In this session, we will begin the road back to performances in a post-COVID-19 world. In breakout groups, we will consider scenarios for the easing of stay-at-home restrictions, consumer hesitation, and the economic downturn, and model responses to these challenges. Bring your best, most creative thoughts!
We live in a time of unprecedented creative variety and possibility, a surge of digital content and distribution, and new understandings of who gets to shape the orchestra experience. In this video of a session from a League Conference, we explore what it means for the artistic leadership of orchestras today, and what may need to change in order to seize the opportunities ahead.
Join our Volunteer Council Networking chair, Laurie Skjerseth of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra, Janet Cabot of the Madison Symphony Orchestra, and guest, Emily Green, who is the Program Coordinator of the Minnesota Music Educators Association and Head Music Librarian of the Minnesota Youth Symphonies, for a PowerPoint Presentation and Q& A on tools to help your organization and orchestras move forward.
While gender representation in the orchestral field has diversified both onstage and offstage recently, the challenge of creating truly inclusive and equitable environments remains. Salary parity, promotion and tenure, and interpersonal treatment are all issues in which gender inequity continues to manifest.
Today’s complex audiences crave a deeper connection to music makers both locally and globally. To provide this, orchestras require an understanding of how listeners and music fanatics relate to and consume music in the digital world.
When we return to the concert hall, we will be forced into a wholesale reevaluation of our revenue model. It isn’t simply that demand will be down, we’ll have fewer seats, and patrons will expect to pay less. The reality will be more nuanced and we’ll need to look to our patrons to tell us what our value is to them.
COVID-19 is challenging many of us to rethink how we lead, create, raise funds, program, and engage with audiences. If the pandemic is a portal (as Arundhati Roy puts it), where do we hope it will lead us? How can we reimagine and reinvent our organizations to be more relevant, equitable, and successful?
Even though in-person performances are suspended and marketing resources are reduced, we are not on hiatus. In fact, maintaining and growing patron engagement is more important than ever. According to Fred Reichheld, Bain Fellow and Creator of the Net Promoter System, “What you do now—how you treat your patrons—will be what everyone remembers after the COVID-19 crisis recedes.”
Orchestras are dealing with unprecedented economic challenges, and board engagement in managing this crisis is more critical than ever. Susan Nelson of TDC provides insights on how boards can help their orchestras make informed decisions based on their principles and values and daunting choices in this constituency session from the League’s 2020 Online Conference.
As our organizations contemplate seismic change in an uncertain landscape, a strong scenario-building process can help us to find the way forward. By identifying and understanding the important yet unpredictable forces at play, how these forces converge, and how they will likely influence our reality going forward, scenario-building can help us to begin to tell new stories about the future, and shape new strategies in pursuit of new realities.