I'm going to give you two more examples of institution marketing. Because I don't want you to think that only large companies like Alvin Ailey can do institutional marketing. because some of you are saying that's great for Ailey, they can do a presidential gala, they can get on Donahue and my organization can't. So this doesn't work for me. Not true. Not true. Two examples. One, my first job in the arts was with a little ballet company in the middle of America called the Kansas City Ballet. If you think selling arts in Dallas is hard, try selling ballet in Kansas City in 1985. Particularly, I started the year that they won the World Series. My first set of performances were during their own, their big World Series win. Good luck to me, right? So what did I do? I had to get people excited. And I couldn't do any of this stuff. But I did my own set of stuff, because every organization has what I call assets. Assets are who you know? What's happening in your city? What's special events you can create? What thing you can announce? We all have assets. As my colleague Brett Eaton, who will teach the next session, always says everyone knows someone more famous than they are. And how do we use that? How do we use the connections? So Kansas City Ballet, one thing we did we put on our board the anchor for the local NBC affiliate Live at Five News. So he was the news anchor at the Live at Five News for NBC in Kansas City, Barry, and Barry's board contribution was not financial. He put us on a show four times a year, for three minutes at a time. It's a good thing, three minutes five o'clock news. I would rotate if there was a guest choreographer, or a dancer, or just a director. I'd focus on things I thought that the general public could be excited by, and we had that. Then we found an early morning talk show, Good Morning Kansas City. No one wanted to be on Good Morning Kansas City because you had to get up at 3:30 in the morning to be on it. But I have dogs who got up early and I got up early, so I said I'll do it. I did it three times a year. They gave me 20 minutes at a time, because they were trying to fill the time. Who watched that show was the local business community getting ready for work. So I had an hour a year on television with the business community talking about the Kansas City Ballet and what our plan was, and how we were moving, and how things were growing and changing. That was really great. Your art, your most transformational art is your best institutional marketing. When you do something really astonishing, it gets people to pay attention. I had a great artistic director, his name was Todd Bolander. And Todd was a disciple of George Balanchine. And he recreated a ballet that George Balanchine had made 30 years before and had never been seen since. Dance people from all over, the dance press from all over America descended to Kansas City to watch this work. And this put us at the center of dance of America for an evening. But that amazing for my local constituents, because they never thought anyone around the country cared about my little company. So we did that. We negotiated a debut tour in New York City. We were the first arts organization of Kansas City to ever perform in New York, that was exciting. We created a gala performance, where my company danced, but I brought two dancers from each of big companies, the New York City Ballet, and the San Francisco Ballet and American Ballet Theater and one dancer from Alvin Ailey, and they all came and danced. And my company danced, and it was a big wonderful performance, and everyone is excited. And my company was being seen in the company of these other companies, and that was really important for getting people to think about us differently. And then we did something that any organization can do, and I recommend you all do this. And one of my board members had just done that, he'd bought one of the big old houses and he was redecorating. And I went to him and I said David, do me a favor and don't let anybody in to see the renovation while it's going on, just keep it to yourself. This was a struggle for him because he wanted everyone to see everything, but I said I promise you they'll all see it but just. And then I said, let's do a cocktail party for 40, 50 people, important people of the community that's going to be opening of your house and he was happy to do that. And they wanted to come, because they wanted to see what they would have done with this house, they didn't care about ballet so much. But in the party, we stopped everything in one point and I gave, I read a strategic plan for the organization. I should say that Kansas Ballet had a tagline, the company that can't make payroll, that was our tagline. >> [LAUGH] >> because every weeks we had to call around to everyone saying, can you give me a $100, or $300, $200 to help us make payroll. Our payroll wasn't very big, our dancers made $225 a week. It was not a big payroll, but it's still was money if you don't have it, $1 is a lot if you don't have it. So I knew we couldn't survive that way. So I wrote a plan for how we were going to go from being the company that can't make payroll, to Kansas City's chief cultural export. Because the opera company wasn't going to tour, and the symphony couldn't tour much. We could tour, and we did tour. And so everyone stopped the cocktail party and I gave this presentation for 15 minutes about what we were going to do and all the exciting things that were planned. And I gave everyone who came a copy of the strategic plan. Which talked, warts and all, from what was wrong to how we were going to make it right. Everyone was so impressed by that, that we really had figured things out, and that we had a path that made sense. And that evening changed the history of the Kansas City Ballet. That's something any arts organization can do, and what we did was we paid off the entire deficit of the Kansas CIty Ballet in ten months, the whole historic deficit and It kept growing growing and growing. A few years ago, they built a beautiful ballet building in Kansas City. One of the most beautiful dedicated dance buildings in America is in Kansas City. And then a whole new art city was built. But all of this grew but not because of the Kansas City Ballet, but in large the Kansas City Ballet kept doing better and better and growing and growing. And it started that one evening, but it really started from that whole year that all these activities that got people to say, wow, this company's really exciting. They're going to New York. They're doing this balancing work. They're on television. They have a plan. All this stuff start to add up. That's what good institutional marketing does. And the key is to be really creative. And I believe we have to be just every bit as creative as choreographers and playwrights and anyone else to do the work we do to really be able to say, here's who we are and here's what we're going to do and we're really exciting and so pay attention to us.
