Over the past year we’ve had the opportunity to talk with dozens of cultural organizations all across the country about the impact of the economic recession, as well as other external factors, impacting their work right now. One of our goals has been to find out how cultural leaders are adapting to the new environment and how they are thinking about the future. Over the course of these conversations it has started to become apparent that there are two fundamentally different ways that that arts organizations are reacting to current trends that hold true across the country. I categorize them as “Leaders” and “Business-as-Usual.”
The “Leaders” are viewing the current economic, demographic, and technological changes as a fundamental shift in the arts ecology, and are adapting in the following ways:
- Using technology to facilitate alternative ways of connecting to their community;
- Realizing they can’t count on old funding and looking for new revenue streams outside of traditional contributed income;
- Looking for ways to move towards achieving their mission in a networked and cross-disciplinary way, instead of as an autonomous institution functioning in isolation; and
- Investigating how to engage different audiences—”Professional-Amateurs,” the Millennial generation, and ethnically diverse communities—in different ways.
The “Business-as-Usual” organizations are largely viewing the current changes as temporary or only peripherally relevant to them. As a result, they are focusing on:
- Increasing foundation fundraising;
- Focusing on marketing (“if we just get the word out there about what we’re doing, they’ll come”);
- Adhering to hierarchical organizational models of roles and responsibilities; and
- Seeking to preserve the status quo at all costs with regard to repertoire, audience experience, and business and revenue models.
Many funders are coming to us asking for our opinion on how to support a vibrant cultural sector under today’s conditions. Increasingly our answer is: invest in the bright spots. The Leaders need investors in the experimentation that they are doing around networks, business models, technology and community engagement. To have the funds to do this effectively, funders will need to pull away from supporting the Business-as-Usual folks. This will take boldness, some of these organizations are powerful and entrenched members of the cultural sector. Yet the Business-as-Usual organizations are becoming less and less relevant to the communities they claim to serve, and are engaging in counter-adaptive behavior that is unlikely to work in the long-term. In doing this, funders will be modeling the behavior that will be necessary to evolve as a cultural sector.
