You’re sitting in your office on a Tuesday afternoon, staring at next year’s draft budget. The numbers don’t work. They haven’t worked in three years, but each year you’ve barely managed to close the gap—a little more here from donations, a little less there in production costs, another staff position left unfilled.

This year, the gap is wider. You need 15% revenue growth just to maintain current operations. Your board is clear: they won’t support a deficit. Your artistic director is clear: the budget cuts are already affecting production quality. Your development director is clear: donors are maxed out and need to see more audience engagement before they’ll increase giving.

So you turn to marketing. “We need 15% ticket revenue growth,” you say. And then, because the math demands it: “But we have to cut your budget by 20%.”

You watch your marketing director’s face as they process this impossible equation. You see the exhaustion, the frustration, maybe even the flash of anger quickly suppressed. And you feel it too—the impossibility of what you’re asking, the unfairness of it, the desperation that makes you ask anyway.

Later, you sit with a question you barely dare to ask yourself: What if we’re all trying to solve the wrong problem?

What if we’re all trying to solve the wrong problem?

The Cycle You Can’t Break

A day later, your marketing director stops by your office. “No one understands how hard this job is,” they say. “How hard it is to grow audiences and sell tickets with ever-decreasing resources. We’re one person short in the department and won’t be able to replace them this year. I don’t know how we can do more with less.”

You want to help. But you’re caught in the same impossible cycle. So you do what seems rational: bring in expertise, try new tools, ask your team to optimize and “work smarter not harder.” And you watch as they try. God, do they try.

You’ve watched them optimize email campaigns—then watched every department add “just one more thing” to each message. You’ve seen social media engagement numbers look good while box office numbers stay flat. You championed dynamic pricing that increased revenue a little but seems to be squeezing it from fewer people. You’ve approved programs to win back lapsed buyers that generate maybe 5% response, if that.

Some efforts produced short-term gains. But nothing has been sustained. And the question that keeps you up at 2 a.m. is this: If everyone is working this hard, why isn’t it working?

This Is Harder Than It Used To Be

Here’s what I need you to understand: If you feel like organizational leadership has become impossibly difficult, you’re right. The world has fundamentally changed, and faster than most of us realized.

Just 10 years ago, we had a less fragmented media environment. Social media platforms still seemed optimistic about their impact. Baby Boomers were the predominant generation buying—and they actually reacted to traditional marketing tactics. The Covid-19 pandemic hadn’t fundamentally changed people’s relationships with out-of-home entertainment. Messages would land and resonate easier than they do today.

The landscape shifted while we were busy executing our plans.

News reporting that once held credibility is now constantly called “fake” when it contradicts someone’s preferred narrative. Social media algorithms have buried organic reach. The pandemic rewired how people think about leaving their homes for entertainment. The generation that built our subscriber base is aging out, and the generations replacing them don’t respond to the same approaches.

These aren’t small adjustments to our operating environment. These are fundamental shifts in how people discover, evaluate, and commit to cultural experiences.

And they happened so gradually, then suddenly, that most of us didn’t realize how completely the rules had changed until we were already deep into the new reality.

These are fundamental shifts in how people discover, evaluate, and commit to cultural experiences.

When the Numbers Started Telling a Different Story

You don’t need me to tell you that something has shifted. You’re living it every day. But sometimes seeing the broader pattern helps you understand that what you’re experiencing isn’t unique to your organization—it’s happening across the entire sector.

Nonprofit email open rates that once soared above the industry average have fallen to mirror for-profit rates. The marketing tactics that reliably filled houses five years ago now generate diminishing returns. Customer acquisition costs have increased while customer lifetime value has decreased. The fundamental economics of audience development have shifted in ways that make the traditional model increasingly unsustainable.

Traditional advertising ROI has plummeted. Print advertising costs have remained relatively stable while readership has declined dramatically. Radio listenership is fragmenting across digital platforms and podcasts. Even digital advertising has become more expensive while conversion rates have stagnated or declined.

Organic social media reach has virtually disappeared. Your Facebook page that has thousands of followers sees only a small fraction of them actually view your posts. The algorithm changes across all major platforms mean that even accounts with strong engagement see their posts reach a smaller and smaller percentage of their followers without paid promotion. You’re creating more content than ever and reaching fewer people.

If you’re seeing these patterns in your own organization—and I’m willing to bet you are—it’s not because you’re failing to execute well enough.

It’s because something fundamental has changed in how people discover, evaluate, and commit to cultural experiences. And we’re still using the same playbook we used when the old rules applied.

The Bicycle with Square Wheels

I live in a still-developing neighborhood where traffic is light. Road cyclists have learned our neighborhood has miles of new, smooth pavement on which to train. We see bicycles everywhere—sleek road bikes, sturdy mountain bikes, the occasional recumbent that makes you do a double-take.

The situation I’ve just described—where you and your entire team are working harder than ever while getting worse results—feels less like riding a bicycle and more like pedaling a bicycle with square wheels.

Picture it: You’re trying desperately to move forward. You’re pedaling as hard as you can. Your marketing director is pedaling. Your development director is pedaling. Your artistic director is pedaling. Everyone is exhausted and sweating and pushing with everything they have.

And yes, you’re moving forward—barely. But every rotation is jarring. Forward, thud, stop. Forward, thud, stop. It’s inefficient, it’s exhausting, and the harder you pedal, the more bruising the ride becomes.

Meanwhile, you can see other organizations (maybe in other sectors, maybe even a few innovative arts organizations) who seem to be gliding along smoothly. They’re not working less hard than you—but something about their approach seems to work with the terrain instead of fighting it.

You know this can’t continue. The board meeting is next week. The season needs to be announced. The grant deadline is Friday. Everyone is pedaling harder, but the ride isn’t getting any smoother.

The Question

Something has shifted in how audiences discover, evaluate, and engage with cultural experiences. Something has changed in what they need from us, what they’re looking for, how they make decisions.

Most of us feel it. The strategies that used to work don’t work the same way anymore. The audiences we built our organizations to serve are changing—or have already changed. The value propositions that once resonated now seem to fall flat.

But we’re still using the same playbook, just with more variations on the old plays.

We’re still structuring our seasons the same way. Still marketing using the same approaches. Still measuring success using the same metrics. Still having the same conversations in board meetings and staff meetings and planning sessions.

We’re pedaling harder on the same bicycle, wondering why the ride keeps getting rougher.

What if the bicycle itself is the problem?

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I want to hear from you. What resonated in what you just read? What made you uncomfortable? What impossible equation are you trying to solve right now? Comment below or send me a direct message. I’ll reply to every note I receive.

Next in this series: We’ll look more closely at the effort itself—at what we’re actually doing when we market, when we engage audiences, when we try to build sustainable relationships. Because before we can imagine doing something different, we need to see clearly what we’re doing now.