Awesome handmade game

I'm working on a board game exhibit right now (for a class, but hopefully it will be real someday!) and came across this image while doing some research on the game "Sorry."

This is apparently a hand-made game that has some similarities to Sorry -- found on this blog about traveling in Jamaica. I would love to see this game in person and play it. Notice that the counters appear to be rocks and bottle caps. Too amazing!

strangers on a plane

hello friends. I have been super busy with school (I'm in the last year of my Masters in Public Administration/Nonprofit Management at IU, focus on museums) and have been thinking about blogging but not doing it. Luckily, school deadlines provide the perfect fodder for procrastination. And this is related to school anyway.

 

I have been thinking a lot lately about audience research, and in particular the problem of how one reaches infrequent or non-visitors of cultural institutions. For a while, I was really anxious about reaching the “non-user,” but after some thought and some good discussions with professors and colleagues, it occurred to me that maybe more relevant -- and slightly easier to reach -- are the people out there who might actually be museum visitors or arts event attendees, but because they are infrequently present and/or not highly visible (i.e. rich), they tend to not be noticed.

I found this being echoed in my fundraising classes, where we focus a lot on cultivating the Major Donor, that magical being in the sky who will give us money and hopefully not care what we do with it. While I understand the practical concerns inherent in this strategy -- more money with less work -- I think it undermines one of the greatest things about nonprofit organizations, also known as voluntary associations. It neglects the “association.”

This is something we’ve seen a bit of a return to with crowdsourcing. Amanda Palmer is a whiz at it, and so have been many others. In an age where your voice seems to be increasingly silenced or at the least unimportant, I think it’s good to know that even if in a very small way, you can still “speak” via where you put your money. It’s not an ideal system, but it’s a powerful one. We saw how powerful it can be when Wikileaks donations were blockaded by pressure from the U.S. government.

That is a conversation for another time, but my point is that the combined efforts of the many can be strong and this is just as true for museums as any other institution. Museums in particular seem to have to balance a fine line between providing public programming and cultivating high value donors.

Which is all just a lead up to discuss Clayton.

I met Clayton on a plane from Chicago to New York City. I had been thinking a lot about arts audiences and how to find those people I mentioned above -- infrequent or non-high-profile visitors. I blearily sat down next to a congenial looking older man dressed inconspicuously in sweatshirt and jeans, and noticed that his carry-on bag was a tote from the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

I’m not normally a chatty airplane person -- in fact, I kind of hate it -- and it was a 6 am flight and I’d had no coffee, but something on that morning told me to strike up a conversation with the man in the window seat. 

 
Clayton, it turns out, is a single, working-class man who in the past few years has discovered a passion for classical music and opera. He described it to me as being similar to one of his other major interests -- attending ball games -- but just a different part of his personality. Clayton works first shift at a low-paying job for 40 hours a week and spends his free time and money making trips to see his favorite music live. That night, he was going to Carnegie Hall for the first time to hear his favorite pianist. He would be flying back to Chicago the following morning.

He told me that by making such quick trips and staying just outside the city, he found that he kept his costs down. Although he didn’t have a lot of money, he found that he really enjoyed putting what he did have toward his new interest in classical music. He found that people were friendly to him and was even introduced to one of the performers by a board member at a performance in Cincinnati.

This conversation was fascinating to me. First of all, this man pretty much presented a totally different view of what the opera and classical music world felt like to him than any I have heard in my life. He felt it was a very open and accepting community, and recognized that while he wasn’t exactly like many of the other people in it, that didn’t seem to matter to him or the people he met. This isn’t a community I usually hear referred to as “open” and “welcoming.”

Secondly, here was the guy I’d been thinking about - the non-high profile arts guy! The guy I’ve never heard mentioned in any of my textbooks or literature about nonprofits (though if you have a great article, send it my way.) Here is a person who is maybe never going to be a major donor. But he has the tote bag. He attends performances whenever he can. He is willing to spend what free money he does have on this art form that he cares about. Luckily for him, some people in the community seem to have noticed. If there is one, there are others.

I understand the desire to cater to the wealthy, high-profile donor. They have money and influence. But this is the power of public institutions, or it's supposed to be... they can reach people in different and exciting ways other than what the market or government provides. And they can attract Clayton. Clayton, who told me he had no college education, but loves classical music. Who has a blue-collar job and spends his weekends at Carnegie Hall. How do we attract more Claytons to cultural institutions? How do we pick them out of the crowd and steward them as audience/donors? It was luck that put me next to him on the plane that morning, but now that I’ve met him, I know that he and others like him are out there. They are a small, nearly invisible, but important part of the audience.

I want to know how to reach these people, how to make them feel welcome, how to get them as involved as they want to be (if they want to be), what brought them in, what might bring them back. I’m too green to have the answers to these questions now, but this is where my interests are taking me - toward answering these questions. In the meantime I welcome any reading suggestions or real-life stories. And I promise I'll try to be nicer on the plane from now on.

quarterly post alert

hello from the world of not-blogging. My only real excuse is laziness, because I have had ample time to write, and ample time to do interesting things, but I have not been doing either. Instead, I have been mostly listening to Sherlock Holmes audio books and playing puzzle games on my phone. Although this is kind of pathetic, I think it was much needed -- after the stress of attempting to run two businesses while first working full time and then going to school full time, I had what I think you might call a nervous breakdown. I needed a serious dose of downtime.

But now I'm ready to re-enter the world once again and what better way to do that than from my own couch, writing a blog post? ha. First let's talk about someone who actually is doing something awesome with their free time, Yumiko Higuchi.

Based on the work in the gallery I can only assume that this person is my one true love and/or shares the exact same interests in common with me. Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. Thanks Lucy for telling me about it.

I did actually do an internship at the beginning of the summer about which I wrote some posts that I never ended up publishing. I will summarize that experience here later -- it was amazing, and I can't do it justice at the moment.

When I haven't been sitting around doing nothing, I have been sitting around reading about acid reflux diets. (This is why I've spent most of the summer alone and friendless, with only Dr. Watson for my companion.) I figured out based on some fruitless visits to the doctor combined with internet research that I probably (though still unofficially) have LPR which is the easiest way to say laryngopharyngeal reflux, which basically means I thought I had terrible allergies but actually it's a manifestation of acid reflux. Which is why allergy medications rarely work for me. I won't bore you with the details, but based on my food journaling I'm pretty sure this is correct, meaning I've had to change my diet a bit which means I've been reading tons of online forums and books trying to figure out what the heck I can eat. Turns out, not much of what I used to eat. Any suggestions or recommendations are appreciated.

In turn I will probably post some recipes here because I haven't found much, to my great surprise. There's a lot of information about what you CAN'T eat, but much less about what you can. I need more positive information here, because what I can't eat is just depressing me.

Not much else to report. I start school again soon and I'm sketching out some plans for new art works. I'm not talking about those yet because I find that if I talk too much about projects before I do them, I end up not doing them because they feel done in my head. But know that they will involve embroidery and will be interactive.