2,241 stories by "Joe Patti"
Last week a very interesting article came down my Twitter feed, (I apologize for not noting the source), written by Les Wallace about the best board meeting he ever attended. What made it th…
Hat tip to Thomas Cott for bringing Jon Silpayamanant’s intriguing refutation of the idea of Baumol’s Cost Disease being the doom of arts organizations. Silpayamanant correctly n…
Not long ago I came across a job posting for a non-profit organization that listed over 25 duties and marked each one of them as a core responsibility. Now, my first thought was, if every jo…
There was an intriguing piece on Wired last week (h/t Thomas Cott) about an alternative approach to funding events via Kickstarter. Andy Baio talks about funding record projects, conferences…
Since I am on the topic of board decisions this week, Non Profit Law blog recently listed a link about non profits doing business with their own board members. While it is natural for non pr…
A little over a week ago I received the news that one of our partner theatres decided to close its doors. That sent the rest of us scrambling to contact artists to see if we could salvage th…
So as something of a follow up to my post earlier this week asking if foundation boards embrace non-profit values, I wanted to point to an article about what private enterprises can learn fr…
In answer to the perennial question about how the arts can show their value to the community, I came across an answer/inspiration in the form of the Flickr group, Japanese Manhole Covers. Th…
There was an article on the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) website in April that I felt started to give me some insight into why it seems that foundations and non profits of…
Hat tip to Non Profit Law blogger Emily Chan for providing a link to an article on a subject near and dear to my heart — vacation time. There are some problems non-profits can run into…
Though I have written about dynamic pricing, I have generally been a little resistant to the idea of implementing that sort of pricing because I feel having a clear and simple pricing is par…
If you have been reading my blog regularly over the last few months, you know I have been keeping an eye on the possibility of the crowd funding elements of the recently passed JOBS Act repl…
There is an old rule of thumb about judging the cleanliness of a restaurant’s kitchen by the cleanliness of the restrooms. I actually used this example this past weekend when discussin…
Hat tip to Adam Thurman for distributing the link to an interesting piece about devaluing artistic content by Todd Henry. Henry wonders about the fate of artists when increasingly the view s…
There was an interesting piece in Fast Company a couple weeks ago that seems to bolster the idea that creativity is an important component of business success. University of Toronto's Rotman…
Brain Pickings had an animated kinetic typography video of Ira Glass’ advice about how to succeed in creative work. Essentially he says when you are starting out to produce creative wo…
Like many of you, my dear readers, I am of a split mind about the inclusion of social media in live performances. Overall, I think this is a good place to be. I have often written here that …
Well, it seems you can’t keep a good theatre down. In the news today, the Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, NY will re-open after declaring bankruptcy in 2008. This case is similar to t…
There has been a post on The Drucker Exchange that has been nagging at the edge of my unconscious for a couple weeks now. Actually, it was one line from a news piece about how the Massachuse…
Audience Engagement being something of a buzz word du jour, (yeah, I have used it a bunch of time here and am aware I am complicit), one of the easiest ways to make your audience and communi…
I had an interesting conversation the other day that convinced me I don’t spend enough time talking to people from other arts disciplines. We were backstage talking to some visual arts…
When I was applying to graduate programs in arts administration, the head of the program I eventually joined said something to the effect of I shouldn’t enter the program if I was a fr…
Some time ago I came across the China Cultural Industries cultural projects page. The page is part of the China International Cultural Industries Fair website, an organization authorized by …
A couple weeks ago Grant Makers in the Arts posted a piece by Rebecca Novick, Please Don’t Start A Theater Company. I had been thinking about the article for some time now when I saw a…
The Non-Profit Quarterly had an article this week, “Why Every Nonprofit Has a New Job Title: Publisher.” It really resonated with the way I had been feeling lately. Back when I s…
