Ann Markusen and David King’s 2003 paper “The Artistic Dividend: The Arts’ Hidden Contributions to Regional Development” aims to reveal what economists typically miss when they measure the impact of the arts sector on regional economies.

Summary

Approach and Methodology

“The Artistic Dividend” presents the arts’ contribution to a regional economy through an occupational lens. Markusen and King conducted two focus groups with arts opinion-makers and interviewed 22 artists in the Twin Cities. Having determined using Census data that artists are differently distributed in different regions, the authors used the data from their interviews to probe what causes artists’ regional preferences.

Components of the Artistic Dividend

Markusen and King hypothesize that regional economies get an “artistic dividend” from a high artist population because artists:

• improve the design, production, and marketing of products and services in non-arts businesses when they do contract work for them, and by being active consumers
• help firms recruit employees by contributing to the quality of life in a region
• export their work out of their region
• purchase local supplies and services.

Artists’ Regional Preferences and How They Might Be Nurtured

“The Artistic Dividend” uses US Census data to show that artists concentrate in some regions more than others. Based on their interviews, Markusen and King posit that a region could increase its artistic dividend by supporting these factors:

• opportunities for education
• formal and informal mutual support networks among artists
• opportunities to connect their work to other industries
• artist live/work spaces
• arts philanthropy that supports individuals as well as institutions
• regional amenities such as affordability, good neighborhoods, and cultural life

Analysis

Overall, “The Artistic Dividend” makes an intriguing argument, but its conclusions are preliminary because of its modest scope and reliance on limited empirical evidence. One of the major issues with “The Artistic Dividend” is that it makes broadly generalizing recommendations based on its small sample size for data (22 interviewees, only four of whom are ever directly cited). It also assumes that artists’ economic actions have a substantial economic effect, but uses the presence of a concentration of artists in a region as a stand-in for the presence of the effect, without attempting to measure it. One way to test this effect would have been to interview non-arts business owners in the region as well as artists; another would have been to compare the artist population data with regional prosperity, as Richard Florida did. By claiming that they cannot measure the artistic dividend even though it is central to their arguments and recommendations, Markusen and King leave themselves open to the speculation that the artistic dividend is not large enough to justify their recommendation that regions invest in encouraging it.

The Artistic Dividend Revisited

Markusen’s 2004 paper “The Artistic Dividend Revisited,” co-authored with Greg Schrock and Martina Cameron, updates the census-based analysis of artists’ regional preferences from “The Artistic Dividend.” This version is deeper and more thorough on the regional data, but does not attempt to address the size or causes of the dividend.

Implications

“The Artistic Dividend” provides a good frame for the discussion of artists’ economic contributions, but because of its limitations in scope, it is inconclusive – the biggest implication is that more research is needed to test the following ideas:

• How and how much artists contribute to an economy through their contract work at non-arts firms and their entrepreneurship, and whether there is room for growth.
• The reasons artists choose particular cities.
• Similar research on sub-regional, neighborhood, and rural economies.
• Trade-offs between funding large institutions and funding on the artist level.

Since “The Artistic Dividend” was written before the 2008 recession, fundamentals such as affordable health care may now be more important to artist populations than regional amenities such as parks. Still, as many artists have focused more on freelancing and found new avenues of income in the last several years, looking at artists’ economic participation through an occupational lens remains relevant.

(For a shorter edition of this analysis, please read the condensed version.)

Ann Markusen and David King’s 2003 paper “The Artistic Dividend: The Arts’ Hidden Contributions to Regional Development” aims to reveal what economists typically miss when they measure the impact of the arts sector on regional economies. The authors describe the artistic dividend as the multifaceted economic benefits of the arts when seen through an occupational approach: a look at the ways artists, rather than institutions, feed regional economies. Using the Twin Cities region as a case study, they argue that artists create a dividend when they export their work out of the region and then spend their earnings locally, when they buy supplies and hire supporting staff, and even when they do projects for non-arts firms. Markusen and King demonstrate that artists have preferences about the regions where they live, and distill their conversations with artists into a set of recommendations for how a region can improve its attractiveness to artists. “The Artistic Dividend” is notable as the first publication of the Arts Economy Initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Project on Regional and Industrial Economics. Though it was noncommissioned, conducted without external funding, and accordingly small in scale, it is arguably Ann Markusen’s best-known work on the arts economy.

Summary

Approach and Methodology

“The Artistic Dividend” presents the arts’ contribution to a regional economy through an occupational lens. Markusen and King used the Twin Cities as a case study to explore the ways artists contribute to a regional economy. They conducted two focus groups with arts “opinion-makers” and 22 interviews with people who make their living at their art to better understand artists’ behavior, preferences, and economic effects on their region. Interviewees were contacted through a web portal for Minnesota artists or the recommendation of other individuals; they were chosen to represent a wide range of types of art but were not intended to be a representative sample of artists in the region. To establish that artists choose some regions of the country over others, Markusen and King compared artist populations between regions using Census data on size and growth rates of artistic occupations and on artistic concentrations in selected metro areas. Having determined that artists are differently distributed in different regions, the authors used the data from their interviews to probe what causes artists’ regional preferences.

Components of the Artistic Dividend

Markusen and King argue that the arts’ contributions to a regional economy are much richer than conventional research methods, such as measuring the tourism draw of a large arts institution, make them appear. Conventional, institution-centric methods overlook the contributions of artists who primarily work independently or in small organizations, and focus on a narrow set of economic benefits, such as money spent by audiences at area restaurants. By using an occupational approach, Markusen and King highlight what they call the “artistic dividend”: the varied ways in which the arts contribute to a region’s economy. They hypothesize that a high population of artists in a region increases the productivity and earnings in the regional economy, and attribute this to the following causes:

• artists directly improve the design, production, and marketing of products and services in non-arts businesses when they do contract work for them
• artists motivate firms to create better products by their active input as consumers
• artists help firms recruit employees by contributing to the quality of life in a region
• artists generate income by exporting their work out of their region
• artists stimulate the local economy through their purchases of supplies and services.

The more obvious forms of the artistic dividend are artists’ purchases of materials and services, and sales of their work. Markusen and King list a plethora of ways the artists they interviewed patronize local businesses and employ local talent: for example, “many act like small businesses, hiring others” for support work, and “they patronize suppliers of materials, agents, teachers, and tutors.” Additionally, even in regions where the performing arts do not attract many non-local audience members, other types of artists, such as writers and visual artists, export their work from the region and contribute to their local economic base.

Markusen and King posit an additional economic impact when artists sell their services to non-arts businesses, using their writing, video, visual arts, or other skills to enhance productivity and profits, and when artists as consumers create demand for innovative products. “The presence of a large, diverse pool of artistic talent in a region enables businesses in the region to design their products better, enhance working conditions and employee morale, and market their output more successfully.” Several of the artists interviewed described successful relationships they have forged with non-arts firms.

Artists Have Regional Preferences

“The Artistic Dividend” shows artists concentrate in some regions more than others. Using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series based on the 1980 and 1990 US Census, Markusen and King compiled the size and growth rates of artistic occupations (using the categories for full-time artists, musicians, actors and directors, painters, photographers, and dancers) in eleven cities. They then compared artistic concentrations for those cities, using a location quotient for artists – the ratio of artists in a local economy to artists in the national economy.

This method revealed that the fastest growing or biggest cities do not necessarily have the biggest artist populations, and different types of artists are concentrated in different cities. Markusen and King theorize that smaller cities that have high populations of one type of artist attracted that population in part because of a major school or other institution. Based on their focus groups and interviews, they highlight factors such as opportunities for education, mutual support networks among artists, opportunities to connect their work to other industries, lower cost of living, and higher quality of life as important components of a region’s appeal to artists.

Nurturing the Artistic Dividend

“Artistic activity as a significant contributor to the regional economy needs nurturing,” Markusen and King write. “In comparison to the very modest amounts they devote to the arts, state and local governments pour hundreds of millions of dollars into downtown revitalizations, new plant attraction and even big box retail developments in the suburbs.” The paper argues that redirecting some money towards attracting, nurturing, and retaining artists would allow the artistic dividend in a region to flourish.

The authors recommend that arts funders, governments, businesses, and artists’ organizations focus on attracting and supporting artists as workers. This includes supporting dedicated artist live/work spaces, but also encouraging amenities that are not specific to artists, such as a region’s affordability, vibrant neighborhoods, and cultural life. Markusen and King call arts-supporting philanthropic organizations and arts establishments a “welcome mat” for a region, indicating to artists that they are likely to find a friendly environment there. They conclude from their interviews that a thriving network of formal and informal artist organizations is as important as big establishments to retaining artists, helping artists find venues to sell their work and hone their artistic and business skills, and providing other resources. Their recommendations are accompanied by anecdotes from their interviewees describing ways in which regional features have helped them succeed.

Art Sale by Jeff_Werner on Flickr

Analysis

Overall, “The Artistic Dividend” makes an intriguing argument that using an occupational approach to look at the arts’ role in regional development reveals many contributions that are invisible with methodologies that focus on the arts industry or arts establishments. Its conclusions about improving a region’s attractiveness to artists and thus its economic success are preliminary, however, because of its modest scope and reliance on limited empirical evidence. “The Artistic Dividend” is promising as a quantitative and descriptive look at artist concentrations in major American cities, as well as a small-scale exploration of artists’ lives, careers, and relationship to place within a single metropolitan region. It would also be provocative as an opinion piece on the value of using an occupational lens to measure artists’ contributions to a regional economy, but it is not presented as an opinion piece. Instead, the authors attempt to use the data from their interviews and focus groups and (by implication) the data on artist concentrations to demonstrate the value of an occupational lens for this purpose, and make policy recommendations on the assumption that the value has been demonstrated. In this area, the paper falls short, raising a lot of interesting questions without enough supporting evidence to justify its recommendations.

To a large extent, Markusen and King are upfront about “The Artistic Dividend”’s limitations. For example, the study excludes the effects of part-time and unpaid artists on the economy, two groups which make up a large portion of the total number of artists in a region. It focuses on metropolitan regions, and the Twin Cities in particular, to the exclusion of examining arts dividends in small towns.

However, there are several key weaknesses in the paper’s construction that go unacknowledged. The major quantitative source of information in “The Artistic Dividend,” the analysis of artist concentrations, cannot tell us anything about whether the artistic dividend exists or how big it is because the authors use those concentrations as evidence of the artistic dividend itself rather than as a lever for measuring its relationship to regional prosperity. This leaves the job of demonstrating the dividend to the nonscientific sample of 22 interviewees in a single region, which is a very small base of evidence from which to draw sweeping policy conclusions.

Similar leaps of logic occur in the authors’ analysis of the nature of the dividend. For example, profiled artist Vara Kamin has written audio and film scripts for a medical technology company, an example of the artistic dividend in action. The authors of the study assume an artist like Kamin produces more valuable results than a non-specialist from within the firm: “artists often sell their work or services to other firms and organizations in the region, helping to make them more productive by enhancing the quality and design of their products or enhancing the work and customer environments.” While such an outcome certainly seems possible, the claim is neither made explicit nor demonstrated or supported with evidence in the paper.

Markusen and King go on to suggest that we could see growth in artists like Vara Kamin selling their skills to non-arts firms, which makes sense if both artists and companies really embrace the creative possibilities in their collaborations. However, as countless artists’ rants and anecdotes published as blog posts or interviews reveal, many artists do not consider such gigs to be their “real” work. The authors note from their interviews that “some artists express disdain for commercial uses of their art… or fear this would damage their status as fine artists.” Yet they continue to express optimism that this is a part of the dividend which could blossom with some encouragement.

The seams between the opinion, census analysis, and anecdotal elements of “The Artistic Dividend” become particularly problematic when the paper makes far-reaching recommendations based on earlier generalizations. For example, the authors propose that a region can attract and retain artists to boost the artistic dividend. In the section analyzing census data on concentrations of artists by profession in various metro areas, the authors note, “each metro has stylized itself in some fashion as a nurturing ground for certain arts and as a destination for artists in that field.” The idea of a city styling itself for certain professions makes the actions sound deliberate on someone’s part. There is a big logical leap between the idea that artists cluster in certain regions and the idea that those regions are deliberately cultivating the presence of specific artistic professions over others. Markusen and King later recommend that cities deliberately cultivate artists, and this section implies it has been demonstrated to be possible.

The authors assert that “it is impossible to directly measure a region’s full artistic dividend.” While it is true that measuring the economy is an inexact science and a “full” accounting may be an unreasonable goal, the authors’ hypothesis that “the more diverse and sophisticated and sizable the pool of artists in a region, the higher the quality of [their] services with associated positive impacts on firms’ bottom lines” is certainly measurable. For example, comparing their data on regional artist populations to measures of regional prosperity, as Richard Florida did, could have provided a fuller picture of whether the artistic dividend has any noticeable effects. Alternatively, as mentioned in the study’s conclusion, including non-arts business owners who do and do not hire artists in the focus groups and interviews could have bolstered the case for the artistic dividend. Unfortunately, by declining to attempt a measurement of the artistic dividend, the meaningful existence of which is the crux of their arguments and recommendations, Markusen and King leave their argument open to the speculation that the dividend is not in fact large enough to justify their recommendation that regions invest in encouraging it.

Moreover, the paper leaves open the question of whether the artistic dividend is distinct from that of other fields when using an occupational approach. While the authors acknowledge in the conclusion that they did not compare the arts to other occupations, it is a surprising omission considering how central the arts’ net value to regional economies is to the paper’s argument, and even more so because Ann Markusen had not specialized in the arts until this study. The only other field explicitly mentioned by comparison is professional sports. The way in which the authors define artistic occupations is somewhat curious as well: they argue that exports of artistic products out of the region are a component of the dividend, but omit filmmakers; they use an artist’s successful venture selling fonts he designed as an example of artistic entrepreneurship even though they omit graphic designers on the grounds that they are more likely to be employed full-time. It is not clear why the lines are drawn where they are, and what unique economic contribution is made by the artists they do include relative to other occupations.

Ultimately, Markusen and King aim to demonstrate that an artistic dividend exists and that it is worth exploring in further research. Artists are indeed economic actors in that they buy supplies, hire services, and do arts work for non-arts firms. Through the results of their focus groups and interviews, the authors identify the building blocks they believe form an artistic dividend in their case study region, the Twin Cities. However, to persuasively argue that cities, philanthropists, and others should make changes to their practice in service of increasing the artistic dividend, the authors would need be able to measure the dividend itself and show that it has some significant effect on the regional economy.

The Artistic Dividend Revisited

Markusen’s 2004 paper “The Artistic Dividend Revisited,” co-authored with Greg Schrock and Martina Cameron, updates the Census-based analysis of artists’ regional preferences from “The Artistic Dividend,” adding a comparison with architects and designers, and examines the pull of employers on artistic concentrations using advertising as a case study. “Revisited” goes into more depth using 1980, 1990, and 2000 PUMS Census data. It does a better job contextualizing the claims about what makes a region appealing to artists within the landscape of existing research than “The Artistic Dividend” does. It does not make the implication that the artistic dividend is necessarily a large part of regional economies, which is where “The Artistic Dividend” began to overreach. Instead, Markusen, Schrock, and Cameron provide a deeper, more thorough version of the original paper’s strongest portion, arriving at many of the same conclusions: artists tend to be footloose, the concentration of artists in a city is not a function of the city’s size or growth, and cities tend to be associated with a few types of artist.

Implications

“The Artistic Dividend” provides a good frame for the discussion of artists’ economic contributions. However, the constraints on the scope of research result in limited evidence to support the paper’s claims about how exactly artists contribute to the economy, and what it takes to attract and nurture them. Not surprisingly, then, “The Artistic Dividend” concludes with a call for more research. The authors suggest documenting “the significance of and delivery mechanisms for the artistic dividend,” how and how much artistic entrepreneurship contributes to a region’s economic base, and the reasons artists choose to live in particular cities. They recommend similar research on the artistic dividend in sub-regional and neighborhood economies (I would add rural regions to this list). The authors see a pressing need for thorough evaluations of the trade-offs between funding large arts institutions and funding on the artist level, and between funding the arts and other economic development strategies.

In the past decade, discussion of the occupational approach to looking at the economy has become increasingly common, although there has yet to be a good comparison between the creative economy and other occupational economies using this lens. In “Crossover: How Artists Build Careers Across Commercial, Nonprofit, and Community Work,” (2006) Markusen et al. surveyed artists in Los Angeles and the Bay Area and found that a high number of working artists earn income from multiple sectors. However, since work for non-arts firms and direct sales of art to consumers are both counted in the commercial sector, the findings in “Crossover” do not help us understand how these two pieces operate as separate avenues for artists to participate in the economy, as they are treated in “The Artistic Dividend.” Markusen’s “Defining the Cultural Economy: Industry and Occupation Approaches” (2008) described the differences in definitions of the cultural economy, including whether to look at part-time workers and which professions make up the cultural sector. However, the literature on the creative economy that uses similar definitions and parameters to Markusen and King’s artistic dividend is still heavy on analyzing methodology and theory. It is light on gathering and analyzing data about how the artistic dividend compares to the economic effects of other occupations, how large existing regional artistic dividends are, and what really works to stimulate the artistic dividend within a region.

It is important to consider that “The Artistic Dividend” was written before the 2008 recession. The recession changed the game in some areas of regional development and older assumptions must be questioned, like the assumption that job growth lessens poverty and inequality in a region. These changes suggest that greater access to affordable health care and other fundamentals may now be more important to artist populations than regional amenities such as parks. Markusen has pointed out that artists don’t fit in either traditional micro-economist or macro-economist arguments about how government spending in recessions work, because they are likely to spend new money rapidly and in the local economy.

I would also be interested to learn about the effect of the crowdfunding movement on artists’ attachment to their regions and on their ability to export out of their regions. Projects funded on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and similar sites are allowing artists to tap into new markets (across the country and the world) and a greater ability to fund their work without relying on local institutional funding sources, but for the most part, the size of the impact remains to be analyzed.

While “The Artistic Dividend” was only a start, the broader question of the role the creative economy has in the larger economy is a valuable one. Changes such as the recession and crowdfunding have encouraged many artists to try to make it on their own, whether that means relying more heavily on freelancing or exploring unconventional avenues of funding. Looking at artists’ economic participation through an occupational approach, then, continues to be highly relevant.

Additional Reading:

• Daniel Silver and Diana Miller, Contextualizing the Artistic Dividend
• Sara Cruz and Aurora A.C. Teixeira, Methodological Approaches for Measuring the Creative Employment: A Critical Appraisal with Applications to Portugal
• Judy Hornbacher ,Anne Markusen’s Concept of the Artistic Dividend
• Vince Carducci, Anne Markusen on Creative Placemaking
• Christopher Farrell, Art for Art’s Sake? No, the Economy’s
• Ann Markusen, Urban development and the politics of a creative class: evidence from a study of artists (A response to Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class)

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” -Ansel Adams
Photo by beast love

(If you don’t know the name Ann Markusen, you should. As professor and director of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Ann has become one of the most respected and senior voices in the arts research community over the past decade. Among her best-known recent efforts was her authorship, with Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, of the original Creative Placemaking white paper published by the NEA prior to the creation of the Our Town grant program and ArtPlace funder collaborative. So when she approached me to offer a guest post on evaluation challenges for creative placemaking, building on previous coverage of the topic here at Createquity, I could hardly say no. I hope you enjoy Ann’s piece and I look forward to the vigorous discussion it will no doubt spark. -IDM)

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Creative placemaking is electrifying communities large and small around the country. Mayors, public agencies and arts organizations are finding each other and committing to new initiatives. That’s a wonderful thing, whether or not their proposals are funded by national initiatives such as the National Endowment for the Arts’s Our Town program or ArtPlace.

It’s important to learn from and improve our practices on this new and so promising terrain. But efforts based on fuzzy concepts and indicators designed to rely on data external to the funded projects are bound to disappoint. Our evaluative systems must nurture rather than discourage the marvelous moving of arts organizations, artists and arts funders out of their bunkers and into our neighborhoods as leaders, animators, and above all, exhibitors of the value of arts and culture.

In our 2010 Creative Placemaking white paper for the NEA, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus and I characterize creative placemaking as a process where “partners… shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities.” A prominent ambition, we wrote, is to “bring diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.”  Creative placemaking also “animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, (and) improves local business viability and public safety,” but arts and culture are at its core. This definition suggests a number of distinctive arenas of experimentation, where the gifts of the arts are devoted to community liveliness and collaborative problem-solving and where new people participate in the arts and share their cultures.

And, indeed, Our Town and ArtPlace encourage precisely this experimental ferment. Like the case studies in Creative Placemaking, each funded project is unique in its artistic disciplines, scale, problems addressed and aspirations for its particular place. Thus, a good evaluation system will monitor the progress of each project team towards its stated goals, including revisions made along the way. NEA’s Our Town asks grant-seekers to describe how they intend to evaluate their work, and ArtPlace requires a monthly blog entry. But rather than more formally evaluate each project’s progress over time, both funders have developed and are compiling place-specific measures based on external data sources that they will use to gauge success: the Arts and Livability Indicators  in the case of the NEA, and what ArtPlace is calling its Vibrancy Indicators.

Creative placemaking funders are optimistic about these efforts and their usefulness. “Over the next year or two,” wrote Jason Schupbach, NEA’s Director of Design, last May, “we will build out this system and publish it through a website so that anyone who wants to track a project’s progress in these areas (improved local community of artists and arts organizations, increased community attachment, improved quality of life, invigorated local economies) will be able to do so, whether it is NEA-funded or not. They can simply enter the time and geography parameters relevant to their project and see for themselves.”

Over the past two years, I have been consulting with creative placemaking leaders and given talks to audiences in many cities and towns across the country and abroad. Increasingly, I am hearing distress on the part of creative placemaking practitioners about the indicator initiatives of the National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace. At the annual meetings of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture last month, my fellow Creative Placemaking panel members, all involved in one or more ArtPlace- or Our-Town-funded projects, expressed considerable anxiety and confusion about these indicators and how they are being constructed. In particular, many current grantee teams with whom I’ve spoken are baffled by the one-measure-fits-all nature of the indicators, especially in the absence of formal and case-tailored evaluation.

I’ll confess I’m an evidence gal. I fervently believe in numbers where they are a good measure of outcomes; in secondary data like Census and the National Center for Charitable Statistics where they are up to the task; in surveys where no such data exist; in case studies to illuminate the context, process, and the impacts people tangibly experience; in interviews to find out how actors make decisions and view their own performance. My own work over the past decade is riddled with examples of these practices, including appendices intended to make the methodology and data used as transparent as possible.

So I embrace the project of evaluation, but am skeptical of relying on indicators for this purpose. In pursuing a more effective course, we can learn a lot from private sector venture capital practices, the ways that foundations conduct grantee evaluations, and, for political pitfalls, defense conversion placemaking experiments of the 1990s.

Learning from Venture Capital and Philanthropy

How do private sector venture capital (VC) firms evaluate the enterprises they invest in? Although they target rates of return in the longer run, they not do resort to indicators based on secondary data to evaluate progress. They closely monitor their investees—small firms who often have little business experience, just as many creative placemaking teams are new to their terrain. VC firms play an active role in guiding youthful companies, giving them feedback germane to their product or service goals. They help managers evaluate their progress and bring in special expertise where needed.

Venture capital firms are patient, understanding realistic timelines. The rule of thumb is that they commit to five to seven years, though it may be less or more. Among our Creative Placemaking cases, few efforts succeeded in five years, while some took ten to fifteen years.

VC firms know that some efforts will fail. They are attentive to learning from such failures and sharing what they learn in generic form with the larger business community. Both ArtPlace and the NEA have stated their desire to learn from success and failure. Yet generic indicators, their chosen evaluation tools, are neither patient or tailored to specific project ambitions. Current Our Town and ArtPlace grant recipients worry that the 1-2 years of funding they’re getting won’t be enough to carry projects through to success or establish enough local momentum to be self-sustaining. Neither ArtPlace nor Our Town have a realistic exit strategy in place for their investments, other than “the grant period’s over, good luck!”

Hands-on guidance is not foreign to nonprofit philanthropies funding the arts.  Many arts program officers act as informal consultants and mentors to young struggling arts organizations and to mature ones facing new challenges. My study with Amanda Johnson of Artists’ Centers shows how Minnesota funders have played such roles for decades. They ask established arts executive directors to mentor new start-ups, a process that the latter praised highly as crucial to their success. The Irvine and Hewlett Foundations are currently funding California nonprofit intermediaries to help small, folk and ethnic organizations use grant monies wisely. They also pay for intermediaries across sectors (arts and culture, health, community development and so on) to meet together to learn what works best.

The NEA has hosted three webinars at which Our Town panelists talk about what they see as effective projects/proposals, a step in this direction. But these discussions are far from a systematic gathering and collating of experience from all grantees in ways that would help the cohorts learn and contact those with similar challenges.

The Indicator Impetus

Why are the major funders of creative placemaking staking so much on indicators rather than evaluating projects on their own aspirations and steps forward? Pressure from the Office of Management and Budget, the federal bean-counters, is one factor.  In January of 2011, President Obama signed into law the Government Performance and Modernization Act (GPRA), updating the original 1993 GPRA, and a new August 2012 Circular A11 heavily emphasizes use of performance indicators for all agencies and their programs.

As a veteran of research and policy work on scientific and engineering occupations and on industrial sectors like steel and the military industrial complex, I fear that others will perceive indicator mania as a sign of field weakness. To Ian David Moss’s provocative title “Creative Placemaking has an Outcomes Problem,” I’d reply that we’re in good company. Huge agencies of the federal government, like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and NASA, fund experiments and exploratory development without asking that results be held up to some set of external indicators not closely related to their missions. They accept slow progress and even failure, as in cancer research or nuclear fusion, because the end goal is worthy and because we learn from failure. Evaluation by external generic indicators fails to acknowledge the experimental and ground-breaking nature of these creative-placemaking initiatives and misses an opportunity to bolster understanding of how arts and cultural missions create public value.

Why Indicators Will Disappoint I: Definitional Challenges

Many of the indicators charted in ArtPlace, NEA Our Town, and other exercises (e.g. WESTAF’s Creative Vitality Index) bear a tenuous relationship to the complex fabric of communities or specific creative placemaking initiatives. Terms like “vitality,” “vibrancy,” and “livability” are great examples of fuzzy concepts, a notion that I used a decade ago to critique planners and geographers’ enamoration with concepts like “world cities” and “flexible specialization.” A fuzzy concept is one that means different things to different people, but flourishes precisely because of its imprecision. It leaves one open to trenchant critiques, as in Thomas Frank’s recent pillorying of the notion of vibrancy.

Take livability, for instance, prominent in the NEA’s indicators project. One person’s quality of life can be inimical to others’. Take the young live music scene in cities: youth magnet, older resident nightmare.  Probably no worthy concept, as quality of life is, has been the subject of so many disappointing and conflicting measurement exercises.

Just what does vibrancy mean? Let’s try to unpack the term. ArtPlace’s definition: “we define vibrancy as places with an unusual scale and intensity of specific kinds of human interaction.” Pretty vague and….vibrancy are places?  Unusual scale? Scale meaning extensive, intensive? Of specific kinds? What kinds? This definition is followed by: “While we are not able to measure vibrancy directly, we believe that the measures we are assembling, taken together, will provide useful insights into the nature and location of especially vibrant places within communities.”  If I were running a college or community discussion session on this, I would put the terms “vibrancy, places, communities, measures,” and so on up on the board (so to speak), and we would undoubtedly have a spirited and inconclusive debate!

And what is the purpose of measuring vibrancy? Again from the same ArtPlace LOI: “…the purpose of our vibrancy metrics is not to pronounce some projects ‘successes’ and other projects ‘failures’ but rather to learn more about the characteristics of the projects and community context in which they take place which leads to or at least seems associated with improved places.” Even though the above description mentions “characteristics of the projects,” it’s notable that their published vibrancy indicators only measure features of place.

In fact, many of the ArtPlace and NEA indicators are roughly designed and sometime in conflict. While giving the nod to “thriving in place,” ArtPlace emphasizes the desirability of visitors in its vibrancy definition (meaning outsiders to the community); by contrast, the NEA prioritizes social cohesion and community attachment, attributes scarce in the ArtPlace definitions. For instance, ArtPlace proposes to use employment ratio—“the number of employed residents living in a particular geography (Census Block) and dividing that number by the working age persons living on that same block” as a measure of people-vibrancy. The rationale: “vibrant neighborhoods have a high fraction of their residents of working age who are employed.” Think of the large areas of new non-mixed use upscale high-rise condos where the mostly young professional people living there commute daily to jobs and nightly to bars and cafes outside the neighborhood. Not vibrant at all. But such areas would rank high using this measure.

ArtPlace links vibrancy with diversity, defined as heterogeneity of people by income, race and ethnicity. They propose “the racial and ethnic diversity index” (composition not made explicit) and “the mixed-income, middle income index” (ditto) to capture diversity. But what about age diversity? Shouldn’t we want intergenerational activity and encounters too? It is also problematic to prioritize the dilution of ethnicity in large enclaves of recent immigrant groups. Would a thriving heavily Vietnamese city or suburb be considered non-vibrant because its residents choose to live and build their cultural institutions there, facing discrimination in other housing markets? Would an ethnic neighborhood experiencing white hipster incursions be evaluated positively despite decline in its minority populations that result from lower income people being forced out?

Many of the NEA’s indicators are similarly fuzzy. As an indicator of impact on art communities and artists, its August 2012 RFP proposes median earnings for residents employed in entertainment-related industries (arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations). But a very large number of people in these occupations are in sports and media fields, not the arts. The measure does not include artists who live outside the area but work there. And many artists self-report their industry as other than the one listed above, e.g. musicians work in the restaurant sector, and graphic artists work in motion pictures, publishing and so on. ArtPlace is proposing to use very similar indicators—creative industry jobs and workers in creative occupations—as measures of vibrancy.

It is troubling that neither indicator-building effort has so far demonstrated a willingness to digest and share publicly the rich, accessible, and cautionary published research that tackles many of these definitions. See for instance “Defining the Creative Economy: Industry and Occupational Approaches,” the joint effort by researchers Doug DeNatale and Greg Wassall from the New England Creative Economy Project, Randy Cohen of Americans for the Arts, and me at the Arts Economy Initiative to unpack the definitional and data challenges for measuring arts-related jobs and industries in Economic Development Quarterly.

Hopefully, we can have an engaging debate about these notions before indices are cranked out and disseminated. Heartening signs: in its August RFP, the NEA backtracks from its original plan, unveiled in a spring 2012 webinar, to contract for wholesale construction of a given set of indicators to be distributed to grantees. Instead, it is now contracting for the testing of indicator suitability by conducting twenty case studies. And just last week, the NEA issued a new RFP for developing a virtual storybook to document community outcomes, lessons learned and experiences associated with their creative placemaking projects.

Why Indicators Will Disappoint II: Dearth of Good Data

If definitional problems aren’t troubling enough, think about the sheer inadequacy of data sources available for creating place-specific indicators.

For more than a half-century, planning and economic development scholars have been studying places and policy interventions to judge success or failure. Yet when Anne Gadwa Nicodemus went in search of research results on decades of public housing interventions, assuming she could build on these for her evaluation of Artspace Projects’ artist live/work and studio buildings, she found that they don’t really exist.

Here are five serious operational problems confronting creative placemaking indicator construction. First, the dimensions to be measured are hard to pin down. Some of the variables proposed are quite problematic—they don’t capture universal values for all people in the community.

Take ArtPlace’s cell phone activity indicator, for instance, which will be used on nights and weekends to map where people congregate. Are places with cell activity to be judged as more successful at creative placemaking? Cell phone usage is heavily correlated with age, income and ethnicity. The older you are, the less likely you are to have a cell phone or use it much, and the more likely to rely on land-lines, which many young people do without. At the November 2012 American Collegiate Schools of Planning annual meetings, Brettany Shannon of University of Southern California presented research results from a survey of 460 LA bus riders showing low cell phone usage rates among the elderly, particularly Latinos. Among those aged 18-30, only 9% of English speakers and 15% of Spanish speakers had no cell phone, compared with 29% of English speakers over age 50 and 54% of Spanish speakers.  A cell phone activity measure is also likely to completely miss people attending jazz or classical music concerts, dramas, and religious cultural events where cell phones are turned off. And what about all those older folks who prefer to sit in coffee shops and talk to each other during the day, play leadership roles in the community through face-to-face work, or meet and engage in arts and cultural activities around religious venues? Aren’t they congregating, too?

Or take home ownership and home values, an indicator the NEA hopes to use. Hmmm… home ownership rates—and values—in the US have been falling, in large part due to overselling of homes during the housing bubble. Renting is a just as respectable an option for place lovers, especially young people, retirees, and lower-income people in general. Why would we want grantees to aspire to raise homeownership rates in their neighborhoods, especially given gentrification concerns? Home ownership does not insulate you against displacement, because as property values rise, property taxes do as well, driving out renters and homeowners alike on fixed or lower incomes. ArtPlace is developing “measures of value, which capture changes in rental and ownership values…” This reads like an invitation to gentrification, and contrary to the NEA’s aspirations for creative placemaking to support social cohesion and community attachment.

Second, most good secondary data series are not available at spatial scales corresponding to grantees’ target places. ArtPlace’s vibrancy exercise aspires to compare neighborhoods with other neighborhoods, but available data makes this task almost impossible to accomplish at highly localized scales. Some data points, like arts employment by industry, are available only down to the county level and only for more heavily populated counties because of suppression problems (and because they are lumped together with sports and media in some data sets). Good data on artists from the Census (Public Use Microdata Sample) and American Community Surveys, the only database that includes the self-employed and unemployed, can’t be broken down below PUMA (Public Use Microdata Areas) of 100,000 people that bear little relationship to real neighborhoods or city districts (see Crossover, where we mapped artists using 2000 PUMS data for the Los Angeles and Bay Area metros).

Plus, many creative placemaking efforts have ambitions to have an impact at multiple scales. Gadwa Nicodemus’s pioneering research studies, How Artist Space Matters and How Art Spaces Matter II, looked in hindsight at Artspace’s artist live/work and mixed use projects where the criteria for success varied widely between projects and for various stakeholders involved in each.  Artists, nonprofit arts organizations, and commercial enterprises (e.g. cafes) in the buildings variously hoped that the project would an impact on the regional arts community, neighborhood commercial activity and crime rates, and local property values. The research methods included surveys and interviews exploring whether the goals of the projects have been achieved in the experience of target users. Others involve complex secondary data manipulation to come up with indicators that are a good fit. Gadwa Nicodemus’s studies demonstrate how much work it is to document real impact along several dimensions, multiple spatial scales, and a long enough time periods to ensure a decent test. Her indicators, such as hedonic price indices to gauge area property value change, are sophisticated, but also very time- and skill-intensive to construct.

Third, even if you find data that address what you hope to achieve, they are unlikely be statistically significant at the scales you hope for. In our work with PUMS data from the 2000 Census, a very reliable 5% sample, we found we could not make reliable estimates of artist populations at anything near a neighborhood scale. To map the location of artists in Minneapolis, we had to carve the city into three segments based on PUMA lines, and even then, we were pushing the statistical reliability hard (Artists’ Centers, Figure 3, p. 108).

Some researchers are beginning to use the American Community Survey, a 1% sample much smaller than the decennial Census PUMS 5%, to build local indicators, heedless of this statistical reliability challenge. ArtPlace, for instance, is proposing to use ACS data to capture workers in creative occupations at the Census Tract level. See the statistical appendix to Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC)’s Creative Communities Artist Data User Guide  for a detailed explanation of this problem. Adding the ACS up over five years, one way of improving reliability, is problematic if you are trying to show change over a short period of time, which the creative placemaking indicators presumably aspire to do.

Fourth, charting change over time successfully is a huge challenge. ArtPlace intends to “assess the level of vibrancy of different areas within communities, and importantly, to measure changes in vibrancy over time in the communities where ArtPlace invests.” How can we expect projects that hope to change the culture, participation, physical environment and local economy to show anything in a period of one, two, three years? More ephemeral interventions may only have hard-to-measure impacts in the year that they happen, even if they catalyze spinoff activities, while the potentially clearer impact of brick-and-mortar projects may take years to materialize.

We know from our case studies and from decades of urban planning and design experience that changes in place take long periods of time. For example, Cleveland’s Gordon Square Arts District, a case study in Creative Placemaking, required at least five years for vision and conversations to translate into a feasibility study, another few years to build the streetscape and renovate the two existing shuttered theatres, and more to build the new one.

Because it’s unlikely that the data will be good enough to chart creative placemaking projects’ progress over time, we are likely to see indicators used in a very different and pernicious way – to compare places with each other in the current time period. But every creative placemaking initiative is very, very different from others, and their current rankings on these measures more apt to reflect long-time neighborhood evolution and particularities rather than the impact of their current activities. I can just see creative placemakers viewing such comparisons and throwing their hands up in the air, shouting, “but.. but…but, our circumstances are not comparable!”

One final indicator challenge. As far as I can tell, there are very few arts and cultural indicators included among the measures under consideration. Where is the mission of bringing diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired? Shouldn’t creative placemaking advance the intrinsic values and impact of the arts? Heightened and broadened arts participation? Preserving cultural traditions? Better quality art offerings? Providing beauty, expression, and critical perspectives on our society? Are artists and arts organizations whose greatest talents lie in the arts world to be judged only on their impact outside of this core? Though arts participation is measurable, many of the these “intrinsic” outcomes are challenging data-wise, just as are many of the “instrumental’ outcomes given central place in current indicator efforts. WolfBrown now offers a website that aims to “change the conversation about the benefits of arts participation, disseminate up-to-date information on emerging practices in impact assessment, and encourage cultural organizations to embrace impact assessment as standard operating practice.”

The Political Dangers of Relying on Indicators

I fear three kinds of negative political responses to reliance on poorly-defined and operationalized indicators.  First, it could be off-putting to grantees and would-be grantees, including mayors, arts organizations, community development organizations and the many other partners to these projects. It could be baffling, even angering, to be served up a book of cooked indicators with very little fit to one’s project and aspirations and to be asked to make sense out of them. The NEA’s recent RFP calls for the development of a user guide with some examples, which will help. Those who have expressed concern report hearing back something like “don’t worry about it – we’re not going to hold you to any particular performance on these. They are just informational for you.” Well, but then why invest in these indicators if they aren’t going to be used for evaluation after all?!

Second, creative placemaking grants create competitors, and that means they are generating losers as well as winners.  Some who aren’t funded the first time try again, and some are sanguine and grateful that they were prompted to make the effort and form a team. But some will give up. There are interesting parallels with place-based innovations in the 1990s. The Clinton administration’s post Cold War defense conversion initiatives included the Technology Reinvestment Project, in which regional consortia competed for funds to take local military technologies into the civilian realm. As Michael Oden, Greg Bischak and Chris Evans-Klock concluded in our 1995 Rutgers study (full report available from the authors on request), the TRP failed after just a few years because Members of Congress heard from too many disgruntled constituents. In contrast, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, begun in the same period and administered by NIST, has survived because after its first exploratory rounds, it partnered with state governments to amplify funding for technical assistance to defense contractors struggling with defense budget implosion everywhere. States, rather than projects, then competed, eager for the federal funds.

Third, and most troubling, funders may begin favoring grants to places that already look good on the indicators. Anne Gadwa Nicodemus raised this in her GIA Reader article on creative placemaking last spring. ArtPlace’s own funding criteria suggest this: “ArtPlace will favor investments… and sees its role as providing venture funding in the form of grants, seeding entrepreneurial projects that lead through the arts and already enjoy strong local buy-in and will occur at places already showing signs of momentum….” Imagine how a proposal to convert an old school in a very low income and somewhat depopulated, minority neighborhood into an artist live/work, studio and performance and learning space would stack up against a proposal to add funding to a new outreach initiative in an area already colonized by young people from elsewhere in the same city. A funder might be tempted to fund the latter, where vibrancy is already indicated, over the other, where the payoff might be much greater but farther down the road.

In an Ideal World, Sophisticated Models

In any particular place, changes in the proposed indicators will not be attributable to the creative placemaking intervention alone. So imagine the distress of a fundee whose indicators are moving the wrong way and which place them poorly in comparison to others. Area property values may be falling because an environmentally obnoxious plant starts up. Other projects might look great on indicators not because of their initiatives, but because another intervention, like a new light rail system or a new community-based school dramatically changes the neighborhood.

What we’d would love to have, but don’t at this point, are sophisticated causal models of creative placemaking. The models would identify the multiple actors in the target place and take into account the results of their separate actions. A funded creative placemaking project team would be just one such “actor” among several (e.g. real estate developers, private sector employers, resident associations, community development nonprofits and so on).

A good model would account for other non-arts forces at work that will interact with the various actors’ initiatives and choices. This is crucial, and the logic models proposed by Moss, Zabel and others don’t do it. Scholars of urban planning well know how tricky it is to isolate the impact of a particular intervention when there are so many others occurring simultaneously (crime prevention, community development, social services, infrastructure investments like light rail or street repaving).

Furthermore, models should be longitudinal, i.e. they will chart progress in the particular place over time, rather than comparing one place cross-sectionally with others that are quite unlikely to share the same actors, features and circumstances. If we create models that are causal, acknowledge other forces at work, and are applied over time, “we’ll be able to clearly document the critical power of arts and culture in healthy community development,” reflects Deborah Cullinan of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts in a followup to our NAMAC panel.

Such multivariate models, as social scientists and urban planners call them, lend themselves to careful tests of hypotheses about change. We can ask if a particular action, like the siting of an interstate highway interchange or adding a prison or being funded in a federal program like the Appalachian Regional Commission, produces more employment or higher incomes or better quality of life for its host city or neighborhood when compared with twin or comparable places, as Andrew Isserman and colleagues have done in their “quasi-experimental” work (write me for a summary of these, soon to be published).

We can also run tests to see if differentials in city and regional arts participation rates and presence of arts organizations can be explained by differences in funding, demographics, or features of local economies. My teammates and I used Cultural Data Project and National Center for Charitable Statistics data on nonprofit arts organizations in California to do this for all California cities with more than 20,000 residents. Our results, while cross-sectional, suggest that concerted arts and culture-building by local Californians over time leads to higher arts participation rates and more arts offerings than can be explained by other factors. The point is that techniques like these DO take into account other forces (positive and negative) operating in the place where creative placemaking unfolds.

Charting a Better Path

It’s understandable why the NEA and ArtPlace are turning to indicators. Their budgets for creative placemaking are relatively small, and they’d prefer to spend them on more programming and more places rather than on expensive, careful evaluations.  Nevertheless, designing indicators unrelated to specific funded projects seems a poor way forward. Here are some alternatives.

Commit to real evaluation. This need not be as expensive as it seems. Imagine if the NEA and ArtPlace, instead of contracting to produce one-size-fits-all indicators, were to design a three-stage evaluation process.  Grantees propose staged criteria for success and reflect on them at specified junctures. Funding is awarded on the basis of the appropriateness of this evaluative process and continued on receipt of reflections. Funders use these to give feedback to the grantee and retool their expectations if necessary, and to summarize and redesign overall creative placemaking achievements. This is more or less what many philanthropic foundations do currently and have for many years, the NEA included. Better learning is apt to emerge from this process than from a set of indicator tables and graphics.  ArtPlace is well-positioned to draw on the expertise of its member foundations in this regard.

Build cooperation among grantees to soften the edge of competition for funds. Convene grantees and would-be grantees annually to talk about success, failures, and problems. Ask successful grantees to share their experience and expertise with others who wish to try similar projects elsewhere. During Leveraging Investments in Creativity’s ten-year lifespan, it convened its creative community leaders annually and sometimes more often, resulting in tremendous cross-fertilization that boosted success. Often, what was working elsewhere turned out to be a better mission or process than what a local group had planned. Again, ArtPlace in particular could create a forum for this kind of cooperative learning. And, as mentioned, NEA’s webinars are a step in the right direction. Imagine, notes my NAMAC co-panelist Deborah Cullinan of Intersection for the Arts, if creative placemaking funders invested in cohort learning over time, with enough longevity to build relationships, share lessons, and nurture collaborations.

Finally, the National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace could provide technical assistance to creative placemaking grantees, as the Manufacturing Extension Partnership does for small manufacturers. Anne Gadwa Nicodemus and I continually receive phone calls from people across the country psyched to start projects but needy of information and skills on multiple fronts. There are leaders in other communities, and consultants, too, who know how creative placemaking works under diverse circumstances and who can form a loose consortium of talent: people who understand the political framework, the financial challenges, and the way to build partnerships. Artspace Projects, for instance, has recently converted over a quarter century of experience with more than two -dozen completed artist and arts-serving projects into a consultancy to help people in more places craft arts-based placemaking projects.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in a few years’ time, we could say, look!  Here is the body of learning and insights we’ve compiled about creative placemaking–how to do it well, where the diverse impacts are, and how they can be documented. With indicators dominating the evaluation process at present, we are unlikely to learn what we could from these young experiments. An indicators-preoccupied evaluation process is likely to leave us disappointed, with spreadsheets and charts made quickly obsolete by changing definitions and data collection procedures. Let’s think through outcomes in a more grounded, holistic way. Let’s continue, and broaden, the conversation!

(The author would like to thank Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, Deborah Cullinan, Ian David Moss, and Jackie Hasa for thorough reads and responses to earlier drafts of this article.)

Note to readers: In addition to the comments below, the National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace have now published official responses to this article. Read them here:

• Jason Schupbach and Sunil Iyengar, Our View of Creative Placemaking, Two Years In
• Carol Coletta and Joe Cortright, Understanding Creative Placemaking

News and announcements

• In what is undoubtedly the highest-profile and most unusual merger of arts organizations since the Great Recession hit, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theatre Workshop will join forces into a new entity known as New York Live Arts. The new organization will be led by a triumvirate of executives from the existing firms.
• A National Creativity Network has launched out of the Creativity World Forum in, of all places, Oklahoma City, with TED talker Sir Ken Robinson as founding chair. Not clear if there’s any funding for it as yet, but the list of participants is pretty interesting.
• The LA Philharmonic will soon be joining the Met Opera on movie screens around the country.

Readings and research

• The NEA’s research department has released a trio of documents of relevance to its initiatives and focus on “creative placemaking.” The first is a white paper by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa that reviews literature on the role of the arts and creative industries in promoting livability and economic development outcomes in local communities; identifies common themes in successful efforts to use the arts to transform neighborhoods and cities; and presents 15 in-depth case studies to illustrate those themes in action. Here’s Markusen presenting the report at the recent National Council on the Arts meeting. The second is a set of notes from the agency’s convening this past June on defining metrics for livability. And finally, the Endowment has published a research report examining the unique role of outdoor arts festivals in attracting nontraditional audiences and defining the character of a place. (The last one definitely features the best cover photo of any NEA research report past or present.)
• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies is working on an international database of cultural policy profiles. It will be based on the Council of Europe’s Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe, available here.
• UNESCO has been active lately. The international agency for culture has released a summary of its email discussion and symposium on the intriguing topic of “funding culture, managing the risk.” Not sure how new this is, but this is a pretty rad index of cultural industry mapping reports and studies organized by region of the world.
• Animating Democracy has a new research study out mapping the grantmaking landscape for the arts and social change. And AD’s co-founder, Barbara Shaffer Bacon, has written a lovely eulogy for the sadly defunct Community Arts Network, whose trove of resources on community arts is luckily still available in archive form here.
• Rebecca Novick has a very interesting article on the travails of midsize theater organizations in the Theatre Bay Area magazine.
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has published a wide-ranging report on the technology needs and usage patterns of the performing arts field, conducted by Callahan Consulting for the Arts.
• Melanie Beene, head of Community Initiatives, writes about how fiscal sponsorship is maturing as a field in the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader. (If you haven’t already discovered it, the GIA Reader is a great resource for arts policy and funding material, with freely available archives going back over 10 years.)
• Americans for the Arts has published the results of a 2009 survey of 554 self-identifying emerging leaders in the arts. The entire report is only available to AFTA members, but the executive summary as well as this blog post on the subject by the report’s author, Stephanie Evans, are open to the public.

Interviews and Conversations

• With Dennis Scholl, Vice President for Arts at the Knight Foundation, talking about the innovative Knight Arts Challenge in Philadelphia.
• With Edward Clapp, editor of the 20UNDER40 anthology, on Barry’s Blog.
• Between Robert Lynch, Fred Lazarus, and Edgar Arceneaux on the subject of the arts and community change in the current issue of Next American City.

Adventures in advocacy

• Is this idea so crazy it’s brilliant? Barry Hessenius argues that arts organizations should join local Chambers of Commerce en masse, thereby forcing the business community (and the Republican party) to pay attention. Key graph:
  

  There are some 10,000 nonprofit arts organizations in California. If 20% of those arts organizations were to join their local Chambers of Commerce (dues are modest and local chapters welcome arts organizations) and get involved on the statewide committees and move up the ranks to chair some of those efforts – thus moving up the ranks of the organization – in just a couple of years the arts could constitute a formidable bloc within the state Chamber – and in so doing we could begin to seriously impact the policies and positions the Chamber takes. If 40% of all the arts organization would join their local chambers, and work into postions of authority, we could virtually take over the whole structure by 2016.  That’s only five years from now.

• Leonard Jacobs passes along the news that NYS Arts, the main arts advocacy vehicle in the Empire State, is closing down.
• The CBC reports that some prominent artists and administrators in Canada are now backpedaling from an economically-focused arts advocacy strategy. What’s interesting about it is that Kevin Stolarick, who has worked with and for Richard Florida for over a decade, is quoted extensively in the article saying that framing the arts in terms of their economic impact has been a “trap.” Florida, of course, is the great popularizer of this line of thinking, although his focus is much wider than the nonprofit arts specifically.

And so on…

• Another wise post from Brigid Slipka. To paraphrase: if you want to increase high-impact giving, trying to convince the average donor to do their own research is a losing battle. Your audience, instead, should be the gatekeepers to givers: ministers, corporate giving managers (who organize employee donation drives to specific charities), and the like.
• Very good sentences: “when Americans insist on total liberty against external molestation, it motivates both good responses and bad ones.  It supports a libertarian desire for freedom against government abuse, but the same sentiments generate a lot of anti-liberal policies when it comes to immigration, foreign policy, torture, rendition, attitudes toward Muslims, executive power, and most generally treatment of “others.”  An insistence on zero molestation, zero risk, isn’t as pro-liberty as it appears in the isolated context of pat-downs.  It leads us to impose a lot of costs on others, usually without thinking much about their rights.” – Tyler Cowen @ Marginal Revolution
• Academics like to rag on Wikipedia, but a new pilot initiative will make updating and improving the quality of pages part of college students’ required coursework. The democratization of who gets to be an expert continues apace.
• Visualization fun with the budget here and here.
• Guy Yedwab asks, could art survive without alcohol?