For use: Friday, August 1, 2000 and thereafter

 

mfinley: "Folk Strategy"

by Michael Finley

For years I have been a student of strategic thought -- the art of deciding on an optimal future. Strategy is map-making; it tells an organization where to go and what to become. Of all the disciplines organizations must master, strategy is the most important, because things do not stand still any more. You have to anticipate change and adapt to them. Having a vision and a plan by which to make the vision a reality is an organization's only leverage against chaos and entropy.

That's the theory anyway. In fact, while I was a student of strategy, I never had much opportunity to be a practitioner of it -- until I was asked to actually help lead something. That something was the Minnesota Folk Festival.

The Minnesota Folk Festival is a down-home, exceptionally nonprofit group headed by Saint Paul folk impresario Deborah Martin. The Festival mounts periodic concert of whatever constitutes folk music and dance these days.

So, for some reason, I can hear your thoughts: How much high-level strategy does a roomful of bearded ukulele pickers require?

It turns out, it requires quite a bit, and strategy is not easy to arrive at, because different visions abound. Our little board involves a handful of people with very specific ideas about what a folk festival is. Besides me and Deb, there's Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary, Kevin Kling the playwright, Richard Broderick the poet and activist, piper and legislative librarian Dennis Skrade, and businessman and banjoist Dennis Van Norman. We get along fine, but we have no easy consensus on what we are trying to do, and every meeting involves a re-envisioning of our mission.

Let me give you some examples of how our strategy could wobble.

1. A folk festival could position itself:

• As a crossover event, flirting with the boundaries of pop, serving up celebrities and household names with a current album to plug, and perhaps only a cursory relationship to folk music.
• As the opposite, a kind of academic purity test, eschewing anything electrified or bearing a freshness stamp more recent than the Spanish American War.
• As world music, a wholesale kowtowing to multiculturalism, at the expense (conceivably) of musical quality. Imagine lots of dance lines of little girls in native dress.
• As partisans to a particular strain of music -- an all-bagpipes, all the time, festival.

2. Likewise, we could pay for the festival any number of ways:

• by charging admission (and risking low turnout)
• by looking instead to corporate sponsors to pay the freight (and risking a contradiction to our "roots" identity)

3. Virtually every operational decision has a strategic consequence:

• We could play a high-stakes game, throwing a lot of money at a one-day event, with top stars, hoping for instant success but risking financial disaster if the audience fails to materialize, the stars fail to rouse themselves from a drunken stupor, or the sun fails to part the black bank of thunderheads.
• Or we could fly under radar, spending as we earn, hoping for slow growth over several years time but risking perennial perception of being small-potatoes, and thus failing to command respect of performers or audience loyalty.

This is a lot to ponder, and it is no easy thing keeping a volunteer organization on point with a clear vision. But we did a few things right. We have avoided outside facilitation. We have avoided, except for one wild weekend a year ago, melting down over the wording of a mission statement. And we have avoided exclusionary "if this/then not that" thinking.

Why, after all, can’t a festival that is naturally diverse and about a lot of things, be a lot of things? Therefore our Sept. 16 festival, to be held all day at Mears Park in Saint Paul's Lowertown, will feature both traditional folk musicians and the more contemporary sounds of singer-songwriters.

Why can’t we rely both on audience donations, collecting from a bucket as people leave, while asking corporations for help via sponsorships? We are already proud to have Summit Brewing sign on as a partner, and we think they’re a great match -- authentic, robust, and a little red in the face.

But as for the third choice, it has really been no choice at all. Music festivals that lay out a lot of cash on the "Build it and they will come" philosophy have a history of getting shellacked by poor response, or by poor weather. Our decision is to stay small, and grow steadily.

Last year's festival, fewer than 2,000 people showed up. This September, we're betting on a better crowd, perhaps 10,000. (Why not? With free admission, people can come and go all day.)

And even if that number should fail, we have our core strategic competence to fall back on -- Deb Martin's love of folk music, and her determination to make this thing a success, however many years it takes. And overnight success -- well, it just ain't folky, you know?.

 

Michael Finley's FUTURE SHOES

1841 Dayton Avenue

St. Paul, MN 55104

Phone 651-644-4540