Deal-A-Day

I have to say I'm totally fascinated with deal-a-day sites and their glitzier cousins for online shopping like Gilt Groupe, Ideeli and BirchBox. I've bought a bunch of deals, mostly for food-related things like dinners or Foodzie's tasting box, but also for store coupons, massage, etc. I'm subscribed to quite a few, and we've even used them to sell memberships and tickets at YBCA. I'll talk more about the work-related deals I've done when I have a bit more time to talk about the kind of ways technology has jumpstarted marketing and fundraising in the sector (have I mentioned that I'm working two jobs?)

Generally, I think most businesses don't have a chance to compete with Groupon's reach. When you ask for a tissue, do you ever say "Hand me a Kleenex?" The brand has become part of modern-day vocabulary, and any description of other deal-a-day sites generally starts with "It's like Groupon..." But I wanted to post that today marks the launch of Facebook deals. I knew this was coming down the line- and you might see YBCA on there soon- as well as Google's bid to get in on the action of an exponentially expanding market.

I can't wait to see what new company will carve a niche out of this market with a differently evolved business model, but CNN's writeup today of Facebook's launch has a couple of interesting points. First, both Facebook and Google are part of the lexicon I mentioned. Their reach is incredible and gives them an edge over Groupon should they be able to leverage their entire networks. (Currently, I think you only see Facebook deals if you are subscribed to it, or any Pages you like offer a deal, though any of your friends who buys a deal will have it on their feed so there will be secondary marketing).

Secondly, Facebook isn't offering the same kind of 50-90% discounts that other deal sites have. According to the article, the Atlanta deals via Facebook range from 13%-75% off. Facebook is hinging on the fact that using these deals is often a social experience so are looking for the socially active discount culture seekers instead of the deep discount customer. They're leveraging the use of Facebook for events listings and social networking with the ability to score coupons while doing it to make their offering a one-stop-shopping experience.

Technology today is marked by an effort to consolidate multiple uses into one gadget or platform. For example, I recently bought a DVD player that can stream Netflix, YouTube, and play music. Sooner or later, it will probably do my taxes. Facebook has made a smart move to combine users interest in social platforms with deal scoring. I'm curious to see how it is adapted. 

Let’s Play a Game (Innovation Is The New Black)

YBCA started an organizational shift towards innovation and resilience in 2007 with a grant from The Wallace Foundation to work on broadening our reach with audiences. The evaluations that followed told us that people wanted a more active role in their cultural exposure, curating their own experiences and determining what art they wanted to see and how they wanted to see it. In 2009, YBCA received a grant from EmcArts, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, to participate in the Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts. Ten staff/board/community members, including myself, were sent to the rolling hills of Virginia to spend a week thinking about major opportunities and challenges to the organization, and how to design and prototype innovative strategies to address them. We came back with a focus on the immersive visitor experience and a plan to prototype new strategies via interdepartmental teams. In January of 2010, YBCA’s Executive Director Ken Foster presented a paper at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters discussing the implications of the economic downturn and suggesting that a transformation in arts management was needed to continue the vitality of the arts field beyond this moment of crisis. He suggested that it was imperative that the sector recognize that the world is shifting under our feet (and in the Bay Area, that even happens literally).

We now live with a new set of rules. There are no more knowns- organizations have to be flexible to respond to change, be it change with the way people engage with you, or change in the revenue streams you once relied on (endowment problems, anyone?) Nothing is permanent, and instead of stasis, organizations need to consistently experiment and refine their practices. We are dealing with a new world and new audience, largely due to technology and the accessibility that comes with it. We must find ways to communicate and build relationships through new channels and, for those people that come to us live and in-person, we need to optimize their experience. Every organization will come up with different tactics, but Ken, and I believe our organization as a whole, have recognized that we need to look for sustainability through diversity, efficiency (though not rigidity under the guise of effectiveness), and developing measures of success.*

To quote Oliver Wyman’s article Strategic Organization Design: An Integrated Approach, “the last remaining source of truly sustainable competitive advantage lies in…the unique ways in which each organization structures its work and motivates its people to achieve clearly articulated objectives.”  I continue to wonder whether we could improve upon our organization’s sustainability by further transforming the ways in which we perform our work.

I’m going to give you two scenarios and I want you to tell me which describes an contemporary arts center and which describes a design firm. 

Place 1: Staff works on interdisciplinary project teams, with a flat organizational hierarchy. Communication occurs between project teams, in group lunches and larger meetings and through email, video conferences, and internal shared blogs. They work in a large open room, with "phone booths" available for private calls, and project spaces dedicated to each team to work closely and hang up ideas, posters and timelines. Casual socializing occurs in the open work area, and other opportunities for socializing occur over weekly teatimes, or impromptu staff-organized events.

Place 2: Staff is organized into departments by skills/type of work, including Marketing, Finance, Operations, etc.  Communication occurs mostly via email, shared documents, and one-on-one, department, and staff meetings. They work in cubicles, with the majority of senior staff located in offices around the main work area. Socializing happens informally at desks, in the kitchen/break room, and at endorsed events.

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Did you make your guess? Well, Place 1 is IDEO, a firm that uses human-centered design to help create or improve upon products, services, spaces, and experiences that sustain innovation and launch new ventures.  Place 2 is Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, my second home, a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary contemporary arts center committed to artistic innovation, the exploration of ideas, and engaging our community. Although one exists in a for-profit sphere and the other in nonprofit, the organizations have similar driving mechanisms; they attempt to use creativity and the diversity of human experience to champion tools for our society to express themselves and function as a community. 

From Wyman’s perspective, IDEO has succeeded in harnessing its competitive advantage.  It has used design strategies to create a workplace that create an environment that caters to the employees, the clients, and the work that they do. The company further motivates the public to innovate with OpenIDEO, an online community where people can create solutions to some of the world’s challenges.

Under the ideas of innovation and resilience is a question that comes up occasionally for YBCA. Should our internal structure mirror the kind of creativity and experimentation we’re committed to in our programming? We’re certainly not like any Fortune 500 company- workwear includes jeans, home-baked goods are often brought in and shared, sometimes the occasional arm-wrestling match breaks out (think Over the Top meets The Office). But could our workspace and ways of working be improved upon? Looking at IDEO’s Human-Centered Design toolkit, I see some practices we’ve already adopted. Multidisciplinary teams have worked well for us for events to improve communication and tap into the organizational resources. Rough and fast prototypes have been attempted and have led to larger program shifts. With the YBCA:YOU pilot program, we are looking to hear directly from our constituents around their realities when engaging with our Center and it is my hope this will impact membership, community engagement, and even curatorial. 

But what if, say, our goal is to improve and streamline audience engagement. Can we replace departments with interdepartmental teams? Can those teams have dedicated spaces to work in-perhaps even a flat hierarchy and a single budget? Can those teams work independently to plan pilots and measure impact within finite timeframes? Are the needs, barriers and constraints within the organization understood by all involved so that they can be adequately represented on each team? And above all, can we look at these big picture goals while managing all the details it takes to support an 11M budget and produce approximately 10 exhibitions, 17 performance productions, 52 public programs, 170 screenings, and 125 commercial and community rental clients that have 600 events all in the course of one year?

It’s a bit of a radical idea, particularly because I’ve made it sound less complex than it would be in actuality. But after speaking with Alan Ratliff, Experience Manager for IDEO’s San Francisco office over lunch I became even more committed to the idea that YBCA needs to capitalize on its own advantages. As he explained his job, I saw that it touched many points that are segregated in traditional job responsibilities: facilities management, building a culture of community, and using creative prompts to facilitate communication between teams. Although it’s unlikely we’d end up looking exactly like them, the IDEO toolkit says, “wild ideas often create real innovation” and this meeting inspired me to continue to encourage and challenge YBCA to move down the path it started on in 2007.  When I joined YBCA, I did not think that innovation would become the trajectory for sustainability at my organization, so maybe we’re just the kind of place to try it.

Special thanks to Alan and Angelique Illusorio for talking to me about IDEO. Be on the lookout for them again when I talk about communication and audience engagement practices at some point in the future.

Homework:

Ken Foster’s article Thriving in an Uncertain World  

IDEO Human-Centered Design toolkit

*Developing measures of success is another post in itself, but I’ll give you something to think about. To communicate our necessity in the community at large (including funders), we have to be able to talk about the value of art. How do you quantify something that is not easily reduced to numbers?

Life may imitate art, but art just imitates TV

Although this blog was primarily conceived as part of a grant, one of the things I wanted to fold in are my activities as someone with an interest in the arts. More and more, the line between work and play has blurred and my career is inherently part of my identity outside the office. I guess I take it as a good sign even though I struggle with it. After all, I always said I wanted to have a job I could be passionate about.

Speaking of passions, I still hesitate to call myself an art collector but the fact is that artwork lines the wall of my apartment. There’s even a stack of framed and unframed work in the corner of my studio waiting to find a place. The underlying motivation behind the work I buy (outside of the obvious aesthetics) is that there is a story behind each piece. I may know the artist or gallery personally, or it represents the memory of a moment over the last 9 years I’ve lived and been involved in the arts in San Francisco. There’s something about the connection to both the person and the piece that really enhances the value for me. I look around the room and see different points and places in my life represented. Here’s one example.

 RTC, Guerrero Gallery, 2011

Image by Ken Harman of Hi-Fructose

I met Ryan Travis Christian (RTC) on a Thursday. A bunch of us were at Park Life, listening to Tommy Guerrero play as part of the Space Cake show by Kyle Field and Thomas Campbell, and browsing their spectacular book table (at least, I was).  The first thing I noticed was that Ryan had cartoon hands… literally. He was wearing a pair of rubber cartoon hands he brought with him from Chicago to install as part of his solo show Sad Sacks at Guerrero Gallery. But the more I talked to him, the more I found them appropriate. His animated personality came out immediately; he was exuberant and funny, unintentionally waving those hands around while telling a story. I liked him immediately. Friday we all met up again. This time, at Fecal Face Dot Gallery in the Lower Haight to see the show Ryan had curated there of Chicago-based artists called West, Wester, Westest. It’s an early night- a drink at Danny Coyle’s, a sausage at Rosamunde, and a long goodbye to everyone standing on Fillmore Street- before I head home and the folks go back to finalize Ryan’s show at Guerrero.

 The cartoon hands as part of a video installation

Image by Ken Harman of Hi-Fructose

Saturday is the big event. Ryan’s work is in the front- a large mural when you enter, framed pieces around the gallery, and a projection involving the aforementioned cartoon hands (pics here and here and here. I can’t do it justice). In Sound and Shape, Chris Duncan and Jason Michael Leggiere have built a modern harp-like instrument on a mirrored floor that people wander in and through plucking strings that emanate sound through the back room. 

The next few hours spent at the gallery are filled with old friends and new ones. Those of us left at the close head over to JaynBee Club for a few more drinks, some pool and conversation. As the bar closes, no one really seems to want to end the night. There’s the electricity of a successful show and good company. We head back to the gallery for a while until we finally call it a night. Except even then it’s not quite done. After hugs from RTC, I join a caravan of friends getting a ride home. Squeezed into a car with a bike encroaching over the back seat, hilarity continues all the way to my house where I get out, realizing that Daylight Savings Time has now made my bedtime 4:30AM. But it was worth it.

RTC works in graphite which is mind-blowing when you look at his art and realize it’s essentially done in pencil. A mix of sharp comic images within themes of sex, lawn care, parties, dreams, entertainment, petty crimes and cars are composed within abstract lines, patterns and shading. Some parts look erased while others are so darkly colored that it feels like he’s intentionally removing or covering things that may be too personal.  There’s definitely a story behind each piece and although he doesn’t like to explain everything behind the work, RTC promised to send me the details about the inspiration for the piece I was fortunate to purchase. Now, the real question is- where will I put it?

Ryan Travis Christian, "Haydays"

11.5" x15", graphite on paper

The Modern Day (Female) Franz Boas

Maybe the first step is a bowtie?

I am outing my inner nerd by starting this blog referencing the man considered “The Father of Modern Anthropology”. Let me explain. I graduated from Smith College in 2002 with a B.A. in Anthropology and a minor in Archaeology. Occasionally during my 4 years there, I would burst into friends’ rooms in moments of pure academic/geek moments to explain something I had just read. They tolerated me with a smile and sometimes it even lead to long conversations involving their areas of study.

An academic revelation came to me after reading how Boas effectively changed the conceptions around “primitive” and “modern” representations in museum displays. He argued against his colleagues, insisting that different cultures did not represent the states of evolution from savages to intellectuals, but instead were contemporaries of each other. In my museum studies, I learned that before Boas, artifacts were displayed according to function or level of technological development no matter where they originated, since they all supposedly represented a point in progressive evolution. (For example, stone tools from cultures all over the world were lumped together in one display of "primitivism".) In his 1887 article Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification, Boas stated that “though like causes have like effects, like effects have not like causes”.  Meaning that, even though stone tools may look similar, they were created in different contexts and for different reasons and therefore, grouping them together was misleading (and in my mind, demeaning). Boas began to push to develop exhibits in cultural and historical context, something that drives contemporary curating today. 

How did this affect me? I became passionate not for becoming an expert in a single culture in a specific point in history (as I felt necessary for Archaeology or Art History) but for the anthropological study of humanity.  For me, there was excitement in learning the immeasurable diversity in the world and marveling in the fact that seemingly disparate people could find similarities in their traditions. 

That brings us to today, where now I am a development professional for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA). I recently received a NextGen Arts Program grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, supported by The James Irvine Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, designed to support career development for the next generation of arts leaders. For this award, I designed a "crowdsourced" mentorship program to network with people from different sectors where I've seen incredible things in the areas of organizational development, marketing, innovation and philanthropy. I am hoping to use these meetings to glean practices and values I can then apply to my role at YBCA (and beyond). 

Do you see why I started with Boas? Like the stone tools mentioned above that were created to solve problems of production in different contexts, perhaps the solutions available in other sectors could apply in my own work. There are certainly valuable points of learning in the arts nonprofit sector, and I’ve had great mentors in the nonprofit field thus far. But now I’m curious about the wide world of valuable experience that exists beyond where I’m already familiar. 

As part of this grant, I agreed to document this experience to provide insight to other young professionals and report on how these conversations play into my experience in the field. So here it is-- announcing the blog, The Future Archives, as my pet project.