5 Mistakes Arts Organizations Make
And Steps You Can Take Instead
The headlines in the arts aren’t great these days. I know it, you know it. “But what do we do about it?” I feel like so many people are asking, as the sector collectively scratches its head. “How do we spin ourselves out of this?”
Last year I wrote about the challenges — in which I shared a similar image of sad headlines compiled (all different and additional to the ones here…that’s how many sad headlines there are), as well as offered ten solutions the journalists haven’t really talked about. Fast forward to today, and the headlines look largely the same, if not increasingly grim. Said differently, the challenges of the sector are not going away. The trends of declining audiences and having to rely more and more on major donors are not going to magically reverse themselves without intervention, and your long dwindling subscriber base isn’t a result of post-pandemic trends. People are going out, just look at the world of sports. People are spending money, just look at inflation. They’re just not going out or spending money at your arts organization.
Ouch, I know. But this sting has a salve. Whereas my previous sad-headlines roundup talks about ten solutions you can and should employ (as well as a whole book I wrote on the topic of solutions), this article covers some mistakes you’re likely making at your arts organization causing these problems in the first place. Mistakes you can fairly easily stop repeating.
I know these mistakes are widespread because I see them everywhere I go — this year alone, I’ve spoken to thousands of arts administrators across the U.S. and abroad as I’ve been on the road for my book tour — and I know they’re stoppable because I and others have done it. Talking to that many arts managers in the span of just a few months has illuminated not just the frequent mistakes, but the organizations who have also actively stopped making those mistakes — and the revenue, audiences, and donors it’s bringing them as a result.
I take that as an indicator a growing body of people are ready for solutions. Maybe that’s you. But maybe you aren’t sure where to begin. Maybe the first step for you is to take inventory, and that’s why you’re here. Below are the top five mistakes I see most arts organizations making. Are you seeing any of these at your organization?
“People are going out… People are spending money… They’re just not going out or spending money at your arts organization.”
People are wired to want big, sweeping solutions to big, sweeping problems. It just feels like big complex challenges warrant equally big solutions. But rolling out a new, grand idea is like seeking a home run when you’ve barely had batting practice. First of all, it’s risky, and second of all, it’s simply not how the research says game-changing solutions work.
A few examples of what seeking a silver bullet looks like:
- Rolling out paid streaming channels during the pandemic only to walk it all back later when patrons didn’t come running to pay for it.
- Announcing big new DEI initiatives or senior DEI positions without being fully prepared for all that comes with that, from stakeholder resistance to lack of financial support, and being left unable to fully deliver on those programs and promises now.
- Launching the big new community event or festival that takes a ton of staff time without really knowing if that’s going to produce lasting returns for the organization, and then scratching your head when people aren’t coming in droves to your regular programming.
- Hiring a new development director, thinking they will somehow raise all the money you need for your organization even when that kind of money hasn’t been raised in years (or ever).
I’m guilty of that last one too. About a decade ago, I hired a development director on a very mediocre salary and then found myself frustrated and disappointed when they weren’t able to deliver what I needed. I was left raising a ton of major gifts myself and nearly drowning without having adequate support for the organization’s fundraising workload. We ended up parting ways a year later.
Instead of silver bullet solutions, the research shows that what actually solves problems more effectively are multiple small steps and strategies that chip away at the problem. After my development director debacle, instead of going big again and thinking that one person will somehow solve all my revenue challenges, I reconfigured the role to a director over patron loyalty. Their job was to oversee multiple small changes to how we segmented and communicated with our patron base, including donors. We ended up nearly quadrupling the donor base over the next four years.
If you’re not sure where to begin, don’t think big. Rather, start small. Think more about chipping away at the problem instead of trying to blowtorch it. What are a few steps you can try? A few operational changes you can begin, because you know the challenges you’re facing won’t get better on their own. Remember, imperfect progress is still progress, but reaching for a silver bullet grand idea rarely pans out to solve the big problems you face.
Whereas some organizations are making the mistake above and hoping for a silver bullet, some organizations do the opposite: they throw spaghetti at the wall.
Iteration and taking multiple small steps does not mean those steps can be haphazard.
Whether you’re at a symphony, opera, theater, ballet, museum, or any other arts organization, so long as you sell tickets to an audience and raise money from donors, you need to be diligently working on four main strategies (there are more in my book, but if you need to narrow it down, just do these to start spinning up revenue):
- Improving your customer experience
2. Retaining your patrons better
3. Having an audience journey plan that moves people from first time buyer to repeat attendee, to subscriber, to donor
4. Using your digital content to attract, educate, and get people to want to come in person
I hear a fair amount of organizations — honestly, mostly the larger ones — who tell me their plight, and then when I ask about those strategies above, say they are doing “some of those things,” and for some inexplicable reason (this is sarcasm) are still seeing declines in their audiences and donor households.
For anyone reading and thinking, “Aubrey, you just told us to start small, and now you’re saying we have to do these four strategies and not only some of them — what gives?” let me be clear. There is a difference between organizations who are doing what they can on a small staff, but making every baby step a strategic and deliberate move in service to the four strategies above, versus the organizations that do have more staff and think having part of a strategy implemented in an unfocused, bureaucratic, non-unified, siloed way should be working for them.
Also to be clear: implementing multiple strategies doesn’t mean do them all at once. That’s an important difference.
The point is, arts organizations of any size don’t have the luxury of doing “some of these things;” we need to be firing on all cylinders because otherwise, we are a sector on the decline. We have to optimize the hell out of what we do because a lot of organizations, including maybe yours, are in crisis. And one more clarifying point: optimization isn’t about adding a ton of work; it’s just the opposite. Optimization is about creating processes that scale, build efficiency, and make the organization as functional as possible.
This idea of doing “some things” is the equivalent of bailing water with buckets when the ship is going down — it’s flawed at best and negligent at worst. CEOs, I am talking to you. Only because I’ve been there though.
When I was chief executive at an orchestra in crisis on the brink of closing its doors, we first worked on patron retention. All I wanted was to just keep the people who were already coming and donating on a plan to come back and give again rather than continue bleeding out audiences and donors like the organization had been doing. It wasn’t until a year later that we introduced a focus on the customer experience, and even then made only no-cost website updates. It wasn’t until nearly two years after that that we finally undertook a full website redesign in response to all we’d learned.
Along the way we were focusing on digital content for only a few social media channels and meeting religiously every week to analyze the data and try to make slight tweaks and improvements. We also did the weekly analysis exercise with emails, looking at subject lines and how that correlated with open rates, and where people were clicking to understand which CTAs were working. And when we saw things that seemed to work, whether certain copy, topics, content…we did more of that thing.
It was not perfect. It was not all at once. But it was enough optimization to start spinning the organization out of deficits. After years of budget shortfalls, we balanced the ledger within one year, and did so every year after that, even as the budget grew.
Multiple strategies, executed imperfectly but iterated on, and not all at once is the play. Not “some of these things” in the form of partial strategies or unfocused strategies or myriad strategies not all pointing in the same direction sort of being executed without optimization over time.
“We have to optimize the hell out of what we do because a lot of organizations, including maybe yours, are in crisis.”
I know there are a lot of factors causing the challenges facing arts and culture, many of which are out of our control.
- Art education in schools has been on the decline for decades.
- The venue you perform in is challenging to work with.
- There is no extra money in the budget.
- There aren’t enough people on staff to do some of the work that needs to be done.
These are real constraints, don’t get me wrong. I have definitely made all of those excuses over the years, too. Then one day I decided I was at a crossroads: stick my head in the sand, or take action around what I could control.
- Why, I realized, do I preach that the decline in public music education in our school system is a big reason why we are seeing declining audiences, yet I had done nothing to change how my organization talks about the music or helps people understand the music?
- Why do I complain about my venue incessantly and yet sometimes don’t at least try to find a way to make a case so they see it benefits them too, or sometimes not even ask for what I need and say no on my own without even giving them a chance?
- Why do I think that someday I will have more money in the budget if I don’t figure out how to spend what I have now to try some ideas I think will help grow revenue?
- Why do I think that if I wait around, I’ll someday have a bigger staff? Am I just going to wait until I’m at a different/bigger organization to do things I care about, or am I going to try to find a way to do them now, even if on a smaller scale?
I realized I had more power to change my organization’s situation than my excuses allowed for.
We were usually not able to implement a full and complete solution to all our challenges. The venue was always a pain, we were never flush with enough cash to fund all the projects we wanted, and public music education certainly did not change on a systemic level. But stopping making excuses and starting to make changes around the parts we could control started moving the needle.
Fort Collins Symphony stopped making excuses, too. “We knew that things would have to change and we couldn’t keep doing things like orchestras (including us) had traditionally done them and hope to build back stronger than we were before,” their head of marketing told me. Over the next year, through their optimizations, they made an additional $15,000 per concert, with audiences far surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
Boise Baroque Orchestra stopped making the excuse of “what will our core audience think?” They decided to try automatic renewals on subscriptions instead of another round on the hamster wheel of asking subscribers to opt back in each year. Not only did the overwhelming majority of their existing subscribers choose the auto-renewal option, only 2.5% of their “core audience” said they actively didn’t want the auto-renew option (usually because they were moving or had a change in income). Because the organization stopped making excuses (and assumptions) about the core audience, they now have very few accounts to worry about renewing each year, and the subscriber base continues to grow because it’s on auto-pilot for almost everyone (see previous section on optimization).
“I have definitely made all of those excuses over the years, too. Then one day I decided I was at a crossroads: stick my head in the sand or take action around what I could control.”
Making cuts is not going to solve the problems arts organizations face. Here are some symptoms of the scarcity disease:
- Reducing the season
- Suppressing staff salaries
- Reducing professional development stipends
- Approaching collective bargaining like someone has to lose
- Cutting the marketing budget while expecting revenue to grow
- Trying not to refill the open staff position with as expensive a person or role
I have been there for so many of these, and I recently wrote about how this ailment is curable.
Revisit that article if you wish, or for now, just revisit the headlines at the top of this one and you can see: cutting will not get you to a healthy, sustainable future. Cutting is a race to the bottom for arts organizations who already operate on remarkably lean margins and who are reliant on the labor force, both on and off stage (in and out of the galleries).
At Flagstaff Symphony, they decided to stop thinking of cutting concerts as a way out, and went on to focus solely on retaining first time attendees and moving multi-buyers to small subscription packages. They saw more than a quarter of their new attendees return within the same season and grew their subscriber households by 40%. Cutting concerts isn’t discussed anymore.
Scarcity mindset is a dangerous mistake for arts organizations, because it is a downward death spiral. Stopping this mistake is an essential step to growth.
When I first became an executive director, I had come from major institutions, managing a big team of people, and having millions in the budget. And at first I was hesitant to take smart, strategic action when doing business on a smaller scale. I kept telling myself I needed to wait to implement my ideas and strategies until I had more money or more people. But that is backwards thinking, because meanwhile the ship was sinking. It wasn’t until we started taking action to begin implementing strategic ideas that the revenue started flowing. And then that revenue allowed us to do even more next time (next concert, next fiscal year, next season).
It turns out, the part of me making excuses was also me waiting. But inaction is a choice in itself.
I’m not the first to talk about how moving an organization forward is like pushing a giant, heavy flywheel — it’s slow and heavy at first, arduous even. The processes are new. The baseline has to be built. But it does get easier. As I write in the final chapter of my book, “If irrelevance is a bitch, momentum is a boss.”
There are two things you need to do to stop waiting and start the flywheel. First, you need to have a bias towards action. Not another quick pivot that creates staff burnout, not another hail mary big idea, but action towards the four strategies mentioned above (improve customer experience, patron retention, audience journey, and digital content). For months, I told myself I needed to wait to do user experience research at my orchestra until I was back at a bigger org someday, and when I finally took action, it ended up changing the entire trajectory for my organization, and honestly, my whole career.
Second, you have to begin. That’s the most important step. In the case of the user experience above, it began with a short blog post inviting new attendees to tell us their thoughts. Sure enough, that call alone was widely shared, bringing in the folks we needed and set us down the path of understanding our newcomers’ pain points.
For every organization mentioned here, they also stopped waiting. For the future you want to build at your arts organization, the best time to begin was yesterday. But today is the second best option.
1. Stop repeating these mistakes. I’ve been guilty of all five of these mistakes, and every time I made the conscious decision to stop something that I knew deep down wasn’t the best path, nothing bad happened. Usually just the opposite occurred: something good to an order of magnitude for the better.
2. Rest assured the product is great. None of these mistakes are around the art itself; this is the best news, because the mistakes don’t reveal a fatal flaw in our primary deliverable. Rather, these mistakes are around how we pursue audiences and donors to consume and support that deliverable.
3. Start introducing something new to better optimize revenue from that product. Whether you want to take action on customer experience, patron retention, audience journey, or digital content, the key is to begin. Don’t do it all at once. But do start taking steps even when you don’t know all the answers. Then when you get a little better at implementing that small thing or things, add on something else. This is called iteration.
I know there are leaders that read my posts and then choose not to take action. You know what that outcome looks like; just read once more some of those recent arts headlines. Every time I waited in my own career, I regretted it later when the situation inevitably got worse, not better. Don’t let that be you.
I’ve also seen organizations stop making these mistakes. I wrote about a few of them here. I’m going to share another round of success stories in another article soon.
Meanwhile, I’m working on a new free training resource to help organizations grow audiences and donors with the strategies mentioned throughout this article. To be notified when it comes out this summer, join here:
And last, to everyone reading who knows you’ve made or are making one or more of these mistakes, you had the courage to keep reading to the end, and that says something. The choice on what to do now is before you.
Interested in more strategies to grow relevance and revenue at your arts organization beyond the four mentioned in this article? Order my book, Run It like a Business: Strategies to Increase Audiences, Remain Relevant, and Multiply Money — Without Losing the Art.
You’ll learn how to:
- Grow audiences and keep them coming back again
- Make our organizations more inclusive
- Get younger attendees in the seats and on the donor rolls
- Generate millions more dollars in revenue
- Continue to create the art we love — without the stress of figuring out how to afford it
Just because your arts organization is a non-profit, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t make money; it means the money the organization makes goes back to fund the mission — whether that’s music, visual arts, theatre, dance, or one of many other mediums that enrich our lives. www.aubreybergauer.com/book
About the Author
Hailed as “the Steve Jobs of classical music” (Observer) and “Sheryl Sandberg of the symphony” (LA Review of Books), Aubrey Bergauer is known for her results-driven, customer-centric, data-obsessed pursuit of changing the narrative for the performing arts. A “dynamic administrator” with an “unquenchable drive for canny innovation” (San Francisco Chronicle), she’s held offstage roles managing millions in revenue at major institutions including the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, Bumbershoot Music & Arts Festival, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As chief executive of the California Symphony, Bergauer propelled the organization to double the size of its audience and nearly quadruple the donor base.
Bergauer helps organizations and individuals transform from scarcity to opportunity, make money, and grow their base of fans and supporters. Her ability to cast and communicate vision moves large teams forward and brings stakeholders together, earning “a reputation for coming up with great ideas and then realizing them” (San Francisco Classical Voice). With a track record for strategically increasing revenue and relevance, leveraging digital content and technology, and prioritizing diversity and inclusion on stage and off, Bergauer sees a better way forward for classical music and knows how to achieve it.
Aubrey’s first book, Run It Like A Business, published in February 2024.
A graduate of Rice University, her work and leadership have been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Thrive Global, and Southwest Airlines magazines, and she is a frequent speaker spanning TEDx, Adobe’s Magento, universities, and industry conferences in the U.S. and abroad.
