Years ago, I wrote about a FastCompany article, Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers. Even though it was written in the context of a for-profit company, I wrote most of the rules are universal…
Around 9 years ago I wrote about a response someone had gotten from the head of a dance program while trying to revive an annual dance festival. The head of the program said he didn’t …
Continuing on the theme of employee turnover that I wrote about last week, I wanted to harken back again to an early post I made about Johns Hopkins study saying that the non-profit sector w…
I am going to be on vacation for the next couple weeks. As is my practice, I will be featuring some of the more interesting/thought providing posts from my archives while I am away. At the r…
Creativity Post had a good piece last week about simple business rules that complements Vu Le’s recent Nonprofit With Balls post on developing organizational values. Both pieces cautio…
It recently struck me that when people encourage students to go into STEM or business as careers, they may be underestimating the importance they place on daily human interactions and are ta…
Always Doe Never Bucks One of the most frustrating experiences in a job search is the salary line in a job description. Or rather, lack of thereof. If you actually see a salary range rather …
Via Kotte.org is P.T. Barnum’s short book, Art of Money Getting. If you are like me in thinking Barnum said “there’s a sucker born every minute,” (he didn’t), y…
It is probably no surprise to learn that food brings communities together. CityLab recently had a piece about a group in Tallahassee, FL that received a grant from the Knight Foundation to s…
I frequently write about the need to have a donation acceptance policy. In addition to not having the resources to handle non-cash donations, some donations come with conditions that do not …
You have probably heard stories about how people blast classical music to scare drug dealers out of their neighborhoods, homeless out of train stations and teens away from convenience stores…
In addition to responding to comments he makes on the blog, I have had some email exchanges with artist Carter Gillies. Many times in the course of our correspondence, he will say “I t…
For over a decade now there has been a conversation about how detrimental it can be if an arts organization decides to add new programs in order to qualify for foundation grants and funding.…
One of the more intriguing ideas I have written about here is the Artist Pension Trust. It was started 10 years ago with the goal of providing retirement benefits to the 2000 participating a…
There is a really interesting piece on Slate telling an all too familiar story. Seeing that the median age of its listeners has been creeping slowly up from 45 to 54, NPR is in the throes of…
I frequently advocate for arts organizations to find ways to help for-profit companies instill creativity and energy in their employees. Last month, the Partnership Movement of Americans for…
I have a post about board recruitment over on ArtsHacker today where I call attention to a webinar Non-Profit Quarterly recently conducted on the subject. My focus in that article was on how…
Non-Profit Quarterly recently hosted a webinar to present “The Completely Revised Guide to Great Board Recruitment.” If you have been following recent conversations about the rol…
There have been a lot of library closings in the UK over the last few years so VICE went around and asked people what libraries meant to them and how they were using them. People they spoke …
VolunteerMatch’s Engaging Volunteers blog recently drew attention to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report (BLS) that shows volunteer rates are continuing to drop. As the post author Tes…
I was really intrigued by the results of a recent study coming out of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs that shows “managers play down their c…
Seth Godin recently posted that it is good to share our “give up goals,” the things we are going to give up in order to improve ourselves. The idea is that if we backslide, our f…
In international trade, having a most favored nation agreement means that your country will receive trade terms on par with the most favorable terms offered to another country. When it comes…
My interest was recently piqued when I read a piece in The Economist which reported that two opera conservatories in Sweden declined to admit male singers because they were not up to standar…
By and large I keep things general and relatively low on direct criticism in my blog posts. However, since the goal of this blog is to engender better practices in arts organizations, I …