Theater For The Future

We’re gearing up at several of my theater companies for a couple marketing summits, using different strategies for that immense undertaking, but the research involved in the process into other examples of Chicago Theater marketing has got me wondering - why aren’t theaters the best marketers in town?

Marketing is essentially a storytelling excercise, as Lois Kelly describes in her book Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. You’re using the worldview and values that already exist in a potential audience member, and crafting a message that says “seeing this play is a way to express your values, share them, revel in them, and hell, change the world.” (for a concise summary of Lois’ 9 genres of marketing story, check out Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Or cross-reference Lois’ stories with Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots. Ah, it’s great to compartmentalize everything you’ve ever heard into neat little categories.)

Theater is one of the most innovative, powerful, and cohesive storytelling formats out there. It creates shared experiences, unlike printed media; it’s cheaper to produce (and in general less ruled by profit) than film; it’s active and even athletic compared to the disembodied voices of Radio. In theater, you can tell stories with the whole human, for the whole human, and still engage the imagination of an audience.

On our good days, theater artists are some of the best storytellers out there. And Lois Kelly tells us that the only reason people buy anything these days is because they are convinced by a marketing story (she’s of course not the only one). If you get that Nintendo Wii, you will unite the generations and create a community and lasting friendships, complete with slow motion victory dances, and it’s all thanks to the ancient wisdom of polite Japanese businessman. So why can’t theater get a wider audience? Because while we are great at crafting innovative and complex visions in 50-seat black box theaters, we’re not always well equipped to tell a good marketing story - which by necessity needs to be dirt simple and loud.

I think there are three basic hurdles to successful storefront theater marketing. The first issue theaters tend to have is that the idealistic desire for detail and/or innovation in storytelling - which serves the work so well - often also leads self-marketing theaters off track. Let’s assume that you’re putting together a postcard for a show. With all the text and imagery fighting for our attention in any given day, you will be lucky to have 2 seconds to hook someone into hearing your message before their attention span shuts you out, so that 4 paragraph dramaturgical summary of your play on the front of the card probably isn’t going to cut it. Marketing messages can’t ever be complex. However, as with the example of the Wii and most television commercials, just because your message has to be simple doesn’t mean that the box it comes in can’t be detailed and exciting and be filled with all kinds of goodies and emotions. It’s just that the first thing everyone needs to get is a unified, simple message. Two Seconds. Bam.

The second hurdle is usefully segmenting the actual community and marketing to specific populations within that community. Storefront theaters are funny beasts in that despite a prevalent desire to speak to and for a community, they tend to become most successful (though anemically so) with the internal theater industry demographic. That’s often because the theater doesn’t have the time, resources, or statistical ability to understand the day-to-day needs of the community passing by their message. While they may connect with individuals in the community very deeply, they have a harder time understanding the various mindsets of the groups of people walking by their message on the way to work each day. I think theaters also tend to want to bring all people together, and in many ways they can be blind to people who don’t already appreciate theater. Over time, this has created a really unhealthy divide between theaters and general society that many other arts organizations don’t face. This problem is described a bit in Standing Room Only, another book on marketing specifically for performing arts organizations:

Most nonparticipants have consciously or unconsciously eliminated the arts as being of any possible interest or value in their lives. They have drawn a “cultural curtain” and have turned off to anything that is written or said about arts activities…

Nonparticipants harbor many inhibiting images of the arts as relatively austere and effete, effeminate, esoteric, inaccessible, too demanding of study and concentration, arrogant, etc. Coping with these attitudes is not easy, but progress is made when experience shows the contrary or reorients the negative value.

The third hurdle, as always, is resources - money and time. Successful corporate brands can flood the market and streets with tasteful, huge, attention grabbing posters and videos and websites on every street corner. They can hire marketers to do nothing but pound the pavement with their message and get ads, reviews, and blogs to feature their product or message. Storefront theaters, on the other hand, need to step up the creativity to find ways of getting a marketing story out to the world… anyone who’s ever distributed posters and postcards door-to-door knows how difficult this can be. I’m increasingly wondering how effective things like postcards are these days, given that there are much more leveragable outlets for promoting a message. Blogs, MySpace, and Facebook are all recent additions to the more creative ways of mass marketing, and of course assembling a powerful and dedicated board can eventually be a solution to the woes of marketing a show while you’re in preproduction.

There’s a fear that I get when I look at these hurdles in the context of my own theaters… I worry that creating a message that jumps these hurdles will also somehow cheapen the experience of theater at the same time that it makes it more accessible. I think that’s just stigma talking. Marketers, like all humans, sometimes cut corners in their work for less fulfulling clients. But a well crafted message NEVER waters down the product… it’s just a good, well-lit frame for the work itself. And thus, both framing and marketing are arts in themselves, with all the potential success and failure that goes with the territory.

In crafting a branding message, I like to think of the care Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan took in crafting the Voyager Golden Record, an audio compilation sent into space radio broadcasts a-blazing, in the hopes of contacting and sending a message of humankind to alien life. The message was, simply, “This is humanity. This is who we are. Hello.” But the container for that message was incredibly detailed and well thought out - based on the anticipated audience of alien life forms.

As described on the Voyager Spacecraft Website:

Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played.

The spoken greetings begin with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and end with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music.

It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Our audience is always alien to us. Theater folk are excited by that reality. The message we craft to reach them must be both simple and address what we know about them - their fundamental humanity and desire to connect with the people around them. This, I know: If we focus our efforts, theaters can be REALLY good at connecting with other human beings.

Oh, if we only didn’t need money and could focus on art, right?

There’s been a number of creative web fundraising ideas floating around the storefront community - and theaters have been doing a pretty good job copycatting the ones that are easy to use (though it’s still unclear which ones are most financially effective for arts organizations).  There’s those good ol’ web marketplace affiliate programs like CafePress.com or Amazon Associates - where your patrons shop through your site for swag or targeted products or just plain anything - and the e-marketplace gives you a cut.

More recently, major search engines have gotten into the non-profit fundraising game and created programs like GoodSearch.com which donates a portion of its ad revenue to non-profits that send users their way instead of Google. And (perhaps in retaliation?) Google created Google Grants, which sort of works like free AdWords for non-profits and increases exposure. 

There’s never a truly free ride, of course. Affiliate programs are partially there for the benefit of the affiliate, but there’s a much bigger profit to be had in having minions convert their (high-value disposable-income-weilding) patrons into big, giant streams of fresh, flaming consumerism. As I described in Part I, these programs only generate reasonable sums of money for the affiliate when you start amassing a great big critical mass of users on your own, and before that happens, it’s just a trickle.  

But, Chicago Storefront Theaters don’t have a lot of resources to chase that money, so they participate in these programs on a small scale because they require very little effort beyond the initial setup. A little easy money is better than staring into the void of funding a show on the ensemble’s collective credit cards.

About five months ago, Chicago businessman (and actor) Steve Misetic decided to throw his hat into this ring.  Like most Chicago Theater cheerleaders, Steve was frustrated with the way that Chicago Arts Organizations often have to fight with the rest of the country for the attention of our local big businesses. He noticed that theater companies were throwing their patrons’ money to e-commerce companies in California, while local businesses spend ad money with national firms, and both seemed the poorer for it. The result of this frustration - his brainchild SaveChicago.org (which launches this Friday) - was modeled on the success of other affiliate programs and the success of locally powered sites like Craigslist and Angie’s List.  The basic idea, in his words:  

SaveChicago.org is the first online marketplace where local merchants and local consumers are able to find each other on the Internet.

SaveChicago.org mobilizes the audiences of non-profit organizations into a unified consumer demographic as members of SaveChicago.org.

Local merchants then pay to reach this first ever critical mass of local consumers on the internet.
SaveChicago.org then gives 50% of the money these merchants spend back to the non-profit groups who’ve helped us mobilize these consumers.

SaveChicago.org keeps local advertising dollars local and sustainable by re-injecting the money back into our local economy via non-profit organizations, instead of letting the money escape into Silicon Valley.

The website we have built is a completely state-of-the-art e-commerce site that basically does to local advertising what Ebay did to garage sales. We’re putting local businesses together with local consumers and splitting the money with non-profit organizations. No one has figured out how to do local advertising on the internet until now.

If this sounds at all convoluted, it’s because Steve is trying to bring together three very divergent groups together with a common marketing strategy - local merchants, local shoppers, and at this point, even the non-profits that the site is designed to support. His mission, other than the glory of saving chicago theater and culture forever, is to generate those deliciously sustainable and work-free revenue streams for non-profits on a local level - hopefully to the levels they require to turn off the fundraising (aka “begging”) bullhorn and regain some long-forgotten sense of dignity. He’s also learning the PR and marketing and e-commerce games as he goes (with professional PR support and a killer web developer), and trying to bring together two e-commerce models that haven’t worked together thus far - local savings sites like craigslist and national affiliate programs like Google AdWords - with the goal of creating a revenue loop that feeds back on itself and grows the local ad money pie for the benefit of organizations that can do some good with it.

All this wrangling, courting, and dreaming big has I think created a very interesting situation on the eve of SaveChicago’s launch - at least from my vantage point outside the down-and-dirty planning - and there’s a couple big challenges ahead for the site in its infancy. The first hurdle is to demonstrate a clear need in the community - not a need to support the arts, but a need for shoppers to find deals and for merchants to find those shoppers. Without this incentive, the whole growth mechanism falls apart - Google and craigslist built that kind of national name recognition after years of providing free, innovative services that were more convenient than the phone book and classified ads, respectively. In his initial planning, Steve envisioned companies like Starbucks spending their advertising dollars on his site to reach local shoppers. Put that way, there’s no reason for Starbucks to buy in to website marketing when they’re already reaching plenty of customers right on the street. To generate that need, Steve has created an Angie’s List-esque membership program for shoppers and promised deep discounts from member merchants that can’t be found elsewhere to those members. And Neo-Futurist and SaveChicago.org groupie Mary Fons points out, the merchants that will be the biggest beneficiaries of a program like this will likely be that mom-and-pop cafe down the street that need to get you to patronize them instead of Starbucks.

The second hurdle to make a system like this work is one that papa Google and uncle Craigslist actually created pretty organically, over time - a critical mass of market share. For merchants to want to give these secret, targeted discounts, they need to know that the people using SaveChicago.org will grow their businesses. That kind of patronage doesn’t grow overnight, which creates a third hurdle: To help grow the patron base, Steve will be leaning on the member arts organizations to help promote the site and drive traffic, patrons, and merchants his way, at least until the ad revenue is self-sustaining.

And the biggest hurdle of all? Convincing all three groups that SaveChicago is a brand worthy of their trust. Chicago Theaters are actually quite conservatively-minded businesses for the most part… their risk tends to be small (though proportionally huge to their income), and they tend to feed their creativity into the product, but not so much the actual making of money. The reactions from other industry types that I talked with to Steve’s initial volley of e-mails promoting the site were skeptical at best, and Steve’s language (which was still being retooled for branding and positioning, and of course betrayed his intense personal excitement) didn’t always help:

Subject: SaveChicago.org to make fund-raising obsolete: Launching November 23rd

Could you imagine getting checks in 2011 from a Fund-raising drive completed in 2008?
Take 5 minutes to register your non-profit with SaveChicago.org and earn recurring income from a one-time fund-raising effort.
no cost - no obligation
Launching on November 23rd, 2007

Savechicago.org is the first company in history to attempt to consolidate the supporters of non-profit organizations in order to create the “critical mass” needed to generate real advertising dollars. We want non-profits to stop begging local businesses for the 5% of their ad budget they feel obliged to donate to charity every year. We’ll get you access to the other 95%.

When the spam filters didn’t whisk away his audience, phrasings like “No cost - no obligation” sparked interest but didn’t inspire confidence, despite his best intentions. Since then, Steve has hired a PR rep and refined and focused his language a bit, which will make his merchant patrons a lot happier and his non-profit beneficiaries a lot more trusting. The first checks will also help to change that tune as well. Smirk.

So what does Steve have going for him? Some folks are already way on board, with a non-profit member list that already includes several high schools, hospitals and churches, hotshot neighborhood development organizations like Rogers Park’s DevCorp North, and a few representatives of the theater scene, including Barrel of Monkeys, Rivendell, The Artistic Home, and Raven, which has never shied away from closer neighborhood involvement. Steve’s also aware of what he’s up against. Which always helps.

Plus? I think his idea is truly innovative and creative. If he can manage to implement it, he will at the very least create a locally-based version of an AdWords-like system, even if that doesn’t immediately translate into flowing rivers of cash for his affiliates. That “local” part of the business model is huge - if you’ve ever bought or sold anything through craigslist, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a whole human, dare I say theatrical, element to the transaction because at some point you’re not just exchanging money and goods, you’re coming into contact with a stranger. The time I sold my old iPod to a craigslister was, while brief, an incredibly exciting day for both of us. I used the cash to upgrade to a video model, and I left most of my music on the old one. And I have A LOT of music, so the buyer pretty much jumped up and down at the deal he got. That kind of excitement can only happen on a local level.

There’s a spark of something here - local cooperation, a spirit of being neighbors - that I think needs to continue even if Steve’s web experiment doesn’t pan out. Steve is also going to need to work his butt off to build that trust and enlist help. I know I moved to Chicago because of idealism like that, and I applaud Steve for thinking really big, and taking the big risk. I think there’s a potential renaissance out there for Chicago Theater and interdisciplinary arts, but it will take a big spark and plenty of fuel - and that means we need to build that fire together and share the wealth.

The first check I got from Google AdWords was more than a little intoxicating.

It had been a hard financial month. I had just gotten married and settled down in our six month old condo (with its six month old mortgage), and I was off from my regular gig for two months. It was our first really lean month in a while, our savings were being tested, and while my life was leading me to dream about the future and children and picket fences, my numerous “volunteer” theater projects were starting to look like the biggest hurdle on that road.

One of those volunteer projects was backstagejobs.com, which Patrick Hudson had been doing out of the goodness of his heart for nigh on ten years. And when I say “doing,” I mean manually entering every contact, job, and spelling error on the site - and the site was powering human resources for a national storefront theater movement. It all funnelled through his poor Pentium II laptop, and his full-to-overflowing inbox. Like many others, I got I think my first three jobs out of college from the site, basically launching my career, and the opportunity to relieve this Atlas of the theatrical world though an automated redesign was reward enough.

But then, after the redesign was working and Patrick started blinking his eyes, wondering what to do with his time, he did what he could to compensate me - he handed me over two months of his google AdWords revenue.

And in that moment, I believed money really could grow on trees. It wasn’t an outrageous amount of money, but it made the difference in that month’s mortgage payment. And all this from a completely free site, that doesn’t charge either the poor starving artists looking for jobs or often the equally starving theater companies looking to hire them. Where the hell was all this money coming from? Who was advertising to this market that almost by definition didn’t have disposable income?

It turns out, the economy really can evolve. The market is rewarding companies with innovative revenue streams like Google. The model is basically: Provide a free service, and then get a large chunk of a potentially national or international market share with that free service, and then make your living through selling ad revenue for the sheer number of people just LOOKING at your site. In Patrick’s case, it’s a small compensation for the number of hours he’s already logged building and maintaining the site, but at the same time it’s a useful way to fund his child’s education.

Before we proceed, do me a favor: I don’t have the readership to justify the effort to make this blog a podcast, but I don’t want to deprive you, the reader, of the full storytelling experience here. So head on over to Amazon and order Joni Mitchell’s For Free or just play it if you’ve got it. Thanks. Life’s too short to not enjoy it.

The first time the economy shifted in such a basic way for American theater was the advent of film. (and I should warn, now that you have this great dramatic underscore rolling: what I am about to say probably has a great deal of ‘truthiness’ to it, but it’s all theory and not so much fact) At the time, there was a premium on the most skilled (read=famous) talent, and people would come far and wide and lavish extravagances on such a talent, and that talent would also tour around to ease the burden a bit, so you’d go to Des Moines instead of having to hoof it to New York. You could make such a name for yourself if you were a big personality, had a clear voice, and could fill the stage with your presence. That economic reality nurtured a style of acting that we now refer to as “Overacting.”

Then, suddenly, performances could be recorded, and seen in every city in the nation. Better yet, you could get up close and personal to the talent. Suddenly, the money changed directions - actors still needed presence, but they needed to be sympathetic and human-sized as opposed to larger and life. And, with expanding markets, projects that were populist and frankly lowest common denominator would suddenly have a great priority to the new studios - if you could bring a film to every market in the country, it better well APPEAL to every market in the country. Over time, the old ways get stigmatized and financially anemic, and the new ways get all that intoxicating money, fame, and - given enough market share - power. Meaning we have a lot of populist entertainment these days, and media conglomerates running way more of the country than they should, because they can literally control access to what people hear, see and read.

But there’s hope yet. Have you noticed how the content peddled by the movie industry has started to suck - repetitively - lately? Have you noticed how recent FCC changes show that cable companies are beginning to scramble for your attention?

Hear about that Writer’s strike?

Well lo and behold - web-based media is changing the rules again, in a big way. Just one tiny reflection of this is how DVD sales and free web access to TV shows has created a a richer and more focused viewing experience than cable and may have actually improved TV serials content as compared with film content. (TV allows for more character development than film due to running time limitations, so it follows that TV can nurture more complete, human characters than film - if the producers get the hell out of the way of the desires of the audience and writers.)

Equally promising - You Tube has created an outlet for user-targeted content which has created some really exciting projects that would never have gotten past the producers in the old days. And those projects are now being funded piecemeal directly by the users who want to see them. The audience’s energy and money is actually fueling the performer’s ability to perform their content.

Sound familiar? Audience Interacting with Performer… hmmm… The secret to this new model is volume, which is the big hurdle for theaters, since each show has a finite number of physical seats and in most cases a single physical location. But let’s take another look at this web theater idea. Throughout this admittedly biased little diorama of history, one thing has remained constant: The public will congregate towards what they want to see and hear. Since most of that pesky attention and money was removed from the equation of theater business back at the turn of the century, Theater has always been a haven for artists and audience looking to drive at deeper human truth and experiment/experience a bit more with the craft of entertainment than mass-market profit-driven companies would ever tolerate. They played their clarinets for free on the sidewalks, and if you happened to catch them, you experienced some breath-halting live-changing moments, that were then gone forever.

People love to have those cathartic moments. I could argue that cathartic experiences are what we want to buy when we see a movie or even when we get that double latte instead of the simple cup of joe. Especially in bubble-gum terror-scared times like these, we trust those moments and use them to recenter our priorities. Theatrical truth and human connection are finally valuable again. It’s what people want, but finding it is difficult, because we’ve become more compartmentalized. People literally are addicted to their iPods and computers, trolling the internet for a blog post or a video that will give them that sensation of human connection. To not create performances for them simply because they’re not looking in the place you’re going to be performing just seems silly.

I also think people are fundamentally smart. They don’t trust the content that is created simply for profit’s sake. They don’t really believe that they can make $20,000 in a month without doing something fundamentally immoral and/or dangerous. They want to interact and create, and theater and the web are far better at allowing that interactivity than film and TV can be on their own. Reality TV? Come on. That’s a silly substitute, but it was the best TV could come up with. How sad is that? People trust people who do things out of love, and they can smell if you’re doing something just for the money. If you see a street musician who’s damn good, you’ll stay and maybe take his card, and download his mp3s from his website, because you know he’ll keep playing even if you were to just walk by.

This new web-based financial model rewards the hard-working and clever street performers of the world. You can now travel the world, dance like a fool, and get paid for it, as long as you do it all the way. In the final analysis, this system is harder for big conglomerates to control arbitrarily for profit and allows for individual tastes and aesthetics to flourish in ways that weren’t possible before. Markets aren’t limited by physical location anymore, they’re delimited by personal interests, so they tend to reward individual and local flavors over nation-wide flavors-of-the-month. Web attention and traffic are also ephemeral, and they reward interconnectedness, which according to the Google Page Rank Documentation is ultimately a factor of trust, volume, and quality.

There’s been a few first gasps of theaters and theater organizations trying to tap new media market business plans, and in part II I’ll outline a little bit of the strategy behind them, and how they may be able to succeed - or crash and burn. Till then, thanks for funding my pipe dream by purchasing wonderful music from my site. Tee hee!

About a year ago, I started getting addicted to The Show by ZeFrank, a hilarious video podcast that served as the front end for a growing online community that built collaborative art projects such as the Earth Sandwich and Craft the Ugliest MySpace Page.

The Remixes for Ray struck me as a project that had big huge possibilities for theater. The story of Ray is pretty simple… Some guy recorded a short clip of a song (with the lyrics “I’m about to whip somebody’s ass”) and sent it to his daughter to cheer her up at work. He probably sent it to a few too many recipients, and suddenly the clip landed on YouTube. In this episode, Ze and his league of loyal viewers find this clip, and generate buzz to create not only musical remixes of the the little ditty, but a pretty kickass collaboratively-built video as well.

THEN… they find the original Ray, somehow, (don’t ask me… they only had his first name and that he was somewhere in North America) and PRESENT the remixes and video too him. Lives were changed forever, and there was much rejoicing.

All these projects are theater… they get the audience involved in the action, they have an arc of thought to build to the payoff of presentation. They often feel more like theater than sitting in a chair for two hours and listening to cell phone vibrations and crinkling cellophane.

Ze dubs his loyal followers “sports racers” and the secret community of really kickass creative and life-loving folk that he wants to be a part of “The League of Awesomeness.” It’s a little Colbert Report in its sheer playful audacity. I look at our community of storefront theaters, and its League… and I feel like there’s a missed opportunity for audacious cooperation and co-inspiration there. Hot Tix and Theater Thursdays are great, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t exactly get the groundlings jumping.

As much as I’m jealous of their catapult to success, this is where I feel the House deserves their media cred. Walking in to their theater, you feel like you’ve been invited into a secret society. High Jacobean Drama this is not - they’ve got a lot of the flash, and I wish they were more disciplined storytellers (and more conscientious community builders - though they certainly have enough on their plate), but I will never fault them for not knowing how to create a little buzz of excitement and anticipation about seeing some theater. Secret Order of the Magic Pearl indeed. (I feel manipulated, and (yes, I love Heroes.))

People roll their eyes when I say maybe there’s a way to create an online community or collaboration network for these kind of audience-energizing projects and works… when I say crap like that, I don’t mean more myspace, facebook, blogosphere self-promotion. The weariness generated by the theater community’s blind and desperate self-promotion is a real problem, and a topic for another time. I’m talking about the things that Ze did - for free - in his year of the show.

Take a look through his archives of the show, you won’t be disappointed. Dream More, Work Less, Whip Somebody’s Ass.

Lord knows I don’t need another project on the ol’ plate.

But I’m becoming obsessed with how I do the same research, make the same explanations, find the same solution, and begin the same projects with each of my theater companies. I’ve found conversations begun in one theater company being echoed in another. I wonder why theater companies don’t talk to each other more.

I’m beginning to see a great collective wealth of thought about storefront theater infrastructure, and great and achievable possibilities for inter-company collaboration and workload sharing. I am working on experimental collaboration techniques that both excite and scare the bejeezus out of me. These techniques and tools may help to legitimize and streamline an industry that is largely assumed to be inviable and unprofitable and a great waste of time. And in the same breath they may serve to homogenize the same industry, as diverse as each individual that works in it.

The main problem I deal with on a day to day basis is theater infrastructure - and lack thereof. Theaters are often crippled with a lack of money and a lack of time. This is a problem that I think can be solved.

For Example.

In this past week, I’ve been doing a lot of work with a busy theater company - real movers and shakers they - who manage their collective projects through email. Everything - Marketing strategies, Production Schedules, Casting Calls, Box Office Duties, all over email - often in the SAME emails. Epic, multi-page, carefully outlined emails.

Now some of you may have just squirmed, and there’s a reason - email is an ephemeral, inconstant, disorganized tidal wave of a web technology. It confuses and babelfies as it tries to spread information. Some people don’t read their email, some people reply to all when they should focus their stream of consciousness, and some people don’t realize that THEY’RE YELLING IF THEY WRITE IN ALL CAPS. I don’ t mean to harp on you if you’re one of those people, but the fact of the matter is, email and web technologies have changed the way that we work and communicate. As a country, very nearly as a species. That’s all happened in the last ten years, so like any evolutionary step, there’s a period of adjustment that gets pretty messy. Welcome to the era of messy.

Many alternatives to the email strategy of project management have popped up in the last few years - from online group forums like phpBB to wikis. These are tools that can organize projects a bit more logically, and they also save old information and posts. They’re not perfect, require a very little bit of adjustment, but they’re hand over fist better at managing multi-step projects than email is.

That’s the kind of stuff I want to talk about here… The systematic inefficiencies that just pop up and can end up squandering a theater company’s resources, what can be done differently, and what could be created to make everyone’s life a bit easier.

Because we’re in the business of changing people’s lives. That’s something worth working for.