Dispatch from the Bay Area, Part I: Navigating the Velocity of Change

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 27th, 2011

(Note: over the years, I’ve gotten out of the habit of reporting live from the conferences I attend. Several factors contributed to this development, including the proliferation of other blogs in the arts management/policy space that cover the same events, the advent of Twitter and live streaming, my own life getting busier, and frankly because I feel like it’s not such an easy thing to make conference blogs “pop.” That said, for a variety of reasons, you’re going to see a lot of conference blogging on this site over the next few weeks! First up is the Grantmakers in the Arts conference, which I attended from October 8-12, followed by the one-day Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference this past week, and finally the Independent Sector Conference in Chicago October 30-November 1. In each of these cases, I have a specific reason for my dispatches, which I’ll share in their respective post.)

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In many ways I have Grantmakers in the Arts to thank for this blog reaching the people it does today. That’s because, in what can only be called a stroke of dumb luck, GIA Deputy Director Tommer Peterson invited me to be the organization’s first official conference blogger in 2009, which subsequently resulted in bringing Createquity to the attention of many funders who would not have otherwise discovered it. I did not hold any such honor this year, but I’ve decided to write up my thoughts anyway because I’ve since come to realize what an incredible privilege it is that I am allowed to represent Fractured Atlas at this annual gathering of funders that is otherwise closed to non-grantmakers, and I feel a sense of duty to share what I learn and observe with the rest of the field for whom such access is out of reach.

My first experience at this year’s GIA conference, subtitled “Navigating the Velocity of Change,” was the Art & Technology Preconference, which I believe (please correct me if I am wrong) is a first for GIA. Fittingly held in the heart of Silicon Valley at San Jose’s $382 million Richard Meier-designed City Hall, the preconference was the highlight of the trip for me. I was blown away by Joaquin Alvarado‘s wide-ranging opening keynote, which explored issues as diverse as the open-source ethos, participatory web projects (Popcorn, a tool to integrate text, video, and other media from anywhere on the web, and Universal Subtitles, a crowdsourcing platform for translation into foreign languages, were particularly attention-grabbing), and evolving trends in the demographics of tech-savviness. Alvarado is Senior Vice President for Digital Innovation at American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, and he shared the details of an intriguing model of knowledge-sharing for journalists he is working on called the Public Insight Network, as well as a “balance the budget” game his team created that has garnered some 6,000 comments from all sides of the political spectrum. Through his talk, I learned that the #1 generator of data on the planet is the United States government; that a $35 tablet computer has been released in India; that the free and open internet is fast becoming a thing of the past; that internet service providers have more unionized workers than anyone in technology; that the fastest growing segment of video gamers is women over the age of 60; that the library is where 20% of Americans get their broadband; and that there were more votes in American Idol last year than there were votes in all democratic societies combined. Whew! We also had a funny moment when we realized that no one in the room had played fantasy football, causing Alvarado to quip (referring to those in attendance), “This is not America!”

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Another standout session from the Technology Preconference was “Supporting the Ecology of Awesomeness,” led by Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences co-founder Tim Hwang. I’ve written here before about the Awesome Foundation, which is a kind of giving circle model for the 21st century sprung from the minds of irrepressible techies. Every Awesome Foundation chapter (of which there are now 29 around the world) is run by ten board members, who pool $100 each every month and award one grant to…well, pretty much anything that seems really cool. (The inaugural Awesome Foundation grant was for a giant hammock in a Boston park that could hold up to 20 people at a time.) Prospective grantees need only fill out a 10-minute online grant application, and the model is so lightweight that many chapters don’t even have bank accounts. (The 10-member limit is also interesting; Hwang moved from Boston to San Francisco and was only able to join the local Awesome Foundation board because there happened to be someone leaving the very month he moved.)

Hwang and his mates have created an infectious language around what they have created that is full of self-deprecating irony. Calling the concept “micro-funding for micro-geniuses,” Hwang noted the “Virtuous Cycle of Awesomeness” that takes place as a result of the funding opportunity receiving more attention. Each board member occupies a “Chair” that is named after the original board member to occupy that spot – so, someone could be the “3rd David Fisher Chair” of the Boston chapter, for example. When it came time to finally incorporate the Awesome Foundation as a centralized nonprofit, it wasn’t called the Awesome Foundation – it’s called the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies! They’re even planning on publishing a journal.

I love the Awesome Foundation’s low barriers to entry (it’s particularly impressive and important that they don’t arbitrarily restrict the pool of potential recipients by legal status or force them into categories that may or may not fit what they do), the lightweight and portable nature of the model, and most especially, the sense of pure fun that Awesome Foundation trustees bring to the practice of philanthropy. At the same time, the model has its downsides, and I hesitate to leap to too many conclusions regarding its applicability to the rest of our field. There’s an inherent lack of scalability within a particular locality, given the limit of ten trustees (and $12,000 total annual giving) per city. Tim mentioned that several chapters were exploring the possibility of starting another chapter in the same city, but there was no information provided on how, if at all, those chapters would coordinate to prevent duplicate applications, much less grants. Hwang and company believe that accountability is a barrier to innovation, but the absence of strong central coordination means that data collection is, understandably, haphazard, and sometimes the main organization doesn’t even know what all the other chapters are up to. Finally, although I personally love and relate to the word “awesome” and the language and ethos around it, I sometimes wonder if that’s because it resonates with certain aspects of my background – white, male, young, educated, tech-savvy – and whether it would feel a little or a lot exclusionary to people who don’t fit one or more of those descriptions. Hwang reports that the Awesome Foundation boards are gradually diversifying with the growth of the chapter network (the average age of the Florida chapter trustees apparently is far higher than that for the rest of the country), but it’s still kind of hard for me to imagine some of the attendees of the Art & Social Justice preconference being down with the Awesome Foundation. (I would love to be proven wrong on this, by the way.)

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My experience at the main GIA conference was more mixed. A number of the sessions I was most interested in were scheduled against each other, and I was sorry not to have been able to attend several that seemed to get quite a bit of buzz, including the announcement of the NEA/Knight Foundation’s first-ever Arts Journalism Awards, the unveiling of the Irvine Foundation’s new grantmaking strategy; and the release of Holly Sidford’s controversial report on equity in arts funding for the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy. Fortunately, those sessions were covered in depth by “official” GIA bloggers at the links above.

Three sessions I found particularly interesting were Manuel Pastor’s Monday keynote on changing demographics, an offsite session focusing on the evaluation of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, and a “video game salon” organized by Ron Ragin of the Hewlett Foundation and Marian Godfrey of the Pew Charitable Trusts. (Disclosure for those who don’t know: Ron has been my close colleague for the past several years in helping Fractured Atlas build Archipelago and the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map.)

Manuel Pastor is a remarkably engaging speaker. Clearly accustomed to the lecture format, he delivered a tour-de-force presentation on the changing demographics of California and the nation at large. Given the work I’ve been doing around California cultural geography for the past couple of years, many of his revelations (for example, that California is already a majority-minority state and that the US as a whole is headed there by 2042) were familiar to me, but even so I learned that the demographic picture is more complex than often painted. For example, people often think that the explosion in growth is primarily coming from Latino immigrants, and that used to be the case. But immigration is no longer what’s driving growth. Developing nation economies are doing better, and birth rates in those countries are going down. In the meantime, the percentage of foreign-born individuals in California is going down, and Los Angeles was the only metropolitan area in the top 100 to experience a decrease in the number of Hispanic children under the age of 18 in the past decade. Meanwhile, the share of recent immigrants to California that from Mexico was just 1 in 3, although many of the other top countries of origin were in Central America and the Caribbean. I also learned that many Hispanics insist on calling themselves their own race, even though the Census doesn’t classify them that way – in every Census since the question was first asked, approximately half of all Latinos have marked “Other” for race.

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Although I missed Holly Sidford’s session presenting her report on equity in grant funding, I did catch her and the Helicon Collaborative team at “Cultural Equity Grantmaking: How Far Have We Come? What’s Next?” The San Francisco Arts Commission, whose Cultural Equity Grants program was the subject of the titular study, has gone through some tough times recently and as a result the evaluation is apparently suspended from public release for the moment. But we got treated to a preview of the results, which let us know that (shocker alert!) a grant program amounting to $2 per citizen per year and representing only 4% of city funding for the arts has not succeeded in achieving cultural equity. But that’s not to say it hasn’t made a difference. Funded groups reported that the grants helped leverage other funding, enabled risk-taking projects, and deepened artistic relationships. Perhaps more significantly, fully a third of the city’s Grants for the Arts funding now goes to “culturally diverse” sources, although it’s hard to know how much of this increase was influenced by the existence of the Cultural Equity Grants program and how much was due to other factors.

The discussion following the presentation posed some important and intriguing questions. Although everyone seemed to be in agreement that organizations representing non-European cultures should get a bigger piece of the funding pie as a basic tenet of fairness, the picture of what that would actually look like in practice seemed less clear. Many of the largest investments in traditional SOB (symphony, opera, ballet)-type organizations have gone to bricks-and-mortar purposes like new buildings, expansions, renovations, etc., but several in the room commented that the building of massive institutions was not necessarily a priority for organizations that would be the beneficiaries of increased funding. Another interesting strand of conversation related to the question of whether having a separate, dedicated stream of funding for diverse programming, as in the case of San Francisco’s Cultural Equity Grants program, is helpful to the cause or only serves to justify the much larger investments made in the “regular” pool. Finally, as discussion continued regarding the needs of culturally-specific organizations, I kept hearing a lot of the same themes that I hear in discussion of the needs of small to medium-size organizations in general: more general operating support, capacity building, risk capital, etc. Recognizing that I still have more to learn from than to contribute to these conversations, I was nevertheless left wondering whether culturally-specific organizations are really so specific, once you get past the content of their programming and the composition of their audiences.

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“Don’t Get Pwnd! | A Video-gaming Salon for Grantmakers“ was a great way to round out the conference, bringing things full circle from Joaquin Alvarado’s revelations about gaming three days earlier. The session was presented by Jonathan Blow, an independent game developer, and Alice Myatt, director of the media arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts. Blow spoke first, telling of the trials and tribulations of the indie game market. Once again, I found it remarkable how a creative industry that is outside of what we typically think of as “the arts” can sound so familiar in conversation. According to Blow, creatively speaking, this is the best time in history to make a game. It’s easier than ever before to find an audience through independent distribution, and one no longer need rely on the giant game companies as a bottleneck. Yet there are challenges: intense competition for people’s time means that everything in the game matters, because your audience could lose interest at any moment. And game developer conferences are extraordinarily expensive, sometimes as much as $2,000 per person in addition to travel and lodging, shutting out those with less financial wherewithal. Ring any bells? For her part, Myatt spoke of the recent round of grant applications in which the NEA opened up the process to video game developers for the first time. Of 360 electronic media proposals, 20% were gaming-related.

The session was a veritable coronation for video games as an art form, Roger Ebert’s notorious assertion to the contrary notwithstanding. More than once, the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring video games a constitutionally-protected form of expression was mentioned, along with the fact that the same recognition was granted to film 60 years ago and literature before that. Blow noted that while everyone in America watches movies, it’s not cool to admit to playing video games – yet. But that’s bound to change soon, now that video games are now bigger business than music and film combined. Myatt opined that games need to be put into the public media pot in order to stabilize society, but complained that she rarely sees her colleagues at the video game conferences she attends (such as Games for Change). Funders outside the arts are on the case, though: next year’s Council on Foundations conference will actually have a gaming track – including a video arcade at the conference!

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And that was that. My overall takeaway? It’s hard to generalize from my experience this year, and I am always conscious of the fact that the intellectual diet that I feed on at the conference is shaped by my own tastes. But in general, there seemed to be a real thirst for innovation that was just a bit more urgent than in previous years. The sessions that drew the most positive attention were, by and large, the boldest: the ones that dared to seriously question the status quo or chart forward a path that hasn’t been tried before. It’s as if, having been buffeted by the winds of change for three years now, funders have been convinced of the futility of fighting back. Perhaps, next year, we’ll see some folks getting out the sailboards, ready to ride this gust wherever it takes them.

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Uncomfortable Thoughts: Is Shouting About Arts Funding Bad for the Arts?

By Margy Waller | Published: October 24th, 2011

(I’ve had the pleasure of working with Margy Waller for almost a year now helping her organization, ArtsWave, with its Measuring the Impact Initiative. Margy focuses on strategic communications and creative connections to promote broad support of the arts at ArtsWave and Topos Partnership. Previously she was Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, with a joint appointment in the Economic Studies and Metropolitan Policy programs. Prior to Brookings, she was Senior Advisor on domestic policy in the Clinton-Gore White House. This is the first entry in what I hope will become an occasional series of Uncomfortable Thoughts, exploring questions that no one really wants to ask about the arts, but that need to be asked all the same. I hope you enjoy it. – IDM)

This all started with a throwaway comment I made to Ian when I was dropping him off at the airport. Sharing an idea that you’ve been mulling over for awhile, but never said aloud and aren’t sure you’re ready to discuss, is best done when the sharee is dashing for a flight and won’t really engage. Or so I thought.

Ian said: 1) Now that’s worth discussing. 2) I’m not sure whether I agree with you. 3) Maybe you should write a blog post about it.

Ha.

So – now you know how I ended up here.

The Theory: Shhhhhhh 

Public Art Paris

Shhhhhhhh

Here’s the theory I pitched at Createquity that day: Advocates for the arts might be better off doing their work under the radar than trying so hard to get a lot of media and public attention when fighting for public funding of the arts. 

Createquity readers get regular updates on public funding of the arts. So we all know this was an especially rough year for many state arts councils.

But is this unique? Nope. We all have examples in our catalogue of “can-you-top-this” horror stories about arts advocacy experiences from over the years.

Like this.

When President Obama proposed including funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in the stimulus legislation, the media covered the topic in typical he-said-she-said style with headlines like “Stimulus funding for arts hits nerve: Some doubt it would create jobs.”

The arts are often used as a way to politicize and undermine bigger issues (like the stimulus bill), because the public tends to erupt with charges of elitism like this one:

“Why should the working class pay for the leisure of the elite when in fact one of the things the working class likes to do for leisure is go to professional wrestling? And if I suggested we should have federal funds for professional wrestling to lower the cost of the ticket, people would think I’m insane….” — Catholic League President Bill Donohue speaking of an exhibit at the Smithsonian in 2010.

Media coverage like this encourages a debate over the “facts.” Unfortunately, rebutting the doubts with our research findings means that arts supporters have to stay in our opponents’ frame.

They Aren’t Listening Anyway

A debate that lives within the position of a critic (like arts jobs aren’t really jobs or the arts should be supported by the rich) does little to shift the public landscape of a widely-shared belief, such as: the arts are a low priority for public funding.

Unfortunately, facts and research we’ve accumulated to prove the value of the arts as a public matter of concern, and then worked hard to get reporters to cover, are too often dismissed or ignored when seen through the lens of an idea that’s not new and about which people have already made up their minds.

Most people will simply ignore the rest of the story (where all our snappy facts live) once they’ve seen the headline. We all filter the barrage of information in today’s info-heavy world, paying little attention to all but those matters of deepest interest to us. A headline that presents an issue we’ve already decided for ourselves is likely to be read as: “Oh, that again. I know what I know about that. And I don’t need to know anymore.”

Worse Even: The Backfire Effect

But even worse is the possibility that a public debate makes things harder for arts advocates in the long run because, as Chris Mooney explains, “…head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect” where people react by defending their position and holding onto their views “more tenaciously than ever.”

In other words, when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers (PDF). Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

It’s true that in the end, Congress included some funding for the NEA in the stimulus bill. But it took a very heavy lift — well executed by Americans for the Arts — to set up hundreds of conversations between constituents with influence and members of Congress. It’s certainly sometimes possible to overcome bad press and the fear felt by elected officials that they might doom their own careers supporting an unpopular cause. But it’s seriously labor intensive and asks a lot of our supporters — not an ideal way to ensure success year after year. And it forced us to revive an old debate – possibly making things harder for arts supporters next time around.

An Alternative: Don’t Try to Change Minds, Change Perspective

One solution to this dilemma is to craft a new communications strategy —one built on a deeper understanding of the best ways to communicate with the public about the arts—that would increase a sense of shared responsibility and motivate public action in support of the arts. That’s what we’ve done at ArtsWave.

Instead of reviving an old debate, we sought a new way to start the conversation – based on something we can all be for, instead of something we’re defending against an attack. And importantly, we aren’t trying to change people’s minds, but present the arts in a way that changes perspective. Therefore, we held the message accountable to factors such as whether it prompts people to focus on certain aspects of the topic (such as broad benefits) rather than others (such as personal tastes); whether a message is coherent and memorable; whether it promotes the idea of public/collective action; and so on.

After a year of investigation and interviews with hundreds of people in the our region and surrounding states, this research—conducted by the Topos Partnership for ArtsWave (happy disclosure, the writer is affiliated with both) —found that public responsibility for the arts is undermined by deeply entrenched perceptions. Members of the public typically have positive feelings toward the arts, some quite strong. But how they think about the arts is shaped by a number of common default patterns that ultimately obscure a sense of shared responsibility in this area.

For example, it is natural and common for people who are not insiders to think of the arts in terms of entertainment.  In fact, it’s how we want people to think when we are selling tickets or memberships. But, in this view, entertainment is a “luxury,” and the “market” will determine which arts offerings survive, based on people’s tastes as consumers of entertainment. Consequently, public support for the arts makes little sense, particularly when public funds are scarce.

Perceptions like these lead to conclusions that government funding, for instance, is frivolous or inappropriate. Even charitable giving can be undermined by these default perceptions. People who target arts funding, as they did in the stimulus bill, know that these dominant ways of thinking about the arts will work in their favor. Our investigation identified a different approach, one that moves people to a new, more resonant way of thinking about the arts.

What is it? The arts create ripple effects of benefits, such as vibrant, thriving neighborhoods where we all want to live and work.  This is not only compelling, but it also sets an expectation of public responsibility for the arts.

However, even though most people agree with this view already (so we don’t have to change their minds), we know that it will take time, repetition, and many partners across the nation to bring this way of thinking to the forefront of people’s minds.

Stay Off the “Front Page”

So — back to my theory about arts advocacy – until we effect that change, the better strategy, when possible, may be to keep stories about public funding for the arts off the front pages and out of the media.

To some this may seem counter-intuitive. Or at least uncomfortable. If we care about the arts, shouldn’t we be shouting about it? Getting people to pay attention to our facts and our data.

Well – it depends. Is our advocacy goal a widely seen news piece outlining all sides of the issue? Or, do we want a successful budget outcome?

I think it’s the latter. And when it can be achieved with a quiet effort, making sure to begin modeling this new way of thinking about the arts in our meetings with decision-makers, that is preferable to another big public debate. Because the big fight in the default way of viewing the arts is very losable. And in our efforts, we’re forced to expand a precious resource: the time and energy of staff and key supporters who have to work so hard to convince public officials that they won’t suffer consequences in the next election.

Moreover, every time the fight is public, we’re likely to be reinforcing the dominant ways of thinking about the arts that are getting in our way now. When attacked, we rebut with facts, and the media covers the issue as a political fight with two equal sides – both seen through a lens that sets up the arts as a low priority on the public agenda. And as we know, this can have the effect of making people defensive and hardening existing positions. Of course, it should be no surprise that even officials who are friendly to arts funding are reluctant to be in the middle of that kind of coverage.

The Ohio Success Story

This past year, I watched closely as our state arts advocates at Ohio Citizens for the Arts carefully managed what seemed to be a stealth campaign to retain funding for arts and culture through the Ohio Arts Council. Despite an initial proposed cut by the newly elected Governor, the final outcome was an increase in funding over $4 million more than the previous budget.  Each step of the process brought an increase in the proposed funding level — the House vote, the Senate vote, and the reconciled proposal sent to the Governor, resulting in $6.6 million more than the proposed executive budget. And it went forward without fanfare or comment when signed into law.

Compare this scenario with the nightmare that was Kansas.  Of course, the Governor started a fight there — and there’s some evidence that this battle to the death did bring out supporters. But it clearly brought out opponents too.

As a little test, I tried two Google searches: One for blogs mentioning ‘“Ohio Arts Council” budget’ and the other for ‘“Kansas Arts Commission” budget’. In both cases, I limited findings to the first six months in 2011. The Kansas search revealed over 1000 posts, compared to only 42 in Ohio. An even greater disparity than I had imagined.

It appears that the Ohio advocates strategically sought to keep the campaign under the radar. And it worked.

To be sure, I called Donna Collins – the executive director of the Ohio arts advocacy organization. And she confirmed my theory.

“We didn’t want to be in the headlines,” she said. “We didn’t want to see masses of people on the statehouse lawn with signs about funding the arts. We wanted people on message, talking with their own elected officials at home, as well as in Columbus.  Our advocates, from the smallest rural community to the large urban centers, all had compelling stories about the positive impact of the arts.”

Collins credits long-term investment in relationship building with state decision-makers and encouraging a consistent message: the value citizens place on the way arts make places great. She organized a meeting about this message for partners on the morning of a well-attended statewide Arts Advocacy Day in the capitol. There was no big public fight, no need to defend a position in the media, no risk of the opposition hardening in place – and therefore little reason for politicians to fear supporting the increase in funding for the arts.

So…this is a theory, and one deserving of more study. But until we have a new landscape of public understanding, it seems a theory worth testing again.

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Cool jobs of the month

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 19th, 2011

Program Officer, Kresge Foundation

The Kresge Foundation’s Arts and Culture program has an immediate opening for a program officer to assist in the design and implementation of the program’s national efforts to elevate the effective use of arts and culture in transforming and revitalizing communities. The program will focus on the themes of strengthening creative place-making, promoting arts as a vehicle of civic identity and engagement, and advancing sound capitalization principles within the arts and culture field. In addition to making grants, convening, commissioning and disseminating research, and participating in national networks, the program will also pursue opportunities to apply our social investment practice to these themes.

The Program Officer will join Kresge at an exciting time, becoming a member of a team with a new program strategy. Although the program’s broad themes and funding priorities are in place, there is considerable room for a talented individual to bring his or her informed strategic perspective to the program by developing new areas of emphasis, expanding our use of non-grant, social investment activities, deepening Kresge’s expertise within a particular niche, or otherwise strengthening the work.

The program aspires to position the Kresge Foundation as a recognized leader within arts and culture philanthropy by partnering effectively with other foundations and with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, and by deploying our capital in innovative ways for the benefit of nonprofit organizations and the people they serve. We seek to hire an individual who will help our Arts & Culture team achieve that vision.

Deadline: November 7, 2011.

Associate Director of Program Strategies, Living Cities

The Program Strategies Cluster is responsible for the development and implementation of Living Cities’ substantive work. This work falls primarily into two categories: Research & Development, focused on advancing nationally significant innovation in areas including Education, Green Economy, Income & Assets, and Transit-Oriented Development; and The Integration Initiative, which provides $80 million in grants, below-market-rate debt, and commercial debt to five regions to help them tackle persistent barriers to opportunity for low-income residents, including education, housing, health care, transit and jobs.

Working under the leadership of the Director of Program Strategies and with an outstanding team of Program Associates and consultants, the Associate Director plays a pivotal role in driving Cluster operations while ensuring that Cluster activities are carried out in a manner consistent with Living Cities’ mission, strategic framework and organizational values.

No deadline provided.

Assistant Manager, Capacity Building, DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

The Assistant Manager, Capacity Building, will support all capacity building programs within the DeVos Institute of Arts Management. The Institute is dedicated to train, support, and empower arts managers locally, nationally, and internationally. This is a full-time position reporting to the Manager of the DeVos Institute. This position will also interact with the Director of the Institute, the Office of the President, and Kennedy Center senior staff.

Coordinate all aspects of producing capacity building seminars (logistics, development of internal and external materials, communication with participants and instructors) for the following programs (and future programs): Capacity Building Detroit; Capacity Building Grand Rapids; Capacity Building Miami; Capacity Building Orlando; Capacity Building Midwest; Capacity Building D.C. (Local); Capacity Building NYC; Capacity Building Culturally Specific; Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ); Ford Foundation Next Generation Arts Spaces I & II.

No deadline provided.

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Around the horn: grantmakers edition

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 18th, 2011

Back recently from the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in San Francisco. More on that soon! In the meantime:

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – FEDERAL

  • Republican House members are back on the warpath to eliminating public broadcasting money (along with other government programs).
  • The first 1:36 of this interview with Grammy-winning jazz musician Esperanza Spalding has the makings of a great arts advocacy video.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – STATE AND LOCAL

  • Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Ryback doesn’t understand why artists don’t have his back when people make fun of public art that his administration has commissioned. The link also contains the complete video of the recent creative placemaking panel featuring Rocco Landesman, which was the context of the comments.

ARTS POLICY AROUND THE WORLD

  • NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, aka the most influential person in the arts you’ve (probably) never heard of, submits four highly entertaining and thought-provoking reports from the 5th Annual World Summit on Arts and Culture in Melbourne, where he and Rocco Landesman were representing the United States. Check them out: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4.
  • During the World Summit, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies released the WorldCP International Database of Cultural Policies, based on the fantastic European version here. Good ol’ US of A isn’t represented yet, but I trust it’s in the works.
  • Sad: BBC to cut 2000 jobs by 2017.
  • Ugh: it sounds like Arts Council England’s new austerity-induced performance measurement system for its grantees is kind of a mess.
  • The former Irish Minister for Arts, Culture, and the Gaeltect is now running for President of Ireland. He is making “a creative society” a centerpiece of his campaign. Is he the first serious candidate for national office in modern times to do so?
  • A new report from the British think tank DEMOS finds that creative industries in the UK present no special investment risk to banks as compared with the rest of the economy.
  • Chinese censors have abruptly canceled the premiere of a new opera by American composer Huang Ruo over complaints that the music was not sufficiently glorifying of its subject, China’s first president.
  • Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for this discovery: the Singapore Complaints Choir. (Apparently a Fringe Festival production!)

PHILANTHROPY

  • California has brought two new corporate forms into being: the benefit corporation and the flexible purpose corporation. Here is more on both from the Nonprofit Law Blog, and more on the flexible purpose corporation from CharityLawyer.
  • The Acumen Fund has been working on a list of “lessons learned” from its work in global poverty in celebration of its tenth anniversary. See them all in this slick but hard-to-navigate web feature, or read them one by one at the blog.
  • PhilanTopic interviews Orlando Bagwell, director of the Ford Foundation’s new JustFilms initiative, which will distribute $50 million over five years to fund social issue documentaries.
  • Here’s a data point I bet we wouldn’t have seen five years ago:

     

RESEARCH CORNER

  • The Urban Institute and LINC have released a new white paper on artist spaces and community development.
  • The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s Tom Kaiden writes up GPCA’s new Portfolio research report for the Foundation Center’s PhilanTopic blog. Portfolio is one of the best examples of Cultural-Data-Project-derived research out there, not just because it looks beautiful (though it does), but because it actually starts to tap into some of the targeted analysis made possible by that rich data resource.
  • Researcher Elizabeth Currid-Halkett challenges the wisdom behind recent national initiatives such as Our Town and ArtPlace, arguing that policy interventions can’t always be relied upon to spur economic development. The op-ed has its flaws (she doesn’t seem to realize that ArtPlace is separate from the NEA), but the underlying point–about the complexity of the ways in which the arts and economies interact–is worth consideration.
  • Yes, journals sometimes retract research, and the trend is on the rise.
  • Fun to see my peeps from the Yale School of Management getting into economic impact studies for the arts.

IN THE FIELD (AH, ORCHESTRAS EDITION)

  • The Philadelphia Orchestra musicians are taking a 15% pay cut under their new contract.
  • More on the Brooklyn Philharmonic‘s new artistic direction, from New York Times critic Steve Smith.
  • Lee Streby has a new entry in his Project MAD (Musical Arts Development) series outlining a forward-looking business and programming model for orchestras. And Paul R. Judy laments on the NEC blog how little real-life orchestras have changed in recent decades.

BIG IDEAS

  • I love how Barry Hessenius just tucks these stealth ideas into his posts sometimes. Here’s one of recent vintage:

    It occurred to me that an interesting pilot project would be for the arts in a given area to open an Apple like store for the two months before the Christmas shopping season – with simple, clean lines in the design, with high tech monitors on tables, and a cadre of Arts Sales People available to answer questions and move the shopper through the experience of looking at all the available performing and visual arts options in the local area — videos of the best of the operas, symphonies, museums, dance companies, theater offerings, and the other arts – and the shopper could instantly buy tickets to a single performance or season tickets  or memberships in museums etc. for themselves or as holiday gifts for others.  There would also be offerings of local classes in various arts disciplines for all ages and , opportunities to join boards of directors or otherwise volunteer at local arts organizations.  If you packaged it right you might be able to recreate some of the same kind of excitement an Apple store generates.  Bottom line:  we have wonderful products, and perfect gifts alternatives to the same old boring stuff people give to each other every year.

  • Franz Nicolay reports firsthand on the life of the middle-class musician:

    Most music fans, and most musicians, only have two models with which to think about a life in music: the Starving Artist or the Rock Star. The starving artist has moral authority and credibility, and the rock star is rich as hell and has total independence. Most Starving Artists imagine, in their heart of hearts, that they’ll eventually be Rock Stars.But most musicians who spend their life in music fall somewhere in between – the Middle-Class Musician. Somewhere in between blue-collar and white-collar; making enough to live on – let’s say $20k-$60k – and caught somewhere along the margins as far as things like health insurance, mortgages, and car payments.And it’s on the head of the Middle-Class Musician that most judgments about morals and ethics in the music world fall, about licensing songs for commercials, about which other bands to tour with, about signing with particular labels (major v. indie v. major indie) – and independent fundraising. A lot of arguments against things like commercial licensing are the ethics of the Starving Artist, which the Rock Star has the comfort and flexibility to ignore or indulge them.

  • Composer Kevin Clark riffs on my post about usability testing and arts organizations, asking what it would take to apply the idea to the art itself.
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An Ecosystem-Based Approach to Arts Research

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 17th, 2011

(Cross-posted from the Fractured Atlas blog. Part of an occasional series on Fractured Atlas’s research philosophy and practices. For more articles, click here.)

As those of you who have been following Fractured Atlas closely may know, we’ve been working on some innovative technological solutions for aggregating and analyzing data about the cultural sector for the past couple of years. This effort is taking myriad forms at the moment, but probably the most comprehensive manifestation is our cultural asset mapping software, Archipelago.

As originally designed for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in connection with the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map (BACAM), Archipelago seeks to shed light on the following questions about the cultural sector:

  • Who’s making art?
  • Who’s engaging with it?
  • Where is it happening?
  • How is it made possible?

This post will focus on how we’ve gone about addressing the first of these questions.

*

From the beginning, we’ve taken what we call an “ecosystem approach” to the question of identifying actors in the arts universe and the relationships between them. I’ve been thinking about arts ecosystems for a number of years now, ever since I sketched out my first interpretation of one while on the beach in the summer of 2008. Many renditions that I’ve seen since have featured in one fashion or another some key players: nonprofit arts organizations, funders, government, for-profits, artists, and audience members.

Those elements are clearly important, but the reality is that the arts ecosystem is far more complicated. It includes social service agencies, churches, and others that might provide arts programs. It includes not just for-profit firms that present arts programming directly, but also the companies that manufacture shoes for the ballet dancers, sell the strings for the guitars, and design the postcards for the show. It encompasses a huge range of patron roles from major donors and Board members, to passersby taking in a work of public art or ambient sound installation, to people who experience the arts only in their own homes. Arguably, it even includes Google, Facebook, Staples, and the IRS – entities with which almost every arts organization interacts, even if those entities are not arts-specific at all.

How do we make sense of such a vast collection of interrelated forces? The short answer is that we can’t – at least not yet with total accuracy and comprehensiveness. But with more and more types of data becoming available all the time, not just in the cultural sector but in every aspect of life, we can at least get a start. Archipelago represents an effort to draw as much of the ecosystem as possible together in one place so that it can be picked apart, analyzed, and put together again in all of its kaleidoscopic complexity.

One of the classes of data we collect is everybody’s favorite, nonprofit arts organizations. Organizations are, in many ways, at the center of the data model created by Archipelago. They carry with them information about their location, finances, and programming, publicly available through the IRS or for research purposes through the Cultural Data Project. They are connected with cultural facilities such as those available for rental through NYC Performing Arts Spaces or any of our other spaces databases around the country. They are the recipients, and sometimes the givers, of grants to support the arts. They have relationships with audience members, artists, and other organizations.

Naturally, one of the first questions that arose during development was “what counts as an arts organization?” Organization data from the IRS comes with a set of codes to identify what an organization does. Using a system called NTEE (short for the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities), the codes are designed to provide a detailed level of information about organizational activities. The easy thing to do, of course, would be to use the NTEE classifications provided with the IRS data to define which organizations count as arts-related – and indeed, this appears to be the default approach for most professional research conducted in the sector. However, we soon realized that doing so would miss a lot of organizations that perhaps aren’t primarily arts organizations, but are still relevant to the arts ecosystem – such as universities, radio stations, foundations, even churches. (A recent report from the Irvine Foundation noted that, remarkably, more than a quarter of the organizations listed in the California Cultural Data Project were not represented among a broader list of nonprofits with arts-related NTEE codes.)

We call organizations that touch the arts without primarily focusing on them “arts-relevant” to distinguish them from straight-up arts organizations. Through conversations with administrators and local arts council heads, we’ve heard a number of times that arts-relevant organizations play an indispensable role in local creative communities, particularly in more rural areas. An inspection of arts grants given out by the funders in our database reveals the same thing: social service agencies, community centers, environmental organizations and the like abound.

Since we knew we wouldn’t really be able to answer the question “who’s making art?” if we didn’t include these arts-relevant organizations, it seemed important to work with as robust a data set as possible. Not only that, but we wanted Archipelago to be capable of adjusting how it responds depending on the nature of your query: did you want to know about just the organizations that we would consider “arts organizations,” or did you want to know about all of the organizations that touch the arts community, regardless of their primary focus?

Uncheck the "only show arts organizations" box to include arts-relevant organizations.

To do this, we developed a set of algorithms and strategies to identify a large set of potential arts and arts-relevant organizations from the IRS data. Cross-checking each organization’s listing against its website, Form 990 information, calendar listings, and any other information we could find, we assigned our own categorizations to each organization, employing a three-level classification system as follows:

  1. Is it primarily an arts organization?
  2. In which discipline(s) does the organization have any relevance?
  3. With which discipline(s), if any, does the organization primarily identify?

After considering several classification systems, we elected to go with a very simple set of six disciplines: dance, film/video/media, literary arts, music, theater, and visual arts. This was a purposefully practical schema: these categorizations (or their equivalents) appear with remarkable consistency in actual field resources, such as our own Spaces database, Chicago Artist Resource and its offshoots, and many arts council and service organization websites.

These six disciplines became the measuring stick for determining whether an organization whose focus was not primarily the arts belonged in our database. If an organization, no matter what it was, had some meaningful intersection with the world of music or film or any of the others, then by definition it deserved to be included. If an organization was interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary in nature, rather than assign it a vague “multidisciplinary” category, we simply marked each discipline in which it was relevant.

Take the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, for example. I’m sure it’s hardly the first organization that comes to mind when you think of the arts community. And yet they are not only in the database, but they are in there marked with all six disciplines.

Boys & Girls Club #2

And why is that? It’s because they offer programming in each of those six disciplines. Check out their website, and you can see that, in fact, nearly a third of the activities they offer through their club network are arts-related!

Boys & Girls Club #1

While this approach was labor-intensive compared to just lifting the list directly from the IRS, it has afforded Archipelago tremendous analytical flexibility. If we want to perform statistical analysis just on arts organizations without having our numbers skewed by schools and YMCAs, we can limit our set just to primary arts organizations. But if we want to see the entire nonprofit dance ecosystem plotted out on a map, we won’t have limited ourselves to the usual suspects. It’s a whole new way of conceptualizing who belongs in the conversation about the arts, and it takes us one step closer to representing the full arts ecosystem in all of its diverse glory.

dance-ecosystem

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NAMP Blog Salon posts

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 12th, 2011

Last week, I participated in the National Arts Marketing Project Blog Salon over at Americans for the Arts. My two entries focused on applying research and feedback-gathering principles to a marketing context. Not the typical Createquity fare, but if you find such things of interest, here’s some more information below.

Is Your Arts Programming Usable? considers the concept of usability testing taken outside of its usual tech- or product-specific milieu. Here’s an excerpt:

At Fractured Atlas, we’re in the process of rolling out a few new technology products that have been in the pipeline for the past year or so. One of these is Artful.ly, which is the hosted version of the ATHENA open-source ticketing and CRM platform that was released earlier this year. Another is a calendar and rental engine add-on to our performing arts space databases in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area that will allow visitors to the site to reserve and pay for space directly online.

For both of these resources, we felt it was important to get feedback from actual users before proceeding with a full launch. So we engaged in a round of what’s called usability testing. Usability testing differs from focus groups in that it involves the observation of participants as they actually use the product. So, rather than have people sit around a room and talk about (for example) how they might react to a new feature or what challenges they face in their daily work, you have people sitting in front of a computer and trying to navigate a website’s capabilities while staff members look over their shoulders and take notes.

Whither the Time Machine? Considering the Counterfactual in Arts Marketing explains why deducing what would have happened if things had gone differently is the central problem of arts research, and offers a couple of examples of how arts marketing can take advantage of control groups.

In a marketing-specific context, counterfactual scenarios come into play when considering alternative strategies aimed at driving sales or conversions. One technique that a number of organizations have used is called A/B testing, which is when two different versions of, say, a newsletter or a website get sent to random segments of your target audience.

Internet technology makes A/B testing relatively painless to execute: in the case of a newsletter, for example, all it requires is a random sorting algorithm in Excel to divide the list in two before sending the slightly different newsletter versions to the lists as you normally would. You could test which design results in more clickthroughs to a specific link or which subject line results in a higher open rate.

By creating an A group and a B group, you are finding a way to test the counterfactual without the use of a time machine to go back and try things a different way. Assuming the groups truly are random and the sample size isn’t tiny, it’s a really great way of getting reliable information on what you’re doing.

A/B testing is not the only way of pursuing this kind of inquiry, however. Sometimes it’s not that easy to simply divide your target audience into two.

Enjoy!

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Around the horn: Occupy Wall Street edition

By Ian David Moss | Published: October 3rd, 2011

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – DOMESTIC

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

  • Is this the first example of a political party devoted to intellectual property issues? Germany’s Pirate Party is “built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency,” and is loosely linked to the Pirate Bay torrent-sharing platform. It also just won 15 seats in Berlin’s regional government, qualifying it for federal funding.

AH, ORCHESTRAS

  • Although the Detroit Symphony is back to playing concerts after a six-month strike last year, it is still far from out of the woods financially.
  • Trouble in symphony-land: the Colorado Orchestra has seen 20 of its board members resign after a dispute with the musicians’ union. I have to say, up until quite recently I have felt a limited degree of sympathy for the union and its members who are employed by the larger-market orchestras – a feeling informed to a large degree, I suppose, by my experiences as a (nonunion) composer in the previous decade. But this story is pretty ridiculous. The Denver musicians just accepted a 9% pay cut – after accepting a 24% pay cut just two years ago. If I understand the article correctly, their base salaries are now down to $37,310 a year – barely half of what their colleagues in Indianapolis are paid. And two-thirds of the board resigned because the musicians union took a few extra days to think about the cuts instead of swallowing them immediately. There is actually a board member quoted in the article saying that those who resigned were “sick and tired of the musicians’ complaining.” Are you kidding me?

GIVING TO THE ARTS (PRIZES EDITION)

  • This year’s MacArthur “Genius” Fellows have been announced.
  • The Grand Rapids ArtPrize, which was deemed a great success in its debut last year, has expanded to include music.

RESEARCH CORNER

  • The Irvine Foundation has released a new report on California’s arts and culture ecology.
  • I sometimes think of the Arts Policy Library and some of the other work I do on this blog as “research journalism.” If you want to see investigative research journalism at its finest, check out this amazing takedown of a Gates Foundation-funded report that, due to five separate spreadsheet errors, overestimated the cost-effectiveness of a deworming treatment by a factor of almost 100. Note that these aren’t methodological issues, but typos and calculation errors. After some initial hiccups, GiveWell (who published the second look) has really grown into its own as an organization at this point, and the ethic of transparency and intellectual honesty that they’ve embraced is really paying off for them. Congrats.

IN THE FIELD

ETC.

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The new Brooklyn Philharmonic: A “Site-Specific” Orchestra?

By Katherine Gressel | Published: September 28th, 2011

The term “site-specific” is ubiquitous in contemporary visual art organizations. For art historian Miwon Kwon, the term encompasses projects that are linked not only to a physical location (like a sculpture installation designed for a particular gallery), but to a specific community and its cultural traditions and values.

Can we also apply the term “site-specific” to the work of a classical music organization that ventures out of the concert hall and into the “community”? The once critically acclaimed but recently cash-strapped Brooklyn Philharmonic is doing just that, after two years of hiatus, in a bold new program under new musical director Alan Pierson. Pierson is “shaping the orchestra’s season almost entirely around Brooklyn composers and Brooklyn communities,” with concerts in Brighton Beach (featuring music from Russian cartoons), Bedford Stuyvesant (featuring rapper Mos Def and a tribute to Lena Horne), and downtown Brooklyn (featuring Sufjan Stevens, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus), as well as a Beethoven remix contest. Each performance will also feature one “traditional” classical offering: a movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony.

This wholesale reinvention has come in for some praise. Yet what does “going site-specific” mean for the future of an orchestra—and for the communities it aims to engage and represent?

A common critique of site-specific community art is that artists and arts administrators, seeking to collaborate with communities in which they are considered outsiders, may treat these communities as fixed and homogenous.  In a New York Magazine interview, Pierson, who does not live in Brooklyn, describes how “going from one neighborhood to another is like traveling to a different world.”  Pierson’s extensive groundwork partnering with community groups to co-design the new programming is commendable.  Yet Brooklyn neighborhoods’ geographic, as well as socioeconomic and ethnic boundaries, are changing, and one neighborhood may encompass people of many different backgrounds and artistic tastes. Are these neighborhood-specific performances opening doors for cross-cultural appreciation and collaboration? Or is it dangerous to build a season around the premise that everyone in Brighton Beach will relate to Russian cartoons, or everyone in Bed Stuy enjoys rap music? And will ticket sales from these new programs, which are being offered free or at low cost, be enough to dig the orchestra out of its financial ditch?

I am curious to know whether there are other orchestras shaping their programming around specific communities to this extent—and how successful they have been selling tickets and reaching new audiences.  I am also reminded of another local institution’s struggle to re-package itself as uniquely “Brooklyn.” In 2010, the New York Times revealed that the Brooklyn Museum’s attempts at “populism” over six years—including expanding community programs, shaping exhibits around local and pop culture themes, and experimenting with open-call art competitions to generate exhibition content–haven’t boosted the Brooklyn Museum’s overall attendance, or necessarily made new people care more about fine art.  (One ex-trustee is quoted as saying, “Although I think First Saturdays are a very effective community outreach, I question whether people come to them to see art, or to enjoy music and drinks.”)

Will the Brooklyn Phil’s mixed programming actually instill an expanded appreciation for classical music—and is this the orchestra’s goal? Or, is the Philharmonic in fact departing permanently from its classical roots in favor of musical genres that are more popular, or hybrid? And will it, in turn, lose its (albeit small) base of Brooklyn classical music aficionados?

Another common critique of site-specific, community-based art is that “artistic” merit and vision may be compromised in favor of community and audience-building goals.  The Brooklyn Museum article describes wavering support among trustees and art critics after exhibits on hip hop and Star Wars threatened to undermine the institution’s artistic reputation. In a Brooklyn Rail interview, Pierson states:

Part of what I’m trying to do is make community concerts first-tier, and—not pops concerts—have them approaching the level of integrity and artistic seriousness that most orchestras reserve for their subscription season.

Critics seem to agree that if anyone is up for the challenge of elevating “populist” music events, it is Pierson, with his solid musical record directing acclaimed experimental contemporary musical ensemble Alarm Will Sound.  Pierson’s interview also mentions the strong backing of his board members.

If the overall outlook for the Brooklyn Philharmonic seems hopeful, it’s likely because the “site” for these performances, is, after all, Brooklyn, which in this day and age is practically synonymous with cutting-edge culture.

Indeed, the Brooklyn Philharmonic website’s home page, which features a close-up portrait of a stylishly-bespectacled Pierson in front of a row of iconic brownstones, might be pulled directly from a Brooklyn Industries catalog. Perhaps if Brooklyn can “sell” classical music the same way it can sell condos and clothing, the Brooklyn Philharmonic could really prosper. Hopefully, with Pierson’s musical credibility and sensibility at the helm, it will also retain a genuine artistic vision.

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Consulting giant KPMG doesn’t think much of the arts

By Ian David Moss | Published: September 26th, 2011

As in many places around the world, particularly developed nations fighting recession, the arts in Canada’s largest city are feeling the pinch. While the details are being sorted out, the latest news from Toronto is that city-run venues may see their funding cut sharply, with grants to arts organizations increased (just about the opposite approach, interestingly enough, from the one that the Netherlands has taken). Shannon Litzenberger has more on the situation, but what I found most interesting about her report was the tidbit that global consulting giant KPMG had recommended eliminating the Toronto Arts Council this summer in a report to the city on how to save money.

The third-party consulting firm was hired by Mayor Ford at a cost of $3M to review services and recommend budget reductions. Those who have scanned the report have reasonable cause for alarm as KPMG systematically explores cutting pretty well anything that isn’t deemed mandatory or essential and therefore within the power of the city to cut. The report then rates each item in terms of its savings potential, risk and possible barriers. Seven service areas were reviewed including Infrastructure and Public Works, Economic Development and Culture, Parks and Environment, Community Development and Recreation, Licensing and Standards, Governance and Management, Planning and Growth Management and Executive Committee.

Service areas were measured against a handpicked control group of cities and other governments to determine whether Toronto services were being delivered below, at or above standard. Any service that was deemed to be “above standard” as compared to the control group was marked as “opportunity for savings”. Suggestions included things like reducing recycling targets, eliminating water fluoridation, further privatizing garbage collection and “reducing the number of subsidized child care spaces over time to eliminate 100%”. KPMG also proposed eliminating the Community Partnership and Investment Program (CPIP), which contains the budget for the Toronto Arts Council, as well as other cultural and social services with a total budget of $47.4M.

The report for the Economic Development and Culture Committee is available here (see pages 11-13 for the discussion on Cultural Services), with some additional background at this link. A few reactions, if you’ll permit me:

  1. WTF?!
  2. Although I’m sure it’s not the first time it’s happened, this is the first time I’ve heard of pressure on arts budgets (to say nothing of elimination talk!) coming from third-party professional consulting firms rather than originating from within government.
  3. While KPMG, to its credit, recognized that such cuts would “impact the cultural vitality of Toronto,” it’s disappointing to see that the firm did not see culture as part of the solution to the city’s economic circumstances. The fact that cultural services were situated within the economic development agency appeared to be lost on them. (Not that it would have made a difference; two pages earlier, the firm incomprehensibly recommended considering cuts to business services even though “these steps will impact the Toronto economy.”)
  4. The entire study appears to rest on a questionable assumption: that if a city provides services at a high level relative to other cities, that city should automatically consider reducing those services. What if that high level of services is an integral part of the city’s competitive advantage? Should Orlando cut back spending on airport infrastructure because Buffalo is spending less? Even so, in the case of the arts, the report noted that Toronto’s spending was less per capita than other cities – and yet recommended cutting them anyway.

I’m glad that we have infrastructure and programs in place as a field to educate policymakers about the importance of arts and culture in their communities. It seems that we may have some work to do on consulting firms as well.

[UPDATE: Russell Willis Taylor writes in with a couple of additional tidbits: first, that KMPG's advice here seems in tension with its corporate sponsorship strategy in DC; and second, that KPMG got hired to design a library grant funding program for the South African Department of Arts and Culture. Included in the latter report is a recommendation "that the revenue-generating ability of the responsible sphere of government, provincial in this case, is further developed...in the absence thereof public libraries, especially those in previously disadvantaged communities, cannot thrive without national government funding in the foreseeable future." You don't say?]

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Cool jobs of the month

By Ian David Moss | Published: September 24th, 2011

Two stellar entry-level opportunities this month:

Research Analyst, GiveWell

We’re looking primarily for Research Analysts – people who will provide support to the goal of finding the best giving opportunities. Research Analyst duties mostly consist of:

  • Reviewing independent research on the best ways to help people and on other issues relevant to giving
  • Reviewing particularly promising charities – including speaking with their representatives and asking critical questions, reviewing and evaluating documents they send, and writing up their answers to critical questions, strengths, and weaknesses
  • Taking part in discussions of which giving opportunities are most promising and of general GiveWell strategy
  • Miscellaneous duties depending on individual preferences, including networking, outreach, writing (e.g., for the blog), and original analysis on research questions
  • We encourage analysts to push their abilities to the limit and take on as much responsibility as they can. An analyst can grow into a major role at GiveWell.

No deadline.

Program Associate, Fractured Atlas

(Fractured Atlas is hiring yet again! Note that this is an entry-level job…note also that it pays in the 40s.)

Fractured Atlas is seeking a full-time Program Associate. This position will provide administrative support for all of our core programs and services and for the organization overall. It is an entry-level position and involves a great deal of front-line customer service. We have over 18,000 artists nationally in our membership who come to us daily for guidance, assistance and support.

The successful candidate will be incredibly personable, have a cheerful disposition and a sense of humor, and possess an incredible amount of patience, particularly as it relates to explaining the same information multiple times. Additionally, the candidate will be able to operate and respond in a rapid-fire environment while still remaining calm, clear and collected.

Deadline: October 7, 2011.

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