We’re still working on overall feasibility, but if all of the pieces fall into place it looks like we’ll be able to offer a special price point exclusively for the under $1 million annual budget organizations. Perhaps the best aspect of this is that all the core elements making Venture special remain intact, especially the Creative Control Engine, Venture’s spearhead feature. Based on what we know so far, it’s looking like we’ll be able to add a third annual subscription price point for the under $1 mill budget groups that won’t exceed $2000.

In other Venture news, I’m very happy to say that the final components related to Pro Connect, Venture’s email marketing and patron communication module, wrapped up a few remaining loose ends this week and we’ll be able to offer more there than originally planned. This part is really helping Venture to shape up as being one of those key pieces of technology that make a big difference in how you work.

Venture = high-performance + low-frustration

Regardless of what you think or understand about technology and arts administration now, Venture is going to be one of those high-performance, low-frustration tools that make you wonder how you ever survived without it. It will work – and allow you to things you didn’t think were possible – without having to understand it or speak geek.

All in all, it was a very “added value” oriented week for Venture and in a time where work environments are defined by less, Venture keeps coming up with more.

I couldn’t be happier and April can’t get here fast enough! In the meantime, make sure you sign up to receive the VentureIndustriesOnline.com launch notice.

Not only are Take A Friend To The Orchestra (TAFTO) contributions indexed by year but you can now browse entries by type, 10 in fact. So if you want to read all the contributions from academics, you can get there in a single click. If bloggers are more your thing, it’s the same deal and so on and so forth for broadcasters, composers, conductors, journalists, managers, musicians, patrons, and even playwrights (pretty diverse bunch, eh?).

One particular offering I’m thrilled to see return is the lost contribution from Marcus Maroney, which was only available in print as it served as the official forward for the collected TAFTO essays publication before it went extinct in favor of an online repository (another fatality in the online vs. print gang wars). At the very end of his contribution, Marcus penned what is perhaps one of the best lines in all of TAFTOdom, but you’ll have to stop by the new site to read it.

Another plus with the new microsite makes it possible to associate each contributor’s bio directly with his/her respective contribution so no more hunting around to find out about who’s inspiring you. Lastly, all of the contributors have a headshot so you can see who you’re reading.

So what are you waiting for? Go, explore, have fun, and get empowered!

Ultimately, Volker was convicted of “clandestine work” and sentenced to three months in jail and a 10,000 Euros fine by a court in Strasbourg on 10/3/08. An article from that time by Frank Cadenhead reports the Strasbourg court determined Hartung had “fraudulent intentions” and “a logic of profit” in employing “foreign workers in unreasonable working conditions” and “avoiding social legislation.” There are four articles about Hartung and this situation here at Adaptistration and a quick Google news search will turn up dozens more from sources across the globe.

It doesn’t take long to see a laundry list of comparable items between the Cologne New Philharmonic activity on French soil in 2005 and the Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra’s current US tour. However, one noticeable difference is no one within US law enforcement agencies seems to care as much as their French counterparts.

Wakin’s article reports that Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra’s artistic director declined to discuss musician payments and phone and email messages to the tour’s producer, Andrew S. Grossman of Columbia Artists Management, went unanswered. However, Wakin did get in touch with Columbia Artists chairman, Ronald A. Wilford.

The Columbia Artists chairman, Ronald A. Wilford, said he was not familiar with the details of the contract. But he said that typically Columbia Artists, as a producer, receives fees from the presenters, who keep the box office receipts. Columbia Artists arranges travel inside the country and lodging, and guarantees the orchestra a set fee. “We have no idea what they’re paying their orchestra,” Mr. Wilford said of Moscow State Radio Symphony’s management.

What do you think, is any of this a big deal? Was the French government overreacting when they arrested Hartung or should the US stand up and take notice? Do working conditions and compensation levels of foreign orchestras touring the US matter? Should US based artist management firms insist on the right to inspect artist payment records for orchestras and other ensembles involved in tours they produce?

Granted, based on the title alone, How to Save Classical Music – Step One, most readers wouldn’t assume that was the point but in order to get the people involved to do their jobs better, we need to know what it is they should be doing and how it should be done. Consequently, examining current efforts and results and exploring new directions is a process that can’t be avoided.

Regardless, I found several suggestions on the list are actually quite good and would fall into the category of doing our jobs better; such as increased transparency, improving the physical concert space, and taking full advantage of technological platforms.

On the other hand, I wholeheartedly agree that one-off ideas centered around attracting attention via flash in the pan tactics are, at best, monumental wastes of time and, at worst, downright counterproductive. Live animals onstage during Carnival of the Animals might be fun to watch but it will do more to get folks interested in exotic animals than Saint-Saens.

Is there any silver bullet solution that will open the floodgates to unlimited revenue and packed concerts? No. But doing a better job at what we’ve done all along on the business side of things and expecting a different result isn’t very promising either (anyone else feeling a little insane?). Instead, perhaps a better perspective is captured in Adaptistration’s About page.

The cuts are achieved from a variety of sources including expected musician compensation concessions and reducing the season from 38 to 25 weeks but one area that should catch your attention includes plans to sub-contract most of the CSO’s administrative staff. According to Sheban’s report, the CSO is anxious to wrap up negotiations designed to outsource nearly every aspect of administrative responsibility.

Meanwhile, talks have been under way for several weeks to let CAPA [Columbus Association for the Performing Arts] handle finance, marketing, development and concert production for the orchestra.

Sheban also reports that CAPA, which owns and operates a handful of Columbus area venues, provides outsourced administrative functions for four other area groups (Franklin Park Conservatory, Contemporary American Theatre Company, Phoenix Theatre for Children and Opera Columbus). Although it isn’t unheard of for an orchestral organization the size of the CSO to outsource certain divisions or even an entire administrative department, it isn’t common to outsource multiple departments in full.

Questions yet to be answered include how outsourcing will impact the organization’s ability to maximize contributed revenue if the professionals actively fundraising have similar fundraising responsibilities at several competing nonprofit arts groups; likewise for marketing efforts. Will board solicited fundraising efforts be curtailed through any sort of no-compete clause? Lastly, how will this impact the CSO board’s duties and responsibilities related to oversight and stewardship?

At this time, a copy of the CSO’s Strategic Restructuring Plan was not available via the organization’s website although the organization did post a press statement on the matter.

As of right now, the only toon available is the single panel pilot (pictured below) from February but rest assured, there’s plenty more on the way unless, of course, Dixon (the cartoonist) figures out how to unlock his ankle chains with a #2 pencil.

After giving this some thought, I’ve broken down key discussion points into the following sections:

The Audience Development Twofer

Mulcahy asserts that creating child care services staffed by “certified care givers who also have music education training” offered to patrons free of charge will help attract the increasingly elusive 30-50 demographic while simultaneously instilling an appreciation for classical music in their children. The result would be an increase in current attendance rates while making it easier (and less costly) to attract audiences 20 years from now.

On one hand, there’s an ongoing debate within the business about whether or not 30-50 year olds have ever attended concerts in great numbers to begin with but it is generally accepted that people with young children are less likely to attend live events than their childless peers. What needs to be determined is whether or not there’s enough potential interest in the 30-50 with young children segment to make an endeavor like this worthwhile. If a properly designed and implemented study confirms verifiable interest, then it makes it that much easier to find funding for a pilot program.

Then There’s The Cost

Big and bold ideas don’t fare well during economic downturns. I can almost hear finance and development officers causing a stir in response to the enormous amount of planning and fundraising needed to initiate something like this. Fortunately, any organization interested in exploring options won’t have to go so far as reinventing the wheel to get started.

Here in Chicago, the Brookfield Zoo has the Hamill Family Play Zoo, which does an amazing job at embodying the merits of cultivating interest in mission based activity at a young age. I’ve seen the facility in action first hand on several occasions and regardless of overall zoo attendance, the building is always full. The zoo aims to teach children everything about their mission “by doing, rather than communicating scientific concepts or facts.”

And they do mean everything, in addition to a play animal nursery and vet center, there’s even an area where kids can play zoo administrator in a room complete with child size leather high-back executive chairs and an oak desk (do kids really aspire to become a suit?).

Granted, one large difference between Brookfield’s program and IKEA’s Smaland is that the former requires parents to remain with children in the facility and it isn’t a free offering. But finding a way to merge both ideas is a comparatively small puzzle to solve.

Don’t Forget The Logistics

An undeniable ugly reality is that most professional orchestras don’t own and operate their primary concert venue, which might stop an idea like this dead in its tracks. But even in cases like this, the old adage of turning lemons into lemonade might apply when you start to look at the endeavor as a partnership opportunity.

Instead of an edu-care center focusing exclusively on music, why not expand it to include all forms of performing art associated with the area’s primary performance venue? If a community has a well established arts council, a project like this would be an ideal undertaking and would certainly relieve much of the logistical pressure from any one organization.

Another avenue that might relieve pressure and open doors for improved partnerships is via the academic community.

Artistic Planning

One of the real positives here relates to artistic planning. It’s entirely conceivable to create a small concert series designed to attract this new demographic. By incorporating many of the earlier start times and shorter concert length formats a number of groups have adopted, it is fairly easy to craft an attractive subscription series.

What might be particularly attractive here is something like this allows programming to step outside of the typical family concert fare. So instead of indoctrinating mom and dad newbies to something their children will have to enjoy, they get to enjoy being adults and revel in everything that has made the live orchestra experience a great event for more than 100 years without the burden of babysitters and worrying about getting home in time because of traffic.

Conclusions

Undoubtedly, a project like this is no small task but looking back over the past decade, it seems to have more promise than a number of expensive audience development initiatives that did little more than waste money. At the very least, a worthwhile pilot program consisting of adequate market research, program design, initial fundraising, implementation, and continuous benchmarking is a five year investment.

Given all the focus on articulating an orchestra’s value to its respective community, this is certainly something that is worth exploring. If we have to wait a few years until the economy stabilizes before someone can initiate something like this, it’s still worth the wait.

The primary RSS feed option most folks are familiar with is the main site feed, which is available via the orange RSS icon next to the search field. You can plug an RSS feed URL into a seemingly endless array of widgets and aggregators, all of which are designed to help bring a lot of content to one in one convenient page.

Less familiar but equally useful is the main comment feed, which provides an automatic list of every incoming comment to each article. There’s a text link located in the left sidebar, under the “Become A Member” heading, although I’ll be adding a more prominent icon in the near future.

Comment RSS feed per entry

The last RSS option is more targeted, but indispensable when you want to follow comment conversations related to a specific post. You can subscribe to comment RSS feeds per entry via the orange RSS icon to the left of the “Comments” header at the top of each comment section.

Not ready for RSS? Click to subscribe to Adaptistration's weekly email summary and keep up with the week's posts at your leisure.

The wiggle room in the amount the association expects to save – the $8 million – comes in part because the financial implications of changes in certain work rules are unknown. These rules involve matters such as how and when substitute players are contracted and how many rehearsals are needed for a particular program.

Those actively following the Philadelphia Orchestra for the past decade or so know that one of the reoccurring themes during collective bargaining agreement negotiations is the Association’s desire to hire substitutes from a pool of conservatory students and pay them at a lower wage. For the moment, let’s set aside the issue of orchestras paying substitute players, regardless if they are students or professionals, a lower wage than contracted musicians and focus on student issue.

Over the course of recent negotiations, the Philadelphia musicians have pushed back against this idea citing artist concerns. After all, if a listener pays regular price for a ticket, they should expect to see an ensemble comprised of professionals held to equal artistic standards; anything less is tantamount to bait and switch.

So no matter how many layers of pseudo-rationalization you wrap an argument in favor of supplementing a full time, salaried orchestra with students paid at a lower scale, it still comes down to a cost cutting measure that isn’t supported by an institution’s mission. And although Dobrin doesn’t mention the students as substitutes issue in his article, it will be interesting to see if this topic returns to the bargaining table with renewed fervor fueled by current economic conditions.

Stay tuned…

The overriding goal in this phase is to ensure that the CCE provides users with incredible flexibility and control via a rewarding and easy-to-use environment. At its heart, CCE is being designed to reward creativity and that process begins by having users determine if they want to produce a website using a horizontal or vertical navigation structure. From here, a vast array of structural modifications can be enabled with nothing more than simple mouse clicks thereby ensuring that each site projects a unique branded presence (no cookie-cutters here). I’ve been especially pleased at how responsive the developer, Blueprint Design Studios, have been to these issues.

To-date, here are the latest versions of the horizontal and vertical navigation wireframes along with production notes:

Keep in mind, each one of these wireframes only demonstrate a fraction of the Creative Control Engine's flexibility.One of the most useful features is the platform's ability to automatically expand and contract based on the amount of content used.

Although the Horizontal and Vertical navigation structures allow users to add as much homepage content as they want, the vertical option shines at providing all that content without making things look too cluttered.

This option forgoes the widgetized footer area but retains the content slider, custom content area, and widgetized sidebar.

In this variation, the goal is to place all of the content above the page fold while using a large content slider to present all relevant information.

Another option at placing all of the content above the page fold, this variation uses the widgetized sidebar and custom content area.

This option moves the navigation sidebar to the right, the custom content area is expanded, and the optional widgetized footer area is disabled.

In these variations, the content slider has been removed. This version has and the navigation sidebar oriented to the left.

Here we have the same options but now the navigation sidebar is oriented to the right.