Insurance review focus groups begin

As announced earlier, Leger Marketing, working with Equity Council, is conducting a series of six focus groups on members' insurance needs.

There will be two in-person groups in Toronto on September 23, and two in-person groups in Vancouver on September 27. One teleconference group each will be held for the eastern regions and for the prairie regions on September 29. The purpose of these focus groups is to lay the groundwork for a structured survey later this fall, to be broadly administered throughout the membership at large.

Over the next week, recruiters working with Leger will be calling a random selection of members from across the country to be part of one of these groups. If you are contacted, please consider participating. The hour or so you spend helping us out in this first phase will go a long way toward ensuring that we are able to collect a full set of meaningful and useful statistics in the later survey work.

Service Standards

A large part of the work handled by Equity can be regarded as customer service. Negotiating an agreement only takes up a few months, once every three years. However, the administration of it happens dozens of times each day, year-round, every year. The Association also handles dues and financial benefits on behalf of its members, including insurance and and RRSP services. In addition, we regularly connect up with theatres, as thousands of contracts are arranged.

All these activities, and more, involve numerous member and engager interactions, some very brief and some quite extended. Four years ago, Council implemented policy to ensure that customer service of this sort met basic privacy and accessibility requirements.

At its meeting in August, and based on member feedback, Council voted to take that policy a step further: implementing published service standards.

It's worth having some sense of the context in which this change has been made. Based on the latest annual data from the office, the Business Rep department alone:

• reviews nearly 14,000 contracts for over 2,000 productions
• receives and sends over 12,000 emails
• spends around 450 hours on the phone 

The overwhelming majority of these interactions are positive and productive. But when one occurs that is not, that's when Councillors hear about it. And that's when the local CPAG members hear about it. And that's when everyone else in the green room hears about it. A single bad experience can echo so far and for so long, that it ends up sounding like a chorus of common occurrence.

It isn't. Weeding out duplicate reports and retelling by others, complaints turn out to be comparatively few in number. In the first year of last term, I put my email address absolutely everywhere, and when I got my first customer service complaint, I started a special email folder for those. I just looked: four years now and they average three per year.

I'll be the first to say it: a couple of the complaints were quite troubling, and on several others we could definitely have done better. There are unquestionably some complaints that didn't make it to me, and there are almost certainly several that didn't make it beyond the green room. However, considered in the context of many thousands of interactions per year, and thousands of members and engagers, a handful per year is a pretty good average.

Council is interested in improving that average. We recognise that, while the typical number of customer service issues is very small, a single customer service problem can be a real show-stopper – pun fully intended.

In the next few months, Equity will implement formal, published standards in the areas of timelines for response to communication, timelines for provision of services, knowledgeable response to inquiry, and courteous treatment. Most complaints centre on one or another of these four issues.

We know that in most cases these standards will be redundant, as they are already being handily met. But by publishing them, the Association makes an unequivocal statement of the level of service which members and others have a right to expect in their dealings with us. They provide the organisation itself with a benchmark for its work, and if we should fail to meet the standard, provide the member or other person with an obvious metric for expressing their dissatisfaction.

The policy change to implement the standards was passed at the most recent meeting. The service standards themselves have yet to be finalised, but they will be published both here and on the main website when they are.

Council knows better than to believe that Equity will never muck up — we're all human too. However, we want to ensure that those occurrences continue to be rare, that we are fully prepared to acknowledge them should they occur, and that we will take every opportunity to learn from mistakes.

As always, we welcome your comment.

Insurance review progress report

It's been a while since Council began reviewing Equity's insurance coverage, so I thought it might be time for a brief update. Council has contracted with Leger Marketing, our research partner from the 2007 survey, to conduct a comprehensive assessment of insurance need and affordability within our membership. Aside from having had past experience with them, their project staff impressed us with a willingness to understand our needs and an obvious team approach between the project specialists from both the qualitative and quantitative parts of the work.

Our first step will be to hold a series of focus groups. In-person groups will be conducted in both Toronto and Vancouver, and separate teleconference groups will be conducted for western and eastern Canada, excluding the two areas already covered. This kind of work does not produce data in the usual sense. Because it is a "live" process, and not static like a survey, Leger will use the group discussions to refine both their and our understanding of all the issues in play.

The input from this first phase will be used to created a structured survey, to be administered throughout the membership at large. It is this second step that will produce the concrete data we will need to rebuild the plan for current and anticipated future needs.

All of this work is expected to take place in the fall and early winter, with a report to Council by February. So, you'll be hearing more from us then.

When the time comes, it's vital that we hear from you. If you are contacted for focus group work, please consider participating. If this process is to produce the excellent plan we hope it will, all communities within the membership need to be represented. That includes everyone from those who want more insurance coverage, to those who want less, or none. Similarly, if a survey invitation shows up in your inbox or mailbox, please take the time to complete it. Your insurance plan will be shaped by those who do.

ITR Committee Announced

ITR Committee Chair Kris Joseph recently announced the full lineup of the committee (save for one space). The full announcement and more detail should be available on the Equity web site in the next short while, but in the meantime, here is the rundown.

From Kris:

"We have forged a troupe of 13 committee members from across Canada and are now planning for our first group meeting and the data collection phase of our mandate. Sharon, Kerry Ann and I are VERY pleased with the makeup of the group and excited about the work.

We have a wide range of work experience, career depth and breadth; expertise on data collection and analysis as well as health & safety and diversity issues; a very even gender split; and a range of folks who are members and member-engagers."

The committee is:

BC & Yukon: Steven Greenfield, Colleen Winton, Katey Wright

Northern Alberta: Gina Puntil

Southern Alberta: Cheryl Hutton

Saskatchewan: James (Jim) Arthur

Manitoba & Nunavut: (still to be confirmed)

Ontario: Sharon Di Genova, Kerry Ann Doherty, Richard Lee, Mark Wallace

Eastern Ontario & Outaouais: Kris Joseph (committee chair)

Quebec: Deena Aziz

Thanks to all who have stepped forward to help craft the future of independent theatre in Canada.

The Joining Process

We've been at it for a while now, but Council review of our current joining process is beginning to coalesce into a plan for change.

One of the great challenges in administering our membership is that Equity doesn't really control how new members join. With the exception of the stage management discipline, apprenticeship is either not offered, or widely bypassed. How widely? Approximately 85% of new joins do so directly, with no apprenticeship credits at all. An additional 10% complete at least part of a 3-credit apprenticeship, but still join before completing it. Only about 5% of new members join having completed an apprenticeship, and most of those are in stage management, where completing an apprenticeship is mandatory.

So, how is it that those new members come to join? Well – assuming you are one of the 85% – pretty much the same way you did. An engager offers an Equity contract to a non-member, and voilà! – instant Equity member. In short, engagers create almost all of our new members.

Neither Equity (nor the engager) nor the new member really know, at the point of joining, whether that first contract will ever blossom into any kind of sustaining and sustainable professional career. Let's be frank – a great many don't. Without question, we should be offering people the highest degree of benefit and protection under contract that we can, but should we compel them to become full members when their career has barely gotten off the ground? That is the question Council has been wrestling with.

There are some obvious plusses and minuses to the current system. 

From a new member perspective, it's a quick route to full membership. However, it costs $750 for that first contract, which is not a small chunk of change. It also locks the new member into an obligation to work under future Equity contracts at a point in their career where they don't have much of a professional engagement history (if any) with which to attract subsequent contracts.

From an Equity perspective, it brings in a steady stream of initiation fees, but it also means that we are constantly adding to our membership and benefit obligations.

Council is currently considering a new system (for members working in theatre) that would not offer instant membership to new joins, and perhaps work in a manner similar to our current probationary membership option. It would offer almost all the benefits of regular membership on those first contracts, but wouldn't lock a new member into a long-term obligation to Equity at such an early stage in their career, when a mix of pro, semi-pro and non-pro opportunity is important for gaining experience and honing skills.

At this point, Council has made no firm decisions, and we are still looking at the administrative and financial impacts a new approach would have, but we wanted to keep you up to speed.


Comments welcome, as always.

The hyphenated member

There has been a lot of discussion lately, in connection with the independent theatre review, on the subject of the "hyphenated" nature of our membership. By this, people mean that members frequently pursue a career as an actor-playwright, director-coach, SM-TD and similar. The basic point being made is that almost all of us have hyphenated careers – some have even gone so far as to say that they don't know any members who don't have hyphenated careers.

Since most of these pronouncements are based on anecdotal data, I thought it might be worth measuring them against some more comprehensive stats. As it turns out, they're not far off the mark.

In the 2007 survey, we asked members to tell us a bit about the composition of their careers and, in fact, almost all of them are hyphenated. 81% of members indicated that they had worked in Equity's jurisdiction in the three year period preceding the survey, but only a small percentage indicated that was their only source of work.

Among the hyphenated, the highest percentage (62%) also worked in a similar capacity in other performance areas, such as film, television or music. 57% indicated that they had various other jobs related to live performance, but outside our jurisdiction, with coaching, writing and teaching at a post-secondary level topping the list. Approximately 44% of members mentioned work outside the realm of live performance – employment in the service industries, other professional pursuits and office work accounted for just over half of that.

I'm sure it won't have escaped notice that this adds up to way more than 100% of the membership. So not only is most of the membership hyphenated, but many appear to have more than one hyphen in their career. Nothing surprising there.

In the next section of the survey, we asked how all those pursuits fit together in a single year. The response to a that question brings a bit more clarity to the picture.

Taken as a group, just under half of the membership's typical year is spent doing work under Equity contracts, or in similar performance activities. The remainder of the work year is devoted largely to activities outside of our jurisdiction, split evenly between those related to live performance and those not.

What a life! There are times when I think stats like these should be plastered on the cover of every theatre school and university drama department brochure. I wonder how many people would pursue live performance as a career if they knew, in advance, what to expect...

Halifax Audition Project follow-up

This was nice to hear...

I got an email the other day that provided a great coda to this spring's audition project in Halifax. I'm sharing it with permission (and with identifying details removed).

I just wanted to let you both know that I have been engaged at the *****. This came about directly because I auditioned for ***** at the Audition Project. I had never auditioned for him/her or met him/her before then. He/she called me up out of the blue last week and offered me the gig. I sincerely hope you and PACT can offer this opportunity again and that more people will recognize what a wonderful opportunity it is for both actors and directors/ADs. 

I can't think of anything to add to that, except "amen".