Appeal is All About Pull not Push

Waiting for the doors to open for a matinee performance of an acclaimed Broadway musical on tour at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC,) several things ran through my mind as I looked from the lobby out at the downtown skyline.

One was that as remarkable as the building is, you can just feel that we don’t build things to last anymore.  Different than the historic structures in the skyline, according to officials at the Urban Land Institute we only build things to last 20-30 years now or less.

Another fleeting thought was how ironic it was that one of the organizations advertising in the program was inferring that the remarkably successful theater, now in its sixth year, was due in part to its vision.

I was on its board at the time and support was mixed with several concerns weighing heavily.  The vote in favor hinged on the snarky comment by one board member who proclaimed, “what do we care, we don’t have to pay for it.”

It seems a prerequisite for any claim of vision should be having “skin in the game.”

My third fleeting observation that day was that but for the Mayor’s letter in the program, not one welcome or announcement leveraged awareness to 70% of the attendees from out of town that they were in Durham.

Communities build cultural facilities in part to leverage awareness and to reap not only visitor spending but also to further stimulate the economy in which the facility costs are born when facilities hire local residents and use local vendors.

Far too many communities take these returns on investment for granted and fail to lace their expectation into operating agreements.

I may have just missed further mentions of Durham that day but this kind of oversight is one far too many cultural facilities and events make, some falling victim to the false notion that they have to blur location in order to be appealing to non-residents on day-trip visits.

This is an outdated mid-20th-century notion perpetuated by some media.  They hoped it will sell more advertising by homogenizing identities with the promise that they could push consumers past businesses in their hometown to buy the same things several cities, towns and counties away.

The further away they could make the claim, the more they could charge for advertising.

This fallacy may have been the reason that when two private fortunes built on such advertising both bought Minor League baseball teams in the 1990s, pushing and shoving ensued.

One was in Durham and the other destined for Raleigh.  But one invoked a territorial clause to push the other to locate instead several towns further east into the far reaches of Wake County.

Symbolic is that the one claiming to be the region’s team draws the same proportion of day-trip visitors from throughout the region to games now as it did back before making that claim.  Not coincidentally, it’s the same percentage drawn by Durham venues overall without that claim.

Drawing attendance from nearby communities and allegiance from visitors, day trip or overnight is earned by pull not push, it is about distinctiveness and sense of place, not hegemony.

It is won, not pandered too, by being somewhere, not anywhere.

Another sports comparison is that two of the major league sports franchises in North Carolina bypassed the identities of the cities in which they play and whose residents paid to build the palaces in which they play.

Instead, they chose the over-reaching identity “Carolina,” hoping not only to claim hegemony over one state, but two.

Lost was the fact nearly 6-in-10 professional sports fans today are loyal to a team that is not near where they live.  Allegiance must be won, not monopolized.

Successful sports franchises such as Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks understand this.  While honoring the city where they play, they have managed to win allegiance throughout the three-state Pacific Northwest and a province of Canada

Appeal is about pull, not push.

I lobbied for Durham to remain in the name of the Durham Performing Arts Center and first coined the the acronym DPAC based on the success of DBAP for the nearby baseball stadium.

But it never occurred to me that the acronym works so well for DBAP only because its where the Durham Bulls play.

Even now that views of the downtown skyline are entirely blocked by office buildings, the community for whom the team is named and whose residents and officials built the stadium is referenced repeatedly during games in announcements heard by visitors from out of town who make up the majority in attendance.

Greensboro, sixty miles west is planning to open a theater similar to Durham’s DPAC in 2016 and it is doing several things better and some not as well as Durham (photo below courtesy of City of Greensboro.)

Officials there plan to make it at least a few seats larger for bragging rights, but DPAC’s accolades long ago transcended mere size.  The question is can Greensboro draw the A-list tour companies that Durham’s contract-management does.

Raleigh didn’t fold its touring Broadway in the face of Durham’s new theater because of the new facility.  It folded because it knew it couldn’t compete with the programming power of Durham’s operator.

To their credit, according to a WUNC news radio report, “supporters there stress the Greensboro facility isn't a money-making venture. It's a cultural addition to the community,” a lesson Durham officials could use.

A local official there signaled that Greensboro must realize that its sense of place has eroded noting that the proposed DPAC-like theater there will "provide a specific identity…” for Greensboro.

You know you’re in trouble if being one of 500 communities with a  theater that hosts touring Broadway shows is your claim to being distinctive.  Researchers long ago concluded that sense of place is about what you have, not what you don’t have, about being distinctive rather than emulative or covetous.

But Greensboro’s project is an improvement on Durham’s in two ways.

Private interests have pledged half the cost rather than pushing for someone else to pay the tab. Second, barring any bait and switch by elected officials, a dollar from every ticket sold will go to increase financial viability for local arts there, especially the indigenous arts that do help make a community distinct.

Officials there lectured surrounding communities for not being regional but people don’t go out on a day trip visit to another community because they are pushed or persuaded by homogeneity.

Appeal is about the pull of being distinctive and worthy.

Only 1-in-10 people who live in the Triangle region anchored by Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh think of where they live by a region.  They relish living in distinct cities, towns, neighborhoods and counties and being motivated to visit others is about their distinctive sense of place.

Durham’s prowess at drawing day-trip visitors from other parts of the Triangle and beyond didn’t come from guilt trips or by minimizing differences and blurring distinctions.

Visitor are pulled--not pushed--to places like Durham by the community’s relentless fostering and promotion of its distinctiveness.

More than two decades ago when new owners threatened to move the Durham Bulls to an out of town venue so it would be more convenient to out of town fans, a survey by researchers at NC State found that a majority would no longer attend without the Durham ambiance and sense of place.

Greensboro would be well advised not to lecture other communities in the Triad region but to instead work to be the kind of distinctive place worthy of a day trip visit.

That kind of identity will also be much more holistically reliant than any one facility. 

Beyond cross town trips, day-trip excursions to another community are drawn by differences, not sameness.

Similarly, DPAC, which is impeccably managed and programmed, should re-embrace its Durham-ness wherever possible as part of fully leveraging its impact on the community that built it.

The visitors who make up 70% or more of its attendees are drawn as much by the community as the theater, including a small share of the 20% of Durham’s overnight visitors who are shouldering the vast majority of the tab to pay for it.

In fact, for at least two decades now visitors have made up 70% of Durham’s overall live theater, festival, sports event and restaurant patrons.

Being distinctive as a place to live and visit, when leveraged by community branding and cooperation, pays a huge economic dividend.

By the way, once the doors opened, the performance that afternoon was fantastic.  It was like being transported to New York City for a few hours.

An Unexpected Flashback at DPAC

I had a flashback while witnessing a performance a few days ago in the Durham Performing Arts Center as a fill-in guest of a friend after her daughter couldn’t use one of their season tickets.

For many years I’ve been aware of the history behind The Million Dollar Quartet, but I hadn’t known until this last Tuesday how closely it coincided with my own discovery of rock and roll.

My flashback was triggered when I learned that, coincidentally, I was viewing the DPAC performance on the very night the event had occurred years ago, December 4th, 56 years ago.

The musical is based on documentation, including recordings and photographs such as the one shown in this blog, of a night when Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis came together for what would be one last time with Sam Phillips at Sun Records for a jam-session at the dawn of their hall-of-fame careers.

I realized, reading the screen (shown in this blog) as the audience filed into the theater, that the original event had occurred in 1956 exactly 26 days before I first felt the the sensation of rock and roll music.

My family was spending New Year’s Eve in a small motel suite with the doors to each side-by-side room facing a sidewalk and parking.  I was eight days away from being 8 1/2 years old.

My first introduction to rock that night of December 31, 1956 wasn’t over the radio because the stations picked up by many towns in 1956 and even through my high school years had to go off-air at sunset.

Instead, I first heard the joy of rock and roll that night when someone in the adjacent room was playing a hit by Elvis Presley on a small portable turntable playing through an open door while it seemed that every guest in the facility was mingling outside in anticipation of the New Year.

Spontaneously everyone began dancing, including my 5-year-old middle sister and I.  Who knows, but maybe hearing that very new music that night may have been why fusions such as rockabilly, country-folk and country-rock music have always kept perfect time with my internal metronome.

That specific date and hour at the close of 1956 were seared into my memory by more than this new genre of music.  Unable to reconcile my grandparent’s refusal to embed the transfer of the generational ranchland my parents worked after WWII, my parents were in the process of moving away from away from the Yellowstone-Teton-Idaho nook of my origins.

That motel was in another state entirely and the vehicles parked in front of the motel included not only our two-tone DeSoto but also our two-and-half ton truck filled with our belongings.  The next day, after having explored the Bitterroot Valley, my parents began to create and work a new farmstead of their own.

We stayed close with my grandparents but we wouldn’t return to live in our homeland until 7 years later.

Any follower of this blog, especially any posts with the keyword “personal” or “family” history knows the significance of this transition on me even as a nearly 9-year-old.  Ironically, the stubbornness of my grandparents about establishing a will, recreated a situation identical to what they had experienced themselves when my great-grand-parents died without a will and they were forced to painstakingly reassemble homesteads.

Maybe that’s why I was so eager to break that cycle and developed my first will before I was even thirty-years-old.

Coincidentally, at its essence, the musical I saw last week is about the painful break-up of formative relationships as people grow and move beyond those who help spawn them.

Setting DPAC Apart!

Beverly Thompson is part of a unique collaboration in Durham.  As the director of the Office of Public Affairs for the City of Durham, she collaborates with communication professionals who represent Durham as a community via the now-best-practice, 20-organization Durham Public Information & Communications Council (DPICC.)

This body was created and has been facilitated by the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) as the community's marketing agency, since the mid-1990s, to synergize and improve collaboration among communication professionals working at the various organizations that represent Durham.

The mission of the DPICC is to leverage both the quantity and quality of information distributed about the community and to jointly address issues that undermine Durham’s identity and image.  DPICC oversees Durham’s overarching brand.

I caught up with Beverly recently and learned that guests at the DPICC meeting this month were Bob Klaus, general manager of the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC) and two members of his staff, Cassie Jones, guest experience manager and Michael Colvin, senior house manager.

Until my retirement nearly two years ago, I enjoyed working closely with Bob and the folks on my team worked closely with Cassie, who truly epitomizes what was said at the meeting.

Bob works for Nederlander/PFM, a partnership that owns and operates theaters worldwide and operates the DPAC under contract with the City of Durham.

Week before last, the City announced that in just its third full season DPAC hosted 192 events, including 58 sellouts, which were attended by 357,000 residents and visitors including 11,000 season ticket holders for the SunTrust Broadway Series.

After operating expenses, DPAC netted $2.5 million in revenue of which just 60% is retained by Nederlander/PFM and 40% is distributed back into a City fund for the facility.  While the distribution seems a hair less than last year, these overall  measures have already transcended what was not originally projected until the fifth year of operation.

Coupled with more than $1.2 million in visitor tax revenue, more than half a million in ticket surcharges and the net from naming rights, this may narrow the overall cost of the theater for this year to around $1 million or so by my estimate.

Public infrastructure including cultural is not really meant to pay for itself other than by leveraging a vibrant community into economic vitality.  But this is as close as you get.

At the DPICC meeting this month Bob revealed four of the keys he sees to DPAC’s success to date:

• Borrowing “best practices” from other theaters and organizations such as Disney, DPAC focused on customer service as the strategy to set the facility apart from other entertainment venues, here or in other communities.

 

• Hiring at DPAC is very selective and considered pivotal to its success and every year all front line staff (ushers, ticket takers, etc.) must re-apply for positions with typically 20-30% not invited to return based on past performance.

 

• Extensive training is given to front line staff on how to do whatever they can to say “yes,” rather than explaining what they can’t do.  If they aren’t able to to fulfill a request, they are trained to immediately elevate the issue/problem to a supervisor so they can get back to helping others.

 

• Thousands and thousands of comment cards are solicited from customers and each manager reads every single card.  Whenever additional comments are added, Bob personally responds to each of them.

The strategy definitely works.  Congratulations to Bob and his team at DPAC, to both Nederlander and PFM and to the management and governance for the City of Durham.

Hats off as well as to Durham Wayfinders, a corps of 1,000 volunteers recruited and coordinated by DCVB that grew from an idea by Bob Klaus into a resource for all Durham festivals, events and facilities.