You may have seen this story that has been circulating about the guy who brazenly climbed up on stage just before a Broadway performance in order to plug his phone into the (unbeknownst to h…
Now and again the issue is raised about people moving from the corporate to non-profit world without really understanding the philosophical and cultural differences between the two sectors.Ã…
Diane Ragsdale has an extremely interesting post today related to an earlier set of posts she made two years ago about coercive philanthropy in response to change of direction the Irvine Fou…
As part of our website revamp, I am in the process of adding content about the various murals located around the building. One of the best pieces is a little removed from the lobby and spans…
The Wall Street Journal had a story entitled Docents Gone Wild sharing some stories about museum docents going off script, treating visitors rudely or diverting people away from works of art…
I do a lot of talking about how marketing is the business of everyone in the organization, not just the department bearing that name. Everybody needs to be invested in the organization and i…
I had made a suggestion to the community board we partner with on our presenting season that they think about changing the names of their giving categories. My rationale was that the current…
…and how do you know? I frequently promote ideas Seth Godin posits on his blog and show how they connect with the arts. I do it so frequently, you may be astonished to learn this ain&#…
Createquity tweeted a piece on Pacific Standard covering a study investigating the way musical taste reflects class divisions. Despite the claim music streaming services are helping to disso…
A potentially problematic assumption many people make is that the status of being an ex officio member of a group limits that person’s voting rights. Nothing could be further from the …
Everyday I get a flurry of emails from the agents of performing artists letting me know when the performers are available cross the course of the next year or two. Often I notice that ar…
For about 7 years now I have been paying attention to the basic concept of leadership transition in non-profits. At first there the conversation was about the lack of transition planning wit…
Seth Godin recently linked back to a post he wrote in 2011 about the economics of fund raising galas. To heavily summarize what many of us already know, he points out that it is difficult to…
I apologize for missing my posting schedule yesterday. I was involved with an activity that I need to keep confidential. It kept me busy all day and required a bit of driving to return from.…
Term limits for board members are a tricky subject. When you are first starting a non-profit organization, the board is often the sole source of labor until the organization gathers enough r…
Last week I was reading an article on Slate that talked about teachers who were making more money selling their lesson plans online than they were from their teaching jobs. So before I go on…
In the course of any given week, I don’t usually think about supertitles. However, in the course of the last week, the topic has come up twice. First, in a post by Fred Plotkin about o…
NPR’s Planet Money program worked up a little interactive tool that purports to tell you whether your job will be automated in the next 20 years. On the whole, Arts and Entertainment f…
The dean of arts and sciences of the university and I were talking briefly about strategies to attract more students to performances. One of the hypothesis that occurred to us was that the s…
One of the reasons why I like reading Broadway producer Ken Davenport’s blog, The Producer’s Perspective, is that like a lot of non-profit arts managers, (though he isn’t o…
Earlier this month, Seth Godin made a post about discovery fatigue that makes me think that recommendations from trusted sources are going to play an ever larger role in getting people to in…
Earlier this week Samantha Teter had a piece on ArtsHacker about writing bios. She does a good job pointing out many important elements that should be part of a bio (including proofreading) …
There is so much discussion about intellectual property rights, it can make you nervous about using other people’s images. Stock photos can either be unsuitable to your needs, or e…
A few weeks ago I posted about an orchestra in Bremen, Germany which is based out of an elementary school. The situation has been something both the students and musicians have found to be c…
Non-Profit Law blogger Gene Tagaki had a post on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago about Social Impact Bonds. These bonds are a fairly new approach to funding non-profit activities. While I think …