Response to Arts Policy Library: Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement

By Guy Yedwab | Published: October 17th, 2009

Recently, I had the honor of posting my first contribution to Createquity’s Arts Policy Library, my response to the report “Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact.” In the comments section, one of the report’s authors Lalitha Vaidyanathan took the time to respond to two of the main points of my response.

The first point that Ms. Vaidyanathan responds to was my desire to see more data on the effectiveness of the shared measurement programs examined by the report. First Ms. Vaidyanathan writes:

Your observation about the relative youth of the systems investigated for the report is spot on. Success Measures and Cultural Data Project are the oldest of the systems we examined in depth and both started operations around 2005. As such their experience is limited to 3-4 years. At this stage, the effectiveness measure of these systems that is most quantifiable is the savings seen in terms of time and cost. The data supporting this is sprinkled throughout the report but in the interest of clarity, it is summarized and elaborated upon here below. In terms of increased impact as a result of using these systems, Strive (the example of an Adaptive Learning System detailed in the report), even though just two years in operation (it was launched in late 2008), has started to see positive improvements on many of the 10 community-level indicators it tracks. While this was mentioned in the report, it was not elaborated upon – I take the opportunity to do so here.

Firstly, I hope I made it clear in my first report that while I very much hungered for data on the effectiveness of the programs, I did understand the youth of the projects. In a way, my comments were less a criticism of the original report, and more a desire to see more investigation in the future along similar lines.

Secondly, Ms. Vaidyanathan is right that the best way to tackle such a short life-span is to look at the most straight-forward, short-term impact, which is the time and money saved by reducing wasteful grant-writing.

(a) Increased effectiveness in terms of time saved
Time saving resulting from the use of the Cultural Data Project system offers a good example. The system streamlines both grant application and reporting for participating arts organizations. Assuming an average grant size of $50,000 (and this is an over-estimate since Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) data shows this average to be true only for the largest foundations in the US), an organization with an annual budget of $500,000 would have 10 funders. Assuming grant application and reporting for each funder takes about 40 hours (this is the median data reported in CEP’s Grantee Perception Report for health foundations), that is a total of 400 hours a year. The Cultural Data system on the other hand, requires annual update of a single Data Profile – while there are 300 questions, many of these (like contact, background, description, etc) need only be entered once. The effort here would be at the most 2 weeks of work or 80 hours a year – this represents an 80% time saving for the non profit.

The numbers are ball-parked, but they seem useful enough to illustrate the time-saving. However, the numbers are still a projection, based on the following stated assumptions:

  • Average grant size of $50,000 (estimate based on CEP Data)
  • Organizational budget of $500,000 (hypothetical)
  • Grant application and funding time of 40 hours per funder (source: CEP Grantee Perception Report)
  • Cultural Data system requires 80 hours of work a year (personal projection)

There is also an unstated assumption that underpins her conclusion. The assumption is that a grantee organization that uses the Cultural Data system does not need to apply anywhere else for funding.

I compared these shared measurement systems to the Common App in my analysis of the report, and my own experience with the Common App makes me think that such an assumption is not founded. I applied for 16 schools when I was applying to college, 11 of which were on the Common App. NYU, my top choice (where I attend now), was on the Common App but required an additional supplement. There were a few other schools that were in a similar category. I also applied to a number of schools on the UC system, which had its own equivalent of the Common App (one UC application for all of the schools). In the end, I wound up filling out more applications than just the single Common App.

This is not to say that the Common App was useless. It did in fact allow me to apply to more schools in less time. I’m not using this as an argument to say that shared measurement systems are not time-savers, I simply want to point out that the 80% time saving projection strikes me as rosy, especially in the early days.

After all, in context of the relative youth of these systems, the question is how many funders within a given field have signed on to the shared measurement system. To compare to the Common App again, the Common App allows applications to 150 colleges in the United States. According to the US Census, there were 4,084 higher learning institutions in 1999. In the case of the Common App, I only needed to be accepted by one. But if I’d needed to be accepted to 10, I would have had to apply to more, and more of those colleges might have been non-Common App schools.

In the funding world, where sources are more limited and more are needed, it is important to ask how many of your funders are going to be participating in the shared measurement system. Can the organizations which participate in such systems put together their entire budget with funding acquired from participating funders? Or is the figure 80% of budget? 60% of budget? It is an important question for an organization to contemplate as it decides on whether or not to participate.

Also, remember that budget sizes are fluid, and that human beings are apt to think that more money is better. Supposing that an organization saves 80% of our time on the grants they planned to apply for. Will they spend that time on their organization? Or will they simply apply to more grants, hoping for more wins and more money?

I’m also curious about the time-saving from the perspective of the funder. Does the ease of applying for a grant lead to more applications? If so, how would the increase in applications compare to the time saved due to an easier review process?

My hunch is that, when these questions are answered, shared measurement systems are still more effective and save time. But I also think that it may not be quite as much time as we would think. Organizations who think that joining a shared measurement system entitles them to fire their grant-writing staff might be unpleasantly surprised.

(b) Increased effectiveness in terms of cost saving
The Success Measures Data System (SMDS) serves as a good example here. In the absence of outcomes data from a system like SMDS, funders would have to use external evaluators to understand the outcome of a grant. The cost formal external evaluation can run anywhere from a few tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars – let us assume an average cost of external evaluation of around $50,000. The SMDS annual subscription fee is $2,500 – assuming an external evaluation is conducted every 5 years – that represents a 75% cost saving.

I have an easier time believing in the cost savings, although some of the same problems from time savings also apply here. The example Ms. Vaidyanathan chose is one of the more clear-cut aspects of cost saving: being part of a system that generates outcomes data does reduce the need to bring in external evaluators to generate outcomes data. Other costs that might be reduced, such as the money that salaried full-time grant-writing staff might be harder to reduce, but this one seems a fair point.

It is important to note that both the above calculations do not capture the other important benefits realized from such systems – improved data quality  and reduced need for evaluation expertise (definition/measurement of outcome indicators requires some expertise – a specialized skill set that most non profits do not have in-house). We would expect both the above benefits to result in increased programmatic impact – as noted below, due to the early stage of these systems, quantitative impact data is not yet available.

All of those are fair points. Certainly, if it turns out that the time saving is really less than 80% and the cost saving is really less than 75%, it is worth pointing out that the other important benefits are part of the cost-benefit analysis as well. Once the quantitative impact data becomes available, we’ll know how much those other benefits compare to the time and cost savings.

(c) Increase effectiveness in terms of impact
The higher level benefits of the above mentioned two systems – increased knowledge for non profits (ability to learn from higher performing peer organizations) and funders (ability to make better programmatic grant decisions) – and the resulting increase in impact of the work is not yet documented in a quantitative manner due to the early stage of development of these systems. As you suggest, we do think a follow up report in a few years that documents this will be beneficial for the field.

Strive however, does provide some quantitative evidence of this point. Even though only in operation for two years, it has already seen positive improvement in all 5 of its major Goal areas (see http://www.strivetogether.org/documents/ReportCard/2009StriveReportCard.pdf  for a copy of its 2009 report card). Perhaps as importantly, the report card also allows it to identify areas where the indicators are trending downwards (e.g. Goal 5 indicators for Cincinnati State Technical and Community College that are trending downwards include College Readiness, Retention in Associates Degree, College Graduation, Number of Associates Degrees Granted) and thus where additional effort would be needed in the upcoming years by those action networks. This ability to identify issues, adapt strategies based on measurement and then act on it is only possible in Adaptive Learning Systems. It is our belief, as we state in the Conclusion section of our report, that Adaptive Learning Systems hold the greatest potential of moving the field toward its ultimate goal of impacting and solving social problems.

The Strive 2009 Report Card is an excellent blueprint of an informational infrastructure. The quality and depth of information in the report is impressive, and it is presented in a manner which, although dense, is clear to follow. The potential there to unify efforts, isolate problem areas, is definitely enough.

What the Strive Report Card is not is a meta-analysis. Strive is an analysis of the outcomes in the community, but it is not an analysis of Strive. We don’t know whether money was effectively used in Strive or if it went to waste, we don’t particularly know what Strive-related projects impacted what parts of the report card. In management, that’s process maturity: having a process about your process. Strive can clearly isolate issues in the outward community, but it doesn’t yet seem like it is able to isolate issues within itself. Unless it does so in internal documents that I haven’t located, and which I’d love to be made aware of.

Again, it’s called process maturity for a reason. Strive is one of the more mature systems, but it isn’t fully matured yet. It is only three years old.

Lastly, Vaidyanathan addresses my main personal insight into the program:

2. Role of public sector
The Arts specific implication you suggest of having the public sector invest in a shared measurement infrastructure for the field is an excellent one. The original development of the Cultural Data Project in Pennsylvania did include the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts which is a public agency in the Office of the Governor of PA. There is however, much greater scope for public sector involvement in building of such infrastructure. Perhaps with the setting up of agencies such as the White House Office of Social Innovation, infrastructure efforts such as that suggested here might be more likely to happen.

The potential for the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement (WHO-SICE) is one I briefly entertained in my own blog in a post here, where I proposed that WHO-SICE would become the patron saint of young, new arts organizations and the NEA would become a caretaker of large, old, established organizations in the traditional grant-making structure. I’m not sure if creating shared measurement systems would fall more under WHO-SICE or NEA in that dichotomy. However, if you note what furor was whipped up around the NEA when they tried to get individual artists to participate in a National Day of Service, you’ll see that any scheme in which the NEA helps the arts without being accused of influencing the artists themselves is probably a better direction for the NEA.

So, thanks to Ms. Vaidyanathan for directly responding to my analysis of “Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement.” I think we’re both basically in agreement that there’s a definite opportunity for a follow-up report three to five years from now that will be able to dive into the impact of the shared measurement systems with more depth and quantitative rigor. The youth of the programs in question prevent answering many of my questions at this time, but I appreciate the opportunity to air them and get responses.

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Achieving Consensus in a Pluralist Value System

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 16th, 2009

527538443_2792a58247_oimage by jef safi (‘pictosophizing) – Creative Commons license

In the course of my occasional blog discussion with Tony Wang about the nature of value (economic and otherwise), I’ve gotten us off on a bit of a philosophical tangent: namely, exploring the question of whether a pluralist value system–one in which we don’t assign any judgment to what one person believes/wishes versus another–is a sufficient framework to allow us to determine what rules/policies/social structures are optimal for the human race at any given moment in history. In his latest post, Tony says,

I think it’s ok to disagree on what’s valuable. Do Ian and I really have to duke it out and come to some sort of shared valuation of happiness, freedom, and egalitarianism in order to talk about organizational structures? Or is it ok if Ian values happiness a bit more and I value freedom and egalitarianism a bit more? If pluralism is not ok then the alternative is that we would all have to agree on our relative valuations of happiness, freedom, egalitarianism, etc. before we moved forward in any substantive conversation. And to be honest, I think that’s counterproductive.

I agree with Tony as far as the first sentence. No, we don’t have to agree on what’s valuable – he might care more about education and I might care about economic empowerment, or he might care about science whereas I care about the arts. That’s fine. My point is that as long as there is some means of reliably measuring or knowing what each individual values and how deeply, it should be possible to come up with a single set of rules/policies/social structures that works optimally given the specific mix of people in the world. (When I say “a single set,” I am including among the possibilities a decentralized system that would take into account local differences and customs, etc. In fact, there would likely have to be at least some decentralization in order to maximize collective benefit.) It would just be a straight-up modeling exercise, albeit one with a potentially gigantic number of parameters. Note that the “values” I am talking about are different from preferences as considered in a market-based context: whereas markets are shaped by participants’ immediate preferences when presented with a limited set of possibilities, here I refer instead to values or long-term goals that people would strive to uphold regardless of the extent to which they may be realistic at that moment.

I would imagine that this line of thinking intersects rather significantly with happiness economics, which I am dismayed to admit I haven’t yet had a chance to explore to the extent I’d like. Indeed, we could go ahead and simply equate utility with happiness, though doing so requires an assumption that human desires can all eventually be reduced to one goal (and also an assumption that people actually know what makes them happy). Even if we don’t, however, we can still work with a finite list of desired “final” outcomes (e.g., world peace, personal prosperity, universal submission to His Noodly Appendage, etc.) as long as we have an idea of how many people care about them and how deeply (and in which direction). The next step after these goals have been identified would be to design an enormous “logic model for the world” that would consider what intermediate factors impact each goal and what societal levers can be manipulated to facilitate the movement of those indicators in a positive direction. It is very likely that in some cases, the intermediate factors (or even the goals themselves) will compete with each other — helping one in a specific way will hurt another. Banning guns, e.g., may be helpful for the goal of world peace but may hinder the goal of individual liberty. In such cases, the relative weights of each goal matter, as does the measure’s ability to impact each goal. So, if banning civilian gun ownership is much more likely to hinder individual liberties than it is to help achieve world peace, and more people care about liberty than peace, then we don’t ban guns. The logic model’s construction would need constant revision as our understanding of the causal links between various regulations and social behavior improves, but given its fundamental basis in logic and science, it should be possible to make one that is as “correct” as possible within the limits of human knowledge.

So why don’t we get off our asses and just do this already? Well, unfortunately, that necessary condition I mentioned at the top–knowing what people value and how deeply–is a work in progress. We don’t have enough information about that now, probably, to be able to perform an exercise like the one I described. But I think we’re getting closer to being able to do it every year that passes, and I think it’s entirely possible that within Tony’s and my lifetimes we will have enough good data to be able to at least get a good start on it.

In the meantime, there are tools we already use to approximate what people’s value systems might look like. The most significant one is the market economy. Friedmanesque true believers claim that most social interventions on the part of government and others are superfluous, because markets already reflect the preferences of the people participating in them–as long as all transactions are voluntary, there are no deceptive practices, transaction costs are minimal, and anyone can participate. And it is certainly true that markets can do wonderful things when all of these factors are in place. One problem, though, is that they often aren’t–and many times, existing participants (especially suppliers) have powerful incentives to keep it that way. Furthermore, many market transactions have things called externalities, costs or benefits that accrue to third parties who are not part of the transaction (and thus do not participate voluntarily). A third problem is that markets have a way of leveraging existing inequalities and power differentials between participants by putting greater amounts of wealth in the hands of those who already have it — a quality exacerbated considerably by our practice of handing down family inheritances from one generation to the next. Finally, markets use money as their currency and also as a proxy for value — but as we discovered earlier this year, money and value are not at all the same thing. In fact, the observed relationship between money and happiness is murky at best.

All of these factors lead to what are known as market failures — situations in which the market economy, despite working as designed, fails to achieve an optimal outcome for the whole. And in such situations, we have the government to take up the slack. In many arenas, including defense, national security, emergency services, low-income housing, some health care and education, and the law, the government takes part in the marketplace directly. Furthermore, the United States has recognized and systematized a third legal status of organization, the 501(c)(3) public charity, to which it provides indirect subsidy in the form of tax exemption. Thus, in this country, we are provided with three sectors with which to try to maximize social good.

Market failures aren’t in and of themselves a bad thing, but they are bad when they result in a loss or non-optimization of collective utility. The arenas in which the government operates through direct action or indirect subsidy are those arenas that it has defined as poor fits for the market economy–essentially, where it thinks market failures that are bad for society are likely to occur. These arenas can provide us with a hint as to the proper and optimal organization of activities if our overall goal is to maximize social good. For the most part, though, these designations come from an earlier era, and the world has changed a lot in the past couple of generations. So part of our job over the next several posts will be to re-examine each of these arenas and try to come to our own conclusions about whether each one might be better suited for market solutions or not, and if not, whether direct government action or third-party nonprofit/NGO intervention makes more sense.

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New Ideas for New York

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 15th, 2009

On September 30, the New York City Mayor’s Office announced a set of five new initiatives involving a collaboration between the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and its Economic Development Corporation. Ever since I started following trends in creative economy policy and research a couple of years ago, it has seemed to me that despite having one of the most active cultural economies in the world, New York was embarrassingly behind the times in comparison to places like Massachusetts, Austin, and the UK. Thus, I’m overjoyed to see the city finally considering the arts in their broader economic context in a more explicit way.

A closer look at each of the initiatives reveals much to admire. Here’s what the city is planning:

Curate New York City – The Curate New York City program will offer visual artists a new opportunity to display their work for free across a portfolio of City-owned properties managed by NYCEDC. Exhibits will run for up to one month and rotate through the 12 to 18 month duration of the program that is expected to begin in 2010. Potential properties include: the Essex Street Market Building, the Brooklyn Army Terminal lobbies and atrium, Fulton Ferry Landing, St. George Ferry Terminal restaurant space, and Richmond County Bank Ballpark restaurant space. NYCEDC will issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) tomorrow, and – in cooperation with the Department of Cultural Affairs – will identify a lead organization to oversee the solicitation and selection of artists to participate in the program.

I’ve written before on this site about how the horrible real estate market is convincing for-profit developers to give artists a second look. Artists’ space needs are often shorter-term than businesses, and they create significant value by making productive and aesthetically pleasing use of storefront space. It’s a win-win partnership waiting to happen. My only concern is what happens once the 18 months are over and the real estate market gets hot again. I hope NYCEDC won’t simply throw the artists back out on the streets after they’ve made an investment in helping the city’s economy recover.

New York City Performs – In an effort to increase the availability of affordable performance space and simplify the permitting process, NYCEDC and the City’s Department of Parks & Recreation will provide organizations with publicly-accessible outdoor space free of charge at locations throughout the City. NYCEDC will release an RFP tomorrow to identify a lead arts organization to oversee the solicitation and selection of artists to participate in the program. Selected shows will run through spring and summer 2010.

Great idea — alleviate the performance space crunch with performances that are inherently highly accessible to the public. This is reminiscent of the rotating festival concept proposed in my Fictional Foundation Fun series earlier this year.

JumpStart for the Arts – The City continues to develop strategies to retain and retrain talented workers affected by the challenging economic climate. Similar to JumpStart New Media launched in July, the City will initiate Jumpstart for the Arts, a training program for up to 50 displaced entrepreneurial junior to mid-level professionals to apply their skill sets to the nonprofit arts and cultural sector. The program will provide organizations within the sector a pre-screened pool of highly-qualified candidates for placement. JumpStart for the Arts will comprise a five-day intensive boot camp focusing on basic skills that appeal to nonprofit cultural organizations. Participants will have opportunities to interact with leaders in the arts/culture sector through guest lectures and networking events. NYCEDC will select a partner organization to help design and oversee the program, which will launch later this year.

I’m a little unclear on how this one works. So it’s a training/workforce development program for non-arts professionals to enter the arts? What about placement? Isn’t the problem not that there aren’t plenty (way too many, in fact) of talented arts workers out there, but rather that the jobs for them don’t exist? How is that going to be solved by creating more arts workers? And how much impact can training 50 people really have? I’m all for leadership development, but I’m not convinced this is the best way to do it.

Artists as Entrepreneurs – Today’s competitive art market increasingly demands artists to be equipped with entrepreneurial skills that extend beyond their craft. To address these needs, the City will administer a pilot program to provide artists and creative professionals with the skills to reach target markets, set financial goals, build effective teams, and develop viable business plans. Upon selection of an organization to oversee the program, Artists as Entrepreneurs will hold a five-day training program to assist artists in determining the viability of their business plan and outline the steps necessary to implement the plan. Upon completion of the program, participants will have access to low-cost studio space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, operated by Chashama, an organization created to find ways to connect artists with vacant real estate at subsidized rates. NYCEDC will issue an RFP tomorrow for a third-party organization to develop and implement the pilot training program.

“Chashama is happy to be developing a new partnership with EDC, joining resources to promote artistic development in tandem with entrepreneurial practices,” said Chashama Founder and Artistic Director Anita Durst. “The new facilities will offer space to 30 additional artists. We look forward to deepening our presence in Sunset Park, and plan to have activities for artists to interact with the local community, including a youth outreach program.”

Fantastic. Resources for artist self-training are becoming more plentiful, but there is still a huge need for entrepreneurial skills out there. Again, my only concern is how much good it does to provide space and training to 30 artists. Certainly better than nothing, but maybe the city could have explored ways to make at least the training open to more people. Then again, they do say it’s only a pilot. Let’s hope it works out and they decide to expand it.

Arts Clusters Promotion Program – In addition to the world renowned art and cultural institutions of Manhattan, many clusters of artists and cultural organizations exist in the neighborhoods and communities throughout the five boroughs. To increase awareness and promote visitation of these art consortiums, NYCEDC will release an RFP tomorrow to identify two local art clusters to receive grants of $25,000 each, an amount that will be matched by a group of arts organizations and businesses as representatives of the clusters. The clusters and their representatives will be tasked with the development and implementation of a strategic marketing program and incentives packages designed to draw local and citywide audiences into their communities.

“The Alliance for the Arts strongly supports the City’s efforts to market and strengthen the arts industry,” said The Alliance for the Arts President Randall Bourscheidt. “We have an opportunity and a responsibility to encourage the ongoing development of New York City’s unparalleled resources to ensure that our artists and cultural organizations flourish throughout the area. Investing in the arts organizations and artists who live and work in New York City is more than a way to promote an individual artistic legacy; it sends a statement that the City is devoted to providing the necessary resources towards building a cultural infrastructure to set the stage for future growth in the sector.”

This is the one that gets me really excited. The devil’s in the details, of course, but New York has tremendous untapped potential for neighborhood-based cluster marketing. Right now, its cultural tourism efforts focus pretty much exclusively on Broadway, the big museums, and other high-profile single attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. That’s great, but as artists know, there is a lot more to experience in New York besides that. Do tourists coming from Europe or Japan know about the amazing indie rock and art galleries in Williamsburg? The off-off-Broadway shows in the East Village? The cultural renaissance of 125th Street? Hell, do most Manhattanites know about these things? NYC bursts at the seams with cultural and creative capital, but it’s all brutally uncoordinated and fragmented, especially across disciplines and sectors. Hopefully, this cluster campaign will help to build stronger ties between artists, organizations, businesses, and residents on a neighborhood level and lead to better outcomes for everyone.

Overall, this looks to be the most forward-looking set of initiatives undertaken by the city’s cultural guardians in years. Kudos to the NYC DCA, the NYCEDC, and the Bloomberg administration for making this happen, as well as chashama and Alliance for the Arts who clearly played key roles as well.

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Ben Davis takes up the banner

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 14th, 2009

Props go to artnet Magazine’s Ben Davis for being the second member of the professional media to actually do his homework on the NEA conference call controversy, joining the Los Angeles Times‘s Mike Boehm. (Hat tip to Anonymous Commenter.) And what marvelous things he uncovers! You should really read the whole thing, but here are some of the choice passages:

The White House’s reaction has been so craven that it has actually fueled the fire by seeming to admit that it had something to be embarrassed about. Instead of forcefully insisting on the truth, that the infamous call was about such diabolical issues as promoting “preventative health care” and “getting kids library cards” — surely things that most people can get behind — the White House moved to sacrifice Sergant and admit the “appearance of impropriety,” even though this appearance was manufactured by foes of the administration. Thus, Courrielche has been given space to continue his assault, claiming, with no real basis besides his own overactive imagination, that the call asked artists “to address politically controversial issues under contentious national debate.” (NB: Since nothing particularly partisan was actually advanced on the call, Courrielche’s argument depends on the leap that because the art community is liberal, any government contact with it can only be veiled code to unleash the gates of partisan propaganda. I’m serious. That is his argument.)

A far more concise and potent distillation of the matter than I could ever muster. Davis is right to point out that the entire smear rests on speculations about what could have happened, not what demonstrably did happen.

In other words, all Courrielche’s platitudes about protecting the arts from outside manipulation are so much hot air. This guy manipulates artists for a living. Yoking artistic communities to inscrutable institutions is his bread and butter. As a matter of fact, Inform Ventures got caught out in 2005 for precisely the political character of its manipulation. As part of its effort to target the Scion at an urban audience, Inform put together an “unsigned emcee search,” judged by a team of hip-hop pros, to give a “quick taste of what it would be like to have label support,” in Courrielche’s words. After the judges selected rapper Bavu Blakes as a finalist, Inform Ventures turned around and disqualified Blakes when the company discovered that his track, Black Gold, contained the line “Now Bush and bin Laden got so much they rotten,” as well as lines suggesting anti-death-penalty and anti-Iraq-War positions.

Ah, some new information! I had previously noticed that Courrielche’s self-characterization as an independent artist was a convenient distortion, but I had no idea about this business with Scion.

Here’s where it gets extra spicy:

With regard to Courrielche’s mingling of politics and marketing, it is also worth noting the fact that his first major intervention as a conservative art commentator was an essay titled “The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident,” in which he championed the anonymous “Obama / Joker / Socialism” posters that appeared around Los Angeles earlier this year. Somewhat improbably, Courrielche defended the posters as an example of speaking truth to power, dismissing claims that the image was racially provocative and claiming that the artist remained anonymous because he was intimidated by the intolerance of the liberal art establishment.

My own working hypothesis about these posters, on the other hand, would be that they were the product of a calculated right-wing viral marketing campaign organized by a professional — someone like, say, Patrick Courrielche. The image, after all, was appropriated from the internet and then put up in poster form on the streets of L.A., exactly mirroring the trajectory of the Shepard Fairey “Hope” campaign and clearly intended to be picked up as its counterpoint. The “Hope” campaign, of course, was famously organized by. . . Yosi Sergant, the man that Patrick Courrielche got kicked out of his job at the NEA.

WOW! I have to admit it never occurred to me that it could be Courrielche behind the Socialism posters. Total speculation on Davis’s part, of course, but not without some justification. After all, while the creator of the image has been identified as Chicago college student Firas Alkhateeb, the identity of the person who downloaded the image from Flickr, made it into a poster, and started distributing it in downtown LA is still a mystery. Wouldn’t that just take the cake if it were true? After all, this is what this guy does for a living, and it’s not like the hip, urban viral marketing crowd is exactly teeming with conservative libertarians like Courrielche.

And finally, we get some dirt on the relationship between Courrielche and Sergant:

Which brings us to the final question: Why hasn’t Patrick Courrielche owned up to the fact that he has a personal grudge against Yosi Sergant? Because it turns out, in fact, that the two men worked together. [...] According to an acquaintance of Sergant’s, Robert Greene, when he met Sergant in 2006, his story was that he had left the Scion campaign because of his increasing commitment to environmentalism and bike culture (Sergant’s strong commitment to biking is almost the first thing mentioned about him in a 2008 L.A. Weekly profile.) On the other hand, the word on the street in L.A. is that the break was bitter, and involved Courrielche accusing Sergant of stealing information from him. Sergant went on to work for a rival lifestyle marketing firm, Evolutionary Media Group, which consulted for the Obama campaign early on.

I’ve been trying to emphasize the personal connection between Courrielche and Sergant ever since I discovered it for myself over a month ago, but Davis and Boehm are the only media figures to pick up on it so far, along with a few bloggers here and there like Dalouge Smith of Dog Days. I don’t know how seriously to take this anonymously-sourced bit about the nature of their break, but it seems clear that there was one. Regardless, the notion that Courrielche is some sort of disinterested, agenda-free observer is completely obliterated by Davis’s multi-pronged investigation.

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Is it time for the arts to become a partisan issue?

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 14th, 2009

3005645604_116169be39_b(photo courtesy Flickr user victoriabernal, Creative Commons license)

So, in case you haven’t noticed, the arts have become a bit of a hot topic in the political arena lately. Though the brouhaha regarding the NEA’s involvement in the United We Serve conference calls seems to have died down a bit since Yosi Sergant fell on his sword, conservatives have been trying to expand the fight to other arenas, like the meeting with arts community activists in May and now, the Obamas’ choice of art to decorate the White House itself. As Janet Brown of Grantmakers for the Arts has pointed out, it’s silly to think this is about anything other than the fact that, in the words of Alan Grayson, “if the President has a BLT tomorrow, the Republicans will try to ban bacon.” For conservatives, this is about fighting Obama wherever and whenever they can, using any pretext possible, to try to slow him down and obstruct any change from happening. And if the arts have to be a casualty of that, clearly they could care less, even if an offspring or two has to suffer for it.

One of my great frustrations of the past couple of months, though, has been that many on the left seemingly could care less as well. A simple comparison of the play that the NEA/Yosi Sergant story received on each side of the aisle will serve to illustrate my point. Every time a “new” revelation from Patrick Courrielche’s closet of secrets came out on Big Hollywood, the story would receive the royal treatment from the conservative elite: front-page posts on Michelle Malkin and Instapundit, live television interviews on Beck and Hannity, extensive, day-after-day coverage from the Washington Times, etc. In contrast, the liberal media pretty much hit the snooze button until people’s heads started to roll. The controversy was virtually invisible on Daily Kos, one of the most popular left-leaning community blogs, despite my own best efforts in cross-posting three articles from Createquity there. Aside from a bit of coverage by Mother Jones and Huffington Post, there was barely any attempt to rally the troops in defense of the NEA on the part of the left until after the damage was already done (and only a halfhearted one even then). I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of artists caring far more about liberal politics than liberal politics cares about them.

And what of the arts blogosphere? When Courrielche’s story first came out, there was a lot of hemming and hawing in our corner that took most of the (as it turned out, borderline delusional) speculation in his original essay at face value — which, in some cases, only served to hand a hatchet to those who were on the lookout for one. This is my second great frustration with how this whole business played out. Look, you can think what you want about the appropriateness or lack thereof of the idea behind getting artists involved in a national community service initiative. But understand this: the Right is not interested in having a reasoned, constructive dialogue with you about the ways in which this concept could have been approached differently or could have delivered better outcomes for the American people. The Right wants an excuse, any excuse at all, to rip the President and anyone involved with his administration to rhetorical (and for some of them, literal) shreds. And if your words end up being that excuse, don’t act all surprised after the fact.

My final frustration relates to the NEA’s own handling of the situation. The communications office appeared completely blindsided by this attack and clearly thought that by stonewalling the inquiries it was suddenly getting from conservative media outlets, the issue would just go away. Instead, the lack of a response just provided more fuel to the fire, hampered the Endowment’s credibility, and gave the story new life every day that clear answers were not forthcoming. Then, by demoting Sergant and ultimately accepting his resignation, the NEA opened itself up to charges of “why are you disciplining him if you’re saying he didn’t do anything wrong?” I obviously wasn’t there, but to me the NEA’s actions during this period look an awful lot like those of an institution paralyzed by fear – ironic, since the great majority of the facts were ultimately on its side.

Taken together, it’s a sad commentary on the state of arts advocacy, both in terms of how others advocate for us and how we advocate for ourselves.

Which leads me to wonder: maybe we have our advocacy strategy all wrong, or at least wrong for this moment in history and this particular political environment. Despite the arts’ best efforts to slink away into nonpartisan anonymity after the culture wars of the late ’80s and early ’90s, we are now finding that the resulting gains in public investment have not only been modest but exceedingly fragile. What this summer has made clear is that conservatives love to pick on the arts. Like bullies of all stripes, they love it because it’s easy. And it’s easy because we’re small, because we’re poorly organized, and because we have no one to defend us – we’re nonpartisan, remember?

I don’t like the increasing polarization in American politics any more than you do, but maybe it’s time for us to recognize that it’s happening whether we like it or not. And given that one side has demonstrated, over and over again, that it is willing to ignore both facts and reason in pursuing its attacks against who we are and what we do, maybe, just maybe, we should think about allying ourselves with the other side in a more formal way.

What might this look like? As nonprofit organizations, most arts groups are limited in the amount of direct lobbying they can do, and they cannot endorse specific candidates. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about seeking a shift in the dialogue of the thought leaders on the left. I’m talking about making the arts a “progressive” issue in the same way that environmentalism, health care, reproductive rights, and labor are considered “progressive” issues. To be sure, this would lose us some fans and invite lots of confrontation, both of which are in a vacuum Very Bad Things. But it would bring with it an advantage, a huge, huge advantage: the machinery, infrastructure, and commitment of one of the two major political parties in the US–the one that at the moment just happens to have led in party identification among voters nationally for the past four years running. This is no small matter. For all the vitriol (and sometimes worse) that has been hurled at abortion-rights supporters since 1973, Roe v. Wade still stands. And where do you think the labor movement would be in this country without the strong support of Democrats through the years?

An alliance between the arts and the left makes a lot of sense on both sides. Most artists themselves identify as anywhere from moderately liberal to borderline Marxist, as do their core audiences. Art production and presentation has historically been concentrated on the coasts, in urban areas, and in town centers, a fact of life decried by some but that nevertheless aligns well with the progressive focus on cities and existing concentrations of progressives. Richard Florida’s “creative class” concept and the arts’ neighborhood-revitalization powers provide us with an opening; it’s up to us to use it wisely. Just as there is a movement of “greening” cities underway, there should be a movement of “arting” cities: providing color, infrastructure, and life to neighborhoods and communities as we clean them up and get them ready for the 21st century. Part of the reason culture conservatives hate the NEA so is because so much art speaks to largely progressive groups: homosexuals, atheists, people of color, the sexually liberated, the alienated, the outsiders. One could even make an argument that art and creativity are inherently progressive values: they require and celebrate a capacity to think critically, to question convention, to consider different viewpoints. Is it time for us to come out of the political closet and show the world who we really are?

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Around the horn: Brooklyn dreamin’ edition

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 12th, 2009

This is apparently the month for Createquity guest-blogging. In addition to my contributions to Barry Hessenius’s NEA group blog, which continues this week with several panelists from the commercial music and television industries, I will be doing double-duty next week: running the official blog of the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in Brooklyn, NY starting on Sunday, and contributing to a week-long discussion about emerging leaders in the arts for Americans for the Arts’s ARTSblog. More on both of those in short order.

  • Blogging at Parabasis, 99 Seats asks, “If [you] just slapped an MFA from whatever school you like most on your resume and left it there, who would question you?” It’s a provocative question, and unfortunately the answer is probably very few people. But this is nothing new – remember when the dean of admissions for MIT had to resign because she faked her own credentials? The more interesting question that it raises for me is this: if getting an MFA is increasingly seen as a requirement to get anything produced in the theater, how do all those MFAs distinguish themselves from each other? Maybe by getting an even higher degree? We’re already seeing it in music, where a master’s degree is no longer enough to make it in a lot of fields (notably conducting). This kind of “degree inflation” is happening in arts administration too, where enough people are getting master’s degrees that the degree itself doesn’t mean as much on its own as it used to. Net result: everybody’s getting smarter, but taking on more debt to do it.
  • Maryann Devine has quietly started reviewing marketing books at smArts & Culture, which is definitely the kind of thing we need more of (see Series, Arts Policy Library). Her latest entry is on Chris Anderson’s Free, about which she has mainly positive things to say. For another perspective, check the Clyde Fitch Report, in which Leonard Jacobs considers Anderson’s book from the perspective of professional arts criticism, blogging, and a column by noted music journalist Norman Lebrecht. Finally, at a site called QuestionCopyright.org, Nina Paley goes the whole hog and says, “It is assumed that a) Artists are inherently entitled to monetary compensation for their Art, and b) copyright is a mechanism for this compensation. I challenge both assumptions.”
  • Sean Stannard-Stockton has had a nice run of posts lately over at Tactical Philanthropy. In “Philanthropedia,” he points us to a new resource that surveys a network of experts for their opinions on the best nonprofits working in  a range of cause topics such as education and climate change. The assessments include not just the rankings and generic/public info about the nonprofits, but also a qualitative assessment of strengths and weaknesses for each organization. A good step in the right direction. In “Philanthropy at the End of the Recession,” Sean points out that, if indeed the Great Recession is nearing an end (a big if, mind you), now is a great time for nonprofits to retool and prepare for coming capacity building efforts. I think that’s true if said nonprofits have fully internalized the depth of the economic downturn and remodeled themselves as leaner, meaner organizations. However, those that have managed to squeak by without major cutbacks to this point might still have layoffs and other cost-cutting measures in their future, as foundations adjust their 2010 and 2011 payout levels to incorporate the full extent of their losses in the market in the past year. Finally, Sean has a guest post from the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s George Overholser, who puts forth a “bullet point manifesto” on how far we can expect impact evaluation to take us in our understanding of charity effectiveness. I have to say that I kind of love this format and may explore using it myself.
  • Compelling cases: over at New Voices in Philanthropy, Trista Harris (and E. J. Dionne) make a convincing argument for why the nonprofit sector should accept the Obama  administration’s proposal to lower the cap on charitable deductions for the super-wealthy in order to pay for health insurance reform. And at Better Together, Grantmakers in the Arts executive director Janet Brown comes out swinging on the subject of politically-motivated attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts. I was really glad to read these words from someone in her position: “The culture wars these days are not about culture. It’s a war about power and about winning. We need to call it what it is. And we need to continue with our work that unapologetically aspires to brighten the lives of all Americans.” Go Janet!
  • Thank you to Gary Steuer for making my job that much easier. Steuer, the Chief Cultural Officer for the city of Philadelphia, has an awesome direct account of what’s going on with the Pennsylvania arts budget. Apparently the much-dreaded “arts tax” (which is really just the application of the state sales tax to arts organization tickets and admissions) is not happening after all. On the other hand, it looks like the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts will sustain a cut of about 27% in all – not as bad as in some states, but still pretty bad.
  • Speaking of Philadelphia, I am coming to admire Peggy Amsterdam and the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance more and more. The latest news is a $750,000 grant program based on the GPCA’s recent audience engagement study, Research into Action: Pathways to New Opportunities. True to the report’s name, this has to be the fastest time on record that one of these research reports has been translated into a bona-fide new grant program.
  • The wise ones speak: go read some great tips from social media Beth Kanter on measuring the effectiveness of your blog; Adam Thurman warns us not to focus so much on thinking outside the box that we forget why the box is there.
  • What a difference a year makes: even real estate developers in New York are falling over themselves to offer cheap (temporary) storefront spaces to artists now.
  • RIP to Suzanne Fiol, founder of the experimental music space Issue Project Room, who passed away at only 49 last week after a battle with cancer.
  • I’m happy to report that Lalithya Vaidyanathan, one of the co-authors of the “Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact” report that we analyzed last week as part of the Arts Policy Library series, has chosen to engage us in dialogue with an in-depth response. Everyone should go read it here. This kind of serious and constructive dialogue around texts is exactly the kind of conversation we hope to foster here at Createquity.
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Meet Me at Barry’s IV: Wrap and Reactions

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 10th, 2009

The last of the panel questions for Week 4 of the Barry’s Blog discussion of the future of the NEA are up, and Barry himself has added some final thoughts to wrap up the week. Check it all out here. To give you a taste and encourage you to visit, once again I’ve cross-posted my own answers below.

Q: There is a growing class of recently retired arts leaders (including some who aren’t yet finished with their careers, but who have moved over to the consultant side of the fence as it were).  What role should the Endowment play in maintaining the sector’s institutional memory and somehow capture the lessons learned from this class of leaders for the benefit of the sector’s future leadership?  How might it accomplish that?

A: I would never presume to assert that emerging leaders have all of the answers. I’m only 29, but even in the last few years as I’ve gotten older I’ve begun to understand just how much there is that I didn’t know at 26, and how much more I have left to learn. So I think our retired and semi-retired arts leaders have an important role to play in guiding the next generation forward and grounding our efforts in historical perspective. Every management team can benefit from having experienced voices as part of it, even if those voices are heard in an advisory rather than supervisory capacity.

What is the Endowment’s most appropriate role? I’m not sure it needs to get involved to too great a degree in this transition, but I think it can start by setting an example in its own hiring practices by putting people with the right combination of experience, skills, vision, creativity, and energy in leadership positions and ensuring that experience levels are appropriately distributed among the teams. The Endowment could also commission an oral history or other research project to record the rich historical perspectives of the retired and semi-retired arts leaders and preserve them for posterity. The next generation of leaders will also need the humility to seek out those perspectives and not get caught up too quickly in their own brilliance. But with that said, I suspect the perspective of elders is more likely to be valued properly when sought out voluntarily or incorporated into a common vision than when dictated from the top down.

Q: Do the programs and services the Endowment currently offers reflect the best use of its money?  Do you think the NEA has (is) doing enough to promote and nurture smaller arts organizations and newer, more cutting edge art?  What about its support for multicultural arts?  What should the NEA do to ensure that it makes provision for these kinds of arts and arts organizations?  Where should the proper balance lie between support for traditional Anglo America arts forms, arts expressions and legacies, and arts organizations, and both multicultural arts and newer, more avant garde artistic expressions of younger generations?

A: As I mentioned before, I think the Endowment could do a better job distributing its resources to organizations of all sizes. There is really no reason for the NEA to be giving $50,000 grants to organizations with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. It’s just another check off the list for those development departments. On the other hand, even a $5,000 grant could have a transformative impact on an organization with a smaller budget, and the vast majority of arts organizations fall into that category. Furthermore, I’m not convinced that the current discipline-specific structure really makes the most sense for the field, particularly as more multidisciplinary work and organizations appear and as genre boundaries between what has historically been considered “art” and multicultural, commercial, and vernacular forms of creativity become ever more blurred. I keep coming back to this point, but as the national funder for the arts in America, I really think the Endowment should focus most of all on maintaining and building the infrastructure that makes cultural production and consumption possible, leaving the specifics of what art gets produced when by whom to others who are in a better position to judge. The decentralized support to state and regional arts agencies is a good example of this infrastructure-oriented funding in practice. Specific programs to subsidize presenters of various sizes, competitions, record labels, distribution networks, community cultural planning efforts, research, and service organizations would help as well. But the Endowment should be vigilant in ensuring that an appropriate portion of these funds ends up ultimately helping artists, rather than arts administrators and for-profit consulting firms. Even though I am generally in support of unrestricted funding, then, there may be instances in which the NEA’s project-based support is more appropriate; and I would also advocate for the establishment of a robust evaluation department to assess program effectiveness using tools from the NEA’s 21st-century peers in the philanthropy community.

Meanwhile, my answer to Barry’s question about arts education from earlier in the week, in which I raised the issue of what happens to newly converted arts fans once they grow up and want to continue their activity in the field of their choice, has generated some interesting responses around the web. Two of the more in-depth commentaries come from Guy Yedwab at CultureFuture, who’s more optimistic than me that an increase in arts patrons resulting from better access to arts education would bring enough new money into the sector to accommodate more aspiring professional artists; and from Joe Patti at Butts in Seats, who points out that it’s actually in an industry’s interests to exaggerate the availability of professional opportunities so that employers can keep labor costs down (though he doesn’t go so far as to suggest that this kind of intentional scheming is happening in the arts).

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Meet Me at Barry’s III

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 8th, 2009

Barry’s Blog has added two more questions to this week’s group panel on the future of the NEA. My answers are below; or you can check out the entire thing here (scroll down). If you do the latter, keep an eye out for Shannon Daut’s excellent comments on public arts agency leadership.

Q: We talk a lot about next generation succession and emerging leadership issues.  What role do you think the Endowment should have in helping to train, prepare, develop and support the next generation of arts leaders and how might it go about that?

A: I believe that our field too often privileges experience at the expense of talent, learning ability, and entrepreneurial spirit. The wisdom of experience is not the same thing as the functional skills required to get things done. After all, how many arts organizations across the country are now redesigning staff job descriptions around maintaining a presence on Facebook, created by Mark Zuckerberg from his college dorm room?

What the field needs most in this area is a clear leadership pipeline for arts managers. The private sector has formed many fruitful partnerships with top colleges, professional schools, and so forth, establishing rotational leadership development or project management programs, 360-degree evaluation practices, and a clear “track” for professional advancement in many industries such as consulting and banking. While not all of these innovations may be the best choice for the arts, clearly our field has a lot to learn from our for-profit cousins.

While the burden of involving next-generation leadership in organizational decision-making will ultimately fall to arts organizations themselves, the advantage of getting the NEA involved in this discussion is its national and cross-disciplinary scope. For example, the League of American Orchestras has developed an exemplary orchestra management training program, but it will never be open to non-orchestra professionals because that would be outside of the League’s mission. A couple of participants in previous weeks of this blog drew attention to the untapped potential of the Endowment as a convener, particularly of national service organizations. I think this would be an excellent topic to bring up at such a convening—and please, NEA, if you do so, include emerging leader voices in your planning process.

The truth is, though, we don’t need the Endowment’s help to start taking better advantage of the contributions of emerging leaders. Most of the bright younger and newer arts professionals I know are not hard to find; it’s just that their entry-level or junior management positions don’t afford them the kind of platform that others in the field have to make their intelligence and insight obvious to everyone. If your organization doesn’t already involve the entire staff in strategic conversations about the future, there’s nothing preventing you from changing that tomorrow. If your organization’s board doesn’t already include voices from people younger than in their forties, that’s an easy change to make. If you don’t have any idea of what your direct reports think about how the organization could do what it does more effectively, ask them. You might be pleasantly surprised by what they come up with.

What would you like to see the Endowment accomplish?  What policies should govern its actions?  What should be its priorities?  If you were to advise Rocco Landesman on what the agenda for the NEA should be –what would you tell him?

As I mentioned in a comment the other week, it strikes me that the NEA and most of its followers have focused quite narrowly on the concerns of nonprofit arts organizations in the United States. In a perfect world, I would like to see the arts field work much more collaboratively and proactively with other fields. There are a myriad of ways in which the arts intersect with broader federal and societal priorities. As Chairman Landesman has recognized, the arts potentially have a gigantic role to play in the economic revitalization of neighborhoods and downtowns, particularly outside of major metropolitan areas where small investments can make a big difference. So why isn’t there more interaction with Housing and Urban Development? The arts are widely regarded as the linchpin of a broader creative economy, due to the space they provide for innovation for its own sake. So why are the arts so rarely a part of the discussion of the White House’s new Office of Social Innovation? Our world is rapidly becoming more integrated even as it becomes more complex. If the recent political brouhahas involving the NEA teach us anything, it should be that we can’t afford to stay in our silos for much longer.

Beyond that, I would encourage the Chairman to focus on the infrastructure of arts production in the way that I mentioned earlier. While the Endowment already does a decent job of spreading funds around both geographically and to organizations of different budget sizes, the fact remains that the vast majority of arts organizations have no hope of receiving an NEA grant because they are too small. Arts organizations receive far more from the federal government in the form of Congressional earmarks than they do through the Endowment’s competitive process. Given that large, established institutions have by far the most tools at their disposal (prestige, connections, large customer base, individual donors) with which to ensure their own survival and artistic success, I believe that the Endowment’s resources would be best directed toward the identification and support of exemplary “under the radar” arts programs, including innovative models for cultural production and distribution.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, the Endowment’s value in centralizing attention on issues of fieldwide interest has yet to be fully realized. By convening discussions relevant to the field and by commissioning high-quality research that enhances our understanding of what the arts do and how they do it (not just how many artists and patrons there are), the Endowment could provide an extremely valuable service that not many others would be in a position to duplicate.

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Arts Policy Library: Breakthroughs In Shared Measurement

By Guy Yedwab | Published: October 8th, 2009

[Note to readers: I'm very pleased to introduce to you the first Arts Policy Library entry (not to mention first Createquity post of any kind) not written by me. Guy Yedwab is a budding theater professional who first became known to me through the magic of Twitter and later through his blog, CultureFuture. Currently a senior at New York University, he has already founded a theater company and a publishing house in the midst of going to school full-time, completing various internships and odd jobs, and now, writing for Createquity. I'm excited to have Guy on board and hope you'll give him a warm welcome. -IDM]

Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social ImpactIn “Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact” by FSG Social Impact Advisors, authors Mark Kramer (FSG’s co-founder), Marcie Parkhurst, and Lalitha Vaidynathan take a look at the different ways foundations and their grantees have tackled the lack of performance measurement standards in the nonprofit sector. The short 26-page report was released July 2009 and funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the largest foundations in America. FSG Social Impact Advisors is a nonprofit consulting firm that helps foundations and philanthropic organizations make effective grants. It should be noted that the Hewlett Foundation participates in one of the shared measurement programs documented in the report, run by the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

SUMMARY

Kramer et al. are clear about their aims early on. The paper opens as follows:

“A surprising new breakthrough is emerging in the social sector: A handful of innovative organizations have developed web-based systems for reporting the performance, measuring the outcomes, and coordinating the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of social enterprises within a field. These nascent efforts carry implications well beyond performance measurement, foreshadowing the possibility of profound changes in the vision and effectiveness of the entire nonprofit sector.”

It is these breakthroughs that  the report seeks to document, primarily through interviews with participants and summaries of the systems involved. The authors isolate three important categories of breakthroughs, each building on the last:

  1. Shared Measurement Platforms, which are an agreed-upon set of benchmarks developed by funding organizations and their grantees;
  2. Comparative Performance Systems, which build upon a Shared Measurement Platform and look for ways to compare the results between different grantee organizations; and
  3. Adaptive Learning Systems, which seek to leverage both of the above systems to develop strategies and coordinate resources between multiple foundations and grantees.

The report looked at twenty different efforts of varying sizes and types.

Kramer et al. first examine the need for these initiatives. Each of these systems emerged in response to the same fundamental problem: the extreme inefficiency of the grant application process. Although foundations in the same field were attempting to evaluate the same organizations, each had its own process and its own benchmarks. Grantee organizations found themselves wasting large amounts of time filling out different applications, spending significant contributed income simply on the process of acquiring more money for their operations. Meanwhile, foundations and grantee organizations were not learning from either each other or their peers. The problem was described vividly in Project Streamline‘s 2008 report “Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted from Purpose.”

In addition to the problem of overhead and waste inherent in duplicative grant applications, the foundations involved in these experiments recognized that organizations did not have professional benchmarks to judge their own success. In the private sector, companies have specific quantitative standards to assess their impact: market share, revenues, etc. But in the field of nonprofits, Kramer et al. note that foundations currently face a choice between two equally problematic ways of evaluating impact: haphazard self-reporting, or expensive third-party auditing. Foundations and their grantees have a mutual interest in systematically overcoming these difficulties.

To address these needs, a number of different and independent Shared Measurement Systems have been set up, usually by a group of large foundations, as reusable yardsticks for their applicants,. These systems typically take the form of web-based applications that allow representatives of a grantee organization to plug in data from their own organization and analyze the results. In the case of Comparative Performance Systems, the participants can compare this data against other users in their field. Adaptive Learning Systems improve on this system by using real-world, face-to-face meetings to discuss the meaning of these results with others in the field.

The report notes certain obstacles to implementing these programs, which all seem attributable to fears on the part of participants. Grantees fear the complexity of some of these systems, worry about disclosing too much internal information, and are afraid of running afoul of funding biases if they participate. Foundations are hesitant to spend money on developing such systems because the spending does not go directly towards their stated goals; although such systems might indirectly help the homeless or the environment, the impact is less immediate. There is also the “free-rider” problem: foundations might pour substantial time and effort into developing a system, only to have later foundations and grantees benefit without having paid in originally. The authors note, however, that in the nonprofit field, concern about the free-rider problem should be less prevalent, seeing as the whole point of philanthropy is to benefit others.

The report identifies eight success factors for implementing these systems:

  1. Strong leadership and substantial funding
  2. Broad engagement by many organizations
  3. Voluntary participation
  4. Web-based technology
  5. Independence from funders
  6. Ongoing staffing to support member organizations
  7. Testing and continual improvement
  8. Users periodically swapping information.

The appendix contains four case studies and detailed information about the 20 organizations examined.  The organizations tackle issues as diverse as housing and economic development, cultural development, education, and environmental preservation—there is even an Adaptive Learning System for marine fisheries.

The four case studies have a number of notable elements in common. Most of these programs involved web-based data-collection and sharing and a support organization to help their members. Many are free to use, but others have subscription costs that can range into the thousands—although the authors are quick to note that the member organizations still save money over not using the system. Most of the programs were started by a few large, locally influential funders, such as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation or the Acumen Fund. The initial investment averages roughly $1.2 million (excluding the Cultural Data Project, a clear outlier at $2.3 million), and time to develop ranges from 2 to 5 years.

ANALYSIS

I found the report’s conclusions intriguing and the arguments put forward in favor of these shared measurement systems persuasive. The common-sense approach to solving problems through sharing of information and reducing overhead seems so intuitive that it’s hard to believe that these programs aren’t more widespread. My only criticism of the report is its lack of depth of examination and analysis of the implementation and effectiveness of the various programs.

The report is entirely qualitative in nature. For the most part, the authors limit themselves to descriptions of the programs they examine; there is no quantitative look at the effectiveness of any of the programs, or any analysis of the metrics used within the programs. The qualitative analysis is drawn entirely from interviews of participants in the organizations, and the interviews are all positive in nature. I wouldn’t go so far as to ascribe this to deliberate bias on behalf of the authors, but the lack of any sustained criticism from the participants or perspectives from organizations that chose not to participate may create an overly rosy picture.

The report holds that the trends described point toward a new direction for the relationship between grantees and the foundations that support them. The opportunities for reducing overhead and bringing order to the chaos of searching for foundation support are clear. In other contexts, this approach has been effective: the Common App, for instance, has made the process of applying for colleges somewhat more bearable for the thousands of students who use it.

Furthermore, there is a particular passage in the report where Kramer et al. seem to reach past the stated purpose of the programs to see an even larger picture. They note that the now-famous success of the Harlem Children’s Zone stems from the powerful coordination between all aspects of the education process. They see the potential for Adaptive Learning Systems to create the groundwork for networks of multiple organizations, as closely coordinated as the Harlem Children’s Zone, working in tandem to accomplish the same goals in other contexts.

Kramer et al. already see this happening in one example, the Strive Initiative. Strive is a large-scale partnership in the Greater Cincinnati area that brings together three public school districts, one diocesan district, eight universities/community colleges, and hundreds of other education nonprofits. Strive sets forward a series of Community-level Progress Indicators, measuring what percentage of children are performing adequately in each year. Furthermore, educational nonprofits using similar approaches to improve these progress indicators collaborate in Student Success Networks (SSN), such as the Tutoring SSN that encapsulates school districts, tutoring organizations, and the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority. What began as a shared measurement system (using the Community-level Progress Indicators) developed into an adaptive learning system (the SSNs).

In a way, the report’s argument for the impact of these measurements reminds me of Richard Florida‘s statement that the culture of the creative class could transform the effectiveness of manufacturing and service industries; here, it seems that the Organization Man has something positive to give to the creative class.

Despite the clear logic and potential of all these elements, the report offers little examination of the impact of these programs, and particularly little examination of the actual systems of measurement themselves. Examples of questionnaires and metrics are provided, but the lack of critical analysis of their effectiveness and use makes it difficult to evaluate their impact. The only empirical evidence put forward is a circumstantial increase in funding for the arts in Philadelphia, possibly as a result of the organization and empirical benchmarks put forward by the Cultural Data Project, but this is only one data point and the causation isn’t very clear.

In fairness, there are a number of reasons why the report does not attempt that level of depth. Most of the projects examined are less than a decade in operation, and many of them have not yet been fully implemented. The “breakthroughs” hailed by Kramer et al. are still quite in their infancy, and it may be difficult to judge their full impact at this time. Still, an attempt to analyze the metrics used by the different organizations would have been very helpful in understanding how they operate.

Perhaps the goals of this report should be revisited in the next decade, with a more detailed and quantitative analysis of the effects of these programs. A future report could create more specific guidelines for how to create new successful systems, and share the lessons learned by the early trailblazers. This could have the added effect of lowering the development time and cost of new systems, as well as building an even stronger case for adoption and expansion.

IMPLICATIONS

The implications of this report point the way toward an excellent new strategy for approaching philanthropy, and by extension arts and culture. Although most of the organizations examined were not arts organizations, it is clear that the lessons translate across boundaries from anti-poverty groups to performing arts. The Cultural Data Project, specifically, looks to be the vehicle for this change.

There is, however, an arts-specific implication overlooked by the authors of the report, and this is the aspect that most interested me. The report focuses largely on the current structure of these shared measurement organizations, namely led by large private foundations. It does not investigate the possibility of public sector involvement. For instance, the report discusses the reluctance of foundations to embark on this sort of indirect investment. This weakness, however, becomes a strength when applied to the public sector. One of the political barriers to the debate in favor of arts funding has been a reluctance (to put it mildly) of public officials to risk funding artists and arts organizations directly, especially at the national level. It is exceptionally easy to attack the arts by attacking a few examples of controversial organizations, and there will always be a toxic debate surrounding which organizations to support and by how much.

The power of this report is that it puts forward another strategy of supporting philanthropy (and in specific the arts), one which avoids the problem of directly supporting organizations. Instead, it proposes an informational infrastructure for the arts.

In this age, we’ve come to recognize that knowledge and data have the particular power to maximize the impact of any organization. The government already provides its greatest support for the arts in infrastructural investments that are equally available to all arts organizations—the institutions of copyright and nonprofit tax credits are, from one perspective, infrastructural investments in the arts. The National Endowment of the Arts could appropriate a fraction of its budget to create national standards for data sharing in the arts, eventually creating adaptive learning systems for the arts.

The political advantage of this approach is that it avoids the picking and choosing of organizations that touch? on sensitive issues of censorship, ideology, and artistic merit. Foundations are better places to support individual organizations and artists—this way, the government’s investment will facilitate the ability of foundations to support those artists and organizations.

To a large extent, this is the federal government’s approach to stimulating industry. It would be very difficult to measure the impact of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the national economy, but no one would deny that for a relatively modest cost it provides huge benefits to the world of labor. So it could be for the arts.

Consider, for a moment, that with an investment of $2.3 million, such an infrastructure is being established in seven states in the form of the Cultural Data Project. Suppose that the cost per state of this is fixed; it would thus take $16.4 million to cover all 50 states (this is a very rough approximation, just for the current point I’m making). This is still only a portion of the $50 million in stimulus money appropriated for the arts, and I suspect that the cost would likely be less than that. In other words, for a very plausible amount of money, the National Endowment of the Arts could invest in a project whose benefits would be accessible to every arts organization.

This report is an important first step in building such an approach. Although more work remains to be done, the report provides a clear method of cutting overhead, sharing information, and eventually building a strategy for coordinating the arts.

[UPDATE: Don't miss Lalitha Vaidyanathan's (one of the report's co-authors) lengthy comment below and Guy Yedwab's response.]

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Meet Me at Barry’s II

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 7th, 2009

I’m participating in this week’s portion of Barry Hessenius’s and Anthony Radich’s six-week online discussion about the future of the NEA, hosted at the Western States Arts Federation website. Barry has the panel’s answers to the first two questions already up. You can check them out here, or if you’re pressed for time, I’ve reposted my own contributions below. I highly encourage you to check out the entire panel when you have a chance, however.

Q: What will it take for the arts to finally move arts education to an equal level of support and respect with math and science – in the minds of educators, politicians, business & industry, parents, the media and / or the general public and what specifically do you think the NEA can do to help us reach the goal of K-12, sequential, curriculum based, arts education for all students?

A: This is surely not going to make me the most popular guy in the room, but I think that it’s really, really important that we have an industry-wide conversation about the long-term implications of increased arts education before we just assume that more arts education is a good thing. Before you call me out as the Grinch who stole music classes, let me explain. I think that the conversation about arts education is inseparable from the conversation about the professional arts infrastructure in America. The reason is simple: the kids who fall in love with learning to play the tuba or do a pirouette today are the adults who are going to be competing with each other for gigs and grant money tomorrow. If we are successful in our efforts and ensure that every child has the opportunity to experience all the arts they want to during their formative years, what happens to them once they get to college? The arts are a powerful drug, as addictive as nicotine for some. The arts encourage people to dream big, and we’ve developed a post-Baby Boomer culture in America that tells children to follow their dreams no matter what obstacles they encounter. That’s fine so far as it goes, but there needs to be a pot of gold on the other side of that rainbow. When music conservatories, playwriting programs, schools of art—institutions whose ranks and capital budgets have been swelling apace in recent years—blithely charge marginal students tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and fail to offer them even the pretense of “real life” entrepreneurship skills, that’s as close to third-sector malpractice as it gets in my opinion. A recent poll of Harvard graduates from the class of 2009 revealed that 16%—more than any other industry—considered the arts their “dream field” that they would pursue absent other considerations (6% actually are pursuing careers in the arts). If we’re trying to hook 55 million children on the arts in a system that pours 3.2 million new high school graduates into the market every year, even if only 10% of them decide to pursue professional careers, what happens to them when, by the NEA’s own figures, only 2 million artists can coexist in that market at any given time?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have arts education or that students across the socioeconomic spectrum don’t deserve access to it. But I do worry that focusing our efforts on arts education is an example of putting the cart before the horse. Much of the literature that advocates arts education as a strategy for cultivating demand for the arts assumes that students who have invested thousands of hours of their lives in perfecting a craft during their formative years will happily set all of that aside as soon as they turn 18 or 21, become productive members of society with skills that they somehow picked up while practicing piano for four hours a day, and donate all of their expendable income to their local arts organizations. Really? Don’t you think that some of them might be a little bitter about having to leave their dream behind? Don’t you think some of them might continue on and spend their parents’ life savings on three graduate degrees in a quixotic quest for fame and glory that never materializes? Is this the best use of our collective human capital? Before we lean too hard on a strategy that, if successful, is virtually guaranteed to pour legions of new aspiring professional artists into the system, we need first to resolve the chronic undercapacity issues that plague that system, starting with significantly increasing the supply of philanthropic capital (whether government or private) available to the arts field.

Q: Several previous panelists have expressed caution about the Endowment trying to re-establish direct funding of individual artists because of the possibility of political attacks putting the agency once again in a vulnerable position.  We’ve already seen signs of that.  Do you think the Endowment should consider funding to artists once again?  How might the Endowment help to create more intersections between independent working artists and nonprofit arts administrators?

A: Again, my position is rather iconoclastic on this one. I don’t think that direct funding of individual artists is a particularly good use of the Endowment’s resources. My objection is less political than operational. Let’s say the NEA is right that there are two million artists in the United States. No agency is equipped to properly evaluate the talents of two million artists—or even a tenth of that number. Hell, top colleges only receive twenty to thirty thousand applications a year. Individual artist fellowships might have made sense back when the NEA was first formed and the arts infrastructure was significantly underdeveloped compared to now. In 2009, though, it’s a horribly inefficient way of distributing money, unless artistic merit (quite a subjective bugaboo to begin with) is just thrown out the window and anyone who claims to be an artist can apply for an automatic $20 grant. But somehow, I don’t think that’s what the individual artist fellowship advocates have in mind.

Far better, in my opinion, for the NEA to support the infrastructure that makes funding for artists possible. There are established procedures in place to pay most individual artists for the activity that they generate. Composers can be commissioned by the ensembles they write for. Dancers can be paid by the companies they dance for. Playwrights can get royalties from the plays they write. The problem is not that artists can’t get money for their work, it’s that too many artists can’t get enough money from their work to make a living. Rather than circumvent the curatorial system that already exists and add another, very expensive layer on top, the NEA should work to subsidize the payments that are already made through the system—especially at the smaller organization level—and thereby support the curatorial activity that already takes place. There is one thing on which the individual fellowship advocates and I will agree: artists don’t receive nearly enough of the funding that goes to support the arts. According to Americans for the Arts’s research study Arts & Economic Prosperity III, artists themselves receive only 11% of total arts organizational expenditures—a figure far too low.

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