Michael Kaiser Transcript 3
Michael Kaiser Transcript 3
Audience member:
My organisation, when faced with a cut to our Arts Council grant in this financial
year, made a decision about our regional programme and we decided to cut the
programme budget in order to keep staff and not make anybody redundant, which
is about investing in the expertise. The way we tried to spin it was by having less
money they would be encouraged to do more interesting, risk-taking things and
work in partnership more. I’m starting to see that actually that’s the case so I agree
that our knee-jerk reaction was to do less of the art, but I’m hoping that the
outcome of that is not that we’re doing less interesting work - but it will remain to
be seen!
Michael Kaiser:
I’m not saying that spending more on art necessarily makes it better – you’ll never
hear those words come out of my mouth because some of the most interesting
things I’ve done were the least expensive. But, in general, if we think that the
mission of our organisation is to hold onto staff rather than to make art I think that’s
not the mission of your organisation. Your mission statement is not “We don’t want
to fire anyone.” So I just think we have to be very careful about that. You brought
up a really important point – the reason we do tend to cut programming is to not
make anyone redundant. We have to think that one through. You also alluded very
briefly to something really crucial, and one of the reasons why I have the time to
make the art – which are joint projects. If you don’t have a lot of money right now
to make your most interesting year, one of the things I love to think about are joint
projects because they allow you to do something bigger, better and cheaper.
When I got to American Ballet Theater and we’d done Romeo and Juliet for seven
years and we had to do something new I said “What’s out there? I’m not a ballet
choreographer so I can’t create” but a wonderful choreographer had come to us
with an idea for a full-length ballet based on Othello with a commissioned score –
new set, new costumes – as big a project as you can imagine in ballet. I said “Boy,
that sounds really interesting.” But everyone said to me “You’re crazy to think
about it – you’re bankrupt, how could you imagine commissioning this work?” I did,
but only for three years out. That gave me the time a) to find money for it and b) I
found a joint venture partner in the San Francisco Ballet and they did it with us and
cut our costs in half. So now we have the big project to talk about for a couple of
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years because you can talk about projects before they happen and get people
excited. The joint venture allowed us to do it at a much lower cost. I’m a big
believer in joint ventures and I find that time is the key requirement for joint
ventures because when they fail it’s almost always because they were rushed and
the contract wasn’t good enough and all the possible scenarios weren’t thought of
and people end up unhappy. But there are so many examples of wonderful joint
ventures between arts organisations, between arts organisations and educational
institutions, all different kinds of combinations that allow you to make bigger, more
interesting art.
What I did at ABT was – our first season wasn’t our most interesting but I could
talk about what was coming down the road. That allowed us to seem like a much
more vital organisation even when things were bad.
Audience member:
I just wondered if you had any thoughts on risk and loss-leaders and what I mean
by that – I completely agree with your virtuous circle here. I work at Bristol Old Vic
and actually my development director and I had breakfast this morning talking
about this very problem – I believe we’re now in a position where our art is strong,
moving round I think our marketing is strong, our family is growing, I believe that
we have a lot of prospects in our vicinity. Simply it’s a case right now that we don’t
have the administrative capacity or the specific fundraising experience and skill to
capitalize on the opportunities. So there seems to be a real challenge about saying
“Do I take a genuine risk and say let’s commit £x,000 to the process of
administrating what I believe to be the potential of this income?” If I believe it, how
do I convince the people I need to sign off on my budget that this is a strong and
progressive decision?
Michael Kaiser:
If you are really convinced that your art is strong and continually strong, that both
your programmatic and institutional marketing is strong and you’re building your
family and all you need to do is have the technical expertise to turn that into money
– to me it’s a no-brainer and absolutely worthwhile. There are so many examples
in this country where that proved true. I’m not just talking about what happens in
the States, but around the world. The Royal Opera House – we raised £60million
in eighteen months. We created a Friends group, a modest level of giving group –
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we had 26,000 of them by the end of the year, each giving £50. It’s not a lot of
money but fifty times 26,000 is £1.3million. It’s a lot.
Audience member:
I think it’s quite a scary proposition for boards and for governments in the country
when I think in the last decade they’ve been especially concerned with protecting
the bottom line, to then go and say £10-20,000 – let’s invest in our capacity to
fundraise.
Michael Kaiser:
My feeling is that if you don’t do it, two things are going to happen. One is that
you’re not going to have the funds you need to keep making art, because it’s not
clear that the sources you’re currently getting from are going to stay with you
forever. Number two, other organisations are going to do it. For me, it also
becomes a defence thing. I believe there’s so much money out there in every
society – one of my favourite stories in my experience was I was teaching a lot in
South Africa in the mid 1990s when fundraising was a brand new concept really.
People thought I was crazy here in 1998, in the press here I was always called
‘Michael Kaiser the Crass American’ – that was my title – but in South Africa they
really thought I was nuts as I talked about fundraising.
But I taught Arts Management, I taught a whole course. Most of my class was
people in the field, people like yourselves, but I had two teenagers and I went to
the head of the program and asked why they had me teaching teenagers, and she
said “Just watch them, they’re really smart, let them learn.” These two kids lived in
Soweto, and if you’ve ever either been to or seen pictures of Soweto there are not
a lot of poorer places on the earth than Soweto was. These two children started
fundraising and they raised enough money to create a dance company called the
Soweto Dance Company which has toured the world and it was really pretty
remarkable. They raised all the initial capital in Soweto. If you can raise money in
Soweto then you can raise it in Bristol – I really believe that.
But also, it doesn’t necessarily take hiring lots of experts to do this. Everything I’m
going to talk about today is common-sense, I’m not a very smart man, I’ve just got
common sense. When I was at the Kansas City Ballet there were four of us in a
room: I was the Chief Executive and the only marketer and the only fundraiser. So
I don’t think it always has to take a ton of money to do this. I think what you realise
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pretty quickly is that doing it much more than pays for itself. Maybe by the end of
the morning you’ll be convinced.
Other questions or thoughts about this cycle? Does it make sense to you? I really
want you to think about it because to me nothing else we’re going to say today is
going to be very important except for “How do we create this family that’s going to
turn into money?” For me, fundraising is really about a funnel, about how many
people we can bring into our organisation in some way and make sure we’re
getting some of them to become those who become our donors.
Do all of you have means of collecting the email addresses or everyone who
comes to your performances, classes, exhibitions? Yes? No? What kind of work
do you do?
Audience member:
Contemporary art organisation.
Michael Kaiser:
Do you have exhibitions? People come and you don’t know who they are?
Audience member:
At the moment we don’t, no.
Michael Kaiser:
You know that kills me.
Audience member:
It kills me too.
Michael Kaiser:
Let me make a suggestion. Do a raffle. Just have a continuous raffle. I find this
best way to collect the names of people who come to your performances and
exhibitions, the best way to figure out who’s actually in your family. Either get
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donated two dinners at a local restaurant, or some modest prize, or something.
Two opportunities you can win, the opportunity to meet the artists privately,
whatever. Just create something. All people have to do is fill out their email
address and put it in a box. You’ll get a large proportion of your people to do that,
and now you have a base of knowledge. Will you think about trying that?
Audience member:
You bet.
Michael Kaiser:
Good. Others of you? You all know how to get your people right? I don’t quite
believe all of you.
Audience member:
Hi. I work for Lift, which is a festival so we present in lots of other people’s venues
– we don’t have one ourselves. It’s really hard to get that data.
Michael Kaiser:
The venue won’t give it to you, most likely. You can do a raffle. Seriously.
Audience member:
Some of the venues wouldn’t let us do that.
Michael Kaiser:
If they won’t, they won’t. But I find that what you can do – do you have a
programme book or a handout?
Audience member:
Some of the venues won’t let us do that. Maybe we won’t present in those venues.
Michael Kaiser:
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You take what you get. But there are a lot of opportunities to communicate that
you want to know who your audience is. I would really suggest trying to think of as
many ways as possible. If you’re doing performances and you’re not capturing the
names, if you’re doing exhibitions and not capturing the names- you don’t really
have a family if you don’t know they exist.
Audience member:
I’m just wondering if it matters if most of the people in your family don’t have very
much money?
Michael Kaiser:
No. The biggest donors to arts organisations are not the super-rich. They’re
average, everyday people. I mentioned the 26,000 friends of Covent Garden? Of
those, the vast majority were schoolteachers, nurses, bus drivers – not the super
rich.
Audience member:
What if they’re well below average? So not the teachers... the most vulnerable
people in society who don’t have very much money.
Michael Kaiser:
Then you can do one of two things. One is that you can still ask – and believe me
you’ll be surprised, because I work with some extremely poor communities in the
States, wonderful Latino theatre that serves the South Bronx, a very poor
neighbourhood, and didn’t think they could raise a penny from anyone around
them. I said “Just try it” and we had a fight for seven years because the woman
who ran it was part of a programme I taught and still do. She just wouldn’t do it.
She finally tried it and in her first year raised $70,000 from her communities. Just
try and see.
The other thing is that not everybody who supports your organisation has to be
someone you serve with your art. There’ll be people, foundations and individuals,
and corporations who value what you do for your community, as long as they can
get back from it what it is they’re looking for. I ran ballet companies much of my
career and there are lots of people who supported my work who don’t love ballet
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but loved other things that we do – the educational work that we do, the role we
play in the community. So you’re not precluded from doing private fundraising if
you serve primarily poor people. But, you have to figure out a different way than
your art to get people interested in the organisation. Then your marketing is more
challenging. Because if someone loves and participates in your work they’re a
natural target; if you’re going to someone outside that work then you have to do
better institutional marketing that really communicates your excitement to your
community. What kind of work do you do?
Audience member:
I work for a community theatre company, working with the more vulnerable people
to give them the opportunity to participate and create their own plays.
Michael Kaiser:
Fantastic. How do you create institutional identity for it? What’s your institutional
marketing plan? I’m not trying to put you on the spot but I’d love you to start
thinking about it. I believe that small organisations three or four times a year have
to do something to get people talking. Larger organisations, ten or twelve times a
year, have to do something to get people talking.
Let me give you just one idea, it might or might not make sense to you. I ran a little
museum in New York called the Morgan Library, it’s a beautiful museum. Its art is
mostly 400 years old or older, so it was focused on manuscripts and on drawingsbeautiful, beautiful things. Every time we had a temporary exhibition we would do a
slide lecture at lunchtime where people could come for free and watch the slides
and listen to a narration. The narration was always provided by the curator of that
exhibition. While these curators were brilliant people they weren’t the most
melodious-voiced. So the slide lectures were a little droney, boring and dry. As a
result, no one would want to come to the lectures. We’d typically have seven
people of whom six would be homeless people looking for a place to be. One
actually cared about the subject.
It came to be that we were doing an exhibition about Beatrix Potter with her
drawings and stories etc. It was a beautiful exhibition; a lot of them came from
England. The curator was English and was not one of our curators and I asked her
if she would mind if we didn’t use her voice for the slide lecture. We still wanted
her to write it but wanted someone outside to do it. She didn’t care if she read it or
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not so said “Fine.” So I asked who in my mind sounded like Beatrix Potter. None of
us have heard her voice, but I asked who might sound like her. I decided Julie
Andrews sounded like Beatrix Potter. I didn’t know Julie Andrews, had never met
her, she had never been to our organisation. I wrote her a letter. ‘Dear Miss.
Andrews, I’m at the Morgan Library, we’re doing this exhibition – I was wondering
if you would mind narrating our slide lecture.’ She wrote back saying – I found that
celebrities tend to be very generous with time but not with money – if you pay for
the cassette tape and the stamped envelope I will read the slide lecture.’ This was
a while ago when we still used cassette tapes.
So we spent 89 cents on the tape and we sent her the script and the stamped
envelope and next week beautifully narrated was our slide lecture which we used
for the slide lecture, and she also let us use little excerpts for our radio ad, and it
became the largest attended exhibition in the history of the Morgan Library and
every slide lecture was completely filled.
There are ways to use people to add an element of interest and excitement to your
work that draws people who may not come and do your work but can learn about
your work.
Audience member:
Thank you, that’s good advice.
Michael Kaiser:
Try it. Give yourself some time. Don’t try it for next week; try it for two years from
now.
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