Williamsburg Area Arts Commission

AGENDA City of Williamsburg Williamsburg Area Arts Commission Wednesday, May 17, 2023 A meeting of the Williamsburg Area Arts Commission will be held Wednesday, May 17, 2023 in the Stryker Center (Room 128), 412 N Boundary St, Williamsburg, VA 23185 commencing at 3:00 PM. Page I. CALL TO ORDER II. ROLL CALL III. APPROVAL OF MINUTES a. March 15, 2023 2 IV. CHAIR'S REPORT a. FY24 WAAC Members V. STAFF REPORT a. FY24 City of Williamsburg Budget b. FY24 WAAC Grantee Letters VI. SUBCOMMITTEE REPORTS a. February 2023 Forum - Robin Phillips and Susan Corbett 3-8 b. Application Guidelines - Patricia Rublein and Barbara Vollmer c. FY23 Year-End Report - Patricia Rublein and Barbara Vollmer 9 d. FY24 Nominating Committee - Patricia Rublein and Georgianna Avioli 10 VII. LIAISON REPORTS VIII. NEXT MEETINGS a. June 8, 2023, at 2:00 p.m. (Joint Meeting with York County Arts Commission) b. July 12, 2023, at 3:00 p.m. (Regular WAAC Meeting) IX. ADJOURN Page 1 of 10  Williamsburg Area Arts Commission Stryker Center, Williamsburg, VA March 15, 2023 Call to Order: Chair Tom Phelps called the meeting to order at 3:00 pm. Attending: Tom Phelps, Georgianna Avioli, Robert Leek, Robin Phillips, Patricia Rublein, Nancy Sullivan, Barbara Vollmer, Nick Vrettos and Joanna Skrabala, Tourism Development Specialist. Susan Corbett was absent. Minutes: Minutes of the grant review session on January 18 and the special meeting on January 25 were approved as submitted. FY22 Grantee Presentation: Adam Stackhouse, co-producer and creative director of the Ampersand International Arts Festival, described the evolution of the William & Mary film festival into a five-day multi-disciplinary affair showcasing multiple arts. This year’s Festival included 60 events and special programs. Chair’s Report: Chair Tom Phelps • Congratulated Forum Chairs Robin Phillips and Susan Corbett for putting together, with the help of Joanna Skrabala, a very successful February forum. • Appointed a Nominating Committee of Ms. Avioli and Ms. Rublein to recommend officers for next year. • Announced former Chair Ms. Rublein’s third term on the Commission will end June 30, and asked Commissioners to encourage suitable candidates apply for the vacancy. Committee Reports: • Ms. Phillips reported the February Forum “A Full House: Building Audiences for the Arts” held February 9 was well attended and received many positive reviews from attendees. Ms. Phillips thanked the Commissioners and Ms. Skrabala for their help in creating a successful event. All agreed February is a good month for the annual WAAC forum. • Ms. Rublein reported she and Ms. Vollmer have reviewed the documents relating to the grant process and will incorporate Commisioners’ suggested changes into a revised year-end report at the May meeting. The next meeting is May 17 at 3:00 in Room 127 at the Stryker Center. The meeting adjourned at 4:58. Barbara Vollmer, Acting Secretary Page 2 of 10  DRAFT Williamsburg Area Arts Commission “A Full House: Building Audiences for the Arts” February 9, 2023 Stryker Center On February 9th, 2023, the Williamsburg Area Arts Commission (WAAC) hosted its 2023 forum, “A Full House: Building Audiences for the Arts.” for representatives from interested arts organizations and members of the community. The focus was on audience engagement and featured a panel discussion from some of the area’s top leaders in the arts community. Speakers included Glenda Turner of Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Christine Everly of Arts for Learning Virginia, Carolyn Keurajian of Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra, and Jeff Ryder of Virginia Stage Company. It was important to the Arts Commission to set an agenda that would provide good take-away information and ideas for audience expansion and marketing their product in a new sphere. The event was moderated by the WAAC Chair Thomas Phelps, formerly with the National Endowment for the Humanities. “The arts community suffered through the years of the pandemic. Audiences drifted away, and some did not come back. Audience development became a major concern. This year, the Williamsburg Area Arts Commission decided to present a forum to address the issue surrounding audience building and development and will feature a panel selected for their expertise and experience, drawn from representatives of organizations who have already aggressively addressed the issue,” Phelps said ahead of the event. The forum was well attended and provided an opportunity for networking with colleagues as well as the discussion with panelists. “The pandemic brought our world to a halt, and it impacted the arts as well as the rest of the world,” said Williamsburg Vice Mayor Pat Dent in opening the Williamsburg Area Arts Commission’s annual forum, “A Full House: Building Audiences for the Arts.” 1 Page 3 of 10 “We look at all the negatives from the pandemic but when you look at all the people in this room, we came up with a lot of creative ways to get around it,” Dent said. Creative thinking was the order of the day, which began with Margaret Hancock of the Virginia Commission for the Arts who explained the recent restructuring of their grant program into “three buckets,” and encouraged attendees to apply. “Unrestricted funding like this is rare,” she said. She also urged groups who get funding to make sure all of their media includes the VCA logo. “It’s the stamp of approval,” she said. “It tells corporations and philanthropies that you have been invested in and vetted by the state of Virginia. It’s a great way to leverage one grant to get another.” WAAC Chairman Thomas Phelps introduced the panelists, outlining what the forum hoped to accomplish. “How do we attract new and nontraditional audiences? How do we bring audiences back? How can we improve accessibility?” Christine Everly, the CEO of Arts for Learning Virginia, says her organization addressed pandemic-era challenges by “adapting our service model.” Eleven days after the March 2020 shutdown, Arts for Learning turned their offices into a recording studio, creating more than 100 10-minute segments that could be delivered electronically to students at home. Staff had no experience in production, and had to learn on the fly how to put together video offerings. “It’s now a permanent part of our service model,” Everly said, adding that shifting to recording performances has allowed them to actually increase the number of students they reach. They have a growing digital library of work and they have reduced costs by eliminating many travel expenses. To improve accessibility for students, they integrated the schools’ “Clever” app into their online platform. This is a single sign-on digital learning platform for K- 12 schools. Jeff Ryder, Managing Director of the Virginia Stage Company said the theater is continuing to recover from the COVID-19 shutdown. “We tried to do Zoom theater without being trained or skilled in being a recording studio,” he said, but there 2 Page 4 of 10 was much lower attendance for virtual performances than traditional in-person theater. Attendance has still not fully recovered since they resumed live performances while at the same time “labor expectations and costs have changed.” “In almost every aspect, it is more expensive to do now what we were doing before,” he said. Those budget challenges, Ryder said, “create a greater imperative for building audiences and retaining subscribers. Our organization could not have survived without the generous support of state donors, local, federal, and relief programs.” The theater’s response has been to work to create an environment where live theater is actively celebrated. “We want it to be an experience you could only have by coming to the Wells Theatre,” Ryder said. In reopening its doors, they chose to stage works like The Hobbit that “really celebrated theater magic,” and familiar classics like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof rather than risk-taking choices. The mission is focused on hospitality and creating a “welcoming environment” for theatergoers, including training and recruitment of ushers who will reinforce that concept. They are broadening the audience by working with Access Virginia to make sure people with disabilities know that the Wells Theatre will accommodate their needs, with ASL interpreters, open captioning, and assisted listening devices. Overall, the goal is to “be the community’s living room: comfortable and welcoming.” Ryder said they have also streamlined their ticketing so buying a ticket is “an easy thing to do,” and changed their discount programs so students can buy rush tickets in advance rather than only on the day of a performance. Discounts are offered through Norfolk’s Power Up Program which makes free or discounted admission available to low-income residents. “We want to remove all the barriers for people to come to see us,” Ryder said. They’ve also added more audience engagement opportunities like talkbacks, a “behind the curtain” series, Young People’s Night, and Hampton Roads Pride 3 Page 5 of 10 Talk Back Series. They also undertook a major outreach effort with a touring production about mental health entitled Every Brilliant Thing which Ryder called “an important piece of theater.” “Whatever your experience of the pandemic was, it was a disruption,” he said. “So many people were isolated and experienced significant loss.” At the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation, “adaptation” has been the order of the day, said Glenda Turner, the senior director of marketing. “We closed our doors on March 14 (2020) and we had “History at Home,” with virtual access to our museums available the following week. The foundation runs both Jamestown Settlement and the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown. Retooling to compensate for closing their elegant buildings involved ramping up virtual visits, blogs, videos, curricula, and training for teachers. With schools closed, there was a concerted emphasis on providing history lessons (disguised as interactive games or tests). “They were actually learning but they didn’t know they were learning,” Turner said. The upside was a better understanding of their audience. Turner said monitoring web traffic to their sites helped them fine-tune their outreach. “You find out who your audience is by learning who’s using your site.” That helped her target her advertising. The foundation developed “personas” based on web traffic to visualize the groups they wanted to appeal to like multi-generational families, nuclear families, the older kids in the family group, and the “Gen Z” visitor. After being closed for three months, museum staff got ready for re-opening by conducting what Turner called “speed dating,” so when “schools did start planning trips again, JYF would be front of mind.” Once restrictions eased, JYF benefited from Williamsburg being what the tourism industry calls “a drive destination.” “Families were packing up their cars and doing road trips,” she said. 4 Page 6 of 10 Turner said another aspect that was important to staying afloat during the pandemic was collaboration, including a concert featuring the Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra and bassist Xavier Foley which was staged at Jamestown Settlement and limited to just 60 attendees. “The symphony has an audience, and we have an audience,” Turner said. “Some of the people who attended were symphony people who had not been to Jamestown Settlement in years. Partnership and collaboration have made a vast improvement to our visitor numbers.” Even marketing the museums as wedding venues has helped. “These are private events, but the photos are shared, bringing awareness that our museums are beautiful places,” Turner said. Finally, Carolyn Keurajian, President and CEO of the Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra said the key to attracting and retaining audiences is to deliver each attendee “a big love bomb.” “This is how I want people to feel when they’re buying a ticket,” she said. “Taking them from first date, to being in a relationship with us, to engagement, marriage, anniversary. Once they become a donor, that means they’re in love.” Keurajian estimates it costs twenty percent of a $54 ticket to bring in a new buyer but only three percent to bring someone back to a second concert, which is why she says the lifeblood of an arts organization is “taking care of the people you’ve already got. They are what’s keeping you alive.” She displayed a chart showing the “Evolution of a Patron,”outlining the progress from a non-patron to a loyal patron; followed by a chart showing the far greater the financial impact that “loyalists” have over single-sale ticket buyers. “The sweet spot is when you have a renewer donor,” she said. “Take care of your loyalists. Make sure they feel welcome.” During the pandemic, the symphony board called each subscriber twice – just to check in. “Not to ask for anything,” said Keurajian, “but just to ask if they were okay and to thank them for subscribing.” 5 Page 7 of 10 Like Turner, Keurajian also stressed collaboration is key and even better if you can collaborate with someone who will reach people you are not already reaching – like adding young performers of diverse backgrounds. The WSO does concerts with the Williamsburg Youth Orchestra and recruited the historically Black First Baptist Church for a performance that required a choir. “You also want to look at your board. Is your board diverse?” she asked. That combination – appealing to non-traditional audiences and cultivating new partnerships – led to the symphony’s highest-grossing Masterworks season yet. Audience discussion was lively during the Question-Answer session, showing that community members were fully engaged and interested in learning from the information presented, and adding their own perspectives from their experiences in audience engagement. The WAAC Chair received several positive phone calls after the event, expressing appreciation. The panelist format was highly effective and well received, and will likely be used again in future forums whenever appropriate to the content. Following that active discussion period participants left with many conclusions that created a great sense of hope and enthusiasm for the group. Evidence of that benefit was a lengthy reception with lots of networking. New behaviors identified include taking care of your loyal patrons, expand collaboration to inform new audience membership, and marketing efforts should include personal interactions whenever possible. This gives a sense of ownership to the product they are investing in. 6 Page 8 of 10  WAAC Year-End Report Name of organization: Mailing Address: Email: Phone: Amount of FY 23 Grant: Describe how FY23 grant funds were used to support a specific project or general operating support. Include other sources of income utilized for the project. Complete the form below: Expenses Current Budget WAAC Funding Notes Salaries Administrative Artists/Performer fees Non-personnel Office expenses Travel (guest travel/hotels) Facility Rentals Advertising/Fund-raising Other Total Expenses Give approximate attendance to activities funded by event. Children (through high school) Adults/Seniors What has your organization been able to accomplish with the grant that otherwise would not have been achieved? Who benefited, and in what way? Please comment on your experience with your assigned liaison commissioner: By entering your name below you are certifying that funds awarded were used exclusively for the projects, performances or services stated in the FY 2023 application, including any approved revisions or additional stipulations which may have been added by the time the grant was awarded. Authorized Name of President or Treasurer: Date: Page 9 of 10  Williamsburg Area Arts Commission Nominating Committee Report March 28, 2023 The Nominating Committee, composed of Georgianna Avioli and Patricia Rublein, met in compliance with the By Laws of the Commission. They recommend the following to serve as WAAC officers for the term of July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024. Chair, Thomas Phelps Vice Chair, Robin Phillips Secretary, Georgianna Avioli The slate will be brought up for vote by the entire Commission at its regularly scheduled meeting on May 16, 2023. Submitted by Susan Corbett Secretary to the Commission Page 10 of 10