As the twenty or so regular readers of this blog will note, I debuted Createquity last October with a rather brash six-episode litany of “Thoughts on Effective Philanthropy” in the realm of the arts. I say brash because, at the time, I had no experience running a philanthropic program; all I had were my outsider impressions as a practicing artist and a seeker of grants on behalf of organizations with budgets ranging from a few thousand dollars to nearly $4 million per year. So I thought it would be telling to look back at those posts, nearly one year later, and see how my impressions may or may not have changed after a summer working for one of the more prominent arts funders in the country. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll address the essays in order in which I wrote them.

Thought I: The Nature of the Arts and Their Impact

Original Thesis: Measuring impact in the arts is totally different from measuring impact in other nonprofit areas, in part because the arts occupy a strange netherworld between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.

The arts, on the other hand, are a field primarily comprised of organizations that produce a product for consumption, much like for-profit companies. In fact, they are basically for-profit companies without the profit. Their value to society (and selling pitch to funders) presumably lies in their ability to bring products to market that would not have otherwise seen the light of day; otherwise, why fund them at all? However, this definition of value doesn’t match up so well with our traditional notions of social responsibility and moral imperative. Think about it this way: if a mission-driven nonprofit were to be wildly successful, so successful that it had entirely solved the problem it was created to address, it would have no choice but to shut down. For presenters, museums, galleries, ensembles, and the like, there is no such consideration: wild success is merely an invitation and an opportunity for more activity. And why shouldn’t it be? Arts organizations, much as they might like to believe otherwise, don’t really exist to solve some urgent problem in society. At some level, like for-profit companies, they are self-serving: they promote the art itself (the product) rather than who experiences the art (the customer).

Post-Internship Analysis: As part of the Performing Arts Program’s Year-in-Review process, we actually spent a good chunk of the summer thinking about the purpose of the arts and how to measure impact. Although I still think the basic insight quoted above is an important one, my dialectic greatly oversimplified the nature of the nonprofit sector. For example, there are many arts organizations whose primary mission is social rather than transactional in nature, though these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. And certainly there are whole classes of non-arts nonprofits that are not set up to achieve the kind of “total success” that would enable them to shut down (such as schools, hospitals, or community organizations). That said, the larger point seems clear: measuring impact in the arts is a challenge precisely because there isn’t a lot of agreement or clarity in the field about what it is, exactly, that the arts “should” be doing. Is it enough for them simply to exist? Does it matter if it’s “good art” or “bad art,” or if one can even tell the difference? And if they do provide ancillary benefits to society, as a growing body of research suggests, does highlighting those benefits diminish the so-called “intrinsic” value of arts experiences? These are extraordinarily challenging questions that a single internship could not hope to address. At the moment, the answers largely remain up to individual choice and preference among supporters of the arts, though we did try to answer them for the Hewlett Foundation.

Thought II: Philanthropy and Experimentation

Original Thesis: While evaluating impact is important, more is generally better when it comes to the arts. Therefore, a narrow focus on supporting only “successful” or “proven” organizations misses the point, because the true value of an arts scene lies in the interactions and network effects made possible by thriving clusters of arts organizations.

So if I’m an agency funding the arts, in some sense I’m not so incredibly concerned with the specific effectiveness of each individual organization I’m supporting. Of course you want your money to be used wisely, but it’s a good thing for the size of the art scene to be able to accommodate the full population of artists who want to work in your geographic area of interest; in other words, to grow according to the supply of artists, not audience demand. So it does not make sense, I would argue, only to fund the blue-chip institutions like the art museums, the symphony orchestras, and the major theater companies in hopes (for example) of lending international prominence and legitimacy to the community. Such a top-down approach potentially leaves out a much larger underground network of artists doing their best to scratch out a living with no institutional support, despite creating significant value for their local communities and economies.

Post-Internship Analysis: As it turns out, the notion that smaller, community-oriented arts organizations are undervalued or represent the future is a common theme in creative economy literature, expressed in various forms by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert at Social Impact of the Arts Project, Duncan Webb of Webb Management Services, Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class, and others. And the importance of experimentation and risk-taking in philanthropy writ large has been highlighted by Sean Stannard-Stockton, Lucy Bernholz, the Skoll Foundation, and plenty of other thought leaders in the field. So it’s heartening to know that my views on this are, if not exactly mainstream, at least echoed by actual professionals who are working in this space. With that said, there are still plenty of donors out there who just want to give to the symphony and the art museum, and that is their prerogative. What we really need is more research to understand the effect that multiple organizations in the same geographic area have on each other and the community, and how that varies systematically across different settings.

An analogy came to me this summer when I visited Yosemite National Park. While exploring one of the giant sequoia groves, I came across a placard explaining that until recently, workers would suppress fires in the park that they thought were endangering the sequoias. They changed the policy when they realized that the fires actually help the sequoias grow by improving conditions for young seedlings and reducing competition from other species. I’ve come to believe that arts policymakers tend to their communities’ art scenes much like park rangers, constantly learning the ways of the forest and implementing strategies to ensure a thriving and diverse environment for public enjoyment.

Thought III: (Dis-)Economies of Scale in the Arts

Original Thesis: Narrowing the argument from the previous essay, I contend that giving to large organizations specifically represents a suboptimal use of most foundations’ resources. Many large organizations have high administrative costs or bloated artist fees that are hard to justify, and are only driven higher by the perception that those organizations can raise money hand over fist. (This, of course, puts pressure on those organizations to deliver on those perceptions, increasing competition for fundraising personnel and raising administrative costs yet further.)

In contrast, small arts organizations are extraordinarily frugal with their resources, precisely because they have no resources to speak of. It’s frankly amazing to me what largely unheralded art galleries, musical ensembles, theater companies, dance troupes, and performance art collectives are able accomplish with essentially nothing but passion on their side. A $5,000 contribution that would barely get you into the sixth-highest donor category at Carnegie might radically transform the livelihood of an organization like this. Suddenly, they might be able to buy some time in the recording studio, or hire an accompanist for rehearsals, or redo that floor in the lobby, or even (gasp) PAY their artists! All of which previously had seemed inconceivable because of the poverty that these organizations grapple with. Foundations concerned with “impact” should remember that it’s far easier to have a measurable effect on an organization’s effectiveness when the amount of money provided is not dwarfed by the organization’s budget.

Post-Internship Analysis: This really comes down to thinking about overhead in terms of percentages versus absolute dollars. It makes sense if you buy that the impact of an arts organization is proportional to its budget. But is that true? Is a $10 million organization at least twice as important and successful as a $5 million organization? There seems to be an assumption among many in the field that (on average, at least) it is, but I’m not so sure. An orchestra is only going to employ so many musicians regardless of how big its budget gets. There are only 365 days in the year that a theater company can put on a show. Not to mention that the more money an organization raises, the more connections and relationships it builds in service of raising future money. People like to give to winners, after all. I may be biased by my belief in distributive efficiency, but it still seems to me that we’d be wise as a field to fight against this impulse, and look for those high-risk, high-reward, small-dollar investments that can make all the difference.

Thought IV: Funding Activity, Not Individuals

Original Thesis: Awards or European-style blanket subsidies for artists are problematic because they tend to increase stratification and reward artists more for being visible than for being good. Instead, foundations should look to build and sustain a marketplace in which the currency is artistic merit rather than the ability to draw a crowd.

Where foundations can add value instead is in setting up and supporting systems by which artistic activity is generated in their communities. How might this be accomplished? The first place I would look is what I would call nexuses for art. Where is art shown, produced, performed, bought, sold, consumed, marketed, supported? It’s not just the museums and the concert halls. It’s the dive bars, the galleries, the coffee shops, the off-off-Broadway theaters, the bookstores, the record stores, the radio stations, and the occasional entities that serve as all of these things and more. Finding a way to get money to these organizations is tricky because many of them are set up as for-profit entities. Yet, from the artists’ perspective, many of these tiny businesses fulfill just as important a function as the city’s performing arts center or marquee theater company, despite being labors of love for their proprietors that often operate completely outside of the support structures that exist to make art available to a wider public.

Post-Internship Analysis: I’ve softened my stance a bit on funding individuals, since there are some artists whose activity is not well served by any marketplace, but I still don’t see any reason to be giving out $50,000 grants to established artists. I continue to believe fervently in the second point of the essay, the need to focus on infrastructure in arts communities. Particularly, the connections between nonprofit arts organizations and the for-profit arts industries are not well understood in any sort of systematic way. This is a great opportunity for further research.

Thought V: Meeting the Artists Where They Are

Original Thesis: Arts funders should let artists do their work, and not get too involved with the subject matter or specific details of their creations.

A composer or a playwright is not like a graphic design shop or an IT consulting firm that will create something to a customer’s specifications, no questions asked. The whole point of supporting the arts, to my mind, is to encourage innovation, expectation-challenging, and all what goes along with leading a creative life. Laying out the path ahead of time with too-great specificity potentially squashes the very thing that makes the arts special….I’ve seen projects in the music world greenlighted for little reason other than the possibility of getting a grant for them. Were those always the best projects to undertake, either for the organizations/artists themselves or for the field as a whole (e.g., audiences)? For example, if the most talented artists are unwilling to create works to specification, does that mean that less talented artists receive those opportunities instead and ultimately become better-known to the public as a result? Or if a high-dollar-value grant also includes an educational workshop component, will the panel end up selecting a fine composer who is terrible in the classroom?

Post-Internship Analysis: Luckily for me, this issue just didn’t come up very much during my internship, thanks primarily to the Hewlett Foundation’s philosophy of funding most organizations with general operating support. In general, though, I continue to advocate thinking carefully about how upfront restrictions on grant opportunities can mess with the fundraising and (sometimes) programming strategies of arts organizations.

Thought VI: The Philanthropist as Speculator, Not Gatekeeper

Original Thesis: Grantmakers enjoy a special privilege and thus shoulder an exceptional responsibility to the field by virtue of their access to resources. This isn’t Monopoly money we’re playing with: these are real decisions that affect the lives of real people. As such, grantmakers should seek familiarity with the entire arts community, not just funded organizations.

With that in mind, I would be heartened to see a more proactive approach toward outreach and community presence from grantmaking organizations, particularly foundations. From my perspective as someone representing two small, newish performing ensembles in New York, it seemed like staff members of funding entities attended only events presented by current grantees, if they even attended those. A few, such as NYSCA, had formal “artistic audit” processes by which a potential applicant could request attendance by program staff at a particular performance, but this process had to be initiated by the applicant organization. I knew and still know of no funding organization that makes significant, formalized outreach efforts to more fully understand the arts community that it serves. By “outreach,” I specifically mean measures to amass institutional knowledge, intelligence if you will, about the widest possible range of players in the arena, including organizations that are neither current grantees nor current applicants. To my mind, that’s the only way an organization tasked with supporting an arts community can truly have its “ear to the ground,” so to speak.

Post-Internship Analysis: This was my polite way of saying that funders need to work hard and get out of the office once in a while. In theory, I absolutely stand by this, maybe more so than anything else I’ve written. All through the summer I keenly felt that sense of responsibility of which I speak above, fully aware of the weight my opinions and recommendations suddenly held. However, I found it harder to live up to my own standards in this regard than I anticipated. Even with my very limited portfolio of grant applicants (most of my time was spent on the cultural asset map initiative), it was a challenge to inform myself as much as I wanted. The main stumbling block is the sheer volume of information that must be tracked, prioritized, and deeply understood on a daily basis. Reading a grant application is only the beginning–there’s analysis to be done, facts to be checked, context to be gathered, conversations to be had, performances to attend, and summaries to write up. Multiply that by a few hundred organizations, and you’ve got yourself a pretty decent chunk of work even without considering nonapplicants. This is not to say that a more proactive approach of the kind I envisioned isn’t possible, but it does beg the question of what information is most important and how to gather it efficiently. I wonder if we could learn anything from our equity analyst friends about this.

(Enjoyed this post? We’re raising funds through July 10 to make the next generation of Createquity possible. We are more than halfway there thanks to the generous support of our readers, but need your help to cross the finish line. Please consider a tax-deductible donation today!)

A family in New York that has long been involved with the arts wishes to establish a foundation that will provide funding for visual arts, music, theater, and dance. Although they have a particular interest in the support of New York institutions, they are also consider a foundation program that funds the arts nationally. The donor’s family will hold many, but not all of the seats on the board, and together they will donate approximately $400 million to the foundation in the first year and then add another $400 million over the next five years.

This week, in a series of posts, I’ll go through some of the decisions that my partners, Shiri Friedman, Daniel Reid, Michael Shay, and Michelle Zhao, and I made in approaching this project. It was a fun experience that, among other things, resulted in my learning what “terpsichorean” means. I welcome comments and reactions.

Generally speaking, we wanted our foundation to be as creative as the work that it was supporting, and it was very important to us to find the gaps in the current infrastructure so as to make our work more effective. We thus conducted extensive review of peer institutions, the results of which I’ll discuss in more detail tomorrow. We were also anxious to experiment with integrating some aspects of “new philanthropy” models like those of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation or New Profit into the arts world, which has seen less of this type of innovation.

Today, we’ll begin with the “Values and Philosophies” section of our report. It goes like this:

Our grantees are critical to our success. The Ortiz Foundation deeply respects the vibrant work of the New York City arts organizations it supports. The Foundation will ensure that its processes are transparent, timely, and streamlined so as to promote a healthy and productive relationship between grantor and grantee. The Foundation recognizes that it has much to learn from its grantees as well as much to teach them.

Knowledge is power. The Ortiz Foundation for the Arts will attempt at every turn to justify its policy decisions, program priorities, and individual grant decisions with objective evidence. In doing so, the Foundation recognizes that an honest accounting of what is known and what is unknown is more valuable than a blind trust in statistics.

The best opportunities are not always the obvious ones. The Ortiz Foundation believes that competition for grants is healthy and desirable, and that the most interesting and diverse pool of proposals is generally yielded by an open-call process rather than application by invitation only. Recognizing that a purely reactive stance is less likely to reach artists and communities outside of traditional institutional networks, the Ortiz Foundation will take the initiative to ensure the visibility of its programs in a variety of contexts.

Grantmaking is both a privilege and a responsibility. The decisions made by any funding organization have a real and significant impact on the lives of individuals and organizations alike. Yet the consequences of missteps are all too often borne by a funder’s constituents, rather than the funder itself. Accordingly, the Ortiz Foundation for the Arts will hold its staff and Board to the highest standards of performance. Foundation personnel will maintain a deep dedication to and respect for the Foundation’s mission and the hard work that is necessary to serve it.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the role of OFA within the New York City arts funding world and describe ways in which the Foundation seeks to differentiate itself.

Fractured Atlas blog
I heart Fractured Atlas and have been a member for a couple of years, but wasn’t aware that they had a blog until its founder, Adam Forest Huttler, posted a comment on one of my thoughts on effective philanthropy posts and a reaction over at his site. As far as I’m concerned, the FA blog is as close to must-read status as it gets in the arts — Adam and his staff are top-notch thinkers and the blog frequently features thought-provoking content.

The GiveWell Blog
I’ve posted twice before about GiveWell, which might just be the most fascinating organization on the planet (another post is forthcoming soon). This is their blog, which used to be much more interesting in the organization’s early days before the founders’ little marketing meltdown about a year ago. For a while, the content got very much on the dry side, consisting mostly of snippets of information that were previews of what would go in the reports. Now, the tone is a little more lively and there is some dialogue with other philanthropy blogs on the web. If you care about philanthropy or developing-world aid, you’ll want to check it out.

Notes from the Kelp
Composer Alex Shapiro, who is one of my favorite people anywhere, offers a blog rich in the natural scenery of her gorgeous surroundings (first Malibu, California, and now San Juan Island in Washington State). In an innovative twist, she pairs each post with a snippet of her music chosen for the occasion. It’s like having a glass of wine with your blogging! To Alex’s vast credit, she was one of the first people to link to Createquity. The rest of her website is worth checking out as well.

Soho the Dog
Music critic and composer Matthew Guerrieri is the author of Soho the Dog, an entertaining and informative source for musicology and commentary spiced with insights from economics and the occasional hilarious comic featuring Mahler and Strauss.

Take It to the Bridge
Take It to the Bridge was originally formed to bring collective action to bear against the Knitting Factory so that artists could get the rights to the master recordings of albums that had been released on the now-defunct Knitting Factory label. When that effort was successful, the organization stuck around and eventually formed this blog. Take It to the Bridge was also active when Tonic closed, circulating a petition demanding that the city finance a new, equivalent space for improvised and experimental music. The blog itself is characterized by infrequent spurts of content, and in fact the most recent post is from last April. However, when there is activity it usually means that something important is going on.

The Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor is a consultant and director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. His blog, which is another member of the ArtsJournal consortium, focuses on general issues of arts management. His program sounds really interesting and I sometimes feel envious from over here in the Eastern time zone. (But then I read about wind chills in the Midwest tonight and I decide that New Haven suits me just fine, thankyou.) The commentary and ideas are thoughtful and well worth your time.

One of the memes that’s been coming out of the “best practices” camp for philanthropists the last few years is that organizations need more general operating support, rather than the project support that many funding entities are accustomed to providing. The advantage of general operating support (or GOS) is that it can be shifted around to different parts of the organization depending on needs, rather than being tied up in one program that may turn out to be overfunded relative to other priorities or encounter unforeseen problems. A funding base that is heavy in GOS thus gives a grantee much greater flexibility with which to design its offerings, which is appropriate because organizations on the ground are likely to understand their constituencies better than their funders (and certainly better than a haphazard aggregate of funders that may have different priorities and agendas at stake, which is pretty common in this field).

One of the dangers of project support, when pursued too zealously, is that it can take the funded organizations away from their core mission—and often, then, their core competencies. Grantmakers need to remember that any money they have to offer, no matter how small it may seem to them, acts as a powerful incentive to those on the other side scrounging for every penny they can. Attaching program-related restrictions or conditions to the use of funders’ money may direct attention to the causes or ideas in which they are interested, but the long-term effect on the field can sometimes be deleterious if organizations are jockeying among themselves for opportunities that take resources away from what they are actually good at.

I think the same principle can be applied to artists, either when they are funded directly or when their activity is supported through a grant to an organization. A composer or a playwright is not like a graphic design shop or an IT consulting firm that will create something to a customer’s specifications, no questions asked. The whole point of supporting the arts, to my mind, is to encourage innovation, expectation-challenging, and all what goes along with leading a creative life. Laying out the path ahead of time with too-great specificity potentially squashes the very thing that makes the arts special. What’s more, the non-alignment of incentives that I talked about in the previous paragraph is even more severe for individual artists trying to make a living from their creative work. I’ve seen projects in the music world greenlighted for little reason other than the possibility of getting a grant for them. Were those always the best projects to undertake, either for the organizations/artists themselves or for the field as a whole (e.g., audiences)? For example, if the most talented artists are unwilling to create works to specification, does that mean that less talented artists receive those opportunities instead and ultimately become better-known to the public as a result? Or if a high-dollar-value grant also includes an educational workshop component, will the panel end up selecting a fine composer who is terrible in the classroom?

Furthermore, I can tell you from my own experience and that of my friends that it is somewhat demoralizing for an artist if the only realistic path to receiving anything resembling professional compensation is to create a work that has nothing to do with what you’re about. Artists are very invested in creating public identities that reflect their personal aesthetic goals and ideas—not to mention devoting their limited creative time and resources to projects that similarly reflect those things. If you’re a creator-for-hire, it’s much harder to maintain that kind of integrity and voice in your own work. It’s a choice that many artists trying to make a living must grapple with.

I would like to think that most philanthropists who truly believe in the arts can trust creators enough not to try to do their work for them. Of course there could be occasions when highly directed creative activity is entirely warranted. This is not a black-and-white issue. But in general, I think it’s worth considering the potential unintended consequences of a “top-down” strategy of arts giving, especially if that strategy becomes the norm.

For years, artists have complained about the National Endowment for the Arts’s 1996 decision, under pressure from Congress, to eliminate individual artist fellowships (except for literature). Nevertheless, it seems that a number of local and private arts agencies and foundations have instituted programs in the past 25 years that support artists in their work directly. Many of the more high-profile of these, including the MacArthur “Genius” grants, the United States Artists fellowships, and prizes such as Columbia’s William Schuman Award, essentially function as general operating support grants for individuals, with no particular deliverables expectation and a closed selection process that operates via nomination.

In the previous segment of this series, I argued that giving more grants to smaller organizations helps to diversify the risk of giving to any one organization while broadening the effect of the money distributed. There’s another factor to consider as well. Because the bulk of foundation and government resources goes to organizations that boast not only the largest artistic budgets but also the greatest market share, there’s a steep stratification within the artist community between elements that are subsidized by outside funding and thus pay “professional” rates for artists’ services, and elements that exist outside of that infrastructure that rely on largely volunteer or far-below-minimum-wage labor in order to get by. Essentially, what this means is that some artists are able to live reasonable or even comfortable lives making art for a living, while other artists of equivalent ability get bupkus. There is little resembling an artistic “middle class” whose members receive remuneration for their services that is respectable, yet not out of proportion with the direct economic value that they generate.

Funding artists directly has the potential to exacerbate this problem. First of all, the growth of artistic stature is spiral in nature: the more citations, awards, and high-profile work you already have, the more you are likely to receive in the future. That momentum makes an artist more visible to funding organizations whose expertise is more usually characterized by a broad understanding of the field rather than an encyclopedic knowledge of thousands of people working in relative obscurity. As a result, awards that fund artists directly, particularly those that do not function via an open call process, tend to go toward individuals who are already doing better, both reputationally and financially, than their peers. In the worst case, it increases the stratification already present in the field on a basis that has more to do with hearsay than intrinsic artistic merit.

I don’t think it’s incumbent upon foundations to judge artistic merit. There are plenty of other people in this world who are perfectly capable of doing that, and arguably more qualified: curators, journalists, other artists, audience members themselves. Where foundations can add value instead is in setting up and supporting systems by which artistic activity is generated in their communities.

How might this be accomplished? The first place I would look is what I would call nexuses for art. Where is art shown, produced, performed, bought, sold, consumed, marketed, supported? It’s not just the museums and the concert halls. It’s the dive bars, the galleries, the coffee shops, the off-off-Broadway theaters, the bookstores, the record stores, the radio stations, and the occasional entities that serve as all of these things and more. Finding a way to get money to these organizations is tricky because many of them are set up as for-profit entities. Yet, from the artists’ perspective, many of these tiny businesses fulfill just as important a function as the city’s performing arts center or marquee theater company, despite being labors of love for their proprietors that often operate completely outside of the support structures that exist to make art available to a wider public.

The artists, in some ways, are only the end product of this multifaceted ecology of organizations. A company that receives no donations, yet values artistic mission over profit, is a company in a precarious position, completely exposed to market pressures. Any time one of these organizations fails, untold numbers of artists (not to mention audiences and communities) are negatively affected. My electric chamber ensemble, Capital M, had the honor of playing one of the last shows ever at the legendary experimental music venue Tonic. The ten-year-old for-profit club, which two years earlier had raised more than $100,000 from fans and angel donors to avert another financial crisis, was only the latest in a string of music venues to close or relocate in the face of enormous pressure from the New York City real estate market. Its demise inspired Take It to the Bridge to organize a protest outside the venue and gather signatures demanding that the city provide musicians with an equivalent replacement. In my opinion, support of these kinds of organizations is an oft-overlooked but critically important way to bolster the livelihood of a varied and active artistic community in a local area, with all the attendant benefits that such activity provides.

When we left off last time, I was advocating for funding agencies to adopt a spirit of experimentation in their philanthropic strategies for the arts. However, I haven’t yet talked explicitly about an idea that goes hand-in-hand with that strategy: diversifying grants across many different (and often smaller) organizations, instead of concentrating them in a few very large ones.

It’s not that I don’t think large arts organizations do good work, or that they don’t deserve to be supported. What I’m going to argue instead is that there is a tendency among many institutional givers to direct their resources toward organizations that have well-developed support infrastructure, long histories, and vast budgets, and in a lot of ways it’s a tendency that doesn’t make much sense (or at the very least, could use some balance).

For one thing, those well-developed support infrastructures don’t come cheap. Consider the case of Carnegie Hall, which due to union constraints (the subject of a current strike over on Broadway) routinely pays its top stagehands north of $300,000 a year. The astronomical salaries that symphony orchestra conductors make (up to $2.5 million annually; and that’s not counting guest conducting gigs with other ensembles) are being paid for by someone, after all. If those kinds of numbers seem a little insane to you, well, you’re not the only one. This is one of the dirty little secrets of the arts—very few people seem to be aware that their local orchestra conductor might be making bank on par with their favorite NFL players. And yet this information is all publicly available on government forms thanks to the incomparable Guidestar. (pdfs; registration required)

An important thing to note is that the forces driving these compensation figures into the stratosphere cannot be described as “nonprofit” in any meaningful way. The labor unions, for example, are not particularly interested in giving Carnegie Hall some sort of break because of their IRS status. From their perspective, this is the top gig in town and they should be remunerated accordingly. Similarly, the conductors and soloists extracting huge appearance fees from the major orchestras are being represented by for-profit management agencies such as IMG and Columbia Artists. Another large expense for many arts organizations is the rent for their office buildings that ultimately winds up in the hands of property-owning for-profit corporations. Foundations that are truly interested in “effectiveness” should ensure they are aware of the extent to which their charitable dollars may ultimately be making rich people richer.

Those are only perhaps the most egregious examples of money ending up where it may not be doing the most public good. The administrative overhead costs of maintaining such a budget can get quite high as well. The more money that needs to be raised for the organization to maintain a certain level of operation, the more fundraising staff need to be hired to support that activity. And, of course, since fundraising professionals know damn well that their services are in demand, they know to ask for a substantial salary from an organization that clearly has the resources to give them what they want. Which they then have to figure out how to pay for by raising yet more money. Do you see how this can become an upward spiraling process?

In contrast, small arts organizations are extraordinarily frugal with their resources, precisely because they have no resources to speak of. It’s frankly amazing to me what largely unheralded art galleries, musical ensembles, theater companies, dance troupes, and performance art collectives are able accomplish with essentially nothing but passion on their side. A $5,000 contribution that would barely get you into the sixth-highest donor category at Carnegie might radically transform the livelihood of an organization like this. Suddenly, they might be able to buy some time in the recording studio, or hire an accompanist for rehearsals, or redo that floor in the lobby, or even (gasp) PAY their artists! All of which previously had seemed inconceivable because of the poverty that these organizations grapple with. Foundations concerned with “impact” should remember that it’s far easier to have a measurable effect on an organization’s effectiveness when the amount of money provided is not dwarfed by the organization’s budget.

The best part of giving more money to smaller organizations is that it actually reduces the risk for the funding agency by diversifying its portfolio. Think about it like this: if you were investing stock in each of these companies instead of grant dollars, your broker would call you crazy to divide a million dollars among four of them rather than forty, or better yet four hundred. Sure, some of them will fail, but think about the missed opportunities with the ones that succeed. To only fund the largest organizations would be akin to confining one’s endowment investments to the blue chips on the NYSE while completely ignoring emerging markets.

When we left off last week, I noted that it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of the arts when we don’t all agree what it is, exactly, about the arts that makes them worth funding. Is it because they contribute to American cultural literacy, the idea being that people are somehow more erudite and interesting if they have a familiarity with what’s going on in various fields of artistic endeavor? Is it because supporting the arts in America means contributing to a body of American artistic work that we can all, as a nation, be proud of? Or is it about something more practical, like improving math and science test scores for kids, or promoting economic development in impoverished urban areas? Or is it about something completely different, like exposing underserved populations to an experience traditionally enjoyed by upper classes?

The RAND Corporation published a nice study a few years ago called Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Value of the Arts. The authors identified a range of benefits, ranging from simple individual emotions such as pleasure and captivation to complex public phenomena such as development of social capital and expression of communal meaning. One of the main points that the authors make is that the public dialogue about the arts tends to bias what they call instrumental benefits, such as improved test scores and learning skills, over intrinsic benefits like extended capacity for empathy and creation of social bonds. Think about that for a second: what can we say about these instrumental benefits as distinct from the intrinsic benefits? That’s right—the intrinsic benefits are really hard to measure! They are what my economics professors might call an “externality”—a force that undeniably exists but that cannot be represented in the model we’re using. So without a reliable objective standard to use as a measuring stick, one might ask, how can grantmakers in the arts properly judge the effectiveness of arts organizations in manifesting these outcomes?

This question really gets at one of the central paradoxes in arts funding. The process of applying for grants is supposed to be objective; otherwise funders might as well pre-select the grantees themselves, right? Applicants depend on a fundamentally meritocratic system that will allow them access to resources in exchange for a quality effort on their part. But making a decision is not as simple as collecting a bunch of numbers and plugging them into a formula. Assessing the “artistic quality” or “integrity” of an applicant’s work certainly doesn’t work like that; nor does evaluating the real impact on audiences of art that has a social or political mission. Even the numbers are not always our friends. Take attendance figures, for example: 800 casual listeners at an open-air concert may not be directly comparable to 50 viewers of an experimental dance show or 100 teenagers seeing a theater piece about AIDS.

I don’t pretend to know all the answers with this, but here’s what I can tell you about my own philosophy. I believe in the intrinsic value of the arts to do all of these things and more. Furthermore, competition between organizations that are engaged in the creation or presentation of artistic work is not an issue the way it can be for service organizations. Rather than divide the market, a high concentration of organizations and artists pursuing their passions will create cumulative network effects that expand the possibilities for all who are involved, from increased cultural tourism to higher land values, to more employment opportunities and a more creative and ambitious workforce. This is the great value in having a critical mass of organizations that contribute to an active “scene” in a particular area: it can go a long way towards redefining that locality as a creative, fun, and attractive place to be.

So if I’m an agency funding the arts, in some sense I’m not so incredibly concerned with the specific effectiveness of each individual organization I’m supporting. Of course you want your money to be used wisely, but it’s a good thing for the size of the art scene to be able to accommodate the full population of artists who want to work in your geographic area of interest; in other words, to grow according to the supply of artists, not audience demand. So it does not make sense, I would argue, only to fund the blue-chip institutions like the art museums, the symphony orchestras, and the major theater companies in hopes (for example) of lending international prominence and legitimacy to the community. Such a top-down approach potentially leaves out a much larger underground network of artists doing their best to scratch out a living with no institutional support, despite creating significant value for their local communities and economies.

Arts funders have traditionally been somewhat reluctant to support such scenes directly because of the difficulty evaluating their performance with precision. Most young, DIY, entrepreneurial arts organizations lack infrastructure and a certain professionalism of presentation, even if the art itself is top-notch. I feel, however, that an intense focus on objective evaluation in such cases is short-sighted, since the risk associated with the failure or ineffectiveness of any given organization is relatively small. Instead, funding agencies would do better to examine the effectiveness of the “scene” as a whole: i.e., to what extent prospective and current grantees are communicating with each other, creating employment opportunities (both artistic and operational), benefiting from synergistic partnerships, and generally contributing to the artistic profile and quality of life of the community as a whole. By adopting a less risk-averse strategy and being open to experimentation in their philanthropy, arts funders can better serve both the artist community and the public while embodying the most inspiring attributes of the field they are funding.

Measuring impact is a hot topic in the nonprofit world right now, if the title of the 3^rd Annual SOM Philanthropy Conference, “Achieving Effectiveness In Philanthropy,” is any indication. Understandably, foundations want to have confidence that their money is being used effectively by the organizations they entrust it to. Furthermore, many staffers and donors in the field come from corporate backgrounds where a premium is placed on deliverables and results, and hope to apply the discipline contained within that culture to the nonprofit sector. In many ways this is a good thing: nonprofits are notorious for inefficiency and amateurish management, and by developing extensive evaluation techniques foundations hope to lead the way toward a more accountable, professional future.

Here’s the rub, though: measuring effectiveness in the arts is a different animal altogether than measuring effectiveness in other program areas, like healthcare or social justice. To illustrate why, let’s take a step back for a moment and think about the differences between the for-profit and non-profit sectors in general. In most cases, the primary goal of a for-profit company is to maximize value for its shareholders by selling a product to consumers. From the outsider’s perspective, then, the focus of the company is on the product. In other words, when we think about Microsoft, we think about Windows. When we think about Starbucks, we think about coffee. Now, what about nonprofit organizations? I would argue that the focus there is not on the product so much as the customer—broadly defined as the recipient of the organization’s services. Take a support group for people with AIDS, for example. Again, from a total outsider’s perspective, the most important thing is not what they’re doing (i.e., the specific programs or services they offer) but who they’re doing it for. When I think about Greenpeace, the first thing that comes to mind is not the specific programs or initiatives they operate—it’s the environment.

In most nonprofit disciplines, funding agencies primarily work with mission-driven service organizations. These are nonprofits that exist in order to improve infrastructure, advocate for interest groups—in short, to correct or alleviate a perceived problem in society. With such organizations, measuring effectiveness can be defined fairly concretely, say in the number of meals served at a soup kitchen or in the passage (or not) of particular legislation that a group was pushing in the local government. Of course there’s more complexity to it than that, but the point is that mission-driven organizations in non-arts fields can generally be evaluated relatively easily and accurately using quantitative and/or results-focused methods.

The arts, on the other hand, are a field primarily comprised of organizations that produce a product for consumption, much like for-profit companies. In fact, they are basically for-profit companies without the profit. Their value to society (and selling pitch to funders) presumably lies in their ability to bring products to market that would not have otherwise seen the light of day; otherwise, why fund them at all? However, this definition of value doesn’t match up so well with our traditional notions of social responsibility and moral imperative. Think about it this way: if a mission-driven nonprofit were to be wildly successful, so successful that it had entirely solved the problem it was created to address, it would have no choice but to shut down. For presenters, museums, galleries, ensembles, and the like, there is no such consideration: wild success is merely an invitation and an opportunity for more activity. And why shouldn’t it be? Arts organizations, much as they might like to believe otherwise, don’t really exist to solve some urgent problem in society. At some level, like for-profit companies, they are self-serving: they promote the art itself (the product) rather than who experiences the art (the customer). As a result, making an argument to donors for support of the arts can be exceedingly difficult, and the arts sometimes take a back seat to other priorities in the philanthropic arena.

That doesn’t mean that there is no argument to be made, however. For me, the role of the arts in a creative society is to define a space in our lives in which the impossible becomes possible. The arts are about celebrating and honoring creativity and innovation for their own sake, not as a means to an end such as financial gain. They need support precisely because a constraint of income inevitably constrains imagination, and the whole point of the arts is to see what happens when imagination runs wild.

Beyond that, however, the arts can be extremely useful to society. This can be seen perhaps most dramatically in the network effects that artists help create when they congregate in undervalued urban neighborhoods (Williamsburg in Brooklyn being a prime example). As an educational tool, the arts have applications in everything from grade-school math to graduate-level management. Not to mention that there are increasing synergies all the time between traditional arts fields and highly creative commercial enterprises such as graphic design, video games, motion pictures, and so on. The arts, in no small way, serve as R&D for society—they provide a leading edge from which other sectors draw inspiration. Their influence “trickles down” into popular culture through numerous intermediaries, providing jobs and creative fulfillment for many in the process. The true impact of the arts is thus difficult to measure properly. For example, my experimental rock band Capital M was made possible in no small part by the money the American Music Center received from the likes of the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations to pay my salary every year. Yet those organizations have no way of accounting for those kinds of residual second- and third-generation ripples created by their investments.

So how can we go about measuring—or even defining—the impact that we want the arts to have? I’ll explore that question in my next installment, Philanthropy and Experimentation.