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.