Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey everyone!  As this episode drops, I will be getting ready to head to Chicago for the Patron Manager Community meeting.  For everyone who knows Patron Manager or has seen or used that CRM database before, I am going there to keynote the event or the community meeting as they call it.  And the reason I am extra excited for this is because one I love, Chicago would totally move there in a heartbeat if I had the opportunity, and I'm very happy to be going in May when it should be just super beautiful and amazing.

A time when Chicago really shines.  And two.  I'm extra excited for this trip because I am going to be seeing or meeting for the first time in person.  Some of the folks that work at the organization that you are going to be hearing about today, in this episode, we have spent a lot of time together, these folks on video calls the last few years, which you'll hear about in the episode, but just never have before met them in person.

So what are we talking about in this episode?  This is our second of three case study episodes this season, all with organizations who I've had the enormous pleasure of working with in my run it like a business academy.  And this episode is really special to me because it's not a classical music organization.  If you have listened to this podcast before or consumed any of my other content before, you know or very likely know that my background is classical music, that's been my track coming up in this industry of arts management and was a big part of my life growing up.

But a lesser known fact about me, or pretty much not at all known by anyone fact about me, because I don't think I've ever shared this before.  Is that also, growing up, in addition to playing an instrument, I also did several plays in high school, like auditioned for the high school plays a few times during my sophomore and junior year and actually got cast, which was just super fun.  And I had almost totally forgotten about this until I was preparing for this episode.  All to say, this episode is for you.

Whether you were kind of like a secret theater kid or a secret aspiring theater kid, like I was a part of any other artistic discipline in your life.  So fast forward to now, and I am just just really grateful and blown away that my work has organically spread to some other artistic disciplines, which at the end of the day, I think this makes sense because we are all facing the same challenges, at least different flavors of the same challenges.  And you're going to hear that theme a lot in this episode.  Things like we are not alone, you are not alone is definitely a recurring sentiment you'll hear.

And this is true certainly for all of us facing the big challenges challenges such as needing to grow your audience, expand the donor base, increase revenue challenges to better serve our communities around us, challenges to build high performing teams and strengthen our company culture in this kind of weird, fast paced, changing world we're in right now.  All of those things are just they're not limited to one artistic discipline, and you are going to hear about all of those challenges today and how this organization, this theater, has tackled them.  So the point I'm trying to make is that it's always a real joy and honor when I get to meet folks outside of orchestra and offer land folks at theaters, dance companies, performing arts centers, visual arts organizations, and other visitor based or exhibit based institutions because we are here to learn from each other.  So I'll say it again we are not alone.

You are not alone.  And wow, do we have a lot to learn from the organization and leader I am speaking with today.  Normally right here I would say something like so let's get to it.  But today.

Let's break a leg.  I'm Aubrey Bergauer and welcome to my podcast.  I'm known in the arts world for being customer centric, data obsessed, and for growing revenue.  I've been called the Steve Jobs of classical music and the Sheryl Sandberg of the symphony.

I've held offstage roles, managing millions of dollars in revenue at major institutions, been chief executive of an orchestra where we doubled the size of the audience and nearly quadrupled the donor base, and wrote a bestselling book on the business of the arts.  And I'm here to help you achieve all these same kinds of successes.  In this podcast, we are sorting through data, research and business strategies from inside and outside the arts, applying those findings to our work and bringing in some extra voices along the way, all to build the vibrant future we believe is possible for our institutions and for ourselves as offstage administrators and leaders.  You're listening to The Offstage mic.

Support for this season of The Offstage Mic comes from Evolve Arts.  One thing I've seen firsthand is that most CRMs make it really hard to run your or like a business.  People ask me all the time, Aubrey, is there a CRM you actually recommend?  That's why I want to tell you about Evolve Arts, an exciting new CRM that is revolutionizing the art space and the only one I've seen built specifically to make it easy to execute.

Many of the strategies from my book, Evolve Arts was created by people who were frustrated with the CRM at their own organization, musicians and board members with engineering and tech backgrounds.  They created the tool that they needed, so it's built for modern use cases.  Performing arts organizations see all the time.  It's extremely powerful, while still easy and intuitive to use.

In less than a minute, you can send personalized emails to first time attendees, identify and target patrons in every segment of the long haul model, and share a discount code with lapsed ticket buyers, inviting them to come back.  Their team is responsive and supportive.  If you are having conversations about CRMs at your organization, please check out Evolve Arts.  That's evolve without the second E evolve the AR ts, search them on Google for free demos or tap the link in the show notes for more information.

Today we are learning about the American Shakespeare Center based in Staunton, Virginia.  I will never forget the day their head of Patron Loyalty.  This is a new title which you'll hear about in the interview.  Their head of Patron loyalty, Stephanie Cavaco, came to office hours in my run at Lake a business academy, and she came to office hours quite a bit.

You'll hear us talk about that too, but I remember specifically the day she came with a huge smile on her face and she said, Aubrey, have I got data and info to share with you?  And she was always prepared.  Stephanie and came with great questions, but this particular time it was just the big smile, this good news and she shared a bunch of data and stats about some things that were just going well for them that they had been working hard on.  And I remember saying to her, we have to do a case study on this.

And so we did.  It started off as a social media post, just a little social media post.  And that was last December.  We did a post on LinkedIn and I think some Instagram stories as well.

And I share this because people loved it.  And just a sidebar, I want to say rage bait is not the only thing that's effective on social media.  Okay, can I get an amen?  Anytime I post about an arts organization doing well, I share a success story.

Whether that's big or small, people go nuts for it and the content does very well and folks want more of it.  That's clear in the comments that usually come through accompanying these posts.  So I say that as a as a tangent here, because that is a testament to so many of you just cheering on the good work of others.  The good news that comes out of our industry lifting each other up, that makes me so happy.

And I am here for it.  And I am so glad that you are to.  The other thing that happened with that post, besides celebration and engagement, is that people were saying in the comments like, I need more, I want more.  Tell me the story.

Tell me the details.  Aubrey, can you can they flesh it out more?  Teach us some things.  So that's what we're doing today.

Here we are to do just that.  Joining me today is Vanessa Morosco, executive artistic director at the American Shakespeare Center or the ASC, as you'll hear her refer to them often.  Vanessa brings more than two decades of service in the theater industry to the ASC, and she has been a cornerstone of the center's growth that you're going to hear about.  In addition to her arts management roles, she has also directed productions for resident and touring theater troops, so she brings a great experience as an artist to her work as a manager as well.

And you'll hear her say this in the interview.  But Vanessa's journey with the ASC began way back years ago as a performer.  So dating back to the first season, the inaugural season in 2002 for the ASC, and she has appeared in over 25 different productions there on the Black Friar's Playhouse stage.  Beyond the ASC.

Vanessa is recognized globally for her expertise in drama based training and development.  She has worked with multinational corporations and business schools worldwide on leadership and communication training through her organization Impact Drama.  Vanessa is also the co-founder of the 5050 Shakespeare Project, which is dedicated to advancing gender equity in the workplace of Shakespeare's plays.  She serves on the executive Committee of the Shakespeare Theater Association, and is a proud member of Actors Equity Association and Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

Vanessa relocated from New York City back to Staunton to take this role, leading the ASC, and I am so glad we get to hear about the great work she has been doing there.  These last few years.  Vanessa, welcome to the off stage, Mike.  Thank you Aubrey.

Thanks for having me.  So start at the beginning.  When did you join American Shakespeare Center and paint the picture of the organization?  Then what did it look like?

How did you come to this role?  What was the just really state of affairs at the organization then?  Well, I love that you're asking this because I think you probably expect me to start with the date that I started in my role, but my history with the organization actually dates back much further.  So the American Shakespeare Center was actually founded by an English professor and his student out of James Madison University in 1988, and then it was called Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, and it was exclusively a touring company.

Right.  So its mission was to be able to recover the joys and accessibility of Shakespeare and to bring that across the country.  And that's what they did for several years.  I started out my career in the arts as a performer, which is not an uncommon way to start, right?

And so I spent a lot of my career in classical theater especially, was my love.  I love that the text really centers the experience and that we're collectively imagining worlds together.  And I started out as a performer, and one of my very first jobs was with Shenandoah Shakespeare.  So I started out as a performer, took my career to New York, came back a few times as a director before the pandemic shutdown, and then in the very end of 2023, beginning of 24, I came in as the executive artistic director of the American Shakespeare Center, which, of course, we renamed after we opened our Blackfriars Playhouse, which we are now celebrating our 25th anniversary year this year.

Oh, congratulations.  I didn't realize it was an anniversary year.  Amazing.  And then.

Okay.  And then lay out kind of getting into you assume this role what was really what was the financial situation?  What were you coming into?  What did you inherit?

Please.  I love that.  Okay.  So I think you know, our story at the American Shakespeare Center is our story.

But I know we're not alone in our story, right?  So the context in which I took over this role was incredibly intimidating, right?  We had had our most theater was shut down for two years.  The American Shakespeare Center had gone into a huge deficit which had not been managed well.

And there have also been rapid leadership turnover.  And I think that it was it was a really hard time.  It was a place that felt like I knew the core of it because I had known it for so long.  Even though it's now 25 years old, not a baby anymore, just, you know, kind of emerging as an adult.

The so I knew I knew what the art was.  I knew what the core was.  But what I saw was an institution that had really been suffering for a very long time.  So when you talk about the finances, I mean, I'll be really honest.

I was incredibly intimidated to come in.  I remember turning to my husband in New York in our, you know, apartment in New York and going, I don't know, I mean, maybe I should say no, maybe I can't do this, but I really believed a lot in the mission of what we do.  And in Staunton, Virginia in general, and its deep dedication to arts and culture, that I felt it was worth trying.  So I was looking at a $1 million deficit in an organization that's under a $4 million operating budget.

So it's a significant deficit as well as a lot of legacy debt.  So it was it was incredibly challenging to come in.  There was also a lot of kind of community and relationship healing to be done, because there had been so much rapid turnover.  Yeah, yeah.

Thank you for sharing all of that.  Because you're right.  I asked because, no, you're not alone.  So many folks are in that boat.

Okay.  So just to I want to get into the steps.  You the first steps you took as you entered the role.  But first just to I was going to say set the stage, pardon the pun.

How many how many productions do you do each season?  Is it all Shakespeare 100% of the time?  How many people on staff like, just lay out kind of the lay of the land a little bit?  Yeah, well, we're a seasonal business, so, you know, like any seasonal business, our our number of employees fluctuates based on our needs.

But I would say at any given time, you know, we have we have sort of just probably just under 50 people.  So our I would and that includes our performers and our, you know, our stage managers, our directors, things like that.  So we're quite a small organization in that regard because we actually produce year round.  So we're actually, as far as I'm aware, of the only year round producing professional repertory company left in the United States.

We perform year round.  So we have four distinct seasons spring season, summer, fall and our holiday season, which particularly serves our local community, which is, of course, the iconic Christmas Carol.  And we do anywhere from 7 to 9 productions a year.  Okay, now with all of that context, talk about you make the move.

You're like, okay, Staunton, I'm in here, I come.  What are the first steps?  Do you remember?  What are the first steps you took as you as you joined the organization?

Well, I mean, I think the first part of my, the, my first entire year was listening, right?  So a lot of it was listening because I was walking into a context where an organization was already running.  It was it was struggling, but it hadn't stopped.  And so I think a lot of, you know, I have to believe that anyone who has been through that has thought of 100 ideas, and I want to know what those are, because I want to intersect with those.

And they're always going to be ahead of me.  Right?  In a good way.  Right?

They'll have been here for longer than I've been here.  So I need to listen to the community, both within the American Shakespeare Center and and within our region and our local community to, you know, what are what do you need from us?  Because at the end of the day, we're a nonprofit.  So our mission is not only to do Shakespeare, it's also to serve a community.

And so I was really listening to the community.  I also spent about a year, at least a year happen still now sometimes apologizing for everything.  And I mean that in a brave way.  So, you know, I'm fascinated by the idea of apology, especially as a leader that identifies as a woman because I feel like I get mixed messages.

Right?  Like as a woman, I'm told, don't apologize.  But as a leader, I've told to apologize.  And certainly I know I'm not alone in this struggle.

And I know I've worked with actually many stage managers who often have been women who navigate this too.  And so I really think of apologizing as a leader, as an avenue to rebuild trust that we all agree.  Right?  It's sort of setting the or reestablishing the standard that we agree that whatever happened was not good for anyone.

So I don't think I've actually ever told you this, Aubrey, but when I did my pitch for this job, when I did my final interview and came, they brought me down.  And, you know, I saw the shows that were happening at the moment and went in and presented to the board.  I actually talked about Run It Like a Business, but it was before you had the Academy, because I've been following your work for a while, so I actually pitched it as part of as part of my pitch of what I intended to do before I did it and before I had the support to do it, because I started to think, you know, I know so many theater leaders, and it doesn't seem to be going well in theater.  So who else is doing what we're doing, even if they're making something different?

So I pitched this work in my in my interview, and obviously they must have thought I was onto something because then I ended up in Staunton, Virginia, leading the company.  But it was interesting because then what I went to do the work, I got quite a lot of pushback.  There was a lot of, I am so glad, sorry, we are talking about this.  So sorry.

Please continue because I knew this.  So okay.  Yeah.  Just keep going.

Yeah.  Well I remember when when you and I when.  So first of all, the big thing was to, to sort of sell my team on it.  Right.

And you know, and I, and I love that your work specifically focuses on marketing and development, right.  And the thing I knew right away, and again, I know we're not alone is like the big issue at the ASC at the time was the financial health of the American Shakespeare Center.  And there are a lot of factors that contribute to it.  But one of the major factors was that as an organization, we had prided ourselves on running on a ticket revenue model.

And while those tickets are great tickets, and the Blackfriars Playhouse is an amazing place to see a show, it's ultimately not a sustainable model because, you know, there's a revenue ceiling, there's a finite number of seats, there's 300 seats.  It's built like Shakespeare's indoor theater.  So I promise you, not all of them are good, though they are all worth the experience.  But also, we are a people powered industry.

So how do we do that?  And I remember saying like, we can't keep doing it the way we're doing it, so it's worth trying something.  Let's say you're running your performing arts organization more and more like a business.  Insights are clicking.

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To take the first step.  Your work was is specifically, or at least the way it related to the work that that we're carrying through in at the American Shakespeare Center is related specifically to integrating marketing and development.  And so my first task was to sell the team on this, because our marketing experts tend to be experts in marketing, and they think one way about selling and our development tends to look a lot at, you know, how to foster relationships or work on grants or work on foundations or work with major donors.  Now, that was a side of the organization that had been untended to for a long time.

So it was I mean, we were running mostly on ticket sales.  So in, you know, in working with the team, what we really identified and what we got excited about is reimagining what somebody relationship to the organization would be.  Right.  Like, I love the idea that when a patron comes in and they they purchase a ticket, let's say they're a first time buyer, we record them as earned revenue because that's what their transaction reveals.

But ultimately, if what we want is for them to not only buy a second ticket, but perhaps make a donation, and maybe they'll even go on the ladder of becoming a board member, at which point we start to see them as as contributed revenue and helping upskill our team to be able to start to rethink of transactions as recorded human behavior, and then to look at human behavior and think about how to engage.  That is really what we focused on.  And of course, as theater professionals like that is human behavior is our area of expertise, right?  It's what we do.

We capture it all the time.  We play out characters that are close to us or far away from us.  We study behavior, we communicate.  And so we really used a lot of those tools to be able to, or at least when we started talking about it and combining the departments, we used a lot of those tools to help center us in how to think about this.

Is a human's relationship to an organization, rather than a transactional relationship to an organization?  Okay, there are so many things I want to unpack a little bit in what you just said.  Let me first, I'm trying to think what order to tackle this.  Can you just talk us through what was Stephanie's role prior?

What had she been doing for the organization and then was there you talked about, you know, bringing the team along.  And I was going to say handling fair resistance.  I think especially for a team that had been like maybe whipped around a bit over the years before you got there.  Okay.

Of seeing the nodding head.  So just talk about that.  Like, how did you how did you like tactically, how did you go about making the change?  And then, you know, Stephanie saying yes and like, you know, just talk us through all of that.

Sure.  So I think, you know, part of it started with, you know, as, as it should started with Stephanie.  Right?  So when I came in, she was the director of marketing, and she was actually an interim director of development.

And in working with Stephanie, you know, it was interesting because she she actually has quite a long tenure with the company.  I think she just celebrated her 12th anniversary.  So in working with her about combining the departments, I think that the structure of Run It Like a business really helped center that.  So, you know, it's one thing for me to say, I think this is a good idea.

Here are the strategies behind it.  But like, how do you actually do the work and what are the examples of it gives a lot of confidence because kind of once you like learn the rules of the game, you can start to riff on those, but it starts to break the rules.  Exactly.  And you can customize them.

But if you sort of have no playbook, it's really intimidating.  So one of the ways that we worked on it was like, well, let's join the run at like a business academy at promise.  Like, I'm not trying to like, sell your run like a business academy, but maybe I am.  But but I do think that it actually really helped because I will say as a leader, it helped take a lot of pressure off me.

Right?  I was able to guide the strategy.  And and then she was I knew that she would have like support to do the work, and that mattered because it was sort of like it was a version of expanding our team at the time.  I love so much about this, so I remember those early office hours during the academy that you all joined, and Stephanie was a regular attendee of those office hours.

You came once or twice, I remember, and I love that so much.  Not not everybody consumes the Academy curriculum material the same way.  Some people are regulars at office hours, some don't.  Some drop in, everything's okay.

There's no wrong answers.  But you all were just such a perfect example of how to take advantage of those sessions.  I remember I expected the conversation to be around, you know, the strategies and the ticket revenue and development revenue, and there was plenty of all of that.  But you all and so many others.

So this is also in the category of not just you all, not alone, nobody listening to this as alone.  Everybody came with board questions.  Still, to this day this happens and it just continually surprises, surprises me.  And maybe now less surprising because I've seen it happen so much.

But this idea of this, yes, we're here to talk about financial stability.  And also that means we have to really talk about our leadership skills and bringing others along with us and all these things that you already mentioned.  So I want to dig in here because you were working on leading these operational changes in your organization, and you're working on bringing the board along with these ideas.  And I just want to know, like, what can you share a little more about?

What did that entail?  Was there a moment when you realize, oh, they want her to be the development director or they want there?  I remember having a conversation now this is coming to me, a conversation with Stephanie where she was like, they thought they weren't going to get a personal touch.  And we, you know, like those moments of like, oh, because, you know, the issue is never the issue.

It's always these deeper underlying things.  So can you just unpack that a little more?  Yeah.  I mean, in general, I think that at that moment in, in theater, many boards had stepped in to a more managerial role.

And, you know, often in the saddest cases had closed down theaters.  Right, which was probably something they never signed up to do.  So I think that there's a couple of things that are going on at that moment.  One is, is this right that they had been in managerial positions in order to help navigate a really difficult time, you know, post-pandemic and during the pandemic shutdown.

And so transitioning them forward into governance was really hard because they've been looking more from a managerial perspective.  Whether or not that was they felt that was their area of expertise.  They were being asked to do it and they were heroes and stepped up.  So I think they deserve to be celebrated for that.

But I also recognize that it's an incredibly difficult transition.  So I think that some of the pushback is actually about that.  It's like I've had to manage this situation and now I don't.  When you're talking about this new idea, I barely knew how to manage that one.

Like I came on to throw some parties for you, right?  I mean, or whatever it is, or to, like, champion you in the community.  But I didn't come on to, like, run your office.  But I've done some of that, and now you're here and you're saying you're going to, you know, do it in a different way.

So I think that there was a lot of like uncertainty there and and understandably so.  But I think it is also like what you said, that personal touch.  So I think part of it is that to do our business well, we have to, you know, be do our accounts really well.  And that for some people is the boring bit.

I kind of find it exciting.  But accounting requires Seiling.  So it records transactions and it really is.  Stay in your lane.

Right.  If something is earned revenue, if it's in marketing, it has to go in that category and it has to be cleanly accounted for.  And if it's if it's development, if it's contributed revenue, it goes in that category.  And those are two different departments with two different reporting styles in accounting when it comes to the financials.

And I think sometimes what occurs is because if we're doing our jobs well as leaders, we are reporting that to the board.  And the result is they are seeing siloed, siloed stories.  And what we need to do is tell the story in an integrated way.  And what I started to discover with a lot of board pushback is part of it was, you know, I'm concerned that I won't have this role of director of development.

That is one sort of superhuman that always gives me the personal touch.  So there's that, because that's their experience in a lot of nonprofits.  And often I find a board member is somebody who's contributing to a lot of nonprofits, right?  Which is an amazing thing.

And so it's partly that, but I think it's also this fear that if we start integrating the work, will we stop being responsible financially?  So what I started to discover, and I remember talking to you about this, of like, how do you take a board along this journey?  Because to me it seems so clear what we're doing.  But as you rightly point out, sometimes when we hear the problems reflected back to us, it we have to actually figure out what the question is like.

I'm not sure that the questions that were coming to me were actually the questions.  I think one of the questions was, Will I have a personal relationship?  And the simple answer is yes.  Like that is what we're working on.

We're redefining transactions as human behavior and then identifying those as humans that we build relationships with, but perhaps diversifying our responsibility across the organization so the burden isn't falling, falling all in one human, which makes it fairly impossible.  Yeah.  Oh, I really like that.  And that connection to.

Yeah, we're used to seeing it on a ledger line this way, and therefore that flows up into our brain of what then the staff structure looks like.  Yeah, that's really a brilliant connection.  Okay.  So continue on.

You are getting everybody on board.  You've done a lot of work as the institutional leader.  And now everything will say is like kind of moving along in tandem.  Then what happens next.

Are there things that you all started, other things you started doing as a result of either the Academy curriculum or just other things?  By nature of just operationally the changes you were making, like, it kind of just keep going with the story basically.  Yeah.  I mean, I would say sort of like the inside peak is that the that we, we encountered sort of stumbling blocks along the way that we didn't anticipate.

But that actually, I mean, in retrospect are not surprising.  So a really, really basic example is like what is someone's workweek look like?  So we're a theater, right?  Which means that we we operate during entertainment hours.

And so.  Right.  So weekends are when people go see plays.  Weekends are our highest working hours.

Mondays traditionally are the day off for theater, but if you're in the office, you might anticipate that you work Monday to Friday.  But if you're going to do the work of integrating marketing and development, where you're interacting with with patrons, with donors who are going to come see shows, then we needed to reexamine our entire, like working our structure of like, how do we set someone up for success to be able to be there to meet a high level donor when they've been earned revenue and purchased a ticket so that you can foster that connection?  And how does that look different than it might than it might have when you were working 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, which is definitely what finance needs to work because they need to work along bank hours.  So we started to even just restructure with an of, you know, trying to create.

So I mean we champion flexible work hours anyway.  So that was not a particular issue though I think being accountable to those started to look different of.  And then how do we sort of spread out our teams so that we're rotating and no one's getting burned out?  Yeah, I mean, I just as an aside, I'm not I'm just not a fan of one size fits all rules because we are not one size fits all people, you know, so I just I love what you're describing.

Yeah.  And you know, and it doesn't tend to work in theater.  So especially because we do you know, we are an entertainment industry.  So like we do plays when people are not working, which means we're working when people are not working.

Right.  Right.  So okay, just to get a little tactical different organizations, I said this before, but different organizations consume the academy content differently.  It's designed that way.

There's no right or wrong way to do it.  But my question is, can you weigh in?  Like, how did you guys consume it?  Did you watch videos as a team or did people did you assign things like what did you do?

Absolutely.  So I actually empowered Stephanie to lead a lot of this because as you well pointed out, she went to every, you know, office hours section or office hours session.  Sorry.  And I went to a couple.

Right.  And that is, that is makes a lot of sense to me.  Right.  Like my time is very, very packed and I'm doing multiple things.

And you know, I'm a huge fan of delegating.  It's like my goal is to champion the the work and to create the context for for someone to do their best work.  But my job is not to do their job.  So, you know, but being able to, especially in those early days, be part of it and be part of it when Stephanie was a part of it, so that we were having transparent conversations in front of each other to do the work together.

But then ultimately, you know, my role in actively being a part of that, if I've done my job well, is going to kind of drop off a bit and she's going to continue it.  But we started integrating it with her team.  So every time we bring on.  So it started with our team members that were some were in marketing and some are in development.

And actually in some ways they still are categorized that way.  Right?  We have staff members that, from an accounting perspective, fall under the marketing budget of people.  And we have development folks that fall under the development budget of people.

But they're essentially I think the simplest way to look at it is they're cross-trained.  So they we have a weekly meeting with the patron loyalty team that Stephanie leads.  And part of what we did that first year is we enrolled them all in the academy.  They all read the book.

And and then Stephanie would lead them through session by session, you know, usually guided by the work that you're doing.  So that we were sort of taking in bite sized versions of it and then having kind of a work session on how does that fit for us, right?  Or how are we?  Do we want to do exactly that?

How are we inspired by that?  Is this something we can implement now?  Is this something we want to burner and like, you know, put, you know, do in six months and bring back.  And every time we bring somebody new in we put them through a same a similar system so that we are really cross-training.

And I've seen it effective for every single team member like those who are stronger in marketing.  What I've noticed and I and this is a part I am an active part about or part in is our messaging has really shifted.  Right.  So one of the things I believe in as an artistic leader is that theater is really about us coming together, right?

It's something we haven't shared space.  And the Blackfriars Playhouse is a very radical expression of that because we are inspired by how Shakespeare practiced, which means there's no fourth wall, there's no divide between the actor and audience.  We practice in shared light.  So it really is the radical active community.

We really are collectively imagining worlds together.  And if we take that and put it into our other strategies and take dismantling the wall between marketing and development and and sharing messaging, then what we see is marketing is really expert in knowing how to write copy and how that needs to scale and fit to say your next Instagram post, but their language ends up really aligned with development.  And the same is true for our grant writer.  I start to see words or phrases that have been introduced by our marketing team to start to show up in grant writing, and what we see over the course of a year is a blending of that, so that we're actually getting messaging that's consistent, and our communication feels like one organization.

That's amazing.  I love this so much, I think.  More and more organizations are sending board members or they'll like, watch this lesson or watch or, you know, and it's been really this is like, use the tool.  You wield it wisely, folks.

But it's like, you know, how much do we want to invite the board members into quote unquote, management stuff?  But a lot of organizations have been very smart like you and that it's like, no, we can help in going back to this conversation and bringing people along.  We can really help use the tool to that end.  Okay.

Here's a question.  What was the hardest part of all of these changes through the academy or otherwise?  Either hardest to like people for people to wrap their head around or hardest to execute operationally?  I mean, that's a really great question.

I think the hardest is and this is ongoing work, is making sure that our teams don't get burned out.  So I think when, you know, I think this is true at every level of an organization, when the work feels so big and sometimes big, it looks like integrated.  It's hard to know where to start or what success looks like.  And so then it can feel it can be a fast track to burn out.

So I think sometimes a lot of my work ends up being kind of turning something into like a bite sized process or and that has a clear outcome.  Because when we're doing this work, and especially in the context of the ASC and many other organizations you're talking about, well, it's what you call it, right?  The long haul model.  Right?

A long haul can be really exhausting if you don't have sort of points and measures of success.  So one of the ways that we tackle this is we actually put it into our because I'm a big fan of integrating, we put it into our key metrics of our monthly financial reporting.  So and it's really easy to read.  So we integrated it all into that.

And what that looks like an example would be it's one of our is one of our metrics that we put every monthly reporting.  We show the ratio of contributed to earned revenue.  Every month.  Everyone on the staff gets just a snapshot of that so they don't have to read the whole financials.

I mean, they can, but it's not you know, you don't have to be fluent in that.  You actually can just measure that number.  And it's just kind of, you know, it's a snapshot.  It's not a linear process, but it helps, you know, what we see is increased success, that we're shifting the ratio of the organization from underneath.

So okay let's talk results.  Paint the picture today.  What are the successes you've seen.  And as much as you can put numbers behind it.

So everybody listening can really track along with how things how the narrative has changed for you all.  So big picture I came into the and again, this is all public information.  You can read this in our 990.  But the I came into the middle of a fiscal year in fiscal year 23, which is a very difficult time to come into an organization facing a $1 million budget deficit.

This year, we produced our first budget neutral budget, which is exciting.  That is a big swing to come from that deficit to balanced.  Yeah, it's a huge turnaround, you know, and I'm not under any illusions.  There's not still a lot of work to do right.

Like we're just hanging on at budget neutral.  But it's a big deal to come from a $1 million deficit to that, as you said, I know this to be true.  There are a lot of theaters who can't say that right now.  So yeah, like take the win as what I'm trying to say.

Like, yes, it's a stop on the path, but sorry, keep going.  I just wanted to celebrate that.  So yeah, that's maybe me doing like board board talk.  Right?

I'm like, we're doing great and keep donating.  And also we're still doing the work.  We don't want to stop stop the momentum.  And it's not a you know, it's not a straight line.

Like there have been ups and downs.  And we again we hit seasonality.  So we're still like constantly managing cash flow.  And it's not like those have gone away.

But we're not looking at a $1 million deficit I mean that's huge.  So, so so that's where we are in two years we were able to get there.  You know, when I, when I came in as well, fundraising was only about 16% of total revenue, which is about the biggest it's ever been in the history of the Ace.  So so that is really hard.

We are now on track.  Our goal in by FY 28 CS, we set some goals is to get to 60% earned revenue, 40% contributed revenue, which is not necessarily where we want to be long term.  But I do think it's an achievement goal and it's one that's going to pace us well.  I mean, last I checked, we're we're up from 16% to about 23.

And any given moment sometimes higher than that, we are tracking I mean, you know, it's always a snapshot, but we'll see what it is by the end of the year.  But it's it's a tremendous improvement.  Our donor renewals are up.  Our retention is 34% year over year, which is a big deal.

And you know, our grant portfolio is up by 165%.  Wow.  That's incredible.  It is.

This is also good okay.  As we start to bring this to a close, just a couple I'm gonna kind of bundle this in one question.  But a couple final questions.  One is the question of what's next.

You've talked about the goals and tracking toward the goals.  So what goes through your mind as you are looking ahead.  And then I think this is sort of same song, different verse.  We could say different act.

How are people feeling now?  Like we talked a lot about the sentiment of just the team and even board when you came in, but I don't know.  I think these two are related, so I'm really bundling them.  But what?

Looking ahead and sentiment, all of all of that.  You know, it's interesting I think that like what I see is a joyful community here in the AFC.  I mean, people feel really connected.  So connection is not just about connecting our donors.

It's also about, you know, when I talk about theater being the radical active community, I think it's also the community of those who are working here.  And what I see is people being really connected and accountable to each other.  They're curious about what everyone else is doing.  They're interested in how to support each other, and it's because their work hinges on each other's success and therefore their invested in each other's success.

And I think that when we're doing that, we're creating an organization that is, it's worth doing the work for.  Oh yeah, such a great answer.  Wow.  I just want to close by saying, I'm so proud of you all.

I think you have done the work, you have done so much work and it really shows.  And Vanessa, I just want to say it's a real testament to your leadership.  I've been so in or from afar and or in the meetings I've had with you in the team, but even just this conversation right now, what keeps going through my head is you just do such a great job of connecting.  Yes, we're talking dollars and cents.

We have to raise the money and generate the revenue we need to fund our art and our mission.  Yes, of course that's the job.  But you do such a good job of elevating the conversation to all these other things besides the dollars and sense of it, and it's just a real hallmark of your leadership.  I'm I'm observing.

So all this is to say, thank you so much for coming on here, sharing your story, sharing the ace story.  And I just hope it inspires so many people listening.  Thank you, thank you.  Thanks for all the work you do.

Hey off stagers.  As we've said this season of the off stage mic, running an arts organization is hard these days, without a doubt.  But what if there was a way to make your revenue goals a little easier to attain, balance the budget and end the year in the black, and feel like you have a real plan for financial sustainability?  As I've also said many times, hard does not mean impossible.

That is why I am teaching a free masterclass where I share my top four strategies to grow your audience, expand your donor base, and ultimately increase revenue.  Things you can do immediately to start seeing results.  Things that don't require a huge team, mega resources, or a giant budget.  I've now seen these strategies work with over 300 individuals and organizations I've taught across budget sizes, geographies, and artistic disciplines.

Just like you heard in today's episode.  And I'm going to show you how to do it to reserve your spot for my free Audience Growth Masterclass coming up very soon.  Think about the relief and freedom that lies ahead when you start increasing your sales and donations over just the next few months.  This can absolutely be your reality.

Reserve your free seat for this Audience Growth masterclass right now by going to AubreyBergauer.com. That’s AubreyBergauer.com.  That's all for today folks.  Thanks so much for listening.

And if you like what you heard here, hit that button to follow and subscribe to this podcast.  And if you've been around for a few episodes now, would you please consider leaving a quick rating or review?  I really can't thank you enough for your support in this way.  To all of you one more time.

Thanks again.  I'll see you next time on The Offstage Mic.  This season of The Offstage Mic is produced by me, Aubrey Bergauer.  Additional production support as well as editing is by Morreale Digital.

Our theme music is by Alex Kroll.  Additional support this season comes from Sandy Kobashi and Johan Dudley.  This is a production of Changing the Narrative.  This podcast is brought to you by Morreale Digital.

We all want our arts organizations to reach wider audiences and engage our communities, right?  Well, a video podcast is a great way to do that.  But as I know too well, podcasts to take a lot of time and technical skills to do well.  That's why I partnered with Morreale Digital.

They handle the technical elements of production, editing and distribution so I can focus on showing up and sharing ideas that matter.  To learn how podcasting can help you reach and engage your audience.  Visit morrealedigital.ca. That’s morrealedigital.ca. 

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