What Taxes Mean to Donors

For a long time now, I have wondered just how important the tax deduction is to donors. This article says that for many, it's not a big deal:

.http://www.philanthropyjournal.org/resources/fundraisinggiving/impact-changes-tax-rates-charitable-giving

Getting back up...

My friends....
It's been much too long, and I'm sorry for the silence. It's grant season over here, and i've been talking to many of you on the phone and in person about applications. It's the best part of the job, but it leads to neglect of the blog. the real enemy of the blog, of course, is high expectations of the things one should write. To defeat this, I'm just quickly putting up some article links that struck me as important and useful, viz:

...a Boston Globe article with inspiring fundraising stories re: the MFA,

...a David Carr piece from the NYT about social networking & the Obama campaign,

...a Chronicle of Philanthropy piece on what nonprofits can hope for from the Obama presidency,

...and that is all. More will come soon!

Why Rich People Give

Came across this in a daily news summary from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. It's a great little education in fundraising--no groundbreaking news, (people give to causes because their friends ask them too!) but a lot of affirmation of basic common sense. which is always useful and grounding.

Here's the study (pdf) on which the article is based. It comes out of Penn's center for High Impact Philanthropy.

Idealware Online Seminars

I've gone on about Idealware.org before, but they just sent around a list of upcoming online seminars, and they look very useful--selecting an inexpensive donor database, email newsletter system, online conferencing, web analytics... all my favorite things.  And the site has a lot of great articles and suggestions. It will make you look smart.

Can't Stop Posting!

sorry to be bombarding you today, but this was in my inbox this morning from the folks at the Harvard Business Review about what to do with underperforming employees & I thought it'd be useful to some of you:

Like Pandora, but for Philanthropy

Here's an interesting concept: a search engine that matches peoples' interests with  appropriate nonprofits.  it's called Donation Dashboard. Sean Stannard-Stockton compares it to the music site Pandora... 

What the Kids are into these days...

We just got a great opportunity to bring in an exciting speaker from Britain, DK from Mediasnackers, to talk about using technology to reach younger audiences.

From all accounts, he's an amazing speaker who gives a lot of very practical advice on millenials. 

Sign up here.

Also, there's still room in our IRS Form 990 session, which will be on September 16 from 9-11.  Sign up for that here.

Bits from the web...

I've become a slave to Google Reader--it's an efficent way to read a lot of blogs, which is both the good news and the bad news. Here's some of what I've found:

Good Fundraising Advice on Donor Power blog

Nonprofit Board Crisis picks up an LATimes story about the future of print journals and newspapers as nonprofits.  He also has a new piece as of yesterday about family members on boards.

Philanthropy 2173 has yet another interesting piece, (and a funky graph, which I love) about the future of the net and fundraising.

...and a friend sent me a recent article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy  about the phenomenon of "musical chairs" with Directors of Development in the current market.  So many organizations are looking for a Director of Development that mediocre people can hop from job to job without having to really prove themselves.  The Chronic is subscription-only, though, so I'm having trouble linking it here...

The New 990

If you get our emails, you should know about the "Alert Workshop" were doing on September 16 about the new IRS Form 990. Eric Fraint of Your Part Time Controller will be doing a presentation & distributing a really great set of handouts all about the new reporting requirements of the form.

If you haven't been reading up on the new form, suffice it to say that it has some major differences from the old one, and will ask you for considerable amounts of new information. It may even push your organization to adopt new policies relating to conflicts of interest, document preservation, salaries, and even the protection of "whistleblowers." and more. Just last week the IRS published new, clarified instructions for the form--here's a Chronicle of Philanthropy story about it.

To register for this Alert Workshop, click here. Seating is limited, and it's booking up fast!

SurveyMonkey on yr Back

I have loved SurveyMonkey since I first saw it. A cheap, easy-to-use online survey system that made getting feedback on programs easy. Where I used to work, we started using it for all sorts of functions--planning events, scheduling meetings--to the point where it became a verb. To S'monkey.

It's so easy and so effective, though, that it can breed laziness about surveys. See Seth Godin's blog post from this week. This blog is eminently worthy of an rss feed, by the way, if you have any interest in marketing or the public image of your organization.

I've just started using Google Reader for keeping up on my blogs. It's the kind of tool that you're not sure you need until you start using it, at which point it becomes indispensable.

Tools for Financial Management

One of our biggest & best loved programs, Tools for Financial Management, is gearing up for its fifth class starting September 24. It's a nine-part class that takes place from September to December, and gives you pretty much everything you need to know to understand nonprofit finances. It's an excellent class that is always very highly rated by the people who take it. It's taught by people from Your Part Time Controller & takes place here at the Phiadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage. (we have to use Temple's center city classrooms for two classes early on, but you'll see that on the flyer.)

There's more info & registration material here.

Presents from Gateshead

A group of us just returned from an Arts Marketing Association conference in Gateshead, England, where much was learned about how arts marketing works in Europe, and in Britain specifically. General conclusion--there's a lot of great, audience-centric thinking happening... partly exemplified by this great white paper/prolegomena/manifesto from a consulting firm called Morris Hargreaves McIntyre called Insight required.

Make sure you catch the "seven pillars" diagnostic!

Another Cautionary Tale

A newly-found story from the L.A. Times from a newly found blog called Nonprofit Board Crisis

LA Times: Self Help Graphics' Struggle Somewhat Self-inflicted

Working Web 1 recap

Wil Reynolds from SEER Interactive came by the center yesterday to do the first session of our "Welcome to the Working Web" series on web stats & search engine optimization. (That link's for you, Wil.)

It was a whirlwind. Wil's a captivating presenter, and he moves fast, so you had to really hold on to your head to keep up with him.

Here are some of the bullets from his talk:

--Wil recommends Google Analytics as the best & cheapest way to track your webstats. It's free, but setting it up requires putting a little chunk of code into all of your website pages.

--if you're google-phobic or don't have the means to put that code into your pages, you should check out www.quantcast.com or www.compete.com to get a sense of how your web site is doing.

--Make sure you know *why* you're looking at your web data. Have specific, quantifiable goals that are consistent with your business plan. What exactly do you want people to do on your web site, and how does the data show they're doing it? have one or two numbers you watch, and ignore everything else. This is the cardinal rule.

--Make sure your site is designed to be Search friendly. Avoid flash intro pages!

--The big search engines ignore meta-tags. Don't even bother.

--The content of your home page is key, the title of your home page is even more important. Put your important keywords into the title of your home page, if possible.

--Be aware of the keywords you want linked to your site. Look into Google Grants as a tool for jump-starting your search-based advertising.

--No SEO firm can promise you a #1 search ranking for a given keyword. It's impossible to guarantee that-the search algorhythms change all the time, the environment changes all the time. This promise, according to Wil, is a sure sign of a bad SEO firm. Now a promise to get on the first *page* of a search... that's another thing.

--What you do *outside* your web site is at least as important as what you do *inside.* The more active your organization is on blogs, YouTube, twitter & other web outlets, the higher you will be ranked. Search engine rankings, especially Google's , are based largely on how people *outside* your web site are talking about it & linking to it. So cultivate your web-image outside, and share as much good "proprietary" stuff as you can.

Welcome Gary Steuer

We cannot let pass without comment the announcement that Gary Steuer has been appointed to be the new Chief Cultural Officer for the city. It's beyond our portfolio to opine on the appointment, but it's certainly great to have an office dedicated to arts & culture in this city again. Steuer is a national-level figure, whose work with Americans for the Arts & other organizations promises that he will be... the opposite of parochial. His appointment is consistent with others that Mayor Nutter has made, bespeaking his intention to find the right people for the right jobs without regard to giving or redeeming favors.

One signal I was especially proud of was the one coming from the cultural community--so many people came to the announcement that they had to turn at least a hundred people away, including some of the city's most powerful culture leaders. It must have sent a signal to the Mayor & to our new CCO--and I think we have Peggy Amsterdam & GPCA's formidable advocacy machine to thank for it.

Sometimes you have to sing a little Kumbaya.

Last week PCMI's Leadership Project--a group of "mid-career" arts professionals who have signed up for a pilot program of leadership development--went on a retreat. We spent three beautiful days and two cool nights up at Skytop in the Poconos, working and talking and writing and figuring out what we were meant to do and how we were meant to do it. There was sharing, there was bonding, there was arts & crafts, there was a campfire. There was no singing, but we came close a few times. Always in the back of my head was a line from Ben Cameron's talk at Drexel a few weeks ago, where he said, basically, that burnout in a job wasn't caused so much by long hours or bad management or by being in one place for to long as it was by being disconnected from your core values.

The problem is that we almost never have the time or the energy to really think about and give a name to what those core values are. This, for me, was the basic agenda for the retreat. Find out what's really important to you and how you can arrange your life to honor those values. The other item on the agenda was just to have an amazing group of leaders hang out together for a while and share an experience.

The process of identifying, naming, and talking about core values requires time apart and discussion and openness, as well as trust with others who have the duty of listening to you. There's a lot of sharing. Many, probably most, of the intelligent, urbane, sophisticated people who make up the world of arts leaders in our town regard the prospect of this kind of work with skepticism. at best. They have budgets to make, trustees to placate, families to nurture, and very very little time for sharing. I was terrified about how it was all going to go over.

I needn't have worried--it was a brilliant success, thanks to the shared investment of the group and the skill of our facilitators. It really helped me refocus on the things that are important to me & the things that drive me in my work.

Inevitably, you come home from that kind of experience & try to explain it to people around you and even if only for a second, they look at you like you just came home from Jonestown. But it helps--it has helped people learn how to be in better alignment with their values, and it's connected a group of amazing leaders to each other, and set an agenda for the next year's work.

How to Have a Meeting

A great little article from the Sunday NYT business section about how to run a meeting. That is all.

Thanks for the hit!

Do you have any idea how many people visit your web site? Or your blog?

You should. Your web site is the real front door to your organization, and you can get very good numbers about how many visitors come in that door, where they come from, and what they do there. And you can use that information to make money.

PCMI is bringing Wil Reynolds, the Search Engine Optimization guru of Philadelphia's own SEER Interactive, to the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage for a 2 1/2 hour presentation on how to find, understand, and use web statistics to increase traffic. He can also tell you why your organization doesn't turn up until page 3 of a Google search. Click here to see some of Wil's presentations on YouTube. He's awesome.

It's happening on Wednesday, July 23 from 1:30 to 4. It's free. Register Here.

Young Philanthropists

As a fundraiser, I always found events designed to cultivate people in their 20's and 30's to be a lot of trouble. Like most fundraising events, they succeed or fail based on the strength of the personal network of the person running them. My personal networks tended to have a lot of grad students and artists who liked cheap wine and cheese cubes well enough, but were in no position to be cultivated for philanthropic duty. They were cultivated anyway.

...or, another way to go might have been to look to the children of those who are currently running major foundations. On this subject, the New York Times sheds light. If you can get past the envy, it bears noting how new generations have very different ideas about what kind of organizations to fund, and how that funding should work. This connects to a number of recent discussions about how the rising generation "millenials" will change philanthropy.

To pull this thread a little farther: one of the ideas that stuck with me after hearing Ben Cameron talk last month was his claim that despite all the handwringing and justified grieving over the dire shortage of arts education in public schools, that the generation in school now is perhaps the most creative that the world has ever seen. They're not creating in art classes (which too often don't exist!), but they're creating with YouTube & Garageband. And yes, one of the big ideas we are hearing all the time is that new generations will expect not just interactivity, but co-creativity, or co-production of artistic work. To that end, another article from the NYT, this one on a "crowd-curated" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

Cool Little Things

...back in my days as a writing teacher, I'd say that the greatest enemy of good writing is high standards. If you know you have something Important to say, and it has to be said Just Right... you're never going to get anything done.

Obviously, I haven't written in a while, and I'm blaming this on my desire to want to write something usefully synoptic about the three presentations I've been to in close succession: Ben Cameron at Drexel, Dan Heath at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, and Andrew Zolli at the AFTA conference this past weekend. Three great speakers whose ideas all converge... but that's going to have to wait.

Until then, here's one awesome thing:

Stanford on iTunes U. [http://itunes.stanford.edu/] .

You're going to need iTunes for this, but it's a set of free recorded lectures and presentations from Stanford business school faculty, including Dan Heath's brother Chip, about nonprofit trends. Look under "Social Entrepreneurship," which is Stanford-speak for "nonprofit." I've been listening to them on my walk to work lately. Yesterday it was "Improve Your Nonprofit Operations in Less than Two Months" with Heather Carpenter and Jennifer Chien. Good advice on basic steps for new/small nonprofits, though in truth, they sound a little like Marcie & Peppermint Patty. If you listen to the Chip Heath presentation on Made to Stick, listen for the example he gives near the end of the presentation about the monastery.

...and another awesome thing: www.idealware.org --more excellent advice on software for nonprofits.

Losing Your Status

There have been two chilling stories in the news recently about organizations losing their non-profit status.

The first involves a Tennessee-based "religious charity" that lost its status basically because it spent such a small percentage of its budget on program. (Here's a story from the San Francisco Sentinel about it, another story from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.) It spent preposterously little on program, really, (less than1%!!) so it's hard to get worked up on their behalf. It sounds like a suspicious operation. But still, the principle that the IRS can pull your tax exempt status because of your program/administration/fundraising percentages is getting a lot of attention. The IRS has put non-profits on notice that it is keeping an eye on the efficiency and governance of non-profits. I've linked to recent talks given by Stephen T. Miller, one of the IRS commissioners in charge of nonprofits, about this issue and what he calls the "commensurate test."

The second case may hit closer to home--Monday's New York Times had a front page story about a Minnesota day-care center that had its nonprofit status revoked because, bascially, it didn't give anything away. The battleground for this organization is in the state courts, and the plaintiffs are local governments who want to collect property taxes. the courts could not find a meaningful distinction between the work of the non-profit day care (which didn't offer any discounts to low-income families or other discounted services) and for-profit day cares, which do pay corporate and real-estate taxes (if they own real estate). Every few years one hears similar murmurings about colleges and universities, especially Harvard, where the contrast between it's $35 billion endowment and its $0 property tax bill to the City of Cambridge is frequently invoked. (I believe Harvard does make a contribution to Cambridge in lieu of taxes, but still...).

Nerdy Productivity Books for Arts People

Getting Things Done by David Allen is exactly the kind of book I hate to get caught reading. It is a productivity book. Having it on your desk is an admission that you don't consider yourself to be productive enough. It also suggests to your coworkers that you think reading books about productivity is a good way to become productive... as opposed to just doing your work already.*

It's also one of the most helpful books about organizing your workday and yes, productivity, that I've ever read. It's description of the average modern workday is exceedingly familiar, and it's argument that we have never been trained to work in our present environments just seems right. And if you google the title, or even just GTD, you'll see that the book has what is often described as a "cult following," particularly among tech workers.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list, you should get it, and read it. It will help. End of commercial.

The Worst Word in Marketing

...or so Stanford says. Here's an article from the Stanford Social Innovation web site about the word you should never use when evaluating marketing materials.

You'll Never Do This

I can't imagine a non-profit ever doing this in a million years. That's just not how we can use cash. But it's a compelling testament to the importance of having & keeping highly motivated employees. If I had more time this morning, I'd bloviate a little bit about how nonprofit employees are paid, in part, in mission (instead of dollars), and how this is mostly a good thing (the lifeblood of organziations), but can also be a bad thing (people who are dedicated to mission, willing to be paid too little, and sometimes aren't the best at their jobs).

A little fascinating, a little appalling...

I'm always interested, despite myself, in business articles about generational dynamics in the workforce. Here's one from the Harvard Business Journal online. It's not the first article I've seen about the connection between the Boomers & Gen Y. I present it to you with the Gen Xers salute--a shrug and a weary sigh. Of course, the Boomers literally gave birth to Gen Y, so there's really not big news here, but it is perhaps another example of the Boomer trait of making everything that happens into a Trend. When your demo's that big, everything is a trend, so why not.

This morning's discoveries

...after coming across the third reference to tech business magazine Fast Company in as many days, I finally went to check it out. It's fascinating--Fortune Magazine for the Web 2.0 era. I feel like I just got in on an old secret, but that's no reason not to share.

Reading Fast Company introduced me to Ning -- critics of the Fast Company article say that it's shameless advertising posing as journalism, and they have a point. But Ning is a pretty cool company I had never heard of before, perhaps best described as "make your own Facebook." You can build your own social network.

You'll also find that Chip and Dan Heath have a regular column in Fast Company. We're bringing Dan to Philly on June 10 to talk about Made to Stick & its relevance for nonprofits. Register here!

The New 990

We've been hearing about the new Form 990 for several years now. It's been so long, in fact, that it's been fairly easy (until now) to tune out the discussion. Well, the new form has been out for a little while now, and the draft instructions have recently been published. Bring on the seminars!

If you've been skeptical about whether the form would really be all that different, let me introduce you with a little taste of Section VI -- Governance .

Do you have a written conflict of interest policy? Do you have a written whistleblower policy? Do you have a document retention and destruction policy? Can you document the process for determining compensation for your Executive Director? Are you still breathing? Are you OK?

First, remind yourself that everything's going to be fine. It's all going to be OK. But if you don't have one of these policies, it's time to start thinking about it.

Stay tuned for more from PCMI on the new 990. We're putting together a program that'll happen soon. In the meantime, I'll link you to some comments from a recent lectures by Steven T. Miller, the Internal Revenue Service Commissioner for Tax Exempt and Government Entities, who has been one of the driving forces behind these changes. The first talk is about the IRS and its interest in nonprofit governance. The second is about efficiency and effectiveness (but it talks about governance too).

NPO Crush of the Day, part 2

...I suppose this is really more a crush of the week feature, but came across this profile from New York magazine of Alanna Heiss and P.S. 1 today. It's fascinating for a whole bunch of reasons, mostly Heiss herself, but also how it reflects so many issues of the day, from founder's syndrome to the strange pivoting of the contemporary art scene in NYC to brand management to mergers. The article skirts around, but fortunately does not commit to, a straight creativity vs. business binary... but it's an excellent case study.

NPO Crush of the Day

The NYT business section had a story this morning about Open Book, a Minneapolis nonprofit that is the combination of four literary- and book-related organziations (plus a coffee shop, of course), all housed in a beautiful old mill. It's kind of a Mass MoCA for the literary crowd.

The article is slanted towards a real estate/development story, so it leaves out the business details I would have found most interesting--like how does the four-way partnership work? What's the relationship between the member organizations and the umbrella organization?

Also this morning, the Stanford Social Innovation review website introduced me to a related term: the Management Service Organization. Basically, this refers to organizations formed by combinations of small businesses, often nonprofits, to share "back room" administrative resources such as HR and accounting. You are going to be hearing more about them.

btw, the Times article mentions that the Loft Literary Center, one of the members of Open Book and an NPO crush of mine for a long time, earned $570,000 in tuitions last year and has 3,000 members. Swoon!

Creativity vs. Measurement

Several times in the last few months I have name-checked (and linked to) the new research published by WolfBrown about measuring impact among performing arts audiences. The study has generated a great deal of discussion in the arts blogosphere, partly because it seems to provide a part of an answer to a bigger question about measuring the impact of all kinds of arts, even of all kinds of nonprofit organizations. "Measuring impact" is a holy grail for those who would like to improve the performance of nonprofit organizations across the board, who would like a way to identify great nonprofits as opposed to the merely good, and especially for those who are interested in developing new forms of capital markets for nonprofits. To oversimplify: capital markets work for for-profits because there are universally recognized measures for results, such as share price. If there were such measures for nonprofits, or even for parts of the nonprofit sector, a capital market could emerge around it. [I leave a space here for those whose cocked eyes are watching the turmoil in financial markets and wondering just why the nonprofit sector would want to copy that system right now. ]

Anyway, it's an important study and very much at the forefront of the discussion of the future of the arts sector. And, like any important discussion, there are dissenters. Jason Grote's piece in a blog about the upcoming National Performing Arts Conference gives one such voice, though he would have a stronger argument if he had actually read the WolfBrown study or could speak towards its methodology. Grote namechecks Mike Daisey (who returns the favor), but who also now is performing his "How Theater Failed America" at Joe's Pub in New York. "How Theater Failed America" is very much on this same subject--here's the NYT review, here's a review of the review in Gawker of all places. And here is a piece Daisey wrote for Seattle's The Stranger that gives you the gist.

Does one have to choose between commerce and creativity? Is measurement of audience response inimical to true creativity? Does our current system (patchwork as it is) allow for theatres (or other artists) to be truly, fully creative, even if that means offending audiences and potential funders? What are the alternatives?

Philly NetSquared -- Meetup on May 6

A recent post about TechSoup generated an email from a member of a new TechSoup sponsored initiative, NetSquared . NetSquared is all about helping nonprofits use the "social web," or Web 2.0, as the kids call it.

We have a local chapter of NetSquared in Philadelphia, and they are having a meetup on Tuesday, May 6. If you're interested in using the social web for your organization, I'm sure they'd love to hear from you.

Software Training

A friend tipped me off the other day to Lynda.com, a web site that offers (for a fee) on-line training video courses for most software packages. Given the pricing and the convenience of being able to take the courses from home or from your desk, it struck me as something that might be attractive to non-profits. Does anyone out there know of competing services?

Not Just Us

This article from the LA Times is about another perspective on the "Leadership Crisis" --the real (or exaggerated?) coming shortage of skilled workers, caused by baby boomer retirements. It focuses, naturally, on southern California--and on the need to train new immigrants to take over skilled jobs.

Tech Soup!

An interesting profile of Tech Soup in the NYT the other day. If you help manage a nonprofit and you don't know abou them, you should. Awesome discounts on software & other tech help. The first time you buy a complete package of Adobe web editing software from them for a fraction of retail, you feel like a genius.

990 time

...a possibly useful tool for doing your 990, from an email I got by virtue of being on the NonProfit Quarterly's list:

Dear Michael,

I thought we might celebrate this festive season of tax returns by
urging you to file your organizational returns electronically this year. We
don't like to think of you sweating unnecessarily over this stuff so, at the
same time, we thought we'd make absolutely sure that you knew about the suite of
Turbo Tax-like services for nonprofit IRS returns produced by National Center
for Charitable Statistics (NCCS).

Here is what Tom Pollak, NCCS program director tells us about these
online tools.

"The National Center for Charitable Statistics at the Urban Institute
provides 990 Online, an easy-to-use
Web-based system for preparing your IRS Form 990, 990-EZ, or request for
extension. Returns can be e-filed directly with the IRS and participating states
or you can print and mail your return and save an electronic version for
distribution to your board, donors or others. The system automatically
calculates totals and creates the schedules and attachments that you need to
complete. Users range from the smallest organizations to those with revenues or
assets in the billions. The service is completely free for organizations with
less than $100,000 in gross receipts and we have a sliding scale for larger
organizations ranging from $25 to $75."

------------------------

Stay tuned for further information about next year's 990, the long-awaited new 990, which will have some very dramatic differences from the current form.

prediction markets

Frequent readers know that I have a lively, if uninformed, interest in the subject of nonprofit capital markets. Yesterday's NYT story on prediction markets in large corporations is another clipping for the file. Lately, my favorite site for following the rise & fall of political candidates is Intrade, one of the more established on-line prediction markets.

At the time it happened, I didn't post about the Rockefeller Foundation's $500K grant to a UK group for setting up a prototype "social stock exchange." These things are related, though perhaps not in a good way.

Raising the Raisers

For the last year or so, the nonprofit world has been abuzz with the subject of an upcoming crisis in leadership. Even the Inky wrote a piece recently about leadership transitions, featuring our own Martin Cohen.



The crisis that is not being discussed so much, though it seems at least as apparent, is the lack of Development Directors. It's taking organizations many months, sometimes years, to find development directors that suit them--usually at a higher salary than they expect to pay. [Of course, for fundraisers a high salary can just increase the stress--after all, you have to raise that money the board just gave you.]

When you talk to smart people in the field, people who might, with a little training, be excellent candidates for development jobs, noone wants them, even for higher salaries, even for the experience that would lead to Executive Director positions, even for the greater influence over the direction of organizations that comes with fundraising.


Why not? There are some good reasons, primary among them being the stress of having to raise money, the distaste for asking for money... there's also the fact that the fundraiser is percieved as carrying the burden for meeting an organization's budget, but unlike the director, has little control over the spending side. The Development Director is charged with using the board as his or her primary tool for raising money, but often he or she does not have direct contact with the board, or has relationships with the board that have to be mediated through the Director. A lot of responsibility with not a lot of control. Doesn't sound like fun.



It's a position that often, especially in stressed organizations, become a scapegoat. If you don't raise enough money, the board does not want to blame itself, or blame the director--better to blame the development director, whose responsibility for raising funds is built into his or her title.

But even with all this taken into account, there seems to be a stigma attached to fundraising positions that is greater than the sum of the negatives against it.

Here Comes Everybody

The business section of today's Times has an article by David Carr about new patterns of media consumption by teenagers and younger consumers. In short, the kids want to choose, and they want the choice immediately, and they want their choices networked with their friends choices. This is the premise of a book Carr discusses in the article, entitled Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It's written by an NYU professor named Clay Shirky.

There's a lot of matter in here for cultural organizations.... Carr's description (inspired by the book) of how different generations shop in a Virgin Superstore has a lot to say to museums and historic sites in particular.

Fans of James Joyce' s Finnegans Wake, however, will also recognize the title as the "name" of the book's main "character," also known as Humphrey Chimpenden Earwicker, also known as Tim Finnegan, etc. etc. HCE is an eternal archetype of mankind, men and fathers especially. an eternal father who stands for all humans conceived everywhere.

In my past life as a Joyce scholar, I often said that the world was not yet ready for Finnegans Wake , that it was still too far ahead of us to be considered avant garde. The networked, international, multi-lingual, anti-authoritarian, eclectic, referential, eternally linked generation that's bringing us Web 2.0 may be exactly the people who will be ready for it. The book title (which is not a deliberate Joycean reference) suggests so. Joyce would have loved it... but he wouldn't have called it a coincidence.

New Arts Leaders in Philadelphia

My suspicions that the Inquirer is improving its coverage of the arts scene in Philadelphia (tho' maybe not its actual reviews) was boosted this weekend by this story about a new wave of arts leaders. Look for comments by our own Martin Cohen at the end!

Business Models

An email from the Harvard Business Journal this morning about Business Models. Open question: how does the concept of a business model work for non-profits, which are mission-driven? Does a total focus on mission threaten to hide from view the ways in which a nonprofit thinks about its business. Jim Collins, in Good to Great, talks about the "Hedgehog Concept," which involves burrowing into your organization's data and culture and history, rigorously searching for a convergence between three areas: what you (and your organization) are passionate about, what the organization can be the best in the world in, and what drives the "economic engine" that part of your business that you do best and that makes economic sense.

In the 2005 supplement, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, Collins tries to translate the core concepts of Good to Great into a non-profit context. One place where the translation is difficult is with the "hedgehog concept," especially with the construction of the "economic engine," which I see as having some analogy to a business model. How does the financial engine of an organization generate enough money to make programs possible? In the social sectors monograph, Collins says that the "third circle" of the Hedgehog trinity, the "economic engine" circle, makes more sense as a "resource engine." By talking about resources beyond (but including) money, you can bring in sources of energy like volunteerism, political influence, etc. that drive the organization forward... or something like that.

I've often thought that what was strange about nonprofits was that they tend to have at least two businesses--the business that serves the public (the "real" business, the front of the shop), and the donor business--the back of the shop. A museum appears to be in the business of bringing visitors in the door, but they're also in the business of attracting donors--which is, in most cases, where the real support comes from. A university is in the business of educating students, but they're also in the business of... attracting and cultivating donors, which is, for most big schools, where the real money is. Universities are perhaps also an example of what happens when the donor business begins to become disproportionate to the "real" business... but that's for another time.

Fightin' Philanthropists

It's been too long since last I posted, and as a result there's too much to download into the blog... same problem I had two weeks ago. But here's the best quote I've come across in the last two weeks:

"'Giving is not about a calculation of what you are buying [...] It is about participation in a fight.'"

This comes from the New York Times Magazine of March 9, specifically the article "What Makes People Give," which is a profile of two economists, John List and Dean Karlan, and their work on the psychological basis of giving. The quotation is Karlan's. David Leonhardt, the article's author, goes on to say, "[Your gift] is about you as much as it [is] about the effect of your gift."

This all ties together with the various memes we've been tracking about the importance of storytelling in fundraising, the importance of understanding your nonprofit's mission as a kind of crusade. And still, this is more easily done for those fighting hunger and homelessness than those making art. After all, what are artists fighting? Complacency? The numbness brought on by relentless commerce and work and daily life? It's a tougher sell...

William Wordsworth laid out the disease and the cure two hundred years ago:

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. [ 1806. ]

...and now I go back to work, before I start firing Gerard Manley Hopkins at you.

More on Nonprofit Capital Markets

--A recent column in the Financial Times by Sean Stannard-Stockton, led me to
--his website , and from there to
--a blog called xchangexchange.com, and from there to
--something called B Corporations

...I'm still at the stage of being largely uneducated, but intrigrued, by these ideas--would love to hear more from someone who knows more.

Mission Statements

A new article from the Nonprofit Quarterly encourages you to think about your mission statement as a haiku.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the literary magazine McSweeney's decides that they will be accepting *only* senryu (a form of haiku) and pantoums for their next issue.

City States

A few fragments from recent news. First, in the Inky, a new study of traffic in center city, occasioned by the increase in people living here and using the city at all hours of the day. The study may recommend, among other things, reducing the number of bus stops, which yr humble author supports, as it addresses a minor but sharp annoyance. Philly buses really don't need to stop on every block, and would be much more efficient if they didn't. But, alas, this is not a transportation blog.

Earlier this week, the ArtJournal enewsletter led me to a related story in the LA Times Magazine about Mayor Villaraigosa, and the struggle to keep Los Angeles on the list of world class cities. The writer name-checks a futurist named Paul Saffo, who apparently has in his quiver of theories one about the demise of the United States and concurrent rise of the American City-State.

I couldn't help but get excited at the notion of the rise of the city-state, perhaps because the savory whiff of Italian romance that comes along with it (Firenze! Siena! Lucca! Venezia!). Still another kind of blog needed for that kind of detour, but also because the arts & culture sector seems to play a more... visible, or prominent, role in the life of cities. [I won't say 'more essential,' because that would slight the importance of the arts in suburbia, exurbia, ruralia and beyond--and I just don't know that that's the case...] The financial "ecosystems" that support our arts organizations tend to be city-based...

And while we're at it, there's today's NYT article about Dumbo & the tactical use of artists to "force" gentrification. It's everywhere.

Cities. Art. Renaissance. A familiar and congenial formula, but not law of nature. discuss.

Another Perspective on the Leadership Crisis

This morning, the Chronicle of Philanthropy posted an article on its website about some new research that's being done on the predicted 'Leadership Crisis' in the nonprofit sector. It's one of the first pieces I've read that resonates with my perception of the issues, and looks beyond the framework of a "replacement theory," where new leaders fill the holes that retiring leaders leave behind, but instead looks at what kinds of organizations rising leaders want to run, and how their management styles (and different sense of achieving work/life balance) will change what it means to run a nonprofit in the future...

Here's a link to the Compasspoint study that the article references.

Next week we're going to the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations conference in San Francisco, where this is sure to be a hot topic. We'll let you know what we learn!

On Attendance, Blockbusters, and Tut

Tut made the papers again this week, as The Art Newspaper published its survey of the top museum exhibitions of 2007 (pdf). The lede is about the Tokyo National Museum, and how its exhibition on Leonardo attracted over 10,000 people a day. Philadelphians, however, noted that the paper's coverage fails to highlight a noteworthy detail--that the Franklin Institute's (that's now The Franklin to you, pal) Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs was the most-attended exhibition of 2007. The Inky picked up the slack, though. [Is the Inquirer's art coverage getting better? Or is it just better coverage of the biggest institutions? Or am I imagining things?] [and as long as I'm writing notes in brackets, why isn't the PMA on the list? Their 638,000+ attendance this year (from their '07 Annual Report) should bring them in right around SFMoma and Tate Liverpool.]

The survey has other people asking questions and indulging in the regular practice of ruminating on the pros and cons of the Blockbuster. Here's one from the same Art Newspaper, with the familiar Tut picture. Apparently, London is not as good as Paris at having them.

Orchestra WolfBrownified

Sunday's Inquirer had this interesting article about the Orchestra's new subscription program. It's based closely on work the a number of performing arts & presenting organizations have done with Wolf/Brown , an international consulting firm that's acquired considerable expertise in the last few years on the questions of arts attendance and in particular, the revitalization of orchestras. I wrote recently about their study about measuring the lasting impact of arts experiences, but this work on the changing nature of subscription audiences has been showing up in the offerings of several Philly organizations lately.

Nonprofit vs. For Profit Leadership, Part 2

a good piece from the Stanford Social Innovation review about nonprofit vs. for-profit leadership. It lines up well with the Nonprofit Quarterly study I referred to a few weeks ago as Part 1 of this sure-to-be-ongoing series!

Facebook & Philanthropy

PCMI and GPCA are teaming up to do a session in May on Social Networking sites for arts & culture groups--stay tuned for details. It's being designed as a hands-on session, where you'll be in a computer lab & given step-by-step instructions on how to set up a social networking site, so by the time you leave your organization can have its own MySpace or Facebook page. We're hoping that this will be the first of a series of basic internet skills sessions to follow through the summer & fall.

Until then, here' s an piece from MSNBC about Facebook and some new tools for philanthropic giving on its network. [With thanks to Matt Fisher for the tip.]

The Miracle of Scrabulous

...spending my lunch hour today reading the Knowledge(at)Wharton website (spelled that way b/c using the at symbol confuses blogger), and there's a great article there about Facebook & the role Scrabulous & other software app's have had in its growth. I have not yet succumbed to Facebook, but PCMI & GPCA are teaming up to do a program in May about arts organizations using these & other social networking sites, so stay tuned...

Nonprofit Capital Markets

On my wish list for "topics for PCMI to rassle with" over the next few years is the idea of new forms of capital markets for nonprofits. My enthusiasm is based only on slight reading and slight familiarity with the capital structures of some for-profit corporations (leftovers from an old paralegal career), but this blog post in the Stanford Social Innovation review awoke the topic for me. Columns or blog posts based on the world of the future often cause my eyes to glaze over (and trigger a memory-loop of Conan O'Brien's old "In the year 2000" sketch), but yes, I do want google finance's experiment with nonprofits to get bigger. See also this Slate article, which specifically calls on Pew to take the lead in this initiative. or even this Slate article. Sounds like I need to call Douglas K. Smith.

Inferiority Complex

Last week we had a meeting of PCMI's new Leadership Project, a group of 14 arts executives who, we hope, will be the next generation of arts leaders in the city. We met to talk about a recent book called Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. If there's any one basic message to the book it's that the most effective nonprofits are those that are able to galvanize people into a movement. My first response, and the first response of a number of our leadership people, was -- well, that's great for Habitat for Humanity or City Year, (two of the organizations profiled in the book), but how does a museum build a movement? Who marches in a rally for an opera company? Who runs to the barricades for musical theatre?

One of the chronic insecurities that besets those who run (and raise money for) arts non-profits is that it's very difficult to articulate in a compelling way how the arts meet a social need. when their missions are put next to those of groups that help house, feed, shelter, and heal people in need, they can look a little... thin. How do you tell a donor that your program to help seniors write poetry is more important, more worthy, than a program that provides a safety net to abused children?

Well, of course you can't. But it's not a zero-sum game, and in fact, those who raise money for social service organizations will tell you that despite the urgency and tangibility of their need, it's no easier for them to raise money from individuals. In fact, they'll tell you, it's harder for them to get major individual support. They can't raise money from the people who most benefit from their work the way that arts organizations can. They don't have as many opportunities for earned revenue, they usually don't have beautiful facilities or the social cachet that arts organizations have, etc. etc.

I didn't mean to get into all that -- but it was a detour to illustrate the very common, very difficult issue that arts organizations have in making their case about their social worth to the broader field of philanthropy.

Where I did mean to go was this article in today's NYT about Henry Louis Gates's new iteration of African-American Lives . I haven't seen the show yet, but put briefly--if you ever wanted to see an example of an archive changing lives, this is a good one.

And let me save for another day the aesthetic argument -- that arguments about the social good of arts organizations are doomed to fail because the best art, to invoke Oscar Wilde, has no social purpose at all.

PS: saw the first installment of African-American Lives last night--which was about Oprah, of course. It was awesome. I'm especially looking forward to the Chris Rock episode.

PPS: Here's an article from Wharton's Deborah Small about a study she did that shows donors respond better to stories than to statistics. This got some attention in the nonprofit press last summer when it came out, but is worth repeating here.

Curators on the Money

Yesterday's Times covered a new program in New York I heard about a few months ago--the Center for Curatorial Leadership. The web site links the origin of the program to two converging trends in the museum world-- one is a well-publicized shortage of museum directors, the other is the increasing business and fundraising responsibilities given to curators. There is also the increasing awareness of a struggle between two different kinds of museum directorship--the curator/director and the administrator/director. A quotation from Phillipe de Montebello on the Center's web site tells you most of what you need to know about this. I suspect that any analysis of successful museum directorship would show good and disastrous examples of both kinds... the trick may be in not investing too heavily in the dichotomy. I feel our mission is very similar to the Center's -- helping the people who run arts organizations learn more of the languages and practices of business management...

... though I still don't understand why they were visiting a hospital president!

Keeping Your Reports Happy

The NPQ article I referenced a few days ago--the one about the relative strengths of for-profit and nonprofit managers--would seem to suggest that nonprofit leaders are more empathetic managers than their counterparts, but this piece from Marshall Goldsmith from the Harvard Business Journal website is still worth reading.

Of course, this morning I was also reading Jim Collins' Good to Great -- part of my unsentimental education in the world of business literature -- where I came across his argument that motiviating employees is of much less importance than hiring the right "pre-motiviated" employees and getting them in the right jobs. Collins' second step to becoming a "Good To Great" organization is all about getting the wrong people "off the bus," getting the right people on the bus, and then getting those people in the right places before you decide where you want an organization to go. This is one of the steps that seems especially hard to translate into the nonprofit realm.

Most non-profits I know have issues with, well, not being able to fire people--to put it plainly. There's a kind of tacit agreement for many underperforming employees that as long as you show up and accept low pay and (sometimes) bad working conditions, you will never be fired. Perhaps the shortage of working capital or cash reserves (to cover the threat of a legal battle), the reliance on volunteer legal representation, the lack of training in HR issues contributes, maybe event the emphasis on mission as the top priority of the organization, contributes to this. I don't know if it's a non-profit thing, an arts thing, or just the nature of any organization... but I'd be interested to know if anyone's done research on the subject.

Submitted Without Comment

From Britain's Independent

Nonprofit vs. For Profit Leadership

The most recent Nonprofit Quarterly has published an article about a recent study comparing evaluations of nonprofit & for profit leaders that found nonprofit leaders led their for profit counterparts in nearly all categories of leadership. It's not terribly surprising that the TNQ would want to bring this news to its readers, but I think the interpretation of the results by Jim Collins sounds about right. Nonprofit leaders generally don't have the resources or authority to make unilateral, "executive" decisions, but instead rely on networks of influence and persuasion... Comparisons aside, it might be nice to make this sort of leadership analysis availalable to arts leaders here in Philadelphia.

Fear of Taxes

This article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy talks about the small amount of taxes paid by non-profits for their unrelated (taxable) revenue operations. Short version: there are lots of ways to make profits unprofitable in the tax code.

It reminds me of a presentation I went to a few years ago about earned revenue opportunities for nonprofits, where a predictable debate over museum shops broke out--what merchandise was related to the organization's mission & what wasn't, etc. The IRS used to use museum shops as an example in their publications on the subject. When faced with a brace of questions about whether one kind of shop could sell a certain kind of product vs. another kind of shop & another kind of product, the presenter just threw up her hands and said, "Hey, worst case scenario, you pay tax. It's not a big deal. Businesses do it all the time." It reminded me that we often needlessly twist ourselves into all different kinds of shapes trying to avoid lines of business that might be subject to tax, when we can just build it into the model...

In the Impact Business

Were this a high school yearbook, I would say that one of my "pet peeves" is the abuse of the word "curate" and "curator." Perhaps it's because I once proudly had the title of curator, perhaps not... but it drives me a little crazy to hear the word used as a cooler synonym for "arranging," to hear about people "curating" their Ipod playlists, their buffet dinners, their sock drawers. It will not surprise you to hear that I dislike "impact" used as a verb, and that am brought to the brink of madness by its degenerate offspring "impactful."

Now that's out of my system. Here's something important.

Andrew Taylor, the Director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at in UW Madison's business school, writes a great blog for artsjournal.com called the "Artful Manager." The title's not so great, but it's well written and insightful and stays in front of the big questions and trends. [As long as I'm at it, consider this a plug for www.artsjournal.com and its daily email update of arts in the news. It's a shared habit here at PCMI--just started reading it a month ago and don't know what I'd do without it now.]

His most recent post, titled (wait for it!) "Curating impact through artists" talks about the new report by Alan Brown on new ways of measuring the impact of artistic performances on audiences. Taylor's blog post does a good job of spelling out some of the implications of the report. For those of us who think about ways of measuring the effectiveness and the impact of arts organizations, it's important work.

More Leadership Development advice

Brief, but to the point, a piece by Marshall Goldsmith on the Harvard Business Review website on the essential components of leadership programs.

Opening Your Mind to the world of Business Literature

To begin with a generalization: arts leaders tend to be skeptical about the value of business culture. A lot of us would consider the phrase "business culture" to be an oxymoron. I'm using it to refer to that vast sector of knowledge production in education & media & conferences, to the arcane language and value system, the network of identifications and affiliations, symbols and hierarchies, protocols and etiquette that constitute the business world.

A lot of people in non-profit arts organizations define themselves and the mission of their organizations in contrast, if not outright opposition, to that culture. A lot of us come out of the peculiar cultures of academia and the performing arts or fine arts, or some hybrid of these. These cultures think about values outside of material and monetary values. They tend to be anti-authoritarian. They encourage the development of the individual and his or her ideas, especially what is new, what speaks truth to power, what sheds light on the assumptions and blind spots of the dominant culture. I could go on.

but the one area arts and academia don't think very much about is leadership, teamwork, the behavior of people in organizations.

This is all a lot of armchair sociology bloviation meant as a kind of "working through" of ideas prepatory to a reading group I want to organize--business books for arts people. There is much to be learned from the Peter Druckers and Jim Collinses of this world, though we might not always see it.

which is not to say that arts leaders are in any way less capable, less smart, less prepared than their counterparts in for-profit industries. They are less cared for, and are able to spend less resources on training that allows them to see the broader field, the broader possibilities. Leading an arts non-profit is at *least* as complex and demanding as leading a similar-sized business. We know this. But all the more reason to read widely and find out what's going on over there that can be helpful to us here... more to come.

Boston's Endangered Small Arts Groups

As a Bostonian by birth and Philadelphian by choice, I'm always interested in comparisons between these cities, which have so much in common but are also completely different. [The basic text on the subject is, of course, the late Digby Baltzell's Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, which traced the divergent paths of these two siblings to their founding religions-the civic-minded, hierarchical, and scholarly Puritans generating political leaders and intellectuals; the family-minded, commercial, egalitarian Quakers generating businesses and private institutions. It's all in the first chapter, really.]

...but that's not what I'm writing about. The Chroncle of Philanthropy drew my attention to a story in the Boston Globe about a report from the Boston Foundation, that apparently argues that the city's proliferation of small, struggling arts organizations suggest that some of those groups begin to plan an "exit strategy." To protest this finding & to call attention to the need of small arts groups, some of these organizations are having a 'die-in.'

What does a live performance do to you?

Yesterday's posting of the Wolf Brown study (by Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak) about measuring the impact of performing arts on attendees has been sending ripples around the arts & culture blogosphere and email lists. I'm reading it now, but am already taken by a note on page 2 that serves as a kind of epigram:

With special thanks to Edward Pauly, The Wallace Foundation’s Director of Research and Evaluation, for provoking us to consider that even the most subjective constructs can be measured – if they can first be described.

Talk about yr leadership transitions...

The announcement of Phillipe de Montebello's upcoming retirement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art isn't shocking to anyone, apparently--certainly not to the NYT, which had thousands of words at the ready to drop into the paper today. It's time. But now, the interesting part. Mr. de Montebello has been held up as the quintessence of the American museum director -- for good reason -- for many years. A scholar, a curator, a "patron saint" of the museum with just enough energy, charisma, and business acumen to build the country's greatest arts board, expand the museum and its audience and its endowment dramatically while maintaining the highest programmatic standards. We're also reading every day about how the present generation of arts leaders, especially museum directors--who are especially scarce these days--will be replaced. I'll be interested to see how the search is conducted and how this transition is managed in this flagship institution--the Met has had plenty of time and plenty of resources to prepare for this moment--we'll see how it goes!

Clinton vs. Obama on the web

The Harvard Business Review online has a short article about the difference between the Clinton and Obama campaign websites that seems at least as relevant for non-profits as it is for for-profits. Big quote:

Why is engagement important? Well, the data on customers shows that the best measure of your brand is not satisfaction – but how many advocates you have. These advocates can sway buyers, or in the case of politics, voters. Firms like REI sports, who have deep involvement of members in their product design, service, and even instruction on use – understand this. The online retailers like Amazon and eBay utilize this natural propensity for involvement to provide everything from user-supplied customer service to new product/service design with eBay getting over sixty percent of its ideas for new products from customers.

The message keeps coming back that the business of a business, especially of a nonprofit business, is building relationships (w/advocates, members, evangelists)...

M

Museums of the Book

Having spent a long time in the rare book library business, I've been asked many times about what the future of rare books and manuscripts will be in the 21st century cyberworld of "myfaces" and "spacebooks" (another's coinage, and to be said with your best Grampa Simpson impression). The future looks like this. As books and handwritten documents become less a part of our lives, they acquire even more aura and make for even more potent museum fodder. I always think of what happened to painting after the invention of photography as an analogy....

Waiting for GOS

It took a few years of fundraising for me to see the dangers of project-based grantmaking. If a donor will give you $50,000 to create a puppet show, you start to dream of felt and glue guns, even if it has nothing to do with your mission or strategy. This sort of funding seldom includes money for salaries or the electric bill, so while the initial check will help with short-term cash flow, those funds usually flow right out of the organization & into the project. Most arts organizations are so strapped for cash that they're vulnerable to taking on projects that drain resources and pull them away from their missions. On the other side, foundations and individual donors rightfully want to see results from their giving, and operations giving seems to be just throwing more cash into a bottomless pit. Internally, it's easy for fundraisers and administrators to become so enamored of an opportunity for a gift or a grant that they make promises that the organization' s program staff can't or simply don't want to keep. All non-profits need to keep this balance, but few do it successfully.

The grantmaking community is well aware of these problems, which have been around for a very long time and have no clear solution, at least not yet. One of the best places to look for an overview is this site, part of the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations main site. Their 2007 publication on general operating grants is linked here--it's been an important text in the debate as you can tell from this article in this past Sunday's NYT.

PCMI specializes in capacity-building grants & programs--sort of a middle ground between program-specific grants and general operating. A PCMI grant might pay for a few years of a salary for a new position in marketing or development or administration, or it might help pay for a study or work with a consultant about how an organization would run better--only hoping to enhance the core business of the groups that work with us. But we're always curious about better ways to help...