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?