Each summer, the Elgin Symphony Orchestra embarks on a thorough Strategic Planning exercise. One of the topics that comes up on a regular basis is the manner through which we should serve the community. The ESO is not unique in this discussion. I assume every well run organization, symphonic or not, non or for-profit, must remain clear on its relevancy. I find the subject fascinating.

During our discussions, some of the smartest members of the Strategic Planning committee argue that serving our community means attracting members of the full demographic into our concerts. Some feel that we should bring Hispanic, African-American, Asian, wealthy, poor, folk with advance degrees, and those without college education to our classic concerts. Others believe that we need to program special concerts to serve specific demographics that they believe are unlikely to attend our current offerings.

These arguments make sense. Depending on what numbers I hear bantered about, only 3 – 10% of the general population will attend symphonic concerts on a regular basis and some of our Board members fear our organization will have a difficult future if we do not serve a larger percentage. They are also worried that the population is shifting away from the Eurocentric audience we have traditionally served. Finally, they worry that the classic audience is getting older and that not serving a younger audience will doom us in the future.

When I think of how we can best serve our community, I refer to Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. In his book, Collins studies seven constants experienced by 11 companies that successfully transitioned from long-term mediocrity to long-term greatness. One of these constants is that each of the companies had what he calls a Hedgehog Concept. Simply put, the Hedgehog Concept is the discipline to determine a single goal that balances what you are deeply passionate about, what drives your economic engine, and what you can be the best in the world at.

If the Elgin Symphony Orchestra is going to focus on serving our community, I think we need to ask ourselves how we can serve our community in a way that is better than anyone else in the world. I do not think we can serve non-Eurocentric audiences better than anyone in the world.

Chicago Sinfonietta has a greater passion for this than any symphony I know of, and is located in the heart of a major city with a huge, wealthy, well educated, multi-cultural audience. They have a greater passion, and greater access to audience and resources to succeed here than the ESO does. I do not think we can serve younger audiences better than anyone in the world.

Orchestra X, who saw incredible success around the turn of the millennium, had the passion and the young audience of Houston to succeed better than anyone else on that front. The Grant Park Music Festival’s free concerts can better serve access than we can.

I do not think the ESO can try to be the best interpreter of Wagner (this might belong to the Berlin Philharmonic) or American music (this might belong to the San Francisco Symphony). So what can we do better than anyone else in the world? The Elgin Symphony Orchestra can bring educated and upper income people into downtown Elgin better than anyone else in the world, and this is a service to our community needs.

Elgin is an incredible city. During the decade I have lived here, the city has experienced a renaissance unlike most ever see, and it clearly is just getting started. Unfortunately twenty years ago, Elgin was experiencing tougher times; and perception lags reality. Of the city’ many tools, we are its most effective at changing who populates its downtown. Elgin has three entities that bring significant numbers of outsiders into our downtown area on a regular basis: the Grand Victoria Casino, the private schools, and the Elgin Symphony Orchestra.

By far, the Grand Victoria brings the most people in on an annual basis, but the median income is the lowest of the three organizations. The private schools bring in a high income demographic on a regular basis, but their numbers of people affected are relatively low and their families do not spend a lot of time in our downtown.

The Elgin Symphony Orchestra brings 55,000 people into downtown Elgin each year, and assures that they have an enjoyable time; with the result that the vast majority want to come back. By clarifying our goal of serving our community through bringing educated and upper income people into downtown Elgin, we achieve the Hedgehog Concept. We are serving Elgin in the way it feels the greatest impact, we are doing what we can do better than anyone in the world, the people we are serving provide the economics we need to propagate our future service and building downtown Elgin is what we are passionate about.

How an orchestra should serve its community is not an easy question. I believe the ESO should focus on bringing educated and upper income people into downtown Elgin, but that does not mean that the Elgin Symphony Orchestra can forget broadening our constituency or serving our young – and we have (and must have) a number of highly successful strategies in these areas.

Chicago Sinfonietta, Grant Park Music Festival and Orchestra X have clear and effective ways of serving their communities that work well for them. One day, the Elgin Symphony Orchestra might find a better way to serve Elgin, or might define our community in a way that changes how we serve. In the meantime, we will need to regroup once a year and have a deep discussion on the subject to be sure we agree that we are on the right track.

Two years ago, Deborah Card, then the brand new President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, spoke at a meeting of the Illinois Council of Orchestras about how an orchestra is initially formed stays a part of the culture of the organization throughout its existence.

She gave an example how the Seattle Symphony (the orchestra she managed before coming to Chicago) was founded by some prominent women in the community who pulled together a band of musicians, lent them their husband’s suits and held concerts. She also discussed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who was formed by a group of business men who decided that a great city needed to have a great orchestra.

I found her talk to be fascinating and have since thought about the formation of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra. The ESO was formed 57 years ago by three people; Doug Steensland, Marian Laffey and Jean Hove. All three were public school music teachers who effectively tied the ESO with the community leaders on the school district’s Board.

Doug wanted to be a conductor, Marian wanted to be a Concert Master and Jean was willing to do whatever was necessary, so she played Principal Viola. The three of them then recruited an ensemble of teachers, high school students, doctors and lawyers who wanted to make music. This combination integrated the musicians with the funders of the symphony from the start. It also ingrained a sense of ownership amongst our musicians for the success of the organization.

These are two traits that I think are, and will always be, profound aspects of who and what we are. Now we – the Board, Musicians and Management – need to decide what we will do with them. If we are not conscious of these elements and do not harness them, they will undermine what we try to achieve.

In the 1970’s, Margaret Hillis became our music director and introduced annual auditions to the orchestra, making it so that some people could no longer play with us. In 1985, we became fully professional, decreasing the number of Elginites who could play with us. In 2000, we committed to a multiyear run at reaching Chicago AA scale (the pay set by the American Federation of Musician’s Local 10-208 for playing symphonic music in Chicago’s loop) so that we can attract the best freelance musicians in the region, making it yet harder for Elginites to perform in the orchestra.

During these profound changes, we can either be aware of the facts both that we have a fundamental connection between our community and our musicians and that we have a clearly defined plan to place the best musicians in the region on our stage (regardless of where they live), or we can simply move forward and assume everything will be alright.

If we do not remain cognizant of our history, the bonds between our musicians and our community will erode. This will likely undermine the structure of our fundraising and ticket sales. Our community members will cease to support the organization, and the musicians will start to put up barriers to our advancement. This could be overcome with new ticket sales and fundraising strategies, PR and Board management, but we would be starting from scratch.

If we remain conscious of it, we can have clear dialog about the fact that we have members of our orchestra who have grown up in Elgin and who we are lucky to have on our stage. We can be aware of the fact that we need to make concerted efforts to encourage musicians to move into Elgin so that our patrons see them in the grocery stores and hire them to teach our patrons’ children.

We can recruit musicians to prominent positions throughout our committee structure. We can make sure that we are consciously building informal bonds between our musicians and community. And we can continue to develop new techniques of building on these existing connections.

In the end, we all have basic traits that define us. It then becomes our jobs to understand them and figure out how to harness them as propellers.

The Elgin Symphony Orchestra is what I call a satellite orchestra. This means that we are neither in the center of a major metropolitan area, nor in a smaller metropolitan area. If we were either the Chicago or Peoria Symphonies, we would be able to attract the attention of both the leaders of those cities and be the clear focus for their surrounding communities.

In a satellite situation, people who either live or work half way between Elgin and Chicago have a much greater focus on Chicago than Elgin.

I assume the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has active volunteer leadership who live in Arlington Heights. We do not. While Elgin is more convenient to Arlington Heights than traveling to Chicago, more people from Arlington Heights work in Chicago than Elgin and are more used to going to Chicago for entertainment.

Being a satellite orchestra comes with other challenges. Most of the major media outlets are focused on Chicago. All of the major network television stations broadcast out of the big city. The region’s two major newspapers are focused on downtown. Until recently, all of the radio stations we would like to advertise on emanated in Chicago. Attracting young staff to a smaller city - just far enough from a cultural Mecca to keep people from wanting to make the commute - is also difficult.

Of course, with every challenge comes opportunity. We do not have the focus of being in the center of a metropolitan area, but we are actually easier for a suburbanite to reach than going into the City.

The suburbs are growing at extraordinary speeds. There are media sources like the Daily Herald Newspaper who have become highly effective at speaking to the suburban audiences and are a perfect overlap for our patrons. Attracting staff from across the country remains a challenge, but we need to figure out how to harness what we have to become ever more effective here.

This is a big country, with a wide variety of orchestras. It is often easy for us at the ESO to look at the difficulties in front of us and how much easier others have it. What is more challenging, though much more effective, is to look at how to harness those challenges into assets.

I am new to blogging and am starting to like it.  My last entry discussed classical music as a growth engine and it looks to me as though there were two responses to what I wrote. 

One response questioned whether number of subscribers was the best measure of success or whether it might be the number of young audience members or the number of contemporary works.  The other entry noted that variety is important and that the field would become boring if every orchestra followed the same approach. 

Both of these comments are great topics.   

To address the second topic first – variety is vital to success.  Before the Elgin Symphony Orchestra set its programming philosophy, we studied what other orchestras perform in the area.  We analyzed what we thought the CSO’s philosophy was, we looked at Chicago Sinfonietta’s funky programming, we looked at Music of the Baroque’s specialized programming, then we set our strategy based on what would make us unique and best fit our suburban audience.

Similarly, I continue to believe number of subscribers is the best measure of success but other great managers have used different measures to extraordinary success.  

As to the ESO’s strategy being boring, I believe the ESO’s job is to give riveting performances for the maximum number of audience members.  Exciting concerts are the conductor’s job.  As a manager, my job is to find successful techniques that give our Music Director the foundation he needs to be exciting; that might be boring but I love it. 

I assume the point being made in the first comment is that young audiences and contemporary compositions are precursors to future success.  To use an analogy I am sure I will regret, nursing homes do not worry about finding younger audiences.  They know that they will find new people when those people reach the right stage in life.  When I was in high school we said, “If it’s too loud, you’re too old”.  I do not know if our slogan has gone the way of “never trust anyone over 30”, but I think it still has validity. 

Concerts are designed for an atmosphere that appeals to a group of people; people who are looking for a contemplative, social event; an entertainment form that lends itself better to a 50-year-old than a 20-year-old.  We could try to change the format to meet the interest of 20-somethings.  Orchestra X in Texas did that to good effect.  Or we could try to build an atmosphere that appeals to all ages; several orchestras are looking for that model.  But, in the end, trying to be everything to everyone tends to be a dangerous strategy. 

Contemporary music is an interesting topic.  The world is full of great contemporary music.  You can find it on almost every program the ESO produces and I have difficulty envisioning a season with variety without contemporary music.  The question is what contemporary is.  Is contemporary the sharp atonalism written through the midpoint of the 20th century?  Does it have to be the major work on the program?  Does contemporary music have to be medicine? 

We use war horses to bring folks into the house, and then introduce them to more recent works that we think they are likely to enjoy.   Composers today are on par with any other period of music and our strategy is to demonstrate this to our audiences. 

I enjoy this blogging stuff.  It is a great forum for expressing philosophies and strategies.  If we all study what we are doing, take the best of what we see, and figure out how to do things ever better, our field is in for a great future.

The Elgin Symphony Orchestra is in the midst of our annual Strategic Planning process. As we debate who and what we are, as well as what we want to become, I find myself thinking about Jim Collins’ (author of Built to Last and Good to Great) Hedgehog Principle. Simply put, the Hedgehog Principle is that great organizations pick a single, objective, measurable item against which they judge their success.For Walgreen’s, it is sales per visit for their customers. If Walgreen’s average customer increases the amount they spend on each visit, things are good. If the customer spends less, things are bad. Once that principal is established, every decision Walgreen’s makes needs to support getting people to spend more money with each visit. Walgreen’s builds lots of stores in close proximity, even though this strategy decreases the number of visits per store, because the convenience increases the amount each person spends once they arrive. Of course Walgreen’s probably had hundreds, if not thousands, of measurable they could have chosen, but they chose the one that they thought most affected everything else.Now what is the one objective measurable symphonies can use? Is it positive newspaper reviews in a year, balanced budgets, ticket revenue, subscriber renewal rates? What drives our health?I think it is the number of Classic Series subscribers. Our Classic Subscribers are our most loyal audience - subscribers come more often within a season and from season to season than single ticket buyers and Classic subscribers renew at a higher rate than Pops subscribers – so they bring in our most sustainable earned income. Our Classic Subscribers both have a higher average gift and a large percent give than do any other donor category. Our Classic subscribers are our best source for volunteers and Board leadership. Growth in Classic Subscribers both implies that we are performing well enough for people to want to return and that we are marketing well. Once our halls are full, fundraising becomes more assured of success.If the ESO accepts that Classic Subscribers are the best objective measure of success, then we can tie everything into it. We need to continually improve the performance caliber so that more people want to return to us. We need to balance our budget because deficits would eventually undermine our ability to market effectively. When our telemarketing and telefunding campaigns run into conflict, we would know that marketing always wins because donations are a less direct way to sell more subscriptions than are subscription sales. If we debate a campaign to build a new arts center, we can frame the debate on the effect a new hall would have on subscription sales.Of course not everything will be clear. We might be able to increase subscription sales if we sold them at half the cost. So then we need to debate the long term effect of the marketing we can pay for through money raised by higher ticket prices vs. an increase in the number of subscriptions sold this season. When we added a Friday night to our Classic Series, we significantly increased the number of subscribers and significantly improved our bottom line, but we now have a night that is far from full; perhaps the impression of a 75% full hall is more damaging than the good brought by the increase in subscribership.This summer our group needs to come to consensus on what our objective measurable is. Once we have consensus, we then need to maintain the discipline of sticking with it and foster intelligent debate on how our decisions relate to this basic premise.