The Chief Fundraiser: Maureen O'Brien
“As fundraisers we must listen carefully.”
6 Questions with Maureen O’Brien
Senior Vice President for Institutional Advancement at New World Symphony
Miami, FL
Maureen O’Brien is the senior vice president for institutional advancement at New World Symphony in Miami, where she oversees a team of 19 responsible for a $10M+ annual fund and a comprehensive endowment/capital campaign as well as public relations and storytelling.
The New World Symphony, America’s Orchestral Academy, prepares highly-gifted graduates of distinguished music programs for leadership roles in orchestras and ensembles around the world. NWS Fellows take advantage of the innovative performance facilities and state-of-the art practice and ensemble rooms of the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center, the campus of the New World Symphony and home of the Knight New Media Center.
1. How are you? How is your organization handling/preparing?
Like many of us, my usual response is, “hanging in there.” It’s such a challenging time and each of us is affected in different ways. At NWS we are focusing on modeling for multiple possible futures. A friend introduced me to a tool called Axes of Uncertainty that is used by futurists which has proven very helpful. It allows you to plot various continuums of scenarios that might happen and brainstorm around the intersection of two continuums. You can read about it HERE. What is wonderful about the tool is that even in the midst of so much anxiety and uncertainty, it allows you to uncover opportunity that you may not have otherwise seen. Like most of you, we’ve made the jump to Zoom and are getting better at it as the weeks go by. We’re trying to inject a little fun too, like team and All-Staff happy hours, to bring back some of the camaraderie that happens naturally in a physical workplace. In fact, last week we had an All-Staff Zoom happy hour themed around poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month.
2. How is this crisis impacting your organizational fundraising strategies, and are you re-imagining your advancement programs?
This crisis is causing us to totally reimagine everything. For New World Symphony, our primary contact with patrons and donors has been physical, surrounding live in-person concerts and at adjacent cultivation or stewardship events. We are relying much more heavily on phone calls and emails to check in, and carefully examining the tone of every communication we send out. We are taking a hard look at our funding priorities and thinking about what is truly core to our mission.
Donors have really appreciated us picking up the phone to just check in. Next week, our Fellows will be making calls to check in on our subscribers. We are beginning to brainstorm about virtual cultivation/stewardship events, such as inviting a small group of patrons to watch one of our online offerings at a designated time and then join us for a Zoom call afterwards. We are thinking very careful about expenditures. One small example: we were due to print our 2018-19 annual report last week. Instead, we released it digitally with a special cover note for donors and will be mailing a postcard next week to bring people’s attention to the release of the report. This decision saved thousands of dollars.
We are also re-imagining staffing. Some team members may be less busy by virtue of the nature of their jobs. Others may be suddenly overwhelmed producing digital content. We are looking at taking an audit of who in the organization has capacity and who has needs and matching those up. The silver lining could be opportunities to leverage skills that team members may have outside of their core job function and/or to give people opportunity to gain skills in areas they are interested in.
3. How do organizations best ask for money right now?
If an organization is serving an urgent need like health & human services or funding specifically for coronavirus relief, it’s important to forge ahead with asks. People at home want to feel like they are helping solve the immediate crisis. For other types of asks, it is much more nuanced. You can have very honest conversations with those nearest and dearest to the organization. You may find that some of those people still have capacity and desire to help. We have in fact received a couple of fairly significant unsolicited gifts during this period.
As fundraisers we must listen carefully. For some of our donors, their primary concern is for their health or the health of loved ones, or they may find themselves in a precarious financial situation and not be comfortable even thinking about charitable giving right now. For them the focus is on staying connected. I believe your strategy must, more than ever, be tailored to each donor and their personal situation.
4. How do you see this impacting the larger landscape of cultural patronage?
On the positive side, I see people and organizations coming together to put together relief funds and collaborate to advocate for public and private support of the arts. Here in Miami we are having a weekly call of all of the development directors of our local arts & culture organizations.
On the tough side, many people still see arts and culture as “nice to have” rather than core. No one would argue that we shouldn’t be funding core health & human services but my hope is that we can get to more of a “yes, and” approach – that arts & culture can be seen as an important part of feeding our humanity, our souls, our ability to connect with one another.
5. We are seeing all programming go virtual. I am investigating how organizations can convert these quarantine audiences into long-term audiences, members, and donors. What do you think, and what is NWS’s approach?
At NWS we have long been experimenting with digital expression and we agree that it’s exciting to think about how this time might even offer the opportunity to expand our audiences. Our Fellows moved quickly to create and produce a weekly online concert, Live from our Living Room, which airs each Friday evening at 7 p.m. on our Facebook page. They are playing solos or duos and careful to follow recommended social distancing guidelines. These concerts are being watched both by a live audience and being re-watched and shared significantly afterwards. Groups of Fellows have also been creating their own video versions of chamber music pieces like the Mendelssohn Octet, with each musician recording their part and submitting it to be edited together into a cohesive whole. You can also find this on our Facebook page.
Our Artistic Director, Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) also moved quickly to dream up an entirely new format we are calling Archive+, which features a video of a performance from our archive preceded by a brief conversation (via Zoom) between MTT and Fellows or guest artists who perform in that concert, giving viewers a more personalized window into and context for the performance. We release a new episode each Thursday on our website. We also partner with an audio and video streaming service (Idagio and Medici.TV respectively) where people can find many recordings and videos of past NWS performances. You can check out all of our online offerings at nws.edu/nwsdigital.
6. How might this change society’s view of the arts as a whole?
My hope is that people will come to realize that the things they are turning to for comfort and connection from their homes are all generated from arts & culture. Whether it’s an independent movie they found on Netflix or a familiar book they are re-reading, or connecting with their favorite arts organizations online, I would venture to say that almost everyone in America is enjoying some form of art & culture every day during this period. With that realization, I hope more people place the value on arts & culture that it deserves and that they consider patronizing more museums, orchestras, independent book stores, etc. after this crisis abates.
Maureen O’Brien is the senior vice president for institutional advancement at New World Symphony, where she oversees a team of 19 responsible for a $10M+ annual fund and a comprehensive endowment/capital campaign as well as public relations and storytelling.
O’Brien graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UW‒Madison, majoring in music and French. She was part of the founding team of the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix and has also held positions in NYC as director of development at Midori & Friends and assistant director of development with Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
A Certified Fund Raising Executive, O’Brien has taught at Arizona State University and Prescott College and as part of NWS's Fellowship curriculum in partnership with Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. She was a featured speaker at the Association Française des Fundraisers' 2015 conference in Paris, a presenter at the 2017 CASE Winter Institute for Chief Development Officers, and a panelist with Philanthropy Miami and CFO Arts Conference. Recognized by the Phoenix Business Journal as a member of the 2015 “40 Under 40” class, she is also a graduate of Valley Leadership Class 33.
O’Brien was a founding partner of Social Venture Partners Miami and has volunteered as board member for Arizona Citizens for the Arts, vice chair of Valley Leadership’s Leadership Institute, board secretary with Young Nonprofit Professionals Network Phoenix, core team member with Emerging Arts Leaders Phoenix, and cofounder of Classical Revolution PHX.
O’Brien is also a flutist, singer, and pianist, and an avid social dancer of Argentine tango. She is a co-founder of Open Air Tango #onLincoln, a free monthly tango event in the heart of Miami Beach.