2,272 stories by "Joe Patti"
Looking back in the archives can be really rewarding when it comes to reminding yourself about things you long forgot. Back in October 2008 Seth Godin reproduced Sasha Dichter’s Ma…
I am off on vacation to the Canadian Rockies for a week or so. If you don’t hear from me again, it may be that the Banff Centre for the Arts is as awesome as I hear and I am hiding out…
I don’t remember where I came across this recently since the story is over a year old. Photographer Oliver Curtis embarked on an interesting project where he started taking pictures wi…
Here is a cool tidbit for the 4th of July. A friend of mine owns a business that provides the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) pronunciations and translations for operas and Latin masse…
I don’t think I could have timed it any better… Last week, Anne Midgette wrote a piece in the Washington Post about the various and confusing roles boards of directors play in th…
Non-Profit Quarterly recently published a piece charting out the cyclic nature of boards of directors. If ever you have been frustrated with your board and wondered why it is acting the way …
A little irreverence today after talking about philosophical questions like “what is art for?” In the past few years, I have done a lot of writing about the need to help people r…
This week Diane Ragsdale wrote a piece addressing the difficultly people have with the idea of Art for Arts Sake. She says when she conducts workshops and asks arts administration types …
I wanted to call attention to the recent return of the Hokule'a, a double hulled voyaging canoe, to Hawaii after a three year voyage around the world that saw the canoe travel 42,000 miles t…
The indemnification clause is a part of a contract that is often difficult to understand. Even after reading this post, you will still want to consult a lawyer, but you will be more awar…
Last month Non Profit Quarterly suggested that organizations undergoing executive leadership transition consider the shared leadership model that many performing arts organizations employ.Â…
You wouldn’t think fishermen needed help telling a story, but according to Non-Profit Quarterly, the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen's Alliance is looking for just that. They are getting…
I visited Fallingwater this weekend. Believe it or not, my impetus for being there wasn’t due to the 150th anniversary Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, but rather because for the l…
Given all the controversy about the depiction of presidents as stand-ins for Julius Caesar, I thought I would offer a somewhat more light-hearted example of how what we think we know about a…
Over the years I have written about studies which have found that the younger generation starting careers in non-profit organizations weren’t content to put in long hours and pay their…
Last week, Non-Profit Quarterly noted that the number of Giving Circles in the US were growing and wondered if this had implications for institutional giving. If you haven’t heard of t…
Pacific Standard had an interesting piece about the misconceptions music teachers and students studying to be music teachers have about the neurological benefits of music and music education…
I recently became aware of the Young Professionals’ Choral Collective out of Cincinnati and was impressed at how they structured themselves to facilitate involvement by a younger demog…
If you have a large physical plant or campus of buildings and aging HVAC, lighting or water systems, you may want to consider an Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC). Under this arrang…
Carter Gillies emailed me a question this morning relating arts with sports which set off a whole cascade of thoughts. First of all, we often talk about how arts organizations and creators n…
Almost as soon as I published my post yesterday about building community around augmented reality, I started thinking about how that might work with live performance. One of my first thought…
Two months ago I confessed I may have misread the impact and potential of the Pokemon Go game on attracting new customers and audiences. However, the Knight Foundation feels that the basic t…
The challenge of being creative in a non-profit environment is that you have big ideas, but few resources. So if you have a great idea for a new project or even an extension of an existing p…
Something I don’t really often see people write about are the benefits of sitting on a grant panel, especially for an organization that funds you. First of all, the organization will l…
In the comment section of yesterday’s post, Carter Gillies warned about succumbing to the temptations of survivorship bias and only holding up a few successful cases as examples to emu…
