Leverage the Crisis for Creativity!

"I do believe that sometimes it takes these terrible difficult environments to allow us to be more creative rather than less creative." -- Michael Kaiser

A great short little interview with Michael Kaiser on NPR. The highlights of his advice to arts orgs:

- Do new things, adventurous things, not just the old chestnuts.

- Be creative. Do more for less. Collaborate to cut costs.

- When you cut programming, you cut your revenue source and your ambitions

TYA Company Leverages Word of Mouth

Childsplay, a company for young audiences based in Tempe, AZ, is utilizing new ways of getting audiences on board and willing to spread the news of upcoming productions.  Especially interesting given that Childsplay was reported to me as being recently hit with furloughs -- hopefully this new strategy will help turn things around.

Michael Kaiser / Kennedy Center's Arts in Crisis Initiative

Arts & Business guru Michael Kaiser seems to be worth looking into.  My pal in the non-profit world Katherine Urbati turned me on to his book "The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations," as well as an mp3 of a recent talk he gave at Harvard.  Also interesting, he's the president of the Kennedy Center these days, and was the leader on the Center's new Arts in Crisis program.  Given that our session will be at the Kennedy Center, maybe we can make a connection.

I think it's worth investigating his work further.