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Relaxed Performance Visual Guide

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra presented their first Relaxed Performance, “Let’s Dance,” on April 27th, 2019. This performance is designed specifically for people living with autism spectrum disorders, sensory and communication disorders, learning disabilities, or anyone who would benefit from a more casual concert experience.

Visual Guide: I am going to see a Toronto Symphony Orchestra ConcertThe Relaxed Performance differed from other TSO concerts in a number of ways:

  • If patrons need to move around, express themselves vocally, leave the concert hall, or take a break in the quiet room, they are welcome to;
  • Audience members will have access to a Visual Guide that details the concert experience, step by step, in order to reduce anxiety about it, and a fact sheet with detailed information about the performance itself;
  • Rows of seats at the back of the hall will be kept empty should guests wish to move away from the sound of the orchestra on stage;
  • Patrons will have access to a quiet room furnished with comfortable seating, stress-relieving fidgets, and relaxing activities;
  • The TSO will provide other resources such as sound-dampening headphones;
  • Specialized training will be provided to musicians, TSO staff, and front-of-house personnel at Roy Thomson Hall by Relaxed Performance Consultant, Rachel Marks.

You can download the Visual Guide prepared for this performance here. Thank you to Aaron McFarlane and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for sharing this with us!

Four Filters of Active Listening

It’s something every symphony orchestra has heard at least once from a teacher. “Oh, my students won’t like that. They can’t handle listening to it, and they think it’s boring”. We know that live music is anything but boring. So how do we equip kids with the tools to understand what they’re hearing?

The Windsor Symphony Orchestra’s education programs focus on developing active listening skills. In active listening, students learn to focus on what they hear and respond to the information presented. Imagine a world in which relationships are developed based on the basic concept of really listening to each other!

The lesson plan, “Four Filters” encourages kids to try new ways of listening. This lesson plan explores melody, harmony, rhythm and visuals, discussing those concepts and using a listen-and-react exercise which helps students identify and describe them in pieces of music.

This year, the four filters were deployed at a partnership concert with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Blindfolded patrons were encouraged to listen for melody, harmony and rhythm in a program, and to consider the emotions that are evoked using these musical elements.

Looking to the future, we have also presented the “four filters” approach to Faculty of Education students, the next generation of teachers. The WSO is committed to bringing active listening to patrons young and old, secure in the knowledge that our community is made stronger when we know how to listen to one another.

You can download the WSO’s ‘Four Filters’ presentation here. Thank you very much to the team at the Windsor Symphony Orchestra for being willing to share this resource with us!

To learn more about this, listen to WSO Music Director Robert Franz’s TEDx talk: Active Listening and Our Perception of Time.

Ontario Orchestra Patrons Research

In the summer of 2018, Orchestras Canada (in collaboration with Ontario Presents) launched a research project on Ontario smaller budget orchestras’ audiences. OC invited orchestras with annual revenues under $1 million to anonymize their patron data, and send the resulting lists of patron postal codes to OC. Using Environics’ powerful PRIZM5 tool, the team at OP then analyzed patron data from 24 different orchestras (in the city of Toronto, in the Golden Horseshoe, and in regional centres from Ottawa to Burlington, North Bay and Sudbury to Kitchener-Waterloo). The end result? An overall picture of smaller budget orchestras’ audiences – plus some nuanced perspective on the City of Toronto, the Golden Horseshoe, and regional orchestra audiences across the province.

Very few smaller-budget groups can afford this kind of sophisticated data analysis on their own, but by pooling member orchestras’ data and working in collaboration with OP, Orchestras Canada was able to offer orchestras some unique insights into orchestras’ audiences, and the catchment areas that they serve. The project was funded in part by Orchestras Canada’s generous donors, who contribute to our research efforts on behalf of Canadian orchestras.

We are thrilled to share with you the final report from Ontario Presents on this research. This is a more detailed expansion of the presentation given by Judy Harquail and Natalie Dewan back in November at OC’s Ontario Small Budget Orchestra Workshop. The report includes a great deal of information. In order to get the most out of it, we suggest you take a look at the following sections:

  • Page 3 for a basic overview
  • Page 4 for a picture of the typical orchestra patron in Ontario as a whole
  • Page 22 for further information on patrons common to all of Ontario
  • The target set for your region: City of Toronto (pg 9), Suburban GTA (pg 13), or Regional Centres (towns/cities outside of the GTA- pg 17)
  • Page 22 for tips on how to effectively use this information

You can download the report here.

The report also references the Prizm5 Handbook. You can find this handbook here.

Advocacy Checklist

Advocacy Checklist Download (DOC)
Advocacy Checklist Download (PDF)

Making Friends and Building Allies at your Orchestra

Fostering and strengthening support with all levels of government – municipal, provincial and federal – is important for all orchestras. Having knowledgeable friends and allies is helpful at the best of times; when you really need them, it’s good to know they are there.

To ensure that advocacy and government relations are an ongoing part of your operation, consider making them a regular item at board and staff meetings.

Tweet from the Regina Symphony reading: Proud of our Executive Director @tanyaderksen advocating for the arts in our community! #orchestrasmatter

Agree on key messages. These could be highlights of recent achievements, opportunities you foresee and the challenges you face. Keep it upbeat and optimistic, especially in the early stages of a relationship

It’s important to recognize that our elected representatives are busy and have many demands on their time. More often than not, they will be supportive of your orchestra and the work you do – especially if they understand your impact and contribution to your community. It’s up to you to make sure elected representatives know about your orchestra and your work. To help, here is a check list of easy actions for your orchestra to implement. We suggest you review it regularly.

An Advocacy Checklist for your Orchestra

Build relationships with representatives
  • Invite elected officials to opening night or other key events in your season. Ensure board members are on hand to host them, and prepare your leaders with some key speaking points
  • Find an opportunity during the season for public recognition of your representatives
  • Establish an annual meeting between your board chair, staff and artistic leaders, and elected officials to update them on achievements and challenges
  • Distribute your season brochure to constituency offices, and put elected officials on your email and mailing lists
  • Engage with elected officials on social media. Follow them and engage positively, especially when there’s good news to share
  • Look for opportunities to highlight your community engagement activities to elected officials. Consider what might make a great photo opportunity!
  • Regularly review officials’ newsletters and websites, to see what they are focussed on
Connect with your public funders
  • Make sure you create a connection with potential funders before applying for a grant. Schedule regular meetings with your key contacts. Make sure they receive regular information about your orchestra and know your achievements, challenges and opportunities
  • Attend relevant information sessions in your community or on-line
  • Whether you liked the results or not, always seek feedback from funders, and listen carefully to their advice
Collaborate with other organizations
  • Join city-wide or regional arts councils
  • Consider establishing a monthly get-together with colleagues at other arts organizations to share information and insights

Perfect Fifth of Diversity: A framework for self-assessment

At two recent OC member convenings, Orchestras Canada welcomed conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser to talk about equity in the orchestra. Daniel is a member of the OC board, chair of our Equity Committee, and Artist-in-Residence and Community Ambassador with Symphony Nova Scotia. At these events, Daniel presented the Perfect Fifth of Diversity, a discussion tool for orchestras to use in considering their equity work.

As Daniel noted, diversity is going to look different in different communities; but for all organizations, there is a real opportunity to engage with people who don’t yet feel welcome at the orchestra in a way that benefits all involved. To help clarify the starting place, Daniel proposes five questions for orchestras to consider.

1. Who is playing?

This element concerns your musicians, soloists and conductors. Most professional orchestras have an audition process during which applicants for tenure track positions play behind a screen for several rounds before their identity is revealed. Selection processes for music directors, soloists, and per service musicians take various shapes. And smaller budget groups may have more flexibility in their modes of casting. No matter what, are we ensuring that our selection processes address conscious or unconscious bias?

We also know that pathways to a career in classical music rely on early exposure, access to instruments, and inspiring teachers and role models, along with the financial resources to pursue serious study over many years. Auditions present financial barriers, as well, such as paying for flights, hotels, and extra lessons. In the USA, the Sphinx Organization in collaboration with the League of American Orchestras and the New World Symphony have started the National Alliance for Audition Support, a program that provides financial support to Black and Latinx musicians attending auditions.

2. Who is being played?

Does our programming reflect the communities we want to serve, as well as the musical traditions and inspirations we have historically celebrated? Do we want to program music of diverse styles, by a more diverse range of composers, including living, women, and Indigenous composers, and composers of colour? Some audiences are curious to hear works they don’t know, and others will stay away. How do we balance comfort, tradition, and challenge, in a sustainable and artistically sound way? This would see the orchestra of the future both continuing to present beloved classics, and becoming a library of sound that puts itself at the service of diverse styles, traditions and communities.

3. Who is listening?

Are our audiences reflective of the community we are hoping to serve? We need to consider what the access point is for tickets to our concerts, and whether we are programming and marketing our concerts in a way that appeals to a diverse range of audiences. This element looks at how we are making our orchestra accessible to communities that are not only culturally diverse, but also diverse in terms of age, socio-economic status or spectrum-linked diversity. This is important both as a means of better serving our communities, and as a means of growing our audience.

4. Who is deciding?

We need to look at who is in positions of power at our organizations – in artistic leadership roles, in staff leadership roles, and on the board of directors. As well, from whom do we seek input, to ensure diverse perspectives in the decision-making process?

5. How is this being done?

A lot of orchestras’ work in community engagement projects involves collaborating with non-traditional artists and community partners, and these projects present many opportunities for reflection on orchestral culture and approaches. How is power distributed between the music director, soloists and other collaborators in rehearsal and performance spaces? How do we approach time, and how do we make space for exploration in the context of an orchestral service? How might we collaborate in a way that nurtures and gives power to voices outside of the orchestra’s traditional hierarchy?

The questions that Daniel is raising are deliberately non-prescriptive: each orchestra will need to answer these questions in its own way, and reach its own conclusions. Orchestras Canada is excited to be part of the discussion, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Comparative Report Archives

Each year, Orchestras Canada collects and collates financial information and audience numbers from member orchestras and produces a detailed Comparative Report which is then shared among all the participating orchestras. The Summaries are created from the detailed information in the Comparative Report. They provide business snapshots of the Canadian orchestra industry in overview. Detailed information from all orchestras has been consolidated in two ways: by budget size and by regions.

Comparative Report 2023-2024

Comparative Report 2022-2023

Comparative Report 2021-2022

Comparative Report 2020-2021

Quick Guide to the 2019-20 Comparative Report Summaries
Comparative Report 2019-20 – Summary by Budget Size
Comparative Report 2019-20 – Summary by Region
Comparative Report 2019-20 – Side-by-side comparison with the 2018-19 Summaries By Budget Size
Comparative Report 2019-20 – Side-by-side comparison with the 2018-19 Summaries By Region

Quick Guide to the 2018-19 Comparative Report Summaries
Comparative Report 2018-19 – Summary by Budget Size
Comparative Report 2018-19 – Summary by Region

Quick Guide to the 2017-18 Comparative Report Summaries
Comparative Report 2017-18 – Summary by Budget Size
Comparative Report 2017-18 – Summary by Region

Quick Guide to the 2016-17 Comparative Report Summaries
Comparative Report 2016-17 – Summary by Budget Size
Comparative Report 2016-17 – Summary by Region

Comparative Report 2015-16 – Summary by Budget Size
Comparative Report 2015-16 – Summary by Region

Quick Guide to the 2014-15 Comparative Report Summaries
Comparative Report 2014-15 – Summary by Budget Size
Comparative Report 2014-15 – Summary by Region

Quick Guide to the 2013-14 Comparative Report Summaries
Comparative Report 2013-14 – Summary by Budget Size
Comparative Report 2013-14 – Summary by Region

For access to summary data from earlier years, please contact Orchestras Canada at [email protected]

Helping People Fall in Love with your Orchestra

At Orchestras Canada’s Ontario Music Directors’ Meeting on January 19th, we welcomed Carol Kehoe as a special guest. Carol has more than 25 years of experience in leadership roles at arts organizations such as Museum London, the Grand Theatre, the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Choir, where she has recently been appointed Executive Director.

We invited Carol because we knew that she could address, in practical and humane ways, the many questions that group members had about their relationship with their orchestra’s governance, audience development, and fundraising efforts.

For members of this group (and many others like them in other parts of Canada), serving as music director is not a purely artistic role. As one of the very few (or perhaps the only) people paid to get things done in their organizations, smaller-budget orchestra music directors are often called upon to get involved in fundraising, strategy development, human resources, volunteer management, public positioning, and beyond.

Fundraising

In Carol’s view, smaller organizations need to be “scrappy” and fight for opportunities to share your stories in your community. An important first step: define your role in the community. Are you THE only orchestra, or do you play a complementary role to other orchestras and musical groups around you? What makes you unique? Do you provide orchestral music to underserved parts of your community? Is your membership distinctive? Is your repertoire unique? It can be useful to look at municipal cultural and strategic plans to see how your goals might align with that of the city or region you are in. How is your orchestra uniquely positioned to help your community reach its goals?

With this vital information in hand, you and your organization can then start discussions with potential partners. It’s not a one-way discussion: you’re looking to listen and learn. If your potential partner doesn’t specifically support the arts, they may be interested in supporting children’s programs, or emerging talent, or one of the other amazing activities your organization does.

Building these relationships takes time, and never really ends. It’s often easier to keep an existing partner than to find a new one, so it’s important to acknowledge the people and organizations who have helped you in the past. Perhaps you, a board member or a musician can call donors to thank them, or write them handwritten notes. What about using special occasions like Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving to send cards, just so they know what their support means to your orchestra?

Governance

Board recruitment is difficult, and it’s only getting harder. While in the past, the business community were encouraged or even told to get involved in the governance of non-profit organizations, this is no longer the case. Volunteers tend to want to be involved in short-term projects, rather than being financially responsible for something long-term.

In much the same way as defining your orchestra’s role in the community before approaching potential donor or sponsor organizations, this is also important when recruiting to your board of directors. Help people fall in love with your organization by finding a set of definable ‘selling points’ for potential new board members. Why should they give their time, connections and money to you? It can be useful to start with low-hanging fruit: work with your nominating committee and go into your community to find people who already love what you do. Get them on board first.

Boards of directors have responsibilities of fiduciary oversight, ensuring that mission and money are aligned. Over time, non-profits have asked our boards to expand their roles, to be all things to all people. We can and do rely on our boards for all kinds of things – from connections, to donations, and, in smaller organizations, even day-to-day orchestra management, operations, and marketing. Whether we want to have a board that’s more hands on, or less, it’s critical to have processes and people to help your orchestra get the right people involved, and to ensure that these partnerships are beneficial for both parties. Music directors, as staff leaders, can help create the environment in which this can happen.

We’d like to thank Carol Kehoe for sharing her time, energy and considerable expertise with OC and our members.

Orchestras in the Ridings: Meeting Materials

In November 2018, members of Orchestras Canada’s Advocacy Committee met with their Members of Parliament to deliver a united message for Canadian orchestras. These meetings were the first phase of an ambitious effort to engage as many of you as possible in meeting with your MPs to share collective messages about the value of orchestras, and the importance of enlightened federal policy and funding programs.

Following this, we asked representatives from Canadian orchestras coast to coast, to request face-to-face meetings in their riding with their MP or MPs during the 2018-2019 Parliamentary break.

The following is a list of materials that can be useful in requesting, preparing for, holding, and following up from a meeting with your elected representative.

To Request a Meeting
  1. If you don’t know who your MP is, follow this link and scroll down to the “find” function, and enter your postal code.
  2. Check our master spreadsheet of all MPs, so you can quickly identify which MPs have already met with orchestra representatives. If you have a choice, please do request a meeting with an MP who are not yet “claimed”. We’d like the messages to be delivered TO as diverse a group as possible, BY as diverse a group as possible.
  3. Customize our template meeting request and send it to your MP, either by email or to the constituency office address listed on our master spreadsheet.
Meeting Tools & Materials

In this folder, you will find a range of useful advocacy tools and materials, tested by our intrepid advocacy committee when they met with their elected officials in November. To prepare thoroughly for your meeting, we encourage you to read through what’s inside:

Advocacy Webinar

On January 17th, 2019, Orchestras Canada’s government relations advisor Micheline McKay discussed the process of setting up, preparing for and holding a meeting with your elected representative, and took questions on this year’s messages. You can access the recording here upon supply of a name, email address and organization. The corresponding slide deck is available here.

The Practicalities of Patron Data

Slide Deck Available Here
Canadian Opera Company Case Study Available Here

At Orchestras Canada’s Ontario Small Budget Orchestras Workshop on November 3rd, we heard from Phil Stephens, an experienced arts marketer and fundraiser who has worked with a number of Toronto-area arts organizations including Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, the Canadian Opera Company, Tapestry Opera, and the Toronto Bach Festival.

Phil addressed not only the “what”, “how” and “why” of collecting patron data, but also how smart arts groups of all sizes are using patron data to connect better with audiences and grow revenues.

What to collect?

Phil stresses that the more information you have about your patrons, the better you can engage with them. Invest the time in keeping patron data up to date: the best-crafted subscription renewal package won’t do you any good if it’s sent to an out of date address. Understand and acknowledge patrons’ preferences, so that you aren’t wasting time and money on people who have no interest in being contacted.

He specifically recommends that you collect, maintain and protect the following information on your patrons: Name, email address, mailing address, phone number(s), ticket purchase and/or donation history, where they work, how they became involved with your organization, what their communication preferences are (online or offline, how often), and which member of your organization they usually communicate with.

It’s also important to ‘clean’ new data as it comes in, to make sure that you aren’t duplicating contact records. Note that approximately 20% of your patron data changes each year, so it’s important to update your records promptly with the precious information that your patrons share with you.

How do you collect patron data?

“Your data is your life”, Phil says. Go out of your way to collect it, keep it relevant, and use it to make decisions. Many organizations will be able to collect patron data from their box office, though some box office service providers are hesitant to share this data. (This subject was explored in another session at this workshop on the legalities of working with patron information.)

Other ways to collect patron data could include: surveys or other name collection exercises at concerts, forms on your website, email surveys (if you have permission to contact your patrons by email). Be clear with patrons about why you’re asking for the information, explicitly ask for their permission to contact them about orchestra events, and respect their wishes.

What can you use patron data for?

In order to know how to use all of this data, it’s necessary to understand something about communication channels. Phil talked about a number of levels of communication, including:

  1. 1. Mass, 2. Public, 3. Group, 4. Personal, 5. Intra-personalMass Communication: information transmitted to multiple people at the same time, such as print, web, radio or television advertisements, blogs, websites or podcasts.
  2. Public Communication: information transmitted by one person to a targeted group of people, ranging from a public speaking engagement to an email blast.
  3. Group Communication: interactions within a small group trying to achieve a shared goal. Focus groups are a great example of group communication.
  4. Interpersonal Communication: communication between two people who can influence one another. Telemarketing and in-person discussions are two examples.
  5. Intrapersonal Communication: the crucial inner dialogue that we each engage in as we make large and small decisions.

Image of different communication channelsIt doesn’t take a huge organization to use data effectively. Whatever resources you have, with the right data you can personalize your communications, and engage with people in ways that acknowledge their interests and values. Demonstrate empathy. For example, if a patron has only attended past concerts featuring piano soloists, they will likely appreciate learning about the all-Chopin extravaganza you have coming up. If they’re always at your afternoon concerts, then perhaps they should be direct-mailed about next month’s matinee rather than being telemarketed at dinner-time about subscribing to your evening concert series.

Knowing your patrons better is also helpful when making your case to sponsors and funders. They want to know about your community impact!

Finally, having multiple avenues of communication can be important in increasing the responses to your campaigns. Phil presented a case study based on a Canadian Opera Company campaign, in which they tested email, direct mail and combined approaches to converting single ticket buyers into season subscribers. Some single ticket buyers received email messages only, some received hard copy direct mail, and some got both. The purchase response from the email-only group was 3-4%, the direct mail-only group was 10-15%, and those who received both responded at a rate of 30%!

While direct mail is more expensive, it’s clear that multiple communication channels can promote higher response rates. And those channels are only available to organizations that collect, protect, and maintain their patron data.

We’d like to thank Phil Stephens for sharing his time and expertise with OC and our members.

The Legalities of Collecting, Protecting and Working with Patron Information

At Orchestras Canada’s Ontario Small Budget Orchestras Workshop on November 3, we heard from lawyer Ryan Prendergast, of Carters Professional Corporation. Ryan has extensive experience in providing corporate and tax advice to charities and non-profit organizations, and he led a lively session on the legalities of collecting, protecting and working with patron information. The slide deck from this session is available here.

A quick heads-up: this article and the points mentioned in the accompanying slide deck do not constitute legal advice. We advise you to consult with a qualified lawyer and obtain a written opinion concerning the specifics of your situation.

Why this is important

Any information that you keep on your patrons could be viewed as sensitive. When you keep information on these people, you are being trusted to take care of it, and to use it responsibly. Whether this relates to your concert attendees, musicians, or donors, you need to have proper systems in place for keeping it secure. Patron data can be susceptible to cyber attacks, or mis-use by employees or volunteers. It pays to have strong information collection protocols in place, and to take the time to train anyone working with your patron data on those protocols.

What you need to know

Privacy legislation varies by province, there are overlaps between key pieces of legislation, and it is constantly being updated as communication technologies advance. The main sources of privacy law are:

  1. Federal Legislation, such as the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)

This act applies to the collection, use or disclosure of personal information in the course of a commercial activity. Given the blurry lines between what is or isn’t a ‘commercial activity’ at an orchestra, it is generally best practice to take steps to comply with PIPEDA. Among many other things, PIPEDA requires that organizations obtain consent before collecting data. They must

  • collect it by lawful means,
  • collect it for a clear purpose,
  • give individuals access to the information the organization holds about them.

Information that has been anonymized and stripped of identifiable markers is not subject to privacy protection, however the risk of re-identification may exist.

  1. Provincial Legislation

Similar legislation exists in individual provinces, but it is not identical. In Ontario (where this workshop was given), provincial privacy legislation includes the Personal Health Information Protection Act and the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act

  1. Federal Legislation, such as Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)

This act came into force in July, 2014 and prohibits the sending of commercial electronic messages (CEMs) unless the sender has express or implied consent. Express consent means that someone has clearly agreed (orally or in writing) to receive commercial electronic messages. Express consent does not expire, but can be withdrawn. It’s important to include unsubscribe links in CEMs to allow for this. Implied consent is slightly more complicated, and is given when someone:

  • “Conspicuously publishes their email address” by including it on a website or having it printed on a business card;
  • Engages in a “business relationship” with your organization, perhaps by attending your concerts or events;
  • Engages in a non-business relationship with your organization, perhaps by being a member, donor or volunteer at your organization.

It’s important that we know when and how individuals have consented to receive electronic messages from us: implied consent expires after two years. If someone doesn’t attend any of your events for this time, you are obliged to take them off your list unless they’ve given consent in another way.

This act normally does not apply to social media, but does apply to direct messaging using SMS or social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn.

In addition to being the law, CASL can also be seen as an example of best communication practices. Communications are most effective when we’re in dialogue with people who want to hear from us, value our content, and feel that we’re listening to them, too. You can save time and money by removing people from your database who have demonstrated that they are not interested in what your organization is doing.

What you can do

Institute (or update) your privacy policy. The policy should be accessible to the public, and it should outline:

  • How personal information will be collected, used, protected and disclosed
  • The process for making and handling complaints and requests for access to and correction of personal information
  • The process for dealing with, reporting and communicating data breaches
  • Who your Privacy Officer is, including contact information

Orchestras Canada’s Privacy Policy is available on our website. Other useful privacy-related policies will depend on your organization’s activities, but could include:

  • CASL Compliance Policy
  • Intellectual Property Policy
  • Social Media Fundraising Policy
  • Staff or Volunteer Privacy Agreement (outlining staff or volunteer obligations with respect to patron privacy)

As Ryan Prendergast told workshop participants, “with the advent of modern technologies as well as social media, the legislatures and courts in Canada are continually creating new avenues for privacy and related protection of individuals… To avoid potential pitfalls involving donor information, charities, directors and senior management should be aware of privacy-related obligations, and implement a proactive approach to compliance.”

Orchestras Canada thanks Mr. Prendergast for a remarkably lively and informative session. If you want to learn more, you can download Ryan Prendergast’s slide deck here.