Americans for the Arts

Bruce Whitacre

At the NCTF Board meeting this fall, we invited Louise Chalfant, the Director of Education at the Guthrie Theatre, to talk about her programs targeting professionals.  (See  http://www.guthrietheater.org/learn.)

Our guest speaker slot is usually offered to a distinguished artist, an artistic director, a major producer, someone one would normally consider of interest to the managing directors and high level executives on our Board.  This time, we wanted to share the special programs Louise and her team have created that are quite unique in their scope, their consistency, and their success.  It was an eye-opening presentation.

Louise is building a very important new bridge into corporations and professional firms for her community, and the country as a whole.  Success such as hers makes a strong case for companies to engage with the arts the Shugol report cites, but at an all new level.

Over the past few years, in conjunction with board members and corporate partners (more on this, below), Louise and her team have crafted the rather likely but exciting range of professional training for employees: leadership, team-building through improvisation.  Sporadically, many theatres have offered this to specific corporate partners, but few do it consistently.  However, there are many for-profit, small-scale companies of actors who have entered some of these arenas.  Louise’s focus, which she emphasizes time and again, is that she brings Guthrie-level standards of excellence to these programs.  Many were tested on the companies of Guthrie board members before entering the curriculum.

Jim Rivett

First and foremost we must define what support actually means. Support in the way of financial contributions is most often cited, yet it is only one measure among many. And as we know, constricted financial donations are a reality in times of economic hardship.

Yet there are numerous ways that businesses and individuals can support the arts, through times of both Boom and Bust. Attending and partaking in artistic events is a basic level of arts support that’s easy and also entertaining.

But more importantly, businesses should recognize that there are ways to offer support that can have an equally important bottom-line impact on the arts as any cash donation or sponsorship. Corporate engagement in the form of time, talent, energy and expertise are all incredibly valuable resources that today’s businesses can provide to arts organizations and initiatives.

For instance, at Arketype, we make it part of our corporate mission to give back to the arts in ways that go well beyond cash contributions. Our 80/20 rule is a reflection of that commitment—80 percent of our time is spent on client projects, while 20 percent is spent putting creative resources in the form of in-kind design, advertising, marketing, video and multimedia toward helping museums, theatres, musicians, artists and other nonprofit groups that share a passion for the arts.

Megan Van Voorhis

At Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, partnership is part of our DNA. Perhaps it is a function of our environment. Some would say Cleveland has been in a recession for thirty years. So we have had to get creative to obtain support for arts and culture. At CPAC, we have embraced the arts and culture sector’s full scope of benefits as central to its purpose, and that view has brought new support and resources to the sector, while slowly making it a better place for everyone. Our work is not done, but here are a few examples of what we have achieved.

The Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE), our small business association, created the first Arts Network in the country four years ago establishing its commitment to supporting artists and small arts businesses. Together we brought health insurance and small business resources to an industry that sorely needed them, and COSE found a new market. All it took was a little understanding that artists and small arts businesses are entrepreneurs; and, that they have the same needs as those COSE was already serving. Oh…and a little incentive. With the support of a progressive funder (Leveraging Investments in Creativity), and matching dollars, we brought the industry knowledge and incentive ($120,000) to animate the COSE Arts Network. Today, over 500 artists and arts-based business members look to the COSE Arts Network for services. Could you deliver a fully functioning small business association for the arts with one-year and $120,000? Alone, we couldn’t. But through partnership, we did. We bring that model to everything we do now.

Katherine Mooring

As we continue to move forward with fresh ideas, I am energized by the reminder that “Doing it “the old way" is not an option.”

Last year, thanks to a partnership with Farr Associates in High Point, NC, we were able to send five local executive directors to participate in Farr’s Mastering Leadership Dynamics™ Program, a five day program for mid to senior level executives. The program is designed to help executives master the dynamics of awareness, actions, and outcomes in order to deliver effective and sustainable leadership practices that maximize workforce performance. For us, the especially cool thing was that the majority of participants are from the corporate sector, so it gave our cultural leaders incredible access and exposure to peers from the for-profit world. Over an intensive five-day period, attendees not only improve their own skills, they also develop new relationships and enhance their understanding of the issues, worries and concerns on the minds of those we would ask for support. We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the first round of participants, and are in the process of scheduling at least four others for the current year.

Finally, in the Spring of 2010, we launched our own leadership development initiative, designed and led by a wonderfully creative and insightful (and slightly unorthodox) facilitator and coach in our community, Angelina Corbet. Lead with Intention© targets mid-level professionals in the cultural sector with high potential to move into a chief executive (or equivalent) role.

Jeff Hawthorne

In an earlier blog post, Monograph author Katherine Mooring pointed out a quote that I too found thought-provoking. It’s from Bob Speltz, Director of Public Affairs for The Standard (an insurance and finance company in Portland, Oregon) making an important comment on intergenerational changes in corporate leadership:

“Doing it ‘the old way’ is not an option,” he says, “and it will require a very different set of skills for arts administrators to appeal to new leadership and the people who work around them.”

To establish and nurture stronger relationships between businesses and arts organizations, Speltz advocates for arts leaders to be more proactive about meeting with corporate decision-makers – but not to start off with soliciting a contribution. “Understanding what [businesses] are looking for in community partnerships” is key, says Speltz, and having these discussions can help arts organizations collaborate “in intelligent and innovative ways.”

I think most arts executives and fundraising professionals are well aware of the need to cultivate their corporate prospects methodically, and remember to reach out to their corporate donors when they’re not asking for money. Yet apparently it doesn’t always happen, so we need to be reminded. And while Speltz notes that it can be invaluable for arts organizations to simply listen to the needs of the business, I suspect many of us could spend more time and energy taking what they hear from a business and considering new innovative partnerships that can meet the needs of both the company and the arts organization.

Since 1968, the Business Committee for the Arts (BCA) has conducted a field-wide survey of businesses to determine why they support the arts, to what extent they support the arts, and how they support the arts. Conducted by Shugoll Research, the 2010 BCA Triennial Survey of Business Support to the Arts is the only survey in the United States that tracks support from small, midsize, and large companies to provide the most complete view of the arts funding landscape from businesses nationwide.

Why Business Supports the Arts

What’s the most important determinant of why a business that gives to the arts might increase its support? Profitability. Businesses make decisions based on bottom line. After profitability, respondents chose a “link to social causes or education” as the next most important factor in deciding to support the arts.

For example, Northeast Utilities, a 2010 BCA 10 award recipient, has an ongoing partnership with one Hartford area elementary school.  A $500,000 grant from the NU Foundation provided funding to enable The R.J. Kinsella Elementary School to transform itself into a K-8 arts-based magnet school.  According to Northeast Utilities Chairman, President and CEO, Charles W. Shivery, “Northeast Utilities and its companies embrace the important role played by the arts in energizing the social, economic and educational fabric of our communities.”

Andrew Witt

I recently had a conversation with one of our board members on how we (LAA’s and UAF’s) were addressing the economic issues that were forcing us (locally and nationally) to take a hard look at the traditional business model.

Over the past two years, and really well before that, the UAF field has seen reductions in traditional corporate philanthropy in favor of sponsorship marketing.  Coupled with that, constituent arts groups (grantees) have taken advantage of that shift to solicit and receive funding from the same corporate sources that were the major donors to united arts funds.

This was noted in the Triennial survey results as business advertising budgets and marketing/sponsorship budget support roughly equaled annual contributions budgets.  Further proof was noted in the Areas of Giving section that theatres and non-symphonic music received the largest percentage of support.  From these two findings, I see two main opportunities for our field:

• Sponsorship and Marketing support is here to stay and the associated benefits such as comp tickets, program recognition, VIP sponsor receptions and the like will continue to be a strong draw.
• Theatres and non-symphonic music have multiple performance runs and therefore more opportunities for exposure – more reach as the ad world says.  A three week 20 performance run even with fewer seats, has a greater impact than a one night concert in a large hall.

Indeed, I have a question to pose to the field.  Since this is a blog and we are asking for your comments, how about responding to this situation?

Amena Brown

I live my life as a full-time poet, writer, performer, speaker, typist, errand runner…depending on which day you catch me. This life is not as freewheeling as it seems. It is a tenuous balance and juggle of many different opportunities that somehow add up to not quite having to eat ramen noodles for every meal. A couple of years ago, I had a full-time gig writing for a Fortune 500 company, editing and composing documents geared towards employees. I was a poser: a creative brain who had seemingly by some fluke been hired to work for a company that achieved its bottom line via left brain initiatives. As a right brain thinker in a left-brain corporate world, I felt as if my creative thinking skills set could not help me win my boss’ approval or a promotion.

According to Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, right-brain skills sets will be a commodity in what is becoming the new marketplace. This means a couple of things: there are right-brain thinkers currently feeling stifled at jobs where there skills and talent will soon be of immense value and there are left-brain executives who will need to know the tools to manage right-brain ideas while completing left-brain agendas. Therein lies the rub.

Courtney King

The “2010 National Survey of Business Support to the Arts” provides a valuable in-depth look at corporate philanthropy through the lens of art and culture. At the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), we enjoy a unique perspective working with CEOs of leading businesses to increase the level and quality of corporate giving. We are committed to data and benchmarking and are grateful for the opportunity to contribute our perspective to this conversation on business’ support of the arts, drawing upon the $70 billion in corporate giving data that CECP has gathered over the last ten years.

CECP does not advocate for specific issue areas for corporate philanthropic support because we believe that each company should undergo an evaluation of which social issues the company is best prepared to address based on its relevancy to the business’ future success and the ability of the company to make a positive impact in that area. However, our annual data publication, Giving in Numbers: 2010 Edition does provide insight into changing strategies and funding priorities, including to the arts, of the over 170 leading corporations that participate in the Corporate Giving Standard survey.

It is important to note that whereas the 2010 National Survey canvasses companies of all revenue sizes, CECP’s study focuses on large corporations, including 61 of the Fortune 100. As the 2010 National Survey points out, a significant percentage of arts funding comes from the small to mid-sized businesses (combined 93%), since most arts giving remains targeted at local arts projects (97%).

Akhtar Badshah

Arts are the lifeblood of a thriving and successful community.   For companies like Microsoft, with over 30,000 employees and their families living in the Puget Sound region, we place great emphasis on playing an active role in the development of our community. Supporting the arts is an investment that pays for generations.  We recently supported the Picasso exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum which opened this October and already over 100,000 people have visited the Museum and viewed the art opening their eyes to works that have never been seen before in this country.  In addition 18,000 school kids signed up to learn about Picasso through school tours and classroom outreach programs.  This is the real benefit of arts we can insure our kids are getting a fully rounded education.

We believe that supporting the arts means going beyond supporting the major and established organizations but also supporting the local theatre, the small children’s theatre and other performing arts organizations because all of them together provide the rich variety of a cultural experience that then becomes the foundation of our growth as individuals and as a community.   Our partnership with the Arts Fund gives us the opportunity to fund the most creative organizations that are both interesting and cutting edge.

Rocco Landesman with ArtsWave

At ArtsWave in greater Cincinnati, we’re engaging our business leaders in a conversation about the ripple effects of benefits from the arts in our community. And we find people in the private sector are particularly intrigued by the way the arts and artists make communities and neighborhoods exciting, vibrant, unique places to live and work.

Our corporate friends who are recruiting employees from all over the world tell us  that the arts in our region – our music, theatre, dance, museums, galleries, festival and more—make jobs here more appealing, and make retention easier.

This experience with business leaders is consistent with the research we completed last year, when we found that people across our region understand and value leaders who invest in the arts because of these benefits.

We learned that the following two ripple effects are especially helpful and compelling to enumerate:

• A vibrant, thriving economy: Neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists and residents are attracted to the area, etc. Note that this goes well beyond the usual dollars-and-cents argument.
• A more connected population: Diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better, etc.

We’ve been using these findings in our work for about a year now and we’ve had real success in changing the conversation.

Katherine Mooring

It’s an understatement to say that I learned a great deal from some very engaged individuals representing both the arts and the corporate worlds while writing the recently released BCA Monograph. But one comment in particular, from Bob Speltz, The Standard’s Director of Public Affairs, has really kept my mind turning. “We are facing intergenerational changes in business leadership,” he said. “The elder statesman CEO is gone, and the men and women leading companies today are seeing fundamental change. Doing it “the old way" is not an option, and it will require a very different set of skills for arts administrators to appeal to new leadership and the people who work around them.” Bob was a fantastic interview, but I found this to be an especially insightful observation. For me, it was particularly refreshing to hear given the NEW ways we’ve begun experimenting with professional and leadership development initiatives for Charlotte-area arts leaders, many of whom have direct responsibility for securing private sector support.

Certainly Arts &Science Council is not alone as an arts council in providing critical capacity building and technical assistance programs for the artists and organizations we support, and like many others, we started down this new-ish path (for us) with a more traditional approach. Over the past 5 years or so, we’ve offered a series of high quality full and half-day workshops featuring hot topics of the day delivered by experts in the field, and we’ve had success with that approach - great attendance, positive feedback, and appreciative constituents. In the past year though – largely in response to significant psychological changes faced by those of us still working in a sector that’s taken quite a beating – we’ve shifted the focus somewhat. We’re still offering workshops, but intuitively it began to feel like those of us working in the cultural sector were really craving opportunities for deeper, more personal professional and leadership development. So, we’ve gone in a few new directions…!

Bruce Whitacre

We are tracking some interesting information as 2010 comes to a close.  One of the obstacles to arts giving, according to the Triennial Report, has been corporate earnings.  Yet we just concluded a quarter of record corporate earnings.  What does this mean for the cultural sector as a whole?  I’d like to explore a link we in culture don’t often make, although it is immediately apparent: the companies that support us are usually after someone else: our top individual donors!

Many companies draw upon NCTF to entertain high-end clients in New York and around the country.  Demand for these services is climbing, and our conversations for 2011 are to a surprising degree about increasing engagement with theatre.  Bigger budgets mean more to spend on top clients.  Good times!

But are we positioned to make the most of this slow but now apparent recovery?  I’ve been attending a lot of networking sessions that focus on the behavior of the affluent.  After all, the single largest source of support for not for profit theatre is affluent individuals, and as I said, a great deal of our corporate giving is focused on chasing those same individuals.

But who are they, and what are they after?  How have they changed in the last few years?

The most important point about the affluent is that they are older, generally above 55 years in age, and they grew up middle class.   In other words, they’re mostly Boomers.  And at this age, they have nearly all the things they want.  So what’s next?