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The Man Who Changed New Haven
Paul Collard did exactly what he said he would do four years ago: Put the International Festival of Arts & Ideas — and its home city — on the map
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Business New Haven
1/22/2001
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Paul Collard is a True Believer.
He believes in the power of art to change people's lives.
He believes that the event he oversees, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, can transform New Haven into an international destination.
Why, he even believes in New Haven.
For all the above reasons - and because he has accomplished precisely what he promised when he arrived here four years ago from the United Kingdom, Business New Haven has named Collard its 2001 Businessperson of the Year.
Collard himself doesn't chafe one bit at the designation. He may not run a store, or a factory, or a brokerage house. But he is the CEO of not only a $4 million annual enterprise that during its peak season (immediately before, during and after the early-summer festival) employs some 320 paid workers and relies upon the efforts of countless scores of volunteers.
And that's not even the half of it. Last year's IFAI drew 175,000 attendees who were treated to 500 events (three-quarters of them free) involving some 2,000 artists (who used 2,700 hotel room-nights) over 17 days in three cities (New Haven, New London and Stamford). A Quinnipiac University study concluded that the 2000 festival generated $15.7 million in total economic impact.
From his first day in New Haven, fresh from his erstwhile UK home, Collard made it plain that “economic revitalization” of the city would be a fundamental aim of his work here. All who heard this nodded and smiled politely. He'll learn soon enough, they seemed to be thinking.
But the New Haven he'll be leaving this summer after four years here is a different place - and Collard is a big reason. The event he has shaped since taking the helm following the 1997 festival has created a splash beyond the city and state. Its “national visibility soaring, [the festival] came of age this year during its fifth outing,” reported Variety last July.
Moreover, there's a renewed sense of positive energy in the Elm City, and the IFAI's now-acknowledged success is near, if not at, the center of it. The “inexplicably high level of negativity” Collard recalls encountering when he first arrived today seems a thing of the past.
Like Collard in 1997, most new CEOs spin extravagant dreams of what the future will hold now that there's a new sheriff in Dodge City. In Collard's case, funny as it seems, the dreams came true.
He never doubted that they would.
Collard arrived in New Haven in August 1997. Where others might have seen a fragile two-year-old event struggling to find its niche, Collard saw a can't-lose proposition.
“I have a deeply held conviction that the arts can play a significant role in building communities and economies,” he says. “One of the deciding factors in coming to New Haven was that it had probably the best collection of cultural facilities of any small city in the world. Other cities around the world are saying, 'We're going to use the arts to play a key role in economic development, and we're going to build [cultural facilities such as galleries, theaters and concert halls].' If you're living in a city [New Haven] that already has all those things and it's not working, that's a problem.”
Because of that belief, says Collard, “I felt it was almost my duty to come to New Haven and prove that it can work here. Because if it won't work here, it won't work anywhere. It's so good in New Haven, it's got to be a easy as turning on a light.
“And so it turned out to be,” he says. “The surprise to me was how easy it was.”
The iridescent “it” to which Collard refers is a belief he has articulated from Day One: that a successful festival could be an important driver of the city's economy by reintroducing suburbanites and others from outside New Haven to the city and showing them its best possible face.
He was not slow to grasp the essential absurd dynamic that had for years kept suburbanites away from New Haven.
“You ask people in southern Connecticut, 'Are you interested in the arts?' and they say, 'Oh, yes, we're interested in the arts.' 'Do you attend arts events?' 'Oh, yes, all the time.' 'Do you go to New Haven?' [Here Collard gasps in mock horror.] 'Oh, no - we never go to New Haven.' 'Why not?' 'Because I'll be shot - if I can find a place to park.'”
The conversation continues. “'So, where do you go instead?' 'New York!' they all say,” Collard exclaims, “where it's so easy to park and no one's ever been shot there.”
Collard can pinpoint the moment he realized this historic dynamic had changed.
“The moment I most strongly felt that was the night [last June 30] we came off the Green from the Metropolitan Opera [in a concert performance of Madama Butterfly] last year, because that audience was a different audience than had come previously. Those really were the 20,000 people who everybody complained had stopped coming to New Haven or wouldn't come to New Haven. They came off the Green feeling proud of New Haven.
“After all those years and all those negative and awful things they'd said about New Haven, they came up and said, 'Actually, there's a real purpose to this place, because you couldn't have done this that well anywhere else in Connecticut.'
“I could actually feel it in the air at that particular moment,” Collard explains. “You could feel it in the way people looked and walked. Something had changed.”
That, he says, is how he would describe what he had accomplished over the past four years to someone who had never been here. “My wild claim would be that I changed the place,” he says. “I don't think New Haven is the same place it was.”
Less this sound immodest, Collard is quick to add, “I think almost anyone coming into the situation” he inherited “could have made something spectacular.” Doubtful. Extremely doubtful.
You may or may not be able to judge the success of an event like the IFAI on numbers alone. Nevertheless, they are essential in charting the rise of the festival:
• Attendance has risen from just over 50,000 in 1996 to 175,000 last year. And remember: A principal goal of the event is to bring people to New Haven.
• A year ago Collard announced that rising earned income was key to the festival's sustainability after he's gone. In 2000, box-office income doubled for the third consecutive year, to some $600,000. While that still represents only about 15 percent of all revenues, that must be balanced against the social goal of keeping a majority of events free.
• Per-attendee marketing expenses have been halved over five years. While it's true that local awareness of the event has soared, that must be balance against the need in 2000 to market in three cities. Nevertheless, marketing costs per 1,000 attendees has shrunk from almost $9,000 in 1996 to just about $4,000 last year.
• As the festival's budget has climbed (from $2 million in 1999 to twice that last year, including an additional $1 million from the state and an equivalent increase in corporate contributions) it has become more efficient is raising the dollars it needs to deliver programming. In 2000, the IFAI spent on average six cents to raise each dollar. By any measure, that's pretty efficient.
And it has had to become efficient, as the exodus of major corporations from New Haven accelerated through the event's lifetime. Founding sponsor SNET, for example, was sold to Texas-based SBC Corp., although it remains a major sponsor and former SNET Chairman Daniel J. Miglio still heads the IFAI board.
Leafing through the IFAI's glossy annual report, one is struck by scope of the festival's “customers” - not just attendees and ticket-buyers, but hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, individual donors, institutional supporters “community partners” and corporate sponsors - a group so disparate as to include Xerox, Clairol and even the Philip Morris Companies.
“Each one of those represents a relationship that we have to manage,” observes Collard, “and some of them are very intense relationships - from very big sponsors who put a lot of money into the festival and expect a great deal of attention, but all the way down to people who give us $50. We have to have a relationship [with them]; they're not just spontaneously going to send us $50. We have to be in touch with them; we have to know what they're thinking; we have to work with them; we have to acknowledge them.”
To Collard, that's actually one of the most gratifying facets of his job. “I can ring up just about anybody in New Haven County and say I'd like to talk, and they'll meet with me and not think it odd that I should have done that. Everyone thinks it's normal that they should have a relationship with me. They also tell me lots of things. That whole network of relationships gives you incredible insight into the community. I don't think many people have that - but it's a fabulous thing to have.”
One of the hallmarks of successful CEOs is having the courage of their convictions - at the same time remaining psychologically sturdy enough to cut bait when an initiative simply doesn't pan out.
So it was with the decision to expand the 2000 event to New London and Stamford. It seemed logical - a way to ratchet up the event's visibility and giving it a statewide profile.
But logic and reality don't always intersect, and just 10,000 people attended events in the two satellite cities out of the 175,000 total.
Part of the reason was probably unfamiliarity, and part of it surely was the festival's financial inability to do targeted marketing in three discrete markets.
Whatever the reasons, Collard didn't hesitate to pull the plug on a failed experiment - after he was able to convince state officials to maintain their financial commitment to the event at the same level as last year. For New Haven in 2001, that means 17 days more chockablock with events and activity than ever before (see related story, page 10).
Some of what that will be was unveiled at a January 11 press conference. The Royal Shakespeare Company returns to New Haven for the third year running, fresh off last year's triumphant Macbeth with Anthony Sher. This year the RSC will offer a new adaptation by Lee Hall of Carlo Goldoni's 18th-century farce A Servant to Two Masters from June 14-24 at a to-be-announced site (possibly Yale's University Theater).
The Metropolitan Opera returns, too, to perform a concert rendition of Puccini's Tosca on the Green on June 27.
Whoever assumes Collard's job will inherit a festival light years beyond what Collard himself discovered when he arrived four years ago. But still not 100 percent of the way to its final destination.
Collard thinks the event is “pretty close” to the “extravagant” original vision of what the event promised one day to be: a major international festival.
What will it take to bridge the remaining gulf?
“We've worked on the assumption that the point of the festival was not to bring large numbers of people from out of state here for a number of days,” Collard says. “It was to persuade people here in the state that New Haven was a great place to go to. That focus is supported by the market research that says [southern Connecticut] is the biggest, most interested [in the arts] and most affluent audience in the world - and therefore that's why it's going to work here.”
Fulfilling the goal of becoming a major international festival, Collard believes, “has more to do with how we develop the artistic program and how that program is perceived elsewhere in the world.”
That perception today, Collard allows, is that the IFAI's programming is “very conservative. But I think that's appropriate for the audience we're developing.”
Also, he says, “We don't commission [new works] much ourselves; other festivals commission more. Commissioning of course is much riskier; we can book things that we know are going to work.”
Collard also remains deeply committed to the event as a forum for not just arts, but ideas. Past Ideas theme have presented provocative discussions about big-picture topics such as war and the role of cities.
This year will bring The 1901 Project, a series of participatory history events, including two exhibitions and a series of lectures and discussions, exploring the New Haven of a century ago. This project is being developed in cooperation with the New Haven Colony Historical Society, marking that group's first major involvement with the festival.
1901 is about looking back. Collard himself is looking ahead - not just to June but to life beyond. He has no idea what he'll do next (“perhaps something in the realm of economic development”) but looks forward returning home to England - an attitude not necessarily shared by his four pre-teen children who have spent so much of their lives in the New World. Two things, according to their father, bind them here: “150 cable channels, and good pizza.”
Those attitudes will probably change with time. Because, as Collard so staunchly believes, “The way you change attitudes is to change behavior.”
Well, he's changed New Haveners' behavior, at least each June.
It's a whole new attitude.
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