Tag Archives: theatre

Delivering arts programming online & helping arts nonprofits survive COVID-19

1 Reply

Let’s get right to this list of resources for nonprofit theaters, dance groups, music groups and other performance groups regarding program delivery and community engagement during COVID-19 (a curated list):

How Theater Companies are Innovating During the COVID-19 crisis

Dance Magazine checks in with three artistic directors to see how they’re handling life in the age of coronavirus. Apr 09, 2020

Coronavirus pushes L.A. dance companies toward the inevitable: Going virtual

Gibney Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center COVID-19 RESOURCE LIST

Theatre community rallies, adapts during COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 Theatre Resources from the SETC

Resources for Choral Leaders/Managers During the Pandemic

Genuine engagement through Zoom calls: a post on the TechSoup community from someone who says she “learned a lot about hosting fun and effective video sessions, including music circles with up to 100 participants from up to seven countries.”

21 simple things to do while your programs are on hold during COVID-19 quarantines   

Your nonprofit is still relevant during COVID19 – SHOW HOW 

What we will need for live theatre to continue: a call to political action

Update: Arts Groups Hold Pittsburgh’s First Virtual, Collective Fundraiser.

Update: Washington Ballet “virtual” gala spreads COVID-19 among artists and volunteers.

Update: Example of a virtual art therapy session.

if you have additional online resources that can help nonprofit theaters, dance groups, music groups and other performance groups regarding program delivery and community engagement during COVID-19, please comment below.

Why do I care? Theatre and live music performances have been a hugely important part of my life for as long as I can remember. They were my joy in grade school and my sanctuary on more occasions I could list. I believe the arts, including non-performance, like museums, play a fundamentally-important role in a community’s health.

I got my start in nonprofit management via nonprofit theatre organizations. I wrote my master’s degree thesis on the non-artistic elements necessary for theatre, dance and music to be used as a tool for public health and other community development initiatives. Months ago, I had written a blog about how arts organizations – performing arts centers, theaters, museums – have always been masters of customer relations and data management, how masterful the best of them, no matter how small, are at customer relations and customer loyalty, and turning event attendees into long term financial supporters. I consider my early professional experience at places like the Capitol Arts Center in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Hartford Stage in Connecticut and the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts to have been pivotal in building my skilIs in data management, project management, customer relations and so much more, skills I’ve applied in every job I have ever had, including international development work in Afghanistan – yes, really. It was a blog meant to celebrate arts organizations for having oh-so-much to teach other nonprofits – and government programs and for-profit companies as well. I kept delaying the publishing of that blog. First by a week, then two weeks, then a few weeks, because things came up that seemed more urgent. I figured that I would publish it right after I got back from my epic Baja, California, Mexico motorcycle adventure.

Well, when I got back from that epic adventure, I returned to a country being ravaged by Covid-19, an inbox full of emails asking me urgently for my consulting rates regarding virtual volunteering, and GoogleAlerts filled with news of newly-launched virtual volunteering schemes (many done with no regard to safety). So that blog got pushed farther and farther on the publishing calendar.

And now, I read the draft, and I want to cry. Because live theater, live dance, onsite museum tours, live music… none of that is happening. And none of that may happen for the rest of 2020. And many nonprofits that produce these events and exhibits aren’t going to survive the year. I have so many friends that still worked in the arts in some way, or some aspect of event management, and their jobs are gone.

Sports will come back. People will watch sports on TV even with no audiences. But the arts… can they survive this? I enjoy watching filmed versions of stage productions, but so many people loathe it, and it’s true: it’s no substitute at all for seeing a performance live. Maybe I’m comfortable with viewing televised productions because, growing up in a small town In Henderson, Kentucky, things like Great Performances on PBS were my only way of seeing Broadway shows or the opera. I go back to that grateful persona, starving for access when I watch Frankenstein presented by the UK’s National Theatre Live, or the Donmar Warehouse all-female production of Julius Caesar directed Phyllida Lloyd and shown on Great Performances. So often, such televised productions of stage shows are all I have access to – and that’s true for so many others.

But I long to sit in a dark hall and watch people act on a stage. Or to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with others while hearing amazing live music. Or wander through an art museum, not thinking about being two meters away from each other person. And it looks like none of us can do that safely for the rest of 2020. And maybe through 2021. And maybe longer. And the nonprofits, and even for-profit companies, that have brought us these experiences, may not survive. And that sends me into an emotional tailspin.

And not one national political leader is talking about what to do about this.

If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

UNV announces Online Volunteering Award 2015

Leave a reply

UNLogoToday – 30 November 2015 – the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) program announced winners of the UNV Online Volunteering Award 2015, celebrating both volunteers and volunteer hosting organizations on the UN’s Online Volunteering Service, and launched a global voting campaign for the public’s favorite, to be announced on December 5.

Profiles of the five organizations chosen for the award, and their online volunteers, are here (and this is where you vote as well). The organizations are Association des Agriculteurs Professionels du Cameroun (AGRIPO), Fundación de Comunidades Vulnerables de Colombia (FUNCOVULC), Hunger Reduction International, Seeds Performing Arts Theatre Group in Papua New Guinea, and a digital media campaign run by UN Women. Each effort also has a tag regarding which sustainable development goals it supports.

If you know me, then you know which one of the winners immediately jumped out at me and what I voted for: Seeds Performing Arts Theatre Group in Papua New Guinea. The group uses live theatre performance to raise awareness on issues affecting the local rural population, including violence against women, and to inspire and implement social change. Seeds teamed up with a group of online volunteers via the UN’s Online Volunteering service to develop a screenplay for a video about the specific gender-based violence associated with witch hunting. The traditional belief in sorcery is used to justify violence against women in Papua New Guinea, and inhumane treatment of innocent women accused of sorcery is common in rural parts of the island as sorcery is thought to account for unexplained deaths or misfortunes in a family or village.

After voting, you are encouraged to copy the following message to your profile on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or whatever social media channel you use:

Just voted for my favourite Online #VolunteeringAward winner. You can, too! https://goo.gl/CTGVfS #ActionCounts #GlobalGoals” and encourage others to recognize the true value and worth of online volunteers!

In 2014, according to UNV, more than 11,000 online volunteers undertook more than 17,000 online volunteering assignments through the service, and 60 percent of these online volunteers come from developing countries. I had the pleasure of directing the service at UNV for four years, from February 2001 to February 2014, successfully moving the platform from NetAid to UNV entirely, engaging in various activities that made the service the first link when searching the term online volunteering on Google (I also made it #1 when searching the term virtual volunteering, but that’s no longer true), vastly increasing the number of online opportunities available for organizations on the platform and authoring materials to support organizations engaging online volunteers that are still used by UNV. I still promote the site to any organizations working in or for regions in the developing world as the best way to recruit online volunteers.

Also see:

The Virtual Volunteering Wiki

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

My research on Theater as a Tool for Development/Theatre as a Tool for Development

Valuing volunteer engagement: an imaginary case study

Leave a reply


Imagine a nonprofit theater showing the value of its volunteer usher program by saying:

We involved 40 ushers in 2015, and they provided 100 hours of service, and since the Independent Sector says the value of a volunteer hour is $23.07, the value of our volunteer usher program in 2013 was $2,307.00.

Here’s what such a statement shows:
moneysigns

  • The value of volunteers is that the organization doesn’t have to pay them
  • Volunteers save money, because they do work for free.
  • Volunteer time, hour per hour, is more valuable than that of all the staff members that aren’t directors, because they are all paid far less than $23.07 an hour.
  • The organization could get even more value for its volunteer program if it could get more volunteers doing things it is currently paying staff to do.
  • The greater the number of volunteer hours, the greater the value of the volunteer engagement.

How would such a stated value of the volunteer usher program make the ushers feel? Make the receptionist feel? Make donors that are union members feel?

It’s an obviously awful idea. Yet, this is how so many consultants and organizations want nonprofits to state the value of volunteer engagement.

By contrast, I would find the value of a volunteer usher program through collecting data that could be measured against both the mission of the organization and the mission of the volunteer program. Let’s say the mission of the organization is “to provide theatrical works that entertain, enlighten, and have a transformative impact on our audiences, and build an appreciation of the arts in our community.” Yes, I just made that up. I have examples of mission statements for volunteer engagement programs here. Here’s how I would collect that data:

I would find out what impact being a volunteer at the theater had for the ushers. I would find this out through interviews and surveys, asking things like “Why did you want to be an usher at our organization?” and “What have you learned as an usher that you might not have known otherwise about our theater? Or about putting on theater productions?” I would also ask why they think volunteer ushers might be preferable for the theater to paying people to do the work.

I would survey new ushers before they began their volunteering, and then survey them after they had served a certain number of hours, asking them the same questions, to see if their perceptions about theater in general, and our theater, specifically, had changed.

I would ask audience members how ushers help their experience at our theater. I’d do this through surveys and interviews.

I would ask staff members how they believe hosting ushers benefits them, the audience, and the theater as a whole. I would also ask why they think volunteer ushers might be preferable to paying people to do the work.

I would look at the profiles of the ushers, and see what range of age groups were represented, what range of zip codes were represented (based on residencies), and if possible, look at the range of ethnicities represented, and other data, that could show how representative of our community the volunteer ushers are.

If I didn’t have time to do all of this data gathering and interviewing myself, I would talk to faculty members at area universities and colleges that teach classes in nonprofit management, sociology, psychology or sociology, to see if students in one of their classes could do the data collection as part of an assignment, or a PhD student who might want to oversee the project as part of his or her doctorate work. The students would get practical experience and I would get people who, perhaps, people would be willing to give more honest answers to than me, someone they know from the theater.

None of this is vague, feel-good data; it’s data that can be used not only to show the organization is meeting its mission through its volunteer engagement, but also testimonials that can be used in funding proposals and volunteer recruitment messages. It would also be data that could help the organization improve its volunteer engagement activities – something that monetary value also cannot do.

Whether your organization is a domestic violence shelter, an after-school tutoring program, a center serving the homeless, an animal rescue group, a community garden – whatever – there is always a better way to demonstrate volunteer value than a monetary value for hours worked. What a great assignment for a nonprofit management or volunteer management class…

For more on the subject of the value of volunteer or community engagement:

theater as a community development/education tool – it takes more than artists

Leave a reply

It’s been a few years now since, for my Master’s degree, I embarked on a year-long investigation of the non-artistic elements necessary for success in “Theater as a Tool for Development” initiatives. It’s a subject that remains a very big interest for me. I wish I had the time and resources to research it further!

There are numerous organizations using theater techniques as part of their community development / education activities all over the world – for instance, to educate children about a health issue – and there are also numerous initiatives, publications, web sites and individuals that promote and chronicle successes regarding live, in-person performance as an effective tool for development. Even in our current age saturated with multi-media, live, in-person performance/TfD is a popular and effective tool for education, outreach and capacity-building regarding a variety of development issues, such as HIV/AIDS prevention, domestic violence, evolving gender roles, or good sanitation practices

However, there is little information on what has to be in place before these techniques are used, excluding performer training, to better ensure that these techniques will be well-received by an audience/participants, and to better ensure that the desired outcomes will be generated. My research was meant to fill in a bit of that gap. And my conclusion? Without deliberate, thoughtful cultivation of support for and trust in such an initiative among staff at the lead agency, among partner organizations, and among those for whom the theater-for-development techniques will be used, and without clear definitions of what everyone expects from TfD activities, such efforts will fail, no matter how experienced or enthusiastic your artistic staff is. In fact, in one case I studied, not doing this groundwork before hand turned out to be deadly.

My project included a review of key literature on TfD, and semi-structured interviews with 12 TfD practitioners. You can read online:

If you have undertaken similar research – not about theater as a tool for development, but specifically what needs to happen before such activities take place in order for them to be successful, give me a shout.

A few fun links for Friday

1 Reply

logoA few links for Friday, when I’m not sure anyone actually reads my Blog or my Facebook entries and I’m not feeling very creative…:

  • Howard Sherman, Executive Director of the American Theatre Wing and a good friend (and my former boss at Hartford Stage!) has a delightful blog about after-performance discussions following live stage performances. I have attended these more than a few times, and lead two myself at two different theaters, and he’s spot on with these observations. Made me smile. As does this photo of Howard next to one of my favorite people in the world.
  • I also recently reconnected with another colleague from my theater days, Sharron Boilini, now of the Westport Country Playhouse, who helped give me insight into what attendees might be expecting out of the live online event I’m helping to coordinate for TechSoup (it’s March 30 – join me and hear me try to talk about accounting software for nonprofits!).
  • Was thrilled to find this Japan-based organization: Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support. Speaking of Japan, because I’ve raised more money on the monetized pages of my web site (the pages focused on helping individuals find volunteering, community service and humanitarian work abroad), I’m donating anything I raise in March above my target goal to an organization focused on helping in Japan. It won’t be much — I’m not making anything to brag about on these pages — but it will be better than nothing.
  • I’ve created a Flickr set of photos of me at work. Very fun to compile. It’s obvious, isn’t, that I really love to work! See all that I can do when it comes to training for your nonprofit, NGO, or other community-focused organization.
  • Are you a trainer? An online community architect? A techie? A marketer? An oh-so-engaging online facilitator or online event producer? And do you love nonprofits and understand their unique culture and needs? If so, you should check out the cool open jobs at TechSoup.
  • One of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is Frank Conniff. One of his latest: If FAA doesn’t want air traffic controllers sleeping, why not use the screaming babies that always keep me awake on planes.
  • Another favorite Twitter feed of mine is FakeAPStylebook: Affect is verb: “The songs of Liza Minnelli affected the crops.” Effect is noun: “Behold the effect Liza has on the corn!”

One last thing: please don’t be offended if I don’t follow you on Twitter, particularly if I already subscribe to your blog via RSS and have friended you on Facebook and subscribe to your email newsletter, in which case I know what you’re up to, really!