Clay Christensen: Hi, this is Clay Christensen, and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call The Disruptive Voice. In this podcast we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at HBS, "Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise". In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them. And I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you'd like to hear more about, or if you'd like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the School.

Katie Zandbergen: Hello, and welcome to The Disruptive Voice. My name is Katie Zandbergen, and I'm the community manager at the Harvard Business School Forum for Growth and Innovation, where our work is inspired by the teachings and life of the late Clayton Christensen.

As long time, listeners of this podcast will know we are constantly delighted by the various ways in which Clay's theories have had an impact on the world. In past episodes, we've talked with guests, about the influence of Clay's work in healthcare, education, poverty, religion, micro mobility, and the environment to site just a few examples.

Today, we turn our attention to the arts in all its many forms. It's my pleasure to welcome friend-of-the-Forum, Pope Ward, to The Disruptive Voice. Pope is the Chief Research Officer at an organization called the Advisory Board for the Arts. Which launched in July of 2019 and is the first global company to provide strategic advisory services dedicated to the leaders of arts organizations worldwide.

Last October Pope began work on a jobs-to-be-done based research project, to delve deeper into questions surrounding why people hire the arts. That play they went to see; the opera, the ballet, that trip to the museum or to the theater. Why did they hire those experiences of the arts? What progress were they trying to make? With this research question in mind, Pope and his colleague, Karen Freeman, conducted 40 jobs interviews over the course of many months.

Then the coronavirus reared its ugly head and the Advisory Board for the Arts pivoted to helping arts organizations weather the ongoing storm that is COVID-19. They also conducted an additional 20 jobs interviews after the start of the pandemic. And it will be interesting for us to reflect on and discuss whether and how people's jobs have changed or taken on added significance over the last few months.

That is to say, in today's episode, we'll consider how arts organizations are using jobs theory to better connect with their audiences. And how those lessons are more crucial than ever. Now that many in the arts industry are struggling in the midst of this pandemic. Pope, welcome to the disruptive voice.

Pope Ward: Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.

Katie Zandbergen: To begin, can you tell us a bit about your own background and how you came to be the chief research officer at the Advisory Boards for the Arts? And also more about what the organization has set out to accomplish?

Pope Ward: Sure. I worked for two decades at a company called the Corporate Executive Board, which created memberships for executives who all have the same job, so CFOs or CIOs or CMOs, and the members would shape our agenda.

And then we would use quantitative tools and best practices research in order to solve their shared entrenched problems. I left there were about a decade ago and after a stint at the opposite management and budget, I've worked in product roles in startups ever since. And it's kind of cool now to be in an arts startup.

Some old colleagues reached out and said that they were launching this membership model in the arts. And I was excited by that mission. And also by the application of the membership model in this space, particularly when the path ahead is uncertain, that pooled learning model, really outperforms expert based consulting models.

When we launched, we couldn't have known just how uncertain the environment was going to be for arts organizations. But we've certainly found out... we now have about 50 the members across multiple countries, all art genres, anybody from Carnegie Hall to Melbourne Symphony, to the Tiesen Museum in Madrid to Austin Opera, you name it.

And so collectively our members shape our research agenda. And then we work on their behalf. And so until the pandemic, we were focused on attracting new loyal audiences to the arts, which is what led us to the jobs work that you described.

Katie Zandbergen:

So the Advisory Board for the Arts was launched last summer. And by October you had begun a research project in which jobs theory was an important component.

For listeners who may not be familiar with the theory of jobs-to-be-done, which was co-developed by Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta, it's designed to uncover the progress that people in specific circumstances are trying to make, which then causes them to hire a certain product or service. Jobs research is not focused on the analysis of huge data sets or demographic data or customer attributes, but rather centers on gaining insights from in depth interviews with a relatively small number people who've had a direct experience with a given product or service.

Pope, can you tell us about your introduction to job's theory and why you chose jobs as an important component of your research at the Advisory Board?

Pope Ward:

Sure. You know, Bob Moesta came to my old company back in 2009 and he did some work for us. And so I had a little bit of exposure concept, but about five years ago, I was visiting HBS and Bob very kindly offered to spend a day with me getting the really deep on the concept.

At the time I was working on social determinants of care in the healthcare space and I wanted to apply as methods in that environment. So when I came to this new role at the Advisory Board for the Arts, the members had asked us to help them attract new loyal audiences. For those of you who don't know, this has been a real problem for years, subscription rates have been going down in the arts sometimes by as much as 10% a year for many organizations.

And so they wanted audiences that would. Not just come, but also stick around. They didn't want bounce off new customers. And so often that meant they were trying to attract younger audiences or audiences that more closely reflected the diversity of their communities. But no one comes to a show because they're in their mid thirties or because they're Hispanic.

They have some reason that they want to come and. In cases where arts organizations were actually able to attract them, to get them to come to one thing, say with special programming, like for example, there's a really popular hip hop Nutcracker near me, outside of DC. Those audiences are unlikely to come back to the core programming because the experience isn't built for them, many people in leadership roles at arts organizations are artists themselves, or at least they've grown up with the arts. And as a result, they believe that everybody wants the same thing from a performance that they do, which is in some form, you know, seeing the art performed at its highest level and they tune the experience that they create and deliver to appeal to that one motivation.

But In reality, people may want to come to a performance to connect with their friends around a mutually palatable activity. Or they may want to send a message to others that they support a vibrant cultural community, or just try something new. So, you know, we had this hypothesis that people are trying to accomplish all kinds of jobs through the arts and that if our members could find one or two that were in line with their mission and didn't conflict with the needs of their current audience. Then they could build experiences for them. That would be much more likely to encourage longterm loyalty. So if that hypothesis is true, then there's this huge opportunity to expand audiences, to reach people who might not otherwise engage with the arts. So we decided to launch the jobs research to see if that was true.

Katie Zandbergen: In my own experience of conducting jobs, research, uncovering pushes, pulls anxieties and habits of the present where the forces of progress that we focused on throughout the interview process, which centered on the progress that someone was trying to make in a specific circumstance. It's all about trying to determine the social, emotional, and functional aspects of a person's job to be done.

Can you tell our listeners about your experience of carrying out jobs research and also crucially? What did you discover?

Pope Ward:

We started off. This was, I guess, last fall conducting about 40 jobs interviews with people who had attended some arts performance. So this was in late 20, 19 before the pandemic, we began by asking them to walk through their purchase.

You know, what were their circumstances? What was the context? Did they attend on their own or would it. Family member, some other friend, did they pay for someone else's ticket? Also contextual factors, you know, did they donate to the organization as well? What other organizations did they subscribe to? We asked them about substitutes, importantly, you know, so if they hadn't purchased an arts ticket in that moment, what might they have done?

That question of substitutes is really illuminating because you can really see when people are trying to accomplish different things based on what they would do instead. So there was one person who said that if they weren't going to go to this arts performance, they would have attended a museum lecture.

That seems like a pretty close fit. Right? But somebody else said that they would work at a dog shelter and another said, they'd stay home and read a book. Those people were all trying to accomplish very different things. They had different jobs. And you could really tell that when you ask them what they would do instead.

We categorize jobs based on their distance from the state. So what I mean by that is with somebody really interested in that musical or that theater production or that opera, the actual artists up on stage. Were they more interested in something else? Some of the people that we talked to were really interested in a community with a vibrant cultural scene.

And so that was more important than the actual production that was occurring. Others were pretty far away, you know, they wanted to create some kind of shared tradition. Perhaps with their family or some common memory, and that could have been in the arts or it could have been something else. And then there were people that were even further away from the arts and they wanted a chance to dress up for the evening or "be seen" -- that kind of thing.

So after these dozens of interviews, we came up with probably 20 or 25 jobs. So not all are worth organizing around of course, but in all, that's the number of jobs we found.

Katie Zandbergen: So through your interviews, you unearthed the myriad of different jobs. How did you determine which jobs were in fact worth organizing around and what do you think the implications of these findings are for leaders running arts organizations?

Pope Ward: The most important takeaway is that while people have lots of different jobs that they're trying to get done through the arts, most organizations, de facto are focusing on just that one that I mentioned, which is "seeing arts performed at the highest level". It's not to say that people with other jobs can accomplish them with an arts ticket.

It just means that they're not getting much help from arts organizations. So we talked to this one guy who was on the board of a musical group. And he would always invite several people to join him at concerts. He regarded as an obligation to kind of fill the hall and before each he would do a bunch of research online and then snip out bits from YouTube or Wikipedia.

It would be a question like "how would Mozart and Beethoven composed differently because one was performing in palace halls and the other was performing in performance halls?" I think what Malcolm Gladwell would say, right. In order to get someone excited about a performance, it's pretty cool. Right? Think how much more of those friends probably got out of the performances they went to with his help.

But it was also dozens of hours of research on his own dime. How many people would come to performances if somebody did that work for them, right? The push pull here that you were talking about at the beginning, there's a huge opportunity on the table if arts organizations can identify jobs that they want to help people accomplish and consistently deliver experiences that help them do that.

After our initial jobs interviews, we moved to a quantitative analysis of motivations for arts attendees so we could help arts leaders understand how motivations cluster and how many people are likely to be motivated by the same thing.

Katie Zandbergen:

Now, the Advisory Board for the Arts promotes itself as an organization that aspires to radically transform how arts organizations manage their toughest problems and biggest opportunities. By creating an unprecedented worldwide shared learning network for the Arts. Given this, I'd like to turn the conversation to the incredibly tough challenge of operating arts organizations in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I imagine that over the last few months, a number yeah of new jobs have emerged from those hoping to engage with the arts. You conducted around 20 additional interviews after the pandemic began.

Have you found it to be the case that additional jobs are emerging or that former jobs are taking on new urgency. And what are your thoughts on steps that arts organizations can take to stay relevant in the era of the coronavirus?

Pope Ward: Thanks for asking. That's an important question. And the simple answer is yes, the world is really different today than it was six months ago, particularly for arts and culture organizations. They were the first to close those and they will almost surely be the last to reopen.

So everybody is shuttered productions. Artists are out of work. There's another round of layoffs coming shortly this month. But almost every arts organization, despite all that has decided to keep some people on staff in order to keep their connection to the world to keep delivering value.

So the question on the table is how can they do that best? As you said, we decided to do 20 more interviews across the past two months in order to see how jobs were changing in priority. And we identified jobs and evaluated them based on how their importance had grown during the pandemic and on how much individuals were looking to arts organizations specifically to help to make progress against those jobs.

There was one that jumped out. Out at me anyway, that was really surprising and it was around kids. So you've got all these parents who are at home, trying to get work done with no support to handle their kids. They need a break and they're looking for some way to engage their children in a way that they don't have to feel terrible about.

You know, they don't want to plug them into Power Rangers. That job has skyrocketed in importance, as you might imagine.

Katie Zandbergen: Yeah. I can relate to that one.

Pope Ward: Yeah. You may have taken part of this, the Kennedy center here in Washington knocked this job out of the park early on Mo Willems is a famous children's right author and happens to be the Kennedy center artist in residence this year.

So he called the head of the Kennedy Center within 24 hours of the closure. And. Told her that over the weekend, he wanted to design an engagement program for kids. And so that Monday he launched Lunch Doodles, which was intended to seriously teach kids how to draw, but in a really fun way. So it's wholesome, it's enriching, it's an hour of solace for these parents and lots of organizations have now stepped into that space. Museums are offering kids at home activities and virtual tours. There's Harry Potter at home. There's EduHam at home. You must have seen these online puppet deers drawing with Disney, all kinds of activities. The interesting thing about that is that people remember you, if you help their kids. And so there's a lesson for us there.

There's another emerging job that we thought interesting, which is helped me feel as though I spent my quarantine well. And so people are saying, you know, the end of this, since I've had this time to myself, I want to learn a new instrument or learn to paint or write poetry or whatever it might be. Some jobs that arts organizations use to serve really well, they may be just as important now, but audiences are not really relying on arts organizations the way they used to to make progress. For example, there was this one woman who was a super avid ballet fan and she went to, you know, 30 or more performances a year.

And if you asked her what her job was normally for those performances, she would say, I want to have an immersive experience. Some people would call this flow. You may have heard that term. She said, I want to leave the theater completely spent, but in quarantine, She was watching almost no ballet. She couldn't achieve the flow she was looking for on the small screen. It was too disruptive. So instead she'd taken up drawing and she said she could achieve that full sensory immersion the way she wanted to focus if she was doing that activity. But not if she was doing that traditional ballet activity that she had loved before.

Katie Zandbergen: So in this particular context, are there opportunities that really jumped out at you?

Pope Ward: There was one really big one and we've organized set of research around it. In addition to our own interviews, we worked with a company called Slover Lynette and another called LaPlaca Cohen to execute a large survey of what audiences are missing right now.

And the punchline of that is that they are missing connection, maybe connection to friends or family, to people with similar interests. It might be connection to some larger shared purpose, and they're not just missing it. They are explicitly giving arts organizations permission to provide it. But the weird thing is that they're not getting it from arts organizations right now.

I'd be happy to share that research with anyone I'll share a link with you after. So some organizations are stepping in to provide that connection and really fun ways. I ran a webinar this morning that included a gentleman named Gil Cates. Who's the executive director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

They’ve launched this really cool zoom performance. It's called The Present. So 25 people. can sign up for each show. There are eight shows a week. It's run by a magician who is amazing. And he, over the course of this zoom session shares the story of his own childhood quarantine while performing magic tricks for this crowd of 25 people.

And it's highly interactive. Everybody takes part in at least one bit. And what's more every participant a package that's sent to their house that they're instructed not to open until that show begins. And so there are all these multiple levels of connection there. People tactically doing things at the same time, the magician is calling people by name.

He's asking them, uh, you know, don't show me your card, that kind of thing. And so everyone feels involved as though they were there. Some people are taking part with family members all around the country. Sometimes teams work teams will just buy out the entire show and they'll do it as a group. And, you know, this is music to any arts organizations ears right now. They're sold out through October. How many people can say that about anything right now? So there's clearly an unmet need there that they're tapping into, but you know, that's full bore connection, but it's not the only way to connect. Lots of people are doing watch parties right now that are increasingly popular.

The arena stage here in my backyard in DC has commissioned several young artists. To document their lives in quarantine and they're hosting watch parties and discussions around those documentaries. There are other groups that are doing work around Black Lives Matter and the social unrest that we're in the midst of right now.

So jobs may be different, but this theme of peer-to-peer connectivity, it's really powerful right now. And we've been driving arts and culture organizations to embrace it.

Katie Zandbergen: Can you talk about some of the challenges that you've seen in terms of arts organizations, trying to serve these jobs?

Pope Ward: Sure. There are real barriers to consuming arts and culture content right now. The biggest is probably the computer in all of our interviews. I can't think of one person who actually was consuming arts content on a large TV. You know, our communications to them or arts organizations' communications to them are coming over the computer. And so that's where they watch. And if we want them to do it some other way, we're not making it easy.

We're not giving them instructions. We're not telling them how this is what I was talking about earlier, where we're shifting all the burden for doing the work to them. And even worse. Some people associate computers with their workday. So right when we'd like them to be opening them up in order to watch our stuffs, they're closing them down, literally to draw a line between their work and pleasure. And instead they're doing their entertainment on Netflix. Arts organizations that are focused primarily on streaming the stage. And there's lots of don't focus enough about the content, which audiences are engaging right now.

You're not gonna get the same thing out of La bohème if it's on a 13 inch computer with Timmy tugging at your sleeve, right? The whole point of an evening at the opera was to get away from all those distractions. And so it's hard to do that right now. We believe that you've got to rethink your content and the overall experience in terms of the context that the audience is experiencing right now.

And if we do, we're likely to build experience that will extend beyond the pandemic, as well as a mindset for thinking about the whole experience, not just the content or the programming that we create. And I think that's going to be the most valuable legacy of this pandemic for arts organizations. If they're willing to embrace it.

Katie Zandbergen: And how do you think arts organizations can address this particular challenge generally referred to as zoom fatigue?

Pope Ward: First of all, blessed zoom, right? You know, we may all be experiencing zoom fatigue, but that's only because we've relied on it so much across the past six months five years ago, we would have been having a much more isolated experience in quarantine.

I think one key to avoid that fatigue is to focus on activities. Sometime go to Airbnb. They have replaced their completely collapsed rentals business with online experiences. So you could get cooking class or something like that on Airbnb right now. And when you're immersed, In that activity and, you know, you're chopping vegetables in the real world while you're watching other people and you're interacting and you're getting advice on technique.

The fact that you're in zoom recedes to the background, it kind of gets back to the flow that that person who was the ballet junkie was talking about. And by the way, if you can build in a tactical element, the better, you know, so I was talking about opening the magicians package at the Geffen Playhouse.

There's another one that comes to mind. If you want to see a really good connective experience, that doesn't feel like a long exhausting zoom call, Google Tsuru Rising: T S U R U. That is normally a live festival of Japanese cultural solidarity and remembrance of internment camps and World War II. This year, they were forced to put it online and they did this amazing job of mixing up modalities, assigning fun pre-work and sewing together this story from end to end based on homework that they gave participants and submissions that they made. So importantly, like Airbnb or Geffen Playhouse, there was this tactile element involved participants made origami cranes. And that happens to be an important symbol related to healing in Japanese culture.

And then they literally sent them all in and they hung them collectively to emphasize that connection. So it's possible to accomplish these connective experiences without popping a zoom gasket. And if you can do it, you will be able to contribute to the community's mental health and resilience in the wake of disruption.

Katie Zandbergen: Speaking of resiliency, the Advisory Boards for the Arts has recently launched what you call the arts resilience center on your website. It's written at the Advisory Boards for the Arts. We are closely monitoring the COVID-19 outbreak and its impact on arts organizations. Our top priority is supporting the arts community through this rapidly evolving situation. While we normally reserve our research and advisory services for members given the magnitude of the current crisis. We are making the center available well to all arts organizations, which is really cool. The arts resilience center consists of three parts. There's live webinars. There's the arts resilience, news, and resources. And there's an audience engagement resource center.

Can you tell us a bit more about the steps being taken at the Advisory Board for the Arts to help arts organizations to meet COVID-19 related challenges? And also in establishing the arts resilience center, is it safe to say that you were addressing arts organizations leaders' job of "help my organization to not only survive, but to thrive during this crisis?"

Pope Ward: Thanks for mentioning the arts resilience center. It is open to any when, so if you go to our website, you can find it and it is purposefully public, and you're exactly right with your characterization about what job we're trying to help people get done. It's certainly true that. Our member priorities changed overnight.

And the audience research that I outlined at the top of the hour matters a lot less when you don't have audiences -- in person audiences anyway. So we're going to hold that research until it's more relevant to our members in the meantime. Over a weekend in March, we completely shifted our research agenda to focus on this question.

How can we -- being arts and culture organizations -- ensure that the decisions and actions that we take during closure put us in the top decile of organizations coming out of closure and five years from now? So that's the question that we've been trying to answer. For them for two months, we created a three-part meeting series that focused on developing a clear strategy statement and designing digital experiences that are capable of creating real meaning for audiences now. Not just a reminder of how great it will be when they can get back to their venues.

And since then we've been building workshops and other tools to help individual members apply our findings directly in their organizations. We're also organizing peer groups so that CEOs across genres can work through solutions to challenges with others in similar roles, but who are outside their regular circle.

We want them to get some outside leaven and not just talk to the same old sources. And, you know, as I mentioned before, we've organized these biweekly webinars for members and for the general public in areas that we think will be most useful. So for example, we've got a webinar coming up where there will be a representative from the Hong Kong Ballet, also organizations in Europe, and a couple of spots in the U S that are peeking open their doors.

And we'll be talking to them about how they are handling a tentative reopening now.

Katie Zandbergen: I've Zoomed in for many of the live webinars that your organization has hosted. And a recent one was it's called lessons from The Atlantic and responding to COVID-19: insights from the media landscape.

In that webinar one of your guests pointed out that US adults spend on average 12 hours per day connected to media, and that people don't necessarily want more information. They want better information and better content. It was also pointed out that many people may be actively looking for content that isn't related to coronavirus, that they have bad news fatigue. Thinking of this in terms of jobs to be done, it could present an interesting, "helped me to escape job.

I'm wondering do you, this current situation as not only a challenge, which it certainly is, but also as a potential opportunity for arts organizations to reach even wider audiences.

Pope Ward: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, but I think organizations need to be really careful and purposeful about how they do that. We found people like escapism, as you mentioned, but weirdly when you ask them later about it, they can't really remember where it came from.

So it was a pleasant experience, but not memorable and not an experience that they may associate with you later. There are a few organizations that have a lot of brand power already, and that have been able to extend their audiences beyond their traditional range.

The Berlin Philharmonic is a really good example. They've been able to multiply their audiences, but they were already world famous. Same with the Νational Τheatre in London, they have exponentially increased their audiences through the pandemic. But those two organizations are kind of like the Harvards of the arts. They were really well known before, and people probably are aware of some of the mega stars who were in their archive performances.

And so they're willing to go back to those. For everybody else, it's probable that they'll need to find their own niche, you know, some unique voice and think about the jobs that they want to help people do that they're best positioned to help with. They can solve the challenge that The Atlantic folks raised, which is kind of bad news fatigue, but they might do it by connecting friends around a music trivia now, or, you know, the American Shakespeare Center in Stanton, Virginia has been explored the role of race in Shakespeare, for example with patrons online. So there are lots of ways that organizations can lift people up now and keep them from experiencing that bad news fatigue, but it doesn't just have to be through escape. It really depends what the audiences want and what they're trying to get done.

Katie Zandbergen: You just mentioned the American Shakespeare center exploring the role of race in Shakespeare's plays. And speaking of race, I'm wondering, do you see a role for arts organizations in addressing the Black Lives Matter movement? How can they best meet this moment?

Pope Ward: Yeah, absolutely. They're deeply interested in playing this role right now. If you go to the website of any arts and culture organization in America, at least you'll see some reference to this on the first page of their site. And honestly, they're the right group or at least a right group to be leading this right now, after all, for hundreds of years, the arts have held up a mirror to society, right?

So if ever there was a need for that, this would be the time. There's a good example that comes to mind. The Out of Hand Theater in Atlanta has done really great job of this it's worth looking up. So they've been curating online discussions that they call equitable dinners. So each discussion might start with some core piece of content of poetry reading or personal narrative. And then the participants break out into groups to discuss the issues that that content puts on the table in a more intimate setting. And at the end, they come back together and they share their takeaways and insights from their more intimate discussions.

But this is also a moment of reckoning for the Arts.

The pandemic has laid bare a lot of problems on the race front, even in arts organizations who would regard themselves as pretty progressive here. So for example, in arts organizations, whose diversity numbers look pretty good. Might have to take another look after they're forced to make layoffs during the pandemic. And they find that all the people who are left are a lot less diverse than the staff in general. So their senior staff may look very different than their staff generally.

And that reckoning is obviously a good thing, not just for society, but because of that issue that we touched on earlier, the tendency of leadership teams to design experiences for people who are like them.

If this period of social unrest catalyzes a move to diversify leadership teams, then arts organizations will be more likely to build compelling experiences for more types of people.

Katie Zandbergen: We've been talking about the urgency of the present moment. But what about the longer term, for instance, do you think that our experience with the current pandemic will change habits in the longer term? And if so, what does that mean for arts organizations?

Pope Ward: You know, it's unclear whether habits will change over the longterm. But one thing that is clear is that organizations have to have a plan for this moment and they can't just have a wait it out approach. You're right. In saying they also need a plan for the longer term.

The pandemic is absolutely terrible and is creating huge amount of suffering for a lot of things. But if there's a silver lining to the situation, maybe it's that the crutch has been taken away and arts organizations will find that they can no longer appeal to audiences through only programming.

Rather they'll realize that there are many different and relevant jobs out there, and many different ways to reach potential audiences. Few arts organizations have R and D functions. Since everything is largely focused on programming, we can help arts organizations to develop test and learn functions and through jobs-research not only gain a better grasp of what audiences might actually want, but the steps to meet those demands to help customers make the progress that they're trying to make.

So are you just building for a bunch of jobs that go away? No, you need to create value now, but also have the value that will endure. So you have to pick jobs that are likely to be stable over the long term. So for example, create a tradition with my family. That job is going to be here over the longterm, and it's also important now.

So operating in the midst of a pandemic can also be viewed as a good opportunity to. Form longterm strategy to really reshape the future.

Katie Zandbergen:

Pope this discussion has really given me a much better sense of what your organization is doing, including your work, to help arts organizations, to tackle the many challenges ahead of them. And particularly in the face of this pandemic. I'm wondering how can our listeners help you?

Pope Ward:

I appreciate you asking, well, first, if you're interested in what we're up to, you should feel free to join our biweekly webinars. I mentioned that they're open to the public. Arts organizations are struggling and we don't think anyone should be kept out of those sessions.

They're on important topics and they're always fun. So if you want to sign up, go to advisoryboardarts.com and you find them from there. Second, if you know, or, work with an arts organizations that you think would benefit from knowing about us just let me know. We'd be really grateful for the connection. Of course, we're trying to expand the membership.

And finally, if you work with arts and culture organizations, philanthropically we'd be really interested in two things. The first is I would love to interview you for research. We're just kicking off some work now on large donor motivations. You know, think of it as donor jobs to be done. Second, we're launching something called the global leaders council in the arts for philanthropists who are interested in sponsoring an ABA membership for an arts or culture organization. As you can imagine right now, they need a shared resource more than ever, and are less capable of paying for it than they ever were.

So if you'd like to find out more about that, we'd be most happy to talk about it.

Katie Zandbergen: Well, our time is unfortunately running short, but as a final question, do you have any advice for them, lots to share that we haven't yet covered in this conversation or that you'd like to really emphasize or leave our listeners with.

Pope Ward: Well, first, support the arts. Some places have seen a shift in thropic giving away from the arts toward either safety net issues or social justice causes. Those shifts are completely understandable given the amount of suffering that's going on. But the arts are also essential at this time, both as an expression of societal conscience and as a mouthpiece for the emotions that community members need to express right now. Think of it as kind of a form of mental health care to support the arts.

Second, if you're in arts organization, you need to, we have a real strategy for creating value in the world at this moment, not just an operational plan to wait out closure. And based on our jobs research, it's very likely that a strong strategy will have a serious component that involves connecting audience members with one another digitally using your organization as a conduit. So you need to think hard about what conversations you're the natural host for.

And finally, if you, I want to look back on this time and say that you were one of the most meaningful organizations that your audience relied on it, you have to understand the context of their lives right now. You've got to reach out to audiences, not just to make sure they're okay, but to find out about the context of their lives. Not enough organizations are doing this. It is not that hard and we highly recommend it. If you want to know how we can help.

If you understand what they're trying to get done right now, you can help them do it. You know, the jobs to be done framework can be really useful in thinking about strategic decisions that arts leaders need to make right now. And so if you're listening and think that the Advisory Board for the Arts could be helpful to you or your organization, don't hesitate, just reach out to us and we'd be most happy to help if we can.

Katie Zandbergen: Well, thanks so much for coming onto the disruptive voice today. I really enjoy our conversations. Me too. Thanks for having me.

Clay Christensen: Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and want to learn more, please visit our website or leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time, good luck everybody.