2,272 stories by "Joe Patti"
If you spend any time even loosely associated with the visual arts, you have probably heard the argument that if you can’t tell the difference between a forgery and the original and if…
Last week I was re-reading a Brain Pickings post I had bookmarked months ago about the book, This Idea Must Die: Some of the World's Greatest Thinkers Each Select a Major Misconception Holdi…
This story has been getting a lot of circulation today on social media, but I think it was Thomas Cott who first linked to a story about how a new law in Washington State will prohibit the u…
Last week I drew attention to Joan Garry’s post for people in the for profit field who wanted to interview for a position as a non-profit executive director. Since then, I came across …
For the last year or so, non-profit arts organizations have been somewhat nervously wondering whether the criteria being used to define what constituted an internship might be applied to the…
Non-profit organizations frequently enter into memorandum of understanding (MOU) relationships so it is important to understand the difference between them and contracts. In simple terms, an…
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…
