And what a revelation it has been! This mostly volunteer-run, financially hand-to-mouth organization is doing impressive artistic work, and has been for almost 35 years. But among its most impressive feats is the tight-rope act of making ends meet. The board bet that someone like me serving as “professional” staff could provide the grounding for a more stable operation. The jury’s still out on whether the budget can sustain that – and the current climate for nonprofits isn’t making it any easier.

For example, The Nonprofit Finance Fund just released its 2012 State of the Sector survey, which asserts, among many other interesting observations, that “…many nonprofits are still facing fundamental challenges that threaten the stability of the sector and the well-being of the people they serve.” Their data show that funding is tenuous at best for more than half, and many have trouble meeting community demand for their services.

The environment is challenging, no question. But it’s also true that arts nonprofits- even small, community-based ones- have a growing array of resources at their disposal. In addition to the financial advice and support of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, nonprofits have access to a number of business services organizations. Fractured Atlas, for example, provides a range of support services, like education and health insurance, to artists and arts nonprofits. Grassroots.org, for another, provides the Nonprofit Tool Box, a mix of services including free web hosting, a volunteer-run graphic design service, and online marketing assistance to all types of nonprofits.

Yes, I use these services, and they help. Yet, when I look around at my small organization and its small army of enthusiastic volunteers and supporters, I am struck by how much of a difference the passion of our artists make. The support services make it possible, but the artists make it worthwhile.

As someone who writes pages and pages every year about the arts, there is one topic I will not tackle: music. That may sound surprising coming from someone who grew up in a family of musicians, played flute professionally for decades, and attends scores of musical events annually. I can write about musical organizations and musicians, but describing music itself or musical performances is beyond me. So I was delighted to read Jonathan Biss’ recent piece in which this superb young pianist describes the problem: “…the only thing worth doing is also nearly impossible: to convey something of what the emotional experience of listening is like.”

Describing music and musical performance is deceptively difficult. Unlike writing about theatre or art, where the writer can include plot summaries or reproductions of images, music is abstract and elusive. Writers resorting to historical facts about composers rarely give us a sense of the music. Writing that is so technical that the reader needs a companion score and dictionary to decipher it is even worse. Then there is the “oh my, isn’t it wonderful” school, who feel that classical music is beyond emotional or intellectual explication.

But recently I read a piece in the New Yorker by Jeremy Denk, another great pianist. (“Flight of the Concord“; 2/6/12). Here at last is a writer capturing the essence and experience of music. It made me want to go right out and buy his recording of Ives’ Concord Sonata, a piece I have never really warmed to. Now I am a double convert – to Denk and Ives – which is what good writing should be able to do.

Apparently, I was not the only one impressed by Biss and Denk. So was Anne Midgette, a well known music critic who had the good sense to acknowledge how much some performers have to offer in writing about their art form. -Tom

The goal of this project is to compile and disseminate good practice to the field. Any campus-based performing arts presenter,

performing artist, student organization, or academic department may nominate one or more case studies. Case studies might include:

• Student marketing campaigns that have yielded good results
• Programs through which students engage directly with visiting artists
• Programs through which students create artistic work, or learn about creativity
• Programs that involve students in planning or producing programs
• Effective student ticket discount programs
• Other examples of student engagement in the performing arts

Nominations should be exemplary in some way. In other words, some evidence of success should be provided that demonstrates why the nominated practice is innovative, replicable, or successful. WolfBrown and the Student Engagement Working Group will review the nominations and select a diverse group of case studies for further research and writing. For more information, contact Jennifer Novak-Leonard at jennifer@wolfbrown.com.

About the Student Engagement Research Initiative: With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College is leading a multi-site research effort aimed at gauging how to maximize students’ performing arts participation and attendance, including a focus on the particular challenges around classical music. The study will culminate in summer 2013 with a national convening of students from MUP campuses to analyze and form action recommendations out of the research.

Drawing from WolfBrown’s research for the National Endowment for the Arts published earlier this year 36% of people who say they are involved in dance do so only through recordings or broadcasts. This is a big bucket of activity that encompasses the dance competition shows (and which I hypothesize may be largely driven by them) that we know very little about. The challenge lies in finding the people who are only involved in dance through recordings or broadcasts. Data on SYTYCD audiences would give me access to this exact population (as well as to those who watch on TV in addition to attending live dance or dancing themselves).

SYTYCD appeals to me as a former dancer, because in a way it lets me relive some of the highs and lows of when I danced myself, but the day my husband (whose TV viewing is otherwise dominated by sci-fi) rewound the DVR to re-watch a performance on SYTYCD (because it “moved him”), I had some tangible evidence that these shows might be opening more people to the power of dance as a form of artistic expression.

I think a segmentation model for dance that incorporates the motivations and values of the dance-on-TV-only crowd, as well as those who attend live performance and dance themselves, would be an important tool for the dance field as a whole.

Happy Holidays!

This all-night design workshop would gather a group of community members (i.e., laypeople), arts administrators, and a few “experts” (e.g., urban planners, architects). The event would take place in an open and mutable space, such as a warehouse or an old airplane hanger. Participants would break into different teams associated with particular artistic disciplines. Through conversation, drawing, and building (materials to be determined), the teams would examine the design issues around their selected building typology. One team would look at museums, another would focus on concert halls, etc. The event would culminate in a presentation of design ideas by each team and perhaps even a voting on “best design.”

Though “Design the Next Generation Arts Space Sleepover” would not end up producing a finalized facility plan, the highly interactive and cooperative nature of the process could generate unforeseen and unique design ideas, as well as community buy-in and support for new building projects.

Thank you for considering my request.

Yours,

Rebecca

Jobs’ reputation for being, paradoxically, customer-service oriented and a domineering control freak has prompted me to wonder how he would have dealt with the chronic pressure within arts groups to balance artistic and marketing objectives. I suspect that Jobs would have rejected the premise that there is a necessary choice between programs and exhibitions of high artistic quality (but no interest to visitors and audiences) and those that are tremendously popular (but fail to meet objective standards of artistic excellence). There is also an often-ignored third option, which is to take into account the aesthetic sensibilities and cultural engagement preferences of your audiences in the creation of artistically vibrant programs.

Steve Jobs seems to have mastered the ability to give customers not just want they wanted, but what they needed, before they even knew they needed it . He was a genius at knowing how to create demand for something of impeccable quality that customers will covet, without pandering to the latest trends. While translating those concepts to an arts group’s programming is easier said than done, setting it as an institutional objective is a good place to start. It might also be useful to follow the advice Steve Jobs gave during a Stanford commencement speech: “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

In a recent Salon.com article called “The Creative Class is a Lie,” Scott Timberg argues that the economic downturn has taken a significant toll on creative workers. He says that while some creatives are flying high, “…for those who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level – the working- or middle-classes within the creative class – things are less cheery…. The creative class is melting, and the story is largely untold.” In effect, the collapse of print media and the transformation of the music industry, among other upheavals, suggest to him that the “creative class” is no longer an engine of economic revitalization (if it ever was).

For those who have been focused on the creative economy as a strategy for revitalizing our cities and may be distraught to hear Timberg’s analysis, Richard Florida has offered a response: “The Creative Class is Alive” (on the very interesting theAtlanticCities.com). He points out that despite the distress Timberg describes, the creative sector has statistically fared better than many other parts of the economy.

It seems to me this tempest in a (hand-crafted?) tea pot obscures the point. The term “creative class” isn’t a lie, even though its use as a tool of advocacy may occasionally overstate its impact. But we arts advocates do ourselves and the cultural sector a disservice by focusing solely on economics-unquestionably important, but its attention should not be to the virtual exclusion of all the other areas in which creativity is important: teaching 21st Century skills to our youth, building more cohesive neighborhoods, or bridging the differences between people of different ethnic, racial, or class backgrounds. We need to broaden our focus so that we acknowledge all the benefits that attention to our creative and expressive lives can provide. Some of these benefits are intrinsic to experiencing art, and those are perhaps harder to measure but no less important. A good place to start is IntrinsicImpact.org, which offers a rationale for exploring the impact of the arts experience beyond the economic dimension.

This conversation prompted me to think about the promises and perils of conducting research online. It would be fairly straightforward to ask a parent to fill out a simple demographic questionnaire using an internet survey tool. But what about a measure of a child’s behavior, one that was meant to present stimuli (e.g., images) in a predetermined order for a specific amount of time, and then record the child’s responses? Even if a sufficient degree of control could be exerted over the presentation of stimuli, the measure could not administer itself. Someone would have to introduce the measure to the child, and ensure that they understood the instructions regarding how to complete it. Moreover, the way in which this was done would have to be consistent across study sites.

Clearly, using online tools to administer measures cannot be done haphazardly, even if the technical challenges involved can be reduced to the point of triviality. However, the promise offered by such an approach-enhanced precision and the opportunity to observe increasingly subtle effects- certainly seems worth the added effort.

A man sits transfixed in an empty subway car, a stark outline against the orange seats. Through the car’s open doors, you see that a woman, stark in black satin, streams along the platform, trailing a wake of churning ocean. Above him is the familiar signage of the platform – and this message:

Vollmond[1] struck him at Atlantic Terminal.
Where did BAM hit you? Join us on Facebook.

A little further up the passage way another sign, stark in black and white, reads:

It can happen at a show. In the subway.
It can happen three days later,
When you are crossing the street.
It can happen anywhere, really.
The beauty is, it is different for everybody.
BAM may be theater, dance, music, art, film.
But that moment of impact, that’s why we’re here.
And at that moment, when it happens, you know it.

This is Brooklyn Academy of Music’s new marketing campaign – one that trades not on the pre-show hype and advance reviews, but on the lasting, unbeckoned power of a great performances – or visual revelations such as can occur facing a painting, the painstaking tesserae of a mosaic laid out centuries ago, or the solemn depths of the reflecting pools at the 9/11 memorial. Art as the sustained release of beauty, insight, longing, or hope.

These posters pack a wallop (on two occasions, other travelers have run into me, all of us staring, making sense, suddenly united by remembering). But the idea behind these images is even more arresting. That man, transfixed on the subway car, should make every researcher or evaluator re-think his or her toolbox. A post-performance survey or a post-test conducted during the last session of a residency will get at what registers right there, right then. But these tools can’t capture what incubates – what goes “BAM” three days (or two years) later. Nor can they x-ray the radiating map of associations over time. What we need are tools, along with ways to use them, that recognize and illuminate the long, associative lines of aesthetic experience – and re-experience.

However, things are not as bleak as they may appear. Applying creative and imaginative thinking can help arts groups overcome these barriers with innovative solutions.  Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s short piece in the Teachers College Record defines the difference and interconnectedness of creativity and imagination in assisting innovative thinking: “Creativity is the ability to use resources in new, clever, or unpredictable ways to solve a specific problem,” whereas imagination is the skill that allows for solutions to bubble up by  inventing a new space, or lens, through which to view the problem. Imagination, they argue, plays a larger role in problem solving, but both are important for their different approaches. I have been learning about arts groups’ inventive audience engagement strategies, and have seen many overcome the staff/time/money challenges. Here are two that I would like to share with you – one more creative, the other more imaginative (as defined by Thomas and Brown):

• Creative approach: The Brooklyn Museum wanted to record and share visitors’ reactions to “The Black List” photography exhibition, and didn’t have the time or staff to record and edit videos. Instead, they set up two webcams at a simple kiosk so visitors could record their responses directly to the museum’s YouTube page without any staff involvement.
• Imaginative approach: South Coast Repertory Theatre (SCR) was concerned about the dearth of theatre criticism, and so imagined an environment in which criticism flourished,  and where audience members were encouraged to think critically (i.e., become “citizen critics”). They recruited “Facebook Ambassadors” (audience and community members who are particularly savvy Facebook users) who would post thoughtful comments about an SCR performance to their Facebook page. They then went one step further and invited local bloggers to attend and write reviews on their blogs.

Both examples demonstrate employing creativity and imagination to develop innovative engagement tactics. What are you seeing out in the field that is novel in regards to engagement activities? Please share your thoughts and comments by clicking on the link below.

Also see A New Culture of Learning for a full-length work on this subject by Thomas and Brown.

The work of San Francisco-based design studio Rebar is “rooted in the belief that human interaction, community and a sense of wonder form the basis of the good life.” Fusing art, design, and ecology, the PARK(ing) project— perhaps one of Rebar’s better-known— has inspired a worldwide annual PARK(ing) Day during which parking spaces are temporarily transformed into parks. Operating under the belief that public art is not only a noun, but “just as often a verb,” this studio has re-conceptualized civic engagement and the role it plays in creative placemaking. The Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF), also of San Francisco, works to inspire “art, community and civic participation” and supports a diverse portfolio of projects that require “human interaction to complete the piece.” Although BRAF occasionally partners with various city agencies, it is a private 501(c)(3) that operates under a unique intersection between “inclusive participation, community input and city collaboration,” which allows them to remain true to their roots. Their installations serve as conduits for engagement; interactivity is key. For example, the Composting Contraption, part of BRAF’s Scrap Eden program, is a “kinetic artwork” that doubles as an educational tool used to engage communities in composting practices.

This is not just a San Francisco phenomenon– the Public Art Fund, Creative Time, Project for Public Spaces, ARTblocks, and City Repair are all exemplary organizations that work to imbue their local urban landscapes with increased community interaction, inspirational public spaces, and thought-provoking installations. I invite you to join the discussion – how do your communities inspire and support public, private, and grassroots creative placemaking?

Kyle Marinshaw, Impact Assessment Program Manager, joined WolfBrown’s San Francisco office in the Fall of 2011tm

As researchers, we always struggle with how to engineer “uptake” of new knowledge. The great fallacy is that results of a major study can be summarized in a 90-minute presentation, after which the consultant goes away and the client is left to “implement” the findings. Oh, that it were so simple. In reality, the “end” of a research project is really just the beginning of a longer process of absorption, reflection, consideration and, hopefully, action. The pathway between research and action, however, is often long and unpredictable. Sometimes it takes three or four exposures to the results of a study before the implications become clear.

The meeting in Columbus was significant in that it represented a breakthrough in the process of uptake. Representatives from Jazz at Lincoln Center, Jazz St. Louis, Monterey Jazz Festival, SFJAZZ and other organizations reflected on the results of the study and were asked to generate ideas for “new or evolved practices that will regenerate the audience for jazz.” Instead of dwelling on all that ails the jazz field, we focused instead on identifying a small number of practices with the potential to move the field forward, such as:

• Conceiving the next generation of jazz venues, including temporary uses of “found” spaces
• Testing new business models for presenting jazz in intimate settings
• New models for artist self-presentation
• Developing programs that combine observational and participatory components
• Programming and educational efforts that accelerate the social transmission of musical tastes
• Linking the live audience experience with acquisition of recordings
• Creating a marketplace for collaborative jazz programming, where artists, presenters and funders can coalesce around new projects
• Developing new vocabulary and images that speak to different segments of the jazz audience.

I was inspired by the quality of thinking. Along with the research results, we will also disseminate the implications for practice – skipping a step in the typical process, and forging a stronger link between research and practice.

So imagine my relief upon reading an editorial that prompted me to recall the distinction between scientific realism and scientific instrumentalism. Scientific realists maintain that we have access to what has been called the noumenological world: the universe as it truly exists. Instrumentalists (of the scientific, rather than musical, variety) argue that our understanding is constricted to the phenomenological: the world as represented by our sensory perceptions. According to instrumentalism, the best that rational inquiry can do is to provide a framework for understanding our inherently limited observations of the world around us. Based on countless observations, we can predict that when we drop something it will fall. But does that “really mean” the object falls because of a force called gravity?

I am personally inclined to side with the realists in their appraisal of many areas of inquiry, but evaluation is not one of them. Nor, depending on whom you ask, is biology, chemistry, or physics. So, if evaluation is restricted to scientific instrumentalism, at least it has good company.

The study admits there is insufficient information to determine a specific cause-effect relationship between cultural engagement and health outcomes (it speculates that such activity may reduce the negative effects of stress, blood pressure, and other factors for disease), but what is even more curious is why the effect would be different for men and women. The differences between the genders are diverse, but why would men and women engaged in the same physical and non-physical activity exhibit different health outcomes? There is at least some reason to propose the effect is rooted in psychology, or at least culturally normative behavior. Activities that align closely with personal values would tend to be more enjoyable and less stressful. This allows us to narrow the original question: is there a difference in what women and men fundamentally value that could account for this effect? Is it that men tend to appreciate the works of others, and absorbing new ideas in a receptive context satisfies that tendency, or that women intrinsically value their own contributions to others’ well-being?

Whatever the case, the effect certainly merits further inquiry, and demonstrates that the cultural sphere may be connected to public health in more complicated ways than we have imagined. Though the data is still too new to be used in planning or marketing capacities, I wonder how this could be applied in WolfBrown’s ongoing engagement studies, or in further elaboration of the specific instrumental benefits of arts participation.

Times change! The options for artists seeking employment have clearly expanded since those days. Some interesting new research, conducted as part of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), indicates that arts training pays off in the workforce (contrary to the cliché of artists furthering their careers by waiting tables). For example, “…92% of those recently graduated artists who wished to work currently are, with most finding employment soon after graduating. Two-thirds said their first job was a close match for the kind of work they wanted.”

My guess is this has happened because artist training is embracing a more entrepreneurial stance. The New England Conservatory, for example, has instituted a program called “Entrepreneurial Musicianship” (that WolfBrown helped design) to consolidate and expand its music industry and business training programs to better prepare graduates for the realities of building a meaningful career as a musician.

These changes notwithstanding, artists still have a hard time earning a living. Indeed, the SNAAP research indicates that “…almost a third (30%) of former professional artists and those who wanted to be an artist but did not do so pointed to debt, including student loan debt, as a reason to find other work.” Click here for a summary report.

What other examples of an entrepreneurial bent to artist training programs are there? How has professional development for artists evolved since the primary means of content distribution has become the Internet?

The current version of Form 990 includes a number of questions that ask about various governance and financial policies. Some of the questions deal with things that are about legal requirements for nonprofit organizations (including topics such as lobbying and unrelated business income) and some are about policies that are not (yet) required but that are highly recommended (including conflict of interest and whistleblower policies). The answers to these questions have implications for how donors and funders may view your organization and its quality of management and oversight.

I recently came across “Fearless Filing: Conquering Form 990′s Governance Questions,” an e-toolkit assembled by BoardSource that can help you deal with these questions before a donor tells you he or she doesn’t like what they are seeing.  This toolkit provides an excellent overview of procedures and policies that are required of nonprofit organizations in today’s world of ever-greater scrutiny and increasing requests for transparency.

This last finding around active online cultural engagement led me to a TED talk by artist Aaron Koblin recently posted on TED’s Facebook page. Aaron has created a number of collaborative art-making programs online that have involved thousands of people from around the world, and his talk introduced these projects as arguments in support of the importance of the “interface” as the new defining tool of cultural activities. One venture in particular, The Johnny Cash Project, resonated and inspired me. The Cash Project invites individuals, regardless of skill or experience, to recreate a single frame for Johnny Cash’s video of “Ain’t No Grave” using an online drawing tool. All of the frames are pieced together into one whole video, a compilation of many different views stitched into one solid vision. And that vision is continuously evolving as new contributors add their unique voices to the mix. It is a living and breathing work of art made possible by the flexibility and pervasiveness of this “interface” – the Internet.

The Cash Project is just one of many online activities through which people are given the tools and opportunity to create, share, and collaborate (YouTube anyone?). Perhaps we should view the Internet as a “Virtual World Arts and Crafts Market and Festival,” open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, how can arts organizations plug into this energy?

These discussions prompt me to ask whether the debate about the optimum structure for an arts and culture group conflates the assessment of an organization’s financial interests and its public value. There are surely many arts and culture groups that enjoy tax-exempt status, which, even if performing at the highest standards of artistic excellence, do not operate exclusively within the IRS’ charitable and educational criteria. Similarly, there may be profit-generating organizations that provide a greater public service than some self-interested nonprofits (which is one of the reasons for the emergence in some states of the L3C, a low-profit limited liability company).

As public sector resources are increasingly strained, there may be mounting political pressure for government leaders to reexamine the criteria for tax-exemption and make it more a function of demonstrated public service than the absence of profitability. This may lead to traction for proposals, such as those made by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) on behalf of hospitals, to have a two-tiered tax-exemption system, with the tax-deductibility of contributions limited to an organization’s charitable and educational activities. In the future, the matrix of tax-exempt organizational options may look like this:

Arts and culture groups would be wise to anticipate accountability demands for tax-exempt status by reexamining their missions, programs and financial structures to be sure they are serving the broad public interest, rather than their narrow self-interests.

However, there are some really neat ways that QR codes and apps are innovatively being used to engage audiences – including interesting ways to:

• Access information in new ways: PhillyHistory.org has released an augmented reality app that serves up historic photographs when the user points a phone at specific locations.
• Incorporate audience interaction into a performance: Progressive rockers Umphrey’s McGee have held events in which audience members, armed with cell phones, suggest themes and ideas upon which the band improvises.
• Curate a listener’s experience as they walk through the city. Hackney Hear transforms the neighborhood sidewalks of London into artistic venues. Poetry, music, writing, and interviews are served to strollers via their smartphones. The project, to be launched in 2012 for the London Olympics, uses GPS to turn the city into a curated audio space.

Visual arts and history-based organizations tend to be further along the development of QR codes and apps, but the performing arts aren’t far behind- check out this experiment that lets the audience actually shape the artistic content of a dance performance.

With a second round of Digging into Data due to begin later this year, could arts researchers step up, join the conversation, and field competitive proposals? What data do we have to put on the table? What could we learn from generations of song lyrics, museum signage? The letters and newspapers of small towns? Could we develop an understanding of how a community makes a place for the arts, or how a work of art becomes iconic? Finally, how can we use new computational strategies to approach research questions?

The Digging into Data Conference will be held next month in Washington, DC.

Some of the findings of the study reinforce fund raising principles from way back: the younger generation is most likely to give to a compelling mission or cause carried out by an organization they “trust,” and that trust is often established by a personal connection. Interestingly, celebrity endorsements were a non-starter (motivating only 2%). Volunteerism was high among respondents (79%), and not surprisingly, Millennials are looking to technology for information and engagement. Non-profits need to pay attention to how they fare in web searches, as that is a primary tool for Millennials to learn about potential recipients of their charitable dollars. Most interesting was the finding that although only 49% gave online, 58% would have preferred to give that way, indicating that non-profits are still behind in facilitating giving through technology.

Giving USA and The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University have also published a monograph on this subject (Charitable Giving and the Millennial Generation, available for purchase here). This study looks at giving trends across different generational groups from the Great Generation to the Boomers to the Xers to the Millennials. Some of its findings (based on 2006 and 2008 data) are considerably at odds with the Millennial donors survey-e.g., it notes that only 33% of Millennials gave and 21.6% volunteered. Nevertheless, the monograph points to a potentially bright future: Millennials and Gen Xers are the most educated generation in history, and the Center’s studies have shown that people with a college degree tend to give $1,900 more annually on average.

Bottom line: cultivate these donors now through multiple personal and electronic engagement strategies in order to build their trust and capture their potential for giving down the road. It’s a long-term investment that will pay off.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for these (largely non-Japanese) printmakers is how to best symbolize sympathy and support for a culture so adept at symbolic expression. The prints designed in the aftermath of the quake are simple and poignant; many (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) are based on the Hinomaru (the official flag), which, while still a controversial emblem for some, is the best-recognized international symbol of Japan. The similarities prove that the arts community’s reactions to calamities need not be deliberate and planned, and that even visual art can convey spontaneous pan-cultural unanimity. The Hinomaru variations are an excellent example of convergent design- though the traditions and backgrounds of the artists may vary, the symbol and the intention are the same. I expect that over the next decade, the variety of visual art about the Japanese earthquake to diverge and grow considerably as the immediacy of the pain subsides. Personal memorials, political messages, comments on energy policy, and other issues are likely to supersede ‘solidarity’ as the dominant motivator of artistic expression around this event, but for now, solidarity is the only one that matters.

I found a number of things remarkable about this story: that the Orchestra chose to go ahead with their performance, despite what had occurred at home, and the choice of the piece itself, which is more tender than solemn, more likely to be heard at a wedding than a funeral. But more than anything else, I was struck by the fact that an orchestra of Japanese musicians would choose a piece written three centuries ago by a Thuringian composer as a memorial and catharsis for the great tragedy that had afflicted their nation. Rarely have I encountered such eloquent testimony to the capacity of great art to transcend time, cultures, and plight.

P.S. Many thanks to all of you who contributed examples of arts programs that occur in unusual settings, in response to my last posting here. Your references will make the dialogue about “setting” much richer.

Clearly there’s a lot going on. What I find most interesting is the focus on creativity expanding beyond the traditional sphere of “arts and culture.” I notice increasingly complex ways in which people actively claim or reclaim their creative selves: through new performance types, new and unusual venues, and new forms of media, among others. This article highlights the ways in which arts organizations have started tapping into the interest in flash-mobs and the role of social media in their formation. In fact, Clarke Mackey’s Random Acts of Culture focuses on “vernacular culture” which gives priority to engagement and tends to focus on participation more than our customary European forms do.

As someone who works on planning for and with local arts agencies, I see this expanded focus on creative participation as a major step forward for our field. Of course the message about the creative economy is being heard (perhaps a bit too loudly, according to some). But I hope we can think more broadly about creativity and its impact on education, communities, and our lives in general.

How would your community – or your local arts agency – look if there were a stronger focus on supporting and enhancing access to creativity?

Pallotta challenges the reliance on financial indicators (specifically overhead as a percentage of expenditures) to determine an organization’s worthiness for contributed support. This measure, he feels, is one derived from assumptions that are more appropriate in the for-profit sector,and is misguided as a measure of a nonprofit’s effectiveness. Are there organizations that spend too much on overhead and not enough on effective programs? Certainly there are some, but given the variety of challenges facing nonprofits, can this metric really be standardized and used as a basis for comparison? But then taken as a whole, what metrics do accurately represent the realities of the nonprofit sector?

These are not just theoretical questions as thousands of donors today rely on existing measures of effectiveness as defined by organizations like Charity Navigator and GuideStar, both of which have expanded their information offerings. According to Ken Berger, Charity Navigator is revamping their rating system to include transparency, best practices, and accomplishments in addition to financial indicators, and Bob Ottenhoff says that GuideStar has recently expanded the kinds of information that nonprofits can submit to include more information about mission, programs, and how successful they are at meeting their goals.

Are these the right measures (or at least more precise)? What role should we all play in developing more effective measures? To download a transcript or audio version of this thought-provoking webinar, visit the Network for Good website (free registration is required for downloads). Both Ken Berger and Bob Ottenhoff have posted follow-up responses as well.

A survey by the Center on Philanthropy of affluent households found that over 36% had a “great deal of confidence” in nonprofit organizations to solve domestic or global problems (fewer than 10% felt the same of corporations). The Economist posits that much of that trust may be tenuous due to the fact that “warm sentiments towards charities may be based on a wider misunderstanding of what they do and how much they cost,” and points to the anger that erupts over charity scandals like those involving Unicef in 2008 or the Red Cross in late 2001.

Accountability rests on transparency and thorough evaluation. This involves not only nonprofits making facts and figures public, but their funders as well. One positive recent trend among funders is to publish the results of evaluations on their web sites (For examples, see WolfBrown’s evaluation of the Knight Foundation’s “Magic of Music” program, or this recently-released report for the Nonprofit Finance Fund. The increasing availability of comprehensive analysis drives transparency, reduces reliance on financial indicators to appraise nonprofits’ net impact (more on that from Jane below), and increases awareness of how nonprofits operate.

1. Gain people’s attention by allowing the attackers in and letting them attack.
2. Win the minds of the relevant, attentive audience with simple, clear and commonsense responses.
3. Win their hearts by, most of all, showing respect.
4. Constantly monitor the people whose agreement you need: the broad audience, not the few attackers.
5. Prepare for these steps in advance.

The “Ten Commandments” are undoubtedly one of the more enduring lists of guiding principles ever developed. To avoid your good ideas taking 40 years to be accepted, I recommend using Kotter and Whitehead’s methods to get real buy-in.

A new instance of crowd-sourcing widens this discussion still further: for the last 50 years, the University of London has been transcribing the papers of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, publishing 27 volumes. More than half of his output remains to be processed. Beginning last fall, the editors invited anyone with time and interest to join the team. In four months, more than 300 people have signed on and have since produced over 400 transcripts. Here, too, there are shudders. Scholars working on other archives such as the Lincoln papers, who tried similar efforts, point to error-laden results simply not worth the time.

But think about this as more than scholarship- could libraries, archives, or museums use crowd-sourced projects as a way to develop a devoted, informed membership? Suppose every American history or humanities class in New York City (or Houston, or Anchorage) took on one such project – each student learning an era well enough to infer the handwritten words, the habits of scholarship, and a deep appreciation for those institutions that save the record of our past thoughts, wishes, and hopes. Research at WolfBrown confirms that people who played an instrument are the most likely to be concert-goers- in the same way, could transcription or other simple forms of conservation lead to life-long engagement?

During a recent trip to New Orleans, I reconnected with an urban planning friend, now a professor at University of New Orleans. We exchanged many stories about our respective studies and project work. Since then, I’ve been mulling over the effects of severe population loss in cities – one of her research topics inspired in part by Hurricane Katrina’s effect on the city. Katrina forced New Orleans to undergo dramatic changes in a short period of time, thereby demanding the development of community revitalization strategies. Most of us are familiar with arguments and examples of arts as a means of community development, a driver of urban revitalization, beautification and business development.

A recent Mission Models Money (MMM) paper, titled “Sustainable Ability,” argues that we should now focus on art’s ability to elevate the importance of intrinsic values in order to adapt to changing conditions, and hopefully resolve or mitigate larger problems such as climate change. In this argument, intrinsic values refer to “what matters on the inside…aspects of ourselves that value community, family, connection to others” that often act as a greater motivator for change than scientific evidence. MMM and others (e.g., The Canadian Geographer’s 2004 article “Reimagining Sustainable Cultures: Constitutions, Land and Art” by Nancy Doubleday, et. al.) assert that the arts act as a galvanizing force to strengthen and heal communities. The arts are a vehicle for solving complex issues through re-imagining the future and highlighting different perspectives, and an agent for changing ingrained and destructive behaviors. In other words, community and cultural resilience is a byproduct of a thriving creative sector. A recent Arts Council England paper – Making Adaptive Resiliency Real- explains the importance of arts organizations in the local sphere, why it is important to understand what is happening in the external environment, and how one’s work is interrelated to community health and vibrancy.

New Orleans changed overnight, without much warning. Most communities have experienced similarly quick shifts and are anticipating others that will manifest on a much slower trajectory. How can we harness our collective creative voice to anticipate and adapt to change, as we experience it, or better yet, before it occurs?

I can personally attest to the squeamishness that accompanies sitting through the premiere of your own creative work, knowing that every bit of the audience’s skepticism and displeasure is yours and yours alone.  At such times, the prospect of someone – anyone – sharing the blame is appealing.  Of course, the diffusion of responsibility for the end creative product of collaboration is not necessarily a good thing (witness many recent films that look like they were conceived around a boardroom table).  But I have often thought that when he was conducting the premiere of “The Marriage of Figaro,” which thoroughly thumbed its nose at the aristocracy in the audience, Mozart must have taken some solace in the fact that the libretto was written by someone else (Lorenzo Da Ponte)- perhaps, he thought, at least the Emperor Josef II would let the two of them share a dungeon cell.

This past Friday at the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters in New York City, I was thrilled to participate in a forward-looking discussion about the pivotal role that venues and settings play in performing arts experiences.  All else being equal, why will some people attend programs in one setting, but not another?  What will artists require in terms of performance spaces in 10 or 20 years?  While most arts presenters are hardwired to offer programs in conventional venues with good acoustics and technical capabilities, the public is increasingly drawn to nontraditional, unusual, multi-use and temporary spaces that add a unique dimension to the live experience.  An increasingly impatient audience, with a shorter attention span and a higher threshold for pleasure, wants spaces where they can move around, be comfortable, eat, drink, socialize, be creative, and participate more actively in the experience.  What does this portend for the future of arts facilities?

I worry that cinemas will become the venue of choice for a large segment of the arts-going public, where they can sit in really comfortable seats and watch high quality digital broadcasts of the best art in the world for a fraction of the cost.  In fact, this train has already left the station.  While multiplexes might be the new frontier of arts participation, and a boost to overall levels of public participation in the arts, conventional spaces might be left in the dark.

I’ll be researching this topic over the coming months and plan to publish a white paper later in the year.  If you have an opinion to share, or if you would like to pass along examples of how arts groups have used non-traditional settings to reach new audiences, I would love to hear about it.  You may submit your comments here or via email.

The recent announcement that Larry Goldman, New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s founding CEO, is leaving to head the center’s affiliated NJPAC Development Corporation prompted me to wonder why more arts groups do not take leadership roles in the development of surrounding commercial property.  Those who develop arts facilities usually cite the positive impact that Lincoln Center has had on residential and retail development on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but often fail to recognize the opportunity Lincoln Center missed by not investing in that neighborhood’s development.  More recently, organizations like Playhouse Square in Cleveland have made adjacent commercial development a core part of their missions to provide audiences with a satisfying overall visitor experience.  They have come to realize that taking a proactive role in the development of nearby shops and restaurants on land they control can provide an ongoing source of ancillary revenue and take some pressure off the need for philanthropic support.

In a previous On Our Minds entry, we wrote about Carnegie Hall’s Music Connections as an example of how new programs in community engagement help foster more “complete” musicians. Another benefit may be that these programs also enable arts organizations, including symphony orchestras, to expand their relevance and connection to underserved communities. Not only does this enrich the exchange between musicians and audiences, it extends the boundaries of typical arts appreciation and expands the nature of the relationship.

I must say, I plead guilty to having advised many nonprofit clients that they must look toward a more diverse funding base in order to enhance sustainability. Miller provides an example of an organization with very diverse revenue sources, including 15 percent of revenue from “the dinner dance, the golf outing” and other labor intensive strategies. Like all best practices, fund diversification should be applied differently in different organizations. I would agree, for example, that it may not be worthwhile to add events to the mix if they yield relatively little for the work involved. Indeed, my general advice about events is that they must have value as a means of building the donor base permanently, not as one-offs with no lasting impact.

But fund diversification is often a good idea. I have seen too many instances where over-reliance on a small number of funders has skewed programming decisions, adversely affected the balance of power on the board, and made the organization vulnerable to sudden changes in the priorities of the funders. I have also seen lack of funder diversity as an issue in founder transition- when the organization relies on revenue from a few sources with which the founder has built close relationships, it is that much harder to make the change in leadership. Whether or not funding diversity is fundamentally counterproductive, or a necessary financial strategy, it works best when applied thoughtfully with a well-identified objective.

Why do we care? Grassroots nonprofit organizations are doing important work in communities across the country. In volunteering for my community in the past, I have worked with small-budget parent-teacher organizations that had not filed annual reports with the state. It wasn’t that the forms were difficult to complete- they simply were not aware of the requirement. The amount of money these organizations raise makes a difference to the schools they serve, and the fact that contributions are deductible matters to the folks contributing. Anyone who alerts his or her friends, neighbors, or community organizations of the new filing requirement could save the nonprofit status for a small organization doing important work.

Guidestar’s report provides support, encouragement, and advice for those who have not yet filed. It also points to the added responsibility of donors to verify that nonprofits are in fact complying with these regulations. Additionally, the IRS provides a list of organizations (by state) that are delinquent and at risk of losing their nonprofit status, as well as information on what an organization can do to preserve its nonprofit status.

Please share this with any organization you may know that is at risk! The deadline for filing is October 15, 2010.

What is more interesting than the simple emergence of these leaders is their focus and perspective.  You could hear it at many of the panel sessions: attention to and comfort with innovation, openness to new ways of conducting business, an awareness of the need to not only do more with less but to “do less better.”  I was particularly impressed with the new publication of the National Alliance for Media Art and Culture called “Leading Creatively: A Closer Look 2010,” which is available for a short time as a PDF download (~24MB) before publication. Also, the concept of “omni-directional mentorship” described by Edward Clapp, whose “20under40″ will be published this month, is well worth a look.  These are fabulous antidotes to the rut we can get into about the hard times our sector faces – yes, no doubt these are hard times, but the talent that’s out there is encouraging. Help is on the way.

Regardless of my skepticism, the article, based on a half century of research by E. Paul Torrance and others, raises concerns about the creative competency and competitiveness of our workforce.  Historically, Torrance’s creativity index has been a good predictor of young people’s creative accomplishments as adults, and after many years of seeing the creativity index rise in the U.S., it is now on the decline.  This is bad news for business, as a highly creative workforce helps us to be competitive in world markets. According to Newsweek, this decline may have reached crisis proportions.

The article makes me wonder about the basis for such conventional creativity tests designed 50 years ago.  These tests most likely do not measure digital forms of creativity (e.g., re-mixing and sampling music, electronic “curating” of photo albums) that are currently such a large part of the creative life of young people.  Could it be that their innate creativity is simply utilizing new tools and being expressed in unconventional forms?  I have always tested high on traditional creativity tests but my seven-year-old grandson is far more creative when it comes to digital activities.

The overall message of this article is one we can all agree on: there is a need for a different kind of educational approach in this country that is not solely controlled by standardized tests and strict curricula, but rather is based on identifying and solving problems with a hands-on approach, and is available for everyone.

1.  The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution, by David La Piana, explains why traditional strategic planning, which generates agreement on lists of long-term goals and activities is not very useful for today’s challenges.  He urges organizations to resist letting the need for internal alignment inhibit them from making tough, but unpopular decisions.  They should develop consensus, if not unanimity, around the right organizational, programmatic and operational strategies.  They should also be nimble, developing dynamic strategies, which can be modified in response to changing circumstances.

2. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, uses counter-intuitive research in psychology and sociology to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change.  The primary obstacle to change, say the Heath brothers, is competition for control between the rational and emotional parts of our brains.  “The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie.  The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine.  This tension can doom a change effort-but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.”  Switch uses entertaining anecdotes to outline a process for breaking down the barriers to change.

3. The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change, by Allison Fine and Beth Kanter, contains valuable practical and contextual information about how non-profit organizations can use social media strategies to further their missions.  The book emphasizes that the effective use of these new technologies is predicated on having transparent and empowered relationships with an organization’s supporters.

These books may not have the titillating suspense of Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy” novels, but reading them will give you a strategic head start preparing for the Fall arts season (and won’t require remembering obscure Swedish names and places).

So many aspects of arts and culture are changing so rapidly that we often haven’t had time to sort out what the best practices are. We can learn from what others are trying, even before their approaches have been anointed as “best.” And as various fields and disciplines shift and merge, looking outside our usual range of comparatives could provide just the flash of strategic or tactical insight needed to move an organization forward. So while we still need to cultivate best practices, let’s keep a forward-looking eye to next practices.

1.  A high level summary report, It’s Not About You…It’s About Them: A Research Report on What Motivates Bay Area Donors to Give to the Arts and Artists, which should be of interest to funders, arts agencies, and others who seek to help artists and small arts groups raise funds for programs.

2.  A series of case studies, Field Reports from the Fund For Artists Matching Commissions Program:  Unlocking the Potential of Individual Donors, which describe how some of the individual artists and arts groups successfully raised funds.

3. A detailed WolfBrown report on what motivates Bay Area donors to give to a range of arts programs and projects, including results of a survey of over 3,000 donors, for research geeks who want to read the whole bloody thing.

The research was co-commissioned by The San Francisco Foundation and East Bay Community Foundation, as part of an effort to better understand the success of their Fund For Artists Matching Commissions program, through which Bay Area artists raised more than $1.3 million since 2004.  I am particularly grateful to our partners in the research, John Killacky and Diane Sanchez, as well as Marcy Cady and Holly Sidford of Helicon Collaborative, for all of their support and good thinking.

- What happens to museums when malls and old factories become galleries?

- If text messaging can fuel grassroots democratic actions, what could it do for the arts?

- Are there aspects of the arts that we should think twice about democratizing?

We will be sharing more about the NEA monograph in the upcoming months. Expected publication is September 2010.

And yet, there is hope: both “creativity” and reform are hot topics among the field’s leaders.  I attended a session, for example, in which Kerry Freedman, a professor at Northern Illinois University, and three graduate students described their efforts to craft curricula at the district level. Thanks to their efforts, youngsters will now explore the references at work in “visual culture” and how they influence us in both conscious and unconscious ways.  Julia Marshall, a professor at San Francisco State and my sister, offered a fascinating case study in which high school students “invented” tools to address chronic social or environmental problems about which they are concerned. Julia’s case study, “Thinking Outside and On the Box,” was published in the most recent edition of Art Education.**  They both offer cause for optimism.

• Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island supports a professional string quartet and other musicians using music to help build and transform community.
• Weill Music Institute and Carnegie Hall’s joint program called Musical Connections takes music out of the concert hall and directly to people who don’t readily have access to live music (e.g., hospital patients, prisoners, seniors). The program also supports participating artists through its Professional Development program.
• Carnegie Hall and Weill are also partnering with the Juilliard School and the New York City Department of Education on The Academy, a two-year fellowship program for up and coming professional musicians which helps them to develop community engagement and leadership skills along with artistic excellence.
• The New England Conservatory (NEC) has a number of programs that focus on community, including musical entrepreneurship that WolfBrown helped design and the American version of Venezuela’s El Sistema, a voluntary musical education program.

Tony Woodcock, President of the NEC, in a recent talk at the Salzburg Seminars last month discussing NEC’s programs and innovations around professional musicians, quoted Dr. Jose Antonio Abreu, the founder of the El Sistema program in Venezuela: “It is not enough for them (musicians) to love their instruments; they must also learn to love their responsibilities as citizens. They need to be apostles to the community.”  I think this pretty much sums up the importance of artists’ activity within their community – agents of social change.

What fascinates me most about all this is the power of the ‘limited-time’ event to capture the attention of the public.  What would explain why tens of thousands of people flock to a website at the same moment in time to donate?  While I would like to think the matching incentive is a motivation, as well as the immutable deadline, this alone doesn’t explain it.  Most certainly there are other, more subtle, psychological factors at play, both altruistic and selfish.  The emergence of community-wide online fundraising “events” underscores the critical importance to arts groups of being able to mobilize their constituents electronically.  New technologies are reshaping the giving patterns of ordinary people who understand that they can play a small, meaningful part in changing the world, or at least their own community.

• Poems submitted to a magazine must not have been published previously, no matter how different the audience may be.
• Poems can usually be submitted to one magazine at a time only.
• Submissions likely must arrive when the academic year is in session, in order to take advantage of faculty counsel and student assistance.
• The author may wait as long as four months for a reply, tying up a set of poems for a good chunk of the year.
• All transactions are likely on paper.  When it comes to submissions in particular, it’s as though the digital age never arrived.

Competitions are not the same as literary publications, and awards are not why poets write poetry.  But a few features of the Poetry Ark, a new online quest for 100 memorable poems, cross over.  Among the possibilities that apply equally to competitive events and literary magazines:

• Use technology more fully to streamline and expedite transactions
• Allow submissions to be in a digital format
• Accept work that is under consideration elsewhere
• Consider previously published work that had a small run or audience
• Come hell or high water, respond within a month, at least two
• Accept self-published work that meets the same high standards
• Go where the next generation of readers will be (e.g., the Kindle)

Perhaps the biggest step we’re taking at the Poetry Ark is to give site visitors the editorial authority to advance individual poems or hold them back, depending on how visitors vote.  At the end of the day, those involved will be able to say that they immersed themselves in the community of English-language poets, made additional resources available to them, helped select and showcase the 100 best poems identified by site visitors, compiled a new anthology, introduced the poets to new markets, and, if we succeed, celebrated work that will be remembered.

As fewer and fewer people attend conferences due to shrinking budgets, I wish more conference organizers would produce this kind of concise summary, so that the field might benefit more widely from the dialogues that too often start and end at conferences.

• who your audiences will be;
• with what programs and through what distribution channels you will serve those audiences;
• who your competitors will be and what your unique competitive advantage will be; and
• what organizational and financial resources will be needed to realize your mission and vision.

Of course, summarizing a seminal 300+ page book in 300 words does not do it justice. So, I will just pass on the advice of a friend who urged me to read it and suggest that the $12.21 cost of the paperback ($9.56 if you have a Kindle) is money well spent.

Over the years, WolfBrown consultants have played a role in evaluating several of the early Wallace audience building programs. Currently our work with Big Thought, a public-private arts education initiative, is an example of what building demand looks like. This work has led to new findings on the desire for arts and cultural opportunities among families with low to moderate incomes, typically not thought of as arts consumers. Families desire and seek these opportunities actively, especially for their children, bartering their time, re-structuring work schedules, volunteering, saving, and using public transportation. But translating this desire into active demand requires three additional ingredients:
1.) A Range of Venues: Families use a wide variety of venues to enroll their children in creative learning, including schools, libraries, park and rec sites, and faith-based organizations. Each setting offers a distinctive point of entry and community of values around the arts (e.g., achievement, literacy, physical activity, or reverence).
2.) A Human Network: Building and sustaining demand also requires a human infrastructure (what Big Thought calls “a creative workforce”) populated with a wide variety of individuals who support, value, and teach the arts. This network is not only comprised of instructors, but also families who mentor other families, community members who work in after school programs, pastors who support choirs, praise dancing and theater, and older peers who act as models and mentors.
3.) Community Infrastructure: Finally, small but powerful, factors shape demand. Is a neighborhood safe enough for children to walk to classes? Is there a place where family members go to share and learn about opportunities? Do the new mixed-income apartments have rooms for rehearsals or showing work?

While Big Thought is clearly not responsible for public safety or facilities, its programs have been a kind of canary in the mine, detecting the daily facts of life that lie between fierce desire and realized demand. For initial findings go to Big Thought, click on the Research tab and Building a System of Opportunities for Creative Learning, a summary report, or one of the other reports.

Understanding the accountability environment is, perhaps, one of the most important dialogues we can have as a sector. Is outcomes-based evaluation a distraction or a necessity for nonprofit cultural organizations? What expectations should funders have of grantees with respect to their capacity to undertake evaluation? Why should nonprofit cultural institutions voluntarily hold themselves accountable to a higher standard? As we investigate these and other questions in more depth, I hope you will send us your thoughts and ideas.

The impact of technology on the ways in which we engage with creative activities is striking, and its relationship to cultural participation is worthy of particular note. For example, WolfBrown’s recent cultural participation study for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, the Cultural Engagement Index, finds an important correlation between personal practice activities and audience-based activities. Specifically, increased frequency in “taking digital photographs with artistic intent” indicates more frequent attendance at museums and galleries. There’s an opportunity to build on this synergy by figuring out how to employ these more powerful and less expensive artistic tools to feed participation in creative pursuits and establish a personal connection between programming and audience or visitor. By building interest and connection to arts and culture as a personal activity with personal relevance, we can develop new avenues of audience development.

The value for arts leaders is using Matt Miller’s provocative book as a prompt to make sure that whatever underlying assumptions you are using to guide your organization’s decisions are still alive and kicking today.

With the help of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and AmericaSpeaks, Gates went directly to students – not principals, teachers, or data-tracking administrators, but 5,400 students at 20 of the 2,000 high schools it has worked with – to take the “YouthTruth” survey. According to Fay Twersky, Gates’ Director of Impact Planning and Improvement, the “YouthTruth” survey will provide feedback to its grantees and “add rigor to Gates’ process,” though it won’t have a direct bearing on their future funding. The article focuses on Woodrow Wilson H.S. in DC’s Northwest Tenleytown neighborhood and describes how the young people were equipped with wireless devices whose instant polling feedback immediately compiled results on a video screen for everyone to see. The devices were a tool to capture the kids’ attention and prepare them for more serious questioning that followed in an online survey later. The article suggests the survey may also prompt students to think in ROI terms. Questions like “What obstacles, like drugs, crime, or family responsibilities make it difficult for you to perform well in your studies?” were designed to keep them thinking about effectiveness and impact, too.