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.