The One-Person Everything Shop

In her 30-year career at the National Academy of Sciences, Wendy White traveled the world, helping to set up scientific networks in almost 50 countries. On one trip, departing from a small airport in Kenya, White handed her ticket to a man at the counter. Out on the tarmac, the same man collected her boarding pass. “I’m sitting in the plane, and the same ticket guy climbs into the cockpit and starts flying the plane,” White recalls. “As we’re in flight, he gets this wooden box of Orange Nehi soda and pushes it back from the cockpit and down the aisle.” 

Now with five years under her belt as executive director of the Larimer Chorale in Fort Collins, Colorado, the memory makes her laugh. “That guy was the ultimate one-man show,” she says. “And it feels just like that for me sometimes.”

White is one of many administrators “flying solo” as the primary manager of a choral organization. Some chorus administrators are board members or board chairs that have been pressed into service. Others are founders or artistic directors who handle the musical product as well as the day-to-day operational details. For some, like White, chorus management is an “encore” career that draws on their long experience in corporate or nonprofit jobs.

But what does it take to be a one-person shop? How do you get the Orange Nehi down the aisle while flying the plane? We asked a number of solo chorus administrators to tell us about the challenges they face and the resources that help them get their jobs done.

The Nature of the Job

Being a one-person shop requires an ability to juggle and manage a long list of duties, from big- picture strategic planning to the nitty-gritty operational tasks. Stephanie Harris, executive director of the Bainbridge Chorale (Bainbridge Island, Washington) offered this list:

“I produce all our printed materials, supervise concert promotion and advertising, negotiate for rehearsal and performance venues, oversee our two youth programs, maintain the website, send out communications to members, see that the music is ordered and stored, run the office, answer email, confer with the music director and board president on everything, attend board meetings, make sure our donors are recognized, act as the representative for our chorus with local community organizations, volunteer at the fundraiser, introduce ideas for new events … and try to keep everyone happy!”

Joanne Paulino of the Symphonic Choir of Southwest Florida stresses that have to keep up with all facets of the job such that you are not just putting out fires.

When she took the job, Harris had been a singer with the Chorale for decades, and the Chorale’s previous managing director had involved her informally in the administrative work. “I was aware of the scope of the job,” says Harris, who had business experience working with her husband in an interior design firm. Even so, she works twice her specified number of hours a week.

Joanne Paulino inherited the role of manager of the Symphonic Chorale of Southwest Florida when it became an independent nonprofit in 2011. The Chorale had been part of the Southwest Florida Symphony for nearly 50 years—“we simply had to show up and sing,” she says—and the separation, as a result of financial crisis at the symphony, has been a difficult culture shift for the volunteer membership. All administrative work is handled by the volunteer board, of which Paulino is president.

The biggest challenge, she says, is “keeping up with everything that needs to be kept up with and doing it in a timely manner so you are not just putting fires out.” In addition to her chorus responsibilities, Paulino works as a freelance writer for a small marketing company. “I spend nights working on chorus things,” she says. “The job is more than full time, and expands to fill whatever time is available.”

In 2013, Brandon Elliot founded the 27-member Choral Arts Initiative (Irvine, California), a group dedicated to performing and commissioning new music. “For the first two years it was all me,” says Elliott, who now has more volunteer help. His official title is artistic director, but, he says, “We still jokingly label me as the Artistic-Music-Development-Marketing-Outreach-Operations Director."  

Elliott balances his work with the Choral Arts Initiative with his job as assistant professor of music and director of choral and vocal activities at Moorpark College. Two and a half days of the work week are devoted to administration of the chorus, including website maintenance, sending acknowledgement letters to donors, finding and visiting venues, and creating board agendas. Sundays are devoted to reviewing music scores—because of its commitment to new music, the group has received 1,300 submissions—and programming. 

Brandon Elliot (center) is artistic director of the Choral Arts Initiative. His duties include running dress rehearsals, training box office volunteers on ticket sale software, and leading discussions about the group's vision.

Being a one-person shop means you need to know about a lot of things—and know what you don’t know. “I really had to hold up the mirror to myself and say, ‘What are my weaknesses?’” Elliott says. “For me it was publicity and marketing. I don’t think that is something that most choral conductors intuitively do.” To fill his knowledge gaps, he went to a bookstore and bought books on the topic. And he ordered Chorus America’s publications on chorus management.

Getting and Staying Organized

Putting orderly processes in place is a major task for one-person shops. Because of her experience in a large, international nonprofit, White approached her job with the Larimer Chorale like a business. “The singing stands alone and speaks for itself,” she told the group, “but we need to have rules, policies and procedures in place for the non-singing part … It shows that we are well-governed, that we are a player.”

White uses board meetings as her organizing principle. “I go from board meeting to board meeting thinking, ‘What do we need to accomplish? What were the action items from the last meeting? What do I need? What kind of progress do I want to show?’ Then I write my report based on what we said we were going to do, haven’t done yet, and still need to do.”

Harris depends heavily on a big corkboard bulletin board on the wall next to her desk. She fills her calendar first with the known quantities—rehearsals, performances, board meetings—and then adds production and printing deadlines, class schedules for the youth choirs, and the like. She also records when key volunteers or board members are going to be away.

Stephanie Harris of the Bainbridge Chorale in front of the bulletin board that helps her organize and track her many duties.

Paulino says she “lives and dies” by Excel spreadsheets. “Everything we do—repertoire, venue dates and locations, rosters for chorus members—goes in there. I don’t know how anyone can do this job if they can’t do Excel.” She also depends heavily on the search function when dealing with her avalanche of emails. “I try to read and sort as they come in,” she says, “but when someone calls and asks about the name of our next venue, I can pull up all my emails about that.”

Elliott is a fan of the online task management application Evernote. “I use it as a brain dumping place,” Elliott says, “and then I can categorize and prioritize, add follow-up tasks, and invite a board member or others to view what I am working on. It has been really great for a lot of my planning. ”

With a full plate of responsibilities, finding the right balance between planning and executing can be a challenge. Harris sometimes feels like “I can sit down and write about it or I can do it,” she says. Her goal is to be more formally organized—she would like to create a calendar with task completion dates, for example—but for now, “I am running as fast as I can.”  

Rallying the Troops

One key to the viability of one-person shops is enlisting volunteers to help—and these efforts start with an active, effective board. “They do not sit back and give direction and hope for results,” says the Bainbridge Chorale’s Harris of her 10-person board. “They participate deeply in fundraising and other tasks.”

For his start-up, Elliott recruited a temporary board of “close friends who trusted me blindly,” he says, but has gradually transitioned to a predominantly non-singer board of members with specific operational skills, such as development and finance. When the organization was new, Elliott says he had to be something of a “micromanager” to make sure tasks got completed. “The more we have progressed forward, the less I have to follow up because people just do it. There is a flow to the work.”

Paulino says the Symphonic Chorale also has had success recruiting professionals from the community who can do important pieces of board work. “We now have a CPA as our volunteer treasurer,” she says, “and having that professional input has made a tremendous difference in our ability to make decisions this year.” The Chorale has adopted a policy that officers of the board must be full-time residents of Florida—not “snowbirds” who are away during the summer months when the Chorale works on upcoming seasons. “We have a core group doing the planning that has to happen,” Paulino says.

Wendy White (left) accepting the Chorus America 2013 Education and Community Engagement Award for the Larimer Chorale’s Singing for Seniors program. Working on behalf of the Chorale is an “honor,” she says.

Beyond the board, relying too heavily on singers as volunteers can be problematic. “It’s really not fair to them,” White says of asking the Larimer Chorale’s singers to take on additional tasks. “They are already volunteering.” Her second go-to source of help is the singers’ spouses. “Finding a pool of people to help with odd things, from ushering and selling tickets to setting up 250 chairs at a venue, is challenging.” One strategy for encouraging volunteering is to recognize those who give their time. The Chorale recently instituted an annual volunteer appreciation ceremony.

The Symphonic Chorale has set up a non-singer volunteer group, called the Vivace Society, to help with events and other tasks that singers can’t do because they are singing in the concert. Made up primarily of former Chorale singers and spouses of current singers, that small group is managed by one or two board members, depending on the event.

To help keep communication and tasks flowing, Harris has enlisted the Bainbridge Chorale’s section leaders as the prime point of contact with other singers. “All information for choristers goes out to section leaders,” Harris says. “We have a special Gmail account, so I can just compose a message and send it out to them. They have their lists set up, and with a push of the button, everybody knows.”

The Power of Professional Networks

Without a ready-made community of co-workers, building a supportive network from outside sources becomes even more important. White found the Colorado Nonprofit Association to be an essential resource and says that its manual, Principles and Practice for Nonprofit Excellence in Colorado has been her “bible” when setting up organizational structures. She belongs to a group organized by a local alliance for the arts that brings in speakers monthly to talk about different aspects of arts management. She also gets together regularly with the heads of other performing arts groups that are presenters at the Fort Collins Lincoln Center, the multi-venue performing and visual arts center in northern Colorado where the Larimer Chorale performs.

Harris participates in the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council, an umbrella group of about 50 arts organizations in the town. “The executive directors of nine or ten of the biggest arts groups meet once a month and talk about everything that has to do with running our organizations,” she says. “And we compare our calendars so we don’t have two groups trying to do their fundraisers on the same day. It helps us all.” She also does information sharing with members of the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium, formed about four years ago.

Chorus America has also been an important professional resource. Shortly after Elliott started Choral Arts Initiative, he attended the 2013 Chorus America Conference in Seattle. “I met a lot of great people who had advice about starting a chorus and lessons learned,” he says.

When the Bainbridge Chorale had a difficult music director change, “the first place we went for advice was Chorus America,” Harris says. “We heard, ‘Yes, it has been done before, and yes you can do it.’ That was really helpful.” Harris, the Chorale’s music director, and all board members also attended the Seattle Conference.

Several administrators also noted how important it is to have close working relationships with the conductors of their choruses, even if the administrators do not have an official role in the artistic decision-making process. “We are buddies,” Harris says of Michael Austin Miller, artistic director of the Bainbridge Island Chorale since 2000. “He consults me on artistic decisions, because I know the singers so well.”

Remember, It Takes a Village

In the end, the term the “one-person everything shop” doesn’t tell the whole story. A chorus is a communal activity, and just as a music director has no role without singers, a choral administrator depends on many people to keep the engines running. “It is very important that this be a ‘we’ thing,” Paulino says. “If I’m doing it all myself, I’m not going to be happy.”

White had no prior choral experience when she found the announcement for her job on Craigslist. To learn about music and the group she is serving, she attends almost every Larimer Chorale rehearsal. “The most gratifying thing for me are the people,” says White. “The singers are doctors, insurance agents, and teachers, and they are an important part of the fabric of the community. To be a part of that is an honor.”

She’s discovered that choral people are a different breed. In fact, it’s quite possible that if a bunch of singers had been on White’s airplane in Kenya, they would have organized a ticket-taking and Orange Nehi-dispensing brigade. “It really is a village,” White says. “That’s how a chorus is different. Don’t tell anybody, but I would do this job for free.”