So we’ve learned a couple things about the concept since we launched it late last year, and they are interesting and not entirely surprising.

1) Relationships like the ones we’re talking about in this model take a lot of trust. Developing that trust is now in the early stages – we’re working first on creating a comprehensive map of our patrons and the core reasons they love New Leaf. That’s going to be a lot of conversations and synthesis before we can really identify who these partners will be within our community. These partnerships are like marriages… you have to go on a bunch of dates first to see if you’re compatible, and when you finally propose, you already know the answer. As far as that is concerned, this proposition process is going to be more similar to a traditional development model, thought the benefits are the real innovation.

2) Several company members (most notably Marni Keenan and myself, to some extent) are very much going all in with a similar model of artistic consultation to power their primary income. Marni has begun working for Marshall Creative – a marketing agency that is also a New Leaf sponsor. In that position, Marni applies her graphic design and production management skills to create a ton of websites, promotional videos and other goodies for agents in the Chicago housing market. So we know it works, and the trick moving forward is going to be how to more closely connect and demonstrate how New Leaf as a cohesive artistic team – rather than just a few company members – can tailor and generate high-value benefits for our local funding partners.

In summary, this new model is very much a slow-burn, long-term approach rather than a just-add-water short-term fix. But we believe that’s what makes it an idea worth investing in.

Thanks for sharing all of this. I’ve enjoyed reading the conversation, and look forward to seeing the plans unfold!

Forgive me if you’ve already read the book I’m about to recommend: THE GIFT by Lewis Hyde. The focus is mainly individual artists, but I think there are some valuable insights for you. While Hyde stops short of providing definitive solutions, he does re-shape the lens through which artists can approach challenges of survival in a capitalistic marketplace. Give it a look if you can…you know, in all that free time you have.

Best of luck!

This is fascinating stuff. I love the idea that modest adjustments to your process and your creative scope could generate disproportionately large value for both your partners and your theater company.

I’ll be very curious to see how you develop the communication of these ideas to your potential partners (at least, the communication that I’ll be able to see online–I’m sure much of it will happen in other mediums!)

In a hyper-local context, professional categories really break down fast, don’t they? It becomes less and less about lumping people into inter-changeable professional labels, and more and more about exploring the astonishing variety of creativity that can come pouring out of any one human being. I’m starting to feel like what New Leaf is doing here is setting dynamite to those cold, stoney labels and sifting out the gold that was locked inside….

I’ll be thinking about this a lot in the coming days, I suspect….

A first easy one to pick off is one I already have in mind – specifically enumerating the actual skill sets at our disposal as a sort of “menu” of ideas for donors. That includes the skills in the company itself – our 7 company members, 2 artistic associates, and the skills that we have access to from our network of 50 – 100 local family of artists that we have working relationships with and could reasonably subcontract and provide paid commissions for specific tasks (for example, Very Clever or Daniel Kozuh, the makers of our video trailers, or Bilal Dardai, one of the prolific and inventive playwrights who we work with on a regular basis).

We have budgeted a portion of each donation to actually fund these projects, as the workload involved in producing them ALSO needs to be sustainable. That internal budget has the side financial benefit of putting a hard number on the actual tax-deductible portion of the donation, since our donors will not be able to deduct the value of in-kind receipts from their donations. This essentially makes us a creative production company – except, as we’ve realized, we’re ALREADY a creative production company.

As part of the “getting to know our donors” process, we’ll be defining internal guidelines for the appropriate scope of a partnership project. We know that we’ll be bringing lots of creative resources to the table and need to keep financial resources other than compensation for our and our artists time at a minimum to make the model sustainable. With that in mind, we want to start by making that hard financial cost of the return gift hover around 10% of the donation – so we creatively leverage $500 out of every $5000 to create a project much more valuable than that $500 investment – an event, a video performance, a document, an artifact, etc.

Which brings me to your suggestions. I know, as a freelancer, the difference in energy between a corporate or commissioned project and a project I do for fun. To make this project succeed, we need to collaborate with our donors and our artists to create projects that are just plain fun and engaging for the entire team even as they create value. We believe that this will make the finished product even more valuable. The example I always use is this series of videos that Marshall Creative did for mortgage broker Dean Vlamis. You can see by looking at them that the project was done quickly, efficiently, folks got paid, and everyone had a blast doing the project. What you don’t see is that this series of videos went viral and generated Dean over $1 million dollars in new business this year. The whole concept of viral marketing requires effective entertainment and a subtlety that corporations and committees don’t get but storytellers do.

So, what I like the most of the two suggestions of scale you’ve made here Chris is not just that they fit that guideline of 10% – by hiring one of our actors to do a voiceover, me on sound engineering and one of our friends to write some inventive copy, we could easily create a low-cost web commercial series that gives you much much much more value than the $500 we used to create it. And training in the way that you’ve described it actually costs me nothing as a designer, but is hugely valuable to you as someone specifically in need of training in a sound designer’s process (other donors might need training in ensemble building within a team, and for that you look no further than Jess Hutchinson) What I like the most about your examples is that it’s an example of partnering with a product or organization that we actually believe in – I consider figure53 to be ‘local’ in the sense that qLab is a product I use on a daily basis and have regular conversations with its creators – and that the organization would be interested in collaboratively creating an artifact or event that is fun, inventive, and unique. That gets me excited as an artist, and that excitement is critical to the sustainability of the model, and more effective for you as potential donor.

We need to break down the false stereotypes of artistic and non-artistic professionals not having anything in common. We can have a conversation. And after a half-hour discussion of what it is we both do for people, I can guarantee that we’ll have three exciting possibilities of collaborations that might lead to a relationship.

Using those guidelines – teaming donor excitement with the right artistic excitement and earmarking 10% of donations towards “thank you” costs – gets us a 90% donation to support New Leaf’s projects, our donors get way more than $500 of value out of their gift, our family of artists get periodic supplemental income in the form of mini-commissions, and New Leaf gets to not provide those creative services out of pocket as an additional “ghost donation” to the company.

Jess, regarding “projects that are partly invented by your audience” — that was my interpretation of the following description:

“New Leaf will collaborate with our donors on projects initiatied by both New Leaf and donors. We want to get to know you, get to know what you trying to accomplish in your lives and in your communities, and to explore new and potentially unconventional ways of collaborating to craft tailored benefit experiences for each donor that use those shared goals as a starting point.”

I interpreted that to mean that the projects you work on in these relationships are in some manner an invention of the donors, guided by their goals and creative interests.

Re: targeted value at a hyper-local level. I love this idea, not least for the way it proposes to create value on terms that are unique to a small theater company, instead of trying to create value on the terms of huge monolithic companies.

My initial reaction to this whole post was that it made me see theater companies as, essentially, a tiger team of hyper-creatives with a remarkably diverse skill set and a powerful understanding of the fundamental thread of the human species: stories. While I’m not yet sure if I completely understand the guidelines for the way your new model will work, it seems like you’re proposing that in some way you want to make this potent team accessible to your community. That strikes me as a fundamentally exciting premise, even if I don’t quite yet understand how it plays out.

A thought: while I totally get the idea of not wanting to limit the creative possibilities by prescribing them, I do wonder if your prospective partners will need some set of guidelines to help them envision the partnership — what it might be or what it would NOT be. As you say, this is something that will become easier to discuss (and will probably be redefined significantly) after the first set of partnerships has been completed.

Let me come at this from another direction. Let me throw some examples at you and ask you where they fit (if anywhere) in your new model:

$50 membership. Let’s say that I (specifically me, Chris) would like to know more about how a sound designer actually develops a design. Here I am, making tools for designers, but I’ve never been trained in the artistic process of doing it. I’d love to learn. As a member, could I propose to sit behind Nick as he works during a rehearsal, and that, as his time permits, he would give me insights into what he is doing and why he is doing it? Sort of a mini observational apprenticeship?

$5000 donation. Back in the days before I released QLab 2, I was batting around ideas about how to introduce it to the world. At one point I was really keen on creating some kind of unique theatrical experience where the software was unveiled. Not an outright advertisement, but a fun and playful theatrical event that did not hide the fact that it was showing off a year of my own creative coding work in the context of some creative theatrical work. Would this have been a candidate for a New Leaf 5K Project?