Is it alive? Part 2: The nonprofit side of creatively surviving the economy

The Guthrie Theater and Florida Stage differ in size, geographic location and audience demographics. But they’re identical in their determination to get creative about cost efficiency while keeping up the quality of their work.

Though ticket sales remain on target for both so far this season, neither is taking anything for granted. At Florida Stage, a small professional nonprofit theater launched 22 years ago in South Florida’s Palm Beach County, founder and producing director Louis Tyrrell has cut a few positions and decided not to fill others, even though his critically acclaimed company enjoyed robust attendance at its two fall shows and is 60 percent subscribed for the season.                                                               

He knows the margin of survival for a theater is narrow in the best of times – maybe only one failed production – and that in today’s economy, even the healthy need to be prudent. So yesterday’s tactics alone won’t do.

  Tyrrell

“It goes a step beyond that for us and our industry,” Tyrrell said. “You have got to think out of the box.” 

Along with trimming staff positions, Florida Stage has begun telemarketing for the first time.

“We’re being very aggressive in our fund-raising … and using the Internet a heck of a lot more,” said Tyrrell, who has taken on the additional task of development since the company downsized its annual budget from $4.1 million to $3.4 million.   

The company does more TV ads, cuts better deals and “so far, it’s worked fine. But it’s really only an interim step,” he noted.

His company has been in the same space for 18 years and the rent keeps going up. “That’s when you have to start circling the wagons and looking for ways to collaborate. Those are the kinds of innovations the survivors are going to have to make if they expect to be here next year.”

While Tyrrell is getting busy talking with other producing and presenting groups in the Palm Beach area, the famed Minneapolis-based Guthrie - a major, 46-year-old, nonprofit regional theater that is one of North America’s finest -has already teamed with The Acting Company on an upcoming Guthrie run, and national tour, of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Their first-ever collaboration blends artistic and educational aims: The New-York-based Acting Company serves as professional training company for students and young professionals actors, while the Guthrie shares a bachelor of fine arts program with the University of Minnesota. Young performers from both companies will fill the “Henry V” cast.

Trish Santini, the Guthrie’s external relations director, said that teaming up for a production and tour was just one of the methods the theater is trying in order to live within a smaller budget. With revenue on track, the Guthrie still made budget cuts in November. It increased efficiency by such means as limiting the number of hours the theater store is open when no shows are running and it added consumer value by creating reduced-price ticket packages for concurrent productions – all what Santini calls “smart, incremental” changes that add up to impact. 

“Normally, we don’t bundle,” said Santini of their new marketing approach. “That’s a whole different creative look for a campaign.”

But even while they’re inventing new means of saving money and bringing in more, both the Guthrie and Florida Stage remain committed to producing top-quality work.

For Tyrrell, full houses are “really just a function of a 22-year relationship with a community” whose members have come to trust Florida Stage’s quality, he said - if a show get good buzz, 4,000-5,000 single-ticket buyers will turn up.  That’s why he went ahead with Florida Stage’s December-January show, “Mezzulah, 1946” a 10-character play by Michele Lowe whose size and cost were risky, but which is paying off artistically and financially.

 ”The play was so wonderful, and by the time we decided to change it, it would have sent the wrong message. It was worth it” to stage “Mezzulah,” Tyrrell said. But he acknowledged that, for next year, his company will be sticking to smaller, less expensive plays.       

There was a ruefulness to his tone that Santini echoed. “I think everything’s vulnerable right now” from size and number of productions to peripheral programs, she said. 

But whatever else the Guthrie may end up having to cut, it won’t compromise the theatrical excellence for which it’s famed.

“I think it comes down to a diligence about your mission,” Santini said. “And at the end of the day, it’s about protecting the  work on our stages.”

Poster design by Kevin Sprague

      Poster design by Kevin Sprague                                                                                          Poster

Is it alive? Entrepreneurs see marketing as the voltage needed to resuscitate businesses

Americans have only to look to their own dwindling buying and borrowing power these days to recognize the domino effect that the banking crisis, collapsed stock market and shocked economy are having on their lives.

For small-business entrepreneurs in creative industries, the situation has become a scary kind of laboratory, where they must experiment with parts of their operations to see what will best help them and their enterprises to survive. In the Cleveland area, two owners of quite different arts/artisan businesses are finding that marketing may be the juice that keeps their companies running.

Photographer Roger Mastroianni, whose well-established studio works with national firms and many arts organizations, including the Cleveland Orchestra, said he plans to rework his website and launch a stronger marketing campaign to try to make up for business lost to clients’ budget cutbacks.

“What’s happened, for instance: The Cleveland Play House is not using me anymore, because they can’t afford to pay me,” Mastroianni said Wednesday. “They’re using a free intern, instead.”

   Cleveland Play House production of “My Fair Lady”           

Photo by Roger Mastroianni 

Doing it better. During an economic downtown, many people regard arts as nonessentials. But, he pointed out, photography is not a budgetary priority in times like these even among arts organizations.

That’s a grim reality for Mastroianni, who derives nearly 40 percent of his business from arts clients. Yet he does anticipate one improving vital sign: Just as he needs to increase his marketing efforts, so, he hopes, will other enterprises, meaning more advertising-related photo assignments for him.

In the meantime, the Mastroianni plans to “do what I’ve done in the past, better.”

His fellow Cleveland entrepreneur, Michael Feigenbaum, won’t compromise the quality and type of work he does either, but he’s willing to tinker with practically everything else.

Feigenbaum, a highly credentialed culinary artist who owns and runs the storied Cleveland bakery, Lucy’s Sweet Surrender, has tried all kinds of creative strategies to overcome what’s happening to his business in its changing Buckeye Road neighborhood. Once a bustling community, a stronghold of the Hungarian-American culture reflected in Lucy’s Sweet Surrender strudels and European cakes, Buckeye long ago lost most of its middle-class population to the suburbs and sank into poverty.

The bakery had been a Cleveland institution for decades when Feigenbaum bought it in 1994. People were still driving in from the outskirts for the delectable treats they remembered from their childhoods and the neighborhood eventually showed signs of revitalization as other business pioneers moved in. Feigenbaum even opened bakeries in other Cleveland locations. Then Sept. 11, 2001, dawned.

“After 9/11, things really did change a lot,” Feigenbaum recalled. Expenses climbed, including rents; he had to close his other shops. 

He didn’t give up, though. After Lucy’s was featured on the Food Channel, Feigenbaum started a website and began shipping baked goods out of town. He developed a market among local coffee houses, supplying them with fresh pastries. He has a presence at local farmers’ markets, works with the wedding trade as a cake supplier and even opened a cafe recently in another struggling Cleveland neighborhood where a budding arts district promised clientele.

Stretching his market reach. But for all his courage and creativity, it hasn’t been enough. With Cleveland the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis and the national economy tanking, many neighborhoods that had been teetering on the edge of renaissance have fallen back into a moribund state of abandoned, shabby homes and closed businesses, including coffee houses that had been Feigenbaum’s clients. The buyer for one of his closed locations went bankrupt, leaving the baker with debt to pay off.

He and his wife can’t afford to hire another baker; they do the work themselves and so can turn out only so much product to ship. Meanwhile, his walk-in traffic has become limited to bursts of sales at Hannukah and Christmas, Passover and Easter, with little in between.

“Gas stations sell more baked goods than bakeries” do now, he said ruefully. The factory-produced stuff doesn’t taste anything like his strudels, which he concocts from real eggs and butter and flour, but it can be made much more cheaply and mass-shipped to thousands of retailers.

So Feigenbaum, 54, is in danger of having to close Lucy’s, nearly the only business left open on its stretch of Buckeye Road. “Until this catastrophic downturn, I’ve been fine, [but] I can’t keep getting up at 3 in the morning forever,” he said. Plus, Lucy’s is going to need remodeling soon: “It’s a building built in the ’20s with equipment from the ’60s. I’m reaching this difficult point.”

This would be a sad story, indeed, except that, in the almost same breath, Feigenbaum began ticking off the many things he still has working for him. Though the cost of a real marketing campaign is beyond him financially, he’s been getting attention in the local media and his website draws people happy to discover how easy it is to navigate, he said. He’s recently started a blog to increase his market reach. And Lucy’s delivers locally, an important selling point with the many Clevelanders who still hanker for nut rolls, dobos torte and Russian tea biscuits.

The irrepressible Feigenbaum even sees a silver lining to the economy’s dark clouds: “Funny for me, the business is going to do better in these times … because we’re a very inexpensive luxury.”

Even the recession-stressed like cream-cheese pastries.

Letters = Pain in the Post-erity

I spent most of yesterday on letters. To be exact, it was actually one letter, customized and reproduced many times.  

And considering that the text fit on a single sheet of paper, I sure did agonize over it. The worst part was trying to make sure the computer file printed out properly on my company stationery (I’m a writer, not a skilled secretary). But the wordcraft wasn’t much fun, either - not so much because this letter was a marketing tool, but because writing letters has always made me a little uneasy.

I  worry: Do I sound fake? Arch and cutesy? Dry and humorless? Hopelessly inane? …Smarmy? If I work too hard at it, it won’t sound conversational, but if I go with what comes naturally, it’s probably going to sound flip. Flip is fine for close friends. Dry is fine for strangers plying me with unwanted magazine subscriptions. But make me correspond with anybody in between, and I develop tonal stage fright.

It’s not just that I’m out of practice, although I guess I am – most of us almost never write letters anymore and composing e-mails doesn’t offer quite the same exercise. It’s just different to commit something to paper – what you put down has a permanence that demands more attention from the reader and more respect, too, whether it’s a love letter or just a hasty thank-you note for the peanut brittle. 

Once paper has had words marked on it, it becomes a cultural artifact. You just can’t say or feel that about something you can make disappear by clicking delete.  (Even though it never - ever - truly leaves… .) 

Can you imagine a published volume called “E-Mail to My Daughter” by Maya Angelou? or “The Selected E-Mails of Arthur Miller” ? (And yes, he did write some. I got one, once, and “The Crucible” it wasn’t.)

So what’s my point here? That letter-writing is a pain, but you have to do it well because people remember how you sound on cream vellum. Or even on 20-lb.-weight copy paper. That can be to your advantage if clients and customers like what they read. Just don’t let your charming and effective words get ink-jetted all over your company logo.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

The creative art of science.  What would imaginative people do without their basements and garages? Those have been the home birthing centers for many a band and handcrafted chair. But geniuses of technology, mechanics, engineering and design like to hang out there, too. 

And here’s something useful for all of them: GarageInventorLive.org. I saw part of this organization’s debut Tuesday when its founders launched their nonprofit, Cleveland-based creation with a conference called “Reinventing ‘Made in U.S.A.,’ “ held at Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Center.

The collection of speakers, including members of NASA; funders; and engineering, manufacturing, marketing, commercialization and legal experts, were there to offer know-how and reinforce GarageInventorLive’s message of dedication to helping inventors figure out how to develop their ideas into products and sell those products to industries and a public that need them.

The point of all this, as GarageInventor’s mission statement explains, is to encourage American ingenuity and manufacturing and make the nation more economically competitive. The organization plans to offer inventors and contract manufacturers a “supply chain” of assistance and advice on invention development, commercialization and marketing.

Started by Mary Kaye Denning with help from Dick Clough, the dean of Cleveland’s marketing industry, GarageInventorLive.org sounds as if it could become a significant champion for the cause of creativity. So all you weekend tinkerers and sci-tech start-ups, take heed: This might be a resource that you need.  

And when you have your cool, wizardly products developed, give me a call. There might be a place for what you make in The Geniocity Shop.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Hot damn. It’s happened twice now, so maybe it’s not a fluke: For the second time since launching Geniocity.com in June, I’ve mentioned the name of my business to a total stranger and gotten the response, ”Oh, I’ve heard of that.” 

Someone’s heard of my company?  Someone who’s not a personal friend or the friend of a friend or my second cousin once removed has heard of my company?! I can’t fully describe the flash of sheer, scintillating euphoria I felt, as if I’d won the lottery or discovered I was born a wizard.

Two persons I’d never met before had heard of Geniocity.com and not because I told them about it with my own lips. That means something is working – people have read a story about the site or seen a brochure or gotten some word-of-mouth or maybe even just discovered it by accident on the Net.

There’s so much I need to do to make that happen more often. I need to learn to use the available tools better – the online social networks, the well-placed and repetitive images or ads, the linking, the sponsorships, the collaborations – all the marketing stuff that lets you reach people more effectively. It takes a long time to learn about it and a longer time to figure how best to use it.   

But even though I’ve barely made a start on all that, I now have proof that even the little I’ve been able to do so far may not be in vain. Because not only had those two people encountered the name Geniocity.com before - they’d also remembered it.

Ok, maybe I’m making too big a deal out of this. It was only two people. And I admit that they were both in Cleveland. I’m guessing people in London and Tokyo probably won’t have found out about Geniocity yet.

But with our web presence and hard work, they could and they will.

Even the thought of that is a happy shock.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Not yet ready for prime time? Got my spirits severely malleted Friday, along with my ego. I went to a consultation with a marketing firm to find out what creative, hopefully inexpensive ideas these folks might have for me about getting the word out on Geniocity.com. They told me I shouldn’t do any marketing yet because the site isn’t good enough.

Ow.

Maybe that blow to my self-esteem caused my personality to split, because now I both see their point and reject it, too. 

Yes, the site is not nearly as rich with interactive information and creative merchandise as it will be one day, if I keep breathing long enough. And yes, I agree that I should not build expectations that Geniocity. com can’t meet right now, in its first phase.

But don’t you have to start somewhere short of perfection? 

And if the answer is no …  then when do you start marketing? Does your enterprise really have to be glorious first? And if so, wouldn’t that mean that only businesses with enormous start-up funding could actually open for business?

I’ve heard of many companies that started in garages, spare rooms or on kitchen tables. I’m pretty sure that the likes of Google and Amazon.com didn’t spring from their founders’ imaginations fully formed and visually designed with endless layers of interactive features and every book or site in the world all ready to be accessed from their pages.

So when did they start marketing? And if it wasn’t right away, how did they ever grow into the global behemoths that they are now?

I know I’m asking a lot of questions here, but I’m honestly confused. I thought the idea was to start building name recognition for my business from the beginning, even though it has a long way to go before it even faintly resembles the spectacularly creative, fascinating, have-to-visit-every-day site I have in mind. 

How else do I build the site traffic necessary to attract advertisers and sell some merchandise? Without ad and store sales, how do I afford the development the site needs to grow?

Is this yet another one of these chicken-and-egg situations? Do I have to have a magnificent site in order to get a magnificent site?

Well, here’s reality: I don’t have a magnificent site yet and I’m going to have to keep changing it tiny bit by tiny bit until it’s outstanding enough to catch people’s attention in a big way. And I don’t see how the site or I can survive until that point unless we slowly build a customer base for the fewer-but-good services and products we can offer and bring in revenue.

So I guess I’m going to have to market my imperfect business anyway, keep trying to sell my vision of what this thing can be and risk that some people will be disappointed in what it is now. I’ll just keep inviting them back every time Geniocity.com gets a little better. And maybe someday, they’ll discover it’s great.