In case anyone is breathlessly awaiting my next post, between a brand new job, and starting the second semester of grad school, I'm a little buried and will probably post in the next week or two.
In the meantime, here are some links to keep you busy:
Fractured Atlas gets an amazing grant for Health Insurance!
An intense indictment of the NEA
Bill Gates wants a kinder, gentler capitalism
NEA Announces new Deputy Chair for States, Regions, and Local Arts Makers
The Guardian weighs in on the ongoing Critic Debate
Enjoy, and see you soon!
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
RSS Obsessed
That little box you see on the righthand side of the screen is an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed from my Google reader. Recently, I've become a little obsessed with my RSS feeds. I started gathering them in late December, and I already have 147 coming into my Google reader, where I track fundraising, nonprofit tech, arts management, advocacy, culture, design, arts marketing, and social media blogs and resources. Then I opened a separate RSS account on Bloglines to specfically track Theatre blogs and resources. I track 26 in that account.
Kind of a lot to take in every day, but I can't believe how addictive it is. It's like every morning some friendly person has combed through all the information in the world, and sent me a bunch of things I might be interested in. In-depth coverage of the Arts Council dispute in the UK? Check. An editorial on the effective use of Twitter in nonprofit management? Check. An update from the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society? Check. A hack-script that splits my Gmail screen between mail and GCal? Check! An update from the NEA on available grants? Check, check, check!
The best part of this obsession is I finally feel like I have a productive way to goof off. Instead of reading TMZ for half an hour and feeling like I have to take a shower, I spend that time catching up on the Philanthropy News Digest, cranky theatre bloggers from New York to San Francisco, tips and tools for cheap market research, best practices in board governance... kind of a lazy nerd's utopia.
If you're new to the RSS-bliss, I highly recommend getting started with Google Reader: reader.google.com (doubly convenient if you already use Gmail). Bloglines is also pretty good, but I prefer Google for simplicity and convenience. To get started, I've listed a few of my favorite sites with feeds, but anywhere you see that orange wireless-looking button means the page has an RSS feed you can subscribe to.
ArtsJournal, home of Daily Arts News, and my very favorite blog, Andrew Taylor's The Artful Manager. If you subscribe to anything, I would make it Mr. Taylor's clear, entertaining, and enlightening posts on the art of arts management.
Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, the Mommy of all nonprofit tech blogs
Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog, near-perfect advice on nonprofit management and marketing
Guardian Unlimited Arts Blog: Theatre, I find Lyn Gardner's posts particularly inspiring
Lifehacker, want to learn how to send emails to yourself via voicemail? Convert a PDF to a Word document? Take a free accounting class? Get your Google Calendar and Gmail on the same page? This site will tell you how.
Fractured Atlas Blog, underrated in the small world of Arts Management blogs, in my opinion
If this all sounds like too much trouble, you can actually subscribe to my shared Google Reader items (here), and let me sift through the daily news for you. Nothing would make me happier.
Kind of a lot to take in every day, but I can't believe how addictive it is. It's like every morning some friendly person has combed through all the information in the world, and sent me a bunch of things I might be interested in. In-depth coverage of the Arts Council dispute in the UK? Check. An editorial on the effective use of Twitter in nonprofit management? Check. An update from the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society? Check. A hack-script that splits my Gmail screen between mail and GCal? Check! An update from the NEA on available grants? Check, check, check!
The best part of this obsession is I finally feel like I have a productive way to goof off. Instead of reading TMZ for half an hour and feeling like I have to take a shower, I spend that time catching up on the Philanthropy News Digest, cranky theatre bloggers from New York to San Francisco, tips and tools for cheap market research, best practices in board governance... kind of a lazy nerd's utopia.
If you're new to the RSS-bliss, I highly recommend getting started with Google Reader: reader.google.com (doubly convenient if you already use Gmail). Bloglines is also pretty good, but I prefer Google for simplicity and convenience. To get started, I've listed a few of my favorite sites with feeds, but anywhere you see that orange wireless-looking button means the page has an RSS feed you can subscribe to.
ArtsJournal, home of Daily Arts News, and my very favorite blog, Andrew Taylor's The Artful Manager. If you subscribe to anything, I would make it Mr. Taylor's clear, entertaining, and enlightening posts on the art of arts management.
Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, the Mommy of all nonprofit tech blogs
Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog, near-perfect advice on nonprofit management and marketing
Guardian Unlimited Arts Blog: Theatre, I find Lyn Gardner's posts particularly inspiring
Lifehacker, want to learn how to send emails to yourself via voicemail? Convert a PDF to a Word document? Take a free accounting class? Get your Google Calendar and Gmail on the same page? This site will tell you how.
Fractured Atlas Blog, underrated in the small world of Arts Management blogs, in my opinion
If this all sounds like too much trouble, you can actually subscribe to my shared Google Reader items (here), and let me sift through the daily news for you. Nothing would make me happier.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Weird and Wonderful
In Scott Walters' Theatre Ideas blog, Mr. Walters makes some good points about the geographic and demographic breakdown of nonprofit theatre dispersal in America. Walters also name-checks the amazing Mike Daisey's recent Under The Radar performance of How Theater Failed America (via Isaac Butler's Parabasis blog). I haven't seen Mr. Daisey's show, but I have to admit I'm a little put-off by the title.
Walters takes issue with the high concentration of NEA donations to theatres in the Northeast and on the West Coast (actually he takes issue with the massive concentration of theatres on the coasts, but stay with me). How relevant is NEA funding? According to TCG's 2007 Theatrefacts, out of the 105 theatres surveyed, about $45,000 in contributions came from the NEA. State agencies contributed more like $195,000, corporations $350,000, and foundations $630,000. But what is consistently the most impressive source of unearned income in nonprofit theatre? Individuals, at $850,000! (That's not ticket sales, that's donations. Tickets sales make up a whole other income source... so some people are giving twice.)
I don't have geographic data for these individual contributions, but the numbers clearly imply that single people are by far the most relevant source of funding. These contributions come from the community. The American funding model is not perfect, but if anything, it is diverse. And maybe I'd prefer to live in the Netherlands, where the state funds arts groups indefinitely, but there's something I like about the diversity of our funding options.
Ok, the subscription model is dying. Thank goodness. On the topic of audience relations, the incredible Zannie and Glenn Voss come to some fascinating conclusions in their study "Strategic Orientation and Firm Performance in an Artistic Environment". I won't go into the data sets, but the study essentially suggests that customer-oriented theatres (organizations that make most of their decisions based on what they think their customers want) in fact perform worse than theatres that focus on their competitive environment or their own programming.
These findings pretty much contradict conventional marketing wisdom (find out what your customers want, and do that), and suggest that arts organizations perform better when they make strong, innovative artistic decisions. This study actually suggests that arts customers want to be told what they want! And really, why do people patronize the arts? Is it to get some kind of instant gratification, or is it to be inspired, engaged, and provoked by an innovative aesthetic point of view? My money's on the latter.
Zannie and Glenn Voss see the nonprofit theatre industry as a market "boundary condition", meaning it's an industry that behaves totally differently from most other business models. But instead of apologizing for being so strange, and trying to pretzel the arts into traditional business models, they suggest that the greatest merit of the nonprofit theatre community is our weirdness.
So, has theatre failed America? Well, first of all, it's cool that Mr. Daisey is even bringing this up. But personally, I'd ask different questions - like what resources are available that we're not taking advantage of? How can we encourage and create community? How can we fix the massive wage inequities? Not as catchy as Mr. Daisey's title... but I'm not willing to believe that theatre has failed America. At least I don't think we're going to get very far thinking that way. I obviously don't have the answers, but I do believe we can do better.
I was planning to start this blog as a straightforward resource for young arts professionals, which I still want to be the main thrust, but I found myself so engaged by what's been happening on these blogs that I really wanted to respond. So thanks for that... I appreciate the kick in the pants.
Walters takes issue with the high concentration of NEA donations to theatres in the Northeast and on the West Coast (actually he takes issue with the massive concentration of theatres on the coasts, but stay with me). How relevant is NEA funding? According to TCG's 2007 Theatrefacts, out of the 105 theatres surveyed, about $45,000 in contributions came from the NEA. State agencies contributed more like $195,000, corporations $350,000, and foundations $630,000. But what is consistently the most impressive source of unearned income in nonprofit theatre? Individuals, at $850,000! (That's not ticket sales, that's donations. Tickets sales make up a whole other income source... so some people are giving twice.)
I don't have geographic data for these individual contributions, but the numbers clearly imply that single people are by far the most relevant source of funding. These contributions come from the community. The American funding model is not perfect, but if anything, it is diverse. And maybe I'd prefer to live in the Netherlands, where the state funds arts groups indefinitely, but there's something I like about the diversity of our funding options.
Ok, the subscription model is dying. Thank goodness. On the topic of audience relations, the incredible Zannie and Glenn Voss come to some fascinating conclusions in their study "Strategic Orientation and Firm Performance in an Artistic Environment". I won't go into the data sets, but the study essentially suggests that customer-oriented theatres (organizations that make most of their decisions based on what they think their customers want) in fact perform worse than theatres that focus on their competitive environment or their own programming.
These findings pretty much contradict conventional marketing wisdom (find out what your customers want, and do that), and suggest that arts organizations perform better when they make strong, innovative artistic decisions. This study actually suggests that arts customers want to be told what they want! And really, why do people patronize the arts? Is it to get some kind of instant gratification, or is it to be inspired, engaged, and provoked by an innovative aesthetic point of view? My money's on the latter.
Zannie and Glenn Voss see the nonprofit theatre industry as a market "boundary condition", meaning it's an industry that behaves totally differently from most other business models. But instead of apologizing for being so strange, and trying to pretzel the arts into traditional business models, they suggest that the greatest merit of the nonprofit theatre community is our weirdness.
So, has theatre failed America? Well, first of all, it's cool that Mr. Daisey is even bringing this up. But personally, I'd ask different questions - like what resources are available that we're not taking advantage of? How can we encourage and create community? How can we fix the massive wage inequities? Not as catchy as Mr. Daisey's title... but I'm not willing to believe that theatre has failed America. At least I don't think we're going to get very far thinking that way. I obviously don't have the answers, but I do believe we can do better.
I was planning to start this blog as a straightforward resource for young arts professionals, which I still want to be the main thrust, but I found myself so engaged by what's been happening on these blogs that I really wanted to respond. So thanks for that... I appreciate the kick in the pants.
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