speak at the Opera America 2010 Conference. I arrived in L.A. Tuesday night—and was amazed at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra mural during my cab ride to downtown—but I had to leave again shortly after noon on Wednesday. That meant unfortunately missing two of my co-presenters, some exciting performances, Placido Domingo’s address, and of course, all the networking and meeting and greeting.

That said, it was great meeting Ling Chan, Ceci Dadisman and Margo Drakos in person. There’s hope for the arts in social media.

I was on first in the seminar. I delivered a presentation on a framework for social media strategy. I got lots of interesting questions. I’m not sure if I answered some of them satisfactory. Things are usually clearer in my head than coming from my mouth.

Here is the presentation:

The biggest struggle perhaps is gauging the level of knowledge and experience in the room. I was surprised to hear the question “what is Twitter?” in the middle of my presentation. But those questions are good to gain back perspective. I don’t think they really didn’t know what Twitter was, they wanted to know the why and how.

The framework I provided contained perhaps surprisingly few mentions of actual tools. I like to stress social media is not about the tools, it’s about the interaction and community. But people do like to hear about concrete examples and tools, about tips and tricks. It was a good lesson for me.

On the other hand, the reason I didn’t include those concrete examples was because I keep thinking about what they are going to do with those examples. Are they going to replicate them? What works for one company, doesn’t work for another. In Amber Nashlund’s popular post Social media topics that need to die, she writes: “If you’re spending all your time building your cloned safety net based on other people’s situations, you’re already behind the game, and not focused on what your business needs.”

I will need to find a happy intermedium. Illustrative examples, but stress that social media and Web 2.0 are contextual and technological (respectively) frameworks in which you can be creative. We’re in a creative industry after all.

Furthermore, if I had included concrete examples, I would have picked the Vancouver Opera…

I couldn’t be happier then to listen to Ling Chan’s presentation about Vancouver Opera’s social media efforts. I already knew the surface of their efforts, but Ling provided the most creative case study of an opera company’s use of social media. I recognized a lot of the same key points I tried to make from a theoretical point of view in Ling’s practical demonstration. She described her own experience of the presentation on her own blog.

I wasn’t ready to leave, but had to catch the flight back to Chicago without seeing Ceci’s and Margo’s presentations…